Interviewee: Dr. LeAnn Caldwell, female, Caucasian, Director of the Center for the Study of Georgia History and Augusta University, Augusta, Georgia
Interviewer: Dr. Niki Christodoulou, Augusta University
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Dr. Christodoulou: Dr. Caldwell, tell me a little bit about who you are.
Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, I’m LeAnn Caldwell, I have been a professor at this university since 1991, with the exception of six years when I chaired the history and geography department at Georgia College and State University which is the public liberal arts university of the state and then I came back here in 2008 and had been here since running the center for Georgia history, and since our merger um, also serving as the university historian. Prior to that in the 1980’s I taught at Paine College for eleven years, which is a historically Black college here in Augusta that was found in the 1880’s in the post-Civil War period by bi-racial Methodist churches, southerners, which is interesting in itself, because most of the African American colleges had been founded by Northerners, but these were Black and White Methodist who came together to found Paine and that was a wonderful teaching experience as well. So, I’ve been in education basically my entire adult life. Um, I got a master’s and doctorate degree in history at the University of Georgia and so that’s the content area that I have focused in and I have increasingly focused my research down to state and local history. I have become one of those people that get called on by lay people in the community who are not historical scholars, but need help learning about our past. So, I enjoy teaching at many different venues and many different level, I’ve certainly enjoyed the years I was in a full-time faculty, professor working with college students and my students seemed to enjoy the classes. I’ve had students tell me since that I really had an effect on them, but I’ve also enjoyed over the years doing workshops for public school teachers. I worked with Teaching American History Grants here in Richmond County for a number of years and in other counties, in areas near Atlanta, down in Savannah, and those were programs that are content based working with teachers throughout the public school system to bring to them the latest research that’s going on in the field because while they’re concerned with working with students every single day of course those of us who are in universities are also doing research and going to conferences to hear about other people’s research and this is a way of sharing those new findings and new research with those who are out in the field teaching. So, I’ve enjoyed that as well and on the local level I’ve worked with various organizations here like, the Leadership Augusta program, I do an entire day on history for that group every year and they also conduct what’s called an executive forum, which is a shortened program for people who are CEO’s new to the area and need some information and background about the area and I do a half day of history for that group as well. Um, because people find that once they have a sense of a place’s past then they can understand how things are, why they are the way they are and so I enjoy that kind of outreach into the community. In fact, my research center here on campus is the Center for the study of Georgia History was founded by a very prolific scholar, Dr. Edward Cashin who wrote well over twenty books on history of this area and of the South and he founded the Center for Georgia History here because he wanted to do research and outreach, specifically about the state of Georgia and it’s past and so after his death I came back from Milledgeville to take this position to continue that work and basically that’s what we do here. We do outreach and research and so I’ve got several projects going on right now delving into various aspects of the history of this area which I hope to get finished and get published so there will be more information out there about how we came to be what we are. (5:08)
Dr. Christodoulou: What are some of the things that have happened or are happening in the area that are of historical and educational importance? And how do your efforts contribute to the education of people?
Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, one of the things that I think is important that I’m involved in now is doing a lot of research on the African American story in this area. We have a rich African American history that goes back to the 1700’s but particularly interesting as the African American community came out of the civil war and had to deal with Jim Crow, had to deal with education and how to get an education, what kind of education African Americans would have. As I said Pain College was founded here so was Haines Institute, which offered education up to the high school level, Walker Baptist Institute, so there was this thirst for education in the African American community. In fact, when the public school system was founded in Augusta which and in Georgia which was – in much of the South was much later than in the North, it was post-Civil War here, it was 1870. And so, the South was behind and in many ways still lingers behind, there was an ethos of the significance of education in the Northern states that um, pertained to the elite of the South but not necessarily to other people including poorer Whites as well as all African Americans who were legally forbidden to have literacy, although some did, but the percentage was small coming out of the Civil War and so there’s this thirst for education and the school system was founded to deal with that. When our school system was started, it was started as a bi-racial school system although school weren’t integrated from the very beginning. So, there’s an important story I think to tell there all the way up through the Jim Crow era. The Civil Rights Movement here and in the state of Georgia was very important with Dr. King being centered in Georgia and coming to Augusta at a couple of points, but we had some leaders in our own community. And then what has happened post- civil rights and some of the issues the African American community and the board of education are still dealing with as schools seem to at least in some areas resegregate and so I think those are important issues we need to continue to try to address and I don’t think we can understand them if we don’t understand the background to them, how we got to this point and what some of the problems are in the school system. So, I think those are important, I think unfortunately as the economy has gone through its ups and downs education has not kept pace with the funding that it needs and so a lot of the enhancement that we’ve done in the past especially for the public school teachers is not there anymore, we’re not doing the same kind of teaching workshops to bring people up to date on the content that they teach, because the funding for it hasn’t been there and the teacher workdays for it haven’t been there. I mean there were years when the days that people we supposed to be in teacher workshops they were actually taking furloughs to balance the budget. Now we’ve seem to have gotten past some of that but not totally because we haven’t had a lot of content workshops recently. The other thing is there was a real curtailment for a while in field trips for students. So we have so many wonderful historic places here in Augusta and the surrounding area that people can go to that are beneficial to the students and the, a lot of the historic sites are willing to match what they do with students when they get there with the standards that the state has set up and is going to test them on, but a lot of the funding for that kind of thing had been curtailed. There does seem to be a little bit of an upswing in that, I know I’m on the board of historic Augusta and recently the Woodrow Wilson house has seen a couple of- a fairly large groups of students from the magnet schools, but we would certainly like to reach out to school beyond just those magnet schools and work with students in some of those other schools. And of course there are places like The Augusta Museum of History, The Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History, The Morris Museum of Art all of these places are such wonderful educational enhancements for our students and we’d love to see them utilized even more than they are. (10:49)
Dr. Christodoulou: Tell me a little bit more about your personal experience. You mentioned that you worked with students in the past through different programs. Is there any content that you noticed that excited the students or they were curious to learn more about?
Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, students come to us sometimes from high schools where they have, I think not, not understood that history is about understanding cause and effect: this happens which then has these outcomes and those tend to cause this. So, they quite often came into a college classroom wanting to know what dates they needed to memorize, and were very unnerved when I said maybe 1776. (chuckle) I’d say get some anchor dates, so know when the revolution was, know when the civil war, get some anchors, but beyond that, I don’t want you memorizing dates, I don’t want you memorizing the date of a particular act. What I want you to understand is how things happen, what people were living like and what made them think the way they did so that they would want to fight in an American revolution war. What led to the succession of the Southern states, um and we have to be honest about those things. And so, students with that different approach to it where it’s more of a story, they have their own personal story so once they grasp the concept of the story then they can begin to see that the country has this bigger story that they and their ancestors were a part of in some way. And so, it kind of depends on the student, some of them very interested in the whole um, how slavery worked and what that was like and I try to use primary sources so they can read things that people from the time said or the whole idea of the American Revolution, not glamorized but what it really was about and um what it was like to live back then. People tend to think that folks in the past lived and thought like we do just simpler, you know they didn’t have the same technology but it was simpler and that’s not true, they lived in a different environment, they lived in a different world, the way they saw it and perceived it, their own internal environment, because of the paradigms they lived with, very different from ours today. And so, once we begin to explore those things people got interested in, some were very, very interested in more recent history, World War II, some students had grandfathers that fought in World War II or in the early years I was teaching even fathers that fought in World War II or now Vietnam, I’ve had a lot of students they rarely got past or got up to past Vietnam in their early courses, so I try to get them all the way up to close to the present in my courses because they had never approached even the part of the world they had lived through themselves from back, from historical perspectives. And so, you can engage them in all of it if they enjoy the primary materials and reading what people say. They were often very surprised by things like, women and how women’s lives were viewed and the laws women had to live under, they had no idea that, I remember students being shocked to find out that before the 1970’s a married woman could not have a credit card in her own name, that those were given out in their husband’s name and they can’t believe that. So, finding out about those kinds of things I think always was engaging to students and I enjoy that part of the interaction and as I said, I try to use a lot of primary sources or secondary sources that quoted primary sources within them and sometimes use film. When I taught the Georgia History course I did use historic sites and we would go to them and kind of learn about how people lived on the ground by looking at some of those. So, I think that those kinds of things engage students and one of the things I really enjoyed is when students would get into dialogue with each other. Race is one of the issues that would always enhance a dialogue and it was such a good learning experience I think for people regardless of what race they were from or it was interesting to always have nontraditional students. I taught a woman’s history course American women’s history and I had an eighty something year old woman who took the course. Well, she had lived through a lot of this and the students were fascinated when she would talk about her experiences and she was very willing to talk about just about anything from what kind of educational opportunities she had or didn’t have, basically her family told her she needed to major in home economics in college and that was one of the few things, options women had, um even to sexuality she would talk about that. And so, um I think those kinds of things always peaks students’ interest and I like when they can learn from each other’s experiences. (17:13)
Dr. Christodoulou: What are some of the things that grabbed your attention earlier on when you were studying or even before that?
Dr. LeAnn Caldwell: Well, I have been interested in history since I was a child. My father was a physician and my mother was a nurse, so I grew up around a lot of medical family and some of my siblings have gone into medicine as well. But, my mother was also kind of intrigued by older things and I remember driving by old houses with her and she would say things like I wonder who lived there. I wonder if there were babies born in that house, you know that kind of thing. So, from a child that kind of stuff intrigued me and when I went to college I really wasn’t sure what I was going to major in and I had about four majors my first couple of years, but I zeroed in on history and literature and I took, I think, an equal number of courses in each and when I went to graduate school my final semester in college I took two graduate courses in literature, but when I settled in to go back to graduate school, which was not immediately after college I came home, I got married, I had a child and when my child was a year and a half old I decided I would go to graduate school, maybe not the best planning in the world, but by then it was clear to me that I wanted to study history.