Conversations with the Dean
Featuring Professor Kate Masur
Professor Kate Masur and Dean Adrian Randolph discuss how her latest book, Freedom Was in Sight! draws on the words and experiences of people who lived during Reconstruction, as well as her teaching approach and the evolving style to teaching history in today’s classrooms.
Kate Masur is the John D. MacArthur Chair at Northwestern. In addition to Freedom was in Sight!, she’s also the author of Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and a New York Times "critics' pick" for 2021. She sometimes writes about legal history and has contributed to amicus briefs in several court cases, including an historians’ brief in the SFFA case that she and her co-author later turned into a journal article. She enjoys collaborating with museums and other nonprofits and has worked with the National Park Service, the National Constitution Center, the Newberry Library, and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. She also frequently works with K-12 teachers and speaks with the media on topics including the Civil War and Reconstruction, Abraham Lincoln, monuments, and public memory. |
|
Adrian Randolph is dean of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Henry Wade Rogers Professor of the Humanities. Dean Randolph's research focuses on the art and architecture of the medieval Renaissance Italy. He joined Northwestern in 2015 from Dartmouth College. There, he served as the associate dean of the faculty for the Arts and Humanities, chair of the Department of Art History, and director of the college’s Leslie Center for the Humanities. |
Watch more "Conversations with the Dean"
Conversation Transcript
Adrian Randolph: Hello, I'm Adrian Randolph, Dean of Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Welcome today to Conversations with the Dean. This virtual series is designed to deliver to you, Northwestern and Weinberg College supporters and friends, updates on cutting edge research from a wide array of faculty experts in our very own Weinberg College. I'm very grateful to all of you and to have Leadership Circle donors and University global volunteers here with us today, and I'm thrilled to enjoy a conversation that I know you will find incredibly valuable. Before we get started, just a few technical or practical matters. First, we are pleased to offer closed captioning during this event. You probably already noticed at the bottom of your screen, and you can adjust the location and size of the text by clicking the caption logo at the bottom of your screen. In that same location you can also turn the captions off if you'd rather not have them during the talk if they're disturbing to you. Second, if you have any technical difficulties in the next 45 minutes or so, please use the chat function. We have folks on the other end who can try to help you. And third, we will be taking questions throughout the session. As the title suggests, this is meant to be a conversation not just between me and my colleague I'll introduce in a moment, but also with you. So please submit your questions using the Q&A function also at the bottom, at least at the bottom of my screen. And I'll try to get to as many of the questions as I can. And when I can, we'll see. Sometimes we we'll sort of veer off to answer a question. Sometimes I'll wait till the end. We'll see how it goes. But do start thinking about questions early on. It's great to have your voices join us. And finally, this conversation and all of our past sessions are available to watch online. We'll circulate the links to each of our past sessions, including this one after today. So again, welcome to Weinberg College's Conversations with the Dean. Today we are incredibly lucky to be joined by Professor Kate Masur. Kate Masur is the John D. MacArthur Chair at Northwestern and regularly teaches course on the Civil War and Reconstruction and US women's history. Her latest book, Freedom was In Sight!, draws on the words, and I'm just going to hold it up here so you have a sense of how it looks, draws on the words and experiences of people who lived during Reconstruction, powerfully narrating how the effects of emancipation and civil War rippled the decades after the end of the Civil War in 1865. She also is the author of Until Justice Be Done, America's First Civil Rights Movement from Revolution to Reconstruction, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and a New York Times critics pick for 2021. She sometimes writes about legal history and has contributed to amicus briefs in several court cases, including historians brief in the SFFA case that she and her co-author later turned into a journal article. She enjoys collaborating with museums and other nonprofits and has worked especially deeply, I think, with the National Park Service, but also the National Constitution Center, the Newbury Library, and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. And she also frequently works with K through 12 teachers and speaks with the media on topics including the Civil War and Reconstruction, Abraham Lincoln monuments, and public memory. And just before we go on, you showed me a book before we began, a new book that's just out on presidential inaugural addresses, collecting all of them. And you wrote on President Biden's inaugural address. We may get to that. We weren't planning on discussing that. But if you can hold it up, maybe people can just see My Fellow Americans Presidents and their Inaugural Addresses. And it's published by Oxford University Press.
Kate Masur: And as Dean Randolph said, it compiles all of the presidential inaugural addresses from George Washington onward, ending with Joe Biden, and then has short essays by historians on eachone. So this was just out and I was just talking about it on a podcast through the National Constitution Center.
Randolph: It's always nice to see fresh off the press work from colleagues. So ok, we're going to be discussing today mainly, but not only this book, which is very particular type of book. And so perhaps you could tell how Freedom Was In Sight!, How did you decide to write this book? And maybe tell us a little bit about, I don't know, the genre, I suppose, and the story of your involvement in developing a project like this. Sure, yeah, thank you and thanks for having me.
Masur: It's really great to get to be in conversation and to have all of the people participating from near and far. So this new book Freedom Was In Sight! is a graphic history. Some people might say it's a graphic novel. We choose to call it a graphic history because it's nonfiction. It's not a novel, but it is in the genre of graphic novel or graphic history, in the sense that mostly what's between the two covers is an illustrated sort of cartoon kind of history of the Reconstruction period in the Washington, DC region. And this book originated, it was not my idea to do a graphic history, but I was really excited to do it. It originated with a person I had come to know in the National Park Service. I had done a lot of work starting in around 2013 with the National Park Service at a variety of different levels, but mainly kind of at the Washington, DC level and then in coastal South Carolina on kind of encouraging and pushing and advocating for the National Park Service to recognize the period of reconstruction and to do more to tell this, the history of that period. And by Reconstruction we generally mean the period after the Civil War. There's some discussion of when that period ends, but anyway, so we can talk about that. So I had come to know a guy named Dean Herrin who was a, historian within the Park Service. And later, after a lot of the bulk of the work that we did to establish to help establish a reconstruction national site in Beaufort, SC, which did end up happening starting in 2017, Dean circled back to me and said, would you be interested in being the historian on a graphic history of reconstruction in the DC region? He had gotten a grant from within the Park Service to do that, and I jumped at the chance. I thought it would be a really cool experience to work with an illustrator to create a book that of the kind I had never done before. It was good timing for me because I was just finishing up Until Justice Be Done, my last book that came out in 2021. And we were so fortunate then to get the illustrator, Liz Clarke, who's this very experienced illustrator who's done a lot of graphic history type of work. She agreed to be the illustrator on this book. And so we worked very closely together, obviously to create this book. And I'm, I'm really excited about it.
Randolph: Maybe to ground us, and I assume everyone who you know is joining us probably has some notion of what Reconstruction is. But one thing which this book has, it is, and we'll get into the details maybe of how you construct the narratives that compose the chapters of it. But it also contains an essay you wrote towards the end of the book as a quasi-appendix about reconstruction. And in some ways, I mean, I read that through and I was, you know, it helped me understand a little bit not just what is reconstruction, the dates, the parameters, what happened, but also the various ways in which reconstruction has been reconstructed in a funny way by historians through this. We didn't plan on discussing this, but I think for the group it might be interesting because many of them studied, I think this area. And I just see a question here from one of our participants. I studied with Arthur S Link at Northwestern in the 1950s. He was interested in reconstruction after the Civil War. Are you familiar with any of his work? So I thought I'd link sorry about the pun. You know, the question to that and say, is there anything you could say briefly, I guess, or just sketchily about what is reconstruction and how where it is today versus when I studied it maybe or when some of our participants studied it or you know, even earlier in the 20th century, etcetera?
Masur: Yeah, I mean, this is a great question, a big question. So I'll try to answer it, you know, pretty, pretty concisely, if possible. You know, reconstruction is, first of all, it's the period after the Civil War, but it is, first of all, been the subject of huge amounts of controversy and how it's interpreted and also is very hard to teach. So I come at this from the perspective of, of course, as a scholar and a professor of history who teaches here at Northwestern, but also as someone who once was a student in classrooms. Some of us, depending on your age and where you went to school and and things like that, you know, some people have learned that Reconstruction was sort of the worst, most shameful period in American history. This is a sort of narrative that took shape right after the Civil War was propagated mainly by white Southerners, but eventually adopted into mainstream academia, including at prestigious northern universities like Columbia. The idea that after the Civil war in pushing southern society to reform and by especially by enfranchising African American men, the federal government made a drastic error too much too soon. The argument was it was unconstitutional and the course correction only happened when southern state governments under white control kind of took back power and got to do what they wanted. And it may sound perverse to say it now, but the idea was the right order for the United States at that time was southern states having control of their own governments and not and and that means white southerners and not having the federal government pushing them or interfering with what they were doing in any way. And that's what established what we now know is the Jim Crow order, which there was a sort of major over that attempt to overturn that order starting in the 1950s and 60s. So that's sort of the old narrative that over time, especially in the 1960s and 70s, historians in academia began to sort of chip away at and say, well, wait a minute. You know, first of all, this is an ideologically motivated story that is was created in some ways to justify Jim Crow. Secondly, it is based on a very small fraction of the sources that are actually available. And when we look at a wider array of sources, we can tell a very different story. If we put the idea of human equality and dignity at the center of our assumptions, we come out with a sort of different story. So there's a huge revision in how we understand reconstruction starting in the 1960s. But one thing I've learned over time is that a lot of those new interpretations never made their way into public history, into museums, into Civil War battlefields and things like that. At the same time, there's a reconstruction gets shorter and shorter shrift in a lot of curricula. So what we realized when I started working on this with the Park Service was there's either sort of some people are acquainted with like what I would call the bad old narrative of reconstruction. Some people just have a, a gap in their knowledge, really just don't know very much about it. It is often taught in ways that are confusing. I know that I learned and I had a very good American history teacher in high school, but I found Reconstruction very confusing. And, and there's a lot of focus sometimes on these kind of political developments, a big fight that happens between President Andrew Johnson and Congress, presidential Reconstruction, congressional Reconstruction. And overtime, especially, you know, including teaching here at Northwestern, I started to have a different take and a different way of thinking about Reconstruction that I thought better conveyed its significance to students. And that's what I brought to bear in this book. And that is just really briefly the idea that what is Reconstruction, it is the period in which the United States first comes to grips with the abolition of slavery. And everything that flows out from abolishing slavery during and immediately after the Civil War is the history of Reconstruction. And seeing it that way, I think allows us to see it in a more meaningful way than if we focus on some of the things that traditionally got the focus in the past.
Randolph: I do want to ask about Arthur Link if there's any connection.
Masur: You know, I, I confess that I think I've read Arthur Link a long, long time ago, but not at all recently. So I can't. But now that I, I didn't even know that he used to be in this department, but now that I do, I need to check him out. Yes, thank you for the question.
Randolph: There's another specific question from the same questioner. In Demons of Unrest, Erik Larson uses some considerable time or spends some considerable time on Mary Chesnut. Have you used any of her, her sources and particularly her concerns about slaves on plantations and post war work for her? I just kid.
Masur: Well, you know, there is a Mary Chesnut expert on our faculty and Weinberg and that is Julia Stern in the English department who’s written a whole book on her. I have not used, I've certainly read about Mary Chesnut and read parts of her diaries, but I have not used her in in my own work. Yeah.
Randolph: So moving back to your book, although it's, I mean, I think what I noticed about this book, first of all is the format. I mean, I think the idea of doing graphic history is just intrinsically interesting because of course it opens up a different notion of audience. And I'd like you to talk a bit about that. But just picking up on what you just said, I think the other interesting thing is reading the back matter, the number of sources you use is really quite remarkable, but also the foregrounding of black American voices in a way that I assume is distinctive, although I do not know your field. I mean, I know there's lots of work, I mean, that's gone on in that area, but it's quite distinctive in this book. So could you talk a little bit about just how this unfolds maybe and the notion of audience and maybe, oh, I think I skipped a little bit, but the structure of the book, for whom it was written and maybe a little bit about why you focused on DC.
Masur: Because this is such a visual book, we thought it would be nice to show you all some pictures from it. So the first slide is just the cover of the book, and this gives you a sense in a way of Liz Clarke's sort of illustration style. And this cover highlights the subjects of the book, which are the book focuses on the experiences of African Americans. And it's about the nation's capital and the DC region. And so it shows the Capitol building in the background and a kind of forward motion right, of the people in the in who are foregrounded. And then in the back, there are some white people sort of standing on the sidewalk looking a little bit hostile, a little bit perplexed. And so we tried to capture some of the dynamics of reconstruction in that cover. And if you could show us the next slide. So the next slide will give you a sense of what the internal pages look like. On the left is just one page of the book. And I know that probably people won't be able to read the text. It's very small for you, but every page has between, I would say four and six usually frames on it with words usually and images, illustrations. And the picture on the that you see on the right is a larger version of the lower left one. I'll talk about it in a second. So generally the audience for this book when the within the Park Service. So this was some aspects of the book had sort of come together in Dean Herrin's proposal. So they were already sort of set. And the idea here was it was for readers 16 years old and up. So the idea was older teenagers through adults. And the premise behind, you know, Dean's idea and behind the grant was that a lot of people, not just young people, would like to get their history through a graphic history. And that yes, it is intended to appeal to teenagers and young adults. But there are a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily want to pick up a dense text and read it about reconstruction, something complicated and deep in the past. And that maybe this could appeal to a lot of people beyond just teenagers. So it is not designed for like 8 year olds. And certainly some of the content is pretty mature. There is a lynching in it, there is intimations of sexual violence in it. So it's not really intended for little kids. The structure of the book. So it has a very short introduction at the beginning, then about 80 or more pages of graphic history, then a longer essay that I wrote, as Adrian mentioned, about Reconstruction that kind of places the more regional events that are discussed in the book in a broader national context. There's a timeline. There are 8 primary sources, which are, I love them. So eight sources that are examples of the sources that I used in the book. And there's a kind of bibliographic as there's a timeline. There's also bibliographic essay that that is where I show my work and show the research that I did to put this book together. And as Adrian mentioned, it is extensive. I drew on a large body of research on reconstruction in general on the DC region, including local studies, and it was really a lot of fun to get deep into that history. We decided to, and this also sort of came with the grant, the idea that this work of history would highlight the history of African Americans. And when you come at the history of Reconstruction the way that I do, and I think that it's a very good way to do it or I wouldn't be doing it. As the history of the abolition of slavery in the United States and what ensued after it, it makes sense to put African Americans at the center of the story. They were in the DC region, enslaved until the Civil War, although there was a pretty large population of free African Americans as well. And the history of how Black Americans experienced this very dramatic change in American life of what did freedom mean? What kinds of freedom and free actions were available to them under the sort of strictures that they were still experiencing? How did they build institutions? How did they create families? What kinds of opposition did they face? These are really dramatic stories, really compelling stories, and also, you know, central to American history writ large. So I mentioned before that, you know, earlier histories of Reconstruction, often early, early, I'm talking long ago, did not consider sources written or produced by African Americans or how African American perspectives can actually be found within sources produced by white people. And there's been a real shift in that over time in the field, so that now we have a really good sense of the rich sources that are available for telling these stories, where to go to find them and things like that.
Randolph: So we have a question, which is timely. And so I want to read this to you. The histories of slavery and of Reconstruction have undergone tremendous changes in the last half of the 20th century, as you suggested. Although, of course, people like Dubois and other black historians began that process earlier, as you note in your essay about the book, I'll say. But now that some States and even educators themselves have become the process of erasing better and more documented histories of these eras, how do you think it will affect our society in general? I mean, this is, of course, referring to, especially in some states, they're being, let's say, a more top down approach to what is and is not taught about this period.
Masur: Yeah. I mean, I think it will. It has the potential, these efforts to kind of sanitize American history to. I mean, first of all, the premise of the criticism is something that, for instance, President Trump mentioned in his inaugural the other day, our students are being taught to hate this country, right? Which is just not true. You know, the American Historical Association recently did a huge study of how history is actually being taught at the elementary and high school level and found that it is largely not being taught in an ideological way. It is not being students are not being taught to hate their country. Social studies and history teachers across the country are doing their best to deliver, you know, curriculum that is inclusive, right? That is true. And so anyway, so there's a movement to try to sort of sanitize this, to tell a patriotic history, which I would argue is not really history at all. I was actually thinking about this because, you know, on one level, I feel incredibly privileged to be at a place like Northwestern that is not just at a university, but also a private university that is not subject to the whims of a state legislature. Unlike, you know, what we've seen in some states where state legislatures are really interfering with not just what is going on in, in K12 education, but also in college and university education. So here we feel like, you know, we are professionals, we design our courses, we want to teach the best history that we possibly can. But it occurred to me too, that our students will be coming, our very diverse students will be coming from all different kinds of education systems all over the country and abroad, where they may have been only exposed to these really oversimplified narratives of a, of American history, right? So it will affect us in the sense that it will shape the undergraduate students who are coming in here. And we will need to be aware of the divergent. We already are aware, of course, of like the very distinctive different high school experiences that a lot of our students have had from one another just by definition. But this adds another layer to that because of the ways that there's history education is being challenged and sort of whitewashed, if you will, in some places.
Randolph: There's a specific question to do with, say, genre of your book again. And this is how did Eric Foner's use of pictures visual essays in Forever Free influence you?
Masur: Yeah, that's a pretty niche question. So Forever Free is a book that I've actually taught. So I've you've come to the right place. It's a book by Eric Foner, who's a renowned historian of Reconstruction, recently retired from Columbia. So he wrote a huge volume on reconstruction that came out in 1988 and kind of set the tone for the field. But then he later did this book called Forever Free with a historian named Joshua Brown, who's very interested in visual culture and visual representation. So Forever Free is a short kind of history, very teachable, and it's got a lot of illustrations in part because of Josh Brown's contributions. And I think it's great. I love, I mean, I, you know, I haven't taught the Civil War and Reconstruction class in a little while, but I think the last time I taught it, if not the time before I used that book. I think it's an excellent text because the history is really, really good. And I have actually always been very interested in visual imagery and visual culture. And so I really appreciated the contributions of the images in that book.
Randolph: I was just sorry, I'm an art historian. And as you were talking, thinking, it's so fascinating to think through the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction because that's when photography became in the United States sort of mass medium. So people were seeing some of the issues you address in a different way, I think than maybe I mean, they were seeing it in the early part of the century through different media, but it's different with photography. It's an interesting shift. In any case, my question, next question had to do and you've covered it to some degree, but I wonder if there's anything else you want to say about it. Because of course, this reaches out to the public in a slightly different way than let's say, I don't know, my writings, which are very niche and very really for an academic audience. And I just wondered if there's anything you want to say about the discipline of history, because many of your colleagues are doing similar things. Certainly, there's a move, I think, in your discipline towards we have to engage with the broader public. And then to some extent has always been the case with history in a way it isn't in all of the disciplines. I don't know if there's anything you wanted to say about accessibility. And even the fact that this is reaching out specifically to 16 plus in a way you could say addresses that question about what happens when high schools, for example, are teaching very different things. Because this, in a sense, you could say, well, here's another way to reach an audience which, you know, might be lost to certain information if they're in a particular state. I don't know.
Masur: Yeah, I think the question about, I really like your query about sort of historians engaging in what we sometimes call public facing work. You know, this graphic history is an example of that. Consulting with museums is an example of that. Some of my colleagues, you know, write for The New Yorker. Sometimes we write op eds. Sometimes we try to publish our books with trade presses, right, like Simon and Schuster or Penguin or whatever, as opposed to publishing with the University Press. So I want to say two things because I actually, you know, I have kind of strong feelings about this. First of all, history is as we practice it here at Northwestern and other universities. It is an academic discipline. So we have specialized skills and specialized knowledge. We think, and I agree with this, that the things that we teach as people get for a PhD and become trained to be a historian at this level are special or give people skills that enable them to investigate the past and say new things about the past that are not necessarily the same as a journalist who spends a lot of their career reporting on stories and that and is a really good writer and then says, now I'm going to write a history book, right. So we think that we're doing something special and important. We generally, you know, we have journals in our field. We sometimes or very often write for one another, right, because we are advancing knowledge and understanding about human history in all of its complexity. And it's really important to me to say that because, you know, some fields lend themselves more to public facing work than others. You know, I don't want to single out any field, but we, I have colleagues who work on, you know, the medieval period on, you know, on what I mean, you name the place and time. We are doing all of it. And sometimes our, what we do is kind of in the news and we can contribute. And that is more often the case for people like me and other people who do United States history. But the fact that there's a field out there and that we are in conversation apart from market forces and apart from political forces in trying to have a better understanding about the past is really, really important. On the other hand, right, one thing about history is in general, across fields, we tend to value good, clear, accessible writing. And I think that's something that kind of helps historians make that pivot from talking internally sort of to other academics and talking to the general public. We generally value clear writing, accessible writing, trying to write without very much what you would call jargon, academic jargon, but to say things in plain terms. And I do think that for many of us, the sense that we have something to contribute is presses us to feel like we want to be in sort of service to these larger conversations. Right. When you think about, I remember when Russia invaded Ukraine a few years ago and some faculty I know at a major public university, were like, you know, this is a great example of how we have no Russian specialist on our faculty. The most recent one retired and our university hasn't given us permission to hire in it. And so people are coming to us and saying, how can you please educate us on the history of this region and why Russia would think that parts of Ukraine or all of Ukraine belong to it. And they're like, we really wish we could, but we have nobody because we haven't been permission to hire. So in many, many world events, having a historical underpinning for understanding them or, or events within our country is very important. And so many of us feel like we have something to offer because we think that you need to know how you got here in order to kind of fully understand the dilemmas that we're facing.
Randolph: I thought I'd just mention on this subject, those of you who read the New York Times, there was an opinion piece by our colleague, emeritus colleague Carl Smith, very well known in American studies in English, but also a colleague in history who published an opinion piece on the LA fires in relation to the Great Chicago Fire, which is of course one of his areas of expertise. I thought some of you might be interested if any of you studied with Carl. So another potential audience for this book and others are undergraduate students who's talked a little bit about, you know, our undergraduate students, you know, how they may come to us knowing different things. But just more generally, I think I'm curious and I'm sure some of what audience are what sort of courses do you teach and how do you approach teaching, let's say, difficult topics? I mean, this is not an easy topic, especially with the contemporary relevance. It's tricky sometimes political.
Masur: Yeah. I first of all, really, really enjoy teaching all of the students that I teach here at Northwestern, ranging from freshman who I'm teaching right now, Freshman Writing Center through for Weinberg College, right, all the way up through PhD students who I'm also teaching right now. I think that, you know, for whatever reason, maybe personal preference, probably, I end up often teaching topics that are, you know, tough topics that have contemporary resonance, you know, sort of things including foundationally related to slavery, race, racism, and then in women's history, right? I which I have really, really enjoyed while teaching at Northwestern, you know, we talk about, I mean, that class has women's rights activism in it, but it also has the history of women and health, including birth control and abortion, sex discrimination. So, you know, like all these are sort of my bread and butter in teaching. Are, you know, some what we might consider, you know, tough or complicated issues. I think one thing that's really a privilege and a pleasure about teaching history is talking about the past opens up the possibility for people to talk about difficult issues. But with a enough detachment that they can actually feel like they're engaging in a in a kind of more authentic conversation than if they're talking about it in the present day where it almost more immediately invokes people's feelings about, you know, this or that political issue in our polarized environment. So, you know, to give you an example in women's history, last time I taught it, we had a big conversation about Margaret Sanger, who was this, you know, in my view, very brave feminist from the early 20th century who tried to distribute birth control right and educate women about birth control and was in doing so violating the laws in the state of New York, was arrested, put on trial. Her sister was put with it, had a hunger strike. But Margaret Sanger is also known to have associated with the eugenics movement. And her association with eugenics is kind of complicated, the extent to which she subscribed to the most racist aspects of the eugenics movement versus a sort of version of eugenics which was inherent in some thinking about birth control at the time, which was you shouldn't have to have babies if you're not able to take care of them, as opposed to only the fittest people should be able to have babies. So there's kind of debate and controversy about her relationship to all of that. So in talking about it in women's history, we were able to try to sort out, and I tried to encourage the students to separate their own, what they may have heard about Margaret Sanger or what they may think about these issues in the present. And think about what are the particular context in which Sanger was operating at the time? What are the decisions that she made? How can we evaluate them in their own context? And that general kind of exercise that involves thinking historically, putting yourself in someone else's shoes, whether you like them or not, whether you think you like them or not in the past. I think all of those things make it possible to sort of plunge into tough topics in history and, and have learning come out of it, right? And have students sort of think in new ways and challenge their assumptions and things like that.
Randolph: Yeah, I mean, I'm tempted. I don't want to go too far to editorialize, but there's of course a lot of critiques of higher education that seem to suggest that our students don't feel comfortable talking about difficult topics and need training in that. I couldn't agree more with what you said. I think it's sometimes easier to have discussions. I feel that way about art sometimes too. It's a zone where you can have to have discussions about some quite challenging topics, but somehow it seems less threatening to individuals to express opinions about history or a work of art than it is to say this is my opinion about a particular contemporary issue. I suppose I was just going to ask. It sounds to me like you have lively discussions in your class, and I'm sure some of our auditors would be curious if you've noticed a change or is there a chilling among students worried about talking about difficult issues. And I'm sorry to put you on the spot. This wasn't what we're going to talk about, but it's just such an issue that it's in my inbox every day.
Masur: I would say. I mean it, you know, to be honest, it's hard to know in a way because you're sort of also asking about what is not said, right? Like it's hard to know who is not saying things because they don't feel comfortable saying them as opposed to seeing what you are, what you are seeing in your classroom. I do think that. I mean, there's no denying that the kind of political polarization and the sense of like you're in this camp or you're in that camp in our culture effects our students. There's no doubt about that. At the same time, again, I think that first of all, I mean we do, I do go to some lengths to try to establish in my classrooms that we are all engaging in these materials authentically and honestly and doing our best, right? And that there is we need to have charity for each other, right? To kind of assume that we're all kind of in this together in a collaborative project of learning. So I think that is important for setting the stage, and maybe it is more important now than it used to be. I don't think there's anything wrong with making those values explicit in the classroom. You know, that said, again, I think that when you have materials in front of you, whether it's a painting in art history or a primary source in history, we are going to the text, right? We are going to be talking about that. And we're going to be talking about like, you know, who produced this? Why, what can we know from this text? These things are, you know, a little bit separate move from what you might think about some issues that's in the headlines. And I think, you know, that's valuable. Again, we're, you know, we're teaching content, but we're also teaching skills. So we're teaching people to read carefully, to analyze what they're reading, to write clearly. So I, you know, I'm not terribly worried about our ability to teach the students that we're seeing now. I think, you know, we have to recognize, and this is another thing about writing a graphic history. You know, we need to recognize where they are, where our culture is, right? We are very visual. Students read less in high school than they used to, you know, so producing something like a graphic history, I don't see any point in sort of saying, I refuse to acknowledge that I will not, you know, create the kind of history that people might like to read now. And, and likewise with our students, we need to understand where they're coming from and, and kind of empathize with them. I mean, it's a tough world out there.
Randolph: Another thing I just would add is that if there is a governing ethos in pedagogy in the college here and I think across places I know in higher education, it is that academics will contest anything and make anything. Despite what you said about writing clearly, I think the idea is we feel our job is to not accept received wisdom and question almost everything. And I think that ethos runs through our classroom. So I'm not too concerned because I think if anything, we refuse sort of easy binaries and try to have students understand that you have to look at a variety of issues and interplay. It's not just a singular story of some sort. There's a couple of practical questions or particular questions I want to get to, and then we'll see if we can get back to our narrative. There's a question about convict leasing. I don't know if you know anything about this. Convict leasing was a significant feature of the late 1800s and early 1900s in the Deep South. Did this also occur in the Washington, DC area?
Masur: That's a good question. So DC is the, the District of Columbia, of course, is in under congressional kind of control.
Randolph: I can jump in a little bit because one of the things you're clear is one of the reasons you chose it is that it's both DC, but it's also Maryland, Virginia, which would strike me as being the place where if this went on, it might be the more likely of your candidates. And so it's about, it's very complex to sum it up, because the different states had different laws, Right.
Masur: Exactly. Yeah. So I'm going to have to punt on that. I mean, I actually contemplated whether to try to put convict leasing into the book. And if I had decided to do that, I would have explored the situation with convict leasing in Virginia. And you're right that of the places, so it's Virginia, Maryland, DC and parts of West Virginia of the Virginia's the best candidate. You know, there were actually I this is not in the book, but there were in the DC associated with DC jail, some chain gangs that worked on the city streets in Washington, I think in the 1870s. But in any event, and we didn't really get to this sort of like how the book was made and things like that. But part of doing history is always leaving things out, right? I've come to realize this more and more. But like, you know, it's kind of like the decisions are what to put in, but also what gets left out. And there were a lot of things that got into the book. And I mentioned that, you know, lynching is addressed in the book. That was complicated and a lot to take on. Police violence is mentioned is dealt with in the book. And between one thing and another, I did not end up feeling like I had space to deal with convict leasing. So and just for another book for another day.
Randolph: Well, as I'll get to that now, but I was just going to ask just for the rest of the group, can you give just a quick sentence what convict leasing is?
Masur: So, yeah, I mean, in in the Southern states in particular, after the Civil War and into the late 19th and early 20th century, first of all, the people who were arrested and incarcerated in the South were disproportionately African American, way out of proportion to their proportion in the population. And this is part because they were criminalized, right? So like minor infractions by African Americans could result in really long prison sentences in a way that they could not for white people or whites wouldn't even be arrested for such minor things. And so you have that and then you have a trajectory of first prison state prisons with lease incarcerated people to private business spend essentially. So I, if I had a plantation in Mississippi, I might lease some prisoners paying the prison to then have these people work essentially for free on my plantation or in a mine or what have you. Then eventually it goes more toward the less toward private leasing prisoners to private entities and more toward leasing prisoners out on public works. So a lot of roads in the South, a lot of, you know, prisons themselves, public buildings were built by incarcerated laborers who were not paid for their labour.
Randolph: Thank you. There are several questions. I'm afraid I can't get to them all. I wanted to get to one last question because we're coming to the end of our conversation. Are there any upcoming projects or any of research that you're particularly excited about? Is this something you're working on? Just looking into the future for our next conversation.
Masur: Yeah. I mean, so I'm midway through, you know, we one thing that I have really enjoyed, especially since getting tenure is a lot of collaborative work. And, you know, that encompasses the stuff I've done with the Park Service and some conferences I've organized and things like that and edited volume. And one of my main collaborators is a historian named Greg Downs, who is a professor at UC Davis. And Greg and I are co-authoring a book on reconstruction. It's part of a Yale University Press series called why X Matters. So it's like why such and such matters and, and ours is why Reconstruction matters. And we're kind of midway through writing that book. And these are short pithy books, kind of like what we've been talking about today, just introducing the topic to a general readership in a short essayistic way. So we're having fun with that. So that's what I'm that's what I'm working on these days, besides teaching my students and going to meetings.
Randolph: Well, it sounds like that's something we could all benefit from. Coming to the end I want to say thank you very, very much. Kate Masur, Professor of History, its been an amazing conversation. I feel we covered a lot.
Masur: Appreciate it.
Randolph: I hope you all have a chance to check out this book. This is not, we're not selling books or anything, but it is a really interesting way both to engage with history, which I think is very creative. And it was certainly new for me. I haven't read things like this before. But also I found the essays you wrote really a great way to sum up a period I happen to know very little about. So it was really helpful for me to engage with it. And to all of you out there, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your presence, your questions. I'm sorry I couldn't get all to all the questions, but I really hope to see you next time at Conversations with the Dean.