Julian Zelizer Interview with David Blight
How did activism shape how you do or teach history?
I was in college from 1967 to 1971 at Michigan State University. So I came of age with the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. Leaving high school in 1967 in Flint, Michigan, where I grew up, and all through college I lived with the changing nature and the reality of the “Selective Service” system, or the draft. I was not in any way an activist until my second and especially third year in college, 1969-70. In every way the questions I pursued about American history and history generally (I loved ancient and Russian history as well) developed through those two extended crises in the United States.
In Flint I grew up thoroughly working class in values and in economic condition. We lived almost my entire youth in a trailer park approximately a half mile from the huge AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors, where my father, a four and a half year veteran of World War II, worked. He first worked on a factory production line and then with time, without any college education, managed to get a “white collar” job sitting at a desk and ordering parts. The white collar was not a metaphor for him, as he often reminded his two sons. The only person I ever knew through high school who had a Ph. D. was the principal of my school, and it was earned in education. He was a bit of snooty sort; his name was John Kouzoujian, he used pretentious big words and insisted on being called “Dr. Louzoujian.”
At MSU my mind and spirit flowered when I formally left the varsity baseball team in winter, 1970. That spring, with the Moratorium against the war, many protest marches, and the killings at Kent State I gained a political consciousness as never before. And in the larger world of race and civil rights, I had just gained a politics because of urban riots from 1965 into the 1970s, especially the huge rebellion in Detroit in 1967. In 1969 or 70 I took the first ever Black American history course; the professor was Leslie Rout, an African American whose field was Brazilian history. My high school history teachers, although I admired both of them, had taught precious little Black history at all. I was a history major from day one at MSU; it was all I ever wanted to do, and I wanted most of all to become a high school teacher. In the fall of 1970, I did my student teaching in Flint; during that term the school had police patrolling the halls for weeks, and there were many disturbances and some violence. White and black parents took sides about “community control” and “Black Power.” My supervisory teacher effectively checked out of town during that term, and I was thrown into the deep end and told that all the US history classes were mine. It was a good if uneasy baptism in teaching and in the turbulence of race relations. Most of the terrible divisions and anxieties about race in American streets and homes flowed into the school and most teachers, including me, were not prepared. But it was an exciting and meaningful beginning in education.
I took my first job the following summer teaching in Flint, Michigan. I taught there for the next seven years and it became the formative time in my professional life. I loved high school teaching, but it can wear down the strongest and most dedicated of people. I threw myself into the job, physically, emotionally, and morally. While teaching full-time, I did my MA in history at MSU, one course at a time evenings and in summers over a period of three years. That experience of taking real graduate seminars and writing research papers (two of which I actually published in popular history magazines) helped me slowly understand that I desired somehow to pursue an academic life.
As a teacher I was an activist in our union and in various kinds of curriculum development, and for five years taking a bus load of working class kids from Flint to historical sites, especially about the Civil War, all over the east coast. I also served on a community council that tried to imagine new magnet schools that would help the city diversify and avoid court-ordered busing. My older brother, Jim, who went on to be a very distinguished scholar of the Cold War, especially the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam, was perhaps the biggest influence I ever had. His brilliance and determination, and his conquest of “graduate school,” as well as his advice despite our background, was always in some form my model.
So In 1978 I applied to two Ph. D. programs, at the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin. Michigan turned me down and Wisconsin admitted me. So in the fall of 1978 I went to Madison with imagination and hope, and very little money. It was there in the four years I spent working for the doctorate that I found scholarly guidance and a fundamental pivot in my life. I always recalled that one of my professors at MSU while doing the MA said to me: “well, if you want to do a Ph.D. it means you want to “live a life of the mind.” I think he saw me as nervous and unfit, but with time, I wanted to somehow live his life. With my brother’s help I had reached that treacherous stage.
Who were some of your key intellectual influences?
At Wisconsin, I was blessed to come under the guidance of Richard Sewell, the historian of political abolitionism. His Ballots for Freedom is still a classic synthesis for anyone wishing to understand how the antislavery movement turned to politics in the 1840s and 50s and how that turn reshaped American political culture as well as the coming of the Civil War. Dick was a masterful mentor and a teacher of writing. His care with and sometimes brutal critique of my over-wrought prose made me a writer. And I suppose, forever, Dick molded me into a political historian, as I was also finding my feet in cultural and intellectual history in the courses of Paul Conkin, Daniel Rodgers, and Paul Boyer. All three taught me how to think about ideas; Rodgers astutely reminded us that ideas should always be somehow tied to the ground, to real people.