
After opening remarks at the Symposium, Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors responded to questions from the panelists and members of the audience. This program aired November 1st on C-SPAN BookTV.
| “Does NLHA depend on an American victory in the Cold War and thereby has a kind of ‘Whiggishness’ built into it even though it defies any sort of Whiggishness?” | George Blaustein |
“We don't need to burden ourselves (since this is a History panel) of whether or not something is aesthetically good enough for inclusion but I do want to ask each of you to elaborate a little more on the idea of a historical canon.” |
Ted Widmer |
Peter Galison |
Farah Jasmine Griffin |
Joyce Chaplin |
| “I worried this would be like many academic publications of the last 20 or 30 years in which there's either anger at the United States and its story or a celebration of cacophony that doesn't allow for the idea of a meaningful nation with a real history that we can talk about. I do think we avoided these dangers.” | “The fall of the Berlin Wall didn't make this book, [rather] the lowering of another kind of disciplinary wall in the University; the sense that America doesn't either have to be defended or decried; the High/Low distinction not something that has to be enforced here to establish the validity of the nation-state.” | “Another way of addressing these concerns was to have ‘very important historical moments’ written by people who the original authors could never have imagined writing about them. I remember deciding to ask Obama to write an entry on Lincoln (this was early on, when he could have actually done it!).” | “On the history of interdisciplinary history: I think there was a nanosecond where Cultural History was thought of as a mash-up of History and Anthropology. And I think that moment actually mattered and really helped condition historians to think about culture as a text.” |
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| Emilil Bizzi (3 min.) | Werner Sollors (15 min.) | Greil Marcus (14 min.) |
photos by Martha Stewart, audio courtesy of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Listen to Laura Miller on NLHA on NPR’s On Point(or read a complete transcript)
(see also The Prehistory of the History, Lindsay Waters' talk at the NLHA Symposium)