join our live conversation with your phone calls, tweets and facebook questions. watch in depth with author paul kengor live sunday from noon to 2:00 p.m. eastern on book tv. and be sure to watch in depth next month with author lee edwards. watch book tv every weekend on c-span 2. next on american history tv, backstory hosts brine balogh and nathan connolly give a behind the scenes look at their weekly podcast. they are joined by a former staff member and a regular guest, this is part of a two-day purdue university conference called remaking american political history. >> okay. good morning. >> good morning. >> welcome to the 10:45 panel called something like behind the scenes at backstory. >> that's right. >> make. just so you know, you are not on

the wrong flight. i'm brian balogh and i've been a co-host for backstory for over ten years now. i'm going to introduce the panel and then we are each going to say a few words about our quite different roles. nathan and i have the same role, he is trying to steal the 20th century from me, doing a pretty good job of it, but we all have relatively different roles in backstory. i wanted to talk about that a little bit and then we are going to open it up to your questions. just for starters, this is not what it looks like behind the scenes at backstory. in fact, we're rarely in the same place at the same time. i had to google nathan to see what he looked like, for instance, even though i talk to him every week. so introducing myself, i'm a professor at the university of virginia, i co-host backstory

and i direct the national fellowship program at the jefferson scholars foundation. my co-host, nathan connelly, of course, is known to most of you as an outstanding scholar. he is the herbert -- herbert baxter adams chair of history at the johns hopkins university. he is the author of a world more concrete, real estate and the remaking of jim crow's south florida. he is also hard at work on a book that is really a deep transnational family history. >> that's right. that's right. >> a fair description? >> yeah. >> and it's called "four daughters." it's a five-generation history of one working class family whose travels and travails took

them between the caribbean, europe and the united states. nathan is also an overall good citizen and as part of his good citizenship he has been involved in a project that a number of you out there are working on called mapping inequality, where you are laying out the landscape of red lining in the united states. joey thompson graduated from the university of virginia about 12 minutes ago and his dissertation is titled "sounding southern: music, militarism and the making of the sun belt." this is, i will say it publicly, one of the best cultural histories that i have read in 35 years of advising graduate students.

his adviser is -- was, i should say, grace hail. he has fired all of us because he is on to a job as an assistant professor at mississippi state university. joey is here because he had the misfortune of being a researcher for backstory for two years. so if you really want to look behind the scenes at backstory, what you will find are first-rate scholars, joey thompson, monica blair who always sits right up front is our current researcher and is a ph.d. candidate at the university of virginia department of history. joey, monica and several other outstanding scholars have done the research that really powers the intellectual connections in backstory, if there are any. and joyce chaplain who i met at

the johns hopkins university when we were both in graduate school together, i prided myself on being the first person to the library every morning. there was only one person who was there always before me and that was joyce chaplain. do you remember that, joyce? >> you're going to tell everything about it? >> no, that's it. i stopped right there. joyce is the james duncan phillips professor of early american history at harvard university. her most recent works include roundabout the earth, circumnavigating ma gellen to orbit and with allison bashford the new world of thomas malfus, rereading the principle of population. joyce has been kind enough to be a guest on backstory three times. >> three times. >> and she's going to talk to us a little bit about what it is to

be like dropped into a show where people know each other pretty well and bring scholarship to bear on a topic that we hope will reach a broader public. not an easy thing to do and joyce has done it master flee as a guest three times. so let me take five or ten minutes and just give you a brief history of backstory, considering that we're four historians, myself, nathan, joeian freeman at yale university and ed airs president emeritus at the university of richmond, considering that we are four historians we know nothing formally about our own history. we can't tell you exactly when we started, we have no archives. i guess since you are all historians none of this comes as a great surprise to you. i actually did some primary research, meaning i went back to

the oldest emails i had and there is an exchange in 2005 about possibly doing a show, it has had many horrible names, the one i remember best is the one i suggested, history hotline. that lasted -- lasted about three minutes, i think. the show started when a man by the name of andrew wyndham who worked for virginia humanities, which we are still housed in and they still support us, andrew wyndham suggested to ed airs and peter onif that it would be fun to do a radio show on history and apparently peter responded, saying two things, number one, we don't know enough history, we need somebody in 20th century.

number two, we're not very funny, so nobody is going to be interested in this show. but andrew prevailed on ed and peter onif, this he came to me. i said that's a ridiculous idea, nobody is going to be interested in this. we spent about a year and a half doing one demo, which was truly horrible. if it doesn't exist, it's because we have all made separate attempts to burn this demo. we circulated that to ten or so directors of public radio stations, our notion was eventually if we hit the big time we would be on one or two public radio stations. originally the show was a call-in show, we took calls from people and we discussed a specific topic that went across three centuries.

we were undeniably three dead white males. we really took pride in owning our own centuries, one of our most frequent troupes was, oh, my century is better than yours. my century is worse than yours. that was -- that was one of the formats that we used again and again. we got training by appearing on live radio shows. i will never forget we were on a radio show in norfolk, we all were sitting in a studio, but we were on this show live in norfolk and a caller called in and asked whether william and mary had been founded on pirates booty. i'm pointing at peter, peter is pointing at ed, we are all going you take this one. ed is googling furiously, wikipedia is next to monica and

joey, that was our major search research engine, and peter answered the question and i have no idea how he answered. we were fortunate enough to air as a monthly show on local public radio stations, meaning central virginia, also wtju, the university's station, that's how we got our start, and very fortunate eventually to expand to roughly 200 public radio stations around the country. we had some good, good in terms of audience, stations. the public radio station in chicago probably reached the largest audience of any station that we were on. there was a good time. we were also on alaskan public

radio, i can't remember what time we were on in alaska. i know that we were on wamu in washington, d.c., i think we were on at 7:00 in the morning on saturday morning and i want to tell you that we were incredibly popular with cab drivers all over washington. i'm assuming some of them had passengers, so at least more than one person was listening to us in washington, d.c. roughly about three years ago we made two very important decisions, one of them was triggered by peter onif, 18th century guy, deciding to retire, both from the university of virginia and stepped down from backstory. we were very fortunate that we were able to reach out to nathan connolly and to joanne freeman and they joined us and their perspectives, their interests, their life experiences, their

own experience in public engagement i think has really changed the show. i love the old backstory, but i also really love the current backstory. at the same time we decided to make -- kind of take a deep gulp decision, with he pulled off of 200 public radio stations and went to a podcast only format. at the time i didn't know what a podcast was -- that's not entirely true. i urged that we go to podcast even though i didn't know how to find podcasts on my phone, because of two things. we wanted to reach a much more diverse audience and we wanted to reach a much younger audience. we lucked out. the podcast turned out to be very successful. on our 200 public radio stations

the estimates -- and they were really hazy -- the estimates were that we were reaching roughly 40,000 listeners. we currently are downloaded by roughly 100,000 listeners every week. and i should have mentioned about eight or nine years ago we went to a weekly format and we continue that weekly format on podcasting. so i'm in love with my co-hosts. i'm in love -- it's true, nathan -- i am in love with our researchers, i am in love with our sizable production staff. we have averaged staff overall full-time of seven or eight people. so we are still aiming for a sound, and i'm amazed people

keep coming up and they think we just get together and sit around a table and shoot the breeze. and we are aiming for that. but, in fact, it's a costly production, it's a complicated production and if it sounds good, it's because of the incredible co-hosts that i have and it's because of the amazing staff that we've enjoyed for now over ten years. so i'm happy to answer a lot of questions in question and answer, but i'm going to turn it over to nathan and ask a question i have never asked, like, what did it feel like to kind of just come into an existing podcast with at least two old white guys? dead. >> resuscitate right away. so it was with the benefit of having appeared on backstory

that i decided to take this move and step into this platform, having done a show -- i think we did one on booker t. washington or the black middle class it might have been, and i will be very honest and say up front that i had a certain amount of trepidation about taking this move into doing media work, in large part because of just where i was in my career, as an assistant professor with all kinds of expectations about timetable and clock and even then as an early associate professor and brian will be the first one to tell you we have, you know, conversations where i'm often agonizing about how to do work/life balance where i have three young children, two manuscripts in the pipeline and a podcast that we're doing. and the process of imagining my own calculations and tradeoffs has a lot to do with really trying to understand genre. so backstory was a phenomenal way to really begin to engage

how senior scholars think about really big expansive complicated ideas and distill them down in extraordinarily compelling ways. one of the things that i'm sure brian won't take a lot of credit for or ed or for that matter -- who is the other guy? peter. is that, you know, they have the benefit of being able to take a field at a glance and really look at it and come at something very complicated with an extraordinarily grounded and intimate look, oftentimes a compelling anecdote and that's a skill that i have had to do a fair amount of learning about. really understanding that as much as i want to complexify things, it's about trying to show the complexity in the details and learning from these folks has been wonderful in that hard. i will also say that the show itself was going through -- and this was all happening back stage -- it's own kind of agonizing conversion from broadcast to podcast. so a lot of the process of

creating a show for the radio had to do with basically approximating that npr sound. so the strategies in the booth had a lot to do with getting our show to sound like this american life or prairie home companion, car talk. there is a lot that goes into how many times one reads the script, whether or not you do a retake on jokes that might have come off extemporaneously and try to get that magic to happen again for take two and three. and thankfully we have arrived in terms of our own legs in podcasting at a much less varnished sound that i think is much more honest as a listening experience goes. we're in an environment now where last i heard, this may have been like two-month old data which we have probably gone up by at least 100% that we are 400,000 podcasts that are out there. having backstory which exists in the top 1% of all podcasts want to be something that people want to tune into means there is a challenge coming up with

compelling topics and really finding the news cycle. in some ways the most exhausting thing about that first year on backstory was that it coincided with the arrival of the trump administration in january of 2017. so we spent week after week after week with no shortage of things that we had to offer deep contextual views of, whether it was muslim bans, transgender bans, border walls and environmentalism -- >> i just want to say, that i nan, i'm the one that said we have to do a show that's not about donald trump. >> yes. >> i came up with a great idea, the history of hair. >> yeah. >> and everyone looked at me and said hair, donald trump, that's going to get us -- we never mentioned donald trump's hair. >> we did not. >> on the history of had a i remember. >> short tli thereafter we did a show on the history of ufos, which i loved. one of the things that i think we've been able to do really well i think is find a way of

balancing two things, one is, you know, in a field where we all would like to imagine ourselves as being really effective collaborators, there is a lot that goes into structuring productive collaborations. i think sometimes when you are on a conference program committee or you want to co-author something, there has been no shortage of opportunities to step on each other where that is concerned and i think that one of the things that makes it easiest to work on backstory, to juggle my own work/life stuff, to think about the show's own permutations is because of the team that we have there is a really clean division of labor that allows engineers to engineer, producers to produce, hosts to hosts. theres a great deal of humility in terms of those roles where we will oftentimes bounce actual intellectual questions off of engineers and producers and they will help us arrive at things. so -- and we will help with script work as needed on the fly. in that sense you get really new and fresh content, but from deep levels of expertise across those

various staff positions. that i think is really important and was really useful to learn how to do that. the other thing that i would just say is that i think it's really critical to think now abe electing to engage the public. i know there is a lot of, for me personally, i do the kind of work that i would say comes out of a left orientation, the kinds of questions that i ask are grounded in materialistic questions, grounded in anti-racist work i have been doing for a very long time. doing that work in a space that has been opened up in way that maybe some npr audiences might not be amenable to. that's really important. how does one do anti-racist work in a liberal media atmosphere? i know we are having a lot of considerations about who is electable or what's acceptable, police discourse. backstory has provided me with a platform for experimenting,

figuring out what some of those middle ground and yet still radical perspective can be and the fact that it's grounded in extraordinary research and our own deep rigorous historical sensibilities allows us to feel more confident. in that sense, it's been immensely rewarding. >> can i task you with one more job? >> sure. >> could you say just a few words about our regular gig on here and now? >> yeah. this is actually -- >> and you are welcome to be on it. >> so another one of the things that came with the new podcast format was a partnership with the folks on wbbr's here and now. and we have been doing basically every other week these appearances on here and now. and here and now, for those less familiar, it has a million listeners? >> a million and a quarter. >> we get nine minutes to entertain a million and a

quarter listeners. it will oftentimes be on topics that are, again, you know, right on with the news cycle. so it's a very compressed timetable to try to get our hand around these issues in ways that are, again, really directed at trying to take advantage of our expertise as scholars. this is a relationship that i think has been great for the show and also one that could be -- i have done over 20, almost 30 now, here and now appearances. the first, i'd say, 19 to 20 of these, without exception i was self-annihilating as i left the booth. i should have said this, could have said this. >> i am going to read some of the texts. >> and through the magic of editing, they come off sounding great and it's all wonderful. but it's also one of those things, especially the early going, we were trying to figure out, do they want us to be analysts? talking wikipedia pages? what exactly is our relationship with this other entity? and there have been things that we have said that they've

decided might have been too, you know, polarizing for their audiences. we make our own calculations going forward. i will say that it's a relationship that i think is mutually beneficial. we have, i think, still to figure out a little bit of a tweaking about whether or not we get the chance to be personalities. the great thing about backstory, you build a relationship with the host as people. i think here and now, we are content providers. so i think there is another round of evolution weak spare with that relationship to make it possible to feel more active personalities on the show. but i think it's a very important civic space that again allows us to be piped into audiences we might not be able to access because they might be looking for us with their usual podcast or search. >> i think it was my first appearance on "here and now," within a couple of hours i was called out on the rush limbaugh show. that's just an audience that i don't normally reach whether

i'm -- and whether i'm -- when we were on terrestrial radio, as it's called, or when we went to podcast format. that's when i stopped reading comments. >> please. >> okay. so thanks for being here. brian, thanks for asking me back. it's been a little over a year since i was actually the researcher. so a round of applause, or maybe not, but a nod to monica who actually is the current researcher. >> monica blair. >> yes. and so brian asked me to come here and talk a little bit about what goes into creating a prep for the show. and then to reflect a little bit about the way that this influenced my time as a graduate student. i was doing this while i was writing a dissertation. how it's influenced my scholarship and, most importantly, if there are any grad students out there, my job prospects. so i'll start by saying that one of the most exciting and

sometimes anxiety producing parts of being the research for back story is being handed a st topic that you know absolutely nothing about. this was the case for the climate change episode that we are going to reflect on a little bit. i am not an environmental historian, never had a course in it. how do you wrangle something that you don't know anything about, write a 10 to 20 single spaced page prep? >> with a picture of a polar bear standing on what looked like, by then, an ice cube. >> yeah. >> i think it had been a shelf of ice at one point. >> gallo's humor is the only way to get through climate change, i think. yeah, to write this, you know, substantial prep. suggest interesting stories and identify authors who might make interesting interviewees all in what you are billed as ten hours a week. sometimes i went over that a little bit. as you can maybe tell, i'm an

overpreparer. so that can be really demanding at times and it reflects, i think, why it's important for a show like backstory to have a dedicated researcher rather than for that to be something that the hosts are doing. nathan gestured towards his crazy schedule. i can't imagine you trying to research a whole show yourself to or your segment or anything like that. how do you go about doing something like that? this will be a very familiar process to probably everyone in the room, but i usually just started with journal and blog sefrmgs. the jhah, modern american history, blogs like black perspective were key for me in being able to find these stories that we could use for each episode. i mean, journal articles are particularly useful because if they are framed in the right way they, themselves, can be a segment if it's based around one compelling story. so other times whatever i found

would just go into kind of the general fodder for the host to read and the producers to see. hopefully, that would generate conversation that happens between the segments of the show, if you are familiar with the format. now, in the case of the climate change episode, i relied on an article by fabian lashay called a climate history of environmental reflexivity, which i found critical inquiry. it's unlikely that a show like backstory is going to use the term environmental reflexivity reaching a general audience. as a researcher i take this theoretical work, digest it into facts and stories and hand it over to the hosts and producers. what that article was really helpful with was creating this intellectual and cultural history of human perceptions about climate change. i want to give a shout out to historians working in different departments of the government

right now. those websites, that website content the state department historians create and those branches of government, that stuff is, you know, it's really key for get the nuts and bolts of, particularly political history, and it's an interesting way to think about how, you know, those are probably ph.d. historians working in those positions. the way that people who didn't take the academic route wound up in government and there is a triangulation happening between the academy, the government, and the media with that. so just a shout out to those historians. that was a great source for me. the other is good old fashioned shelf browsing. and here is where conducting this work at uva is important. they have a tremendous library source. it wasn't uncommon for me to look for one book and come out with 20. we have probably all done that. that was helpful in a way looking at world cat or the digital sources was not always

was productive. you can rifle through a book and check out stories. related to that, it was -- i often would go to the best kind of synthetic history that i could find to create the big historical arc of the show prep. for the climate change episode i relied on james fleming's historical performances on climate change and spencer wurts, the discovery of global warming. these types of works, ones in which they are creating overarcing narratives, they were really indispensable. you get a sense of the themes, useful anecdotes and hopefully gain an understand of the argument once you start mining their footnotes. another great method for me was relying on colleagues. it wasn't uncommon for me to email and reach out to my peers at uva or other institutions and people that i knew that were working on a particular topic. in the case of the climate

change episode i reached out to one of brian's students, justin mcbrian, who i knew was working on climate change and the weaponization of weather. and i asked him, you know, would you kindly share your research to help me figure this out, which he did. and i bring that up just to point out how important it is for us to use our networks as scholars to help create this kind of public programming. and we're lucky to have people who will donate their time and research in that way. relatedly, i believe nathan suggested professor chaplain for this episode. he knew she was working on this climate change topic and she was generous enough to share in-progress research and we created a segment around that. using that research i would tease out continuities versus change over time. obviously, a big part of the job here is finding historical precedents and analogies sort of for the topic.

in the case of climate change, that meant looking for the ways that historical actors had recognized anthropogenic alterationes in climate and weather going back as far as we could and professor chaplain's work speaks to that. there is a kind of weird comfort i think we provide audiences in this way to say that you have been here before. so on the one hand, you know, with a show like climate change, listeners can feel a little less like they are living in unprecedented times maybe, like oh, we have been talking about climate change for a long time and the world hasn't ended just yet. so maybe there is still something we can do. but on the other hand, there is this kind of sad continuity to that, that in fact we have been talking about climate change for as long as we have been burning fossil fuels or freedom molecules, and we haven't -- we still haven't heeded people's, you know, warnings on this topic

yet. what does the prep look like? usually i would start, you know, following the tagline of the show. history behind the headlines. i would start with something i found in the news to catch the reader's attention. these guys and the producers and say, hey, maybe this could be a lead for the show. in the case of climate change episode, it was recent news that the faa had grounded planes in phoenix due to heat. apparently, you can't fly planes -- or certain types of planes in which the atmosphere reaches this particular threshold. and the phoenix had grounded airplanes after it topped 119 degrees. the atmosphere just simply wouldn't support those. so sometimes those stories can be used as lead ins for the show. sometimes not. but whatever. i would often though those in there to help kind of spur conversation. then the introduction we describe the overall arc of the history as i mentioned. like a sort of synthesis,

recommend potential interviewees, highlight the big issues and arguments and themes that i think could drive the discussion. it's a weird feeling to provide that information sometimes to such experts. i mean, never have i felt more ridiculous than writing a prep on reconstruction for ed ayers. but i say that to say that even the sharpest minds in the game appreciate having the basic facts in front of them and sort of reminders and prompts of things. moving into like the body of the prep, i would highlight the stories that i found that i thought would make interesting segments. and i usually presented those in chronological order. now, that's not the way it always turns out when it's produced on the show, but it's, you know, we are historians, so it is helpful to walk me down a timeline. in terms of how this fit into my graduate studies, i was thinking about this.

i think there is three ways that i can talk about that. one is that it kept me up to date on recent publications. i started this job after i had finished coursework. i wasn't being assigned dozens of books a semester to read. borking for backstory felt like a continuation of coursework, like write a seminar paper basically on this topic. so that way it was great. it kept me up to date with what was going on in different fields. number two, it gave me an exposure to a wide variety of writing styles and method ols i would not have gotten siloed in of history. it's a cliche to say we are all siloed away, but it's cliche for a reason. it was great to bust out of that and dip my toe into climate change and actually learn

something. lastly, it pushed me to think about my scholarship as it applies to general audiences and how to write for those general aw audiences. people are turning to historians for answers now, and that's something we should encourage. so it never helps to write well when you are doing that. so it was very much a spur in that direction. as far as the job market, i entered graduate school with zero expectations, actually, of finding a job as a pfess professor. lo and behold, that's the way it worked out. i don't need to recite. dismal job market numbers here for anyone. but i say that to say that backstory was a way i could start cultivating a different side of my resume besides teaching and publishing. it was a way to kind of make my

public history bona fide and start looking elsewhere for jobs. i went through the whole ph.d. program basically with one foot out thinking like this isn't going to work out for me so i need to be looking on horizon for something else, right. so that was a great -- backstory created a great opportunity for that. it also gave me an understand of what kinds of stories connect with the general public. there were many, many titles that times i would write a prep and find a story and think they are definitely going to use that for a segment because of what scholarly relevance i found, only for the producers to, you know, quash that. so it was an interesting lesson in learning what media production people think makes a snappy segment versus what i think would be great for scholarship. and so i was able to apply for a different public history job even as i was applying for academic jobs. i was also looking for jobs in

media production. the researcher before me, her name was melissa jess mondy, she used her experience to land jobs at the walrus and other radio programs. most recently, she is back at backstory as a senior producer. she is a brilliant historian who earned a ph.d. at uva. it's interesting to see how she bridged her academic training with the media skills she picked up at backstory. and lastly, i'll say that working for this public history outlet helped my odds on the job market in terms of the numbers of jobs i could apply for within the academy. i applied for dozens of jobs this year, and probably a third of those had some component of public history teaching or doing public history. so, again, it was just a way to beef up that part of my cv. i i'm elernlty grateful for that. thank you. i'll end there.

>> no, you won't. >> okay. >> i would love for you to comment on use of your own material on backstory. scholarly material. >> yes. so this episode already came up in conversation, but the episode on hair. rather than lead with donald trump, which was, you know, came to a lot of people's minds, including my own, brian was asking around anything else, kind of show topper that we could use. i happened to be writing about elvis presley getting his haircut as he went into the army back in 1958. and that's a part of chapter 3 of my dissertation. and so we were able to use that as the show topper. so in that way, you know, not only was i behind the scenes, but i got to be on the mic and put my own research out there, which was a great, you know, advertising for me. a great promotion. so i'm indebted to brian for

that as well. thanks. >> joys. >> i like how the bells started just as you talked about elvis. >> when you have a production team of eight people, it happens, joys. >> well, thank you. the climate episode was my third time, i think before that we worked on nelly bly. and then the one before that that we can't remember -- >> but it was memorable. >> well, i think it might have been on roanoke. so that's why we lost that memory of that place. that episode, i was in chicago. so i remember being very cold going to the studio. the second one i was in cambridge. a third one i was in italy where it was very hot going to the studio in that summer.

i mention that because i ended up doing the taping, the student radio station in venice. and i am delighted to have any opportunity to thank them again. they were fantastic. they were extremely helpful. and after we were done, they asked a lot of questions. that's where i immediately knew that the kinds of questions you were pitching me came up with material that was immediately interesting to these far off students. i was impressed and i remain really impressed that you chose the topic of climate at all. at a time, even two years ago, when this wasn't really common for a lot of public media. it is becoming very common. an episode for bbc radio 4 that i contributed to just aired on tuesday. so i'm getting this request a

lot. but you guys were there first. >> we call it the backstory bump. >> i see, right, the bbc thinks, huh, that's what we should do. but around the same time i worked with you all i was asked to write something for an online magazine. and i pitched a climate story. and there was a pause and then the editor emailed back and said, you know, funny thing. climate change is not only fatal to human life, but to reader ship. could you think of writing about something else? and i didn't email right back because i was so angry for many reasons because i think that's not the reason you don't run with a story. and so, again, i remain very, very impressed that you realized it was an important topic. it had to be covered at a time

when, obviously, your peers weren't necessarily going to agree with that. let me say just a little bit about the content of this segment that i did. there were four or five stories, and i just did one part of it. about early modern climate change. the colonization of the americas, the invasion by europeans took place during a period of global cooling that goes under the name the little ice age that began from about the 1300s onward. geologists think we might still be in it, that if we weren't we would be feeling the effects of global warming even more. the colonists felt it extremely in the 18th and 17th centuries. the inability of places like virginia to produce olives and wine were sources of complaint. and just kind of

incomprehension. during this period as well european colonists thought that they might be able to change this. so not only was this a period in which climate change was occurring, but there are also near owe of anthropogenic climate changes. the british colonists thought if they cleared the forests and opened land for cultivation, the weather would moderate and the temperature would get warmer. they weren't wrong. of course, cutting down forests will actually warm conditions. their reasons for this were different from ours. so here you have a fairly complex idea about how human interaction with the natural world can produce hemispheric changes. there was also debate whether this theory was correct. so jefferson, for instance,

signed ton to cut down the tree hypothesis. benjamin franklin was skeptical, or basically he warned, be careful what you wish for. we may end up with a climate way hotter, especially in summer, than what would be optimal. so that's what i talked about, if i remember correctly. it was tee zbliend designed to not warn people, but encourage them to think of the past as a set of resources for way of thinking about problems we have today. i think that a lot of discussion about climate change now emphasizes this sense that this has never happened before. this is unprecedented. this is an amazing crisis no one has lived through. there are dimensions that are true. especially the anthropogenic nature of climate change now. the overemphasis on the unprecedented nature of the crisis can be helpful and makes

people freeze in terror, whereas encouraging them to think about how people in the past have delwith such problems -- how their solutions may be paths we may or may not want to follow, that's what the episode was great about emphasizing within this. i think these days probably, if i pitched a climate story to a lot of different places, i wouldn't get this response that, no, that will kill reader interest because now, of course, there is greater interest. and that's one reason why i think it wasn't a great idea to have this -- it was a great idea to have this panel to kind of revival the episode and add to the conversation yet again when readership, listenership about things related to the climate is growing. it's really growing for sad reasons, but necessary ones. i also really liked how the

episodes, the stories went into political dimensions to emphasize that climate change now and earlier had always been about politics and understanding the interface between what happens in the natural world and how scientific and non-scientific understandings of what is going on in climate have political dimensions. i thought that was very necessary, and i liked how the episode ends by pointing out where the incredulity of climate change comes from and the political context for that late 20th/early 21st centuries. i thought that was incredibly necessary and needs to continue to be discussed. i do think that even as climate is being discussed now, a lot of issues related to it remain sort of, hmm, don't touch that.

i worked, as brian said, on thomas robert malthis, the original malthusian, original and best question mark, ma and d the critical edition of his principle population, which critical editions include later iterations or discussions of a classic text. so i'm really aware of how discussions of population have been very fraught, extremely fraught. it is strike to go me that you can now have a conversation with most people about what kind of car they drive. do they have a car? is it a normal car? is it an electric car? whereas, you know, 20 years ago a lot of people would have been offended thinking, well, that's none of your business. they knew where that conversation was going.

you can now have a conversation with somebody about that because climate change is now something that i think most reasonable sections of the public think is a problem worth public iteration. you cannot have a conversation with a lot of people about how many children they have. this remains a topic where people are like, no, i'm sorry, that's none of your business, go away. i shut down entire dinner parties, i think. people ask, what are you working on? i am like, malfice. they are like, okay. it's not an unrelated topic, is what i mean. it's not the only one. i am not going to say that population is the driver. and it's not the only one where people are still reluctant to get into that. so i think the politics of how we talk about human use of the natural world, how we are a part of the natural world and must think of ourselves in that way, unfinished business, highly

plilt-sized. really necessary to think about. and this leads me, i think the last thing i'll say is if you were to do an update, a new episode on climate or environmentalism perhaps more broadly defined, what maybe wasn't included last time, what we didn't discuss, what didn't come up -- and i really think this is the dimension of human rights. there is a way in which you can think of climate change and environmental crisis as one of the most fundamental threats to human rights today. environmentalism, including climate change, i think was long categorized as one of those luxury worries. environmentalism was privileged white people worried about trash on the trail in yosemite. and there is this sort of lingering sense that, yeah, we'll get around to that, you know. maybe that's a concern. it's not that climate change might eventually be a

fundamental attack on people's well being. their ability to live in the same way they might want to. the ability to live where their ancestors had lived. it is already a threat to a lot of populations in the world on this level, and i think that's just something that one episode can't do everything. and we didn't talk about that, but i really think that this it is a very pressing way in which we need to think about climate change in particular, but other environmental issues. mass extinction. the collapse of ecosystems. in some ways, we live with one of the biggest hypotheses we have ever posed for ourselves as a species. can we survive ecosystem collapse? there is definitely no answer. i think of thinking how, even now, environmental collapse is affecting populations

differentially and prejudicially and how in the future, if unaddressed, this is going to be an even more extreme problem. >> i'm dying to hear that show. if i had a better track record at you're producers accepting my ideas, wypych it to them this afternoon. maybe we can work together to pitch that hoe. thank you very much, joyce. does anybody want to add anything before we open it up to questions? yeah? shoot. >> wait for the mic. >> thank you so much. >> maybe we can all identify ourselves? >> yeah, thank you. i'm katie bernel, associate professor of history here at purdue. and thank you so much for a terrific conversation. i am wondering if i could ask the panel to dig into deep into something that nathan talked about, about the question of time.

and where this public engagement work, how you fit it into your schedule that is already consumed by research and teaching and service. and how you carve out this particular time and make it valuable. make it seen as valuable to your colleagues within the department, to tenure review, committees who are evaluating your work, and what perhaps we could do as a profession to make engagement work more of a respected and valued and rewarded aspect of our job. >> well, i guess i'll start with that follow-up. so when we first began the conversion from broadcast to podcast, and i was coming in as a neophyte to this platform, you know, i was spending about 15 hours a week per show. >> oh? >> exactly. it was way too much time. the producer said it was too much time.

brian was telling me i was spending way too much time. and it was definitely too much time. and while i was teaching and doing everything else. and basically a lot of it was the learning curve, right? it was figuring out -- we did spend every bit of two hours for a two-hour session in the studio recording script, redoing rifts. there was a way in which we were trying to figure out how to reduce our number of studio hours. and then you have to factor in that we were doing a lot of very heavily produced segments that required a great deal of planning on the front end in terms of guests, in terms of e kinds of books you wanted to incorporate, in terms of what kinds of sound bites and sound files could possibly help to create an immersive listening experience. a lot of earlier stuff you listen and get really great voiceovers, soundtracks, we'll re-create that moment where she is denied transport to explain her radicalization as a journalist, so on and so forth,

and eventually we moved it to a four to five-hour week, i would say, commitment, if that even. so it's much more manageable in terms of less -- as a team, getting more streamlined. relative to the question, which i think is a really important one, about how does this register in more conventional academic conversations, this is unchartered territory right now. one of the things i find so fascinating with the arrival of twitter historians and the kinds of things that are being created, i mean actual scholarly content generated on facebook in extraordinarily quick fashion, there is no denying that we have arrived at a digital moment in the production of new knowledge that now universities have to catch up to in their credentializing and rewarding and so forth. i had a conversation with my department chair, who i love dearly, about what it would mean to bring me up for a full

professor while i am doing backstory. we talked about, for instance, printing up transcripts and putting that in the dossier as paper to go with, you know, more conventional sources. again, joey wrote most of those transcripts, right? so it's not actually a fair reflection of transcripts -- >> and having outside podcasters review and comment on them. very important. >> so we're still trying to figure out what does it mean to have a peer review of this kind of media. and, look, it's like if you have allison hobbs or tom segrew or joyce chaplain writing for popular readership nobody can say that's unscholarly, right? at some point we will to get wise and say there has to be a way of measuring scholarly aim pact, not simply how many times you have been cited by peer-reviewed journals.

the genie is out of the bottle. i many, many of you who are working, for example, in analogue publishing, particular in academic journals, you see the sand moving through the hourglass faster than anything. that's a platform that you are finding harder and harder to sustain and get people to contribute to. so the institutions are going to have to figure out how to catch up with that. so in some ways i'm not necessarily worried about whether or not the efforts being done will be fruitless. i think, frankly, that the political economy of higher education is going to have to adjust as a technology adjusts. as a last point, i'll say on this, and this connects to the point that joey raised earlier, one of the really i think fruitful consequences of a really tough moment, and i'm speaking specifically about the long-term now more than ten-year contraction in the academic job market, is that there has been a real flowering of extraordinarily talented historical minds in a variety of

different corners of the world of letters. and that can only make it, again, a much more productive moment for civic debate, for scholarly thinking and the like. the fact that you have people who are working as journalists, as novelists, as, you know, public historians. and not just folks thinking, okay, if i just do genealogy until i get my academic job, i am fine. but folks making their career writing for popular media. i think about the kinds of journalists we love to read, these are folks who have got research jobs oftentimes doctorates in history, and i had think it cannot be argued that we are more impoverished as a reading community as a result of their moving into that community. i feel as if there is going to be a gradual acknowledgment on the part of universities to basically recognize that scholars are going to feel much greater payoff. i know i feel this way.

most of the stuff that i write for popular readership, if i get 15,000 people to reading is, that's a lot more attractive than writing something that will be at 15 people, which is the average readership for an article in an academic journal, right. i think they are going to have to figure out how to properly reward and remun rate folks who are hunting where the ducks are. >> do you want to add anything to that? >> two things. i really do think you are absolutely right that one upside to the university and academia being in a state of crisis, i think there is a really pressing and great opportunity to redefine what people with ph.d.s can and should do. just to add to that, i mean, i remember when environmental historians were at pains to say that they were not environmentalists, that they were not politically engaged. and just looking back on that i

think, what on earth were they thinking? so i think the stepping up and making public statements and using the kind of knowledge that we have is critical. it's just this is not the moment to say there is noism in wh is i do. i also want to comment on the question of status in the academy. i think as a senior person, if i have the opportunity to say something in public, i should do that. i mean, what is going to happen? i'm safer than a lot of people in doing that. i think where i pause is when i want to get untenured colleagues involved. and there is tricky because i don't want to be the kind of paternalist who says i am going to make that decision for them and just not talk to them about it. i think that extending the invitation and having that

grown-up make a decision about how much time they think they have, what kind of contours they want to have in their career without any sense that they should do it or they should have to do it. but that is a really sticky question about at a more vulnerable stage of your career, how much time and how much risk, especially now, when visibility to the public is not as pleasant perhaps as it used to be. so that's, i think, an unresolved question, and definitely university administrators probably need to have clearer guidelines about what risk is appropriate for people who aren't tenured. >> yeah. just very briefly, you will be shocked i am going to address the bureaucratic implementation of this, but my limited experience with those at the higher echelons of

administration in universities is they crave this kind of public engagement and, for the most part, ph.d.s, they understand the dangers for, let's say, a person who is not yet tenured or a person in nathan's situation who is still, you know, aspires to go on getting promotions and chairs and all those kinds of things. my own sense is that -- well, no, he already has a chair. but anyway, forget the chair. a whole dining room set. my sense is that the people at the high -- there really is a disconnect between what the people running the university want, not to mention they are often highly paid large

organizations dedicated to public engagement. let's just put that aside, because they also have athletics departments. so maybe that's not a good example. and our own colleagues, our colleagues who write the reports for tenure and promotion who are no longer against this. i have watched this change over the course of my career. they no longer will hold it against you if you write an op-ed for "the washington post" or if you are on backstory, whatever. but they think the higher ups are going to hold it against you, that it's not going to count. so, in terms of bureaucratic implementation, quite literally i don't know which organization you would go to, but a discussion between the decision makers within our own disciplines where all of this starts and those people who run

universities might go saya ways towards resolving this problem. the second thing i'll say is we need more conferences like this one. i am going to give you a shout out for organizing it. [ applause ] where there is not this, like, great divide between presenting -- say i would like to panel the first panel, terrific set of scholarly presentations, but they are also, you know, discussions about how to engage the public. we ourselves are not distinguishing between the two. >> just quicker rider to that comment, backstory is a university supported show in many suspects. if you think about the fact that you have someone like ed ayers who sees value in the show, humanities gets support from the university of virginia, and the

provost's office at johns hopkins helps support the show. i have had some of the most fruitful conversations with my provost who wants to see scholars who are out there, who are engaged and have an impact. as a final point on this, one of the most comforting and eye-opening conversations about this process actually came as i was still an assistant professor and my then-department chair john marshall was comforting letting me know like, by the way, the people on the school-wide tenure and promotions committee, they are scientists. historians are terrible at winding up on boards reviewing the dossiers and they have to recuse themselves. the scientists are actually reviewing your file. one of the questions the scientists ask folks in humanities all the time, what's the impact of this this scholarship? we wind up making a easy and compelling sacase and saying yo can see quite easily where this scholar is shoepg and impacting

present day conversations. some ways not falling into the mythological notion that these are all starkly divided conversations, but there are a number of people in the institution at various strategic and important places within that institution that want to see you do the kind of work that reaches out to the public. >> great. more questions? okay. yes, sir? tell us who you are. >> i work at the library of congress where we are starting to archive backstory for long term. >> thank you. >> and so my question relates to that. a couple of questions. first of all, what value do you see in communicating historical knowledge through audio, through audio alone? if you might want to talk about that. value and limitations. the other thing is what value do you think archiving this for people many, many years in the

future will have to access this show? >> well, i'll take the second one first. tremendous value in archiving. and, no -- >> keep doing it. >> he is slapping me because he knows most of my answers are, well, b.s. but great value because, you know, in dog years, in podcast years, we are about 400,000 years old. i mean, podcasts just don't last very long, and we have been very fortunate. somebody talked about, i guess, the balance of work and how much time you put in. a lot of my time now goes into just keeping the show afloat financially and personnel changes. i don't run the show in any way, but shows don't last. and what you are doing will

last. so extraordinarily important. and i would be happy to ask nathan to write a letter to that effect in case it will help you with your -- no, i'm happy to write a letter for that. audio? i'll start with my answer. i'd love to hear from other people. i have been shocked at -- you know, i read marshall mccluen. i even teach marshall mccluen. i have been shocked at what an intimate medium audio is, especially the podcasts, especially kind of the less formulaic forms of audio. you know, this is remaking american political history. franklin d. roosevelt remade american political history by using the radio. and he did it in a way -- it

wasn't just the technology. herbert hoover used to talk like this on the radio and it just didn't work so well. but roosevelt got the format and the technology right and changed americans' sense of their relationship to the federal government. what could be -- what could be less intimate than the federal government, by using audio. i think some of the more talented podcasters out there and some of them are in this room are doing exactly the same thing. it's just it resonates in way that a scholarly article isn't going to. aside from the reach. i mean, actually the ability to remember moments from that. i have never heard anybody refer to a driveway moment for an

article in the journal of american history. i don't doubt people sitting here have spent years it their driveways finishing articles, but driveway moments happen all the time with audio. and so i think that's part of the value. >> yeah, well, this is something that brian gestured towards, is just the reach, right? the accessibility. that's not just about audio, but about a podcast in particular. being able to carry it around in your pocket and listen to it on the plane, as i'm sure everyone did here to get ready for this panel. yeah, i mean, just having it at your fingertips that way and making it browsable essentially, making it there to where i want to -- i am going to search history and have that come up and have backstory come up and have content like that available to people who are not -- they are not going to -- they are definitely not going to read a

journal article. they might not read an op-ed in "the washington post" or something like that, but here i'm walking the dog. now i'm learning about climate change. yeah, it's incredible that way. also, i would say particular to the podcast is the flexibility that it allows in terms of production that you are not going to get on a live radio like when it was supposed to be basically history, car talk but history. you are not going to get that sustained storytelling that you can do with a podcast. so i think it's just immensely exciting. >> i would only add in terms of some of the costs that i think we incur when we rely on the audio format, i'm a big fan of this platform in a bundle of other ways, sharing knowledge. one of the limitations, and this has been shared with me by guests and other people just in terms of wanting more information, we don't have the benefit of footnotes and

bibliography. there is a lot of scholarship we draw from sometimes on the fly. a book that we read comes to mind. we can't say for more on this please go see. we don't get the chance to give the proper tip of the hat who might be with us in the booth from a content standpoint. and so in that sense i oftentimes feel like i want to -- i'll send follow-up notes to people and say i hope you tune into this week's show. i want you to know i was driven by something you said in another piece about this that helped move my thinking just so it acknowledges the broader scholarly community that might not get their chance to have their name called during the credits. >> yes? >> hi. i'm a freelance historian based in boston. i taught six years at angelo state university in texas. i taught freshman survey classes to students who are first generation.

maybe out of, you know, 225 students in a semester, i might have four history majors. so you framed your audience in terms of the public and you are always talking about like, you know, essentially adults who are learning more about the issues of the day and the issues of history. it seems to me that my students, my freshmen are very much that public audience. >> oh, yeah. >> so i wanted to hear how you frame your audience in terms of students because i certainly have used backstory a lot very effectively in the classroom, not just for the content that you all provide. the ability to weave in the stories of people who might not otherwise make it into the narrative of the lecture, but also for the process of what historians do and sort of the demonstration of like this is what your professors do. i know some of these people who

are being interviewed or doing the interviewing, right. so how do you frame your production in terms of reaching that audience and helping out teachers in those types of classrooms? >> well, so while we're giving shout outs, a shout out to the national endowment for the humanities who has been -- we have an incredibly generous anonymous donor. but next to that incredibly generous anonymous donor, the endowment for the humanities has been the most consistent and generous form of support. and that last grant comes in the form of something called classroom connections, which aside from supporting the basic costs of production allows us to work with uva's curry school of

education to target -- i can't remember exactly how many shows, but a good number of shows specifically for use in classrooms from high school through college. and we don't do anything -- stop me if i'm wrong, but as co-hosts, we didn't plan those bells. i hope the nah is listening. but we are not aware of what's a classroom connection show or not in terms of content or discussion, but in the post-production we do some of those very things that nathan was talking about. we provide detailed lists of resources. we also distill some of the ideas into a little bit of video that might convey some of the

key ideas. the other thing we do, and we don't do it in a systematic fashion, is we meet with conferences. large national conferences of high school teachers, for instance. we hear from a lot of teachers who use our material. and i'm always, i mean, i can't imagine an audience that i want to reach more than that. so thank you very much for what you have been doing. i think, honestly, we reach a lot of people spontaneously. not through any kind of systematic effort. so after the panel, i'd love to hear your tlouhoughts about how can be beyond classroom connections a little more systematic in reaching those classrooms. >> to connect this to the earlier question about what are academics supposed to do and rewarded for doing, i think anyone who teaches is already reaching the public.

and so -- >> absolutely. >> my colleagues who say, well, i can't do that, i have to tell them -- well, you already are. whether that's good news or bad for them. because that's a skill. again, you don't give the footnotes when you lecture to undergraduates, or only very sparingly. that distillation of how we speak to each other colleagues in a kind of intellectual setting and how we transfer that to people who don't care, you know? and good for them. they really don't need to know all that detail. they really want the very clear narrative and analytic content that will help them think about the past. >> and i will share the first comment i saw when we moved away from the public radio 52-minute hour with requisite breaks at certain points in that hour to podcast, the first negative

comment i saw, and granted i'm usually shielded from these. i already told you, i don't go to the comment section. the first negative comment that came through was a big fan of backstory, and she was very upset we had gone to the podcast format because our first podcast like ended before her exercise routine did, and she was very upset that she used to time her exercise regime to backstory. i wrote back and said personally, i would be delighted to end my exercise regime earlier. yes? >> you have the mic. >> the historical association. nonprofit, non-partisan. >> you have to say both. >> very important. so backstory has gone through a

number of really interesting iterations, and i have actually been honored to be on it, and thank you. >> thank you. >> what do you guys see as your future goals? what's next? >> nathan has been talking a lot about diana ross and the spreem supremes and how diana ross left the supremes. i think the nathan conway show -- just kidding. i don't know. >> yeah, no. i mean, it's -- and something that we think about in part because of funding issues and in part because of generational questions. there are, yeah, very real career management questions. there is a lot that's there. for right now, we found a really good, think, sweetspot in terms of the production schedule, the platform. i think, you know, we are probably going to keep doing shows that are, you know, firstly connected to the news cycle, but then with a bundle of

evergreen topics. i don't know if there is any qualitative adjustments on the horizon, to be honest with you. we haven't had those meetings yet, i would say. but i do noknow we get a great deal of enjoyment from the show and want to keep going it as long as we can. >> you got any ideas? >> email me. >> to add to that, i started about the same time that nathan and joanne did. so it was interesting to me. i had been a fan of the show when it was just the original three hosts. and then to see -- >> it's required to say that. >> check's in the mail, i hope. no. to see new hosts come in and the show sustain its popularity and grow. not only grow in popularity, but grow in the topics that it's covering. i think it was encouraging for me to see that, oh, this show can like, you know, people can tag team out even.

and this show can live on past the -- however long the people want to do it, right. so it's got -- it can inject fresh blood, so to speak, into it an institution now. i'm speaking as on outsider. i see it as an institution that can keep going beyond peter, brian and ed, however long they want to do it. i don't know what brian thinks about that. >> i think it's my dream. the create the kind of platform that can be modified and changed and renewed, absolutely. >> a hand here. >> yes. >> i'm at western carolina university. this is a pointed question for nathan, but it would apply to professor tucklin too. you talked about your back story gave you the ability to experiment with anti-racist

work. i gather that meant not just in the platform of audio. could you talk a little bit more about -- >> yeah, yeah. >> one of those experiments or what you meant by that. >> what i meant by that. yeah, so how do i put this? so when you are writing for scholarly audiences the kind of positioning that one does to let a reader know where you stand relative to existing debates, archives and so forth. there's not, again, a whole lot of room. here i will argue such and such. that sentence never comes out in the podcast. however, i do think that there are really important things that, to joey's point, that one can do to basically take a story that folks think they know and to really help to change it. and to modify it. right? so, i mean, again, one of the things i think is really important, for example, for the folks that do work in the early period of u.s. history, again this is something that came, you

know, across strongly in the interview with joyce, is just how integral native american technology was in the creation of the early republic's own sense of science. so when joyce was describing, for instance, when you arrive on the shores of north america it's not some overgrown forest because, in fact, native american people have been very good at curating ways to get through this wilderness. it was not uncultivated wilderness. technology in the modern united states doesn't begin with the arrival of europeans. when we did a show about black panther, the phenomenon that was "black panther" as a cultural moment. it was really important to not just think about the film itself but to think about the long history of efforts of black self-determination that were informing the popularity of that film and i had the opportunity to write about that for the hollywood reporter but to put that in a podcast format that

reached, again, a very wide audience for important for getting people to appreciate that what was happening was not just a comic book movie or another moment of pop culture. when we had a discussion about confederate monuments, as historians we were trying to get our footing. where do we stand on existing confederate statuary? how do we imagine an appropriate response to a moment now where the country is grappling with whether or not it should memorialize traitors in some camps or war heroes in another. for me i'm going to have a conversation with folks i really respect who are extraordinarily and deeply informed about these issues. it was a moment, i think, again to experiment in what the arguments about ending white supremacy would look like in terms of an actual policy for what one does with a statue, in a city like richmond, for example. that's different than taking the sanctimonious position in an academic article that very few

people will read. i have the benefit of teaching a class i love called racial literacy in the archives. i try to have my students in that class think about what it would mean to step out with their own work and understand that, number one, you know, their experience as scholars is a starting point for actually doing good rigorous work and so similarly i think on back story one of the things that we do, simply just acknowledging experience, not pretending to be the objective, detached, disembodied observer that was born out of european modes of knowing and doing research, that's anti-racist work, speaking from that vantage point. the show provides a really important platform for selectively making those points, you know, explicitly and other times just allowing the conversations or the topic selection to do some of that work. >> are there any other questions? yes.

>> i'm an associate professor at the harvard kennedy school and i have a bit of a two-part question. so the first is a broad question for all of the panelists which is that, do you think that historians, particularly in the age of today or of the moment have a responsibility to engage the public beyond teaching in classrooms or engaging publics behind say the ivory tower? if so, why? if not, why not? i'm just interested in hearing the panel's response. and then two, also interested in wondering if there's something to be said for your role or the medium that you guys use as an

a aggregator of good historical and analytical work in a post fact or, you know, alternative truth, or, you know, particularly where people are siloed or have their own set of facts. so presenting this and engaging a much wider audience, but also aggregating the good work that, you know, lots and lots and lots of people are doing through a very powerful platform and through a powerful medium. so wondering if you can talk a little bit about that as well. >> i do think i already said that i think historians as well as other academics in other fields do have this responsibility and particularly because of the moment that we are in now to talk about what knowledge is and what facts can determine. seems like that should be part of our job.

in terms of my working on climate history i feel like i'm part of a tag team involving scientists on the one hand and then people broadly defined in the environmental humanities and maybe social sciences about policy are on the other, that i think the scientists, oh my gosh, if i ever feel like i'm getting heat -- sorry, for talking about climate change as a historian i just look at what happens to climate scientists when they speak in public. it is amazing how they're immediately attacked and they become objects of ridicule and abuse. they are simply stating the facts, and that's what happens. but i do really think that it's important for non-scientists to support them, to point out that that is a form of knowledge that has validity. and then, again as a historian, i also want to point out that

this moment may be unprecedented for many reasons but it's not entirely unprecedented and here are reasons why we can think calmly about the state that we're in. which i just think that given the moment that we're in is important and i should help do that. >> so first of all i want to give you a round of applause for organizing this conference. speaking of aggregation of facts which is a great way to go from everything i've seen so far. we have an obligation as a profession to do public engagement. but i'm still a big believer in specialization and division of labor. and i have colleagues who are better teachers than i am.

i love it when they teach. i teach also. but i think students benefit more when the very best teachers do the teaching. i have colleagues who are better scholars than i am. i think that we all need to think of ourselves collectively in the best sense of the word, a profession. so the profession needs to engage publicly. but there are people who are far better than i am at public engagement as well. i think that if we could all think about where we can contribute to the multiple responsibilities that we have and privileges, because we have privileges, being in this discipline. if we can think about that collectively and figure out who is best at doing what. i think the public will be much better served that way. that's the way i would answer

your first question. sadly on the second fact, aggregating, besides thanking you for doing this, what's sad is i kind of thought of back stories that for a while but that moment, in a way has passed, there are more urgent needs. we need people who can tell us if a video is a fake video or not. we need people who consistently call out, you know, an ocean of lies when they see an ocean of lies. i mean, it's -- the ability of a podcast to influence a world that is rapidly moving towards not being able to distinguish whether something you cena video is real or not, i'm afraid we're just a drop in the bucket in the

fight against that. not that we shouldn't try. >> and if i could -- for academics, distinguish between what we do as knowledge just in case versus knowledge just in time. because i think there's a lot and, again, speaking about climate history where it seems immediately and timely, again for very sad reasons, and can be deployed right away. i would hate for the academy to only do that, that we're only supposed to study stuff that is immediately timely. >> yeah, yeah. >> that we need all the just in case kinds of analyses, that people don't see an application, but you never know. also, if we were really to be in a state of emergency where we were only allowed to work on stuff that was immediately relevant there's something that

is just over about the pursuit of knowledge and the ability we're going to give to future generations to kind of experience what it is like to be a scholar and a teacher if it only comes down to that immediate application. >> please go ahead. >> so to your first question, the way that i think about it is there's obligation and then there's opportunity. and saying that we have an obligation can feel, i think, kind of echoing people here, but can feel like a burden maybe. oh, i need to check in on twitter and make sure -- see if there's anything i need to weigh in on right this second. that's going to take away from our productivity in other ways. it's going to be -- you know, cause anxiety, mass anxiety for historians, i think. it's not to say we have an obligation to be right there with the hot take, but it's to say that we have the opportunity. and to recognize our expertise as a tool for that.

and in terms of like an aggregation of knowledge, and this is related to what i'm saying to your first question is that i think of back story as the warm take rather than the hot take. >> could be warmed over. >> that's going to be on your tag line, i like that. >> the tepid take. >> the warmed over take. >> leftovers. oh, no, rabbit hole, yeah. i'm sorry, go ahead. >> take it as far as you want to. but in seriousness it's -- yes, we can -- the show can react to sort of breaking topics. but it also has that, you know, couple of week lag time where you can dip into the historiography and you can aggregate facts as you suggest and as brian says be a drop in the bucket at least against -- you know in the fight against this propagation of lies that we often see. >> i mean, i know we're a little bit over. i'll keep it brief.

i think this is a really rich moment in which we're being encouraged to just develop fluency in a bunch of different forms and so, you know, i think a lot of people are going to feel stronger or lesser pulls to, you know, weigh in in public forum but i don't think anybody is really going to be completely separated again from that need or that desire. it might not even be a question of having to induce people to engage but actually encouraging them, giving them the tools to most fruitly engage. i like this idea of just in case, just in time. i have graduates who want to jump straight from a half done dissertation into podcasting or have a trade press contract right away but they don't have a topic necessarily hammered out. there's something about walking young finminds through the stag of a project maturing and then giving them through that process a confidence that allows them to weigh in with great gravity when

the time comes when the public needs the debate of the work they do. giving us the kind of tool kit where we would feel comfortable doing a deep dive monograph, an op-ed, an article, or a podcast to me feels like a way to leave our students well served. and i do think in keeping with that that archive creation is one of those skill sets. i mean, as we all know when we do these massive projects you wind up with a ton of material in your hard drive and you've got to organize it. i'm happy, in fact, to have back story be at least one of the archival projects i'm a part of. i'm happy when i go back and i read very quick essays that were written by someone like dubois and other historians offiest ye years. dubois wrote over 3,000 articles and they weren't all peer reviewed. there's always a way in which they were engaging, always

playing with form, always experimenting and thinking about -- dubois had a radio show. clj was a journalist. there's a lot we can do, we've been here before by looking back at earlier historians to see how they engaged in their moment and did so with great fluency. >> that back story is the wefth way to end this panel. i want to thank my colleagues and i want to thank the audience for terrific questions and coming to this session. remember, don't be a stranger. this holiday weekend on american history tv saturday at 10:00 p.m. on real america, the

1970 film honor america day, the july 4th celebration of the national mall featured comedian bob hope and the reverend billy graham. >> never hidden her problems and faults. without freedom of the press and open communication system we don't sweep our sins under the rug. if poverty exists, if racial tension exists, if riots occur, the whole world knows about it. instead of an iron curtain we have a picture window. >> and sunday at 6:00 p.m. eastern on american artifacts, living history hobbyist craig hall portrays a soviet calvalry officer. >> one month before d-day we had been occupying 65%, maybe, of the best german troops fighting us. if we hadn't done that, if they hadn't failed that -- if we had failed at moscow or stalin grad,

all of those troops could well have been under normandy beaches and it could have been a different outcome. the story that has to be told is that that's a significant contribution to winning the war. >> watch on american history tv on c-span 3. baylor university professor teaches a class on the american military during the revolutionary war, including a look at the equipment and capabilities of both the continental army and militia troops. >> one thing everyone is going to need is your musket. state of the art, my friends. this is it. this is a replica of the 1756 flint lock musket. it's about 4 1/2 feet long, weighs about eight to ten pounds. and this is standard issue. you will have this. you will own this and you will

love this, don't lose it. don't break it. is the thing. it consists of three parts, your lock, which is this metal mechanism right here. your stock which is the wooden part right here. and your smooth boar barrel which is this long metal tube right here, hence the phrase, lock, stock and barrel. means the whole thing. it's important to note this barrel is a smooth boor, means it's long tube of metal, it's not grooved. when something is rifled what that means is that there's grooves in here. when you put a ball in there and the grooves would snug down and give it a spin. you can't aim with this weapon. that's not the point is the thing. >> learn more about the american military during the revolutionary war tonight at 8:00 eastern on lectures in history. you're watching american history tv where we bring the classroom to you.

next on american history tv, west point history instructor major david lambert discusses how gun powder was outsourced and manufactured in the mid-19th century. the new york military affairs symposium hosted this event. it's about an hour and 40 minutes. major david lambert is a native of chicago, illinois. following high school he enrolled in the united states military academy at west point, new york and there he majored in history and graduated with honors in 2007. he commissioned as an officer and served as a tank platoon leader and company executive officer at fort hood and in mosul, iraq from 2008 to 2010. in 2011 he deployed to the republic of korea and commanded a tank com