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 permission to

people to use to use these precious pieces. our past native american history, things that, you know, have to be uncovered. but they are there like we couldn't write this history if documents in many cases written colonizers who in no way intended this kind of book to come out of them, right. i'm written things down and then they got carefully preserved the library of congress or the national archives or the kansas historical society or someplace. and and, you know, we're there for us and countless other scholars and interested publics to find them. i mean, it history. people worry about a statue being taken down, history would be lost without archives and libraries. yeah, i'm i'm totally a product of that kind of life in and around library systems. i know it sounds strange, but sometimes we we end up with a i,

i, id library id cards and we of keep them on the like old driver's license, you know, and so and every stage of my academic career and development, i've been deeply immersed within a kind of be usually university or kind of historical society or independent library like the newberry library, chicago, which has the best bibliography collection in the field of native history. um, we can't understand american history without libraries and need books and librarians and archivists. and so cutting funding or limiting the acquisition or shifting exclusively to a digital format is not going to help redress the kind of educational deficiencies that we've been discussing this afternoon. so i'm really grateful of the work that you're doing as well. and one thing that might be interesting that i don't know, i maybe you could help us learn is

how many tribal libraries are there within this kind of world of because of these cultural centers that i reference have within them library systems, and so are library libraries. so you can see the kind of growing power of tribes to harness and harness kind of history in certain ways in libraries, often written full of books written by non-indians, have been very helpful in those processes. yeah. thank you. and we have hundreds of tribal libraries across this country. right. thank you so much for sharing. thank very well said. thank you. i thank you for being here. i an interesting exhibit, the smithsonian american indian museum about who qualifies to be an indian and that the laws differed state by state. you had to be 100% indian. you had a just the pilot with

some type of proof 75% 50%. and it varied state to state. and this was important in order to qualify either affirmative action or renumeration or things like that. and i would like to know, in your opinion is how do you handle affirmative action and renumeration to american indians? hmm. well, i'd say the most important thing and they can correct me if i don't say it right is citizenship in a partic killer native nation. and so citizenship in a particular native nation is a mutual recognition by that nation and by the individual that that individual is a citizen is a member of that community. so there have plenty of efforts by states by the federal government to say who is indian and who's not. but at its heart, the most

important thing is whether a nation and that individual recognizes as each other, as as that individual belonging to that nation. you know, this is one of the myths under elements of contemporary american society. essentially this kind of presumption that all american indians now are receiving the gaming revenue streams, which is not true. and so i can't remember the exact percentages, but only 20% of tribal nations manage casinos. and of those 20%, only a certain percentage actually turn profitable revenue return. so that may have changed in the last decade or so. but the vast majority of american indian citizens are not now receiving the kinds of enumerations. if that's the kind of suggestion many tribes are fighting for restoration of particular lands resources as well as certain types of claims against the

federal government. and there were over 100 tribes that filed claims against the federal government for either sanctioning or illegally taking tribal lands throughout the 19th century following the passage of a law and called the indian claims commission act. and so there's something called the indian claims commission over the last 50 years that held heard over 100 claims by tribal nations. but the question you're asking is about membership and citizenship is kathleen mentioned and it's not determined by states. so tribes themselves within states have the authority to determine who is and is not a member of their community. they often make that membership determination based on the imposition of congressional or establish governing requirements through something called the indian reorganization act, which required tribes to adopt constitutions to elect their tribal council and establish a membership criteria based on a quarter of indian descent, a blood quantum requirement. so that's the federal if we were to say, what is the federal government recognition and

tribal membership requirements, we would say that even though tribes themselves have a reformed in over 400 constitutional changes, their own constitutions reflect their own concerns. and so the cherokee, the navajo nation and my tribe, they all have differential membership standards essentially. so a quarter is one grandparent. what's dissent on a census roll? and so to be a member of a tribe means to be descendant from either census rolls taken for or with the tribe in a certain time period. but it could be multiple members of family. so this is a very complicated subject because the contents and it's not just a mathematical but political. and it's also a historical and it's very emotional as well. but many tribes are moving to move past this requirement. they're changing the constitutions. many recognize indian descent.

so you can be a recognized member of a tribe through descendants. and they offer a kind of citizen certificate of indian descent, essentially. so you can and that for that is essentially a tribe's recognition of your relationship with them through a process of descent from a tribal member. so that's a very obviously complex subject that is very hard to explain in a world where many of us believe that certain types of multiple citizenship types might not be maybe constitutional, think thank you. thank you so much for the wonderful question and for the attempt to answer what can take an entire semester to be able to answer. unfortunately, we are out of time. i do want to acknowledge everyone who wanted to ask a question and say that they will

be signing books at 130, so they're not going anywhere. and i do as we close out, you know, kathleen, i want to just state one of the sentences in your conclusion. you state as in the past, solutions live with native peoples themselves and the determination of the rest of us to listen to them. so i want to thank both of you for all of the work that you have done to help us listen to native people. i want to thank the audience for joining us today. encourage you. please go check out their books. please go have them sign and please join me in thanking ned and kathleen for their work. thank you.

i love heard or ha ha ha ha ha. uh huh uh. or. or uh. or uh. and you're watching live coverage of the national book festival held at the washington convention center. this is the 24th year in a row that book tv has been live with the festival, which kicked off in 2001, founded by laura bush in about 20 minutes, bestselling author erik larson talking about his new book, which details the time between abraham lincoln's 1860 election and the firing on fort sumter in april 1861. that's in about 20 minutes.

joining us now, though, is diplomat stuart eizenstat. his new book is called the art of diplomacy how american negotiators reached historic agreements that changed the world. ambassador eizenstat was domestic policy adviser for jimmy carter and u.s. ambassador to the european union during the clinton administration. ambassador eizenstat, there's an old saying that politics stops at the water's edge. is that still true today? unfortunately, it's not, peter. and i think one of the things that inhibits u.s. leadership abroad in diplomacy is the fact that politics don't stop at the water's edge. they are very divisive. we saw that, for example, with ukraine. so when our negotiators leaders are negotiating with foreign governments and they don't have the full bipartisan support of the congress and the public, it weakens our position.

i wrote this book for three reasons. one is that we live in a very turbulent time with seemingly irresolvable conflicts. and i wanted to show by looking at the major conflicts we did resolve over the last 50 years that diplomacy can. it did work and it can work again. second, i wrote it because we're in the midst of two hot wars in gaza and ukraine. we've through an era in our own lifetimes of multiple wars, the vietnam war, the two balkan wars and bosnia and kosovo, the two iraq wars, afghanistan and and libya with very mixed results. so i wanted to look at when, how and whether u.s. military force can and should be used as a adjunct to diplomacy and third, and very of concern and this gets back to your first question that we're in a environment in

which a significant percentage of the congress and the public are in an isolationist mood. and i wanted to show by this book how vital it is for u.s. leadership abroad to soar of problems, to solve conflicts, and that if we don't, we leave a vacuum in which our adversaries russia and china will fill. when you go into the mindset of somebody who is perhaps isolated, honest, can you understand their views? of course. in fact, one of the things that i point out as an attribute of the 130 people i interviewed in the book who were the great diplomats of the time is the ability to be able to listen to your opponent. to put yourself in their shoes and to understand their point of view. so, yes, i do understand it, but it's important that we have a dialog with people who say, well, we can't afford to engage abroad. we have to devote ourselves to our problems at home.

but the two are inextricably intertwined. if we don't resolve problems abroad, then we can't resolve problems at home supply chains with china, access to energy. all of these things require engagement abroad. if we're going to solve again, our problems at home, we need to be engaged. and if u.s. leadership is absent abroad, then that will leave again a vacuum which our enemies will fill. and which will leave us weakened at home. should note that henry kissinger wrote the introduction, and james baker wrote the foreword they did to the book to republicans. exactly. and because i wanted to show the bipartisan nature of diplomacy and with kissinger, i have a chapter on his negotiations in in the vietnam war. his opening to china and his negotiations for the

disengagement after the 1973 young kippur war in the middle east, where jim baker, i really highlight his engagement with george h.w. bush on the first iraq war. what i think is the good iraq war, but also his fantastic accomplishment, along with george h.w. bush of reunifying germany under nato. and he had convince not only the soviet union, which had a deathly fear of germany for obvious reasons of that, but he also had to convince our own allies, the french and the british. margaret thatcher said, i love germany so much. i want to of them. so it was huge lift. and what jim baker showed was the importance of personal relationships. he developed a personal kinship with the foreign minister of the soviet union, shevardnadze took him to jackson hole for several

days where his own retreat was and broke the ice so that shevardnadze could take positions which were at odds with his own foreign ministry on reunifying germany. but doing so with nato. that was a huge accomplishment by. both jim baker and by president george h.w. bush. and it's one of the reasons why that is one of the 12 chapters that i highlight and why his preface to my book is so important as you can guess, we're talking about diplomacy and foreign policy. the numbers are up on the screen. go ahead and dial in if you would like to talk was to eizenstat, former ambassador to the european union, former chief domestic policy adviser to president jimmy carter, and in fact, when you were in the white house, the camp david accords were signed. but you were working on domestic policy at that time. well, yes, i was. but i had a significant role in that because i was the official back channel between the

president and the israeli embassy transmitting, in effect, secret views of where the israeli prime minister bacon, was going to come, giving them a view of where carter was going to come. and then i actually negotiated a part of the treaty with egypt and israel dealing with giving israel access to the oil that it would lose by moving out of the egyptian sinai, leaving those egyptian oil fields. and we guarantee that if, in fact, there was a cutoff of oil from egypt, israel, that the u.s. would step in. so i was very directly involved and in many occasions when president carter shared his frustrations with me, and i have whole chapter on the middle east negotiation from kissinger through gaza today. he shared his frustrations with the both with opposite, often from the jewish community.

the difficulty of getting prime minister bagan to go along with some of the proposals that we made. and so i was engaged, even though my mandate was domestic policy, i was very much engaged in the whole middle east peace process. ambassador eizenstat, since those 1978 camp david accords, we've had the abraham accords and we have issues right now. anthony blinken is over there. often in the middle east. what's your take? well, first of all, i am special adviser to secretary blinken on holocaust issues, not on the middle east, but the gaza issue is as difficult and complicated as any i've ever seen and that i write about it. and the reason is that hamas has to be disabled as a military and governing authority. no country can accept on its borders a government that's

dedicated to their elimination. but this cannot be solved. peter but military force alone, it requires to palomas see as well. and israel made several mistakes that i catalog as lessons learned from all of the wars. i look at. and i've looked at all the major wars of our time and talk to the generals, for example, very poor intelligence, not realizing that had morphed from purely terrorist group into a full blown terrorist army organized by an attack battalion and with the most sophisticated arms invited by iran, not realizing the surprise attack that they were going to do, they actually had a lower level intelligence. so the whole battle plan on october seventh and they said hamas is not capable of doing it. but the biggest mistake and one that continues to this day and

it's confront secretary blinken, who just came back from his ninth or 10th trip, is that one of the lessons i learned from all of the interviews i did, the two iraq wars, afghanistan is you should never fire the first bullet. and two, you know, beforehand what the political outcome is you're seeking. steve, who was george w bush's nasser security advisor, said that that's one of the big mistakes they made in deposing saddam hussein in the iraq war. they got into it before knowing what outcome was going to happen when they did depose him. and that remains the problem in gaza today. the last problem with gaza is that you have two entities, the hamas government, what's left of it, and israel, who have diametrically opposite final outcomes. hamas wants to keep its military and political power in israel

for good reason, doesn't want that. so that is what's really stalled everything. it's not just how many hostages are turned over, it's what the final outcome is going to be. and phase three of the biden plan, who is going to rule over gaza and israel properly says it can't be hamas. it has to be not hamas. people. but hamas says we want a role in it. the other role is do you reconstruct gaza? it's destroyed 80% of the infrastructure. we need the gulf states to get involved. all all of whom except the saudis, already have peace agreements with israel through the abraham accords, through president carter's efforts, and president clinton's efforts with jordan. but they are setting a key condition that is, we are not going to reconstruct gaza unless there is a political horizon for the palestinians in the west

bank and gaza to have a state of their own. and that's something the current israeli government can't get to. so having the right negotiator is critical. i focus on the great negotiators of our time and all the skills they have, the preparation, the intelligence, listening, sitting on the other person's shoes, the political courage to depart as happened in northern ireland from long held positions. but when you're dealing with two parties who have dynamic, strictly opposite outcomes, even the best negotiators and tony blinken is one of them, have difficulty finding a common solution. going back to the trump administration, the u.s. embassy move to jerusalem, the abraham accords. two things. were you consulted during any of that? and what do you think of those two? well, i think that the abraham accords are truly historic because they broaden the peace

dimension from egypt that we did in the carter ministration, that jordan, that we did in the clinton administration to include the gulf states, bahrain, the uae, then morocco. the key is saudi arabia and in the biden administration, i am convinced we were within weeks of having a normalization between saudi arabia and israel, which would have been transform it if and that's one of the reasons october seventh happened. the iranians couldn't tolerate that. and hamas couldn't tolerate it. now, putting those chess pieces together is much more difficult. but we were within really a few weeks a truly historic agreement. i whoever the next president is and i hope it's kamala harris. but if it's mr. trump that they will continue to work on the saudis, because that would be

truly transformative. but again, the price is a political perspective on sovereignty for the palestinians, which israeli public at this point for understandable reasons, because of october seventh, is saying no, even the moderate left doesn't want that. so you have to start building. and one of the things that i take as a lesson from all of my diplomacy, diplomatic analysis is if you go for a home run, you try to include too much, you're going to strike out. you have to go for single. so, for example, with the good friday agreement for northern ireland, where again, you had two warring parties, the catholics and the protestants, the nationalists and the unionists, george mitchell, the u.s. mediator, didn't resolve the to fund a mental issues. what's the future of northern ireland? is it part of the irish republic or part of great britain that was left to a referendum? that's never happened to this day because the two parties are

now in a peaceful relationship. the other was what happens to the guns the militias had. it took tony blair nine more years to do that. and the lesson is don't overshoot. and that's what i would say for the middle east. don't try to go all the way to a two state solution. build confidence, build economic relationships, create an environ in which the israeli public has confidence that the palestinians, they will be peaceful. ambassador eizenstat, when you're negotiating a treaty, is the first rule. how does this the united states always but it's not a poker game and one of the things that i point out in my book is that diplomacy, to be successful, has to be a win win situation. you have to put yourself in your opponent's position. there, obviously representing a sovereign country, they have their own public opinion.

they have their own political pressures. and you have to have what, by former boss? when i was deputy treasury secretary larry summers in the column, australian called a sympathetic empathy for the other side. you have to empathize with them if you don't agree with them. he called it a unsympathetic empathy and that is crucial. so, yes, it obviously has to be in the national interest of the united states, but you have to recognize it has to be in the other side's interest as well. that's what makes it so difficult, so complicated. how did you get to washington originally? i had a summer in 1963 as a congressional intern for the university of north carolina. i was placed in congress and i got potomac fever from there. the next summer, i ended up working the political office of the postmaster general, who was then in the lbj cabinet. i went to the first democratic

convention in 64, and that led me to work in the johnson white house in 67. and then the carter house. and i worked in six administrations and all. well, i know you're from atlanta. how did you meet jimmy carter? after we lost the 1968 election when i was working for hubert humphrey against nixon, i went back to my hometown, clerked for a federal judge, and then i was going to work for the prohibitive favorite, carl sanders, who had been the former governor and was the odds on favorite. my high school roommate. henry bowers, said, you have to see former state senator jimmy carter. he's the underdog. but i think you'll like him. and i went to see him and carl sanders was in a very upholstered office of his law firm, jimmy carter. i met on a folding table with two irons folding chairs. and i said, what am i getting myself into? he had work boots on. it took me one hour to realize

this was the real thing. he was from south georgia, but he understood urban issues. mass transit, education reform, and from me. he was someone who was supporting civil rights, even from south georgia. and it took me a second interview to convince myself i shouldn't work for carl sanders, who i had first gone to see. and the rest is history. i became his policy director as governor when he ran for president. and then in the white house. stu eizenstat, you have one minute to tell us about your chapter on trade, nafta, usmca. one of the concerns i really have is we're moving into an anti-trade environment. and so i interviewed all of the trade representatives, including donald trump's mr. lighthizer, who was a first rate trade representative. trade is critically important, and it's the issue internally,

certainly, peter, that has the most domestic political content, because you're dealing with jobs, you're dealing with plant openings and closings. you're dealing with imports of sensitive goods like steel and aluminum, which are going to compete here. and i found that what bob lighthizer said was the key to his negotiations preparation, preparation and preparation. knowing what the other side was standing for, what you needed to have, and how you open markets like mexico, like canada, as in now, after, but do so in a way that protects the interests of american workers. well. stuart eizenstat, the art of diplomacy. how american negotiators reached historic agreements changed the world. thank you for spending a few minutes with us here at the national book festival. our coverage of the national book festival now continues with bestselling author erik larson.

good afternoon. who here is a medgar evers fan of a mega-star and eric larson. journalist and author. erik larson is author of six national bestsellers the splendid and the vile dead week in the garden of beasts thunderstruck talk the devil in the white city and isaac's storm. collectively, larson has sold more than 10 million copies. one of them amazing achievement. his newest title, the demon of unrest a saga of hubris,

heartbreak and heroism at the dawn of the civil war. brings to life the five months between the election of abraham lincoln and the start of the civil war and describes the tragic miscalculations made by key men in power who ultimately led america to the brink. the session is moderated by david and rubenstein, author and co-founder of carlyle group. enjoyed the festival and let us welcome them to the stage. so. how many people here have read a book by eric larson? oh, wow. how many people have not read a book by erik larson? oh, okay. well, you have to leave. would you stand up, please? oh, okay. so i interviewed you last on your book, on winston churchill's first year in office. it was spectacular book, bestseller. and at that time, i asked you, what was your next book? and i think you were you weren't

sure or she wouldn't tell me, but why did you think that the world needed another book on the civil war? i mean, there have been 100,000 books. why did you think you could add to the civil war literature already? and didn't you once say you would never write a book on the civil war? okay. thank you so, sir. i am on record. can google this? i am on record as having said numerous times that i will never write a book about the civil war and i will never write a book about abraham lincoln or anything where he's a is a significant character. so here i am on stage talking about a book about the civil war, abraham lincoln as a key character. i didn't want to do a book about the civil war because frankly, i didn't need the grief in my life. you know, a friend of mine, the late tony horowitz, unfortunately, he did a book called confederates the attic. anybody read that book? it's a great book. and he told me it once went to a book signing and in texas and somebody showed up with an actual live civil war candidate.

and so, no, i didn't want to write about the civil war. but what happened? what happened? was it actually has to do a lot has a lot to do with the pandemic. i blame the pandemic for this. i was in the middle of my book tour for the splendid and the vile, the book we spoke about when the, you know, the covid pandemic intensified and suddenly the world locked down and on march 12th, my wife's birthday, and suddenly i was on a plane home and my tour was over halfway through, found myself in our pandemic redoubt on eastern long island, found myself a lot of time on my hands that had not expected to have and i decided, okay, i'm going to devote this to looking for my next my next project. and so that's probably when we encountered each other. i was on a fence and looking at two other things. i started looking at the various ideas you recall about. then there was a good deal of political discord that kept

hearing people talking about otherwise sane people talk, supposedly otherwise sane people talking about secession and civil war. modern secession and civil war. what if, for whatever reason, they just sort of decided, okay, i'm going to maybe there's a maybe there's a story and how the civil war actually the real civil war actually got started. you know, i i confess, i'm not a civil war buff. never was. i had significantly gaps and significant gaps in my knowledge about about the civil war. but i thought maybe that was the story. i mean, something that's a very, very compelling thing, obviously. so i started wandering around online. i couldn't go my usual m.o. would be to go to a physical archive, parachute in without any advance warning, no advance warning to the curators, to anybody, and just see what kind of material was available. obviously, i couldn't do that. you know, my beloved, i'm not just sucking up your beloved library of congress, madison reading room, which is god's gift to researchers.

anybody who does research, we know that this is a fantastic place. i couldn't do it. i couldn't go. so so unfortunately, was consigned to doing online research, started wandering around. it's it's i personally find online research stultifying. i did find, however, this collection of documents, the official records of the the war of the rebellion, the official records of the union and confederate army. i started reading it and i found it very compelling. this is this is brilliantly curated, chronological. hundreds documents. yeah. a telegram, response. letter response report. response. which is the stuff that i live for. this is great. this is like they were giving me my story, and so i ordered a physical volume. i was able to track down a publisher of of those documents, volume one. of course, it arrived at my pandemic. i disinfected it. i did. and once again jumped into and i

just found it incredibly compelling. so i started you know, it's i mean, it's sort of the ultimate suspense novel tension. it's got everything almost novel. so i started looking into it. i was still wandering around, looking at some other ideas. i wasn't completely committed. then came the events of january six, 2021. and as i watched as i watched that unfold from my office. i never forget that afternoon. i felt i felt this array of emotions, anxiety, fear suspense, what was to happen. and i thought to myself, wow, you know, here's this thing unfolding on tv. the documents that i've just been reading about for the last couple, a couple of months for the last year, actually could have been written today. so that's made you decide, okay, this may have some relevance. right. so when you picked this topic, how much research you actually

do? how many? a year and a half of research or. and how do you do your research then? right? or do you research and write? research and write or all your research first and then write this kind of kind of kind of, a hybrid of all of that stuff? what what, what happens very the first thing of all is that i was doing a very detailed book proposal because i want to know what i'm into. you know, once i commit to a contract with a publisher. my agent keeps telling me, look at this, in your career, just write a letter. just them. this is what i want to do. i be terrifying on the day that i got the and started working on the story. so i always do a lot of advanced of the book proposal for me as a as a sample chapter and essay lengthy essay about why this should why this might be a compelling thing where the resources are what the actual is, and then a capsule outline, which is a vital thing for me, a capsule outline that has each chapter that i envision at that

point. the idea being to try to try to see where this what narrative arc is, to see, see if it's there. and it was for me. so i did my book proposal and then and that represents about six months of of concerted research. then i dive in for the project. i do the heavy duty research. a lot of material is still archives were closed or their schedules were very funky. so i still couldn't dive in for a while. but i found lot of great primary records online. you know, anybody who's into lincoln mean just, you know, the complete works of abraham lincoln is accessible to anybody and is wonderful and the library of congress databases are just tremendous. and then finally, i was able to to get of my my, my, my condition. yeah. i have to say, as a writer, lockdown is what i do. so it was not that awful, but i was finally able to get out and go to go to the library of

congress, go to the mass reading room and above all, get to get to charleston. so i your publisher probably didn't expect and i don't know if you expected that this would become the number one best new york times bestseller because the civil war is a long time ago. and there's the battle for wouldn't have many people wouldn't have would be the most exciting part. were you surprised that it became the number one new york times bestseller? yeah, i was. i hoped i hope i mean, i thought i saw it by the time i was done with the book. i actually think it's not a bad story. you know, this is i mean, this is this is sort of the the tick tock, not the social media tick that, but the tick tock, as we journalists like to say that the tick tock of of the, you know, the advance toward america's greatest tragedy, you know, how could it be anything but but to me, it is very compelling. i don't really understand the dynamics of bestseller lists. i don't understand what makes a book, you know, reach the list. one thing i would like to just

point out of it, i have actually had the seven bestsellers because that includes demon and anyway, and that's pretty good. so and it's not actually not 10 million, it's 12. so have you already picked a subject for your next book? yes, but you can't say what it is yet. i will never tell. so. so this is this is actually this is actually the first time in my in my career as a as a writer of narrative nonfiction that by the time i finished one book, i actually knew what i was going to do this. i'm not going to tell you what it is. i'll tell you why i won't in moment. but but this is something that has been gestating for about a decade. and because of various contractual issues and timing issues with other other works and so forth, i just couldn't do it. but now i'm going to do it and i will tell. the zone of history, it's the it's that i've gone back to the

to the gilded age, which delights me. but beyond that, i won't tell you because never talk future works because i'm a terrible i would fail in hollywood if i had had to do this. because if i told you my next idea, you would look at me like, okay, you know, and i can't have that in my mind for four years when i this when i learned this most vividly was when i was at a family reunion on long island with my extended family, my sisters, so forth. and i was working on my book, actually thunderstruck about marconi and and england's second most famous murderer. and and my sister. my oldest sister came up to me. everybody'd have a few beers and so forth. and she came up and she started badgering me to get to know what the book was. just like, come. but you never tell what it is. just. just me. so i thought, after all, among friends here, it's family, you know? so i told her idea and she goes,

oh, i read that for years. four years of that, running through my head is like a like a like a like a 22 caliber bullet from the sopranos. know, just bouncing around in my brain. for those who haven't read the book, let's try to summarize it briefly. yeah. the essence of it is there was an effort by number of southern states led by carolina to secede from the union, and this began more or less under president buchanan before lincoln. so what was the main concern that south carolina legislature had and the man who was leading that mr. ruffin? well, he was one of one of the players on the whole thing. but what was the main concern? why would want to secede? what was the problem? the south, the south, particularly south carolina, had had long felt itself to be subjected to the tyranny of federal, particularly of northern rule.

south carolina had always been a touchy or touchy, as they would say back, that a a touchy state in terms of its its alleged rights. and what could and could not do even at the point where even at the point where the constitution, the various elements of it were being negotiated. south carolina was first and foremost to to to say that there had to be a there had to be something in the constitu ition that would allow the foreign slave to continue in perpetuity. the other the other negotiating people from the north, so forth, or more more wise and humane souls would not go for that. so there was this significant conflict yielded as a footnote that yielded this promise in the promise that that in the constitution, that for 20 years

the united states would not than the foreign slave trade. footnote number two, 20 years almost to the to the day to, the date to the time the united actually banned the foreign trade in 1808. eight, yes, eight, eight. so, so carolina had always been this irascible, so irascible, actually, that other states were were embarrassed by its behavior here in the year before. the whole secession thing. they didn't want it. they with the concept of secession, but they didn't want this crazy state to be the leader because they felt it would devalue the the the meaning of secession in the in the world high. so one thing leads to another. south carolina in 1832 leads the so-called nullification effort. they just decided. again citing study of the

constitution but not really the idea that in south carolina they could nullify federal law. they chose and happily, andrew jackson was president at the time, was no, that's that's not going to happen. the story advances. south carolina continues to feel like it's been been completely abused. big element, big element fuel in south carolina was course slavery. it let anybody tell you otherwise it was all about slavery early in the 1800s. planters tended to see slavery as an as a necessary evil. over time, that changed for a very important reason. the world began moving rapidly away from from slavery, led by led by britain. the abolition movement rose in the north, and this for southern planters. this was an existential threat.

their entire culture, their lives were based on this, this, this, this enslaved body of people, 4 million slaves in the south x, whatever, in south to, to to eliminate slavery would be not just to eliminate the free labor that allowed these people to do what they did and get quite rich was also to eliminate eliminate the capital base which they, they, they function. i mean, you know, you could you could and they did you could you could get a mortgage on land secured by the bodies of your enslaved people. this was capital and when lincoln was elected in november. of 1860, november six, 1860, southerners, southern planters saw this as the end of their world because they believed that lincoln had one goal. his goal was abolish slavery

completely. that was not his goal. that was not his goal at all. at that point. but the south, led by fire leaders, activists, this gentleman, not a actually, but edmund ruffin, had had had just become convinced that lincoln was going to was going to was going to do this same time there had been a movement in south carolina led by south carolina. but also became commonplace throughout the throughout the south was the pro-slavery movement because the north was moving more and more radically against slavery, the south managed to persuade itself, pro-slavery writers, that slavery was best of all things, not just for the planters, but for the enslaved. so you have this, this, this, this massive split happening which led to you know, with lincoln's election that led that was the final so south carolina secedes from the union when buchanan as president, buchanan

doesn't really do much about it. lincoln is is elected president in november. take office till march right he says in his inaugural address. i'm not going to do anything to effect slavery where it already exists because it's protected by the constitution. so why did people in the south and the south carolina particularly not not take him at his word, he said i'm not going to get rid of slavery where it already exists. it's protected by the constitution. why didn't they believe him? you know, that is that is one of the one of the mysteries of the whole saga. it's like i think you could kind of come back to another sort of contemporary thing we have now. back then, they they were in their own echo chamber. you know, they had come to believe that lincoln was going to be was going to abolish slavery, that he could say all he wanted about protecting slavery, but he didn't really mean it. that's fact. so they persuaded themselves that this guy was the antichrist and. when you have that kind of situation, nothing's going to shake it. all right.

so south carolina secede from the union that means that the union forts and union in south carolina are not really in a they're in foreign country in effect now. right. right. let me just sketch the situation in charleston harbor in that in that period, you know, the united states, the the federal government possessed numerous establishments in the charleston harbor area. one was a fort fort. one was a castle. there was an arsenal, a revolutionary war fort that was pretty much obsolete. and there was fort sumter, sumter at this time was incomplete construction had begun in 1828 and it was still not the guns had not been mounted. the fortress was meant to have

650 soldiers at this point before the action begins that had essentially none. some laborers who were working, working on the floor. so us control these properties and. that really rankled south carolina. that really rankled because again they felt that the north was this tyrannical force. and here in the harbor was this federal presence. then you know, this fort sumter galled them the most. it had this this, this gigantic flag flying from the top of this. you know, fortress with a 50 foot walls and three tiers of guns and so forth, really -- them off. and so, so the united states became concerned about this after after lincoln's election, after the declaration of of secession, but actually even even before lincoln's election, the united states army put a new commander in charge of the federal properties in charleston harbor. robert anderson, major robert

anderson, who, if there's a hero in my book, it it is major robert anderson. interestingly, anderson was a southerner by birth. he was a former his wife was from a prominent slaveholding family in georgia. he was put in charge of the federal presence in charleston harbor. he arrives. he becomes aware immediately, especially after lincoln's election, which happens soon afterwards, that things are getting really dangerous down there in south carolina, that, you know, the population, south carolina is ready, you know, literally for war. they want these guys. south carolina declares secession. i think it was on december 20 of 1860. if my recollection is. and then things start getting really, really tetchy down there and all anderson and his men feel it and suddenly he has only

75 men under his command at this point. and again, fort sumter was meant to have 650. so comes christmas day after christmas the night after christmas. anderson execute this brilliant plan to secretly move all his men from fort moultrie across charleston bay into fort sumter the next morning. the charleston is real to where they realize that this has happened because because smoke and flames are pouring from fort moultrie over on sullivan's island. because anderson has left behind some officers and men to burn the gun carriages and to spike the cannon and inside the fort. so so so the charleston awake this. this after having this wonderful christmas to see that moultrie on fire and to see this this that fort sumter has been occupied by federal troops. they could not just could not stand that.

so south carolina seizes fort moultrie, seizes castle pinckney, the federal arsenal and demands anderson to surrender his sumter. so when lincoln becomes president, does he decide, well, look, fort is now in a state that has seceded, we had to get our troops out. or should we them there to say that we're not really recognizing the secession and therefore we should keep these these troops in the fort because it's still an american fort. right? right. so so lincoln lincoln's attitude, lincoln's attitude was that, you know, we're not going to we're not going to surrender. we're not going to surrender for fort sumter. but remember, at this point, he is not yet officially the president of the united states. he has been elected. but but lincoln had i'm talking still in the period of of 1860, in the early part of 1861, before the inauguration, lincoln is enough of a lawyer to know that that not enough of them respecter of the constitution, legality of things that that

that he is not going to be president until two things happen the electoral votes are counted and his inauguration place on march 4th, 1861. interestingly, by the way, the two moments of grave national concern in 1861, prior to the start of the civil war, where would electoral count come off as as it should? and would the inaugural come off? would lincoln actually a, make it to washington? b, would he actually and would the inauguration happen? so, i mean, doesn't that sound familiar you're right and so so so lincoln decides that he doesn't want throw gasoline onto this fire that's already burning in the country. he decides essentially to keep quiet until his inauguration is not totally quiet, sort of cedes the atmosphere through through

friendly politicians, friendly editors and so forth. he stays essentially quiet. so what's happening then is you have janesville. can the president. buchanan whoo hoo hoo hoo! oh, the one thing he wants at this point is to get out of his administration without a war on his time. and he is doing anything he can. at one point he talks to congress and says he says essentially, i can't anything i give up. he says it's up to congress and we know how effective congress is. so, so so you have buchanan this vacuum in washington. you have lincoln not wanting to plunge into things until march 4th, and you have the us government. at this point, the buchanan's cabinet is very much southern facing his secretary of war. eventually fled to join confederate forces. anderson left there in the harbor with no orders essentially no orders as to what

to do. and, you know, this is the situation and and south carolina starts ramping up to appoint general beauregard to put him in charge of southern forces in charleston harbor. he immediately starts installing cannon emplacements throughout the harbor. so what had happened there is that when when south carolina initially seceded december 20, fort sumter sumter, you know, they were anderson and his men after that were installing guns and so forth. but but there was no real threat to federal because this cannon emplacements had not been erected. so who knows, maybe could buchanan have done something at that by now? that's one of the eternal questions. but what happens as the story advanced is and the reason that the reason i really loved the story in the end was because there's so many fine points that i didn't.

know about. is this political manipulations and and the importance to lincoln and his government after march 4th of not, as you pointed out, not recognizing the south. they went to lengths they i think are actually quite almost comical as this whole story unfolded. it's just fascinating to me. so lincoln decided, as he doesn't want to give up fort sumter because that would be symbolic that we are recognizing secession of south carolina. but does he send more armaments, food and other supplies to fort sumter to make sure they can hold out for any attacks that might occur? right. this is the question that confronted lincoln literally the day after march for his march 4th inauguration, because major anderson said a set of reports saying that basically he was running out of everything and would have to surrender, would have to surrender the fort lincoln was trying to decide that point what to do. do we reinforce the fort? do we surrender to the fort?

he sends three different emissaries down to south carolina to try to determine the extent appropriate pro-union opinion. he, like others, like to make like a secretary of state, henry seward had had had under the impression that there was a lot of pro pro-eu and pro pro-union sentiment in the south that just hadn't been hadn't been revealed yet. so he sends his emissaries down and he learns, in short, that there is no pro-union sentiment, least not not not in charleston. and so then the question confronts him what do do to send an armed expedition into charleston harbor? this point would have been suicide for. those who were entering the harbor because beauregard had so reinforced it that it would have been a disaster. but he has to he comes to repair that. he has to do something. so he does something that's really very clever. he he decides, okay we're going

to send essentially humanitarian aid. we're going to send food and nonmilitary supplies to fort sumter. and he notifies the governor of south carolina. so this is what we're going to do if you do not molest this this this expedition, you will simply unload supplies and we will leave the harbor. and the status quo will be preserved. and you know, he knew i have to believe that that south carolina at this point was not going to it was not going to go for this. and so, you know, indeed the the expedition is raised we're word of this is is is signal to south carolina to charleston via via telegraph which is present in very, very active media element at this point south carolina then realizes okay they don't once again they don't believe they don't believe that this is just an expedition that's

bringing food and humanitarian supplies. they are convinced that this is a military expedition with the intention of seizing charleston charleston. it seizing and reinforcing that season, but reinforcing fort sumter and so forth. and that's why that's why they finally decided this is over and the bombardment. so they bombard fort sumter and watch fort sumter. how many american soldiers were in fort sumter at the time? where a large group. so by the time by the time this all gets to the point of the bombardment, anderson has anderson has into the fort with his his men, 75 men. that's all he has. 75. and again the fort was built to have 650 men. so he was vastly outnumbered. they have managed to put a lot of cannon into the fort. this he's ready for four, four, four action. and then now the bombardment begins. bombardment begins. but this is the fort surrendered

because the is falling apart. it's on fire or because they don't have enough supplies to fight back or just have a food to fight back or stay there. well, essentially, essentially both the supply of food was was was essentially non non existent. but also the bombardment had created had caused a fire within the within fort sumter that was so intense, so smoky, so so overwhelm army that there really was no alternative. and finally anderson decides that he's actually it's a very funny moment there. he anderson decides, okay it's it's it's time it's over. normally when you surrender a military situation like that those who surrender are taken prisoners of war. but were these prisoners, these soldiers taken as prisoners of war, were they allowed to go back to the north? no. what happened? what happened was, anderson, was given a promise. this is because of the sort of gentlemanly relationship between beauregard and anderson. they were friends.

one was his pupil. and that west point and so forth. and friends to the point, though it didn't stop god from essentially constructing enough weapons to destroy anderson and all his men. but they came to an agreement that anderson would be able to march out of the fort bearing the american flag and have a 100 gun salute. this is going to be very honorable removal for and the the and his men were going to be taken wherever they wanted to go in and in the north. and that's how it came to an end. now we promised questions. yes, we're going have some questions on one final question i want to ask you, lincoln was a person who was pretty not is very smart, not well-educated, but he consistently, you point out, spelled to fort sumter incorrectly. yes. so how do you spell it and how did he spell it? okay. it's spelled as u as a married tr. he spelled it swampy in peter, t

or r the best. this is one one reason i really fell for lincoln. the best thing was he could not inauguration. he could not spell inauguration. well, okay, we have time for questions. who has questions? stand up and come to the mic. ask your question. hopefully a question, not a statement. just a question. well, it's a race. the mikes. either. i love your books, everyone them and you say. that again. i really love books. and i have been a civil war. both until i found out some. my ancestors were in andersonville. but one thing that always struck me was writing to my family. there's a general winfield scott

who related to on my mother's side, who are you? okay. and he offered the command of the union army to someone who served under him. robert, we and robert, we turned it down and usually know the historians just skip this. but i wonder if you have any thoughts on what would have happened if he had said yes, i can't speculative history or something. i just i just don't do. i won't do it. i want to add a footnote about winfield scott. it's very important that i the fact that the concerns about would the electrical power come off right. and general winfield scott, he was at this point the commanding general of the united states army. he was on his last legs. he was he was like six foot four, 350 pounds or something. he had every ailment imaginable. but this guy was loyal to america to not to a fault, but he was loyal to america. he was not going to let anybody interfere with this electrical.

so he fills washington with troops. cannon cavalry, and he makes this wonderful pledge that anybody tries to interrupt the electoral count. i'm going to strap them to the front of the cannon and maneuver the hills of arlington, virginia, with his body on winfield. scott was old, but he wasn't old enough to be present. united, was he? how old was he? you're 70. so somebody google that. okay. he ran for he lost the right. okay. next election, next president. thank you, sir. hi. i first encountered one of your books as a text in an american studies class. so i'm curious, as a student of history, how do you decide you're writing narrative nonfiction, how much context you need to build for yourself? you said that you weren't a civil war history buff before process and how much your audience also how much context you need to build for your audience as well. that's a good question.

you know, i need i need to be absolutely confident that i've got it nailed before i can actually start start writing something. i think we have a name for that. it's like immersion immersion research, immersion journalism, so forth. and and it's basically it's, it's anything particularly it's reading every thing you can read and just to get to the point where you really have a good, good sense of the stuff, was it was it isaac storm? that was the book you came from? it was dublin, the white city. what city? oh, okay. okay. so they forgave for isaac's storm, i guess. anyway, anyway, so that's i had a question about your book in the garden of bees. yeah, i had read that tom hanks bought the movie rights to it, like a decade more than a ago. and i really know how to hurt a guy. i was. i was curious which of you didn't hurry up and up? i because i think had he made it i've actually tweeted this several times you have you made it before 2016 i think it would

have gotten a broader audience. people would have recognized what was happening. do you think? well, i wish you know. just like every book of mine is or was under option, how many films have been made? not. and and i allowed myself last year one moment. one more usually i espouse i the philosophy of tom wolfe once said when you're dealing with hollywood, you take your book to the fence it over, take the bag of money and run. but but last year, i learned that that i had signed on to play to play burnham and the devil in white. it and and i thought, wow, this is real. he actually signed a compensation package he actually signed a contract. so i thought, this is going to happen.

so, you know, the agent who had actually negotiated that option no longer my agent. but no, it's. it's not a pejorative thing. once i learned so much, i learned that i mean, i think i sent her because i her the guy i sent her a very expensive bottle of champagne, $360. but bottle of champagne. champagne that churchill used to drink, of all things. but yet this was for my sake. and then, like three days later, on a friday evening, i hear from my agent. keanu reeves has dropped the director dropped out, and i was like, was like i was actually let myself really depressed that that night. and then the next day. i don't know if you know the hemingway short story up in michigan, where the character says you know, it was noon before before he remembered that his heart was broken. oh, okay. so it was not that that because

you question you've written about lot of interesting people in history and who would you most like to meet and have lunch with potentially. oh, martha dodd. no, no. you know my favorite characters of all the characters in my books was frederick law olmstead, the landscape architect in chicago for the for the world's fair. just a brilliant guy that every thought that goes through that went through that guy's head was just original materials at the library of congress. you can go read his his materials. and i just i swear he didn't he never wrote an unoriginal sentence in his life. so i would i would really like to, i think, spend time with him and churchill. i mean who wouldn't? hey, you spoke of other federal forts along the southern states, especially around florida. how important were they in the lead up to the civil war? one fort in particular was it was mixed up, actually, in the whole conflict over.

something was that was fort block and fort pinckney, right? fort, yes. the one off. one off fort lauderdale. i'm getting my piece screwed up. anyway, big, big sea fortress. similarly, an offense to the to the confederates. a different situation because it would have been impossible for the confederate navy to actually seize it. but it was a symbolic thing all the same and that also was that was successful reinforced by by lincoln and the navy. but but beyond that, a lot of states, a lot of the southern states simply seized federal properties and held. question yeah. so a lot of historical figures that you've written about have been really kind of mythologized in our culture. and so how do you approach that as a writer trying get back to like they were a real person at the time? that's yeah, you know, you know, that's, that's something that i

deal with all the time. i refuse to succumb to hagiography, you know, i mean, even lincoln, i basically said to myself, okay, yeah, i'm going to make lincoln prove to me that he needs to be a character in this book. now, obviously he needed to be, but it was little things, little things like sense of humor, his warmth, the fact that you couldn't these are the things that that that, you know, really appealed to me. but i was i'm always aware that i don't want to play into what is presumed i don't i don't want to write assumed you know. so it's you it's not that it's not that hard. i mean just call it the way you see it, you know, and let the facts, let the stories come across in diaries and so forth. let them guide you through through through the story. hey, we have time for one more. i think one more question. hello. i really loved devil in the white city you for being here. i'm curious knowing what you know now.

what's the one thing that you wish you knew when you first started writing and was there anything that shifted for you to be able to write consistently? you mean you mean when i first started writing, i was sitting any and just in terms of your career. oh, what i wished knew. yeah. boy, i. i wish i hadn't been so different starting out. i mean, dilly dally as my, my, my. if i had a coat of, i would use a quote from one of jimmy buffett's songs, which is indecision may or may not be my problem. so it won't tell us the subject next book, but you tell us approximately when you think it might come out or it's too hard to predict. that's funny. my publisher wants to know that too too. i was thinking actually, 2 to 3 years because i've done a lot of research already. okay. yeah.

all right. well, i want to thank erik larson. i want to thank you thank you.

and several hours of live coverage still here. the national book festival coming. you're going to hear an author on disinformation. you're going to hear from pulitzer prize winner carlos and sara, jeff rosen, the national constitution center. but right now is, frankly, my favorite segment of the year. it's called are you reading the numbers are all on the screen. you can see there. go ahead. we want to know you're reading and we're pleased to be joined by the librarian of congress, carla hayden, for this segment. we're going to talk about the library. we're going to talk about books, and we're going to find out what she is reading as well. but, dr. hayden, i'm going to throw your curveball because as we were talking earlier, before we went on the air, we were talking about google and wikipedia. yeah. are those to librarians?

no in fact, there are a lot of librarians who work for search engines because we are we in fact, librarians have a t-shirt and mugs, a bag that says librarians the original search engines. and we help people find information. and so we love it because when you want something quick, you want to know. we just looked up some birthdays of some authors to just get a sense of it. you get the quick fact wikipedia. now you have librarians who are contributing to wikipedia. so there's more accuracy. and so it's wonderful to have these tools because you have questions. you are seeing things, you're hearing things and you want to know just quickly, you know, when did that happen or what are they doing? well, how has the festival gone so far? oh, it's wonderful. and you can just hear the noise and people and there's so many families here today and we have special areas for young people. the national science foundation

is here for the first time, and they're showing how and reading get together. we have a math section. i couldn't use that when i was young. and then all the authors for young people, including the tv actor, were from, i think it's tv girl. max greenfield with his new book, goodnight thoughts. and so it's just wonderful. and when did you decide you were going to become a librarian? oh, my goodness. i had an experience when i graduate way from undergrad and i was trying to figure out what i was going to do and my dear mother, who's here with us today, finally, there she is who's here said, while you're trying to figure that out, maybe you can get employment and. so i started searching for jobs and everything and i would go in between interviews to my favorite place, the chicago

public library. and while i was waiting for the next interview where people me, you're a nice young lady, but you know, you haven't done anything. but one person who had just graduated with me came in and say, hey, carla, they're hiring anybody. and what? it wasn't. they still do this in libraries. we hire people with undergraduate degrees in any field, and we introduce to the field of librarianship. and so that's when i discovered what libraries could be. and it was all over after dr. hayden investing in a book. and in the time to read in today's world, how do you how do you make that happen? well, think about how people invest devices and all the time. and so they're getting information so activities like the book festival are ways to get young people in particular excited about books because get

to meet the authors that illustrate ideas we have for the first time in the book festival this year romance novels and writers and the lines are just going crazy. so give people what they want to read if they want to read fantasy and romance and we shouldn't be book judges let people read in free people read freely and let it read what they want to read too. or too is the area code 7488 200. if you live in the east and central time zones and want to talk about books, talk to librarian of congress, what are you is the question we're asking. but if you have a question for carla hayden, please call in 2027488201. for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones. plus we have a text number. 2027488903 if you want to send a text, please do include city and your first name.

if you would. library of congress. $840 million annual budget. 3100 employees. what's the focus? what does america get for that money? what america gets is a wonderful report entry and depository of all human knowledge and information. the library collects in information in 70 languages that collects. it's now up to 170 million items or half of that is in languages other than english. and we collect all types of things. one of the sessions, the library has a booth here at the festival is about free photographs and images that you can download that are free of copyright, like the first selfie, the first photo of harriet tubman. there are all of these wonderful

things and ways to get information and inspiration. and so the library congress is the nation's library. i just see, i think stacks and stacks and stacks of hardback books. well, you're right about that. there are 836 miles of shelf that the library has. so, yes, the library has quite a few physical books, but it also has manuscript collections. the papers of 23 presidents from washington, the coolidge supreme court justices, notable figures, rosa parks, frederick douglass, all of these people that we know about in history. but also music legends george and ira gershwin, jonathan larson max roach. so go on the website and long llc echo. i think you'll be surprised.

can anyhow, two questions. how do you work with local libraries and can anybody get a library card for the library of congress? if you're and older you can get a reader's card and that allows you access to the reading rooms that are in washington dc. but anybody can go on to the website and get information. we even on the website, something called ask a librarian and you can email library and you get a real time back. and so you have that and you also have the opportunity to participate in our virtual front door, we call it that. you can look at programs, you can do all of these things. the way we connect with libraries throughout the country and it's on display today at the convention center is called roadmap to reading each state and territory has a booth and we connect with them through the centers for the book so you can pick your favorite state and.

now, all of the young people in that expo floor are going around with a map of the united states getting charts is things that see a lot of kids with these with louisiana and idaho is giving out little data things and all that. but you read authors from the states as well and that's a real connection to local libraries and you councils things like that. mrs. hayden is sitting down here. listen my mom what was her role getting you to be a reader? well helped instill the love of reading. so of course she read to me and then my joy was learning how to read because wanted to be independent and then we would. and she read her book and i'd read my book. and then there was day and she reminds me of this when i looked and i said something was wrong. and what it was, was i was reading out loud because i had

just learned to read. so then the goal became to read silently. so we could sit and we sit there. i also learned about library funds by checking out bright april and and i. she still reminds me that what it was and. that's what is so important here for young people see someone that they care about or they love or they know reading they. see, it's important to we've talked in the past about april, the book that got you into reading what's on what's on your side table now? well there are several tables and i have different piles of books, so there aspirational books usually diet and health even the new tamron is sterling quote a confident quote. those are things you want to do. mysteries love mysteries. and so luis printing and some of

the mystery writers we have of those. then there's the section the non fiction a lot of history. we see that miss miles will be here. she has a book on harriet tubman tiya miles yet we come alive earlier and that so i have those. and then there are magazine names. and so you to decorate. i have a book about decorating with books. well, let's take some calls. let's begin with james calling in from ohio. james, you're on book tv. what are you reading or do you have a question for carla hayden? well, since peter, you you this your favorite segment i got called in with list of books i top eight years and dr. hayden will be happy to hear that i was a librarian, media specialist for a couple of those years. yes. so mostly i'm a non mostly i'm a nonfiction guy. so i build up summer lists. got in the habit of that while i was teaching the big miss naomi

rescues and eric conway on american business, how it taught us to lower the and love the free market. i've got leah penniman black earth wisdom which is a really nice book on black environmental wisdom. you might say, well, i'm reading jeff roe's jeff rosen's new book, the pursuit of happiness and how the classical writers influenced the founders. and i'm just trying to do this quickly because i know you've got people waiting. i've got the lessons of history and old book by william ariel durant. and then just for fun, i've got loretta lynn's book on her religion ship with patsy cline, called me and powerful kickin up dirt. all right, james, thank you for that list he mentioned jeff rosen. and we will be hearing from jeff rosen a little bit later today, talking about his book he's on with carlos lozada, who's written a book called the washington book next call, comes

from barbara and alex. andrea, virginia. barbara, what's on your reading list? well, i'm current. i'm currently reading jeff rosen's in pursuit of happiness. and i mostly read a nonfiction and american history and all the individuals that created our great country. and i have to say i lived here for 54 years. i've never been to the library of congress. and now i'm too old to actually go. but i'm hoping somebody will take me there just so can see it once in my lifetime. well, but that's my list. hey, that's not what i read. and jeffrey rosen's is the one i am currently reading. now, barbara, you're right across the river where the library of congress is. you have you driven by the library or any of its buildings? yes, many ago, when i was

younger, but i was always taking the grandchildren or children to the museums, and it never got our national archives or to the library of congress. well, let's see how let's see how we can get you into the. we would love to have you, barbara. we have a new treasure gallery that just opened, so we going to make sure when you come or somebody takes you, you have the most important parking and that you will have people to meet you. so, barbara, please make sure we get your information. and it would be the building is is the one with the main reading room, correct? david rubenstein really donated the funding for this new treasures gallery and it's wonderful so that we will be where we meet. and you know, offhand, our is library open every day for

tours. it's open monday through saturday and with barbara we will make sure that we have someone there in case you need it. oh, sure accommodation of any type. this is sharon, southern indiana. text message. i just finished the hamilton by elizabeth cobbs. now i'm reading this troubled world by eleanor roosevelt. oh, perfect timing. talk about an active is first lady. i'm a place to hang the moon by kate albus. that's carol in papillion nebraska. do you have you heard of that? that title? i have not. yeah, i have not. it's angela is 83 years old and is reading the revolutionary sam adams by stacy schiff and another pulitzer winner, stacy.

yeah. yeah. she's because people of sam adams and bill i in today's world. yeah. well you know it's rendering and everything, but sam adams was quite character and you don't hear about him as much during that revolutionary time. so that's a great book. rick in pennsylvania. rick, good afternoon. what are you reading? i'm eruption by michael crichton and james patterson. no, but i read a lot of fiction, mainly. a lot of authors. david ball dodge is one. oh, he is here. yeah. what's it like to bend down to see him and jeffrey archer and james are all and see j box have more titles and rod taylor like where does the car chase? hey, rick, have you ever come down to the national festival?

no, i actually had thought about doing it this year because our library had a puzzle headed down there. well, and well. next year. but when they first talked about doing it, it was hot. and i was thinking about washington and all. and i just decided against it. well, you're going to be in a convention center and it's all air conditioned, so it'll be all right. john is here with us as well. and we're going to send john out into these folks listening with his whiteboard and see if anybody has anything that they're reading that they want to share with a national audience. maybe we start. is mrs. hayden reading anything at this point? any books? we'll we'll get that. well, we'll take the next call. john will write it down for us. we'll let that talk to him.

we'll let get ready. we'll let in fort worth, texas. hi, will. let. you're on the air. oh, no. oh, bits and pieces we'll be getting, i guess, for me, more and more. and when we need. i, i, i apologize we'll let that one was not one that i could understand. i couldn't hear. it seemed a little muffled. leslie is in richardson texas and she texts in she's reading poverty by america by matthew desmond. yes, we him do a program at the library of congress, and it's a very thought provoking book. and as we talk about social issues and the face of poverty, in fact, diane arbus did a wonderful you know, she's a famous photographer and think of her in one way that she did a special series, the social

security administration, the 1970s, right before she passed on the face of poverty. it was really something. how often you have public program at the at the library, all the time. and a lot of them are streamed online on youtube. and so you can actually see some of the and of course, in person we have a new program thursday live at the library. dr. hayden there's also a series for you are the library of congress. so there is a series for members congress only correct and series focuses on the historical books. so jeffrey rosen, for instance, will be there. mr. rubin's, who has a number of books, historic figures, and the book he's going to talk about at the festival is about the president's and character

douglas brinkley. doris kearns goodwin. so having the author will give members of congress a sense of history and to think about what is a doris kearns goodwin 50 years from now or michael castles or douglas brinkley going to be writing about you all right now. well, it turns out, mrs. hayden, your mother is reading james mcbride. oh, yeah. and a book called camelot. so we will send john back out there. and to anybody else, the news, the news. i have to say, homer's in massachusetts. homer good afternoon. what's on your reading list? oh, this is also massachusetts. i am reading rob ford's from on this continent by david hauser, which is a good book. i become a history buff. up until six months ago. i don't think i've.

i've read six books in my lifetime and i'm almost 83 years old, so the book i'm reading is mental maps of the founders. but michael, they're both excellent books. now, homer, you got to explain what you just said that you've only. reading about six months ago at age 83. why did it take you while to get started? well, because i was developed some illness so i had some issues with my lungs and so forth. so i've been kind, not bedridden, but i can't do much. so between listening to the history channel on tv and reading, getting the reading books, especially history books, you know, i'm i found a new life, me put it that way. wonderful for and that's what can . and they could take you away they can take you back they can just really and you get absorbed in books. you can tell i kind of like it but that's what they can do.

alissa out here in the studio is this alissa hi alissa. all the things we cannot say by kelly rimmer is the book that you're reading, not say nazi, nazi, but cannot say nonfiction. nonfiction. thank you. greetings from philadel phia. this is a beena and she is reading becoming philadelphia how an old american city made itself new again and it's by enga enga safran. now that should be something. it's something that f jeffrey rosen because constitution center is in this is they're doing quite a bit even the philadelphia free library is doing they have entrepot a newer center in the central library in philadelphia. so there seems to be quite a bit going on. carla hayden are book fairs

besides national book festival all around the country. how many of you are where do you where have you attended that? oh, well, our vendors several, but there's several that really grabbed me and that was going back twice to the mississippi book fair. and you were there and you can see what it meant held in the state capital, beautiful supreme court chamber is a group of young women girls read and they were there and just being in a historic state and in story place and to celebrate reading and what books can do that was one that was remarkable. next call is stewart in peoria, illinois. hi, senora. sorry, i'm from illinois. all right. great to talk to you. great show librarians, my hero. i read recently david portrays book conflict. he was just in town last week, so i to speak, see him speak.

and then i just finished reading doris kearns goodwin goodwin's book, the unfulfilled. it's something back to the sixties. why i went to, which was really, really great. and then i read some nonfiction and kristen hands book the women and also the nightingale by her. and then i just watched your show with erik larson. his on lessons of demons so. but once again thank you very much for your show and love it. my favorite tv show. thank you for we appreciate it. doris kearns goodwin was on this program a little bit earlier. david petraeus of course has been on book tv. if you go to book tv, talk, that's our website. we covered about 25,000 authors plus in our, you know, 25, 26 year history every single. one of those videos is available

to watch online for free book tv board search function up at the top. just go and type in an author's name and. you will find it. all right, amy, where is amy? hi, amy. amy is reading a fiction book about the empire. you dreamed of empires. alvaro. enrique. thank you. sharing that book with us. we appreciate it. and homer might like to get on your website. absolutely. he's reading, and he might think of authors. and yelp. and just listen to author as that might be a good activity. there you go, homer. there's your advice for today. joe in columbus, new jersey. joe, good afternoon. what's on your reading list? afternoon. well, i just want to let you know that i recently completed the latest novel by douglas preston in lincoln child. and find that series very, very

entertaining. and ed, can you describe the series. it's a match centric fbi agent named our wishes and our guests and it goes through a number of, different mysteries that he's involved in. and are they more of the thriller genre? yes, i think they're more of a thriller, but since i completed that, i'm picking up a book that i had purchased set aside for a while, a promised land by barack obama. i'm really anxious to into that and go through that right. you have set that aside for a while. that's how it's. but sometimes that happens. you have something and then something puncturing. is that. oh, i think i have that. and you pick it up and you read it and probably knew i's because of what has happened since it was published.

carla hayden, do you have to go in front of congress every year to testify about your budget? appropriations that you talked about? yes. and what has been heartening is that congress really supports the library of congress. we serve them directly. we get them nonpartisan objective research. and we do research for congress. they also realize that we serve the people. they serve and the communities, and that and so the congress has given such good support to the library of congress. brenda, where's brenda? hi, brenda. brenda is reading james patterson the secret history of booksellers and librarians. and mr. patterson was here? yes. the thing was that his mother was a librarian, so he has such an appreciation. and that probably helped him on his way. so we know that librarians and booksellers, this is now one of

our favorite books. patricia springfield, massachusetts. hi, patricia. hi. i'm reading an older book by lynn dayton. i can picture i'm surrounded by book here and to read to read. you read books from a small bomber and it's absolutely fascinating. a bit heartbreaking, too, but i never read it before. and i'm that i picked it up. i love the writes. i the history. can you tell and and i've been history now since i was in first grade. so i love to share both father and son and oh, i've had a book about teddy roosevelt. one of the stories just read really rather. oh, and i love our crosswords, and i'm so glad you when i

happened to be tuning into tv. so i better shut up, you know, go away. two things i will let you know. patricia. we are going to re-air everything you've seen. today begins at 8 p.m. eastern time tonight. so if you didn't catch all of eric larson and you can see all the other authors we've covered, everything we've covered begins re-air at 8 p.m. eastern time. carla hayden i lost track of time. do you have five more minutes so you can stay? are you sure? oh, yeah. we've kept you longer than we. were supposed to. this. so now, before anyone yells at me, i want to say that out loud. nancy in des moines. hi, nancy. hello. i'm reading the grand affair, john feinstein, and he's called by paul fisher. and that was part of the research for america and apollo. that was an opera that was opened this year that the moon upper. and i love the library of

congress. when i went to graduate school in the seventies, i could park in front and go and do my research. when i was a student at american university. oh. you can't park in front of the library of congress anymore because we're to make some provisions. yeah, i hope you're listening to that. barbara got a special, special tour guide over here who wants to help you out. suzanne in colorado said, i love nonfiction and learning about other people's stories. last three books i read coming home by brittney griner. yeah. on call by anthony fortune. wow. and lessons from the edge by marie yvonne of inch, who, of course, was the diplomat who resigned during the trump. gary, where's gary? hey, gary gary is reading tommy orange's novel want stars? it's about native americans a little bit earlier today, that

blackhawk right. speaking of we covered that live. i hope you were in the room in, the room for that. and this is a text. i don't see a name, but i am reading one of the best books i have ever read. it is age of revolution. it is an intellectual history covering the time period between 1066 to the present by fareed zakaria. oh, right. and that is bringing us to the end of our list that we have carla hayden, are you going to be attending or talking in front of any more groups? sure. i'm getting a real lesson on how to be a confident cook with tamron hall. her coauthor who is featured on segments on the food channel on apple gentleman, the today show. and that's how she met tom and so they're on to we're going to

talk about this book because it's more than it's about food brings together and then i'll be with stuart i love that who we just had on this program on this program the art of diplomacy and that's going to be kind of interesting too so it'll be really wonderful to see them. and then i'm going to visit other book signings, everything. when do you start planning for year's national? we're going to have an announcement at the very end today when we're to say when the next book festival. so tune in. but you do know the date of that. we do know. i don't think i'm supposed to say it right. well, to be the grand finale. okay. well, we posted as soon as we say it, because it ends 8:00. we are looking forward to that. this is a text from timothy in i don't know where timothy's from, but he's reading the titanic, survivors book club. oh, something i've never heard

of. and he recently finished. oh, no, i apologize. and the start this again. beth heard from rhode island. hi. i'm reading the titanic survivors book club by timothy schaefer. and recently finished canary girls. oh, canary. so, carla hayden is the librarian of congress. and we really appreciate sitting down and talking with us a little about what you're reading and i've gotten some tips. looks just like, okay, well, we've got a couple more hours of live coverage coming up here at the washington convention center. and we're going to start in just a few minutes a panel on misinformation. you're going to hear from a couple of peter pomerantz of and anna lee newitz. and this on disinformation. this is live coverage of the national book festival on book

tv tv. and. good afternoon and. welcome to the 24th annual library of congress national book festival, a where books build us up. i am beatrice, head of logistics of, the library of congress national library services for the blind and print disabled. it is a pleasure to welcome all of you here today and at this

time we ask you that you turn off or silence your electronic devices and cell phones. if you need to leave the premises, the presentation, the doors, the right is the exit. and it's also the nearest restrooms. we also want to notify you that this will be recorded in your entry and presence at program constitutes your consent to be filmed or otherwise recorded. there will be time for questions near the end of this and the microphones are here upfront. at this time i would like present our guests. we know that this information is dangerous, but now we know it is also a weapon of war. emily is a journalist and, the author of several science fiction and nonfiction books, including the national bestseller for lost cities, newest rights for the new york

times and co-hosts the podcast our opinions are correct. their newest book is stories are weapons, psychological warfare, and the american mind. peter pomerantz of he's a senior fellow at johns hopkins university. he has written two books about, russian disinformation and propaganda. nothing is true and. everything is possible. and this is not propaganda. his newest title, how to win an information war, the propagandist who outwitted hitler is a biography of world two propagandist swift delmer interspersed with pomeranz of own with the invasion of ukraine. the session, moderated by russell and encina, the library's chief community relations officer. enjoy festival and let us welcome them to stage.

all. on behalf of my colleagues at the library of congress, thank you for joining us today. it's definitely one of our biggest festivals. thank you, annalee and peter. we have a lot to talk about. we'll dive right into it. so the elephant in the room when it comes to misinformation. is it better, worse from the last presidential election to this one? so we were talking about this beforehand and peter said, do you want the tweet answer or the long answer? well, the answer about twitter. yeah. or the answer about twitter. i'll say something relatively short about that. you know, it's better in some ways. i think the public is more aware of the fact that there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation swirling online, swirling in the media. and we're kind of prepared for it. we're not necessarily prepared to recognize it and to that have

changed since the 2020 election. one is that through the efforts, a number of politicians, including jim jordan, a lot of that were studying misinformation, like the stanford internet observatory i talk about in my book have been have been essentially sued out of existence. and so they aren't able to do the kind of really important work of tracking out rumors they start and as they spread online rumors about where to vote or how to vote. just really simple stuff that. the other thing that's changed is that we now have propaganda discourse about propaganda and will simply leave you with the the point about taylor swift being a psyop. the fact that now psyops themselves have psyops which made extremely interesting for me when this book came out and people were like, wait, how is taylor swift a psyop? and so i think that we're

simultaneously more aware more of psychological warfare, more aware of culture war, but also more confused. what do you think? i think that's it's it's always useful dividing this into a supply and demand issue. is it easier to produce misinformation usually means accidentally produced lies and disinformation, which means that done on purpose. is it easier since 2016? overall i'd say yes, because even though there is much more cognizance in society to some companies, you know, have have claim to do more about this this issue, there's also way more things that you can do you know have ai and and all these other technologies which make it way easier to proliferate, proliferate, lie. so before you have to have a troll with people sitting there typing, stuff up that's expensive and unwieldy, now you just have one guy running and

running an ai program shooting out the taylor swift as a sale. so the technology's got more powerful. meanwhile, in america the research has been destroyed and. you know unlike in europe where there is the start of regulating this space in america, we've gone backwards. so that's the supply side. but even more is the demand side. because because know my fascination having, you know, spent a lot of time in authoritarian societies where i saw, you know, especially in russia the early putin years propaganda being fed from the top, but also being demanded from the bottom. it seems to have got much stronger. i mean, i don't know how to interpret of these statistics, but what is it, 30% of americans think the last election was rigged despite. the evidence that it was. and despite fox to spend a billion in in damages after they had alleged that there had been fraud to the company, that that

ran the machines, the electoral machines. so the demand side has just increased wildly. and whatever happens in this election, i don't think it's going to go away. you know, what's scary is, you know, most this, as you write peter, dates back or propaganda or misinformation actually dates back a long time ago. like you wrote that it dates back to the trojan war. you wrote that it dates back pre-revolutionary america. so it makes us feel a little helpless. but we'll get to a little a little bit, you know, when it comes misinformation. we've seen it could either be funny, like taylor swift, but most of the time it's either dangerous or deadly from from hitler to the lavender scare to comet pizza to the big lie, there's some really scary kind of fallout coming from all of this. so that's peel this back a little bit, go back a little bit and see what lessons could learn from history. if there are lessons we can learn from history and you wrote

in pre-revolutionary america, there was a big lie, a big propaganda going on, and it centers around benjamin franklin and, what was called the indian. could you explain that very quickly, the audience, what that was? yes. so benjamin franklin, you know, one of the kind of founders of our nation, also was a producer, fake news. and during the revolutionary war. he was trying to drum up support the british public to ask their government to withdraw from the revolutionary war, to get, you know, the british public to hate the war as much as the americans did. and so he produced a fake news paper with a very boring name that was full of letters that he had written himself that purported to be letters from that were fighting in the revolutionary war and in the process of doing he talked about how the seneca had allied with the british and that they were asked to scalp women and

children who were killing and send those scalps to canada so they could be shipped all the way back to england to please the aristocracy. all of this was made up, but it was it was gross. were lots of descriptions of the scalps, the exact dimensions of the boxes that were used to send them back. it felt very real. and the story went 18th century style. it reprinted in a ton of newspapers in england, and then it came back the united states and got printed in a bunch of papers here on the east coast. and even though the point this propaganda, this fake news was to make the british public think that england was engaging in war crimes and doing terrible things to women and children and therefore they should get out of the war, the unintended or perhaps the not unintended, but the secondary effect of story was also to demonize the seneca and other indigenous groups that were fighting alongside both

english and the americans and the french and it really i argue in my book that, it's kind of the beginning of what we think of as psychological operations and psychological war in the united states, because it is propaganda and after the revolutionary war, the us government, the war department immediately is going to with, you know, hundreds of and nations in the country. and so the hatred that, you know, franklin was kind of attempting to inflame by portraying the seneca as these war criminals simply continued throughout the 19th century. and so i trace the ways that we engage in psychological war to that long bloody 19th century when the us was at war with tribes, both using weapons kinetic weapons but also using all kinds of psychological strategies to erase the history of indigenous people taking kids away from their and putting them in residential schools to remove

their knowledge of their native languages, histories, and then all way up through the present day where we're still dealing with these. it's one of those examples that something that the genesis was more than 200 years ago clearly carries to today. you know, you mentioned histories being erased how native americans were treated, why something like that still happening is it could be like the average person could be asking it's something that dates more than 250 years ago. why has that not been? why haven't we fixed it? i mean a lot of the strategies that the us government used in the 19th century turned out to be very effective, and so it became, you know this whenever the nation went to war, there was this twin effort to use violent force and use cultural coercion. and one of the things that the

united states has always been good at, especially in the 20th century, is producing entertainment. we have an incredible entertainment industry. we have an incredible and marketing industry. and once we had things like radio and movies and television, a lot of the things that were done piecemeal, like say, with ben franklin's during the indian wars, we could do at mass scale and this is something that peter talks a lot about in his work. and so i think that that strategy of erasing enemy trying to take away that and that foreign adversaries history and using pop culture to it. it's just it's a winning combination again and in part of what i trace in this book is how people who worked in writing science fiction, people who worked in advertising, got involved psychological operations during world war one and world war two and brought those storytelling skills to

bear. and so i think it's we're still trapped in that same cycle where our often bleed over propaganda in the united states because we have this twin history of of violence and production. and peter, we can't talk about dangerous propaganda without talking about hitler here. how did hitler successfully spread misinformation from world war one all the way up to world war two? so the power of nazi propaganda is is unique and it's evil maybe, but definitely not unique. its strategies and it is about tapping into needs, especially with hitler. i mean, he was with a society that after the first world war, people were in a state of confusion. they didn't know who they were. social norms were being questioned, gender norms were being a of huge creative flux

and excitement. berlin in the sort of cabaret era was very, very inventive, but also a time when many germans felt very insecure. so the first thing he did was give them a new common identity. you are the volk people. you, you, you know, you who you are. he gave them a language through which to feel superior to others. you are an aryan and all those people there are illegal jewish immigrants, something. but you know he was giving them way to feel superior to others. feel spare, special and most importantly, he was giving a way to legit surmise and surface the most usually negative emotions anger sadism. and you know, we often why why these leaders seem sort of incredibly narcissistic and incredibly hateful why they're

you know, can't everybody see that hitler or somebody else is narcissist and hateful? and of course, that is why they're popular. they allow you to be that as well and you identify your most negative feelings through them and bring them to the surface in a way that most polite doesn't let you. so when you put those things together, plus, you know, the sense of grievance and, humiliation from the loss in the first world war, you have a very potent. but again, many people underestimated them. so the hero of my book who observed hitler's rise when he first sees hitler, he thinks he's ridiculous. you know, he hitler as part of one of these sort of absurd miracle men in germany in the 1920s who would be kind of essentially they'd always be selling an ideology that germany can be strong again and then selling kind of pills that make you strong as well, which i mean, that just look at alex jones. it's so his he has no the parallels is so striking.

it's just like germany will be struck and here's my magic pills that will make you strong and so he thinks hitler is one of these charlatans at first. and he kind of laughs at him and then he just sees him winning in parliamentary elections and he goes, my god, this is really serious speak of that gentleman, the hero or the main character of your book is a gentleman named sefton delmer. explain to the audience who this man is. delmer was a really one of the most famous journalists of his day. he was he was fascinating, think had something in common with with with an analyze main character as well is that he was a man born in between cultures his parents were british, british australian but his father was a professor at berlin university. so stephan was born in germany, grew up speaking better. german than english, was bullied as an english kid at a german school, world war one. but then when he moves back to

england at the age of 13 or 14, bullied for being too german. so a man very about his identity, but very, very aware that identities are created. you know, you can learn to act english. he learns to act english. in the end, you can perform your your nationality. and when becomes a journalist, he goes back to germany and he's basically this i don't know, will americans know these references? you guys who tintin is? yeah. yeah, of course. so he's kind of like tim said. he does amazing investigative of war reporting, but he's also a lot like borat, you know, borat yeah, the so what he does is he pioneers a form of journalism where he dresses up in different personas in order to provoke people. so in the 19 sort of in the late 1920s he goes to england goes little provincial english hotels and acts like this boorish very

kind of like awkward german tourist. like how long is that english? what do you think about this? all i'm trying to, but as a social experiment to see have the british got over the war. can they to a german and it's this fascinating of sort of satire and sociology and he writes this wonderful reports on this mean just like just like, you know, the whole experiments is all about that as well. but he's also this very brave journalist, but as a master of disguise he gets to kind of infiltrate the nazis as the nazis are rising, he essentially convinces them that he be sympathetic to them, and he ends up sort of like, you know, acting as if he was an assistant to the head of the storm troopers to infiltrate or to a huge nazi rally and write about it from inside. they like him so much that he accompanies hitler on hitler's famous air flights to, different rallies.

this is the 1920s, quickest read. hitler wasn't allowed on twitter. no, wasn't allowed on on on the radio, you know, because he was seen as so dangerous. but he did really well in the elections in the 1920s because he was flying from rally to rally and inspiring, you know, this growing fascist movement while his rival hindenburg, was really old. and doddery and could barely make it to could barely make it do a public interview, let alone a public event. no parallels with the current. you america situation. oh, there. and anyway, that's too. but but but delmer goes with hitler and he sees close up how it works and and that gives him just unparalleled insights and when the war starts. he first like like everybody else who wants to help in the war effort. he goes back to britain and he gets recruited by the german service of the bbc who are, you know, they're a bit like the washington post today or

something they were like they were like preaching germans about how democracy dies in darkness, how fascism is evil, how hitler is a bad, and how germany should dream about its democratic future. it's 1941 and it's like, i think this is not going to work. you he what he would say is that the bbc, this is the german services broadcasting in german to germans. he'd say it's sort of stuck in its own echo chamber preaching to the converted and. he decides to do something completely. now you write that propaganda, the true remedy to loneliness. it was very effective. um, during hitler's time. it's sadly a reflection of what's still happening today. i'll start with you anyway. why do you think it keeps on repeating? we kind of know the prime, i guess suspects or the prime kind of audience of when people want to target someone who, it could be, i want to say gullible.

but who would eat up the misinformation. why do you think it keeps on repeating? i mean, it is an effective strategy and know one of the main characters in my book is a fellow named paul lineberger who wrote the first guidebook to cycle logical warfare that was used by the us army, and he wrote it right after world war two based on experience that he'd had working in operations in the pacific theater. and like sefton delmer, he had also grown up between worlds. he had a father who was a diplomat who work and a lawyer who worked with sun yat sen and sun yat sen became borderers godfather and pauline barger, he was a westerner, but he grew up in pre communist china. he loved. i read through his journals from when he was a kid and he has this great journal where he's drawing pictures of shanghai. he's like ten and he writes best city ever like underline and

like multicolored pen and stuff. and he throughout adult life as he studied chinese history and learned more warfare, he really mourned the loss of that place. and he hated communists in a way that most americans didn't. you know, he was at it from a very different place. it wasn't, you know, anti-russia and it was anti communist party in. and he brought sense of, you know, living between worlds to his job as a propagandist in world war two and came up with a lot of different for how to affect the japanese public how to get people to surrender. and one of the things that he really relies on in his work is the fact that he had a secret life. you'd think secret life would be the fact that he's working with the agencies. but no secret life was that he was a science fiction writer and

under the name called weiner smith, which some of you may recognize, he's a kind of a cult figure in the scientific community, very popular in the fifties. and sixties. he wrote stories about uprisings on other planets, about oppressed of cyborg animal creatures who were ruled by a ruthless government that looked kind of like the communist government in china that was called instrumentality. and he uses these stories to think through what it is like to, create propaganda that an adversary believe that there is a thriving resistance in their midst and this resistance could come at any after the government, after people in power. and this idea that there is a hidden really an effective psyop it's demoralizing if you are on

the side of the ruling group, the adversaries. but you disagree with the government. of course, a source of hope, right? someone's telling you, hey, there's a resistance going on. and so he took his science fictional and he applied them to and he advised his students, his colleagues, to use the power of storytelling. when they created their psychology products for aiming at adversaries. and he at one point, you know, adversaries would much prefer the america of a laurel and hardy movie than the america of a square man teaching you how to farm. he really wanted propaganda to be fun. and after war two, what we saw in the united states, a really interesting turn. and i think this gets to the point of why this keeps repeating, because until that point propaganda had been something the military

understood, as always, aimed at a foreign adversary. so if you were in the military and you were developing psychological operations, which are, you know, messages intend to harm an enemy, it was always aimed at at another nation. but during the cold war and during you know, the house un-american activities committee hearings, all of those weapons were appropriated by u.s. politician and used against the american people. and suddenly all of these tools that had been developed to undermine the morale of adversaries, to confuse adversaries, were being used against us citizens and that's really the dawn of culture. and that's one of the things that i really got myself immersed in as i was working on this book, is how much the culture wars that we're immersed now where politicians are taking aim at marginalized groups like immigrant, like black people, like trans people, people. how those all are picture

perfect reproductions of things that lineberger was writing about in his book on psychological warfare in the 1940s. and they're using three basic i feel like i'm in a monty python routine. there's three basic weapons in the arsenal. or tactical yeah. or ted talk seven of these. yeah exactly that are a psyop or a culture op if you will, always will include violence. it will overt lies not just the little white lies and some of scapegoating of a marginalized group. and when you look at the kind of political rhetoric that we're surrounded with now, almost always includes at least two of those things, and especially violent threats, which can mean anything from death threats to of imprisonment. so we've just seen this weapons transfer program on and gain speed. and so that's one of the things that is part of that repetition. you know, we've taken it from the military arena and brought

it into the culture arena. and seth and delmer did something almost similar here with the power of storytelling and stories. and that's what he used against hitler to at least counteract hitler's propaganda. well, belle moran, you know, he, he became of special operations of the political warfare. so he was running a whole empire of subversion dozens of stations in a multitude of languages across occupied europe. a daily newspaper, you know, a staff of hundreds famous novelists worked with him, ian fleming, the bond author of made it all possible. they'd been no friends. muriel spark, the great scottish novelist. there. most people who worked than what germans or exiles so, a lot of avant garde artists, a lot of from the cabaret scene. and they were very important because essentially what delmer did was create stations which, pretended to be nazi stations

but weren't, and mix some of the nastiest bits of nazi propaganda with content that subverted the nazis as well. so the most famous example is the first radio station that he creates, which isn't a radio station. it to the to the person listening to it in it would have sounded a kind of a coded message from a a renegade, very angry senior nazi officer, kind of like ranting to his, you know, to his band of of of unhappy soldiers about corruption among nazi officials, about, you know, how everybody was a secret communist from going down about how they're spending, you know, all their stolen money on a lot of sex, a lot pornography while poor soldiers on the front. why aren't we hitting the british hard enough back? the luftwaffe is full of spies

etc., etc., etc. it incredibly colorful language and with this kind of like incredible, filthy anger. delmer said that his aim was to cover nazi officials with the same and i'm trying to quote here the same kind of layer of filth and slime that the nazis had covered the -- and the show was an it was an amazing success. terms of engagement. there's a lot of people the time in germany saying it's the most popular station in germany. i have no idea what that means. they must be the most popular kind of underground station because this was a short wave pirate station. there's no way it was as popular as regular nazi radio. but that's the feedback they get. we see it in diaries. the british at one point start doing little poles with p.o.w.s. they capture seeing how many listen to stuff like half the are listening to these radios. so that's what he starts with and the idea is to create a rift between nazi and german

soldiers, which is an split is a classic vulnerability of the nazis between the army, the party that's he starts with it. i mean, you're going to have to read the book because this is a family friendly saturday audience. but like the -- is spectacular. and it got delmer into trouble because when some of the more prudish members of churchill's government found out they were scanned realized the we were that we would be using something so filthy to fight. more importantly than that, it didn't take the germans long work out who it was and they started writing, you know, articles in the nazi press saying, this is just a british operation. at which point delmer kind has to do two things. one is slightly to tone down the --, but he kind of realizes what anyone operating knows is that like deception will only get you so far, you know, it might work

in a very, very quick burst. if you're planning military operation, you know, soldiers, armies often will create a a deceptive maneuver to distract the enemy. trojan horse, good example. but but if you're if you want to do this kind of long term cultural change, which is what that was really after, he wants to undermine the edifice of nazi propaganda. you you're not going to get away with that for very long. and then he starts kind of rethinking his strategy. um, but oh i was going to say, one of the things that i think is so interesting, that story from the point of view. leinberger, who's codifying this stuff is, that basically what delmer is doing, is the illusion that there is this resistance within germany. and so and it kind of does erode confidence in the leadership. so it's a it's an interesting strategy. i'm going to, as you mentioned, that about line by door. i thought the same thing. he'd go further than that.

i mean there was very little resistance in germany, but so he'd ask you to work with partizan groups a lot. he basically would sort of tell like polish partizans who are working inside germany. like after you kill some germans, you make it look as if a german resistance group did it. and he's like, you know, here's a fake. just give the sense that there is a resistance because there isn't one. really. i think these days whenever you hear about russian partizans or bela russian partizans things up in russia, i always wonder whether it's sort of ukrainians trying to sort of like give the illusion that is some resistance in russia. i mean, the idea is that if you, if the illusion goes on long enough people start joining the groups that's the hope right. but yeah who knows. you know some of this old propaganda, as i mentioned earlier, is still seeping into today's problems, whether it's, you know, let's go way beyond over to whether it's the lavender with sort of mccarthy to the fallout after sandy hook. you mentioned alex jones and spreading the lies about the families there.

so, you know, to be honest, after reading both of your books, there was a feeling of a little bit that i felt like what, can we do you know, this is clearly keep on so do we. let's say for the average person, how do we distinguish fakery from facts? and is fact checking enough? you know, because know, we we demand that all the time, let's say from journalists, you do your fact checking where they do their stuff. when somebody is feeding the public lies. but is that really enough? what else should what else needs to be done? fact checking is not enough, i'm afraid. but my goes out to all the fact checkers who've helped me. sure, my stuff is factual, so i'm part of the small community of fact writers. one of the things that. can we fact check the. yeah exactly. and of course, i mean, i have science fiction where i get to make stuff up, so i try to keep them segregated. so i have a kind of a balanced

breakfast i recommend for dealing with misinformation, propaganda, and the three ingredients are slow down, keep receipts, tell better. and i'll tell you very briefly what means slowing down is taken. the research of a lot of different folks i talked to who work in online misinformation and who look at algorithmic shaping of news. and one of the main recommendations that has come out of a lot of that research has been maybe what we need is to have our social be slower. so instead of letting stories go viral where you click a thing and share it without even reading. what if you had to wait an hour before sharing a story? what if you had to wait a day before posting something? what if you had just a little bit of friction seeing something and sharing something? because it's those shares that cause misinformation to explore mode and, you know, truly mislead the public.

so there's slowing down with our media. there's also keeping receipts and keeping receipts. is just whenever there is a culture war going on. one of the main things that gets attacked is, history, recent history, what's going on right now, older of how various groups been treated over time in the united states and elsewhere in. order to do that, we need to protect libraries. that is why i'm so to be here. we do want to mention annalee, you wrote a wonderful op ed in the washington post earlier this week praising the role that libraries play. so, yeah, and libraries emerged in this in the course of writing this book found that libraries provide their kind of the of culture war. if you're thinking about the public sphere and how to how to describe the public sphere, a lot of people now like the public sphere, is a war, a culture war. it's just people yelling each other. the library offers a different

view where history is maintained, where many points of view are maintained. and when you the space of the library, nobody throws books at your head or tries to like make you read an advertisement before getting to the books, they just say follow your curiosity. we go ahead and look at everything you want know about frogs. here's everything we have about frogs. i have no political opinion about frogs. just learn about them. so that's keeping receipts. and the final thing, of course and i think this is close to all of our hearts, we're here at a book festival telling better telling different stories because it's very easy for stories to become weapons, to become tools of trauma, to vessels for predicting darker future. that makes us feel like there's nothing we can do. but we can also make stories into pathways to peace. we can tell stories about futures where we negotiate each other, futures star trek where we try to be not colonizing other planets, even though

actually on star trek, they do a lot of colonizing. but they but the idea is that it's it's a way of reimagining who we are as as a community. i think one of the things that you do so well in your book, peter, is to talk about how propaganda does appeal to us because we're lonely and because we want a way to feel connected to something and telling a story about peace and and coming together, solving problems. that's also a way of of calling on people's sense of community. so that's your job out there is to tell better stories and tell different stories. so that's those are my recommendations. you were to speed about social media out there, you know, like just a good example. maybe it was like on thursday, you know, a big rumor that went out that beyonce was going to perform at the dnc and that spread like fire. is the government on a more serious note on these kind of things is the government or is the better equipped in handling how fast and the speed that technology and information

spreads so quickly. i don't know if if either of those we definitely want the military to involved and the government. look, i would love to. i see. let's not make this gendered one of my in-laws. let's not make a mother out of it. suppose host some nonsense on facebook. love to call facebook hq or, you know, government lies and say my in-laws posting nonsense on facebook again about, you know, beyoncé and and they will go bomb fact checked you know i don't think that's going to happen so i mean you've raised the specter there of of the question of regulation which is you know i don't know if you're tracking events in europe. i mean there is a sort of titanic collision coming between american tech, especially x, especially elon musk and

european. and what are they clashing the clashing over two ideas of freedom for the mosques. and here i'm you know, i'm not words in their mouth. this is how i understand what they're saying. you know, this is about of speech and their freedom of speech and, their freedoms, entrepreneurs and what the hell they like. the eu and british regulation saying, but hold on the public has the right to understand how it's being influence. you know freedom of speech is the right to receive information as well. we don't understand what your algorithm is doing. we don't understand why i swear. i don't understand. why do i see one thing here and not another here online? why is this piece of content being suppressed and this being put out? why am i constantly seeing it on musk's tweets and call it by sole name and when i never i didn't the man like, what the hell is going on? so we're kind of surrounded this weird influences with, no understanding about how it works, let alone any kind of

power to control what is now our public sphere. so these are two different ideas of freedom, both of which are in the universal declaration of human rights, the freedom to express, but also the freedom to receive information european and british regulation based around the idea that you, as a citizen, have the right to understand whose influencing you, how, whose it yeah is it? seth delmer or death and selma or lindberg should have the right to know that in a democracy yeah, and actually the information environment we're in now, there's no in it in the way that mr. jordan says in congress there's a different type. we do not understand the black box of algorithms that influence us every day. that's a huge democratic deficit. but i completely agree regulation can help clear things up, make it a more even playing field. but you have to compete. you to compete by design. you have to design other online spaces. you know, we often use, you know, the metaphor of a city to talk about the online space.

at the moment, it's a bit like the bladerunner, you know, there's two or three huge companies that control everything and. you don't know who's real and who's not online, or in bladerunner, i don't know if i've really seen blade runner, but whatever. and then there's the kind of the dark net, you know, the bottom full of sort of filth and crime and it should be like a normal city that it's normal that there is a facebook or an x, but there should be what is the online equivalent of a park or a library or some sort of space where we meet to debate political ideas. it certainly should not be on x. x might be great for advertising campaigns for coca-cola that's why it was created. it's really good at it's really bad for political debate. there should be a different space for that that's built for it. so that's designing things. and thirdly, i'm with you. at the end of the day, we're going to have to compete. you'll never regulate. you're out of it. you'll never design your way out of it. we are in a race who can engage audiences better and the other side who approach with a mix of military thinking, a mix of

really cynical advertising thinking are totally effects driven. that's totally audience driven and and i think us on the side of democracy, we still hold on to myths which are nonsense, the myth of the marketplace of ideas we'll put stuff out there and the best stuff will miraculously float the top through a theory of rational choice which has been discredited by every social science and undermined by algorithms. and then yes, and then it's not as if it's. yeah, it's not as if marketplace is even. yeah. so we're going to have to learn to compete. and that means people better. the other side, which you know, look, every local journalist needs to do that because every local journalist would go to the night, you know, hang out with his audience. he'd know them. and that's why local journalism was so important. and now that's gone and been taken over by really something quite malign. that's where we're at. and i in america, because i

don't understand whose job going to be in in europe. in britain, we have a tradition of public journalism which all about that public journalism in, britain and in europe, it's not about being boring. that seems to be what it means here. it's about it's about or educational. it's about creating a public. it's about engaging diverse audiences in a public square that happen by accident. somebody has to do that. and i've been two years in america now and two years of people saying, hey, this 30% of americans who think the last election was rigged, i'm like, what are you doing to reach them? it's like, huh, the marketplace ideas will sort it out. it's like, no, we weren't so i'm sure america will to it. but, you know, i'm still a here i'm still a and i'm still but i know i'm not i'm not joking very worrying this is what i've seen in countries that do go authoritarian where bits of society allied with those in power start identifying

themselves by claiming a different reality. it's not that they believe it. maybe that's sort of fool process, but like we are the ones who think the last election was rigged the way that, you know, hitler would would say we were the ones who lost the war because we were stabbed in the back was his main method. you know, the good german been stabbed in the back by socialists and -- in in germany. so this really now i did all that because i've got a new podcast coming out called autocracy america starting september six from the atlantic. but that was by the by everything is a psyop while we're waiting for america to do something about us average people, how do we program our heads, make sure that we're again reading, how do we distinguish or filter what's bad and good or what's true and not true? you know, sometimes, you know, this misinformation is happening in real time. you know, you just get hit by trolls, you're hit by troll farms. you write about a good example of how this happens in real

time, and you can't distinguish, if it's real or not, is the dc blackout hashtag from several years ago. so how do we filter on an everyday level? so we don't get caught up in something that's wrong? i mean, i guess there's a couple of answers there's the kind of deep thought answer which is it's important to understand our national history a little bit, to understand and why these stories, like the stories that you're describing, happen to capture people's imagination and like, why are people so persuaded that the last election was rigged? like where does that come from it doesn't come out of nowhere there's a long history in the united states of people mistrusting elections and mistrusting certain groups of to vote. and so one of the things that i really try to untangle in this book is the history of. various strands in our culture, war and you've mentioned the lavender a couple of times and. that's a really interesting

example because. and so the lavender scare was kind of a i suppose you could say a a subgenre of the house un-american activities work where lgbt government workers were targeted and in for hearings in front of mccarthy and were basically kicked out of their government jobs because it was believed they were immoral, also could be blackmailed. there were a lot of reasons for it, but people's lives were blown up and that was the 1950s that queer people were being targeted as un-american. but that stretched back even further into history, back to the 1930s where the very the category of sex criminal was invented to describe why gay people be allowed to be around children, because allegedly they were behind all of these kidnapings i'm not going to go into a whole the whole criminal history of that. but the point is that this idea

that lgbt people trans might be somehow criminal cells that should be kept away from children, that should be kept out of government jobs like schoolteacher jobs or librarian jobs goes back almost 100 years in the united states. and so when you start seeing rhetoric about how, you know, trans people and their stories are polluting children's minds and they're turning kids trans and they're turning kids gay again, it doesn't come of nowhere. it's groups of people who, as peter was saying, are constituting themselves by buying into narratives about, outgroups about people who aren't like themselves, people who threaten them. and that becomes a way of identifying with each other. it's like, well, we're the people who don't like trans people. and that's how we we know that we're a group. and this is a big part of republican rhetoric right now where you know, there's just a lot of weird, i have to say weird rhetoric around the trans and how there's social contagion

of transgender identity online. and i think that knowing that history helps to undermine it. and we have similar kinds of histories around, you know, the marginalization of black people, marginalization of indigenous people and immigrants, knowing that long history helps us to recognize when those stereotypes pop up again, because you keep seeing the same names being called the same ways that people each other in groups that are attacking marginalized communities. so i think knowing history is one thing and then the other of it, to go back to this about algorithms and not knowing how social media operates and understanding how information is being given to you, we need more for content moderation. we need teams at technology who do what's called trust and safety. and these are groups of people who dedicate their lives to almost being librarians of, social media posts, looking at

the posts that are out there. exam to see if there are harmful rumors as if there's dangerous information. if there's illegal. just trying to be the faces behind the decisions are made at, say, a company like facebook when content gets taken down or, when content gets left up, actually putting in those positions because most of the major platforms including i'll just keep picking on meadow which owns facebook, most companies are now laying off their trust and safety teams that are laying off their content. moderators. and so nothing is being looked at. we just have these spaces is where bots rule propaganda rules and there's no one curating. no one's looking it and keeping people safe in, these public spaces. so we need both those things. we need history, but in the present we need content, we need trust and safety teams, we need beings making decisions, not algorithms. i know many of you probably have questions for pete or natalie, so we have to here these people

have questions short and please keep them questions. and so while we're waiting for people to line up, i do. and you mentioned libraries and because the national book festival is hosted by the library of congress, i do want to read a quote from your op ed celebrating, we need to preserve our libraries and the books they hold partly to figure out who we are and where we come from. but perhaps more precisely pressingly, we need to preserve them as both a rift, a refuge from the culture wars and a template to rebuild a cultural life together when this war is over without them. we may have no way to teach children to share ideas instead of battling each other forever. it's been wonderful. oh, i read libraries were always refuge for me because literally. so when i was around 910, the age when like you start to school by yourself in london. but but you're still small enough to be beaten all the time, and that was very

dangerous to have to cross from. like, you know, the area where my was, where my home was. and there a library on the corner, which was an old church, converted. and, you know, they always see me coming, you know, the kids who that beat me up and steal trainers. stealing train is a big deal then and i had to make it to the library, run the stairs. the library there i was safe because they couldn't get to me. the library is literally my refuge. and one time, one of them followed me in and later i see that kid, eloise, from a kind of very disadvantaged sort of white working, broken down family. but that time i didn't really know him. he just came in and he was just amazed. you could see his face. you sort of fell. and he was like so many books. and then this moment of, all i now i'm probably like now completely making this up. and i think curiosity and then complete panic. he ran out of there like a vampire who'd seen the sunlight. so it's like libraries were

literally my refuge. so i'm down with libraries being refuge. i love that. thank you. all right, let's start with you. such a great lineup at national festival. when i saw i know it's on the schedule, i knew i had come today, so how did you strategize the scope of your book when there's unfortunately so much propaganda and center information, even just u.s. history? well, part of the way i down the scope was to focus just on united states, because i knew that at least i narrowed in on one country. i had only you know, one one strand of multiple histories weave together. and i wound up trying to spend, you know, a good portion of the book talking about military, psychological. and then the other part of the book is about culture war. and so i kind of tried to divide it between the two things, how

did i pick out which things i wanted to talk about? i mean, some of it was i always wanted to talk about wonder woman. so there's a chapter about wonder woman and how she's a propaganda tool for feminism. goodness. so i but i mean, a lot of it was just being guided by the material history and following historical strands through the present. so you. yes, sir. thank you, all three of you for for an amazing discussion on these strategies or endure meaning they haven't changed much over the years except for technology and how they're delivered us. why are we still so at fighting it it or tell us. that as i mean, we're bad many things. no true. but what but what usually mean? there is a pattern, i think not a linear.

whenever there's a new technology that gets introduced, whether it's the printing in the 16th century radio, the start of the 20th century or social media. now there's a moment of incredible hope. and everyone thinks that this tool will deliver perpetual peace. i mean when radio appears, it's a lot the sort of early excitements around facebook, this idea that people will hear each across the world and there will be no more wars because we can communicate now and very quickly. the opposite happens. hitlers, the stalin's, the various evils on social media realize, oh, hold on, there's actually an unregulated space where i can normalize the nastiest things within. and that's that's what that's what they do and then it takes a little bit the democratic forces to to rebalance that so if radio it's the introduction of the bbc in the twenties is a response to polarization and dictators dominating the media you know fdr here using radio good and so

it takes a bit of time. so so i think there's that kind of drama plays out over and over. but there's this narrative turbulence before that equilibrium takes hold. and we're in that turbulence now. hopefully we won't need a, you know, second world war to come to our senses. yes. hi. i was that optimist it? i'm i'm a i'm a public librarian and. and in light everything that you've shared today, how does that end do tuition remain relevant moving forward with everything you talked about? because all really talk your. we'll thank you for your work and your service it it a very tough job right now. one of the things that i talk about in my book and then of course, many other people have

talked about is how libraries are under attack specifically teachers who work with books and schools and, you know, there's no perfect answer. i mean, we have to we do to protect libraries. we do have to make people aware of how important libraries libraries are, community spaces, and they continue to be. and i think part of what need to do is make sure that funders are recognizing libraries are a place for community together. it's not just a place finding books now are places for having events like this you have readings at libraries. you meetings at libraries, people to study at libraries. people go use computers at libraries, find comic books, libraries. they're not out of touch. like i'm always weirded out when people say, like, libraries, like, why would you go there? and it's like, get the latest manga. like, you can get anything at the library. in san francisco where i live, there's a tool library.

you can check tools out so that you can do gardening and you don't have to buy like an expensive lawnmower. you know, they're really model for mutual aid, right they're a model for care, for making tools available for free to your community. and so all i can say is that they are incredibly necessary. they're necessary for community, they're necessary for knowledge. and i really hope that going forward, we can make sure that our federal government and state and local governments understand that. so write to your representatives. i was about to say i want to keep the library open that clip should be played at every city meeting that any public library needs for funding so thank you and so. yes, sir i perhaps one more for peter. i wonder given your background and the topic misinformation, if you would offer some thoughts on putin and the russian efforts at misinformation, how they've

evolved since you were focusing on it earlier in your career and do you is anything about what's going on surprising to you? is it effective it working domestically, internationally what's the state of that situation? so when i wrote read my first, when i read when wrote, got my first book, nothing is true and everything is that was a decade ago and. it was describing what it was like living in russia. but through the lens of propaganda. in the first decade of the 20th century. and as i wrote the book, i found it echoing christopher isherwood's diaries, berlin, which you all know is the movie cabaret. you know, your librarians, you know, isherwood but but, but, you know, most people know is the movie cabaret. and i wrote my book. i was like, oh, there's all these parallels of isherwood. and i was like, no, it's not really going to go full fascist here. mean, this is me leaning on isherwood in as i look for a literary model and. there's no way it'll be so bad. and then i wrote it and it

becomes that bad in russia is now i don't to get into the political science debate of what is a fascist state, but it's a fascist state and and the logic was the same from this kind of exuberance and chaos and unresolved history of sadism, trauma, this cabaret that i described in russia in the early 2000s where where all identities are up for grab to this kind of one single fascistic identity that defines itself through the destruction of others and feeling superior to them right now ukraine. but after it'll be someone else punctuated by grievance and faceless victim narratives. so, so, so that does seem to be something canonical, you know, that repeats over over in these situations. so that's what russia is now in terms of their foreign propaganda you know, they were like the icebreaker, you know, had diplomats who suddenly broke the of diplomacy and started

essentially being trolls at the u.n. now, everyone does it. they created they took idea of foreign state media as in like bbc voice of american says we're going to use it to do crazy conspiracies and hate speech. now the chinese and the iranians are doing it. so they're kind of the icebreaker in the propaganda start using their troll farms internationally. now, even medium sized one to be authoritarian. states have a troll farm. it's like one of the things you do if you kind of want to when, when, when to act big on the global stage. so they've redefined the game and now they're allying with china, venezuela and then really weirdly countries within the eu like hungary for these very tactical in the propaganda space with one essentially to make their own predilection mass murder normal and to to show the world america is dumb that there

are two things that unite all of them and other things they actually compete. so yeah, i mean, they're getting their act together. i hope we are we'll squeeze in one more question before we wrap up. you thank you. thank you. all of you, for being here. it's been a great discussion. listen to the the tools and weapons that you talk in in your books are tools that can be guided by intention and they can be used for good or for bad what are guidelines for us normal people that we can use as we tell stories of hope, which a powerful weapon and what can we do? i mean, this tool, some of these tools can't really be used for good, like a violent threat pretty much never good. i mean, you know, you know, mass murder pretty much never cool, you know, even if it's klingons. we're friends with them now. so i think you know it part it

is the content of the story you tell. you know, it's not just like sort of structure or how you disseminate it. so i think imagining stories, imagining messages that that suggest like negotiating and befriending your neighbors is like really awesome and adventurous, cool and fun. like, you know, making democracy cool, you know, making, making like meetings seem like really exciting like, you know, yeah, like if we can make mass murder sexy fun, you know what? we could actually make, like, a large democratic fun. and i think that's a big part of it. i don't know. what do you think? i think design i mean, these are my tools. you mean psychological tools or design? either you know, i think. i think i think design mean. you're talking about the psychology and the storytelling. think design matters a lot. so so the way our social media is designed is a choice.

there's other designs out there. there's a great project in taiwan called v taiwan. it's kind of the anti twitter. so it's designed to find commonalities in arguments around very difficult issues, find the commonalities and find a common policy. so it's a policy making tool. so so it's designed to to create a better conversation. so no, i think, i think design is very important to this if it's if going to use the metaphor of a public square how is that square designed you know, who gets to stand on a pedestal who's been locked down in the gutter? what are the acoustics? i mean, think i think there's a lot to do there. and i think that's probably, you know, a role for either philanthropy in the us or the public, you know, public funding in to to to make sure that supported. unfortunately i'm getting the wrap up sign here thank you for everyone who's here today. thank you to everyone who's watching on c-span. please see peter and natalie downstairs when they sign their

books. and thanks for being with us for live coverage. the 2024 national book festival in dc, a couple more hours of coverage up next. in about 20 minutes, you'll hear from author marie arana talking. her book, latino land. but in the meantime, we are on our book tv set here in the convention center by viet tan to win. he is pulitzer prize winning author of the sympathizer, which came out in 2016. but his newest book is a memoir, a of two faces. you also it a memorial.

what do you mean by that? peter is such a pleasure to be here with you on c-span tv. well, it's a book that about me, but mostly about my parents. the occasion for writing the memoir was when my mother passed away in 2018. i don't think i would have ever have dared to write a memoir, would have included her life and my father's before she passed away. so the book is a testament to her a memorial, her, and to everything that she lived through, everything that she accomplished in the book. they are referred to as bob marley the sea. and my saying that correctly. ma had a little bit of a rough time in her later life, didn't. she was a very successful. she came out of poverty in a rural in vietnam, became a refugee, made a fortune twice. and then when she came to united states, she and endured all of these travails of refugee life and she became mentally ill. and so it was a very traumatic experience for her and for our family, of course, and certainly for me, watching what had

happened to her visiting her in the mental hospital for the first time, which was a very difficult for me and something that i would put aside and not try to deal with from for many, many decades. it was the asian american psychiatric hospital. psychiatric of the of a larger hospital. and this was the 1980s in san jose. and so it was this very striking to realize that there were so many people of asian descent who were in fact afflicted in some way by mental illness and were most of them refugees. you know, i was i was 17 or 18 years old, and i was completely terrified to go into the psychiatric ward and to see people afflicted as poor people were. i wasn't asking anybody any questions. i was just trying to cope with was happening to my mother. viet thanh nguyen we kind of missed the lead. who what do you mean by faces? well, i grew up in united states. i was born in vietnam but came as a refugee 1975, and i was raised in a very vietnamese household in a vietnamese refugee community. and my parents told me, you are

100% vietnamese. and at the same time, i was constantly being exposed to american culture. so i felt like an american spying these vietnamese people. but when i my parents household, i felt like i was a vietnamese spying on americans. and that sense duality was something that has always stayed me. you write that you got very adept at keeping secrets and silence while home. what does that mean? well, i was raised by very devout vietnamese catholic parents who wanted me to be a good boy, and i was not a good boy. and i was rebelling against being vietnamese and against being catholic and against my parents. but i didn't want to confront them because i knew that they were looking for my best interest. they loved me, but they were very, very strict and didn't want to, you know, offend them for all the sacrifices that they were making for me and my brother, my sister, who we had left behind in vietnam, all the vietnamese relatives in vietnam. so lied. i kept secrets from my parents so that i could live my life and keep them happy at the same time. when you talk in this book, you talk about coming over here.

but that's not a big part of your story. do you have any memories of vietnam? i have only flashes of memory because i came when i was four years of age. and even the memories that i think i had, i rely on them. for example, i remember we were on a boat leading saigon, and on the last day in april 1975, and i remember on a barge and a smaller of refugees trying to come up to us, and i remember sailors shooting at this boat. and so i told my brother, who was seven years older, and he said that never happened. but how does he know he was only ten or 11 years old himself? so the unreliability of memory is one of the things that this memoir explores. what should we know about your parents in vietnam? what do we know about my parents? what should we know about what should we know about my parents in vietnam? that they were very, very young they were born in the 1930s or are very young when they when they had to deal with colonialism, with poverty, with being of a rural background, with having the country divided 1954, they had just gotten married. my father was 21.

my mother was 17, and they became refugees for the first time. what we should know, is that what they went through was incredible, but was also completely typical for hundreds of thousands of vietnamese people who were living through war and colonialism during time. when you talk about being mentally colonized, to whom are you referring? i am referring to both americans and the french. mean, i know very well historically and factually what the french did to vietnam, which was terrible, and what the americans did to vietnam, which in my opinion was terrible, and yet i'm completely seduced by american pop culture by american. i am an american. and when i go to france, i'm completely seduced french culture, even though i understand where french colonialism comes from. so the power of mental colonization is not to be underestimated. and i think it's just as powerful as physical and violent colonization. did your parents become americanized? as i said before, they assured me that we were 100% vietnamese, and yet, 20 years after the end

of the vietnam war, when the united states reestablished relations with vietnam, my parents took that opportunity, go back to vietnam for the first time. and when they back, it was thanksgiving. and over thanksgiving dinner, my father said to me, we're americans now. so i think that was an unusual experience that they had these fixed ideas about what. vietnam was like, but when they finally went back to a changed vietnam, they had to confront how americanized they had actually become. did he say that to you in english or in vietnamese? i'm pretty sure that was in vietnamese, yes. viet tan nguyen who is bruce smith? when i was very i went on a field trip to the monterey language institute, which is the army's post for a training soldiers in different languages. and i had a very poor grasp of vietnamese at that age because i was an american and there was a young american soldier there, red haired, wearing a vietnamese aliya who studied vietnamese. and so he said, we'll translate

your vietnamese name into english. and the english equivalent that he he could come up with was bruce smith. so that's my alter ego. and have you have you changed your name since you were born? when my parents became citizens, when i was around 12 years of age, they actually changed their legally. so my parents became joseph and linda, these people who said they 100% vietnamese and, they offered me the chance to change my name. and i thought about it for quite a and i went through various names in my mind i thought, what if i were named troy? it just didn't right. to me, this person who himself to be american but still knew he was vietnamese in a very fundamental way. so no, i resisted changing my name in. reading this book, it's not written in a typical manner. i mean, you've got it's almost poetic in a sense. is that a fair word to use? i think that's fair. i also think of it as being playful. and what happened to me is that i became a father i have children. they love children's literature. i had to relearn children's

literature through them. after 30 or 40 years away. and what i discovered that children love to play and that there are no rules in children's and that children's authors do whatever they want to do. but adult authors were constrained by all kinds of and rules. and so in this book really wanted to give in to that playfulness and that inner child. well, something that you do with the book is whenever you're referring to the u.s., it's america in capital letters trademark. why do you do that? well, i think because greatest contribution to the world is. this is we, the new world. that's what we represent to the rest of the world, for better and for worse. and we have come to own the name of america. we have to remember that the united states of america is not the only american country out there. there are a lot of people from other american countries will tell you we are a part of america too. but in the global imagination, the united states that owns america. do you feel like an american? do you feel like you're accepted as an american. i think that i am american and

i'm accepted by many americans as american. i don't think i'm accepted as american. everybody in the united states. and i think my relationship to america, united states is a very complex and contradict one just as the united states itself is a complex and contradictory country. we're a country that's given us president obama and president trump. it's not surprise that emerged out of the central of the united states, which is that we're a country founded on democracy and equality and liberty and a country on genocide, colonization and enslavement. and i live in the middle of that contradiction. we're going to put the numbers on the screen. we've got a few minutes left. viet thanh nguyen case, you a question you would like to ask him in 2016. you wrote the sympathizer won the pulitzer, became a series on hbo. how did that change your life? the pulitzer obviously everybody should win a pulitzer is fantastic. it has changed my life for the better in so many ways, but it hasn't me as a writer, i think, because i wrote the sympathizer, i wrote it for myself, and

ironically, because wrote it for myself, it was a story, a vision that that resonated with a lot of other people. and so i've tried remain maintain that conviction that this is where the power of story comes out of. if one is true to one's own vision. what do you mean you wrote it for yourself? i, before the sympathizer, had written a collection of short stories called the refugees, which was published after the sympathizer. i think it's a pretty good book, but it is a book that is in many ways written not just for myself, but for other people, for my parents, for vietnamese, for reviewers, for editors and so on. and so forth. and at the end of that experience, which took me over a decade, i felt that that was enough. now i needed to write not the opinions and estimation of others, but for myself. and i think that's a turning point that a lot of writers have come to. of course, we're seduced by the by what the world wants from us. but in the end, art has to emerge from inner self. viet thanh nguyen is, the sympathizer.

historically factual. is it based on experience or is this come out of here? almost everything that happens in the sympathizer happened in real life and one of the interesting things that that i come across is when people read it or watch the tv series and they're like, hollywood just made that up. but no, this really happened. and of course, what we can as human beings is so incredibly weird that we can't believe that these things actually took place. what does come out of me, however are the emotions within the sympathizer. those are my emotions. i want to read from a man of two faces. to be creative without being critical risks, being a lack of politics is the politics of the dominant literary world. many american writers to certain open seeks books, the open secrets dearest acknowledge its presence. if tell on the open secret, we anger the many who do not.

it called out the open secret of america trademark is that white people founded it on colonization, genocide, slavery, war, and white supremacy, all of which continue shaping the self and the other. i think it is an open it's an open secret by definition is something that we can actually say. so the various words that i've used, i think many americans do know of those words. but have we fully confronted what that means as americans? how we o of our contemporary reality to these things that have happened and these things that have happened are not actually only in the past, but in the present. i think that is part of the open secret of who we are as a people. and there are many americans who totally reject those that i have just used. they completely deny that this is a part of american. the one thing i want to ask about is a lack of politics. is the politics of the dominant american literary world.

a lot of people would say that literary the literary world is very political. i think in some ways, yes. and in some ways no. i think that even interjecting the very of politics into a literary discussion controversial. i've been criticized by by people like george packer and phil clay for taking on this particular stance because there are writers who would say no you have to separate literature from politics. so a certain way american literature is political because course writers are dealing with race and gender, things like that. but to be explicit, oddly political, to foreground that act in the very nature of the writing and your proclamation of yourself as a writer. i think that's still actually pretty controversial. what's day job? my day job. i'm a professor i still teach people. and what you teach tomorrow. on i start teaching my graduate seminar on writing as an other and in the spring teach my undergraduate survey of american war and memory in vietnam.

150 undergraduates, many of whom are southeast asian refugees, their descendants, and many of whom are military veterans, american military veterans or rotc training to go off and serve in the american military. how did you get that gig? because i care about this history and of americans are not unusual in having a habit of forgetting their very contradictory past. so we have fought wars as a country. and most of those wars americans choose not to remember vietnam war happens to be one of those. so i think it's an important act of pedagogy, of democracy to teach class for people such southeast asian refugees and military people. and although i didn't intend it to be the case that courses now a requirement for the rotc at, my university, which is the university of southern california, when did you when your first writing award? i was in the third grade, about eight years of age. and our teacher, you should we

should all write a book and draw it. and i wrote and drew a book called luster the cat, which was about an urban cat stricken with ennui who, runs off to the countryside and falls love with a country cat. and san jose public library decided to give a book award for luster the cat. and i'm forever grateful the san jose public library for encouraging me and setting me on the path to more than 30 years of misery in trying to become a writer. it was a role of maxine hong kingston. your life. i went to berkeley at 19 years of age, a very passionate person who wanted to be a writer. i took maxine kingston's writing seminar. she was one of the most famous writers in the country at the time. i was 19 years old. what did i care? in a class of 14 students, i would come in and every day i would sit this far away from maxine kingston. and every day i would fall asleep. and at the end of the semester, she wrote me a note and she said, you seem to be very alien. you should make use of our universities excellent

counseling services. and of course i didn't do that. i became a writer instead. did she encourage your writing, though, at some point she asked questions. oh, absolute i mean, i think as a as a writer and as a professor as a teacher, i'm so encouraged by looking back upon my failure as a student. and upon maxine's taking me seriously, even though i fell asleep in her class every day. what she told me in that letter was you need to ask questions. here it is. you come into my class, you don't ask anybody questions, you fall asleep. but to be a writer, you have to be awake. you have to be engaged. you have to ask questions. you have to be inquisitor. and it took me decades and decades to that lesson. and so as a professor and as a teacher, i hope that when i look at my class and i see people falling asleep, i think maybe they're absorbing something. and 20 or 30 years later they'll realize they actually took away something from my class. you spend a bit of time in your new memoir, a man of two faces

being of miss saigon, the that keeps coming back in in the book, what? when i was a student at u.c. berkeley, miss saigon came out and wrote an op ed criticizing it for telling a very stereotypical racist, sexist story about americans in vietnam and vietnamese people and course casting a white man in the role of a eurasian character. and then a few years ago, i wrote an op ed for the new york times, exactly the same thing when saigon was really revitalized and put back on the road again. and to me, it just demonstrated that, in fact what we're confronting as asian-americans, asians, as vietnamese people, in terms of the racist and sexist projections onto us has been enduring and is still a reality for today. that's very much what so much of my work responds, including the sympathizer and the tv adaptation. let's take a call. let's hear from robert in

arkansas. robert, good afternoon. you're with author on the win. thank you. what an honor? i'm a service from boone county, arkansas which would define me as a hillbilly. and i appreciate so much of this because i understand, too, had parents that were very strict, very, very loving and great parents. but i lived two lives and at some you break out into the life that you want to be in. the point i want to make. what we're looking is opportunity, and it appears that opportune beauty has come to you. but along with that comes personal ambition and appreciate so much your statements, your coming together. and you think and as we think of the country as a puzzle, i think you're a tremendous piece in this puzzle of what the country really is. thank you very much. thank you so much, robert that

really means a lot to me. you know, as a writer we put our books out in the world, we put our words out into the world. we never know who we're going to to find who they're going to contact. so delighted that i i've met you through my books. a reader in an arkansas when i was young and growing up, i went to the santa state public library. i read as much as i could. that library, none of those books think were written specifically for me, a young vietnamese refugee. and yet those books connected with me. so i totally understand your experience as a reader. text message from laura in virginia is the sympathizer a tv show true to the book? i think the sympathizer is the tv show actually pretty true to the book? and the reason why? because we were very careful in our collaborators for that tv show, starting with lee fishman, the producer who is israeli canadian, don mckellar, the head writer who is a white canadian. park chan wook, who is a korean. and i think the most important common denominator besides their esthetic visions, which really vibed with mine, is that none of them are americans.

and i think americans are so up hung up on their version of the vietnam war that it's really hard for americans to get out of that point of view and having not who have experience american power come in and help me collaborate on the making of that series that was so crucial. vietnam to win is the author, the sympathizer, which won the pulitzer in 2016, became an hbo series 2024. but he is the author of this book a man of two faces. it's his memoir from, 2023. we appreciate spending a few minutes with us here at the national festival. peter thanks for having me on c-span yet again. our continuing of the national book festival is now with maria rana. latino land is the name. her book.

good afternoon. when i started this. and welcome to the 24th annual library of congress national book festival, a place where books build us up. i am beatriz haspel, head of the logistics, the library of congress national library services for the brain and print, the disabled. it a pleasure to welcome all of you here today at this time. we ask you that you turn off or silence your electronic devices and cell phones. if you need to leave the premises, the presentation, the doors to the right is the exit. and this is also the nearest restrooms. we also want to notify you that this event will be recorded and your entry and presence at this program constitute your consent to be filmed or otherwise recorded. there will be time for questions near the end of this. so the microphones are and you

can come to the front. and now let's get our program because we are joined this afternoon noon by maria elena, a prize winning author and literary critic and literary director of the library of congress. yes. among her numerous books are the national book award finalist, american chica. the novels cellophane and limon knights, the biography bolivar, american liberator and a sweeping history of latin america. silver sword and stone. her new book is titled latino land a portrait of america's largest and least understood minority. she is in conversation with maria pena, a former journalist

for outlets such as univision daily mundo and nbc latino others. she's a public public relations specialist at the library of congress. and i hope you enjoy the festival. welcome them to our stage. so thanks to everyone here. thank you for joining us. i hope you get a lot out of this conversation because it will be an engaging conversation. this is the book that we're to be talking about. is a great overview of the history of latinos in the u.s. way before it was a country. there are challenges. their hopes for the future how we contribute to the u.s. it's very packed with a lot of information. marie did a thorough research. she interviewed over 237 people

across all parts of the latino community. so it's a very engaging book. i recommend it. i do have a housekeeping item here. the book is for sale in the expo floor, and she will be signing it at 515 after this panel is over. so it's a timely topic, of course, because we are 72 days away from election day. very timely topic. and immigration, of course, for for better or for worse. it is. and immigration is the electoral. so i encourage you to read it. there's a lot to unpack so i wanted to ask you, first of all, what inspired you to write this book. thank you, maria. and first of all, i want to thank the library of congress for holding festival, which is an incredible tribute. thank you to you for coming on

this beautiful day. and thank you to beatriz for introducing our santa maria, who is a sister latina from nicaragua and i'm so proud and to be in her company for this conversation. what prompted me to write this book. this has been a long journey for me. i have been in the books business for a long time. i was a journalist at the washington post at point along the way. this population was growing in my lifetime. it has grown from two and a half million to 64 million people. and thing for me to be watching along all along and yet feeling all the way that we invisible in some that we always were explaining ourselves in some way. when i worked for book publishing company was one of

the biggest publishers. simon schuster. i was never asked about the world of latino. whenever i brought it up at an editorial meeting, i was told the latinos read, so let's don't bring me your ideas about latinos. bring me your ideas about everything. and i got to the washington post, and they were curious. they were curious because there weren't that many. i was one of the very few latinos on staff at the post. and i offered to be sent out, even though my job was books to be sent out to talk to and talk to them in spanish and bring to the paper stories about them, because that was growing. and in washington in the area and the post being a good journalistic institute, i was curious about them. so i began at that. i began to write books, every aspect of latino, starting with myself.

my first book was a memoir because i was suddenly made aware of that little girl, ten years old, who arrived in country. where did that little girl go? because had been harassing her ever since. so i wrote american chica, to remind myself of who that was. that was 24 years ago. i presented book at the very first national book festival here 24 years ago. yes. and so every other book been a chapter of sorts. i two novels, one a very broad, epic novel set in the amazon jungle. another a very short, sharp love set in lima. that was lima nights. and then i began to think, well, how can i tell the story of these people, the history of

these people and, where we come from, where we've been, who we are. and i it was kind of a parlor game that i played with myself who would tell larger story. and i came to simon bolivar because his family had been in the for 300 years before he decided to mount the for independence of of six republics. and he had traveled i mean, he traveled 75,000 miles up and down the hemisphere on horseback to prosecute that revolution. so i thought that would be the way to put human terms where we're from and where where we come from. and then i went from there to dilating the story. the whole of latin america, silver sword in stone, which was really a portrait of the region

as was through history and why those things have not changed. and that you can recognize history in the population that lives today in latin america. and then, of course, it was that that population is here. we're here. we are 64 million that started with two and a half million when it started. when i first arrived and it was two and a half million, that population was largely mexican, largely central american. and who had been here for generations. and now there was this wave that happened during my lifetime and who we and we were by now the second largest spanish speaking nation in the world. and so, you know, i don't know to go after latin on that because i this is this is the

broadest subject. well, you know, it was massive undertaking. i mean, i could tell that you spent so time researching it, you know, you left no stone unturned because there's so much data in there. i actually saw census report, an update a few weeks ago. that's actually 65 million hispanics now close to 20% of the population latino land. why did you come up with that title? how did you come up with that title? this is such a latino story. just a few months ago, uh, well, it was actually my last birthday, which was in and didn't have a title. i had no title. i was through every silly assembly of words you can imagine. and my editor kept saying, no, no, no, my publicist saying no. my agent said no. and i was desperate.

and i got a call from. my very dear, wonderful friend sandra cisneros, who was here today and the mother of. an sandra says, i'm going to be in washington, d.c. i know it's your birthday. let's have lunch, your birthday. so on my birthday last september, i went to lunch with sandra. we started an indian restaurant. fabulous. and she said, you look so depressed. what's going on? you? and i said, well, you know, of all tummy troubles, but also i don't have a title for my book. and, um, she said, here's what you do. here is what you do. you go home. spend the rest of the day, have a very happy got into your pajamas, go bed, turn off the light, look up and think about

the person that you love. absolute me without limits and you concentrate on that image. it can be also a thing that you. it doesn't have to be a person. but if it's a person better. so i did that, got in my pajamas, i got into bed, i off the light had been a very nice birthday thank you, except for this problem that i had and looked up. and i think about the person that i, without any unconditional love. and then i go to sleep and i wake up in the morning. latino land is in my head. that's part of the story. that's only part of story. so i call up sandra immediately and i say, i have a latino man. and she said, that's that's it.

that's it. that's it. i call it my editor. that's it. that's it. publicist. agent. they all say that is the title. wonderful okay, great. a few months later. my editor calls and says you have to come new york because we have to have a conversation. and i said, okay. so i came to new york. it's not too far. washington, d.c., four and a half hours. and i'm sitting with him at lunch. and bob says, oh, here's what i have to tell you. we're speeding up the publication. you're going to have two days where the pages are going to have to two days with the prose. you're going to have three days with this. and you're going to have to do everything very quickly because we're speeding up the publication because it's election year. so i said, that's fine. and so i said, when? when was one date? and he says, february 20th. and i almost fell off my chair. that is the birthday of my father. and that is the person that i thought of when i looked up.

so gave me the title. and as i say that's a total latino broke the just wonderful thank you so much it's such an intimate you know it all my guests gets me teary eyed because a lot of us were probably lucky to have beautiful fathers that in our lives. but thank you so much for sharing that story. so, you know, you talk about latino land, a country unto itself, almost that if it were a country, we would be the fifth largest economy, the world. that's how powerful we are, right, with our purchasing power and all of that. but you said that we are a people with no name. explain what you meant by that. we've been given all these names. we've never really announced a name for ourselves. i remember coming the age of ten

to some individuals where there were no hispanics at all except for my family that i could see. and i remember being called a mexican and that was fine with me. but i. so i would say, well, i'm actually, i've never met a mexican. and people would say, that's okay, you're you see. and so, you know, from then on then nixon was in the white house. he needed to be reelected. he hadn't had a very good turnout from among and his in the first go round. and he wondered why, you know why. because i'm from california, he said, i'm from california. i'm not california. but my father was a grocer. i worked with latinos. i, you know, piled fruit. their gardens in there and vegetables from their fields

into my father's truck. i worked them. i know them. why didn't they vote for me? and big numbers. and so he was one president nixon was the one who established hispanic month hispanic heritage, who gave us really the name of hispanic, who insisted then because he brought hispanics to his first white house and said, what do i need to do? and and the hispanic advisor said, you need to have hispanic generals, you need to have hispanic bishops, you need to have hispanics, the white house and nixon. so this is you know, this wonderful way that we were given the name hispanics. then we became latinos, and we became latinos, which is really not a great name for us, because that was imposed really by napoleon of all people. when napoleon had his eye on

mexico and on taken really moving into the hemisphere in a very large he ap ode to hispanics to south americans to the latin america of the world by saying you know we are we are latin. you're like us you're like french. you're like, you know, we're all the same thing. we come from latin blood. and so the word became in latin america came from that time. so that was an imposition as well. and now, of course, have the variations, which are latin. very few of us use term latin x, but it's very much the academy and people prefer it because it's gender equal. and now we have latin in which is which is another variety of of of latino latin that's latin because it is a vowel at the end we like it.

i mean don't us. right. so there is a nice at the end and now it's latin. so these are all names that been imposed on us by by nixon, by napoleon, by the know academic word, by the us census and. so we in a certain way, a people who have never a name for them, for ourselves. most of us say they got on wind seneca one american, a peruvian, a mexican american. most of us identify ourselves that way. i find that was some one of the things that i found striking in the book because it was surprising to me to know that nixon was the one that that started courting the hispanic way back then. and it's been really interesting because we're so diverse. you talk about multiplicity and and like the complexity the hispanic community because we're from everywhere and we're now everywhere in the u.s. and so

being so distinct yet we find a way to forge unity. so i was wondering, do you think or to the public in general, why is it important to understand the largest minority in the u.s. this point? first of all, because we have been invisible for so long. second of all, because we are so product native, this was the one thing that absolutely thrilled me and impressed me and inspired me. and writing this book, there are, as maria has said, you know, 237 people. i to at every level of society of of the latino world, people from, menial workers on the street, construction people. i would stop talk to people who are grape pickers who started their lives as as picking peaches in california who then became the greatest one of the

greatest neurosurgeons we have in this country. and the the importance of this popular nation, the the story of the advancement, the dedication the work ethic, all of that that is so lost, think. and in the conversation because people think of us, first of all, as being poor, as being a burden on society. we are not a burden on the society. we are without the gdp that mentioned we i mean, we produce. $3.5 trillion for the economy it is an astonishing amount. we have the the greatest percentage, the growth of small businesses this country is in latino hands. this is an enormous productive engine for this country. and it is to me it has been inspiration to see how the the

generations move because you can start as a menial worker. but can have children who go to college you can have children grandchildren who become professors in their fields. and you see the story all the time. it is a tremendously mobile population. and i think that the what inspires me most to write about this book is the invisibility. why do we have to explain ourselves all the time? why do we have to say here we count and for a long time i think it has been the reason why it getting people to vote, getting latinos to vote was a project because people felt, well, nobody cares about me, nobody cares about my children, nobody about my life.

this is a tremendous population that needs to be invested in by this country, appreciated by this country. that's my whole reason for my whole mission right now and then and to get this and, if i may say one more thing, to get this in the schoolrooms, because latino schoolchildren don't know the pride that they could have, you know, hearing hearing sandra cisneros just morning or just earlier talking about her life and the shame that she felt as a child, which heartbreaking because this is this is a people who have been here since the american revolution, contributions have been extraordinary. schoolchildren need to know their own history. and i think is my largest project. and i think that's an important point to make. that was one of the questions that kept coming to me as i read the book. you know, we remain invisible little understood, despite the

fact that we are by 2060, we're going to be a third of the population. one out of every three americans will be of latino origin. and so my question to you would what role do teach and school districts have or can have in making sure that latinos do not remain invisible? well, the biggest i think the biggest issue here is that we are part of the american story. and if you don't know as a latino and a lot of people don't know that certainly the don't know that we have been, first of all, on this territory that is the united states since, the 1500s. and before that because our indigenous we have a lot of indigenous blood. i have a great majority of my of my is indigenous. so this is a population that has here for millennia.

and then you have of course the the spanish presence that was here from the coming from mexico, the, the spanish population came up in what was it, 1501 15th 32 was when of course mexico was, was um was invaded really by um, by cortez and so the mexican population that began to come up was in, uh, i think it was 1601 was the, the, the expedition that came up and was the first spanish rejection. and a lot of those people came up and the population of new mexico, arizona, for instance is filled with generations that have been here since that time. linda chavez, who worked i write about her, who worked in the reagan white house, was the first hispanic to to work in the white house. she came from a family that that

came up with the expedition 61. so this is a presence that has been here a very long time. and it is the, uh, the issue of history that is not told in the classrooms for instance, the george washington himself said that he could not have won the revolutionary war had it not been for the spaniards and the spanish help that up the mississippi river when the english blockade had taken over the coast of the the the only way that the ammunition could come up for the patriots, for the rebels was through ships in spanish hands and galveston is named after goddess galvez, who was the commander at the time. and louisiana, who allowed this to happen and was a huge help. starting from the american

revolution, we have a history here. latinos fought in the civil war. great heroics. in fact, do you remember you probably were taught this in in your history class. -- the torpedoes full speed ahead. um, and who was that? that was. that was on that was a latino that. was a an admiral is known whose statue stands in four blocks from the white house. and you go and you see him there and you see his in the army navy club. but nobody tells you that this admiral was latino. his father had fought the revolutionary war. so you have all of this history and and a huge presence of from then on, all the way through the world, all the way through through the vietnam war, through

the korean war. great heroics, really, by the latino population. but this isn't this isn't learned. and i think, yeah and i also think there's also individual responsibility, right? so to reach out to your to, you know, share stories, one, you you you bring up a lot of important issues in the book. one of them being that we continue to be underrepresented in a lot of segments of society. there's no equity. and so, of course, you have a lot of individual success stories and trailblazers. but as a collective there's still a lot a lot of you know room to grow and, a lot, you know, further to go. so what is it going to take for latinas to stop counting the first, the first this the first that in a lot our families, we are the first, this the first that. but we want to get to a point

where we no longer have a need to talk about that. so what do you think it's going to take to go beyond the success story? i think it's going to take a lot of of, um, for first of all, political. there's no question about, um, the. joaquin castro, who is a representative texas is going around all the time speaking to the media a corporations through hollywood to book publishers to magazine publishers, to journalists and saying, you know, why are we not more present in this story? and aren't there more latinos on on on board corporate boards in this country right now? we are 1 to 2% on boards, corporations in this country, which is almost ridiculous because we were saying on same breath, this is the the fastest growing small businesses of the country are owned by latinos so

that it takes political power. it takes a first of all, it takes political power. where does that come from? comes from education. it comes being aware of who the population is and where it has. and you're you're right. there's a lot of talk about, you know the people to go to the college the first people to get on the board, the first hispanic to be on the editorial staff of the washington. i'm sure that was same for you. your journalistic career. but there are there and there happen this is a population that is little, little year by year. obviously, we've grown from two and a half million to 65 million in my lifetime. we are also going to college going to ivy league schools, becoming doctors, becoming people who you hopefully will see more and more the media. but that takes work and that takes people being more aware of the population and that takes

coming out of the invisibility that i'm talking. so one quick question before we move on to our section for a q&a, because i know a lot of you will have questions. unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time for that. but a quick question. you know, immigrants like myself, like many in the room here, have always this tension between assimilation and maintaining cultural identity. what is the case for u.s. born hispanics in terms of the challenge of keeping that cultural identity? huge challenge. challenge because there is such a thing as cultural attrition. it's not nothing new. it happened to the german-americans, it happened to the irish americans, happens to the swedish. we all blend eventually with latinos it's different because are an ethnicity that every racial mix in the book we are i mean and i have done my dna and. i have every racial down on me. i have black, african, i have indigenous, i have asian and i

have caucasian. so, you know, are the biggest mix. we look like a variety unto ourselves. we are diversity writ large. just as a population and so the attrition that comes with a driven american or a swedish american or a danish american is not going to be the same as for us because there is a racial component to our presence and a racial component, frankly, to the way that we are were kept out and. it's been not not too, too long ago we were kept out of in marriage that we were kept of bathrooms, etc. there were signs just as recently as the sixties when i arrived that that said, no, no, mexicans, no dogs. and so that would incline one to

not be associated with latinos. i think that that's the cultural attrition is one thing. another thing that we're an ethnicity that most intermarried i mean, pew research has done all this incredible work. i'm so grateful to them to to, you know. absolutely. pass the population that we are the population that most intermarry which is to say what that, you know, maybe in a household the two parents don't speak english are, don't speak spanish. excuse me. and also, you have to say that you and i, maria, we were born abroad. the great majority of were born here. 70 70% of hispanics were born here. so you have this population of, you know, about 80% that speak

english fluently. and only a very small percentage that don't speak it fluently or don't speak it at all. so you have a little by little generations fall off. i have a daughter in law who is mexican, mexican-american, 100% who whose family is of those who has been since the 1600s. and she doesn't speak spanish and she's not teaching her spanish. so little by little we become more, um, more americanized, uh, a lot of us managed to and this is certainly true for my daughter in law, managed to keep hold of that culture, even though the language may be. so i'm going to we only have 10 minutes. i'm fortunate so i think that's going to give us enough maybe a couple of questions, unfortunately. so you're welcome to come up and ask marie a question.

hi there. thank you so much for and talking to us something that you mentioned and that you did with your book on simon bolivar. what's create this massive cultural like work for the people who like the hispanics and every like who live in the u.s. in english, which is something that doesn't really exist like like, for instance, like, like me, i was born in venezuela and. you know, i grew up, you know, simon bolivar and all these people. and since i was born there, i move here when i was 14 or so. but i have learned the history. i had learned all these things, but like for like my cousin's friends, like they were of, like, born here. and you see that, you know, like, oh, like i'm from there. but i don't really know the history. and then you sort of get that sense of like, they like, they feel weird about this sort of thing and you sort of need this work of of media movies and books in english or in spanish. but for these people who live in the u.s. so, i'm curious, what

advice would you give for you, someone like me, who just would like be part of that creation of work for these people a new way that it's not necessarily like victimizing and sort of like, okay, here's a history. how do we actually go about? and you sort of feel good and but also be part of the u.s. absolutely. thank so much for that question. that's such an important and so important but you want to be part of that. you know the the the the bringing of the culture here to make it part of the american it is part of the american story. i mean, it is the media doesn't tell us. so hollywood certainly doesn't tell us so as you know, just within the last i think five, maybe ten years, we are beginning to see hispanics as we truly are. before, we were villains know or we were the lazy ones sitting under the tree. but the this work which needs to

be done by hispanics themselves, latinos like you, who are aware of culture before, who an appreciation for the same unbelievers of the world that um gave this hemisphere so much of its history to to bring it here to to serve not only as but as people who work in the media. we don't enough of you in the media. we don't have of you in hollywood. we don't have enough you in the classroom. we don't have enough of you teaching latino children like the child that you used to be. and i think that that that a huge project hand and that needs to be undertaken by all of us who care about it. thank thank you. thank you. and please to keep your questions short because we running out of time and. they're very strict up there. so question is next.

hello. as the hispanic community is continuing to grow, how beyond the language? the language is such a huge factor of preserving our culture and to the next generation. what are other ways that you recommend that we preserve our culture, but also this as embracing our american culture, but also our latino culture together for future to come? i would say thank you for that question. that's a lovely question our culture, our of family, our culture our work ethic are, culture of of togetherness i mean, the food among lacombe that they made us the the the food the the our sense community all of these things that are so important to us and that are something that we can we offer and that we give to the larger

population we are in so many ways a spark that's yet to take flame and and i and i wish more than anything for that flame of humor, courage, resilience, work to really be spread into the larger american sphere. and i think that people like us who care about these things, we care about family, who care about work, we care about sticking it and making better generations. us. it's it is a great contribution to country. and i think that we need keep it alive. thank you for the question. thank you your next and probably you're probably the last question i'm sorry so we have i was very curious about how your book looks into the impact of media and cultural. where i'm getting at is i read

about something called the migrant capsule effect, where migrant community comes to the and in that in a lot of ways that community that house hold they they maintain like a snapshot their culture from them from the home country. now for me as a second generation in mexicano as a millennial i feel that there's like this rapid pace of change within even my community. and i'm curious how social media has really that. you know, again, a millennial, i've been able to connect with other latinos, other colleges in other and even in other countries now. what role is social media playing in accelerating that pace of change within our culture? it has been amazing you for that question. it has been an amazing effect because. when i look back at father and my mother's life, they were writing letters and it was taking months and the cultural

so far away that now it's immediate. i mean, you can get on whatsapp, can get you can call your family in mexico and i can call my family and in lima and i and you can be in touch in a way that you weren't before. and you can you keep those connections. and we do mean we we send money back we we keep the families connections alive. i think social media has been an enormous effect on our being able to the culture in the ways that my parents generation could not. so this is a very important part of our culture and we have to develop that even more. thank you. thank you. your next hi, this is my own theory, but i've read so many books like che by jon anderson and a beautiful book, a cuba, an american story by ana farrar and the history of the united

states. yeah, we only have a few minutes, so. yeah. okay so my my thing is, i think of the problem with invisibility. people not knowing latinos is because our people don't know the history of the u.s. in so many countries how much we've undermined democracy, so many countries and so i think that's a part of why it's been harder for latinos to adapt. that's a very good point. that is a very good point. and i'll be very, very brief in answering it. the reason why we have had this wave of immigration has in many, many ways been connected to the american hand in latin america. and i mean, a hand that has not been particularly contributing. it has. thank you for that question. yeah. so on fortunately, we are going to have to wrap it up. i want to give you the last word, but before do that, i strongly recommend that you buy

and read the book. i think it should be required reading in the classroom. last for you, maria, and thank you for coming. i just want to thank you also for and for being and being willing to listen to this extraordinary story that we're going to hear a lot more about. so thank you. for her. uh uh, handwritten or her her, her, her, uh.

and earlier today at the national book festival. book tv sat down with author laura beres to, talk about her book, orwell's ghosts. here's that interview. joining us now on book tv, it's american university history professor laura beres, author of the new book orwell's ghosts wisdom and warnings for the 21st century. laura beres, what does it mean for something to be orwellian? well, i think orwellian is. one of those words that is used and almost more commonly than else. i mean, when we talk about orwellian it's usually both in the sense of kind of a totalizing world of misinformation of social control, of thought policing, to use a term that orwell coined and propaganda. and, you know, i heard dnc described in a right wing newspaper the other day as orwellian kamala