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- [00:00]
A
Hi there, it's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're listening to the free preview of one of our Patreon episodes. We switch off every week between free and Patreon exclusive episodes. So if you'd like to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join our honorary Haters club. A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Peter Mancall, who is. I have to take a deep breath for this one. A distinguished professor. Andrew W. Mellon, professor of the Humanities, Linda. And Harlan Martins, Director of the Early Modern Studies Institute and Professor of History, Anthropology and Economics at usc. He's also the author of a lot of books, I think. 10, question mark. Most recently the first volume of the Oxford History of the United States, Contested Continent, the Struggle for North America circa 1000 to 1680, which I currently have here with me and which is maybe the biggest book I have right now. It's pretty. This is a serious book. Welcome to the show.
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B
Thank you for having me, Claire.
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A
Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's uncouth for me to call it sort of a doorstop book, but that's kind of like how we describe this kind of book, right? Where it's like.
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B
Absolutely. I mean, the series is filled with books like, I mean, you know, in the History of the Oxford United States series. Mine is on the shorter side. Yeah, I mean, those books are these books. Now that mine's one of them, I guess I have to put myself in this category. Yes, our books, these are epic length, but that was the idea. The idea generated by two historians long gone, one who was at Yale, C. Van Woodward and Richard Hofstadter was at Columbia. They're long gone. They had this idea of publishing long form narrative history for a general audience. And all the books are certainly long form narrative and pitched to a general audience. I mean, I hope that mine is as well. But yes, these are not Sort of casual. I'll take it to the beach and be done in two hour reads. And these books take some engagement.
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A
Yeah. This is a serious book and I think on the Oxford website somewhere I have to find it. They call this the most ambitious book in the series. So that's a really.
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B
Wow.
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A
Yeah, that's a real mark in your favor.
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B
I'll take it.
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A
Also terrifying. So I usually try to start with a little question that helps to introduce the guests to the audience a little bit beyond just being a historian. And I haven't asked this specific starter question in a while, but it's my favorite one, so bear with me. If right now someone said you had to switch careers and you could not be a historian anymore, but also, unfortunately, you can't retire, what is the academic discipline or job outside of the academy you would pick to undertake?
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B
I would be a journalist.
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A
Okay.
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B
And I would be a journalist who would write about economics. Oh, and economics in a cultural sense. So the reason I have those academic appointments, I do have a PhD in history, but my work ever since graduate school has really integrated economics and anthropology. And as I've moved through a career, advised graduate students, done whatever, written some things I really want to the extent that I can sort of reach a wider audience. And I really have always. I was on the college newspaper. I loved it. I sort of set it aside when I went to graduate school. And then in the last, I don't know, five, eight, 10 years, I've been writing pieces. I've been writing short journalistic pieces, a number, you know, which have come out various places. And I really like that kind of writing. I really like. The idea of. This is going to sound ironic considering how big that book is that, you know, Contested Continent is. But I really like the idea of capturing a subject in 800 to 1200 words.
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A
Sure.
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B
And I get a lot of feedback on those pieces. The feedback is not always positive. Invariably, and I imagine this year will follow suit. I write a piece around the time of Indigenous peoples or Columbus Day, and I write a piece around Thanksgiving. And almost just as invariably, the peace around Thanksgiving generates some fairly hostile responses, even though I'm not saying anything that's all that radical or even unusual to anyone with a casual interest in the period. But Thanksgiving is taken very seriously in this country.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And so I just sort of brace myself. It's like, okay, we'll see what happens this year.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So anyway, so, I mean, I love the question because I think one of the things that when I, you know, and I think I see this in you and we've talked about your publishing a little bit. I think that, you know, historians, back in the day, back when I was in graduate school, maybe earlier, but certainly when I was in graduate school, you know, we were all trained to sort of, you know, dissect societies and you know, we put much more emphasis on the analysis than we did on the presentation of it. And I think now there are a lot of amazing historians who are academics, who have really written for broad audiences and done so through super engaging prose. And I read those, that's what excites me. But I also like to read histories of non academic historians. So I think, you know, one of the great historians, a couple of the great historians of our world are Jonathan Hart and Patrick Radden, Keith, you know, I mean, the stories they tell are deeply rooted in an understanding of the past and yet in narratives that I'm so envious at their ability to paint a scene. Right. To give us a character in depth, to make us care about someone, to have that sense of suspense, to make me want to turn the page and go to the next chapter. That's real enviable skills. So anyway, that was a long answer. No, that's great.
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A
So I mean, it also seems like you found a loophole to this, which is that you would be a journalist who works on economics and maybe also does history, but is not a historian.
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B
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Well, I sort of, you know, I think one things that we all have to learn in our careers is, you know, what is our avenue? Like, what am I sort of okay at? And you know, I think I could say I know something about history. So yes, my alternative career would still sort of draw on it. If I was to go in complete, complete fantasy land, I would say, well, obviously professional tennis or surfer amazing. But those are not careers that are viable for me at this point in my career.
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A
Sure, sure. But I mean, I think there are many ways to interpret the question and both of those are totally valid interpretations. One is the reasonable thing you could actually do and the other, I mean, in your dream life you're surfing every day. Why not? You live in la.
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B
You could be one of my graduate students taught me how to surf about almost 20 years ago.
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A
That's amazing.
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Yeah, I don't surf very frequently now, but it is fantastic just standing. Are you a surfer?
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A
No, but my partner is. And also growing up on the coast, I spent a lot of my time just around surfing culture.
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B
But just the feeling of standing on that Wave, you know, even a relatively mediocre surfer like me is just, you know, I'll get gushy. It's just so inspired, so amazing, the feeling of it. It's like, wow, this is a different existence. It takes you totally out of everything else. You're completely there in the moment. And it is. It is fantastic. It is also for people much younger than me.
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A
So, to be fair, in, like, Hawaii or parts of California, there are people who are, like, in their 80s surfing, like, old. Not that 80s is, like, the most insanely old person in the world, but, like, there are people who are, like, have long since been retired and are still surfing.
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B
Exactly. And I look at them with envy and thinking, wow, that is just amazing. I think maybe the great. Certainly one of the great books about surfing is William Finnegan's Barbarian Days, you know, wind up in the Pulitzer. He's a New Yorker writer, and he writes in there that basically, if you don't learn to surf by the time you're 10, you're never going to really do it. You know, I always feel like writing to him. I've never met him, and said, you know, I started later. You're right, I'll never surf like you. But it is still amazing.
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A
My last thing before we get into the actual point of the purpose of the show is that I think surf documentary. So I'm like a big sports documentary person. I love watching sports docs. For some reason, they do something for me. I don't know what it is, but I love watching them. And I think surf documentaries and surf movies are like one of the most joyous versions of film that one could possibly like. They're exclusively. Even the really depressing ones where someone's like, oh, I was surfing and something horrible happened to me, or whatever. They still are, like. And I got back on the board one year later, and I now have a surf camp for people who've been eaten by a shark or whatever. Like, I just think they're the best. So everyone listening to this, go watch a surf movie tonight.
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B
Exactly.
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A
We should actually. Now that we've explored the surfer fantasy, we should actually do the thing that is your actual job. Who are we here to talk about today?
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B
So we're actually sticking with that maritime theme, because I am talking about someone who's famous for being in the water or on the water. And we're here to talk about Henry Hudson. Someone whose name is everywhere, on more bodies of water than anybody else on the planet, I believe, or certainly most water on the planet is named after Henry Hudson.
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A
Okay.
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B
People that know him best are the people who live in New York, you know, cause of the river and in Canada because of the bay or Hudson Strait, which connects the ocean to the bay. So he was an English explorer and I think he's a fascinating character and that's who we're here to talk about.
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A
Yeah. Let me see. What did I know about Henry Hudson? Going into reading the parts of. I mean, I've read more than just these parts of this book, but the Henry Hudson parts of contested continent. And then the normal amount of research that I do for this, I knew about the places. Right. I knew about the Hudson Bay and the Hudson river, and I knew that he was an explorer and that's what he's primarily made famous for and that the things are named after him because of the exploration. And I think I did know that he was a early 17th century explorer, although he's born in the mid to late 16th century. But I think that's basically it. My note for what I knew ahead of time was Hudson River, Hudson Bay. That's it. Is that what most people know?
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Yeah. Maybe you have a Hudson Bay Company blanket in your closet, right?
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A
Sure.
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B
As many people do. Yeah. That's what most people know. Most people know about his. What is really his third voyage, when he goes to what is now New York. That's what he's known for. And when the 400th anniversary of that voyage happened, which was in 2009, Henry Hudson had a moment. He had a moment. There were museum discussions about him. I published a book about him timed for that anniversary. That book got me onto the Daily show with Jon Stewart because Jon Stewart wanted to talk about Henry Hudson. Right. Hudson had a moment and then like people who lived 400 years ago, it kind of faded away again. I think he has, you know, people who are his fans sort of. He's known differently to people in Canada. You know, he has a. More who. I think maybe Canadians have a deeper sense of him in some ways. Maybe they know more about his last voyage, which is when he's. We'll talk about that. What happens on the last voyage?
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A
Something does happen.
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Something happens. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, you know, I. I wrote that book Time to the Anniversary because I knew there would be interest in Hudson. Absolutely. But I wrote that book because Hudson, for me, as a historian, raised questions that I was interested in. What was it like to be a European colonist, to be an English colonist, to be an explorer, to go out into the world, to go into an area that you don't know very well. Now, I should say the background to this is my whole career has been based on setting encounters between native peoples and Europeans, primarily in eastern North America. If there's a through line in my work, much of it is critical of English and Europeans who come to the Americas. Right. I mean, I am, in that way, very much a product of my generation.
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A
Sure.
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B
So I didn't go into Hudson as he's a great explorer and a great hero. I went into Hudson thinking, can this guy tell me something I can't otherwise get? I had written a sort of biographical study about a promoter of English colonization named Richard Hakluyt, which had come out a couple years before my book on Hudson. And I wrote that book on Hakluyt because I was trying to figure out a fairly simple question, which is, if Columbus and the Spanish start colonizing in 1492, why we're not talking about the English until 1607?
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A
Mm.
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What is this explains this enormous gap. So I did this rather intense academic study of the younger Richard Hakluyt to try to understand that world. And it was there that I sort of realized that I'm particularly drawn to writing about characters about people. Hakluyt is obviously not a household name in North America, but some people in England know about it, but absolutely not in this country. Hudson, as I was sort of transitioning towards trying to write for a wider audience, Hudson seemed a good opportunity for me. Here's someone who people have heard of. So it becomes, you know, in that sort of classic distinction, biography instead of micro history. Right. It's actually something people know about. I figured there would be, as I was right. Some documentation. I wish there was much more documentation. There's a lot I wish I knew that I don't know. But he did give me. He got me in there. Right. Because one of the enduring frustrations I have of someone who studies, by early American standards, the early period. Right. Because early America is a period, you know, we typically talk about, that goes through the revolution.
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Sure, sure. Yeah.
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And the Revolution's obviously having a moment right now with America. 250 and all of that, which we don't have to talk about. But this earlier period, one of the enduring frustrations I have is I don't have many Native voices. I don't have much in the way of Native understanding of what's going on. I have colonial understanding or colonizers understanding of what's going on. So, you know, it's, you know, again, from the period when I was in graduate school when early Americans would talk about these kinds of things. It was like, okay, how do we take these texts which were written for a certain purpose, and how do we read against the grain, read between the lines, whatever way you want to talk about it, to try to extract, if not indigenous voices, at least some indigenous perspectives, an indigenous angle on what's going on with colonization. So we turn colonization in the North American context towards conquest and colonization. That we have to, as people who write about American history, really put at the front of our stories the violence that happened in the early colonial period. And that American historians in ancient times kind of just washed over and emphasized people like Henry Hudson or emphasize people like Captain John Smith or William Bradford or John Winthrop. These people are important. You know, I've written about all of them. But that said, I go at it not in any way to celebrate these people, but instead to sort of say, how can I use them to understand this moment?
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A
There are certainly historians of all generations, but I think right now there is a moment, not in academic scholarship so much, but in sort of general trade history, of trying to revive the hagiography of some of these people. Like, all of a sudden, there will be a new book on just like Hudson, but in a pro Hudson kind of way. And so I did really admire, in reading parts of Contested Continent, how you will tell someone like Hudson's story, but then layer over it or with it the experiences of indigenous groups that he comes across. For example, you talk at one point about how his crew says that they're attacked for no reason and they can't explain why that would happen. And at the same time, sort of in the same breath, in here, you say, well, the indigenous group probably felt like they had. Had done something to offend them. Like, it's not just that we can't just take these colonizers at their word, that they did nothing wrong, and these people just came and attacked them for no reason. But there are a lot of people who would not necessarily be willing to engage in that layering. And I think that's a really important thing in any kind of writing about someone like Hudson, who has this sort of mythological sort of relationship to all these places that are now named after him and that are marked by him. I don't know if that's the right reading of this.
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B
No, I think that. Claire, I think that was a brilliant reading. That's such a generous reading. Thank you so much. But that's exactly it, right? Because on the pages that we have, so a person who works in the period that I work on. So primarily the 16th and 17th century, I have far less documentation than a modern American historian, than a modern historian of any field has. And so I have this documentation. It's fragmentary. Even if I wanted to tell a celebrating story about one of these people, it's still relatively thin in the documentary record, but then it becomes much thinner. And so I read these moments. It's like, wait, they just attacked us out of the blue. But it's fairly clear they were not just doing it because, oh, it's Tuesday, and I'm going to attack you. Because one of the other, through lines of my work, is the sense that I do think people, when they meet each other, are not necessarily going to attack each other. I think there is a sense of opportunism. What can I get from you? What can I learn from you? And I think that's very important. And I think the ones who've left us the written record from the 16th and 17th centuries in some ways are telling us that story, but they're not telling it in an obvious way. So we historians, you and I and others who do what we do, need to read these texts critically, but also in some sense, sensitively. Right. I mean, I don't want to portray, though I would get to issues about Hudson. I don't want to have stock figures, you know, this guy's evil, this guy's great. I'm trying to explain them in there as much as one can with the separation hundreds of years in some complexity.
- [18:54]
A
Absolutely. And I think so, obviously, yes, I'm. Because I'm a contemporary historian, which feels like an. It doesn't work together, but it does. I think, yes, my people, the people I work on are not my people. I work on Nazis, but the people I work on. There is more documentation of them in general. But because the ones that I work on, on specifically are Holocaust perpetrators who immigrated to the United States and therefore have a vested interest in not keeping documentation. For example, like, they don't keep diaries. We don't actually have access to a lot of their inner worlds a lot of the time. And at first, when I started working on these people, particularly at the start of my PhD, I was constantly being asked, well, how do you write about someone that you actually can't see into? Right. Like, how do you write a whole book or a dissertation about these people that you only have these other ways of understanding them? And I think this is actually useful for historians of earlier periods, because the way that I approach that is by saying well, the fact that there is no documentation also says something. Pretending that a lack of information means there's no. There. There is a failure to actually engage with the realities that you're working with. The fact that we have the documentation of what explorers believed indigenous groups were thinking, but not what the groups were actually thinking, and that we have allow the silence on one. Silence. And I would put silence in sort of scare quotes. Right. But the silence on one side to dictate our understanding of them. I think that's terrible, actually. And instead that the. The lack of information gives us a different sort of information too. And that's something that we should be bringing to the forefront for people who are not historians, that. That is actually a useful thing.
- [20:43]
B
That is really well said. Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting to think about that, to sort of spin off what you're saying about your subject. I don't know. Of efforts to deliberately obscure. Well, we'll talk a little bit about Hudson. You know, so we're dealing with very different things, but yes, I think it is the responsibility, and I take that word seriously, the responsibility of the story to try to dig in, to explain things. Right. I mean, you know, we have a job. You know, our job is to tell us something about the past and to make sense of it. Whether we make sense of that for the 80 readers of an academic article would make sense of that. That for people who will pick up something on the bestseller list. We still have the responsibility that we have to tell these complex stories. And yes, we have to push against and push and push and push. And that's one of the things that differentiates us in some level. I said earlier, if I had an alternate career to be a journalist, which I love, but there's very different thing between sort of writing that alleged first draft of history and writing it quickly and doing what we do, which is just digs deeper and deeper and deeper.
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A
Sure.
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Until we think we've reached the end of the evidentiary trail that we need to be on. And then we sit down and write.
- [21:51]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for listening to this preview of a Patreon exclusive episode. To subscribe and listen to it in full, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked ever
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C
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