An Interview with Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green

Greg O'Brien

On July 11, 2012, Greg O'Brien conducted the following interview with Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green at their home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Greg O'Brien (GO): First of all, tell us a little about your personal backgrounds, where you're from, where you grew up, what your parents did, and how you got interested in history as a profession.

Michael Green (MG): I was born and raised in Iowa. My dad was a Methodist minister. I've been interested in history since I can remember. When I was a kid in junior high and high school, I was a voracious reader and what I read was historical stuff. It was never a question what I was going to major in when I went to college. I went to Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where I was a history and political science major because history and political science were joined together in the same department. When I went to graduate school to the University of Iowa I was a history major. I've always been, I've always had, the soul of a historian.

Theda Perdue (TP): I'm from McRae, Georgia, a town of 2,500 where my father was a farm equipment dealer. My mother had been a beautician during the late 1930s and through World War II, but by the time I was born she was a stay-at-home mom. I'm the only child, and my parents were middle-aged when I was born. I think I probably became a historian in part because my mother was an avid reader. She read constantly, and even in her late 80s, she could read a book a day. I remember going with her to the library where there was a series of biographies of famous women arranged alphabetically by their first name. I started with Abigail Adams, then Amelia Earhart, and I ended, I think, with Sarah Bernhardt the actress. So, I guess that hooked me. I began college at Emory University, then I transferred to Mercer University. By that time I wanted to be a lawyer. I entered law school early after my junior year in college, and I lasted one semester. I quit law school because I thought that the study of law was one of the most boring things I'd ever done in my life. It consisted largely of abstracting cases, but equally important, I was struck by what one of my professors said, which was that "there is no justice in the law." What he meant was that your client could be innocent and still not win, but it bothered me terribly, because this, after all, was 1971, at the height of the antiwar movement, and issues of social justice were still very much in the fore. I was appalled by the idea that you couldn't really be assured of justice in the American legal system. So I quit, I thought about what I wanted to do next, and I decided to go to graduate school in history. I ended up at the University of Georgia and became a historian.

GO: Okay. Mike, did you ever consider any other career other than being an academic historian?

MG: I briefly toyed with the idea of the State Department diplomatic corps, but when I graduated from college, I was faced with a real crisis, I guess. I graduated from college in 1963. I was married. I had a son who was two years old. I had not taken any education courses so I could not qualify to teach high school. I was a historian, and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do, but I realized that I had to make up my mind immediately and graduate school was the only thing I could think of to do. That's how I ended up going to graduate school, and I discovered very quickly that I had blundered into the right decision. I was very happy as a graduate student, and I was very happy being a historian. So the question about whether or not I was going to become our ambassador to the Soviet Union slipped through my mind fairly quickly.

GO: Okay. Theda, other than possibly being a lawyer, did you ever consider any other careers by the time you were an undergraduate?

TP: No, I don't think so. I resisted education courses in the same way that I resisted typing courses in high school. (I still type with two fingers.) I don't know whether it was a kind of budding feminism or it was simply a reaction to my mother's situation. My mother was an extraordinarily bright woman who really never found an outlet for her intellect. I didn't want to get pigeonholed into a stereotypically female job as a schoolteacher or a secretary, so I shunned anything that smacked of that.

I never really thought about being a historian, it just sort of happened. I got a job, although, in the fall of 1974, there were not many jobs out there. I had not finished my dissertation or even taken qualifying exams when a job came open at Western Carolina University for a position in Cherokee history. Few people did Indian history in those days, and apparently I was one of two people in the country who applied. I managed to get the job. I was hired on December 30, and I started teaching the first half of world history on January 2. That was a humbling experience. But I took qualifying exams that spring, and by the next spring, I had a dissertation ready to defend. So, my career was something that just kind of happened. But once I got an academic position, I was absolutely certain that that's what I should do.

GO: Mike, I've heard you talk a lot before about academic legacies and your intellectual forebears, so I was wondering if you could spend a little time talking about that. Who have been your intellectual influences, either in your career or just in the way you approach history?

MG: Well, I suppose that the person most responsible for my becoming a student of American Indian history was Allan Bogue, who was my first professor at the University of Iowa. I went to Iowa with the intent of being a western historian. I took a seminar my first semester as a master's student with Bogue, and the first day, we went around the table talking about our projects for the seminar. I had no idea what a seminar was. I had no idea...