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I'm here at Harvard University with Jilla she is one of the best known American historians and also a columnist for the New Yorker I'd like to give you my conceptual and indeed highly subjective introduction to how I think of her work so the book of jills that
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really made everything click for me is her book called A is for American and that's a book on communication it studies Noah Webster Samuel mois scholet Alexander granbell and I think of Jill's work as being fundamentally concerned with communication it's as if there's
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information stored in silos around the country around the world they're often distinct silos and they're somewhat hidden or encoded and the job of the historian also the journalist also the human being is to unearth those silos carry materials from one to another deal
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with the impermanence of information so she is herself performing these multiple roles and if I think of her different books or columns her book on Wonder Woman is looking to Comics as a silo where there's information about American history unearthing truths about King
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Philip's War Native American history realizing how much of the history of the 18th century and indeed New York city is in part a history of slavery so all of her books I started viewing in this framework and it turns out my Mo my favorite of her books is her latest one
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that's called Joe Gould's teeth and Joe Gould was a rather strange figure who at least claimed to be assembling a kind of definitive oral history of the United States and it's still debated to what extent this oral history actually existed now Jill writes that ghou
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suffered from graphomania which is the desire to write and write and write and I think of Jill when she's writing about Joe Gould she's actually writing about herself that she herself has graphomania doesn't really suffer from it it's something we Envy in her and it's not
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just that she's written a lot of pages but the information density of those pages the diversity of topics and perspectives the different silos being brought together is so high so there's so many features of Joe Gould's life that in some way refer to Jill's own
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life so the connection to New England Joe Gould being at Harvard Joe Gould being this Outsider that Joe Gould was made prominent by the New Yorker that he was writing a history of America and that he was obsessed with collecting materials so I think of Jill as in a way
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like a character in a Borge's short story or her own obsession with Edgar Allen Poe and Po's short story The Gold bug and encrypted messages and in Ence she's writing all of these books that are deeply personal I read her book on
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Jane Franklin Benjamin Franklin's until Jill's book not very well-known sister who was largely an unrecorded figure in history and I think of Jill when I read these books and that they're all scattered with references and inside jokes and retellings of stories she's
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been processing in her in her own mind uh that's my introduction to Jill highly subjective but now she's writing a book on the history of the United States she's been working on it two years and I thought I would just toss out some topics on any given topic you can
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comment on the topic or you can tell us what it reminds you about in the 18th century or you can just pass how does that sound okay I'm I'm in okay first topic well since we're here in New England uh let's start with Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop the poet correct
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what do you want to ask me about Elizabeth Bishop what does she mean to you what's her role in American history oh I don't know that I have an answer about her role in American history but I will tell a story when I was an undergraduate I took a creative
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writing class at tough which was a disaster in every conceivable way but one way in which it was a disaster is that I wrote a one of the first short stories I wrote that semester featured a main character whose name was Elizabeth Bishop and I had no idea who Elizabeth
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Bishop was he had a terrible grade somehow I think my creative writing instructor thought I was offering a meditation on the poetry and life of Elizabeth Bishop and in fact I was offering no such thing so I don't really have I I don't have a what does
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Elizabeth Bishop mean to us today she just is a kind of dark cloud over my own past now you're you're writing more and more on the issues of publicity and privacy today's the 125th birthday of a woman born under the name Gladis Luis Brooks known as America's sweetheart but
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we all know her as Mary pford so how does Mary Pickford fit into your vision of American History so one of the things I find so interesting about our modern discussion of privacy is that the very notion historically comes out of the
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confinement of women so if you think about the the big discussion about privacy that began in the United States and and influences our constitutional arguments today starts in 1890 when Louis brandise and Samuel Warren living both here in Cambridge together write an
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article for the Harvard Law Review called the right to privacy and what they're animated by in doing that is Warren who's married into a very influential Washington family has been concerned about the way new technologies of Photography but this will then apply
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to film as well have exposed people's ordinary lives to public view right in a new way and in particular they have made women visible and the private lives of families visible so people send reporters with photographers come to Warren's wedding for instance and his
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mother's his his wife's father's funeral is covered in the paper with photographs and so Warren and brandise who write this article called the right to privacy in which they they argue that there inheres in the Bill of Rights a constitutional right to privacy which
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then we later you becomes resurrected and since 1965 we use it to understand rights to rights to reproductive privacy is actually really about trying to hide women and so much about Pickford and the early women of Cinema and the controversial nature of their careers
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has to do with women becoming visible more parts of women's bodies becoming visible the sort 1920s new woman in the flapper and the visibility of women incites uh a kind of big public conversation that makes possible eventually the abolition of the Comstock laws the
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sort of 187 it's a comto in 1873 the first federal law that sort defines pornography and it includes everything from discussion of contraception discussion of homosexuality those comto laws the federal law and all the little state laws that follow are really being
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contested in the 1920s as as freedom of speech issues so I guess I would just put pford in that in that context and in that conversation cuz what I think the Legacy interestingly is for that our notion of the right to privacy historically has
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its roots in men's interests in keeping women visible from public view means that we have a really screwy understanding constitutionally with the right to privacy and that Reproductive Rights for instance are grounded in a right that doesn't to me make a lot of
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sense that Reproductive Rights seem to me would be would have been much better grounded in uh claims for equal protection or uh claims for Liberty than in claims for privacy which I think turned out to have kind of backf fired as a way as a man of legal discourse so
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that's a long departure from Mary pford but that's how when I when I look at it get back to your Silo when I look uh at something now or in the past it always to me appears to me on a timeline I actually like not all historians do this but I'm really fascinated by timelines
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and so sort of I see pford like where did pford come from and what's pigford's Legacy like I just sort of put things in that way of course she's also an immigrant from Canada but speaking of visibility of women uh Elanor Rosevelt you've just written the preface
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to a book uh by elanar Roosevelt correct yes yeah and then it was tricky because I I I'm writing this History of the United States and I was working on the chapter the parts of a chapter that are about the New Deal and and Ellen Rose says you know the really new deal is a
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new Civic role for women and it's really hard one of the challenges of writing the textbook is how to fully integrate the story of women into the story of men politically over this over the centuries because Roosevelt is so interesting and so important in that era
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but what she's mainly the introduction I wrote is to this book that Roosevelt published her first book called it's up to the women that came out in 1933 so she had a very unhappy happy marriage as you may know FDR had had an had an affair a long running Affair he was
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quite in love with another woman their marriage was sort of a disaster she didn't want him to run for president she really didn't want to become first lady and she'd been very involved in the Democratic party so after women get the right to vote in in 1920 the parties
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kind of have a fight about who can get women to join their parties and so they both form women's divisions and and Roosevelt is the head of the women's division for the Democratic Party by 19 208 and she's been really involved in getting women to become engaged
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civically uh and politically into run for office and she's kind of disheartened by the idea of becoming a first lady it was essentially like being a caged bird I think to her still is so she DEC it still is exactly so she decides she's she wants to write a book
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and so she writes this she well her husband's like kind of preparing for his inauguration she writes this book called it's up to the wom it's actually kind of a hilarious move if you think about it it's it's a little it's a little kind of
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nose thumbing in a way like you know what good for you you're president but really to get out of this depression it's up to the women so it's kind of a it's a kind of a fascinating but it becomes controversial because she goes on a speaking tour I was just reading I
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signed in my class this week I had my students read this incredibly funny document by HL Minkin from 1937 right after the court pecking Scandal Minkin writes this constitution for the new deal it's a fake Constitution and just making fun of FDR's abuses of power and
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one of the Clauses the Constitution and the executive part is the president shall have the ability to appoint anyone in his family to any part of the administration to take on any role and they shall not be pre they shall not be prevented from touring the nation and
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making speeches like it's is sort of very not very Sly attack on Ellen Roosevelt but so interesting how in the 1930s when Roosevelt was doing was what she was doing this question of whether women were too visible too outspoken whether women could speak in public
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whether they could could write to public write on topics of interest to uh public affairs remained a question it remains a question today right what what people there's a cont remains a kind of surprisingly controversial question if we think of the intensification of
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celebrity starting in the 1920s and we compare figures such as say Charles Lindberg to Amelia arhart who were two big early celebrities a man and a woman doing some roughly comparable things uh the unfairness Meed out to women saying say being judged by their looks in
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particular ways that that are unfair to them has that really improved much since the 1920s if you think about pford and Amelia aart and other women who first hit that onslaught of celebrity publicity or do you think we've solved some problem we had back then through
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some means I don't know that that's improved women have a more visible role in Realms other than entertainment uh they're more visible politically but for for sure but I think it remains quite a punishing thing to undertake in in many ways right the
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technological forces would seem to be are suppressing women's political speech in a different in a new way right there are new technologies social media the cost of speaking in public is different because there are new ways and more immediate ways of being being shot down
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so you might have said even 15 years ago before the rise of social media you might have said things were quite a bit better than in the 1920s or 1930s but I my guess would be if you were to look at it empirically I would suppose and I could be wrong I would
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would really want to investigate this in a quantitative way that the the costs are more significant and there there would be people who are measuring that because like the ruers has this Center for American women in politics where they look at under what circumstances
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are women willing to run for office because it's not that women don't win when they run uh they have a hard time raising money but it's it has to do with a kind of reticence of the cost often not only to oneself but to one's family right that that that women assess
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and I I wonder how chilling the discourse around social media has been for women who are considering and from the book you haven't written yet Charles Dickens in his American notes why is he so grumpy about this country what is it about the thought of Dickens that led
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him to underappreciate our virtues if indeed that's what he was doing and focus as much as he did say on the penal system here yeah and other areas where very few people would defend America's record well for your listeners who don't
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know the back story so Dickens in 1942 late 1941 he decides to go to the United States partly he needs to earn some money he wants to earn some money and he's got a good nice book contract people tend to you know pop over to America spend a few months and go back
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and write a little um a little a little travel note and Dickens thought this would be a natural for him and Americans thought of Dickens as a kind of honorary American because he was because he wrote about the lowly right and the uh and he this is after Oliver Twist 1838 and and
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the pck papers have been hugely popular in the United States he has this huge audience he wants to meet his audience and his audience is thrilled to meet him and kind of honor him with uh their kind of deao citizenship and Dickens thinks
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of himself as an honorary American in many ways this is the land of democracy and he's a democratic writer so he's expecting it to be this incredible Love Fest and the anticipation is huge and yet although he loves Boston he lands first in Boston and uh he he quite loves
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Boston is adored and finds it adorable he becomes quite close with Longfellow and with Charles suner really good friends with both of those guys um the trip really falls apart when he goes to New York he finds that Americans are to him garish and
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coarse in a way what Dickens finds traveling through the the United States is that he really is an Englishman and he he's angry because I mean there are a lot of answers one could give to your question why does he decide he doesn't like the United States so much he would
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have said in a kind of Pious way because he he was sickened by slavery and although that's true he was indeed sickened by slavery and he he's supposed to go and tour the South and he doesn't he gets as far as richond he just turns around and in the end he escapes and
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goes to Canada where he's very happy have in Canada but more practically he's come partly because his work is generally pirated in the United States and he's Goes to Washington to argue for copyright law an international copyright law that would
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protect his work because he's earning just pennies from the huge vast unprecedented sales of his work in the United States and he finds that Americans are very newspaper editors in particular are quite contemptuous of him for having done this like here he is the
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sort of you know the poet of poverty and he's come here to earn to to make sure he's paid for his work that that Americans find that to be ironic and to be hypocritical and dick like well I'm not working for free like I'm trying trying to writing for a living here you
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should be willing to pay so it's really it's as much that as anything else but there is a kind of General cultural coarseness that he doesn't like and he's he's exhausted clearly his relationship with his wife is falling AP there are a lot of other other factors I taught a a
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research seminar with undergraduates about Dickens a few years ago and the end product was students made a podcast they wrote a radio drama using only primary sources describing dickens's trip from dickens's letters home and newspaper reporters reports of Dickens
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as he goes from town to town and it was they did a fantastic job but it was hilarious because he comes with such high hopes and the whole thing just unravels like the further he gets into the United States the more he hates it the more Americans decide they hate him
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and it's I was going to write a book about it in the end I decided like narratively it was too unsatisfying cuz you're waiting for the Redemptive moment and just doesn't come if we go back to the 18th century there's Abby rol from France the philosopher George Barkley
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from Ireland argu will be Jefferson they think America will Blossom as the new Athens and actually do so fairly soon and at best they were a hundred years too early with their forecast for when it would happen arguably more and what variable do you think they
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misunderestimate misestimated why were they so overly optimistic about the Arts and letters in what was to be become the United States so there's much more alcoholism than they expected more hooliganism arguably more stupidity badly polarized politics and more
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violence what was wrong with their model of this country or country to be I guess I think that the flourishing that they anticipated rested on a misunderstanding of the basic premise of Republican government government as it was set up
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in the 18th century that they they did not see what we would now think of as the original sin of the Constitution the 3- fifths clause and the continuation of slavery and the Constitutional sanctioning of the institution and could not see how the kind of Decay that that
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would lead to in what was erected as a as as this kind of shining City on a Hill version of republicanism that the first century of American History is engaged domestically almost entirely with the struggle over that question every step Westward that
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Americans make is a step deeper into that problem right and there's no alleviating it before the war and no real alleviation of it after the war so it seems naive to suppose looking back that the flowering the great flowering of culture which is contingent in that notion on
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the kind of ease of equality could be possible I'm not asking you to comment on Steve Bannon but if you think of Steve Bannon does that strike you as an unprecedented phenomenon in American history or something that reminds you of something earlier Bannon as a character
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or bannon's ideas either Bannon as a role maybe the mix of character and ideas in this weirdly unaccountable position uh so I try really hard not to offer like here's a historical analogy this is this is a person some somewhat similar at a different moment cuz I don't that
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logic generally makes no sense sense to me um there there's something to me very kind of 1840s about Bannon only in the kind of schlumpy I mean partly in the kind of schlumpy like you could see that guy wandering around a precinct on Election Day uh
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and he has that um it's this is just going to seem unfair but it's something about his just his Visage right he can you can completely picture him in an 1840s painting of American politics like you just he wearing the kind of baggy coat and he's got the kind of bulbous
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kind of red nose and uh he's a very dickensian character in that sense uh Dickens would have written him extremely well you've argued at times that people overestimate the connectedness of the present with the American past uh so it's not just that the past is a foreign
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country as Peter Lett suggested but it's indeed Stranger in some sense now if we could undo those mistaken intuitions about oh this is like the 1960s or this is like Andrew Jackson whatever the analogy may be what's a concrete example of how that could improve our
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understanding of the current world I guess I like to think about it in a different structural way than that that that completely understandable desire to find a historical analogy is just like to take an accordion and compress it so to make
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then just like now so oh I know Trump is just like Andrew Jackson you know it's the same move he's appealing to the people he's unwilling to enforce the rulings of the Supreme Court he's he's overriding Congress in order to to get the Mandate whatever whatever it is that
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uh you want to say about those two people and that seems to me really quite kooky although a different move that I find much more edifying and historically defensible is to pull open the according and stretch it open as far as so you can see the distance between now and Andrew
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Jackson uh you know the distance between Trump and Jackson and try to understand what happened between those two characters in those two presidencies that that helps us to see transformation and that I it's actually it's a little bit like some of the controversy
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over how to interpret the Constitution because originalism to me is like squishing that accordion all the way together right like what would James Madison think right is the question that originalists want to ask whereas I want to know like what happened between when
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Madison thought that and here where we are now and that's that's a very different kind of constitutional interpretation there was this great in 1987 when it was the 200th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention yes there was a lot of hoopla and it was
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right after the Robert bour nomination and an originalism was very much the priority of the Reagan justice department under Edwin me and there's a lot of conversation about you the kind of the kind of philiopiety of a of a bicentennial and it's an exciting thing
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to think about the 200th anniversary of the Constitution but they're good Marshall as you know the first African-American Supreme Court Justice who had argued board V uh Bard V brown brown V Board of Education in 1954 he was asked you know are you going to
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participate in the hoopla the bental hoopla of the Constitution he gives this incredibly powerful speech in which he says you know no you know what I'm willing to celebrate not that document which was flawed let's just understand the ways in which it was flood I want I will
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celebrate the 200 years since the 200 years of to make good on the Promises of that document and that's it's that kind of thinking that kind of historical thinking that I think contributes to our popular culture and to our discussions of the relationship
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between the past and the present more than that desire to really kind of collapse things and say oh it's 2008 this is just like 1932 you know it's not it's really not like 1932 you've written a book on the tea party as a modern phenomenon and uh part
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of that book includes examples of how they've misinterpreted the con Constitution are there aspects in which you would say the tea party was right about the Constitution and we've neglected what they had to tell us to our Peril I guess I think constitutional
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inter constitutional interpretation is not as neat as that like these people right these people were wrong historically we can see certain decisions are from our modern Advantage unequivocally wrong they tended to be decisions that were extremely
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controversial at the time so Dread Scott in 1857 the worst decision the court ever made people at the time said it was the worst decision the court ever made uh and then it becomes the measure of this is the worst decision since Dread Scott so FDR in the 1930s when the court
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strikes down a lot of the new deal he says this is the worst thing since Dread Scott or lochner in 1905 people say this is the worst decision since Dread Scott I don't think we have about say the Roberts Court's decision about the Affordable Care Act which surprised
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people in the Tea Party by upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act under the under the kind of broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause I don't think that there's some striking National consensus that that decision was either right or wrong uh so that
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would be the I mean when the people I spoke to in the Tea Party were most agitated about Healthcare that they thought Healthcare that this the provisions that Obama was proposing and then later were passed by Congress were these were things that were not in the
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Constitution and they would carry around signs say these things are unconstitutional and the court made a different decision and I don't think I don't I guess I just don't think that we are in any kind of an advant have advantage on that that would
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suggest oh yes no the tea party was right and the court was wrong um and that's the chief constitutional question that the that the people I talk to were interested in arguing about but isn't it good to have a certain dogmatism about at least some aspects of the
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Constitution so if we look today at the imalent Clause arguably it's being violated in a fairly large large number of ways right now and as far as I can tell the world doesn't seem to mind that much we'll see how that develops but if we were more originalist and more
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dogmatic about our own Constitution would there not be a greater outrage right now about the emoluments clause in a way that would be productive well I don't think that would require originalism that would just be textualism I mean just taking looking
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but textualism and originalism they blend together right yeah yeah uh I get I I don't mean to avoid your question but I I guess one thing that became clear to a lot of people observing the Tea Party phenomenon was which is thought of as popular constitutionalism
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or popular originalism that is to say rather than legal Scholars offering these various interpretations that the people would decide how to interpret the Constitution it was a really I thought really fascinating and kind of exciting part of the Tea Party Movement you'd go
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to these rallies and people would be selling little books called the Constitution made easy and people in the party would join study groups or they would read the Constitution and I'm all for reading the Constitution and one of the reasons that that was Illuminating
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was you could see how entirely liberals had failed to talk in constitutional terms in making political arguments that for as much as the Decades of the middle of the 20th century having involved constitutional arguments made by minority seeking
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rights from Brown you know all the way through the same-sex marriage case that that liberals don't talk about the Constitution as often and uh it left a lot of room for that political argument to make it seem as though conservatives have the constitution on their side and
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liberals just think everything is kind of made up and there's a great deal of uncertainty and that that this structurally that's a completely unequal unequal fight and so I I hear what you saying you see that now the degree to which thinking about the travel ban or
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the emoluments clause or the many different ways in which the early acts of the Trump Administration might be challenged on constitutional grounds that Liberals are use citing the Constitution more often but it becomes problematic when you only look to
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constitutional argument when you're out of power in addition to your work reminding me of Po and bores someone else that also reminds me of is Connie Willis so she writes about the difficulties of time travel in her novels there are stories of researchers
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being caught with not enough information or having conflicting pieces of information and not exactly knowing what to do but then in response to that compiling or assembling more information so something like Doomsday Book do you have a take on Connie Willis or it's
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something outside of your perie no I haven't read Connie Willis I have a take on time travel and Doctor Who but that uh I'm totally fascinated by time travel and I'm really you should read Connie Willis that's her main theme and his historical understanding of time
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travel yeah um and I I mean I love sort of thinking about how Wells HG Wells thinks about time uh I find that really really interesting and I think what happens at the end of the 19th century which is when you know modern science fiction is being born is among other
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things there is this really dramatic sense that the pace in which we lead Our Lives is changing and industrialism has accelerated our lives so this this kind of new and a lot of historians have written about this this kind of new attention to time and so you get this whole world of
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science fiction that's interested in going back through time and especially going back to a time before industrialization yes uh and kind of working out what what what would be the nature of our politics and our economics without industrialization I just think
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that I think that's really really interesting when you get to I wrote a long piece once about Doctor Who because I happen to have just watched a ton of it both as a kid and as a grown-up and like with my own kids and as a kid and with my in-laws who are British and I
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got really interested in how by the time Doctor Who starts which I think is 1961 it just had it 50th Anniversary a few years ago the way that it the way that doctor who works is to use that sort of HG Well's kind of critique of the widening inequality of industrial and and then to
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post-industrial life attaching it to Nostalgia for the British Empire like what what Doctor Who is all about is about going traveling through time so that the so that Britain can be the world's policeman instead of just one of the members of the security Council it's
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like it's actually really really interesting way to then kind of reimagine imperialism like like you could be the Lord of time like that's Doctor Who is a Time Lord that you could be that that it's a kind of longing for Britain being the Imperial power of the
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whole world and what it means to then think about time as something that you could colonize I just think that hold is really really kind of profitable intellectually to kind of puzzle through when and why people have fantasies about moving through time I mean the and
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brexit is arguably another example of that it's another example right people kind of want to just kind of could we just turn back can't we trade more with New Zealand what about India yeah yeah can we join NAFTA maybe to go back before industrialization in your novel
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uh blind spot which is yet another way of assembling and interpreting broadly historical materials you mentioned Adam Smith theory of moral sentiments what's your take on that book is it overrated underrated what do you pulled from that
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so I wrote this novel blind spot with a friend of mine who's a colleague here now Jane kamensky and we had a a whole lot of fun doing it and the reason that we wrote it and tossed in a lot of you know Adam Smith and everybody else was we'd become really frustrated that we
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were really interested in telling stories that weren't biographies of the founding fathers 18th century stories that weren't you know the another biography of Benjamin Franklin another biography of John Adams and it's very frustrating as a historian who studies
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other sorts of people that you just don't have characters to drive a story like that uh we know a lot we know a great deal quantitatively in aggregate about say poor widows in Boston in the 18th century because we have the records of the overseers of the poor we know how
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how old people were when they entered the Poor House how old they were when they died there how many days they spent there how much they were you how much their food cost but we just don't you don't have a story to tell about those people so Jane and I decided to write
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this novel in order to animate the 18th century the lives of ordinary people in the 18th century but then we also wanted to show how important 18th century thought was to ordinary people that for Smith ideas about sensibility and the moral
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imagination and the degree to which we form ourselves in relation to one another uh through the act of empathy and sympathy were ideas that suffused the whole culture that for Smith came out of his experience of the culture as much as they were him injecting
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something into the culture so that's why that's why stuff is is all over blind spot of two ultimately I think two dactic of professors to sort of here would be an occasion where we could we we could allude to the wealth of the Nations now and here would be an
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occasion where we could bring in lock and you know that we wanted to show that ordinary people were bound up in the world of ideas now even though you're famous and teaching at Harvard I think of you in some ways as an outsider historian much as we have Outsider
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artists in American culture so you have a background in Ry in field hockey and you also for a while were a secret at Harvard Business School how do you think those experiences have made you different as a historian and also writer compared to say your colleagues in
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American history uh I don't know I I think I I I might be kind of romanticizing myself to believe myself to be an outsider in the way but I've done it for you you don't have to do it I do think I come from a different place than a lot of academics I would say a large
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number of my colleagues are faculty brats they raised in academic households in one degree or another I think that's a common a common experience of contemp contemporary academics uh that was so entirely not where I came from and uh I I I cherish
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that I guess I do have a kind of fascination with the experience of ordinary people because that's um and in the way that our contemporary politics is organized around hostility to intellectuals on the part of the people is something that's familiar to
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me that's the world that's absolutely the world in which I grew up when I was a kid and what town did you grow up in I I grew up outside of Wester and we we came into Boston to see the Red Sox when we could get bleacher seat tickets and we never did anything else in Boston and
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the Boston Globe was that communist Rag and Harvard was an embarrassment and like that was just which all kind of made sense to me at the time and I think that's an important background to have because there's a a lot of that just I I guess having the experience of going back
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and trying to write this history textbook where that comes from and how that intersects with my own biography has been really Illuminating to me and thinking through so in the 1930s that left really romanticized Ordinary People right there's the great kind of passion
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for the folk and in the 1950s the left left intellectuals decided that the folk were had terrible taste right and and then there's this kind of incredible cultural contempt for mass culture and television in particular right so I remember like when I went to
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college meeting a lot of people like oh yes we didn't have a television at home because that was just the kind of intellectual move of a certain kind of cultural Elite yes at that moment and I'm sorry but like I my entire childhood watching get smart in gilan's island and
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I will not apologize for that like that that that's like I had a totally kind of lower middle class experience growing up and uh same shows I watched by the way the exact same I I learned a lot from I Dream of Genie I Dream of Genie $6 million man like I I whatever like I I I
36:47
don't feel like when I went to go interview people for the te party book I went to talk to people who were involved in the Boston Tea Party and they were just is like exactly like my family like and like my family is completely sympathetic to all those political
37:01
arguments and I so the the weird sorting where people like oh when I go home I don't know how to have a conversation at the Thanksgiving table with my family like I don't even know like what are you talking about like these are people you
37:13
love like it's not that we are not enemies with one another like that whole piece of having been sorted out at the worst moment historically in the 20th century for 10 iions between different groups of people I think has serves a lot of people very poorly and how they
37:32
can lead their lives I don't I by no means escaped that right like I teach here it's a different world I get that uh but I also get like when I went to college I'd never been to a restaurant yes and like I we get pizza sometimes and I had been to friendlies and that
37:51
was like my experience of restaurants and I remember freshman year like people like let's go out and well we're going to go get nachos down at teal square and I like what are you talking about like with what money and what like we have a meal plan I'm working like three jobs to
38:04
pay for my freaking meal plan like I'm going to like and then people had no idea about that uh so when what's difficult for undergraduates who come from who like first generation college students now like I don't get that in I didn't come
38:17
from nothing like I I don't get that like I don't I don't have I I don't mean to like give myself some kind of Street credit or something but I do get being really having a that you don't belong in the place and there's so many ways that Elite institutions communicate to you
38:32
that you don't belong and so I've never really shed that so when you were a secretary at Harvard Business School I mean what were you thinking was it like hey I can do this or I'm about to make my Escape I'm just putting up with this for now or being a secretary is more fun
38:47
than people realize this is an input into what I'm going to do later or what how was that for you uh it was actually kind of a good time they were demolishing the building that I was working in that summer and they were throwing away all the
38:58
stuff in it and I was like can I can I have my desk and know they let me take my desk and I had that desk all through graduate school it was like trash it was a piece of trash to the Harvard Business School I was like it's a beautiful desk like this is the nicest piece of
39:11
furniture I have ever had um so I graduated from college early because I ran out of money and then I I worked a number of secretarial jobs because I really wanted to be a writer and I could not figure out how to how to do that like I just had no in the same way like
39:27
I had never been to a restaurant like I didn't know any writers I had no idea how you would like I went through the classified ads and like trying to look like I tried to get an editorial job had a local paper um but I needed to pay my student loans and so whatever I took I
39:42
worked at um I worked for a temporary service called Manpower for a long time and I worked at all the what we would call them startups but they weren't called startups then but they were all falling apart I worked with these big companies that were
39:56
falling apart like Polaroid and Unisys worked at Unisys for a long time uh and it was great because they had great computers and I was and the thing is if you were working at a company that's falling apart and they they have you hired as a temp they Bas means they
40:11
basically don't have any like they fired their secretarial staff yes and they need someone somebody to like answer the phone but they have nothing for you to do cuz the company's about to close so I did uh I did a lot of writing at those
40:22
places and I found that very fun like I I lived with a bunch of friends I had a pretty good paycheck I could meet all my loan obligations was fun writing all day I'd read all night it was it was nice I mean I didn't have a I didn't have a plan well when I was working at the
40:36
business school the business school was a little bit tougher because the money was just shocking the amount of money that was there the amount of money people that were people were making and a lot of this passed over my desk yes and it it was really shocking
40:57
really really shocking to me cuz I'd worked maybe it was before then after but I'd also worked at Radcliffe like at the bunting Institute like there were I'd seen academic life in other ways and there was nothing it's not this not the same thing it's like academic life in a
41:11
college is like maybe a mom and popop grocery store on the corner and academic life at a business school is I don't know it's like being the CEO of Whole Foods or something like it's just a completely different scale of endeavor so I was pretty shocked by it
41:27
and I thought um I really did feel like okay that this wasn't I'd spent enough time doing this I needed to make some kind of a move and I still couldn't figure out how to become a writer written like all these stories and like I wrote a
41:40
novel so I decided to apply to graduate school because the only thing I could really think of doing that I I figured if I went to graduate school to get a PhD I'd be able to write a book and somewhere along the line in graduate school I would learn like how you would
41:52
publish a book this was my incredibly lame just really I was I remained somewhat befuddled by how things a lot of how a lot of things happen in the world in the end material of your novel blind spot you refer to Adriana Alti as one of your Muses and then Joe G's teeth
42:10
I see the dedication it's to Simply AA possibly that's her yeah what did you learn from Adriana Alti who was your best friend in high school correct yeah yeah I did a long uh I did a three-part story for the New Yorker Radio Hour about Adrian or Adrian and I did a story
42:24
heard did you learn what did I learn from Adriana I learned from Adriana all the time I was I was just texting Adriana yesterday because I was watching was trying to write about the Civil Rights moving in the 19 early 1960s for the chapter this crazy book that I'm
42:39
writing and I um I watched this while I was writing CU I'm so far behind schedule I was trying to watch this PBS documentary about the Freedom Writers while I was writing the chapter and just like listen to it in the background and
42:52
I texted Adrian I was like okay this is a whole different kind of courage than I've ever really thought about like those people going into those bus stations in 1961 and knowing that they were just going to be beaten sure and and Adriana texts me back yes
43:10
obviously next question like she's just she's just like the person I've known the longest in my life with whom I've been the closest both my par I was very close with my mother both my parents are dead um but she's the person who and we play this role for each other I don't I
43:24
don't know if you have a friend from that early in your life we are yes I do two high school friends I still we are each other's kind of eyewitness to history like I know everything I I know who she was when she was still a brain stem you know and that is really
43:39
important because Adriana is for me the person who often will reflect that maybe what I'm doing isn't consistent with who she thinks I am and that's a really helpful correction and uh uh we don't all get that in life um and so I I don't know I guess there
44:03
the kind of the long trajectory of that when I was younger I'm not sure if I'm really answering your question because I hadn't I when we were working on blind spot Adrian is an artist she's she paints and she also is a sculpture but sculpture but I talked with blind spots
44:18
about artists and so right I sent her a thousand questions about how to understand 18th century art and how to make it and uh that was super fun now I'm am often fond of saying uh most thinkers are what I call Regional thinkers they're really deeply shaped by
44:32
the region they grew up in I am myself for better or worse a Mid-Atlantic Suburban thinker now you grew up near Worcester in Massachusetts you're now at Harvard you've been at Boston University a big chunk of your life has been spent
44:45
in New England indeed in in one state in New England I hesitate to use the word bias but how how do you think that is shaping this History of the United States that you're writing that you are so much a product of of New England yeah I think it's a big problem honestly so I
44:59
lived in California I my first academic job was in California I did a master's degree in Michigan and what then I was in Connecticut uh but no I'm not and I nor have I ever lived abroad I mean like and I'm not the most well-traveled person and there's a whole kind of
45:13
foreign policy Us in the world part of a story of the United States so I guess I've just tried to be conscious of that parochialism if we take the cliches about New England they may or may not be but a certain kind of Civic culture a certain kind of blue blood moralizing do
45:30
you see that in your own perspectives or you think you're some other New England maybe all of New England to some other New England um I have a like my world is a little bit more Manchester by the Sea New England yes so that's not William James
45:50
and I think when people think of that New England bias they're thinking of a kind of William James character uh or have a New Yorker version like Liney trilling kind of that and I that I don't have um what's the part of this country you understand least well the part of this
46:08
country I understand least well I would think the Southwest honestly um I've been trying to think through that emergence of the Sun Belt story right and how dramatic Al it reshapes American political arrangements and I am absolutely impaired by not having spent enough time
46:34
in that part of the country and what it and know what it is now or what it was 20 years ago um that said I also didn't live in Boston in the 1820s or in Philadelphia in the 1780s OR in Georgia in the 1730s so when you're writing history you're always using your
46:51
imagination and having a greater Vantage on the present day in some ways can be another kind of distorting force in your work because you're always trying to kind of gather together what you believe of the world today and make it come out that way do
47:09
you know what I mean like when you write history to make it come out the way you think it's supposed to come out yes and that's tough that I find that really hard I find that just a challenge altogether so on the one hand it's definitely a problem that I for me as a
47:21
citizen frankly that I haven't spent more time in much in in more parts of the country as a historian I'm not sure it's the liability that it would might at first appear I've seen data that indicate that literally every County in Connecticut right now is depopulating
47:36
and Connecticut is not exactly a complete economic train wreck though some parts have their problems do you think America as a whole as a country is in some way rejecting New England because Boston aside it doesn't seem to be on the rise and in terms of cultural
47:51
centrality at least superficially it seems to be on the decline I I think that's a long-term Trend I don't think that's something new I mean if you think about some sorry I'm so stuck in the moment that I'm writing about great great but the sort of 1964 sort of
48:08
Nelson Rockefeller versus Barry Goldwater there's the whole like in the Republican Party there's like here's the East Coast moderate Republican establishment and here's the Arizona senator that represents the rising tide of conservatism in American life and
48:23
Goldwater wins the nomination and he's defeated resoundingly and it's a crisis but in the long run it's that move that wins out and you you know you so you can say yeah but Mitt Romney but M Mitt Romney didn't run as a governor of Massachusetts Mitt
48:45
Romney ran as a guy from Utah right like there's a that the train that you think is just leaving the station is I think like left the station 20 30 years ago and what is wrong with New England so to speak why is it not retaining the Loyalty of people who were born here why
49:02
are they leaving oh well the New Englander who's not ashamed of New England would say what's wrong with the rest of the country New England is where it's at uh I think where that the vacuum that was left in terms of the liberal East Coast establishment who's I I guess I would
49:21
contest that it's you know Doom completely doomed but is the kind of Silicon Valley that's the plug that fills up that vacuum right and I think the question is not what's wrong with New England but what's wrong with why we've put people in Silicon
49:37
Valley on such a pedestal why there's no why there's so little criticism of of what is being offered by way of technology and its consequences especially for our politics so you know if I had to choose between John Dewey and Mark Zuckerberg I
50:03
would pick Dewey every time okay let's say you know someone from China they're highly intelligent quite literate but they don't know much about the history of the United States and they ask you to recommend to them a book to read but not your own and a visual artist to look at
50:19
or study to get a better understanding for their first trip they're going to come here and drive across country where would you direct them so a book I've really loved reading which is published I think in 1954 so it it it misses the last half
50:35
century and more uh is called out of our past and it's a history of the United States really one of the last attempts to synthesize the entire story and it's a short book it's funny I just ordered this book on Amazon yesterday someone wrote me and said you need to read out of our pth
50:56
and I haven't so I just bought it yeah but why is that interesting um what I like about it is it doesn't attempt to tell the whole story it's not text Booky like now we must address the War of 1812 its premise is here's my I found this really helpful in thinking about my
51:17
attempt to write this synthetic history let's we're not trying to sort of justify present day Arrangements but let's use as our tool in determining what should be in this book and what should not be in this book what are things that are still big questions and
51:35
so it's 1954 1955 and and he says you know well there's going to be a lot in this book about the Negro in America but you know what there's not going to be a lot about most presidential administrations of the 19th century and I'm not going to
51:52
pay as much attention as I should to the f of the various colonies and American Indians you know and it just it has this kind of decision about selectivity that means that it works as a book it's a coherent story without being a highly ideological story and that's a
52:12
tough that's a tough bed to make like tucking in each of those corners and making it flat on top but yet it would be comfortable to lie down and it's a tough it's a tough job another book from that era I quite like is John Gunther is inside USA which is written at a very
52:26
superficial level but state by state I find one of the most insightful treatments of what this country is about uh I know you're a big fan of Stewart Little by EB white which I won't call a children's book but what do you think is really going on in Stuart Little what
52:40
are people missing um so I wrote a long article investigative piece about Stuart Little years ago because this often happens to me I just kind of fall into a hole in the ground and I can't get out until I've gotten to the very very bottom of
52:55
it it and uh I was asked to write a book review of a new history of children's literature yes and so I read the book and then I read a couple of other books about children's literature and they all in this kind of throwaway line said Stuart Little published in 1945 was of
53:10
course baned and then like no footnote no explanation no nothing and at the time one of my kids was six and he was reading Stewart like we were reading at night together and I just like wait like the story about the mouse who drives the little car and like has rides the
53:27
sailboat across the pond in Central Park like that was a ban book like what do I not know about 1945 or this book like what am I missing and I was shock I really was shocked and I I was staggered that these histories of children's literature couldn't even identify the
53:44
story so I got really interested in that question and I I did what I do when I get a little too curious about something is I become obsessive about finding out everything that could possibly be found out so I began by reading EB White's
54:01
papers uh his wife Katherine Angel white was a fiction editor at the New Yorker she edited Nabokov and she was incredibly powerful fiction editor but she also for a time when her children were young had a column in the magazine called the children's shelf where she
54:18
would review children's literature and so I started looking at her papers it was very clear very early on that it was the first librarian of the children's room at the New York Public Library and Carol Moore very formidable woman who had decided to ban that Stuart Little
54:33
ought to be banned which was interesting because it was she who tried to convince EB white to write for children in the first place and so I started reading in Carol Moore's papers and then it was clear there was elaborate drama among these three people and Carol Moore
54:49
Katherine White and Evie white about what books should be for children and should not be for children and Carol Moore was part of a generation of women who became Librarians and who segmented out literature and built these children's rooms where there would be
55:04
the books that children were allowed to read but why why ban it is it because procreation is such a mystery you would think that would decrease the need to ban it but the main characters you're always wondering where they come from when steuart is with Harriet he has no
55:16
idea what to do is steuart gay is steuart autistic all of the above what's really going on in the story in your take so what's really going on in the story is that eie white and Katherine White didn't really believe in children's literature as an Endeavor
55:30
this is obvious so when Stuart Little the mouse is adopted by the littles he's not adopted in the original Edition he's born yes and the fact that children are asked to imagine a little mouse coming out of a woman's vagina was too shocking to an Carol Moore so that's one thing
55:46
but also then his parents said about bowdlerizing children's literature so uh when you know the uh the Night Before Christmas uh it was the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring not even a mouse they think
56:00
that might hurt Stuart Little's feeling so they change it to a louse like they go through his parents go through everything they're going to share with him and take out all the the bad things that happened to mice because they want to protect their little one so what eie
56:12
white and Katherine were hugely upset about was the juvenilization of children's literature so in the 1930s there was this uh Life Magazine expose called the birth of a child and it was a photo essay centerpiece photo essay that Life Magazine made this huge fuss about
56:27
they put sent out a mailing to all their subscribers in advance saying next week's issue is going to be scandalous you might not want to show it to your children they put it in like a rapper and it was just photographs of a woman giving birth and they weren't even
56:38
explicit like you certainly did not see the head coming out of her body um but it was this huge hubbub and it was a huge success for life's subscription and then Henry Luc who published life and Harold Rouse published in New York were big rivals
56:53
Evie white uh wrote a parody of it called the birth of an adult very very funny and so in other words Stuart L is an extension of that project little had eie white had written a book in the 1920s called is sex necessary which was a parody of Facts of
57:10
Life books for kids and how silly they were and uh so seart little is a continuation of these forms of satire and parity that are making fun of the juvenilization of American culture in the age of the kind of golden the the the the Golden Age of children's
57:26
literature what was so fun about so it's really about sex education then it's really about sex education but they in the letters between an Carol Moore and eie white and Katherine White they kept referring to this letter that an Carol Moore had sent after she read the GS
57:39
before the book came out and she apparently sent this letter to eie White telling him not to publish it and that she would stand in its way and I couldn't find the letter anywhere it was like The Smoking Gun of the great suppression of this book about a mouse
57:52
and Katherine White said she was so upset by it she had destroyed it and like but there was a c i could anyway I eventually found it in UCLA in the papers of an Carol White's in Carol Moore's successor who had done an oral history and anyway I found the I found
58:10
the letter it was a total fine but it she talks about how monstrous it is and how children won't be able to understand this and uh so it was really it was it was one of the most fun like research Benders I've ever been on I remember like I was driving one day I
58:24
like got up like at 5: in the morning my kids were too little to be taking on these trips but uh a friend of Katherine Angel white has her papers were at Vasser and I like got in the car and I drove to and there were these incredible letters about steu about Stuart Little
58:38
and about an Carol Moore and this woman who was a children's editor at McMillan had these letters so um it was incredibly fun to track down uh I had a student who went to see EB White's papers which at Cornell recently and he said is there anything that you really
58:52
want to see and I said yeah you know what I want to see like box 251 folder 12 it says according to the finding guide Stuart Little's Roadster is in that box and he said are you kidding so he went and he got it and the curators hadn't seen it like since the
59:07
papers had been cataloged and they all pulled it out and looked at it and look it's still there like I'm I'm so I'm very jealous I didn't get to go hold the Roadster in M oh and we had skipped over the question for your imaginary Chinese friend what painter or visual artist
59:21
would you recommend they take a look at for their visit here I got really interested in Jacob Lawrence when I was working on Joe Gold's teeth and thinking about what it was what was so exciting representationally about Harlem artists in the in the 30s and
59:37
40s um I've often thought about what it would mean to for Lawrence to be your introduction and the kind of swans song Piece of what American art is representationally so I don't know that's a that's not if I had endless amount of time to think about it I don't
59:54
know know that I'd settle on Lawrence but in my mind at the moment if we think about the 18th century American painting it's so portrait intensive as you've observed yourself today income inequality is fairly High Andy Warhol Sil silk screens aside there's Chuck
1:00:09
Close but for the most part it's not very portrait intensive and even Chuck Los very often is not painting the people who were paying him to do the painting given that celebrity so intensified why have we so much moved away from portraits you know there's
1:00:24
this love series of lectures that Frederick Douglas gives in the 1860s they have different titles but one of them is called pictures in progress so Douglas when he escaped from slavery 1838 he was 20 the year before the degar type comes to the United States and he
1:00:40
sits for deger type in 1841 and he's really transformed by what it is to see himself in a photograph and in the 1860s he writes all these essays about photography and in which he argues that photography is the most democ atic art and he means portrait photography
1:00:57
and that while no white man will ever make a true likeness of a black man and because he's been represented in caricature you know the kind of the runaway slave ad with the guy little figure silhouette of the black figure holding carrying a a sack and he he's uh
1:01:15
as hisi have recently demonstrated he's the most photographed man in the 19th century Douglas just makes a big commitment more than Lincoln yeah and he just is really obsessed with photography because what it means to have a a black man represented is a kind of I am a man
1:01:30
speech that you know from the 1960s he's kind of black protests that slogan I am a man I'm not a caricature I'm not less than a man and he writes this he say like the thing is about uh photography why it's so important to and why it's basically although not a natively
1:01:45
American art is the is the sort of deao American art form is because I even the poorest servant even the poorest cook maid can afford a a photograph of herself and of the people that she loves and can therefore uh in a pre in previous ages when it would be
1:02:01
Kings uh Kings and Bishops who were portrayed that everybody can see themselves and can see one another and therefore we can understand our equality and he has this kind of whole kind of technologically deterministic argument about photography and progress and it's
1:02:16
very much bound up in 19th century fantasy of pro you know Notions of Notions of progress but it's a little heartbreaking to read because that's not what happens with photography right so photography was initially a de democratizing art if you think about
1:02:30
Silicon Valley jpegs today and Instagram also Snapchat is that as well a democratizing art or somehow the opposite and if so why the difference I as my students that question all the time I ask them how they understand what the political consequences
1:02:47
are of the technological tools that we use dayto day because I myself I'm really really puzzled by that um you're puzzled the people do it or you're puzzled as to what its effects are oh I'm definitely puzzled puzzled that people do it but as to what its
1:03:03
effects are you know there's this great section in uh Walter isaacson's book The innovators where he talks about the guys who invent the personal computer and that it's all this he argues that it comes out of the Beat Movement right um that there's the there's the big
1:03:19
business uh Mainframe world of IBM and univac and then there's the idea that the of Liberation through a personal computer that like as a kind of keny well networking yes to some San Francisco had networking La had the broadcast model which in a sense failed
1:03:36
right and San Francisco outpaces or the Bay Area the entire rest of this country so there's this and and that's where the whole sort of uh digital democracy notion comes from that these these this a kind of leftover of of a 60s utopianism a kind of new left utopianism
1:03:56
and it's not I mean that to me is just a very tragic story because the research that has been done that kind you know like that book The Myth of a digital democracy what people expected digitization and the rise of the internet to do politically those expectations have not
1:04:15
been met and I think it's very it is it's not an exertion intellectually to be dystopic about the consequences of these Technologies I think the exertion is actually trying to steer a middle course and see what's working and what's not
1:04:29
working and what what effects things are having and what are the ways that those things maybe could be measured but like when I ask when I tell my students I ask them to read Frederick Douglas's pictures in progress from 1861 and I ask them what's your answer for
1:04:46
Snapchat I think they generally have a dark cancer explain a little more I'm I wish I could best represent the student who would make the strongest argument in favor of what's good about these but what if I were to say well they are truly democratizing so brexit
1:05:05
the British people actually wanted I thought it was a mistake personally but it may not have happened or or won without social media but it did represent the popular will and once it was voted through there's been remarkably little regret so what if someone argued the problem is democracy
1:05:21
and not social media yes or no yeah I think the problem myself I suspect that the problem is that we have a representative system of government but we no longer believe in representation we we actually believe in direct democracy and that most of these
1:05:39
tools that allow us to represent our own views we're constantly representing our own views instant polling and even you know the the rise of the referendum or growing Reliance on a referendum something as big as brexit uh that we we don't actually subscribe to the idea
1:05:58
that we elect someone like our congresswoman say to represent the views of a large constituency of people we that that is an act of faith and it is an act of community and that we instead and this is reinscribed for us in our Technologies we instead believe
1:06:19
that her job is to tally up our individual views and then act accordingly and that previous generations said that that was robotic right that would be the language in the 1950s that people would talk about the problem of people who are elected to represent you they're not
1:06:37
delegated to to do what you tell them to do you elect them to represent the your the views of the community and we don't I think there's a mismatch between what we think happens and what is what the system is it's set up to happen and we may decide people could decide you know
1:06:54
what direct democracy is the right thing we should have we should get rid of the Electoral College say we should you that there we should have a instant polling so that if your congresswoman is going into to vote on an act of legislation she should be able
1:07:09
to uh get feed from every constituent and then just do what she's told we might decide that that's a way to reframe our system of government but that's not actually how it was built final question the world of social media we all know it's not going away maybe it
1:07:27
has some problems but if you were to give a student or a person some piece of advice or intellectual ammunition to carry with them through this world some book some essay some thought so as to make it marginally better rather than marginally worse what would that
1:07:43
be read this eie white essay Called Death of a pig and what is he tell us in Death of a pig I think reading death of a so a pig dies on his he lives in Maine and he's trying to understand what it means when something dies when you didn't expect it to die
1:08:04
and you couldn't save it and I find it a very beautiful essay but I think something is dying and we can't save it and that's a good place to start to figure out how to feel about that Jilla poor thank you very much it's been a pleasure and an honor thanks
1:08:24
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