of ideas that puts everything into question, that has no reverence, that a gives us no point of moral orientation. and for a country, a pluralist country trying to find its unity, this is not the kind of philosopher we need here. and so you're not alone in that reading of nietzsche, and all i would say to you then is as a historian is that there are many people who both i think are thoughtful, really intelligent, really interesting readers who did very different things then with the consequences of that. so you're on, you're right. and the question for readers was what can come out on the other end? can we get a better america, a more humane america, a better democracy? or is this, um, will this tear away everything that we hold near and dear and we'll be stuck in, you know, a destroyed, anihilistic age.

so the stakes are very high in nietzsche, and i think most of his readers understood that. and just how they came to terms with that, how they came to terms with their america is the subject of the book, and the reason why it's the subject of the book is because it's a huge part of our intellectual history. and so today the letter writers are just a tiny little sampling of a much larger set of conversations, worried ones, angry ones. i mean, today i showed you the devotees, but there are people who dedicated their careers to taking nietzsche down, and they're important too. and they're discussed in the book as well. but what i hope to simply make unmistakeable is we understand these moral reckonings, we can't do can it without understanding how nietzsche often figured into this conversation. so thank you. >> there was a comment in which he was compared to albert einstein, and i saw that, too, because albert einstein's ideas were, basically, a

poplarrization of -- popularization of moral relatively, that there are no absolutes. and so my people don't admire him either. >> that's -- yeah. i mean, but that's, that's nietzsche. moral relativity. or that already, actually, let me change that one, could quibble with that philosophically. richard world, a reader of nietzsche, quibbles with the notion of relativity. it's self-bound in the same kind of absolutes as ab jekylltivity, but that gets a little high-flying tonight for us at 7:30, but the notion he's carrying away moral absolutes is absolutely true, and your concern about the consequences for that and also that it brushes up against what you hold dear is -- >> right now in the united states i'm what's called an indigenouser, the errapin tribes person, and our people are being

used for medical experimentation right now. there's a genocide against us, and nobody cares because it doesn't effect them. and this is moral relativity. if our morality was based on our physiology and there was absolute right and wrong, this could not be happening. >> that's, i mean, that's -- i would just try to bring to you awareness that there are many nietzsche readers who would think that nietzsche's philosophy would be as outraged as you are, he would just use different arguments why it's outrageous. so, anyway, thank you. thank you very much for coming. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction author or book like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@cspan.org, or tweet us at

twitter.com/booktv. in 1942 bill manbo and his family were relocated from their hollywood home to heart mountain relocation center, a japanese-american internment camp in wyoming. while at the camp, mr. manbo took numerous photographs that documented the day-to-day life of the japanese-americans who were held there. eric muller, editor of colors of confinement, presents photographs from the late bill manbo's collection while speaking at heart mountain interpretive learning center in powell, wyoming. this is about 45 minutes. [applause] >> thanks and good afternoon, everyone. um, i want you to take a minute and conjure up in your mind an image of world war ii. just try to get an image in your mind from world war ii. i'll make a couple of suggestions. you might try picturing a

burning u.s. warship at pearl harbor, or if you would rather do a happier image, how about a man kissing a woman, leaning over and kissing a woman this times square in new york at the victory, on victory day. or maybe you prefer politics, picture how about churchill, stalin and roosevelt at yalta sitting down together. maybe that image. or maybe you'd rather think of something from the america of that era roughly, maybe a little bit earlier, the great depression. try to get an image in your mind of the great depression. if you're having trouble, think of a tired, worried-looking young mother staring off into the distance with a rag a muffin child leaning on each shoulder. can you find that famous, iconic

image in your mind? the iconic photograph by dorothea lang that we have come to call migrant mother that has come to symbolize the great depression. it's very likely, as i've done this just with you just now, that the images you've conjured up in your mind have been in black and white. very, very likely. so now i'd like you to do the same exercise, but think about the imprisonment of japanese-americans during world war ii. try to find in your mind an image that represents the imprisonment of japanese-americans during the war. so what are you picturing? does it look like this? a bunch of, um, young japanese-american girls in kimonos? dancing? this is a photograph taken by a government photographer at the granada relocation center in

eastern colorado in august of 1943. so if this isn't what you had in mind, what's different about it? well, it's a photo, as i said, of young american citizens dancing, celebrating the spirit of their ancestors in a summertime buddhist ritual. does it surprise you that japanese-americans would have engaged in such open displays of japanese culture while detained in what was basically a prison camp? well, but maybe it wasn't so open. because after all, it was at night, right? i mean, this was happening at night. so there's a surreptitious quality to this. well, this is a photograph here at heart mountain, and it was taken either in july of 1943 or july of 1944, we can't be sure

which, one or the other. it's daytime. nothing suspicious about it, nothing surreptitious about it. the barracks in the background, you can see that it's taking place in an open, public space. within the residential area of the camp itself. so just check this image out. oops. there we go. so there's something else that's special about this image. it's in color. it's actually in color. brilliant, beautiful color. take this photograph in for a moment. it's another shot of the same event at heart mountain, and it was taken not by a government photographer, but by one of the internees in camp. so just check that out and then look at that. with the color restored. what i've done is i've taken

color photographs, and identify removed the color -- i've removed the color so that you can see them the way we're accustomed to seeing this era, and then you can see the way the shot by the photographer. so i wanted to just take a moment and ask you what the impact is, and i'd love to hear a couple of comments from you, what is the impact of seeing this historical moment in color rather than in black and white? could a couple of you maybe put into words what the difference might be of seeing it in color as opposed to black and white? yes? >> i don't know if i can put it into words, eric, but i know when i saw the color come up, i smiled. i felt warmth. >> warmth. >> yeah. >> any other reaction to color rather than black and white? yes, sir. >> i think the color makes it seem a little more present time. i think the black and white you have that sense, oh, that happened long ago, it doesn't have quite the effect. >> so the suggestion is there's

something about black and white, at least when you're looking at historical photographs, there's something about seeing it in black and white that marks it as history whereas the color, he said, makes it feel a little more current? any other suggestions? yes, ma'am. >> it gives you a feeling of happiness and that everything is fine. >> it gives you -- very interesting. it gives you a feeling of happiness and everything is fine. >> when you see it in black, it looks -- black and white it looks bleak, and it looks -- >> bleak. >> -- kind of dangerous. >> dangerous can. somber. >> yes. >> stark versus real. >> stark versus real. yes, sir. >> spontaneous versus staged. definitely the black and white prop propaganda image is replaced by something that seems authentic and is at that moment. >> these are wonderful suggestions. let's hold on to all of these because i think it's an

important theme of this project, this book called "colors of confinement" of which this is a presentation. it's to think about not just the episode that we're treating, the incarceration of japanese-americans during world war ii, but also the way we interact with it, the way we see it and the way these representations communicate meaning to us. so let me say a few things about -- i want to volunteer a few of my own observations about what's striking about this photograph. one of them is just the beauty of the subjects. the beauty of the subjects. and i'm not just talking about theirkeykimono -- key kimonos, h are gorgeous. i'm talking about their energy. there's a beautiful energy to these young women. their delight and their humor. the lighting is not perfect, but the woman in the red key know with the flowers -- kimono with the flowers, the white flowers,

is turned to her left in a look of what can only be described as gleeful amusement. obviously, something very funny has just been said when this photograph was snapped in this group of young women. so let's spend a moment on that. delight, humor, there's a playfulness in the interactions in this group. this is unusual. what we're accustomed to seeing is images of dreariness, images of bleakness. depictions that that on their surface communicate injustice. think if you are familiar with it with the very famous photograph of three boys at manzinar standing and looking across wistfully across a barbed wire fence, a black and white image. that's the classic image of japanese-american incarceration. this is something quite different. notice the contrast between the

beauty of the subjects and the bleakness of the backdrop, the dry, parched ground that they're standing on, the dreary tar paper barracks that they lived in, the chimney of the communal mess hall where they ate their meals. notice again something that i suggested in the earlier photograph, the black and white one, the openness of japanese culture. this is something very, we're very unaccustomed to in the imagery of in this era. but, and this is hard to see in this light, don't miss -- look at the young lady in the purple facing just to the left of the woman who's laughing, smiling. she's wearing saddle shoes. if you look down at the bottom, she's got on saddle shoes. and so, um, this is not a depiction only of japanese culture. there is something culturally complicated going on here given

the ages of these subjects, we can be certain that if we could listen in on their conversation, they would be speaking unaccented american english. so there's something culturally complicated that's being documented here. i love this photograph. this one shows that cultural blend that i'm talking about. in a really beautiful and very humorous way. same event, it's the summertime buddhist ritual of celebration of ancestors, and we've got a young woman dancing and over her right shoulder a man with a headband is dancing, and then over her left shoulder is someone, a man or a woman, who has dressed him or herself up as some kind of fanciful bird or dragon. and do you see what they used to make the costume? they used cereal boxes from the mess hall kitchen.

the white plate if front is a rice crispies box, and the one above it is from are a cereal that i believe has not survived, i've certainly never seen it, something called wheatonax. [laughter] does anybody remember that? there's something, actually, there's layers of cultural complexity here because you've got a japanese-american dancer engaging in a japanese dance in an american prison camp making a costume out of boxes of american cereals, and the american cereal that they chose, of course, is rice crispies which is a concoction based on the staple of the japanese diet, rice. so there's one other thing, though, about this photograph that, um, is a little surprising. besides the fact that they're in color, besides the fact that they show japanese cultural

activities rather than american cultural activities, but i want to give you a hint. it's actually not in the frame. it's not in the frame. there's something a little bit starting about the photograph, and it's not in the frame. any ideas about what i might be referring to? yes. >> it surprised me that cameras were allowed in, particularly when there was such security involved here. >> exactly. the thing that i'm alluding to is what's outside the frame is the photographer. somebody was taking in the photograph. with a camera. and he was a japanese-american prisoner at this camp. so that's worth noting too. um, we are usually led to believe -- and it was true at certain points -- that cameras were contraband. so why would a japanese-american have had a camera, and why would

he have felt comfortable shooting photographs out in the open like this? under the eyes of the camp's administration? well, i'll say a little more about that later, but for right now remember, somebody is taking these photographs, and remember, there's a lot more going on in this place of confinement than what you see in these photographs. the photographs are a snapshot of a subject, but there's an entire world that surrounds that subject. so what i'd like to do with you for a little while today, um, is share with you, introduce you to this very rare collection of kodachrome, color photographs of ordinary life here inside -- ordinary life inside the camp here at heart mountain. i also want to introduce you to the photographer and to his family and give you some sense of what was going on outside of the view finder, outside of the camera's frame. this is bill manbo, this is the

photographer. bill manbo was born in riverside, california, in 1908. american citizen, of course, he was born in the united states and, therefore, under the 14th amendment a citizen by birth. he went to hollywood high school, he was in the class of 1921. at hollywood high. went off to the frank wiggins trade school to study to be an auto mechanic. he graduated in 1923. and he opened up a garage in hollywood. he liked model race cars, and he loved photography, he was an amateur photographer. he also developed an alias for himself that he used at times. his name was bill manbo. he developed a french version of his name that he would use. he would refer to himself as pierre manbo. [laughter] and he would actually, he changed the spelling of the last

name so that it would be man -- not manbo be, manbeaux. [laughter] and there's actually a photograph in this collection of his barrack, he has built a little foyer with plywood in front of the door, and arching artistically across this little entryway is the name manbeaux right here at heart mountain. so he was a bit of a character, no question about it. this is a lot of his family. um, in the middle, the two older folks in the middle, on the left is his father-in-law, and next to him his wife, lio, bill manbo's mother-in-law. they were both immigrants from japan. his fall had trained as a mechanical draftsman but did a number of different jobs when he

came to the united states and ultimately took up farming in the mid 1920s in norwalk, california, southeast of downtown los angeles. they had three children. on the right is their youngest child, that's eunice. she was about 16 or 17 in this photograph. on the other end, on the left is mary, actually who then became mary manbo, that's on the left is the photographer's wife, mary manbo. and then in front of his father-in-law is his grandson, bill and mary's son billy. also named bill, but he was called billy in the family. billy came along in early 1940. this is probably shot sometime in 1943, so he's about 3 years old there. he's clutching his little toy airplane. mary went to the frank wiggins

trade school as well, that's where she met bill. she was studying to become a seam stress. she became a seam stress, she did costume design among other jobs. then there was a third child, sammy, a boy. by 1931 sammy, who's not pictured in this photograph, but you'll meet hill later, sammy was at cal, at uc berkeley in the rotc program in 1941. and eunice, as i say, was in high school. now, the father-in-law had done some accounting work for a japanese-language school, and as a consequence of doing that accounting work, being affiliated with a japanese school, he was arrested in march of 1942 after several months after pearl harbor, and he was move today a federal justice -- moved to a federal justice department camp for enemy aliens, and he was held there through may of 1942.

when franklin roosevelt signed executive order 9066, sammy, the son, left berkeley and came back to norwalk, back to the farm to try to help his mother,lio, in the absence of his father who was locked up in the camp, to gather and conclude their affairs. and that included making arrangements for their farm. they were farmers. and one of their most valuable crops was rhubarb. now, the rhubarb crop was not be ready to harvest, but it's a perennial plant, and its roots are very valuable. so sammy, home from cal, getting ready to be excluded, negotiates the contract, signs the contract with the white land lord of their farm. they were tenants of the farm. strikes up an agreement that the landlord is going to care for the rhubarb, is going to

market -- harvest and market the rhubarb and is going to share in the profits with the family in camp. for the duration of the war. and then at the end the contract would terminate at the end when the family returned. that was the arrangement that they struck up with the landlord. there were a couple of buildings on the property that they known owned as well, and the landlord agreed to take care of those. so they are forced out in march of '42, and they go to santa anita, so-called assembly center, where they spend the summer of 1942 living in the horse stables. be and then they are sent to heart mountain. this is a photograph that bill manbo took of his wife mary and little billy. at an -- on an outcropping to the west of camp, so heart mountain is to their backs,

looking out across the camp, looking out across the site where we are today. you should know, by the way, that the very first trainload of internees arrived here 70 yearses ago yesterday. 70 years ago yesterday. august 10, 1942. heart mountain was run by the war relocation authority, a civilian agency set up specifically for the purpose of running these camps. >> eric? >> yes. [inaudible] >> executive order 9066 -- yes. >> civil liberties act of -- >> oh. floyd is reminding us that the civil liberties act of 1938 was also signed on that date. thank you, floyd. during the time when heart mountain was open at its maximum population of almost 11,000, it was the third large city in wyoming. and what an unfamiliar place it must have been for people from

temperate california. check out the icicles. there was a day in january of 1943, i went and dug out the meteorological records, there was a day where the high temperature was 13 below zero, the high for that day. now, bill manbo was a hobby photographer, and he -- not a professional, not a documenttarian. he used his camera for the most part the way you and i use cameras. he tried to capture things that struck him as beautiful or interesting. so here he's got rainbow, obviously, in better lighting you would see it more vividly, but he saw a rainbow ending at a latrine building -- where all rainbows end, of course. [laughter] a pot of gold, or a pot intyway. thank you. thank you very much. well, remember i told you that here's a man with a camera, why

did he have a camera? the reason he had a camera was because the war relocation authority -- which unlike the military was staffed by people who in the context of their time were progressives, they figured out that cameras would be a good thing for interneverything -- internees to have. it would be a good thing for japanese-americans outside the coastal strip to be allowed to reclaim their cameras they had surrendered as contraband. why? because it's a way of feeling normal. it's a way of doing what we all do, documenting your experience, taking pictures of your family, taking pictures of your children, taking pictures of events. the camera, the war relocation authority recognized, that it was an instrument of adjustment for the incarcerated commitment. so after about march of 1943,

japanese-americans off the west coast, so not at manzinar, not at toolly lake, but at camped outside of the western defense command were allowed to reclaim their cameras. that's why bill manbo had a camera and was comfort cial walking around with it -- comfortable walking around with it. the boy scouts were very active at heart mountain. here you've got the boy scout with the american flag and the drum majorette with just behind. classic american image. and then maybe a not so classic american image. [laughter] sumo wrestling was practiced openly here at camp. very much, again, like the dancers. japanese culture being practiced with the permission of the war relocation authority. if you could see the faces of the folks behind, this is clearly a very light moment in this particular match.

it looks as though the older gentleman has just been successfully pushed out of the ring by the younger guy, and there's, you know, cultural historians might see some interesting comic relief going on here because there was actually a fair am of unspoken -- amount of unspoken intergenerational conflict at the camp between the generations. so there's a way in which the young man pushing the old man out of the ring may have had a certain kind of tension-breaking humor to it. little billy gets an ice skating lesson. people would order ice skates from montgomery ward and sears roebuck catalogs. ice skating became a very, very popular activity. swimming hole. you can see the splash of a diver there just having come off the diving platform. this swimming hole was built after a young boy drowned in

swimming illegally in one of the irrigation canals. one of heart mountain's two movie theaters. people lined up for what must have been a matinee showing. if you look carefully at the photograph along the right side of the barrack, you can see black cur thains that have been hung in the window to darken this barracks structure so that the film can be shown, and the film that was shown that day, there's a bluish stein downward to the right of the big sign that says theater, and the film is so well preserved that you can actually read if you look closely what film was being shown. somewhat ironically, they were showing how green was my valley that particular day. [laughter] bill manbo used his camera to document newsworthy events like a fire in a mess hall.

this is a fire, these are men on the roof who are trying to control a mess hall blaze. um, there's all sorts of layers of meaning in photographs, but one of the things that's certainly noteworthy here is how self-sustaining the commitment needed to be, right? it was internees who provided fire protection. with the cooperation, of course, of the war relocation authority, but it was the internees provided that. internal policing was largely an internee-run enterprise. this is one of my favorite photographs. bill manbo loved the landscape, and he loved using his camera to capture the various hues and moods of the camp. ..

so to capture a photograph like this add-on with a 10 asa film, he was not a bad photographer and he loved to shoot portraits. marry his wife and sam, and remember i mentioned him before, sam itaya brother and sister, very striking and handsome photograph of the wife and brother-in-law. and he especially loved shooting photographs of children, as we all do. that is billy, his little son with the cap -- a military cap kind of leaning to one side there. it's hard to tell. they are playing with something.

it might be a marble. it might be something else. this is a little group of children, a little bit ragtag looking but adorable standing in front of the tarpaper barracks. that is billy on the right in the blue cap and the galoshes. and the little baseball bat, a little mini-baseball bat looking thing there. that is billy. that is also billy being an ice cream cone. so one of the things that we can see bill manbo doing with his color found and his camera and is doing what most japanese americans were not able to do which was to use the camera to try to create and bring together some kind of a normal family life, taking pictures of our children is one of the staples of normal family life. that is what he was doing with his camera. he was in a certain way, you could view these photographs as being the family album that so many japanese-american families don't have.

from this time period. that is a photograph of billy as of voted -- portrait. let me show you another picture of billy. kind of different. what would you describe the difference between the last portrait and this one? distillation i'm hearing. survival i am hearing. i'm sorry? monochromatic. it is a bit better with the lighting but it is fairly monochromatic for a color image. what i'm trying to get at here is that bill manbo may have mostly uses camera in extraordinary ways but there was clearly something else going on for bill manbo. he was at times documenting something, he was commenting on the bleakness and the isolation. the enormity of the surroundings and the seclusion of the ceramics and i think it's unmistakable in an image like this of little billy walking up the avenue pass the piles of

coal in the barracks. how about that image? what is this a picture of? >> the guard tower? >> it's a guard tower. now he could have taken any number of photographs of barracks subjects around here. it's impossible to read a photographer's mind of course but it's very hard for me to believe that he was not commenting on surveillance, right? that is the central image of this photograph. that is the focus, the guard tower on the hill looking down on all. that is a mess hall. how about this portrait of childhood? it's not exactly the way i have taken portraits of my children clinging to barbed wire fences. bill manbo had documented certainly. we can see in these photographs

a keen the keen awareness of the surveillance and the confinement that there is really only one image in the collection that is a shot of an overtly political moment and it's this one. there is heart mountain in the background. that is the high school building on the left, and an enormous crowd has gathered on a september afternoon in 1943 to see the folks who are protecting the belgian son with umbrellas or parasols. this is the moment when the people who had failed the government foiled attempt that you may have heard about the so-called questionnaire administered in the spring of 1943, those who fail the tests were shipped off from hartz mountain and the other camps and sent to one camp that was being converted to a segregation camp in california. this was the gathering to send

off those from heart mountain who are being ripped out of the heart mountain to be put on trains to be shipped off. these questionnaires were a disaster. they produced far more -- one w. r. a. official called the mortality. they ended up undermining the very thing that they were intended to gauge by asking all manner of insulting questions. i was able to find bill and mary manbo's loyalty questionnaire and the in the records of the national archives and their anger and jumps off the page. when they were asked for their citizenship they reported american question mark. a one of them said only if my rights are restored. mary manbo says japanese, and i'm not ashamed of this, so you

can sense on these forms that they are bristling at what they have been asked to endorse. it got them into trouble. their answers on those forms were insufficiently suspect that they were submitted to hearings to determine whether they were or were not loyal and at those hearings, the their anger, the transcription the national archives, their anger is probable. it's probable. but the wra understood better than the military did that the japanese-americans often had good reason. ultimately fill in mary manbo were adjudicated for being loyal and not disloyal so they were not on that train in september of 1943 heading off to the lake. there darras junso and rielle a tie with their grandson billy. let me tell you about how things went for the manbo family towards the end.

yunas itaya, bill sister-in-law, when she turned 18 she left camp, went to the midwest and took a secretarial job. sammy left to do some agricultural work and then he volunteered into the united states army. bill, the photographer, left for cleveland to find work in a factory there. toward the end of 1944, junso a tie he had decided he wanted to see if he could get work in new jersey at seabrook farms which was a farming enterprise that was recruiting japanese-americans from the camps to come work. so junso leaves camp in the fall of october 44, heads to new jersey to scope the situation out. at that point sammy had gone, bill was gone, yunas is gone.

the only people left in the camp are real, mary and little billy. rios suffers what they call a nervous break down. she ends up in a camp hospital and for the rest of her time in the camp which is another nearly year in camp rio itaya is suffering greatly and really unable to work, barely able to stay in the barracks. she is something of an invalid for most of the rest of the piers. junso comes back and finds his wife in the hospital so he decides not to take a family to new jersey but to stay in the camp and care for his wife. mary and billy and end up leaving to join bill at a factory in cleveland. the only ones left in the camp in 1945 are rio and junso.

they finally leave in september of 1943, just a month or two -- i'm sorry, 45 just a month or two before the camp closes and they head back to california to find the cruelest blow. they discover when they get back that the landlord a few months after they had left in 1942, plowed under their rhubarb crop, carted off the building. they are gone. they had nothing left. and the cruelest blow of all, it turns out that the landlord didn't even own the land. he had been collecting rent on the entire family since 1937, but the property had ceded to the state because the landlord hadn't been paying his taxes. the state hadn't come in and taken possession but that landlord had no right to their

rent from 1937 all the way through when they were forced out in 1942. bill in cleveland enters the factory and returns to the west coast with mary and little billy and decides to reopen his garage in hollywood. junso, his father-in-law more or less creates a fish cake maker that gets installed in the store in little tokyo and los angeles but he never really returns to productive economic life. and what about little billy? billy is now 72, lives in anaheim. he became a recreational parachutist. more than 1100 free falls in his career until he finally stopped because of an injury and guessed what? he went to work in the aviation

industry. [laughter] he designed exit systems for airplanes and then ultimately wins two operations for several major aviation centers. these photographs, these color slides, they were slides, set doxed up and little billy, now bill manbo's closet for decades which is why they look so great. kodachrome has enormous staying power particularly slides if they are treated properly. they sat in the dark for 60 years so they

i want to conclude with the image of the cover of the book. you will see the book that i chose is the image of the young women in their, nose and i want to share with you that i really struggled with what the image on the cover of the book should be.

i went back and forth between this image and the image that is now on the back of the book which is the image of billy clinging to the barbed wire fence. i decided to go with this image but with trepidation. because somebody earlier when i asked about the color, initially when i asked about color and people said it's about warmth and happiness. people said things about warmth and happiness. and there certainly is warmth and happiness in that photo. there's no question about it. those smiles are not fake. they are not even smiling for the camera, really. they probably know the photographer is there. i was concerned that this image scene quickly could leave people

to think that these were happy places, that these were places of joy and frivolousness and that these people were really japanese rather than americans, repeating the very categorizing mistake that got the country into this whole problem in the first place. i ultimately decided that if you allow yourself to reflect on these images, and you inform yourself a little bit about the very tragic arc of the manbo and its family stories which is representative of the stories of so many japanese-american families, he will ultimately come to see that any concern that these were places of joy is no thicker than the paper on which the photographs are printed. thanks very much for your attention. [applause]

[applause] >> i'm going to look at our time people. do we have time for a few questions? we will move it along. if they're a couple of questions or comments we have time for those. yes, sir? [inaudible] >> they were yeah they had to be shipped back to california so one of the things that little billy, now build, has izzy has the mailer in which, in which you know the envelope in slides came back from the photo lab in california. and they are addressed by the way to manbo. [laughter] >> when i saw the word kodachrome i thought right away of paul simon song and then the

first two verses i think are so appropriate particularly when you talk about the political context of the one photograph. when i think back and i look at high school, to wonder i can think of all of it. my lack of education has not hurt me. i can read good writing on the wall. kodachrome, this nice bright colors the greens of summer, makes you think all the world is a sunny day oh yeah. i have a nikon camera, i love to take photographs. so mama, don't take my kodachrome way. [laughter] >> i'm glad you mentioned that. my essay in the book tells the back story of manbo but i opened with paul simon's kodachrome. i open with those very lyrics. [laughter] because what i say is, kodachrome does make you think all the world is a sunny day but for this story really isn't so sunny and that, that is the

central problem in the central challenge and the central delight of these color photographs. >> did you get to meet with little billy and how did you find his personality? he did a great job in those pictures and a lot of it has him within a confined space. >> it's a very perceptive observation. billy was four when he left. he doesn't remember any of this. he has a very faded memory. his family as it was common among japanese-american families, his parents never talked about it at all. so he has no memories of this. he has no evidence that herness. he remembers going around looking for rocks with his grandmother and he remembers little things like that, but he has no bitterness. he is a very quiet gentleman, a

very reticent man, and doesn't. >> extensively about any of these subjects but he is extremely happy that his father's photographs are coming into public view. maybe one more and we will wrap things up. yes? >> the colors through the gears doesn't change. did you make a decision not to restore them to what they would have originally been? >> again i encourage you to look at the images in the book itself because part of what you are seeing here is the bleaching from the fluorescent lights. so the colors are more vivid but also yes it's a great question. the only thing we did really on the slides, the book is published by the university of north carolina press and we worked in conjunction with with the center for documentary -- at duke university.

i had the photographs scanned, the slides scanned at high resolution and then using a computer dust was removed, not from the original slide but from the scanned images and then for perhaps a dozen of the photographs, the pew center for documentary study altered ever so so slightly a little bit of the contrast perhaps contrasts perhaps so for example in that photograph of the movie theater, there was an enormous shadow in front and then the back drop in the movie theater itself itself was in the brilliant sunlight so there were slight adjustments made to bring the foreground out and titone the background back a little bit but mostly you are seeing them the way they would appear if they were sitting in one of those old-fashioned slide projectors that we all probably grew up looking at pictures from. i think we should bring things to a close now so we can keep the program moving. thank you matt -- thank you so much. >> this event took place at the heart mountain interpretive

learning center. for more information visit heart mountain.org. >> during the republican and democratic conventions we are asking middle and high school students to send a message to the president as part of this year c-span studentcam video documentary competition. in a short video students will answer the questions, what's the most important issue the president should consider in 2013. for a chance to win the grand prize of $5000 there is $50,000 in total prizes available. c-span's student videocam competition open for students grades six through 12. for complete details and rules go on line to studentcam.org. [applause] [applause] >> how are you guys doing? [applause]

hi everyone. can you hear me? wow. this is so exciting. this is my very first book, and my very first and probably only look signing. this is so good, this is so good. well, let me just say i am so proud of this product. it is the book, "american grown" is everything i would have imagine. i wanted the book to be beautiful and i think that the pictures are absolutely beautiful. i could tell because when malia and sasha picked it up, you know moms, though a book how nice. they actually got pulled in by the pictures and then they couldn't put it down. they started looking through and then they started actually reading it and eventually i actually got a thumbs up. so that is what we hope the book

will be. the book is really not just the story of the white house garden and how it came to be and how we had our ups and downs in trials and tribulations but it's also a story of community gardens across the country. everything from the wonderful community garden in hawaii to some excellent full gardens that are happening right smack dab in the middle of new york with some gradeschool kids. so the story of the work that people are doing across this country are really an important part of the book as well. but we also talked about one of my key initiatives which is, let's move and it's all about getting our kids healthy. said so the book shares that journey and some of the interesting statistics and work that is going on all across the country to help our kids lead healthier lives. and then it's a little practical too. it gives a few tips. i am not the best gardener in the world but i had a great team

of national park service people and i had my bancroft kids. [applause] they are my partners in crime in this respect. these two schools have been with us from the very beginning and that was one of the things that we said when we started, whether or not we could plant a garden on the south lawn. it would have to be a teaching garden. it would have to be a garden that kids could participate in and understand where their food comes from and engage in that process because that is really what i learned in my own life. when i involved my kids and of food we ate and we didn't garden in chicago but we certainly went to farmers markets and we got them involved in really changing their diets and owning that process, that they accepted it a lot more. we have seen that with these kids. you know these kids are working in the gardens in their own schools. i know they are bringing back ideas and questions to their own families and helping to change the way they ease into great

things. so these kids have been amazing, and they have just been a pleasure. they come to the white house. they don't get -- they don't look around. they get to work. they get to work and they get our garden planted and harvested in a manner of 10 or 15 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes if they just get it done so we could not do this without them. i am so proud of you all. so proud, proud, proud of you all. thank you. thank you for helping me. [applause] thank you for helping me. i want to thank you all for standing in the rain, coming out. i am just thrilled and i hope you all enjoy the book and i hope it becomes the beginning of many congress asians in your own homes and in your communities and i hope that it leads to a healthier generation of kids at some point. there are also some good recipes in there too that are easy to follow and they are pretty good.

white house chefs so i urge you to try them. you while thank you so much and i look forward to seeing you all up here. alright. [applause] alright. >> ready to sign books. >> okay. okay, alright. [inaudible conversations] this is my first book. >> this is exciting.

>> okay, kids do you guys want to come around and get your books? come on and get your books. there you go. that is great. there are you are. come right in. >> that is great. you have to have that when you come to a book signing, right? >> there we go. thanks, sweetie. thanks for all your help. there you go, there you go.

very special. i think there are pictures of you in there. did you find yourself? it is so good to see you guys. thanks for taking the time to come out. oh, cool. very cool. we couldn't do this without your school. it's so good to see you. oh my goodness, thank you. they are. oh my goodness. thank you. it's so good to have you guys hear. this is a good way to end the year.

oh, goodness. hi, how are you? i remember. thank you so much. thank you so much. are you ready to party? >> alright. we appreciate you. thank you for coming. how are you? you know me, i have a cause for everything. oh my goodnes