10:00 p.m. and sunday at 4:00 p.m. eastern here on american history tv. ♪ c-span bus is stopping at high schools across the country to represent the awards to the winners of our studentcam competitions. and this month, you can see the top 21 winners every morning journal," ncdgton behind the scenes winners online at studentcam.org. universityn professor kevin kruse talks about the role of historians on social media and what he feels is their duty to provide context to current issues. he also discusses how media consumption has changed since the 1970's. this 13-minute interview was recorded in chicago at the annual american historical association meeting.

steve: kevin kruse is a professor at princeton university, and he is out with a new book this month, the title "faultlines: the history of america since 1974." what is the premise behind it? kruse: a colleague and i co-taught a course for a couple of years, and a course that we taught was developed on the idea that this period was really a distinct period, something that should be treated as a distinct thing. it is a discrete entity that we need to dig into on its own terms. steve: you have the resignation of nixon in 1974. the first and only appointed president in gerald ford, and the cold war at its peak. kruse: that is right, that is right.

it goes into détente at that period but it is in a state of flux. you got the end of the vietnam war taking place over 1973 to 1975, the opec oil crisis. there was a great deal of chaos. it seemed to be a moment that was ripe for making the post-cold war order and think about new trends that came about. steve: what did you learn? prof. kruse: i learned a lot. what we learned in this book, realor us, it was a adventure because we were really writing about the history of our own lives. it was a process of rediscovering things we thought we knew as teachers and people who had grown up in these decades. steve: what surprised you as you looked back at the presidency of jimmy carter, ronald reagan, george h.w. bush?

prof. kruse: the reagan revolution comes in and really sweeps everything aside. what we discovered instead was that there is a real stickiness to ideas and institutions that survived the reagan revolution , and there is a real preservation of some of those old values and old policies, so rather than a conservative ascendancy, it's a conservative versus liberal type of war. steve: you're on social media with more than 220,000 followers on twitter. how did that come about? prof. kruse: i have no idea. because i came about had a willingness, and i'm not alone in this, but a willingness not just to provide anodyne historical antidotes but rather to take on people who were propagating falsehoods, whether knowingly or unknowingly spreading mistruths about american history. steve: so give us the history of social media. when did it really begin and where are we today? prof. kruse: that's something we

talk about in this book, "fault lines." it really begins with the rise of the internet in the 1990's, very crude forms of interaction. it takes off in the early 2000's, with sites like meetup.com and later on facebook. it comes into the world we know today with the rise of twitter. and so, over these periods, the globe has become much more tied together, much more intertwined, much more engaged, in good ways and bad. steve: teddy roosevelt called the presidency the bully pulpit. how would he view donald trump using his megaphone, twitter, today? prof. kruse: i think he would see it as the new bully pulpit, and trump is putting it to good use. steve: what has surprised you about how he has used social media? prof. kruse: what has surprised me is the total lack of filter.

so when roosevelt or other presidents would use the bully pulpit, it was done with a very carefully prepared, carefully crafted message behind that. we have a strong tradition, especially through the modern period. if you look at presidents like reagan, he had a team behind him who really crafted a very important message, and they were very careful to shape every detail, they would pick backgrounds for photos. they would have key words of the day that they stressed throughout the day, and that they hammered home one theme and it was all very carefully thought out by a team of experts. trump does it on the fly. he does it, you know, seemingly on a whim. i guess on a phone perhaps. there are typos. there are plenty of inaccuracies. it comes out without a filter , and that's really unusual. usually the bully pulpit has a great deal of structure. this is him out there on his own. steve: as we go through so many questions about the trump presidency and some house democrats saying it's time to impeach the president, have you

ever thought about what richard nixon would have viewed in terms of twitter if he had that capability in the early 1970's? prof. kruse: there is actually a i have. there is actually a great twitter account as someone who poses as nixon, dick nixon. he does a good job of capturing his voice. what we see in that account and our own imagination as historians and what he would do, nixon would do here today, nixon would have somewhat of a fighter instinct that we see in trump , but he would show more restraint. nixon was careful about what he said, so we have all of these examples of nixon flying off the handle and using colorful language, attacking opponents. but it was behind the scenes. instead, with trump, it's all right out there in the public sphere. steve: if you could go back to the 1990's, the start of social media, do you think the pioneers of, you know, social media and technology really understood where they were heading? prof. kruse: no, i don't think so. i don't think they thought about it that much. there is a real movement in the

mid-1990's, where they see the internet is going to be this free and open space, and it will self-regulate, self-govern. it won't impact the real world. it will be a separate place. i don't think they saw the real impact it would have on day-to-day life, the way in which it would shape political discussions as it does today. status: because, as you know, people now say individuals have their silos. they are in this tribe or that tribe, and they don't tend to gravitate to the other side, which has created a discourse in our politics today. would you agree or disagree? prof. kruse: i would agree with that completely. we talk about that in "fault lines," the way in which -- this begins, we would argue, with the changes in television. siloing effectsoe start to happen with cable television in which they advocate what people behind mtv call narrowcasting. they will reach a specific small segment of society. reach out to rock fans or sports fans or news junkies or that or this. you see it across the cable spectrum today.

the internet picks that up and amplifies it. social media, it is the exact effect where you can have this sealed off eco-system in which you only get information from sources you already trust, and it becomes reinforced by other sources. you have this echo chamber that does not get penetrated by anything outside it. steve: is that an underlying factor in where we see the political discourse today in the country? prof. kruse: i think it absolutely is. what that does is it reinforces the political siloing that happens in the political realm, too. and so things like gerrymandering and the extreme polarization of the two parties are reinforced by that because , because the media sources that these voters then pick up on reaffirm what's going on in the political sphere. steve: i'm curious, as you look at this topic, and you are teaching to a group of students that have twitter accounts, facebook, instagram and other social media, do they fully understand what they have grown up with and how different it was for your generation or mine? prof. kruse: we try to explain it to them.

like, you know, it's like a fish in water. they have lived in it their whole life, and they don't quite understand what's really novel about it. we do do a decent job, trying to explain what it meant when someone like walter cronkite came out against the vietnam war, how important that was that one single voice was trusted above others and that his shift in opinion really did not matter for the country, and that's something they don't quite have today, but it's something that we do try to re-create. steve: there are probably more sources of information today than ever before. is that a good thing or a bad thing? prof. kruse: it can be a good thing. the problem is people need help navigating that, so we've had a movement in the country, a kind of revolt against the elites, and that elitism is a bad thing. that has also thrown out the role of experts with it. and i think we need experts to help guide us in our daily affairs and to help us figure out which of these sources is actually trustworthy. steve: so you are putting this

book together. who surprised you the most? what intrigued you the most? what was the one thing that you learned that you didn't know going into the project? prof. kruse: that's a great question. we have been at it for so long, i trying to remember what i am did not know at the start. i think what really impressed me the most, and what was new to me, was the revolution in communications. i am a political historian by training, so the politics were all things that i knew fairly well, but the media side was something i was not quite aware of. i had a vague sense, having grown up in the 1980's, what mtv was like or what cnn was like when it started, but i was 8 when cnn started, i didn't quite remember that. to have a sense of where these institutions came from, where c-span came from and what that did to politics had a real impact. something that was really new to me and really a revelation. steve: i guess a follow-up question is, where are we heading, what's the next big thing?

prof. kruse: i'm a historian, so my training is in hindsight. it is hard for me to make predictions about the future. i would say that we are entering into another period of reckoning. in a lot of ways, that book starts in the aftermath of watergate with the ways in which the country has to pick up the pieces, in the aftermath of that scandal. i think we are heading into that moment again. steve: really? prof. kruse: yeah. steve: what do you want people to take away from reading your book? prof. kruse: i want them to take away an understanding of the way in which they themselves understand their world. that title "fault lines" we mean in two senses of the term. one, the division across american society, in terms of politics, economics, race, gender, and sexuality. but also the lines people believe about who is at fault. and that comes through the way in which they receive their information, through media, through social media, through traditional media. and i hope people would start to question the way in which they themselves form their opinions about the world. steve: so before i let you go, as somebody who studies social media, how are historians using

it, and what are some of the lessons we can take away from others? prof. kruse: i think historians are using social media to really provide fact checking that only historians can provide. there is a certain duty that i think historians have, the same duty that scientists have to push back against climate change deniers or doctors have to push back against the fight against the role of vaccines, historians have a special expertise, a special knowledge about our past. and there are a lot of mistruths being spun about that in both the popular media and among on social media. we have a duty to step in and correct those. steve: how do you use or apply that in your own craft? prof. kruse: well, a lot of it happens reactively, so when i see the president or another politician or a cable host or a cable guest make a misstatement about the american past, which i know well, i can offer a correction on twitter. one which is read, not just by the people who follow me, but hopefully can be spread by some of the journalists who follow me

and serve as a corrective to that. steve: how do you do that? i mean, there is so much coming at you and in our society, in our 24/7 cable news and media environment. how do you keep track of it all? prof. kruse: you can't keep track of it all. it is like drinking from a fire hose. it comes incredibly fast so what . so what i try to do is to limit it to the things that i know best. i am an expert in the civil rights era, southern politics. when things like that come up, that's where i step in. luckily, i know there are lots of other historians on twitter who are doing the same thing i'm doing. they have different areas of expertise, and they will step forward when it's their topic on the table. steve: are they making a difference? prof. kruse: they are, i think. again, i would like to think we are making a huge difference. but i do think that because of the way in which twitter is a place, where so many journalists are on there, and journalists are looking for the truth and looking for experts to be able to speak to these issues and the fact that historians are on there providing this expertise is an excellent source for them

to correct the record themselves. steve: kevin kruse, professor at princeton university, thank you very much. prof. kruse: thank you for having me. americane watching history tv all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. artifacts,american we travel to independence, missouri to tour the area's truman library and museum. truman became president in 1945 after the death of franklin roosevelt and served until 1953. ♪ >> in independence, missouri, the harry s. truman library becomes a realities, fulfilling a long-cherished dream of the ex-president, a noted amateur historian. a crowd of 10,000 witnesses the dedication. mr. truman and chief justice warren both take part in the ritual.