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♪ [Theme Music] ♪
MICHAEL STOLER: Historians, what is a historian? A historian who
grows up originally in Brooklyn, Great Neck, travels, two PhDs,
four books, professor, dean, vice provost and now the
President and CEO of the oldest museum in the city of
New York, the New York Historical Society,
Louise Mirrer. Thanks for being here today.
LOUISE MIRRER: Thank you, that's great.
MICHAEL STOLER: So tell me about your great-grandparents,
because they have an interesting history going back in
the lineage of the family, especially for a historian.
LOUISE MIRRER: Well, my great-grandparents were
New Yorkers. They were real New Yorkers. On one side the
family they were business people. They bought real
estate. They made...
MICHAEL STOLER: They were in Harlem, right?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes, they were. They were in Harlem
at a really amazing time. They owned a brownstone
in Harlem that they lived in and businesses.
MICHAEL STOLER: And they were in the bread business, right,
the bakery/bread business?
LOUISE MIRRER: They were. They decided that each of their
children should be in some business and my grandfather
and his brother, my great-uncle, they decided they should
be in the bakery business. They had a very, very
well-known bakery which sold something called Mirrer's
Health Bread and it was shipped literally all over,
including overseas during World War II.
MICHAEL STOLER: So that's that side. Let's go
to the other side of the family.
LOUISE MIRRER: They also were New Yorkers,
my great-grandparents. I had the great fortune of knowing
my great-grandfather. He lived until his 90s and he was
an extremely learned intellectual man, as was all
of that side of the family. Everyone on that side of the
family had a college degree, which was also pretty unusual.
MICHAEL STOLER: Your grandmother, I think, wasn't
she involved with the parks?
LOUISE MIRRER: My grandmother went to college to train
as a pharmacist and had a degree in pharmacy but when
she married, she married a lawyer who thought it was
undignified for him to have a wife who worked as a
pharmacist. During the Depression they needed the
money so she sort of on a lark took the test to work
in the parks department. She had to know how to
use all sorts of volleyball and baseball and softball equipment
and she passed the test and she got a job running a park.
It was called Sauer Playground. It was named after a young
man who had been killed in World War I. His mother used
to come to the playground every day and sit there.
It was a playground on the Lower Eastside but she rose through
the ranks and before long she supervised all the playgrounds
from Union Square to the tip of Manhattan.
MICHAEL STOLER: So that was Grandma.
Let's talk about Grandpa.
LOUISE MIRRER: Well, very sadly my grandfather died
young. I never knew him.
MICHAEL STOLER: I think I read that your grandfather probably
was in World War I, right?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes, my father's father.
My paternal grandfather, who I knew very well, he was drafted,
he fought in World War I, he was posted to Bordeaux, France and
in fact I have the postcards that he sent.
MICHAEL STOLER: Right, and you use that part in an exhibit
once for the Historical Society.
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes, absolutely. We actually just did a great
exhibition on the armory show which really presaged
World War I and I felt that we had a special understanding--
and I particularly had a special understanding-- of what the
European world meant, just based on the souvenirs that he
sent home which I now have.
MICHAEL STOLER: Tell me about your mother and father.
Your father, who recently passed on, where did he grow up?
LOUISE MIRRER: My father was the son of the bakers and he
grew up in the bakery business. But his mother resolved that
he would not go into the business, though it was a
very thriving business, so he became a doctor.
MICHAEL STOLER: And he went to Wagner College?
LOUISE MIRRER: Went to Wagner College on Staten Island
in the days when Staten Island was...
MICHAEL STOLER: When he had to take the ferry over,
the only way to get there.
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes, but he did actually live on campus.
He lived there. It was a different world. Staten Island
was country and he had a great experience at Wagner,
he really did.
MICHAEL STOLER: Then he went to NYU Medical School?
LOUISE MIRRER: He went to NYU Medical School of which
he was very, very proud because it was very tough
to get into medical school and NYU was a very good
school and he's always been proud of that.
MICHAEL STOLER: Now your mother?
LOUISE MIRRER: Well my mother's a historian and my
mother graduated from Brooklyn College and then she went
onto Columbia to do her graduate degree.
She actually was a historian of New York City.
She did quite a lot of her research at the
New York Historical Society.
MICHAEL STOLER: Where she took you.
LOUISE MIRRER: Where she took me, which is why when
I took my current job I felt as though I'd come home.
MICHAEL STOLER: Okay, your parents were living in Brooklyn
when you were born, right?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes.
MICHAEL STOLER: And your father was one of the
founders of North Shore Hospital and you move out to
Great Neck. Tell me about growing up in Great Neck.
Great Neck South is where you graduated.
LOUISE MIRRER: I did. Well, it was a very rarified
community in very, very many ways but for me it was
terrific. I was part of a crowd of very, very smart kids.
I still think about them as kids.
MICHAEL STOLER: Right, and everybody at that time you said
there was this propensity to want to become physicians.
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes, everyone wanted to be a doctor.
MICHAEL STOLER: Everyone wanted to be a doctor and you,
as a child, wanted to be perhaps a doctor and you were a candy
striper, right? So how was the historian a candy striper?
LOUISE MIRRER: I had very small ambitions. What did
I know? My father was a doctor in the old days and he used
to make his rounds. He would start his Saturday morning,
he'd get up early, he'd make bacon and eggs and I'd have
breakfast with him, we'd get in the car and we'd go to
North Shore. While he made his rounds of his patients at
North Shore I would sit in the lobby and watch all these
pretty young women in these gorgeous -- what I thought
were gorgeous -- uniforms and that seemed like a good
ambition to have. But I also went on his -- he made house
calls and he would talk about his patients.
MICHAEL STOLER: House calls, you remember house calls?
LOUISE MIRRER: And his little bag, which my brother
actually-- who's also a doctor now -- now carries around with
him, though of course he doesn't make house calls.
No one does these days.
MICHAEL STOLER: How did you decide to go to
University of Pennsylvania?
LOUISE MIRRER: Well, this was just the moment at which
the very selective schools were going coed. I had no
idea where I should go to but the smartest -- my sister
was three years older than I am -- girl in
her graduating class had gone to Penn so I thought
that was a good choice.
MICHAEL STOLER: So you go to Penn and initially you're
planning to be premed but then there's a change, right?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yeah, I loved biology. I was a quite good
biology student and I really loved it. I was in the middle
of taking organic chemistry, which alas was not second
nature to me at all, and I got mononucleosis so I had
to step out. There really was no way that I could continue
after I came back to school and I decided that that was
a good sign that I should redirect my attention.
MICHAEL STOLER: It was an omen.
LOUISE MIRRER: An omen, exactly.
MICHAEL STOLER: So what happens? You graduated from
University of Pennsylvania and then you decide
to go to Cambridge?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes. Well, two things happened to me when
I was an undergraduate student. One was really the feminist
movement was sort of gearing up and so I actually wrote my
undergraduate thesis on the cult of the *** Mary.
The *** Mary in the Middle Ages was a very powerful
woman so I was kind of fascinated by that story, so
I went in that direction. But also a linguist called
William Labov who was studying dialects came to Penn and
so I decided well I'll try something different so I
actually went to Cambridge to study sociolinguistics.
Then I decided to come back to the medieval world.
MICHAEL STOLER: You said to me prior to the show your parents
had gone to Spain because there was the Spanish--
the Sephardic...
LOUISE MIRRER: Connection.
MICHAEL STOLER: Connection.
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes, yes. My parents felt very rooted.
There was a strand of our family that had its roots in
Medieval Spain way back in the 15th century. My parents
really felt that we should really understand what had
happened in Spain because Jews in Spain prior to the
Inquisition were extremely important to the lifeblood of
Spanish civilization. That period in Spain was also an
interesting one when we think about different religious groups
getting on today because there really was a lot of
cross-fertilization among Jews, Muslims and Christians.
MICHAEL STOLER: Cambridge, Penn, Stanford -- how do you
end up in sunny California, where it doesn't rain too
much these days?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yeah, I'm going to sound stupid about this
but it takes two years to actually get a degree.
You have to spend two years in Cambridge to actually get
a degree and so I did. They were the two wettest,
coldest years to that date in recorded history in
Cambridge and one of my professors at Cambridge
had spent a year in California at Stanford and
said the weather is balmy and I thought that's where
I'm going, the weather is balmy.
MICHAEL STOLER: And you go for two degrees, right?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes.
MICHAEL STOLER: Dual. One wasn't enough, I mean.
LOUISE MIRRER: Well, I have always -- since I really decided
what I wanted to do, I've always been focused on
how history gets told and history gets told in two ways:
one, through historical documents and the other is
through literature. So that's why I needed to two degrees
at Stanford. I was very fortunate because Stanford
was an incredibly hospital place. Really I could do
whatever I wanted to do there and I did, so that was that.
MICHAEL STOLER: So you get the two degrees and you write your
thesis, which becomes your first book, right?
LOUISE MIRRER: Right.
MICHAEL STOLER: What's the book about?
LOUISE MIRRER: Well, I wrote on a very dramatic civil
war in the middle of the 14th century in Spain,
which culminates in a legitimate king and his half-brother
actually coming out of their tents with their knives
drawn and the half-brother manages to kill the
legitimate king. It's the first time in European history
that an illegitimate son manages to be seated on the
throne. It might sound obscure but it had many,
many implications for European history, many.
So that was my first book.
MICHAEL STOLER: That was the first book. So now you're at
Stanford, did you have a yearning to come back to
New York, to come back to Lincoln Center and to the
Bronx, to be at Fordham?
LOUISE MIRRER: I am such a New Yorker. I loved what I
did but I was just desperate to come back to New York.
Very luckily for me, there was one university. It was
a very hard time to come on the job market as an academic.
But there was one university that was very, very interested
in the Middle Ages and that was Fordham because for
the Catholic Church the Middle Ages was a very, very high
point. So it was my great fortune to come back to a great
university that really cared about the research that I did.
MICHAEL STOLER: And you come back doing what at Fordham?
LOUISE MIRRER: I had the great chance to teach both literature
and history at Fordham. I taught Spanish and Comparative
Literature at Lincoln Center and History at
Rose Hill in the Bronx.
MICHAEL STOLER: The next stop is a return to California?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes. Well, I got married to another academic
and the life story of an academic couple is almost
invariably complicated, certainly in our generation
it was. So for the next several years my husband
and I followed each other around. First to UCLA and
then to the University of Minnesota and we decided
that we didn't really like following each other around,
that we would commute.
MICHAEL STOLER: So let's talk about UCLA and then Minnesota,
because then we come back to New York again.
LOUISE MIRRER: Well, I mean I had really a great chance
to teach at two terrific public universities, having been for
all of my previous life in private institutions, higher
education institutions. The experiences at both places
I think were very determinative. Certainly when I went to
the University of Minnesota I went as Department Chair
and at a time when everyone was looking at
central administrations of universities and worrying about
the demographic, male white demographic, and I became a
token. I was a token. It wasn't a negative thing at all.
They needed a white woman or an African American
woman or a Latino woman.
MICHAEL STOLER: And as the token, what was your job?
LOUISE MIRRER: I became Vice Provost for the university
and I really leapt from being Department Chair to
being Vice Provost.
MICHAEL STOLER: Different world from being the Department
Chair to being a Provost, running the administration
for the institution.
LOUISE MIRRER: Very much so. Yeah. I never met an
engineer in my life and I got to know engineers very well.
I really liked them. I like everyone. I really enjoy
supporting other people's research. I liked doing my
own but I recognize that I'd done what I wanted to do
and now it was really time to try to help other people
do great things.
MICHAEL STOLER: During this period you wrote your
second and third book?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yeah.
MICHAEL STOLER: And the second book was what?
LOUISE MIRRER: Well, the book that I really always wanted
to write was my last book, which was on women Muslims
and Jews in Medieval Spain.
MICHAEL STOLER: That's the fourth book?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yeah, that was the last one.
The book that I wrote before that was a book that I wrote
with my husband on the art of Leroy Neiman. It was a bit
of a detour for me because I didn't really work on
contemporary history and certainly not contemporary
art. But my husband is a sociologist who works on art
and culture and I had spent a lot of time both studying
how history gets told and how people understand storytelling.
So I translated some of that to the visual arts.
MICHAEL STOLER: So that was the third book?
LOUISE MIRRER: That was the third book.
MICHAEL STOLER: And the second book?
LOUISE MIRRER: My second book was a book on widows.
MICHAEL STOLER: Right, that was an interesting topic.
You were talking to me about it before.
LOUISE MIRRER: Yeah, it was really fascinating.
I was in a panel talking with other historians and I
was focusing on a woman and she was quite a powerful
woman. One of my fellow panelists said to me well she
must have been a widow and I said she was a widow,
but what does that have to do with anything? Well, she said,
widows were the only category of woman in the Middle Ages
that really were able to exercise power independently.
From that was borne my book which was called
Upon My Husband's Death, which is a well-known Spanish
proverb. Actually Sephardic Jews still repeat that proverb.
It's not a happy one for men because Upon My Husband's
Death the woman gets to do all sorts of things that she didn't
get to do when she was married.
MICHAEL STOLER: So now you're at Minnesota and then
you find out that there is this university in
New York who's having certain changes, let's say. So
what happens? It's in the mid-90s, right?
LOUISE MIRRER: That's right. I came back to New York in
1997. I loved the University of Minnesota but I was
freezing cold and...
MICHAEL STOLER: That's why we're keeping the weather
now is so you feel similar.
LOUISE MIRRER: Yeah, no I feel like I'm back almost.
It's still colder there, I have to say. But I am a real
New Yorker. I just longed to come back to New York and
I had great opportunity to come to the City University of
New York as Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. There was
a lot underway at CUNY. Living in the Midwest, 1500 miles
away, I really just did not have a sense of how many changes
I would be a part of when I came to CUNY.
MICHAEL STOLER: At that time the City University was under
changes. There was tuition, there was different student--
City University had, I don't want to say it but it had lost
its shine a little bit in the mid-90s.
LOUISE MIRRER: Well, there was big...
MICHAEL STOLER: Economic recession.
LOUISE MIRRER: Right, a lot of things happened in New York
itself, the city itself went through a lot of changes and
CUNY was part of those in many, many different respects.
One of the things that had happened to CUNY was that
I think the attitude on the one hand very nice and embracing
and welcoming, anyone can some to any of the CUNY colleges,
but it was sort of like a giant sieve. Anyone can come but
no one can get out. You're really not helping students;
you're just not helping students. What students
really need is they need their degree. The most helpful thing
that you can do is prepare them before they come to
college and then enable them. But enabling them
means that you have to have some system of admission standards.
So I came to CUNY as really part of a group that was very
tough but I think really did the right thing and I think in
the longer term...
MICHAEL STOLER: And you came and Matt joined
right afterwards, right?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes.
MICHAEL STOLER: Matt returned.
LOUISE MIRRER: He returned to CUNY and it was -
we had a great partnership.
MICHAEL STOLER: The Honors College and a variety
of other programs.
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes.
MICHAEL STOLER: So what happens in 2004? You're at CUNY.
You love it at CUNY but you're a historian.
So what happens in 2004?
LOUISE MIRRER: Well, I loved my job at CUNY.
I thought I got to do exactly what I wanted to do,
but I'd done it really. My ambition was I liked turning
around an institution or being part of a turnaround and so
that's really what I wanted to go onto do, to find another
institution that really could be turned around. There was
one very obvious candidate in New York and that was
the New York Historical Society. My advantage was that I really
knew-- as they say in the real estate world --
the institution had great bones.
MICHAEL STOLER: Great bones and a great history,
but needed a lot of restoration.
LOUISE MIRRER: There was only one direction it could go in,
I knew that too. So I really thought that that would be
a great next step for me. It surprised a lot of people for
me to go from this giant institution to a much smaller
place. But in every way an extremely complex institution
that also, like CUNY, does all things for all people or
should do all things for all people. So it was a
great opportunity.
MICHAEL STOLER: Where historians are there all the time, right?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yeah. It's a very scholarly place.
My academic background, all of my research,
my entire career had been about how history gets told so
imagine now being the person who gets to tell it.
MICHAEL STOLER: You've done a lot of interesting exhibits,
but you've done a lot of work with children also, right?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes, we have indeed. The great
yawning gap at the New York Historical Society was it
really did nothing for children and families. We had lots of
students but for children and families-- right across the
street is the Museum of Natural History and you see all
the kids streaming in and all the strollers streaming
in and there really was no reason why you'd take your
child on a Saturday or Sunday to the New York Historical
Society until we created a children's history museum.
So that was a wonderful, wonderful achievement of
which we're all very proud.
MICHAEL STOLER: Now you're doing a lot of work on the
fourth floor, right?
LOUISE MIRRER: We are. We have a stunning renovation
which we are about to embark on. it will consist of an all-glass
gallery that will feature Tiffany lamps. The most
interesting fact about them is that most of them were designed
by women, which no one knew until very, very recently.
That will be on our lens through which we'll look at women's
history in New York. New York gave remarkable opportunities
for women and we produced some of the most extraordinary
right here in our city.
MICHAEL STOLER: And what about Chinese, the Chinese program?
LOUISE MIRRER: Well, coming up in the fall,
September 26, 2014, we will open what will be a totally
eye-opening exhibition on the history of Chinese in
America. The story begins in New York with the first ship
ever to go to anywhere, trade ship, anywhere from the
United States. It was brand new then and it goes to Canton.
It brings back a platter which we have in our collection
which was commissioned for George Washington's home
when he was President, because we were the nation's first
capital. Then the story moves to the West Coast and comes
back to New York again with Chinatown.
MICHAEL STOLER: So let's talk a little bit about the family
who commuted back and forth. You have three children, right?
LOUISE MIRRER: Yes.
MICHAEL STOLER: Let's talk about them. Tell me their names
and what they do today.
LOUISE MIRRER: Well, my oldest is Phillip. Phillip's a lawyer.
He's a lawyer in Washington. He's married to another lawyer
and I have one grandson.
MICHAEL STOLER: And your grandson's name is?
LOUISE MIRRER: My grandson's name is Thomas and he is
a wonderful little boy. He's, as they say, the apple of my eye.
MICHAEL STOLER: Future historian. And then?
LOUISE MIRRER: Then I have a daughter, Carla.
Carla was a teacher. She went to University of Virginia,
studied history, became a social studies teacher, but decided
to be a lawyer so she's a student at Georgetown
Law School now.
MICHAEL STOLER: And then the youngest?
LOUISE MIRRER: My baby, who's not a baby anymore, is--
he works for a big advertising firm in New York.
So he stayed, so I have one in New York.
MICHAEL STOLER: And his name?
LOUISE MIRRER: Malcolm.
MICHAEL STOLER: Malcolm.
LOUISE MIRRER: Great kids.
MICHAEL STOLER: Now, your husband is at UCLA or here now?
LOUISE MIRRER: Right now my husband is in New York.
He's on sabbatical. In the spring he'll be teaching--
he's really pioneered online teaching at UCLA. He loves
online teaching, so that's going to be his next career.
MICHAEL STOLER: Didn't you say he's also doing that with
the City University also?
LOUISE MIRRER: He did. He actually learned how to do
online teaching with a great program, that I'll say with
a high degree of pride that I started with I was at CUNY.
It's the School of Professional Studies.
MICHAEL STOLER: So the kid who grew up originally in
Brooklyn, Great Neck and went to the Historical Society
and I think you said in one of the articles that I read that
when you were growing up, when we both were growing up,
stores were closed on Sunday, things were closed but museums
and the Historical Society was open and that was a
place that you went.
LOUISE MIRRER: Absolutely, every Sunday. I cannot think
of a single Sunday of my childhood-- there must have
been some but I can't think of any-- that my family did
not go to a museum.
MICHAEL STOLER: And you continue to, and now you
continue to do it on Saturday and Sunday at your museum.
LOUISE MIRRER: Yeah. Now we have a seven day a week set
of programs and I never have an excuse not to be at the
New York Historical Society because there is
always something going on.
MICHAEL STOLER: And I hope that my audience makes sure
that they go to the Historical Society and thanks for
being here today.
LOUISE MIRRER: Thank you.
♪ [Theme Music] ♪