James Campbell is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History at Stanford University. Professor Campbell's career has focused on African American history and the wider history of the Black Atlantic. 

Q: Alongside teaching, researching and publishing monographs on American history at major universities, you’ve been a part of a wide range of public history projects during your career. You've consulted on PBS documentaries on the history of African American religious experiences, on web-based history projects, and on museum exhibitions, including the The Power of Place exhibition at the Smithsonian's Museum of African American History and Culture. Can you tell us a bit about this range of public history projects that you’ve been involved with? How and why did you become a public historian? What exactly is “public” about history?

JC: The idea of becoming a “public historian” at the simplest level refers to a commitment to talking to an audience beyond the university gates. But there are a couple other usages that I think are worth tending to as well. The term also conveys a sense that you are communicating and sharing your scholarship through different media beyond academic journals or monographs. Museums are an obvious place where stories about the past are retold. Documentary films (or sometimes even Hollywood narrative films) are another example. A lot of historians run Substacks. 

For me the vocation of public historian also intersects with questions of public or "collective" memory. There is a growing awareness among some professional historians that ordinary people are also historians, that they not only embody historical experiences but also remember and report and recount those stories to others. I hope our profession has moved away from the arrogant assumption that that the general public only trades in trivial nonsense and that we in the university are the "real" historians dispensing actual wisdom. To be sure, there are stories and beliefs that circulate publicly that are not historically accurate. But the term public history to me reflects an appreciation that there are broad publics involved in the historical enterprise and that the difference between what they do and what the professoriate does is not so stark as one might imagine.

Q: How did you get into this work?

JC: I’ve always been committed to communicating to a broader public audience beyond the eleven other scholars working in my specific subfield. But there are a couple of things that inspired my interest in this area. There was an episode at the Smithsonian Institution in 1995. I was a young professor, and I remember watching the episode quite carefully. The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum decided it was going to do an exhibition on the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. They actually have the plane, the Enola Gay. And this came at a time when the Smithsonian was becoming much more open to what you or I might call new history. The Smithsonian American History Musuem, for example, had just done a quite extraordinary exhibition called "Field to Factory" about the migration of African Americans from the rural south to the industrial north. It was also doing an exhibition about the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Basically, the Smithsonian had begun to open itself to more self-reflective and, in some ways, critical representations of the American past. Anyway, the Air & Space exhibition—which was never ultimately mounted—included an account of the decision to drop the atomic bomb. It tried to take readers back to the moment when people had debated that question, to show that in fact there had been intense debate amongst historical actors at the time, some of whom worried greatly about the consequences of using the bomb, that various alternatives had been considered and ultimately rejected. It wasn’t an exhibition that condemned the dropping of the bomb per se, but it invited people to develop their own interpretations and to reflect on the consequences of that decision. Probably the most controversial item in the exhibition was one that the Smithsonian had borrowed from the Peace Museum at Hiroshima, a metal lunchbox that a little Japanese girl had been carrying to school that morning. The girl was incinerated but the lunchbox survived. 

The exhibition—and the lunchbox specifically—ignited a ferocious political controversy. Congress threatened to cut off all Smithsonian funding and senior leadership of the Smithsonian was sacked for traducing the honor of the so-called "Greatest Generation." And I remember watching this incident and becoming much more reflective about how societies choose to remember their pasts. There’s always a politics there. And that catapulted my own scholarship in new directions, including a book that I’m working on now thinking about the Civil Rights Era as a problem of collective memory and how we remember and misremember the movement.

The second thread was when I was in South Africa during and after the collapse of apartheid. I attended hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). That was another one of those moments where you could see the stakes of historical memory. What aspects of the nation’s collective pasts would be would be remembered and which would be forgotten? There was an explicit commitment in the context of the TRC to creating a better, more inclusive, more honest account of what had happened during the nearly half century of apartheid, not only for its own sake but as a way of creating a charter for building a different kind of society. So that was very influential for me. 

Q: From 2003 to 2006, you were a member of the first committee appointed by an American university to investigate that institution’s historical ties to the transatlantic slave trade. How did that experience shape your understanding of public history? 

JC: After returning from South Africa, I was working at Brown University and the university’s then-President Ruth Simmons appointed a steering committee to investigate and disclose the facts of the university's historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. I was appointed to chair that committee, chiefly, I suspect, because of my experience in South Africa. That committee consumed a couple of years of my life. Today, the idea that a university should tell the truth about its historical ties to slavery is accepted as a basic institutional responsibility. But at the time, this was a new and, for some, a quite outlandish idea.

The steering committee was appointed against the backdrop of a revived movement for slavery reparations. That movement has a very long history, but it gained a new lease on life following the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which issued a presidential apology and monetary reparations for victims of Japanese American internment. The question of whether descendants of enslaved African Americans deserved similar consideration was a very controversial one. Depending on how you posed the question, about half of African-Americans believed that they were entitled to some reparations in light of the unrequited centuries of toil of their ancestors. But when you put it to white Americans, as three major polls did in the late 1990s, 95% of white Americans said no, often extremely vociferously. I mean, imagine an issue today that would unite 95% of all white Americans. 

In that context, most universities gave the whole slavery issue a very wide berth. But Ruth Simmons at Brown, not coincidentally the first Black person to be appointed President of an Ivy League university, took the opposite approach, appointing a committee to investigate the university's ties to slavery. She publicly stated that the topic of reparations was a matter of public interest, and that universities were institutions designed to encourage truth-telling and reasoned exchange on highly controversial ideas. Part of the charge that we got from President Simmons was to stage public programs that would help our students think in reasoned, rigorous ways about how societies might deal with painful histories, taking account not only of the gracious and honorable but also of the grievous and horrifying. And so over the course of two and a half years we had upwards of 100 speakers who came to campus to talk about everything ranging from slavery to the Holocaust to the demands of Korean so-called "comfort women" abused by the Japanese Army during World War II. 

We went about our work soberly, carefully, and by the time we finished, other universities had begun similar inquiries. At this point, I think there are about 150 universities that have done some kind of venture. Not everyone, of course, has signed onto the project. Truth-telling has provoked backlash in some quarters. But I think the tide was with us in that moment.

Q: One of the recommendations of the Brown report was for the university to invest more in historically disadvantaged communities, particularly in the realm of education. A number of universities have followed suit. But what is the status of this kind of work today, when institutional efforts to reverse racial inequalities, when universities themselves, have come under withering assault from the federal government and prominent donors? Reflecting on your involvement with the Brown University report 20 years later, do you think any of your initial recommendations and hopes are still viable?

JC: I think as a general rule, the more insulated institutions are from dependence on federal funding, the more free they feel to continue this work. There is a consortium of universities established some years ago, Universities Studying Slavery, which is an online community of institutions and scholars involved in this kind of research. In the year and a half since Trump’s second inauguration, several of those institutional websites on slavery have gone dark. So some institutions have either discontinued doing the work or have chosen not to advertise the fact that they are doing it. There’s no question the moment we're living through now has cast a pall over an earlier movement for historical truth-telling.

But I think the problem runs deeper than just the Trump administration. It's easy to be critical of the so-called "Right"—of the Trump administration and others of that ilk who have been threatened by or opposed to these processes of historical disclosure. But I also want to be critical of those who imagine themselves, as I confess I generally do, as inhabiting the political "Left." The besetting danger for those of us doing this kind of work is sanctimoniousness, pointing an accusatory finger at ill-doers in the past while patting ourselves on the back for our own superior moral wisdom. I've tried really hard not to do that. I believe that this kind of sanctimoniousness explains at least some the backlash that universities are facing now.

I recently wrote something about a Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina, Silent Sam, that was toppled by a group of students. They threw a lasso around it and brought it down in defiance of a law passed by the state legislature. I wasn’t in favor of that law, but I'm also not in favor of groups of self-appointed historical monitors arrogating to themselves the right to tear down public statues. So I think we need to be a little more thoughtful about how we do this work. We can speak a little more quietly, a little more modestly, in ways where we avoid the perils of sanctimony. For me, the purpose is not so that I can feel better about myself in light of “terrible” Thomas Jefferson. But thinking about Jefferson can provoke me to be more self-reflective, to think about the historical injustices in which I am complicit. What might futurity say of us when they have one of these committees 100 or 200 years from now?

When I got involved with the work at Brown University, I was not thinking of it as an end in itself. What I believed then and what I still believe today is that telling truer, fuller, more inclusive versions of our shared past is important because it can help to alter the matrix of political possibility in the present and future. The real work doesn't end when you topple the monument or publish your report. That's when it begins. A lot of people involved in so-called “memory activism”—the people who tore down the statue at the University of North Carolina, for instance—where were they later? Were they phone banking on election night? I worry that we've been so focused on taking over the mnemonic landscape that we've effectively ceded control of the political landscape, the executive, legislative, the judicial branches of the federal government, as well as most state governments, to the Right. And now they want to take control of the mnemonic landscape too. 

The point, again, is not that we shouldn't do this kind of work, but that it should be done in a way that is humble, inclusive, and devoid of self-righteousness or sanctimony. You do it not because every monument has to pass some political litmus test, but rather because you believe in the democratic process, you believe that a nation that understands its history more fully can act in ways that are more responsible in the present.

Q: There is often pressure on early career scholars and graduate students to stay away from the limelight of public history—to focus on writing a “serious” dissertation before moving onto more public-facing projects later in their career. How do early career scholars and graduate students navigate pressures to produce “serious” historical scholarship alongside a desire to engage with public questions about history?

JC: History is probably the last discipline in the university that still commands a broader public readership and, even more than that, that still has a purchase on the moral imagination of our society. I think that’s an extraordinarily important legacy for younger historians to embrace. If you went back to the 1950s and 60s and asked who were the great public intellectuals writing for a broad audience, people writing in The New Republic or Dissent or Partisan Review or other such publications, a lot of the names that would arise would be literary critics. And that’s certainly not the case today. With all due respect to literary critics, I think that field has tended to retreat into a more abstruse academicized field. I hope historians won't do that. Young historians especially need to be encouraged to write in ways that are accessible to broad public audiences. That’s just always been a commitment of mine and I try to inculcate that value in the students that I teach.

The particular exhibit that I worked on at the Smithsonian was called The Power of Place, which explores a series of places that African American people made and that made them. In the first year that museum was open, some 4 million people walked through that space. And yet, in terms of the way that our profession conventionally credits scholarly work, if I had published an article in some journal that 400 people read, that publication would count more than working on a museum exhibition visited by 4 million. So I think we need to alter the culture of our universities to recognize, again, that history is produced and consumed in lots of ways beyond our narrow little academic corner. We need to engage with and credit public-facing work as well.

Q: While founded after the abolition of slavery in the United States, Stanford University has also had to grapple with its historical connections to enslavement, forced labor, and scientific racism. From 2012 to 2020, a number of your colleagues ran the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project. In introducing the project, the team wrote that “the labor of these Chinese workers (who eventually numbered between 10-12,000 at any one moment) was central to creating the wealth that Leland Stanford used to found Stanford University.” Stanford has also renamed a number of campus landmarks previously labeled with the likes of eugenicist David Starr Jordan and mission founder Junipero Serra. What do you make of these recent projects and what future work is there to be done at Stanford? 

JC: The issue at Stanford is not only the exploitation of Chinese indentured workers to build railroads. This campus sits on unceded native land. So whenever I see people at Stanford waxing righteous about boycotting a university in some or other place, I always think that I have never imagined a university that is a glasser house than this one. 

In recent years, one of the things that became standard practice at Stanford was a land acknowledgement at the beginning of public events, recognizing the Muwekma Ohlone people on whose land we currently sit. Earlier this year, perhaps due to the changing winds from Washington, Stanford rescinded the practice of using the acknowledgement. Insofar as we were given any explanation, Stanford argued that the land acknowledgement was empty and gestural. I don't necessarily disagree with that, but if you think that the acknowledgement is empty and gestural, the next question you must ask yourself surely is: What might we do that is more substantive and material? 

We went through a process 5-7 years ago when the address of the university, which is now 450 Jane Stanford Way, was 450 Serra Mall. Because of Junipero Serra’s involvement in the genocide of the indigenous population of California, there was a decision to change the name. Other sites on campus that were associated with Junipero Serra which were likewise changed. I don't hold a candle for Junipero Serra, but a recent book published by Professor Benjamin Madley at UCLA reminds us that the genocide of the indigenous population of California did not chiefly happen under the Spanish but under the Americans. The book includes a 100-page appendix listing not only scores of grievous acts of genocide but also texts of state laws and orders using words like “exterminate” and “extinguish.” Importantly, most of these laws were signed by then-Governor Leland Stanford. So we return to this weird moment here where we are congratulating ourselves for expunging any memory of Junipero Serra.  

I am not suggesting, therefore, that we should change the name of Stanford. Institutions, like people, can learn and grow from the failures of their past. To me, the answer to the discoveries in Professor Madley’s book isn't that we should shut down Stanford University. I happen to believe that this institution does immeasurable good in the world. We're facing a false dichotomy here. You've either got to be with Trump and avoid talking about anything dark or you need to talk about how everything in our history is horrible and has to be flushed down the toilet. I just don't feel that way. Our history reflects our humanity. This is to say that history is full of things that are grievous but also things that are gracious and redemptive. And so to me, the fundamental question of all of this work that we're doing is: Can you tell a story that's big enough to encompass all of it? Can you build a democracy that's big enough to take responsibility for the totality of who we are?