television, online or listen on our free radio app and be part of the national coverage through c-span's daily washington journal program or through our social media feeds. c-span, created by america's cable television companies, as a public service, and brought to you today by your television provider. more now from the purdue university conference on u.s./political history. up next we'll hear from the h t hosts of the podcasts, "backstory." >> okay. good morning. >> good morning. >> welcome to the 10:45 panel called something like behind the scenes at backstory. >> that's right. >> maybe.

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're each going to say a few words about our quite different roles -- well, nathan and i have the same role. he's trying to steal the 20th century from me and doing a pretty good job of it, but we all have relatively different roles in backstory. we're going 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 connolly, 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. is that -- >> that's right. >> a fair description?

>> yes. >> and it's called "four daughters" and 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 [=%1 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 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 behind 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 chaplin 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

chaplin. do you remember that, joyce? >> you're going to tell everything about -- >> 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 magellan to orbit." and with allison bashford the new world of thomas robert mouthace 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 masterfully 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, joanne freeman at yale university and ed ayers president emeritus at the university of richmond, considering that we're 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 -- that 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 ayers

and peter oniff 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 are not very funny, so nobody is going to be interested in this show. but andrew prevailed on ed and peter oniff, they came to me, i said that's a ridiculous idea, nobody is going to be interested in this. and 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 -- you know, 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. a public radio station in chicago probably reached the largest audience of any station that we were on. it 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 oniff, 18th century guy, deciding to retire both from the university of virginia and step down from backstory, and 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 a -- kind of take a deep gulp decision. we 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 with our researchers, 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 think we just get together and sit around a table and shoot the breeze. and we are aiming for that. but in fact it is a costly production, it is a complicated production, and if it sounds good, it's because of the incredible co-hosts i have and because of the amazing staff we enjoyed 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've never asked, like what did it feel like to just come into an existing podcast with at least two old white guys, dead? >> had to 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 and black middle class, it might have been. i will be honest and say up front i had a certain amount of trepidation about taking this move into doing media work in large part because of where i was in my career, as an assistant professor, with all kinds of expectations about timetable, clock, and early associate professor.

we had conversations where i am agonizing how to do work like balance three young children, two manuscripts in the pipeline and a podcast we're doing, and the process of imagining my own calculations and tradeoffs has a lot to do with trying to understand genre. so "backstory" was a phenomenal way to really begin to engage how senior scholars think about

big, expansive, complicated ideas and distill them down in extraordinary compelling ways. one of the things brian won't take a lot of credit for or ed or for that matter who's the other guy, peter, is that they have the benefit of being able to take a field at a glance and look at it and come at something very complicated extraordinarily gowneded look, often times an anecdote. that's a skill i have to do a fair amount of learning. as much as i want to complexify things, it is showing the complexity in the details. learning from these folks has been wonderful in that regard. i will say that the show itself was going through, this was all happening backstage, its own agonizing conversion from broadcast to podcast. a lot of the process of creating a show for the radio had to do with basically approximating the npr sound. it had to do with getting the show to sound like -- there's a lot goes into how many times one reads a script, whether to do a retake on jokes that come off extemporaneously and then trying to get that magic happen for take two and three. and thankfully we arrived in terms of our own legs in podcasting at a less varnished sound that i think is more honest as a listening experience goes. we're in an environment last i heard this may have been two month old data which had gone up by 100%. there were 400,000 podcasts out there. having "backstory" that exists in the top 1% of podcasts, still something people wanted to tune into, that means a challenge of coming up with compelling topics

and finding the news cycle. some ways the most exhausting thing the first year on "backstory" is 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 to offer deep contextual views of, muslim bans, transgender bans, border walls, environmentalism. >> i want to say, nathan, i'm the one that said we have to do a show not about donald trump. and i came up with a great idea. the history of hair. >> yeah. >> and everyone in the room looked at me and said, hair, donald trump? never mentioned donald trump's hair on the history of hair. >> and shortly thereafter did a show on the history of ufos which i loved as well. suffice to say one of the things we have been able to do well, i will close my remarks here i think is find a way of balancing two things. one is in a field where we all would like to imagine ourselves as being effective collaborators, there's a lot

that goes into structuring productive collaborations. sometimes when you're on a conference program committee, or you want to co-author something, there's been no shortage of opportunities to step on each other where that's concerned. i think one of the things that makes it easiest to work on back "story," to juggle my own work/life stuff, think about the shows's own perfect -- engineers produce, producers to produce. and we will often times balance intellectual questions off engineers and producers and they'll help us arrive at things. and we'll help with script work as needed on the fly. in that sense you get new and fresh content, from deep levels of expertise across various staff positions. that, i think, is really important and was really useful to learn how to do that.

the other thing i would just say is i think it is really critical to think a lot now about how we are electing to engage the public. i know there's a lot of -- for me, personally, i do a lot of the kind of work that comes out of a left orientation. the kind of questions i ask are grounded in material questions, grounded in anti-racist work i've been doing for a long time. doing that work in a space that's been opened up in a way that maybe some npr audiences may not be amenable to is also really important. how does one do anti-racist work in a liberal media atmosphere? this is a very basic question. i know we're having a lot of conversations about who is electable, what's acceptable political discourse. "backstory" provided me with an important platform for experimenting, figuring out what some of the middle ground and yet still radical perspectives can be, and the fact that it is

alwaysed grounded, again, in histo extraordinary research and our own deep rigorous historic sensibilities allows us to feel more confident when we step out and push the civic debate in ways we think is necessary and important. that's been immensely rewarding. >> can i task you with one more job? >> sure. >> can you say a few words about our regular gig on here and now? >> yeah. yeah, yeah, yeah. >> you're welcome to be honest. >> so another one of the things that came with the new podcast format was a partnership with the folks on wbur's "here and now." we have been doing basically every other week appearances on "here and now." for those that are less familiar, has about a million listeners. >> a million and a quarter. >> we get about nine minutes to entertain the million and a quarter listeners.

and it will often times be on topics that, again, are right on with the news cycle. so, it's a very compressed timetable to get our hand around the 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 but also one that can be overdone.

i have done 20, almost 30 now "here and now" appearances. the first 19, 20, i was very self annihilating as i left the booth. oh my god, i could have said this, i should have said this. >> i will read some of the texts he sent me. >> with the magic of editing, they all come off sounding really great and it's wonderful. but it is also one of those things where, especially the early going, we were trying to figure out, do they want us to be analysts, do they want us to be talking wikipedia pages? what exactly is our relationship with this other entity? there are things we said that they decided might have been too polarizing for their audiences, we make our own calculations going forward. but i will say it is a relationship that i think is mutually beneficial. we have, i think, still to figure outd a little bit of tweaking whether or not we get a chance to be the personalities. great thing on "backstory," you build a relationship with the host as people. and i think with "here and now," we are still content providers. so there is another round of evolution to spare with that relationship to make it possible to feel as if we're active personalities on the show. i think it is a very important civic space that again allows us to be piped into audiences we may not be able to access

because we may not have an i device or may not be looking for us on podcast search. >> i think my first appearance on "here and now" within a couple hours was called out on the rush limbaugh show. that's just an audience that i don't normally reach, whether when we were on terrestrial radio, as it's called, or even when we went to podcast format. that's when i stopped reading comments. >> okay, over to me? okay. thanks for being here and, brian, thanks for asking me back. it has been a little over a year since i was actually the researcher, so round of applause or maybe not. nod to monica who is the current researcher. >> monica blair. >> monica blair, yes. brian asked me to come here and talk a little about what goes into creating a prep for the show and then to reflect a bit about the way this influenced my time as a graduate student. i was doing this while i was writing a dissertation, how it

influenced my scholarship and most importantly for, if there are grad students out there, my job prospects. i'll start by saying one of the most exciting and sometimes anxiety producing parts of being the research for "backstory" is being handed a topic you know absolutely nothing about. this, in fact, was the case for the climate change episode that we're going to reflect on a little bit. i am not an environmental historian, never had a course in it. how do you wrangle the history of something you don't know about, write a 10 to 20 single space page prep? >> with picture of a polar bear standing on what looked like by then an ice cube. i think it had been a shelf of ice at one point. >> humor is the only way to get through climate change. to write this substantial prep, suggest interesting stories, identify authors that might make

interesting interviewees, all in what you're billed as ten hours a week. sometimes i went over that a c also trying to then research a whole show yourself, or your segment, or anything like that. so how do you go about doing something like that? this will be a familiar process to probably everyone in the room, but i usually just start it with a journal and blog searches. the jah, american quarterly, modern american history, and blogs like black perspectives were key for me, in being able to find these stories we could use for each episode. journal articles are particularly useful because if they're framed in the right way, they, themselves, can be a segment, if it is based around one compelling story. 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're familiar with the format. now, in the case of the climate change episode, i relied on an article by lachey called "moderni "modernity's frail climate of refl reflexiv reflexivity." the show probably isn't reaching environmental reflexivity, if we're reaching a general audience. my job is to distill it into digestible stories and hand it over to the host and producers. what that article was helpful with was creating this intellectual and cultural history of perceptions of climate change. also, shoutout to historians working in different departments of the government right now. that website content that the state department historians create, and those kinds of

branches of government, that stuff is, you know, really key for getting the nuts and bolts of particularly political history. it's an interesting way to think about how, you know, those are probably phd historians working in those positions. so the way that people who didn't take the academic route wou, wound up in government, and then there is a triangulation happening between the academy, the government, and then the media with that. a shoutout to those historians. it is a great source for me. the other is good, old fashioned shelf browsing. here's where conducting this work at uva was really important. uva has this tremendous library source, and it wasn't uncommon for me to go in there laooking for one book and come out with 20. we've probably all done that. it was helpful when lookling at the digital sources wasn't as 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 arch of show prep. for the climate change episode, i relied on james fleming's historical perspectives of climate change, and "the discovery of global warming." these warms, ones in which the authors are creating these overarcing narratives, as i said, they're indesensiindispen. you can get the themes, antidotes, hopefully gain insights once you get the footnotes. another method 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 climate change episode, i reached out to one of brian's students, actually, justin mcbryan, who i you was working

on climate change and the weaponization of weather, and asked, could you kindly share your research to help me figure this out, which he did. 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. we're lucky to have people who will donate their time and their research in that way. relatedly, i believe it was nathan that suggested professor chaplain for this episode. he knew that she was working on this climate change topic, and she was generous enough to share in-progress research. we created a segment around that. using that research, i'd try to 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 way to, you know, historicals that

recognize the alterations in climate and weather, going back as far as we could. professor chaplain's work speaks to that. there's a kind of weird comfort that i think we provide audiences in this way. to say that you've been here before. so on the one hand, you know, with a show like "climate change," listeners can feel a little less like they're living in unprecedented times maybe. like, oh, we've been talking about climate change for a long time. the world hasn't ended just yet. maybe there's still something we could do. on the other hand, there is this sad continuity to that. that, in fact, we've been talking about climate change for as long as we've been burning fossil fuels or freedom molecules. we haven't -- we still haven't immediated people's, you know, warnings on this topic yet. what does a prep look like? usually, i would start following

the tag line of the show, "history behind the headlines." i'd start with something i'd found in the news to catch the reader's attention. these guys and the producers and say, hey, this could be a lead for the show. in the case of the climate change episode, it was then recent news that the faa had grounded planes in phoenix due to heat. apparently, you can't fly planes -- or certain types of planes when the atmosphere reaches this particular threshold. phoenix had grounded airplanes after it topped 118 degrees. the atmosphere simply wouldn't support those. sometimes, those stories can be used as lead-ins for the show. sometimes not. but whatever, i would often throw those in there to help spur conversation. then the introduction, we kind of describe the overall arc of the history, as i mentioned, a synthesis. recommend potential interviewees, highlight the issues, arguments, and themes i

think could drive the discussion. it is 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. you know, i say that to say, you know, even the sharpest minds in the game appreciate having the basic facts in front of them. it's sort of reminders and prompts of things. so moving into the body of the prep, i would highlight the stories that i found that i thought would make interesting segments. i usually presented those in chronological order. now, that's not the way it always turns out when it is produced on the show. it's, you know, we're historians, so it just is helpful to walk me through it, down a timeline. in terms of how this fit into my graduate studies, i was thinking about this, and there's three ways i can talk about that. one is that it kept me up to date on recent publications.

you know, i started this job at "back story" after i finished course work. i wasn't being assigned dozens of books a semester to read. in some ways, working for "back story" felt a continuation of it. write a paper, basically, on this topic. that way, it was great. i was 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 methodologies that i would not have gotten had i stayed sort of siloed in my own little corner of cultural history and music history, that kind of thing. so, you know, it is a cliche to say we're all siloed away, but, you know, it is cliche for a reason. it was great to be able to bust out of that and dip my toe into the his tortoreography of clima change and learn something. also, pushing my scholarship to

write for the general audiences. you turning to historians for answers now, and that's something we should encourage. so, you know, it never helps to write well when you're doing that. it was very much a spur in that direction. as far as the job market, you n know, i entered graduate school with zero expectations, actually, of finding a job as a professor. lo and behold, that's the way it worked out. that was not where my expectations were taking me. i don't need to recite the dismal job market numbers here for anyone. i say that to say that, you know, "back story" was a way i could start cultivating a different side of my resume, besides teaching and publishing, right? it was a way to kind of make my public history bona fied and

look elsewhere for jobs. i went through the phd program with one foot out, thinking, this isn't going to work out, so i need to look on the horizon for something else, right? that was a great -- or "back story" created a great opportunity for that. it also gave me an understanding of what kinds of stories connect with the general public. there were many, many times that i would, you know, write a prep, and find this story and think, oh, they're definitely going to use that for a segment because of whatever scholarship 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. so i was able to apply for different public history jobs, 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, she used her

experience to land jobs at the walr walrus, producer at bbc for "ideas and tapestries." now, she's back at "back story" as a senior producer. she is a brilliant historian who earned a phd at uva. sheanything with that. it is interesting to see how she bridged her academic training with the media skills at "back story." lastly, working for this public history outlet really helped my odds on the job market just in terms of the numbers of jobs i could apply for withinacad academy. i applied to dozens of jobs and a third was teaching or doing public history. again, it was a way to beef up that part of my cv. i'm eternally grateful for that. i'll end there. thanks. >> no, you won't. >> sorry. >> i'd love for you to comment on your use of your own material

on "back story." >> scholarship material, yes. this episode already came up in conversation, but the episode on hair. rather than lead with donald trump, which was, you know, what might come to a lot of people's minds, including my own, brian was asking around about anything else, any kind of show topper we could use. i happened to be writing about elvis presley getting his haircut as he went into the army back in 1958. that's a part of chapter three of my dissertation. 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 actually got to be on the mic and put my own research out there, which was a great, great, you know, advertising for me. a great promotion. i'm indebted to brian for that, as well. thanks. >> thanks. joyce? >> i like how the bells started just as you talked about elvis.

>> when you have a production team of eight people, things happen, joyce. >> not at random, clearly. well, thank you for setting up this panel and the opportunity to talk about what i've done with "back story," and also to actually meet everybody in person. this is really great, in indiana. it was my -- the climate episode was my third time. i think before that, we worked on nelly bly. the one before that, that we can't remember -- >> but it was memorable. >> well, i think it might have been on roanoke. that's why we lost that memory of that place. that episode, i was in chicago. i remember being very cold going to the studio. the second one i was in cambridge. the third one, i was in italy, where it is 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. i am delighted to have any opportunity to thank them again. they were fantastic. they were extremely helpful. after we were done, they asked a lot of questions. that's where ibm[ñ immediately 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. you guys were there first. >> we call it the "back story" bump.

>> the bbc thinks, huh, that's what we should do. but around the same time that i worked with you all, i was asked to write something for an online magazine. i pitched the climate story, and there was a pause. then the editor emailed back and said, you know, funny thing, climate change is not only fatal to human life but to readership. could you think of writing about something else? >> wow. >> and i didn't email right back because i was so angry, if mafoy reasons. because i think that's not the reason you don't run with a story. so, again, i remain very, very impressed that you realized it was an important topic, 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 the 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 the 1300s onward. it is thought we might still be in it. if we weren't, we'd be feeling the effects of global warming even more. but the colonists certainly felt it extremely in the 17th and 18th centuries, when comments on the psnows in new england, and inability for places like virginia to produce olives and wine were complaints. just sort of miscomprehension. during this period, as well,

european colonists thought they might be able to change this. so not only was this a period in which climate change was occurring, but there are also theories where the colonists thought if they cut down the trees, opened land for cultivation, cleared the forests, 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. here you have a fairly complex idea about how human interaction with the natural world can produce hemispheric changes. there was also debate over whether this theory was correct. jefferson, for instance, signed on to the cut down the trees 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 we'd find optimal. that's what i talked about, if i'm remembering correctly. >> yup. >> it was designed to warn people now that -- well, not warn people, but encourage them to think of the past as a set of resources, for ways of thinking about problems that we have today. i do think that a lot of the discussion about climate change now emphasizes this sense that, this has never happened before. this is unprecedented. this is an amazing crisis that no one has ever lived through. there are dimensions of that that are clearly true. especially the nature of climate change now. but i think the overemphasis on the unprecedented nature of the crisis can be unhelpful and kind of makes people freeze in terror. whereas, encouraging them to think of how people in the past have dealt with such problems, how their solutions may or may

not be paths we want to follow, that was, i think, really 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, it'll kill reader interest. now, of course, there is greater interest. that's one reason why i think it was a great idea to have this panel, to kind of revive 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's 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 context comes from. late 20th and early 21st centuries. i thought it was incrkrecrediby necessary and needs to continue to be discussed. i do think that even as climate is being diskugcussed now, a lof issues related to it remain sort of, don't touch that. i worked, as brian said, on thomas robert mathis, the

otherwise mathusian. original and best, question mark, mathusian. i did the critical edition of the principal population, which the 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 striking to 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 lelectric car? you know, 20 years ago, a lot of people would have been offended, thinking, well, that's none of your business. they knew where the 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? oh, mathis. they're like, okay. it is not an unrelated topic, is what i mean. it is not the only one i'm not going to say, that population is the driver. it is 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 part of the natural world and must think of ourselves in that way, is unfinished business, highly politicized, really necessary to think about.

and this leads me, i think, to the last thing i'll say. 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 do 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 the luxury worries. environmentalism was privileged white people worried about trash on the trail in yosemite. 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. i think that's just something that, you know, one episode can't do everything. we didn't talk about that, but i really think that this 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've ever posed for ourselves as a species. can we survive ek scosystem collapse? quite a question, and there is no definite question. i think thinking of how, even now, environmental collapse is aaffe affecting populations prejudici prejudicially, and in the future, if unaddressed, it'll be

an even more extreme problem. >> i'm dying to hear that show. if i had a better track record at producers accepting my ideas, i'd pitch it to them this afternoon. maybe we can work together to pitch that show. thank you very much, joyce. does anybody want to add anything before we open it up to questions? yeah, shoot. wait for the mic. >> huge microphone. >> it'll be coming around. >> thank you so much. >> maybe we can all identify ourselves. >> yes, thank you. i'm katie, associate professor of history here at purdue. thank you so much for a terrific conversation. i'm wondering if i could ask the panel to dig in deep to something that nathan talked about. about the question of time. where this public engagement works, 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, 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, right? it was way too much time. the producers said it was too much time. brian was telling me i was spending way too much time. it was definitely too much time. while i was teaching and doing

everything else, and basically a lot of it was the learning curve, right? it was figuring out -- i mean, we did spend, you know, every bit of two hours for a two-hour session in the studio, recording script, redoing riffs. there was a way in which we were trying to figure out how to reduce our number of studio hours. then you have to factor in that we were doing a lot of heavily produced segments that required a great deal of planning on the front end, in terms of guests, in terms of the kinds of books you wanted to incorporate, in terms of what kinds of sound bites and sound files could help create an immersive listening experience. a lot of the earlier stuff on the podcast side, you'll listen and great really great voiceovers, sounds, recreating the moment, helping to explain the advocacy for journalism, so on and so forth. then we moved it to a four to

to five hours a week commitment. it is more manageable, in terms of the team, getting streamlined. relative to the question, which i think is an important one, as to how does this register in more conventional academic conversations. this is unchartered territory right now. one oftd thi the things i find fascinating with the twitter historians, things being created, actually 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, rewarding, and so forth. you know, 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 doing "back story." we talked about, for instance, like, printing up transcripts and putting that in the dossier

as paper, to go with more conventional sources. now, again,transcripts, so it i fair reflection of transcripts -- >> and having outside podcasters review and comment on that. very important. >> so we're still trying to figure out, you know, what does it mean to have a peer review of this kind of media. you know, look, it's like, if you have allison hobbs, joyce chaplain, writing for popular readership, no one can say the platform is unscholarly, right? we have to get wise and say there is a way to measure impact and thinking about scholarly impact not along the lines of just how many times you've been cited by peer review journals. that's something that university presidents, department chairs, it's a conversation they have to have. the genie is out of the bottle. i mean, many of you working, for example, in analog publishing,

particularly academic journals, you see the sand moving through the hourglass faster than anybody. you know it is a platform you're finding harder and harder to sustain and to get people to contribute to. so the institutions are going to have to figure out how to catch up with that. in some ways, i'm not necessarily worried about whether or not the effort in the digital arenas will be fruitful. i think the platforms of higher education has to adjust azts technology adjusts. 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 flowering of extraordinarily talented, historical minds in a variety of different workers of the world of letters. that can only make it, again, a much more productive moment for

a civic debate, scholarshpsychs thinking, and the like. you have people working as scholars, novelists, public historians, not just folks thinking, if i can do genealogy or library work, i'll be fine. but people are wreiting for media. we think of the cobbs, folks who got research chops, often times doctorates in history, and i think it cannot be argued that we are more impoverished as a reading community as a result of their moving into the arena formally. in that sense, again, i feel as if there's going to be a gradual acknowledgment on the part of universities, to basically recognize that scholars are going to feel much greater payoff. i certainly feel this way, you know, in most of the stuff i write for popular readership. if i get 15,000 people to read

something, that's a lot more attractive than writing something that will be 15 people, which is the average readership for an article in an academic journal, right? i think in a lot of ways, they'll have to figure out how to properly reward folks who are going -- hunting where the ducks are, to use an old political saying. >> do you want to add anything to that? >> just two things. i mean, i really do think you're absolutely right. one upside to the university and academia being in a kind of state of crisis is i think there is a pressing and great opportunity to redefine what people with phds can and should do. just to add to that, i mean, i remember when environmental historians were at pains to say they were not environmentalists. they were not politically engaged. looking back on that, i think, what were they thinking? 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 no ism in what i do. i just wanted to also comment on the question of status in the academy. i really think that, as a senior person, if i had the opportunity to say something in public, i should do that. i mean, what's going to happen? i'm safer that n a lot of peopl in doing that. i think where i pause is when i want to get untenured colleagues involved. this is tricky. because i don't want to be the kind of paternalist who says, i'm 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. that is a really sticky question, 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 an, i think, unresolved question, and definitely university administrators probably need to have clearer guide lines, about what risk is appropriate for people who aren't tenured. >> yeah. just very briefly, you'll be shocked i'm going to address the bureaucrat iic implementation o this. but my limited experience with those at the higher echelons of administration in universities is they crave this kind of

public engagement. for the most part, phds them themselves, 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 -- no, he already has a chair. anyway, forget the chair. a whole dining room set. >> foot stools? >> my sense is that the people at the highest, there really is a disconnect between what the people running the university want want. not to mention, they're often highly paid, large organizations dedicated to public engagement. let's put that aside. 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've 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're on "back story," whatever. but they think the higher reps are going to hold it against you, that it is not going to count. in terms of bureaucratic implementation, quite literally, i don't know which organization you'd 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 a ways toward resolving this problem. then the second thing i'll say

is, we need more conferences like this one. i'm going to give you a shoutout for organizing it. where there is not this, like, great divide between presenting -- so i went to a panel. the first panel was terrific, scholarly presentations, but there are also discussions of how to engage the public. you know, we, ourselves, are not distinguishing between the two. >> right. just as a quick writer to that comment, you know, "back story" is a university-supported show in many respects, right? if you think about the fact that you have, you know, someone like ed ayers, who was a former university president, who sees the value in the show. humanities gets support from the university of virginia. and the provos office at johns hopkins supports the show. i've had fruitful conversations

along the lines with my provos who exactly 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 profe professor. john marshall, my then assistant chair was comforting, saying, by the way, the people who are on the school wide tenure and promotions committee, they're scientists. historians are terrible about winding up on the boards of reviewing the dossiers, and they have to recuse themselves, in your department. the scientists are reviewing your file. one of the things they ask folks in the humanities all the time is, what is the impact of this scholarship? >> great point. >> right? we wind up being able to make a very ease andy and compelling c. you can see where this scholar is showing up and impacting present day conversations, the application of this research, and so on. in some ways, not falling into the mythological notion that these are all, you know, starkly

divided conversations, but, in fact, there are a number of people in the institution at various, strategic and important places in the institution that want to see you do the kind of work that reaches out to the public. >> great. more questions? yes, sir? wait for the mic and tell us who you are. >> i work at the library of congress, and we're storing "back story" for long term. >> thank you. >> couple of questions related to that. 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. >> keep doing it. >> they're laughing at me. he knows most of my answers are, well, b.s. but great value. you know, in dog years, in podcast years, we're about 400,000 years old. i mean, podcasts just don't last very long. >> right. >> we've 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, personnel changes. i don't run the show in any way. shows don't last. what you're doing will last. so extraordinarily important. 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 mccloughan. i even teach marshall mccloughan. i've been shocked at what an intimate medium audio is, especially the podcast, especially 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. 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 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 -- resonates in a way that a scholarship article isn't going to. aside from the reach. i mean, actually the ability to remember moments from that. i've never heard anybody refer to a driveway moment for an article in the "journal of american history." i don't doubt. probably people sitting here

have spent years in their driveways finishing articles. driveway moments happen all the time with audio. so i think that's part of the value. >> yeah. well, this is something that brian gestured towards, is just the reach, right? theaccessibility. that's not just about audio but 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'm going to search history and have that come up, have "back story" come up, have content available to people who are not -- they're not going to -- they're definitely not going toarticle. maybe not an op-ed in the

"washington post" or something. here, i'm walking the dog and learning about climate change. it's just -- yeah, it is incredible that way. also, i would say, particular to the podcast is the flexibility that it allows, in terms of production that you're not going to get on a live radio, when it was supposed to be history. like "car talk" but history. you're not going to get that sustained storytelling that you can do with a podcast. i think it is just, you know, immensely exciting. >> i mean, 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 like sharing knowledge. one of the limitations, and this has been shared to me by guests and other people, just in terms of wanting more information, is we don't have the benefit of footnotes and bibliography. >> sure. >> there's a lot of scholarship that we draw from, sometimes on the fly, a book we read came to

mind, and we can't say, for more on this, please go see, right? so we don't get the chance to give the proper tip of the hat to everybody who might be with us in the booth, from a content standpoint. >> great point. >> in that sense, i oftentimes feel like -- i'll send follow-up notes to people, hope you tune into the show. want you to know, i was driven by something you said in another piece about this. it helped move my thinking. just so it acknowledges the broader scholarship community that might not get a chance to have their name called during the credits. >> yes? >> hi. i'm catherine. a freelance historian based in boston. i taught for six years at anglo state university in texas. i taught freshman survey classes to students who are first generation, maybe out of 225 students in a semester, i might have four history majors.

so you framed your audience in terms of the public, and you're always talking about, like, you know, essentially, adults who are learning more about the issues of the day, 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 "back story" 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. also, for the process of what historians do, and the sort of demonstration of, like, which is what your professors do. i know some of these people 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? >> yeah. well, so while we're giving shoutouts, a shoutout to the national endowment for the humanities, who has been -- we have an incredibly generous anonymous donor. next to that incredibly generous anonymous donor, the national endowment for the humanities has been the most consistent and generous form of support. that last grant comes in the form of something called classroom connections. aside from supporting the basic costs of production, it 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 neh is listening. but we are not aware of what's a classroom connection show or not. >> right. >> in terms of content or discussion. 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 schoolteachers, for instance. we hear from a lot of teache ee 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've been doing. but, i don't you knyou know, i 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 thoughts about how we can be, beyond classroom connections, a little more systematic in reaching those classrooms. >> thanks. >> to connect this to the earlier question about what are academics supposed to do and get rewarded for doing, i think anyone who teaches is already reaching the public. >> absolutely. >> so 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. that's a skill. where, again, you don't give the footnotes when you lecture to undergraduates, or only sparingly. the distillation of how we speak to each other as colleagues in a kind of intellectual setting, and how we transfer that to people who don't care, you know. 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 -- but the first negative comment that came through was a big fan of "back story." she was very upset we had gone to the podcast format. because our first podcast, like, ended before her exercise routine did. she was very upset that she used to time her exercise regime to "back story." i wrote back and said, personally, i'd be delighted to end my exercise regime earlier. yes? >> you have the mic. >> all right. i'm a historian. non-profit, non-partisan. [ laughter ] important distinction. >> now you have to say both. >> really important. so, "back story" has gone through a number of really interesting iterations. i've 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 supremes, and how diana ross left the supremes. i think the nathan connelly -- no, i'm just kidding. i don't know. >> it's -- it's something that we think about, in part, because of funding issues, in part, because of generational, you know, questions. there are very real career management questions. there's a lot that is there. right now, we found a really good, i think, sweet spot, in terms of the production schedule, the platform. i think, you know, we're probably going to keep doing shows that are, you know, firstly, connected to the news cycle, but then with a kind of bundle of evergreen topics. i don't know if there's any

kwaul ta qualitative adjustments on the horizon. we haven't had the meetings. but i do know we all get a great deal of enjoyment from the show and want to keep doing it for as long as we can. >> do you have any ideas? >> i'll email you. >> okay. yeah, email me. >> to add to that, i started about the same time that nathan and joann did. it was interesting to me, i had been a fan of the show when it was just the original three hosts. then to see -- >> he's required to say that. >> check is in the mail, i hope. >> yeah. >> no, to see new hosts come in, and the show sustain its popu r popularity and grow, and not only grow in popularity, but grow in the topics that it's covering. i think it was encouraging for me to see, oh, this show can, like -- people can kind of tag team out even. this show can live on past the -- however long the people want to do it, right?

it's got -- it can inject fresh blood, so to speak, into it, and keep going. i see it as an institution now. i'm speaking as an outsider now, but i see it as sort of an institution that can keep going beyond, you know, peter, brian, and ed, however long they want to do it. but i don't know what brian thinks about that. >> no, i think it's my dream. to create the kind of platform that can be modified and changed and renewed. absolutely. >> hand here. >> yes? >> elizabeth mccray at western carolina university. this is maybe a more pointed question for nathan, although i think it would apply to professor chaplain, too. you talked about your -- that "back story" gave you the ability, i think, to experiment with your anti-racist work. >> yeah. >> so not just -- i gather that meant not just in the platform of sort of audio, but could you talk a little bit more about one

of those experiments or what you meant. >> what i meant by that, yeah. so how do i put this? so when you are writing for, you know, scholarly audiences, the kind of positioning that one does, to let the reader know where you stand relative to existing debates, archives and so forth, there's not, again, a whole lot of room on the podcast. here, i will argue such and such, right? that sentence never comes out in the podcast. however, i do think that there are really important things, to joey's point, that one can do to basically take a story folks think they know, and to really help to change it and modify it, right? one of the things i think is important, for example, for the folks who 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, right? so when joyce was describing, for instance, that when you arrive on the shores of north america, it is not some overgrown forest. native american people have been very good at curating all kinds of ways one could pass through the wooded areas. it was not simply an unkept, uncultivated wilderness. it is important for listeners to understand that technology in the modern united states doesn't begin with the arrival of europeans, right? 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. i had the opportunity to write a little bit about that for the "hollywood reporter." then to put it in a podcast format that, again, reached a very wide audience was 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 the discussion about confederate monuments, that was one of the shows that i think helped crystallize some of this. 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 memori memorialize, you know, traitors, in some camps, or war heros in another, right? 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 a policy of what one does with a statue in a city like richmond, for example, or some place else. that's very different than simply taking a santimonious

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

i'm leah. i'm an associate professor at the harvard kennedy school. i have a bit of a two-part question. so the first is a broad question for all the panelists. which is, 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 beyond, say, the ivory tower. if so, why? if not, why not? i'm just interested in hearing the panel's response. then, too, also interested in wondering if there's something to be said for your role or the medium that you guys use as an aggravator 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 in engaging a much wider 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 i'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that. >> i do think i already said that historians and those in the academic fields do have this responsibility. and particularly because of the moment we're in now to talk about what knowledge is and what facts can determine. seems like that should be part of our job. i think in terms of my working on climate history, i feel like i'm part of a tag team involving

scientists on one hand. and then maybe social sciences about policy. they're on the other. i think the scientists -- 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. 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. 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. [ applause ] speaking of aggregation of facts, i think this is a great way to go from everything i've seen so far. i think 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 we all need to think of ourselves collectively in the best sense of the word profession. and 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 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. 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 thanks you

for doing this, i mean, what's sad is i kind of thought of back stories that for awhile. but that moment in a way has passed their 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. it's -- the ability of a podcast to influence a world that is rapidly moving towards not being able to distinguish whether something you see in a 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 distinguish

between what we do is knowledge just in case versus knowledge just in time. i think there's a lot -- 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. we need all the just in case kind of analysis, people looking at stuff that you don't see needs an application, but you never know. also, if we were only allowed to work on stuff that was immediately relevant, there's something about the pursuit of knowledge and the ability we'll give to future generations to

experience what it is like to be a scholar and a teacher, if it only comes down to that immediate application. >> the way i think about it is there's obligation and opportunity. saying we have an obligation -- i feel like i'm echoing people here. it can feel like a burden. i need to check in on twitter and see if there's anything i need to weigh in on. that's going to take away from our productivity in other ways. it's not to say we need to be right there with the hot take, but we have a responsibility.

this is related to your first question. i think of back story as the warm take rather than the hot take. it could be warmed over. >> that's your tag line right there. >> the tepid take. in seriousness the show can react to breaking topics, but it has that couple of week lag time where you can dip into the history and you can aggregate facts as you suggest. as brian says, be a drop in the bucket at least against the -- in the fight against the propagation of lies that we often see. >> i know we're a little over so i'll keep it brief. i think this is a really rich moment in which we're being

encouraged to develop fluency in a bunch of different forms. i think a lot of people will feel stronger or lesser pulls to weigh in in a public forum. i don't think anybody is going to be separated from that need or desire. it might not be a question of having to induce people to engage. i like this idea of just in case and just in time. i have graduates who want to jump into podcasting or they want a trade press contract right away, but they don't have a topic. i think there's something about walking young minds through stages of a project, maturing, and giving them the confidence to weigh in when the time comes, when the public needs the debate they do. giving us a tool kit where we would feel comfortable doing a

deep dive, an op-ed, an article and a podcast feels like a way to leave our students well served. i think keeping in that that archive creation is one of those skill sets. i'm happy when i go back and read very quick essays written by other historians from yesteryear and realize they were doing a study on this too. there's a way we can look back at historians and realize there was always a way they were engaging and keeping people

informed. there's a lot that we can do to let us know we've been here before by looking back at earlier historians and see how they engaged the technology in their moment. >> that story is a perfect way to end this panel. i want to thank my colleagues on the panel and most of all i want to thank the audience for terrific questions and for coming to this session. remember, don't be a stranger. [ applause ] >> with the federal government at work in d.c. and throughout the country, use the congressional directory for contact information. order your copy online today at

cspanstore.org. tonight more from purdue university with a panel on the correlation between violence and u.s. political change from the american revolution to present day. watch american history tv tonight and over the weekend on c-span 3.

next on "american history tv," a discussion about the role, contributions, and voting trends of latino americans in u.s. political history. from purdue university, this is about an hour and a half. >> hi, i'll be guiding our conversation this afternoon. our panel today is entitled making the case for latino political history. a theme that is arguably central to the idea of remaking american political history. this is not to say that no one has ever thought of or written about latinos in politics and history. in fact, the conversation to come follows in the footsteps of many major works and scholars. but instead, this is about rethinking about what political historians pay attention to. in an earlier panel this