My speech to the U.S. Army

I was invited to speak to the 440th Civil Affairs Battalion, a reserve unit within the U.S. Army. My remarks were overwhelmingly well-received.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that last weekend I was invited to deliver a keynote address to the 440th Civil Affairs Battalion of the U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado. It was a wonderful visit, and each soldier I met with was unique, passionate, and intellectually curious. I could write an entire article about each of them and their personal stories of why they serve and how they feel about the state of our country.

For my newsletter this week, I thought it might interesting for you to read the remarks I delivered to the battalion. My speech was overwhelmingly well-received, with many soliders approaching me afterwards to ask questions, talk further, and confess their love of history. The full text is below.

It was an enriching two days, full of interesting insights, conversations and revelations. Another manifestation of that great, big, complex thing we call America. -JS

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Good evening.

You may be asking yourself: who is this man and why is he speaking at our military gala? He’s not a military general or high-ranking officer. He’s not a celebrity. He’s not an athlete or television personality. He refers to himself as a “public historian”—what is a public historian? Why is it relevant to us here tonight?

Well, allow me to answer that penultimate question first and then proceed to the others. In my world, the world of professional historians, we tend to classify ourselves into two sub-fields, two divisions (if you will): academic historians and public historians. Academic historians are fairly self-explanatory, history professors teaching inside colleges and universities. But historians operate in many places beyond the Ivy Tower. Historians work in museums, in archives, in libraries, in governments, in think tanks, in national parks, in historical societies, and in the military.

Beginning in the 1970s, these historians began to unite, recognizing that their concerns were slightly different than those of their academic peers. They called themselves “public historians,” and whereas academics were largely in conversation with each other, public historians were in regular conversation with the public and with policymakers. Whereas academic historians might publish scholarly books and articles, public historians might mount a museum exhibition or help design a curriculum for a local high school. These forms of public history emerged as a vibrant wing of the profession, and today public history is everywhere, with more than 20,000 history organizations in the United States—not to mention millions and millions of e-history content being produced on the Web and social media.

That is my world. For the past 20 years I have devoted my life and career to public history, and to thinking about how what we know about the past shapes how we think about ourselves in the present. I began my career creating museum exhibitions at New York City’s only Holocaust museum, a museum called the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. The first exhibit I worked on was called Ours to Fight For: American Jews in the Second World War. It told the story of the more than 550,000 American Jews who served in the U.S. Armed forces during World War II, including my grandfather, Frank Steinhauer, who served as a Chief Warrant Officer in the U.S. Army, and whose dogtags I am wearing tonight. That 6,000 sq. foot exhibit was actually voted the best exhibit of the year by the American Association of Museums, and launched my career.

From there I curated an exhibit about Jewish refugees who arrived in New York City after WWII. I then struck out on my own, and did a number of different projects, including helping to create the library and archive of the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame; helping to build a Jewish museum on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, where several hundred Jewish refugees escaped Nazi Europe before WWII; making a documentary film about the history of the Catholic community of Miami; curating an exhibit about Abraham Lincoln at the New-York Historical Society; and serving as the personal archivist to the author and philanthropist Barbara Goldmsith, whose papers were donated to the New York Public Library.

From there I found my way to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. For 2.5 years I collected the stories of America’s war veterans, working with organizations nationwide to preserve the stories of those who served in our armed forces so that future generations might better understand the realities of war. To-date the Library’s Veterans History Project has collected more than 100,000 veterans’ stories: more than 50,000 from WWII, more than 30,000 from Vietnam, tens of thousands from the Korean War, the Persian Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan, and even several hundred stories from World War I, including two interviews with Frank W. Buckles, the last American World War I veteran, the first interview conducted when he was 100 years old, the second when he was 103. If you’ve not contributed the story of the veterans in your life to the Veterans History Project, I encourage you to do so, and I’m happy to answer any questions about the project.

I then spent the next 4.5 years bringing scholars to the Library of Congress to conduct research in the Library’s collections, and sharing that research with Members of Congress and Washington policymakers. From there, I became the founding director of an academic center, and, after that, became a fellow at couple of think tanks, The Wilson Center and the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Most recently, I published my first-book, titled History, Disrupted: How Social Media & the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past, which I’m pleased to say is now a best-seller.

The question that has animated me through all of these experiences has been, what role can history—and historians—play in our public life? This will, hopefully, allow me to answer my earlier questions of why I’m here and why it is relevant.

Historians tell us where we’ve been, and give us insights into where we’re going. Historians remind us of the things that we’ve forgotten, and speak up about the things we’ve deliberately omitted. Historians reveal things that we never knew. Historians show us that we’ve been asking the wrong questions, and perhaps even giving the wrong answers. Most crucially, historians tell us who we are, because how we know ourselves in the present is intimately linked to the ways we remember ourselves in the past. “We swim in the past as fish do in water,” said historian Eric Hobsbawm. “We cannot escape it.”

You each have histories. Where you came from. What your ancestors did. What they persevered. What they overcame. The stories that you learned about the people in your life, the people that came before you, are crucial ingredients to who you are. You know that you are a Catholic or a Jew or a Protestant because you have a sense of the histories of those religions, traditions, practices and peoples. You know you are a Coloradoan or an Arizonan or a Californian because you have a sense of what Colorado, Arizona and California are. You know that there is U.S. Army because the U.S. Army has a history that it has been purposeful about recording and passing on. We are each a product of our histories. We cannot know ourselves without them.

America, too, is a product of its history. And if you’ve paid attention to the news or the world of public affairs over the past decade, you know that we in America are reckoning with all of the history that we are each a product of. From textbooks to classrooms, to public monuments to the names of military bases, Americans today are asking themselves tough questions about our own history—who we are as a nation, as a people, and where we may be headed.

Many of those questions are being driven by historians, both academic and public. Historians are now asking how the same general who led our armies in the defeat of the British in the name of liberty, could have enslaved 150 people on his own property, even going so far as to chase down one enslaved laborer who escaped to New Hampshire in search of her own freedom. Historians are asking how the same man who penned the words all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, could have owned a plantation where men and women were readily denied those rights.

Such questions are not solely confined to certain individuals or certain generations. How could Chinese immigrants who volunteered to fight and die for the Union during the Civil War be stripped of their rights as citizens in that Union a generation later through the Chinese Exclusion Act? How could a nation that saved Europe and the world from tyranny and calamity in World War I, proceed to turn to nativism and isolationism in the decade immediately after? And how could the country that smashed through gates of Dachau and Buchenwald, liberating Jewish prisoners from the worst horrors and injustices that humanity has ever perpetrated against itself, proceed to refuse entry to those same Jewish refugees after the war, refugees that included my mother and her parents.

These juxtapositions and contradictions are not realities to shy away from but rather to embrace and run towards. They can be hard and uncomfortable questions to ask, but we must ask them and we must answer them. We must answer them because doing so will give us a more honest understanding of who we are and where we have been; what we can be at our best and what we can do at our worst; where we are and where we still need to go. But they are perilous questions. And just as you who serve in our military and defend our great nation have the courage and responsibility to run towards peril, so do we as historians have a responsibility to do the same.

As a funny aside, my wife and I were at the SxSW conference in Austin this year where I was delivering lectures about my book, and there was a car that hopped the curb and ploughed into other vehicles. It made such a loud explosion people thought it was a bomb. Everyone else ran away from the violence; my wife ran towards it. I joked with the police afterwards that you can take the soldier out of the military, but you can’t take the military out of the soldier.

When there is danger, you run towards it. That’s what you do as soldiers and as leaders. As historians, we also have dangers that we run towards. Today, being a public historian means confronting these dangerous questions with the same courage that a soldier does. I recall a conversation with a friend when he learned that the matriarch of his family, his great grandmother in Ohio, had been an active member of the KKK. History is dangerous. Uncovering that which you may not want to know, is dangerous. Revealing things about yourself or your relatives or your country that you love is dangerous. To speak publicly about such things is dangerous. Real and honest history is dangerous because it threatens to unsettle our sense of self. The myths we’ve created, the details we’ve advertently or inadvertently admitted. But we must run towards these dangers. Because doing so shows leadership, courage, honesty, and integrity. It makes us better as a nation, and helps us realize the greatness of ourselves and our country. By not doing so, we risk the opposite.

Increasingly, these days, I have been thinking and writing about the effects of social media and the Web upon our lives, and in particular what we learn about our history through the Web. Millions and millions of e-history content can be found online, some of it reliable, some not, some of it created by historians, others created by journalists, activists, political groups, teenagers in Australia, hate groups and Russian disinformation agents. All of it is adapted and packaged to be consumed online, micro-doses of the past delivered to us on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and in the news media. These content forms have the effect of flattening our history, turning it into a competing war of symbols, quick-hitting dopamine rushes meant to persuade us to one side or the other of the culture wars, but which do little to get at the complexity of our past and what it portends for our future. They can have the effect of leading us down rabbit holes, or wedging us into filter bubbles, where we only see the parts of the past that we agree with, that we want to see, or that make us feel comfortable about who we are. Social media can actually have the effect of shielding us from danger, not running towards it—even when we feel we are doing the opposite. Such are some of the consequences for this information and disinformation ecosystem we have all had a hand in creating, and why, I think, we need public historians more than ever to give us an accurate understanding of our history and who we are—our triumphs, our accomplishments and where we still have work to do.

Our nation and our world now stand at a crossroads. Will we be the people that burst open the gates of tyranny and oppression, or the ones that close our doors and turn our backs on it? Will we be the ones that live up to the ideals of our founding documents, and fight for liberty and justice for all, or will we be a series of contradictions in our own time? Will we have the courage to confront all of the difficult questions of our past, in order to chart a better future?

You, our Armed Forces, our U.S. Army, the strong and the fearless, will have a vital role to play in the creation of that future. So, too, will we historians. Consider us—consider me—your ally in creating that world. Let us work together in this home of the brave—one eye towards the past, another eye towards the future—to keep this great big, beautiful and complex thing we call America the land of the free.

Thank you for your attention.

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These remarks were written and delivered by public historian Jason Steinhauer in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Saturday, June 11, 2022.

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