nearly 30 years ago media was founded on a powerful idea bringing cutting age broadband to underserved communities from coast to coast we broke speed barriers and led the way in developing a platform and now we are offering the fastest most reliable network on the go. decades of dedication, decades of delivery and decades ahead. >> joining us now president of the organization of american historians which is what?

>> mostly in the early days teaching the universities but now the membership spans including junior-college as well as beyond colleges and really coming together in a community of historians. behind us of course the universities, and honor scholars work by bringing their books so the organization headquartered in bloomingtonlo at the universy of indiana has been serving to understand what it means to be in service in the field that we help educators and policymakers. how is it different than the historical association?

>> i jokingly call them grandma and grandpa. in the united states working on that whole range including u.s. history all over the world but who specialize in u.s. history so l it's kind of a differen lens. can you be a member of both? >> i am, yes. >> and what is your background field of study? >> i came up through the history department has an undergraduate and then went to the university of california riverside as well as for my graduate studies and i fell in love very quickly with the way in which we shape the land and objects. i've been fortunate to work and

served on state commissions and mostly work in a nonprofit world and was running the california historical society in san francisco when this was a very hard t call not to take so i was honored to be in that candidate pool to be the first woman director of the national museum national museum of history so that has continued my love of making history accessible and meaningful and relevant in our liveshi and like this conference you have the main themes of the conference and the year-end so this technically is the confidence that the program committee and the committee that i helpedd create is shaped and the overarching theme is how do we help communities make

themselves feel like they have agencies and not that history is something that didn't happen to them or their communities. i get to do that but on a national scale right there on the national mall and then as my service helping i think other historians throughout the nation and the world think about their role in the community. >> it is a set of tools that should be used as possible. i joke we don't operate on grains but by understanding and interpreting the complexities of

that path that we've all inherited it's also a pretty great mystery of love and life and meaning of why we do things and studying the process i think can be a very active and meaningful way in which we engage our present w selves in which we understand our land and communities and essentially ourselves as political both kind ofin actors in this great space called life and i also find it utterly fascinating and endlessly fascinating to understand history is very much something that is a lot that truly can inform the added history repeats itself. history has been very busy lately.

it's been watching you and judging you and. the way in which history can be those a tool of empowerment. history can repeat itself but

it's kind of folding in on itself like an origami at the timeuc like there is a parallel hold that helps you understand. >> as the director of the history museum, how much time do you spend listening to scholastic historians? >> i'm fortunate to have dozens of historians on the staff at the national museum which is a long tradition of bringing in scholars and certain fields. the history of modern science, the history of music and popular culture, the history of

political movements. it is an incredible group of scholars that choose them to work but who choose to work in ways that have millions of objects we hold in the stewardship to help tell the stories and there's miles of archival materials and joining if you will the federal partners for the archives. but then if you infuse that with the oral history and traditions and the written word and the object we c have created in timi think it's an incrediblebl opportunity to tell meaningful stories and to figure out how to

interpret but in 75 words on an exhibit text, so i love also that kind of art of that and how to instill the material 250 objects that relate to what you want to tell into an accessible and meaningful multilingual set of words that help people understand the relationship that they might have with that object. that process i find really fascinating and i'm soav fortune to have such great colleagues. >> every so often and more frequently we see an article about colleges cutting their humanities departments are history.

why in this age of information should we be studying history even going to college? >> so, that kind of ebb and flow especially with the history departments in the '90s that both of us remember. the memory of how we are taught and the profession itself you can take it back to the greeks but let's say from the 1880s onward when historians started going to graduate school, self identifying as historiansre, there's always been that kind of tension between what is shared and what is taught, so that is an old art, but the newer kind of i think and more troubling is

the devaluation of the humanities of how we learn. for the critical thinking how then can we or our children or

grandchildren kind of ascertain from the promise if we are not training ourselves and with the ability to think and ascertain i think we are losing so much of what makes the human experience. he says it so well that to find and locate and be unafraid of the fullest history for the most we can about ourselves and truncating that and stopping that were shaping that i think is a form of censorship that has wrestled with but it is a good

history. then you also know that there would be a qr code that your phone would then pick up and if

you wanted to listen to it you then would hear what the label says. that is technology we may have had a decade ago or two decades ago but thatt wasn't employed s readily or as thoughtfullytf without the technology we have today. that is just one example of how it can make things so accessible. >> these are long arguments and what innovation and what invention does to both the arts and crafts and people's livelihoods so that we can see it in the long arc and the capacity that is one core

element that has a lot of people on easy when they ask you to write a paragraph about your bio or my bio. because we have the history of computing and the collections those in particular are fascinating to talk to because they see it in this long complicated dance of easiness of technology and they go back to something i mentioned a bit ago helping people ascertain. i think it kind of comes back to some of the same challenges. you could read something today and think that's about advanced ai taking over the writings and realize it's about a typewritero

or it's about some other technologicall moment for that paragon tuned in and was shifting. it's to help people with some of those bigch changes. so wein are thinking about those as will be the 250th anniversary of the spinning of the declaration of independence, so we are asking ourselves what's revolutionary. we have a lot of materiall from the revolutionary war and the republic in our collection some of the oldest material surprisingly but we are also asking ourselves what truths are self-evident? how are we created equal or not.

thomas jefferson drafted the declaration and i think we can call that a revolutionary object. when she was sunk in the battle in lake champlain in october of 1776 and then raised up and brought to the museum in the 60s clearly revolutionary objectsow. what are the other 248 so we are embarking on a really exciting journey to think about the centennial. and in ways that are both kind of predictable that you wouldou want to come to the summer of 2026 but also ways to get you thinking about the quiet

revolution czar or major revolutions are. in the community life division they brought forth the first commercially produced crockpot and other revolutionary objects. for the first time you could put that on in the morning and come back eight hoursrnck later and actually have dinner. so we find those entry points into the past where people identify with an object andwe because we have such a rich collection thereth are so many o choose from and then you can really take them on a journey with them and they can help us with their reactions and contributions to our understanding to create that

richness and fullness of our understanding. it's not monochromatic or linear but it's rich and dynamic and colorful and complicated. >> how do you avoid politicizing history? >> great question. >> so, very consciously nonpartisan, but all of us i think believe of course with our constitutional freedoms we are political. our bodies can be political, our actions. so it's less about being political as politicized. it's been kind of inclusive of a

pretty significant range of political thoughts which is challenging but also very doable by theau rest of the collection because if we go and collect every presidential election and joke they would be the only ones going like in 2020 before i had to pull them from the field because they were in the field when covid hit they joke that it would be reporters, c-span probably and curators who would be the standard rally and trump rally in the same day so part of it is the collection and interpretations with lean that way. and being unafraid to be contextual. but also being positioned in a

way that that would seem that progressive interpretation of the path. your choice of an object, your education material is leaning too far to one side or the other and one of i think my biggest goals and challenge is to take the fellowship of the fantastic historians who continue to do really meaningful work while pushing the boundaries of the traditional notions and the gender politics and our own bodies.

with that kind of thoughtfulness and also compassion. and really i think leaning into the wealth and fellowship and wealth of knowledge and not running away from it but also then keeping in mind that our audience some not all the bridge between what they think that american history is and has been and then what they can learn by the presentation of the fact and

knowledge and object and artifact. and to the point about technology using the especially visual technology to be able to condense the years of political history i love the question because it is a constant. if people can see us as a nonpartisan place to come in and tome learn and to sit next to someone that you've never met beforere.

to be in that kind of a mutual inviting civic space. >> speaking of civics, what should high school students know about our nation? >> as much as they can. >> -- coming out of high school. what should be a national standard? >> the smithsonian educators around the country, the department of education all work on a new roadmap called educating for american democracy. it was finished just as the pandemic hit. we had rollout plans in g 2020.

in the history and social studies it wasit released but te pandemic interrupted so much. it wasn't rich with the national council social studies, all of the big kind of educational groups in the nation are encouraging districts, states to both learn about but also employee very carefully and thoughtfully done and it opens up to the point of what should they come out of high school learning and not make learning and civics of history, learning in the past exciting and relevant and a little bit less butt it's essential for a democracy's future.

but the power of what their vote would mean they would get to vote for the first time when they graduate and if they can feelee like they are informed, d what people taught so hard for for so many years i think that would be a success. is it available on the website? >> it is along with a whole host of other educational material and curricula in american history dot sii .edu. >> why is that? >> the vast majority of our work and curators is considered. >> what is the most important?

what is the most popular exhibit at american history we opened about 18 months agoal entertainment nation which is the culmination of about ten to 15 years of work around the popular culture collection. what i love about thatly exhibit yes it is good popular culture from about 1840 to the present but it's how we use entertainment as national forums to come together about who we are. who is included, who is

excluded, what do we produce, what do we include, what do we exclude, and i think it is rightfully one of the most popular, friendly though, the star-spangled banner, the presidents and first lady. >> first ladies gowns. >> and china. we had a daytime and evening ensemble and both designers so for the first time since. do you have all the first ladies gowns? how many things are on display

and how many things are not? it's a slightly tricky one to answer. the generally accepted rule is that two plus million object. we exhibit roughly three to 4%. what is essential as the radical digitization efforts that we are undertaking now to get as many of the objects, not all. we wouldn't want all of them online but we are working to get them online and to make sure those can go all around the world but also to make sure that scholars and researchers know what we have and we have a number of traveling exhibitions rightib now that are very small

and some need a 3500 square-foot space. i love the way in which we make sure our work in the scholarship is done as gladly as possible. >> do you think it is the right amount to display or would you like to see that ten, 20, 30%? >> that is a great question. i do think that there's i will say both i think sometimes it is in the quantity but the quality of the object that can speak to us. if it is unique and there is

one. you need that much more than that to telegraph that story. or in the case of objects that you can see an amazing chronology and change over time where we have all the patent models and i would love to see more of those on display. for the digital means because what we found it is doing, let's say we put and we work with communities and crowdds source e learn and ask will you help us

translate. then people started volunteering their time to do that but then asking for more. what else do you have, what else is in the collection that you need our help. once you unlock some of the digitals, then what else so sometimes i think they do play so well together and people getting interested in the objects and in archival material letting them go deeper in research and also it helps us to decide how we privilege our own work. >> how is your position coming together? >> i'm the second person to be

the president of oah that isn't is into professor at the university and the other employee -- i think it has aligned well. it is a an extension approved by the secretary and it has to be especially as a museum director or anyone from the smithsonian to another nonprofit that is carefully reviewed. it doesn't make sense in this capacity. so it's been a remarkable couple of years.

i hope that my staff and my colleagues are proud of that joint service. >> president of the organization of american historians. she's also director of the smithsonian's nationalm museumf american history. >> and the first woman to do so since 2019. we appreciate you spending a little time with us. >> thank you.

he first of all believed in the resilience of the people he was working with and that kind of thing he honestly looked at them like they were his sons and he was also very willing to accept responsibility for the decisions that were charged with him and as you may or may not know, he spent the night with the troops the night before they deployed to normandy and they were walking around and talking and there is a fairly famous picture

where he is talking to another soldier number 23. they made a poster step out of that one and he ended up taller than the soldier. not really sure how that happened. but anyway i said your picture has been on my father's desk, my grandfather's desk and a postage stamp. i never saw my grandfather so intense. he said what was he talking about. we were talking about saginaw. he walked around and put everybody at ease and just tried to make it as easy as possible but still that came back to the

expression. one place where the quick and the dead walk together and i was not announced or anything like that. i was wondering how the troops ever got up the bluff. a veteran came up behind me and said he just started talking. he said i wanted to clear the woods really and out of my unit of 15, only five survived. it now only three are in the camp tribal. i said wow and the person i had

been with dropped back to give me some quiet to reflect and could see him walking up and i knew he was going to introduce me. he said i think there's about nothing we wouldn't have done for ike and i will never forget a puff of wind blew on my face and i could see his wife behind with my friend and she goes. so he didn't know i was there but she did. you see that compassion pay off many years later and you realize the decisions he was making i'm

not sure i could make those decisions. he wrote a letter or a note the night before all the planning was done and the weather was going to be in, and they knew it. he wrote on a piece of paper in the event of failure if there's any blame to place the troops did everything they were supposed to. somebody said why don't you go out there and spend the night with the troops and he said because i knew i was sending over half of them to their death and i felt like they deserved the right to see the man that was doing it. >>