i got my after taliban pass port -- you read the book, you'll see how. >> [inaudible] >> well, it's -- [laughter] >> if there are no more questions, a reminder -- [inaudible] >> yes. >> a reminder for our internet audience, if you'd like to purchase a copy of "an american bride in kabul," please, call the number on your screen. dr. chesler will sign that for you, we'll mail it to you wherever you are in the u.s. free of charge. all of our live stream events are archived so you can visit the books and books web site. there's a link to the live stream, and any event that we've live streamed you can watch at any time at your convenience. for those of you here in the house, we have "an american bride in kabul," and we also have a selection of dr. chesler's other books.

there's much more over there on the counter. she will be signing here at the table to my left. this was fascinating. please give her a pig hand. -- a big hand. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> booktv is on facebook. like us to interact with booktv guests and viewers, watch videos and get up-to-date information on events. facebook be.com/booktv. >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week.

>> look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org. >> what we're told both as student ands as a nation in terms of popular imagination is that there's all kinds of sit-ins and marches and demonstrations that occur, but they're really done by these famous, iconic people. base clue, it's rosa parks who just -- basically, it's rosa parks who just was so tired that she refused to get up from the

bus in montgomery, alabama, and basically a young preacher who even the president referred to during the election as young preacher from georgia which is dr. martin luther king jr. who sort of leads the passes of african-americans from racial oppression. so this notion that rosa sat and, you know, martin could do this and jesse could run and then barack could fly, all these things, they sound good, but they really, they really simplify a much more complicated history, can that complicated history really involves so many african-americans, women and men, who proact you actively dismantled racial segregation including rosa parks. rosa parks was an activist. she didn't just refuse to give up her seat by accident, it was a concerted, strategic effort to try to transform democratic institutions. >> tufts university history professor and author of "dark days, bright nights," peniel

joseph, specializes in the subfield of africana and what he calls black power studies. his latest, "stokely: a life," will be in bookstores march 4th. today he'll take your questions "in depth," live for three hours starting at noon ian on c-span2's booktv. >> welcome to salem, oregon, on booktv. located along the river, the city is home to the state's government. it's known for its cherry industry as well as its vineyards and is also home to the oldest university in the western united states. >> the funding of primarily catholic education in the 1960s was the issue. in fact, it was so crucial that it actually had its own name. people called it the school question, and everybody knew what that meant. that meant this question about how religious should public education be and whether we should be funding non-protestant alternatives to public education. it's not that i've set out as a

mission to explore the deep, dark, unknown corners of american history, but as i've end countered these stories -- encountered these stories about oregon's history, i know they're not in oregon's history weeks, but they're an important part of our history. >> with the help of our comcast cable partners, for the next 90 minutes we bring you to this capital city to learn about its history and to talk with local authors answer their -- about their book. we begin with professor ellen isenberg on the american-jewish response to japanese interment during world war ii. >> pearl harbor, of course, is in december of '41, and almost immediately people start talking about what's to be done with the enemy alien population which includes german and japanese and italian foreign nationals or who are enemy aliens. and there's an interment program that starts with them. what happens to japanese-americans is a little different, and it's commonly

called intermeant but actually most historians talk about it now as removal and incarceration. so the japanese-american population in general on the west coast -- which two-thirds of the population were american citizens, so they were not enemy aliens, they were american suicides by birth -- they were rounded up en masse, and they had to leave their homes if they lived in what was called the western defense zone. so they were removed and put in camps surrounded by barbed wire in the interior, and they were not charged with anything in particular. i got interested in this issue when i read an article about african-american and jewish civil rights organizations, an article by sheryl between burg, talking about how -- greenberg, talking about how the issue had passed unnoticed to them. and they were in new york city, right? the headquarters were. so i got curious about what the reaction would be here, and i expected to find that jewish community because of the involvement if civil rights

issues would have spoken out here because unlike the jewish community in new york, for those who lived here, japanese-americans weren't an abstraction, they were their neighbors. they were familiar with them, and the community had a commitment, a public commitment to speaking out against what they called prejudice in all its forms. a lot of the reaction was really a nonreaction, and i think in order to understand the significance of it, you have to understand something about the content. so the first thing to understand is that as the policies started to take shape -- and it took shape in february and march of 1942 by destroying japanese-americans hiving in the area were -- living in the area were subsequently move today the camps in the intermountain states. in general, west coast non-japanese-americans, the population in general most politicians, most newspapers

strongly supported the removal of japanese-americans. it was a very popular policy. so that's one piece of the context. the other piece of the context and what got me interested in this question really was that the civil rights organizations which were largely based back east didn't pay much attention to them. what i found was that for the most part there was very, very little said about in this. and so i started by looking at newspapers, the community newspapers, and each of those major cities add one. and there was almost nothing said. but when you started to read between the lines, there were these awkward almost mentions of japanese-americans. so right after the executive order, roosevelt's executive order that kind of launched this policy if all of the maw georgiou -- major jewish newspapers on the west coast, they were weeklies, and they had editorials talking about how the rights of all have to be protected, and we should fight

prejudice in all of its forms and so on and so forth without ever saying the word "japanese" specifically. so it was almost as if they wanted to say something but were nervous about actually doing so. so there was i call it a kind of awkward silence or a, an uncomfortable silence around this issue. and then i started to investigate more. to speak out about it was to stick your income out, and the jewish populations were already nervous about anti-semitism. so that's one piece of it. the other piece of it that i think is interesting is that be you look at these newspapers, what you see is these communities had really two main agenda items at this moment in time. one of them was this agenda of fighting prejudice in all of its forms because they believe only when all prejudice was eliminated would anti-semitism be eliminated, that you had to fight it together. the other priority was to support the war effort. and so this policy, i think,

really put those two goals right into conflict with one another. so the war department and the president himself was saying that japanese-americans had to be removed in order to further the war effort, that they were a threat to the war effort. so you would think the inclination would be that the jewish community would support that. on the other hand, those few people who speak out against in this policy say that it's a policy based on racial identity. right? and so if you're against prejudice, you should be speaking out against it. so i think this policy brought those two goals right in direct conflict with each other, and that's what produces this kind of silence around the issue. some of those who -- it depended a little bit on community, but some of those who spoke out were threatened in various ways. yeah. there was very strong feeling and, you know, you have to remember that at this time there were blackouts in the costal cities, there was a fear on the west coast that the west coast would be attacked and so

tensions were quite high. the community relations committees were an arm of the jewish community that emphasized what was at the time called intergroup relations. so work with other ethnic and racial minority groups against prejudice in all of its forms. and so i knew that the group in l.a. had emerged during world war ii as a force in the community, and it's often held up -- there are several accounts that hold it up as one of major organizations behind civil rights activities this los angeles. so i went to their archives expecting that they would with a group that spoke up. and what i found was really quite different than that. and it goes back to their history. so they were founded under a different name. they were called the jewish community committee of los angeles. they were founded in 1934 at a time when anti-semitism was increasing very rapidly in the los angeles area and southern california in general.

and so they made it their mission to document that anti-semitic activity, some of which was coming in the form of pro-nazi groups. there were, there was a group called the silver shirts, for example, and there were various pro-german groups. and so they wanted to document what was going on. one of people who came to work more that organization, a man by name of joseph, was originally from austria. and he and his wife and several other austrian and german-jewish emigres actually went out and infiltrated these meetings of these pro-nazi groups, and they would take notes, they had code names. they would take notes on what was going on, and then they wanted to get word out, and the message that they wanted to get out was these groups were both anti-american and anti-semitic. however, they felt that if it was a jewish group getting the word out, that that would be perceived as self-serving, and

so they wanted to find a way to get the word out in a more neutral way. and so the solution that they found was in 1939 they started an organization called the news research service which you'll notice has -- doesn't say jewish in the name. and the news research service published a weekly called the newsletter. and it went to important decision makers. so they sent it to the press, to all of the major newspapers across the country, to many members of congress, to the president himself, to people in the justice department and so on. and it began to have a reputation as a very good source of news about these kinds of fascist groups. when japan joined germany and italy in the triple alliance, then the group started publishing things about imperial japan as well. and in the end, they published several pieces in the late

1930s and '39 mostly about japanese-americans. now, clearly they were not going to, you know, they were not passing in the same way that they passed among the austrians, but they were clearly getting the information from somewhere else. and a lot of the things that they circulated had been long circulated by the many anti-japanese forces. there was a lot of anti-japanese tension in the and had been for some time. so they spread the oft-quieted report a the programs were antidemocratic, that kind of thing. then once pearl harbor happened, those reports got picked up even further. and so the news research service information that they had gathered ended up being used in various government reports. so, tradition, the house un-american aa fairs committee, the earlier -- affairs

committee, the earlier version of that, there was a lot of contact between the dyes committee and this group, the news research service, which is part of the hlacc -- lhacc. and their information goes into some of the testimony that helps justify the removal of japanese-americans. so, yeah. it was a rather unexpected finding. and both at the time and in the years since there was knowledge that the news research service applied part of information, but it was not known that that was a jewish organization until i found this information in the archives, much to my surprise. it's very odd to read that organization's materials because at the same time that this is going on, they're expending a huge amount of effort working on these anti-prejudice campaigns. i think what happened was that they are -- it is very useful

for them to have these kind of contacts in the government, in the dyes committee and so on. and the dyes committee, they were aware, had some issues with excess. it was not only going after far u.s.es, but also after communists. but it got the word out so effectively about the dangers of naziism, and that was really their primary concern. the vast majority of their materials was really about fascism and primarily about pro-german groups. and the japanese-american stuff was not great in volume and was sort of incidental. it was secondary. it was something that today did because the dyes committee and others asked them for information, and they got the information, as i said, from elsewhere, and it kind of funneled lu them. however, it did end up having an impact. there was a report put out by the dyes committee about the dangers of the japanese-american committee. it had a more formal name, but it became known as dyes' yell

hoe paper. a lot of that -- yellow paper. a lot of that information comes straight out of the news research service. and so they ended up doing a lot of damage, yeah. even during the war in this coalition of of pro-civil rights groups comes together, and one of things that they do is try to work to enable japanese-americans to try to come back to their home, and that work starts as early as '43, '44, trying to get the government to distinguish between those people for whom there might be a suspicion to the community in general. of and this group is involved in that work. and there's no indication that anyone knows -- that they don't acknowledge it. there are histories written of group. this is never mentioned. there was an interview done years ago. he's, of course, since passed, but there was an interview done years ago with joseph ruse, an oral history. and when they get to this part of the history of the

organization, he asks them to turn the tape recorder off, so i wasn't ever able to hear what his comments were on it. but they do work very hard to support the japanese-american community afterwards, and so one has to think that they realized that they had, they had done wrong in this case. i mean, these are people who spent -- including joseph -- these are people who spent their lives working on civil rights issues and that they participated in this is really shocking. people have a difficult time hearing it. there were, certainly, jewish-americans who stood up just as there were other americans who stood up and opposed these policies. they were in the minority. certainly on the west coast they were very much in the minority. but people don't expect to hear story. and unfortunately, it's a story of kind of getting in bed with the wrong people.

so they got in bed, so to speak, with people like martin dyes and so on because he was able to further their cam pawn against anti-- campaign against awpt semitism. but in doing so, they ended up doing damage to one another. i think many people read history looking for good guys and bad guys, and here's a case where if you look at -- to go back to this organization in los angeles, and like i said, these are people who dedicated their lives to civil rights and yet even they got caught up in this, in the sort of wartime hysteria and expediency and so on, so it's not so simple as just good guys and bad guys. and i think, you know, as we saw at the time of 9/11, during times of war when people feel vulnerable, they sometimes aren't as thoughtful on how things as they might be. and so i would hope that that would be the message. i'm certainly not trying to vilify the community.

certainly, if you look at the jewish community overall, the pact that they maintained the -- the fact that they maintained the silence for the most part, an official silence, at nurse i saw that as a failing because i had expected them to speak out. but when you look at the secular press at that time, i mean, people are virtually screaming from the rooftops that all of the japanese-american community should be taken away. with by not jumping on that bandwagon, right? that says something. so i kind of shifted from seeing it as a failure to seeing it as, you know, they realized, right? they weren't going to get on that bandwagon. so it's not quite what i expected to find, and it's up not the lesson that people expect to hear especially when, you know, when i go out to talk to community groups. people will come to the book or come to my lecture expecting they're going to hear the story

of good people who stood up, and there's some of that in the book, but it's a much more mixed bag. >> coming up next, r. gregory nokes, author of "breaking chains," tribes the only slavery case to ever be adjudicated in govern court. he spoke with us -- oregon courts. he spoke with us during booktv's recent trip to salem, oregon. >> we're on a property that was once owned by nathaniel ford. he was a slave holder, landholder in missouri who came out to this area in 1844, and he brought with him six slaves who helped him to pardon me property. to farm this property. inthe fact that there were slavs in oregon was always a surprise to me, but he brought out more than any other did and is tried to keep them, and that's sort of part of story. but this area was part of williame,t text valley, and it was very much of interest to

farmers because they could get up to a square mile of free lammed, and this is what drew the early settlers, was the opportunity to get free land. well, it was mostly, there were a few white people here. there were native americans, of course, the tribes. there were fur trapper, missionaries, hudson bay company had a big far-trapping operation -- fur-trapping operation up on the columbia river, but for the most part it was very unpopulated by settlers and whites. there were native american tribes here. so the, it was under joint occupation of the british and the americans. they had both had a claim to the land, so there was no real government out here, and in 1843 a provisional government was established which sort of kind of became the start of gop. and then the u.s. congress, two senators in the congress wanted to create a fait accompli on the ground to bring this under the american flag, so they taliban

to develop legislation -- they began to develop legislation that provides a free square mile of land to the early settlers. and in this happened to coincide with the time in missouri in particular the economy was in the tank. so it was missouri settlers who were among the first to come out in the major wagon trains in 1833 and 1834. and ford was a big deal in missouri. he was a member of missouri legislature, a four-time county sheriff of howard county in central missouri, probably growing hemp or and tobacco on his major land oldings there and had up to 13 slaves. and then when the economy went into the tank, he organize toed his own wagon train and brought them out here and settled on this land which you see around me. most of the early settlers that came out from missouri, we're talking about the missouri settlers who made up a large portion of the early settlers, were both anti-slavery and anti-black. many of them had never had

slaves and found it very difficult to compete in a slave culture against slave holders who had slaves. so they were fleeing slavery in a way. at the same time, they identified african-americans with slavery. so the idea was we don't want african-americans here period. not a slave, not as people who would compete for our jobs. and so this was what was behind what was one of three exclusion laws in oregon's history which banned african-americans from living here. but it turned out the law wasn't enforced, and so some of the early settlers did bring slaves to help them get their huge farms started. some of them set them free right away and others, like nathaniel ford, kept husband for quite some time. polly holmes were a family that had been with the fords in missouri. ford bought them probablily about 1831 -- probably about

1831, and they had several children. and, you know, i went through -- had the researcher go through the records, slave records in missouri for me and the buying and trading. nathaniel ford was dealing slaves all the time, and he traded away three of the holmes' family chirp, you know, to settle some of his debts. and so he brought out six slaves, and they were five members of the holmes family, robin and polly and three of their children. and the sixth adult slave named scott. and so he made a deal you come to oregon, help me get my farm started, and i will give you your freedom. so they came out in 1844 and developed this land all around here growing wheat, and they had cattle and all the things that -- and corn and things that farmers in oregon had in those days. but 1850, six years after he'd come out here, robin knew that slavery was supposed to be illegal in gop, so he was agitating, probably had some

support from abolitionists, advocating for his freedom, you promised. ford made yet another deal with him. you go to california and mind gold for me -- these were the gold rush days -- then when you come back, i'll give you your freedom. he made the same deal with scott who was the sixth slave that came out. so robin and scott went to california to mine gold for him, and on the return trip scott, unfortunately, drowned at sea in a shipping accident. robin came back, and ford did give robin and pol lu their freedom. -- polly their freedom. but he kept their children. this time there were four children. two more years went by, one of the children had died, and robin holmes was concerned for the safety of his chirp. he hadn't been able to see them for a couple of years, and so he filed suit against nathaniel ford for the freedom of his children. people knew that in 1843 the provisional government had

declared slavery illegal, so apparently -- and we don't know this for sure -- most of those who brought slaves made that kind of a deal with their slave knowing that they or assuming they on the couldn't keep their slave here because it was illegal. but the law was changed in 1844 and not a lot of people know this, but nathaniel ford did which allowed slave holders, originally the '43 law was no slavery period. but in 1844 because of the work of a fella named peter burnett, the law was changed so that male slaves had, you could keep your male slaves two years and your female slave for three years. and then free them. and that law also had an exclusion clause in it which provided for lashing. so if that slave were freed and didn't leave oregon within a is certain amount of time, they could be subject to whipping, lashing, up to 39 lashes. now, it's not clear that was

ever executed. now, this is the only slavery case ever adjudicated in oregon courts. and i contend that holmes is really one of the unsung heroes in oregon for several reasons. when you think about it, he was illiterate. of course, slaves were e deprived of education and so all those who came as they were trout the rest -- throughout the rest of the country, most of them were illiterate, knew nothing about oregon law. i mean, how would he know? pretty much's lated, there were very few blacks. racially isolated. in fact, this area around here was known as dixie during the civil war which gives you some idea of the sentiments, you know, of this community. he managed to get help from the prosecuting attorney who came from massachusetts, an abolitionist state, fellow named reuben boyce. so the dallas county courthouse is just down the road here about 10 miles in the little town of

dallas. so rue bicep boyce took robin holmes' case and helped him with it. it was not a jury trial. it was done before a judge. it was a bench trial, i guess you would say, and it dragged on for 15 months. and i found the original trial record in the polk county courthouse in dallas which is very nearby here. it's a very interesting -- it's almost an inch thick. they copied it for me from microfilm. but it's all happened written by different people, and you have all these editing, scratchings, new words inserted, changes made, and you could just imagine that as these transcripts were made that robin holmes was given his testimony orally to a clerk or to an attorney, he were writing it down and reading it pack to him. and so i imagine that these were changes where he said, no, that's not quite right, you know? this is what we need to say, that kind of thing. so it was rather poignant that

way. three different judges heard case. none of them wanted to decide it. and they were in a dilemma. by this time nathaniel ford had already been elected to the oregon territorial legislature. he was a big man. he'd been nominated or appointed chief judge of oregon. he declined to seven, but he'd been appointed to that position if an area which was ostensibly fairly pro-slavery. and so he had -- but boyce took on in this case and, like i say, it dragged on for 15 months, and then a new judge was appointed, chief justice of the territorial supreme court, a fellow l named george williams. never been in oregon before, originally from new york. and within weeks he decided the case for robin holmes. well, for one thing there was not a lot of reporting of the case at the time. there weren't many newspapers in oregon, certainly not newspapers doing any in-depth or

interpretive coverage. so a local salem newspaper did carry a few paragraphs. but years later george williams had commented on it, and he had said this kept me from being a senator. he said there was of, i think there's a quote, he said there were many virulent pro-slavery people in the territory, and this was very unpopular with them, is the way he put it. so we can only imagine what their reaction was. it would have been very, very negative because we know the attitude in this community. else in benton county which named their school union during the civil war, sentiments were significantly different. so you had different reactions in different communities. robin went on to be -- he operated -- let's see. after he was proceed in 1850, he worked in the gristmill which is very nearby here, or and he was

working there at the time of the trial, and after the trial he and polly moved some of the children to salem, near salem, where they operated a nursery. and apparently successful according to what we know about it. and he bought a plot of land for a cemetery plot, and he is buried will along with a lot of other -- buried there along with a lot of orr african-americans and some of his children. and we know he bought the plot. we don't know exactly where he was buried there, and there's no gravestone for him. but in 2007 an organization here called oregon black pioneers, deseven adapts of the early black settlers, you know, erected a monument -- not a monument, but a grave marker for all the people who were buried in the cemetery who were african-americans, and his name is there. polly, apparently, ended up in an institution. she apparently had some mental problems, so we don't know exactly when she passed away.

i had written an earlier book called "massacred for gold" about a chinese massacre published by the oregon state press. and it was very well received, so i wanted to do another book. so is i had several ideas, so i bounced these off my brother bill one day, and he kind of dismissed each one politely and said why don't you write about reuben shipley? i said who was reuben shipley, and he said he was a slave brought to oregon by one of our ancestors from missouri in 1853. well, i was dismayed for a couple of reasons. one, i had no idea there was slave history in the background of family. most of the family came through iowa. and then i had no idea there were black slaves in oregon. a couple reasons for doing this book, one to address my own family issues. i can't say that i feel great guilt because of an ancestor in the background that owned a

slave, but it's something, you know? i don't like hearing it. i don't want -- and i wanted to know about it. that's one of the reasons i kwan to pursue this story -- i began to pursue story. the second one there's a certain smugness in oregon that i have shared in the past. we're kind of a little bit better than the people in the south. we're kind of a liberal culture, you know? sort of humanitarian-oriented. and i had not known about this background. and so it's just kind of a dark secret in oregon's past, and it's not that much in the past east when you come right down to it. so it's something people needed to know, and so that became my book. >> this weekend booktv is in salem, oregon, with the help of our local cable partner, comcast. take a tour of the ben maxwell collection at the salem public library, up next. >> we're in the say hem public

library which is in the salem civic center, essentially, complex. well, the ben maxwell collection is our primary collection that was donated to the library, so we have full amounts of copyright of this collection. ben was a journalist and i guess you'd call it an amateur historian who was born and raised in se a hem, and he had -- in salem, and he had a particular interest in history probably to some degree because he comes from a family of old people who talked about old times. ..

>> we have a great photographic history of it here. and we were interested in and building as well as covered bridges as well as transportation. this is a photograph of the marion county courthouse which was unfortunately demolished in the mid-50s.

at one point there were a lot of riverboat here in salem, and this, i believe, is one of the last steamers they came down from oregon city. ben wrote over a period of about 26 years. about 3000 articles about local history. we are lucky to have scrapbooks that he put together himself with many of his articles. most of the articles were from the capital journal. but he also was published in other papers and his photographs were actually published nationally. in fact, some of them were in better homes and gardens magazine's in "the new york times" as well. and this is a really interesting article that talks about salem's congregational church. the most interesting part for me is a little bit of information

of obed dickenson, who is a distant cousin of emily dickinson area in the 1850s when he founded the congregational church in salem, oregon come and happen to be the first or the was a mixed-race congregation. i'm not sure if everyone knows that a certain movie was filmed that are state hospital, and here is a photograph and an article in 1958, talking together about the diamond jubilee of the state hospital. been put together books of photographs and he put them together by county. and these are some examples of books from marion county and st. paul's catholic church in photographs of old pioneer homes as well as some early

photographs of the indian school that is located just to the north of salem. and we are very fortunate to have a collection of ben maxwell. currently the collection is named after a library director. his personal friend with been maxwell. what makes ben maxwell's work so unique is not only technically was he a photographer but a historian, and he brings a lot of the history alive. not only the contemporary things, but his ability to draw together a lot of things that were still around in salem and bring them to us in a way that we can understand how life was. >> while visiting salem, oregon, with comcast, booktv talked to

stephen green about the book, "the bible, the school, and the constitution: the clash that shaped modern church-state doctrine." >> the battle for started probably on day one of the british colonization of north america. there is a long history of interaction in the temple realm within our history. it continued through this very day. there are two cases before the united states supreme order. so these matters are literally did quite frequently. i would like to study on this book with the complimentary issue of religious education. we see this as two distinct issues. and when we dealt with those cases, they have dealt with at

the best they can. but historically they are closely interrelated. so i look at both of those because those are by far the battles that were part of the mormon church in utah and were very prominent issue. the funding of primary catholic education was education that was so crucial and people called it a school of question. and the men how should public education be and whether we should be funding nonpartisan alternatives of public education. they came to a head in the constitutional amendment after the civil war. there were battles in the streets over these issues, there was a couple of riots over this in the public schools. it was a highly contentious

issue. it arose with the advent of the schools in the first part of the 19th century. and it initially was highly religious. but over time due to a variety of pressures within the nation, immigration being the primary pressure and then even more internal pressures, it became less and less religious and more for trying to justify on nonreligious ground many times, greater opposition was rising not just catholics but from the growing number of secularists and choose and even moderate to liberal protestants were starting to see this and it was not consistent with constitutional principles. and so there was a very strong debate going on back in the part of that century.

there is sometimes so much tension on what they wanted to be an initially the catholics and the jews and other minorities, initially they objected to the highly protestants oriented public. so as a result many public schools predominately in urban areas, where the school board made the decision to use it to water them down. they would get rid of catechisms and they would get rid of the highly sectarian nature and fall back on what they thought were reading from the psalms or proverbs or whatever. this is what they thought everyone would agree to. but to their surprise, some of them are not aware of the catholic doctrine all day because the catholic church

believed that children needed to be directed. that they needed to answer what the mediation of a priest. so they actually disagreed with any type of religious exercise in the public school that didn't involve a priest. well, that, of course was when they were seeing the encouragement of catholics being threatened on so many levels. the idea of them to do this was upsetting to them. so what happened is neither side really understood the argument. the evangelical protestants are just holding onto this in the king james bible and the liberal and moderate so they can accommodate the catholics, tell us what you want, we will water them down a little bit more. and we will even get rid of

them. but the catholics said that we think religion has to be crucial. we cannot separate these two. and we even need to have the readings under the direction of the public schools be a part of this. and we can have an integrated religious education. and neither side could see the merit from the other side and it was again highly contentious and it tore apart communities throughout the 19th century on how to resolve these issues. the supreme court first entered this debate about school prayer in 1948 in a case dealing with release time. it's actually an interesting modification as a way of kind of accommodating all groups.

and let us put aside the time during the day, and we will allow each religious community to bring in one of their teachers and administrators from the children of that faith. and that became a common practice for the first part of the 20th century. and in the north and the west as well, it became a common thing. the supreme court heard a case on that of the first true modern case and they found not to be unconstitutional because it was too close of a relationship and the schools were promoting this and became indistinguishable from the public schools or promoting religion.

four years later they reversed that and so they can't allow them to do this off-campus. and that's actually still a lot today children being released to receive instruction off-campus. it's optional. but the seminal cases were 1962 and 1963, which address the core issue, which was a nonsectarian and nondescript pair that would be read over the public address system. no commentary, just read the bible, and then maybe have something like that. and again, the feeling is that because it is a universal aspect of religion, it's something that all christians can agree with. and they came out and said that that is unconstitutional with

school sponsored in-school directed exercises. >> the first question that president kennedy's news conference deals with the supreme court decision that a new york school prayer violates constitutional separation of church and state. it's in the nature of the effort to calm the storm. >> we have the effect on the first amendment and the supreme court has talked about this with it. but i think it is important for us we're going to maintain this even when we may not agree with them. we had in this case a very easy remedy and that is to pray ourselves. and i would think that it would be to welcome at what every

american family here at home and we can make the true meaning of prayer more important with our children. >> that continues to be contentious today. more than 12 to 15 years after the school decision. my high school was still having prayer as well. in so many states and school districts have been so crucial and morals and character education as well. >> i think this issue has lasted and we have some relatively religious communities as well and to a degree we like to see

our government and public schools do more than the rope and character education. but for many well-meaning people of faith, and we can't teach the religious aspects of it or not is what makes it part of this. so a lot of people see it as causing no harm and also we saw many times that it's kind of the greater society opposing values on the local community. and i litigated these cases for about 10 years people in the

community have said, everyone likes this practice, everyone thinks it is a good idea. and you look a little bit closer and you find people objecting to this practice may have always been marginalized. and so in that sense it's a combination to reaffirm the community values. and also it is proposing its values on our community. and there has been an argument that some people are overly sensitive to this and the culture. and i think that argument has some merit to it. and religiousness is very

prominent outside the capital beltway. and there was a lot of religious messaging that occurred. and so there is that presidents of religion that already existed. especially with the hard-line extreme atheist and we don't want to see that. the vast majority have a problem with that. so it becomes a question of whether there is a de minimis ruling comes to this. whether something should be seen as just not that crucial in order to ensure that we maintain a healthy separation of church and state. and there are practices that are just not worth litigating at the same time.

some people can go overboard and this to a degree of religiosity and society. but we should never presuppose that something is just religiously acceptable and not religiously offensive. justice o'connor with one of the most important principles that she advocated in advance is that one thing they are directed to do is to make sure that people don't feel like they are outside of the community because of their religious beliefs. that we need to ensure that we don't endorse religion in ways that make some of the people feel like they're over my religion. for some people this is a

zero-sum game. if the government isn't celebrating or recognizing religion at all, then you are denigrating religion. and i think that there is a middle ground that is neutral to this issue. not disparaging religion or promoting it on the other side. we are the most religiously part of it. as many as 1500 groups within the united states. presbyterians, episcopalians and methodists. and we're seeing a greater religious diversity within this nation.

it's part of me to say that no one should be offended by this representation because to me it is just accepted. but there are many people who make these as well and we have to be safe with us. not like people to take away from this book that they understand that these debates about church and state are complex. and they have a long history there has never been a consensus view about what the proper relationship between church and state should be. objecting to certain manner but visions of government involvement and no one has the right to claim that prior advantage when it comes to religion. that there should be no default

of one religious preference or another. in the battle over the schools is the best example that we have of how we have fought through that principle trying to understand. because this is one of the things that the public school educators can never understand this. it's something that all protestants agree on and we find the common ground on this. and we need to realize that there is a growing religious diversity in the 19th century. and we need to be sensitive to the minority religious communities and some people may say that that is disparaging within america. but at least in my study of

american religious history and constitutional law and practice, those that need the protection of the constitution. it is the religious outsiders that also needed as well. >> up next, ron miner details the experience of howard miner in his book "sketches of a black cat." >> one of my earliest memories is a moment where he had taken me through the basement to the file cabinet and insight he had a manila folder full of these exciting sketches of jungles and soldiers and all this kind of thing and they were all kind of tattered and worn down. please to speak there with friends and i would show them

these pictures and we were just imagine what the stories were. then one day i never saw him again as a young man. when he passed away a couple of years ago and 92 years old, i found the sketches again and we are relieved to see all of this world war ii art. is it dates back to the 1940s and he had done it in his downtime. he was one of the many blackouts that was part of a group that was in the south pacific during world war ii. and they flew in these planes called catalina and it was distinctive and that the planes were not terribly well-suited and were almost obsolete.

they were not well armed. and they were not particularly elusive. they were very slow. and so they had to come up with ways to protect themselves from the attacking aircraft. and so that is what they were. they were kind of an ingenious bunch that figured out ways of taking what is normally the most difficult part for a plane and they most hazardous part and using it to their advantage. initially their roles were more controlled in a harassment sort of activity. and as time wore on i became more adept at flying at night. the planes didn't use any light and so as they began to become

more or less invisible at night, they were able to extend what they did it become more effective and not only searching for things but attacking them and bombing demonstrating them and this general kind of harassment activity and he was a copilot and navigator and so they did fly in the typical fashion and do a lot of research and harassment missions and they would even try to keep japanese troops overnight just lying around and making noise anything they could think of. that's certainly a big part of it was doing these runs are just searching for contact and conveying that information into the proper places. so he was involved heavily in that his first tour. the second one he became what they call a patrol plane

commander and had his own frame included at that point. and they pushed north towards the philippines more and more with the rescue missions because so many planes were being shot down and these guys were on islands and needed a pickup. but there was a totally amphibious airplane at this point that could land both on runways and in the water. and they were nicknamed flying votes they would land is near to an island as they could get with these individuals and their canoes or whatever they had. and a lot of the sketches would involve airplanes and military people, trees, koala bears,

whatever they would capture the imagination, they would do watercolors or sketches. so the book is actually featuring his illustrations. there's a part of the story all the way through it. to mackey mackey is an artistic guy and we always knew growing up that he could old or draw make just about anything wonderful. and he did win some awards at state fairs and that kind of thing. teenage competitions. so he always had a knack for it and he was particularly good at things like trains and planes and building things like that. and so he was a natural, for sure. but he kind of took it to another level when he got into the military and he designed the squadron logo, for instance. the front and the back view depending on which side of the plane approached.

and they did the sketches of things that they saw. one of the particular things that caught my attention was a time where on the rescue yet managed to locate and pick up five survivors on an island. they had been through so much and their stories were so coming in how they even managed to find this location and managed to stay just ahead of the japanese and they were not able to fly back home in the plane was just leaving the runway when somebody, on a joyride, came in and took it, took the tail of the plane and the pinwheel then.

so it turned out that the two guys and he didn't talk that much about the war. and it's pretty typical of world war ii veterans. they just didn't do that. generally they didn't do that. they thought of it as a job that needed to be done and it was over and the kindness they their stories were each other's reunions and things like that. so we didn't talk a lot about in the last two years of his life. my dad passed away in 2011. when we found this artwork, we were surprised to see how much of the writing and photographs and memorabilia he had kept for nearly 70 years. and in spite of this was a variety of notebooks and site logs and ledgers and even in my grandmother's scrapbook that had

all of these newspaper clippings and photos and things like that. a lot of the firsthand account had been kept on old envelopes and manila pages and they were still intact and still in there. very difficult to read at this point. but they were fascinating and after struggling through them to try to figure out exactly what they were saying, i was able to piece together its hoary over sometime and it took me a lot of research with navy records to determine what he had written with what the real war diary wise and finding time to put a timeline together through the use of all of these things in these pieces. and i was surprised when i had no idea that he had been through so much. i was also surprised to find out as much as i had about it in general. such a remarkable group and one of the least told stories and world war ii, just the

significance to the whole thing. everything from the rescues to just becoming this stealth aircraft that no one had seen the likes of before. one of the first use radar so they could fly low over the water and be virtually invisible. it's fascinating stuff and i just didn't know any of that. i feel like it's a tribute to the black cat and my dad as well. any opportunity that you have to tell a story like this, it's just an important opportunity that you need to take advantage of. and i also feel like it's been a great opportunity to meet world war ii veterans in particular and i've met for black hats now. i'm about to meet the fourth one. one who actually knew my dad and flew with my dad and they found

out about it more or less from the book. so that has been really important side effect through the whole thing. and one of the most satisfying things as is meeting other people and maybe the book has inspired them to go ahead and talk to their own parents or loved ones who they have served and kind of capture that narrative and have an opportunity to save a legacy before it's gone forever and if i can inspire some of these people to do that, that's been worth it all by itself. >> coming up next, learn about over at 30 chinese miners that were massacred from the author tran-sevens i heard about the story in northeastern oregon that county clerk had found records of a long forgotten

murder trial. and the murder trial had to do with a group of whites who were accused of murdering these chinese and they were found innocent and let go. now, i was born and educated for the most part in oregon. had a modest interest in history and knew nothing about his crime. but it was one of the worst crimes ever committed to anybody living organ besides native americans, of course. and so i had known that we needed to do this story for our paper. in this part of the investigation i had only such a brief knowledge as to why the chinese would hear and what they were doing to budget a lot of investigation as to what they were, where they came from, what they were treated like. it became a self education in that process.

the chinese and miners arrived around the year in the late 1850s. starting in southern oregon were gold was discovered in that area and they moved to northeastern oregon around baker city. and then on up to lewiston idaho. i think that was 1861. after a few years they were more chinese miners in the northeast and northwest. during this period, it is important to know that while the chinese were usually discriminated against and not accepted, the often employers at that time wanted to hire them for good reasons. they worked harder at many times and they didn't want to be unionized. they didn't go out on strike. they didn't want to be unionized. so this period was it period of

this particularly in california. back when gold was first discovered, many of the caucasian money stands passed a law to bar them from mining gold at all and the chinese had very heavy experience in california that they were tired of mining gold and they were anxious to sell their minds or leave them. so they were extensively not allowed to buy property or mine in oregon and other areas. but they were able to buy from those who wanted to sell out. the chinese very often.much more gold from the abandoned mines than the original. in 1887 there were a group of miners that have come down into the oregon side of the canyon from lewiston, idaho.

to mine gold along the river. and this was a very difficult journey for the minors because the snake river is a north flowing river at this point. and so it's a rough and wild river and the miners would have them pull their votes and pulled him along by the quest to get to this mining site. i didn't know if viewers are aware of it, but it is a significantly deeper canyon with the high walls through the access into it all. the chinese have been mining this for probably four or five months and they are operating in northeastern oregon and they had observed the chinese mining in the canyon and decided to take

the gold, in which they did. and it was never understandable to me. one of the reasons i wrote this particular book is why did they have to kill them? because they could have easily just have taken the gold and let them go but the fact that they killed them was a savage act of theirs. they threw the bodies of the chinese into the snake river and the crime wasn't discovered for a couple of weeks until some of the bodies floated all the way to his den, idaho and other bodies may have floated clear out into the pacific and were never found at all. the exact number is unknown. there probably killed over a period of a couple of days and there's a lot of chinese mining in various canyons. yet it was so remote and we wanted to go in there and

investigate a young man named frank bond was a very well known name even today. and the testimony before the grand jury, he implicated all of the others were time. but by the time the matter came to a trial, they blame just those of the six killers. three of them were cops, three others escaped, including the ringleaders. and so during the trial he penned in on those including the three others that were caught and had nothing to do with it. so the jury let them go. i don't know of any kind ever made to catch this individual. and the weak explanation is that they wanted to borrow a vote. they wanted to borrow a vote from the chinese to take some of

their stolen horses across the river into what is now idaho. and this is what the killers were doing. they were stealing cattle and horses in oregon and taking them on to idaho and montana where they were selling them. so he said that they couldn't get the horses across the river and they wanted to borrow the bow and the chinese would let him borrow the vote. so the ring later went up there and got furious and that was pretty weak. and i think the reason is they didn't want to talk about gold during the trial. once they mention the word gold, that would open up a whole new area of investigation, which was what happened to the goal. so there was a trial in 1888. there is an indictment with

members of the gang. but a jury found him in a. and in my research i discovered their many crimes against the chinese. this happened to be probably the worst of all of them committed by whites against the chinese in this country. but i had never found a single case where a white jury found a white man guilty of tilting killing or injuring a chinese that was let go. of course they were appalled at the massacre and the loss of life. but they also have had a lot of experience for these types of crimes against the chinese, particularly in california. probably as many as 150,000 at any one time, primarily in california and then we filled up in oregon and the rest of the northwest and more numbers. and the reaction was that i need to go back just a little bit

more. this occurred in san francisco and los angeles in the chinese were burned out of their homes in northern california. a lot of deaths in different places in the chinese complain that i mentioned earlier, no white man was put behind bars for one of these crimes against the chinese. but what did happen in this timeframe is that trade with china was very valuable to the united states then as it is now. and so the chinese began making monetary claims to the united states. and i think with each individual loss of life they claimed damages for loss of property. the congress was approving fairly significant sums of money to compensate for their loss of life. so the letters that the chinese litigation did get involved with and then the national archives in maryland where that a lot of my research, you will wind in

these letters the chinese being appalled at the crime and the fact that nobody was investigating and indeed nobody was investigating. saying that you need to compensate us for this loss and the chinese were compensated in most news. but in this one for a peculiar reason he never actually made a monetary decision on what happened. the previous claimed that had been paid to the chinese, the money did not always get back to the families of the victims and the people who lost property, suggesting there might have been a fair amount of corruption involved in this timeframe. and so the head litigation in washington the he was called back to china and then in a period of years he was headed. so in my interpretation of that,

this is part of the people who replace them to really pursue this investigation and all of this happened about the time of the trial. attorneys were the chinese were informed by the u.s. government that there was going to be a trial. to the best of my knowledge they were never informed or asked what the results of the trial were. and i think they were able to just be concerned to the officials involved with what had happened to their predecessors. and we didn't want to get into it. so the matter was dropped and covered up in oregon for more than a century until like i say, this county clerk found the old records and old save and there's a chapter in the book about two elderly women who i was told early on new about this crime as much as anybody dead. one was a wonderful woman who was a county historian for many years and the other was a county

clerk for many years. both of them now deceased. and at first they didn't want to talk to me at all, but i kind of have semi-contact and eventually they did. and marjorie martin later acknowledged that by the time she was talking to me she was not always as clear as one had hoped that she would be. but the explanations that i got is that she didn't want people to see this and then one of her friends in the county was a granddaughter of a leader of the killers and when they fled the county, he left behind a wife and two children and so a grandchild was a good friend of marjorie martin. so she told me that now that her friend had died, i cannot talk to you and there were two things going on.

one where there's not a lot of population turnover and where people who live there today are the same as the people who first went in there. and so that seemed to be that we don't want to offend this family by resurrecting the skeleton and the closet. the other one is protecting the images and allowing them by the fact that they kicked out this in 1877 even though they claim to have land and there was a fraudulent tree that had been developed. so this had been, to me, a black mark on the county's history. and they've tried to come to terms with that over the years. well, i finally did a book launch and i was joking to my wife about it that i don't know

what all quite when i come home, but i did what is called a writers group and they are fairly well-known and they had a packed house of probably 40 to 50 people there. and i did my presentation and just one criticism. i misspelled the first name of the book. but other than that i didn't get any criticism at all so i chatted with my friend leader. and i said that i'm surprised that there was no hostility and rick said that i didn't we are just ready to hear about what happened. and it's not that i set out a mission to explore this with oregon history, but as i have encountered these worries about slavery in oregon and the massacre and mistreatment of the chinese, i know that it's not in oregon's history books but it is an important part of our history. and i think that they need to be known. for example, we don't know how much the chinese contributed to

the development of the northwest. they cleared the land, they dub the ditches. that was such a huge thing. they did the work that the white people didn't want to do. similarities to what is going on with hispanics now days in terms of african-americans. there were for trappers in the region and in some ways we have already talked about robin holmes, who i think was declaring that slavery was part of this and there was a complaint that he brought to free his children. he and some other were slaves and we know nothing about them. no one is keeping their history. just a word or two in a history book and i think that that is tragic. so if i have helped to bring some of that into our public

awareness and keep some of that history where it belongs, that is satisfying to me. >> for more information on our recent visit to salem, oregon, and the many cities visited by her local content vehicles him a good expand outward/local content. >> you're watching the tv on c-span2. here's our primetime lineup for tomorrow night. beginning at 6:30 p.m. eastern, a panel discussion on the monuments men followed by an hour-long viewer discussion with mr. edsall from last week. at 9:00 p.m., "after words" with gabriel sherman, author of the loudest voice in the room. then at 10:00 p.m. james barrett describes artificial intelligence and the end of the human era. and we wrap up tonight programming at 10:45 p.m. eastern with paul kengor who wrote "eleven principles of a reagan conservative." that all happens tonight on

booktv. >> less than 2% of members came from the working class. they eventually wound up in congress are at the flashing forward to the present day, the average member of congress spent less than 2% of their career in service industry jobs. and so this is one thing that really hasn't changed. lots of different aspects of the political aspect. big money in politics, the decline of unions, while all of this is happening, there is one of the constants in 100 years or so.

>> we are trying to represent the worker and so i think. >> i'm glad you brownness up. the question that i talk about in this book is really that it doesn't matter that the working-class people are part of this. almost no one has a real experience in the working-class and their argument has stuck around ever since.

and we all want the same things and we all want prosperity and growth. and we all want the same thing at the end of the day. and this is one of the affordable thoughts in this country. there's another school of the founding and that will seriously told the policies. and it will make it harder for the voices of working people to make a difference and this is a long-standing debate.

in these debates have been going on since the founding. what interested me is that there wasn't any hard evidence on this point. so one side would point to an example of a white collar professional who really cared about working people and the other side would point to the working-class candidate who works with him and he really needs no more like that. so what we really needed to know is if they stopped looking at individual cases and looked across large samples of politicians in our political institutions as a whole, and does it really matter that much that white-collar professionals are calling the shots and working-class people are almost totally absent from her political institutions? so i really wanted to take this

debate and try to bring. >> you will get 783 lawmakers. and he will have more of these blue-collar jobs and it is incomes versus socioeconomic status. >> absolutely. one of the challenges in doing this research was that when i started, there wasn't a sort of good database.

in the first task for me it was just to create that and go through. and all 783 of the unique men and women who served. and the question i ask is what did you do for a living before you got into the political office. so for each of them we pulled it together from a half-dozen different almanacs every piece of information that we could find just finding out all of these different facts.

and in the course of doing this research i found out that he actually spent a big percentage doing manual labor jobs in service industry jobs in all of these other types of things. doing what i would call working-class jobs in the course of researching the book i also have come across the data sets that have been compiled for other people in the thing that was really striking to me is that i got the same answer every time.

and there is a sample of the u.s. house members what they thought about the issues and what committees they were on. and it really does bring a different perspective to the political office. especially politicians who only did this do this in the private sector. that really seems to be a major part of the political institutions. >> you can watch this and other

programs online apple tv.org. >> here's a look at some of the best selling e-books according to "the wall street journal." robert edsall talks the list about the allied task force kind to save artifacts from world war ii. booktv posted a live call-in program with mr. edsall, which included a panel discussion at the national archives. both programs re-air this sunday starting at 7:00 p.m. eastern and are available to watch anytime at booktv.org. and second is the memoir 12 years a slave. the book was originally published in 1853 part of this. and then alone survival or. the eyewitness account of operation red wing and the lost heroes. booktv spoke with the author

in 2008 and you can watch the program online at booktv.org. twenty-five years after its initial publication, richard rhodes and the making of the atomic bomb is the fourth best selling e-book according to "the wall street journal" followed by delusions. then we have journeys on the silk road by con rod walters on the discovery of the worlds oldest printed book. and then eric the task is profiles a stand against nokia germany and wrapping up the top 10 as bill o'reilly and historian martin duke guard in his account of the murder of jesus of nazareth and killing jesus. these are some of the current best-selling nonfiction e-books according to "the wall street journal."

>> we have a lot of famous iconic people. this is back to martin luther king junior and justice can run and it sounds good and that really involves so many average african americans and women and men who dismantled racial

segregation including rosa parks. and this includes democratize institutions. >> what he calls black power study. his latest will be in bookstores on march 4. he will take your question and that and that is starting at 9:00 a.m. eastern on booktv c-span2. up next "after words" with richard benjamin. author of searching for utopia.