LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH: Hello.
Well, my goodness, aren't I lucky?
I got to follow all these fabulous talks,
and I'm up here to talk about improbable things.
Hmm, and I even have two titles to remind you.
I am really interested in the common and the ordinary,
and I have a challenge here to convince you that there's some value in that.
When somebody asks me to think big, I have an inclination to start small.
I'm a historian.
History is all around us.
I hope you can feel it in this building that we're in today.
It's meant to intimidate you, it's meant to overpower you, and I can tell,
some of you at least can feel that sense.
But we can get ahold of lives and ahold of our position in the world.
If we can exercise a lot more curiosity about ordinary things,
including the things sitting right in front of us, and so
I'm going to try to convince you of that a little bit today.
What did you have for breakfast this weekend?
Did they feed you a very strange thing called a Veritaffle?
Did anyone get a Veritaffle?
No?
Yes?
Oh, if you didn't get a Veritaffle this time,
you'll get one when you come back.
What is a Veritaffle?
It's one of the strangest things on this campus.
It's actually a waffle produced on, I think, generally
on Sunday mornings in the Harvard dining halls
that is impressed with the official Harvard seal.
The Harvard seal?
It is three open books arranged in a kind of triangle
and one syllable of the three syllable word Veritas embossed upon on it.
Veritas, which is a Latin word for
AUDIENCE: Truth.
LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH: Truth, you've already got it.
OK, what's going on here?
What are they trying to do?
Are they trying to get you to think big?
Is that what goes on in the dining hall as you pour syrup on your Veritaffle?
Well, Veritas is all over the place.
When you walk out of the auditorium today
and you're in what's called the transept, at each end of the transept
is a stained glass window, and you will find the word Veritas
in both of those windows in slightly different forms.
I'd like to suggest a little game, as you go around campus,
looking for various manifestations of this word to Veritas.
They show up on windows, on t-shirts, on banners.
Here, we are in the entrance to Widener Library.
Here is a really fabulous example that you're not
going to find walking around campus, but if you're lucky enough
to go into the University Archives and ask,
they might show you a Harvard flag emblazoned with the symbol Veritas that
went many, many times circumnavigated the earth in 1991 in the space shuttle
Atlantis.
So Veritas has gotten around a bit.
Where did it come from?
I think as you see this symbol over of a campus,
you think nothing could be more stable, nothing
could be more ancient than the Harvard seal.
And in fact, if you went into the Harvard Archives,
you would find in an early college book this inscribed in 1643,
someone drew the outline of the shield and in a crude kind of way,
outlined and designed the Harvard seal with the word for truth.
Unfortunately, a few historians have been punking around in the archives.
This is a legitimate document--
it's real.
But somebody designed the symbol for Veritas,
but the college didn't want it.
They didn't like it.
They turned it down, and they preferred something more specific to the Puritan
origins of Harvard.
And they gave it a Latin term Christi Gloriam--
to the glory of Christ, and that symbol in various forms,
different Latin incarnations about Christ in the church,
to the glory of Christ.
The ultimate purpose of Harvard College initially
was to train a learned ministry.
In various incarnations, that version of the Harvard seal
lasted through the administration of President Josiah Quincy, who
actually found the old document from 1643, and it continued until the 1880s.
Long, long time after the origins of the universities,
and it was there in time to show up on the base of the John Harvard
statue, which you have all seen.
So, what was going on here?
What was this fight about?
This was about what kind of university Harvard was going to be,
and those who eventually went out and reduced the shield
to its old 1643 version wanted a kind of universal commitment
to truth rather than the ratification of the sectarian original organization
of Harvard.
Now, why does this matter?
I'm not sure that the people who come up to the John Harvard
statue, which was installed in 1884, care this isn't John Harvard.
Nobody knows what he looks like.
I mean, this is a historical fact that Harvard
took its name from the donation of books from John Harvard,
but nobody seemed to notice that and create this statue of Harvard
until almost 250 years later.
People don't care about that.
This is about the present, like the Veritaffle.
It's not about the past.
It's about the present.
Is it about a Harvard brand, or is it about something
more enduring and something more significant
about a commitment to an idea?
So what the Veritaffle teaches me--
and it's a theme I hammer on in my courses--
is history is not the old and moldy.
History is not the past.
History is the study of how things change.
You want to change the world?
You really want to know how people have changed things in the past.
History is not about the veneration of the past.
It's about understanding it.
And history remains contentious as you know if you noticed in the newspapers
the controversy over the seal of Harvard Law School, which was recently,
with the approval of the corporation, done away with because it carried
a symbol about slavery.
It's a very complicated story that I won't go in here today,
but history is controversial.
And history is above all, a conversation between present and past,
about what matters, about who we are, what kind of boundaries
we establish between one another.
This project, Tangible Things, that I have
engaged in with a number of colleagues for many years, one of the things we've
done is dig into archives and museums at Harvard
to look for little stuff, small stuff that
open up new ways of thinking about the world around us.
We found lots of interesting things in our explorations, but none of us
were quite prepared to meet Harvard's 120-year-old tortilla.
Yes, it's there.
It's in the Harvard Herbaria and botanical research libraries-- a place
that Professor [? Claymore ?] does some of her path-breaking work is recorded.
A tortilla, what on earth is doing there?
Well, it confronts us with a past we've forgotten
and invites us to confront it, and invites
us to explore, and to understand.
It's pretty obvious that if Harvard is collecting tortillas--
and when I dug into this problem, I discovered
a whole jar of tortillas that are 139 years old
collected in Mexico by a man named Edward Palmer, who
pioneered a new field called ethnobotany,
which was not just about plants and their development
but was about how people used plants.
So he paid a lot of attention to how women
in the areas he was researching in Mexico made their tortillas--
very interesting documents that survived,
and so interestingly enough, these tortillas
that were collected by people who were called
botanic explorers in the 19th and early 20th century, went out to find plants.
These ended up-- some in the anthropology museum,
some in the botanical museum, or the herbarium.
And then something else interesting happened,
it wasn't just about the advancement of science,
the collection of usable plant products, or the plants themselves.
It was about a kind of science that supported the larger economy
and found new ways to use plants.
Harvard has then a collection in something
called economic botany that is how to take a plant and make it useful.
A man named Oakes Ames-- the archive with economic botany is named after
him, and looking at his papers, I was just fascinated because it was
an example of how something that looks kind of clever and interesting
in the 1920s becomes a big political controversy in our own time--
as he noted that someone had figured out how
to make a substitute for maple syrup out of corn or maize.
So, what did you have for lunch?
I have no idea, but I know many of you have eaten the products produced
by economic botany.
And if you start with a tortilla and begin to move forward in time to a time
when a tortilla was so exotic that nobody in Cambridge, Massachusetts
has ever seen one and therefore put it in a museum exhibit
to a time when that's practically all some of us
eat, and how did that happen?
How did that change occur in ordinary life as manufacturers took over?
And here's the interesting thing, food crosses boundaries
and creates boundaries as people move from place to place.
So the Frito Kid, blue eyed and blond, becomes the Frito Bandito and then it
sort of pushed off the screen for something else,
and we are now in the period of the perfectly organic, healthy,
gluten-free, fabulously [? hand-produced, ?] authentic Mexican
tortilla made in Western Massachusetts or perhaps Joe Bravo's fascinating
tortilla art produced and sold in galleries in Los Angeles.
Food is about history.
Common things take us beyond our own lives, not just to foreign places,
but to lost eras in time, and food can also remind us, I think,
that in a world where humble bread, a tortilla crosses boundaries,
it can still remain very difficult for some people to do so.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]