the financial world that are good for institutions. you can be bought by private equity firms if you don't perform. but by and large, >> that answer the question for short-term problems, the risk that you are going to be taken over yes but there are all these companies that are highly elevated self. you think about a company like amazon.com which never makes a profit and yet it is still growing at a fantastic rate and yet my concern about amazon.com or microsoft or google is that they are so powerful and so strong that they end up dominating the market. and the big question is to what extent do we have reentry into these markets? i can see 20 years from now company like were doing the same for transportation. these threats are all too real and i think the financial market will have a

serious responsibility to make sure it stays alive and that the cc is going to have to step in. >> starting with the at&t. >> thank you we ended up agreeing on most things too. >> make your mind up, i will recommend again this book and thank you professor joel mokyr. [applause] >> welcome to convey on book tv. discover phoenix with a population of about 160,000 is home to arizona state university, one of the largest public universities in the country. with the help of our cox

communications cable partners , for the next 90 minutes we will explore areas three and culture with local authors. >> for two years, this country after the great fires of 1910 was traumatized and tried to take fire out of the landscape and the problem was that we put good fires and bad fires out. for the last 50 years, that's a long time in history of her engagement, we tried to put good fires back in it's really tricky to because once you've taken fire out , restoring it is like trying to put an endangered species back in. >> we also spoke with civil war and presidential historian brooke simpson. >> i make the past come to life, all right? so hamilton, who lives, who dies, tells the story, i'm the person that tells that story and i'm going to try to do it as best i can, as honestly as i can, as

balanced as i can but i get to do something fundamentally creative and say this is what i think happened. >> we begin our look at tempe's literary life with author david berman. his book on arizona's evan term governor george hunt. >> if you're going to write a history of arizona, you just can't ignore george hunt because he was so much involved in everything that went on from 1890 to the 1930s. the populist movement, the aggressive movement, the new deal. he ushered in a lot of reforms, brought arizona's water to colorado. he's at the center of everything. george hunt was born in a place called huntsville misery which was named after his grandfather. he was born there in 1859. he was then a part of misery

that was largely southerners from the upper south and north carolina, his family came from that area and he was raised on a farm which devastated terribly by the civil war. he was raised in poverty, really and had a very tough time. subsistence farming, he had to live on what theygrew. he had very little education . he didn't have, he had to work on a farm, he didn't have time to floor itself he was more than willing to find something else to do with his life and he decided he wanted to west. he wound up in new mexico and decided to go to arizona on a ferry and then he wound up in arizona writing the donkey in the town. he didn't know anyone.he

went very well before starting off washing dishes and he had all made a lot of menial jobs, became quite wealthy. he was president of the bank. in the meantime he decided he wanted to get interested in politics. it was largely the people who ran the government who were republicans because they were appointed by republican presidents but most of the people, the settlers, much of arizona was settled in compass areas in tucson and the southern part by southerners and to the north settled by northerners, their work that much people there but you had yankees here, southerners there but in the legislature, the democrats largely controlled the legislature. although what was happening then was the division among democrats who had a populist movement which basically was

strong among workers in mining areas. there wasn't too much of a farm movement as there was elsewhere but there was a movement which was wrong among minors. these were the first workers in arizona . before the advent of corporate mining, most mining took place in individual exercises that were either the side of the mountain or you attain something through a river or were in business for yourself. all of a sudden you need capital, you need organization, you need companies and the miners became wage slaves. there was all kinds of problems in terms of minors taking pay , unjust working conditions so there wasn't much education among minors. this led to the populist movement and he was selected on a joint ticket with a populist had territorial

legislature. but it was a time when he got into it when there was a lot of nationalism. populism then later progressivism. the idea that the government had a role to play in protecting the week, protecting the people who are just becoming wage slaves. george hunt, he was a rather attractive young man. and as time went on he couldn't ride a horse and was dangerous with a horse. he was nearly over 300 pounds at one time. five foot nine maybe. and he had a walrus mustache and he was not the handsomest of men. i don't think it had bonded him so much in speaking or appearance. he was a common guide but he

did worry about what people thought of him because he grew up with sort of a class by us. people thought he was a hillbilly and a sort of a hit . and he spoke horribly, he looked terrible. he was not made for the modern age of television by any means. but he had a great talent for one on one politics. people would think that they knew him and he thought he knew them. he would go to town halls and talk to people about their children and their aspirations or lives, how things are going. and when it came to that time again, he would say how is that son of yours? did he ever get his leg fixed? people were so impressed that he remembered all those things about them. and it's almost a style of

politics was so good for arizona at the time that it was just a state of small towns and mining campsyou could go in there and get to know everybody in about half an hour . and you know their families and they held up index cards and he remembered people. and this style was picked up by other politicians so successfully. governor hunt was elected for the first time in 1911. he got elected probably before he came to the state, went in office and turned away from the political issues and economic issues to work on an area with a lot of interest in the prison reform. and he cleaned up the prison, they had a snake hole where they tortured people and had all kinds of terrible things there and he got rid of that. he was the believer in scientific prison

administration, although people were not necessarily bad when they are born, they are turned that way and can be educated and saved and science can do thatand education can do that . so he was ready to let them get the mail they wanted, they didn't have to strike, he was inclined to treat them as human beings who needed help, not necessarily as criminals and george hunt was a progressive focused on progressive issues up until say 1920. well, 1924. he was as you may have remembered, in 1916 they said he lost the election and the votes came in in 1916. this was toward the end of the progressive period. he didn't think he did and he refused to vacate the office. he barricaded himself in the building actually.

the fellow who beat him, tom campbell couldn't get in. hunt said i'm still governor, go away. and this is true, they had two people contending to be governor of arizona in the supreme court stepped in and said hunt, would you vacate the building. so he did that but next year, 1917 he challenged the results and finally got reversed. so he came back in office. but after that, he wasn't going to run again for governor until 1918 he got an appointment to siamfrom president wilson . that was done largely because he had threatened to run for the u.s. senate against a democratic, conservative democrat who was close to wilson, marcus smith. and marcus smith said to wilson, do youthink we can get another job for george hunt ? make him an ambassadorship somewhere far away?

and so wilson appointed him ambassador to siam where hunt went for two years, largely spending his time planning to come back and run for reelection. he didn't, he bought a lot of antiques and trinkets that he sentback to people and of course , it's in the library here. he was trying to figure out who was going to vote for him, whether he was going to run or not and decided to run again in 22 he ran in 22, 24 and 26. he lost in 28 and came back in 2030 but by that time, the issues had changed. there wasn't so much progressive issues. it was an organized labor so that was the driving force. his issue was saving the colorado river through arizona.

he had this sort of proprietary interest in it. he thought the water that came through arizona, why can't we use it? he didn't think about the downstream people. he didn't think there was anything at all, he just said this is arizona'swater and they're going to need it someday . they need to protect themselves from it, they need to grapple our water. they were trying to get it fixed at the time. so i spent a good deal of the 20s on progressive issues, trying to save arizona's water. being routed from the colorado river into southern california. which caused, there was a number of causes in the state and it was a good one. he died in 1934 and he lost in 32 and then came back, he was fighting to come back in 34 when he died area but much of the establishment party was thereby 30s, 32 or 34. his influence was pretty low.

he was basically very relevant to the minds of contemporary progressives and he would say to be saying what bernie sanders is saying and a lot of progressives were saying so his ideas are not his, there are spokesmen there. we are looking at downtown tempe arizona where we are learning more about the city's literary scene. up next, we speak with stephen pyne about his book "between two fires: a fire history of contemporary america". >> for 50 years, this country after the great fires of 1910 which in the forest service tried to take fire out of the landscape and the problem was we took good fires with bad fires and in the last 15

years, it was a rather a long time. we tried to put the fire that and that has been very difficult but then that's the dominant theme and it's not one that's easy to communicate because what we see is news media are the bad fires. that's the conflict. that's what's sort of stimulates character in choices and the sort of deep, patient cultivation of good fires has been much trickier to do.we don't have a strong narrative. we have a good health narrative for fires as a battered, taking out hundreds of people, destroying communities in the 19th century, well into the 20th century and we have great stories of firefights. the crew digging in, battling or hiding out or trying to find some refuge. and often, the people that

write about it, the default to a kind of war story. you follow the cartoon through the campaign from beginning to end and you learn the personality. that could be adapted to fire but it's really not fundamentally what the story is about, it's very hard to tell the story of how you put good fire back in. there were of course horrific, catastrophic fires in the 19 30, the 20th century. the wildlands in the northern rockies, the forest service got serious. we are going to have fire and medical. they decided to wait and handle it but take every fire , address every fire so they could not become lost. you could never have the potential for the kind of full scale resistance model that we will tackle a potential threat before it has a chance to do anything. and this took a lot of a lot

of effort. it wasn't until the 1930s with the new deal and the civilian conservation clause that they had the wherewithal to begin tackling that country and at that point, the forest service jobs became known as the 10 am policy. the universal standard across the country, all environments and all settings, every fire by 10:00 the next morning. if you fail, you plan to control that the following morning and so on. the sense that we could once and for all by putting enough political resources and people into it, which we now have available, we can tackle it. and that lasted until 1860 and then you started getting real push back. so there was some institutional pushback, people didn't want the forest service to set policy. there were private landowners who wanted access to fire that they officially used it successfully.

a civil society emerges. the challenge was becoming a government monopoly for the call centers, research stations in florida was instrumental in this, the nature of conservancy becomes involved and what they saw is the series of problems. part of it was the substance monopoly and monolithic character that had evolved in the forest service and local institutions. part of it was the landscape consequences. grasslands and trouble lands were becoming overgrown with trees. forest had used frequent fires, that is every two or three years, the longleaf pine in the southeast, the southwest, and environments like that were not getting those frequent fires so they were growing up. stuff was building up. all the stuff that fell down was no longer being flushed out. the character of the forest was changing so you had continuity of fuel in the

service up to the canopies so you are getting different kinds of fires resulting. these particular forests are no longer adaptable. they are adapting to a particular pattern of fire, not just fire in general. and there were areas that simply had evolved with large what are called stance replacing fires that seem to regenerate. large chunks through the canopy and they received. this is how this is the kind of fire they need so all of these fire regimes are sort of out of whack and we need to get fire back in. partly because if we don't, we have these unhealthy environments. we also have fuels building up to the point that they still really disastrous fires that we can no longer control so even from a fire control standpoint, fire protection perspective you are losing the game area the more you keep doing this.

and most people can't live in urban settings of some kind of easy fire in that context. and that doesn't apply to wildlife, they are the. so everybody without a city is a problem solve. most fires that you put out in wildlife are simply problems put off and they become worse. the catalytic era is really 1954, the first billion dollar budget. , 34 firefighters were killed including 14 south canyon fires in colorado. why that particularly matter is the use two years before norman mclean had published a best-selling book, young men in fire, that gave a cultural context that it had not had before. and that proved critical, i think. that book did make the

difference . you think so what, people write books, does it matter? this book really did matter. this changed how the fire community thought about these fatality fires, resolved that they were not going to let this happen and it took a long time again to work all the mechanics out and that is now pretty well embedded in the cultural firefighting and fire management now. so given the names, it used to be the division of fire control but by the early 70s they are the divisions of fire management. we are going to find ways to work with fire, we're going to put fire back where we can. going to watch natural fires have some room. what does that actually mean? a lot of full start, a number of failures. i think now they are working mostly in the west with the concept of some kind of managed wildfires.

though they don't have to throw everything at it. they tried to control it in its tracks which they can't do anyway for a fire of any size. they are going to contain it, they're going to confine it, they're going to work with it . pulling it, pushing it there, protecting critical assets, keeping fire out of communities, detecting against the watershed, keeping it out of sequoia groves and so forth but otherwise work with these to get fire back on the ground. part of what is unhinged i think is the fire revolution was that by the mid-80s, that they thought this to be stupid geeky term was coined, it comes out of southern california but it's describing this consequences of unrestricted urban sprawl moving into areas that are naturally fire prone. and the firesthemselves, it's sort of the really deeply

held , even legal consequences of mainly two things that should be separated. and that first, the scrawls continue. we are decolonizing but there's been around a lot of rural landscapes and not just there. and that has restricted a lot of the maneuvering. partly because the public doesn't want wildfire in their backyard. they don't want smoke lingering, perhaps for weeks. while these fires burn themselves out or whatever. and they have by forcing this protectorate around these areas, the really shrunk the area and the large landscape scale, the space that had been there that you could play with to tackle fires in a kind of efficient, safe and

perhaps ecologically useful way. this problem had been sort of quarantine in the narrative about westerners and particularlycalifornia . and in some ways smith but the issues are really in the southeast now. and that's not a message most people are aware of or particularly indicated to. people want to move to a closet rural setting because they want what, some kind of nature? what peace, they want privacy , they want seclusion. they don't want to have to be burdened with all kinds of regulations and institutions and taxes and all the rest of it . but if they do that, unless they take active measures on their own, most of them are not going or they want to, they find they don't have any fire service to backlog and capacity is a huge issue. so there is an effort to build up volunteer fire departments and strengthen

federal programs through the forest service, help build up capacity. efforts to reintroduce controlled burning in these areas as a relatively benign way of keeping the problem under wraps. so there's now even legislation in some states that having landowners right to burn. that you follow those rules, you are fine. florida has even changed its liability considerations to put fire in favor of burnings. cause the alternatives are so awful. so there's a lot of movement going around. and we have a lot of experience with our cities, the 18th and 19th, early 20th centuries and we fix that primarily by political decisions. we are not going to have fires burning like this anymore. we're going to put in codes,

enforce the codes, we're going to build up detections and stuff. and despite all of the sort of voluntary efforts that are going on in many communities, that's what it's going to take. and it's unlikely that that will happen at a national level but some states are finally making those choices. that doesn't help with the backlog of 40 years of bad sprawl but it may help a little in the future and fire agencies are simply refusing to defend areas that are indefensible. they are not going to put people's lives at risk to save the structure. and so that has impact and there's a lot of talk about letting the market come in. fire insurance hasn't worked very well. these fires are not made. one category four hurricane, these fars fires are aboutthe

same level as a tornado . they are graphic and captured the imagination but in terms of the numbers, it's just not there so i think you're going to have a political decision that will establish a base level of the market to operate in, that's how we did it with pretties and that's what we're going have to do with these. the wildland urban interface which has alreadybeen mystifying in some ways, the wildland has a fire problem but there are houses around. we could invert them and say this is really an urban fire problem . and if you redefine it, then the solution is pretty obvious what you have to do. people may not like it but that's what it takes. this is not technically solve the problem. we know how to keep houses from burning. the flora is under our control but the larger issue is not one of a problem that we fix, it's a relationship. we have had a relationship

fire all our existence as a people. we are the catalyst.of environmental pollution for the planet. fire has really defined who we are. and that's not a problem you fix, changes. so we are always going to be between fires. because fires are always changing, we are changing in ways to change fire you get this mobius trip going on. and i think that's important. that this is not something okay, we just an act the right legislation. we pour billions into it were tens of billions into it, we fix the problem and it goes away. it's never going away. it's part of a deeper work. it's part of how we interact with nature. and that's a lesson we need to hear.

>> we are at sun devil stadium on the campus of sarasota state university in tempe arizona. the book tv is here to learn more about the city's rich literary scene. up next, we investigate institutions discovered by accident in the book accidental genius. >> so i had known before i started writing this book, i had known about many of these accidental scientific discoveries and i had learned about them in some level, some degree of detail but i have not really looked at them analytically. what makes this possible? once i have this book and was writing it and i began to collect anecdotes and look at them in more detail and gather people's lab books or papers that were published, reminiscences that happened many years after this happened, when i put those together i realized that there were three elements that had to be part of every

accidental scientific discovery. the first ispreparation. many people have seen evidence that scientists later on said wow, this is something cool. they bought because they were not prepared to recognize there was something unusual in what they had seen, they didn't pay any attention to it . other is the actual circumstance itself, whatever the accident is. i call that opportunity. the opportunity needs to be there to create or make an observation, create something that you observe or just observe something in nature. observe a natural effect. and the third element is desired. once you see, you know what you're doing, you know what to expect, something unusual happens. you are in this circumstance and something unusual has happened. now it's very easy in many different environments just toss it aside and say all right, that was interesting and move on with your work. scientists are just like

everybody else, they got a job to do. they are investigating and maybe investigating how to create a new dive for clothes. and they wouldn'tnecessarily occur to them to look at that guy and see if it can be used to cure disease . so when you see an effect like that, you can't just say that's not my job, i am working on making a dive, you have to have the desire to follow up , the accidental observation you have made. so just about everyone has heard of louis pasteur. louis pasteur is interesting because he is what we term in one very major sense a father of vaccination. he is not the first vaccine but he was the first one who created a vaccine where they had some idea about why things might be working so he started to create that scenario which ends up being the framework for all modern medicine, really. and louis pasteur had a

controversial theory and that is that diseases were caused by microorganisms. chicken cholera was and still is when it occurs a very debilitating and dangerous disease and it was also very economically important for agriculture, chicken cholera was killing a significant portion ofpoultry in france . and pasteur said i believe this is due to this infectious agent. he pulled this infectious agent out, what he believed to be the infectious agent. people that agent out and put it in bra. he would make a soup and would grow the microorganism by feeding it soup. and then he would take some of that bra and he would injected into the kitchen and when he took that bra and injected it into the kitchen, it died. to pasteur, this was proof that if this organism was causing the disease but

people were not all that easily convinced of the strength of his observation at that time he had to do this over and over again. he's doing this for a long time and it's time for summer vacation so he leaves and he leaves his assistant and says you guys, i miss back of infectious agent here. now, inject all these chickens. >>

make it now in this time you've got a big twice as much because we were behind schedule so it's got to affect about our chicken beard and a new batch is a rock that may affect a bunch more chickens. some that had been in with the old broth and some that were not injected with the old broth. every chicken that was not earlier inject it with the old broth died. every single chicken that had already been injected with the old broth lived. and they said let's do this again. he repeated the experiment. it turns out the pastor had the wrong idea for why this injection was working. now we know that when the body detects an infectious agent, it

begins to manufacture weapons against the infectious agent. normally are many times if the infectious agent is deadly, your body's response to that agent is lower than the agent can work and you either get really sick or died. but if you slow down that infectious agent and if you weaken it ahead of time so that it's slower, it can't type that can spell against your body's defenses comment in your body's defenses can get ahead in the next time you get that agent, your body is all prepared. so you and and check them with a weakened portion of that infectious agent. now voice we have fancier ways of doing it. a weakened version your body gets used to it and when the real thing comes on your body assault that.

you're gone. and it was all because of an accidental discovery that would've happened if he hadn't taken the summer vacation. so the story and his accidental discovery is a very interesting one and certainly has ramifications for the modern world, but one of the interesting things about accidental discovery is that the person who makes this observation, they need to pursue the observation to its logical end. he was the boss. if two guys working for him, so when he wanted to look at something that looked at it. it's tougher in the corporate world and not only today, but in 1938, for example. 1938 there is a chemist who is working for dupont and his job was to make new refrigerants, things like freon, the cfcs and

they had a process there is some well-defined chemistry for making these things. if a certain elements together and put them under pressure something that would make a good compound for working in refrigerators and other motors and other kinds of compressors. that was his job, to make new refrigerator. well, one day if they left their bash to set overnight chimeric in the next day in open up the gas bottles they get their reactions and, openoffice costs bottles and nothing comes out. he says it must delete. right there he could've said it must delete, he could have thrown it out and started over again. but he said what if it didn't leak. so let's would the bottle. so he went to bottle it up way

just as much as it should have with all the things in it. he said wait a sec and, it didn't leak, but there is no gas in there. so we unscrew the top of the thing in a little bit of white powder looking like shredded coconut was in there. they saw the final in half and pulled it out and there is this white powdery stuff coating the outside of this metal gas bottle. his job is to make it -- it's refrigerants that can be used at his company dupont came out to make money in their refrigerators and other things to require that kind of capability. but he went to his boss and says well, this material is cool. look how slippery the stuff is. so he was able to get the body and front office that he himself had the knee and the gumption to

say hey, this thing looks really interesting. it was tough one. tesla nowadays we think most commonly we think of it in terms of the nonstick pans even though we are a little bit move beyond teflon in general. teflon was the nonstick material. they had wire insulation and products. but in the 1930s, there is another problem that was happening. the world was just kind of discovery and atomic energy and one of the things that they discovered was that they needed this uranium and uranium comes in a form that is very toxic. it's very toxic, very caustic. it just eats through anything around. well, when you have a process where you want to push this

chemical through a jury kind of operation, when you want to do that, and you've got to have seals, valves, joints and it's a joints and as the referee make those things out of the centigrade and its toxic really nasty stuff and it's if. you don't want that. you need to have some kind of material to make it appear you can make bearings with it. you can attitude made against each other and yet they still maintain a good field and so slippery and yet so resistant chemically and became the perfect answer for confronting right at that time in the united states in particular. once again, this one is interesting because colgate has the preparation. he was a chemist. humility was looking for.

he knew what to expect. he had the opportunity. he by chance met the conditions just right to make this new material. but what he could easily have not had with the desire to follow it. he had a job to do. he had to ignore the job because it was something really interesting here and he had to then be interested enough that he can go to the boss and say this thing is really cool. we should take a look at this thing. the desire came through to him and that's why there's teflon in the world today. one of the prototypical examples of accidental discovery in the scientific community is the discovery of x-ray. x-ray was discovered in 1895 by bill hemmer lincoln. x-ray still known as rent and raise to acknowledge his seminal role in the discovery.

one of the reasons why it's an interesting discovery is because it makes it very clear that you need a lot more just and preparation and opportunity. you need that desire as well and this is why. around that time scientists are discovering the nature of matter. in the same way we are exploring it out. but this was before they even had a kind after the atom. the idea of the nucleus and electrons surrounding it was unknown at the time. however, they did find a new state of matter called cathode rays and you could make a cathode ray by taking a glass bowl like a light all more or less and put enough elements in it, but putting it very high voltage. it's a little more complicated than not, but that's the general idea. you can take that and see this being of 17 which was a cathode ray because they had no idea

what it was. now we know that the cathode rays are electrons. at the time they had no idea. well, many people were investigating these cathode rays, but it turns out something else is happening as well in addition to these cathode ray, there is another kind of radiation that was coming from this. pilgrim can solve he had just put some photographic plates down and he saw that there was an outline of an object on this photographic plates. he said that's not from the cathode rays because cathode rays don't do that. they don't have this effect on this film. and so he said i'm going to take a look and see what these things are. so what the cathode ray, if you put cathode ray and the magnetic field, belgrade. but he said will be things been?

no, they won't win. cathode rays don't go through very much. if you put a piece of paper they don't go beyond. they will go through piece of paper. he did a series of experiments over six weeks. it has been said that in six weeks he learned everything that would be known about x-rays for the next 100 years. the other things that have been learned since then, but he did such an exhaustive investigation of x-ray for about six weeks he buried himself and by the time he was done he had a complete understanding of the operation of x-ray. he didn't understand everything and in a sense he was likely. what he did not realize at the time was that x-rays are wet was called iodide stained radiation when they hit nonliving material, they will kind of destroyed a little bit.

bit by bit, just a tiny little day. over time it cannot up and be dangerous. luckily for rank and he did his experiments in a dark room and said he did that to keep light out. what he didn't tell us he was also protecting himself from the dangerous effects of the x-rays. people were exposed to these x-rays and began to develop lesions on their hands. but because the back of x-rays are used as a medically important tool for diagnostics. nowadays we learn message to significantly reduce the dose that make insensitivity much higher. without x-rays the whole science of medical imaging would not be anywhere near where it is today if it weren't for those six weeks spent digging into this. one of the interesting things is of course not only did rank and get some degree of fame for

this, which he did not really enjoy, he did not like the fact that in germany they called them ranking rays. he wanted them to be x-rays. but not only did he get that when he got a degree of fame, all these other folks come out of the woodwork and say i saw that, too. and they had. what if they do with it? nothing. they said that was funny and the last day. so this is one of the things that's difficult for people who weren't in the scientific field to say he was just lucky. you can be just lucky. it takes a lot by then. you've got to have the preparation to see something unusual has happened. you have to have the opportunity to see the unusual thing and that's a chance fire. part of that is directed by the more you look at things the more you'll see. do you need to also have that

desire and the people outside -- when people outside scientific and technological fields think of the role of chance, sometimes they think of it as winning the lottery. that's why you made the scientific discovery. you can see it unless you first put in all the groundwork to understand the basics of what should happen and when something happens that shouldn't have been, you have to know enough to question it and you have to have the desire to follow it out and that's why the story of x-rays is an interesting one in the scientific animals. the more we prepare ourselves at the baseline of knowledge for whatever it is we are doing, the easier it is for us to identify when things are unusual. once you are in a situation where you are given the opportunity to see something unusual, then you are not really in -- it's in your hands now. prepare yourself, work hard.

you have the observation that the hand of fate stepped in and show you something and now do you have the desire to follow it up? it could be something as simple as the place for and something happens an accident you descend in and say that really work and now you say yes but that's not the way i'm supposed to see it. but he followed up and see if i could really make this work. i think this happens and we can apply those principles in many different ways than our life and enrich ourselves by being the open to follow in this chance opportunities that present themselves to us. >> oftentimes early morning the house is quiet, nothing else is

going on. i can get some writing and i'm just shared. for the reason i can pay attention to my daughter, my wife and everything else during the day. during the evenings, early mornings, that is my time. i make it past come to life. lives, who dies, that tells her story. i'm the person that tells us right and i'm going to do it as best i can, as honestly as i can, as balanced as they can, but i get to do something fundamentally creative and say this is what i think happened. my routine and writing is sometimes the night before i take in some notes about things they want to talk about. sometimes sentence fragments and phrases i want to try out. i have a good idea by the time i get a run of my computer when i'm going to do.

i've usually thought about it quite sometime before that. most people know me as the historian's 19th century america, especially political and military topics. that area i am best known as the construction. wherever it about the united states military political leaders so most notably at the people well, abraham lincoln and other people. i spend a little time to write about presidents as a whole. i now bear that title is being a presidential historian when it comes to assert things. it can be very busy for me as the sesquicentennial was a busy time for me. one of the challenges is that you know you're not working with everything that happened, that

they have a slice of what happened. didn't survive, other things perish. so trying to take that material and say now let's find out what really happened. forget about what you think about it. forget about how you interpreted. what really happened? that i find history is don't understand what did happen. that can be challenging enough. forget about the notions that they have a prearranged agenda and an ax to grind and they want to celebrate their subject or denigrate it just finding out what happens is challenge enough many times. when you write about civil war generals, you are trying to get your reader to understand what that particular person understood. you know in hindsight what

happened in hindsight would sharpen your understanding. in fact, it's very distorted because now you know what the result was a new say why did someone do something as. well, history goes from front to back, not that front. you then have to say what were they thinking? what was their understanding? sometimes we can understand they made the wrong decision but at least we have a better idea why they made the wrong decision given what they do at the time. political figures is a challenge in a different way because they too carry their own baggage. you've got to think about the decisions they had, the options before, the reality before then. politics is possible the great political leaders expand what is possible and that distinguishes

abraham lincoln responded to situation to the bridge of opportunities and moved forward to some unlike ulysses s. grant who often found himself and in the notion of what was possible and do not do much to expand that even if he was frustrated by it. the moving target in terms of the popular awareness of him that when i started to write about grant as an historian, the most famous biography was william mcphail he won a pulitzer prize, to give largely negative view of grant. some saw it as unsympathetic entities that anything else, it was bound to be more positive. that said, by the time i started writing after a while it making the point about smaller, more focused ways first, other people began getting interested saying he might be safe if the

biographical topic and some of them too far in the other direction. at the beginning people saw me that i was going to correct the historical record and returned kuwait to its pedestal. now we've had a slew of grant biographies. people think it's safe to read about grant. they weren't around when i was writing. even roger noll is writing a great biography. when the big names come in that someone is now seem to be like the revision going on for 25 years, they are really coming in near the end. they are not talking about how they rehabilitate grant. it's not my object is paid by objective is to make you understand what ulysses s. grant was about, what he did, the names that we may find praiseworthy. we may find questionable. the man and not his humanity and

in that sense, the people at that age, i can identify with them as certain times i said why did you do that? i don't see myself as somebody who is there to raise grant a few pegs on something, i'm somebody scale of greatness. but i do do not see myself as someone who says this is what grant was about and i think in that way i try to be very fair and try to be dispassionate. i don't try to become enamored and i don't become hypercritical. what is the civil war popular? some people are still fighting and i think especially as someone who is fighting the americans saw through his married to a southern born

woman, many people interested in the civil wars were identified in a very personal way and talk about how we lost. they had nothing to do with this. they become very agitated when you say certain things about the confederacy because they take it as a personal attack and about their heritage and honor their ancestors. that's not the same as understanding below their ancestors may have played in that period. a lot of people get involved in this. very personally. reconstruction i think it different and reconstruction is different because people are interested in the civil war. let's go home. reconstruction is the story that americans not to pay attention to. one of the reasons is because the use of terrorism to reinstitute a white supremacists order in the american south, a

process that many white northerners acquiesce. that's another part of our past that we don't want to confront head-on and yet i think we must understand that and we must understand why after the civil war the united states came back together after a fashion but that the struggle for reconciliation to place by trampling over racial justice. americans have to look at the dark parts of their past, not just a celebratory prayer. i think it is something we have to pay attention to. the war in many cases still continues in part because reconstruction must so much undone. when people react to my writing are not enamored with it, first that is their problem. sometimes it is because people who read what other people write to assume that they come with an

agenda, that they do have here is villains that they are going to vilify and has areas come to their test with really solid ideas about what they want to do and they are going to exalt somebody or pray somebody. it is interesting to see that assumption. often in fact i see those critics are actually project their own issues onto me. one time i read a book on henry adams back in the 1990s, a sure boat commander would be controversial and historians the bike and literary critics enamored with hate it and would take issue with that even if they had to be grudgingly admit that i might have a point. so when the book came out in the reviews followed, and it was a review which said with simpson doesn't appreciate adam's great literary achievement.

that's not what the book was about. it was how henry adams tried to forge a political career and how he failed and how the failure was reflect the and historians make it their critics. i knew what i was getting into. history is never just the facts. it's how you put those facts together and how you bring the past alive to the reader and give your and light in the things that you know, making it work. that's a lot of fun. when the work is over and you can reflect on what you've written, that can be a lot of fun. that can be a really delightful moment. >> c-span is in tempe, arizona to learn more about his literary culture. up next to speak with carlos velez-ibanez on his book, "an impossible living in a transborder world."

>> premise of the book is both simple and complex. let me tell you how it started. i was doing work in central mexico about 60 kilometers southeast of the city and renew urbanizing area we had 10,000 people moving their permanent. i know it's been interested in two basic questions. one, how do people manage to survive when they shouldn't? two, how do they excel when they shouldn't be able to do that either? i have always been trying to get those questions regardless of where the fieldwork was. this particular case came almost by serendipity. i was asked by the guy who i was staying with and i said what do you need 100 vessels for? he said [speaking in spanish]

i said what is that? he says they get 10 people together and each one puts% 100 vessels and we take turns over it. have 10 turns in nature and get 90 vessels and the other people remain in the circle keeps putting back in 100 vessels. when your turn comes along you get 900 vessels. i said how does that work? i knew what a wise, but he explained that basically is a mutual trust. the people who participated are basically people who trust each other. i asked the basic question how do you avoid people just getting the money and taking off? he says it's a matter of trust built a new social relationship which is a very nice handy sociological kind of argument. the more i delved into it, the more i then understood that

these [speaking in spanish] here in the united states is in fact these are saving and credit associations that very as i studied them over a period of years. .. so every three months the other person to participate in this comp let's say there are 10 of them, they will be collecting $250,000, actually 225,000 they will keep putting in, putting their stock in over a period of 30 months. fable used that money for investment or to take care of whatever expenses you have any particular business, let's say i love mexican restaurants

participate in these kinds of things. that's what extreme the idea the extent it could be somebody who uses in mexico city come uses these 100 pesos, 900 pesos, buys a big box of kleenex, sells the box and makes 900 pesos. it could be used for that. it could also be used for ritual obligations. one of the ways in making sure you in fact need your original obligation, mexicans have a ritual cycle that begins more or less in christmas, divided by easter but in between christmas and easter that all bunch of other punctuating kind of ritual celebrations including weddings, funerals, baptisms, communion, confirmation, all of these events that need some kind of gift. what happens is people will time their tur turbine order to meett they did many social obligatio obligations. that in and of itself creates more density in the network

itself. every time you give a gift you will receive one at some of the time because one of her children's birthday is coming up. the collateral is constantly being reinforced and expanded as well because the people are coming in. ev don't know somebody and they want to be part of these, what you do is you lend to them. you lend your own collateral to the rest of the group to this individual and that individual is obligated to you to make sure they meet their obligations. along that line, you have to understand, as i looked at 135 of these, these are truly transborder. array to which people did not pay was .005%, which is infinitesimal. it's better affect to participate in peace, temperature money in the bank. one of the major banks in the

trade that was recently caught and expanding their service to all bunch of people that didn't need it. people don't put the money into a standard bank. in fact, select rotating savings for a lot of reasons. number one, ranks ask a lot of questions. if you're a poor person or a person of modest income and you don't have a lot of collateral, you don't have a lot of credit, and this is what you wish to get around that and participate in something that is guaranteed. a bank asks you to fill out forms after forms after force about your own personal identity, i.e., it's a highly individualized kind of transaction between you and this thing called a bank. it's not a social relationship. it is strictly an economic one and there's nothing coming back except for maybe, perhaps minimal interest. the government can't be involved with us of recent these are not purely schemes. if it were a newbie scheme, they would be illegal.

what you are doing i this rotatg the same amount of money between twin under 10 or 20 or 30 people. you are not making money unless it's what's called -- you have an organizer the charges in order for that person to organize everything. and to make sure everybody, that each individual has money to distribute it at the proper point in time. that kind of thing that is kind of an armed income for the individual but not for the rest of the participants. part of my obligation as an anthropologist and working in this particular area is to provide a closer approximate narrative to what the population is. there's an awful lot of stereotypes, an awful lot of negative information as well as what i would call racialized concepts of immigrant population, especially the mexican population in this region. being treated differently

because of the way you look or what you speak, this balance is that negative narrative that is even being used now in the presidential elections by at least one of the candidates. so in a way writing the book has three or four or five different list of reasons, one of which is to make that narrative more proximate to whom the population is. into a provide a kind of understanding, fundamental understanding of the cultural and social and economic behaviors of this population. and three, really to contribute to an academic literature really that didn't exist prior to that, except in very small terms. >> while ncp we visited tempe town lake to learn more about the city's growth from public information officer kris baxter. >> typically when we tore a city where on land come in a van driving around. we are not on water in a pontoon

boat. tell me, what are we right now and what's the significance of the water into the? >> we don't do things the normal way. we always try to do a little different. we're in the middle of tempe town lake. the interesting thing about this is most people don't have leaks that are brand-new. our lake will be 17 years old very soon. >> tell me why it was built. >> this actually used to be a very barren stretch of the salt river. the salt river runs quite a way throughout arizona and it was damned up in the 1930s when the roosevelt dam was built. this beautiful stretch of river bed that had fish and water flowing in it was dry and people actually through garbage and you. to in all kinds of horrible things to this end we worked hand in hand with the army corps of engineers. we took everything out of your that have been here for decades

and we are turn this into a lake. this lake is responsible for 1.5 million dollars worth of economic development. >> you lived here before this was a. what changes have you seen while pretty much nothing that you see here was here, with the exception of the two bridges. we're talking of buildings, talking about all of the shops, restaurants. the restaurants. nothing was here before 1999. so pretty much as far as the eye can see it's new and it's all, the lake is responsible for all of it. the reason our city exist is this is really great place to cross the river. where we are right now is exactly what our city was founded. >> tempe was originally are just because of the ferry crossing, absolutely. the building you see behind you, the white building, i was our original first business.

that's the flour mill. he doing the ferry and the middle this is how our city got its start. spirit what is the city like no? >> tempe, arizona, is one of the most urban and densely populated cities in all of arizona. we are the number one college town in america. we are doing amazing things. tempe is known for being innovative. turning the river into a lake is pretty original, right of? >> something you don't hear very often. >> one of the things we have to do is wedded able to great a lake that could become a river again. because there is water that runs from the salt river and it comes down this way. so it's not just afloat. we're going to put up a wall. when it rains, we would have a big snowmelt, this lake becomes a river year we can let out as much water as we need to and

then we can raise up the damn again and have a lake. >> how is a utilized recreationally. you have this done by polish and it doesn't drop people? >> this lake has 2.4 million visitors a year. it is the second largest tourist destination in arizona, second only to the grand canyon. >> did it grow the population? >> our population has grown quite a bit. we have condos. we have condos that are here on both sides of the lake. across the lake. just the sheer building of those have resulted in a lot of new residents. but beyond that the companies that you see, we are fortune 500 companies that is located here. part of it is because people want to play in tempe town lake. if you were working in this building behind you, a lot of people have stand up paddle boards in the office. they grab the board, walkout,

hit the water on the lunch hour all right after work and there they are. we have a lot of tech companies that are here. we have go daddy's that's just a few miles down the road. this is the lifestyle millennials want. our average age is 28 for our city. >> gary younge. do you feel that reflects in the community with new ideas and a lot of energy? >> the students put a huge role not only just in our community but in the world in general. one of the things, a huge amount of research, that college students are part of. they have a cure for ebola that originated out of the institute at arizona state university two miles down the road from me. they have built some parts for the mars rover again using students who live here. the inventions, the ideas, new companies are greater all the

time. >> why tempe? why do these businesses thrive in tempe? >> i really think the reason people come there is because of the innovative nature. there is nobody here that says you can't do that. we think that the best thing to do is say let's figure out a way to say yes. let's figure out a way to support your dreams. back to me is probably what makes us unique. we didn't say we like having an ugly river bottom. we said we want to have some pretty water, so how do we get that dirty water? we spent 30 years figuring out the answer. we started in 1965, this concept was created by asu, arizona state university, dean james and his architecture students came up with this idea. over 30 years we figured out how to fund. we figured out what it would take to support the annual maintenance of it. for about $100 billion we got

1.5 billion bag plus all these great places to work and truly hundreds of new businesses being generated just for the sake they want to be your. >> you are from tempe a rigidly. what do you want to see next? using all this growth can all these changes. it sounds like it happened rapidly. what is your ideal scenario for your city? >> you know, what i think tempe wants, the city itself, what i really think to be wants is to make the world a better place. not only that but our businesses, we have a lot of young people and really the goal is help its residents to achieve its dreams. that's the goal of any city. we want our residents to be able to do whatever it is that they want to be able to do. if they want to cure disease, great. if you want to open a popsicle stand, that's fine, too. if you want to come to work and have how were under lunch our, that's good. that's what we want for our city. >> here's a look at some of the

staff picks on politics and prose bookstore in washington, d.c.

>> many of these authors have will be appearing on booktv. you can watch them on our website booktv.org. >> this is a booktv on c-span2, 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors every weekend. from time to time we like to visit college campuses. we talk to professors are all full authors are on the campus of hillsdale college in michigan today and we're visiting with professor gary wolfram who's written a book called "a capitalist manifesto." professor, in your book you write that the roots of capitalism are ancient, so ancient in fact that they likely predate even language. in the development of civilization just. >> yes. i mean, people have been exchanging goods and service for a long time.

and people have been making things that they didn't exchange for other things that other people have. so that's really what market capitalism is about. it's about volunteer exchange between two individuals or a group of individuals. and so i would say that a fundamental aspect of it which is really a system of volunteer exchange where everybody is better off is, predates many roots of anything else. certainly government as well. >> host: would you say it is an eight transfer i would say certainly. all you have to do is look at a couple two year olds and see if they trade stop. i will bet you will find that they will. they may take something your two year old is trading to another two year old for stuff they really shouldn't be trading because of $50 book or something and the they're trading it for 3 pokémon. but yeah. people exchange.

i think they have that innate ability and instinct to do that. >> host: on a purist level where are we in the capitalist system today? >> guest: we have been moving in a different direction. and we, for example, if you look at the index of economic freedom that the united states is on comp it has moved from, used to be fourth and now it is 12th. if you look at how me things to cover it comes in and tells you, you can't make this trade, you can't make this exchange, we are going to tell you how you will produce, we have really moved in the wrong direction for a long time. i think part of that is because people don't really understand how the system works. they don't realize why they are so wealthy. adam smith wrote, he was looking at capitalism when it first started, wow, why is it we are

so wealthy and the rest, he didn't even have indoor plumbing by the nose we were wealthier than we ever were. he started to write about how the system works. part of the problem is i don't think we covered that very well in school, and i think people just don't get why they are so wealthy. the occupy wall street was an example of that. if you really thought about how the system worked or understood how it worked then you wouldn't be out there saying all by gosh we should have a government tell us what kind of insurance we should have. >> host: a student here mentioned this and write about this as well and what you to get to explain, the student said we have a lot of austrian theory here at hillsdale come and to write about the austrian theory of economics, which is what? >> guest: the austrian theory is really to look at how markets work and how markets are efficient. really, a book on socialism in

1920 and said look, this thing isn't going to work out for you. that was can remember in the 1920s there was the bolshevik revolution and socialism in great britain, inducing look, there's going to be a big problem because a central planner cannot possibly know all the information they would need to know to make sure that resources went to please consumers. that's what the austrians focus on is how does the market system work and how it works to please consumers into a sort of political philosophy you need to be consistent with that. that political philosophy is going to be government to protect life, liberty and property, and that's what its focus should be, and let the market allocate resources among people and across the nation's or whatever. >> host: there is no real freedom other than the kind a

market system provides, you write. >> guest: that's correct. because if you started looking through, let's look at, let's look at the bill of rights and say oh, my gosh, we got to the right to peaceful assembly. if the government owns the land how are you going to give the right to peaceable assembly? that can only happen if we owned a. how can you the right to bear arms if the government owns everything? you have to be able to own that weapon or whatever. the right to free speech, how does that work if the government owns all the media? and, of course, when you look at countries, some of the audience might be old enough to remember the soviet union, what happened? they control all the media. that was a government agency they controlled the media. they had the iron curtain to keep people from finding out about other things. you can't really have any other

liberties that we enjoy with out a system where you own the property and you have the right to use the property. unless it conflicts with other people's rights, to use their property, the government should just they out and protect your property rights. >> host: why do you call this a manifesto? >> guest: because obviously it was a takeoff on communist manifesto and because i thought it really needs to be discussed that this is why markets are beneficial to the poor. this is what markets are the only way that you can have individual freedom. this is why we are so wealthy. this has not been really discussed much. certainly in the k-12 education system and it's not even discuss that much in the political of reno. how does this thing really work? for example, suppose i was running for president and i said gee, i want to make it so that

no one, that no one can get a job in america and less they can produce $15 an hour worth of product. if you can only produce $10, you can't work in america. and i want to make sure that's what happens. that doesn't sound very good. if i want to $15 an hour minimum wage, that sounds good, right? so that's what the book is really about is to get the basics of -- i tell my students, this isn't rocket surgery. it's not hard. it's making the connection. it is seeing and observing. i love the story about sherlock holmes and the scandal and 20. walking at the top of the stairs and he decides to go to see many walks up the stairs, knocks on the door and then he says watson, how many steps from the ground floor? watson says i don't know. sure looks as how many times have you come up this?

hundreds of time. watson, there are 17 steps from the ground floor. the problem is you see that you do not observe. that's what this book is about, 20 people to observe. if someone tells you when you $15 an hour minimum wage you should outserve but that means there's lots of people that will never get a job in america if that's what we have a i don't know if you're old enough to remember service stations. this thing called service station. you drove in, someone punctured gas, church or oil. who was that? some kid who is learning to get the first job to show off, learn how to interact with the public. those jobs are not there anymore. that is a real problem. y. or not they -- we've asked for public policy to give us results that no one had expected. >> host: who is this book targeted to? >> guest: this book is targeted to the average person that wants to learn a little bit about how the system operates at their living within.

it's not designed to be an academic piece that people are going to read and publish an american economic review. this is about somebody and they get an economics class in college and they said this was boring, didn't understand any of it, they are drawing a bunch of cars around, or you are a homeschooler or if you are a teacher in a k-12 system and you want to have a secondary book. that's what it is for, the average person that's interested and it's not often, and if you read you can see it's not complicated, you know? thursday at about shaping his company or something like that. it's not complicated. it's a matter of just taking the time, sit down, i can spend a few minutes a day just taking a look at this thing.

>> i want to read the recent legal statements that have been made during this current presidential campaign and get your reaction as an economist. quote, this is the headline on cnn, hillary clinton promises to remedy excessive drug prices. >> guest: well yes, that's the question of how can she possibly do that? does she know what the price of a drug should be? what we really are to be doing is looking at why drug prices are the way they are. one of the reasons why is because you have a government agency, the fda, that requires all sorts of things do happen before you can sell a drug and caused billions of dollars. and so you come if you're going to make a drug, you have a very high fixed cost of you have to spend $4 billion. is what we have is a system that said we have done this much study, and you can sell this

product but you have to let people know it hasn't been completely tested, and you decide gee, i'm willing to try that. you know, i'm willing to take on the risk. they have a lot more innovation in drugs and danger to a lot more competition in the industry. the reason that you get drug pricing the way you do is because you have all these barriers to entry, some of which are necessary. we don't want people going out and you don't tell people this is going to cause cancer or cause asthma or something like that. that would be fraud, that if you all the people and say hey, this is the way it is, then let them make the choice, let them define what the risks are. then i think you'd get a lot more innovation. for her to think so much she should know what the price of these drugs are good to be and how it's going to affect innovation and new drugs, how could she possibly know that? >> host: donald trump, quote, we will renegotiate nafta and tpp.

>> guest: yeah. i mean, the problem with a position donald trump takes on trade is he acts as if trade is between countries. trade is not between countries. trade is between individuals. just as we were talking about the two-year-olds swapping with another to your old come if i want to trade with someone in china or trade with someone in brazil or germany, i should be able to do that. the government shouldn't come along and say you can't trade. he has a point that we can act like a trade is between countries and we might say gee, if you're going to trade with us, you have to do x, y and z. that overstate the amount of trade that happens but if a trade is going on, then both parties are better off. no one forced me to buy the chinese noodles that it might have on the one forced me to buy the german car that i have. i must've said i'm better off giving up my money and the german car manufacturer must

instead we are better off giving gary wolfram the corporate once we started to get a trade between individuals, that i think it will affect a great deal of how we do our public policy with regard to trade. >> host: gary wolfram teaches economics at hillsdale, "a capitalist manifesto" is the name of the book. thanks for your time. >> guest: thank you for having me. >> c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. >> booktv's "after words" program is next. guardian journalist gary younge reports on gun deaths in america over a 24 hour period. >> host: hi, gary.

thanks for coming today. i'm really excited, as you can see. i really, really read it. there were a lot of gyms in some really excited to talk to you. i'm going to ask you an easy question. you've been in the u.s. 10 years when you what this. he could've written someone other different books. why this one? >> guest: well, i've done this as an exercise for the guardian magazine, the paper that i worked for in 2007. when i did that at the time i thought this could be a book. so every day, eight children were shot dead, it is not condemn the senate and house passed with financial that day in 2007 and i was blown away by so many of these stories, many of which did was make the local news. i felt this could be a book. so when i got the opportunity a few years later to actually pursue it as a book, then i did.

it's one of the things that foreign people don't understand about america is culture. i'm not sure i ever fully understood it. and yet by the time i finish the book had been in the country for 12 years and i had one foot in and one foot out. i have to american children, my wife is american. for a long time i assumed that i was going to live here. in the end i did move back to england, and so i had skin in the game. >> host: let's go back a little bit. because i've lived abroad also and usually i do end up getting a lot of questions about all kinds of things that are uniquely american. coming into the project, the first initial long speech you gave, what was your sense of american icon culture? >> guest: i think i hadn't