revolutionary war. you may be thinking of his writings subsequently in favor of the war. why did we win the revolutionary war? it was france. without the support of france we would have a more difficult time predicting or explaining the victory. >> host: who was tom paine? >> guest: tom paine was an englishman who came to the united states in november of 1774. his life had gone nowhere. he was the son of someone who made those stiff little things in women's corsets. my father did this for a profession but he is trained to lead to become a tax collector. lost a job in england because he was organizing if. ended coming to the united

states for a new start of life after two failed marriages, and went to pennsylvania the crystal became an editor and a little over a year after he arrived he published this pamphlet common sense which suddenly got americans talking about independence which had been the forbidden topic, wanted to deny that this -- where they were going. he made a positive argument and also laid down a klan for how to go forward. how to found a new government we might design. .lead "common sense" as a transitional document. it ends -- it doesn't end, but it marks the beginning, almost the end of the debate over who's responsible in england, can we ever, you know, patch things up and go on. basically, he says, that's a very bad idea. and then the whole new debate that came in with how do we

design our own institutions, how do we write constitutions, how do we design the governments that are outlined in constitutions? and that became the whole new issue. >> host: professor, did "common sense" get out into the public organically, or did somebody take it and really push it? >> guest: oh, it just went through the country like wildfire. i mean, people were reading it. we have letters from members of congress who went home and came back and all along the road they see people in the taverns, in the coffeehouses were reading it g ab >> it's difficult to get concrete figures on how many copies of the pamphlet were actually published, but it was clearly america's first bestseller. and, of course, any one copy, you can read it in half an hour, and then you give it to your you friends. so how many people read any one copy, there's another issue. clearly, it was enormously influential. >> host: chris smith tweets in

to you, was there a global: ch audience for the declaration, who was listening, and who was inspired to political action from a it? >> guest: as i have argued, i think the declaration was meant primarily for an american audience. there are historiansen who disagree with this, but i think that argument is justified. it j was, however, sent abroad, and it was, it was reprinted in the press. a whole series of american revolutionary documents were collected includingg the first state constitutions ands translated and published in france. it's clear there was an international audience that wasd interested in what was going ong in the united states. and the declaration was one of a whole series of revolutionary documents that attracted their attention. >> another tweet, this is from a.j. jones. what book would you recommend

for a bright high school grad gr joining the army? >> guest: depends -- joining th army.-- depends on what this bright high school grad is interested inn reading. [laughter] of course, i recommend american scripture or ratification. >> host: if a.j. jones picked up "american scripture," what wouln they learn? >> guest: yes. well, "american scripture" tells the story, essentially, of the last stages in the development of american independence. it talks about -- the first chapter gives the background to the document itself. >> host: to the declaration ofhw independence. >> guest: right, and hownolo people -- the chronology of it. it, also, the second chapter looks at some of the local documents.hat i mean, what was the documentary history of it? the great discovery that's in ge

the book, what was probably thek greatest contribution toco scholarly knowledge of the topio was my discovery of all these local documents that towns wrott what they thought about tho independence. massachusetts is probably the da most dramatic because the end of may 1776 the legislature asked the towns to debate the following proposition: should so the congress decide for the safety of the united colonies to declare their independence ofcla britain? would you, the inhabitants ofwo the towns, be willing to support that decision with your lives and fortunes?es and that isn't just a graceful way of putting it. it, it -- everybody understood that the punishment for treason was death and confiscation of the state. -- of estate. so lives and fortunes meant are you willing to risk the punishment for treason? and the towns debated this very seriously, and some just, you, y

know, said, sure or no. hardly any said no. but several of them explained e why they had come to this t decision, and those are, thosea, are wonderful documents.l and then i discovered there were others from counties in virginia, in south carolina --on >> host: multiple declarations. >> guest: many of them, statements, and so we get the voice of the people in a way we wouldn't, and they'rewe interesting to compare to the language of the declaration of independence. >> host: from your first book, "resistance to revolution," you write: the colonists were emotionally and intellectually unprepared for war and a a potential withdrawal from thewih empire. re. >> guest: yes, yes, yes.st: >> host: jay inye asheville, nov

carolina, you're on booktv'sook "in depth" program. this month, professor pauline maier of mit. >> caller: yes, thank you for taking my call. most high school students that i talk to don't know anything atal all about the american revolutionary period. they don't know anything about a really pivotal military leaders like nathaniel green, daniel morgan, even washington himself. and what a bitter struggle it was. my question is, why do you think this portion of american history is so abysmally neglected in public schools? and i'll take my answer off the air. thank you. >> guest: well, is it always abysmally neglected in public schools? i think american history in general is not taught terribly well, but there are some extremely bright spots not necessarily on the revolutionary war. rev i've become aware of a nationalo competitionme called we, thecom

people, where high school students understand thecons constitution and issues that are related to it, to the wholediti documentary tradition of the revolution with amazing sophistication. i gather the program is in some funding peril at present, but i, you know, there are bright spots like this. the whole the tradition has been to have history taught by, you know, coaches. they always say the first name of your history teacher is always coach, and they keep one chapter ahead of the kids. you have to know the history better than that in order to make it interesting, i think. >> host: this e-mail, by the way, if you'd like to call in and talk with the professor, 202 is the area code, 737-00 o 1 in the east or central time zones, 737-0002 mountain and pacific time zones. this is from jan in boise,

idaho. i've never been able to get an explanation of why and how madison evolved from being a co-author of the federalist papers to being a staunch republican. what am i missing? i don't think it's as simple as jefferson's influence on him. i really hope you take my question because i've been passionate about american history all my life, and this has puzzled me for years no matter how much i read on the subject. >> guest: well, one problem -- i guess what she's really trying to get at is why this strong supporter of the constitution could become a critic of the federalists in power during the 1790s. and i think -- well, first of all, the federalist, we misunderstand the federalists. glses who were the federalists? >> guest: well the federalists, sometimes called the federalist papers, are a series of essays that appeared during the ratification debates in the newspapers. they were written by john jay, by james madison and by

alexander hamilton. they are often taken as the essence of everything that was said during the ratification debates on the constitution or the most profound analysis of the constitution that emerged during that time. in fact, they were relatively ineffectual with regard to swinging votes. they were not circulated very broadly until they appeared in book form in the spring of 1788 when most of the states had already met. that was late in the game. i think it did have some influence at that point, but rell thetively less. it did have some influence in new york. it was written primarily for new york which was a swing state where the opposition was very strong. now, it did not equal jay plus madison plus hamilton. publius with was a fictional

character, so what he said wasn't always what the writers honestly believe. and i think this is particularly the case with ham hamilton. and the views changed in the 1790s in some of the debates you'd see. madison and hamilton were taunting each other with passages from the federalist which were inconsistent with their current politics. but the real thing with madison, i think he expected -- he really believed that power was, would almost automatically go down to the states. he saw no real danger of having a centralized government that seemed to be a threat to the freedom of the people. and he changed prison view, certainly -- changed his view dramatically by the time of the alien and sedition acts and went the other way. so i think it's really the development of national politics in the 1790s that made madison rethink some of his assumptions

that he had expressed in the federalist papers and elsewhere, to see a danger in national government he had not anticipated. >> host: your second book, "the old revolutionaries: political lies in the age of samuel adams," why did you write this book? >> guest: i wrote this book because after "resistance to revolution" i remained a little unsatisfied. i mean, i could explain the course of politics, i could explain, i thought, reasonably well why it was that americans had come to embrace independence. but i didn't think i really knew them personally, and i wanted to look at some of the individuals who were in that earlier story more closely and try to understand what they did and how they differed from each other and why they took the political courses that they took. >> host: who was samuel adams? is. >> guest: samuel adams was with

probably the leading massachusetts politician of the period before independence. >> host: so the 1750s, 1760s? >> guest: well, he was of an older generation, so actually he was active in the 1750s and then in the 1760s i think became a clerk of the massachusetts legislature. he was a boston tax collector. but his, he was mostly important in the boston town meetings and became, he proposed and was the chair of the boston committee of correspondence which was formed in 1772 and then carried on correspondence with the town. now, one earlier, a viewer, an earlier caller asked about the newspapers. it was a caller. newspapers didn't always circulate to all the towns, so if you wanted people to be joining the resistance, they had to know what was to be resisted. so what the boston committee of correspondence did was to

establish contact with the towns and then tell them what was going on and encourage people to discuss these and to respond in an appropriate way. in this way he managed to get massachusetts rell -- relatively united in its politics. >> host: who was isaac sears? >> guest: he was a member of the resistance movement in massachusetts. he came from -- new york city. but he was a sea captain, and in new york that was extremely important politically. there isn't a boston town meeting. he was the son-in-law, actually, of the owner of a very popular tavern, jasper drakes. and this, too, gave him, you know, access to a large part of the pop husband that would go into these taverns and talk and fight and argue. but sea captains were very influential over all the sailors. they looked up to them and, you know, he was a big supporter of

the revolution, and it was interesting to see what a different kind of a role he played in the development of independence. >> host: henry, in miami. good afternoon to you. >> caller: good afternoon professor maier. my question concerns john marshall. we all know he was central as a federalist and nationalist on the supreme court, but i'm curious about his role in the ratification. >> host: all right, henry, thank you. >> guest: well, john marshall was in the virginia ratifying convention and, clearly, the young john marshall was already highly respected by his, his fellow delegates. he did speak up, he was in favor of ratification and, indeed, in some ways he -- pardon me. he defended article iii. on the court. >> host: and we'll let the

professor, who's been talking, now, for about an hour and 17 minutes very general generously, we'll let her get a sip of water, anything else you wanted to add about the john marshall? >> guest: his memory of the ratification turned out to be extremely important. in an important case of the 1830s, baron v. baltimore. this was a case that had to do with whether the states were bound by the fifth amendment. and in the case, pardon me, marshall basically said the whole of the rights amendment -- we would say ten, but certainly one through eight are specified specific amendments, bound only the federal government. and he said this on the basis of his memory of the ratification debates. i would argue that the words of the amendment do not support that. so it was a decision of lasting

significance because it means we needed the 14th amendment in order to make the first eight binding on the states through separate court decisions. >> host: our next call comes from doug in aberdeen, south dakota. hi, doug. >> caller: hi. dr. maier, wondering if you could comment, please, on colonial script, the currency used between the colonies at the time. finally, i believe it's article x specifically p demand withing the use of silver and specify being exactly what the monies for the nascent nation would be and, finally, the coin act of 1792 and the penalties thereof. thank you. >> guest: oh, you raise a very large, complicated issue. in the colonial period, the states did often issue paper money. look, they needed paper money. you needed a circulating medium, otherwise, you know, how do you, how do you have economic

exchanges by barter? and you cannot have a specialized economy on the basis of barter. the difficulty was that sometimes the currency lost value, and the british ultimately said that they couldn't pass, that the states could not issue legal tender currency, and this is one of the big grievances. but in some states they held value, and they supported the economies quite well. later in the colonial period, after independence, pardon me, this became an issue again. i mean, the states issued paper money, or they did not. and there was a tremendous fear that they were issued, that they would lose value as continental currency had lost value in the early years of the war and that they were simply a means of trying to defraud creditors. that is, if you negotiated a death, say, in -- a debt in

sterling, and the debtor tried to pay it off with depreciated paper money, well, the creditor might, you know, come out having lost a great deal of money on this particular transaction. article i, section 10 which has limits on the state said the states could issue no money except gold and silver as legal tender. this was one of the reasons why states like rhode island were very hesitant to ratify. they had issued a fair amount of paper currency, and they had no idea what its status would be once the constitution went into effect. >> host: we have two teachers who have tweeted and e-mailed you. >> guest: okay. >> host: this is from stan brown of macon, georgia. just a comment rather than a question. your contributions to the pbs series on the american revolution, "liberty," are so wonderful. i use that in my high school

u.s. history classes. >> guest: that's wonderful. >> host: and this tweet is from a middle school history teacher. it seems it is not possible to determine original intent. your thoughts, please, and that's from chris. >> guest: well, depends on what you mean by original intent. as i've said earlier, scalia said he is not interested in original intent, that is that he's not interested in what people meant to say which is very difficult to determine. but in what they say in the meaning of the words of a given statute. i think, i think that it is useful to look, for jurists to look at what either the drafters or the ratifiers said about given provisions of the constitution. there you can, i think, find information that is of use. there is no original intent, there is no original understanding of the constitution as a whole, but usually the questions are much more specific. and you can find some information, but i see no reason

to think that we are bound to understand those or to continue the provisions, to say precisely what people originally thought. as i've said earlier, i think the original understanding was that the constitution would be adapted over time to changing circumstances that the founders knew they could not anticipate, and that's why we have the amendment process. >> host: you've worked on textbooks for high school or middle school level. >> guest: right. >> host: if you were to -- what do you think middle school and high school kids should know about the revolutionary period? >> guest: well, i think it's extraordinarily important that they should understand what the revolution tried to accomplish. and have some idea of the revolutionaries' origins of our current institutions. you know, it came to me as

epiphany in writing "ratification" that most americans had not even read the constitution. perhaps they'd read it in high school, but they hadn't read it since then. now, there are those that say, well, that's for lawyers and courts to decide, but certainly the ratification itself gives us a very different read on that. but to put it into effect, americans knew it inside out, they read it carefully. we had the debates on the local level. i mean, this is our government. if we're going to decide whether it's acting legitimately or illegitimately, if it's acting consummate with the ideals we hold or whether it is, you know, being true to the documents that we, the people, have enacted. it helps a lot to know what we enacted. of i mean, this is just civics, isn't it? i think we have neglected this over much in our educational system. >> host: what's the relationship between the declaration of independence and the constitution? is. >> guest: well, the declaration

of independence ended the old regime. it said britain had no more power to govern us. and with that the states went about enacting their own constitutions, that is their alternative governments that would be for the states themselves. the constitution, ultimately, was a -- the constitution was a similar government for the national scale. the articles of confederation had provided us a form of national government that proved to be wholly inadequate, a kind of a league of nations of sovereign states. and finally, we created a government whose authority itself was founded on popular consent and that could enforce its authority on the people directly. >> host: ron in seattle, thanks for holding. you're on with professor pauline maier of mit. >> caller: thank you very much for taking my call. before i get to my question, i'd

like to make a comment on an earlier question and response. dr. maier, you may recall in an earlier interview regarding the neglect of the american revolution that even professor alan taylor in his multicultural book on the american colonies which however valuable you said virtually ignores the revolution itself. [laughter] so i think that might be one reason. but beyond that, i'll get to my question. in the opening paragraph of the book, your mentor and ph.d. adviser bernard baylin said the revolutionary's background constitutes an important chapter in american intellectual history and emphasized the importance of periodically challenging prior interpretations based on new evidence. in that book and in his subsequent work, he articulated a fresh viewpoint that has become known as the ideological interpretation. and from my reading of your first book, the old vintage

paperback, you further elaborated on this quote-unquote real league restrained revolutionary viewpoint. so i'd like to ask you to, one, briefly summarize for the audience this ideological interpretation and, two, now four decades later in the spirit of those earlier calls for continuing fresh interpretations, if you have modified those viewpoints at all, especially in the light of dr. t.r. breen's recent book, the marketplace of revolution: how consumer politics shaped american independence which includes a critique of the ideology school. i'll take my -- i'll stay on the line. >> host: thank you. and if you lost any of that, fortunately, ron also sent an e-mail. >> guest: yes. well, that's a heavy question and a couple parts. first of all, the ideological interpretation of the revolution. we should go back a few steps and say at mid century several prominent historians had argued that the writings of the revolution were propaganda, that is that they weren't sincere

statements of beliefs, but they were efforts to manipulate the public, to pull them into a resistance movement that was largely self-serving or that served their private interests. in the 1950s or '60s, a couple of historians and actually then a larger army of historians, basically, came to the conclusion that that really wasn't true, that the arguments made sense and that they developed not as an effort to pull in the public, but that they had a logical spine. and so the whole literature of the revolution was opened up again for serious study. when i teach the revolution, i take the students through the pamphlet literature of the revolution, and we see how thought was changing in a relatively logical forum. this also included the discovery of the colonists' attraction for a particular tradition in

english thought which went back to the glorious revolution of 1688-'89. that is the whole basic what we call lockian ideas although they come from a whole panoply of writers that the colonists were reading; that government is based on concept, on contract, that -- consent on contract, that governors and rulers are appointed by the people to serve their rends ends, and if they don't protect their rights and their security, they have a right to be replaced. or -- and, indeed, it would justify limited resistance to unjustified acts of authority as well as revolution if things went to a more extreme stage. these ideas were expressed broadly in the colonists, and i think it made sense in the literature once again. now, what do i think about this? well, you know, i think this -- what i thought was wonderful about this was that it got us

away from our historically reading the -- our historical understandings of the revolution. we could get within the shoes, within the mindset of people who were looking at unfolding events, and we could understand in their terms why they responded in ways that we might not have responded. that is, they were very sensitive to issues that we might not be sensitive about, and be it was important to understand the revolution in terms of those, of course, who lived through it and who accomplished it. all right. tim breen's marketplace of revolution. i, it's been a few years since i read it carefully. i did look at it again since i saw your e-mail before this program. basically, i didn't find tim breen's argument persuasive. i thought that one of the failures of the book was its, it was breen's unwillingness to look carefully at the ideology of the revolution, if you will,

or at least the assumptions that a colonist took from it about how one resisted authority. i thought that he could have explained the nonimportation associations, for example, more persuasively if he'd seen them in that context. that is, what the colonists were interested in doing is finding a nonviolent way of posing britain. of opposing britain. nonimportation or commercial boycotts were one way of doing that. in fact, that's very relevant today. you know, we see so many of these insurgencies in the middle east who are influenced by the writingings of gene sharp who talks about nonviolence as a way that you can move from dictatorship to democracy. well, the circumstances of the colonists who were, of course, very different, but i was struck in looking through sharp's lists of nonviolent techniques how many of them the colonists had actually employed. they understood that violence, gratuitous violence at least simply alienated people.

and they were, they looked for ways you could bring pressure to change policies without the use of violence. and it allowed them to coordinate their support at home, not alienating people who they might otherwise alienate, and they did not eshoo for us, but they needed to answer for it and that the rule of law should be held up to the extent possible. so i think a little more attention to the thought and the assumptions of the revolutionaries would have made tim breen's work stronger. >> host: and very quickly, who was bernard baylin? >> guest: bernard baylin was a leading professor of history at harvard, the man who whereon a pulitzer prize-winning book called the ideological origins of the late revolution in, i think, 1968. >> host: roger in burbank, you've been holding on for a long time. go ahead with your question.

>> caller: thank you so much. the word "ideology" has come up, but i'm wondering if role of history or the historian has changed. and by that it seems to me there were charges that professors and eggheads had rewritten american history, and now it seems conservatives are rewriting the history i grew up in. [laughter] i'm just wondering, maybe i should say i thought the role of a historian was to try to discover what really happened. but now it seems to be history as a means of furthering an ideological agenda. i wonder if you could comment on that, thank you. >> guest: well with, you and i are of a mind. i mean, i like to write a history that is true to the document that tried to tell the story in it own terms. i read the work of other historians not so much to see if i can make an argument against them or for them, but to see

what they learned that is of help in adding to my understanding of the past. in "ratification" i worked very closely with a new set of documents that are being published out of the university of wisconsin, the documentary history of the ratification of the constitution, but they have not covered all the states, and even for the states that they do cover there is, there is some literature that is of relevance, and i just tried to use what i, what i could of them. i made a very conscious decision in "ratification" to say nothing about its contemporary significance. i have some of my convictions, of course, on what it means for some issues that are important today, but i wanted the book to be what it was always meant to be, and that is a history, to tell the story. and like most stories, people can draw different significance out of it. but it isn't one that was shaped by my politics. i'd like to believe it was shaped by the documents i've

studied. >> host: how is it that the university of wisconsin, the wisconsin historical society -- >> guest: yes. >> host: -- got ahold of all these original documents? who started that process, and is this material available online? >> guest: they have -- some of it is. they have, meryl jensen who wrote the book on the articles of the confederation that i mentioned earlier was a major historian and of a progressive, a progressive tradition. one of those that was interested in socioeconomic determinants of politics, but he wasn't confined by that. i mean, he had a wonderful book on the founding of a nation which is sort of my bible if i want to know precisely what the stamp act said or precisely what the townsend duty said. he was meticulous in his faithfulness to the details of the historical record. and he founded a whole series of these documentary records books. and the documentary history of

the ratification of the constitution is the one that seems to me of potentially the greatest significance, although there are others, also, of importance. he started it. it's been carried on by john kaminsky in a serious of other wonderful editors, rich leffler -- >> host: all at the university of wisconsin. >> guest: all there. and he had, the project has the advantage of having seniority, people who have worked all of their careers on this. what they have done is to send -- where they deal with the ratification history in a certain state they'll send teams in, and they go through the archives, they go through the newspapers, they'll go through local libraries that have relevant documents. they'll survey the towns, see what kinds of documents they can get there. they pull them all together, transcribe them, order them and publish them. and this is a fuller documentary

record than we've ever had before. what we had was really flawed and biased. the reports of debates even in the state conventions were often taken by federalists or published by federalists, often they had certain biases in them. now we also have letters, we have other delegates' notes, we have newspaper accounts, and so we're not so dependent on any one authority, one source on what happened in these conventions. it's opened up the summit entirely -- subject entirely. but it's out of -- they just started this, and they've kept doing it. they still have five states to cover, and then they're going to work on the origins of the o bill of rights, and i think see if they can find some more documents on the state level to do this. now, you ask, are they available online? is some are available online. i think on the site of the state historical society of wisconsin,

i think montana is up. -- massachusetts is up. i don't know that the other states are yet up. there are five volumes on new york. this is, this is serious stuff. but it's fascinating. >> host: our guest this month on "in depth," professor pauline maier of mit. she is the author of four books on the revolutionary period. "from resistance to revolution" and "ratification." we have an hour and a half of live television to go with her, and we'll be right back.

pauline maier, who's jack gray could ha? >> guest: a history of law at stanford who writes extensively on the revolution. >> host: and why is he appealing to you? >> guest: oh, we were old friends in graduate school. i was a little ahead of him, but in the old days we always worked

in widener library, and there was a part of the library where you could have typewriters, you know, before computers came in. and he typed, and i typed, and we used to compare notes as we were work withing on -- he was working on his dissertation, i was working on mine. so we have a friendship that goes back to when we were both in graduate school. this is one of the great joys, i have to say, of this historical profession. you make friends, and when you have been in it long enough, as i have, when you want somebody's opinion on something, you know who to ask. and i'm often asking jack questions. and he's asking me. so we e-mail each other. [laughter] >> host: who is maya jassnov? >> guest: professor of history at harvard who has just written a book called "liberty's exiles," which is the 60,000 loyalist refugees of the revolution. that is, those who were so

alienated from the revolution and from the revolutionaries that they really could not stay in the country or decided they could not stay in the country and left the united states after the revolution. and she traces them as they go to far-flung parts of the world. most meant to nova scotia, others -- some went to britain. she said each a handful ended up in australia. they ended up in, of course, india. some helped found the new sierra leone, so it's the loyalist exodus that is her favorite subject. >> guest: you mentioned joseph ellis' founding brothers and the biography of abigail adams. have you read and what do you think about david mccullough's john adams and ron chernow's bestseller on washington?

>> guest: yes. i have not yet read the book on washington. i look forward to doing it, but i haven't done it. i did review john adams, the mccullough biography of adams for "the new york times", and i thought he did a lovely job of it. people criticize him for not paying much attention to john adams' thought. but i didn't think he was totally blif crouse of it -- oblivious of it, and he was more interested in other parts of adams' career. and, clearly, he managed to get a large part of the american reading public interested in john adams, and, you know, he became a great fan of john adams, and i'm a great fan of john adams, so i like the book, and i cheer for david mccullough's success. >> host: who was john hancock and why did he serve as president of the second continental congress yet not president? >> guest: well, hancock was a boston merchant who inherited,

actually, his fortune from his uncle. and a leading figure in massachusetts politics who was extraordinarily important in solving the divisions that came out of shay's rebellion during the '70s and '80s. he was elected, wonderful support from the electorate, governor and replaced the hard-line governor who against the insurgence. he pardoned large numbers of the insurgents who had not already been pardoned, and he traveled to distance parts of the states to reach out to the people, to heal the wounds of the rebellion. so he was extraordinarily popular in massachusetts. and he had been a president, of course, this is looking at his later career. he was -- one member of the congress was elected to preside over it. you know, it was the president of the continental congress was not like the president of the united states. he was a presiding officer.

hancock was also the president of the massachusetts ratifying convention although he did not attend until the end. he had a serious case of gout. he was home suffering until, finally, a political deal was cut, and he discovered that he could overcome the pain and appear. >> host: this is booktv on c-span2. this is our monthly in depth program. our guest, mit professor pauline maier, and we're discussing the revolutionary period in american history. 202 is the area code. 737-0001 if you'd like to participate from the east and central time zones. 7347-0002 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones. if you have a question that you'd like to call in. you can also send us an e-mail at booktv@cspan.org or send us a tweet, twitter.com/booktv. next call for professor maier comes from william in manhattan

beach, california. william, thanks for holding. you're on the air. >> caller: thank you. and, professor maier, and i want to know how you say your name, that's first. [laughter] you're a national treasure, thank you, madam. >> guest: well, thank you, thank you. i say maier because i inherited the pronunciation from the family of my husband to whom i will soon be married for 50 years. so, you know, at this point it would seem to me to change the pronunciation would be an act of hostility. however, i will say i answer to meyer as well, and two of my daughters have chosen to pronounce it meyer, so it gets a little confusing in this family. >> caller: maier it is, and i have two quick questions. on booktv a year or two ago i saw a gentleman talking about his book that put the american revolution as much on the -- [inaudible] and the constitution, he put it in perspective worldwide and said that the american revolution was small potatoes worldwide at that time. and secondly, don't you think

the way to change a constitution is to amend it and not have the supreme court rewrite it? thank you. ghg is the constitution -- >> guest: is the constitution and the american revolution of global significance? you know, i think so. we founded the first modern republic. this was a very dangerous thing to do, or it seemed very dangerous in 1776. republics are everywhere now. we have the world's first written constitutions, even written constitutions have become an item in politics worldwide. not universal, but certainly this is, they're not unique to the united states anymore. so it seems to me very clear that this is part of a world narrative, not simply our national politics. and what was the other part of -- >> host: about amending the constitution? >> guest: oh, amending the constitution. this is extremely interesting. i kept saying this is the way

the founders expected the document to be daytimed over time. adapted over time. maybe it's become too difficult. i mean, you think about it, we managed to ratify ten by 1791, what we call the bill of rights although that terminology came in later, and after that we now have 27, so 17, but take off two because one enacts prohibition, and one undoes prohibition, so that means 15 in 200 years. well, more than that, 220 years. that's very few. really. is it because we respect constitutional stability? i think that's part of it. or maybe that the process is just too difficult. you need a two-thirds vote in either congress or a special convention which is not a chosen mode of proposing amendments, and then the consent of three-quarters of the states. this, like the procedure for electing the president, was

written before the development of a two-party system. the 11th amendment took care of the difficulty with terms of the presidential election because of the emergence of a two-party system, but the amendment process may be too difficult. i don't know. i haven't really made up my mind. but it's clear we've made very few and that the court itself, the questioner is absolutely right that we have been much more changing -- that that it'se court more than the amendment process which has been changing the constitution. and now, you know, of course with all the talk about originalism, putting the brakes on that as well. but it certainly is clear to me that the founders were not so sill crouse to think the document they wrote that enacted an understand anything the 18th century was going to work for all time. they knew it would have to be

adapted, or it could be replaced. many state constitutions have already been replaced. by 1787. so, you know, we have not chosen to do that. massachusetts still has its revolutionary constitution, but it has a little book like this of amendments. >> host: pauline maier, who's mr. pauline maier? [laughter] >> guest: i don't think he would answer to that. charles maier is a professor of history, does european history at harvard university. >> host: when did you first get interested in american history like this? at this level? >> guest: well, i went to college as a -- i thought i was going to be a political science major. i was interested in journalism and in government and so on, and i took early government courses, i was at radcliffe which is now harvard but was a women's college that was with harvard. and somehow my mind did not work

well with political science. they made great leaps of assumptions, and i need -- somehow my mind needs to have the points spelled out as you go from a to b. and then i started to taking history, and i just loved it. it was exciting to me. and the wonder, i had the wonderful joy of working in harvard's widener library with, you know, stacks and stacks of books and sources and, you know, to me to sit there in a stall in the widener library with the sun pouring in and all these books reading this wonderful stuff, to me this was heaven. and i thought, you know, the idea that i could spend my life doing this was just beyond belief. and, you know, i have done it. i still work in widener library. it's, it has been the joy of my life. >> host: where did you grew up, and who were your parents? >> guest: i grew up in st. paul, minnesota, and my father, irvin, who is alive at 97 in st. paul

was a st. paul city fireman. and my mother was, she was a housewife who raised five children, and she died in november 2009 and it's much regretted, but she lived to be 92. they are long-lived people, and we have a strong family, and i am the only one that left minnesota. >> host: did you you up with books and reading and learning? >> guest: i have a memory as a child of going to the library and bringing home a pile of books to read. i mean, this was something we did. it was part of our, you know, we did. but i can't say that my family was a family of readers. neither of my parents were college educated. i think my mother or read novels and read magazines, i think my father probably read the newspaper but, you know, he was a -- he was a fireman, and he fixed refrigerators in the his

spare time. he didn't have a lot of time. they went fishing, and they gardened, and they did all of those kinds of things. but they were very supportive of education. my father never went to college and always regretted that he hadn't gone to college. and so he was intent that his children would be able to do what he had not been able to do, and i was the oldest. so i was the first to get the benefit of all of his encouragement. and was lucky enough to get support to go to radcliffe which nobody had heard of in my immediate circle. it was a total fluke. [laughter] that i found out about it. and managed to go there. and, obviously, went on to graduate school, married when i finished, had a fulbright scholar and married in england charles maier and then went back to graduate school. >> host: what was -- >> guest: i've been doing history ever since. >> host: what was the fluke? >> guest: well, the fluke was that i went to -- this is a

longer story than you really want to hear. i had been part of a program by the american legion auxiliary for girls' state where girls in high school went and they reenact government. and i'd run for governor and lost, and the girl who won, i met her at a reunion, and she was going to a radcliffe tea that afternoon. and did i want to come along? and i went along. and asked questions which they noticed. [laughter] mainly because i'd never heard of this place, you know? [laughter] and they recruited actively. >> host: pauline maier's our guest. john in tupelo, mississippi. hi, john. >> caller: i'd like to ask professor maier and, first of all, she's spell binding in her explanations. but nowadays there's a lot of discussion about the separation

of church and state, and so i would like to have her explain do we really believe that this is a christian country that is founded upon christianity and whether or not the founding fathers would approve of what's going on today. thank you. >> host: professor maier. >> guest: all right. well, the one point where this issue came up in the ratification of the constitution concerned the provision that there would be no religious tests for office. and this caused a considerable amount of concern among some people. north carolina and new hampshire, for example, had provisions in their state constitutions that only protestants could hold office. pennsylvania state constitution of 1776 said people's religion, religious believes would not effect their civil rights.

however, to sit in the legislature you had to swear that you thought both books of the bible were the revealed word of god which, of course, effectively excluded jews. the founders, clearly, had moved on to another place that there would be no religious tests for office, and there were those that thought this was very dangerous. i think that their idea of religious freedom -- and we have to remember this was an intensely protestant country in the 18th century -- they feared catholic domination. they thought of the story of the hugh nots, they thought of the salzburgers. puritans had an old anti-catholic tradition. the founders really were having none of this, and at one convention after another if some rural delegate often questioned the provision on the lack of religious qualifications for office, somebody stood up,

interestingly, often a clergyman and said that was precisely the way it should be, that we should have a level playing field, and whoever the people chose to select for office the people should be able to choose. and i was very struck because the opposition would say, well, we would get what they called catholics or muslims by our language, and it made no difference at all. the constitution is not a constitution for an exquisitely catholic country. it is the constitution for a country where religious beliefs are irrelevant to people's civil identity, i think. >> host: laura monroe from cleveland, ohio. e-mail. the map of the colonies in the introduction to your book shows the colony borders extending all the way to the mississippi river, land that was later purchased in the louisiana purchase. ..

>> guest: i will confess. i can't answer this in any detail. there's a great deal that i haven't followed. >> host: who was he? >> guest: connecticut, yes. he was involved in the diplomatic corps, and