An America more divided than ever - but patriotism is something we have in common

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to On Deadline, your radio news from Odyssey newsrooms across the country. America is turning 250 years old, and what a long, strange, fulfilling, amazing historic journey it's been.
What have we learned since the founding? Here's KCBS in the Bay Area.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
Dr. Colleen Shogan, I wonder what kind of arc we see as we zoom out and look back 250 years. We recently had the historian and filmmaker Ken Burns on with us, and Ken talked about what he sees as similarities between the Revolutionary War period and today.

**Colleen Shogan** (0:36)
Absolutely. I mean, there's relevant, you know, there's comparisons all around. You see the incredible amount of division and frustration and ideological debate going on in the country, and you can't help but make those comparisons from that time, that very difficult time of the 1850s in the United States to what we're seeing right now.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:01)
Yeah, whether it was differences between the colonies in the Revolutionary time or the North and the South during the Civil War or the Vietnam era or whatever, I think one thing that we have found is that this nation has been pretty resilient. It may be stretched and near the snapping point, but it always seems to come back together.
For our listeners who don't know, what is the Archivist of the United States? Are you basically our country's historian, chief historian?

**Colleen Shogan** (1:30)
Well, the Archivist of the United States runs the National Archives and Records Administration, which is an agency of the federal government that is responsible for all of our nation's records, both our federal records of all the different agencies and departments that operate in the United States government, and then of course also our presidential records. So the job of the Archivist of the United States is to lead the agency. There's over 2,000 people who work at the National Archives and Records Administration across the country, which preserves, protects and shares those nations' records with everyone, which of course represents our shared history.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:13)
How important is it, do you think, to preserve firsthand accounts of our nation's history?

**Colleen Shogan** (2:20)
I mean, it's absolutely invaluable because I think, sometimes we think, oh, well, history is static, and there's nothing new to be learned, and that's not true at all. You have to realize we have 13.5 billion paper records in the National Archives, 13.5 billion. So no one has looked through all 13.5 billion records. So there are discoveries and insights that are being made all the time with these records so that we can look at our nation's history, perhaps sometimes in small different ways, rediscovering new stories. But other times there can be major discoveries that really change how we think about a historical event.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:59)
Did Washington reflect on his own times? Did Lincoln write essays about the time, you know, that he was in Washington in his life?

**Colleen Shogan** (3:08)
That's a great question. I don't think, I mean, Washington, you know, not as much of a writer. We know Washington was a voracious reader as he became older. He read more and more, collected more books as he was able to. Now, Lincoln did write. Lincoln kept what we might consider to be almost a journal, what other historians have called meditations. And when he would have an insight about something, he would write it down and sometimes just on scraps of paper.
And those meditations became snippets for his very famous speeches. You see some of those observations show up in the Gettysburg Address. You see other observations that he wrote down come up in his second inaugural address.
I see a lot of great evidence that there's very active examples of democracy at the local level. We see, for example, the regeneration and resurgence of civics education, and that's coming from, I think, a ground swelling from localities and states. Very interested in that, the strength of communities that are solving problems actually in the face of natural disasters. You just had an earthquake here today, but we see examples of communities figuring out how they can solve those problems on their own, without intervention, at higher levels.
Local libraries are stronger than ever in many instances, so I think there's a lot to be said at the local level. However, what we've relied upon in the United States for many, many years is that energy from the local level to then influence and feed our national institutions, and I don't see that happening these days. There's a broken connection between much of the trust that we see at the local level. It's not percolating up into our national institutions, and we know from recent surveys and polling that the faith and trust in our national institutions is at an all-time low. So there is a big concern that we have to think about. One of the ways we can solve this, I think, is through a reinvigoration and a refocus on civics and history education.