organization, but the very idea of human rights. with the onset of the global war

on terrorism a senior bush administration officials reportedly told amnesty international delegates, quote, your role collapsed with the collapse of the twin towers in new york. in a report from amnesty international 2005, i mean wrote about guantanamo bay calling it the gulag of our times entrenching the practice of all our perjury and indefinite detention and violation of international all, trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process. 2005 was somewhat of a different time than now and it was a big deal. i was in washington at the time as a capitol hill correspondent, and i remember the fer it cost and washington. defense secretary donald rumsfeld called the report reprehensible. cheney said he was offended. [laughter] bush called it upsurged and "the

washington post" editorialized that, quote, the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnation is not for the world's dictators but for the united states. it was a clear attempt to try -- officials attack you instead ignore you it is because they are scared of you. the white house attack on the group's credibility for me at that time was a clear affirmation of amnesty international's integrity and power. now, we are talking about the bush administration but it's important to note that this past wednesday president barack obama signed the national defense authorization act that in forces yet another attempt to conduct a commission trials. amnesty international and irene

are once again pushing and changing the way that we see human rights. in a new campaign called demand dignity amnesty international is seeking to make poverty to human rights. irene argues that the poverty remains a global epidemic because it continues to be defined as an economic problem or and the aid and investment. why it's called the unheard truth poverty and human rights she says in powering the poor with basic rights for security and food and even health care as our only chance of a eradicating poverty. before joining the amnesty international, she spent 20 years with united nations high commissioner for refugees. in 1997 as a very young person she helped create the organization concerned universal which works with people in some of the poorest countries of the world to find local sustainable solutions to poverty and

inequality. she was born in bangladesh during a time when they were fighting for their independence from pakistan. well, it is my pleasure to be able to introduce to you the general secretary of amnesty international, irene khan. [applause] >> thank you very much. nice to. >> irene khan, it's great to have you here. i know you have a little talk that you have planned for the audience tonight. welcome. >> thank you very much. i thought i would just speak a little bit about the book and through the book about also amnesty's campaign to demand dignity. and i began -- sidey we have to this st because i don't want you to hear that cracking malaise.

i begin my book actually at the beginning. in fact with my berth in my grandmother's house, and my mother is actually here in the oddest is it is a particular privilege to acknowledge her. i was at the same time i was born in that house another beebee was also born, and that was a child of my grandmother's made, and if i can read from the book 50 years ago to babies were born around the same time in my grandfather's house. one was a girl, myself, the other was a boy born to my grandmother's made. growing up as children the same household we often played together. i remember as a great child came to draw pictures to make toys out of tin cans and pieces of string and run around the yard singing loudly. as we grew older our lives with their different ways. i went to school and on to the

university of prague and a successful international career. it was awesome to school but dropped out after a year because the teacher and schoolmates teased and taunted him for being the child of a domestic servant. his mother put him to work in a state-run factory. considered a man at age 18 he married a 14-year-old girl from a village and soon became a father. when his factory was privatized a few years later he agitated with other workers. my family gave him money and he did reasonably well until political violence and insecurity on the streets drove them out of business. he then drifted into petty crime and was badly beaten by police. unable to afford proper medical care she never fully recovered from his injuries. today he is disabled and lives in a shack in one of the sprawling slums. his children and grandchildren surviving on handout and his sons meager income.

fragile is one of 60 million bangladeshis who live in extreme poverty. the different tragedy's of his life and my own show that many factors -- [technical problem] >> thank you. okay. if i can continue the reading fagile is one of 60 million bangladeshis who live in extreme poverty. the different tragedies of his life and my own show many factors, not all of them easy to analyze and economic terms are crucial to understanding why people are poor. i then go on to say i was not

born poor but i was born in a poor country. my experience as a citizen of bangladesh and as a human rights activist tells me that discrimination, state repression, corruption, insecurity and violence are defining features of poverty. they are human rights abuses. to me, therefore, poverty is the denial of human rights and an affront to human the. that's the definition i use for poverty in my book. and shortly after i came to amnesty international had the occasion to visit south africa, and i went to a police station with an amnesty researcher and found there that the government had put counselors in the police stations to help women make complaints about domestic violence. south africa has one of the most progressive laws on domestic violence and here was a clear attempt to assist women very

progressive, and they're the counselor told me the story of rosie and her story is in that same chapter shortly after i speak about fagile. now rosy was a black south african woman mother of five. she was beaten very often by her husband and one day she was beaten so badly that she died so i asked the counselor why rosy haven't gone to get a protection order from the magistrate. the was one of the provisions. was it very easy for a woman simply to obtain a protection order. the counselor said to me rosy didn't have the money to pay for the bus fare to take her from her home to the nearest court so the best law of the land could not protect rosy. so you have heard the story of fagile and you now hear the story of rosie. and of course all of us when we

hear rosie's story we recognize right away the issue of lack of income. but that's not the whole story. rosie's story is about insecurity with which poor women lived and the difficulty they have of getting out of that situation of poverty and that's why this holistic definition of poverty to include not just income, not how many dollars a day you are and if you listen to the poor they tell you they are poor not because of their income but because they are discriminated. 70% of the world's poor are women and that proportion is increasing. some call it the feminization of poverty. and even in the united states, the highest educated group are asian males, the highest earning group are men, the lowest

educated group and the lowest earning group are latino females. the porth live in and security. they live in neighborhoods with high crime rates. they are very often subject to police violence. in my book i speak of the work that amnesty international has done in the slums of rio and sao paulo in brazil where the police basically criminalize all of the residents who live there. we will ask questions afterwards. the poor are criminalize even in this city. 43,000 citations were given to people in san francisco in 2006 for sleeping in public parks or places to get homeless people were caramelized for being homeless. there are other forms of insecurity that were suggested

to. security of tenure if you are a poor farmer you can be pushed off your land. if you are in a slum you can be destroyed. if you are a day laborer may not durham -- you don't know whether you will earn any money the next day or not so you live with job insecurity so there's many forms of insecurity that defined the lives of poor people. poor people are deprived of basic economic and social amenities, resources. we call them rights, housing, education, health. but most important of all poor people are excluded from political power. they have no power. powerlessness defines poverty constantly. i travelled on behalf of amnesty several times to mexico and met with the mothers of juarez. many of you know about the situation. this is the city where women have come from all parts of

mexico to work their. the income, the work during the day, they go to night school to improve the situation and many of these young women have been killed, a seductive, kidnapped, raped and their bodies found mutilated afterwards and the mothers constantly said to me no one cares and it's true. police did not investigate these cases. there have been no until recently there were no prosecutions and the mother says no one cares. we don't count. we don't count because we are poor women. and the powerlessness of the poor is a defining feature of their life, so it's a discrimination, its sensitivity, its exclusion is deprivation. that is what makes poverty. and these issues are human rights issues. that is why poverty is a human rights problem. the other point that i talk

about in my book is how one of these problems reinforces the office of that there is a constant downward spiral from which people once they have been pushed into poverty by these human rights abuses find it very difficult to get out of poverty. and what i am saying now is not original. i have to admit many others have said it before. marcus who i acknowledge my book, he spoke of freedom has been the route to development, the path to development and freedom also being the ultimate in the of development. and there are many others who have said the same. my book draws heavily on the research done by the world bank. the world bank research analysis, it is very well-known book called the voices of the poor in which the documented testimony from 60,000 poor people around the world who said

the same thing about powerlessness, deprivation and discrimination. and yet when we look at the policies of the world bank, when we look at poverty revocation strategies around the world, human rights are very rarely incorporated there. saugatuck chollet puts a question, points out the problem, defines it but then goes on to say that if we know what the answer is why don't we respect it, why don't we follow it? and their one finds interesting reasons. one finds on the one hand the argument that you need bread before ballots, kaput bread before ballots argument and that is the argument china would use that it is important to suppress civil and liberties in order to promote economic development and many people tend to go along with that that somehow authoritarianism is one way for

development. in writing my book, we did a lot of research and we could not find any evidence to suggest china's economic development is because of the suppression. it was a choice the chinese government made, but there is no economic reason for the chinese. on the contrary what you see in china are great mistakes that have been made. a lot of people have a very heavy price for the development in china. a lot of people continue to pay a heavy price and these are people who are living in rural areas committees are minorities in many cases, these are migrant workers in cities who are not enjoying the prosperity of china, and of course when things go wrong because it is a closed society it is difficult to point out the mistakes that have been made and so authoritarian regimes very rarely correct the

mistakes. there is no space for pressure to be put on them. so, there is this argument that is still thought that you need to suppress liberty to have prosperity. the other argument that also we hear very often is that what we are talking about are not economic and social rights and that is an argument of course, not in china but here in the united states. right now there is a debate on health, health care as a human right, and yet the irony is that when the universal declaration of human rights was drafted in 1948 that declaration included economic and social rights as well as civil and political rights and the architect of that document was eleanor roosevelt. her husband spoke of the four freedoms, freedom from want alongside freedom from need.

and freedom from fear, freedom from fear and want went hand in hand, and his conceptualization of the freedom. and that was because in 1948i think the memory was very fresh in the minds of the u.s. at ministration about the depression, and so i think it's interesting to see whether the economic recession today will again revive interest in brackett pricing economic and social rights in this country has rights. the third reason why i think poverty is not seen as a human rights issue, and human rights are not injected into the poverty ratification strategies is because there is a belief that the market will solve everything. if we simply have economic growth we will all be pulled up out of poverty. well, as we all know eight isn't all cried out economic growth takes place.

economic growth actually creates inequality is at the same time. and even as it pushes some people out it leaves many others behind and as human rights activists the question we constantly have to ask ourselves is who is being left behind? because the people who are being left behind tend to be women or women of the headed households content to be minorities, tend to be, you know, people who are discriminated against. people who are down and out so that's why the market is not an answer either and yet these are the arguments that are constantly used to keep the human rights debate and the development d date in two separate boxes, and i challenge that in my book and i look at the issue of bortolotti and i look at the issue of slums and of the extractive industry operating in africa, some of the

richest in natural resource countries in africa and through those three case studies, i make the point that human rights abuses are underlining these issues the maternal mortality, it isn't wealthy women. and the united states, women of color or three to four times more likely to risk maternal death than white women. in sierra leone the number is one and eight women. i was in ziara lenone four weeks ago after the book had been published. i do mengin sere early on in my book but in sierra leone during my visit i was actually able to see what was happening there myself. and a woman said to me that when she got pregnant her family came to visit her but to say goodbye because pregnancy, she said, is a death sentence. and pregnant women die in sierra leone because of a lack of health care, discrimination and

mismanagement of the health system. who decides when a woman should get married? who decides when a woman should have children? how many children should she have? how should she speaks her children? who decides how much of the national budget should be spent on maternal health care? certainly not women in many countries and it is precisely in those countries that you see high rates of maternal death, so there again you see the relationship between power and impoverishment and that's why l'vov thesis of my book is that it is not poverty the answer to poverty is not enrichment, it is actually empowerment and in every chapter of my book i put out good stories, good news stories it's important to know how people have organized themselves, how people have brought about change, where they have had the freedom, where they have had the space, and where they have had equal access to economic and social rights.

that combination actually produced good results. so perhaps i should stop here by saying police matters, equality matters, security matters, and that empowerment is the answer and we need to invest in people, listen to people and give them the space to play the role to define their own destiny and regain their dignity. [applause] >> thank you very much for that. and of course the irene khan's book is called the unheard truth poverty and human rights. i know they had some in the lobby. irene khan has about 25 minutes to spend with us and we do want

to ask many questions you have again come here he is walking around and account cards if you would like one to read your question down please do so. let's begin by asking in linking poverty human rights and having effective change that comes from that would that require a whole new set of whether it could be policy national or international level to be created or could you somehow make that link and had already applied to existing human rights treaties that the countries have already ratified? >> i think there's a couple of things the would be enormous progress. one would be for the united states to recognize economic and social and cultural rights and

for china to recognize civil and political rights. in fact that is part of amnesty's demand dignity campaign. our goal is to get these two countries to recognize these two sets of rights so that we actually have a common unified vision of human rights. i think that is the first step. the second step would be to get the international community that is investing so much money into the development through the millennium development goal which is the u.n. sort of recognizable for eradicating poverty for the next few years to get them to inject human rights into those goals. those do not recognize participation of people as a means for achieving those goals. those goals do not recognize the legal empowerment as an issue. those don't even recognize discrimination. one of the goals is to have poverty. now, that is a very commendable goal and many countries claim to have reached that goal. but my question is who's still

poor, and you may find that among the minorities and rural areas or among women, poverty is not just had, it is still 80% higher. but among the more privileged class is there is no poverty. so if you don't disaggregate the data, if you just look at these things generally you get a very different picture. discrimination is an issue that is fundamental to human rights. human-rights experts will always ask who has been left behind. who is not in john ecology. so by injecting human rights you can reshape the international strategy on poverty eradication. these are two big issues but there are many other issues where i think human-rights approach to make a huge difference. i don't think you need new treaties. they are all there. when you really need is

political will. you need commitment, and you need i think people to change that debate, and this is why, you know, i am promoting the book, not because i get money out of it. all of the authorities to amnesty international but because i hope people will read the book, they will be date and say this is not about economics, this is about politics. it is about power and it is about human rights. >> it seems like you would need a movement to make that happen. i can imagine a number of countries but not all of them being very cautious about such an approach thinking that if this was the way was adopted it would now have a situation if you have poverty in your country which seems like every country does that they would suddenly be held reliable. mabey amnesty international would come with a lawsuit or something that would try to say

that united states is out of compliance with the law braking human rights laws. >> i think many countries would feel uncomfortable about this issue because, you know, poverty is not just something that happens. it isn't inevitable byproduct of our economy. it is deliberately created in order for some people to benefit from. those people who are in a power will want to retain their power and therefore deprive others. if you look ejector eight this is the chapter that looks at the global economy. looks at the role of big business and what is happening in africa. i identify countries like chad, new guinea, the democratic republic of congo, these are very wealthy in natural resources. yet they have some of the poorest populations. the have conflict, the hat and security committee of deprivation, and that is happening because corrupt

governments are polluting with greedy business to create systems by which the benefits don't go to the population, and very often the international community is part of that problem because they turn a blind eye to these governments. they accept it because it is in their economic interest. the economy is growing and some people are benefiting but many others are not. so, yes, you are right many governments would feel uncomfortable. but on the other hand, i think first of all there is a greater realization on the people side about human-rights and there are movements even in these countries there are some movement on human rights activists who are trying to bring about change. but the bigger reason why i think change will come is because we are all living in one world, and the one thing that we have learned now is that we are part of the same system. 1911 showed us what happens in

afghanistan matters in manhattan. climate change is showing us that what happens around the world matters to everyone of us. so if we want to create a sustainable world we will have to create an economy that is for all of us and not just for the benefit of some and depriving others and that will mean reshaping the economy as well as the politics with which we live today and those are scary subject. but it takes courage to create a sustainable future. >> a question from the audience. what are concrete steps to achieve in power meant than in team lead qtr to achieve results? >> okay. let me give you a very concrete example about which i talked in my book. it is about india and a few years ago workers in a state-owned factory, the workers felt that the hours that they were doing did not reflect the

payment that they were getting. so you know, somewhere the member that were working were not being loaded properly so the workers decided to go and ask the four men, you know, how many hours was he looking and they were told it was a state secret. because it was a state-run factory and their was a piece of all going back to the colonial times which meant any information provided by a state officials a state secret. that was the beginning of a nationwide movement in india for freedom of information legislation, and it eventually led the indian government to adopt a law we about freedom of information. now i was in india about six months after that law was adopted in 2006 and i met an activist who was working in one of the villages, so i asked her as the law made any difference and she told me in the village where she was working the state

provides the food for public works and now the villages go and ask the local official how many bags of food did the government send you? and he is obliged to show them the docket with the bags so it says 100 bags in the villages go and count how many have been distributed and they come back and say we distributed only 87 backs so what happened to the other bags? if you can see very clearly from that how the dialogue, how the relationship between the state and the individual state and citizen is changing. >> another question from the audience, how do you help women in muslim countries as an exit poll iran go up against institutionalized discrimination >> well, institutionalized discrimination is a serious problem in many countries in the world. something like 50 plus countries in the world there are laws that actively discriminate against

women. so the first thing you have to do is change law and then ensure that the law is properly implemented and then you also have to fight social discrimination. but in a country like iran where the state itself refuses to recognize the discrimination against women and institutes it in the name of religion, in the name of culture and in the name of tradition you have a very big battle to fight. but what is remarkable in iran is the million signature campaign that has been launched by shooting a body and many human rights defenders in that country. when human rights activists but also saw this as a campaign for ten signatures and what they're trying to do is mobilize people in their own country to stand up and tell their government what you say or what you do is not what we want. so there is this grassroots issue happening there. now this issue about women's rights and religion is something often asked about perhaps

because i am a muslim a lot of journalists will ask me well, you know, what do you think about discriminating against women, and my answer is, you know, as part of my work with amnesty or as previously as a u.n. refugee worker i traveled all around the world to many muslim countries and i have never heard a single muslim government say that they will not be part of the international financial system because the sharia law we dustin allow them to take interest. right? and yet how often do we hear the same governments talk about the sharia law when it comes to the women's rights? now, shirley law is interpreted in many different ways from morocco to indonesia. why take the least progressive interpretation rather than the more progressive one? these are choices, these are political choices governments make so it is not an issue of tradition, religion or custom.

tradition and custom change over time. they evolves and governments have to be pushed to move along side with it and that is where popular mobilization of the kind happening in iran is commendable and we need to support that. we need to support the women of iran. >> following on that one of the criticisms that we have heard about amnesty international is that it has spent -- it has more reports directed toward open government, space governments than it does toward close government's. >> welcome amnesty international covers over 150 countries in its annual report for example. so we do work very in debt and about 70 countries in the world, and we do keep an eye on another 77 countries of the world, and so we have a very wide range of countries that we cover. so done to sweden. we are looking at human rights

abuses human rights performance in these governments. yes, space governments get very sensitive when we point out to the human-rights abuses in their countries. but so do authoritarian governments. they don't like us pointing fingers at them either. and what we say is we are looking to hold governments to account against international standards they have signed up to. so whether you are a powerful government or a weak one, whether you are a western democracy or, you know, african or asian dictator, we are going to hold due to the same standards of human rights. i know president bush felt we were holding him to close to the fire. but i don't feel guilty about it at all because i think what we were doing expecting the u.s. administration to show the same respect for human rights as we were expecting the government of sudan or the government of sri lanka. so i think amnesty should be proud of applying the same

standards of human rights across the world and we would like to see governments get away from the double standards where they are happy to point to human rights problems elsewhere but not so happy when the light is shone on their own performance. >> another question from the audience. is it a basic cause of the the result of a deliberate policy on laws that benefit the rich, for example and the lack of equitable health care benefits, the wealthy health insurance corporation's fight poverty. don't we need to redistribute wealth and power by a radical change in laws and policies? >> will call laws and policies, it's interesting that you raise the issue of laws and policies. you know, laws and policies are there to protect all of us. but the reality actually shows that the law doesn't work in favor of the poor very often. there was a commission set up, commission of legal empowerment

of the poor set up by the united nations. it included madeleine albright and mary robinson very eminent people including some people from bangladesh to in this room would recognized for his work there. and that commission discovered that the law doesn't work for the poor. there are millions of kids, poor kids who are never registered whose birth is never registered because the system is a bit too bureaucratic or simply is not of local people living in conditions of poverty. the law often believes they require bribes before they will do anything. judges belong to an elite that don't understand the poor. very often laws are there to restrict people. i mentioned earlier the citation for homelessness. you know, law doesn't work for the poor. and therefore you need to make changes and also that the power

can get its protection and there are many situations that is actually happening alternative legal. you have poor people being assisted to litigate to enforce law and actually when their rights. so yes, the economic systems, the political system, the legal systems are not necessarily always fair. the counter movement, the anecdote to that is actually providing the space and working, mobilizing and talking about mobilizing the people for change. >> another question from the audience. have you studied the poor of this rich country usa? tell us something about those findings. >> amnesty international, amnesty usa will publish a report in february next year which looks at the issue of maternal death in this country

and that report shows already our research is showing that report would make it very clear women of color face three to four times the risk of dying and the reason for that is often the lack of access to health care, no insurance, lack of information in the conditions which they live. so, that is one area of poverty that we will certainly want to highlight. i myself since i have been promoting the book in the last two or three weeks wherever i've been in the cities i was in a soup kitchen in richmond. i went to a briefing center in south bronx because i wanted to get a sense of what do people in this country feel about poverty. this is the richest country of the world and i must say i'm also, another center in boston called rosie's place as it

happened, rosie again, and in all of those places what i found was the amazing wealth of the people and i mean intellectual wealth of the poor people coming to the soup kitchens and had very interesting conversations with them. i asked a man and richmond in virginia, you know, what would you say to your leaders and he walked to the wall and started speaking and said it would make that much of a difference. what i say to the wall and what i say to my leader's. so there was this sort of amazing sense of frustration and the person who runs the center said to me the difference between someone being here and not being here is maybe a paycheck not writing. miti and the eviction. maybe some kind of tragedy and there is no support, no show because social support for that

and that is what pushes people here and then they can't get out of it here and they lose their dignity and they just become the are made to feel as though they have no role to play in society. so, yes walking down san francisco two days ago i had people begging and i was struck by it. i am used to bidders. i come from a country their spending on the streets but one wouldn't expect in the richest country of the world. >> another question from the audience. what role does corporate greed play in the creation and maintenance of poverty? >> and our global economy today, the big challenge is how do you hold economic actors accountable for human rights? the traditional concept of human rights is the state, the government, the country, the

state owes the duty to respect your rights in the global economy today if you are a person living in eastern congo than the decisions that affect your life are not being made in the capitol of your country. they are being made in four of the board rooms so how do you influence that? and that's why there is a movement now going on to bring human rights responsibility tabare on big business. there is a process in the united nations going on, amnesty international is campaigning for international standards to be set for companies about how companies should be paid in these situations because what they do and what they don't do those have a huge impact on human rights so that is a very important part of that. the second part of it of course is weaker yet the standards but the standards have to be enforced and very often in these poor countries the state is just

not able to enforce those standards. the government either doesn't have the political will or doesn't have a criminal justice system that can enforce a legal system that can enforce these obligations and that's why it is important that no matter where the company is the company can be held liable. companies go global to seek investment. they are present in stock exchanges around the world. their investment is global. they offered globally. the supply chains are global. so when it comes to legal liability for what they do they should also be held globally. but they are not. think of the disaster and india which took place because of what a union of dow chemical's did. they are still today children being born with birth deformities. young women who were bbs at that time who are now young women who cannot marry because in that

society if you are not fit to give birth the new or no value. women's lives have been totally destroyed. and the company has yet to clean the site property. the water is still being polluted. the government of india invited dow chemical's and at that time to promote its economy and the government to deal with dow chemical's afterwards which deprived the people of the possibility of pursuing the case in the united states some of those justices that need to be set right. >> on the other side of the question about corporate greed another audience member asked is changing consumer habits effective and in powering humane labor forces for the world? >> yes, i think the consumer movement has done boycotts and other things have pushed companies to improve the behavior. some companies learned the hard way. reputation of risk is certainly

something the companies today take into account but there are also certain industries that are more susceptible to consumer pressure than others. for example the clothes we wear. some of them have suffered and improved their behavior. but of the things matter. it's more difficult to put consumer pressure on some other commodities so it's a difficult business by consumers putting pressure. i think their needs to be greater consciousness about applying rules to all companies regardless where they are situated about their behavior. you can only rely on consumer pressure to change company behavior. >> another audience member asks i understand that you will be leaving amnesty international at the end of the year. >> what are, and i see a lot of questions similar to this, what

is the edify used to your successor about running the grassroots volunteer membership organization? >> i have had eight and a half years with amnesty international, years i have treasured very much because all that i have learned, and the privilege i have had of leading this organization. my advice to my successor would be always be courageous. it took a lot of courage when you talk about guantanamo as the gulag of time. it took courage of the time to say it and we got pushed back immediately from the u.s. government and many others. so courage is very important. and the other very important thing i tell my successor would be to not be afraid to shine the light on have been scandals and

to recognize and a membership organization the mobilization of people bringing the membership along as a force to change public opinion and put pressure on government is a huge force and that we should not underestimate the power of ordinary people to do traordinar things. >> irene khan, thank you so much. [applause] >> irene khan as an amnesty international secretary-general since 2001. she is the first woman and first muslim to head up the organization. she previously worked u.n. high commissioner for refugees. for more information, visit theunheardtruth.com.

this, if you don't know already is the map. it was on display the jefferson building. if you haven't been there to see it i strongly urge you to do it. this nothing like face time with the real thing. there's only one copy that survives in the world and it's this one. it's probably about that big. it's 8 feet by four and a half so that is a reasonable in fact

it might even be a little bigger. so, please, go over there at some point. i didn't know anything about this that to the combat or cartographia when i started. in 2003 when i was an editor and writer of the land to get boston opening my mail i can across a press release from the library announcing for $10 million ahead of what it called america's birth certificate. the math that gave america its name. that $10 million was the most the library had ever spent on anything. it was also almost $2 million more than had recently been paid for an original copy of the declaration of independence, and that kind of caught my attention. i never heard of the map or had seen the map but the library seemed to think it was the most valuable piece and the market even seemed to think it was more than an original copy of the declaration of independence. so, i wanted to find out more and at this point i was thinking maybe i would do an article,

short piece for the alana tech. so i did some research and got the basics of the story pretty quickly. early in the 1500's in the eastern part of france in the mountains there was a small group of scholars among them the mapmaker martin and he had come across letters and at least one early sailors chart showing the coastlines of the new world and they decided that what they were reading about and see on the charts was not a part of asia as most people had assumed was but in fact it was a new continent. people traditionally have fought of the world as having three parts, europe, asia and africa, his colleagues decided that this was the fourth part of the world, hence the title of the book. because they had made the decision that seemed to represent a fourth part of the

world needed a name just like the other continents had names and they came up with the name america in honor of him. it is a great story. there's more to it than that and we will get more into it later. but as i was looking at the maffei learned pretty quickly it also was significant for other reasons not just for the naming of america. if you look on the left that is the new world, south america and with north america about eight. this is the first map to show north and south america unambiguously surrounded by water. not as some undefined part of asia or some undefined place that really isn't identified at all. because it shows more than south america surrounded by water it's the first map to suggest the existence of the pacific ocean and this is something of mystery because europeans are not supposed to have known about the pacific ocean until 1513 when balto was caught sight of it from the mountaintop. so, that is something that brings a lot of people back to that and something peter has

written about extensively. it's not something i dwell on a lot in the book because i felt the mystery is almost more fun to leave as a mystery than to try to resolve but it's a great part of the story. it's not the only part of the story though. there's more that is very significant about the map. if you look at africa for its simple this is one of the first printed maps to show the full coastlines of africa. africa and, excuse me, have only been circumnavigated by the portuguese in four to 97 and maps were only beginning to show all of this. the frame at the bottom of the math here is broken. it would have been pretty easy just to push the frame down a little bit. i think the point is clear this is a break with tradition, this is new knowledge and it is exciting possibly to a lot of the viewers more exciting than the stuff over on the left. people tend to forget that this is a great discovery because it means you can steal from your letter of africa into the indian ocean and beyond.

even beyond that fact, so is the fact the map shows a full 360 degrees of longitude. it's one of the first to do that as well. maps prior to this one tended to leave a certain portion of the globe kind implied on the back of the map as it were and the implication was generally that there was just kind of on chartered oceanic space and you didn't really need to try to depict. here is one of the first pictures of the world laid out in a full 360 degrees and we see there for is a picture of the world roughly as we know today. it isn't fully correct. it's distorted and is full of misconceptions and deliberately odd juxtapositions but is basically a vision of the world we have been refining ever since, and that to me was what struck me. this wasn't just a map announcing existence of the new world but declaring we can now

see the whole world for the first time. so, great story. i thought this would be a great article. i would clippings and a little article i kept and then i got sidetracked by other things for a couple of years. and in 2005 when the word came down the land it was moving from boston to washington did i start to try to think about the map again and i did because i wanted to make a living in boston and not move to washington. [laughter] excuse me. and when i went back to the article id a folder i had a brilliant idea i would write a little book about the making of this map and it would come out in 2007 timed perfectly to coincide with the anniversary of the naming of america and i barely made 2009. so what happened? why did it take me longer than i expected? visible the answer is i got sucked in. and i thought when i came to the

map was going to be focusing on the new world and particularly the naming of america. very quickly as john suggested i started just seeing more and more in the map and feeling as though there was an opportunity to do a much more comprehensive book that what survey the map as a whole and could be an excuse for doing a kind of geographical intellectual adventure story with the map as the backdrop. so what struck me the most was it wasn't just one world that is depicted. it's actually many worlds and if you change your perspective this way or that it's like a kaleidoscope and you can tease out different stories of a different collisions of ideas, different mysteries as well and i wanted to do something that was sort of complex enough that it would do the math in full

justice. even if you have never seen this map before or don't know the maps of this period it's pretty easy i think to see what we are looking at. the north is at the top and this period wasn't necessarily always the case. we assume today the north is always at the top but there were plenty of maps that didn't. over year toward the east this is what we now call the pacific, this is china, india, central asia, the middle east, europe appear, africa and then this is the most famous part of the map, north america up here in the gulf of mexico here and these are the islands of the caribbean and then it south america. the dominant visual impression you get from looking at the new world is this john and southern

place and that is what was making an impression on europeans in the early days of discovery. it wasn't so much the west of obviously columbus had pioneered a great new route across the alana tech but he thought he reached asia so he had just about everybody thought he confirmed old geographical ideas. south america which he wrote about infil late 49 fees' and early 1500's extend far into the south and to part of the globe people tend to think about there wasn't any land in. that made a big impression and we will get back to that in a minute. what dominates is the southern part and that is why martin, the cartographer put the word america on the subcontinent along the shores america he sealed upon.

it is what today would be considered brazil. they put it on the map. as i said there's much more to the map than just the depiction of the new world and i wanted to do a book that for a gal reader like me who was reasonably well but didn't know anything about the map or the history of world mapping would read and learn much as possible from and we wanted to come up with a way of making it gripping and narrative read as many different stories as possible i can up with organizing that to use the map as the guide and as the backdrop. the book is organized into chapters that move all over the map. each chapter starts with a little detail from part of the map it starts about the 1200's in england at the three western edge of the known world of the time and then gradually moves across the map through geography

and history as europeans gradually make their way out to central asia and in china, come back to europe and move along the coast of africa and then eventually moves across the land and over to the new world. >> this was a portion of the book tv program. you can view the entire program and many other booktv programs online. go to bootv.org, type the name in the upper left-hand corner of the page. select the watch link. now you can view the entire program. you might also explore tv box or featured video box to find recent and future programs. >> jonathan look said dr. martin luther king jr. from his lesser-known speeches and private conversations with colleagues. he spoke at the friend select school in philadelphia. this program is just over one hour and contains language some may