6

Roots/Routes of American Identity

Roots premiered on ABC over eight consecutive nights from January 23 to 30, 1977. It was the capstone media event of the American bicentennial and Wolper Productions’ most ambitious public history project. The twelve-hour miniseries attracted 130 million American viewers, the largest audience up to that time for a single program in the medium’s history, and played on home television screens in more than twenty countries.1 David Wolper adapted Roots from author Alex Haley’s family slave narrative.²

The story begins with the capture of Haley’s ancestor Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) in the West African village of Juffure in the mid-eighteenth century. It ends with Kinte’s descendant leading the family to a newly purchased plot of land in Henning, Tennessee, shortly after the Civil War. Roots drew its cultural authority and emotional power from its innovative “docudramatic” form, and was part of a larger wave of bicentennial-themed programming and merchandizing. The two hundredth anniversary of the nation’s independence was not an isolated event, but a constellation of performances, parades, exhibitions, theatrically released films, and television shows around which the country rallied during a period of instability in the national economy and distrust in the power of the chief executive.

It would be corporations, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, and local politicians, rather than the federal government, that assumed responsibility for bicentennial planning. Under the leadership of Tom Bradley, Los Angeles’s first African American mayor, the metropolis both reflected official bicentennial values and became a major center for the creation and display of bicentennial media. For the film and television industries, the bicentennial offered a seemingly limitless vault of experience from which patriotic moving images of a diverse American polity could be constructed. Televised docudrama became the bicentennial’s preeminent commercial product, and Wolper its most prolific creator and greatest supporter. Docudrama combined the truth claims of documentary with the world-creating capacity of period fiction.

Roots did internationalize American identity and confronted the controversial subject of slavery in a progressive way. At the same time, the miniseries was part of the bicentennial’s broader effort to downplay the politically resistant dimensions of cultural expression and to absorb the minority liberation movements into a discourse of celebratory multiculturalism. This process of incorporation sought to package Americans’ disparate historical experiences as simplistic narratives of progress. Strategic forgetting as well as remembering, silencing as well as giving voice, became integral to bicentennial culture.

The architects of the bicentennial portrayed history through a distorted lens, giving Americans a misleading perspective regarding the severe racial and class hierarchies that pervaded society in the early years of the Republic. This perception in turn obscured the persistence of injustices in the present.

BUILDING A NATION ON THE RUINS OF CONSENSUS

Arrangements for America’s two hundredth birthday had been shifting for the ten years leading up to July 4, 1976. What had started as federally organized activities concentrated within one historic East Coast city had evolved into a dispersed and heavily privatized series of events. Official bicentennial preparations began in 1966 when president Lyndon B. Johnson created the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC) by signing Public Law 89–491. Johnson envisioned the bicentennial as not only looking back but also marking the central tenets of his “Great Society” legislation. Using Cold War rhetoric, he claimed that since the writing of the Declaration of Independence, “the forces of tyranny and despotism have been in retreat throughout the world, and where men find freedom still denied, they struggle on, inspired by the ideals expressed in those words.”3 Boston, Philadelphia, and a Washington, DC-Virginia-Maryland consortium each vied to be the bicentennial epicenter. When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, he downsized the plans for the celebration and rejected the notion that the bicentennial should be housed within any one city.

This change of direction stemmed from the new administration’s decision to reduce federal funds for massive public projects. Memories of all-too-recent urban uprisings further deterred the government from locating the bicentennial in a single metropolitan area. Under Nixon’s tenure, interest in a federal government–planned bicentennial continued to wane. An unjust and prolonged war in Southeast Asia heightened tensions between American citizens and their political leaders. Additionally, critics charged that the ARBC was being mismanaged and that its members were involved in conflicts of interest. Nixon eventually established the smaller American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA) in 1973. ARBA would help the federal government coordinate and promote state and municipal events and make modest financial contributions.4 The mounting Watergate scandal coupled with an unprecedented energy crisis and rising stagflation further discouraged momentum for the bicentennial.⁵ In the aftermath of Nixon’s forced resignation, citizens felt profoundly suspicious of big government and were wary of its place in public life.

President Gerald Ford pursued the idea of a dispersed and locally planned bicentennial, while attempting to infuse it with a sense of patriotism and levity. Administrators anticipated a bicentennial based on the active participation of private industry as well as limited federal government support. The Bicentennial of the United States of America: A Final Report to the People, Volume 1 announced that Watergate, Vietnam, and assassinations had put the American political system to the test, and that the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution aided the nation in persevering. The publication later stated, “All these events had not proven our system to be faulty. They had proven that our system works like no other. They had shown the strength of those three great documents. They had proved our Founding Fathers to be brilliant architects.”⁶ Three programming initiatives bolstered the bicentennial. “Heritage ’76” commemorated famous leaders and events; “Festival USA” lauded “diversity” and the “traditions” of the American people; and “Horizons ’76” outlined future challenges and goals that could be met by means of individual drive and technological innovation.

Many social chroniclers did not consider Los Angeles a very historical place, as the city was only incorporated as an American municipality in 1850. Robert Lawlor gave it scant mention in his cross-country tour guide, The Bicentennial Book.⁷ Nonetheless, Los Angeles generated a vibrant array of bicentennial attractions. Mayor Bradley organized the Los Angeles City Bicentennial Committee to coordinate and promote events.⁸ Bradley grew up on Central Avenue, a midcentury African American cultural hub that nurtured many of the city’s great jazz musicians. At UCLA he studied education and ran track; later he rose through the ranks of the LAPD in unprecedented fashion. Bradley lost the 1969 mayoral race to incumbent Sam Yorty, who frequently resorted to racist attacks on his competitor during the election. But in 1973 Bradley defeated Yorty by mobilizing a biracial coalition of African Americans, white liberals, and Jews. His campaign pledge to “be a mayor of all of Los Angeles” involved devoting increased attention to the city’s diverse populations and business interests.⁹ In practice, this meant building on some of the unifying concerns advanced by the minority rights movements as well as the liberal coalition that elected him to office. Bradley courted existing federal funds for social service and job training programs. He also brought blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, and women into public-sector jobs through commission appointments and affirmative action. Furthermore, he sought to combat systemic racism within the LAPD by instituting heightened oversight on proceedings, along with civilian review boards, which allowed greater citizen participation in the process of policing.10

Cultural historian Daniel Widener describes Bradley’s creation of the Cultural Affairs Department (1978–81) as one of the major undertakings that engendered an era of “incorporative municipal multiculturalism.” This initiative brought about greater “inclusion” of minority arts within Los Angeles; however, it also involved “containing” these cultural practices within established institutions, festival days, and sponsored events, thus severing them from their home communities and curbing their potential for social change.¹¹ Although the bicentennial is often overlooked in social histories of Los Angeles, it paved the way for what would later become arts administration policy. So, too, did the bicentennial begin the cultivation of Los Angeles as a “world city” that would come to fruition in the 1980s. Los Angeles’s official bicentennial theme, “unity through diversity,” spoke to Bradley’s vision for the city as a multicultural metropolis. Urban historian Scott Kurashige argues that Bradley’s policies “emblematized the new effort by civic leaders to celebrate ethnicity and reverse the postwar tendency toward assimilation.”¹² Bradley also looked to mobilize the idea of diversity for the purpose of making Los Angeles a friendly home for transnational capital. In turn, the bicentennial involved two goals. First, to celebrate the city’s residents by means of cultural display, promoting the message that all Angelenos possessed a heritage. Exhibitions and live performances encouraged people to see their lives and those of their ancestors as distinct, but sharing the experience of movement, struggle, and success. Bicentennial events highlighted rituals of cooking, craft, music, and religious practice as constituting ways that group identity is communicated and sustained over time. Loyola Marymount University hosted an exhibition about German immigration. At the First United Methodist Church, religious figures performed the Islamic call to prayer, Buddhist chants, Greek Orthodox hymns, and Jewish prayers. A gathering at the Ukrainian Cultural Center titled “Old Ways in the New World” featured musicians from Ghana, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, and Panama. The International Heritage Festival at the Civic Center Mall contained one hundred kiosks filled with costumes, food, and entertainment provided by Scottish bagpipers, Swiss alpenhorn players, Chinese ribbon dancers, Samoan fire dancers, and Egyptian belly dancers. Visitors could sample Belgian waffles, French wine, German beer, and Nicaraguan tamales. The local bicentennial committee called it the “city’s largest multiethnic celebration ever.”¹³ Bus tours advertised the city’s Spanish heritage as a period of “romance” and “adventure.”¹⁴

A second goal was to showcase Los Angeles’s history and contemporary identity as deeply connected to trade, invention, and industry. Journalist Steve Harvey playfully noted that the city had given birth to the relatively contemporary “science” of cryonics, the freeway, mini-golf, and the drive-in church.15 A large exhibition titled Free Enterprise and How It Has Built the American Way took place at the Convention Center. A show on commercial aviation was held at Northrop University in Inglewood. The Museum of Science and Industry brought attention to industries native to California and also hosted the multimedia extravaganza USA ’76—The First 200 Years. Cal State Los Angeles had an open house where visitors toured the Van de Graaff atomic particle accelerator and learned about cutting-edge medical devices.¹⁶ The Los Angeles County Museum of Art hosted a traveling exhibition by Charles and Ray Eames on “the world” of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Visitors learned about how Franklin’s and Jefferson’s respective ideas concerning the rights of humanity, civil society, and the government mechanism of checks and balances directly influenced the early growth of American democracy. The show also looked at their breakthroughs in natural science, architecture, and communications.¹⁷

These bicentennial events complemented Bradley’s broader efforts to expand the city’s military defense, aerospace, finance, technology, and craft sectors. The creation of the Office of Economic Development in 1975 was crucial to this endeavor. Between 1972 and 1979, employment in seven high-tech clusters, including aircraft, communications equipment, electronic components, and guided missiles, grew by 50 percent. Industry became increasingly concentrated in the outlying white working- and middle-class counties of Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, and Ventura. These shifts disadvantaged working-class minorities, many of whom lived in downtown, South Central, and East Los Angeles. As the urban historian Roger Keil details, recent immigrants and minorities were able to find jobs in the fast-growing apparel and service sectors geared toward retail, business, and social utilities. Nonetheless, these positions were often low wage, part time, and nonunion, which made for highly insecure employment.¹⁸

Under Bradley’s leadership, downtown Los Angeles was becoming a site of corporate redevelopment with the creation of the Aon Center (1973), Broadway Plaza (1973), and Security Pacific Plaza (1974). Little was built for working class minority residents. The creation of the Century Plaza Towers (1975) strengthened the Westside as a financial and business destination. The luxurious New Otani Hotel (1977) went up in Little Tokyo, and the massive thirty-five-story Westin Bonaventure Hotel (1976) took up a city block on West Fourth Street and Figueroa. Los Angeles Magazine marveled at the futuristic elements of the latter, which included “an indoor park with trees, hanging gardens and even a meandering one-acre lake; twelve lighted, rocket-shaped glass elevators which lift guests through the atrium, then outdoors up the side of the cylindrical towers to guest rooms; on the very top, a revolving two-story restaurant and cocktail lounge; six shopping balconies to wrap around the atrium; and cocktail ‘pods’ that jut over the lake.”¹⁹

Hollywood personnel made many contributions to the bicentennial. For example, studio luminaries took part in the city’s “celebrity quilt.” Each member of the thirty-square quilt got to add designs that were personally meaningful. Gene Kelly highlighted the Whiskey Rebellion and the Liberty Bell in honor of his home state of Pennsylvania. The quilt was made available for viewing in Los Angeles libraries, at Broadway Plaza, and at the United California Bank. Actors and actresses walked in the “All Nations, All Peoples Official Los Angeles County Bicentennial Parade.” Four thousand participants walked for nearly eleven miles down Wilshire Boulevard, from Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles to the Santa Monica city limits. Mayor Bradley led the parade. Behind him were floats containing busts of the founding fathers, scenes from popular films, and boutique automobiles. Disneyland hosted its own “America on Parade” procession, in which classic animated characters in “Spirit of ’76” costumes marched down Main Street USA together with pilgrims, colonists, pioneers, flappers, and suffragettes. Wolper along with other Hollywood producers planned the Los Angeles International Film Exposition. The festival’s bicentennial retrospective contained Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), silent comedies by Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harry Langdon, and a series of Westerns. The opening night’s theatrics involved a costumed figure dressed as George Washington riding a horse into Century City’s Entertainment Center. Fireworks emblazoning the festival’s logo lit up the sky.20

President Ford selected Wolper to join the twenty-five-person American Revolution Bicentennial Advisory Council. Wolper was then elected chair by its members. Writer Alex Haley, poet Maya Angelou, former first lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, and CBS executive Frank Stanton were also on the council.²¹ The group’s task was to advise the ARBA board on the approval of annual budgets, the coordination of programming, and the process of reviewing grants. Reflecting on the experience, Wolper wrote, “We saw, through the various bicentennial events, that, although we are a patchwork of different cultures, various colors, shapes and sizes, from different regions, when put together we certainly make a beautiful quilt.”²²

Businesses interpreted the bicentennial as an opportunity to combine consumerism with civics. They made it possible for people to literally buy into the bicentennial, expressing their fondness for history by purchasing a T-shirt with George Washington’s face, learning about the American Revolution from a board game, or branding their home as patriotic thanks to a bald eagle–decorated doormat. Companies took pride in their contributions to commercializing the bicentennial. After all, ARBA emphasized that capitalism and principles of the free market were essentially American. As the historian Tammy S. Gordon argues, “The business world used the occasion of 1976 to re-naturalize the connection between American business and American heritage.”²³ If companies paid ARBA a 20 percent royalty for a specific product, the organization would officially sanction the item.²⁴

Pieces of Hollywood memorabilia were on board the American Freedom Train. Pepsi-Cola, General Motors, Prudential Life Insurance, and Kraft, as well as the commodities broker and part-time engineer Ross Rowland Jr., funded the locomotive. Departing from Wilmington, Delaware, and traveling for twenty-one months across forty-eight states, the train was an exhibition of Americana on wheels. When the train stopped in a city, it shuttled passengers along a moving walkway for the price of one or two dollars a ticket. Visitors saw Harold Lloyd’s glasses, Judy Garland’s dress from The Wizard of Oz (1939), a poster from The Magnificent Yankee (1950), and Cecil B. DeMille’s script for The Ten Commandments (1956).25

The American Film Institute collaborated with ARBA to produce America at the Movies (1976), a tribute to Hollywood cinema since the mid-1910s. In the official pamphlet accompanying the film, Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin wrote, “Movies were an American invention” and “became the great democratic art, which naturally enough, was the characteristic American art.” He went on to comment that America at the Movies “shows the boundless diversity of the American experience—a national family album.”²⁶ The documentary’s director (and former head of the US Information Agency film division) George Stevens Jr. used the organization’s Doheny Mansion in Beverly Hills as the home base for production. Charlton Heston served as narrator. Discussing the mission of the compilation documentary, Stevens announced, “We have tried to create a mosaic of how we’ve seen America through the movies.”²⁷ The film includes excerpts from eighty-three movies, divided into five thematic segments: “Land,” “Cities,” “Family,” “War,” and “Spirit.”²⁸ At the beginning of the documentary, Heston delivers a rousing proclamation: “From the beginning, the story of America was an adventure. It began with a dream, a candle burning in the mind. Immigrants all, they crossed the seas hoping to find a new and better world.” Set against images of families aboard large ships journeying toward the Statue of Liberty around the turn of the twentieth century, Heston establishes that the upward struggle of the immigrant is the overarching narrative of the American people. Wolper served as a consultant on the project and attended the film’s premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Also in attendance were five hundred members of the American Film Institute, twenty-two senators, and 125 members of Congress. The film went on to play commercially as well as in schools, embassies, and consulates overseas.²⁹

Televised docudrama engaged with the bicentennial in a unique fashion. This genre of prestige educational entertainment for the small screen embraced dramatic reenactments of past events while still claiming fidelity to truth. Docudramas constituted a more immersive and emotional form of pedagogy than the on-location reporting, interviews, and variety shows typical of NBC’s The Glorious Fourth (1976), CBS’s In Celebration of US (1976), and ABC’s The Great American Birthday Party (1976).³⁰

WOLPER’S DOCUDRAMATIC TURN

By the early 1970s Wolper Productions had itself become a respected and still-vibrant institution. The honors it received spoke to the history-focused charge of the studio’s output as well as its affirmative and optimistic view of the nation’s past. Wolper Productions had also been recalibrating its liberal posture toward post–civil rights America by means of taking an inclusive perspective on its subjects and hiring practices. Commemorating Wolper’s twenty-fifth anniversary in the media profession (including distribution and production), the American Film Institute arranged a one-week retrospective in Los Angeles. Additionally, the American Embassy in London organized a three-day tribute to the studio. The Cinémathèque française in Paris even planned a thirty-day screening of Wolper documentaries; its eminent director, Henri Langlois, wrote, “As a custodian of films, I appreciate perhaps more than anyone the historical significance of documentary films, and David Wolper’s outstanding contribution to recording current history on film.”31 Los Angeles Times journalist Marshall Berges noted in his introduction to an interview with the producer, “David Wolper is a history buff who makes history pay off. . . . He is an undisputed leader of documentary films, serving up a classroom of the air with television specials.”³² Mayor Bradley proclaimed March 17, 1976, “David Wolper Day,” describing Wolper as “the most honored producer of film documentaries in the world.” Around that time, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce dedicated a star to Wolper on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at Sunset and Vine.³³

The bicentennial seemed to trigger a commemorative impulse that rippled through the film and television industries. In 1976 CBS board chair William Paley donated $2 million to create the Museum of Broadcasting in New York, an initiative that coincided with the network’s own fiftieth-anniversary celebration. Paley announced that the mission of the museum was to “collect, preserve and present the programs and historical materials of radio and television. Its purpose will be to give scholars and students an insight into broadcasting.”³⁴ Two years later, the Library of Congress widened its archival purview to systematically include television and radio in its collection. Under the guidance of media historian Erik Barnouw, the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division would be responsible for the “custody, processing, preservation and servicing of the library’s collection of more than 252,000 motion picture reels and 711,000 sound recordings, as well as developing a new American Television and Radio Archive.”³⁵

During the early to mid-1970s Wolper Productions continued to move in innovative directions, even as some of the company’s chief 1960s-era personnel left the organization. Of the three core members of the original Wolper brain trust, only Mel Stuart remained. Jack Haley Jr. left in 1970 and went on to become creative affairs director at MGM. In 1974 he became president of Twentieth Century–Fox Television, where he produced the compilation film That’s Entertainment (1974). Landsburg left in 1970 to form Alan Landsburg Productions, where he made theatrically released fiction and documentaries.

Television docudramas were by far Wolper Productions’ most highly regarded and publicly discussed genre. These shows helped to fashion a renovated liberal imaginary as well as to reaffirm the studio’s brand identity as a producer of public history. The docudrama was also an alluring commercial venture. As scholars Thomas W. Hoffer and Richard Alan Nelson argue, docudrama denotes a particular kind of documentary-drama hybrid involving “accurate recreations of events in the lives of actual persons.” In their definition, “accurate” and “actual” involve claims to factual evidence on which productions are based. “Re-creations” point to the full array of written dialogue, performances, sets, and special effects that are used to craft the story-world.36 Hoffer and Nelson’s framework positions docudrama within a tradition of film practice going back to the medium’s origins. They also call special attention to the cycle of American television docudramas in the late 1960s and 1970s.³⁷ The early docudramas on public television such as NET Playhouse (1966–72) and network series such as Saga of Western Man (1963–69) gave way to Continental Congress, 1976 (1971).

Hoffer and Nelson as well as other scholars of nonfiction provide a useful vocabulary for analyzing the epistemological claims and formal complexity of docudramas, but have not fully accounted for the cultural pressures and significant players that contributed to the rise of docudrama in the United States during this period. First, the horizon of the bicentennial incentivized filmmakers to devise a way to portray events and people that existed before the advent of moving-image technologies. Producers saw docudrama as capable of “creating history” along with maintaining a strong investment in “truth” and “authenticity.” If fashioned in collaboration with skilled subject experts, docudrama could perform the intellectual labor of documentary, while venturing into the reaches of the past where conventional forms of documentary could not travel. Second, docudrama was an enticing way to make educational programming popular and vice versa. Its creators sought to synthesize the grandeur of Hollywood historical epics with mobile, character-focused documentary. Separately, these different spheres of media production were not particularly fresh. On the one hand, a number of 1960s-era flops such as George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) had proven that large-budget period fiction was a precarious financial investment. On the other hand, observational documentaries about well-known and everyday citizens had appeared on the small screen of television since the early 1960s. Even though they offered their producers, sponsors, and exhibitors prestige, they attracted an extremely limited viewership.

Docudramas were elaborate in production values and scope, but still possessed an intimate focus on individuals and small groups. They flaunted their relationship to “truth” within the program itself or by means of press releases, advertisements, or reviews; the sensory-rich encounter with a historical moment and locale was considered paramount. Docudramas were time machines, transporting viewers to biblical Jerusalem, the New England colonies, the antebellum South, turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York, or post–World War II suburbia. Audiences could feel what it was like to be a part of seismic events, to observe both major politicians and ordinary bystanders. At a 1979 symposium on docudrama (chaired by Wolper) in Ojai, California, writer Frank Swertlow praised the format for offering a holistic, historical perspective on society—one that narrowly focused, temporally constricted news and print journalism could not.38 In practice, docudramas constituted totalizing period- and place-specific environments that looked and sounded authentic. Within these worlds individuals overcame tremendous obstacles in uplifting fashion. Spectators could relish the intimate experience of getting to know and then identifying with these characters as well as luxuriating in the period environments. Docudrama thus proved an ideal cultural form for the bicentennial. As critic David Lowenthal noted, “the past” as seen through the prism of the bicentennial was not “museumized” but actively relived.³⁹

Wolper Productions had experimented with docudrama in They’ve Killed President Lincoln! (1971) and the seven-episode Appointment with Destiny (1971–73) that followed. Beyond these early endeavors, the studio partnered with American Heritage magazine for a series of docudramas for ABC. One of the show’s sponsors, Texaco, communicated that the objective of the series was “to humanize our country’s heroes and in so doing give Americans fresh insight and renewed pride in the story of America.”⁴⁰ The first program, The World Turned Upside Down (1973), shines a light on the leadership of George Washington during the American Revolution. The climax is Charles Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown. The second program, Lincoln: Trial by Fire (1974), portrays the conflict between the confident, pro-emancipation Lincoln and the inept, proslavery Union general George McClellan. The third program, The Yanks Are Coming (1974), is based on an actual archive of letters from a World War I veteran; the show recounts the misadventures of a wealthy, young, idealistic Bostonian who goes off to fight in Europe, has his dreams dashed, and is eventually killed in combat. The last installment, The Honorable Sam Houston (1975), traces the fruitless fight to prevent the state of Texas from seceding from the Union and Houston’s own withdrawal from political office. In an interview about the series, writer-producer Robert Guenette proudly asserted that these shows “reconfirmed one’s feelings that the roots of the country are very strong. You don’t kill a tree by chopping off its branches. One thing the bicentennial will do is show that our roots are very strong, and we will survive. I challenge the most entrenched cynic to sit there and deny a flutter of patriotism watching these shows.”⁴¹ The mainstream press responded favorably to the period likeness of the settings as well as to the way the actors skillfully embodied their characters. Critics also praised the expansive advisory council for the series, which included James MacGregor Burns, Daniel Boorstin, Bruce Catton, Barbara Tuchman, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.42

Wolper’s adaptation of Carl Sandburg’s multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln embraced an episodic structure that revolved around one man. The Washington Post deemed Wolper’s six-part NBC miniseries Sandburg’s Lincoln (1974–76) “the best of the networks’ Bicentennial offerings.”⁴³ The series dramatized periods in Lincoln’s life without the conventional aid of voice-over, stock footage, or interviews. Much of Sandburg’s lyrical description of Lincoln’s surroundings and the people with whom he interacted was excised from the series. What made Sandburg’s multivolume project seem full of facts to critic Van Wyck Brooks in his 1926 review of the biography, or a kind of literary encyclopedia of Lincoln experiences to the contemporary historian James Hurt, was absent in the television programs.⁴⁴ Nonetheless, humanizing Lincoln was crucial to the project. The tightly framed, hour-long episodes looked at different moments in his legal and political career. They showed Lincoln as a calm, compassionate, and candid lawyer, as well as in the roles of president, father, and husband. This characterization contributed to a warm, but still commanding, image of American politics so lacking in the early 1970s.⁴⁵ The country was reeling from the disgraceful actions of the thirty-seventh president. Actor Hal Holbrook believed that a program about Lincoln might boost national morale. Holbrook wanted to make viewers “feel they’re actually seeing Abraham Lincoln.” He went on to say, “Lincoln was an honest man; even when he was a shrewd politician, he still had integrity. I have never seen that in Nixon.”⁴⁶ Journalists echoed this juxtaposition, comparing Honest Abe to Tricky Dick.⁴⁷

The series eschewed some iconic moments in Lincoln’s life, for instance his debates with Stephen Douglas, the Gettysburg Address, and his assassination. Instead, it delivered poignant vignettes that cast Lincoln in a personable although no less virtuous light. In the first installment, Mrs. Lincoln’s Husband (1974), a wartime Lincoln quells Union fears concerning his wife’s alleged Southern loyalties and copes with the sickness and death of their young son, Willie. In Sad Figure Laughing (1975), Lincoln clashes with secretary of the treasury Salmon Chase over the 1864 presidential nomination, but as a believer in the free democratic process he does not discourage his opponent’s efforts. The episode ends with Lincoln reading the second inaugural address. Prairie Lawyer (1975) is a portrait of the statesman as a young attorney in 1838. Lincoln appears as a lovesick romantic, losing Mary Owens and eventually finding Mary Todd. Additionally, he is a shrewd Illinois litigator who successfully argues for an acquittal on behalf of the accused murderer Henry Truett. The fourth program, Unwilling Warrior (1975), explores Lincoln’s maturation as a decisive leader, his intolerance for corruption in politics, and his demand for clarity of government actions during the Civil War. He tells secretary of war Simon Cameron, “When we try to hide government business from the people, we are betraying them.” The drama of political appointments makes up the fifth episode, Crossing Fox River (1976). This episode takes place between the 1860 election and the inauguration. Lincoln refuses to bow to pressures by his own advisors to pay back those who supported him or to appease opponents. He demonstrates his abilities as a negotiator and statesman to bring individuals of different ideologies together to serve in the same cabinet. The final installment, Last Days (1976), aired on the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. The episode explores the post-Appomattox denouement of the Civil War and the challenge of how to reintegrate the South into the Union. Lincoln desires a “harmonious restoration of the Union.” He supports a balanced and moderate strategy before going with his wife on a carriage ride and then on to Ford’s Theatre, where he will tragically meet John Wilkes Booth’s bullet. The first episode of Sandburg’s Lincoln was previewed at Ford’s Theatre, followed by a reception at the National Portrait Gallery for Washington, DC, dignitaries and the entertainment community. Critics responded warmly to Holbrook’s performance and the show’s redemptive image of American politics. The miniseries received three Emmy nominations, for Supporting Actress, Lead Actor, and Film Sound.48

In the same period, Wolper Productions created docudramas on minority subjects.⁴⁹ I Will Fight No More Forever (1975) depicts the resistance and defeat of Chief Joseph (Ned Romero) and his Nez Perce tribe by the US Army. The film narrates the Army’s egregious effort to remove the Nez Perce tribe from their home in Wallowa Valley, Oregon, and relocate them to an Idaho reservation. It begins in 1877 with General Oliver Howard (James Whitmore) announcing Ulysses S. Grant’s mandate that Chief Joseph and his tribe must relocate or they will be forced to do so.⁵⁰ After being provoked into a war when the US Army kills one of their tribespeople, the Nez Perce begin a three-month, 1,600-mile attempt to escape the American government’s jurisdiction into Canada. The Indians clash with the soldiers in a series of shrewdly fought battles across Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. Surrounded, and with the tribe decimated, Chief Joseph surrenders less than forty miles from the Canadian border. It is here, in the concluding moments of the program, that he recites the famous lines, “Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

It is difficult to imagine the broadcast of I Will Fight No More Forever without the Red Power movement’s struggle to bring the long history of American Indian displacement and dispossession to public consciousness. The Indian occupations of Alcatraz Island (1969–71) and the town of Wounded Knee (1973), along with Sacheen Littlefeather’s Oscar refusal on behalf of Marlon Brando (1973) made a mainstream film like I Will Fight No More Forever possible. And yet, Wolper Productions’ film is also self-conscious about the national wrong in a way that blunts its progressive charge. The docudrama signals the government’s treatment of the Nez Perce as an injustice that will one day be rectified. This is a move that in part redeems some of the US government figures featured in the film and posits a belief that the future will entail enlightened change. The viewer’s sympathies are supposed to lie with the Nez Perce, but also with Howard and his lieutenant Wood (Sam Elliott), who appear deeply conflicted and even regretful about what they have been ordered to do. These soldiers ruminate on the Nez Perce’s removal, and clearly understand it to be unjust and unethical. Talking to Wood in the Army camp toward the conclusion of the pursuit, Howard mentions that “We [the US government] make massive mistakes, captain, and we pray we survive them.” He sees the kindhearted Wood as having a future leadership role in government and tells the young lieutenant to “stick with it, this country really needs men like you.”

I Will Fight No More Forever was nominated for two Emmys (for writing and editing) and was rebroadcast closer to the bicentennial.51 Even though the docudrama’s producer, Stan Margulies, was white, the fact that Romero was half Blackfoot Indian aided in separating the film from a long tradition of Hollywood Westerns in which the lead American Indian role was played by a white actor in red face. Baltimore Sun journalist Terrence O’Flaherty discussed the letters he received from viewers deeply affected by the plight of the Nez Perce. O’Flaherty quoted Chief Joseph’s 1879 speech in Washington, DC, on the equality of all people before the law and the necessity for all people to be free. He concluded his review with the line, “If I Will Fight No More Forever caused some spectators to think about this—even for a moment—television’s seldom-used power for human kindness will have been abundantly demonstrated.”⁵² Offscreen, the cast members participated in local events in Los Angeles. Romero was grand marshal of the 1976 Watts-Willowbrook Christmas Parade and Frank Salsedo was master of ceremonies at the American Indian Cultural Festival.⁵³ Wolper Productions continued to address minority social history during the creation of Roots, the studio’s most ambitious project to date.

ROOTS AS MEDIA EVENT

Adapting Alex Haley’s Roots ran parallel to Wolper Productions’ other bicentennial projects. Cinema scholars such as Linda Williams have placed Roots within a long tradition of American melodrama starting with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.⁵⁴ The television miniseries, however, had its more immediate origins in the changing media industries and political culture of the early to mid-1970s. Wolper first heard about Roots through Haley’s friend, the actress Ruby Dee, whom he had met at the 1969 Moscow International Film Festival. The two discussed the myriad problems plaguing Wolper’s controversial and never-to-be-produced Nat Turner film. Dee’s husband, the actor and civil rights activist Ossie Davis, was an outspoken opponent of the Turner project. Over the course of their conversation, Dee pitched literary texts by black authors that she thought would make promising films, including Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), and Haley’s unfinished Roots. Dee and Davis then discussed Haley’s narrative at greater length with Wolper over dinner at his Beverly Hills home the next year. Wolper was moved by the historical sweep of Haley’s genealogical research and intrigued by its docudramatic potential as a grand story about family. Wolper discovered that Columbia Pictures had already optioned the book and was planning to do a four-hour theatrically released feature. Upon learning that the deal had fallen through, he aggressively courted the book. Wolper discussed its possibilities with Haley’s agent, Lou Blau; the president of ABC’s Movies for Television Division, Barry Diller; and members of his own studio. An August meeting, during which Haley’s retelling of the story of Roots allegedly left Wolper’s staff and ABC executives in tears, solidified the studio’s interest in bringing the book to the screen.55

FIGURE 20: Alex Haley and David Wolper, ca. 1976, in The Man with the Dream: A Pictorial Tribute to the Life and 50-Year Career of David L. Wolper, ed. Auriel Sanderson (Hong Kong: Warner Bros. Worldwide Publishing, 1999), 106.

Wolper Productions spearheaded the Roots adaptation, but it was the conjuncture of diverse interests that made it feasible. Haley had little experience with film and television beyond coauthoring Super Fly T.N.T. (1973), the minor sequel to Gordon Parks Jr.’s Super Fly (1972). He nonetheless wanted to reach the largest possible audience and was thus excited about the idea of a network television docudrama. Haley himself was a best-selling author famous for starting Playboy’s interview column in 1962 and cowriting the critically acclaimed The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Since the mid-1960s, he had been researching his family’s genealogy. This journey took him across the United States as well as to England and Africa. Haley published condensed excerpts from Roots in the May and June 1974 issues of Reader’s Digest, which fueled anticipation for the release of the longer narrative scheduled for early fall 1976. Haley emphasized the connection between Roots and the bicentennial, noting on the dedication page that Roots was a “birthday offering to my country.”56

The fact that ABC was moving in the direction of long-form narrative created an opening for Roots. After the high ratings and positive reviews of Leon Uris’s Holocaust-themed courtroom drama QB VII (1974), the network wanted to expand into multipart dramas. ABC acquired the rights to Irwin Shaw’s novel Rich Man, Poor Man (1970) about the disparate life trajectories of the German American Jordache brothers. The network also brokered a deal for John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, which follows twelve characters struggling against the forces of modernity in the early twentieth century.⁵⁷ ABC vice president Lou Rudolph liked the idea of programming topical subjects and drove the network’s investment in this direction.⁵⁸

Wolper and his circle were motivated by the prospects of commercial success as well as by the socially progressive dimensions of Roots. They were committed to having African Americans actively involved with creating the miniseries. Haley continued to work on the manuscript over the course of 1974 and 1975 from Jamaica and acted in an advisory capacity throughout the process of adaptation. Joseph Wilcots, the first African American to be admitted to the International Cinematographers Guild in 1967, served as director of photography. He had worked on The Long Goodbye (1973) as well as Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and The Mack (1973). Wolper tried to sign Gordon Parks (The Learning Tree [1969]) and Michael Schultz (Together for Days [1973], Cooley High [1975]) to direct installments of the series, but both directors were committed to other films. Willie Burton recorded sound for Roots at the same time that he worked on Car Wash (1976) and The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976). Burton was the first African American inducted into the International Sound Technicians union. Wolper also succeeded in signing Gilbert Moses to direct three episodes; Moses had cofounded the Free Southern Theater and directed the black gangster film Willie Dynamite (1974).

Still, much of the editorial power concerning character, script, and story was held by white personnel. It was William Blinn who adapted Haley’s writing into a continuity script that was then used to write individual episodes. Blinn had received an Emmy for writing ABC’s integrationist sports drama Brian’s Song (1971). Stan Margulies, who had produced I Will Fight No More Forever, served as head producer. Veteran television director David Greene set the visual tone and pace of the miniseries by directing the first episode. As one of three directors for Rich Man, Poor Man, Greene was familiar with the high production values of long-form commercial television. The prolific record producer, musician, and soundtrack specialist Quincy Jones was hired for the score, but ended up being replaced by Gerald Fried due to Jones’s frustration with the rigid temporal and financial constraints of the miniseries format. Casting involved black and white entertainment personalities and artists well known to crossover audiences. These included Richard Roundtree, O.J. Simpson, Maya Angelou, Leslie Uggams, Ed Asner, Chuck Connors, and Carolyn Jones.

Roots took on a subject seldom seen on television. The Afrocentric narrative of American history did not shy away from the human suffering engendered by the institution of slavery. The miniseries begins with the birth of Kunta Kinte in the West African village of Juffure in 1750, his capture in 1767 by white slavers, and his transport on the Lord Ligonier to America. It follows the selling of Kinte at a slave auction in Annapolis, Maryland, to John Reynolds (Lorne Greene), who owns a nearby Virginia plantation. Kinte’s three failed escapes result in the amputation of half of his right foot. Kinte eventually marries Bell (Madge Sinclair), a house slave who helps him recover, and the two have a daughter named Kizzy (Uggams). The narrative next tracks the separation of the family. After assisting a young slave named Noah (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) in an escape attempt, Kizzy is sold to a North Carolina plantation as punishment. She is raped upon arrival by her new master, Tom Moore (Connors), and gives birth to “Chicken” George (Ben Vereen). Chicken George becomes a prominent cockfighter, but is sold to an Englishman, Eric Russell (Ian McShane), to repay his master’s debt. Chicken George eventually returns to the plantation, but has to relocate because of a law preventing free black men from staying in the state for longer than sixty days. His son Tom (Georg Standford Brown) participates in the Civil War, attending to the Confederate cavalry horses, and is severely abused. Contemporaneously, his family befriends and provides for a poor white couple from South Carolina, George and Martha Johnson (Brad Davis and Lane Binkley), who are looking for food and shelter. In the early years of Reconstruction Tom and his family are continuously harassed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Tom contemplates whether they should move or become sharecroppers. The miniseries’ conclusion involves a valiant Chicken George returning to defend his family and lead them on a journey to a newly purchased plot of land in Henning, Tennessee.

To be sure, Roots’s popularity stemmed from the ways its story could be interpreted as compelling as well as relatable to a wide range of viewers. Still, its publicity was critical to its success. Over the course of its production, the miniseries stayed in the public spotlight. Haley’s book release, his speech-giving and interviews, along with Wolper’s and ABC’s press reports, production photographs, and print advertisements, sustained considerable buzz.59 Roots was poised to be not just a program enjoyed in the privacy of one’s home, but the subject of discussion in high school classrooms, college campuses, around water coolers in offices, and in neighborhood bars. Newsweek referenced the recent blockbuster phenomenon of theatrically released fiction in its description of Roots’s “Jaws-size publicity.”⁶⁰ Some of the same techniques used to mastermind a new breed of Hollywood mega-hits on the big screen were also applied to Roots. The miniseries used a popular literary property as a springboard, featured a cast of well-known and emerging talent, and was subject to an aggressive, multimedia advertising campaign. Showing the docudrama over consecutive nights made it an extended event instead of a series of isolated broadcasts. What was originally a conservative network decision to mitigate the losses of a possible ratings disaster actually concentrated mass interest. The nightly rather than the weekly broadcast cycle heightened the momentum of the continuous narrative, but still allowed time for conversation to build around each episode. Variety advertised Roots as a “historic television event.”⁶¹

The miniseries received a 44.9 rating and 66 percent audience share, thus captivating the most viewers to date for a single program in television history. Roots was showered with awards, including a record-setting nine Emmys, a City of Los Angeles Proclamation of Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. Colleges assigned credit for watching the miniseries, and study guides were made available for primary and secondary schools.⁶² Sales of Haley’s book skyrocketed in the aftermath of the broadcast. Vernon Jarrett of the Chicago Tribune wrote that the “shocking truths” of the African American slave experience dramatized for viewers would “replace the old, beguiling, myth-filled half-truths about slavery that have been perpetuated in scholarly works and textbooks as well as in novels and movies such as Gone with the Wind.” The cover of the trade publication Broadcasting proclaimed Roots “the biggest event in television history.” The Washington Post’s Sander Vanocur observed, “We have read about slavery. But we have never seen it.” Donald K. Richardson of the New Journal and Guide noted, “[Roots] presented a realistic portrayal of African culture and served in its way, to dispel the notion that black Americans are void of heritage, language, and religion.”⁶³

Roots provided a tent pole around which the country could come together and affirm a national identity built, on the micro level, around the family, and on the macro level, around a narrative of national progress. In designating the week of January 23, 1977, “Roots Week,” Mayor Bradley proclaimed, “In telling the story of [Haley’s] family’s heritage, he has told the story of all Americans.”⁶⁴ The miniseries was designed to appeal to Americans across racial lines. The full title of Haley’s book was Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Tellingly, to emphasize the notion that the familial struggle resulted in achievement, the title of the miniseries was changed to Roots: The Triumph of an American Family. Roots “is primarily a story that deals with a family,” opined ABC vice president Brandon Stoddard, “a very human story.”65 Newsweek asserted that “in many homes the program was an intimate family ritual, attended by serious discussion or emotional outpourings.”⁶⁶ Haley said that “when you start talking about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth. We all have it; it’s a great equalizer.”⁶⁷ In a cover story, Time cited the appeal to the concept of family as a major reason “Why Roots Hit Home” with so many Americans.68 Viewers witness the family’s oppression as field hands and day laborers, their friendships and love interests, their unwavering support of one another, and their shared investment in drawing on their past for strength. In addition, the presence of sympathetic white characters and familiar crossover stars strategically obviated moral color casting and broadened the series’ appeal.

FIGURE 21: Cover, Time, February 14, 1977. © 1977 Time Inc., all rights reserved, reproduction in any manner in any language in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. TIME and the TIME logo are registered trademarks of Time Inc. used under license.

On a macro level, Roots portrayed American history as a narrative of progress that begins with the brutality of slavery, but ultimately leads to freedom, integration, and class mobility. The opening episodes feature Kinte spending his adolescent years in chains on a plantation. The later episodes, however, show the family not only surviving, but enjoying a series of accomplishments. Chicken George earns his freedom, and his son becomes a skilled blacksmith. The last episode depicts Kinte’s descendants embarking on a wagon train migration westward from North Carolina to Tennessee. With Fried’s buoyant score accompanying their journey into a lush green field, they stop atop a bluff and look out onto the land Chicken George has purchased. George gives a speech that recounts his family’s genealogy and models the oral process of passing down the heritage from generation to generation. The final embrace is one of core kin, but also a larger, integrated collectivity. White compatriots and coworkers George and Martha Johnson eagerly make the journey with Chicken George’s family, driven by feelings of solidarity and friendship as well as a desire for economic opportunity. George’s speech, in some ways answering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, serves as an optimistic end to the story. Concluding the miniseries on such a note further amplifies the sense of triumph. This ending resonated with the collective desire at the end of the bicentennial—less than two weeks after president Jimmy Carter’s inauguration—to conceive of racial strife as a problem that had been solved.

Although Roots’s narrative and docudramatic form made it appeal to crossover audiences, these factors were also cause for intense criticism. Some intellectuals, community groups, and concerned citizens rebuked the docudrama’s liberal idealism, Cold War nationalism, narrow focus, and sacrificing of strict fidelity to archival sources for the sake of entertaining storytelling. These reviews rhymed with criticism that Wolper’s past programs had recently received. In writing about his American Heritage specials, the prominent television critic Horace Newcomb described them as more pageantry than inquiry, and attacked the programs’ lack of depth.⁶⁹ On the subject of Sandburg’s Lincoln, historian Martin Duberman wrote that the choice to show Lincoln as a unifier and compromiser diverted attention from understanding his position on slavery and the racial politics of the Civil War. Duberman also catalogued some of the episodes’ inaccuracies (for example the extremely exaggerated encounter between Lincoln and his stepmother in Crossing Fox River that mythologizes rather than “humanizes” his image).⁷⁰ Similarly, New York Times critic John O’Connor and New Yorker critic Michael J. Arlen took aim at I Will Fight No More Forever’s revisionist treatment of General Oliver Howard. The program misrepresented him as a conflicted liberal who was forced to act against his conscience, rather than as the provocateur he actually was, a figure who encouraged the fighting with the Nez Perce tribe.71

FIGURE 22: Still from Roots, 1977, 16mm; based on the book by Alex Haley; directed by Martin J. Chomsky, John Erman, David Greene, and Gilbert Moses; produced by Wolper Productions; broadcast on ABC. DVD, Warner Home Video, Burbank, California, 2007.

Criticisms of Roots coalesced around three issues. First, the miniseries foregrounded characters such as Captain Davies and George and Martha Johnson to offset the dichotomy of white cruelty and black victimhood. This plot device was an attempt to downplay the horror of slavery and to make the miniseries more appealing to white viewers. Second, Roots’s clear moral delineation of people and places made for a streamlined narrative but distorted the social geography and the complexity of both African and American societies. The on-location shooting as well as attention to period dress and decor resulted in an environment that appeared manicured and polished. John E. Cooney from the Wall Street Journal wrote that the miniseries’ depiction of Kinte’s African village was “so saccharine it looked like a travelogue for Club Med. The sun always shone. Everyone seemed as serene as transcendental meditation teachers. For the most part, unpleasantness and hardship belonged to other tribes, other places.”⁷² Third, the program’s steady focus on family diverted attention from social movements, communal action, and federal intervention. These forces were crucial to small- and large-scale acts of resistance to slavery and the struggle for emancipation. Local and national government are referenced as abstract entities. The Nat Turner rebellion and the Civil War remain in the background and surface only obliquely, serving as signposts rather than narrative agents driving the plot.

Furthermore, the Roots phenomenon revised the American myth of individual agency into a romanticized conception of the family as a social unit that is always supportive, always joining together against an outside threat. Infusing a multigenerational slave narrative of survival with the “bootstrap” mythology of struggling upward through hard work, frugality, and faith afforded the opportunity for the mass television audience of white spectators to project their own family sagas of immigration onto the screen vision of Haley’s ancestors.73 As the social historian Matthew Jacobson argues, Roots did not galvanize a nationwide interest in African American or minority history so much as family history as such, encouraging all Americans to discover their own “roots.” He thus connects Roots to the ethnic white revival during the 1970s. White Americans of Irish, German, and Italian descent proudly embraced the life stories of their ancestors as narratives of perseverance against oppression. They were at once drawing on the vocabulary, structures of affiliation, and rhetorical claims of the minority liberation movements as well as rebelling against the legal and social advances made by these groups.⁷⁴ Indeed, a cottage industry of guidebooks and instructional research texts were published in the mid-1970s, encouraging people to discover their own family histories. John J. Stewart commented in the 1977 book Finding Your Roots, “By starting out with your mother and father, you embark on a journey to meet your ancestors. As you travel back into your family history, you are bound to experience the pleasure and excitement of discovering warm and fascinating characters whose blood flows in your veins.”⁷⁵ This cultural shift toward the subjective and private reinforced the political shift involving the retrenchment of the welfare state. The rise of corporate interests in planning the nation’s birthday demonstrated the business sector’s increasing presence in public life. So, too, did the Roots phenomenon support the notion that it is individual initiative and self-reliance, independent of government assistance or social movements, that lays the successful path toward upward economic mobility.

In addition to being socially “bound” by the familial frame, Roots also remained temporally bound. Haley appears at the conclusion of the miniseries to explain that he is, in fact, the descendent of Kunta Kinte. He then gives a snapshot summary of the subsequent generations, positioning his own life within the Roots narrative. Still, his cameo does little to help spectators understand the myriad ways people live with and relate to their personal and collective pasts in the present. Roots revealed how far racial tolerance had come, and proved that it was no longer possible for the film and television industries to simply ignore the country’s diverse population and historical traumas. At the same time, Roots exposed the limits of American society’s ability to address pressing socioeconomic inequities. The logic of Roots, its fellow docudramas, and bicentennial culture in general was that race and class tensions were problems of the past that had ultimately been solved or were on a promising path toward reconciliation. The docudrama’s spectacular display of familial unity masked a fractured body politic suffering in plain sight. “Difference” and “diversity” circa the mid- to late 1970s was fashioned into something to be simply celebrated rather than the subject of critical reflection and debate. The bicentennial thus appears as a proleptic cultural event that anticipated the Los Angeles–based 1984 Olympics.

While Hollywood docudrama offered people a thrilling historical encounter that left them feeling safe and secure, activist filmmakers on the fringes or outside of Hollywood found other ways to put the past in dialogue with people’s present lives. Documentarians associated with Visual Communications, the L.A. Rebellion, KCET, and even commercial studios made films about the consequences of selective deindustrialization and corporate development, the community-building power of art, embattled memories of Vietnam, and the everyday struggle to survive with dignity and grace. As the cultural politics of the bicentennial anticipated the country’s conservative turn to the right, activist documentarians continued to create an alternative space for the reevaluation of public history.