The History Wars and America at 250, with the Historian Jill Lepore

Summary

Podcast Summary: The New Yorker Radio Hour — "The History Wars and America at 250, with the Historian Jill Lepore" (May 15, 2026)

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode, hosted by Jill Lepore (sitting in for David Remnick), considers America’s 250th anniversary in the context of historical memory, national identity, and ongoing cultural and political debates over how the nation tells its story. Through archival audio, reflection on past national celebrations, and conversations with historians Beverly Gage and Jelani Cobb, the episode examines persistent anxieties, the evolution of national commemoration, and the current “history wars” that shape public life and education in the U.S.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Federal Writers Project & Historical Memory (00:44 - 03:04)

• Background: Lepore introduces the 1930s Federal Writers Project, which collected the stories of everyday Americans during the Great Depression as a way to bolster democracy.
• Key Idea: The project lent dignity to ordinary lives and storytelling as a civic act; Lepore wonders what a similar project today might reveal about contemporary America.

2. Reflections on the Bicentennial (03:04 - 11:37)

• Archival Clips: Snippets from a lost National Park Service bicentennial film ("The Birthday Party") capture mixed or skeptical attitudes about the 200th anniversary in 1976.
  • Quotes from the street:
    • “I don't see a great orgy of celebration right now.” (02:42, Man on the Street)
    • “For me, it doesn't have any real significant meaning. ... what's the difference between 199 years or 201 years?” (04:00, Man on the Street)
• Beverly Gage Analysis: Yale historian Beverly Gage comments on the commercialization, uncertainty, and persistent anxieties about national decline.
  • "The anxiety that the country is in decline ... is almost constant in the story of this country." (06:19, Gage)
  • "There are not more convenient moments in history.” (06:03, Gage)
• Changing Uses of History: Social movements once used founding myths and symbols as a means of critique and opportunity; Gage laments that energy may be waning.

3. America at 250: A Messy Moment (11:50 - 13:47)

• Lepore characterizes the current anniversary commemorations as “a goat rodeo,” implying disorder and confusion.
  • “America at 250 seems now to a lot of people ... like a mess. In a piece I wrote for the magazine this winter, I called the 250th a goat rodeo. And I stand by that.” (03:45, Lepore)
• There’s concern that the country is even more divided now than at previous milestones.

4. The “History Wars” & Role of the Historian (13:47 - 17:25)

• New Culture Wars over History: The MAGA movement and Black Lives Matter both contest national origin narratives; most historians "aren't really in that argument."
  • "Most historians aren't really in that argument. Most of us are just watching." (13:58, Lepore)
• Popular Reactions: Referencing Richard Pryor and Gil Scott Heron’s bicentennial works, Jelani Cobb illustrates the longstanding tradition of critiquing national myths.
  • “The blues remembers everything the country forgot.” (15:30, Man on the Street quoting Gil Scott Heron)

5. Censorship, Erasure, and Public Memory (17:25 - 21:09)

• Erasing Complexity: Removal or sanitization of public history—examples include taking down slavery plaques and pushback against the National Museum of African American History and Culture—undermines national understanding.
  • “The problem with that kind of sanitized approach to history ... is that it prevents you from getting to the things that are actually the basis of a claim for greatness.” (16:34, Cobb)
  • “You can’t unring the bell. Not even the Liberty Bell.” (19:06, Lepore and 19:09, Cobb)
• Official Narratives: Critique of the America 250 commemorative film for historical revisionism and “providentialism,” ignoring Indigenous presence and focusing on Columbus.
  • “They gerrymandered the founding to include Christopher Columbus.” (19:37, Cobb)

6. Commemoration: Looking Back or Ahead? (21:28 - 25:06)

• Historical Precedent: Past milestones were forward-looking (e.g., Centennial's faith in progress); current celebrations appear obsessed with the past, especially through the lens of “nostalgiacracy” (Cobb's term).
  • “The future almost seems to be only found in the past.” (23:20, Lepore)
• Presidents and History: Instead of inspiration, the present commemoration is defined by grievance and nostalgia.

7. Debating History in the Classroom (25:24 - 28:59)

• Culture War in Education: Lepore and Cobb discuss the challenges teachers face from conflicting curricular demands—between state mandates, parents, and new history projects (1619, etc.).
  • “Academic historians have largely abdicated their obligation to K-12 teachers… leaving classrooms more vulnerable to ideological flip-flopping.” (28:15, Lepore)
• The Need for Engagement: Both argue that historians should not cede the field to politicians and partisans.

8. Building a Shared Civic Culture (30:10 - 33:17)

• Local Civic Action: Lepore and Cobb advocate for engagement at the community level: neighborhood celebrations, classroom projects, re-investment in local journalism.
  • “Tend your own garden. But think of it as a community garden.” (30:10, Lepore)
  • “Local newspapers tend to not be as polarizing ... you are writing for a community that you know very well.” (32:15, Cobb)
• Civic Tolerance: Emphasis on Jeffersonian ideals and the role of civil discourse.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Recurrent National Anxiety:
  • “There are not more convenient moments in history. … The anxiety that the country is in decline … is almost constant in the story of this country." — Beverly Gage (06:03, 06:19)
• On Debates Over History:
  • “You can't unring the bell. Not even the Liberty Bell.” — Jill Lepore and Jelani Cobb (19:06, 19:09)
  • “We should, as we say, have maybe argument without end.” — Jelani Cobb (27:18)
• On Community Engagement:
  • “Tend your own garden. But think of it as a community garden.” — Jill Lepore (30:10)
• On the Difficulty of Teaching History:
  • “I think one of the things I sometimes feel really responsible for as a member of the historical profession is I think that academic historians have largely abdicated their obligation to K through 12 teachers.” — Jill Lepore (28:15)
• Counterculture Reflections:
  • “I don't know, maybe progress is regress. I think we've done already enough. … Maybe progress is regression. I don't know.” — Man on the Street (09:34)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:44: Federal Writers Project and the importance of documenting ordinary American lives
• 02:12 – 11:37: Archival bicentennial reflections and analysis with Beverly Gage
• 13:47 – 17:25: Historians’ role in current history wars, Richard Pryor and public memory
• 19:11 – 21:09: Critique of the America 250 commemorative film and historical narratives
• 23:12 – 25:06: Comparing centennial, bicentennial, and 250th commemorations
• 28:15 – 28:59: The pressing need for historians to support K-12 education
• 30:10 – 33:17: Community-level civic engagement and the revival of local journalism

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Tone & Style

The episode maintains a thoughtful, occasionally wry tone, with moments of nostalgia, skepticism, and concern—but also hope for local, grassroots paths forward. Jill Lepore, Beverly Gage, and Jelani Cobb balance scholarly analysis with personal reminiscence and practical suggestions for engagement.

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For listeners new to America’s ongoing “history wars,” this episode provides historical context, sharp critique of official memory-making, and an invitation to help build a more inclusive civic culture—one community garden, classroom project, or neighborhood celebration at a time.

Transcript

[Narrator/Producer]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC and the New Yorker.

[David Remnick]

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Guess what? The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is nearly upon us. And to think about this occasion and what it means, I've asked Jill Lepore to join us. Jill's been a staff writer at the New Yorker for many years and just this month she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book, we the A history of the U.S. constitution. Jillapour is a professor of history and law at Harvard University and she's our host for today's program.

[Jill Lepore]

Way back in the 1930s, in the dark days of the Great Depression with democracy on the rocks, the US government hired more than 6,000 out of work writers for something called the Federal Writers Project. They brought on all kinds of writers, from newspaper reporters to playwrights, anybody who used to make some kind of a living by writing and couldn't anymore. Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, Richard Wright, they all got involved. Studs Terkel, too. He got his start at the Federal Writers Project. The government sent those writers out all over the country to talk to people, to listen to people, to chronicle American life. The project's folklore editor, Benjamin Botkin, said he wanted to turn the streets, the stockyards and the hiring halls into literature. The idea that documenting ordinary lives was important was part of how Americans in the 1930s saved democracy at home. So this year, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, I got really interested in what a project like that might find out today. We're going to hear that later. But I've also been really curious about what Americans thought about the state of the country 50 years ago. The bicentennial Revolution.

[Interviewee/Man on the street]

That's what it means. Well, it's just a celebration of 200

[Beverly Gage]

years, lots of work.

[Jill Lepore]

I came across this film deep in the National Archives. It's called the Birthday Party. It was commissioned by the National Park Service, which hired a documentary filmmaker named Joe Giovai to make a little film. Vox pop style man on the street Federal Writers Project style. Reporters went all over the country to ask Americans what the nation's 200th birthday meant to them.

[Interviewee/Man on the street]

It's a good thing. It's a big celebration. It's like our great big birthday. I'm glad it's happening. I'm really excited about it. I don't see a great orgy of celebration right now.

[David Remnick]

We don't have A great deal to celebrate.

[Interviewee/Man on the street]

I feel that it might leave a lot of people out. I'm just thankful to be here, be a part of the centennial.

[Jill Lepore]

This film somehow got lost. I don't know if anyone ever even watched it, but I've watched it like 50 times. I love this stuff. I would eat this stuff for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's a message in a bottle. There are middle aged men wearing pork pie hats, smoking pipes, women with long straight hair parted in the middle, young guys with really, really long hair and beards or Afros. There are bell bottoms and beads. And the thing is, America at 250 seems now to a lot of people, to me, anyway, it seems like a mess. In a piece I wrote for the magazine this winter, I called the 250th a goat rodeo. And I stand by that. But the bicentennial had kind of the same vibe. A lot of the people you can hear in this birthday party film, and not just the countercultural types, they just weren't too head up about America at 200.

[Interviewee/Man on the street]

For me, it doesn't have any real significant meaning. I mean, what's the difference between 199 years or 201 years? In many ways, the bicentennial is just being fabricated. If at the time of the bicentennial we still have, you know, 8% unemployment, I can't see any reason to go around patting ourselves on the back for having just survived two centuries. We have a long way to go, baby, as Billie Jean King might have paraphrased it.

[Jill Lepore]

So what do you hear there?

[Beverly Gage]

I hear a couple of things. One is a critique that was made about the Bicentennial, which is that it had become commercialized, and I think also a deep sense of kind of uncertainty about how you're supposed to act in a moment like that.

[Jill Lepore]

Beverly Gage is a professor of history at Yale. In researching her new book, this Land Is yous Land, Gage went out on the road a few years ago trying to figure out how this country tells the story of its own past. I really wanted to talk to her about this bicentennial film.

[Beverly Gage]

So is like any birthday or big marker, is it just a sort of fake occasion? And also, how do you relate to a country that. I actually think it's kind of remarkable that it lasted 200 and then 250 years. So I would not agree with the, the commenter who was saying, what's the big deal? But nonetheless, how to, how to relate to and maybe even celebrate a country about which you feel profoundly ambivalent to

[Interviewee/Man on the street]

bicentennial I think it could be a very profitable thing for business here in Washington.

[Jill Lepore]

Well, it's a bad time, I think, to have it, so I don't. I really don't know what we have

[Beverly Gage]

to gain by it.

[Interviewee/Man on the street]

Well, after Watergate, the morale of the country's low. Maybe if we could inject some national spirit back into the country, it would do a lot of going.

[Beverly Gage]

I loved the comment that the bicentennial was coming at a really inconvenient time. We ought to reschedule, which I think a lot of people feel about 2026, too.

[Jill Lepore]

I think that woman was basically my aunt, you know.

[Beverly Gage]

You know, the other thing that strikes me is that there are not more convenient moments in history. And one of the things that you can see reflected in that clip is how persistent the anxiety that the country is in decline, that it's flying apart, that you are living at the worst moment. In fact, one of the. One of the opening images of the book is this famous, you can tell me, apocryphal or true moment with Ben Franklin after the Constitutional Convention when he says, hey, you know that sun on the back of George Washington's chair? Is the sun rising or setting on the Republic that we've created? So at the very moment that the Constitution has been created, there's this anxiety. Are we making progress or are we already in decline? And so you can certainly hear that in the 70s now, I think there are particular things about our moment that make those concerns acute in a different way, but they are almost constant in the story of this country.

[Jill Lepore]

There are also some bits in this film of a kind of anguished account of American progress. There's another clip, I think, from this lady that I think of as my aunt with the blue glasses. And another thing, we have the different nationality problems, the different color problems. However, we have begun to accept some of it.

[Interviewee/Man on the street]

I think there's a lot of divisions here in the United States used to be called the melting pot. I don't know what's happening here. You know, maybe the compounds are beginning to separate again and the people in the United States are diverging again. So, like, if they're going to do anything rather than celebrating, I think it's the time to start implementing all the things they have on paper, getting it out into the streets. If some people that are in power right now would sort of reconstruct quickly what took place in 1776 and what the colonies wanted. These are where the minorities sometimes want.

[Jill Lepore]

Is that optimism? Do you hear optimism there?

[Beverly Gage]

I do, to some degree. But what I see there is something that I wonder how much we have of anymore, which is a willingness to think about a moment like the bicentennial as an opportunity. A whole range of different movements, but especially movements of social change, social progress, use to seize upon the symbols, the stories of the founding of American national identity. The early women's rights advocates, the abolitionists, were so engaged with these questions about the meaning of the Declaration, the meaning of the Constitution, what it is that the country ought to be, could be, has been.

[Jill Lepore]

Is it not the case that the Tea Party movement or the no Kings movement are engaged in that kind of work? Right.

[Beverly Gage]

I think that those are great examples. And

[Jill Lepore]

so I want to turn to one last clip from the bicentennial film. This young long haired guy in a jean jacket in big mirrored shades.

[Interviewee/Man on the street]

I don't know, maybe progress is regress. I think we've done already enough. Enough buildings and enough covering the earth with concrete and destroyed enough in nature already that maybe progress is regression. I don't know.

[Beverly Gage]

He really captures a moment in history, the sensibility of the. Of the mid-70s.

[Jill Lepore]

Yeah. How so?

[Beverly Gage]

You can just see the force of all of these movements and incredible cultural changes that had happened over relatively short period of time.

[Narrator/Producer]

Right.

[Beverly Gage]

He has a counterculture vibe, he has an environmentalist vibe. He's questioning all the big narratives. You can tell from the pacing of his voice that he may also be shaped by certain things that he has himself imbibed in recent years. I don't want to.

[Jill Lepore]

That's a very delicate version. His sobriety or someone who jested. So, as a person who has been exploring the implications of this moment, the 250th anniversary of the country now for a few years, on the road in classrooms. What is your July 4th plan?

[Beverly Gage]

New Haven does actually incredible fireworks every 4th of July also, maybe not for the 4th itself, but I want to go to DC because there's going to be this wild thing called the Great American State Fair going on that the administration is putting on on the Mall. And I'm actually quite curious to see what that's going to look like. I'm sure I won't love all of the history on display there, but I do like that something is happening in this moment. So the energy behind it isn't bad. Even though I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to engage the execution.

[Jill Lepore]

Hey man, progress is regress, you know,

[Beverly Gage]

that's the way to engage.

[Jill Lepore]

Beverly Gage is a professor of history at Yale University. Her books include G Man, a biography of J. Edgar Hoover and this land is your land.

[Interviewee/Man on the street]

I'd like to see the bicentennial, deal with the kind of future I think we're going to have, and I think it's going to be a sort of troubled future.

[Jill Lepore]

We're going to talk about that future in a moment. I'm Jill Lepore and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.

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[Jill Lepore]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm Jill Lepore. I'm a staff writer for the magazine, and I wrote an essay about the Declaration of Independence for the New Yorker's special issue called America at 250, and that's our theme for today's program. Also, America at 250. The MAGA movement has put a lot of attention on America's past. So has the Black Lives Matter movement. It's a big and often pretty heated argument, and most historians aren't really in that argument. Most of us are just watching. But that argument raises vital questions about the role historians play in public life. American history, like any history, is full of beauty and also tragedy. Have historians got the mix right? I wanted to talk about this war over America's past with Jelani Cobb, who, like me, is both a historian and a journalist, and we're also pretty close in age. We were both kids during the bicentennial.

[Jelani Cobb]

One of the things that stands out to me was that Richard Pryor released an album that year which we totally cannot even say the name of, but it is Bicentennial. Insert racial epithet here, where he goes in on kind of the contradictions of the founding and race and slavery and Prime Targets, exemplifying particular contradictions in the founding of the country.

[Jill Lepore]

I listened to this Gil Scott Heron piece called Bicentennial Blues.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Oh, wow.

[Jelani Cobb]

Yeah.

[Jill Lepore]

Yeah. Like, it's some good rhymes about the state of our country.

[Interviewee/Man on the street]

The blues is grown, but not the home. The blues is grown, but the country has not. The blues remembers everything the country forgot. It's a bicentennial year, and the blues is celebrating a birthday, and it's the Bicentennial blues.

[Jill Lepore]

It seems to me that so much about this moment, this year goes right to the core of the questions that have animated so much of your work, both as a journalist and as a historian. And yet it's also just kind of just such a messy moment.

[Jelani Cobb]

But at the same time, it seems like this is a moment where we're least likely to. To embrace particular kinds of messiness. And what I mean by that is we saw earlier this year the federal government attempt to remove the plaques from the President's house in Philadelphia that talked about the history of slavery in the early republic and people who were enslaved at that site. We've had this kind of contentious discussion about American greatness, anchored in the Make America Great Again rhetoric that we've seen from Donald Trump. But the problem with that kind of sanitized approach to history, at least in my estimation, is that it prevents you from getting to the things that actually are the basis of a claim for greatness. In saying, out of this incredibly flawed founding moment, there are people who, across generations and across centuries, engage in the work, often at the cost of their own lives, of trying to push the country in a more democratic direction. And I don't know that we're going to get that particular conversation this year.

[Jill Lepore]

We've been reading a lot about the kinds of erasures, deletion, suppression, censorship, that's going on all over the country, but largely through institutions that are under the influence or control of the national government, like the National Park Service. There's a really kind of amazing organization called Save Our Signs that's been going around taking photos of signs and making a big archive of them online. But how much of an effect will that have? Like, do you think, what's the tale of those changes?

[Jelani Cobb]

I think that people are right to be concerned. The President also said that he thought that the Smithsonian African American Museum focused too much on how terrible slavery was, which is an astounding kind of thing to say, especially if you recognize that the impetus for the American Revolution are offenses that are categorically less than kidnapping, raping and enslaving bondage of people. And so it's an astounding thing for someone to say. And at the same time, I feel like you can't un ring a bell that generations of historians have done so much work to increase the public consciousness, to increase the availability of access to this kind of information, that ultimately it would be very difficult to sanitize those kinds of things. Now there's an astounding array of books, documentaries, private museums.

[Jill Lepore]

You can't unring the bell. Not even the Liberty Bell.

[Jelani Cobb]

Not even the Liberty Bell.

[Jill Lepore]

I think the short film that The Trump administration's America 250 Commission had projected onto the Washington Monument over the winter, which is a story of American history, is a good proxy for the version of American history that the federally funded celebration intends to proffer. And as a historian, I find it somewhat bewildering.

[Jelani Cobb]

That film was really interesting. It was strange and demoralizing in a particular way, but also strange. And it was almost like historical trolling because they gerrymandered the founding to include Christopher Columbus. And I think that was just an attempt to critique people on the left who have associated Columbus's arrival in the Western hemisphere with the subsequent tides of warfare and genocide and all the other kinds of things that happened in the wake of 1492 and him being kind of removed. And also the idea that you can discover a place where there are already people living.

[Jill Lepore]

There is no land acknowledgement in this film.

[Jelani Cobb]

Well, there is a land acknowledgement. It's the acknowledgement that Columbus landed.

[Jill Lepore]

Yeah, there's a lot of providentialism in it. And in a way, it seemed to me a little bit like, you know, George Bancroft, the 19th century historian. Right. He has this providentialist account of the. The history of the United States that's written in the 1830s, but it's really the manifesto for Manifest destiny.

[Jelani Cobb]

Sure.

[Jill Lepore]

Like this is this we're fated to expand across the continent, and that was his agenda. And this is our God given. Right. But then it has kind of tacked onto it like a Marc Andreessenism or like a muskism. It's like a. Like a technology boosting, like that's also like, we are fated by our providential God to go to Mars. Like, that's kind of what.

[Jelani Cobb]

Right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, presidents and presidential administrations have had their preferred versions of history for a long time, but they did tend to leave it in the hands of historians, where this seems very much like a kind of made to order political speech.

[Jill Lepore]

So who does get to tell the story then this year? I mean, I was thinking you and I have this weird thing in common, which is that we're both trained as academic scholars of history and we also work as journalists. You're at the pinnacle of that profession as dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. So I'm wondering if you think about this moment differently in your capacity as a historian.

[Jelani Cobb]

The historian part of me is very interested in how this fits into other kind of commemorative moments. And, you know, it occurred to me that it was like, oh, okay, this is the only president who's been impeached twice. He's a wildly polarizing figure. But then I look back to 1976, and those July 4th celebrations were presided over by Gerald Ford, who was not elected president or vice president and had controversially pardoned Richard Nixon. And so there was that in 1876, Ulysses S. Grant tacks on his comments about the nation's centennial to a State of the Union address. He went on and on about the kind of industrial progress and the amount of railroads that. And he was like, oh, also the bondsmen are now free. But he goes on. He's really into what we would have called GNP in our time, but the country is still bleeding from the wounds of the Civil War. So I think that none of these moments are really kind of picture perfect in that way. They just emerge and then we kind of look at them through the lens of what's going on around us right now.

[Jill Lepore]

But, you know what's so interesting about what you say about the centennial is I think of that celebration as really forward looking. It really was a celebration of American ingenuity and technical industrial growth. And it was very forward looking, almost a kind of like, what is the century of the future gonna be? And I think the bicentennial was kind of mixed in that regard. People didn't really want to look back except at the costumes. But there was a sense Ford had given that speech when he took the oath of office. Our long national nightmares come to an end, right? Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, Vietnam, these things are behind us. Sure, the recession. But There was by 76, some sense of maybe it's worth looking forward but what I think is odd about this 2026 moment and the Make America Great Again movement's relationship to it is that the future almost seems to be only found in the past. I mean, it's a really. There's no reason for America 250 not to be futuristic like our version of the Jetsons. Let's look ahead to the next 250 years. What are we gonna be doing in space or whatever? But it seems almost uniquely obsessed with the past.

[Jelani Cobb]

It does. That curious absence is partly a product of. Of Donald Trump himself, because rhetorically, he hasn't been really the kind of president that says we're going to cure cancer, as Nixon and Obama both did, or we're going to go to the moon, or we're going to go. I mean, there's the kind of occasional passing reference to these things, but that's not what you associate with him. You really associate him with. With much more of a kind of grievance politic about where we have gone in the past 50 years or so. What I usually refer to as a nostalgiacracy.

[Jill Lepore]

Bring back coal.

[Jelani Cobb]

Right, right. Why? What is our attachment to coal? I mean, if we honestly, if we have an industry that can replace coal, and why do we specifically want coal, you know, internal combustion engines.

[Jill Lepore]

But I wanna ask you, though, I'm really fascinated by what you label as historical trolling. Cause I think that's spot on. But I also wonder how you respond to the notion that that is a reaction to essentially a kind of historical trolling on the left, or what people on the right would feel is like, you know, this kind of woke progressive who insisted that we have land acknowledgments and talk about white fragility and adopt, you know, this new ethnic studies curriculum or, you know, whatever list of things might be on that list of grievances and that there was an over rotation in that direction that was as top down, not from the office of the president, but from cultural elites and coastal elites. And that the particular emphasis of the America250 administration's commission is an attempt to rotate back to some norm.

[Jelani Cobb]

You know what I think? I think it's really interesting because as you very well know, interpretations of American history have been contentious from the outset. And there are wildly divergent ideas about what even the American Revolution meant. At first. There's the kind of idea that it's this incredible leap forward for human freedom. And then another generation of historians, the progressive historians, see it as purely a capitalist land grab, essentially that benefits the landed aristocracy. And I think that is great and that's healthy, that we debate what these things mean. And so I think that we have to make room for a divergence of opinions while upholding the same sorts of intellectual standards that the historical profession has benefited from and relies upon. And I think that outside of that, we should, as we say, have maybe argument without end.

[Jill Lepore]

And yet schoolteachers have to have a lesson plan. Sure, it's different than being an academic historian where we're having argument without end. New evidence emerges, new interpretations, new methods, new people, new ideas. History is the argument. Right. But you're the third grade teacher trying to figure out what to do for the 250th in your classroom. You've read all about the 1619 Project and its lessons. Plans are available to you. There's stuff coming from your state legislature, your school district, parents have opinions. You can't really teach the debate to the sixth grade or the fifth grade.

[Jelani Cobb]

You can't reliably do that in college with undergrads.

[Jill Lepore]

No.

[Jelani Cobb]

Yeah.

[Jill Lepore]

I think one of the things I sometimes feel really responsible for as a member of the historical profession is I think that academic historians have largely abdicated their obligation to K through 12 teachers. And there are huge exceptions. But I think it leaves that those classrooms much more vulnerable to this kind of ideological flip flopping where, you know, a state will say, you must do this, and then the party affiliation of the legislature will change in the next elections and then they'll say, no, you must not teach that. You must teach this. I mean, I think teachers are really afraid to, you know, museums are afraid of what they're going to put on their walls. Civics teachers don't know how to teach civics. Like what are our obligations to, to engaging in that work with them?

[Jelani Cobb]

Or, you know, we're talking about history where no one really wants to put their head above the parapet. And, you know, you could just go on living your life and doing work that is important for a select number of people. But really getting into the kind of framing of public discourse is where you can get so much trouble that you might reasonably resist ever doing that again. And at the same time, we really need people to do that. And I think obviously your work has pointed to that in some really important ways about us having to do the very difficult work of hammering out a national narrative that we can take pride in, that we can all kind of claim and feel some sort of reflection of ourselves, of our values, of things that we find admirable and some common basis for us to begin to

[Interviewee/Man on the street]

work

[Jelani Cobb]

together on the challenges of self government.

[Jill Lepore]

Yeah, I think too. I talked to a lot of people lately who say it's a hard time to be out in public, running for office, engaging in any kind of political discourse or public activity. But their response is, tend your own garden. But they think of it as a kind of a community garden. And I really love that. Which is like, all right, we're gonna have a potluck for the July 4th, and we're gonna invite everybody in the neighborhood, figure out what our neighborhood used to do for July 4th, and write July 4th speeches in our fifth grade classroom or, you know, record a Fourth of July speech podcast. Like, just that there are, like little things in your kid's classroom in the retire that your mother's at, like have some experience of, hey, what does this mean to you? The idea that we're sitting around waiting for the occupant of the White House to tell us what American history means? You know, that's the thing where you just kind of want to walk into traffic. But, like,

[Jelani Cobb]

I think that's true. I also think it's consistent with what, you know, people might have thought in much earlier generations. For all of his contradictions and the things that I critique about him, one of the things I think that Jefferson really got right was his emphasis on localism in American democracy. A kind of civic undertaking with their closest neighbors and the people who were in their community and sitting down and saying, this is what we think is right for us. And I understand that these people on the other side of the Hill are gonna do something that they think is right for them, and we're mostly okay

[Jill Lepore]

with that old fashioned political tolerance.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jill Lepore]

You know, I feel I teach at a law school now, and I see where it used to be, the most ambitious students wanted to go to Washington, work for the federal government. And a lot of them are going back to their home states, their home towns. And I wonder if you see that in journalism.

[Jelani Cobb]

Yes. The short answer is yes. And there has been this real emphasis on local news in the past decade in particular. And people have. Because local news has been so challenged, it's caused this assessment of all the things that local news does, the way in which they bind communities together, that those local newspapers tend to not be as polarizing because with a small margin of success, you have to bring in everyone. And you are also writing for a community that you know very well.

[Jill Lepore]

That same kind of community work of just being there and having those conversations, doing that reporting is part of binding up civil society.

[Jelani Cobb]

Right?

[Jill Lepore]

Yeah.

[Jelani Cobb]

Right. And doing the fundamental thing that you have to do in a democracy, which is talk to people.

[Jill Lepore]

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks so much, Jelani. It was great having you. And happy 250th thank you.

[Jelani Cobb]

And happy 250th to you as well.

[Jill Lepore]

Jelani Cobb is dean of the Journalism School at Columbia University and my fellow staff writer at the New Yorker. I'm Jill Lepore, sitting in for David Remnick for a special program of the New Yorker Radio Hour and it's going to continue in the next episode of our podcast. Thanks for joining us.

[Narrator/Producer]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Mike Kutchman, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell and Ursula Sommer, with guidance from Emily Bottin. And we had assistance this week from John Delore. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

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[Jelani Cobb]

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