Big Think Interview With Nell Irvin Painter | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Nell Irvin Painter

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A conversation with the professor of American history at Princeton.

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Nell Irvin Painter:

Nell Irvin Painter, a leading historian of the United States, is the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University. In addition to her earned doctorate in history from Harvard University, she has received honorary doctorates from Wesleyan, Dartmouth, SUNY-New Paltz, and Yale.

A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nell Painter has also held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Antiquarian Society. She has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. Those presidential addresses have been published in the Journal of American History (“Ralph Waldo Emerson's Saxons” in March 2009) and the Journal of Southern History (“Was Marie White?” February 2008). The City of Boston declared Thursday, 4 October 2007Nell Irvin Painter Day in honor of her Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center in 2006.

A prolific and award-winning scholar, her most recent books are The History of White People (W. W. Norton, 2010, paperback, March 2011),Creating Black Americans (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Southern History Across the Color Line (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). A second edition of Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 and a Korean translation of Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbolappeared in 2008. Her other books are also still in print. For a complete list of her book and article publications and other honors and activities, please consult the CV on this website.

As a public intellectual, Professor Painter is frequently called upon for lectures and interviews on television and film. In January 2008 she appeared live for a three-hour “In Depth” program on C-SPAN Book TV. To see the program on the internet, go to the web page for “In Depth.”She has also appeared on Bill Moyers’s “Progressive America.” New Jersey Network’s “State of the Arts” documented her work as both a scholar and an art student.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Nell Irvin Painter: Okay, Nell Irvin Painter and I have tworntitles. One is Edwards Professorrnof American History Emerita, Princeton University, and the other is lowlyrngraduate student.

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Question: After so manyrnhistories of nonwhite people by whites, does your book seek to correct thernimbalance?

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Nell Irvin Painter: It’s not an attempt to correct anrnimbalance, but I think it may function that way. For me it was an answering of questions. I started with a question I couldn’trnanswer. Why are white peoplerncalled Caucasian? You knowrnwhy? So that was where I startedrnasking questions and it went from one thing to another.

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Question: Where and whenrndid the concept of “whiteness” originate?

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Nell Irvin Painter: Yes, yes. Yeah, there are two ways of talking about it. one is just to notice that there isrnsome people who are kind of light skinned and other people who are kind ofrnbrownish and other people who are kind of darkish, so people notice that yournknow immediately, but since there wasn’t a lot of motion around from one’s townrnor one’s village that didn’t come up very much, so somebody like Herodotus forrninstance, who did travel, he could say that for instance the Scythians, whornmade quivers out of the arms, the skinned arms of the people they vanquished,rnthat man’s skin is very showy and white, so it was clear that people were lightrnskinned, but to make it into something called a race or a variety, and then tornendow that with certain characteristics, racial temperament for instance, thatrnlatter kind of way of dealing with race, that’s an invention of the Enlightenmentrnof the eighteenth century.

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Question: How didrnEnlightenment-era notions of race develop?

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Nell Irvin Painter: Sure. Well when we think of science, science is a truth that isrntrue no matter what, no matter when and for all time and science as the kind ofrngospel truth replaces the gospel, which was religion.