"Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
That aphorism, credited to the pen of novelist, essayist and poet George Santayana, might also be used to define the impact of Case Western Reserve Associate Professor of History Peter Shulman’s Twitter Account: @HistOpinion.
The provocative account has gone viral — and for good reason. Shulman’s Twitter feeds have shed new light and offer unique historical perspective on issues that are impacting the lives of Americans.
It all started in October 2013 as Shulman was completing the manuscript for his book “Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America.”
“I had been thinking of doing something with Twitter for history for a while,” says Shulman. “At the time there was a mushrooming proliferation of historical photographs on Twitter accounts, and many had dozens of followers.”
But many of them were out to monetize content, and many didn’t have attribution of who was in the photograph or who might have taken it. Others only featured celebrities or famous politicians, and quite a few took things out of context or got key details wrong.
Shulman turned to a book of public opinion polls from 1935 through 1946 compiled by an early pollster named Hadley Cantril and began his quest. But Shulman’s tweets were initially limited to 140 characters. “I saw a pollster covering a contemporary event who had tweeted a graphic of a poll, and that’s where I got the idea of attaching a graphic image, because I could squeeze more information into the tweet,” he says.
Shulman began tweeting up to three polls a day, eventually cutting it down to two, always looking for “polls that either stood in stark contrast to the present, made a time and past that we think we understand and know seem really strange, or to make a time and place that is very far away seem very familiar,” he says. In addition to Cantril’s book, Shulman began sourcing public opinion polls from old newspapers and magazines.
One tweet generating a lot of interest came from a public opinion poll of college students from December 1938 asking if the U.S. should allow Jewish refugees from Central Europe into our country. According to the poll, the answer was overwhelmingly “no.”
Another poll asked about attitudes toward allowing German, Austrian and other political refugees into the U.S., with the same results. Shulman compared those results and found many similarities with the recent statements by politicians concerning Syrian refugees today.
Many of the same arguments against letting Jewish refugees into our country are now being used by politicians to keep Syrian refugees out, even though the threat concerns were essentially the same back then. An emotional tipping point was reached, and Shulman’s observations went viral.
The tweet on Jewish refugees garnered 4,700 retweets, and Shulman’s Twitter followers swelled to more than 17,700. Results showed that the U.S. has a long history of immigrants, and refugees in particular. However, the incendiary rhetoric against these people often doesn’t match the reality or actual risk.
Another poll found that during the late 1960s, Americans were questioning whether we should go to the moon, using the funds instead to improve cities, infrastructure and schools.
“We tend to think that people in the 1960s were very interested in going to the moon, but, if you dig down into the details of the polling, there was a lot of ambivalence about the space program even in the summer of 1969,” says Shulman. “It makes a lot of sense of why the funding and political support for the manned space program disappeared in the 1970s and beyond.”
While there are other public opinion polls that can bring the past into greater focus, he has decided to shift his focus to writing a book on the history of intelligence in our country, from eugenics and IQ testing to how we've conceptualized intelligence and its impact on schools, government and other institutions.
“The work with public opinion polls has been fun and very fascinating,” Shulman says, “but I didn’t want to base the next 10 years of my work on the fact that I wanted to open a Twitter account.”