By Claire Trask

As the world descends further in a post-fact era and the Trump administration limits journalistic freedom, the way history is documented and preserved for future generations is under threat, a UC Santa Barbara panel said last week.

Cuts to public broadcasting and universities mean Americans should prioritize recording public events – especially digitally — to maintain the integrity of history, said two professors and one student from the History Department.

Rosie Bultman is majoring History of Public Policy major and minoring in Black Studies. She is a student journalist with UCSB's radio station, KCSB, and her film “The Takeover,” about protests that led to the founding of the Black Studies department at UCSB, has received international recognition.

“Old newspaper articles are some of the best historical sources,” said Rosie Bultman a student journalist who is news director at KCSB Radio. “The only people that can get into Trump’s press room and ask him questions are people that are going to promote his propaganda, which means that journalists have fewer opportunities to poke holes in logic, to challenge propaganda coming out from the Trump administration.”

Bultman was joined by Prof. John Majewski, an expert on the Civil War era, and Prof. Juan Cobo Betancourt, who specializes in Latin America and digital documentation, at a virtual event hosted by UCSB’s Division of Humanities and Fine Arts. 

The talk called “Holding onto History,” honored National Preservation Month and was moderated by Claire Yacaboski, a graduating Communication student who is an HFA web and social media intern.  

John Majewski is a History professor at UCSB, who specializes in 19th century America, focusing on slavery and the Civil War. He is currently working on two book projects: “The Many Journeys of Robert Glenn,” and “Inventing the Creative Citizen: Creativity and the U.S. Civil War.”

Majewski warned against the impulse to erase a past that is not agreeable, urging instead that we be mindful of how to present these parts of the past. For example, Confederate era statues and monuments do not represent the beliefs of the 21st century, but they do have historical value, he said.

According to Majewski, the Trump administration's view of history is very self-centered, with a focus on "unity" "patriotism," and "economic progress," and in which slavery is portrayed in "nostalgic” terms." 

“Nostalgia, in some ways, is a form of forgetting,” Majewski said. “Where you turn [from] the brutal realities of the past and [make] the saccharine memories designed to ignore the past or make people feel good about the past.” 

History is being kept alive in many ways, including through digitization, said Cobo. History today is already digital, he said, but documents and artifacts that predate the digital era are prone to being lost to time. Digitizing history before it is gone is important for accessibility, and to allow future historians and communities the opportunity to remember.

“Archives are resources that communities use to assert land rights, to pursue legal processes to contest injustice, to find ways of building communities or adapting to a changing world,” Cobo said.

Juan Cobo Betancourt is a UCSB History professor. He specializes in colonial Latin American history, and he focuses on the digital preservation of historical documents.

He has been working over the past decade to make the digitization process more accessible to communities with less robust resources than research universities such as UCSB. His work was used by a city in the southwest of Colombia, Popayán, in a legal hearing over the historical valor of a Spanish conqueror who had a statue in his honor in the middle of the city. The trial used the archives to determine whether or not this statue should remain, and ultimately, the statue was taken down.

Radio host Bultman also co-directed the award-winning film, The Takeover, about the Black Student Union protests that led to the founding of UCSB’s Black Studies Department. She said much of her research for it came from the archives she had access to on campus as a result of journalistic accounts from the late 1960s.

Journalists, who moderator Yacaboski noted often write the first draft of history, currently have less access to first-hand information, and with funding cuts to NPR and PBS news outlets, there will be less access to reliable news, Bultman predicted. 

“It's so important that these radio stations and TV stations remain active,” Bultman said. “Not only for current residents of communities like Santa Barbara and rural communities throughout the United States, but also for future residents of those communities.”

Claire Trask is a third-year UCSB student majoring in English and Literature Co-Editor for the department’s student-run literatary magazine, “The Catalyst.”