Transcripts For CSPAN3 Historians As Public Figures 20150201

if you can see -- i cannot do anything about the space. there's some room on the floor. feel free to make yourself comfortable. this is our session on public intellectuals, and i am delighted to be here for this panel. i apologize ahead of time if i have a little less energy than usual. my appendix did not quite make it to the new year so i am just recovering from surgery. this has been a big debate, ongoing debate about public intellectuals in the academy. there was an article by nicholas kristof which triggered a conversation. he wrote an article -- "professors we need you are cope he argued that many people in the academy have in some ways render themselves irrelevant for various reasons using languages fall of jargon or revocation or not asking questions that were relevant to the public, and in some ways fostered a disconnect with the public that is unnecessary and is also unfortunate. he did not say this was true of all intellectuals, but he did argue that public intellectuals are in some ways a dying breed. others responded critically. there are many interesting voices out there and gave many examples in the rebuttal, including members of this panel, just to say that that tradition is alive and well. the point of today's panel is not so much to have a debate about whether he was right a wrong, nor is it to have a debate which is familiar at almost every aha or oah conference for sure about the role of the public intellectual or should historians even be trying to do this. i think most of us and the panel start the assumption. it is a good thing for a lot of us who want to do it, and it has a lot of value. rather than what i wanted to do when i put this together is bring people together who are doing interesting work and ask them about their lives, about their career experience, and give a little auto we all graffiti about how -- a little autobiography about how this works for them and how we can learn about what the public intellectual is through their own experience was up i will just introduce everyone on the panel. i will then begin, and we will go into about 10 minutes of commentary from each person, and then we will have q&a. as you can see, c-span is covering this, so when you ask a question, it might be a trick for some people, but you can get some exercise, if you can vault just to get to the mic to ask but we will figure it out. do not worry. i will start. i am julian zelizer, director of public affairs at princeton university photo i write a weekly column for cnn, and i also write for other outlets and appear on radio and television. i have a new book that is coming up this week with england press called the "fierce urgency of now: lyndon johnson, congress, and the battle for the great society." we then turn to erikc f who is theoner, to which professor at columbia -- we then turn to eric foner, the dewitt professor at columbia. he has written many classics many awards, a lot of this people in this room i think and learn from "free soil, free labor, free men: reconstruction, the story of american freedom," and the new book coming out with norton. right after this, he just told me, you can go to a book signing upstairs in the book exhibit. he is also someone who appears in the areas places, in the media, television, "the colbert report," he has posted up as in newspapers, magazines, and he consults with very is institutions doing public history. we will go to peniel joseph, who is a professor of history attest university and i think one of the i was happy he could participate in this. he's the author of a very good new book that received a lot of attention, and he has become a regular commentator in the national press am a publishing in "new york times" and "washington post." you will see him weighing in on issues in a very serious, smart fashion. we once got on -- in an argument during some debate on the radio. i was very impressed with the conversation. then we have a good friend and great historian of the american left michael kay's and, professor at georgetown university. he's also the editor of " dissent," something i hope he can speak about today. he's a very well-known commentator. he is heard everywhere as well -- television, radio 2008 he helped launch historians for obama. he's been very involved politically, and i think his work his scholarship has become important to the american left in a way that is quite impressive. and finally, to my right we have claire potter. in the world of social media she has had a tremendous impact. she's a professor of history at the new school for social research, the author of "war on crime," she's writing a book about anti-pornography campaigns, and she publishes in many places, but she has a very popular blog that many of you might read called the 10 year radical, which was picked up by the chronicle of higher education, has been an innovative example of what people actually talk about but don't do very well, of how to use social media to offer commentary to offer and foster useful discussions. we will close with her. at the end we will have questions. let's start with comments, and then we will turn to the professor. in my opinion, there's a gate -- great tradition. i don't quite agree with kristof that that tradition is dead. within this discipline for sure, there are many examples of people who really contributes either sporadically or regularly to what we call the public square, broadly defined. there is a wide range now at places in which this happens from scholars who publish in traditional popular outlets like "new york times" to those who are using social media, those who work with museums or are engaged in debate with policymakers. there is no shortage of people, and there's more ways where you can find them. it is an old tradition, certainly in the field of u.s. history you start with bancroft, who was talking to a broader public and figures charles a beard and arthur and your -- arthur/injure -- arthur schlessinger. they write and speak in a fashion compelling to not simply those practicing historians. the other part of the discipline i always found very important is historiography. you are trained as a historian to engage in debate, to question the conventional wisdom even among their own colleagues, to accept the idea that interpretation can be dynamic and always in flux. that training lends itself to someone who will ask those same kinds of questions in a broader arena. one of my formative moments came about when i was trying to decide where to go to graduate school. one of the places i looked at was u penn, to work with michael katz, who unfortunately passed away this year, whose work is for me also an example of how you can reach a broader public. when i went to visit with him i got off the train and i was walking somewhere to get to his office, and there was a big rally of civil rights activists. it was disconnected from u penn, and the person speaking was holding a copy. 48 21-year-old getting into this, it was very impressive to see -- as a 21-year-old getting into this, it was very impressive to see. my time doing this has been much longer than the 15 minutes i thought this thing would last. i really started in the late 1990's. it was during the impeachment of president clinton. one thing i've learned is to always take small opportunities and make connections with good people, good editors, and learn how to do this. i don't see being a public intellectual always as an art. it's also a science, and it is something i've tried to gain mastery over the years. the first thing i did was in 1998 and 1999 during the impeachment, the local cbs station in albany asked me to come into the morning news show. they squeezed me in between the weather and the sports, with a guy named ed o'brien. he had seen i was speaking on campus grade he liked me and started having me on once a month to talk politics. it was a little odd sometimes. they were dressed up in "survivo r" outfits. i did this because i figured this was a part of the way i could learn how to do this medium. i met great editors in my career. as a woman some people here have worked with, allison silver. she was the editor of the "los angeles times" opinion session and the "new york times" week in review, and now i think she said bloomberg. -- she's at bloomberg. she's a great editor. not simply in figuring out what needed to be written, but helping epidemics learn how do you write these kinds of pieces. she taught me things like how do you put some juice into an article. that was the essence. you had to figure out if there was any juice there. if it did not have it, it was going to fall apart. she taught me how to structure the argument and how to move things in directions i probably would not for an academic piece. she taught how to boil things down to the essence in a way where in an academic piece of writing, you would not want to do. she was phenomenal. in some ways, she mentored me in doing this kind of work. i'm forever grateful. i've had an editor at cnn who also has worked with some people here. i been working with him for many years on a weekly basis. i've always looked for people like that, and taken them seriously and valued their work when they took me seriously. then i had some weird opportunities, even weirder than the cvs that i took advantage of. in album you went to a sports bar on a monday night. there was a guy from the local espn doing his radio show live. he did it right before monday night football, roger wallen of espn albany. he said, any jets fans? that's the only thing probably harder than having your appendix burned, is being a jets fan. i raise my hand. he said, come on up here in -- up. we put the headphones on and we go on the air. he was like, what do you do? i said, i'm a professor. he found this odd that wasn't what he was expecting. he liked it, and he had me on. he said, can you come next monday? he had me every monday night. the professor took calls about the new york jets. i did it for 2 or 3 years. it wasn't what i write about, but i always tell people -- i said i learned something from this too, i will take it seriously. i learned a lot about radio, the rhythm and timing of radio interacting with the host live on the air. that was extremely helpful. i e-mailed him to tell him that. those kinds of people and opportunities i have found to be really important. and i have allowed myself to be open to new developments in the media. i was never a guy who's going to be stuck with am i in the "new york times" or not. i'm fortunate to be in their. -- there. a number of papers isn't the only place i've aimed for. it's opened up many opportunities. i remember in the late 1990's, a guy called me starting this thing. he said, call politico. they were going to be doing online journalism. it was a bizarre concept. i wrote for them. a guy named david mark was my editor there. it turned into a really great experience and introduced me to writing to this new online journalism which is now in many ways surpassed a lot of the older outlets. cnn was the same. my editor asked me, we are starting an opinion page at cnn. they were basically going to do an online page that has the kind of impact newspapers did. i really am grateful to him for asking me, but i think in the world we are in -- we have to have some of that, especially for younger people who are just starting. you do know exactly where this is going. some of these new institutions might become quite important over the coming years great it is always a risk, but sometimes this new form of writing and new organizational outlets can be quite exciting and have an impact on our conversations. there's a lot of outlet for opinion. i'm talking about some of the beneficial things i've learned. one of the things i've tried to do from the start is understanding the world of the academy and the broader public world need different things often right in different ways. -- write in different ways. the role of the public intellectual is to bridge those two worlds. hofstadter is incredible. if you read his books that have such a big impact, he still is very versed in the academic base. i always thought that's what i was trying to do. back to the polarization with politico, that has been a theme i have thought about him anyways, and over and over trying to really explain, what do we learn from political science, what do we learn from historians about how polarization happens in american politics, and how does that add to the conversation of the dysfunction in washington that we are always talking about? there's always questions about what is the legacy of a president going to be. we try to talk about what we learn in the academy about how presidential reputations change over time, and there is no set definition in what a president is and how we evaluate the different aspects, but then bring that to the public. my new book just landed in one of these debates with the film "selma," and i didn't interview in the "times" -- i did an interview in the "times," and it's really rewarding to be able to take arguments that really grow out of academic concerns i've had about the treatment of presidential power and the relationship with the grassroots to congress, and then try to connect them to a debate that more people are interested in as a result of something like a film. it is both useful and rewarding. i wish i would conclude by saying that for those who want to do this, i realize not everyone wants to do it. there are some ways in which this happens. the miller center offers fellowships in u.s. history, and they require people to write and op-ed. if they get it, they write more op-eds. there needs to be one-on-one mentorship with historians who do this sort of thing. i want to be a public intellectual, how do i do it? it's not like you open the door and you are set. it is something that has to be learned. it has been a wonderful experience in my career. i did not fully expected, but it has been greatly rewarding. it has been an additional supplement the complement to the work i do here as a historian. i always hope to continue bridging these two worlds. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you julian. about 25 years ago the historian russell jacoby published a book called "the last intellectual," proclaiming the death of the public intellectual, like many such announcement, turns out to have been premature. today anybody with a smart phone and a twitter account can be a public intellectual, compose his or her views about history or anything else for anyone to see. this is represent the democratization of the public intellectual or is it another sign of the decline and fall of everything? on one hand, we witness the proliferation in the public sphere of ill-informed or downright mythical invocations of history, for example, the supposedly jens of african americans who fought for the confederacy -- supposed legions of african americans who fought for the confederacy. there are nonacademic public intellectuals who are very conversant with history, for example, of the "atlantic," who is able to reach a broad audience with very good history. what does all this mean for us as professional historians, as public intellectuals? julian asked us to reflect on our own careers in this realm. mine is involved museum exhibitions, writing for nonacademic venues from the "new york times" to the "nation" magazine, appearing on tv, the " colbert report," advising pbs documentaries or historical documentaries, testifying in court as an expert witness on history, and lecturing very frequently to audiences outside the academy. some of these forays into the public sphere have been successful. some have not. i think the museum exhibitions i have helped to curate, one on the reconstruction which travels all around the country, and then the national park service's new visitor center at gettysburg. all of those were cut successful -- quite successful and helped to bring up views of the civil war era to a broad, nonacademic audience. in other cases, not so much. i testified in court in the 1990's for one of the university of michigan affirmative action cases trade -- cases. i was questioned at length by the judge about the reasons for the enactment of the 14th amendment. the resultant disabused me of the idea that judges care what historians have to say. not only did the decision go against us, but the only mention of my involvement in the long decision that judge wrote kim in one sentence, quote, the professor also testified. [laughter] i signed on to an amicus brief before the supreme court, which had to do with the interpretation of the civil rights act of 1866. in a very important case patterson v. mclean credit union, it was written by a professor of fordham law school, it was signed i very several -- by several for a prominent historians, but since reefed -- briefs are named alphabetically, you will never have a brief named after you in court. my brief was the last on the list. before that i had sent a copy of my book on reconstruction to justice anthony kennedy, because i was told he was one of the few members of the supreme court who read books. [laughter] he wrote the majority opinion which went the wrong way from our perspective. he said the position of the brief seems to differ from the account of this event in eric phone or's book. it was a warning against the temptation to use history too instrumentally, which we are all tempted by and really ought to resist. sometimes briefs in court actually play an important role. i know one bite george chauncey -- by george chauncey and others in the gay marriage case were important. too often we are tempted to work the history to fit an immediate legal issue. i certainly have not felt satisfied with the end result of tv history documentaries in which i have been involved, which seems unable to avoid the oversimplification of history. not everybody has, but i have. one has to remain cognizant of what hat you are wearing when you are writing. when i write for the "nation" magazine, i'm writing with a different hat and different style and in some ways a different john rudd than a scholarly -- genre than a scholarly work of history trying to apply historical information to the present. this is important. it ought to be done. probably my nation piece most widely cited circulated, anthologized and denounced by defenders of the american way was published just after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, just a week after. it drew on the history of the repression of civil liberties in wartime to argue that the most patriotic thing you could do at the moment is to maintain a steadfast defense of civil liberties and the crisis that was coming. i reminded people -- you know all this history from john adams and the alien sedition acts, to whether lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, world war i, you can go on -- to argue that governments in times of war see civil liberties as an inconvenience, if not outright treason. this would have to be fought. this led to a lot of praise and a lot of criticism from people who thought i was a first cousin of osama bin laden or something. what should we try to achieve as historians who are public intellectuals? one of our most important tasks is simply appointing people with what historical scholarship is in the first place. i'm going to quote you a letter from "the financial times." like all british publications, half the letters are denouncing other letters. [laughter] this guy writes, sir, john templer's letter is so wrong, so uninformed, that the term revisionist historian comes to mind. this is a very common term of public abuse. i would counter with oscar wilde, who said the only ute we have to history is to rewrite it . being a revisionist is what we do. that is our job, to revise interpretations of history. outside of the academy, history is too often seen as a collection of fixed facts fixed interpretations, new interpretations are seen as inherently suspect if not downright subversive. many of you are familiar with the quotation often used from the 19th century historian ernest ran on quote, the act of forgetting i might almost say historical error, plays a significant role in the creation of a nation and therefore advances in the field of history are often a threat to the nation. that is to say, to the mythologies that all nations are built on and promote. there are many people in public life, politicians, columnists others i won't even name, to whom the active reinterpretation itself is a kind of a threat. first we have to tell people what is it that the study of history entails, and why do historians disagree with each other, and why do we think differently about history today than people did in the past? beyond explaining what the study of history is, our job is to try to keep alive -- the role of the public intellectual is to try to keep alive something very endangered in our society today which is respect for the life of the mind. in the last generation, as you know, the values of the market have come to permeate every aspect of our lives. the notion that the public good can be measured in other than economic terms has pretty much been abandoned. the philosopher william james once wrote that an hour spent communing with nature must be considered quote, a worthless our when measured at the usual standards of commercial value. the same can be said of an hour contemplating a work of art or reading a work of history. as a result, arguments for higher education today -- we have been pushed back into the position where we are the defense of history or higher education is couched in economic terms. having more educated people is good for the economy, or for the social advancement of individuals. unfortunately, this outlook hopes amount for the fact that letter -- literature, history philosophy, and the arts, subjects that do not seem to increase economic productivity, are on their way to becoming stepchildren at all levels of education. charles francis adams in his presidential address to this organization noted quote the historical point of view is an important point of view. only when approached historically, can any issue be understood in its manifold relations with a complex civilization. the economical point of view vital as it unquestionably often is, comes much lower in the scale. these observations are as upper pro today -- are as a propo then when adams spoke. the study of history instills equality so lacking among policymakers and more broadly today, the value of critical inquiry, of subjecting all beliefs to the test of reason and experience, of questioning dogmas, whether political religious, or economic, that the fan uniformity of thought. the historical frame of mind that may assist americans in candidly if facing up to some of the problems that we face in our society. i want to close by emphasizing that while we are here to discuss public engagement, the historian does not have to step outside the so-called ivory tower to have a lasting public impact. scholarly works of history can in a sense be quite public. reminiscence about seeing katz's book is a good example of that. the public results of historical scholarship are not always salutary. the period to which i devoted much of my career, the reconstruction area after the civil war, is an object lesson in how scholarly interpretation in this case, the old dunning school, can offer intellectual legitimacy to serious injustice. the dunning school became a powerful part of the political culture, offering a scholarly basis for the defense of jim crow and black disenfranchisement, among other things. if you don't believe me take a look at how often their works were cited into the 1950's and the supreme court itself in decisions to justify the emasculation of the 14th and 15th amendments. if you will indulge me for a moment, i was gratified to read the other day in an article in the online journal democracy this comment about the public impact of works of history. qutoe, every writer i know interested in the american dilemma of slavery, jim crow and institutional racism has read eric's "reconstruction." every feminist has read the history of birth control "women's bodies, women's rights." historians can through good, scholarly history as well as public engagement offer a usable path to those struggling to make this a fairer, more equal, and more just society. thank you. [applause] i'm going to take this question from a different angle. >> one is biography, but two why does it matter that historians serve as public intellectuals? why are we doing this? as a proud son of haitian immigrants, my take on being a historian as a public intellectual is deeply rooted in a specific experience as a native new yorker who grew up in brooklyn, in queens, whose mother was a trade unionist at 1199. i was on my first picket line at eight years old in new york city. i became a scholar after being an activist in the city, in new york. it was activism around issues related to police brutality activism around issues related to anti-poverty, issues related to all these things that were plaguing predominately segregated black communities in new york city in the 1980's. for me scholarships had never been separate from politics from policy, and social movements. when we think about historians as public intellectuals, i'm not going to talk about how you get to msnbc or cnn or how you get an op-ed in the "new york times ." what is important is why we are engaging in the debate. people's lives are at risk. black people, poor people, lgbt, women. when we think about how do you become a historian as a public intellectual, we have to first say what are we engaging in? is it about us and our careers? are we trying to transform public policy and a public discourse that is unequal in the united states and that is anti-democratic? when we think about african-american history historically there have always been black public intellectuals. usually they are not in the conversation. you can have a book by the metaphysical club were there are no black folks and the metaphysical club. where is ida b wells -- b. wel ls? people who contributed not just to pragmatism and philosophy, but american democracy and citizenship. in the period i study the civil rights movement and black power in the 20th century, even though there is not a dunning school in terms of civil rights, public commentary about the civil rights movement has completely been whitewashed. martin luther king jr. is a plastic saint. rosa parks is not a community activist and organizer. she's a little old lady -- even though she was 42 years old -- who decided to not get up off the bus. it has been so distorted that by the time we got the election of barack obama in 2008, people said that was the end of the civil rights movement. the reward for all of us was barack obama. six years later eric garner and ferguson and michael brown, we see that was not a reward. the reason why historians have a vital role in terms of being the public intellectual is about democracy, small "d" democracy. what i've done throughout my career is try to talk about the way in which black radicalism has contributed to that ongoing democratic debate. we thing about this idea of black radicalism, i include martin luther king jr. in that. i include ella baker in that. it is not just stokely carmichael or the black panthers. when we exclude people like hang an elevator and fannie lou hamer, what is political radicalism, and medical democracy, we impoverish the debate. the last six years we have had extraordinary events really book ended by the election of barack obama in november 2008 and the protest we saw starting this last august of 2014 in the aftermath of michael brown hot shooting in ferguson, the grand jury decision three days before thanksgiving 170 different cities arresting in protest, and eight days later, the eric garner decision, and the protests surrounding that. for the first time, what millenials -- they were born after 1992. that was the l.a. writes -- riots. they saw and witnessed first-hand not just institutional racism, not just militarization of the police, but white supremacy in our political process, in our democratic institutions. they had been waging sit-ins all over the place. historians have a role in that to say why are students and young people and activists and ordinary citizens doing that? are there echoes to the past? how can we connect this social movement to policy? the most exciting part about historians as public intellectuals is that we live in a society and a country that is anti-historical. it does not want to remember the martin luther king jr. who said that materialism and racism were the triple threat facing american democracy. it does not want to rubber that martin luther king jr. was despised and demonized in 1966, 1967, and 1968. whether it was the "new york times" or "time," he's coming out against the war because a radical who is so scared of stokely carmichael is also coming out against the war in 1966. we don't want to remember the civil rights movement as a muscular pro-democracy movement that wasn't popular in its own time. but we can do as historians is remind the public that even though 50 years later, we have martin luther king jr., a monument, a holiday -- king was despised in his own lifetime. what does it say in our contemporary period when we say folks who were nonviolently protesting should sit down and shut up and be quiet? that's not how they did it in the 1950's and 1960's, then -- 1960's, when it is exactly how they did it in the 1950's and 1960's. historians as public intellectuals, the reason why our voice matters so much in this discourse is because there are so many people who are talking about issues related to feminism immigration foreign domestic policy, african-americans, latinos, a whole range of people in this country who have no historical context for what they are talking about. even some journalists who do great things, there's a breadth of knowledge they have, but they lack a depth of knowledge. that depth of knowledge is what provides us with context to make our voices be heard. we're here today not because we want our own television show. we are here today because historians as public intellectuals is how can we transform the discourse leads to policy changes, which leads to transformation. things like mass incarceration. things like -- there are thousands of missing black women in the united states that no one is searching for right now as we speak. all these things matter, and what historians can do in this discourse is provide a historical and a little -- analytical framework to talk not just about the past but, how the past can inform the present. thank you. [applause] >> thanks to julia for putting this together. being a historian is not for the faint hearted. we are a tough breed. when they asked me to take part, i immediately thought about the first time i heard the term public intellectual, which was reading "1987." as eric mentioned, the argument of that book was that there were not any more public intellectuals. he talked mostly about white men. it's clear. now, it seems to be everywhere. i'm sure out there you have been thinking, how come that person -- there's a lot of people who could've taken our place. our politics, everyone appear linked decidedly to the left. -- up here leans decidedly to the left. what i want to do is some different point of view, talk about my motivation for doing the public intellectual work i do why i write a lot of op-eds and why i co-edit this small magazine of the left which has been around for 61 years. why i teach my courses the way i do. i don't see a contradiction between those three parts of my professional life. the first motivation is clearly political. i want to understand the way things have developed in this country and the world as part of helping the change of my country and the world. second motivation -- there is a sense that i have a political responsibility as a historian to do that kind of work. second motivation is pure ego. i would not mind having my own television show, but no one has asked me. also my wife would mention -- she would say that's also a motivation. i came of age as a political activist in the late 1960's. i thought of myself as revolutionary for a while. i traveled to cuba with fellow radicals when it was still quite illegal to do so. sugarcane, one day fidel castro cutting sugarcane alongside me. i started writing articles for ap, liberation news service and a lot of underground newspapers. a few years later i enrolled in a program. i cannot figure out what to do with my life when the revolution wasn't happening. i decided to write labor history. some of you my age or younger know about this. this is a way to engage in politics a different way, the kind of americans that are moving to the left have for the most part neglected and sometimes driven them into a fury. i wrote specifically in my dissertation my first book about the trains in san francisco. if you know the history of the 1960's, building trades for one group of the working-class population which was particularly unhappy. in 1970, a few blocks from down here, a group from the building trades had beaten up friends of mine, antiwar demonstrators, and had been praised by nixon for doing so. he put a hard hat on and made sure everyone knew he was on the side. every book has been motivated to explain the roots and development of some aspect of contemporary american politics, whether it is the ubiquitousness of popular language the relationship between evangelical christianity and political passion am a what difference the left has made to american culture and politics. always trying to connect the present to the past in that way. what i found in doing interviews with people in writing op-eds, the media mostly cares about history if it has some connection to what is going on now. every op-ed i write about historical matters, i've got to start with something happening now and work my way back to history and end by referring again to the reason why people who don't care about history should care about what i just wrote. there are a few exceptions. the civil war era is the exception to that. more recently, slavery, helped by "12 years a slave," and held by the african american studies and african-american history which is so prominent in the academy and outside as well. i have written a lot about the late 19th centuries which most people in the media don't care about. guilded age, what is that about? it doesn't make any sense. my one success of getting that kind of history out into the public was, i was amazed to get a note on white house stationery from karl rove, who said i like your book for a much, you made a few factual errors about the weather in texas. invited me to the white house to have lunch. it was a very strange experience. [laughter] i wasn't exactly a supporter of george w. bush and his policies but president bush and karl rove had this contest to read as many books as they could, especially poodle -- political biographies. they found time. we had a great discussion for about an hour about history, about biographies, and rove showed me what a great sense of humor he has. he had a great time mimicking right-wing evangelicals, who we could not stand. at the same time, i've never stopped being an activist at heart. as i have gotten older, i write more op-eds and go to fewer meetings and demonstrations. i became a co-editor of "di ssent." julia asked us to comment on how we balance the responsibilities of being a public intellectual with being an academic. i said, i don't see any great contradiction between the two. when i teach class or write an article for an academic journal i make my own views clear. to try to be empathetic, to explain why the people with whom i would've disagreed believe what they believe. i don't try to convert my students to my point of view. i always assign ratings to take different positions than i do. i encourage debate about any logical differences. some students would say i require it. if a student leaves class thinking more along the lines i do i'm not displeased. i try to tell what i think is the truth without fear or favor. the second motivation is somewhat less honorable. i want to change the world but i also like the fact that people know who i am and want to read what i write. i'm going to quote one of the most uncomfortable sentences i've ever read in an academic journal. a few years ago, david brody in a very good journal was part of a forum which brody called a charismatic book. in his commentary that david wrote about the book, he said quote, the fate of most historians is to write history that nobody reads. an overstatement, to be sure, but not too much of one. for most of us, writing is hard work. mentally hard, anyway. he finished breakfast, you procrastinate a little bit. this always a lot of websites to read, and blogs. you write a few good paragraphs, then you have lunch you do it again and the afternoon, then you do it over again the next day if you are lucky enough to not have to teach class or go to meetings. to be gratifying, to only do academic history, even if all the other academic historians know about your work and only if some of those historians think it matters, intellectual affinity groups have their merits. we could never write good history if we didn't read a lot of books and articles by people who not that many people have read. i get anxious if i don't feel like i'm part of a larger conversation, a large debate, about what has happened in the past and what relevance it may have in the present and future. talk about being a public intellectual everyone can't write a good op-ed, and sometimes, trying to write a good op-ed doesn't just present your knowledge and sophisticated understanding and political commitment to the world, it can also oversimplify things i think. in a way, it can become a caricature of good history. we have to be careful about that. i like to conclude with quoting christopher hitchens. i disagree fundamentally with the last major stand that hitchens took, supporting the u.s. invasion of iraq, but he was still quite capable of wisdom and he knew how to express himself in memorable ways. this is how in 2008 he describes the ideal attributes of an intellectual. quote, this intellectual not need be one who speaks truth to power. powerful people know what the truth is. that doesn't mean they want to go along with it. the attitude towards authority should probably be skeptical, as should the attitude towards utopia, let alone to heaven or hell. other aims should include the ability to survey the present the past with the perspective of the living, and the culture and language of others. to put it another way one needs to have something important to say about the present as well as the past, and to say it well. thank you. [applause] >> i'm very fortunate to go after all these wonderful presentations, and i think you will find that what i'm going to say picks up on a number of themes. 10-year radical was launched october 18 2006 in new haven connecticut. in a little more than seven years, i have written 1795 pos ts. posts on topics as various as the humanities job market, national politics, sexual assault, books, writing, and the bds movement. though i began writing under a pseudonym, that only lasted a couple months. i was outed by my students. not only has blogging brought me a great many opportunities in the old and new media world but it also became a place where i have been able to articulate my ideas and observations about higher education from the perspective of someone who has been in school in some fashion for over half a century now. in the summer of 2010, i received a call from the chronicle of higher education asking me if i would like to move tenured radical. very few of us who migrated our blogs are still active on the site, but our work changed the chronicle of higher education by making it aware that a younger academic public faced with different challenges than even people in my generation had found much of the chronicle lesson relevant. as a result, the chronicle's newest non-fire walled section is bloggy rather than journalistic, opinionated rather than researched. it favors younger authors, most of them in pre-tenure or preemployment stages. many are current and former bloggers, and the articles tend to favor horizontal advice giving, confrontational language, and heretical views about academic success, some of which are complete bullshit. [laughter] i would also argue that academic blogging probably launched a new genre of memoir called [indiscernible] in which academics announce histrionic lead that they are mad as hell and they are not going to take it anymore. my jump to this larger academic audience which has since led to opportunities to be a guest in other venues mass circulation journals of ideas, radio, and television, occurred through a weird combination of luck and pluck. shortly after i commenced publishing under my real name in spring 2007, i wrote a post about a new york city racist commentary on the rutgers university women's championship basketball team, all african-american women, and all outstanding students. i noted in passing that a group of white male athletes at you cap acquired a robust and proactive group of defenders despite a long history of poor academic behavior, violent behavior, culminating in rape and assault charges against a black stripper they had hired for a party. the charges were later job for lack of evidence. i posted a piece and by the next morning i had over 100 comments. i was used to6 or 7. -- to 6 or 7. many of which threatened me with sexual assault, and an inbox full of equally nasty e-mails. the message light on my telephone was linking wildly. i had messages from the president of the university, the chair of the board of trustees, the provost, my dean, the university council, and my department chair all of whom who had also received e-mails and phone calls demanding my immediate termination. this can be the downside of being a public intellectual. [laughter] perhaps what was most shocking to me was that the attack had actually been led by a fellow historian, also a blogger my first introduction to what is today commonplace social media experience for scholars and journalists, being viciously attacked by colleagues and graduate students who you have never met. the moral of the story is that just because a scholar once a wider public, it does not follow that you always get the public you want. this is the pluck part. my comments section can have all the charm of a 19th century lower east side used beer joint, and it makes venues like msnbc where the interviewer peppers you with non-questions that begin -- don't you really think -- seem like models of sane conversation. in the fast paced world of digital publishing controversy sells if it doesn't get you fired. this is probably the place to say that every one of those telephone messages from the president of wesleyan on down reassured me that my blog, which hardly anyone i worked with him a really understood, or liked, which is why it was such a sweet phone call, was covered by academic freedom. this experience was lucky, because i never sought it out but my blog was noticed and i suddenly realized i was actually going to be backed up by my university. largely because i became part of a bigger story and in the process learned to write a fast i acquired an audience of many thousands a week. journalists began to call me for quotes and opportunities in the mainstream media followed. there is a maxim in the blogosphere are coined by my friend that links blogging to more conventional print productivity. what anne says is, the more you write, the more you write. the corollary to that is, the more you are read, the more you are read. it is why lots of people whose reputations have been made in journalism, fiction, and nonfiction worlds take up blogging in the first place. it is called a platform. if you want to build an audience for non-scholarly or scholarly work or in anticipation of a major publication, you build a platform. it's very often a blog. what do i personally bring to the table as a public intellectual? there are political and cultural narratives about higher education out there that are actually vital to all our future that are very difficult to interrupt, whether it is long-awaited death of the humanities, or the crisis of higher education financing, or the assumptions that are currently governing academic hiring. there are very few people who are not presidents of major foundations you are bridging the many constituencies affected by these debates. as a blogger, i can speak to these issues knowledgeably and in ways different publics can understand. by speaking knowledgeably, i don't necessarily mean knowing everything, which i don't, but i do mean being curious about the interrelated parts of every discussion, and the differences between and among conversations occurring simultaneously. i also mean listening and learning from people who join me in the comments section, even, perhaps especially, the commenters i do not like. let me pause here to say that in the middle of my horrible experience with the duke lacrosse people, i talked to a political reporter from the st. petersburg times, a friend of the family. i said i'm never reading my comments again. she said, you have to read your comments. there are people who are trying to tell you things anonymously that they would never tell you in person. it was a good lesson. a blog is an opportunity to start a conversation, if nothing else, and that conversation may finish somewhere else entirely in a journal, on tv, on radio in a panel like this, or in a book. i and a number of other bloggers bring feminism and critical race theory to the table in a journalistic world where some version of a whether beyonce is a feminist or b whether the united states is post-racial seem to pretty much run the table. although the social justice movement that began in ferguson seems to have put piad to be for the time being, few people know how to or want to write and talk about race and gender the way academics do. many bloggers aspire to the status of the publicly engaged scholarship of the late 20th century, whether done by the legal scholars or intellectuals who are more associated with social justice movements. adding high-profile attention to violence, it is very difficult to have a serious conversation about race or feminism nowadays, not to mention about a queer pol itics that won't come to a dead stop with federally recognized marriage in all 50 states. it is even more difficult if you want to do that kind of writing and are that kind of person, a woman, a person of color queer to become visible to publications that will commit to editing and publishing your work. this was an issue very much raised around the curve awful around "the new republic" and the mass resignation of its writers. it is very difficult to be heard . women don't get to write for "the new republic," by a large. when i said, what about queer people? everyone would say, andrew sullivan. he is a very conservative man with debatable politics. blogging creates a kind of visibility that is very difficult for some of us to get in the conventional print or conventional media world. it can actually allow us to make that jump to bridge the gap on the radio and television and film. however, writing for a broader public brings challenges with it, challenges that include the fact that exposure to an undifferentiated audience, as opposed to an audience like you chosen by the fact we are all at this conference, brings unpredictable and sometimes unpleasant outcomes. people who read "10-year radical" know that i'm a relentless advice-giver. first of all, most academics think that they write more accessibly than they do. [laughter] or they have failed to understand that the rhetoric that is impressive to journals and tenured communities cannot engage a general audience. get me wrong. there are many kinds of good writing, and there are many people who do many different kinds of good writing. some of the best historians write intelligently and accessibly across the john is. most people don't. it is a learned skill. so is being on television or in a documentary or even doing the pre-interview that will get you into a mass media production or on a television show. nobody teaches this in graduate school. if we really care about historians doing public intellectual work, we really should. second, writing for spur of the moment, short-term deadlines is really fun, as julian's presentation underlines. you have to be willing to ditch other responsibilities to make it happen. for example, preparing for class. [laughter] going to meetings. grading papers. the things we are actually paid to do. if an editor wants something by 3:00 p.m. or by friday, that is when they want it, and they want it to be clean. which leads me to my next point. initially, your ability to move from self-publishing to commercial publishing to a broader audience will have a great deal to do with your tolerance for disappointment criticism, rewrites, and being managed by people who don't have a phd. many of these people will be interns who just graduated from your college. many academics can't help but see all criticism as very high-stakes, so much so that several editors of important publications have told me that they often avoid working with us if they can. writing for an edited, general publication requires compromises. we are also not very good at making compromises when we think we know exactly the right way to make an argument. compromises include word length, word choice, being fact checked, and perhaps having a piece of that you have worked hard on being rejected at the last minute because of a transportation accident. i once had a piece for cnn.com fact checked for five days. they checked every single clause over and over again. do yourself a favor. practice your writing by blocking. even writing pitches to yourself before writing the post. spend a lot of time reading the publications you want to be published by, other it is "the huffington post," which publishes pretty much anybody or "dissent," "the nation," where the barriers are much more rigorous, and understand you may be rejected numerous times before getting a piece accepted. try not to be paranoid about the grounds for objection. actually, it's not personal l. the reason intelligent outlets for ideas exist in a competitive publishing world is that they are well edited and different from each other and gather an audience of a certain type and offer something special. you need to do that too. if a good piece is rejected, you can probably publish it at 10-year radical. [applause] >> those are great comments. now we need to use our phd's to figure out -- we need questions asked from the mics. if you could just get behind it, we can line up a few people at a time. these come to the mic and ask away. if you can keep your questions on point, that would be great. >> my name is sean driscoll. i am a graduate student in western mass. you touched on it a little bit at the end of your discussion about film. i personally feel that film, if done right, can be one of the greatest openings for learning, whether it be young students, older students, what have you. i was just wondering, one, what is your feeling about public intellectuals and being involved in crafting quality film, proper films, films better educated and b have any of you had any experience in the film industry of being asked to advise? >> i would just start by saying i think it's an extremely tough issue. there are many people here i know who have advised film. films are made, non-documentary films, i assume, with a very different approach from a piece of academic work. screenwriters are willing to play around with time. they are willing to create scenes that never happened to convey a point. they are comfortable with that. ultimately, they will make the argument they are not historians and are not bound by what we are bound by. that is how they do it. we can think of many films where this has become an issue. i'm fine with people doing that. sometimes you cringe. i don't like when someone is portrayed as doing something that they fundamentally didn't believe in or didn't do. i'm a little ok when chronology is used in a way i wouldn't use it because that is how you tell a story. this is much more problematic knowing that what you say is going to be only a piece. >> let me just briefly add -- historical fiction is a wonderful jon runyan -- genre. shakespeare didn't go on tv claiming that julius caesar was accurate, was true. probably people do believe it but nobody should really think that is how julius caesar really was. this is shakespeare. today, unfortunately filmmakers want to play it both ways. they want to make things up, but they also want the impromptu or of accuracy. when they create something which is largely fictional and claim it's historically true, as a historian, we have the obligation to say, wait a minute folks. the historian is a killjoy. the historian steps in and says it wasn't like that. this is misleading. nobody will go to a movie with me anymore. i have sort of given up. the genre is powerful. millions of people see these movies. with some exceptions "selma" being one, most movies hollywood makes are based on one individual, whether it's malcolm x or gandhi. by the way, all of these seem to be men. are there any movies like that about women? amelia ehrhardt had one. >> queen victoria had one. >> it is usually great men, and even when it is an biographical, it is fundamentally one individual driving the history what hollywood seems unable to get away from, and that is rather antithetical to how many of us think about how history develops. >> a little bit of a disagreement with eric -- i think some of these historical films, even though they are not accurate, can start good discussions. i'm thinking of a film that was completely inaccurate, oliver stone's "jfk." i don't want to start a conspiracy discussion, but i think the speculations he made went from one of certainty to another absurdity, but some of you will remember there was a pretty good debate about that film. it got people thinking about kennedy and who opposed kennedy . we were talking about how everybody loves king, but at the time he was alive, not everybody loved king. that everybody loves kennedy either. i students are always amazed at that. why would they have wanted to kill this saint? it depends on the film. if the production values are good, then a film could start a good discussion about history and make people want to learn more. >> i want to throw in something about the production piece of this. my first book very strangely is the only scholarly treatment of the fbi's war on crime. i don't know why that is true. i wrote it first as a dissertation. it has actually been used repeatedly by filmmakers, both documentary filmmakers, and it was used by the people who did the johnny depp, dillinger. it was used by the clint eastwood "hoover" people. on a certain level, your work is done when you write the book. what they choose to do with it or not is their business. the part i would caution everybody about is getting involved with hollywood filmmakers. what they really want is a lot of help for free. both with the johnny depp people and with "the hoover -- with the "hoover" people, we would get to this place two hours into the conversation where i would say look, if you want all of this, you need to hire me as a consultant for the film. they go, oh, and hang up. it is a lot of uncompensated labor. you'll probably find out that they are not -- they will not tell the story you want to tell. the biggest rope about j edgar hoover was that he was a closeted homosexual who hated everybody, and everything that he did -- that is what the movie did. i have been interviewed by multiple people -- i was interviewed by multiple people on that production team and told them a very different story. they don't care. if that is the story that they bought, that is the story that they bought. i don't think historians have that great of an impact on a film once it has gone into production. >> let me add one quick thing. if you think you're going to get rich by being involved in a movie, forget it. i said done with richard attenborough, the british film maker who wanted to make a movie about tom paine. he said, i have your book. we are planning to use it. i said, that's nice. surely, you have to pay me something. buy the rights. no, no, that is public domain, he said. forget that hollywood will pay you. >> there are some great films that are historically based. i'm thinking about a film by raul peck. i'm thinking about "the great debaters." obviously, "selma," "12 years," "the butler." >> the historian can jump in after the movie comes out. the movie creates an opportunity for a conversation about subjects people are not usually talking about. "selma," we are talking about voting rights. most people are just not focused on this on a daily basis. now there is a great debate. i think that is a fortunate development, and that creates space for conversations about serious issues that otherwise it's low on the agenda of most americans. >> thank you. i appreciate -- while i appreciate what you said, you mentioned the author. i feel that you did not go far enough. he was very influenced by psychoanalysis. with regard to the professor over 10 years ago, i corresponded with you, and he wrote back to me. it had to do with psychohistory. you said to me that columbia university was a very conservative school, yet and one time the leading psycho historians in one way or another came from columbia. >> can you get to the question? >> ok. i'm almost there. i will try to be as brief as you have been. some 50 years ago the professor was the president of this organization. in his presidential address, he said this with regard to his tier are graffiti -- historiography. even the best historians are not that good. he said this -- if historians want to do a good job, they have to go into psychoanalysis. that deals with people and the unconscious. that is all i've got to say. >> interesting. does anyone have a comment? >> actually, i would say that psychoanalysis helps everybody. [laughter] i actually feel like i am a better historian because of psychoanalysis, but i would also say that as public intellectuals, it is wise -- i think the panel this morning on international public intellectuals really made this point very graphically -- when we put history out there, it has consequences, for nationalism consequences for certain kinds of public debate. one of the things i was talking to my friend martha jones about this morning is what it would mean for some of us who are committed to antiracism in our historical practice to be proactive, so we are not always responding to things like ferguson, but we are actually ready to go when they happen. in answer to your question, in order to do that, we really have to be rigorous researchers because what people don't want to hear is theory, and they don't want to hear our opinions of why people do what they do. they want actual historian context. as ellen fitzpatrick put it, did it ever happened before, will it happen again, what does it mean? that kind of ease aids the practice of psychoanalysis -- evades the practice of psychoanalysis. >> do you think the right, probably conceived, is a parallel to the left in terms of how public intellectuals function, just a different set of values, but the same institutions and motivations, or is it asymmetrical? you know, i'm thinking of the way some of the recent history that says, the right and the left are not mirror images of each other. they function in different ways. they are not equally motivated in social movements. i just wanted to throw that question out. >> i'm sure we have different opinions about that. in some ways conservatives are in a better position to be public intellectuals because they think we control the academy. that is not true in economics, but for humanists, i think it is more true than not. there are more of us on the left than there are people on the right, certainly in history, philosophy, creative literature, etc. i think that means if they want to have an impact and get paid to write, they often have to write for more popular publications. i have some good friends on the right. christopher caldwell, for example, who writes a column for "the financial times," also "the weekly standard." he never thought of writing like an academic ever. he began as a journalist in "the american spectator." there are some journals like "the claremont review," which comes out of university, but is written in a pretty sprightly manner. i hate to say it on a panel like this, but we can learn a lot from conservative intellectuals, the way they write. not all of them, of course. in terms of style and reaching the public, we could do worse than not follow the politics necessarily, but learn from how they really put forth a point of view very starkly, often very vividly, as well. >> in terms of that question there are a couple of things. the left, there are many different lefts. we've got many different segregated left public spheres that are african-american, that are clear, -- queer an old left now an old-new left. they are geriatric. [laughter] i'm not saying that as a criticism. i'm saying that as a empirical fact. even stokely he was born june 20, 1941. if he was alive today, he would be 73 years old. it's just an empirical fact. [laughter] what is interesting for all of us when we think about left versus right what i think left public intellectuals and think tanks should do is really be antiracist and anti-sexist and anti-homophobia. what it does, you've got all of these think tanks. you've got center for american progress. most of those are very monolithic and homogenous in terms of the character of who is producing that thought, almost without question. you are going to have queer blogs. you're going to have african-american websites like the root, the grio. that is its own public intellectual site. one of the worst things that we have, and i think both obama's election and ferguson brought this to the four, is just how segregated political thought is in the united states, even in the 21st century, whether it's cnn, the kennedy school, wherever you go. they might be progressive, but they are progressives who are segregationists. michelle alexander talks about the new jim crow. it's not just about mass incarceration. it's about the way we teach our graduate students. it's about what we study. everybody is talking about slavery and capitalism. many people are not citing clr james. they are not citing dubois and black reconstruction. you've got new people doing tremendous things, but they are still segregating the scholarship. we do it in the public, as well. that is why it's so important when we have public intellectuals, because there are six people this author looks at, and three of them are women. ida b. wells was a public intellectual. she is a radical activist and a thinker we should all be reading. i started grad school when i was 20 years old and one of the most apprising things to me about graduate school was the way in which white colleagues were not reading black political thought. they just wouldn't read it. people who were interested in democracy, they were interested in tom hayden, abolitionism. you say, what about "black reconstruction"? not interested. why not? my professors haven't told me to read this. we segregated this public. we have a right wing, left wing, but we don't want to acknowledge that the left is segregated. we can do something about it as public intellectuals by calling people out that we've got to converge and have conversations with each other. it's not just "the new republic." it is other forms that have not allowed queer people or people of color to be part of the debate. >> back to mike's comment and nelson's question, the right did invest a lot of money in creating outlets for public intellectuals, and i know there is a disconnect with part of the anti--- anti-intellectualism in the conservative movement. i think now the left in some ways, whatever the left is at parts of the left, have tried to rip it that, whether it is "american prospect" or the center for american progress. i don't know if they have caught up, but it is a period that is probably interesting to study. the right, i think there are parts of the right that take ideas very seriously. i'm sure many people you don't like or agree with, but fierce and promoting the role of the intellectual in revitalizing and strengthening conservatism. i think there are probably lessons that can be teased out from how they did it. i also just want to add. one medivation -- motivation on the panel is an activist public intellectual. i think there is a role for a commentator. to me, it is how washington works. that is what drove me. i come from a family of rabbis. i'm just trying to teach everyone. figure out ways to impart knowledge. i think that part of how historians are public intellectuals should also be thought of and nurtured. there needs to be space for that. i think there are many scholars who have contributed in that way, too. it is important public debate. it is important to add to what you get, which is usually very thin from the media. not that it's bad, because that is how much space they have, but that is another tradition. >> you can definitely do both. he talked about a family of rabbis. rabbi #and dr. king, doing both. sometimes, our commentary is what becomes part of that transformative -- >> today can be integrated. some people do it with a disconnect. i think has show -- heschel is a great tradition. there are different kinds of public intellectual activism we have to think about. >> if i can just throw one thing in. we actually do have those institutions. the right had to build them, but the left has been. years ago, i was in a seminar with andre shifrin. one of the things he talked about was the future of publishing might be with the unions. it was really the unions that had the structure, the financing, the way to actually put stuff out there that nobody else would publish. when you think of expanding that to the lesbian-gay task force the hrc, the naacp, planned parenthood, emily's list, there are institutions on the left that are raising millions and millions of dollars, and it doesn't cost that much to support one or two scholars for a year to get a book out to really let congress know how conception happens. [laughter] >> as someone who co-edits a left-wing magazine, and i know people who edit right-wing magazines, right-wing people believe in funding ideas. left-wing people with money usually believe in funding activism, as if ideas over -- are over here and activism is over there. it is a realistic. planned parenthood doesn't have a lot of historians, i don't think, writing for it. they might have one. the heritage foundation and aei and cato have lots of people writing for them. they get paid very well to write the kind of stuff -- that kind of stuff. >> keith very, hillsboro community college, tampa florida. as public intellectuals, have any of you ever written anything that you regret? [laughter] >> i did actually. it was probably one of the things of mine that got circulated all over the place. it was a piece that "the washington post" asked about -- was george w. bush the worst president in american history? i think this is a debate that historians should resist jumping at. somehow, maybe for the reasons michael pointed out, i jumped at it and wrote a column about why george w. bush was the worst president in american history. it was polemical obviously, but it had historical fact and it, too, here or there. [laughter] i compared him to other bad presidents. looking back, it probably wasn't a very well-considered thing. than a reporter for "usa today" asked president bush about this in an interview. he said, this historian has said you are the worst president in american history, and bush gave the right answer. he said, we will let future historians judge that. this is not the time to make that judgment, and he was right about that. yes, when you write quickly -- and i don't have a blog -- probably there are many things that you later on might say, i'm not so sure i want to have that on my tombstone. >> as the person who has probably published more things that i regret than anyone else in the room, it is one of the costs of writing quickly. it is one of the costs of being responsive to current events. i try to stick to writing about things that i know well enough to be able to stand behind, but sometimes, i write rings -- things either that i'm not as well informed about as i should be, or that are so controversial that i actually wish i hadn't spent the energy on them that i had. one of these is a series of posts i did about a boycott. it cost me more trouble than the duke lacrosse case in the end. i became the object of some really horrifying behavior, and i would not say that i'm sorry about what i wrote but if i had to do it over again, i wouldn't do it, because it wasn't worth it. one of the things to think about if you are putting your stuff out there it's not just, am i willing to stand behind these views, but am i willing to suffer for these views? >> i second what claire said. i wrote one column criticizing the bds movement, and i still hear about it. one of the things i most regret -- this comes from when i was still young and starting to be a left-wing journalist -- i wrote a four or five part series on how great north korea was. [laughter] that was the original kim in power, kim mill june -- kim il-sung. [laughter] i should have suspected something, because all of the north korean sources i was using called him the iron willed come and are in every sentence. i really thought i had done something great. i got an invitation to go to pyongyang, all-expenses-paid. i said, sure. why not? they said, please, bring your wife. i told them i wasn't married and then they canceled out the invitation. i guess maybe they thought i would of scone with a north korean woman. i don't know what they thought. either way, they found out i wasn't married. the invitation to tour this paradise of socialism was canceled. >> this is a lesson in social media. when joe wilson yelled out "you lie!", i wrote a piece that wasn't really about that as much as about how congress has been a raucous place. i did a quick history of other infamous moments when congress has done outrageous things stuff like joanne freeman talking about how they used to fight and have guns and beat each other senseless. that was basically the light story, but to put the context of the institution. i learned people don't often read a column. this was right when the tea party was wrapping up. suddenly, this became a column attacking joe wilson. once it got so severe, the university contacted the fbi. the fbi investigated this guy who written -- have written me who said, i'm going to come and beat you senseless. this unfortunately is part of the new media because it is very easy to get comments out to reach people. when you are a university professor, you can't hide how to get comments. i wish i could just take this thing away. it's not worth that kind of heat. i've learned to get used to that. it didn't go away, but it is part of the new media world. >> hi, i am jane carr. i just want to thank all of the panelists for sharing their biographies of public intellectuals. i want to pick up on a concrete comment you had about suggesting media training as a part of graduate education, to ask if panelists overall would reflect or share examples from or elaborate on how they mentor graduate students and junior scholars who show desire or initiative or perhaps already have experience doing public intellectual work and ways in which those colleagues may have mentored you. >> i think it is very haphazard right now. i would like to call your attention to an article in "perspectives" a couple of years ago in which a group of us put together a protocol for tweeting panels. it was becoming clear that a lot of people were using twitter in the context of conventions like this one, and that there needed to be some agreement on what was an ethical use of twitter in that context. the vast majority of people still do not know these protocols. i think they should be part of the app that was distributed for this meeting, but they include things like asking permission if you're going to tweet, which i always do. are people who feel like they can't speak freely if they are being turned into public intellectuals against their will. they think they are in a ballroom at the hilton, and yet they are out in the world screening through a megaphone. i think the recent whatever you want to call it, the withdrawal of the 10 year offer -- tenured offer to steven's colada, should be a warning shot across the bow that if faculty and students don't begin to talk to each other about what we are doing when we use social media universities will begin to make policy for us, and it will be very draconian. there have been incidents of at least five scholars recently some on the right, some on the left, some who just made a mistake -- my colleague eric tweeted something about the nra that nearly did get him fired and also brought a lot of nasty criticism and death threats on him from nra supporters. i think it is something we have to talk about. we can't act as though our scholarly lives are separated from social media lives. actually, all of the young scholars coming up are on social media now. i think it has to be part of the training not just to think about the multiple venues that will help you get your workout, but what does it mean to be a responsible member of the social media community? i would include facebook. i see things on facebook that i actually think are deeply and profoundly unwise, and i love facebook. >> in terms of mentoring grad students for junior faculty, i think the biggest thing has to be one, to do the academic and scholarly work, because we are not being trained to be public intellectuals. it is just growing out of you being a professional-trained historian. if anything, if you are in grad school, i would recommend focusing on your research, the historiography, turning the dissertation into a book, and not writing blog posts. most of the time, that is taking up too much time. everyone here is a tenured professor. they are fine. they are set. some of them are more set than others. i would say the big training before any of that is getting your scholarship done, and once you have your scholarship done, once you have that book that is going to tenure you come and you have the energy to work on a second project and blog and do this stuff, i would say, that's great. one anecdotal thing -- i have had young scholars who have asked me for advice, and i have given it to them, but these are folks who have published their first book and have a tremendous amount of energy. i do agree with what claire was saying. we have to tell our young people that you can't use twitter and just be angry. i have seen twitter accounts that are crazy. you are saying, people check this, and you may not get a job. the politics, left, right whatever -- they are simply angry and rude politics. the nra can go to -- if you can't write a twitter post that your mom would be fine with, i would say, don't write it. if you can't write something that you can't proudly show your mother, don't write it. that is what is getting people into all kinds of trouble. >> i've done that. i have done this miller center thing. i generally dissuade people from doing it, both because they need to now become scholars and get the job, and two, it is so polarized out there. when you send, you just don't know what is going to happen. something that seems kind of monday and or interesting but not explosive can turn can hurt you career-wise. i have a graduate student -- some of my graduate students have heard this from me -- i will help, but i'm also very cautious. i had a graduate student who started recently. i met him for the first time in person. i said, you've got to get off her twitter. i looked it up. it was fine, the twitter. there was just a lot of it. i don't know. it's nerve-racking because this stuff survives. i don't know how it is going to work with jobs and publishing. i don't know if that was the right thing to say, but that was my advice. >> a slight disagreement. of course, when you write a dissertation, you shouldn't be writing op ads, but at the same time, i think this is particularly true of u.s. history -- i think there is nothing wrong with picking a topic that you think will be more popular, will get you into more of a public dialogue. a couple of my graduate students are here, and they have heard me say a lot of times -- good writing is good writing. my agent also eric's agent, give me the best piece of advice about writing history. one cannot assume interest. [laughter] a lot of historians assume interest. they narrow themselves down at the beginning. look, there are wonderful medieval historians out there. i'm not the kind of person. those historians will have a harder time writing op ads clearly. if you do the kind of history that all of the people on this panel do, then i don't think there is anything wrong with thinking come as you are finishing your dissertation, how can i turn this, how can i get this better publicized? i do try to get my students to think about that, not when they are in the middle of orals or in the middle of doing research, but as they are ending their dissertations. after all, as i said, what is the point of writing something unless people read it? >> i'm going to contradict myself. he is right in that practically given the direction of publishing, like it or not, you have to find ways in u.s. history to have work that will have some appeal to a dying press. i edited at princeton university press. they are looking at books that don't have mass commercial value but have that niche. it matters now if you want to get published. i don't think you can tailor it just to that, but it has to be in your mind. it is going to be a reality in publishing now. >> i would also say one more thing about the pitch, which is a learned skill. it's not that different from the first paragraph out of your mouth when you are interviewing for a job. it's the kind of thing -- we now use the wikipedia exercise for undergraduates -- it is the kind of thing that actually teach us something about how to operate in another mode that is also very useful to your scholarship. >> hi, i work on the emma goldman papers. i consider emma goldman to have been one of the great public intellectuals of our time. i totally respect everybody on the panel, so it has been a real joy. i guess i'm very aware of the fact that to be a public intellectual, you also have to have a certain amount of privilege. for example, when i think of emma goldman, i think, she was an immigrant. her citizenship was sort of iffy. if you are too eloquent and two out there, then you are more vulnerable. one of the things i wanted to say is that almost all of the government records that i have on emma before her deportation, and also clay carson, before martin luther king got shot, was all about their eloquence. that was something that was terrifying to the powers that be. i just think that there is power in words, as you were saying but i also think there's an element -- you were saying that you are all faculty and everything, but i think you have to encourage people. you also have to protect other people who are in a more vulnerable position based on race, country, citizenship, to be able to speak, as well. >> i think that is true, candace. not to return to a subject that is far more complex than we have time for, but i actually can't think what more we could have done for stephen soleda. it didn't work. it is not just our privilege. it is the institutions we work in. it is being proactive about establishing our rights and our academic freedom in those institutions. i went to a panel yesterday on the 150th anniversary of the aaup, and it was really very instructive about the ways in which academic freedom has not always been the gold standard for the aaup and that the academy evolved in an atmosphere in which the aaup said for academic freedom in principle but not really in practice. we can say it is about privilege, but it gives us very little to act on. we did act, thousands of us, in relation to stephen, and it didn't do anything. that is why i'm saying i think we need to turn to our institutions. wesley and protected me. you might say, it's the privilege of that institution. they do not rely on taxpayers but i think there are broader principles to protect. that is going to take a certain amount of activism on our part, to make these issues public. >> i would follow up on that. i think the task -- julian called it activist public intellectuals -- historians as public intellectuals are activists, whether they intend to be or not. what we can do from the position of our ebony and ivory towers is use of -- is utilize that and bring in these other voices. go out to the community. roxbury, dorchester, people who have no former connection to task, we brought them onto the campus, and we do free workshops. it's not just talking. it is listening, as well. how can we use all the resources at a place like tops -- tufts has? they're not necessarily prospective students. they are students that are at risk, young people. some of them are community organizers. some of them are ex-convicts who are trying to make a different way. when they come to campus, they find it extraordinary. some of them have never been to a university campus, and they find out what we do and the discussions we are having. we connect with what they are interested in. some of them are interested in things like gentrification and how it is impacting them. that is happening in new york, as well. we can be not only public intellectuals and historians but people who are shaping policy debates at the local level wherever we are at. it is important for those of us who are privileged enough to have gotten tenure -- for somebody like me, i am in the history department, with the whole field of african american studies coming out of the 1960's, certainly there is dubois and the 19th-century version, but the institutionalization into the american academy was a fraught institutionalization through protest. some places just capitulated because it was a social movement. in the context of a black wives people want to find out more because there is this social movement. in the 1960's and 1970's, these programs came because people were protesting. part of what we are doing is trying to provide access to people who don't have access. >> i think i was misunderstood slightly. [indiscernible] as successful as you are reaching other people, you can be sure that that is considered a danger to the country. [laughter] eloquence is much more powerful. >> we have a few more minutes. let's try to get the final two questions. >> my name is the glenna matthews. i plead guilty to being a geriatric lefty. [laughter] i want to just briefly say something, and then i have a substantive question. just to give some historic perspective, my first publication was in "the nation" 40 years ago, and it was called "women of the boycott," and it was based on a co-authored article. i got one letter. i was teaching at san jose state at the time. oh! i'm a public intellectual. i didn't think that, because i didn't have the term, but that was the general idea. i opened the letter, and the letter -- i'm paraphrasing -- d olores huerta turns me on and because you wrote that letter, you do too. then it went to body parts. you don't have to have the internet to get really weird responses. my substantive question is, something that we haven't talked about yet at all is the public that is school kids and high school kids. i think it is so important for academic historians to feel -- not just writing textbooks which is important, but what other ways to have engaging our young people? the right is absolutely determined to push back against -- we see what is going on in texas, that one school district in colorado. do you have any thoughts about that? >> let's get the next question. >> you made a comment about medievalists. i was actually just wondering if anybody on the panel had any examples of somebody or ideas or comments on historians who work more in an early modern or premodern period, if there is a place for them, or do you feel there is a place for them as a public historian? even perhaps as an activist with that particular area of research. >> i want to briefly address -- i think people are doing it. others are speaking, making sure that high school students get -- whether it is civil rights or the history of slavery -- i do and my center does a lot of outreach that is free and open to the public, both middle schoolers and highschooler's. i think you are right. they are not getting this history. i have worked with different people in boston foundations and such, to make sure that is happening, especially in predominantly african-american high schools. there is a debate over common core. i think one of the scandals of high school history is that african-american history is often not taught. many of my suburban students from tufts have never had one unit of african-american history. they are 18 years old, and it still hasn't happened. there are some school districts where every child has to have a unit of african-american history. people like greg carr worked on that textbook. one of the things historians have to do, even if it's not your discipline, we should be collectively as a unit making the case that african-american history has to be taught in high school, so that by the time our students are coming to us, they have at least had one or more units of african-american history. >> i would like to take this opportunity to make a pitch for outhistory.org, which is a website i work on with my colleague jonathan amelio, one of the original activists in our community. the site was founded by jonathan that katz, who wrote the first book called "gay american history," which itself was an act of public intellectual work. in a broader sense, i would like to make a pitch for digital humanities, which can get primary sources, teaching materials, short, critical essays biographies chronologies. this is the kind of work out history does. you can do it for any field. it often gives teachers and under resourced districts materials they can work with that they wouldn't otherwise have. it gives students who are not getting this history in schools the opportunity to access it over the internet and over mobile devices. one of the things we are really aiming at at out history is making it available on mobile devices. most homeless gay, lesbian trans youth are connected to the internet through smartphones. that is how they get jobs and housing. begin to investigate the ways in which a digital humanities projects can actually put your work out there in a scholarly fashion that speaks to multiple audiences. >> material>> offers a way around the curriculum problem, meaning the way policy is not structured since no child left behind, there is not a lot of flexibility in how the school will reorient its curriculum. it is geared towards these tests. never you speak at one of the programs that the government has for teachers -- and i try to do that -- you will go for hours and have a great conversation. at the end, they say it's great, but we can't use any of it. the curriculum is pretty hardwired, and they don't let it deviate. that is a policy problem. material is something that can be incorporated. it can be incorporated outside the classroom. it is a way to get new kinds of items in front of students. i think there is a policy problem for the public school part of the equation. it is very hard to shift almost anything at this point. >> yeah, i agree. i think we do have an obligation to try to -- like the others here, i speak all the time at pre-collegiate teacher conferences and run these seminars in the summer for teachers. the problem today is not only ignorance of history but the retreat from teaching history in schools. i hate to say this. a friend of mine is very involved in education reform issues and said to me, i never thought i would say this, but thank god there are only two more years for the obama administration. education matters -- are not going to say who is the worst president in history anymore -- they are terrible, absolutely terrible. on the point of view of history it's terrible. no child left behind does not include history. top-notch schools can teach it. >> the bush -- [laughter] >> my old friend taught in england. every president makes his predecessor look good. a sad commentary. yes, we do need to talk to high school students, high school teachers precollegiately. >> i did not want to end without addressing the second question. if you're not a u.s. historian, which all of us are -- though i am a leftist, i think continuity matters. if you write about the catholic church, that has been a run for a while. you can draw on what folks have done -- popes have done and compare them to what france is the string. environmental history is becoming an exciting part of the profession. the environment didn't suddenly emerge 200 years ago. [laughter] one of my colleagues, john mcneil has done great environmental history, looking back at how wars have affected the environment the kind of thing you can draw on to talk about how the environment in the middle east has been affected by almost constant war. human history, as we know, it's a cliché, but it's pretty damn short. you may have to be a little bit more careful to get people to care about anglo-saxon history in "the new york times" or on msnbc, but think about why you chose your subject, what your passion is. her most people, it is not historiographic. you couldn't wait to demolish that book published 10 years ago. it is usually something much more immediate sometimes personal political. i think that will draw you towards trying to convert it into something more interesting to a wider audience. >> you are going to bring the session to an end. thanks to the panelists, the audience, everybody. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> the battle of new orleans was the final major battle of the war of 1812, fought after the british and americans signed the treaty of ghent in 1814. join an american history tv as we visit new orleans for a bicentennial commemoration of the battle tonight at 6:30 eastern on c-span3's american history tv. >> the political landscape has changed with the 100 14th congress. not only are there 43 new republicans and 50 new democrats in the house and 12 new republicans and one new democrat in the senate, there are also 100 eight women in congress, including the first african-american republican in the house. keep track of the members of congress using congressional chronicle on c-span.org. the page has lots of useful information, including voting results and statistics about each session. new >> h week american history tv's reel america rings you archival films help tell

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