Historian's Eye

Beginning as a modest effort in early 2009 to capture the historic moment of our first black president’s inauguration in photographs and interviews, the “Our Better History” project and the Historian’s Eye website have evolved into an expansive collection of some 1000+ photographs and an audio archive addressing Obama’s first term in office, the ’08 economic collapse and its fallout, two wars, the raucous politics of healthcare reform, the emergence of a new right-wing formation in opposition to Obama, the politics of immigration, Wall Street reform, street protests of every stripe, the BP oil spill, and the seeming escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide. Interviewees narrate and reflect upon their own personal histories as well, a dimension of the archive that now spans many decades and touches five continents. The momentum of our culture encourages very short memory and very quick judgment. We take our public discourse mostly in sound bites, and hence things that predate the latest news cycle are most often crowded out of our consideration. Historian’s Eye asks you to slow down; to look and to listen; to pay close attention and to notice; to entertain a variety of perspectives; to ask varied questions; to think about the current moment as possessing a deep history, and also to think of it as itself historical—futurity’s history. Above all, Historian’s Eye asks you to pitch in and to talk back. Matthew Frye Jacobson is Professor of American Studies, African American Studies, and History at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University in 1992, and is the author of Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (2006); What Have They Built You to Do? THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalez, 2006); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995). He is currently at work on Odetta's Voice and Other Weapons: The Civil Rights Era as Cultural History, and a multimedia documentary project devoted to the Obama presidency and political life in contemporary America. His teaching interests are clustered under the general rubric of race in U.S. political culture, including U.S. imperialism, immigration and migration, popular culture, and the juridical structures of U.S. citizenship.