Civics in the Classroom: Kate Carté, Brian Franklin, and Ronald Johnson

This is Civics in the Classroom, a podcast series from the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Civics in the Classroom is part of the A250 Summer Teacher Seminar, America's First Principles. This program to promote innovative K-12 instruction in U.S. history and civics was designed by the Center for Presidential History with support from the U.S. Department of Education and in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. In the first year of this three-year project, our workshops and lectures will focus on the causes and context of the movement for U.S. independence and the production and legacy of its most famous document, the Declaration of Independence.  

This episode features a conversation between Drs. Kate Carte, Brian Franklin, and Ron Johnson, all of whom will be giving lectures this June as part of our A250 Summer Teacher Seminar. Their lectures will look at specific sections of the Declaration of Independence, as well as some other primary documents from the period. They’ll hone in language and phrasing, and in doing so break down how it is that we have come to understand the Declaration today. In the meantime, stay tuned for more episodes of Civics in the Classroom and more conversations about the lessons that U.S. history holds for the present.  

The music for this series comes from the album K2 by Blue Dot Sessions under an Attribution-NonCommercial License. 

Transcript

SUSIE PENMAN: This is “Civics in the Classroom,” a podcast series from the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. I’m Susie Penman, Assistant Director at the Center for Presidential History. This episode features a conversation between Drs. Kate Carte, Brian Franklin, and Ron Johnson, all of whom will be giving lectures this June as part of our A250 Summer Teacher Seminar. Their lectures will look at specific sections of the Declaration of Independence, as well as some other primary documents from the period. They’ll hone in on language and phrasing, and in doing so break down how it is that we have come to understand the Declaration today. In the meantime, stay tuned for more episodes of “Civics in the Classroom” and more conversations about the lessons that U.S. history holds for the present. 

BRIAN FRANKLIN: Hi, this is Brian Franklin with the SMU Center for Presidential History, and I'm here with my colleagues to talk about our summer teacher seminar on America's first principles, and I'd love for them to introduce themselves here.

KATE CARTÉ: I am Kate Carté. I am in the history department here at SMU, and I specialize in American history, the American Revolution and American religion.

RON JOHNSON: Hello, everybody. I'm Ronald Johnson. I'm so excited to be a part of this. I'm part of the history department at Baylor University, and part of my work is dealing with the Black Atlantic and the ways in which the American Revolution spread across the Atlantic world. 

FRANKLIN: Well, thank you both for being here. We are really excited at CPH to get an opportunity this summer to meet with teachers from really all over the country as we recognize the upcoming 250th anniversary of this country's birth. We're excited to learn together about the roots of the United States, to consider founding era documents, founding era principles, and the history of those things, and to think about how to equip educators to approach these ideas maybe in new ways in the classroom, and also to equip students and perhaps even ourselves to be better, more thoughtful citizens, given our history. And so this summer is all about the Declaration of Independence. We've got an opportunity to do three years of this, where we'll look at the American Revolution and the Constitution in upcoming years. But this summer, we get to spend a whole week just focused on the Declaration of Independence. In a minute, I look forward to us getting a chance to talk about some details, but before we do that, I just want to ask you two – and perhaps we can start with you, Kate, and go in the same order – just generally, like, why in the world should we even spend a week, an entire week, focused on really just one document and its history and legacy? 

CARTÉ: That is such a good question, Brian, and it's, you know, embedded in that question already we need to ask, why are we celebrating the nation's birth this year, in 2026, instead of another year? Why did we pick the Declaration of Independence? When we come at this from the lens of history, that's already a year into the war. It's long before we write the document, the Constitution, that frames our institutions. So why is this important? And I think even just asking the question is crucial, and it's crucial to how we understand how we participate in the United States. How do we define what our principles are? And that's really what the crux of the Declaration is. It's a statement of principles. It's a statement of complaints. But it's also a place where we outline what we believe and who we are, and that's a really living question. So I think it's at the core of our civics.

JOHNSON: I just want to piggyback on what Kate was saying and just say, without any scientific measurement, to me, the Declaration of Independence remains one of the most powerful documents ever written in the English language. I can remember still when I learned about it for the first time in school in the sixth grade, and the impact that it had on me as a kid. And what I’ve found in over 16 years of teaching, when I teach about the Declaration of Independence, I see teenagers and young 20-year-olds really respond in the way that I did all those years later. And I think that remains the power of this document that we're talking about today. 

FRANKLIN: Yeah, I think, I recognize this too, both the kind of almost like the backwards and the forwards power of the document that it says something, like Kate said, about the way we think about our own history that we would start here rather than in any other place, and that ever since then, for 250 years, you see people consistently appealing, not even just to the principles of the document, but to the document itself for why they're advocating for their own independence or their own freedom. And so I'm really excited to be able to focus on this document in particular because it really is, regardless of where you might fall on the partisan spectrum, it's kind of at the roots of anyone's appeal to freedom throughout the nation's history. 

So I'd love for us to just talk a little bit about how we're going to do that, because it's one thing to say it's the most important document and it applies to everything and all freedoms, but it's another thing to actually teach that. And so the way we're going to do this over the week, I'm, I'm excited about, we're going to get to spend four full mornings breaking down the Declaration of Independence. Four mornings of instruction where we'll have a couple of lectures every morning and a couple of breakout sessions where we look at sections of the Declaration and some other primary documents from the period that help us maybe understand those sections. Each one of those lectures and breakouts is going to be centered on a particular phrase or a particular section from the declaration, which I think sets us up really well, both to pay close attention to the text itself in its own time, but also to then extrapolate from it, like how it's been used, how it was used at the time, and how it's been used ever since. I'd love to just have a little conversation about what each one of us might be doing on any given one of those lectures. And maybe I'll start with you, Kate, this time, and just give us a sense of maybe one of the things you look to open up from the Declaration and how we might think about it. 

CARTÉ: You know, the Declaration has a couple different parts, and one of the biggest parts there is the list of complaints that the founders make that they, that they are articulating for why they're taking this big step. So one of the things I'm really interested in is those actual complaints. Those ask us to look backwards towards the relationship between the colonies and Great Britain, and think about what the nature of that political relationship should be. When we have ties that link us to another nation or to anybody in politics, we should think about when those ties are healthy and when those ties are unhealthy. So looking at how they articulate those complaints, but also thinking about what was the actual history of that relationship? What did the British do, and how did the Americans feel about it? What were the specific complaints? I think that's one of the ways I want to get into this question. 

FRANKLIN: Can I ask you about that? Because I think even just the way I've been talking about it and already the Declaration can become almost a disembodied document, right? Because it can be utilized for almost any argument for freedom and has been in our history. But as a historical document, it has kind of the flowery, high-flying language of rights, but it also has very specific historically-grounded complaints. Do you have a couple of those that you think kind of stand out or might just be helpful when we're thinking about what it even means to be Americans? 

CARTÉ: The complaints are themselves really interesting. Some of them are rooted in really specific British actions, and some of them are a little bit harder to pin down, and that's interesting, too. I think the most famous complaint in there is the one about domestic insurrections. So when Jefferson and his fellows accused the British of having used the indigenous peoples and the enslaved peoples in the colonies to fight against them, so to actually turn Americans against each other. That's a really interesting complaint. It both has basis in fact and also reflects a kind of imagined threat. What were the colonists most worried about? I think that's a really interesting subject to get into. Some of the complaints actually have to do with the process of government, and that's super important because procedure in government is a huge part of what we want our students to learn when they're learning about civics, right? How do you get things done? Why do we have these bureaucratic practices? Why does the Congress meet on a particular day? Why does a certain thing have to happen in order for the president to give the State of the Union? Well, some of those relate directly to the complaints that are in the Declaration of Independence, and they relate to what we call the Coercive Acts, where the British moved in to sort of shift the practices of government and pull authority back to Britain, and the colonists object to that. They want their legislatures to be independent. 

FRANKLIN: I like what you said about the fact that people are thinking as citizens and the way in which they want their government to work for them, because again, perhaps we'll keep coming back to this a lot as a theme, but it's very easy as citizens today to look back 250 years and think about, imagine disembodied people thinking about high-minded principles and then just going to war over it. And that's certainly underneath a lot of it, but usually people have somewhere between I'm sitting in my house and I'm going to war, and it has to do with the way in which they're living their daily lives. Their courts, their taxes, their neighbors. And so I love thinking about that connection even for today. People have complaints about their government today, and how do we deal with that within a republic? Ron, what about you? 

JOHNSON: Yeah, so I'm really glad that Kate laid out the grievances, right? And your point is well taken. You have to have concrete things in order to get people, you know, to touch the lives of people in real time. But also within that document, right, with its many parts, and I love the way Kate dissected it that way, there is a necessity to get people inspired to be willing to risk it all to get those grievances, to get redress for those grievances, and we see that in the very opening, right? We see this language that is intended to be inspiring, right? And if I could, I would just remind everyone of a sentence that we know very, very well, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness.” It must be remembered that every man in that room where this language was voted upon was elite within the American colonies. Some of them were slaveholders. And so the sentence itself and the document at that moment was imperfect. But what that language did was transcend that room and the men who wrote it to speak to poor Americans, Americans of different genders. And what that sentence did, and continues to do, was inspire hope, possibility, and the courage to dream. I think in that moment, even the founders understood that the document they were writing and talking about and debating was not an end, but a beginning. And Brian, as you stated kind of earlier in our conversation, that heritage has continued across 250 years, and it has gone beyond the boundaries of the United States, that people around the world have grabbed on to this unalienable right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness 

FRANKLIN: I think about what you just said, about how it's gone around the world, and I wonder how that principle affects us as Americans and how we think about citizenship, both historically and in the present. Because one of the things that happens with a text like the Declaration is that, or frankly with any text, is that once you write it and you put it out there, it's no longer really your own anymore. I mean, in part it is. There's a sense of authorship and there's a sense of context that you have to understand, but once you put it out there, it in some ways becomes its own thing, where people can take it and utilize it in all sorts of ways. I really look forward to asking our teachers who are dealing with very young students today, how they think about it and how their students think about it. I wonder, have you all recently had any encounters in the classroom where discussion has gone in some unexpected ways or in some interesting ways that you just didn't expect?

CARTÉ: Something that jumps to mind is how important what Ron was just talking about there, principle, is to these conversations, and how quickly our students revert to language of principle and, and truth, right? We hold these truths to be self-evident. In this moment of crisis, trying to pause and think about what is essential, right? I think that's something that is timeless, and our students do that reflectively. They stop and wonder, what should this truth look like? What did it look like, but what should it look like now? And that moment was really explicitly opened up by the drafters of the Declaration of Independence. They set the example of pausing to wonder about truth in a moment of crisis.

JOHNSON: I love what Kate just said, this idea of, that that language opened up a space, right? Because, and I think it's important for students to realize that in that moment of revolutionary fervor, young people became a very important part of that movement. And, and for instance, this opening up of space, within this revolutionary moment, there was a 15-year-old girl who was enslaved, and yet she was writing poetry about King George and George Washington. This moment that we're talking about opened up space for Phillis Wheatley to write poetry that spoke into the moment in ways that I don't know that there would, without that language, without that moment, she would have had these opportunities. And what I hope that our teachers and our students would take away is that when we have grievances like Kate listed off earlier, one of the great things about this document, the Constitution that comes after, and 200 years, 250 years of being a republic, is that everybody in this country, no matter what their age is, can pick up a pen or go to their computer, or even on their phone, and write down their grievances to the most powerful leaders at the local, state, and national level of our government, and that is a revolutionary inheritance that I hope we never stop cashing in on.

CARTÉ: Ron, if I can jump back in and, and take us back to that particular moment, right? We know that George Washington met with Phillis Wheatley. We know that Thomas Jefferson wrote about Phillis Wheatley. So she was not shouting into a vacuum. Just knowing that she wrote is wonderful, but just as important is that enslavers, Washington and Jefferson, listened to her and responded to her, and then made the statements they made consciously. So as historians, we have to grapple with that fact. We have to think about the compromises they made, and the ways they chose to act, and the ways they didn't choose to act, knowing not that they were just men of their time, but that they were thoughtful, conscious political actors who were aware of what they were doing. That's a complicated thing for us to deal with, but we have all of the evidence that tells us that we have to deal with exactly that. 

JOHNSON: Yes, and I love that. Not only was she writing, but people were reading it and responding to it in real time. And I hope that the students that are talking about the American Revolution this year and beyond, they see that you, we don't know. Like the founders, we talked about the America – the Declaration. They didn't know how far that declaration was going to go and the power that it still has 250 years later. Phillis Wheatley could've had no idea when she wrote those poems that some of the greatest leaders at that time would acknowledge and write back to her and meet with her. But that 250 years later, we're still talking about that work, and I hope that our students will see, put it on paper. Say it, put it out there, because one never knows where something we, what we say or what we do, where it will land 

FRANKLIN: Yeah, I thought I might share just a little bit as well. One of the things that I'm picking up here in our conversation that, that of course we'll explore is this interplay between the timeless, you might say timeless principles or timeless considerations that a document like this evokes, but also the time-bounded nature of the language and the moment. And that, and ironically, one of the things that I look forward to getting to talk about is the question of particularly of Jefferson and religion. I say ironically because often we think of, in religion, about religion in terms of timelessness. But in the Declaration, Jefferson uses words that have a particular meaning at a particular time. Nature's God, Creator, Judge, speaks generally about providence. And one of the things I really enjoy doing with teachers or students, I suppose all are my students in some way if I'm teaching them, is to think about the ways in which those words meant a particular thing at that time, and they didn't mean what we want them to mean now for our own particular purposes. And even particularly when we're thinking about the issue of slavery, we often get very twisted up in knots, as we should, about trying to understand how someone might write something like, "All people, all men are endowed by their creator," and then also hold people in slavery. And one of the reasons we can get very twisted up, well, there might be a couple reasons. One could be that our historical actor might just be a hypocrite, but it also can be true that we mean different things by those words, and that in a different time, people were using similar words, but expressing very different things. And so trying to get to the heart of those things and, and understand words in a particular time from particular characters, I think is really interesting, especially on the topic of religion. 

JOHNSON: I think in terms, I love the way you laid that out because that document, as wonderful and powerful it is, it, it was a paradox, right? You're talking about freedom on the one hand, but people who were writing and voting on it were forfeiting the freedom of others, right? Or taking that freedom away, and people in real time were reading this, or understood this. Like, where is my freedom going to come from? And one of the things we know from this moment is that many Black people, tens of thousands of Black people in the United States at the time, are going to choose to stay with the British and fight with the British in order to gain their freedom. But we also know that thousands and tens of thousands of Black people in the United States and those that come from Haiti are going to fight with the Americans, and they're making an investment on, where am I going to get my freedom? Because they understand that the language that's being thrown around about freedom and liberty is paradoxical, but they have to make real time decisions, and they make different ones. And it just talks about that moment as being incredibly dynamic for all involved. 

FRANKLIN: Well, thank you both. I really look forward to working with you, and I hope that this episode is just something of a little bit of a teaser for all of you teachers and people in the general public who are going to get an opportunity to come and, uh, spend a week with us here in Dallas. Thanks again to you two. 

CARTÉ: Thank you. 

JOHNSON:  Thank you.