Is there anything in our history that w- we can compare what happened on 9/11 to?

Yes, if it's destruction and slaughter on a single day.

And if you think back to the press coverage at that very moment, immediately people were using Antietam, 'cause it was the largest single casualty, uh, count of the Civil War.

Pearl Harbor came to mind for everybody.

Fort Sumter, the start of the Civil War.

There, there were analogies flying everywhere.

Uh, which is what we do as humans.

I also think, you know, Americans are very bad at understanding even our own recent history, and it is impossible to separate from 9/11 the events that we are living through roiling our domestic politics here in the United States today in terms of the immigration crackdown by ICE, by CBP, by the border patrol, by DHS, all of which are an invention of the post-9/11 world and in an attempt to ensure that these types of terror attacks never happen again.

Is there anything in our history that we can compare what happened on 9-11 to?

Yes, if it's destruction and slaughter on a single day.

And if you think back to the press coverage at that very moment, immediately people were using Antietam.

because it was the largest single casualty count of the Civil War.

Pearl Harbor came to mind for everybody.

Fort Sumter, the start of the Civil War.

There were analogies flying everywhere, which is what we do as humans.

I

Is there anything in our history that we can compare what happened on 9-11 to?

Yes, if it's destruction and slaughter on a single day.

And if you think back to the press coverage at that very moment, immediately people were using Antietam.

because it was the largest single casualty count of the Civil War.

Pearl Harbor came to mind for everybody.

Fort Sumter, the start of the Civil War.

There were analogies flying everywhere, which is what we do as humans.

I

How does that affect the conversation on slavery? You have to decide what to do about these new territories when it comes to slavery.

Right, and for a very long time, from the 1830s through the '40s, high politics in America between the Whigs and Democrats tried to keep the slavery issue, the expansion issue in a shell.

They tried with gag rules in the Congress to prevent its discussion.

They couldn't.

And of course, the Mexican War unshucked this from its shell, if you like, and forced it into American politics as never before.

Now you got this huge expansive territory.

Will those territories become slave states? Will they become free states? Will they somehow be divided? How can they be divided? And that's important because it has everything to do with the representation of the two sections, the free North, the slave South, in the US Congress and the Senate.

So as our last question, uh, what can we learn from Franklin Pierce?

Uh, tell us about the context in which the Trump people are using it, and what it, what it means to you.

Well, thank you, Lawrence.

Um, they used it in this report put out by the Domestic Policy Council of the White House.

Uh, uh, they accused, uh, the leadership of the American History Museum of trying to instill ideology in visitors and so forth and so on.

But then they advocated instilling a certain triumphal version of American history in the American public.

Um, essentially, what the White House is doing is accusing the Smith- the great Smithsonian Institution of doing exactly what the White House is doing, which is trying to take over some kind of control of the narrative of American history, how American history is represented, how it is presented, uh, in our great museums.

Uh, that, that doubted me because it's not what historians wish to do.

As you sit there and testify, when you write something like this for The New York Times that you know is the kind of source that 100 years from now historians would be looking for to try to find out the, the, the details of this part of this era, do you feel that, that burden? Do you feel yourself trying in any way to communicate with the future Yale professor 100 years from now in the history department who's trying to study this era?

net exactly at u texas and where toyan falola was on his committee that's what i'm like this guy knows better doesn't

he he was he is a trained historian but he's gone over to you know, being a political operative, to say the least.

And the other rule we had is we were going to try to be civil.

Okay.

And we were going to try to see if it's possible to, you know, debate and discuss across these boundaries.

We both knew, too, that we weren't going to agree on much of anything.

And that, of course, was the case.

right.

How did her initial treatment of him change him forever? And I think we should point out, she starts to teach him to read.

Oh, yes.

Sophie Auld was his mistress, white mistress in Baltimore, where he is sent when he's seven years old.

And in the first year and a half or so that he was there, he was supposed to be there to be the companion of the Auld's son, whose name was Tommy.

Uh, and that's fine.

But he was obviously a bright kid, this Fred was.

And Sophie Auld took him in.

Hmm.

To break the electoral impasse, a group of men from both parties got together to make a deal

And the deal that was struck is that whatever the vote counts were, Hayes would get the presidency, but the Democrats were gonna get a lot as well.

And it did not just involve politicians, it involved railroad presidents.

There was gonna be a transcontinental railroad with a Southern terminus.

Supposedly, the Republicans promised the Speaker of the House to the Democrats.

Eh, they're not gonna fulfill that one.

All kinds of skullduggery and deals, and some involving a lot of money.

There would be no more Federal effort to enforce the rights of Black people, or for anyone else for that matter.

So, um, but, but this is all submerged as if we hadn't lived through it, and as if we're not connected to it, and as if this is not an attempt to bring parts of it back.

Well, it's why I always end up, and, and I'm sure, Sean, you do this, constantly being asked, "Well, how can the past help us today?" And so on and so forth.

I, I'm just...

I constantly urge people to go back to the 1850s.

Um, you gotta understand the major turning points of the 1850s.

You gotta understand how an issue like slavery tore pa- apart the political party system.

I always stop and say, "Beware, if you get fundamental realignment in the party system, look out." I mean, you might think that's great, and maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

And what-

Well,

she's done that before.

She did that back on Section 3.

She did it even earlier when they even took up the 14th Amendment.

This is the notion that color doesn't exist under law.

It isn't recognized before law, that equal protection means we don't do race anymore.

And of course, that's nonsense historically.

Yeah,

So now he's president and he wants the traitors back in.

they would be immediately readmitted to the Union.

He would accept some disenfranchisement of ex-Confederates.

But even that, he had an alternative plan for, which was to require them to apply to him personally for pardons.

And that is existing.

That whole staff of people.

working for the executive branch, just processing pardons for ex-Confederates.

David Blight again, Douglas's biographer.

We met him earlier in the series, and he says Douglass really loved this whole idea.

Well, I think it was so important to Douglass because it, it does fit in the best, uh, sentiments of that idea of self-reliance.

If you had 10 bucks or 20 bucks or 100 bucks, put it in that bank, earn some interest, become your own capitalist, become self-sustaining.

See, the Freedman's Bank was a moral issue to Douglass.

It meant that if the government creates this and it sustains it, it becomes one of the principal examples, physical examples, that the United States truly means the emancipation they committed, and they will sustain it.

A disposition is seen to shake off the Negro and accept the old master's class.

And this is a very large Black community now in Washington, D.C.

It had swelled to forty, fifty thousand Black Americans.

[whooshing] Last night, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Yale professor David Blight, said this about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's opinion in the birthright citizenship case.

[whooshing] I, uh, already, uh, emailed the executive director of the Organization of American Historians, and I said, "Is, is there any way we could put Jackson's opinion in the next issue of the Journal of American History?" Because frankly, Lawrence, it reads like a historical essay.

It is a historical essay.

It's deeply researched.

She not only quotes from me, or quotes Frederick Douglass several times, but six, seven other historians, the best historians of reconstruction.

Um, and you know, it, it sets up her essential argument, which is that Section 1 of the 14th, and especially birthright citizenship, is rooted in universalist principles.

What was your reading of this one today?

Uh, Justice Jackson was not an amateur today.

Uh, q- quite, quite the opposite.

In fact, I, uh, already, uh, emailed the executive director of the Organization of American Historians, and I said, "Is there any way we could put Jackson's opinion in the next issue of the Journal of American History?" Because frankly, Lawrence, it reads like a historical essay.

It is a historical essay.

It's deeply researched.

She not only quotes from me or quotes Frederick Douglass several times, but six, seven other historians, the best historians of Reconstruction.

And it seems, uh, one just wonders w- w- what, how Samuel Alito thinks he got his citizenship in this country.

Love to hear your reflections on that phrase, David.

Well, thank you for that question.

I will channel Jeff Rosen since you brought that up.

Jeff would tell us, as he did in that book, that for the founders this meant it's rooted in their many, many readings about virtue, about the history of virtue, about virtue as a moral philosophy, Cicero, Aristotle, many others.

Being Your pursuit of happiness being protected means you are free to pursue virtue.

That neither the law nor the state can prevent you from doing that.

Quickly, to Robbie's point about natural rights.

Yes, David.

Was that deliberate then or is that just a modern set of eyes looking back at that line?

No, I think that's quite deliberate.

Douglass was fond at times of employing, appropriating, using the flag.

This speech can be read as a kind of embittered but deeply honest form of patriotism as demand for what the country has not yet done, demanding the principles of the founding, demanding the promise be fulfilled.

A key thing here, and those wonderful young voices capture it, Douglass was writing a literary work here.

We should not forget that for a moment.

This is a work of literature.

So I'm wondering if in Frederick Douglass, you see this notion that perhaps and hopefully is still well and alive in the country today, that in the traditions of our founding, there continues to be Let's call it an energetic core of justice that has been used by Americans who have had to fight for that justice in the past 250 years.

So now he's president and he wants the traitors back in.

they would be immediately readmitted to the Union.

He would accept some disenfranchisement of ex-Confederates.

But even that, he had an alternative plan for, which was to require them to apply to him personally for pardons.

And that has existed.

Sounds familiar.

Whoa, that whole staff of people.

David Blight again, Douglas's biographer.

We ought to have our government so shaped that even when it is in the hands of a bad man, we shall be safe." Ooh.

Indeed.

You know, can you imagine the first time I read that? I mean, it was ...

Well, I'd have read it before at some point, but you know, you can read a Douglass speech s- six times and find something new in it.

But I used to end, occasionally I used to end talks on Douglass with that during Trump's first term.

They'd just end with that.

I, I wouldn't mention Trump.

For three years.

[laughs]

And, and also, I mean, origin stories are tricky.

We, we can't live without them.

Every culture does it, every church does it, every institution does it, every country does it.

Always has.

But they're tricky.

Marc Bloch, the great French historian, uh, killed in the Holocaust, uh, warrant...

Mm-hmm.

What would the authors of the 14th Amendment have thought of that?

Uh, well, uh, Bingham and the authors of, of Section 1 would say, "Oh, no, no, no, no.

We meant all persons." [laughs] That's what they said.

Born here, it's birthright citizenship, unmistakably.

They meant it that way because they intended it, and this was a rowdy debate back, oh, a few years ago.

In fact, I was part of an amicus brief, uh, to the Supreme Court on this one.

But they meant it not just for that moment of the status of the freed people, the four million former slaves.

How does, how does this revolutionary period come to its end?

You declare before the world that we are unfit to exercise the elective franchise and, by this means, lead us to undervalue ourselves.

There is no argument, he says, against this right to vote.

You can say that Black people who were enslaved are not as well-educated, but they know how to till a field.

They know how power gets used because it's been used on them for generations.

They know how political will is based on how you can bend it out in society.

They know something about economic power because they were slaves living under this system.

So he says over and over and over, "Don't tell us we're not educated as a means of not letting us vote.

At the time, some Black men were voting, but not consistently, and it definitely wasn't a guaranteed or protected right.

[clears throat]

And then he uses the word "your" over, and over, and over, and over again, dozens and dozens of times.

"It's your Declaration, it's your country, it's your, um, creeds." And then in the end, [exhales] nevertheless, lets the audience back up after some masterpieces of rhetoric.

He lets the audience back up.

It's like he hands out towels and lets them wipe o- wipe off after the hailstorm he's just rained on them, and he said, "But don't, don't be, don't be too concerned.

Your country is young," he says.

"It's still malleable.

Uh, tell us about that speech, their complicated relationship, and their joint embrace of the principles of the Declaration.

Take a dip and a trip by searching for Jaws Island wherever you get your podcasts.

The Nazis also found a way, uh, and Richard Evans builds this story brilliantly.

They, they gave the cloak of legality to each step they took.

If this law sort of prevented them or blocked them, well, they changed the law.

And then there's, of course, the recrafting of history.

The Nazis were brilliant at that.

They created a whole new narrative, they created an ancient past for the Germanic peoples and so on.

Mm-hmm.

Let's have it in a way that the country can hear it and judge." What brought you, uh, to this point and to this idea?

Well, thank you, Lawrence, for having me back on.

Uh, what brought me to this, first of all, was the viciousness of the attacks that Kevin Roberts has made on us, on my profession, on American historians, on the last half to three quarters of a century of revolutions in scholarship, of which he was part with that dissertation you just cited.

But what also brought me to this proposal or invitation to Mr. Roberts is that I don't see what else we can do at this point.

This isn't about facts and evidence.

I mean, it is at the end of the day, we hope, but it's not about, um, interpretations that may differ.

This is a political fight.

I didn't realize that they've been at this project for so long.

For critics like the President and others, this has meant a loss of acknowledgement of, of heroes, of heroism, of, of many of the positive aspects of American history.

Well, that's frankly nonsense.

I mean, it all depends on what, uh, people consider to be a hero.

It also depends on what people consider to be, as the Trump administration has explicitly said, patriotic history.

It is not the job of professional historians, whether they're in universities, in the National Park Service, in the Smithsonian, or anywhere else, to fashion an openly patriotic history.

Our job is to search everywhere and anywhere for the truth and then to convert it into narrative and convert it into stories that are compelling.

Americans love history and they want a history they can trust.

So, what should the Smithsonian Institution and other museums do now? What should professional historians do?