G'day mate 40 here. I'm loving this book by Peter Novick Came out in 1989 that noble dream the objectivity question and the American historical profession and some Insides here about the role of Jews in the American historical profession and in what areas they would dramatically differ from their non-Jewish colleagues So a lot of details that I didn't know so apparently There's a book on On social access to the professions late 19th century academics at the University of Michigan as a case study so there are very few Jews in the American historical profession or in American English departments until the 1960s so American English departments and history departments were dominated by non-Jews until the 1960s very few Jews in these departments because both history and English literature played major roles in In developing a national consciousness and these were were thought of as essentially sacred ground Reserved primarily for Anglos and eventually that was expended around the turn of the the Fender Secular and the turn Of the 19th and the 20th centuries Some Catholics started to come in and then you started to get a trickle of Jews in the 1940s and 50s so There are only four identifiably Jewish historians before World War one in the United States Can you imagine that? I mean now there are hundreds of Jewish professors of history But there are only four identifiably Jewish historians in America before World War one two never sought regular academic appointments Uh, so there were so few Jews in the profession that anti-Semitism was not an issue Catholics were rare within the mainstream of the profession They were mostly employed at their own colleges and universities So what did someone say about the University of Chicago? It was University of Chicago. It was it was largely Jewish professors teaching teaching about Roman Catholic intellectuals for primarily Anglo-Saxon audiences So that's a saying about the University of Chicago prior to the 1960s so after After the 1930s All right Americans were less likely to go to Germany for for their doctoral studies obviously in history and In by the 1930s you started to get this trickle of emigrate German historians And they were almost all Jewish Or at least part Jewish or married to Jews And they were very busy scrambling to find positions rather than Serving as expositors of the crisis of historicism to their new compatriots So I guess this was World War one That we're talking about here. I'm just going through looking out the word Jewish in this terrific book by Peter Novick So there was Selig Perlman a professor of economics at Wisconsin And he would regularly summon Jewish graduate students in history to his office and warn them in deep Yiddish accent History belongs to the Anglo-Saxons. You belong in economics or sociology or anthropology So the academic patrons of Jewish graduate students despaired of finding them jobs So we're talking here about the early 20th century. So Americans in the American historians at this time Were concerned about the lowered status of their profession And they were concerned about who should be entrusted with the guardianship of the geist G-e-i-s-t So what does geist mean? It means the spirit of a people right so It's long been thought in American history departments prior to the 1960s that the spirit of a people Can be found in the study of its literature and the study of its history and that was thought in United States in England in Canada and Australia that You could only trust the study of the spirit of the people to primarily Anglo-Saxons and then many non-Jewish professors of history in the United States the early part of the 20th century Josh Randall blessings They were concerned about the aggressive what they saw is the aggressive intellectual and personal style of Jews and they were afraid that bringing hyperverbal And verbally aggressive Jews into the profession That discourse and social life within the profession would become less genteel if it became less Gentile The life in the profession would become less genteel if it became less Gentile So the the best known Jewish historians in the interwar years so between world war one and world war two European Jews So Leo Gershoy, Lewis Gottschalk, Jay Saul and Shapiro and Lawrence Stiefel so anyway, the there's a dominant concern about hiring Jews that Discourse and social life within the history profession would become less genteel if it became less Gentile And there are all these letters of recommendation that try to reassure prospective employers on this point. So oscar handlin a Jewish historian quote unquote I have not read or referenced the book who's who an american jury So there's a letter of recommendation for a Jewish historian oscar handlin trying to find a job and quote Has none of the offensive traits which some people associate with his race I remember my father talking about Jews who'd converted something adventism, but how Supposedly nobody liked them because they still retained their their Jewish traits even though they'd come to embrace christ Okay, there was a A letter of recommendation for another Jewish historian seeking employment birch a loenberg quote unquote By temperament and spirit measures up to the whitest Gentile. I know That's Arthur's Lassenger's letter of recommendation and others Lassenger also said that Said that thing about oscar handlin had none of the offensive traits by which some people associate with his race and then Roger merriman says deniel j borstein Is a Jew they're not the kind to which one takes exception That's in his letter of recommendation Then he wrote about richard leopold was of course a Jew But since he is a Princeton graduate, he may be reasonably certain that he is not of the offensive type Then meryl jensen wrote a letter of recommendation for solemn and cats was quite un-Jewish if one considers the undesirable side of the race So that all these various variations on the formula were endlessly repeated Trying to reassure history departments that it was okay to hire Jews That it wouldn't reduce the gentleness of the history department So overwhelmingly Jews just stayed out of the history department so this this widespread distaste for Jews within american history departments prior to the 1960s You could attribute it to status anxiety the preservation of gentile norms or unadorned prejudice So at the same time the american history departments thought of themselves as embodying objectivity and universalism But you can see in their attitudes of Jews Now I talked about kevin mcdonald going to university of wisconsin, which is a A bastion of of left-wing historical approaches and many Jews from new york went to the university of wisconsin to be In in their words to become americanized So that's where kevin mcdonald first encountered a large number of Jews and they were dominantly left-wing activists in his recollection so Think about the exquisite ambiguity of the phrase that arthas lessinger applied to oscar handlin had none of the offensive traits which some people associate with his race So he's simultaneously embracing and distancing himself from the stereotype And this phrasey ology then commanded itself to other harvard historians who repeatedly used it So raymond turner of johns hopkins said of a candidate that you would not recommend him quote Or it not that in my opinion he is for those who may object to jews The least objectionable jew engaged in teaching that i've ever seen Then bernadette schmidt of the university of chicago wrote to the same effect about lia gurshoi Bruce cucklick found similar locutions in letters of recommendation Written by harvard philosophers at the same time so cucklick's view is that those who employed such phrases even if not themselves anti-semitic participated in And reinforced a vicious system of prejudice So this may be a little bit overly judgmental if those seeking to find jobs for jewish students in an anti-semitic Environment took a high moral ground. It would probably have been at the expense of the students So before arthas lessinger who was himself half jewish by ancestry for lessinger moved to harvard and learned its ritual phrases He said of a candidate for instructorship that he was quote Little afraid of employing a jew unless i know him personally Some Gentile job applicants such as wallace notenstein and frederick noosebar ran into difficulty because of their names And prospective employers had to be prevented from leaping to the wrong conclusion that they were jewish So charles hole of cornell reassured c.m. Andrews of yale Where not a scene was under consideration that quote his family or all presbyterians very much so Except wallace himself who was somewhat of his strange sheep and there's a question in the chat Let me get to that. Why do I think about the human race going extinct? Would you rather the human race goes extinct and the earth survives or vice versa? I would rather The human race survives and the earth goes extinct Yeah, so human beings are more important to me Than all the rest of this earth combined So universalism was equally absent in the relation of catholics to the historical profession But in circumstances quite different than in the case of jews. So american catholic historians inhabited a separate scholarly world So All the american-born roman catholics who had any prominence in the interwar historical profession were all converts Carlin Hayes Raymond Sontag Parker moon robert lord Gellar hunt there are a few european catholic emigres like oscar lecky They were bookish catholic youngsters Frequently wound up as clerics. So this used to be true of protestant. So in the 19th century german universities leaving protestant boys would come to university And with the intention of training to become a cleric And then in the course of their university education, they would lose their faith And often become historians instead Is the australian pronunciation of rather rather? But did you require that from your jewish milieu? I think it's part of it's just youtube speak So youtube speak is you put additional emphasis and you draw out some words. It's kind of like uh salesmen speak So i don't normally say rather It's just uh, it's just youtube speak where you You elongate your words you give them extra emphasis Like a salesman trying to hold your attention So it's not easy to hold people's attention when it's just you speaking into a phone about difficult intellectual issues So one way that youtubers, you'll notice that youtubers tend to all sound alike. It's like hey guys My name's 40 and today I want to talk to you about jews in the american historical profession Like it's that kind of this upbeat words elongated Vows and consonants are often extended all right So protestants in the early 19th century went to university to study to become a cleric But then frequently lost their faith uh bookish catholics Youngsters were more likely to stay on to become priests So there are a large number of historian priests and nuns who earned their phd's at catholic universities and they spent their entire academic careers in religious institutions Generally speaking there was considerable antipathy to catholics among protestant historians Who believed that a catholic cannot teach history and be a true catholic so Catholics were then hypersensitive to all possible signs of prejudice Which sometimes produced rather amusing results. There was a book by the catholic scholar peter gilday received an unfavorable anonymous review in the american historical review The jejuot historian john winne wrote a letter of protest concerning the dishonest review he observed This is not the first time that I deemed it necessary to point out to you systems of bias in some of your contributors and reviewers And turned out that the reviewer was the roman catholic archbishop of st paul Who had chosen anonymity to spare gilday's feelings. Where do I get the ideas for my videos? I just read and then when I read something it's like I I I read and I read and I wait until I get this compulsion that I got to share this I've got to share this. This is so cool. I've got to share this. So I used to do pretty much regularly scheduled shows Uh about three hours length every afternoon And I spend much of my spare time thinking of topics that I wanted to hit on those shows and now I've shifted to more spontaneous streams And I simply wait until the mood strikes me that hey, I read something and I just want to share it with you Okay, so protestant historians generally speaking were the were quite hostile to both catholics and jews and uh and then there was the historian named william t wash Who who wrote a book on philip the second? and uh He said that his book annoyed his critics because it exposed the shabby and slipchart and bigoted methods by by which The whole anti-catholic historical conspiracy to justify the wretched division of christendom have dealt with catholic spain in the church They explained the path played by jewish spies and jewish finance and the protestant revolt a part that they have passed over in silent So this is a william t wash a catholic complaining that a critical review from a protestant was was Was inspired by anti-catholic prejudice so Steve sailor recalls that when he was at ucla many of the jewish professors steve sailor did an mba at ucla and he noted that many of the professors would take aside jewish women getting an mba who plan to make a career in department stores and let them know that The department stores are pretty much all owned by jews and they did not hire women in upper management so There's this one historian who lost his column in the new york world at telegram And he says it was because the british intelligence department turned on the heat via the morgan banks And the pressure of jewish department store owners in new york city who threatened The news All advertising if they kept me on any longer So newspapers have long disproportionately relied on advertising from department stores, which have been disproportionately owned by jews so I talked about the historian william b. Hazel tine. He came up from virginia came up from the south to study at Ohio state I talked about how he hated having damned yankees around on all sides so other southern historians Uh absorbed traditional racial attitudes in their youth Had them reinforced daily by their environment And so their defense of their racial attitudes became more strident as they began to Increasingly come under attack in the 1930s and 40s so frank ousley became president of southern historical association in 1940 And he was one of the vandal built agrarians. So one of the southern southern conservative intellectuals And he wrote of half savage protected group Some of them could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations removed from cannibalism And he said that tranquil race relations in the south both before and after the civil war had been disturbed by northern trouble makers Who had bamboozled the childish and naive protected group into believing that the white man was his oppressor? And he proposed a secret organization to bolster southern morale. So history is usually Operated for particular people to boost a morale. So on the one hand the history profession Like to proclaim is commitment to objectivity But the way the history profession is usually worked is to boost the morale of the group that it focuses on So american historians are different because pretty much everywhere else in the world historians concentrate just on their own people And they proclaimed that outsiders can never understand the mystery that is their own people But most american historians don't write about american history. They write about history all around the world So this southern historian wanted to form a secret organization to bolster southern morale And that's history like much of history Has been used to bolster morale of the ingroup. So to bolster southern morale and combating interlopers Members of this secret group will be required to Visit confederate cemeteries. And if that doesn't work If smart lawyers meaning Jewish lawyers continue to come to the south to stir up the Black Sea threatened a revival of the Ku Klux Klan So between world war one and world war two The historical profession in america was dominated by relativism, which doesn't say that there is no truth It just focuses on how difficult it is to try to reach objective truth So after After world war two The historical profession generally turned us back on relativism So you may not realize this but marxists tend to be objectivists. They don't think that they're offering you relative truth They believe that they're offering you objective truths So anthropologists after world war two took a close look at the moral implications of cultural relativism and found it wanting So they didn't want to grant significance to hitler's culture or nazi cultures And One anthropologist noted that the remaining Jews of europe are going to be poorer customers for gospels which hold that there are two sides to every question So prior to After world war one prior to world war two relativism was the dominant ethic in the american historical association But after world war two for about 15 years What reigned was consensus and a belief in objective truth And an anti-relativism that was the reaction to the horrors of world war two So historians and anthropologists during and after world war two felt like look we're fighting a war to preserve freedom And we need to state that some things are true and good And and turn our back on there are two sides to every question We need to celebrate the american dream So cultural relativists were very much on the defensive within Anthropology and the historical profession after world war two And so relativists wonder how tolerant they should be of cultural practices that included soviet slave labor camps and nazi debt camps and the lynching of blacks in the american south so american anthropologists and historians after world war two Turned away from relativism and searched for universals in cultural values And part of this was a reaction to what happened to historians under the nazis So they wrote histories From a nazi perspective And anyone who was jewish and anyone who didn't get on board with the nazi perspective They got pushed out of their academic position. So in germany all academic positions have always been Being funded by the government. So you're a civil servant when you're a when you're an academic in in germany so The historical community Is not just responding to outside pressure for conformity following world war two and for the repression of dissidents Much of the pervasive pressure came from within the community So there was this one historian armin ruppaport who was appointed to berkeley in 1949 His appointment was held up because he was worried he might have some of the ultra left wing tendencies so common to the new york jewish intelligentsia so There are virtually no communists Employed as historians in the united states following world war two until the 1960s. So We may think that the history department is just a hotbed of commies. Well, not actually true so so Communist historians couldn't find employment And uh There was a tremendous pressure for conformity following world war two like we're all uniting In the fight for freedom was kind of an ethos that dominated history and anthropology and other academic departments and Looking at this the author here peter novick says looking at the editorial correspondence of the leading american historical journals What struck me most was the absence of any dissident submissions Like the apocryphal small town nazis who petitioned berlin to send them a jewish shopkeeper so they could boycott him There may have been the will within the university to repress distant historians, but there wasn't much dissidents to repress So why is it frowned upon to reference heidegger because heidegger for pragmatic reasons for careerist reasons joined the nazi party and nazis are not held in high esteem in the west Luke looks like he's waking up later than usual pillowhead. Yeah, I was just lying down listening to that napin coughness interview with Who was that bloke matthew? That nice bloke matthew lipton So I was just lying down listening to that just kind of drifting in and out of Have it in fall asleep, but I I might have and then now I'm about to get on my exercise bike and ride 10 miles But as I was preparing to mount my exercise bike. I thought I want to talk about this book some more I want to talk about Jews in the american historical profession Okay, this is something that I never knew All right Almost all the historians who are highly critical of american populism We're jewish. All right. We're talking daniel bell. Nathan glazer oscar handlin seamore Martin libsett talcott passons david reisman edward shills So with with few exceptions almost all the historians who are critical of american populism were jews from the northeast And almost all of those who defended american populism were gentiles from the south or the midwest Now this feature of the controversy about american populism meaning characters like william jennings brian This feature was well known to all the participants and to many contemporary observers But it was usually mentioned only obliquely obliquely if at all Because it tacitly raised issues of perspectivism and universalism Which following world war two until the mid 1960s the historical profession preferred not to discuss openly So in the early 1960s, carl briddenbough not jewish Gave his american historical association presidential address And it was he outraged many people because people thought he was taking on jews Who for the first time were becoming a significant presence in the american historical profession So carl briddenbough Deployed the fact that whereas once american historians had shared a common culture meaning anglo culture and rural upbringing The background of the present generation of historians would quote make it impossible for them to communicate to and reconstruct the past for future generations They suffered from an environmental deficiency being urban bread. They lacked the understanding Given to historians who were raised in the country or in the small town There were products of lower middle class or foreign origins And their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstruction They find themselves in a very real sense outsiders on our past and feel themselves shut out This is certainly not their fault, but it is true So he got in a lot of trouble because everyone thought he was going against the jews So Richard Hofstadter it was a famous historian who wrote the authoritarian personality in the 1960s He was the son of an eastern european jewish immigrant father and a lutheran mother So he was only half jewish by inheritance as a child. He served as an episcopalian altar boy He taught an interview that he'd spent a lot of years acquiring a jewish identity Which is more cultural than religious anyone whose part jewish can only be a jew so Can can I tell you a jewish secret? so A jewish secret is it's much more of a tribal identity than a religious identity that the more Traditional you go in observance level The more people tend to have strong in-group identities So someone raised in a very jewish environment may not realize until age five or six or seven That there are any such thing as non-jews in the world And Here's here's a secret about jewish identity is that as with any strongly identifying in-group We tend to think of our groups as fairly homogeneous. So So Orthodox jews tend to think of christians. It's just like this one group. Oh christians or muslims Or bodice when really christians muslims bodice, you know, there's tremendous variation There's just as much variation among these these groups as there is among jews Do lots of la jews convert to Scientology? No Very rare Where is laura lumabine? I saw her speaking about three months ago Seems like oswald spangler is even more controversial to reference the martin heidegger Yeah, I don't I don't know why uh I guess spangler's right wing orientation is medium little outside Outside the cool club So people who heard this address Had no hesitancy Determining it anti jewish they inferred that this guy was distressed and resentful at the entry of jews into the history profession Which only occurred in the 1960s And then those who defended Oh, yeah, those who defended the populace the american populace like william jennings brian They would frequently comment publicly and privately On the jewish ethnicity of populism's critics Often using language resembling carl britain bowels So they were trying to account for what they considered to be an astigmatic meaning an inaccurate perception so These are the viewpoints found among the anti populace They tended to be the new conservative the new liberal the liberal progressive the jewish the anglophile the urban now there's Another alternative explanation of jewish responses to populism. So daniel bell Record for an interviewer discussions about anti semitism he had with richard hofstadter in the early 1940s But arose in our conversations has shaped Subsequent work a fear of mass action a fear of passions let loose A lot of this goes back in many ways to a particularly jewish fear In traditional jewish life going back particularly to the assyrian and bablonian episodes the first creativity Is a fear of what happens when man is let loose when man doesn't have halakha the law he becomes an animal so that's according to These blokes daniel bell and richard hofstadter. That's that's kind of the the bottom line animus behind these various jewish historians Going after populism in a very hostile way Because there is a fear among some jews that if you let man loose That he becomes an animal and therefore you need a strong government to restrain man So prior to the 1960s there were very few jews Would I be willing to do a movie with tom cruise or john trawler sure, but i'm not willing not willing to to Do anything for the I'm not willing to do anything that violates my morals that let me just Put it that way. Let me just put it that way very delicately Okay, i'm not willing to sleep with anyone to get ahead there Okay, so prior to the 1960s very few jews undertook graduate work in history So there were fewer jews doing graduate work in history compared to any other discipline save geology biology botany and zoology But by the end of the 1960s jews constituted nine percent of academic historians But 22 percent of the membership of history departments had highly rated universities Of works in american history deemed outstanding impulsive historians None published before 1950. It was by a jewish historian But of those published in the 1950s three out of ten were by jews In the 1960s four out of ten jews also figured prominently modern european, especially german history Particularly those jews who had emigrated in the 1930s So anti-semitism did not completely disappear in american history departments in the 1960s So increasing entry of jews into positions of prominence was an added provocation So j. fred rippey of the university of chicago history department complained in the early 1950s That the publishing house Alfred noff does all he can to promote the jews the harris foundation here is now largely hebrew controlled The gubernheim foundation favours the jews in its awards Saturday review of literature is now in the hands of jews jewish influence has been responsible with the choice of Louis scott chalk as a member of unesco's committee to write a world history Enrollments have declined the main cause probably is the distaste such an overwhelming number of jewish refugees on the faculties That's j. fred rippey of the university of chicago history department But these attitudes became rarer They were hidden when they survived and they became less influential in part because they could be costly So lewis got chalk was favored in his selection as american history association president because it would establish the precedent of honoring a jew When david donald recommended six young americanists that means studies of american history To the university of wisconsin in 1957 where kevin mcdonald went five of the six were jews So by that point the price of anti-semitism was mediocrity So whereas jews was substantially overrepresented elite institutions in the history department said 22 percent Of the historians at elite universities were jewish by 1970 versus nine percent in the profession at large Situation with respect to catholics was reversed So they were only 10 percent in the elite universities 21 percent in the profession at large One young catholic historian in the 1950s wrote his protestant graduate school mentor Asking him to recommend a protestant denomination for him to adopt so that he could evade anti-catholic discrimination I don't give a bang if it's mohammedan when affect my beliefs when offend the god and christ i believe in I really am shopping around for a church the way i figure it My god deserves the best and that includes earning a decent living too And uh, so this this young catholic historian became an episcopalian Just to try to get a job as a history professor okay, there was a there was a creation of a minor court surrounding jewish historian mark block He was the eminent french medievalist executed by the germans for his resistance activity So his life and death combining serene scholarly detachment in a field fiery move from the current struggles meaning world war two With heroic moral commitment in the great issues of the day. He worked in the french resistance There's a dramatic and reassuring example which suggested that detachment and commitment could coexist without either threatening the other So this is mark block So he was a jew who'd risen higher professionally than had any jew in the united states before world war two And for the growing number of jews in the historical profession He was an inspiration While for non-jews the call to mark block was something of a talisman against the profession's reputation for anti-semitism So wisconsin throughout the 1950s university of wisconsin was a progressive holdout against more conservative historiographical current so significant portion of its historians And graduate students with new york jews have leftist backgrounds. So the university of wisconsin served an americanizing function So in the late 1960s louis scott chalk at a young age was elected to the president of the american historical association As a deliberate symbol of the acceptance of jews within the profession And then in 1978 the selection of eugen genovese An even younger age as the president of the organization of american historians signaled the legitimacy of the left What's it like in australia people versus army versus government versus narrative? Okay, so american society in history Revolves if you had to name one cultural value and be freedom One the one dominant cultural value in australia new zealand is fairness So a lot of different expressions revolving around fairness a fair go fair dinkum That the australian cultural value par excellence is fairness while in america the cultural value par excellence is freedom Australians regard the government much more positively than americans regard the government So for about half of americans government is the problem probably only five percent of australians would think that The government is the problem. So australians more supportive of the government they follow government directions More than americans do They are more willing to give up freedom for fairness And there's much more of a sense of mateship In in australia among among guys while friendship in america is much more likely to be found Through your profession or your ethnic group or your religious association or your hobbies or your interests okay, so The entry of large numbers of jews into the upper reaches of the historical profession in america in the 1950s and early 60s Was widely seen as the fulfillment of the universalist norms of the historical profession So historical profession has long regarded itself as universalist seeking objective truth But it was completely the opposite with the arrival of blacks and women in the historical profession from the late 1960s onward Because their rise to prominence coincided with a new assertive particularist consciousness Which challenged universalist norms. So they defined themselves not as historians who happen to be negros But as black historians committed to cultural nationalism They weren't historians who happened to be women seeking proportional representation In textbooks for members of their sex, but they were feminist historians with an overriding loyalty to their sisters And agendas which called for a thorough going transformation of historical consciousness So jews when they entered the historical profession insisted they were just like everyone else except more so So they were generally committed to a sensibility. There was not just integrationists, but usually assimilationists as well But in a different cultural climate the new black and female entrants stressed the distinctiveness of their vision And they were often highly critical of central values of the history profession So assertive particularism then had implications not just for academic universalism in the abstract but for values As basic to academic life as a commitment to quote telling the whole truth So jews who rose to prominence within the historical profession overwhelmingly did not venture into history. They certainly never attempted to define a jewish perspective And almost all the leading figures in developing the consensus interpretation of american history were of jewish background So now with the rise of black and female professors of history we get the rise of particularist ways of thinking. So we're challenging universalist assumptions about cognitive style and modes of discourse So turn of the century meaning the fen de sicklay from the 19th to 20th century Racists asserted that blacks were naturally subjective while whites were naturally objective And they asserted that women were naturally intuitive and men were analytic And those blacks and women in the academy scoff scoffally repudiated these assertions as racist and sexist slanders So enlightened egalitarians consistently maintained that the approved academic cognitive style Including the commitment to objectivity had no relation with color or gender But in the 1970s and 80s a substantial number of black and feminist scholars denied that blacks were innately only white men with black skins And that women differed from men only in their reproductive systems So serious claims were made for distinctive cognitive styles distinctive discursive styles Like claims were made that blacks and women think differently And that therefore blacks and women should not assimilate to white ideals of cognitive styles and objectivity so During the 20 years following the publication of his book from slavery to freedom in 1947 black history as far as a profession was concerned Was represented above all by john ho franklin Who always denied he was a negro historian? He said he was a historian And he wanted to show as possible for a black man to reach the heights of the profession With honor and respect and to have warm relations with leading white historians So he in 1956 he became the first black historian to receive a regular faculty appointment at a white institution brooklyn college where denis prager got his undergraduate degree so John ho franklin was deeply committed to Universalist and objectivist norms of the profession just like most jews entering the profession He had great faith in america. He was optimistic about the attainment of racial justice through integration Look forward i wrote you a song for your For my birthday it goes do do do do do do do do do do do do do do It's beautiful. What should i call it? I would say owed to the common man So most of john ho franklin's scholarly work had nothing to do with blacks He was a historian of the south that just happened to be black so When he denied that blacks had privilege inside or access to the black experience. He was to some degree just protecting himself because to grant the skin color conferred epistemological privilege epistemology is how do we know what we know so you can only understand the black experience If you're black, right, that's the that's the thinking But that would then denigrate the value of his own studies of white southerners So it was his universalist ethos and his rejection of particularist racial claims That dictated his choice of subject matter not the other way around So his criticism of the profession like his criticisms of america rory's directed to the gap between principles Which he wholeheartedly accepted and performance which he frequently found wanting So prior to the 1960s black anger and black impatience were not unknown But the face which blacks turned to whites were often disguised So in the mid 1960s white americans were confronted with the full fury of a new generation of blacks who wore no such masks So blacks in northern ghettos exploded in violence most of the new militants repudiated americanism rooted in old integrationist tactics They called instead for black power and they termed themselves black nationalists so those who can gloat And those who can't brood so So if you're a reform gloater, let's say you're you're a white liberal And you feel a sense of guilt about white racism Right, you still identify with the white master race But the brooder makes the opposite identification and he feels no sense of guilt and the sense of outrage So there was a dramatic difference in the dimensions of black history When addressed by gentile and jewish scholars in the 1960s and 70s So almost all the most influential studies of white attitudes and behavior towards blacks were Written by gentile professors david brian davis george redrickson winthrop jordan morgan calso james mc furson And of those who wrote of blacks as subjects were overwhelmingly jewish meaning ira berlin herbert gutman laurence levine leon litwak george roehlich So why wasn't that as overwhelmingly gentiles who wrote about White attitudes and behaviors towards blacks and as overwhelmingly jews who wrote about the black experience because I guess Many of these jews identified much more as brooders rather than glotas So press one if you identify primarily as a gloater Right, I identify as a gloater and idnewickey He seems to identify more as a brooder.  They were vanilla wafers with chocolate filling So some black historians argued that black and white historians had different sensibilities But some would say the jewish historians of the black experience were able to think in black ways. They thought black So the generalization about the difference in focus between Gentiles and jews applies with greatest force to those who came of scholarly age in the 1960s and 70s That you could observe it in the previous generation with woodward and stamp writing the history of racism and oppression from the white side and herbert apthika and philip foner emphasizing black agency By the 1980s the injunction to think black had become so powerful the distinction began to break down The jews were considerably more likely to have a background in left-wing politics And thus to be pre socialized into identification with the oppressed so when prior to the 1960s Well prior to the 20th century When whites wrote about the black experience They took black inferiority for granted After the 1920s this became increasingly unpopular And so the dominant approach was to talk about the damage that was done by white oppression and white slavery But then studying the mid to late 1960s A lot of the the black historians rejected the notion that the blacks were damaged So there was a new theme a theme of resistance So there's these new themes would say that you know black slaves were virtually always on the barricades So it's a little bit like jewish attitudes towards People in going through the holocaust so Many jewish historians want to emphasize jews who revolted during the holocaust In world war two So resistance comes to be equated with endurance and survival So responding to criticism that in his book the slave community he had slighted the role that resistance played for blacks John a blessing game made the analogy explicit the most apt Characterization of the slaves behavior is that lucy devituits used in the war against the jews They learned not only to invent but to circumvent not only to obey but to evade not only to submit but to outwit Their tradition of defiance was devious rather than direct Employing nerve instead of force So after 1965 the dominant Approach to chronicling the black experience was to emphasize resistance And to deny damage So the young white historians who wrote the history of blacks in the 1970s generally came from left-wing backgrounds Generally came from involvement in the civil rights movement.