Episode 207: Dispelling America’s Myths
Most people do not want to fall victim to or share misinformation. With so much information out there, how do we make sure what we are engaging with is not just confirming what we already believe but is based on facts and good data? L. Joy brings historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer to the front of the class to break down how we can tell fact from fiction, discuss their new book, and explain exactly what the role of a historian is.
Homework:
Read: Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer https://amzn.to/3IDteSg
Ensure you don’t get caught up in misinformation. Make sure what you read in general and see on social media etc. is factual, real, and based on primary sources and data.
Ask Questions: Who wrote this? Who are they? What is their agenda? What are their biases? What are they hoping to accomplish?
Who is this written for? Who is the intended audience? What do they assume the reader knows?
What is the context for this? Is this person/account trustworthy?
Our Guests:
Kevin M. Kruse is a Professor of History at Princeton University. He specializes in the political, social, and urban/suburban history of twentieth-century America, with a particular interest in conflicts over race, rights and religion and the making of modern conservatism.
Kevin is currently conducting research for his new book, The Division: John Doar, the Justice Department, and the Civil Rights Movement (contracted to Basic Books). The point man for civil rights for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Doar was a vital actor in countless crisis moments in the civil rights movement — personally confronting segregationists at Ole Miss and the University of Alabama, putting Klansmen on trial for the murders of civil rights workers (including the famous “Mississippi Burning” murders), helping draft the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, literally leading the way in the Selma-to-Montgomery March, etc. Through the previously untapped papers of Doar, he hopes to provide new insights into these civil rights milestones as well as a new understanding of the ways in which the federal government worked (and didn’t work) during the racial revolution unfolding across the South.
He is also the co-author of Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974 (W.W. Norton, January 2019). A sweeping history of the past four decades of American history, the book chronicles the origins of the divided states of America, a nation increasingly riven by stark political partisanship and deep social divisions along lines of race, class, gender and sexuality. Co-written with Julian Zelizer, the book tracks not only the course of our current state of political polarization, but also the ways in which an increasingly fractured media landscape worked to aggravate divisions in American politics and society as well.
Kevin is also the author of White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, published by Princeton University Press in 2005. That book won prizes including the 2007 Francis B. Simkins Award from the Southern Historical Association (for the best first book in the field of Southern history, 2005-2006) and the 2007 Best Book Award in Urban Politics from the American Political Science Association.
In addition, he has co-edited three essay collections: The New Suburban History (University of Chicago Press, 2006), with Thomas Sugrue; Spaces of the Modern City (Princeton University Press, 2008), with Gyan Prakash; and Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press, 2012) with Stephen Tuck. He has been honored as one of America’s top young “Innovators in the Arts and Sciences” by the Smithsonian Magazine, selected as one of the top young historians in the country by the History News Network, and named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.
A Nashville native and an alumnus of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Kevin went on to earn his MA and Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2000. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his family.
Julian E. Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN Political Analyst and a regular guest on NPR’s "Here and Now." He is the author and editor of 22 books including, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (2015), the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress and Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (Norton), co-authored with Kevin Kruse and Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party (Penguin Press). The New York Times named the book as an Editor's Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books in 2020.
His most recent book is Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement (Yale University Press, Jewish Lives Series). In 2021-2022, he will publish three new edited volumes—Daniel Bell: Defining the Age: Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours (Columbia University Press, co-edited with Paul Starr); The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton University Press) and Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past (Basic Books, co-edited with Kevin Kruse).
He is currently working on a new book about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the 1964 Democratic Convention. Zelizer, who has published over 1000 op-eds, has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the New York Historical Society, and New America.
