revolution. >> i think we have time for perhaps one more question. i see you there so yours will be the last question. >> thank you very much. thank you both very much and thank you for a marvelous book. to what degree is morgenthau involved and what effect did it have and is a still involve you and in what ways? >> yes, i identify very much with bob's passion to build this museum because his father tried to save as many jewish as he possibly could during world war ii and in a way he was finishing

what his father had started in my mind. he wanted people to remember always what happened and from that eventually to say jewish law would otherwise. she and another holocaust. this beloved feeling he had for his father really was the engine that drove him to the personal parts and then of course his whole character was based on we have to build this museum. we have to have a place where new yorkers can go, children can go and see what has happened and can never happen again.

>> we are near the end. what question have we not ask you that we should have asked to? [laughter] >> i don't know. you have been pretty thorough. you have been an investigative reporter. >> the book is "timeless" and the author is lucinda franks. it's been wonderful being with you hear lucinda. >> thank you so much. you are amazing. you are amazing. [applause] and thank you, all of you for coming. [applause] this week in booktv's in

colorado springs colorado with the help of our local cable partner comcast. next anne hyde authors of "empires, nations and families" takes a look at the multiethnic inhabitants of the louisiana purchase. >> the premise of the book is pretty simple, that no matter what time period you are talking about an american west it was never empty. so in a way it's a challenge to the traditional pioneer story where white anglo pioneer landscape so i really wanted to fill up that landscape of people before those other people came. the families that i looked at had a lot to do with why they were so many people there before 1850 and the white pioneers arrived in all of that colonial conquest created mixed blood families. so families of mixed hispanic and anglo, native american and

anglo, native american and black, native american and hispanic you name it and i was just amazed to find out these people who filled up that empty landscape. this question about racial attitudes in the west is really a great one because it does change. in the first half of the 19th century, you know everything isn't just hunky-dory and the easy pc about race but there is much more racial -- going on in it's normal. the only way you can get business done is you are in the fur trade of the military is really to have connections with native people so you needed those people. racial mixing was pretty much the norm. after the civil war changed a lot in racial attitudes changed a lot. racial lines began to harden and that's a very interesting story, trying to figure out what happened to all these mixed-race people in the options they had once those racial lines hardened after the civil war.

if you look in particular at the way people did this, they are fabulous records in the big for companies about who's doing what and he gets paid to do what and the notion that you needed to know the landscape like the back of your hand to figure out where the beavers were and where the buffalo weren't all that kind of thing makes sense. you gave the labor of native women to process all those furs and many many native men to get them back to civilization. but there's this whole world of these mixed-race people who have education in the white world and cultural values and experience in the indian world. they are really negotiators between all this. they are great businesspeople. they are sea captains. they are teamsters, you know any part of the business you can

imagine these people are doing it. suddenly that's not possible anymore. really the interest is ownership of property and citizenship. and once agriculture begins to replace things like the fur trade is the main business than then this issue of who is allowed access to this american landscape really becomes a big deal. native people begin to get shut out and this question about these mixed-race people, are they white, are they native? what are they? one of the things i'm working on now and it really surprised me, there are a whole bunch of these things called halfbreed reserves and halfbreed tracks that are set up as part of indian treaties and there are 50 of them in the united states and i'm completely amazed at the services. they are places where mixed blood people are given special access to land and that

disappears. it's one of these issues we are still arguing about, about sort of what race means, what that racial mixture means in the united states, what kind of options people had. the group that i'm looking out which is native people, or a range of other people, it's not that they had to pick one or the other. it's just that being a mixed-race person doesn't exist anymore so you can look at the census for example of this was true in two the deer 2000. it never was a box you could check for being a mixed-race person. so depending on what you look like, what your educational level was, what your family support system was, people make choices so there's a big wave of these well-educated sophisticated mixed-race people moving back on reservations in the 1880s and they have you no

very dignified lives. they are often leaders. but they are doing that because they need access to land. so the question of how race works in the u.s.. so i think this might shift the story in two ways. one story that we'd like to tell about ourselves in the present and i have to say people like ferguson and michelle anderson's work makes me doubt this but we tell the story about race that we move from the battle of slavery into india and land and it's slowly getting better and better. there's one story we tell about it. the story i'm adding in the 19th century adds to the up-and-down kind of story where we figure out new ways to protect certain races and

advantage some people at the expense of other people. though in various ways race has been used. a more positive spin would be thinking about there's this moment in the early 19th century, a pretty long moment, 15 years, 75 years, 100 years were mixed-race people were completely unremarkable. no big deal. there were lots of them around. racial mixing, inter-racial marriage, all those things that became anathema and the early 20th century were possible. so you can hold that out as their hopeful moment. there was violence and there was that things have happened but the racial politics filling that landscape, appreciating what complicated lives these people had. the fact that they were everywhere.