>>, secretary of the smithsonian institution and documentary filmmaker discussed the complex challenge of telling america's story. the university of virginia's democracy initiative hosted the discussion and provided the video. anthropologists clifford geerts once said that culture is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. what are those stories in the united states? how have they been shaped and told sustained and valued and by whom? and how do they affect our cultural memory and our future? this afternoon. we have an extraordinary group of three people who will engage in those questions and others. lonnie bunch is the 14th secretary of the smithsonian the

world's largest museum education and research complex, and he used the founding director of the smithsonian's national museum of african-american history and culture which is attracted over four million visitors and has become a pilgrimage for so many of us. can burns is one of the preeminent documentary filmmakers of our time his work crisscrosses american life from the brooklyn bridge to baseball to jazz to the civil civil war to country music. and today's moderator is amna nawaz, or as we think of her in our house and as i told her she's the thoughtful and informed soundtrack to our evening every single evening. she's a senior national correspondent and primary substitute. anchor for pbs's news hour a foreign a former foreign correspondent who reporting also includes education and politics sports and culture and now i'm going to turn it over to you

amna. the thank you so much. melody thank you so much for that. very kind introduction. i have to say i think my kids would disagree they have a different nickname for me in this household. i'm more of sort of a nagging annoying soundtrack to their lives, but i am so pleased to be here today. i want to thank everyone out there for joining us both on this webinar and on the webcast and i am just honored and delighted to be in conversation both with ken burns and with secretary lonnie bunch. thank you so much both for being here secretary bunch. how are you doing today? i am always doing well, especially when i get to hang out with ken burns. i love this new pairing by the way, ken burns. how are you today? i want to make sure i can i'm great but can do i have to say mr. secretary the whole time. that's the first time friend of mine for so long. i know i have just some guy from jersey trying to make it in a big city. just a yankee fan from jersey dane lonnie. yeah. absolutely. we're gonna get into the sports

rivalries a little bit later. that's gonna be safe for the q&a portion of this and just a reminder to everyone out there who is watching on the webinar. you can submit your questions at any time. just click on the q&a button at the bottom. don't use the raise your hand or chat function. click q&a submit your questions. we will try to work them in so gentlemen the title of this conversation is history is now and we are sitting here talking by the way as the second impeachment trial of the former president is unfolding on very weird split screen moment in all of our lives. it's undoubted that we're living through historic times, but i really want to talk today about how we frame our history what parts of our history we choose to hang on to the artifacts of that historical narrative and how this story of america came to be what it is today where it goes from here, which is a dangerous question. i know but let's just start with some definitions and secretary bunch. i want to start with you this

idea of cultural memory. right of america's story as we've all come to know it and learn it over the years. what is the role of an institution like the smithsonian? right? what is a role of an institution like that in helping to craft that cultural memory of who america is well, i think you framed it exactly right that we know that history is much about today and tomorrow it is about yesterday. so in many ways what institutions like the smithsonian are about are they're helping people understand that culture that history is the glue that holds the country together and part of our job is to find that right tension between history driven by scholarship and research and memory the collective memory that people bring to an idea. so for me what i love the fact is that in america our cultural memory is a kind of changing mosaic and because it's a changing mosaic. it means that they're often

debates and discussions and disagreements. but in a way the goal is to create a memory that allows people to be able to do something i think is really important and that is to embrace ambiguity. too often our search for memory is here's the simple answer to complex questions. i think the job of people like ken and i is to help the public understand the complexity the nuance and be comfortable with the debates and discussions. ken what about that idea ambiguity i should say, you know for storytellers. that's not a great guidepost, right? you're looking for clarity. you're looking for a linear narrative in some cases. what about you? how do you approach this idea? well cultural the school as the son of an anthropologist. let me go back to clifford garretson. it's the stories that we tell ourselves, but lonnie is right and ambiguity or contradiction or undertow is the only way to do it that is inherent in everything. it is lawful. it's only the forms of our storytelling that periodically suggests that it should be one

thing or another the binaryness of our computer world the the sort of dialectic of our superficial politics meaning red state or blue state what we know from human experiences that it is much more complex and much more dynamic changing. aslani suggests. that's lawful. we're always going to do this. so the dna of all of this is memory and memory is itself fragile and not yet a thing the is not yet a thing. it has to combine and recombine in order to be something and so i think that we are watching the layers of a pearl being imperceptibly added and remember a pearl is created through irritation friction. and so american history. is this pearl born out of perpetual friction that at times presents itself in a very positive way at other times particularly now in a not so positive way, but it's our job

lonnie's to collect the stuff of it and interpret interpret interpret and mine to sort of try to find the narrative. not that lonnie doesn't try to find the narrative in it that permits us to tell a complicated story that tolerates what keith said shakespeare had which was negative capability the ability to hold something in contradiction. without making that judgment and so where we get into trouble as storytellers and as americans as we construct and reconstruct and deconstruct our history and our culture is when we're certain you know, yeah, the opposite of faith is not doubt. the opposite of faith is certainty and so we need to have a kind of faith in a process that understands as faulkner understood that history is not was but is and tomorrow as lonnie suggests, but we also have to find the processes that permit us to gather and include

as much material as we can because the only way we survive is with that abundance of indeed contradictory material. that's okay. oh sorry. go ahead. wait, you know i've tennis so right i've been shaped by an experience. i had early in my career. i was interviewing a sharecropper on a rice plantation and talking about history and slavery and he said to me i'm not really sure to historian does but if you do your job, right your job is to help the public understand and remember not just want not just what it wants to remember what it needs to remember right and i think that tension is really what we're seeing which is to help people recognize that it's not as cancer. it's not a simple yes or no. it's really the shades of gray that help us understand the history and understand ourselves. there's another element of tension to a lot of this right which is as you mentioned you go back in your interviewing people about their memories and their first hand accounts. there are the memories that people hold on to which are

themselves sort of fragile and biased and narrow maybe in their own way and then there's evidence and facts that you can uncover through some of that academia and scholarship and so on when those two come into conflict with each other, how do you balance that? i mean do you put less weight on the memories in some way because you've got some contradicting or conflicting facts ahead of you. i can give you something very specific from a film that i've worked on. i mean first thing i'd say is reagan quoting the old russian proverb trust, but verify, you know what? i mean? we want to collect evidence, but you also want to have a vessel of narrative that is able to tolerate these contradictions wynton marsalis and my jazz film said sometimes the thing and the opposite of the thing are true at the same time. now he was talking about menstrual c and the degrading nature of menstrual c. but it also represented a white curiosity about black culture. how do you dance how do you make love? what do you eat? where do you live? where do you sleep all of these questions and the only way you

could even deal with the horrible feeling of what you had done to african-american's was to degraded and make it base, but it was one thing in the other. so we made a film on the second world war and we asked going in to the various servicemen and women that we talked to that we wouldn't talk to them unless they gave us access to their official military record, right? so then we would operate within the confines if they told us that they were up in the air and fighting over europe in a plane on this date. we could verify that. right, and then we had to look them in the eye to understand that basic human thing that we all do which is the fish gets bigger the farther away from the lake you get the idea that maybe your role is a little bit so we would sometimes make just gut judgments. you know what he's great here, but here i can't go this far with him or her or whatever it is. so i think there's a sense of a

continual testing and retesting. but again, you're accumulating all of this stuff and and history ain't nothing. but the memories of sharecroppers added to the memories of factory workers added to the memories of here added to the memory of a reporter who thought he heard it right or she heard it right and then you know, that's what i mean when we say this is verified for you as a journalist. i'm not you're saying that you've got at least two different. you know sources at least and you want to have more than that, but even those sources have certain agendas and things they may want you to have and so all of a sudden we've we've become part of a human con compact about trust but also verification and i and i think the notion that is so powerful to me is i think history is at its best when it finds that tension between history and memory right when you recognize that as a historian. i was trained to be distant from

my subject, but i realize i became a better historian when i began to work w >> when i reveled in their memories, when it shaped the rough edges of memory and made them smoother. you are in search of clarity, sometimes even truth, so the key is to marry those, but recognize it is the accuracy, the scholarship, that is the engine of what i try to do. >> we are getting some great questions. secretary bunche, let me put the first to you. one of the audience members is asking how can we trust what is written about historical events? along the lines of, if winners are the one to record history, if the victors are the ones who dictate what is kept, how do we trust that history is written without bias? >> you are right.

early in my career, most of the history i read and was trained by did not tell the stories i wanted to hear, did not embrace the full diversity of a nation. i would argue that today there is much more good history or complicated history so that you can begin to trust the stuff written by good scholars. the challenge is that there is so much history that you can make -- can get online, so the challenge is to find those sources, a kevin burns film -- a kevin burns -- ken burns film. you can get closer to the truth as long as you understand the history will always be changing. there will be new discoveries based on new evidence, interpretation. >> i would add that this notion that history is written by the

victors is lovely but definitely not true and it is mostly not true in the united states, because the north won the civil war, but the south wrote the history of the civil war, birth of a nation and gone with the wind. postulating that a homegrown terrorist organization, like our own al qaeda or isis, were actually the heroes of a post-civil war moment, when in fact, the exact opposite is true. and it has taken us generations to undo that and to begin to include other competing narratives and the loudest voice in all of this is not the truth or a complicated narrative, but you are taking our history away. >> this is a related question that i was not planning on getting into until later, but let's dig in. this idea of a lost cause. you says it takes a generation

to challenge that. when you look at american history, why is that? why was that clung so tightly to and not challenged. and so it was a conscious effort. it wasn't it didn't just happen. there were groups that worked on. how do we celebrate the lost cause? how do we as we try to bring the country toget -- let's not focus on slavery because there complicated. -- they are complicated. let's find the simple answer, brother versus brother, and in essence, we were seeing fighting for the whiteness of america from both points of view, and therefore coming together, not grappling with the issue of slavery, allowed people to create these myths, allowed people to come together. one of the most powerful and painful images are those 50 years after the war when you see

old yankees and rebels shaking hands. the war is over. yet you never see an african-american. you never see any of the 200,000 african-americans who fought in the war, the african-americans who in some ways challenged the nation to live up to its ideals rather than follow the kind of discrimination and hatred that came out of the lost cause. >> lonnie is right. the north is completely complicit with a version of the lost cause. a lot of it was just because it was easier to perpetuate the simplicity of the brother against brother and now we have come together and to move on. let's not forget, particularly as we are debating qanon and marjorie taylor green ended this stuff, the republican party, on trial today as well, was born in a schoolhouse in ripon, wisconsin in 1854 out of the ashes of the whig party out of one central thing, the

liberation of african slaves in america. we have gotten a long way from that, brothers and sisters, and that's a pretty interesting american journey that's complicated and that i would just refer lonnie, my dear friend come to our civil war film, and which, in addition to all the reunions at gettysburg, we found every ounce of footage of black troops that were there and included them. because that is exactly what happened. the scarlet barbara feel -- the scholar barbara field said the civil war is still going on and can still be lost. >> that is how the work scholars do changes the narrative. it is saying let us find the things that have been neglected, because they were there, but not deemed important enough to talk about, and it takes talented people like ken to say, let's

complicate the story. in essence, what we are trying to say is it is really about the complexity and the nuance. and i always think that the most important contribution i could ever make is to help people understand that there are not simple answers to these questions and that you have to grapple and wrestle with these. >> i have said that i have made for more than 40 years films about the u.s., but i have also been making films about us, that is to say, the lower case plural pronoun, all the intimacy of us, all the majesty, but also the complexity, contradiction and even controversy of the united states. you have to exist. i feel it is a privilege. i know lonnie exists in this space too. it is a privilege to operate in the kind of conscious state of unknowing that that represents. and you have to be able to be

there and to sit on that undertow and talk about -- and tolerate it, because otherwise, we will end up making the mistakes we tend to make, which is to decide that it is one thing or the other and not often neither and both. it is a whitman ask kind of moment -- it is a whitmanesque kind of moment. do i contradict myself? i contain multitudes. we, us, contain multitudes. for me as a filmmaker, i see it as a lens. it is not ignoring someone's history. it is pulling back and saying it is a greater history. look at south carolina. their tourism now involves african-american history. why? they were a majority black state at the time of the civil war. the south had 9 million people, 4 million of whom were owned by other people. that's an extraordinary percentage of your population

that has zero interest in the lost cause, zero interest in slavery, and ef are 100 plus years, nobody even -- and yet for 100 plus years, nobody even day and to ask what was your family like? -- nobody even deigned to ask what was your family like? luscious paint a picture of the antebellum south -- let's just paint a picture of the antebellum south with hanging spanish monster. -- mas. -- moss. you could argue that jim crow is a worse period for african-americans. there were more african-americans lynched between then and 1920 than in any other period because he would not want to lynch your property. that had value. but once your property did not have any value, the reason the great migration happened is a

mother did not want to have to worry every day about whether her son is coming home alive from school. >> one of the powerful things that comes out of ken's work, candidly, is this notion of how do you humanize history? how do you help people understand that when you are talking about the african-american experience, you are talking about the quintessential american experience? >> exactly. >> if you look at almost every film ken has made, at the heart of it is that it is the african-american experience that has held the country countable, it is the african-american experience tied to when we expand our notions of freedom. we are not talking about ancillary stories. we are talking about stories that are central to who we are regardless of race, regardless of how long our family has been in this country. that is one of the great

contributions of ken 's work. >> let me put a period on that briefly. this is february, our coldest and shortest month, african-american history month. i know it is -- i know there is a reason for that. but how could african-american history not be at the burning center of who we are? because we have the memories of people who had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a supposedly free land. they have much more to tell us than the people who have bought hook, line and sinker the treacly, madison avenue, saddest -- sanitized version of our past. you do not have to go looking for american history. it is there. it is the conscience of the nation. it is affirmation in the face of adversity in a way that teaches us perpetually and not to the

exclusion of anybody else. in fact, it defines the best of who we are. >> you have raised a couple of key ideas i want to bring together and examine. we are talking about expanding our historical narrative, making sure that it is inclusive, making sure that the stories that were previously not told are being included and uplifted and centered in a way that they should be, but there are some who say we are revising history. you can see that in the debate over the placement of confederate statues. since we are talking here and being hosted by a uva institution, just a few years ago, we saw that violence in charlottesville over the removal of a confederate statue. i am curious to hear from both of you, what is the place for a confederate statue in american society today? >> well, let me be clear, when i helped build the national museum

of african-american history and culture, it means that i felt race -- here are ways that this history needs to be corrected. i would argue that removing confederate statues are not erasing history at all. in fact, it is helping us find a truer, more accurate history. i would argue that there is some statues that ought to be preserved in museums because they help us understand this moment we are in, but i am a believer that if you are in search of accuracy, confederate statues help you understand history a bit, but removing them does not challenge, does not change our historical narrative. it corrects that. >> what he said. if you just go back and means test when that statue was built, you will find it was built in the 1880's or 1890's. what was happening then? reconstruction, which has come down to us as a bad period,

actually an experiment in civil rights. it's collapse was a tragedy. because in its wake, and the post-civil war piece, you had -- because in its wake, in the post-civil war peace, you have the resurgence of the clue >> clan -- of the klan, jim crow, so if you say here is an example of the reassertion of white supremacy, it does not have an organic sense of this is the story of my people. it is a story of you cannot even enjoy the freedom we begrudgingly gave you and that you can take the confederate flag. it is not the confederate flag. the confederate flag is a different flag. the flag that we call the confederate flag is one of many battle flags of the army of northern virginia, which was adopted by the ku klux klan, and

it went into the state flags. it went into mississippi in that period. it went into other state flags of the old confederacy after 1954. what happened in 1954? let me see -- was there a supreme court decision that might have prompted some sort of, you know, individual resistance? that's exactly right. it is not even the flag of the confederacy. it is the flag -- it is like ices, right -- it is like isis, right? it is like al qaeda. it is not even the confederate flag. it is the ku klux klan's appropriation of what they thought was the confederate flag. so you can make some simple descriptions -- mitch landrieu talked to lonnie, me, when marsalis -- lonnie, me, winton marsalis, and he did the right thing. these are in museums. we interpret.

this is what this man spends his life doing. that is what we have to do. and nothing has been erased. nothing has been erased and the problem is that sometimes there is a tendency on the other site to want to erase and to say you cannot say this anymore or you cannot talk about that. we have got to continue to talk about nathan bedford forrest, but do we have to name a high school after him? i don't think so. >> we should also note, by the way, it was just this past year that mississippi finally changed its flag. >> yes. >> it took a little while. i do want to bring in the audience to a couple of polling questions we have pulled together to get a sense of where everyone's head is. there is this idea of being included in the narratives. audience, you will see this question pop up in on -- pop up on the screen. we would love for you to weigh in. vote, take part, and then we can jump off of that.

the question is to what extent do you feel included in the narratives and images that define american civic identities? all these institutions secretary bunch and conference -- and ken burns have been talking about. very, somewhat, or not at all? go ahead and click and i think we will see the results pop up here as well. and we will just take a moment. i think we will see those pop up very soon. ok. . the results are overwhelmingly somewhat. secretary bunch, 58% of people responded to the poll saying they feel somewhat included in the narratives, 34% said very, only 9% not at all. that tells me that you guys are doing your jobs pretty well. >> it tells me that over the

last 20 years there's been a greater appreciation of history, of understanding our story. i remember receiving a letter once. somebody said i should not do work on african-american history because america's greatest strength is the ability to forget. >> yeah. [laughs] >> to me, it is its ability to forget what it did not want to talk about. what you are seeing here is the people recognize there is a more complicated narrative than we were initially taught. people are seeing parts of themselves in the narrative. what i want to make sure is that the narrative really does reflect the complexity and the diversity of this nation. >> and the somewhat, as a sort of in between as it may sound, reflects the kind of complication that lonnie has been talking about and the sort of desire, the innate desire that we would all like to have, that it is all very certain and

it is like this. and it is not. a lot of it is that i know there is a bigger story, it is a bigger story, that what i believe is being challenged, what i believe is finally being recognized. it is not yet there. so you have a whole range of people who are feeling not fully enfranchised and not fully out of it who are struggling, as we are, as lonnie is, as i am in the work we do to try to figure it out. i am working on a film on the u.s. and the hollow cast -- and the holocaust -- what we knew, when we knew it, what did we do to intercede. during the writing of the emma lazarus poem, there's a guy writing the opposite, don't open the door. and that guy won.

preventing jewish refugees from coming to the united states. not a comfortable image. we would still like to say give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but it is more complicated than that. >> this idea of how we choose to remember our darkest chapters -- this is popping a -- popping up a lot in our questions -- there is a debate between the 1619 project and the 1776 project. some folks are asking about the removal of confederate statues. this is an area of debate for folks. one person saying "i do not think they should be destroyed as they represent a part of our history, but can they somehow demonstrate the horrors those people perpetrated as a reminder?" another question saying "i have

heard removing them sanitizes a dark place in our history." secretary bunch, what do you make of that? >> first of all, you definitely need to prune these statues. like mitch landrieu, like they have done in budapest with soviet era statues, they are wonderful opportunities to put things together because they are a part of history. they shape the way we think about ourselves, so it is important not to lose that, but it is important to say our goal is to find the unvarnished truth, and so therefore you have to have room to be able to tell the truth. so you prune those statues. you put some in parks. you actually say that you find other statues that replace those, that tell a fuller, more complicated story. in essence, what you are trying to do is to say that america has certain creation myths and it is important to keep those myths as

a of our northstar, let us be that more perfect union, but let us also recognize that we have a long way to get there, and that, in order to get there, you have to understand your history. you have to understand the complexity. you have to understand the dark moments. only by understanding those do you understand the resiliency and strength of a people. >> i agree. the great anxiety and all of this is not to have a kind of soviet set where you throw out everything and select a new history and. i understand while people could feel anxious about that. i do not think that is going on or will go on. this is more of a reactionary thing, "this was about states rights or nullification," and it is not. it is about slavery. if you look at the south carolina articles of secession,

they do not mention states rights. they do not mention nullification. they do not mention the other raging constitutional issues of the day. they mention slavery an awful lot. , that is what worried them that would -- that is what worried them, that they would take away what turned out to be there most valuable property, human beings that they owned. we have got to be able to contain -- and by the way, the guy who wrote "all men are created equal" owned over 200 human beings. we are not talking about removing monticello or mount vernon. monticello a disguise plantation, betty plantation nonetheless. we have to do the pruning.

let's leave it. nothing will be lost in this story unless we have the kind of horrific, wholesale, soviet style cleansing of the system, and we are not about that. americans are strong enough to figure out how to tolerate the good and the bad. it is just for too long, we have permitted just one very narrow, superficial story to obtain. it is good to complicate it. it makes for great drama, great stories, great exhibitions. go to lonnie's original museum. i mean, this is by no means a picnic, and yet the fact that it produces these feelings in you are amazing, are transformative, and not just for african-americans, but for all of us, indebted to that museum

for reminding us that this experience has got to be at the heart of our story. it is the original sin, as historians like to say. that is why we have to have our eyes open to it. george floyd gave us a huge opportunity. his teacher in houston said he wanted to be a supreme court justice like they're good marshall. -- justice like thurgood marshall. he has achieved a horrible fate, but is helping us remarkably, and we cannot drop this moment. it is a 402-year-old virus we are dealing with. >> talking about inclusion and exclusion and revision and so on, how much of this consists of re-centering conversations? we look at the work the 1619 project did bite re-centering our story -- did by re-centering

our story of the arrival of the first slaves in virginia? that is not the history you are presented in a formal education place at all. even in journalism, when you are talking about racism in law enforcement, how about centering the role and voices of the black law enforcement officers who have to work in that environment rather than white officers who used to be racist and are no longer? how much of that curating artifacts, evidence, narratives in the smithsonian informs your work? what is at the heart of the story? >> i think you have put your finger on what has shaped my career, which is grecian touring -- which is re-centering race and the american story. in the 1960's, just discove ring that race was there. it was always sort of exotic and ancillary.

for me, it is saying, of the many kind of creation stories of the u.s., the story of the notion of us as the beacon of freedom, equally important is the story of us struggling to redefine what freedom is, to make that freedom more accessible to african-americans, to women, to others, so to me, the tension of being able to say let us build on our original creation myths, but let's re-center these stories so we have a better way of understanding who we once were, which will help us understand who we are today and maybe point us towards a better tomorrow. i thing i take very strongly from african-american history is i am amazed that people believed in america, that america will one day live up to its promise if you struggled, challenged,

made clear what the needs were, if you sacrificed. to me, re-centering means not pushing these other stories out of the way, but saying we cannot understand ourselves if we do not see how this issue of race has touched us all, has shaped every presidential administration from washington to biden, and in essence, we are not understanding ourselves if we turned a blind eye to one of the key factors -- if we turn a blind eye to one of the key factors that makes us who we are. >> i agree. dr. king's dream was not a dream articulated especially for -- to kill it is specifically for african-americans, buffer -- but for all people. certainly in this country, everybody is light and. -- lightened. you definitely don't want to be an enslaved person. but you definitely don't want to be a slave owner either. these things free people and

-- in unusual ways and the reframing of it, now that you are talking about, and lonnie said so beautifully is that the heart of our survival as a country. it is being willing to tolerate the increasing number of narratives that go into what is actually us. narratives that were always about us in the u.s., but were left out in labor, women, bottom-up stories, individual oral histories, all of that stuff. i mean, american history for the longest time was a sequence of presidential administrations, white men, punctuated by wars. >> one of the things that ken does so brilliantly, and i love the term lens. because i think that what we're really trying to suggest is that you're using african american history, we are using the story of issues of gender, you're

really saying, these are lenses in what it means to be an american. these are not simply lenses into a community. they are a lens into a nation. i frame the stories as thinking about people's journey through a -- but a nation story. >> both now have mentioned specifically gender and the rule of women in history. we've got some great audience questions coming in so guys, please keep them coming. but let me put this question to you from you from the audience. someone is asking, how are institutions bringing jane crow to light, the intersectionality of racism and sexism, has there been enough conservative focus, -- concerted focus, and off of that shifting of the lines to the stories of women and racism? >> not yet, i made a film on elizabeth cady stanton and susan b anthony and there's an extraordinary betrayal at the heart of the women's movement after the civil war. it was the women were told ok, you are right, but we're working

on this one thing and once were done will take care of you and in fact, then all of a sudden you've got a lot of right women -- white women going ok, we want to vote, but we are not necessarily wanted for black men were certainly not for black women. you know, the movement of the very progressive movement against the splinter, which is always the case. fortunately, what's happening now is that our history is beginning to include extraordinary stories of women and women of color into the narrative. harriet tubman, you know, is just ascendant and ida b. wells will be ascendant and you will be able to hear more about the -- about sojourner truth and people that will help put a live to so much of what the conventional ways them of what american history is, so there is a huge long way to go, long way to go for women, period. i'm the father of four daughters

and i don't get it every day from them, it's just, i understand a world through their eyes, and they're all very capable. but they are not a white male and that still has a kind of privileged position that is always, you know, is one lap ahead automatically. and in every race but jesse owens is running. >> in some ways, chance your question, if i look at museums around the country, i think they're doing much better job of looking at these different stories and crossing these lines. but i still think there's so much work to be done. one is the scholarship is now at a point where we can understand what's the challenge of black man vis-a-vis black men. what are the challenge of race vis-a-vis the fight for women. we are getting to those stories. i'm not convinced they were given to the public in a way yet that makes them accessible, that

makes them central of public's understanding, but i think we're getting there. that is the exciting thing. >> and when stacey abrams is president, and then we'll all have our lessons brought right up to date pretty much right away. >> so we are now in this historic moment, we have the first woman of color, we have a black woman of south asian descent, occupying one of the highest office in the land. -- offices in the land. i'm asking to follow up on your secretary -- your statement, secretary, because i'm curious how we get there, what's incumbent upon all of us, within our institutions to make sure that those stories are included moving forward? >> i think it's important to make sure that we're helping the public understand that all we're trying to do is understand who we are as americans. >> great. >> it's all we're simply trying to do so that even as we explore questions that people may say, that doesn't relate to me, it does. and i think the challenge is one that people understand but -- that there is still so much more to learn.

there is still so much more to understand through her history and that by understanding that, that will challenge us but that'll put us in the direction where, as the vice president has said, that she doesn't want to be the last and so, i think the key is to make sure that we're telling these stories that allow us to open those doors. >> so we're in the business, him and i, of storytelling and i'm i'm -- i'm just reminded of a statement by the novelist richard powers who said the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's mind. the only thing that can do that is a good story. and if you think about it, arguments are about you are wrong, i'm right. let me convince you. stories, if done well in the -- and the american story that lonnie and i are trying to add to is one that gets increasingly bigger and more inclusive is the wrong word. it's a bigger table and there's lots of stuff on it and people don't agree and that's okay.

but at the end of the day, if someone feels they have a place at that table and are part of that story, then the skies the limit. there is a kind of possibility ahead of us. the problem is that we're all about dialectic, we're all about polemic, we're all about argument. and that means everything is just binary. when nothing in life is actually that binary, it just isn't. everything exists in the complicated shades of gray in between and that's where we have to operate. and it's incremental and it's sometimes steps backwards, as well as going forwards and that i think is lawful. it isn't just american history, it is interest are complicated story, it's human interaction because it is of course human beings who lie and human beings who make conspiracies and human beings who are paranoid and human beings who have always, through all-time manipulated and

promoted disinformation. which is one of the great resistance forces to just being able to expand with the history we're talking about. >> that leads to this idea of one singular american narrative which i wonder sometimes if it does exist because you're talking about disinformation, conspiracy theories and so on and we're seeing the proliferation, especially right now with the social media. but is also, seems like two very different conversations about who america isn't who depending -- who america is and who she isn't depending on where you are in the country and one kind of community year in. so in some places, you're having a really real complicated discussions about the place of confederate statues, how we look really rigorously at our history and other places you have conversations where we're talking about amending school textbooks to include creationism. there are very real belief systems guiding all of these conversations and we talk about complexity but sometimes, those ideas are exactly in conflict with each other. they cannot exist at the same

time in the same space, right? so do we still have and can we still work towards a singular american narrative, or are we sort of at a divergent point where there will be two or multiple american stories, depending on who you are. >> the latin motto of the united states is e pluribus unum, out of many, one. it's never been one thing and it will never being one thing but the impulse towards, this is the civilized idea in which i understand where i come from, i understand what i believe, but i understand that where i come from and what i believe has to be in concert with other people who have perhaps diametrically opposed points of view. and that i wish to participate in this civilized hole, then to disintegrate into the tribal equivalent, which we all know where that leads to.

it's just very bloody. and we don't need that and nobody in their right minds wants that. i stood on the rim of the grand canyon, explaining to my daughter's that the colorado river exposed pre-cambodian vision shifts, that is 1.7 billion years old, nearly half the age of the planet itself, the woman next to me said, this earth was created 6000 years ago, and i just turn to her and i said, your years are longer than mine. you know, you just have to make room for her and room for me. and we may believe in the same god, i think we did. >> i think in many ways, we used to have a narrow, linear notion of what america was.

whether it was called a master narrative or whatever. now we have expanded it like a balloon. and my sense is that it's important to do that. we are still within a framework that is america, but we're now recognizing that understand, we've got to understand rule -- rural america in different ways, we've got to understand gender differently and we have to recognize that maybe one day, we'll get to all these pieces and will begin to move back towards a single narrative. i believe they'll never be a single narrative. i do believe however, there is room within that room for -- that balloon for different creation stories and that's why we try to do. >> that actually gets specifically to one of the audience courses coming, in which it can we bring ourselves back to us? -- back to a single narrative? >> it's called a work by it's called a work by richard, so that paranoid style in american politics. this stuff, you know, stuff like this has been out there, ebbing and flowing since the beginning

of the united states. since the beginning of time and i think what happens is, we tend to be chicken little's in our own particular moment in which we go, the sky is falling. the great benefit is that as much as you know all the dirt underneath the carpet that's been presented as american history, it also makes you kind of optimistic at the same time, because you understand that while the moment is unprecedented, the aspects of this are completely precedent it. -- precedented. we know that there's been this demagogue here and this demagogue there. we know when the know nothings believe this about immigration. we know all of these things that in their aggregate sort of combine to make a moment kind of like ours. i just sort of feel these things, mccarthyism died out, other things will happen. it's replaced by comedy, sometimes the civil wars and -- sometimes it is replaced by civil wars and that's a terrible

thing. but all in all, you know, george will said of franklin roosevelt in our film on the roosevelts, he said that he thought franklin roosevelt saw american history as a rising road. that's a good image to have. >> all of this, i think leads to another poll question i want to put to the audience which is not just the role of arts and cultural institutions and preserving, maintaining and telling american history but also, preserving and maintaining and even strengthening our democracy. so one of the questions we've wanted to put to everyone out there is do you think arts and cultural institutions have a role in strengthening democracy? you can click yes, you can click no. we will look at the results as they come in. i want to talk a little bit more about this and about how these institutions feed into our democratic systems and narratives as well. let's wait for a moment while those pop-up and i think we have the results. absolutely louis -- absolutely, overwhelmingly

yes. gentlemen, weigh in on that. especially as we look to -- i know, ken, this is something that you mentioned when we spoke before this event. the role that artifact stop prism from solves right after events, you look at the presidential takes that the center previous been going through. those has evolved our understanding of history and democracy, right? ken: that's really true and i am glad you brought up the most because it's interesting in our film on the vietnam war, we were bending over backwards not to make kind of political judgments about people. and even though after the period that our film covers both president nixon and henry kissinger would books that put -- wrote books that put their views in a different light. the tapes that the mueller center has and have listened to and it's really important to know that all of the tapes haven't been listened to our -- listened to or catalogued or interpreted by scholars, so this is a vast ocean of potential stories and research and further complication of the american narrative, and i think that

applies to lyndon johnson as well. there is just the luminous amount of them. we didn't have to say anything, we could just put the tape, the president could go out and say this in public and that afternoon, say this on a tape. it is just wonderful to have that. we live in an age of so much information that no matter how many times somebody says something, we've lost our sort of ability to be outraged, which i hope we came back shortly -- we gain back shortly because, things can be said so many times. but there's something about having a tape where you hear the president of the united states talking to doctor kissinger about something that they have independently together said the exact opposite. and there is nothing a filmmaker has to do. you want to put your thumb on the scale, you could but you don't have to. you just present these things. these things are really, really important. i have in my office leg shac

kles. they are incredibly heavy. and you just go, this speaks more than volumes of books about -- this is an instrument foraged by human intelligence that has only one purpose. which is to enslave other americans. lonnie's got all of that and it's just the accumulated weight of that. it has a kind of power to transform and rearrange or -- our molecules in a really positive way. so these artifacts are central to how we're going to not just fix history, that's impossible but continue to interpret and let it guide us. we sort of think the past is unknown and our history is fixed, it's the opposite. our past is as malleable as anything and our future, at least the immediate future is rather predictable.

and i love the fact that passed -- that that past is so malleable and each generation rediscovers and reexamines that part of the past, it gives its present new meaning. so people fall out of favor and people come back into favor, we've all seen that happen. revisionism changes the dynamics of everything and something else is replaced. i love, even just since world war ii, the number of variations of historiography that have captured the imagination of the academy. they are radically different. lonnie knows better than me all the different permutations we've been through saying, this is the only way you can see histories through this lens and at the end of the day, telling the good story and incorporating as many of those perspectives as possible gives you the best possible access. lonnie: i think the biggest challenge of building a national museum was all the different scholar interpretations, trying to understand the model, trying to navigate those. but i think to your question,

the notion of cultural institutions are crucially important because they are both the glue, because there are -- they are interested places. they are places where people will come and grapple with questions that they want another places. i find people coming to the smithsonian who wrestled with slavery or wrestle with climate change where they wouldn't in cleveland or in chicago but when they come to these institutions, they have trust. but it also means that these institutions have to also have courage. the courage to grapple with social justice. the courage to grapple with clarity, the courage to actually ensure that in their collections are things that allow us to tell complicated diverse stories. my frustration early in my career in museums is there were stories that i want to tell and there was nothing in stories that could help me tell those stories, so i vowed that it's crucially important for museums like the smithsonian to collect today for tomorrow.

so i sent a response team to collect george floyd, collect was going on at the capitol on january 6. it is important that without those stories people can then say the history did not exist. the key for the work that ken has done and i have done is to ensure that people have an understanding of what happened before, and how they can dip into the reservoir and be transformative. amna: can i put another audience question because this pivots to something i wanted to get both of you to weigh in on, academia? what we are taught. our education. about our history. one of the audience members asked specifically about oral history. you mentioned you sent people out to gather all this wonderful evidence and these stories right now. this audience member is asking is there is a distinction between storytelling and oral history? where does oral history fit into the academic model? how do you view that? lonnie: first of all, there is

the storytelling that's shaped by scholars. that really frames the stories and questions we want to answer. and then there's oral histories that sometimes fit right into the scholarship and other times they challenge it. other times they are not as accurate. but the reality is that when you get into the water of all history, as an academic, you learn to ask different questions, to see things differently, and it forces you to understand what are the truths you are trying to understand. -- trying to tell. i'm a big believer, i became a better historian listening to oral histories, stories of people. sometimes they are completely accurate. sometimes they are memories that are wrong, but you are made better every time you hear those stories. because what they do is remind you to humanize yourself. -- humanize history. they remind you that that will get people engaged, and it reminds you that there is

complexity, because you are hearing different things in the oral histories, and i think that made me a better historian >> i agree. that was really beautifully said, lonnie. i'd said earlier i thought memory was the dna, but not yet a structure. the first structure of memory, regardless of whether it turns out an academic or other ways, is oral history. it is telling -- honey, how was your day? that is the beginning of all history. it really is. and you edit. human beings edit. and in that editing is the initial subjectivity of real, actual, true human experience. i back slowly down the driveway avoiding the garbage can at the curb is not what we say unless someone hits us and that's what we say. so we are all collecting from the original oral history.

scholars will apply a whole set of different things and they will be drawn to particulars before historiography's. narrative was out of fashion after the second world war, and you can understand why. you kill 60 plus million people, storytelling is really losing it. freudian interpretations, marxist interpretations, symbolism, deconstruction, semiotics, all sorts of things have helped the academy learn a different thing, but it all goes back to being able to tell a story. the story essentially goes back to answering the question, what happened today? what happened today? what was your experience today? that is an oral tradition as old as human beings and as new as this conversation right now. amna: i was going to say, i think honey, how is your day, is a dangerous question during pandemic work from home. [laughs] ken: i had a conversation

earlier today in which i said white people are notoriously inept at understanding about what's going on, but a pandemic, at the same time we are dealing with this racial reckoning, is a good way to understand that it has never been a problem to go to the convenience store until now, but it's always been a problem for african americans. it has not been a problem to jog in another neighborhood until now. but it has always been a problem for african-americans about whether you come home alive. in some ways, the pandemic and george floyd hit at a moment where it was possible, at least, to pry open the door. you could see it shutting real quick. people are making facile decisions about what happened, but our job as museums, filmmakers, journalists, is to keep that door open. let's not let it shut with the conventional wisdom that will gloss it over and say it's brother against brother. amna: i think the pandemic, as

you have told the stories, covered these, i cover them. it has also revealed to us so much more about who we are. disparities are deeper than most people believe them to be. they are across every single institution, while a lot of people think of the pandemic as an equalizer, it is brought into -- it has broadened the disparities. you have black, latino, native american communities hardest hit, not just on the health, -- health side, but on the recession as well. i think we are at a historic moment. we say this so many times. i would love to ask each of you to reflect on, it because -- on it because obviously, you deal in history, and gathering history and artifact and evidence and stories and preserving them for future generations. how are you processing this moment right now? we are probably too close to look at it with a clear eyed view. how are you viewing this moment? when we have long overdue racial

reckoning in this country, we have a global pandemic that we are dealing with in our own way. what is it that's standing out to you in terms of continuing to tell and preserve america's story? ken: i agree with you. i have said this was the fourth great crisis after the civil war, the depression, and world war ii, and in some ways, it may be worse because it has brought to an existential for the very -- fore the very existence and continuation of the united states. and i believe, we are dealing with three viruses, this year, covid-19, which is horrific, the 402 year old virus of white supremacy and racial injustice, and the age old virus of lying and misinformation and all that stuff has reached a new boiling point. at the same time, let's also not forget what's happening. nurses, teachers, delivery people, emts, are now the most exulted positions in the

country. that is a really good thing. more people voted, almost 160 million people voted, more than ever before. that's a really good thing, in the safest, most secure election we've ever had. people risked the virus, and more importantly, poll workers, people who had to be there all day and couldn't mail in a ballot, democrat and republican, maintained an american civic order at the most basic, granular level in a great way we are having this racial reckoning. we have a woman of color as vice president, and a woman of south asian dissent, and we have the oldest president we've ever had facing an fdr moment, a guy who knows he has to represent everybody, including the people who didn't vote for him. these are all good things that are happening and i think as much as we cannot be pollyannaish about any of these,

-- this, we also can't be the opposite. we cannot be consistently cassandra's? why are all of these negatives women? amna: that's a whole other conversation. i want to host a webinar on that. ken: we actually have to be able to measure all of this, just as the african american experience produced jazz music. it's the greatest expression of affirmation in the face of adversity. the blues itself is not a complaint about your condition. it is your absolute affirmation that you are going to transcend this bad situation. we always have to see this glass, however perilous it is, at least half full. that's why history makes me an optimist, despite the fact that i spend my entire life charting really bad stuff.

i don't know how you feel about it, but the possibilities are as great as the threats. lonnie: as a historian, i have always felt history makes me hopeful because i see where we were. i've seen the changes. but it also reminds me that we will probably never get to the promised land of full equality, but we work towards it. for me, it's that kind of journey. what i find in this moment is one of the parts of the smithsonian community museum, they went around and began to do oral histories, interviewing people about what does this mean to them? what has been wonderful is hearing people say here is what we've lost. here is where i'm sad but here is where i see this pointing us to better understanding. a better understanding that this is a moment of reckoning for the nation. and how do we participate in that kind of moment?

some participated by voting, some participated by protesting, some participated by sharing artistic creativity to make sure moments are not lost. we've had amazing young poets taking us in new directions. but for me, this is a moment to real loss, real pain. but at the moment that's transformative, if we seize the moment. and that's always the question. amna: what about for our democracy? the idea about the more we look back, the more questions we may ask, the more things we may find are not necessarily as true as we believed them to be, as new evidence surfaces, as more narratives are included. does this rigorous look at our history, questioning and holding it up to the light and shaking it around, does that serve to strengthen our democracy? ken: of course it does. we just came off of the last, thank god, football game of the season. i love the sport, but it's over and we get a little bit of a rest.

if you think about it, the people who do it the best are the people who go back and look with very clear eyes, and not the great past they made, but the mistakes they made. a great country does the exact same thing. it goes into the film room and it says what can i do to be better, how do i up my game, what do i need to do in order to not be beaten again by this team. we just washed, the day before yesterday, 18 that was not supposed to win to a much superior team, handed to them, because they did the work. they studied the film. they understood where they had gone wrong. and the metaphor is incredibly weak. is an important one if we're going to be better is that we all i mean, this is socratic you have to know yourself and if you don't if you avoid it if you if you coast on cannot do either you ho

be constantly studying the film and understanding with you know, the most intense self-criticism what you could do better. that's the process. they don't he doesn't go. oh, let's have an exhibition and it's out next thursday. it's out next thursday five years from now and i spend that long on a film because we have to spend all of that time means testing it order to make sure it fits into what all the variety of scholarly comments that have all the sense of the bottom up as well as the top down history the variety of art >> the following is a paid program and the opinions don't reflect those of bloomberg lp, its affiliates and its employees.

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