Author Archives: Stan Deaton

“That History Commercial”: Today in Georgia History

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tigh“Hey! Aren’t you the guy that does that history commercial every night on TV?”

I was walking back to my office one afternoon after lunch in Chatham Square here in Savannah, and that question was shouted at me from a guy unloading a truck on Gaston Street. That history commercial?  He was referring to Today in Georgia History.  I was flattered that he watched the show and, as we say, tickled at his notion of what the 90-second program was.  Yep, that’s me, I said. “Keep it up, it’s great!” he shouted back.

The Georgia Historical Society launched Today in Georgia History, a daily 90-second TV and radio program, on Georgia Public Broadcasting in September 2011, and it has been a rewarding and powerful way for GHS to fulfill its mission, to reach new audiences, and to teach Georgia history on a daily basis. The program was produced in collaboration with GPB. In addition to receiving the praise of viewers, this innovative program has won two Emmy Awards, a Leadership in History Award from the American Association of State and Local History, and a Georgia Historical Records Advisory Board Award for Excellence in the Educational Use of Historical Records.

Today in Georgia History, or TIGH as we call it, features historical events or people associated with a particular day in Georgia history. TIGH began with the question, how can the Georgia Historical Society teach Georgia history every day in a way that will be entertaining and educational,  help raise our visibility around the state, and get audiences to stand on new ground and see the past in a different way?

emmyWe proposed the idea of a short 1-2 minute daily radio program to Teya Ryan, President and Executive Director of Georgia Public Broadcasting, and she loved it. But, she asked, why limit it to radio? She saw the potential for something much bigger—radio yes, but let’s broadcast it on TV and internet as well, with illustrations, photographs, maps, and other graphics that flesh out each subject in a more meaningful way, and broadcast it across the state—and into Georgia classrooms—every day.

This turned out to be a good decision for many reasons. The ability to market TIGH as an educational program is tied very directly to the visual product; teachers made it clear to us that the program would be more useful in the classroom if there was a visual element rather than just an audio segment. And ultimately, as regards funding, the ability to reach students and teachers is vital to the success of any project like this, because it’s been our experience that getting funding for education projects for children is easier than for other types of programs, like lectures for adults.

Both Teya and my boss, Todd Groce, GHS President and CEO, wanted me to act not only as lead researcher and writer of each episode, but also as the face and voice of the show as well. Why me? We wanted the show to be more than just the usual trivia that often makes up the “today in history” spots in the media, and in addition to my background with both journalism and history degrees, they felt that having an honest-to-goodness professionally trained historian as the on-air host—rather than just hiring an actor to read a teleprompter—would give the show a credibility and authenticity it might not otherwise have.   “You’ll be the Steve Thomas of Today in Georgia History!” Teya told me, and as a fan of both the show and the long-time host of This Old House, I was excited and grateful for the opportunity.

So we began work on creating a daily TV show that would tell Georgia’s story in a new and hopefully thought-provoking way—and do it in less than 90 seconds and about 165 words.  At one point we counted over a hundred people at both GHS and GPB working on the show.  Georgia Public Broadcasting put together a team of seasoned and dedicated professionals that included producers, editors, sound and lighting technicians, graphic artists, and set designers.

tigh-group

It was my great pleasure—and it was great fun—to work with legendary Atlanta producers Don Smith and Bruce Burckhardt, and the GPB crew that included Keocia Howard, Mark Harmon, Ashlie Wilson, Rosser Shymanski, Layron Branham, Marilyn Stansbury, Bob Brienza, Tom Spencer, Tiffany Brown Rideaux, and all the other talented folks at GPB who worked so hard to make me sound and look good. GPB commissioned an original score for the TIGH theme music that TV viewers and radio listeners would instantly recognize as belonging to our show.

The GPB team worked with a dedicated group of staff and interns at the Georgia Historical Society, including my colleagues Laura García-Culler (who acted as GHS’s executive producer), Christy Crisp, Leanda Rix, Katharine Rapkin, Maggie Brewer, Sophia Sineath, Elise Lapaglia, and Alison Zielenbach. They worked tirelessly to track down the images from hundreds of institutions across the country that would flesh out and illustrate that day’s subject. Not only did using these illustrations help promote the GHS collections and those of other repositories but also demonstrated the ongoing need for institutions like ours that preserve the documentary evidence of the past.

We didn’t shy away from controversial topics either; we took an unflinching look, for example, at the myriad ways in which slavery, Jim Crow, and the continuing problems of race have shaped Georgia’s history and identity right up to the present. The production team put into daily practice on TIGH what we at GHS do as an institution every day: GHS as a public history institution serves as a bridge between the academy and the public, taking the best of cutting-edge historical scholarship and making it accessible to the lay public without watering it down. This was one of the reasons the show received so many accolades from viewers and professionals alike.

The project began in the spring of 2011 and by the time production ended a year later, we had collaboratively created an impressive body of work that over the course of 366 days (leap year!) covers the entire scope and sweep of Georgia history, from 1526 to 2009. We told the stories of artists, authors, athletes, singers, actors, poets, musicians, architects, politicians, civil rights leaders, agriculture, aviation, military history, Native American history, political history, economic and business leaders, sports, education, weather history, cultural topics and religious subjects, covering every historical era from the colonial period through the 21st century. There’s no facet of Georgia history that we didn’t cover in the course of the year.

In order to help fund the project as part of a larger capacity building  campaign, GHS secured a $900,000 grant from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation.  We needed to raise our visibility across the state, particularly in Atlanta, to help the institution attract the resources it would need to sustain future growth. When we invited someone to become a GHS member or walked into a corporate or foundation office, we wanted them to know who we were, and TIGH has helped raise the visibility of our brand in every corner of the state.

In addition to daily radio and television broadcasts, we created an interactive website, www.todayingeorgiahistory.org, to serve as an educational resource for teachers and students. Many history classes around the state begin their day by watching the daily segments on the internet. The site features audio and video streaming of each segment, as well as transcripts, tips for teachers, curriculum, writing prompts, review questions, discussion topics, classroom exercises, follow-up research topics, and selected primary source materials. The web resources align with Georgia’s social studies curriculum and performance standards.

Public response to TIGH has been overwhelming and positive. No other kind of program we’ve done has matched this one in reach. By the end of 2012 nearly six million Georgians had seen or heard the program and it was being used by thousands of Georgia teachers and students in the classroom. And it will continue to live for years to come on the internet.

For me, working on “that history commercial” was one of the most professionally rewarding things I’ve ever done. When the show won two Emmys—for short-form writing and overall cultural and historical excellence—at the regional National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences gala in Atlanta on June 8, 2013, it was a tribute to the hard work and dedication of all the talented professionals at both organizations who worked on the show. I will always be proud to have been part of the TIGH team.

Worth Reading:
The Letters of C. Vann Woodward

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The Letters of C. Vann Woodward. Edited by Michael O’BrienThe Letters of C. Vann Woodward. Edited by Michael O’Brien. Yale University Press, 480 pp., $40.

C. Vann Woodward has cast a long shadow over the American historical profession for the last 75 years. His path breaking biography Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel, first appeared in 1938, the first of Woodward’s 15 books and numerous essays and reviews that transformed the way we understand the American South in the years following the Civil War.

Woodward was born in Arkansas in 1908 and graduated from Emory and  Columbia before receiving his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina. He taught for many years at Johns Hopkins and Yale, where he was Sterling Professor Emeritus until his death in 1999.

I had the pleasure of spending some time with Woodward on a cool early January day in 1998, a year before his death at the age of 91. I had just completed my Ph.D. at the University of Florida, and Woodward was on campus to speak and to visit with Bertram Wyatt-Brown, one of his most distinguished former students. Wyatt-Brown was my advisor and mentor at UF, the author of Southern Honor, and himself a giant in the profession. Among all the students who showed up for the private lunch that day with Woodward, I was the only one who brought copies of some of his books for him to autograph. I’m looking at them now on a shelf here in my office.

Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History

Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History

They were all path breaking works—Origins of the New South, 1877-1913; The Burden of Southern History; The Strange Career of Jim Crow; Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction; Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History; American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North/South Dialogue; and the aforementioned Tom Watson. In person, he was quiet and unassuming, soft spoken, and delighted to be asked to autograph them. He inscribed each of them differently, personalizing them all, bemused at some titles he hadn’t seen in years.

All of this was recently brought to mind when a new book from Yale University Press landed on my desk, The Letters of C. Vann Woodward, edited by Michael O’Brien. It’s a wonderful collection of letters written to and from Woodward, and they offer a rare glimpse into the mind and thoughts of one of our most influential and gifted historians.

Besides the influence of his own published scholarship, he mentored some of the leading scholars in America, including Wyatt-Brown, Civil War scholar James McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom), Willie Lee Rose (Rehearsal for Reconstruction), Louis Harlan (Booker T. Washington), and William McFeely, the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Ulysses S. Grant and Frederick Douglass. McFeely was my mentor for a Master’s degree in history at the University of Georgia, so I was thus fortunate enough to be trained by not one but two of Woodward’s best students.

Wyatt-Brown and McFeely were each, in their own ways, heirs to the Woodward tradition—warmly generous with their time, loyal to their students, and unfailingly polite but professionally critical with anything you wrote for them or asked them to review. Woodward was all of these things as well, as these letters make clear, and he was justly proud of his students’ accomplishments while being self-deprecating about his own. His 1982 edited volume of Mary Chesnutt’s Civil War won for him a long-overdue Pulitzer Prize. Three of his own students—McPherson, McFeely, and Harlan—won that prestigious award as well, while others, including Wyatt-Brown, were nominated for it.

Michael O’Brien’s introduction is a good guide through the letters, but their worth is not in explaining the importance of Woodward’s historical writing and its impact on our thinking. One can look elsewhere to find that. The treasures here are different, though just as rewarding; they are more revealing of the temperament, character, and the evolution of the thinking of a man whose work influenced so many others.

Woodward’s published letters cover every phase of his career. They’re all worth reading, but even casually dipping into them reveals a deep humanity that most scholars sorely lack. He asks John Hope Franklin, the most prominent African-American historian of that day or this, if he’s thought about where he will stay at a conference in segregated Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1949; describes to Virginia Foster Durr the pain of losing his only child to cancer in 1969: “The ordeal was mercifully short but all the more poignant and bitter. The most haunting and unbearable part was . . the knowledge that it was the last of it all”; and rejoices to Wyatt-Brown in 1995 that after a non-malignant diagnosis of a colon polyp, “I leaped out of the bed, kissed the nurse, thanked the doctor and emerged in a world more beautiful than I remember it being before.”

The stoic academic that so many of us awe-struck students saw at professional conferences, that stares back at us from nearly all of his photographs, the man who weathered the devastating loss of both of his wife and son, is nowhere to be seen here. Here was Woodward in his 87th year, happy to be alive. Historians have long known Woodward the scholar, but this is a side of him that few ever saw.

In writing to a distant cousin, a college student whom he had never met, Woodward told of the tragic loss of his son Peter, and asked “Are you a hippie with granny glasses or a square with horn-rimmed? Revolutionist or jock, it doesn’t matter. The cousinship is the thing, and you must still have something of the southerner in you or you wouldn’t ever have bothered to write.”

And there it is. For all of us who struggle to understand the history of the American South and its connection to the world we live in now, C. Vann Woodward will always be a welcome companion who labored mightily to light up the dark spaces of our past, and whose published letters now reveal the true depth of this remarkable southern gentle man. For all of us who love history, he remains a kindred spirit. The cousinship is indeed the thing.