i wish he were something else he is not. we are lucky we got him and put an end to the eight years had. some things like the new air pollution standard he proposed he rejected the epa and we have a pollution standards worse than george w. bush. i don't understand that. i wish he would stop that because he has depressed is based, the people who voted for him. they're not excited about voting for him the next time around. i don't understand why he doesn't understand that. people like me and others will vote for him but they won't bring ten people to the polls like them they could they did last time. he should be worried about that and the way to get it -- to excite people is the president you were elected to the. what part of the ten million vote margin you won by don't you understand? .. mandate. why not do them? you have a year left. there is time to do it but, you

know, i'm proud that i voted for him. i want to vote for him again. i think a lot of people do. and we have his back. we want him to be the president reelected. i want to say this. i walked in the voting booth that day, and it was an emotional moment when i saw his name on the ballot. when i saw his name on the ballot, i couldn't leave not one that i was going to vote for someone who is also african-american which i never thought i would see my lifetime that the fact on that ballot was the word hussein. he put his name middle name on the ballot. hussein. hussein. how many hundreds in this town told him not to do that right? but he said no that's my name, that's my name. it stands for china's. hussein, put it on the ballot. he didn't care. he didn't care. he had the guts to do that. i want that guy back. i want that president that's why voted for, that's who we all voted for. the man who had the guts to put

hussein as his middle name right there on the ballot. as what i want to see happen. >> host: and from "mike's election guide 2008", six modest proposals to fix a broken election, one, hold on elections on the weekend. number two, every citizen is automatically a registered voter. >> host: 30 seconds. sorry, we're running out of time. >> caller: that's all i need. i compliment you, c-span, for bringing us people like michael moore to us. as a mother, mother in quotes, i believe that who you are michael, was what you also experienced growing up in the

family god chose for you. and my last thing is god bless you, michael. and i pray that you are protected by the god of all people. if you ever need a gray-haired nanny to stand with you please call me. thank you. thank you sounds like a sunday dinner coming up. thank you. tran one michael moore has been our guest on "in depth" here for the past three hours. he is the author of eight books "downsize this!" came out in 96. "adventures in a tv nation," "stupid white men" "dude, where's my country?," "will they ever trust us again?," "fahrenheit 9/11" "mike's election guide 2008", and his

latest stories from his life "here comes trouble" is the name of the book. it just came out about a year ago. mr. moore is also a filmmaker as everyone knows. "roger and me" was his first in 89, canadian bacon. the big one in 97 "bowling for columbine" in 2002. that won the academy. "fahrenheit 9/11" in '04. slacker an uprising came out in 2007. originally called captain mike across america, citgo in 2007. and "capitalism: a love story," 2009. and he won't tell us if he is working on a new one or not right now. so, michael moore, thank you for being on "in depth." we appreciate it. >> guest: thank you so much for having me. thank you for c-span, so fortunate for our nation to have this network, and have

>> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here online. type the author or book title on the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can also share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> next, from the 11th annual national book festival on the national mall in washington, d.c. maya jazz november presents her book, "liberty's exile." [applause] >> well, thank you all so much for coming today. um, you know, when i have the pleasure to be invited for this and saw the program, of course i immediately looked at the

program to see who else was speaking at the same time as me, and soon discovered no but ther than two pulitzer prize winnersvz major hollywood actress. so, you know i know my topic is losers but, you know -- [laughter]wñ however, i take some pleasure however, in speaking to you between two pulitzer prize winners. so you should certainly stay on for more in this tent.wz but most of all, thank you to the library of congress and to the organizers of this wonderful festival. i mean, how great is this to walk along here and see all this? [applause] thomas brown would always remember the day that the american revolution changed his life. it was the summer of 1775, the 25-year-old's first on his own american land. he had arrived in the colonies a year earlier from the blustery english ports with 74 indentured

servants in tow to start a plantation in the georgia back country near augusta. the newcomers must have marveled on reaching this strange, subtropical landscape with giant black oaks standing like 60-foot columns holding up the sky. within nine months brown and his laborers had cut much of the forest into farms. he supervised a burgeoning 5600-acre estate from a fine new great house. his tenants surrounding them in 36 farmhouses of their own. horses filled his stables, cattle and hogs got fat off his grass and feed. but another force was set to transform thomas brown's new world. he saw it coming one august day in the form of 130 armed men walking straight toward his house. now, brown knew before coming to america of the troubles that had been tearing up an lo american relations for at least a decade;

a series of taxes imposed by britain had triggered a heated series of conflicts over the limits of parliamentary authority and the rights of colonial british subjects. brown confidently reckoned that georgia, a thousand miles away from new england, the center of unrest had quote, no connection or concern in such affairs. even in many 1774 investing his personal fortune and his future in the american colonies looked like a good bet. but in april 1775 british and american troops exchanged the first shots of the revolution outside boston, and no part of the colonies remained unconcerned for long. in savannah and charleston, the nearest major cities to brown's estate patriots formed associations to organization support for the rebellion and approached brown and his neighbors to join. did he have anything to gain from joining this rebellion? not really. the fact that he had recently arrived, and i should add in

1775 10% of the people living here in america had only just arrived from britain. this mattered less to his calculations than that he intended to spend the rest of his life here. whatever he may have thought of the principles at stake self-interest alone pointed out brown's choice. he refused patriot overtures and signed on to a loyalist counterassociation instead. the next thing brown knew patriot invitations became demands delivered by gangs like the one at his door. standing on the porch, the sticky heat clinging to him like a second shirt brown tried to put the men off calmly. he had no wish to fight his own neighbors, he said but he, quote, could never enter into an engagement to take up arms against the country which gave him being. the conversation quickly turned to confrontation. some of the patriots quote threatened that they would drag him by force to augusta. brown backed into the house to

seize his weapons determined to defend himself as long as he was able against any violence. it would be at the peril of that man who should attempt it, he screamed brandishing his pistol. six men lunged at him blades slashed, rifle butts swung up over his head and then blackness. what came next he would reconstruct later from flashes of recollection in a semiconscious haze. shattered head throbbing body bleeding, he rattles over a track. they reach augusta. he is tossed to the ground his arms lashed around the trunk of a tree. he sees his bare legs splayed out in front of him, funny looking, and he sees hot brown pitch thrown over them. under his feet the men pile up kindling and set it aheight. his feet are on fire. two of his toes charred into stubs. the attackers seize his broken head by the hair and pull it out

in clumps. knives take care of the rest, cutting off strips of scalp making the blood run down. half scalped, skull fractured, slashed and battered brown -- remarkably -- survives. later a doctor comes to the place where he is confined and bandages him up, setting his broken bones on course to heal. a sympathetic guard moved by the spectacle of this badly damaged man agrees to let brown get away. he slips out of custody and rides over the border into south carolina to take shelter with a loyalist friend. now, this may not sound like the american revolution that you learned about in school. but today i opened with the story of thomas brown, one of the early episodes in my book, because i want to throw, i want to ask you to throw out that revolution that you learned about in school. just sort of leave it aside.

put it away out of your mind. and i want you to follow me instead through a looking glass to see the american revolution from the other side. this is a side on which sticking to your beliefs sticking to your loyal beliefs, loyalty equality that we value mattered more than violently throwing them out on what seemed like a whim. where the losers whom history has forgotten actually become the central actors in the story. and where the story of america, the history of america can unfold in the world beyond our shores. so the story i want to tell you today is about the american loyalists who left the united states to find new futures in the british empire. now, when talking about loyalists, the first thing that we need to realize is that a man like thomas brown was far from alone. fully one in three members of the american population at the

beginning of the revolution remained loyal to britain. it was the default choice. about a third of colonists meanwhile, didn't have much of an opinion. so at the beginning of the revolution patriots were in a minority. theirs was the strange choice, the one that is difficult to understand. so we're talking about a large percentage of the american population. and what this meant is that the american revolution was really our first civil war. this was a war that was divided communities, it divided friends, it divided families. most famously, it divided our founding father, benjamin frank lip, from his only -- franklin from his only son william franklin who remained a loyalist. so this was a conflict that cut right through the center of americans' life, and it was routinely described as a civil war at the time. who were these loyalists?

well stereotypes still loom large when thinking about loyalists. we tend to think of them as being white, elite men with strong ties to britain, members typically of the anglican church. we think of them under the label torrey which is a term meaning conservative in british political churl. again, throw these stereotypes out along with your old images of the american revolution. this was not the only profile of loyalists. loyalism ranged right across the social, the ethnic the geographic, the religious spectrum of early america. it included shoe makers and carpenters and bakers, cosmopolitan city dwellers farmers on the frontier like thomas brown, and most of all these loyalists were not even torrey in the sense of being conservative. in fact, many of them resisted the idea of paying taxes to britain, and many of them wanted

to see reform in the imperial relationship. crucially, not all loyalists were white. ooze one of thester -- another one of the stereotypes that we need to throw away. loyalists included a number of native american nations who saw better future for themselves, better prospects for themselves under the governments of the british empire than they did at the hands of the white settlers who for so many decades had been trying to take their land. so the creeks, the mohawks various indian nations ally themselves with britainment and loyalism also included a large number of black americans. early in the revolution the british issued an amazing promise to the black slaves who lived and farmed across the american south. they said come and join us, and we will give you freedom. and some 20,000 black slaves responded to this call running

to the british earning their freedom, becoming what are called black loyalists. so for them, you know, their patriot owners might talk about liberty, but the british version, freedom was the liberty that they could really believe in. for most of the people who were caught on the front lines of this civil war this wasn't so much a war about ideals, it was a war about ordeals ordeals like thomas brown's, ordeals where your windows might be smashed, your livestock might be poisoned in your fields, you might have your property confiscated by the state you might be jailed or harassed in other ways. and this kind of violence impels tens of thousands of loyalists during the war to move into british-held strongholds for safety. they moved to new york city which was occupied by the british throughout almost all of the war they moved into

charleston, they moved to savannah, they moved into the protection of british forces. but the end of the war and the evacuation of british troops meant that they had to rethink those choices and revisit them. they felt fearful. they felt uncertain. they had no idea what kind of future was going to await them in this post-conflict united states. were they going to be safe? were they going to be able to have a life? while they were wrestling with these questions, the british held out an alternative to them. the british said come with us, we'll give you land somewhere else in the british empire, and you can start out a new life somewhere else. so imagine yourself then as a loyalist at the end of the american revolution in new york city, the last place to be evacuated by british troops. george washington is marching in at the helm of the continental army. a jubilant moment for the

patriots celebrating this with fireworks and banquets and all the rest of it. it's a great moment for patriot america. but there are still thousands of loyalists who have to figure out what to do. imagine yourself on the docks, the patriots coming down. you don't know what's going to happen when they come in, but in front of you are the british ships, the ships that belong to, you know the most powerful navy in the world offering you a free chance at a life somewhere else. what are you going to do? 60,000 loyalists decided to follow the british, and they brought with them 15,000 slaves. so we have 75,000 people leaving these shores at the time of independence to seek out a new future in the british empire. this is something like 1 in 35 or 40 members of the american population, so an attempt like this several of you would be out the door. please stay for the rest of my talk. but it's proportionately up to

our population the biggest civilian exodus in american history. what happened to them next? well, this is where the story really gets juicy and unknown. the answers would unfold across the british empire which is to say at this time more or less across the world. because the british empire is on it way to becoming the leading global power of the 19th century. so you go off into the british empire, you are a subject of the superpower of the 19th century to come. the loyalist refugees confronted britain, really w the biggest and the most geographically wide-ranging refugee crisis that britain had ever faced. and britain's response to the refugees really provides a good case study in if how to be a good loser. because britain realized, look, i mean, we've lost the territory in america. united states is independent. but we have to do something for

these subjects. we can still get some kind of moral high ground out of this. and so they used the loyalists as a way to advance certain kinds of social agendas. they put into place a comprehensive program of refugee relief a lot like what international aid agencies do for refugees today. they gave them free passage on british ships, getting them out of the danger zone. they gave them land grants in canada and the bahamas and elsewhere. they gave them just the most basic things these refugees needed. they gave them food supplies for a couple of years, they gave them blankets, they gave them shoes, they gave them farm implements. some of the most amazing documents that i found in my research are these catalogs coming across the atlantic to meet the loyalist as they arrive, you know, inventories of

stockings and shoes and hammers and things like gimbles and women bl bitting and things i have no idea what they are but i can only assume the refugees appreciated receiving. so british leaders consistently stood up for the refugees. they put into place even a program of financial compensation to help loyalists get some money back for what they had lost in america, and they consistently upheld the promise of freedom to the black loyalists. over and above repeated american objections, the british stuck to their prom of free -- promise of freedom. where did the refugees go? now, you might think oh, they went back to britain. in fact, fewer than 15% actually went to britain, and it wasn't even back to britain because most of them had never been there before. they were americans, and britain was as much a foreign country to them then as it would be to us now if not even more so since communications technologies have progressed a pace.

and so they found themselves really strangers in an alien land. in fact, the majority of loyalists went to other places. more than half went to canada to the provinces that are now nova scotia, new brunswick and to a lesser extent ontario and quebec. another 10,000 or so headed south. they went to the bahamas they went to jamaica, and they took with them those exported slaves, 15,000 slaves with them as well. but loyalists ranged around this expanding empire. some, for example, would be on the first fleet to australia settling present-day sydney australia. in fact, a loyalist was the first person to propose colonizing australia. there were loyalists who went to india. in fact benedict arnold had two sons who joined up in the east india company army and ended up spending the rest of their lives in india. and in the most surprising migration in 1791 about 1200 of

the black loyalists the freed slaves crossed the atlantic to settle a new part of west africa and found the city of freetown in sierra leone. so within a few years the map of the loyalist diaspora looks a lot like a map of the british empire as a whole. what was it like to be one of these refugees? let me tell you a little bit about the experience of being a refugee through the story of the woman who first told me a little bit about this. her name is elizabeth johnston and i encountered her story right at the beginning of my research, and it convinced me reading her recollections and reading about her experiences it really convinced me that there was a story here that needed to be told. elizabeth johnston was just a girl when the american revolution began. she was born in georgia in 1764

and the war inverted her world when she was just 11 or 12 years old when as happened to thomas brown, a patriot mob came to her father's plantation and effectively chased him off his plantation leaving elizabeth whose mother had died and who had no sinlings -- siblings basically an orphan of war. she spent the next several years living in the custody of relatives, family friends while her father fought in british forces elsewhere on the continent. and she next saw her father at the age of 15. she's no longer a girl she's now a young woman, and so it takes some time to get reacquainted with one another. in particular, her father has to deal with the fact that now at 15 she's, you know, a teenager, and she's able to fall in love. and she falls in if love with one of his brother officers, a sort of rakish captain called william johnston who served in a loyalist regiment as well who's from a prominent family in

savannah. and he was known during the war as a dashing, fashionable in occupied new york he was a gambler, a charmer, a flirt. he had been a medical student before the war but he department seem to be very much -- didn't seem to be very much interest inside that. anyway, over her father's initial resistance, elizabeth marries william johnston in 1779. now, they don't have much of a honeymoon because against the backdrop their early unmarried -- their early years of married life unfolds against the backdrop of britain's losing campaigns throughout the south. and so elizabeth ends up following william johnston through one city after another as the british pull out. they evacuate from savannah in july of 1782. she has at this time a newborn son, and she's also well he's not that newborn because she's also seven months pregnant at the time.

she follows william next to charleston where again, they have to pack up and go. she stays just long enough to give birth to a second child. they again move. she goes on her own with these two very small children heading off again into the unknown, this time to st. augustine in florida. now, they expect to stay in florida. florida at that time remained loyal, it was not part of the revolution, it was still a british territory, and something like 12,000 loyalists and slaves ended up actually going to florida at this time expecting that this was where they could you know, pick up, start up plantations again and move forward. but they arrived there only months before learning that this place, too is going to be evacuated. it's handed over to spain in the peace treaty that ends the war. and so, you know elizabeth johnston with her two tiny children, her husband's still off, actually, doing his military service trying to make

a go of it in the third city she's lived in in as many years is having to face the prospect of moving yet again, and you can perhaps sympathize with her when she says the never gave me half the distress which this peace has done to the loyalists. now they really have to figure out what to do. so william has been a medical student before the war, and he decides to pick up his career path. being a doctor right? good choice. everyone should approve of that. so he decides to go to the best medical school in the english-speaking world which is at that time is in scotland. so he decides to set off with the family to deaden borrow -- to edinborough which they do in 1784. and once again elizabeth follows him, he goes first. now she's got three small children born in each place they've lived. she sets up the family eat first home all under the same roof

together in edinborough in a charming cottage that she's very happy about. but for all that she likes living together as a family for the first time having this new life, there are sadnesses too. sadnesses of being a foreigner for one thing. you know, they don't know anyone there, they're very disconnected. the difficulties of being poor, these are people who were middle class who have lost everything, you know, a lot of what they had in the war. they have to set up from scratch. and then also they suffer other calamitous 18th century woes. her fourth child who is born in scotland dies of thrush not long after, and she's had a child in every place she's lived. she now plants her first gravestone in scotland soil. and the question of the future remains hauntingly unresolved. the family gets some compensation for their losses from the british government, but it's not enough to live on, and

the career opportunities are not all that they would wish for. and so william johnston decides to move yet again. this time to the richest place in the world. you'd think it would be a good place to go. and i'll just read you very briefly about the place that they go which is jamaicament -- jamaica. its beauty could take your breath away. your gaze swept sharply up to the craggy blue mountains climbing into the clouds. a living green blanket connection r textured in the weird vegetable forms of the tropics. giant ferns and tufted very mill ideas, flap-eared plantings, muscular trees careening stands of bamboo and sinewy palms. when you turned past the outer lip of the harbor, you floated over the broken stones of the old capitol of port royal, mostly destroyed in a 1692 earthquake.

the gleaming sand swept around the shoreline to king son, port royal's replacement, the greatest british me metropolis in the caribbean. the sun cut the water into liquid diamonds. no wonder loyalists were captivated by it. such hills such mountains and everything so bright and gay, it is delightful gushes one newcomer. an 18th century compared the bay of kingston to the bay of naples with the blue mountain standing in for vesuvius and the submerged pompei under the sea. others let the grandeur simply overcome them, knocking language from their lips. whatever else loyalist refugees knew of this lush island, they could see it wasn't the 13 controlnies anymore. now, the place that it was,

jamaica, was at that time the richest colony in the british empire and, in fact if you want to know why britain manages to bounce back from the american revolution as successfully as it does, it's partly because it holds on to its most valuable territory which is in the caribbean. so it seems like a great place to have a flourishing career. but the very things that make jamaica so rich and appealing is incredibly lucrative sugar cultivation and its lush tropical environment that lures many of us there on vacation if we are so lucky today. these very things, actually, make it also quite a dangerous and difficult place to be. for one thing all of that sugar is cultivated by a huge slave labor force. the ratio of slaves to whites is about 10 to 1. and the white minority asserts it power through this incredible sort of rein of terror and violence on the island. there are virtually no white women, so johnston shows up in

this place that is very violent with almost nobody for her to relate to to speak to. and the tropical lushness is an issue as well because it also means disease. now, william johnston is a doctor, so this is a useful place for him to be. but very soon the diseases of the islands will turn fatally inward on the family as well. so a toddler called jane die of scarlet fever, a baby, then they have a new baby, they name the baby jane -- this is a common practice in the 18th century -- and that baby also dies of smallpox the you would son dies of yellow fever. it's a fatal place for the johnston family. and elizabeth falls into a deep depression. she's as much exhausted in mind and body having no female relation to be with me only black servant t. it's too much for her to bear. she decides to go again.

if you think that you've heard a lot about the different places she's going, i mean, just imagine what it's like for her to live through all of this. so she decides to leave this dangerous island behind. and this time they go to nova scotia. the very idea of which horrifies her. william finds this place, he says hey, i've booked you a passage to nova scotia. and she says, what? to be frozen to death? why, better to send us to greenland. she's horrified. but in nova scotia at last elizabeth johnston after 2525 years on -- 25 years on the move will stay put. little did i think that i and all my family would ultimately settle in nova scotia, she says. but there she stays. it's the number one loyalist haven. her surviving children all end up joining her there and flourishing, enjoying a kind of status and success they could never had had if they had

remained in the u.s. and by the time she sets down her memoirs decades after all of this has happened she's lived as long in one place as she had lived on the move before. so i told you at the outset this is the american revolution through the looking glass as you haven't seen it before, and we need to turn our assumptions and perspectives around. and so maybe the last assumption that we have to turn around is the one that says that these people were losers. for in a sense finally finding homes in the greatest world power of the 19th century, finding stability, finding a new life, in a sense, were they not victors after all? now, i'm very happy to take questions, and while i let you formulate your questions, let me say just one final thing about this story. i have been working on this book for many years, and little did i

think that this book would come out at a time when revolutions are again sweeping the world in the middle east. and i just want to say a quick word about why i think this story matters now also speak anything the shadow of the capitol. now, the revolution, of course remains a touchstone for our ideas about who we are in america. who we are as americans. now more than ever this is sort of in the news as a touchstone. but we also live in a moment, of course, of great partisanship very much in the news as well. and so i think it's worth looking at the story and attending to it to realize that even at our founding we were a people of many ideas, of deeply felt values. and, you know we had great divisions within our society. we had to make one nation out of people who had fought a civil war. and so the lesson here, i think would be to hang on to common principles, celebrate them, but there isn't just one kind of

freedom, there isn't just one way to pursue happiness. this isn't just one way to be american. um, and the other point is about the international context. but, you know, this is a good reminder that our history has always been embedded in the history of the wider world. the history of america is part of a world history. and the story of the loyalist refugees shows how american people and american ideas have made their mark on the wider world, but also perhaps show us how we need to bring things from that wider world back here to america in certain ways. so the strings of our -- the strength of our country, it seems to me, is, you know, founded in our wonderful unity. but the beauty of it resides in our diversity. is with that i -- so with that, i see there are people with questions. [applause]

>> those loyalists who were religious, particularly those who professed christianity what biblical and/or other explanations were given to justify their taking a stand by remaining loyal to their original national roots there is? >> so the question, if you couldn't hear it is about religion and the american revolution. so anglicanism, you know, there was some correlation between anglicanism and loyalism. in particular you find clergymen who have, of course, sworn an oath of sorts to the church of england which is the established church of which the king is the head. so for these people there is definitely an element to which is the sacrilege as well as, you know political disloyalty to break with the to break with the royal authority. scriptural passages i'm afraid i

can't cite for you, but i could direct you to some of the prominent clergymen who wrote passionately on this very theme providing some biblical support. >> hi, maya i have two questions, the second of which you almost killed from your final talk. but the first was when i first saw you on television, i was just curious. you're going into a subject matter which is totally different for most historians. were you influenced by your esteemed parents who look at the world a little differently? want to tell them who they are. and my second question is, when you do watch the revolutions in the middle east, you watch the people there do you sort of empathize with them and sort of say, oh, i know what they're going through? >> yeah. so the first question about how i came to see the american revolution this way is very much, yeah, i mean, it's partly a personal story, i suppose. i'm a historian of the british empire by training and by origin

i'm half indian and my father's from new york. but, you know, i have a somewhat mixed background. and so my first book looks at the british empire in india and in egypt. and so it was while working on that that i kind of realized wait, you know, there's this other thing happening in the british empire that i actually don't know anything about. and i'm making these huge arguments about how the british world is changing without paying any attention to the place that i actually am from. and so i came back to the american revolution through that lens. and i then realized, oh, wait you know if you come at it from that direction when you just see it very differently. and so i would just say from, you know history all looks different depending on where you stand and where you're seeing it from. and i don't think i would have seen it in this way if i had come up through the american history track in -- track. in terms of the middle east revolution, i would just say you know, another lesson we can

get from the story is that no revolution fails to leave, um, problems and challenges that the regime that comes up after it has to deal with. and, you know, we can celebrate the wonderful visions of democracy that are being articulated in tahrir square and tunisia and elsewhere but, you know, we also have to realize that that's not that's just the very beginning of a story that may end up taking quite unexpected forms. >> your parents are esteemed scholars, and i'm wondering if they said to you, maya, you've got to look at things differently. that didn't affect your outcome? shot at all? >> it was in my mother's milk what can i say. [laughter] >> yes. could you address the question of those loyalists who either remained behind in the new nation or for whatever reason after the period of time in exile decided to return to the

new nation and how they fared and how they were treated by their fellow americans? thank you. >> sure. um, the question is how loyalists fared who stayed. now, the majority of loyalists did stay, and they were in various ways reintegrated into american society. i think there are a couple points i would like to stress here. the first one is that at the moment of the british withdrawal in 1783, that outcome was in no way clear. there were lot of episodes of violence, of legal measures taken against former loyalists. and so for a period of a year or two things were fairly uncertain. that said, there was not the end a bloodbath. we did not have guillotines in america. we had no reign of terror. we can't have gulags either. so, you know, the story of the loyalists in america has often been woven into, i think a very good story about the ability of our country to accommodate

dissent. and so the loyalists be reintegrated with the emergence of political parties in america. so former loyalists are overwhelmingly federalists and there are a lot of ways in which in the early republic you can see the kinds of arguments that loyalists espoused before the revolution taking on new forms in how they deal with the anglo-american relationship going forward. >> i think we have time for just a couple quick questions. so -- >> i've got a couple quick ones. first, i recall reading about an article about your book that you found a gravestone in india so maybe you could talk about that. and secondly, you mentioned loyalist compensation but i'm also aware that british would not permit claims to be made if a torrey, you know, was forced to take an oath to support the patriot cause under stress

obviously. i don't know if you have any thoughts on that. >> yes, these are two great questions. the first one is about india. you know one of the great pleasures for me, the book was following the loyalists wherever they went because i wanted to see what they left behind. k what they left behind in terms of documents, of course, which is the life blood of historical research but also the intangible because only a privileged few can leave documents. and one of the most amazing things i saw was the grave built by a former loyalist who moved to india, became there an incredible sort of military commander with a huge estate, married an indian woman, had a half-indian family and spent the rest of his life there in india. his eldest son predeceased him so he built this wonderful monument which is illustrated in the book which is still there, and it rises autoof this mustard -- out of this mustard field in the middle of central north india, just this amazing testament, i think, to the

mingling of cultures. um, the other question concerns the loyalist claims commission which is a remarkable commission whereby the british government decides to give compensation using treasury funds to loyalist claimants. and it sounds great, it is great. of course, there are bureaucratic and legal hurdles, and so there are various ways in which it's practically very difficult for loyalists to make claims. they have to prove their loyalty, they have to prove the value of the property that they've lost, and in this process if there are kind of glitches in the case like oh, you did this at one time and you said that in another, it can make it more difficult for them to win compensation. i think one very last question. >> okay. well actually, it's two. one is what became of elizabeth johnston's father, and we last saw reluctantly giving her in marriage. and the other one is about the

way the narrative of the loyalists has been used for fiction. as far as i know only by kenneth roberts and oliver wiswell whereas the narrative of the south side in the 1860s civil war has been pretty well n many ways at any rate hijacked by the south. and i'd like you to address the different ways the two have been handled. >> sure. well, i think they sort of go together. so elizabeth johnston's father fights in the army. he goes to britain for a little while and gets a loyalist claim. he files a loyalist claim. he then resettles in nova scotia the number one place for loyalist refugees, and he ends up living the rest of his life there, dying there, and is buried in annapolis royal in nova scotia. the reason this fits in with the second question which is a

fascinating question about, essentially, memory of these conflicts, um, is that, you know, my suggestion that the loyalists are victors in the end is, in a sense, brought out by the fact that we don't have this kind of lost cause literature. we don't have them sort of raising secret toasts like the jackabites to the restoration of the monarchy in america, and we don't have this kind of lore folklore, songs of loss in the way that, for example the french acadians brought down to louisiana. why don't we have that? well, we don't have it partly because they got reintegrated into the british empire. they remained british summits from first to last -- subjects from first to last. they found a new home. it was a new geographical home, but it wasn't necessarily a new unite -- identity. and they were also reintegrated into the u.s. somewhat but i do think we're missing something if we forget that this was a civil war.

and i, like you am fascinated by the discrepancy between the incredible sense we have about the need to rebuild after the civil war of the 1860s and the way in which i think we've erased the need to rebuild taffe revolution when our very -- after the evolution when our very values were being forged. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> this event was part of the 2011 national book festival in washington d.c. for more information visit loc.gov/bookfest. >> book time out of my attempt to answer a question that i was asked very frequently when i was talking about climate change,

particularly after i'd written "the weather makers" in 2005. and that question was, what are our chances really of surviving this shifting climate that's looming and that we are causing? and the only way i could think of to answer that question was to really go back to the scientific fundamentals to go back to the process that created us and our planet. and, of course, look at the intersection between our species and this thing that we call planet earth because it's at that intersection that the issue of sustainability arises. and i couldn't think of a better way really of starting to look at the issue than to go back to the work of that man there. that's charles darwin's tombstone in westminster abbey, the great kind of sacred house for all of the great men of the, the british -- and women -- of

the british people. it tells you something that he was buried in in the church in the great house. um but nothing is said on his tombstone of his achievements. it's sort of pretty unique actually, among all the monuments in the abbey that you wouldn't guess why he was there obviously. what he had done and written about with the theory of evolution didn't um, was not kindly looked upon by his own church. the reason i wanted to start with darwin is because he's the man who really explained to us how, the process that made us and the process that made our earth. and his idea his great idea was an extremely simple one. it was simply that in every generation there is variation between individuals and that some of those individuals are more likely to survive and reproduce than others and that other the vastness of time that

people were just becoming aware of the history of the earth in the mid 19th century that that must tell on irritability, on those which the shape species as a whole, as he put it. so a very very simple idea. but darwin being a very wise man, i think, a very perceptive person decided to sit on that idea for 20 years. and it was only when it went to daughter win -- when i went to darwin's house in kent that i really understood a little bit more about why he waited so long before he announced this fundamental idea that changed our view of the world. just outside his house he built a little thing that he called the sand walk, and um, that's it there. it's actually a pebble walk, i don't know why he called it a

sand walk, but there you go. even great men can do odd things. and every day of his life at down house he would walk for several hours around that sand walk, and people have wondered why he did it, what was he thinking about, what was he doing as he walked around that race track, really? it's just a loop around the forest there. scientists have speculated that maybe he was perfecting his arguments or constructing in his head the beautiful paragraphs and sentences that characterize his written work. but the testimony of these children suggests something very different. they left memoirs where they talked about what they knew of their father, and they would play in the forest there and often interrupt him as they were doing so. and he always seemed glad of the interruption. he'd sometimes join their games where they were kicking a ball or whatever they were doing. and they are not the actions, i would say, of a man who is deeply engaged in very complex and critical thought. i think what darwin was doing as

he wandered the sand walk was metaphorically fingering his worry beads. he was thinking about the implication of his theory for religious belief in his country for the shape of civil society and other deep matters. i guess at base what he was worried about was that if he destroyed faith by showing that we were not the unique creation of a loving and caring god, but instead were the result of an amoral and utterly cruel process that by destroying faith he might destroy hope and charity as well and have a very adverse impact upon his society. he may never have published his theory if it hadn't been for this man here. in 1858, 20 years after darwin first stumbled on the idea of

how we and every other living thing on the planet was made this man here alfred russell wallace, was working in indonesia. he was a man 20 years younger than darwin. he was working class-led self-made. went to the tropics to collect biological specimen and while he was there on the island he had a malarial attack, and as a result of that malarial attack as he was highly fevered, the idea came to him that perhaps species were created by exactly the same mechanism that darwin had chanced upon 20 years earlier. when he recovered enough from his malaria to write he wrote a note to darwin in great excitement outlining his theory and asked darwin if he wouldn't mind transmitting it to one of the journals to be published in britain. when darwin received the letter he was horrified. he said wallace couldn't have made a better summary of my work if he'd had my notes in front of

him. and he thought, perhaps, that his whole life's work was about to be stolen by this upstart, this working class-led. as it was he appealed to his friends, particularly those who looked after journal publications and so forth including charles lyle, the great geologist, and as a result both pieces were published in july of 1858, and it is extraordinary how similar they are. the theory is presented in fullness and completeness in both accounts. but for all of that, it was like a squibb going off in british society. no one took any notice. in fact, the man who was in charge of publishing the journal, professor bell who was an expert on crustacea, wrote

his summary in 1858 that there'd been no scientific discovery published in the journal nothing that would revolutionize the department of science that they bear upon. of course, he couldn't have been more wrong, and that was showed in the following year when darwin published his book on the origin of species. and then as darwin perhaps feared um, with the theory unleashed upon his society everything began to change. within five years herbert spencer had coined the term "the survival of the fittest," and social darwinism had been born. darwin didn't really help his own cause in the subtitle he picked for the book which included the line "on the preservation of favored races." and i can imagine going into a book shop in 1859, you know as an average sort of englishman and pick up this book, and i wouldn't have been thinking about worms.

you'd be thinking about british empire builders, wouldn't you? and in india and stuff like that. and so there was this social impact. and over time i think what we saw was a very, very deep impact on our society by these darwinian ideas. um, everything from national socialism to eugenics through, i would argue, to neoclassical economics have borne some imprint of darwinian thinking. particularly as mediated through the likes of herbert spencer. so i as i was beginning to look at the process that created us, read reread darwin and began to despair that perhaps we were selfish, short-sighted, ruthless

entities forged by an amoral and utterly cruel process. that it was this man here that really gave me hope that that may not necessarily be the case. alfred russell wallace lived a very long and full life, dying at the age of 90. at the age of 08, he was still -- 80, he was still writing and, in fact, i would argue his most important work was published in many 1904 in his eighth decade. and that's the title page of it there, "man's place in the universe: a study of the results of scientific research in relation to the unity or plurality of worlds." very very strange title indeed. but what this book really is, is a summary of wallace's understanding of what the evolutionary mechanism had created. he wasn't like darwin. he wasn't interested in drilling down with reduction of science ever more finely in terms of understanding the evolutionary

mechanism. he'd done that in 1858. what he wanted to know was what it created. and being a holistic thinker his field of endeavor was the entire planet. and this book is the foundation of the science of's to biology. he compares worlds quite literally, and he posits the theory that this planet is the only living planet that the others -- wherever they be in the universe -- are all dead. it's also the forerunner of james revlock's work, he talks in the book about the atmosphere, the way the atmosphere works dust which is created in important in regulating earth's climate system. it's an extraordinary, lucid, prescient work, really, that underpins many aspects of current science, particularly holistic science like earth

systems science and so forth. and what we learn from wallace and his work is that evolution's legacy is not nasty brutish. in short, not a survival of the fittest world. instead, this cruel and amoral mechanism has led to a world of extraordinary inti cat si -- intricacy and cooperation. and i just want to run through a few examples of that cooperation. this slide just shows mite con drink ya the small org knells that exist in all off our cells. they're the power packs for our cells. it's been realized in the last 30 years or so that these mite con drink ya have nothing to do with us in terms of origin. they originated this free-living bacteria a billion years ago in an ancient ocean, and they came to co-habit the cells of our bodi