great things about her. and she's done a spectacular job. the library of congress national book festival was conceived of, as you'll hear in a moment, a little bit more why under jim billington. but i think carla has really taken it to a much greater level than even jim could have imagined. so we're we're all proud to be part of it. and i want to thank you, carla, for doing everything to make it

possible. and so for some of you who may not realize this, you know, carla hayden, when she took the job, she was the head of the entire library in my hometown library. and when she was given this job and president obama, who knew her from chicago, where she had been before, told her she could be the library of congress, obviously have to be confirmed. but she was afraid of telling her mother because the job paid less than being the head of the not correct library. but and so it's a great public service that she's doing. and i should tell you, she knows it doesn't come with a car and driver when she wants to come back and forth from baltimore. she lives in baltimore and drives herself more or less back and forth to board from baltimore as because there's no car and driver for the library of congress. right. so i hope you're not reading too much when you're going back and forth. but just listen. you're listening to books, right? right. okay. so i'd like to thank the some of the other people who've been involved in making this possible.

and we have a logo that will show up somewhere on a screen, i think. so our charter sponsors, i'd like to thank our general motors. is there a logo for them? there it is. general motors. everybody go out and buy a car that night to thank them. the institute of museum and library services. i want to thank them. the james madison council, that is the organization. many how many here are members of the james madison council. okay. well, thank you. this is named after james madison. whose idea it was to have a library of congress. now, he proposed the idea in 1783 and 17 years later, congress finally got around to doing it. but we still admire him for having the idea. took a while to get it. is colleagues in congress agree with it. so i want to thank the members in that chair. mr. madison council. i'd like to thank our patrons and the aarp. and you're going to hear shortly a little bit more about the aarp. i want to thank them for their support. the costar group, thank them.

the joint w clooney center and the national endowment for the arts and the national endowment for the humanities. so thank you all for your support. i'd like to also thank our champions, the friends of the library of congress. and there's their logo. and our media partners, led by npr and c-span. we have their logos. okay. and i guess c-span will be televising some of the interviews tomorrow and some of the authors will be doing interviews with them. and we also want to thank our exhibitors, our many hardworking library staff and volunteers. how many people here are volunteers? tomorrow? anybody? a lot of them. well, thank you very much for doing that. how many people work in the library of congress staff? okay. how many of you are volunteering tomorrow? okay. thank you. and among our most dedicated volunteers are the junior league of washington, which supported the festival since 2003.

they have a logo. there are the junior league. i thank them and so i'd like to thank everybody who is a sponsor because, you know, one of the most popular words in the english language is free. and the library of congress national book festival is free thanks to the support of all the people i've mentioned. so i'd like to thank them very much for doing it. and that was david rubenstein from last night at the library of congress national book festival gala that is always held the night before. we are live at the 24th annual national book festival. here is the bag that we are handing out, book bag on site. it's library of congress. the other side, of course, book tv. if you happen to come down to the festival, you can pick one of these up for free. the festival is free, as we learned from carla hayden, the

library librarian of congress, over 100 authors are here today. children nonfiction fiction, life style, etc., etc. so they're expecting about, oh, 15,000 people or so to be here at the washington convention center in just a few minutes. our first author discussion of the day will be kicking off and that's on explorers hampton sides and amanda bellows. each have written a bestseller about explorers. amanda bellows is called the explorer hours, and hampton sides is called the wide, wide sea. and they will be coming up in about 10 minutes or so. well, david rubenstein spoke at this year's gala in 2001. at the kickoff gala. the late historian david mccullough made remarks. mr. president, mrs. bush, dr. billington, ladies and

gentlemen, i am hugely honored to take part in this event, this historic event. there has never been a national festival of the book launched by the library of congress, and with the backing and enthusiastic leadership of our first lady. i would like to read something from my book. john adams, and to set the scene. let me just say that in 1812, after more than ten years during which they refused to even speak to each other, the rift between thomas jefferson and john adams was broken. when john adams wrote a letter to his old friend jefferson at monticello and thereby began one of the great exchanges of letters in american history, which went on until their deaths in 1826. not just one of the great exchanges of letters in american

history, but one of the great exchanges of letters in the english language. jefferson, in his continuing correspondence with adams, had observed that old and worn as they were, they most expected here a pivot there, a wheel now opinion next to spring will give way. there was nothing to be done about it, he said. meanwhile, he wrote, i steer my barque with hope in the head, leaving fear astern their exchange of views remained a sustaining exercise for both men. whatever the state of their physical opinions and springs. there was nothing whatever wrong with their minds, nor any decline in the respect each had for the other's talents and learning. having run on for several pages about cicero, socrates, and the contradictions in plato. jefferson asked, but why am i dosing you with these antediluvian topics? because i am glad to have someone to whom they are

familiar and who will not receive them as if dropped from the moon. jefferson had offered to sell his private library to the government in washington to replace the collection of the library of congress destroyed by the british when they burned the capitol. it was both a magnanimous gesture and something of a necessity as he was hard pressed to meet his mounting debts after prolonged debate in congress. a figure of $23,950 was agreed to. and in april 1815, ten wagons carrying 6707 volumes packed in pine cases departed from monticello. when adams learned what jefferson had done, he wrote, i envy to that immortal honor. jefferson immediately commenced to collect new books. he could not live without books, he told adams, who understood perfectly. they remain two of the greatest book lovers of their bookish

generation. adams library numbered 3200 volumes. people sent him books. overwhelm me with books from all quarters as he wrote to jefferson. yet he wished he had 100,000. he longed particularly, he said, for a work in latin available only in europe titled act sanctorum. in 47 volumes on the lives of the saints compiled in the 16th century, what would i give to possess in one immense mass one's stupendous draft all the legends, true and false, unable to sleep as long as abigail, he would be out of bed and reading by candlelight at five in the morning and later would read well into the night. when his eyes grew weary. she would read aloud to him. unlike jefferson, who seldom ever marked a book and then only very faintly in pencil, adams pen in hand, loved to add his comments in the margins. it was part of the joy of

reading for him to have something to say himself to talk back, to agree or take issue with rousseau. conder say to virgo mary wollstonecraft, adam smith or joseph priestley. there is no doubt that people are in the long run, what the government makes out of them. adams read in rousseau that government ought to be what people make of it. it of make of it, adams wrote in response. at times his marginal marginal observations nearly equaled what was printed on the page, as in mary wollstonecraft law's french revolution, which adams read at least twice, and with great delight since he disagreed with nearly everything she said to her claim that the government must be simple. for example, he answered, the clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels, but it would not tell the time of day on a blank page beside the contents. he wrote in part, if the empire

of superstition and hip autocracy should be overthrown, happy, indeed, it would be for the world. but if all religion and all morality should be overthrown with it, what advantage will be gained? the doctrine of human equality is founded entirely in the christian doctrine that we are all children of the same father, all accountable to him for our conduct to one another. all equally bound to respect each other's self-love. in all in this one book, adams marginal notes and comments ran to some 12,000 words to the pronouncements of the french philosophers in particular. he would respond with an indignant nonsense or a fool fool, but he could also scratching and proving good or very good, or an emphatic, excellent. your father's zeal for books

will be one of the last desires which will quit him. abigail will observe to john quincy in the spring of 1816, as adams eagerly embarked on a french history in 16 volumes, telling america's stories is an exciting challenge because there are so many different voices in these united states. for many reasons, i think the job of the writer is to share these stories, to be the voice, to provide an opportunity to be heard. and that was the late historian david mccullough speaking at the very first national book festival gala over the past 24 years. he often would come on and take calls. when we were here at the national book festival, where we

are, we are live at the washington convention center. if you do happen to come down, come on down and pick up a free book bag. the festival itself is free. coming up in about an hour, so you'll have a chance to talk with historian pulitzer prize winner doris kearns goodwin. she will be out here to take your calls and talk about the 1960s and the memoir she has written about her life in the sixties, along with her husband, richard goodwin. so that's coming up in about an hour. but right now, we're going to go to our first author event. and this is on explorer. amanda bellows and hampton sides, two best selling authors, historians, the wide, wide see is hampton sides book. the explorers is amanda bellows. here it is.

and we welcome you to the salon, the abc at the library of congress national book festival. i'm mark sweeney, the principal deputy librarian at the library of congress. and if you're interested in nonfiction writers, whether they're tackling some of the most pressing issues facing our country or historians who help readers feel as if they're vividly in the past, you're in the right place today. we're thrilled that c-span's book tv viewers are also joining us. we're thankful for their strong partnership between the library of congress and c-span. and i also want to thank the members of our james madison council, the philanthropic group that supports the engaging project, such as this 24th national book festival. we hope you'll visit the library. up on capitol hill to research about subjects you're interested

in, or see the beautiful jefferson building. or attend one of our live at the library events. when we keep the library open till 8 p.m. on thursday nights and present dynamic three events. and you can be part of helping us produce these free events and others like today's festival for family day by joining the friends of the library just this week. the friends helped bring an exceptional group of 19 librarians from around the world to the library of congress to share their stories and best practices serving the blind in print disabled your support extends the reach of the library and allows all people everywhere to benefit. consider becoming a friend. find out more at lucy gov slash donate our first event in this stage in this room is titled to the edge of the world rethinking and exploration.

amanda bellos is a professor of american history at the new school who's writing has appeared in the new york times, the washington post and the wall street journal. her new book is titled the explorers the history of america in ten expeditions. she'll be talking with hampton sides, the author of the bestselling narrative histories blood and thunder and hellbound on his trail, among others. but he's at the festival this year to talk about his newest book, the wide, wide sea imperial ambition. first contact and the fateful final voyage of captain james cook leading the conference. that conversation is frederick weary. he is a professor of sociology at princeton university, where he is also the vice dean of diversity and inclusion in the office of the dean of faculty. have a wonderful day at the festival. and let's welcome them on our stage. thank you.

what's your. so let me just start out by saying that it was a real gift to be asked to read these books and to moderate this discussion. and it's in part a gift because of the kinds of questions that it stirs up. and when i see a book about explorers, i always wonder why that guy. of all the people that you could have chosen. why did you, hampton, decide to go with captain james cook? and why did you, amanda, decide to go with not one, but ten explorers, including sacajawea and matthew henson, the son of a sharecropper who went to the north pole. so why? well, in my case, i had done a number of books that took me to some extreme parts of the world that my wife did not want to go to with me like siberia and

remote parts of the philippines and korea. right up against the border with north korea. and she actually i only say this half facetiously, but she did say, why don't you pick a book that involves travel to some places that, you know that i'd like to go to? and i said, well, let me think about that. and three days later i said, well, how about captain cook? and she's like, well, where did he go? and tonga to tahiti. hawaii, of course. new zealand, australia, tasmania, pretty much everywhere in the pacific. he went and that's sort of the facetious answer to your question. captain cook has been on my radar for a long time. he was one of the great explorers of all time. but i couldn't figure out a way into that story as an american writer with an american publisher and a largely american

readership. it's sort of been the province of the brits and the australians and the kiwis. but then i realized that captain cook's third voyage, which is the subject of the book, was a very american tale. they they left in july of 1776, just as the certain events were heating up in in boston and philadelphia. and they go around the world to explore the west coast of the north american continent. along the way, they stumbled upon this amazing archipelago, the hawaiian islands, and they chart the coast of oregon and washington and nearly the entire coast of of alaska. and so i started to realize this is an american story and much more interesting to pick one of his three voyages because he had three enormous around the world voyages. and it would have been a book about, you know, 3000 pages if i decided to do all three of them.

and that's how i gravitated to captain cook, who i'll talk a little later about just his personality, his accomplishments, an extraordinary, complicated and now quite controversial explorer. so what about you, amanda? yeah, well, i think in american history, certain explorers have gotten an outsized amount of attention. so we all know names like daniel boone, davy crockett, kit carson, kind of these men on the western frontier and i wondered whose stories had been left out of the narrative of the history of u.s. exploration. so i came up with ten amazing explorers from diverse backgrounds, each of whom made different kinds of discoveries, both in the continental u.s. and outside of it. and each chapter of the book covers the journey that explorer. and as i'm reading this book, i

start to wonder just who these people were. so they're deeply human in the way that they're portrayed in the books. and i'm imagining that they had some personality traits that readers might find surprising. sure. and my case, one of the things that drew me to captain cook is that unlike most captains in the british navy of that time, he came from nothing very modest background, from the moors of yorkshire. he worked his way up from from poverty by sheer sort of ferocious work ethic and a genius for astronomy and mapmaking. and so many of the captains of that day had connections. they had money, they had some some foothold that got them where they were. and in his case, it was merit. it was merit. and so that's one thing. another thing is that he was raised by quakers.

and he wasn't himself really quaker, but he imbibed a lot of their kind of values frugality and, you know, temperance and like he would, you know, ferocious temper on board these ships. ferocious, but he never coerced, unlike everyone else in the navy. and but what i like most about him and i think is interesting, is that although he was self-educated, he had no certainly no training as an anthropologist. he becomes on these three voyages around the world, something of a proto anthropologist. he is there to describe and document ceremonies and implements of war. and you know, how these societies, mostly polynesian societies, functioned. and you get this kind of agnostic. you know, fair minded analysis of these people. he never once tries to convert

them to christianity or show them just, you know, just how you know, what their the shortcomings of their society versus the british society. and this is very, very rare among captains, european captains of that day. he is documenting all this stuff and then all this stuff gets published in these enormous folios sized volumes. spreading all this knowledge around the world about how these societies functioned. also, new new animal species, new plant species that have never been described by at least by europeans before. and you get this kind of it's you really view him as a product of the enlightenment and i like that about him. we can get to his a lot of his negative quality is maybe a little bit later because there are plenty of them. yes. and so for the explorers in my book, it was interesting to see what traits they might have shared and which traits were specific to each explorer.

but some of the things they had in common that might not surprise you would be curiosity, a passion to discover whatever it was they were interested in. so that differed, though, for people, you know, for matthew henson, it was a drive to be the first person to reach the north pole for, let's see for john muir, right? he is in the yosemite valley and his passion was to preserve the landscape for amelia earhart. her drive was to circumnavigate the globe for sally ride. her drive was to go into that frontier of space. so i think that passion is common across all the explorers, but some surprising traits might be flexibility or adaptability. so on the one hand, you have to be single minded and focusing on your goal, and on the other hand, you have to really be able to change when things might go wrong during your expedition to change course when necessary.

and then finally, i think sometimes we think of explorers as kind of rugged individuals, but really, for so many explorers or cook too, probably you need to be a good leader. but you also need to work well as a team because there's often a team of people supporting your expedition, be it again, that journey to the north pole, an airplane trip across an ocean, a space shuttle journey around the globe that lots of people help make exploration successful. and you just mentioned how things go wrong. yes. and one of the things that we see in the book is in both of the books, they've got maps. and in moments in which you really need the maps to be correct, the maps are all just wrong and and dangerously wrong. they've got instruments for navigation and they're needing to also improve upon those instruments and make new instruments. but sometimes those instruments aren't even reliable. so how do you how do they

navigate these spaces of uncertainty when the knowledge that they were passed that was passed down to them about what's there and what's not there just just wasn't correct? yeah, i think we we have to peel back the layers of what we know the planet looks like now, and we we have gps and we have satellite maps and all kinds of great tools and go back to those times and try to imagine what those explorers were dealing with. captain cook especially was aggravated and frustrated with the maps he had to work with because he was a mapmaker. that was his main skill over and above all, his other skills as a captain or or as an anthropologist or anything else. he was a mapmaker. and he would look at these cartoonishly wrong maps that were provided by the admiralty. perhaps emanating from the bering's expedition, say, 20 years earlier. and he and he would try to

reconcile what he's seeing with these maps and then he would just you know, he basically learned the hard way that a bad map is worse than no map at all. i think something we all kind of know and then he would just chuck that map and start charting, start measuring, start observing. and we get our very first chart of the entire alaskan coastline. and it's pretty accurate. it's pretty cool, actually, that he was able to do that in one summer. there's a famous map that he did earlier in his career when he was in the navy during during the french, just after the french and indian war, where he mapped the entire coastline of newfoundland and there's a documentary, a british documentary, where they superimpose his map on top of a satellite map of newfoundland. and it is chillingly accurate how he did this with just trigonometry. and, you know, dead reckoning

and just a just observation with the crude tools that he had to work with in his day is is kind of it's kind of extraordinary. and so in response to your question, i think i will focus on the core of discovery's journey across the continental united states. so, you know, lewis and clark are tasked by the us government with trying to figure out if a northwest passage exists, some kind of water route across the ocean and when they reached present day north dakota, that's when they ran into sacajawea, who had been captured from idaho and was living in the nice remote villages then. so she and her husband, two sons, charbonneau, joined the corps of discovery, and they're all going together across the continent. and so the maps that they had for the western portion of the united states were very poor. they didn't know the extent of the mountain range. they didn't know how far the rivers went. but sacajawea was able to point out different landmarks that she

knew, having grown up in idaho and spent time in the west. so as they got closer into that region, she was able to do that. and then another thing that people did was they asked for directions. so so really, if you look at the diaries of lewis and clark, you'll see that they're constantly speaking with people from different indigenous groups and they're asking, what do you know about this region? what trails arctic cist, you know, what do you recommend is the best way to go? and so they're often, you know, in this expedition and others, people are often drawing on indigenous knowledge as well. i don't know if that was true for cook. oh, definitely. i mean, i think yes, cook was constantly asking for directions from polynesian wayfarers and something that was really interesting about cook's voyages is that he began to understand he was the first european explorer to begin to understand the extent of the polynesian diaspora. you know, just like these amazing wayfarers who populated the entire pacific ocean from

easter island to, you know, new zealand to hawaii to the society islands and beyond. they did this with some kind of superior knowledge of the stars and the migration patterns of marine mammals and birds, understanding the currents and so cook is constantly asking them, you know, questions and kind of tapping into their knowledge and also simultaneously just wondering how did they do this? how did these were planned migrations? these weren't just accidental drifting. and so i think that's another credit to his personality. there's so many european captains. they don't care what the native people think, but he's constantly realizing they have this phenomenal, you know, the font of knowledge that he wants to tap into. and and he does. and and cook and other explorers are not just tapping into this

knowledge. they're also they seem to be opening up a gateway for some of these indigenous peoples to become explorers, as with them. and so i i'm thinking hampton about my oh and amanda i'm i'm reminded again it's like a trivia. so can you tell us how their lives might inform the way that we think about the legacies of explorers like james cook and lewis and clark? sure. that's a great question. yes. just returning to sacajawea. ah, so as i mentioned, you know, she was 12 years old when she was kidnaped by members of the that's a tribe and brought to those knife river villages. so think about, you know, four years later, she's 16. she has a newborn baby and she's off on this journey for lewis and clark and the other members of the corps of discovery, it is a journey of discovery because they've never been to this

region. but for sacajawea, it's like a return to her homeland. she does many important things as part of the corps of discovery, i mentioned that she's identifying landmarks on the way. she's also, you know, finding root vegetables and things to sustain the corps of discovery. she saves their supplies from one of their boats, capsizes in the river and she negotiates with the shoshone people once they make it out further west for horses, the horses that enable them to get, you know, over those mountains, since there is no northwest passage. so what i try to do in my book was to really show what a critical role she played in the corps of discovery. and i think indigenous people in general, again, in this expedition and other expeditions, are really playing an important role in sharing knowledge. so yeah, in my book you mentioned the character, my there's a young polynesian man named mai who was the first polynesian to set foot on english soil who came to england

as part of cook's second voyage around the world. and he becomes a major character in the book and a major celebrity in england during that time. for two years, he he's they roll out the red carpet for him and they love him. he is, you know, dressed up in all sorts of finer cree and they give him a he gets a vaccination for smallpox. he learns to hunt at the estates of the aristocracy, becomes a, you know, a bit of a card. sharp and, you know, he learns backgammon and chess and goes to all the salons and learn and london, he meets with boswell and johnson and goes to the royal society. and, you know, he's paraded around england somewhat patronizingly as kind of the noble savage. but they but they love him and the little ladies seem to take a fondness to him as well. but after two years, my who is

this has been paraded around england is becoming to understand a little something about english society. and by this point he's really learned english. he's homesick, he wants to go home. he wants to go back to tahiti and king george, the third of england, says, well, we'll take you home. and the person who's going to do it is captain cook. so captain cook becomes his sort of personal and delivery man brings my back to polynesia. but now he's got all these belongings. he's got these gifts that he's been given, including horses and sheep and and goats and a full suit of armor and guns and muskets, you know, ammunition swords, all this stuff. and the haitians don't know what to to make of him. he's actually comes from a fairly poor background in a very highly stratified society.

they don't know now what to make of this commoner, as they would call him, who's now suddenly rich and he's been around the world. so it becomes a sort a story of, i don't know, he becomes kind of a man without a country. he's not english. he's not really haitian anymore. he's so he's something else. and i follow him through this experience. but along the way, cook uses him very much like sacajawea, i guess you would say, in the sense that he becomes a translator, he becomes a he becomes an envoy in negotiations as they move from polynesian island to polynesian island on their way to tahiti. so he becomes an important part of the whole voyage. and brings you through this experience. you're you're story reminds me a little bit of thomas wolfe and the idea of, you know, you could never go home again for sacajawea and for my, you know, those returns back home. they had been changed by their

journeys. yeah. different experience. yeah, i think very much so. yeah. yeah. i'm and and i think one of the things that certainly would would have changed me is there are moments in the books where you can see a great deal of honor and discipline and restraint from the explorers. and that's something that gives you a, you know, for me, a lot of pride. i'm like, these are people who were really sort of bent on discovery, but really sort of they held they held the line sometimes under difficult circumstances. and then there were a moments in which you would see the model behavior somehow break. it would snap. in a moment, and we would see some eruptions of just violence. but senseless. and so how do you, as authors, make sense of what looks to be from time to time senseless acts

of violence? yeah, well, so now we get into some of the negative qualities of cook on his first and second voyage. he was pretty famous for being quite lenient with his men, quite tolerant, quite reluctant to use the lash, quite sympathetic with the native people. he was in countering on his third voyage, the final voyage, the subject of my book, we get a very different cook and a lot of biography, verse and and his story is an even sort of forensic kind of people have wondered what was wrong with captain cook on this third voyage. he had a ferocious temper, but much more so this time he's using the lash on his own man all the time. he's perpetrating acts of violence. as you mentioned, against the native people repeatedly.

he's just, you know, his famous qualities as a kind of a diplomat have have left him. and he is become this kind of tyrant in episodes in we see the old cook every now and then. and then he snaps, as you say, he snaps repeatedly leading up to the events surrounding his death in hawaii, where it was really a series of bad judgment calls on his part. his temper got the better of him and a series of sort of miscues and miscommunications result ultimately in i guess this a spoiler of captain cook dies and he dies a very a very in a very graphic and very violent way. and many people think he had it coming, that he deserved it, that this was karma coming back around. and when you go to that site in hawaii on the big island where he was killed, there's still a

lot of i don't know, juju in the air. it's it's it's a weird feeling. and all of this goes back to these this thing about being a commander or being in control, having this economic equanimity of his personality, then suddenly abandoned him. and on this third voyage, some people have said he had a parasite that prevented the absorption of vitamins that he essentially is some kind of brain damage. other people have said he had classic bipolar disorder. and it is true that he went to nearly to antarctica and he went deep into the arctic as well. so he was bipolar. 704 but something was wrong with the captain and that's something a big theme in the book to try to figure out what what it was. and i'm sure that's true with so many of your i mean, there's a lot of pressure, stress running an expedition and being a commander. and i'm sure with a lot of

yours, you get people who losing it at times. yeah, well, so most of the explorer was in my book, typically hold it together and you know or which is good but i but one thing that the book i think really brings out is the fact that, you know, could have people with good intentions who have, you know, objectives of discovery and that kind of thing. but exploration often leads to settlement, and settlement leads to violence. in so many cases, the violent displacement of indigenous people in the united states and in other regions of the world discussed in the book it environmental destruction is often a consequence of the settlement that follows exploration. the spread of disease to which indigenous people have little to no immunity, and that's very harmful. so that's one thing that really comes out in the book. and i think two of the most kind of egregious examples of that were the gold rush era in

california. so if you think about peoples objectives, right, in getting to california, it's about the acquisition of resources to enrich themselves. and so, you know, there was genocide against the indigenous people of california, just a level of terrible violence. and that's really a tragedy in american history. and the other example that comes to mind from the book would be in the belgian congo in the era of imperialism. so you have king leopold the second, you know, treating the congo like his own colony, and he wants to get harvest as much river as he can because it's the industrial you know, the nation nations around the world are industrializing. they mean for different things. and so agents of the state of belgium are you know, committing these atrocities against the congolese. so that's to say. right, that exploration and discovery leads to things that perpetuate violence, particularly against indigenous

people. and that's a very sad pattern we've seen across world history. which is why some people will simply say if you've got these adventures that are causing so much harm and they have a history of causing harm, should we be doing them any more? should we have done them then? and so what do you say to that? why i explore? well, i would say, you know, exploration is is inevitable. it is very much what humans do and have always done curiosity to know what's over the next hill or the next horizon that the almost obsessed of need to know what the planet looks like. and yes to to find something new, new animals, new societies, new kinds of people, new ways of organizing the world, new

substances. you know, it's just so deeply ingrained in our dna that i don't think there's you know, we're not it's not going to stop. and it's so it's perhaps it's pointless to say they shouldn't have gone, you know, or they shouldn't have wondered, you know, or wandered around the planet. that said mean someone like captain cook, you know, i mentioned that he was kind of a proto anthropology, just an unusually kind of agnostic for his time. but he, of course, understood that he was working in the service of empire and this large colonial and imperial chess game that was being played around the planet to carve up the remaining lands and claim them and to extract resources and all of that stuff. and the reason captain cook is so controversial today, it's not really what so much what he did

as an explorer or and a mapmaker. it's that his put these places on the map sometimes literally on the map and very accurate maps that were published around the world and then suddenly this accelerated the process of everything else that came the diseases the alcohol all the you know, occupation. um, you know, all sorts of germs supplanted there economic system with a new of economy missionaries you name it the i think it's you know it's been called the fatal impact and cook's voyage is certainly accelerated that process. so yeah i don't know it's it's a mixed bag we we seem to be a human species that can't help ourselves. we have a lot of curiosity and

it leads to harm not only to the people that are visited, but also sometimes to the visitors. cook's own men. i think we're in some cases, ruined by these. so it's it's something we need to be careful about, i guess you'd say, as we make our voyages around the world and be mindful of their impacts. i would agree with you, hampton, that, you know, curiosity is innate to the human condition. and i think, you know, my book shows different explorers from a wide range of backgrounds men, women, african-americans, immigrants, indigenous people, all who share across 200 years different urges to go and uncover new things about the world. so at its best, exploration leads to discovery, which adds to human knowledge. and i think that's a positive thing. but i think there's also so much that we can learn from history as we think about new frontiers

today. and there are many new frontiers today that are really exciting right now is has its arduous missions, sending people back to the moon. people are trying to get to mars and there's so much to discover here on earth. we've got underwater exploration and we know just a tiny little bit about our own seafloor and all the creatures that live there. so there are so many people around the world even today doing amazing kinds of exploratory work in the name of conservation for science. so i think that if we look at the past and we learn the lessons from the past about what people have not done well, and we can try and apply those lessons to the present. and when we're thinking about the lessons for the present, i'm just going to stretch this a little bit more. some people have taken as a lesson the need to sort of say, take down a statue or sort of remove someone from our more celebratory public discourse and

what you both seem to be doing is sort of offering up a fuller story of what those explorers did. and so, you know, if you were sitting with someone who really disagrees with you that we should be celebrating these various explorers, what might you say to if not to convince them otherwise? but at least to demonstrate to them that maybe they got a point, but we should do it anyway? like how would you how would you bring them along with you? well, in my case, i would i would say that you could argue that up until the time of cook, perhaps the greatest long distance voyagers arguably were the polynesians themselves. and i like to think about, well, you know, as they may their

migrations across the pacific and and you can say colonized these islands populated these inhabited them kept moving, moving, moving. i like to think of this sort of hypothetical scenario of like, well, what if they had just kept on going and what if they had arrived in plymouth, england, first? well, before during the stone age of england, when the, you know, they were building stonehenge or something. i like to think of that scenario and imagine how history might have been changed if the polynesians had discovered england would have been interesting, maybe to go through a wormhole and kind of have this altered alternative reality. but i think, again, exploration is not just something that the europeans did. the chinese were extraordinary explorers of the polynesians. obviously, and so many other societies and cultures through

time. so i would try to expand our understanding of what exploration is to get well beyond just the european paradigm of of discovery. yes, i agree that expanding our understanding of what exploration is and who's done it is very important. i also think that history is complex. it's not always black and white, and i think having a sense of nuance is important when studying history. and in my book, the explorer, you know, i try to give readers just a full picture of, each person in his or her life and the context in which that person lived so that readers can, i think, decide for themselves what they think of this person, what they think of their motives are objective lives, rather than telling people what to think. i think, you know, being honest with evidence and then letting people make their own decisions is important in history as well. and my final question before we open it up to the audience

audience, would, as you are writing and making decisions about what goes in the book, what you almost got in there and decided to take out, and those also those moments of anxiety and doubt as as a writer, what what did you learn about yourself as you were learning about these explorers. well, that's a really good question and a little bit of an imponderable. i you know, i do think when one reason why people love explore creation books is is that they begin to think would i have been able to survive that voyage? how would i have experienced ship ship condition of those days? you know, with the cockroaches and the rats and the weevils

slops of food that they're eating. and, you know, we it's a way for us to have a vicarious experience. but also to question our own resolve and our own stamina and so forth. i mean, and i tend to think god, i wouldn't have lasted a minute and and and these two ships of captain cook, these 180 men that went on this voyage, the you know, these stories are full of, you know, mutiny and scurvy and cannibalism and all sorts of other really delightful subject and and but for some reason, i think we are all drawn to them for all kinds of reasons. yes, they may have been important voyages or expeditions, but also are drawn to them because we like to put ourselves on the ground or in the ship and try to imagine what sorts of qualities, what sorts

of strengths would we be able to summon within ourselves to get through this experience? because, you know, now these voyages were not easy for for any of these guys, any of these characters in your book. and i think that's what i think about with myself is like and i think the answer is i wouldn't have survived. i am a wimp. i look, i'm to a creature. i love my creature comforts and so forth. and i i'm a i'm amazed that these men, so many of them in cook's case, signed up for one. then two and then all three voyages. they were a glutton for punishment. they were sado. i don't know what it was, but it's a very interesting thing to contemplate. yes, i think writing this book and immersing myself in the stories of these people really gave me an appreciation for their resilience and my favorite chapter to highlight one of the

explorers is the chapter about matthew henson, the race to the north pole. so matthew henson was the son of sharecropper, was born in maryland, not so far from here, and he was orphaned at the age of about seven. he became a cat, ran away from home, became a cabin boy, sailed the world, and he ended up going on seven journeys to the north, towards the north pole. and the last one, he reaches the north pole with robert peary and henson is doing this all in the jim crow era. so he's overcome poverty, he's overcoming discrimination, you know, throughout his life, people said to him, you know, you're not the kind of person that can make it to the north pole because you're black. you can't withstand the cold, things like that. and you know, he was just determined to prove them wrong. and then when he came back, having most likely been ahead of peary in terms of reaching the geographic north pole first, or at least as close as the instruments of the day, it could have gotten him. so he comes back home and all the newspapers give all the

credit to peary. so even after he's made this amazing accomplishment, you know, being fluent in the inuit language, learning how to build sled and how to be an expert dog sled, i write. he then faces this jim crow era discrimination in the aftermath. so what's compelling about his story and others is not only the physical during that these explorers make, but also kind of the boundary pushing they do in terms of frontiers pushing against racism, sexism in many cases, lots of discrimination. and so i think that's something i admire and came away with from writing the book. and now we're going to open it up for the audience and there are two microphones here left and right. i will call on you to ask your questions. but before we start, the question, because i am a celebratory type, we're going to celebrate our authors right now. so thank you for that

conversation. so we'll hear first and then over here. hi. thank you so much for this talk. this is really interesting. i'm really looking forward to going home and reading back. amanda, i'm sorry. i just have a question. i'm curious these expeditions, how did they contribute to american mythmaking? what were some of the narratives that emerged in the aftermath of these explorations? i'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that. yeah, that's a great question. so how did these expeditions contribute to mythmaking? i would say that there are a lot of myths today about expedition points in u.s. history and these stories actually challenge those myths. so the book starts kind of with a discussion of a well-known figure, daniel boone, who, you know, made inroads into kentucky

territory across the cumberland gap, that kind of thing. and someone like boone has an outside his presence in our popular imagination, even in his own time. right. he had an autobiography. it was widely in the united states and then europe, his you know, in after his death. right. his base was used to mass market products in the 19th century and then the 20th century. we've got television shows. it's the cold war era. he's the rugged frontiersman. so actually, i would say that we have a lot of myths about kind of these individualistic frontiersmen that exist. and then what this book does is it brings in people that you may not know, like james beckworth, a mountain man who was born into slavery and found freedom on the frontier, or florence bailey, a gilded age ornithologist, whose mission of exploration was to save birds during this ecological crisis when birds are being slaughtered. so hopefully books, these stories counter some of the

existing myths. thank you. and the gentleman over here, i. i have a question and followed up by a question. the suggestion is i wish somebody would write a book called unintended consequences. i cook and. perry. i there's an argument cook did not get pole. he may have climbed mckinley, but he didn't get there. you said two things. one, did perry get to the coal pole or did he get close to it? and at any rate, whatever happened, people believed he did. so amundsen was ready, go to the pole, turned around and went south and went to the south pole and beat scott. so i wish somebody would write a

book trying out those four guys together and yeah, people written about, well, not so much about cook. what about the other three? but it hasn't been tied together. my question is on one, you said perry got to the pole and then you said henson got close to it. so i think that there's still arguments about that right here. you are not. thank you. thank you. so the question is who got to the north? who got to the north pole first? and you know, f in 1908, in 1909, frederick cook i was thinking, captain cook, now frederick cook claimed have beaten robert peary and matthew to the north pole. i think that has been largely disproved, moved i think there has been some debate about how close matthew henson and robert peary and the four inuit men who were with them got to the north

pole and from what i've read, it seems like they got as close as you could within a few miles using the instruments of the day. so i think that's a pretty impressive feat. here. thank you very much. i really enjoyed your talk and i couldn't help but wonder some of the parallels between. cook and columbus. christopher columbus and i, i realize you know, that they were both mapmakers and the impact that they had with their expeditions and and how they put so-called places on the map. but i also am feeling down and it's a feeling how columbus, in

a way. in modern times presently anyway, seems to be getting an unbowed lens interpretation of what he did and how he put the new world on the map and and, you know, he had similar a similar. what should i say, goal of conquest, which involved plundering and all of that. so my question is, and i don't know exactly how to phrase it, how do you redeem or how do you balance the view of someone like columbus in the present time. i'm certainly not a scholar, christopher columbus, but scholar either. but i, i and i do think it's

probably although cook has sometimes been called the columbus of the pacific, i think that's an unfair characterization. and because cook cook never left a single person behind, he did not colonize these places. he did not. participate like like columbus did. and yet destruction of populations or, you know, mass murder, he may move from ireland to island ireland. he had a few encounters that were violent, a few, but it works both ways. in one case, ten of his men were were killed in in new zealand, for example. so i think it's unfair to kind of compare those two explorers, columbus really, really was. a much darker figure in the

history of the world than than. and now what came immediately after? cook i get it. i mean. like the colonization of of australia and tasmania, for example, that's a dark story, but that's not something that cook himself did. so, you know, i think that is a much larger, darker and more complicated subject. the story of colonization and the genocide that i think that is tied up with the legacy of columbus. okay. thank you. thank you very much. it was a very interesting presentation. my question is for amanda. so i appreciated how you expanded the definition of explorers in the book beyond physical exploration. one of the points that you

mentioned and then proceed to illustrate is the the relatively higher degree of personal autonomy that these explorers experienced, especially in the 19th century during their explorations. for example, one of the examples you gave is the the 19th century west, and to varying degrees, many of those same limitations and their knock on effects that were placed on those explorers because of their gender, tribal status, citizenship, skin color are still imposed today. so i'm curious what you would say are some of the areas where those experience facing those limitations today can be explorers in their own right and can find a greater degree of autonomy and independence. that's a great question. so just thinking historically for a moment, you know, a figure like jim beckworth, he's born into slavery in virginia at the turn of the 19th century.

and he is moved. so his his mother was most likely enslaved. his father was white, so he was biracial. and his father moves the family to st there. beckworth was emancipated by his father. and then he was able to go off and do what he wanted to do, which was to explore the rocky mountains and what's interesting for beckworth, you know, in this era, right, where slavery is legal in many parts of the united states, is that he's able to move through different societies. so he actually embeds himself among the members of the coronation. he has different indigenous wives. he's in the southwest. he marries someone there. he's at gold rush, california. he really is really all over the country. and so, you know, just to illustrate your point that the west provided someone like beckworth with more economic and social mobility than he would have otherwise experienced, you know, say, in antebellum virginia. so no.

and i think, as i mentioned, kind of at the end, i think there are so many frontiers today still and places to explore are in the world. hopefully people have got the knowledge, the acquisition of knowledge being a primary objective and i guess i'll make a plug for the explorer cross club in new york city, which has people from all over the world of every different kind of background, as you suggest. and it gives grants to people and publicizes their different kinds of research. so people of all backgrounds should definitely check out the explorers club. that's a place for reaching new frontiers. thank you. thanks. how do you approach collecting research for your books and how do you decide what you want to include. you have an hour. it's very complicated, especially you have a subject like captain cook where there is a voluminous amount of material. i'm not just cook's own journals, but the journals of

his officers, the journals and on unauthorized books were penned by members of the voyage. it's just a huge amount of material. get your arms around and i, i, i'm kind of old fashioned. first of all, i can't look at digital stuff on the screen all the time. i need to have physical book that i can hopefully mark up and i was taught when you go into libraries, you know, you can't, you know, mark up a book and by the way, a big shout out to libraries everywhere and and the big shout out to the greatest library in the world are the greatest libraries, certainly in this country. the library of congress. so so so don't don't mark up library books. but if you know, if you have, i tend to have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books

that i, i mark up. they're usually cheap versions of books or sometimes photocopied versions of the books because i need to have things underlined. and that's how i begin to absorb my material, get it distilled. but everyone has their own own way of doing it. what is your what is your technique? yes. well, mean, i was thinking about, you know, how you want to look at things. so many of the ten explorers that i wrote about have autobiographies. you just rely on someone to autobiography, tell the story. it's really important to have a well-rounded understanding of the time in which they lived. what did they tell the truth about? what were they not telling the truth about? so i think my best of advice to researchers, of course, would be to use a wide range of primary and secondary sources to get a full picture of someone's life and circumstances.

so we've got four questions left and about 7 minutes. and after those questions ends, what will happen is you will be able to meet the authors down to level two and hold the line 11 or just look for them. if you want to get your book signed. and i recommend doing that it's quite an experience. so what we're probably going to do to be efficient, we're going to do two questions at a time. that way we get the last four in. so first here and then here. so you think certainly the case of q and i guess some of your explorers exploring most like jump funded by the state, i guess. but i got wondering i outside of the job but they're also in their spare time or they're also that they enjoy just wandering the wilderness and things, or do they prefer to just at home and rest after that? that journeys up here.

my question is like so, like in the especially in like the 19th century our like you know because you talked about like well when they went to like you know coke went to hawaii and like he had one mode of were there any conflicts especially when especially when explorers get back home, like is there any like conflicts that like when they've had and they won't like when they go back to their own, like geological societies or geographic societies and like about like the experiences that like those people kind of have on like, you know, like, think what? like, oh, here's the, the mode of that the commissioners of the expert exploration actually have in mind. like and then the explorer comes back and say, oh, that's not like, you know, like that is their risk. i think the questions i'm sorry. oh, so i changed my mind all the time out thing. so we're going to do two more questions just to make sure you two have enough time to fully answer or in the time that we have remaining. so here and then then there.

okay. hampton your your book was extremely i've never read anything about before. two weeks ago i was in england was overrun with be oh yeah i got to see where he apprentice with the quaker and where his ships were built. absolutely fascinating. quick question i'm a retired nurse tell us share with us about his how he care of his sailors regarding their diet all that that's my question and i'm so i'm not trying to keep four questions in my head right now. first fantastic presentation. thank you so much. and then second, simple question regarding your art. is there a favorite moment in? your research we talk about discovery of all these explorers, but as researchers, i'm imagining that you may have discovered something in your research that you really used, either hadn't been found before or had not that you had a chance to interpretive. really. it's so favorite moment.

wow. this is like speed dating here. i got to do this fast, you know, so you historians, i think, have a fantasy that they'll find descendent of their main character who has a little, you know, has a trunk in the attic that's, you know, full of yellowed old letters and, personal papers. and that actually happened to me one time for a previous that i wrote called in the kingdom of ice, and that's that's a wonderful thing when you get that treasure trove of of original documents that have never been seen for hundreds of years that did not with captain cook unfortunately, captain cook's wife burned all the family papers shortly before she died. and it's a mystery why she did it and it's a kind of a source of many conspiracy theories, actually. but captain cook, the other thing about the other question was his his understanding of diet, his forcing his men to eat fresh food and vegetables and fresh meat left led to the fact

that his voyages were the first long distance voyages in the history of the planet. as far as we know, where not a single man of scurvy because he was beginning to understand something about scurvy and forced this food down their throats. sometimes sort of like eat your vegetables kind of idea. so those are two of the questions. anyway, you in with with what you remember on the questions that that those questions worked really well together. very quickly. i can say that most of my explorers in the book did not like to rest on their laurels home. they wanted to get back out there soon as they could. and in order to do that, they often had to raise money because all of these expeditions for government funded a lot of them. they had to raise money from people to go where they needed to go. so was a practical element to that. and then in terms of favorite moments, i can think of just that come to mind. one is there's nothing like being in an archive and seeing not just documents, but actual

objects that were significant in history. so morgan state university has some of matthew hansen's, the arctic explorers belongings. so seeing his gloves were amazing. and then also i took a two week journey in the footsteps of the core discovery. so going from st louis the way to the oregon coast and there in front of the ocean and imagining they must have felt after their extremely long journey, it took me a lot less time, but just looking on the ocean and you feel that connection with explorers of the past and that felt really good. so before you all head out to level two, line 11 to meet the authors, let me just thank the authors for rekindling the spirit of discovery thank you so much because.

thank you. i think about how. they really.

and we are live at the 2024 national book festival being held at the washington convention center. several hours of coverage had several author collins will be joined a little bit later by carla hayden, the librarian of congress, to talk about books and what you are reading. but joining us now is pulitzer prize winner doris kearns goodwin. here is her most recent book, an unfinished love story a personal history of the 1960s. doris kearns goodwin, this is your eighth book. was this the toughest one to write without a question. why? well, before that, my guys were the presidents. they were no longer alive right?

franklin roosevelt, teddy roosevelt, johnson and abraham lincoln. but more importantly, this was my husband so he was my guy. and it meant so much to me to finish the project we had started before he died, and i just wasn't sure i could do that after he died. but it turned out to be probably the most important emotional book that i've ever written. well you were doris kearns in the 1960s. you didn't meet him until the night, until 1972. but this history of the sixties, how did you do that? yeah, well, it's true. we always tease each other that we should have met because we were in a lot of places at the same time. i was at the march on washington in 1963. he was there, but so were 250,000 other people. so we didn't meet. we were both at the chicago convention in 1968. we're in washington, the riots in 1968. he always he was looking for me, but he never found me. i loved him thinking that. how did you meet him? finally in 1972, after he had worked for lbj and jfk, bobby kennedy and i had been a white

house fellow for lbj and then ended staying on his white house staff. he came to my office building in harvard. i was a young assistant professor and he was being given an office there. we all knew who he was. he was kind of well known among us, nerdy people who loved politics. we knew that he had bushy eyebrows, that he had kind of a strange, wonderful smile, that he'd worked for all these people with bobby when he died. so i was excited but i went to my room and just sort of plopped in into my office as if he were one my two t's. and he sat down he said, so you're a graduate student, right? i said, no, i'm an assistant professor. i tell him all my qualifications of course he knew who i was. he was teasing me. he took me out to dinner that night we kept talking all afternoon, all night never stopped talking for 42 years. so that's how it all began. when did he passed in? 2018. so six years ago in your book. and unfinished love story, this is what you write.

quote, linden's a kind of poet, said --, seriously. richard goodwin from the time -- and i met, we often referred to the president simply as linda when speaking to each other. we both knew him so well and all. there are a lot of johnsons. only one lyndon. back to -- rhyme sex, music, phonetics and beautiful churchillian phrases, -- said with wonder what a recipe for high orator all know it was great. one of the things we never heard, we never fully understood, was how was it that -- got to be from a jfk speechwriter to an lbj one? because there was real fault line between those two, especially after the assassination and then we found a tape recording of a conversation that bill moyers had with lbj and lbj saying, i need a new speechwriter i need somebody who can put sex into my speeches, somebody who can put rhyme into my speeches, somebody can put churchillian phrases. that's what sticks. referring to who could that be?

and moyers said, well, the only would be -- goodwin, but not one of us. and that meant that there was this fault line. but nonetheless, johnson did take him, and his best work was done for lyndon johnson. how did he get involved with jfk? lbj and rfk? well, what's he doing? well, he's only in his twenties when he's involved with jfk. he had graduated from harvard law school first in his classes. he would often remind me, clerked for justice frankfurter, and he was in washington in 1958 and 59 when john kennedy was just thinking of running for the presidency, and he needed to up his staff and have another speechwriter. sorensen so there was a contest that was held. -- did realize it was a contest. he was just asked to write a speech and in another speech and then another speech and they chose him. so he was on the plane with jfk in 1968. was a great experience. he said a little little plane, a private plane that his father had gotten for him. but it meant that there was a camaraderie and a real sense of connection. and then he was in the jfk white house, and we're going to put the numbers up on the screen.

we have a few minutes with doris kearns goodwin. if you have a question or comment you would like to make about this book or some of her previous books, team of rivals, etc., etc. we'll look at those books a little bit later. the numbers are up on the screen, so go ahead and dial in. what's your read on sixties? i mean, lbj, rfk, jfk. so much history there. but is that the entirety of the sixties. no, i think the most important part of the sixties are the movements that were coming from the ground up. now it's really interesting when. when dix saved 300 boxes through our entire married life of really a time capsule of the sixties memos drafts, diaries, journals, everything was kind of crazy. and they went with us everywhere. they were in storage, they were in back. we finally came to the big house. we were in the end our lives and he wasn't ready to open them for so long because the sixties had ended so sadly. that's one read on the sixties assassination. john f kennedy, bobby kennedy

martin luther king, riots in the streets, violence. so we decided we would open the boxes. when he turned 80, he said if i have any wisdom to dispense, i better start dispensing now. so we went through them chronologically, not knowing what was going to come next. and that meant we could absorb the excitement. the sixties before the terrible things happened, the early days of of jfk, the great days of j. lbj, before the war escalated, and being with bobby kennedy in that 68 campaign before he was killed. and we realized that more important than the sadness of the sixties, it was a time when people believed they could make a difference, when there were civil rights movement. there was the peace corps, there was the gay rights movement, the women's movement. it was a excitingly wonderful decade where young people, especially felt empowered to be part of politics, public life. and you refer to those boxes, your sixties boxes. how many of those did you get through? and is there another book in there? well, what happened is we got through most of the sixties

boxes, but there were still maybe 100 more left from the rest of -- life. it was interesting the last year of his life after he got the cancer that did take his life, he i wonder who's going to be finished first. me or the boxes, because he looked ahead at this huge trail of boxes. but in some way, boxes were so important to us because they i felt as long as we had more boxes to open, he would still live because had too many boxes to open. and it gave him a sense of purpose in that last year of his life. he couldn't wait to wake up in the morning and go through more of the boxes. we were able to relive our lives together. so wonderful when you're older, to be able to look back on it. i think about so many other who have letters or diaries that are in an attic. and then somehow when the person dies, the child or the grandchild can go through them. if i had any advice, it would be for people do them now. so you can hear the stories now. everybody he wants to be remembered for something and it's often through the stories you tell your children or your grandchildren about your parent or grandparent is the way they're remembered and how much

better to do it now before they're dead. i was so glad we got through so many of them, but there's still a lot left to go through. we'll see what happens next. doris kearns goodwin, as somebody who has spent a lot of time in the archives researching those letters and papers and etc., as what do you tell people today when everything is emailed or, you know, text message? i'm so glad that i was a historian in this earlier era because there's nothing better than handwritten letters. you read a letter that somebody written like, say, in lincoln's time, his secretary of state, seward's wife stayed away from washington and he would write letters to her not only about what happened that day, but what was lincoln thinking, what was he feeling? how did he look? do you see the moon, my love? he would say to her, they have the same moon. of course, from going from upstate new york to washington, and you just feel like have your head over somebody's shoulder and you're reading a handwritten letter. you read diaries. people kept in huge detail back in the 19th century. i don't know what i'd do without

letters and diaries. you're right. we'll emails, but they're rather staccato or usually. and do people keep them? you'll have, you know, tick tock, have instagram, things like that but it won't be the same intimate detail and you'll know much more about the people. now i remember when we were making the movie about lincoln spielberg, we only knew that he had a high pitched because somebody deti said he did we never heard him speak right? and then we only knew that he walked like a laborer coming home at the end of a hard day because somebody described that. now we'll see everybody in three dimensions. we'll see them on television. but will we know them as well as we were able to know these people who put their lives, their letters, even the soldiers in world war two and the soldiers in the civil war, when they wrote home to their parents those letters are treasures because. there's such an emotion connected to it all. what's the role? a public historian, such as yourself? i'd like to think that what i can do, i love history much. i've loved it from the time i was a little girl.

i want everybody to know important it is to understand our history, and especially in a terribly time like we've been living in. now i'd like to remind people that we've been through really, really hard times and remind them of what it was like in the early days of the civil war, the early of world war two, and the people that didn't know how it was going to end just like we don't know how this is going to end. and it gives us perspective. it gives us solace and it gives us lessons. so whenever i can be talking in public, on television or on the radio about what's happening now and put it in historic context, i think that that's what gives people a sense. history matters. history really. and it can help us get through the. doris kearns goodwin mentioned that your late husband was with rfk. june 5th, 1968, at the ambassador hotel. what did he tell you about that and where were you? i don't think i've ever asked you that question. well, in 1968, when robert kennedy died, i was still

working for lyndon johnson. i was a white house fellow. i would stay with him until the end of 1968. but what my husband said was that he was really pretty certain that robert kennedy would have been an even greater president than jfk. he had been through jfk's death. he'd gotten wisdom, he'd gotten self-reflection. it was a deeper person. he read philosophy, he read poetry. and when he gave his essay, he gave his speech where he won the california primary. it looked he was possibly on his way. and there was that great moment. he was probably happier than he had been during the campaign because it had been tough campaigning against senator eugene mccarthy. and then he leaves a minute later and is killed. -- was devastated. i mean, he thought that was the end of his public life. he went up to maine and became a writer, and he never really fully got back into it after that, although he helped with gore's concession speech and he was always writing books for people about get involved in public. so i think he'd be very happy to see. there's an energized young people out there today. now, two months prior to that

march 31st, 1968, lbj makes an announcement and surprised. absolutely i think everybody in the country was surprised, as you know, he had everybody thought he would be the nominee. it would be a tough fought battle. mccarthy and robert against him. but he had all the all the presidency behind him in primaries didn't have the power they have now. and then on march 31st, he comes out there and he gives a speech, not only saying he's going to win the war down, but that he's going to not for the presidency again. so he can concentrate on the war. i remember feeling really empathetic toward him, but at that period of time, i thought he made the right decision. and i was thinking about it a lot this summer because then what happened when he made the decision the next day, he goes out on the streets, people are saying, yeah, lbj instead of, hey, hey, lbj, how many kids did you kill today? editorials, all like they did for president biden. he withdrew that he had put principle above politics and for a few it looked like it really

might work. on april 3rd, the north vietnamese said they would come to the bargaining table. he said it was the happiest day of his presidency. he filled a plane of all the and the state department people and the generals go to hawaii to start talking. and then they were going to leave on the night of april 4th at 530, he got the news that martin luther king had been shot and killed. it had to be canceled. and then the riots took place in the cities and then bobby kennedy was killed. and by the time we got to the convention, the talks had stalled. i wondered always wondered what would have happened if that had not happened and the talks had been moving forward at the convention. but as it was, it was his birthday on the tuesday night of the convention. i was thinking about this whole summer and johnson was supposed to go to give a valedictory speech much as went to his convention. but they called him and said that what was happening in the streets, the police confrontations with the protesters was so tumultuous that he could not come. and he was so sad that he couldn't come. but i was at the convention, not

as an official. i was just there with my friends. one of my friends was they were all in working for congressmen on the hill. and so we were staying in a hotel suite, not even in the middle of everything. we had one further away. we were watching the convention that night and somebody said that there was on the line for me. they said it was the president of, the united states. and i thought there, casey, i picked up the phone and he said, and i thought, if he's going to ask me to do something, i don't know what i'm going to do. so he said on the phone, it was lyndon johnson. he said last week when you were at the ranch, borrowed a flashlight and i can't find where is it? i was so embarrassed in front of everybody. but then i said him, well, how are you? and then he said to me, how do you think i am? i've never lower in my life. it was my birthday my 60th birthday. i was supposed to go to the convention they tell me that i can't go to the convention of my own party and then i really felt empathetic and sad him so that he gave life for that. and if only he had known. i wish that here we are 50 years later and he's now considered of

the one of the really good presidents medicare and medicaid, education, civil rights voting rights, immigration reform, and pbs. it's astonishing what he did. his children know it, but he didn't know that before he died. well, let's hear some other voices. start with charlie, who's calling in from bethesda, maryland. charlene, please go ahead. dr. based on your underst standing of robert kennedy and, of course, your husband's close relationship with him, what do you make of contemporary events, specific lee robert kennedy junior's suspension of his presidential campaign in support of donald trump and his statements as his father would have approved? oh, i think, you know, there's the kennedy name is what's kept young robert kennedy going. i don't see that he's been, you know, proposing the policies that his father or his father's progressive ideology would have

would have been talking about. and i think happened to him, he started out as a new voice and people wanting neither trump nor biden. i think at one point, even had 20% in the polls. it then dwindled down to something like four or 5% now. so he realized he had no choice in the campaign and decided for his own purposes to go with trump. but i most of the family has has not felt close to this decision that he's made. it's up to him to make it. but i'm not sure it will have much impact on the race. i mean, it might in a small way when, you know, when everything is very close, then that third party candidate who then endorses trump might make a difference. but we'll see happens. but i don't think this is somebody that would necessarily be in the tradition of the robert kennedy that was in the 1960s. doris kearns goodwin, this has been an interesting political. how soon can we write about this year with good perspective. it always takes a while, right? but it's going to be even the last six weeks is going to be

read about somebody can picture an historian like me, 50 years from now, just taking the last six weeks read between then. it's been so exciting in a way because it just allows to know that you think you know where the country is going and then things change. you know, even now they can change between now and november. fate intervenes or something. like biden's decision to withdraw comes and then somehow a mood. that's how leadership the mystery of leadership is, how mood can change. when when fdr gave his inaugural address, the country was at lowest ebb. the depression was was rock bottom. and he gives his address. and he's so confident. an optimist, stick and full of joy. i mean, he's happy days are here again are sung at the end of his inaugural address. it's crazy right and such a terrible time but it shows that if you can believe in the future, if you have a sense that something is going to happen, you have energy that that can change the whole mood of a party, at least not necessarily the country, but see what happens with the country. skip waterbury, connecticut. good morning. good morning.

i love i love your books and i love the way you talk about our history. it seems to me i grew up in the sixties. i was in high school in 1967. so you're of me. you're close to me. yeah. so this is in my memory. what we lived through. and now i'm 72 years old. i'm looking at the crisis our nation is into right now. right. for some reason, maybe just my. it seems to me that the american people will join together and say are going to stop. we've not good for our nation. we, the are going to get together and do it again. thank you, skip. doris kearns goodwin. i agree with you, skip i mean, i think optimism is the only answer no matter what in certain times, can't you have to have brutal realities on the as happened during the depression or early days of world war two. but now i feel that the majority of the people want a change in

the mood of the country. the majority of the people feel like they no longer want the kind of hate and invective that we're seeing. and that can come to the surface if the conscience of the people can be fired. i mean, that's what happened in the sixties over and over again with the civil rights movement in particular, the bravery and the nonviolence of the civil rights movement? the people recognized we needed to change segregation. it had to happen. and segregation had to be undone in the south. voting rights had to be assured. i think we're at that point right now where the majority of the people are going to speak up and say, want a different kind of politics. we want something divisive. we want something less filled with hate. we want something with more joy and more optimism. i really feel on that road right now, i just hope we can that world. ronald of washington, d.c. sent in a text message now that we know so much about the kennedys womanizing, how does that color your memory of the time he might be referring? maureen callahan's new book?

i think it's a very interesting question. i think for historians, the question always is, yes, colors your information and you understand finding about the private person. and then the question is, for an historian also, how does that affect their public personality? i mean, when we didn't know about these things before, what would you say is that if the private behavior affects the public personality effects policy or affects their ability to govern, then absolutely. that linkage needs to be made. otherwise, it's something makes you feel better or worse about the individual, but it may not affect their judgment in history. i mean, for example, people didn't know at the time that that fdr couldn't walk on his own power. it's that we know that now. it makes us know how extraordinarily hard it was for him to be president and how much even more powerfully we should respect him. and i think it's better that we know these things now. but at the time, we simply judged him as a different kind of person. and i think that's what's important from an unfinished

love story. one afternoon, -- asked me to slowly recite one of his favorite poems, wordsworth's intimations of immortality. when i had nearly finished, he was breathing very deeply, and i thought for certain he had fallen. i went on reading the end when i finished. he turned to me and from memory repeated quote, though nothing can bring back hour of splendor in the grass of glory in the flower, we will grieve, not rather find strength in what remains behind. doris kearns goodwin's latest book, her eighth an unfinished love story a personal history of the sixties. thanks for spending a few minutes with us at national book festival. i'm delighted to, as always. thank you. thank you. thank you. thank you as well. up several more hours of coverage. go to book tv, dawg if you want to see the full schedule. but right now we're going to hear from authors alexis pauline gum survival is a promise is her book and best tie miles

nightflyers is her book. morning. morning. i honor to welcome you all to our next event, harriet tubman and audre lorde. icons resistance. alexis pauline gumbs is the author of several of poetry, but her brand new biography is titled survival is a promise the eternal life of audre. she will be in conversation with ty miles, who is a professor of history at harvard university and received the national book

award in 2011. for all that she carried. her latest book is titled night fire. harriet tubman and the faith dreams of a free people. they will be in conversation to be moderated. martha jones, professor of history at johns hopkins university. her work examines the legal and cultural history of black citizenship, voting rights and the rights of women enjoyed festival and let us welcome them to our stage. thanks very much, beatriz. thank you to the library of congress. welcome to this extraordinary crowd to the national book festival. wonderful to see you all here.

and greetings to our friends on c-span. i want to dive into these books. what a pleasure for me to have a special opportunity to read them. and i'll say to listen to them, which i also recommend as i did on the long road trip this summer. but i want to ask you where these books began for you. harriet tubman, audre lorde. these are historical figures, whose names i think will be to many of us. certainly they were familiar to you all before you began these project. so what led you to return to them and what did you learn? what was new? by the time you got to the end of this process, alexis, do you mind getting us started? i don't mind at all. i'm so happy to be here. thank you all for coming so i've never. audre lorde.

she has never left me. when i was 14 years old in writer's group in the oldest feminist bookstore, the south carries books. i first learned about audre lorde, and it was really because a nearby professor had ordered her books for their class through this bookstore. and so i got my copy of the collected poems of audre lorde, and i started writing them on my walls. i started using them for the epigraphs for all of my english papers. and i wouldn't say i really understood her poetry. at 14 years old or exactly why i needed it in my life. but i kept to it and i used book like an oracle would just open to a page and i would find something for myself in the complexity, her imagery and the bravery of her words.

so. when i am like, there's so many opportunities in between. i never stopped writing about audrey in college. my dissertation features work along with the work of barbara smith, jordan and alexis deveaux. and i had the honor of being the first person to visit and work with her archival papers, which are at spelman college in atlanta, georgia. and it was sitting that archive holding her journals and other materials that i discuss in the book. but you'll have to see what those are later. where i felt this responsibility that there's there's something like an energy that i think happens in the archive. and i knew that there might be people like us who we spend weeks and go back and back and back to the archives and get to spend so much time in what i think of as sacred, where like

at the library of congress can actually time travel and be with those materials. but i also knew that most of the people who lived in my community would not have opportunity to sit among those materials like i did. so i started to bring it back into my living room. i had a night in my living room. i called it school of our lord, and it was an all ages school tiny duplex room and people, their kids. it was i think the youngest person that participated was probably like two months old and the oldest person that participated was in their eighties and everyone in between and we would we would have interactive ways to work with the life legacy teaching strategies, poetic ethics, political work of audre lorde and it was that that really started to bring audrey's people to me. her partner, gloria joseph, invited me to come live for a

little while in saint croix, where audre lorde lived at the end of her life and to work in her studio, which is also the place, the place where she took her last breaths. and so the energy exchange and, i never thought i would write a biography. i was like, you know, the form of biography. it feels so constricting to someone who, like they call me a poet, because they can't actually define how it is that i write. but i came to understand that. this was part of my responsibility holding all of this energy, having not only all of this archival access, but then access to audre lorde, students who have been mentors and teachers and her loved ones who have supported the community work that i've been doing, inspired by audrey this whole time. so, so basically, at a certain

point yes becomes. yes, i just had to recognize this within myself and i think it happened at exactly the right time because my book before this black feminist lessons marine mammals was oh you read it. thank you for reading it it it really was a leap for me as a black feminist scholar. black feminist, literary scholar to, learn so much marine biology and to study marine mammals and listen to marine mammals. and i now that all along i was missing the fact that audre lorde was a person who did that, too. she was obsessed with science, and she would study geology and, astronomy, and she would collect stones and polish them in her kitchen. if you were wearing a stone on your ring, she would be like,

what stone is that? and it from a volcano. she was really curious about these things. and so natural imagery in her poetry is in a metaphor and just this incredible complexity and that she uses to have us think about human relationships differently. it's actually not metaphorical. it's part of what i understand her to be of explaining to us that earth is a relationship. and so maybe this can be a way to pass it to you because there's this beautiful scene that your book opens with harriet tubman in the storm and when audre lorde was in a storm, surviving hurricane hugo on saint croix, she had this under standing that maybe a lot of us have now around, climate change. she said that we are in breach, the covenant upon which we live earth is trying to tell us

something about our conduct. and when i read that a letter that she wrote to ashleigh, which was a black lesbian feminist collective in the bay area that was sending supplies to audre lorde's community in saint croix, i thought about the fact that if we live on the covenant, if we're involved in some kind of promise with earth, allows us to keep breathing and living and growing and knowing each other, then earth is actually a relationship and every part of this planet is not something that we look at to, represent who we are. we are actually part of everything. so the way that this book rethought audre lorde to me was as a climate theorist was as a scientist, then i had to learn even more.

all the amount of geology that i read, how much i had to learn of chemistry, like all of these that i avoided my whole life up till now, really. she offered a rigor and an intimacy in order to be able to get to know, but also to offer to the world and a person who understood herself deeply. part of the transformation of earth. so i have more to say. but it was fascinating for me to learn that as i was relearning audre lorde, as environmentalist, you were reteaching harriet tubman as an. so i'll stop there because i can talk about audre lorde forever. now. we could listen forever to that was just beautiful. everybody.

hello. i think it's still mornings like the morning and i go, what? martha said, how wonderful it is to be here in this room just full of everyone with such positive energy and about what it is that we have to share with you today and the same goes for the people we can't see who are out there. you know, in the internet land, you know, then the c-span land. hello. thank you for being with. so alexis's comments, i think already have set the table so beautifully for our conversation and also for an interest that we all have in common. and that is about the future of this planet and all living creatures upon it. which of includes us. and we have all as black feminists, as black scholars, a way to connect our work in black women's and black women's theory

to this urgent question of life today, which is how do we live with? and on earth? how do we face multiple crises? where do we look for examples or inspiration or just comfort and companionship as we move through these more like the darkening days ahead? mm so my entry point into my new book, night fire, which is a biography of harriet tubman, really started this recognition that is in trouble, which means we are in deep, deep, deep trouble too. and i i came to this awareness. in around 2009, soon after my third child was born. i had been very focused on looking at african-american

history, especially black women's history, as it related to native american history. and my subject matter was slavery. so looking at experiences, black enslaved people, especially black enslaved women, and i realize some point that my fervent focus on black experience and native experience really had no meaning if we didn't have an earth, that part. i just that my attention was a little bit too narrow. and at that moment i decided i wanted to try to see if i could expand it and try to explore how might i expand it. i did that through a number of different kinds of projects, including organizing a community group in southeast michigan. we had a professor jones and i both lived and worked and became friends and this was a group called eco girls, which for

environmental and cultural opportunities for girls. this was a day program, a weekend program at a summer camp for girls in urban southeast michigan, in which we learned about the environment and the natural world and stewardship and in which we to maybe kind of beat on the down teach skills that could be productive useful for these girls as. they grew into their womanhood. and just as an aside, i have to tell you all that i heard from somebody in that camp and see she's texas now and she texted me and she said, have you told us we should learn how to build shelters? and i'm down here working at habitat for humanity building three people, learning how to make places to live. it was wonderful and other people from that program have gone on to work on sustainable food, to teach, to become academics in their own right. and so on.

so that was one of the ways in which i tried to face up to what it felt to me to be, you know, a pretty terrifying reality, which is what are we doing to our earth? how will that affect our children and and future generations? and at the same time that this was all happening for me, i had a colleague more than i had a colleague in the industry, too. taylor, who is an environmental sociologist who's written a number of books on different ways to think about urban environment and the notion of conservation and people of color in, the outdoors and the ways in which they have been sidelined in of the environment. and i figured taylor said to me one day at the hearing, they give a talk, black women who were enslaved. harriet was an environment analyst. and that was one of those moments where it's like, you know light bulb, it stars, you know, flash in the sky because i

was already concerned and worried about this issue. but i was not seeing a way to put my work together with this very urgent feeling. and our christina taylor gave me the way. she just gives it to me by saying harriet tubman was an environment catalyst. and she said she had to be in order to know how to read the trees and read the sky to get free. something that you talk about in your book and around as well. and i can tuck that notion away, continue to do my work, and to publish other books. but i started developing a concept of environmental history of underground railroad. so i'm thinking about what would that be like if we could turn around and really, you know, what would the natural elements be? who would the historical actors be? and i started keeping files and i started typing notes and going back to previous sources and trying to assemble various kinds

of materials to conceptualize idea. and then another gift that just came my way, which was to have the chance to write a petite biography. for a series that's edited by henry louis gates. the series is mostly black thinkers, artists and activists. and i said well, how about harriet tubman? because i read about harriet tubman. and the answer was yes. and i said, can i go to harriet tubman? an environmental perspective. and here i held my breath. that was sort of an unusual and answer came like again, yes, absolutely. absolutely. go for it. and so that's how this particular framework battalion telling harriet tubman story came about, that long history of just a widening lens of attention and concern and interconnecting different of study.

so my answer to part b of your question, martha, concerning what was new new in this project would a, they'll be twofold really. harriet tubman is someone we're surrounded by, you know, especially as kids. i mean, you know, black history month and probably now women's history comes along and she's going to be plastered on the elementary school walls and i think that's good. i hope she sees that there might be some states in which her role in those spaces, you know, could be endangered because of concern about teaching the truth of black history in history. and harriet tubman, whenever the walls is a very flat way of understanding her and this project, the research, the thinking, and especially writing through her life, helped me to see her in a multi dimensional way, which just blew my mind, because as i will admit, and not

to my credit, this is something that i feel like embarrassed to admit, but i will admit that i sort of carried along with me this caricature of harriet tubman. i just i saw her in kind of that action figure mode that we all know, that we see the images that we get and the kind of the folks, the stories and even we that we get in the recent biographical film to have in which was very moved me moving but it still has that of aspects to it of tubman through the woods right and i had to relearn her through this book and as i did that, i saw much more of the depth of her character, like the seriousness and weight of who she was the breadth and

sharpness of her thought. i mean, harriet tubman appeared to me working on this project as somebody who was an incredible more astonishing talented early thinker and the black advantaged american tradition. so abolitionist, yes. moving through the swamps in the woods. yes. you know, and certainly she was a freedom taker. she took her own freedom of freedom, bring her to other people. she was a warrior, but she was also a brilliant philosopher and theorist and analyst i came to know that they're working this book. thank you for that. you know, we could have called this panel, one on black women's intellectual history, and i think that would been as apt. but i want hold on to something else that ran through both your comments and i'll call it place

and and how does place matter in these stories ease you know tire you and i both have trekked through the eastern shore of maryland on. the one hand revisiting those sites in the seasons and and searching tubman, but also witnessing i bearing witness to the way in which the crisis of earth is transforming perhaps irredeemably the eastern shore of maryland and think. but at the same time, i think one of the ways in which tubman is is mythologized that she's a little bit stuck in place. but i took from your book. and the same is true of lord. this is a woman in motion and so can you talk a little bit about how place figures in this story

and figures in tubman's life story. mm yes. so anybody who hasn't yet read martha jones's new york times travel article about revisiting harriet tubman's homeplace in maryland must go and google it and read it immediately. it's beautifully, it's informative. and the photographs are just gorgeous. if you've been to maryland before, you will see it in the way in your article. and if you're on cusp of going, you will have a different frame to bring with you. i'm so glad you asked that question of both of us. martha, that question is absolutely apt for the reason that you said that these two women were always in motion inside themselves and externally in the world. and also because i couldn't have told tubman's story. and i don't think alexis kind of told lawrence story without keen

attention to place. it's of our colleagues. the regular at savoy says. everything takes place, right? everything happens and it happens in place. it happens in a context. it happens in an ecology. it happens on a certain piece of land that happens near a particular waterways, which all interact with one another and every other living thing. and so non-living things to create a vibrant energetic web of existence. so harriet tubman comes out of that place on the eastern shore of the chesapeake in maryland, and this place shaped her. it formed her. it taught her how to do those things that we associate with her, an underground railroad. that period of her life, it's the place where, of course, she

learned the waterway. she learned the woods she learned to read the night skies, especially probably from her father. but there's another dimension to the environment and climate change in place that i want to slip in here. and martha already pointed to it and that is harriet tubman's place is changing and it's changing because change happens. things are always changing. the natural world is changing. we're changing, right? but that change has been accelerated because of climate, which is in in harriet tubman's ecological context. that endangerment has all kinds of potential repercussions. one of them might feel a little bit tangential. i think that it's really important to think about, and that is that harriet tubman and other enslaved people who were

able to find their way to freedom in the 19th century did so in environments that were thickly alive. they did so because they had tree cover, because they had forests, because they were rivers that they could actually follow that weren't completely people and settled. and harriet tubman chose to travel in cooler temperatures in the winter, she chose to travel at night. she liked to move with people who were seeking their freedom. she was 18 at times when the other people, the and the people who were trying to catch enslaved people for would be in their beds. the more that climate change accelerates and we lose our forests and the water rises and, even when we lose our colder temperatures, the less likely it

is that we have opportunities for people to free themselves of one another. by partnering in with an intact natural world, this is really important to recognize that the abolitionist network and the work they did depended on intact natural. environments that we are losing now and know what's going to happen. you know, and our political world, none of us knows. and i am not attempting to offer some kind of the gloom and doom scenario or any kind of conspiracy theory. but i will say, should things that our country turn in a way that we were facing some kind of extreme chaos. i'd actually i didn't see that film about the new civil scenario, but let's just say i heard about such a say something like that.

where would the freedom fighters hide? where would the freedom fighters convene? which natural areas would be protected them as they made their plans and plotted their way forward to defend us all and to defend this country? that is an important aspect to a changing environment that i just wanted to put out there in this space. and let me try to see if i can conclude this comment by going back to my point about movement and change. one of the things about harriet tubman that i wasn't focused on enough, and i think many of us are not focused on enough is fact that her underground activism, which was truly heroic and tremendous and mysterious, took up about ten years of her

life. she lived from approximately 1822 to 1913. she lived a long time. and ten years is significant, but kind of like a blip in such a long lifespan. so what else was she doing in that time? she was traveling all over the place in this country and in canada and quite significantly, she moving to upstate new york to auburn, new york and building, shaping a community, a community of care, a community of welcoming people in who were hungry, who were leading, who had disabilities, who were elderly, who were sick, bringing them in and creating a safety

net for all of them. and did this in new york well past the time when she was running into the swamps and the woods. and so in a sense, movement and also coming to know new places, coming into relationship with new places over time was a part of survival strategy. alexis, there's a moment, moments in this book where you set audrey lord in new york, but in particular at hunter college. so we haven't talked about this, but was a young student at hunter college, lord was there. and so you can imagine how it is. i'm reading this and i'm rethinking all of the all of that time and all that space through arts perspective. but my question really is maybe we don't think of new york city, we don't think of the upper east side of manhattan as the

birthplace of an environmentalist. so what happens to audrey lord? where does that happen for her? how does that happen for her? mm well, well, first of all, i just want to shout out eastern shore. it's anybody from eastern shore, maryland, who's here. you know, again, my ancestors from eastern shore. i'm a descendant of the oyster workers of eastern shore who were part of that waterway underground railroad. i'm going up to staten island, new york. so then maybe. okay, so now we're in new york. okay. so audrey lord was in harlem and also lived much of her life in staten island, new york. she raised her kids in staten island. and, you know, she talks about this in one of her early author statements. she says, you know, i wasn't born in a forest. i was born hemmed in by stone.

right. that's what she describes being born in new york city as being, like, hemmed in by stone and there's so much natural imagery in her poetry that when people started to ask her, like, exactly this question, how did that happen? she would say, you know, really, i grew up. i didn't know the difference between a weed and a flower in a piece of grass and she would make these little bouquets of like grass from little green space between buildings in new york city and give them to her mother as bouquets and her mother is like, well. having migrated from grenada, a place of so much less and some of the most beautiful fruits and flowers in the world, she was just like, okay. and yet even early on, wandering the hallways of hunter college high school, which was a school for girls at that time, she was interested in the ecology of her

city. she started to write about roaches. she was like, what is it? what does it mean that there's actually a life form? it's in relationship with what we're doing heating cooling, building, crevices or waste and trash that is in relationship with us in ways that scare everyone like that. the people of new york are in constant battle against. and yet reflected by and how does that actually shape what her experience was like as a student? she would write about homeless children that she would see in the street and say, okay, how how does this city build and reject itself at the same time? and that is something that you can see in her teenage

notebooks. so when she actually has a chance to go to more places, very time is when she goes to mexico as as a student, she studies abroad in mexico city and then lives in kind of back and travels to oaxaca lorca and. she's like, oh, oh, oh. you know, she's to see the wildflowers and the butterflies and these great expanses of space that weren't part of her experience of new york. and she talks, adrienne rich, the poet adrienne rich, about this she says, this is when i realized that there's so much beauty, the world, that beauty wasn't just something i had to make out of my words and the way i put them together. it was something that i could bring people to. and this becomes one of the major shifts has her looking at the world differently and wondering about a wider set of

species and being the type of person that one of her friends describes would go to like a street market and be like smelling everything and putting everything to her face and her friend andrea cain, and says it was like being with somebody who just got to planet earth, who was like, what is this? what can i taste this? you know, everything. and you can see that sensuous ness in her and her writing. and then she well and maybe it's not all linear, right? because i want to lift the fact that audre lorde as a student was of a group called committee for a sane nuclear, where they were already thinking about what does it mean the way that we use energy, what are the dangers of nuclear energy? remembering that lorde grew up down street from where the manhattan happened, where the atomic bomb was created, and she

remembers listening with her family to. the radio. when the first atomic bomb was dropped on hiroshima and her father crying for the only time she ever really saw him emotion in his life, saying that humanity has now is now capable of destroying itself. and so these questions, which audre lorde in her early life brought to reading science fiction and the early study of of science, she started to do as a pre-teen and as a teenager was thinking about humanity in relationship to itself and planet earth. and then just grew and grew and grew and grew. so when she started to understand as a person from the caribbean, but then who also moved to st croix at the end of her life, when she started to understand stand that what we've done to the atmosphere was

actually causing her to be stronger. storms like hurricanes hugo, which she survived, then wrote a lot about that in that not a lot of people have read as a warning for how we respond. these crises. it's very it's interesting to me that she starts this essay. she wrote hugo letter saying those who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them and then she outlines the us response to hugo and st croix in a way that could absolutely be about katrina. it could absolutely be about some of the other storms that we've faced where people's lives and livelihood are put second to the the interests of property in business anyway, all of this is to say that, i think the there something about audrey lorde's sense that that earth is

something process and you know, maybe it comes from early on you know her mom talking about kick kim jenny that underwater volcano near grenada and carioca where earth is becoming itself where isotopes are still transforming this idea that earth is not a finished project, earth is not a stable for human action earth is something that is in motion itself, not only in orbit, but like from within like audrey was in motion from within. i think that there was identification with that that caused her to look at these different things and say, yeah, i should, i should be thinking about what the nuclear policy is. i should be thinking about what the practices are. i should be thinking about what life is contingent on. and so i think it connects to what you were just sharing about

being part of an ecology our freedom work and the work of our freedom fighter. our warriors like audre lorde, self-identified black lesbian feminist warrior poet, just want to make sure to say that because she always said that wherever she went, she was like, just in case. just in case. and she had a lot of other things that she would say. she would say socialist, she would say sometimes she would say nearsighted, high maintenance, all these things, just to let you know. but there's if we're in a relationship with earth, which harriet tubman clearly was so deeply as an herbalist, as a daughter of a forester forester. it's not not. the natural environments that were part of our more than a resource for our. what's at stake is actually our

capacity to be in free relationship with ourselves with each other and with life itself. and so the way that you describe in this book, by the way, just for that just for that you'll have to read this book as the feasting of flesh as elites, feasting the flesh of other people in order to consume their labor. it's so accurate. it's so much better than any way i've heard it describe it. and more true, it requires so much violence and contain it and captivity to stop us as living beings from being in the relationship with earth. that would be most life giving for us and for all species to force people to grow a monoculture of crops that they can't even eat.

it takes violence to force people to act outside of our best interest, which would be what some people would call permaculture. now. but it would be in the relationship that. and as you also talk about this in your book and this is something that was very important, audre lorde as well, an indigenous relationship land is the most dangerous to a colony project and an enslaving project. and so this. this question of being an environmentalist. i'm so grateful that we get to like from not starting with harriet tubman and certainly not ending with audre lorde, but to understand, like fannie lou hamer was an environmental ist when she said have to be able to feed our people and we're going to use this land to create freedom farms and not cotton

plantations. right. but actually voting itself is an environmental because the disenfranchize of the people in mississippi was about stopping them from being in relationship with the land in a way that would make the most sense right? so i think there's been a separation and this is what had us be like, oh we're we're remaining our same our same ancestors that we love. there's been a separation between black power movement, civil, and then the idea of environmentalism. but when you look at it, all of these women were environmentalists. the whole which probably means all the ancestors that you would draw were also environmentalists. the whole time. there's just been this narrowness, to use that word earlier. there's been this narrowness in. who an ecologist can be, right? who who can be the person who

speaks about. and also in erasure, the same erasure that we fight as biographers of black women. that's there's actually a freedom. it's right. it's with us because. we are actually part of this planet. and we are hearing it in our own desire for freedom and in what the planet is telling. audre lorde talked about it through hurricanes, earthquakes, through every form of communication and. we have to be environmentalists in order to be free. audre lorde really, with what you said she would often say in interviews. we have to work with the creative power of difference and we have to be able to talk to each other across all these differences. but that conversation can't happen if we're not in a relationship with earth that allows us to have any conversation at all and i think that that part of audre lorde legacy is the most important,

especially right now. and so audre lorde lives on somebody who absolutely has saved lives, has saved my life as a person who we understand is an icon of identity and speaking our truth and, claiming our multiple identities and, collaborating across difference. but the depth of what she was really embodying and asking for is a total transformation in our relationship as a planet, not just with a planet, but as earth. and i'm really excited for that aspect of what she had to say to be something that we can all access now. well, i yeah. so i want to i want to stay with one of your key terms relationship and maybe just transform it a bit to relations. yes. because we're hearing just

snippets of how these are also women who spend their lives in remarkable and essential webs of of human. and tie. i wanted to ask you to help us understand better this dimension of harriet tubman life, in part because i think in myth she comes to us is sort of the singular solitary figure in so many ways. but i think you to tell us something about the way in which she is part of a world and an world with with yes, earth, but also with other humans on earth. mm hmm. mm hmm. relationship. also, the word that was thinking in my mind to you, alexis i'm glad you highlighted that, martha, and gave us more space

by offering us relations, because this does seem to be a key idea running through our comments. a critical way of being that means being with others. others who might be human, others who might not be human. and and harriet tubman did both. we know from people that harriet tubman spoke with during lifetime that she found support, energy peace, calm when. she was outside, that she the the features of the natural world as being alive and even in and that this sense of and spiritedness for vibrancy and of spirituality outdoors was deeply interwoven her very strong christian faith.

so tubman's concept of relational had to do with her with god maybe even first and foremost. she was a very religious person. mm hmm. that was something else that learned as was doing this. this work that she wasn't as religious in that. yes, we know that very prayed when she was an underground railroad, but is religious in the sense that her faith in god, this divine being supersede everything in her life. it was her flaw. it was her compass. it was the way she made decisions. this was a very real relationship that tubman existed within throughout her entire life. was a religious understanding and sensibility which connected up with her environment or or ecological understand.

because for her, again nature was in spirited or spirited, it was it was alive. it had something about the power of god threaded through it. in addition, harriet tubman was in a long standing, deeply felt closely held, but always endangered relationships with other people. she adored her parents. she adored her siblings. her parents and siblings adored. and even though she and her and her siblings were often being rented out, leased out by the man who owned her a different person than who earned her father's family was separated. she was always taking risks to, be closer to her family. if her relationship with god we might say, was the bedrock of her her was the soil that was the place.

she found richness where she was resourced over and over again, emotionally and physically. she was mistreated, neglected. you know, abused by enslavers. and harriet tubman always had a dream and a vision of reconstituting her family because they were separated, because she had two sisters who were sold away. and she witnessed and was was distraught about it and had nightmares and traumatic memories of it throughout her life. and this intense relationality, the strong love for her family, this desperate need to bring family back together is partly what i think guide her, because god was her primary guide. always. to developing this community in new, where she could create a new and family, including some

of her relatives from down in maryland who she helped to escape, but also other people who she was meeting the very first time when they came and knocked on her door saying, we're hungry, we're thirsty, we no place to sleep tothem was constantly and caring for relationships, which i think such an important example for right now. mm mm. so yeah, please. yeah. two things about family and relations, i think struck me about lord. one is, is her relationship with daughter elizabeth, which runs through this book and really feels like guide through this book on the one hand. so her children but then i think the other thing is that has this extraordinary i'll say, expansive perhaps a queer sense of what relations in families

are. that is as strong in the way you tell it to us. but please say more. yes, i mean, i think this is one of the things i love about night fire understanding and harriet tubman and community and also understanding her and her intellectual community of other black women survived slavery and knew they could be free. i love understanding our people who again, the title of this is icons, but how we can understand these people who think about what an icon is like on your computer in icon press it and then you go into the the place it represents, whatever the place where you go to type your documents or something, you get access through an icon. and i think it's important for these black women icons. it's not like i could never do a harriet tubman did. i could never be like audre lorde. actually, what audre lorde

believed. audre lorde always believed she was a genius, not a humble person, not even as a child. this is why we have all her journals. she was like, i know i'm important to this planet, but she thought that was what she had in common with you. she was when she would say, i am a black lesbian feminist warrior poet doing my work, come to you. are you doing yours? it was because she thought your work was as important as her work. so you also are a genius. you also are so important to this planet. and i think sometimes we lose that. or maybe it's our copout when look at these people and were like, what a great figure. but me i don't actually have the power to change the and. that's not what audre lorde believed at all. and i'll have you know, as a person who spent a lot of time in audre lorde's papers, she procrastinated to just like you do, just like i do. she didn't know what to say.

sometimes she was afraid. a lot of the time she, had nightmares all all of these things that for her were a part of her pathway, of being who she was. a lot of her poetry came out of those nightmares, those strong images that become a warning or, an opening space or a powerful questioning place for us coming from something that really was a problem. her insomnia and nightmares over, the course of her life. and i think about harriet tubman and her her brain, her traumatic brain event that she had that also was part of her leadership. and so i think about there's so much to think about. but you had asked about this idea family and relation and audre lorde was definitely a person who who she felt that our love is meant to transform us.

we are here to transform from each other through reflect and really rigorously. and i think some of this comes out of her growing up as a child with disabilities profoundly. they would say legally blind at the time. who didn't speak until the age four or five. what it meant to be close was a very serious thing. she couldn't see you if you weren't close. she couldn't communicate you if she couldn't touch you. and that soul lives through her work, her poems are like, you got to be able to smell it. you got to be able to feel it. this isn't the pretty picture from far away. this is like getting close. and she really required that in her relationship. she was like, oh, no, no, we're going we're going all the way. i'm going to tell you what i really think. even if you really want to know

it and she created a community of people across her life who she understood be family, who who were we would say may be close friends. for her, this was like her cohort, her kindred people who she raised her children with together. she. understood. i mean, in this book, i write about it as like a forest. she understood as part of a macro organism, like a forest can shift climate, an individual tree can't shift the climate. so what does it mean to be part of the forest? and how do trees each other alive through their roots? and how do the fungus that are part of that and all the different species that live in the forest participate in that? i think you can look at audre lorde's life, her students, her close friends, her children in

her relationships that she intentionally cultivated with women who were working for all over the world as. part of this idea that if we're going to shift the climate, it happens through deep investment in each other and that that's actually the scale of life. so there's a scale of that audre lorde practice that i'm really grateful for, and i hope that can learn a lot from. i've got 2 minutes and and i feel like we've just begun, but that is just one more reason for us to encourage folks to dive into these books themselves and discover all of the richness that is in them in one minute. one of the things we know about both of you is that you are

prolific writers. so what's next time, miles in 30 seconds, 30 seconds. i'm working on a cultural history of harriet jacobs and harriet beecher thinking about women's friendships and conflicts and tensions across racial lines during that great moral movement and also about to be working on a on climate change and historic sites that are endangered. thank. i'm so excited. i guess home i am writing about change jordan in particular centering her relationship with. fannie lou hamer who was one of her primary mentors. yes. and this this question the ecology that's that's always

there and i also have just completed a book of poems inspired by a local, the great painter, alma thomas. oh, i her so much. i love her so much and yes, so it's poetry that's inspired by basically a year where wrote inspired by her paintings every single day. thank you to ty miles, alexis calling guns rape survivor is a promise. nightflyers. thank you. national bookstore. best of all, thank you. library of congress. thank you. our friends on c-span. congratulations to you both. thank. you. i love and her. ha ha ha ha ha ha. uh huh, uh ha ha ha ha ha ha.

um. uh huh uh. and you're watching coverage of the 2024 national book festival

at the washington, dc convention center. several hours ahead. authors ned blackhawk. erik larson are two of the authors that you'll see joining us now on. our set. is the american the evolve event. his fifth book is called american covenant how the constant tution unified our nation and could again. mr. levin, start with the lead. how could the constitution unify? you know, i think it's very important to see that the american constitution was intended really a unifying document. its purpose, when it declares its own purposes first that it lists, is to form a more union. and i think we americans now tend to forget that we look at the constitution, a dry legal framework, else we see it as part of what divides us, as part of what frustrates us about american politics. but over and over, the constitution rises to offer us ways to unify across lines of difference, to compel americans

who disagree with each other, to deal with each other, to negotiate, to compete, bargain that sort of tries to us to do. and to the extent that we fail to do that now, we're failing to protect this american constitutionalism. and i think the way to recover that practice is to our knowledge of the constitution. that's really what the book tries to offer. a re acquaintance, the constitution for americans who know it, but maybe don't know it as unifying framework. to quote from american covenant as, we consider the particular elements our governor and framework. we see that americans have weakened the capacity of our constitution, unify us not by accident, but on purpose. out of an understandable but ultimately misguided sense of frustration with precisely the means by our system of government pursues, us cohesion. let's start with that line not by accident, but on purpose. right. we find the constitution frustrate because it slows this

down and it is especially frustrating for narrow majorities in american political life. and of course, narrow majorities are the only kind we've had now for about 30 years. the american, unlike a lot of the parliamentary of europe, for example, which a perfectly democracies to our system, when you win an election, doesn't give you all the power until the next election when you win an election, you win a seat at the table. and what happens at the table is negotiate eating and bargaining and competing. the constitution always wants narrow majorities to grow before. they can be empowered because you have to win the presidency and the house and the senate and power in the states to really make dramatic change happen. that's very hard to do in a divided time. and what the constitution says to a narrow majority is work with the other side, find some people there who will agree with you too and build a broader coalition. it's really that knack for coalition building that we've lost in 21st century america and. the demand to build coalitions is frustrating. think we just won the election?

yeah, we won percent plus one, but we won. why do? we have to deal with those people and our constitution wants to say you have to deal with them so that the outcome is broadly legitimate and otherwise majorities will push their way through. then they'll lose and the opposite majority will come in, will undo everything they did and will do what they want to do. we'll do it back and forth forever. that's a little bit of what 21st century american politics has felt. and that i think, is a failure. constitutional practice. it's a failure to see that ultimately we have to build in order for our system to function. right now, too many voters don't want that primary voters, too many politicians don't want that. and we have to relearn our constitution that that is what we should want and that is what we should do. mr. levin, would you agree that most of us have a passive membership in democracy? it's true. most even most politically engaged citizens. now think about american democracy, something we watch. we participate every couple of years as voters. i think there's more of a role

for us if we want it. and especially in our kind of democracy, which begins from the bottom up and, which works by empowering people at the local level and only then at the state, only then at the national level. americans who want to participate more could, i think, the nationalization of our politics its tendency to turn into a kind of form of entertainment has led us to think that what it means to be a politically engaged citizen is just to watch politicians in washington. it can mean a lot more than that if we wanted to and. i think it should for our system to work well. we to be more active citizens than we all tend to be. what's danger in the nationalization of politic, in your view? our system actually gives the national government a fairly limited of issues to control the american national government, in charge of defense, of diplomacy of economic regulation. but a lot of the real governance of our country to happen at the state level, at the local. and if we don't see that, if we turn every issue into a national issue, then you have a deformation of politics, both at

the national level where the national government tries to engage itself in much more than it needs to in education, in welfare and some of the most contentious and divisive issues that aren't going to be resolved at the national level and so shouldn't be fought at the national level. and also you have a nationalized ocean of local politics. i live in maryland. in my county, we have people for county council on an agenda that's focused on immigration. now is very important, but it's not a county level issue and i don't really care what you think about immigration. if you're running for the county commission, it's just that people say that now as a way of sending a signal about who they are of a kind of symbolic message of i'm on the right team and that's not really what politics needs to involve. it becomes much harder for our politics to function when we think that it's all one big show in washington. yuval, all of us, our guest, he is with the american enterprise institute of their social, cultural and constitutional study. his numbers are up on the screen case. you want to participate in our

conversation this afternoon. he's a contributing editor, the national review. his previous include the fractured republic a time to build but hasn't politics always been relatively performative. there's always been a performative element to politics, no question about it. part of what it is to be a politician is be a public person, is to convey a kind message that people want to hear and like to hear. i think our politics has become more in the era of social media than is healthy for our institutions. there's always a balance between playing an inside in an institution like congress, participating in the bargaining and negotiating. and that has to happen internally and playing an outside role using congress a way to convey a national public message. in our time, the outside role has taken over and a lot of members see their purpose fundamentally as to be political communicators and think of congress less an institution for them to operate in and which might form their behavior, our

politics and more as a stage, a platform for them to stand on and be seen. and so they look at congress as a way to build a social media following to build an audience on cable news or on the internet, and ultimately makes it much harder for them to do their inside work, their core legislative work. the work of a legislature isn't. and negotiation just can't in public. it has to happen in private. so congress has to have an interior life as well as an exterior. and that's what we've seen diminish in the 21st century. and was that in the review you did an article that congress. absolutely. i and it's part of the book too. i think that the the essential failure of our constitutional system now is congress's dereliction of its responsibility. congress is the first branch of our government. it has to be the moving force of our politics. but a lot of members now don't want to make the hard decisions they want to pass those over to the president to courts, and they want to be observers like everybody else.

commentators and pundits, than the decision makers in our system and the the political environment. they operate in now makes it too easy for them to do. they can just be performers, they can youtube clips, rather than producing. and too many their voters, i think, want that too. so recover the sense of what the institution to be. we have to reacquaint ourselves with the constitution looking in our history. what do you think congress functioned? well. well, there's always been reasons to complain about congress, but i think there have also been moments when congress has allowed the country genuinely to overcome some significant national divisions. we think, for example, of the era of the civil rights act in the 1950s and sixties, as dominated by presidents and courts. and those presidents, those courts did have important roles to play. but ultimately, was congress its job in that era of bargaining, negotiating, facilitating, compromise that allowed those resolutions to endure, that allowed those laws to last? i think we've seen at other

times in the course of world war two and congress stepped up to facilitate the growth of the american military in a way that, again, we attributed to. but it was congress that did the work that moment. i think we're in a moment now when there is that kind of work to do around immigration, around some the essential challenges that confront us in american fiscal policy, where it can only work if congress bargains its way toward an outcome that americans will view as broadly legitimate. the president can't do that. the president is one person and one person can't represent 330 million people. a representative outcome would have to be negotiated and. only congress can do that work. yuval levin 95%. 96% of congress gets right. it's true. people always seem to have a favorable view of their own member also hating congress simultaneously. i think the problem we confront very often now is that the way in which we begin process of electing congress, the candidate

selection process at the very beginning has been turned over entirely. a set of party primaries that tends to prefer candidates who don't want to do the work of negotiating and bargaining. but want to do the work of performing for their most devoted voters, people who vote primaries, they're under 10% of both parties, and they're the people who at least a a politics of bargaining and negotiation and. we end up with candidates who are just not right for the job, quite frankly, very often, especially in districts, are less competitive. the primaries do all the work and the work they do is to fill congress with people who want to do a job other than the one the constitution wants them to do. and so i think in order to fix congress have to think about the institution itself to strengthen, to allow the work legislation to matter more. but we also have to think about the electoral system, which is not in the constitution. it's not written in stone. it can be rethought. we want a better working system. well, we had an incident this summer where a candidate for a

major party was appointed. her party? yeah, that's perfectly legitimate, though, isn't it? it is legitimate. i think that the party's job is win general elections to build broad coalitions, especially in a two party system. the parties institutions are very useful because they tend to broaden the appeal of their candidates than to narrow them. whereas a candidate who thinks of himself or herself as an contractor, only has to speak to a narrow primary voter, the party as a whole has a broader interest. and i think the parties should see that they don't have to be stuck with candidates that don't have broad appeal. we've been stuck now for 30 years in american politics with two minority parties. they're both at just about 50%. neither of them can build a durable majority coalition, which has actually majority have been the norm in american politics. we generally have broad majority parties. and then after a long period, we have a realigning in which the minority becomes the majority.

since the 1990s. now we not had a majority party and that actually more to do with the dysfunction of our politics than we often think. it's not just polarization but deadlock that makes it hard for our parties to learn anything. parties learn lessons from voters they lose. and neither of parties feels like it's really lost in almost 30 years now. when they lose, they lose narrowly. they think we'll just do the same thing next time and it'll work. and right. it does work. neither has been able to build a broad coalition, and i think that has to do with the fact that neither of them thinks of itself enough in terms of building a broad coalition. 60%, not percent plus one is what it would take for a party to help our system get back into order and the other party would respond. right. when you have a broad coalition, the minority party tries to broaden own coalition and they're both in the business of reaching across lines of difference to find persuadable voters. at this moment, neither party doing that well enough. if you step back from our

politics now and ask what the parties doing, you'd think, well, they're they're trying to purify themselves. they're hunting heretics. they're not hunting convert. and that can only change. we have a better understanding of how our system meant to work. the book called american covenant how the constitu unified our nation and could again. the author is yuval levin. the first call up for him is kim down in houston. hi, kim. hello please go ahead. we're listening. okay. well, had a question for the author. how can. educate our children about the constitution in such a way that the constitution is, um, extremely important and and something that we just don't cast aside. i think it's. thank immensely important question and thank you for it.

it's really a question about civic education and do we help americans better know the tradition they're inheriting. i would say that it's very important subject to stress not only in at university level where there has been a kind of reawakening of civics, but especially at the k through 12 level in elementary school. people have to become broadly acquainted with the kind of society this is to learn about its strengths, to learn about its weaknesses, about what it offers. we certainly have to teach children about the darker sides of our history, but we also have to teach about the resources that are available to them, like the constitution so that fixing the problems we have should not be thought of as something that requires us to throw out what we have and start over. we have a lot of resources to work with in terms of historical to learn from and in terms of actual framework for governing that are alive, for us that we can work with now, that we can strengthen and reawaken today and about the constitution. and that sense is particularly

important. that's the purpose of a book like this. and there are a lot of books like that directed to people of all ages and of all levels of historical knowledge. i think in a sense this is a time of a kind of awakening of interest in civic education, and that interest has to be directed toward younger americans who need to know what they're inheriting and why it's worth their while. gail's calling from d.c. hi, gail. we're listening. my question for the author is how do you feel that the supreme court is making the congress work? i don't know the way you described and dysfunctional it. gail, are you what are your views? well, my views are some of the justices on the supreme. it's about me and they're not reading the constitution. that's how i'm looking at. thank you, ma'am. i think it's very important to think about the purpose of the

court in our system and the purpose of the court can be very confusing for us as citizens, because on the one hand, courts resolve disputes and our consists of disputes and disagreement. but courts are not meant to resolve disputes about what the law should be. courts are meant to resolve disputes about what the law is, and disputes about what it should be have to resolved in congress and in the state legislatures. the places where we argue with each other about what want as citizens. and so role of a judge is actually quite constrained. it is really to make sure that the system is operating as it ought to be, to make sure that people's rights are protected, especially the rights enshrined in the amendments, the constitution and the bill of rights and the 14th amendment, and to sure that the other institutions are doing proper work these days because much of the problem we face is the dysfunction congress. a lot of what the courts themselves doing is trying to push congress to do its job. and so over and over, you find courts trying to insist that it needs to be congress and not an administrative agency and not

judges that resolves the big questions of the day. sometimes can be frustrating to us as citizens. we want the question resolved and we want it to be clear. congress often resolves questions in ways that are a little more muddy, that are a little more matters of bargaining. but i think the court this court right to push congress and over to do its job. there are always going to be people unhappy, particular decisions and particular judges that. i can certainly give you a list of ones. i'm unhappy. but i think on the whole, the supreme court over the past generation has actually recovered its capacity to compel the system to work in the way it's intended under the constitution and broadly, i think that the roberts court has done a good job on that front. garrison winchester bay, oregon. gary, have about a minute left. go ahead. hello. i appreciate your well-reasoned positions. i'd like to hear what you feel. the ranked choice, voting and open primaries. it seems like that would force candidates to come to work, centrist positions, and discuss

issues. thank you. thank you, sir. it's subject i talk about a lot in the book, and i ranked choice. voting has a role to play in the kinds of problems we have. i would think about it, though, in primaries not ranked choice in general elections, which would tend to weaken the parties. but choice in primary elections, which would tend to encourage the parties to choose more broadly appealing candidates. the winner of a ranked choice election is a candidate who is good at being everybody's choice, as well as a lot of people's choice. and i do think that that is the kind of personality we want more of in our politics. yuval levin, his fifth book, american covenant how the constitution unified our nation and could again thank you for your time on this saturday afternoon. thank you so much, peter, and thank you for c-span. and we are returning to another author event at the national book festival. this one is called american history is called native history. ned black hawk, the rediscovery of america. and kathleen duvall, native

nation's live on c-span. good morning. we are about to make history. come at the national book festival. all yeah. ned beckley, black hawk is a history at the university and unenrolled member of the democ. tribe of the western shoshone. the author of many books of indigenous history. his most recent title is the rediscovery of america, native peoples and the unmaking of u.s. history, which won the 2023 national book award. kathleen is a history professor at the university of north

carolina chapel hill, where she teaches early american and native american history. the latest book, native nations a millennium in north america was longlist for the canadian prize in historical literature. the event is moderated by shelley silo, a citizen of the navajo and the chair of the national endowment of the humanities. enjoy the festival and let us welcome them to our stage stage. okay. thank you very much. good afternoon, everybody. this is a beautiful, engaging crowd and i hope that everybody who's online a chance to get a little bit of a glimpse of who's the room. we are so delighted. be here this afternoon with ned blackhawk, kathleen duvall and

just want to say, you know, these two books, the of america and native nations, are a reminder that the telling of history is ever changing, that america is complex and fascinating. and sometimes heartrending. and we cannot move forward as a nation as these have proclaimed in their books or as a people until we understand where we've been. so, kathleen, in that, i want to thank you for being with us today. we're going to delve in a little bit into your books, but not give up too much because hopefully you'll go get it, you'll get it signed and you'll be as immersed. the past two months of reading that, i have been. so. so ned, going to start with the little quote that you have in your introduction and it says finding answers to the challenges of our time racial strife, climate crisis and domestic and global inequities, among others, will require new concepts, approaches and commitments. and it is time put down the interpretive tools the previous century and take up new ones.

and i think that you both have taken up new tools in your book. so tell us a little bit about what you are both trying do with in your new books. well, thank you for the kind introduction and for joining us today. and thank you, kathleen, for coming as well. and thank you. i'm delighted to be here and honored beyond measure, my new book, the rediscovery of america, is an attempt to offer, a new vision of american history rooted in the field of native american history. and it its title, the rediscovery of america from a generation two of kind of amazing. and a profusion of both academic and tribal initiatives that have yielded far more vast conceptions and paradigms for thinking about american history than we've been previously given. and so actually, both of our works are kind of interpretive

overviews of broad eyed centuries of american historical

to sever, as one scholar has suggested, the effective bonds between native american children and their families.

and so by removing children from their families, from from their communities, and simultaneously trying to desegregate communal landholdings, the federal government attempted to assimilate american indians into the body politic of the republic. and native americans fought those those intrusions as best they could, and eventually brought reforms to indian affairs during the new deal era. and so the laws that we think of as kind of consequential are most consequential in shaping native american 20th century politics, essentially, where in many ways envisioned by native activists who have been kind of written out of the history of 20th century america and a very few american indians ever appear in kind of contemporary visions of modern america. and so that's one of the themes of both of our books and of the field more broadly, is to move past the sense of indigenous victimization and or disappearance to kind of highlight not just the presence, the survival, but also the creative capacity act of the generative ideas and politics

and reforms. and it's, you know, it's really kind of a remarkable story. and i kind of wish most of us had encountered the modern american indian sovereignty movement as a kind of subject of inquiry prior to maybe graduate training or kind of interested in reading on one's weekend or because these are really rude remarks or histories that teach us as a nation a kind of different vision of what constitutes rights or justice or power, even democracy. and so american indian history really offers us a kind of more robust and inclusive and and less familiar and a vision of what it means to be an american. yeah. thank you. you know, one of our former nih council members, dr. patricia limerick, often says to me how, as she has kind of learn more about the board in school era and some of this work that is coming out, like your work, how ironic it is. all the policies that were meant

to destroy native cultures and native languages and native peoples in general have seemed to have done the exact opposite. and you both really kind of tie up your work. talking about kathleen, you talk about the renaissance of native people, especially in the late 20th and early 21st century, that you kind of end with the surprising paradoxes of native resurgence. so you've talked a little bit about what might be driving that, but where do you see this really coming from and how do you see us moving that forward. hey, i just completed a long response, so. below to the 19th century abolitionist and feminist sarah grimm. people would say to her, you know, you're working for women's rights or working for black americans rights, but really, we've never seen any evidence that they're quite as capable, quite as smart as those white men are. and she said, well, take your foot off her necks and then you'll see what we can do.

and in some ways, i feel like native nations have had odd decades in some cases centuries of people, powerful people in institutions trying to make them not exist. and now if, you know, maybe right now that has gone away, that active effort to make native nations no longer nations has gone away with lots of things yet to be decided. but i think that's why we're starting to see or i should say, why we there means someone who's not a member of native nations. right. starting to see just the research agents of of public facing governance and culture in all of its way, you know, language revitalization, his historical preservation, all kinds of things that just, you know, were sort of, you know, limped along out of public view on purpose that now we're coming

out and are so important internally to nations, but also are something that the rest of us can learn from outside of native nations. and i think, you know, just it's and i use the word government on purpose because i think a lot of that, you know, tons happens in families and schools and but so much of it is because native nations are their own government. so one of the things i have my students do is think of a native nation and go to their tribal website and they're expecting to find history and things about the past. you can find that on one of the tabs, but mostly it's about how you govern. it's about child care and all. you know all this right? and it is such a good reminder that that's as a as important as lots of different things are in the arts and such so much of it, i think is happening because tribal governments are able to reemerge, find basis of of revenue, which governments have to have, and then support for their citizens in their individual and community and

family ways of of just a wide variety of places in which they're, you know, doing what they want to do. yeah, i'm sure you. it's a remarkable moment, actually. and i think from the academic perspective, if you can see this kind of transcend dance occurring in the field of american history, there is now something called the native american and indigenous studies association, or nesa, that many of us attend. this is becoming actually one of the growth fields within the academy over the last 20 years or so, publishers or interested conferences are attracting sometimes thousands of participants to. and it's not just the us based. and one of the great things about what we call indigenous studies is it's kind of capacity to speak across national borders or across even continental differences and so scholars from

new zealand and australia and north america, europe, latin america are having a conversation about the place of indigenous peoples in the modern world. and many of us are noticing they're kind of commenting on or writing about this recent resurgence of the un declaration and you have national apologies, you have there were slightly muted during the obama administration here in the united states, but there are kind of moments where you can really identify the kind of visible presence of indigenous consciousness kind of percolating or kind of sometimes even an exploding intent on national affairs. we had much of that in the united states. and, you know, when i was a very young child and don't remember much of it, but the indian american indian movement, two sets of activists, takeovers of places like alcatraz and wounded knee that sets up kind of monumental congressional legislation that was passed during the nixon, ford and carter administrations, the kind

of seemingly kind of envisage, well, activism throughout the 1980s and was was kind of a darker time in indian country when very few people understood what indian affairs were kind of going through. the federal government is getting radically kind of reduced in the early reagan administration. so the dependency on the federal government yielded a kind of interest in finding economic opportunities elsewhere here in this great kind of economic make studies of native america over the last couple of decades that have explored this kind of subject, which i am very proud to have kind of drawn on for the last chapter of my book. so gaming, for example, which comes in kind of a supreme court case in 87, followed by a congressional act in 88, gaming didn't just come out of nowhere, essentially. and so these ideas of government jurisdiction and kind of the private presence and growing power of tribes, the ability to start doing things outside of that kind of dependance on the federal government, these are all kind of historic subjects that help explain our kind of modern moment.

and so we're kind of living through this kind of literary and cultural and one might even say media kind of renaissance, but it's kind of paralleling or kind of connected to a kind of larger political and economic and kind of social revolution that has been occurring across indian country for the past two generations. well, i'm really enjoying this renaissance. let me say. it's been very fact. heavy on their shows that are native made and native characters. but, you know, i know you guys have both been doing quite a few book talks and you've been out presenting. have you had the opportunity to travel into tribal communities to present to tribal members? and if you have or haven't, either way, what have you found to be kind of the response from tribal communities to your work. well, i'm have a your my, my, my work, i think is a few months older than kathleen, but i would say that it's still pretty early to ask that kind of. but i know both of us work very closely with students and have

collaborated in all sorts of kind of ways with and i like how you use a lot of oral history and your towards the end of your book and have all these nice like family inclusions that i somehow didn't quite have this kind of narrative capacity or kind of kind of understanding to yield myself. but i'm generally very pleased to see tribal community members, you are less so tribal council, so to speak, working with me and in this and other regard. so i did have. a small group of students, including many tribal members who helped craft the maps in this book. for example. and so i spent a lot of time in emphasizing the kind of heterogeneity and diversity. of indigenous america through

visual cartography and had a set of maps made that highlight in the contiguous united states. all the federally and state recognized tribes. and so you can find that in the in pages of the book. and really, i think communicates one of the arguments and lessons of the project as a whole, that there are still tribes, you know, all across the united states within, you know, often, you know, 50 mile radius of most large urban centers who maintain governments, who are, you know, who have citizens, who have delegated budgets in economies, who run hospitals or health care initiatives for their for their families and or a government. so that's kind of one of the emphases. and i found tribal members and community community representatives kind of responsive. i have to say that neither of these works are, you know, conclusive, like this is you know, we're just beginning that kind of retelling of america from a new perspective that's going to take a very long time. and so there is no kind of

complete history of the lumbee in kathleen's book or of the navajo or lakota or the crow in mind. but they, you know, communities all kind of start making appearances and kind of convey this kind of sense that this is, in fact, a kind of inner tribal rather than singular tribal subject matter. and so in my civil war chapter, for example, you learn a lot about the contest nation around certain forts in the west, where the shoshone and crow are fighting with the lakota, and they're all expected to show up in fort laramie in 1851 and negotiate a diplomatic accord together. together. and they're very reluctant to do so because their concerns are more with one another than with the federal government. and so that kind of intertribal diversity was is present now. and it was present 50 years ago, was present 20 years ago as president, thousand years ago. so, like, you know, this kind of diversity is essential if one wants to make sense of the subject, which i think we all and some level are all kind of aspiring to do. one has to begin by recognizing

the diversity of this kind of subject matter and so this book, for me in some ways came out of conversations with with the tribes tribal preservation officer, because my first book, my dissertation book, was on sort of early america, and we both come out of early american historiography and copper's feature largely in there. and i you're starting to learn from the past as they also used my book and got to i got to know some people there. but what he and other copies i just kept, they kept connecting me their history to the longer past and to the present in ways that i was. they didn't know to do. on my first book. i'm and and it really was over a decade or so of having those conversations that it slowly sort of sunk in to me that i wanted to tell a longer history and so i was able to sort of bring some of those things into

my book, sort of the way that copper and other people that i talk about sort of connect. they're just an ancestors past as different as it might have been. you know, this is not in any way a story of of change and history, but that there is a long history that connects that. and the very things that are going on today and the very understandings that happened today, that that's all part of a continuous history. and so, yeah, i like ned's book. mine is pretty new, and i'm waiting to hear sort of what some of the wider reception is. but i am i hope, you know, having it rooted in some of those conversations, as is evident. yeah, exactly. well, you know, for these are very informative books. i haven't seen them along. but you know what the the fun thing, they're long and you're like, oh, got to read all that about almost a quarter of both of your books are in notes and references. and so these are very well researched books that aren't over a couple of decades.

we're talking about couple of centuries or more, you know, tell us a little bit or tell you know, the aspiring authors and researchers, students who might be in the audience. what was that process like? how did you start the research? how long did it take? where were you going? what did you find surprising? what did you enjoy the most? yeah, it took a long time in my case, i think for both of us. but but i think, as neta said, several times here where there's this there has been this generational shift or there's been this shift for about a generation or two maybe in people writings, smaller scale books on particular subjects that really show native power and presence in all of these different eras. and so i you know, my book certainly wouldn't be possible without that couple of generations of scholarship. and so those footnotes are very full of secondary sources as well as primary sources like works that other historians have written and published and and so

yeah, it was sort of building on that building on primary sources in a variety of way, primary sources being written sources, but also oral histories and an awful lot of other things. i'd say one thing that surprised me, i was writing in the things that happened a thousand years ago. there aren't written documents for that. so i knew i would use archeology and i would use oral history. and one of the things that surprised me is how when i just started looking at specific places, i was looking at cahokia and which is in illinois, moundsville in alabama and and among the hug them in what's now arizona and the mexican state of sonora. and i was really surprised at how well the archeology and the oral histories spoke to each other, that the oral histories that have been maintained for a thousand years still say things about major changes that happened a thousand years ago. so there's a period of cities falling and across the continent, very different peoples today. some of their oral histories talk about about why those cities fell and why their ancestors created a new way of

living on the land. and so i thought i would be sort of, you know, having to test, you know, the oral history tells us more here, but it doesn't, you know, say the same thing. the archeology does. but it it it that really surprised me how in some ways my job was so easy because the oral history could just kind of lead me through the meaning of the archeology. i think it would really stun our audience if they heard that not only is this now become a very vibrant academic field of study, but it's one that has a roots so deeply entrenched in the kind of scholarly infrastructure of america more broadly. so you can't really like if you go through the national portrait gallery, you walk through the 19th century art section without encountering, you know, dozens of native american imagery through cowan and bierstadt and others who are profiled there, the entire discipline of

american anthropology, you know, arose from the study of native peoples. and even in history, which has a slightly somewhat infamous standing in native american studies for having ignored the subject for so long. you know, many of the most famous kind of american historians from the 19th century were, you know, deeply interested in problematic ways with native americans in the process of western american settlement. and so the kind of archeology of knowledge within native or within american history in many ways has native americans in its foundational spaces. one could look at literature as well, and so the kind of vast kind of constellation of american academic fields of humanistic inquiry, indians essentially have entered into in so many ways. and so there's a universe really of scholarly and kind of academic information to draw upon. you also have tribal, not just

oral histories, but tribal and cultural preservation initiatives. and i was astonished having read amy little and trees great book, decolonizing museums, which i teach regularly. i was astonished when i went back to it. one of the things i learned is that there are over 200 tribal, either cultural centers and or museums in north america and in connecticut, we have the largest as well as the oldest. so and that's something that i had. i not come to yale 15 years ago. i would not have ever really known about. and and so all across the country, there are literally 100 over 200, nearly 200 tribal cultural centers and or museums that offer this kind of new vision or kind of particularly rooted or kind of blended methodological kind of reinterpretation that shouldn't be exciting is from ivy league history departments or kind of leading academic institutions, which they still often still are. so it's very hard to find this

information in many kind of well-known academic or campus communities, but it's there. so any of you wanting to learn about this subject. and so it's kind of remarkable that we're kind of part of a generation that is finally now bringing overviews to a subject that is literally, you know, nearly two centuries old as a professional, right? you know, yeah, very true. so who are some of the scholars or authors or individuals who have you know, you have kind of look to in their work to guide what you've done? mm. i did mention amy who who's a great book on those museums. we know a lot of people in common, so i don't want to you go first, sucker figure because i could even talk about someone. kathleen stevens is okay. so for example, in the last 15 years, several of the most venerable academic institutions

in the country have hired and tenured, which is an incredibly important thing in professional academia, hired in tenured native american history professors. this has happened at yale at i then at harvard and columbia and sorry, so princeton, the princeton recently hired and tenured at one of you and cesar illustrious students named liz ellis or elizabeth ellis, who wrote a remarkable book on the colonial history of louisiana. it's called the the great power of small nations. remarkable. and it's a depth of research and that kind of suggestions and and this kind of major reorientation, i mean, it's not just a kind of history of the colonial era. it kind of critiques the kind of vision of southern history that faulkner and others kind of establish that, you know, knew about in in mystical indigenous presence that seemingly was always fading away or disappearing. but, you know, her research with, i think there five federally recognized tribes in louisiana. you know all kind of highlight

this themes of survival and endurance and adaptability. and so they've been small nations essentially throughout the last half millennia, if not for millennia. so the kind of themes of her work kind of crystallize or embody kind of this larger kind of academic transformation that many are doing. some of our earlier work would fall into a kind of field that i've sometimes called indians and empires, in which in the colonial era, it's so evident to establish and study and kind of identify how indigenous peoples were so central to the evolution of all the major imperial projects in north america and the spanish in the south. whereas to the french east, the dutch along the hudson, to the british and the chesapeake, the piedmont and and in new england, all of those colonial worlds would not have survived without indigenous peoples. it's simply, you know, they're the vast forms of laborers. they provided the vast frontiers of trade. they defended and or fought

alongside the french case with french military officials, often against other indigenous peoples. you simply can't understand what used to be called early colonial america and these indigenous subjects. so there's a kind of universe, as i said earlier, of academic studies that kind of are inspiring us to try to bring together in this kind of unwieldy, centuries long ways with this kind of new vision of america, right? yeah. i have a further reading section in the back that has lots of things everybody should read. i would just throw in, since we mentioned boarding schools, a couple of terrific books about really understanding boarding schools from the inside and in all their complexity by brenda child and amanda cobb greetham. and then since we're at the national book festival, i just sit in my bedside table is about to fall in on me at night with all the novels and poetry that i have there that i haven't even gotten to read. but just tremendous things going

on in novels and poetry. my favorite poet at the moment is natalie death, who's just as amazing poet. but i'm not going to start listing because that'll get boring. well, you know, i think you've shared a lot about what's in the book, how we can kind of reframe our thinking about history and the role of native people. so for the individuals who read your book and for our audience today, you know, what are you really hoping they walk away with either idea is or even more specifically, where do we go from here after we've been introduced to all of this work? i would hope in mine by you know, by looking at this millennium, people or to lessons people take away. one is the long, long history much more than a millennium, obviously, of of native nations on these continents. and then the second is just that word nation and so i think that takes me to third to the second part of your question that native nations have been

polities for longer than we can even know, and they still are today. and as we move into the future that they are part of the the landscape of governance as well as just sort of the mosaic of the american people right there, nations moving us forward. so if you look at the covid relief bill or the infrastructure bill, tribal nations are right there alongside counties and states and i think that is just a tremendous in the united a practical, real thing. but it's also a symbol of that as we move forward, tribal governments are going to be part of our answers. whatever are good or bad answers we get, they're going to be part of the answers to how to we how do we live together and how do we function as as one country that's also made out of many country and ultimately as you kind of conclude and as i kind of gesture that also in my ending, there is an imperiled. kind of challenge constantly across native america that's rooted in part out of non-native

ignorance and that federal officials, supreme court justices, and so many other kind of a particularly a state leaders, have never been exposed often to these subjects. and they have recently, you know, we may all know that there is a kind of rising not just tide of consciousness, but even kind of political standing of native peoples. first cabinet secretary, lieutenant governor of minnesota, who may become potentially governor. several congressional representatives over the last few years. this kind of rising tide is changing. that kind of level of regional, often ignorance or misunderstanding. but it's really incumbent upon all americans to try to reeducate ourselves, to kind of realize the limits of the kind of perceived paradigms of information or categories and analysis we've been given and embrace as a vision of our selves, essentially nationally, that includes this

distinctiveness, because if this distinctiveness is conflated as a kind of singular or community of people, it loses its capacity to argue certain political dimensions. and i know you mentioned in the end your several recent supreme court cases, one of which was a challenge to the indian child welfare act, one of the kind of signature congressional statues that kind of codify the indian self-determination or red power era. and so you really can't understand the modern indian sovereignty movement outside of these congressional laws that native peoples have been fighting for for decades, if not generations, and keeping indian children within their communities have been a longstanding concern for native peoples in terms of foster and adoptive and in removal practices. so that case came before the supreme court last summer, and it was and certain what that outcome was going to be. fortunately for indian country, the justices upheld the constitutionality of that law of

electing questions, certain elements or concerns or tribes, essentially political communities or races and if the races can, they essentially legislate or can the federal government legislate certain protections for them against other people? and so that's the challenge. 14th amendment challenge that has been brought to numerous initiatives designed to protect sovereign native nations. so this is a conversation that we as a nation have never really had, but it's reaching a point where we can start beginning we can start beginning to highlight this. and i would give you a long, boring lecture if you wanted on how the constitution emerged out of this imperial crisis. of the seven aftermath, the seven years war, and how the constitution holds within it a certain protection of the federal government, the supremacy over indian affairs is rooted in article one section. susan and so that's the beginning of what we would call federal indian law and policy, which is a big theme throughout the second half of this book. so i've been teaching this for

some time. so i can kind of draw upon that if needed. but i don't have the time to. well, we think you that was very helpful because that leads me to my last question and then we'll open it up to the audience for a couple of questions. so, ned, you know, you write in your introduction our history must reckon with the fact that indigenous peoples, african-americans and millions of other nonwhite citizens have not enjoyed the self-evident truths of a quality life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness proclaimed at the nation's founding as inalienable rights belonging to all. so, given both of you, your work that you've just done, and maybe you've already answered this question in a way you know, how do you think how would you like to see us commemorate the 250th and what can we what can be done in light of the work that you've done and how you've informed us? oh. i remember the bicentennial. yeah. when i was about this big and, you know, the coins changed the

statue of liberty and it all like news hour shows for a year, and there was all this kind of even like apollo creed was dancing then, you know, i'm an uncle sam. i've, you know, all these kind of icons of of a national celebration, which at the time didn't i didn't think of as exclusive or threatening in certain ways, and that maybe i was being naive and i was just too young and thinking about these things or i didn't have the language to approach it, which obviously i didn't. but i would hope that when we reached this point, we as a nation are not kind of prone to kind of polarized perspectives on the subject, but really informed ones and perhaps learning these subjects will help. lead to a kind of a more informed conversation rather than a kind of shortened one on

ultimately the origins and expansion of our republic, which started with 13 former colonies and states and quickly spread across the continent. homeland home to the hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of others that i was writing about there. thank you. mm yeah. so i remember the bison temple. i think, you know, for all of its shortcomings, it did it. i mean, yeah, maybe i'm misremembering cause i was so little, but i felt. i think it brought americans together in a certain way. and i think this one's going to be different. it's already different even from the top. the american 250 commission includes tribal governments, right there with other governments that are involved in the planning and i think i hope what it will do is, of course, it's not going to, but i hope it will bring all americans together to to this sort of wiser, more sophisticated hearted, but equally hopeful, i

think, view of of a more complicated american past and present. and, you know, one of the more practical things is, yeah, at the time of the revolution, most of north america was indian country. it's and and just to sort of connect that to today that so much of it actually still is would be one of the lessons i hope we sort of learn in the moment and then take forward into the future. thank you. excellent. we have a few minutes for audience questions. if anybody would like to come up. oh, we haven't already. oh, hi. sorry. i want to get in line first. thank you for speaking on the subject with grace and respect reading buffalo woman come singing by burke medicine eagle has enlightened me with a spiritual story of the white buffalo woman. i'm curious if you have heard of the white buffalo calf birth in yellowstone over the summer and what that could mean spiritually for mother earth, the native tribes that follow her story. and if that can usher in a shift in the use of indigenous knowledge to solve modern

problems. sorry. okay. um, shelly, are you and maybe shelly can a panelist. i think that yes, i think that for all of us, that's a really good. presence to kind of point to to say that things are shifting in some ways and we should be paying attention. mm hmm. i find me tacky. happy. i'm cindy hall, dakota of the south eastern nation and president of the american library association. we're so grateful that you're here. yeah. thank you. so thank you so much for your work. as this is sponsored by the library of congress, would you please share with us how important libraries were to you during your research? as we see universities across the country and even other library types being closed due to a lack of funding or support? we are at a critical point where

librarians need to be supported and we need are authors to be able to have access to information and these bodies of knowledge. please share the importance of libraries. thank you. thank you so much. here. yeah, you're exactly right. i'll give the audience. we mean this is maybe almost literally speaking to the choir here at this event, but i mean, the if the most visual way to see this importance is if you just if you just looked at the captions in all the illustrations in my book, library of congress is a full third of them. library of congress makes high resolution images available on their website to download on demand and use as you want. as you know, so many of our federal institutions do, and then the others are from you and cs library or other libraries that that give permi