Interviewee: Dr. LeAnn Caldwell, female, Caucasian, Director of the Center for the Study of History and , Augusta, Georgia Interviewer: Dr. Niki Christodoulou, Augusta University ******************** Dr. Christodoulou: Dr. Caldwell, tell me a little bit about who you are. Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, I’m LeAnn Caldwell, I have been a professor at this university since 1991, with the exception of six years when I chaired the history and geography department at Georgia College and State University which is the public liberal arts university of the state and then I came back here in 2008 and had been here since running the center for Georgia history, and since our merger um, also serving as the university historian. Prior to that in the 1980’s I taught at for eleven years, which is a historically Black college here in Augusta that was found in the 1880’s in the post-Civil War period by bi-racial Methodist churches, southerners, which is interesting in itself, because most of the African American colleges had been founded by Northerners, but these were Black and White Methodist who came together to found Paine and that was a wonderful teaching experience as well. So, I’ve been in education basically my entire adult life. Um, I got a master’s and doctorate degree in history at the University of Georgia and so that’s the content area that I have focused in and I have increasingly focused my research down to state and local history. I have become one of those people that get called on by lay people in the community who are not historical scholars, but need help learning about our past. So, I enjoy teaching at many different venues and many different level, I’ve certainly enjoyed the years I was in a full-time faculty, professor working with college students and my students seemed to enjoy the classes. I’ve had students tell me since that I really had an effect on them, but I’ve also enjoyed over the years doing workshops for public school teachers. I worked with Teaching American History Grants here in Richmond County for a number of years and in other counties, in areas near Atlanta, down in Savannah, and those were programs that are content based working with teachers throughout the public school system to bring to them the latest research that’s going on in the field because while they’re concerned with working with students every single day of course those of us who are in universities are also doing research and going to conferences to hear about other people’s research and this is a way of sharing those new findings and new research with those who are out in the field teaching. So, I’ve enjoyed that as well and on the local level I’ve worked with various organizations here like, the Leadership Augusta program, I do an entire day on history for that group every year and they also conduct what’s called an executive forum, which is a shortened program for people who are CEO’s new to the area and need some information and background about the area and I do a half day of history for that group as well. Um, because people find that once they have a sense of a place’s past then they can understand how things are, why they are the way they are and so I enjoy that kind of outreach into the community. In fact, my research center here on campus is the Center for the study of Georgia History was founded by a very prolific scholar, Dr. Edward Cashin who wrote well over twenty books on history of this area and of the South and he founded the Center for Georgia History here because he wanted to do research and outreach, specifically about the state of Georgia and it’s past and so after his death I came back from Milledgeville to take this position to continue that work and basically that’s what we do here. We do outreach and research and so I’ve got several projects going on right now delving into various aspects of the history of this area which I hope to get finished and get published so there will be more information out there about how we came to be what we are. (5:08) Dr. Christodoulou: What are some of the things that have happened or are happening in the area that are of historical and educational importance? And how do your efforts contribute to the education of people? Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, one of the things that I think is important that I’m involved in now is doing a lot of research on the African American story in this area. We have a rich African American history that goes back to the 1700’s but particularly interesting as the African American community came out of the civil war and had to deal with Jim Crow, had to deal with education and how to get an education, what kind of education African Americans would have. As I said Pain College was founded here so was Haines Institute, which offered education up to the high school level, Walker Baptist Institute, so there was this thirst for education in the African American community. In fact, when the public school system was founded in Augusta which and in Georgia which was – in much of the South was much later than in the North, it was post-Civil War here, it was 1870. And so, the South was behind and in many ways still lingers behind, there was an ethos of the significance of education in the Northern states that um, pertained to the elite of the South but not necessarily to other people including poorer Whites as well as all African Americans who were legally forbidden to have literacy, although some did, but the percentage was small coming out of the Civil War and so there’s this thirst for education and the school system was founded to deal with that. When our school system was started, it was started as a bi-racial school system although school weren’t integrated from the very beginning. So, there’s an important story I think to tell there all the way up through the Jim Crow era. The Civil Rights Movement here and in the state of Georgia was very important with Dr. King being centered in Georgia and coming to Augusta at a couple of points, but we had some leaders in our own community. And then what has happened post- civil rights and some of the issues the African American community and the board of education are still dealing with as schools seem to at least in some areas resegregate and so I think those are important issues we need to continue to try to address and I don’t think we can understand them if we don’t understand the background to them, how we got to this point and what some of the problems are in the school system. So, I think those are important, I think unfortunately as the economy has gone through its ups and downs education has not kept pace with the funding that it needs and so a lot of the enhancement that we’ve done in the past especially for the public school teachers is not there anymore, we’re not doing the same kind of teaching workshops to bring people up to date on the content that they teach, because the funding for it hasn’t been there and the teacher workdays for it haven’t been there. I mean there were years when the days that people we supposed to be in teacher workshops they were actually taking furloughs to balance the budget. Now we’ve seem to have gotten past some of that but not totally because we haven’t had a lot of content workshops recently. The other thing is there was a real curtailment for a while in field trips for students. So we have so many wonderful historic places here in Augusta and the surrounding area that people can go to that are beneficial to the students and the, a lot of the historic sites are willing to match what they do with students when they get there with the standards that the state has set up and is going to test them on, but a lot of the funding for that kind of thing had been curtailed. There does seem to be a little bit of an upswing in that, I know I’m on the board of historic Augusta and recently the Woodrow Wilson house has seen a couple of- a fairly large groups of students from the magnet schools, but we would certainly like to reach out to school beyond just those magnet schools and work with students in some of those other schools. And of course there are places like The Augusta Museum of History, The Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History, The all of these places are such wonderful educational enhancements for our students and we’d love to see them utilized even more than they are. (10:49) Dr. Christodoulou: Tell me a little bit more about your personal experience. You mentioned that you worked with students in the past through different programs. Is there any content that you noticed that excited the students or they were curious to learn more about? Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, students come to us sometimes from high schools where they have, I think not, not understood that history is about understanding cause and effect: this happens which then has these outcomes and those tend to cause this. So, they quite often came into a college classroom wanting to know what dates they needed to memorize, and were very unnerved when I said maybe 1776. (chuckle) I’d say get some anchor dates, so know when the revolution was, know when the civil war, get some anchors, but beyond that, I don’t want you memorizing dates, I don’t want you memorizing the date of a particular act. What I want you to understand is how things happen, what people were living like and what made them think the way they did so that they would want to fight in an American revolution war. What led to the succession of the Southern states, um and we have to be honest about those things. And so, students with that different approach to it where it’s more of a story, they have their own personal story so once they grasp the concept of the story then they can begin to see that the country has this bigger story that they and their ancestors were a part of in some way. And so, it kind of depends on the student, some of them very interested in the whole um, how slavery worked and what that was like and I try to use primary sources so they can read things that people from the time said or the whole idea of the American Revolution, not glamorized but what it really was about and um what it was like to live back then. People tend to think that folks in the past lived and thought like we do just simpler, you know they didn’t have the same technology but it was simpler and that’s not true, they lived in a different environment, they lived in a different world, the way they saw it and perceived it, their own internal environment, because of the paradigms they lived with, very different from ours today. And so, once we begin to explore those things people got interested in, some were very, very interested in more recent history, World War II, some students had grandfathers that fought in World War II or in the early years I was teaching even fathers that fought in World War II or now Vietnam, I’ve had a lot of students they rarely got past or got up to past Vietnam in their early courses, so I try to get them all the way up to close to the present in my courses because they had never approached even the part of the world they had lived through themselves from back, from historical perspectives. And so, you can engage them in all of it if they enjoy the primary materials and reading what people say. They were often very surprised by things like, women and how women’s lives were viewed and the laws women had to live under, they had no idea that, I remember students being shocked to find out that before the 1970’s a married woman could not have a credit card in her own name, that those were given out in their husband’s name and they can’t believe that. So, finding out about those kinds of things I think always was engaging to students and I enjoy that part of the interaction and as I said, I try to use a lot of primary sources or secondary sources that quoted primary sources within them and sometimes use film. When I taught the Georgia History course I did use historic sites and we would go to them and kind of learn about how people lived on the ground by looking at some of those. So, I think that those kinds of things engage students and one of the things I really enjoyed is when students would get into dialogue with each other. Race is one of the issues that would always enhance a dialogue and it was such a good learning experience I think for people regardless of what race they were from or it was interesting to always have nontraditional students. I taught a woman’s history course American women’s history and I had an eighty something year old woman who took the course. Well, she had lived through a lot of this and the students were fascinated when she would talk about her experiences and she was very willing to talk about just about anything from what kind of educational opportunities she had or didn’t have, basically her family told her she needed to major in home economics in college and that was one of the few things, options women had, um even to sexuality she would talk about that. And so, um I think those kinds of things always peaks students’ interest and I like when they can learn from each other’s experiences. (17:13) Dr. Christodoulou: What are some of the things that grabbed your attention earlier on when you were studying or even before that? Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, I have been interested in history since I was a child. My father was a physician and my mother was a nurse, so I grew up around a lot of medical family and some of my siblings have gone into medicine as well. But, my mother was also kind of intrigued by older things and I remember driving by old houses with her and she would say things like I wonder who lived there. I wonder if there were babies born in that house, you know that kind of thing. So, from a child that kind of stuff intrigued me and when I went to college I really wasn’t sure what I was going to major in and I had about four majors my first couple of years, but I zeroed in on history and literature and I took, I think, an equal number of courses in each and when I went to graduate school my final semester in college I took two graduate courses in literature, but when I settled in to go back to graduate school, which was not immediately after college I came home, I got married, I had a child and when my child was a year and a half old I decided I would go to graduate school, maybe not the best planning in the world, but by then it was clear to me that I wanted to study history. And, once I had my first graduate course I was really hooked and getting to do primary source research itself was just fascinating to me. I loved European history but as I said I was married, had a child, it wasn’t practical to go into that and have to go abroad to do research so I was also fascinated originally by colonial and revolutionary era American history. This idea that people left took this rather dangerous voyage across the Atlantic and settled into an area that was populated by native people, but also in many cases not very clear. I mean when people came to this area there were pathways to the river that the Native Americans had made, but the rest of it was basically forest, so it intrigued me that people did that and as I proceeded on with my master’s degree I got interested in women’s role in all that, and this was back in a period when not a lot of women’s history had been done. So, women’s history in many ways came out of the women’s rights movement of the sixties, and, so, by the time I was studying in the mid to late seventies, there was some women’s history coming out, but there was still a lot of research to do. So, that’s what I got into and then I went from that into my doctoral program and so that’s what has kept me going, and now I do research on local history, some state, but a lot of local history in all time periods. I got really fascinated by the post- Civil War period I got tired of the Civil War itself but really fascinated by how people put society together after the war was over and the old way of doing things were not acceptable anymore although there’s a whole group of people who are trying to get things back to the way they were as much as they can, but then there are these new opportunities and what do people do with that. How did the war change African Americans, how did it change women and then as we modernize and go into the twentieth century how does this new technology change how people are living every day? Those were the kinds of things that have grabbed my attention in the last few years so- (21:33) Dr. Christodoulou: Talk to me a little bit more about women’s role and what are the things that you consider important? Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, I think getting women’s role into education early on, when they first start talking to students about the history of the country they need to include Americans of all colors and all gender in that story, because they’ve always been there. I’m doing a talk July fourth for the city on the role of women in the American Revolution in this area, so they were definitely here and so I think getting children, just think about how that would change your mindset if you knew, especially if you are a female but even if you were male, knowing that women were totally involved in things going on from the time you’re very young so you don’t feel like you don’t hear about women until you get to high school and you hear about Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Tubman. Not that they weren’t extremely important women but there are a lot of other women who contributed to how our country turned out and you know with a woman now the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties it becomes increasingly important for students to know that women have been part of this story, they just have not had access to these positions of power the way they are beginning to come into access. So, I’d love to see that happen and start as I said with the beginning of the country, because when Jamestown was settled it was initially settled by males and one of the things they asked the Company in London to do was send some brides because they found out that a society of males only did not work very well and they wanted some women. James Oglethorpe when Georgia was founded, it was founded by families but as he was signing up the military colony down near the Spanish in Florida he asked, we need more women. Women have an effect on men that is good for the colony so we need to start there and as we go through the story we need to tell it in a way that is inclusive. So, I think that’s important and people are doing more of it but whenever history seems to begin to include some new people they tend to do it through something called the great man or great women theory, so we pick out one or two people and we tell the story through them, the civil rights story is told through Martin Luther King, he was certainly, certainly important but so was Fannie Lou Hamer and congressman John Lewis and other people, so usually things are a movement of lots of people and you have more than one leader in most cases. So, I think the more inclusive our stories can be then the more our students will understand from the very beginning that it is a story of a lot of different people including probably some of their own ancestors in many cases. (25:21) Dr. Christodoulou: Tell me a little bit more about the concept of sexuality. I don’t know if that’s something that you have studied and how important it is in this area (25:34) Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Yeah, and the whole idea of studying history of concepts of sexuality is relatively new; we start out just including women and men in economic and political history and then there’s been a lot more social history recently and it’s kind of, out of some of that we’ve begun to look more at issues of sexuality. And, like other people, for example gay and lesbian people, it’s not until there’s a movement for their right that you begin to see a lot of people, beginning then to look at the history of how that, how those people lived in various periods and how society treated them, what the laws pertaining to them, I mean basically their sexuality was illegal for much of the history until fairly recently. So, I would say that’s a young field of history and, but one that’s beginning to get some attention in a lot of different ways. Not just same sex issues, but heterosexual relationships and how that worked, and look at the issue of rape, for example, there was no such thing in legal term as martial rape until fairly recently, because a wife was basically considered the property of her husband so there are a lot of issues that come along with sexuality. And of course, those have to be introduced at age appropriate times in education and I’m not an expert on that, you folks in the Department of Education, College of Education probably know more about that, but certainly by the time we get students in college, we’re beginning to talk about some of those issues. And again, students are surprised by some of the ways people thought about these things in the past, but you still see the lingering effects of those ways of thinking about things, in how we do things in the present. So, there’s a lot of work going on now, scholarly work going on now about the intersection of sex, class economic and social class and race and how it affects people to be something on that tripod. So you can be a White upper class heterosexual male and there are certain ways society has viewed that, or you can be an African American female who is poor and there’s a different way society has dealt with that. So, we’re trying to use scholarly methods to begin to understand that and what the impact of that is, not only on how it’s developed in the past, but now how it comes all the way up and affects how things are in the present. (29:12) Dr. Christodoulou: Tell me about a project that you had in the past and that you still remember as important and why. (29:22) Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: What kind? Dr. Christodoulou: Like something you have done with your research in history; here or elsewhere, that you still remember as important, and why it was important. For example, you mentioned working with student, holiday programs, the Leadership Augusta program… (30:07) Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Right, the Leadership Augusta program now has over 1,000 graduates. Dr. Christodoulou: This is a recent one? Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: This program started in 1979, ‘80, I was in the first class and the whole goal was to educate people from various occupations in the community that were expected to be civic leaders, that were going to make a civil contribution to the community. So, we had business CEO’s, we had bankers, we had educators, we had leaders of nonprofit organizations of arts organizations, small business people who were making an impact. So, from all these different areas and the goal was two- fold, one is to educate people about their own community so that they can then be better leaders; and not just educate them. I did the history part of education even for my own class but we spend a day looking at the criminal justice system, a day looking at the educational system in Augusta, we look at business, we look at environment, we look at the healthcare system so all the different aspects of the community are studied. And then the second goal was to create a network of people that could then call on each other and work together for the betterment of the community. And so after thirty, what five, six years now of doing that we have created these over 1,000 people that have learned about this. So, I consider that program and the executive forum, which grew out of it in the 90’s, because we had… For example new college president comes in like Bill Bloodworth when he came here in ’93, he didn’t have a day, a month that he could give up for an entire year to go through that program but he could do a long weekend and some of the other new, like the commander at Fort Gordon that kind of thing. And so the executive forum started for the – and Bill Bloodworth is a graduate of that and Jeff Foley who does major leadership talks now was a graduate of that he was the commanding officer at Fort Gordon. So, I think that’s an extremely important program. And it’s interesting because the history started out just being part of a day and in the evaluations that the class did, they said we need more history, the history was helpful to understand, we need more; and same thing with the executive forum, they gave me an hour to do a kind of synopsis of Augusta history, now I have a half of a day to do it, because they said we want more of this. So, I think they, these leaders got that they needed to know more of the history, so I feel like that’s very important. The good thing is that when people get that, they tend to support efforts in the community, preservation efforts and education efforts. I’m on the board of Richmond County Historical Society, we have done over 800 oral history interviews with World War II veterans telling their stories, a day in the life – CD’s are in the library of congress now as well as in our special collections, so I think that’s another important thing. I did not, I was president part of the time that was going on but we had a wonderful volunteer who headed up and just pushed, pushed, pushed to get that project done so I think that’s very important. I did some early writing in women’s history in early colonial period, early research on women colonial period in Georgia in the South, I still – even though I’ve moved on from that research I’m still doing a couple book chapters about that; I consider that to be important. I- we’ll talk about the textbook in a minute but that’s something that was a real labor of love, because we had a relatively short period to do it and it covers everything from beginning to end. So, you know I’ve been very involved; I’ve always been on civic organizations and boards and at the same time I was doing my teaching and research so I have tried to live a scholarly and academic life that I hoped was making a contribution to the students I worked with, as well as to the community that I was working with. So, it’s also important, it’s kind of hard to pick out one thing and say oh this was the important thing, it’s not, I guess I haven’t done one big thing, I’ve done a lot of smaller things that I hope add up to a successful, in the sense of being a contributing member of the community. (35:41) Dr. Christodoulou: And again, before we go there, what drives your effort or what guides your passion? Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, I have a passion for the subject, I just find it fascinating, it’s like a scientist who looks into a microscope and is just fascinated by all the cells going around. So, I find the subject matter very interesting, not just the stuff I do research on, but I love to go to conferences, I’m not one of those people who go to conferences and just hangs out and talk. I go to the sessions and take notes on things because it fascinates me to learn about other things. I went to the Georgia Association of Historians Conference, I’m on that board this year and the keynote speaker was from Georgetown and he was talking about Istanbul in the early twentieth century and it was fascinating and I’m sitting there, because I didn’t know anything about it. So, the subject just draws me in and it’s very interesting, although I’m interested in a lot of things. I read a couple of science magazines every month and journals every month, you know try to keep up with other fields, I love art, I love music, but history is just my special passion. But, I also was raised to believe that we have an obligation to contribute to our communities in ways that we can and I’ve had to get myself focused. So I was raised to um, by my parents and by my grandparents taught that we have an obligation a civic responsibility I guess you could say to make a contribution and then in the end that’s what it should be about is what have you done to enhance the lives of the people around you, your colleagues, your students, friends, your family and um that’s basically how I tried to live. (38:23) Dr. Christodoulou: Tell me about the textbook that you have written. Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Back in 2010 I think it was the textbook publisher called me and said that he was very interested in my doing a Georgia history textbook. His company had published an earlier one, but he wanted one that was done by a scholar, even though it was for public schools he wanted to have a scholar do the book and it just seemed like a perfect way for me as director for the Center of Georgia History to fulfill one of the goals of the center which is getting information about the state’s history out to the public. And so, I worked nonstop on that book. I tried to do as much original research as I could, although I did use secondary sources as well, but I tried to use scholarly sources where I knew that the people had done the research and it could be relied on. So, I literally worked around the clock, I would go home and work until ten or eleven every night and I was working on weekends in the last few months the only days I took off were Christmas day and half of New Years, so it was that kind of labor of love. And, in the end the publisher turned out to be a very wonderful company to work with, because they wanted it to be quality, so they included a lot of wonderful photographs for people in school; it’s interesting to see photographs. They hired people who were in the field of education to do the exercises for students at the end, because of course as a college professor I wasn’t, I didn’t feel I had the expertise to do that and they let me have a lot of leeway. I had to make sure that all of the state’s standards were covered in the book, but beyond that they let me have a lot of leeway. So, for example, we had –in every chapter there were at least two what we call special features and they could be about a person, they could be about a business they could be about an organization and so I tried to use those to make that book diverse and inclusive. So, for example, in the chapter on the American Revolution in Georgia I wrote a special feature on Mordecai Sheftall, he was a Jewish resident of Georgia who basically financed the revolution here that nobodies heard of; we may not have been part of the revolution if he had not literally put up his own money and never gotten paid back. So I wanted to introduce that idea to students early, that we’ve always had people from different backgrounds working on things. I try to include a lot of African Americans, I wrote an entire chapter that was not in the standards for the state because the teachers had told me in these workshops that once the testing was done they usually had three weeks to a month at the end of school with nothing to teach. So I wrote a chapter on culture and it had art and music in it, because that wasn’t in the standards, I had some things about education in it, I put the HOPE scholarship in it, because I thought this is something they need to know about so they can plan for it and one of the special features I had done was on Natasha Trethewey who, right after the book came out, was appointed poet laureate so that just ended up being a wonderful fortuitous kind of thing and I had special features on two writers; one was Flannery O’Connor and Alice Walker both from Georgia. So that was fun. And I did a workshop in Columbia County, because they use the textbooks in all their schools – and I did a workshop there for teachers and they said they just were so happy about the textbook, because it had these things that they could use in ways that – I’m sure in more clever ways than – I would have to really get the students engaged and involved. So, that was important and I’m about to do a revision of it; over the summer I’m going to work, because they’re going to do a second edition of it, so we’ll bring things up to date. I’ve got to read it, once I got that project finished I moved on, so I haven’t read it in five years, it came out in 2011, so, but I’ll bring it up to date. I already know for example, the statistics in the geography chapter which begins the book they were from 2010, 2009 so those kind of things I’ll try to update and then toward the more modern stuff there might be – so – things to add, we don’t have the same governor we had then and that sort of thing. So, I’m looking forward to doing that I’ve got a couple of other book projects that’ll be going on this summer, too. (44:16) Dr. Christodoulou: This textbook is used by which students? Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, I don’t even know, the publisher would know but any county can adopt the textbook or any private school. I know that Augusta Heritage Academy here in Augusta is using it because they have asked me to come speak to their students, and I know that Columbia County people are using it because I’ve done a workshop out there for their teachers. I know that there are some other counties around the state but I’ve just not kept up with that. Actually they use it for their education majors, you know who are gonna teach history at Costal Georgia College so they use it in their Georgia history class because their thinking was, the professor told me this is the textbook they’re gonna use so they might as well learn their Georgia history out of it, too. So, I don’t know if there are other colleges that have done that, but I know they are doing that, and there’s a private school up in Atlanta that called me, because they were using the book. So, you know I just kind of hear hazardously whose using it, but I assume since the publisher wants to have this second edition lots of people must be using it. So, I’m glad for that, you know you’re making an impact because people are getting something out of this thing that you’ve worked on, put a lot of effort into and tried to really think about and think through what might work well for the teachers. (46:04) Dr. Christodoulou: It’s a great skill to put together a textbook and to make it attractive for the students. Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, I have to give a lot of credit to the layout design people for the wonderful layout and the photos. I mean some pages, especially the beautiful photos in the geography section just double page photos of beautiful places in Georgia. We don’t tend to think of our home place as being interesting or exciting, but there are so many, there’s such a diversity here of geography and stories that you could do vacations in Georgia for years and not see everything. (46:51) Dr. Christodoulou: Maybe you mentioned it before but you were born and raised here? Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: I was born here, I was. Dr. Christodoulou; In Augusta? Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: I was, in Augusta yeah. Dr. Christodoulou: You’re from Augusta- Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: I’m from Augusta, we lived in Virginia briefly with my parents – and I – when I was young, and I went away to school, but now I didn’t go away for graduate school because as I said I was married and had a child so we moved to Athens and I went to UGA. But, basically Augusta’s been home and home base and now – when Ed Cashman and Neal Callahan were still living, there were other scholars who had studied Augusta history. Now I’m the only scholar here in town who has spent a lot of time doing Augusta history; so I would love to find a young person to mentor to come behind me and really care for the heritage of the community, but so far that hasn’t happened and we’ll see, we’ll see how that works out. I had a wonderful mentor named Ed Cashman and I would love to be that for somebody else. (48:13) Dr. Christodoulou: So you said that July 4th you are going to talk. Usually when you are called to talk what are the topics? Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, Judge Jim Blanchard is in charge of the community July 4th event that takes place in front of the municipal building in front of the , there’s a huge it’s kind of like a mini Washington Monument that two of the Declaration of Independence signers of Georgia are buried under. And so one year, a couple of years ago, I spoke about who was one of those signers and his home is a historic site here, it’s open to the public Meadow Garden. This year he has asked me to talk about the American Revolution here so that’s what I’m going to do for that. But, I talk about a variety of things, I talk about a lot of talks on history of race relations in Augusta, history of the African American community, because I’m really working toward a book on – that it keeps getting put aside for these other projects, but I’m fascinated with that. I have done talks on women’s history in the area, I’ve done talks, I write for Augusta magazine I’ve been doing that for several years and so often I’ll write an article about something and then people want me to come talk. I wrote an article about Frank Miller who founded the Miller Theatre, which is undergoing a historic restoration right now, and so I ended up – about three or four groups asked me to come talk about that. I did an article on Julia Lester Dillon who was the first female landscape designer in the entire South and wrote for national magazines and ended up doing landscape designs for federal building throughout the South and so I wrote an article on her and a lot of women’s groups asked me to come talk about her. So, it just kind of depends, but you can see this back here, those are my speeches so I have a lot of them. (50:32) Dr. Christodoulou: How do you grab the attention of your audience every time? I guess you discover things as a historian and then share them, is there something that you remember or that you can recall from one of your speeches or something that you discovered? Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: The way I have tried to approach it is, I’m telling a story and I think that’s what most people who’ve heard me speak say. That’s what my students used to say about my classes, that it was like going to hear a story every day. So, I try to tell the story of something and what its impact was, but I also let people from the era speak for themselves so I’ll use quotes. When I did Julia Lester Dillon I quoted things that people who knew her said about her, as well as things that she wrote and said, so that her character would come alive for people; so you could kind of imagine how this woman from the late nineteen, early twentieth century is thinking about these things. And, so that’s how I try to engage my audience, by telling the story in a way that can draw them in, that they may relate to. I did a talk for the Augusta Museum of History back in January on immigration in Augusta from the beginning, who were the different groups of people who had settled here; so I began with Native Americans then talked about the English colonization, some of the early Jewish colonization, because that was two months after Oglethorpe arrived and then taking it on through into Africans being brought here, Irish, the Germans and then in the late nineteen century Chinese Augustans and Italian Augustan and Greek Augustans and Central European Augustans and then how they got here, why they came, what made them part of the community and what they contributed, how they made their living all of that kind of stuff; and we had – I don’t know, they were bringing chairs in so I think it was 110, 120 people, but a lot of them came from these various backgrounds and they were interested to find out about their own people and where they came from and how they became part of the community. So, that’s what I love to do; I think that’s a lot of fun to do that. I’ve had to cut back on it a lot because it takes research to do a new talk especially, and I just have so many things going on now that it’s hard to keep up with all of it so I’ve cut back some. I’m not doing – except for scholarly conferences – I’m not doing speaking engagements out of town for right now. I had somebody call me this week and wanted me to come to Washington, Georgia and do a speech and I said I’m just sorry I just can’t, because by the time you drive somewhere and then give your talk and do the reception and get back it’s a more than a half day out of your work schedule, so it takes too long. (Laughter) But, eventually, if I get some of these book projects done, I may go back to that before I retire. (54:16) Dr. Christodoulou: Where do you usually search for information? It’s amazing how you can discover new things, like, for example, about the Jewish man who contributed here… Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Mordecai Sheftall. Dr. Christodoulou: Exactly, how do you- Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: They knew about him in Savannah, especially in the Jewish community of Savannah, which is the earliest one in Georgia. But, he just never made it into the textbooks and if you, there are people now who study the history of textbook and if you look at textbooks – what we end up learning in school depends a lot on what people choose to put into a textbook or leave out of a textbook. For a long time Southerners would say slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, well that’s what they were taught in school, because that part was left out of the textbooks. And now there’s a wonderful book out called the Dixie’s Daughters, where this scholar looked at some of the women who were trying to preserve Confederate heritage and clean it up a little bit and they literally took all the slavery stuff out of the textbooks in the South. So, the people they weren’t lying when they said no it didn’t, I didn’t learn that in school. They really didn’t learn that in school, because it had been taken out of the textbooks. So, we’re trying to present a much more accurate picture by going to the primary sources and putting it back into the textbooks, because if you read the primary sources all the leaders in the South, I mean Henry Benning, whom Fort Benning is named went to Virginia when they didn’t succeed and tried to convince them to succeed and become part of the Confederacy, because as he kept pointing out if you don’t, they are going to end slavery. We’ve got to do this or we’re not going to have slavery anymore. So, at the time they understood that they were trying to preserve their system as they called it. And we’ve got to get those kinds of things back into the textbooks; and they are now for the most part and most people recognize that. There are still some diehards that say that wasn’t about that, well it was. They didn’t like the tariff but they would not have gone to war over the tariff and people try to make it out to be about the tariff. But, so that and then people if you grew up in the fifties, you wouldn’t know that African Americans had anything to do with how the state had turned out because they just weren’t there with the exception of maybe Harriet Tubman. And, even with the Civil Rights Movement, the first textbooks had Martin Luther King in it; and you rarely heard about some of the other people who were very much a part of it and these brave students White and Black that went on Freedom Rides or Northern students who came down to register people to vote. All of that’s part of the story so you know you’ve got limited amount of space so you can’t include everything, but you can at least introduce ideas and I think that’s what’s important about that. And then you can include, I included a pretty long bibliography in this which will be one of the things I update, so that teachers who want to know more about some of this can see those books and maybe go read some of them, themselves or they can see where some of the primary source materials are. There are all kinds of things that are primary sources and everyday people find some in an attic or they find records that we thought we lost and there in an archive somewhere back in a corner, just hadn’t been processed. So, they give us new insights and then there are new methodologies there are things we know now that we could not have really known before computers, because we can feed data in; this is particularly true of demographic data. We can take demographic data from the church records of colonial New England and we can feed all this stuff in and see what ages people were getting married, see how many children they were having, we can see what their infant mortality rate was, things that without something to crunch all those numbers it would’ve been very hard to do. And, one person would’ve spent ten years to do what you can do now in a few months of data gathering. So, new methodology has come along and they tell us new things and sometimes those new things may have implications for your own time. For example, one of the surprising things when they started doing these microstudies of New England towns was that, about one- third of the women were pregnant at the time they got married. In puritan New England! Everybody’s surprised; well, with how bad a thing that was in puritan New England you can imagine that just saying no as a policy strategy might not be as effective as you want it to be. It says something about the power of human sexuality especially at a younger age, that you had people in puritan New England and they were married, but we know that if their children are born five months, six months after that marriage in a time when they would not have survived without, we just didn’t have the modern ways of keeping premature children alive. Then we know that this couple had involved themselves in premarital relationships that weren’t acceptable in that society but, a third of them that was a surprise. So, I guess you could say we’ve had teenage sex going on all along and so there are probably some implications on how we may think about teenage pregnancy today. So I just think it’s fascinating to do these kinds of projects. (1:01:17) Dr. Christodoulou: Excellent. Is there anything else you want to share, something that I didn’t ask, something that you know is important and just didn’t- Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, I’ll get on a soapbox for a minute. I am very much of an advocate for teachers. I’ve worked with teachers at these summer workshops and we’d be there all day long for a week or two and we’d have lunch, we’d sit and talk about some of their issues. I just don’t think they are getting the respect that they should be getting. Now, do we need to make sure that the teachers we have in the classroom are knowledgeable? Indeed we do and that was one of the issues, that a lot of these teachers would admit that until they took some of this content work, they really didn’t know, you know, they kind of just stay a day or two ahead of the students, because they had not had a lot of content themselves. So, we need to make sure they are prepared, but I also think that we need to appreciate them, because they are being called on to do so much today beyond just their classroom work. They are teaching students in some cases that are bringing a lot of baggage to school with them and so I would like to see them get the respect that I think they deserve. There was a period in history where women especially really intelligent women had few choices about what they could do and teaching was one of them and people respected them in that time period. That has sort of eroded in the – probably in the post-World War II era, maybe, since the sixties or seventies, so I would love to see us get back to- a lot of people tend to blame things on teachers and there’s enough blame to go around for our societal problems right now, that it’s certainly not all because of public school teachers. So, I would like to see our teachers get more support than they sometimes get. (1:03:44) Dr. Christodoulou: Does looking at it historically help? You mentioned before that a third of women in puritan New England- Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: In some of these, these were microstudies that were done in New England towns- Dr. Christodoulou: Right, so does it help to understand how our society or generations have always been, say, unethical that we often- Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: We’re not, maybe as out of the norm of people- a lot of the time when people talk about going back to the way things used to be, they really don’t know how things used to be. And it depends on what age group they are what this wonderful period in the past was. So, for example, in the 1920’s after people had gone through all of this industrialization and urbanization, they tended to look back at the period before so much urbanization and industrialization when they thought life was simpler. Well, it was simpler but having a washing machine or scrubbing your clothes on a board, maybe it wasn’t so much fun after all back then. In the fifties, in the 1950’s those people tended to want to go back to the 1920’s, it seemed like a more simple fun time and in the 1980’s they wanted to go back to the … beaver days of the 1950’s and now we hear people talking about the 80’s, how wonderful the 1980’s were. So, you know we get rose-colored glasses about eras in the past that may have seemed simpler, but they had their own issues and we tend to forget about those issues. The other things is – sometimes it depends on who you are, I mean I don’t think there are a whole lot of African Americans who would say that they want to go back to the way things were in the 1920’s and really even though a lot of women may think they want to go back I don’t think a lot of women would really enjoy living in era’s when the laws restricted them in so many ways you know. Women weren’t voting in this country until 1920, so they didn’t even have a voice about in what was going on, other than what they could persuade their husbands to think. So, we need to have a realistic understanding of our past and in some ways it might be informative on why we are the way we are or maybe things were in ways we didn’t think they were and sometimes it may be cautionary. We tried this before, it didn’t work out too well, so maybe it’s not the way to go right now you know. Dr. Christodoulou: But, maybe for teachers it was different. Maybe – I don’t know if it was an easier life, but they didn’t have all of the standardized testing- Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: No! Dr. Christodoulou: In terms of teaching not having to take care of- Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: That’s what I’m saying, that’s what bothered me. Teachers have to do so much today more and more seems to be added on to them. And there are no – they have so little opportunities to use their own judgement about things; they’ve got to follow these standardized things and the kids are going to be tested on them and so they end up having to teach to a test because there are all kinds of consequences if your students don’t do well. And yet, with all this are we producing a better product than we used to? I’m not so sure that’s true, I mean ya’ll may have studied this more than I have, but I felt like I got a, I was a public school child all the way through and I felt like I got a very good education and I went to college and I was in classes with students from all over including other areas of the country and I felt the education I had prepared me pretty well to be up there with people. I had a wonderful high school English teacher, who bought out of his own money books for us to read, like Walton Pond and Moby Dick and things like that so you know I just felt like I got a good education. So, that’s one of the issues, but some of those people who would have been teachers, women, especially, because teaching became what was called feminized in the twentieth century, that was especially true at the elementary school and what they call grammar school we call middle school areas and so it was increasingly taken over by women. So, you’d still find male teachers maybe in high school and then college was predominately male, because few women were let in unless they taught at a female college and then you’d find a lot of female scholars at that level, but there were a number of female colleges but that’s a very tiny percentage of people. So – But what happened is after the women’s movement, people who would’ve gone into teaching, because they would not have had another option, became lawyers or they went on to teaching college as more and more women were let into higher education, people who would have been nurses some of them decided to be doctors instead. So, as fields open up for women some of these other fields are lost, some of the best and brightest that might have stayed with them. Now, I think nursing has become so much in demand; now that salaries have gone up and there are opportunities there. I don’t know why that hasn’t happened with teachers, because we definitely need really good people in the classroom and it should be an attractive enough profession salary-wise and just in what the expectations are that we can get more or people will want to do it. I mean what’s the statistic now? The average career in teaching is five years or something, because people just get so burned out at the end of five years and they can go somewhere else and make more money and not have the same kinds of stresses. So, I think it’s a big issue that we as a society are going to have to address; it’s certainly not a very efficient way to educate your public if you’ve got to, if you’re losing well-trained people every five years. So, I think that’s one of the big issues for education now. (1:11:32) Dr. Christodoulou: Yes. That’s right, we give focus to other things like technology. We treat education as if it is another technological advancement and standardizing everything and making groups for everything, telling teachers how to think and what to say. There’s no freedom. Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: You know it’s very cliché to say, but most people who have very successful careers and lives can point to a teacher in their background, not a computer, but a teacher in their background who opened their eyes to something or who mentored them or who provided a stabilizing point in their lives and so I mean teachers are affecting lives as much as people in the health professions in some cases. So, we’ve got to remember that it seems to me. I saw a study and I can’t remember, this was years, a number of years ago, and I can’t remember where it was, where they compared children who lived in low income areas, I think it was actually in public housing, and looked at the ones who had gone on to have successful live. They had gotten into a good career, they had gotten educated and those who didn’t, those whose lives had just not progressed or had not done well at all and the one variable they could find that kept showing up was having a mentor. Sometimes it might be a parent, but often it was a teacher or a person in a community center, basically a teacher who made the difference in them. So, I just think its key that we begin to respect that and that people know that they can have that opportunity if they go into teaching. (1:13:44) Dr. Christodoulou: What you said I think is amazing; how teachers if they are allowed to make a difference in children’s lives then these children can succeed, but it seems that we don’t allow them to do that nowadays. Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, I don’t know that they, I think that they try; the one’s I’ve worked with – and of course the ones I’ve worked with are willing to give up some time in the summer to come for a two-week workshop so that they may be a self-selecting kind of cream of the crop so to speak teachers; but the one’s I’ve worked with are dedicated and they are trying, they are frustrated, but they are trying really to reach their students. And – But if you’ve got all these other things that you’ve got to do, there are only so many hours in every day and you can’t necessarily reach somebody on this level if you’re doing paperwork, you know what I’m saying. Dr. Christodoulou: You cannot focus on teaching, you cannot focus on the thing that you have been called to do so you are burnt out by the time you end up in the classroom or try to focus on preparing a group lesson; your energy is gone. Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Right, right. Dr. Christodoulou: Thank you so much. Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: I’m glad to do it. It’s nice to talk to you a little bit.