State of the Field for Busy Teachers: Graphic History

Daniel Story
I’m Daniel Story, and this is History in Focus—a podcast by the American Historical Review. You’re listening to one of our four-part miniseries titled “State of the Field for Busy Teachers,” where we deliver to you one expert’s overview of their field of history, including how it has evolved over recent decades and where it’s at now in terms of recent advances, debates within the field, and where you can go to learn more. You’ll find other episodes in the series and links to resources at historians.org/ahr. Now, to the episode.

Walter Greason
My name is Walter Greason. I am a professor of history in the Department of History at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota, and this is the state of the field for graphic history. Graphic history overall as a field, has been an asteroid that has hit the profession in a world where we’re fighting book bands and curricular revisions that prevent us from teaching various subjects. We’re at the very beginning of a process of undoing the separation between professional history, art history, religious history, and really crafting a new era of holistic world history that blends really outstanding writing with brilliant art and amazing, immersive, visceral learning experiences. 2018 is really the turning point with Trevor Getz and so “Abina and the Important Men” is West African history that is just extraordinary. The “March” series about John Lewis also commercially opened up the door to do extraordinary work with graphic history. There are always classics like “Maus” or “Persepolis” that deal with really difficult subjects, whether it’s Islamophobia, whether it is the European Holocaust, I saw a brilliant new book on reconstruction that was about a black governor in Louisiana. Zinn Education is now featuring graphic histories that are talking about the legislative process and how do we actually provide equal justice for all people. You have books like Octavia Butler’s “Kindred” that have been rendered as graphic novels as well and have extraordinary utility in the history classroom. The entry point into graphic histories for me has been the New York City public schools. Trevor Getz at San Francisco State University really blazed the trail to open the door for something like a graphic novel, but much more grounded in historical scholarship, when he began to work with Oxford University Press, beginning the process of creating a framework to review what some have called Graphic nonfiction, But much more commonly people refer to as graphic history. That is, unlike a graphic novel that you might see from Marvel or DC or a trade paperback, where they’re essentially taking fiction and then providing sequential art to amplify and deepen the story. This is a way of taking history, particularly but also other academic fields, and applying the same technique of partnering with artists so that they can then provide visual content that enables different levels of learners to acquire the material much more quickly than if they’re going to read a historical monograph or engage with a series of academic journals. And for me, the entry point came because Trevor saw that I was experimenting with visual art in teaching history, he suggested that I work with New York City public schools to create a lot of new, advanced historical insight on modern US history for their Passport to Social Studies series, for their Hidden Voices series, and then ultimately their Hidden Voices posters. The big breakthrough came in December of 2022 the main coordinator for this work is Joseph Schmidt in the Civics For All education group, and after we had done so much work together the previous couple years, he says to me, in December next year is the 50th anniversary of hip hop. Would it be possible to put together a graphic history of hip hop? I’ve been teaching hip hop since 1994 when the field wasn’t even considered a possible academic area of inquiry, and the chance to do a comic book about hip hop that would then be the basis of teaching in New York City is too good to pass by. I had an artist in mind that when Joe asked the question, I had been waiting for two years to work with this artist, and I had seen him do live art that was absolutely spectacular. I was like, I can write the script and this artist will then produce a gallery of just priceless work to complement it. So that’s Tim Fielder. Tim Fielder, professionally is known as the OG Afrofuturist. He and I had worked with a consulting group in conjunction with the US Air Force on preventing nuclear proliferation, and this was an extraordinary collaboration where we envisioned a world where there’s just greater efficiency, much more peace, and the ability for people to live without the fear of nuclear annihilation. The work that he did in drawing the kinds of policy proposals that I’d outlined in that work, in 10 to 15 minutes, he brought these entire worlds to life. And now the exhibit has been featured at the United Nations. It’s touring in Amsterdam right now, Tim is one of the most gifted artists in the world. I want to say in March of 2023 I had the script to him. He had the draft of the 24 page comic done by August. The Public Schools wanted to edit and kind of make sure it was appropriate for classrooms, so we made a few small tweaks that set it up, and it was printed and distributed in November of 2023. What happened next is, where you get that scritch on the album in the movie is like, this is how I ended up here. And we went with the public schools to do a three day professional development training about teaching the “Graphic History of Hip Hop: Volume One”, the teachers jumped out of their chairs and were like, we need more copies now, like, this is the thing that is going to reinvigorate what we’re doing with our language arts and our social studies curriculum. The next two days, we went to visit a high school and an elementary school and brought copies. The elementary school students chased us through the building, demanding that they get more like, “Where can we get more of these?” And so the demand had just been off the chart within the city schools. Tim and I left there and we’re like, “Oh, we can do something much larger than just this initial resource.” So between December and February, ’23 into ’24 he and I expanded it to a 90-page full graphic history where we just really did a deep dive on all the kinds of events and influences that made hip hop evolve, not just in the 50 years from 1973 to 2023, but we go back to ’64 and the Civil Rights and the Voting Act. We talk about the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. These are all huge influences on what makes hip hop as a culture emerge in the early 70s. And then we continue that, we continue to historicize the music and the way the art forms evolve according to the way the nation and the world is changing around it. We released that on April 1st of 2024 and in less than a year, it’s been incorporated into the Smithsonian Institution in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has featured it. San Diego Comic Con, New York Comic Con. The University of Richmond has an institute called New American history, where they built a lesson plan around the book that now has been downloaded 10s of 1000s of times. The lesson plans that the New York City Public Schools teachers are writing in response to it are their most popular resources. The way that we combine outstanding historical scholarship with the kind of passionate energy of hip hop music and then just the grandeur of Tim Fielder’s art– I’ve been teaching either K to 12 or higher ed for almost 40 years– there’s nothing else like it that I’ve ever seen. It’s not just about literacy. It’s about the emotional relevance that it brings to the reader, the debate that it inspires about things that people have, about deeply held values, about what is art, what is music? The school district immediately said, we need two more volumes of this. So I wrote the scripts and now Tim is just drawing the art, and Volume Two will be out summer of ’25 Volume Three will be out summer of ’26. It is by far the most impactful academic work I’ve ever done. I’ve written extensively about racial violence that had a real impact on the response to the Unite the Right rally. I’ve worked with Marvel Comics and Marvel Studios for 20 years, and helped design Wakanda as it shows up in the Black Panther films. This is much greater than either of those things, and both of them are far beyond anything I imagined I could do as a historian. I’m very confident within two or three years, we’re going to have 1000s of new graphic histories, the company that I started with Tim Fielder, the Graphic History Company, we’re partnered with New York Public Schools, but we’re also partnered with the University of Richmond, New American History. We have partnerships with a dozen other institutions to provide early career scholars, folks who are graduate students or just finishing ways that they can do formal, traditional history, but also have space in their work for graphic history. I’m really good about imagining really big things and how to do them. I can’t get my mind around how big graphic history can be. It is a way to rethink everything we know.

Daniel Story
That was Walter Greason on the state of the field of Graphic History. You can learn more about this and other episodes—including other installments from the “state of the field for busy teachers” series—at historians.org/ahr. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by me, Daniel Story, with transcription support from Mallory Hutchings-Tryon. That’s it for now. See you next time.