And for good reason. Were here for a conversation with kevin kruse and Julian Zelizer, and theyre here to talk about, of course, their coedited book, myth america historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past and our recent past. Kevin kruse and Julian Zelizer are colleagues in the History Department at princeton university, where kevin is. In addition, director of the center for collaborative history. And julian is also on the faculty at the school for public and international affairs. The two cowrote faultlines a history of the united states. Since 1974. Before now coedited miss america. Kevins other books include the Award Winning white flight atlanta and the making of modern conservatism and one nation under god. How Corporate America invented Christian America. Yes, julians many equally celebrated books include the fierce urgency of now Lyndon Johnson. Congress and the battle for the Great Society and burning down the house. Newt gingrich. The fall of the speaker and the rise of the new Republican Party from these titles alone, you can easily see the venn diagram of their long running and overlapping interests in american political history and miss america now drives home for us how the disinformation crisis is a condition made acute by the Trump Presidency as much as by the role of social media in spreading lies and it makes inescapable the fact that this disinformation is a chronic condition with very deep roots in americas selfconception. In fact, maybe what distinguishes a myth from a lie is that a myth takes time to take hold and can be corrected, but perhaps not undone with a countervailing truth. Not that its a given any longer that the truth will this larger lie. The range in this book is as impressive as it is sobering. Reaching as it does from the myth of american exceptionalism to that of the vanishing indians, to the men of america, as somehow not an empire with many others along the way. And we can maybe take some comfort from the fact that myth america was on. The New York Times bestseller list for many weeks running if myths cant be undone simply by setting the record straight. They certainly also cant be overcome without that crucial work. This book does some heavy lifting in creating the conditions of possibility for selfexamination that its many readers seem to be ready to show up for. I imagine that the brief to contributors must have included a demand to write forthrightly and clearly, because sort of incredibly. All the essays. Essays in this book meet that very high bar. And i feel certain, not least because of that, that miss america will be a powerful tool for the classroom. What more could we hope for from our historians . Please now join me in giving a warm welcome to Julian Zelizer and kevin kruse. Thanks again. Thank you so much. Its great to be here. Thank you for having us here. Labyrinth is just a wonderful bookstore, so its really an honor and always a welcoming place to speak about ideas and books. So how were going to do this, were each going to speak for about 10 minutes. Just give you a little overview of what we are trying to do, and then we want to open it up for questions and answers for the rest of the time so that you can ask whats on your mind about the book. This was really great project to work on. We tried to find some of the brightest minds in the academy who write well and who had something to say about the big issues of the day. I think we were responding to a number of issues. In fact, and we always say debating history and controversies over history are not new. The history profession has always actually prided itself on intense arguments about how do you interpret the past . We call it historiography. Thats what were trained to do in graduate school to try to understand how different scholars have interpreted, assert in period a certain issue of a certain person. Theres a huge literature on the cold war, for example, and kind of what caused it and what caused the ramp up of the cold war. Theres a huge literature on reconstruction with historians having very different interpretations of how do you study that period . The key in these arguments is that the historians are grounding their arguments in Archival Research and theyre grounding it in a kind of wide read, a vast read of what other scholars have found on the topic. Theres also been more political controversies that we talk about in the introduction before our current times. In 1994, for example, there was a big debate in washington when there was going to be an exhibit over the end of World War Two and the atomic bomb and the decision to drop the bomb. And a big controversy broke out between veterans groups, historians, curators about how do you depict that decision and what are the implications of the way its depicted in that kind of moved out into the public sphere today, though, is a different kind of issue, which i think drove us to take on this project. And its a problem more about disinformation, misleading information, arguments about history that are totally disconnected, totally disconnected from what historians and teachers have been working on. And finding over the years. And we highlight in the interest action to kind of sources of this. One does come from the modern media ecosystem, in particular conservative media, which has created a huge platform form where we saw a lot of arguments being put forward in the last few years, which were kind of striking because they were directly at odds with some basic facts that most historians agree to be true. And we wanted to put out an alternative to understanding these questions. And in part its in politics, history has become politicized and we do argue that theres an imbalance between what we saw in the parties. And there was a big push in a lot of republican politics and that those examples range from the 1776 commission that former President Trump put together at the end of his administration, sean, to whats going on in florida under governor desantis, where history is being weaponized and either being used as a real tool of political combat or the subject itself is becoming the focus of what can be taught and what cant be taught. The book also, we should say, looks at some myths that really have taken hold across the aisle and are not partizan, and theyre just myths that can often mislead us in terms of how the past is unfolded. Issues like the history of native americans, the u. S. Overseas. I wrote one on the reagan the idea of a reagan revolution, immigration and more as well as on the founders. Our goal really with the book wasnt to myth bust so much as to put out smart arguments about these big issues by historians who really know their stuff, historians who are really well versed in these subjects, but again, who can write it and it really accessible way and finally on that, we did want to showcase what goes on in the academy. I mean, the two of us as professors feel the kind of intense heat and antagonism that often exists. Unfortunately, in these days between the university and most of you live near one and the rest of the world. And theres historians, people dont hear from who are doing just great work and work. Thats interesting. Even if you dont agree with it, thats thats really sophisticated and engaging and we wanted to showcase some of the scholar, as you might not see so much on tv or hear on the radio, some of whom have come out in the last few years via social media, writing in different publications and and use this book as a vehicle to introduce readers to them. My essays on the reagan revolution, and thats an idea that has a real powerful hold. The idea that in the 1980 election, really everything changed and we moved into a fundamental, really new political era. And i just try to take on two elements of that, which i think dont give a full history of the period. One is the persistence of liberalism, the idea that reagan didnt wipe away the legacies of the new deal or the Great Society. Reagans presidency in the end was built on top of the foundations that they created, and they look at different policies, domestic policies, even foreign policy, where you can see that conservatism wasnt a revolution, it wasnt a clean sweep into a new era. But these other ideas and policies persisted as well. And you have more of a civil war unfold that i think helps us understand where we are today. And the second part of the idea of a reagan revolution, which i tried to challenge, is the idea that reagan wasnt an incredibly contentious president. There were Many Americans from activist, religious leaders to citizens who were not on board with what the Reagan Administration was doing. And i highlight someone like tip oneill, who these days is often remembered for liking to have a beer with reagan at the end of the day, as many people often tell the story. But in fact, if you look at oneill at the time and even in his memoirs, he didnt have very kind things to say about what reagan was doing and about the reagan president. So i tried to bring back just how contentious this decade was, and i do so as kevins heard me say, as a way to actually treat reagan more seriously and to really understand his presidency, including some of the limitations and challenges that his administration faced, rather than somehow discount finding the significance of those two terms. So let me turn it over to kevin to talk a little bit and then wed love to hear from all of you. Just want to echo what julian said in terms of thinking labyrinth for having us here. They always put on great event is one of my Favorite Places in town so very happy to see you all out. Not just supporting us in the book, but this great bookstore and also to just the second all the things that he said about our ambitions with the book, ill briefly talk about my chapter, which was on the southern strategy. Now i see a lot of puzzled faces around the room. The idea that the southern strategy would be included in a book on myths about American History might seem a little odd because a lot of you lived through it a lot of you saw it unfold before your eyes. I grew up in the south. I saw the some of the tail end of it and this was a very conventional idea. The southern strategy, for those of you dont know, is that the Republican Party long the party of lincoln, the party of racial liberalism, the Party Associated with the north, from the civil war on that in the 1960s, it finally decided that it needed to make some inroads into the south and make win over some conservative voters. There and that its long support of civil rights was the Sticking Point that had to be tossed overboard. And so they made peace with segregationists and made an effort to reach out to them. This is a standard story. I cannot get more conventional and conventional narratives than this story. And its obvious because its all over the Public Record at the time. And since this is something that. Reporter guys were chronicling in real time, that strategists for Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon were talking about in real time to the press, the Party Platform terms of the Republican Party showed this transformation. The polling data shows that no ordinary voters understood what was going on. We see it after the fact in the memoirs and the oral histories and interviews with these figures. They talk about it very openly. What they were trying to do, what they what they accomplished. And its really a remarkable achievement. It really does bring about the kind of the conservative ascendancy that ends with revolution or not brings reagan to power. So this is an obvious story. And so part of my task was very easy, just going back and drawing out this, the story that was kind of hiding in plain sight. I had to do this because a lot of people have suddenly started to doubt this idea of the southern strategy, and theyve done so for clear partizan reasons, i. E. , about a decade ago, a decade and a half ago, republican ends were seeking to turn the page on the southern strategy. We had two different chairmen of the Republican National committee, ken mehlman, and then michael steele, who apologized for the southern strategy, who basically said that was a different chapter of the Republican Party. And now were turning the page on this. And i think in the era of george w bush, there was a sincere effort to turn the party towards a more multiracial, make up, a more moderate on civil rights, open to immigration reform, things like that. You can look at bushs cabinet and its priorities. You can see it all pretty clearly. So that was in keeping with this long history. They acknowledge the past and were seeking to simply move on from it. The problem came when the Trump Movement started and there was a new generation of republican operatives who didnt want to apologize for the past. They wanted to pretend the past never happened, and rather than own up to the southern strategy, they insisted it was, in the words of an article carol swain put out a video on prager. You. It was largely an invention of liberal academics and an invention recently that we had somehow retrofitted this story out of the past. And so the idea here was that they were going to rather than acknowledge racism in the past of the party, simply pretend that the party had never embraced racism and therefore couldnt possibly embrace racism. Under trump. So again, i hear the chuckles. So part of my task was to go back and just recover this history thats hiding in plain sight. I was actually surprised at how plain its hiding. Bill dickinson, an Alabama Democrat who switches to the Republican Party in 1964 and is elected as one of the first republicans in congress from the state. When he switches parties, he says, i am joining the white mans party. The mississippi Republican Party in 1964 writes that offensive racial segregation into its platform, the first Mississippi Republican elected in 1964, the first place he goes to speak after winning his election is a klan front known as the association for the preservation of the white race. Its not subtle. Okay, so all of that story was something i thought i knew, but i found incredibly colorful details, which i was happy to write about in the piece. But i also found that the origins of this are a lot earlier than we thought, and im not alone in this. Other people have written about this, but the traditional story is the public might know it is that this all happens under goldwater and nixon. Its a story rooted in the sixties. And certainly theres a really remarkable shift there thats really, really comes out in the public. You see big things like Strom Thurmond switching of the dixiecrat candidate, switching from being a democrat to a republican. Barry goldwater, the nominee in 64 as voted against the civil rights act. And theres a long proponent of the socalled southern strategy have been telling republicans, we need to go hunting where the ducks are in the south. And by that he meant give up chasing black votes, go after White Conservative votes. But what i found in looking at this is that the origins of this is a common problem for historians. We always find things a little earlier than we. We thought they were. We keep digging back further and further into the past. But i found that the story really takes off not in the 1960s, but in the late 1940s. And right after the dixiecrat revolt, when southern democrats, both the Democratic Party and opposition to trumans embrace of civil rights in 1948 and run the states rights Democratic Party, the dixiecrat party, theyve grown in failure. But this signals to both parties the republicans in the democrats, southern democrats are up for grabs and even though the southern democrats technically come back into the fold of the Democratic Party, largely because the senior figures on the senate dont want to give up their seniority. Leaders of the Republican Party see an opening here, and it starts right away. And in 1948 and 49 prominent senators from the Republican Party are urging a union between dixiecrats and republicans. The head of the rnc goes down to alabama in 1952 and says, you all believe in states rights. Republicans believe in states rights. We should get together and form a union. And its no accident that some of the early candidates that the Republican Party runs in the south are themselves former dixiecrats. In 1954, the candidates the Republican Party runs in both alabama and florida are former leaders of the dixiecrat movement. As time goes on, theyre less former formal dixiecrats than just former segregationist. In 1963, they run a two Democrat Officials who have just jumped to the Republican Party. But who make it clear they believe in white supremacy. So this story is one that stretches back from the forties all the way really into the current millennium. A lot of this change doesnt finally settle out in Southern States at the local level until the early 2000s. So its a long process. And so i think its wrong to think of it. Its simply wrong to think of it as something it didnt happen. But if youre someone who believed it did happen, but it was suddenly a quick switch in the mid sixties, its a much longer and a