Thanks so much, everyone.

Good evening and thank you for coming to America at 250 and beyond the past, present and future of the United States.

I'm Katie Roden, a faculty member in the English department here at Gonzaga University and the inaugural director of Gonzaga's Woodley Institute for Civil Engagement and Humanistic Dialog.

Newly launched in the spring of 2026, the Woodley Institute was created to foster civil discourse and create spaces where diverse communities can come together to discern a common good.

I'm so pleased that our nascent institute has been able to support tonight's programing, but dialog and civil discourse are never achieved in solitude, and so it's essential to acknowledge that tonight's event is a product of so much collaboration.

America at 250 and beyond is also underwritten by the William L Davis Memorial Fund, which honors the 40 year career of Father William L Davis, a beloved Gonzaga history professor.

Since 1971, the William Davis Fund has sponsored public lectures and other events that have enriched the intellectual life of Gonzaga's campus and the greater Spokane community.

The Woodley Institute is honored to partner with such an established speaker series to reflect on what it means to be an American now, at the semi Queen's centennial anniversary of the United States.

Happily, you'll hear very little from me tonight and a great deal more from our expert panelists and moderator, Mr.

Schuyler, whom I'd like to invite up.

Skyler Reep is president and general manager of CSPs, PBS, the public television station serving the Inland Northwest and Western Canada for the last 60 years.

He spent more than a decade in public media and believes deeply in its role as a trusted civic institution, a place where communities can learn, encounter different perspectives, and engage thoughtfully with the issues shaping our shared future.

He's presented nationally on public media, philanthropy, and community engagement.

I can't think of a better partner organization than CSPs or a better moderator for the evening.

Friends, please welcome Skyler Reed.

Hey, y'all.

Wow.

Thank you.

And thanks, Katie.

Thanks to Gonzaga and the Woodley Institute for inviting CSPs into this conversation.

One of the things we're thinking about a lot at CSPs, PBS, is what it means to be a civic institution, not just a television station.

Civic health is one of the four pillars of our mission.

And we're putting that into practice through candidate debates and town halls.

Our programs at Issue and civics Ball and other opportunities to bring people together around questions that matter to this region.

For me, an important part of public media's role is helping people understand consequential issues without telling them what to think about them.

And that feels especially important right now.

I also think there's something particularly useful about the way tonight's conversation has been constructed.

We're going to begin looking backward before we go forward.

We live in a time when it's easy to feel that everything happening around us is unprecedented, and that change is coming too quickly and the challenges are too large, and we're somehow uniquely ill equipped for this moment that we're living through.

And history can't tell us what happens next, and it certainly can't reassure us that everything always works out.

Sometimes people rise to the demands of their moment.

Sometimes they don't.

And sometimes progress takes generations.

And sometimes the gains that look secure prove fragile.

But history can give us perspective.

People before us lived without knowledge of how their story would turn out.

They inherited circumstances they didn't choose.

They made choices with them and they handed something forward.

Tonight, we'll look at three earlier moments when Americans pause to consider their country and significant anniversaries.

Then we'll turn toward 2076 and ask what the choices and uncertainties of our own moment might mean for the people who come after us.

And so, to help us begin our journey, we'll hear first from three Gonzaga historians.

I'll name them each, and then we'll do them one at a time.

So we'll have we'll hear from Ray Rast, chair and associate professor of history.

We'll hear from Vita Shannon Schliemann, associate professor of history, and from Rob Donnelly, associate dean and professor of history.

I think we begin with Ray.

Is that right?

Good and welcome, Ray.

So good evening.

Welcome to our event.

Thank you for coming.

So I'm Ray Rast.

I'm chair of the history department, and I'm going to talk to you for a little bit about how Americans observed the U.S.

centennial in 1876.

And I'm going to talk to you about what that might tell us about Americans values and their hopes and their concerns at the time.

So Americans marked the centennial in ways that remain familiar today.

They flew American flags.

They held parades like this one in Boston.

They enjoyed patriotic music.

They even set off fireworks.

And I wish I had a good image of that.

But but trust me, they did.

But they also, in addition to these things, they also staged what was known as a World's Fair in Philadelphia, and nearly 10 million of them paid a visit.

1 in 5 Americans visited Philadelphia for the fair.

Officially, the fair was called the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine.

And it drew inspiration from similar expositions that had been staged previously in London and Paris and Vienna.

Unofficially, the fair was known simply as the Centennial Exposition, opening in May 1876, the fairgrounds covered 285 acres of Philadelphia's Fairmount Park.

More than 200 buildings were constructed, including five substantial glass and iron structures.

The main exhibition building enclosed 20 acres, making it the largest building in the world at the time.

The federal government, the U.S.

federal government, and 26 of the then 37 states participated, as did 37 other nations and thousands of businesses and organizations.

The fair cost $180 million in today's dollars before it closed in November 1876.

It generated around $150 million in revenue.

So, as the official and unofficial names of the fairs suggested, the fair had two main goals.

One goal was to exhibit the products of American industry, agriculture, and arts.

The other goal was to celebrate the United States itself, the very existence of which had been tested a decade earlier by a bloody civil war.

So while the main exhibition building housed most of the other nations exhibits, its floor plan revolved around exhibits of American mining, metallurgy and science.

The floor plan of the Machinery Hall.

This building revolved around the 700 ton Corliss steam engine, then the largest engine in the world.

This Corliss steam engine ran for the duration of the fair, powering some 800 other American made machines also displayed in the Machinery hall.

The Memorial Hall, which still exists in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia.

It housed American paintings, sculptures, and other works of art.

The Agricultural Hall displayed the implements and products of American farming, and the Horticultural hall featured American grown plants and flowers, as well as elevated walkways that allowed visitors to admire the gardens below.

Now, it might be hard to believe, but Americans as a people lacked some self-confidence in the 19th century.

They did take pride in the plain, utilitarian aspects of American society, like the modest house in which their president lived.

But many felt embarrassed by their nation's lack of artistic and literary output relative to that of European nations.

So the fair was an opportunity for Americans to celebrate themselves, to tell themselves, and really to tell the world how great they thought they were and how great they thought they were going to be.

Admiring the Corliss steam engine.

The writer William Dean Howells revealed this mindset.

He wrote, quote, it rises loftily in the center of the machine hall, an athlete of steel and iron, the mighty walking beams plunged their pistons downward.

The enormous flywheel revolves with a power that makes all a tremble.

Yes, he concluded, it is still in these things of iron and steel that the national genius most freely speaks by and by the inspired marbles, the breathing canvasses, the great literature for the present.

America is valuable, and the strong metals and their infinite uses.

Americans, in other words, will support the arts and humanities.

You know, someday.

But for now, we're investing in this wonderful and powerful technology.

Still, the fear focused more on the present than on the future.

And perhaps oddly, for a commemorative event, it focused more on America's future than on America's past.

Although we're doing some of that tonight as well.

There were a few historical exhibits at the fair, like this one featuring items owned by George Washington.

But these historical exhibits were mostly just baselines for demonstrating how much technology had improved American life since 1776.

This neglect of history was possibly because Americans wanted to put the nation's past behind them.

Clouded as it was by slavery and the Civil War.

But as one observer at the time noted, quote, Americans are better at doing things than at commemorating them.

Of course, there were many things happening in the present that also received little attention at the fair.

Industrialization was transforming the environment through coal mining, iron ore mining, and oil drilling.

Not to mention the clearcutting of forests, the overgrazing of grasslands, and the disruption of habitats by ever expanding railroad lines.

Cities were growing too, with the population of New York surpassing 1 million during the 1870s.

And corporations were growing their power, protected by a Supreme Court that soon decided they had the same rights as citizens.

And yet, despite all of this, the economy was mired in a depression that began in 1873 and drove the unemployment rate above 15%.

Making matters worse, the nation's political leaders seemed to have no answers.

Many of them were corrupt or incompetent, and most owed their positions to the corporations or political machines that put them into office.

For these and other reasons, the post-Civil War process known as reconstruction was on its last legs.

Any evidence of such things at the fair was not intentional.

The priority, instead was to promote the technological innovations and the growing abundance of consumer goods that together inspired optimism about the future of American life, or at least about the material comforts it might include.

The Corliss steam engine, for example, powered machines at the fair that made hand soap, sewing needles, wallpaper, chocolate, silk, sugar and glue.

Visitors to the fair could ride steam powered elevators and they could see electric lights, most of them seeing them for the first time.

Visitors could enjoy the first ice cream sodas.

They could sample bread baked with the Fleischmann Brothers new compressed yeast.

They could try a condiment that Henry Hines called tomato ketchup, that they could see the first typewriters.

They could see an automated cradle rocker.

They could see an early version of Thomas Edison's mimeograph machine.

They could see a device that Alexander Graham Bell called a telephone.

Bell thought the day would come when telephones would be everywhere and, quote, friends will converse with each other without leaving home.

Visitors to the fair also could see the hand and torch of a statue that would be named Liberty Enlightening the World, as envisioned by the French political thinker Edward de la relay.

The statue would honor the U.S.

not only for abolishing slavery, but also for promoting freedom and democracy.

Lighting the way for the rest of the world, the statue remained incomplete.

In 1876, as countless Americans new efforts to promote freedom and democracy remained incomplete as well.

In the South.

Paramilitary groups terrorized African-Americans at the polls, and this helped Democrats reclaim political power.

In eight of the 11 former Confederate states.

By the mid 1870s, black votes again were suppressed.

In 1876, making the Democratic candidate for president appear to be the victor.

But when Democratic leaders offered to concede the election in exchange for an end to reconstruction, Republican leaders accepted the deal, leaving black Southerners to face a future of racial discrimination, segregation, and violence.

In the West, the federal government pressured Native Americans to move to reservations, and tribes then faced encroachments on those reservations.

The Great Sioux Reservation, for example, included the Black Hills of South Dakota.

In 1874.

George Armstrong Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills that discovered gold, touching off a gold rush and a new round of warfare that included Custer's defeat near the Little Bighorn River in 1876.

The U.S.

retaliation against the the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and Arapaho people would be overwhelming and brutal.

In California and in the Pacific Northwest.

Chinese immigrants faced mistreatment.

Congress effectively banned Chinese women from immigrating to the United States in 1875, based on the charge that they were prostitutes.

Anti-Chinese agitation continued in 1876 and beyond, leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

In Texas and across the southwest, Mexican American Catholics likewise confronted mistreatment, including dispossession of their lands and denial of the religious freedoms that were supposed to have been protected under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

In the north and throughout the nation, working class people faced constant hardship.

Their diets were poor.

Their dwellings lacked indoor toilets, and most of their jobs were difficult and dangerous.

Coal miners, for example, risked asphyxiation, collapsing tunnels, and black lung disease.

When some of them went on strike in 1875.

Mine owners fear mongering about the Molly Maguires, a supposed secret order of radical Irish-American Catholics.

Mine owners hired vigilantes to kill the strike leaders.

Mine workers retaliated, and ten of them were sentenced to death by hanging.

In 1876.

And throughout the nation, women suffered from such conditions and lacked the political power to do anything about them.

Susan B Anthony and other women suffragists read their new Declaration of Rights of the women of the United States at the Centennial Exposition.

Now, at the close of 100 years, they proclaimed, we declare our faith in the principles of self-government and our full equality with man in natural rights.

We ask of our rulers no special favors, no special privileges, no special legislation.

We ask justice.

We ask equality.

We ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.

Americans in 1876 knew the future was up for grabs.

That meant it could be better than the present, or it could be worse.

And such uncertainty fueled anxiety.

At the same time, those with wealth and power stacked the deck in their favor.

And that fueled anger.

Looking back, we can see such things more clearly than most people at the time.

The tragedy in my mind is that those who did understand the injustices of this era did so little about them.

We can speculate about the reasons the problems were too overwhelming.

The opposition was too strong.

Their own positions were too precarious.

They lacked vision.

They put their faith in gradualism and the work of future generations.

And so, whether those future generations liked it or not, it would fall to them to take up this work.

Future leaders such as Eugene V Debs, who was 21 years old in 1876, Booker T Washington, who was 20.

Clarence Darrow, 19.

Theodore Roosevelt, 18 years old in 1876.

There he is at Harvard.

Carrie Carrie Chapman Catt, 17.

Jane Addams, 16 years old in 1876.

They and countless others would do what they could to make America a better nation in the decades to come.

Thank you.

And now let's welcome my colleague Victor.

Good evening everyone.

The argument I want to offer you about 1926 is that in this 150th anniversary, Americans lived amid extremes.

These extremes are reflected in their anxieties and their optimism about the future of the United States.

Some of the evidence I will offer you illustrates these extremes.

They will also seem eerily familiar to us today.

So I want to start by clarifying that history does not repeat itself.

It does sometimes rhyme, but it never repeats and it will leave.

You'll see the striking similarities between 1926 and 2026.

I hope that you will also bear in mind the differences that separate then from now.

When I wanted to understand how Americans celebrated the sesquicentennial, I decided to look here to Spokane.

And what I learned from the newspapers was that the 150th anniversary was as unremarkable in Spokane as it was across the nation.

In Philadelphia, which hosted another World's Fair to honor the nation's anniversary.

The fairgrounds were incomplete.

By July 4th, there was a downpour, and visitors slogged through the mud and the completed buildings all leaked.

There was not much fun at this fair.

It was an unremarkable event here in Spokane.

The Spokesman-Review and the Spokane Chronicle encouraged residents to visit Philadelphia and enjoy the festivities.

But the local papers sent no reporters to Philadelphia.

Instead, Spokane observed the 150th anniversary by pausing its occupations for two days.

The city didn't celebrate as much as it simply paused.

I think the most remarkable recognition of this recent centennial in Spokane was this ad from December, extolling the cleaning effectiveness of the award winning Eureka vacuum.

This tells us a lot about 1926, more than the Philadelphia Fair does.

It is representative of the first of the extremes that we see in 1926.

In the 1920s, Americans enjoyed a decade of affluence.

Their material well-being increased dramatically due to technological innovations in appliances that Americans could afford to buy.

Americans lived better than they had before the First World War.

They lived better than their parents and grandparents did.

More Americans owned a home, almost half of them.

They purchased refrigerators that were powered by in-home electricity, washing machines and radios.

Radios connected Americans across the nation.

Millions could listen to the same program at once.

And they did.

The consumerism and the sense of affluence that made Americans optimistic about their nation defined this decade.

In fact, President Herbert Hoover just two years later, in 1928, he expressed this sentiment when he said, we in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.

As Americans fulfilled their consumer desires by purchasing appliances and clothing, they were likely unaware of the ways that public relations shaped the advertising and their desires.

In the 1920s, Edward Bernays used the growing field of psychology to mold public opinion and improve the president's image.

Advertisers adopted his techniques to build desire among potential consumers and to sell them more stuff.

Consumerism aligned with the youth culture of the 1920s.

This represents another extreme because of the ways that the activities and desires of the young defined consumerism.

We might speculate that this was a response to World War One.

Though the United States entered that were only in 1916, it was still shockingly devastating.

Globally, over 20 million people died in the First World War and another 20 million people were wounded.

The industry that had so inspired Americans 50 years earlier was now a point of anxiety.

The industry of war produced dead and maimed soldiers and civilians.

Americans viewed industry with optimism, but also with anxiety over its destructive potential.

The rise of a new generation with no memory of war held inspiration along with its own anxieties.

We associate the 1920s with the American flapper, a youthful female figure unconstrained by chaperons, who danced and drank the night away in mixed company.

The flapper symbolizes how gender and sexual norms changed during the 1920s.

Women claimed the right to wear sheer clothing and show off their sleek forms.

They claimed the right to socialize with whomever they wanted.

They claimed the right to their wages, which the men and their families did not own.

They claimed a right over their bodies to be affectionate with anyone they chose.

And women generally also claimed the right to vote, just like men did.

Beginning in 1920, American women could not be denied the right to vote.

The women who embraced this notion of womanhood were optimistic about a future that they would have more say in.

The young flapper and her companions frequented dance clubs where they socialized with men, but also with a mixture of Americans of different races, styles and religions.

They all listened to jazz music.

Jazz was unique American art form that emerged from black communities, and it became wildly popular among Americans who were not black.

This is something that makes the 1920s remarkable.

Americans, including white Americans, began to value and purchase the music, artwork, and writings of Black Americans.

This made Black Americans optimistic for a future where their neighbors valued their work, valued them as people, and relented a future where the disdained discrimination and violence was no more a part of their America.

Black Americans had a cautious hope.

They lived in an America where some thrived, but too many others suffered and mob violence continued.

Black Americans watched with dread as the Klu Klux Klan grew in the 1920s to unprecedented numbers throughout the entire United States, and Black Americans were joined in their anxiety by new groups that the Klan targeted for harassment, intimidation, and violence.

Catholics, Jews and immigrants.

Anyone the Klan didn't identify as American.

The Klan surged in the Midwest and in the Pacific Northwest.

Spokane even elected a Klan member to its city government.

The success of the Klan is indicative of the conservatism that embraced the United States in the 1920s.

Despite revolutionary change in American culture and in femininity, many Americans expressed deep anxieties about the family and the future of the American people.

We see these anxieties in the regulations surrounding education.

Americans were inspired by the youth, but also afraid for them.

The state of Nebraska passed a law banning the teaching of banning teaching in languages other than English.

This law specifically targeted German speakers.

In 1922, an Oregon referendum passed, and that state required all children between the ages of eight and 16 to attend a public school.

Oregon targeted religious schools, specifically Catholic schools, and in 1923, Washington state tried to do the same thing through a referendum, but the ballot measure failed.

In 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, John Scopes stood trial for teaching evolution to his high school biology students.

The jury found scopes guilty, but the nation watched with bated breath to the courtroom proceedings as Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan debated not over science so much as they debated the future of the nation.

Would it be guided by Christian values or by secular modernism?

Bryan joined American fundamentalists, and this was a new group of Christians that were calling themselves fundamentalists.

They believed that the U.S.

had strayed too far from God's will.

Bryan maintained that Christianity was the bomb that would counter social Darwinism and all the harms that notions of race hierarchy had created in American society.

Bryan didn't appreciate how racism could be both secular and faith based.

Belief in racial hierarchy underwrote many laws Americans passed and enforced in the 1920s.

Foremost among these was the 1924 National Origins Quota Act.

The law that restricted immigration in the United States over the next four decades.

With the 1924 law, Congress set quotas on the number of immigrants each nation could send to the United States, with the caveat that those immigrants had to align with the desired racial makeup of the US.

This table shows how selective Congress became.

Congress privileged Britain and Western Europe over Asian countries.

And the quota that you see for China, which was 100, was for 100 white people.

In 1924, the US did not limit immigration in the Western Hemisphere.

So immigration from Canada, Mexico, Central and South America was in no way restricted.

But the US started to regulate and track it, restricting movement across the US-Mexico border in particular.

But the Border Patrol that they created through the 1924 Immigration Act was charged with looking for illegal Chinese immigrants because no one in the Western Hemisphere was excluded.

I see this 1924 law as a eugenics law because it tried to engineer the racial makeup of the US population, and it consciously tried to make the US more racially white.

Immigration is not the only place where we see eugenics take hold.

Americans pursued plans to encourage reproduction of so-called desirable traits and stop undesirable traits through laws that banned interracial marriage.

States acted on the assumption that races had distinct genetics, and that mixing those traits would produce only the worst consequences in the children.

Washington State is a notable exception on this map.

It did not pass an anti interracial marriage bill, though it did debate many of them.

It just didn't pass one.

Consequently, Washington state served as a refuge for mixed race couples who sought to marry.

But in 1921, Washington state passed a compulsory sterilization law just like two thirds of U.S.

states, which were 48 states at the time.

The law targeted anyone in a state institution who has had a physical disability or was somehow feeble minded, someone who engaged in same sex relationships, or women who were deemed loose or immoral.

The state of Washington just deprived over 5000 residents of the right to reproduction.

And the US Supreme Court in 1927 affirmed the state's power to do this, saying that states needed to protect the health and safety of other, more fit Americans.

These laws show us how Americans mobilize the power of the state to rein in the freedom of the flappers.

Young women who claimed authority over their bodies had to contend with these laws.

The last matter that we need to consider when assessing the United States at 150 is the fact that the Republic had become an empire over the past half century.

In the 1920s, American colonial subjects circulated freely through the US states and colonies.

They enjoyed most of the rights that American citizens did, but none of the political rights that only citizens received.

They numbered almost 12.5 million, which was about 10% of the US population at the time.

The U.S., at its sesquicentennial, was a nation of polarization and extremes.

Americans consumed new things.

Doing so, they embraced the comforts of new technology with a wary eye towards the destructive power of technology.

American women flaunted their new role as liberated youth and as a political powerhouse in conservative circles.

Americans struggled to embrace their diversity, while they also looked with suspicion on perceived differences.

Americans in 1926 were happily unaware of what the future had in store for them.

They didn't foresee the catastrophic economic depression that began in October 1929.

They didn't foresee the drought that would envelop western farmland in astonishing dust storms.

What they discovered in the growing darkness of the Great Depression was a kind of hope, in spite of their divisions in the 1920s.

Many Americans in the 1930s learned how to come together across differences of nationality, race and ethnicity, religion and politics.

When they found themselves suffering similarly, this is just as telling of the American character as the optimism and anxieties they expressed in 1926.

Thank you.

I want to introduce my colleague, Rob Donnelly.

Good evening.

By 1976, folks around the country had been hoping for a national event like the World's Fair to celebrate the bicentennial.

In Philadelphia.

They had hoped that they would come back to Philadelphia in the middle of the Cold War.

This would be an opportunity to showcase American economic and technological power and highlight the free world.

When planning for the event was initiated in the 1960s, the Johnson administration saw it as an opportunity to use Great Society domestic funding to help Philadelphia's inner city with urban renewal projects.

In time for 1976, corporate leadership, too, saw this as an opportunity.

Business leaders played prominent roles in, well, maybe not funding the celebrations, but capitalizing on our consumer culture.

Various airlines, food companies, oil companies, even vitamins participated in what folks called the Bicentennial b u. Y. Centennial.

There were t shirts and hats.

There were.

There was glassware, commemorative coins, special edition automobiles, ashtrays, and of course, plates.

Now, as estimated in the late 1960s.

That a national celebration of the country's bicentennial would cost in the ballpark of about $1.5 billion.

But by the late 1960s, Great Society funds disappeared.

For urban planning projects needed for the fair because Great Society funding.

As you probably remember or know, by the late 1960s was being diverted to fund the Vietnam War.

And what was left a Great Society programs by the early 1970s was dismantled by the Nixon administration.

Not only did Great Society disappear, but according to white House documents and historian Christopher Coppa, Zola Nixon balked at the price tag as plans were creeping forward.

In fact, the economic, social, and political turmoil of the early 1970s ended the planning for a national celebration.

The economic downturn included an energy crisis that included growing inflation, and the U.S., under Nixon, was experiencing the first trade deficit since 1888.

The social and cultural conflicts of the 1960s were not settled either.

Again, the promises of the jobs of Johnson's Great Society, the Community action programs, the job training, urban renewal projects, housing programs had collapsed due to, yes, the economy and the war, but also because of the rise and swelling of social and cultural conservatism as a response to the 1960s and the urban rebellions by black youth, the anti-war protests on college campuses, and the liberal rulings of the Warren Court over over that decade and the previous decade.

Also, conservatism arose because of a response to hippies and drugs.

Rock n Roll and Richard Nixon brilliantly exploited this in 1968 and then again in 1972.

Speaking of Nixon, just as Americans were wanting to plan a grand celebration for 1976, they were also discussing the definition and the history of America.

They were discussing this just off the Watergate scandal, Nixon's resignation, and the last days of the Vietnam War, when Americans watched U.S.

diplomats and South Vietnamese citizens fleeing Saigon aboard U.S.

military helicopters.

Just off of these political and national humiliations.

We also learned from the Church Committee hearings.

These are, this is a the Senate committee named after committee chair, Senator Frank church, Republican from Idaho.

The church Committee is where we learn of the activities of the FBI and their counterintelligence program to infiltrate and disrupt civil rights organizations attempting to discredit and spread lies about civil rights leaders.

We also learn about the activities of the CIA, not only spying on American protesters, but also engaging in foreign political coups and assassination attempts and actual assassinations of world leaders in the 1950s and 1960s.

Americans by the mid 1970s were skeptical.

They distrusted their government and their country in general, and the president was skeptical to about the state of American life.

Gerald Ford January 15th, 1975, at the state of the Union spoke, quote, I must say to you that the state of the Union is not good.

Millions of Americans are out of work.

Recession and inflation are eroding the money of millions more.

Prices are too high and sales are too low.

This year's federal deficit will be around $30 billion next year, probably $45 billion.

The national debt will rise to over $500 billion, he said.

Our plant capacity and productivity are not increasing fast enough.

We depend on others for essential energy.

Some people question the government's ability to make hard decisions and stick with them.

End quote and popular culture reflected this skepticism.

The Parallax View, 1974, starring Warren Beatty Warren Beatty.

A reporter uncovers a secret multinational assassination organization funded and operated by U.S.

corporate and government leaders.

Three days of the Condor, 1975 Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway Robert Redford's a CIA researcher who's on the run after his CIA coworkers are gunned down by rogue CIA assassins.

All the President's Men, 1976, starring Robert Redford again and Dustin Hoffman, reflects the distrust and dissatisfaction with the government and the criminal shenanigans of corrupt corruption within the Nixon administration.

And Taxi Driver, 1976.

Also, Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle in the film, or the film reflects social and political conflict and paranoia.

Menthol a mental health crisis, an existential crisis, and just basic violence in the 1970s.

Bickle, Robert De Niro's character attempts to assassinate a political candidate, sets out to rid New York City of the, quote, scum of the streets, and proceeds to do this like a vigilante.

And in the end, after all the violence, Bickle actually becomes a hero to many people in America.

And what does that say about America?

Pundits and historians portrayed the 1970s as the mid decade, an era of narcissism, selfishness, personal rather than political awareness.

They portrayed the mid decade as the antidote to, or a repudiation of, the activist, altruistic 1960s.

One cultural critic bemoaned the 1970s as, quote, a betrayal of 60s passion and idealism, a trashy postscript that found the broad torrents of pop culture siphoned off into tinkling displays of dandy ism, self-parody, and androgyny.

Instead of Pete Townsend and Jimi Hendrix sacrificing the guitars on pagan altars.

We have we had David Bowie, all the glitter, the New York Dolls and downtown drag.

Midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, end quote.

And then, on top of the distrust of the government or paranoia that the government is coming to get you, we get Saturday Night Fever, and it's narcissism and self-indulgent, but great music and dancing.

But the Bee Gees are moaning and staying alive.

The film's signature song.

You want to sing with me, life.

Live life going nowhere.

Somebody help me.

Life going nowhere.

Somebody help me!

Skepticism and our fear of the Cold War is also reflected in television.

Thankfully, the government is working on a secret project that gives us a $6 Million Man and the Bionic Woman to get us out of this mess.

Although it could all go wrong.

And you'll get a superhero, a true superhero, but also an angry, agitated, destructive superhero.

Yeah, folks really wished in the 1970s they could vent like the Incredible Hulk.

And our Incredible Hulk was Lou Ferrigno, not Mark Ruffalo.

The Bicentennial ignited debates about the meaning of America in American history.

In fact, we learned that political officials tried to avoid or cautioned others to avoid using phrases that connected us back to the war for American independence, like words like revolution, and we the people.

Some Americans believed the nation's hopes.

Here we go.

Back up one.

There we go.

Some some Americans believe the nation's long and ongoing history of discrimination excluded them.

And some folks believe that we the people, only included their white community.

Some critics took the opportunity to show how far the nation had supposedly fallen from its original principles.

Extremists, for example, protested against bussing black students to the suburbs to rectify segregation in public schools.

Other critics.

Extremists called for self-government, even secession.

There was also division within the Black American community over participation in the bicentennial celebrations, and some used the opportunity to be for more black history in the festivities.

Some saw it as an opportunity to collaborate with other groups to lobby for social and economic improvements, like urban renewal programs and job training, as part of the national bicentennial agenda.

But others in the black community were more critical, seeing the bicentennial as a self-congratulatory celebration that politicians and others were trying to sell.

Isn't America great?

In fact, Reverend Jesse Jackson led boycotts of bicentennial events.

Many see no reason to celebrate because black people were still not free.

Native communities and organizations like I Am the American Indian Movement, which was founded to address police brutality like like the Black Panthers.

I am challenged celebrating freedom in America and patriotism in the nation's great accomplishments, including conquering the American West.

Some local and national bicentennial event organizers tried to reconcile American native heritage within the celebrations, like inviting native groups to join a covered wagon pilgrimage to Philadelphia that represented essentially American expansion.

And so, for many native groups, this request didn't land well.

But in many communities across the country, though, native people participated in the local celebrations and took the opportunity to share and educate folks on their histories and their culture.

So a single national celebration was not going to happen.

There was no money.

There was a great uneasiness about outspoken patriotism and what it meant to be an American.

And it was clear that folks did not agree on the historical narrative.

But in 1976, there were celebrations at the local level.

Tens of thousands of separate events, over 50,000 separate events.

And what was striking was their dedication to local cultural and family histories.

It has been argued that the bicentennial, as return to the past, was part of that search for self that characterized much of the 1970s.

One part of the legacy of the Bicentennial in 1976 was the great explosion of interest in local history, in genealogy and American folk culture.

Pop up museums popped up, highlighting mostly local history.

And some of these became permanent and often centered on helping local communities.

And outside researchers moved genealogy from just a hobby to a national phenomenon.

In fact, Alex Haley's Roots, published in 1976, became a bestseller.

Chronicled it chronicled race and slavery in America, using Haley's own family history.

Roots also contributed to widespread interest in genealogy among black Americans and other ethnic groups.

The mini series will be launched the next year.

Roots is a good example of Americans searching for themselves in the 1970s.

So on the one hand, you have examples of Americans searching for something positive in American culture or researching what they often thought was safe family history.

Although sometimes folks found stuff they didn't want to find.

And in the celebration of folk culture, we witnessed a we witnessed renewed interest in quilting.

In fact, by 1976, the metaphor of America as a patchwork quilt became a theme of many bicentennial celebrations.

But on the one hand, but on the other hand, I should say American Bicentennial nostalgia and celebrations could also have been a bit of avoidance.

Some Americans, according to Zola, were embracing an imagined peaceful past, and that helped folks avoid the divisions of the present in the 1970s.

Again, many Americans searched for a hero who could help them find a way out of their despair and escapism gave folks a way out of a failed, narrow national narrative.

And that feeling of despair, though, did not fade away with the election.

In that year of Jimmy Carter, the economy did not improve.

The Cold War did not end, in fact.

Jimmy Carter increased tensions with the Soviet Union, and foreign affairs in the Middle East, ignited conflict and crisis, and will end the decade.

And what Jimmy Carter called a crisis of confidence.

And if Americans believed Ronald Reagan would renew confidence in the US government to invest resources to improve their social welfare, they ignored his reliance on big government.

In his in his Morning in America rhetoric, he said government is not the solution to our problems.

Government is the problem.

Thank you very much.

I hand out over to.

Okay.

We've just visited three moments, separated by 50 years.

And in each of those Americans, we're looking, both backward and forward.

Trying to understand what had changed, what hadn't, and what kind of country they were becoming.

Peter gave us a useful caution.

History doesn't repeat itself even when you hear it rhyme.

And tonight we've heard some striking rhymes alongside some important differences.

Now we're going to turn that question toward ourselves.

50 years from now, in 2076, people will mark America's 300th anniversary.

We obviously can't know what world they'll inhabit it.

So I'm not going to ask our panel's panelists to predict it.

But instead I'm interested in what they see from where they sit today.

Which parts of our moment belong to longer human patterns?

What really is new?

What possibilities and dangers those changes create and what choices we're making that may matter to the people who inherit what comes next.

So we're joined by five scholars whose work takes us into very different territory.

You're welcome to come up and grab a seat.

As I name you, I've got Brian Henning, working in philosophy and environmental ethics and climate.

Feel free to welcome them just to do.

And we have Engel, Lawrence.

Working in law, justice and dispute resolution.

Paul DePalma is working in computer science and artificial intelligence.

Rebecca Dunaway is working in political communication and civic participation.

And Rene GAC is working in genetics and genetic medicine.

So, I have asked each of them to take about three minutes to tell us what they're watching in their field.

What gives them concern?

What gives them hope?

Perhaps both.

And then we'll open it up into a conversation.

So I am curious to see who wants to go first.

All right.

Okay.

All right.

Let's just start at the far end.

How about that?

I was going to say it's a benefit of being the moderator.

You get to choose.

That's right.

Hi, everybody.

Thanks for being here.

What an interesting set of talks.

Thank you so much to my historian colleagues.

That was really, really interesting.

Let's give him another hand.

That was super, super interesting.

I really like how Doctor S's organize this.

This is a fun combination.

So thanks for the prompt.

I'm a philosophy professor.

I'm focused on environmental ethics, and I get to lead our climate institute.

Part of what I thought about with this question is, in thinking about history is how, the people who came to this country from Europe, brought with them some ideas that really influenced how they thought of themselves in the relationship to their environment.

In particular, they brought a version of Christianity that interpreted Genesis as notion of dominion as domination, and that, view of domination is something that then informed how they thought they should relate to nature.

And then secondly, in enlightenment idea, especially found in the work of John Locke, which, thought, you know, the idea of, of property, recognize that it's only a value insofar as it's made useful to humans and that nature isn't intrinsically valuable.

In fact, Locke defined unused land as literally wasteland.

And so they were doing a favor to the rest of the country by, changing it into, use, by European colonists.

That set us up intellectually, conceptually to think of, of our relationship in a way that has led to, a continuation of the destruction of nature.

And so my field of environmental ethics was started right around the time of our bicentennial in the, you know, the world, the first, Earth Day was in 1970.

And so environmental philosophers finally started getting going right around 76.

They were a little bit late to the party, and they were interested in saying, well, if part of the challenge is a wrong view of ourselves and our relationship to nature, we need a better view.

We need a new conceptual framework, and then we need to do more than just what they called shallow ecology, more than just reduce pollution.

We need to think about how nature itself is intrinsically valuable and change more fundamentally our economic, political, and technological approach to nature by embracing what they called some of them, deep ecology, so shallow versus a deep ecology.

Looking forward, what I'd like to imagine is that we're on a slow march to gradually increasing who's part of the moral community, over time.

And we see this in the narrative, our country.

And I think we can talk about this more globally as well, is part of the fight is who's part of the world community counts and deserves respect and appreciation.

My field of environmental ethics hopes that, in the future will be able to get to a point where non-human animals and non-human nature can be also seen as part of the moral community deserving of respect and appreciation, along with the broader human community.

So that that, we move beyond our own, anthropocentrism, our human centered ness, thinking everything is just about us to recognize that we're part of a community of life.

A community of life.

That it is.

It was here before us, that on which we depend and and, and that that would be a wonderful progression, a moral evolution, if you will.

That, I hope, the future has in store for our species and not just our country.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Greetings.

A long, long time ago.

Justice was local before city states consolidated power and began ordering society through system ization.

The people closest to a conflict were intimately connected to its resolution.

And with the precarity of life and the scarcity of resources, people were naturally more interdependent, relying on one another for sustenance and safety.

Ancient justice prototypes, largely based on dialog, prioritized relational repair, addressing needs and restitution so that people could keep coordinating action for safety and security.

Today, life is pretty different.

You could say that we're perfecting justice system systematization and professionalization.

We're also far less collectivist and lonelier.

In 2023, the U.S.

Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic, and we're increasingly polarized.

When conflict arises today, our current justice template exacerbates these realities.

We largely outsource our conflict.

When crime or wrongdoing happens, the conflict is handed over most frequently to professionals.

It's right there in the name of every criminal case in the country.

State versus defendant.

The conflict belongs to the state, while the person actually harmed isn't even mentioned.

Direct engagement, repair, relational repair, addressing needs, and restitution are no longer the dominant aims of our modern justice processes, if they are aims at all.

And the shift from direct conflict ownership to conflict abdication has far reaching implications.

Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie gave a lecture called The Conflicts as Property, and in it he argued that conflicts are valuable in and of themselves and meaningful to society.

Without them, communities lack sufficient normative opportunities to renegotiate our collective rights and responsibilities to one another and the fabric of our society.

Frey's.

We're now having a very difficult time having difficult conversations.

Collectivist societies have always understood the importance of direct conflict, ownership, and interconnectedness.

Many Indigenous and Aboriginal societies and subcommunities within dominant culture have fought to keep direct conflict ownership alive.

Chief Justice Emeritus Robert Yazzie of the Navajo Nation calls peacemaking the people's process.

So when people ask me what the future of justice looks like, well, my answer is it actually looks pretty old.

In the 1970s and subsequent decades, Some Justice Reimagined is motivated by a deep dissatisfaction with processes that failed to address the root causes of conflict, began adopting components of Aboriginal and indigenous justice as an intervention, restorative justice, transformative justice, and a turn within transitional justice all developed as countercultural approaches to overly legalistic, professionalized systems of abdication.

Each movement attempts to alter the paradigm by democratically reengaging dominant culture through more direct modes of conflict ownership, to hand back the conflict to the people it belongs to.

Turns out the direction we must travel for a more just society is actually back towards ourselves.

It's always makes me nervous.

I speak terrible Italian, but I can't talk without waving my arms.

The danger to my right here.

Well, okay.

All right.

I'm a couple.

I've taught computer science at Gonzaga for a very, very long time now.

A visiting scholar at WSU.

I'm a computational linguist.

That's my specialty.

I torture language, God help me with computers.

This evening is entitled, America 215 and beyond.

And there is nothing more beyond an artificial intelligence.

And that's to say a couple of things about God.

Everybody wants to say something about this, don't you?

Like.

I'm sorry.

I'm doing it again.

Why wouldn't you just like not to open up the New York Times and read about damn AI again?

Enough.

I buy bastards with that.

You know what I mean?

Okay.

It is extraordinary.

I'm here to tell you.

It is.

You know it.

You've used it.

You know, ChatGPT talks to me every every night at 3 a.m.

about about history and language and.

It helps me with mathematics that I've.

I've forgotten or never learned.

Also, at 3 a.m., one night, one especially weird night, it wrote a poem for me in Italian about my grandmother's church in Italy, my grandparents church.

But I have to say it aloud because it's so glorious.

And that's why he wrote the poem.

He.

Can you believe I said that?

Maria Sundays in my Adorno art.

And it said to me, okay, Bella, I'll write you a poem.

And he did.

And if you beg me, I'll recite it to you later, but a little bit later, you know.

But that clever chatterer, teacher, poet destroyed my profession.

My students can't get jobs.

Enrollment in my department is under decline.

In decline.

And we're threatened with human extinction.

At least that's what the New York Times.

So my grandmother said very different things.

Dichotoma just calmed down a little bit.

Eliot says.

Not so bad.

We've been here before.

I has a very, very long history.

You wouldn't know it, reading the newspaper.

But remind me to tell you about 1943, 1956, 1957.

But 1776 is the time.

That is what brings us out tonight.

So, as it happens, there were a lot of big things happening in 1776.

So what introduced an improved steam engine, the, the, the hardware industrial revolution.

Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations.

I think of it as the software.

And Jefferson, you know, we know he did these.

You know, we know that document is exquisitely beautiful.

It's wonderful to regions of all kinds of things, he says, all kinds of unpleasant things about King George.

But what it really is, what it really is, is, is a document that that releases human aspiration in all of its violence and sometimes wonder.

AI is neither new nor is the.

Is it the product of of geniuses in Silicon Valley?

It's just the latest in a chain of contraptions that have been used to squeeze more stuff out of labor in the same amount of time.

I mean, it's happened to be a particularly clever one, but really, that's what it's about in these enormous investments.

Enormous investments in AI are just for that and for not for anything else.

I promise you, they're not for anything else.

So economists call this productivity, and we need it for growth.

So they tell us, I know I have an English professor here, so I'll be schooled to, to to misuse, to misuse the words of the great poet W.B.

Yeats.

I was born in the foul rag and bone shop of return on investment.

It is nothing beyond that, believe me.

It is.

It is glorious.

It is fun.

And it is not as dangerous as we think, I believe.

Now I'm making this part up, the rest of it.

I didn't make this, but I'm going to make up, I. I think that once we decide to hold its makers liable, both civilly and criminally for what it is they do, it'll keep them in check.

You know, Ralph Nader thought about this 50 years ago, and he managed to keep the automobile industry in check, with simple.

And this is me.

This is just my opinion with simple social democratic planning of the part that you can find it in.

In Denmark, it's called flex security.

We can plan for the dislocations of a. I just don't think it's the problem that that that it is purported to be.

Anyway, It is glorious, but I don't think as dangerous as the New York Times tells us.

Skyler, can you repeat the question?

Again?

Just take three minutes to tell you.

Tell us about what you're watching in your field.

What gives you concern?

Okay.

Gives you hope.

Perhaps both.

Great.

Okay.

Thank you.

Good evening.

It's nice to be with you.

As I hear my colleagues, here on the panel and also my history colleagues talk, I'm thinking about the ways in which technological innovation that made communication easier or more efficient, caused panic for people.

Right.

And so the radio, like the War of the worlds, radio broadcast, that scared people.

It was, it was a broadcast of a story, a fictional story about an alien invasion.

But if you turned on your radio and you had missed that beginning description, it was terrifying because it sounded like there were aliens coming.

And that was your only source of information.

Right.

And so and then with the television that was going to also rot the American mind, and it was going to change the quality of, entertainment and information.

And so it's not unprecedented or uncommon for us to look at technological innovation that speeds up or amplifies communication or communicative processes in some way and feel concerned.

That feels quite familiar as I listen, tonight, what does give me pause, though, is the relationship between people and the particular information they need to be active, citizens in a sort of democratic society.

So, normatively speaking.

If we want democracy to work, we need a set of information that's relatively the same.

And we all get the information and we come together to work on a solution.

And so things like, clickbait and sort of outrage content, affective polarization and, political disengagement are the things that sort of give me pause.

It's really hard to solve problems if we have wildly different sets of reality to begin with.

And that's one of the things that is, unique to this moment is simply the number of opinions were exposed to in any given day, the ways in which we rarely encounter new information without some sort of opinion already attached to it.

It's very difficult and uncommon that we might get unfiltered.

Sort of.

There is a bill, and it will do these things without any sort of commentary, whether it's in the comment section or your friend shared it and said, this is bananas.

I can't believe they're proposing this.

Right.

So access to information that helps us make decisions is easier in some ways than it's ever been.

And it's also we have more to sift through.

And as you talk about labor and productivity, our brains are really cool.

They are fantastically cool.

And they are not always super efficient at sifting through all of the ways in which information is coming at us right now.

Those are the things that I'm sort of thinking about.

But my colleagues did a really lovely job of sharing ways in which we've been we've been panicked by things before.

And yet we persist.

Right.

So.

Thank you.

So for context, as I'm at the end of the line, I studied genetics and specifically here tonight to talk about human genetics.

And I think it's an area where we've seen massive growth in the last few decades.

And a lot of it here in the United States that we've seen the sequencing of the human genome and just an exponential decrease in the cost of doing that work, where you can do a cheek swab and send it off and someone will tell sequence your genome and that you can learn about your family history, ancestry, you can learn about disease risk in things that are now becoming actionable, which I think is very exciting, that we can get not only information and say, we learned this about about genetics, about your genetics.

Right.

This is that is a fun little game, but things that can actually improve people's health and well-being to say, hey, you're at increased risk for this condition.

So because of that, we can give you these advice.

We can increase screening, or we know these things about your genetics, and we can use that to give you medication that you're more likely to respond to, or to not give you medication.

That might lead to really bad side effects.

And I think this is very exciting.

But then I have to step back and remember that this is built upon a history of abuse and non consent and things like eugenics, and that that's a history that we can't get away from and just push forward because it still has repercussions in what the landscape of studying human genetics looks like today, that most of the information in our sequencing databases that we use to learn and to make these predictions of how people will be at risk for diseases, will respond to medications, is the genomes of white Americans.

If we're speaking of the United States, white Americans who live near large urban areas with academic research centers because they can go to those places and have their genome sequenced and because they trust those institutions.

And so these are things that we have to think about going forward, is who is included and who benefits from the work we do.

And I think about this in genetics, but I think this applies to all of these fields that this is coming through.

For instance, as Peter was talking about eugenics, there's the racism and the ableism that underlie eugenics, that I don't think it's a repeat or even a rhyme, that this is a line that's continued through to today.

And we see that in different ways, and we have to be cognizant of that and actively counter it.

For instance, we will see people who are researching the genetics of autism.

This can be incredibly beneficial in conversation with that community.

People who are saying these are areas where we have needs and understanding these can improve our lived experiences, but this is also used by people to say with these, genetics have a less valid lived human experience that we would like to exclude from humanity in this is eugenics.

And so I think we have a responsibility to call these things what they are.

It's not neo eugenics, it's not new.

It's just new technology.

This is it.

It's still eugenics.

And so that these things that are a burden that I carry working in human genetics, I still see so much hope because so many more people are working to actively repair this harm, this trust.

Right.

This isn't unique to genetics.

There's been a massive breakdown of trust over.

And this isn't a recent problem either, but really exacerbated through the Covid 19 pandemic.

Massive breakdown of trust between citizens and health care and scientific institutions of responsibility to actively repair.

And what that looks like often is genuine, open lack of asking hard questions and of listening and making efforts to answer those questions, of including people in every questions that you're asking.

Because that forms what questions you ask and of whose needs are met, of including people who will benefit from the beginning in the design.

Not saying I found this cool science and I'm going to use it to fix your problem, right?

Maybe you found some cool science and someone else has a problem that they would like you to fix with it, and it's a dialog, but it's a shift in perspectives that we aren't coming here with.

The Savior complex of I have brought you science.

We're all exploring the world in different ways.

We all come with different areas of expertise, and that if what I can bring is a super niche understanding of how one gene might affect how you respond to one medication, you can't even take my advice on that because I'm not a clinician.

I'm just a nerd.

Right?

And the finding this joy and working together in communities of people who need that, and of people who work in that, that I get so much joy from being in a group where there are people who are experiencing a genetic condition that I work on, and their clinicians are there, and we're working together, right, that we're bringing back in a lot of ways, accessibility and making this more cyclical of saying, I have this information.

This leads to this question, let's work on this together.

And then I think this is something that we're moving forward towards.

But we have to be really active about how are we inclusive at every step that we're not saying that anyone is asking a question that's too stupid or too out there for us to consider answering morally and moving forward together.

Okay, so, we've got a number of hard questions, and then we will be coming to the audience for, for some questions.

And I have some connections I'm going to try to make among the things I'm hearing tonight.

But, Rebecca, I want to start with you.

We've just heard from three historians who described earlier moments of profound change.

So listening through the lens of your own work, what did you hear tonight that sounded familiar?

And what are we confronting now that's really new?

I think change is scary, right?

Like inherently.

My daughters can ride a bike without training wheels, and she's terrified, right?

And, like, it's just the same thing as the Strider bike, and it's just this.

But it's scary to try a new thing.

And when change is happening all around you, particularly if it challenges your own status or identity, I think that it's destabilizing.

It's it's uncomfortable.

Now, the thing that I think is especially unique right now is how those changes or perceived threats to identity or status are amplified in such a significant way.

So I go on my social media feed and I'm scrolling, and every four seconds I'm getting this little dopamine hit of those people dislike me and they're coming for me.

Those people dislike me and they're coming for me.

Those people want to upend my way of life.

Those people are a threat, a threat, a threat.

So not only am I getting like, physiological reaction, the bottom of the brain stem, but then there's the, like, social isolation piece.

We are deeply social beings, and fear of isolation, separation from the group is one of the most painful things you can do to humans.

That's why the cold shoulder.

And you can't sit with me and I'm going to give you the silent treatment hurt so much.

And so I think it's not uncommon to experience, nervousness around change.

Will we still be valued?

Will we still have importance in our community?

What will be different for us?

But I think the way in which we hear, that threat amplified right now is what's unique to the moment.

And it's a pretty easy solution to not hear the amplification.

You just don't scroll.

You just stop that, right?

You cut that out.

You asked me in another spot about those things, but I'll let you do that later.

That sounds good.

Thank you.

It's.

Anybody else hear that question differently?

What?

Sounded familiar.

What?

Okay, I'm going to.

I'm going to switch topics then.

Paul, you've deliberately taken some of the mystery out of eye by putting it into that longer history context of technologies just designed to increase productivity.

So if that's the right frame, what should we have learned from earlier technological revolutions about who actually benefits from productivity gains?

Well, I'm way out of my depth here.

I'm a geek, right?

I write code for a living, but I'll speculate on history.

There were enormous social disruptions with with, productivity advice, devices.

My wife always my grandparents, you know, They they were they weren't removed.

It's more, much more complex than this.

But the joking of the steam engine with with, the automatic thresher that was developed earlier in the 19th century for southern, southern Italians also land to the waiting arms of the steel industry in the United States.

Wildly socially disruptive.

I think there were 10 million.

They didn't call themselves Italians.

They didn't know that word yet.

But 10 million southern Italians arrived the same.

I mean, we watched in our lifetime.

Now this is it's getting to be ancient now that the the, introduction of networked computers, it's not talked about very much, but it's the introduction of networked computers allowed this massive globalization effort to take place, 15, 20 years, 25 years ago.

And this is what I'm talking about when when I'm trying to urge Danish social democracy on all of us, it was not planned for as I mean, as I recall, my, my cousins and second cousin from this Rust Belt town that I grew up and we're were asked to learn to code and it didn't work out all that well.

Right.

So it strikes me that with just, I mean, minimal planning, minimal social democratic planning, the worst of the excesses can be dealt with.

Thank you.

So, Brian, grab your microphone.

You want to.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'd love to jump in a little bit.

This is.

I like the historical framing that we got, because it was a good reminder about how much technology has been at the center of our identity, and championing it and, and promoting it.

And, and I like Paul's, combination of that with Adam Smith, because it's also wrapped in a particular model of capitalism that is also central to our national identity.

And so I think we can focus on the technology and whether it's good and bad, in what ways is good and bad, and what its impacts are, and whether we can moderate them, and how do we accommodate and develop new habits.

And that's really important to figure out how to do.

But we should also be thinking about what are the goals relative to which that is either in service or not, and that those questions too frequently aren't our focus.

It's really just.

Those underlying, more fundamental questions about value are are left.

And we're just really like, how do we make it so that it's less destructive and less impactful?

One of my favorite, thinkers is a cultural history historian named Thomas Berry.

And he, after studying many different cultures, argued that in front of us, we're bringing about not just the end of the Holocene epoch, which is this last 11,000 years.

But he thinks we're witnessing and bringing about the end of the Cenozoic era, which started 65 million years ago.

And that we have the option in front of us to bring about two different, eras, either the techno zone or the ecozone.

And the techno music isn't well.

So I'll start with you.

The egocentric isn't anti technological.

So just just it's not that contrast for him.

The tech mosaic is the reason for human existence is technology and growth.

That's that is the goal.

And so doing that without being dead is the goal right.

Not killing ourselves.

Right.

That's a successful techno zone, right?

Are we as smart as we think we are?

I hope so, right.

And maybe Paul's right.

I hope he's right.

The economic is an anti technological is saying we should invent technologies and design economies with a goal of becoming a part of a of a functioning community of life, and that technologies and economies should be measured relative to that, that goal, they're not ends in themselves.

So I'm interested in those more fundamental questions.

And I don't think America has been particularly interested in that question over the last 250 years is what I'm coming away with hearing.

The history lesson is that has not been our interest at all in the humanities.

And I think of of Katie's work with the Institute, I mean, the role of of what it is to be human like the question of what it is to be human right now, super important.

And I don't again, I don't I'm not pessimistic about America, but I don't think that's our strong suit either.

Historically asking that question.

Gonzaga.

Yes, I think we're really interested in that question.

Really fundamentally what is it to be human?

But America, I don't know.

I'm not a historian, but I thought I should stop talking now over my skis, and I appreciate that.

I'd like if I can't very quickly.

And then I want to move on.

Yeah.

Feel free.

I, I agree with that.

The sentiment very much and want to say, I think that across all these technologies, what we're seeing is we get very excited about a new thing and we stopped it.

We don't stop to think about the consequences.

And I think that that's an important piece of this, this forward thinking and why I like how this is structured, is thinking about where are we going to be in 50 years, because I don't think that comes up a lot when we're developing new technologies, are thinking about implementing them is it's very short term instant gratification.

I can do this, I can make this, I can fix this thing right now, but that the real benefits come from kind of playing that long game and thinking more, more deeply about, longer term impacts and that I think that's really how differences get made.

So you don't just have to be a blip in the technological history, so to speak.

You don't become outdated if you're thinking forward.

So stick with that.

Actually, Renee, what is how does history shape the way that your field thinks about trust and, and responsibility and maybe that, like, you know, long term thing?

It's crazy to think of 50 years as long term, actually.

I'm like, you know.

Right, right.

I was laughing as somewhat young faculty here.

The human genome sequence may be older than most of my students, but it is younger than me.

So that this is a young field.

And I think because of that, people have been excited and not done much back.

Looking back, and that that has led to harm and a lot of very recent harm.

And so that that being in dialog with all of the stakeholders from the beginning, I think, is really kind of the gold standard of doing genetics going forward.

And I'm really excited to see a lot of people doing that work.

Now, of, for instance, I, I collaborate with folks in Montana who do, outreach and genetics work with tribal communities in Montana, who there's a horrible history of data abuse and misuse, in, in native genetics of using it to do studies without their permission of using it to make racist claims.

And so what has to happen to fix those problems going forward is for people to say, we did these things that are inexcusable and make the effort to go out to drive hours.

These are colleagues in Missoula, and they're driving hours and hours to meet with tribal leaders and saying, you know, how can we, you know, meet you physically where you are in your place?

What are these things that you need from us, this information that we have, and what can we do to actually bring it here and making it much more, bidirectional that it's these are their collaborators and people that they're working with.

And I think that that's a shift, across a lot of sciences as well as it's not just, it's not people you serve, it's people you work with that you're all invested in the same problem together.

And I think that as more and more projects in, in the research base also are beginning by bringing people together who are invested in the problem at the beginning, instead of just staying sort of in this academic silo of, I think this is interesting, and I want to study it, of starting from a place of what is a need in my community, what is an interest in my community, either where I am now or where I come from, and how do I bring these things together and pull from, different people's expertise across disciplines.

And I think that that's where I mean, in all honesty, genetics has been lacking from an ethics education for a long time, and it's important that we talk to people who are trained in those and that these are fields that are coming more and more to the forefront then and I ethics and things like this that are blooming and I think are really, really important because if we stay in a field and we stay in a silo, we're going to miss a lot and we're going to hurt a lot of people.

But we're also going to miss incredible, beautiful things that we can do together that we couldn't if we didn't work together.

Thank you.

Dare I say it's going to take all of us, Renee.

Which which is the name of a US government funded, genetics initiative to include more people in genetics.

You know, it was a good one.

It's a good one.

It's a good one.

I like it, yeah, yeah, but I wasn't sure if that was an intentional pun.

Right.

But things like that of saying actively trying to recruit people who have been excluded from databases and going to places, taking mobile vans to places that didn't have genetic testing.

Right.

That's the effort that it requires.

And that that was a project that I think was done quite well, and still continues to some capacity in the US that I think is something to be proud of.

Thanks.

So, Inga, almost everything we're discussing tonight is a much larger than any individual person.

So it's climate, eye medicine, democratic institutions, justice.

Where does meaningful individual agency actually exist?

Where do we need to just, you know, take action ourselves?

And then I guess I would ask, you know, where does individual choice, you know, and and we need to, you know, solve systemic problems, collectively.

Just, can you answer that for us?

Sure.

It's easy, but easy peasy.

Can you say your first question again because I lost it after the second one.

Which impossible task?

Where can we find?

Where are places that individuals can find agency?

And then where would you like abdicate that responsibility?

Well, individuals can find agency everywhere.

So much of the work that I talk about is the abdication that's happened of our conflicts over to other people.

And frankly, that's often because we've been told that's how we're supposed to do it, right?

If you see something, say something, not do something right, not intervene.

It's time to take back our neighborhoods.

Governments are inept at being able to dispense justice to the people that they're supposed to serve.

It's just too big a project it can't individualize.

Just results for the people who are involved in those conflicts.

People can do that.

People who are involved in the conflicts know what's up, right?

They know, like what happened, what's happened since they understand they're the holders of the experience.

And so they also understand and have awareness of the needs that must now be met in light of the conflict or the wrongdoing that that occurred.

And they're the people in the position to ask for, how those needs can be fulfilled.

And if you have a person who is willing and able to come into individual accountability, then that person can figure out exactly what do we do to make this right.

And not only does it is just individuals who can do that, that we can dive deeper back into our own conflict, into our own neighborhoods, into our own communities.

And communities can be broadly defined, right?

Can be like geographical places, or it can be communities of, you know, organizations or things that you're involved in.

But it's also, once we can resolve problems at the individual, the individual level communities can also take responsibility for finding out what happened.

Right?

A lot of times you hear, oh, we all knew that was going to happen, but nobody did anything.

Right.

That's more of that.

See something, say something.

And then after a wrongdoing occurs, people don't know how to come in to assist because there's not pathways that give us rights to come into spaces to be of actual service to people who have been harmed.

So we say things that are very trite, often like, I'm so sorry that happened to you.

Don't worry, they'll get theirs.

Right?

Like it becomes a very external process rather than where are you right now?

What do you actually need?

What can I provide for you in a very physical, real sense of the word?

How can I meet those needs?

Right.

And so communities continue, whether kind of unwittingly, to continue to abdicate their responsibility to one another as well.

And a lot of times what it takes is you having to sit with yourself and get out of your own way.

We don't need another casserole.

What we need is people to be open, to listen, to truly listen to what somebody needs in the face of being harmed.

And I don't know if folks watched Ted Lasso.

But Ted Lasso the other night.

Sorry.

Spoiler alert.

Or, last week, right.

SAT beside somebody who was experiencing pain and it was intense pain, and he didn't try to fix it.

He sat next to the person he invited.

Can I sit?

Do you want me to sit next to you?

You want to be left alone?

Gave agency to her to make a decision.

She didn't know what you want.

She was overwhelmed.

So he told her.

I'm just going to sit next to you.

And he sat next to her and he breathed.

And that's all he did.

He shared space to let her air out her pain and followed her lead.

People know what they need.

We need to create inroads to access and to provide space for people to tell us what they need, and for us to be truly responsive and not responsive in the ways that we kind of think other people need.

We just need to listen and to provide space to respond.

And that's a that's another way to actually, you know, be agent tech.

I love that I love that okay.

So before we bring the audience in, I want to make this personal for a moment.

So each of you spends your professional life thinking about serious subjects.

That could be unsettling.

So how do you remain engaged without becoming overwhelmed by the scale?

Right.

What sustains your belief in engaging and that that engagement is worthwhile.

And we got to keep it tight.

So I'm asking for 30s from each of you, and we're going to start at this end right here.

I think going big and going small both bring me joy when I step back and I see the bigger picture of good impacts.

Right.

And I remember, oh, like, this is something, you know, even if it's not something I did, I knew someone or there's connections and I find joy and hope in those connections.

And also like Brian was talking about the inherent beauty of the world.

I see that in genetics and I love it.

And I just love being able to sit down with someone.

Often it's students here and they're like, oh, this is really cool, this weird niche thing.

I'd never heard about that you're excited about and just enthuse about the like fascinations of the world and of science together is enlivening and I think brings us together as humans as well.

Very good.

Well, I study the news.

So, I stopped looking at it after a period of time.

I don't think that most, people need more than, I don't know, 12 to 15 minutes a day.

I think you could go once every other day.

I think that would be sufficient.

So I got, like, some hard stop, some things, like, I just don't.

I don't have to check back on this.

If something crazy happens, somebody is going to let me know, right?

Like, I don't have to keep participating.

So that's step one is to, like, recognize that it's time for break.

And then step two is like, you need people and you need action.

So Adrienne maree Brown says small is good.

Small is all.

I love it so much.

Right.

It's making a meal for a friend.

It's going on a walk.

It's, conversing with your colleague.

It's calling your grandma.

It's whatever the thing is, right?

You take a small action and you do it with people.

Community.

We need each other.

We cannot do this thing solo.

And so that's that's the.

Yeah.

You stop the bad and you take action with people.

Thank you.

Yeah, probably.

That was correct.

I've always been slightly embarrassed about what I do for a living.

I think it's I think it's a fairly negative force that I've been involved with now for, I don't know how many years, 40 years, ten years in the computer industry before I came to Gonzaga.

And I did it for a totally utilitarian reasons.

I was an aspiring English professor and couldn't find a job and retrained.

And I found the patterns in computing just beautiful beyond belief.

They reminded me of the 17th century English poems that I like so much as a graduate student in mathematics, has that same symmetry and joy.

For me, this is all personal.

It says if I never leave my room and that is possibly true.

Both of those things, I, I spent an inordinate amount of time reading and thinking about politics, and it's, I think, a negative and destructive force.

It's bad for me.

I don't think it does any good for anyone to limit it.

Yes.

I thank you very much.

I'm working on that.

But this time that I spend, thinking about language, thinking about the symmetries of mathematics and computing is, is is just pure joy.

I don't know how else to describe it.

And I have in recent years and right now, nearly full time working on a project with the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at WSU is appointment and and we are building software to allow.

Linguists and cognitive psychologists and, language pathologists, to look at the language.

We have 50,000 hours of infants and toddlers speaking with their children, and that's a wonderful thing.

But it's not possible to look at it.

And we're using AI related techniques to, to build software to, to to make this available to, to researchers.

That strikes me.

I don't know if this is true.

I don't like to be too self-serving about this, but maybe it's penance for all those years that I build ugly systems.

So, I think it's being honest, being honest with myself.

Being honest with what I see in the world.

So investigate inconsistencies.

We use we have a system that says it's a justice system that harms people, to show people that harming people is wrong.

That's inconsistent.

It is not aligned.

Systems and governments and like lots of people who use words that don't align, challenge, challenge that not it doesn't even need to be external.

Challenge it within.

Right.

You have to be honest with yourself.

And then you can be honest with other people and experiment.

It was never designed to be stagnant or status quo.

It was always designed to be better than what it is.

It amazes me that people say that like, oh, you're so critical of the United States.

Well, yeah, because if you love something, if you care about it, you're absolutely honest with it.

You want its growth and development and beauty like you don't want it to just kind of sit where it is.

You want its development.

So just like if you love a child, so it's it's just investigate and be honest with yourself with whatever it is that you're facing, and experiment.

It's supposed to be.

It didn't we didn't say experimenting is easy, but it is.

It is joyful.

In the process of you'll learn.

You'll learn about yourself, and you'll learn about how we do this work together.

We.

None of us have a clue.

We.

We're trying to have a clue, but none of us really do.

And we do it together.

And we talk about if it worked or not.

So climate change is not usually a super warm and fuzzy topic to talk about.

You know, we all know the statistics.

We had a really rough summer.

The planet had a rough summer.

So that's looming.

The climate crisis is real and and growing.

And so people assume when I tell them that I direct an academic project on climate change, that it's kind of like a dour, sort of sad place.

And actually, it's it's a really interesting it's a very fun, hope filled space, because, what we're trying to do is use this idea that agency is the antidote to despair.

So, we're just trying to create agency for ourselves and for our community to address a hard problem.

And every day we get to use our our capacity to give more agency, to build capacity within the community to address the problem.

And that just is, well, I have a good therapist, too, but it's cheaper than therapy.

It's it's great as and we're a part of the university that, is a Jesuit school that has committed to this idea of accompanying the youth for a hope filled future.

And so we have this opportunity to do it with all of these young people who are wanting and believing in an optimistic future and sort of helping to create a moral imagination of what that might look like together.

And so I have a I have tons of heart problem, but really, really hopeful and optimistic, about the work that I get to do.

Okay.

Good.

Okay.

All right.

We have done a ton of talking.

We are ready to hear from y'all.

There's a question and we'll run a microphone to you.

I see one right here on the, steps.

I can think of, no more important celebration or reflection on 250 years of our country than what I just observed tonight.

So thank you, History Department, for the just excellent, walk you've taken us through tonight.

As someone who works in the communication studies department here, and I study popular media and particularly audiences, I was curious if, our panelists and perhaps our history colleagues might reflect upon, especially because I heard our history colleagues and I've heard some of you talk about moments of popular culture that were, important to the way our country has developed and evolved.

Is there something and the other thing is, for most of our country's history, we were largely tuned in to the same stories.

And one of the things that's really different in our culture now is we have so many stories coming through so many channels.

And so you already did this beautifully.

I'm curious, is there something you've watched, listened to or read that you think will have an impact?

When we look back 50 years from now, will we see something in today's popular culture?

And I think Ted Lasso was, you know, so impactful, and especially through the lenses of your fields.

Is there something that you see that you think is doing work that can lead us, through the next 50 years?

Thank you.

That's great.

So science has learned a lot from science fiction, and I think especially with ethics, thinking about difficult questions about new technologies when they were fictional and that that was my gateway as a child to science, was reading science fiction.

And that has formed a lot of my ability to be conversant about the ethics of science.

And so I think reading fiction, reading stories about glorious things and about terrible things gives you a space to step back and think deeply about them when it's not connected to something you might be immediately experiencing.

And I think that that helps us do good at our work, that sometimes it's accused is a little escapist.

And I think that actually learning from literature is incredibly beneficial of that.

Great answer.

Yeah.

I, I think, when the UN voted to pass the resolution to say that slavery is the gravest crime against humanity, that's going to be a turning point.

We've already been having a conversation about reparations for a really long time, but the most important thing about reparations is getting everybody on the same page about what happened.

It's the story that we're not sharing.

People have different way, different narratives about the history.

And once we can acknowledge and come to a unified or a closer to unified story, that's when we can actually begin to heal and move forward and advance in a coordinated action together.

And so I think that will actuall Great answer as well.

Who else from the audience has a question for a panelist or for the panel?

Hey, guys.

This was wonderful.

Thank you all so much.

I, I guess this is mainly for the the scientist people on the edges here.

Because I noticed from your talks these themes about advancing and ethics and advancing and thinking differently, the philosophy of a lot of these issues, it seems like that's hand in hand with sort of in between Rob stock and now, in the last 50 years there it maybe it's a product of social media and we're seeing more of it, but it also feels like there's been some real regression on, like when I was growing up.

Like, of course climate change is real.

That was not a it was a settled issue.

And we watched Captain Planet and, it seems like between environmental issues and seeing a real resurgence of race, science and eugenics in not in the academic spaces, but in other spaces, and I so I'm just I guess I would love to hear you guys talk a little bit about how you see these academic spaces that are really thinking about stakeholders and bringing more people in and the ethics of these questions.

And maybe, you know, academic computer science departments as well.

And at the same time, there are people with a lot of money and influence who are pushing trends in the other direction.

And I love the optimism you all had about about where we're going, but I would just love to kind of hear you.

What your thoughts on that, that kind of, things that are working at cross-purposes right now.

It's got to be an.

Yeah.

I'd say very briefly that as people who are making things that can be used and abused, you do have a responsibility for that.

And I think that that's something that we forget about, of saying that, oh, well, I made this good thing and they used it for ill, and we've seen research and genetics and things put out in, in that way.

And so that there is a responsibility of when you are putting information out in the world to think about how people may use it for ill and to actively combat that before you are putting it out.

And that that looks different depending on what you're making.

But that that is something that sadly does need to be considered, but that, that is part of doing work responsibly.

One of the biggest challenges with climate change is, the problem of time scales.

So the the problem is a long lived one.

We have short attention spans and short political cycles and economic cycles.

And so there's always a mismatch.

I don't know if you remember the commercials with there was a brief period where politicians were sitting on a couch together in the middle of the screen, and the most famous one was Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich sitting on the couch together and saying, global warming is real.

And that actually happened.

Like, it's just seems like a million years ago in a different reality where that was the case, where both parties were briefly, saying it was real and it's not an accident.

There have been really good studies about, concerted efforts to to create doubt.

And there's every obvious reason why there's lots and lots and lots of money and power at stake.

And so it just feels like a pendulum swing, right?

You make progress and the status quo reacts very negatively against it.

And so the question is, are we, you know, is the moral arc of the universe long and we're making progress or not.

And we're amidst that right now.

It's just not clear, what what what who who will win in that?

But, so it feels like the status quo is reasserting itself in a really strong way right now.

But I'm still optimistic about the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice in the long run.

Dengeki!

Let's take one more response here, and then we'll have one question from the audience after that.

Speaker.

Okay, okay.

I was just going to say something to, Amy's point there about, not having a shared reality.

One of the, you know, tying an agency here to one of the best things we can do is to talk to other humans.

Because if you don't think climate change is real, me giving you CDC data, or me giving you EPA data, or me giving you, I don't know, pick your government institute of choice and saying no, but it is is not going to remedy that.

But we've lost the art of conversation, right?

We've lost saying, Paul, that's really interesting idea.

Tell me more about that.

I want to know, because in this setting, Paul is much more likely to question those sort of ideas that he gets.

But if all we're ever getting is the sort of, the megaphone of distrust and we don't have anything to counter it, and personal narrative does that so well, there will be a vacuum there that, of course, there's a lot of money to be made in sowing distrust.

There's a reason it's united we stand and divided we fall.

Right?

I mean, there's a financial interest in keeping us disengaged and disenfranchized.

Okay, time for one short question, and then one short and very concise answer.

But I'll make it short.

Thank you for this evening.

It's there anybody that you see in a public sphere that is like a guiding light that says things will be okay, and maybe everybody just run down the line and tell us who you look to as your guiding light.

That's a great way to land.

I don't look to politicians, but you said anyone, right?

I'm not sure.

So I went I went that direction, past.

People in a circle, I want to I don't want to talk about God.

Is it okay if I could say another thing?

It's a guiding idea.

We're confronted.

We Americans right now are confronted with, that this this building out of data centers in, in the community.

And that may or may not be a good thing.

I want to be agnostic about that part.

But there is so much opposition to this.

And this is cross class and it's cross political.

This is an organizer's dream this time.

Right now, you know, Joe Hill, what do you say?

Don't mourn, organize.

This is really the time.

And maybe, maybe and maybe, just maybe.

But you know, you want to build you want to build a data center in the Costco and on, on on freeway.

Well, we'll think about that.

But, meanwhile, you have to set up social democratic protections for displaced workers as a result.

As a consequence.

No, I have no idea how this will play out, but I'm very excited about about people coming together and organizing and not sitting on zoom and getting out and making their voices heard.

And there appears to be a collective purpose.

I thought it was going to happen a few years ago with unions, but I think, I think I think the inertial mass of, of, capitalism is just too great in the United States for that.

But this, this is this is our moment.

My moment.

Okay.

I really like Kate Bowler.

She's, religion professor at Duke, and she was diagnosed with colon cancer in her early 30s.

So she got tenure, she had a baby and then was told she had six months to live.

And she was able to get some really fantastic treatment that has extended her life.

But that very unique perspective, allowed her to talk and interact with other people in a way where, she she's not into toxic positivity.

She's like, this sucked.

Like, this was awful.

Why did this?

Like, she's very authentic and honest.

And, one of her arguments is, is, something along the lines of, and I'm paraphrasing here very quickly that, hope doesn't it doesn't mean there's going to be like rainbows and butterflies, but it means there's good worth working for.

And that's the part you have to accept.

And there is better the the experiment, the project, a more perfect union.

It did.

The document didn't say we were finished.

Right.

We could make it more perfect.

We could keep going.

But we have to we we on that, right.

Like we say, there's good worth working for, right?

Your idea of that becoming more perfect is somewhere where I see that it's in people that I have known for a long time, because I've seen where we started and how we've all grown, and that gives me hope for how I can still improve and learn, because I've seen them mess up and I've seen them do things that I'm really proud of, and I know they've seen that in me.

And so that gives me hope when I see others at their worst and at their best also.

Very nice.

All right.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Okay.

Well, I begin tonight by saying that history doesn't give us instructions for the future.

And after listening to this conversation, I think that's worth coming back to the people that we've encountered tonight.

They they didn't get to choose the moment into which they were born, and neither did we.

We inherit institutions.

We inherit technologies.

We inherit accomplishments and relationships and the natural world.

But inheritance isn't the same thing as destiny.

I really like that idea of if you see something, do something that's really nice.

One thread I've heard across these very different disciplines tonight is that the future isn't only something that happens to us.

We participate.

We're creating it.

We're creating the conditions from which it emerges.

And participation doesn't mean accepting personal responsibility for fixing climate change or artificial intelligence or democracy or justice or medicine or genetics by ourselves.

Problems of that scale do require institutions, not abdication, but they require communities and collective action.

But the scale doesn't make us irrelevant.

We can become better informed at 12 minute intervals.

Right.

Okay.

And, we can ask who's included, who benefits?

We can examine the stories that we tell about our progress.

We can take ownership of difficult conversations instead of always outsourcing them.

And we can participate in institutions and communities capable of doing things that we individually can't do alone.

So 50 years from now, another group of people is going to gather, maybe in this room and ask what Americans in 2026 understood about their moment and what we failed to understand.

We don't get to know their answer, but we do get to participate in writing it.

So thank you to our historians, to our panelists, to Gonzaga, to the Woodley Institute for bringing us together and for everything, everyone here and watching with us through CSPs, PBS, thank you so much.

I'm going to turn it back over to Katie.

Don't worry team, I know it's late on a school night.

I'll be brief.

I've scribbled so many notes over the last few hours, but I should stick to my, my prepared notes.

This interdisciplinary panel, invites us to think about the value of diverse perspectives, and diverse voices as we consider what it means to live in this nation and how we each might pursue what's obviously the never ending labor of seeking out new ways to form a more perfect union that will probably never be perfect, but we always need to be in pursuit of it.

Our panelists today have illustrated much as, the last Davis lecture, which occurred last April, and was given by our colleague in Native American studies, and history, Laurie Arnold's at the top talk was entitled we Share Our Futures with You natives, nations and neighbors the first 250 years.

This panel today.

And Doctor Arnold's talk last April reminds me that, America's future can only be helped by a deeper understanding of its past.

In recent years, Davis Lecture scholars have shared histories of Washington's military veterans, urban redlining, civil rights activism, and the U.S.

war in Afghanistan.

These are the core of humanities, programing, and humanities scholarship.

Listening to the diverse stories of America, of what it was imagined to be, what it's actually been, and what we hope for it in the future, I believe, provides the opportunity for growing our own understanding of how our own individual narratives, our stories, fit into this bigger American story.

The possibility of developing a more expansive empathy of the many ways humans have and do live in this place we call America, and more than anything else, a sense of shared future.

If we're willing to name, acknowledge, and accept our differences and our histories as we work together to articulat The Woodley Institute for Civil Engagement and Humanistic Dialog, with community engaged in human centered partners like our friends at CSPs, invite you to engage in this work with us.

Please continue to join us for programing that helps us continue to think about not only the most pressing issues of our time, but where we might identify hope and intentional community and dialog across all of those concerns.

If I may, please give a final round of applause and a huge thank you to our moderators, Skyler Reep.

As well as, the CCV CSPs crew that has been working behind the scenes, both on cameras and helping us assemble a resource page, that is available on CSPs for viewers at home and folks in the audience.

If you're interested in some of the sources or resources or recommendations from our panelists, we're trying to make that information available to you.

I also have to acknowledge, finally, the chair of Gonzaga's history department, doctor Ray Rast, who's invisible efforts behind the scenes have resulted in a wonderful evening and told Ray has about 50 papers left to grade by tomorrow, so it seems like we should probably call it a night.

But thank you so much for joining us.