This interview has been collected and condensed by Kelly Lin-Kremer.

Class of 2021, History

Tell me a little bit about yourself, where you grew up, and what you're doing now.

Jon Ort

Joe and I are identical twins who grew up in Highlands Ranch, which is a suburb about 45 minutes south of Denver, Colorado.

I just graduated from a master's program at Yale Divinity School. The Master of Divinity is traditionally the professional degree that one would pursue in order to become ordained or to enter ministry, but I'm not quite doing that. In the fall I'll start a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago.

Joe Ort

After college I worked at a law firm in Boston for two years, and I'm now a law student. I just wrapped up my 1L or first year at Harvard Law School, and I'm doing an internship this summer with the Massachusetts Attorney General's office.

What led you to history? Did you know when you started that you wanted to do history? 

Joe Ort

We have a joke in our family because I knew I wanted to go to the same college as Jon, but Jon was keen to get away. So he set some strict boundaries, and one was that I could major in history, but he was going to do politics. He was staking out his turf there, but then he invaded the department sophomore year, which was a funny about-face.

But, despite what he said, I was interested in a lot of things: history, politics, and the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA). In my first three semesters, no two classes I took were from the same department. I enjoyed the history classes, and the department seemed to be populated with extremely kind, engaging professors and students, so I naturally gravitated there. The structure the department offered for writing junior papers and the senior thesis was particularly appealing.

Jon Ort

Joe's account is true, embarrassed though I may be to admit it. When we first entered Princeton, I promised myself I wouldn't major in history. I felt like Joe could and should choose history, but I was going to forge my own path. In fact, I very much felt the pressure to pursue something more quantitative and “practical,” with more prestige. I thought I would do political science or SPIA.

In retrospect I am so glad that I disabused myself of those assumptions, and that I did major in history. For me, the turn towards history was reflective of the experiences I had in the classroom that most inspired me.

In that early period of Princeton where we were trying to differentiate what we were going to do, I told Joe he could have history, and I signed up for the humanities sequence. I told Joe he wasn't welcome to join me there, that I wanted to do this on my own, and that was the concession Joe had to grant me, because we had gone to the same university.

The most powerful moment in the entire year came at this dinner, which is held at the end of the year. Professor Padilla Peralta, who's in the Classics Department, gave an address in which he exposed all of the workings of this so-called Western canon as an instrument of empire and of white supremacy, and the ways that this fictive notion on which our year-long course had been predicated had vindicated injustice throughout history.

For me, that was a moment of suddenly understanding a series of assumptions that I had taken for granted. I can pinpoint that moment as a really important one in helping me to realize that the craft of history and the work of historicizing allows us to take nothing for granted, and to think critically about everything around us.

I think that it's a realization that is at once profound and inspiring, and daunting, too. It was encouraging to know that the structures in our midst, like social orders and everything about the way in which the world is constructed, has a history. To trace that history is to place ourselves in relation to these systems, and not have a kind of false innocence or an ignorance.

Like Joe, I actually didn't take any formal history classes in my first year, not until the fall of sophomore year. My experiences in those history classes very much built on that spark that Professor Padilla Peralta had lit for me, and the rest, as they say, was history.

What were some of the most memorable courses that you took in history?

Joe Ort

There were a lot that were great. I took History of the American West and Archiving the American West with Martha Sandweiss, who was also my thesis adviser. She retired a couple of years ago.

The Archiving the American West class was during COVID, but it was still an incredible, extremely innovative course. We were going into the Firestone Special Collections looking at various manuscripts and collections of photographs and texts. Professor Sandweiss had an approach that was extremely eye-opening by using different sorts of historical evidence. Her scholarship focused on using photographs as indicia of things that were going on under the surface.

I enjoyed American Intellectual History as well, and Professor Blaakman's junior seminar on frontier lands in the early United States.

Jon Ort

One of the first history classes I took was Professor Dlamini's Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, which takes a comparative lens to understand the realities that underpinned colonial rule and this project of exploitation, extraction, and white supremacy, as well as the entwining of race and religion. Much of Professor Dlamini’s work examines the moral complexities that arise from these structures of colonial domination. He often engaged his own upbringing under apartheid South Africa, and so it was such an immense privilege to learn from him.

Another class that really informed and changed me was the junior seminar that I took which was taught by Professor Prakash on Subaltern Studies. Professor Prakash is one of the historians who helped to devise and create this framework of subaltern studies when it came to trying to understand the realities of peasant life in India under British colonial rule.

One of the premises of subaltern studies is to recognize that the archive is not an innocent or neutral receptacle that chronicles the past. Instead, the archive is a site where power is at work. The constitution of that archive, whose perspectives it records and amplifies, has everything to do with violence and ideology, such as white supremacy. Taking that junior seminar gave me a more nuanced and critical understanding of what it means to try to “go into the archive,” which, of course, is the kind of foundational move that historians do, and then to try to employ subaltern methodology which seeks to recover those voices that aren't explicitly recorded in the archive, and trying to ascertain what we can know about those whom the archive silences.

The last class I want to mention is Professor Mota's course, Modern Brazilian History. More than anyone, Professor Mota taught and transformed me. She advised my second JP as well as my thesis. Modern Brazilian History examined and confronted the kinds of assumptions and myths that underpin Brazil's narrative of its national history. It also foregrounded indigenous and Afro-Brazilian culture and history. The majority of the Brazilian populace is of African descent to some extent, and so it’s important to recognize what that means for Brazil's national identity in the wake of slavery, its trajectory as a plantation colony, and then as its own kind of imperial power. An unexpected but very powerful implication of taking that class was that it also gave me a comparative perspective to think about the United States.

Joe Ort

We never took a class together in the History department, did we?

Jon Ort

I'm not sure that we did.

Joe Ort

The only class we took together was COS 126 (Introduction to Computer Science). We partnered on some assignments, and that was a terrible idea, because neither of us had any idea what we were doing, so we just got mad at each other instead.

Tell me about your senior thesis.

Jon Ort

For my senior thesis, which was advised by Professor Mota, I looked at Jamaica in 1938, which was a year when across the Anglophone Caribbean, colonized peoples organized and mounted not only protests, but more sustained insurgencies to try to undo colonial oppression. Jamaica at that point was a British colony, and in a certain sense it was the crown jewel in Britain's empire across the Americas.

I tried to take a subaltern lens here. This was during Covid, so I didn't have access to physical archives, but I was able to use the digitized archives of the Daily Gleaner, which is the largest newspaper in Jamaica, and by reading the coverage that the Gleaner published over a four-week span in the spring of 1938, I tried to reconstitute what the industrial workers who rose up were seeking to do and the kind of vision that they forged and advanced, a vision for Jamaica that was free from the anti-Black system of British rule.

The second half of the thesis then tried to understand how that vision, for not only an independent but a free Jamaica, came to be co-opted and silenced both by British colonial authorities, who dismissed the insurgency and who failed to understand the radical vision at its heart, but also how a certain kind of nationalist, middle-class narrative had also sought to strip the workers’ vision of its radical politics.

Joe Ort

My senior thesis, which I wrote with Professor Sandweiss, was about an episode in my home state of Colorado about the Royal Gorge War. It was a railroad “war” between two railroad companies, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, who were competing to lay track in a very narrow gorge. It's a tourist site today because it's very dramatic.

There was a standoff for over a year. Both sides armed laborers and constructed forts in the gorge, which has extremely steep walls. There are amazing photographs of these little forts and of railroad workers with rifles, and Bat Masterson, who is an iconic Wild West figure, was involved at one point.

This railroad war ostensibly fit into that rubric of great men, as a narrative about mavericks who were leading the railroad companies. My thesis challenged that narrative and explored other perspectives, arguing that a whole range of other actors shaped the course of the “war,” and that it wasn't these great men from afar calling the shots literally or figuratively about what transpired, even though it was this dramatic episode, where both parties were ignoring commands from the Colorado Government to stand down. It explored how local people in the area responded to and had an influence on the course of those events. The source base was a lot of digitized newspapers and photographs.

What have you done since Princeton?

Jon Ort

As an undergrad, I became interested in the presence of the Firestone name on Princeton's campus. For nearly the past century, Firestone has run the world's largest rubber plantation in Liberia, the West African nation. I had a sense that there had to be a connection between the fortune that the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company built on the basis of this rubber plantation and then the fact that this campus we inhabit bears that name and has benefited from Firestone’s exploitation of Liberia.

I had written a couple of OP-eds in The Prince calling for Princeton University to examine and disclose its ties to Firestone. Ultimately, because I was a history major, I had the chance to try to take up that work on my own. In this case, I had the opportunity to be mentored by none other than Professor Sandweiss herself, so, though I never had the honor of taking a class with Professor Sandweiss, we like to joke that she advised two Ort theses, because in the two years after graduation, I wrote a long-form investigation for the Princeton and Slavery Project, which Professor Sandweiss created.

I found that for many decades Princeton and Firestone fostered a close relationship. Firestone’s money was central to Princeton's rise as a modern, world-class research institution, and therefore that the racist system of forced labor that Firestone has long imposed in Liberia and Princeton's modern rise can't be extricated from those injustices and from that exploitation.

Divinity school really deepened and expanded what my study of history had already begun to do, which is to help me think about myself in relation to my work, and to challenge this assumption that historians should seek to create work that is entirely divorced from who they are. That's an illusion that just reinscribes systems of power.

In divinity school, many of my peers were studying to become pastors and religious leaders, and so therefore their own religious beliefs and commitments informed the academic work they were doing. That's different from the study of history, because the historian is not necessarily locating their history in relation to a set of religious beliefs.

Now as I prepare to re-enter the history world, I hope that I can honor what I've learned about how to be honest with myself in terms of the work I might want to write about. In my Ph.D., I'm hoping to focus on Liberia, how it came to be, and in particular, to think about the ways that race and religion as categories mediate and define each other. I'm hoping to examine how Christian vocabularies and logics have structured the making of race in Liberia's history.

Both the Princeton and Slavery research and the time in divinity school helped me develop my approach and my thinking around how to engage with the archive, and also about my own responsibilities as a historian. I'm frequently reminded of a really important lesson that Professor Prakash taught me in the Junior Seminar. He said that any historian who claims to be writing for the “benefit” of their subjects is treating their motives dishonestly, because those subjects have already lived and died, and whatever we write in the present day can't make any difference on those lives that were lived.

As I think about what I'm hoping to do as I'm seeking to align my historical work with a commitment towards racial justice and an honest confrontation with the ways that anti-Blackness structures colonial modernity, I have to be honest with myself as a white historian. What does that really mean? And if I'm just trying to excuse myself of responsibility that has everything to do with my own positionality and nothing to do with my subjects. And so that foundation from history to think critically about myself and my work has continued to guide me.

Joe Ort

This summer, I’m interning with the Massachusetts Attorney General's office, and I’m specifically working with the gun violence prevention unit, which is interesting because Second Amendment jurisprudence in the United States, particularly based on recent decisions, has come to involve “history.”

In Second Amendment cases, there's this imperative to look to history, because the 2022 case New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruen was an articulation by Justice Thomas of this notion that we have to look to things that are “deeply rooted in our nation's history and tradition” to assess the constitutionality of, in that case, gun regulation in New York state.

It was an invocation of history to look at the ways governments have historically regulated restricted firearms consistent with the Second Amendment. But Bruen’s account of history can be completely divorced from what professional historians think. Justice Breyer warned in his dissent that history, according to Justice Thomas, “can be used as a 1-way ratchet,” and you can pick your friends from history's crowd. It makes it possible to cherry-pick the parts of history that best comport with perhaps the outcome they want to see.

So the work I'm doing this summer with the gun violence prevention unit is in the register of history because Bruen has introduced this predominance of “history,” and that's created a lot of confusion. Lower courts have really struggled to apply Bruen’s rigid approach to history.

Do you have any final advice that you would give to people thinking about majoring in history or people who are currently majors?

Jon Ort

Earlier in our conversation, we touched upon the pressure that is widely felt not to study the humanities, this implicit assumption that history isn't practical, that the decision to study history has to be defended and rationalized. And I just want to affirm for anyone who's thinking about studying history, that if your own convictions and interests have brought you here, then it's the right choice.

Following what animates and motivates you won't lead you astray. I hope that both my experience and Joe's underscores that following questions about which you feel passionately is a way to try to remain faithful to the kind of work you see yourself doing. History has afforded us the opportunity to understand the world that we live in, and to understand ourselves in a radically different way, and for that gift I will always be grateful.

Joe Ort

Something Professor Sandweiss taught me is to just start reading the primary sources if you're trying to find inspiration for a topic. Pick somewhere to start and pay close attention. I think there's a lot of joy to that. There's the excitement of discovery, of connecting pieces together, and I think that's something that stuck with me. Whenever I feel the impulse to think too big, or feel like I have to have an idea right off the bat, I remember that paying close attention will take you to wonderful and unexpected places.