American History Tellers - Does History Repeat Itself? | 4

Episode Date: February 13, 2019

"Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it." On today’s show, we’ll consider what lessons we can draw from history, and what lessons we can’t. David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers University, joins us to discuss how to connect the events of the past to the events of today. We’ll also talk about his latest book “Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency,” which explores the history of political messaging inside the White House. Plus, Jesse James and this day in history.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's February 13th, 1866. It's a frigid day in Liberty, Missouri. You're standing behind a counter at the Clay County Savings Association, where you work as a bank clerk. Normally, there's a full staff of employees on the floor. But today, it's just you and one other person, your father, the head cashier. Everyone else got to stay home on account of the snow, but not you.

You get to spend the day poring over bank records with your dad. You're grateful to be inside where it's warm, but the truth is, you're bored out of your mind. You'd kill for a customer, something, anything to break the monotony and pass the time. Then, at around two in the afternoon, two men dressed in blue union overcoats, walk through the door. Welcome to Clay County Savings. What can I do for you? One of the men nods politely and warms his hands by the stove. The other man heads your way.

He slaps a $10 bill on the countertop. I'd like change, please. Singles be all right? That'd be just fine. Yes, sir. You bend down to reach for the cash drawer, but when you stand back up, there's a pistol pointed right between your eyes. As you back away, the man jumps over the counter and hits you with the butt of his gun. The other man grabs your father and points a pistol at the back of his head. Make a sound and you and this old man are dead.

You understand me? Yes, sir. The man slams a large grain sack on top of the counter. He presses the barrel of his gun into the flesh in the center of your forehead. Open the vault. Now. You empty the vault and fill the sack to the brim. When you hand the man the bag, he shoves you and your father inside the vault and slams the heavy door shut. As you reach for your father, something catches your eye.

A sliver of light creeping through the vault. They didn't lock it. You push open the door and run to a window. Outside, you see the two men in blue coats with a dozen more armed bandits on horseback. And you see something else, too. A pair of unaware young men walking straight into the gang's path. You open the window and call out, Robbery!

Hearing your voice, the two young men quickly turn and run in the opposite direction. But they're not quick enough. When the smoke clears, the bandits are gone. You and your father are alive and well, but one of the young men in the street isn't so lucky. You run to his side, but you can see there's no hope for him. He lays in a pool of his own blood, choking for air in the frigid snow as the life drains from his eyes. This was not the excitement you were hoping for.

Now streaming. Welcome to Buy It Now, This was not the excitement you were hoping for. From the team behind American History Tellers comes a new book, Tony Hawk! Oh, my God. Buy it now. Stream free on Freebie and Prime Video. From the team behind American History Tellers comes a new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, intimate moments, and shocking scandals that shaped our nation. From the War of 1812 to Watergate. Available now wherever you get your books. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. On February 13, 1866, Jesse James held up his first bank in Clay County, Missouri.

The take was incredible. Cash, gold, silver, and bonds worth nearly $60,000, roughly a million by today's standards. Even more incredible is the fact that Jesse James wasn't even there. It's believed Jesse planned the heist, but couldn't go along for the ride because he was still recovering from a nearly fatal gunshot wound he received near the end of the Civil War. Two other members of Jesse's gang did the heavy lifting, Cole Younger and Jesse's older brother, Frank. The two outlaws donned Union coats, rode into town in the middle of a snowstorm, and held up two bank employees at gunpoint, William Byrd and his father Greenup. They were the victims of what is believed to be the first daylight bank robbery

in U.S. history during peacetime. The holdup was also the first known criminal act of what would come to be known as the James Younger Gang. Jesse's ingenious plan to rob the bank in broad daylight was not supposed to involve murder, though. George Jolly Wymore, the young college student who fell dead at the hands of Jesse's gang, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A few days after the robbery, or so the story goes, Jesse sent Wymore's parents a letter apologizing for his death. Jesse may have expressed remorse over Wymore,

but his days of murder and mayhem were just beginning. Jesse James rose to infamy in a time when the country was still reeling from the Civil War. During wartime, he was a bushwhacker, a rebel guerrilla soldier. But after the war, as the world changed around him, Jesse found himself a man without a country. So Jesse turned outlaw. Over the years, he and the James Younger gang robbed dozens of banks, trains, and stage coaches. Jesse eluded authorities for nearly 15 years and became one of the most successful bank robbers in American history. For Jesse, like most outlaws of his day, his path to infamy was paved in blood,

and the cost to society was tremendous. It all began 153 years ago today, February 13, 1866, an otherwise normal Tuesday in February became history. Every day starts out ordinary. We have no way of knowing what the day will hold or whether our regular lives might be captured by urgent and important events. History is a horizon viewed in hindsight, but when it was happening, in the moment and on the ground, no one can say they truly predicted it. Today, on this special segment of American History Tellers, we're considering the famous quote, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers University,

has thought carefully about this idea that history repeats itself. He's an academic, but also writes for Politico, and has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He joined me from his offices in New York to talk about how we connect the past to the events of today. We also talk about his most recent book, Republic of Spin, An Inside History of the American Presidency. In it, he examines the history of political messaging by the White House. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Professor Greenberg, thanks for coming on the show.

My pleasure. Now, you live a bit of a double life. You're a professor of history at Rutgers University, but you're also a professor of journalism and media studies also at Rutgers. You write for the public at large at Politico and Slate, but you're a fully credentialed PhD researching and teaching in the cloisters of academia. I don't believe that's too common. So why exert yourself trying to have two careers? Well, I think it is actually probably

becoming a little more common than it once was. And there are various professional historians who, to varying degrees, you know, will write for the public, write book reviews, op-eds, be on TV, and so on. For me, it's really a matter of having two goals with my writing that I've always believed are reconcilable, even though it may be some work to reconcile them. One is to reach other scholars and to make contributions to the study of history that will be lasting and that will be influential so that other historians in years ahead will, you know, I hope continue to benefit in some way from my books. But the other is also to reach the general public and to help impart an understanding of history to all kinds of readers. And so you

really have to hone at least two different sets of skills. Yeah, I think there's probably a very big difference between what academic historians are looking at it on a daily basis and those in the general public who are interested in history are consuming. As someone who straddles both worlds, is there a large gap? If I picked up the headlines of academic history right now, would I be surprised to see what the academy is working on? Yes and no. Really, since I started graduate school and then sort of came into my own as a historian, there's actually been more of an interest among academic historians in reaching the public. Partly that is because the Internet has helped create platforms that have made it possible for people to break through and put their ideas out there, whether it's blogs or dedicated history websites. And partly, I think, in certain political times, there's a desire to connect the two,

to have history inform our understanding. So if you look at a recent issue, the most recent issue of the Journal of American History, kind of one of the leading journals in the field of U.S. history. One of the main articles is about fascism in the 30s as an international phenomenon and the way American fascists were sort of in dialogue with European fascists. And obviously, that's a set of questions and concerns that has resonances for our own day. So there are ways in which I think people might be surprised that academic history does touch on popular concerns, public political concerns. But also needless to say, there's plenty of fields where people are toiling away doing wonderful scholarship that really does not have that much to say to the current moment. And that's fine, too. Obviously, we have a need for

that as well. Well, one of the often cited benefits of studying history is exactly that you can learn much about the present by studying the past. If you feel you might be living in a historic moment, you might search for a similar moment from the past. Do you think this is the right use of history's lessons, or should we be skeptical about applying a history like that? It's very tricky. I mean, on the one hand, I wouldn't, you know, I do what I do partly because I believe there is a connection between the past and the present. The past history tells us how we got here, how we arrived at our current moment. History is a form of explanation of the present. But there's also a tendency, both among journalists, but also even among some academics, to resort to a fairly crude mechanistic application of lessons.

You know, this is what happened in the 30s, so therefore this is what we should do today. And usually that kind of thinking leads you astray. And, you know, there's the line from Santa Yana, the Harvard philosopher, that those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it. And then others will say, yeah, and those who remember the past are also doomed to repeat it as well. I mean, history doesn't provide you any great inoculation from making mistakes. It doesn't provide neat lessons that you can apply. I think what it does do is help expand your horizons of thought. And there are possibilities. There are intellectual traditions, political activities that one can

find in the past that maybe aren't so present today. And so they can kind of stimulate your imagination about what could be today or help you to ask why things aren't the case as well as why things are the case. So the past has to be used in a very sort of subtle, fluid, oblique way in speaking to the present. It rarely hands down neatly packaged, ready-made, you know, simple points of instruction. So you are in the history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes camp. I think there's, yeah, there's something to be said for that. You know, I mean, I think right now I brought up the question of the 1930s and fascism.

And I do think over the last 50 years, sort of since Vietnam, the older history of American isolationism as a very destructive thing has largely been forgotten. And when we think of America's withdrawal from the world, we are more likely to think, well, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, we think of moments of American overreach. So having the history of the 30s when isolationism clearly helped bring on a global catastrophe is a useful reminder that foreign policy isn't simply a matter of plain black and white morality where America's involvement in the world just leads to bad things. There have been times where America's withdrawal from the world led leads to bad things. There have been times where America's withdrawal from the world led to even worse things. And so having that complexity of thought is more useful for analyzing

what America's role in the world should be today than simply saying, well, we have to avoid another Vietnam or another Iraq. Well, I think if the goal is complexity of thought, nuance, and understanding, that's going to be a tall order for any mass public general consumption. What would be your advice to both producers of popular history and consumers to get to that complexity of thought? Well, I think one way I try to achieve it in my own writing is through an integration of narrative and analysis. And often when we talk about the gap between popular and academic history, we're talking about a difference between analytical and narrative history.

And that's a little crude. It doesn't always boil down to a strict alignment of those two qualities. But as a general rule, the really popular historians, you know, people like John Meacham or Doris Goodwin, specialize in narrative. And the level of analysis that they have to offer will typically be less sophisticated or complex than what you'll get from an academic historian. On the other hand, a lot of academic historians don't particularly go for narrative, or if they do, the narrative is a little bit of a skeleton on which they kind of hang the analysis, but it's not really a narrative-driven work. Now, I think if you can successfully integrate the narrative and the

analysis, it's a way of almost smuggling into a well-written, readable story a more complex, sophisticated level of argumentation. And that's a tall order, but that's in a way what I try to do in my writing. And I think you can point to a lot of successful historians, both inside and outside the academy, who do that to some degree or another. Well, while we're speaking about narrative, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about political narrative. Your most recent book is Republic of Spin, An Inside History of the American Presidency. And you investigate how politicians have cultivated their image, their narrative to appeal to the public. Is spin something that's developed recently in our political history since, I don't know, since the first televised debates or the rise

of cable news? Or have we been dealing with this for some time? One of the arguments I make in Republic of Spin, and it is an argument, although I try not to present it in kind of relentless polemical form, is that spin is as old as politics. The ancient Greeks called it rhetoric, and so it didn't go by the name of spin, of course, until fairly recently, the 1980s. But that the craft of putting your best slant on the facts, of presenting the information in such a way as to reflect well on you, the politician, on your agenda, on your ideas, well, that's part of what politics is about. And I really trace the rise of the White House spin machine, which is really what the book is about, to the start of the 20th century, where Theodore Roosevelt in particular understood that there was a new age of mass media upon us, that we had this mass public that was engaged with politics,

and that he could lead by reaching out, by taking his message to this broader public. And that was a very different conception of what presidents did from the 19th century, when really it was Congress that drove the agenda. And the president would work with Congress, but the president's role toward the public was less about being an agenda setter, less about achieving a program of reform. And so the change in the presidency and the change in media bring about the development in the White House spin machine. And that's really what the book is about.

Well, let's get specific about the change in the mass media. What was it in the media at the time of Teddy Roosevelt that changed? Well, several things. First of all, you have the rise of these huge metropolitan daily newspapers. And many, many more people are reading the newspaper. Between immigration and urbanization, you have cities full of people who are turning to these papers for their daily news. You also, within journalism, have the rise of news itself as opposed to opinion or commentary. And although there are still influential editors whose opinions on the editorial pages matter, people are sort of learning to read the news columns, the reported news, and make up their

own minds. This is kind of the new ethos of the progressive era of the early 20th century, that citizens should be sort of independent and make up their own mind about public affairs and not just sort of take their cues from what had been a very partisan press. The third element of that is the rise of reporting itself, particularly from Washington. You know, in the 19th century, the Washington press corps was a pretty small group, and they typically covered Congress. If you were a Washington reporter and you wanted to get the news, you didn't go to the White House. There was no White House press room or press secretary, no press releases. This really starts a little bit with William McKinley and some other predecessors to TR, but it's really Theodore Roosevelt who starts regularly gathering

the Washington reporters in the White House to tell them what he thinks they should write. It's Roosevelt who starts hiring dedicated press aides, you know, communication specialists, we might call them today, to handle a project that reporters seem to have particular interest in, like the building of the Panama Canal. You know, it's Roosevelt who first contrives publicity stunts. You know, he'll do things like climb into a submarine and go to the bottom of Long Island Sound himself because he knows that will make headlines and draw attention to the need for submarines in the Navy. So there's lots of ways in which Roosevelt's sensibility, his media savviness, allows him to help redefine the presidency. I'm Tristan Redmond, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up,

I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined. Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Ambys and is a Best True Crime Nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story is now the first ever Apple Podcasts Series Essential. Each month, Apple Podcasts editors spotlight one series that has captivated listeners with masterful storytelling, creative excellence, and a unique creative voice and vision. To recognize Ghost Story being chosen as the first series essential, Wondery has made it ad-free for a limited time only on Apple Podcasts.

If you haven't listened yet, head over to Apple Podcasts to hear for yourself. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of business leaders who risked it all,

the critical moments that defined their journey, and the ideas that transformed the way we live our lives. In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis arrives in Britain determined to make something of his life. Taking the name Robert Maxwell, he builds a publishing and newspaper empire that spans the globe. But ambition eventually curdles into desperation, and Robert's determination to succeed turns into a willingness to do anything to get ahead. Follow Business Movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Now, you indicated that in this moment, we began to read the news items themselves and make our own decisions. You've said also elsewhere

that we increasingly have the tools to be aware, resist, and challenge spin. What are these new tools that we have perhaps today that can aid in our political skepticism? Well, I think what happens over the course of the 20th century is that as politicians and their aides, you know, PR people, advertising people, as they developed new techniques for projecting the presidential image, for shaping the presidential message, you know, we got speechwriters, presidents began to use radio, and then television coaches, all this professional expertise was brought to bear on the project of spin or presidential messaging. You know, audiences weren't simply passive dupes. That is a kind of commonly held notion. And in the early years of communications scholarship,

that sort of was the premise on which people operated but that's long since been debunked i mean we know that listeners television watchers audiences are engaged and we can think about what we're hearing and we can reject it or we can challenge it or we can applaud it even if we know it's contrived and so what happens is sort of in the course of the century, audiences become quite savvy about the different mechanisms. And the press plays a role in this. Starting in the 60s, the press becomes much, reporters become much more explicit about explaining the strategy behind the presidential speech, even in the lead paragraph. So it's not just a dutiful recitation of the facts of what happened, but there's much more

context analysis and explanation that goes into the way news is presented. This is in television news as well. There are studies, one famous study from the 80s showed that the length of sound bites, the length degree to which a subject would be quoted, diminishes radically from 1968 to 1988. What does that mean? It means the reporter's own voice is saying more and they're just turning it over to the sources less. So viewers, readers,

become very aware of the context, the strategy, the intentionality behind presidential communication. And so we don't take it at face value. And of course, that poses a challenge because it can also lead to cynicism, which is certainly a malady of our times. Sometimes I think maybe it would be good if we had a little bit more belief, not necessarily naive belief, but sort of willingness to credit politicians with operating from conviction rather than imputing cynicism to everything that's done. Well, that is something I was thinking about.

Okay, so we're not, the American public is not a bunch of rubes, but there is a cynicism, a public suspicion, that spin is not just putting your best foot forward, but somehow deeply nefarious. We have political narratives that there are an established professional machinery to deceive us. In your study, how much of that is true? I think what happens is when the political party or candidate prevails that we don't like,

we're very reluctant to attribute that success to winning the war of ideas or winning the political arguments. So we tend to impute it to deception, to these sort of nefarious methods. And if they are in agreement with our own side, those communication skills, we don't see them as nefarious. We see them as a great advantage and tool of governing. So I think it's a mistake to see spin or communication as primarily a tool of deception, which is not, again, it's not to say there isn't lying in politics. There is. But generally, spin, and the reason we have a word for it that's different from lying, spin is the effort to kind of put your best slant on the facts while stopping short of demonstrably untruthful claims, right? That there's kind of this rhetorical battle of how far you can sort

of stretch the truth or pitch the truth so that you can feel like you've made a defensible claim while still trying to be as persuasive as possible. I think as far as the word spin goes, you know, the linguist or psychologist Stephen Pinker has this term, the euphemism treadmill. And what that means is when there's a word that has some unsavory connotations, we reach to create a euphemism. But it's still referring to a phenomenon with those unsavory connotations. So eventually, even the euphemism starts to smell a little rotten, and we look for new euphemisms. So if you go back early in the 20th century, the term propaganda used to be a neutral term. It didn't have those negative connotations it does now. But with the First World War and especially the Second World War and communist and Nazi

propaganda, it really came to mean something dark, misleading. And we began to look for other words. You know, publicity and public relations was another one. But today, even public relations has a whiff of disreputability about it. It's, you know, someone's trying to kind of put a gloss on things. Even rhetoric, that ancient Greek term that I mentioned, it can be used in a way that's derisive. Oh, you know, that's just a rhetorical posture, rhetoric as distinct from reality.

But the truth is, no matter what term you come up with, there is a need to describe political communication. Political communication is always going to be different from an oath taken in a courtroom or an argument presented in seminar. There are places where we expect the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but we don't really expect that coming out of the mouths of senators and governors and presidents. We understand that politics is an arena of competing narratives, competing explanations. And that's why I like the term spin. I think it has a slightly kind of playful tone that acknowledges that politics is an arena of contested truth and not absolute truth. In your view, is spin at the levels we have it now necessary or

destructive? Well, I think it's both. Spin is the language of politics in an age of mass communications. We really can't imagine a political world without spin. Look, there are places, if you're reading the report on the Dow Jones, where did it finish today? If you're looking at the box score of a baseball game, if you're looking at the weather report, you should be able to expect a fair degree of neutral objective information that's not inflected by political positioning. But for most of what we talk about in politics, we have spin. It's not only necessary, it's inherent in what politicians do. Now, it can be destructive, and particularly

in recent times, there is a frequent crossing of the line from permissible spin of the sort that all politicians partake of into a kind of outright denial of reality. Well, this brings up a question of revisionist history too. Is there spin in our view or use of history? Is our conception of what happened now influenced or infected by our desire to spin it? Sure it is. You know, I think it's worth distinguishing between kind of good faith and bad faith efforts to understand history. Everybody, of course, has a politics and a political leaning. But when we analyze the past, we try to bracket that enough so that when we look at the facts of what happened, the interpretation isn't simply going

to reinforce our ideological prior convictions. And that's true when making all kinds of political arguments, but it's especially important in understanding the past. Now, it's still hard to achieve. And I think there are many historians who do read the past opportunistically, who read it sort of in the service of, you know, a political or social set of values. And that can be problematic. And politicians do this even more. You know, if politicians are invoking Vietnam or World War II or any number of moments in the past, usually we should remind ourselves they're speaking not first and foremost as students of history who are interested in engaging us in a discussion about the past, but they're speaking not first and foremost as students of history who are interested in engaging us in a discussion about the past, but they're interested in making a political point.

And so we should then turn to historians to say, well, is this an accurate view of the past? Is this a view of the past that is being distorted for a present-day political purpose? And a lot of the columns that I've written over the years, I used to write a regular column for Slate, now I've taken it to Politico, they're sort of designed to be a little bit of a check on the political abuse of history and to offer a little bit more context and grounding and backstory

so that people can have a basis for assessing what the president or even a political columnist might be retailing as an account of American history. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still have urged it. It just happens to all of us. I'm journalist Luke Jones and for almost two years I've been investigating a shocking story

that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn Trials, I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker.

Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders. This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. And it turns out convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy.

Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening. Is there an example of a moment in history that has been egregiously spun, a popular myth that we just need to disabuse ourselves of? Oh, well, there are so many. I mean, they sort of come up every day that it's sort of hard to pick one. You know, a few years ago, or a couple of years ago,

John Kelly, when he was the White House Chief of Staff, made a remark about the Civil War, and this being, you know, it was regrettable that we had to go to war and that we couldn't compromise on our differences. And this provoked kind of a huge backlash, particularly from what I guess is being called liberal Twitter or liberal commentators, who countered with a very different account of the coming of the Civil War. And what both sides failed to recognize is that this is actually a deep historical debate, or as we say, historiographical debate among professional historians. That for a long time, Kelly's view was actually the mainstream view. That Kelly's view was what they called a blundering generation, was just on both sides kind of locked into ideological position and unable to find their way through to compromise. It's really only been in

recent decades that this other view has come to predominate that says, well, no, actually, the North did compromise quite a bit, and it didn't arrest the spread of slavery. And there was actually a legitimate concern that if allowed to spread westward, slavery would not extinguish on its own. And that, of course, it was the South that chose to secede and chose to go to war. So what both sides missed is that this is actually a debate among historians. And sometimes I think people on all sides tend to look at history as a discrete set of facts that is like an encyclopedia entry about which there is no room for dispute. In truth, history is, there was a Dutch historian, Peter Gale, who has this

aperçu or aphorism, history is an argument without end. And, you know, I think there's a lot of truth to that, that, yes, you can make a more or less persuasive argument. I certainly am more partial to the necessary conflict account of the Civil War rather than the blundering generation account. But we shouldn't completely dismiss the blundering generation account. We have to acknowledge that a lot of historians for many years found merit in that interpretation. And we can't just simply say, well, Kelly's wrong or Kelly's ignorant or Kelly's racist. We have to reckon with the fact that this was a powerful interpretation that held sway for a very long time. As we're drawing to a close here, is there a particular moment or era of American history

that you would like Americans to be more aware of, to have a more critical knowledge of? From what I can see, probably every period in our past is too little understood. History majors are declining right now. It's a time where there's a lot of pop social science thinking that's big. And I actually see in a lot of students, and even among some younger faculty, a displacement of empirical research in favor of theory and thinking that certain theories can be manipulated to tell us what we need to know. And I think the more kind of empirical fact-based research into the past that we encourage, the more we are going to open up creative thinking, creative interpretations, that it doesn't start with theory, that it's important to be theoretically sophisticated and not just to take your facts at face value, but that what we really need to

encourage is the ability to do research, to do reporting, to find out facts, to question facts, and that those basic skills of finding and building knowledge are really what needs strengthening right now in our society. Well, thank you for your research and finding of facts. And also thank you for speaking with us today. Sure, it was a pleasure to talk with you. That was my conversation with Rutgers history professor David Greenberg. You can find him on Twitter

at Republic of Spin or check out his latest book, Republic of Spin, An Inside History of the American Presidency. In the past, we've asked for feedback on the show

and we deeply appreciate all the reviews and notes you have sent us. But now we truly want to hear from you. Call us at 424-285-0548 to answer this question. If you could be an everyday person at some point in American history, which time period would you choose and why? Remember to include your name and where you're calling from. We might play your message on the show. Again, that's 424-285-0548.

One more time, 424-285-0548. On the next episode of American History Tellers, we delve into an era that upended American society, the Great Depression. In October of 1929, the hopes and dreams of middle-class Americans who'd invested beyond their means evaporated in a single week. By 1932, one in four Americans would be without work. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

If you did, subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts. Tune in, Wondery.com, or wherever you're listening to this right now. If you're listening on a smartphone, tap or swipe over the cover art of this podcast. You'll find the episode notes, including some details you may have missed. You'll also find some offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring this show to you for free. And if you do like this show, one of the very best ways you can show your appreciation is to give us a five-star rating and leave a review.

I always love to know your thoughts, and detailed reviews are one of the best ways for others to find the show. Tell your friends and family, and show them how to subscribe. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. Sound design by Derek Behrens. Our producers are Katie Long and Jenny Lauer Beckman. Our executive producer is Marshall Louis, created by Hernán López for Wondery. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music.

And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.