Patty Vest:
Welcome to Sagecast the podcast of Â鶹´«Ã½. I'm Patty vest.

Mark Wood:
And I'm Mark Wood.

Patty Vest:
In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes as we all shelter in place.

Mark Wood:
This season on Sagecast, we're talking to Pomona faculty and alumni about the personal, professional, and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today.

Patty Vest:
Today our guest is historian Joanne Freeman, class of 1984. The class of 1954, professor of American History, and of American Studies at Yale University, and author of among other books, The Field of Blood, Violence in Congress, and The Road to Civil War.

Mark Wood:
Welcome, Joanne.

Joanne Freeman:
Thanks for having me.

Mark Wood:
It's good to have you with us here in cyberspace. I should tell our listeners that this is being recorded on April 21st, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. And I understand that you're right at the epicenter right now in New York City.

Joanne Freeman:
I am indeed in New York City. So there are high chances that a siren will go whizzing by in the background.

Mark Wood:
So how are you getting along?

Joanne Freeman:
Okay. I have not left my apartment in a very long time. It's very un-New Yorky because there's no one on the street and it's actually quiet and, but it's okay.

Mark Wood:
Can you hear birds singing or anything like that?

Joanne Freeman:
No, but I can never hear birds singing anyway. That's not a problem.

Mark Wood:
So let's start at the beginning. Where are you from originally? And how did you end up at Pomona?

Joanne Freeman:
I was born in Queens, New York and I grew up in Westchester County, and then my family moved out to LA. And I was there for part of junior high and high school. And I took I guess the SAT, and I started to get some letters from schools. And one of the letters I got was from Â鶹´«Ã½ which I had never heard of. And I went to my parents and said, "What's Â鶹´«Ã½?" And they said, "That's actually a really good school Joanne. "I said, "Cool, and nice then that they sent me a letter."

Mark Wood:
It's nice that they knew.

Joanne Freeman:
But I did what high school students do and I visited campuses. And I just really liked the feel of Pomona, I liked the people I met in walking around. And I just liked the feel on campus, which I can say was accurate, and which I continued to like pretty much for my entire time there.

Patty Vest:
Tell us about your Pomona experience. What was it like once you got there? And are there any professors that stood out from your time at Pomona?

Joanne Freeman:
Yeah. This is going to sound like a commercial advertisement, but I loved my time at Pomona, I really did. It's a wonderful academic experience, it was a wonderful college to be at. But it was tough academically, and then low-key, and friendly at the same time. And I got spoiled because I was calling... I was an English major, actually, not a history major, although I'm a historian now. And we all refereed to the professors by their first name. And when I went to grad school and immediately started doing that with my professor, they were not amused. Their eyebrows went up, I was like, "Oh, that's a Pomona thing." I was a happy English major, I couldn't believe that I got to be in school and then read novels. I was really close to Martha Andreasen.

Mark Wood:
Oh, as many people were.

Joanne Freeman:
Indeed, she was amazing, I was her research assistant for a while. My first job outside of Pomona was her research assistant. Actually, I went and got myself a car so I could be her research assistant, so she had a big influence on me. And we actually stayed in touch until semi-recently. I was going to do an event in California and I contacted her and she was getting ill, but she wanted to come. So she was amazing and you don't need me to say she was amazing. She had so many people who thought she was a wonderful teacher, she was. And she is one of the people who taught me a lot about being a professor now. But I loved Pomona, I love the fact that I went to a school that had a Sagehen as its mascot.

Patty Vest:
Now that is something we don't hear every day.

Joanne Freeman:
No. You have to have the right sense of humor, right?

Mark Wood:
Yes, you do.

Joanne Freeman:
And when Cecil Sagehen chirps it's a song that we sang and people don't believe me and [inaudible 00:05:00] on all counts.

Mark Wood:
So how did you segue from English to history? And how did you first get interested in history in general and American history in particular?

Joanne Freeman:
I actually was interested in history long before college, probably because of the bicentennial. And it was, early America was everywhere, and I began reading things, and I was probably 14 years old reading biographies and things. And I got very interested in that time period, and at some point. I literally think I started at A with biographies, and then I was working my way through. And I got to Hamilton, and I stopped because he was interesting and strange, and not a lot of people knew who he was at that point.

Mark Wood:
That's changed.

Patty Vest:
Just a little bit.

Joanne Freeman:
A lot. That boy was, that's a whole story as to how that flipped my mentality around because I for decades was the person wandering around, talking about Hamilton saying, "You need to know who this guy is." And now I walk around saying, "He's not so great, calm down."

Mark Wood:
It's hard even to say his name now without hearing music behind it, it's Alexander Hamilton, there's beat to it.

Joanne Freeman:
You can say anything, any word from that play and you could see the smiles on the student's faces. They're like [inaudible 00:06:31]about the Hamilton soundtrack. So I started to read Hamilton's letters because I wanted to really understand him for myself and not have some other person tell me about him. And I became so engaged with reading his writings, and his letters, and things he had written. I didn't want to have someone teach me history because I thought they would take that away from me by teaching you the right way to do it. And so I went to college and refused to take any American History because it was so precious to me, I didn't want a professor to take it away.

Mark Wood:
Need more for a professor to ruin it for you.

Joanne Freeman:
Exactly, and I love reading and I love writing and English major made perfect sense. But I took no American history in college. I should probably not admit that in public, but it's...

Mark Wood:
You did it all in your spare time.

Joanne Freeman:
I did it in my spare time.

Patty Vest:
That's too funny. We did a little bit of research from our alumni directory, and we found a little fact about you that we wanted to ask you about. It lists you as or it says that, "You were a museum interpreter?"

Joanne Freeman:
Yeah.

Mark Wood:
This was just three years after. This is an old directory it's like three years after you graduated and it lists you as museum interpreter.

Patty Vest:
Is there a story there that you'd like to share? Or where did that come about?

Joanne Freeman:
I sometimes talk to my students about the longer view of this because I think it makes students feel better. The fact of the matter is I graduated from Pomona and had a whole slew of jobs in different places trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And I thought I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker. Actually here's a goofy promoter story, I decided I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker, but before that, I just thought I want to work on film and work in TV. And there was a Group W Cable truck in front of Wig, the dorm, fixing something. And I climbed onto the truck and asked the guy in the truck who his boss was, so I could contact him or her and find out if there was a job for me, and I got an internship.

Joanne Freeman:
That's what I thought I wanted to do. And when I graduated from college, lots of people who are documentary filmmakers start out in advertising, and they learn how to make quality film, and then they move. So that's what I thought I would do. And so I in the days before, real computers, I think there was a computer center, but nobody had like personal computers at this point. I got the names of like, 200 advertising agencies all over America, and I wrote a letter. And I went to some woman who had a magical computer, and she wrote 200, she used somehow mixed the addresses with the letter, and I mailed 200 letters out saying, "I'm graduating from college and I'm interested in advertising, and I would love to talk to you." And ended up getting 12 interviews and got a job that way.

Joanne Freeman:
So I did that for a while until my ad agency cut itself in half because it wasn't doing very well. And I got laid off in New York City, it's very exciting, I was on unemployment in New York City. And I went into the newspaper in the days when there were the help wanted ads you see it in the movies all the time you circle with, which I did. And there was a job at South Street Seaport Museum. And they wanted interpreters, they wanted people to teach the public and teach students and basically, it was an outdoor job in New York City. And I got that job. So for a while, that was what I was doing, was telling the story of New York Harbor, to school students, and doing public tours. And doing tours, there's a ship that goes around the harbor, I was on the ship with a microphone talking about New York Harbor. It was a really interesting, fun job. And at the time, I didn't know it but what it was partly telling me was that I was a good teacher.

Mark Wood:
So we live in a time of pretty intense political hatred. And sometimes people will talk about it as if it were something new. But you've been studying that kind of political conflict and even political violence ever since your dissertation, haven't you? Can you talk to us a little bit about how you first got interested in that?

Joanne Freeman:
Sure. I'm particularly interested in the culture of politics, the ground-level reality of politics, but particularly the ground-level reality of elite politics. So if you're in Congress, or if you're in the Capitol, what kind of logic do you use to get what you want done? So not just how are you're voting or what bills are you're voting for, but more than that, what do you do to get people to do what you want? And the first book I wrote was about at the time I called it The Grammar of Political Combat, which meant the kind of unspoken rules of how you engage in political fighting. And in that period, and also in the period of my most recent book, fighting is sometimes really fighting. So sometimes it's saying nasty things in newspapers, and sometimes it's fighting a duel, or caning someone, there's actual physical violence.

Joanne Freeman:
So I think explicitly because things like that seem to make no sense, why would two men, two politicians go out on the field and shoot at each other? Particularly if they're not trying to kill each other. What sense does that make? I really enjoy decoding that and trying to figure out how it made sense to the people at the time. So that's the kind of stuff I write about is how are people behaving? What can I tell about the logic that's driving them? Even if the logic doesn't make sense to me, and then what does that show me about how the period's politics works, that we probably have missed before?

Patty Vest:
Going back to Hamilton for a second. And as we said, it's hard to think about Hamilton without hearing a little bit of music. And you said your students you can see them hearing the lyrics a little bit. Have you seen the musical? And what did you think of it? And did they get history right?

Joanne Freeman:
I have a haunting story. I've got a new story, but it's part of my surreal Hamilton life experience. I've seen the musical many, many times. And the reason I've seen it many, many times is well, it's a two part story. So way back when it was being written when Lin-Manuel Miranda was writing it, I read somewhere that some crazy person was writing a musical about Alexander Hamilton and I thought, not going to happen more than once in my lifetime. So I don't know who this guy is and I don't know what he's doing, but I want him to put Hamilton's real words in his play, because I knew it was based on a biography and I thought, "I have to get this guy the collection of Hamilton's letters that I edited so he'll have real words from Hamilton that he could put in the play.

Joanne Freeman:
So as luck would have it, I had my 50th birthday party in Hamilton's house, because I had done so much work for them over the years, they allowed me to have my 50th birthday party in his house, which was quite something. And a friend of mine was in town, who was really good on Twitter. And I said to her, "How do I get this guy a copy of my book?" And she said, "I'll tweet him." And it's like, "Yeah, you do that, you tweet the play, it'll go really well." And she did. And she said, "My friend has a book she wants to give you. And by the way, she's having her birthday party at Hamilton's house, you should come." And he did.

Patty Vest:
Holly molly.

Joanne Freeman:
Crashed my birthday party. And I gave her a copy of the book. And I said put Hamilton's words in your show. And then he vanished for several years writing his play, and then I saw that it was opening at the Public Theater. And I thought, I don't know if it's good or bad, but I'm going to be there in the audience for sure right when it opened. And I was and they started going through it, and there's a song in it called the 10 Duel Commandments about the rules of dueling. And as the song is going I'm there with a historian friend, first I'm like, "Oh, excellent. It's a rules of dueling song that's right up my alley." And then I'm like, "Yeah." It's a rules of dueling song that is really accurate. And then there's a lyric in the song that comes from a document that I found at the New York Historical Society. And [inaudible 00:15:32] to my friend and I said, "That's my document."

Patty Vest:
He's singing to me.

Joanne Freeman:
Exactly. So I actually did meet him, and I asked him if the song was based on my book, and he said, "Well, yeah, of course." So then I became the wacky historian who has some little bit of her book being sung. [crosstalk 00:15:51] but, I had a number of really interesting conversations with him where he wanted to have me talk about Hamilton as a person, and he kind of wanted to pick my brain. And then because I was the Hamilton expert, organizations and groups began to hire me to talk to them about Hamilton, see the play with them, and then debrief after the play. So I was thinking...

Mark Wood:
Not many people can say that.

Joanne Freeman:
So, it was a wild time because it's a wonderful piece of theater. There's more history in it than one would think would be in musical. Not everything in it is right, and there's certainly a lot that's missing. But my take on it was number one, holy moly, they're singing Washington's farewell address. And the assumption of state debts is in the song, like who [inaudible 00:16:46]. The thing was as a teacher, I thought, "Yeah, there's a lot that's wrong, but what an opening for teaching." My students love it, and I told them okay, now let's talk about what really happened. So it's a great teaching opportunity.

Joanne Freeman:
So there are some historians, I think, who became a little grouchy because of the things that were wrong or missing. I think it's stupendous theater, and I just have seen it always as a doorway into teaching that period. And there were so many more students interested in that period. So many more students even than there were before in my classes, they know things coming in that they didn't know before. And I don't engage so much with little kids, but I know that's true of little kids too. So, to me, it's a great starting point.

Mark Wood:
We were talking about Hamilton and political violence, and the two did come together, he was an early victim of political violence. Can you tell us the details about what really happened there?

Joanne Freeman:
Sure. One of the interesting things about dueling generally is, and this makes perfect sense, I think people assume if two men go out on a field with guns and shooting each other, one must be wanting to kill the other. And that's a very logical assumption. However, duels are about proving that you're willing to die for your honor. So what's important is going there and standing up and being willing to be shot at. And the fact is that in the vast majority of duels, especially between politicians in this time period, no one gets killed. And when someone gets killed, often they get in trouble. Their enemies gang up against them, they have to leave town, their friends leave town, winning a duel is not necessarily about killing somebody. So in the case of Hamilton and Burr, Hamilton in the 1790s, already was very fiercely opposed to Burr's political career, considered him an opportunist who was just out to get what he wanted, and said, and I think 1792 that he considered it, "My religious duty to oppose his career." Which is pretty serious going on. And he was pretty consistent in it.

Joanne Freeman:
And by 1804, he had stepped forward a good number of times to prevent Burr from getting one thing or another. Burr at that point, had been sort of booted out of the vice presidency and had lost the race for governor of New York. So he was desperate to prove himself so that his supporters would still follow him. And he basically said something along the lines of, "I'm looking now, for the next guy who insults me, that's it. I have to do something to defend my name." And as luck would have it, someone came up to him and said, "Did you see what Hamilton said about you?" A letter got printed in the newspaper relaying a dinner conversation at which Hamilton insulted Burr. And so that's ultimately what led to the dueling ground.

Joanne Freeman:
Most affairs of honor and an affair of honor is basically the negotiating without the fighting, without the duel. Most affairs of honor they managed to negotiate their way out. But in this case, each one insulted the other in the course of the negotiating. So then a duel was essential. But I don't actually think Burr wanted to kill Hamilton. Sadly enough, he didn't think a doctor was necessary, he just wanted to get it over with. I think he wanted to prove himself, and his name, and defend himself before his supporters. And, sadly, that's not what happened.

Patty Vest:
The duel of Hamilton and Burr is probably one of the most famous one in American history. Were there any other political conflicts that ended up being settled with a duel?

Joanne Freeman:
Yeah. In the early periods, so in the 1790s, and the very early 19th century. There are there other duels. I think, in a chapter of my first book, where I talk about the Burr, Hamilton duel, I know that there are like 12 other affairs of honor around it, and maybe two or three actual duels around it. So there are a lot more duels than we thought most people think, I guess I would say. And over time it shifts a little bit because over time dueling comes to be seen as a really Southern practice, and Northerners begin to frown on it. It continues on in the south.

Joanne Freeman:
But then, and this is what led me to my second book, Congress becomes really interesting, because in Congress, Northerners and Southerners are in the same room arguing about intense things. And Northerners and southerners don't have the same fighting rules. So then what happens? And that was one of the questions I asked, so what happens then you southerners come in, and they're armed and they're ready to duel. And these Northerners come in and they're not armed, and they're not excited about dueling, what happens. And that became one of the questions that led me into trying to figure out the most recent book that wrote.

Mark Wood:
I read somewhere that you actually learned to shoot an old fashioned dueling pistol. Why did you do that? And what was it like? And you know, what did you learn from it?

Joanne Freeman:
I'm, I want to say Goofy, but I don't know if it's goofy. I like to be in the places that I'm writing about. I like to do the things I'm writing about. I sort of jokingly say that I was training myself as an 18th-century gentleman for a while, took fencing, I took riding lessons, I shot a pistol. I was bad at all of them, so I would have died 5,000 times. 80, surgeries it wouldn't have gone well at all. But with a dueling pistol, I had a friend who had one that we could use and he had a friend that was at on the force of a local police department. And took me out to the police firing range, so we did everything very formally. But we went out to this firing range and shot this dueling pistol. And it was very funny because the police officer kept telling me that I was going to be alarmed, and it was going to be frightening, and I should stay calm, etc. Meanwhile, I'm like, "Give me the gun. I want to shoot a dueling pistol."

Joanne Freeman:
And it was really satisfying in a kind of experiential way. Because what happens is, and it's not a surprise at all, you shoot it and it's like click, flash, boom, and then the smoke comes up. It's exactly what you would think a dueling pistol would do, but seeing it happen right in front of you, there was something that as a writer was very satisfying about seeing that. And that was the first time I'd ever shot a gun and the last time I ever shot a gun. So I can't say I was very good as far as aim is concerned, but it taught me what it felt like, it sounded like, and look like. And then I had a chance to shoot another gun, a real gun, a modern gun. And that gun I didn't like shooting because like the dueling pistol was so strange and unpredictable, a modern gun felt like death in my hand and I didn't like that at all. But the dueling pistol, I probably could have written about dueling without doing that. But boy, I could keep that and use that in writing, and then talking about other people using it.

Patty Vest:
It's all in the name of research.

Joanne Freeman:
Exactly.

Mark Wood:
Right. And dueling pistols were pretty inaccurate. That was one of the reasons probably not many people died because it was very hard to hit someone with a dueling pistol.

Joanne Freeman:
They were relatively inaccurate and the police officer who was with us and who shot the gun, even he, and he was an expert marksman, wasn't absolutely sure where or what it was going to do when he was shooting it. So, they were. And as I suggested before, people weren't trying for the most part to kill each other anyway there are a lot of leg wounds, shin wounds in duels. And so if people are trying to do something, they're obviously not, I don't know if they could aim for the heart and be that accurate, but it doesn't appear to have happened very often.

Patty Vest:
Joanne, you started talking a little bit about your new book, The Field of Blood. Can you tell us more about it? And anything that surprised you, that you discovered while you were researching for this book?

Joanne Freeman:
Sure. My first book was about the grammar of combat in the 1790s, I didn't know what my second book was going to be about. And I had a fellowship with the Library of Congress to try and figure out what I was going to write about, and I started reading people's papers. And I knew that in 1830, it's either 36 or 38, I think 36, one congressman killed another one in a duel. So I thought if I want to understand how things are different between 1804 and this later period, maybe the difference will inform me about something right about, I'll do that. I'll look at that duel when one congressman kills another and people are bound to talk about it. And I read the letters of one congressman from the same state as the fellow who gets killed. And as luck would have it, he wrote almost every day to his wife. And as I was reading his letters, there's a lot of violence in his letters or near violence, people pushing up their sleeve to throw a puncher people actually punching someone.

Joanne Freeman:
And I knew in a general kind of a way that there was some violence in Congress, I didn't have an image of it being that present. And I thought, "Is he entertaining his wife in some strange way? Or is there some other explanation?" So I began to read the papers of other congressmen and note when I saw violence. And I think I had three months at the Library of Congress, and I don't think I opened one collection during that three months that didn't have at least one episode of violence in it. So it was really clear really early on there was a lot of physical violence in the US Congress, that people had sort of acknowledged in a general way was there but hadn't really delved into, and for good reason. Because it was largely essentially censored out of the Congressional Record. So if you're studying the Congressional Record, big fights get mentioned, although sometimes it'll say something like, the house is like a heaving billows and nothing else. And you have to know that means people are punching each other.

Joanne Freeman:
But more often than that, the record says something like the debate became unpleasantly personal at one point. And in one case, he pulled a knife on another Congressman, and it became unpleasantly personal so...

Patty Vest:
So unpleasant.

Mark Wood:
That sounds unpleasantly personal to me.

Joanne Freeman:
Very unpleasantly personal. So once I understood through the private letters what was going on, then I began to actually realize that violence was a part of Congress. And then I really needed to figure out how it was being used. So one of the surprises was, I found, 75-ish physical incidents in Congress, in the House, and in the Senate and a few of them on the street when Congress was in session. And a lot of them were ones that people just hadn't known about before. People know about the caning of Charles Sumner in 1856, and he's an abolitionist senator, and he speaks out against the South. And Preston Brooks the South Carolina representative comes and says his state has been insulted, and one of his kinsmen has been insulted and he violently canes him in the Senate. It's a huge deal and it's a nationwide impact. But there were all of these other episodes besides that. And so that became really what I wanted to do was understand what was the logic of it.

Joanne Freeman:
And some of the logic of it was southerners knew that they were more willing to duel and more likely to be armed the Northerners so that if they wanted to shut down Northerner up, intimidation was a really effective tool. So southerners bullied Northerners, particularly on the subject of slavery, to get them to sit down and shut up and not say things southerners didn't want them to say. And for a time, it worked. Partly because Northerners assumed that their constituents wouldn't like them to fight back, partly because Northerners were worried about their party, and they didn't want to mess up their party by attacking its Southern half. But for a while, that was the dynamic in Congress until basically, Northerners began electing Northerners who were willing to fight into Congress, and the dynamic changeD.

Joanne Freeman:
But the whole dynamic of that was a surprise to me because we just don't picture our institutions that way. And certainly not the antebellum Congress, which we think of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, holding forth in these black fur coats, that's how you imagined that Congress. And the fact of the matter is, they were also occasionally tossing spittoons, and slugging each other, and standing on desks to see what was happening. And there was a lot of stuff going on in there, was much more rowdy and combative institution than a lot of people have understood before.

Mark Wood:
Well, I guess it's a booking segue into today a little bit. Our politics today aren't that violent. But we do have a president who has been accused of inciting his followers to violence, sometimes overtly and a political climate, you know that demonizes people on the other side of the aisle. What parallels do you draw between that time and this time and how is our time different?

Joanne Freeman:
Well, your question is a good one, actually, because of the way you asked it. I think and sometimes I'm very conflicted about the way my book is received. Because some people read it and say, "Oh, we're okay, It's happened before." Or something and that community-

Mark Wood:
Went to a war that time.

Joanne Freeman:
That's right. Wrong response to have.

Patty Vest:
Read the book again.

Joanne Freeman:
There have been other times, obviously, in our history, I'm taking the long historian view. There have been other times in our history that have been fraught, and polarized, and on the edge of violence or even violent. And so, the late 1790s, when the debate was about how democratic our politics would be, and people were in the streets attacking each other, and there was physical violence. That was one of these extreme, I'm American and you're not and you must be destroyed kind of moments in American history. Obviously, the lead up to the Civil War is, another one. I think the civil rights era is another one where they're two very different visions of what America could be and people become physically violent and fighting over them, and each side is convinced the other isn't American. And I think we're in another such moment now.

Joanne Freeman:
And I think all of those moments, whether it's democracy or slavery, or civil rights. And in the current case, I think in a sense, we're talking about citizenship and what it means and who gets it. In all of those cases, we're talking about something so fundamental, that it's almost impossible not to talk about it without feeling that some American essence of something is getting threatened. And those times are fraught, and those times are polarized, and those times I think inch up towards violence. Now, the important thing to keep in mind there is that although we have those moments, no two are the same.

Joanne Freeman:
And so you can't predict, you can't look at this moment and say, "Well, we came out okay before, we even had a Civil War and we're okay now." On one hand, you can't say, "Oh, well, it was a nice Republic while we had it." And give up or you can't say, "It's all going to be okay." I think both of those views are irresponsible. And I think what you have to say is, "We don't know what's coming next, and for that reason, we have to really be watching what's going on around us, and be willing to act to help things move in the direction that we want them to go." So, if looking at the past is a way of reminding us that these moments are fraught moments in which sometimes big decisions can be made, okay, that's useful. And then we have to watch to see what decisions are being worked on and negotiated, and see what we can do to weigh in on those rather than sitting back and watching things happen.

Patty Vest:
What do you think, and we seem to go through these phases where politics get more violent, what do you think that is? Is it because we tend to perceive parties themselves where ideology becomes dogma and party becomes almost like a religion? Or is it something else?

Joanne Freeman:
I think when you just look at party politics, in the early, early republic in the first decade, people didn't think that there could be national organized parties because the idea that any two states would agree on anything, was not likely. So there was no way people were like, "Yeah, sure." People in Massachusetts and South Carolina are going to agree on almost nothing. And they didn't like the idea of organized parties because it's suggested to them that a party is a group of people who are out to get something for themselves and no one else. Which we can debate whether that's a good definition of a party or not. We've always had a party system since that point, at the essence of what we're doing. I don't think party systems are inherently violent or fraught. They do create a team fighting mentality, and in the United States, particularly we've had a couple other parties try to beam in, but it remains pretty much a two-party system.

Joanne Freeman:
But I really do think that when there's a moment of potential change, that can't help but be fraught, and we're in one of those moments. And sometimes those moments happen because they've been building up for decades, sometimes those moments happen because a particular leader pushes things in a particular direction, sometimes both of those things happen. There's no predicting, but this is obviously a moment when people are assuming, and I think rightly so, we're making some pretty major decisions, and really debating some important issues now that could have a major impact on the government and on the country. So in that sense, it makes sense that people are caught up in it, and intense, and stressed, and polarized, and each side accusing the other side of being un-American, that's a long tradition.

Joanne Freeman:
But one key to being a historian is acknowledging that the people you study in the past didn't know what was coming next. I talked about this all the time in [inaudible 00:36:06]. You have to remember contingency, that people existing in 1830 don't know that in 30 years, there's going to be a Civil War. They're percolating ahead and doing whatever they need to do. And to understand what they're doing, you have to try and look from that vantage point. So we're in another moment that's really a moment of contingency, and I don't think anybody knows what's coming next. And I think, how could it not be fraught given that?

Mark Wood:
Going back to your book for a minute where you were just saying about the people that you're studying, they don't know where it's all leading, they don't know how things are going to turn out, we do. But even so, sometimes it's hard to decide how to evaluate those things, isn't it? You look at the violence in Congress before the Civil War, it's easy to condemn it as unnecessary violence. But the same time, and that it led to a Civil War. But in some ways it was a necessary Civil War, it was a war that liberated a huge portion of our population. So I'm curious about how as a teacher you deal with those ethical dilemmas that are still right there, fraught in history, even though we know how things turned out.

Joanne Freeman:
Right. None of those things are easy to deal with, and that's a particularly hard one. And I find it hard to believe that the problem of slavery would have been solved any other way. I don't think you could legislate your way out of that, and I don't think people at the time assumed that was possible. And they kept making compromises thinking that they could, this compromise will make it all okay. And the fact is the ultimate discussion was what kind of a nation was this nation going to be? And was slavery going to be a part of it? So was a war inevitable? I don't know if I would say that. But it's hard to imagine another way that issue is going to be sooner or later discussed, than with something extreme.

Joanne Freeman:
But yeah, I think morality, and change, and progress, and selfishness, and immorality in politics are complicated and bound up with each other. And the person who's your friend today might not be your friend tomorrow. And the thing that seems moral today might not seem moral tomorrow, and it's part of why politics as a historian is interesting to study. It's also why generally speaking politics is complicated and often ends up disappointing people. It doesn't do what you want it to do, because people don't do what you want them to do.

Mark Wood:
Right.

Patty Vest:
Joanne, what are some current projects you're working on?

Joanne Freeman:
Well, I guess I'm working on two things. So on the one hand, I'm working on a book about surprise, Alexander Hamilton. It's not going to be a straight biography, but it's going to be kind of a study of how you find people in the past. And since I know Hamilton so well, he's the guy I'm going to do that with. But I'm at the very beginning of it, so I can't really go into much more detail than that, I'm really playing with ideas. But that's my immediate writing project. The other thing that I began working on in the last few weeks is a history show online that I've begun doing because everyone is in lockdown or close to being in lockdown, and I felt like I needed to do something. Give something to people who were out there trapped in their houses and apartments.

Joanne Freeman:
So as a historian I figured history is what I can give. And so I began this show titled, History Matters (...and so does coffee!). Because it's at one o'clock in the morning every Thursday and I need my coffee. [inaudible 00:40:12] Thursday morning I talk about some document or photograph or person or event or something from the past that I find interesting or exciting or revealing. And I talk about why it's those things, and then I talk about how the lessons we can learn from the past, how we can really apply them to the present. And then I open things up for questions.

Joanne Freeman:
And it's been working wonderfully so far. We've done it twice so far, big groups of people. And so in a sense, it's kind of a casual conversational pseudo-class that's not really like a class. So that it's not just students, it's certainly not just teachers, it's aimed at anybody. And you can beam in and click in and join, you don't have to sign up for anything. I guess I should say where you go, it's nche.net/conversations. The National Council for History Education are hosting it, and so they're the people who allowed it to happen. But anyone who's listening to this, feel free to beam in because it's fun, and it's lively, and it's history. And what else can you do in lockdown? Learn history and apply it to the present. Obviously, I like teaching history.

Patty Vest:
We love it.

Mark Wood:
So on that note, we're going to have to wrap this up. We've been talking with historian Joanne Freeman, class of 1984, the author of The Field of Blood, congressional violence in antebellum America. Thanks, Joanne. This has been fun.

Joanne Freeman:
It's been great having you thank you so much.

Patty Vest:
And to all who stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast the podcast of Â鶹´«Ã½. Stay safe, and until next time.