To Whom Do We Serve

Every now and then I get requests to speak to college classes about what I do as a historian and of course, HATM. For me this is a lot of fun. My first love is as an instructor and if I’m honest about my skill sets I’m a far better teacher than I am as a thinker. But thinking draws me here today.

One of the outstanding students in Erica Edwards’ course at Francis Marion University yesterday asked me how I was able to conduct interviews despite differences in culture, age, race, generation, etc. In other words, how do I bridge the divide between myself and another person and earn their trust? I sat on that question—a really good and important one—for what felt like an hour, though my reply came in about two seconds. I gave a seven word response:

Remember that our work is a service.

Human life is short. We get maybe 80 years if we’re lucky. Then we’re off to the next stop, or none at all. (I was once Southern Baptist, and believed in a sort of place. Now I’m just a southern man, baptized by the experiences of life. I don’t really have an opinion on things I cannot understand. Such as why people drink Pepsi or live in Indiana. But I digress.) What lives past our physical selves are our children and descendant generations and the memories of the lives we lived. That’s about it.

As historians we deal in legacies. Folks, I see a lot of bad apples out there. People who would corrupt the lived experiences—the struggles, the triumphs, the heartbreaks, the failures, the lessons—of those who came before us and use those perversions for their own aims. One of the things I tell students in classes in that we must be on the front lines. That is where the fight is. The costs are too great.

Historians must be guardians of legacies—servants of the past so that we can protect our common futures. It is a good think to want to know more about the past because we find it interesting or we are curious or even because history is cool. But I hope that in grounding our motivations on serving other people we can do even better jobs telling their stories.

I thought of this the rest of the day right before recording the next pod with Brett Rushforth. Maybe it’s kismet that we’d scheduled the afternoon to talk about his favorite movie, 2009’s Up in the Air. Before I’d gotten to know him, Brett had always appeared to be one of the cool kids at the lunch table. He’d written this just terrific book about Indigenous slavery in New France and was a professor. In my field, Brett was and is a rock star. We’d crossed paths once when he visited Minnesota but only briefly said hello. But in the intervening years through the power of mutual connections and yes, twitter, became friends. When I was struggling to figure out how to be both a dad and historian, Brett had reached out to me and gave to me the assurances I needed to continue forward. He’s one of the many people I see who are daily acting in service of one another via the act of being his genuine self. Frankly, I had no idea how we’d tie his work to Up in the Air, but my goodness, the way he did it kinda blew me away. We talked for an hour and a half and could have gone longer. Apologies in advance to producer Fletcher Powell.

*I promise Brett did most of the talking.

I suppose what I want to close with today is the idea of actively remembering that we are in service to one another. We will fail at this. Often. But I see so many of you through your actions working in this very endeavour. It’s encouraging. Keeps me wanting to fight.