Historians From The United States

"it was amazing for me to see, in cities like Jackson, Mississippi, and Detroit, or even to see my own students, you know, for whom I wrote the book, go on to lead a number of these organizations that erupted in the mid-2010s and in 2020. It was also a chance to reflect on the developments of the last 20 years, you know, the shifting political landscape, the extraordinary expansion of a radical vision. You know, there’s so much — we have such an expansive vision, more so now than 20 years ago, in terms of the power of feminist and queer and trans movements, Indigenous movements for decolonization, in climate justice and disability justice. So, it’s really an extraordinary moment."

"it doesn’t have to be reciprocity. We don’t build solidarity for the sake of getting something back. We build it because we’re together. And that old slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,”"

"Community policing grows out of "broken windows" policing, which involves targeting Black and Brown residents with surveillance, harassment, using predictive technologies for policing. And think about what would have happened had $37 billion went into things that people need to make them safer, like housing, healthcare, environmental protections, jobs. But let me just say, one, this is not a glimmer of hope. I’m not making a case — you know, but I'm making a case that despite the Biden people’s opposition to defund, there’s an element of it that was a response. That is, you know, $15 billion of grants for nonpolice first responders for mental health crises. Let’s see how this is going to turn out. I’m not sure. But clearly, movements make a difference. And this is part of the argument of Freedom Dreams, that movements do make a difference, especially when you think beyond the immediate needs to something bigger."

"Radical black feminists have never confined their vision to just the emancipation of black women or women in general, or all black people for that matter. Rather, they are the theorists and proponents of a radical humanism committed to liberating humanity and reconstructing social relations across the board. When bell hooks says "Feminism is for everybody," she is echoing what has always been a basic assumption of black feminists. We are not talking about identity politics but a constantly developing often contested, revolutionary conversation about how all of us might envision and remake the world."

"The name Charles Darwin calls to mind a man and a theory. The theory may refer to its classical formulations in various editions of the Origin of Species or to neo-Darwinism. Charles Darwin's name may also be employed as shorthand to stand for a wide range of subjects touching on evolution. Historians of science have important roles to play in elucidating all these uses of Darwin's name: establishing the details of the man's life, filling out its context and associations, and providing historical analysis of issues current in evolutionary biology."

"As a young man Darwin was known both popularly and professionally as a geologist. In February 1859 the Geological Society awarded him its highest honor, the , for his signal contributions to the field. In reading the citation for the medal, Charles Lyell noted Darwin's studies on the growth of s, on evidence for the modern elevation of Chile and the repeated elevation of the Andes, on South American geology generally, on the distribution of boulders in Britain, and on fossil s."

"Today's mic-hogging, fast-talking, contentious young (and old) lefties continue to hawk little books and pamphlets on revolution, always with choice words or documents from Marx, Mao, even Malcolm. But I've never seen a broadside with "A Black Feminist Statement or even the writings of Angela Davis or June Jordan or Barbara Omolade or Flo Kennedy or Audre Lorde or bell hooks or Michelle Wallace, at least not from the groups who call themselves leftist. These women's collective wisdom has provided the richest insights into American radicalism's most fundamental questions: How can we build a multiracial movement? Who are the working class and what do they desire? How do we resolve the Negro Question and the Woman Question? What is freedom?"

"Although Darwin was an innovator, his ideas rested on a foundation of fact and analysis that naturalists and explorers around the world had built up over the course of a century or more."

"[B]ack in 2000, 2001, you know, it felt like the Bush-Cheney election derailed a lot of our movements, despite the fact that we witnessed the largest antiwar protests in history, you know? And I was in New York City during 9/11, and I remember the Islamophobia. I remember the real uncritical celebration of cops as first responders. And keep in mind, this is right after, in the wake of the Cincinnati rebellion in April 2001, after the killing of Timothy Thomas. This is in the wake of the Amadou Diallo protests around the acquittal of the cops who killed — again, these two, both cases, unarmed Black men. And, you know, Cincinnati looked like Ferguson. It was like a precursor in many ways. So, we're out here protesting Bush-era militarism. That militarism continues to escalate, despite the claims that there's an end to the war on terror. You know, your last guest talked about this continuation of these wars. And militarism continues to this day. Sometimes it takes on the form of, you know, U.S. support for Israeli occupation of Palestine. It takes on the form of the expansion of troops in Africa, you know, through AFRICOM. So, a lot of what we were fighting for then — or, fighting against, still exists, still persists. So, I think that's important. The other side, in thinking about the whole attacks on critical race theory, it’s an interesting problem, because what I can say briefly is that the latest wave of intellectual McCarthyism, the sort of attacks on CRT, is not really attacks on critical race theory, it’s attacks on liberal multiculturalism. And it’s interesting that — you know, it relates to Freedom Dreams in that the backlash is a backlash to a movement, and not necessarily a backlash to, say, President Obama. It's driven by white heteropatriarchal nationalism, which was there in 2000, persists throughout the 21st century, and it uses the racially coded language of anti-wokeness. "Anti-wokeness," DeSantis's use of that term is not an accident. It's supposed to signal something. But it works. It works because it convinces a large segment of the country that the real threat to their lives are nonwhite people, queer people and our history. You know, this is the real existential threat, not privatized healthcare, not climate catastrophe, not crimes of the state, not global recession, not food and housing insecurity, not the threat of war with China, not economic policies that make the rich richer, you know, like this CHIPS bill, so that rich people could buy Black and queer art, as a fun right-wing causes. So, you know, in many ways, if there’s a basic sort of lesson that Freedom Dreams continues to sort of convey and that the movements that erupted since then have actually taken up and expanded, it is that we don't have the luxury to just fight for reform. We can’t survive that way. We've got to fight for revolutionary change. That's the only way we’ll survive as a planet. And the only way to do that is to think beyond the immediate needs and concerns and crisis that are right in front of us."

"on the one hand, liberalism wasn’t that helpful for us. You know, Clinton gave us the crime bill. Clinton gave us welfare reform, you know, gave us the deregulation of the financial industry. And some of those same policies continue into the Obama administration, especially around finance and around war, the continuation of the war. So, you know, one of the important lessons about fascism is that liberal regimes, you know, open themselves up to fascist change. They’re not necessarily always a hedge against fascism. And so, yes, it is true that Trump and Trump’s people were a backlash against this Black president, but this Black president basically continued policies that were Bush-era policies, you know? And I think it’s important to remember that. So, when I talk about the threat of fascism, I am talking about something that is some ways new under Trump, but I’m also talking about something that’s very old and rooted in American history, the fact that we’ve been here before, that Jim Crow itself is a system of fascism, when you think about the denial of basic rights for whole groups of people, the way in which race is operating as a kind of nationalism against some kind of enemy threat, the corralling of human beings in ghettos. I mean, this is what we’ve been facing for a long time. But part of what makes me hopeful is that the same organizing efforts against — right? — the Obama administration, against the Obama years, in terms of the height of anti-police protests, is the same force that could basically be the hedge against fascism. The question is: Where are we going to stand? How are we going to support them? And how are we going to move beyond simply, you know, trying to put another liberal in office to continue the status quo, to doing something radically different, something that’s more abolitionist?"

"Grace Boggs is the inspiration, in many ways, for Freedom Dreams. You know, we go back to like 1992, and she started this debate with me about, you know, you need to read Dr. King, you need to pay attention to people's needs beyond protest. Like, how do you build the society we're trying to establish in time, in the present, as opposed to just continuing to fight for reform? And so, we had this ongoing debate, and she forced me to rethink some things. Even after Freedom Dreams came out, she had more critiques, of course. And so, I end the book with an epilogue that has a very substantial section on what is being built in Detroit right now as a result of the Boggs Center and the work that Grace and Jimmy Boggs did. And so, that’s a really important part of the story, saying that freedom dreamers are basically building that society of creating new human beings, new ways of being together that don’t fall into the same old trap of, you know, the Marxist seizing state power."

"Aja Monet specifically, as a poet and activist, embodies everything that Freedom Dreams tried to be, you know, because part of what the book argues, or a central part of what the book argues, is that we need to think like poets, that poetry, as Aimé Césaire talks about, is not just, you know, pretty words. It's not simply trying to find the right metaphors. It was a splattering. It's a kind of pulling from the unconscious the deep sense of both pain, suffering, but also our imagination for creating something different. And one of the things I felt like social movements needed, or lacked, at least, at that moment was, this scramble to deal with crises every day made it difficult to stop and think like poets. And one of the things I added to the book was an epilogue that I wrote originally for the book, that I decided not to put in, which describes what I call a proletarian revolution. And so people could read that in the book. But the key thing is that poets — or, poetry is not something that is the reserve of professionals. It is something that we all do, we all practice. And in order to find our way to the New World, we’ve got to be able to think like and dream like poets, because that is the dream that we can’t see in the same tangible way. It’s the one that we build, not blindly, but with our eyes wide open."

"disability justice. It’s a framework that embraces abolition. And that is to say, it demands nothing less than the overthrow of all forms of ableism, you know, and the structures that support it. So, the difference between disability justice and disability rights is that disability justice says, you know, we’ve got to deal with racism, sexism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, that these are the forms of oppression that make even disability differential. And so, if you think about the way that we responded to the COVID-19 crisis, for example, and to this day how we’re still responding to it, that disabled people who are Black and Brown and poor, undocumented, Indigenous, queer, gender nonconforming, they’re the ones that end up getting differential care, sometimes less care, sometimes inhumane care. They’re the ones who end up incarcerated, end up homeless, end up jobless, housing insecure. And that’s what disability justice tells us. And for me, I was forced to really come to terms with it by a number of folks who really were involved in the disability justice movement, who really forced me to think deeper about, like, what is a radical freedom dream, you know? Aurora Levins Morales, for example, is one who’s a really important disability justice activist who really kind of pulled my coattails on this."

"yes, Black Lives Matter was important. It was part of a whole wave of movements — We Charge Genocide in Chicago, Assata’s Daughters, the rebellion in Ferguson, which was separate from Black Lives Matter. I mean, it was really a kind of insurgent movement saying an end to state violence as we know it. But it was also an insurgent movement against white supremacy, though it didn’t always take the form of the Klan or the Nazis. It took the form of the police. It took the form of state policies and right-wing state legislatures passing laws that made protest a crime, you know? I mean, we saw this. When we think about the problem of white supremacy, it is the perennial problem, from before the founding of the nation. And, you know, when we think about, for example, the anti-Klan movement, the modern anti-Klan movement in the 1970s and '80s emerges where? It emerges in prisons, where prisoners are saying, “We've got wardens and guards who are Klansmen, and we need to fight them.” And it expands across the country. And I think we have to keep remembering that over and over again, because some of the same people who end up being elected to office are the — in some ways, the political offspring of the Klan and the Nazis and white supremacist organizations of the '70s, ’80s and ’90s. And then, you know, you know, because you've covered this so well, how many cases of racial violence, whether it’s against Sikhs, against Black people, against undocumented immigrants, that we’ve seen every year. Every year, you know? And we keep coming back to this question of, “Oh, well, we’ve got to deal with assault weapons.” That is important, but it doesn’t solve the problem of continuing and sanctioned white supremacist violence."

"Writing is a learned and practiced craft, not a work of magic or mystery. Indeed, the magic happens when you are practicing the craft. Literary talent may be distributed unevenly, but no one is “born” a writer."

"My hands-down favorite writer is my friend , and that's in large part because much of what I've learned about writing over the last couple of decades has come in the form of gifts from him. Carlo is an apostle of craft, skill, mastery, and work. He writes great prose, to be sure, but he has also taught me about blocking, outlining, editing, structure—all those things I pretended to do, but never actually did. Talking to Carlo, I am always reminded that craft itself produces ideas and insights, unbidden thoughts that transcend the nuts and bolts work. That's why we tell our students that writing is thinking, and that thinking may well be incomplete without writing."

"...There was also a feeling among many clergymen that scholarship somehow threatens religion. Even Jonathan Edwards, himself a profound scholar, took the colleges to task for failing to inculcate piety. The persistence of such a view is seen in the sustained effort of the nineteenth-century academic orators to refute the charge that learning and religion are at necessary odds. No note is more often struck than this in the hundreds of commencement orations and other academic addresses that I have had the somewhat doubtful pleasure of reading."

"The culture hero of our business civilization was the self-made man, a man of action, not one of trained intellect."

"American respect for business, and the businessman's inadequate appreciation of the intellectual, have by tradition been pretty generally taken for granted. One historian has gone so far as to say that whenever business sits in the driver's seat, as it did in the 1920's and as it does today, the distrust of the intellectual is both epidemic and dominant."

"The ivory tower can become a pretty dull place, and rather unproductive, too."

"While appraising all aspects of the past, including myths, we must at the same time uphold the critical function that is the basis of all scholarship, indeed, of civilization itself. For this we also need to recognize clearly the sources of irrationality in history, in our culture, in ourselves."

"(everyone should read:) Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight. Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass is probably the best biography I have ever read. If you want to understand America, you have to understand Douglass. He is one of the true founding fathers of this country, someone who helped America see what it was, and who helped direct it towards what he believed it could one day be."

"The death toll, the sheer sense of human loss experienced in the war, North and South, among blacks and whites, left a profound and haunting pall on American society and culture for generations to come. The old, official count of Civil War dead relied upon for a century and a half was approximately 620,000. According to some remarkable new research, as many as 750,000 American soldiers and sailors may have died in the conflict, the majority from disease. Approximately 1.2 million were wounded, including perhaps 30-40,000 northern amputees (there are no equivalent numbers for Southerners) who struggled with life and livelihood well into the late nineteenth century. There is no reasonable count of civilian deaths, nor of the numbers of freed slaves who perished in the struggle for their own emancipation. Research now suggests that a quarter of all freedmen who made it to contraband camps operated by the Union forces died in the process. Based on the military death count alone, per capita, if the Civil War were fought in the United States today with its ten-fold greater population, 7.5 million soldiers would die. For most Americans that is an unthinkable toll, but such was the equivalence for their kinfolk in the 1860s. Whenever Americans have been compelled to face and understand experiences of great loss and suffering—the World Wars, the Great Depression, the attacks of 9/11—they have returned to the Civil War-era for touchstones of understanding."

"...These men and their party had overseen an unprecedented centralization of power in the federal government as a means of fighting and winning the Civil War. It is worth remembering, especially in America’s current political circumstances in the early 21st century, that these men of the first Republican Party vehemently believed in government."

"The first American republic, created out of revolution in the late 18th century, was in effect destroyed. A new, second republic took its place, given a violent birth in the emancipation of four million slaves and the re-crafting of the U. S. Constitution in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Those Amendments—ending legal slavery forever, sanctifying birthright citizenship and establishing “equal protection of the law,” and creating black male suffrage—in effect re-made the United States Constitution. This comprised a second American revolution."

"A significant segment of American society hates the President [Barack Obama] and cannot seem to abide a black family living in the White House."

"Mary Beard undertook in several of her books to trace the positive achievements of women, their social role, and their contributions to community life. Her concepts are most successfully reflected in The Rise of American Civilization, which she co-authored with her husband Charles Beard. In it the position of women is treated throughout in an integrated way with great attention to the economic contributions made by women. But the Beards' approach to the subject of women had little influence on the historical profession. Perhaps this was due to the fact that in the 1930s and 1940s both the general public and historians became somewhat disenchanted with the woman's rights movement."

"Her methodological suggestions, her practice of comparative history, and her drawing on sources from other disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology, were a revelation to me. Long before the new feminism surfaced, reading Mary Beard raised my feminist consciousness. Essentially, Mary Beard invented the concept of Women's Studies and Women's History. It was Mary Beard, first and foremost, whose critique of an androcentric academic establishment led her to envision new models of education for women. "Equal education for which women have clamoured," she wrote, "has merely meant the extension to women of men's education in their own history and judgements of themselves." But such "history consists of threads... selected from men's activities in war, business and politics, woven together according to a pattern of male prowess and power as conceived in the mind of man. If the woman's culture came into this pattern in any way, it is only as a blurring of a major concept." Here was a statement which expressed what during my graduate education I had experienced only vaguely as dissatisfaction with and resistance to what I was being taught. Traditional history fixed women into marginality; I knew and now found confirmation in Mary Beard's writing that this was not the truth."

"History does not exactly repeat itself. Modern mechanical economy, nation-wide, even worldwide in its sweep, is a novel experiment. If civilization-the great society of today-is to continue, then the problem becomes one of making the huge superstructure of economics and politics function for the essential purposes of life and at the same time of maintaining a sound and creative community life at the basis."

"Here as everywhere a divorce of thought from action leads to a decline in creative intelligence."

"I began to read an enormous amount of history around this time. I was very taken with Charles Beard-at that point his writings seemed to me to represent great Marxist truths because he talked about the things that high school history never talked about, the underlying economic motives of history makers. I read everything he and his wife Mary Beard wrote."

"Writing as a well-trained historian who deliberately chose not to be part of the academy, Beard asserted boldly that women always were and always had been a force in history. Women were central to the historical process and History, to be true to life, would have to be written so that their world-view, their vantage point, would be as fully represented in it as that of men. "Woman is and makes history," she asserted and devoted her life to winning recognition for that fact. Mary Beard was herself an activist in the labor and feminist movement of the 1920s. She, together with a remarkable group of older suffragists, spent years in the struggle to create a World Center for Women's Archives, which was to serve as a repository of the sources of Women's History and was "to encourage recognition of women as co-makers of history." Their effort failed for lack of support in the 1940s, but it did not fail entirely, for out of this struggle came the creation of one of the major Women's History archives in the United States-the Schlesinger Library Archives at Radcliffe College, as well as, eventually, the Miriam Holden collection, now housed at Princeton University. Mary Beard not only conceptualized Women's History as an academic topic, she wrote four pioneering works on the subject and showed in her collaborative works with her husband, the historian Charles Beard, how the shifting focus provided by attention to women would transform the historical narrative."

"As thinker and student, woman, like every thinker and student, borrows with more or less understanding from the heritage of thought in which she finds herself; thus she may accept ready-made views of her personality and the world as she now accepts ready-made clothing in the stores."

"Early in my undergraduate studies I had first read Mary Beard's Woman as Force in History. Somehow, I was able to disregard her poor presentation, her fervent, and sometimes ill-tempered rhetoric and to connect with her central idea: that women have always been active and at the center of history. I was struck, as by a sudden illumination, by the simplicity and truth of her insight. Mary Beard had arrived at that conviction the same way I had, by her having been an engaged participant in women's work in society...implicit in Beard's work, whether she fully understood it or not, was the recognition of the duality of women's position in society-women are subordinate, yet central; victimized, yet active...Her greatest contribution is the insight that focusing on the concept of women as victim obscures the true history of women."

"I am inclined to think that all fact finders should be recruited from the ranks of experienced journalists with noses for the relevant and a knowledge of how to state it, or from the ranks of such poets as Miss Clinch Calkins, whose Some Folks Won't Work told more truths about unemployment than all the Department of Labor reports rolled into one."

"But when the panic that opened in 1929 spread with devastating sweep over the nation supposedly secure, the question was whether a civilization based on profit-making industry and spoils-dividing politics, so enriching for women of the leisure class and so generous in opportunities for higher employments offered to women of the lower middle class, was not after all a transitory phase of history, notwithstanding its duration of a century or more. That "man's world," in which women had secured a foothold, had been more of a nightmare than a dreamland for millions of working women. This they knew from bitter experience."

"Cultural sociology, the larger view, reveals in elaborate studies how, from primitive times to the modern era, societies have been organized with reference to the supreme functions of life-its continuance, care, and protection. Societies that are not so organized, it shows, are robber bands exploiting other societies until inevitable degeneration sets in."

"the labor movement is more than an economic enterprise or a field for energetic leadership. It has a deep social and spiritual significance. It draws men and women together in a great cooperative undertaking which grows in strength day and night and develops ideals of peace and well-being in society as well as practical contests of force."

"Having made the broad change against man, the convention then presented a list of grievances to support it, patterning them on the American men's Declaration of Independence submitted to a "candid" world as well as to the British government in 1776. Though the women found it somewhat difficult to match the exact number of grievances which had been assembled in the men's Declaration of 1776, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton later confessed, they finally accomplished the feat and specified the "abuses and usurpations" of which man was guilty in gaining his object - "the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her [woman].""

"So marked has been this recent trend of social thought that it is scarcely too much to say that we are now in the very midst of an intellectual revolution, perhaps the most fundamental in the long course of civilization that we are today passing over the threshold of a period even more re-constructive than the Renaissance which flowered in the sixteenth century."

"Looking at a medieval mappamundi (or world map) is a disorienting experience. Oriented to the east, displaying unfamiliar geographical forms and blanketed with images of strange animals and monstrous humans, it does not correspond to our modern concept of a world map."

"There are some simple-minded persons who accept this dictum as the final word on the subject, but those women who have studied even a little American history and politics know very well that the border line between national and State matters can not be settled by a mathematical process or by an ipse dixit of some interested politician. They know that neither the Republican Party, the champion of nationalism, nor the Democratic Party, the champion of State rights, has been consistent in its attitude toward national and State rights. They know that each of them has leaned toward National or State Governments exactly whenever it has suited the party and economic interests."

"At the close of that ever-to-be-regretted war the Nation wrote into the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments the fundamental principle that the suffrage is a national matter Those amendments were intended to establish forever adult male suffrage throughout the American empire. It is true that those amendments are in many respects nullified by ingenious provisions. But there they stand. You are confronted by this dilemma: Either you must openly flaunt and scorn them, and thus virtually say to the Nation, We will obey just as much of the Constitution as we please, which is the doctrine of the anarchist; or you must say suffrage is by the Constitution a national matter and we abide by the Constitution."

"'Reading a map' in the Middle Ages could mean scanning great blocks of written matter, describing geographical, anthropological, and historical features. The Hereford map asks for the prayers of all those who 'see, read, hear or possess' it."

"Behind the maps of the sixteenth century lies another story—the change in geographical conceptions, mapmaking, and map usage that took place in the late Middle Ages. Pietro Vesconte, Cresques Abraham, Fra Mauro, Andrea Bianco, and Henricus Martellus Germanus were among the medieval cartographers who began to reshape the image of the world before Columbus sailed west."

"Szilard is one of a brilliant group of Hungarian émigrés, which also included John von Neumann, Michael Polanyi, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller. He believes this remarkable concentration of scientific talent grew out o( a special environment in Budapest at the turn of the century—a society where economic security was taken for granted, a high value was placed on intellectual achievement, and physics was taught so badly that serious students were thrown upon their own resources."

"... on many questions involving science and public affairs those who know cannot speak whereas those who are free to speak often do not do so for fear that their information is not adequate."

"Had the outcome of Los Alamos been anything less than the threat of man's self-destruction, I daresay what would have stuck longest in everyone's mind is the sheer absurdity, the general wackiness, of the whole operation."

"In the strenous autumn of 1945, when scientist tried to provide legislators with a new set of facts and a new concept of military destruction, two courses were advocated. Leo Szliard called for intensive pressure on key individuals; the scientists' lobby, which helped to establish civilian control of atomic energy, was a collective exercise in this technique. Rabinowitch, while supporting this crash program, argued that the radical change in patterns of political behavior required by the new weapons would be achieved only by the long, painfully slow process of education. The education must begin with the scientists themselves for, said Rabinowitch, the scientists had a lot to learn about how to handle political and social evidence as scrupulously as they used laboratory data, and how to think politically with the same blend of imagination and rationality that they applied to scientific questions."

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. Paxton, R. O. (2004). The Anatomy of Fascism. Alfred A. Knopf. 336 p. (Allen Lane History.) ISBN 1-4000-4094-9. P. 218."