A History Of The United States

A History Of The United States | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"The Revolution shaped the future of the country significantly less than the Constitution did. I mean, revolution is literally that, a revolving, a turning of the wheel. And Americans understood their revolution as a revolution that needed to stop. And in particular, they looked to France, whose revolution did not stop, and the wheel kept turning. The Revolution got bloodier and bloodier, and more and more anarchic. In the United States after the revolution, there was an, which was itself quite radical, there was an extraordinary amount of momentum to stop the wheel from turning anymore, and to kind of right the political order, and that momentum was all that was what led to the drafting and then the ratification of the Constitution in 1787.

The Constitution is not radical in the way that the Revolution was radical, the Constitution looks for stability. It's radical in the sense that it is an entire rejection of aristocracy. It is far more democratic than any frame of government anywhere else in the world at that time, but it is conservative in the sense of establishing three branches of government of course, along the order of the mixed constitution in England, that looks for stability in addition, attributing political power across groups… [The authors of the Constitution] all believed that it was essential to study history to even consider yourself as eligible for public service of any kind. And the, you know, the chief architect of the Constitution, James Madison of Virginia, spent a great deal of time reading history, and particularly making an inventory, essentially of all of the fates of every other Republican government in all of human history. Each of the drafters of the Constitution, each of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention made some version of that study...

‘How much should we need to understand the role of the media and of communications more generally, when we think about the history of the US?

‘I think it's very useful to have a few more data points then say the last five minutes which is I think what most of us walk around with in our head, or maybe you know, the time horizon that most of us carry around in our head about the influence of technologies of communication on political arrangements, maybe begins with, you know, the first iPhone or with the founding of Facebook, you know, these are developments in the last 15 years. I sought in this account to offer a time horizon that begins in 1492, with Christopher Columbus and his quill and his journal of  printed you know, a paper on which he writes down what he what he sees and what he wants to report to the king and queen of Spain, that technologies of communication are and have always been crucial tools for the exertion of power. They have been tools both of tyrants and of democrats, people seizing power from tyrants so that when we think about you know in the US, oh, Black Lives Matter is a movement of the social, of social media, wouldn't have been possible without social media.

There are analogues throughout history that have that kind of emancipatory utopianism to them. Frederick Douglass in the 19th century, an escaped enslaved person who became a famous orator and one of the most important statesmen of the United States in the 19th century, believed that photography would end slavery, that same way, the sort of Black Lives Matter advocates think that social media and posting images of police brutality has this, you know, technologically carries this political capacity to upend existing political arrangements. Douglas thought that about photography, that if people could only see black men and women as they truly are, the way that a photograph captures you, as opposed to a racial caricature, which is really all that Americans had seen, White Americans had seen, that this would this would be kind of irrefutable evidence of the equality of all people’...

I tend to find solace in history because I genuinely think that you, I didn't want to die in childbirth, die of malaria, walk around with smallpox, pox on my face, see my children die in infancy, not be able to vote, like there's very little when you look at the past, there's like appeals to me. So I don't, I don't find solace in, I don't, I'm not nostalgic about the past. And I find that history that pedals nostalgia to be quite insidious. At the same time, I do find solace in the past because I see that people face struggles, not all together unlike struggles that many people are facing today, and nevertheless found a way through them."