>> you are watching booktv, nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. you are watching booktv. next, peter carlson recalls the capture journalists albert richardson and junius browne by confederate forces at the battle of vicksburg. the reporters were covering the war for the new tribune anderson to multiple confederate prisons over 20 months until the escaped and made their way across the appalachians with the assistance of union sympathizers. this is about 50 minutes. >> thank you, david. thrilled to be at the national archives. to be back your i should say. i've written three books and have researched all of them at the national archives. it's a place of buried treasures all over it.

they got a lot of boxes here, boxes filled with little folders filled with papers, and there's a lot of stories hidden in those papers. in fact, if you get real quiet and you listen real closely, you just might hear somebody take a piece of paper out of the box upstairs and read it and go, holy cow. you don't have those holy cow experiences all that often, but when they come, it's really a thrill for a researcher, and that's what keeps researchers going. so this book exists today because i gave into one of those deep, dark desires that lurks in the depths of the human soul. i refer to the desire to prove that your boss is full of baloney. this happened in 2010. i was hired as an editor at american history magazine, and i

immediately made a suggestion to the honcho of the place who just hired me. i said, the 150 the anniversary of the civil war is coming up. i don't we take a couple pages in each issue and run a newspaper story about some event in the civil war that happen 150 years ago? i thought it was a pretty good idea. apparently he didn't. he said, well, that would be a good idea, but civil war journalism was really lousy. i thought to myself, i used to be a reporter, and i couldn't imagine that all the reporters covering the civil war had somehow missed the biggest story in american history. i thought to myself, this guy is full of baloney. but i didn't know. i wasn't sure so i checked it out. i went to the library and that took out a couple of books on civil war journalism. and i found out a lot of civil

war journalism was really lousy. and some was really great, and some was, most was mediocre, sort of like today's journalism. but more important i came across a synopsis of what seemed like a really great story about two reporters for the new tribune who cover the civil war -- "new york tribune." their name were albert richardson and junius browne. and one night of may 1863 they were desperately trying to catch up to general grant's army, which was outside pittsburgh ready to attack expert. these two reporters got on a barge that was going down the mississippi filled with bales of a for grants forces. debarge set out at night so the confederate wouldn't see. but, unfortunately, it was a night with a full moon and it was really quite visible and the

confederates fired cannons at it. one of the shells hit the barge, exploded, killed about a dozen union soldiers, set the hail and fire and junius browne albert jumped into the river and attempted to float away. but the confederates sent out votes and captured them and imprisoned them in various prisons for the next 20 months. and then they escaped from a prison in salisbury north carolina and with the hope of slaves and protein bushwhackers, walked 300 miles over the appalachians to the union lines. so i read this. visible and about as long as what i just said, and i thought to myself, wow, that would make a great movie. unfortunately, i don't make movies but occasionally i do write books. so i thought, well, should i write a book about these guys? i suppose if i was a novelist,

that little synopsis would have been enough images could have made up the rest. but i write history, nonfiction, so i had to do what nonfiction writers do in such circumstances, which is do some research and find out if there are enough facts available to tell the story. so i did a little research and learned that yes, indeed, fortunately former -- for me the worst such facts. there were memoirs and letters and diaries and newspaper stories, some of them written by junius and albert and some written by others who said part of their story. all had to do with dig them out of various archives entries places in america, including right here at the national archives. that was great because that enables me to have that great holy cow experience, as i picked papers out of boxes. so i wrote this book called

"junius and albert's adventures in the confederacy" because it's an adventure story. it's the kind of straightforward adventure story that keeps you awake late at night, wondering what's going to happen next. are these guys going to make it home, or are they going to get shot or hung, or otherwise detained on the way. but it's also a work of history, and i think it illuminates parts of the civil war that most people don't know about, the culture of reporters in the civil war, what civil war, what it'it was like in confederate prisons, and most importantly, the guerrilla war that was fought by prounion folks in the mountains of north carolina and tennessee and virginia. the story has many colorful characters, but, of course, the main characters are junius

browne and albert richardson. they were both 27 when the war began. they were best friends, but they were very different. albert richardson was a big, strapping, handsome farm boy from massachusetts. he grew up on a farm, but he hated farming. he was a romantic young fellow who wanted to be an explorer of the american west. so as a teenager he headed west. and when he got to cincinnati, took a job as a newspaper reporter. as it happened, he was a great, natural reporter. he had the reporters ability to attract people to him and make them want to talk to him, want to tell him things. during the war he managed to hobnob with ordinary soldiers and escaped slaves and generals, and even president lincoln. he also attracted women, and when he was in cincinnati he

started dating a young bookstore clerk named mary lou. she soon got pregnant, so they got married. and when albert was captured, he was married with three children and his wife was pregnant with a fourth. junius is very different. junius is kind of a scrawny, cocky, prematurely bald guy with big ears. he was a rich kid, the son of a cincinnati banker. he was sent to saint xavier college in cincinnati which was a very regress just what school where he learned to speak ancient greek, latin and french. he thought of himself as sort of an intellectual and a philosopher. in fact, one of his favorite parts to -- one of his favorite pastimes was to read philosophy in ancient greek or latin. his friend alberto used to kid him about that.

junius was not a particularly good natural reporter. he was too shy, and he would basically stand off, stand aside from things and watch them and then sit down and write these flowery literary essays about what he had seen, complete with a lot of quotes from ancient writers. and actually that was a pretty common practice in those days, in journalism. it was much more flowery than we have now. so these two guys covered the civil war for the "new york tribune," horace greeley's paper. sometimes they travel together. sometimes they travel the part with the different armies. they were always looking for an army that was about to go into battle, which was hard to predict. albert was kind of better at figuring that out and junius. between them they covered the battles of fort henry and fort donaldson, shiloh, antietam,

fredericksburg, and many of the naval battles along the mississippi. the first battle they covered was a battle of fort henry. they were in cairo, illinois, and hitched a ride with the general grant as he put his arm on a bunch of ships sailing down the tennessee river to attack fort henry and fort donaldson. so i thought i would read a little passage about that. richardson went ashore with grant's troops, slogging through swampy flooded woods. browne accompanied the soldiers on the march while richardson climbed a tall oak tree on the river bank for a better view of the artillery battle. for an hour the ships and the fort pounded each other with shells until the air was so full of smoke that richardson could no longer see the gunships. when the confederates ran up the white flag of surrender, albert went down the tree and join the

union soldiers as they swarmed into fort henry. quote our shots have made great havoc, he reported in the tribune. in the fort, the magazine was torn open, they can simply shattered, and the ground stained with blood, brains and fragments of flesh. under gray blankets were six corpses, one with a head torn off and the trunk completely blackened with powder, others with legs severed and breasts opened in ghastly wounds. richardson watched as union soldiers delivered a highest-ranking captive, confederate general lloyd tillman to the conquerors of the fort, general grant and commodore andrew foote, commander of the federal gunboats. how could you fight against the old flag? it was hard, but i had to go with my people. a chicago reporter interrupted

to ask every journalist most prosaic but necessary questions. how do you spell your name, general? sir, if general grant wishes to use my name in his official dispatches, i have no objections, but sir, i do not wish to appear at all in this man an inning newspaper account. i met asked it, the reporter said, for the list of prisoners captured. you will oblige me, sir, tilghman replied, by not giving my name in any newspaper connections whatsoever. of course, richardson included tilghman's name in the store, as well as that absurd dialogue. he wrote his article aboard a union ship heading back towards cairo, where he dispatched it to the tribune. so okay, albert heads back to file his story, and junius stays with the union army, which then marched across 12 miles of

swampy land in a snowstorm to attack fort donaldson. they basij the fort for four days and finally the confederate garrison at fort donaldson surrendered and the union army took that fort and 12,000 prisoners. it was the first big victory for the union. junius filed a long feature story about it, which is really good, but what he became most famous for him and his colleagues was an incident that occurred during the battle. the last day of the battle, junius and reporter from "the new york times," union snipers who were trying to pick off the guys in the confederate artillery battery. the confederates were behind walls made of logs and they would sort of load the gun and pop up and fire it. the union snipers would try to shoot them when they popped up. the confederates tried to keep their heads down, so the snipers

were very frustrated, and finally one of them got so frustrated that he had his rifle to junius and said here, why don't you try it? so i suspected junius had fired a rifle before at some time in his life, but he was not a soldier and he was not a marksman, and he certainly wasn't a sniper. but he figured, what the hell, and he crouched down and in the rifle and he waited until he saw somebody pop up and he fired, and the confederate battery went silent. the union sniper turned to him and said, well, i think you got him. and junius said, well, i wouldn't be surprised. although of course he was completely surprised that he did have the presence of mind to sort of walk gallantly a way before anyone could give him another rifle and expect them to do it again. that story illustrates how journalistic ethics have changed over the use. i can't help suspecting that my old boss at the post would not

be happy to hear that one of his correspondents in afghanistan had put down his notebook and picked up an m-16 and fired away at the taliban. but journalistic ethics didn't even exist at the time but i think if you'd used the phrase in those days people would have laughed, figured you would have been an oxymoron to the next story illustrates just that. a couple weeks after the battle of fort donelson, junius was in st. louis and he heard that a union army had left southern missouri to invade arkansas, attack a confederate army there. so he and a reporter named richard colburn of the new york world hopped on a train and tried to catch up with a union army to watch this invasion. outbreak know what happened next. browne and colburn realized okay, they get in misery and to

learn the battle has been fought. the union army has defeated the confederate army in what is now known as the battle of pew ridge. browne and colburn realized that thomas knox of the new york herald would scoop them an arrival in new york newspaper. frustrated they devised a simple solution. they would wind. simply concoct the battle based on a brief report and with the rumors that it reached raleigh. it was unethical of course but hardly unprecedented. journalists in the 19th century were not finicky about facts and did not permit them to ruin a good story. newspaper routinely and live with their meager supply of facts by garnishing them with rumors, exaggerations, political grant's, vicious, a kind of pseudo-political pros that escape the gravitational pull of truth and soared off into fancy.

during the civil war, reporters routinely made soldiers dying words sound as lofty and eloquent as a silk we. the dead soldiers never complained. nor did there can. all these habits contributed to sling insults it became popular during the war. he lies like a newspaper. but even by the lax standards of the day, what they did was outrageous. they wrote long vivid eyewitness accounts of a battle that occurred 200 miles beyond her eyesight. the pieces were so ludicrously overblown that perhaps the two men were competing to outdo each other in the art of fiction. it seems quite possible that alcohol was involved. colburn's story reads like a parody of a style of first person journalism that stars the reporter as the main character. even now, he began, while i attempt to collect my blog and

disconnected thoughts, the sound of booming cannons and the crack of rifle bring in my ear, while visions of carnage and the flame of battle over before my site. three days of constant watching without food and sleep and the excitement of the struggle have quite unstrung miners. that was hard to top, but browne topped it with a heart pounding you are their style of prose that reads like fiction, which, of course, it was. junius had learned the union won its victory with a dramatic charge led by general siegel, so he cast him as the hero. never was better fighting done, never ground more closely contested, then it, gannon, alter their bloody work and the earth was stained and slippery with human gore. every soldier kept his eyes fixed on his fearless leader, whatever they saw his hand flashing sword, they knew all

was safe, but there was hope of victory while he survived. strains of siegel he was not killed, he was -- 100 rifles sought in vain to end his career. the balls of wheeled about his head, but none touched them. wind carried away his spectacles, and they second pierced his cap. and on and on he went. the story filled a whole page in the tribune, and horace greeley, the editor, wrote an editorial suggesting that the union army reprint it and give it to every union soldier. of course, nowadays, reporters would be fired for doing that, but in those days the other reporters thought it was a holiday stunt and they became even more hilarious when "the times of london" announced that it was the best story of the war. so about a year later, albert and junius were captured outside

pittsburgh, and they weren't really that worried about it at the time because reporters were captured by both sides fairly often, and were usually quickly released or traded for reporters or other prisoners. so they figured they would be quickly released. in fact, he were given their parole papers, but the confederates hated the "new york tribune" because it was really an abolitionist paper, and because at the start of the war it had run a banner headline above each page saying on to richmond. some of the confederate officials in richmond didn't really like that. so the confederate who was in charge of prisoner exchange just said point blank, i'm not releasing these guys. these are the most obnoxious prisoners we have. so they held them for 20 months. they moved them from one prison to another for 20 months. so before i did my research i thought, 20 months in prison. i don't know, people would get bored with it.

it will be one green thing after another. but that turned out not to be true. actually the prison stuff is really interesting. there were a lot of strange, weird incidents in the prison. junius and albert met a lot of fascinating characters. for instance, for five months they were in prison in richmond. the warden was a wonderfully colorful character named captain george washington and alexander. he had long black hair, long black beard, he wore a black shirt, black pants, black belt with two big revolvers on it and the black jacket and he set off this kind of grim outfit with a big red sash. he would saunter around the prison with his 180-pound black russian wolfhound dog who scared the hell out of the prisoners. the captain looked like a pirate, and, in fact, he had

been a pirate, a confederate pirate who had seized the boats early in the war on the chesapeake bay and sailed them to richmond. he got caught doing this in 1861, was locked into fort mchenry, but he escaped, jumped off a ford into the bay, swam to shore, and somehow made his way back to richmond. when he got there, the authorities, confederate authorities, i just figured well, if this guy knows if this guy does have escaped from a prison, we will put him in charge of a prison. so they put him in charge of the prison. in addition to being a warden and a pirate, captain alexander was also a poet and a playwright and songwriter, and he wrote a musical comedy, a truly awful musical comedy that was performed in richmond during the war at the time he was warden. he would leave the prison after a work day and go to the playhouse where he had come he

had written himself a big scene, a climax to play. he would ride across the stage on his big black horse with his big black dog and the black outfit and everyone would stand up and cheer. this really happened. you can't make this stuff up. so he was also, one of the thing about captain alexander, he was crooked as a pretzel. he ran his prison which was an old tobacco warehouse with well over 1000 prisoners in it, most of them living in squalor in the huge rooms with no beds. they slept on the floor and the atv is -- 882 meals a day of rancid stew. i set up a little prison inside with one room called the citizens room, with room for about 50 people. it had windows that you could open and close. it had beds. it had a wooden stove that could

heat the place in the winter. he picked up prisoners who were either rich -- there were too many of them -- or who were connected and to get shipments from the north of money and food. if you could get money and food from the north, or from the south, you could stay in the citizens room, provided that you shared your shipments of money and food with captain alexander and his cronies. so the prisoners in the citizens room lived pretty well. and two of them were albert and junius. they got money and food from their buddies at home on the tribune here today show did with captain alexander and they live pretty well. but in february of 1864 they were transferred to a prison in salisbury, north carolina. and that wasn't too bad. there were a couple hundred producers, maybe a few hundred and they were living indoors in an old cotton mill buildings but there was a guard outside so

they could stroll the grounds and make a play baseball. so they amused themselves playing baseball. a lot of the prisoners in this prison were political prisoners. they were guys who had either dodged the confederate draft or deserted from the confederate army, or just generally made it known that they weren't really down with the confederate cause. most of them were from the mountain areas of north carolina, virginia and tennessee. the mountains were filled with prounion people. there were plenty of pro-confederate people but there were a lot of prounion people. because there was not a slavery up there. it was mostly small farms, family farms, poor farmers eking out a substance is living. they couldn't afford slaves and they really weren't all that excited about risking their lives fighting for this confederacy that was established by the slave owning, plantation

owning rich people from the low lands who had never really treated the mountain areas all that well. so junius and albert met a lot of these dissidents from the mountains in the prison. and, in fact, they were initiated into a secret prounion organization called the heroes of america. would get something like 10,000 members in north carolina, tennessee and virginia, mostly in the mountain areas. and they learn all these secret handshakes and secret signs and passwords that the members of the heroes of america used to identify themselves to each other. these were things that would come in handy later when they escaped. so life and salisbury wasn't too bad, and till the fall of 1864 when the union armies encircling richmond, grant is threatening richmond, so the confederates

sent the prison itself. the union producers. most of them to andersonville, the infamous prison in georgia, but about 9000 union soldiers were sent to salisbury. so instantaneously in the fall of 1864, instead of like 800 guys living indoors in salisbury, you know had about 10,000 guys with 9000 of them living out in the yard where they used to play baseball, i was now filled with these nature shacks and just holes in the ground that the guys were living in. it was a very cold, wet fall, and winter, and it rained a lot. it snowed some pick these guys didn't get much food, and they were exposed to the elements. so by the time december came, they were dying at the rate of about two dozen a day. of dysentery, of starvation, of exposure. so the end of november, the

prisoners had been -- they attacked the gates open to break out but the guards on the stock paid -- stockade fire down and be back the escaped the tune -- attempt. albert and junius and a couple of the french manage to escape from the prison with the help of a guard who was a member of the heroes of america. so they set out on a rainy, cold december night heading for the nearest union lines in knoxville about 200 miles away across the appalachians. they had only the barest of close. they had n no food. albert smuggled over the ft out of the prison, but that was it. they headed for knoxville 200 miles away. the only way they could make it was to get help from the kind of

people who might be sympathetic to escaped yankee prisoners in north carolina. who would that be? well, slaves. so they would walk all night heading north, they hoped, and walk all night and when don was coming they would look around for a slave cabin. let me read a little bit about that. it was almost dawn when they located the slave cabin. the slaves inside to be very wasn't safe. several white men were nearby and led into a barn down the road. it was filled with damp corn husks and the yankees burrowed into them, seeking warmth and sleet. they found little of either but remained there until dark, when they emerged, their muscles sore, their joints aching, their skin teaching from the husks. they shook out the wet clothes and made a few feeble attempts to comb their hair and beards.

browne realized that he had lost his that somewhere among the husks, but there was no time to look for it. they needed to set out in search of someone who might be been. 10 minutes later, they came upon another slave cabin. when the old man who lived there heard their deities, he said he'd be happy to feed them. he invited them into the cabin, and it gives them dancing and introduced him to his wife and daughter. then he went outside and killed two chickens. he stayed outside on guard by the women cooked the birds and the yankees huddled to the fire, their wet clothes steaming. looking around at the little cabin, richardson realize that it was the first private house he is entered in 20 months. it was crude and cramped, but it had a dinner table with plates and utensils and beds with sheets, civilized amenities that made him long for his own home and family. when the yankees had devoured the chicken and hot cornbread, richardson took out the bag of tea he'd smuggled out of prison. the women had never seen tea

before, so he showed them how to brew it, and then the slaves and the escaped prisoners sat down to an odd little tea party. revived by the food and the t., the yankees thank their host and hostess and got up to leave. may god bless you, the old woman said with tears in her eyes. her husband notice that browne had no have to wear on the long, cold journey, so he pulled off his own head and handed it to the reporter. the ha had was humble, an ancie, shapeless, sweat soaked woolen sock, but the gesture was grand. here was a man who owned almost nothing, he did not even own himself, but he was willing to give his hat to a stranger he would probably never see again. browne thinking, pulled the hat over his naked paid, and the fugitives headed off into the night. so for the first few days, when

junius and albert and their friends were in the low lands, they would look for a slave cabin in the slaves would take care of them. they never failed. they never let them down to junius wrote later, god bless the negroes. they never let us down. but then they got into the mountains and the weren't any slave cabins anymore because the farms were smaller. there weren't any slaves. so they could no longer tell friends from foe by the color of their skin. they knew there were a lot of pro union sympathizers in the mountains, but you couldn't tell them from confederates by looking at them. and the mountains were teeming with bands of armed men. there were confederate calvary and the confederate home guard, and there were these bands of pro union guerrillas made up of draft dodgers and guys who deserted the confederate army, taking their rifles and heading to the mountains and formed groups and who were living out

in the woods, staging occasional battles with the home guard. so that they were, portuguese and albert on the figure out who might help them and who might shoot them. let's see, where are we? so does they are, in amounts. there's a lot of warfare going on. if you have read the book cold mountain or seen the movie, it depicts pretty well the situation up in the mountains with these sort of bushwhackers and guerrilla war. so about a third of my book takes place as the attempt to make their way through the mountains. i'd like to read one scene from that part of the book. at this point junius and albert have joined up with the union bushwhacker named dan ellis is another one of the great

characters in the book. he was famous for leading groups of pro union people across the mountains to the union lines. he also had long black and a long black beard, very thin mountain guy. he looked kind of like he could stand in as a bass player for the band zz top. and he was, he was almost killed so many times taking people to the mountains that he concluded that god was protecting him from confederate bullets. so having this protection cost and take a lot of chances, which scared the hell out of the people he was leading. he financed his trips i stealing horses from rich confederate sympathizers and taking them across the mountains with them and selling them to the union army when they got the knoxville. his modus operandi was to go as fast as possible through the

roughest terrain possible. and as a joke he called the people he took with him stampeders because of your stampeding across the mountains. so let me read a little piece of this from there. at this point confederate cavalry is chasing them, and ellis has divided the guys. there are several dozen. the guys were on horseback go one way with alice and the stampeders tour on foot go another way. albert is on horseback. he goes with alice. junius is on foot because the other direction but it's the first time they have been separated since they were captured 20 months earlier. some talking about ellis and albert now. the writing was rough. ellis led the group across country so rugged that they regularly had to dismount and walk their horses to in the bitter cold of frost covered mud on the trails were so deep that the horses sank down. worried that the rebels would catch up, ellis first pushed the

retired in an exhausted and so hard at several horses died or came so close to death that they were simply abandoned. their riders proceeded on foot are doubled up on healthier animals. during the ride, ellis is meant encountered an old man perched on a fine horse. one of the stampeders now without a horse saw an opportunity. what are you, southern or union, he asked? holding his rifle menacingly. well, said the old man looking very nervous, i have kept out of the war. i have not helped either side. come, come, that will never do, said the stampeders you don't take me for a fool, do you? you never could have lived in this country without being either one thing or the other. are you union or secession? the poor old man had to guess immediately who the strangers might be. he could see that they were scraggly and dirty, wearing

ragged, muddy clothes that included pieces from the uniforms of both armies. they look like rebels. i voted for secession, he said. tell the entire truth, his interrogator insisted. well, sir, i do. i have two sons in johnson's army. i was an original secessionist but i'm as good a southern man as you can find in the state of tennessee. that statement alighted the horseless stampeders holding the rifle. all right, my old friend, just slide on down. what do you mean? i mean that you're just the man i had been looking for in walking 100 miles, a good southerner with a good horse. i am a yankee. we are all yankees, so slide down and be quick about it. the old man had no choice but to obey. he dismounted and watched as the man with a rifle client into his

saddle and rode off on his horse. so there they are, writing away chased by confederate cavalry, and junius as the way on another trail chased by confederates, heading for knoxville. do they make it or do they get captured or shot or hung? i'm not going to tell you. [laughter] you're just going to have to read the book and find out. so if anybody has any questions, feel free to ask. [applause] >> obviously, these two were prisoners after the incidents of african-american union troops to did either of them ever comment that seeing african-american prisoners, or does what we hear about take no prisoners from the

confederates carry the day? >> no. there were some black in salisbury, and, obviously, as you suggested, there were incidents in which a black prisoners were simply executed. but there were some black prisoners at salisbury. in one incident after the revolt i mentioned, after that prison revolt, guards would shoot a prisoners for sport randomly. at one incident they fired from the fence and killed a union guy, and one of the confederate doctors at the prison went to find out why this had happened, and he was informed jocularly by the confederate guards that they had watched and they saw three black prisoners standing together at they thought they would never get such a good chance to shoot somebody as that

presented itself. but ironically the guy the hit was a white person who was standing nearby. but yes, to answer your question they were black prisoners there. >> could you tell us the story about the young girl, the angel of the mountain? >> yes. as i mentioned, they were being led through the mountains by dan ellis, and ellis new the union sympathizers in the mountains and he would go at night in a bed that he would go to the houses of nearby people and ask them what it heard about where the confederate people were. and one night they told them these confederate cavalry with her and their army troops a little further away. so they split up and ellis' men rode away and the other guys, as i said, walked on a different trail. ellis hope the cavalry were

chasing. he could stay ahead of them and the other guys could sneak away unseen. but they had to cross the river, and there was only one real place to cross. so first, ellis and the writers went over and then the next day the walkers went over. so on both occasions they needed somebody to go over the bridge to make sure that the rebels were not hiding at the bridge waiting to shoot them as they crossed. so they found a person who lived nearby to ride over. she wants this young teenage girl who lived by and the confederate cavalry were quite enamored with her because she was young and people. so they will quickly stop by and talk to her which give her father who is pro-union and opportunity did they get when the confederate cavalry were around but anyway, she let them across the bridge. first the horse riders and then the walkers the next day.

junius when he wrote his book, they both wrote books about this, didn't identify as anything except this unknown angel. albert's book came out later and he identified her by name. so she begins her famous out the door as this unknown angel who led the union folks to safety. there's a song written about her which you can find on the internet now. >> could you talk a little bit about -- [inaudible] the events they were covering? >> okay. the new york papers, there were a lot of them at the time. they all have their editorial policies, and they all differed somewhat. the tribune was horace greeley's paper. he was very pro-lincoln. it was pro-abolition.

although he was very eccentric and sometimes came out with weird statements that contradicted everything he said before, any change back again, but basically he was pro-lincoln. in fact, he was one of the republican founders who have linking to his nomination in 1860. "the new york times" was pro-union and pro-lincoln. the new york herald was a democratic paper which was sort of grudgingly pro-war that was vicious towards lincoln. the world was also democratic paper, sort of grudgingly pro-war. you could and would be against the war and not be considered a traitor i guess in new york. it also slammed lincoln, which is why when they were captured there were captured by the guy from the world. he was immediately paroled because the confederates didn't hate the world. so you had all these papers and

they have their editorial stances, but the reporters filing the copy did not necessary agree with the editorials involved. junius and albert were abolitionists as was their boss, but coburn was also a radical republican and he worked for this democratic paper. so they didn't really, i don't think the world ended with coburn's dispatches in that regard. >> sorry about laughing in the middle of your talk spent that's okay, i like laughter. >> i was wondering, does -- visit richardson guy had a wife. was there any way to write letters home from any of these 20,000 camps that they were in? >> yes, they did write home. and some of the letters that he wrote home exist, and i found of them in one of those archives in one of those holy cow moments.

the richardson family papers are in the massachusetts historical society, and so some of the letters he wrote home on there. of course the letters they wrote him are lost to history. but more important for me, the letters that junius and albert wrote to the managing editor of the tribune were found by the grandchildren in 1950, and the family stable on staten island, and they gave into columbia university where they exist to this day, and are quite, most of them, not all of them but most of them quite legible. so i could read the letters they were writing also the time when they were covering the war, and when they were imprisoned, too. so that was a godsend to me. i don't think i could've written the book without them.

>> thanks for your presentation to very interesting and entertaining. >> thank you. the book is even better. [laughter] >> i think you mentioned at some point along the way that either or both junius and albert that contact with some extent with lincoln and grant. could you expand on that a bit, if that's the case of? >> i'm glad you asked because relates to the reporting. in late 1862, shortly after the battle of fredericksburg there's a battle near vicksburg in which general sherman, you know, sent these guys up against the strength of the confederate positions are like vicksburg and they got mowed down common so it was an incredibly horrible defeat for the union. and a reporter named thomas knox for the "herald" was there, as were some of the reporters. not junius and albert. they were elsewhere.

i think junius had missed the. julie's kept missing, some missing battles. he's kind of funny in his ineptitude, but thomas knox wrote the dispatch to send back and put it in an envelope and put in the mail bag with the union army boats. and general sherman who hated reporters, he had, told them take the reporters letters out of the mailbag and open them up, and sherman redden and he got really mad at knox and had them court-martialed as a spy, and he was convicted and he was not shot which i guess he could've been but was sent out of the army and forbidden ever to enter the army again. so richardson, who really had a talent for moving and shaking among powerful people, after fredericksburg he went back to washington and heard about this, and so he got a petition and had

reporters and some politicians and others signed it and took it to see lincoln, along with a guide named winchell from the new times. they went to see lincoln. lincoln met them and listened to them and basically said, well, i agree, you know, loyal reporters should be allowed to cover this. he said i will write to general grant telling him that he should let knox come back into the union line. and then he wrote that an albert was thrilled, and he said, you know, the generals are really more important to me so i will just add this, you know, knox should be allowed to come back to the union lines and less general grant decide she doesn't want him to come back to the union lines. so as an upshot, knox ultimately did get back into the war, but it took a while. so albert had met lincoln on that occasion. you also met him when he was covering, leaving kansas before

the war for the boston journal when lincoln had a speaking engagement in kansas in 1858 or nine. so lincoln remembered him from that, and, of course, remembered him from the interview that i just described, and window capture, lincoln instructed the union official in charge of the british exchange to get brown and richardson back from the confederates, and that's when the confederate in charge of british actions wrote the letter saying, i'm not sending these guys back. the tribune reporters, i think he said something like they cause more trouble for us than even your army. so i'm not letting them go. anyone else? okay. [applause] >> thank you very much.

>> folks, we will see you upstairs in just a couple of minutes for the book signing. [inaudible conversations] >> for more information visit the author's website, petercarlsonauthor.com. malcolm gladwell, what is your book about? >> it's called david and goliath. underdogs come misfits in the art of battling giant. it's about underdogs. i got really interested in telling the stories of people who seem weak and powerless and yet go on to accomplish great things. that was a puzzle of how they managed to do that but i thought was worthy of a book. and so my latest. >> back in '09 you a piece for

"the new yorker," david versus goliath and i'll let you tell us to come but is that when your interest started? >> weirdly nothing in that part of the road for the nuke or made its way in the book but it was what got me thinking about it. it was an article i wrote about attacking start with the story of a guy who, using indian immigrant living in silicon valley, tries to coach his daughter's basketball team and all 12, 15 to do all the daughters of software engineers in silicon valley and they can't pass, shoot, dribble, they can do anything that resembles pascal. so he decides what they'll do is play maniacal defense. they will play, have full-court press, 100% of every game. and that was so ineffective that they go all the way to the national championship. so the idea was that he responded to a weakness, the

fact that no basketball skills, by adapting and by adapting any way that proved to be pretty dancing and also by breaking the rules because people don't expect 12 you little girls to do a full-court press but it's a little un-sporty because the skill level at that stage, if you play the press, no one can get the ball up the court. so it's interesting example of someone who chose to, rather than remain passive in the face -- face of some kind of weakness, to adapt, that adaptation is what really this book is about, it's about what strategies people use to respond to their own shortcoming spent with one of the examples you use in the book? >> i am really interested, from seven talk about -- eyeball chapter on why are so many successful entrepreneurs dyslexic. it's a neurologic problem. at the deficit. it's a part of your brain isn't working probably.

it's nothing you would wish on a child, and yet in one case after another many of the most famous onto as we know have lived their whole lives with this devastating disorder. and if you talk to them, they will take they succeeded not in spite of this disorder but because of it. that it taught them something about how to deal with the world, that proved to be incredibly valuable in their career. and there's something very beautiful about those and very moving about those kinds of stories. and i tell a couple of them about, the beautiful stretch of the sort of paradox i'm interested in describing, which is very often we learn more from artistic images and we get from our advantages. >> malcolm gladwell, is any connection between david and clyde, tipping point, out liars? >> i wish there were. i wish there was some grand

unfolding narratives i could argue if you own one should have to own them all, but i don't think there is. i think they happen to be what i'm interested in at the time and i suppose they're all answers to the question, why does the world deprived us of why does the world not work the way we expect? that's the thing i keep coming back to. >> how do you -- how long to sit with an id of? >> a long time. i mean, i think about a book for years before i start writing it. i don't think, if you're going to ask the reader to commit a big chunk of their life to your book, you have two correspondingly commit a big chunk of your life to the boat. in other words, you cannot expect people to make investment in you if you don't take your time. so i take, i thought about this

one in collected ideas for years before i started writing it spewing some of the david and glass doors that we have heard our military stories, the vietcong versus the u.s. army. are those included at all in this book? >> the book starts with me we telling the actual david and goliath story. it's not what you think. very different in reality than has been -- that tell a story about a guy who understood very early on that the vietcong was not who we thought they were, that they were going to give up easily. and no one would listen to them. it's because the military was not, the american military was not, like all of us, i think, had difficulty with the notion that someone could be without obvious things, without money, men, weapons, anything and still be a formidable opponent. and my book says the opposite,

that don't be fooled by the armor someone is wearing, what matters is the man inside the armor. >> how did the tipping point change? >> well, i mean, put me on the map as a writer. and so it paved the way for the success of my other books. it didn't change me personally, it just made my life, my professional life much easier. people would return my calls although faster than they used to, but it didn't turn me into a different person, which i'm thankful. so it just was a kind of, such a bizarre and happy accident, that i've been just grateful ever since. >> do you look at you books or did people look at you books and perhaps self-help books or

business primers? >> well, you know, all great books are self-help books in that they encourage us to look more closely at ourselves and what we think and how we behave. so in that sense of they are. they are not how to change your life in seven easy steps, but the reason i write is i want people to take a step back and say, and just rethink their own experience. say, oh, that had not occurred to me, or, oh, that's how it makes sense of, or that sheds a whole new light. >> malcolm gladwell there's a recent -- how do they maintain their success to? >> that's a great question. the first half of my book is devoted to the ways in which goliath shoots himself in the foot. that the acquisition of success sows the seeds for failure.

and breaking out of that cycle is very, very difficult. every single day we look around us and we see once mighty institutions falling. the camera that is recording the show is by sony. sony was once the mightiest electronics company in the world but last year they lost, i read this yesterday, $8.5 billion. some people say they should shut down their electronics division. in 10 years they've gone from the top of the heap to a situation where people say openly they should pack it in. you know, this country, we talk about vietnam. there has never been an individual country as powerful as america was in 1964, and what happened over the next 10 years in vietnam? we were humbled. so i mean, there is something i think profoundly humbling about what happens to giants, and

there could be someone in position of great authority and power, it's a more purchase positions i think most people realize. >> why do goliaths shoot themselves in the foot? >> well, there are many reasons. i explore just a couple. one is they assume the same strategies that made them great will keep them great. and that's not true. and they underestimate just how useful struggle was, how created a maven but when you don't have enough, when your business could shut down tomorrow, when you are constantly at the very end of your wit, you, jimmy, i mean some cases you fold and die, but if you don't, you learn how to be innovative and to take

chances and to take risks and to all kinds of things that propels you to do all kinds of things you ordinary wooden do. when you get comfortable you are no longer under the compulsion and that is a huge, that's a huge transition that many organizations, or individuals, can't make. ..

>> guest: it's pretty good. we're all pretty happy with it. we all pay our taxes, we don't leave. and be people want to come here. so i don't think there's anything i could teach the system. the system, as far as i can tell, is doing a pretty good job. >> host: are you a citizen now? >> guest: no, i remain a canadian. >> host: when does david and goliath hit the stands? >> guest: at the beginning of october, october 1, 2013. >> host: this is booktv on c-span2 previewing malcolm gladwell's latest book, "david and goliath." october 1st, 2013, is when it hits bookstores. >> c-span, created by america's cable companies in 979, brought to you as a public service by your television provider. >> host: walt mossberg, has

technology plateaued? >> guest: oh, no, absolutely not. absolutely not. technology is always changing and always coming up with -- technology companies are always coming up with something new, and there are new technology companies all the time incubating, a lot of them are what we call stealth mold, we don't even know who they are. certain technologies plateau and things move on, but in general, no. not at all. >> host: i guess i ask that because the last couple years we have had the explosion of smartphones, we've had tablets come online. what's out there? >> guest: well, first of all, there are vast numbers of people especially in the less developed countries, but even in the developed countries who don't own a smartphone, and certainly

there are vast numbers that don't own a tablet. to give you a rough example, apple -- which leads in the tablet market -- has sold somewhere around 160 million ipads since 2010. that's a remarkable achievement, and for people that own apple stock and, you know, i don't own any stock in any of these companies, that makes them very happy. but even 160 million ipads and then even if you add in the android tablets, it's a, it's a small fraction of the people that could own a tablet, especially as the prices come down. so, you know, there has been a lot of talk about the difficulty of innovating in the smartphone space, but -- and we have seen a couple of iterations by apple

and samsung that haven't been big, giant jumps in innovation. this often happens. but i think there's even much more to do with the smartphone, and just to give you one example, the less you have to pull the phone out of your purse or your pocket and the less you have to hit icons and buttons no matter how ingeniously designed they are, the more convenient and kind of natural the process will seem. and so there's a lot of work going on in voice recognition, in what are called wearables, you know, google glass is a good example, really smart things you

wear on your wrist. i'm not talking about the fitness meters now that are out there, but significantly beyond that, that would tie back into the cell phone sitting, the smartphone sitting in your pocket or purse and allow you to do a bunch of things. also giving, just staying on the smartphone for a minute -- and that's hardly the only area of technology -- but giving it more capabilities and more intelligence in a way that's easier to use. so making a smartphone that is aware to some extent not in a human sensuous but aware of its -- in a human sense, but aware of its surroundings, aware of what's going on. just today, for instance, motorola -- which is now owned by google -- is announcing a new smartphone that it says can automatically adjust its

functions when it senses that it's in a moving car, when it senses that it's in your pants pocket, you know? it'll shut down the screen and other functions to save battery, because it senses it's turned down, screen down on a table or in your pocket. you can pull it out of your pocket b and just by twisting your wrist, it'll immediately turn the camera on even before you've unlocked the phone or pressed any button of any kind, or an icon, done any swipe on the screen or anything. those are examples of something i think could get much bigger which is phones, tablets, wearable devices, using their sensors, gyroscopes and then new kinds of sensors that maybe can

detect body heat or body function to do different things. and so we have a lot of stuff going on in technology now. >> host: who's developing those sensors? >> guest: i don't know the names of the companies. obviously, the customers for the sensors are, many of them are well known. apple buys a lot of sensors. if you have an iphone, there are a whole bunch of sensors in there. be you have a samsung galaxy phone, there are a whole bunch of sensors in there. and then there are all these people making medical devices or fitness devices that are using a new, using various new types of sensors. so there's just a ton going on. at the same time, you are right, some things are plateauing or even declining. the pc, aye -- i've been writing for years now the pc has peaked.

and the proof has finally arrived in the last year or so where you've seen pc sales actually falling dramatically, in the double digits, five quarters in a row. and before that it had been quite flat. some of this had to do with the economic meltdown around the developed world and really the whole world over the last four or five years, but even as economies have recovered, the pc has peaked. when i say it's peaked, i don't mean it's done, i don't mean people are going to throw their pcs away, i don't mean that tablets and smartphones, for instance, can replace everything a laptop can do. but what's happening is that there are enough dalety

scenarios -- daily scenarios for which people used to grab their laptop that are more conveniently done now on a tablet, especially a tablet but also a smartphone. that, people find their actual daily use of their laptop has declined significantly. they still haul it out for things that a tablet and a smartphone don't do very well like, for instance, creating a complicated spread shed or writing a long, you know, you're not going to write a novel probably on even an ipad with a keyboard. but people are finding they use them less. and as they use them less, it means they feel like directing their money toward one of these other devices and not replacing the laptop as often. so that's what i mean by

peaking, and i think that's what most of the experts mean by peaking. and, yeah. so some technologies plateau. right now i think there's somewhat of a plateau ins, altht think it'll last very long. it's not a plateau in sales so much as it is in feature innovation. i, as i just explained with the kind of self-awareness thing, i think we're going to see a bunch of that. so i think that's going to keep going. and then other things get replaced or decline or become less important in the life of somebody who depends on technology, and the pc is an example of that. >> host: how's the blackberry q10 doing? >> guest: i don't know what the sales are of the blackberry q10. for those who don't know, we should explain that, you know, blackberry -- which i think most people know -- has been in a lot of trouble, missed a lot of the kind of revolutions set off by the iphone, very tied to

corporate i.t. departments which have themselves lost a lot of power and influence. blackberry changed its leadership, changed its entire operating system platform and brought out two new phones. one's called the z10, and that is a all-touch phone directly competitive with the iphone and the android phones like the samsungs and the htcs. and that has not done very well. the other one was called the q10. same software, same functionality on the software, but it looks more like a regular, traditional blackberry with a physical keyboard. and that's been out i want to say two months or less, and i

don't know the sales numbers on that. my guess is that will do pretty well, at least in the first sales quarter or two that it's ohs because there is a pent-up demand among people, mostly blackberry users, who like physical keyboards, and this is a much more modern software, has a much more modern software base than the old blackberries, so they can keep using their fiscal keyboard and not feel so behind the android and iphone friends they may have. but i think the company's belief was that there was a finite number of those people, and that's why they had to bring out the other type of phone which is more directly similar to the iphone and to the android phones. so i don't know how the q10 will do. i'm guessing it'll do pretty well in the first quarter too.

>> have you reviewed the z10, and how did it compare? >> guest: i've resawed the -- i've reviewed the z10, my colleague reviewed the q10. i thought the z10 was okay, and it had a couple of interesting features. but blackberry, like windows phone which is another platform where most of the phones are made by nokia, they're in a difficult situation because they got started at least in this new generation, the post-iphone generation of smartphones, they got started late. and it's been difficult for them to attract the apps, the variety and the, certainly, the important apps that i think

people are looking for. so they're really engaged in a battle for number three. and it's just, it's a tough situation. it's not that the phones are terrible or anything like that. they, you know, windows phone has really got a quite nice user interface, and it's been carefully thought through. the nokia phones, hardware built around it has for the most part been pretty good. but they haven't been able to attract, you know, all of the -- an app like, say, instagram. and, of course, this changes day by day, so what i'm telling you right now might have changed by the time people see this show. but last time i checked, they didn't have instagram on there. i'm not sure, i don't think it's

on the blackberry. it might be. but just, that's just one example. and then new apps come out all the time. and when app developers whether they're a small shop of five people or a big company with a app development team, you know, these folks have limited resources. they have to prioritize what they do. and they're looking for the platform where they can also monetize their app as quickly as they can. and they continually go to apple and android. and it's a chore for blackberry and for microsoft to convince them to go with their platforms. >> host: are apps for apple and android devices on par now? >> guest: they're more or -- more on par until maybe the last

nine months to a yearing with i think there were a large number of apps where the very same app would be much nicer on the apple operating system than the android. i think that there's a lot more parity. i still think of the, i guess, almost a million apps on both of those app stores you're going to find a greater number that are higher quality on the apple side and a lesser number that are the same quality on the android side. you're also going to find a lot more malware, viruses or other kinds of malicious software on the android side. there's a reason for that that i can explain. but on the quality issue, i think the gap is closing. and be certainly, the numbers of apps, android may even have more

apps now than apple. >> host: why the malware on the android side? >> guest: well, there's probably some technical, under-the-hood issues that i don't understand because i'm not an engineer, but i know that the one big issue is that the android app store which is called google play is not curated. you can submit an app, and google doesn't review it. so it's easier to slip things in. apple famously curates all the apps in their store. and, you know, they get criticized by some people who believe you shouldn't make any choices in what you offer, everything should be allowed. apple just says, you know, i think the number is 2% or 3% of the apps that are submitted to us, and i think that's true. but one of their criteria is

that they these things, and -- they test these things, and they reject the ones they think carry pal ware. they're not perfect -- carry malware. they're not perfect, but they've been pretty good. i don't think there is any significant malware on the iphone. there is, there have been estimates i have seen that as many as 60% of the apps on the, in the android store carry some amount of malware. now, i'm not endorsing that number, but i've seen estimates like that. it doesn't mean those apps get downloaded a lot compared to the ones that are safe and popular. i mean, there's -- i presume there's no malware on the facebook app, there's no malware in the, you know, twitter app and the instagram app or whatever or the various games that are frequently downloaded on both platforms.

so even if that 60% number were true, it wouldn't mean 60% of the actual downloaded, used apps had malware. but, you know, google's aware of this, they understood the risks, and they just preferred -- they will yank apps after the fact if they learn they are in some way a problem. but they don't curate beforehand x apple does. some people are drawn to apple for what it does, some people are drawn to android -- there are many reasons, but some people are drawn to android for that reason, that they don't like the idea of curating. >> host: well, walt mossberg of "the wall street journal," what do you use? >> guest: i'm not a good example because due to my job, i use everything. right now i'm sitting here with a brand new android phone that was just announced today. this one by motorola called the

moto s which is this. >> host: looks like a normal phone. >> guest: yeah. it has a number of interesting features. as i was saying, it has the ability to sense certain things about its location and movements, and then i also have this iphone 5. so, you know, i'm always using multiple device cans. i own, i personally own an iphone, couple of ipads, couple of tablets and couple of android phones. so, you know, i try to use what i like the best and what works best for me, but as a practical matter i own, i don't know, three or four windows computers and three or four macs. you know, i have a roku and an apple tv and a chrome cast which

is the newest tv device. i have them all on my tv at home. >> host: well, speaking of which, we asked some reporters who cover technology here in washington if they had any questions for you concern. >> guest: yeah, you to -- do that. that's annoying. [laughter] >> host: one of the questions was about the chromechristmas, and this reporter says you recently recommended google's new chromecast product. how will chromecast change television viewing habits? >> guest: well, we have to back up and explain what we're talking about, because i don't think we can assume everyone knows what chromecast is. so the tech industry in general and especially apple and google and a few -- microsoft and a few other companies -- have been trying to change television. they've changed phones, they've changed, you know, the music industry, they've changed lots of things, but television has

been a hard nut to crack which frustrates these guys because they regard it as really pretty backward. i mean, if you think about it, if you carry around one of these devices and then you look at how these work and then how your tv works, try to go to the menu on your tv and change something, you know, it's really quite primitive. even if the tv is new, even if it has a so-called smart tv functionality. and so the technology guys have been trying to reinvent tv. the problem is that there are two problems. the biggest problem is that you can build a tv, but what you really, what they really want to do is change the con opportunity that's come -- content that's coming into the tv and equalize it. they want to equalize the internet content like netflix or hulu or itunes' content,

amazon content. they want to make that just another choice along with c-span and nbc and, you know, hbo and whatever else you're getting from your cable company. the media companies are, are not crazy about that. and so there's been a lot of friction will. the second problem is if you build a tv and let's say you built a revolutionary tv that was much easier to use and took some of the lessons from these devices or even, you know, integrated with all of your other devices which is all perfectly possible, you've built a device in the tv that people really don't replace more than every -- i forgot the number, but it's, what, seven or eight years that people keep tvs and then replace them. it's not like these things, these phones which a lot of people replace every couple of years.

so it's not as good a business in some respects for these companies. so that's the backdrop. they're trying to change tv. the only way or the way they have so far been doing it has been by building a box that you plug into the tv, and there's apple tv. they've sold about 13 million of those which is, makes it one of their very smallest products. it's the rounding error in their financial reports, but they've sold about 13 million. and the interesting thing about that number is about half of those have been sold in the last year or so, i think. if i'm not mistaken. so it's accelerated. roku, which is a competitor, sold about five million of a similar box. and these boxes, what they do is bring content that is not coming from the cable company because these are not cable boxes,

internet content to your tv. so netflix is a great example, youtube is a great example, itunes, amazon, whatever. google tried that. they tried something called google tv which they did the software and a couple of other companies did the hardware, and and it was failure. i gave it quite a bad review. it was kind of a mishmash and didn't work very easily. chromecast is google's second attempt. and what it is, is it says, you know what? we're not going to build a complicated box that goes on the tv. we're not going to put content streams into that box. we're just going to pick a little thing that looks like a usb flash drive. you plug it into a port called an hdmi port which is a common, the common port on the back of hd-tvs, and then there's a wire that you use to plug it

into power. and whether you have an android phone or whether you have an iphone or tablets of those two types, you'll be able -- you'll see a little icon pop up that will let you just beam whatever you would be watching on the phone or tablet onto the tv screen. and that's the new product b they came out. with it costs $35. now, apple for several years has had a similar thing. if you happen to own an apple tv, in addition to the programming that's on the ap a l tv -- apple tv that's built into it like, i don't know, major league baseball, itunes, photos, things like that, you've been able to use a technology of theirs called airplay which does the same thing. a little icon on the screen. i'm watching a video or audio, you know, music. i hit that, wirelessly beams it to the tv. so apple had that, airplay.

google has it with chromecast. the pros and cons are kind of inverse to each other. the positive on apple's airplay system is that it works with thousands of apps x the app developer -- and the app developer doesn't have to do anything. the little airplay icon just appears. it works on just too many apps to even go into. you couldn't sit down and just review all your photos on the tv screen with no wires, just hit that button. the downside on the apple product and system is it only works with apple products. so if you have an iphone, an ipad or a mac, it'll work. if you have a windows computer, an android phone, airplay doesn't work even if you own an apple tv. on the chromecast that just came out, it works across pratt forms.

it -- platforms. it doesn't only work with google's android operating system devices. it works with apple's devices. and on a windows computer or a mac with google's browser which is called chrome. it'll work with that. so if you have a windows laptop and the chrome browser and you want to go to the youtube site, you want to watch a youtube video on your tv screen, it'll work. so google is cross-platform, apple is apple only. this is not an uncommon thing. and then the downside is that chromecast so far only works with a handful of apps. on android devices it works with four apps. four out of a million. and it works with -- and they're important apps for video, so it works with netflix, youtube -- which google owns -- and then google's own video and music apps.

there's only really one app that google doesn't own. on the iphone it works with netflix and youtube. and in my tests, the reason i gave it a good review was it worked. i tried it on an old tv, an old hd-tv and a newer one. i tried it on android products and windows laptops, and it just worked. the challenge for google is to get more companies to sign on and add that little chromecast icon to their apps. and the challenge for apple might be to open it up to other companies' devices. >> host: and we're talking on "the communicators" with walt mossberg, personal technology columnist for "the wall street journal." >> c-span, created by america's cable companies in 1979, brought to you as a public service by your television provider.

>> from the 20134 roosevelt reading festival, joseph persico discusses his book, "roosevelt's centurions: fdr and the commanders he led to victory in world war ii." the annual pest value is hosted by the franklin d. roosevelt presidential library and museum in hyde park, new york. this is about 50 minutes. >> good morning, everyone. >> good morning. >> my name is bob clark, and i'm the supervisory archivist here at the franklind. roosevelt presidential library and museumt we're celebrating the tenth anniversary of the henry a. wallace center, so welcome, very glad to have you. so a couple of housekeeping mattery before i introduce our speaker. one is will you, please, all take out your cell phones, pagers, things that