hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm chatting with Alan Tor who is Professor of history at the University of Virginia he could plausibly be considered America's greatest living historian he's written numerous books on colonial America Native Americans the revolutionary period the early now mid and partly latter part of the 19th century he is one of only very few
people to have won two Pitzer prizes let me stress the new book publication date May 21st is American Civil Wars a continental history 1850 to 1873 I enjoyed reading this very much learned a great deal from it Allan welcome well thank you Tyler I really appreciate having the chance to talk with you let's start with the revolutionary period we will work up to the topics in your book
but initially why did only the 133 colonies declare independence so there's this thing we later call Canada to the north why aren't they part of this well it's also all these British colonies in the West Indies like jamaic Antigua and Barbados uh if if you look at the population figures the the places that Rebel are the places that have the largest populations and they're
connected with each other so there is a greater confidence that you can resist militarily whereas if you're one of these islands or you're one of these small colonies to the north you're very tenuous and you're very dependent on the British royal Navy and that means that there's a higher threshold in order to build up the confidence to rebel and what's the influence of New France on
this process well in Canada at that time you had a French speaking majority and a Catholic majority and recently meaning 1774 the British had mollified the French Canadians by basically endorsing their system of law and their religion and protecting it by law and that's one of the things that alienated the 13 colonies that were very much against Catholicism at that time so the French
Canadians were you know the devil we know well which is the British Empire is better than the devil that we fear even more which is the the Protestant colonist to their South now here's a quotation from your writings page 37 quote one of the great ironies of the American Revolution was that it led to virtually free land for settlers in British Canada while
rendering land more expensive in the United States unquote could you explain that please sure the war was very expensive so all the states and the United States also incurred immense debts well how are you going to pay for that um this is a time there's no income tax and the chief ways in which governments could raise money were on uh import duties and then on selling land and
there was a lot of land provided you could take it away from native peoples and so all of the states and the United States were in the business of trying to sell land but also the Reliant within the states on these land taxes and all of these go up then to try to finance the war debt whereas in British Canada the British government is subsidizing the local government they're paying the
full afraid of it which means that local taxes were much lower there and it ALS meant that they could afford to basically give away land to attract settlers so they had this notion that if we offer free land to Americans um they will want to leave that new American Republic move back into the British Empire strengthen Canada and provide a militia to defend it so if we think of
people who left the original American colonies how many of them do you think were leaving for political reasons and how many were leaving because the land up north was cheaper I would say about a third of them are leaving for iCal reasons and most of those leave very early in the 1780s and then there is a larger number uh 2third of the overall total who are going during the 1790s in
the early 19th century and for them they're not particularly political their motivation is that they can get this free land and this lower tax burden by moving into British Canada we shouldn't exaggerate the numbers however we're we're we're talking about you know relatively small numbers something in the vicinity of about 50,000 people at most and that's a small portion of the
millions that lived in the United States if we think of the American Revolution as at some point being a kind of surprise is there any evidence on how asset prices reacted to that surprise which is the question an economist would ask it's it's a great question well assets are greatly depreciated during the war because this these colonies in the new United States highly dependent
on transatlantic trade and so if you've got the Royal Navy which for almost all of the war is dominating the Atlantic it's very difficult to send out American produce to European and West Indian markets and it's very difficult to import goods and so economists who've looked at the impact on the of the American Revolution on the economy in the short term meaning essentially 1775 until um 1790
uh estimate that the economy shrank by a third which would make it the the second greatest depression in all of American History so assets were were greatly depreciated until there's a new federal government and there's Peace So that during the 1790s there comes a boom which more than restores the lost property values of the 1780s in general why did the British find it easier to mobilize Native
American Americans as allies is it just because they were less expansionist well it's basically again comes down to population numbers so you have approximately 2 and a half million people living in the 13 colonies their population is doubling every 22 years so this is the fastest population growth of any place on Earth at that time and they are an agricultural people
overwhelmingly 95% of americ made their living by agriculture at that time and as the population doubles they want the Next Generation to have the same standard of living which means they need twice as much land and so they're expanding um and meanwhile the British are their population is at that time during the war is based in Canada and it's much smaller so the British are just running
a few small forts in the west and they need native help to defend those forts against American Amer expansion so native peoples are calculating the enemy of my enemy as my friend and they see the British as providing them with Firearms to resist the American expansion and so for the great majority of native peoples the British Empire is the better bet in order to maintain their hold on their
homelands fast forwarding to the War of 1812 which you've written an excellent book about why couldn't the then more than 7 million Americans overwhelm the what 3 to 500 ,000 I've seen different estimates British subjects in what we now call Canada well certainly American leaders thought it would be easy Thomas Jefferson said it would be a mere matter of marching and it turns out Wars are
always more difficult than their uh projectors imagine uh the United States had virtually no professional military at that time they had an army that was essentially 9,000 men spread very thin off over a very large country uh so they're going to have to build up their army very very fast which meant that they were sending people uh into combat um with virtually no
training and they are going into a difficult landscape in order to try to supply them so the logistical lines were very long in order to support troops that are going into Canada and so almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong and then these American forces start to suffer for defeats which then leads a lot of the American public to say what are we doing here the Madison
Administration which had declared war was counting on winning some early victories in order to boost public support for the war and when they don't get those early victories instead they get some catastrophic defeats then suddenly everything gets much more difficult it's also the British had some good troops there were they weren't numerous but they were better trained
troops than the Americans had and they also had the support of native peoples which turns out to be an enormous asset when you're fighting in a landscape which is largely forested and that's because of supply lines and food well the British have better supply lines because uh in that's a world in which things move more easily by water and so the British supply line is basically the
Great Lakes connecting to the St Lawrence River so it's a lot easier for them to move supplies and their Manpower than it is for the Americans who are trying to go over from one Watershed into another one so they're trying to go from the Atlantic Watershed into the Great Lakes Watershed and British are much better established in the Great Lakes Watershed and why you know looking after
the war why is there never a third war with Britain as so many people had expected what what did those prognostications get wrong well what they get wrong is that the United States is the most important export market for British goods and the United States relies on Britain for um most of its manufactured goods U now I'm talking about the 1820s the 1830s also America is a capital
deficient country at that time it is a landr country but it is relatively labor poor and it is capital poor there is a push to develop a transportation infrastructure in the United States the form of canals and then railroads the United States does not have enough Capital to develop these things so it's British investment that makes possible the development of
American infrastructure and so a lot of American states and American corporations that are emerging at that time are highly dependent on British capital and and they really don't want war to erupt and America cotton exporters are very dependent on the British Market American wheat exporters are very dependent on the British market so there are such powerful economic interests that lead
people to draw back from the brink and there are a lot of Brinks during this period in which there are tensions between Britain and the United States but the interesting thing is they don't lead to war was there ever a chance of a union invasion of Canada right after the US Civil War there's a chance because that is one of the periods in which there's a lot of tension that's built up the northern
leaders and the northern public were very angry at Britain because they had allowed the Confederacy to obtain some very powerful and effective warships uh the British had allowed a recognition of the Confederacy a partial recognition of the Confederacy in the form of seeing them as a belligerent and this this really alienated a lot of Americans toward Britain who felt that Britain was
insufficiently supportive of the effort to suppress this Rebellion so there there was a lot of talk and and and there's a lot of triumphalism because the Union forces in April of 1865 have been so triumphant and the United States is one of the largest and best militaries in the world which which was unprecedented in American history so there was a lot of talk about well let's even scores by
taking Canada uh but then on the other side of the Ledger is that most of the public while they didn't like Britain and kind of liked the idea of adding Canada they wanted their boys to come home um it had been a long hard deadly war and most of the people just wanted the Army to be demobilized so it's remarkable out at how quickly the Union Army was demobilized and once that happens any
kind of organized invasion of Canada vanishes under the counterfactual would America have won that war an invasion of can yes they would have won the war absolutely at that point because they had an organized military you know the British had essentially about 12,000 troops and the union had about a million so uh it it would have been very one-sided now the British royal Navy was is probably still
better than the American Navy so there would have been a lot of collateral damage to seaports like Boston or New York City because the the Royal Navy could have come in and done some some real damage there uh so it would not have been um it would not have been a war in which there was not a lot of suffering on the part of the Americans but it's a war in which if the goal was
to conquer Canada that could have been readily done flesh out the whole picture for me now is this why the British North America Act comes in 1867 yes I mean the the Canadian leaders have a set of problems one of the problems is there's there was a Canadian Union but it's just between what we now call Ontario and Quebec uh Quebec was frankophone and um what would become Ontario is anglophone
and so there's an uneasy relationship there politicians of All Sorts say this can't go on so one of the ideas they had was let's bring in some more Partners let's bring in the Maritime Provinces New Brunswick nov Scotia Prince Edward Island New Finland and maybe we can also expand to the Pacific at that time there was another British colony um British Columbia and then the Hudson Bay Company
in theory owned all the Territory between British Columbia and what's now Ontario so there were Visionaries who said let's build a transcontinent Country and this might help us solve the anglophone frankophone problem well you're bringing in a lot more angones so one of the things that you offer to the French Canadians is okay this will be a looser Union this will be one where
you'll have more autonomy for Quebec than you currently have and that becomes acceptable to most French Canadians now the other thing about it is they're also Canadian leaders are looking to the South and saying okay the immediate danger may be over of an American Invasion but there's going be tension again with Britain in the United States and we need to be in a better
position to defend ourselves the final factor is that British leaders were getting tired of footing the bill for defending Canada and they want the Canadians to pay for it so all of those factors lead into the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867 short of an American invasion is there a meaningful counterfactual where Nova Scotia and New Finland become part
of the United States yes and what does that look like well what it looks like is the people in The Maritime Provinces weren't so sure that they wanted to be linked with Canada they had um much more robust trading relationship with the United States um because they're martime oriented there was no railroad at that time linking the maritimes to Canada so there were a fair number of politicians
in Nova Scotia For Whom the first option would be let's just maintain Ain the status quo we're an independent Colony we're our own little world and we have trading relations with the United States okay second option is let's join Canada and that that's seems a little dodgy to a lot of people third option which some people put on the table is well let's leave the British Empire and join the
United States because that's our primary market and uh so everything was on the table in the 1860s and early 1870s as to what North America would look like in terms of uh what we now call Canada this is a bit of a digression but how is it that New Finland ended up as a kind of independent Crown Colony for a big part of the 20th century given that there was the act in 1867 they then
separate again what's the story there well they're in they're a separate British colony and they have a very small population uh in the 1860s 1870s uh the economy is ENT does one thing fishing and the market for their fish is the British is they don't really see any economic reason to be linked to Canada they see very powerful reasons to remain linked to the British Empire so they're not an
independent country but they're a distinctive colony and they will remain a British colony separate from Canada until the late 1940s if we look at Canada today we see as you know extremely high levels of immigration people from all over the world uh do you in any way see this as rooted in Canada's earlier history do you have a different perspective on that
for you is it a kind of continuity or reversal or well Canada has long been a country that has wanted to have more immigrants and so they have aggressively recruited immigrants um ever since since the later 19th century and one of the powerful considerations is they look at the size of their country terms of just Geographic size and it's just a notch larger than the United
States but most of that country is Arctic and subarctic but even despite that fact the population density in Canada uh within the temperate zone which is approximately within 200 miles of the American Border that longs stretch from the Pacific to Nova Scotia uh is still underpopulated relative to the United States now there they part of that Corridor is well populated that's particularly in aariel
and Quebec but Points West uh and uh points in the maritimes it seems to Canadians that if they want to develop their economic potential uh and retain you know some sort of relatively modest equilibrium with the United States that they need more people and so they've been um setting quotas in recent years that are up to 500,000 immigrants annually which for country of
Canada's size of about 32 million is is you know a significant number it adds up over time so right now the proportion of people in Canada who are of foreign birth is is rising but there there's also developing some push back against that because it is contributing to uh inflation in the urban centers you mean just housing prices and rents housing prices and and medical
costs too um because they're they're committed in Canada to um public health care it's been a system that's been very very popular um because it's been effective but right now there are strains on it because of the numbers of people people and uh Public Funding for it has not quite kept pace with either inflation or the numbers of people who want to use the system a very general question you've
written about this in a number of your books but many early commentators especially in Britain in in Canada even in America some of the founding fathers they were very afraid the American Republic was going to collapse that it was too large too chaotic some thought too Democratic what exactly did they get wrong the people who thought that what did they fail to see because those
arguments did not sound crazy at the time right no they didn't sound crazy at the time and you know then they weren't crazy to worry about it in that the United States did fall apart in 1860 to 1861 and it took an enormous effort a very expensive effort in terms of lives and money to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and so they had spent a long time ever since 1776 worrying about
what actually did happen in 1860 to 1861 so you could say well yeah they fended it off for 90 years um but there's a recurrent sense of Crisis within the American Republic through much of that period of time because there's just fear that some region within the country would be growing too po too powerful or there's a recurrent U fear that the country is getting too
large uh you're getting Americans and now live on the Pacific coast it was an open question whether those American states would spinoff and create their own country uh so a lot of things still seem to be possible it's also important to remember that the form of government that they were gambling on a republic had not worked very well in the past in Europe and it had never been tried on
this Geographic scale so they don't yet have the confidence that their institutions will be durable surviving the Civil War is an enormous confidence booster that the United States will hold together despite its great internal diversity and despite its Geographic scale but before that success in Civil War that confidence was absent and let's say circus 1780 what were General opinions like concerning
the Swiss Confederacy that was seen as okay a failure big success it doesn't seem it was very wealthy then right uh Switzerland is is almost never mentioned in in American writings of that period if they want to talk about um republics they're much more likely to talk about the Netherlands uh so Switzerland is kind of out of sight out of mind for Americans and do you think it was by
anyone view it as a success or just it didn't matter well if they paid attention to it all then they would think okay that's that's pretty good they they've got a Confederacy it's been fairly long lasting but it's um it's a small country and it was a Confederacy that was very loose at that time that that's what a fair number of Americans thought they wanted at the
start of the 1780s but by the end of the 1780s most of the top leadership in the American states had come to the conclusion that they needed something stronger than the kind of Confederacy that you'd see in Switzerland that they needed something that could be more truly a national government one where the government at the center could make decisions that would be binding on all
13 states so Switzerland recedes as a potential model as the United States experiences so many difficulties with its loose Confederation during the 1780s how Democratic were the jacksonians anyway your Mentor Marvin Meyers he wrote on this a great deal as I'm sure you know yes he did um and he wrote extremely well about it okay it depends on how we want to define a democracy yeah let's let's take
the kind of definition that we would use today in which we're saying well it's the vast majority of adults get to participate in making the political decisions that will affect them by that standard the jacksonians aren't particularly Democratic because they they're not keen to expand the vote to African-Americans um to say the least and they were not keen to open up
political rights to women so the great majority of adults in the United States were not included in the political system as direct participants now if we say okay by the standards of the 19th century in the transatlantic World women were were just not considered to be political participants anywhere uh and we're just talking about the male electorate then you would say the jacksonians were democratizers in
that in most of the states they have broadened the electorate by eliminating the property requirement to vote so but they have not eliminated the gender requirement that you be male and they have not eliminated the racial requirement that you be white uh African-Americans even were free could vote only in the New England states at that time and and in New York
if they met a property requirement which was pretty high so it's it's not what we would considered democratic but it is more democratic than what had preceded the jacksonians in so far as you view the Jacksonian period differently from your Mentor how does that difference shape your view of 1850 to 1873 which is what you cover in your new book well I agree with um with Myers on most
things what I would what I might you know Myers was not he of a generation where the Focus was less on Race than it has become and thinking about American history so that's not an important dimension of his one great book Jacksonian persuasion and so the role of American expansion into the West at the expense of native peoples is just what was not on his agenda now that's not to
criticize him it's to say he was focused on political culture and that political culture he brilliantly illuminated but if we expand out the story and literally to think about American expansion then it's it looks like a somewhat different story not an entirely different story because the political culture is very much as Marvin Myers described but if we also bring in just how obsessed
American leaders were at that time with racial difference and at their sense of being beered by the British Empire and that there's this very defensive expansionism that American leaders commit the country to and so I would say that that expansionism the the the bill that has to be paid for it comes due in the 1850s in that the United States States had had a a magnificent military success
over a weak country Mexico during the late 1840s they have conquered 40% of Mexico extremely valuable potential territory including California Arizona New Mexico and then the issue becomes okay what kind of Labor system will be allowed by law in this conquered territory will it be the labor system that prevails in the northern states of free labor or will be the labor the more mixed
labor system of the South where enslaved people are a critical element of the economy and these economic questions are linked to visions of what's the good Society Northerners had had become quite committed to the notion that they had a superior system and Southerners had become quite committed to the notion that their system was Superior at um at favoring white men and at favoring
Republican govern government so the the two systems have evolved in parallel but now they're going to come into conflict over what sort of Labor system will prevail in this newly conquered territory and is a civil war inevitable by that point well historians don't like to say that anything's inevitable uh but I'll come closer to it than than the great majority of
historians would do it's very hard for me to imagine how the leaders of that time given how committed they were to different systems and how committed they were to the notion that only their system could support free government that I don't quite see how they could have reached a compromise there was an effort in early 1861 to reach a compromise that would have said slavery is protected forever and the
federal government can never touch it that the West would be divided between the the two systems the geographic line that would be extended across the continent uh and that there would be certain restrictions on what the federal government could do in terms of protecting Industries with high tariffs and neither side was willing to accept that compromise there were people
wanted the compromise particularly in in the board States places like Kentucky and and Virginia that were were kind of keen for that kind of compromise but but the most of the North had become committed to the notion that the United States was a nation where the majority should Rule and the deeper South had commit become committed to the proposition that they could not be United in the same
country with with uh a northern public that favored a true nation and so I I just I I really don't see the juncture between 1850 and 1861 where any other kind of arrangement could have averted a conflict how did proximity to Mexico destabilize slavery in Texas Mexico had abolished slavery now they do have a coercive labor system it's called debt page and it involves many Mexicans but
it is not the same thing as buying and selling human beings in perpetuity meaning into future Generations so enslaved people in Texas are relatively close to Mexico uh it's not easy to get across the border um but you do have several thousand African-Americans who are escaping from slavery in Texas and going into Mexico and this is perceived by Texans and indeed by Southerners generally as a
major problem and they want the United States government to be putting pressure on Mex Mexico to extradite the escaped um former slaves and Mexico refuses to do so so it is a point of tension between the United States and Mexico during the 1850s and when the French occupy and partially conquer Mexico in the 1860s what exactly do they think they're going to accomplish is it about mining
or trade or just desire for Empire well it's it's all of the above and it's not entirely well thought out the prime mover for this is the emperor of France at that time Napoleon III he is a nephew of the more famous Napoleon the and Napoleon theii has very grandiose ideas about rebuilding the French Empire and he sees an opportunity in Mexico and he thinks this would position
France to become the dominant power throughout the Americas especially to the South so he has this notion of Latin peoples meaning Spanish and French and Portuguese speakers should all hang together and that they're they're Catholics and that the United States in its Republican system is a problem and needs to be contained and that he so he thought that he would be capturing a lot
of trade for France through these this geopol iCal system of building solidarity with the Latin peoples of Latin America it's however he's plunging his country into a Guerilla war that will be extremely deadly and extremely expensive and he will never be able to achieve the kind of stability in Mexico that would be essential to fulfill his grandiose vision and in your understanding how
does that temporary French occupation sway the rest of Mexican history well there had been an ongoing civil war between the two political movements in Mexico that were conveniently called the Liberals and the conservatives conservatives were committed to very traditional institutions in other words supporting the Catholic Church supporting the military supporting
landlords the Liberals were modernized anwers in that they wanted to have a republic where the voters would choose their rulers they wanted an economy that was freed from traditional restraints imposed by the church and by the landlords they wanted a a 19th century liberal system in which individuals were free to compete for economic benefit it's so there are two very powerfully different
Visions for what Mexico should be by the French intervening on behalf of the conservatives and then losing they discredit the conservative movement for a long time and so it means that the liberal movement while they don't fulfill all their Promises by any means for example They Don't Really uh succeed in taking down all the landlords they do take down those landlords that
had been most conspicuously supportive of the conservatives and the French imperialists but Mexico is going to continue to struggle with enormous inequality throughout the rest of the 19th century but the liberals do establish principles of um more free elections not completely free but more free elections and of a free press and of a legal system um which is going to
be U more Equitable than what had preceded it so I would say that the Triumph of the Liberals in Mexico under the leadership of Bonito Warz is one of the most important events of the 19th century in North America and until poerio Diaz later why is there so little interest in building up national infrastructure in Mexico oh there's very powerful interest in doing that but the problem is again Capital uh
it's also rural security Mexico has a major problem with banditry in the Countryside because there's so much poverty and so starting the 1850s Mexicans leaders whether conservative or liberal are desperate to build railroads but the Striking thing is they've got almost no railroads also the geography of Mexico is not nearly as favorable for building long-distance railroads than is
the United States uh very mountainous very Aid um in many parts of the country the population is so thin on the ground that it's not economically sustainable to run a railroad line uh lack of capital uh governments that were uh unstable and it's only with the Triumph of Warz that it's that it's clear that there is a a government that can be a partner with American investors and
that's when the railroad system starts to develop at a more rapid CLI given what you know about the history of Mexico does that make you more bullish or more bearish on the country today it's had enormous potential for a long time in some ways it's realizing the potential but one hears well drug gangs maybe rule a quarter to a third of the territory speaking of rural banditry uh how do you
view the current moment based on everything you know well I can't pretend to have the kind of expertise on Mexico today that that I mean there are other people that you could consult with so I'm just giving you my superficial impression but those other people will know less about the history than you so I want your marginal product well what I would what again I
want to say I've not ever been to Mexico so I I very hesitant to say very much my impression from what I do read and so forth and compare it with the past history is that Mexico on balance um has been uh in the 20th century early 21st century economically successful that uh its political institutions have undergone a lot of stress during that period of time but that they're currently doing
okay um our political system is undergoing a lot of stress right now so it's I would be very I would be wary of an analysis that says Mexico is some kind of basket case it's a mixed bag as you said there are parts of the country where the the nation state does not have full security uh and then there are parts of the country where where people are doing very well and the government is
relatively secure so I I would be hesitant to go beyond that given what you know about earlier Caribbean history how do you view the Haitian instability which is almost all the time yeah no that that that is clearly a very tragic and longlasting situation one of the in one of the sources of hades's problems I'm not saying it's the only source but one of the big sources
is that they had waged a revolution to achieve their independence uh and then none of the countries would recognize them as independent because they were fearful of the precedent of uh enslaved people rising up in Revolt and killing their masters and also frankly the French had seen a lot of property that had belonged to their Nationals um wiped out by this revolution so France refuses to
recognize Haiti unless Haiti will pay an enormous Financial sum I can't off the top of my head tell you what that amount is um but it is an enormous amount and it then commits the leadership of Haiti to adopting a more coercive system that compels its people to become Plantation laborers and to produce crops that can be exported uh to earn um foreign Capital so that this can be
turned over to France so it's it's an enormous burden that Haiti never gets out from under uh the 20th century situation is so complicated and I have not looked at that fully so I'm just saying what from the 19th century has contributed to the impoverishment of Haiti and the establish M of a political tradition of authoritarianism uh and it's those two problems that still remain so evident in
Haiti today that the Dominican Republic has done relatively well do you view that as an issue of deep roots or just a series of later different accidental forces from a historical point of view well in the 19th century you would not have said that the Dominican Republic was doing well it reverts back to Spanish control during the American Civil War and so what I would say is that the
Dominican Republic never has this extractive financial commitment that turns out to be so burdensome on Haiti uh at that time the country was called Santo Domingo meaning the Dominican Republic and so if you were in the 1870s you would be hardpressed to say which of these two countries is going to have the better economic future but if you look really closely and you think this debt
burden that Haiti is carrying is probably going to be the difference in the longer run and it is one of the factors that has led Haiti to lag behind the Dominican Republic do you think there are deep roots to the now long-standing Cuban communist rule period uh or is that again just something that happened later in the 19th century Cuba is still part of the Spanish Empire and will
remain part of that Empire until 1898 when the United States conquers it it's a period of great instability because many Cuban leaders want to be independent they're looking at the other countries of Latin America Mexico Venezuela Colombia Brazil on and on as had having achieved their independence and there is the perspective by many can uh excuse me Cuban leaders that they would be a more
prosperous country if they were not being ruled by the authority of Spain but Spain is able to maintain its control over Cuba until there's an American Invasion and then the United States kind of reneges on its initial commitments to recognize a full Cuban Independence it's it's very grudging the concessions that the United States makes to the Cuban people so it builts up a
kind of resentment uh toward the United States uh they wanted the United States to be the Liberator initially it looked like the United States was their Liberator and then there is a long period of the frustration of those aspirations so I would say those are aspects that do contribute to the rise of um a future Revolution that will end up being a Communist Revolution in
Cuba what do you think toefield got most wrong about America I'm more impressed by what he got right about it uh you know I I guess what you could say is that what he he didn't predict there would be a civil war but he thought it would be a civil war that would be um purely along racial lines now now race of of course is very very important to the American Civil War but I don't think he would have
predicted that it would be a a north south conflict he thought it would be a civil war within all of the states so I'd say that that's the one area where he didn't get it quite right how good a novel is Uncle Tom's Cabin we know it's historically very very important but just to sit down and read it what should someone today think about it uh I wouldn't if you're looking
for a good read today I would not recommend Uncle Tom's Cabin if you want to understand sentimental culture of the 19th century then you should read Uncle Tom's Cabin because it's very much pitched in that vein it's a vein that that most of us readers today just are not that interested in going back to the beginnings of your career in which regards was Maine ever the frontier state of the Northeast oh
it was very much the frontier State throughout the colonial period and on into the early 19th century so if if you're in Massachusetts and you were looking for a place where you could go and get some Farmland there would be relatively low in cost because hadn't been developed as Farmland you just apply your labor to create a farm then the easiest place for you to get to was
May on into the 1830s and 40s so it it it's in the odd position of being along the Atlantic coast and yet it's still a frontier what's the closest thing America has to a frontier today it's not space anymore if it ever was well you know it's not main no it's not main um I I certainly hope Americans will not regard going into space as something that millions of people are going to be
able to do and be able to survive on say Mars and I think that's a complete Folly and waste of money um so the reality is we live on this planet which has a very thin atmosphere and it's the only and that in our geomagnetic field or and the existence of a moon are rare things certainly they're unique in our solar system and what's beyond that is utterly in inhospitable
to say the least to our bodies so there is no real Frontier anymore anywhere in the world yes there are places that are more thinly settled than others you could say Alaska is still a frontier but large numbers of people are not going to be able to expand into um into Alaska it's not going to be able to support a lot of people and so as a consequence um we're kind of stuck on
this planet and we we have to figure out how to make the best of it and sustain it I have just some general questions about doing history just to simple kind of physicalist question what's the most difficult thing I don't mean intellectually but just on on your body or on your eyes or on your behind the hardest thing about doing the work of history your eyes yeah you're you're reading a lot of
old documents with um that are written in a cursive and often by people who have a very different style of cursive than we do today a lot of cases you're looking at stuff that's on a computer screen or on a microphone real uh so so that's the hardest thing now also just sitting still is something that I I think is easier for People of Our Generation than it is for younger people so you know
being able to kind of isolate yourself in an archive there's nothing that makes me very few things I should say in this world that make me happier than doing that but it's not for everybody to do that kind of work I I know some young people who just have said you know I tried graduate education in this field but I just I being alone uh researching in an archive is just not for me if you
meet a young person and they're a potentially promising historian of course they should be smart they should want to work hard but beyond the obvious factors and good eyes what else do you look for in the person how do you spot that magic something well it it is uh it's not easy and for example I used to run the graduate program at the University of California Davis a graduate program in
history and there was a young man who wanted into our program and on paper he didn't look white as good as some of the other applicants so we weren't able to come up with financial support for him we admitted him I sort of thought he wouldn't come but he came anyway and then he turned out to be the very best graduate St we had uh so what I would say is that it's
very hard by the kind of just exam scores or paper that they've written or letters of recommendation you're making your decisions on those on that basis and they're not always the best predictors um and it's hard to say what would be the best predictor uh in this case this this was a guy that was just really driven to work hard uh and to if a professor told him to do something differently he
figured out how to do it differently uh and and that's be hard to find I would say now your PhD is from brandise that's a very good school but it's not a top five School in the traditional sense and yet you've become you know a top tier historian is that harder to do today coming out of a good but not very very top school I would say it's harder today because okay we're talking about people
who are historians in a college or university setting and the number of job openings on um for historians has shrunk dramatically and there lots of complicated reasons for why that's happened but the general answer is that there's a much smaller public investment in higher education particularly in um the liberal arts and particularly in um non-quantitative Parts on the
liberal arts and so they're just fewer opportunities out there for somebody to to work their way in and when that happens then the the marginal advantage that is The Prestige of the school you went to becomes more important in the competition for a shrinking number of jobs so if I were to go on the job market today as a young person with the particular abilities and inabilities
that I had when I went on in the past uh I'm I'm not sure I would get a job in the Academia what is it you tell graduate students in history or what should we tell them you tell them well your chance of getting a good job is one divided by some number that's a little scary or how is this marketed to people well I can't say how all plac is marketed I can just say what I would say
and what most of the people I do know say is if you're going to to get a PhD in history with the notion that this is going to assure you of a tenure track job at um in a place where you want to live um that's not going to happen or it's very unlikely that it will happen now there are people who are getting phds in histories who are finding other places that will uh employ their skills working
for foundations working for local or the federal government sometimes working for corporations which will want to have an in-house historian so there is some growth in fields Beyond Academia what has come to be called public history so it's not entirely hopeless but what I say to you is if your vision of your future is that you must be an academic uh and you wanted to be in
history I would say that's very very unlikely it's going to work out given current conditions how will large language models change How We Do historical research well I have to confess I'm not that familiar with how these large language models would work so I'm I'm going to punt on that question but say you could wear glasses and I think this will be possible in less than five years
and the glasses record everything you read and put it into a datab base that you can search just using your voice so everything you've read in your entire life you you would have on file searchable you could organize it any way you want I would think that would change things I I don't know how yeah no absolutely I mean giving your description of it it would change things radically um now
I I'm trying to resist being you know the old kogan who says the way we did things in my day or the way things always should be so what I would say is it does seem that AI and the various other technological um revolutionary measures that were right on in the midst of right now in terms of managing data and analyzing data is going to render the individual human mind of less value in
the overall process and it is going to it seems to me is going to diminish the role therefore of individual ity and diversity in analyzing data and telling stories about the past which is what we do as historians we tell stories that we think uh and hopefully our readers agree are are meaningful for understanding the past in relationship to their current situation uh so all I can say is it does
seem like we're in the midst of a very radical change um I kind of like the the system of analyze ing data that I grew up figuring out uh and I'll be sad to see it go how can an educated person best use YouTube to learn history without going too badly astray uh if you're relyant exclusively on YouTube Good Luck um you it's to do history really well is to have a sense that you
need to see very different perspectives on events that you want to understand and you need to get as close to the actual original sources as you can the fact that so much information is now available online is a two-edged sort it's mostly good but there's also lots of misinformation that's woven into it and it can be very hard to tell the information from the misinformation and then there's also a
kind of notion that everything is already there online when in point of fact lots of information about the past still only exists in archives and it's also the fact that archives themselves are only a partial um survival mechanism for all the things that did happen in the past most of which were not well documented if we get Beyond STP political leadership so it's
endlessly difficult I think to try to get into a history that is truly true given those difficulties but you have some serious Talks on YouTube which I think represent your views quite accurately it's you right is it typical person better off reading an hour of your book or listening to an hour of you on YouTube which by the way they might do at 1.5x right so it could take less than an hour
right well your original question was not um could could people get history just by seeing me on YouTube that's a different answer but you could just put into YouTube search you know different historians at Harvard at Princeton at University of Virginia and just listen to their talks I mean is that a better thing for people to do than to read their books I would say no but again I'm of an
older generation where I think books are are the best place to get information but a lot of most young people would not agree with me uh and you fair number of older people would rather listen to something um than to to read it I do think when you read if you read with some patience that there is the possibility to absorb information a fuller range of information I you I
often will give talks and uh you know people seem to like them um but I'm not always so sure that they've come away from that talk with as deep an understanding as I think they would if they read the same thing as a text I have one more question but let me just repeat my enthusiasm for your book by Alan Tor American Civil Wars a continental history 1850 to 1873 I've also read most of Allen's
books and find them all to be worthwhile I know many other smart people who are big fans so Alan thank you for chatting with me but last question what is it you will do next well I'm working on a project which is about a set of um plantations in Virginia in the early 19th century in the part of Virginia where Nat Turner's Revolt occurred so it's it's plunged me into the archives
into this fabulously Rich collection which has not um not been used by historians before and I'm hoping to tell a story that will show the ways in which uh environmental constraints um and the market economy and slavery all intersect and contribute to the kinds of tensions that would culminate in that Turner Revol in 1831 Alan Taylor thank you very much thank you Tyler