 Good afternoon, I'm Bob Wilhelm, I'm the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and I'm glad to be joining you here today in what is our fourth Nebraska lecture for the monthly series that we're running for the N-150 celebration. The goal of the Chancellor's Distinguished Lecture Series is to bring together the university community and also our many friends and partners beyond the university to celebrate the intellectual work that's taking place here at the Unabrasca-Lincoln and also looking for the interaction that we can have with all of our partners and our friends in the community. The presentation highlights our faculty's excellence in interdisciplinary research and creative activity. The lecture series is sponsored by a number of different groups on campus, both the UNL Research Council in cooperation with the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of Research and Economic Development, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, also known as ALI. I want to make a special welcome to our many friends, the ALI members that are here today, and also recognize you. I also want to give special thanks to the Humanities Nebraska and its Executive Director, Chris Sumerich, for helping sponsor this year's lectures. Also thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we have now this very much expanded lecture series for our N-150 celebration year. With this support, we've also been able to create podcasts of all of the presentations both for historical purposes and also to make this available to many different audiences, both now and in the future. I also want to recognize the University's Research Council, which includes faculty from broad disciplines at the University of Nebraska. This council solicits nominations of faculty to present at the Nebraska lectures each year. The selections are made on the basis of major recent accomplishments and also the lecturer's ability to communicate and to explain their work to a wide audience. The selection to be selected as a Nebraska lecturer is one of the highest recognitions for the University, and it's certainly the highest recognition that the council bestows on an individual faculty member. So I guess I'll look out to the camera and say we're also happy to be welcoming everyone that's joining us on the live webcam and through Facebook Live. Social media users can use the hashtag NEB, hashtag NEB lecture to offer more comments and questions during the presentation. So just a few words about the format after the lecture, Jamie Reimer, chair of the University's Research Council, will lead and also associate professor of voice, will moderate a question and answer session with the audience and then following the question and answer session will also announce a winner. So there's a prize today and we'll be given away one of our N-150 books and so the selection is random, you have to be here to win, so stay with us until the end in order to take your chance on the prize. Afterwards, we'll also have a reception next door and you'll have a chance to visit with our speaker and with many of your colleagues and friends that are here today. So now please welcome Chancellor Ronnie Green who will introduce our speaker. Well thank you very much Bob, it is a pleasure to be here for our fourth N-150 lecture, Nebraska lecture of the calendar year as Bob said. We're very pleased to have the opportunity to do 12 of these during our 150th anniversary year celebration and I just want to also call out as Bob has just done, thank you to Humanities Nebraska and the National Endowment for the Humanities that are helping us to actually facilitate this expansion of our lecture series for the calendar year. We've had three wonderful lectures already this year. You might recall on January, Charlene Barron's who I see sitting here in the audience gave us a wonderful overview of the history and the impact of our unicameral legislature here in Nebraska in February during Charter Week. We had a great lecture and kind of a VR even experience if you will about the architecture of the University of Nebraska and a special emphasis around University Hall in particular as the first building on our campus and then then last month we had a great delve into history with the Abbott sisters the social justice sisters as you might remember John Sorensen's lecture that we had just a few weeks ago and today we have a very special treat as our fourth lecturer and it's my pleasure to have the opportunity to introduce it for you. Today Tim Borstelman, the Ian and Catherine Thompson professor of modern world history and an expert in the intersection of US domestic history and international history is our Nebraska lecturer and I also want to underline before I tell you how wonderful Tim is about what an honor it is to be selected to give these lectures so Tim congratulations on that honor and being selected. Though most of the lectures as I've already described in this series this year are focused on university and state history this particular presentation is not only a very timely one but also is one that has a global reach and its topic is particularly resonant in today's turbulent political environment. Today Tim will explore the historical events that have shaped Americans perceptions of immigrants, refugees and people who live in other countries. He will examine why despite resurging US nativism in the past few years most Americans still believe that those outside groups in their hearts aren't all that different from Americans in their perspectives and themselves. The themes of Tim's lecture will be included in his forthcoming book from Columbia University Press, The Hearts of Foreigners, How Americans Understand Others, that's due to come out in publication in the spring of 2020. In addition to that book, Tim has authored or co-authored four others including his first, apartheid's reluctant uncle, the United States and Southern Africa in the early Cold War. That work received the Stuart Burneth Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for the best first book in American diplomatic history. Tim is also a very highly regarded teacher and instructor here at the university and on our campus. He received the Anishchakin Sorenson Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities here at UNL in 2015. He's also a four-time recipient of the UNL Parents Recognition Award which honors individuals who have made a significant difference in students' lives and a two-time winner of the People Who Inspire Award from UNL's mortarboard chapter. A group of students who I think as you know are selected as a senior honorary for their academic and leadership excellence on our campus. Please join me in welcoming Tim who will present today's lecture, The Hearts of Foreigners How Americans Understand Others. Tim? With any luck I'll only be miked once. Can you hear me in the back? I hope you can. Great, great. Thank you Chancellor Green. It is it is an honor to be here and I'm particularly grateful to all of you for taking the time to be here today to spend this time with us. It's great to be back as well in Nebraska because recently I have had the opportunity to talk about this book project in with audiences in different parts of the country and which is fun but it's great to come back and feel like I'm sort of with my home team again. Especially several colleagues and friends who are here. Thank you for coming out. Of course that doesn't mean we're home fans. It means you're supposed to be tough referees and remember that referees are tougher on the home team right because they got a show that they're even mine. So I will expect particularly difficult and challenging questions from you. That's the at the end. That's the other great thing about being back on your own campus you can sort of act professorial and people expect it. You shall do this. Tough questions, that's the goal. Six years ago I began serious research into a historical question that had long interested me. How have Americans thought about and understood non-Americans? Conceptions of foreigners have underpinned all of U.S. foreign relations and all of U.S. immigration policies. Two fields of historical inquiry that have traditionally been studied separately but that actually fit very closely together. I completed the bulk of this research in the first four of those six years which coincided with the second presidential term of Barack Obama and I began writing up the results. It was an optimistic time for considering the question of foreignness and the expanding definition of who could be considered fully Americans. Historians, we may work on the past but we are not immune from the world that we actually live in despite what some of our spouses think. Then came a certain election two and a half years ago. The results were loudly applauded by among others the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, so-called white nationalist isolationists and nativists. My storyline of a sort of expanding tolerance, if you will, of diversity seemed imperiled by these events. As some of my more blunt friends put it, and some of them are here today I want to emphasize, aren't you just plain wrong? The answer I believe is no. My argument is not about the future but it's about the past. The historical evidence up to 2016 remains the same. There has always been a struggle between forces of inclusion and forces of exclusion between those emphasizing commonalities and those emphasizing differences. While the pendulum swung one way in 2016 it's not at all clear that the nation's future is now Trumpian. Chinese revolutionary Zhou Enlai was once asked what he thought of the French revolution, a century and a half earlier. Zhou famously replied, too soon to tell. It is surely too soon to tell the future direction of U.S. politics. But regarding foreignness there is a historical pattern to date that is too clear to ignore or to discount and it is largely an encouraging one. This is my story for you today. Foreign, what does it mean? The English word foreign derives from the Latin for door and outside. That which is outside the door and thus not part of us and our household, whoever we are here on the inside of the door. It's close to the Italian adverb fuori outside and it's opposite of the Spanish adjective familiar, meaning family. Foreigners do not belong to the family or do they or could they? How have Americans understood the nature of other peoples over time? Are they essentially similar to Americans or are they in their cultural or even biological essence different? On the answer to this question has hung great significance for how the United States has interacted with the rest of the world. The most compelling quest answer to this question of how to understand foreigners I want to suggest was crystallized in a scene from full metal jacket Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film about a group of American GIs who were serving in Vietnam. A U.S. Colonel in the film, this fellow in the poster, is instructing a skeptical young army journalist in his unit about the purpose of the American war in Southeast Asia. We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every foreigner the Colonel uses a racial epithet for Asians but he clearly means all foreigners. Inside every foreigner there is an American trying to get out. This universalist assumption arises not merely in fiction or art. John Pryor a U.S. Army sergeant serving in Iraq two decades later explained precisely the same view to journalist George Packer. In my heart said Sergeant Pryor in my heart I believe everybody's American. Indeed from the Convention Hall in Philadelphia in 1787 to the invasion route through southern Iraq in 2003 there has been an abiding assumption that American culture, American principles and American practices are not only the best ever created by human beings but are also closely aligned with the very essence of human nature. The ultimate logic of American exceptionalism on brightest display during the Cold War held that U.S. history and American institutions had facilitated the full liberation of the human spirit and the fulfillment of the highest human aspirations. American democracy and American culture were thus seen as truly natural in common American thinking giving citizens self-rule freedom and a market economy that sold them what they wanted and what they needed. Such assumptions about the essential character of American society and about the inner yearnings of non-Americans reached unprecedented influence in the mid 20th century but they were not entirely new in the Cold War. The revolutionaries of the 1770s had expected other peoples to emulate their actions and in fact they had watched as most of Latin America did so in the following generation. The subsequent story of U.S. expansion awkwardly balanced conquest with attempts at conversion from Pequot and Cherokee to Afghani and Iraqi. A letter sent by the Continental Congress to the inhabitants of Quebec in 1774 perfectly squared the circle of an expanding empire imagining itself as a center of freedom. The Continental Congress's letter invited the Quebecois to join the anti-British union of colonial troops marching north with these words. You will have been conquered into liberty if you act as you ought while Quebec and the rest of Canada managed to avoid being conquered into liberty others were not so fortunate or unfortunate depending on one's political views. Through the 19th century U.S. Dominion ranged from Liberia in the east to Hawaii and the Philippines in the west from Alaska in the north to Nicaragua in the south and of course right here to Nebraska in the center of the continent but certain constraints had to be overcome to enable the full flowering of American universalism. One such constraint had been persistent racial and ethnic prejudice that cramped the ability of white Americans to fully imagine non-Europeans and even many Europeans from east and south of the Alps as being like themselves. Another constraint was a lingering cultural insecurity among American elites. While intensely proud of U.S. economic success they still look to Europe for the highest cultural standards in such arenas as art or literature, drama, fashion, cuisine and a third constraint was the tradition of hemispheric if not isolationist resistance to global engagement and to militarism. The political and military position of the United States in international affairs remained modest before World War II in comparison to the nation's economic might. These constraints began to disappear rapidly in the 1940s as the distinctive circumstances of the mid 20th century ratcheted up the stakes for how Americans understood non-Americans. The denouement of World War II left millions of U.S. military personnel on duty on every continent and on every ocean. The startling resurgence of the U.S. economy expanded American trade interests everywhere. The decline of globalism reshaped American politics. I'm sorry the decline of colonialism reshaped global politics and the Cold War drew the American presence outwards toward the world. As Secretary of State Dean Atchison explained to a group of newspaper editors in 1950 there is no longer any difference between foreign questions and domestic questions. They are all part of the same question. In newly extensive and intensive contact with foreigners everywhere Americans had to figure them out. What Americans did after 1945 was to largely shed some older hierarchical notions of humankind, grounded particularly in ideas about race, ethnicity, and religion and to confirm instead a growing sense of foreigners as potential Americans. Despite some ongoing dissent the broad middle ground of common sense in mainstream American society came to agree eventually with the Colonel in Full Metal Jacket and with Sergeant John Pryor in Iraq that other peoples despite often growing up and living under repressive political and religious regimes still in their hearts if they were allowed to would reveal themselves as American. They wanted in other words US style freedom opportunity and affluence. This view of foreigners was both profoundly ethnocentric and inward looking on the one hand and universalistic and inclusive on the other and it came to be shared across the political spectrum from liberal proponents of immigration reform to conservative advocates of preemptive war in Iraq and by most moderate Americans in between. Very few Americans believed in cultural relativism. If American culture was natural and allowed for the fullest expression of human freedom and if other peoples aspired to live like Americans or even to be Americans then what Americans most feared was the loss of their natural freedom to unnatural subversion. Captivity was the threat and supposed communist brainwashing mental captivity emerged as the quintessential challenge of the Cold War era. While my primary theme today is the shrinking sphere of what was foreign to Americans I want to emphasize also Americans concomitant anxieties about possibly losing their freedoms to subversion and to captivity and I will conclude today by suggesting the potent magnetism of relatively democratic American capitalist culture whose individualistic pursuit of material comforts and personal freedoms may have been the actual greatest subversive force in late 20th century international history. Let us consider first the problem of Americanness. How did Americans in the era of their greatest power and widest contacts with the outside world, the decades of World War II and right thereafter, how did they come to understand their own American identity? The very idea of foreignness after all required not just boundary lines with Canada and with Mexico but also a clear sense of Americanness. Like most peoples, Americans tended to cherish a firm sense of who they were and to imagine other nations having similarly clear timeless national essences. Thus the stereotypes of Germans as orderly, Japanese as self-effacing, Italians as emotional, British as stoic, and so on. Indeed the very idea of entities called Germany or Japan or Italy or Britain seemed inherently logical with the nation state if not liberal democracy assumed as a kind of end of history. Americans paid much less attention to the implications of the continual process of human movement and migration across history. This was the biggest story of all. The two-step process of first human migration out of East Central Africa and all around the globe, creating the wide diversity of cultures, phenotypes, and languages and second globalization or the reconnecting of the world's far-flung peoples since roughly 1500 A.D. after the Colombian voyages. In other words, people move. Human history is the story of continuous movement with perpetual cultural evolution and political change as a result but most Americans by the mid 20th century imagined their own national borders as solid, permanent, and sanctioned by some degree of divine approval. On a map the oceans provided the anchors and the relatively straight east-west lines just seemed well right. There were a few imperial complications around the edges. Hawaii and Alaska muddied the picture. The Philippines slipped off to at least formal independence in 1946. Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands seemed mostly just winter tourist destinations and the Panama Canal Zone and Guantanamo Bay remained beyond most Americans consciousness and those straight lines west from El Paso and west from Lake of the Woods had of course little to do with natural dividing features such as rivers or mountains but few U.S. citizens had any doubts about their nation's geographical identity. Regional differences however complicated the meaning of Americaness well into the 20th century. The Civil War made vivid the absence of national unity and the South remained an outlier in American life for generations thereafter. Various parts of the nation claimed to be uniquely emblematic of American identity. Massachusetts for example boasted the pilgrims and the bulk of the nation's early Christian missionaries going off to bring the light of the gospel to such unchurched regions as Texas. Not an aspect of history much noted in the Lone Star State where regional pride has long held Texas to embody the very essence of American character except when the governor is publicly contemplating secession. Philadelphians for their part touted the Liberty Bell and the writing of the Constitution though French revolutionaries in 1793 before beheading King Louis the 16th apparently considered instead simply exiling him to Philadelphia as sufficiently cruel punishment. His apologies anybody who's a native of the city of brotherly love. Mid-westerners meanwhile like to call their region the nation's heartland and Nebraska perhaps the very heart of the heartland. Westerners claimed their landscapes as the most American of all with Alaskans promoting the last frontier and Montanans proclaiming the last best place. New York remained the most famous and most diverse place in the country perhaps both the most loved and the most hated. With an immigrant filled population of 75 million in 1900 and 300 million in 2000 the United States did not lend itself to simple characterization. Despite its size and its persistent heterogeneity however the United States did emerge from the 1920s the 1930s and World War II with a new and increasingly robust sense of national unity. Fighting and winning two global wars stimulated national self-consciousness and social consolidation as did the emergence of more tightly integrated national markets and national media particularly radio and film. Observers at home and abroad even before World War II had begun to comment on two new aspects of American identity. First an American way of life as the first truly modern nation built on individual economic opportunity and mass liberal democracy and second a Judeo-Christian tradition of religious liberty relatively free from prejudice. That's a term that doesn't show up before the 1930s. Revived by wartime economic expansion and by victory over right-wing totalitarianism the United States set off into the post-war era determined at home to build a middle-class society of unprecedented affluence and abroad to lead what Americans called the free world against the new threat of left-wing totalitarianism. American leaders in the Cold War imagined other peoples as eager to live like Americans. When President Harry Truman in 1947 famously bisected the globe's enormous diversity into what he called just two alternative ways of life echoing the biblical division of goats from sheep he articulated the commonsensical American assumption that no people would knowingly choose communist enslavement over democratic capitalist freedom. All people desired freedom only despots kept them in chains. So the United States was not opposed to other peoples but only to oppressive regimes. Other peoples identified with the United States with both the American citizenry and the U.S. government. President Woodrow Wilson had placed this assumption front and center in the first U.S. engagement in a global war. We have no quarrel with the German people, Wilson declared in 1917. We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. The enemy, Wilson said, was solely the Prussian autocracy. 20 years later most Americans were inclined to see the German people themselves as the first victims of the Nazi gangsters. Late in World War II President Franklin Roosevelt continued to insist that we bring no charge against the German race but only against the Nazi conspirators. In the midst of the nuclear missile crisis in Cuba in 1962 Secretary of State Dean Rusk, he's the fellow on the right here, yes, said precisely the same thing. The United States had no quarrel with the Cuban people only with the regime that has fastened itself upon that country. The U.S. Congress and President Dwight Eisenhower in 1959 issued the first annual captive nations declaration to highlight the injustice of peoples kept unfree in Eastern Europe. Even after the Cold War the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of its government proceeded on the promise of Vice President Richard Cheney that we will in fact be greeted as liberators. This was a liberal universalistic vision of American culture and government as optimal for everyone. This was not a conservative Edmund Burke style understanding of societies as organic, coherent, and fundamentally different from one another. Regardless of their views of invading other nations or their self descriptions as conservative or liberal or moderate Americans during the Cold War tended to assume that other peoples were for the most part like Americans. Indeed others often apparently wanted to be Americans as the United States had received well over half of the vast flow of Europeans who left their continent of origin in the century following 1820 what historian Alfred Crosby called the Caucasian tsunami of some 50 million people. The 1924 law establishing the national origin system for immigration largely closed off this flow into the U.S. Reflecting the enduring power of nativist sentiment in U.S. political life but the geopolitical imperatives of World War II soon sprang leaks in that restrictionist dam and the Cold War competition for good relations with the newly independent nations of the third world swept the dam away eventually. American soldiers for example brought home tens of thousands of brides from England, France, Italy, Germany, and eventually Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam. The Heart Seller Immigration Act of 1965 eliminated the national origin system. Invidious ethnic and racial distinctions retreated not disappeared but retreated particularly in public life a once essentially black and white society became rapidly more multi-racial together Latinos and people of Asian heritage constituted five and a half percent of the U.S. population in 1970 by 2017 they had more than quadrupled to 24 percent increasingly in the last third of the 20th century foreigners from all lands could become Americans. Now racially coded anti-immigrant sentiments hardly disappeared from American life as remains all too evident today. The anti-immigrant tradition is long and powerful stretching back to the era of Benjamin Franklin's warning that colonial Pennsylvania was becoming a colony of aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our anglifying them and will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion. But just as the idea of Germans having a different complexion from other Northwestern European Americans came to seem peculiar so too did mainstream public attitudes about race and discrimination changed dramatically in the decades following the black freedom struggle and the decolonization of Asia and Africa. Perhaps even more striking in the high Cold War years was the transformation of mainstream American attitudes and behaviors regarding religious diversity. The United States had long been a more avowedly religious nation than other Western industrialized countries even if its people's religious knowledge did not always keep pace with their professed piety. One thinks for example of the recent poll indicating that fewer than one third of Americans know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount or that 10 percent of Americans believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. This was fun putting that slide together I enjoyed that for more than three centuries before World War II and despite a constitutional emphasis on religious liberty the nation's large Protestant majority had regarded Roman Catholics and Jews with tolerance at best with skepticism at almost all times and with often violent disdain at countless moments. But in the face of what we're seeing as deeply anti-religious totalitarian enemies first Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union religious differences among Americans swiftly lost their motivating power. In their place emerged a newly public tri-faith culture under the banner of that still fresh term the Judeo-Christian tradition. Mainstream American understanding of what was foreign in terms of religion a key American concern shrank dramatically. Anti-Catholicism had previously served as a rich scene in the mind of American the American past. For the Protestant majority the Church of Rome tended to embody the warping of religious truth the practice of magic and the sway of blind loyalty to authority over individual reason and conscience. Then came the large new numbers of Catholics in the immigrant surge of the three decades before World War II before World War I many of them coming here to Nebraska they're increasing assimilation in the post 1924 restrictionist era Catholic soldiers patriotic service in World War II the fervent anti-communism of prominent Roman Catholics during the Cold War and the election of John Kennedy to the White House in 1960 by the 1970s even fundamentalist Protestants traditionally the nation's fiercest anti-Catholics were finding common ground with conservative Catholics in the new Christian right. By 2009 the US Supreme Court consisted of six Catholic justices and three Jewish justices not a single Protestant among them one of the largest stories of modern US history is the change in perception of Roman Catholics from being essentially foreign to being quintessentially American. Anti-Semitism followed a similar path an influx of Jewish immigrants in the years before World War I stimulated traditional Christian prejudice and discrimination which actually only crested late in World War II then came a series of blows to that ugly tradition the patriotic service of Jewish Americans in the US military the full revelations of the Holocaust the Cold War imperative of equality and inclusion and the creation of the modern state of Israel the success of Israel in particular recast Jews in the minds of Gentile Americans as no longer helpless victims of the Nazis but now tough, virile pioneers making the desert bloom as successful farmers despite hostility from non-European indigenous neighbors a story that sounded to American ears a lot like the story of the United States and a lot like Nebraska in particular discrimination against Jews in the United States while not disappearing declined rapidly in the decades after 1945 it's immeasurable from out marriage rates to university admissions processes to employment opportunities the new Christian right for their part became fierce defenders of Israel and Israelis and Americans developed myriad intimate ties by 1996 Israel's then new prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounded and acted precisely like an American because he had lived extensively in the United States where he had attended high school and college and had begun his career foreigners it turned out often didn't remain foreign former external enemies Germany Japan Italy became close allies once suspect internal exotics Roman Catholics Jews Latinos became mainstream Americans a defining feature of modern American society has been the tendency to absorb diversity and even dissent in a resilient expansive popular culture Americans would subvert the subversives even the communists eventually the dream of a better socialist future was the siren song that most Americans feared above all others for capitalist socialism posed a perilous form of apostasy a false promise of even greater freedom and justice for religious believers Marxism offered only scorn and for vigorous nationalist communism was about as foreign as one could get with the aim of uniting all workers of the world and thereby erasing the very national boundaries that literally defined America as America to a people obsessed with individual liberty communist rule threatened captivity eastern europeans and north koreans had joined soviet peoples in this kind of captivity by 1948 and a year later the establishment of the people's republic of china dismayed americans who had long believed their country had a special role to play in the in the world's largest nation through missionary and educational work with god's help our own senator kenneth weary of nebraska had declared just a few years earlier with god's help the united states could lift up shanghai up and up ever up until it looks just like kansas city instead young men from kansas city and young men from shanghai were soon killing each other by the thousands on the korean peninsula similarly fidel castros revolution in cuba in 1959 seemed to most americans another demonstration of free people being taken captive and enslaved now worrisomely close to american shores four years later the high priest of socialism himself nakita khrushchev visited the starkest symbol of communist captivity the newly erected berlin wall and announced to an east german crowd of half a million i love the wall for americans who thought of their own culture as the freest and highest expression of human nature the idea of captivity was peculiarly repugnant physical captivity such as being taken prisoner in war was bad enough but the prospect of mental captivity of americans losing their minds to the false lures of apostasy this was simply evil it was unnatural fears of captivity dated back to the earliest english settlers in north america and their encounters with indigenous peoples the original subversive communitarian reds if you will which gave rise to abiding anxieties about white captives going native in the phrase that was commonly used that is losing who they really were the central story of captivity in the united states was of course that of tens of millions of enslaved black workers a century-long gulag whose deep scars remain visible today but for the vast majority of americans by the 1940s who were not black and who did not live in the south race slavery seemed increasingly a story of a distant past even as segregation remained meanwhile the 20th century had witnessed the rise of these two great totalitarian totalitarian empires that literally locked up their own people and other peoples nazi germany soviet russia ann o'hair macormick wrote in the new york times in 1952 of this grim century of the homeless man in which russians and eastern europeans were now the saddest people on earth forced against their wills to live under a system so alien to their own instincts and desires their own instincts and desires in this view were to live freely like americans or at least like white americans the spread of this system so alien into china in 1949 filled many americans with dread communism had now seized the most populous nation in the world a symbol of the non-white global majority who were rapidly shedding colonialism it seemed a portent of the future particularly when the united states and china went to war with each other within a year in korea and when american soldiers began to be taken as prisoners of war a new fear swept through the u.s. military command and through the american public the fear of brainwashing this term encapsulated american anxieties that the communists in china had developed devious new methods of psychological torture and mind control used first on chinese citizens and then on american POWs which supposedly enabled them to reprogram the minds of their victims the wall street journal explained this phenomenon in an editorial under this expository headline the silent people communist brainwash the once individualistic chinese into gloomy conformity fear and mental atrophy despite a lack of scientific evidence acknowledged a few years later by the u.s. army brainwashing became the standard explanation for the refusal of 21 american POWs to be repatriated after the war they chose to go to china instead by contrast the 50 000 chinese and north korean POWs who also refused repatriation remaining instead in us allied south korea or being sent to us allied taiwan they seem to represent to americans a vigorous confirmation of the natural aspiration of all peoples to live freely like americans the myth of brainwashing outlived the korean war and drifted into many corners of cold war american culture from the novel and film the manchurian candidate down to today's uh tell showtime television series homeland brainwashing dominated the science fiction films that proved so popular in the 1950s in which aliens regularly infiltrated and changed american minds while leaving them apparently normal and unchanged on the surface suddenly while you're asleep worn the 1956 film invasion of the body snatchers they will absorb your minds your memories and you'll be reborn into an untroubled world of collectivist column without individuality or meaning such concerns about preserving americans individuality and essential personhood dovetailed precisely with the dramatic expansion of psychology as an academic discipline after world war two i wouldn't be here without it in fact since my father was a university psychologist in the years right after world war two glad it expanded in the long run however in the long run even supposedly brainwashing communists could not remain completely foreign to americans from the beginning in 1917 of course some americans had been sympathetic to the bolshevik project and even those highly unsympathetic sometimes learned to live with it often quite profitably the ford motor company for example in the 1920s who sold a very significant percentage of their tractors to moscow us leaders promoted warmly positive views of the soviet union during the crucial world war two alliance against the axis powers the united states built a constructive relationship with the communist government of yugoslavia after yugoslavia's ejection from the soviet bloc in 1948 even the iciest u.s relationship with the communist regime began to thaw in 1972 when president richard nixon famously visited the people's republic of china and six years later beijing initiated reforms allowing in the first subversive elements of private enterprise the trojan horse of free markets if you will i was going to have a slide of various trojan horses but none of the imagery was very good you get the idea of coming out of the horse the united states even eventually opened formal diplomatic relations with communist vietnam in 1995 establishing a new relationship that would warm very rapidly indeed within a few months the new vietnamese ambassador to washington found himself invited to dinner with the most obdurate and powerful american anti-communist and long-term racial segregationist jesse helms chair of the senate foreign relations committee helms represented north carolina's tobacco farmers who were facing declining domestic smoking rates at the time and negative publicity at home and were seeking to make gains in more tobacco friendly markets abroad particularly in asia helms was pleased with the dinner and later explained to reporters i was with some vietnamese recently and some of them were smoking two cigarettes at the same time now that's my kind of customers perhaps the largest change of all in mainstream 20th century american understandings of what was foreign regarded asians and people from asia from a demonized and supposedly unassimilable yellow peril people of asian descent in the united states rose swiftly during the cold war to emerge as a so-called model minority by the 1960s john dower and other scholars have made clear that non asian americans long held a wide variety of images and ideas about asians many of them fiercely negative but also some that were quite positive the u.s. wars against japan and in korea and in vietnam sharpened the sense of racially coded enmity but in each case they also complicated it with the presence of critically important asian allies of americans returning u.s. soldiers also brought home brides in many cases first a few thousand from japan and then almost 100 000 from south korea by the end of the century these women joined skilled chinese refugees from the communist revolution adopted south korean orphans and highly decorated japanese american veterans of world war two as well as is a gold star mothers as faces of a new pacific oriented americanness california voters sent the first asian american to congress in 1956 and hawaii with its majority asian descended population entered the union as the 50th state in 1959 readers digest then an extremely popular magazine noted what it called an amazing turnabout of japanese americans just one decade out from mass wartime incarceration now enjoying a prestige a prosperity and a freedom from prejudice that even the most sanguine of them had never hoped to attain within their own lifetime the process of domesticating asianness into americanness is an ongoing one not yet completed despite the optimism of readers digest and others discrimination against people of asian background comes in many forms from street violence to higher standards for elite college admissions the very idea of a model minority was constructed in part as a not so subtle rebuke to african americans during a time of militant protest against racial discrimination chinatown in other words was not watts in historian ellen woose concise formulation the model minority idea necessarily carried its own burden of prejudicial limits expectations of being studious of being orderly of being hardworking and being deferential but the old issue of whether chinese americans or japanese americans were really just extensions of china or japan as though their culture were carried somatically and inerasably in their skin or in their bones or even in their blood this old issue had been decided in mainstream american life by the middle years of the cold war vietnamese were reminded of this reality in 2009 when the uss lassen docked in danang for an official visit and the american commander walked down the gangway to a red carpet welcome he was hb lee once a five-year-old refugee from vietnam back in 1975 and now the first vietnamese american to command a us navy destroyer the chinese public demonstrated a similar awareness of changes in american life with the enormous attention they paid to the arrival in 2011 of gary lock as the first u.s. ambassador to china of chinese descent during his two and a half years in beijing however lock failed to adequately curry favor with privileged chinese officials and major chinese state media eventually responded to his imminent departure by referring to ambassador lock with a racial slur as a rotten banana when a banana sits out for long its yellow peels will always rot revealing its inner white core thus did the government of the largest nation with an emigrant rather than immigrant tradition reveal its incomprehension of the integrating and hybrid character of what cullen murphy has called the world's most successful multi-ethnic state the united states across the last several globalizing decades the contours of what was considered foreign in american life shrank steadily due to sharply increased trade information flows cultural exchange travel and migration in matters from food music and sports to disease scientific education and climate change americans became more engaged than ever before with non-americans a development eased by the rapid spread of english as a global language increased contact did not always lead of course to perfect understanding or even to good relations resistance to american inflected globalization helped shape politics from russia to china to the middle east to latin america thoughtful americans worried about manifestations of anti-american sentiment abroad well before the september 11th attacks of 2001 and polls regularly revealed a wide gulf between americans and informed knowledge of the non-american world one example among many would be the roper poll of late 2002 on the eve of the us invasion of iraq which revealed that only one in seven young americans aged 18 to 24 that is only 13 13 percent of them could even locate iraq on a map although gary trudeau in his cartoon strip dunesbury responded that unfortunately for saddam hussein all 13 percent are marines widespread american ignorance of the outside world was perhaps no worse than parochialism in any other country but it had greater impact due to the scale and the intensity of american involvement beyond u.s. borders the argument here in sum is neither wiggish nor polyanna ish my argument is simply this that across the 20th century and particularly over the cold war decades the united states engaged increasingly with foreign peoples in and from every part of the globe and those interactions significantly spurred the expanding definition in mainstream american society of who could be considered fully american in legal terms and also in terms of politics and popular culture that is in the common sense of mainstream american life the radically more inclusive public society in which americans lived by the early 21st century compared to the early 20th century stemmed in large part from the imperatives of the nation's foreign relations perhaps the greatest advantage that the united states has in engaging with foreigners in this era was its relentlessly absorptive popular culture and economy american society operated much like an amoeba does with foreign objects i wanted to come up with a little video clip of an amoeba in action but failed i'm sorry but go with me here it's after an initial encounter an amoeba slowly surrounds and absorbs the foreign what used to be outside becomes inside this process happened with the united states with cuisine and the continual evolution of popular taste to absorb new ethnic traditions the same process was visible with the commodification of the counterculture turning once exotic foreign seeming items such as rock and roll records or incense and now marijuana in many states into profitable mainstream consumer items so too with once feared black political radicals such as paul robison and malcolm x each long since granted his own first-class u.s postage stamp with a warm smiling image the united states the indian-american novelist jumpa lahiri has suggested just absorbs everything it accommodates differences but always extinguishes them in some way immigrant parents in particular experience the power of this force on their children with varying mixtures of regret resignation and satisfaction and they understand that that power better than do anxious nativists and better than do observers including historians who focus too narrowly on the sound and fury of those nativists american culture is the amoeba culture i grew up in north america north carolina in the 1960s where political leaders scored a lot of points by warning of the supposed threats of subversion that came from communists and from racial integrationists from homosexuals from hippies from insubordinate women and the like i spent much of my youth trying to grasp the full range of the ignorance and ill will of powerful people like jesse helms my former senator elected five times served 30 years in the u.s senate only only ended by his own resignation eventually if there was a subversive they were wrong these these people like helms they were wrong about a lot of things they were certainly wrong about subversion if there was a subversive force loose in the world it came rather from america's own democratic ideals combined with america's own popular culture and seemingly infinite consumer pleasures that culture and its products encourage the spread of the viruses of individualism and headlong material consumption which tended to disrupt other more traditional cultures what is the process of civilizing prominent clergyman joseph strong famously asked in 1885 what is the process of civilizing but the creating of more and higher wants and americans have been at the front edge of this process of civilizing ever since a wide swath of americans may have imagined themselves to be what they called conservatives but their way of life brought persistent pressure for change everywhere it flowed there was nothing conservative about it americans instead turned out to be the real subversives of the modern world determined at home and abroad that other peoples would if given the chance choose to live just like them thank you tim borstelman for an excellent performance and well performance i'm a singer for an excellent lecture today thank you so much and i think now all of our online friends can hear me speak so at this time we will entertain questions from our lecturer and we do have someone out in the audience if you would please wait until you are presented with a microphone to ask your questions so our live stream friends can hear us as well who would like to speak first great great job to him my question to you is given what we are all experiencing today in relationship to foreigners what period in time is most like this period and how did we get through it then you did ask for the hard questions i asked for this you did that's really a mistake next well one way to think about it is in terms of immigration restriction and when those major changes happened in the american legal system and you know there wasn't immigration restriction in this country before 1882 in any significant way so in a certain sense i guess you could almost say anytime before 1882 i mean there was this because the the united states as a as a political and economic project was was one of building a society which had thanks to the genocide of native americans a vast amount of land without enough labor to do the work that could be done on it and so you know there's the filling in of the nation necessary in economic terms but you could also see that in another period of economic i mean i'm sorry a political change regarding immigration laws right in the middle of world war two and that's in 1943 when the chinese when the act is passed by congress to allow in a sort of symbolic hundred and five individuals from china as into the united states for naturalization that is to say this ends the period of 60 some years in which china had been identified as the only nation ever singly singled out to be the one place that people could not move from to the united states in order to become americans it was sort of this these unique sort of badges like the scarlet a i suppose depending on your literary references the thing you couldn't do you to be it was to be a chinese immigrant and that's ended in 1943 and people like to point out well it's not exactly out of the goodness of the hearts of americans that that's done it's done because of the us need for china as a critical ally against in the war against japan where the chinese are holding down some two million japanese soldiers on the occupied eastern coast of china which who were therefore not out helping kill americans in the island hopping campaigns coming across the pacific but in fact it's more than that you can see lots of sympathy for chinese peoples in popular cultural references in the 19 early 1940s during the war because china is seen as an ally of the united states you have this sort of sense and i mentioned this in my talk in which the sort of the contrasting images negative and positive of asians you see the positive ones come back up for china in the course of the 1930s as japan's power rises and instead um you see by the early 1940s you know that the chinese are seen as these terribly important allies so that's a pretty cool precedent i guess i guess i'd go probably with that one i think you could also say after 1965 uh that the the the immigration act the heart seller act which eliminates the old national origin system is a is a freeing it's not it's not perfect it's complex and it limits the number of uh immigrants from the western hemisphere so it's the first time that latinos people from south of the border had latin americans had been able to come to the united states and have those numbers limited but in other ways the heart seller act is really important because it eliminates the old racially defined system of immigration restriction and the late 60s you see very little of the sort of anxiety about immigrants of course it's going to change as the numbers get bigger by the 80s i'd go with the early 1940s is that it for the hard questions i don't know are there any other hard questions hi tim thank you for the talk i really like that i one of the things that strikes me about it is is kind of the parallelism with anti-americanism in that the fears of anti-americanists are in some ways this is the same amoeba amoeba amoeba i don't amoeba like qualities of of of kind of these american creed right that um american consumerism and american individualism just kind of takes over and and becomes popular but i think particularly in the 60s there's also this this critique that right that what you get is not democracy but consumerism and kind of the fake choices and freedoms of consumerism without the actually real freedom and political freedom um and if i feel like in some ways those fears may be even more prevalent now when you see kind of a some a state like china where consumerism is all there but the political freedom isn't going on coming along with it and then the kind of regression that you maybe see some to some degree in the west so yeah kind of a common question great so so can i just point out that if if distinguished colleagues from my own department like alex pazansky are going to be allowed to ask questions this is going to go downhill very fast because that's a brilliant and terribly important observation is that the exporting of american style you know consumerism and democracy is often weighted to consumerism no question about that and china is is running an amazingly volatile experiment in this right now in these decades the one the one thing i guess i would say about that is that we're in the middle of it right and so we can't tell i mean that that the anxiety in china has been always that this economic the growth of a private enterprise of private property ownership and entrepreneurship within china which has in some ways you can understand it as the largest and most successful anti-poverty program in global history that is bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty into something closer to a secure economically secure life with the anxiety in beijing has always been that this we need to give them these advances economically in order to keep controlling them politically to maintain our own dominance as the communist party controlling the country and their concern has always been would this get out of hand would this go too far and you can see the ferocious repression of dissent inside the chinese system these days especially under she and even a little bit before Xi Jinping was became head of state there and so that anxiety is still there even as americans are fascinated by chinese effectiveness in crushing dissent while accommodating economic growth but you know we don't know what it's going to look like 10 years from now right we're just like americans are fascinated by by supposed russian military might you know which is an amazingly shortsighted understanding of how desperately weakened the russian political economy is which isn't to say they don't create all kinds of problems and challenges for the united states and and everyone else particularly ucranians and anybody else on their border but we have a tendency to be too concerned about that i'm not saying that china is not an issue of concern but i'm not sure where we'll be 20 years from now i mean there may be a time when they're writing the history of modern china that looks back and says oh we made a boo boo and shinjiang you know we went too far crushing the weakers or something in that we don't know and maybe i'm wrong maybe they're going to sail on and have a permanent totalitarian system politically even as with the i cannot yeah but how democracy and consumerism fit together that's i hope you're going to write the book on that one because that's a that's a big question and americans these days you know we don't bother going to the ballot box very much right our levels of democratic participation even in voting much less other political forms of participation is so minimal but boy do we show up i was going to say we show up at the mall but we don't anymore now we just show up in the amazon box clicking you know but we still show up there right so so yeah that how we do that that's a tough question i think there was another question in tim thank you for your talk yeah um i was going to ask you a question about um so about immigration and foreignness but thinking about american citizenship and american laws and whiteness so even when foreigners are coming into the united states it's not clear as people who would be than find this foreigners that they're entitled to citizenship and so if you can kind of think about that um and tell me how how you see that as relating particularly to the anti immigration laws um so even if you're here who can be citizens and what does that say about our understandings of foreigners and then the second question which is related he knows me so it's okay um black people as being seen as perpetually flooring even though they were born here for generations so that's my question thank you poof is that it can we boycott the history department from now on oh yeah well i mean to the first one uh the 19th century and the early 20th century is spent into no small extent sorting out whether all europeans are considered white or not you know whether they have sort of full citizenship or not um legally they do but it has to be worked out as to exactly where europe begins and ends you know when you're out in russia or when you're out in in syria or you know i mean the caucuses is a great example because the 1917 division of the world by the us uh authorities regarding banning asians runs a line right through the caucuses which is amusing if you think about it because of course caucasians are supposed to be from there right but it turns out that northern caucuses inhabitants qualify as potential migrant immigrants whereas southern caucasian inhabitants don't you know so they could be caucasian maybe but they can't be white it's just it's really it's kind of fun just some of the the sort of absurdities eventually work themselves out into what is now our common sense about what whiteness means which is absurd in a whole other set of ways um and it's based on the social construction of race as we like to say in the university uh so citizenship i mean the other way to say this is that citizenship was largely managed by states before you know before the 14th amendment um and when birthright citizenship is really established in a clear way um in 1868 so uh citizenship is being worked out i think that's a good point and part of what i'm trying to do is suggest a kind of mainstream here of american thinking about that then involves the law but goes much further than the law and so i particularly appreciate that question because irish are certainly not considered full-blown americans in the 1850s in the way that some of them wind up going to california to work to work and then to also work in anti chinese exclusionist political campaigns to establish particularly their their americanness by showing that they're that they're not chinese right and then the bigger one your second question is the perpetual foreignness of being of african descent in the united states you know and that the whole project of whiteness is much is partly about not being asian in california but it's always about not being of african descent that's the the key definition in order to have status outside of slavery to be a free status and then later to have status in the segregated system of jim crowe and the versions of mainstream harassment and social uh lack of privilege that continues today even when we've legalized the system you know um so that's a great question about i mean in a sense what i do in the first chapter is i try to think i do it elegantly but i don't think so for the book i try to say look there's this vast problem of blackness in american life and i've spent the first half of my career writing about that mostly and i'm saying go check out this literature it's crucial it's but but it's also the americans no longer imagine americans of any race imagine black americans as not american in the mainstream of american culture by 1945 they're they're often seen in lesser status it's not that everybody's equal but they're definitely not seen as foreign um so that's a partial answer to great questions yeah thanks same row yes i i've got here they go again three in a row i'm i'm also one of tim's colleagues and i'm also trying to subvert him and undermine him as much as i possibly can be brainwash me because we love you yeah thank you um you use the phrase other peoples two or three times i believe and i was reminded once when i was in germany and i went into an italian restaurant and i got into a little conversation with the owner server and he quickly explained to me that he wasn't italian and this wasn't an italian restaurant he was sicilian and this was a sicilian restaurant and he really meant it this was not pedanticism this was accuracy because nobody in the italian peninsula considers themselves to be italian they are roman or neapolitanese or the european but nobody wants to be italian and is italian and i would want to put out there for you to chew on i don't know if this is exactly a question but the hearts of lots of foreigners are not really national in orientation they're very much tribal and regional i mean for example just to shift emphasis who are the chinese i mean they're the han who came from northeast asia and have gradually taken over every place on the east asian continent all the way down to tebet and out to out to the west and so to say that there are really chinese is a little bit of a kind of fast move on the part of certain people in germany for example you know if you're from berlin that's a long way from unik and vice versa and it's widespread so i mean if you compare it with the united states where it seems to me i hope you'll agree that we're terrific at integration yes we've had some great failures in regards to black white and in other ways but you know the most of the world out there belongs to a tribe or a region and and their hearts are local unlike our hearts which are kind of national or very much moving in the national direction so i'll stop there who okay this is a terrific question and explosive in so many directions i'm challenged about where to start let's do a couple of them that come to mind very quickly though one is the italian case is brilliant because italians only learned when they came to migrants from the peninsula we call italy today only learned that they were italian upon arriving in american on american shores or other shores where they were lumped together with other peoples from the same peninsula or in the case of Sicilians the adjacent island if an island can be adjacent in other words the whole thing is an artificial construction of italianess there is some common ground in terms of legibility of language between sicily and the piedmont it's not perfect but you know i mean so there is some sense of which italian is spoken across the nation i would give i would grant that a few more or argue that a few more italians actually think of themselves as italy than as italian that you might be suggesting here but there's definitely this long project of of how do we figure out modern nations and how they come together the united states is not unique in this regard i mean you know certainly the french have a very clear idea of what frenchness is you know the germans the same etc but it's been constructed over time and what i really what it makes your question makes me think of is how you can think of history as as flowing in a sort of way in a sort of movie sense or a film sense is flowing continuously and we're artificially stopping at any point to say at this point these are the chinese whereas 200 years later it doesn't look like that and so but we act as though it's permanent we actually always have these national essences to them and boy is that not true and so i take that point as being particularly important the united states had its own version of course with the civil war which you know give or take a few things you know we might have been in a whole different era of two different nations and you know who knows how all that whole history would have flowed out as a contingency from that so yeah the american nation is powerfully assembled it is um it is admired widely or worried about widely depending on the politics of the observer from outside about its multi ethnicity the fact that the u.s is so diverse fascinates people it's by far the most diverse of the large powers of the great nations about 42 43 million people in the united states today were born elsewhere which is more than four times as large as the next largest immigrant foreign born population in any other country partly that's because the u.s is big it's the third largest country in population so it's going to have more foreigners as a percentage our our percentage is not as big as canada and a few other places but in sheer numbers it's vast the american story and other countries tend to be intrigued by this i mean if you were hitler you looked at it and you thought oh it's a mongrel nation and they'll never do well in warfare because they aren't unified but if you're you know more of a of a opposite perspective people look at the united states and thought the election of brock obama which fascinated people across the world they were like how can they do that these americans it's amazing how can they elect a black person and then reelect him it was just stunning in u.s all these reports of people from france and germany other place saying god we could never do that you know and so the american model is different that way for all its ferocious continuing patterns of nativist waves resurgent anti-immigrant stuff and the continued racism under it you know it's a it's this continual struggle and the most of what i'm trying to do in this talk and in the book is to remind people that there's a context a historical context in which the baseline of degree of inclusion is not what it used to be that it's gotten higher much higher than it used to be which doesn't mean that we now say oh great it's all done perfect i mean hardly in some ways you it's it's that very success over time and being more inclusive that enables people to have a high enough standard to think why are we stopping now why are we harassing trans people you know or whatever the next you know issue of concern why is why are we still dealing with nativist feelings in the united states that erupt in violence i mean how so so that consciousness to me can be considered a sign of success but not of complacency i mean the response that isn't you don't say okay we got it figured out we keep carrying on great questions are we that's the whole history department right there you see why these they're wonderful my colleagues i love them right there hi tim thank you yeah for such a rich conversation so i would love for you to give us your take on the latino question just whatever you want to riff on spin it out for us how how do latinos fit into this conversation yeah well i mean how do latinos fit in this conversation everywhere i guess is that is the way to think about it you know latinos have this very um very unique is a oxymoron i mean either it is or it isn't it's like pregnancy a unique status of having had the northern half of the country of mexico stolen from mexico in war and incorporated in the united states including incorporating a lot of people with them who and as part of that arrangement in 1848 you get this full citizenship at least legally for people of mexican background mexican descent so they're legally white but in practice they're not they're socially and culturally and economically discriminated against but in varying ways with class differences and differences in in sort of skin tone and racial demography among people who were seen as coded as latino which is why when you're latino today you can be any race right we finally figured that although who knows 100 years from now how we'll look back and say those were pretty stupid census questions about race and ethnicity in you know we always think we haven't figured out now you know that the people who asked who assumed that latinos were a race 20 years ago in the 1980 census that they were dumb and now we figure that out you know they can be anything but who knows what it'll look like 80 years from now we'll finally figured out that humanity is one great race maybe i'm hard to know but so so latinos have this really remarkable status in there and in some ways that makes them a particularly great example of this business of watching this status both rise and also over time but also continually be pushed back against because of this peculiar border that the u.s has with mexico and what's peculiar about it is the steepness of the gradient between it's the steepest gradient of any border in the world in economic terms between the average income of people north of the border and average income of people south of the border there is nothing like this if you if you think about all the immigrant crisis the refugees flowing out of africa and the middle east especially in 2015 as the syrian civil war accelerated and flowing up into europe there's not a single place people are like well well they get to turkey and that's better and then they try to get to greece and that's better and they try to get to hungary and it's sort of step steps to get to germany or to get to sweden or to the uk or but for the u.s it's all one big border unless texas gets away with that secession that i had that slide for the i mean that would change but but it right now and so there's that's a distinctive part of the u.s story with latino so there's it's kind of like a continual aggravation of the challenge of latino status is this constant reminder of a of a weaker status that comes with being impoverished and desperate as refugees are particularly from central america today and of course mainstream americans society has little ability or interest in distinguishing between handurans and mexicans or you know whoever whoever else much less you know young men and and women with young children you are really kind to send that softball down the middle there i've done i've done poorly i hope it was i hope it was at least a bunch single okay thanks um yes i wanted to ask a little bit about uh one thing you mentioned a couple different times throughout your topic which was um there's this view that other people or the uh want to be american or want to have what americans have and this seems like a bit of imperial hubris um and i'm thinking of like recent examples afghanistan we seem to not understand the role of taliban or of the taliban in society in iraq we didn't understand the role of religion with the shia and the sunni um and then we um in the arab spring with egypt we somewhat abandon our uh former support for their leaders and then when they don't elect who we want the muslim brotherhood were upset so my question is as america moves forward how do we understand um other societies but not only that how do we apply that to them and make a sound and informed decision on foreign policy great terrific question and not from the history department uh so um the first thing is to learn languages above all else we have to learn languages besides english um for example the first thousand diplomatic personnel into iraq in 2003 included out of the 1006 of them spoke arabic you know which is so of course i mean the the idea that americans won't understand what's going in iraq well they they have no idea they're carrying these little these little portable translators around with them that there's some hilarious journalists reporting on how they would try to have american soldiers in the field are trying to talk to iraqis who don't speak english the um and the us benefits from this you know growth of english as a global language so much so that we you know in schools we increasingly don't require people to have foreign language training of any kind and the university i'd like to think we're still holding on to that although i'd be happy if it were if it were higher and we required people to live abroad for all the economic complications that that brings i mean mostly to me it is about understanding the rest of the world and americans are very bad at this are we worse than other peoples a little bit because two things really operate against us and one is the isolationism of having oceans on both sides and an english-speaking neighbor to the north and neighbors to the south who learn a heck of a lot of english in order to deal either with american tourists coming down or to survive in texas or arizona on their way up uh but the other one is that you know is that the united states has just has benefited so much from essentially following on the in the wake of the british empire all right which established english as in the place of what used to be french as the international language of commerce and diplomacy up into the middle of the 19th century and that begins to shift toward brit toward the british and the americans absorb that and americans in their usual kind of i'm grossly generalizing but there's some truth to this and our usual kind of oblivious friendly way we just sort of assume well of course the world speaks english why wouldn't they i mean that's that's like everybody's language isn't it i mean go to the i mean 75 or 77 percent of internet postings are in english i mean in all of the movies you see all over the world start out in english even if they're subtitle you know the ways that americans see themselves abroad are very easily kind of mirrored back to them in ways that make them feel good about themselves in some way but of course then the real push comes to shove when the u.s actually engages in military conflict abroad and and hits people who really are not happy about the u.s showing up and then you always have the same patterns of rethinking this it's sort of like what happens in the night early 1970s late 1960s when americans for the first time realized that large numbers of vietnamese did not want the united states to be there and then we had to sort of learn about guerrilla warfare and why it was that that it was hard to defeat a guerrilla force in another land that americans didn't know much about that was seven thousand miles away and then when we get the same problem in afghanistan in from 2001 on and in iraq from 2003 on you get the same patterns it's shocking the patterns of you'd get little publications in military journals and also in non-military journals about the importance of learning how to think about guerrilla warfare it's like everybody was asleep for the last 40 years it's it's stunning to me that this the replication about this our failure to learn in that and honestly the the the success for this that the the solution to this is right here it's in the university it's in chancellor greens university i mean this is where it's going to happen i'm serious i mean it's when college students are demand more truthful behavior and words from their elected presidents we've seen that happen and we've seen it happen powerfully in the late 1960s when they do that and when they demand honesty about not understanding other countries and a determination to learn about them that's how we got vietnamese studies in the united states how we got vietnamese language programs was only after you know going through that and so hopefully we've done the same with arabic so the simple answer is we need to learn arabic we need to learn mandarin we need to learn spanish of course but you know every every possible foreign language it's a great question yeah yeah take history don't follow uh don't follow the university of wisconsin steven's point aren't they the people who who got rid of their history major at least temporarily yeah i mean you know america is a is a culture famously forward-looking and it's part of what's charming about the united states and other people love it because it's you know we're the land of second chances and everybody's always trying to look forward and and you know the past is you know what the phrase means when we say your history means you're irrelevant right i mean so it's really quite clear or the study that the american historical association did about 10 years ago they they they did a big poll of americans asking them for the word that first came to mind to describe history and by far the the most problem was boring it was like let's get on to the future i can barely handle the present but the future is exciting you know in the past it's just so you know and of course it's not that other people need to take history it's that we need to teach and write history better right i mean that's and we need to get out of our own little channels of doing our our treasured research on these narrow little topics that don't engage bigger issues and we need to quit giving long boring lectures that you nicely just sat through but and you act like you're still interested it's awesome you guys did you pay these people it's wonderful you know it's just great this so i mean it's in the teaching and the learning you know i mean i really do believe that and obviously that's true at the it's at the middle school high school levels as just as much as at the university level that that's where the work will god i sound like an assembly in education don't i i mean i really do believe this is where we this is where we got to work from yeah i think we'll take our is that a stretch or a hand our last question for the afternoon come there from the back hi thank you for your to talk it was i really enjoyed it i don't know if these are actually interesting questions so like my first question is do you think of like americana you know the cultural anemia do you think of it as a fundamentally progressive project of sorts or is it something else and uh secondly when it comes to like the civic nationalism that america has is it like a uniquely american phenomenon or are other countries capable of that those are good questions okay so the first one american this uh as i tried to suggest it's both universalistic inclusive and it's also profoundly parochial and ignorant of the rest of the world and that's that's my overwhelming feeling about the country that i live in is that we're spectacularly attractive in so many ways and painfully ignorant and unself aware in so many ways and you you know you get this from any thinking person you deal with who is from another country and spends much time in the u.s. they're like boy you people are great in so many ways and you're just so out of it in so many ways and it's both i don't see a way around it that's the american vision of the world as i understand it and i mean it it keeps me up at night worrying about it but it also i don't see a resolution it feels like those are it's sort of like having two parts of your personality you know that that as a nation that we have civic nationalism um you know other other nations have their own versions of this i mean certainly the french are the ones right now we're watching with this emphasis on laicite they're they're you know secular origins and the question how that operates when you have increasingly resurgent religious communities within you know whether it's roman catholic or jewish or or muslim or anything else um and so other nations i think wrestle with their own versions of that but they don't all have a constitution like ours which was you know constructed to not be a christian nation as that early treaty that washington signed with um one of the north african nations that we were engaged in war with over piracy the treaty said something to the effect of the united states i don't have any i'm paraphrasing slightly is not a christian nation you know in other words i mean it's really quite clear despite the fantasies of right wing um people who imagine there that the christian faith is somehow embedded in the in the constitution it's it's very much in the culture in which the constitution emerges from absolutely but that constitution is so secular in its fundamentals that that i think that's a a big part of what makes our civic nationalism different yeah thank you all for your questions great thank you thank you