break basically is to give me a break school which says there is no history without personal interpretation because guess what, history is in the record of everyone everyone has done since the first caveman came grunting having completed his last land on the walls or something. history is above all ordering in terms of significant about what counts and what does not count and win it addresses itself to big questions. who knows, we have now got a bottle of wine feeling. [laughter] who knows, in the first sentence which you have all read, class, he says -- he describes himself as being obliged of his story

and what does his story amine, actually? don't of the speakers to this, what does his -- historia mean? it doesn't mean story, actually it would be wonderful for storytellers -- it doesn't really mean story. ..

. >> i have to tell you, one of the problems of the university now in the united states is that academics are really all about each other. professors are too much interest the business of collective self-reproduction, producing kind of countless mini-mes, who then go on to give the right kind of paper, the right con of conference to get the right kind of job, and of the many thing we can't afford, hummers, we can't afford that higher instruction. but short life. just write cooking. but plum gave me my first review. i remember it very well in 196 5 an undergreatwall. a book about the battle of waterloo. a terrific book and for the

saturday evening post, that's how old i am, everybody. and i got five dollars for it and it was fortune and i framed the check, and it was the kind of my hippocratic oath. it solved the problem about green eye shadow journalism or live the life of a scholar. they're not mutually depleting. they are necessarily self-nourishing. you right for the public, you do scholarship, that you may write for the public, and you write for the public as a friend and companion but above all as an authority with impeccable integrity of research and primary sources. so you want to say it's a good thing, boys, make up already, bishop, thomas carlisle, enough already. so, i have been lucky enough to do that, and the american future was born in some sense of this complicated marriage between on the road journalism and

reflecting back as it was said, we seem to have run out of time but that's okay because you can read the book. these four subjects, war and immigration and religion and plenty, and the reason i -- none of us quite saw the meltdown in the magnitude with which it happened, but -- and i plead guilty to that as i was going to make a fifth film and there would have one a fifth chapter called american money but actually the bbc ran out of its own money, and is unfortunately true. we are you making a film about morals and money, which is the story of the 1907 crash. i thought -- i still do think that actually when and if as we hope the present government gets us -- we get ourselves -- not the government getting us through. it is part of the most admirable part of the project does seem to

be about the restoration of america as a sense of mutual obligation, and the miracle of it was, i have to say, i think of that election campaign, was that he said something very wise at the exception speech in denver. he said you can always make big elections small. he said, it's been trifled it worked. what he meant what lee atwater. the proven success, karl rove in 2004, was that it's all very well throughout the great issues affecting america, the deep structural problems in all the fields i talked about, but you know, americans actually wont politics to be a branch of entertainment tonight. and enough already with the high debates. don't need that. americans are sort of -- it's a very, very pattronnizing view for roger ailes, the atwater, ed

rollins, karl rove view. it's spin and, work did it come gloriously unstuck in the months of our travail, and it was obama -- it was -- it was specially obama that, guess what, america did want to hear about the things that mattered to the life and death of the republic. 2005 and 2006 sealed that possibility or at least i think gave obama the audacity to actually try and, hey, sentences, something which hasn't happened for a while. [applause] >> and those of us going around the country, i wasn't just the gradual sense in which we had all been sold a bill of goods about the weapons of mass destruction the relationship between the iraq war and 9/11 or the nonrelationship, but also

katrina. i remember giving a lecture in norman, oklahoma, a wonderful place, and oklahoma city, too but not somewhere normally on the democratic side of the column, and i remember our driver in iowa, i was very struck by it. in not long after -- must have been towards christmas 2005, not long after katrina, and someone from a military family described his stomach being turned. the wasn't the kind of you're doing a heck of a job browny moment. he said it was the flyover. he said i don't expect our government do much. i agree with reagan that the government can sometimes be the problem but i do expect them to get the bodies out of the mud. we all want as americans our government to be decent and we want it to work, and i think the sort of sense of alienation from the idea of governments, you

know, with all so deafened by the relentless rantses of the right week talk shows where any kind of public service is a betrayal of our credentialed that we forgot is there was somebody noble about the elementary obligations of public service. and that i think actually taking a huge risk was what obama gambled on in his campaign and is gambling, the sense of restored mutuality in trouble. if it weren't for government we would be in an even deeper hope than he actually are but it seems to be something that was lying out in american history. whenever you looked it was lying in watts and what lincoln had to say and what roosevelt had to sea and what you read about the churches in the 19-inch century

that produced the most important educational programs for the people through the long miserable years of jim crow but there was lying richly in american tradition a sense of not having to apologize for decent government. and there's no guarantee we're going to get it, but at least the young, my children's generation of poking heir head -- their heads before the public service. my daughter's husband, one of many -- i told the story of a man who gave up corporate law to go into the office of management and budget in the government, which is either the worst job in the world or the best job in the worked but in the case have a sense of doing something again for the country, many, maybe millions of americans felt i think every 9/11 that there was a real opportunity for the president to actually stir and

mobilize the altruism which we have seen it install any church bake sale or pta, out there with an extraordinarily tough, impast passioned sense of what it means to be part of an american community. so it was an extraordinarily bet that obama doing and he won the bet, i think, appealingly because he was prepared to embrace the power of language. part of the at atwater rove assumption, which assumed that americans were turned off by politics, and turned out 70 million people watch the first debate. that they were r were ready to led into a different language, and obama came with them on an extraordinary movement. the language of our grandchildren, the language of the web, which circumnavigated around the old tried and true campaign machinery of spin, and then on the other hand the brand

new, contemporary, and mobilizes $10 as a time a staggering amount of money for the campaign, and on the other hand what obama brought back into american public life was the duty of public rhetoric. you all know within the 19th 19th century you had to pass exams in rhetoric to get through high school in many states and college. i gave an address at harvard and it was called the fate of eloquence in the age of ozzie osborne. [laughter] >> but there were millions of little areas over america. lincoln made himself one of them, of course, and you would say that the power, not just the sort of ornamental beauty of fine speaking, but the ability to actually be persuasive as a

speaker seemed to be absolutely sort of discounted in the world of campaign spin and takedown mutual character assist nation, but obama delivered that. i mean, here the most gracious speech was in the midst of jeremiah wright. and i thought that morning we were filming a monticello, actually, when he made the speech and when i heard it i thought he is going down in flames. it's hilary -- hillary will be the nominee because this was the act of an most deadon, frontal candor, explaining to america the roots of black rage in the church forms they took as well as eluding to white rage, and america took it -- it was a credit to the sophistication of the electorate, really, its willingness to face something fresh to actually face truth

even if they're tough about american history, but instead of doing him a irreverse able harm it did him an -- immediately an enormous amount of good even though he had to distance himself further from jeremiah write, -- wright, who would not leave well enough lone and shut up at that point. so i think we have a moment in which the american future and the american past are this extraordinary already tike two wires in a kind of electrical connection. we can't use history really as a predictor of what will happen next but you do know that, you know, whether it's wonderful books about roosevelt0s the depression or about the end of the american century and where we go from here in our relationship with china and so on. one does know that the richly

informed bed of understanding which history gives us about america is something we absolutely need as we go on into a difficult future. the cicero who said, i regret to say practitioner jar rised a bit by jefferson and limp -- lincoln, they know not whence they came, and whatever we can say about the 44th president, that's not a problem for him and win the new campaign to abolish social studies a whole new life of american history lies before us. we know what is in store for the american future. not the end of one particular story but the beginning of a new and i'm confident to say, spirited and noble chapter. thanks. [applause]

>> thank you. [applause] >> thank you. >> i think most of you now how this works. please raise your hand. we will get a microphone to you who would like to start us off? a gentlemen at the back, andy. >> all the way in the back there. >> would you share a few of your thoughts about the outcome that you see with regard to the tension with regard to building the economy and protecting the

environment. >> um, a small subject you asked me about. [laughter] >> this is going to be tough. the chapter called american plenty is about america's expectations, really, and again it's right to say this in the city of franklin, of brotherly love. if you have enough resourcefulness and hard work, then the providentially granted expanse of the american continent rich in natural materials with always provide for abundance, but of course we know that even if sarah palin had a witch and we drill, baby, drill, the whole of alaska, maybe we get 18 months more of oil for our reserves. so i think it wasn't just the -- at least one hopes it wasn't just the five dollar a gallon gas crisis of last summer and autumn which made americans wean

them off suvs and seal the doom of some redundant departments of detroit and michigan, but the sort of general, it's up to the educator in chief in the white house, he has certainly been out there doing, just yesterday in fact actually in laying down tougher rules about emission. it's necessary to educate the public that really that our economic future in some sense depends how much short-term pain -- and there will be an awful lot of pain especially in the collapse of the automobile industry in transitioning to a greener future for us all. we have no choice. i mean, it's extraordinarily ironic -- doesn't quite answer your question. i was in shanghai and you would think the chinese would be in gloat mode really. our creditor, once our debtor, saying turn in your bonds, the bottom falls out of what is left of the american economy but

actually they're not. they're not at all. and they are instead actually not wanting the american model to fail, but on the other hand what they don't like is the message that we really have to at least deliver to ourselves, shanghai -- and i have been in some polluted plays, shanghai takes the cake. it is staggeringly temperature -- turbid with the most emphysema ridden place in the world, raw,en contained discharge of pollutants and they're bringing tragic problems to themselves. i'm not saying that america that has to look at china and gloat. this is one of the expectations out of easy abundance into other times where we are stewards of our own resources. this, ties is an american tradition. one of the chapters in the book,

called american plenty, is about water, and water is going to be an absolutely incredibly major problem for the west in particular. lake mead is running at 50% of capacity. i'm not sure what the snow melt shortfall is this year but i think it was projected to be dire. and when we are filming, when i was researching the book, i went to the place become the most improbable place as a model of environmental stewardship, which is las vegas. one of the most impressive people i ever met in public life is a woman named pat who runs the water authority. the lag afternoons -- lagoons are recycled water. las vegas pays citizens to take

up sod and lawn. you can see trucks driving off people's lawns and backyards and replace them with suck ulent cactus and they plane about runoff in albuquerque and phoenix and los angeles as being wasteful and compounding and intensely irrigated crops like alfalfa. you wouldn't need as much if you didn't do industrial cattle raising. and another of our campaigns which we're about to start everybody -- aren't we all lucky tonight -- is actually mcbison, really. buy son are the answer-everybody, its turns out. the plains indians knew what they were doing. bison basically live on junk that grows. they live on thorns and prickles and weeds and they don't actually need pasture, much lest

al fall fathom automatic of you have had buy son burgers in good for you we can leave this room dripping with social virtue tonight. that's probably enough in answer to your question. [laughter] >> you came to the united states, i assume, quite a while ago. as an outsider, what was the essence that drew you here? why did you want to come and has that -- do you still find whatever it was appealing, and why? [laughter] >> i'm baffled. intellectual freedom is the answer. i'm part of the great jewish

world conspiracy in which -- that we're brothers and from my mother's family, sandbergs were lithuanian. they actually lithuanian lumberjacks, actually, and i always wanted to revise that famous monte python song, crossed over with fidler in the woods actually. they were lithuanian lumberjacks, and there were four brothers, and three of them had the energy to go from london to liverpool and made the atlantic crossing and settled in brooklyn. my grandfather, mark, the butcher, was too lazy and stayed in london, but what this meant, the reason why it's so digressive answer to your question was that we had an american family always when i was growing up, uncle elliott came in his rather beautiful air force uniform when i was a kid. we were close to our new york

sandbergs, so new york when they came, -- very much like home to me. it wasn't a surprise. you know, i got tired -- i was raised in cambridge and i was given liberty by any doctor father to write scholarly history and i went to teach at oxford and there was a sense you were tied to an immemorial curriculum. never mind what you wanted to team. i was interested in crack pot things to do with cleanliness, feats tissues and strange and wacky things, and i remember standing up and proposing that the history on the history of the family, for example, and it was as though -- i remember being met with looks of

rummy-eyed disbelief as though i uttered some unspeakable profanity. and then the next day i tried to kilnle the enthusiasm of one of any undergraduates in something very marginal, say the russian revolution, and i was meant with twinkle, which reminded me very much of what cousin gentleman's jasper says, treat the dawns like the village parseon and you won't be wrong. i wanted to sort of wipe the smile off their country gentlemen face and i wanted to be able to teach what wanted, and harvard hired me for a term, and the first thing that the department chairman at harvard -- i guess this was 1979 -- said to me. what would you like to niche and no one had ever -- what would you like to teach? just staggeringly trail blazing

thing to say. so i was in clover at harvard. i crossed over between art and history as i have been doing ever since, and i found the american university much more hospitable to that coined of interdisciplinary exchange, and would flirt with anthropology and philosophy and that was really -- i -- i often asked myself, i have written so many odd books, landscape of memory, whether or not -- and embarrassment of riches -- whether i would have done that if i stayed in a more conventional university setting and i'm actually not sure i would. so it's all america's fault. >> the impression that people get or jewish people get in the united states is that british

liberal intellectuals are hostile towards israel and siding with the palestinians and making the israelis villains in this terrible drama, and i was wondering, you sort of have a foot in england and a foot in columbia, which is another place where such views are prevalent, and -- >> they are not. smile when you say that. >> i'm wondering if you could talk about that a bit. >> well, you are right in the first half of the question. you didn't say liberal jewish intellectuals. you said liberal intellectuals. the paper until recently, wrote

a lot for the guardian. and the independent particularly has the kind of extravagantly antiisrael writing. it's not really just the last. i mean, there -- you must remember the great conservative romance with the purity of the deserts, t.e. lawrence, and the sense in the kind of romantic consecutivism of the last century. the 19th century and the 20th century in which the arab was incredibly idealized in a way, and the jew if you think about the trollops way we live now, is the modernity, so there's a slightly golf club, patronizing snobbery about the jew.

pound had it and again, very much a european style. but there's no doubt you're right there is a degree of something unhinged, hostility towards israel government policy. i'm not a great admirer of current israeli poll simple i'm sort of peace now, but i'm a zionist. i believe in the jewish state and the palestineish state. i'm a two-state solution person. but has it shadowed into without daring to call itself that, a kind of anti-semitism? the answer is, yes, in my view. and it's something actually which friends of mine who are jewish public intellectuals -- a phrase which slighma