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 with the living community when i reveled in their memories when their memories shaped the rough edges of history made a little smoother, but then the other side is to bring the scholarship in the evidence because you're in search of clarity sometimes even truth and so i think the key is to really marry those together but recognize that it's the accuracy. it's the scholarship. that is the engine of all that i try to do. that's right. we're getting some great questions coming in related to this. this is clearly hitting a note with our audience. so secretary bundle and put the first one to you right now. one of the audience members is asking, how can we trust what's

written about historical events really all on the lines of if you know if winners record history if the victors are the ones who dictate what gets kept in our history and not how do we trust that history is written without any kind of bias. what would you say to that? well, i would argue that you're actually right that early in my career most of the history that i read that i was trained by didn't tell the stories that i wanted to hear that didn't embrace the full diversity of a nation, but i would argue that today. there's much more good history that are more complicated history so that you can really begin to trust the stuff written by good scholars. i think the challenge is that there's so much history that you can get online through other places and so the challenges to find those sources like a ken like a smithsonian exhibition like a book by great scholar from yale. those are the things that you can count on so i do think that you can find closer to the truth as long as you understand that

history is always going to evolve and it's always going to be changing and is going to be new discoveries based on evidence based on new interpretations. and and i would add if i may under that this notion that history is written by the victors is lovely, but definitely not true and it's mostly not true in the united states because the north one the civil war but the south wrote the history of the civil war birth of a nation and gone with the wind postulate that a homegrown terrorist operation organization like al qaeda our own al qaeda or isis are we're actually the heroes of a post civil war moment when in fact the exact opposite is true and it's taking us generations to undo that and to begin to include other competing narratives and the the loudest voice in all of this is not the truth or the complicated narrative, but you're taking our history away, right? well, so this is a related

question that i wasn't planning on getting to until later, but you guys are really digging into it. so let's just keep going on this thread right now this this idea of the lost cause when you said it generations to be able to move past that to even to challenge that when you look back at american history and the narrative we have held on to what why is that why was that clung? so tightly too and not challenge sooner. well, i think it's some ways it's clear that the north won the war, but they lost a peace they lost that narrative 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 together? let's not focus on slavery or the african-american because they're complicated. yeah, let's find the simple answer the simple answer brother versus brother and that in essence what we were doing was seeing fighting for the whiteness of america from both points of you.

therefore coming together not grappling with the issue of slavery allowed people to create these myths that allow people to come together for me one of the most powerful and really painful images. are those images 50 years after the war when you see old yankees and old rebels shaking hands the war is over and yet you never see an african-american you never see any of the 200,000 african-american's that fought in the war. you never see the african-american to in some ways challenge 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's absolutely right the north is completely complicit with the version of the lost cause that went and a lot of it is because it was just easier to perpetuate the simplicity of the brother against brother and now we've come together and to move on let's forget. let's not forget. i mean particularly as we're debating q anon and marjorie dale green and all of this sort of stuff the republican party. is in some ways on trial as well

today was born in a schoolhouse in ripon, wisconsin in 1854 out of the ashes of the whig party with one central thing and only one thing the liberation of african slaves in america. and we've gotten a long way from that brothers and sisters and that's a pretty interesting american journey. that's that's complicated and and i would just refer lonnie my dear friend to our civil war film and which in addition to all the reunors at gettysburg. we found every ounce of footage of black troops that were there and included them in it because that's exactly what happened and why at the end of our film the scholar barbara field said the civil war still going on and regrettably it can still be lost but i think that's the example of how the work you do the work scholars do really changes the

narrative. it really is saying let us find the things that have been neglected because they were there but they won't deemed important enough to be talked about and it takes gifted people like can to say let me complicate the story. let me bring scholars in like barbara fields that will help us understand it in new ways. and in essence what we're really trying to say is it's 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 aren't simple answers of these questions and that you've got to grapple and wrestle with these as we go forward. you know, i've said that i have made for more than 40 years. i've been making films about the us, but i've also been making films about us that is to say the two letter lowercase plural pronoun all the intimacy of us and all the majesty but also the complexity the contradiction and even the controversy of the united states and that's you

have to exist and i feel it's such a privilege and i know lonnie exists in this space, too. it's a privilege to be able to operate in the kind of conscious state of unknowing that that that represents and you have to be able to to be there and to sit on that. undertow and tolerate it because otherwise you're going to end up making the mistakes that we always tend to make which is decide that it's one thing or another and not often neither in both. i mean, it's a whitman-esque. kind of moment, you know do i contradict myself? i contradict myself. i contain multitudes we us contain multitudes and and it is our obligation as museums and filmmakers to to represent that however messy, it might be and for me, you know as a filmmaker. i see it as a lens, you know, it's not ignoring someone's history. it's pulling back and saying this is a greater history. look at south carolina their tourism now involves

african-american history. why well, they were a majority black state at the time of the civil war the south had 9 million people. four million of whom were owned by other people for you know, that's an extraordinary percentage of your population that has zero interest in the lost cause has zero interest in slavery and yet for 100 plus years. nobody even -- to ask some questions about what was your family? like? what did your family do? let's restore this plantation, but we don't have rebuild the slave cabins, you know, let's just, you know paint the picture of the antebellum south with the hanging spanish moss and we can just ignore the fact they were emancipated when in fact, of course, they weren't they were given freedom, but that's all they were given and maybe 40 acres and a meal sometimes but you could argue that jim crow the post the collapse of reconstruction is a worse period for african-american.

they're more african-american's lynched, you know between then and 1920 than in any other period because you wouldn't want to lynch your property that had value but once that property didn't have any value you know the reason why the great migration happened is a mother didn't want to worry every single day about whether her son is coming is coming home alive from school. i think one of the powerful things sorry comments a powerful things that comes out of ken's work candidly, which i think i try to do not as well as can but it's this notion of how do you humanize history? how do you help people understand that when you're talking about the african-american experience you're talking about the quintessential american experience exactly if you look at almost every film can has made part of you see at the heart of it is ah, it's the african-american experience that helps hold account a country accountable. it's the african-american experience where you say when we expand our notions of liberty and freedom our definition of citizenship tied to this community. so for me part of the real challenge is to help people

understand that we're not talking about ancillary stories. we're talking about stories that are central to who we are regardless of race regardless of how long our family's been in this country. and i think that's one of the great strengths and contributions and work. let me put a let me put a period on that very briefly is that this is february our coldest and shortest month, which is where we put african-american history. well, i know why it's there and it has a legitimate reason why but how could african-american history not be at the burning? enter not in the outer orbit of pluto is some politically correct addenda to our national narrative, but at the burning heart of who we are because we have the memories of people who have the peculiar experience of being unfree in a supposedly free land. they have much more to tell us than the people who've bought hook line and sinker the the trickly madison avenue sanitized version of our past and so you look to there and it's you know, you don't have to if you're

gonna scratch the surface american history, you don't have to go looking for it. it's there. it's just there. it's a kind of conscience of the nation. it's 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 so you've raised a couple of key ideas. i want to bring together an examine sort of a moment in time because we're basically talking about expanding our historical narrative right making sure that it is inclusive that the stories that we're previously not told or ignored are being included. uplifted and centered in a way that they should be but there are those who say we're also revising history. we're erasing parts of it. you can see this and the debate just over the place of confederate statues in america, and since we're talking and hosted here by a uva institution, i think it's relevant to remind people that was just a few years ago, right? we saw those violent clashes in charlottesville over the removal of a confederate statue, so i'm curious to hear from both of you. what what is the place for a

confederate statue in american society today? well, let me be clear when i help build the nationals you have african-american history and culture was because i felt that race needed to be center in the place where the world comes understand what it means to be an american the national mall. but it also means that this was an opportunity to say here are ways that is john franklin used to say that this history needs to be corrected. and i would argue that removing commiterate statues are not erasing history at all. in fact, it's helping us find a true or more accurate history. i would argue that there are some statues that ought to be preserved in museums because they help us understand this moment. we're in but i am a big believer that if you're 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 it yeah what he said if you just go back and means

test when that statue is built you'll find it was built in the 1880s or the 1890s, right? and what was happening then well reconstruction, which has come down to us as a bad period actually an experiment in civil rights. it's collapse was the tragedy because in its wake in the vacuum of the absence of federal troops in the south enforcing the post civil war piece. you had an extraordinary influx of ku klux klan of lynching of jim crow laws all enshrined by 1898 and the in the constitution and plessy versus for or in in the courts in plessy versus ferguson. so if you just say here is a representative sample of the reimposition of white supremacy, then it doesn't have a kind of organic sense of this is my story of my people. this is my story of me deciding that you can't even enjoy the freedom that we begrudgingly gave you and that you can take the the confederate flag.

it's not the confederate flag. the confederate flag is a different flag the flag that we call the confederates 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 went into mississippi at that period 1880s nineties went into the other state flags of the old confederacy after 1954. hmm. what happened in 1954? let me see. was there a supreme court decision that might have prompted some sort of in, you know, individual resistance. yes, that's exactly right. and so it's not even the flag of the confederacy. it's it's the it's the flag. it's like isis right? it's like the it's like al qaeda. it's not even the confederate flag. it's the ku klux klans appropriation of what they thought was a confederate flag so you can make some very simple descriptions. and do you know mitch andrew is the guy who struggled over

talked to lonnie? i'm sure talk to me. talked to winton marsalis a lot of people about what to do and he did the right thing right these things aren't melted down into you know bullets or anything like they're in museums and we interpret interpret interpret. this is what this man spends his life doing. that's that's what we've got to do and no, but nothing's been erased. nothing has been erased and the problem is that sometimes there is a tendency on the other side to want to erase and to say you can't say this anymore or you can't talk about that. we've 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. so what we should also note, by the way, i think it was just this past year that mississippi finally changed its flag. correct? yes. yeah, it took a little while. listen. i do want to bring in the audience to a couple of polling questions. we'd pulled together just to get a sense of where everyone's head is and that can give us another jumping off point for the conversation. there's this idea of being

included in the narratives audience out there. you're going to see this question pop up on the screen and then we'd love to have you weigh in. so once you see a public you'll see some instructions on the bottom vote take part in this conversation and then we can jump off of that. the question here we're asking is to what extent do you feel included in the narratives and the images that define american civic identity so all of these institutions secretary bunch and ken burns have been talking about the way we remember and define our own history. so what extent do you feel included in all of those narratives and images you can multiple choice so it's either very somewhat or not at all. go ahead and click in and then i think we'll see the results pop up here as well. and we'll just take a moment. i think we'll see those pop up very soon and there you have. okay, so the results are overwhelmingly somewhat secretary bunch when you look at these 58% of people out there responded to the poll by saying

they feel some what included in the narratives 34% said very only nine percent said not at all that tells me that you guys are doing your jobs pretty well. well, it tells me that they're over the last let's say 20 years. there's been a greater appreciation of history of understanding our story. i remember receiving a letter once that somebody said that i shouldn't do work on african-american history because the letter line and let i'll never forget said america's greatest strength it's ability to forget. yeah. to me. it's a spread that's its ability to forget what it didn't want to talk about and so in a way, i think what you're seeing here are the people recognize that there is a more complicated narrative. were initially taught and people are seeing parts of themselves in that narrative and i want to make sure is that the narrative really does reflect the complexity and the diversity of this nation and the somewhat as

sort of in between as it may sound actually reflects that kind of complication that lonnie's been talking about and the and the sort of desire that innate desire that we all like to have that it's all very certain and it's like this and it's not and so a lot of that somewhat is that i know there's a bigger story. i know that's a different story. i know that that what i believe is being challenged. i know that what i believe is finally being recognized or how do it's not yet there. so you've got a whole range of people who are feeling not fully in franchise 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 out i'm working on a film on the us and the holocaust you know, what we knew and when we at what the antecedents were and one of the things that we inherit in the 20th century is the emma lazarus poem. you know, we're the golden door. there's another guy at the same time a poet writing close the door. we won't don't want those sorts

of people in guess who won? that guy in 1924. we had an immigration bill that just shut the door and created quotas that made it impossible for refugees from europe and particularly jewish refugees from coming into the united states. not a very comfortable image. we'd still like to say give me your tired your poor your huddled messes yearning to breathe free, but it's a lot more complicated than that. this idea of how we choose to remember our darkest chapters. this is actually popping up a lot in some of our the conversation and the questions here. there's some folks weighing in on the debate between the 1619 project which of course led by the incomparable nicole hannah jones and also the 1776 project that the trump administration had just put out but there's some related thoughts. i want to share here with you and get you to weigh in. some folks are asking about the removal of confederate statues is still very much an area of debate for folks one person saying i don't think they should be destroyed as they represent a

part albeit an ugly part of our history, but can they somehow help demonstrate the horrors those people perpetrated as a reminder instead of just glorifying those people. there's another related question saying as far as statues are concerned, i've heard it said removing them sanitizes a dark place in our history secretary bunch. what do you make of that? i think it's important to realize that first of all, you definitely need to prune these statues. and that i think that like mitch landrew like they've done in in budapest with soviet era statues. they're a wonderful opportunities to put things together because they are part of history. they've shaped the way that we think about ourselves. so it's important not to lose that but it's important to say that our goal is to find is john. o' franklin is always say the unvarnished truth. and so therefore you've got to have room to be able to tell that truth. so you prune those statutes 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 really simply trying to do here is to say that america has certain creation myths and it's important to keep those miss as sort of our norstar. 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've got to understand your history. to understand the complexity. you've got to understand the dark moments because only by understanding those dark moments. do you really understand the resiliency and the strength of a people? i agree. i think that the great anxiety in all of this is to not have a kind of soviet set. you know, where you throw out everything and and select a new history as if nothing ever existed and i understand well people could feel anxious about that. i don't think that's going on and i don't think that's going to go on. i think the more is the reactionary thing that this is a

legitimate part. this wasn't about slavery. it was about states rights or nullification or into position or you know, and it's not it's all 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 congressional and constitutional issues of the day, they mentioned slavery and awful lot and that's what worried them that they are going to take away. what turned out. be their most valuable property which are the human beings. they owned in a country which forescore and five years before had proclaimed that all men are created equal. so we've got to be able to contain and by the way the guy who wrote that sentence owned more than 200 human beings and so we're not talking about throwing out the jefferson memorial or tearing down monticello. we're not talking about removing mount vernon a very obvious plantation or removing monticello a very disguised

plantation, but a plantation nonetheless characterized as some classical hoo-ha and beautiful, but we're we got to do the pruning. you know, i'm not suggesting going into gettysburg and lopping off all the statues of robert e lee the battlefield there. let's let's leave there's an appropriate places. nothing will be lost in this story unless we have the kind of horrific wholesale, you know soviet, cleansing of the system and we're not about that. we're americans are strong enough. to figure out how to tolerate the good and the bad it's just for very too long. we've permitted just one very narrow superficial story to obtain and it's it's just good to complicate it. it makes for great drama. it makes for a great stories. it makes for great exhibitions you go to lonnie's original museum there. i mean, this is by no means a picnic. and yet the fact that it

produces these feelings in you are are amazing our are transformative and not just for african-americans, but for all of us are indebted to that museum for reminding us as lani was saying that this experience is got to be at the heart. it's our original sin as historians like to say. that's the thing. we got to be opening our eyes to every day. and why? george floyd last year really gave us a huge opportunity, you know, it was his third or fourth grade teacher in houston said that he wanted to be a supreme court justice like thurgood marshall. he's achieved. a horrible fate but is helping us in in that area remarkably and we you know, we can't drop this moment. you know, this is the 400 and 2 year old virus that we're dealing with. well, how much of this we talk a lot about inclusion and exclusion or revision and so on

how much of this is about recentering conversations, right? i mean we look at the work that the 1619 project did by recentering our history around the first arrival of enslaved people here, right, which is not something that i could say as a product of, you know, virginia's public schools. you're not taught that growing up in america. that is not the history you're presented in a formal education place at all. we talk today about even in journalism when you're talking about racism and law enforcement. how about centering the role and the voices of the black law enforcement officers who have to work in that environment rather than talking to white officers who you know used to be racist and now are no longer or those kinds of conversations how much of that and especially secretary bunch and curating artifacts evidence narratives in the smithsonian how much of of that informs your work? what's at the heart at the center of the story? well, i think you put your finger on what is shaped my whole career and that is re-centering race in the american discourse.

we're centering race in a way that you know in the 60s the key was just to discover that grace was there right you shine the light and go i didn't know that story. i didn't know that history, but it was always sort of exotic and answering and so for me, it's saying that of the kind of many creation stories of the united states the story of the notion of us as the beacon of freedom. equally important as the story of us struggling to redefine what freedom is to make that freedom more accessible to african-american to women to others. so for 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 just maybe point us towards a better tomorrow because the thing that i take very strongly from african-american history is i'm

always amazed at people who believe that in america didn't believe in them. i'm always amazed that people who believed that america would one day live up to its promise if you struggled you challenge you made clear what the needs were and if you sacrificed so for me, we centering means not pushing these other stories out of the way, but saying we can't under our stand ours if we don't understand how this issue of race has shaped us all has touched every presidential administration from washington, you know to president biden and in essence, we're not understanding ourselves if we turn a blind eye to one of the key factors that makes us who we are. agree, dr. king's dream is not. was not a dream articulated specifically for african-americans, but it's about the liberation of all people if you escape this specific gravity of the almost

built-in racism in in the world certainly in this country. everybody's lightened, you know, i mean you definitely don't want to be an enslaved person, but you definitely don't want to be a slave owner either. i mean the these things free people in an unusual ways and and the reframing of it now that you're talking about is and and lonnie said so beautifully is at the heart of of our our survival. as as a country is is being willing to tolerate the increasing number of narratives that go in to what is actually us narratives that were always about us in the us, but we're left out, you know in labor women, you know, 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.

boom done and one of the things that ken does so brilliantly and i love the term the lens because i think that what we're really trying to suggest is that you're using african-american history. you're using the story of issues of gender. you're really saying these are lenses into what it means to be an american. um, these are not simply lenses into a community. there are lens into a nation. i've always framed these stories of thinking about a people's journey but a nation story. you've both now mentioned specifically gender and the role 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 the audience someone's asking how are institutions bringing jane crow to light the intersectionality of racism and sexism. has there been enough concerted focus enough of that shifting of the lens if you will to the stories of women and racism not yet.

i made it 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. yeah. okay, you're right, but we're working on this one thing and once we're done we'll take care of you. and in fact, then all of the sudden you had a lot of white women going. okay, we want the vote, but we're not necessarily want it for black men or certainly not black women and you know, the the movement of very progressive move it begins. 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, you know, and harriet tubman, you know is is just ascendant and ida be wells will be ascendant and you will be able to hear more about sojourner truth and people that

will help put a lie to so much of the conventional wisdom of what american history is. so there's a huge long way to go long way to go for women period that you know, i'm the father of four daughters and i 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're not a white male, you know, and that still has a kind of privileged position. that is always you know is one lap ahead automatically and in every race that jesse owens isn't right. in in some ways to answer your question if i look at museums around the country. i think they're doing a much better job of looking at these different stories and freshly crossing these 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 it mean. what what the challenge of black women visa v black men with the challenges of race vis-a-vis the fight for the vote with women. so we're getting to those stories. i'm not convinced. they're given to the public in a way yet that makes them accessible and makes them central to public understanding but i think we're getting there and i think this is the exciting thing and when stacey abrams is president, then will all have our our lessons brought right up to date pretty much right away. well, so we are now in this historic moment, right? we have the first woman of color. we have a black woman of south asian descent occupying one of the highest offices in the land. i'm asking to follow up on your question your statement there secretary bunch because i'm curious how how we get there. what's incumbent upon all of us what's incumbent upon our institutions to make sure that those stories are included moving forward. well, i think it's important to make sure that we're helping to public understand that all we're trying to do is understand who

we are as americans, right? it's all we're simply trying to do so that even as we explore questions that people may say but that doesn't relate to me it does and i think the the challenge is one make people understand. and that there's still so much more to learn. there's still so much more to understand through our history and that by understanding that that will challenge us, but that'll push us in a 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 have storytelling, you know, and i i i'm just reminded just now of a statement. i love by the novels richard powers. he 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're wrong. i'm right. let me convince you stories.

if done well and the american story that lonnie and i are both trying to add to is one that gets increasingly bigger and more inclusive is the wrong word. it's just it's a bigger table and lots of stuff on it and people don't agree and that's okay. but but at the end of the day if if someone feels they have a place at that table and are part of that story then the sky's the limit then there's a kind of possibility ahead of us. the problem is is that we're all about dialectic. we're all about polemic. well 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 you have to operate and it's incremental and it's sometimes some steps backwards as well as going forwards and and that i think is just it's lawful. it isn't just american history. it isn't just our complicated

story. it's 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 it through all time manipulated and and promoted disinformation, which is one of the great great, you know resistance forces to just being able to expand the history we were talking about well that leads to this idea about one singular american narrative, which i wonder sometimes if it does exist because you're talking about disinformation conspiracy theories and so on. we're seeing the proliferation especially right now with social media, but there's also it seems like sometimes two very different conversations about who america is and who she isn't going on depending on where you are in the country and what kind of community you're in. so in some places you're having very real complicated discussions about the place of confederate statues how we look really rigorously at our own history and in other places you

have conversations where we're talking about amending school textbooks to include creationism. i mean, there are very real belief systems guiding all of these conversations and we talked 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? we sort of at a divergent point where there will be two or multiple american stories that you going to depending on who you are latin motto of the united states is e pluribus unum out of many one. it's never been one thing and it will never be one thing but the impulse towards this is the civilized ideal 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 than to disintegrate into the tribal equivalent, which we all know where that leads to it's just very very bloody and we don't we don't need that and nobody in there what right minds wants that i stood on the rim of the grand canyon explaining to my daughters that the colorado river exposed pre-cambrian vishnu shift 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 6,000 years ago, and i just turned and i turned to her and i said your years are longer than mine. and that you know, you just got to make you know room for her and room for me, right?

and we may believe in the same god. i think we did. so i think i think in many ways. we used to have a narrow linear notion of what america was. um, whether it was called a master narrative or whatever and now what we really do is we've expanded it much like a balloon and my sense is that it's important to do that. we're still within framework. that is america. but we're now recognizing that to understand we've got to understand rural american different ways. we've got to understand questions of gender in different ways. that we've got to recognize that maybe one day will get to all these pieces and we begin to move back towards a single narrative. i believe they'll never be a single narrative. i do believe however that there is room within that balloon. for different creation stories, and that's what we try to do. that actually gets specifically to one of the audience questions coming in which was can we bring ourselves back to a single narrative?

oh, yeah. there's a great scholarly work called not a single narrative islani said but there's a scholarly work by richard hofstetter said the paranoid style in american politics this stuff, you know q&a 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 littles in our own particular moment in which we go. ah, the sky is falling the great benefit of history is it makes you 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 precedented. we know that there's been this demagogue here in 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. well, you know mccarthyism died out other things will happen. it's replaced by comedy. sometimes there's civil wars and that's a terrible thing. but all in all, you know, george will said of franklin roosevelt the in our film on the roosevelt's 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 perfectly 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 maintaining and even strengthening our democracy. so one of the questions we wanted to put to everyone out there. you'll see a pop up on your screens is do you think that arts and cultural institutions have a role in strengthening democracy? you can click. yes, you can click no, we'll look at the results as they come in and i want to talk a little

bit more after this about how those institutions feed into our democratic systems and narratives as well. it's wait for a moment while those pop-up and i think we have the results now absolutely overwhelmingly. yes, 99% of people who responded gentleman way in on that. i mean as we look to i know ken this is something you had mentioned when we spoke before this event the role of artifacts the present themselves. well after events, you look at the presidential tapes that center at the uva has been going through those have evolved our understanding of our own history and our democracy right? it's really true. i'm not and and i'm glad you brought up the miller center because it was 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 wrote books that put their views in a

different light the tapes that the miller center has and have listened to and and it's really important to know that all of the tapes haven't been listened to or cataloged 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 linden johnson tapes as well. there's just the luminous amount of them is that we didn't have to say anything we could just put the tape you the president could go out and say this public and then that said this on a tape and you know, it's it's just wonderful to have that, you know, we live in an age of so much information that no matter how many times somebody says something. we've lost our our sort of ability to be outraged which i hope we gain back shortly because you know things can get be said so many times but there's something about having a tape where you hear the president of united states talking to dr. kissinger about something which they have independently together said the exact opposite.

and there's another filmmaker has to do you want to put your thumb on the scale? you could but you don't have to you just present it so that these things are really really important really important i have in my office leg shackles. you know. a unbelief, they're incredibly heavy. and you just go this this speaks more than volumes of books. about this is an instrument forged by human intelligence that has only one purpose. which is to enslave other americans? and you know 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 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, you know, i mean, we sort of think the past is is unknown and our history is fixed. it's the opposite, you know, i mean, our future is known our past is is malleable as anything and our future is at least immediate futures rather predictable. and and i love the fact that that past is so malleable and each generation rediscovers and re-examines that part of the past that 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 then 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 and they're radically different lonnie knows better than me all the different permutations. we've been through saying this is the only way you can see history is through this lens and at the end of the day telling a good story and incorporating as many of those perspectives as

possible gives you the best possible access to whatever one of the biggest challenge of building a national museum was all the different scholarly interpretations. yeah, trying to understand them all 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 they're trusted places their places where people will come and grapple with questions and issues that they want in other places. i find people coming to the smithsonian who wrestle with slavery or wrestle with climate change where they wouldn't in cleveland or in chicago, but when they come to these kind of cultural institutions, they have trust but it also means that these institutions have to also have courage right 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 and my career museums they were stories. i wanted to tell and there was nothing in stores that could help me tell those stories. so i have vowed that it's crucial important for museums like the smithsonian to collect today for tomorrow. so i said a rapid response team to collect george floyd, but the collect what was going on in the capital in january 6th. it's important to make sure that without those stories people can then say that history didn't exist. yes the key for the work that ken has done that i have done is to make sure that people have an understanding of what happened before and how they can dip into that reservoir to be transformative for today. it's actually a bunch and i had put you in other audience question because this pivots to something i wanted to get both of you to weigh in on which is the idea of academia what we're taught our education about our history, but one of the audience members is asking specifically about oral history as you mentioned you send people out to

go gather all this wonderful evidence these stories right now. this audience member is asking is there a distinction between storytelling and oral history? where does oral history fit into the academic model? how do you view that? well, i think that first of all there's the storytelling that is shaped by scholarship right that really frames the kind of stories questions. we want to answer and then there are oral histories that sometimes those are all histories really fit right into the scholarship other times. they challenge it other times. they're not as accurate, but the reality is that when you get into the water of oral history as an academic, you learn to ask different questions, you learn to see things differently. forces you to understand. what are the truths you're trying to tell so i'm a big believer that i became a better historian when i spent more time listening to the oral histories listening to the stories of people as ken said earlier, sometimes they're completely

accurate sometimes their memories that are wrong, but you're made better every time you hear those stories because what they do is first of all, they remind you to humanize history, remind you that that's what's going to get people to be engaged and secondly, they remind you that there is complexity because you're hearing different things in these oral histories and that i think made me a better historian. yeah, i agree. that was really beautifully said lonnie i had said earlier that i thought that memory was kind of the dna but not really yet a structure the first structure of memory regardless of whether it turns out an academic or in other ways is oral history. it's it's telling your store honey. how is your day is the beginning of all history? you know it really is it is and you and you and you edit human beings edit. and in that editing is the initial subjectivity of real actual true human experience, but you know, it doesn't, you

know, i draw i back slowly down the driveway avoiding the garbage can at the curb is not what we say, unless somebody hits us and that's exactly what we say. so we're all collecting from that original oral history scholars are going to apply a whole set of different things and they're going to themselves be drawn to particular as i suggested before historiographies, you know, narrative was out of fashion after the second world war. you can understand why you kill 60 plus million people storytellings really losing. it's a freudian interpretation marxist interpretation. symbolism deconstruction semiotics all sorts of things have obtained that have helped the academy learn a different thing, but it all goes back to being able to tell a story and that story goes back to essentially answering that question. what happened today? what happened today? what was your experience today? and that's an oral tradition as

old as human beings and as new as this conversation right now. it's going to say i think honey. how was your day is a dangerous question these days during pandemic work from home. yes. well no idea, you know, i did say i had a conversation earlier today in which i said, you know white people are notoriously inept at understanding about what's going on, but a pandemic at the same time, we're dealing with this racial recogning is a good way to understand that, you know, it's never been a problem to go out to the convenience store until now, but it's always been a problem for african-americans. it's not been a problem to go jog in some other neighborhood until now, but it's always been a problem for african-american. it's about whether you come home alive. so in some ways the pandemic and george floyd hit at a moment where it was possible at least to pry open the door, you can see it shutting real quick. people are making some facile decisions about what really

happened but our job as museums and filmmakers and journalists is to try to keep no no, let's keep that open let's let's not let it shut with the conventional wisdom. that's going to gloss it over and say hey, it's just brother against brother. i think the pandemic as we've all you've told these stories you've covered these i certainly cover them. all the time is also revealed to us so much more about who we are, right the disparities are deeper than most people believe them to be they are across absolutely every single institution and while a lot of people think of the pandemic as an equalizer if anything it's broadened to disparities right black and latino and native communities hardest hit among them among americans not just on the health side, but of course in the recession as well, and i i think where we we are at the historic moment, we say this so many times. i'd love to ask each of you to reflect on it because obviously you deal in in history in gathering history and artifacts and evidence and stories and

preserving them for future generations. how are you processing this moment right now? we're probably too close to look at it with a clear-eyed view, right? so, how are you viewing this moment when we have long overdue racial reckoning in this country. we have a global pandemic. we in america are dealing within our own way. what is it that standing out to you in terms of continuing to tell and preserve america's story. well, i i agree with you. i've said that this is the fourth grade crisis after the civil war the depression and world war ii and in some ways it may be worse because it's it's really brought to an existential for the very existence and continuation of the united states and we're dealing with i believe three viruses. obviously this year plus old covid-19, which is horrific the 402 year old virus of white supremacy and racial injustice, and i think that age old virus

of lying and misinformation and all that stuff and it's kind of reached a boil boiling point, but at the same time, let's all so not forget. what's happening nurses and teachers and delivery people and emts are now the most exalted positions in the country. that's a really good thing more people voted almost 160 million people voted then ever before that's a really good thing in the safest and most secure election we've ever had people risked the virus and more importantly poll workers people who had to be there all day couldn't mail in a ballot democrat and republican maintained a kind of an american civic order at the most basic granular level in a really great way. we are having this racial, you know reckons, you know reckoning. we have a woman of color as a vice president and a woman of south asian descent and we have the oldest president we ever had facing an fdr moment a guy who

actually knows in his guts that he has to represent everybody including the people who didn't vote for him. these are all good things that are happening and that i think as much as we cannot be pollyannish about any of this. we also can't be the opposite. we cannot be consistently cassandra's. why are all these? negatives women that's a whole another conversation. that's happy to host a webinar on that because i have questions part two, but but you know, we actually have to be able to measure all of this just as you know, the african-american experience produced jazz music. i mean it is the greatest expression of affirmation in the face of adversity. the blues itself is not a complaint about your condition. it's your your absolute affirmation that you are going to transcend this bad situation.

and so we always have to see this glass. however perilous it is as at least half full and i and i'm i mean, that's why history makes me an optimist despite the fact i spend my entire life charting really bad stuff that happens. i don't know lonnie if you feel about it, but i just feel like wow the possibilities are as as great as the threats. i think you know as a historian. i've always felt history makes me hopeful yeah, 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 keep working towards that so for me it is this kind of journey what i find in this moment is one of the parts of the smithsonian the anacostia neighborhood community museum went around and began to do oral histories interviewing people about what does this mean to them? what what and so what's been wonderful is hearing people say here's how what here's what

we've lost. here's where i'm sad. but here's where i see. this is pointing us to better understanding why i need to vote or to 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 your artistic creativity to make sure these moments aren't lost we've had amazing young poets who have taken us in new directions. so for me, this is a moment of real loss real pain, but it's a moment that is transformative. if we seize the moment and that's always the question for me. yeah. what about for our democracy? i mean this idea that the more we look back the more questions. we may ask the more things. we may find are not necessarily as true as we believe them to be right as new evidence surfaces as more narratives are included. does this rigorous? look at our history questioning and holding it up to the light really shaking it around.

does that serve to strengthen our democracy too? of course it does and we just came off of the last thank god football game of the season, right and i love the sport, but it's over and we get a little bit of a rest, but 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 that they made but the mistakes that they made and 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? eaten again by this team and we just watched you know day before yesterday a team that wasn't 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, but it 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 the bromides or even the negative stories, you're lost. you cannot do either you have to 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 attack artifacts we could or could not

use every exhibition isn't 100% of the stuff. they've got you know what every one of my films is 140th of the stuff we got and so all of that is what we need to be doing as a republic and then you know, we'll be figuring out that we are in pursuit of happiness. we ain't gonna get there and happiness by the way is not an accumulation of objects in a marketplace of things but as our founders thought it was life long learning in a marketplace of ideas. that's what capital h happiness was and it's the pursuit not even the happiness. it's always going to be the road and not the inn at the end of the day. i think what i think what ken said the truth of the matter, is that as humans we are better when we really understand ourselves our strengths our weaknesses our foibles history allows us to do that. history allows us to find those moments where we find great pride and we look at achievement

and we say here's where we want to go. but it also allows us to challenge ourselves to say here's where we clear-eyed failed. here's where we didn't live up to our ideals. so it's a challenge just to do just that so for me if you don't look at your history with a clear eye and look at it candidly and have those conversations. all you're doing is living in an illusion and at some point an illusion will hurt you not help you. you know lonnie at the very beginning of our conversation today implied something that is part of that pursuit of happiness that the man who wrote the second sentence of the declaration are creed the distillation of a century of enlightenment thinking owned other human beings and when he said all men are created equal he meant all white men of property free of debt. we don't mean that now, that's that's that's the herald of coming good as well as the

progress that has to be acknowledged just as we refused to accept a status quo that still keeps some people behind. i'm just checking the questions for any tom brady haters out there after you mentioned the super bowl and they don't see them so i will ask you both one final question, which i found in all my interviews is often reveals. one of the most interesting parts of any conversation, which is is there anything i have and asked you about that you want to make sure you get a chance to say today. are you kidding? it's you we have been at all. we're we're you made us look good because you ask good questions. i'm not we're just happy to be wholly owned subsidiaries of you this afternoon. you are both incredible gentleman incredible leaders i cannot thank you enough. not just for the work that you do, but you're at time and your insight and your leadership in this space. it is an absolute pleasure to spend this time with you.

so thank you. thank you very much for that. and with that i am going to turn it back over to melody barnes and there she is. you so much. you all reminded me yet again why i was a history major and why i love it so so much that was a stunning conversation. it was really rich and wonderful, and there's so many things. i remember i decided down a few things quote. we won't understand ourselves if we turned a blind eye to who we are a great country asked. what can i do better cultural institutions must have courage and of course, i think one will all take home honey. how is your day to oral history? i literally i'm not exaggering i've had friends around the country texting me and saying that this is one of the best programs they've ever seen and for that i want to thank you, ken and lonnie and amna you've been fantastic. i want to thank this your stabs as well as those of the miller

center the college of arts and sciences the democracy initiative, and i want to thank our audience for such wonderful questions and for being with us this afternoon. so, thank you all. so much we are indebted to you for this conversation and we are enriched by it. thank you. have a good afternoon. thank you and go yankees, go red sox, and i love you, brother. i love you.