In a rousing lecture finale to “America at 250: A History,” distinguished Yale professors Joanne Freeman, David Blight, and Beverly Gage rewound the clock, and — like a trio of 60-minute gourmet chefs of history — offered up a prophetic recipe for our national future, based on the ing redients of the past. Our republican democracy was (and is) a fragile and unfinished dish. That is, a never-before-undertaken experiment in self-government requiring all citizens in their own way in every generation to be the cooks — to be informed and to be involved — and so it remains today, or else. Over 14 weeks of more than two dozen lectures to 400 students and community members at Battell Chapel, parallels between the past and the current dicey moment for American democracy had been largely absent from the professors’ remarks. Not so in this, the 26th and only lecture in which all three professors shared the podium. It was titled “Meanings on the Eve of 2026,” and at the end of the presentation the professors received a long, enthusiastic standing ovation. This time they shared not only some favorite images and anecdotes from the American chronicle of the last 250 years, but, most movingly, what key ideas, lessons, and moments seem to have mattered to them the most in their years of study, in the hope these offer light for the perilous present. In other words, they were trying to answer the question: What are the uses today of the American past? Or, as Blight put it: Why study history? The answer: “Something in the present bugs you. Where you gonna go? To your therapist? Your priest or rabbi? The rabbi or therapist might tell you to read more history!” Here are some highlights for course’s final lecture: Should we be worried about America at the moment of the semiquincentennial? Of course, said Gage, and yet all the previous red-letter anniversaries were also fraught: 1876, 1926, 1976. “These were all moments of larger contemplation,” she said. “That’s what [our] semiquincentennial is for.” Then she showed one of her favorite images, from 1876, following a highly contested election, and not ten years removed from the lacerating brutality and near dissolution of the country in the Civil War, and the country was still trying to figure itself out. We found time, she added, to do that by mounting the country’s first World’s Fair, an exposition in Philadelphia that drew, over two months, ten million people, about 20 percent of the population. “I’ve always loved this image [of just the arm of the Statue of Liberty, from the exposition] because it captures something about the work in progress that is American history. There’s some hucksterism involved, there’s some big ambition, and then there’s imperfect execution.” That imperfection was that the statue was behind schedule, and budget, needed money, and you could climb into her arm, but you of course had to pay! Blight reminded us “of a relatively unknown aspect of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, his struggle with the First Amendment, which was brutally tested in the Civil War.” Starting quite early in the war, “Lincoln suspends habeus corpus eight times,” Blight said. And there was more: Due to the emergency of the war — Lee’s army is converging on nearby Virginia, and pro-slavery mobs are burning bridges to obstruct Lincoln from sending an army to defend the Union. At this fraught moment an Ohio representative, Clement Vallandigham, who is anti-war and pro-slavery, is gaining in popularity. He is having rallies with upwards of 20,000 people. Who knew if this continued but that the war might be lost in this moment. So Lincoln disobeyed the Supreme Court and simply had the man arrested. What am I supposed to do?, Blight paraphrased Lincoln’s dilemma at this moment when free speech is at loggerheads with national survival: “I’m supposed to shoot an eighteen-year-old boy if he deserts the army, and about this man do nothing?” (Succumbing to pressure, Lincoln eventually let Vallandigham “self exile” to the Confederate States, and then to Canada, where he spent the remainder of the war, returning to Ohio and eventually dying in 1871 after shooting himself by mistake in the stomach.) “There was a terrible tension,” Blight said, between a government constrained by law but also needing some discretionary power to respond to crises.” In addition to arresting Vallandigham, “300 Northern newspapers were closed and dozens of editors arrested,” Blight reported. Then the professor paused, looked out at the rapt audience arrayed across the pews of Battell, let his voice drop into his deep, gravely octave, and said, “And we think we have it bad!” “Free speech is as American as it gets,” Blight concluded, “but it’s never specifically defined in a crisis.” Then he shifted to the Gettysburg Address: “Look for the pronouns. ’We’ is mentioned nine times. ’Ours’ and ‘us’ four times. It was about us, as a democracy if it can survive, it’s about its remaking. A president can make a speech not about him. Sorry!” Blight concluded, to an eruption of applause. The origins of the country, Freeman said, taking the class back to the initial lectures about the talky founders, always featured “real debate.” “‘Independence’ was never abstract,” and those debates “unleashed issues that would come to fruition in the future.” One reason the country is an experiment and not a finished item is that the origins were always in process, said Freeman. And the Constitution is basically a fundamental agreement on structure and process, she said, and during a crisis, the Constitution would always provide a way out. Or at least that was the hope. “As Jefferson put it after the crisis-fueled election of 1800,” Freeman said, “he was asked what would have happened if there were violence; if the Federalists hadn’t allowed a president to be elected; if something had gone awry and the whole thing blown up?   “Jefferson answered, the Constitution would have saved us. Yes, he acknowledged, maybe it would need to be tweaked, it was not perfect, maybe it would have to be, like he put it, a watch rundown; so, they’d have to rewind it, and then nation would move ahead abiding by its fundamental pact, the Constitution.” Freeman was also at pains to remind the class, at its conclusion, that the founders were always “posterity minded.” They understood the historical significance of what they were doing, Freeman lectured, but not because of its glory. “They didn’t see it in some golden haze,” she said, and Adams, in his dotage, said to a young biographer that way back then, in effect, We didn’t know what we were doing! “They looked to Americans to continue the experiment. They understood that a democratic republic doesn’t go on by itself, but requires effort to survive and to prosper, and nothing teaches that like a knowledge of history. “The present is the product of the past. The telling of our history matters, particularly in the high stakes of the moment at hand. It’s not abstract! Never forget America’s semiquincentennial is about us. About we the people, in all our diversity. In all of our complexity our disagreements, and commonalities.” And this reporter at least feels it’s fitting to end with Freeman on patriotism: “To me loving your country means loving it for all those things….its ideals and its failures. “To me patriotism doesn’t have to be shallow, glossy or performative. It should have meaning. It should be grounded on broadly shared ideas and ideals and a bracing recognition of who we are as a people, for better or for worse. “Years like 2026 are moments of reckoning….where we can go if we come together and work toward something better. We must for the sake of all of us. For the sake of ‘We the people.” And then she and her colleagues assembled on center stage. Given that they had just now spoken so much about free speech, and given the pressures by the Trump administration on universities and, increasingly, how the American story is presented there, Blight appeared constrained to answer publicly a question he said a student had recently asked about the course: “‘Has the university been censoring you?’ the student queried. No!” Blight said curtly, and the matter was done. Then, after copious thanks to the teaching assistants, the tech helpers, and the team that put the complex course together, the professors turned their backs briefly to an adoring audience, and took a group selfie. For all the lectures, along with post-lecture podcasts with the professors, after each one, here’s the site. See below for other articles about Yale’s ​“America at 250” course. • ​“America At 250” Course Debuts• Tom Paine, Podcaster• Long Live The Republic of Vermont! . . . Or Maybe Not• A Republic, If You Can Keep It• The Balance Of Power And George Washington’s Tailor• Jackson And Trump: Beware Of What You Wish For• On Calhoun, Dred Scott, An American Compromise-Armistice• On The Greatest Rupture In American History• “America Of The Melting Pot Comes To An End” The post “Never Forget America’s Semiquincentennial Is About Us” appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less