A Teach-In for History

Forget the Africa you think you know. This is Radio Workshop. Real stories about young Africans. From celebrating queer love in Uganda. Man, have you been in love? When you're in love, it's just like you're on a cloud. To Zimbabweans chasing opportunities in the UK. I was so disappointed when I got here.

The world's youngest population, one story at a time. The Radio Workshop Podcast. This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMeo. A flyer wheat pasted to a plywood fence around a construction site or...

staple gun to an events board in a college town, or slipped under a windshield wiper, or handed out in a street corner. In 1993, I was 19. I was driving across country in the 1985 Chevy Chevette. light blue with my friend jen from high school wanted to have my car out at college in santa barbara she wanted to see someone in sonoma but mostly just sounded fun to her and so we set out one summer morning from providence

A full tank of gas, some snacks, a bunch of CDs. Digwheel planets hitting as we hit the on-ramp to the George Washington Bridge. My plan was to make it to DC by nightfall and walk around a bit. Then we'd head off and stay in some AAA-approved motel in Virginia somewhere, however far we got. It seemed like what one should do at the start of one's first cross-country drive. It felt very American.

We'd already listened to America by Simon and Garfunkel while counting the cars in the New Jersey Turnpike and Fugazi and Rites of Spring as we looked for parking near the National Mall. And the Washington Monument went from a sunset peach... to a matte white, and then shone in the floodlights in the night, and it was beautiful. It was good to be there. It was a good idea. We walked around in the dark among the monuments and the tourists.

our fellow Americans. And he learned a couple of things. One, I had known factually. It was there in the AAA guidebook, and my folks had also told me that you could just walk around at the mall at night for free. The museums weren't open, but the Capitol steps were, and you could just climb up and turn around and see it all. The whole of the mall. But I didn't know how it would feel. To walk end to end. The broad lawns in shadow.

Up and over the rise at the center with the Washington Monument. Then the reflecting pool, shallower and a little grubbier in person. Then you could just walk up to a giant Abraham Lincoln aglow at the other end. stand around with the Cub Scout troop as their den mother tries to explain what she finds so beautiful about the second inaugural, etched there in the wall. I knew we would be able to do that, but I didn't know what it would mean to me.

To sit on the marble steps with a pretty girl in the summertime. People from all over the world, all around us. Buying little copies of the Constitution. Soft serve ice cream. A twist with rainbow sprinkles. A disabled vet manning the POW MIA info station, even at night. A Lyndon LaRoucher, they were around then, trying to tell folks about the gold standard and intercontinental land bridges and whatever else those guys were on.

We walked around, stumbled upon the World War I memorial, unlit and unmajestic and unworthy, crumbling in a corner. The Vietnam Memorial that I'd seen on the Today Show and read about in class. Stunning in real life. Found the name of a relative of Jen's. An uncle, I think. I wish I remembered. Ran my fingers over it.

Now remember that. You can still feel it. We saw the White House, saw the security gate manned by a serviceman, by the garages where senators would park their cars, and then go inside and make history, literally. pass laws, make appropriations, name post offices, launch cruise missiles happening right inside that building. And there were two thoughts that came to me on that night as we walked around.

two epiphanies that have stayed with me ever since. The first was this, that for all the activity happening over there in the White House, or in the Capitol, or the Commerce Department, and for all the monuments and the museums, The mall itself was historical. It was the embodiment of the history that maybe I cared most about. Because when we sat there on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, we were sitting where Marian Anderson once sang.

where she sang because she was black and the Daughters of the American Revolution wouldn't let her sing in a place called Constitution Hall. We sat near where MLK spoke. We walked on the mall where those who had come from all over the country to hear him had stood. Crane their necks to catch a glimpse of him, as he did. We walked where people protested the war that would take Jen's uncle or relative. I wish I remembered. Walked where the Bonus Army camped in the 1930s.

made fires to stay warm, where the AIDS quilt was pieced together, where the suffragettes marched in white. And the second thing, the second epiphany, was that it mattered. It was important. It was beautiful. That it was free. That you could just drive up, feed a meter, and walk around anytime in a place that wasn't just iconic or emblematic of the United States and see the vistas you knew from postcards or...

from b-roll and major motion pictures or posters in your U.S. history classroom. You could walk around a place that embodied the best of that country, where people gathered, where they spoke their mind, spoke truth to power. Or just passed out their little flyers with urgent truths or crackpot delusions? Either?

where parents put strollers, where stone college kids laid on their backs a gate looking up at a monument dedicated to this guy who once really lived and now there was this obelisk and a city and a state. bridge and all of these things named after him and where veterans could find the names of their friends who had died in a war a decade before run their fingers across them it was all free and we were all free to be there to take from the experience whatever we would

Because it was America. It was July of 2002 when I was 28 and my friend Aaron and I were driving across country in a 1997 Saturn sedan. I was moving out to L.A. And we did the same thing that Jen and I had done nine years earlier. We started our trip by driving to D.C. We left from Brooklyn this time, so we got there earlier while the museums were still open. There was a festival happening on the mall.

celebration of the peoples of the silk road the tagline for the event was connecting cultures building trust and both of those things are nice but it was also strange to have the mall filled with chintzy temporary architecture designed to look like places along the old trade route that connected Europe and Asia, including Afghanistan, which we were bombing right then. We went to the National Museums of Art and Natural History, Portrait Gallery.

Saw Rothko's and Cassats and Bierstadt's and Durand's, Ashcan school paintings. Dresses worn by first ladies, taxidermied elephants, extinct birds, tiny models of Mayan villages. Mississippi River Boats. Went to the Museum of American History, saw a couple of Muppets, a hat worn by Abraham Lincoln, a chair I knew instantly was Archie Bunker's, though I don't think I'd ever seen the show, artifacts from architects of the nation.

Senate leaders, justices, industrialists, of leaders of movements, religious, philosophical, artistic, that were once so vital and pressing and just aren't anymore. Some muskets. Various agricultural technologies. The first car to make the first cross-country road trip. And then unannounced, just there, in a case, the table that was once in the Kansas home of Lucinda Todd.

at which the lawyers and activists sat the first time they kicked around the idea of what would become Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. It was overwhelming and kind of preposterous, this mishmash of artifacts.

of institutions within this larger institution of the Smithsonian, with no coherent narrative or ideology or aesthetic. American history... across disciplines, spread out across buildings, built at different times, under different mandates, under different administrations, during different periods of plenty or scarcity, under different leaders with different visions and management styles and tenures and portfolios.

incoherent, arcane intellectual projects made manifest. Some fantastic buildings, some eyesores, some rooms, whole wings so perfectly considered and curated, some pure chaos. Some on the cutting edge, some comically dated. The work of different curators, different tastes, different ideas, often in conflict, progressive, regressive, straight racist, righteous, all of it. all at once. I'm not sure I've ever found a better metaphor for America itself than the museums on its National Mall.

It is 2025 and I am making another trip to Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian, in the way it has been allowed to conduct the work of history and tell accurate stories about America, is under direct attack by the Trump administration. In March of this year, the president signed an executive order directing Vice President J.D. Vance through his role on the Smithsonian's Board of Regents.

to work to, quote, remove improper ideology, unquote, from the museums. As the year has gone on, there have been specific measures to remove displays in language that tell the truth about slavery, and discrimination tell... Historically accurate stories about the contributions of transgender people, immigrants, or talk about the impeachments of President Donald J. Trump, and more. And this infuriates me. And so on Sunday, October 26th...

of 2025. I will be on the National Mall by the Museum of American History, along with other writers and historians, including my friends and colleagues Kelly Carter Jackson, Nicole Hemmer, and Jody Avergan. of the show This Day, also of Radiotopia. We are organizing and holding a teach-in in the spirit of and the tradition of the academics and writers who played principal roles in the protest movements in the 1960s and early 70s.

We will be reading stories and conducting lectures about the very things that are currently under attack. The kinds of things the Smithsonian has in the past decades done so much work to tell. and to teach about so well. The history of its nation and all its complexity. Real history, accurate history. We will be there from sunup to sundown. We will be following all applicable laws laid out for gatherings on the mall.

Because those laws are righteous and have created this thing that is called America's front lawn. And we are gathering there and speaking our minds and calling out injustice. And you can come to listen. Because this is America and we are free people.

This episode of the Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMeo. The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw as a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent, listener-supported podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you want more information about the teach-in, go to thisday.org. That is the website of my sister Radiotopia program, This Day. They have an easy pop-up thing that I was not able to replicate on my own website.

And you can just click and you can find any information you want about it there if you happen to be in the area. You can also find me on Facebook at The Memory Palace or on Blue Sky at Nate DeMeo and on Instagram and threads at The Memory Palace Podcast. And you are always welcome and even encouraged to drop your line at nateatthememorypalace.org. We'll be back with a new regular story in a couple of weeks. And in the meantime, take care of each other. Radiotopia.