scheduling updates author information and to talk directly with authors during our live programs. twitter.com/booktv. we continue our visit to augusta georgia with lee ann caldwell. >> guest: the book we are talking about today is sub five then and now. it's a book i wrote with the augusta museum of history so no better place to talk about the book and what we learned about the history them here in this award-winning local museum and we are in an exhibit entitled acosto story. it tells us about how augusta developed and how it then came to be the augusta that it is now. in 1733 and man named james

oglethorpe who was one of 21 trustees basically a charitable trust kind of like a nonprofit organization would be today came to savannah with a ship load of people who are going to start a new colony south of the savannah river. we are in the area of the museum now that talks about this early colonial era here in augusta. we have a picture of just augusta. she was the wife of frederick the prince of wales. you can think of them is sort of the william and kate of their day. they were married in april of 1736 and went oglethorpe came back from england after that marriage, he said he wanted a fort built in this area where the trade was going on to protect the trade and the traders who were here so the fort was named or princess

augusta the new princess of wales and there was another fort built in the south part of the colony that was named fredricka after her new husband so the royal marriage was honored by oglethorpe in doing that create fortunately in augusta as in much of the backcountry of the south the revolution was really a civil war. it was between people who lived here, those were loyal to the crown and those who are part of the patriot or revolutionary force. in augusta that was true and so some of the fighting has that sort of a real warfare civil war nature about it. behind me are the representation of a continental soldier in uniform. they would come to the area toward the end of the war and then what we would have seen here most of the war and that is

georgia militiamen. so you basically have two different armies fighting for the patriot cause. you have people within states who are part of their state militia as well as people who have joined with the continental forces under the command ultimately of george washington and washington would appoint general nathaniel green is the commander of the southern forces after 1778. after the american revolution of course the indian trade was over as farmers with dan and filled the backcountry and increasing numbers of land sessions from the creeks and the cherokees with which the indians all the way out of georgia. the initial farmers that lived in this area were producing tobacco. many of them had come from virginia and the carolinas where that was the cash crop and

tobacco grew in this area as well so in the 1780s, 90s, we see augustine's and people in the countryside producing large numbers of tobacco that was put into what were called hogsheads and moved into town and basically big barrels that were then turned on their side. and axl put through the center hooked up to a team of horses and then world to town. that was how people made their money. the roads on which they were rolled and came to be called tobacco road because they followed bridges to keep the tobacco from going through low-lying areas where it might get wet. so tobacco was the center of a lot of augusta trade for years and then in the 1790s, 1793 to be exact a connecticut inventor named eli whitney was working on

the plantation of catherine green outside of savannah and came up with an invention called the cotton engine or jen and that would make cotton for the first time muslim cotton in terms of short fiber. it would make it profitable because now you get this seems out from the fiber and so basically people switch from tobacco to cotton and from that period on,, the early 1800's on, cotton was king in this area as one of the planters right across the river in south carolina said and so for the entire what is known as the antebellum period before the civil war the countryside around augusta produced cotton. those cotton farmers brought a tear to market and well here they bought the goods and luxury

items and things that they would like to have from the merchants of augusta. augusta became an important part of the confederacy because during the civil war acosta was chosen as the site of the confederate powder works by george washington. the augusta arsenal was surrendered to the confederates in january of 1861 and produced munitions throughout the war, and so augusta was very much a part of the war but there was no actual fighting here in which would make recovery in the post-war period faster and easier for a augustine's so in the reconstruction period augustine's began to talk of the new south philosophy, let's use our canal and let's enlarge it and deepen it, built textile mills along it, stop sending our

cotton to the north for processing and process it here and make the money that will come from that right here. so after the war, well into the 20th century augusta was a textile center and it would remain that until the modern era when textiles like other parts of the south, textiles here began to move out of the country to other places. local history i think is the key to understanding history on a larger scale because a local community is a microcosm of what happens in the larger world. i believe we can't understand where we are if we don't know where we have been. we can understand why things are the way they are if we don't

understand how they got to be the way they are. local history provides that window for us into understanding our past and how it evolved over the years, which helps us know who we are as a people and why we are what we are today. for more information on booktv's recent visit to augusta and the many other cities visited by her local content vehicles go to c-span.org/local content areas

that some book to be a panel discussion on race and politics by the 17 annual harlem book fair.