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Nov. 28, 2025 21:19-22:01 - CSPAN

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peter slen

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unidentified		Thank you very much, gentlemen, and looking forward to a great rest of your day.
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peter slen ▲ ● ▼		And now on your screen is Jason Steinauer.
		He is the author of this book, History Disrupted, How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past.
		He describes himself as a public historian, which is what, Mr. Steinauer?
unidentified		Someone who has a background in public history, museums, archives, libraries.
		I worked at the Library of Congress for a while.
		Spent my entire career thinking about how the public interfaces with history, learns about history, and how we as historians can better communicate history with public audiences.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Well, we are moving into America 250, and C-SPAN is the official media partner of the America 250 Commission.
		But how are you viewing this?
		Is it a celebration?
		Is it a commemoration?
		Is it an exploration?
unidentified		Yeah, so for viewers who are unaware, 1776 to 2026, 2026, 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
		Obviously, American independence comes later.
		The war with Great Britain doesn't end for another few years.
		The Constitution comes after that.
		So this anniversary is, first and foremost, about a declaration.
		And so I think that's interesting for us to think about in 2026.
		A declaration about who we are, who we want to be, who we've been, where we're headed in the future.
		That's kind of how I've been thinking about it.
		I think it's a good moment for introspection.
		I think it's a good moment for looking backward, taking stock of where we are now, and looking forward, thinking about what type of country and nation we want to be in the future.
		And I think that could take a number of different approaches.
		There could be celebrations, there could be commemorations, there could be chances for more solemn occurrences.
		I think part of the beauty of this country is the diversity and the complexity with which we honor and think about our past.
		And I think this is a great opportunity for a wide variety of commemorations, celebrations, etc.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		So it's been going on already in 2025, the American 250 commemorations, celebrations, et cetera.
		We've had a commemoration of the Army, the Navy, the Marines.
		What's your take?
		And those have been very, you know, very patriotic, very rah-rah.
		But what's your take on those?
unidentified		Well, I think in general, you know, I've been thinking about AmeriCoup 250 as sort of an occasion to get really local.
		I would encourage people to think local.
		There's been a lot of conversation over the past decade about the American national story.
		And certain political actors have tried to persuade us to see the national story this way or that way.
		But America is a very, very diverse and complex place.
		And there are millions of American stories.
		And I think this upcoming anniversary or the anniversary that we've already begun is an opportunity to drill down and be very local in how we think about this.
		And, you know, for a viewer, in a very practical way, you know, there are 21,000, more than 21,000 history organizations in the United States, in every community across the country.
		There are local history museums, local libraries, local archives, historic cemeteries, historic markers, historic buildings that tell some aspect of the American story.
		And I think 2026 is an opportunity to really, number one, support those places by attending, contributing, donating if you're able.
		But number two, to really connect with some of those places in our own communities.
		And so, yes, there will be national celebrations.
		There'll be a national celebration on the mall.
		There'll be a national celebration in Philadelphia.
		We've already had parades, as you mentioned.
		But for me, I think the beauty and the value of this coming year is really the opportunity to connect with some of these local stories and to see American history in all its complexity, in all its diversity, in all its nuance, and even contradictions.
		I think some of that displays itself really well in our local history organizations.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		When you look back, Mr. Steinhauer, at the bicentennial celebrations, what's your take on those?
unidentified		Well, the bicentennial in the history profession was actually a boon because it actually enabled many of these local history organizations to generate funding, to generate attendance, and to help them prepare for the coming decades in terms of programming and infrastructure.
		Actually, there's some really good books about the 1976 celebrations, and one of the outcomes of that was a real boon, a little boom, excuse me, in local history.
		And so as we've led up to this anniversary, there has been some optimism that maybe that could happen again.
		Now, there have been some challenges.
		Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic set back to museum attendance, and there's obviously been cuts in federal funding, which have really hurt local history organizations.
		But there's still time.
		There's still an opportunity.
		So I think if we want to repeat something that was very successful from 1976 in 2026, it's really investing locally with our attendance, with our eyeballs, and with, when we're able, our investments in our dollars, strengthening our local communities by ensuring these local history organizations can succeed and thrive, not just in 2026, but beyond.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		In 2021, History Disrupted came out, how social media and the world wide web have changed the past.
		What do you mean by the subtitle in your book?
		So I used to work at and I think Mr. Steinhauer just froze up there in New York, and we will get him back in just a minute, but we'll get an answer to that question.
		But we're going to be talking about America 250, the celebration of the semi-quincentennial signing of the Declaration of Independence.
		We're also going to be talking about how history is taught, how public history is taught.
		What should we know about our history?
		And we're going to be talking about that with Mr. Steinhauer as soon as we reconnect with him.
		Numbers are on the screen.
		202 is the area code 7488000.
		For those of you in the East and Central time zone, 748-8001 if you live in the Mountain and Pacific time zones and for independent 748-8002.
		You can go ahead and start dialing in now.
		We'll get to those calls in just a minute.
		Mr. Steinhauer is back.
		When we lost you, Mr. Steinhauer, I had asked you about the subtitle of your book, History Disrupted, How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Yeah, in short, I became very interested in how the devices that we use every day, the news feeds, the social media feeds that we interact with on a daily basis, how those were shaping people's opinions about history and where and how people were learning historical information or encountering historical information on those devices and on those platforms.
		So I began to explore it and it became a really fascinating story, much more complex than I had imagined.
		And the result was the book that you mentioned, How Social Media, History Disrupted, How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past.
		And it turns out that social media, the World Wide Web, sites like Wikipedia, they've had quite an influence on how we think we learn about the past or what we think we know about the past.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Well, you said it's, you used the word complex.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		What do you mean by that?
unidentified		In this context, the platforms that we engage with every day have billions and billions of pieces of what I call e-history on them.
		And one of the questions that I wanted to answer was why do we see certain types of e-history in our news feeds and why are there some that we never ever see?
		Why will you see stories about the American Revolution, but not stories about the Iraq War or about the Persian Gulf War?
		And so I began to look into it.
		And the more I looked into it, the more I realized it was a complex set of factors that determined that outcome.
		It was the design of the platforms themselves.
		It was the culture that had grown up on those platforms.
		It was some of the source information that those platforms and creators were drawing from.
		And it was also what was being talked about in the news media at any given time that would then spill over into social media.
		So all of those plus others factor into what history content we encounter on our screens and on our phones every day.
		And starting to think about that and peeling back those layers, that creates a more complex picture than just what we see on our screens at a given moment.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Many of us start a research project on Wikipedia.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Do you?
unidentified		No.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead and expand on your answer.
unidentified		Well, Wikipedia is, I hate to use that word again, but it's a complex place.
		There are lots of agendas at work on Wikipedia.
		Years ago, I actually was hired by somebody to write Wikipedia pages.
		So there's that that's happening.
		People are paying to have Wikipedia pages created and those pages obviously are putting some flattering information in while taking unflattering information out.
		There are also activists who use Wikipedia to promote particular agendas.
		There are foreign state actors who use Wikipedia to promote disinformation narratives.
		There are numerous links at the bottom of Wikipedia pages that are broken or don't lead to actual sources.
		Some historians and scholars have actually experimented with creating or inventing imaginary historical events and then inserting them into Wikipedia and then seeing how far they travel or how much traction they get on the wider web.
		So Wikipedia, it can be a useful source.
		It sort of depends entry by entry, but I think it's healthy to approach all of these platforms with a bit of critical thinking and try to verify as much information as possible in other sources.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Let's talk to our viewers.
		Bob is calling in from Massachusetts Independent Line.
		Hi, Bob.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Bob or listening, please go ahead.
unidentified		Yeah.
		First off, I'd like to say, yeah, there is a big difference in how we look at history.
		Because remember the guy that wrote Roots?
		You know, that movie, Roots?
		He even admitted everything in his book was made up.
		None of it was true.
		Absolutely none of it.
		Now, I didn't like slavery, didn't care for it.
		But I don't believe any of the black people in this country deserve any reparations.
		George Floyd was a lie.
		Give me a break.
		The first coroner said that he died from drug overdose.
		Then they went out and found a corner that would say he died from being asphyxiated, which he did not.
		And everybody knows it.
		And now police officers are in jail.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		So, Bob, what's your point in bringing up these examples?
unidentified		Because all of the history that this guy is talking about is history that now the left is beginning to write.
		They're destroying history.
		They're taking down statues and doing all that.
		If you want to put a plaque on something that denigrates something, go ahead, but don't destroy it.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, sir.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Jason Steinauer, can history, and this is kind of a naive question, I guess, but can history be political?
unidentified		Oh, history is oftentimes political.
		And, you know, history, for me, my definition of history is a history is an argument.
		History is an argument that we make about the past, right?
		None of us was there at the American Revolution or the American War for Independence.
		So what do we have?
		We have sources that have come down to us.
		We have primary sources.
		We have secondary sources.
		We have pamphlets.
		We have first-hand accounts.
		And so what historians do is we take those sources, we evaluate them, we try to see what's in them, what's been left out, what different perspectives we have to look at a certain situation from in order to fully understand it.
		And then we make an argument about it.
		We make an argument about why it's important, about why people should learn it, why we think it matters to us today.
		And some of those arguments end up being intertwined with politics.
		And that's been happening for centuries.
		It's not a new phenomenon.
		It's not unique to one side of the political spectrum or another.
		It's part of doing history.
		And I think that's part of why history also elicits a lot of strong emotions from people, because there are political aspects to it.
		But that's part of the task and part of the challenge of being in the profession, of being a citizen who engages with history.
		And one of the reasons why public history, to me, is such a fascinating field, because ultimately, our goal is to speak to all Americans, regardless of their backgrounds and political ideologies.
		And so how do you make arguments that are grounded and rooted in evidence and make those in a way that at least a majority, if not all Americans, and indeed people around the world, can engage with and embrace?
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		We are just over the Thanksgiving holiday, and I think everybody here listening can remember what they were taught about Thanksgiving, that the Indians and the pilgrims sat down together and had this lovely meal and et cetera, et cetera.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		At what point does that history kind of dissolve into more nuanced truth?
unidentified		Well, again, if we think about history as an argument, then I might suggest that we're constantly having that argument.
		And that's really healthy for a democracy.
		We should be having that argument.
		We should be continually examining the sources of early America and asking tough questions about them in order to get to some more accurate and honest understanding of what happened in the past, whether it be with pilgrims or Puritans or Indigenous populations or enslaved Africans or everything in between.
		It's an ongoing discussion, an ongoing argument.
		That's part of the beauty of these commemorative celebrations that we have.
		In 2026, we have a chance to continue that conversation and continue that argument on a national stage and in our local communities.
		And we can discuss and debate and argue about what we think that history really means, both back then and for us today.
		I personally think that is a wonderful, beautiful thing about democracy.
		I've been and traveled to other countries where those arguments and debates are not possible, where they are stifled by oppressive forces or by the government itself.
		And I much prefer the system that we have, where we can have open debates like this one about our history.
		I think that makes for a stronger democracy and for a stronger citizenry.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Jason Steinauer, is there something from 250 years ago that in your view is a misconception that we have been taught for 250 years that you would like to see corrected?
unidentified		Well, I mean, just on a very basic level, you know, we're commemorating next year in 1776 the Declaration of Independence.
		That's not the official American independence, right?
		The American War for Independence lasts for another few years.
		So that may be a misconception that people have.
		But I think also it's an opportunity to think about the Declaration of Independence itself.
		I mean, this was a very bold, radical document.
		It makes some bold statements about life and liberty and the rights of all, not just men, but all human beings.
		And I think it's an opportunity for us to really take stock of that and think through that very carefully and critically and see if we're actually upholding some of the bold ideas that are in that document.
		So instead of accepting the document as just etched in parchment and immutable, let's think about it in a context that allows us to evolve and grow with it, to learn from its words, evolve its meaning, and apply it directly to where we are today and where we want to go.
		I think that would be a great use of the commemoration next year.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Our previous guest, Darrell Davis, we asked about the taking down of Confederate monuments.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Do you view that as erasing history?
unidentified		Well, again, I've been in places in Eastern Europe where monuments to Soviet dictatorship have been removed and replaced by monuments that are more reflective of the people and the values that they want to hold in democratic societies.
		So I think that if you look over the course of human history, buildings have come and gone, statues have come and gone.
		What's important are the values that we want to embody as a society.
		And if we believe in equality and liberty for all and democracy and freedom, then we should have public monuments and statues that embody those values.
		You know, I think I agree with Darrell that if these monuments are removed and taken down, they can be placed into museums.
		They can be interpreted by scholars.
		Scholars can make arguments about them.
		And then the public can come in and read those interpretations and make their own arguments about them.
		That said, anytime you take an object and put it into a museum, it requires resources to preserve it, to conserve it, and to put it on display for the public.
		So if we were to remove statues and put them into museums and memorials for people to learn from, hopefully that would also come with increased funding and resources for those museums and memorials to care for those objects over the long term and make them accessible to broad audiences.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Alan, Brooklyn Democrat, you are on with author and public historian Jason Steinhauer.
unidentified		Please go ahead.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Alan, you with us?
unidentified		Yes.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Alan, we are listening to you.
		Go ahead.
		Do you know what?
		I apologize to you, Mr. Steinhauer.
		Alan was having trouble connecting.
		Let's talk to Richard, who's an independent in Illinois.
		Richard, where in Illinois are you?
unidentified		I'm from the land of Lincoln.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Right.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Which city are you in, Richard?
unidentified		I am from South Illinois and southern to none.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, sir.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead with your question.
unidentified		Yes, my question is that in looking at history, history is a living process of reflection.
		I have had an interest because since age five, I was at Dachau concentration camp as a little boy with my mother.
		I also had my dad as part of the prosecution at Nuremberg.
		He was a lawyer.
		He later became the head of the American sector with regard to implementing changes within the legal process of German law.
		Now, whether or not they still stand firm today, I don't know, but they did learn a little bit about democracy.
		We also included them in the right to protest.
		They used to have a thing in Germany where, or they still have it.
		They call it fushing, which is the same as Mardi Gras.
		And even in that period of occupational period, they were given the right to be able to make fun of the United States and, believe it or not, the Soviet Union.
		So I grew up also in the South.
		And the lady that taught me about color with regard to humanity was a personal, how shall I say it, a lady who worked for Judy Garland, and she was a black woman.
		And I, as a little three or four-year-old, asked her, why can't you get the dirt off your face?
		And she explained to me that color was a thing that God had created because he loved different colors.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		So, Richard, tie all that together now.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Put a bow on what you've been talking about.
unidentified		Okay.
		So, I became, like your friend there that we're listening to, I became a professional adult educator, having earned a master's degree in history,
		but also being a graduate of Georgetown, and later earned a PhD and wound up in, believe it or not, the field of adult and continuing education and worked among people that basically were working in farms.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Hey, tell you what, Richard, we're going to have to leave it all right there.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Jason Steinhauer, any comment from what Richard had to say?
unidentified		Yeah, well, first of all, thank you, Richard, for your service as an educator, and thank your father for his service.
		During World War II, my grandfather served in World War II in the American Army, and my grandparents on the other side of my family were Holocaust survivors.
		My mother was actually born in a displaced persons camp outside of Ulm, Germany.
		So this is part of the diversity and complexity of our American stories.
		And I think what we just heard is all across this country, people have amazing stories about how they and their families fit into this larger thing that we call America.
		And it's a great opportunity to start hearing those stories and recording those stories.
		Richard, I encourage you to do an oral history with your family so that they know your story and your family's history.
		I wish I had done that with my grandmother and my grandfather.
		There are so many fascinating stories all over this country, some of which have been preserved and documented, some of which have not.
		And maybe this is an opportunity in 2026 to preserve more of those stories while we still have the chance.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Jason Steinhauer, one of the things that both C-SPAN's American History TV and the America 250 Commission are doing are oral histories.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		As a historian, a trained historian, do you find them valuable?
unidentified		Oh, I am a huge proponent of oral history.
		I began my career working in museums where we did oral history interviews with Jewish Americans who served in the Second World War.
		At the Library of Congress, I worked at something called the Veterans History Project, which collects the stories of America's war veterans from World War I all the way through Iraq and Afghanistan.
		So I've interviewed hundreds of veterans in my life.
		I encourage everyone who's watching, if you have a veteran in your life who has not recorded his or her story, please take this opportunity to do so.
		You can keep a copy for your family.
		You can keep a copy in your community, and you can give a copy to the Library of Congress so it will be preserved forever.
		Oral histories are incredibly valuable primary sources.
		They tell us so much about a time, a place, a period, the emotions that people experienced.
		And then we use those oral histories in combination with other documents like newspapers, letters, diaries, secondary sources like scholarly texts to really fill in the three-dimensionality of the past.
		So if you do anything in 2026 to commemorate America's semi-quincentennial, please do conduct an oral history with a loved one or someone in your community who has an amazing story and share it.
		That would be a great contribution.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear from Edward calling in from New York City.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Edward.
unidentified		Yes, good morning to all.
		I'm Edward here in Manhattan, New York City, and thank you, Mr. Steinhauer, for bringing up diversity, complexity, and honoring the local societies.
		You know, we have many, many historical societies here in New York City.
		But I wanted to just highlight the founding of the 369th Regiment in the Harlem Hellfighters in World War I, founded by a prominent white New York attorney here in New York City and the members of the Union League Club.
		That's very complex.
		That being said, this unit went to France to fight, trained by and financed by Mr. Hayward.
		And when they got there, they were told that there would be stevedors and truck drivers, which he refused to accept.
		And he went to Pershing himself, and Pershing said, well, the only way I can get around this, because the segregation rules and laws, were to transfer the unit to the French Army, which they did.
		And this unit, the Harlem Hellfighters, sustained the most number of days in the front lines of the trenches.
		They were the most highly decorated unit with something like 170 quad de guerre.
		And oh, by the way, James Rhys Europe, who was the bandleader of the unit, when the unit stood down for rest periods in villages, conducted jazz concerts.
		And he's actually credited with introducing jazz to France.
		So there you go, just as an example.
		And thank you for being there this morning and bringing up all these important points about history.
		And also what you said about stories, the stories in families.
		And really, that's the thread that I think binds all of this together and recording those stories and in the oral histories.
		I'm a combat veteran in the Marines from Vietnam.
		And I always say to people, don't thank them for their service.
		Ask them three simple questions.
		What branch were you in?
		Where did you go?
		And what did you do?
		And that really affirms and honors the veteran when you say that, when you ask them those three simple questions.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, sir, for calling in.
		Jason Steinhauer.
		Any comments for Edward?
unidentified		Well, thank you for your service, Edward.
		And I would be honored to ask you about your service in an oral history.
		I used to work at the New York Historical Society, which I think is called New York Historical now.
		I also worked at the New York Public Library for a bit.
		So I have great affection for the cultural institutions in New York.
		And those are just two examples of local organizations, local history organizations that literally have millions and millions of documents in their archives.
		It's just such a rich fountain of knowledge to drink from.
		You could spend a full year inside those repositories and not even scratch the surface of what they contain.
		So that's another activity that one could do during this upcoming year to be part of the festivities is to visit those organizations, go to the research rooms, not just the public exhibits, but go to the research rooms and look at stuff.
		You know, when I lived in Manhattan, my girlfriend and I at the time went to New York Historical.
		We went to the research room and we looked at old maps of the street that we lived on.
		It was fascinating.
		And it was such an exciting adventure to dig through that history.
		That's something that any of us can do during the coming year to support our local organizations to use those materials and to connect our past with our present.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Jason Steinhauer, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, shouldn't all of this be available online for people?
unidentified		Well, that's a complicated question.
		I keep using complicated and complex.
		So you can see how I kind of view the world.
		It's complex and complicated because digitizing material is expensive.
		It's expensive to take high-quality scans and photographs of millions of documents to put metadata in them.
		Metadata is the data about the data.
		So basically, if I was to scan a document, I'd need to tell you when it was made, who created it.
		I need to give you some information about it.
		I need to do that a million times over.
		And then I need a system to house all that information.
		And then I need a mechanism to display it publicly so that people can search it and make meaning of it.
		And for large organizations like the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, maybe even the New York Public Library, they have the resources to do that.
		But as I mentioned, there are 21,000 history organizations in the United States.
		80% of them have an annual budget below $250,000.
		So the amount of investment that is needed to make all of this local history digitally available to anyone around the world is quite prohibitive for many organizations.
		So there are two options.
		One, people could make financial investments in these organizations so that they can do this work.
		Or on the flip side, people can visit in person to look through the materials.
		And that's sort of the situation that we find ourselves in at the moment.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		In the History Club Substack newsletter, what topics were the most recent that you wrote about?
unidentified		Yeah, so I publish a newsletter on Substack where I try to talk about all of these questions around public history and the way we think about our past.
		I've recently written a couple of essays about artificial intelligence and its role potentially in how people learn about the past, how they encounter history, and how AI may shape the historical narratives that we encounter.
		I have also written about America 250.
		I've written some pieces about local history in California, visiting the Redwoods in South Dakota, which is one of my favorite historical states, rich with history everywhere across the state.
		And I've also written about some of the more current events in our country, putting them in more of a historical perspective.
		So all of that is available for people if they're interested.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Alan, Brooklyn, please go ahead.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		You're on with Jason Steinhauer.
unidentified		Thank you very much for the opportunity.
		Wonderful discussion.
		One of the things that varies among generations is their understanding of how history is taught and how information is conveyed.
		In the print era, we didn't have to worry so much about balancing truth and free speech because there was such diversity of print that the ideas competed and the best ones won out.
		It's only since the broadcast era, when you give a really big government-funded or government-sponsored megaphone to a few people, that for most of the history of broadcasting, we had a fairness doctrine that required that anyone given that trust had the obligation to air opposing views to make sure that no really controversial views went unopposed or uncontested.
		And since the Reagan era, a whole generation has grown up not having a fairness doctrine.
		It was justified in part, ironically, on the advent of cable, which supposedly created such media diversity that we no longer needed to have a fairness doctrine to guarantee truth.
		But then organizations like Fox began to self-select their audiences for viewpoints that might not have been true but were favored by that audience.
		And we end up with the polarization we have today, where some people will believe untruths because they're part of a media tribe.
		I don't think people can really understand the substance of history until they understand the context in which information control by technology and laws has shaped the way history occurs.
		We never would have had a Nazi era, I believe, if it had not been first a radio era, where he had the ability to.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		All right, Alan, we're going to leave it there.
		A lot on the table.
		Mr. Steinhauer, any comment for Alan.
		And we will come back to Mr. Steinhauer.
		It looks like we're having just a little bit of.
		He's up in New York, upstate New York somewhere, and I think it's pretty cold, and that's why we're having a little trouble.
		He's frozen, as they say.
		Let's hear from Joe in Florida, Republican line.
		Joe, what do you want to talk about?
unidentified		Hey, good morning.
		Interesting conversation.
		I just wanted to segue into the pre-American history.
		Like, who was here?
		Like, we just celebrated Thanksgiving and all that good stuff.
		There's a talk right now, particularly in some indigenous communities, that there were people here that were not really what we've been taught.
		And to Mr. Schweimharz's comments about it's very difficult to go to the Smithsonian Institution and get documents, Library of Congress.
		Isn't it a fact, and I would like to comment on this, that there are certain documents that no matter how you try to dig into, people have a vested interest not to actually share those documents.
		And furthermore, isn't it true that some of the folks that actually came here to form the United States actually left France?
		They had no sovereignty, and to that extent, they still are not a sovereign people.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Hey, Joe, a lot there.
		Thank you.
		Thank you so much for calling in and for being curious and having those great questions.
		Jason Steinhauer, I want to address one of the questions that he asked, which was about pre-American history, pre-250 history.
		And do we know enough about that?
unidentified		I'm not sure I understood the question.
unidentified		Can you say it again one more time?
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Joe was asking about pre-American history, you know, prior to 1776 and what was going on in this country.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Do we know enough about what was going on before, you know, basically the arrival of Europeans?
unidentified		Well, there have been generations of scholars who have written about the colonial period, who have written about indigenous tribes who lived in the United States.
		There's people who work on even pre-human history.
		We're thinking about, you know, the large mammals that used to roam the continent that we now call America.
		So there's tons of scholarship out there.
		Now, how much of that makes it to public audiences?
		That's always a question.
		I would encourage folks who are interested in these topics to actually look at the local universities in their area.
		Generally speaking, university history departments will have specialists among the faculty who work on colonial era, United States history, or even prior to that.
		And those are great places to start to find scholarly books and scholarly articles that have been written by those experts.
		And then from there, you could go to your local library and talk to your librarians to do searches on those subjects.
		There are quite literally tens of thousands of books that deal with that topic.
		Maybe not as much of it is available on social media, but it's certainly available in the public domain for people to engage with.
peter slen ▲ ● ▼		Unfortunately, we were only able to scratch the surface of history with Jason Steinauer.
		We could spend hours doing this.
		We really appreciate your time.
		The book is called History Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past.
		Came out in 2021.
		But Mr. Steinhauer also writes the History Club Substack newsletter.
		So you can go there as well.
		Jason Steinhauer, thank you for your time this morning on the Washington Journal.
unidentified		Next, this week's edition of C-SPAN's Ceasefire, where the shouting ends and the conversation begins.
unidentified		Our guests this week are Cornel West and Robert George.
dasha burns ▲ ● ▼		Welcome to Ceasefire, where we seek to bridge the divide in American politics.
dasha burns ▲ ● ▼		I'm Dasha Burns, Politico White House Bureau Chief, and joining me now, two guests who have agreed to keep the conversation civil, even when they disagree.

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