Jeff Burns
Pat Young writes The Reconstruction Era Blog and The Immigrants’ Civil War. He is Special Professor of Immigration Law at Hofstra Law School in New York and he works to provide services and advocacy for immigrants in New York City, Long Island and the Hudson Valley.
1. How and when did you get hooked on history?
Like a lot of older white men, I date my interest back to the Civil War Centennial (1961-1965). Since I was only three when the Centennial started, I must have caught the tail end of it. Over time my interest in history matured and I studied the histories of a number of civil wars, and looked at their aftermaths. I was in-country doing human rights research during one civil war, and my wife’s uncle fought in another, the Spanish Civil War, in the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” I have interviewed thousands of people who fled civil wars. Most of what I learned told me that the sanitized stories of the American Civil War did not match how people experience the trauma of civil conflict.
I also learned that the post-war world in countries torn by civil war is not a time of healing. Often the war continues by other means. I thought that further study of the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era might turn up information that was not accounted for in what I learned as a youngster.
2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?
I am lawyer and all lawyers are involved in the use of history. When we cite precedents, we are using legal history to support our case. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jack Rackove calls this “Law Office History,” but it is important for the lawyer to understand the history of a statute to suggest its correct interpretation to the court.
History has also been important to my life in another way. The immigrants I work with are often the targets of marginalization both because of their race and because of anti-immigrant hatred. Understanding how current concepts of race developed over American history helps me counter implicit bias in modern legislation and law enforcement. Understanding xenophobia from the Know Nothings to modern movements like the Proud Boys helps untangle the arguments of the rhetoriticians of hatred.
3. How does history play a part of your professional life/career?
My lectures on immigration law at Hofstra University are steeped in the history of the law’s development. In its immigration laws, America wears its heart of darkness on its sleeve. As I tell my students, you can’t understand the Chinese Exclusion Act unless you understand the fevered and deadly hatreds aroused against what was, after all, a very small group of immigrants.
I recall several years ago being introduced by one of the leaders of Hofstra University’s history department a “a great historian” and being more thrilled by that than by any other introduction I have had in my life. History is important to me.
4. Why is studying/knowing history important?
Our institutions and laws were developed at specific times in American history. We can’t understand them without knowing the history behind them. If we look, for example, at Alabama’s current constitution we need to know that its adoption was advocated for by the man most responsible for passing it with these words: “The new Constitution eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be — with the Anglo-Saxon race.” Our laws often embed discriminatory intent within legalistic prose. We need to take seriously the invidious discrimination inserted into our laws in the distant past and often still active in the legal system.
5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?
The Civil War and Reconstruction eras. This period gave us three enduring Constitutional Amendments; the 13th ending slavery, the 15th eliminating the color line, and the 14th. That last amendment influences court decisions every day in America. From the citizenship status of children born to immigrants to the right of same-sex couples to marry, the 14th Amendment is a beacon of equality. And it is more than 150 years old!
A lot of people love to study the Revolutionary period, but we are not so concerned today with whether we should be a colony of Britain or not. On the other hand, the issues of 1850 to 1877 are still alive. Racial distinctions, immigration, state v. federal power are all still open questions.
6. How did The Reconstruction Era blog get started?
I already was blogging about immigrants during the Civil War, so I was familiar with the form. I had been posting documents from the Reconstruction Era on a message board and found that they kept getting taken down by the site’s moderators.
I decided that if I was going to invest my limited spare time in researching the period, I needed to have control over whether the materials I developed were displayed. So I started The Reconstruction Era Blog. It quickly gained a following and last year I had more than 85,000 unique visitors from all fifty states and a hundred and fifty countries.
I am particularly happy to note that the blog has a large following in the South. Five of my Top 10 states in terms of visitation are from the former Confederacy. The notion that Southerners won’t read the unvarnished history of Reconstruction is nonsense. Many of my most loyal readers are from Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. For them, this is “local history” and they tell me it helps explain the persistent cleavages where they live.
7. What do you hope readers of The Reconstruction Era blog learn and take away with them?
I hope they gain insight into how we as a country got this way. Racial conflict did not begin in 2020. The Reconstruction Era offers us some frightful examples of the depravity that the doctrine of White Supremacy can lead us to, but it also offers inspiring stories of men and women, black and white, already working towards a world in which progress and diversity are welcome. As Frederick Douglass said in 1867, the “voice of civilization speaks an unmistakable language against the isolation of families, nations and races, and pleads for composite nationality as essential to her triumphs.” We are that “composite nation” formed from many peoples that Douglass dreamed of.
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