David W. Blight
Appearances
Today, Explained
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We don't have huge resources by any means. I don't think the history profession has ever received quite a frontal attack like this. They are going for the essence of what it means to do research and convert it into the narratives of history.
Today, Explained
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During World War II, the United States created a massive propaganda machine called the Office of War Information. Now, That's what governments do during wartime. They do. But that organization did indeed engage in a lot of propaganda, selling stories to keep Americans patriotic.
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Move ahead from that to McCarthyism. Anti-communism was a very deep phenomenon in America, and not without some reasons in the 30s and 40s and the war years and immediately after. But McCarthyism caused a wave of attempts of trying to control what writers wrote, what historians could teach, who could teach anything.
Today, Explained
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Let's take the Civil War, if you want. In 1865 to 1870, 75, there was an organization in the South, for example, that called themselves the Southern Historical Society.
Today, Explained
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That was originally made up mostly of former Confederate officers who were determined to try to control the story of what the war had been about, what they had actually fought for, what their crusade meant, what the Confederacy actually was.
Today, Explained
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they told a story that we've come to know as the Confederate lost cause. Namely, they were arguing early on that they did not really lose the war on the battlefield. They only lost to superior numbers and resources. They said they lost only to the Leviathan of Northern industrialization. There's some truth in that, but that's not the full explanation. They also argued that
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in season and out for generations that the war was not really about slavery. It was really about state sovereignty and states rights. It was really about resisting the federal interference with their lives and their civilization and their mores and folkways.
Today, Explained
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Because over time, in culture and in schooling and in politics and in rituals from the 1870s and 80s, well on into the 20th century and still surviving in a textbook you were learning from in the 1990s, I am sorry to hear, was this idea that the United States divided, terribly divided, had this all-out horrific war. But it had to put itself back together again. It had to reunite.
Today, Explained
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It had to have reunion. And how do you have reunion? How do you put back together something so horrifically divided? You're going to have to find mutuality. You're going to have to find some kind of unified narrative. Well, one of the unified narratives they did develop in the 19th century, and there's reality to this, is that you unify around the valor of soldiers.
Today, Explained
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But if we admire valor without ever looking at the cause for which they fought, it's, of course, limited. Now, the typical and powerful belief in the national reunion
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occurred in america by the late 19th early 20th century was that everybody in that war fought for the cause they believed in and if you fought for the cause you believed in with great valor you've you fought for the right everybody was equal in valor the causes had to be muted Put aside. Well, you know, and we all know that that's a part of human relations as well.
Today, Explained
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How do you keep a family together? Well, there's some things you don't talk about. But for nations and whole peoples and cultures, the dangers in this is that the stories you take on, the stories you develop that define the identity of who you are, the identity of your nation, the identity of your past and now your future, is gonna leave somebody out.
Today, Explained
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In fact, it may end up allowing you to reconcile on the backs of those who most suffered from the conflict you are trying to reconcile. Obviously, that meant in America, black Americans in the South or the North, it meant their civil and political rights, which were created and then, slowly but surely abandoned and then crushed in the Jim Crow system of the South.
Today, Explained
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Now, the point of all this is that that Confederate lost cause that said the South fought for noble ends, they fought for their homes, they fought for their sovereignty, they fought for their integrity, it eventually becomes, though, not a story of loss at all. It becomes by the 1890s and into the 20th century, a victory narrative. And this was an age now of a lot of sentimental literature.
Today, Explained
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Americans came to love stories of the old South. And of course it's there in Gone with the Wind, the most, still maybe the most famous movie ever made. Most of the miseries of the world were caused by wars. And when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were about. So the Lost Cause was both a political movement, it was a literary movement, but it was at its core a racial ideology.
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And it lasted a very long time. Now that was a version of history.
Today, Explained
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That's a very good question. And my, my instinctive answer is partly my wishful answer is that no, he won't. It is not subtle. You're right. They're wiping out websites. They are explicitly saying professional history, whether it's in our greatest museums or our greatest university has been teaching us all the wrong ways. They've been dividing us. This is the word they love to use.
Today, Explained
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The history we write has been divisive, divisive, divisive. Well, no, it's not. It's simply informative. Sometimes it gets people riled up and sometimes it gets them arguing and sometimes fighting. But what the Trumpists are doing is they are telling us that they know better.
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policy people at the Heritage Foundation or pseudo historians who think that studying all this stuff about race, studying all this stuff about gender, studying all this stuff about all the ethnicities that make us up, all this pluralism, is just taking away from American greatness. And they use that term a lot. We're no longer teaching our youth about American greatness. Yes, we are.
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We're teaching our youth that our greatness is in the pluralism. Our greatness is in the amazing strivings and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power. What will you know about World War I if you try to find nothing but greatness? What will you know about the history of imperialism and expansion if all you want to know is about greatness?
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What will you actually know about Native American history if all you look for is greatness? It defies the intelligence of anyone with an education and a whole lot of people who don't have a lot of formal education. I'm not very optimistic right now about what's going on, but I do have a certain faith that people just aren't going to buy this.
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Discrimination programs, that's what he calls them, are gone, and... We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.
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I study slavery, abolition, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and African American history over time.
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What do you mean contested? Yeah, it's always been a little edgy, but actually never as much as right now.
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Well, just a week ago from where we are now in Chicago, the Organization of American Historians had its annual gathering. I, for my sins, was the current president. It was almost a kind of a rolling fear and despair in a lot of the conversations. And in many cases, it was a council of fear because, let's face it, historians don't have, we don't have a legal defense fund.