Search for Meaning with Steven J. Ross

When I read in the book about the Treblinka piece, I wanted you to share a little bit more about it, so thank you for doing that, because you very rarely hear stories of people surviving Treblinka.

And, uh, and I, I understand that sometimes it, it was just those who were there at the end of the war, basically, when they decided to evacuate the camp and send, send the, the survivors to their death one way or the other.

So it was interesting, and tha- and thank you for sharing that with me.

But I'm thinking about this part of the story that I didn't know.

Um, and I...

It connects to a question I wanted to ask you, because your books have focused, some of them that I'm familiar with at least, are focusing on forgotten stories, things that, wow, I didn't know that was part of the American story, like in The Secret War Against Hate.

And I'm... grew up in this country, and I've spent my life, you know, learning about Jewish history.

But there were components that I was like, "I didn't know that.

I didn't realize that." We're gonna get into some of those things.

Um, your, your book that talked about, um, Hollywood and, uh, some of those stories, I, I didn't know those stories.

And I'm now discovering that there was a very important personal story that you didn't know the details of.

Do you think those are all connected? I'm not trying to be a, you know, amateur psychologist here with you, professor.

But as you reflect on telling those stories that are kind of the hidden stories, how much of that do you think connects to your own hidden story?

Well, I think let's start with the professional, which is easier, then we'll go to the personal.

Uh, I'm part of a generation, uh, having gone to college.

I graduated from Columbia in '71.

I was at Oxford for two years, and then I went to Princeton in '73.

And I was part of a generation of the, doing what's called the new social history.

That is, we did what we call history from the bottom up, that the history of ordinary Americans had not been written, that when I was in high school, you know, American history was political history.

We studied presidents.

We studied generals, famous men.

But what about ordinary people who built, who quite literally built this country? We had very little.

And so I started writing about 19th century working class history.

And basically everything I've written has been unknown history, trying to bring ordinary people to light, and bring the history of the unknown people who q- as I say, quite literally built this country to light.

So it started with 19th century working class history.