Randall Stephens
"NEW HAVEN, Dec. 4 [1967]--Gov. Ronald Reagan of California, who said he had never taught anything before except swimming and Sunday school, sat on a desk at Yale University today and conducted a class in American history." So reported the New York Times on the Gipper's visit to the ivy, where he was met with student protests and plenty of probing questions (December 6, 1967).
"Should homosexuals be barred from holding public office?" a senior from LA asked. The governor was surprised by the question. Rumors had been swirling that his administration had fired two staff members after their sexual preferences came to light. "It's a tragic illness," said Reagan, after a pause. And, yes, he did think that homosexuality should remain illegal. Some students earlier had demanded that the school rescind its invitation to Reagan. The governor, who visited Yale as a Chubb fellow, gave his $500 honorarium to charity.
The confrontation between the 56-year-old governor and Yale students in 1967 speaks to the culture wars that roiled the decade and continue to reverberate to this day. In the video embedded here the students, with haircuts that make them look like clones of Rob from My Three Sons, square off with Reagan on poverty, race, and Vietnam.
The commemoration of the one-hundredth birthday of the 40th president brought with it the usual fanfare of radio specials, documentaries, guest editorials, and the like. The new HBO doc
Reagan, like PBS's American experience bio, spans the actor-turned-politician's career. (Watch the latter in full here.)
Lost in the telling, sometimes, is the scrappy, intensely ideological cold and cultural warrior from the 1960s and early 1970s. To correct that a bit, see the governor go at it with the somewhat nervous Yalies. Or, observe him lashing out against that "mess in Berkeley." (A clip from the HBO doc showing the governor dress down Berkeley administrators shows that pretty well.) The public memory version--rosy-cheeked, avuncular, sunny--overshadows that more fiery aspect of his personality and politics.
Americans remember their leaders as they choose. (The myths and legends are as stubborn as a Missouri mule.) But it is good to remind ourselves that the politicians and public figures we revere and/or study are rarely as one-dimensional as we'd sometimes think they are.
Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Counting Flowers on the Wall
Randall Stephens
The Associated Press site has a "Today in History" page. History Today regularly features it-happened-on-this-day posts on its blog. The History Channel, the purveyor of pop and trivia history for the masses, has something similar. (I wonder if they feature the days on which ancient aliens completed the
construction of pyramids or the dates on which Nostradamus's predictions came true.)
A fun twist on the theme comes from a computer scientist trained at the University of Cambridge. In an interview, William Tunstall-Pedoe tells All Things Considered that after he had run 300 millions facts through a program he had come to the conclusion that April 11, 1954, was "extremely notable for having almost nothing happen."
A little from the transcript of the interview:
Listen to the full story here.
The Associated Press site has a "Today in History" page. History Today regularly features it-happened-on-this-day posts on its blog. The History Channel, the purveyor of pop and trivia history for the masses, has something similar. (I wonder if they feature the days on which ancient aliens completed the
construction of pyramids or the dates on which Nostradamus's predictions came true.)A fun twist on the theme comes from a computer scientist trained at the University of Cambridge. In an interview, William Tunstall-Pedoe tells All Things Considered that after he had run 300 millions facts through a program he had come to the conclusion that April 11, 1954, was "extremely notable for having almost nothing happen."
A little from the transcript of the interview:
Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: It's not that nothing happened. It's that it was spectacularly unnotable in terms of the events that happened that day. So it was the most boring day in recent history.
SIEGEL: Well, perhaps someone in our audience knows of something that happened on April 11th, 1954, that might lead some revision of this judgment.
Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: I'm totally up to the challenge.
SIEGEL: You're up to the challenge.
Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: Up to the challenge, yeah. A lot of people have tried already in the last few days. So but yes, absolutely.
SIEGEL: There was, I think, an exhibition baseball game between the then-New York Giants and Cleveland Indians, who would go on to play in the World Series later that year.
Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: And you think that counts as...
SIEGEL: Well, perhaps someone in our audience knows of something that happened on April 11th, 1954, that might lead some revision of this judgment.
Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: I'm totally up to the challenge.
SIEGEL: You're up to the challenge.
Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: Up to the challenge, yeah. A lot of people have tried already in the last few days. So but yes, absolutely.
SIEGEL: There was, I think, an exhibition baseball game between the then-New York Giants and Cleveland Indians, who would go on to play in the World Series later that year.
Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: And you think that counts as...
Listen to the full story here.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Oral History and Iconic Red Desk Objects
Heather Cox Richardson
Morgan’s post on oral history struck a chord. (Among other things, he observes how valuable information is lost from one generation to the next.) I was shocked, recently, when talking to a high school student about her National History Day project, to learn that she
had never heard of the Cold War hotline between the US and the USSR.
Indeed, why should she have? She was born after the end of the Cold War, and knows the USSR only from history books, most of which are too general to mention the hotline.
But in the 1960 and 1970s, everyone knew the story of the Red Telephone. It was such common knowledge that no one, apparently, has bothered to make a point of passing it down.
The significance of that loss goes far beyond understanding the mechanics of the connection. Indeed, the actual hotline was not a red telephone on the President’s desk; it was a teletype machine at the Pentagon. (The history of the hotline is told wonderfully here, by Webster Stone, now producer and executive of the American Film Company.)
The mechanics of the line are far less important than the cultural context it evoked. Imagine watching TV or films from the era of the Cold War without the knowledge of what a red telephone meant. Everyone who lived during that time understood that when a red phone sat on a desk, it was not a fashion accessory. It was a symbol of an enormously important link on which hung the fate of the world. (See this clip of a 1967 episode of Batman, for instance.)
But to a more recent generation, it’s just a red telephone.
For younger readers who don’t see why this matters, think of a red Swingline stapler. It’s a key prop from the black comedy Office Space. It represents the stifling bureaucracy of the modern
office, cut into cubicles staffed with faceless paper pushers. (This is also the film that gave us “Didn’t you get the memo?”) To a certain generation, a red stapler carries an indictment of the soul-crushing big business of the early twenty-first century. Ignorance of that meaning tears a critical understanding away from modern popular TV and film.
But will anyone bother to tell their children what a red stapler signifies?
It seems to me that such cultural context is one key aspect of history that is lost without oral history. People simply don’t write down what is common knowledge. It is more likely to get recorded in a passing comment made to an oral historian.
Morgan’s post on oral history struck a chord. (Among other things, he observes how valuable information is lost from one generation to the next.) I was shocked, recently, when talking to a high school student about her National History Day project, to learn that she
had never heard of the Cold War hotline between the US and the USSR.Indeed, why should she have? She was born after the end of the Cold War, and knows the USSR only from history books, most of which are too general to mention the hotline.
But in the 1960 and 1970s, everyone knew the story of the Red Telephone. It was such common knowledge that no one, apparently, has bothered to make a point of passing it down.
The significance of that loss goes far beyond understanding the mechanics of the connection. Indeed, the actual hotline was not a red telephone on the President’s desk; it was a teletype machine at the Pentagon. (The history of the hotline is told wonderfully here, by Webster Stone, now producer and executive of the American Film Company.)
The mechanics of the line are far less important than the cultural context it evoked. Imagine watching TV or films from the era of the Cold War without the knowledge of what a red telephone meant. Everyone who lived during that time understood that when a red phone sat on a desk, it was not a fashion accessory. It was a symbol of an enormously important link on which hung the fate of the world. (See this clip of a 1967 episode of Batman, for instance.)
But to a more recent generation, it’s just a red telephone.
For younger readers who don’t see why this matters, think of a red Swingline stapler. It’s a key prop from the black comedy Office Space. It represents the stifling bureaucracy of the modern
office, cut into cubicles staffed with faceless paper pushers. (This is also the film that gave us “Didn’t you get the memo?”) To a certain generation, a red stapler carries an indictment of the soul-crushing big business of the early twenty-first century. Ignorance of that meaning tears a critical understanding away from modern popular TV and film.But will anyone bother to tell their children what a red stapler signifies?
It seems to me that such cultural context is one key aspect of history that is lost without oral history. People simply don’t write down what is common knowledge. It is more likely to get recorded in a passing comment made to an oral historian.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Death, Memory, and Oral History
Morgan Hubbard
A recent piece in The Root on World War II-generation African Americans got me thinking about memory.
When people die they take their memories with them. Their memories become inaccessible forever. Our understanding of events that shaped
our world can be lost with the death of one woman, man, or child.
When memories have contemporary political valence, this can be dangerous. Allesandro Portelli’s The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and the Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) illustrates this point well. Portelli shows how nationalist Italians have purposefully misremembered the circumstances of a Nazi massacre sixty-five years ago for present political purposes. In 1945, anti-fascist Italian partisans attacked a column of German soldiers in Nazi-occupied Rome. The Nazis retaliated less than 24 hours later by massacring more than 300 Italians. Pro-fascist Italians at the time concocted a counter-narrative that blamed the partisans, not the Nazis, for the massacre, alleging that the partisans ought to have turned themselves in to forestall the murders. The documentary record demonstrates that this was never possible, but the counter-narrative is persistent, even among young right-leaning Italians today. Portelli's work rescues the truth, but only in the nick of time—the citizens of Rome who remember what really happened are now elderly. Many have already passed away.
Granted, most cases of memory are not so politically and morally fraught. But the fact remains that the loss of memory accompanying a person's death is also tragic for the historical record.
Since the inception of large-scale oral history projects in the 1940s like the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers Project—and the cultural turn in the humanities since the 1960s—academic historians in America have increasingly considered this. This is a good thing; memory enriches the documentary record.
The next step is to understand that generational memory loss is no longer as inevitable as it once was, thanks to technology, which has made democratized/amateur oral history a reality. If you have a laptop, or even a smart phone, you can conduct an oral history. StoryCorps has an excellent Do-It-Yourself guide to oral histories; the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress is another good place to start.
A recent piece in The Root on World War II-generation African Americans got me thinking about memory.
When people die they take their memories with them. Their memories become inaccessible forever. Our understanding of events that shaped
our world can be lost with the death of one woman, man, or child.When memories have contemporary political valence, this can be dangerous. Allesandro Portelli’s The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and the Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) illustrates this point well. Portelli shows how nationalist Italians have purposefully misremembered the circumstances of a Nazi massacre sixty-five years ago for present political purposes. In 1945, anti-fascist Italian partisans attacked a column of German soldiers in Nazi-occupied Rome. The Nazis retaliated less than 24 hours later by massacring more than 300 Italians. Pro-fascist Italians at the time concocted a counter-narrative that blamed the partisans, not the Nazis, for the massacre, alleging that the partisans ought to have turned themselves in to forestall the murders. The documentary record demonstrates that this was never possible, but the counter-narrative is persistent, even among young right-leaning Italians today. Portelli's work rescues the truth, but only in the nick of time—the citizens of Rome who remember what really happened are now elderly. Many have already passed away.
Granted, most cases of memory are not so politically and morally fraught. But the fact remains that the loss of memory accompanying a person's death is also tragic for the historical record.
Since the inception of large-scale oral history projects in the 1940s like the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers Project—and the cultural turn in the humanities since the 1960s—academic historians in America have increasingly considered this. This is a good thing; memory enriches the documentary record.The next step is to understand that generational memory loss is no longer as inevitable as it once was, thanks to technology, which has made democratized/amateur oral history a reality. If you have a laptop, or even a smart phone, you can conduct an oral history. StoryCorps has an excellent Do-It-Yourself guide to oral histories; the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress is another good place to start.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Disappearing History, Reappearing History
Randall Stephens
A recent TNR review, NYT essay, and a piece in the Chronicle shed light on the contested nature of history and memory here and across the pond. Mostly dark business. On the bright side, long-lost reels from the dark classic Metropolis are finally being shown. Der Spiegel reports on the recovery of the reels from the 1927 Fritz Lang film. Berliners recently previewed the restored classic. Turns out that this more than 20 minutes of extra material alters the story. (Hat tip to my wife Beth on the latter.)
Mark Mazower, "History's Isle," The New Republic, February 3, 2010
Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent
by Richard J. Evans
The effects of a great financial crisis ripple in many directions and last long. After a decade of expansion, for example, austere times lie ahead for British universities, with deep cuts on the horizon. There will be consequences for British scholarship and British culture. Richard Evans’s new study of the historical profession in Britain serves as a timely reminder both of what Britain’s historians have achieved over the past half-century, and what may be lost if their legacy is squandered. In particular, Evans celebrates his colleagues’ outward-looking mindset and their love-affairs with Europe, an engagement that is striking when compared to the introversion of their peers across the Channel, and—though he does not come out and say so—with the parochialism of contemporary British political and cultural life. read on >>>
Russell Shorto, "How Christian Were the Founders?" New York Times, February 11, 2010
The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society. As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.” read on >>>
John Castellucci, "The Night They Burned Ranum's Papers," Chronicle Review, February 14, 2010
At about 2:30 a.m. on May 22, 1968, as New York City police entered Hamilton Hall, on Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus, to clear it of demonstrators, files belonging to Orest A. Ranum, an associate professor of history, were ransacked, and papers documenting more than 10 years of research were burned. . . .
The papers were irreplaceable. They dated back to Ranum's time as a student at the University of Minnesota, where he got his Ph.D. in history. The notes were going to lay the basis for a textbook on early modern European history that he had been commissioned to write for a series edited by the British historian Sir John Plumb. read on >>>
Siobhán Dowling, "Back to the Future in Berlin: Restored 'Metropolis' Comes Home," Der Spiegel, February 13, 2010
After 83 years, Fritz Lang's Sci-Fi classic "Metropolis" has returned to Berlin in its full glory. On Friday night 2,000 fans braved the snowy weather to watch the restored classic at the Brandenburg Gate. It took restorers a year to repair the damage to the newly discovered scenes. They say the original film was much more complex and interesting than just a sci-fi cult classic. read on >>>
See Roger Ebert on streaming the restored version.
A recent TNR review, NYT essay, and a piece in the Chronicle shed light on the contested nature of history and memory here and across the pond. Mostly dark business. On the bright side, long-lost reels from the dark classic Metropolis are finally being shown. Der Spiegel reports on the recovery of the reels from the 1927 Fritz Lang film. Berliners recently previewed the restored classic. Turns out that this more than 20 minutes of extra material alters the story. (Hat tip to my wife Beth on the latter.)
Mark Mazower, "History's Isle," The New Republic, February 3, 2010
Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent
by Richard J. Evans
The effects of a great financial crisis ripple in many directions and last long. After a decade of expansion, for example, austere times lie ahead for British universities, with deep cuts on the horizon. There will be consequences for British scholarship and British culture. Richard Evans’s new study of the historical profession in Britain serves as a timely reminder both of what Britain’s historians have achieved over the past half-century, and what may be lost if their legacy is squandered. In particular, Evans celebrates his colleagues’ outward-looking mindset and their love-affairs with Europe, an engagement that is striking when compared to the introversion of their peers across the Channel, and—though he does not come out and say so—with the parochialism of contemporary British political and cultural life. read on >>>
Russell Shorto, "How Christian Were the Founders?" New York Times, February 11, 2010
The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society. As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.” read on >>>
John Castellucci, "The Night They Burned Ranum's Papers," Chronicle Review, February 14, 2010
At about 2:30 a.m. on May 22, 1968, as New York City police entered Hamilton Hall, on Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus, to clear it of demonstrators, files belonging to Orest A. Ranum, an associate professor of history, were ransacked, and papers documenting more than 10 years of research were burned. . . .
The papers were irreplaceable. They dated back to Ranum's time as a student at the University of Minnesota, where he got his Ph.D. in history. The notes were going to lay the basis for a textbook on early modern European history that he had been commissioned to write for a series edited by the British historian Sir John Plumb. read on >>>
Siobhán Dowling, "Back to the Future in Berlin: Restored 'Metropolis' Comes Home," Der Spiegel, February 13, 2010
After 83 years, Fritz Lang's Sci-Fi classic "Metropolis" has returned to Berlin in its full glory. On Friday night 2,000 fans braved the snowy weather to watch the restored classic at the Brandenburg Gate. It took restorers a year to repair the damage to the newly discovered scenes. They say the original film was much more complex and interesting than just a sci-fi cult classic. read on >>>
See Roger Ebert on streaming the restored version.
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