Welcome to our audience on c span to the 2023 annual James Madison lecture. This year to bedelivered as dr burnett said by the distinguished historian hw brands, a lecture with the uh antiquarian but eerily relevantle, founding partisans hamilton madison jefferson, adams and the brawling birth of american politics. By the way, heres a, an advanced copy of the book um which will be in bookstores soon, i believe, which promises to be a provocative read. Professor brands is the jack s blanton, senior chair in history at the university of texas at austin, which is his doctoral alma mater is the author of over 30 books, two of which have been finalists for the pulitzer prize. And in discussing my introduction, he, he said hed be happy with a brief biography. So im not going to recite all 30 of those titles uh to you, but heres a sampling of them. The money man. Andrew jackson, the age of gold, the First American tr the strange death of american liberalism. What america owes the world. Lone star nation and the devil we knew. Henry william brands was born in portland, oregon where he lived until he went to college at Stanford University and studied history and mathematics. After graduating, he became a traveling salesman with a territory that spanned the west from the pacific to colorado. He says that his wanderlust diminished after several trips across the great basin. And he turned to sales of a different sort, namely teaching history. For nine years. He taught history and also mathematics in high school and community college. And, and i, if i may say personally, as an aside, having had the privilege of spending the morning with him and doing doing a constitutional conversation. Its evident from the first moment that teaching is a vocation, a calling, a true calling to dr brands. He loves it. He was born to do it and i think youll get that sense in, in this afternoons lecture. Meanwhile, he resumed his formal education, earning graduate degrees in mathematics and history. So i presume both lobes of his brain work equally. Well, something i cant say of myself. He worked as an oral historian at the university of Texas Law School after completing his doctoral work at ut and then became a visiting professor of history at vanderbilt university. In 1987 he joined the history faculty at texas a and m university where he taught for 17 years. And in 2005, he returned to the university of texas where he has been ever since. In addition to his books his articles have appeared in the new york times, the wall street journal, the washington post, the boston globe, the atlantic monthly, Smithsonian National interest american historical review, the journal of American History and Political Science quarterly American History, and many other newspapers, magazines and journals. So you can just get a sense from that. Hes a scholar who also writes for a wider public audience. Hes a regular guest on National Radio and Television Programs and is frequently interviewed by the american and foreign press. So please join me in welcoming giving a warm Madison Foundation welcome to professor w. H. Brands. [ applause ] this is intended to keep me from talking too long. Thanks very much jeff for that kind introduction. Thank you for the James Madison foundation for having me here. Im delighted for an opportunity to speak to any group that chooses to come listen to me. Youre all teachers and then im a teacher and i teach a large class at a couple of large classes at the university of texas. And i flatter myself to think that im kind of interesting and sometimes entertaining teacher, but i am fully aware that if my students didnt have to be in my classroom, many of them would not be there. I want to pick up on something jeff said earlier about uh sort of feeling that teaching is my calling. I dont know if you had this experience, and maybe youve had students who say they, maybe they think they want to be a teacher. And this happens to me all the time. This is typically students who are in their last semester in college and they got to figure out what to do with their lives. And they think, well, maybe id like teaching and very often its in context of, maybe ill go to history, graduate school. And o ok. Well, you talk about that a little bit and, and then i say, if you do go into history as a profession, as an academic, a large part of what you do will be spent teaching. Now, many of them think i want to be a historian. I want to write books. Ok. Thats fine. But the way its set up in the United States for the most part you also teach and, and the question i asked them is, have you ever been in front of a classroom yourself . Theyve all been on the student side of the classroom. But, i asked them if theyve ever been in front where theyre in charge of the class where its their job to focus the attention of the students. And i say that unless youve done that until youve done that, dont even consider teaching as a career because you dont know if youll like it until you do it. And i speak from personal experience here because i got my first teaching job was, i was a year out of undergraduate college and i talked my way into a job teaching in a private school where i didnt have to have particular credentials. I just could, i got the job and i, i thought id kind of like it. Ive been a good student. I liked school but its very different thing when youre in the front. And i discovered by my third day in front of the classroom that i really liked it and i still do. I still, i, to me the very best day of my year is the first day of the fall semester. And i especially like it because i teach the students, you and your fellow High School Teachers send me as jeff said, i taught high school for nine years. And the reason i stopped Teaching High School is that i wanted to get myself in a position where the Job Description would include time to write. I thought i wanted to write. And i know from having been a high school teacher, you dont have time, you, its a full time job teaching. So i thought this would be great. I will say this too that when i first started Teaching High School, i was five years older than my oldest students. And i taught at an all boys school. So, there was, at least at the beginning, some of this, you know, you cant make us do that stuff. So its a little, you know, its a little bit of the, the alpha male with a subtle context around it. But, sort of once we got that settled, then it all went very well. Now, strangely, strangely, my students have been getting younger and younger over the years. So i was almost their age peer when i started teaching. I have had children of students in my class. The age difference is enough that conceivably i could have. But i dont think i actually have had yet grandchildren of the students that ive taught. But i, i think about retiring, im old enough to retire. But, as long as i get that rush on the first day of the semester, i tell you some of you maybe have this experience. Certainly, teachers have been in the business for a while. Its what keeps me young because its also what keeps me from getting well, you study history enough and you see all the stuff that happens and its pretty easy to become jaded and think, oh, man, we got these problems that just dont go away. Fortunately, most problems, you know, dont become fatal, but were just dealing with this and then the students come into my class and they are full of enthusiasm. Theyre full of optimism, theyre gonna change the world. And some of it rubs off on me now. I dont, i dont tell them the worlds pretty hard to change and a lot of people have tried it before you. Ill let them figure that out on their own. But its still, i consider it to be a real privilege to teach young people. I, you know, its in some ways when i did Teach High School and i would go to the, you know, back to school night meet the parents. And i would tell them that there are certain times when im gonna be spending more time with your child than you are at this age because they are, they have to be in my class, but they get away from home as much as they can. And thats, that is a real responsibility, but its also a real privilege. Ill also tell you. And this is, i enjoy teaching college. I really like Teaching High School. How many of you are . Are there any middle School Teachers in here . Ok. My hat is off to you. Youve got the hardest job in the world because i have occasionally sort of substitute sat in teaching in middle school. And i thought, well, i thought the way that i kept the attention of my High School Students was i sort of had to generate more energy on my own than the whole class of them could generate. And i could do that with 15 and 16 year olds with those middle school students, i didnt have a chance. So, really congratulations to you. But, but anyway, so the longer i teach, i teach history, i used to teach history and mathematics and i never could find a connection between the two. Its just, i had these two interests and i liked them both and actually i found it easier to get my first job teaching math because Everybody Needs math teachers. History teachers a little bit easier to come by. And perhaps this, i probably shouldnt tell this joke or say this line in front of a bunch of High School Teachers. But youll get it. This is especially true in texas where ive been living these last 40 years, i grew up in oregon, but it is, it pro im sure its true of and some other places that, that a lot of people when they get out of high school and years later, they cannot remember the last name of their history teacher, but they do remember that the first name was coach that doesnt apply to math teachers, you know, you have to know something about math. But anyway, so the longer i teach, the more im convinced that teaching history, the study of history is at least the way i increasingly do it. This perhaps doesnt apply to anybody else, but that history is a form of applied philosophy and what, the longer i do it, the more i conclude that what were trying to do in history as students of history, as teachers of history, as writers of history, were trying to figure out what it means to be human. And this is the same thing that artists do. This is the same thing that writers do. Its the same thing that psychologists and social scientists do. What does it mean to be human . Now, a lot of people, when they talk about, what does it mean to be human . Theyre speaking in the present tense. What does it mean to be human now, we who deal in history, we have an advantage. Weve got a much larger sample to draw from. What has it been like, what it has, what has it meant to be human over time . And if we want to get sort of interesting about this, has that meaning of what humanity is about . Has it changed over time . Its something that those of us who teach history and write history at least have to, we have to have kind of a rule of thumb for a theory of human nature. Because if im trying to explain to my students what it was like for James Madison to organize this Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787. And i can read from his letters, i can include passages from his letters in my books and the readers can read them and we read the words and we imagine, i think everybody does this when theyre trying to understand somebody else, they say implicitly or explicitly that ok, if i had said that heres what i would have meant, heres what i would have been feeling when i said that. And the question is, and its a question i dont have a firm answer to. Does that, does that actually work if somebody says a certain sentence today in the year 2023 im living in that time and we share that context if somebody 100 years ago says something thats persons coming from a slightly different place. 200 years ago, 300 years ago. Is there such a thing as human nature . And does it change over time . Ok. So this is, this is what i conceive of is what i do. And its also one of the reasons that as i teach, i increasingly ask my students to imagine that they were alive back in the time im talking about and imagine that they were, lets say a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. And theres this argument about whether the new congress under this constitution should be based on population, should be apportioned by population, or should it be based as the model under the art of the confederation by state . So, what would you have thought . What would you have done . And in fact, when i teach my classes, i have my students, they always have a piece of paper handy and they simply write down their response. And so at the end of the end of the hour, they turn it in and it serves as a proxy for taking attendance. But my, but no, but that actually my point is that i want them to think about what it was like to be alive in the past. We can only get it imperfectly. But unless you try to do that, then you cant, you wont have a hope of actually understanding what it was like. Now i asked them, ill ask you, oh, well, ill put it this way. I will demand of them and i demand of you that if you want to understand what it was like to be in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to be in George Washingtons cabinet in the early 1790s, it is imperative that you abandon something that comes naturally to anybody interested in history. And that is you have to abandon the advantage of hindsight. You have to forget that, you know how it turned out because unless you take that away, then you cannot imagine what it was actually like to be there and to make the decisions that people made, not knowing, how were they, how it was going to turn out. And this is one of the reasons, its one of the reasons that, well, i will admit to being somewhat impatient sometimes more than just somewhat impatient with people who take what i consider to be cheap shots at important figures from the past. Ok. So they maybe they did this, but look at all those things, they did wrong, look at all those bad things that they did. Well, this is well and good to say if you know for example, that this instance, were talking about the constitution, if you know, the constitution is gonna work out, if you know the American Republic is gonna hold together and that were gonna be here in the year 2023 and theres still gonna be a United States of america and we are all relatively secure. We are all by world standards, very prosperous and speaking sort of against the background of humanity. Weve really got things good. So i, i dont tell my students not to criticize people who came before but bear in mind that in addition to their imperfections, they did stuff that made it possible for us to be here. I mean, sometimes in a literal sense that its like, its like criticizing your parents, you can ok, kids criticize your parents. This is what kids do, but if not for your parents, you wouldnt be here, you wouldnt be alive, you wouldnt be in a position to criticize. So, as a historian, as a, you know, to withhold your judgment, as a citizen, as Something Else on your own time, sit in judgment on the past, but before then simply try to understand what was it like. Ok, now thats all kind of preface, im going to ask you a question and the question is this. Is there, should there be Something Like a statute of limitations on much like a rectifying past wrongs or changing, going back and fixing things that went wrong in the past. So that doesnt make any sense as ive told it. But lets try this. So i dont know if you do this in your classes. I find that it works with my students and that is to connect the past to the present so that were not simply talking about something that happened 150 years before my students were born, but it does have some relevance. Its connected to something. The United States today is firmly in support of the government of ukraine and its army against the government of russia, which has attacked ukraine and is trying to re attach ukraine into Something Like a russian empire. Ok. And most americans appear to be in favor of the policy, at least in favor of the idea behind the policy. There are some questions as the United States getting involved too deeply, but on the whole, most americans have registered the position that ukraine is in the right on this. Russia is in the wrong on this. And therefore, if we, if the United States is a country can help the ukrainians all to the good. Again, we can argue about the cost and what the risk might be. But i would suggest to you. Well, i guess i could ask for a show of hands, but i wont. Just imagine that ive asked for a show of hands. I dont want to require anybody to reveal their views. Do you think that Abraham Lincoln was justified in using military force to hold the union together starting in 1861 . Ok. Just register in your head. Im gonna guess that most of you think. Yeah. And, and the way that it turned out was better than if the union had fallen apart. Now, im going to suggest to you, im not stating this as a fact. Im just putting it out there for you to consider that what lincoln was doing in 1861 was essentially no different. Then what Vladimir Putin is trying to do in 20 well, starting in 2022. That is to prevent the secession of part of the what the former soviet union. And if youre like most audiences, you say, well, yeah, lincoln did the right thing and most of you probably are saying, well, putin is not doing the right thing. So, we can argue about the differences. But im gonna, im gonna suggest one fundamental difference and that is lincoln waited only three months. So there was three months between the last of the secessions that is be before