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KAREN BARTA: Good morning. I'm Karen Barta with news from Minnesota Public Radio. A Minneapolis neighborhood leader says residents must step forward and tell what they know about people who are a threat to the community. Minneapolis Northside resident community council president, Matthew Ramadan, says he is outraged at the drive by shooting Sunday night of an 11-year-old Minneapolis boy.

MATHEW RAMADAN: People know who these people are, and that's the problem. It's not like these are people who just, you know, came in from out of town, did this and left. These are people that live in our community, that talk about what they did, that other people know what they did, and the feeling of aiding and abetting criminals has to be something that we have to check very strongly and very harshly in our community.

KAREN BARTA: Ramadan says too many African Americans declined to offer information because they lack trust in the police department. The 11-year-old boy was playing in a neighbor's yard in the 1800 block of Newton Avenue North when a man in a car fired several rounds from the vehicle. Rochester Police say two baby girls found dead Saturday, apparently were killed by their mother, who then tried to commit suicide. Investigators say autopsies show the girls died of asphyxiation.

Minnesota has dropped from second to eighth in a national ranking of the overall well-being of children. The federal report out today says state youngsters fare well in some measure, such as health care. Problem areas include poverty and dangerous behavior on the part of parents. The state forecast partial clearing by afternoon in the West, continued mostly cloudy in the East. Highs in the 60s. For the Twin Cities, mostly cloudy, a 50% chance of showers and a high of 65. It's cloudy around the region. Light rain in Duluth and 50 degrees. It's 53 in Rochester. And in the Twin Cities, it's cloudy and 53. That's news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Karen Barta.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It's six minutes past 10 o'clock. Good morning. I'm Paula Schroeder, and this is Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

10:00 on Mondays means it's time for Voices of Minnesota. And, today, a conversation with the person officially in charge of state memories. Nina Archibald is director of the Minnesota Historical Society, which manages the Minnesota History Center in Saint Paul and a number of historic sites around the state. Nina Archibald took the top history job in 1987 after many years at the Historical Society and the University of Minnesota. Archibald's specialty is music history, but perhaps her biggest career achievement was overseeing construction of the new History Center building in Saint Paul. That's where Minnesota Public Radio's Stephen Smith sat down to talk with Nina Archibald.

STEPHEN SMITH: Let's start off talking about where we are at the moment. We are in a gallery devoted to the history of the family. And we're sitting in what looks like an attic. What is this?

NINA ARCHIBALD: This is a part of our new exhibition called Families. Not even called Minnesota families because nobody really owns this exhibition. It's owned by anybody who's ever had a family who I guess is everybody. And what happens here is that people come, and they explore the whole subject of family in all kinds of different ways.

They can read about family here. They can smell smells that will evoke memories of family. They can be in a space like this and see vignettes presented that give them insight into family in general and perhaps even some greater insight into their own experience as being part of a family.

STEPHEN SMITH: We're in the History Center, which is a new, in some ways, a very monumental building. It has a monumental feeling to it. It's interesting that you have this family exhibit in this sort of monumental building. When one thinks of history, you know, our ideas, especially from school, might be of important people, famous events, kind of the National history, if you will. I wonder if most people really think of their families as being history.

NINA ARCHIBALD: Maybe they don't. Although, I think increasingly they are. You have to, in a way to understand what happens here at the history center, go back to the beginning of the conception of what the History Center was for. It's not by accident that it was called The History Center and not a History Museum. Not that there's anything wrong with museums, but somehow museum carries with it ideas about protecting and preserving and putting velvet cords in front of things.

And I think, from the very beginning, when the History Center was envisioned, it was envisioned as a place for people and a place where they would come to come together to learn about their past and to engage each other in all the kinds of ways in which people build community. So it's a place for people to come together to really discover and to make community. And I think that's why it has a different feel than the traditional museum does.

STEPHEN SMITH: Let's talk about your family history to a certain extent. Where did you grow up? And what was your what was your life history, the path that brought you here to the History Center?

NINA ARCHIBALD: The path is so circuitous that it's hardly traceable. But I grew up in New England, and it was very small New England town, just maybe 20 miles west of Boston. And I think that, as I look back, a turning point event for me was, when this little town of Lincoln, Massachusetts had its bicentennial, and all of us who were in school at the time-- it was a sort of Dewey-esque school-- were asked to do a project that would engage us in the community's history. And I remember doing research, talking to descendants of the first families that had been in that town and having a very close tie, feeling a very close tie, even though my own ancestors hadn't been around in 1754, feeling a very close sense of ownership of this community in a way that I had never felt from a history textbook in a sense.

And I think that, in a way, that was a very powerful experience for me and made me move intuitively when the opportunity came much later in life to develop the History Center toward a kind of history that was very tied to your own personal kind of discovery and voyage. Because it was for me then at age 14, and it is for people who come here to the History Center as well.

STEPHEN SMITH: My guess is that, if most Americans are like me or, you know, maybe my friends, we sort have a rough idea of the countries that our great grandparents came from or our great, great grandparents. Maybe if we're, you know, especially particularly Norwegian or Swedish, we might know what town because that kind of ethnic pride is fairly strong in Minnesota. But, for a lot of Americans, we really lose track a couple of generations back. And history doesn't seem like a personal thing. It seems, like I was saying before, like a kind of an institutional thing almost, that our own families, our own pasts almost don't seem to rate as history. At least that's how, in a way, I feel about mine. Am I looking at it all wrong?

NINA ARCHIBALD: I think you probably are. But I would have to say that the kinds of ways in which we are engaging people in history here have to do with commonalities. In fact, one of the decisions that was made early on in the History Center was that, at a time when we are talking about things that make us different, that make my history different, my family history different from yours, that it was an impossible task to imagine that we could focus on your history alone, or that what we needed to do was to find the common ground even in this moment in which we look at difference and we look at ethnicity and we look at multiculturalism, that there were certain common things.

And I can remember it being a very conscious decision here, that we would look at subjects that in fact were known to all of us, subjects on which we are all expert subjects that are common to all of our lives--

STEPHEN SMITH: For example.

NINA ARCHIBALD: --family. It doesn't matter whether you grew up on Bradbury Brook 9,000 years ago or whether you moved into a Roseville subdivision in the 1950s, you understand something about family. Everyone who comes here knows something about family. One of the early screens that I personally passed over as I was looking at this exhibition and development was to look at the expert voice, because it seemed to me that one of the things we needed to be very careful about here with the family's exhibit was to recognize that our visitors are the experts on this subject. And so, I think, if you look around in the galleries, you'll see that there are not a lot of labels that present us as experts. We present information, but we're allowing all of our visitors to be the experts.

STEPHEN SMITH: Now, it's interesting, this tension or this question of who the expert is. Your expertise isn't really musical history.

NINA ARCHIBALD: That's true.

STEPHEN SMITH: You're undergraduate and I think your master's degree is from Radcliffe and your--

NINA ARCHIBALD: Right. Radcliffe from Harvard and my PhD here at Minnesota.

STEPHEN SMITH: University of Minnesota. So there's no question that you're a professional historian. Is there a conscious decision to try and keep, at least from the public's viewpoint, the professionals from getting in the way of telling history? I mean, because one thing that is an argument currently in the field of history is that, to a certain extent, historians, academic historians, professional historians have become so hyper specialized. Is that somehow that tension that's going on somehow reflected in your choices here about whether or not the historians are kind of in front telling you what to look at?

NINA ARCHIBALD: Certainly, the specialized knowledge and the expertise is behind everything that we do. If I think about the Minnesota Historical Society long before I came to work for it, I think, for a long time, it would have been described as an organization that was about excellence and that had very high standards and in regard to what history is. I would have to say that that's still true. The people whom we hire come with excellent training.

We work with academic historians in planning all kinds-- all the work that we do. An exhibition like this one not only involves historians, it involves psychologists. It involves social scientists. And so the specialized knowledge of academic work comes to this institution, but it gets played back in ways that are accessible to people. So I think, in many ways, institutions like this one are intermediaries between the specialization of academic history or any kind of specific academic subject and what gets played out here in the History Center that is absolutely accessible to people.

I guess what I'm saying is that the academic history is essential to what we do. There isn't a conflict between the two. That one really feeds the other. But I think, for the large majority of people, that kind of specialization is not how they're going to learn their history. They're going to learn it in an environment like this one. Sometimes we even have conflicts over these things internally. Here in the History Center, we have a wonderful big reading room where the public can come and get first-hand access to primary source materials. That happens here in the building.

STEPHEN SMITH: Meaning they can go. And, if they know that the letters of a certain person in their family history or a famous Minnesotan exist in your archive, they can call it up and pull on a pair of white cotton gloves and look at it.

NINA ARCHIBALD: Look at the real thing. Absolutely. What happens here, though, is that, not only do we have academic historians, but we also have people from all walks of life. We have family historians who come here, people doing restoration work on their house, people trying to understand what their community looked like. We even have children coming here. We have a very successful History Day program in this state.

There were about 15,000 kids in Minnesota who participated in History Day last year. And our young people not only did well in Minnesota, but they went all the way to Washington, DC and won major national awards. Well, they do a lot of that work, not only in their schools, but a lot of them come to the History Center to find the sources. So, on any given Saturday morning in our reading room, you'll find fifth graders, sixth graders, as well as postdocs doing their work.

STEPHEN SMITH: Post-doctoral students, yeah.

NINA ARCHIBALD: Post-doctoral students, exactly, doing their work in our reading room. That makes for an occasional conflict. Kids get pretty [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHEN SMITH: So that the students are yelling at the postdocs to keep it down, I assume.

NINA ARCHIBALD: Yeah, that's the way it goes. Something like that. Interestingly enough, we've actually, even in our collecting process, begun to think about the needs of school-age children as we collect primary source materials. I was very excited to hear that, in our acquisitions, what we call Acquisitions and Curatorial, the people who make the decisions about what's going to come into the collections to be preserved over time, we now take into consideration the kinds of materials that young people are going to want to look at when they come to do research.

STEPHEN SMITH: So acquiring the sketches and, in some ways, the fourth grade handwriting assignments from 100 years ago can be as telling as acquiring, you know, the letters of some great notable person.

NINA ARCHIBALD: Right. Or just imagining what topic a young person might be interested in pursuing and making sure that we have the materials to take care of that. I have to tell one little story that happened shortly after the History Center opened, and I think one of our more frustrated academic historians came one day and must have found an unusually unruly crowd in the library. And he wrote a letter of complaint to me, and he said that he really thought what we ought to do was to take all the primary source documents, all the manuscripts out of this building, put them in another place, and let the academic historians, the serious historians have access to that material.

Because after all, all that we had done here at the History Center was to create an education palace. And I thought to myself, where is the bad news in this letter? An education palace sounds-- if I'm going to build a palace, a palace to education is a wonderful thing to imagine.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Nina Archibald is director of the Minnesota Historical Society, speaking to Minnesota Public Radio's Stephen Smith. This is Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. Our Voices of Minnesota interview with Nina Archibald continues in just a moment. I'm Paula Schroeder and this is Midmorning. National and global issues coverage on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by Medtronic, the world's leading medical technology company specializing in implantable and invasive therapies.

In the weather today, we're expecting partial clearing in the western part of the state. It will remain cloudy in the east. Highs will be in the 60s across most of Minnesota. And there is a 50% chance of rain redeveloping this afternoon in the Twin Cities area. Tomorrow, partly to mostly sunny with a high from 65 to 75 degrees, depending on where you are. Look for a high right around 70 in the Twin Cities. Let's return now to Stephen Smith's conversation with Minnesota History Center director, Nina Archibald. It's 20 minutes past 10:00.

STEPHEN SMITH: Let's talk about the original Minnesotans who have also you've had a lot of experience working with in terms of developing historic sites outside of Saint Paul with Native Americans, especially thinking of the museum at Mille Lacs. How has that informed your sense of history? And I'm especially curious about how, working with a people, who are Minnesota's first people, and who some white folk would regard as historic themselves.

In other words, I'm interested in whatever tension there may be between encouraging a sense of history or encouraging the development of a history center among native people, but at the same time, getting away from the notion that I think did take over easily at the first part of the century and up maybe until the 50s or 60s among professional anthropologists and historians to a certain extent, that Indians were a thing of the past.

NINA ARCHIBALD: Well, you've begun to touch on part of my work that I think has been most rewarding. One of the very early projects that I was assigned to look at when I came to the Historical Society in the late 1970s was the plan to build a new building on the Mille Lacs reservation to replace a building that we had there. And I began to go up to Mille Lacs and began to work with the people there. It was very clear to me very early on that this was a culture that was still alive, very much alive.

You still hear Ojibwe spoken on the Mille Lacs reservation, as you do on other reservations. One of the first questions I asked when I began to work up at Mille Lacs was, what kind of relationships. Do we have with this community? These are people whose history we're dealing with in this museum. And other than employing people here, which was a very important part of what we have done there, what have we talked to this community about the kind of museum that they want, about the story that they want told, how they feel about the objects that we are preserving in our collections?

And I guess I didn't feel that there was an adequate answer to that in the late '70s. And so, we spent a long time, have spent a long time working with that community on what the history is. One of the interesting things is, when you ask questions, your questions are answered. If you don't ask questions, there's no answer.

And the process of developing that new museum at Mille Lacs has been a very, very close relationship between the Mille Lacs Band and the staff at the Minnesota Historical Society to the extent that, as we are talking now about having really jointly sponsored events, because that really is-- we have a sense of shared ownership-- what's happened up there has been the restoration of the historic trading post and the construction of a wonderful new museum built with both public dollars and private dollars. There are state dollars. There are federal dollars as well as private dollars and Band dollars in that project, which I think is every bit the pride for Minnesota that the new History Center is. It's a wonderful new history facility.

STEPHEN SMITH: How does it represent a change or a different approach to the history of the Ojibwe people and native people in Minnesota? How is what you're doing there now different from what was there 30 years ago, 20 years ago?

NINA ARCHIBALD: I think, point of view, it is a museum not only for the band. It is a museum for the people of Minnesota. But I think we are careful there now by including Ojibwe language and also being sure that we present a community point of view as well as a point of view that isn't possible for someone who doesn't live in that community to have. If you think about how long the native people have been in this state relative to how long non-native people have been here, a huge piece of our history is the history of Indian people.

And Indian people have had, not only in Minnesota, but in other parts of the country, long-standing relationships with museums. I was thinking as I met with our Indian advisory committee up on the Fond du Lac Reservation a couple of weeks ago, that, because of the fear that Indian history would somehow be lost, museums, anthropologists have been busy for a long time for the last century and more collecting the artifacts of Indian people. The fact is that Indian people are still with us, that Indian culture is still alive, and that much, however, of the material culture of Indian people actually is being preserved in museums. And so the relationship between Indian people and museums is a very close one because they're absolutely aware and interested in the fact that we have much of the material that documents their own history.

STEPHEN SMITH: Why is it important for us to study history? I mean, the old cliche is that those who don't know their history are forever condemned to repeat it, et cetera. Is that true? I mean, why do we need to know about our history?

NINA ARCHIBALD: I think there is truth in those cliches. Cliches get to be cliches because people find some sort of fundamental and basic truth in them. And I guess, I, instead of exploring the cliche or even that idea, which I think people have heard and played with some, the idea for me is a little bit different than that. The idea for me has to do with somehow what is ultimately a humanizing that we go through the process of studying history, in the sense that memory, number one, is human to have memory. That's a piece of what we do. And that's a piece of what happens in history. But, beyond that, shared experience is what enables us to relate to each other. That seems to me to be an absolutely fundamental human function, the building of community.

Going back to the idea of the history as a community place where people work things out that matter to them, that they build on traditions, that they know something about the past, they build on traditions to create a sense of community. That, to me, is in some larger picture about-- that is, in some larger sense, how history reaches beyond the facts in a textbook and begins to influence what happens in everyday life. So that we know the past, we create the past together, and, through that, we create understanding and relationships that build community among us.

STEPHEN SMITH: Now, one thing, we're doing this interview at a time when you have an advertising campaign around town, billboards with famous, I assume, or at least old photos of people who look like they ought to be famous with either party hats on or a rubber clown nose. Who is that guy with the party hat and the rubber clown nose?

NINA ARCHIBALD: Fortunately, we don't know who that person is. And serious research has assured us that we have lost the identity of this person because we were a little hesitant about putting a red nose or a party hat on anybody's great grandfather or great grandmother. We've had a lot of fun with this campaign, which has a very simple message, which is to say that history is fun. In introducing this to our own board members and staff members, we all got to wear red noses. And it's really a charge to walk around with red noses.

STEPHEN SMITH: So, if history is fun, how come you had to find somebody anonymous to have fun with? I mean, I'm a little-- Sure, I'm puzzled.

NINA ARCHIBALD: We were a little worried that somebody might get alarmed that their revered great grandmother might appear on a billboard with a red nose on.

STEPHEN SMITH: But the message implicit in this billboard campaign is, hey, guess what? History isn't boring.

NINA ARCHIBALD: Right. History is fun.

STEPHEN SMITH: Well, how did we get this idea that history is so boring? I mean, a lot of our conversation so far has, in a way, you've been, in one way or another saying, hey, you know, history is not boring. It sounds like you're kind of, as a professional, both historian and a professional museum director or History Center director, you're kind of on the defensive in a way.

NINA ARCHIBALD: Actually, I think you're putting me on the defensive. What I've been saying is that history is fun. Not that I have to say that it wasn't before or that it isn't fun. And I'm trying to convince you that it is. I think the statistics tell us that there are people who aren't coming here, and we know that we have something that those people would enjoy. And so it's our job as part of an organization that exists to serve, to make what we have available as available to as many people as we can possibly reach.

STEPHEN SMITH: Well, I don't mean to put you on the defensive.

NINA ARCHIBALD: That's OK.

STEPHEN SMITH: What I'm saying though, is that, in a way, the statistics that you're citing put you on the defensive.

NINA ARCHIBALD: That's true.

STEPHEN SMITH: You have a greater image problem as a historian and the head of a History Center. Otherwise, you wouldn't have billboards out there with rubber noses on historical figures. Why is it that we, and Americans, seem to have this idea, this notion that our history is boring? What happened?

NINA ARCHIBALD: I'm not sure it's that. I think it may be that museum is even more of a problem than history is because, if you look at our historic sites, our historic sites are drawing across the spectrum of people of Minnesota in terms of--

STEPHEN SMITH: And those would be, for example, the Split Rock Lighthouse.

NINA ARCHIBALD: Lighthouse, Fort Snelling, the James J. Hill House, the Saint Anthony Falls Historic District. They draw broadly from across the community. But there's something about going to a museum, I guess, that I might put my finger on that first. On the other hand, you know, I don't want to be defensive, but I'd have to look back into my own history personally and say that it wasn't really until I got to college that I had a wonderful history course taught by a wonderful history professor.

Maybe I just happened to hit a particularly bad run of history teachers. But I think, for those of us who do in such an important area, it takes some experience to turn us around. I think people who come to the History Center are converted.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Minnesota History Center Director, Nina Archibald, talking with Minnesota Public Radio's Stephen Smith. Our Voices of Minnesota installment this week was edited by Justin Maymon. The series is produced by Dan Olson.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

We're going to continue our conversation about history and who writes it, who the experts are, and who it's for in the next several minutes of Midmorning. It's 10:30, and you're listening to Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. Today's programming is sponsored in part by Ruth and John Knudsen on their 51st wedding anniversary. Congratulations to you.

Before we continue our conversation about history, I need to make a correction and my apologies go out to the Strohkirch family. I said at the beginning of our first hour that charges of criminal vehicular homicide had been filed against Patrick Strohkirch in association with a traffic accident that occurred recently on Interstate 35E. We have since been notified that those charges have not yet been filed. The investigation into that accident continues, and so no charges have yet been filed in that particular incident.

Well, joining us in the studio now is David Noble, who I think is one of those professors of history that Nina Archibald spoke about, persons who get students interested and passionate about history. David Noble is a professor in the American Studies department at the University of Minnesota and has been a history professor for, oh, a long time, several decades, shall we say.

Susan Hill gross is also with us. She is the director of the Upper Midwest Women's History Center. And welcome to both of you. Thanks for coming in today.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: Thank you.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Nina Archibald brought up a number of different or fascinating concepts in her conversation with Stephen Smith. One of them was that she didn't want herself and other people at the History Center to be seen as the experts on history and to tell people what they need to know about history. Give us a reaction to that, either one of you, I guess, that, you know, do we need experts to tell us about history? And who should they be?

[LAUGHTER]

Maybe that's the key question.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: Dr. Noble for one.

DAVID NOBLE: Well, we have experts in the sense that we have professional historians, but I guess all my life I've felt that there isn't a significant imaginative difference between the way in which so-called non-professional historians understand the world and professional historians see the world. I think that professional historians are within larger communities and that people talk about every generation of historians rewriting history. And I think that this is true because the larger culture is constantly changing.

And, as different styles, different values develop, historians are coming out of that larger world and are really expressing that larger world. So I think the difference between the imaginative world of professional historians and the general public is greatly exaggerated.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, Susan Hill Gross, as the director of the upper Midwest Women's History Center, I think that that's probably a key point in that women were not, for a very long time, recognized by professional historians, those who write the history textbooks. But that is changing now.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: Yes, and I think that's something of what David Noble perhaps is saying here, is that each generation even picks up the same piece of history, but begins to look at it in different ways and study it over and over. And the professional historian has that great advantage of being able to carve out a fairly small piece of the past. They would think maybe 10 years of English history perhaps would be their real expert piece and look at it and look at it and find new evidence and keep looking at it from different views.

And, with the enormous increase in women's history research and in family history research, that gave another view for that professional historian to look at and then to make that leap that Nina Archibald is talking about. It also provided, I think, a bridge to a huge constituency that often was not particularly interested in history. If you ask women of my age in their 60s if they liked history, very few will say yes. No, we didn't like it. But I think that Women's History did provide that bridge. And so it's that tension really between the analytical history of the academic and very appropriate.

And, as she is trying to say, how do you make that relevant to a bigger group of people? Well, in this case, the academics were the ones that led the way. People like Sara Evans at the university who really the outpouring of this scholarship is amazing. And then that provides that basis, that bridge for the rest of us to look at perhaps our own past and make it relevant that way but also the past of who we might relate to.

PAULA SCHROEDER: I think that a lot of us, when we think about history, look back at our grade school and high school years and studying those history textbooks that, you know, have a lot of dates in them, mostly focus on--

SUSAN HILL GROSS: Pretty dull.

PAULA SCHROEDER: --wars and battles and, you know, leaders of countries. And I know that both of you have the viewpoint that, well, there's a heck of a lot more that was happening during those years, say, of the Civil War than the battles that were occurring.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: And history can be looked at as stories. I mean that's what's fun about it is that it is-- that's one part of it anyway.

PAULA SCHROEDER: David Noble, do you think that the teaching of history is too simplistic? in this country?

DAVID NOBLE: Well, in all countries.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah, in all countries. Right.

DAVID NOBLE: It tends to be the establishment view of things which, to a large extent, tries to lock skeletons in closet or sweep things under the rug, whatever. And, again, that we live in a world of values. We live in a world of competing values. We live in a world of changing values, so that there is always drama involved in our lives, individual lives, community lives. And to a large extent, the way history has been written and taught really represses those conflicts of values.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, just this weekend, in fact, I went to see the movie Sense and Sensibility. And it seems that these Jane Austen novels are all being made into movies now and gets at that, that very issue of the repression that has occurred during that period of time but certainly that underlying drama that is there in everyone's lives.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: That's right.

PAULA SCHROEDER: And sometimes maybe the only place to find out about that is in fiction because-- [LAUGHS]

DAVID NOBLE: No, I-- [CHUCKLES] I've tended to be unpopular with my colleagues because I think, for a long time, if not always, but for a long time, I've said that I think novelists are better historians than historians because they do get into the clash of values and the issue of personality that has tended to be written out of our textbooks.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: For us who taught younger grades too, just to follow up on that, often what parents and many times the general public really would like us to teach is something to do with patriotism or nationalism. And that's why one gets very tangled up in, as you suggested, these competing values. Whose values are going to be taught and from what view? And do you end up just teaching, you know, the great male leaders? Or do you teach really analytical history or whatever?

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, you're getting dangerously close to this controversy now about the history guidelines.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: Right. That's true. That's true. And that would be, I think, another conversation. But it certainly entered into that discussion and some misunderstandings I feel about them. But certainly that is always a tension, is between-- I remember years ago teaching in Savannah, Georgia, and I was teaching about communism and Karl Marx and had them read The Manifesto and had some, you know--

PAULA SCHROEDER: Oh my gosh. in Savannah, Georgia.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: Right. Well, that's right. And I had a couple of phone calls from parents, and I said, well you know, they have to learn what this is about. And so that there is always that kind of control of what is taught.

PAULA SCHROEDER: David, you have students of all different ages, I imagine, in your classes these days, but most of them younger college students. Do they come to your classes with a good base of knowledge about history, particularly American history?

DAVID NOBLE: No.

PAULA SCHROEDER: They don't.

DAVID NOBLE: Well, in that sense that, to a large extent, they don't see the issues of the conflicts and the drama that they don't see history as a soap opera. That it's just something that's sort of given that the American nation came into existence in 1789 and in a way hasn't changed from 1789 to 1996. There's no feeling of the way in which national identity, like personal identity, is constantly being recreated and the conflicts that are there involved in that recreation.

And I suppose that, somehow, what they have some sense of, the debate among politicians and the angry assaults of one politician against another politician is a way of understanding how national identity is always being debated, and certain groups are trying to get in a place where they can define national identity and, in a sense, capture national identity from other groups. So that there's no feeling of that constant drama that's existed from the moment when the nation came into being in 1789.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, and doesn't a lot of what young people are taught in our public and private schools, but in those K through 12 years, pretty much limited to the period from the Revolutionary War up to maybe up to World War Two? But I have to say that I didn't get a lot of instruction about World War One and the participation of the United States in that either.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: We try to do a better job at that I think now, Paula. I think also they do try to-- to some extent, anyway, a better teacher will globalize even American history. I was thinking of we have a chapter in our book on women in Japan on the role of women in World War Two. And I've had teachers use that chapter with some materials on Germany and what women were doing in Germany in World War Two and then contrast it to the factories and so forth in the US.

So, again, teachers are becoming aware of integrating like Women's History into their curriculum, but also perhaps globalizing it in that sense of not just, well, it wasn't just the United States fighting this world war, you know. I mean, there were things going on all around the world.

PAULA SCHROEDER: But that takes a that takes a lot of effort on the private teacher.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: It does, and it does take a great deal of effort and a great deal of knowledge. And, you know, we try to provide materials for teachers because they are not able to take a huge bibliography that Dr. Noble would have for his students and create lessons. But you're correct that you have to be deeply committed and deeply interested in the subject of history to really be a good history teacher. And I think the best ones really show that.

PAULA SCHROEDER: David Noble, one of your former students is now the producer of this program. And she was telling me that you sometimes use texts from historians from long ago, 70 years ago or so. Why do you do that?

DAVID NOBLE: Well, [CHUCKLES] there is always this drama of change and continuity. And, again, I suppose in politics, the major debates and major crises tend to be forgotten. And, again, the major debates among historians a generation ago or two generations ago or three generations ago tend to be repressed so that, when one gets the idea-- graduate students tend to get an idea that what the historians see at the moment is what they've always seen instead of being a dramatically different kind of world. And that this generation is-- history is not ending with this generation, that there will be another generation coming along and displacing this generation.

And, in a way, each generation of historians has tended to believe that they are saying the last word, and it's good, you know. And going back to earlier debates, be aware of the way in which historians operating at the level of so-called professional historian are no more outside the changes of styles and changes of values than the general community is.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, I think that's something important to remember. I talked to another historian who said, you know, the Watergate is probably going to barely be a footnote when it comes to history books that are written, you know, 20, 30 years from now, maybe even the Vietnam war, which was an absolutely consuming part of the American national debate for a long time.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: That's right. And there's quite a revisionist view of the Korean War going on right now, so we kind revisit these things. One thought that I had along this line of having young people be invested in history and learning some of this analytical side of it, that David Noble's talking about, and being able to see these changes not only changes in history, but even changes in historiography is, I think, one thing that Nina was talking about is making it relevant to even the general public.

And I think one way young people can be interested in history is if the people around them are interested in history. And I had the privilege on Memorial Day of going over to Lakewood Cemetery where my parents are buried, and they had this marvelous guided tour of the cemetery. And the cemetery is just full of women's history, of ethnic history, of early Minnesota history. And the guided tour brochure they did was so good on doing this, of mentioning Fridley but also mentioning that he introduced the first suffrage bill into the Minnesota legislature.

I mean just touches like that. I'm not sure of who the authors of that tour were, but it is just very well done. And I recommend people to do that, take some time and to take that walking tour. It's like parents who read, children read. And I think, if parents are interested in history and in their own histories, children become interested and will continue to be.

PAULA SCHROEDER: And I think that both of you are proof that learning doesn't stop when one graduates from high school. I mean, what's wrong with not getting interested in history until you're 45?

SUSAN HILL GROSS: That's right. Absolutely. In fact, I think a lot of people do, really. I thought you should mention, Paula, what you told us before about your daughters scout troop, because I thought that was interesting.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah, it was. We went to the Minnesota History Center, and they put on a wonderful program for kids there. They have them go on a scavenger hunt, and they can find things to complete this little--

SUSAN HILL GROSS: Marvelous.

PAULA SCHROEDER: --bingo-type sheet. So it gets kids involved in really looking at the displays that are there. And I was surprised because, you know, I live in an area that, I think, takes pride in its education, certainly, and parents are pretty active in their kids' lives. But my daughter was the only one who had ever been to the History Center, and the kids loved it. These are, you know, eight and nine year olds, and they just thought it was a wonderful place. So there is an interest and an innate curiosity there, I think, for a lot of people. But, again, it might be that the imposing facade of that big building on the hill that's keeping people away, too.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: It's so handsome inside, though.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It is It's a beautiful building.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: It's just so gorgeous.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Absolutely beautiful. Well, I want to thank both of you for coming in today and talking about your love of history and the importance of history. And particularly, David Noble, thanks for reminding us that it's a changing field. It changes all the time. David Noble is a professor in the American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota. Susan Hill Gross is director of the Upper Midwest Women's History Center, which helps women do research and teachers teach women's history. Thank you so much for coming.

SUSAN HILL GROSS: You're welcome.

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PAULA SCHROEDER: Reminder that, coming up tomorrow morning at 10:00, we will be talking with Justice Richard Goldstone, who is the chief prosecutor in the International Crimes Trial, criminal trial in the former Yugoslavia. That's at 10:00 tomorrow here on Midmorning. Time now is eight minutes before 11 o'clock. And you're listening to Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. Sylvia Poggioli is in town, and she is going to be speaking tonight at the Macalester College chapel in Saint Paul. That's at 7 o'clock. You have heard her many times in her reporting from Europe here on National Public Radio.

She's based in Rome, Italy, but she's also done a lot of reporting from Bosnia and also from London. She's covered post-Cold War Europe. And that is going to be the subject of her comments tonight at the Macalester College chapel. You're invited to hear her speak about Europe in the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That's at 7 o'clock tonight at Macalester College. And that event is free and open to the public.

GARY EICHTEN: The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to usher in an era of peace and prosperity in Europe. Well, it hasn't worked out quite that way. And on our next Midday we'll find out why. Hi, Gary Eichten here inviting you to join us. National Public Radio's Peabody Award-winning foreign correspondent, Sylvia Poggioli, will be in our studios. And I hope you can tune in and call in with your questions. Midday begins each weekday morning at 11:00 on Minnesota Public Radio, KNOW FM 91.1 in the Twin Cities.

PAULA SCHROEDER: So you see another opportunity to talk with Sylvia Poggioli at noon today. During the 11 o'clock hour of Midday, Gary will talk with Eighth District DFL Party Chair, Don Bye, on the impact of the BWCA flap on this weekend's DFL convention. That's coming up this weekend. We'll also look into a new study from the Minnesota Children's Defense Fund that says children in Minnesota and in the nation are worse off now than in the past. That's coming up on Midday. First, it's time for Garrison Keillor.

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GARRISON KEILLOR: And here is The Writer's Almanac for Monday. It's the 3rd of June, 1996. It's the anniversary of the Battle of Midway on this day in 1942, when US Naval forces intercepted a Japanese attack on Midway Island and destroyed Japan's naval air superiority in the Pacific Ocean. It's the birthday of the man who created the New York City Marathon, Fred Lebow, who was born on this day in 1932 in Arad, Romania as Fischel Leibowitz.

It's the birthday of Josephine Baker in Saint Louis, 1906, dancer and singer who went off to Paris in the 1920s and became a great sensation in La Revue Negre, and the following year headlined a revue at the Folies Bergere wearing her famous banana skirt and very little else. It was on this day in 1888, the San Francisco Examiner first printed Ernest L. Thayer's poem, Casey at the Bat. It's the birthday of Ransom Eli Olds, 1864, Geneva, Ohio, who designed the three-horsepower Oldsmobile.

And today is the birthday of poet, Allen Ginsberg, born 1926 in Newark, New Jersey. Here's a poem by Allen Ginsberg on his birthday entitled My Sad Self inscribed to Frank O'Hara.

Sometimes when my eyes are red,

I go up on top of the RCA building,

And gaze at my world, Manhattan,

My buildings, streets I've done feats in,

Lofts, beds, cold water flats,

On Fifth Avenue below, which I also bear in mind,

It's ant cars, little yellow taxis,

Men walking the size of specks of wool,

Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine,

Sun go down over New Jersey where I was born

And Paterson, where I played with ants,

My later loves on 15th Street, my greater loves of Lower East side,

My once fabulous amours in the Bronx far away

Paths crossing in these hidden streets,

My history summed up my absences and ecstasies in Harlem,

Sun shining down on all I own,

In one eyeblink to the horizon in my last eternity,

Matter is water.

Sad, I take the elevator and go down, pondering,

And walk on the pavements staring into all man's plateglass, faces,

Questioning after who loves, and stop,

Bemused in front of an automobile shop window,

Standing lost in calm thought,

Traffic moving up and down 5th Avenue blocks behind me,

Waiting for a moment when,

Time to go home and cook supper,

And listen to the romantic war news on the radio,

All movement stops,

And I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,

Tenderness flowing through the buildings,

My fingertips touching reality's face,

And all these streets leading so crosswise,

Honking lengthily by avenues,

Stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums through such halting traffic,

Screaming cars and engines,

So painfully to this countryside, this graveyard, this stillness,

On deathbed or mountain,

Once seen, never regained or desired in the mind to come,

Where all Manhattan that I've seen must disappear.

A poem by Allen Ginsberg, My Sad Self, from his Collected Poems published by Harper & Row and used by permission here on the Writer's Almanac for Monday, June 3rd, made possible by Cowles Enthusiast Media, publishers of Early American Homes and other magazines. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Thanks for joining us here on Midmorning today. Reminder that tomorrow we are going to have in our studios at 10 o'clock Justice Richard Goldstone, who is the chief prosecutor in the Bosnian war crimes tribunal. He is going to be speaking tonight as well at the annual Human Rights Award Ceremony by the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. And that takes place at 7:30 at the Downtown Minneapolis Hilton at 10th and Marquette. So you might want to call 341-3302 for more information about that.

It's good to have you with us today. Drive safely. Remember our first hour conversation and leave some room between you and the next guy. We'll see you tomorrow. Stay tuned. Midday is coming up next.

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JOHN RABE: I'm John Rabe. Just like picking the kids up from school or sitting in your favorite easy chair and taking your shoes off, make all things considered part of your afternoon ritual. Well, you could leave your shoes on, all things considered. Weekdays at 3:00 on Minnesota Public Radio.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. 53 degrees under cloudy skies at KNOW FM 91.1 Minneapolis Saint Paul. In the Twin Cities today, mostly cloudy, with a 50% chance of rain this afternoon. The high near 65 degrees. Northwest winds at 15 to 25. Partly sunny with a high near 70 tomorrow.

GARY EICHTEN: Good morning. It's 11:00, and this is Midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. In the news this morning, Rochester Police are investigating three more homicides in the city. Investigators say two of the victims, young children, may have been killed by their mother, who then tried to commit suicide. Minneapolis police, meanwhile, are investigating the drive-by shooting death of an 11-year-old boy last night.

A new national study says the status of children has slipped in Minnesota. Last year, Minnesota was ranked second in the nation. This year, Minnesota is