#1637 Historical Integrity in a Hyper-Partisan Time

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

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Summary

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Clay discuss the challenge of maintaining historical integrity during political turmoil and uncertainty. How does a professional historian differentiate between her personal politics, her status as an American citizen, and her responsibilities as a professional historian? In other words, how can the public trust a historian when we venture into something as controversial as the current president, who is a self-styled disrupter of American traditions and norms? How does a historian contextualize current events in the matrix of what is known with certainty about the past? Lindsay is exemplary in her intellectual discipline, but it doesn’t come easy when things we all thought were settled and taken for granted are being assailed by a populist revolutionary. In particular, we talk about Mr. Trump’s first-day pardon of 1,500 individuals convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Can a historian provide an analysis that puts this moment into a context that helps the American people know where we are and how we got here?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to this introduction to this week's podcast edition of listening to America.
0:05.4	I'm Clay Jenkinson and Bismarck today.
0:07.5	About to leave the country for 10 days to see my beloved child, my daughter in Oxford,
0:13.4	and we're going to Paris and then on to Switzerland.
0:17.6	I'm celebrating a birthday, a big one, and she has finished her doctoral work.
0:23.3	She's now doing a three-year postdoc as a research fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford.
0:28.5	This program is with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky.
0:32.0	We squabble quite a bit, but it's actually mostly just for fun.
0:36.1	She's less committed to Mr. Jefferson than I am. She's less committed to Mr. Jefferson than I am.
0:38.7	She's quite hard on Mr. Jefferson, I think.
0:41.4	Unnecessarily hard.
0:42.7	And at the end of the program, I do actually say one of my goals is to convert her to a certain extent
0:49.5	and to a more generous attitude towards TJ.
0:53.5	I think that he's a world historically important person,
0:57.4	this great exemplar of the Enlightenment,
1:00.0	a man with perfect penmanship
1:01.3	and one of the greatest libraries ever gathered,
1:04.4	and that you can't just toss Jefferson out
1:06.3	because he's sometimes inconsistent or paradoxical
1:09.2	and, of course, the issue of slavery and his
1:13.5	dispossession of indigenous peoples or his beginnings of a policy that would dispossess
1:20.1	indigenous peoples in a much more ruthless way under the hands of someone like Andrew Jackson.
	...

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