best of her days bent on redeeming and affirming his memory. and that no man stood higher in the annals of history and alexander hamilton. it's a glorious thing. >> well, john, thank you for a wonderful 3 >> well, john, thank you for a wonderful talk. very enjoyable, so scintillating. my question is about the idea of duels. and to what extent were duels commonplace? was this duel between two high positions government officials unusual in 1804? >> no, it was not that usual. i don't know exactly what the account was but i would venture to say that in a 30 year period surrounding 1804, that the probably 100 duels that were fought in the greater new york area. all of them by the way in new

jersey because then as now, you can do things in new jersey that you can't do in manhattan last night even though our equally illegal. so they would go across weehawken into the battle there. they would assume that everything would be fine but in this case of course it wasn't. there was no, there was this code that doesn't exist today because our doesn't exist and, therefore, the need to pretend it doesn't exist. and for that reason it's just unimaginable to us. but at that time it was so ritualized its automatic ticket i think frankly that there were duels because there was an advocate of dueling. it was a process for doing that nobody would have thought let's go have a duel to settle this. we'll shoot each other at 10 paces. no. they knew that this was done and, therefore, it was done. and i think this happens where it's sort of a cold situation

more largely a culture buys into the notion, and any other time with any other group of people come it would be utterly bizarre. and today and it seemed as an inevitable as the sunrise. [applause] >> thank you. >> thank you very much. thank all of you. to our copies of the book is like to purchase want up front, and you'll be glad to sign them for you. and again we welcome you to come up and take a look at the letters we have up here. and begin if you want to become a member, the our brochures out in front. thank you. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> you are watching 40 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span's booktv, television for serious readers. microsoft founder bill gates reads close to 50 books a year and writes a blog in which he reviews several of his selections. here's some of what he read in 2015.

that's a look at some of the books bill gates read last year. you can read his full reviews of these books and others at his blog. >> the fascist militarist states of the axis in world war ii believe that the democracies, if you put enough stress on them, would break. in a sense that world war ii was fought on that proposition. and instead what we found was it was the democracies that stood up under the strain and it was the axis of the return militaristic model that broke. world war ii was a struggle

between competing visions of how to organize a society. i spent a lot of time in my first two books and novels in quite a bit more in my third book paying attention to the issues of media, press, propaganda, how the war was presented to civilian populations in that there is country. this is a subject that i believe is important. it is received surprisingly little attention in the literature of world war ii. watch another history of the pacific war but there's a certain amount of fatigue i shared with just the enormous pile of books that have been published that continue to come out every year. world war ii is in a sense over published. if you look just at the number of books published about certainly the war in europe but also the war in the pacific. the sheer number of them is rather impressive. every aspect of the pacific

campaign has received a good deal of attention so it certainly is a mature literature. think what's happened particularly indicates that the pacific war is that there has been a tendency to slice the subject into smaller and smaller pieces, and then to focus deeply on those individual pieces. what you have is relentless specialization. and what that results in overtime is a literature which is very rich, but also very piecemeal. and this has been a larger problem i think in this room of military history. it's treated so much as a sub genre, perhaps even a data, hermetically sealed off from other important aspects of history. it has been neglected in the halls of academia. there are various reasons for that, perhaps because there's this lingering view that the study is to glorify.

i remember a review of six triggers, my first of which was a friendly review but strays out of his lane, out of the lane he should stay in which is naval history and into these other areas of politics and diplomacy, and even economics. i a great idea stay out of -- straight out of my lane. i continued to do that can double in the future. future. i think that stay in your lane mentality has been a problem in military history. even more so in naval history which has often been treated as a subgenre of a sub genre, much of it written by scholars were in one way affiliated to the u.s. navy. the pacific war has larger dimensions which deserve our attention, the politics of the war, the diplomacy, the managed issues and managing a global coalition, foreign policy, social history, press and propaganda, the organization of the economy for more protection,

the planning for the postwar future in asia. all of these are important subjects that are usually completely omitted in military history of this conflict. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week.

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