Here's Where It Gets Interesting - How the Future Shapes Our National History with Heather Cox Richardson

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

On today’s episode of Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon interviews one of our most-requested guests. Listeners regularly write in and ask to hear a conversation between Sharon and political history expert Heather Cox Richardson. That day is today! Heather Cox Richardson shares how she believes the way we use language shapes how we see our political views, allies, and enemies. Together, Sharon and Heather also touch on the ways that our future may change our past. Tune in to understand what they mean. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hey friends, welcome. Today's guest is somebody who y'all have been asking me to have on the show since before the show even began, when I was just planning for it. since before the show even began, when I was just planning for it. This person has been at the top of your most requested list for over 200 episodes, and she is finally here today, Heather Cox Richardson. She is one of the most subscribed to historians. She has a phenomenal podcast. I don't know if other people do this, but I refer to her by her three initials, HCR. You know that you're somebody important when you get three initials. So let's dive into my conversation with Heather Cox Richardson.

I'm Sharon McBain, and here's where it gets interesting. I'm Sharon McBain, it's lovely to be here. I will say I have not really been doing podcasts or much media at all, because I've been writing a new book. So yours is the first one I have done since I started to say yes again. And we quite literally put you on the calendar, knowing that. Thank you. Can you tell us what your new book is about? Or is it still a secret? I'm not sure it's a secret. We don't have a title for it yet. It'll come out in probably 10 months or so. It's the story of how we got to where we are right now, where we are, and how we get out of it. That sounds like exactly the book we need, Heather.

Well, let's hope. I will say it's been hard to cover what is essentially all of American history in a really short, readable way with a new argument behind it. And it's really pushed me as a writer, which is fun at my age, actually. One of the things people ask me all the time, has it ever been this bad before? Has America ever been this fractured? Have we ever been this divided? Has there ever been this much civil unrest? And I would love to hear your take on that question. Yes. That's what I say too. Yes. Yes. Yes. So we, of course, measure things by our own lifetimes. And the period since the 1960s, really, has been relatively, and I say relatively, calm in America. But certainly in our history, we've had periods which were more divided than we are in right now. What makes this moment unique

is that for the first time in our history, we have a significant percentage of one of our political parties that appears to have given up on democracy. And that's unique. I mean, that's not happened before. There was a glimmer of it in 1879. I talk about that a lot before. But it means a number of things. It means we're in a period of realignment. It means a period when people have to rethink where they stand. It changes the relationship between politics and morality. There's a lot of things going on right now that we have not seen before. But in terms of divisions, let me tell you, if you think about the manifestations of divisions, you think about times like the 1880s and the 1890s or the 1930s. In both of the cases, there were gangs in the streets that were literally killing people.

We are in a moment that is certainly fractured, but not nearly as bad as those times were. One of the other things that I think a lot of people are curious about is, again, you speak about this frequently in your newsletter, Letters from an American. It sounds like you're going to talk about this in your book. How did we end up here? How did we end up in the position where new polling shows that something around 80% of Americans feel that democracy is in danger? And of course, there are varying beliefs about who's at fault for that. Both people on the right and left think that the other side is at fault for democracy being

in danger. How did we get to a position where the United States of America, with all of its flaws, now is on the knife edge of democracy? It's worth pointing out, first of all, that what historians do is we take a look at how the world works. We try and figure out what creates change. Is it great men? Is it movements?

Is it economic forces? Is it religion? What creates change? You know, is it great men? Is it movements? Is it economic forces? Is it religion? What creates change? And most historians have their own version of what they believe creates change. I happen to be an idealist. That is, I believe that ideas create change. That if you can change the way somebody thinks, you can change the way they behave. And if in fact, you agree with me on that, you will understand the next point of this. And that is what I believe has put us where we are is the use of language in such a way that it has explicitly been used to divide us and to put us into two separate camps. And I think what you're pointing out is a reflection of that division created by political actors. And I'm happy to talk about that.

I would like to point out that if you look at polls, most Americans agree on most issues. They don't know they agree on most issues, but they agree on most issues, including ones that are identified as being hot-button issues. agree on most issues, including ones that are identified as being hot button issues, issues like abortion, issues like gun safety, issues like the environment, issues like our foreign affairs. We tend to agree in quite high numbers on those issues, but you would never know it from the way that we talk about those things in the public sphere. And that really seems to me to have been a deliberate attempt to divide us as voters and as Americans to enable a certain group of people to take power. So I, as an idealist, say it comes down to language, and that language has shaped the

way we think about ourselves and the way we think about our history. So many people have embraced a history that is both not accurate and frankly, I think, angry and defeatist rather than emphasizing the kinds of things that we do best when we work together. Who is the perpetrator, if that's the right word? Perhaps it's not the right word. Who is the perpetrator of this type of sowing of these divisive portions of our language, divisive ideas? Who is benefiting missing from our political discourse is what you just said, who wins. And one of the things that you cannot miss if you look at any chart about our economy since the 1980s is that money has moved upward dramatically. Both income and wealth have moved upward dramatically in our society. So we have one of the largest wealth gaps in our entire history, with about one half of 1% ending up with basically all the cookies, all the marbles going home with them. So putting that back in the equation, that's not an accident that that happened. So the question

is, where did that come from? And one of the things that jumps out to economic historians and to political historians is that the period from 1933 to 1981 was the things that jumps out to economic historians and to political historians is that the period from 1933 to 1981 was the opposite of that. It's known as the Great Compression, named by a couple of economic historians, in which the gap between wealth and income really narrowed, that Americans compressed so that we were all much closer together economically than we were before that, or in the period that began in 1981 after the election of President Ronald Reagan. And in that period from 33 to 81, we had what was known at the time as the liberal consensus, that is that Republicans and Democrats both believed

that the federal government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure and defending civil rights. And that was a belief that was really widespread. Now, within that system, though, there were people who really hated the idea of the federal government taking on those roles. And at first, they were actually led by a libertarian wing of the business community that didn't mind taxes so much. That's not what they really talked about. They talked about the idea that the federal government should not regulate the way that their businesses ran.

And what they argued was that that kind of interference would destroy the market economy, which was, as far as they were concerned, the way that society worked best. Now, they joined hands with religious conservatives who didn't like the idea of what they considered the breakdown of the patriarchal society through things like the Social Security Act or the provisions in the New Deal that gave some protections to women and children. And they, in turn, joined hands with the white supremacists in the South who didn't like the idea that the federal government intervention in society as well as in the economy gave a leg up to black and brown

people. Those people came together in an organization, I shouldn't call it an organization, although they consider themselves that they came together in the 1950s as what they called movement conservatives. That is, they called themselves conservatives as a name, but they were not actually conservatives. That is, conservatives as an intellectual position are people who want to conserve things that work, the family, society, churches, protection of property, things that create a society that is not destabilized, that is not going to have gangs in the streets, that is not going to be attacking each other. And they quite literally said, we are here to disrupt that and to create a new normal. And they had a real problem because Americans actually liked the federal government doing

all the things that I just talked about. So by 1954, in a fairly well-known book, they began to divide Americans between capital C conservatives, people like them, and what they call liberals. And those liberals, they said, were essentially socialists or communists. And that was not just Democrats, although that's come to be defined that way, that was Democrats and Republicans. Because of course, this is the period when Eisenhower, who's a Republican, Dwight Eisenhower is in the White House, they are all labeled as liberals who must be destroyed, but not through voting, honestly, and not through honest arguments, because every time they make an honest argument, Americans picked to have the federal government do these things. So instead, they began consciously to divide the country in two. And that began to work, especially after the Brown

versus Board of Education decision in 1954. And then by the time you get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it was easier and easier for them to say the federal government protecting civil rights is a misuse of tax dollars because it's taking tax dollars from white people to, for example, integrate Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. And that idea that the protection of our civil rights, the provision of a basic social safety net, the promotion of infrastructure and the regulation of business being equal to socialism, which is actually has nothing to do with international socialism, was a weapon that really worked. And you saw that really taking off in, of course, the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan manages to ride to office on the image of the welfare queen, a black woman that was supposed to be taking advantage of all these welfare systems in order to live high on the hog. But you saw it really taking off in the 1990s, when then House Speaker Newt

Gingrich's Political Action Committee actually distributed lists of words that newly elected Republicans should use to characterize the Democrats. And of course, that became more and more extreme as the laws that were that Congress was passing were concentrating wealth upward. So at the end of the day, it was a project not incidentally of the mainstream Republican Party, but of this upstart group of movement conservatives who have now taken over that party and switched to become something very different in the modern era under former President Donald Trump and his allies. modern era under former President Donald Trump and his allies. But the statistics will show you really clearly that while people talk about polarization, the Democratic Party has really not shifted very much at all. If anything, it shifted rightward. What has really shifted is

that the Republican Party has ceased to be the old Republican Party and has been taken over by this group of people who have now a very different agenda than they had even in the 1950s. to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock First Come, first serve spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. A&W is now serving Pret Organic Coffee, and you can get a $1 small coffee, a $2 small latte, or like me,

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I am very curious about the last couple of years. What do you think historians of the future will say about this time period from 2020 to currently 2022 in America, if you're going to prognosticate? Okay, so I love this because because of course, I'm trying every night to write the first version of history, the first look at what's happening in this moment. But one of the really important concepts about history, and this is really not this is just kind of fun and interest me is that quite literally, the future changes the past. That is, depending, for example, on how the Dobbs versus Jackson women's health decision affects our society, we might look back at the Roe versus Wade decision of 1973 in entirely different ways. So the future really does change the way we think about the past. So what historians will say will depend a lot on what happens. So for example, if America takes the moment we're in right now, and says, hey, wait, we want to recommit to our democratic principles, and we're going to do so. And this is how we're going to do it. And this is how we're going to build democratic coalitions around the world. Historians will look back at this moment and say, that was the turning point. And here are the outrageous moments that made that a turning point.

And those, of course, will become clearer going forward. But if, in fact, America tosses democracy overboard and embraces a form of Christian nationalism or fascism, then they will look at this period as a certain kind of birth, that the country has finally given up on democracy the way, for example, enslavers in 1858 said they should. They literally said that, you know, Jefferson was wrong to talk about everybody being created equal, that in fact, people weren't created equal, and some people should rule others. And they actually began the Confederate States of America to do exactly that. The cornerstone of our Confederacy is human

enslavement. This is what we believe, and this is why we believe it. 1861, a very famous speech by Alexander Stevens, who becomes the vice president of the Confederacy. So maybe this will be a moment that history will rewrite as, look, the Confederacy finally has taken over American democracy and turned the country into something else that had its roots all along, but didn't ultimately flower until 2024. That's such a great point that the future informs how we view the past. We now look back on those ideas, those morals, the people who are perpetrating it with revulsion of like, how could we have done that? What made us think it was okay? And I know as a historian, that's exactly what you're studying. But there are other things that

have not changed so much. And we look back on the past with a different viewpoint. So it's a fantastic point that this is the moment in which America will have to decide. What is America? If we're talking about this being an important moment in American history, where Americans must decide whether we are willing to recommit to the principles of democracy over party allegiance, or whether we are willing to sacrifice that on the altar of something else, fascism, white Christian nationalism, whatever that is. What should they be using to make that decision with? How should they make this choice? This is a moment we must choose. What should Americans be looking for when they're making that decision?

I actually think this is easy. And I'm one of the few academics that thinks this is easy, I think. To me, it seems like in America, I won't speak for any other country, but it seems to me like there's really two ways of looking at the world. Either you think that everybody is equal and has a right to self-determination, including a right to have a say in the government under which they live, or you believe that human society is actually made up of hierarchies. Some people are better than others. And if some people are better than others, the people who are the better ones should get to rule over the rest of us. And ultimately,

that means that you're best off and society is best off if you put all your political power in the hands of one person. Because logically, if some people are better than others, then one person is better than everybody else. And everything to me comes down to that. Do I have a right to self-determination? Do you have a right to self-determination? Does the smartest man in the world have the right to self-determination? Does the smartest man in the world have the right to self-determination

along with the person who, as I used to say sometimes in a classroom, that student who used to smoke his breakfast? Do you believe that they have a right to make decisions about their lives so long as they don't hurt other people and all that? Or do you think that society is really going to be better off if you turn everything over to a few people to tell the rest of us what to do? And those two ways of looking at the world are the ones that America has always struggled over. It is about democracy. I really believe it is a human question that to me, the ultimate goal in human life is to be able to determine your own fate and to be able to make your life what you want of it. And the idea that we should somewhat randomly based on religion or money or education or race or gender, turn over our rights to make decisions about our lives to some group of people just seems to me to

to me to be a denial of what it means to be human. So for me, the difference is, do you want a society in which we all have a right to a say, like the Declaration of Independence promised? Or do you want to turn that all over to somebody else? I've said this many times that the power you wield now, likely can and will be used against you in the future when the pendulum swings. So we have to be extremely careful. Because always think that like our in-group is going to be the one in power. If we desire that sort of society in which the strong man comes in and has all the answers and saves us all from the civil unrest and all the terrible things that are happening in society, unrest and all the terrible things that are happening in society, we believe that our in-group is going to benefit from that.

Otherwise, we wouldn't support it, right? We would think, well, I'm going to be worse off. I'm not going to align with that person. We don't think that. We always think we are going to be in the in-group that gets to make the decisions. And historically, that does not always play out. Well, it's also not good for the people who are making those decisions, because if you look at strong men, they always turn on the people in their inner circle. I mean, once you have said

you can treat people however you want, that's it right there. The other piece about this that seems to me worth emphasizing is that, as I said, this is such a bleak view of America and of democracy. And one of the things about the idea of democracy as self-determination is it assumes that the world is not limited, that we don't have to fight between an in-group and an out-group, that there is, in fact, enough for all of us, and even more than enough for all of us, that if, in fact, we believe that everybody has the right to self-determination and should be treated equally before the law and have equal access to opportunities, we're going to have

incredible innovations and new ideas and new ways to think about things. And to me, it's such a bright and exciting way of thinking about the future. Unlike what can I steal and, you know, have over here in my corner with my other little rats, that it seems to me, I would really love for us to recapture that sense of excitement and possibility. And that seems to me something we don't talk about enough when we talk about democracy. I want to talk a little bit more about Abraham Lincoln. He is, you know, most people's favorite president, right? If you ask people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, right up there amongst both historians' view of great presidents and also, you know, the citizens'

view of who great presidents are. And one of the things that I often point out to people is that if Abraham Lincoln were alive today, half of you would hate him. Half of you would absolutely hate everything he stood for, everything he was trying hate him. Half of you would absolutely hate everything he stood for, everything he was trying to do. And if you take what Abraham Lincoln did in the United States, if you transpose that onto the modern day, that we would write an executive order that radically changed the lifestyles of a large number of Americans. How do you think that would fly today? Two things. First of all, it is worth pointing out that Lincoln's party, the Republican Party, which was quite new at the time, got shellacked in the 1862 elections, and that he himself did not think he would be reelected in 1864. So the idea that Americans at the time were behind him is just incorrect. Again, the future

changes the past. Now we're all ooey and aahey about Lincoln, but at the time, George McClellan called him the original gorilla, and he was theoretically supposed to be on his team. So there is always the fact that it's hard to transpose the past into the present. But the reason he is such a pivotal figure in our history is because he comes at a really important moment. And this, I think, is instructive for the present. That is, when Americans went into the Civil War, both sides, both the United States of America, and it's worth remembering that it's the United States of America. When we say union, that's what we mean. And the upstart other government called the Confederate States of America, both of them believed that they were defending true American values. And by 1862, on both sides, all of those things had been completely destroyed. Racial roles fell apart, gender roles fell apart, economies changed so dramatically in two years they were unrecognizable. Cities rose, cities fell. Everything changed dramatically in two years. reasons that Lincoln becomes such a pivotal figure is that in the Gettysburg Address in November, he reimagines what it means to be an American. And he says, yeah, we told you we were fighting for, you know, the world to stay just the way it is, but it's not. We are searching for a new birth of freedom, for a new birth of freedom and a government that is

of the people, by the people, and for the people. And if we're going to do that, we cannot have human enslavement any longer. And he managed to tie the United States population into the idea of the Declaration of Independence as being our crucial founding document. And while Lincoln was able to redefine America with that second birth of freedom, as it was articulated in the Gettysburg Address, the Confederacy never found something like that. Their society fell apart, and they had nothing to replace it with. And people stopped rallying to it. You know, by the end of the war, the number of Confederate soldiers who had gone AWOL made it impossible for them to continue to fight. And this idea that

somehow the Confederacy was united is completely a product of later years. In fact, it was riven by disagreement, by people ceasing to fight, by people refusing to pay their taxes. Jefferson Davis has to declare martial law across the whole place. Lincoln managed to take a moment of incredible insecurity and to redefine it, to redefine the country. And that's the same thing that Franklin Delano Roosevelt does in the 1930s, to take a moment when the country is bitterly divided and to redefine it. And one of the things that I am looking for in this moment and pushing, to be honest, is the idea that this is an incredibly chaotic moment for

us. But we can do what Lincoln did, we can do what FDR did, we can say, hey, our system has not worked in the past. But now is the time to take that principle of human self determination to take that principle of democracy, and to take that principle of equality before the law and equality of access to resources and to make it really come alive. And that to me is just as realistic an outcome of this moment as the other horrific outcomes you hear about. We just have to work to make it so. Reconstruction is one of your areas of specialty. It's one of your areas of interest. You teach a lot about reconstruction, and it is a time period that many Americans know very little about. That leaves a lot of Americans with this huge knowledge gap about what was happening

during the reconstruction period of the United States. And we think that civil rights just kind of came from nowhere, right? Like we go right from the Great Depression into World War II, into civil rights. And that's often where our American history curriculum stops. Can you give people who, maybe they've heard the term, but they don't really know what it means. Can you give people a really high level overview of what Reconstruction was and how it has shaped the United States today? So I love this question because I'm right there with you and people who didn't understand Reconstruction. If you actually look on Wikipedia or on Google, you will see that my first book is on the Civil War because I'm like, I'm not getting in that Reconstruction thing. I can't figure out who's

doing what. And what got me doing Reconstruction was that I grew up on the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. And she was born in February of 1867, which is the month before Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, giving black men in the American South the guaranteeing their right to vote for delegates for state conventions to rewrite the state constitutions in the American South the guaranteeing their right to vote for delegates for state conventions to rewrite the state constitutions in the South. And when she died in 1957, America already had military advisors in Vietnam. And I didn't get how somebody could live through that period and not see all these different issues mixed up together. Because in history books, like you say,

when I'm older, so when I learned it, first, we talked about congressional reconstruction, then we talked about presidential reconstruction, congressional reconstruction. Then you went to all of a sudden in 1877, something happened in the South and Andrew Carnegie arrived from nowhere. And then maybe if you were lucky, women started running around in the 1890s. And maybe you got some American West. But I was like, there's just no way. Laura Ingalls Wilder's dad was like, okay, this year, we're going to think about presidential Reconstruction, but not about the West, even though we live out here.

So I ended up, after I finished my first book, reading all of the New York Times for the Reconstruction years. And that's much less impressive than it sounds, because the New York Times for the Reconstruction years. And that's much less impressive than it sounds because the New York Times is only four pages in those days, and only two of them were news. So it was a pretty, you know, relatively quick read. What I discovered was that all of these stories, the African American lives in the South, Chinese American lives and Mexican American lives in the West, immigrant lives in the North, Confederate lives in the South, Northern soldiers in the North. It is a period of such extraordinary possibility and so many voices.

We had literally hundreds, hundreds of black newspapers in America at the time, which most people don't realize now. the time, which most people don't realize now, but there were thriving black newspapers all over the country and German language newspapers and all kinds of different voices in our society. So reconstruction is really about the relationship between individuals and the federal government. Does the federal government in fact have a role to play in protecting civil rights and in keeping the playing field level among all Americans? Or does it not? Do we want to turn everything over to a market system in which the government protects big business? Or do we want the government to protect individuals and to protect a level playing field? And that's the whole through line of the Reconstruction years. I have two more questions for you. Who is the worst 19th century American president?

And why is it Andrew Jackson? Okay, I will give this to you. And I will answer that. But I have my own candidate, Jackson is introduced to something important into our lexicon as well that I don't think we talk about enough. And that I hope someday to write a book about I'm actually really digging deeply into this right now. And that is that he argues that democracy belongs at the state level, that democracy belongs at the state level, because it is at the state level that the government can most quickly respond to the interests of its constituents. It's a lovely thought. However, he makes that intellectual leap because he doesn't like that the federal government wants to do a bunch of things that are not good for enslavers, of which he is one. And he uses it primarily when he's in office to force indigenous Americans off their lands in the American South. by saying to them, hey, you don't want the federal government to be involved because you can go ahead and you can have these lands, except for those horrible people at the federal

level. And he backs the idea of pushing the indigenous Americans off their lands for the little white American guy. What the reality is, is those lands are going to become part of an extraordinary land boom that is going to become part of an extraordinary land boom that is going to put the price of land out of reach of most farmers and give it all to the large enslavers. That's how we get the real expansion of human enslavement across the American South after 1830, the 1830s and the 1840s, which gives rise to virtually everything else. Of course, that just to be clear, the Indian Removal Act does

eventually go through Congress, but it goes through Congress because of what happens in the states in the American South. So that's one of the reasons that I'm not a fan of Andrew Jackson. And there are other reasons as well. But I got to put in a plug here for Benjamin Harrison as being the worst president in America. Okay. All right. Make your case. Well, I'm not gonna give enough attention here to the Wounded Knee Massacre, which he oversees and which many of his biographers don't even mention. Of course, I wrote a book about that

and his involvement in that. But one of the things that Benjamin Harrison does is he's a Republican, he is elected in 1888 after it's clear that Americans prefer the Democrat Grover Cleveland, who is offered to level the playing field between the rich and the poor, the employers and the workers in late 19th century America. And in after Grover Cleveland is elected in 84, the big business Republicans create a new form of campaign finance to paper the country with propaganda, essentially, to elect a Republican. And they do, but he actually loses the popular

vote by more than 100,000 votes, and he wins in the Electoral College. Okay, that's its own story. But the reason we care about this today is, for many reasons, if you're a 19th century historian, but in my case, they recognize that they need to pack the Electoral College and they need to pack the Senate to make sure the Democrats can never win again. We get six new states in 12 months, and they're quite open about the fact they're packing the Electoral College and they're packing the Senate so that the Democrats who want to use the government to level the playing field can never do so. And we are still living with the consequences of that rapid expansion of the

government in 1889 through 1890. Today, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, they are still states that have wield enormous power in the Senate and the Electoral College compared to places like California, Florida, Texas, or New York. So I'll make a case for Benjamin Harrison being somebody who belongs in the pantheon of weenies. I mean, okay, what about studying history gives you hope? This speaks back to what I was saying about reconceiving the way we think about America. Almost everything we have talked about on this podcast is the bad story. And what America has always been about is, as I say, constructing a future, either for

an individual or for a society. a future, either for an individual or for a society. And what gives me hope are the people who created dramatic and exciting and productive and enviable lives out of whole cloth, if you will. And Fannie Lou Hamer, who was the daughter of sharecroppers and got involved in learning about voting and election rights in the American South in a period when there was simply no way a black woman was going to be allowed to vote. And she started to register people to vote, and she got beaten almost to death for that. And she picked herself up and said, you know, you've killed me, essentially, I'm paraphrasing here. She said, you've killed me once, you can't kill me again, and proceeded to go out and fight hard for black representation and the Voting Rights Act,

and change the world. And when people say, you know, I have no way to change things, I always think of people like Fannie Lou Hamer, or, you know, so many of our people we now think of who are heroes who didn't wake up one morning and say, hey, I'm going to be a hero today. They woke up one morning and said, you know, there's something here I can't live with. It's just a little thing. But I can change this one little thing. And the next day, it was something that was maybe a little bit bigger. And by the end of their lifetimes, they have changed the entire way America looks and the way we behave. And so I am actually far more hopeful than unhopeful, because I look around at the people around me, and I suspect you could say the same thing. And they're people who are making lives in the face of mortgage payments or a sick child or, you know, really bad grades or

health issues or great fortune. And they are every day pushing that ball a little further along. And I find that entirely inspirational. And it's all through our history, but it's also all through our present. I totally agree with you. I love that. I've heard it said from another historian that one of the things that they love is that history gives you access to a great community from which you can learn. Well, my great example of that recently is Thurgood Marshall. Do you know how he got interested in the law? His father was a waiter whose hobby was to go to the courtroom and listen to cases and

deconstruct the cases. And I mean, you just think about that and you think, okay, dad's got a weirdo hobby, I guess I'll go along. And you know, how many of our students would say the same thing? Oh, yeah, my dad dragged me along to, you know, rebuilding airplane engines or whatever. And from that, we get one of our great jurists. His mother was a teacher. And one of his early cases was in Maryland fighting for equal pay for teachers of all races. And then that movement spread. And I loved what you had to say, too, that somebody might have woken up one day and decided, you know, I'm going to do this one little thing.

Fannie Lou Hamer did not wake up one morning and think, I'm going to speak at the 1968 Democratic Presidential Convention. That's my goal. That wasn't her goal. But each day that she worked, she grew in capacity. She grew in understanding. She grew in resources. And we all have that potential as well. We tend to look at these massive, insurmountable problems problems and think there's nothing I can do to fix income inequality. But we all have the ability to grow over time. You

might not have it today, but the more you practice it, the more opportunity you have to grow in capacity and resources and understanding, the more people you have the ability to impact. And you don't have to be the person who changes the entire political system. And for all that Fannie Lou Hamer became Fannie Lou Hamer, she had lots of people with her who moved the ball just enough to enable her to move it forward. It really is a team effort. Everything we do is a team effort.

And you might just be the person dragging your kid along to your hobby and saying, you know, listen to the way he made that argument. But as long as you're moving the ball forward, you're part of the team. I love that. That's so good. Heather, I feel like we could just talk about all the things all day. It's always so fun to chat with people who have very similar interests and the amount of thoughtful discourse you bring to these topics, the amount of expertise you have on them.

It's no wonder people love reading your Letters from an American newsletter and also your Now and Then podcast with your friend Joanne. I love listening to it. We have a good time. listening to it. We have a good time. You too. It's very fun to hear to friends, historians, you guys are interested in different topics. I love listening to people playfully argue about history. Like that's very amusing to me. And I just love your I love your show. It's fantastic. Well, thanks so much for having me. It's been a great deal of fun. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor.

If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review or sharing a link to it on your social media? All of those things help podcasters out so much. Here's Where It Gets Interesting is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder. And it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. See you again soon. you