Grace Mallon: Hello and welcome to Convention's a podcast about the history of constitutions brought to you by the Quill Project at Pembroke College, Oxford.
My name is Grace Malen and I'll be your host in this episode.
I'm joined by two researchers who are deeply involved with the project's digital modelling of the American Federal Constitution,
Kiana McCalister and Erika Krofft, a student at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
They are part of the team at the university's Centre for Constitutional Studies investigating the negotiation of the 13th,
14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which are known collectively as the reconstruction amendments.
In this episode, we discuss what it's like to work for the project,
why it's important to understand the origins of the reconstruction amendments and what this original
research can tell us about these brief but utterly transformative items of American constitutional law.
Welcome, Kiana and Erica. Erica Croft: Hi, Grace. Thanks for having us.
Kiana McAllister: Hello, thank you for having us. Grace Mallon: It's terrific to have you here.
I'm sorry that your fellow team member, Mizuki, can't be with us today, but I'm really excited to have you on the podcast.
So my first question for pretty much everyone on the podcast is,
is how did you get involved with whatever it is that I happened to be interviewing you about?
I'm so what I'm really interested is,
is why did you want to come and work for the Quill Project and how particularly did you get involved with the reconstruction project?
Kiana McAllister: So I was first introduced to Quill and a study abroad programme at Oxford with Dr Nicholas Cole.
At the time, him and his team were working on the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
And so that's really when I was first introduced to Quill and just the unique perspective that the Quill platform can give to to history.
And so I started working for the Centre for Constitutional Studies just a couple of
months after that study abroad programme and quickly became involved with Quill.
More from a researcher perspective, a user perspective, looking at sovereignty and federalism, using the platform to do that kind of research.
And then I switched over to being a researcher for Quill and modelling projects within the platform,
and I was immediately drawn to the reconstruction amendments and just the significant history of them.
So that's how I became involved in Quill.
Erica Croft: I actually ended up working on it by coincidence,
sort of I just I really wanted a campus job where I could work with records and study history and politics.
Yeah. So I was looking for a good job, basically. So I sort of found myself working on it.
But how I found myself working on it for a couple of years and sort of investing a lot
of my time and care into it really is because at the Centre for Constitutional Studies,
they let us sort of choose what direction we wanted to go in. And the materials for reconstruction just just captivated me.
Emancipation to just this area of of American history really became my life.
And it ate me up. Grace Mallon: Those are both really interesting answers and in a funny way,
I suppose my story of getting into Quill is sort of a mixture of both of those two stories.
I also fell into it kind of by accident by getting to know Nicholas Cole,
who was one of my tutors when I was doing my undergraduate degree here at Oxford.
But but I was also essentially looking for employment after I graduated.
And he happened to have this you know, he was starting this digital project and said,
we don't know whether it's going to work, but, you know, come along and have a go at doing some data entry for us.
And that led to sort of reading the records of the federal convention and getting invested in those texts and getting invested in that historiography.
And that was how how I got interested in it. So I think it's sort of an astonishing example.
I think a lot of people who are setting up digital humanities projects talk about wanting to get undergraduates involved.
And I think this is a really amazing example of how that can actually work and the skills that you can learn along the
way and the way it can help you to become a real life historical researcher at a very high level by getting to work,
by being trusted to work with these texts,
which is something that I think is amazing about what Quill and the Constitutional Study Centre are managing to do together.
So my next question sort of off the back of that is that, um.
History is going in a lot of obviously history as a discipline encompasses all kinds of different areas of study,
and this pluralism is really important and good. I think as a political historian, a historian of institutions,
I sometimes feel like that area of the discipline is undervalued or is is being
left behind or is treated as as kind of a backwards or a conservative project.
And I wanted to know how you as as students felt about that designation and whether you feel that actually people in general,
regardless of their sort of political affiliation or political interests, should be interested in the history of constitutions and institutions.
Kiana McAllister: So I would just first like to say that I I am well aware that constitutionalism
has kind of that label of conservative or for more conservative ideologies,
but it's interesting, especially with the reconstruction amendments we've been working with, to see that this whole idea of liberal and conservative,
you know, how the various ideologies use the Constitution is not a new thing.
I mean, we're having the very same debates today as we're being had, you know, during the development of the reconstruction amendments.
And so I think that there is a lot of value.
I think that for liberals today, there's still a lot that can be found looking at constitutional history because,
you know, people with those very same ideas were pushing similar things one hundred, two hundred years ago.
So I don't think much has changed. And I think that, you know, that old adage of, you know, history.
So you don't repeat it, you know, kind of it's it's an adage for a reason.
Erica Croft: You know, and so far as the politics of constitutional history, that's kind of an important question to me
like in so far as like how conservative the field can be or can seem, you know, we can even see that reflected in our own project.
For instance, we know that we decided,
like due to limited time and resources that we would put to the side things like Freedmen's Bureau bills and petitions from
black Americans who are petitioning for emancipation and civils for civil rights and freedom and bills and that kind of thing.
And so you sort of see that kind of dynamic reflected in our project.
But at the same time, if history is enquiry into like power and change,
like like it was it was these institutions that developed these constitutional amendments that became quite influential.
So, you know, it's a relevant place to be looking, I think.
And insofar as the conservative character of the field, I think, you know,
constitutional history sort of has the same problem that Western history can have where there's this sort of mysticism, there's this exceptionalism.
And we went into this project intentionally resisting that.
Grace Mallon: I think those are really important points from both of you.
And I want to come back to that question that Erica just raised of what kinds of documents you choose to include in the project.
And I think that's a really interesting one that I also came across sort of doing the
1787 project is there is a ton of extraneous or we could call it extraneous material,
things like correspondence, things that are happening in Philadelphia, the creation of the Northwest Ordinance, for example.
Right at exactly the same time the constitution is being negotiated.
And how you choose sort of what kind of material goes in, I think is a really important question.
I want to get back to that in a second. But but to sort of go off of that question about about the politics and as you as you've both laid out,
I think that there is real importance to a fresh approach to constitutional history now and not leaving it as a sort of 19th century project.
I wanted to ask I mean, this maybe this is obviously perhaps naturally clear to you as Americans,
but why is it important that we understand the legislative process by which the precise wording of the reconstruction amendments was negotiated?
Kiana McAllister: Well, I think that the precise wording is where you get the controversy right is, I think,
really important for understanding significant Supreme Court cases and decisions that really influence all of our lives here in the US.
Erica Croft: My kind of answer to that would be that this sort of period of U.S. history that we're really dealing with in our project,
it's kind of like 1861 to 1875 about is kind of an extremely revolutionary period.
And so far as our conceptualisation of the application of certain fundamental liberal principles like Liberty,
which is sort of reflected in the development of our constitutional text at this time, and also its interpretation.
And we can kind of see, like Kiona mentioned, that a lot of modern controversies are sort of like ripples in the water that we can still see,
like, if anyone, a really popular film in this last year, like during the Black Lives Matter uprising, like the 13th Amendment film.
I want to say her name is Ava DuVernay. You know, I think that would leave viewers with a lot of questions about, like how that text was developed.
And, you know, our project would be actually a good place to start with that.
And maybe you would discover, like the text coming from the Northwest Ordinance, which you just happened to bring up.
And and if you looked at the debates, maybe you would even learn that how they were,
how nervous really Congress was to even be amending the Constitution, like how sort of the norm, the political norm at that moment really was.
How can we make this amendment that is doing something radical seem traditional?
And so, like, you can really explore these kind of modern controversies in the past.
But what I will say importantly, and this also has to do with like sort of the conservatism of con history as well,
is what our project really doesn't do is it isn't like an original intent function
where you can sort of input your questions about modern jurisprudence and output,
the true meaning of due process.
I don't think that you'll get that from our project, but if you go in it with with questions, you'll come out with insights for sure.
Grace Mallon: You have been making a lot of choices, one of the things the Quill allows you to do, as you've said,
is to make a lot of choices about, you know, obviously at the centre which kinds of projects you want to get involved with.
And then when you're building a digital model of the of the particular convention or the particular legislative process,
it's not just a question, is it, of quote unquote data entry, which is the word that Nicholas often applies to this.
You actually have to do a lot of interesting historical analysis and research to get to this point.
So what I wanted to ask you about now is two things.
First of all, what kinds of archival research have you had to do to supplement the the available records that,
you know, one might be able to sort of Google? And also, how have you chosen what kinds of material you want to include in the model?
Kiana McAllister: I think this is a very long answer to this question, so I'll try to be as brief as possible.
But there's just so much that has gone into the choices that we've made for these projects when we first went into it.
You know, our initial our initial plan was to just find the resolutions attached to the amendments, modelled those and be done with it.
So we thought it would be a really quick. Quick model, and that did not end up being the case as we got into the records,
we found that there were so many propositions and bills that were intertwined with the
draughting of the 14th Amendment that we ended up expanding our scope a little bit.
And as we did that, we found that there was more attached to it.
And so we kind of had to we had to revise our plan.
And so we kind of looked at it like a target. You know, the inner circle would be everything central to those constitutional amendments.
And then as we worked out things that are a little more periphery to that to those central amendments, we made decisions.
OK, is this vital to the understanding of the draughting of these amendments?
If it was, we would keep it. If it wasn't, but was still good for contextual purposes.
We kind of put in our on our maybe list for later, but that's kind of the process we followed as we've encountered new things in the records.
So it started out just looking at the congressional journals and the congressional globe,
which documents the debates and proceedings of each Congress.
And then from there, as we came across bills that seemed relevant, we looked at outside scholarly materials.
So as we researched, you know, Kurt Lasch or Foner, we it gave us a better idea of the types of things that we should be including.
And so some of our our choices and our decisions were based off of that, too.
But we found that as far as records go.
There's not many committee records that are accessible to the public right now,
digitally at least, so that's kind of an issue we've run into with the records.
We found that we needed a lot more committee records than we initially thought, and those just have not been available to us, especially with covid.
So we've hit a couple snags with that, which hopefully will work itself out as things reopen.
But. There's a long answer to your question.
Erica Croft: I just I just I'll just add that, you know,
like like Kiana said when we were sort of hit with this realisation that especially unlike a convention like this was developed just in Congress.
And so the lines between when are they talking about the amendment and when are they talking about
other like maybe supplemental legislation actually became not nearly as clear as I expected it to be.
Sometimes, even just procedurally, the lines became blurred.
And so when we were faced with that, we realised suddenly that everything that we were doing was an active choice to include.
And so then what? Then the question of what is being withheld from the project becomes much more important.
So we spent a lot of time, like Kiona said, with, uh,
with with Curt Lasch and also other legislative histories and just trying to figure out, you know, what the other people see as important.
But then we also, you know, if I could shout anyone out to the Library of Congress website,
the American Memory Project does so much heavy lifting for me.
I spend so much time on that website just reading the record and finding bills that nobody's never, ever heard of.
It's not on Wikipedia anywhere. I was going to say that it was really it was the point where me and Kiana really realised that,
you know, constitutional amendments developed in Congress isn't like a convention.
There aren't solid boundaries. And so everything that we decided to include had to be very intentional.
And conversely, anything that we excluded had, you know, a lot of meaning to it means that we would believe it didn't have a place in the narrative.
Basically, there were some things actually that we did exclude that we wish we wouldn't have.
But that's, you know, limits of resources and write that down, basically.
But, uh, we started we made everything as intentional as possible, really.
And so we sort of were able to construct what do we want Reconstruction era to mean.
And so it is a bit we call it the reconstruction era, but we start in 1861 with the Korwin amendment or 1860,
December actually, and in like 1875 with the Civil Rights Act bit.
But it's because we felt the inclusion of these toward a more holistic and well-rounded
and importantly a non exceptionals history of of the of the of these developments.
Because when we are doing the research of the legislative history, what we found to be like a little bit of a norm was this sort of perception where
sort of white liberal Republicans were standing on this cutting edge of history,
just ever advancing like like like liberty for all, which is sort of true.
But it's also sort of not true, especially if we're looking at that that period between 1860 and 1865 where, you know,
these lawmakers are really grappling with their own white supremacy in the realisation that slavery might not be able to last by material demand,
regardless of how they feel about it.
And they're sort of grappling with the possibility of a biracial society that it seems that they're not quite ready for.
And so you see a lot of bargaining, a lot of denial, a lot of the processes of the stages of grief, frankly.
And so ultimately, we sort of started with the core minimum.
And so that you could ask yourself about emancipation,
how did they get from here to there and why sort of how we sort of how like the intentional selection of materials plays into,
like, the character of our project in sort of the the result is that we wanted to build the collection as well rounded.
That isn't that isn't so flattering as well that you could go for genuine insights about the constitutional text of this period,
but also really just the political terrain itself, I think.
Kiana McAllister: And just to add to Erica's comments, we also found it really important to include failed drafts of but we're working with.
So we kind of found that in the legislative histories we were researching, you know, a lot of it had somewhat of a survivalist bias to it.
And a lot of those failed drafts were overlooked.
And we found quite a lot of value and including those filled drafts and.
Erica Croft: Yeah, no, Kiana is absolutely right, other petty documents that seem rather petty become interestingly important when they are like a funnel,
they'll funnel all of these resolutions and random like, you know,
it just seems like some random senator's opinion and a resolution and other random bills will
get funnelled in a committee and output like significant constitutional text afterwards.
So we found that sort of including all of the spaghetti that they threw on the wall to be as important as possible.
Grace Mallon: I love the idea of them throwing spaghetti at the wall. And I think I think those are those are all really important points.
So I think I think the fact that a lot of these records actually aren't publicly available is so important.
Something that I encounter a lot working on political, constitutional, institutional history is the idea that no, that's all online.
That's all online. And then there's so much I work with state legislative records, which actually isn't available.
Some of it is in online, some of it isn't even in print. Some of it is still in manuscript.
So I think that's that's really striking from Ulyana.
I also think what really strikes me about this whole conversation is the fact that this question of, you know,
including and excluding material, deciding on the chronology of your project, when's it going to start?
When's it going to end is something that a lot of historians won't be dealing with until until the FD essentially.
And and they won't necessarily realise that a documentary edition, which is what you guys are essentially creating,
is something which is based on a set of decisions about about crafting a narrative, essentially.
And what you guys are trying to do is say we're not going to we're not going to craft a narrative which only includes the success,
which has a clear arc towards freedom, but but one that sort of helps to make sense of the fact that, you know,
reconstruction doesn't work in a lot of people's minds or a lot of its gains are
very rapidly reversed during and after the period that you are dealing with.
So I think those are really important and interesting points that you're able to
make actually through those decisions about what kinds of material to include.
So my I have I've sort of three more questions, the first one is,
is how has working at Quill changed the way you think about doing the history of the United States?
Kiana McAllister: I think working on Quill has really changed my perception of history, especially U.S. history,
and that as naive as this sounds, I think I went into it thinking things are more black and white.
So working on Quill has shown me the nuances of our history and that it definitely is not black and white.
But even more than that, I think the biggest thing I've taken away is the negotiated process, right,
that a lot of these are compromises and a lot of these members of Congress during the Reconstruction era came with their ideals, right?
They they had a purpose. They had what they wanted and it did not end up how any of them wanted, you know, and there was a lot of negotiating.
There was a lot of compromise, whether for the good or for the bad.
But I've really appreciated working with Quill and seeing that negotiated side to these founding documents, if you will.
Erica Croft: I think the biggest change in my perception of American history would have to be in so far as how I
see how I see constitutional amendments has basically changed completely and that I used to see them,
that you would think because they're taking up text and discussing it for days and arguing over it and amending it and changing it,
that that it would be everything is very intentional. It's just it's much more chaotic.
I think we have a tendency to assume a sort of a and a lot of these men are educated and smart,
but we assume a sort of a we put them on a pedestal of brilliance often, even when that's sort of implied when we call them framers.
And it's true that they did frame some things. So it's not entirely a lie, of course,
but the extent to which it was an act of really precise engineering that was supposed to have very clear outcomes. For me,
I can't see that as anything more than a fairy tale anymore.
Grace Mallon: More fairy tale of anyone getting what they intended down on the page at the end of this process of negotiation.
I think that's a that's a really that's a really great insight.
And the idea that that all of this text ends up, as Kiana says,
coming out of of compromises of these tiny little changes that are made to individual clauses and words through this process,
I think is a really important it is one of the sort of key insights of of Quill and the idea that,
you know, what a person's political ideology is not necessarily going to give birth to this.
You know, whole and entire text is absolutely essential.
And speaking very quickly about about these these framers.
What was it like encountering their views on the nature of American society and particularly race relations?
How did that make you? How did that make you feel, essentially reading, reading those texts and their attitudes that they carry?
Kiana McAllister: And it was pretty disillusioning for me, honestly.
There were some days that I walked away from reading the records, feeling heavier and discouraged because.
And there's just no doubt that blame racism that is going on at this time and the men that feel that it is their duty to to make known how.
How unintelligent black people were and how they were not able to to vote or didn't have the capacity to contribute to society and government,
and so it was definitely discouraging for me to read that.
Of course, there are a few instances and there are a few members of Congress that time that were not that way, which was refreshing.
But I was just talking to Erica yesterday about this.
But we kind of I currently, you know, there's kind of this idea that like, oh, we can't judge past generations by our current standards.
Right. So, yes, they may have been racist back then, but they didn't know differently.
Kind of, um, you know, that kind of excuse that we give when looking at history.
But it's I've come to really resent that, especially as I've worked on these projects,
because I found that no, they they knew they knew that they were they knew that they were being racist.
It might have been more acceptable back then and more popular, but it.
There were still those who are saying, no, this is this is wrong and it was a choice, and that's become more and more clear to me.
So I hope that that's something that our projects can bring is kind of exposing.
I don't know if that's the right word, but exposing the this idea that they it was a choice for them to be racist.
Erica Croft: I can only add on to that, and that's just that it is extremely depressing.
You want to hold hope in so far as like the real liberals that that are sort of resisting the people who think human beings are property.
But then when you realise that they have white saviour complexes as well and are also white supremacists and,
you know, like, let's emancipate the slaves,
but then let's please export them to Liberia or to Haiti or to Texas or to anywhere but here, because I can't cope with a biracial society.
Grace Mallon: I think there's a I think that's a really significant point that that you've both made about the fact that even the quote unquote,
good guys have have in many ways very unpalatable views from today's perspective.
But but also as as you both say, that the idea that there was a uniform standard of racism at the time of acceptable
racism is simply not true and simply not represented in the records that we have.
So one last question for you. What's next for the Reconstruction Amendments Project?
Where are we? And I'm hopeful that you're going to be able to get back into the archives fairly soon.
You know,
the archives are going to be able to come back to you and then and then sort of when can we get access to this research is my real last question.
Kiana McAllister: So we've completely finished modelling the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments,
so those we are just waiting to can I curate some commentaries and collections to help better navigate those projects?
Right now, I am modelling the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
Erica is modelling the Korwin amendment.
So we're kind of working on opposite ends, just rounding out finishing off that narrative that we're hoping to achieve with these projects.
Like you said, with the archives being closed, it's been hard to get those committee records,
which are really essential to what we're doing, especially the Committee on the Judiciary.
So once those open up, we hope to get those and get them included in the model.
They're not digitalised yet.
So that that will be a really exciting thing that our projects can offer is a digital copy of those records that are currently not available.
So that's kind of what we're looking at next for the reconstruction projects and hopefully they will be available to the public next year.
Grace Mallon: This is absolutely fantastic news. I've really enjoyed talking to you both.
And and, you know, seeing what fantastic work is still being done continues to be done on Quill, that was will be done well into the future.
And I think you've both represented really profoundly how significant this project is.
This Reconstruction Amendments Project is for understanding American constitutionalism,
for understanding American politics and society, not just historically, but also today.
So thank you both so much, Kiana and Erica, for coming on the convention's podcast.
Thank you for listening to conventions, I'm Grace Mallon and I was joined by Kiana McAllister and Erica Croft,
researchers at Utah Valley University's Centre for Constitutional Studies.
This was the last episode of the first season of conventions.
But we'll be back soon with more constitutional history from the United States, the United Kingdom and around the world.