How distance brings historian Sarah Churchwell closer to her craft

Sarah Churchwell is not a fan of Herbert Hoover, the American president who encouraged food rationing during the Great Depression. But she still bought a collection of PEZ dispensing U.S. presidents, including the infamous food dictator, from the period between World War l and World War ll.

“They make me laugh,” she told me, glancing at the candied mini effigies in her University of London office.

Originally from Winnetka, the 54-year-old moved to London 25 years ago. The university professor and author of several contemporary commentary pieces — from literary analyses of “The Great Gatsby” to op-eds on American democracy — calls herself a “cultural historian of the Americas.” Her new podcast, “Journey Through Time,” launched in March and uncovers lesser-known tidbits of American and British history, like the stories of Black Tom Island and Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for U.S. president in 1872.

Did you always know you wanted to be a historian?

Sarah Churchwell: No. I wanted to write, and I wanted to understand. Starting as an undergraduate, all the stuff that I loved had cultural history aspects. So I had to discover it for myself. I’m interested in the stories that we tell about ourselves and our communities, and I’m interested in how politics, history and culture intersect to create the discourses that shape our lives. 

Was there a class you took at any point in your academic career that informed the work you do today?

Obviously, I had classes that I found very stimulating or inspiring. But there wasn’t one that unlocked the stuff for me. If anything, it was the other way around. I was always focused on literature and fiction because I loved it so much — and not understanding the degree to which what I was really interested in was how all of this stuff intersects. And it wasn’t until I started letting myself really, really work on history and think about politics and bring all of that stuff together that I started to find it satisfying, that the work was then saying something meaningful about the world that we all actually inhabit.

Talk about your upbringing in the U.S. How much time did you spend there?

I grew up in Winnetka. I went to New Trier and was the beneficiary of a tremendous public education. I grew up believing in all of that. And then I went to Vassar, then Princeton, then came here. I lived my whole life in the U.S., and I moved here as an adult. I mean, I’m still American, right? For better or for worse, I’m an American who lives here. I did a year in Scotland for my junior year abroad. I was 29 when I left the U.S. I didn’t intend to emigrate here. I did my Ph.D., got a job and came up in England. I thought I was ready for a change and a new adventure, and I thought I’d do it for a couple of years. And that was 25 years ago.

How has your perception of history changed based on where you’ve lived?

When you’re an expat, you end up with a kind of stereoscopic view of your home because you still see it from within the way that you always did. You don’t suddenly become alienated. It’s not overnight, but you do become estranged enough that you see it from the outside because you see what the other people outside of it see, and you hear everything that they say, and you start to see what the news coverage looks like and how ordinary people in the country that you live in react to things that you took for granted that they think is so bizarre. It just made me more and more interested in history — to understand how it was that we had developed the idiosyncratic things that we developed.

What are some of the most common questions you get about America?

What on Earth is happening in your country? How could you people vote for Trump? How could you people do this with guns? How do you let school children be slaughtered? Why can’t you sort out a health-care system like every other developed country in the world? Why do you tolerate this? Why haven’t you all taken to the streets? Those sorts of questions, which I don’t think are weird at all.

What have you learned to see differently about the U.S.?

Everything. But it’s not that it’s changed my beliefs. It’s more that it’s deepened my understanding. And what it does is it puts your country in isolation so you see it more clearly. It’s the degree to which perspective depends on distance. Your feelings remain pretty much the same. They might get more complicated because of the new distance. But some of that happens with age and not with geography.

You’re based across the Atlantic. Does that make it easier or harder for you to engage with America’s history and its present?

As with everything, the strength is also the weakness. The benefit is also the challenge. In many ways, it makes it easier. It means that I’m a bit insulated from it. I’m not personally vulnerable to it in the same ways. But it also makes it harder because you feel distant from something that you’re profoundly invested in and committed to. 

My political opponents would like people like me to leave the country. So I feel very conflicted about being over here when I would like to be on the ground fighting them tooth and nail. It’s certainly what most of my American friends here are engaged in doing — figuring out how we can do that.

We talk a lot about objectivity in journalism, especially in our current political moment. What role does objectivity play in historical research?

Objectivity is the goal, but it’s a chimera. I’m much more interested in self-aware positionality and recognizing that the more that we can problematize our own positionality, the more likely we are to be able to estrange ourselves from it. We’re not ever going to achieve objectivity. But we can achieve empiricism. It’s the space in between where history happens, which is the questions that we ask about the factual events of the past. We all have willful blindness. We all have blinkers. But the drive toward something that looks more like objectivity will make us less subjective.

Your new podcast, “Journey Through Time,” launched on March 20. Walk me through how this podcast came to be.

There is a company here [in London] called Goalhanger, which has been very successful in doing this narrative historical podcasting. And they’ve developed a fundamental formula, which is two people telling a story about history that they do conversationally, and they interpret as they go. I co-host with David Olugosa, a wonderful Nigerian-British historian here.

Why do you guys work well together?

We’re genuinely friends. We respect each other’s work, which sounds like a polite thing to say, but it actually is fundamental to it. And we’re both learning from each other in ways that we both find exciting, and we make each other laugh. We trust each other, which is really, really important.

You don’t have to tell me all your secrets, but how much of the podcast is scripted versus ad libbed?

It is extemporaneous. It’s a conversation. But we work from notes. 

As you would do in a lecture?

Exactly. But when you do it as a lecture, it’s just off your own bat. Figuring out how to do it so that it’s a conversation is what has been the most interesting challenge.

Given the current political climate, how do you advise students to approach both the past and present in their studies?

I don’t think I would presume to be prescriptive, because there are going to be vulnerabilities around being outspoken. The only way I would feel appropriate doing it is talking people through what that looks like to the best of our ability and making sure that people are thinking through their choices. In this very fluid, volatile environment, we should fully understand what might be potential consequences for choices that we make.

What class should students not graduate without taking?

I’ll say two things. One is that I am a big believer in the importance of critical reading and textual analysis. I think that we have to get better at teaching that. There are places, like Finland, that we should be learning from. [Two,] I think civics, civics, civics, because we stopped teaching it. And it wasn’t a coincidence that after we stopped teaching it democracy imploded. It’s not that it would save it alone, but it would go some way. I also believe in a broad-based education. I don’t believe in hyper-specialization. I don’t believe that we can just teach STEM and not teach the humanities. And vice versa. It’s not as if we could afford to get rid of science. 

I believe in knowledge. I support all approaches to education that instill curiosity-driven learning. That is what is innate. What sparks love of learning is when we can connect education to curiosity-driven thinking.

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