>> princeton university professor kevin kruse talks about the role of historians on social media and what he feels is their duty to provide context to issues. he also discusses how media consumption has changed since the 1970s. this 13-minute interview was recorded in chicago at the annual american historic association meeting. >> kevin kruse is a professor at princeton university, out with a new book this movement the title, fault lines, a history of america since 1974. what's the premise behind it? >> it comes from a course we taught for a couple of years. post 1974 in history is distinct. one the historians need to treat at its own thing

rather than a postscript. it's a discreet area that we need to dig into on its own terms. >> you had the resignation of richard nixon in 1974. the first and only appointed president gerald ford, and the cold war that was at its peak. >> that's right. the cold war in some ways, it goes into de taunt, and that period, in a period of flux but global affairs are in a real state of turmoil. you've got the end of the vietnam war. really taking place. 1973 to 1975. the opec oil crisis. there is a great deal of chaos and it seemed to us to be a moment that was right for seeing the start of the unmaking of the old post war order that governed not just the u.s. but the entire western world, and think about new trends that came about. >> what did you learn? >> i learned a lot. what we learned in this book is that -- at first it was a real adventure because we were writing about the history of our own lives. i was born in 1972. julien was born a couple

of years earlier. it was a process of rediscovering things we thought we knew. >> what surprised you, as you look back at the presidencies of jimmy carter, ronald reagan, george h.w. bush? >> what really surprised us, the reagan and bush eras it's been talked about as appeared of conservative dominance. reagan comes in and sweeps everything aside. there was a real stickiness to liberal ideas and institution that is survives the reagan revolution and there is a real preservation of some of those old values and old policies so rather than conservative -- it's a conservative versus liberal type of war. >> you're on social media with more than 240,000 followers on twitter. how did that come about? >> i have no idea. i think it's because i had a willingness, and i'm not alone but a

willingness not just to provide historical antidotes but rather to take on people who were propagating falsehoods, whether knowingly or unknowingly spreading mistruths about american history. >> so give us the history of social media. when did it really begin and where are we today? >> that's something we talk about in this book fault lines. it really begins with the rise of the internet in the 1990s,very crude forms of interaction. it takes off in the early 2000s, with sites like -- later on facebook and it comes into the world we know today with the rise of twitter. and so, over these periods, the country has become the -- the lobe has become much more tied together, intertwined, much more engaged in good ways and bad. >> teddy roosevelt called the presidency the pulley pulpit. how would you view donald trump?

>> i think you would see it as the new bully trump pet and he's put it to use. >> what surprises you about how he's used social media? >> 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 luke 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 he day, and that they hammered home one theme and it was all very carefully thought out by a team of experts the 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. >> as we go through so many questions about the trump presidency and 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 1970s? >> 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 as historians and what he would do, nixon would have, i think, some -- fighter instinct that we see in trump, but he would be more restrained. 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. it's behind the scenes. instead, with trump it's all right out there in the

public sphere. >> if you could go back to the 1990s, start of social media, do you think the pioneers of, you know, social media and technology really understood where >> no, i don't think so. i don't think they thought about it that much. there is a real movement in the mid-1990s where they see the internet is going to be this free and open space and self-regulate, self-govern. it won't impact the real world. it will be a separate -- 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. >> 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? >> i would agree completely. we talk about that in fault lines, the way in which -- this begins, we would argue with the

changes in television. so you see the effects start to happen with cable television in which they advocate behind what people call narrow casting. they will reach a specific small segment of society. reach out to rock fans or sports fans or news junkies or that or that. you see it across the cable spectrum today. the internet picks it up and amplifies it, social media, it's 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 ecomes reinforced by other sources, and you have this echo chamber that doesn't get penetrate by anything outside it g. is that an underlying factor in where we see the political discourse today in the country? >> i think it absolutely is. what that does is it reinforces the political siloing that happens in the political realm, too. so things like jerry man derring and the extreme polarization of the two parties

are reinforced by that because the media sources that these voters then pick up on, reaffirm what's going on in the political sphere. >> i'm curious, as you look at this topic and you're 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? >> 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 understand what's really novel about it but we do do a decent job, trying to explain what it meant when someone like walt cronkite came out against the vietnam war that his shifting opinion didn't really 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. >> there are probably more sources of information today than ever before. is that a good thing or a bad thing? >> 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's 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. >> so you're 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? >> that's a great question. we've been at it for so long i'm trying to remember what i didn't know at the start. i think what really impressed me the most, and what was new to me was the revolution in communications. i'm a political historian by training so the politics were all things that i knew fairly well but the media side was something i wasn't quite aware of. i had a vague sense, having grown up in the 1980s what mtvwas 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. >> i guess a follow-up question is where are we head something what's the next big thing? >> i'm a historian so my training is in hindsight. trying to make predictions about the future, i would say that we're 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're heading into that moment again. >> really? >> what do you want people to take away from reading your book? >> yeah. >> i want them to take away an understanding of the way in which they themselves understand their world. fault lines, we mean in two senses,

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. i hope people would start to question the way in which they themselves form their opinions about the world. >> 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? >> i think historians are using social media to really provide fact checking that only historians can provide. there is a certain duty that historians have, same duty that scientists have to push back against climate change or doctors have to push back against though -- 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 spoken about that in both the popular media and among social media. we have a duty to step in and

correct those. >> how do you use or apply that in your own craft? >> a lot of it happens reactively, so when i see the president or another politician or a cable host or 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 severrve as a corrective to that. >> how do you do that there is so much coming in our 24-7 social, cable and news environment. how do you keep track of it all? >> you can't, it's like drinking from a fire hose. it comes incredibly fast so what i try to do is to limit it to the things that i know best. i'm 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. >> making a difference? >> i think, they are. again, i would like to think we're making a huge difference. but there are so many journalists on twitter, journalists looking for the truth and looking for experts to be able to speak to these issues the fact that historians are on there providing this expertise is an excellent source for them to correct the record themselves. >> kevin kruse, professor at princeton university, thank you very much.

>> to that eeks tent i'm a nationalist. superior in the sense that it embodies, made by a philosophy that is right and that not suitable for all people at all times but everyone ought to spire to it. i want to make it available to people, i want to help them where we can and we have a lot of experience with wl civil society of the democratic society. so i'm a mild nationalist. >> tonight at 9:00 p.m. eastern.

>> next on the civil war, the book copper heads. the rise and fall of lincoln's opponents in the fall. this talk was part of a con frens hosted by schenn doea niversity. >> there a lot of great things about institute and having the great pleasure to work at shenandoah university and one neat thing about the institute is that historians, there are so many civil historians that publish great work and had times, you never get to meet them and you can only admire them from a war. i've been familiar with jennifer weber's work for years and never had an opportunity to meet her, we're both at a conference this summer but there, but never hadded a chance to connect. so i'm glad that we're able to bring her to shenandoah. are weber is a