Civics in the Classroom: Pearl Ponce

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 with Dr. Pearl Ponce, who is the director of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Before she stepped into that role, Pearl was a professor at Ithaca College, where she served as chair of the history department for six years. She’s a political and diplomatic historian with a specialty in the Civil War era — and the author of To Govern the Devil in Hell: The Political Crisis in Territorial Kansas as well as the editor of Kansas's War: The Civil War in Documents. 

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

Transcript

PEARL PONCE: “But it's important for us, I think, to learn about our past, even what we'll call the more disappointing aspects. Because I think to truly love one's country, one has to know one's country.”

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. In this episode, I speak with Dr. Pearl Ponce, who is the director of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. But before she stepped into that role, Pearl had a lengthy academic career. She was a professor at Ithaca College, where she served as chair of the history department for six years. She’s a political and diplomatic historian with a specialty in the Civil War era — and the author of To Govern the Devil in Hell: The Political Crisis in Territorial Kansas as well as the editor of Kansas's War: The Civil War in Documents. I talked with her about the importance of primary sources, and how they can serve as critical tools in understanding the country’s history. 

PENMAN: So I wanted to know, as the library director, what does a typical day look 

like for you? 

PONCE: Well, one of the things that's interesting about my job is there actually isn't a 

typical day. And I'll be honest, I've taught most of my life, and that's one of the things that I was worried about was leaving academia. Because so much of course of that is about the life of the mind. And once you've been in that world, it's a really exciting one, along with teaching, and so I didn't really know what it would be like working outside of academia. But it's really been great here. Every day is different. Some days I'm problem solving. Some days I'm helping set up an exhibit. Some days I'm consulting with my colleagues about digitization and what we should prioritize. So every single day is a new one, and it's really been quite stimulating. 

PENMAN: And I want to go back to what you just mentioned is that you were in 

academia for a long time. Can you talk about the role that primary sources had in your own research, which of course is mainly focused on the 19th century. 

PONCE: Yeah. So of course, as a historian that is the coin of the realm. You don't have 

history without evidence. So all historical works depend on primary sources. When you ask what role it played, it plays everything. So you have to go, and I think what's interesting, and of course it depends what type of historian you are, like what type of primary sources you're using. But for a political historian, they might be diaries, they might be newspapers, they could be political cartoons. So it really just depends on the era that you're working in and what the topic is. But it's an intrinsic part of our work and we simply couldn't do it without it, which is why the preservation of the records are so important. 

PENMAN: Do you have a favorite primary source or like an early story about 

encountering a primary source in your research that got you really excited?

PONCE: I think what would surprise people is how passionate people wrote about the 

events of the day. So I think probably one of, it's not one that I use in my research, but one of my favorite documents that I always shared with students was the inauguration of Andrew Jackson. And if you read, there's diaries from some – we'll call it socialites in Washington D.C. – who they genuinely seem to be thinking that there's going to be a horde descending on Washington, D.C. And in fairness there were so many people who were so excited to see and to meet President Jackson that essentially they were ruining the White House. And so they had to put tubs of ice cream on the lawn to get the people to come out of the overcrowded White House. And unfortunately, they exited through the windows and everything, so it didn't really help. But it just again speaks to that passion. People were so excited to be at that inauguration. But reading them, and of course, part of your job when you're teaching something like that is you want a whole range of people. So someone who's worried about what this Democratic president, and that's Big D Democrat, represented. And so all across that kind of spectrum. So you want to make sure that you're representing the different views. So somebody who is really fearful, someone who's really excited, so you can put together a good picture for students of that event.

PENMAN: Tubs of ice cream. 

PONCE: Tubs of ice cream. 

PENMAN: Do you know what kind of ice cream?

PONCE: No. That would've been fun. And I do, if I'm not mistaken, believe there was 

also wine to encourage people to leave. 

PENMAN: Here at the library, you've actually just taken me through and shown me 

some of the primary sources that you have here as part of the A250 exhibit. What is it about seeing primary sources, you think, that – in person – that is exciting?

PONCE: I think for a lot of people it's, in some ways it, it gives a tangible kind of sense 

that these people were human. They were just like us. Because I think especially for some of the bigger documents that have greater resonance, they feel like somehow they're on a pedestal. Right? But you can actually just see, oh, look at how they wrote. Though in fairness, a lot of these, especially the political documents, are written by their clerks. But you can just see a little bit of what life was like. What, for instance, kind of ink did they use? What was penmanship like? And it's funny because I was, I ran into a woman who came to the exhibit, and it turns out that she is one of the citizen archivists that worked for the National Archives. And so part of what she does, there's a kind of initiative that the public contributes to transcription of documents and one of the crises that's happening that seems, depending on how old you are it seems interesting that we're at this point, but one of the reasons that we have the citizen archivist initiative is that so many younger people actually don’t know how to read cursive. And so this gets people who know how to read cursive to help with the transcription of some of these documents. 

So I ran into her in the research room and she was just talking about the work and how interesting it was. And that's also something for a lot of, especially students who haven't been taught to write cursive, they don't know how to read cursive. So increasingly some of these documents might be unintelligible unless we go back to this ability to read cursive. But as I said, in the interim, we do have people who are doing transcription. But again, for a lot of students, and I know among the ones I taught, increasingly they only use block letters, and so having to give them a primary source, that's one of the first struggles is that they don't know how to read it. So you actually have to teach them how to actually read a document. And again, when I was first starting out, that wasn't an issue because everybody was taught cursive and they knew how to read cursive. 

PENMAN: And here at the Bush Library, you're obviously not dealing with documents 

that are that old. Can you talk still though about the importance of primary documents that come from, you know, 2000?

PONCE: Yeah. Because again, one of the things that it does is it helps us understand 

our past. And that's why NARA’s mission is to preserve, protect, and to share the records. And one of the things that NARA always talks about is our obligation, because again, we're the George W. Bush Presidential Library. So all of our records really concern his administration. But there's a greater mission, which is to understand our government, to understand our past, to understand democracy. And all of these documents help contribute. And of course, because of the nature of President Bush's, for instance, election – if you go into the museum for instance, you can see the butterfly ballot and you can see well, what was a chad? What's a hanging chad? And it helps tell that story of why was that election so controversial? Why did it take so long to actually determine who had won it? Right. But if you actually look at a butterfly ballot – because you can read about it, but can you truly understand like what really is a chad? And why was it so hard to read this ballot? But if you can go and look at the ballot, it's like wow, okay, maybe now I understand it. And so that's one of the reasons why we preserve records of all sorts. And of course, I think especially as a historian, I think we tend to think of records as textual. But one of the nice things about working in a place like this is that you realize that there's a whole range of different types of records. And they're not just for instance, speeches. But a quilt can tell a story. An object can tell a story. And that's part of what we do here and throughout our as well.

PENMAN: Do you have any favorite objects here at the library? 

PONCE: Oh, there's so many great objects. I was fortunate enough, last year –we do 

something every year called the valuable and vulnerable inventory, and there was such a really wide range of things. So you expect some things, like for instance many government sent Mrs. Bush jewels. So there's some beautiful necklaces, watches, earrings. But someone also sent the president a gold plated machine gun, and you're sitting there going like, why? At least I say that. Because I can't imagine like, why would you gold plate a machine gun? It just seems so odd. But somebody did it and presented it as a gift. And then there's artwork. And the artwork is really interesting too, because I personally, first of all, I'm not an artist, but even if I were an artist, I can't imagine finishing a piece and thinking, “What should I do with this? I'll send it to the president.” But we have – but from our perspective, of course, it's great. We love that Americans do that. And one of the nice things about the archives is, my collection manager always likes to say, is that we treat every single object equally. From the handmade drawn picture with crayon to the million dollar painting that we have, and all of them are given equal standing in our eyes.

PENMAN: You were talking about digitization earlier and trying to decide what to 

prioritize. How do you organize that? Because there must be so much that you need to digitize. 

PONCE: So we've just started and we're still awaiting our digitization staff in part 

because there's been a hiring freeze. So the decision was made that we would start with the open records because not all of our records are open. So we have a collection of records that have been opened through the Freedom of Information Act. And so we have started with that, with digitizing them and then releasing them. So for instance, if you go to our website you can find PDFs of these records. So that's what we're starting with. And then once we finish the open records, we will go to what we'll call high priority or high request records. But they all have to be open. So there is a, we'll call it a queue. 

PENMAN: And so our summer seminar that begins in June is for K through 12 teachers 

who will be hopefully taking back what we teach them into the classroom and working with their students on some of these – on the Declaration, the Revolution. How do you think teachers of K through 12 students can talk to kids about the importance of primary sources? For kids that age, how might they understand the importance, especially considering 2026? I feel our understanding of what is a primary source might get muddled when we're not sure of what we're looking at is even real.

PONCE: Yeah. It is one of the challenges with AI right now. And it's something we're 

going to have to work on, and especially as – because you can, frankly, fake documents. And it's not to say that it's a problem today. There have been people who have figured out how to forge, for instance, paintings by aging or finding particular types of paint that only would've been used. So I don't want to pretend that it's only a problem of 2026. It's something that, we'll call it a presentation of falseness that is longstanding. But to go back to your previous question, which is how do you help students? I think the real key is to make it fun. And I know when – so to be clear, I've never taught K through 12, but I used to teach freshmen a lot and I know when I was first teaching the American survey, which is what I was responsible for as a U.S. historian, I really struggled to find documents that would really captivate students because as I said, I think the tendencies is to think, oh, do I have to read another speech by another dead guy who lived 200 years ago? And sometimes it's hard, especially when the language is flowery, it's formal. It's long. People used – there was nothing else. They would sit and listen to political debate for four hours, right? It was a Saturday afternoon. So I think sometimes student struggle with that. And I finally found a really great documentary collection that I was very fond of. Originally it was called American History in a Box, and it was in a literal box for each kind of segment there would be folders. So it was actually an object. And I thought what was great with about it was that it was such a wide range of documents. So there was a map. There would be a portrait. There were like, for instance, a telephone directory. There were ship manifests. And it really helped students really understand because, well, what is dragon's blood? Which showed up on a manifest from India. Right? So you could talk about that. One newspaper from Cincinnati mentioned that a necromancer had come to town that Saturday. And again, especially students who game, they know what a necromancer is, right? And so that could really prompt a really exciting conversation. What was the necromancer doing in Cincinnati and in the 1830s? What do you think it means? What was he doing? How did the people respond? Why is this worthy of a newspaper article? So to really dig in, to think not just about what the document literally says, but what it says about the time. And what we can learn from these just really little nuggets that might seem like a throwaway at the time, but that can help illuminate a whole world that maybe they haven't thought of. And so I think the key is really to try and make it as exciting as possible. So I think it starts with a good selection of sources.

PENMAN: And I’ve been here at the Presidential Library in the museum before and 

seen big groups of students come in. Can you talk about some of the programming that y'all have for students? 

PONCE: Yeah, so I will say that there's a difference between the presidential library 

and the museum. The museum is now run by the George W. Bush Presidential Foundation. And so we don't handle, for instance, like the groups. So when we think about the kind of programs that we have for students, they're kind of different. So for example, if alocal classroom wanted to come, we would be happy to host them. So for instance, we sometimes host classes from SMU, we give career talks. We bring up objects and talk about the objects. We talk about our work, we talk about the books. We also do have a traveling trunk program that is really great because those are also trunks that are full of primary sources that are meant to be touched. So unlike our artifacts, which can't be touched. So for instance, there's one called nana's attic, I believe, and that one is about immigration. And so there's different kinds of sets. So like an Asian American family, an African American family. And there's a whole range of things like maybe there's a tea set, maybe there's postcards. Maybe – one of them had some of those old-fashioned skates. I don't know if you remember them. Ones where you used them around your own tennis shoe. And so these are designed to go out to the schools and for them to teach students about primary sources in that way. And so that's more our type of outreach at the moment. 

PENMAN: This is a really broad question, but what do you see as the role of 

presidential libraries? There are 16 of them, is that correct? 

PONCE: Yeah, so there's 16 of them, but only 14 currently have buildings. So the 

Obama library will be opening in June. And then we have the Presidential Biden library, which I believe has chosen a site. And President Trump's has also chosen a site, but neither one of them are yet built. So on a micro level, we do in fact preserve the records of a presidency, and that again, helps us to understand our past. It makes sure that all the records are preserved. And we facilitate access to researchers. So that's the micro level. The macro level is that again, part of what we do is to support what I'll call civic education. So through the presidency, trying to reach out to various communities and offer, for instance, any, if anybody wants, for instance, for me to come and talk to a class, I'll go and talk to them about the presidency, about this president in particular, about democracy, about education. So I really think it's outreach. But at its core, again, our mission is to preserve, protect, and to share the records. A presidential library in particular shares records of a particular administration. 

PENMAN: Could you speak to the importance of civic education when it comes to 

being a citizen? 

PONCE: I think it's imperative that we understand the nature of our own government. 

Because part of being a citizen as opposed to a subject is that we do in fact have responsibilities. And I would argue, of course, those responsibilities are to vote. And of course the more informed a voter you are, I think the better for against smaller republic. So I think fundamentally. What a presidential library can do is to help teach people, for instance, what is the constitution? What does it actually say? What are our rights? So to teach a little bit about how we came to be a democracy, how we establish the nation, how we continue to commit. Because as a nation, we haven't all, even though we, we're supposed to form a more perfect union the truth is, it wasn't. And it's one of the things that as a nation that we have to reckon with, which is our past. But it's important for us, I think, to learn about our past, even what we'll call the more disappointing aspects. Because I think to truly love one's country, one has to know one's country. And part of how we know it is through history, through looking at our past and really trying to understand it. 

PENMAN: Well, thank you. 

PONCE: Of course. I would just tell any teacher who wants to learn more to please 

reach out. As I said, we're happy to work with teachers. We have an educational specialist whose main goal is, I know your program is bringing teachers from across the country, but of course, especially now, one of the aspects of digitization is so that you don't literally have to come to Dallas to be able to access the resources that we actually provide. So I would just encourage everybody to do the great work that they're doing. Teaching is hard, and of course I have deep respect for anybody who's in that profession. 

PENMAN: Well, thanks again. 

PONCE: Of course. I'm happy to talk with you.

PENMAN: This is the fourth episode in a six-part series leading up to our summer teacher seminar in June. Next week, we’ll feature a conversation with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, former CPH postdoc and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. She’ll be giving the seminar’s keynote speech — so be sure to tune in.