Hi, I'm Peter Creighton and welcome to a very special interview here on WXAV 88.3F. Chicago and wxav.com. I'm joined by Dr. Graham Pack from the Department of History here at St.
Xavier University. I got to ask, I'm very intrigued by the title of Dr. Pack. You have in there the age of Ken Burns history and the age of Ken Burns.
What do you mean by that? What's the age of Ken Burns? Well, that's a great question. I was an undergraduate taking a course on Lincoln when Ken Burns famous Civil War series came out and I remember I watched it over a number of nights.
All the history students were talking about it and we loved it and what's been very interesting for me to observe over the past 20 odd years as I become a professional historian and a civil war scholar and in fact a scholar who's published on Lincoln is that I found out that many people really love to experience history visually. They might not ever want to pick up a book that a historian writes or an article that I've written but they will love to talk about history and to see history and so that's a different kind of venue for history to be experienced and yet is not one that I've been trained in that the historical discipline tends to focus on. It's a very text-based discipline. Why do you think history has always been more text-based instead of a visual medium or visual field?
Well, the entire discipline was based around the idea that we would read sources that were written and have survived and that can tell us about the past because conversations in the past disappear, right? Unless someone records them visual vistas unless someone paints them or takes a photograph of them or describes them those are gone as well. All sorts of physical artifacts are gone unless they get dug up or somehow preserved. So commonly texts tend to be not only what are preserved disproportionately but also what tell us the most because they're the actual ideas of people that they've inscribed.
So historians have spent a lot of effort trying to learn how to use texts to interpret the past but the whole visual sign of history is not something they've completely ignored nor have they completely ignored physical artifacts but they tend to be something that occupies attention of a far smaller number of historians. The field of history is experiencing this new revolution of digital technology as you said Ken Burns with his series on PBS whether it's on baseball or prohibition or the Civil War and then we have the advent of the history channel. Do you think historians are slow in embracing what new technology has to offer specifically the use of creating documentaries, audio documentaries, things like that? I don't think so on the whole.
There are a number of initiatives that historians have taken over the past 15 to 20 years that have changed the discipline of history. There are a large number of digital archives which granted is largely the work of archivists and historians but historians have been involved in utilizing those new resources to write history. There are commercial databases that offer a huge number of digitized documents that historians use to do research and in fact now can search those documents in completely different ways allowing new approaches to analyzing the past. There are even programs like Zodarohum's Mozilla product that allows you to take notes from digital sources in new ways and to search your notes in new ways.
There are even digital books in the American Historical Association, the premier historical organization in the country about a decade ago began a project to create opportunities for historians to create digital books which would allow for use of different kind of visuals and for hyperlinks. So historians have been moving that direction and certainly they've long been teaching with new digital resources whether using pictures in their lectures or whether even using YouTube now with to embed videos in their lectures. So all that's going on but at the same time I don't think the fundamental training of historians has moved away from its largely text-based character so that part of the profession is really quite traditional and I think potentially historians might think about visual ways of doing history that would allow them to disseminate their thinking and findings in ways that would broaden the appeal of their work and to me that's one of the questions that is symposium is asking of historians. I'm sitting here talking with Dr.
Graham Peck a professor of history here at Stacey University. He's the organizer of a symposium that will be taking place here at St. Xavier here in Chicago at the end of April called Visualizing the American Past. Remembering Stephen A.
Douglas in the Age of Ken Burns and for more information on the symposium visit our official website sxu.edu keyword Douglas. Now Dr. Peck I got to ask you you're going to be premiering a documentary that you created on Stephen A. Douglas.
What inspired you to create this documentary? Well it's an interesting story. It has a lot to do with a woman named Sherry Williams who I mentioned before the founder of the Bronzeville Historical Society. She's a remarkable lady.
She's a community historian not trained as a professional historian but she's very interested in interrogating the past one of the kinds of people that I'm really interested in historians communicating with and in a sense communing with to think about the legacy that history holds for us and Sherry Williams ended up rehabbing a home that had been in the Douglas tomb for many years. In fact it used to house the caretakers of the tomb but it was largely empty and she got permission from the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency to rehab it and to work at the tomb doing interpretation not only of the Douglas site but also of the broader Bronzeville area where the Douglas tomb is located. And Sherry also joined the board of the Stephen A. Douglas Association of which I was a member and when we learned that she was going to actually be present at the tomb and so that now people could come to the tomb and have someone to talk to which previously wasn't the case.
It occurred to me that perhaps my students and I could make a film to be shown at the tomb. You know this is fairly common if you go to say federal interpretive sites like the Lincoln home you can see a 15 or 20 minute film. There was a great enthusiasm at the Douglas Association board for doing this and so I kicked it off. I didn't know anything about making a film.
I went to the instructional design folks at the university who helped faculty such as myself said how can we make a film they said well you've got a movie I said can you help me they said yes and there it went. You were off to the races then. We were off to the races. So what was that experience like to do you know I mean you're a professional historian and now you've added filmmaker to your resume.
Do you kind of see a historian as a filmmaker or filmmaker as a historian? Well I'm a lot more comfortable seeing a filmmaker as a historian at the moment because naturally I'm an amateur very much at making films but I think filmmakers would be equally worried about being called historians because they likewise would feel unqualified to take that designation. But the interesting thing to me is in some senses we're occupied with the same central sort of a challenge or purpose which is using history to interpret history to understand how we want to live today which is really what everyone has done with the legacy of the past ever since human beings have created oral histories about the history of their tribe or their people. And the emergence of modern professional historians is a pretty recent development over the last 150 years and it seems to me we don't want to divorce those individuals those professionals who've gotten a PhD in right academic pieces about history from the broader public that has to interpret history.
Historians can't control history like engineers can control engineering. Only an engineer can build a bridge. You've got to have certain qualifications and you've got to sign legal documents that you are that you are going to take responsibility for your bridge. Well historians can't control the past like that and that means that we really need to be communicating with others, with teachers who are teaching history, with re-enactors who are communicating history to many people that come to reenactments to filmmakers who make history and are putting it up on the web and on TV people like Dan Andres.
So to my mind in a sense this act of trying to understand history in this regard filmmakers are historians even if perhaps in the professional sense of producing scholarly knowledge they are not. So that I think is a useful distinction but in the end of the day the central task of people who explore history is to understand it. Not necessarily to produce scholarly knowledge about it. There's always going to be a very small percentage of the population doing that.
So really that's the fascinating part of the symposium to me is bringing together these various groups of people who are really interested in understanding history and getting a conversation going about what that means in this new digital age. Final question for you Dr. Peck. Do you think Stephen A.
Douglas's role in history is forgotten or that his significance is downplayed slightly? Douglas is like a footnote to Lincoln's career. Well you've put your finger on it. That is exactly the way those scholars who think he has been downplayed would put it.
That he's become a shadow that arguably the most important politician of the 1850s is remembered only because he was Lincoln's foil in the debate in 1858 and in some ways that's understandable because Lincoln is not just your average president. Not even your average president. He is realistically the greatest president we ever had. I think the only one you could seriously put up against him is George Washington.
And because of that it's hard to see Douglas in any other light especially since Douglas dies right at the beginning of the war and Lincoln carries the mantle of the Union forward. Yet the interesting thing is in the 1850s the language of union that was Douglas's language more than anyone else's language because he was trying to preserve the union against anti-slavery politicians and pro-slavery politicians who were very eager to try and create a unified nation that was either anti-slavery or pro-slavery and he tried to straddle this line and failed and the end failed dramatically and then he died right after his failure was most manifest so in that sense some historians might argue that he was he has been forgotten but on the other hand other historians might say well no he hasn't he's he is less significant because he didn't represent the American public by 1860 that's why he failed and so perhaps the real story is is the story of the secessionist in the south and the story of the anti-slavery politicians in the north. From my standpoint as someone who studied Douglas and has made a film on him I'm interested in both illuminating his influence on why there is a tomb in Chicago where there is this magnificent statue how did that come to be why is it there why is it historic site so I'm interested in answering that question we can't unless we understand why he was so influential during the 1850s but it's also true I'm interested in interrogating the complexities of that legacy because even though he was a unionist which is the part of Douglas that can be celebrated in retrospect it's also true that his unionism in the 1850s was predicated on a pre-profound racism that enabled him to say we can keep slavery forever it's not a problem we don't have to fight about this and that part of his legacy is very difficult for us today to wrestle with and yet to my mind here's the critical intersection of both scholarship and public understandings of history because public understandings of history often try to deviate away from these tough questions to gloss over them because most national histories to take an obvious example have these difficult national questions the Japanese and Pearl Harbor the Germans and the Holocaust the Russians installed well with the Americans that space it it's slavery and Indian removal are probably the two biggest arguably to some historians are foreign policy record but certainly slavery and Indian removal at home and here is Douglas in the middle of this very controversial issue saying that it's okay at some level that it's okay and and I think that's something to be interrogated the film addresses it the sessions are going to address it and we're going to have a conversation about that so I think scholars by engaging this public discourse can really probe into some more some more difficult issues that in the public domain usually are not probed so intensively because they are delicate but I think that will be one of the real contributions of the symposium the symposium is called visualizing the american past remembering Stephen A. Douglas in the age of Ken Burns who will be taking place here at the Chicago campus of St.
Xavier University on Saturday April 26th for more information visit sxu.edu keyword Douglas Dr. Peck thank you so much for joining us today thank you I appreciate it it's been a pleasure