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History is written by lions. But it's also recorded by lambs.In order to understand American history, we need to look at the events of the past as more prismatic than the narrative given to us in high school textbooks.Including different voices can paint a more full and vibrant portrait of America. Which is why more walks of American life can and should be storytellers.

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ELIZABETH ALEXANDER:

Elizabeth Alexander – poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, and arts activist – is president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation's largest funder in arts and culture, and humanities in higher education.Dr. Alexander has held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Columbia University, and Yale University, where she taught for 15 years and chaired the African American Studies Department.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Elizabeth Alexander: America is a diasporic country. America is a country, you know, we start with native people in this land and then people were brought here sometimes involuntarily, sometimes voluntarily but in diaspora from other parts of the globe. So, of course, there's the African diaspora largely brought here involuntary. There are people who come in diasporas from Europe under different sets of circumstances, from Asia and different sets of circumstances in continuing waves throughout American history, uniquely American. So I think that what is amazing about this place is that it has always received people who are scattered from other places and then made a mix that is uniquely its own.

I think that in thinking about the commonalities of let's call them immigrant or transplanted or the people who in various waves come from elsewhere to make America. What's really important is while we can sometimes see renewal and rebuilding I think that those stories have very, very distinct particularities and it's important for us not to flatten them. The slave experience, the experience of coming north in the great migration is very different from coming here from the Holocaust, coming here from the potato famine, coming here from other kinds of international either crises or seeing the United States as many have as a land of opportunity. These are very, very distinct stories. So I don't mean to say that I don't think they have any common denominator but I think that they are more richly understood in their particularity.

Well I think that what is important about memory shaping our sense of a legacy is that how memories are transmitted, how stories are told has everything to do with what we remember. So that's why I think the work is really so important of which books are taught, which projects are funded, who gets the mic, how do we even have a chance to record and then evaluate what a wide range of American stories are so we can understand who we really are. I'm a part of a school of thought in African American studies and sort of revisionist histories that sort of say okay, well here's one timeline but actually look at all of these other stories that were not included on this timeline. You know the wonderful saying the lions are the victors in history because the lions write history. And when the lions no longer write history we'll have a different history. So if you think about how much history has been told by people with power and cultural resources, more male than not, more white than not, more monied than not, more elite institution affiliated than not. How can we understand that that's not all the human beings, right. That's not all the human beings. So I've always been a professor who goes back at one timeline and says but look at this and this and this and this. All of these conversations that were happening simultaneously.

And by the way when you do that with culture very often these poets, for example, who were not placed on a narrow conical timeline together in their time were actually very much in interaction with each other. So I think that we actually need to do the restorative work to remember that human begins living in proximity to each other are not always unaware of each other in the way that history sometimes has written it.

Throughout my career I have been working to expand notions of where value, cultural value, artistic value resides. When I was more engrossed in literary study and particularly African American literary study and women's studies, gender studies what we were always trying to do was recent...

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