Class 1: The Road to 250

All right, welcome, welcome to all of you to America at 250. It is an amazing thing to see. All of you here gathered in one place to talk about American history. I am Beverly Gage. I'm a professor here in the history department. You will be hearing from me again at the tail end of the course. So we thought we might start with just me up here saying a few words. You'll then hear from my colleagues, Joanne Freeman and David Blight. And then I'll come back up here at the end of today's session and talk a little bit about the logistics of the class. And I will say as we were making all of these preparations in registration and the police and the fire marshal and all of these in the last couple of weeks. It was such a thrill to think that all of that was happening because of an American history class. And so we thank you all for being interested for wanting to come here and join in this semester long conversation about what the United States is, what it has been and maybe also a little bit about where we go from here. To start out, I wanted to visit a few people in the 20th century, the period of American history that I study and specialize in, who looked out over their own country and saw things that were troubling and tried to figure out what to do. First as a man named Reinhold Nebore was one of the great theologians, philosophers and social critics of the 20th century. And in 1930, he looked at the world around him at the United States at his own community and said, I see a real divide between what I want this place to be, what I want American society to be and what it seems to be in reality. He was looking to the 1920s, which had been a period of repression in American history, a period of disappointment for many progressives who had not seen the big dreams of that period of history earlier in the century realized in that moment. It was a period of backlash against immigrants against people of color. And then in 1929, the Great Depression came along and it seemed like maybe American society was actually going to collapse from within. And so in 1930, he looks out says, how do we think about this? And his quote is that he decided society is a quote mediocre compromise between the real and the ideal. Second person that I wanted to visit is someone I'm sure you have all heard of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Speaking in 1962 at a very different historic moment, he had made his way as the country did through the Great Depression, through the Second World War. This is sort of the peak of postwar prosperity for the United States, but it's also a moment in which many people are questioning whether the United States is going to live up to its promises of being a true democracy. The Civil Rights Movement was underway, particularly but not exclusively in the South. Student activists had started to come together to take action, freedom rides, sit-ins just beginning around the country. And what Martin Luther King said in that moment was America can't afford the luxury of an anemic democracy. And he looked to the students who were entering the movement and said when these students sit down at lunch counters, they are in reality standing up for the best in the American dream. The third person that I would like to visit is another name that may be familiar from around the Yale campus and that's William F Buckley, one of the great figures of the modern conservative movement, someone who looked at American liberalism looked at the rights movements that were emerging around the country and said, I don't want any of this. This is a troubling path to be on and very famously in the mid 1950s had said I stand a fork history yelling stop well by 1970 Martin Luther King had been assassinated many of the movements that were conjealing around the anti war movement were causing controversy all over the country. And Buckley look and said that's the problem right that's the trouble that the Supreme Court other forces in American society were quote making the Constitution incoherent. And then he concluded with a phrase that I think is really interesting to think about he says repression is misunderstood that there are moments where repression is desirable where you don't want what he perceived to be the chaos and trouble lack of respect for law that he diagnosed as part of the problem in 1970. So why do I start with these three figures well there are there are few reasons one is that they were all looking out trying to make sense of the world around them the society around them and that's part of what we're going to be doing here through the lens of American history. The second is that all of those words were spoken here in Battelle Chapel at moments when the conversation was happening within these very walls and we want to be part of that conversation that is a conversation that is happening over time we're going to be looking to these figures of the American past to guide us to remind us that actually complicated problems can sometimes be solved. To assure us that even if you think you're solving them you're probably doing some things wrong and also that change is the real constant of not only American history but human history more broadly and those figures were in conversation with each other Martin Luther King looked to Reinhold Nebore for guidance he wrote part of his dissertation at Boston University in fact about Nebore. Bucklead was looking to both of them in a critical way to carry on that conversation and right now on the cusp of 2026 is a particularly valuable moment for all of us to enter that conversation. So that is as most of you know going to be the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and that means it's a moment for public reflection for community reflection for personal reflection and above all for national reflection there's going to be a lot of that going on next year and we wanted to start the conversation now so that we're all equipped to think about those things as 2026 comes. And of course it's an important moment to think about American history because we are once again at a time when many people are looking out on our society from a variety of perspectives and thinking about how to improve it thinking about how we relate in the present to the past and I think really wanting to know something about history and the historical tools that we can use to understand things better. So that is what this class is all about it is going to be a whirlwind tour through American history from 1776 up to the present day that means we're obviously going to be selective about what we say up here at the podium we can't cover everything but that's also why you all are here to carry on those conversations between yourselves in section with your families with people online. We'll be back in a few minutes to talk about some of the mechanisms we've built into the course to do that but for now welcome welcome to America at 250 and I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Joanne Freeman. I'm standing on a box. What can I say on five feet tall okay I am very very happy to be here with you with my colleagues in what really is a community of history because however many of us there are here we are a community of learning and of history and that matters particularly now. In a sense it's a blessing that will be thinking about our nation's past on such a sweeping scale with its semi quince and tenio it's 250th anniversary almost upon us it's a time for thinking historically and for thinking towards the future along those lines for the next few weeks. Thank you hopefully you could hear what I've said up until now along those lines for the next few weeks you'll be hearing from me about the period that we actually will be commemorating next year the American revolution and a few decades after it the creation of the Constitution the early years of the government and will make our way just past Andrew Jackson. Now that is a lot to cover in eight lectures I'm going to be discussing. discussing the entire American Revolution in one lecture. It normally takes me an entire semester to talk about the American Revolution, but as Professor Gage has already mentioned, this is a different kind of course, focused on big questions, big ideas, over a long sweep of time. Now, there are any number of things that I find particularly fascinating about this time period. One of them is its sweeping sense of improvisation. Breaking away from Britain was a huge risk in and of itself, and I'll be talking about that next Tuesday in the first lecture lecture. But even after that point, the entire period was framed by improvisation and risk. The United States was trying to create a democratic republic in a world of monarchies. And people considered this new American government as experimental. They used that word actually all the time. We are engaged in an experiment in government. So in essence, people were making it up as they went along and they were never entirely sure that their decisions and actions were right or would actually work out for the best. Now, this is not typically the way that we envision the founding, which is I think all on capital letters. That tends to be the way we think about the founding, as though it's entrenched in stone. But really to fully understand that period, you have to know that it most decidedly was not etched in stone. One of the best ways to understand that idea of early American improvisation is to have someone from the period a test to it. So I give you ladies and gentlemen, John Adams. Adams had a lot of things to say along these lines. Actually, John Adams just always had a lot to say. But he's particularly good on this idea. In his old age, Adams, like the other surviving founders, spent an enormous amount of time answering letters from complete strangers who wanted to know what really happened during the revolution. What really happened at that point in history? Now, in the case of Thomas Jefferson, those kinds of letters drove him crazy. He called answering them, quote, "the burden of my life." In at least one year, he once said he received over 1,000 letters of that kind. At one point, he said, "And I pass this along to you as a handy Jefferson quote that you can pull out at any moment." It's easy to remember, facing a pile of these letters that he did not want to answer. He said, and I quote, "Is this life?" Now, Adams had similar letters and totally in character in answering them, he spent a good deal of time punching holes in the bubble myths of the American Revolution that were circulating by the 18 teens and 1820s. Over and over again, he told people, "You know, things back then were not as unanimously patriotic and glorious as they might seem from the long view of time." In response to one letter, Adams insisted, the revolution did not represent a big wave of unanimous patriotism as he put it, every measure of Congress from 1774 to 1787 was disputed with acrimony and decided by as small majorities as any question is decided these days. And as far as iconic revolutionary moments were concerned, even those were not as glorious as they seemed even at this time. In one letter, Adams recalled what he was thinking as he watched his fellow congressmen sign the Declaration of Independence, talk about iconic moments. He said, quote, "I could not see their hearts, but as far as I could penetrate the intricate fullings of their souls, I then believed and have not since altered my opinion that there were several who signed with regret and several others with many doubts and much lukewarmness." So clearly, Adams was insisting a lot. The revolution was not this golden haze of perfection. It was a human struggle and that struggle mattered. Adams summed all of this up in a letter that I particularly liked because it's so straightforward. In 1811, he wrote to one correspondent who once again had us sort of tell us about the glorious founding letter that he wrote to Adams. Adams says, "I ought not to object to your reverence for your fathers, but to tell you a great secret. As far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different periods, I had no reason to believe we're better than you are. I have no reason to believe we were better than you are." That's quite a statement. My point here is that to Adams and to many others, you are not supposed to look at the revolution as some kind of perfect founding moment. And in a sense, to these people, worshipping the founding era in that way did more harm than good. The revolution and the period right after it had been about beginnings and testing and struggling about beginning traditions and starting patterns of governance about new constitutions, but those beginnings and testings and struggles were supposed to go someplace to continue on, to aim for improvement. They represented the beginning of a kind of national conversation about who the United States was as a nation and what it could or should be going forward. Worshipping the founding era or any part of early America generally as a golden age makes it seem as though the time for that kind of hard work ended with the passing of the founding period, which it most certainly hasn't and which was never what the founders intended. Now, I'm sure many of you expected me to get up here and talk about the founders and in future lectures, you will certainly be getting a dose of that, but my larger point in coming weeks goes beyond that. In one way or another, I'll be talking about democracy and power. Who had power, who didn't have power, how that shifted and changed over time and how it profoundly shaped our nation. Now, when it comes to the first thing that I just mentioned, democracy, one of the issues that dominated the revolutionary and early national periods, in fact, was how democratic was this new nation supposed to be? On Tuesday, I'm going to discuss what democracy meant to people at that time period as opposed to now. For now, I'll just say that in coming weeks, we'll see time and again, American people of all kinds striving to be heard. We'll also see some elite folk who are not entirely comfortable with that kind of broad democratic reach. And in one way or another, that question, how democratic should the United States be? Woeves way in and out of the entire time period that I'll be discussing and obviously far beyond. The powerful rhetoric circulating at the time about that theme, about democracy, about gaining rights had a really powerful influence. It was not just words. The rhetoric of liberty and rights meant something particularly powerful to people who didn't have them. And I want to offer you just an example of the power of ideas and maybe more importantly, ideals on real people. In 1773, four black enslavemen in Boston wrote a petition to the representative of Trontan Massachusetts, who was their representative. And I'm just going to read you a few lines of this petition that they signed. The efforts made by the legislature of this province in their last session to free themselves from slavery gave us who are in that deplorable state a high degree of satisfaction. We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow men to enslave them. We cannot but wish and hope, sir, that you will have the same grand object we mean civil and religious liberty in view in your next session. That's the power of political sentiment and political rhetoric. That's a sense of mission that you can see spreading. Throughout this course, we're going to see American people reaching for that kind of goal, seeing where America could go as a nation and often being silenced or ignored. My coming lectures will be talking about these kinds of big formative questions, but mostly from a ground level human perspective, as you can probably already tell from some of what I've said here today. In the process, we're going to learn a lot about America's national character, how it was shaped and how it changed over time. People in the early part of my time period had a really self-conscious sense of America's national character. They thought about and worried about shaping it. They actually very deliberately tried to shape it in all kinds of creative ways that I'll be talking about some of them in weeks to come. They were asking really important questions. What was America's national character? What kind of nation was the United States going to be? In a way that is an eternally open question. But there are periods in American history when that question, what kind of nation with the United States had a particularly powerful resonance, an immediate power and meaning. The revolution and early national periods were one of those times where people really were reckoning for the first time with what the United States was going to be. There have been other such moments. We are living through one of them now. In those moments when big questions and high stakes are at hand, a full understanding of the full range of American history is particularly important. Our history, our full history for better and worse, is who we are. It got us here. And our understanding of it in all its complexity can help us move forward. Our history represents our roots as a nation and helps us determine the path ahead. For that very reason, throughout American history, there has been an ongoing fight about what parts of history should be included in our national narrative and what should be excluded. Whose voices get heard. Hopefully by joining us for this semester's broad view of American history, you will emerge from this course with the ability to consider for yourselves our many national narratives with a full understanding of how we got to the present day and where we can go from here. Thank you very much. (Applause) I don't need the box. I guess. (Laughter) What are you all doing here? God. Get ready to generalize. (Laughter) When I was asked by my esteemed colleagues to do this, I took a big gulp because no one teaches like this anymore. No one does the whole story of the American nation in one core. If nobody, I said something like, "Bev, what are you talking about?" And then I also took a gulp because I'm going to have to be between and after these two brilliant lectures. And I decided, "Why not? Good, my advanced age, I need a challenge." So why not? Walt Whitman, to a historian, he put it right up front, almost like an inscription in the last edition of Leaves of Grass. It's brief. You who celebrate bygones who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races, the life that has exhibited itself, who have treated a man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers, and priests. I have a town of the Alleghenies, treating of him as he is in himself in his own rights, pressing the pulse of life that has seldom exhibited itself, the great pride of man in himself, the chanter of personality, outlining what is yet to be, "I project the history of the future." Okay, Walt, I've always taken that as a challenge. No Walt, we do it too. Historians are chancers of the surfaces and aggregates. We love our aggregates. We love our data. We love evidence. We should love evidence. We even love studying rulers and priests. But historians are also poets. Some of them. I've never accused all of my colleagues of being poets, except these two. Now, briefly though, following on Whitman, actually is history. Some of you know that I like to go to the first book we know of, Everwritten in Western Civilization, Herodotus. The opening sentence of Herodotus, The History. I've always wanted to write a book called The History. In it, he says, "I, Herodotus of Halaconarsus, I'm here setting forth my history, that time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds manifested by both Greeks and barbarians, fail of their report, and together with all of this, the reason why, they fought one another." I don't know how closely you could hear that, but what is Herodotus saying? History says, "It's the color, it's the story, it's the narrative, but it's also the reason why. It's the interpretation, it's both. It's the oldest book we have in its first sentence, telling us history is a story, and it's analysis." We promise to try to do both. Actually, we will do both. Another favorite writer, I'm doing what Bev did, and thank you, Bev, for teaching us a little of the history that's happened in this very room. I had to throw out my neighbor because she already used neighbor, but that's all right. Robert Penn Warren said, "In a throwaway line in a poem, history is the thing you cannot resign from. You can try, you can avoid it, you can walk around it, you can deny it, you can erase it, you can obliterate it from museums, oops." But you cannot resign from it. Or James Baldwin, who left us so much to chew on about what history is. History, Baldwin said in the 1965 essay, "is it not merely something to read?" It's that too, don't. And it does not refer merely or even principally to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, or unconsciously controlled by it in many ways. And history is literally present in all that we do. How often do you feel that? Maybe not very often. We often don't like to. How does it feel when the past somehow enters your bones and you start feeling it, and it's really uncomfortable? Now you've probably really learned something. And then Baldwin concluded that passage with this almost horrifying image. He said, "If Americans ever really begin to face their past, and in his case he was speaking about slavery and racism, they would be entering into his words a dialogue with that terrifying deity called history, a terrifying deity. Sometimes that's what history is. Maybe that's why some people want to control it so much, because it terrifies them. Where should we begin American history? There are a lot of places. We're going to begin with the American Revolution, because we got to get all the way to the early 21st century. But where do you begin? Do you begin in the hold of a slave ship? Do you begin with John Trumbull's paintings across where are we? The street of the Declaration of Independence, or Lord Cornwallis's surrendering to George Washington at Yorktown. They're right up the street, folks. Should you begin with the manual loops as westward the course of empire, or an image of Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation? Where are you going to begin this? Or do you begin with images of massacres and the burning of one panoag and narrow-gancelled villages and King Phillips war? Or do you begin with the final signing of that Constitution? Or the passage of the second Constitution in 1865, '7 and '68, '69? Do you begin with Dred Scott? Do you begin with Brown v. Bord? Shelby v. Holder, U.S. v. Windsor, Roe v. Wade, Dobbs v. Jackson women's health organization and the United States versus whomever about immunity. Where do you start? Do you start with a tragedy or a triumph with pain or with pleasure because American history? like everybody else's history is full of all of that. Last couple thoughts. Tony Morrison, when she gave her Nobel laureate address, anybody ever pulled that up and just read it, it's only 10 pages. It's a classic, you know, Empress Morrison essay, but she gave it at an extraordinarily hopeful moment. 1993, Cold War at Ended, Berlin Wall was down, Pax Americana was spreading. The world was opening up to her rising-seen limitless Soviet Union had collapsed. There was no more bipolar, we thought nuclear, standoff in the world. But what does Tony Morrison do in that speech? She warned her audience that when you feel a triumph, watch out, history's waiting. And she warned about what she called, "statist language," censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism. Its own inexcusivity and dominance, statist control of history and language. That was her concern. And she warned, she said, "If the state controls your history, it exists then her words to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege." And then she invented a term. This doesn't seem like the lyrical Tony Morrison, but she said, "Don't commit tongue suicide." Don't muffle your voice. Don't cut your tongue out. Don't let the state control your thoughts, your language, your speech. My period is, of course, the middle of the 19th century through the end of the 19th century. It has been called, "Many, many, many, many things" by historians in the past. In a journal called "Sivil War History," it was once called the middle period, which is utterly unsexy. The middle of what? Sometimes, Annie Bell and America was called the Golden Age. Sometimes the Age of Ambiguity is a great David Donalds, so it's called the Age of Ambiguity about Annie Bell and America. Sometimes it's been called the Age of Dread, the coming of the Civil War. And then the Civil War has been called all kinds of things, as many of you know, including the late unpleasantness by the law's cause advocates. This whole period has been called the Age of Compromising Conflict. That's way too nice. Of course, there's Compromising Conflict. It's also an Age of Disunion and Disaster. Joanne's going to create the Union. I get to destroy it. And then help you watch it, come back into being in a second founding, and try to hang on through the end of the 19th century. This is a history of the American nation as best we can do it, in 26 lectures, and 13 or 14 discussions on Thursdays over at the studio, where we're going to conduct our own kind of faculty section, so to speak. Welcome back to a lot of you from the Age of Community. Welcome all the Age of Students. Stick around for this crazy ride, and we're anxious to take it with you. Thank you. [Applause]