something else, it is unfathomable to me. again, you might be wrong about things, that is okay if you are honestly wrong but you have got to live and speak and write with integrity. the cliche about living a lie hafed is worth than death. the mind from dr. foster they ask what about held. ..

>> enjoy the way books make our lives and richer, and at the same time live that life. informed by books.

>> and the highlight of the 2009 los angeles times festival of books. a panel discussion featuring paula giddings, author of "ida: a sword among lions." richard reid, author of "a force of nature: the frontier genius of ernest rutherford." and robert roper, who wrote "now the drum of war: walt whitman and his brothers in the civil war." this program lasts an hour. >> to the matter at hand. our title today is at the gates of the 21st entry. and i have to admit that i at least am a little bit mystified by that as the authors that you

have today don't really have works necessarily better at the gates of the 21st century. although paula's works century bridge the 21st 19 today. richard has written that he really spans the 20th century rather than standing at its gates. but with that, let me make -- a big gate. exactly. let me make a few introductions and then we will move to the panel. i will try to reserve time idea to take some questions from all of you. first to my immediate right, paula giddings. paul is the author of when and where i entered, also in search of sisterhood, and the challenge of the black sorority movement and is the editor of burning all illusions. her most recent book, "ida: a

sword among lions." the campaign against lynching was called the best book of the year by the washington post and chicago tribune. although it noted that it was a final for the national award, it connotes her there was a final for the los angeles times book prize. i'm happy to report you that as of 9:30 last night it was the winter. [applause] >> paula also hold the chair in african-american studies at smith college and is the editor of the academic journal readings feminism. among other publications. to the far end of the panel, robert roper. we are here today to talk about biography and related topics. but most of roberts published books are novels or stories collections. some other titles include mexico days. the trespassers.

he has written for magazines such as national geographic, outside, and men's journal, for newspapers including "the new york times," chicago tribune and happily the los angeles times. he has also been publishing essays is the americans call and he teaches writing and film departments of johns hopkins. he has idled at work just written a new novel and working on the second, in search of another biographical historical subject. his most recent book i suspect we'll talk about here today was titled "now the drum of war: walt whitman and his brothers in the civil war." finally richard reid who probably needs no introduction to any of you. is a senior lecturer at usc. he is probably best known for his presidential biographies of john kennedy, richard nixon and ronald reagan. his latest book however, was a

biography of artist rutherford in which he repeated the extent to which led to generally accepted picture of the adam. that he described as a labor of love designed to show his fellow engineering graduates that he was not as dumb as they thought he was. [laughter] >> so to begin, i want to invite each of our panelists to offer some hoping thoughts, and sort out we start with the question, you know, we're here today to talk about biography. i would've each of you talk about some of the challenges of telling history through the development of characters. paul, you are the award were, do you want to be first up? >> thanks a lot. i think the greatest challenge, it took me a long time to write this book, and for many reasons. of course, lots of research and lost two with the fact that you have to have a full-time job as well as writing. but also i had to learn about

biography specifically. i written books about history before, but not a biography before. and so so many of my first drafts were really the history of ida wells life rather than the story and the narrative of her life. so it took me a long time to understand the different, and my first drafts of the life of ida b. wells, if any of you know pretty much about her, it is such an exciting person. she starts the first anti-lynching campaign in 1892. she refuses to leave a first class ladies car in 1883. she is a settlement house out of. she is embroiled in all kinds of controversy because she is a transgressive, very transgressive woman, and coming up in a victorian period. with all that, those first drafts made her life bill. this is really something, that i

can make i dislike dull. and that's because i was writing the history rather than the narrative. that was my big lesson of how to, and of course the great challenge of integrating of her personal life with his tumultuous and defining period of the late 19th and early 20th century. and she is an exciting figure, because her life actually -- one reason why ida wells launches the first anti-lynching campaign, if we think about lynching, that really begins in the revolutionary war years. it's not until 1886 that the number of blacks which exceed the number of whites lynched. coming at precisely the time when blacks are making such huge advances, i mean, just a generation from slavery, making huge advances.

this was the people who believe that citizenship rights had to be earned. and they did so in literacy, drops dramatic results show that 200 black newspapers are being published every week by the 1880s. this is when the churches develop. this is what all the social institutions begin to develop. so it's a mystery to many blacks, as well as particularly, but why is lynching increasing so much when blacks are fulfilling the social contract of this american idea. and so it is wells really who figures it out, and figures out that there is another way to thank about protest, which blacks are often, the black elite very reluctant to do in this period of time. they had terrible experience during reconstruction course. and they are very internal.

let's develop our community spirit was not worry about what's going on on the outside. and protest is just an anomaly to many of them. so wells was not in a this. her task was too full. she has to convince her white allies, potential white allies and opinion makers in the north particularly, that blacks are not guilty of the crime that they are accused of. the lynchings of the rationale for lynchings is that black men are raping white women. and wells calls this a new cry because this has never emerged before so she has to deconstruct that. which she does through using the new method of the social sciences that are developing industry. she also has to convince blacks to mobilize and protest using modern methods like civil disobedience. she creates a railway, a strike, long before rosa parks. and other means and also

integration, etc. etc. so she has a two task fold -- a twofold task of which she does with great drama, with great meticulousness and intellectual acuity, and with great courage. >> robert, you have written across various genres. what about telling history through biography? what were your experience is in that regard? >> well, all of my books are about people, characters, but i feel like i was in some ways i have been stocked by walt whitman and a long period of time. began when i was high school forced to read a captain my captain. other bad poems of whitman's. and then when i was in college i stumbled into a class where we

are reading a lot of whitman. and again we read a lot of poems of oh indiana, oh nebraska school. and i had a feeling that -- what is all the excitement about this guy. and wasn't until some years later that i realized that we were reading poems exclusively out of the deathbed edition, many of you know widman was this rare poet who appear to write the same book over and over again. to get it right. but he was editing out his poetry as he went. so that the deathbed edition that he signed off on, really on his deathbed, was in many ways the least exciting and most censored version.

so i went back and read the first edition, the 1855, and i wasn't electrified. the guy is speaking right to you. he is leaping off the page. he is so hungry to make, get in contact with you. it is a powerful force. in 1860 edition, which i think is the greatest and other earlier one is replete with a very, very vivid and moving sexual -- sexualize poetry, which walt then begin to bounder rise himself with highs. so i thought maybe there was something to this guy. and i began to read with great intensity and excitement. and then i learned somewhere along the line that he had been unearthed in the civil war hospitals. and widman was always careful to

claim he was not a nurse. but he was. he assisted investigation, carried bedpans, sat with probably hundreds of young men as they died, wrote thousands of letters to bereaved parent. it was a very hard-working nurse. i calculated 40 to 50 hours a week in the hospital's. and these are civil war hospitals all in washington, d.c.. many of them were terrible houses. so i was very moved by that. i began to work on it at the time when the iraq war was really going bad and i was really worried about soldiers at walter reed, guys were coming back. and i felt that there was more and more i wanted to learn about walt whitman. and i discovered that, not that i discovered it, but i stumbled upon the fact that he had a brother who was an ordinary soldier who had written probably hundreds of letters to walk into their mother.

and walled wrote his brother, many hundreds of letters. so there was a body of correspondence and opened the door into the family that was a great and exciting discovery for me. so i suddenly felt that, although widman has been written about, there was this great potential story about this family, this family and during this war and experiencing it in many different ways. his brother george whitman was not just an ordinary soldier. he was an extremely capable and indeed fierce soldier. walt was described by a friend as a great tender mother man. george, who adored walt. they were very, very close. george was a very ardent soldier, a very effective soldier, a killer. his letters to the mother back

in brooklyn, they kind of really threw him a back. he would write to his mother sang mom, there was a little dustup a couple of days ago. i don't know what they're going to call it but it was close to a little creek. and then we fall brilliant five k. description of very, very carefully creation of the battle. george was in the thick of the fight and then afterwards would walk the rounds of the battle to really understand the forces that had come to bear. so anyway, i thought these different kinds of manhood were very interesting. i thought there was a book their. >> did you ever consider writing to some walt whitman in the war, or is it in the course of the researcher expanded to include his family? >> i think it was apparent, when i realized that they had written so much to each other and taken such -- had such different experiences of the war that i thought there is something you. >> so that was part of the

genesis? >> yet. >> richard, obviously we all know you through your political work, but this latest book, technical, scientific? what special challenges did oppose and what are your thoughts on telling history through biography? >> i think you are going to tell the history of science, which is the least well told story and the 20th century, you will have to do it through biography since much of the material that scientists produce or discovered in the period, which we now call the heroic age of physics is too complicated for most people to stick with. so that it is not an accident that people like einstein become public figures, interesting figures, in their own right. because it is the only way you

can tell the story of what these people did. and i picked -- and i love the title at the gates of the 21st century. i am doing a second book, a second scientific biography, on the inventor of the internet, is that it was science that drove the 20th century. the wars, after all, you can surely construct a historical construct showing the wars, but the wars in the end were about machine guns, about gas, about atomic bomb's, about the airplane. the history of the 20th century would have been totally different if it had not technologically advanced. you know, in a certain way. ernest rutherford then presents himself to me, born in 1871 on the frontier of new zealand, 10 miles from the next, built

his own bicycle of wood and traveled about on that and became the first colonial scholar, accepted at the laboratory at cambridge university which would later become the head. and in much of science, einstein is an example of this, the young men, or young women, make a great discoveries. sometimes when they are teenagers, and then spend the rest of their lives defining it. rutherford was an exception to that rule, probably because he started a little later in life because of where he came from. but between 1911 and 1932, rutherford and einstein were the two greatest -- two best known scientist in the world.

rutherford was the great -- the greatest of experimenters with the possible exception of michael faraday, the scientist renowned. and einstein was certainly the greatest theorict of his generation. they were friends. rutherford had a good deal to do with getting einstein out of germany and into the united states, which may have been a mistake on rutherford's part because once einstein became part of the great american evolution machine, you do this very, very well, science became einstein and rutherford's reputation, at least in the united states, began to disappear. but in those 21 years, through some of the experiments that i re-created as well as i could, he discovered the generally accepted shape of the atom.

the nucleus. radioactive decay, discovered half-life. he discovered he was the first successful outcome is, that is a change one element into another. up originally it wasn't a goal, but it was nitrogen. he in addition, 11 of his students won nobel prizes in physics or chemistry, including the other great scientists of that period, younger niels bohr of denmark who was a student, an assistant of rutherford. one of 11 nobel prizes for him. ended in 1932 with three students that you would never notice, reading american history, with obsolete equipment and hand in the small grinding

cars of the cavendish laboratory in cambridge, they were the first to split the atom before the americans were able to do it and the germans were able to do it. both of them were putting hundreds of times -- resources into trying to do it. but with old equipment and three young men, rutherford split the atom in 1932. another reason i was interested in writing about him, and -- is that he was the anti-edison. thomas edison invented money. it was business. it was america. rutherford was of english school, as later was a young man named tim berners-lee who felt the scientific publication should be opened and the wayside, rutherford never had a patent in his life. the wayside advancely by opening

this dissemination of information, that there was some kid in new zealand who would read this and figure out the next step. and that's the kind of size i wanted to write about. when rutherford died, he died rather early in the late 30s. his bank account was 7000 pounds, which was exactly his own nobel prize money in 1911. i will than by talking about the new times once had a very bright science editor named comfort. and in "the new york times" magazine in 1936, he wrote what these people did, einstein, rutherford, or eisenberg, plunk, the heroes of the heroic age of physics. and this is what he said they did.

suppose that nobody on earth had ever heard a piece of music. and suppose that beethoven's fifth symphony is played over and over again by invisible musicians. that this is his problem is to devise an apparatus which will shift out one note from another and analyze it, and for what kind of invisible instruments produced the sounds, and determining what notes should be played and how long and how loudly. it's not likely that he would succeed him imagine violins and clarinets or even musicians going into wards or he would postulate nearly vibrating bodies. these would meet his requirements. even with this application, the odds of him completely solving the mystery of beethoven's fifth would be happy. solving the problem of the invisible atom, which is far more complex than any of this and which emits light and heat and other forms of energy and more intricate ways than sound

is emitted by musical instruments is infinitely more difficult. and that is what these men did, and that was the 20th century. and that's what i wanted to write about this. >> let's go back to you for a minute, robert. an episode in american history more chronicled than the civil war, a new book on lincoln it seems to much every year. what draws you, what do you think are so many of us to the civil war, the spirit? what specifically do you do that period? >> that's a great question. i discussed that a lot in my book, because walt had an idea about the civil war. walt was steeped in the war because he nursed these thousands and thousands of soldiers turkey really knew what was going on. he visited battlefields also. but walt had an idea that pretty

soon this war is going to be over, please god, the union will be preserved and we will forget about this stupid battles. we will not care about them, what he called about the military munitions of the war. will not care that the battle of the woman's gap was fought on december 24 whatever it was. what we will remember is the suffering and the men. the suffering and the caring. because those are spiritually vibrant tax. they have a lot more to do with this experiment in democracy, this great thing that america represents. and walt was profoundly wrong. what people remember, particularly american men, is that passage at arms, actual details of the battles, who suffered were, what was done, how men overcame their fear, who

survived, who died. those are the things that soldiers in particular, and then the sons and daughters and 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 about the civil war, for me this was -- this book was also an opportunity to really get into the literature of the war. spent a couple of years just reading about the civil war. it occurs to me that the war was not a tragedy because brother to brother, but rather so many brothers killed so many brothers and did it so well. i mean, american soldiers, when motivated and reasonably

equipped our fearsome force. i mean, the destiny war are so equal that, over 6 million dead young men. soto into why that fascinates us, i think it's a profoundly framing idea. and we need to encounter it, try to understand it. paula, you're struck, ida wells begins in the immediate aftermath of the. by the time she died as you note in your book she had faded from prominence. i assume, i haven't heard you talk about this, you really see part of your mission here to reestablish her in the american imagination. tell us sort of that part of your exploration of her life, and have you, i assume you have 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,

or i'm sorry, less during her lifetime than later. and one of the things -- this is the woman who did just so much. she was one of the first investigative reporters. she starts a settlement house in chicago. she starts the first black women's suffrage organization in chicago which is really instrumental in the election of the first black alderman in chicago, oscar depriest. who works with marcus garvey. i'm talking about all this, and of course the anti-lynching campaign is a successful in many ways. lynching doesn't stop, but lynchings go down. is redefined. she is defended blacks pretty successfully. and yet, i remora coming across in her daybook which she wrote some notes in the 1930s. this was a year before dedrick at this point she was running for a state senate seat in

illinois. a year before her death she writes about going to a negro history meeting with her daughter. and she says, and they are discussing the book by carter woodson, who is known as the father of negro history. . . was she who -- was it

significant this campaign as i fought but of course it is. all the evidence is. and what i came to the conclusion this was -- she does have -- excuse me, i have allergies killing me. she does have -- she is so transcripts if even along reformers and so i had of her time largely because i think also of her class ideas because the progressive reformers were going on many levels but they were mosul agreed on class and they believed the elite should get together and solve the nation's problems. and wells believed in this insurgency of the laboring class to be involved and she had a different idea about poor people than many of her peers so that was one of the leadership issue. another issue was when frederick

douglass died i think in 1895 wells had been very successful in this campaign by the and 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. antilynching legislation has passed even in southern states, lynching is begin to go down and after the death of frederick douglass and 95 wells should have been the leader of the black reform and civil rights movement. as we know it is booker t. washington emerges in this vacuum. and one reason why she was never permitted was because of gender mainly. and she tried to sort of get the torch passed by frederick douglass she was close to in some instances but he wouldn't give her that. so she is a figure -- she is so i had of her time in so many ways and that's -- you know,

that is the price that you pay when you are at the time that she would have loved the 60's i think to her campaign provides a foundation for that protest movement and i think she is enjoying politics right now probably. [laughter] >> the more modern civil rights movement often is told as a story principally of men. is that -- is that an accurate portrayal? does that tell more about the history -- [inaudible] this is what i'm asking. [laughter] why is that? >> it's a complicated -- the obvious, you know, the of these ideas are around sexism and patriarchy and all that but there is a little more complex idea as well which has a lot to do with i don't know can i get into the weeds questions of nationalism.

let me say quickly i was at a u.n. conference for women several years ago in my robie and i was around is really women and i was around algerian women and i was around a palestinian women and this was a period of time when women were having such a hard time in the black power mo of mant, civil rights more often to the power movement and this whole idea women have to be behind and men have to be controlled and all that stuff and i was talking about this and the israeli women said that's happening in your country, too? and the palestinians said that's happening there, too? and all of these places were in a nationalist moments in this period of time and national some kind of defiance defines leadership among males and men and it's a kind of 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 male patriarchy is in control and of course the role of women is to have children for the revolution to have children to maintain the cultured in these nationalist movements so that's the other side of it and the wells suffers from that. this is a very nationalist moment in the 19th century. >> i have a question i would like each of you to tackle. how do you choose subjects for your work? how do you know you have looked upon a subject that will result in an effort full biography? >> when my publisher -- [laughter] -- ups the anti. [laughter] frankly the way i chose subjects was one, 1993i wrote a book about john kennedy which was greatly successful and,

therefore things poured in on the right about other presidents, and i thought i had learned how to write about what president actually do, and so i did to more common nixon and reagan, and then of course like everything in life i got to the feeling if i wrote about one more president, ironically my daughter is on barack obama's staff in the white house. [laughter] so maybe i will write about her. [laughter] and i had always had this year nine -- believe me, no one wanted me to write about scientific figures. [laughter] but i was fighting over me and i wanted to reject -- i had no more to say about presidents. i had something to say about the politics of today but not the overriding thing.

>> robert, how do you choose subjects? >> for me it is a pretty embarrassing slap negative process. i'm sort of in the midst of it now. i'm 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. that's always fun, but some kind of good news at some point a kind of excitement overtakes me, and it often turns out there is something in the material and the subject i am starting to stumble on and so i get chosen by the topic at some point. i felt that walt, the fineness of his personality started working and me and then was the

real discovery of this project, which is okay i have these two brothers, very interesting relationship, but their mother was the soul of the family. the mother had been written about in a biographical literature as walt whitman's embarrassing mother, fi is illiterate mother back in brooklyn, and i was puzzled because i went to an archive and found hundreds of letters this illiterate mother had written, and they were not only the letters but they were a long stream of consciousness extremely funny and perceptive letters. she was writing to her son who was this merc dealing with amputations. walt would write her mother, i have to tell about a soldier i saw yesterday. i cared for him and his wound is already gangrenous. he's going to die. he's beautiful like a god. i watched him, i combed his

hair. i can barely hold back the tears i am so sad about this. and she would write back, you know, she would talk about this is 32 cents a pound, and then there would be a saying walt, you can write me about the soldiers, i understand you love them and and it becomes a fascination. there's nothing wrong with that. i understand. she wouldn't say i know what you're going through but she would encourage him and hearing that from his mother really booked him up. she would do the same thing with george, would write to her very frankly about what he was going through in the war. so this mother was -- i had no idea i would come upon her that i would read her letters which had been a chord by many scholars, not only ignored the darrigade. so i feel that family, the

subject chose me and a way and i was lucky. >> you mentioned earlier you had written the history of ida wells before the biography. is that typical? you circle around the subject like that or how do you generally come upon a topic to write about? >> well, the walt -- wells intervened -- when i was writing about black activist women, wells popped up in the center of my pages and said i need a book of my own. these other women are fine but this one is -- and she grasped my imagination in a way that wouldn't let go. and now i didn't intellectual i said then, but now i understand that i have always had some in questions about american culture and race and gender and her story is so central to american history and i think that is what

i knew intuitively. now if i could look at the opportunity to see america in the late 19th and gates of the early 20th century as transforming itself into a modern industrial power struggling with all of these anxieties are around race and gender and sexuality, and all these great moments of course during the 20th century and look at this unfolding through the eyes of a black woman activist like ida wells is quite extraordinary because she takes the full measure. she is a progressive reformer in the full sense of the word and she takes on everything. later, suffrage as well as -- but it is all based on what she learns about the country and the culture through the lynching and what that means. she sees the lynching has kind of the rosetta stone of race

relations, once you can on tangle it, and what she does she on tangles it through understanding and what is happening with not just race but six schiraldi, class, gender roles and her discourse is unlike any other in this unique in this period and so she has to take everything into account. there's 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 has to understand it and she's an activist. she's not just intellectualizing it or just writing about it, she's writing superbly but she is also mobilizing people. so, she was a figure that sort of tapped me on the shoulder and said come with me. you will enjoy it. [laughter] >> we will have time for all of

your questions i have one more craft question i hope each of you would address and then we will open up the microphones. maybe start with you, robert. i am curious how each of you structure your work. do you complete your research before you set out to write, are you writing as you go? what is your work flow like in terms of putting together a book like you did hear? >> ghosh i really don't have a good answer to that. [laughter] accept what is compelling about the subject parts of it dictate a structure so that it becomes the question almost of telling a national story. sometimes the structure and editor will read it and say this is quite complicated, this is very untraditional but it's certainly not because i set out to do something formerly invented. to me it is the clearest and

simplest way. >> did you feel if you had all of your material assembled before you sat down to write or did you figure it out as you went? >> i had to continue to do research but pretty much like i said before i sat in the chair and read for two years and at the end of the two years i had a bunch of old fashioned notebooks which i had made notes and i realized one day it was getting so the low negative i was going to have to start taking notes on the notes and i realized that way madness play. [laughter] the next day i wrote the first sentence. it sort of frightened me. >> about you, richard? i'm curious as to your process but also with the that has changed over the years and whether you are giving it the way you initially did. >> i don't do it the way i initially did. the first piece i wrote was a

magazine piece for the new york time that profiled john lindsay the mayor of new york and for some reason i thought that real riders, after all i had been educated as an engineer real riders wrote in one sitting so the energy would go like this. [laughter] when i learned more about myself i set up a system, i get up early in the morning usually about 5:00, right 1,000 words a day, and then i become a human being. the first time the phone rings or something happens, one of the kids runs through, i know i finished that part of my life and then i teach about -- think about teaching. similar to robert though, i do probably spend a year or two on research and filling the crates from office depot

chronologically. there's a great chronological writing is the easy way out i think and i often teach it. even if you are riding in 800 world book, the structure is the same as a good joke with foreshadowing and finally at the end everything becomes clear and chronologically that works particularly with presidential books where every second of the president's day is recorded and everyone who has contact it is the high point of their life so if you go to them 30 years later they remember what happened i write before there's anything easier to be done and those hours 548 to nine. >> [inaudible] [laughter]

until you have to do something else. i think the best -- one of the most important things i learned, i took a film writing -- it was a weekend, one of those film writing weekends and new york city, and that was important to me because i learned there was so much going on in this period and of course in wells's wife, too, the only way you could write successfully was and scenes. and so that's how i constructed the biography. as seems you see things and understand things in particular ways by you can just tell people this happened and that happened. and so, that was a way to begin to construct and began to i think get a sense that you see what's going on and not just read from its going on at the

same time. >> why don't we see if there are some questions from the audience. i think that do we come to a microphone? >> i wanted to ask mr. reeves why is there so little written about science and also, too, i want to ask a process question about since you are writing about people mostly dead and dealing with letters what do you do with conflicting points of view? how can you trust the information? >> well, i think the answer about so little be written about science, and i agree with you about that, is that it is, well there are two reasons. one, there are few people who understand it, so there are very few eminent science writers, and the second is the perception, which i think has a good deal of truth, the public is either not interested or can't really

follow this. when you get -- we are post mechanical. earnest referred was the figure of that. everyone in this room could own an automobile and if you broke down and opened the hood and try to fix it you wrote on a typewriter and if it broke you could fix it with a paper clip, now you open a car and don't have the vaguest and god knows what goes on inside a computer. [laughter] so that we really haven't developed a cadre of people who can write about this science, and most publishers have the prejudice that unless it is abraham lincoln and the atomic bomb no one is interested.

[laughter] >> who's next? >> good afternoon. first i want to say i almost feel, dr. giddings, that i know you personally. i've been keeping and i remember seeing you on our eyes on the prize and -- >> thanks. >> you're very welcome. [laughter] >> thank you. >> you did a great job on that by the way. and also, did you e. b. du bois, the biography to me in my personal opinion is an excellent one. i wanted to ask you how would you feel, number one, about ida wells being the precursor of the generation of the 1960's that believed in bearing arms because the work that you are doing a kind of represents part of history. there is a tendency to jump from slavery all the way to the

1960's and kind of skipped over which is a terrible injustice as far as i am concerned. and lastly, what was mrs. ida wells conclusion? >> let me begin with marcus garvey. she liked the black nationalist leader. she liked marcus garvey because she considered him a grass-roots leader the people actually made him the leader rather than being superimposed by others, leadership super imposed by others. she didn't worry about that scheme. she knew he was going to get in trouble with that. but she liked him and it was interesting in fact looking into the military intelligence files you realize military intelligence started falling marcus garvey because he was hanging out with ida b. wells

and in fact this one conclusion that says marcus garvey is a dangerous agitator but i'd be wells is more dangerous. in terms of -- i love bishop turner. he was one of the few men beside her husband who defended her in very critical periods of her career and of course henry mcneil turner was also an emigration must 19th century emigration must, he was a bishop, methodist bishop and believed blacks should go back to africa as well. and a radical and also believed, as you mentioned, taking up arms. this is quite a radical position at the time as you can imagine. but wells fought by the late 19th century certainly that there was no reason not to

defend oneself. she herself of a pistol after writing the first antilynching editorials and said i am going to take someone with me. and what's interesting of course is she is also this great victorian so they solve this tension in the contrast as the one she makes for a wonderful character. she famously says, and i will end with this, she famously says in her discourse around and hire a lynching -- i mean, she says first of all we can civil disobedience. the south's reconstruction depends on black leader and northern capital. and if we could stop -- if we could stop any of that from coming into the south, we can have a revolution. but the civil disobedience didn't work she famously said winchester rifle should have a place of honor. [laughter] and believed certainly was born

out eventually after world war war i. these are stories we don't hear very much in the summer after world war i, 1919 for example. one of the reasons one of the biggest rally it was in chicago where wells was living at the time, and it's very interesting that this one of the ends that fly it 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 blacks are armed. and this begins this idea of the radical negro as you mention is a former the 60's. thank you for the question. >> another question?

>> i don't know i've got a lot of questions but one of them is this is the festival of books that are you tempted with all of the research you have done to use other forms? the young man talking about the documentary is don, are you tempted to do that, and also mr. reeves, language of science as mathematics, and in order to interpret that for people who are not a mathematical oriented and it is an extraordinary thing and how can we do more of that for kids so that they can get involved in science and last question is as a living person how do you do a biography of a living person versus someone who has the entire story done? >> who wants to take those? >> the science part of it that and i think you have got --

children should be taught math is not an abstraction. it is a tool and i have shown my kids but if anybody doubted there are rutherford museums in canada and cambridge and the amazing thing about them is most of the experiments are about this size. they look like music boxes or something. and the reason he was a great teacher was not because he had great rhetorical skills or what not, but because he connected math with something you saw work. the simplest example is the way for action is taught so that math in the abstract i think is very difficult also, i had not

thought about the question, but part of the answer i feel for better or worse i think for better is we don't have to train and mathematicians as much anymore in our society because they are being replaced by mathematicians from korea, india, china. i teach at usc down the road, and the engineering school and theath and the biological science as well are very heavily asian and asian-american so that like many things in america, we have outsourced maffei learning and we know the people on wall street can't -- [laughter]

>> robert a piece of the question was living people versus dead people for lack of a better word. any thoughts on that? >> [inaudible] -- amazing files, chronological material [inaudible] >> welcome the answer is definitely yes. i mean, if you have a story that is exciting to write, i think you should begin to imagine dramatizing it if it's that kind of thing. and it doesn't have to be a competition or categorical choice. you can all go down one road. i think that any story that has human themes that are powerful and moving can be dramatized.

i think to dramatize rutherford's life i don't know. i would have to read richard's book. i know that with the wittman's, they live in modest homes in brooklyn, they were a family of carpenters, the father, wald, george, they built houses and sold them and live in these very small dwellings and a lot of questions have arisen to the family know that what was what we would now call homosexual. the word didn't exist in the early 19th century. and of course there has been a long scholarship denying that whitman was homosexual and then sinking that well, during the civil war he sublimated that uncouth urge to be other man i discovered he had a very active love life while he was a nurse. but i got back