It’s 7 a.m., and Crystal is getting ready for her day as a historical interpreter.

To begin the transformation, she puts on the period-appropriate dress she laid out the night before: 19th-century underclothes, overclothes, and an apron. Next come the stockings, which she pulls up and over the knee, boots, and jewelry.

She then heads over to the historical site she works at, thinking about the day ahead. When she arrives, she sits before a mirror and continues transforming, putting on a bald cap first, then pinning on her wig. Finally, she switches out her modern glasses for the round wire-rimmed period ones.

At 9:35, transformation complete, she gathers with the rest of the team to learn what roles they will portray that day. Will she be a shopkeeper, the wife of a blacksmith, or will she stroll down the avenue with the guests?

The life of an interpreter demands extreme flexibility because every day is different. Whatever the day calls for, though, Crystal is prepared to help draw guests out of the contemporary moment and transport them back to the world of the 1800s.

Historical interpreting is an ever-growing and evolving profession that has the potential to serve as an antidote for these polarizing times. By creating a welcoming space to stoke curiosity—rather than endless partisanship debate—historical interpreters like Crystal help people interact with and understand the past in a more broad-minded way. They can, quite literally, bring history to life, warts and all.

The professional historical interpreter is usually traced back to the creation of Colonial Williamsburg in 1924, when Reverend W.A.R. Goodwin approached John D. Rockefeller Jr. to help him create a living monument to America’s past to “tell of how patriotic spirits wrought here to erect an enduring spiritual temple to liberty.” What started as a way of stroking the American ego post World War I has evolved into a means of presenting audiences with a dynamic window into the past.

Historical recreational sites are now established across the United States, including the Plimoth Plantation, Jamestown Settlement, and Ohio Village. Alongside the rise of these historical sites is the evolution of dedicated interpreters, who have shifted from amateur participants to recognized professionals. While a degree is not usually required today to be a historical interpreter, it is desirable. Crystal earned hers in historical and natural interpretation at Hocking College, an immersive hands-on program where she learned many aspects of how to communicate science and history to visitors.

The Hocking College program focuses on the idea that an interpreter’s job is not to be overly thorough or “info dump” on guests, but instead to strategically light a spark of curiosity in people walking through these historical sites. This philosophy is grounded in the idea that people can be shown all the data in the world, but if the meaning behind it cannot be communicated, then it will not resonate.

Historical interpreting goes arm-in-arm with the rise of experimental archeology, where researchers seek to better understand the lives of ancient peoples by replicating their practices. This could mean building and driving a chariot to attempt to learn what it was like driving it across the desert sands 3,000 years ago. Or reconstructing and living in an Iron Age house, complete with a thatched roof, wattle walls, and historically accurate tools and household goods. Similarly, at historical sites, buildings and many of the artifacts serve as replicas that can be used by interpreters to present as accurate a portrayal of the past as possible.

Historical sites’ duty to history means many have needed to adjust their grounds and practices to reflect our changing picture of what was. In Massachusetts’ Plimoth Patuxet, for instance, interpreters no longer wear the stereotypical black Pilgrim outfits and tall black hats with buckles, as we know now that most colonists did not wear black. They have also incorporated raised gardening, as new research has suggested they would have been used back then. Colonial Williamsburg will—and has gone as far as to—pick up and move an entire building if it is found that it is not in the correct placement. In recent years, Colonial Williamsburg has also added slave quarters and interpreters to tell crucial African American stories that were not included in earlier iterations of the site.

As the tapestry historical venues weave is fluid and ever-changing, interpreters are put on the frontlines of communicating these adjustments to guests. They have to be willing to admit when they are wrong or when they do not have an answer, and in that case, work to find one out. That means that their preparation never ends, and no program is ever static from year to year. Not all guests will be open to updates that interpreters convey due to their own misinformation or personal biases, so interpreters are also trained to de-escalate, redirect, or gently tell the truth in the face of pushback. While interpreters know they will not win over everyone who visits, they have a responsibility to portray history as they currently understand it, and be ready to update their stories as more research and the inclusion of more marginalized voices alters existing narratives.

The job of an interpreter is not a one-size-fits-all position. At historical venues, you likely will encounter either a third-person or first-person interpreter. A third-person interpreter usually dresses in the period style, but engages the guests at the venue from a modern perspective, helping them to understand when and where they are. First-person is more complicated. There are two major types: scripted and impromptu. For scripted, the guest receives more of a show, an activity within the historical moment. With impromptu, however, the interpreter is fully immersed in the moment, freely engaging with the guests to draw them into the past. Improvisation becomes the keystone to success. Because impromptu interpreters are not part of a static exhibit, they can dynamically respond to every person they encounter through both of these lenses.

Crystal’s preferred interpreter character is first-person impromptu. On this day, she is assigned to perform this role in the form of a shopkeeper.

Each time a guest walks into her shop, she’ll consider them from two lenses: within their modern context, entering the venue ready to learn, as well as in the contemporary context of a customer entering the shop. Around her, all the aspects of her shop have been carefully researched and recreated to further the experience, down to the real soup that Crystal is cooking over a real fire. She lets her guests drive the conversation when they enter. By engaging with them as the shopkeeper might talk to potential customers, she helps them to immerse themselves in the sights and even smells of the past.

Carefully, Crystal closes up her shop at 5 p.m. Even though the day is over, she does not drop character until she has left the venue.

Only then does she take off her wig, switch out her glasses, trade her basket for her purse, and head over to her car. At home, she changes out of the rest of her clothes, stepping out of the 19th century and back into the 21st.

Crystal reflects on the day, on what people might have learned about the politics, economy, and identities of quotidian life at the site. She considers what she did well and what could be done better.

She then lays out her clothes for tomorrow.

The post Can Living in History Bring Us Together? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Everyone who’s the least bit plugged into the NFL or popular culture, or has spent at least five minutes out of a coma the past few months, knows why the Kansas City broadcast keeps cutting to the Chiefs’ luxury suite. Shots of Taylor Swift cheering for Travis Kelce are now seamlessly part of television coverage. Is it love? Is it a publicity stunt? Why does the media follow their every move so breathlessly—and why is America following along?

Only time might answer the first two questions, but history can help with the third.

Long before there was a Taylor and Travis (or, for that matter, a Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio), actress Helen Dauvray and baseball player John Montgomery Ward were the ones dominating the headlines of their day. The Dauvray-Ward romance and the media coverage it received offer a glimpse into the future of the celebrity power couple, from a time when entertainers and professional athletes were still socially suspect in the minds of the Gilded Age elites who valued the perceived purity of amateur pursuits.

In the late 19th century, the concept of publicity was starting to evolve. Instead of earning fame and media coverage through political or charitable deeds (or misdeeds), Americans started becoming newsworthy just by being well-known, in part due to the development of the celebrity interview, which both responded to and stimulated public interest, thus establishing a self-reinforcing public relations loop.

Helen Dauvray, the headliner of her own theatrical troupe, was a fixture of this loop. So famous was she that a October 12, 1887 New York Times article previewing her impending marriage to Ward identified her as “the well known actress” whose “history is too familiar for detail.” The journalist didn’t bother reprising Dauvray’s rise to fame as 1860s child performer “Little Nell,” and glossed over the actress’ time on the stage as Helen Gibson before she reinvented herself in Paris and changed her name because readers already knew the story; Dauvray had received 66 mentions in 1887 in the Times alone, not counting classified ads.

Her beau, John M. Ward, could not compete with Dauvray’s megawatt stardom. “[T]he man she is to marry is not so well known, although he has made a reputation on the diamond,” that same Times profile noted, providing readers with a thumbnail sketch of Ward’s baseball career so they could catch up: He’d won one championship, received bachelor’s and law degrees from Columbia, and had a role in founding the Brotherhood, the first labor union for major league baseball players. Not mentioned were the facts that Ward had pitched the second perfect game in professional baseball history, moved from pitcher to outfielder and shortstop, and served as player-manager of both the Providence Grays and New York Giants—all after allegedly being kicked out of Penn State for stealing a chicken.

If Times readers required a 101 course in Ward, no such introduction was necessary for enthusiasts (“fans” was just coming into usage) who subscribed to the Sporting Life or the Sporting News, the recently founded weeklies that were the ESPNs of the 1880s.  The front-page story in the October 19 issue of the Sporting Life called the Dauvray-Ward marriage “the sensation of the week” in “base ball,” which still appeared in print as two words.

The first breadcrumb of a Dauvray-Ward relationship appeared in late May 1887, when newspapers announced the actress’s gift of her self-named trophy, the Dauvray Cup, to be presented to the winner of a postseason championship series. On July 20th, her name was linked to Ward obliquely when Sporting Life identified her as a “perfect crank”—19th-century slang to describe an obsessive, unreasonable person—for his team, the New York Giants. Only in September did the first direct connection to Ward surface, when Dauvray mentioned him in a letter to the National League president that Sporting Life quoted from. Dauvray and Ward were not linked romantically until their Times marriage preview on October 12, just one day before they publicly tied the knot.

After the bombshell news dropped, papers were full of speculation about the couple, who were perhaps trying to avoid this very type of rumor-filled attention by keeping their relationship secret up until that point. As MLB historian John Thorn has established, the two had, in fact, first gotten married a month and a half before the Times reporter’s visit, on August 31, 1887. Was Dauvray playing games with the press when she didn’t admit to this on October 11? Doing so might have saved the couple a trip to Philadelphia the next morning to get married a second time.

The mystery around their coupling deepens when you consider an October 17 Detroit Tribune report that Thorn surfaced, which observed that the “newlyweds” appeared to be anything but happy: “[Ward and Dauvray] haven’t been married a week, but they didn’t seem particularly affectionate,” the Tribune correspondent wrote. “Ward shouted for the Detroits and Mrs. Ward applauded for the Browns … They occupied opposite ends of the box, and hardly spoke to each other during the contest.”

Reading between the lines more than 100 years later, such coverage raises the question of whether they were leveraging their relationship for attention, or if they were genuinely attempting to avoid feeding the rumor mill of 19th-century journalism. If they were seeking publicity, it’s worth asking for what end. Of the two, Dauvray would have benefitted the most from an image boost at that moment; the news of their relationship may have helped her recapture headlines after she canceled her fall season in early September following reports of a serious illness. Ward’s exploits on the field (he led the league with 111 steals that year) and the contract negotiations between the Brotherhood and the National League already kept him at the forefront of the sporting press.

After the hoopla surrounding the marriage subsided, the couple assumed a lower profile. Initially, they may have tried to stay out of the news after Dauvray’s brother was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a servant (the charges were later dropped). But minimal details were also given about their westward honeymoon travels in November, except that Dauvray intended to appear on stage during a charity event in San Francisco. This last detail seems to indicate that Dauvray, despite having announced her retirement from the stage following their marriage, was not ready to leave the limelight. Such speculation is supported by the pattern that developed over the next two years in the press: Dauvray’s name perennially appeared in the theater gossip column of the New York Times, where her return to the stage would be promised, only for those plans to be scuttled by some difficulty or illness.

Ward’s name, meanwhile, was in front of the sporting public regularly due to the mounting labor struggle between the Brotherhood Union and the National League. When that struggle came to a head in 1890, Dauvray and Ward received increased media attention again. As the leader of the Brotherhood, Ward was the face of the union’s labor war with the National League. In the reports of Ella Black, a Pittsburgh correspondent for the Sporting Life, Dauvray was credited as being perhaps both the inspiration for and the cause of the new major league formed by Ward.

That same year, in 1890, the Cosmopolitan published perhaps the most telling piece of media around the Dauvray-Ward romance: a satirical short story that was part roman à clef melodrama and part Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Ward was recognizable as Algernon de Witt Caramel, the “Champion Short-Stop of America.” Dauvray appears as Miss Violet Veronica Van Sittart, “our hero’s peerlessly beautiful fiancée.” The story ended with the young couple, living off the millions Caramel made as a shortstop, “doing very nicely indeed.”

Given that John Ward’s salary was $3,000 in 1887, the idea that a baseball player would ever earn millions of dollars for playing a child’s game hints at the key to the story’s satire. Because magazines like the Cosmopolitan were written for an upper-class audience, the editor likely chose the story not because it painted the couple in a positive light, but rather because it encouraged an elite audience to laugh at the efforts of professional actresses and ballplayers to rise above their stations.

In real life, Dauvray and Ward’s union was short-lived; 1890 was also the year that newspapers quietly announced the couple’s separation. Though it was not public knowledge at the time, Ward had also been seeing actress Jessie McDermott, according to Ward’s biographer, Brian Di Salvatore. Equally small notices chronicled their divorce three years later.

From its supernova start, the dissolution of Dauvray and Ward’s marriage is most notable for its understated silence. Nonetheless, for a brief, shining moment in the late 1800s, enthusiasts of the lime-lit dramatic boards and dusty ball diamonds could thrill at this uniquely American aristocratic union that served as a trial run for Marilyn and Joltin‘ Joe 60 years later, and now again with Taylor and Travis in this century—when the millions in question have become a matter of billions.

The post Before Taylor and Travis, There Was Helen and John appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959, 13-year-old José Azel joined the ranks of the underground opposition engaging in acts of sabotage. When Castro closed the country’s schools, José’s father became worried. So he sent his teenage boy on a brief trip to West Palm Beach in June 1961 on a cargo ship full of seminarians. It was the last time they saw each other.

From 2021 to June 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported just over 400,000 “encounters” with unaccompanied children. The quality of care for these kids has been dubious at best and abusive at worst. Today’s numbers may be unprecedented, but this group is not—in fact, they are part of a long tradition of young people finding refuge in the U.S. without their parents.

In the early 1960s, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare created the Unaccompanied Cuban Children’s Program to care for thousands of minors fleeing their country after its 1959 revolution. Colloquially, it was known as Operation Pedro Pan—a reference to the tale about the boy who could fly. Like today, in the 1960s a vocal contingent of naysayers balked at the newcomers: Some feared that there could be communists in the unvetted masses, while others asked why taxpayers should shoulder their financial weight. Yet drowning out these doubtful voices was a larger willingness to accept the children and to affirm the country’s tradition of sanctuary and freedom in doing so.

The more than 14,000 Cuban minors who arrived to the U.S. between 1959 and 1962—then the largest group of unaccompanied children in U.S. history—were among the 250,000 Cubans who trekked across the Florida Straits during that period. In contrast to today’s migrants, the Cubans were cast as refugees and symbols of anticommunist heroism. President John F. Kennedy reminded the country that welcoming refugees was a Cold War imperative. In a letter to Congress, Kennedy heralded the U.S. as “a refuge for the oppressed” with a “long humanitarian tradition of helping those who are forced to flee to maintain their lives as individual, self-sufficient human beings in freedom, self-respect, dignity, and health.”

The Children’s Program resettled young people across the nation in group homes and with foster families throughout the country—from Helena, Montana, to San Antonio, Texas, to Dubuque, Iowa—largely paid for by state and federal coffers. At times, parents did not know where their children had been relocated.

The program relied on a vast network of federal and state offices and a long list of nonprofit church groups, child welfare agencies, and Pan American and KLM airlines, which would help procure seats for these children, as well as embassies, parochial schools, and a counterrevolutionary network in both nations. Those without immediate family support in the United States—more than 8,300 children—received care through the Catholic Welfare Bureau and other religious, governmental, and non-governmental organizations.

Some Pedro Pans found respite with Protestant, Jewish, and secular organizations, but the nucleus of the program was the Catholic Church, which assumed responsibility for 7,346 Cuban children. At the program’s helm was Bryan O. Walsh, an Irish priest who’d recently relocated to Miami, and embraced his mission with gusto. Walsh later called his role in Operation Pedro Pan “an opportunity given to me by Divine Providence to combat communism.” He had ample support from the Church, which also opened its doors to Catholic leaders isolated and banished by the Cuban government.

After arriving in the U.S. with a group of Catholic seminarians, José Azel jumped into the world of American adolescence. The transition was connected to the automobile, and he remembers the immense glee he felt registering for a driving permit. Football, rock ‘n’ roll, and an occasional cigarette rounded out the adaptation process for the young man.

Other Pedro Pans tell similar bittersweet stories of their crossings. Mayda Riopedre was a 15-year-old student at American Dominican Academy in Havana when she arrived in Miami. Mayda had lived a privileged and “very American” life in Cuba— she took classes in English and U.S. history, listened to American shows on the radio, took ballet and piano lessons, and had a French tutor.

After spending a month in a transitional shelter, Mayda Riopedre and her sister spent a month at St. Mary’s Home in Dubuque, Iowa, where they went bowling for the first time, before being sent to live with a family in Signal Mountain, Tennessee. She retains some very pleasant memories of her time there, but she also recalls a favorite outdoor spot where she would look at the mountains and cry inconsolably. The sisters and their parents reunited two years later, and today Mayda considers herself “lucky” and will be “forever grateful” for the foster family.

Why did so many parents choose to send their children away? The upheaval of the revolution—including school closures and new revolutionary pedagogy, nationalized property, and rumors that Castro’s government would dispossess parents of their children—was frightening enough to make the decision feel warranted for many Cuban families.

They also believed that the separation—and Castro’s reign—would be brief. But most Pedro Pans did not see their parents for months or even years —and in rare cases, like José Azel’s, ever again.

Now in their 60s and 70s, the former Pedro Pans—many of whom are part of Florida’s large Cuban community—find themselves ensconced in the vitriol surrounding today’s migrant children. Unlike the majority of Pedro Pans, who lived comfortable lives in Cuba, these young people come from locales ravaged by violence and economic scarcity.

And they are receiving a very different welcome. In 2019, 3,000 children were housed at a center in Homestead, Florida, five miles from the Florida City camp that had sheltered hundreds if not thousands of Pedro Pans. Then the Trump administration closed it, which drew criticism from those who argued that the state should provide suitable accommodation for children, as it had done 60 years prior with the Cuban Children’s Program.

More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis bickered with the Miami Archdiocese after he issued an executive order that curtailed the ability of Florida agencies to care for undocumented migrants, including children. Pedro Pans took sides: Some argued in favor of sheltering the minors while others sided with DeSantis and drew differences between today’s young migrants and the Cold War context of their own crossings.

As their hesitancy indicates, today many Americans are reluctant to support similar groups in need. The country took in just 11,411 refugees in the 2021 fiscal year, the lowest number since 1980. UNICEF estimates that a record 43.3 million children live in forced displacement worldwide. Those crossing the U.S. border often remain invisible or banished to the status of a national crisis rather than an opportunity to provide help. But the Pedro Pans, aided by government assistance and everyday American altruism, exemplify what is achievable when we harness our abundant resources and guarantee our healthy tradition of refuge for the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The post When the U.S. Welcomed the ‘Pedro Pan’ Migrants of Cuba appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’ve felt the power of reconciliation wash over me. I felt it at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery and at the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. I felt it when a family of Black descendants approached me at a book talk, with tears in their eyes, to hug and thank me for telling their family’s story in my book Hattiesburg. It is a feeling that inspires wholeness, human connectedness, historical justice, and internal peace.

And so I was eager—and tremendously honored—when Zócalo Public Square asked me to moderate the events in their new editorial and public programs series, “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?” I knew that I would have to harness that powerful feeling in this work. Funded with a grant provided by the Mellon Foundation, these conversations spanned two years and three cities—Jackson, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; and Los Angeles, California. At each site, I moderated thematic discussions rooted in exploring how we might best confront the most difficult and enduring aspects of the American past.

There is no single rubric for facing challenging histories. But the writers and thinkers involved in this project all have something in common: a sense of forward-looking hope. Courageously and ambitiously, they write and think for people and generations beyond themselves.

I have learned a great deal over these past two years. Some of my early feelings toward reconciliation have grown into more concrete ideas. This series taught me three primary lessons about how societies should remember their sins. They have to do with the nature of memory, scalable action, and the question of who should be invited to participate.

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The first lesson has to do with the importance of storytelling in shaping our collective memory. People tell stories through many modes—history, fiction, art, monuments, and artifacts. Most importantly, storytelling is available to everyone, which is why it’s the oldest tradition in human civilization and a bedrock of democracy. Stories give lifeblood to our dreams, connecting us with other people from the past and allowing us to imagine and believe. During the fourth panel discussion, “How Does Confronting Our History Build a Better Future?,” Indigenous environmental activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez observed that artists who tell stories “generate the imagination for the rest of the population to begin to see the possibilities of a different world.” This imaginative space, then, can be a form of resistance, an accessible place where even the most downtrodden and forgotten among us can dare to dream. And that is precisely why so many people want to control whose stories get told.

A problem with our past, and part of the reason so many of our nation’s historical sins remain unresolved, is that not everyone has had a chance for their stories to be told. Some have been intentionally excluded, either by law or custom. There are those among us whose ancestors were never supposed to be part of history. But more than ever, new storytellers are folding the tales of marginalized citizens into an ever-expanding American narrative.

Stories of miners engaged in armed resistance help give the descendants of those miners a sense of belonging, and establish a long lineage of labor action in this country. And the stories of lynching victims can exonerate century-old wrongful and racist convictions and foster a sense of compassion for Black defendants in today’s criminal justice system. Stories also challenge us with tales from the past of people who resisted evil and inspire us to do the same. And fiction, the writer Adria Bernardi told us, can provide a space to “dwell with complex moral investigation.”

At their best, stories both welcome and inspire, inviting us into a space of common humanity, helping us to remember and feel. We still do not live in a society that openly welcomes all stories, but we do live in a moment with incredible technologies that make it possible for everyone’s stories to be told, which gives us the groundwork for an infinite ability to heal.

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The second lesson is that repair must be local if it is to be urgent and open. National and state-level conversations are important, but repair needs to be driven by local people to be possible and productive. Each community has its own unique needs and challenges.

As panelist Robin Rue Simmons showed us in Memphis during “Why Isn’t Remembering Enough to Repair?,” repair is leading an initiative in Evanston, Illinois, to become the first municipality to approve a formal process of reparations. The people of Evanston did not wait for a national movement. Instead, they moved on their own. They began delivering housing stipends to Black families who have been historically disadvantaged in housing markets, seeking to repair a racial wealth gap set in motion long before our time. Simmons’s organization, FirstRepair, is a nonprofit created to help inform other communities interested in exploring the idea of reparations.

No matter the form it takes, productive repair must include action. Teaching and remembering alone have not been able to solve the problems borne from the sins of our past. Repair requires vulnerability and the shedding of traditional social hierarchies. Wherever one seeks repair, listen to the descendants of the people who have been wronged, and think deeply and hard about what you might say to their bygone ancestors. Their past deserves our attention, and the future desperately needs immediate action.

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The final and most difficult lesson I learned has origins in our first panel, “What Is Our Responsibility for Our Government’s Wars?” Held in July of 2022, this program convened an incredible group—Lt. Gen. (ret.) Robert Schmidle, Air Force veteran and social worker Noël Lipana, and the foreign war correspondent Farnaz Fassihi. It took me over a year—and the experience of moderating all the other panels—to realize the most important lesson from this conversation: the concept of “moral injury.”

Broadly speaking, moral injury is the psychological trauma that comes when a person realizes that a cause or nation they supported was immoral, and that they contributed to that immorality by way of their participation. It’s a term commonly used in veterans’ circles, especially among soldiers who fought in Vietnam and America’s recent wars in the Middle East. As the psychologist Jack Saul wrote, “Moral injury has been described as a ‘wound to the soul.’” It is emotionally crushing to come to the realization that one has committed or condoned violence on behalf of a side that is not just.

In every panel since the first, I have asked our speakers to comment on those who resist the idea of grappling with the sins of our society. Few tried to answer that question, as it’s difficult for those of us engaged in this work to imagine offering a place for people who seemingly want to shut down open dialogue. The people banning books and blocking history lessons, we so often think, are the enemies of progress.

In many cases this may be true. But it is also true that exposure to the sins of America’s past can lead to a form of moral injury among some of our fellow citizens, which makes it psychologically traumatic for them to process new lessons that reveal the dark sins in the American past. Hundreds of millions of Americans have been told since birth that the United States is a moral nation—the most ethical in the world—and that our shared history has been one marked by the advancement of human rights and freedom. During the fourth panel, journalist Krista Tippett said that America has been seen as the country of innocence, but its sins have been left to fester, unresolved and ignored. Some are even celebrated. Slavery, segregation, and war have been described as blemishes, or even revered in twisted ways that celebrate those who have killed and enslaved. These deep, dark American sins, then, must be pronounced and discussed with great care, especially for those they disabuse.

If we are serious about creating a more usable past for a better future, then we must take seriously the collective psychological trauma of citizens who learn new and disturbing things about America’s past. People cannot merely be ambushed by waves of negative histories that fundamentally alter their view of America. They—like the veterans who have experienced moral injury in war—need to be considered and cared for. As Saul writes, our citizens need an “emotional toolbox,” one stacked with the practices of “convening with care and purpose; listening with compassion; grounding, reflecting, and responding; and integrating a view or action and moving forward.”

And so, the final lesson is that there needs to be greater care for the psychology of those who face having their worlds shattered by new information about—and a persistent confrontation with—America’s complicated past. Care is needed even for those who fight societal efforts at reconciliation and repair. In fact, those are the people who might need it the most.

In Mississippi, Patrick Weems of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center told our audience a story of a white man who came out to protest the erection of a historical marker to Emmett Till. Faced with a tense and difficult circumstance, Weems made a gesture of care for the man by listening to his perspective—to “dignify him with space,” Weems explained—that allowed for a more productive conversation. A breakthrough came when the man realized that his own child today was the same age that Emmett Till had been when he was murdered. Moved, the man became involved with the unveiling of the marker.

“I believe in humanity,” Weems concluded.

So do I. It is for that reason that I believe that any effort to remember our society’s sins must operate with a hope that is generous enough to welcome even those who resist the difficult processes of healing.

It is a great American tradition to refuse to confront our society’s sins. But to ignore the opportunity for repair is to simply pass the onus onto the next generation. As a historian, I have always thought about the past. Now, like the writers and thinkers in this project, I think ever more steadfastly about the future. About the need to tell better stories in order to remember, and remember better, and to act on the basis of these histories—always with generosity and care.

We owe far more to the future than we do the past.

The post Facing Our Collective Wounds With Generous Hope appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

During the first Republican presidential primary debate, on August 23, former Vice President Mike Pence spoke of founders of the nation conquering the American “wilderness.” It was one of many mentions of American history: Candidates also name-checked the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the legacy of President Ronald Reagan. Toward the end of the evening, Pence stressed the wilderness theme: “If we renew our faith in one another and renew our faith in Him, who has ever guided this nation since we arrived on these wilderness shores, I know the best days for the greatest nation on earth are yet to come.”

Historical references are so ubiquitous in presidential debates and stump speeches that they can seem superficial. This year’s Republican candidates seem especially committed to the idea that the past matters, perhaps because of battles over history and ethnic studies curricula spreading in some states.  If, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis opined, “We cannot be graduating students that don’t have any foundation in what it means to be American,” then perhaps we also need to pay closer attention to what kind of American identity candidates are finding in history.

When Pence referenced conquering the wilderness, he used a keyword lifted from the Puritans. Those early American immigrants make cameos in plenty of political speeches, but often in ways that are misquoted or misunderstood, because their writings reflect a world of the 1600s, whose concerns are not identical to those of our time.

In England, the Puritans constituted a religious minority who opposed the state-sanctioned Church of England, which they believed had betrayed true faith. By leaving for North America, many believed they were testing whether their distinct vision of Protestant Christianity could survive in a new continent.

The concept of conquering a wilderness came into American vocabulary from these immigrants. Between 1630 and 1650, Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford penned a history of the Puritans’ settlement of Plymouth, known today as “Of Plymouth Plantation.” In the text, the governor offered a vivid depiction of how the Puritans who sailed to the coast in the autumn of 1620 met a land “with a weather-beaten face” and how “the whole country, full of woods and thickets,” had “a wild and savage hue.”

In reality, Bradford and those who sailed with him on the Mayflower did not encounter a wilderness as we typically use the word now. As even other Europeans like Samuel de Champlain and Captain John Smith acknowledged at the time, these English arrived in long-settled Wampanoag territory. Cornfields, not thick woods, surrounded Patuxet, the town the English renamed New Plymouth. Residents of the town had suffered through a devastating epidemic, possibly caused by rats that had stowed away on ships from Europe, that tore through coastal New England in the late 1610s.

Despite the loss of life, the Indigenous community survived. Yet because Christians did not inhabit these places, Bradford and the other Puritans saw them as part of the “wilderness” that needed to be conquered. Later in the same book, Bradford celebrates the destruction of a Pequot village, which left 400 to 700 dead in a single night. The Puritans rounded up survivors and sold them into slavery.

In his references to wilderness, Pence left unspoken the irony of representing a party bent on restricting access to newcomers while praising the idea that the nation emerged only because newcomers ran roughshod over those who already lived in North America.  In his version of early American history, Europeans were the only important actors, so his view of the nation’s history concentrates on them alone.

The second Republican debate will take place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley today. Like Pence, Reagan invoked the Puritans to boast of American exceptionalism. In his farewell address to the nation on January 11, 1989, he cited a lay sermon delivered in 1629 by soon-to-be governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony John Winthrop, and referred to the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” Reagan famously interpreted Winthrop as stating that America was “a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom.” He also called Winthrop “an early freedom man.”

In an interview with Time magazine published last week, Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott repeated this invocation of Winthrop. He stated that he hoped to lead “a team anchored in conservatism that wants to make sure that America remains the city on the hill.”

But Winthrop wasn’t bragging about the colony being a yearned-for destination, like a freedom-minded Emerald City. He didn’t even use the word “shining” at all—that was Reagan’s addition. The original text was Matthew 5:14: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill, cannot be hid,” the verse reads in the 1599 Geneva Bible the Puritans favored. Winthrop understood what the apostle meant: Creating a biblically centered community was a challenge, and if the Puritans succeeded, they would be the envy of the world. But if they failed, everyone would see their shortcomings. They would make an embarrassment of the Protestant agenda to reform the world in the way they believed God intended.

Reagan took the line out of context. His proud, sunny version missed the Puritan theologians’ point, which was made at a time when religious wars were driving Catholics and Protestants against each other across much of Europe. For Winthrop and his contemporaries, the fate of the world was at stake. They knew that the English migrants could lose their battle. That possibility did not fit into Reagan’s belief in the inevitability of American greatness.  (For what it’s worth, when John F. Kennedy invoked Winthrop’s speech shortly before he became president in 1961, he understood that it referred to a challenge rather than an assertion of inevitability.)

But if Pence and Reagan twisted the meaning of the twinned ideas of conquering wilderness and building a city on a hill, they are right that these concepts are foundational to American history. The English migrants to New England believed that what happened to them had world-historic significance, but that success was not pre-ordained. Bradford and Winthrop each recognized that danger lurked. They believed that survival depended on adherence to their faith—and that even so, the risk of failure was high. Those views shaped early New England and, by extension, much of what became the nation’s culture in the years after the American Revolution.

A different kind of existential threat seems to animate at least some of the candidates for the Republican nomination. In some ways, it appears, these candidates feel the kinds of pressure that the Puritans faced four centuries ago. They too look to stake out a moral position, based on the notion that the future of our culture depends on who comes to occupy the Oval Office.

Though they are battling to govern in the future, the Republican candidates seem obsessed by how we understand the past. Those who cite the legacies of President Reagan and the conquest of wilderness want to emulate what they see as the heroic steps the Puritans took to establish a nation. Yet they seem blind to the complexity of the actual past, in which Europeans pursuing one vision of the future displaced and attacked Indigenous peoples who had their own plans for what was to come. If the Puritans are to serve as inspiration, it seems time to reckon with their actual ideas and actions.

The post What the GOP Gets Wrong About the Puritans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I started working in repatriation efforts before I even knew what the term meant.

But repatriation—bringing our ancestors home—is in my blood. I grew up in a Cherokee community in Chewey, Oklahoma, in the foothills of the Ozarks. Sometimes I’ve wondered how my extended family could be as fortunate as we were, remaining isolated from the nearby towns, with a river running in front of us and a small creek behind. My relatives would tell me how much it was like our ancestors’ original home in the East, with mountainous terrain, ample water, and lush vegetation.

Over a century, my relatives fought for this Oklahoma home, traveling thousands of miles to push back against U.S. government overreach. Today, I continue the tradition by teaching a new generation of tribal officials how to work with the federal government to preserve what is ours. As a former “tribal historic preservation officer,” or a THPO, who reviews federal undertakings, it has been my job to step in when such projects threaten our sacred sites or our tribal interests.

My family’s land—where my grandmothers raised us—was a parcel that the U.S. government designated for individual Cherokees through the allotment process created by the Dawes Act of 1887. In the 19th century, allotment was presented as a way to “domesticate” us. I believe the real idea was to divide up families and scatter us about.

My great-grandfather, Osie Hogshooter, understood this. He had a significant role in an uprising against the allotment system, joining forces with Chief Redbird Smith, leader of the Keetoowah (Gi-du-wa) Nighthawks. The Nighthawks were traditionalists, full-blooded Cherokees who had made their way to Arkansas after ceding southeastern territory to the U.S. government in the late 1700s. They were distinct from the emigrant Cherokees who came to Indian Territory later, by way of the Trail of Tears, though both groups experienced forced displacement.

The Keetoowah Nighthawks knew that dividing our community would weaken our families, and the communal way of life that had sustained us through traumatic removals in the past. So a group of leaders, including my great-grandfather, who served as secretary, accompanied Chief Redbird Smith on a widely publicized journey to Washington, D.C., where they met with President Taft.

Unfortunately, the Nighthawks were not able to stop this moving freight train.

I learned about Osie’s participation in the Nighthawk campaign from my mother, Marie Bird, the only living person in our family who remembers him today, if vaguely, from when she was a little girl. She often spoke to me of the Nighthawks and all that they stood for. Osie refused his allotment, she told us, never living on it. When people filed to claim the land through squatters’ rights, we asked her, what do we do? She said, we do nothing—we stay away, just as Osie had. She always told me to stand up, and not to be afraid to speak my voice.

It wasn’t a stretch for me to get involved in a movement of my own, but I didn’t know what sort of movement it would be. I attended and graduated from an Indian boarding school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma; married, had three kids, worked taking care of my family.

As a young adult, I looked around our tribal communities and saw how divided we had become. Not just from family but from municipality. We didn’t have libraries. We didn’t have internet access. The rivers and creeks can only do so much for you, and we had to work for wages, but our job options were limited—chicken farms, manufacturing, any place within 30 miles each way. We shared rides, so you went to work where your neighbor did.

Stories about the Nighthawks lay dormant in my mind as I went through life’s struggles. If Osie, whose genes I shared, could educate himself about government and become a part of a movement to protect what is sacred to us, I could do the same.

Once my youngest child was a high school senior, I quit my job to enroll in the native studies program at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, something I had wanted to do since I was 18. I wanted to understand how the American government took over Cherokee lives and lands. I wanted to be able to explain why we were where we are, and how we got here, to my people back home. I wanted to continue the resistance.

A portrait of Osie Hogshooter, probably taken during his Washington, D.C. visit with the Keetoowah Nighthawk delegation. From The History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore by Emmet Starr (1921) / Author collection.

In college, I learned about sovereignty, and about federal Indian law. In 1966, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, a law designed to protect “our cultural footprint” during construction. But the Act excluded the tribes. Which was one of the reasons why, in the name of progress, the federal government routinely flooded valleys where our people had lived since time immemorial in order to build dams. Our bones have interstates on top of them now. Anything found during construction got whisked away and placed on museum shelves. Institutions held our ancestors in collections, against their will. Who would choose to be in a box, far from your homeland?

I graduated from college in 2012, and then began to work within and sometimes against the complicated system that was emerging to bring our culture and people back home. Things had begun to change—slowly. In the early ’90s, Congress amended the National Historic Preservation Act to include consulting tribes. It also passed the Native American Graves Protections and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which allowed us to recover our ancestors’ remains from faraway institutions.

I found my movement, and made this struggle my cause.

In 2015, I became the first-ever tribal historic preservation officer, or THPO, for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. I created a process to give us a voice on the 300 projects the federal government proposed every month that posed a threat to our cultural footprint. When the federal government proposed selling leases to build a transmission line through Cherokee and other tribal lands, for instance, we figured out a path through the regulatory thicket to prevent the project. It never got built.

Across the U.S., THPOs have figured out ways to save our cultural heritage. Working with other tribes, for instance, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma developed a tribal monitoring policy for construction projects. Now, on certain projects, we accompany archaeologists working in historic preservation when they come in to determine what to save before a project. Things that signify a burial site for us might not be obvious to them. You take notes on what you see, we tell them, and we’ll take notes on what we see, and together we’ll come up with an agreement on how we’ll proceed with the project.

After two years, I left the Cherokee Nation to become a consultant to other tribes, to help them do this work. THPOs come from a wide range of backgrounds—we found our way here through different journeys, stumbling upon a job that we hadn’t even known was available. We are often overwhelmed by our workloads, by an alphabet soup of technical and legal acronyms we have to digest, by blanket U.S. government policies, and by the sheer number of projects that threaten to deplete our tribes’ cultural footprints.

Social media has lent a hand, creating a way for us to pool our experiences, but we have trouble communicating and educating on a broader scale. I searched high and low for a better way, and finally settled on a podcast to bring our tribal interests and landscapes together. “THPO Talk,” which I launched in the spring of 2022, connects preservation officers’ voices. We talk with federal partners, or any interested party who wants to understand our goals. Repatriation, international repatriation, historic preservation—we touch on it all. We support one another, and hope that in doing so, we will honor our ancestors, and assure our survival.

Our ancestors paid the ultimate cost, and paved the way for us to be resilient in this work. We’re telling our stories. We’re telling our grandchildren about the past and also about how to protect our future.

It wasn’t until I became a THPO that I went to Washington myself, to testify before a commission. While I was there, I found a Washington Post article that described my great-grandfather’s journey with the Nighthawks, more than a century earlier.

I wore moccasins that I had made myself. I looked down at my feet and I thought, I could be walking the same path Osie did.

The post Following in My Cherokee Great-Grandfather’s Footsteps appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Our mission is to connect people to ideas and to each other, which is why we have honored authors who explore these themes since 2011. Our annual award ceremony—which includes a lecture, interview, and reception—is a highlight of our year. It simultaneously captures the zeitgeist, honors a brilliant thinker, and allows Zócalo’s audiences to both create and investigate human connection.

Because community is such a vast field of inquiry that can be explored in myriad ways, we accept submissions on a broad array of topics and themes, from writers of many disciplines and professions.

As with everything else Zócalo features, we are on the lookout for that rare combination of brilliance and clarity, excellence and accessibility. The 2024 Zócalo Book Prize selection committee consists of 2023 Zócalo Book Prize winner and The Fight to Save the Town author Michelle Wilde Anderson, Human Rights Watch chief communications officer Mei Fong, Marquette University historian Sergio González, creative director and Zócalo Advisory Board member David Lai, infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine Rekha Murthy, MD, Lawrence Welk Family Foundation president Lisa Parker, Smithsonian National Board chair Jorge Puente, MD, and LAXART director and curator Hamza Walker.

The author of the winning book will receive $10,000 and participate in a public program in Los Angeles in spring 2024. We will also recognize the authors of the books we select for our short list. For more information about the prize, please contact us at bookprize@zocalopublicsquare.org.

The deadline to submit is October 20, 2023, at 11:59 PM PDT. Books must have been published in the U.S. between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2023, to be eligible. Please send a single copy of any books nominated for the prize, along with a submission letter containing publisher or author contact information and publication date to:

Zócalo Public Square
c/o Book Prize Committee
1111 South Broadway
Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90015

The 13 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients come from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and scholarship. They have studied specific times and places—from a single street in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, to Jim Crow-era Hattiesburg, Mississippi—as well as phenomena, including cooperation, technology, and morality. They are:

• Michelle Wilde Anderson for The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
• Heather McGhee for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World)
• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)

The post The 2024 Zócalo Book Prize Honors Nonfiction on Connectedness and Social Cohesion appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Our mission is to connect people to ideas and to each other, which is why we have honored authors who explore these themes for over a dozen years now. Whether it’s a public health emergency or a political crisis, current events continue to make our mission feel increasingly urgent.

Because community is such a vast field of inquiry that can be explored in myriad ways, we accept submissions on a broad array of topics and themes from many disciplines of investigation. The 12 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients come from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and scholarship. They are historians and journalists, economists and philosophers. Previous winners have studied a single location (whether that’s Hattiesburg, Mississippi during the Jim Crow era or an Eastern European border town in the centuries leading up to the Holocaust) as well as phenomena, including cooperation, technology, and morality.

As with everything else Zócalo features, we are on the lookout for that rare combination of brilliance and clarity, excellence and accessibility. The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize selection committee consists of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes chief executive officer Leticia Rhi Buckley, Texas Tribune editor in chief Sewell Chan, former California governor Gray Davis, The Sum of Us author and 2022 Zócalo Book Prize winner Heather McGhee, Goldhirsh Foundation president Tara Roth, USC professor of American studies & ethnicity and history George J. Sanchez, and Zócalo trustee and Boeing engineer Reza Zaidi.

The author of the winning book will receive $10,000 and speak at a public program, including an award ceremony, where they will deliver a lecture based on their work, and participate in an interview, in Los Angeles in spring 2023. We will also recognize the authors of the books we select for our short list. For more information about the prize, please contact us at bookprize@zocalopublicsquare.org.

The deadline to submit this year is October 28, 2022 at 11:59 PM PDT. Books must have been published in the U.S. between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022 to be eligible. Please send a single copy of any books nominated for the prize, along with a submission letter containing publisher or author contact information and publication date to:

Zócalo Public Square
c/o Book Prize Committee
1111 South Broadway
Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Our past winners are:

• Heather McGhee for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World)
• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)

The post The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize Honors Explorations of Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For most people, the memory of the largest armed labor uprising in American history is unknown, buried beneath the dirt of West Virginia’s Blair Mountain alongside bullet casings and relics of coal camp life. In miners’ families, the stories stayed alive, passed down around kitchen tables and on front porches. But until the 21st century, there were no monuments, museums, or markers of the West Virginia mine wars, a seminal American story of how labor unions came to be.

In late August 1921, some 15,000 mineworkers and allies banded together across racial, gender, religious, and ethnic lines and marched south from the town of Marmet, West Virginia. They were determined to free jailed miners who, for decades, had been trying to unionize the southern West Virginia coalfields. Some of the marchers dressed in military uniforms—many were World War I veterans—while others wore blue-jean overalls. All tied red bandanas around their necks to distinguish friend from foe. Known as the “Red Neck Army,” they were highly organized and armed to the teeth.

The miners never reached their intended destination. Instead, beginning on August 31, they clashed with coal company deputies, mine guards, and the state militia over five and half days of combat at Blair Mountain. It was the largest armed uprising since the Civil War—and it ended only when the U.S. Army intervened. While the number of fatalities remains largely unknown (estimates range from 16 to over 100), we do know that it was the second time in American history the government planned to bomb its own citizens—only three months after the first, Oklahoma’s Tulsa Race Massacre.

Those five and a half days were a generation in coming. The majority of West Virginians had gone from living and working on their own land to being totally dependent on out-of-state coal mining companies, who controlled and owned entire towns. The work was unrelenting and exploitative: Coal companies often paid miners in “scrip”—a currency only redeemable at the company store—by the tonnage of coal they hand loaded from the mountains. The conditions underground subjected workers to roof falls and gas explosions, both of which were often catastrophic. For workers and their families, these companies became landlords, employers, and overseers.

In addition to hiring West Virginians displaced from farms, the coal companies recruited immigrants from Europe and African Americans from the South. Companies housed them in tight but segregated communities, aiming to use prejudice and racial barriers to prevent unionization. But their strategies backfired. Unionization efforts, including the Red Neck Army, broke those barriers partly out of necessity and partly as a source of strength. Striking workers moved into desegregated canvas tent colonies after being evicted from their company-owned homes.

By 1921, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which formed in 1890, had organized much of the coalfields in West Virginia and elsewhere with the promise of better working conditions and a better life. However, in the southern counties of the Mountain State, such as the areas around Blair Mountain, the coal operators and hired mine guards employed harsh countertactics to keep the miners from unionizing, including the murders of union-supporting police chief Sid Hatfield and his deputy Ed Chambers. Hatfield and Chambers’ murders in early August sparked pro-union rallies throughout southern West Virginia, which ultimately led to the Red Neck Army’s armed march.

After the end of the physical battle, a legal battle began that put over 500 miners on trial for a variety of charges, including murder and treason, and crippled the UMWA. Mineworkers in southern West Virginia would have to wait to join until the right to organize was written into federal law as part of the New Deal. In the mid-1930s, they finally gained the better wages, safer working conditions, and other benefits and protections they had been fighting for over decades.

Blair Mountain faded in West Virginians’ and Americans’ collective memory. Politicians strategized to stamp it out of textbooks and public discourse, while miners—many of whom had been on trial—swore themselves to secrecy for fear of retribution.

In 2013, a ragtag group of Appalachians—mineworkers, educators, townspeople, activists, and descendants of Red Neck Army members—came together and shared a table at the UMWA Local 1440 hall in Matewan, West Virginia, 47 miles from Blair Mountain. The folks who gathered were determined to ensure that this history would be celebrated, remembered, and shared for generations to come.

This was the first board meeting of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, which opened two years later in downtown Matewan. I started work at the Mine Wars Museum as its first part-time executive director in 2018. As the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of union mineworkers, it is an honor to preserve and share the history and legacy of my ancestors and those who stood with them for labor justice.

One of the exhibits at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Courtesy of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, photo by Roger May.

One of the museum’s key initiatives is to bring visibility to the sites of the West Virginia Mine Wars. Today, Blair Mountain’s twin-peaked ridge stands tall and quiet. Despite the mountain’s inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, you can drive through the miners’ marching route and over Blair Mountain without realizing you’re there. But that won’t be the case for much longer.

On the heels of the Battle of Blair Mountain Centennial and with funding from Philadelphia’s Monument Lab, in 2022 we launched Courage in the Hollers: Mapping the Miners’ Struggle for a Union. We’re taking the museum beyond its four walls and holding community meetings along the miners’ 50-mile route to resurface the stories of the Mine Wars and working people—past and present—in public.

This Labor Day, steel silhouettes of 10 men and women, shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, marching toward Blair Mountain, are being erected in Marmet, where the Red Neck Army’s route began, and Clothier, just 12 miles from where the battle raged. The silhouettes are not of the original miners but of local community members—honoring the history that fuels our shared hope for the region and working people across America. As much as it pays homage to the past, it’s a vision for the future.

We held our Courage in the Hollers kickoff meeting in Clothier in a small building that started as a school, then became a church, and is now a union hall. One attendee wondered out loud about Monument Lab’s backing: “Why does someone in Philadelphia care so much about coal miners?”

The simple question struck me. Local residents know this history has been ignored—it is absent from the landscape, their textbooks, public records, and gathering places. But they haven’t forgotten.

Neither have the local archeologists who have spent decades unearthing and preserving artifacts, and the miners’ descendants, more and more of whom are sharing their stories publicly. New accounts of the battle are surfacing for the first time as the monuments and markers to labor make their homes in Clothier and Marmet. Meanwhile, many people are still fighting for the rights and standards the Red Neck Army marched in support of—from miners in Alabama entering their 17th month on strike to unionizing workers at Starbucks and Amazon.

Though the history of those who fought at Blair Mountain is now 101 years old, it is also as alive as ever.

The post Going Back to Blair Mountain appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Can democracy stand the test of time? Many factors have triggered the deep schism in American politics today. But a root cause of our faltering democracy may be our failure to grapple with the truth about the nation’s history of discrimination and institutionalized racism. Because Americans can’t even agree on basic truths about our history of exclusion, slavery, and Jim Crow segregation, we have become mired in contentious debates about what role, if any, the government should play in addressing past injustices and their present-day legacies. To forge a path ahead, Americans must acknowledge our problematic past and collectively commit to upholding the principle of liberty and justice for all.

Where could we possibly start? As a first step, we can look to other nations that were once deeply divided, and learn from their efforts to address their difficult histories in pursuit of accountability and justice. The United States might do well to consider transitional justice approaches—the political, social, and legal processes societies use to respond to legacies of systematic or serious human rights abuses, primarily during periods of political transition like changes in leadership after a period of civil war or conflict, or the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. These temporary judicial and non-judicial mechanisms and practices include criminal trials and prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations, and institutional reforms to help transform a society and reestablish the social contract. The United States is not undergoing a political regime transition, but transitional justice tools can still help us promote national reconciliation and reinforce our democracy as we reckon with the truth of our history and legacies of systemic harm and oppression.

The “Human rights, universal challenge” room at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, showing a map of human rights abuses around the world. Courtesy of Warko/Wikimedia Commons.

The truth commission is a widely used transitional justice instrument—and one that can offer the most insight to Americans looking to reshape the collective memory and conscience of our nation. These official fact-finding bodies investigate, document, and disseminate accurate information about past wrongdoing and human rights violations authorized or carried out by the state. The United States can certainly learn a great deal from the successes and failures of these commissions in countries like Argentina, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Morocco, Peru, South Africa, South Korea, and Timor-Leste (East Timor).

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is one of the best-known national truth-telling and reconciliation processes and has been the model for several other truth commissions. In 1995, South Africa’s newly elected democratic, multicultural Government of National Unity established the TRC to investigate serious human rights violations perpetrated under the apartheid regime from 1960 to 1994. Apartheid was a brutal system of white minority rule and legally enforced racial segregation that formalized and expanded white supremacist and segregationist policies that had existed since the period of colonial rule. Institutionalized racism stripped Black South Africans and other non-whites of their civil and political rights—including their citizenship—and created extreme inequality and poverty. Anti-apartheid protests, demonstrations, and strikes organized by freedom fighters were met with swift and ruthless repression, and an estimated 21,000 people, the majority of whom were Black South Africans, were killed in the political violence during the apartheid era.

The primary purpose of the TRC was to promote reconciliation and forgiveness among all South Africans, while holding perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable for their actions. The commission’s work involved a systematic process of investigating human rights violations, organizing public proceedings where victims and perpetrators could testify, offering reparations to victims, and granting amnesty to perpetrators under specific, limited conditions. The TRC’s mandate covered both violations committed by the state and by anti-apartheid liberation movements. In its comprehensive final report, which the government endorsed, the truth commission outlined detailed recommendations for reforming the political system and civil sector, which included financial and symbolic reparations. President Nelson Mandela also apologized to victims on behalf of the state.

The TRC faced some criticism for its amnesty provision and the limited identification of perpetrators, among other things. Many South Africans later railed against the government for its delay in implementing the TRC’s recommendations, including the reparations program. But despite these critiques, the TRC succeeded in making sure the crimes of apartheid would be fully documented so that South Africa’s horrific history would never be forgotten. And in the decades since, the TRC’s broader emphasis on truth-telling, social transformation, and national reconciliation have made it a standard for other justice and accountability efforts around the world.

Inspired by truth and reconciliation processes in other countries and recognizing the need to educate Americans on the historical context for current racial inequalities, in early 2021, Rep. Barbara Lee (CA-13) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) called for the establishment of a national truth commission in the U.S., proposing legislation to create the United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation. The history Americans must reckon with is not as immediate as South Africa’s, and our political system is not in a moment of democratic transition. But similar efforts have succeeded in non-transitional societies, notably in Canada, which established a truth commission in 2008 to investigate, document, and educate Canadians about the abuses that occurred in the Indian residential school system for Indigenous children over the 19th and 20th centuries (between 1894 and 1947 attendance was made compulsory). These residential schools are a legacy of Canada’s colonial system and have been described as a form of “cultural genocide” because of their explicit goal of cultural erasure, and forcible assimilation of Indigenous peoples. The Canadian TRC documented widespread physical and sexual abuse in these schools, and officially recorded the deaths of 3,201 students, though concluded the actual toll is much higher. As part of its work, the commission hosted national events in different regions across Canada to support public education about the residential school system, pervasive discrimination, and the lasting trauma for survivors and Indigenous communities.

Citizens march for justice following the Greensboro Massacre of 1979. Twenty-five years later, community leadership organized the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Project to uncover the full harm done to victims of the domestic terrorist attack. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In the United States, there have been similar initiatives, organized by grassroots groups, to address abuses and wrongdoing at the local level. In 2013, the state of Maine’s Office of Child and Family Services with the support of the Wabanaki Tribes established the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission (MWTRC) to investigate and document state child welfare policies, their compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act, and their effects on the Indigenous Wabanaki people. The commission collected testimony and found compelling evidence of public and institutional racism toward the Wabanaki people, documenting how Native children in Maine were placed in the foster care system at a rate of more than five times that of non-Native children, and concluding that the administration of child welfare by the state constituted a form of cultural genocide. The commission wanted to provide opportunities for truth-telling and healing, give voice to the Wabanaki people, establish a more complete account of the history of the Wabanaki people, and foster deeper understanding and reconciliation between Wabanaki people and the state of Maine.

The city of Greensboro in North Carolina also embarked on a notable truth and reconciliation effort, modeling the 2004 Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the South African TRC. Greensboro created its commission to investigate and document the underlying causes and consequences of a single event:  the “Greensboro Massacre,” a confrontation between members of the Communist Workers Party, the American Nazi Party, and the Ku Klux Klan on November 3, 1979. During a “Death to the Klan” rally, Klansmen and neo-Nazis shot into the crowd, killing five demonstrators and wounding 10 others. Suspiciously, there was no police presence at the rally, even though the Greensboro Police Department knew about the planned attack. Despite eyewitness accounts and videotaped evidence, the Klansmen and neo-Nazis claimed self-defense and were acquitted of all charges by all-white juries in two separate criminal trials. During a civil trial in 1985, the Greensboro Police Department, the Klan, and Nazi Party members were found liable for one of the deaths.

After about two years of collecting evidence and holding public hearings, the commission concluded that the decision of the police to stay away from the rally was a significant factor in the violence that unfolded. The commission also found that the police department and city managers deliberately misled the public in order to absolve the police department of any responsibility. They found fault in the two criminal trials as well: Neither jury was representative of Greensboro residents and community members, which contributed to impunity for the killings, distrust of the police department, and further strained race relations. The Greensboro truth commission’s goals were multifaceted—to pursue the truth about racially motivated political violence; to foster healing, reconciliation, and social transformation; and to learn from other truth and reconciliation processes.

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