Narrators: Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Richard Kehrberg
Interviewer: Skye Doney
Date: 22 October 2024
Format: Audio
Duration: 1 hour, 26 minutes, 14 seconds
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg Biography:
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg grew up in the suburbs of Denver, before going off to Colorado College for her undergraduate education. She earned a bachelor’s degree in 1985. She then pursued graduate study in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she earned an MA in 1986 and a PhD in 1991, working with Allan G. Bogue. She taught at Illinois State University for nine years before moving to Iowa State University in 2000, where she currently serves as Distinguished Professor of History. She is a Fellow of the Agricultural History Society and a recipient of the society’s James C. Giesen Award for Excellence in Teaching Rural and Agricultural History, as well as the Gladys Baker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Agricultural History. She is the author or editor of seven books. Her most recent book, When a Dream Dies: Agriculture, Iowa, and the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, won the Benjamin F. Schambaugh Prize for the most significant book in Iowa history and the Dorothy Hubbard Schwieder Award for Excellence in Historical Research.
Richard Kehrberg Biography:
Richard Kehrberg grew up in Menomonie, Wisconsin, before earning a BA in History at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He followed this with graduate study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning his MA in 1986. He continued with graduate study in American Military History, with Edward M. Coffman. One of his enduring memories of his time in Madison is playing intramural basketball with a graduate student team called ‘Historians Without Jobs.” Despite having several tall players, including Rick, who is 6’2″, the team won only one game. (The softball team did better.) He began lecturing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has also taught at Illinois State and Iowa State University. In addition to teaching U.S. and world military history, he has taught all levels of U.S. history, including the full U.S. History Survey and courses covering topics up to and including the Civil War. He is currently Assistant Teaching Professor of History at Iowa State University, where he regularly teaches colonial and revolutionary history.
Transcript:
00:00:01
Skye Doney: Okay. Recording is underway. You can still hear me?
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg: Yes, we can hear you.
Doney: This is Tuesday, the 22nd of October, 2024. This is Skye Doney with the George Mosse program, conducting an oral history for the Mosse Oral History Project. I’m going to ask both Rick and Pam to briefly introduce themselves before we launch into our questions.
00:00:33
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg: All right. I’m Pam Riney-Kehrberg. I am a distinguished professor of history at Iowa State University.
Richard Kehrberg: I’m Richard Kehrberg, I’m an assistant teaching professor at Iowa State.
Doney: Thank you both. I thought we would just start with some pretty basic background about where you were born. What was the milieu like you grew up in? Anything specific from your childhood that you think influenced your decision to pursue history and to pursue advanced studies?
00:01:07
Riney-Kehrberg: Well, I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and my parents spent a little while moving around while I was small. But I grew up in Littleton, Colorado, and I think probably what influenced the most to be a historian were two things. One was that my parents kept giving me books, and a lot of what they gave me was historical fiction, and I really enjoyed that. And then also what influenced me was sitting around my grandparents’ table at Thanksgiving and Christmas, because the whole family were great storytellers, and just sitting there with them and listening to what it was like when they were growing up was a marvelous introduction to the whole idea of history.
Kehrberg: I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but grew up in a smallish town, Menomonie, Wisconsin, about 70 miles east-northeast of Saint Paul, Minnesota. And pretty typical childhood for that day and age, I guess. And I, one of the things that got me interested in history―or sustained my interest in history―is that it was kind of a perennial topic of conversation in our home. My father was a mechanical engineer by trade, but he had an interest in history, as did my mother. And so on those rare occasions when we did go on vacation, it usually included visits to historical sites and things of that sort. Uh, one of the things that was probably a great influence is my grandparents, who lived in northwest Iowa, had a set of books called “The Nations of the World” that came out in the 1890s, and it was devoted to the history of the various nations of the world. And that was one of the things I always read when we went to visit them. And it was a big influence on my decision to study history as an undergraduate and then go on to graduate school.
00:03:20
Doney: So, you both had an early interest in history. That’s fascinating. And you share a connection with being influenced by by your grandparents and the stories of home. Riney-Kehrberg: Very much so. Kehrberg: Yes. Doney: Where did you both complete your undergraduate degrees? Did you know right away that you would like to major in history?
No. I went to Colorado College as an undergraduate. I thought I was pre-med, and I was I was just sure I was going to be a physician. And then I took analytical chemistry and that convinced me otherwise. Never been so miserable in my life. And what I did was I, I dropped a class, dropped a calculus class, and then begged a history professor to let me into her class. And her name was Susan Ashley. She still teaches. Well, I guess she’s retired from Colorado College now. And I said, please, please, please let me into your class. And she said, well, you know, I never let people in late. They never do a good job. And I said, please, I’ll try hard, I will, I promise. And she let me in and I got an A-minus. And I never looked back. I didn’t know then that I wanted to be a professor, but I knew that I liked history, that it was a whole lot more rewarding than the science classes I was taking. And so, I figured it out and became a history major.
00:05:04
Kehrberg: I started as a history major and stayed as a history major. I did my undergraduate work at UW Eau Claire. Uh, so not that far from home. And I knew from the beginning that is what I wanted to do. I actually had my German teacher in high school when I was in tenth grade, just took me aside after class one day, we were cleaning up after an exercise we had been doing. Each of us had been given a German state, and we were supposed to give a little piece on the German state, and I’d done mine on the Rhineland Pfalz, and she pulled me aside and said that I’d done, I’d done a nice job. And she thought that I was probably going to end up as a historian. Uh, so she probably knew better than I did at that point. But yeah, it was something I was always interested in, and I was I knew from the beginning that’s what I wanted to do when I got to the university, uh, we didn’t have advanced placement classes at my high school. Menominee is home to UW-Stout, uh, another one of the schools in the Wisconsin system. And so, for doing AP classes, we would just enroll at Stout as special students. And so, my first history class was when I was 16 years old. I took a 300 level class in English history and had a great time with it. And so I knew that’s what I wanted to do.
00:06:27
Riney-Kehrberg: Oh, and I feel like I have to mention that in spite of the fact that I graduated from high school not knowing I was going to do this. I had marvelous high school history teachers. Verna Wilborn and Dalton Holsteen were absolutely amazing high school history teachers who cared about writing, who cared about teaching us to think. And even though I didn’t think I was going to be a historian, I’d had really good preparation and really good role models.
Doney: When did you two meet?
Riney-Kehrberg: Well.
Kehrberg: We met in graduate school. The first time we actually met was at a graduate school graduate student party over the Labor Day weekend. The last, kind of the last big bash before the beginning of the semester.
Riney-Kehrberg: And then we ended up in offices across the hall from each other in the Humanities building, and we ended up in one seminar together. Yeah.
Kehrberg: Tom McCormick’s (1933-2020) American foreign relations.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yep. And one day we decided to have lunch by the lake together. And. End of story, you know.
Kehrberg: And that’s how.
Riney-Kehrberg: We ended up here. And that’s how we ended up here. We just sort of, you know, immediately clicked more or less. So. Yeah.
Doney: Okay. So we have to take a step back, I guess.
Riney-Kehrberg: And.
Doney: Let’s just talk about how did you how did you come to study at UW-Madison? What was that decision process?
00:08:20
Kehrberg: It’s for me. It was based on in-state tuition. Doney: Okay. That was a big part of it. Uh, and also when I went to originally went to graduate school, I was interested in museum studies and archives work and things like that. And the catalog said they had all of those things. And when I got there, they did have archives, but it was under the library school and the museum studies portion of the program, although it was prominently featured in the catalog, had basically withered away and no one was even sure who was in charge of it, which was very reassuring. As a new graduate student that I came here to do this and now you’re telling me it doesn’t exist? Of course, this was all pre-internet, and so it was all either through writing actual physical letters to people or looking at print catalogs. And so, it’s not I imagine it’s not quite as responsive as it might be today, where they can just with a press of a button, eliminate something. But, but yeah, that’s how I ended up at Madison was I was interested in those things. It was in state and they let me in. But it was also the only graduate program I applied to. So, I don’t know how much of a test that was.
Riney-Kehrberg: And when I was an undergrad, my undergrad advisor was a man named Tom K. Barton (1934-1997). And, TK had gone to the University of Wisconsin for graduate school. He’d worked with both Bill Hesseltine (1902-1963) and Merle Curti (1897-1996), and when he and I started talking about graduate school, we knew that the University of Wisconsin had a really good reputation. And so I made some applications. Wisconsin was one of the two I got into, and it was the one I didn’t get as a beginning MA student I didn’t get any aid, but it was the one that I thought I could afford. And so I packed my bags, sight unseen in Colorado and flew off to Madison. I had I had never, ever, ever been there before. It was a huge shock. But it was one of those things where if I could have turned around and gone back and gone home without anybody, without embarrassing myself, I would have done it. But I was sure I was going to embarrass myself if I dropped out before I started. And so, I hung in there, and by the time I was two weeks in, it was okay. But yeah, it was, it was not it was not an informed choice in the way that choices are informed these days. It was more like my advisor said I should go there. And so I went.
Doney: How was the grad program organized? Did you, when you applied? What I mean is, did you apply to work with, to be admitted to a specific professor’s seminar or it had changed? Okay.
00:11:22
Riney-Kehrberg: No, back then, if you were an MA student, you were either in US history, women’s history, European history, or what they called then non-Western history. And so you applied to be a sort of in a general area. I was part of the US history cohort. Uh, but you just applied and there really wasn’t any concern about who you would work with unless you were writing a master’s thesis, which they did not encourage in those days. They encouraged you just to do three semesters of classes, and then they made a decision about whether you could go on or not. And at that point, you began being more specific about who you wanted to work with. But it wasn’t. It was a, it was a huge program. There were 300 graduate students in history when we were there, and I came in with a cohort of 25 Americanists. So it was a much bigger program, very loose. It was sort of sink or swim.
Kehrberg: Oh yes, at at the MA level. Well, even later. But the MA level you didn’t really have with a handful of exceptions, you didn’t have a faculty member who was kind of your champion who would look out for your interests. You were on your own. Um, but in some ways, I think that was that was actually better. It forced us to rely on each other. And so you got to know your fellow graduate students very well, especially those who were in your cohort. I mean, it was divided between US history, US history, European history, and then everybody else. Um, and so you got to know the people in your cohort really well, and usually through them you got to know 2 or 3 people and the others and, and but it was a very, your life was centered on your fellow graduate students, not centered on a particular faculty member.
Doney: So go ahead.
Riney-Kehrberg: Really tight. I mean, I when I think about graduate school, most of the time I think about, you know, the other graduate students rather than necessarily thinking about professors.
Doney: Uh, this this next question then, might be frustrating. I was going to say, did you both then, uh, meet and decide on your major, professor, through those first three semesters of seminars or?
00:14:04
Kehrberg: Yeah, essentially. Um, I ended up working with Edward M. Coffman (1929-2020) Mack Coffman, who was the military historian. Uh, and it was basically, you spent that first year just figuring out who was there. You know, once again, because we didn’t have the internet, unless you went to the library and went through the card catalog, you didn’t even know what kind of things they published. And so for that first three semesters, it really was kind of a learning experience, not just learning the system, but also learning who’s there, what they did. Uh, talking to some of the older graduate students, you know, what faculty member had a reputation for being very helpful. Which ones were frustrating to deal with? You know, who you should still steer clear of? Um, all of those things. Things they don’t put on the internet, usually.
Doney: Sure. Yeah. Those things that can only be learned through. Through experience. Yes.
Riney-Kehrberg: And I was an Al Bogue [Allan Bogue, 1921-2016] student. Yeah. And he was gone. He was on leave when I arrived. I don’t remember exactly when he came back. But I had heard good things about him. I knew that his graduate students were legion, and that they all seemed to have really good relationships with him. And so, I made a point of getting to know him. You know, when he got back, I did, um. Well, there were 5 or 6 of us who did an independent study with him on the American West, and by the time that was done, I knew that I wanted to work with him. Just because he was so concerned with his students and so easy going you know, I wouldn’t not exactly easy to work with, but you definitely knew what you were getting into. You know? He was he was going to be tough. But as long as you did your job, he was he was going to be a good, supportive mentor.
Doney: So you’re both Americanists. How did it come about that you came to know George Mosse and to live at 36 Glenway?
Riney-Kehrberg: We didn’t know George Mosse.
Kehrberg: We kind of knew him by sight. Okay. George was a unique individual.
Doney: Sure.
00:16:37
Kehrberg: Between the very thick glasses. And he always. He liked to wear a black beret on campus in the fall and in the winter. And so, he was he was a distinct figure on campus. So we knew who he was in that sense. But then we were basically recruited by one of the department secretaries. Yeah. Because George traditionally had a married graduate student couple, uh, would live with him, would live in the basement of the house on Glenway Street. And I think it was Judy Cochran. Judy Cochran who approached us and said, the people who are living there now are moving on. And would you be interested in doing this? And, I mean, we didn’t know it at that time. Apparently, it was kind of jokingly referred to as the Mosse Housing Fellowship. But we went out. We met him. He, you know, we went out to his house and met him, and he got to see if we were the type of people he would like living there. And we got a little bit of the lay of the land and what duties would be required of us.
Riney-Kehrberg: And but, you know, it was Judy who chose us. You know, she was the, the graduate secretary. She knew us all really well. She knew we’d gotten you had to be married. She knew we’d gotten married. And so, um, there were not that many married graduate students at that point. Yeah. And so, you know, she she liked us. We spend a lot of time talking to Judy. So that was how we ended. We were, we were planning on moving into married student housing at that point to save money. And here comes this opportunity. And it just looked like a better deal. So, we took it.
Doney: There was no rent. Is that right?
Riney-Kehrberg: Oh no, no, no, no, no.
Doney: What, what were the what were the duties?
Riney-Kehrberg: Well, the way it worked was that, um, when he was in the country, which was about half the year.
00:18:42
Kehrberg: It’s it was like working for the Queen of England in some ways, in the sense that at some times he’s in residence and the flag is flying above the house, and other times we’re just caretakers. Yep. Um, and we we were fortunate, I suppose, in a way that we were there right when he retired. I mean, I think we were, we were there for four years and he worked his last year, and then we had three years where he was in retirement, and he was gone six months of the year. Yep. Um, after he retired, because he had this kind of set program, he would go to Cornell in the fall, teach a class at Cornell, he would come back for Christmas. He would then go to Cambridge. From Cambridge he would go to Hebrew University in Jerusalem and he’d be back sometime in early to mid-June. And for us, it was terrific because when he was gone, we had full run of the house and so we’d move. We had had one of those wonderful old desktop computers that’s the size of a dorm fridge, and we would move that up to his study when he’d gone off to England. And, you know, so we wrote a lot of our graduate work was written in his study. And he had a when we first moved with him, he had an elderly cat named Sunshine. And so part of the job, too, is to take not only to take care of George, but to take care of Sunshine.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yes, yes. And when he was in residence, he paid for all the utilities. He paid for half the groceries. There was a cleaning lady who came in. And then when he was out of the country, we had to pay the utilities, which were sometimes astronomical, on that very, very badly built house. And then um, he also continued to pay to bring the housekeeper every other week. So we had the only time in our life we’ve had a maid. And then when he was gone, we had the use of his car. We also had the use of his parking pass, which was the parking spot was under Helen C. White, which was the most expensive parking spot on campus. No way we could have afforded it. Yeah. Um, and we would.
Kehrberg: We would get strange looks from faculty members who were parking their cars, and we, you know, get out of our car, and they look at us like, what are they doing here? Yeah. But that was only when he was actively teaching. When he became emeritus, he was there used to be a parking lot behind. I think it’s where the Business School is built now. There used to be a Walgreens Greens on, uh, is that not Johnson?
Doney: Park and University? Yeah.
00:21:24
Kehrberg: Yeah. Um, and that all. There was a big university parking lot behind that where he parked. So, it was still close to Humanities. Yeah. Uh, but you didn’t have the nice, you know, you’re under the building, so you’re out of the weather thing. But, you know, as a graduate student, it was still, I mean, most graduate students couldn’t afford to park on campus. Yeah. So it was, it was surreal, in a way. Because you’re in graduate school, all of your friends are struggling. And here you are living in a house with access to a car. I mean, we had a one of the terms of living there is we had to have a car. So we actually bought a car before we started working for him, but suddenly it’s except for one period. It’s the only time in our lives that we’ve had two cars in a sense, because he insisted, you must drive my car. It has to be driven. And he would. I don’t know why he was so worried that it had to be driven every week. And so. And he liked little fast cars. And so he had a Honda Civic GTI, which was it was at that time it was a favorite for the street racers in California. And here’s this 70 year old university professor with a rice rocket.
Riney-Kehrberg: And, and he drove it like it was a rocket. Oh, yeah. He was a very bad, very fast driver. Yeah. Very bad.
Kehrberg: Yeah. Michael Berkowitz is the person to talk about that. We only got to drive with him as passengers in Madison. Michael’s driven with him in Israel, and he said, in Israel, this man is a menace, but they’re all menaces there. So, it works out because we kept saying he drives like a European. And Michael was like, no, no, no, no, no, no it’s not, it’s not. He drives like an Israeli. But yeah, it was, uh, financially. It was it was a tremendous boon for us. And just living with George was an interesting insight, too, because he he loved to gossip. And so, he would tell you the gossip from 40 years ago about Merle Curti and Fred Harvey Harrington (1912-1995) and all of these people. And it was one of I, you know, one of our main sources of information on the history of the department, which was, you know, as historians, it’s a lot of fun. Although, Pam well, we would prepare dinner for him largely. Pam would prepare dinner for him, and she did really well at that because he was George was diabetic, but Pam’s dad had been diabetic, so she knew the whole drill. But then we would have, let’s just say, wide ranging discussions at the dinner table because he’d expect us to eat with him.
00:24:15
Riney-Kehrberg: Yep. It was. It was a family situation. It was like we were his family. And every night he was in residence, we sat down and had dinner together and we might be there for an hour. We might be there for two hours. It was very much a family experience.
Kehrberg: Well, even the cat had a chair at the dinner table, Sunshine had his own seat at the dinner table. And one of the perennial topics of conversation was, does the cat think? And what is the cat thinking?
Riney-Kehrberg: If he does think, what does he think?
Kehrberg: Yes, that was one of George’s favorite topics.
Riney-Kehrberg: For dinner conversations.
Kehrberg: So yeah, we could go. We watched the news before dinner. Um, he encouraged. Pam would be cooking, and he encouraged me to come up and sit with him and watch the news. And so, we might talk about current events. Um, but then we would transition into what is the cat thinking? Yeah, we’d go from Reaganomics to what is the cat thinking?
Riney-Kehrberg: Well, I was just thinking when when you were talking about sitting and watching the news with him, we were sitting with him watching the news when the Berlin Wall fell.
Doney: Oh, wow.
Riney-Kehrberg: And he was.
Kehrberg: And when the Gulf War started and.
Riney-Kehrberg: When the Gulf War started, and he was. And we were all just flabbergasted watching the Berlin Wall come down and getting to be there with someone for whom this was a really important moment was very exciting.
Kehrberg: I mean, it wasn’t just a geopolitical event for him. It was a very personal event, and it was interesting to hear his response to that or to hear his his judgment about East German leaders and things like that, where he would. Well, or if you really wanted colorful stuff is you’d get him to talk about Israeli leaders. Because he had he had, as you probably know, he’s a man of strong opinions. Yes. And it was always interesting to hear them. But also some things, it was eye opening in the sense that you figured out, here’s this man who has this enormous reputation as a scholar, and you read his material and, you know, you’re really impressed by it. But at the same time, this is also the man who can’t figure out how to work the television and Riney-Kehrberg: Or the microwave. Kehrberg: Well, he loved things with push buttons. And the problem with the TV remote is he would hit auxiliary input all the time and the screen would go to snow because there was nothing hooked up to it. And 2 or 3, two times, three times I actually stopped him from going out to buy a new TV because he just he would oh, it must be broken. And so, it wasn’t even we’re going to try and fix it. We’re just going to go get a new TV and.
Riney-Kehrberg: And I had to if, if we were for some reason going to be gone, I had to leave instructions on the front of the microwave that said, this is how you do it. And for God’s sake, don’t put any metal in there, you know. And he I mean, he once not while we were there, while someone else was there threw water. He he had a toaster oven that he loved and it caught on fire. And instead of unplugging it, he threw water on it. Um, and so, you know, you had to be we knew all these things. And so, we had to be very carefully leaving messages around the house about, do this, don’t do that, for goodness sake. You know, watch out. Um, because he really had well, we had to screw in light bulbs for him. He just didn’t, you know, I think.
00:28:02
Kehrberg: He had a hard time remembering clockwise and counterclockwise on some of that stuff. But.
Riney-Kehrberg: Then again, he’d never had to, you know, he’d always had somebody taking care of him, you know, so that, you know, there was somebody else to take care of the little details.
Kehrberg: Yeah. It was a bit like living with your eccentric uncle. Um.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yeah. He was pretty helpless.
Kehrberg: Well, on some things. Yeah. I mean, it was it’s. He would do radio interviews in particular. And so, in a on a very busy day, he might do an interview with German radio and another with Italian radio. And so, you’ll hear this going on and, you know, the man is brilliant and he’s very insightful. And then he comes out and he’s having a hard time figuring out how to work the microwave. Or there was the infamous episode where he locked, after Sunshine died. Um, we got a cat named named Gustav, and at one point George locked Gustav in the refrigerator. Because he didn’t.
Riney-Kehrberg: See him go in.
Kehrberg: So. And Gustav was none the worse for wear. He was a kitten at the time, and he opened the refrigerator, and he’s sitting on the bottom shelf, looking at you like I’ve discovered that the light does go off when you close the door. He also locked the cat in the lazy Susan. Yes. And in the recliner. There’s kind of a theme, as you probably.
Doney: Definitely.
Kehrberg: Know. It was. It was interesting, I think the people who would have been perfect to interview were the Crows who were the next door neighbors. And Mrs. Crow, I think, told Pam at one point that all the, the, the husbands of the couples who go to live with George have a really good time. All the women eventually begin to worry that their husband may turn into George, and they get less enthused about it.
00:30:09
Riney-Kehrberg: Yeah, because that would have been disastrous. Yeah. Absolutely disastrous. He, you know, I, I really appreciated what a scholar he was. But I also got a little frustrated with the level of helplessness that he had about everyday life. And it was, it was funny because, you know, the line between George at home and, and George the scholar was, was pretty thick. And I was on campus one day. It was in his last year of teaching, and I hear this voice, this big, booming, authoritative voice coming out of a lecture hall. And I go, and I look in there. And it’s George talking in a voice I’d never heard. And, you know, lecturing to his students, I thought, huh, okay. There’s just this persona of the professor that he puts on when he goes in front of an audience that we didn’t see at home. George at home was different. Well, unless we could, you know, hear him doing an interview or something like that.
Kehrberg: Well, he did he did have a couple of classes that would meet in his living room that they would come out to the house, because then one of my jobs is I was supposed to build a fire in the fireplace so they could have a nice roaring fire while they talked. And he, you know, he was kind of in his element with that because he was very at home. He could be very relaxed. And it always sounded like they were they were doing serious work, but they were always having fun doing it as well. And I think in some ways it was an influence on both of us in that we wanted to have that kind of rapport with the students that we might have in the future, because that was something I did admire about him is he had a, it wasn’t that they were friends or anything like that, but it was a very relaxed. You definitely knew George was in charge, and George was kind of guiding the discussion and everything, but it was very relaxed and everyone seemed to have a very good time at it. And so that was something I think that we, maybe not the fire, but, you know, the other parts of it. Was some of the stuff we talked to him about, you know, both of us were TAs, and so we would talk to him about how to handle teaching. How do you handle grading and all that? And I think we were both a little shocked by his grading advice was, you don’t have to drink the whole bottle to know the wine is bad, he said. All you need is to read the first page. I’ve never been able to bring myself to do that, but, um. And I’m not sure he actually did it. He also liked to. That was kind of one of the issues is you could never quite tell when he was joking. And I think he liked that. Yeah, I think he liked to see you not struggle, but that you had to think.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yeah. Well, and the other thing that he said that, has stuck to me about education is that, we would talk about students wanting things to be fun and entertaining, and he would say, fun, fun! Education is not supposed to be fun. I had my Latin verbs beaten into me! You know, and and so he, um, had some very, very.
Kehrberg: Well, that was that was after we had seen the movie “Dead Poets Society.” Mhm. And he did not like it at all. And that was the catalyst for the conversation on. Yeah.
Riney-Kehrberg: Education is not supposed to be fun.
Kehrberg: And apparently he told like a large lecture hall of students that same story about education is not fun. I had my Latin verbs beaten into me because we’ve run into students who’ve heard that. So yeah, it was it was an education for us, too. Yeah. Uh, to be there, it wasn’t just that. It was, you know, financially, it was terrific. Uh, in terms of I think in terms of our mental health, it was nice, too, because there were certain things we didn’t have to worry about, and we were removed from campus. So, we didn’t have some of the drama that goes with living near campus. But at the same time, we learned quite a bit from George.
Riney-Kehrberg: I learned that my beloved graduate advisor. George had been on the committee that decided to hire him, and he was hired in spite of the fact that he wore white socks with his suit. All sorts of things I wouldn’t have known.
Doney: Yeah.
Kehrberg: Or you’ve probably heard that, George. George at least claims that he was coroner for Johnson County, Iowa. Something like that when he was at the. Have you heard that story?
Doney: Yeah.
Kehrberg: Yeah. I mean, that was it’s one of those that you just kind of. All right. Is he telling? Is this a tall tale or? And then you realize with George, it’s entirely plausible that he could have been elected coroner and then refused to view the dead body.
Doney: Yeah.
Kehrberg: Which I keep meaning to look that up here in Iowa, because we’d have access to the records to see if he really was. I should.
Doney: I would be fascinated to know.
00:35:46
Kehrberg: Yeah. Um, but, yeah, he had a whole . . . He liked to tell stories and he was good at it. I mean, he was. He could. He wasn’t.
Riney-Kehrberg: He was entertaining. Very entertaining.
Kehrberg: Yeah.
Doney: Which is ironic, that education is not supposed to be fun because, well, how he’s known. Both at Iowa and then why he was so appealing to Wisconsin was how much students loved the way that he taught the huge surveys, which was, very engaging.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yeah. He was also very exotic. And I think that also appealed to them between the accent, the mannerisms. You know, he was just so interesting to watch because he couldn’t have been like anybody else they knew. And so that had to have been a big part of the appeal.
Kehrberg: I think George would really like that description. We also had some discussions about what he wanted when he died. And I don’t
Riney-Kehrberg: A big monument.
Doney: Yeah. Yeah.
Kehrberg: He made no bones about it. He liked. He liked to be the center of attention at times. He used to. All right.
Riney-Kehrberg: At times? He always liked to be the center of attention.
Doney: Yeah.
Kehrberg: He used to. Again. This was before we arrived. Sunshine had a dog counterpart named Schnutzi, and he used to walk Schnutzi around the cemetery. He claimed that he did that so Schnutzi, would pee on the graves of people he didn’t like. Yeah. And it’s another one of those where you think it’s plausible. But did he really do it?
Riney-Kehrberg: And probably.
Kehrberg: Yes, he was. He was a character. There’s no doubt about that. Yeah. Living with him could be trying at times. But for a lot of things, he just deferred to us. I think we had to buy a couple of major appliances while we were there, and it was just, you know, go do it. You do it. You go out and do it.
00:37:47
Riney-Kehrberg: And he would just. I mean, the man really was very trusting. You know, I would say we’re running out of house money and he’d write me a check and never asked to see any sort of records or anything. He just trusted that we would handle the house money and that we would if things needed to be done, that we would get them done. So, we did.
Kehrberg: Oh yeah. Well, he had when he would go on trips, he would at times he would just give us $1,000 in cash and then we would give it, you know, the remainder of it back when he would get home and he would be confused. Why are you giving this back? I gave this to you. It’s George. We only needed, like, 150 bucks
Doney: (laughs)
Kehrberg: To cover the expenses. There’s 850.00 left. We can’t just keep it. He says. Oh, and then he would take it back. Um, yeah, he would. He could be very trusting. He could be. And you never knew if it was. It was just he was trusting or if he was a little naive when it came to money. Um, because we’d had some conversations with him where it was clear he had no conception of how the amount of money he was talking about related to the mass of people in the state of Wisconsin. We had a discussion at the dinner table one night where he was telling us how he didn’t understand how anyone could get by for less than $90,000 a year. And this was at a time when a family of four’s average income was about $35,000 a year. And it was, how can they do it? And it was George. They don’t go on all these trips. They don’t do these, well how can they not do that? What do they do? Do they just sit at home? Uh, and we had to tell them. Yes, sometimes they do. Um, but yeah, it was dinner with him was always interesting. Um, whether it was gossip from school, the news, whatever it might be, because George had an opinion and he was willing to share it. And I think that was one of the reasons he liked dinner is he liked. He kind of got to get things off his chest that he’d been thinking about all day, because the man.
Riney-Kehrberg: Worked all day.
Kehrberg: Oh, yeah. His work ethic was amazing. He was at his desk by 8:00 in the morning. He would take a break at about 11:30 to have lunch, and then he would go back and work until 5:30 when the news came on.
Riney-Kehrberg: And he was up at 5:00, 5:00, 6:00, 5:00 , you know, and, you know, you always knew he was going to be in his office working.
Doney: My favorite sort of Mosse disconnected from reality story was from Steve Aschheim at a time when he was very worried that squirrels were laying eggs in the attic.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yes, yes, yes.
Doney: Which is just like, what?
Riney-Kehrberg: Yeah. We’ve heard a variation on the squirrels with eggs story, except, ah, the variation we heard was that it was he was at the University of Iowa, and he was giving a lecture and got distracted by one of the windows in the lecture hall and rushed over and said, oh, look, the squirrels are hiding their eggs. And the whole classroom, thousand kids erupts, um, because of the professor’s thinking that squirrels laid eggs.
Doney: Um.
00:41:23
Kehrberg: I was going to say that was the 70th anniversary or 70th birthday party.
Riney-Kehrberg: I think.
Kehrberg: So. The retired.
Riney-Kehrberg: It was the I think it was his birthday party.
Kehrberg: Yeah, they they brought in a lot of his former students from both Iowa and Wisconsin. And they were sharing stories. And so we were kind of on the periphery of that. Um, which it was good to know that he’d always been the same way, you know, in a way, because, you know, you just had this feeling that George was kind of timeless.
Doney: Yeah.
00:41:52
Kehrberg: Um, that he always, you know, whether it was the 1930s, the 1960s or the 1980s, he there was kind of this foundation that was unchanging, which in some ways was rather comforting. Um, yeah. He liked to tell the story at least 2 or 3 times a year about John Kennedy being in his house, uh, during the 1960 presidential campaign. And he would show you the chair that Kennedy sat in. And so you could sit in the chair that Kennedy sat in, and he would talk about how, uh, he talked to Kennedy about becoming ambassador to the Vatican. And he would say, you can go to the Kennedy Library and see it. It’s in a letter. And I’ve always been curious. I’d love to see that letter.
Doney: I never heard that.
Kehrberg: Oh, yeah. Yeah, he would at least 2 or 3 times a year. He’d bring that up and he’d talk about, you know, Kennedy had asked, you know, could he do something if he became president, could he do something for George? And George’s response was, uh, I want to be ambassador to the Vatican. And he said he said, and it was it was kind of quintessential George. He said, I like the idea of all the pomp and ceremony, but there’s not really a lot to do in terms of the diplomacy. And he would get this, get the big grin on his face. Um, yeah. I mean, he was he was quite a character.
Doney: So you, you two overlapped with Berkowitz then who was his last? His last student and I think defended in 1991, maybe [1989]. Yeah. So that would have been the same year as you, Pam, right? What was so you mentioned sort of your friends in graduate school. Did they tend to be Americanists? Was that was it siloed sort of by field or was there quite a bit of.
Riney-Kehrberg: It was sort of siloed by field. But it also we also had the people we shared an office with. Mm. And so, you know, you might mostly know Americanists, but in your office or in the office next door would be a Latin Americanist, a Europeanist. And so, we got a little more mixed up just because of, of the TAing thing. Yeah.
Kehrberg: I think your first couple of years, it pretty much was in your caucus. You know, it was other Americanists, it was other Europeanists. And then the longer you were there, the more you got to know other people. in part because to and a part, just because people start dating across caucuses and so they kind of bring in new people or they just, you know, I know you, you were up on the sixth floor kind of thing. So over time it breaks down a little bit. But yeah, I think most of them that we’ve stayed in touch with are Americanists. I think it’s after a while, it’s just kind of the luck of the draw.
00:45:01
Doney: Any other faculty that you would like to to talk about or memories of seminars? I hoped we could talk about that and then then talk about your projects.
Kehrberg: In terms of seminars, I think one of them that we both had that turned out to be much more influential on our teaching careers than we thought at the time, was Diane Lindstrom’s (1944-2018) American Economic History. Diane was another one of the faculty members who was a character, shall we say? She was a woman of.
Riney-Kehrberg: Strong opinions.
Kehrberg: In And high standards, and she intimidated a lot of graduate students for good reason. Yes. Um, because that was a difficult seminar. And I think of all the seminars I did in graduate school, that’s the one in a way that I am most proud of, in a sense, that I did well in it. And just because it was kind of terrifying at times. Because she wouldn’t. I remember she had us doing, lectures that we would be given a topic and we’d have to develop a lecture like you would give to a class. This was supposed to be, uh, you know, master the content and then present it in a way that is going to help you in your future. And I was the first one up, and I had managerial capitalism, and I had no idea what managerial capitalism was. And so, I went through this, I found a definition, and I wrote this thing up. And being the first one, I had no one to kind of gauge what I was doing. And it worked out all right in the end. But it’s one of those things where I think it meant a lot more, because you knew that there was a very high standard that you had to meet, and then you find out that, all right, all of these things fit into this other stuff I’m doing, whether it’s teaching a U.S. history survey or a lot of the classes I do now, are Colonial America and era of the American Revolution, and I use a lot of stuff from that seminar. It really I mean, for me, it changed the way I looked at history, and I was really glad I was in there.
Riney-Kehrberg: Well, and what I think was even more important was she then chose the two of us to be her TAs. And Rick TA’d business history for her, I TA’d economic history. I did not enjoy TAing economic history at all, but I use that information all the time, and the stuff I’ve ended up writing has often been really intimately connected in some ways with economic history, and I had no idea that that was going to be so incredibly valuable to me. But it was, it still is. And, you know, she kind of took us under her wing and, you know, we both we both really benefited.
Kehrberg: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And she was she she was useful in a way that that George did, too, in terms of exposing you to different parts of the department that you didn’t know were there. Sometimes not always pleasant. You know, there are a lot of interpersonal. I mean, I imagine it’s it’s completely different now, but back then, it was a collection of divas. And there were all sorts of vicious battles over little things. And I can remember being used at one point as a human shield between two professors because as actually one of them was Diane and the other was Gerda Lerner (1920-2013). Because Diane said that if I wasn’t between her, she might actually hurt her. Their relationship at that point, they were at a particularly low spot. Um, but yeah, that was interesting because you think coming into all of this, these are our, you know, highly educated people who don’t don’t bother with these these petty things that mere mortals do. And it’s. Oh, yeah, they do. Yeah. And they do it up in a really big way sometimes. Yeah. And so that was, that was actually useful too, because then when you go off into a department you can recognize, ahh all right. You’re just like just like so and so. And I’m going to treat you carefully because I know you could explode. Yeah. So yeah, it all is helpful. A little frightening at times.
Riney-Kehrberg: I’m trying to think who else? I TA’d for John Cooper a lot. And I now regularly teach the class that I TA’d for him. Except my twist on it is rather different. But I learned a whole lot from him. Um, a lot of good, you know, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt stories that I still use. Who else was particularly? Those they were really responsive to graduate students. Some of them weren’t. Tom Archdeacon helped me a whole lot with the. I did because I worked with Al Bogue I had to crunch some numbers. And Tom Archdeacon sat down and worked with me on the number crunching part, and which I greatly appreciated.
Kehrberg: I had a class with Ed Gargan (1922-1995), who was the French historian. Yeah. Yeah. And it was it was a good the class was very interesting. But it was even better in terms of how to run a class, how to be how to appear completely relaxed and friendly. But at the same time, there is this underlying structure that kind of seamlessly guides you through the material and through the class, and he was just a very nice man to begin with. He was always he I think he remembered every you know, I was an Americanist in a European, though I did modern European as my minor, but I’m an Americanist in a European class. He remembered who I was for the rest of the time that I was there, and would always make it a point to stop and say hello and things like that. And that leaves a big impression on you, too. I mean, it was a wonderful demonstration of how just to be a good person in an academic setting. And so I was I was actually really distressed. He retired and then passed away three months later. In fact, there were three of them who retired and all died within four months, which, you know, it left the impression that one should not retire if you wanted to.
Doney: Yeah.
Riney-Kehrberg: Well, and I also want to give a quick shout out to Margaret Bogue (1924-2018), who. Who at the. very end, right before she retired, finally officially got a position in the department and it made me. It still makes me angry that there was not a spousal accommodation then in the way that there is now, because I would have benefited so much from being in a class with her. She really helped me with my dissertation. She was the kindest, the kindest person on earth. When Al died, she sat down and tried to figure out where every one of his PhD students were. And she called. She called all of us.
Doney: Wow.
Riney-Kehrberg: To tell us that he had died. And that kind of loving attention is something that you just don’t see very often, particularly from someone who is such an incredible scholar. And, you know, the department made a big mistake not bringing her on board fully when they brought Al on board because they were both amazing and together they were I mean, they were both on my dissertation committee. They were both wonderful and, uh, you know, they really goofed by not hiring her.
Kehrberg: I would one person I would kind of put out there to he wasn’t a member of the teaching faculty, but Gaspare Saladino (1936-2019), who worked in the documents on the document, what is it? Documents relative to the ratification of the Constitution? Yeah, he was in that process. So, I would walk by my office was up on the fifth floor, and so I would walk by his office on the way to get to mine because, you know, as you know, the Humanities Building there is so well laid out. Um, he was he. The two of us shared an interest in in books and book collecting. And so that’s how we started talking. But he was another one who was very free with his time to give advice and just served as a tremendous role model for this is how you can be a top rate scholar and still be a top rate person, because there were a few people there in the department at that time who were excellent scholars, but their credentials as human beings were in doubt. That they really, for whatever reason, they didn’t get along with people. And Sal was kind of an antidote to all of, you know, to all of that. Plus, I got to find out a lot about the ratification of the Constitution. And but unfortunately, she was the one who got to go to Camp Edit where they still ran the historical editing camp, which is something I always wanted to do, but she got to do it. Uh, but that was after she left. She left and came back to do that. But yeah, those are the people, I think, who, at least for me, were the biggest influence. I mean, in addition to Mac, who was my advisor.
Riney-Kehrberg: And a peach of a man.
Kehrberg: Oh, yeah. Mac was a very nice guy. I mean, he was from southern Kentucky. He was kind of he was a true southern gentleman in the best meaning of that word. He was another one who he was very easy to get along with, very friendly, very concerned about his students and both his graduate students and his undergraduates. In addition to being a good scholar.
Doney: How do you guys feel? Can you go on for a little bit?
Riney-Kehrberg: Sure, sure.
Kehrberg: How do you feel?
Doney: I feel great. I’m actually in the humanities building, as you can. You can see.
Kehrberg: I was noticing the windows.
Riney-Kehrberg: Windows? Yeah. Humanities Building.
Kehrberg: I was going to ask you what what room you were in.
Doney: The Curti is right through this wall in front of me. So I’m in. I’m on that corner by the Curti, 5231.
Kehrberg: Those aren’t seminar rooms anymore. Or you’re up. No.
Doney: Yeah. There used to be, I think, two seminar rooms that are combined into one suite now on this corner.
Kehrberg: Oh, okay. Because, yeah, that was the Paul Knaplund (1885-1964) room or something else when we were there.
Doney: Yeah. The Knapland room has been moved down to the other end of the hall.
Kehrberg: Yeah. Stanley Kutler (1934-2015), who was one of the faculty members there, refused to teach in the Knaplund room because he’d had a feud with Knaplund and he wouldn’t go in the room that had his picture.
Doney: All the pictures were moved to the Curti Lounge, I think. Okay, so, yes, the Humanities Building, right? It rains inside. It’s hot in the summer, it’s freezing in the winter.
Kehrberg: And you still have bats?
Doney: No, I think the bats are sorted. We’re down to just cockroaches and spiders.
Kehrberg: Oh, wow. I don’t remember cockroaches.
Riney-Kehrberg: I don’t either.
Kehrberg: We had bats while we were there.
Riney-Kehrberg: Bats. And then there was a bird’s nest in the corner of one office. Oh, wow. Because some of the birds had one of the windows had broken and some of the birds had come in, and one of my fellow graduate students was crawling around trying to find something in Al Bogue’s office and found a bird’s nest up in the corner. So.
Doney: Wow.
Kehrberg: Not the tidiest of office. No. He wasn’t.
Riney-Kehrberg: He was. Not at all.
Kehrberg: I wouldn’t be surprised if there was, like, a deer in there as well.
Doney: Okay. What I would like to do now is talk about. I wondered if you could talk about your defenses, and then how it was that you wound up at Iowa. And then I hope some of the work you’ve done since and how that’s related to studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison or not.
Kehrberg: Well, that’s her department.
Riney-Kehrberg: Let’s see. My defense I don’t remember a whole lot about, um, it was it was. Yeah, I just I just really don’t remember a whole lot about it, and I did not. I kind of regretted it. I did not do graduation. Um, so instead, my friends crowned me queen of history. I still have the paper crown somewhere. Um, but I decided not to go through graduation. Let’s see. Since then, I’ve done a fair amount of writing. I’ve edited two books. One is an edited diary, another is a collection on the history of rural America. I’ve written a children’s book about a nonfiction children’s book about, rural and agricultural history, and then, four research monographs. My dissertation was on the Dust Bowl. And so I kind of think of that as one, you know, one goal post. And then the other is my most recent book, which is called When a Dream Dies: Agriculture, Iowa and the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. And it’s about, of course, the farm crisis of the 1980s, which really decimated the Midwest. I have not. It’s interesting. I was at Wisconsin when all of that was happening. I was peripherally aware that it was happening. But you know, historians, you want everything, things have got to be a certain time past you before you get to them. And I’d been nudged by my students to work on the farm crisis. And then I finally realized, yeah, it had been long enough. And so, you know, I think of those two books, I don’t know, maybe not goalposts, maybe bookends. I don’t think I’m done writing. But the two big agricultural and social crises of the twentieth century, one at the beginning of my career, one as I’m getting closer to retirement, with other stuff about the history of childhood and families in between. I’ve got a book on the environmental history of childhood and a book on farm childhood from the 1870s to the 1920s. And, you know, through all of those up until. Well, I guess Margaret Bogue was still alive when I started working on this last one. Um, but Al Bogue read all of my other work, um, before I had it published. He and I maintained a working relationship, until he died, reading each other’s work, commenting on each other’s work. So it, you know, he continued to push me along and, you know, still, as I worked on this last book, I was thinking about, okay, what he he was really into, you know, agricultural economics. And, and I kept on thinking, okay, now what would Al think about what I’m writing right here? And, you know, I know he would have expected me to crunch more numbers. But, you know, still, I think he he’d find the book okay. So that’s what I have worked on in the years since. There was another part of that question. What part of it did you miss?
Doney: I think you got all of it. We talked on the defense. And then. Oh, how you wound up at Iowa.
Riney-Kehrberg: Oh, okay. Iowa State actually, um, I graduated in 1991 and went from there to Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, uh, where I was not incredibly happy. It was, it was okay. It was okay. Um, I made some good friends there, but I just it just didn’t quite feel right. And I kept an eye out. And then Iowa State started looking for another person for their what was then called Agricultural History and Rural Studies program. And they needed a faculty member who would essentially, at that point, be second in charge for this graduate program. And they recruited me, and I came here as a tenured associate, and I’ve been here for 24 years. And, this has been, you know, in spite of kind of the turmoil that the university has been through in the last four years or so. It’s been it’s been a good place. I’ve had a lot of graduate students, and I’ve had the chance to do what I wanted to professionally. And we were fortunate Rick was able to come on board. Um, how many years ago now?
Kehrberg: Seventeen.
Riney-Kehrberg: Seventeen years ago. The department needed, had some really big holes, and he was a great person to fill those holes and to do.
Kehrberg: To do all the jobs no one else wanted. It’s my professional career, basically. I’ve taught every US history class pre 1877. So everything from reconstruction to the beginning, and that’s largely what I did, was fill in for people who’ve gone on leave or people who suddenly change jobs and they needed a course covered. So I’ve taught a variety of things. But it was always part time because we have a son with severe autism. And so that was kind of the full time job. And this was the, the fun thing to do. Some people go to the movies. I get to go to lecture.
Riney-Kehrberg: We were really, really fortunate in that, you know, if you have a child with disabilities, you need desperately need to have a flexible employer. And we needed one and a half jobs. I mean, that was all we could manage.
Kehrberg: One and a quarter.
Riney-Kehrberg: One and a quarter, one and a half, somewhere in there. But we needed flexible employers who would allow us to always be scheduled opposite each other to, to be gone when we needed to be gone. And it’s worked out. I mean, in that way, being here has been remarkable. Yeah.
Doney: I would like to give you both just a chance to reflect back on all the things we’ve talked about, and then I want to give you a chance to reflect forward on sort of the future, the future of history, which is, as Mosse always said, historians make for very lousy prophets. But first I wondered if there’s anything from your first getting an interest in history winding up at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, etcetera, that we missed, or that you would like to record? And then I would invite you to think about the changes within history over the course of your career.
Kehrberg: I think for me, the big thing about coming to Madison was the State Historical Society.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yes.
Kehrberg: You know, because being able to walk in at that time, it was the second largest collection of American history books in the United States. Only the Library of Congress had more. And so it was, you know, you go into those stacks and it you know, I admit the when I was a kid, our community library was one that had been built in 1888 by a local lawyer, and it was this marvelous Victorian fire box. All the books were kept in a fireproof room on metal shelves. Cast iron shelves. And you walk into the State Historical Society. And it’s the same type of thing if you go into the old part, big old cast iron standards. And it was, you know, it was like the cathedral of history. And that was one of my still is one of my favorite places. We actually have a lithograph we found in Peoria, Illinois, of all places of the campus there, right after the State Historical Society was built. So it’s so old Bascom Hall still has a dome before it burned down. And it was you know, that was kind of the big thing about that’s how you knew you were in the big leagues, in a sense, is having an access to a thing like that. And then, you know, getting to meet the faculty who wrote the books that are in the library was another thing. And so that was for me. That was one of the big deals about being in Madison, was that you got to see this is how it’s done. And there’s also kind of a downside to that, too. It’s, you know, a little bit of looking behind the curtain at the Wizard of Oz and you find out, all right, things, things aren’t exactly what you thought, but it makes it more interesting because it also makes it more accessible. You know, these are human beings. They have all the problems that human beings do. I can do this. I’m as screwed up as they are. I can do that.
01:08:40
Doney: Yeah.
Riney-Kehrberg: And I’m trying to think if there was anything in particular and. I just wanted to say again what I said before, and that is that it was the other. And we Rick and I had marvelous mentors, but it was the other graduate students that really made the experience. We were part of a really interesting cohort of people, and it was it was a marvelous experience. And when when I’m getting warm fuzzies about graduate school, it’s the other people. It’s not what happened in seminar. Well, it wasn’t what happened in seminar. It was, you know, all of the other places where our lives intersected that are the best part of my memories.
Kehrberg: I mean, as an undergraduate, I don’t know about Pam, but as an undergraduate, I think among my circle of friends, I was the only history major.
Riney-Kehrberg: Mhm.
Kehrberg: And so there were other history majors you could talk to. But the great thing about graduate school is you were all kind of broadly interested in the same things, and so you could relate to what each other was doing. And if you found something and were really excited about it in your research, they would get excited about it too. Whereas your other friends who were studying accounting or chemistry or whatever. Oh that’s nice. I’m sure that’s exciting. What else are you doing? Um, you know, and so it was one of those things where you kind of find your niche and, you know, graduate school was terrific for that. And I think one of the things that worries me now with online education and all that sort of stuff, is that something that students can miss. And it’s a boon to learning the subject matter and learning how to be a historian or whatever your major is. But it’s also very important just on how to learn to be an adult and how to work with other people. And, you know, you learn that it’s not all like high school, that people do change and that you have to be accommodating and things like that. And so there’s all these other skills that you learn or refine while you’re there. So.
Riney-Kehrberg: And in terms of predicting the future. Oh man, we’re in the middle of a bit of a crisis of enrollments here. A crisis of the university not taking us seriously, although we’ve got a new dean who’s an improvement.
Kehrberg: That’s an understatement.
Riney-Kehrberg: That is an understatement. He’s a humanist. He understands, he at least understands what we’re doing. Um, whereas.
Kehrberg: Whereas the previous physicist did not. She had no idea what humanities did at all.
Riney-Kehrberg: She was horrible. Let’s just put it that way. But, you know, predicting at all. I was chair having to deal with her. So, I, in terms of predicting the future, I desperately hope that we’ll have a cultural shift and that people will appreciate what history can do for students. And, you know, right now, as much as we’re having this enrollment crisis, I’m actually kind of enjoying it in that I’m not the person who’s responsible to tell the dean, oh, no, we didn’t get enough people in those classes. And I’ve been able in the last two years to teach the way I wanted to, which was to really get to know my students, to work with smaller groups, to give them. I keep thinking, oh my gosh, when I think about all of my colleagues and the quality of teaching that we have here, and I think about the few, the proud, the history majors right now. For the price of a relatively inexpensive state education, they’re getting a phenomenal experience. And you know that that’s not all bad. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s not good that the university is worried that we don’t have enough bodies. But for those students who are sitting there in my classes. Oh my gosh, you know, this is this is for them. If they if they’ll understand that and grasp that it’s an incredible moment. And, you know, I’m hoping, you know, I’m looking at retirement before too very long. I’m hoping the ship will get righted. I don’t know if it will or not. If somebody’s smart, they’ll understand the skills we teach and the power that history offers students. If they don’t, we’re all going to be in a really sorry boat.
01:14:03
Kehrberg: I think in the future. I mean, outside, outside of the academy, I think there still is a great interest in history. All you have to do is go into the few surviving bookstores and figure out that history tends to be one of the biggest sections. I think the big problem is going to be that we’re going to have fewer and fewer people are going to read, and I’m looking at all the books behind you and thinking. I used to ask at the beginning of every semester I would ask my students your name, where you’re from, and then I would ask a question of what was the last book you read, and a book that you you didn’t have to read for class, just a book you read. It doesn’t matter what it is. And I eventually gave up last year and substituted a new question because I was getting more and more people saying, I don’t read if I don’t have to. And I think the big challenge for historians is going to be, I don’t think we’re ever going to get them back reading. I think there’s going to be a dedicated group who is always going to be interested in the printed word, but I think history is going to end up being more and more kind of documentary type things that you might find on YouTube or find online. And I think that’s going to pose some significant, not insurmountable problems, but it’s going to be a different way of getting the same material across. But, at the same time, I think there’s a tendency with a lot of documentaries to oversimplify. Whereas with the printed word you can take more time to explain things, and if you’re the reader, you can jump over them in a way that’s easier than in a video format. I mean, my students, we were doing citations the other day and I gave them, I have a a rant on why I hate inline citations, and I talk about them as they’re the devil’s. The devil came up with inline citations. How can I make reading? I’ve already screwed up math by inventing calculus. How can we make reading less pleasurable? Well, we’ll stick the citations in there to act as speed bumps. And and we talk about, you know, with footnotes, you can skip over them and go back to them. And I think for historians, I think it’s not going to be that there’s a lack of interest in what we do at times there’s going to be people who attack what we do from whatever political perspective, because we don’t tell the story they want. But our big question is going to be, how do we reach a public that doesn’t read as much anymore.
Riney-Kehrberg: And keep some of the complexity?
Kehrberg: Well, yeah. And hopefully, you know, maybe the thing is, we can use the documentaries to get people interested in topics that they then are willing to read about. I don’t know.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yeah. But then they’re going to find out. It’s not like Ken Burns told them it was. They’re going to be horribly disappointed. I’m not a huge fan.
01:17:04
Doney: Fair enough.
Kehrberg: Well, she’s worked with him.
Doney: Okay. Yeah. Um, yeah. Yeah.
Kehrberg: I, I, you know, I think we have we still have a future. I mean, it’s still interesting that the people who study the past have a future in a way. But I think it’s our big challenge is going to be how do we reach people who don’t read anymore, you know, because that traditionally that’s how you did it. Oh, I’m interested in this. I can go down to the public library and find a book on it now, I can’t, I find out my students don’t even have library cards.
Riney-Kehrberg: Oh, I find out my students are afraid to go in libraries and have never been in one before and don’t know how to check out a book. Last semester I had in a class of 14, I had to teach two different students how to check out a book. So that’s a huge problem in our future.
Kehrberg: But I don’t think that’s necessarily, it’s not just it’s not just history that’s affected by that. It’s the education system in general. And that’s probably too big for us to get into. But.
Doney: Yeah.
Kehrberg: Yeah. it’s, you know, we’ve got our problems as historians, but there’s a larger issue that’s kind of in the background. We just get dragged down with it? Yeah.
01:18:32
Doney: Any other thoughts? Anything we missed or that you’d like to share?
Kehrberg: No, I think no.
Riney-Kehrberg: I just wanted to get this on record. Yeah, actually, for quite a while. So. This is exciting.
Kehrberg: Well, I mean, living with George was a big part of our lives. It was a big part of our graduate school experience.
Riney-Kehrberg: Um, it was four of our first five years as a married couple.
Doney: Yeah.
Kehrberg: That was kind of interesting.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yeah, we were newlyweds in George’s basement.
Kehrberg: Well, you. I mean, on a practical level, too, you learn. I mean, living with George, it wasn’t just about learning about history and all that. I mean, on a practical level, we kind of ran the house in terms of, you know, making sure repairs got done, buying appliances, shoveling the walk, all of that sort of things. And yet we still went out and bought a house eventually. I don’t know why. Yeah, should have known better after that. But yeah, I mean, George was a huge part of our experience as graduate students. Yeah. You know that thing we did in Madison? Yeah. But, you know, not just that part, but in terms like she said about our first part of our married life, we suddenly had a child. Yeah.
Riney-Kehrberg: And so we had a 70 year old child.
Kehrberg: Who had a driver’s license.
Riney-Kehrberg: He had a driver’s license? Yes. And shouldn’t have. Well, no, no, he shouldn’t have. I’d been in the car with him.
Kehrberg: It got to the point where she wouldn’t sit in the back seat.
Riney-Kehrberg: The front seat.
Kehrberg: Seat. She would sit in the back seat with her eyes closed if.
Riney-Kehrberg: If he was driving. Yes. Yeah.
Kehrberg: Yeah, it was it it was. It was a big deal. It was. I don’t want to say it completely changed our lives, but it certainly influenced our lives in ways that you would not expect. I have, living with George. I have a new appreciation for where they run the plumbing in a house of all things, because in his house, in his upstairs bathroom, the plumbing was in the northwest corner, and if it got really cold, it would freeze. And so we would have to get up in the middle of the night, go upstairs and flush the toilet so it wouldn’t freeze. That’s not the kind of thing they tell you when you buy a house. That’s not the kind of thing you learn in graduate school.
Riney-Kehrberg: But we learned it in graduate school.
Kehrberg: Yeah, we learned it in graduate school. Yeah. I mean, it was just there were so many different things that you were picking up all along the way. I mean, stuff that was academic, stuff that was historical in terms of the history of the department, in terms of George’s personal history. Because there was always something new when his friend Paula came to visit from the UK, you’d get to find out what George was like as a kid. And that was interesting.
Doney: Paula Quirk. Yeah, I can’t believe you got to meet her. That’s great.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yeah. She came and stayed at the house 2 or 3 times. 2 or 3 times. I’ve got a little a little brooch that she brought for me. Cool. So. Yeah. Well, yeah.
01:21:38
Kehrberg: She it was interesting because she was a year or two older than George, and she was actually friends with his sister and his older brother, and he talked about his sister occasionally, but he never talked about his older brother. But she just kind of moved in and kind of took charge of everything. And so, yeah, I mean, that was interesting too. Yeah. So it was, it was an experience. Would I do it again? I don’t know. I think, I think we would.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yeah, I think we would too, because.
Kehrberg: Some of it, there were some things that were just so surreal.
Riney-Kehrberg: The Christmas parties were awesome.
Doney: Yeah,
Kehrberg: We got chewed out, though. We. He’s Jewish. We’re having a Christmas party. We helped him set it all up, and then he wanted to know, where’s the tree? And we didn’t know you had a tree. You’re Jewish, and we must have a tree. Well, this is like an hour before the party. Oh, boy. We’ve got this little three foot tree that we had in our apartment before, so we put that up. He was extremely. After that, it was every year he made sure that we went to the forestry club on campus and bought a tree.
Riney-Kehrberg: That was at least eight feet tall. Yes.
Doney: Wow.
Kehrberg: Yeah. It had to be at least eight feet tall, preferably taller.
01:23:01
Riney-Kehrberg: And what he liked to do, he was very, very blind. He would take off his glasses and sit across from the tree, because then he. All he could see were the big round lights. And he loved to just sit there in the dark and look at the tree. And it’s like, okay.
Kehrberg: Which is strange because our son used to do the exact same thing.
Doney: Interesting.
Kehrberg: And there was, there was I had this moment one time where he’s sitting in his chair doing exactly what George would do, because the tree in our house is roughly in the same position it would have been in George’s house, in the living room next to the big windows. And our son would sit there staring at the tree and in his rocking chair, and George would sit in his rocking chair and do the same thing. And it was like, this is too weird.
Riney-Kehrberg: What are they seeing? You know.
Kehrberg: Not just, what are they seeing? Is this George reincarnated?
Doney: Yeah.
Kehrberg: Um.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yeah. We just we had lots of, you know, everybody in their graduate experience has lots and lots of things that were really important to them as memories. And our memories are just so incredibly different.
01:24:23
Kehrberg: Well, there are a lot of them are entwined with George.
Riney-Kehrberg: Yeah, they’re entwined with George. They’re entwined with this different kind of life we had. And then, you know, you you occasionally meet somebody else who was one of George’s basement students and it’s, oh, my gosh, you did this, too. But it’s also I, you know, I met.
Kehrberg: It’s like being president. No one else quite understands what the job entails. Yeah, you can read about it, you can hear things about it. But until you’ve experienced it.
Riney-Kehrberg: Well, and then you meet people who know George in other contexts, like I’ve met Patricia Heberer Rice from the Holocaust Museum last week, and I don’t know how we got onto it, but I told her that I’d lived in George’s basement and she immediately wanted to know. Okay, so what’s this? What was this person like in another context? And so having had this.
Kehrberg: Well she knew him when he was the fellow.
Riney-Kehrberg: Right, when he was the fellow at.
Doney: The first.
01:25:30
Riney-Kehrberg: Yeah. So yeah. So, it’s just it’s very, it is produced some very interesting discussions with people who I otherwise, you know, might not have thought I had a whole lot of common ground with necessarily who want to know what it was like to actually live with this very interesting, very complex person. And I can fill them in on that.
Doney: On that note, this is still Tuesday the 22nd of October, 2024. This is Skye Doney concluding an oral history with Pamela Riney-Kehrberg and Richard Kehrberg.