preconceptions or on assumptions our own at-- and then the actual documentary record of the past. professor lie and what it said objectivity does not mean that you go to the past with an empty mind. mean to go with an open mind. you go with preconceptions, assumptions, presuppositions but you must be willing to change your mind if you encounter countervailing evidence, so that is one question, something that surprised you or change the way you think. the historian achieve the

same relation of subject to the that we have heard so often in the last couple days in the readings from these novels? is the documentary record available to enable us to reconstruct the subject to the of the past? and finally, do you read historical novels? and if so, have you gained any insight from any historical novel that might have changed the way you thought about history. please choose anyone or more of those questions. i will go to jill lepore. >> yesterday there was a wonderful panel that my friend and historian james kaminski was on, a panel of novelists, dane said she felt compelled to defend the tried and speak as a

historian. i am in the reverse situation. i am a historian. an attempt to cross the plate and be a switch hitter, i am a boston red sox fan. all my metaphors come from baseball. i thought it would be interesting to see what would happen. i will answer the question about surprises in the archives. my last history book was an account of an attempted slave rebellion in new york city in 1740 one. most historians have used a set of trial transcripts printed three years after it these -- confessed to conspiring to burn the city down and murder of a

whites. at one point in my research, the public record office, i came across an additional maine is the copy of one of the slave confessions. it reads like this, yes, we were going to burn the city down and kill all the whites, except we were only joking. in the printed account of the trial transcript it reads yes, we were going to burn the city down and kill all the whites, period. holy cow! it was a joke! they were confessing to having joked about what it would mean -- you didn't know who to believe. a lovely essay by the historian robert darden, the great cat

massacre, a conspiracy of region printers in the eighteenth century to massacre cats, and they do massacre these cats and they laugh about it. what is so funny about a massacre of cats? the essay is a wonderful examination of the joking this of culture and you know that you finally get the time and place if you get their jokes. i am not getting the joke. i worked really hard in that piece of historical research to get that joke. i knew i could not actually communicate that joke to my reader because it required too may -- many layers of explanation. there's another moment of research in that project that speaks to a different problem, which is that one of these guys held for months in the dungeon of the basement of city hall was described, the man's name was caesar, a black slave, one of

the few men who was literate, while he was in jail he read little and cried much. those four words, he read little and cried much. it was the only description of an emotional aspect have any of these guys who were living knowing they were going to be burned at the stake, were coerced and tortured into confessing, and i thought for a long time about whether reichard communicate to my reader what that emotion was. i finally decided i just couldn't. it would be a historical ventriloquism against this man, caesar, to presume i could describe how he felt beyond those five words which i lingered over for some long time.

those two experiences, maybe i got the jump, maybe i understand but i am not sure, as a historian, if i can be that confidence. those standards of evidence are important in historical works. i backed away from those in many ways. i thought maybe i could hit that from the other side. so we tried. if you argues this morning, i read a passage from a novel in which the narrator whose narrative i drafted a, a keen observer of human nature goes -- his reluctance to attend the execution of a black man named cicero, it is derived from the scenes i learned about in scenes i gathered in new york.

he doesn't want to go, he needs to be convinced to go. the theory of moral sentiment, to be in sympathy with someone on the gallows, it got to the point that i was sitting in my computer, dennis and wants to write down what cicero, named after the great orator, what he said on the gallows, here is my moment, i can hit that picture, say what he has to say, then i have as a historian and -- there's no evidentiary trail, he would not have been allowed to speak. there's no way that a black man on the gallows in boston in 1764 would have been allowed to speak in public, do anything but the peak a formalized christian confession and make his peace with a minister. i came against the same evidentiary standard as a historian and he is not saying anything, what does he want to

say? i can't tell. i should wrap it up. i couldn't hit the picture in either case. i didn't get hit by it which was a small victory. [applause] >> the joke that you discovered seems to be a joke that repeats itself in many of the forthcoming trials taking place under homeland security for the accused, we really didn't mean to do what they tell us, we were accused of. i don't have a fact that changed my view of a project or brought me to a project, but rather an eat tiffany in tpiphany in the

interpretation. the service of the profession in undermining the established wisdom that exists in the republic, that seems to be our stock and trade. this is an example of honoring that tradition. i would like to read from my latest book. i come to that as an example of what i want to do, god's crucible and the making of europe. i think of this book in an eccentric way because i became increasingly concerned about what i thought was history coming. that is to say the interaction between the world of islam and the developed world, western democracy. as we think about that, i began to kind of rummaged through my mind, great pivotal moments in

history that we all are in accord about. one of them is the battle of twice a -- the british, the business who owns history, the british have called it the battle of torres. until recent times that is the way we have spoken of it. it takes place in the year of -- winter of 732 at the foot of the pyrenees windy jihad, the muslims who have conquered spain in 711, crossed the pyrenees and it looks like they are going to occupy france. there goes the game, civilization as we know it. let me just read this part. the battle has taken place. it is good military history.

contemplating europe's accepted version of history, written by the winners, contemplating europe's narrow escape from a supposedly terrible fate, still shivered in relief after a thousand years. perhaps that the interpretation of the koran would be taught in schools of oxford and her pupils might demonstrate to the circumcise people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of mohammad. the prime minister, a prolific historian of immense authority certified that the french had delivered civilization from an unspeakable fate.

in the nineteenth century volume, the moment when the world's fate was played out between the french and the arabs. was europe saved by the french from asiatics and the africans? one of the arbiters of early twentieth century history, the great german military historian hans bill brock, writing in the twentieth century, there was no more important battle in the history of the world. smarting from the deep humiliation of world war ii, many twentieth century historians commended him. riding at the beginning of the next century, the carnage and cultural landmark battles, the rise of western power, and military historian victor davis hanson was of the same opinion.

to day, charles martel at the feet is buried deep in the collective memory of the west. an occasional scholar has asked a more philosophical question, one with huge considerations of nationality and religion. the furring value judgments to the degree possible, those historians have invited speculation about the cost

benefits of the blood letting some 60 miles from the pyrenees, had those men curtailed that october day, the post from an accident would probably have been incorporated into a cosmopolitan muslim -- unobstructed by borders, as they hypothesize, these historians, devoid of the priestly caste, elevated by the dog of the quality of the faithful and respectful of all religious faiths. curiously, such speculations, such a speculation has a french pedigree. 40 years ago, two historians enumerated the benefits of the muslim triumph, astronomy, trigonometry, arabic numerals, greek philosophy, quote, we,

europe, would have gained 267 years, according to their calculations, quote, we might have been scared the wars of religion, depressed the logic oñ persecution, cultural particular rhythm and hereditary aristocracy. [applause] i was really quite startled. i came to this topic because of a kind of a dread of coming events, then i thought, my goodness, history, in fact, has

so little of the inevitable about it, it is the result of contingencies and too often, we historians approach history as if what we are about to analyze was the way in which it was. now we have to make sense of it but we don't often ask ourselves what we are making sense of. and in that sobering way, eschatology, cultural clashes, civilization, confrontations, those hypotheses, those claims should give us pause. thank you. [applause] >> i want to answer your question about the discovery, but complicate it a little bit. there are a number of -- quite a

few manuscripts discoveries, i am going to talk about confirming a hunch, and another that really change the way i planned to write the book. this is a topic that i think involves particularly biography but also the way history and fiction come together, that involve creation of characters, to write a biography, you need to they deuce from the evidence you have got the best you can come an accurate sense, when you are writing fiction, you may not need to work from fact, in a recent article in the new yorker, she brought up the problem in which a biographer, missed judge character, joe alice's biography of thomas jefferson, in which he built the

character of jefferson, and is so unknowable. they could never have had an affair with his wife, sally having. there was an affair. the hole assessment of jefferson's character, and particularly you spend this time in the archives, getting the evidence, your invoices of these, in motion. everything seemed to be coming together, it actually felt a little bit like i imagined it would. everything is coming together, the story is right. it was nagging at me, this question, does it feel this way because i have invented these

people, how true to life are they at this point? i have taken my 20 years, finished the book, it was in production, and someone that i see only in the summertime, i saw her in the summer as it was going to press, did you really finish the book as you said you would? yes, i did. i said i didn't want to tell you this because i knew you were trying to finish, but i found some letters in my attic, mary peabody, would you like to see them? i said yes, with trepidation. they turned out to be 80 letters, not just written by mary peabody but all three sisters to an ancestor of this friend of mine who had been one of their students. i started reading these with great dread. i made some mistake. the wonderful thing about it was on like the letters i would come across in the archives, these

were all jumble up, they were not marry's letters, elizabeth's letters, they were not in any chronological order. i would pick up a letter from the pile and start to read, recognize the handwriting and i would recognize the voices and here they were as if they were speaking to me from the past, yes, you did get us right. there was elizabeth who couldn't stop quoting from all these dollars she was reading and advising this person, some educating her even though it was long past the time she had been a student. there was mary, counseling her on her love life and there was sophia who would get our way through a page and say i am not well enough to finish this letter. it was a wonderful confirmation that i had done something real and true, at least to the best of liabilities. there were also a couple incidents that i had injected about that proved to be true in

these letters, so i felt lucky about them, i thought i would sneak in a few quotations at the eleventh hour. that was really great. the second issue came much earlier in my research. i love biography and i had read many, many biographies before, starting in on this project. one thing i tend to dislike in biography is when the author will spend the first chapter giving you everything about the ancestry of these people. i just want the subject to be on the stage right from the start. whatever it is i do, i am not going to dwell on the ancestry of these peabody sisters. i have three of them to write about, it will be a long book anyway, can't put that in. but i began to find out what was called at one point of the tragedy -- first tragedy in the family's history.

another point was referred to about the mother of the peabody sisters, that she had a history that could not be told. and the more i looked into this i would find traces of what turned out to be a story of charles's sexual abuse and seduction was the term they use, something closer to rate whipe resulted in an illegitimate child, it was not a story i set out to tell, but this is women's history, these are the things that happened to women. i did my best to substantiate these stories. i feel quite convinced that these events took place even though it was a difficult thing. the history that should not be

told, there were little clues. so i wrote a chapter about the ancestry of the peabody sisters. i felt it was a discovery, both of these discoveries, a curse and a blessing for the book. [applause] >> i have a couple of examples of surprises. these are both in connection with my theodore roosevelt book, i can tell you surprises all day long but i will keep it short.

if you ever read anything, any political history about the period from 1900-1920, especially in washington. one of the sources you will see cited all the time are the letters of archie butt, a military aid in the white house, and he was the president's right hand man. was the end of roosevelt's administration and through most of taft's administration, he died on the titanic. these letters, he didn't keep a diary. he wrote these letters home to his family in georgia, very much inside stuff, they but to be kept under lock and key and he kept his copies under lock and key. in the 1920s and in 1930, volumes of letters of archie butt were published, these get

quoted all the time. i ordered out my copies of these books come and the first thing i noticed when i was reading the first of these three volumes was how many of the seas theellipse the page. mrs. taft, mrs. roosevelt, there must be a lot of stuff, there was a big feud between taft and roosevelt. so i found my way to the original. in the second two volumes, there were no ellipses ease on the page but things had been left out. i found my way to the originals, but was there and larges what we know about what went on in the

taft white house. archie butt was with taft from morning until he went to bed at night so he knew the stories. so that was wonderful. the other thing wanted to tell you about, when i started working on a book about the roosevelt, his life after the white house, i wanted to write -- he was only 50 when he left the white house, he was the youngest president, the youngest ex-president, jfk was the youngest elected president but teddy roosevelt became president when mckinley was assassinated and he was two weeks shy of his 40 third birthday. he is the youngest ex-president,

only 50. what would happen to a man who had power once he didn't have it any more? the existing biography of theodore roosevelt don't cover this period very much with the exception of the time he ran for president as foremost candidate in 1912. there just wasn't a lot about him in this period, and the reigning idea was that teddy roosevelt, out of power, was out of control. this was an assertion made by a historian in this era of a biography that every undergraduate still reads. i thought that was what i would find when i started out, that this was a man who was a rogue

elephant once he was out of the white house. the farther i went into things, the more i realized that i didn't agree with at all, that he was very deliberate, often at the top of his lungs, all calculated, everything that he did. he was a critic of wilson's war effort, people writing about this period would often cite this as an example of how he was totally out of control once he was out of power. he really made a calm decision to speak at the top of his lungs about what he thought was wrong with the war effort as a way of speeding it up. he spoke if in a calm, reasonable voice, nobody would pay attention to him. so i am doing this and feeling bad about the conclusion being the opposite of this other conclusion because this historian had become a friend of

mine and was a nice friend to my work and i couldn't bear to face him when i was doing that. he wrote me the nicest letter, he said that he was wrong about that. i -- you have to forgive me. i was 32, i didn't know anything about the in their 50s or men who were tired. the story had a nice ending but when the book was reviewed, everybody seemed to know for sure that teddy roosevelt's power was out of control. so it turned up in review after review that i didn't know what i was talking about. that is the thanks you get. [applause] >> i wanted to throw in my 2 since before we move on on this

question of surprises i remember early in the time was working on this period every construction going through this, all the letters received by the governor, people want a job, not the same way they do in illinois, but minor little problems, a cow travel by corn, what do i do about this? i came upon this one letter so striking to me that i reproduced most of it in this book i wrote ,ñpñst the

politicization of everyday life, these daily encounters in the aftermath of slavery was fraught with meaning and power struggles

at every level. it really showed -- it made me rethink what i was going to write about, not just national politics, but this day to day struggle over what kind of society was going to replace slavery in the south. it also reveals an advantage, there is nothing else in the historical record about this. i have no idea what happened to this letter, the governor never rode back as far as i can tell, i doubt if it ever went to court, i know nothing else about this writer, i can't get into his mind other than to say what an amazing sense of dignity. two or three years from slavery, able to stand up but not in a violent way, a dignified way to defense a sense of himself and family. to get into the subject to the of a person in the way that the historical scholars is prevented from doing.

>> before we abdicate to the novelist to finish reconstruction history, i wonder if this question is useful, that letter, quite poignant, an example of politicization of everyday life, were their responses, gubernatorial responses? >> there was a book of letters sent from the governor's office which i immediately went to. i would guess the governor never responded to this letter. >> or any such letters. >> he did respond to letters from black people but this was a governor elected by black folks in parts. this is two years after radical reconstruction. he is probably a constituent of wasn't considered significant enough for the governor to do it but maybe there is such a letter somewhere. this is a real researcher here, to get to the absolute bottom of

the story. let me see if the panel wants to add anything to what has been said and if not, since we don't have much time, let me open the floor to anyone who wants to pose a question to the panel as a group for any individual up here, this young lady has a microphone and another one here. so i invite anyone who has been listening all morning -- ma'am? >> i am wondering if you have any difficulty accessing sensitive archives? >> anyone here have difficulty accessing archive? >> i could say yes, i would suppose, freedom of information requests to the justice department are not responded with great alacrity. when you receive your trove of stuff, what is the term?

read action? there is that aspect. my biography of dubois is prefaced by a record amount of letters. was embargoed -- embargoed for ideological reasons. it required some compromise with what i had fought my political views were in order to be credible to the people. >> i have an answer to that, not about sensitive archives but the production of archives overtime. one of the things that fascinates me is the degree to the which the founding fathers were enacted by victorians. famous for having taken out anything that was funny from the

founding fathers, so washington and his papers always called general putnam old putt or put put. he transcribes washington, always change it to general putnam. the originals are lost. the originals are lost or held in private hands. it is a different sensitivity question. it is about the evidence we do have. >> another question over here? >> how do you know it is 5 to stock research in? >> when i start running into the same thing over and over again, i am not finding anything new any more. >> the law of diminishing returns. >> exactly. other answers to that?

>> you could also ask your wife, your spouse. >> sometimes the archivist would say get out of here, get writing. i thought i had cleverly limited myself to reading just the letters written by the sisters and their friends and family members and their diaries, i drew the line at reminiscences from after their lifetime. however, i had this point at which for personal reasons had to put the book aside for about a year's time and i thought i would get back into it by reading some of these reminiscences, peabody at the end of her life. i had read one or 2 and they started to be repetitive. this silver-haired woman with a brilliant memory, lovely blue eyes, but i went back to read a

few more of these in the historical society and filled out the slick for one and thought i would get this little folder of ten majors and instead out came two enormous manuscript boxes, 700 pages of biography, minister biography written about elizabeth the body, it was written in old-fashioned style, life and letters. so this person was saying then they move to salem, long quotation from journals and letters and i realize many of these letters and journals, i had never seen before. there were amazing discoveries in this, i found out, accounts of elizabeth peabody and her childhood, how she hated her curls and wanted to cut them off with her mother's sewing scissors, she fought with her mother about what she was supposed to read, she was a religious rebel at age 13, read the bible 30 times, i thought i would have to rewrite the childhood chapter, journals from

when she stayed with the emersons, i mentioned those yesterday in my talk. it was a wonderful find. if i hadn't taken forever and even had this year when i gave up the book for a little while i would never have gone and looked at this and no one ever would have. >> it is probably better to keep researching, do too much research and too little research. we don't have that much more time. >> a question for jill. would you describe to us with the conflict between your historians sensibility and your creative sensibility, the two examples you describe. i wonder if you could tell us the advantages and disadvantages of that struggle? >> that is too hard, a wrap up

moment. i found it immensely instructive and fruitful to meditate on it but in a concrete way, not sitting in my office thinking i wonder what is the difference? struggle with it, it relates to the research question. in my period, if i do early modern work, the research, when you get to the end of the research is clear because you have read everything, if you want to study the salem witchcraft trials, as a historian, if you read everything, you still don't know what the hell happened. you need to come up with an explanation. i had an interesting experience, i was writing a piece for the new yorker on the children's book stuart little. the first time i had done a piece of research in the modern period, working with people who wrote a lot, e.b. white and katharine white and i thought what was stuart little suppressed? i would love to come -- i thought it would be wide to the

salem girls think they saw which is, it was a question that had an answer in the archives. if you keep reading and reading, it explains it all. that was, in a way, a moment when i understood why fiction appealed to me in particular as the kind of historian that i am, so much of the historical work i have done with people who left poorly documented lives, a particular kind of imagination, narrative strategy, to deal with those silences, it has always been a struggle. i know it has been frustrating. what was useful to me about the steward little project, historians can solve things and figure out what happened and there is a bottom to the evidence. in a novel, actually novelist's can't solve anything either, these are human problems and at the end of the day the novel is not an answer, it is an

argument. >> does miles--are there further announcements? >> there is one announcement, a book signing, james kaminski, yourself, your founder, we will be signing books in the lobby. give them a sense to get out of here. [applause] >> this is book tv's coverage of the 2009 key west literary seminar. next, author barry unsworth on his novel "land of marvels," set in 1914 and focuses on the attempts by western nations to control part of mesopotamia. it is about 20 minutes. >> good afternoon. i would like to read a few pages

of my new novel "land of marvels". each morning, armed with rifle and revolver, accompanied by his interpreter and two men from the village, also armed, aliens set off on horseback for the fields of bitumen that glittered a somber welcome to him. as he drew near. for a time that could not be measured, before there existed being able to measure time, this had continued to, the slide of oil from below the scaling rock, the spreading acreage of swamp. this horse might be far from the borders of the pitch. oil could migrate many miles before flanking the belt of

shale or play that held it trapped. he had to find clues to the direction of flow, the whereabouts and ferocity and depth of the underlying reservoir rock. , was some indication, though far from entirely trustworthy. a fresher, more recent flow, sometimes yellow against a darkly weathered older pitch. he was proposing, with the help of his escort, it would lay aside their rifles to take up picks and shovels, big exploratory wells and so obtain a cross-section of the for surface rock. begin was not drilling. it was in keeping with his role of archaeologists. but for the time being in these