our opportunities are too great. our lives too short to this moment so tonight we vow to her nation we will seize this moment of american promise. we will use these good times for great goals.

chickening is now on c-span is arthea hartig president at the organization of american historians which is what? >> since 1907 the oah has been in services and nonprofit and associations ofs, historians locally in the early days and teaching at universities but now our membership spans high school history teachers junior-college

and beyond colleges and coming together in a community of historians. mostly university presence, and honors the scholar's work by bringing their books forward but the organization in bloomington indiana at the university of indiana they are has been serving and continues to refine his mission. we help educators, we help policymakers understand the past relevance to our contemporary lives and for the future. >> how is it different than the american h historical society? >> i think they call them grandma and grandpa. older institutions of the aha's scope includes the united states working on a whole range of global issues including u.s.

history and the early zero -- oah specializes in it. so it's a different lands. >> can you be a member of both? >> absolutely, i am. >> what is your background? >> i came up through ucla's history department as an undergraduate and went to university california riverside for my graduate studies and i fell in love quickly with the way in which we shaped gland which reshape objects and leave materials the culture of our lives and so i've been very fortunate to work as a public servant and i served on state commissions. i mostly work in the nonprofit world and i was running the california historical society in san francisco when the

smithsonian came calling which is a very hard call not to take. so i was honored to be in that candidate pool to be the first woman director of the national museum of american history so that h has continued my co-joind love of making history accessible and relevant in our lives. like this conference that as president you have the main themes of the conference and your service that too and is president so this is the conference of the program committee -- committee that i helped create. the overarching theme is are we in service to the community and how do we help committees to make themselves feel like they have agency in this world and that they are part of history and not that historyry is something that didn't happen to them or didn't happen to theirun

communities. i get to do that on a national scale at the history museum the national mall in and my service to the oah helping other historians throughout the nature -- nation in the world think about their roles in their community. >> why should we know history? but does it bring to us? >> a great question. for me history is a set of tools which i think should be a democratically used as possible. i joked we don't operate on brains but we do like to change minds. by understanding and interpreting the complexities o' that path that we have all inherited. chris -- history can unlock some pretty great histories of love, of life of meaning of why we do

things in studying the path can be a very active and very meaningful way in which we engage our president selves in which we understand their families and understand our land and community and especially ourselves as political lowercase p in this great age called life and i find it utterly fascinated and endlessly fascinating to understand history is very much something that truly can inform and the adage history repeats itself. it's been very busy but it's been watching you in judging you and history doesn't do anything buthe historians using the tools and scholarship and analysis and turbot patient historians do

things that history has been in the news quite a bit and employed in different ways. so i find it endlessly fascinating the way in which history can be both a tool of empowerment, tool of impression, a tool of repression and oppression but also i think a pathway for us all to understand the fullness of where we are and where we have come from. i don't necessarily think it's physically -- history can repeat itself but sometimes i think of it as folding it -- folding in on itself like origami. there's a parallel fold that one

wonderful helps you understand the opposite one. >> as director of the american history museum a much time do you spend with scholastic historians? >> i am incredibly fortunate to have dozens of historians on staff that joined with me at the national museum of american history which has a long tradition of bringing us in certain fields. we have the history of food in the history of brewing and whether they are specializing in the history of modern science, the history of music, the history of popular culture the history of political movements. it's an incredible group of scholars who choose them to work at the smithsonian but who choose to work in ways that use

material culture and use millions of objects that behold in viewership to the american people and our quest to enliven the past in ways that truly in which we have linear feet of archival materials enjoying our federal partners at the national archives and library of congress. if you infuse that with histories and traditions the written word and the objects that we have created handed down in time you have an incredible opportunitya to tell dense meaningful stories but then to figure out how to interpret those like in the book surrounding us in the hall and 75 words on an exhibit text so i love that kind of art of that

how open you and still lets say 18 pages of history in that material in 250 objects that relate to what you want to tell and anything that's accessible and meaningful in a 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 so fortunate to have such a great colleague. >> every so often for more free than we now we see an article of colleges cutting their humanities departments are history and find this age of information should we be studying history? even going to college. >> that ebb and flow especially of academic history departments,

the history words of the 90s i see it in a couple of ways. the i first one is that the memy and how we remember what we remember and how we are taught and what we are taught with lets say you can let say to the 1880s onward when historians started self-identifying as a historian and there's always been that tension between what is shared and what is taught. that's an old arc with the newer i think the more troubling arc rightt now is the devaluation of the humanities and how we have learned about each other throughout time and the humanities as a touchstone has sustained our civilization since

the earliest time. in totally different form and i'm not taking it from a bureau centric perspective that history and memory and that is with which we are member and passed down from generation to generation. it's one of those sustaining parts of our shared humanity. this dictatorial gag orders that are in place right now the laws that are in place limited access to information where information is all around us where we don't have the tools for critical reading and critical thinking how then can we or our children or our grandchildren kind of ascertained it from fiction from a real photograph from a completely faded one.

if we aren't containing ourselves and with the ability to think critically and ascertained critically we are losing so much of what makes the human experience. secretary lonnie bunts looked at my work and he says is so well and he says to find and locate and be unafraid of the fullest history is then when we know the most we can about ourselves and stopping that are shaping that i think is a form of censorship that states in particular have wrestled with from it's inception. but it is a particularly good part of history. >> when it comes to american history of using which you run has technology impacted it's?

>> absolutely. in wonderful ways actually. if you come to ourbi new exhibis and you are blind or low vision, they are plates and pam -- points and then you would know there's something there that you can touch or feel and a full cast broadcast of every sequence. youen also know that there would be a qr code that would pick it up and you tap your phones in if you wanted to listen to it but you would then hear what the label says. that is technology that similarly may have happened a decade or two decades ago but wasn't employed as readily or is

thoughtfully without the technology we have today. that's one example of how technology can make it accessible. senate was the downside of technology? >> people have been arguing about technology probably since the sewing machine. there are long arguments over what innovations and what invention does to the arts, the craft in people's livelihoods so you can see it in the long art. artificial intelligence is not a new thing. the capacity of the tap boxes that i think is one core element that has a lot of people -- when you can ask it to write up photograph about my bio in your

bio, because with the history of computing in the collection those creators are fascinating to talk to because they see it in this long complicated easiness with technology and they go back to something i mentioned a bit ago in terms of helping people ascertain and have knowledge of what is generated through especially advanced ai. i think it comes back to some of the same challenges. you could read something today and you'd think that's about advanced ai taking over our writing and it was some technical logical moment where that paradigm is shifting and there was -- one of the museums goals is to help people with

those big changes. they are been if you changes in american live in our lifetime for the past two and 50 years so we are thinking about those revolutions as we careened towards 2026 which will be the 250th anniversary of the signing of the declaration of independence. we are asking ourselves drafting that was revolutionary. we have allowed materials from the revolutionary war in the early republic in our collection.we but we are asking ourselves what truths are self-evident and how are we created equal or not? what moment in time have been revolutionary in thehe last 250 years and what objects are revolutionary? he drafted the declaration and i think we can call that

revolutionary. 1776 in what would become the u.s. navy when she sunk in the battle of lake champagne and october of 1776 and raised up and brought in and the 60s as we were building 800 square-foot building clearly a revolutionary object and what are the other 248? we are embarking on a really exciting journey to think about this centennial and ways that are predictable that you want to come to washington in the summer but gets you thinking about what quiet revolutions are what major revolutions are. the community life division brought forth the first cia commercially for the first time

you could put it on in the morning and comee back eight hours later. for working women was that a revolutionary onset of? i asked my mom she said oh yeah that was revolutionary. you find those entry points into the past where people identify with an object and because we have such a rich collection there's so many and then we take them on a journey with us and it can also help us with their reactions and their contributions in our understanding to create that richness and that fullness of our understanding. it's not monochromatic and it's not monolinear but it's rich and dynamic and multi-varied and and

complicated. >> arthea hartig how do you avoid politicizing history? >> a great s question. the smithsonian is avowedly consciously nonpartisan but secretary bunch and all of us believe the course as human beings in this country with our freedoms our constitutional freedoms we are political. our bodies can be political in our actions can be political so it's less about worrying about being political as politicized. it's less about being partisan is being inclusive of the significant range of political thoughts which is both challenging but also very doable by the breadth of our collection because if we go and collect, we

collect everysi presidential election and are so did the only ones going in 2020 before had to pull them from the field because they were in the field. it would be the reporters c-span probably in the smithsonian chariot jars would he have the the -- rally in the trump rally in the same day so part of it is the interpretation of the collection and part of it would be very thoughtful and being unafraid to be contextual but also being very thoughtful about being overtly positioned in a way that would seem overtly with the progressive interpretation of the past or overtly conservative.

there's always the risk from both sides of the political spectrum that one will see in the other year interpretations your words on the label your choice of an object your op-ed, your educational materials as leaning too far to one side or the other. one of my biggest roles and in a way my biggest challenge is to take the scholarship of fantastic is touring to continue to do really meaningful work so pushing the boundaries of what the past is and what our traditional notions and traditional definitionsan of sef of the body politic in our own bodies to then put that into museum contract in which his the zero for 3 million people will see in the building and so many people will ask us on line. i think we handled that to

answer your question but that care and thoughtfulness but also compassion. and i think leaning into the wealth of scholarship and the wealth of knowledge and not running away fromru it but also keeping in mind that our audience will need some, not all, some are smarter than i but they will need for us to be that bridge, that bridge between cutting-edge scholarship and what they think american history is or should be or has been in then what they can learn by your presentation of knowledge in object and artifact into your point about technology using technology especially, visual technology to be able to

condense years of entertainment history or years of political who you are meeting through the visual medium of film. i love the question because it's a constant, if we fail to ask it and we won't be doing our jobs well. if we fail to realize we are in this moment and a complicated and contested and if people can see us as a nonpartisan place to come in and t to learn and maybe sit next to someone whom you have never met before standing and looking at an object and you are involved in an educational or two that he and think together aboutut it. to be a net neutral inviting civic space.

>> speaking of civics what should high school students know about our nation coming of high school? should there be a national standard? >> so the smithsonian, educators around the country the department of education all work on the new roadmap called ajit kading for american -- educating for and democracy and it was finished just as the pandemic hit. we had big rollout plans in 2020 year was going to be the year of the woman in this centennial suffrage in the year when the brand-new history and social studies curricula was released. it was released but the pandemic and erupted a big part of our lives that are remarkable resource that we are encouraging

along with a national council of social studies and all of the big educational groups in the nation are encouraging teachers and districts states to learn about but also employ very carefully and thoughtfully and it opens up venues to point about what should they commoditize school learning that makes learning of civics and learning of history and learning ofof the past exciting and dynac and relevant and a little bit less like your grandfather's civics in the way but still mindful of the facts of the educated populace is essential for an democracy. if they emerge from high school with a clear understanding of their own power with their vote would mean they'll get to vote when they are 18 so their first time when they graduate. if they can feel like they are

informed about what that awesome right that people fought so hard for for so many years i think that would be a success. >> what is it called called again >> educating for american democracy. >> is available on your web site? >> it is along with a whole host of other educational material and curricula in american history. e-sight.edu. >> you are in. edu and not a ghost. >> the vast majority of our work as a scientist and a curator is considered to be scholarly. >> speed but the most important exhibit? most popular exhibit in american history? >> that's tough. we opened that 18 months ago we opened entertainment nation which is the culmination of 10

or 15 years of work around our popular culture collections so the intersection of music sports broadway film and television. you have the ruby slippers dizzy gillespie's and original kermit the frog. what i learned about that exhibit and probably the most popular right now is yes it's about popular culturere from 180 to the present but it's more about how we view entertainment in a popular form at the national forum to come together about who we are. we are a nation and who's included in who's excluded what do we produce and what do we include and what do we exclude and i think it's one of the most popular friendly, the "star spangled banner" the president and the first lady's.

>> the first lady's gown. >> in china and most recently dr. biden's inaugural. he added daytime ensemble and an evening ensemble both women designers. speed for the first time since the smithsonian we collected it. >> do you have d all the first lady's gown's? >> we do. we have something from each first lady including martha washington.n they are in a collection. >> how many things are on display on the mall of washington and how many things are not? >> excellent question. hard answer to the general accepted rule is of the two plus

million objects we exhibit roughly three or four at a time. so what's essential about that is an effort we are undertaking now to get as many those objects and not and you would want all of them on line but you want a poke of them so we are working to getet it least 1.2 to 1.5 million objects on line and also to make sure they are accessible. also to make sure scholars and researchers know that whatat we have that we have and the number of traveling explanation -- expeditions. some need a 3500 square foot space so i love the way in which we make sure our work and our

scholarship is disseminated as broadly as possible. >> do think that three to 4% as the right amount to display or would you like to see that 10, 20 or 30%? >> it's a great question. i do think all answered in two ways. i think that sometimes it's not the quantity but the quality of the object they can speak to us. if it is unique and there is one what president lincoln was wearing when he wasne assassinad we have an amazing lincoln -- but you need much more than that to tell the story. or in the case of objects that you can see an amazing criminology and do change over time and the models from the

patent that was astounding. you can instantly sell see how inventors were thinking about different elements of technological need. i'd like to unlock the collection because what we found, let's say we put and we work with communities to be crowdsourced the translation of our chinese currency. will we learn that asking people maybe you translate is part of ourle collection. then people started volunteering their time to do that but also asking for more like what else do you have and what else is in the collection that needr their

help or once you unlock some of the digital facsimiles of those boxes you wonder what else do you have so sometimes i think they do play so well together getting people interested in the objects and their archival materials and letting them research and it helps us decide how we privilege our own work, are on digital efforts in their own efforts. >> what is your position at the smithsonian and president of -- how did they come together quite >> i am the second person to be the present of oa h2 is not allied as a professor at the university and the only other one was at the smithsonian and

employee and i hope it is aligned well i and i hope i served them well. my being nominated were nominated as vice president and elect president was approved by the secretary and a test to be. any ofas our service as director or anyone at the smithsonian especially nonprofit is carefully reviewed for kinship. does it make sense. this in myan official capacity o that was approved and it's been a remarkable couple of years. i hope my staff and my colleagues and the secretary are proud of that joint service. it shows to the smithsonian many

of our fellow directors are very involvedpr whether the sciences for the arts and i think it adds so much to the richness are scholarly capacity but then our work on behalf of the american people. >> the president of the association of american historians in the director of the smithsonian national museum of american history and the first woman to do so since 2019, arthea hartig we appreciate you spending time with us. >> thank you. >> if you're rendering american history tv sign up for a newsletter using the qr code on the screen to receive weekly highlights of upcoming programs like lectures in history american artifacts the presidency and more to sign up for the newsletter today and sure to watch american history tv every weekend or anytime on

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