Q&A: Meet Colorado’s new state historian

SS: Yeah, I think about that all the time. The privilege of being a teacher is that you get to work out that conflict every day. In other words, there hasn't been a year in my 30 years of teaching where I haven't had students who aren't both ardent patriots and ardent critics. We're all in the same room, and we sort of learn from one another.

I have come to really passionately believe that students and the public want the complicated story. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean being a relentless critic and focusing only on, as you put it, the shameful moments. It means that the full story is more complete and fascinating. It's more satisfying. In other words, I've never found my students to want some kind of sanitized picture, but I also am pretty careful to remind them that this is the only country in the history of the world based on an idea. And that we always fall short, but the idea is pretty remarkable.

SS: Yes, there's one data point that really brought that home to me when I was studying history as an undergraduate at Berkeley. A teacher said to me, ‘If you want to think about the American Revolution, just remember, the population in the colonies was divided. A third loyal to the crown, a third patriots who wanted independence and a third in the middle that wanted to compromise.

I know that sounds simple, but that blew my mind. In 1976 I was eight and I was thrilled to be part of my little local town's bicentennial. And I just assumed that there was this mass movement toward independence, that it was consensus. But learning that one data point, and I use that when I talk to students about the revolution all the time. To me, that was really a great entree into exactly what you just said, people are human. They are reckoning with circumstances that we can barely imagine. So we should start with empathy. That doesn't mean sympathizing necessarily with choices they make, but it does mean that you can never fully capture at any moment the challenges and pressures that people in the past were up against. The best you can do is not to prosecute the past, but to sort of try to understand the causation that's involved.

SS: That's a tough question. History is constantly being generated. History Colorado is actually responsible for that like finding new historical sites. I have begun to see the plans that they have in store for the 250th. And I think there are lots of things that they're planning a massive state fair, a Garden of Heroes, which I thought was sort of interesting.

The erasure is complicated, I don't think I have any great insight. That is a good question for a public historian. 

SS: Not to sound too Pollyanna, but I think it's an entirely positive one. All I mean by that is I see my job as first and foremost to share my passion around history, and to facilitate any public interest in the past. Whether that's to bring texture and concrete examples, evidence, artifacts, to their attention or whether it's bringing in new populations like K-12 students. I work a lot with teachers and, so I don't see this year as anything different than what I've been doing for a few decades, but maybe a slightly larger audience.

SS: It started pretty late. I was not a person who grew up with much interest in history and thought it was pretty passive, a record of dates. It came extremely late when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, and I had a class where the entire class was American History. But the entire reading list was documents and sources. So we learned about the Gilded Age in the Progressive era through cartoons, artwork, plays, songs, speeches, letters, newspaper headlines. And it blew my mind. And our job was to look at the sources and then try to tease out what was happening, but without a textbook. We had professors who were guiding us and were the experts, but it was about putting the sources at the forefront and then working back from them. And I felt particularly in love with political cartoons and newspapers. So I would say it was the primary sources themselves.

SS: Given my interest in the 19th century, I was absolutely floored to find out that Colorado was created in the midst of the secession crisis. And just as the nation was descending into war. And that Colorado achieves statehood just under the wire to send their three electoral votes into the presidential election of 1876, which became a tie. And so the most contested election in American history has to do with Colorado. Statehood was achieved in August. The election is in November. And so that's this wonderful story because it gets contested. It gets thrown to a commission. They ultimately determine the outcome. And it's a great compromise where a Republican will stay in the White House. But in exchange for that, Reconstruction ends and the troops are pulled out of the South. It's the very last moment of the American Civil War. And that leads to a kind of long period of Jim Crow.

SS: I would say in my capacity is teaching undergraduates the most important thing is that it helps them understand the production of everything around them. So everything we see, whether it's the houses we live in or the jobs we have. I remember being blown away when my grandparents sat me down, when I was in college and explained their own history in the Depression and World War II, and I felt this moment of being actually connected to the past for the first time. Because growing up in Los Angeles, you don't always get the sense that you're part of history, and of course you are. 

So that the thing I want my students to see is not necessarily how it produces them, but that everything around them is no accident. There are forces involved. There are events involved. 

[History] is also just sheer fun. It's an endless source of fascination. I was fascinated by my grandparents, their old photos, their old artifacts, the way they lived. So I would just say the sheer interest in it. No, that's not a great answer for why it has to be necessarily part of the curriculum. But I think that is the first answer, which is that it helps people understand where all of this comes from.

It's also a tremendously good reminder that people have been where we are before. Whether you're talking about periods of economic decline or political polarization or gender conflict, this is not the first time, it feels like it to us. It feels like we're constantly in uncharted territory. And that's not to say we have to look back because it's always going to be different. It's always an echo. It's not a repeat, but it is reassuring to me to kind of think about the long view.