he controlled everything except rubber, except his source of rubber and hence his move into the amazon. but, like most things with ford, it quickly became much more than just an attempt to get control over another raw material. in some ways it became a ponzi scheme of high ideals. ford felt compelled as the washington times said, to cultivate not just rubber but we saw little bit of that with the disney film. yet managers build cape cod style shingle houses for workers

and he urged them to attend flower and vegetable gardens and the whole wheat bread, scientifically balanced meals, and polish dries, and michigan peaches, the oatmeal. it was the 1920's and in the united states prohibition was the lore of the land and he had his managers try to enforce it in brazil as well although it was and the law, it was not legislation there. on weekends the company organized not just soccer but also square dancing. this board had become a bit of an obsessional advocate of old-time dance, of conservative square dance and round dance and polkas and walls is. he had them also listen to recitations of henry longfellow poetry and william wordsworth and other poets. the hospital ford built then you saw a little bit of that in the documentary offered free health

care not just to workers but to visitors. it was actually designed by albert con, the famous architect to design the number four buildings back in dearborn and detroit. ford a central square that had sidewalks and indoor plumbing, manicured lawns, movie theaters, perfume shops, swimming pools, tennis courts and a golf course and of course model ts and model a's rolling down its paved streets. in many ways it is good to think what is great about this story about fordlandia, it is an epic clash of opposites, to the irrepressible phenomenon. on the one hand there is henry ford, the man to revolutionized industrial capitalism by reducing human motion to its simplest possible component, to produce a series of identical parts, the first and distinguishable from the

million. ford once calculated that it took 7,882 distinct motions to make a model t, so kind of a great quote. he doesn't just thought there in calculating 7,882. 949 of them by strong able-bodied men, 670 i legless men, 2,637 by one legged men, to buy armless men and 715 by one-armed men, and ten by blind men. that doesn't quite add up to 7,882 so i'm not sure what the differences, what the quality of the workforce was in the difference between those two numbers. on the other hand the amazon, it is the opposite of, the most complex and diverse ecosystem in the world, a place for 7,882 organisms can exist on any 5 acres and the encounter

between these two forces was almost chaplinesque in its absurdity and produced a parade of mishaps straight out of a hollywood movie. i have been using the hybrid of think modern times in fits grow the but it would be good to throw in a touch of citizen kane into that. brazilian workers rebelled against ford's puritanism and nature rebelled, despite the nice piece of propaganda that we saw which i will talk about in a second, against industrial regimentation. it was run by incompetent managers who knew little about rubber planting much less social engineering. fordlandia in the early days was played by knife fights and riots and rebellion. the men ford sent down to raise his michigan town knew nothing of planting rubber, much less of

creating a sociological experiment deep in the middle of a tropical rain forests. they turned a jungle into a mud hole when they burned large lots of force without the slightest idea of what they were doing. the place seemed less like sauertown and more like deadwood and casinos and ours began to is all over on the periphery of the settlement with ford managers trying to shut them down. the local merchants moved the of to an island on the river that was outside of ford's jurisdiction. some oldtimer i spoke to said that they call that the island of innocence because nobody was innocent. [laughter] so nice of me. ford managers did eventually managed to gain some sort of sovereignty, some sort of control over the settlement, social control and the con tours of ford's midwestern ideal began to come into view as captioned in the documentary in the disney

documentary. but then nature rebuild. rubber is native to the amazon, which also means that the predators that feed off of the rubber leaves, the bugs and the caterpillar and the fungi are also native to the amazon. >> a vault in tandem so you can grow plantation rubber, state rubber in southeast asia or south asia or africa where the predators are native. you can have trees close together but in the amazon is best to grow them especially before the time hybrids were developed to grow them disperse, two or three or four to disperse drought in a. , protected by the jungle groves, which slow the reproduction of the predators that fed off of the rubber. ford was ford and back in dearborn he famously in river rouge he famously placed machines close together come closer together than did chrysler or general motors and

able-- in order to save motion so in the amazon he obviously went to have the industrial mass production of rubber and what he effectively did was created giant incubator, not once but over and over again and when the first fordlandia failed, they pulled up stakes and moved downriver and they tried again with the same, with the same success or lack of success. managers tried to hault the spread of bugs and the actually came up with a fairly impressive pest control regime. the necessity actually force them to develop some fairly innovative poisons, pesticides from natural plants, but it was all too much for them. there is one great, one great scene in the book, where during one particularly bad caterpillar epidemic, the manager sent every man, a woman and child out to

fans to the plantation and thick the caterpillars off of the trees in five hours. they collected an estimated 250,000 kalb panel-- caterpillars and piled them up on a large mountain and poured gasoline on them and force them, created this on fire. one can almost imagine with a little bit of imagination ford managers locking hands and performing some kind of incantatory chance around the fire to drive out the preindustrial sprites that they can't control embodied by the caterpillar. it turns out that there is even evidence that this very aggressive pest control regime actually accelerated evolution, that they just pick the caterpillars that set off the lower parts of the trees but that left the survival of the fittest, the caterpillars who were up on the top of the leaves, where the pictures could

not see the manatt actually obviously increase the future epidemics. one of the problems is that ford did not like experts. some of the most spectacular successes in dearborn and detroit were accomplished from hands on observation by self-taught engineers so and the amazon, he put norwegian sea captains and michigonians lumberjacks in charge of his-- the only problem is when it comes to rubber planting some expertise could actually be a good thing. fordlandia's managers for instance knew very little about cross-pollination and there is one funny story that when i found this document in the archives i could not stop laughing. will rogers was a friend of ford, the humorist was traveling through brazil flying on an airplane trip and he heard that things weren't going well for his friend, henry ford, so we sent in a letter to "the new

york times." i guess this was back in the day when "the new york times" woodprint random letters from humorous. so, he said to the editor, brazil ought to belong to the united states. we like to brag about everything big. we have been flying up its closed line for five solid days and it's still got another day. we are just circling the amazon. this is where mr. forge rubber plantation is that somebody sold him all male trees and they are having a little trouble getting them to bear alaa becky could not fool them on carburetors but he doesn't know much about the sex life of rubber trees. yours, will rogers. this was a joke. rubber trees don't have gender. there are no mail rubber trees and there are no female rubber trees but the humor was lost on one fordlandia manager when he read this letter, but immediately wrote the united states department of agriculture, asking if it was true that rubber trees were divided among male and fuel-- female lines.

some official in the department of agriculture rode back and explained that rubber trees do not have male and female trees and then he proceeded to give a short course on insects cross-pollination. it is almost impossible not to think of, think of the story of fordlandia without thinking of joseph conrad's harden darkness, that great european colonialism in general and belgian fertility in particular, but in the case of fordlandia, there's something more mark twain binge joseph conrad and some more huckleberry about the stories of ford men lost in the wilderness. there is, take one story these two ford agents of were sent up the river together better rubber seed for rubber planting on the plantation, the soon ditched their brazilian assistance and

began to spend for its money and credit on liquor and on prostitutes. then, one night they pass through one trading post after another, making scenes, making fools of themselves and in one last rubber trading post, one of them went in and with what money was left on the ford account brought all of the perfume in the trading post and then proceeded to waddle down the town's one street, sprinkling the perfume on all of the livestock, including the pigs, saying apparently yelling mr. ford has a lot of money, you might as well smell good too. so it is a little keystone, and unlike european colonialists the jungles did not release the kind of homicidal racism that was seen in the heart of darkness but rather almost a lilting dystocia, not for a receiving

klaus jungles, lost tropical rain forest, but more for an america that they had left at home and also for a changing america, one that the ford motor company, their employers, their employer, was largely responsible with dispatching. there's something about the amazon when one reads the chronicles of the amazon. the amazon almost induces people to wax philosophically or existentially in a very florid allegory about the enormous nature of the amazon, how it seduces man to impose his will and only to render that will implement. think of verna heard sog's interview in burden of dreams, just the way that people talk about the amazon as this place and the of moral meaning and very florid. there is something about though the men and women that ford sent down, most of them from

michigan, a lot of them also from the upper peninsula down to the amazon. they were almost immune or inoculated. they had a certain midwestern stubborn little less that refused to see the amazon in those six essential terms. was actually relief reading about it, but then they would wax nostalgic but again certain nostalgia for receiving in a lost united states. it would also be easy to read the story of fordlandia as a parable of arrogance. one can't think of a better curator then ford of american exceptionalism, the belief that you can impose americana on amazonia, the wildest police in the world, with the sure the of purpose and curiosity about the world that today seems all too familiar. for deliberately rejected

exploded bison set out to turn the amazon into the midwest of his imagination. and the more the project failed on its own terms, that is to produce rubber and in inflation-adjusted dollars ford spent something like a billion dollars and not one drop of latex made it. they defended it as a civilizational mission as an attempt to bring america and the american way of life to the amazon.com to the back would have a son. you can think of it as a distant preview of the ever expanding sense of justifications that for why the u.s. invaded iraq six years ago and went from finding weapons of mass destruction and when that didn't happen, then it became about bringing democracy to the middle east and even ridding the world of evil, so there's that kind of escalating set of justifications and the more things they'll the more you search for idealistic reasons. this is what i meant by ponzi

scheme of high ideals. yetter think fordlandia cuts deeper into the marrow of the american experience than that. it says something a little bit more than that. over 50 years ago, the harvard historian, perry miller gave the famous lecture that he titled errand into the wilderness. in the essay he tried to explain why english puritans led out for the new world to begin with a rabid then say go to holland. the wins he suggested not to escape the corruptions of the church of england but to complete the protestant reformation that had stalled in europe. according to miller that puritans did not flee to the new world but rather sought to give the faithful back home a working model of a pure community. but in another way, central from the beginning of the american experience, of american expansion was the deep disquieting, a feeling that

something had gone wrong at home. the founding of fordlandia in many ways was driven by a similar restlessness, a sense that even in the best of times the roaring 1920's, that something had gone wrong in america. when ford embarked on his amazon adventure he had already spent the greater part of two decades and a large part of his great fortune trying to reform the american society and in many ways he could think of him speaking of is the documentary's, you could think of them as the sorcerer's apprentice, constantly trying to put the genie back in the bottle of the forces he himself on leashes. his frustrations and discontent with domestic politics and culture were legendary. among them were war, unions, wall street, energy monopolies, modern dance, cow's milk. he hated cow's milk for some

reason. both theodore and franklin roosevelt, cigarettes, alcohol were among his many targets and complaints yet beneath all of these imagined annoyances was the fact that the force of industrial capitalism he had helped unleash was undermining the world that he hoped to restore and in his later life, he increasingly grew more and more eccentric and more and more desperate. also he abandoned an earlier kind of liberal modernism that he was associated with. and once claimed to have invented the modern world to embrace the vary cultural conservatism, looking to the values of small town america as the solution to america's problems. ford preached with a pastors confidence is one true idea that ever increasing productivity combined with ever increasing pay would both relieve human drudgery and create working-class communities with corporate profits, depending on

the continuing expansion of consumer demand. he put it very simply, high wages to create large markets. by the late 1920's, fordism, as this idea came to be known, by the late 1920's fordism, as this idea became called was synonymous with americanism, indeed the world over apparently having humanized in democratized industrial capital ofism while catapulting the united states had of its other competitors but fordism contained within itself the seeds of its own and doing, the breaking down of the assembly process that 7,882 motions, distinct motions that i mentioned earlier, into smaller and smaller tasks combined with obviously wrath advances in transportation and communication made it easier for manufacturers to break out of that the fenner relationship between high wages and large markets that ford tried to establish.

for that fordism tried to establish for the goods made in one place could be sold someplace else, moving incentive employers had to pay workers and up to buy the products they made so ford since this on rebilling early on and he responded to it by trying to slow it down and fordlandia in many ways, he set up a number of what he called the litsch industry, small communes in the upper peninsula and elsewhere in michigan and united states the try to balance industry and-- and proposed to put the idea into place on a grand scale in apalachicola in the tennessee valley, but eventually became the tva, the tennessee valley association was henry ford's idea. he wanted to come he proposed building a 75-mile long rivan city that would work, workers would work in industrial plants part-time in the year and farm other parts of the year. it would be powered by

hydroelectricity. that was a nonstarter for a number of different reasons, and the more he was increasingly stymie.com the more he looked abroad, so but these kinds of pastoral, ians morneau match walk for the raw power of the changes he unleashed, he himself unleashed. so, he turned to the amazon to raise the city on a hill, and the city of the hill that blends so large an american mythology or in this case it was the city in a river valley, pulling together the many strings of his utopianism into one last desperate bid for success. i will just in there and i will open it up to questions and maybe we could have a discussion. thanks. [applause]

if anybody has a question, she will pass you the mic. >> to questions actually. how did you first become interested in fordlandia, and then what is your next project? >> my next project? i first became interested, i first read about fordlandia and a great book called fate of the forest and it came out in the 1980's and it talks about fordlandia as one, oftentimes a lot of books on the amazon is obligatory to mention the story of fordlandia as one in a long parade of the thames to conquer, to tame, to domesticate the amazon, but i was always struck that there wasn't a larger history of that, and i thought it would be interesting to write one. there is a novel fordlandia and apparently the novelist, i read in an interview somewhere that he initially tried, he initially

intended to write a history but then the thought fiction, he thought the story was so outsized that fiction would be more appropriate genre. i think this is actually a story in which the non-fiction part in outstrips what you could imagine fiction. i don't have another project. [laughter] >> what is going on where fordlandia used to be right now? >> well, it is still there. i traveled their toys. it is still pretty remote. it still takes about 18 hours in a slow-moving river boat from the nearest provincial town to reject. it is like a museum piece. the american town, where the american managers lived is overrun by fines, as you would imagine. their bats living in the old houses in the vines wrapped

around the little red fire hydrants. the hospital is collapsed in on itself. the industrial plant is abandoned. the power plant in the saw mill, inside that there's all this kind of industrial remnants, boxes of bolts and rusted model ts and then in the worker area of the cottages are still inhabited. brazilians eking out a living from the river, from the jungle. in the second fordlandia which was actually called-- until the first one failed and they did the whole, moved the whole operation downriver, that is a little bit closer to more of the major population center and what is fascinating about that, and that also come at the center of it also looks like its cousin comes straight out of michigan, but the surrounding areas is actually being overrun by

soybeans, which is how i end the book for one of the ironies in which i end the book. ford loved soybeans. ford spent millions and millions and millions of dollars trying to find uses for soybeans, industrial and nutritional uses for soybeans. this was part of his attempt to find industrial markets as a way of reviving the agricultural sector in finding that balance that he believed. if you could find industrial markets for soybeans then it didn't matter if agricultural prices, which collapsed in the early 1920's and never refight, then you would be able to support small farms and farming communities. he thought soybeans, soybeans would be, he poured money into other crops also but soybeans were the ones that he held up the most promise. he made his underlings eat soy dinners and soy biscuits and soy milk, cheese, aside this, sorry that. he also was able to produce the

base paint for the model a was made out of soybeans and made plastics. but the irony is that today soybeans, mass production of soybeans are literally out of all of the agents of deforestation, logging, cattle implantations soybeans are the most socially destructive. they are literally running through the lower amazon like a wildfire and it is ford's vision on steroids. this is the splitting, this is the breaking down, he has this vision of an attempt to balance industry and agriculture, but trying to contain these forces and domesticate these forests but what you are saying is literally these communities being wiped off the face of the earth. large scale supplantation does not, it is labor-intensive so it doesn't need a lot of workers. nowhere near the amount of people that this places. those displaced people wind up

being pushed into the cities are the pull-- the printed the younger leading to a new cycle of deforestation, so a lot of the rubber groves that had been, the jungle had been cleared and rubber planted has now been converted into soybeans, so-- soybean plantations. >> it seems as if the american auto industry may be on its last legs. for example chrysler just filed for bankruptcy. i was wondering if you think the rise and fall of fordlandia foreshadowed this in any way? >> i don't know if it foreshadowed it. you can read a lot of things into historical parables and i think they are a lot of different lessons in this. i don't know if it foreshadowed but this between certain moment in does reveal a moment in which the u.s. auto industry was not just the foundation of the united states, the high-tech,

high profit economy but it really was the motor of the united states, the sense of itself and here is in some ways the high point of that, the attempt to overlay america on the amazon, in the most, one of the most inhospitable places you can imagine that you think you could just transplant the american way of life. i think it does speak to a certain moment of the high point of what the auto industry men's for the u.s. economy but also u.s. expansion in general. >> can you talk just little bit about this sort of social control mechanisms and what happens to the actual workers and fordlandia? it was a little bit unclear from the documentary the division between sort of where the workers lived and where the managers lived. obviously the workers were not on the golf course playing golf,

so he could talk a little bit about that and what happened when fordlandia crumbled come to those people who were the workers? >> no, there was a social hierarchy and segregation of the midwestern mill town. there was a workers' bungalow sections working-class section and then there was the american section. the american houses were not too ostentatious. they were protestants, they want catholics, so they were midwestern, very restrained in terms of their comfort level. they have porches. there was a very strong social regimentation that was imposed, not just for this eccentric ideas about diet and health care and recreations, square dancing and all of it but generally the regimentation that is involved in treating industrial workers. and in getting people to abide and live their life by a time

clock on the factory whistle. this was a region that didn't really have church bells much less factory whistles and all of a sudden there was a factory whistle. .. up to that point but things in the 1930s had calmed down, they had settled into a more or less regular routine. the way that food was served was

true weight service in a mess hall with brazilian worker is divided between brazilian foreman and the front line workers who did the worst and most difficult work. but then a manager from dearborn showed up, decided it would be more efficient, rather than await service, have basic file service, an assembly line. you can think of the great scene in baton times where they have that food thing to make lunch go faster and you can't keep up. it was administered in a chaotic way. it was hot as hell, and workers rioted and nearly led to the complete destruction, managers

had to evacuate on boats, brazilians had to send in planes, buzz some of the protesters, and the plantation was nearly completely destroyed. trucks were pushed into the river, the time clocks were particularly singled out and destroyed, which is great. there's a great photo in the book of the time clock being destroyed. they were rebelling against what one worker called into a 365 day machine. ford didn't end the project, is granted did -- his grandson did. in 1945 he does not in touch with reality, henry ford ii took over ththe company, he pulled t,

he turned it over to the ministry of agriculture and a lot of the workers continued to receive a pension and continued to live, more people moved in, more villages were set up, other people moved out. the ministry of agriculture tried to continue as a working experimental station for a while but after a while they gave that up and it reverted into small units of, the -- municipality. a few people are still alive receiving pensions. >> what is the meaning of the quotation that is often quoted, history is bunk, and was his

life religious based? >> i will answer the second question first, he wasn't religious. he grew vaguely spiritual towards the end of his life. he was a kind of typical person of the twentieth century, he believed in reincarnation, he dabbled in esoteric spiritual beliefs. he didn't like organized religion because he didn't like any kind of organization whatsoever. he didn't like churches, there were ways of manipulating individuals. in some ways he was a very high individual accept for the discipline he insisted on workers submitting to in his factory. one of the things he refused to

have was a church. there was a church that was referred to the brazilian company. the quote history is bunk, this was a famous quote that ford said almost with turrets syndrome like reputation -- repetition. people sometimes take that to indicate a modernist rejection of tradition, he said we don't want tradition, the only tradition, the only history we want is the history we are making today. in the early 1910s, ford embraced a certain modernism. he eventually reject that and move away and develops traditionalism as a prime example. when he said history is bunk, he was actually talking less about history as such and more about

great man history. he had not surprising mist or killed sensibility, he believes the history read in texas was meant to manipulate people into patriotism, he was a radical, rabbit and tie militarist and pacifists and believed history was part propaganda in order to get people to go to war. when he said history is bunk he missed talking about history that exalted battles and nations and individuals like teddy roosevelt. he believe history move forward through technological innovation. this is what i meant, he had a quite modernist historical sensibility, driven by more subterranean, and seen changes that social historians largely

adhere to. >> what about social darwinism? >> his anti-semitism was rapid and profound. social darwinism, he expressed -- as he developed -- as his vision began to cloud over in the 20s and he developed a certain kind of cultural conservatism, he began to espouse more racist and anti-immigrant sentiment that he didn't earlier on. >> two questions. while researching this book, ford came to life to you, did you find even with his views which i assume you don't always agree with, did you find that you liked him as a character, as

a personality? the second, what you are talking about, being a pacifist, why isn't that happening today? why are more business leaders or titans talking about why they are against the iraqi war? >> in terms of a first question i don't know if i liked him, but as a historian he provided a never-ending trove of quotations that you could draw from when you needed him to say something. that i like d a lot. as for the pacifism depends on theed moment. in the early twentieth century things for up to grabs, how capitalism and american society would be organized. there was more room to imagine

different alternatives. ford was a committed fastest -- pacifist. he wanted to break the equation that leftists and socialist want to establish between militarism and industrial capital. he wanted to insist you could have industrial capital without militarism. and he wasn't against u.s. expansion. he just believes u.s. expansion should be through both commerce, production, and providing a model. he was against the notion of war and territorial conquest. so i think it has to do with the moment in history that he emerged, when a lot more things were up for grabs. the u.s. economy has changed in the last 80 years.

politics is pretty much what it is and you can't imagine somebody like ford advocating -- ford was incredibly -- his vision was popular, he represented a certain heartland pacifism that i think had deep roots in all the major religions, deep roots in liberal internationalism, he vandalism, catholicism, social protestantism, all had a certain pacifist tradition that ford tapped into, and he was incredibly popular. part of the book deals with a conflict he had with teddy roosevelt. he has this very personalized, rhetorically violent conflict with teddy roosevelt, part of the conflict that ford represented to republicans, that roosevelt represented at all the isolationist republicans

represented a third way, a threat that many saw as bordering on some form of socialist pacifism. >> i was wondering about the did -- gendered division of labor in the factory and in the city's itself and also, unrelated question, a utopian communities outside the united states with megalomaniac leaders? >> there are a lot of different utopian -- jonestown comes to

mind because it is the northern part of the amazon basin. there are others as well. american history is filled with these attempts to deal with, in some ways, the problem of expansion by trying to establish these utopian communities. that is one particular example of it. as far as the gender division of labor, it was meant in terms of the -- carved out the jungle. ford sent mostly men down in terms of administrators, he also sent families down, and one of the things that was interesting

about it, the men ford sent down, whether they hated it or loved it, had something to do, they bridge charged with creating this community out of the jungle. it occupied their time. a lot of the wives, the women who went down, the wives of engineers, sawmill operators, lumberjacks and administrators, all of a sudden found themselves catapulted to a new level of social status, working class, they didn't in july -- it didn't enjoy much domestic help, but suddenly they were in the amazon and had new brazilian work, cleaners and nannies attending their needs, and one of the things that comes out is how

board a lot of them were. there was a listlessness that overcomes the life of many of the spouses of the men were spent down by ford. >> just to be clear, you said that no rubber products ever reach the u.s.? >> some of it reached the u.s.. towards the end, they did eventually send plant pathologists and botanists down to develop some quite innovative techniques. never enough to produce any significant amount of latex and none that actually -- was ever processed into tires or tubes.

>> translating that into today, they had a big write-off after many years of losing money. >> i imagine that they did. >> where does the rubber come from for to day? >> most of it is synthetic. brazil imports more -- brazil, in the nineteenth century, the brazilian amazon was the primary supplier of all the world's latex, basically supplied the latex for the nineteenth century industrial revolution and it was all tapped mostly by independent, impoverished, debt ridden -- in the chain of the kind of houses in the nineteenth century, along that process that i talked about in terms of jungle growth. by 1910/1911/1912, seeds that

had already been taken out of the amazon a few decades earlier, the botanical garden in london, and send to what is now sri lanka and southeast asia, and ceded the beginnings of the plantation economy. that begins to come on line in 1910, 1911, 1912, white south the rubber economy. ford's venture into the amazon was also a venture into a region that had this enormous rubber bubble, produced -- the cities we have seen that we talked about that keeps those, built on the profits of robert, often

called tropical parises. and classical buildings, that collapses by 1910. ford's coming to the amazon is celebrated by many brazilians and has the potential of reviving and redeeming at rescuing the collapse robber economy. >> had a chance to read the book. one thing i remember was in the intro, there was somebody that you interviewed either living in or around the settlement, recalled with quite a bit of honesty, kind of bubbling about the settlement, can you trace that a little bit to what you found and how you see, a lot of the factories, how they are run now and the conditions, can you talk a little bit about that? it is 80 years from then and in many cases conditions have gotten in suffered the worst compared to the, many of the

times. >> one of the things, in both of my visits to fordlandia, what i noticed was an intense nostalgia both by people who had firsthand memories, some old-timers and people with second-generation, heard stories from their parents about henry ford, free medical attention, schools, everything was organized, and i think that nostalgia and that longing is understandable considering the services that are available to most people today in terms of health care, certainly the ruination that visited on the amazon in terms of savoy, logs, and cattle. the vision of humane developmental, no matter how the

absurd or paternalistic, there's a nostalgia for a form of capitalism that care about workers outside of the factory gates. the fate of most of the world today is the opposite. we live in an economy in which, of the things in my presentation, there is no relationship between wages and markets. the relationship ford tried to establish the tween high wages and large markets no longer exists. so it can be made at the lowest possible wage, and in the conclusion of the book, the epilogue, i do talk about, on the one hand, there are people in some ways are still waiting for ford. it was remarkable, one story

kept popping up, by people who had firsthand memories of fordlandia, they all said some variation of the same story, ford never visited brazil, much less the amazon, even though he kept promising he was going to come, many people still tell a variation of the same story, that he was all set to come in 1943 but his son died and he canceled his trip. if he had come, maybe he would not have shut out fordlandia. it is interesting that there is this longing. in fordlandia, there is this sort of waiting for ford feeling, you go 300 miles, 500 miles east to announce, the fastest growing city in brazil, a free trade city, free trade zone in which major corporations, harley-davidson

and nokia and sony, assemble parts for sale within the latin american market. in some ways, these people are still waiting for henry ford. this was the true legacy of ford, the breaking down of the assembly process but on a global scale that makes these free-trade cities possible. >> i want to give you a big round of applause for writing such a reading history of fordlandia. thank you for coming tonight and asking great questions. if you want to come to more events, it is all listed, thanks again. [applause] >> greg grandin is the author of several books including "the

last colonial massacre". he is a history professor at new york university. he served on the united nations truth commission that investigated the guatemalans civil war. for more information about the author, visit history.f a s.and why you got e d u. >> douglas grimly looks at the first green president, teddy roosevelt, the wilderness lawyer, 2 hours starting at 6:00 p.m. eastern today on c-span2's book tv. >> michael luongo, author of "gay travels in the muslim world," looks at the life of gave men who live or are currently serving in the middle east. he spoke at the queen's public library in new york. this is just over an hour. >> i want to thank you all for coming. i want to thank alexander sanchez for having me here. i want to say i have spoken

about this book in many countries, several countries around the world. i have spoken throughout the united states on the book. but here in new york only until now have i spoken in manhattan. so it is great to actually be in queens of the los divers borough, the most diverse place in the most divers borough, the most diverse place in the country, in the world. i am michael luongo, editor of "gay travels in the muslim world". i love libraries and i love when people buy books. the top of gay travel book on amazon, consistently in the top 10. it is interesting a top islamic study, islamic history book on amazon. that is another thing, i hadn't expected when i did this book. that is another thing that is very interesting about the popularity among different groups. the book is in english.

next year it comes out in arabic which i have about. is very rare for books to be translated from english to arabic, of any topic. it is quite rare. for a board of this topic to be translated by a lebanese company for distribution in the middle east, will be very interesting when i actually get to do those talks, they are interesting enough in the english-speaking world. that is another thing wanted to mention, you put a book out and wonder where it is going to go. whenever i do talks at universities, whether i am doing talks at bookstores and, of the things that comes up, what does they have to do with it? it sounds like that tina turner's song, what does love got to do with pig? people look at the title of the book, gay -- "gay travels in the muslim world," look at the issues in the middle east, muslim issues, why would you look at this from a gay

perspective? why would you do such a thing? there are many reasons for doing a book of this topic, looking at gay issues in the middle eastern and muslim context. we are living in special times, we are all in new york, we know how different things have been since 9/11 and how these topics have come to the forefront. i don't need to remind people here of that. but i want to point out, why would you look at this topic since 9/11, if you look at the coverage of 9/11 and the coverage of the issues, homosexuality, is often very sensationalized, has always been part of the conversation. so i didn't start it. one of the things i point out, we are going back eight years, mohammed hadi, of the men who flew the plane did to the twin towers, after september 11th, you begin to see all these stories, both in the mainstream

press and the gay press, the possibility that he was gay and the fact that he might have been day influenced him into wanting to be a terrorist. you saw articles where he had problems with his masculinity, people examining photographs of him trying to point out how effeminate he might have been and there was a quote in one of the publications that even his father had described him as girly. that was at the beginning of everything. that was the start, when people ask that question. the other thing is if we remember back to when we have -- invaded afghanistan in october and november of 2001, shortly after 9/11, began to notice these articles about homosexuality concerning the

taliban, concerning afghanistan, some interesting articles that suggested the taliban where a group of gay men who hated women and somehow taken over the country. the possibility that they might have been gay influence their behavior, so again, it wasn't me starting the conversation, it was something i had begun to read. there was an article in thes fashion magazine in 2003 that looked at the taliban and homosexuality in terms of gender separation and how that might have influence their behavior. we have time for questions at the end. there was an article in a british publication about gay afghan farmers who were begging british farmers to have sex with them. i get into more of this when i read from the introduction,

these topics were already there. the other thing, horrific thing that was part of the conversation, the homoerotic sexual torture in abu ghraib. those photos came out in 2004, it is very clear that the middle east does not like the fact that we invaded iraq. whether you hated it to begin with, once you have those photographs out, it clearly colored in another way, and made worse, the situation, in terms of what people thought of the united states invading iraq. under obama this topic has come up again because there are more photographs that have not been issued. one of the things i think is very interesting as a gay journalist and a writer looking at topics on the middle east, looking at homophobia and the

word islam phobia, and the word torture, the most humiliating thing that they could do to muslim men was to force them to have sex with other men,. the american soldiers, western soldiers, british soldiers that we did this because we knew we could humiliate them because of the homophobia that existed in the middle east and muslim countries. that is how they thought they would humiliate them. it is interesting when you look at this discussion. you are talking about the homophobia of the middle east