A Literacy Beyond the Page

Continuing my conversations with AHA members, I spoke this summer with N. D. B. Connolly (“Nathan” among his friends). Nathan and I share a Johns Hopkins University footprint. We spent five years together on the faculty there, and in 2016, he became the first African American historian of the United States to earn tenure at Johns Hopkins. Today, he is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History.

Connolly’s scholarship exposes the mechanics of power embedded in land, law, and everyday life. His first book, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2014), earned a host of major awards. By framing Greater Miami’s segregation as part of a longer, global history of colonial extraction, Connolly recentered debates about the profitability of racism and unearthed the tense negotiations among Native Americans, Caribbean migrants, working-class whites, landlords, politicians, and the Black poor.

Our conversation ranges from his formative teachers to the stakes of racial literacy, the promise and peril of artificial intelligence, and the enduring power of grassroots storytelling.

Nathan, take us back. How and why did you become a historian?

In middle school and high school, my most interesting teachers were the social studies and history teachers. I did have a real love for math and science that I wasn’t encouraged to pursue. I attribute that to a combination of factors—tracking within public schools in southern Florida, the interests of my own family, how I was identified as a “right-brain kid” (when that was the language of the day). Beyond watching 3-2-1 Contact or mathematically inclined public television, I never got pushed in the direction of math and sciences to the degree that I was drawn into history and storytelling.

My history teachers were especially colorful characters. My eighth-grade social studies teacher, Mr. Costa, was an amazing artist. Whenever he talked about different periods of American history, he would draw these incredible cartoon characters, who would be wearing the dress from the time period. That was another one of the ways that I got pulled in.

I always had some sense of storytelling, but also the importance of grounding it in nonfiction and in truth. At St. Thomas University in Miami, I had an inspiring mentor and instructor, Frank Sicius. At the time, he was the youngest of the three history faculty at 50 years old; he had this incredible breadth of knowledge. Another professor, Father James MacDougall, had a briefcase he brought to every class. At the start of each class, he would draw out a simple Styrofoam cup. He’d fill that cup up at a water fountain in the hallway. For the entire four years that I took classes with him, he took nothing else from the briefcase. He would speak without notes on every possible subject.

I was very impressed with their analytic thinking, historical recall, and mastery of facts, but also of processes and moments—it was magnetic. When I started college, I aspired to be a high school history teacher. By the time I graduated, I had doctoral programs in my sights, and I was off to the races from that point.

How would you characterize your scholarship and the questions that animate it?

I entered the career of professional history writing as someone who wrote urban history and American political history. I was always interested in questions of how geography—and urban, suburban, and even rural space—preconditioned people’s outcomes and experiences. I also became taken by the power of history to decode architecture, urban planning, and the somewhat arcane workings of government bureaucracy. A lot of government documents can be written in an opaque way, but if you learn the vocabulary, it’s almost like speaking a second language.

I became taken by the power of history to decode architecture, urban planning, and government bureaucracy.

A few years after I got to Johns Hopkins, I began teaching a graduate course called Racial Literacy in the Archives. It was inspired in part by Lani Guinier’s “From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy” (Journal of American History, 2004), in which she talked about the importance of racial literacy and understanding the history of educational inequality. I ran with that, thinking about the ways we can understand archival methodologies as requiring a literacy beyond simply being able to read the words on the page. Having “racial literacy,” for me, means having the ability to see race and racism at work in the world and, for historians in particular, to combine race with other categories of analysis (such as gender, class, and sexuality, of course, but also work, faith, family, and/or popular notions of time).

In my work, I am largely trying to think about how big, sometimes impersonal processes like urbanization, capitalism, and nation-building are experienced in people’s everyday lives on a very intimate scale. A World More Concrete is about real estate development in the Jim Crow South, but it was grounded in the experiences of Black people from the Caribbean and the United States primarily, their experience of becoming Black, and how the geography and the landscape of an American city governed by practices of legalized racial segregation made people have a “colored” experience. I’ve since gone on to do some quite personal work that revolves around a multigenerational family history; it historicizes the love and labor migrations of my mother and her three sisters as part of larger processes that cross the Atlantic world.

I’m really interested in operating at high scales of analysis as concerns big, somewhat abstract historical problems—but always connecting it back to how everyday people live and experience those things.

That topic of racial literacy—why is it especially urgent right now?

American universities have to figure out their own relationship to historical processes of racism and domination, and our scholarship is a primary source for the history of the American university. We have an incredible history of people of color beating their way into institutions that we now call historically white or predominantly white institutions. I think, too, about the early foundations of higher education in the late 19th century as it was crafted as a professional vocation, and all the connections that were there to build strong bonds between, say, German or British institutions and American institutions, and how in many cases, people of color were written out of those networks. What we have now is an incredible opportunity to think about the life cycle of what people of color have attempted to do in higher education—whether it’s the same kind of environment and they have the same kind of possibilities.

Today, with the federal government threatening—in some cases directly seizing—federal funds from universities, the Trump administration has behaved, in some ways, as if Uncle Sam is a donor who can decide simply to give or withdraw funds. The seizure of federal monies from higher education, however, is not without precedent. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were efforts to make universities more democratic places by using the seizure of federal funds to coerce institutions to actually hire Black people, to hire people of color generally. Our former colleague Franklin Knight was one of the first Black faculty members hired at Johns Hopkins at a time when the federal government was overtly enforcing antidiscrimination law and threatening the federal funding of universities to make that real. These federal seizures proved to be perhaps the single most effective way to root out Jim Crow in American colleges and universities.

Now we have the inverse effect, where federal funds are threatened for universities advancing antiracist aims. It is a moment where the soul of higher education is being decided on whether they want to continue to invest in things like racial literacy. The call for racial literacy is more important now than it’s ever been, in other words, at least in my lifetime. Whether that call can be answered inside the university’s walls is still an open question.

The call for racial literacy is more important now than it’s ever been.

When you reflect on the biggest challenges and opportunities historians face, what do you see in your crystal ball?

It’s foggy, to be sure. Number one is the question of scholarly integrity in light of artificial intelligence. To what degree do we defend questions of academic integrity in the classroom?

You and I came of academic age when digital sources were becoming more readily available. The extent to which many of us are still practiced in analog research methods—those methods are going to determine the soul of the discipline. There has always been a pressure to publish and be productive, and sometimes to speed up things that need to be cooked slowly.

Second is the role of the historian for the public. We are seeing a battle around the question of history itself. Whose history gets institutionalized? To what degree are we supposed to talk about the founding fathers but not slavery at the foundation of the republic?

Third, we have to think about our relationship to other disciplines. Many history graduate students are reaching for literary studies and other speculative branches of academic inquiry. There is a question about what history uniquely offers and to what degree we still need historians.

That last question is a bit contentious, because I do think that there are certain subfields feeling a bit less connected to the old way of doing archival research, and for reasons that are totally understandable. Still, there are incredible examples of scholars who have shown that even when you’re dealing with people who may not have left a robust written record, you can still use rigorous archival methods to reconstruct their experience.

As I hear you reflect on the future, I wonder if one day there will be an AI historian or graduate student in your seminar?

I don’t see that as far-fetched, only because I’m looking at the telos of our work. We’re teaching in rooms where none of the students have physical books; they’re all working from laptops. Today’s students do not make photocopies. They don’t use pens. I would be foolish to imagine that there won’t be an AI student, or at least hybrid programs where students use some listening software to help streamline what the seminar does.

What makes you most optimistic about the future of the discipline?

I do not feel that the craft of history writing is in danger. I’m very optimistic about the creativity of humans to know and connect with their past. People are swept up and drawn into meaning-making when they can understand the origins of things.

The eminent anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote his book Silencing the Past while at Johns Hopkins, oftentimes in direct conversation and conflict with some of his colleagues in the Department of History. But I always found Trouillot instructive in helping historians to not take themselves so seriously, as if we’re the only ones who own a relationship to the telling of the past. His book shows the broad base that history-making has. “History” doesn’t just reside in the ivory tower; it resides in homes and around the dinner table, in churches, in civic groups, in relationships, and in the stories that parents tell children and children tell among themselves. That grassroots relationship to the past will remain strong.

History writing will be an incredible and dynamic thing. If anything can become more democratic about our abilities to narrate the past, I see that as a good thing, even if the cause of it may not have been comfortable at the time.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.