Memory Lane sign by Martin Bennett / Stockimo Source: Alamay Stock Photo

Those Were The Days

Nostalgia in American History

01.03.20

It’s common for folks to look back on a time gone by and romanticize it as “better days.” But is nostalgia a harmless yearning for the past, or a distraction from what’s happening in the present?

This episode and related resources are funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this {article, book, exhibition, film, program, database, report, Web resource}, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

historical memory; nostalgia

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Nostalgia in American History Lesson Set

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Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for something from the past. It is a universal feeling that exists in different ways in our popular culture and politics. Just as the television show “I Love The 90s” appealed to a population of millennials, Donald Trump’s campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again” harkens back to a bygone era of American history.

This lesson, and the corresponding BackStory episode, examine different examples of nostalgia throughout American history, including music, television, architecture, and politics. With each example of nostalgia presented, students should be encouraged to consider why it gained traction among a certain population of Americans. Additionally, students need to consider whether the idealized version of America conflicts with the experience of different minority groups.

Segments

Sha Na Na Meets Woodstock

Nathan learns about how an unlikely 1950s throwback band called Sha Na Na became part of the most notable counterculture event of the 1960s: Woodstock. Scholar Daniel Marcus helps tell the story.

Music:

Longtime Rye by Blue Dot Sessions
1950s Doo Wop Band by Audio Blocks
Soda Pop by Audio Blocks

Woodstock Festival; counterculture; nostalgia; rock & roll

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Nathan C.: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Joanne Freeman: I’m Joanne Freeman.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Joanne Freeman: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians. And each week, along with our colleague Brian Balogh, we explore the history of one topic in American history.

Nathan C.: We’re going to start the show in New York City. It’s late April, 1968. And in the Upper West Side, Columbia University is ablaze with protests of the Vietnam War and the university’s role in the conflict. The protests were part of a wider counterculture movement in the 1960s that challenged the status quo on everything, from foreign policy to the nuclear family.

Nathan C.: Meanwhile, in the midst of all this tumult, a group of Columbia students were doing something a little different. Precisely because tensions on the campus were so high, these students wanted to come up with a way to unite their fellow peers around one thing they all had in common, a 1950s childhood.

Daniel Marcus: These students got dressed up in what they saw as ‘50s greaser gear and they sang all these old ‘50 songs in a very satirical but loving way as well. And they quickly became very popular at Columbia, and they started playing around clubs in New York City.

Nathan C.: Daniel Marcus has written about this period and the group that became known as Sha Na Na. He says Jimi Hendrix happened to be at one of Sha Na Na’s New York City shows. This was around the time that organizers were getting ready for Woodstock, the 1969 music festival that would become a cultural touchstone. Hendrix was already on the bill, but he needed an opener. So Hendrix told the promoters-

Daniel Marcus: “You should bring these guys from New York called Sha Na Na to Woodstock.” So they performed at Woodstock. We think of Woodstock as the apotheosis of youth’s counterculture of the 1960s with the Jefferson Airplane, and Hendrix, and all of these counterculture icons, but in the midst of this, you had Sha Na Na doing Duke of Earl, Chapel of Love, and songs like that.

Nathan C.: Okay. So you’re probably wondering, “It’s Woodstock. There are rock stars like Hendrix, The Who, Carlos Santana. What did people think about a bunch of guys in gold lamé singing doo-wop?”

Daniel Marcus: And they were very popular. It’s not that they got booed off the stage. Those hippies loved them. It was seen as funny. It was seen as entertaining. It was a throwback. Okay. In the midst of all this craziness of the late ‘60s we can have a moment where we can enjoy Sha Na Na.

Nathan C.: In many respects, the politics of the 1950s couldn’t have been more different from that of the ‘60s; where the ‘60s was known for counterculture movements, the ‘50s emphasized conformity and conservatism. This was, after all, the decade of President Dwight Eisenhower and Leave It to Beaver. But Daniel says that this was besides the point for Sha Na Na fans.

Daniel Marcus: It doesn’t mean that this audience was embracing the politics of the 1950s. Not at all. They were just embracing these few cultural emanations.

Daniel Marcus: There is also another moving rock fest called Festival Express that is now a documentary, which was about a train ride through Canada, where the band would stop along various cities and play shows. And these were again ‘60s icons like the Grateful Dead, the Band, Janis Joplin, they were all playing at this. And for one concert, Sha Na Na flew in and performed with all of these bands on the same bill, and it was like seeing aliens from outer space, all these guys with short hair and grease-back hair pretending to be ‘50s hoods among Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin, but this was all seen as part of the mix of youth counterculture at the time.

Daniel Marcus: So Sha Na Na was one of those bands that really showed the nostalgia for this early era within rock and roll culture, that eventually got transformed into Happy Days and then into the conservative nostalgia of the 1980s.

Joanne Freeman: Today on the show, we’re exploring nostalgia in American history, and how bygone eras have shaped culture and politics.

Nathan C.: You’ll hear more from Daniel Marcus on how popular culture of the 1970s and ‘80s fueled an idyllic 1950s nostalgia.

Ed Ayers: And, can a building be nostalgic? We’ll discuss how allusions to the past have shaped an iconic style of Southern architecture.

Revolutionary Reminiscence

As soon as the American Revolution ended, people wasted no time commemorating and memorializing the war’s legacy. Joanne talks with scholar Sarah Purcell about the ways that the public remembered the war and how nostalgia for the American Revolution helped shape a national identity.Music:

Cm by Podington Bear
Copley Beat by Skittle
Gymnopedie 1 by Podington Bear

American Revolution; collective memory; commemoration; identity; nostalgia

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Joanne Freeman: But first, we’re going to take you to the early days of the United States, all the way back to 1824.

Joanne Freeman: It had been about 40 years since the end of the American Revolution, and people were figuring out how to commemorate and remember the war. Here’s scholar Sarah Purcell.

Sarah Purcell: The notion was, there’s something of a feeling of crisis or declension as the men of the revolution were getting older and starting to die off in 1824, and a notion that the nation owed these men one last gasp of gratitude before they were gone.

Joanne Freeman: So Congress decided to invite an old war hero to tour the country as a way to memorialize the revolution’s legacy. But the person they invited actually wasn’t an American. It was the French officer, Marquis de Lafayette.

Sarah Purcell: And Lafayette was a perfect symbol of this because he, for one thing, had such a close relationship with George Washington, so he was associated with Washington ever since the revolution, and also because he symbolized international approval of the United States and French support for the United States in the revolution.

Joanne Freeman: So Lafayette came overseas and traversed from state to state, stopping in cities, small towns and battlefields along the way.

Sarah Purcell: Many of them had very large basically receptions, public parades, rituals of all kinds, usually a ball where he would be celebrated by the women of the communities and just thanking him as a way to also, by proxy, thank the generation of the revolution.

Sarah Purcell: Partly, he was good for this because he had been so young when he joined the revolution. He was only 19 when he came to the United States and became an officer of the Continental Army. And so, he was a little younger and more robust than some of the other founders who had already passed or were about to pass away. And so he was able to undertake this tour because he was slightly younger. And he also made a big effort to connect with average veterans.

Sarah Purcell: So on the battlefield at Yorktown, for instance, he held a receiving line, and elderly men came out of the crowd and shook his hand. And newspapers all over the country reported on these told stories about old men weeping in sympathy as they remembered their years in the Continental Army or the militia.

Joanne Freeman: Sarah says Lafayette was meant to represent a certain nostalgia for revolutionary America, and that his tour helped shape the public memory of the era.

Sarah Purcell: A public memory is a whole collection of behaviors and cultural expressions. It’s really the memory of a whole society put together. So it includes commemorations, and things like parades and monuments, and a whole constellation of cultural ideas about the past, that people used to make sense out of the present. It’s the way that societies interact with their past to give it meaning in the present.

Joanne Freeman: Now, Lafayette sweeping tour across the country happened in 1824, but Sarah says people were creating a collective memory of the revolution decades before that.

Sarah Purcell: Well, it actually started really as soon as the revolution itself started. Memories begin to be formed even while the experiences are still happening. There’s a whole series of local and national holidays that celebrated the memory of the revolution, things like monument building, parades and other kinds of civic celebrations, as well as a whole host of print culture and speeches that people gave to have this shared sense of the kinds of things that should be remembered about the past.

Joanne Freeman: I gather even, basically, funerals and eulogies sort of fall into this camp of ritual.

Sarah Purcell: Yeah, 100%. So funerals and eulogies, obviously, are about remembering the dead, the person who has died. And they had a long-standing precedent in colonial America to serve a community function that was often religious, to put the person’s life in context and give it a meaning for the community.

Sarah Purcell: Probably the greatest example of that is George Washington, where funerals were held for him all over the country when he died in 1799, including funeral processions with mock coffins and all kinds of draping of black cloth and other things that really presage even larger public funerals to come in the 19th century. But it was a way to bring together communities to mourn for the past, but also to glorify the past through that funeral ritual.

Joanne Freeman: Now you just talked about respect and you’ve talked about praise, and I gather that gratitude is also a part of what’s being expressed during these moments in rituals. Is that true?

Sarah Purcell: Yeah. Absolutely. Certainly in the early Republic post-revolutionary period, the classical value of gratitude is something that really took on a deep patriotic and political meaning. And so gratitude is something that the public not only feels, so it’s not only my responsibility as an American citizen to just feel gratitude, but to actually show gratitude by paying respect. Gratitude meant that patriotism itself and reverence for the sacrifices of the military was part of what made America great, the willingness to come together and grant veterans respect.

Joanne Freeman: I would assume that in some way or another, the disenfranchised made use of public memory. I would assume that as forgotten as they were, African-American veterans probably had their own ways of claiming some ownership into this larger message. Is that the case?

Sarah Purcell: Oh, absolutely, because there’s great cultural capital to be gained out of that common public memory. And so you’re totally right that disenfranchised people can use that as a tool to associate themselves with the nation. And African-Americans certainly did that, starting right after the revolution. You see it in lawsuits from black men and women suing for their own freedom, and using both revolutionary political rhetoric and the memory of black male military service for the American cause as some way that disenfranchised African-Americans can really try to leverage their own freedom and participation in both civic and political life in the United States very, very early, as early as the 1780s.

Joanne Freeman: So, is that the sort of thing that you mean when you write about the democratization of public memory?

Sarah Purcell: Yes, it is. The fact that once you have public memory of the Revolutionary War and of the American Revolution as a very powerful political concept, initially it was used for men like George Washington, the very revered, people we now know as the founders. But once that language is out there, it’s available to be spoken by people who also want the respect and participation of and in the nation. And so, people like impoverished former veterans who need food, they’re able to talk about, “Look. I have these scars on my body that I received in the revolution, and I don’t deserve to waste away.” Or African-American suing for their freedom, they’re also able to mobilize that language.

Sarah Purcell: Now, it doesn’t mean that the memory itself is completely democratic and just equally available to every person, but that it is a tool that people can seize hold of to try to leverage some political capital.

Joanne Freeman: We’re talking about public memory as a unifying thing. We’re talking about public memory as a democratizing kind of a thing, as a tool, but obviously there would’ve been a lot of disagreement about what that public memory was and what it meant. How did that break down into factions or opposing sides? What were they contesting?

Sarah Purcell: Yeah. There’s all kinds of record of people arguing and contesting memories of the revolution. And it can take a lot of different forms. Of course, in the 1790s, when the very first era of political contest between the two first political parties in the United States happened, each of them used a lot of memory of the revolution to argue that their interpretation of American politics was, of course completely correct, and that their opponents were violating the proper memory of the revolution. And that broke down even to the point of which holidays the parties celebrated the most.

Sarah Purcell: The Democratic-Republicans tended to celebrate the 4th of July and have very partisan-flavored celebrations. Federalists engaged in celebrations of George Washington’s birthday and battle anniversaries. And these were really ways to just say that you are being nonpartisan and celebrating the past while simultaneously blaming your opponents for not being properly patriotic.

Joanne Freeman: Right. And commemorating events that allow you to highlight things that you can claim as yours. So the Federalist claiming George Washington. How can you protest celebrating George Washington? Then that ropes people in in some ways to sharing that public memory.

Sarah Purcell: Exactly. You also see in the 1820s, when the Bunker Hill Monument was being proposed in Charlestown, Massachusetts, that people proposing that put a lot of time, and effort, and money into designing the monument. It was probably the first very, very major large monument to the Revolutionary War. There were other smaller ones before it. And then some people writing into newspapers saying, “Look. We shouldn’t be spending all this money on a pile of stone when soldiers need pensions,” and, “There are men starving in the streets, and you’re putting all this money into blocks of granite that are supposed to preserve the memory of the revolution when really we owe that recompense to the soldiers themselves.” So sometimes it took a more economic turn in the arguments over the memory.

Joanne Freeman: Now, how did women either engage in this conversation or use it as a tool in the way that we’ve just been talking about?

Sarah Purcell: Yeah. Women were a huge part of really all of these rituals, monument building, all of the things that I’ve described, parades. Women were often making the arrangements. They were playing symbolic roles often, but still it’s a way in which they were present at battle anniversaries, honestly, serving food at large gatherings. And it’s not just that women showed up with the snacks, but that they would be publicly praised. And that was seen as a ritualistic part of the proper political celebration of a battle anniversary, for instance.

Sarah Purcell: So it’s important for women to provide sustenance for the men. Women were definitely framed as one of the most important parts of society, the keepers of memory if you will. It’s women’s job to remember the war, remember the sacrifice of the revolution.

Joanne Freeman: And to pass it on through kids. Right?

Sarah Purcell: Right. Pass it onto their children. Exactly.

Joanne Freeman: Now, we’ve been talking about all of this commemoration and even nostalgia for the Revolutionary War. But that last word raises a question. This is a memory of a war. So, is there any of the ugliness of war kept here, or is it really purely a kind of sanitized, publicized version of the war?

Sarah Purcell: Yeah. It’s a good question. A lot of it is pretty sanitized. I do think that the public memory tended to stress the glory of war and sacrificing kind of a generalized term. So for instance, Joseph Warren. The image that still remember of Joseph Warren is John Trumbull’s painting of him dying heroically and expiring in a beautiful shaft of light at the Battle of Bunker Hill, when in fact he was shot in the face at rather close range and his body had to be identified by dental records afterwards. But that’s not what appears in the beautiful heroic history painting that has lasted until today as the memory of martyrdom and the revolution. So it is about death, but it is sanitized to a certain degree.

Sarah Purcell: And I do think that that has created a pattern for American history, where warfare and heroic military sacrifice is something that is so valued as part of our national identity, that it is seen as a very positive thing. But every generation kind of has to learn for itself the ugly side of war. But that’s become a little bit more apparent in the 20th century when the sort of movement for soldiers themselves to reckon with what we now would call PTSD, for instance, and to give a more realistic picture to society.

Sarah Purcell: But there were some memoirs where soldiers did talk about difficult experiences, and certainly violence. There were even women who told the story of their children dying in the Revolutionary War or losing their husbands. But that was seen as, for the most part, more a personal loss and not as much a part of the national story.

Joanne Freeman: Now, you just said each generation needs to relearn for themselves or a re-shape, I guess, for themselves, what these public memories of the past are. So in a way, is nostalgia a form of education? And educational in the sense of educating people about the sort of public memory of the past and what it meant.

Sarah Purcell: I do think nostalgia is one of the drivers of why events from the Revolutionary War or from 200-plus years ago still are important. It is something that might drive people to have a real interest in those events, and to drive them to learn more and to be educated. But I do think, sometimes, pure nostalgia takes the place of education and maybe is a little bit less informed than it might be. And sometimes nostalgia can also be distracting.

Sarah Purcell: Again, it has positive uses to hold people together, but it also can drive people apart. And if people are prone to this idealized division of the past, then sometimes they’re missing the details that might actually tell them something about the present that is different than the nostalgic haze would indicate.

Joanne Freeman: Sarah Purcell is the chair of the history department at Grinnell College. She’s also the author of Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice and Memory in Revolutionary America.

Sunday, Monday, Happy Days

Daniel Marcus, a professor at Goucher College and the author of Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics, returns to talk with Nathan about how nostalgia for the 1950s shaped politics and culture in the 1970s and 1980s.

Music:

Ma’am by Jahzzar
Get Out by Jahzzar

counterculture; nostalgia; popular culture; television

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Nathan C.: As you heard earlier in the Sha Na Na helped unleash a ‘50s revival in the late 1960s. But they weren’t the only ones jumping on the ‘50s bandwagon. Daniel Marcus says a ton of ‘60s counterculture rock stars were doing covers of Chuck Berry and Little Richard songs that they loved when they were kids. And although the ‘50s revival started rock music, by the 1970s movies like American Graffiti and TV shows like Happy Days cemented the ‘50s as a moment when America seemed, well, great again.

Daniel Marcus: And that’s when people throughout the country really seem to think of the ‘50s as a touchstone to evade all the problems of the ‘70s Watergate, and the post-Vietnam malaise, and the oil crisis, and the coming down of American reputation and power in the 1970s that the country seemed to experience.

Nathan C.: And in thinking about the ‘50s as a cultural moment, are there specific images, or iconography, or even ways of dress that are particularly well suited for folks to latch back onto in these later decades?

Daniel Marcus: I think the ‘50s, you have to think about, “Well, who’s ‘50s was being remembered or commemorated?” And it was a very narrow band of the essentially white middle class and working class teenagers, who are seen as the emblematic ‘50s inhabitants. So other people did not get that kind of attention. But that’s when you had the rise of this nostalgia for greaser culture, for the Fonz as a cultural icon.

Daniel Marcus: And the ‘50s did supply a lot of very specific cultural markers. You had the rise of rock and roll, which became so important in later decades. So the ‘50s as opposed to ‘20s jazz, the ‘50s seem to still be relevant because it was the origins of rock and roll according to these people. You had the rise of television as a dominant medium. So a lot of the pop culture of the ‘70s, the ‘80s, is seen as stemming from at least the early experiments of the ‘50s.

Nathan C.: So bearing down on the question of rock and roll in music specifically, I mean, what is it about rock and roll that makes it so translatable for later decades in such a point of nostalgia for folks coming afterward?

Daniel Marcus: I think a lot of it has to do with its appeal to adolescence, which is when we create our cultural identities and to a certain extent social identities as well. So because it was aimed at adolescents, because it was made by young artists for the most part, it always had this appeal to the baby boomer generation and then later generations as well, as one of the first ways to mark your territory as somebody who is now interacting with popular culture in a big way, and where you get to choose your music, your style that you identify with.

Daniel Marcus: It also always had that tinge of rebelliousness to it. So as adolescents rebel against their parents in various ways, rock and roll and associated popular music as we went along, for instance rap in the ‘80s and ‘90s became embraced as a way to articulate that kind of rebellion.

Nathan C.: And do you see similar kinds of callbacks happening in TV and film in the ‘70s looking back?

Daniel Marcus: American Graffiti was very much wrapped up with rock and roll culture. It had a very big soundtrack. And because there was already this nostalgia for the music of the ‘50s, I think it was easy for George Lucas who made the film, based roughly on his own teenage experience, it was easy for him to use the soundtrack of the ‘50s to articulate a lot of the emotions of the characters in the movie, and to make it seem like this was going to be a popular product, which it was. He could go to the studios and say, “There’s all this nostalgia for the ‘50s. I want to make a movie about the end of the ‘50s,” essentially. Even though the film took place in 1962, symbolically that was about the end of the ‘60s before the Kennedy assassination, before Vietnam, et cetera.

Daniel Marcus: So American Graffiti takes place in 1962, but it was seen as the end of the 1950s or the ‘50s as a cultural construct, with a period that was ending before with the assassination of JFK, before Vietnam, before drugs became a middle class avocation. So American Graffiti was certainly seen as part of the whole ‘50s construct. And I think Hollywood could see that there was this nostalgia for that period.

Daniel Marcus: At the same time, American Graffiti is completely about the teenagers. There are almost no adults in the film. The only authority figure really is Wolfman Jack, this weird DJ who understood the kids. There were no real parents in the film.

Daniel Marcus: What made Happy Days so important was that it brought this kind of rebellious teenage sense and the cultural specificity of the ‘50s back into the family sphere. It domesticated it. Instead of it being about kids going out all night, running around on their own in these cars, it was about kids hanging out at the malt shop and then going home, and basically getting along with their parents. The two authority figures in Happy Days where the Fonz, okay, the kind of greaser elder statesmen of the youth scene, but also Mr. Cunningham, the father. And they got along fine. They really were not at odds with each other.

Daniel Marcus: So Happy Days muted that kind of generational rebelliousness or antagonism, and brought all of that ‘50s cultural specificity back into the domestic sphere and what was seen as a healthy family life that conservatives then used to say, “This is what American families and American life were always about until those rebellious hippies of the ‘60s ruined it all.”

Nathan C.: Right. I remember as a kid in the late ‘80s growing up, there was actually a Wolfman Jack cartoon on Saturday morning, I recall. The Muppet Babies, as a cartoon that I watched growing up, was set as the Muppets were kids in the ‘50s, and the whole music and soundtrack was built around that. I find myself now caught between generations trying to talk to my own students about pop culture from the ‘80s and even the ‘70s. And they have no frame of reference for a lot of this stuff at all.

Nathan C.: And so for our current generation of millennials who might not even have grown up with Happy Days in this indication, how could you explain to them the popularity of this particular kind of nostalgia? How do you account for it being so widespread?

Daniel Marcus: I think the standard account, which I think has a lot of validity, is that the country had gone through so much tumult in the ‘60s and early ‘70s with Vietnam, with Watergate. And that’s something that millennials could perhaps understand today in the Trump era, that when people are talking about the country being so divided, we were also very divided in the late 1960s, and it seemed like the country was kind of having a nervous breakdown at that time.

Daniel Marcus: And so, television was slow in actually registering that. In the late ‘60s, TV was not that confrontational. There were a few shows that pointed to those sorts of politics, the Smothers Brothers variety show, most famously, and they got kicked off the air for it. But then in the ‘70s, TV caught up, and there was what became known as the turn to relevance, which is a little bit overstated and a little bit simplistic, but there were a lot of shows like All in the Family, that started to play out this social antagonism and division in the society, and became phenomenally popular. All in the Family was number one for many years. So the country really wanted to hear these sorts of discussions and all this antagonism played out.

Daniel Marcus: But by ’74, ’75, there were some people at least, who felt like they needed a breather. And it was Happy Days that really toppled All in the Family as the number one show in the country.

Nathan C.: Wow.

Daniel Marcus: It wasn’t that everybody who had watched All in the Family now moved over to Happy Days. I don’t think that happened. But there was a reaction against all the shouting of All in the Family, and Maude, and even the social relevance of MASH to this kind of fun escapism of, “Oh. Wasn’t it nicer and more innocent and less troublesome when we were in the 1950s?”

Daniel Marcus: And I think some of that was also based on the reruns from 1950 sitcoms, because the late 1950s family sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, were also very mild-mannered and basically very conformist in their attitudes, for the most part. And these we’re seeing now as virtual historical documents of what the ‘50s were really like. So Happy Days reach back to them to say, “Wasn’t this great? Wasn’t this fun before we had Vietnam, before we had Watergate, when people trusted each other?”

Nathan C.: Right. Right. So even as people are reaching back to this earlier mainstream, middle class, white America, you can’t put the civil rights movement or a second-wave feminism back in the bottle. Right? You can’t make the anti-war movement completely disappear, or the Red Power movement. I mean, I’m curious to know if there’s any space in these nostalgic representations where women, people of color, other marginalized communities, are working themselves in at the margins in terms of popular representation.

Daniel Marcus: With Happy Days, there were certainly female characters, and they became more important as the show went on after Ron Howard left the show, Fonz actually became a mentor toward the young women in the show. And so it became more about female teenage experience after the major male actors left the show. The show was certainly anachronistic in certain ways, for instance regarding race relations. There’s one episode where a black man is on trial and he looks like he might be getting railroaded, and the Fonz is a jury member and he stands up for fairness, and justice, and equality and help us get the guy free; acquitted.

Daniel Marcus: And so, it was sort of a sense like, “We actually know better now. But looking back to the ‘50s, there were these people who meant well. And if you got the Fonz taking charge, you don’t really need the civil rights movement.”

Nathan C.: Atticus Fonz, right, on TV. Wow. That’s awesome.

Daniel Marcus: That’s a great parallel. I had not thought of that. So there was a tipping of the hat to a very mild feminism, and there was a tipping of the hat to the idea of racial fairness and equality. But those certainly were not the central parts of the show when it became really popular.

Daniel Marcus: The other show that displayed a little bit of that with Laverne & Shirley, which was a spinoff from Happy Days from the same producers, but this starred two adult working class women in their 20s in this era. And they had a certain amount of feistiness and a certain amount of, again, mild feminism in their show along with the slapstick. They were really going back to I Love Lucy as a template, and having the disruptive, unruly, uncouth woman who is disrupting the social norms.

Daniel Marcus: So I don’t think was seen as a real rebellious show, but you could see something in it if you wanted to. If you are a young woman, a girl really who had some knowledge of feminism, Laverne & Shirley might validate that or certainly wouldn’t work against your burgeoning feminism. And that became a phenomenally popular show as well.

Nathan C.: And this is one of the things that’s so incredible about your perspective on this, is that you have progressive movements in ultimately conservative movements, looking back on the ‘50s with a sense of value and nostalgia. And I’m curious how you account for that period being so available and politically useful to people across the political spectrum.

Daniel Marcus: I think it does have to do with demographics, that the baby boomers were becoming voters and they became such a huge demographic, and also the cultural specificity. It was very easy to take these markers of youth culture. But I think the other thing was that you had this stark differentiation in popular culture of how the ‘50s and the ‘60s got defined. So for the left, the ‘50s were not a touchstone, except as they’d kind of tipped their hat to the beginnings of the civil rights movement. So the left really gravitated toward the ‘60s, toward the height of the civil rights movement, to the beginnings of the Black Power movement if they wanted to embrace that, to the anti-war protest, to the youth counter-culture.

Daniel Marcus: So for the left, they based their identity really on what was going on in the ‘60s, not the ‘50s. So you had a youth counterculture that was basically left, that liked that nostalgia for the ‘50s but they didn’t want to go back to the politics of the ‘50s. That was the last thing they wanted. It was conservatives who brought up the ‘50s as a political touchstone, saying, “Let’s go back to that.”

Daniel Marcus: So you had this clear differentiation in political and popular culture between the meaning of the ‘50s and the meaning of the ‘60s. And that got then fought over. Nobody really doubted or challenged to the conservative narrative of the 1950s once they really got going by the late ‘70s early ‘80s, in saying, “The ‘50s was the height of everything great in America, and the ‘60s ruined it all.” I think that it was the ‘60s that then got fought over with competing definitions from the left and the right.

Nathan C.: And how would you characterize the consequences of this nostalgia for the ‘70s itself? Right? So in other words, all of this stuff is being brought back in pop culture, in political rhetoric, and it has to have some impact that is shaping the ‘70s and ‘80s as its own moment in time.

Daniel Marcus: The political impact of this nostalgia really got going in the late ‘70s and the 1980 political campaign. And so, it was really in the 1980s with the Reagan administration that this nostalgia became politicized in a big way.

Clip Playing: Not so long ago, we emerged from a world war. Turning home at last, we built a grand prosperity, and hoped from our own success and plenty to help others less fortunate. Our peace was a tense and bitter one.

Daniel Marcus: Conservative discourse justifying Reagan policies was often based on this nostalgia for the 1950s and attacks on ‘60s social movements, social groups.

Clip Playing: Then came the hard years, riots and assassinations, domestic strife over the Vietnam War. And in the last four years, drift and disaster in Washington. It all seems a long way from a time when politics was a national passion, and sometimes even fun.

Daniel Marcus: And so people really used their own nostalgia in different ways, but now it moved into the political sphere in very explicit ways. And Reagan himself seemed to be a kind of icon of the ‘50s. He had appeared on TV a lot in the 1950s, and he had that kind of patriarchal feel from the 1950s domestic sitcoms, even though he wasn’t actually an actor in those. But it was sort of a Father-Knows-Best idea that we had this kind of ‘50s patriarchal, gentle but stern at times, father figure coming into the political landscape.

Daniel Marcus: And this sort of feeling really dominated 1980s politics, even though it wasn’t always all that popular. And that’s what’s just as important to understand, is that while the conservatives created this dominance, I think ideologically, half the population never bought into it, but they were put on the defensive and did not really come up with a good answer to the politics of nostalgia in the 1980s. What you saw from the left, in a way, was the popular cultural response. You had cultural producers saying, “Wait a minute. There were good things about the ‘60s. We shouldn’t just flush it all the drain.”

Daniel Marcus: It wasn’t until 1992 in the Bill Clinton campaign for president that you saw the left or the Democrats mobilize politically around a sense of the 1960s as something to reclaim, to celebrate. What he celebrated was not the late ‘60s of massive anti-war protest, the Black Power movement, he celebrated the early ‘60s, the promise of the new frontier, JFK. And he used JFK as a political touchdown a lot.

Nathan C.: Is it safe to say that people often romanticize moments in time that they themselves didn’t experience as kids, or even as teenagers?

Daniel Marcus: Absolutely. Because we get these sort of public memories of these areas passed down through the generations, so that people can claim certain kind of errors or certain icons. So people can go back to all sorts of errors, but I think that what they’re taking is definitions that are passed down from them. And those initial definitions, that have a nostalgic cue that are already looking back, the primary historical memory, is often created by cultural producers in their 20s and 30s looking back to when they were five-years-old, and the life seemed simple, and easy, and innocent. So when they are defining their era of childhood, it’s imbued with this kind of golden innocence.

Daniel Marcus: We saw that with the wonder years, which was a show in the 1980s looking back on the late ‘60s, this time of incredible tumult. And they didn’t ignore the tumult, but they weren’t focused on college students or people in their 20s, they focused on 12-year-olds, and it was a show about adolescents coming into adulthood. So they had that kind of nostalgia for the late 1960s and early ‘70s that nobody had really seen before. And the Wonder Years became a way to reclaim the ‘60s for yet another younger generation.

Nathan C.: So in all of the creation of new cultures and new political movements, obviously new forms of consumerism, I mean, how do we account for nostalgia and its impact on people’s sense of crisis in a given moment? And more pointedly, is nostalgia a pretty reliable form of distraction for people to keep them engaged in mainstream institutions and practices that we don’t always pay attention to?

Daniel Marcus: I think it ebbs and flows. There are certain moments and eras that are more nostalgic than others. But at this point, I don’t think it’s ever really going to go away as a potential resource, because we have all of these cultural products. We’ve got television from different eras, music from different eras, movies from different eras, so they can always be summoned up again.

Daniel Marcus: So there are moments when we were completely bathed in nostalgia. There was a period in the ‘90s when the Beatles had the number one hit record and Star Wars was the number one movie at the Box Office, and it was just crazy how much retro there was going on. The Onion actually had an article in the 1990s in which they claimed that the US department of nostalgia or department of retro had claimed that we had run out of the past. We had used it all up. But, of course, now you’ve got that era of the ‘90s. I’m sure there are some people nostalgic for the Onion of the ‘90s. So it’s always going to be a resource.

Daniel Marcus: What we have to also understand though, is that most of these cultural products are in the hands of very few entertainment companies now; behemoths, and they are making decisions as to what to re-release, and what to highlight and what not to highlight. And they’ll certainly follow social trends, but they also have their own economic reasons for highlighting certain things over others. So again, our past now is shaped so much by popular culture, and there are actually just a few main conduits through which that culture of passes to the present.

Nathan C.: Daniel Marcus is a professor at Goucher College. He’s also the author of Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics.

White Columns, Southern Fantasies

If you venture across the South, you’ll probably come across houses, or maybe government buildings, with white columns out front. But how did these white columns become ubiquitous with Southern architecture? Ed talks with scholar Philip Herrington about the connection between white columns and “Plantation Revival” architecture.

Music:

Denouement by Podington Bear
Neon Drip by Radiopink

American south; architecture; plantations; slavery; slavery myths

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Ed Ayers: As we just heard, nostalgic sentiment for a time gone by has been something of a crux for popular culture, but what does nostalgia look like when it isn’t broadcast on your television and instead is found right outside your front door? What happens when a nod to the past can’t be found scrolling through TV Land, but roaming through your neighborhood? I’m talking about architecture, and how some buildings have allusions to another era. For example, if you drive around the South, you’ll probably come across houses or maybe government buildings with white columns out front, but why? Why have white columns become such a commonality on buildings today?

Philip H.: They’ve really become a kind of exaggerated aspect of Southern architecture things to things like movies and fiction.

Ed Ayers: Philip Harrington is researching the ways in which modern, white-columned houses evoke the architecture of the Antebellum South. It’s a style he calls “plantation revival”.

Philip H.: Plantation revival is a term that I’ve come up with with my research partner, Lydia Mattice Brandt, to describe these buildings and landscapes that are constructed and designed to evoke 19th century historic plantation buildings and landscape. So they’re really about Antebellum Southern fantasies.

Ed Ayers: Phillip says white columns are often remembered as the epitome of Antebellum Southern architecture. But contrary to popular belief, he says the South wasn’t filled with plantation houses with big columns on the front.

Philip H.: That’s something that comes as a surprise to many people, I think throughout the world, people who’ve been exposed to Gone with the Wind and seeing the white columns. Margaret Mitchell, actually, in the novel Gone with the Wind described Tara as ugly, and sprawling, and columnists. She was aware that not all plantation houses had white columns. The Hollywood producers had different ideas in mind, and so they really helped spread this idea that white columns were an essential part of Southern architecture before the Civil War. And Gone with the Wind really amplifies the fantasy, but it’s certainly not the starting point. If anything, it’s responding to a fantasy that’s already alive and well.

Philip H.: In our research, we really discovered that a lot of this starts up in the late 19th century with novels, with plays. If you think about how a play might be staged, if it takes place on a plantation, you just put some columns up on the stage, it becomes a facade. And then when we get into movies in the 19-teens, 20s and 30s, that’s really where we start to see a lot of these movies that take place in the South being populated with white columns. And so Gone with the Wind, which comes to big screens in 1939, is really the latest in a long line of these white-columned dramatic productions.

Ed Ayers: So if you went to parts of the United States outside the South, would you see this reference to the past with white columns on different houses?

Philip H.: You very well might because it is a national architectural trend as far as these buildings that in some way speak to this traditional Southern architecture with the columns. There are columns on a lot of buildings. And so it can be difficult to determine what is something that is supposed to look like a plantation. Something that I find very curious is I recently found a postcard of the Alaska governor’s mansion. And on the caption on the back of it, and this is probably from the 1950s, it refers to it as a plantation style mansion.

Ed Ayers: Wow.

Philip H.: And this is in Alaska. So yeah, it’s all over the place. But you think about who’s looking at it and deciding that it looks like a plantation, and that’s the one thing that I find very curious. So plantation revival, it’s one of those things where you know when you see it, but it can be difficult to pin down in terms of an architectural style.

Ed Ayers: So, we do certainly see a lot of them on college campuses. And you and I both have been to a lot of Southern colleges and universities, and you certainly see on the fraternity houses and sorority houses, this is a big theme. Well, what do you make of that, Philip?

Philip H.: Well, my research partner, Lydia Brandt, did some work on fraternity houses at the University of Alabama. And what she found was pretty surprising to me. In the 1920s is when you first start to see these fraternities building freestanding structures, and they built them in a variety of architectural styles. It’s only in the 1960s when we get a new round of houses, they’re getting bigger to accommodate a larger student population, that’s when we start to see these white-columned fraternity houses, what we often associate, especially in the South, with fraternity and sorority houses.

Philip H.: I don’t think it’s any accident that the university is dealing with desegregation at this time, is trying to figure out how to, I’m sure, maintain certain types of segregation, and they then choose for these houses these white columns. If you just look at the houses, they’re not direct copies of plantation houses, but it’s certainly I think no accident that all of them end up taking on this white-columned form.

Philip H.: One thing that’s I think especially interesting to me in terms of what makes them plantation revival is not so much just their architectural features, but the types of performance that happened around these houses. So things like old South days, you have these houses that end up draped and Confederate flags so that the white columns are just coming through that fabric. So they really act as kind of a stage, like a white-columned stage for antebellum fantasy performance. So when we think of plantation revival, we have to think of something beyond the buildings themselves, but how are they being used?

Ed Ayers: So, there are other building styles and avocations of the past in the South in the form of Confederate monuments that have been much in the news for several years now. How do you relate your research to the monuments to the Confederacy that we see around?

Philip H.: I think that there is an important distinction to make between Confederate monuments and at least most plantation revival buildings. Confederate monuments, just like I think most monuments, are built to tell a very explicit message that is difficult to misinterpret.

Ed Ayers: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Philip H.: They are erected by people who are concerned that someone will forget something, and they want to make sure they don’t forget it. Plantation revival buildings so often were built as private homes. Of course with something like a fraternity or sorority house, it’s playing a different role, it’s playing a more public role, but frequently they’re private buildings. So I think that the people who are building them may not even themselves really be fully aware of why they’re choosing a house that looks like that. Think about all the people who build houses or buy houses, we usually don’t think about very explicitly, “What is it about ourselves that these buildings represent?” But clearly, they do represent a lot about our desire and what we want people to recognize are about ourselves.

Philip H.: So plantation revival buildings aren’t built typically with that sort of memorial aspect. And there are also a whole lot more of them. So whereas we talk about Confederate monuments in terms of, should we remove them or not, that’s not really an option for plantation revival spaces. And I think, also, because it’s so difficult sometimes to distinguish what was plantation revival and what were the intentions of someone who built that building, removal is not obviously a good solution.

Ed Ayers: I mean, are they a problem? I mean, are they sending a message that is not helpful?

Philip H.: I think they can be a problem. I think the way to think of them, the buildings themselves aren’t so much the problem, but they can be used as tools. Thinking about the use of these plantation revival fraternity houses as backdrops for things like old South days. And, of course, a lot of that has really faded out, thankfully over time, but this type of antebellum performance, I think that they can be used as tools in ways that are definitely problematic. I think when you create a neighborhood and attach the name plantation to it and it’s not a historic plantation, and then use architecture that very clearly ties that property to the plantation in the minds of the public, you have to think about what kind of message you are sending to people who might want to be in that space.

Ed Ayers: It’s quite common in subdivisions, I’ve noticed. And there also seem to be a proliferation of places that tap the name “plantation” onto the name of the subdivision. What’s going on there?

Philip H.: Well, I have a nice close example. My brother used to live in a neighborhood in Georgia called Ivy Falls Plantation. And Ivy Falls Plantation always was very curious to me. It was sort of like the Holy Roman Empire, it’s not holy, Roman, or an empire, because there was no Ivy, no falls, no plantation, so completely made up. And I think plantation was just that added… it’s such a kind of throwaway type of attachment to stick on something, especially in the South. But I think it just gives that little touch of class. I think, again, it’s often a throwaway gesture.

Philip H.: There was a neighborhood near where I grew up called Arlington, and I noticed that they were promoting it using a picture of Robert Lee’s Arlington mansion that overlooks DC. And I think that they just Googled it, and they thought, “Well, what sounds ostentatious?” “I know. Arlington.” “Let’s stake this house on there.” And I thought, “That did not stand in Columbia County, Georgia,” I’m sorry, but most people, of course, aren’t going to really be thinking that way.

Ed Ayers: So how do we determine when we see a plantation revival house, the intentions of the people who put that place up or who lives there? How can we know what it means?

Philip H.: Oh. Well, that’s a great question. And you know that as a historian, that’s a really difficult one to answer. It can be really hard to assign motivation to historical actors why people are doing what they’re doing. And so often, they don’t really know because they don’t really stop and think about it. Hopefully, one takeaway from this project is that, I think that within certain contexts, people could be a little bit more careful. We have enough historic plantations. We don’t need new plantations. So if you are developing a neighborhood, there’s no reason to attach plantation to the name of it if there was no actual plantation there.

Philip H.: So if it’s not a real plantation, hey, just maybe don’t stick that name on it, and maybe be a little bit more thoughtful about that. I think also, if it’s a building that is, for instance, a clubhouse or a fraternity house, something that maybe comes from more of a history of exclusivity, maybe a building that’s designed to evoke a plantation house isn’t the way to go.

Ed Ayers: Philip Herrington is an assistant professor of history at James Madison University.

Ed Ayers: In the history of biz, calling somebody nostalgic is like one of the worst professional insults that we can get. Why is it that nostalgia seems the enemy of history to historians?

Joanne Freeman: Well, I mean, partly I suppose because nostalgia feels personal and emotional. And as historians, I suppose on a certain level… I don’t necessarily agree with this, but on a certain level, we’re not supposed to be just reflecting personal thoughts and particularly not emoting in that way.

Nathan C.: Yeah. I think nostalgia conveys a certain thinness. And I know historians pride themselves on their big footnotes and endnotes, and it’s almost as if through the sheer volume of the work that scholars do that we’re supposed to in some ways beat the nostalgia out of us. But I got to say, I mean, there have certainly been scholarly works that I have read that felt nostalgic to me in spite of them having many footnotes. And so, I wonder if there’s a certain relationship that is always there when we think about the past in ways that feel maybe too saccharine or useful in ways to solve immediate social or political problems.

Ed Ayers: Yeah. People often come up to me and say, “I just love the Civil War,” and I think, “You don’t, really.” You love learning about the Civil War, and mastering all those battles and details. And I respect that. But I find that people assume those of us who live in the past must love it, but I don’t want to live for a day in the 19th century. And so, I don’t know if nostalgia comes from people who don’t really know much about the past, and therefore just project onto it what they want, or am I just projecting my own professional disdain for this enemy of our profession.

Joanne Freeman: That’s interesting, though, because I do think people often, I guess particularly because I’m pontificating about the founding, I get asked a similar question a lot, which is, “Would you want to go back there?” And not even that, but, “If you went back, where would you go or what would you do?” First of all, I usually say, “Well, I would die in childbirth. Probably that would be my fate in that time period.”

Joanne Freeman: But I think along the lines of what you just said, I obviously am passionate about the people in the period I study, but it’s not because I love them. You know what I mean? I love studying them, and I’m fascinated by them, and I want to figure them out. And there’s a lot of emotion bound up with that. But it’s not just, “Boy oh boy, do I love this.” And even worse than that, I suppose to a historian, it’s not, “This makes me feel so good,” which is kind of what nostalgia does.

Nathan C.: I mean, that feeling part, Joanna, I think is really so critical, because it’s almost as if when you think about what it’d look like if history was wrapped in the Star Wars universe or the world of J.R.R. Tolkien. There’s a fantasy element to this, where people are trying to escape into the past. And it’s weird, because I think about a film like Field of Dreams from 1989. And baseball has this way of just totally dripping with nostalgia in a way that almost no other sport seems to be able to achieve. And it’s totally about creating this space where someone can literally go back and watch the old ball players.

Nathan C.: I remember that that film and all of it’s magic. But it’s also, I think, a sign about how a lot of people tend to think back. I mean, when I talked to Daniel Marcus about the ‘50s, it was about deep concerns about the ‘70s, and wanting to go back to something different. Or when folks in the ‘90s or 2000s were nostalgic about the Reagan era. I mean, it was about a particular conservative politics that seemed to be on stronger footing than it was in the wake of someone like Bill Clinton… I mean, his presidency.

Nathan C.: And so I guess for me, there’s a way to understand nostalgia, even separate from say “bad scholarly history” or even someone who’s simply a Civil War enthusiasts and say, “Okay, there’s an element of escapism that’s baked into nostalgia,” where somebody pines for, to your point earlier, at living in a moment that feels easier or simpler than the complexities of contemporary moment.

Ed Ayers: We also know that nostalgia is not entirely a benign thing. It can also be weaponized. Nostalgia seems very much alive in our culture today. How do you think it’s being used by people?

Nathan C.: Well, I think the obvious example of this is the way that you had a presidential candidate in recent years talk about American history as being basically his platform; really, the base of his platform. When president Trump argued for Making America Great Again, it was a looking back. It was about having people who were going to pull the lever for him, basically feel as if they were undoing recent history. And there are a number of ways in which people could mark that recent history, whether it was about, the desegregation of the American presidency with Barack Obama, whether it was about issues of gender or sexuality, immigration issues.

Nathan C.: I think it is important to recognize that we didn’t really have a powerful, historical counter-narrative during that campaign. Right? There was a lot of talk about the future. And there’s all kinds of ways in which, as we know, politicians will run on a vision of the future, but I find it to be very telling that we don’t have immediately at hand, a bipartisan commitment to nostalgia in the sense of saying, “Okay, let’s all go back to the 1950s and find different things that we can weaponize.” There’s a different relationship between the past and the future for a lot of our political conversations, I would say.

Joanne Freeman: That’s really interesting, though, because that’s nostalgia as history. Right? That’s the suggestion that we’re going to make it great again, because there was this, again, there was this moment where everything was golden and beautiful. And in and of itself, that’s saying, “Let’s be nostalgic,” and that’s kind of what that statement means. But some people go back to the past and are going to think about that kind of golden past, others are going to go back to the past and see complexity. They’re not going to have that nostalgic glossing.

Joanne Freeman: And I think the question you raised, which is really interesting, which is, one side in that election was kind of grounded on this golden pass and the other side didn’t have a counter-narrative, what would be the counter-narrative for people on the other side given that liberals are grounded on the idea of complexity?

Ed Ayers: I think that if you’d ask the people who support the Make America Great Again idea, they would say, “Look. You liberals are just as fixated in nostalgia as we are. It’s just that your nostalgia is that of the 1960s.”

Nathan C.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ed Ayers: “You’re all about identity politics.” Right? “And you’re trying to recapture some time when the civil rights movement was new or the women’s movement was new. So you’re recycling the past just as much as we are.” What would you all say to that?

Nathan C.: Oh. I think there is a lot of truth to that. I mean, I think there’s something about having a candidate in Bernie Sanders on the left, who lives through certain periods that are directly pulling from this kind of countercultural moment. I think his popularity in the way that he frankly talks about issues feels in some ways kind of old-timey and fire and brimstone from an older period.

Nathan C.: But I think there is actually an even more fringe example of nostalgia on, I guess you would call it the left… I’m not entirely sure, actually, just isn’t thinking about people’s nostalgia for Jim Crow. And this is something that isn’t really part of the mainstream debate just yet. I mean, you hear some of this around, the concerns around reparations, or building black banks institutions. But there are folks who believe that one of the answers to the problems of lingering inequality is basically just empowering communities to “do for themselves”.

Nathan C.: And some people do actually look back at the 1930s, 40s and 50s in a progressive way, and say, “You know what? The push for desegregation came with so many costs to black business, black education,” so on and so, that we now have to have a movement that reinvests in different kinds of enclave economies or Buy Black movements and so forth.

Nathan C.: Again, these aren’t necessarily common conversations. And I wonder if there’s a similar conversation around the question of the women’s vote. Right? I mean, looking back at the 1920s as a moment where women were clearly fighting for the very fact of suffrage, is that now one of the ways in which we’re trying to encourage younger women to really take the franchise seriously? Or maybe that argument doesn’t have to be made, but I have to imagine that there are a variety of different political movements that we can point to where the stakes of what was at issue were so high that you can actually draw a progressive inspiration from earlier decades as well.

Joanne Freeman: That’s interesting though, because it sounds like what you’re talking about there, Nathan, is going to the past and plugging into the past, not for comforting nostalgic feelings but to have a sense of the stake. So quite the opposite. Right?

Nathan C.: Right.

Joanne Freeman: Going back to the past to remember the emotion, and the anxiety, and the fight, a different emotion, but still to make feel something, that’s going to make you do something in the present.

Ed Ayers: So this brings us back to the first question, the difference between nostalgia and history. We do believe that politics has to be infused with an understanding of how we got here, but what is dangerous is a false notion of how we got here. And how will we know what’s false and not? All those footnotes and endnotes you’re talking about Nathan.

Nathan C.: I do think that there are ways to be very honest about the fact that we’re all historical subjects. I mean, one of my all-time favorite lines from a scholar is Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s line from Silencing the Past, where he says, “We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be.” And so, I think there is a real advantage about being honest about that. But to your point, it feels as if maybe the real value added that historians have, and I think citizens in general can bring to these political debates, is simply to say, “Okay. We know we’re going to be thinking about our history. Well, let’s think about history in a smart way, in a way that is informed, that is documented, that is about context with a long view, instead of simply trying to score talking points or just simply win the next election cycle.”

Nathan C.: I mean, one of the things that I loved about your interview on white columns and plantation revival, Ed, was that it wasn’t just about getting rid of columns necessarily, but actually talking about what’s going on inside these plantation revival structures. Right? In fraternity houses, are there really arcane Confederate rituals going on in these places? Because that means something very different than simply there being white columns on the outside. And I wonder if our general political nostalgia should be approached similarly. Like what’s the real content of the conversations happening within our historical discussions?

Ed Ayers: On the subject of nostalgia, we have an announcement to make, and we have our good friend Brian Balogh joining us. Our announcement is that our last show will be published on July 3rd.

Brian Balogh: From the beginning, BackStory has been a show that brings together multiple voices discussing multiple related topics, inviting guests from many backgrounds from all over the country and beyond.

Joanne Freeman: Frankly, we made the show as hard to do as possible. The amount of labor behind the scenes is enormous. The amount of skill and time in producing the show is awe-inspiring.

Nathan C.: The commitment of the hosts, who have other jobs, has been challenging. The resources required to sustain such a complex show have been daunting.

Ed Ayers: Everyone has made it work for 12 years. But if there’s one thing we know as historians is that all things, especially good things, perhaps, come to an end. It’s been a great adventure bringing you BackStory, and we look forward to reflecting on that adventure through the spring. You can find more this announcement on our website backstoryradio.org.

Ed Ayers: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history. Send us an email at backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Joanne Freeman: Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins studios in Baltimore.

Nathan C.: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Nathan C.: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham, for Virginia Humanities.