CHESTERTOWN, MD—In an unprecedented journalistic
partnership with one of the world’s foremost media outlets, faculty and
students at Washington College have created a new online feature in The New
York Times that will keep watch over the ways politicians and special
interest groups use and misuse history.
The series, which is titled Historically Corrected, launched on Sunday, July 8,
with a broadside aimed at both Democrats and Republicans, casting significant doubt
on claims that both President Obama and his opponent, Mitt Romney, have recently
made on the campaign trail.
“History is often the language of American politics,” says
Adam Goodheart, director of the College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of
the American Experience, which is spearheading the project. “But whether it’s
Democrats harking back to the New Deal or Republicans claiming the mantle of the
founding fathers, fact and fiction are often much too easily confused.”
For instance, Mr. Obama’s standard stump speech usually hails
past achievements such as Hoover Dam as examples of how Americans “built this
country together.” But this week’s column reveals that the dam’s construction
in the 1930s was far from what one might call a “kumbaya” moment. Washington
College undergraduate Kathy Thornton, part of the faculty-student research team
at work on Historically Corrected, unearthed a 1932 newspaper article
documenting protests against policies banning Asian-American laborers from
working on the site, while African Americans were relegated to a few menial
jobs.
Meanwhile, Mr. Romney recently gave a speech celebrating the
United States as “unique” and “exceptional in the history of the world” as the
only nation that has never taken land through war. But as the Historically
Corrected team points out, he made the comment in San Diego – which itself was
seized by a U.S. force in 1846, invading what was then part of Mexico.
Co-directing the project with Goodheart is journalist and
historian Manseau, a scholar-in-residence at the Starr Center. Beginning with a handpicked group of student associates
this summer, the project will expand in the fall when Manseau’s “Writing for
the Media” course will serve as a “newsroom” allowing students to track down
leads, hone their fact-checking skills, and pitch topics for the series just as
they might do one day at newspapers or television networks. “Working on a
project affiliated with the New York
Times is unbeatable real-world experience for any aspiring journalist,”
Manseau says. “Students will come away from Historically Corrected with a
better sense of how news and other media are created today, and the role they
might play in that process.”
With tens of millions of unique visitors per month, the
newspaper’s Web site is one of the most-read media outlets in the world. Historically
Corrected will run several times per month under the rubric of the Campaign
Stops blog, one of the Times’ most
high-profile online series. A condensed version of this week’s inaugural column
also appears in the Sunday, July 8 print edition of the Times.
“The Times is
excited to be able to include in our pages and online this valuable
contribution to the political discussion,” says Clay Risen, senior editor in
the paper’s Op-Ed department, which will oversee the series. “We expect that
Adam Goodheart, Peter Manseau and the rest of the Washington College team will
offer our readers a unique insight into American history, ironically via a
medium — the Internet — that has only recently made such perspectives so
quickly and widely available.”
Washington College president Mitchell B. Reiss sees the
project as “a wonderful opportunity for our students to be engaged at the
intersection of history and politics in a meaningful way. They will be learning
from some of the finest historians in the nation, and their research will
support journalism on one of the most widely read and influential Web sites in
the world,” he adds. “Adam and Peter are
illustrating yet again how the work of the Starr Center can bridge the past and
present and bring the insights of history to the forefront of the national
dialogue.”
Unlike existing fact-checking sites that simply declare a
statement to be true or false, Historically Corrected is designed to encourage
nuanced interpretation, discussion, and debate among readers. Nationally
distinguished scholars will contribute comments to spark the discussions. The
initial group of participating historians includes Richard Beeman of the
University of Pennsylvania, the biographer and journalist Richard Brookhiser,
and Ted Widmer of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, along with
Washington College professors Melissa Deckman, Joseph Prud’homme, and Richard
Striner.
“Readers will be
encouraged to join the debate in the comments section and through social media,”
Goodheart adds, “and the column will also offer a window into the past by
providing primary sources—documents, letters, and images—gathered by Washington
College students.”
This examination of how history is incorporated into today’s
politics is at the heart of the mission of the Starr Center, which was founded
in 2000 to encourage new approaches to studying American history, to draw
connections between the past and present, and to make the work of first-rate
historians accessible and inviting to the general public. The Center also creates
unique opportunities for Washington College students both on-campus and far
beyond; in addition to the new Times endeavor,
it has developed longstanding partnerships with the Smithsonian, George
Washington’s Mount Vernon, and other nationally eminent institutions.
Goodheart, who serves as the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director
of the Center, is a historian, essayist and journalist. His recent book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, was a
national bestseller. A frequent contributor to the acclaimed New York Times online Civil War series Disunion, he also contributes to numerous
national publications, including Slate,
National Geographic, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and the New York
Times Magazine.
Manseau, the Center’s scholar-in-residence, is the
author of several books on history and religion, including Rag and Bone: A
Journey Among the World's Holy Dead and Vows: The Story of a Priest, a
Nun, and Their Son, as well as the
award-winning historical novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter. Manseau
has written for publications including the Washington
Post, the Wall Street Journal,
and the New York Times, and is currently at work on a book about the forgotten
influence of religious minorities in American history.
 |
Project directors Adam Goodheart, left, and Peter Manseau, right, discuss
the first installment of Historically Corrected with student assistants
Maegan Clearwood and Kaitlin Tabeling. |
