Gary Gallagher: recommendation

Transcript context

…I think if we ignore history, we’re gonna be doomed to repeat it. I think that’s… We should never censor books. We should read books. We should read Mein Kampf. We should read books that capture a certain moment in history, even if it’s a hateful moment in history, even if it’s a destructive moment in history. We need to understand- Or have them read texts written at the time that have language that we wouldn’t use now. It helps you understand the ti- It’s, it’s- There are a lot of hard edges in the past. There are a lot of nice edges too that make you feel good, but there are a lot of really hard edges in the past, and if you’re gonna be serious about coming to terms with history, you need to accept that and deal with them and talk about them and not just try to erase them, I think. There are a lot of books that people won’t read now. I taught a graduate seminar at one point on foundational 19th century texts, and one of the texts I was gonna… that I assigned in the class was Huckleberry Finn. And a lot of the students said they wouldn’t read Huckleberry Finn because they knew it had language in it that they… And they didn’t wanna see those words. Even just reading about slavery, American and otherwise, is hard. It’s really difficult. But, like, we’re capable of that. We humans are capable of that. And this doesn’t somehow go away because we agree for it to go away. We’re always can return back to that, maybe in other forms, in other ways. We can do evil things unto each other. And I personally believe all of us are capable of doing evil things unto each other. And the dark reality of that is we too readily convince ourselves that we’re doing good.…

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