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Talking Texas History
Talking Texas History
From Textbooks to TikTok
We're kicking off a new season of Talking Texas History with a bang! Our first guest is the impressive Rachel Gunter. In this digital age, the use of social media platforms is almost inevitable, and Rachel has made a significant contribution to history and teaching using social media to explore history and debunk myths. Her work is a testament to the potential of these platforms as educational tools. We think you'll enjoy hearing about Rachel’s insights and experiences as much as we did. Tune in and join us for the journey!
Find Rachel on social media:
@phdrachel
Facebook: RachelMichelle
Website: https://rmgunter.com/
This podcast is not sponsored by. It does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas, based upon our professional training and study of the past ["The world"].
Speaker 2:Welcome to another edition of Talking Texas History. I'm Gene Pruijs.
Speaker 1:I'm Scott Sosby. I'm back this time, gene. I'm sorry you know it wasn't there last time. It's too hot in Ecuador, just that I'm melted Well that's OK.
Speaker 2:You know, scott, actually we are celebrating one year of doing.
Speaker 1:Talking.
Speaker 2:Texas History. Exactly so this is actually season two, the first episode of season two, that's right, yeah, dr Gunter is first person on season two.
Speaker 3:There you go, I get to be the season premier.
Speaker 2:That's right. So let's introduce our guest for season two, the first guest of the new season, and that is Rachel Gunter. And Rachel, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from?
Speaker 3:I am from Houston, texas, originally. You know the area 45 south of the Beltway it's about where I grew up. I graduated high school year early because I was a bit bored, and then I went to A&M Corpus Christi for two years and then my dad fell at work he worked at Minokey and broke his hip, and so my parents lost their house and couldn't pay for school, and so I ended up moving back home and waiting tables for a year helping them out, and eventually I got a job as a secretary at a maritime insurance company and I realized I was right down the road from the University of Houston, clear Lake, and at the time 70% of their classes were at night or online. So I finished my bachelor's that way, while working full time, and my master's too. And then I got into Texas A&M's history PhD program and was able to stop being a secretary and go there and do my training.
Speaker 2:So my so you were like what we would consider a non-traditional student, right?
Speaker 1:I was going to say, even though she's young, she's non-traditional.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, I'm first-gen. I think my mom tried to take a community college class or two when she was in her 40s and I was like in fifth grade and my brother was in ninth trying to help her with her math homework. She eventually decided that was too much. She didn't go back to school and dad barely passed high school, like he didn't know if he was going to graduate until the week of graduation because he slept in so much and his mother thought that he needed to sleep in and that was more important. So, yeah, I come from a pretty non-academic background.
Speaker 1:I get that First gen. We got to stick together. My dad, he went through a semester of college and then he went home to marry my mom. We go through these various things. It's amazing that we make it, but we do Gives us a special perspective yeah. So tell us, won't you just tell us about a little bit about your teaching philosophy? Because you teach at a two-year school, you have to teach a lot of surveys and you get a lot of students as we were just talking about from a lot of different backgrounds.
Speaker 3:Well, I started teaching at A&M, which is a bit different. It has a lot of international students and I was teaching History 13.01, which for them is 105, the first half US History Survey. I had an international student come up and asked me for some sources on just the US government and Constitution because there were things that weren't quite making sense to him because he didn't have that background. So I realized I needed to be teaching that as like the intro to my classes. And then that carried over when I moved to a community college, because you can have students who were out of school for several years or maybe their high school wasn't the best. And so I start with an overview of US government in both classes, just to kind of make sure we're all in the same page.
Speaker 3:And I try really hard not to assume any prior knowledge so that whether you're just really interested in American history or you have no background whatsoever, you can get something out of the class and pass it, which is also very helpful. And I try to kind of jump back and forth and different media in class. I'll have my PowerPoints up and each PowerPoint will have maybe two or three short video clips so they'll listen to me lecture for seven or eight minutes and then they'll have maybe a Smithsonian Channel clip or a PBS clip for two or three minutes and then they hear me again, and so they're constantly kind of jumping back and forth, which works really well for our students' attention spans at the moment, kind of stick with us because we're moving about.
Speaker 1:Do you find that your background that you just told us about is a real asset when you're teaching, particularly at the two year schools, or I think it would expand. Listen, what you just described is not a whole lot different than where I teach, so, and it's, you know so, the four year in the two years not a whole lot different. So you think that background helps you get.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I explained to students kind of that. I worked full time and I, when I was going in school and I tried to set up a class, that has some leniency in it for that, because I took an online class when I was working full time that the professor gave out a survey of when do we want it to take our exams and the most popular and least popular answer was the same one, and it was nine to five pm on a work day. Well, I worked eight, 30 to five. So the only way I was able to pass that class is I had a wonderful boss who offered to watch the phones for me while I took that exam at work, and I don't want my students having to do that. So you know things like having exams open for 48 hours, having grace periods and all my assignments, so that if it's a rough week and you can't get your work in this week by Friday at midnight, well, you've got three extra days. No questions asked, no points off, just get it in.
Speaker 2:I think, the way that you connect with your students and with the public in general. And this is our anniversary edition of Talking Texas History. You two have really used social media as an academic, as a professional historian. So tell us how you have kind of come into using social media. What drove you to do this and what have you done? How does it help you in the classroom?
Speaker 3:So the first kind of academic social media thing I did was Twitter and it was becoming a big thing right when I had applied and gotten into grad school at A&M and so I made my Twitter handle PhD Rachel, which was aspirational because I just got into grad school and I started following a bunch of historians and kind of having conversations with them and it's a really great way to build a community. And I ran across Jason, who leads the historians at the movies group over on what used to be known as the Bird app, and so historians all across the country every Sunday night at 7 pm watch the same movie and live tweet it and educate the public about the things that we're watching and how movies can kind of open us up to different historical events and understandings and how movies are historical artifacts and in different times. It's been really cool to see what comes out of that. We changed our movie to Black Panther after its late actor passed away very suddenly and we were tweeting about Black Panther and I tweeted out about the villain's final kind of monologue about how he wanted to die instead of being imprisoned and he was calling back to his ancestors in the transatlantic slave trade, choosing to go overboard and die instead. And so I tweeted out a link to American Yop's primary sources from a lot of Equiano and thousands of people clicked on a link to go read a primary source because they saw it on Twitter, right, 10,000 people clicked that link to go read the source. So it's amazing the kind of reach it can have in certain moments and the community we've built there.
Speaker 3:And then I started playing around on TikTok and I started seeing what claim to be historians accounts right, or historical accounts, I should say that have big followings and make big claims but left my historian Spidey sense going. I want to see those sources, I want to see where they're getting that from. And I eventually found some more academic historians accounts that are always a little smaller than those massive ones that are more click baby and decided like I should be doing this. Then I wasn't really sure what I was going to start with, but I had kind of made my account, was kind of watching things and saving things, trying to figure it out. And I woke up and it was MLK day and I was on Twitter and I saw all these posts from conservative politicians who absolutely opposed civil rights legislation. But we're praising Dr King right, because his memory is not. You know what Dr King was, and so I made my first TikTok about Dr King's approval ratings in his last year of life and how he was actually less popular than Colin Kaepernick at the height of his kneeling protest in the NFL and said, like, basically, how you feel about Colin Kaepernick is probably pretty close to how you would feel about Dr King, and that was kind of the first video and it did pretty well.
Speaker 3:And then the other thing on TikTok is there are a lot of K-12 teachers. Teacher talk is a big thing, and so I followed some of the big creators, but I also wanted to be kind of the historian that those creators come to when they're questioning what they should be teaching or how they should make this more interactive for their students. And so the first kind of pedagogy thing I posted was about the Sojourner Truth project.
Speaker 3:Sojourner Truth very famous A&I woman's speech is not actually her speech, right, it's the Francis Gage version that's been interpreted through a very white lens into a stereotypical black southern accent for a woman who was from upstate New York with an Afro-Dutch accent, like she never said ain't. That just didn't happen. And so I pointed out there's this website I use in class called the Sojourner Truth project. You can see the more accurate version of the speech next to the Francis Gage version and they highlight the overlap and how little there is. And then they also had women with Afro-Dutch accents read the more accurate version so you can hear as close as we can get to what it really would have sounded like. And that video took off and I got a bunch of teacher followers and that was my first thousand followers on TikTok was because of that video.
Speaker 1:And how many are you up to now?
Speaker 3:I'm just over 10,000. I'm still a smaller account, but I'm picking up. They send me a check every month, so I'll take it.
Speaker 1:You know what they're just big monetize these things. That's real great. So what kind of feedback do you get and how have you found out about for lack of a better word the trolls? How do you deal with them and how do you do with that kind of thing?
Speaker 3:So if I get a troll comment, the first thing I'm going to do is respond as if they're acting in good faith.
Speaker 3:And I'm doing that not for them but because somebody in good faith might read that comment and think like, well, maybe they have a point, I don't know what's the response to that, and so they get one good faith response from me and then I shut it down.
Speaker 3:There's no point in the back and forth although my followers will get into back and forth but it drives up my views, which is fine by me. The other thing I'll do is make a video about that comment and explaining what's right or wrong with it. So I had one that was very lost-causing and so I made a video and was like, actually this is a great distillation of the lost cause. Like let's talk about the big features of the lost cause that are in this comment, and we just kind of went through what the lost cause was and educated people about it. I wasn't responding to the person who posted the comment, because they're not listening to me, but to the larger public who sees those comments and maybe doesn't connect them to that larger history. I think that's my job when I'm dealing with trolls and if they have any Nazi memorabilia, just block them.
Speaker 1:That's right. The lost cause was very good. Is that your most viewed episode?
Speaker 3:No, not even close. The most viewed one is at 340,000 views, which is by far, far and above all my other videos, I think the other ones that are maxed out are just over like 100K. But this one thing about TikTok you never know what's going to hit and what's going to miss. And so the most viewed video I was just sitting on my patio porch scrolling TikTok and saw this thing about the happy slave myth and was like oh, I've got something to say about this. And just off the cuff recorded like a minute and a half video and it is by far the most popular video on my page. And it was about being in class and covering slavery and getting to the Q&A.
Speaker 3:And I had a student who was ignorant but was acting in good faith, he wasn't trying to troll, and he said I don't mean to defend slavery, but isn't it true that the slaves who were treated fine stayed on the plantations and the slaves who were treated bad ran away and left slave accounts? And that's why all the accounts are so terrible? You have to teach your face. You don't want to show them what was going through my brain the moment he got to the word. But in that sentence I don't mean to determine slavery, but please don't, please don't. And I just told them, like the worst accounts of slavery we have aren't written by the enslaved, they're written by slave owners and they're how to torture manuals. That's what they are and I would not assign them to a college freshman, like for the mental damage they would do. And that little video has 340,000 views and an uncomfortable number of people asking me for that particular how to torture manual, which I've never responded to.
Speaker 2:You're using social media as a teaching platform. What is some of the feedback you're getting from your colleagues and our colleagues?
Speaker 3:Mostly they don't know how I edit and do the things we can do on TikTok, and it's the same for recording online lectures and stuff. I wasn't a huge fan of teaching online because I didn't want to record those videos and have all of my material out there if someone did act in bad faith or wanted to cut it or wanted to complain about it. But when COVID hit, we had to teach online and I felt like the best modality for my students was to actually have them see me teach. So I was recording videos and we all had that learning curve where I'm sure our first videos were all terrible. We got better over time.
Speaker 3:I actually really liked watching the Stephen Colbert show because at the time he was recording by himself at his house, like with his wife and kids recording, and it was like, if he's that awkward, it's okay that I'm awkward. If professional comedians don't have this down, it's okay that we're all struggling through this, but you get better at it and more comfortable with it and it's going to be out there when we are the others, so mine as well. I don't tell my students about my social media. I'm sure some of them will Google and find it, but I don't advertise my stuff to students, especially since I've gotten an FU to be monetized on TikTok. It just doesn't seem very ethical in that sense. So they are kind of two separate worlds for me. Well, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:I mean that you don't send your students to it because they don't know about it. So it really is essentially public teaching.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and one way that it's really useful is I get to see kind of the historical misinformation that my students are exposed to, either from history accounts I follow or things that I'm tagged in. I have a whole video on the three-fifths compromise because I kept running into people on Twitter and TikTok arguing that the three-fifths compromise hurt the South and cost them representation, when in fact it's the exact opposite. So I made a video explaining that. But that also meant I went back into my lecture notes for my history classes and added a deeper explanation of the three-fifths compromise, because I know my students are exposed to that stuff and so it makes me a better teacher because I know the myths that are circulating that they've been exposed to.
Speaker 2:How long are your social media presentations?
Speaker 3:On TikTok you're looking anywhere from 60 seconds to three minutes. Three minutes tends to be the max. Yeah, Anything over 60 seconds. I can get paid for those, so we'll go to like 65 seconds just to do that.
Speaker 1:Obviously, Gene is showing us to have to watch. He's getting me up there.
Speaker 3:Look, I do. Look, hey, there's a really popular one on TSA right now.
Speaker 2:I'm just saying I used to think I was cool and kept up with all the social media and with all the technology, but you know that ended about Six, seven years ago six or seven years ago.
Speaker 1:You haven't been cool in 35 years. Change, so I mean I.
Speaker 2:So how do you, how do you get like something on the three fifths Compromise or on sojourner truth into 60 seconds?
Speaker 3:So I think both of those are probably two to three minutes, but sometimes it's just realizing you're taking too long and starting over again and cutting something. You'll also hear me talk very quickly on tiktok, and there's even a whole thing on tiktok about the millennial pause that as old as millennials on tiktok We'll often hit record and then breathe before we start. They call it the millennial pause and a lot of Gen Z will scroll by if they see that. So you have to like edit out that pause and start talking right when it's because they don't.
Speaker 2:They don't breathe before they start talking, they just talk.
Speaker 3:There you go. Yeah, it's. It's a lot of like. That's interesting in the middle of a lecture and thinking like, oh, there's this really cool thing about Benjamin Franklin I want to throw in here. That's not really in the class, but it's one of those cool stories that will like keep the class with you. It's those stories and one to three minute bites.
Speaker 1:Interesting. That's very good. Well, you, all of us, we were professors and though we do other things Tiktoks, great, and recording and teaching all great but we also are active historians and active researchers. So tell our audience what it is that you research, what you're working on, what's about to come out, all those kind of good things.
Speaker 3:I had two big projects at the moment. One is revising what was my dissertation into a book manuscript, tentatively titled Soldiers, suffragists and immigrants, and it's all about drastic changes to voting rights in the progressive era. I think most of us know. Women's suffrage of course passes in 1920, but the idea that two-thirds of the country allowed non-citizens to vote and that ends in the same era that soldiers for the most part were not allowed to vote throughout American history, and really the first time we see a majority of states pushing for that is World War one. So you've got all these different changes to voting rights budding up against Jim Crow In the 19 teens and 20s, and so it's kind of a Road map through what happens in Texas with that, but also showing that Texas is spoiler alert, not exceptional, and that these things are happening in all these other states too. It just depends on which part of the country you're looking at. So that is kind of the big thing at the moment. And then Part of doing the ticktocks, as I was contracted, contacted by one dream slash the great courses to do a course for them, and it's a framing that historians do not like.
Speaker 3:Forgotten moments in US history, overlooked moments, that kind of thing, and yet I thought I was going to be a little bit more and yet I thought I could do some fun stuff with it. So three of those episodes are coming from my research. One on immigrant voting and how common it was. You know the founding Congress established non-citizen voting in the Northwest territory, which would freak out a lot of people today. There's one on married women's dependent citizenship, where women ceased to be Active citizens when they got married. Their citizenship status was determined entirely by their husband status and so you could be born in the US, never leave the US, be in the 20th century and still not be a citizen because you married an immigrant. And then, of course, there's one on soldier voting, which there's a lot of civil war and World War one history in there that I think people will find really interesting.
Speaker 1:It's. It's a. It's a fascinating topic and not enough people study it. The great courses I'm gonna ask you the great courses doing that is interesting. Actually, I actually helped with one of those gosh. Now it's been so long ago because and I took it at that time, so I don't really want to do this. I don't really think about the great courses, but I take up time because I got paid for it. It wasn't as much as I like, but it was on. It was a Western class on history in the West that we did and it turned out to be great Fun and I and I really enjoyed it. But those are hard to do. That takes a lot of work, doesn't it?
Speaker 3:It takes a lot of work to write the scripts. That's the part I'm in right now. We've got eight written in, four to go. The three, based on my research, came super fast. But the the other topics, like we're looking at the history of Thanksgiving not really being about Thanksgiving. Right, that meal was not a holiday like religious Thanksgiving, and actually the first Recorded event of a Thanksgiving meal happening between Europeans and indigenous people was in Texas. Exactly, we predate the Virginia version.
Speaker 2:As we did, a podcast on correct us. We did a podcast on that very issue and, of course, texas had two.
Speaker 1:Thanksgiving right, they didn't have chili in it.
Speaker 3:Yes, we will get into that the Franks giving and all of that which it didn't end up working out so yeah and actually tying that one into the lost cause, because we don't really embrace that until about 1900 when the Indian Wars cease to be and we can have this mythical friendly Indian character. But also it's very much a story of Protestant Christians being like welcomed in and it's something to focus on. That isn't the Civil War, so it kind of goes right with the lost cause. But yeah, there's a lot of episodes Eight are done for in the works and our due next month. I'll be very busy, all the чемod.
Speaker 1:Pearl prank forts trailer.
Speaker 3:Because True Deadlines with paychecks attached are also bad, exactly. Then we did a rehearsal where they had us read off of a teleprompter, which I don't normally use anything like that, but when I record for classes, my lectures, I've got my lecture notes in the presenter view of PowerPoint. I was reading what I wrote off of this teleprompter and they were shocked that I could read what I wrote. I was very concerned about academic reading levels. If they were very surprised, it's like well, I did write it Exactly.
Speaker 1:You were involved in a documentary, correct? Also?
Speaker 3:I was a co-writer for Citizens at Last, which is a suffrage documentary on Texas which gets a little bit into Latino women and African-American women but a lot on white Texans trying to get suffrage in what was a southern state. It is still streaming on the PBS app, both the TV cut and the extended cut.
Speaker 1:There you go, people, you can go watch that.
Speaker 3:It's streaming for free. If you are teaching Texas history or American history and want to assign it, you can do so.
Speaker 1:There we go. Good, I have graduate class and we're doing something. Myth and memory in Texas. I may have them do that. That's a good idea.
Speaker 2:Rachel, give us if somebody is looking for you on social media, how are they going to find you?
Speaker 3:I'm PhD Rachel on all the socials Twitter, tiktok, instagram. You can find me on Facebook as Rachel Michelle. Mostly that's just cross-posting from other places, but if that's your social media platform, you can still find me over there. Mostly it's PhD Rachel. Then my website is rmguntercom.
Speaker 2:Okay, we do like to ask all of our guests a very important question. That is Rachel Gunter what do you know?
Speaker 3:Voting is only a right if preventing it violates the 15th Amendment, the 19th Amendment that very specific bits of federal law, including what's left of the Voting Rights Act. States have the right to disfranchise those that they want to, as long as they don't step on those particular federal laws. Of course, if you do as we are seeing with current indictments, you can still be charged, but at an individual level, legally there really isn't a right to vote Not a right and they don't change unless it's competitive. All of this effort to enfranchise or disfranchise, that is because we are having competitive elections and people in power are scared they're going to lose. The same political situation that incentivizes it for politicians to disfranchise incentivizes other politicians to enfranchise. Keep that in mind when you're hearing people talking about Puerto Rico and DC and statehood and voting and all of that. It's the same political conditions that are leading the other side to try to take away people's votes.
Speaker 1:That's absolutely right. I took an offense. Actually I was doing a thing with Texas Tribune, working on some of these tech stuff, and one of the reporters had written and they sent it the draft Timmy Scott's involvement beforehand that Texas is a deep red state. I said you're going to have to change this because Texas is not a deep red state. It's not even close to being a deep red state and the hinterlands.
Speaker 3:haven't you heard? That's right.
Speaker 1:And so they said well, and they went back forth and I told them. I said, oh, I guess you're right. And so they did change it Because this is not a deep red state, it's not even close to being a deep red state.
Speaker 3:Yeah, drive through Mississippi, you'll get a different view.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Right. So one of the things that my political science friends tell me is that talking about the issues isn't good for politicians. What they want to talk about are what they think the public wants to hear, and they start talking about the issues and started debating it. They're afraid people aren't going to vote for them, so they talk about the wedge issues. They talk about, you know, the. What are? They called the wolf whistles or the, I don't know.
Speaker 3:Dog whistles. Right Dog whistles. What's going to get people angry enough to go vote Right? How are you going to scare people or piss them off to get them to the polling booth?
Speaker 1:Well, that's what we'll again. Thanks, Rachel. This has been very good. We will see you soon. It's getting to be the start of the semester. We'll all start seeing each other, See you soon, thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you very much.
