Miller’s historical flimflammery

Tags

colonialism, Erin Bartram, narratives

This morning, the president gave a speech to the United Nations General Assembly. There were lots of these moments:

And lots of these moments:

I just want to focus on one particular moment, one line, in this speech – a speech reportedly written by our old friend Stephen Miller.

From the beaches of Europe to the deserts of the Middle East to the jungles of Asia, it is an eternal credit to the American character that even after we and our allies emerged victorious from the bloodiest war in history, we did not seek territorial expansion or attempt to oppose and impose our way of life on others. Instead we helped build institutions like this one to defend the sovereignty, security, and prosperity for all.

And all at once, millions of historians and people around the globe cried out:

Anyone with even the thinnest knowledge of postwar history knows that the U.S. absolutely tried to impose its way of life on others through political, military, and economic pressure during the Cold War and beyond. To quote Hawkeye Piece: “I just don’t know why they’re shooting at us. All we want to do is bring them democracy and white bread.” In the long run, we didn’t even care much about the democracy, as long as they bought the white bread.

But the fact that Miller would even try to make this claim, as full of nonsense as it is, is tied to the way we tend to talk about “expansion” in the United States, and the way we don’t talk about colonialism in its various forms.

Could you draw the shape of the United States in 1787? Or 1803? Or 1848? Or 1870? Probably not, because the narrative of “Manifest Destiny” is so powerful. When we talk about “expansion,” we show the outline of the current borders because we can’t imagine that they weren’t always meant to be the borders. This oft-circulated GIF, made up of images from Wikimedia Commons, is a prime example.

You can find this map on Wikipedia or read about it in an LA Times article titled “How the West Was Won, in one GIF.” Ugh.

“This map recognizes European colonial claims, no matter how tenuous, while ignoring all of the nations that already existed on the content, nations with whom the United States made war, treaties, and trade agreements. It assumes the perspective of European sovereign nations, the sort that Miller would find valid, and deems portions of the continent “Unclaimed Territory.”

This map also excludes current colonial possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It makes no attempt to show U.S. colonial occupation of the Philippines, which ended a year after World War II. Nor does it show the places the U.S. tried and failed to colonize or annex: parts of Canada, Mexico and Central America, and Cuba.

This is the problem with using the phrase “territorial expansion” instead of using the language of colonialism. Expansion implies empty spaces waiting to be filled. It also tacitly ties “expansion,” and therefore colonialism, to land and land alone. Therefore, if the U.S. didn’t take possession of Axis colonial land claims in Africa and Asia, there wasn’t any “territorial expansion,” and so no real colonialism. It’s not that many in the U.S. don’t recognize cultural colonialism, really, it’s just that they don’t seem to see it without it being tied to immediate territorial claims.

Moreover, this emphasis on land allows many contemporary United Statesians to lament the Trail of Tears, and maybe even the Carlisle Institute, and yet express relief that at least now members of these displaced and dispossessed are citizens who can participate in U.S. institutions so maybe it’s all fine. Miller says that the U.S. didn’t take land or impose values, it just created the U.N. to protect things like “sovereignty, security, and prosperity for all,” which are presented as things everyone understands and desires in the same way.

In both situations, the popular understanding of colonialism as something rooted in explicit territorial expansion helps obscure the fact that the U.S. political system and the United Nations are institutions that are based on a specific set of values and were set up to impose and perpetuate them. All evidence suggests that Miller knows this, and sees it as a feature, not a bug.

In this little snippet, Miller made a historical argument that is problematic on about 15 levels, but assumes – probably correctly – that many in his American audience wouldn’t question it.

Question it, and every historical argument made by this and every administration past and future.

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“America was built on her citizens”

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Erin Bartram, narratives, Steve Bannon, white nationalism, White supremacy

This image sanitized for your protection.

Charlie Rose’s interview of Steve Bannon on 60 Minutes was full of provocative statements, but every U.S. historian’s mind exploded upon encountering this exchange:

 

There are so many problems with this answer that it’s hard to know where to start. NPR’s Steve Inskeep, who recently wrote a book on Andrew Jackson, did a pretty good job tackling the basics of the American system and the place of immigrants in the growth of American manufacturing, so you can read that here.

I just want to add another angle to Inskeep’s analysis, and explore another group which Bannon didn’t include in his history of America’s economic past. His exclusions and erasures are important in understanding his worldview, one he wants us to buy without looking too closely at it beforehand. Caveat emptor. 

America was also built on – and by – enslaved Africans and African-Americans. Enslaved people like the ones whose labor Hamilton, Polk, and Clay (one of these things is not like the other) exploited to build their personal fortunes. Enslaved people who were never immigrants, as Ben Carson implied.

Additionally, America was built on – and by – free African-Americans, who were stripped of their citizenship by Dred Scott v. Sandford, had it restored by the 14th Amendment, had to fight to exercise many of the rights of that citizenship, many of which are still denied.

And America was and is being built on – and by – later black immigrants from Africa, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, whose entrance into the country and opportunities for naturalization were nevertheless restricted.

Just as his attempted erasure of immigrants should prompt us to recall who exactly worked in the factories and dug the canals he praises, his attempt to erase the labor of enslaved people from the economic history of America should remind us that without that labor, none of the textile factories of New England would have existed.

These erasures matter, because of Bannon’s well-documented ties to white nationalism. White nationalists claim that white people are a race who should should organize pan-nationally and who should seek to maintain dominance in “white” countries. Eschewing the “white supremacist” name, some claim they don’t think one race is better than others, per se, but that it would be better if races lived separately. As God/nature intended.

But it really matters because of how Bannon has tried to reframe his white nationalist views since he’s come under public scrutiny. Less than two weeks after the 2016 election, Bannon asserted in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that he wasn’t a white nationalist at all. Instead, he said: “”I’m an economic nationalist. I am an America first guy…the black working and middle class and the Hispanic working and middle class, just like whites, have been severely hurt by the policies of globalism.”

Despite his words of solidarity to non-white Americans at the end there, Bannon’s exchange with Rose makes clear that his economic nationalism is inseparable from his white nationalism. The tell? His emphasis on “the American citizen” and his exclusion of both immigrants and non-citizens from his historical narrative.

The historical narrative he promotes denies that white Americans were ever the descendants of immigrants; they were always citizens, because they were always supposed to be citizens. Therefore, when he denies the contributions of immigrants and non-citizens, he’s not denying his own immigrant ancestors, because he’s reimagined them as once-and-future citizens.

Bannon’s economic nationalism is still white nationalism, and it always has been. In his exchange with Charlie Rose, he neatly excludes white people from the category of immigrants and non-citizens and excludes immigrants and non-citizens from the economic history of America. The glorious economic future of America, safe from the forces of “globalism,” must therefore be modeled on the glorious economic past, a past he claims was solely created by white Americans.

Sound confusing? It is, because he’s trying to flim-flam the unsuspecting viewers of Middle America who sat down for some Sunday night television with a trusted interviewer like Charlie Rose.

Bannon believed he could present his world view, tidied up a bit, and people would believe him: a middle-aged white man assertively talking about American historical figures, including some slightly-obscure ones like Polk and Clay, and presenting a narrative of American economic greatness that was mostly unmoored from historical fact.

If nothing else, he’s proof that American manufacturing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. He manufactured this poorly-constructed narrative and is trying to sell it to Americans. Now mainstream American media is allowing him to stock his product on the shelves of programs like 60 Minutes. Don’t buy it. It’s junk.

 

Slack chat: historians talking past their audiences

Tags

Charlottesville, Chris Bouton, David Mislin, Erin Bartram, Jim Crow, memory, monuments, narratives, reconstruction

Erin Bartram: In the wake of Charlottesville, there’s been a renewed discussion about the place of “Confederate” memorials and monuments, or lack thereof. Historians of all stripes have written elegantly and persuasively in major newspapers and magazines and local weeklies, spoken at public events, popped up on news show roundtables, and generally done everything Karen Cox urged of us in her recent CNN piece about being historians in the public. But as Matthew Christopher Hulbert noted in his piece Why Historians Often Talk Past Their Audiences – And How We Can Do Better, we’re not necessarily changing minds, or even being understood. We might actually be making things worse. Today, we’re talking about Hulbert’s view of how historians and “the public” think of “history” differently, and consider the implications for teaching and public engagement.

There’s a ton in here and I barely know where to start.

David Mislin: So, this is not especially insightful. But can I just say that I find it weird that someone who claims historians talk past their audiences is a historian putting words into the mouths of the audience?

Erin: Nick Sacco’s comment urges us to think in that direction too.

David: I guess I just struggle with arguments that suggest there’s a coherent mass of people who have any sort of collective agenda.

Erin: I mean, the stuff that I found really useful in here was thinking about what “history” means to various people, and maybe some of it resonated with me because it’s the start of the semester and I’m having those conversations with students who have lots of different ideas about what history is.

David: I think Nick’s point about emotional v. intellectual is important, but I also think we risk over-thinking and over-analyzing this.

Maybe people like the monuments because they’ve always been there? Maybe people don’t like conflict and assume thinking about/talking about monuments will breed conflict?

Chris Bouton: I don’t think it’s that they like or dislike the monuments. I think it’s more the fact that they’re there and we as humans are skeptical of change

Erin: I mean, I think we need to note this: “When they worry about memorials to Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln coming down, they are actually worrying about losing their cultural – and nationalistic – bearings in the present.” Is he assuming a white public? Seems so.

Your argument, David, is a little more productive in helping understand why a significant proportion of black Americans don’t want the monuments down. I think the argument for this as conflict avoidance is a strong one too, though, as evidenced by every bit of human interaction I’ve ever had in my life.

Chris: There’s a status quo bias going on here. And historians have the harder argument to make. It’s much easier to say something should stay rather than be removed.

David: Well, right. I’m thinking about interactions I’ve had — and also imagining interactions I might have — with white people, and they seem to all come down to “I don’t want to think about race. Those monuments have been there for a while. Let’s leave well enough alone.” But to me that’s more avoidant than emotional.

Erin: What do we think of his argument that many people see these objects as “history” itself, and that taking them down is erasure?

David: That one seems more compelling to me.

Erin: I think historians agree with the first part, and have tried to emphasize that the monuments aren’t “history” of the Civil War, but of Jim Crow. We’re not saying we should pave over Gettysburg.

Chris:  Right, but that’s a harder argument to make.

Erin: It’s why I think putting up images of the text on some of these plaques etc is important. Interrogate the objects themselves, ask people to look closely at a thing they pass by every day.

David: (Just to clarify the above: I don’t agree with the argument, but it is compelling to me that people hold it)

Erin: I think Peggy Noonan offers a counterpoint here, though. This article presumes a lot of good faith misunderstanding among people who support or are ambivalent about this issue. There is no way Peggy Noonan doesn’t know the history of Reconstruction. The same way the people who put up the monuments we’re talking about knew the history of Reconstruction. Putting those monuments up was a way to shape a narrative, and she’s doing the same, consciously.

David: Yeah, but I don’t think there’s any mistaking Peggy Noonan for a normal person

Chris: Does she though? Or does she subscribe to a Dunning version of Reconstruction? We heard Hillary Clinton spout the Dunning school last year.

Erin:  But I think this is a problem a lot of the time – is this person completely ignorant, willfully ignorant, or malicious?

David” For Noonan, at least in the case of the current tweetstorm, I think she’s being malicious. She knew she was provoking academic historians.

Chris: I’m suggesting that there’s a generational factor to consider. This doesn’t preclude her other motives. In fact, it enhances them.

Erin: And we should be able to say that, as historians. We’re not just working against “ignorance” or “misunderstanding.” People lie about the past to gin up fear and gain power.

I guess sort of where I’m going here is a larger question for many in politics today – should we stop presuming some people can be persuaded? How do we know if it’s that people can’t be persuaded or that we’re not good at persuading?

Chris:  That’s a chicken and the egg question.

In terms of the persuasion question, we will never convince everyone of everything. There are people who think the Earth is flat, or dinosaurs never existed, or vaccines cause autism.

 

Erin: How do we persuade some people to accept a past that forces them to confront the fact that everything they inherited – money and social power – came from the blood and labor of other people?

Chris: Well there’s the problem.

We think analytically/argumentatively. We’re trained that way. Most people don’t think that way. They respond to emotion/narrative. And defenders of the monuments have a simpler narrative. One that avoids that kind of reckoning with the past.

David: I guess my non-answer answer to that would be that people are persuadable, but not at the speed we would like.

I’ve definitely had the experience of students changing their views, but it’s happened over the course of their college career. They leave my class maybe inching in a direction but I don’t see it come to fruition.

I think that holds true at large. We can’t expect to persuade people overnight. We can just do our best to make facts and interpretations available to people, and trust that they’ll think about it over time. But that’s a process that takes years.

Chris, I think that gets to your point. We gradually need to build a different narrative for people. They might reject it emotionally at first, but gradually if they’re genuinely thinking things over (and I think many people are well meaning and do think about issues at least occasionally) they’ll start to think differently.

Chris: Right, we need our own narrative that is simple to understand initially and is bolstered by historical evidence.

Erin: I agree. Even with students who have that “aha” moment, it doesn’t mean everything just shifts all at once.

Chris: My point speaks to a broader issue with academia. That for as much as we call for engagement with the public, there isn’t a professional acknowledgement/recognition of its importance.

We say it’s important, but there’s no institutional incentive. It doesn’t help with tenure or getting a TT job.

Erin: And that means, I think, that we do it in a scattershot way. It’s why some people think this issue of monuments is “new”

We need the equivalent of the Union of Concern Scientists or the Agricultural Extension Service, but for historians.

David: Historians March for History? (only half-joking)

Erin: I mean, the “marches” are kind of a great example of this issue. It’s important that the Women’s March and Indivisible and all the rest are doing the long-term organizing. It’s what works in politics, in labor, etc, and maybe it’s the only thing that works here.

 

 

Chris:  Yes, and we also direct our efforts towards one another, which means writing argumentatively and analytically. And in search of the next complex argument. That makes it harder for us to get out of our bubbles and speak to people who don’t think like we do.

Erin: Someone, maybe Honor Sachs, joked about having a “The Historian Is In” booth. But honestly, why not try that?

David: “The Adjunct is In” booth that we’ve had at Temple did wonders for raising awareness among the average student about the plight of contingent faculty…

Chris: Public historians, like those who work for the park service and in museums and the like, do this work already, but the CNN isn’t highlighting their work. Because when we talk about “public engagement,” we’re talking about older tenured faculty writing op-eds in the Atlantic

Erin: Is there a way to move that public engagement away from sites? To expand it?

Some departments have done a sort of antiques roadshow but having people bring in weird junk from their attics (I think John Fea wrote about this a few years ago).

David: But I feel like things like that just (the antiques roadshow example) just perpetuate the idea of history as static objects. Maybe that’s what you meant, Erin.

Erin: I mean, I was thinking about how we might think of that style of engagement without the objects or the museums or the historic houses.

I mean, the most common form of public engagement for me, besides teaching, is getting into random conversations with people at the library or the cafe where I hang out. Or with my hometown priest when I was home for Christmas, who I introduced to the 19th century New York bible controversy and changed his understanding of “prayer in schools”

David: I hate talking to people. I’m definitely the wrong kind of historian for this.

Erin: Hahahahahah I actually think I do it well because older white men assume they know as much as I do. I might be a trained historian, but they’re the sort who know what’s what. And then maybe they realize they don’t know what’s what.

[Addendum after the fact: I actually suspect this might happen more to me because men presume they can and should talk to any woman they encounter in a public space. They just don’t expect those women to have advanced degrees.]

Chris: How do you replicate the tangible nature of a house or object? That’s the question.

Erin: Do we have to?

Chris: If we want to replicate the things that make material culture appealing, then knowing why it’s appealing is useful.

Erin: Ah okay, I see what angle you’re taking now. Are the things that people find appealing about material culture actually the historical parts?

Chris: Right, that’s the question.

Erin: I’m thinking about the Newport mansions (Maybe Allison Horrocks can chime in later if she reads this)

Chris: Does seeing the objects themselves making the use of historical imagination (and then understanding) easier?

Erin: If so, can physical objects that are documents provide a bridge?

Chris: And we’re back to monuments.

David: Maybe what would actually move the conversation would be counter-monuments? Because I agree with what you’re both saying. People seem to connect more with objects. And objects have the added benefit of cutting out the historian as the obnoxious “expert” forcing their interpretation on people. (Though of course it’s not really that simple)

Erin: I was thinking the same thing. That is tossed out a lot by people who want to keep the monuments: just put up other monuments.

David: Yeah, my reason for suggesting it is different. I don’t especially want to keep the other monuments. But I wonder if physical reminders of the other side of the story might actually make people rethink the initial monuments.

Erin: And wonder why we didn’t have these monuments before.

Chris: What would you two consider a “counter-monument”? Just more monuments?

David: Yeah. To lynching victims, for example.

Chris: I’m going to do the academic thing here and press you to define your terms

Erin: Or some of the triumphant slave resistance monuments like we see in the Caribbean? (Also this)

David: Right, though I think non-triumphant monuments are also important. Or else there’s a risk of “well, see, everything worked out in the end.”

Erin: And put it right next to the Freedman’s Memorial.

I mean, here’s what I want to see, and what might move the argument forward in the public sphere: a Nat Turner memorial. (This is not an original thought, of course)

Because literally every argument that will be trotted out against it – against HIM – is one that you can make far more honestly about the people honored by Confederate stuff.

“But he killed innocent people” Were they innocent? And is that somehow worse than killing innocent people to preserve slavery?

David: Yeah, that’s a great idea.

Chris: There is a Denmark Vesey statue in Charleston, though his alleged plot never got off the ground, and though that statue commemorates his whole life and not just the plot

These are steps in the right direction.

David: Right. That is what we need more of. But memorials need to become ubiquitous

Maybe that’s something historians could do beyond Atlantic op-eds? Curating pop-up memorials?

Erin: Do the changes of suburbanization make this harder?

Chris: Yeah, some on the ground organizing.

David: I realize that sounds like a joke the way I just phrased it.

But rather than large-scale museums/monuments, which take forever to build and are bound by geography, have smaller-scale things that can be set up easily.

Erin:  Some town in CT is doing something to mark where every enslaved person in town lived. Like the blue plaques in the UK. [It’s Guilford, on the Connecticut coast – the Witness Stones Project.]

Chris:  It starts locally.

Erin:  Sounds like a great project for history majors.

Chris: After all, who organized all those Confederate statues in the first place? Local Daughters of the Confederacy chapters and other orgs

Erin: Get the Ladies’ Auxiliary on the case!

It seems smarter to put energy into these sorts of things than to all try to write a big thinkpiece in the Atlantic

Chris: And will have longer lasting impact.

David: Well, there is a distinctly echo chamber feel to stuff like the Atlantic.

Erin: Absolutely.

Chris: Well, in something like the Atlantic or the Chronicle, we’re not reaching anyone new

Erin: But if people could walk around their town and there were plaques embedded in the sidewalk in front of every house where a slave lived? That would do SO MUCH in New England

David: Even Made by History, which I applaud, seems to largely be turning out to be history-for-historians.

Erin: Agreed. I mean, monuments work because they’re in public space and they intrude. You can just not read that column.

David: Right — and they’re not mediated by someone that a lot of people are inclined to shrug off as an elite intellectual.

Erin: I have to run, but this also seems like a good place to wind down.

David: Yup.

Chris: Yeah I think we’re done.

David: We have a concrete resolution!

Erin: We’ve put some ideas out there!

Dismissed as irrelevant, or just dismissed

Tags

Erin Bartram, narratives, teaching

Yesterday, historian Karen Cox published a powerful piece on CNN: “Historians need to use their power now”  In it, she urges historians to take their work to the American public, a public she says is “is hungry for both context and conversation.”

Beyond their usual haunts of classrooms, museums, and historic sites, Cox urges historians to write op-eds, speak at public forums, write more accessible books and magazine articles, engage with people on Twitter, and make their scholarship public. Correspondingly, she calls on institutions of higher ed to place value on these contributions. She also urges journalists to look beyond the usual pool of experts, which I think all historians would encourage: less of this, more of this!

From the WikiHow article “How to be a history professor,” which is weird and worthy of its own examination. TBH, its images show a lot of gender diversity, but no racial diversity at all. 

Nothing in this post disputes Cox’s call to arms. Clearly we think it’s dead-on or we wouldn’t be blogging. Instead, this post is really directed at our non-academic readers, and it’s going to explain why many historians, especially young ones, might be afraid of using their power as historians because they are powerless as workers.

When Cox says colleges and universities should “value” this sort of engagement, she’s talking about getting tenure. In basic terms, having tenure means a professor has a permanent position and is protected from arbitrary dismissal. People earn tenure through service to the college, good teaching, and research, all of which is reviewed regularly over a period of time (often seven years) before a tenure decision is made. Research, measured by grants and publications, matters the most in lots of places, especially big research universities. Lots of tenure review systems don’t see the kind of work Cox is urging as “valuable” when it comes to measuring someone up for tenure, and many professors and administrators see it as a distraction or a waste of time.

Most people outside of academia think of tenure as a system that prevents professors from being fired for any reason. Even if they make all students conform to their political beliefs or sexually harass grad students, nothing will happen to them. Professors can be fired for egregious misbehaviors, though they often aren’t. But honestly, if the non-academic world is any indication, no tenure system is needed to protect serial harassers in the workplace.

You will often hear tenure defended in the public sphere on the grounds that it protects professors who do controversial research – a scientist whose work on oil pollution might anger a prominent donor to the college, for example. But there’s another important facet to tenure, and that’s its protection of professors in the classroom, allowing them to teach material and interpretations that might seem controversial or even offensive to those outside the classroom and outside the discipline.

This really matters to historians because honestly everything we teach is controversial or offensive to someone. The people who contacted Cox in response to her Confederate memorial op-eds were actively choosing to learn more about this particular topic, while students in any history classroom in the country may or may not be open to learning about a new topic or considering a new interpretation on any given day. The protections of tenure mean that you can’t be fired because your students – or their parents – didn’t like your interpretation of the American war for independence.

This matters because most historians in American classrooms don’t have tenure and never will.

Most college-level history teaching, including all of the teaching done by the people who write this blog, is done by non-tenure-track (TT) professors. They may be hired by the course (often at the last minute), by the year, or by multi-year contract. They may teach what TT professors at the institution consider a full load of courses, or they might get one course a semester. They might teach at one institution or five at the same time. They might get some benefits, but most likely not, and they often live near, at, or below the poverty line. Non-TT faculty are hired and re-hired each semester/year, unlike tenured faculty, who are permanent, and TT faculty, who are largely permanent subject to their scheduled tenure reviews.

Most of the college teaching in America is done on this system, but it’s not because these professors lack PhDs or because they don’t do research. They all have PhDs and most all of them continue to do research and write. This system exists because colleges and universities have made the choice to value short-term financial gains over long-term financial, institutional, and cultural gains.

This matters because non-TT faculty lack the protections of TT faculty. We’ve seen some prominent examples of what this can lead to lately, as with the adjunct professor fired after an appearance on Tucker Carlson. That’s something any non-TT historian has to think about when they consider public engagement of the sort Cox wrote about.

But it also matters because non-TT faculty are re-hired on the basis of their teaching. Despite lots of research that shows student evaluations are very bad at judging good teaching and significantly biased against female professors, especially women of color, colleges continue to rely on these evaluations when making the decision to re-hire. This means that, depending on the culture and reputation of the institution, non-TT professors might consciously or unconsciously feel pressure to make their students happy through lighter workloads and easier grading, though there’s evidence that at least some students respond positively to high expectations.

But what does any of this mean for considering how historians use their power?

It means that most historians in the classroom aren’t concerned that their public engagement won’t count for tenure because most of us are denied access to that path anyway.

It means that most historians in the classroom need to be concerned that their engagement in a public forum on removing monuments to white supremacy or editorial on the local legacy of slavery might get them trolled, doxxed, and fired.

It means that most historians in the classroom are aware that every interpretation they present in the classroom, no matter how firmly-grounded in evidence and well-accepted by the historical community, might result in evaluations calling them “biased” or “unfair” or accusing them of “having an agenda.”

It means that historians in the classroom who don’t conform to the Google Images stereotype of the college professor find their expertise doubted when teaching a subject coded white/male, and find their “objectivity” questioned when teaching a subject that isn’t, all of which ends up in their evaluations.

It means that honestly and rigorously teaching US history – teaching about white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, religious oppression, slavery, eugenics, unions, taxation, representation, and the shifting views of the major political parties – is dangerous.

It means doing your job can lose you your job.

Every time a non-TT history professor steps into the classroom, she’s engaging with the public. She knows that some portion of that small public, on any given day, might be really offended by what she chooses to talk about and how she chooses to talk about it. She knows it might mean that her job doesn’t get renewed months later, and she’ll never really know why.

Cox notes that quite often “humanities scholars are roundly criticized for being irrelevant.” Smearing humanities scholars as irrelevant is, in many cases, just a way to undercut the arguments they make, whether you’re a political elite or an uncle participating in a Thanksgiving dinner conversation that’s making you feel uncomfortable.

But for thousands of non-TT historians across the country, making good, solid, historical arguments in the classroom might not only result in them being dismissed as irrelevant – it might result in them being dismissed.

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NB: Plenty of department chairs and deans do go to bat for non-TT faculty in these situations, and understand that there’s bias in evaluations. One semester of rough evaluations probably isn’t enough to prevent renewal in most institutions, though with things the way they are right now, we might see that change. Not every situation like this ends with a parent calling the dean, but it can really erode the classroom dynamic and prevent learning. Still, the lack of security means that the fear is always there – “What if this escalates” – and even if most of us don’t let it affect our teaching, we do so knowing there might be consequences.

Teaching History in the Age of Trump 2

Tags

Erin Bartram, teaching

As Chris mentioned yesterday, we’re taking our inspiration this week from David’s question, which was initially in response to my musing about teaching the Articles of Confederation:

Thought for @historycontext posts this week: What are we teaching/would we teach differently this year as a result of the past few months?

— David Mislin (@dmislin) August 26, 2017

I had raised the Articles because they, like French military engagements and “government programs,” are easy targets for glib “historical” comments, but are actually very complex and thought-provoking – hence the tendency to be glib about them.

As I begin my teaching tomorrow, I feel less inclined to humor those sorts of glib comments, honestly. The past few months – and the past year and a half – have re-emphasized to me how important historical thinking skills are. I’ve spent some time this summer thinking about how well my classes teach historical thinking, and how to make clearer to my students the way historical thinking is a thing that they can and should be doing in their daily lives. As such, I’ve created one new assignment and re-committed myself to an emphasis on ideas and meanings.

If the last eighteen months have shown us anything, it’s not that “kids these days” have a poor grasp of what we’d call civics, it’s that all people in this country do. My new assignment, described here, uses the NHPR podcast Civics 101 to help my students shore up their civics knowledge. I didn’t need the 2016 election to show me this was a problem, though. As I noted:

Even though many of my students – certainly those from Connecticut – took a civics class within the last five years, they often struggle to understand the contemporary structure of the U.S. government and the ideas behind it. This makes it hard to teach the history and evolution of those structures and ideas, not least because students sometimes can’t see just how different things are.

Helping my students to think more about civics connects to the broader emphasis I will be bringing to bear in my classes this semester with renewed vigor: things mean things. I generally have a pretty Socratic approach in the classroom, though I know its limits, but I am going to really push myself to push my students to think through the ideas behind the systems.

For instance, most of my students don’t know that direct election of senators hasn’t always been a thing. When they learn that it wasn’t a thing in the first half of the nation’s history, they make sense of it pretty easily by saying things were different then. To be quite honest, I often have students argue that slavery could have been made “less bad.”

These responses remind us that the notion that the past is a foreign country can be really dangerous, as we have seen in recent discussions about monuments to white supremacy under the guise of honoring the Confederate dead. I’ve seen an awful lot of people say “Things were different back then, people thought differently” and then move on.

If I ask my students if they’d accept enslavement under the conditions they propose, or even accept an amendment that canceled out the 17th Amendment, they say “of course not!” This year, I want to push them harder to think about why these ideas are so repugnant to them, to think about why they are so quick to say they were nbd in the past, and to think about what it actually meant on the ground for people and the systems they created and engaged with.

The supposed foreignness of the past enables and is enabled by a refusal to acknowledge the diversity of people and opinions in the past. I always push students when they say “people” but mean ” white people” or “men,” and I’m going to do that more this semester. Because “people” didn’t put up those statues, the same way “people” didn’t need to be persuaded that slavery was bad. Just because things were different in the past doesn’t mean that everyone in the past agreed with them, and I can push my students to think about whose dissenting voices and views might be erased by thinking of the past this way.

When thinking about how to approach this semester, I lamented to a friend that I felt I had little patience for students who could say “History doesn’t really matter” right now. She replied that people who say that are really saying “I think history doesn’t matter for me, and I don’t care that it matters to the lives of other people in this classroom.” That framing really helped me understand why I was so anxious and and even angry, but it also reminded me that I had a way through this.

Historians have ways of thinking that break down the notion that any of us are outside of or disconnected from the past. Those ways of thinking reveal to us the systems we inhabit and re-create every day and the way those systems are shaped by everything that has come before.

We also have ways of thinking that encourage empathy and understanding, ways of thinking that help break down the notion that any of us can ever be disconnected from the people around us.

This can be really unsettling for students of all stripes. I have had students break down in tears in class upon comprehending anew the gravity of American slave culture. I have also had many students react quite angrily to the notion that our contemporary culture, one in which they have many unearned advantages, is the legacy of a past culture in which they would have had even greater advantages.

This is basically what I see when a student really starts to engage with the past.

I’m scared of this semester, honestly. My university has a high Jewish population, and a significant international population. Last spring, we had an uptick in the amount of antisemitic and anti-Muslim graffiti on campus, graffiti that is always there, to some extent. The JCC down the street got numerous bomb threats. We got a letter from the university president telling us what to do if ICE approached us on campus. All the professors got email from a white supremacist group saying it had a presence on campus. Some students felt emboldened to voice more racist, ableist, sexist, and xenophobic ideas in the classroom, ideas that have always been there in their speaking and writing. This is all on top of the normal low-level stuff that comes with being a young female professor teaching women’s history.

But I can’t not do it, you know? I don’t just mean because it’s my job. I have the ability to teach young adults how to be more critical thinkers and more understanding people. So I’m heading into the classroom tomorrow, and I’m ready.

 

 

“…and Friday for Astronomy”

Tags

education, Erin Bartram, religion, science, Women

Yesterday during the eclipse, we saw pictures of thousands of children – boys and girls alike – with pinhole viewers and eclipse glasses, excited see the sun disappear.

Yet we often hear about the dearth of women in STEM fields. Some, like former Harvard President and Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, persist in advancing arguments about what women are and aren’t “naturally” interested in or inclined to. But most accept that the imbalance in these fields is due to social and cultural factors, both in terms of shaping the “pipeline” into the fields and in terms of the employment restrictions and sexual harassment women encounter in graduate school and on the job.

It might surprise you, then, to learn that late 18th and 19th century American girls and women regularly studied astronomy in school and continued to engage with it as amateurs as adults.

Take, for instance, twelve-year-old Kate Sedgwick’s curriculum at her New York school in 1832. She wrote home to her parents to let them know her schedule:

In the first place, five out of the six week-days are appropriated to school; on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, besides my French lessons, I have my Italian and music-masters to attend to; on Mondays and Thursdays I go to dancing school, on Tuesdays and Saturdays to the Academy of drawing, Wednesday is the day for French Parsing, and Friday for Astronomy.

Not all young women could go to a private school like Kate, certainly, but among the increasing number of girls who did, her study of astronomy did not set her apart as unique.

Nor did interest in the subject end when formal schooling ended. In 1843, she devoted an entire page of a letter to her father to “the appearance of the comet” and its significance to the Millerites, the Polish Jews, and the “Mahometans.” Her cousin Jane, the same age and living in rural southwestern Massachusetts, prepared papers summarizing astronomical research for her local scientific society. The women of the family, old and young, reported attending “scientific orations” on astronomical subjects.

“The Great Comet of 1843, as seen from Australia” by Mary Morton Allport

When we think of astronomers today, we think of research scientists working for universities or the government. Since we know women weren’t allowed to hold such positions in the past, it can be easy to assume that they were also believed to be incapable of understanding and producing scientific work, and might not even have been interested.

What we actually see when we look at the period of Kate’s girlhood and young adulthood is two ideas held in tension: the idea that women have the same intellectual capacity as men, and the idea that men and women have two distinctly different roles to play in society. Women could learn astronomy, just as they could learn rhetoric, geography, and history, just like men, but the sexes were to put their education to different, complementary uses.

We may scoff at the idea that one could agree with both of these conflicting ideas, but you’ll hear variations on this theme even today. Just as we don’t want to look at the present lack of women in STEM fields and say it’s because women just aren’t interested or lack natural talent, we shouldn’t assume the lack of tenured female professors of astronomy at Harvard in 1830 meant women weren’t interested in and engaged in the field.

Lest we feel abundantly proud of the progress we have made in women’s education in the sciences, it is good to remember Kate and her classmates set aside “Friday for Astronomy.”

---

This post was informed by lots of reading on women’s education in the early 19th century, most notably my recent re-reading of Lucia McMahon’s Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early Republic. For more cool stuff on eclipses in American history, check out Bill Cossen’s “Total Eclipse of the Past” over at S-USIH.

Ahistorical manifesto about gender? Dealbreaker!

Tags

Erin Bartram, gender, science

I’m currently on vacation and, whether it’s responsible or not, trying to avoid the news and thinking historically about it. But even in a self-imposed bubble, and the bubble imposed by spotty internet and phone connections, some things break through.

What has broken through? Some dude at Google thinks he’s discovered the Truth About Women and he’s sorry/not sorry but it’s just The Truth.

There are two main historical points to make about this “manifesto.” The first is that there’s a long historical record of people like the author making the claims he’s making. The second is that his claims are historical, even though he claims that science makes them ahistorical; these ideas have a long history, but they aren’t just “the way people have always thought.”

There’s an important difference between believing a group of people has a particular role to fill in society and believing a group of people is fundamentally biologically incapable of filling anything other than a certain role in society. These two beliefs often overlap, and are related, but they’re not the same.

Despite popular assumptions that everyone in The Past thought women weren’t capable of rigorous intellectual work because they were biologically flawed and controlled by their reproductive organs, that’s just not the case.

In the early years of the American republic, parents of the upper and rising middle classes sought out rigorous academic educations for their young daughters, with curricula that would stress out today’s tweens and their parents: multiple foreign languages, history, rhetoric, geography, philosophy, and natural and physical sciences, along with dancing, drawing, painting, sculpting, and singing or playing a musical instrument.

To us today, these might look like college prep tracks, but that wasn’t the point of these educations. Depending on who and when you’re talking about, the point of educating young women was to allow them to participate in educated, cultured conversations, to be good and pious Christians, to be good members of the republic, to assist their future husbands in keeping a business going, and to develop strength of character through rigorous study.

That a woman could do all of this, and study the same things her brothers did, didn’t fundamentally change what her role was in society. But her designated role in society didn’t mean she was inherently incapable of rigorous intellectual work either.

By the middle of the 19th century, the United States had undergone significant social changes in the decades since independence: rapid colonization of the continent, industrialization, marked changes in agriculture, the explosive growth of the slave economy, and, important for our purposes, a significant increase in the number of women receiving academic educations that went beyond reading, writing, and sums, both in private academies and common schools. Some were even going to new co-educational and women’s colleges, and pushing to open up even more men’s colleges to women.

In the latter half of the century, there was a backlash against the education of women, but this time, it was explicitly rooted in physical difference. Rather than arguing that women’s education disrupted society because it causes women to forget their obligation, scientists argued that women were incapable of the intellectual work they had been doing, because of different brain sizes or the inexorable control of the uterus.

Others argued that women’s intellectual labor was physically dangerous to them, as it took essential nutrients and energy away from a woman’s childbearing capacities. This could, in turn, endanger the nation, and educated white women were accused of contributing to “race suicide,” their selfish desires for education contributing to a declining white birth rate. When women started to outnumber men in the teaching profession, men raised the specter of a generation of “feminized” boys who had lacked appropriate male role models in the classroom. Rather than opening up long-standing male colleges to women, the end of the 19th century saw the creation of very separate women’s branches.

We can see this “crystallization” of sex differences, as Rosalind Rosenberg put it. We can see the historical moment when people started to make a new claim about the differences between men and women. People didn’t always think this way. But rooting this claim in biological/physical difference helped make it The Truth in the minds of many Americans.

Mr. Google Manifesto makes claims about “natural” differences between men and women and he believes those claims are therefore unassailable, existing outside history and culture. The fact that even in in fairly recent American history we can see competing ideas about gender roles, competing ideas about what is “natural,” and even competing ideas about what exactly determines those roles should give the lie to his claims.

And if all that doesn’t convince you, let’s just consider his claim that women are naturally less tolerant of stress. Seriously? In a world where I am asked to give this sort of claptrap the benefit of the doubt, even as a thought experiment:

*This essay draws heavily on Rosalind Rosenberg’s Beyond Separate Spheres, Catherine Clinton’s The Other Civil War, and Margaret Nash’s “Rethinking Republican Motherhood: Benjamin Rush and the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia.”

 

 

Chat: David Brooks’ manly virtues

Tags

Chris Bouton, Erin Bartram, gender, Jackson, masculinity, military, presidents, race, slack chat

Erin Bartram: In his weekly column, the more prominent of the two white men named David on the New York Times opinion pages wondered “where have all the real men gone?” Frustrated with the “varieties of wannabe manliness” he sees on display in the White House – the Bannonesque, the Scaramuccian, and the Trumpy – he urged us to consider his understanding of a Greek understanding of manliness instead. Be like the Greeks, he urged, which to him means be like John – Wayne, McCain, or Kelly. That, he believes, will rescue us from the “crisis of masculinity” we face today. Rarely will historians sanction the phrase “Throughout American history…” in a paper, but sometimes it feels like “Throughout American history, there has been a crisis of masculinity.” Today, we’re going to talk about how Brooks is using history to talk about gender roles, and how by doing so, he’s engaging in a long American tradition of freaking out about whether men are being the right kind of men. For once, the fact that we’re both 19th century American historians means we’ve read a lot about this.

Chris Bouton: It’s telling to me that Brooks immediately jumps to the Greeks as his exemplar of masculinity. He initially seems to idealize the Greek view of masculinity, but then complicates it. Suggesting that Greek views of masculinity had destructive elements.

Which of course, it did. The Iliad is all about honor and masculinity and its destructive force.

Then he pivots back to the US, where he sees 2 historical examples of the “magnanimous man.” George Washington and George Marshall, why those two? He never explains.

Erin: Another good Anglo name!

Magnanimity seems to be the key difference for him. If you look at his list of qualities, the one that he says is the problem is that the manly man is touchy: “He is outraged if others do not grant him the honor that is his due.” Frankly, it’s amazing he didn’t use George Washington as an example more thoroughly, or as the center of the piece.

Chris: And being magnanimous is about being generous to others, especially those below you. Brooks is writing in a frame of honor and masculinity, that there are those who have honor and those who aspire to it in some way, but fail

Erin: It sounds like the courtesy manual my students read in class, much like the one GWash copied over himself – respect thy superiors, despise not thy inferiors. A truly manly man (like a true aristocrat) just is, and doesn’t need external validation.

Chris: He’s also endorsing hierarchies of manliness and honor, but honor always relies on external validation. If honor is reputation, then it requires a societal judgment. At the top of his hierarchy are the Johns and the Georges and the thread that runs through all of them (McCain, Kelly and Washington, Marshall) is the military.

Erin: That, I think we can say, is something that is true and has been true for men and women, though the aspects of reputation/honor judged have been different.

Chris: Right they’re judged by different standards, but there is a judgment.

Erin: He’s trying to craft a definition of manliness that blends selflessness and sacrifice with the other manly virtues that are important to him. The willingness to fight, in a particular framework, is important. Would he consider MLK an ideal man? Or Father Daniel Berrigan?

Chris: Yes and as your framing question suggested, there’s nothing particularly new about it. Other than it’s been given the David Brooks gloss with crimes against the English language like “thrusting masculinity.”

How can masculinity thrust?

Erin: It can’t, that’s why it’s in crisis.

Also as a woman living in America, the crisis of masculinity is certainly thrusting itself into my space all the time

Honestly, much of my US I survey course centers around this perpetual, evolving crisis of masculinity, so Brooks’ paean to a masculine ideal of the past is familiar and frustrating. [I get that he wanted to go with Greece, but I was surprised not to see Cincinnatus in here]

Chris: I think this is a good chance to dig at the historical roots of this perpetual crisis.

Erin: As I think about how to get at those historical roots, I’m already expecting the question on the first day of my women’s history class in a few weeks, one that I always get: “So when did patriarchy…start?”

Chris: From the moment human beings attained sentience?

If we understand patriarchy as a social system of control, then from the moment those social systems/relationships began to emerge

Erin: Correct.

In terms of a colonial North American context, I think most of us think of gender order as one of the man things that informs the values of this colonial space, one that then shapes the racial system that emerges here. Whether you’re talking Edmund Morgan or Kathy Brown, you’re hard pressed to get away from the importance of particular ideas of what men deserve and expect in Anglo-Virginian society.

Chris: And what their concordant responsibilities are.

Brooks’ definition of a magnanimous man struck me as very much rooted in the American colonial/Revolutionary past. I’ll drop the whole quote in for context.

The magnanimous man has a certain style. He is a bit aloof, marked more by gravitas than familiarity. He shows perfect self-control because he has mastered his passions. He does not show his vulnerability. His relationships are not reciprocal. He is eager to grant favors but is ashamed of receiving them. His personal life can wither because he has devoted himself to disinterested public service.

Erin: He wants republican masculinity.

Chris: “Mastering passions” not reciprocal relationships, “disinterested public service.” He’s swallowed John Adams whole

Erin: Musical interlude #1

And it’s quite clear what historical ideas of masculinity he sees in the White House: Jacksonian masculinity, the liberal individual.

Chris:

Unrestrained by passion – “peacocking” as he describes it.

Erin: And “touchy,” which I took to mean: if he does the baseline decent thing in a situation, he gets pissed when you don’t give him a cookie for it.

Chris: I’m struck by this idea of “touchy” since it gets at the root of the “crisis.” So much of masculinity and honor culture depends on that public acknowledgement, and when men don’t get that acknowledgement, they’re “touchy” about it, because they measure their honor against one another. Go back to Achilles sulking in his tent.

Erin: Frankly it’s why his use of McCain in this situation is a bit of a tell. It reveals to us that when he says there should be no peacocking, he just means “not tooooooo much.”

Chris: And the problems come when the personal sense of honor doesn’t align with the public.

Right, because McCain’s vote on the health care bill was a masculine performance.

Erin: The two other Republican women – who embodied every one of the virtues he calls “manly” – just voted and got it over with.

Chris: He won, in Brooks’ eyes, honor for himself through his public behavior. In this case, McCain’s personal honor and his reputation were aligned (from Brooks’ perspective)

Erin: His column put me in mind of Amy Greenberg’s book Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. She talks about two kinds of masculinity in the mid-19th century – restrained and martial.

Chris: Yes, I’ve been thinking about Greenberg this whole time.

Erin: Brooks, like so many other men we study, seems desperate to find a way – or at least a living example – of blending the two.

Chris: Because a man should exercise self-control, but also needs to be able to kick some ass when needed. There’s a recognition that neither type of masculinity can solve the “crisis.” Restrained men can be too passive and martial men too violent.

Erin: And “his personal life can wither” because another person is supposed to take care of that anyway.

Chris: George Marshall had Mrs. Marshall to care for the children and the like.

Erin: He never says it, but there’s one thing that’s at the core of his ideal masculine world, one thing that I think he thinks is missing. The magnanimous man never takes favors (charity) and can think about public disinterested service only if one part of his life is secure. Without the economic security and credit he thinks men are due, they can never be the kind of men he wants.

Chris: To go back to the American Revolution context, he must free from dependence, he must independent.

Erin: Bingo.

Chris: Hence property owning requirements for voting and office holding. Now all of these colonial/Revolutionary men who proclaimed this ideal were in debt up to their necks…

Erin: And they were in debt even with the unpaid labor of their wives, children, and slaves.

Chris: Jefferson needed that French wine!

Erin: And when most white men can’t meet those requirements, the choice is either tell men they can’t vote even though their fathers could, or change the way one becomes eligible to vote.

I mean, I don’t actually want to read this column, but I would like to know, given what he claims as “manly” here, what is left for women? I’m not sure he actually even cares that much, so intent is his focus on men.

Chris: And that’s also historically fitting.

Erin: Defining white masculinity against a variety of dependents.

Chris: Exactly.

And it’s no wonder that masculinity is always in crisis when you look at the arguments and assumptions underlying it.

Erin: It also reminds us of the ways that Obama’s masculinity was constantly questioned. His fashion sense? Effete. His refusal to get angry? Submissive. His mustard choices? Elitist and possibly gay.

Chris: Out of all the figures that Brooks cites, Obama’s masculinity came closest to his definition. In terms of his behavior in office, I mean.

Erin: Absolutely, though I think few who read Brooks and agreed with him would acknowledge that.

He didn’t even let his private life wither away! He could do it all!

Chris: And that’s why his fashion sense is effete, his lack of anger meant he was submissive etc. You can’t be more masculine/honorable, he’s from a historically dependent and marginalized group.

Erin: I’m thinking of François Furstenberg on autonomy and Manisha Sinha’s great piece on reading the caning of Charles Sumner in the context of racialized masculinity. IIRC, she argues that [Preston] Brooks’ caning of Sumner, rather than challenging him to a duel, was essentially to communicate “If you’re going to associate yourself with enslaved people, I’m going to treat you like one”

Chris: Brooks did not treat Sumner like an equal.

Erin: Musical Interlude #2

And that’s the thing [David] Brooks consciously or less consciously avoids: that a key part of American ideas of masculinity involves hierarchy and dominance and differentiation from those not capable of full independence.

Chris: Yes, these ideals of masculinity that he’s mourning and celebrating all rely on notions of inequality.

Erin: Without saying as much, by defining manliness this way, and only including white men as examples, he communicates as much.

Chris: His examples of masculinity tell us everything we need to know. Greeks, the Georges, and Johns.

Erin: Not, as we saw, the Hillarys, the Elizabeths, the Kamalas.

Chris: The Lisas and the Susans.

Erin: They’ve got those characteristics in spades, but sorry, David Brooks has reserved them as “manly virtues.” At best, a woman displaying them remains invisible. At worst, she’s pilloried.

Chris: Brooks’ work is so rooted in this veneration of Western Civilization and its traditional masculine heroes. It’s like he was born a century too late. Or should’ve been teaching Solon in the Classics Department at Harvard in 1840.

Erin: I believe those are the qualifications listed when applying to be a columnist on the NYT opinion pages. Seriously, we’re pretty close to explicit faculty psychology with this column.

Chris: Or your ability to turn conversations with cab/Uber drivers into sweeping generalizations about globalization. That’s right I’m coming for you Thomas Friedman and your the world is flat BS.

Erin: Can’t A Man Get A Manly Sandwich Anymore?: The Collected Columns of David Brooks

Chris: I feel like we missed one other key piece of the column. David Brooks wrote the words “it’s man-craving all the way down” and I’m pretty sure he has no idea the other connotations that phrase could take.

Erin: I mean, he uses the term “man-crush” as well, which makes me wonder how he’d process 19th century male friendships.

Chris: To turn away from the joke, his unconscious use of language reveals the hetero-normativity of his understandings of masculinity. After all, he ignores the Greek understanding of masculinity which involved same-sex relationships and was intimately tied up in these ideas of honor. Why does Achilles go back into battle? Because Patroclus dies.

Erin: And Trump’s adoration for Putin is marked as something inappropriate, stemming from Trump’s own masculinity issues.

Give me a primary source of a dude talking about manliness and I can have a fruitful discussion with any group of students.

Chris: Seriously, look how long we’ve talking about it.

Erin: I guess, David, we’ll call it a draw: you get to keep having your column, and we get to keep thinking it’s wrong.

Wretched refuse

Tags

Chinese Exclusion Act, Erin Bartram, immigration, narratives

Today at a White House press briefing, Stephen Miller responded to a question about proposed restrictions to legal immigration from CNN’s Jim Acosta by saying “I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history, but…” He then argued that the Statue of Liberty is about America enlightening the world, and that Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus” is irrelevant because it was added later, implying that being welcoming to immigrants isn’t a core American value.

Full exchange between Stephen Miller & @acosta on Statue of Liberty & immigration. "It reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree." pic.twitter.com/9eHTiNaR4G

— CSPAN (@cspan) August 2, 2017

This exchange reveals one of the ways that history gets used in the public sphere: to justify present policies as continuities with the past.

Miller’s claims have caused some outrage, and rightly so. Many have pointed out that “under God” wasn’t in the Pledge of Allegiance until the 1950s either, but were you to suggest it wasn’t relevant, lots of people would be angry. (Lots of people would be fine taking it out as well.)

The problem here is that Miller’s larger point isn’t wrong, and we have to grapple with that. The Statue was put up, and the poem inscribed, at a time when there was a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment and, for the first time, significant federal anti-immigrant legislation.

Chinese immigration had been barred a few years earlier, restrictions that would gradually spread to cover the rest of Asia. In the 1920s, the Johnson-Reed Act further regulated immigration by barring immigrants from certain (largely non-white) parts of the world and placing quotas on immigration to restrict immigrants from other parts of the world (largely Southern and Eastern Europe).

Therein lies the problem, the reason why Miller and his opponents are both right and wrong. The U.S. is both a nation of immigrants and a nation that has often hated, exploited, scapegoated, and restricted immigrants. Our values have evolved, certainly, but the distance between those stated values and our laws and actions has often been quite large.

And so, we need to have conversations about what we want our values to be, rather than looking to history to tell us the Truth of American Values.

History has an important role to play, however. It reminds us that many of the arguments made today about “valuable” and “dangerous” immigrants have been made before, in different historical moments, about different groups. It’s not accurate or productive to simply be shocked at Miller’s comments and claim that we’ve always been a nation of immigrants.

It is more accurate and possibly more productive to point out that many of the people making claims about dangerous immigrants who need to be restricted, and immigrants who won’t learn English, are themselves the descendants of immigrants who not that long ago were considered dangerous and unassimilable, or unskilled and likely to drive down “American wages.” Moreover, they are descendants of immigrants from Europe who, despite the claims of the third and fourth generations, often didn’t speak English and weren’t in a hurry to learn it. 

Miller wanted to use history to put an end to a conversation. Instead, let’s use it to begin conversations.

100+ posts. What’s next?

Tags

Erin Bartram

It’s been a little over 100 posts since we’ve started. Have we been more or less productive than the current administration over the course of six months? Hard to say.

As the tag cloud to the left suggests, we’ve talked a lot about race, gender, religion, health care, the environment, and the politics of dominant narratives and commemoration. We’ve tried different post formats, scrapped some of them, and picked up a new regular contributor and partner in our efforts.

We’ve also gotten exhausted by how often the news draws us back to the same things, over and over: race, gender, health care, religion, lather, rinse, repeat.

In the time we’ve been writing, there’s been an explosion of good historical writing online, most notably the new Made By History section in the Washington Post. It’s made me ask myself whether what we’re doing is important. Whether it serves a unique purpose. Why write here when we could pitch something to the WaPo?

But I keep coming back to what Chris said in our opening post. We wanted to engage people in the historical context of our present moment in “a short and accessible manner.” We’ve kept it short, for the most part, but what does it mean to be accessible? Have we succeeded?

One measure of accessibility is whether we’ve hooked non-historians, whether those non-historians have been engaged by our writing, and whether they’ve understood it. Often the sorts of pieces you pitch for newspapers and magazines ask you to presume an “educated” audience. I see two problems with that, both of which this blog has tried to avoid. First, all people deserve to be able to engage with the past and the way it shapes the present, whether “educated” or not. Second, even “educated” people have very different ideas about what happened in the past and why we should study it. We’ve tried to write for our friends and families and the people we grew up with, many of whom wouldn’t count as members of an “educated” audience.

Another measure is how widely our material has been shared and read. We have tried to use Facebook because, even though historians hang out on Twitter, we know that Facebook is where most people get and share their news. Some of our most popular posts have been the ones shared on Twitter, through networks of historians. That’s great, but it’s not really what we were aiming for.

The last measure of accessibility is that what we produce is free. This is somewhat of an issue among historians writing for the public. After all, this is our labor and expertise, and if we don’t place monetary value on it, how can we expect the public to?

But on the flip side, are we reaching the people we want to reach if people have to decide if they have enough Washington Post or New York Times articles left each month to click on the piece we’ve written? It would be great if everyone had the money to subscribe to lots of magazines and newspapers, but that’s not the case. And many people who might be interested in what we’re writing don’t think of themselves as people who subscribe to these sorts of outlets anyway.

Besides, I don’t think legit outlets would let me use all the GIFs I need in my writing.

Ultimately, we’re trying to write for people who don’t think of themselves as people who read all of the other historical writing that’s out there in national magazines and newspapers

We want to keep going. If you like what we’re doing, you can do a few things to help.

• Like us on Facebook.
• Comment on Facebook or on the website. It’s really not scary!
• Share our posts, especially with people who might never click on a link to an elite coastal news outlet. We try very hard to make sure the posts come with an engaging image so that the links look more appealing when you share them!

We’d also like to get better at writing about what people are interested in. We’d love your thoughts on these questions.

• What topics have you found most interesting?
• If you teach history, are there any of our posts you’ve considered using in the classroom?
• What topics would you like us to cover? Things you feel like you’re supposed to have learned about at some point but never did? You can always privately message us on Facebook to suggest a topic.
• Any posts you want us to write specifically so you can passive-aggressively share them on Facebook for the benefit of that one relative?