tv Historians Public Policy CSPAN June 3, 2018 3:40pm-4:00pm EDT
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building the american republic" and it is published in the half-eaten post. this was at an annual meeting in washington dc. it is about 20 minutes. >> jane dailey teaches history and at the law school of university of chicago. she is an academic and public historian, and active in the media. let's talk about the intersection of that. where do you get the most attention or reaction to your work? >> they are very different. i guess up until now, the academy. since i've been writing for huffington post, i have gotten more reaction from the people who read those. some of whom are in the academy, but some of -- many of whom are not. >> what does a historians perspective bring to today's policy debates?
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jane: one thing it brings his knowledge. talk toas historians policymakers, we can say, you don't have to reinvent the wheel here. we've done this. we've done supply side before, for example. we have done creating a regulatory state, or dismantling a regulatory state. we have done things before. i think we also bring different perspectives, meaning sometimes contradictory perspectives. so historians are not always going to agree. if you say, let's ask the u.s. historian about this, we are not all going to say the same thing. which i think is probably helpful to policy makers so . host: so maybe the perception or rap about historians and larger society might be they tend to be more progressive or left of center. is that perception true? in if it tends to be true your work, how do you incorporate other points of view? jane: i guess it depends on if you mean progressive and left of
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center are the same thing. so, i would say, american historians as i know, especially political historians, feel quite deeply about our democratic institutions and founding document. the ideals we think are part of an inclusive and participatory democracy. so sometimes i think our commitment to those things comes across as more politically progressive than it necessarily is. susan: what has the digital age done for your profession? jane: a lot. ishink one thing it has done enable us to reach a much broader audience. for instance, things like huffington post being online, podcasts,of blogs, these are all very democratizing.
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i think a lot more people are interested in what academic historians have to say. can find them and listen to them, but now they can. it is a great opportunity for us to rich more people than we could have, simply to the editorial pages of the new york times. to theseally tell through huffington post, which is something that i have really experienced. you can reach a lot of people. that makes you think about, how do you talk to a really broad audience, as opposed to a students or other audiences, other academics, these sorts of things. but the online presence makes that possible for many more people. susan cole and you were telling me about an experience, an article you wrote about a on confederate generals. would you tell me that story on camera? jane: sure. what happened in charlottesville last summer, it really brought a lot of historians out into the public square, because h
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these were things we knew about. we knew about the monuments, the history of them. we wanted to talk about it. that was kind of an interesting moment, just a burst of historians out there. the piece i wrote about was about a virginia general who was a som very successful confederate general who after the war founded an african-american majority third-party in virginia that was extremely successful in elections. he ended up in the u.s. senate. this is a story that not many people know about. so it got a lot of reaction. susan: in terms of sheer numbers. jane: in terms of sheer numbers, for sure. people at the huffington post at something like 800,000 people had clicked on the link, if not necessarily read the whole thing. susan: and you had a comparison on the academic subject. jane: i got my first -- i did area i wrote my first dissertation on that, but i did
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not quite reach about extent of an audience the first time around. susan: what is a moment like charlottesville do for people interested overall and history. ? doest bring a lot more people to the dining room table talking about and making them examine how they feel about history? or is it just a continual process in society? jane: i think there are moments in which that is more likely to happen. charlottesville was one of those moments. it was kind of a perfect storm. with people already talking about confederate monuments, in town councils. historians had studied them for ages, none of this was a new to them. but i think for the rest of america to sort of awake up and let's talk about confederate monuments, especially for people outside of the south who had no idea that there were so many of them, and who did not necessarily know their history. but neither did southerners necessarily know their history. i think the one factor that seems to have gone through putting much for everybody now,
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was that these monuments were not directed after the war. they were erected 30 or 50 years later. that fact came through. which gets to the question about ok, how do we talk about these things, which are not what we thought they were? they mean different things to different people. that for me, gets to the question of where historians can step in and say, here's how we interpret facts that are new or different. or, that conflict with opinions we thought we held, historians we thought we knew. susan: when you are talking about the digital age, i am also interested in what is happened on the research side of history, with the digitization of so many archives and collections. what has that done for the collection? jane: it has been extremely confusing for people like me. where's the card catalog? we just got used to using the card catalog and now we have all these electronic systems.
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for example. i rely very heavily on our bibliography at the university ccago, nancy spiegel, our bibliographer. she understands how this works and she understands how to search and this new world. but as you say, our archives have been digitized, powerful search engines, newspapers online now. in part, it is wonderful, it also makes you nervous as a historian. i think, ok, now, do i have to check every single newspaper? or can i do it the way i always did it? which was, checking a few.. it is come together in an interesting. susan: do you have any examples of where your opinions have been modified, based on access to new digital records? jane: oh, gosh. -- for me, the digitization of so many of the african-american newspapers, which is a source i rely on.
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they were often fragmented, they would not necessarily have so many editions of them or issues of them. he would have to go from library to library. this has made it much easier to look at a whole run on the newspaper. so i think i have actually -- i have checked much more broadly, about perceptions that i have. now that is so much easier, let's just see if this newspaper is talking about the same things that this newspaper was talking about. can i really make a claim that they were both interested in x in the 1930's, or was it this one and the other not? is crosschecking, i think, what has become much easier to do now. susan: what was the role of the national federal archives, the library of congress, national archives records administration, in preserving the nation's history, particularly for people in your
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profession? jane: oh my gosh. just unbelievably important. we could not write american history. everyone uses the archives they bash everyone uses the national archives. they preserve an astonishing amount of information. the library of congress is also absolutely vital for historians. it is a working tool for historians. the thing i most recently used i think, are the papers of the supreme court justices. which are sometimes scattered in their home states, and some of them collected in the library of congress. that can be very helpful, so that you don't have to go running all over the country. the library of congress will have something for you. to youi wanted to talk specifically about the new project you are involved in. i have volume two of a history textbook. can you tell me what this is? jane: this is "building the
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two-volumepublic," a u.s. history first edition textbook written by scholars and published by the university of chicago press. they did something really interesting and exciting. they decided to publish an of charge.rely, free so this is a scholarly, narrative history of the united states, that anyone can read for nothing. in you can also buy it inexpensive paperback and hardcopy, too. that was an idea to see how many people we could reach using these new techniques and also having no cost. in the way that so many other online resources are free but they are not necessarily refereed or have any kind of quality control. susan: so i downloaded it in about 30 seconds.
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i saw all the options that were there, to buy the book or simply read it online, or download it onto my device. i'm curious as to whether or not this kind of trend is going to help the text book industry. making it available for free, how does the publisher make money for all the scholarship and work that went into creating it? jane: well, they don't. think the press was hoping to break even with people buying the paperbacks. it is a new model, completely untried model. sometimes, it is a public service. we know that experts are incredibly expensive. we know students cannot afford them. there's research done on what happens to students who don't buy the textbook. they don't perform as well in class. so we thought, well, what happens if we make a scholarly again, there are other online textbooks that are for profit, where they will make one
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, companies will tailor the textbook to you. ,hich i always interpret as don't like evolution? leave it out. but everything is here in this book, and it is free of charge. we hope everyone will take advantage come and read some of it, read all of it, it is up to you. susan: what is the market? college? high school? all the above? jane: all of the above, we want everyone to read it. whenuestion i had in mind i was writing it was common at a college students. they are the largest group of college students in america, and they also tend to be a bit older. a lot of them are veterans, a lot of them have kids, jobs. so as i wrote the narrative i was trying to write an engaging one. in aning to write engaging way. i did not have young prince him -- a young person in my head, i had a slightly older reader. it does not mean high school it, it wasnnot read
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just the reader that i had in mind when writing. susan: can you give the web address. c-span has a lot of people interested in self-education. i think it would be appealing to them. how do they find this? jane: heck if i know. [laughter] we will put it on the screen. i told you, i am not good at this electronic stuff. susan: you take this book up how far? jane: up until the 2016 elections. susan: how do you have a history and perspective on something that is a year and half old? how does one put context something that is desperate in context something that is so recent? jane: it is hard. i think that is the reason why most textbooks to go that far forward. i found that scholarly work i could draw on, the university, refereed work, is about the iraq -- it ends about the iraq war. then i relied on primary sources and also on really great nonfiction journalism.
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so for example, someone like george packer, who i think is a really first-rate researcher and writer. i relied more on them that other than other things. but i do think it is dicey, the closer you get to the present. alive, so ihat i am have opinions. so i have to be more careful than normally about being independent, making sure that it is not about the things that i think all the time, it is about what i can find in the sources and what other people are creating in the historical narrative. susan: why did you make the decision to make it so contemporary? jane: i think in part, it was from teaching. students always want to get to where they are. they get so disappointed if you teach a modern u.s. history class and you and it would say, ronald reagan.
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that is 15 years before they were even born. so they want to get to something that they remember. so you have to balance, i think, their desire to finally get into their lived experience with the limited scholarly resources we have for that era. susan: who are your students , generally? are they going to go on the profession, or are they interested in just rounding out there scholarship? jane: there are people who want to learn to think critically. a few of them become historians. a lot of them go to law school, a lot of them work for the government, because people who like the american past often end up working for the state department and other branches of government. you know, -- we say,, any history professor will say, you can do anything with a history degree. and in terms of reading evidence and balancing arguments, i think
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that is true. susan: let us close with your own story. how did you get interested in the study of history? jane: i think i always found it interesting. we would literally sit around the kitchen table talking about politics mostly, but in the st, talking about john kennedy, talking about nixon, the vietnam war. during nixon's presidency, and that was time,teresting because everyone was arguing a great deal about what to do about that. i think my first real political memory is watching president nixon get on the helicopter as he left the white house. being a kid and not really understanding what that was about. so i think actually i kind of liked this way back. susan: if you could tell the audience about young people, we might not say they are not really interested in the study of history, they do not care,
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they're all temporal -- would you disabuse us of that notion, do you think that you see a change in your students over the course of time? jane: i would disabuse that notion. i don't think this generation is any less or more interest. in fact at this moment i think they're more interested. i think there are looking for some guidance in how to think about history. guidance in thinking about how to think about history. for example, a millennials said to me, the difference between what we are doing and wikipedia, is that wikipedia is really quite reliable and it is crowd sourced. it is a compilation of facts rather than a narrative that has voice.thorial and it has an interpretation of those facts. that, i think, is what they're looking for. they don't find that in online sources. they would like the story parts .
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susan: so they can decide how to think about it based on hearing someone else's narrative. jane: oh, yes. to get to know the people. one thing we try to do in building the american republic is to have characters and plots and voices and narrative attention. those things that get people to read the big biographies. there's a great books, and part for those reasons. susan: we will give you one more plug at it. this is "building the american republic, volume two," give a nod to your co-author, wilson, professor of history at the university of north carolina chapel hill. volume, a first magnificent, much larger than mine, magnificent work of history. you can get the blue volume with the picture of the uncompleted capitol on a cover. thank you for spending time with
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american history tv. we appreciate it. announcer: you are watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3. follow us on twitter@c-span history. keep up with the schedule and the latest history news. 30 years ago between may 29 and june 2, 1988, president ronald reagan and secretary mchale go much of -- mchale gorbachev met for the first time. the leaders finalized the intermediate range nuclear forces treaty they had signedhed by the u.s. senate a few days earlier. next on "reel america," a compilation of several videos from the summit, courtesy of the ronald reagan presidential library. we will see the arrival of president reagan and nancy reagan, a walking tour of red andre with the two leade
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