guys i played with. nothing builds a bond stronger than being part of a group and all of the people committing to something bigger than the individuals. that is -- and for me, i told my friends this all of the time, people say what is the thing you love the most and i was like the thing i love the most is i have some of the best people. i love all of my people and i am lucky to have had really great friends and teammates along the way. so i think the relationships and friendships that you build from ports are invaluable. >> okay. thank you. >> no thank you. good luck in your upcoming season. >> hi i have a question. my name is richard. how did you come up with the title of your book?

>> so i think the original title they wanted to use was i reggie and i said i am not going to sell that around torn with that word on it. and we powered forward and thomas levine came up with the my presidential part. he is at harvard press now. really good guy. >> thank you. [applause] >> you can bring them back here to get signed. >> is there a non-fiction author

or book you would like to see on booktv? send us an e-mail tweet us or post on our facebook wall. welcome to greensboro north carolina. we will talk about the supreme court court case plussy versus ferguson to help with segregation in the united states. we will explore the seen in greensboro starting with linda brown recruiting her memories of the sit-ins. >> in the mass marches going down the street and some had eggs thrown at them and water dumped on their head from the

buildings. it never got to the point where it was like seeing this is nice. it was just more than the city could handle. it was that unanimity and solidarity and we are all in this together. i grew up in ohio and they were a little less segregated. not less racist but less segregated. so i grew up in ohio and understood things were different in the south but i grew up in a family that was sophisticated about politics and what the situation was. so i knew both sides of the coin and i felt it was unjust and needed to be changed and my

father was very much involved in african-american rights as a social worker and he worked for the national urban league. so i was not unaware of any of this and what this meant to black americans. essentially life was like what it was for the rest of african-americans and particularly in the south it was a matter of jim crowe segregation. that is if we went downtown to the movie we had to sit in the balcony in the negro session. if we went to a place to eat, we may or may not, and probably not get served. and what happened with woolworth was they enjoyed selling you their snacks but you had to stand up at the end of the room

and eat them. you could not sit down at the counter. and most other places you could not eat in the restaurants. and in some clothing stores you were not welcome whether you had the money or not. so it was life as a par tide. it was second-class citizenship. when people became to think the same way and someone else thinks the same way and ideas take off for reasons that no body quite understands, and i think it was time, you know? people were fed up and sick and tired of being sick and tired of being second-class citizens. so they all had that same kind of sense that is it is time to do something. that the king came to bennett --

dr. king -- and spoke in 1958 and there were things going on with school desegeration which was a big deal in america in 1954-1955 with the supreme court decision. all of that is going on. here on this campus the campus of bennett college, there was a student naacp chapter. and naacp has always had student chapters particularly in historically black colleges which is what this is. so of course we had a chapter. and the chapter had an advisor or a couple of them. and in the course of meeting with the advisors and the students who were members of the chapter of course a lot of conversations took place about what can we do to make things better, do we need to do

anything, other people are doing things in other parts of the country, and you know over a period i suppose more than a year, there were conversations about what we could do and it kind of boiled down to sit-ins and let's look at woolworth and look and see what can be done. so those meetings took place here on this campus and the david lee jones student union. and they would combine bennett and ant fellows and the bennett college advisors and so on. there were plans made to start the sit-in. and those plans began in the fall of 1959. and somewhere along the way they were advised by the president of bennett college who happened to be my auntie who said you should

really not do this until after christmas vacation because if you start this and then you go home for christmas vacation the momentum and energy and excitement will be broken and where you will have to start all over again in the winter. and so that is why it got put off from december of '59 and that is why when the guys came back from christmas vacation and in those days you had a long break on college campuses mostly january people were gone. so we got back at the end of january and the ant fellows decided tay were going to go downtown and sit-in without having a meeting with us.

so they kind of jumped the gun all right? but the planning for it was essentially done and it was spontaneous in the sense they decided to take the bull by the horns, okay? but it was not -- they wok up that day and it wasn't a new idea. i went there on the third day. the guys had gone on the first and second and here is the third day and they are expecting us by this time. so number one it is quite. number two the lunch counter, which was long and lined up but it was quite intimidating because most of the seats were empty except for college

students and ant and bennett college. most everybody else was like i am not going down there because anything might happen. so there is these empty seats, it is quite we go sit down and wait to see what is going to happen. a waitress came by with a tray of knives and she was so nervous they were rattling. she was as scared as i was. we sat there with our textbooks trying to study. i remember her saying we cannot serve you all or we don't serve colored and i will have to ask you to leave. we had this instruction, you know that just don't say anything just keep sitting,

don't say anything and if they ask you what you would like and you ask for cup of coffee -- they never asked us what we wanted because they knew they were not going to serve us. i sat there for an hour and i think we had hour shifts. you know? we had it planned so that if you went at 9 o'clock you were back on campus by 10:30 for your 11:00 o'clock class and we had cars going back and forth with people volunteering transportation. i don't know when was driving. to this day i don't remember. i think i was too nervous to remember who was driving us and dropping us off in front of woolworth and that same person would be there in an hour to pick us up and bring us back. it was quite nerve-wracking

exciting, you had a sense you were doing something very important and significant. they were not hostile, i don't think they wanted to provoke anybody. it was just dead hands. in terms of people from wherever they came from i don't know you had a lot of young white guys hanging around, yelling, making bad remarks, but the day i remember that happening was the day i was picketing in front of crest and woolworth with a picket sign and cars of young, tough guys drove by and said ugly things and racial episodes and all kinds of things and that was very unnerving and like are we going to get out of this

okay? and there were incidents within the five and dime stores as the weeks went on the incidents got to be scary. there were people who tried to provoke, especially the men who were sitting in at the counter, somebody got burned with a cigarette stub and what they were trying to do was provoke us out of non-violence. and so you know jostling people and i wasn't present for that. but all of that is in my book and i interviewed a lot of people. many received non-violent training and we are very committed to this way. this is the way you do this. we are very connected to dr. king's philosophy and had been

even some of them had been in demonstrations in other places. they knew what could happen and some of them experienced what could happen. it was a remarkable exercise in commitment to the movement and discipline. so it was not a matter of one nice day and they are going to let us eat. this went on until april and in april they arrested 45 college

students and that was when i think about 13 bennett women were arrested in april. and the rest of them were from ant. and i don't know -- i could not find the numbers exactly and the names -- i do know the newspaper says at least 13 women from bennett were arrested in april. and then there was the moratorium moratorium. it was just one side after another, you know? until 1963.

greensboro wasn't the first sit in. wichita were the first sit-ins. and the differences was that it didn't take off in the sense of national media and people copy catting it and so on. it didn't take off. but greensboro happened to be everyone game together and people got galvanized and imaginations were sparked so sit-ins in south carolina and florida and all across the country after greensboro. the fight had just started and what are we going to do about the other restaurant and movies. so they tried to keep alive, as

jesse jackson used to say keep alive, by having meetings. but it was hard because people graduate and got jobs so you had a small group of students and faculty who were left to try to keep things moving. and a lot of that is in the book also and a lot of those people were people who -- one of the original sit-inners, one of the four guys said if it hadn't been for the bennett women after the war degraded we would not have been able to move forward. so things kind of quited down until '61-'62. and bennett picked up again and here again i cannot tell you why

except it happened in history. and people began to say okay and the national organization of congress for racial equality sent national people to help and began to have organized sit-ins at the hot shop -- a restaurant called the hot shop. and at the may fair cafeteria and at the movies. and the more they did the more people joined and so by '62 you have got this continuing pressure on the city and marches and so on which are growing. and finally this turns into the police department beginning to arrest people for trespassing

and that is when you have 250 bennett women who get arrested in 1963. and that is kind of a huge push for integration. mean time in washington you have got president johnson's efforts to support the civil rights movement and all of things going on nationally. so you know it looks to us in greensboro like you know this is past time for you to open the city. so what happened in greensboro was this growing mass movement with adults community people cleargy people and students all going downtown to march and

volunteering to be arrested. so we filled up the jails to the point where they had to beg people not to get arrested and that was a whole struggle. here at bennett college they tried to tell my aunt to call off her girls and tell them to come back to the campus and she said no, i am not doing that. they believe they are right and if i have to give exams in jail that is what i will do. and a.n.t guys had a struggle with their president and they finally had to bail them out of jail because ant is a state school and there was pressure from the governor. so it became a tussle between the city and the colleges and the african-american community. and we were not going to give up at that point. they could not keep arresting 200 people. they didn't have anywhere oo put

the people. they were housing, the girls at bennett were housed not just downtown at the police station but at an old hospital where the polio epidemic had been and out at the armory because they had nowhere to put them. they had 37 girls in a room with five mattress. but when you do this kind of movement and you have them on the run it is like there is no way we are going to make it easy for you by not getting arrested. see, as long as you have this position that if you go in this restaurant you are trespassing, and we are going to arrest you, so we go in knowing they will arrest you. if you stop going in the restaurant you have said we have

wrong and you are right. you don't do anything wrong, you just put people in a situation where they have to see they are wrong. you would be interested to know greensboro was the last city of major size in north carolina to integrate. having been the first to experience the sit-ins. when you talk about a foreman of experience. opening the door and getting in the car it is like, okay this is it.

that particularly moment said to me this is a huge part of who you are. that you will take a stand for what is right. and you will not worry about the implications of this and the risks you are taking. this is who you are. and you do this out of love not rage and anger. you do it out of love. >> during booktv's recent visit to greensboro north carolina we toured the university of north carolina with a special selection of memoroirs that provided military information. >> we stopped by to learn about the changing role of women in the military through the

archives. >> women in the war. united states navy nurses line up and every day new ones are being called to duty ready to follow the fleet to any battlefront. they know one code. ism service to humanity. women as always the heroes of all wars. >> women have always served in some role in the wars of the country. in the revolutionary war, women followed their husbands to battle and help out with cooking, laundry, volunteer nursing, some of our earliest materials are some of the civil war. this is a 1910 publication but out by the citizens executive committee of new jersey honeoring

the civil war women nurses. they have current photos and biographies of some of the women we served. we want to try to collect books that might be not put out by major publishers. some were like maybe we should just have women to be part of this. >> the conversation of manpower is a matter of first imporetance.

these women are taking over the jobs of soldiers behind the lines and here at home. >> so these women wanted to remember their history wasn't being collected and they just wanted to tell their stories. so this is some women in world war ii in the army. here was an army nurse. two army murs nurses and a combat nurse and a lieutenant colonel here. the wasps were not actually in the military. they were civilian pilots that zoneed to help in the war effort and were trained and certified pilots. they tested and flew them from where they were needed and helped train pilots and flew for target practice.

they were started in '43 and trying to become part of the military but they were disbounded in 1944. some of the other books in the selection do an overview of the idea whether women should be in the military and what their worth is as a society and is this a good idea. >> there goes one of those petty coat soldiers now. >> what do you think of that? >> she is crazy. what does a woman want to be a soldier for? >> just a waste of time. this is a man's war. >> when the women were made part of the war in world war ii the idea was this is just for the

duration and women were allowed to be taken away after and allowed to be nurses. turns out the military thought the women were doing a great job and wanted to keep women in the military. so in 1948 after much lobbying women became an official part of the united states military. they had separate branches and they could not be more than 2% of each branch and they could only rise up so high there was a limited number of positions for women and they could not rise to general or admiral or anything. this is the year they indutegrated the arm forces as well. the militarily was the only place where women and, you know, minorities/african-americans, would be able to receive the same pay as white men. some of the other interesting books we have are cartoons.

we don't have modern day ones. but again, when women were part of the military, world war ii was odd. wenny the whack, vick herman was poplar. his views were pinup like. a few were shooting out ranking men. but she is girly. this person tends to be i don't want to say realistic but more accurate depiction of what the day-to-day life was for the women. the last type of materials i will show and talk about today are recruiting materials. this essentially is called a recruiting brochure and i think they are very important to see

the role of women and the perception of how you are trying to basically make it okay through society and make at a appealing for women to join as well. >> in 918, we were on the sidelines. -- 1918 -- when the war has been won, women in the army will march shoulder to shoulder with men in the great victory parades as we celebrate the return to the world. >> this group is from world war ii when it just started. and we will focus just on the army. this is before women became an official part of the military. the army was the first to militarize women but they didn't have the same rights and benefits and status.

so they were the auxiliary. when the navy accepted women they dropped that and women became on official part of the army. so '42-'43 is woman started fighting. here is the idea we are freeing a man to fight. very patriotic. and it is recruiting them showing the uniforms. here we have another page. this woman was the first director of the women's army core and again we are focused on being patriotic. you can see the u.s. army air force. we didn't have air force until after world war ii. you could cheese all of these

jobs besides clerical and i am not sure if they would give it to you but you can chose radio operators, drivers, books, bakers telephone operators, and some of the women worked in other areas. this one gets a little odd. i don't exactly have the year. this would be after world war ii if you notice the woman are encourageed to go home and no men left the military. so the military is like what can we do to get women back. well it seemed to be a lot more focus now on you know you will retain your feminimity and be a normer girl if you join -- normal girl. this entire book is about being a girl and dating. she is doing her job.

but pretty and wearing dresses and dating officers and apparently she is getting married and going grocery shopping. in the '50s and '60s this is my favorite. barbara isn't knowing what to do with life. she meets a woman at a party and joins. and our concern is the uniform. there is nothing more dashing or trim than that of a young women in a tailored and styled uniform. that is a whole different thing than joining and helping the men win the war. this is an entire recruiting packet. your fashionable choice again and chosing your job.

'70s and ''80s we saw some materials. when i see recruiting i run up to see what what they are recruiting and how. this selection analyzes women in society and the military so it is specific stories but it is also bigger and look at bigger issues in our culture. women, you know, they still you know, feel very undervalueedd. they are 10-15 percent of the armed forces and have a different experience. what we are learning from the

oral history in world war ii is they were considered separate and now more integrated so the issues are different. but, you know some women had very good experiences, some women had very bad experiences, but even the ones with bad experience were proud of their service. and that is kind of why i read this. just to make sure this history is preserved. >> love and loyalty to one's country have never in exe exclusive attributes of celebrating the country. today our women will meet the challenge. >> i will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. >> and that i will obey the

orders of the president of the united states and the orders of the officers appointed over me according to regulation and the uniform code of military justice. so help me god. >> booktv this week is in greensboro, north carolina. mark elliot is up next. he follows the life of a leading proponent in racial equality. >> he wrote a best-selling fictional account of his own life having moved to north carolina after the civil war and taking part in the reconstruction of the state. i was fascinated with him and his story and trying to find out how much of what was included in

that fictionalized account was true history. before he moved here he grew up in the northeastern part of iowa which was the western missouri of ohio which had been settled mostly by families from new england and his own family was from massachusetts. he grew up there and you know we lived on a farm. he was a farm boy growing up. he was the first in his family to go to college which he had to pay on his own dime because his father didn't support the idea. he went off to had university of rodchester. he wanted to go to harvard but it was too expensive. he only had enough to pay for one year at rod chester and started working to save more for college when the civil war broke out. he was one of the first

volunteers to respond. less than 48 hours after lincoln put out a call for troops he signed up. he was out of school and saw a new direction for himself there. when he fought in the war he was injured severely at the first battle of bull run he injured his back so severely he was paralyzed for a few months. he rehabbed that injury went back to the front, served again for more than a year but reinjured the back and suffered various other injuries ge shop shop -- and he called it quits and went back to finish school and got a law degree. when he originally moved to north carolina he came as part of a group. he came with his wife his

wife's family including sisters and his wife's parents, and some of his friend who were business partners. he had a law degree. and they all came down because there was cheap land right? and good business opportunities. and the state of north carolina was actually recruiting people with capital to invest and skills to help lead and serve the modernization of the state. so we came with the expectation he was going to be part of a wider movement of justbriing north carolina into the modern world. but what happened was he got caught up in the politics of what was going on when in the initial stages of reconstruction african-americans who were emancipated during the war were being forced back into conditions almost exactly like those they had under slavery and

he was one of the many who said we fought the end this. this isn't the result of the war i fought for. he became a leader of the state, a framer of the north carolina constitution of 1868 he was one of the most influential delegates there and wrote a good part of the constitution and served as a superior judge when the klan was at their height trying to overthrow people like him in power in the state government and intimidate black voters and poor white voters who came out to support the republican party and what the program was all about. and reinstall the old order. there was a lot of political ferment and there is a seen in the novel where the main character, who is him, is

dragged on stage because white southerns have having a meeting and they say we want to know what you think. and he got up on stage and does tell them what he thinks event eventually eventually. and i suspect something similar happens here. he is giving speeches they are being reprinted in the newspaper, he is chosen to go represent southern republicans at a conference in philadelphia where he goes and he talks about the atrocities going on and he mentions a story he heard from a quaker in greensboro of 15 black murdered bodies dragged from a pond. the pond was in south carolina. well the story goes out to greensboro and the conservative press and they say he is lying

to the north and making up stories. they claim 15 bodies were found in the greensboro pond. a lot of misinformation goes out and pretty soon there is death threats and people want the family to leave and business partners sever ties with him. he made it clear the stories wasn't about greensboro but sticks to the story and sources and eventually when he comes back he makes a stand and joins the republican party and gets elected to the constitutional convention as the representative of gill ford county. one of the things i have the documents discussed in the book, is a listing of 15 points that he advocateed as a representative to the constitutional convention.

and one was equality of all people regardless of race equality of rights of everyone everyone to vote free public education for everyone in the state which all of things ended up in the constitution and guaranteed by the constitution and changing the tax code to put the burden of taxation back on landowners. so there was a pretty radical program there. it really meant -- it wasn't just a revolution in making democracy stretch across racial lines, but also abolishing class privilege which is a big part of had power structure in north carolina. he crossed all kinds of racial lines making the city ostracize him. he was viewed as a puculiar fig

injury and marginal to the social life of town -- peculiar figure -- and he helped found bennett college and was part of the founding of that school which was right by his property. so for the black community, in greensboro they saw him as a powerful friend. and certainly a trusted figure. as a justice, he also was hefb heavily criticized for what people thought was bias toward african-americans. and the black community criticized him because they felt he wasn't catering enough towards him. he got criticism from both sides

and eventually he was praised by a lot of conservative justice who said he did apply the law fairly to all people even when it was dangerous for him to do so. and there are times where he wrote editorals in the newspaper and one of them i got the title of my book from and he said the laws also depicted blind and justice should be at least color blind. and in that editoral he says i will know no man by the hue of his skin. probably his most important contribution after the reconstruction period ended up being in the 1890's when he founded one of the first nation civil rights organizations. he founded it in the response to

the waves of lynching that were taking place. in the south, we used to write about lynching in his columns and he learned about them from blacks in the south writing in or they would send a clipping from a national paper. started reporting on the lynching and the jim crowe laws in new orleans when they passed the separate car act he called on the people of new orleans to protest this act. this act required railroads to seg segregate citizens into white and black and he said this is a violation of the amendment and called on them to passively protest this law.

when the sitcitizens of new orleans did that they eventually contacted him asking him to lead the federal movement. so he brought a case that went all the way to the supreme court. a man named plesi refused to get out of the white car and filled a lawsuit against the railroad and eventually it was heard by the supreme court. his side did lose that case. it was a devastating loss because the ferguson case and ferguson was the judge in the original local case established a principle that became known as the separate but equal. that came from the law itself

requiring that the railroad provide separate but equal compartments for each race. what does that mean by equal? the supreme court said if you want to assume they are not keeping their end of the barg' barg' -- bargain and the accommodations are not equal, go ahead. but we don't see anything violating this. he made a series of arguments against the law. bringing back the principle that the law must be color-blind. the law doesn't have the power to classify as white or black. citizens are citizens. and we made a number of other points including you have to look at the whole history of

slavery when you are classifying people by race because this isn't a benign classification. some said we have ladies rooms and men's rooms. and he said that is different. the purpose of this is to stigm stigmatize others. and it is said our constitution is color-blind and knows no color differences among citizens. that is a para phrasing of the brief. in the '50s civil right activist looked back on that when they challenged the legaldy of segregation. and in the brown versus board of education case they looked back

to that as well. that case explicitly says the decision in was wrong and must be overturned. and very few times where one supreme court court looks back and says one was wrong. at the end it is all i have done has been a waste and all been for nothing. we are in the worst place we have ever been. much worse than under slavery. he felt the world was headed in a terrible direction instead of more equality and people being judged on things that are not the color of their skin but based on more than that. personally i can see the longer road than he could and i can see those ideals he had didn't die out. when he reached the end of his life they were at a bad place

but they came back again. but that struggle continues. i guess it all remains to be scene. >> and we spoke with charles bolton. author of poor whites in the anti bellum south. >> there have been books written about almost all groups in the south. planters non-slave holding landed farmers called yomen farmers and of course slaves. but there wasn't much written about the poorest white group in the south and that is people who were landless and slaveless and represented probably 20-40 percent of the white population wherever you looked but very little was written on these folks. i wanted to see what i could

find out and see what their lives were like and add to the story. i focus on central north carolina including greensboro and northern mississippi. i tried to identify real individuals that might belong to the social class and in looking at papers of wealthier people. and sometimes there was letters and i knew it was one of theirs usually because they were ill literate. and north carolina had an insolvent debtors law so when people had to apply to take the benefits of the law they had to file documents about the property they owned and that gave me information. and i found information in criminal records because one of

the places were they were visible is when they were prosecuted for crimes. and little problematic source because most of the people that i was talking about were not criminals. but they shared some of the same aspects of life in terms of what they did for jobs and family relationships were like and you know these people in these criminal records you could see hat. i have very few voices of these people. a lot of watt i have is looking at the circumstances through the various records. the book starts off with an amazing story. i found one autobiography of a poor white man and as far as i know that is the only one we have of a poor white man. one thing that made the study of slavery so rich is we have the

wonderful slave narratives that the were recorded in the 1930s. we don't have as much or hardly anything like that poor whites. but this one story about a man who was born and group in a mining town in north georgia. we moved around looking for work in alabama, tennessee, went to arkansas and couldn't make it and came back ending up in central north carolina where he took a job in 1859 digging ditches for a local landowner. they got into a dispute about his wage. he murdered the man and was eventually executed by the state of north carolina. but before he did, his defense attorney, the man assigned to be his defense attorney who is from here in greensboro took down his life story. so we know details about, for instance, all of the various jobs he did, the fact he was so

mobile. a lot of the same things the poor whites did but he is very atypical because he was a murder and not many of the poor whites i talk about are murders. i don't really have those voices or kind of individual personalities that come through the way he does because those documents don't exist for people in this social class. i have a lot of fragments i tried to put together. they filled in as a casual labor force and plugged the holes in the labor needs of people who own slaves or non-slaving farmers would use their labor. when they were farmers, they were tenant farmers where they would usually pay a share of the crop they made to their landowner as the rent. or might be sharecroppers.

these are familiar to people looking at the south after the civil war. but this was before. sharecroppers were labors who were paid their wages in food and crops. but they also did other things. they were day labors. many of them would find themselves working in the field for a few days for a farmer or a planter. sometimes they would be working side by side with slaves in the field. and they worked on the railroads. they mined. and especially in north carolina there was a lot of mining concerns. there were even early lumber mills and cotton mills in these areas they would find jobs there. but most of the jobs were temporarily. they would be living in you know whatever kind of dwelling they could throw together which were makeshift often times. they might be living on a place that might be on someone they

knew land or whatever building was there. and looking at the property list of these folks in things like the debtors records the most common property that they had -- they usually had kitchen utenisils. some furniture but it was limited. usually a bed which is something that can be easily moved. they had some clothing but not much. and many of them had some livestock. maybe a hog or cow. ...

allied in greensboro, we are looking at a collection pretty distinct, over 450 world war i pamphlets that are in our holding so we will do a walk through today. what stands out with this collection is it runs the gamut of combatant countries during world war i so there are pamphlets, heavy representation of pamphlets from great britain, france belgium, a large collection from the united states but also the german empire pamphlets from russia as well. i would like to show a number of examples, and one of the first

appearances of pamphlets happened after the outbreak of the war and breaks out in august of 1914 but pamphlets are produced for combat and countries about the war. and place blame on who caused the war. in industrial countries getting involved in this war. many recognize the need to recognize public opinion, to sustain the war effort. and a very lengthy and bloody war, and there was discussion about germany itself. the allies really play off of the theme of german blame and there was a long discussion about what drove germany to work but a lot of the allied path

talk about that, and german militarism and the pamphlet in front of me, british and american pamphlets, to talk about german culture. it is interesting. when they make a speech about germany going to war. and the german way of life. british translators and talk about german culture somehow inherently militaristic. the templates here, to dominate central europe and push into,

and colonies overseas. and we looked at diplomatic cables and walked their readers through. and the assassination of the arab parent, and the document here, the history of 12 days basically takes you, these are cables, french and british cables, and these other ones do the same thing you have french and british intellectuals and historians being asked to write documents, they looked at early diplomatic cables and pamphlets to talk about it. what i think is fascinating is we have a counter response. german pamphlets talking about the events leading up to the

war. austria hungarian book that also keeps its own set of cables that talks about beating up to the war and the red book the blame is on austria and area, it is actually on the country of serbia. they blamed serbia for the cause of the war, the ally of serbia is really the aggressor and push the war forward. germans tend to blame russia for this and the british sort of pushing their way in into the war and forcing germany into what they think is a defensive war. on the underside the french generally blame the germans because germany invaded, they are occupying northern france. what is fascinating is this is being sold to the american public and the united states was deeply divided about the war. you had a very pro war week of

informal civilian groups that supported great britain and you had a very significant german-american population who are very sympathetic to germany and might have been forced into it. it goes to a fundamental issue of how did these industrial countries that previously had interlocking military alliances with international crises before world war i they worked these issues out before. there were times when things flared up, european countries going to war but they haven't gone to war. they worked it out through international mediation and negotiation and for many europeans they couldn't figure out why they couldn't have solved this issue. there's a political reason for these documents but fundamentally they are trying to respond to the general populace couldn't figure out why these countries are going to war.

and officially the united states was a neutral country. it wanted officially to do business with all the parties, the idea of freedom of information so they allow this literature to come in. they were tracking it, they were aware of it, the embassies in the united states trying to influence public opinion as well. though wilson administration was very concerned about being pushed 1-way or the other. a lot of posturing by the combatant countries but also there was a sensitivity to influence domestic public opinion and that is a political issue as well especially in 1916 election where you now have your being at war for two years and

the question is what is the united states going to do it? it is clear the united states is trading heavily with great britain and france and russia with germany. then there is a question of germany itself is an occupying country, occupying belgium and luxembourg as well as northern france. one of the big themes for britain, belgium and france is ed discussion that the german army in its willingness to break an international treaty the neutrality of belgium, that they were somehow a rogue army that was breaking international convention. prior to world war i, there were a number of international treaty inventions to talk about war and

the proper conventions of fighting a modern war. this group of pamphlets here does talk about those types of attacks under civilian population, not just on those military, talking about how the civilian population is coming about. things like german atrocities or desired army there's a great example called through the iron bars which talks about the occupation of belgium by german troops and they talk about things like slave labor using civilians to bills munitions for them but they draw, some of them draw on what they claim as documents from these occupied areas. fascinating in looking at this mix of documents is the atrocities team has picked up

again come up with their own documents, and occupying belgium, talks about the fact that it is a belgium government, and these atrocities stories. and what is interesting is by 1917 the united states is also publishing propaganda about this atrocity. it has not gone away by 1914-17. and they're using it in their own aspect explanation why they're going to war. number of these are talking about why justification of why britain is in the war, and they are establishing a blockade. we have counterresponses by americans talking about the need for freedom of seas, having the

international right to trade. what you are starting to see by 1916, 15, 16. and u-boat's and german crime, neutral allied shipping this gives you a sense of what is being said. dealing with trade and also with an american politics. the next group of pamphlets a relief fascinating collection because, these pamphlets. and 15 countries are involved in the war, the declaration of war in april 1917, president wilson

establishes a committee for public information. the head of that committee is john crow a supporter of president wilson, a newspaper man he was a reformer, strong backer of wilson and he appointed into this position of the chair of the committee. this committee actively ramp up in 18 months, to really drive a message about the war itself. the american public bind this war. wilson is concerned about conscription and the united states civilians are going to support to get men mobilized to

join an army. and the influence of propaganda from combatant countries that we are at war with. and pacifist groups there might be a message to what you wants to do. and his appointed to the center should board, they have some informal censorship rules the crow is issuing to the american press newspapers but there is also some state pressure, we have a number of documents, on a committee public information, it is a fascinating story they start to publish their own national newspaper about the war

effort. they start publishing of the war information's ceres in these pamphlets, world war i and they published over 100 pamphlets using american academics said they are mobilizing the academic community. this is a council that gains control, they have their own war photography foreign nationals dealing with women and work and it is the massive effort that you never referred to as propaganda and information shearing. then you understood why the united states was going to war. these deal with financing of the war. this is another issue americans had to deal with, conscription meeting draft, and issues about taxation. and how to pay for that war?

concerns about that, how do you get infusions of cash, there were a number of liberty loan campaigns during world war ii war bonds, raising money for the war effort. big public events to support these things and pamphlets talking about how we are financing the war, and the liberty loan campaign, the idea was you are not mobilizing to fight in 04 and war. their arms propaganda before recruiting posters in other wars we have mass media.

daily newspapers and cities, some cities have to newspapers going midday sun in the morning and afternoon, and also film, newsreels going on, the telegraph, information coming gone, people are a little more connected. that is why this type of propaganda is so huge. there was a real this taste after the war of the idea of being manipulated for propaganda and a push back by congress a popular sense of being manipulated which may have influenced postwar politics and concern of state power at that time. >> on booktv, a literary tour of greensboro, north carolina. we start our trip with jerry bledsoe and at the 11 whose book "fire in the belly" tellsjerry neal

whose book "fire in the belly" tells the story of rf micro devices, time-warner is our partner. >> we're here with a jerry bledsoe co-author of "fire in the belly," build a world leading high-tech company from scratch, and jerry neal, co-author and founder of the company rf micro devices that the book is based at around. why did you write this book? >> i was hard pressed. i was getting calls from cheri's assistant on a fairly regular basis and i said i don't do this type of thing. and fedex truck pulled up in the driveway, and a package and a letter from jerry, if you just

come and talk to me, come and talk to me let me buy you lunch, fix you lunch, so i call his assistant kathy, tell him i will come just to get in to quit bothering me. i will come and have lunch with him. so i went and changed my mind. of course i met him. >> why did you think it was important? why jerry bledsoe to help you write it? >> the company had grown extremely fast. i wanted something to be passed down to feature employees so that they would not lose the essence of what happened in the early days of the company,

extremely rapid change and so in order, very familiar with a lot of different business books, i didn't want to do the traditional business book. i wanted to do a book that actually told a story and i figured that is the easiest way to learn, through stories rather than just a bunch of facts. for people who read jerry's work they know he is the master storyteller and the best in the business so i figured this isn't exactly what i need. >> another aspect of it is jerry is a very funny guy and once i discovered that and we started telling stories and laughing and joking and realized we could work humor into a story about a business. and actually it worked pretty well i thought because i was reading some of it this weekend

and laughing at it. you don't see many business books with humor in them. first of all i did a chapter that followed this story of communications from the time the first electric car flew through a wire. all through the whole development, one whole chapter brings this story up to the point where we are now in communication. you can communicate almost instantly with anybody. that is not the thing for most of them. all the complexities, the way these chips are made and materials they are made with and all of those things could actually be told and keep the

reader involved in this story. >> one of the things, we had probably at least three near-death experiences, the creation of the company. and concerning a contract the we have got a division of actual wheat the electronics for them and they want to put the cellphone in a car that was -- seems so common now. as a company, we had probably ten employees solely contract did to do a power amplifier, the component that provides energy that sends a signal from the cellphone to the tower.

we had never done a power amplifier before. we believed we could do an extremely small amplifier and all the amplifier's, the ones we were going to do had been large devices sell my partner a world-class, we took this contract and we started working at this power amplifier and got the first samples back from the fabrication facility. this device is the size of a flake of pepper so extremely small with gold wires that come out and you have to look at a microscope to see it. got the samples back, the first ones after three months and it worked great from the very first

except it had a problem with it that would occasionally vaporize. so the thing you would be working with and all of a sudden it is gone. during the course we try to figure that out, the chief scientist, dr. don greene wanted to come to our place and see what progress we were making so this has a bug. we prefer you wait a month or two before you come. so we said go ahead and come but we have not little small building, it was 1800 square feet where we were developing all this. dr. greene showed up and we had a unit of the work bench and was

operating beautifully. and a cup of coffee, he says the ship is gone. it had a bug in it. that is it. it vaporizes. and so he said what are you going to do? my partner bill was not a man of a lot of words we were going to fix it. he was not really confident about that. i need to dictate at memo to the corporate office i will need some privacy so we said we need privacy we either go into the restroom or we go outside to the parking lot.

i will go out to the parking lot. he went out and filled out a little dictation machine across the parking lot. we look at the blinds and said i wonder what he is saying out there. he was dictating not memo these guys will never develop even one power amplifier much less one that we can use. a week later is a canceled 100% of the business which at the time 80% of our total business. you can and mansion investors are concerned, we could get that thing fixed and it became the signature component for the

company. >> cellphones around the world -- >> you say that without blood mobile phone industry wouldn't be what it is today. >> that is right. the company and able to a lot of that managers asian that took place. >> when whatsis rf micro devices founded and how did that go? what were you doing prior to the company? >> action will be the three of bias worked together for over tenures and analog devices was planning to try to do this on their own so they went to a remote office to start the initial work.

it turned out that was in 1988. they worked for a couple years and made some progress but not fast enough for analog devices and there was a recession in electronics about that time. in early 1991 in january the corporate officers came down and met with bill and howell and laid them off, gave them a severance package and gave them a good deal on renting the equipment that they had and actually gave them a license, the technologies they developed during that time. they were good friends of mine so they asked me to join them as a founder and of course i didn't

have the money. i set if i can get myself laid off, i will join you. the founder of analog devices in boston. i scheduled a meeting with ray and went to see him and told him i wanted to be laid off. and get a severance package. he said he couldn't do that but if i could get the local people in the greensboro division to agree to lay off than he would agree to it. so it took me -- in january, it took me until may to get laid off. i got laid off first day of may and lay off at noon and had my going away lunch and by 2:00 i was in my office working with bill and powell.

>> at no salary. >> at no salary. they told me the money won't be a problem so it will be your job to get the money. we need a small amount for a semiconductor company bottom million dollars about to get it started. i found out how lonely it can be when you go out for the first time to raise venture money. that was my job and it took from may until fought following february to raise the million-dollar is. >> what made you believe enough in this product to leave your job and leave the salary and go out with these guys and try to create a company in a difficult industry to get started in.

>> i would say the main thing is i trusted these two guys. i worked with them for ten years and we have been into the semiconductor business with analog devices so i had absolute trust in them. and wheat had right before i got there, bill had worked on a business plan and i read that business plan and it seemed earlier in my life i had an entrepreneurial ventures that was not all that successful but i guess i still had that desire to be an entrepreneur and get back into it. >> they realized these huge possibility of everyone being able to talk wherever and whenever. i think they foresaw that before anybody else did that this was

possible, what we carry around now, tiny computers in our hands that can use anything research anything -- >> i around 50%. it is pretty good in the industry. >> go through this experience, the company as big as it became the learning experience, one of the biggest things, what was the biggest lesson? >> several points come to mind. the first thing is always higher people that are much smarter than you are. we had the division we talked about his genius and he was, we

tried always to hire people we fought actually had a great deal of ability may be more than we did in design or what ever. the next thing was we found that you give people tools, the best tools that they can possibly get so you hired the smart people and give them the best tools and you make them part of what you are doing and the first six years of the company we gave stock to all new employees so that they would feel they have a real stake in it and this was important. we also had a fun environment. its sounds a little odd. technology co. that is growing should be a lot of fun.

we want the employees to have fun. we were having fun. and bill always said our goals are two. to have fun and make money. that is what we try to do, whether you make money or not. >> for anybody that might be watching that thinking about leaving their salaried position won their own company, what advice would you have for them? >> if there's another way that you can be happy, do that. if you are an entrepreneur at heart, definitely whatever sacrifice there is to it, it is all fun. you have to be a person who

believes that you can't overcome whatever happens to come your way. so i think it is the most fun i had in my life were those huang days. we typically for the first six years work from 8:30 to level:30 at night and did that for six years. that is the most fun that i ever had in my entire life. >> almost seven days a week too. an immense amount of work. >> thanks for joining us today. appreciate it. >> for more information on booktv's recent visit to greensboro, n.c. and many other cities visited by our local content vehicles go to c-span.org/mobilecontent.

>> barack obama is the first, probably not the last african-american president you will cover. but his grade, is this high as bill clinton? >> because the first time and, i won't say in action but he did not come out. there are two different barack obamas, first term, second term we see a more as i say african american president who is african-american versus a president who happens to be african-american. he knows who he is. he is not ashamed of it. first term he had to be strategic. he had to be very strategic. there was a fight in the white house, he was the president who gave the black pharma payout after 17, 18 years of reading

this though he was the president who did that. took tactics. >> barack obama didn't make a stronger case his first term? >> no because looking back he had to be who he was. >> you can watch this and other programs on booktv.org. >> here is a look at the current best-selling nonfiction books according to the washington post. michael pillsbury starts the list with the 100 year marathon which looks at the economic and political rise of china. next is walter isaacson's history of the digital revolution.

>> that is a look at the current nonfiction bestsellers according to the washington post. >> now more nonfiction authors and books on booktv. steven brill, the founder of courttv talks about the effectiveness of the affordable care act with dr. ezekiel emanuel. [inaudible conversations]