Turning Points in American History

The artistic genius of Nicole Angelin. When intuition fed American The psychology of One Day University. The most acclaimed and popular professors from top colleges. They're best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi, I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn. So history is not just about the past. History is about now. And the more we understand history in that sense, the more it can actually work for us. History isn't just supposed to be

a fun story. History is Edward T. O'Donnell and my title of my lectures, turning Points in American newspeople think about the the fight over the Confederate flag. You know, that's just not some abstract fight. That's a real issue that has a lot to do with what's going on right now in the United States. So often history is thought of as as dates and great leaders, usually men. You approach it a different way, Yeah, I mean, I

think that you can't get past dates. You have to know where you are in time and all in certain people like Andrew Carnegie, or Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. They're all very very important people. But history probably understood, you know, it encompasses all of society, and so I always say that the people that make history are often great leaders, but it's also often legions of nameless, faceless

people that want to push for change. So millions of enslaved people saying we do not want to be slaves anymore, millions of workers who say we don't want to work sixteen hours a day, millions of women who want the right to vote. They you know, we don't know most of their names, but they're the ones who organize and move history in a different direction. Some of your turning points, are they huge events that we all know? Are? Are they sometimes a little bit obscure? And then you explain

why they're so important? Yeah, Well, I try to peg them to events. Often I'll start with the Declaration of independence, which is not an unknown event obviously. But what I do is, I would say it's incumbent upon me to make this tell you more than what you know. Not just that the Declaration Independence gains us our independence and it's this sacred document, but what does it actually means? We delve into that. People are often unaware exactly what

the document actually was. But the declaration is essentially a declaration of war. And the first part that we love, you know, the declaration that you know defines all these great values that was sort of considered fluff. The key part was the last two thirds where we said we are breaking away from a great Britain for these reasons. He has, he has, he has. The king has done all these terrible things to us. He sent troops, he's tax us to death, he's dissolved our legislatures. He has,

he has, he has. That's the key part that we need to explain to the world. But Jefferson does put that flowery philosophical treatise at the beginning, and that, as we'll see, we'll have legs. It's not this great declaration of human rights, but it becomes that and it has power decades and now centuries beyond its original creation and that so we delve into how this, you know, the how a document like that can have a life that nobody,

including Jefferson himself, could have ever expected. Yeah, talk about that, because some of that declaration is a litany of somewhat grumpy complaints against the boss, right, George the third of England. It's kind of interesting. When the declaration was was issued in seventeen seventy six, the more important part was the back end, the two thirds, where it just says he has tax us into starvation, he has sent armies to

plunder us. Today it's just the opposite. Nobody can really remember, other than historians, the back two thirds about he has, he has, he has, and they focus primarily on, you know, we hold these truths to be self evident and all of those beautiful statements of human rights, of universal truths and so forth. What fires you up, what keeps you going?

Why do you do this? Well? I think it has to do with the idea that I mean, I find history fascinating and interesting in and of itself, but I think history also has a way of helping us understand the world that we live in. If we look around us and think about what do we value in this country. We value our democracy, we value our democratic institutions. We value certain ideas about human rights and equal protection before the law and all that. You know, there's a long

on list. That's just the beginning. And I always point out that these things, it's really history tells us these things did not fall from the sky. These things are not you know, chiseled on a gold tablet somewhere way back when. These are things that are the product of struggle. Every generation of Americans said to make their democracy and

the republic what it is. So these you can't take these things for granted, And that prompts one to appreciate that struggle, but also to look around and say, what are the what are the compelling struggles right now? So unless us we're aware of our past, we can't build a better present. Right the past tells us that democracy

requires work, requires attention, requires struggle. And if we get lulled into thinking that it's a kind of a wind up machine that was designed in the seventeen seventies and seventeen eighties and then just turned on and that we just live in this democracy, that is a dangerous not on it's false, but a really dangerous idea about how democracy works. Are there any surprising moments in these lectures

that you've given for one day university? Absolutely? And I think a lot of what I'm doing is reminding people of stuff they've learned in the past, just sort of familiarizing them with things, and then also showing things they may not have gotten when they first encountered this history. That say, the Declaration of Independence, to see how powerful it is, way beyond seventeen seventy six that it has. This it's a document invoked over and over again by

various groups. Here's Elizabeth Katy Stantond. She forms convenes the Women's Rights Convention eighteen forty eight Seneca Falls, New York. You know, takes the Declaration of Independence kind of heretical and rewrites it as a feminist manifesto and writes right at the very beginning that all men and women are created equal. And then of course labor parties take it and use it. You can buy a book of a hundred Declarations of Independence that are all rewritten in this manner.

So this is the Workingmen's Party and Da da da dada, for the full benefit of their labor right. They change the words where they need the words changed. Martin Luther King, and it's famous. I have a dream speech. And of course, how many of you've ever read the Declaration of Independence of Vietnam written by guy named Ho Chi Minh. It starts with these words all men are created equal, They are endowed by their creator with certain I mean this

is a document that has global significance. You make a controversial argument that the cause of the Civil War was not states rights, it was slavery. Right, that's not controversial. It's controversy among people who don't really understand the thing. And I don't mean that in a paternalistic way. If you took at was in American historians who studied the nineteenth century and said what's the cause of the Civil War? Nine of them would say slavery was the cause of

the Civil War. This when people say states rights, it drives historians crazy because we've been teaching this for decades now. It's in all of the books we write, it's in all the lectures we give, it's in all the presentations. It's about slavery, or if you want to get particularly say it is about states rights. It's about a single states right to own people as property. That's what it's

fundamentally about. If I was a doctor and I was talking to a one day university or group and I said, you all know what to do when you get the flu right, and I turned to the audience and everybody says bleeding. You know, we've cut and bleed people. That's what that's that's that's the solution to it's It's the equivalent where I say to people, you know what the cause of the Civil War was, and they say states rights. It's like, no, that's oversimplified. And it's also a self

serving story that we know. The reason that is a popular idea is that it was made popular after the Civil War by people who wanted to change the meaning of the Civil War and change what it was all about. So it's not as an accident that people say it. It's actually in a successful job done by people in the decades after the Civil War to changed the narrative.

Another thing which is far from obvious and fascinating in your lecture is when you talk about America's attitude towards the military, which has changed hugely um or even in recent decades. Yeah, I think that's there is another good example of the surprises when you tell people. So you know, up until the nineteen fifties, it was absolutely understood that we had to have a tiny military. The Founding Fathers did not believe in a strong military. What did the

Founding fathers believe in? Almost no military? Because they understood things very clearly. They said, looking at world history, how do you get a Caesar? Later on, how do you get a Napoleon? Their generals they have an army. And when you have a huge army, you have a huge base of power that is going to be abused. So in our Republican playbook, we always said small, small, small military, build it up, tear it down, build it up, tear it down, build it up. World War Two we begin

tearing it down, the biggest war ever. And in nineteen fifty five years after the war, the Korean War begins, we re engage and we never stop. That's when we get two million soldiers and six hundred ships. That's that's only seven years ago. That's a new thing. And they looked back to Roman history that they had clear, vivid examples in their minds of that's what it's supposed to be. And think about when George Washington, his his ideal that

he followed was of Cincinnatis the citizen soldier. He was put down his plow, go off and fight a war, and immediately leave back to civilian life. And then he gets called into the presidency and he serves two terms and he says, I'm out of here because we can't have, you know, perpetual government by one person, particularly one person

with the military background. What is the single biggest misconception that people have about American history or about a moment in American history which in their view is completely different from the reality. This is a big, big question. So I think probably the notion that the founders created something that was perfect and that it we just need to figure out what they had in mind. And that's a really comforting idea. Originalism is a really comforting, wonderful idea,

but it's it's divorced from reality. The founders themselves always used My favorite expression in studying history, in American history is they always said this republican experiment. They say this over and over again. When you read the speeches of Jefferson, of Madison, of Lincoln, they keep saying this Republican experiment will rise or fall on the basis of this. You know, they invoke this idea, and but what do they mean

by experiment? They mean it wasn't perfect. It was a It was a thing that's set in motion by brilliant but fallible people, knowing that it was not perfect and that it would have to be adjusted, and that it would move through time. You know, the founders could never conceive of the Industrial revolution, just to give you one example, and so that there's an understanding that through time we are going to have to make adjustments, have to figure

out what is it? What does free speech mean in a in an era of mass media, which simply didn't exist in the in the founding period? What does the Second Amendment mean in an era of mass production of firearms and much more powerful firearms? What does you know? Freedom of assembly? What do all these things mean? Uh? In our you know, in the future. So the idea that the Founder has created something that was perfect and unchangeable and that all we need to do is figure

out what that is. That's a great fallacy. When you're up on that stage firing people up, what's your favorite turning point to tell? Ah, that's a good question. The one that gets I think people scratching their head the most. Just when I talk about what I call the reformulation in the in the late nineteenth century, we see all the tremendous benefits of the Industrial Revolution, but we don't have any institutions and any ways of dealing with all the downside of it and all the turmoil that this

is creating. So it's creating a lot of gold and a lot of wealth, and a lot of new technology, but it's also creating mass poverty and huge strikes and all kinds of problems and great concerns about the you know, the fate of the republic. And the founders didn't didn't give us a plan for it because they couldn't have even imagined you know, us steel. They couldn't have imagined John D. Rockefeller and these in this kind of world

that they're building, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin. All their traditional notion of the way the politics worked was that power is the great threat to liberty. So that's why power is inherently evil. People possess it, they'll abuse it. The biggest power in the world in seventeen eighty is the state. Any government is always big so we as self conscious Republican citizens, will keep our state, our our governments small. That's why Jefferson says, the government that governs least governs best.

That's the idea, right, it's a it's a it's not about low taxes. I mean, it is about that to some of you, But it's about power. Power is inherently dangerous, So we need to keep governments small so that we don't have tyranny. Well, in the progressive notion around nineteen hundred, people are beginning to rethink this because where is the power? Power is still the number one threat to Republican government, So that part's true, But where is the power? The

President United States? Is this big compared to John D. Rockefeller, And Rockefeller is not an elected official. Rockefeller is separate from democracy, separate from our Republican institutions. And so that's the essence of it saying power is a problem and we need to reign in that power to save liberty. Right, So, the state, which we've used to fear is actually now,

you know, the lesser of two evils. We need to build up the state, build up the government to give it some powers to protect us, to protect against abuse, to protect and also to work on benefiting the common good. And so people in the progressive era, but as people in the Gilded Age, and these are labor leaders, these are intellectuals, these are politicians, and they're coming out from

many different angles. But by the early twentieth century, there's an emerging consensus that the founders didn't give us ways of dealing this or specific ways, but they gave us the tools. They gave us our democracy, they gave us an amendment process, they gave us ways of thinking about what is most important. And the progressive air sees this great advance of policies that greatly enhanced the common good, greatly enhanced the well being of the average citizen. And

they don't undo, they don't destroy industrial capitalism. They don't nationalize our steel industry, but they just rein it in a little bit, you know, put up some guardrails so that the capitalist engine can roar and do all the things that does for us, but with some boundaries in some ways, which so that workers in a steel mill work eight to ten hours, not sixteen hours. They work and they earn a reasonable wage that means they can

feed their family and not going to get rich. So there's ways in which we can do this while keeping the benefits of that kind of an economy, but also creating systems and creating institutions and practices that benefit the whole. We're living in a time of great change now, much of which has been brought about by the revolution in technology. I know your lecture is called the five turning Points,

but do you feel there's a sixth unfolding right now? Well, when I do the five turning points, a fifth one is the invention of the person computer, the dawn of

the digital age. So I do emphasize this idea that we are living in a dramatic turning point moment and we can't exactly figure out what it is, but it's clear by any measure the unleashing of digital technology beginning with the personal computer in the seventies, and what's that opened up, and how it's dramatically transformed our world in ways it's almost impossible to enumerate them. Your cell phones and computer, your your refrigerator is now a computer, your

car has a computer. I mean it's hard to even imagine, hard to even see what that definition is. And so this digital revolution, not just the computer but then when you think about expensively out into the whole universe of digital technology, the Internet and all of that, when you start stitching all that together, this is a true revolution. Computer technology changes absolutely everything because it's in everything. It

changes communications. If you have a children or grandchildren, you have a fourteen year old, how often does a fourteen year old talk on the phone. They don't talk on the phone. They think of talking on the phone as like writing on with a piece of chalk on a slate. They think. They literally will tell you it's weird. I don't want to say, Well, what are you going to meet up with Julie? I don't know. She hasn't answered my text. Well, you know, there's another button on that phone.

You can just like push it and and Julie's voice will come out of the end of that thing, and um, you could say, speak to her, and then she can speak back to you. In like fourteen seconds, we can solve this whole thing. So it's changed the way we relate to each other. And and also hard to know what the impact is going to be fifty years from now, what we're gonna look back and say about it exactly. I mean, if you and this is true of most

breakthrough technologies. When the telegraph was was created back in the eighteen forties and then spread nationally, people said, this is great. We can get we can get crop prices and a little bit of news back and forth and low and behold it. You know, it dramatically transforms our economy and our way of understanding each other. It shrinks

the country in our conception of ourselves. We can find out about outbreak of cholera in New Orleans in a in a matter of minute, and we can eventually send signals under the water of the Atlantic Ocean when we get a you know, a telegraph cable across there in the eighteen sixties. So it has, I mean one a great example of just to give you all human history, up to the invention of the telegraph, the fastest way

to deliver a message was a galloping horse. That's true in the days of Alexander, it's two in the days of George Washington and everything in between. And then the along comes the telegraph and you can send something instantly,

you know, through time. And if you think about the War of eighteen twelve, we were trying to get stay out of war in eighteen twelve and finally decided that British depredations against our shipping meant we need to declare war against them, So we send a declaration of war across the Atlantic Ocean to them. They have already dispatched a ship with a list of concessions that they're going

to make about scaling back their problem. So these two ships pass each other, one saying we're going to back off. You don't need to declare war. The other ship has already literally already sailed as far as that goes, saying we've declared war. Yeah, And at the back end of the War of eighteen twelve, the same thing happens. Dandrew Jackson wins the Battle of New Orleans after the war or is literally over, but he hasn't been notified that

it's over. So it's an interesting thing to see how technology has impacts and implications way beyond what we think it's going to be useful for. So what do you think people get from a live lecture that they don't get perhaps by watching a video or reading a book

or looking at a website. Well, I mean, certainly there's something about the live presentation that's different from others where they can just even how you use pauses, how you you leave people hanging, or you have ways of double reversing on something like if I'm talking about, you know, the eighteen fifties and the coming of the Civil War, and I say, you know what States writes the cause of the Civil War, and I've always causes a bit of a you know, ruffle in the crowd, and I say,

don't answer that, because you're not gonna upset me. And ultimately we point out that, you know, the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty was the single greatest invocation of federal power over state power to enforced slavery, to uphold and protect slavery, and saying, so Southerners, you know, like states rights, but they only liked it some of the time. They liked federal power a lot of the time when

it served their interests. So ways you can kind of you know, you always you literally see people almost scratching their head, you know, when they when they say, oh my gosh, I hadn't I hadn't thought of that. You know, what do you hope that people will take away as a result of being at your lecture? A lot of things I think the operative thing is that history isn't just some interesting stuff from the past, interesting people, interesting events,

properly understood and properly taught. You know, the power of history gives us insights into how we can understand our own problems in our own world. History doesn't give us lessons per se or a script to follow, but it does tell us how we got to where we are. You know, there's that famous quotation by James Baldwin that you know, history isn't merely about the past. It's actually the great force of history is that it's you know, it's with us now. We all carry history with us,

and so with that insight, history is incredibly beneficial. It is interesting, it's fun to read about battles and read about famous people, but it's also has to have that that element that speaks to us now. There are many people, and I know a few of them, who think we're screwed, who think that America is really in a rough point of its history right now. One of the lessons I took away from your lecture was there have been many other perilous moments when people may have felt in similar

ways to today. Well, I agree. In one of my little maxims is that history keeps you sane because everybody in all kinds of different areas is always thinking, oh that, you know, we're losing our republican soul. Where you know kids today and you know, and they're really upset about all the things that are happening in their in their society, and it's really beneficial to understand to no history, because history tells you that people in nineteen seventy thought the

country was absolutely collapsing. People in the three absolutely convinced that the country was collapsing before their very eyes. And that was during the depression, during the Great Depression. And people in eighteen sixty two said, not only none, as the country metaphorically falling apart, it is literally falling apart in a civil war that is going to destroy the lives of almost a uh, you know, a million people

and untold millions in wealth and so forth. But Americans have found ways to, whether you know, push through those problems and devise solutions to them or or things that ameliorate those problems. So history keeps you saying, because you realize right that times are tough, but I have no choice. I'm living in this era. My children are they going to live in this era, my grandchildren gonna live in

this country. I need to we need to find ways to ameliorate and or remedy the problems that that plague us, just like people have done in the past against great odds. Edward O'Donnell, thanks very much. All right, thank you, it's my pleasure. Thanks for listening. Sign up on our website one day you dot com to become a member and access over six hundred full length video lectures from the world's finest professors presenting their very best talks like the

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