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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer WNYC and we continue now with our series Books That Changed Your Mind. We're doing this in conjunction with the New York city neighborhood library awards. Follow the link on our website to nominate your own branch library as one of the best in the city, and it might win a $20,000 prize. This is only for the libraries in the five boroughs, but in any of the five boroughs. They can buy more books that educate entertain and change people's minds if they win one of these awards from the [unintelligible 00:00:40] foundation.

Today, I'm very pleased to be joined by two writers whose books changed the way a lot of us see 20th century American history, Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter turned historian who wrote the amazing book, The Warmth of Other Suns, the Epic story of America's great migration and Stephanie Coontz known for her collection of myth-busting history books. Most prominently The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, and A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. Welcome back, Isabella and Stephanie.

Stephanie Coontz: Thank you.

Isabel Wilkerson: Great to be here.

Brian: Books that changed minds. I'm curious if that's what you set out to do Stephanie Coontz, or if that's just where your research led you.

Stephanie: Well, I think it's where my research led me. Usually when I start a book it's because I think I know something about a topic, but I know that I'm beginning to realize I don't know quite enough about it. The Way We Never Were actually started out as a book about women. I was asked to write back in the early '70s a book about the history of women. I quickly got bored with it because it was either like what's been done to women through the ages or what a few women have done despite it and a lot of books were coming out like that. I said, "Well, let me see if I can find a place to bring women and men into interaction." Of course the family finally occurred to me, but that was not a respectable field of study at the time.

I spent 13 years writing a book I now think you can callas pompous as you want to be about the history of family life. When I looked up from it, I realized that this whole debate was emerging about family and neither side actually knew the complexity of family history.

Brian: Like [unintelligible 00:02:24] nostalgia about Ozzie and Harriet 1950s America.

Stephanie: Then I wrote a follow-up book complicate-- Sometimes I think it's not so much to change people's minds as it is to complicate their oversimplified understandings.

Brian: It sounds like your research changed your mind. Isabel Wilkerson, how about you with The Warmth of Other Suns? Were you setting out to change people's minds about something? Or is this just where your research led you?

Isabel: Well, first of all, I was seeking to understand the phenomenon that had created me. Meaning I was a child of this migration and had been raised by people who had participated in it, but they never talked about it. That instilled in me this curiosity about what had led them to do what they did. I also wanted to better understand and felt that we could all better understand how the cities came to be and why it was that 6 million people fled the Jim Crow South and went to all points, North, Midwest and West to escape this caste system and to understand what had motivated them, why they did this, and also how this was so similar to the recognized stories of people who've come from other parts of the world to our country.

I saw these things that they had in common, but these dots had not been connected in that way. People hadn't really sat down to understand truly what it was like to be these people. That's what I set out to do.

Brian: I think that's one of the ways that your book has changed people's minds by having more people think about African-Americans in the great migration within the country in the same category in certain respects, as they think about immigrants from other countries, that's what you were just saying.

Isabel: Exactly. I think to be able to make a connection to something that we already know, and is part of our understanding and to see how it could apply to something that we never would have imagined. I mean, I think that is the beauty of history itself, is to be able to go back and to see in some ways how each of us might have reacted in that situation. History is often thought about with the bold face names [unintelligible 00:04:36]. I was really trying to understand how individual people, unrecognized people, the silent invisible people could have an impact on our country.

I mean, this migration ended up changing our country in so many ways from the social geography of all the cities that they went to, to the politics of blue States and red States was affected by this outpouring of people who went to the North and were able to vote for the first time in their lives to music, as we know it from Motown to jazz. It had this huge impact. Yet the idea of something this big being able to be told through individual people who would be not unlike ourselves, I think allows people to identify with history in a way that is really exciting and as personal and big at the same time, Epic in its own way.

Brian: Stephanie Coontz and Isabel Wilkerson in our books that changed your mind series. I don't know if you two have ever met or ever read each other's books. We just had the idea that you two would make an interesting match on just two pieces of family and social history that enlightened readers about history they may have thought too simplistically about from around the same era. I wonder if you see your book, each of you as fitting into a larger context of revising 20th century history to be more accurate or more inclusive. Stephanie, do you?

Stephanie: Well, I think certainly true. It is true that you try to find, you don't try to start out trying to correct people's misapprehensions. You do, like Isabel was talking about, you try to answer your own questions and in the process, it complicates and expand your thinking about things. I think the difference between a writer and somebody who's just talking to their neighbor over the fence is that you just feel compelled to share what you found out. Certainly, that's what I did with the way we never were. I didn't think of myself as revising history, but I thought of myself as cutting through a lot of the myths and stereotypes, some of which I had held when I was younger.

Brian: Like what's one, what's an important one of your own?

Stephanie: Well, for example, I went through successive myths about the place of women. When I was in high school, I bought into all of the biological determinism of women and that women are fundamentally different than men and they're more nurturing. Then when I was in college and I read some of the things about how women had been treated through the era, I went through a period of thinking, "Oh my God, women have been oppressed by men all over. That's the most important issue."

Then one of the books that changed my mind was a book about witchcraft in early tudor and Stuart England. It's got me totally beyond this question of men versus women, to understand how people thought through social anxieties and a period of change, and especially how they deal with when they have to start behaving in ways that contradict their ideals, the complicated, very sad ways they sometimes come up. Racism is another good example to explain why they're behaving in ways that contradict their ideals. That's what was very useful for me. It gave me more compassion than I had when I started out

Brian: A book about witchcraft changed your mind. Isabel, do you have an example of a book that changed your mind?

Isabel: Well, I do, but at first I'd like to say that I view all of this as an invitation to opening up the table to different ways of viewing how we came to be who we are and how we are as a country right now. I think that, when we think about history, the story is incomplete until we have heard from everyone in the room. That's one of the ways that I think people may use the word revising, but I think of it in terms of opening up the spaces for people who had not been heard before. When you do that, you often find that a lot of this material is hidden in plain sight.

One of the misconceptions that I myself had that was blown away by something that I read in the course of researching this book had to do with assumptions about family formation and the idea that African-Americans when they got to the big cities had all these children and I myself I'm a product of all that we have been taught. There was a book called A Piece of the Pie by Stanley Lieberson, a sociologist who was at Harvard. This was a scholarly work. In it, he makes reference to the 1940 census in which he describes the-- He has a chart about the fertility rates of women arriving to the big cities in 1940.

He compares the women, African Americans who had arrived from the South to the North to their Southern and Eastern European counterparts. Also arriving to the same cities in the North at that same time. It turned out that the African-American women who come from the South and arrived in the North did not have higher fertility rates than the comparable women coming from Eastern and Southern Europe. Not only were they not the highest rates, they weren't the second highest rates or the third highest rates or the fourth highest rates, they were actually at the bottom of the group of women that he was looking at. The largest number of women coming in to these big cities by that time.

I found that to be really mind blowing. I also then once you know the history, and you know the story of how these people came, it turned out that they were also making less than these women who were coming in from outside the country. Once they got to the north, they were making less than any of the other groups that had arrived there and therefore they could not afford any more children and their birth rates reflect that.

That's the way that by looking at and opening our minds to the world around us and to the record that already may be there, but we just have not seen it, or recognized it helps us to understand who we are as a country and how we came to be.

Brian: That's fascinating. Are either of you concerned that people read these days less in a way that could open their minds or change their minds. There's all this talk about how we split up into silos on the web, and read and share things with our Facebook friends and get shared with, things that we already agree with. We're less likely to change. Isabel, are you concerned about that?

Isabel: Actually, there's a term for it, it's called confirmation bias, meaning that we already have been encoded with assumptions and belief systems that become so wired in us that we-- When we are exposed to new ideas, we often try to either reject them because they don't fit what we have already been trained to believe or we find a way to recast it so that it fits in with what we have already assumed to be the truth. I think that it challenges us to be open, particularly given that new voices are coming into being, new actors are being recognized as part of the American story.

That has reminded me of these two books that I'm so excited about The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist, and of course, The Internal Enemy by Alan Taylor, which won the Pulitzer Prize this year. These are new ways of looking at what we thought we already knew. I think that this is-- We're on the cusp of a new way of understanding ourselves.

Brian: What's a very short take on one of those books, and what's so important about it?

Isabel: Well, those books are helping us to understand first of all, the origins of the Revolutionary War, and the role of enslavement, the institution of slavery in the making of our country. With The Eternal Enemy, one of the things that I've been stunned by is it's focusing on the war of 1812, but it also gets to the roots of the role of the state of what was then the colony of Virginia, and the founding of our country. We often tend to focus on the northern part of it than the New England role. All of these things help to-- Once you recognize and see the blanks filling in, you recognize that all of these things begin to make sense. What we're getting as a fuller-

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Brian: I'm going to jump in, because we've just got 45 seconds left in the segment. Stephanie, I want you to get your lick in there. What are you reading currently? If you want to do that similar kind of shout out? Are you also worried about people splitting up through confirmation bias, not reading things that will change their mind?

Stephanie: I'll go directly to that since we don't have much time. I think it's a tremendous danger and more and more I try to organize my writing to challenge the people who think that they agree with me, as well as finding places where I may agree with or at least can see the point of somebody who, for example, misses the 1950s and try to explain to them, I understand that. I understand why you would miss a time when the average 30 year old man couldn't pay for a whole month 15% to 18% of his income, but you may be missing, why. There were other things here that we would not want to go backwards for and why we should go forward. I do think that that confirmation bias and the siloing is a tremendous problem today.

Brian: What a wonderful dialogue between Stephanie Coontz and Isabel Wilkerson, I appreciate both of your time so much. In our Books That Changed Your Mind Series and listeners continue to nominate your branch libraries for those cash awards at nyclibraryawards.org.

 

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