Nicholas Kristoff’s column in the February 16 edition of The New York Times about the irrelevancy of academic scholars in the national discussion has set off quite a conversation among my academic friends on social media. His point is that the academy contains some of the greatest minds in the world today, but too many of them have voluntarily removed themselves from taking part in a larger discussion in the national arena and marginalized or even punished their colleagues who do.

He quotes Will McCants, a Middle East specialist at the Brookings Institution: “academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research. This attitude affects tenure decisions. If the sine qua non for academic success is peer-reviewed publications, then academics who ‘waste their time’ writing for the masses will be penalized.”

Even worse, the International Studies Association executive council proposed that its publication editors be barred from writing personal blogs like the one you’re reading now. As Kristoff writes, “The association might as well scream: We want our scholars to be less influential!”

As someone who works for a public history educational institution, I have a large stake in this conversation. The Georgia Historical Society bridges the gap between the academy and the public, taking the sometimes-esoteric findings of the profession and making them accessible, understandable, and relevant to a larger public. As Senior Historian, it’s my job to make sure that happens, and it’s a role I’ve come to relish. We try to incorporate the latest in cutting-edge historical research in everything we do, from public programs, to K-12 and college and university teacher training, historical markers, and the Today in Georgia History program. It’s one of the reasons that I write this blog. (That and it’s just so much fun.)

I spoke to the Rotary Club of Savannah last week about the controversy over removing statues and monuments and was introduced as, among other things, a “public intellectual.” Far be it from me to claim such a distinction, but I’m glad if others see me that way. It tells me that they do in fact see me playing a public role and contributing in a meaningful way in the discussion of issues and debates of our time. I have worked hard over the last 15+ years to build a respectable public history resume that demonstrates engagement with my peers in public history and in the academy, and with the public at large.

And I am unashamedly a public historian. When strangers ask me what I do for a living, I usually tell them I’m a historian, specifically a public historian. Not a professor, not a teacher, not an academic, but a public historian (though public historians are of course teachers). What does that mean? In the simplest of terms it means I get paid to think, talk, read, write, and talk about history in the public arena on behalf of an educational institution that has for its mission teaching the public about the past in order to create a better future.

I say “unashamedly” because when I finished my Ph.D. in history the University of Florida (pictured above) I was expected to get a job in the academy and teach and publish. When I didn’t, there was a palpable sense of disappointment among some of my professors, past and present. Not, I should say, among my UF peers—the men and women I went to grad school with there are among the finest minds and best people in the world.

In fact, let me take a moment to give a shout-out to the Band of Brothers that I entered UF with in the fall of 1990, all gainfully employed in various jobs in history and the humanities: Andy Chancey, Glenn Crothers, Mark Greenberg, Dan Kilbride, and Chris Olsen. Andrew Frank and Lisa Tendrich Frank followed a couple of years later, and collectively they are some of the best historians I know—and seven of the best friends I am ever likely to have. They have all gone on to distinguish themselves in the profession and I’m proud to say that we always supported and encouraged each other in a way that I knew even then was unusual in the cut-throat world of academia.

From many others former colleagues and professors and from new acquaintances I’d meet at professional meetings, I kept getting the same questions in the years after graduation: when are you going to get a real (aka academic) history job? When are you going to come back to doing “real” history? It didn’t seem to matter that I had a job working in Savannah, one of the most beautiful places in the world, in a job that made me very happy. I wasn’t in the academy, doing “real” research, writing monographs, teaching undergrads, and there was a sense that I was wasting the training I had received. I was often treated by other professional historians in the academy condescendingly as the proverbial red-headed stepchild.

That isn’t the case anymore, I’m happy to say. Public history jobs are as desirable as academic ones in the ever-shrinking humanities job market, though there will always be those who turn their nose up at anyone working outside the academy or at those who seek to reach a wider audience beyond specialized journals and monographs.

For me personally, the rewards of the job after almost 16 years have far surpassed anything I could have imagined when I first started working at the Georgia Historical Society. I was hired to direct programs and publications, which at first meant planning and implementing our lectures and meetings and assisting with the editing and production of the Georgia Historical Quarterly. The job has happily grown far beyond that.

Through the years I’ve been fortunate to be able to shape the job in ways that have made it uniquely my own. I’ve dropped many of the duties that I first had while picking up others along the way. As Senior Historian, I serve as the chief academic officer of the institution, responsible for ensuring the scholarly quality and integrity of our brand  through all of our educational initiatives, including public programs, publications, historical markers, teacher training initiatives, and public outreach.

If that sounds like the boiler plate off my job description, it is. But here’s what it means, directly relevant to the topic under discussion here: Above all else, it’s my job to make sure we’re connecting with a larger public in three important ways: 1) educating the public about the importance of history and the role it plays in our contemporary culture and society, 2) the role that GHS plays in serving as a bridge between the academy and the public and 3) how GHS serves as a national research center that facilitates the ongoing study of the past in order to ensure a better future.

None of this is what I thought I’d be doing when I was interviewing for academic jobs as I finished my dissertation. I thought I’d be teaching a heavy load of classes, grading blue books, and serving on various committees. Not that I would have minded any of that. I enjoyed doing all of it as a grad student and got great teaching evaluations from my students. But as a public historian, I’ve been able to do things and meet people in this job–writers, journalists, broadcasters, politicians, sports figures, entrepreneurs, Supreme Court justices, musicians, actors—that would have seemed impossible when I began. And very improbable if I’d followed the traditional path. I’ve been able to grow professionally in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

From the beginning of my tenure here at GHS in 1998, I’ve been fortunate to work for a boss, Todd Groce—himself a published, professional historian—who never minded when I got the spotlight and the publicity as long as I was making the Georgia Historical Society look good. And he understood that the more we were all out there, talking to and engaging with a larger public, the better history and GHS were being served.

Consequently, from the moment I arrived here I started doing public speaking and haven’t ever stopped, becoming along the way the public face of a public history educational institution. I’ve spoken to every group imaginable at meetings, dinners, and luncheons, hosted televised round-table discussions, directed a half-dozen National Endowment for the Humanities summer workshops that trained hundreds of college and university professors from all over the country, written dozens of historical markers, helped with fundraising and donor cultivation, assisted with manuscript recruitment for our research center, conducted oral histories, and written editorials and book reviews for newspapers and other publications, including here in this blog.

And it was my supreme good fortune to serve as writer and host for Today in Georgia History when that opportunity came along, which garnered two Emmys. All of it has been enormously rewarding professionally and I’ve had a blast doing it.

I think Kristoff has missed the mark about my colleagues in the academy, too. They are almost all engaged in the larger community outside the walls of academe, and they use social and broadcast media to do it.

Some examples among people I know, all interested in different subjects: my friend Karen Cox at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, on her blog PopSouth: The South in Popular Culture, recently highlighted eight different blogs (including this one) being written by professional historians, and hers is one not to be missed.

Stacey Robertson serves as Oglesby Endowed Professor of American Heritage and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Bradley University in Illinois. She writes about her work on women abolitionists and their meaning in contemporary culture, among many other things, at www.staceymrobertson.com.

My former grad-school mate Dan Kilbride, now at John Carroll University in Cleveland, is host of the webcast New Books in American Studies, a consortium of podcasts that introduces new scholarly books to a larger audience. Check out Dan’s latest interview with Michael O’Brien, editor of The Letters of C. Vann Woodward (which I reviewed here) and his own webpage for other interviews.

No scholar I know is more heavily engaged with the public than Heather Thompson at Temple University, whose findings about the historical and cultural implications of mass incarceration have landed her on nearly every media outlet in the country. She’ll be even more widely seen and heard when Pantheon Books publishes her new account of the Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 and how it still reverberates in American society.

Finally, Doug Egerton, who teaches history at Le Moyne College in New York and serves on the editorial board of the Georgia Historical Quarterly, has spent his career speaking and writing for a broad audience. His recent editorial in the New York Times on the controversial Denmark Vesey statue in Charleston is a model for what all of us should be doing in both local and national media when we can.

All of these scholars, and many others too numerous to list here, are also on Facebook and Twitter.

The truth is, all professionally trained historians have a responsibility to talk to a larger audience, no matter where we work—on college campuses, libraries, in museums, national parks, or historical societies. There is a great hunger for history out there, and it is readily available now on the internet, but so much of it is just plain bad. Indifference about engaging a larger public isn’t just ignorant, it’s dangerous. All of us, in and out of the academy, have a responsibility to be engaged with a larger public because we cannot afford to cede the ground to others who would willfully distort the past for partisan ends.

Americans revere their history, but they need to get that history right, and they need trained, credentialed professionals to help them understand not history as some wish it had been, but as it actually was, based upon sound research in credible primary sources. It’s one thing to examine the evidence and come to disagreement over what it means. That’s the very essence of education. It’s another thing entirely to fabricate history out of whole cloth, like the myth of black Confederates. No one will ever be served by a pejorative, factually inaccurate distortion of the American past.

And the internet, as we all know, is full of self-anointed authorities. As writer Alexander Chee said in a recent New York Times editorial about everyone and anyone “contributing” to on-line encyclopedia articles, the belief that we all have a right to our own opinions has given way to a larger cultural problem, the belief that we also have a right to base those opinions on misinformation. As he put it, “I believe all information should be as democratically available as possible, but I’m averse to it being democratically produced.”

If we can ground our history in good, modern, sound and credible scholarship, that is the best foundation of all. And the best answer of all. All of us in the academy and in public history have a responsibility to engage with the wider world. No more turning our collective noses up or looking down on each other. Let’s join together and make our voices heard.

One warm August  evening, cloaked in darkness, a group of people toppled Elberton’s Confederate monument. The next day, they buried it.

Anti–Confederate activists? Politically-correct terrorists? Nope. It was August 14, 1900. Elberton, like many Southern towns in the 1890s, wanted to honor the Lost Cause. It also wanted to promote its new granite industry as part of the vibrant new South. A Confederate memorial, made from Elberton granite was the perfect way to do both.

The problem was the monument itself. The Italian sculptor hired for the project had clearly never seen a Confederate soldier—the statue was wearing the wrong uniform. The squatty figure with bulging eyes was lampooned as “a cross between a Pennsylvania Dutchman and a hippopotamus,” earning it the unaffectionate nickname “Dutchy.” So down came Dutchy, replaced by a new Confederate monument. Elbertonians felt that the existing statue was offensive and didn’t represent the values of those in the community. They replaced it with something they felt was more in keeping with who they were.

Some state lawmakers don’t believe the people of Georgia should have that right, at least as regards state-owned monuments.  Reacting to the removal of Tom Watson’s statue from the State Capitol grounds, there is a movement afoot in the Georgia state legislature to prohibit by law the destruction or relocation of Georgia state-owned public monuments.

One of the bills’ supporters,  a current state legislator and retired history teacher, reacting to the transfer of the Tom Watson statue off the Capitol grounds, says that “current and future generations should not be given the right to re-write history based on the political correctness of the day.  Generations to come can benefit from history and knowing where we have been is a necessary element in judging where we are and where we need to go. Arm chair second guessing has no place in the preservation of history. “

Hmm. Current and future generations shouldn’t be given the right to re-write history, but he apparently believes, because of his own political agenda, that a current state representative does have the right to enforce a very limited version of the past on the rest of us for all eternity. This is legislation one would expect to find in a totalitarian regime, not in a self-governing democratic republic.

He’s certainly right that we can all benefit from the study of history. But there are several things wrong with this statement. First, “history” is re-written every day and has been since the dawn of time, as new evidence about the past comes to light. The very act of writing history is historical revisionism.

Just two examples: When President Harry Truman left office in 1949 he was universally considered one of the worst presidents in our history. By 1992, when David McCullough’s magisterial biography appeared, he had been re-evaluated as one of the best. Nothing in the past had changed.  Calvin Coolidge is going through a similar revival on the political right at this very moment, from hapless bumbler to “Great Refrainer” who championed small government, thanks in part to Amity Shlaes’ new biography.

History isn’t some sort of static rock that never changes. There’s a huge difference between the past and history. History is what we say about the past, and it changes all the time.

If you believe that removing names off landmarks is re-writing history, then we have a long and honored tradition of that in America, and in Georgia. Under the proposed legislation, it seems highly unlikely that Georgians in the aftermath of the American Revolution would have been able to remove statues of King George III or to change the names of streets with royal names like King Street  and Queen Street to Congress, President, and State streets, as Savannah did in the 1780s. Those names no longer represented who they were as heirs of the Revolution. Freedom meant having the right to choose who you honored and who you didn’t, and no one can accuse the Revolutionary generation of being slaves to political correctness.

Speaking of political correctness: When Georgia seceded from the United States in 1861, the secession convention published a “Declaration of Causes” that explained to the world why the delegates believed the extraordinary step was necessary. I urge you to read it–it is widely available online. From the second sentence in the document, Georgia makes it clear that preserving the institution of slavery was the primary and most important reason for leaving the Union.  Georgia’s secession delegates were not ashamed of that reason and didn’t shy away from it in 1861. Indeed, they expected that their support for that cause would rally most of their fellow white Southerners to their banner. In the document’s 3,300 words, the phrase “states rights” appears nowhere.

Nevertheless, after the war, in one of the most blatant acts of “political correctness” ever undertaken, Lost Causers and other former Confederates obliterated and repeatedly denied any link between the Confederacy and the preservation of slavery, as they do to this day. Why? Because it was no longer politically (or racially) correct after the war to have attempted to destroy the United States over such a thing as the preservation of slavery, so they simply did a lot of “arm-chair second guessing” as to their reasons for secession. Most pro-Confederate groups continue to do it to this day. The idea that history isn’t re-written is ludicrous.

The proposed bill’s supporters also insist that statues and monuments are themselves “history” and that keeping them intact and in place is part of the “preservation of history.”

But here’s the thing: statues aren’t history. They’re pieces of artwork that reveal more about the cultural values of the people who erected the statue than about the person portrayed in the statue or monument. The very act of designing a statue or monument is an act of historical revisionism itself, because designers and supporters of the statue are very selective about what they put on the marble. Anyone who puts up a statue chooses very selectively from the accomplishments and writings of the person they are honoring and how they want that person portrayed, and what is chosen is one interpretation among many of the person or event being honored. But it’s just that, an interpretation.

For example, the Tom Watson statue at the State Capitol has none of his writings about Jews or African-Americans, which were as controversial in his day as in ours. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington doesn’t list the number of slaves he owned, nor does it say anything about Sally Hemings. And the MLK monument in Washington has nothing about King’s adultery or plagiarism.

These three men, like all human beings, had moments of greatness but they were also flawed and fallible. We all are. But the flaws never make it onto the monuments or statues and therefore should never be confused with the balanced, full interpretations that real historians and the real study of the past strives to achieve. Moving statues from this street to that one or even removing them altogether does nothing to prevent us from studying the achievements or the multi-faceted aspects of the lives they represent, warts and all.  That study takes place in the primary documents of history and the secondary sources written from those documents, not from statues or monuments. When those primary documents themselves face obliteration, then we should be alarmed.

The idea that the state can virtually chain all of the people of Georgia in perpetuity to a narrow slanted interpretation of the past is a ridiculous notion, and one quite frankly that should be rejected by all Georgians as being one of ideological correctness run amok. Professional historians constantly re-evaluate people and events in the past as new evidence comes to light, just as doctors re-evaluate treatment for diseases based on new medical research, and we shouldn’t be opposed to changing our minds about what we think about something or someone. Revising our views about the past isn’t “political correctness,” it’s sounds and professional scholarship.

Suppose a community erected a statue to a person and then evidence came to light 20 years later that that person was a child molester. Would anyone suggest that the people living in that community 20 years later don’t have the right to take that statue down? That the person being honored no longer represents their values? Of course not. But under the proposed legislation, if it was a state-owned monument they would be forbidden to do so.

This is a strange piece of legislation indeed for opponents of big government to propose. Using the power of the state to enforce one version of events or values is a dangerous thing, and strikes me as being worthy of Orwell’s 1984. It sounds like something the Soviets would have done. After all, when the Soviet Union fell, exuberant Russians were quick to take down statues of Lenin and Stalin because they no longer felt those figures represented who they were and they had been forbidden to take them down under totalitarianism. Freedom means having the right to honor who you choose.

The proposed monuments bill would have made such a thing illegal, as nothing more than “arm-chair second-guessing” by latter day enthusiasts of “political correctness.”   Binding the people of the future to the values of the past that are enshrined in marble is nothing more than enforcing a narrow and one-sided interpretation of the past that all Georgians should be wary of. It’s as if Governor Eugene Talmadge had proposed legislation in the 1930s forbidding Georgians in the future from believing in the equality of the races.

Before anyone accuses me of trying to censor the past, let’s be clear: moving or taking down statues in no way prevents anyone from learning about a figure in history. In fact, I would argue that far from removing figures like Tom Watson and Eugene Talmadge from our history, we should study them and their words and deeds in depth—and in their totality, not just the parts that make us feel good about them. If they wrote racist things about Jews and African-Americans, let’s read those words, not to condemn but to try to understand how deeply those words created their identities and shaped the world they lived in. Watson and Talmadge were very popular in large part because of what they thought and said publicly about blacks and Jews, and we need to understand that and not hide from it. We need to understand how accomplished and educated people like Talmadge and Watson could have ever thought what they believed, and how their beliefs shaped the society in which they lived and influenced those who came after them.

But it’s nonsense to enforce by law the notion that because our ancestors 100 years ago revered Tom Watson we therefore should too.

Taking down or removing their statues in no way keeps us from studying these people. When anyone begins proposing that we burn their letters, diaries, and public correspondence, then we should indeed get alarmed, because destroying primary source documents will in fact prevent our gaining a greater understanding of historical events and figures. But a statue of a person put up days or years after that person’s death is nothing more than a marble representation of what people at a certain time wanted you to know about that person–an interpretation, and nothing more. There’s nothing sacred about them.

I’m not proposing that Georgians or anyone else should be moving or taking down statues. But I am saying they should have that right if they or their elected representatives so choose. And no one is suggesting that the Watson statue be destroyed, it was simply moved. Even the U.S. Constitution allowed for changes through amendments, freeing future generations from the icy grip of the past. The proposed bill would freeze our collective grip forever on people and prejudices that we long since would have otherwise cast off as representing who we are. Making it illegal for future generations to remove or replace statues is a form of thought control that even Orwell didn’t envision.  It should never be illegal to change our collective minds.