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captioning performed by vitac in the current administration of generals, so we have -- that was an outstanding briefing and it's a way to bring good history to and understanding to people to staffers trying to advise senators or congressmen and congre congresswomen and how to preact to policies and issues with regard to that. anybody else want to comment? yes, rob. >> we don't have anything as formal as what dain does but we have seen and i would echo what he said about i think

fundamentally people have an interest in history, how we got to where we are today. if you take the view and it's debatable and hard evidence perhaps is difficult to come by, that history is not taught as well as it once was or isn't being taught at all. i hear that from older constituents of the marshall foundation, more and more people are tending to look to organizations such as ours because of itsz longevity and association with general marshall as being something as authority. a librarian will get phone calls, i saw x and y and z on the news, did it happen in that fashion? are they accurate? >> we seem without a lot of effort moving in this area of being some sort of authority on events for which we hold the papers or which general marshall was involved and how we do that in a more intentional fashion, such as dain that's another one of our challenges. but this certainly seems to be

an opportunity for organizations like ours in the public sphere where once perhaps and this sorts tr-- sounds trite, we're thinking somewhat intentionally about how we might do that and build on what we've done in the past. >> great. anyone else on that point? yeah. >> i would just say, i guess it's more as spirational than a reflection of current activity of our center. it seems to me to go back to this moment, this moment of potential of renewed interest in history, but also this moment of tremendous turmoil and upheaval the world over. one of the things historians can bring to bear on the current conversation is really a textured sense of the threat to democracy and here i'm really -- i'm always reminded of the litmus test proposed by the late, great yale political

scientist who proposed i think three criteria of warning for the erosion of democracy putting recourse to violence or endorsement of violence, curtailing the rights of one's political opponents and denying legitimacy of the democratic -- democratically elected regime. that's a good place to start and it seems to me both in our own country and the world over, that historians have the potential to make nuanced analogies that can be of importance as warning signs to the potential erosion of democracy really of the world over, from this country to the middle east. >> that seems to me a function that we together might want to take on -- >> i couldn't agree with you more on that and at our museum as we move into this last

pavilion, deliberation pavilion which addresses what it means today, what does world war ii mean today, we're looking at the last 75 years and major legacies of the war. we feel like we are at that inflection point and this pavilion will bring us in the center of perhaps one of the biggest debates in our country and even around the world as nationalists and populist movements are growing up and old alliances are dissolving and the world order that goes back to fdr four freedoms, in the state of the union address and january '41, long before pearl harbor, where he established the freedoms that he thought would be the foundation for our warrings and did em bed that in the atlantic charter and with the united nations and nur em berg trials and we gave democracies to the countries we just defeated.

that -- you could document the advance of democracy and freedom with america's leadership over the last 75 years, not always perfectly, but nevertheless, it's been the consistent framework. and without necessarily just buying into the full thesis of the good war, we could certainly say that the world ended up better off in '45 as a result of the allied victory than had -- than would have been if the racist regimes of germany and japan had prevailed. so we have to enter as historians into these larger debates it seems to me and we're right at this inflection point right now where national history center and everybody at this table has a way to enter into that debate and engage populations, whether through social media or coming to your centers. >> yeah, i just wanted to say that, i'm really actually struck

by the sort of complimentary strengths that all of our centers put together and whether it's lectures or congressional briefings or white papers or podcasts or blog posts, we don't -- we don't each have to do everything. >> right. >> you know, so there are ways to work together where we could sort of focus on strengths and amplify each other's work and so we at the la page center have been -- we promote stuck from back story and miller center and -- >> you felt made by history. >> on the editorial board of made by history. we can sort of help each other not only in collaborating on joint programmings which we should but amplifying existing program that we're each doing that we sort of honed and refined. we would never invent a congressional briefing program but we would love to continue to support what national history center has done because it's fantastic. there's greater opportunity for

that, i think. >> as david pointed unitout, th ability to reach both the national level and regional and local level, i think all of us who have studied the history -- the history of the united states or have been -- had thetsa imposed on us -- just kidding. understand the power of organizations that can operate at the national level but have the freedom and decentralized way to operate at the local and state level. this is just a tiny, tiny piece of the picture setting up here. but you know, i do think we have a tremendous opportunity to be effective in the world if we put our minds to it. >> dain? >> in organizing this panel, i really had two agendas in mind, one was to bring all of us together and communicate with one another about what we are doing and the way in which we

sort of intersecretary and can strengthen one another's operations and i think in that contest, one of the future projects i'd like to see the national history center launch is perhaps say website that links all of our operations and provides a kind of -- if not clearing house, a way in which we with effectively understand what everyone is doing and communicate with one another. there's so much activity going on right now. and the other agenda actually has to do with all of you in the audience, because as david said near the beginning and i thought it was an important and apt point, we need to modify the culture of the academy and the fact you're here, i think reflects the fact that you have an interest in doing this. i think that interest has been reflected in the extraordinary outpouring of activity op-eds and interviews and so on by

historians in response, for example, to the charlottesville crisis and the confederate monument history and aha solicited with its members, solicited contributions they made to this broader conversation and they got hundreds of responses by historians at the local level interviewed by their local newspapers or interviewed by the local television stations or what have you. that too i think speaks to this hunger among historians at this moment, at this inflection point. on the value of a historical perspective on the kinds of challenges and issues we face today. so that's our other major agenda as i see it in this enterprise. >> david? >> i just want to offer up a historical observation if i may, which is part confession, which is that this enhanced sense of

the relevance and utility of history that i think our institutions and individual efforts reflect, is directly related to a set of historical circumstances. >> yeah. >> in particular, i mean one can choose many, but the one i'm thinking of is the economic collapse of 2008-2009, which fundamentally altered the landscape of the marketplace for historians. and really added a sense of urgency to the demand for relevance in what we do. it also made clear to us those of us who teach both undergraduate and graduate students, that the same opportunities that might have been available to a previous generation were not going to be available to that current generation and that we needed to think of multiple career pathways. and i think the -- what is good

about that moment of crisis is it allowed us to think of new avenues in which we can infuse in which we could infuse historical knowledge and perspective into do mains of life where previously we hadn't thought. so i think that crisis induced a sense of the relevance in history and in a sense liberated us from thinking that the only worth while career outcome was an r1 research university. and so that's how i often think of this moment of relevance as in part induced by this crisis of 2008-2009. >> i think that's an excellent segue to one concluding comment i would make and open it up to questions from the audience as well. but i'm reminded of another inflection point in history back in the 16th century and as max faber wrote about the -- when martin luther and the protestant

ethic and spirit of capitalism and there's a great line that luther slammed the door of the monastery behind him with an edition of the bible. there were always these inflection moments in history as a broad sweep of the major currents of history. and historians do have that opportunity it seems to me to step into that moment and to find ways to collaborate and to have join forces in a way we can to have a louder voice and reach more people interested in good history and solidly based understandings of how we got to where we are and where we might be going based on the decisions and public policies that get articulated. so let me just open up to questions. we still have about 20 or 25 minutes i think. and since for the tv audience, i guess i'll have to repeat the questions.

i think we can hear your questions from wherever you might have them. and i'll try to repeat them so our television audience can hear them as well. so do we have some questions? yes. >> thank you. i reiterate or endorse the theme of communication to the importance of communicating sound scholarship. and to some extent you addressed this, would you speak how is the training of historians graduate programs addressing the need for rerete rretore cal verbal liter skills. we have seen presentations by highly credentialed and top scholars that were dizzying and so much lost left on the table and they can't communicate

effectively. >> so let me just rephrase the question quickly, the question for our television audience a question of communications and the importance of communications and communicating scholarship and what are we doing in our universities and graduate programs to train young historians in verbal, retore cal skills and media skills to bring their history to broader publics. >> i'm thrilled to say we've already had one successful history communication course taught at the graduate level at the university of massachusetts a. amherst, was highly successful. and then there are three more history communication courses coming online in 2018 at universities across the country. it came about as a result of two workshops that were held in

2016. an initial workshop held at umass amherst had about 30 journalists science communicators coming together to build a curriculum that would model what the science programs have done but apply to history. there was a follow-up workshop in washington, d.c. in august of 2016 that really put the meat on the bones of that and actually spelled out week by week how the course would unfold and you can find that course at history communication.com. our website for the history communication movement. so any and all of you who are in universities and would like to bring that course to your home university, we would encourage you to visit that website and grab the syllabus and the umass course taught last year and adapt it to your home university and bringing in scholars and specialists in your area. but we would love to see this

grow and continue to expand to other universities across the country and as i mentioned, we also now have history communication fellows at the lapage center at villanova. that's another great avenue for training, giving students on the job experience putting together a podcast, working with you on media, presenting things in five or ten minute chunks. i think the movement is growing, it's not there yet, but it's starting to perk late. >> that's exciting. and i think there are a number of universities around the country that now have a master's degrees in public history for people going into the fields of museums and librariy ries and o government agencies and research institutes, cureating and collections and so forth. that would be a welcome addition to many of those master's programs in public history. i don't know if university of

history of new orleans has a master's program tied together with his military program. other questions or comments about -- yes. >> the discussion seems to be directed at the university level and general public. i'm wondering if any of you have -- schools and secondary schools as well as students. sometimes that's -- it's almost too late. >> hope not. there's about 3,000 of them out there. we've got to execute some reforms and they got too much of the population there to leave it all. but there are other things i'll comment on what we're doing. do you want to add something there? >> i would like to say, one of my predecessors at the marshall foundation, great to have your question.

the marshall foundation in the past endeavored to reach out to high schools especially but it can be a challenge. the rigid curriculum demands of high school history teaching mean there's little opportunity certainly in public schools, little more latitude in private schools but it can be a enk. capturing that and wetting that appetite with good scholarship everily on is what is needed but we found it a bit of a challenge. >> at the la page center, we create online resources and in the midst of our sort of examination of fake news and false information, we actually developed an online resource called six steps to historical literacy and you can find it ton our website and twitter account. it's aimed at high school students and high school teachers in fact and it's a --

it's a matrix for identifying and distinguishing good history online from bad. right? is this article copied from wikipedia? is this written by a historian? is this making a historical argument? we created this resource and put it up online and got it into the hands of teachers. i had a meeting with the philadelphia public schools and got it in the resource for history teachers across the philadelphia school system, also got into the hands of some teachers in other places. they love it. they love it. i got an e-mail from a teacher that said they watched history videos on youtube and used that resource we created as a guide to determine whether they could trust the videos or not. so i think the way that we found to make inroads in that is to create easy resources for teachers that they can bring into the classroom. and when i mean easy to -- to the point it was just made -- it has to be super easy because

they are overloaded and have a ton of things on the plate that are understaffed and under resources, six steps to historical literacy, one page online resource can be printed off and stuck in a folder and used in a classroom. that's the way we found success. >> we just discovered inadvertently at back story and virginia foundation for humanities which houses backstory. that we have a lot of high school history teachers who are fans and they write into us. we have developed the very kind of lesson plans for some of our shows that jason was talking about, simple, straightforward. they kind of came to us and we said, oh, who knew. these history teachers are listening and they report back. they use -- we did a show on hamilton. that was our most successful with high school history teachers, high school students and we actually interviewed some

of the students and the high school teacher that taught this in a high school. we interviewed him on back story and they -- i know that a lot of high school teachers use that particular episode. >> i will say, at least as far as national world war ii museum is concerned. we've done a lot in that area in the past five or six years. we have provoked teachers and students in k-12 at the teacher level, we have three or four summer institutes that are nationally competitive, fully subsidized for 30 teachers every year and from the social sciences and history, around the country they come and get an immersive one week program for our european and normandy academy done by miller and rich frank, does the pacific academy, pacific war. those teachers get 30 teachers

out of 300 who apply, get immersed and they have curriculum materials making it easy. taking our millions of dollars that have been invested in digital products for our exhibits and film and video and animated maps and oral histories and packaged together with the curriculum materials. they go back and the obligation for their free ride is they have to train at least 30 teachers in the use of these materials in their regions and they are doing better than that. 30 times 30 every summer you get the picture. the following summer we take them to normandy, depending on which cohort they are for an on the ground boots on the ground through the battle sites or take them to pearl harbor bore a week there. we do the same thing for high school students an immersive program for 30 students, leadership, looking at the values and understanding the history of world war ii. and with -- they approach the

study of world war ii through literature and we -- they have programs around the country. we're one of the few museums has one of the guilder lerman institutions. we have a third for teachers and leadership program for students. and we expect to reach over a million teachers in the next four or five years. >> that's amazing. >> yes. >> secondary schools, i didn't hear anybody comment on connections with national history day or with ap u.s. history. and increasingly been using the john green history crash course videos introducing american history to international students. it's challenging but it's a remarkable series. any comment on it? >> well, we're the national history day representatives for the state of louisiana so we've

been involved with them for 10 or 12 years and helped them to design their norm andy institute which takes some of the -- 3,000 students who compete in college park and 30 of them get to go to norman normandy, we've been working with national history day with 800 schools around the country. it's a valuable network. some of you may be representing or working with them. >> we work closely with the national history day in philadelphia, which is a pretty robust program. and i've been a judge of national history day as well. it's absolutely fantastic and actually funny story. i was in lidthuania earlier thi year and some of the u.s. embassy had seen on my cv i was a judge at national history day. oh, i did national history day when i was younger, i love that program. it's a connection for people around the world.

>> it's a great network and activates students all over the country in study of history using original resources and original sources to begin their work. but i think we're close -- more questions? i think we have a little bit more time, another five minutes or so. >> can i make one? >> sure. >> i wanted to add one audience that i think that we have all overlooked is the business community. we don't hear a lot about historians reaching business leaders or doing things for the business community but that's an influential community in the u.s. that has a big influence on policy and on our society in general. one thing we're piloting at the la page center, a business history briefing series, briefings for business leaders in center city, philadelphia and hoping to make it sort of a quarterly or biannual program that happens in center city and

perhaps beyond if it takes off. and we're actually sort of a little bit following the model dana set out with the congressional briefings in focusing on an issue that is res nant to that particular community. we're focusing next week on brexit, that's our first topic for the briefing and we're meeting with the irish-american business chamber network in philadelphia. so i think you know, we all have so much on our plates and there's a lot of people we want to reach but i do think the business community has been overlooked by historians. we're going to make an attempt to foray into that. hopefully we can report back on how that went. the la page center for history and public interest of which i'm the first director. it was created and founded by a businessman, albert lapage, alum nus of villanova. did major in history but went on to work in the baking business, in the baking business for 30 or

40 years and sold his business to a larger con glom rate and where he got his money and started his philanthropy. it was in talking with al bert we got this idea. i'm excited for it. >> a similar story helps explain the rise of the luskan center at ucla -- >> i suspect there's a businessman behind all of our centers actually if we want to go down. >> history major, but who credits history and historical perspective with saving his business career. and actually getting him out of a very tricky situation in the middle east and back home to other pursuits. and we've discovered that in fact a good number of ucla ph.d.'s in history have made their way into the history and banking world. who report back to us that the

common thread is the problem solving quality of history. the act of contextualizing and figuring out what created it and then sort of pulling the pieces apart to see how to repair it. so there again, this business connection reveals the absolute utility of history. >> and i would say that all of us in our efforts to survive need to raise funds and find them in our donors, our museum, we have a 60-member board, business leaders from all across the country, ceos of major national corporations, you'd be amazed how interested they are in history and how they debate history in board meetings. from our part we're starting a corporate leadership academy to develop leadership principles of generals and government leaders of world war ii. and bring these programs for a

fee to corporations and decision-making crisis management and how do you handle -- how do you handle a crisis when you're getting thrown off the beaches of d-day and you're -- maybe moments away from a disaster. so there's other ways that history museums can get into that business community with good history and they are very interested in that approach as well. but i would say all of us have donors of our centers or universities that come from the business community and are interested in what we do. and we should mind them and engage them in our endeavors. as long as they don't tell us how to do the research and engage and respect the research we do, which has been said several tixz times at the core of everything. as we draw this to a close,

we're about out of time, we have by my clock about two more minutes but let me just say that rob, you want to -- >> i want to say one more thing, in the spirit of reaching out and reaching through that noise the marshall foundation and society for military history has for 20-odd years sponsored the marshall lectured aha, i would draw your attention to the fact this year's marshall lecturer is professor isabel howell from corn el, speaking on the armistice and defeat and victory on saturday evening at 5:30 in the marriott ball room, saloon one. the fact too that general marshall addressed the aha in december of 1939 and talked about the need to study military history in part to on veeiate or avoid future wars but if you're going to get involved in a war and have a good sense how to win

the war once you are inevitably engaged in this. this honors general marshall. if you can, come along and i know historians love the reception post the lecture. please come and enjoy. >> thank you, rob for a wonderful plug at the end of the program. i think what you can tell from this very engaging panel and questions from the audience, there's a great deal of u.n. nimty, despite the fact we're coming from different institutions and different centers with different missions, there's a desire and i think expressed today for us to find other ways to collaborate and cooperate and to partner to create more space for great history and to break through that noise of the online chatter and the 24-hour news cycle. and i think with the work that the people who are sitting at

this table or on this panel, other great history museums around the country and other centers who are not here, that we have a great resource to move into that inflection point that you were talking about david and i think historians need to maybe not come out of the monasteries but get in the marketplace and you can tell from this invigorating discussion, historians are out there, using the new tools and technologies to get to new publics and new audiences and we're finding multiple ways to break in to the public policy arena with great history. so thank you all for your participation. thanks to all of our panel for your time and effort and thank you, dane kennedy for organizing the panel and it's been i think an interesting experience for all of us. i hope all of you as well as

those also in our television audience. so thank you and we say good night. >> thank you all very much. [ applause ] this week on the communicators, we take you to the consumer electronics show in las vegas and speak with industry leaders about their latest developments in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, 360 degree cameras and enhanced communications for self-driving cars. watch "the communicators" tonight at 8:00 eastern on cspan-2. next on american history tv, journalist coky roberts moderates a discussion on the first federal congress at the annual meeting. it talks about the nation's founders including james madison and george washington who met from 1789 to 1791