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LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH: Hello.

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Well, my goodness, aren't I lucky?

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I got to follow all
these fabulous talks,

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and I'm up here to talk
about improbable things.

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Hmm, and I even have two
titles to remind you.

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I am really interested in
the common and the ordinary,

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and I have a challenge here to convince
you that there's some value in that.

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When somebody asks me to think big,
I have an inclination to start small.

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I'm a historian.

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History is all around us.

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I hope you can feel it in this
building that we're in today.

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It's meant to intimidate you, it's
meant to overpower you, and I can tell,

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some of you at least
can feel that sense.

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But we can get ahold of lives and
ahold of our position in the world.

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If we can exercise a lot more
curiosity about ordinary things,

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including the things sitting
right in front of us, and so

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I'm going to try to convince
you of that a little bit today.

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What did you have for
breakfast this weekend?

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Did they feed you a very strange
thing called a Veritaffle?

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Did anyone get a Veritaffle?

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No?

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Yes?

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Yes?

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Oh, if you didn't get
a Veritaffle this time,

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you'll get one when you come back.

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What is a Veritaffle?

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It's one of the strangest
things on this campus.

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It's actually a waffle
produced on, I think, generally

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on Sunday mornings in
the Harvard dining halls

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that is impressed with
the official Harvard seal.

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The Harvard seal?

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It is three open books
arranged in a kind of triangle

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and one syllable of the three syllable
word Veritas embossed upon on it.

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Veritas, which is a Latin word for

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AUDIENCE: Truth.

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LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH:
Truth, you've already got it.

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OK, what's going on here?

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What are they trying to do?

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Are they trying to get you to think big?

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Is that what goes on in the dining hall
as you pour syrup on your Veritaffle?

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Well, Veritas is all over the place.

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When you walk out of
the auditorium today

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and you're in what's called the
transept, at each end of the transept

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is a stained glass window, and
you will find the word Veritas

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in both of those windows in
slightly different forms.

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I'd like to suggest a little
game, as you go around campus,

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looking for various manifestations
of this word to Veritas.

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They show up on windows,
on t-shirts, on banners.

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Here, we are in the
entrance to Widener Library.

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Here is a really fabulous
example that you're not

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going to find walking around
campus, but if you're lucky enough

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to go into the University
Archives and ask,

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they might show you a Harvard flag
emblazoned with the symbol Veritas that

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went many, many times circumnavigated
the earth in 1991 in the space shuttle

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Atlantis.

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So Veritas has gotten around a bit.

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Where did it come from?

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I think as you see this
symbol over of a campus,

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you think nothing could
be more stable, nothing

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could be more ancient
than the Harvard seal.

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And in fact, if you went
into the Harvard Archives,

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you would find in an early college
book this inscribed in 1643,

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someone drew the outline of the
shield and in a crude kind of way,

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outlined and designed the Harvard
seal with the word for truth.

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Unfortunately, a few historians have
been punking around in the archives.

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This is a legitimate document--

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it's real.

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But somebody designed
the symbol for Veritas,

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but the college didn't want it.

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They didn't like it.

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They turned it down, and they preferred
something more specific to the Puritan

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origins of Harvard.

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And they gave it a Latin
term Christi Gloriam--

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to the glory of Christ, and
that symbol in various forms,

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different Latin incarnations
about Christ in the church,

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to the glory of Christ.

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The ultimate purpose of
Harvard College initially

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was to train a learned ministry.

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In various incarnations, that
version of the Harvard seal

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lasted through the administration
of President Josiah Quincy, who

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actually found the old document from
1643, and it continued until the 1880s.

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Long, long time after the
origins of the universities,

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and it was there in time to show
up on the base of the John Harvard

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statue, which you have all seen.

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So, what was going on here?

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What was this fight about?

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This was about what kind of
university Harvard was going to be,

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and those who eventually went
out and reduced the shield

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to its old 1643 version wanted
a kind of universal commitment

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to truth rather than the ratification
of the sectarian original organization

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of Harvard.

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Now, why does this matter?

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I'm not sure that the people
who come up to the John Harvard

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statue, which was installed in
1884, care this isn't John Harvard.

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Nobody knows what he looks like.

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I mean, this is a
historical fact that Harvard

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took its name from the donation
of books from John Harvard,

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but nobody seemed to notice that
and create this statue of Harvard

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until almost 250 years later.

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People don't care about that.

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This is about the present,
like the Veritaffle.

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It's not about the past.

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It's about the present.

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Is it about a Harvard brand,
or is it about something

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more enduring and
something more significant

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about a commitment to an idea?

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So what the Veritaffle teaches me--

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and it's a theme I
hammer on in my courses--

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is history is not the old and moldy.

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History is not the past.

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History is the study
of how things change.

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You want to change the world?

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You really want to know how people
have changed things in the past.

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History is not about the
veneration of the past.

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It's about understanding it.

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And history remains contentious as you
know if you noticed in the newspapers

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the controversy over the seal of
Harvard Law School, which was recently,

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with the approval of the corporation,
done away with because it carried

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a symbol about slavery.

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It's a very complicated story
that I won't go in here today,

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but history is controversial.

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And history is above all, a
conversation between present and past,

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about what matters, about who
we are, what kind of boundaries

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we establish between one another.

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This project, Tangible
Things, that I have

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engaged in with a number of colleagues
for many years, one of the things we've

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done is dig into archives
and museums at Harvard

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to look for little
stuff, small stuff that

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open up new ways of thinking
about the world around us.

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We found lots of interesting things
in our explorations, but none of us

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were quite prepared to meet
Harvard's 120-year-old tortilla.

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Yes, it's there.

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It's in the Harvard Herbaria and
botanical research libraries-- a place

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that Professor [? Claymore ?] does some
of her path-breaking work is recorded.

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A tortilla, what on
earth is doing there?

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Well, it confronts us with
a past we've forgotten

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and invites us to
confront it, and invites

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us to explore, and to understand.

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It's pretty obvious that if
Harvard is collecting tortillas--

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and when I dug into this
problem, I discovered

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a whole jar of tortillas
that are 139 years old

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collected in Mexico by a
man named Edward Palmer, who

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pioneered a new field
called ethnobotany,

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which was not just about
plants and their development

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but was about how people used plants.

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So he paid a lot of
attention to how women

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in the areas he was researching
in Mexico made their tortillas--

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very interesting
documents that survived,

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and so interestingly
enough, these tortillas

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that were collected by
people who were called

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botanic explorers in the 19th and early
20th century, went out to find plants.

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These ended up-- some in
the anthropology museum,

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some in the botanical
museum, or the herbarium.

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And then something else
interesting happened,

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it wasn't just about the
advancement of science,

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the collection of usable plant
products, or the plants themselves.

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It was about a kind of science
that supported the larger economy

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and found new ways to use plants.

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Harvard has then a
collection in something

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called economic botany that is how
to take a plant and make it useful.

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A man named Oakes Ames-- the archive
with economic botany is named after

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him, and looking at his papers, I
was just fascinated because it was

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an example of how something that
looks kind of clever and interesting

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in the 1920s becomes a big political
controversy in our own time--

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as he noted that someone
had figured out how

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to make a substitute for maple
syrup out of corn or maize.

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So, what did you have for lunch?

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I have no idea, but I know many of
you have eaten the products produced

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by economic botany.

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And if you start with a tortilla and
begin to move forward in time to a time

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when a tortilla was so exotic that
nobody in Cambridge, Massachusetts

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has ever seen one and therefore
put it in a museum exhibit

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to a time when that's
practically all some of us

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eat, and how did that happen?

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How did that change occur in ordinary
life as manufacturers took over?

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And here's the interesting
thing, food crosses boundaries

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and creates boundaries as
people move from place to place.

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So the Frito Kid, blue eyed and blond,
becomes the Frito Bandito and then it

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sort of pushed off the
screen for something else,

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and we are now in the period of
the perfectly organic, healthy,

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gluten-free, fabulously
[? hand-produced, ?] authentic Mexican

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tortilla made in Western Massachusetts
or perhaps Joe Bravo's fascinating

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tortilla art produced and sold
in galleries in Los Angeles.

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Food is about history.

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Common things take us beyond our own
lives, not just to foreign places,

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but to lost eras in time, and
food can also remind us, I think,

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that in a world where humble bread,
a tortilla crosses boundaries,

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it can still remain very difficult
for some people to do so.

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]