Modern American History Overview

Welcome, Dr. Epic here, and what we're going to do today is ask three questions, three important questions, three big questions. Questions like, what is America? What is history? And ultimately, what is modern American history? We're going to follow that outline right up above my little yellow box. So put that outline in your notes to serve as a framework for the information that's going to follow as we both ask and answer that question up there. What is modern American history? But to answer that question, we're going to take that big question and break it up into a series of little questions. What is America? What is history? What is American history? And why bother? After all, isn't modern history a contradiction in terms? Why do contemporary historians spend so much time and energy and effort writing the history of a country as it is currently unfolding in front of them? And what do they mean when they say America? Generally, when people refer to America, they're referring to one of three different Americas. So there's basically, broadly speaking, three definitions for America. There's a geographic definition, there's a political definition, and, most difficult to define, there is a cultural America. And once we understand what we mean when we refer to America, then we can actually figure out who those people are on the lower left. Who are the Americans? Now, the easiest of these three definitions is Geographic America. There, on the left, is Geographic America. Geographic America consists of two continents, North America and South America, with a third area in the center, Central America. The North is mostly English-speaking, and the South is mostly Spanish-speaking. But... Mostly is a very important adverb. Don't go to Quebec and start slinging around your English. Don't show up in Brazil thinking your Spanish is going to be of much use. These are mostly the common languages of these areas. And that's it. That's Geographic America. And this tends to blow a lot of people's minds. To think that somebody can get on a plane in Argentina, land in the United States of... get off a plane and really this person has just gone from one part of America to another because everyone here is an American. But you see, in the United States, we tend to refer to America using its political definition. What is political America? Well, there is political America. It is the United States of America. All right. What is the United States of America? Well, it's 50 states. bound together by a single legal document, the U.S. Constitution. But there's more to it than just 50 states, because in addition to the 50 states, there are more than 500 sovereign Indian nations. These Native American nations, scattered completely across the country, inhabit more than almost 400 distinct federal reservations. And some of these reservations are huge. Some of them are quite small. Some of them consist of a single church and a cemetery. But these reservations are not quite part of the state, because Indian reservations don't have the legal authority to make their own laws, but they can kind of pick and choose which laws to follow. Because these sovereign Indian nations possess a legal thing called tribal sovereignty. So they... are not just inside of a state, but they also have a special relationship with the federal government, which is why certain Indian reservations can do things that people in the rest of the state cannot. So political America consists of 50 states, more than 500 sovereign Indian nations, and various overseas territories and dependencies. Because there's all these islands scattered all over the Caribbean and the Atlantic that are also part. of the United States, but they're not states and they're not Native American nations. The most famous of these territories is Puerto Rico, which was added to the United States at the end of the 19th century and has remained a territory ever since. And Puerto Rico seems, for much of its history, to be quite happy with that legal arrangement. There are certain advantages to being a territory. You don't get to vote in federal elections. But you'd have to pay federal taxes. So every 30 or 40 years, Puerto Rico has kind of made this decision. Does it want to stay as a territory? Does it want to become a new state? Or does it want to break away and form its own country? And former American territories have done that. The Philippines, way over there, used to be an American territory. But they broke away, and now they are their own country. Recently, in the last 10 years or so, Puerto Rico has made... you know, has made motions to become the 51st state. But Puerto Rico is a very pro-Democrat state, and that means it gets all wrapped up into the messiness that is contemporary politics. So for now, Puerto Rico is on hold. But you can see in the Pacific, there's all of these islands. Some of them have no one on them at all. That's, I think, what a dependency is. But all of these areas, they're not states. They're not sovereign Indian nations. They're their own thing. So, political America is the United States of America, which consists of 50 states, more than 500 sovereign Indian nations, and various overseas territories and dependencies, all of which are bound together by the United States Constitution. And that's political America. Now we move on to the third and most difficult definition of what exactly. is America? What is cultural America? And what we have here is there's grandma, there's apple pie, there's baseball. That is America. Can't get more American than grandma, apple pie, and baseball. But if you'll see from the map, you'll notice that there's very many different regional areas scattered across the United States. There is no real single America. American culture. There is no single American ethnicity. The United States is not like, you know, Korea. It's not like Germany. It's not like, you know, Japan, where you've got a Japanese ethnicity, a Japanese state, a Japanese culture. The United States isn't like that at all. In fact, culturally, there are many ethnicities. There are many cultures. There are Many different people all wrapped together. So a cultural definition of America. Cultural America is a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural mix of various peoples scattered across the United States, placed in distinct regions, and historically situated. Because if you see that map you see there on the upper left, that's a map of the many ethnicities of the United States. And each of those ethnicities is historically situated. And they all come from different waves of immigration into political America. Immigration into the United States has never been a steady flow or a constant drip. And instead, charted historically, it's been in these huge waves and troughs. And each of those waves corresponds to generally something really awful happening in another part of the world. We have a huge wave of Irish in the early to middle 19th century because of the Irish potato famine. We have the Italian wars of unification drive thousands of Italians across. We have the breakup and meltdown of Tsarist Russia sent a huge wave of immigrants in the early 20th century. And in the middle to late 20th century, constant civil war, instability, and crime across Latin America have driven Thousands, if not millions of immigrants to the north, changing the ethnic and cultural makeup of the United States. So the United States is not, it's not Germany. Germany has a German culture, a German ethnicity, a German state, a German people. None of that exists for the United States. We have multiple cultures, multiple regions, multiple ethnicities, all bounded together. All historically tied in to the United States. all regionally scattered. Culturally, there are many Americas and many different historians and geographers have mentioned this, whether it's Colin Woodard or Joel Gourou. They've sort of looked at these regional cultures of the United States and tried to map them out. And if the United States had a history like Europe did or like Asia did, all of these different regions would be their own countries and all of them would be locked. in constant violent competition with each other. But that's one of the reasons that America is quite unique. We do not have a European-style history to our country. So what we have here for cultural America is a multi-ethnic, multi-regional nation with different ethnicities and cultures regionally bound and historically situated. And all of these people... are Americans. Whether they are immigrants from Ireland, from Germany, from Scandinavia, from Russia, from Latin America, Puerto Rico, Native Americans, all of these people, these different ethnicities, cultures, regions, all of these people are Americans. And everyone sees what Americans look like and go, that is an American. Well, that's just Mean-spirited. So having known what America is, let's turn to history. What is history? I mean, you walk into a bookstore or a library, there's a history section and you know what to expect when you walk in there. All of these books about stuff that happened in the past. So history is the study of past events, sort of, sort of. It is a little more complicated than that. History exists as a serious academic pursuit. It is the study of past events that makes use of the historical record to build better and more accurate models of the past, to sort of untangle the narratives of our collective memory from reality. People remember things that happened, but those things may or may not be true. You know, President Taft really wasn't so fat he got stuck in a bath. Abraham Lincoln really didn't promise the freed slaves 40 acres and a mule. You can check these things using the historical record, because historians use the historical record to build better and more accurate models of the past. So, like, what is the historical record? There it is, right there. The historical record is the collection of anything written down about past events. Biographies, letters, manifests, accountings. Anything that's been written down. Benjamin Franklin's love letters to his French mistresses, plural, who are often half his age. That is part of the historical record. Newspapers about the sinking of the Titanic. That is part of the historical record. Thomas Jefferson's laundry list, shopping list. That is part of the historical record. It's anything that is written down about past events. Now, historians take the historical record. and present to the public new interpretations of past events. And they can sort out myth and legend from actual reality. Now, the historical record is not accurate. You really can't expect Benjamin Franklin to be completely honest when he's talking to his, you know, 33-year-old French mistress. There, the historical record is itself subjective. And histories themselves are usually written with very distinct subjective biases. And here's something that tends to blow a lot of people's minds. History can actually change as new documents become available in the historical record. And I'll give you a very distinct advantage. That fellow right there, his name is Alger Hiss. Alger Hiss was a senior member of the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was a senior member of the State Department. He accompanied the... president and the vice president and all of these big important missions and big important meetings and in the late 1940s alger hist was accused of being a communist spy and he had this spectacular celebrated infamous 1950 trial alger hiss completely denied it he's like i am not a communist spy i am a loyal patriotic american Trying to serve my country, he was convicted of perjury, given a five-year prison sentence. You can see the newspaper right up above me. He only served three and a half years of this prison sentence, but his reputation was ruined. His career was destroyed. And so, you know, for the next 45 years, the history books about Alger Hiss said, This man was innocent. He is just a victim of this horrible, evil, communist witch hunt. A loyal civil servant maligned and ruined by these evil witch hunting communists. And that was in history books. That was in history books from the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. And then in the 90s, the Soviet Union collapses and... And in the middle to late 90s, the Russians come out and they're like. He was our spy the whole time. The Russians are like, oh yes, he was totally a communist spy the whole time. He sat in front of Congress and he lied and lied and lied. He was selling top state secrets to the Russians. In fact, he's one of the most damaging spies in American history. So with all of these new documents from the Russians who are like, yeah, he's totally a spy, the history books change. No longer. is Alger Hiss, the innocent victim of a communist witch hunt. In history books today, he is a traitor and a spy for a foreign power. So history books change. Alger Hiss was once lauded, and now he is condemned. But let's actually look at the functions of history. Let's look at how history actually functions, the role it... plays in society. Why should you even bother with history? You should bother with history for four reasons. Reason number one, history serves as a corrective to an imperfect collective memory. Now, a collective memory is what everybody kind of thinks and imagines about American history. Pocahontas falling in love with John Smith and paddling down the rivers of colonial Virginia. The Wild West with Buffalo Bill and gunfighters and savage Indians. But what people imagine happened in the past, that's not actually what happened in the past. The formal study of history corrects this collective memory. Pocahontas and John Smith never fell in love. She didn't even have a talking raccoon. And in colonial Virginia, they didn't spontaneously burst into musical numbers. The Wild West was very, very different from what we imagine from TVs and novels. You know, the cowboys were there, but they were part of this huge unfolding industrial revolution that covered the West with railroads and barbed wires. And the Native Americans who lived there had to be moved because the industrial revolution needed their land, all right? The second reason we should study history History helps explain why the country looks the way it does. It explains why these different ethnicities and cultures are scattered and concentrated in different parts of the United States. Why a bunch of French settlers ended up in southern Louisiana. Why a bunch of Irish refugees ended up in Boston. Why a bunch of Native Americans ended up in Oklahoma. And the one example I'll give to this is why you've got hundreds of thousands of Cuban Americans. in southern Florida, because there was a distinct historical reason for that. In the late 1970s, you know, this communist dictator of Cuba, Fidel Castro, basically made an attempt to kill like a quarter of the people on the island. And almost the entire professional and middle class of Cuba was desperate to escape, you know, this dour, declining, crumbling, you know, Republic of Cuba. and they could escape by... across the ocean. And this started this incredible historical event in 1980 called the Mariel Boatlift, where thousands of people fled from Cuba to Florida in an attempt to escape the communist dictatorship. And they were in a incredible act of generosity. The United States allowed them to enter. Thousands and tens of thousands of Cubans took over southern Florida, and they basically built this incredible city called Miami. And Miami today is what Havana should have been. Today, Havana is this dour, crumbling half city of ruins and oppression. And Miami is this glittering metropolis. That is because of the Cuban refugees. And that's why if you go to South Florida today, if you go to Miami today, you can hear their incredibly bizarre Spanish. I can't understand Cuban Spanish. I can barely understand Spanish. and they have these like crushed little pork sandwiches, they're quite good. But that is a distinct historical event, created this new American ethnicity and a new regional culture, all because of the Marielle Boatlift of 1980. The third reason we should study American history is the study of history builds the nation and it encourages a shared national identity. Now, remember, the United States, America does not have the bloody history of Europe. It doesn't have the bloody history of Asia. And one of the reasons we don't have that bloody history, one of the reasons that the different regions of the United States aren't at constant war with each other is because we view ourselves as a single nation. Political America exists because we think it does. And this is why we teach American history over and over and over again in the schools. Not so much to teach fifth graders the intricacies and mechanisms of American politics, but to instill in them a common sense of nationhood and a common shared identity. And there is something to efforts of the American nation and the American history itself is legitimately glorious. As a unified people, Americans have done incredible things, from the heroes of World War II to the great science and engineering feats of the 19th and 20th century, which include, but are not limited to, putting a dude on the moon. You know, the moon landings of the 1960s and 70s. It was something uniquely accomplished by the United States, something unequaled by any other country. I mean, right now, China has a moon program, and they're trying to put, like, a Chinese astronaut on the moon somewhere around 2030 or 2040, you know, in an attempt to duplicate something that the United States accomplished, you know, 60 years ago. And it's not just military history and veterans and politics and... science, and engineering, legitimately the United States has produced incredible masterworks of art and literature and political science. To this day, the Declaration of Independence itself is a near perfect political document outlining exactly when a people are justified in separating themselves from the government. And there's a reason that people across the world and revolutionaries from Asia to Africa to Europe have read and quoted and made use of Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence. And it's not just political writings. Some of the greatest novels ever written are American. From Herman Melville to Edgar Allan Poe to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Toni Morrison. Incredible authors. And the United States has done incredible, incredible things. And the fourth reason you should study history. The fourth utility of history, this takes us back to history as a serious academic pursuit, is that the formal study of history uses the historical record to build better and more accurate models of events in the past, and to untangle the narratives of our collective memory from reality. From a modern perspective, we know that Alger Hiss was a communist spy, but you know, you never know. Maybe... some new document will come out in the next 10 years that exonerates him. Probably not. But yeah, we're constantly trying to build better and more accurate models of the American past. So we know what America is. We know what history is. So who are these Americans? What is? American history. You've got your three definitions of America. You've got your four utilities of history. You know what history is. I want you to kind of cogitate on this a little bit. Using your own brain, I want you to think about the definitions and the uses of history. And with those, right now, build your own definition of what is American history. And with that, you're necessarily going to have to answer the question, who are Americans? Well, there they are, but who are those people? So we know what America is. We know what history is. We know why we should study history. We should have a really good definition of modern American history. And we do. There it is. Modern American History is the events of the past 150 years, generally dated from the end of the Civil War to the present day. All of modern American history is still unfolding around us. These events occurred largely within the scope of living human memory, which makes the periods that we're going to discuss much more accessible, but it also makes them much more complicated. You know, discussing the moon landings, or Elvis Presley, or... War in Afghanistan is difficult because those events haven't exactly ended. Rock and roll is still around. You know, they still, we still want to put Americans on the moon. And Afghanistan is still a mess. It's been a mess for a couple thousand years, but there it is. All of these events have occurred within living memory or very near to living memory. And when I say that most of modern American history has taken place within living memory, I'm being quite literal. There are people who have lived through most of modern American history. When you look at the oldest living persons in the world, you know, there's Thelma Sutcliffe, born 1906, and Hester Ford, born 1905. Teddy Roosevelt was president when these two women were born. They lived through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, the 50s and 60s, the... crazy hippie times of the 70s. They lived through disco fever through the 80s into the 21st century. More than 110 years old, they remember modern American history. And to emphasize how we're really only talking about one or maybe two full human lifetimes, what we're going to do is take a fictional person and move through her life from 1920 up until the early 21st century. We're going to enjoy, and me and you are going to live together an imagined life. But we're going to do that next time, and I will see you there.

Welcome, Dr. Epic here, and what we're going to do today is ask three questions, three important questions, three big questions. Questions like, what is America? What is history?

And ultimately, what is modern American history? We're going to follow that outline right up above my little yellow box. So put that outline in your notes to serve as a framework for the information that's going to follow as we both ask and answer that question up there. What is modern American history?

But to answer that question, we're going to take that big question and break it up into a series of little questions. What is America? What is history? What is American history? And why bother?

After all, isn't modern history a contradiction in terms? Why do contemporary historians spend so much time and energy and effort writing the history of a country as it is currently unfolding in front of them? And what do they mean when they say America? Generally, when people refer to America, they're referring to one of three different Americas. So there's basically, broadly speaking, three definitions for America.

There's a geographic definition, there's a political definition, and, most difficult to define, there is a cultural America. And once we understand what we mean when we refer to America, then we can actually figure out who those people are on the lower left. Who are the Americans?

Now, the easiest of these three definitions is Geographic America. There, on the left, is Geographic America. Geographic America consists of two continents, North America and South America, with a third area in the center, Central America.

The North is mostly English-speaking, and the South is mostly Spanish-speaking. But... Mostly is a very important adverb. Don't go to Quebec and start slinging around your English. Don't show up in Brazil thinking your Spanish is going to be of much use.

These are mostly the common languages of these areas. And that's it. That's Geographic America. And this tends to blow a lot of people's minds. To think that somebody can get on a plane in Argentina, land in the United States of...

get off a plane and really this person has just gone from one part of America to another because everyone here is an American. But you see, in the United States, we tend to refer to America using its political definition. What is political America? Well, there is political America.

It is the United States of America. All right. What is the United States of America?

Well, it's 50 states. bound together by a single legal document, the U.S. Constitution. But there's more to it than just 50 states, because in addition to the 50 states, there are more than 500 sovereign Indian nations.

These Native American nations, scattered completely across the country, inhabit more than almost 400 distinct federal reservations. And some of these reservations are huge. Some of them are quite small. Some of them consist of a single church and a cemetery. But these reservations are not quite part of the state, because Indian reservations don't have the legal authority to make their own laws, but they can kind of pick and choose which laws to follow.

Because these sovereign Indian nations possess a legal thing called tribal sovereignty. So they... are not just inside of a state, but they also have a special relationship with the federal government, which is why certain Indian reservations can do things that people in the rest of the state cannot.

So political America consists of 50 states, more than 500 sovereign Indian nations, and various overseas territories and dependencies. Because there's all these islands scattered all over the Caribbean and the Atlantic that are also part. of the United States, but they're not states and they're not Native American nations. The most famous of these territories is Puerto Rico, which was added to the United States at the end of the 19th century and has remained a territory ever since.

And Puerto Rico seems, for much of its history, to be quite happy with that legal arrangement. There are certain advantages to being a territory. You don't get to vote in federal elections. But you'd have to pay federal taxes. So every 30 or 40 years, Puerto Rico has kind of made this decision.

Does it want to stay as a territory? Does it want to become a new state? Or does it want to break away and form its own country? And former American territories have done that.

The Philippines, way over there, used to be an American territory. But they broke away, and now they are their own country. Recently, in the last 10 years or so, Puerto Rico has made...

you know, has made motions to become the 51st state. But Puerto Rico is a very pro-Democrat state, and that means it gets all wrapped up into the messiness that is contemporary politics. So for now, Puerto Rico is on hold.

But you can see in the Pacific, there's all of these islands. Some of them have no one on them at all. That's, I think, what a dependency is. But all of these areas, they're not states.

They're not sovereign Indian nations. They're their own thing. So, political America is the United States of America, which consists of 50 states, more than 500 sovereign Indian nations, and various overseas territories and dependencies, all of which are bound together by the United States Constitution.

And that's political America. Now we move on to the third and most difficult definition of what exactly. is America?

What is cultural America? And what we have here is there's grandma, there's apple pie, there's baseball. That is America. Can't get more American than grandma, apple pie, and baseball.

But if you'll see from the map, you'll notice that there's very many different regional areas scattered across the United States. There is no real single America. American culture.

There is no single American ethnicity. The United States is not like, you know, Korea. It's not like Germany. It's not like, you know, Japan, where you've got a Japanese ethnicity, a Japanese state, a Japanese culture. The United States isn't like that at all.

In fact, culturally, there are many ethnicities. There are many cultures. There are Many different people all wrapped together. So a cultural definition of America. Cultural America is a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural mix of various peoples scattered across the United States, placed in distinct regions, and historically situated.

Because if you see that map you see there on the upper left, that's a map of the many ethnicities of the United States. And each of those ethnicities is historically situated. And they all come from different waves of immigration into political America.

Immigration into the United States has never been a steady flow or a constant drip. And instead, charted historically, it's been in these huge waves and troughs. And each of those waves corresponds to generally something really awful happening in another part of the world.

We have a huge wave of Irish in the early to middle 19th century because of the Irish potato famine. We have the Italian wars of unification drive thousands of Italians across. We have the breakup and meltdown of Tsarist Russia sent a huge wave of immigrants in the early 20th century. And in the middle to late 20th century, constant civil war, instability, and crime across Latin America have driven Thousands, if not millions of immigrants to the north, changing the ethnic and cultural makeup of the United States. So the United States is not, it's not Germany.

Germany has a German culture, a German ethnicity, a German state, a German people. None of that exists for the United States. We have multiple cultures, multiple regions, multiple ethnicities, all bounded together. All historically tied in to the United States.

all regionally scattered. Culturally, there are many Americas and many different historians and geographers have mentioned this, whether it's Colin Woodard or Joel Gourou. They've sort of looked at these regional cultures of the United States and tried to map them out. And if the United States had a history like Europe did or like Asia did, all of these different regions would be their own countries and all of them would be locked. in constant violent competition with each other.

But that's one of the reasons that America is quite unique. We do not have a European-style history to our country. So what we have here for cultural America is a multi-ethnic, multi-regional nation with different ethnicities and cultures regionally bound and historically situated. And all of these people... are Americans.

Whether they are immigrants from Ireland, from Germany, from Scandinavia, from Russia, from Latin America, Puerto Rico, Native Americans, all of these people, these different ethnicities, cultures, regions, all of these people are Americans. And everyone sees what Americans look like and go, that is an American. Well, that's just Mean-spirited.

So having known what America is, let's turn to history. What is history? I mean, you walk into a bookstore or a library, there's a history section and you know what to expect when you walk in there. All of these books about stuff that happened in the past. So history is the study of past events, sort of, sort of.

It is a little more complicated than that. History exists as a serious academic pursuit. It is the study of past events that makes use of the historical record to build better and more accurate models of the past, to sort of untangle the narratives of our collective memory from reality. People remember things that happened, but those things may or may not be true.

You know, President Taft really wasn't so fat he got stuck in a bath. Abraham Lincoln really didn't promise the freed slaves 40 acres and a mule. You can check these things using the historical record, because historians use the historical record to build better and more accurate models of the past. So, like, what is the historical record?

There it is, right there. The historical record is the collection of anything written down about past events. Biographies, letters, manifests, accountings. Anything that's been written down.

Benjamin Franklin's love letters to his French mistresses, plural, who are often half his age. That is part of the historical record. Newspapers about the sinking of the Titanic.

That is part of the historical record. Thomas Jefferson's laundry list, shopping list. That is part of the historical record. It's anything that is written down about past events. Now, historians take the historical record.

and present to the public new interpretations of past events. And they can sort out myth and legend from actual reality. Now, the historical record is not accurate.

You really can't expect Benjamin Franklin to be completely honest when he's talking to his, you know, 33-year-old French mistress. There, the historical record is itself subjective. And histories themselves are usually written with very distinct subjective biases. And here's something that tends to blow a lot of people's minds.

History can actually change as new documents become available in the historical record. And I'll give you a very distinct advantage. That fellow right there, his name is Alger Hiss. Alger Hiss was a senior member of the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He was a senior member of the State Department. He accompanied the... president and the vice president and all of these big important missions and big important meetings and in the late 1940s alger hist was accused of being a communist spy and he had this spectacular celebrated infamous 1950 trial alger hiss completely denied it he's like i am not a communist spy i am a loyal patriotic american Trying to serve my country, he was convicted of perjury, given a five-year prison sentence.

You can see the newspaper right up above me. He only served three and a half years of this prison sentence, but his reputation was ruined. His career was destroyed. And so, you know, for the next 45 years, the history books about Alger Hiss said, This man was innocent. He is just a victim of this horrible, evil, communist witch hunt.

A loyal civil servant maligned and ruined by these evil witch hunting communists. And that was in history books. That was in history books from the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s.

And then in the 90s, the Soviet Union collapses and... And in the middle to late 90s, the Russians come out and they're like. He was our spy the whole time. The Russians are like, oh yes, he was totally a communist spy the whole time. He sat in front of Congress and he lied and lied and lied.

He was selling top state secrets to the Russians. In fact, he's one of the most damaging spies in American history. So with all of these new documents from the Russians who are like, yeah, he's totally a spy, the history books change. No longer.

is Alger Hiss, the innocent victim of a communist witch hunt. In history books today, he is a traitor and a spy for a foreign power. So history books change.

Alger Hiss was once lauded, and now he is condemned. But let's actually look at the functions of history. Let's look at how history actually functions, the role it...

plays in society. Why should you even bother with history? You should bother with history for four reasons. Reason number one, history serves as a corrective to an imperfect collective memory.

Now, a collective memory is what everybody kind of thinks and imagines about American history. Pocahontas falling in love with John Smith and paddling down the rivers of colonial Virginia. The Wild West with Buffalo Bill and gunfighters and savage Indians. But what people imagine happened in the past, that's not actually what happened in the past. The formal study of history corrects this collective memory.

Pocahontas and John Smith never fell in love. She didn't even have a talking raccoon. And in colonial Virginia, they didn't spontaneously burst into musical numbers. The Wild West was very, very different from what we imagine from TVs and novels.

You know, the cowboys were there, but they were part of this huge unfolding industrial revolution that covered the West with railroads and barbed wires. And the Native Americans who lived there had to be moved because the industrial revolution needed their land, all right? The second reason we should study history History helps explain why the country looks the way it does. It explains why these different ethnicities and cultures are scattered and concentrated in different parts of the United States.

Why a bunch of French settlers ended up in southern Louisiana. Why a bunch of Irish refugees ended up in Boston. Why a bunch of Native Americans ended up in Oklahoma.

And the one example I'll give to this is why you've got hundreds of thousands of Cuban Americans. in southern Florida, because there was a distinct historical reason for that. In the late 1970s, you know, this communist dictator of Cuba, Fidel Castro, basically made an attempt to kill like a quarter of the people on the island.

And almost the entire professional and middle class of Cuba was desperate to escape, you know, this dour, declining, crumbling, you know, Republic of Cuba. and they could escape by... across the ocean.

And this started this incredible historical event in 1980 called the Mariel Boatlift, where thousands of people fled from Cuba to Florida in an attempt to escape the communist dictatorship. And they were in a incredible act of generosity. The United States allowed them to enter. Thousands and tens of thousands of Cubans took over southern Florida, and they basically built this incredible city called Miami.

And Miami today is what Havana should have been. Today, Havana is this dour, crumbling half city of ruins and oppression. And Miami is this glittering metropolis.

That is because of the Cuban refugees. And that's why if you go to South Florida today, if you go to Miami today, you can hear their incredibly bizarre Spanish. I can't understand Cuban Spanish. I can barely understand Spanish.

and they have these like crushed little pork sandwiches, they're quite good. But that is a distinct historical event, created this new American ethnicity and a new regional culture, all because of the Marielle Boatlift of 1980. The third reason we should study American history is the study of history builds the nation and it encourages a shared national identity. Now, remember, the United States, America does not have the bloody history of Europe. It doesn't have the bloody history of Asia.

And one of the reasons we don't have that bloody history, one of the reasons that the different regions of the United States aren't at constant war with each other is because we view ourselves as a single nation. Political America exists because we think it does. And this is why we teach American history over and over and over again in the schools.

Not so much to teach fifth graders the intricacies and mechanisms of American politics, but to instill in them a common sense of nationhood and a common shared identity. And there is something to efforts of the American nation and the American history itself is legitimately glorious. As a unified people, Americans have done incredible things, from the heroes of World War II to the great science and engineering feats of the 19th and 20th century, which include, but are not limited to, putting a dude on the moon.

You know, the moon landings of the 1960s and 70s. It was something uniquely accomplished by the United States, something unequaled by any other country. I mean, right now, China has a moon program, and they're trying to put, like, a Chinese astronaut on the moon somewhere around 2030 or 2040, you know, in an attempt to duplicate something that the United States accomplished, you know, 60 years ago.

And it's not just military history and veterans and politics and... science, and engineering, legitimately the United States has produced incredible masterworks of art and literature and political science. To this day, the Declaration of Independence itself is a near perfect political document outlining exactly when a people are justified in separating themselves from the government. And there's a reason that people across the world and revolutionaries from Asia to Africa to Europe have read and quoted and made use of Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence. And it's not just political writings.

Some of the greatest novels ever written are American. From Herman Melville to Edgar Allan Poe to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Toni Morrison. Incredible authors.

And the United States has done incredible, incredible things. And the fourth reason you should study history. The fourth utility of history, this takes us back to history as a serious academic pursuit, is that the formal study of history uses the historical record to build better and more accurate models of events in the past, and to untangle the narratives of our collective memory from reality. From a modern perspective, we know that Alger Hiss was a communist spy, but you know, you never know.

Maybe... some new document will come out in the next 10 years that exonerates him. Probably not. But yeah, we're constantly trying to build better and more accurate models of the American past. So we know what America is.

We know what history is. So who are these Americans? What is? American history.

You've got your three definitions of America. You've got your four utilities of history. You know what history is.

I want you to kind of cogitate on this a little bit. Using your own brain, I want you to think about the definitions and the uses of history. And with those, right now, build your own definition of what is American history.

And with that, you're necessarily going to have to answer the question, who are Americans? Well, there they are, but who are those people? So we know what America is. We know what history is. We know why we should study history.

We should have a really good definition of modern American history. And we do. There it is.

Modern American History is the events of the past 150 years, generally dated from the end of the Civil War to the present day. All of modern American history is still unfolding around us. These events occurred largely within the scope of living human memory, which makes the periods that we're going to discuss much more accessible, but it also makes them much more complicated. You know, discussing the moon landings, or Elvis Presley, or...

War in Afghanistan is difficult because those events haven't exactly ended. Rock and roll is still around. You know, they still, we still want to put Americans on the moon. And Afghanistan is still a mess. It's been a mess for a couple thousand years, but there it is.

All of these events have occurred within living memory or very near to living memory. And when I say that most of modern American history has taken place within living memory, I'm being quite literal. There are people who have lived through most of modern American history. When you look at the oldest living persons in the world, you know, there's Thelma Sutcliffe, born 1906, and Hester Ford, born 1905. Teddy Roosevelt was president when these two women were born. They lived through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, the 50s and 60s, the...

crazy hippie times of the 70s. They lived through disco fever through the 80s into the 21st century. More than 110 years old, they remember modern American history. And to emphasize how we're really only talking about one or maybe two full human lifetimes, what we're going to do is take a fictional person and move through her life from 1920 up until the early 21st century. We're going to enjoy, and me and you are going to live together an imagined life.

But we're going to do that next time, and I will see you there.

Transcript for:Modern American History Overview

Transcript for:
Modern American History Overview