tv Book TV CSPAN December 24, 2011 6:00pm-6:45pm EST
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70s and early '80s and our farmers got in trouble, we have been hundreds of small state chartered banks who did not want to foreclose on the farmers. they knew that they were just having a couple of bad years and they couldn't pay their farm loans off and they didn't want to take possession of these farms. so we allow the banks, we change the law and allow the banks to take an ownership position in the farm and then gave the farmer and absolutely at buyback price to take his farm back and full title once they could pay off the farm loan. >> you can watch this and other programs on line at booktv.or. >> next, from the 11th annual national book festival on the national mall in washington d.c., maya jasanoff presents her book, "liberty's exiles." [applause] >> thank you also much for coming today.z6r6
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you r6know, when i had the pleasure to be invited for thewz program of course i immediately started looking at the programvzvz to see who else was speaking at the same time as me. and i discoveredwz there were no view were then to pulitzer prize winners, a major hollywood actress, so you know i know my topic is vñ9?ñzsvçvwñvzwñsñwñçvvzsvwzvv?>wvwz=?çvsvwzléówvnuwzwñwvsvvzy!y']3ycyc
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with 74 indentured servants and toast to start a plantation in the georgia backcountry near augusta. the newcomers must have marveled on reaching the strange subtropical landscape where giant like oaks stood like 60-foot columns holding up the sky. within nine months, brown and his labors had cut much of the forest into farms. he supervised a burgeoning 5600 acres as state from a fight new great house his tenets surrounding them and 36 farmhouses of their own horses build a stable, cattle and hogs got fat off of this 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
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house. now brown knew before coming to america of the troubles that had been tearing up anglo-american relations for at least a decade. a series of taxes imposed by britain had triggered a series of conflicts over the limits of parliamentary authority and the rights of colonial british subjects. brown confidently reckoned with georgia 1000 miles away from new england, the center of unrest had quote no connection or concerned in such affairs. eden in 1774 investing his personal fortune and his future in the american colonies looked like a good debt. 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, beatrice formed associations to organize support for the rebellion and approached
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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 177510% of the people living here in america had only just arrived from britain, this mattered less to his calculations than that he attended to spend the rest of his life here. whatever you may have thought of the principles at stake, self-interest alone wanted out brown's choice. he refused patriot overtures and signed onto a loyalist counter association instead. the next thing brand-new, patriot invitations became demands delivered by gangs like the one at his store. standing on the porch the sticky heat clinging to him like a second shirt, brown try tried to put the men off home late. he had no wish to fight his own neighbors he said that he quote could never enter into an engagement to take up arms against the country which gave him being.
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the conversation quickly turned to conversation. some of a patriot's quote threatened but unless he would subscribe to the association they would drag him by force to augusta. round back into the house to seize his weapon, 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, legs flash, gunfire, rifle buts won over his head and then blackness. what came next he would reconstruct later from flashes of recollection and a semi-conscious hayes. shattered head throbbing, body bleeding he rattles over tracks. the reach augusta. his arms lashed around the trunk of a tree. he sees his bare legs laid out in front of him funny looking for an things and he sees hot brown pitch poured over them, scalding clinging to his skin. undersea the men pile of kindling and set it alight.
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the flame catches the tar. his feet are on fire. two of his toes are charging to stubs. the attacker seizes broken head by the hair and pull it out in clumps. nightstick air of the rest cutting off strips of scalp, making the blood ran down over his ears and face and neck. scalp, skull fractured and battered. brown remarkably survived. later a doctor comes to the place where he is confined in bandages i'm upsetting his broken bones to heal, said that the got it guard moves by the spectacle of his badly damaged man agrees to let him get away. he slips out of custody and rights 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 open with a story of thomas brown, one of the
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early episodes in my book because i want to throw, 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 site in which sticking to your believe, sticking to your loyal belief loyalty of quality that we value, mattered more than violently throwing them out on what seemed like a swim. where the losers whom history has forgotten actually become the central actor in this story. and where the story of america, the history of america can unfold in the world beyond our shores. the story i want to tell you today is about the american loyalist who left the united states united states to find new features in the british empire. now when talking about loyalist
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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 remains 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. bears was the strange choice the one that was difficult to understand, so we are 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 community. a divided friends. a divided families. most famously it divided our founding father, benjamin franklin from his only son william franklin who remains a loyalist. so this was a conflict that cut
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right through the center of american life and it was routinely described as a civil war at the time. who were these loyalist? stereotypes still loom large when thinking about loyalist. we tend to think of them as being white, gilead, men with strong ties to britain, members typically of the anglican church. we think of them under the label tory, which is a term meaning conservative in british political culture. again, throw the stereotypes out of love with your old images of the american revolution. this was not the only profile of loyalist. a loyalist and ranged right across the social ethnic, the geographic, the religious spectrum of early america. it included shoemakers and carpenters and bakers cosmopolitan city dwellers farmers on the frontier by thomas brown and most of all,
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these loyalist were not even tory 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 loyalist were white. another one of the stereotypes that we need to throw away. loyalists included a numbered native americans combinations nations who saw better futures for themselves better prospects for themselves under the government of the british empire than they did at the hands of the white settlers who for so many decades have been trying to stake their landlands, said the creeks the mohawks, various indian nations allied themselves with britain. and loyalist am also included a large number of black americans. early in the revolution, the british issued an amazing promise to the black slaves who lived on farms across the
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american south. they said, come and join us and we will give you freedom. and some 20,000 lakh slaves responded to this call running to the british earning their freedom, becoming what are called black loyalists. so for them, they're patriots owners might talk about liberty but the british version, freedom, was a liberty that they could really believe in. for most of the people who are caught on the frontlines of this civil war this wasn't so much a war about ideals. it was a war about ordeals ordeals like thomas brown ordeals where's your windows might he 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 until tens of thousands of loyalists during the war to move into
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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 charles didn't. they moved to savannah. they moved into the protection of british forces. at 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 will give you land somewhere else in the british empire, and you can start up a new life somewhere else. so, imagine yourself then as a loyalist at the end of the american revolution come in new
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york city, the last place to be evacuated by british troops. george washington is marching in at the helm of the continental army come as a jubilant moment for the patriots that are celebrating them with fireworks and banquets and all the rest. 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 is going to happen when you come in but in front of you are the british ships, the ships that the long 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 feature in the british empire. this is something like one in 35 or 40 members of the american
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population so several of you would be out the door. please stay for the rest of my talk, but it's proportionately to our population to biggest civilian exodus in american history. what happened to them next? well this is where the story really gets juicy and unknown. the answer would unfold across the british empire which is to say at this time more or less across the world because the british empires on its way to becoming the leading local 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 with the biggest and the most geographically wide-ranging refugee crisis that written had ever faced, and britain's response to the refugees really provides a good case study in how to be a good
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loser. because britain realized look, i mean we have lost the territory in america. the united states is independent, but we have to do something for the subjects. we can still get some kind of moral high ground out of this so they use the loyalist as a way to advance certain kinds of social agenda. 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 come in 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 i founded my research for these catalogs of items that
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are crossing the atlantic to go meet the loyalist. they arrive in these unsettled areas of the british empire. did you know their inventories of stockings and shoes and belts and hammers and pose and things like gambles and wimbledon 10 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 the money back for what they had lost in america and they consistently upheld the promise of freedom to the black loyalist. over and above, repeated american objections, the british stuck to their promise of freedom. where did the refugees go? now you might think oh they went back to britain. in fact, fewer than 15% actually plan to britain and it wasn't even back to britain because most of them had never been there before. they were americans in britain it was a as much a foreign
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country to them 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 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 québec. 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 poor example would be on the first fleet to australia settling present-day sydney, australia. in fact a loyalist is the first person to propose colonizing australia. there were loyalist it went to india. in fact benedict arnold had two sons who joined up in the
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company army and ended up spending the rest of their lives in india. and of the most surprising migration in 1791, about 1200 of the black loyalist, 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 the 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 johnson, and i encountered her story right at the beginning of my research and they 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.
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elizabeth johnson was just a girl when the american revolution began. she was born in georgia in 1764 and the war in bird in 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 them off of his plantation, leaving elizabeth whose mother had died and had no siblings, basically an orbit of war. she spent the next several years living in the custody of relatives, family friends, while her father fought in british wars elsewhere on the continent come and she next saw her father at the age of 15. she is no longer a girl. she is now a young woman and now it takes her some time to get reappointed with one another. in particular her father has to deal with the fact that now at 15, she is you know a teenager and she is able to fall in love and she falls in love with one
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of his brother officers, a sort of rakish captain called william johnston who served in a loyalists regiment as well who is from a prominent family in savannah. and he was known during the board as a dashing fashionable and occupied new york he was a gambler, charmer, a flirt, and he had been a medical student before the war. he didn't seem to be very much interested in 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 years of married life unfolds against the backdrop of riddance losing campaign throughout the south. and so elizabeth ends up following william johnston through one city after another as the reddish pull out. they evacuated from savannah in july of 1782.
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she has at this time and newborn son and she is also, well he is not that newborn because she is almost seven months pregnant at the time. she follows william next to charles didn't wear again, they have to pack up and go. she stays just long enough to give earth to a second child. they again though. she goes on her own with these two very small children heading off again into the unknown, this time to saint 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 in something like 12,000 loyalists and slaves ended up actually going to florida at this time expecting that this was where they could pick up start a plantation again and move forward. but they are right fair only months before learning that this place too is going to be evacuated.
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is handed over to spain in the peace treaty that ends the war. and so you know elizabeth johnson with her two tiny children her husband still off actually doing his military service, trying to make a go of it and the third city she has lived in as many years of having to face the prospect of moving yet again. so you can can perhaps sympathize with her when she says, the war never occasioned which this piece has done to the unfortunate loyalist. and 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. after all being a doctor, good choice. everyone should approve of that so he decides to go to the best medical school and the english-speaking world which at that time is in edinburgh in scotland. so he decides to set up with a family to edinburgh which they do in 1784. once again elizabeth follows him. he goes first.
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now she's got three small children born in each place she has lived. she sets up the family's first home in peacetime all under the same roof together in eden borough and a charming cottage that she is very happy about. but for all that she likes living together as a family for the first time, having this new life, there are sadness is too. sadnesses of being a foreigner for one thing. they don't know anyone there. they are very disconnected. the difficulties of being poured. these were people who are middle were middle class who had lost everything or a lot of what they had in the war and they had to set up from scratch. and then also they suffer other calamitous 18th century was. her fourth child who was born in scotland, dies of thrush not long after and she had a child in every place she had lived. she now plans her first gravestone in scotland soil.
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and the question of the future remains hauntingly unresolved. the families compensation for their losses from the britishlw 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 life in the world. you would think it would be a good place to go and i will just read you very briefly about the place that they go, which is jamaica. its beauty could take your breath away. from the sparkling surface of the water year gaze swept sharply up to the blue mountains climbing into the clouds. over the rippled slopes fellow living green blanket textured in the weird vegetable forms of the tropics, giant ferns and tufted vermilya had, muscular trees, drapes careening stand stand of bamboo and sinewy palms. when you turned past the outer
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lip of the harbor, you floated over the broken stones of the old capital of port royal mostly destroyed in 1692 earthquakes. the gleaming sand swept around the shoreline to kingston, port royal's replacement, the greatest british metropolis in the caribbean. gold slice circles around the map and "the sun" cut the water into liquid diamonds. no wonder loyalists were captivated by it. such hills, such mountains in such berger everything so bright and delightful gushed one newcomer while cruising towards the spectacular landscape. in 18th century -- compared the bay of kingston to the bay of naples with a blue mountain standing in for cfius and the submerged simmering like a pompeii. others let the grandeur and sublimity simply overcome them knocking language from their lips. whatever else loyalist refugees
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knew of this lush island they could see it wasn't the 13 colonies any more. now the place that it was jamaica, was at that time the richest colony and the british empire and in fact if you want to know why britain manages to bounce back from the american revolution successfully as it does is partly because it holds onto its most valuable territory, which is in the caribbean. so it seems that 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 any of us 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 race you would place to whites is about 10:1 and the
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white minority asserts his power through its incredible reign of terror and violence on the island. there are virtually no white women's elizabeth johnson shows up in this place that is very violent, with almost nobody for her to relate to to speak to. 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 in inward on the family as well. so a toddler called james dies of scarlet fever. a baby then they have a new baby and they name to baby jane. this is a common practice in the 18th century and that maybe also dies of smallpox. the eldest son dies of yellow fever. the eldest daughter becomes mentally ill. it's a fatal place for the johnson family and elizabeth falls into a deep depression.
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she is much exhausted in mind and body, having no be no relations to be with, only black servants. it's too much for her to bear. she decides to go again. if you think that you have heard a lot about the different places she is going, just imagine what it's like for her to live through all of this. so she decides to leave this dangerous ivan behind, and this time they go to nova scotia. the very idea of which horrifies her. william finds it -- i have booked you a passage to nova scotia and she said what? better send this to greenland. she is horrified but in nova scotia at last, elizabeth johnson, after 25 years, on the move, will stay put. little did i think that i end all my family would ultimately settle in nova scotia she said. but there she stays in the
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number one loyalist haven her surviving children all end up joining her there and flourishing enjoying a kind of status of success they could never have had if they had remained in the u.s.. and by the time she sets down her memoirs, decades after all this has happened, she has 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 if you haven't seen it before. we need to turn our assumptions and perspectives around. 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 home in the greatest world power of the 19th century, finding stability, finding a new life, in a sense where for the non-victors after all?
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now i am very happy to take questions in what i water that you formulate your questions let me say one final thing about this story. i have been working on this but 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 the story matters now, also speaking in the shadow of the capital. 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, a touchstone. but we also live in a moment of course of great partisanship, very much in the news as well. 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, deeply felt values and you know we had great divisions within our society. we had to make one nation out of
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people who had fought a civil war, so the lesson here i think would be do you know hang onto common principles, celebrate them but there is in just one kind of freedom. there is in just one way to pursue happiness. there is in just one american. 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 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. so with that, you see there are people with questions.
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[applause] >> those loyalists who were religious, particularly those who profess christianity, what biblical and/or other explanations were given to justify their taking a stand i remaining loyal to their original national roots there? >> so, the question, if you couldn't hear it is about religion and the american revolution. 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 ahead. so for these people, there's definitely an element to which it is sacrilege as well as political disloyalty to break
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with, to break with the royal authority. scriptural passages i'm afraid i can't cite for you but i could direct you if you would like to chat afterwards to some of the prominent clergymen who wrote passionately on this very theme of providing some biblical support. >> my eye have two questions come the second of which almost killed from your final thought but when i first saw you on television, i was just curious, you are going into a subject matter which is totally different from most historians. were you influenced by your esteemed parents who look at the world a little differently maybe in who they are and my second question is when you do watch the revolutions in the middle east, do you watch the people there? do you sort of empathize with them and sort of say oh, i know what they are going through? >> yeah. so the first question about how
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i came to see the american revolution this way, yeah i mean is partly a personal personal story i suppose. i'm a historian of the british empire and by origin, my fathers from new york but you know, it it is if a somewhat mixed background. and so it looks that big british empire in egypt so it was while working on that i kind of realize wait, there's another thing happening in the british empire but i actually don't know anything about it and i last learned about it in u.s. history and i'm making these huge arguments about how the british world is changing without paying any attention to the place that i really am from. so i came back to the american revolution through that lens and i then realized oh way if you commented from that direction, then you just see it very differently. so i would just say history always looks different depending on where you stand and where you are seeing it from. and i don't think i would have seen it in this way if i had come up through the american
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history track. in terms of the middle east revolutions, i mean i would just say that you know another lesson we can get from the story stories that no revolution fails to leave 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 is just the very beginning of the story that may end up taking it quite an unexpected form. speier parents are esteemed scholars and i'm wondering if they said to you maya you have to look at things differently. did this affect you? not at all? >> 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
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new nation or for whatever reason have it 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? beasher. the question is how loyalist spared in this day. the majority of loyalist did stay and they were in various ways were integrated into american society. i think there are a couple of points i would like to stress here. the first is at the moment of the british withdrawal in 1783 that outcome was in no way clear. there were lots of episodes of violence, of legal measures taken against formal -- former loyalist so things were fairly uncertain. that said, there was not in the end -- we did not have guillotines in america. we had the rain of terror.
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we didn't have gulags of either so 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 this sounds. and so you do see loyalists being reintegrated. now they tend to be reintegrated with the emergence of political parties in america, so former loyalist overwhelmingly federalists, and there are a lot of ways in which in the early republic, you can see the kinds of arguments that loyalist espouse before the revolution taking on new forms in how they deal with anglo-american relationship going forward. i think we have time for a couple quick questions. >> i've got a couple of quick ones. first, i recall reading about an article about your book that you find a in india and so maybe you can talk about that. and secondly you mentioned loyalists compensation but i'm also aware that the british
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would not permit claims to be made if the tory you know was forced to take an oath to support the patriot cause under stress obviously. don't know if you have any thoughts on this. >> two great questions. one of the great pleasures for me during this book was following the loyalists wherever they went because i wanted to see what they left behind so!k they left behind in terms of!k!k!k!k!k documents, the!k courts which is the lifeblood of historical research but also the intangible things they left behind because only a privileged few can leave documents. one of the most amazing things i saw was the graves filled by a former loyalist who moved to india, came there an incredible military commander with the hugeu/ 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 we built this wonderful monument which is illustrated in the book. reasons to take a look at the
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book. which is still there and it rises out of this mustard field in the middle of you know central north india, just as amazing testament to the mingling of culture. the other questions concerns the loyalist claims commission which is a remarkable commission whereby the british government decides to give compensation using treasury funds to loyalist claimants. it sounds great. it is great. of course there are bureaucratic and legal hurdles and so there various ways in which it is practically difficult for loyalist to make claims and to prove their loyalty. they have to prove the value of the property that they have lost and in this process there are glitches in a case like oh you do this at one time and you said that at another. it can make it more difficult for them to win compensation. one very last question. >> okay well actually it is two. one is what became of elizabeth
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johnston's father for whom we lassar 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 was well aware as the name of -- narrative of the southside in the 18th 60s civil war has been pretty well in many ways at any rate hijacked by the south. i would like you to address the different ways the two have been handled. >> 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. been resettled in nova scotia the number one place for loyalist refugees and he ends up
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living the rest of his life there, dying there and is buried in an awful as royal in nova scotia. the reason that -- the second question which is the man of question which is essentially the memory of these complexes that you know, my suggestion that the loyalists are victors in the end is in a sense brought out the fact that we don't have this kind of loss caused literature. we don't have that sort of raising secret toasts like the jacobites to the restoration of the monarchy in america. we don't have this kind of folklore songs in a way that for example the french arcadians brought them to louisiana. why don't we have that? well, we don't have that partly because they got reintegrated into the british empire. they remained british subjects from birth to last. they founded new home. it was a new geographical home but it wasn't necessarily a new identity of the political subjects culturally speaking.
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and they were also re-integrated here into the u.s. somewhat, but it do think that we are missing something if we forget that this wasn't civil war. and i like you i'm fascinated by the discrepancy between the incredible sense we have of the need to rebuild after the civil civil war of the 1860s and the way in which i think we have the raised their needs to rebuild after the revolution when our very values were in the process of being torched. [applause] >> this event was part of the 2011 national book festival in washington d.c.. for more information visit al osi.gov/book fest.
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>> and now on your screen at the national press club is well-known author, and culture. she just did three hours on end up with booktv. and culture i did want to ask you your most recent book, demonic, for the first time ever you are wearing a white dress. [laughter] >> yeah we wanted to shake things up a bit. i stuck with a black dress for a while. we take photos. the dress i was wearing in the photo was green, but the design people, they are people said it looks better to have me in black because it looks like i'm a letter. anyway, they were the ones who would often we color the dress i was wearing black and i was always in favor of it. for some reason it drove liberals mad and i enjoy doing that. >> this is then demonic, your most recent has been out for six or seven months
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