they have a lot more to do with this experiment in@pñ survived? who died? those are the things that soldiers in particular and then the sons and the daughters and the granddaughters and the grandsons of soldiers cherish. they need to know those hard facts. so why it fascinates us? i think it's partly because it's our great tragedy. as i discovered reading the civil war, this book was also an opportunity to really get into the literature of the war. i spent a couple of years just

reading about the civil war and it -- it occurs to me that the war was not a tragedy because brother killed brother but rather so many brothers killed so many brothers and did it so well. american soldiers when motivated and reasonably equipped are a fearsome force. the deaths are 6 million young million dead in contemporary terms. it's a profoundly frightening idea and we need to encounter it and try to understand it. >> paula, your story begins in the immediate aftermath of that and yet by the time she died, as you note in your book, she had faded from prominence, i assume having heard you talk a little last night, you really see part of your mission here to

re-establish her in the american imagination. tell me or tell us sort of that part of your exploration of her life and have you -- you've come to admire her? tell us what you think of her at the end of your work? >> she actually gets a little lost more during her lifetime. i'm sorry, less during her lifetime than later. >> uh-huh. >> and one of the things -- this is a woman who did just so much. she's one of the first investigative reporters. she starts a settlement house in chicago. she starts the first black woman's suffrage organization in chicago, which is really instrumental in the election of the first black alderman in chicago. she works with marcus campaign and this anti-lynching campaign

is successful in many ways. lynching doesn't stop but lynchings go down. it's redefined. she has defended blacks pretty successfully.fñ and yet i remember coming across in her day book that she wrote some notes and in 1930 -- this is a year before her death, at this point she's running for a state senate seat in illinois. a year before her death she writes about going to a negro history week meeting. and with her daughter. and she says -- and they are discussing a book by carter woodson who is known as the father of negro history and who she knew. and she says i walked away disappointed that my name wasn't mentioned as a contributor to the lynching -- the anti-lynching campaign and i felt this was just extraordinary. this was more than racism and sexism and then i looked further

and she was really left out of history by many of her peers and by many of her progressive peers. if you look at the books of jane adams, if you look at the books of dubois, of mary terrell, i'm talking about black women reformers, white women reformers, she's left out. so this is a whole other road of inquiry. was she really -- was it really significant that this campaign as i thought but, of course, it is. all the evidence that it is. and what i came to the conclusion that this was -- i mean, she does have a very -- excuse me, i have allergies that are killing me. ..

wells had been very successful in the campaign by then mainly because she had gone to england twice and great triumph in the british isles. after she leaves the british isles, no one can ignore this campaign anymore. and tie lynching legislation has passed for the lynching is begin to go down. and, after the death of frederick douglass and 95, wells should have really been a leader of the plexiform civil rights movement. as we know it is really booker t. washington that emerges in

this vacuum, and one reason why she was never permitted was because of course of gender mainly. she tried to sort of get the torch passed by frederick douglass him she was close to in some instances but he would not give her that. so, she is so i have heard time and so many ways and you know that is the price you pay when you are ahead of your time but she would have loved the '60s. i think that her campaign provides a foundation for that protest movement and i think she is enjoying politics right now. [laughter] >> the more modern civil-rights movement often is told as the story principally of men. is that an accurate portrayal? does that tell us more about history as it is written? this is what i am asking. [laughter] why is that?

>> it is a complicated-- i mean the obvious, the obvious ideas are round of sexism in patriarchy and all that but there is civil more complex idea as well, which has a lot to do with gosh, can i get into these weeds? with questions of nationalism. let me say this very quickly. i was at a u.n. conference for women some years ago in nairobi and i was the round is really women and i was around algerian women and i was a round palestinian women and this was the period of time when women were having such a hard time in the black power movement, civil-rights morphed into the black power movement. this whole idea of women have to be behind and then have to be in control and all of that stuff. i was talking about this to women and the israeli women said, that is happening in your country too? the palestinian said, that is happening there too?

all of these places of course where nationalist moments in this period of time and nationalist defines a kind of a leadership around males and men, and it is kind of, it is a, it is a definition that has a lot to do with nationalism created in the late 19th century based on the icon of the family of the 19th century so the mail patriarch who is in control and of course you know what the role of women is, to have children for the revolution or to have children to maintain the culture in the internationalist movement, so that is the other side of it. and, wells really suffers from that. this is a very nationalist moment in the 19th century. >> i have a question-- how do you choose subject for your work? how do you know when you have lit upon a subject that was the result on a--

>> when my publisher of the county. [laughter] that is certainly part of it. frankly the way i chose subjects was one, in 1993 i wrote a book about john kennedy which was briefly successful. therefore, things poured in on me about other presidents, and i thought i had learned what presidents actually to end so i did two more, nixon and then reagan. like everything in life, i got to feeling, if i wrote about one more president ironically my daughter is on barack obama staff in the white house, so maybe i will write about her. [laughter]

and, i had always had this year ng, believe me no one was fighting over me to write about science at the figures. i wanted to reject, i had no more to say. i had something to say about the politics of the day, not the overriding ordered. >> robert? >> for me, it is a pretty embarrassing slap-process. i am sort of in the midst of it now. i am writing a novel but i am looking for something else and often i have a few ideas and i start researching all of them. i like to read. thank goodness at some point, and excitement overtakes me and it often turns out that there is something in the material and the subject that i am starting

to stumble on and so, i really get chosen by the topic at some point. i felt that walt-- his personality, it finally started working in me and then i made what for me was the real discovery of this project, which is okay i have these two brothers, had a very interesting relationship but their mother was the soul of the family. the mother had been written about in the biographical literature as walt whitman's embarrassing salam mother, electorate mother back in brooklyn. and i was puzzled because i went to an archive and i found hundreds of letters about this illiterate salameh mother. they were not only letters but they were long, stream of consciousness, extremely funny

and perceptive letters. she was writing to reyerson, who was this nurse dealing with amputations. walt wood reichert, mother i have to tell you about a soldier i saw yesterday. his wind is already being grannis and i know he is going to die. he is beautiful like a god. i watched him, i combed his hair. i can barely hold back the tears i am so sad about this. she would write back, she would talk about mountain is 32 cents a pound, and then there would be a paragraph saying, you can write me about the soldiers. i understand that you love them and it becomes a fascination. there is nothing wrong with that. i understand. she would not say i know what you are going through but she would encourage him and hearing that from his mother really bucked him up. she would do the same thing with

george the would write to her very frankly about what he was going through and the war. so, this mother, i had no idea i would come upon her and that i would lead-- read her letters which have been ignored by many, many scholars. not only ignored but irrigated. in a way i felt that family, the subject shows me in a way and i was lucky. >> you mentioned earlier that you had written a history of ida wells before you read the biography. it is that typical of your work? do you circle brown the subject like that or how you typically find a topic to write about? >> wells really intervened. when i was writing my first book, which about black activist women, we'll sort of popped up in the center of mike pages and said, i need a book of my own. these other women are find but

this one, and she really grasped really, she grasps my imagination in a way that would not like go. i did not intellectualize it then but now i understand, i have always had some pointed questions about american culture and about race and gender and her story is so central to american history and i think that is what i knew intuitively. if i could look at, and boy the opportunity to see the mayor cut in the late 19th and early, the gates of the 20th century that is transforming itself into a modern industrial power and struggling with all of these anxieties around race, gender and sexuality and all these great moments, these great moments of course during the 20th century and to look at this unfolding through the eyes of a black woman activist like ida b. wells is quite extraordinary because it takes the full measure. it is a true progressive

reformer in the fullest sense of the word and she takes on everything, labor, suffrage as well-- but it is all based on what she learns about the country and about the culture through lynching and what that really means. she sees that that kind of the-- the lynching of ,'9e(túdh'ç'ipt period, so to sort of, so and she has to take everything into account. there is no one she can ignore. there is no group she can ignore. there is no movement that can be ignored and she takes it all

into account and she has to understand it and she is an act of this too. she is not just intellectualizing it or just writing about it. she is riding superbly about it but she is also mobilizing people, so she is a figure that tapped me on the shoulder and said come with me. he will enjoy it. >> i have one more craft question and i hope each of you will address it and then we will open up the microphones. i am just curious how each of you structure your work. to you complete your research before you set out to right or are you writing as you go? what is your workflow like in terms of putting together a book like you did hear? >> what gosh, i really don't have a good answer to that. what is compelling about this subject, the parts of it dictate

a structure, so that it becomes a question almost of telling the natural story. sometimes the structure, an editor will read it and say this is quite complicated. this is very untraditional structure but it is certainly not because i set out to do something that was formally invented. to me it is the clearest and simplest way. >> did you feel that you had all of your material assembled before you sat down to write, or did you figure it out is you went? >> i had to continue to do research but pretty much, like i said before, i sat in the chair in red for two years and at the end of those two years i had a bunch of old fashioned notebooks in which i had just made notes and i realize that one day, it was getting so voluminous that i was going to have to start taking notes on the notes and i

realized that way that the slave, so-- the next day i wrote the next sentence. it sort of frightened me with. >> how about you richard? i am curious about your progress or whether that is change for you, whether you are still doing it the way you initially did? >> i don't to it the way i initially did. the first long piece i wrote was a magazine piece for "the new york times," a profile of john lindsay who was the mayor of new york and for some reason i thought real writers-- after all i had been educated engineering, the real writers wrote in a long sitting so the story would go like this. when i learned more, her eyes set up a system. i would get up early in the morning, usually by 5:00, right 1,000 words a day and then i became a human being. the first time the phone rang or something happened, one of the

kids runs through, i know that i am finished with that part and then i think about teaching or column writing or things that are essentially easier. similar to robert though, i.t. probably spend a year or two on research, filling those crates from office depot and but chronologically, chronological writing is the easy way out i think and i often take it. even as you are writing and 800 word book, the structure is the same as a good joke, with a foreshadowing an finally at the end everything becomes clear and chronologically that works particularly with the presidential box, where every second of the presidents' day is recorded and everyone who was contact with him, it is the high point of their lives so if you

go to them 30 years later they remember what happened, but basically i write before there is anything easier to be done. [laughter] those hours from 5:00 28:00 9:00. >> i do the same. >> that is the first thing you do in the morning, before you have to do something else. i think the best, one of the most important things that i learned it, and i took a film writing, it was a weekend-- one of those thelma riding weekends in new york city and that was really important to me because i learned there was so much going on in this period and so much going on and wells lights too that the only way you could write successfully is then-- and that is why constructed the biography. in scenes that you see things

and you understand things in a particular way but you can't just tell people this happened, that happened and this happened. and, so that was a way to begin to construct and to begin to i thank get a sense, that i hope, that you also see what is going on and not just read what is going on at the same time. >> with that, when only see if there questions from the audience. i think, if you can come to a microphone. >> i wanted to ask mr. reeves, why is there so little written about science and also i wanted to ask a process question about, since you are writing about people in dealing with letters how you deal with conflicting points of view? how can you trust the information? >> well, i think the answer about so little being written about science, and i agree with

you about that, is that it is just-- there are two reasons. one is, they are very few people who understand it so there are very few eminent science writers, and the second is that the perception, which i think has a good deal of truth in it, that the public is not interested or can't really follow this. i mean, when you get-- we are posed mechanical. ernest rutherford was a great, was really the transition figure of that but we grew up all of us in this room i think, where he could own an automobile and if it broke down you could open the hood and figure out what was wrong and try to fix it. you worked on a typewriter, which if it broke you could fix it with a paper clip. now you don't have the faiz then

god knows what goes on inside a computer. so that we really have not developed the cadre of people who can write about this new science, and most publishers start with the prejudice that unless it is abraham lincoln and the atomic bomb, no one is interested. >> who is next? >> good afternoon. first of all want to say that i almost feel like i know you personally. i have been keeping up with a whole bunch of stuff over the years. i was a young college student at the time. >> thank you. >> you are very welcome. [laughter] you did a great job on that by the way and also in the documentary w.e.b. dubois, in my

personal opinion is an excellent. i wanted to ask you how would you feel one of about ida b. wells and bishop henry, of being the precursor of the generation of the 1960's that believe in bearing arms because, the work you are doing kind of represents a part of history. there is a tendency to jump from slavery all the way to the 1960's and kind of skip over, which is a terrible injustice as far as i am concerned. lastly, what was mrs. ida b. wells conclusion of marcus garvey? >> let me begin with marcus garvey. she liked the black nationalist leader. she liked marcus garvey. she liked him because she considered him a grassroots leader, that the people actually made him the leader rather than him being superimposed by others, a leadership being

superimposed by others because she didn't worry about that boat schema though. she knew he was calling to get in trouble with that. she liked him and it was very interesting in fact that looking into the military intelligence files, and you realized that the military intelligence started falling markets garvey because he was hanging out with ida b. wells and in fact there is also one conclusion that says marcus garvey is a dangerous reyes agitator but ida wells is more dangerous. in terms of henry mcneil turner, i love bishop turner. he was one of the tyumen to really defended her in very critical periods of her career and of course her-- he was also an immigration test. he was a bishop, methodist bishop and believe that blacks should go, need to go back to africa as well.

and the radical and also believed as you mentioned, taking up arms. this is quite a radical position at the time, as you can imagine. but, blacks, wells had fought by the late 19th centuries certainly, that there was no reason not to defend oneself. she herself thought a pistol after writing the first into lynching editorials. she said i am going to take someone with me. it was interesting of course she is also this victorian, so all this tension and the contrast makes for a wonderful character. she famously says, and i will end with this, she famously says in her discourse around anti-lynching, she says first of all civil disobedience, the south reconstruction depends on

black labor and northern capital. if we can, if we can stop any of it, if we can stop that from coming into the south, we can have a revolution. the disobedient did not work. she said famously, a winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black. and believe certainly, and was born out eventually after world war i. these are stories we don't hear very much. in the summer of world war i and 1994 example and one of the biggest rights was in chicago where wells was living at the time. it is very interesting that that this sort-- agents the bright period because for the first time in chicago, the first time in these riots, hundreds of them taking place in this period of time where blacks are being killed, chicago is a place that fights back. chicago is a place that blacks

are armed. and, this sort of begins this whole idea of the new radical and again as you mentioned is now forebearer of the '60s. thank you for the question. >> who else? another question? >> ida-- >> i don't know, i have got a lot of questions but one of them is, this is a festival of books but are you tempted with all the research you have done to use other forms and a young man talking about the documentary's that were done. are you tempted to do that and also mr. reeves, science, united with sciences mathematics and in order to interpret that, for people who are not mathematically oriented, it is an extraordinary thing and how

can we do more of that for kids? endless question, tim burners lee is a living person. how do you d.w.i biography of a living history versus having their entire story done? >> who wants to take those? >> i will take the science part of that. i think that you, that children should be taught that math is not an abstraction, that it is a tool and oedipus-- i showed my kids but if anybody did it, there rutherford museums where he taught and at cambridge, and the amazing thing about them is that most of the experiments are about this size. they look like music boxes or something, but and the reason he was a great t