Matthew Frye Jacobson on Why I Became a Historian

Randall Stephens

Matthew Frye Jacobson, interviewed in the video posted here, is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University.  He is the outgoing president of the American Studies Association.  He's also the

author of What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalex, University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Harvard University Press, 2005); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (Hill and Wang, 2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, 1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (University of California Press, 1995).

Jacobson was one of the keynote speakers at the Nordic Association for American Studies conference I attended this past weekend at Karlstad University in Sweden. Jacobson's talk dealt with a fascinating website cum archive he and others have developed called the Historian's Eye. This expansive visual and oral history project is described on the site:

Beginning as a modest effort in early 2009 to capture the historic moment of our first black president’s inauguration in photographs and interviews, the "Our Better History” project and the Historian’s Eye website have evolved into an expansive collection of some 3000+ photographs and an audio archive addressing Obama’s first term in office, the ’08 economic collapse and its fallout, two wars, the raucous politics of healthcare reform, the emergence of a new right-wing formation in opposition to Obama, the politics of immigration, Wall Street reform, street protests of every stripe, the BP oil spill, the escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide and the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

I caught up with Jacobson in Karlstad to discuss his work and how he became a historian.  In the interview above he speaks about his interest in cultural history, his early understanding of the possibilities of historical study, and describes how he chose to work in the field.

For other interviews in this ongoing series, click here.

In Praise of YouTube: Interviews on Civil Rights, Early Modern England, Writing, and Teaching History

Randall Stephens

On a recent browse through the loud, garish halls of YouTube I found several interesting history clips.  Without diminishing the importance of LOL catz videos and the endless Fail compilations, I'd like to praise/point to some of the history gems on YouTube.  In the last 5 years YouTube has served as a go-to source for me.  Interviews, documentary films, and materials on teaching draw me in.  It's been a boon to my teaching and research.

For example . . .

Hear the late esteemed historian and former master of Balliol College, Oxford, Christopher Hill speak about his work on 17th-century England.  He also reminisces on why he became a historian, the nature of revolutions, and more. ("Conversations With Historians: Christopher Hill," BBC Radio 4, October 14, 1991)

In this much more recent video (April 11) see historian Taylor Branch discuss the critical year of 1963 and the context of the black freedom struggle.  Branch pieces together this momentous year with the wisdom of 50 years of hindsight.  He also wonders why historians have not explored some of the major issues of the era. (Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, PBS.)

And finally, Sam Wineburg and others in this clip, speak about "Teaching Students to Think Like Historians," Stanford University, March 4, 2012.  (Several months back I interviewed Wineburg here on a related topic.)  "The first thing that we need to do is to break the stranglehold of the textbook," says Wineburg.  To play on the murder theme a little more, see Jonathan Rees's August 16, 2012 piece on this blog, "Kill Your Textbook."  Do history textbook snuff the life out of history?  Are students in history classes unfamiliar with, as Wineburg puts it, the "variety of voices" from the past?  How can high school and university history instructors better teach about the past?

Richard H. King on Why I Became a Historian

Randall Stephens

Why are some youngsters fascinated by the past while others don't have the slightest interest in the subject?  (Indeed, quite a few run to the hills at the mere mention of "history.")  What makes some of us into historians?

While I was at the British Association of American Studies meeting at the University of Manchester I had some time to sit down with the historian Richard H. King.  I asked King the same question I've put to other historians: "Why

did you become a historian?" 

King is a prolific author (now emeritus professor of American intellectual history, University of Nottingham). While in grad school at the University of Florida I read his engaging book A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955 (Oxford University Press, 1980).  Along with that volume he is also the author of a number other influential books, including: The Party of Eros: Radical Thought and the Realm of Freedom (Delta, 1972); Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (University of Georgia Press, 1996); Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940-1970 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); and he co-edited Dixie Debates (New York University Press, 1995) with Helen Taylor.

In the interview here, King speaks about his undergraduate experience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the early 1960s.  He also talks about the literary and social forces of the day that led him to study the past.

David D. Hall on Why I Became a Historian

Randall Stephens

I first read David D. Hall's work when I was a grad student at the University of Florida. David Hackett taught a wonderful course on Religion and American Culture, which familiarized students with the big themes

in religious history.

Hall's study of the religious world of 17th-century American Puritans challenged my uniformed ideas of what it meant to be a "puritan." His writing on "lived religion," especially intrigued me. He described it as "a shorthand phrase that has long been current in the French tradition of the sociology of religion (la religion veçue) but is relatively novel in the American context." It was "rooted less in sociology than in cultural and ethnographical approaches to the study of religion and American religious history that have come to the fore in recent years." It involved "the study of 'daily life,' especially among Protestant laity [and a] reflection on 'practice' as the center or focus of the Christian life." (Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice [Princeton University Press, 1997], vii.)

Hall has edited and authored a number of books and articles on American religious history, including: The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Omohundro Institute, 1972); Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Harvard University Press, 1990); Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology (Princeton University Press, 2004); Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and, most recently, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (Knopf, 2011).

Hall has had a major impact on the fields of religious history and religious studies in recent decades. As such, he's a great fit for the new HS blog series "Why I Became a Historian." I caught up with him last week at the American religious history group meeting at Boston University. In the video embedded here I ask Hall why he was drawn to history and he responds by describing his early interest in the past, his reading of history at a young age, and his later college and grad school pursuits.

Hall's comments make me wonder if most historians had an early affinity for history through family, location, and a curiosity about all those things that had come before us.

Jack Rakove on Why I Became a Historian

Randall Stephens

For the last year I've been kicking around an idea for a new series of video interviews. I thought it might be interesting to ask various historians why they decided to study history. In the short responses that I'll post

you'll hear about what drew a scholar to the field and what engaged them on a personal level. I've always enjoyed reading autobiographical reflections of historians, and this is, in some way, a little extension of that genre.

The first installment features Jack N. Rakove, who reflects on his early fascination with history and his later pursuit of graduate study and career as a professor and author.

Rakove is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science and Law at Stanford University. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1975. Rakove is the author of a variety of books on legal and political history and the American Revolution, including: The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (Knopf, 1979); James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (Scott Forsman, 1990); Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford 1997); Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights (Barnes & Noble, 2006); and Revolutionaries: Inventing an American Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 2010). His Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Knopf, 1996) won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in History. Rakove is currently working on a book titled Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion for Oxford University Press.