generation of voters and also this is a time when you are in your teens and late teens and early 20s we are most passionate about things in your life. ..

>> a decade ago, if you drove down highway 99, that flat zipper of road down the heart of central california, and you look to the side of the road, you would see this shack standing, and i remember the first time i saw it, i thought, jeez, that's been lifted from the mississippi delta, 1930s, you know, who lived there? well, as i was driving, you looked closer, there was puffs of smoke coming from the roof. it was not someone who lived there. someone was still living here in the year 2002, 2003. one day, myself and matt black,

a photographer who, you know, is kind of a modern day dorothy lang, evans, we pulledded off the side of the road, came over the railroad tracks across this little dirt road here, across from this vineyard, and we pulled up to the shack. it was in better shape then, but a tarp paper shack, and as we walked up, there were rabbit furs that had been -- that were hammered on to the wall. i remember knocking once, twice, and this place was on stilts. the door creeked open, and there stood this black man who looked like he'd been lifted from the mississippi delta, 1930s. he had a stutter. in fact, later he told us that he came west with a stutter, one state at a time. his name was james dixon, 95, he was living here and had since the 40s. he was part of the migration of blacks who did something that no

blacks in america -- went against the grain of the great migration that went from south to the northern industrial cities and if it came west, it came to oakland, san fransisco, and l.a., but there was a tribe of black, black oakees from the south and southwest, who wanted to retain the rural lifestyle. it was very important for them to feel the wind at night, to be out in places where no one bothered them, to be close to the land. about 25-30,000 of them didn't go to the industrial cities. they went from rural to rural, following the cotton trail west, and james dixon was one of them. he was from louisiana. he worked in the railroads for a while as a porter. when i met him, he was -- he had a water pump here and a little pecan tree, and he was cutting down the pecan tree to burn fire

to keep himself warm. he was five-foot-five, sleeping on a little iron crate. the crate was too small for him, so he had a wooden beekeeper's box for his head. there were -- i'll looking inside, and there were veinna sausage cans, empty ones, that had had put in the corners to keep the place from falling. literally, chickens have a better roost than had did, and this is where he was living. he came, you know, we found him a half century later, and he was nervous, thought we were government workers here to maybe inspect the house, shut it down, whatever. i said, new york city we're -- i said, no, we're here to tell his story. we're standing in the old lake basin. it was the biggest body of fresh water west of the mississippi, 800 square miles of lake right

here in the middle of california, and these cotton grower from the south, chased out by the bull weevil came west, and they claimed this land, this lake land, and they took the rivers and dammed them and shunted the flow to places where they wanted to grow cotton, and at some point, they had to go back and find labor, and a number of folks came to the basin, and their narratives played out here. white oakees, latinos, and black oakees. no one wrote about them. they came in the 40s when the cotton picker was just starting in the fields. it was clunky, big, and it couldn't -- it could take the middle swath of the fields in the 40s and 50s, but it could not pick the edge of the rows, and so the black oakees were

literally in the fields working alongside of the machine that would eventually idle them picking the edges of the cotton, and in ten years time, they were idled. the women ended up becoming maids and housekeepers for wealthy white farmers, much like the south. the men, where they could, found work, but many were idled, and the children left this place, so when we came upon it, it was mostly old folks. when i wrote the last week, "west of the west," i came back to find them because i wanted to open up the book with the black oakees, and every place i went to a decade earlier, it was empty. they had died, and in some cases, the places were still standing like this place. there's a yellow house just two fields away. this is where we found mini

patterson, came in 1945-46. she was dying. they set up a room for her in the front to see the grapevine that her husband planted when they arrived here in california. she said she'd come to the patch of brown surrounded by a sea of white cotton in the fall of 1945. she decided that first night she would not be staying. what kind of land have you brought me to, she asked her husband? driving three miles to fetch water, reading scripture by the lamp, you might as well kept me hitched in the plantations of east texas. she wanted a home, nothing fancy, and a civilized city, a house up the road in fresno or bakersfield would do, but willie patterson, her husband, kept pounding nails and boards on to that crooked hut in the middle of horn toad country, and the black people kept trickling in from oklahoma, arkansas, texas, and louisiana.

they'd come looking for a place with a cotton growing a little taller and the white folks had. raised up a little nicer. they found the taller cotton. i'm not sure they found the white folks any nicer. the black oakees thought coming west they'd leave behind the racism. the sunshined more benignly on them here, but i remember a number of them telling me it was a more cruel kind of racism, smile on the face, but a dagger behind the back is how they described california. they were not allowed to live in any of the cities, not even the small towns. they were locked out. the only land available for them were these patches of ailing land. when you see the land, it's so salty, it's like it snowed there. it was the land available to them, and they built their little wooden shacks here, no

water. they had to go into town to fetch the water. no city suers. they had outhouses. no police roamed this area. it was a no map's land. basically, glorified squatters' villages. i mean, this is a place that got bypassed by the civil rights movement, by the war on poverty. none of it ever came here. you know, it was a tough life. one of the things dixon told us before he died, he was stuffing, actually, cardboard boxes into the plywood of the house to keep it insulated, and he looked up, and i remember he said, i worked all my days in the cot tin field and the railroad. i was not lazy. what happened to my life? we're standing in some of the poorest places in america right now.

you'd have to go not border lands of texas or appalachia to find the poverty that we have here, and that really is a function of the kind of agriculture we have. we have big industrial agriculture that concentrated wealth in a few hands, and that depends on a constant supply of cheap labor, and for most of the century, that cheap labor's come from south of the border, and farmers here are reaching deeper and deeper into the rural pes cant heart of mexico to bring out the labor, but there's been problems with that flow now and again, and that's why the farmers have reached to other people. seeks came here to pick, chinese, japanese, mong, all the small farmers, and then the black oakees at some point and whites were brought from the south and southwest to come here and pick the crops.

some of them moved up the economic ladder, became tractor drivers, truck drivers, business owners, that's happened with the white oakees. happened with latinos, some of them. the black oakees, though, had to leave this place to find economic prosperity, and the original family members who came here, the old folks remain, stayed behind. they never -- they never acquired much. i think theirs is the saddest story of all those group, and they stayed behind here, simply because they loved the rural lifestyle. we went by martha william's house today. it's no longer there, but she was an 86-year-old widow of an arizona sharecropper living with her son in a sagging house.

don't feel sorry for me, williams said, this is a shack, but it's my shack, god gave it to me. i ain't got nobody coming to me saying you owe me rent. i sleep as long as i want to and get up when i'm ready, and when the beautiful wind gets to blowing, i can flap my wings when i want to flap them. i sleep easy at night, right here in my little run down shack by the highway. it may not be your dream, but it's mine. now you can just turn around and leave us alone. >> the history of homicide in the united states in this next interview from columbus, ohio. >> the homicide rates since, really, world war ii, 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 answer "yes" toe questions like the early 50s and 60s, we don't kill each other, and when we say "no, we don't trust the government or public officials," the homicide rate goes high. homicide rate in the united states has be 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. we've had a pretty high rate, and it doesn't always sound very high when you hear it in the newspaper. for most of the 20th century, our homicide rate was around nine to ten per hundred thousands persons per year, and that sounds like a kind of small year. one year, nine out of a hundred thousand, but multiply that by

the life expectancy. that means each year you've got that chance, and so when you look at that homicide rate that we have for most of the 20th century, and you multiply that by life expectancy, we maintain that rate, that means roughly one out of 160 children born in the united states today would be murdered. it works to one out of 460 white females, and statistics by nonwhites, one out of every 160 white males, about one out of every 110 non-white female, and one out of 27 nonwhite males. it's a huge toll. when we think about those numbers, it's a costly thing. our homicide rate is lower than it was at its peak between the mid-60s and early 1990s, but still as the rates run today, between five and six per hundred thousand, and we were part of

the 20th century, the rates before, still talking about one 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 the mexican war in the 1840s. look at the north and mountain south, probably had the lowest homicide rate in the western world, and if you factor in improvements in emergency care and emergency medicine and think of how many of those people killed in that period would survive today, it was extraordinarily low rate as low as, you know, the lowest rates in the world today, so there's been periods when it's been very low, and you look today, african-americans, most likely to commit murdering, to be murdered today, it was not like that in the past. in fact, right on through into reconstruction from 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 to shift proportions where whites -- european americans, always the most homicidal and murder yows were slightly less murderous. they were not less likely to be murdered. in fact, they were murdered at a very high rate in reconstruction. you know, compared to other americans, but they were not the perpetrators. they were the victim, and african-americans really had a low homicide rate amongst themselves. look at slavery or early reconstruction in the south, african-americans less likely to kill each other than the whites were, so these patterns changed dramatically over time, which i look at it and say, well, there's hope, because it's not inevitable that the united states is murderous or that a particular group of americans is 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 weather they rape or murder a young worship they don't know, whether there's a deadly bar fight has to do with the political system and the beliefs of government society. when one of the things that we really see break down is we have a failure of nation building essentially. our nation falls apart. we are thinking over 700,000 people were killed in that conflict, and during reconstruction easily a hundred thousand murders or more coming out of that devastating event,

and when you have that kind of loss, that kind of hemorrhage, when the state breaks down, when you have political instability, and lose trust in government, when you don't have the fellow feeling that goes beyond the bounds of their family that encompasses a racial or national group or religious group, the murder rate can really skyrocket and go to ten to even a hundred per hundred thousand, and some of the places in the united states in the border land, the conflict most intense, it's a hundred thousand a year. up until then, the homicide rate was lower than canada's and lower than england, and they say we're violent, well, up until state breakdown, our country was working pretty well. there was a peak for african-american distrust government came during the nixon administration in 1971-74, and that's when african-american homicide rates are higher. now, when did white homicide rates peak? it was 1980, and that was when

you see that accumulative anger over affirmative action, welfare, defeat in vietnam, the humiliation of the hostage taking in iran, and our inability to do something about it, you know, proactively, that has lingered. that's when white trust in government went down lowest, and the white murder rate was the highest. at seven per hundred thousand, just a huge break, that's just whites themselves, and then ronald reagan comes in and speaks to the concerns of the people and what happened? the homicide rate plummets. same thing happened with roosevelt came in in the depression and said, we're going to move in another direction. it was not the first year of the administration, but the second year when people started to trust him and to say, this is someone who cares, this government 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. it's not a partisan thing, in other words. it has to do with how people feel generally about that person, whether they feel connected or included. another thing is really how connected we feel for our fellow americans. the best correlation that i found of the homicide rate from colonial times into the 19th century, and this is a strange one, it's the percentage of new counties in any decade named after national heros. when we name the counties after national heros, george washington, jefferson, we don't kill each other, this is unrelated adults, but when the number is low, the number drops, 1840s and 50s as people thought we're not a nation anymore, deeply divided, 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 don't know about, the glorious revolution of the 1680s, but that increased trust in government in great britain for the empire, the

identification, so the number of counties named after british heros went up 80%, the homicide rate drops. when the imperial crisis came in the 1760s and 70s, the number dropped, and we started to kill each other. it's a way of saying something about solidarity. another thing is hate speech. we find we're starting to map out the use of words now, and these kinds of hate speeches, and how intense feelings were. the best map out the use of the "n" word, and how often it's used in books published, you will map out the homicide rate perfectly. it's scary. in other words, when that racial hatred, that racialization of hatred comes where the sectional crisis in the 1840s and 1850s, the homicide rate booms and goes up. peaks in the civil war, goes down as reconstruction ends, and then the crisis of the 1890s, it goes back up again.

it follows that same pattern, and it works the other way. the other phrase that the anti-abolitionists used -- or the abolitionists used, slave power, these are not our fellow americans. they are tyrants. they, you know, they brutalized their fellow human beings. we want nothing to do with them. when that speech, that anger towards the white southerner comes in, you 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 to break down the national cohesion seems to be really what we are looking at. if you ask, something my friends in europe and canada asked me, how -- you americans really hate your government. we never heard so much hatred of government speech. i'm knot talking about that in a partisan way. you know, people get upset in the country, and it goes back to the distrust, really gets amplified in the civil war, and,

you know, we're still fighting the civil war. the electoral map of bush versus gore. it's the flip of the electoral map for longes versus everyone else. the political decisions are there. the feelings are still there. that is why we think as historians, as social scientists, or many of us are beginning to think this is how we got into this, and i guess the thing that i would say, too, what i think would help, i mean, both liberalisms and conservatives, in my opinion, contributed importantly to human progress. there's ideas in both ideologies that are very constructive, but their theories of violence don't work. it's not about deterrence, and it is not about the economy working well. sometimes in the great depression, the homicide rate is down, you know, the 1960 #, it's up. it can't be the economy. we look at religion. we are the most church going

people of any affluent nation, and we have the highest percentage of people who believe in god. you know, still, we kill each other. how can this be? our faith doesn't even -- our extraordinary faith doesn't solve this problem, and if you think the people are doing the murders, don't think of themselves of godly, well, moe of them do. they are god-fearing people who think that person deserves to die. i mean, you'll read in the murder things, you know, god told me, you know, got what he deserved, so that doesn't work. when you have anger, you know, there's people use their religion the long way or warrant their faith, and so i think we have to get away from the idea that our ideologies are going to have the answer to the homicide problem among adults. we got to look elsewhere, and that's what we're trying to do. >> new mexico is teaming with

western legends from kit carson to billy the kid. next, we see a rare first edition of the authentic life of billy the kid published in 1882 and signed by pat garret. mr. garret is known as being responsible for the death of the well-known teenage outlaw. >> today, you're in the historic zimmerman library built in 1935, and we're in the conference room, which was one time one of the rooms used for rare books and rare materials, pretty appropriate because in front of us here is the 3 millionth volume to the library which we'll celebrate on april 1st, and that's the authentic life of billy the kid. one of the single most, probably most important books of western american, certainly for knack, but also for the west, and one

of the most rarest as well. we only know of six copies of this particular edition autographed in the country, and three of those are, we know, are in private hands, one is here, and the other two were not exactly sure where they are, but they are not in any other institution so it's really a pleasure for us to have this rare material in our library. this is important because it sets the stage, the fountain head for all billy the kid history or nonhistory as you imagine. the myth, the intertwining of the myth and legend of billy the kid with the facts stem from this book. pat garret wrote this book in response to a lot of other books being printed in new york city and in the east coast that really exaggerated the kid, and it almost made the kid a hero, and pat garret was then being seen as being the guy who

ambushed billy, who killed billy, and he wanted to set the record straight by writing a biography of billy the kid and how it all happened so it becomes the first account, the only firsthand account we have of what happened that day in july of 1881 in fort sumner, new mexico, and at least from pat's perspective, but it is -- it is what everybody else takes the facts from is this book, and since this really is the first edition, the first printing, and an autographedded or complimentary copy by the author makes it extremely rare and one thats, i think, almost unheard of, even to find now. like i said, this just so few of these still available, which is funny because they were -- when they were first publishedded maybe a thousand copies were made, but pat kept a small

number of books that are in this special read calf leather behinding that makes it unique because, like i said, it is just the presentation copies that pat made that he gave to important people and dig dignitaries thatd his compliments. the other copies were never bound. they were just loose, and they actually just -- the person who has the actual book would have it bound themselves perhaps or leave it unbound. again, here's the title page with billy's picture, and this, actually, is an engraving from the original. the only known picture of billy that recently sold for over $2 million, i believe. it's a really, even the image is rare, but for folks given this, and just loose, and then they had to bind it themselves, and that really didn't help the sales as well, and what the

story goes is that these were on sale in santa fe, and there was a bushel basket of them, not the red ones, but the copies selling for a quarter a piece, and they couldn't sell them, but someone came buy and bought them all, went off, and we want to know who it was, but we don't know. consequently, it was not the moneymaker they thought it would be, and, of course, because of that, it really is so rare to have that kind of a history with the book. i think the most interesting part is really the culmination of the book where pat is pretty sure that billy is in that house, and he stakes out the house. it's almost like -- it's almost like a television detective show where they know that the bad guy

is in that house, and they know there's civilians in that house, and how do they go about getting desperado. just the idea of creeping in the house, goes to the bedroom -- he doesn't know where billy is, and he doesn't know he's in the house. can you imagine? no lights. it's not like they had electricity. they had lamps and things, but not much light. you have pat venturing into a place he does not know where a murder might be, and he goes into the bedroom of the owner of the house, and he confronts the owner and pretty much says, is he here? have you seen him? that is where pete maxwell says, he's been around. he doesn't say he's here now. he's been around. you can imagine pat's level of

anxious anxiety and sense of fear because you don't know where the murdering fellow is, so when the -- when billy comes out of the hall and into the bedroom and says to pete, who you talking to? he knows there's people on the front porch, and pat backs into the dark corner, and that's the moment in time that a decision is made. do i take him in alive? do i try to over power him? do i shoot him? what happens? that's the time that only pat can tell us about because he's the only one still around that was there when it happened. when he says that billy drew his gun, because, apparently, billy dbt have a gun and knife. when he drew his gun and pat shot him, it was -- in pat's mind, it was self-defense, he was going to shoot him, and, again, that becomes the real crux of the entire story. did that really happen that way? did billy really raise his gun,

or did pat shoot him? it's this series of these things so you waiting for the big climax, so when pat talks about that, those few minutes of time that really bring all this together, it really is kind of exciting, it's an exciting story. i think pat did a good job with that. for a while, pat garrett was the darling of knack. he -- of new mexico. he captured and killed the outlaw, billy the kid, but for the short time, people started asking the question, was billy -- was it a fair fight? did he really have his gun pulledded? did he really -- was he shot in the back? all these questions started to be asked about pat, what did you do? all of the sudden, pat felt like he was becoming the villain instead of the hero, so he's

then talking to a friend of his named marshall upson who was a journalist from back east, and he asked him to with him, write this book, that was the true account, once and for all, of what really happened. i think pat, more than anybody else, wanted people in new mexico to read it because he was in new mexico, and he was feeling, i think, the sting of being the, now a tyrant, or as the bad guy. when he really saw himself as the hero to the people of new mexico for capturing this fellow and taking the fellow off the streets, so even when he was first -- when this first happened, when he first killed billy, the governor had offered a $500 reward for the capture or death of billy, and when pat went to get his $500, the governor didn't want to give it to him, and the citizens in new

mexico raised a thousand dollars to give it to him because they were so pleased with what he did. again, i think that for pat, that was important, and i think that when that started to be questioned as to what happened and was billy unarmed? was billy shot in the back? rumors going around, that pat really wanted the people of new mexico to know, and that's why -- that's why i think that he did not go to an east coast publisher to publish this, that he wanted it published in santa fe so it would be available to people of new mexico to get, read, and learn, and, again, that was probably one of the reasons why it was not successful because it was -- distribution was bad, and it didn't get out to where he wanted to dwet it out, so pat, in the end, even though he wrote this for the short term, did not really benefit from getting his story out, but in the long term, this becomes the true -- again,

fountain head for all stories about billy the kid because it really is a firsthand account. you have other -- over the years, you have people interviewed who were there either on the porch or came in afterwards or from pete maxwell saying what really happened, and there's all these different accounts of what really happened, and some folks said that billy never was shot anyway, he escaped actually, and the guy there was not billy the kid. even as late a as just three years ago, they were trying to exhume billy's body to ensure he was in the grave. there is a lot of questions still unanswered about billy the kid, and which makes it so interesting as a historical phenomena that intertwines fact and fiction and legend and myth all into one person and into this one book. it's a great thing for us to have, to be able to have that for the students and faculty to

use and see that original piece. >> now from mesa, arizona, april summit talks to booktv about the colorado river with her book "contested waters." >> it is considered to be the most litigated river in the world, and that is, probably, very accurate. more lawsuits, compacts, laws to regulate what is collectively known as the law of the river. there's probably 13 to 15 major laws that have spanned the whole 20th century, really, up until the present time talking about who gets how much of its water and who can take it, how much every year, how to share it, and our relationship with mexico and the water as well. the colorado river is about 1450 miles long. it's not the longest river in north america by any means nor have the most flow, probably

number seven in terms of size, but it drops 8,000 feet or so from its source in the rockies, and it used to flow all the way down to the gulf of california reaching the ocean. it doesn't reach there very often anymore, only on rare occasions does it get that far. there are seven states in the united states that depend on the river and two in mexico, so you have wyoming, which probably has the least amount of water, but it also has most of the source tributaries along with colorado, and nevada, utah, new mexico, and arizona, and california. the basic water law in the west is what we call the law of prior appropriations. it differs from water law in most of the rest of the united states where water rights are connected directly to land, and if you have land that has water, then you have a right to that

water. if you sell land, you sell that water. you can't sell the water without selling the land that's attached to it, but there's just not enough water out here to have the law operate that way so the miners early why western history in the early 1800s coming to california made up their own agreements with each other. whoever got there first got the water with the right to direct it wherever they needed it, and sometimes that's a long distance that you have to send water to where it's needed so this law of prior appropriations as it evolves over a few decades becomes law, which basically comes down to first in time, first in right. if you get there first, you have the most water. whoever comes next, gets what's left over. there's one caveat to that law, and that is the caveat of beneficial use.

you have to put your water to beneficial use to have a right to it. in other words, people can't get to a river, claim it, and not use it. if you are using it for some beneficial purpose, then you -- and you got there first, then you have the right to that water. well, all of us here in the colorado river basin or water shed, and we're talking about somewhere between 35 and 40 million people now in the united states and mexico as well, they all depend. we all depend on the colorado rivers as our basic water source. there is ground water and other rivers, but most of the rivers in this area are simply tributaries that are part of the colorado river, indeed, and we need it for everything, for municipal use to drink, we need it for our houses, we need it for industry, for mining, and most importantly, and the bilgest water user out here is still agriculture. we can't grow anything without

it. the land is very fertile and the growing season is long so it's a good place to do agriculture even though it's ironic it's a desert, but you have to bring water here, that is the reason why we use the colorado. it's how it was first seen as an important source and the reg was settled because of the people recognizing they could tap the colorado river and redirect its flow to bring the water to the desert. the federal government regulates the operations of the dams that there are seven major dams on the main stream of the colorado rivers and dozen or so others on the tributaries, and the bureau of reclay mages, formed in the -- reclamation is a body within the interior department oversees dam operations up and down the river and operate dams an other rivers as well, but the colorado river

is almost exclusively the bureau of reclamation's doe -- domain. that's where the federal government is involved. at the same time, there's a lot of competing interests. the states themselves have a certain amount of rights to criminal how their allocation of water is used and distributed. they fight amongst themselves. the longest supreme court case in american history was about the colorado river, and throughout most of the 1950s was timely settled in 1963. a big fight between arizona and california over water, how much do they get, how much do they have a right to? there had been a few lawsuits prior to that time by arizona against california. the major argument was that california believes, hoping to get as much water as possible, california believed that they were entitled to more than their 4.4 million acre share. that's how we measure the water out here in terms of knowing how much water covers an acre of

land a foot deep. it's the largest share of the river. they believed they were entitled to more, and that, certainly, arizona was not entitled 202 -- 2.8 million acres. there was not as much agriculture going on in arizona at the time of the compact in 1922 which remains law, governing who gets how much water, and california said, well, they need to give us some of that water. they shouldn't have all of it because the river, one of the largest tributaries of the colorado runs all the way through the state. the water pulled from that, the salt river, a major source of water for mesa, right here, is part of the colorado. we have to subtract that amount of water, and what's left is their share of the main stem of the river. arizona, of course, said, are you kidding? no. refused to sign the compacts for a lot of years, not until just before the treaty with mexico.

the disagreement was still there. california saying, no, arizona can't build that canal that they want to build, and federal funding was blocked for it because california believed that would take away water needed, hence the lawsuit. once it finally was settled, the judgment did come down in favor of arizona. the decision said, no, you can't count the tributaries in arizona. they are entitled to the full 2.8 million acres of water, and if they build a canal big enough to bring it, they can do that. california had no choice other than to accept the judgment and understand they would have to live in the 4.4 limitation, but what happens after that is interesting. in -- as soon as the decision is made, of course, arizona starts thinking, okay, let's build a canal, but you have to have federal funding for a project that large so they tried to find funding in congress for it, and

at that point, california, once again, worked to block funding. in the end, arizona has to almost give up some of its gain in the lawsuit. yes, it was granted the right to the full 2.8 million acre feat, but in order to persuade congress to give them money for the central arizona project canal, arizona, at that time, had to agree that we had the most junior rights, that the canal that would be built would be cut off first in time of shortage, so arizona knows this. they are not happy about it. there's always been an anger at california about them having better rights, more priority rights, but it was southern california, the imperial valley, that diverted the water first so their water rights are much more senior than ours. however, the good news is for arizona, the good news is everyone realizes we can't just cut arizona off. well, at least we hope here, we hope they realize that, but in

the research for my book, i found lots of examples of attempts to make agreements about sharing shortages. it's not been an easy thing to do, but just this last november, 2012, there have been -- there has been progress. we give mexico about 1.5 million acre feed, and that -- that's a treaty between the united states and mexico, so arizona, having the most junior rights to the colorado, feels upset about that situation saying, well, why should mexico always get their 1.5 million acre feed because of the treaty while we have to have a shortage while less water will run down the central arizona project canal? the shortage sharing would cascade. they do have a plan in place for shortage, and yet arizona would still take the first cut, but they are negotiating to try to

minimize that. case understands they have to share in this. if you just take prior appropriation law the way it is laid out, arizona would simply suffer, and then maybe somebody next, whatever the motion junior right is, probably in colorado because some of those projects are much more recent, utah as well as nevada, las vegas would really suffer, but california has the most senior right, so that is part of the stress between arizona and california over the years, and the california has understood that it will have to give up some of its water in time of draught as well. we all will. california gets the biggest share of the colorado river even though a lot of the water is pumped out of the water shed to los angeles throughout imperial valley for a huge agricultural bread basket of america. they will have to cut back, but it's not really clear as of yet how that's going to go smoothly. the good news is we're talking,

but that's about as far as it's gotten. there's interim guide lines for shortages. the bureau of reclamation back in 2003 said to the states, okay, if you don't come up with an agreement, we'll make it for you. if you don't want us to decide who has the shortage and who doesn't or how we're going to manage this, then all of you get together for once and sit down and negotiate. that is what -- that's what's really started the progress of talks between the states and the basin. that's been helpful. a good thing is, finally, we're bringing mexico into the conversation. we left mexico out. we like to think back in the early 0th century and throughout most of it, since it started in the united states, it was ours, nevermind is used to flow into mexico. all of us will and do have to sit down and talk. it's really unclear how the shortages are reallyplay out,

but i think everybody understands that it's only fair to share. we will try to do that. this book has been a fascinating project for me, and i've been interested in rivers for a very long time. i grew up on the banks of a river, and looking at the importance of this river in the southwest has been a fascinating experience. it's an odd sort of river. it's really a plumbing system or big garden hose, really, if you want to think of it that way. we have put a lot of straws into it to tap the water, and so that's been a fascinating story, so its experience, its story over time, the human relationship with the river can provide a microcosm i think of a very much larger picture of the human relationships to the environment. we have no choice here in the southwest. we have no choice but to figure out how to create a steanble relationship with the colorado

river, without the hoover dam, we wouldn't be here. without the canals that bring the water to us, we wouldn't be here. this is a desert. oh, there'd be a few people here, but not all of us, certainly. the great megalopolis that's grown here in phoenix and los angeles, all of those areas wouldn't have the growth that it has if we don't pay attention to the importance of using the river in a more sustainable way. that's been a huge challenge, and i looked at a hundred years of a river's history, and i've only seen some real hope towards the end of that hundred years and beyond in the 21st century, starting to pay attention. it's almost crisis before we actually look for reasonable solutions. looking at the whole picture, looking at the whole history of the river helps us understand, yes, why we exist the way we do here in the southwest. it also helps us understand the role of rivers, surface waters in arid regions in other parts

of the world, but it also gives us a larger picture, a piece of a larger picture of how humans relate to the environment, and the stresses and strains that come along with it, the political fights that hamper creating a sustainable relationship, all of the barriers that stand in the way of making better use of our natural resources, and we can look at what didn't work, plenty of that, but we can also look at what did work, and what is working now, and what kind of changes we can make, i think it's going to be a fabulous example for river water sheds throughout the world. >> talking about joseph pulitzer, the name sake of the pulitzer prize. he talked from santa fe, new mexico.

>> i'm james mcgraph-morris here today in the palace press, and behind me sands early printing presses, and this sometimed like a perfect place to talk about the man who revolutionized american newspapers. when i first started working on the book, people reacted with recognition when i said i was writing about joseph pulitzer, but it was clear they knew the name and not anything about his life because plight ser shares the fate with nobel well known for a prize he endowed, but not for what he did in his life. few remember nobel was an explosive ammunitions maker, and few understand the significant role he played in american history, yet, leek the giants of the 18th century who names we remember, carnegie, morgan, rockefeller, all these people, pulitzer played an enormous role making america the way we think of ourselves today. the role was he was the midwife of the birth of the modern mass

media. before his time, we didn't have the media we now swim in every day. the notion of americans, you know, checking their news on their phones or going to cnn or watching c-span, these are all things that were cultivated in that period so turns out the pulitzer not just played a historically significant role in the 19th century, led a fascinating life for great reading, but he's with us today. the reason they don't remember him because his complirpment is happenstance now, and we're used to what it is. in the 19th century, printing was the internet. we all go, you know, wow, i can book a ticket now, or i have this little gadget, and every day we exclaim, and so the idea of getting news today quickly and easily are all common place things, and we don't think it's such a big deal in evaluating it, and the same way, i'm not so sure all americans remember who morgan was or who rockefeller

was or who carnegie was, but we have bridges made with steal, that's a carnegie gift, using cars powered by oil, that's all the world that rockefeller built, and we have a financial system built on morgan and cop soup news built on a system developed and created by pulitzer. he was born in the 1840s, came to the united states as a mercenary soldier to fight in the civil war. the north needed soldiers, went to europe for young men promising a home here. he was unemployed. after war, it's hard to reintegrate people into the economy. he ends up in st. louis where he becomes befriended by a major german-american who becomes a senator from missouri and is a newspaper publisher. he enters the world of the press at that point doing everything at an extraordinary rate which we don't do anymore, but it's important to compare his life. within five years of the entry in the united states, he's elected to the state legislature

in missouri. it's that kind of speed of integration that we had in the 19th century when people were coming. he's successful, and i'm shortening the story, in st. louis, and he had a new form of journalism. let me give you a comparison of the pulitzer's much like the modern day surfer. if you go to a beach and look out on the water beyond where the waves are breaking, you see men and women just paddling lazily their surf board, but one of them paddles with speed because they perceive that water will be the best wave of the day. the others don't see it. what pulitzer saw in the 19th century were tidal waves of social change to ride. what were they? people left the farms to come to the cities and work in the factories, becoming commuters. women who made important economic decisions in the farms were now becoming housewives. paper was made with such -- it was such strength out of wood, not out of clothe, that could go

through printing presses at high speed that it was possible to print a newspaper thousands of copies and get it out in the street. the victorian internet was invented, that's the telegraph, bringing news from washington, d.c. that morning so what happened in congress reached st. louis in the amp. pulitzer produced an afternoon paper to sell to commuters entertaining to read containing economic information, advertising so the wives knew where to buy gingham or flour, contained the latest news so the next day's paper were printing yesterday's news, and he did more than that. he discovered that an urban life, and it was a tremendous drama that you could write up in a nonfiction way the way dickens wrote of the poor in london. the paper was rivetingly interesting to read, and the elements combined into what they called western because st. louis was west, western journalism. like a broadway play, they test plays out in the hinterland

before bringing them to new york, he did the same thing. bringing his style of paper to the new york city, and within months, made millions of dollars in revolutionized journalism in new york. new york being the media center of the country and world at the time, he revolutionized journalism. one set of antedotes, analogy for the importance of pulitzer is they said pulitzer created the newspaper for the world of new york, and looked in the lower east side where the massive immigrants were coming, and when i mean massive, there's millions coming from overseas, ellis island was about to open up, and the upper class and upper reaches of 5th avenue saw the folks as a dangerous group, seeing them as poor, dirty, you know, all these kind of things. pulitzer didn't see them that way, but as potential readers. he admonished reporters to write about their lives. the day's paper said tiny to the

falls to his death from a tenement building. the upper class drinking tea with fingers up, said, oh, what a prattle. they missed the point. to the lower east side, overcrowding, this was their lives being portrayed in print. kids did fall to their deaths. in fact, in the summer, it was so hot in the buildings, this is the most death hi populated place in the world. people went to the roof to breathe at night and children would fall to their deaths. this was chronicledded by the journalists. by writing about them, he was, in a sense, dignifying their lives, and i give this comparison all the time. if you were to take me home, i bet on your refrigerator is a clipping that you kept, your child's graduation, accomplishment at school, sad news, those events occurredded regardless of whether they are in print oar to -- or not. why keep them? writing and print brings dignity

and meaning to actions. the lower east side of class saw the paper as their friend that produced this kind of dignitary. the paper also is the entry to american life. for as little as a penny, on sundays, you get a paper as thick as a telephone book with dress patterns, easy to understand stories, serialization of literature. you know, we download music now on to the phones. that's old stuff. then he printed this sheet music to the latest tune inside the paper so you could play the latest music in your house. pulitzer built an important semiautomatic relationship with the poorest people of new york with this paper, and in return, two things happened that were really amazing. one of which is the statue of liberty was begin to the united states by the french people, nots by the french government, but the french people, and in return, we had to raise money on our own, not the congress, so the statue was on the way over, and we had not raised the money for the ped stole. there was a front page story

saying bring me your pennys and nickels, i will put your name in the paper and thank you for it, and we'll raise the money privately. now, you have to understand that he's a barren of the 19th century, so trusted by the lower classes of the new york that the kids would come in with pennys, workers came in with nickels saying, here it is, i trust you will use this. it's like my going to some major corporate leaders saying here's five bucks, use it in the right way. it amplifies the relationship. the next day in the paper, your name would be listed for that contribution. the same paper that had the vanderbilts, the asters and morgans in it, there's appears michael's name for having begin a penny. this sculpture's pedastool was built, and the statue put up, and there's a picture of pulitzer out in the park on the island. the last thing to show

significance is he recreated journalism, it's vital, important, and papers published every hour of the day. if there's an important trial in new york like in 1905, a reporter sat in the room, write a story, give it to a copy boy, get a phone, dictate it back, print that hour's trial, put it in the street, and boys would sell, you know, so and so accuses so and so! that was the cnn of the time. it was so important that on election night, people would gather by the thousands on park row because there was no radio to tell you who would win, and you looked at the front of the newspapers with big boards and put the results in chalk. pulitzer became the midwife of the whole world of journalism in which people depended on it, turn to news for entertainment and said, did you read the story in the new york world? maybe the competitor, but the point is people would talk about news in the way it was all new.

.. >> think of it? terms of the empire state building in the 20th century, you know, that kind of profound effect. so just like he remade the landscape of journalism, he he remade the landscape of new

york. when those immigrants kept coming into new york harbor, and this is something that people forget, when immigrants left the steps of russia, there was no delta flight or virgin air flight to go home and see mama next year. you were betting your last dollars you might be able to reestablish your life in this new land. so as you went to the harbor, it's a terrific moment. you're going to have your first look at the new land, and if the fog is there, maybe, you know, the fog will clear, and you'll see the statue of liberty. and those immigrants would see that. you go right by the statue of liberty. and then they would turn and have their first look at the new york city skyline. the city that would welcome them, the city where they'd learn their english, where they'd get their first foothold on the american economic life. and be if the sun was right, it would be gleaming off the dome of the world building. not a monument to commerce, banking, manufacturing or agriculture, but a monument to the american press, the only

constitutionally expolice sicily-constitutionally protected in the land, it will be their ticket to understanding how to get ahead, their ticket to learning english and their ticket to american politics. that's the effect pulitzer had back then. he was a very difficult man to live with as a biographer. he was sort of like the howard hughes of the 19th century. at the peak of his power, i mean, his paper had the power of the new york times, cnn and "the washington post," cbs news all combined. it was, people read the world in a way that people when i was a child used to watch the three networks on tv. immense influence. so he reached this enormous pinnacle of power, and he began to blind. so pulitzer couldn't read his own paper. and at the same time he became

beset with a number of psychological issues, one of which was sound disturbed him. so he built a famous tower of silence, a room in which he could go in and get refuge from sound. his new york city mansion had a special bedroom which was separated, had separate walls, inch plate-thick glass to keep the noise out. if you were invited to have lunch with him and you ate your celery in a fashion that was too noisy, you'd get a memo saying next time no crunch-crunch, please. so this became an obsession for him. and he became obsessively beset with all these problems. so the second half of his life he got on his yacht, the world's largest yacht -- well, to be correct, morgan's was three feet bigger, but one of these massive yachts. the engines were put in a special part so the sound wouldn't reach him, and he basically went back and forth across the world. and david phillip graham, a very famous novelist who was later

assassinated by one of his readers wrote him a note in which he had the courage to say your problems are not the kind you can flee. pulitzer, as i told you, was an impossible man to live with. once his daughter had a common operation that involved some bleeding, but the whole household was in a tizzy. and pulitzer stands up at the dining room table, and a waiter had written this down and said, hey, folks, what about me? i'm suffering here. so his self-centeredness, his egomania, his social issues makes him an absolutely fascinating character, and we're able to understand it better today. but the thing i love the best about the book was that his wife kate understood better than any of us did. she loved him in a way that no one else could love him, and she took a rocket of his mother and enlarged it, she had a painter paint a really large version so he could still see his mother.

so, and then later i portray that at one point she does have an affair, and i think the sense that readers have at that point is, you go, girl. i mean, he was so impossible. people say, you know, what is joseph pulitzer's legacy? his legacy has two parts to it. he left in his will money to create two things, one is the journalism school at columbia university which is celebrating its centennial right now. this is very important. it isn't just columbia university, i will admit that missouri has a journalism school, kansas, i mean, there are many -- but what's important about it is that pulitzer came to realize that journalism, like any profession, required professional training. so he took his money to create a school by which people could become professionally trained to become journalists because it is a responsible craft. and what i think so important about his legacy is i think a lot of solutions to the modern mass media's problems today will come out of those institutions

where younger people are trying to become journalists, and they have to figure out a way to make it work. so in a sense, the next pulitzer may come out of the school he created. so that's one important legacy. the other is the pulitzer prize. pulitzer prize was money he left behind to reward journalists and newspapers and writers and artists and other people for great contributions. and there are two aspects of it that are significant. one, if you get it, it, of course, changes your life. the joke is now you know what the first three words of your obituary will be because it says pulitzer prize winner so and so passed away. but that reflects the power of that gift, of that prize. now a century after pulitzer's death we're still honoring people using pulitzer's name. the other thing it does is it does something it shares with the nobel peace prize. if you look carefully, the nobel peace prize is often given to seem who are in danger, you know, could be a woman in burma standing up for democracy, it could be a group trying to bring

about peace in a dangerous place like northern ireland. and the reason the prize is given is in a sense to protect that person because you're not going to go and assassinate somebody who just won the nobel peace prize, that's bringing world attention to them. well, the most significant pulitzer prize is the one for public service, and it's often given to newspapers who have been daringly covering something their community didn't want them to cover. and when they cover something the community doesn't want them to cover, the journalists are ostracized, and local towns often pull out their advertisements which is the economic base, and the newspapers take a tremendous risk to write about something that could be a scandal, it could be something important, but the community doesn't want to hear about it. and when they get the prize for public service, it's a national recognition of the importance of what they've done and in a sense provides that same kind of umbrella protection that the nobel peace prize does to people who are daring. pulitzer was an extraordinarily

significant person who still to this day affects our lives. and just like, you know, a child may recognize all of a sudden they have a mannerism from their father or mother or a habit, you know, you suddenly say, oh, i'm just like my mother, you know? and you recognize those roots, we as a culture need to understand that a lot of the habits we have today come from people who came before us. when you read pulitzer, you given to understand a lot of the traits we have about consumption of news, understanding of news, news as a form of entertainment. i mean, these are all radical notions from his time that we inherited and have taken on to build our society. the other thing that i think is, perhaps, really important about pulitzer and we need to think about it in the seismic change that's going on with the american media, pulitzer hammered away over and over again that the newspaper business is not just a business. there's a public service aspect to it. that a democracy cannot function caught an inform -- without an informed public, that somebody has to be at that school board

meeting at 2:00 in the morning when they're voting on a contract as to who's going to build the next school. and as the press shrinks today, there are no people at those meetings keeping an eye on things. the press ultimately lights the darkest recesses of our society. we know about the hardships of poverty whether we want to or not because of the press. we know about corruption in the government and it gets fixed because of the press. we know about what's on the public agenda and sometimes too much like the fiscal cliff we hear about over and over again. but these are critically important role that is the press plays, and i think pulitzer's story is a reminder of that. yes, these are businesses run by the grahams of "the washington post," but they perform this enormously important siic action of informing us, and the question we have to deal with as society is as these papers no longer can support themselves, what will come next to replace them? that would be part of what i hope people would take away from the book. >> roger ransom explores how

domestic and foreign policy would have been different if the civil war was won by the south. his book is "the confederate states of america," and he spoke with booktv while we were in palm springs, california. >> premise of the book is exactly what the title suggests, it's what might have happened if the south won the civil war. and i think that's something worth worrying about, because the truth of the matter is the reason we worry so much about the civil war is the south did not win, and the north did. and so i'm trying to go back and reconstruct from what we know about the way the war actually went and the reasons for it and say now if we changed a few things -- and we'd have to change more than one, but a few things -- then what would the world be like if a southern confederacy was on the southern border of the united states of america? >> what are some of the first things you look at? >> well, the first thing i look

at is why did we fight this war in the first place. and i won't go into all the details, but to make a long story short, it is we went to war over the issue of slavery. there were a lot of issues between north and south, but as my daddy used to say about money, slavery may not have been the only reason that the civil war happened, but it's way ahead of whatever's in second place. and that's important because the issue of slavery turns out to be something that is extremely difficult to resolve. so as the war progresses, there respect very many exit paths, so to speak, to say let's stop fighting and see if we can settle that. we already tried all of those, and they didn't work. so we have to fight it to the finish. what most people concentrate on is one of two battles, gettysburg is one, and that's the most famous battle, and that's the one that lee could have won but didn't, but the other one a lot of people think

may have been more pivotal yet was antietam. antietam is the battle in which the british basically decided since b the south didn't win, we won't go in, and, of course, it's also the battle that prompted lincoln to issue the emancipation proclamation, and that sets the tone of the rest of the war as being a war against slavery. and to defeat mcclelland in what is sometimes referred to as the maryland campaign was a turning point in the sense that it meant the south was now committed to having to keep on fighting, something they really weren't as prepared to do as simply because they were a smaller country, fewer men, not the capacity to fight war that the north had. the south really would have preferred to end this quickly, and antietam put any end to people who had hopes of that. the other turning pointer, once you get past gettysburg, the other turning point would be

that lincoln would have to lose the election. one of the premises i've always held about the civil war is that a major thing the north had going for it was a leader who was totally and completely committed to waging that war to the end, to ending slavery and to winning the war. and that meant the election for '64 would have had to go the other way. now, that wouldn't have happened without something prior going different. the two things i have differently are that the northern forces are not as successful in the west, particularly at shiloh, and this leads up to a situation where by the time you get to gettysburg if the south wins that battle, it is likely to turn the populace against lincoln, and maybe they could have lincoln win the election and then end the war. >> so now can we, i guess, tell the story of how history was in your book. lincoln had lost the election in 1864. what's going on now? >> well, i follow what is

probably a pretty standard practice for people who speculate onhef gettysburg. i have lee winning because he does a couple of things right and because luck goes with him rather than against him, and the union army then has to retreat. lee really doesn't have to do a whole lot more, he just has to stay in the north and make a menace of himself. and be, you know the way elections go, these things build and the opponents jump on it, and the next thing you know lincoln has lee threatening pennsylvania, there goes new york and the next thing you know, he loses the election. the person coming in is going to be in a position to try and negotiate with the confederacy. and it's not that they necessarily want to negotiate with the confederacy. the problem is that with a victory at gettysburg with, the french and the english -- who have been watching ever since early in the war for a chance

not necessarily to send troops to the united states, but to meddle. we're familiar with this today because you always see people coming, we will mediate the peace for you. and the british offered to do that. lincoln would have turned them down. but in the this his place -- in his place the new president says, no, wait, we will let you mediate a peace. the peace is mediated, the treaty is signed, and the confederate states of america with jefferson davis as the president become a nation to the south of the united states of america. and that opens up a whole new world, a world that we can only imagine because it never existed. but think for a minute of the united states from baltimore all the way down through around florida, down along the gulf coast to the end of texas. that would all be be a foreign territory. it would not be part of united states. in fact, the united states would

have no real access to either the atlantic or the caribbean except for a narrow path from baltimore north as far as boston. beyond that it's not very good harbors anyway. so all of a sudden the great coastal, the atlantic coast of the united states is now down to a point where it can easily be with blockaded, everything has to be funneled through there. it doesn't mean the united states would collapse of its own weight. it means that the united states would no longer have anywhere near the presence in the western hemisphere in terms of dealing with british intervention or french intervention. and i remind my readers that in 1865 the french had troops -- technically, it was the emperor maximilian -- in mexico. and my theory is that had the south won the civil war, the french would have stayed in mexico, and the british would have expanded their influence around the caribbean, and what became for the last half of the

19th and into the 20th century the caribbean as dominated by the big north american state, would not there would be a south and a north, and the south would be allied to the british and to the french. and that would change the geopolitics. now, i think it would also change the politics within the united states of america. losing wars does not come easily to any populace. and in the case of the civil war going the wrong way and having the south win, the republicans would be cursed because they were the ones that started the war in the eyes of the public and then lost it. but the south would be the ones who surrendered to the enemy. and both parties could use that against the other. so my theory is you probably would get a huge realignment, probably the rise if not what

became the populace, but some third party. but mostly you would get a situation of much more instability and much less the -- one has to remember that the actual path after the civil war was a republican-dominated perseverance that led to the united states becoming the great industrial nation of the 20th century. i'm not sure but would have been the great industrial nation of the 20th century had the south won that war. >> so what happens to the institution of slavery in "the confederate states of america"? >> ah, you took it right out of my mouth. as far as the slaves are concerned, the irony is that the slaves would have eventually become free. they would have become free not because the confederates wanted to free them, not because of abolitionists in the north. they would have become free because the cotton market was going to collapse in the 1870s. well, whatever the outcome of the civil war. and that collapse was going to cause the prices of slaves to

fall dramatically. now, slavery in the united states was a very economic institution. even before the civil war, half the value of invested money, capital in the south was in the form of slaves. it's huge. now, think of the housing market collapsing recently in the 21st century. in the 19th century, a collapse of the cotton market and a collapse of slave prices would have a similar sort of effect. it would be be a financial disaster. now, the way to offset that disaster if prices are falling and if people expect them to keep falling for a while is that the slave holders would turn to the government for help. that is, after all, the american way. they would say buy our slaves, emancipate them, get us out from under this debt, because it

would become a debt because they had paid a hot for the slaves, and they couldn't repay it, get us out from under this debt, and we will be forever thankful. now, in the book i probably have to speed things up a little to suit hi tale, and i have that happening in the 1880s. if it weren't the 1880s, it'd be the 1890s. now, i have to quickly remind people in this isn't the same as saying, oh, well, the united states would have emancipated the slaves anyway. the southerners could do that because they controlled the outcome. and what you would have as far as slavery is concerned is something not very much, i would think, different from apartheid in south africa. blacks wouldn't be free, they just wouldn't be slaves anymore. you wipe out the economic burden of slaves being capital, and you replace it with a racial system of segregation much stronger than what we actually saw. but what we actually saw is enough to give you a chew of what would happen -- a clue of what would happen if southerners

had their hand free to do anything. and the one huge loser in a southern victory in the civil war would have been the african-americans. because even if they were freed from slaves, they wouldn't be able to go north. remember that, in fact, the way many, many african-americans got out from under the heel of segregation as the legacy of slavery was they went north. i don't think the united states would welcome them if it had been in the context of a war that they lost to the south. >> why not? >> same reason we don't really welcome mexicans, latin americans. i think there are very strong racial aspects here that i've always told my students one of the things that made the exnsion of slavery so disagreeable to northerners was they really didn't want blacks coming into their territories. i mean, it was simple. you don't want blacks in your neighborhood. and slavery and black were

synonymous. in antebellum america. i mean, there were a small number, a very small number of free blacks. but for the most part, a black person was a slave and, therefore, if you moved your slaves in there, you're moving black people many there. and i've always argued that this was, this was definitely a deterrent to favoring any form of expansion of slavery in the new areas. slavery could be tolerated partly because northern americans weren't all that free from racism themselves. they could tolerate slavery if it were in the south run by southerners and never touched our shores, so to speak. but they wouldn't tolerate it if they started bringing their slaves into the neighborhood, so to speak. >> so now we're into the 20th century. what would the united states of the confederate states of america be like? >> well, in my book i point out that one of the problems with

counterfactual history where you'll note that i keep referring back to what actually happened, well, you can only do that up to a point. and the further on you go it's kind of like climbing a tree. pretty soon you're way out at the end of branches, and you've got too many branches and too many roots, and you can no longer maintain a coherent story. so i end my book, and i'm perfectly willing to concede that to some extent this is just a convenient way to close out ending a book, counterfactual book is harder than starting it. i end it by saying, look, the one thing that wouldn't have changed is the world would still have been caught up in the grips of the first world war. great powers, france, england, germany still would have played out their games and fought the great war. but i say one of the differences about this great war is that the united states would have been drawn in. because the confederacy would be tied closely to england and france, and america would only have one place left, that would

be germany. now, you say, oh, no, no, 20th century america would never say we'd join up with the germans. in 1900, the germans were the second largest immigrant group in the united states behind the irish, and there were a lot ofgermans. to this day you can see it in the midwest, in milwaukee, in st. louis. large german communities. and this, actually, was a factor in our not getting into world war i, to some extent. and so my theory was the united states would have come into the war on the side of germany, and the confederacy would have been on the side of the, quote, entent or allies, and the first world war would have been right here at home. counterfactual history changes just a couple of things. in my case it's some battles in the war, and then after that you bin to see what the ramifications -- you begin to see what the ramifications of that are. but you try, i had a recipe. i'll try to remember it. i believe it's two parts reality and one part imagination, and

you intersperse them and enjoy a good meal. but it's, but the factual part is very important. >> is what if is a question that historians ask often? >> they don't ask it often openly. there's -- the way i put it, every historian secretly asks what if when he's writing his history. or at least if you're dealing with historians who are writing about great events and so forth. they choose their events partly because they think they're important. why are they important? because if they didn't happen, the world would be different. if you're arguing that the world has changed because of your event, then you must be arguing, and it would have been different if it didn't happen. so, yeah, i think what if is very, very much there. and that's why i came out of the closet, so to speak. i think that's what my book on

the confederate states of america was, coming out of the closet and say, hey, guys, here's the way i think the civil war should be taught. in terms of people understanding what would have happened if that war had turned out differently. >> on our recent visit to awe discuss that, week tv spoke with pulitzer prize-winning journalist barbara walsh. up next, she talks about her book, "august gale." >> "august gale" is a story of two storms. one storm is about a hurricane that roared up the coast in 1935 and headed straight for newfoundland where my ancestors lived in this fishing village. and during that time period, these men sailed 15-foot dories and schooners that were made 40-60 feet. they had no warping of this devil -- warning of this devil, as they called it, as it came up the coast. and this fishing village where my father was born, 300 people

on the south side of mary's town, there were 42 children out of this community that lost their fathers, so it was devastating to them. and the other part of the storm is my grandfather. he moved to staten island and later abandoned my father, my nana and my uncle twice. so growing up i never knew anything about him because my father refused to talk about him. so the book alternates between the real storm in 1935 and my grandfather who created his own storms. i wrote this book because after i saw the movie "the perfect storm," i sat in the theater, and that movie just resonated with me. i'm irish, i'm connected to the water, and i just sat there after being a journalist for 30 years, i said i can do that. and two years later when i talked to my father and i said, dad, i want to write books, and he said what kind? and i said sort of like "the perfect storm." he said you have a story like that in your family. and then he starts telling me about this august deal that

killed -- gale that killed several of our ancestors in this tiny village. and all he knew was that potentially captain paddy, his great uncle, was lashed to the wheel, and many of them died. and i was just like, wow, that's a great story. and then he tells me another piece about my grandfather, the man i never knew, who at the time had emigrated to staten eye hand and a few days after the gale, a newspaper is swirling around his feet. so he picks up the headline, and he reads 40 newfoundland fishermen killed in august gale. he knows all of his family is out in that storm, and he just loses it and becomes hysterical. so my father tells me these two pieces, and then he says maybe we can get in touch with family. and i'm thinking, family? a.m. bros' family? -- ambrose's family? i never knew anything about ambrose because he abandoned my dad, and my dad refused to talk about him so on this night at my

home in maine, i dreamed of giant waves and the grandfather i'd never met. and that began a research into the "august gale." and i spent nine years off and on, because i work full-time as a journalist, researching. my dad and i and my sister traveled to newfoundland to interview the survivors, people who lost their dads in the storm. we interviewed people who remembered the gale and what it did to that community. so it was, the research was incredible because it was, you know, the priest going door to door to tell all these families, you've lost a son, you've lost a husband, you've lost three sons and one husband. so it was just an event this their lives that was sort of like their 9/11. it was a natural disaster that took all of their fathers away. and the other piece during that trip is learning about my grandfather. i mean, i'd never seen a picture of him. and my father was very

ambivalent about going to newfoundland, but i was like, dad, we need to research the storm. but as we approached the rock, newfoundland as it's called because it's just this glacier-scraped island, i looked out, and i was just overwhelmed at the emotion of coming to this island where my ancestors had lifted and my grandfather was born. and i turned to my dad and said did you ever think, you know, you'd be going to newfoundland? and he said not in a million years. and i was terrified because i thought what is this trip going to be like for him, is it going to be really emotional? we were meeting people who kept saying your father was a great man, and my dad would say, well, he deserted us. so it was kind of a mixture of emotion. but the good piece, we interviewed so many of these mary's town men and women who remembered that storm and remembered the night it came. and many of them saw spirits.

i mean, they saw spirits. they're all very irish, the newfoundlanders, so they're superstitious. the night of the gale, many of them saw their fathers who returned to their homes. so it was, it was a very interesting story to interview them. and then interview some of the fishermen that were out in the gale. and as these waves rose from 40 to 60 and 80 feet, they were tied to the rigging and just praying, you know, let us get home. and a few of them did. many of them did not. so it was just a story that resonated, like i say, because of my irish background. but the families were so grateful, because no one had told the story for them. now this book has brought me together with my newfoundland family that i never knew existed. and often many of these people are -- they're all cousins. we're all related. but it was also fascinating to

learn about captain paddy who was my great uncle. he was a legendary fisherman, and he had never lost a hand in 25 years -- lost a man in 25 years. he was fearless. many of the irish catholic fishermen would go to sea with their crosses, their palm fronds, their holy water, and as the waves would rise, they would throw this into the sea. well, captain paddy would climb to the top of the rigging and shout to god in the middle of a storm, i am not afraid of you. so the catholic fishermen would be like, paddy, you know, get down. we're all going to die. but he was known for bringing home the cod. and so when this storm, people could not believe that paddy did not make it home. and during the storm they all feared the august hurricanes because it was the start of the hurricane season, and the night before paddy set sail his wife, lillian, said please, paddy, don't go. because not only was paddy going

to sea, he was taking his 12-year-old son frankie, his 14-year-old son jerome, and paddy easeleddest son, james, was on another schooner. so during this storm paddy is out to sea with his three sons. and as a scene in the book -- and this is all true, you know, researched -- paddy was last seen in a dory as the waves are rising, and another skipper is saying what are you doing, paddy? there's a dell coming. and paddy says, i know, but we've got a stray dory. paddy was looking for his son, jerome. meanwhile, he knows his son frankie's onboard the schooner terrified, and his eldest son james is captaining a schooner for the first time. so, you know, incredible scenes. and the research, i was really fortunate that many people had memories and had witnessed certain parts of the storm and could help me recreate, you know, having seen paddy or, you know, having seen the priest who

had to knock on all these doors and let the families know, you know, your father's not coming home. so it was an incredible piece of history for me because as a journalist, i've interviewed many different people for stories. but this was my family. this was probably the hardest story i've ever written about, because i was related to everyone. not only the newfoundlanders who died in the storm, but my grandfather and one of the toughest pieces, i did not want to tell the story of my grandfather. i wanted to tell the story about the storm because that was compelling, and, you know, my grandfather was digging up too much pain in my father's childhood. so originally i said i'm not going tell that part of the story. but it was like my grandfather was pushing his way in. and finally i said, dad, i have to tell ambrose's story too. and he said, it's okay, i trust

you. and it's funny because a lot of the people will say am prose, he was a bastard. and i'll say, no, he head some bad choices. he wasn't a bad man. and it's interesting, after i won the pulitzer for the willie horton story and my newspaper, you know, we won the pulitzer, he knew about that. my nana grewsed to write him. and he said i wonder if my journalist granddaughter will come find me, and i did. only many years later after he had died. so i feel like i've gotten to know my grandfather. and there were good things about him. you know, he never deserted his second family. he was a hard worker during the war. he worked in brooklyn, you know, helping repair the victory ships, and so he was, you know, hard worker many times. and he loved his children. he kept the picture of my father and my uncle when they were young in his wallet. he had paint beings of them in his closet. and when his second family would say who are those boys, he could never talk about it. they were the secret boys that,

you know, later in life they learned about. but i think he always regretted what he did. >> why did he leave? why did he run? >> well, he met another woman and got her pregnant, and so in the middle of the night in brooklyn, he packed up this baby, he snuck out of his house and left my father who was at the time 11, my uncle was about a a year and hi nana. -- my nana. closed the door, stole my aunt's car and a thousand dollars from a paint job he would never do and drove away with this mistress and this baby that was just born and then made his way to san francisco. and then decided, oh, i miss my family and calls them again only to leave them again, get the mistress pregnant again, and my nana had a nervous breakdown there. so that was the part my father could not forgive, you know? you abandon us once, but why'd you call us out to san francisco?

and my father, you know, i think the book, too, it's been some healing for my father. he would never -- if summon said ambrose's name, he left the room. he would not talk about him. so this book suddenly, you know, my father's story is out there. and i think it's been good for him. i think the story of forgiveness, the story of the sea, of realizing, you know, they were fighting this storm at sea the courage of these, you know -- it's just a time gone by. i mean, there's still fishermen that go out, but i think these people, the his to historical pt was a difficult time. they barely survived. they were so hard working, they just never gave up. the women, you know, would raise their children in a much simpler way. they, you know, had gardens. and so for me, it's the courage

and integrity of these people that we can all learn from. i mean, they worked very hard to survive. and a lot of the times the women lost their men, and they till had to carry on. they still had to carry on. and the government budget there to help them. -- wasn't there to help them. these people, you know, they survived on their own. they're very hard working. and i think too with family, that connection to family. newfoundlanders are so -- family means more than anything to them. and i think that's such a great, you know, value. growing up my father, despite being abandoned, he always said to us there's nothing more important than family. and i think that's because he knew his father abandoned him. and newfoundlanders, i mean, if you're their cousin, they can't do enough for you. so for me the piece is, as well, there's nothing more than important than family. and i learned that through this book in ways. >> and now if from booktv's

recent visit to providence, rhode island, author and pulitzer prize-winning journalist michael stanton talks about his book, "the prince of providence." >> the prince of providence is the story of buddy cianci who was our longest serving mayor in rhode island history and one of the more colorful mayors you'll find anywhere in the country. he was part huey long and part soprano. he was this lovable rogue who helped transform this dying industrial city of providence into a city that was rated one of america's most livable by a number of publications, and he presided over a breathtaking array of corruption over three decades that ultimately landed him in federal prison. and he's a very colorful character. i call him america's longest-running lounge act because he would be squired about the city in his chauffer-driven limousine with a

big jack-booted police officer by his side, and he'd have a cup of vodka in one hand and a cigarette in the other hand, and, you know, the keys to the city and -- [inaudible] in the trunk of the car. and he was willing to meet when i set out to write a book about him, he was the embodiment of politics good and bad. and he reflected providence which as one of america's oldest city, to me, embodies the american political story. buddy grew up kind of in a privileged background, in the silver lake neighborhood of providence, an old italian enclave, and he went to moses brown, kind of a waspy private school on the east side near brown university, and he became a lawyer. he became a prosecutor, prosecuted mobsters. he became a republican in a democratic, irish city. and then he ran for mayor in the

1970s, 1974, and he basically upset the providence democratic machine, and he became this eyal cell phone- italian-american republican mayor in the '70s, and he attracted the attention of the white house at the time. jerry ford was very taken with him, and he saw him as a way to embody what the republicans were trying to coopture, you know, the kind of vote that usually went democratic. buddy had a goal of speaking at the '76 republican convention. he was a guy who was seen as potentially going places. he was glib, he was articulate, he was a champion of cities and urban renewal. and some people audaciously even said he could be a potential vice presidential candidate or at least go to the u.s. senate where he could have a very long and successful career. but then some problems ensued. he, of course, gerald ford the election, and he went on to become mayor and get ensnared in

some corruption. there was a massive investigation in the early 1980s. he had characters like bug -- buckles and blackjack and bow bow stealing manhole covers, stealing city asphalt, cutting all kinds of crooked deals selling city trucks to private owners. and that sort of thing. and then there was massive corruption, and several people in buddy's administration went to prison. they never got to buddy because his top aide never ratted him out. he went to prison instead himself. but buddy was caught up in a perm marital -- personal marital dispute. he went through a nasty divorce. he, basically, suspected this businessman who had been a friend of his of sleeping with his wife, invited the man to his house and with his city police bodyguard, held the man prisoner for several hours, tortured him with a lit cigarette, try today hit him with a fireplace log, threw an ashtray at him at one

point and ultimately was charged with assault in that episode, and that forced his resignation in 1984. and that seems like that was the end of a once-promising political career, but it was only the first act. he spent the next six years on talk radio, was a very popular talk show host. and in 1990 he ran for mayor again with the slogan he never stopped caring. and, you know, "the wall street journal" called his political comeback the envi of richard nixon, and in 1990 he was elect inside a three-way race by about a few hundred votes. and he came back. and be this is the '90s when providence was undergoing this remarkable renaissance. rivers were being moved, concrete that smothered them was being ripped up. as you see now the water fire display on the rivers and the beauty of the architecture, and buddy was a champion of that. as providence became a really hot city, he became a really hot mayor, and things were going really well for him.

but just as he was celebrating becoming the longest-serving mayor in providence history, the corruption reared its head again, and the fbi found this local businessman who agreed to go undercover into city hall. he wore a wire, had a hidden camera in the handle of his briefcase, and he taped various aides to buddy -- including his top aide -- taking bribes at city hall for city contracts and other favors. and this became known as the federal fbi case called operation plunderdome, and it was led by dennis aiken who was originally from mississippi. and he'd fled this investigation that ultimately resulted in buddy's -- he'd led this investigation that ultimately resulted in buddy's conviction. in a city where people said you'll never convict buddy cianci, in a city where buddy went to prison with 67% of the voters still thinking he'd done a good job, and when buddy was sentenced by the judge, the

judge talked about how he was really two people, he was dr. jekyll and mr. hyde. and buddy in his own way said, well, you know, privately to a friend later, how come i didn't get two f-ing paychecks? what buddy was convicted of was racketeering conspiracy, knowing about it but not actually being physically involved in any of the underlying acts. and buddy kind of framed it as what did i do? i was convicted of being the mayor. some of the jurors i spoke to felt other side, that he was -- otherwise, that he was a guy who knew how to keep himself insulated, kind of like a mob boss that he had once prosecuted, ironically, and that a he was able to stay out of the direct line, but that he knew everything that was going on. he was the kind of guy, one juror told me, who would know how many rolls of toilet paper they were in city hall. now, later buddy said that was part of his myth and his aura that he kind of conveyed that fear in people that he knew everything, but he really

didn't. so that was his defense, but ultimately, didn't play out with the jury, didn't play out on appeal, and he went to prison and relinquished his famous toupee, or what he called his dead squirrel. he did his time, and he came out, and he went on talk radio where he's on the local, a local radio station. but it's interesting, pro dense has changed a lot, and i think he went from being a really relevant political figure to being more like the quaint uncle who you kind of have around at holidays. but most of the people in providence who live here when he got out of prison didn't live here when he went to prison be which says something about the remarkable transformation of the city. there's a lot more latino voters, young voters, we have a strong gay population, and the city's really changed. and his succession, the mayor that followed him, um, was the first openly gay mayor of a large american city, david cicilline, who's now in congress. and the mayor who followed him,

who's in office now, is the city's first hispanic mayor and reflecting that growing population. buddy cianci is, i compare him to huey long in the sense that he, they were both, you know, incredibly charismatic figures. they were both politicians who were beloved in spite of their flaws, in spite of the corruption that went on in their administrations, who had a real populist evangelicaller fervor about them that spoke to the ability to be successful on a larger stage. you know, huey long was seen as a potential presidential candidate. buddy, as audacious as it seems being from such a small city, was actually seen as somebody that could be a national figure in washington. and in one of his pivotal moments of his career in the 1970s, he's within his first term as mayor. there was a u.s. senate seat that had opened up in rhode island, and he thought about whether he should run or not, and he wound up being ultimately

outmaneuvered by john chafee, and a lot of people feel that was a real turning point for buddy. if he had gotten out of providence then, he would have gotten out of the place that breeds corruption and ultimately dragged him down, not to excuse his culpability, and gone to washington where you can be a showman, you can be on the national stage. remember, he spoke at the republican national convention in 1976 and again in 1980. he actually went out, it was funny, before the 1980 election he went out and met with ronald reagan, and he pitched himself as a potential running mate for reagan. and while he was out there, he went to palm springs, and he visited gerry ford who had been good friends with him when he was president. and when he was there, he also got invited to have dinner at frank sinatra's house. and so he's having dinner at frank sinatra's house, and as he tells the story, you know, he sees a picture of raymond patriarch on the wall behind the

bar, and, you know, the bartend or says, oh, buddy, you're from providence, who's raymond doing? so there was those bizarre cross-currents in buddy's life and the people he would encounter. buddy and i had kind of an interesting relationship as i wrote this book because the one thing about buddy -- two things that really matter to him are power and control. and, of course, money. and he didn't have the control over this book, and he didn't get the money, and he couldn't control his legacy, and he didn't like some of the negative things that i found about him. but i tried to be fair to him because there are two sides to the coin, and that's what makes him so compelling. but buddy always wanted to write his own book, and he later did a few years ago called "politics and pasta." and i always, he used to always kid me i'm not going to talk to you about my inside stories, and, you know, how are you going to write -- i remember he called me into his office a month before he went to prison.

he'd been convicted, it was his final days in office, and it was a summer afternoon, quiet. and be as we're sitting in his office he starts to say, hey, you know, how about you rip up your contract with random house, we write a book together, i'll get you an immediate, you know, six-figure advance. how much are you getting? i said i'm not getting that much, but i'm getting enough to make it fair, and it's about telling a good story. and buddy looked at me and said why isn't it just about money? how could you sell yourself so cheap? and at that point a thunderstorm started to play out over city hall, and there was a loud crash of thunder, and buddy said, you know, telling -- writing this book without me and my inside stories, it's kind of like the thunder without the lightning. this book, i think, says that american politics is a blood sport, that it's very entertaining. buddy cianci had a saying, when he was first elected mayor, he was the republican candidate, he

was championed by kind of the upper crust liberal set that lived up on the east side of providence and brown university. and be they were the elites. they were the people that didn't need things from city hall. they weren't looking for patronage or contracts, they were looking for good government. and, you know, buddy had a cynical saying even though he was their champion when he was first elected, good government will only get you good government when you come down from, you know, college hill and you cross the providence river, you know, you have to cut deals, and you have to do things like that to get things done. and when he came in as mayor the first time, remember, he was a republican in a city that hadn't elected a republican since the great depression. he was the first italian-american mayor in a city that had been ruled by irish democrats for decades, and he had a city council that was committed to his destruction just like the republican congress was committed to barack obama's downfall in his first therm. and he had to work with those guys. and he did work with them.

and he also machiavellian maneuvers that he had, he outlasted them. and he outmaneuvered them. there was this -- they refused to confirm any of his appointments, and then there was the famous massacre, they called it, where the city council had a meeting, and they didn't have a quorum because there were three members who had been arrested or dieted or convicted of various -- indicted of various crimes such as insurance fraud and fixing races at a track. and buddy used that to take over the city council. and the l.a. times came to town and did a feature about him. he said in the general population, the instance of felons is 1 in 50,000, on the city council, it's 1 in 8. the genius of buddy was he had charm, he had charisma. he'd walk into a room and if there were 100 people there and 99 loved them, he would go to the 1 that hated him and try to

win that person over, and invariably he could. they would say he would go to the opening of an envelope. i remember being a young reporter not covering buddy at the time, not covering city hall, and i was at a another reporter's backyard cookout in the summer be, and we were sitting around drinking beer, and buddy pulls up in his limousine as the mayor, and he shows up at the party. and it wasn't just a politician making a token appearance, he was there for hours. he was one of the last persons to leave. he was a champion of the city of providence can. the city was a drown trodden city. he would, you know, go on national tv, he would go on the don imus show when it was really popular, and he would sing the city's praises. and people loved him for that. they figured, you know, we've always had corruption, it predates buddy, it will postdate him, but at least he makes us feel good about ourselves, he helped put providence back on the map. so that's why people loved him. >> from vermont, a tour of month

pellier independent bookstore bear pondbooks. hear owner claire benedict talk about the store's longstanding role in the community, the impact of checial competition and how the store's survived for nearly 40 years. >> oddly, what we're well known for is our squeaky floors. we have these great old wood floors that make a ton of noise, and our customers love it. we, you know, it's a little bit lost on us why this is so wonderful because we listen to it all day long, but, you know, it's a character, you know? we're not a super slick box store kind of look, you know? and i think people, i think the squeaky floors represent that. so it's just kind of a real old kind of store like you don't get in a lot of communities anymore. we're an independent bookstore, been here since 1973, and i've

owned the store since 2006 along with my husband, robert. it was opened in 1973 across from the street, and it's been part of the community ever since. they moved the store after a flood in 1992 when the old store got flooded. it was time to expand. and start in a fresh space. and they moved here. and we've been here ever since. and bear pond books is really a community bookstore. people have been coming here since the beginning. our kids have grown up here, and we definitely like being part of the community that way. i don't think you can find too many towns of 8,000 people that support three book stores. in fact, at one time we had five bookstores downtown all within a stone's throw of each other, and you don't find that too many places anymore. mostly independent bookstores are closing around the country. some commitments are supporting more and -- communities are supporting stores, but lot of

stores have been in business for almost 40 years like us are not surviving changes of ownerships and retirements and things like that. but this is a community that values books, values reading. we have a lot of writers. and it's also a community beyond that values independent stores. there's not a lot of big box stores and a lot of malls around here, and it really makes a huge difference. if a barnes & noble had come into town 20 years ago, i don't know if we would still be here, but it didn't. [laughter] and, you know, there are certainly borders and barnes & noble in other towns nearby, but this community got -- long before the buy local and shop local movement started, this community understood that if you wanted to have a bookstore in town, you had to shop at the bookstore, not go to barnes & noble and, you know, say that you love this store. [laughter] which, i think, is a problem. people definitely say they support their stores, but when

you're purchasing elsewhere, you're not really supporting a store. so this community has really understood that from the beginning, and we've had people, people come in here all the time and say i looked this book up online, but i want to hear it from you. we hear that all day long. you know, i looked it up on the internet, but be i'm not going to buy it there. i would never buy it there, you know, they make sure to tell us. we appreciate that. and it's that attitude that keeps us in business. because if we didn't have that, we wouldn't still be here. >> [inaudible] >> bear pond's always been very involved in the community. we're, you know, from small things like we serve as a ticket agent for a lot of activities in town, everything from school plays to chamber orchestra concerts we sell tickets for. so we, we've become a supporter of the arts in that way which also brings a lot of people in to talk to us. but we're also, you know, on local boards and involved with

the local downtown organization, and we're involved with local schools in supporting activities they have there. so some of it's monetary and some of it's just helping out. [background sounds] >> we are definitely reliant on our community. the writing, the readers, the writers, the people who just support independent book -- independent stores. but there's a great writing community in vermont and in this area, and we have the vermont college of fine arts right up the street that has writing programs for both adults and children and creative writing. and so customers, the first place they go when they come in is our bestseller table which is right up front, and that's the independent bookseller list. it's a survey of independent booksellers across the country. it's not the same as the "usa today" or the new york times, although, of course, there's some overlap, but it's what

independent booksellers are selling the most of. so people go straight there, and then they go right over to staff picks. doesn't have a big publisher, doesn't have a lot of publicity. so we definitely rely on local writers to keep things vibrant and interesting around here. you'll see a lot of local authors on our front table on display. ..