What's Better Than This: Guys Being Dudes Being Historians

A formal endorsement for my candidacy and case for why history should be your favorite subject in school

Jun 08, 2021

When I was in high school, I chose to write a research paper on the Beats, the Beatles, and the counterculture. Even after I wrote up an entire proposal, I was asked multiple times by my teacher if I wanted to select an “easier” topic to look into. I don’t say this (simply) to flex about my headstrong, persevering nature, but because it is, unfortunately, the thing that still most defines my pre-college history education.

Researching the way the Beat Generation and the Beatles influenced the 1960s counterculture has been done so often that I was told in college it had been done too often to write anything new or inventive about. But I remember being told it’s too complicated for me to look into, just like so many other students today are being told by their parents and their school boards that critical race theory is too complicated for K-12 kids to understand.

While these two subjects are obviously apples and oranges, all attempts made to determine what gets taught in schools show the importance of history in our education system and in our society at large.

I wanted to talk about this with someone who brought the same passion for the past as me, so I reached out to Jason Goodman, ex-history major at Emory, ex-President of TEDxEmory, and guy who is currently trying to figure everything else out.

Jason and I talked about why it’s so important to study history, what he found from studying one major intersection of history and pop culture, and why we’re all so damn addicted to cop shows (additionally, why my mother should watch Watchmen which I’ve literally been recommending for months).

A Very Astute and Well-Researched Response

Emily: Historically speaking, who am I funnier than?
Jason: You know Emily, this is a super interesting, thoughtful, and nuanced question. After a careful analysis of both primary and secondary sources, I would say you’re funnier than most EXCEPT Bo Burnham. His new standup special is fantastic, hilarious and moving.

Try writing a revisionist history of this one, suckers!!!

QAnon Tried to Steal “Save the Children” and Then WandaVision Stole It Back1

As you can probably tell from the intro, I often think about my pre-college history education and all of its positives and negatives. Positive: having a hot take on the I/P Conflict. Negative: not being exposed to enough histories to have a hot take on much else.

While I am grateful that my K-12 history education was more extensive than that of so many others, it took no time at all in college to see how many gaps there in what I had been taught: all of my research was conducted on topics I never knew existed until my sophomore year at Emory.

I’ve been thinking about what having a more robust historical education would do for students for a while now, and believe that everyone is more empathetic to others when they understand the past causes of a current action or reaction. Obviously, bigoted and biased people are still going to exist and suck, but we also know that hatred is learned behavior, so why don’t we just try to stop that shit early?

I wanted to get Jason’s hot takes on K-12 history curriculums and why history is probably the most important subject in school:

Emily: This is such a large question, but why do you think it is so important for everyone —and Americans in particular— to study history?
Jason: I love this question, mainly because there’s a super cheesy answer that everyone always gives.
You ask any 9th-grade history student why it’s important to study history, and they’ll probably answer something along these lines: “History is important because history repeats itself and we need to study history so that we don’t repeat the past’s mistakes.”
Don’t get me wrong, this answer is well-meaning. It’s honorable to believe that we study history in an effort to predict the future and stop future bad things from happening. But the reality is that historians study the past, not the future. And the idea that history repeats itself is far from true. Besides the strange coincidence of a deadly virus upending the world in successive hundred-year periods since 1820, history is rarely cyclical. And while it’s true that history as a tool of remembrance is super important, the idea that we study history to predict the next Holocaust is a bit naive.
So now to get to your question as opposed to just complaining about a personal pet peeve: history is important to study because it informs us about who we are and how we got here.
When we learn about the past and share collective truths, we form some sense of collective identity. This doesn’t mean that history’s purpose is to indoctrinate. It just means that we should understand history as a way to better understand ourselves. Just as you or I might spit in a tube and send it to 23andMe to find out that we are 99% Western European and 1% unknown, studying history is a way to collectively reckon with our past in search of a current identity.
History, at its worst, is dates, people, and events. At its best, history is the study of “why.” Why did this or that happen and what does it mean in the short term and long term. We study history now to better understand the people, circumstances, institutions, and events that got us here.
Emily: Do you have any thoughts on how history is taught at the K-12 level, or any thoughts on how to improve it?
Jason: First off, I appreciate this opportunity to air my many grievances and complaints with history as it is currently taught.
When you ask Little Johnny what his least favorite topic in school is, and he inevitably says history, you should ask why because I would bet $100 that its because he doesn’t like memorizing dates, times, people and events. And I super don’t blame him. History is sucked of all its excitement when its taught without questions.
I first became really interested in history in 10th Grade AP World History when my teacher stated something along the lines of “Eurasian and North African civilizations have historically survived and conquered other civilizations.” To me, that wasn’t interesting until he asked us “why.”
We were subsequently exposed to multiple perspectives arguing that environmental and geographic differences amongst certain civilizations perpetuated and exacerbated existing power dynamics. In short, middle and high school history classes should focus on exploring why certain things happen instead of just repeating the simple fact that things happen. And by doing that, we can allow students to explore multiple historical perspectives instead of just indoctrinating kids with a white, hegemonic view of U.S. history.
It will lead to better analytical skills and a more robust understanding of the nuanced and massively large discipline of “American history.”

It always helps to have friends who share your opinions and can state them way more eloquently than you can.

It’s very hard for me to get a flex on Jason and you’ll all understand why in the next section (hint: his thesis is worth a read), but I had one more question about having a wide-spanning history education and I managed to Be Best at one thing. See if you can catch it:

Emily: While I think I learned about everything at the exact right time in my life, I kind of wish I had learned more about events like the Lavender Scare before I was 20 years old. I also feel like it is a topic more people should learn about. Are there topics in history that you wish you had learned about earlier, or that you wish more people would learn about?
Jason: Ok, well first off: I have no idea what the Lavender Scare is and thus feel totally unworthy of the history degree I received from Emory like 12 days ago.
To answer your question, let me begin by saying that the U.S. education system needs to do a much better job teaching about the horrific and communal acts of racism that engulfed much of the North and South post-Civil War. Too often, history is taught as:
Slavery = Bad
Civil War = Good Guys Won
Segregation = Bad
Martin Luther King and Civil Rights Act = Good Guys Won
And we’re done!
That really removes all the nuance from history and blurs the public-private partnership that has existed since Reconstruction to exclude Black folks from American life. Whether it be the massacres that upended and destroyed Black communities in cities like Tulsa, Wilmington, and Atlanta (here’s a great map of them all), or lynch mobs that killed thousands of innocent Black men and women from 1890 to 1930 and even later, or the construction and development of highways which destroyed Black communities.
These examples and many more are often not explored in your typical high school history classes and stuff I didn’t know about until college after taking many history classes as a history major.
That’s really bad. Like super duper bad.
So before we get to fun, niche events that more people should be taught, I think we need to teach really important historical trends and events that have shaped America’s political, geographic, economic, racial and social landscape in massive ways.

Credentials Schmedentials

While a part of me does want to have an Oprah and Meghan Markle-esque sit down with Marjorie Taylor Greene for this newsletter one week, I only invite people I consider brilliant (much less cognizant of reality) to answer my silly little questions each week.

Because of this, I can’t go on any further without giving Jason and his research the proper hype:

Emily: Can you tell everyone what your thesis was about?
Jason: My thesis was a cultural history that explored youth gang films and the ideologies they perpetuated. People may think, “that sounds like a media studies thesis, not a history thesis.” To that I would say, you’re not entirely wrong.
However, my thesis was ultimately a history thesis because it uniquely used movies as a primary source. Instead of looking at government memos, or diaries or speeches, I explored the the years leading up to the era of mass incarceration through the movies that made harsh policing more acceptable in the popular consciousness.
Ultimately, the thesis of my thesis is that these movies that centered youth gangs from 1973-1994 perpetuated conservative explanations and solutions to urban gang crime that ultimately lead to the punitive turn and passage of the 1994 Crime Bill.2

See? Brilliant.

In order to pivot to our next conversation (because this newsletter is nothing if not a well-oiled machine), I asked Jason:

Emily: In your opinion, do you think pop culture does history a net service or disservice to how we learn about and process our history?
Jason: To start, I’ll say that pop culture that deals with the past is super great and cool and I’m all for it when it is done right. However, I am academically much more interested in using popular culture as a primary source for historians to look back on.
If you think about it, historians have literally no way to know how the masses felt about something that happened at a particular moment. Especially in the pre-Twitter period (~99.99% of human history), the only way we knew how the masses felt was through polling and even that is pretty much strictly political. So what’s really cool about popular culture is that it is consumed and produced by lots of people, and thus, can be mined as a historical source to better understand how the general public felt during certain historical moments.
In that sense, popular culture is a MASSIVE service and tool for historians to understand the past. In about 30 years, I’m sure I (or hopefully an unfortunate undergrad research assistant of mine) will be scrolling through TikTok archives to better understand the discourse around #BlackLivesMatter and the ways that social media figured into the larger cultural movement. And that’s great! The more tools we have to understand the way people thought, the better picture of the past historians can paint.

Obviously, We’re Regina King Hive Here

Oh, look: the next conversation!

I am a woman of the people and so I asked Jason what kind of conversations he wanted to have around our larger chat about history and so, like a detective in a crime show that just cannot let an inkling go, we decided to go deeper into under-discussed histories and pop culture.

(Disclaimer: I have not seen Mare of Easttown, so this was very much an Olivia Benson reference. I only have the emotional capacity to be concerned for one fraught female detective at a time.)

Emily: I think the most prominent example in my mind of historical pop culture is Watchmen which is standing out to me even more since we just had the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Can you speak a little on both the significance of that event in American history and how the show helped start a conversation around a moment in history that has often been forgotten?
Jason: Watchmen was massive. It was the first time I can remember seeing the events of the Tulsa Race Riot (or any race massacre for that matter) discussed or depicted in the larger discourse. Like I alluded to previously, these race “riots” are part of a larger post-Reconstruction history that is often ignored.
In cities across the country, white men saw newly emancipated Black folks as a threat. They not only were free but they were gaining economic and political power. And because of this new threat, white folks in cities across the country destroyed Black communities that were on the precipice of accruing real social, political and economic capital. Thus, the effects were devastating.
To be sure, this did not only happen in Tulsa. These outbursts of racial fury occurred in dozens of cities, north and south, during the post-Reconstruction era and they represent a history that has been swept under the rug for far too long. This is why Watchmen was massively important. To my understanding, it depicted a historical event that too few people know about. This is film and television at its best: exciting, intriguing, honest and informative.

Emily: Building off of this Watchmen convo, I want to know your hot takes on cop shows. We've been in this moment in history over the course of the past year where we've been excavating and frankly talking about problematic histories —like that of policing— for seemingly the first time. There are SO MANY shows about the police that are so popular and I can't tell if their prevalence helps or hinders the conversations around reform and abolition. What are your thoughts on this?
Jason: Ok, so I love this question but let’s start here: there are so many cop shows on and they are MASSIVELY popular. In 2020, more people watched the season finale of NCIS than the final game of the World Series, and it wasn’t particularly close.
If we look at the “Top 100 most-watched primetime telecasts of 2020,” the shows included that are not live events are the following: NCIS, FBI, 911: Lonestar, FBI: Most Wanted, Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., The Good Doctor, This is Us, Chicago Med, and Young Sheldon. Beyond those shows, the Fall 2021 lineup for CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox includes The Rookie, the entire Law and Order franchise, SEAL Team, S.W.A.T., The Equalizer, NCIS: Los Angeles, Magnum P.I., Blue Bloods, and CSI: Las Vegas.
This is all to say that people love watching good guys lock up bad guys. It’s perverse and exciting. And before you put your coastal elite hat on and say “well I don’t watch any of that garbage,” Mare of Easttown, a COP show, was incredibly popular in liberal elite circles and many people love the avalanche of true crime docuseries that have occupied a massive space on every streaming service.
Basically, crime shows —fiction and non-fiction— have occupied a massive space in popular culture for decades and these crime shows usually perpetuate false perceptions about the valor of policing and the hideous nature of criminals. They often focus on individualistic causes of crime rather than institutional causes, and portray police officers as operating under a pretense of good faith in order to solve crimes.
On the non-fiction side, true-crime docuseries like Tiger King paint criminals as “other” in an act that reaffirms the viewer’s own normativity and shows like Cops invite audiences to view violent (and often illegal) police tactics as normal and acceptable.
Popular culture is political. Everything perpetuates SOME ideology, even if it is unintentionally accented in certain stories. Just like eating cake, too much of anything is bad for you. It’s fine to watch crime shows but you should understand why they are potentially problematic before you do so and maybe (just like anything) consume them in moderation.

My comment about only being able to have one weathered and wise female detective in my life was actually one of those casually stated jokes that actually carries a surprising amount of social awareness such that it stays with you for a while after and you begin to formulate your own thoughts on the subject —how many pensive yet quietly hopeful detectives do you have enough space in your heart and mind for— at hand.

Anyway, the people had to know:

Emily: I think my mom would really like Watchmen but she refuses to watch it because she's "too busy." What's your one-sentence pitch for why she should really make the time to watch it with me?
Jason: Watchmen is 9 hours of television, which means if you watch Watchmen, that’s 9 hours of invaluable quality mother-daughter time, and that really should be enough!

Ok so maybe asking this was a light abuse of power but he is only stating facts, Danni Lee!!

Looking Forward to the Future But My Eyesight is Going Bad

I really just had so much fun reading through all of Jason’s responses and wanted to let them all speak for themselves without adding too much stand-up in the margins. But in trying to keep the closing super simple, I ended up asking one of the biggest possible questions:

Emily: Who has an obligation to study and discuss history? Do we all?
Jason: Great question. I think we all have an obligation to be informed! But if you’re into science and cells and stuff I don’t think you need to be an expert on history in addition to that.
During the past year, it has become abundantly clear that we as a society must reckon with the horrific histories that have brought us to this point. So yes, we can’t be ignorant however I don’t think its incumbent on everyone to be an expert.
Emily: If people feel like their historical education has some gaps in it, how would you recommend they begin to fill those?
Jason: I will take this time to suggest some really great books cause the BEST thing anyone can do to learn about history and be more informed is to read. Disclaimer: I am primarily interested in 20th century U.S. History so these books will reflect that.
City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles by Kelly Lytle Hernandez
Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew
The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff
Podcasts:
Buried Truths by Hank Klibanoff
Stuff You Missed in History Class hosted by Holly Frey and Tracy V. Wilson
In general, if you want to know more just read and listen and watch stuff. There’s tons of accessible historical work out there!
Emily: If you could go back to one historical event, where would you go?
Jason: History is generally a bad time and I think I study the past to escape the present. So by the nature of your question, I’d like to keep the past in the past and not ever go back to it.

Personally, I’d go back to the 1970s. Now that I know everyone else’s mistakes, I’d for sure manage my way into Studio 54 because, in my heart of hearts, I’m just a disco-loving clout chaser.

But that’s just me.

Thank you to Jason for being so supportive of this whole E4P enterprise and for being game enough to answer all of my questions!

Jason: Thank you so much, Emily, for having me as a guest on your Substack. It was super fun to talk to you and your audience about history and movies and TV (all of my favorite things) and I’d like to officially, on the record, give a strong endorsement to you, Emily, on your presidential run!