was the master of the short form is what they like to say. he's also very well known for his cartooning, especially cartoons of dog and his career at "the new yorker" into one of america's great writers. i like to move throughout the house and tell the stories about the family as we see the house. .. >> this is not a long quote, but it certainly tells you about

charles thurber. he was always mightily plugged by the mechanical thurber rights. he was also plagued by the manufacturing which takes in a great deal more ground. knobs froze at his touch, lines fouled, the detachable would not detach, the adjustable would not adjust. he could rarely get the top off anything and was forever trying to unlock something with a key to something else. so charles was quite a man and, of course, he had been to put up with his wife. and she is quite a story in herself. she was a fisher, and the fishers are a very famous family in columbus. there were fife fishers, and maim is the one we think jamie got a lot of -- got a lot of his humor from. in the kitchen mom used to bake brownies every christmas, and

this is an interest thing she did nearly every year, and james remembers because they had a dog, mugs, who liked the bite people. and she had a very cavalier attitude toward this dog's biting people. she just made sure she knew who they were so the boys could give them chocolates and brownies every christmas for being bit by mugs. and that's kind of the way she took things. another funny be dog story that has to do with maim that i always enjoy is she had a sister who didn't like dogs, and according to thurber, the dogs didn't like her either. but she was coming over once, and they had a great plan. maim said go get some dogs in the neighborhood. they had over a dozen and a half dogs, according to thurber, locked in the basement. the sister came and said, oh, dear, i'm so busy, would you feed the dogs? oh, i hate those dogs. just set the plate by the top of

the stairs, open the door, and they'll eat no problem. well, you can imagine. thurber writes about the incident with wonderful humor. the dogs burst out, nearly knocking her down. she grabbed a broom, chased them all over the house, they were jumping autowindows, and it was -- out the windows. it was quite chaotic, and at the very end charles looks at his wife, well, i hope you're satisfied, charles says. and james writes, she was. now we'll move upstairs, and, oh, my heavens, i can't help but remember one more maim story because it happened at a banister just like this. charles was a politician, and imagine him sitting in the parlor with all the politicians in a very serious way talking about whatever politicians talked about in columbus, and maim in a negatively jay is said to have draped herself over this banister and in a very loud

voice proclaimed to all these gentlemen, at last, they've let me out of the attic. that was maim fisher, and poor charles lived with her happily all these years. his life and adventures were all in columbus like a typical childhood, though one incident stands out. and it was when they were living for a short time or visit anything washington. his brother william wanted to play william tell. and being the younger brother, jamie got to play the one with the apple. to his wisdom, he did have his back to his brother but, unfortunately, was impatient and turned at the wrong time and had his eye put out. he had a glass eye all of his life. because of that glass eye, his other eye went bad, and the last three, four years of his life he was pretty much legally blind. but it didn't keep him from working. i mentioned one of the pieces

that he did, and there's a picture of him working very, very close to his drawings that helped him to see, even though blindness came upon him. but his life at ohio state was interesting because of that glass eye. he couldn't pass be biology, he had trouble with -- [inaudible] which was required, and he was no good at baseball. he had no depth perception. so poor mr. thurber did not graduate from ohio state. now, i mentioned the new yorker, and this is really where thurber's life took off. when he was in connecticut, he lived in connecticut most of the time he worked for ross. ross was the editor of the new yorker. and their relationship and his relationship with e.b. white, the author of "charlotte's web," really, really solidified him as a writer in the americans' eye. most of his short pieces were published originally in the new yorker, and his cartoons got rave reviews.

people really loved them. as primitive as they are, they captured something. and a fun story that we tell in a short video that i like to tell is how a real cartoonist came into raz and was irritated -- ross and was irritated. he said how can you turn down my work and print this fifth rate artist's cartoon -- no, no, raz interrupted, third rate artist, he said. so they had quite a fun working relationship. it inspired thurber even to write a book called "my years with ross." it was made into a movie, a wonderful movie, but if you're a real strong buckeye fan, and many of us are, he isn't real fond of the football program at ohio state, and he takes some shots at it though very indirectly because he never refers to the university by name. but it's quite a fun film. walter mitty played by danny

kaye is pictured here. that's another thing people often associate with thurber because it was put into a movie. and he's a day dreamer. his wife constantly heckling him, but walter would day dream that he was saving the world again. and this, then, is jamie's room. james thurber stayed in this room in the years he worked, and this is one piece that we know did belong to him. when he was a young reporter at the columbus dispatch, and he has a collection of my life in hard times, and can he writes about incidents that happened to him in columbus, one of the hilarious stories is the day the dam broke. and there was a flood here in 1913, in fact, and it was a very serious flood that took a lot of life and really caused a lot of problems. but thurber always took the humorous side, and that's one of his very, very humorous tales. talks about the panic of people three, four and five miles away

from the flood running madly down the street screaming, we're going to die. go east, young man, go east. but thurber had many of those experiences and wrote for the dispatch on that typewriter. james thurber is one of our great, you know, local boys that made good. so that pride really brought people to wanting to restore this house. and having it open not only is it now open for touring just to talk about thurber, we have a writing academy which children can sign up for saturday mornings, we have camp programs, we bring in authors, adults, we have adult writing classes. so thurber as a writer has really given thurber house a chance to make columbus a center for great writing and remembering great writers like james thurber. >> up next from columbus, ohio, hear from paul beck. he details the important role ohio plays in american politics. >> ohio, since really the

beginning, has been a battle ground state. highly competitive, both parties have been strong in ohio, both parties were able to win offices in ohio. they almost go back and forth in terms of party control. there was a period after the civil war where they literally did go back and forth. every two years you had kind of a change of horses. a big state. has a lot of electoral college votes, and that's important, of course, for the presidential contest. it also is one of about a dozen states, maybe a little more than that, that really is competitive. could be won by either side. is and so you put together the big prize with the competitiveness, and it means the candidates are going to be here. governor romney had a bus tour just a week or two ago, president obama had a bus tour just last week. they will be back in ohio. we will see more campaign ads in ohio than people in most states will see, to the point that people will be sick and tired of seeing them. columbus, the market that we're in right now, had the highest

degree of political advertising two weeks ago of any place in the country. and it was june. be so it's really going to be -- so it's really going to be a place that both candidates court. and almost always have. well, particularly after the civil war it was a place that harbored both southern sympathizers and northern sympathizers. there are a bunch of counties to the south of us here in columbus, between here and cincinnati, that were counties that are called the virginia military district. after the revolutionary war, officers in the revolutionary army who didn't get paid were given land in ohio. ohio's a part of the west, of course, at that time. they moved out here. they sort of carried with them their culture and their background. they came from a slave-owning state. they didn't bring slaves with them into ohio, but they were sympathetic to that culture. part of ohio also has been settled from west virginia,

kentucky, tennessee. those states just to the south of us, appalachian states and, indeed, there's a part of ohio that really is ap lay a cha -- appalachia, and that's southeastern ohio. there were southern sympathies there. there was a lot of activity during the civil war that was pro-confederate activity in ohio. the governor of ohio at one point declared martial law in ohio to try to rein in the confederate sympathies and sympathizers who were here. so all of that adds up to a picture after the civil war where if politicians were going to be successful statewide in ohio, they had to appeal to both people with southern sympathies and people with northern sympathies. on the northern side, the grand army of the republic, which was the union army, took many of its leading officers from ohio. and when they mustered out after the civil war, they came back to ohio and established the republican party. and so the grand army of the

republic became, in many ways, the republican party organization. so you had strong republican organizations, particularly in the northern part of ohio. you had people with southern sympathies in southern ohio. you as a politician who wanted to run statewide were thinking, well, i've got to try to appeal to both groups. and, of course, by appealing to both groups, you were also able to appeal to the whole country in a way which meant that people who were presidential candidates for many, many decades after the civil war came from ohio. and we have a whole run of people who were presidents who were ohioans, and it was because they were able to compete in a state that had sympathizers on both sides of what had become the great divide in american politics between the north and the south. ulysses grant, probably s the most famous one. the one who was the head of the victorious union army. he came back here, got into

politics, was a very loyal republican, obviously, was elected as a republican president. there were others, william henry harrison before the civil war, was a soldier here in ohio who's actually born in virginia, but he did his soldiering here in ohio and indiana. all three states claimed him. but he was successful partly because he was able to adapt to the midwest and appeal to people kind of on both sides of the aisle politically. as you go into the 20th century, william howard taft was both supreme court chief justice and before that a president of the united states, came from cincinnati. cincinnati in some ways was a southern town because it was oriented, its trade was with the south along the ohio river and the mississippi. it also was the home of the underground railroad. so if you could get slaves -- the slaves could get out of kentucky and cross the ohio river, in some ways they were

safe in ohio. and then they could be dispersed to other places where they were even safer in ohio. so taft was from here. harding was from marion, ohio, just north of columbus here. william mckinley who was elected president in 1896 was an ohioan. so a whole bunch of ohioans. james garfield, again, was an ohioan. he was a short-lived president because he was assassinated in office. but you have a set of presidents who came during this period, many many after the civil war all the way up into the 1920s. and then it sort of stops. they were pulling presidents from other parts of the country afterwards. they tend to be more moderate, for one thing. they don't tend to be idealogues. that's still true among major ohio politicians, particularly statewide politicians. there's a tendency for them to be more pragmatic and less

ideological than, let's say, politicians from the south. these days or maybe from california and maybe from other states if you're trying to compete in a general election, it helps to be able to appeal to voters who are swing voters in the middle, and ohioans over the years, in fact, goag back in -- going back in time have been able to do that. ohio generally demographically is sort of the average state. almost every demographic group you can think of is well represented here. catholics, protestants, fundamentalists, mainstream property standpoints -- property stabilities, various ethnic groups. the only group that's not represented well here probably is hispanics, even though there is a growing hispanic population. there's some places in the state where there's a fairly significant concentration of hispanics. so there's an infusion of hispanics, but they don't really amount to much in terms of the overall significance of their voting patterns and their voting in elections. but demographically it's almost

as if you want to test a consumer product, you would test it in ohio because you've got every demographic slice that you want. and, of course, ohio has large rural areas with very low populations, but most ohioans live in big cities. big cities and their sub you shoulds. >> do -- suburbs. >> do you foresee ohio always being important in elections? >> in the future, yes. now, ohio is not growing as fast as other states which means our electoral college weight is going to decline over time. we lost two congressional seats in the most recent reapportionment of congressional seats. and that will probably continue to happen as there is more rapid growth elsewhere than there is in ohio. we're kind of stable, population wise. where the sunbelt states tend to be growing, although the recession has hurt them in terms

of their growth. so as long as we are significant in the electoral college and particularly as long as we're competitive, we will be a battleground state. candidates will be coming here, they will be saying i have to win ohio if i'm going to win the presidency. i think both of these candidates this year probably have to win ohio. and so they will go at it hammer and tongs in ohio, spend a lot of money here and be here a lot. >> booktv recently visits columbus, ohio, with the help of our local cable partner, time warner cable, to explore the area's rich cultural and literary history. all weekend long we're airing interviews with local authors and tours of prominent literary sites. watch one now right here on booktv. >> hi, my name's eric duncan, i'm the associate curator for rare books and man you scripts at the ohio state literary library in columbus, ohio.

we are here at the jan and jack creighton special reading room which we share with a couple of divisions of the ohio state library special collections d. and the -- [inaudible] research library. and i'm here to talk to you a little bit today about art collections which are really rather expansive and to give you a sense of what kinds of things we have by highlighting a few examples of things that i particularly like, um, some of them are also just random, off-the-cuff selections. the first item i'd like to talk about today is what i like to describe as my white whale. this is the hornby bible. this is probably, in my very biased opinion, one of the most substantial and beautiful items we have in the rare books and manuscripts collections. and what the hornby bible is, is an example of an early 13th century transitional bible. what i mean by that is medieval

bibles by and large, um, did not look at all like bibles as we think of them today. they tended to be in larger volumes, larger pages than even this, and they -- to have a complete bible, you likely would have had a bible in a multivolume set, usually anywhere between6-20 or even more volumes n. the early 13th century, however, a number of changes were happening in europe that necessitated the creation of a new type of bible. and the hornby bible, um, is a result of that. what happened in the early 13th century, to put things very, very simply, is that you had the emergence of the universities, and you had the emergence of the fraternal orders or the orders of fry cars, the dominicans and francis cans. one, let's take the universities first. with the rise of universities, the bible became, essentially, the core textbook for all fields of study. what they needed in that case, um, when a lot of people are

trying to use the same text is something that is standard or as standard as possible during the period in which we do not have the mechanical reproduction of books. everything is being written by hand. so what happens in the early 13th century is they start to develop new ways of packaging the bible. the bible starts to coalesce into a single volume, and you start having coherent and consistent ordering in the order of the books of the bible. so beginning with genesis and ending with apocalypse. and other things begin to happen. certain facets of the early medieval bible start to fall out. so, for instance, if you look at this leaf here, you can see all of these colored roman numerals, these ruin ri candidated roman numerals. this is an outline of the old chapter numbers that had been assigned to the bible traditionally over the course of centuries in the early medieval period. in the early 13th century, what happens is these old numbers

start to fall out of fashion, and the bible is rechapterred, so to speak. it's reorganized. if we look at this leaf, we can see an example of this happening in the hornby bible itself. these colored numbers, these ruin ri candidated numbers in the margins are traditional chapter numbers. however, we can see that these have been crossed out lightly by either plumet or ink, and then the new chapter numbers, so in this case chapter 51 has been renumbered to chapter 22. we have one revision in ink and another revision in plumet, or early pencil, and the old traditional chapter numbers are giving way to the new 13th century style of ordering chapters of the bible. and, essentially, these chapter numbers are the same chapter numbers we see now when we look at the bible today. the hornby bible is extremely significant for a number of reasons. it was created, we don't know

exactly when, but sometime between 1210 and 1220, and it survived intact until 1981 at which point it was tragically sold at auction and broken apart by its purchasers immediately. the leaves were then distributed for tax purposes and sold off piece by piece. sometime in the early 1980s ohio state university came into possession through donation of roughly 150-160 of these leaves, and over the last few years, it has become somewhat of an obsession for me to try to piece together as many pieces of this bible as possible. we are now sitting at approximately 100 or 181 leaves out of an origin 440 leaves here at ohio state. this one, or actually these two, i should say, are our newest additions. this illuminated leaf features st. james. we acquired this one in april, and the one right next to it

with this gorgeous vine work, we acquired in may. and what i'm trying to do is reconstruct this bible not just because we already have a lot of it and it would be a nice thing to do, but for all intents and purposes the changes we see working in this manuscript constitute what we would call in the biological terms a missing link. this is a fundamental step in the transition and the evolution of the medieval bible from the early medieval period to what we now know and think of as the bible. it's an extremely important witness to the textural production of the bible, and i would encourage anyone if any of these leaves look familiar to, please, get in touch with ohio state. you may have one on your wall. this is actually a late 14th century copy of -- [inaudible] and what this essentially is what's called a legendary or a collection of saint slaves. the text itself, while

significant, um, wasn't that popular, and the reason that we're showing it to you today is not because of what the words happen to say, but because of this little guy right here. and this is an original medieval bookmark. and as you can see, it's still bound in to the original binding. this is an original hate 14th century binding in deerskin over boards. and what's significant about this is i don't have an exact census for you, but there are an extremely low number of these bookmarks that still survive. and most of those that do survive do not exist in their original books. they survived as single, independent units. they're not on strings bound to their texts. but this is a significant and fun object for more reasons than the fact that it's extremely rare. this is what i really like to call an example of medieval

hyper text. books, as you can see, looking at this layout could be pretty hard to read in the middle ages. you've got tightly-packed, condensed text. the collars that are operating here -- colors are predominantly punctuation. and so medieval readers and writers would employ these different colors in order to help them navigate their way through the text. in spite of any sort of help that these colors could give, however, the whole process of reading one of these books, um, could be very, very difficult, so they created other forms of readers' aids, and this bookmark is an example of this. and i'll show you how it works right now. step one, this is very much like any modern bookmark we can think of today. it's on a string, and you just lay the string in, and it will mark your page opening. however, you'll notice that there are four columns of text on this page. well, this would be pri miss,

the first, second, third and fourth columns. if you take our bookmark, you'll notice, one, that it has a lovely little drawing on it. pen and ink drawing. and you'll notice that it spins. this is what's called a vovelle bookmark. on the back you have four words written -- [speaking in native tongue] we'll drop this one, we'll mark it at quartus. now, what this is telling us is the reader is on the fourth column. not the first, second, third, but on the fourth column. so we have two steps. page opening, column marker. now, i'm not going to do this because it's extremely fragile, but you'll notice this knot right here. this little knot just between my fingers is actually a noose of sorts, and it would allow you to move this bookmark up and down the string. and that would allow you to then not only mark the page opening and and the column you're on, but

the exact position in the column where you had stopped reading. this was a very, very creative way medieval people developed. there are all sorts of other examples, but this one is probably the rarest one that we've got here at ohio state, and it's a very, very popular feature of this late 14th century manuscript. i'm sure most of you, if not all of you out there, know who martin luther is. he's considered the father of the modern protestant church, all of its branches. and potted history of martin luther in the barest possible terms. the 1517 mart b luther -- martin luther hammered his -- [inaudible] on the door of a church, and this essentially starts what is going to be a firestorm in the landscape across europe. needless to say, powers do not like luther's challenge of papal authority, in particular he's challenging the system of

indulgences whereby people could buy time off from purgatory and buy forgiveness for their sins. and there's a lot of back and forth between martin luther and the catholic church during the next two to three years. luther participates in a number of disputations with catholic authorities and really no common ground is being met. and then in 1520 luther essentially begins what becomes the final breaking between this new protestant movement and the roman catholic church, and he issues, um, three texts. ohio state has the -- as i mentioned earlier -- the harold grimm collection. it consists of over 600 different titles. we're probably approaching closer to 700 if not more at this stage. and it chronicles really every aspect of the german reformation. and ohio state is extremely lucky to have probably what could be considered the three core texts of the early german protestant movement. these were all written by martin

luther in 1520. this first text was august 1520, and this is luther's address to the christian nobility of the german nation. and in this book luther lays out a doctrine that will become one of the foundational tenets for all of protestantism as the years go by, and that is the notion of the priesthood of all believers. and, basically, in quick terms what this doctrine tick dates -- dictates is that your personal relationship with god need not be mediated by priests. this charges all christians to actually take their own salvation into their own hands. the second book next to it is -- [inaudible] on the babylonian captivity of the church. and this was probably luther's most antagonistic text of the 1520s, of the year of 1520, and this was issued in august -- excuse me, october 1520. and in this martin luther

essentially attacks the sacramental structure of the roman catholic church. he pays particular attention to redefining the understanding of supper, baptism and the doctrine of penance. perhaps most antagonistically, however, this is the first printed occurrence of luther actually calling the pope -- in this case pope leo x -- the antichrist. there's really no going back from that point. the third text is november 1520, and this is on the freedom of the christian man. and in this text, um, we have a nice little early wood cut portrait of luther. in this text we, basically, see luther saying that the faithful christian does not believe in god and does not love god because he is compelled; rather, it's a free and willing demonstration of love and a free and willing pursuit of charity and right living simply because you love god, not because you are compelled to love god.

>> be a conversation with andrew welsh huggins is next on booktv. he talked with us during our recent visit to columbus, ohio. his book, "hatred at home," chronicles a domestic terrorism trial that started in the city. >> on august 6, 2002, these three men who had known each other for a couple of years at a local mosque got together. they, basically, went out for coffee at a caribou café coffeehouse. this was ten months after the war in afghanistan had begun, and at the time there were a lot of reports about the civilian casualties in that war, and these three were very upset about that. and they just started talking about sort of what they could do to enact revenge, or if they could do something about this and send a message, what would they do? and so one of them threw out an idea about the hoover dam, and

christopher paul who was with them thought that was a good idea, but maybe there was something else. and then the third man who was a somali immigrant to columbus, he said, well, what he thought would be a good thing to do would be to shoot up a shopping mall. maybe that would send the right kind of message. this meeting which was kind of a casual meeting, again, where they were just sort of tossing out ideas, this became extremely significant to their three cases. the following year investigators came across one of them, he was originally from kashmir, had emigrated to the united states. he'd been in columbus five or six years by then. authorities came across his name during an investigation of another guy who was an immigrant to baltimore, and khan was associated with khalid sheikh mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks. and sort of through that investigation they came across

ferris' name, and they came across this notion that ferris may have been asked to check out the brooklyn bridge, see what it would take to bring the brooklyn bridge down. this is, obviously, after the 9/11 attacks. turns out ferris had actually visited afghanistan, he'd been to the camps, some of the terrorism training camps, he'd met bin laden, he'd met khalid sheikh mohammed. and so the fbi was, obviously, very interested in him. ferris was questioned beginning in march of 2003, and during the interviews with ferris, he mentioned this conversation that they had had with and this idea of shooting up the shopping mall. and also the name of christopher paul, the third man at this coffee shop came up. authorities started to piece all this together, and eventually in a sort of slow domino effect the three were arrested and charged.

so ferris, the pakistani immigrant, was -- ultimately pleaded guilty to two charges of terrorism-related crimes. he pleaded guilty in a secret, closed deal in may in virginia. may of 2003. the idea was that he had a lot to offer the government, and he might be able to get a reduction in his sentence based on the information he could provide. unfortunately, his case leaked, and the government was forced to publicize his conviction in that june. and at that point everything went to heck. ferris was very upset. he'd lost his bar going chips. meanwhile, the government -- the bargaining chips. meanwhile, the fbi was very interested in one of the then, and they became more and more concerned about this shopping mall threat. what's illustrative of the situation we were in then is

here's somebody who made a throwaway comment about shooting up a shopping mall. unwe knownst to -- unbeknownst to people of columbus what that led to was government agents spent weeks searching every mall in columbus at midnight. they would descend on malls with search dogs, s.w.a.t. teams looking for anything. maybe he was going to set off a bomb. so there's something a little bit comical about this notion that this might be bombs sitting in these pretty luxurious shopping malls in columbus. but it shows you that the government simply couldn't take anything for granted. and so one throwaway remark led to this massive outpouring of investigations. meanwhile, the fbi was having a huge debate in washington with immigration authorities, can we arrest the guy? on what basis can we arrest him? we don't have a warrant yet.

so there's a big legal fight in washington, and eventually the decision was made to arrest abdi the day after thanks giving -- thanksgiving. first of all, on immigration charges and then, ultimately, after about three days of nonstop questioning he acknowledged the conversation that had been at the coffee shop and, ultimately, he was charged. he was on his way to morning prayers when he was arrested. his family didn't see him again for six months, and he actually wasn't charged for another, gosh, almost eight months. so a lot of us in this columbus remember ferris, but we didn't realize there was this other case pending until april 2004. now, the third guy in this trio in some ways is maybe the most fascinating. he grew up in worthington which is a unyou should of -- can suburb of columbus. it's older than columbus. he was one of a small number of african-americans in this

suburb, but he grew up in a pretty close family. went to ohio state university, he underwent a conversion to islam, and he became radicalized. this was when the soviets were still in afghanistan, and there was a lot of concern among muslims about the atrocities the soviets were carrying out. ultimately, paul laws changed his name. he went to afghanistan. like a lot of -- they called him the afghan arab. muslims from around the world who went to afghanistan the to join the fight. he was over there. he became fairly radicalized. ultimately, he returned to columbus. he married a pakistani woman who'd been born this england. he changed his name to christopher paul. nobody knows exactly why, but the assumption was that he wanted a more sort of american-sounding name, something that might actually distract people from who he might be or what he might be up

to. he stayed in columbus, but he stayed in close contact with terrorists cells in germany. he did travel to germany, and at some point he crossed paths with people who had direct contact with some of the 9/11 hijackers. there's no evidence paul had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, but he was on the periphery of those circles. and then through the decades of the 2000s, he was here. he was living kind of a quiet life, but at the same time he was still involved with these radical notions and radical people. the fbi took a long time to arrest him. all three were charged, essentially, with what's known as material support prosecution. so the terrorism law that was seriously beefed up after, after 9/11. and this law has been used widely. it charges you with providing support to terrorists.

what's controversial about it is it doesn't necessarily mean you did anything, you didn't commit a terrorist act, but you provided aid, supplies, money, sometimes even yourself as a foot soldier in the cause of terrorism. christopher paul would be someone you consider a very passionate, ideological person. also, i think, probably a pretty honorable person. he really didn't fight his prosecution at all. he, there were a few court filings, but essentially he agreed to plead guilty almost immediately. he refused to testify or offer any information that might help him. so he's now in federal prison serve ago a 20-year sense. the other two, the somali received a very light sentence because the evidence against him was probably pretty thin. and he's actually scheduled to be released in the summer of 2012. his problem is he's not a u.s. citizen, and somalia is still

not really a functioning government. part of his sentence was to be deported to signal ya, but it's -- somalia, but it's unclear whether that can happen. ferris went back and forth with the fbi, and he essentially truck -- struck a deal, and the deal was he would plead guilty to two of these material support charges in exchange for his continued cooperation. and he, he agreed to this. there's a full transcript of his plea hearing where he agrees to all this. it's only later that ferris got cold feet after his case became public, and suddenly he had nothing -- he one worth anything to the government -- he wasn't worth anything to the government anymore. at that point there was a long court battle with ferris where he tried to withdraw his plea, and then he tried to have his conviction thrown out. ultimately, he lost on pretty much every level. ferris is also serving a 20-year prison sentence, he's in the

federal super max in colorado, and only of his cell mates are people like robert hanson, the infamous fbi spy and, um, ted cozinn sky, the unibomber. these are three pretty good examples of what the government was trying to do after 9/11. um, they were under enormous attacks -- pressure, but it was beefed up and added to. i think the prosecutions point out that the government felt it had to go after every leeld no matter -- lead no matter how minor it might have seemed in the end. there's a lot of people who think that it was a stretch to go after abdi for mouthing off about shooting up a shopping

mall in a coffee shop while he's sort of shooting the breeze with some friends. i think what it shows is this complete change in the government's approach to investigating and prosecuting. john ashcroft, the former attorney general, made it very clear when he began to change the rules of investigative engagement, he said we are no longer going to start in the rubble of a terrorist explosion. we are -- our job now is to prevent those types of things. and in the prosecutions of the three men, that's clearly what you saw. they were going after people who had not done anything violent. they want today o go after these people to -- wanted to go after these people to stop anything from happening, and these are three of the best early examples of them trying to do that. when i started this book, one of

the first things i wanted to do was, basically, illustrate how this was a, this was a national story that happened to unfold in ohio. i, you know, when people look into my book, i hope they don't think of it as an ohio story. this was a national story that happened to take place in ohio. >> while in columbus, ohio, booktv took tours of several important literary sites with the help of our local cable affiliate, time warner cable. our coverage of that visit continues now. >> we get asked a lot who was billy ireland and why is the library museum named after him. billy ireland was a longtime editorial cartoonist for the newspaper, the columbus dispatch. he was the cartoonist from 1898 til his death in 935, so he -- 1935, so he spent 37 years at the columbus dispatch. at the cartoon library museum

our mission is to collect, preserve and make available american printed cartoon art. our scope includes graphic novels, magazine cartoons, editorial cartoons, comic strips, comic books and sports cartoons. here are some examples of what you would find in our library. what i have pulled here are the passing show pages that billy ireland did for every sunday. and in these you can really see sort of his style, what he -- what he drew. he drew about things that, everyday things that happened in columbus. like the potholes on high street, you know, things that the average person could relate to and identified with. in this panel over here, ireland was, he was a master of gentle sarcasm. he really thought that humor was a more effective instrument than anything else, and as you see here a councilman talks about he

wants to find people for sneezing in public, and he sort of wonders, well, how do you stop that, you know? should we wear a sneeze strainer? should we have a veil over our faces? so in this panel you see really his civic pride in columbus. he's saying that the magnolia trees, you know, are just as beautiful or more beautiful than the cherry trees in the washington. this is one of his more political passing shows. this is at the end of 1918, and he's kind of hoping that 1919 is a pieceful year. -- peaceful year. he draws the preceding years as rambunctious little boys, and the globe is sort of the beleaguered father with a bunch of cuts and bruises. so he's hoping that 1919 will be a peaceful, quiet little girl. and these are some of our editorial cartoons. these cartoons are by sam malay

of the pittsburgh courier. these are sort of great to see the examples of an analogy, a sort of satire. it also reflects his viewpoint. he was a centralist, and he believed -- he was very loyal to lyndon b. johnson. he really credited him with passing the civil rights bill and to sort of lead the other democrats on why they needed to pass it, why it was important. um, and also he drew about desegregation. here we have james meredith who was the first african-american to be admitted into the university of mississippi. you have the governor at the time who tried to block him, and even a retired general tried to block him. uncle sam is kind of shown as protecting him and leading him into old miss, and he kind of gave these misbehaving boys a spank on the bottom for not

allowing him to go to the university. political cartoons often depend on a lot of common, common imagery. the symbols that we see every day. this cartoon is by be ann mergin, she was a cartoonist at the miami daily news from 1933 to 1956, and during that time she was the only female editorial cartoonist in the country. and in this one, you know, she's using the familiar imagery of the donkey as the democrat party, the elephant as the republican party, and here this was drawn in the '50s where candidate adlai stevenson and truman, they're kind of by their candidacy, they're both kind of pulling the party in two different directions, and the republicans are getting a laugh at it. character is also very important in editorial cartoons, and it usually takes a physical feature andage rates it. -- exaggerates

it. here, you know, we see churchill with his cigar. they're always using the analogy that socialism is like a lion who's get withing his tail clipped and sort of a reflection on world war ii that now we're going to nip socialism one bit at a time. um, why we collect these materials is they give insight into what the average person was, thought about the issues of the day. so we hope that in 100 years when people look at these materials, these will be the primary sources that they use in order to give context into any given place in time to the issues that were happening today. >> local ohio author randolph roth is next on booktv. his book is american homicide. >> the homicide rates since, really, world war ii have correlated best with the answer to this question: do you trust the government to do the right

thing most of the time, and do you believe public officials are mostly honest? when we've answered yes to those questions like we did in the late '50s and early '60s, we don't kill each other. and when we say, no, we don't trust the government, we don't trust our public officials, the homicide rate goes high. homicide rate in the united states has been extraordinarily high really compared to the rest of the affluent world for over a century. compared to most other affluent nations, our homicide rate for most of the 20th century was, you know, between, say, four times to ten times or more the homicide rate in other societies. so we've had a pretty high rate. and it doesn't can always sound -- it doesn't always sound very high when you hear it in the newspaper. for most of the 20th century, the homicide rate was somewhere around nine to ten per 100,000 persons per year, and that sounds like kind of a small number. but you have to multiply that by

your life expectancy because you're exposed to that rate for your entire life. so that means each year you youe got that chance. and so when you look at that homicide rate that we had most of the 20th century and you multiply it by life expectancy, if we were to maintain that rate, it would mean that roughly 1 out of every 160 children born in the united states today would be murdered. it works out to about 1 out of every 460 white females -- the statistics are by white, non-white -- for about 1 out of every 160 white mails, about 1 out of every 110 non-white females and 1 out of 27 non-white males. it's a huge toll. and so when we think about those numbers, um, it's a really costly thing. now, our homicide rate is lower than it was at its peak between the mid '60s and the early 19 1990s, but still at the rates we're running today, between 5

and 6 per 100,000, and we were there for part of the 20th century at these rates. you're still talking about 1 out of every 200 children born in america roughly will grow up to be murdered. as a matter of fact, when we think now that the united states, say, right after the revolution down to, say, the mexican war in the 1840s, if you look at the north and the south, probably had the lowest homicide rate in the rest of the world. and if you factor in improvements in emergency care and emergency medicine and think of how many of those people who were killed in that period would survive today, it was an extraordinarily low rate. as low as, you know, the lowest rates in the world today. so there have been period when it's been very low. and you take a look today. african-americans are the most likely to commit murder and to be murdered today. it wasn't like that in the past. in fact, right on through into reconstruction from about the mid 18th century to reconstruction african-americans were the least homicidal or

among the least homicidal of all americans. so something changed in the late 19th century, early 20th century to shift those proportions where whites who had always been, you know, european-americans who had always been the most homicidal and murderous became slightly less murderous, and african-americans became more likely to kill. now, that doesn't mean african-americans were less likely to be murdered. in fact, they were murdered at a very high rate during reconstruction, you know, compared to other americans. but they were not the perpetrators, they were the victims. and african-americans really had a low homicide rate amongst themselves if you take a look at slavery or early reconstruction in the south. african-americans were less likely to kill each other than the whites were. so these patterns have changed dramatically over time which i look at it, i say, well, there's hope. because it's not inevitable that the united states is murderous or that a particular group of

americans the murderous. but figuring out why those rates go up and down, how that changes over time is what we try to figure out. where we got out of bounds was beginning in the 1840s and 1850s when the country fell apart over the issue of slavery. and what we're beginning to see is what drives the homicide rate. it's hard to imagine this, that whether somebody rapes and murders a young woman that they don't know, whether somebody gets in a dead hi bar fight and kills their best friend has to do with the political system, has to do with feelings and beliefs associated with government and society. um, when one of the things that we really see break down in the mid 19th century, we have a failure of nation building, essentially. our nation falls apart. and we're now thinking over 700,000 people were killed in that conflict. and during reconstruction, easily 100,000 murders or more

coming out of that devastating, um, event. and when you have that kind of loss, that kind of hemorrhage, when the state breaks down, when you have political instability, when people lose trust in government, when they don't have that sense of feeling that goes beyond the bounds of their family, that encompasses a racial group or national group or religious group, the murder rate can really skyrocket. it can go to ten, even hundreds per hundred thousand. the united states the murder rate is getting up over 100 in 100,000 per year. and that's when we kicked down. up until then i think our homicide rate was lower than canada's and england's. and the english always say, well, you're so violent. up until that state breakdown, our country was working pretty well. it was the peak for african-american distrust of government that came during the nixon administration, 1971-'74. and that's when african-american homicide rates are highest. and when did white homicide

rates peak? it was 1980. and that was when you see that accumulated anger over affirmative action, busing, defeat in vietnam, the humiliation of the hostage taking in r.n. -- iran and our inability to do something about it, you know, proactively, that it lingered. that's when white trust in government went down lowest. and the white murder rate was the highest at 7 per 100,000 which is just a huge rate. that's just whites themselves. and then ronald reagan comes in and speaks to the concerns of those people. and what happens? the homicide rate plummets. the same thing happened when franklin delano roosevelt came in in the depression and said we're going to move in another direction. and it wasn't the first year of his administration, but the second year when people started to trust him and say this is someone who cares, i'm empowered, i'm included, i matter, you see the homicide rate drop rapidly for all americans.

and, of course, you see that drop under reagan, too, interestingly enough. so it's not a partisan thing, in other words. it has to do with how people feel about that person, whether they feel connected or included. another thing is really how connected we feel to our fellow americans. the best correlate that i found of the homicide rate from colonial time into the 19th century -- and this is a strange one -- it's the percentage of new counties in any decade that's named after national heroes. where we name our counties after national heroes, george washington, thomas jefferson, etc., we don't kill even other. this is -- each other. but when that number's low, and when did it drop? in the 1840s and 1850s as people started to think we're not a nation anymore, and that number went down, and the murder rate went up. the same thing happened in the colonial period when, from, say -- this is one people won't know about, the glorious revolution of the 1680s. but that increased trust in

government in great britain, the empire, the identification. so the number of counties named after british heroes went up to 80%. the homicide rate dropped. but when the imperial crisis came in the 1760s and '70s, that number dropped, we started to kill each other. so it's a way of saying, you know, something about solidarity. another thing is hate speech. um, we find we're starting to be able to map out the use of words now and these kinds of hate speech. and how intense these feelings were. the best -- you could, if you map out the use of the n word in the 19th century, what percentage, you know, how often that was used in the books that are published, you will map out the homicide rate perfectly. it's scary. in other words, when that racial hatred, that racialization of hatred comes -- the sectional crisis in the 1840s and '50s, the homicide rate booms, and it just goes up, peaks during the civil war, goes down as reconstruction ends, and then

the crisis of the 1890s it goes back up again. it just follows that same pattern. and it works the other way. the other place that the, um, anti-abolitionists used was the slave power. in other words, these are not our fellow americans. they brutalize their fellow human beings. we want nothing to do with them. and when that speech, that anger towards the white southern elite comes in, you'll see it maps out the murder rate too. so we're trying to look at ways to measure these kinds of emotions. but political instability, the breakdown of national cohesion seems to be really what we're looking at. so if you ask, it's something my friends in europe and canada have always asked me. you americans really hate your government. we've never heard so much hatred of government speech. and i'm not talking about that in a partisan way. you know, people get upset in this country, and it goes back to that distrust, really gets

amplified during the civil war. and, you know, we're still fighting the civil war. you look at the electoral map of bush v. gore, it's the flip of the electoral map for lincoln versus everybody else. those political divisions are still there. and the feelings are still there. and so that's why we think as historians, as social scientists or many of us are beginning to think this is how we got into this thing. and i guess the thing that i would say, too, what i think would help, i mean, both liberalism and conservativism, in my opinion, have contributed very importantly to human progress. i think there are ideas in both of those ideologies that have been very constructive. but their theories of violence don't work. i mean, because it's not about deterrence. and it's not about the economy working well. um, you know, sometimes in the great depression the homicide rate goes down, you know, the 960s it --

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