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Reflections on Season 1
162 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Jason M. Kelly and Ray Haberski sit down and reflect on the first season of the podcast. They consider the theme of Justice and War as well as the future of the humanities.
Audio Engineers: Jason M. Kelly and Kelly Kerr
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Transcript
Season Finale Reflections and Future Hints
00:00:09
Speaker
All right, welcome back to our podcast, Justice and War in American History, and this is the concluding episode to season one. We'd like to think that there's gonna be a season two, and I think this concluding episode will give you an indication why.
Exploring Justice in War Through Veteran Experiences
00:00:23
Speaker
Jason, you have had a chance to talk with a lot of different people, mostly vets, about the experience of war and the idea of justice in war,
00:00:34
Speaker
So I'm curious now, how have those conversations changed maybe your view or your sense of this very big question about what justice means in war, where justice resides in the experience of war?
00:00:51
Speaker
Yeah, thanks, Ray. That really is a huge question. Of course, it's the guiding question of everything that we're doing in the season. So listeners have heard both of us talk throughout the episodes. And in some episodes, you'll hear Ray. In some episodes, you hear me. But we're both in the room when these interviews are taking place. So one of us might be on the board while the other one listens. So we've been listening to a lot of people or talking to a lot of people.
00:01:18
Speaker
And what strikes me in all of these conversations is how individual justice is, right? The many, many meanings of justice from kind of big legal frameworks of justice, which we see in some of the texts, we see in presidential addresses.
00:01:36
Speaker
We see justice manufactured or designed through gender or through race, but by speaking to people, the day-to-day individuals, I think we really get to see how justice is embodied and experienced in people's everyday lives. And I guess maybe when I went into this, I knew this was coming, but I didn't quite understand the
00:02:00
Speaker
The scale at which just you know We've had maybe 10 people on the podcast and those 10 people all had very like similar experiences But but very individualized experiences so that you know as a historian, I know this by studying I know that you cannot reduce People's experiences to one overarching
00:02:23
Speaker
umbrella or framework. And this kind of maybe drove it home to
Enriching Discussions on War and Justice
00:02:27
Speaker
me a little bit. Like people understand justice in so many different ways that it, it reminds you of focusing on those complexities, not as something you want to ignore, but actually something you want to maybe highlight. What about you, Ray? Well, I mean, it was interesting for me because I get to
00:02:50
Speaker
think through the ideas that I sometimes write about and think through it with people who they can't dwell on the terms that we typically use when we talk about justice and war.
00:03:09
Speaker
You can see within almost every person that there are two or three very distinct views on war within the same person, and that they are in different stages of contending with those different versions of themselves in many ways.
00:03:27
Speaker
I will say this, they also give a lot of grace to the rest of us. People like me who think about war sort of theoretically, you know, and not in
00:03:42
Speaker
a practical, frankly, life and death situation. And I do think that it is important, and I think this is why the NEH has this particular program, to continue having these conversations in very real ways with vets about how war affects them, their families, and the rest of us. Because if we don't, it's one of the most consequential things that any country can enter into
00:04:09
Speaker
and whether or not I feel it as acutely, I am responsible to some degree for these conflicts. I have some moral obligation to think about it, think through it with the people who do have direct responsibility for the fighting and the dying.
Challenges in Understanding Military History
00:04:27
Speaker
So I think for me, it was an opportunity to think
00:04:32
Speaker
about how I will teach and maybe approach my writing in a slightly different way through personal testimony and how to take those testimonies in context so that I can both feel a sense of perspective on the tradition of war in America, but also understand that almost every person is going to be, to some degree, an exception to that tradition
00:05:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's really interesting you frame it that way, Ray. We spent a lot of time putting together the texts for this podcast and looking at those texts as ways to get insight into these historical wars. And as academics, our tendency is to try to abstract things, right? And I talk about it in a theoretical term.
00:05:26
Speaker
even a letter from a soldier from 1899. We wanna look at that as an example of a broader category of things. But yeah, as you
Shift to Personal Testimonies in Military History
00:05:37
Speaker
said, each of the individual veterans who we sat down with had three or four understandings or experiences about justice in the context of war and reminds you that when you look at those historical documents,
00:05:52
Speaker
Those historical documents are just fractured examples of what is actually happening on the ground in history and it does force you to think about
00:06:09
Speaker
what we do as historians in the process of writing. Yeah, I think many of us understand military history in really big, in two ways. One, sort of like, you know, a very sort of broad perspective of strategies and tactics and the flows of armies, wins and losses, huge battles, things like that. And for many of us, teaching that can be dramatic, but also
00:06:40
Speaker
It doesn't get at so much of what we now consider to be important or significant history, which is the other way that we see military history, which is from the viewpoint of the people who are actually involved in it. And that perspective, those perspectives are tiny battles.
00:07:01
Speaker
millions of them, and making sense or squaring those two things, sort of the large-scale strategies and tactics with the on-the-ground personal experience, I honestly find very difficult. And I don't think there are many histories out there that have to work with this tension quite as closely as, in some ways, military history does.
00:07:29
Speaker
In that sense, I'm happy that we sort of turned the corner on military history and are now incorporating many more ways of doing history. Military history has gone through its own cultural turn. I think there are huge world history projects that have been collecting experiences from vets.
00:07:53
Speaker
I think it will, in the long run, actually make the political history of wars more deep and profound. And we'll get a sense for what we've always had in social history. It's like the history of the civil rights movement or something like that. But how leadership and how personal agency really plays an enormous role in these events that we've always taken from a 30,000-foot view.
Community Engagement Beyond Grants
00:08:22
Speaker
In that sense, I think the podcast has been really helpful in raising more questions than certainly it answers for me, and so I'm sort of looking forward to us continuing to do more stuff with it.
00:08:38
Speaker
also thinking about the podcast in the context of the larger project that we've been working on. We're coming to the end of the NEH support for this project. And a lot of grants, when you're finished the grants, that's it. The project is over. And this is one of those projects that's not going to end when the grant comes to an end.
00:08:59
Speaker
As you've just said, Ray, there's a lot more to be done here. And so continuing this podcast, having community-based conversations, and even perhaps starting up our own oral history project here in the city of Indianapolis with veterans,
00:09:17
Speaker
maybe the next stage of this project. But, you know, I've, I've, I've said this probably once or twice on this podcast already. I'm a historian of 18th century Britain. So everything, most of the work that I do seems so distant, you know, it seems so, you know, 300 years ago, you know, it feels, it feels so far away in many ways. But this is, this, this really has grounded me
00:09:47
Speaker
in kind of a contemporary history as well, because we weren't just talking about the Vietnam War or the the Spanish-American War. We were talking about, you know, folks who've recently returned from deployments overseas. There is a universal nature to the experience of war, right? And I think that that's something that certainly comes through in a lot of the conversations we
War's Impact on U.S. Society
00:10:11
Speaker
have.
00:10:11
Speaker
as much, again, military history in some ways is so interesting in this way. It's very particular to the person, but those people add up to traditions that have not changed all that much over time. And that is something to grapple with as a country, as a people. And I think this is why the NEH really wanted to push this sort of program forward.
00:10:37
Speaker
War has shaped the United States in ways that are so fundamental that we often don't look at them head-on. We don't dig into it as much as we should. And if we leave it to just the idea that there have been wars and these wars, you know, win or lose are too big really to understand, we miss the fact that war has been as much a tradition in the shaping of American politics and society as any other force in U.S. history.
00:11:06
Speaker
I think the fact that we want to continue it and we come from very different sub-fields in history tells you a lot about not only the program the NEH has promoted, but the role that war has played in our contemporary world.
Learning from Veterans' Experiences
00:11:25
Speaker
You and I both can find a lot of relevance to these discussions.
00:11:29
Speaker
and moving away from the documents. We as historians are often very document bound. For me, it's paper for the most part, paper and materials, but as we move into the 21st century, we have more video, more and more audio.
00:11:45
Speaker
But being with veterans and listening to the veterans is, I think anybody who works in the historical fields could learn from talking to veterans about their experiences. Because it does remind you of the complexities and the
00:12:08
Speaker
broad-ranging impact that war and even service more generally has on society and has for thousands of years, of course.
Valuable Off-Mic Discussions and Future Topics
00:12:20
Speaker
Of course, we're talking about the podcasts and our exchanges over the podcast, but there were so many more exchanges that took place off mic, right?
00:12:28
Speaker
The conversations that we had off mic were much even wider ranging than the conversations that we've had on mic and they do point the path forward I think for more conversations in the future.
00:12:43
Speaker
You know, we were just talking before we got in the mics today, uh, about, um, the issue of unhoused veterans, for example. Um, that's, that's, that's, you know, the coming home piece of this. We talked about arriving home, but we didn't actually talk about home. Right. Being at home. Right. Yeah. No, no, no. I think you're right. And I, you know, it's, um,
00:13:07
Speaker
I think for those who are outside of military service or who are not related to somebody who's come home recently,
00:13:17
Speaker
We have this tendency to allow the acceleration of events and of time to sort of move us quickly beyond things that have been crucial or critical to the shaping of our contemporary moment and in order to get to the next thing. And I think it is not a bad thing to have these conversations to slow us down, to remind us of
00:13:43
Speaker
What it takes to be American, it's all the different ways that people contribute to this contemporary moment. Good, bad, very problematic, at times very dangerous.
00:14:00
Speaker
And I hope that where we head next in whatever conversations we have, whether it's in our classes or because you run a public-facing institute here at IUPUI, that we continue to invite more and more voices in.
Connecting Academia with Public Conversations
00:14:19
Speaker
Because I think this is something that the NEH has at its core in all sorts of programs.
00:14:26
Speaker
But it's also something that we've we've absorbed right as as faculty of a new kind that we don't want to keep what we think about in the stuff that we read or research or write about or even teach. We want it to be something that goes beyond the walls of a university, beyond our own conversations with colleagues. So it's been really enjoyable to think outside of the university with you on this podcast.
00:14:54
Speaker
Yeah, same here, Ray. I imagine what the humanities will look like when we retire, 20 plus years from now, question mark. But sometime in the near future, it's these programs and these conversations that are reshaping the humanities as a field of practices.
00:15:18
Speaker
But I think in so doing, when we bring that into the university, they're reshaping the university and it reminds us of our public mission. And I think when we are reminded of our public mission, we are better advocates for the humanities and the public as well. And hopefully bringing the university together with publics across the country is what we see
00:15:46
Speaker
I mean, we are already seeing it, but we see more on a greater scale moving forward. And 25 years from now, I look forward to the moment when this is what we're doing here is common practice, when students are sitting down with veterans and other groups as part of their training. This is what they do as historians or sociologists or anthropologists, just by virtue.
00:16:12
Speaker
of being in the new humanities in the university. I'm happy to be there with you. Well, Ray, this has been such a great program. I think we've said it before, but we should say it again. Thank you to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding this.
00:16:31
Speaker
Thank you to all the veterans and our colleagues who came together to talk with us about this.
Gratitude and Future Podcast Plans
00:16:38
Speaker
We are going to be back for another season for sure. I know it sounds good. Until then. Thanks Jason. Yeah. Thanks Ray. And we will be on the mics with all of you soon enough. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.