while i had my hands. i nodded and said, me neither. >> some of these authors have appeared on book tv. watch them on our website, booktv.org. >> good evening, welcome. i'm a rosenfeld and i'm the

vice president of public programs at the new york public library. it's a privilege for the library to host tonight's program celebrating mike wallace's new book, greater gotham. the long-awaited sequel to his book gotham. greater gotham picks up the story at the turn of the last century, a period when new york experienced unparalleled growth, expansion and consolidation when much of the infrastructure was developed and when many of our institutions were founded including this one at the new york public library. incidentally the room in which we are seated was carved out of what was once the reservoir and there is a great illustration of that in the book. it's a special honor for us to host this program not only because of the importance of the book and its subject matter but also because mike wallace who is a fellow in the coleman center for scholars and writers and a resident in the allen room researched a good deal of the book right here in the

library's archives. the library's holdings on new york city are of course vast and include such collections as the archive of the new york times, records of the waldorf-astoria and a mysterious collection called new york city miscellaneous 1640 to 1975. but it is the painstaking work of historians and scholars that brings the contents of those collections the life and into public discourse. the room meticulously researched books like "'greater gotham" and so we are thrilled to welcome you back to the library to share the first of your research with us and to moderate the

conversation we are honored to have another historian, writer and scholar, jelani cobb. through his pieces of the new yorker where he's a staff writer, he provides a steady stream of emotional nourishment to many of us seeking to understand to today's political client climate. bringing a perspective that puts events in the context of our long american life and i have to say jelani, the piece you wrote yesterday on what happened in las vegas was my morning nourishment today so thank you for that. jelani as the race the library stage on many occasions, interviewing people of all words and the rapper timberland. he gave an outstanding lecture at the coleman center entitled the half-life of american freedom and either are available to download on the library's podcast and they should be required listening or anything trying to make sense of what happening in america today. we are grateful he has joined us again this evening. for us at the new york public library, programs like this are an extension of our mission to provide the people of new york with access not

only to great books but a forum for discussion about the critical issues facing our communities, city, country and world. when you read mike's book in particular," by lenin of all people. i will not give it away, you have to learn it. you will learn that's always been the case at the library. we view all our services including our public programs as steps in a lifelong educational journey. if you are interested in history or urban planning or the history of immigration or any of the subjects we will touch on tonight, the library is your partner. we are help here to help you learn more and gain insight into the issues that matter to you. visit your local library, get a library card if you don't have one and check out a book or three or five or download our simply eat at where you will find books available to download for free. or simply channel your inner mike wallace and make use of our research collection either here in this building, online or in any of our

research libraries. come back to our public programs, there's a list in the back of your hand out. after the event, mike will sign copies of his book and the library is offering a 20 percent discount this evening so pick up a copy. all book purchases benefit the new york public library. i went and ended with a thank you to public programs who put together tonight's event as well as many others that we offered to the public. now please join me in welcoming mike wallace and jelani cobb.[applause] >> good evening. thank you for the introduction and i wanted to start i guess on a slightly somber note. just acknowledging what is happening in las vegas right now. it's a tremendous opportunity and really privilege or us to

be able to get together and enjoy discussion and have conversations and to trust in our fellow citizens and for us to be able to enjoy the company of each other and that's something that has been taken away from a large number of people in las vegas and i wanted to keep them in our thoughts as we start this evening. and so part of this, mike and i talked and when was that? about a week ago. so we got into a long, sprawling conversation and i was saying to myself,save it for next week . so i wanted to cover some of the same ground but what are the things that are really interesting to me was the story of the book itself. it was the story the book

tells but there's an equally interesting story of how you came to even be involved with writing the second volume. i wonder if you could talk about how these two books again? >> this really is a collectiveproject . and to set it in its proper historical context you have to go back a ways. i'm a child of the 60s, 40s actually . and the 60s was a moment of historiographical revolution as it was, social and economic upheaval. and in fact the two were related. it's hard now to recall how maligned the decade, but the 50s take on the narrative of american history was

unrecognizable now. not to be to stick figure he but yes, there were blocks in american history. there was george washington carver who did peanuts and there were the slaves who were happy. there were more or less women , nancy ross sewing the american flag. there was some significant violence because there were no significant engines across class, race, ethnic lines. the view about the us position in world affairs was totally benign. it was all plus. and then came the civil rights movement.

the civil rights movement was calling for a transformation of black position in contemporary society . and it had a component that at the same time people wanted to change the present, they began to think about changing the past, read people in the past which was so limited in its definition of membership. the histories written about the united states focused on the great white guys and the affairs of state and the affairs of business, social history and economichistory was by the boards . so now, african-americans were not only protesting the state of affairs at the workplace, at the ballot box and here, thereand everywhere , they were protesting their

absence from the historical narrative. and historians, black and white in tandem with the social movements in the streets began to insert blacks into the narrative. when you did that, you were just adding, you were in fact considering now racism as a major force in american life. the contradiction between the declaration of independence, all men created equal and the realities of slavery and racism. so just about got going on this massive transformation that had been glimpses of this before, w ejb wise talked about structure in 1935 when he was shoveled to the sidelines. now thewomen's movement , that was all i got, it's half the population from the historical narrative. let's start filling in those

blanks but if you do that, you have to deal with sexism, you have to have the possibility of thinking about domestic life, about sexuality and there's a whole range of things that were simply not on the table. days. days, that wasn't even an issue before. unthinkable song. now he's putting on the table again both particular and large scale forces. and this is in the middle of the resistance of the vietnam war. suddenly american discussion seemed not as mean as it had professed. i was a child of the 50s in that i was very nervous. my mother had convinced me j edgar hoover was watching my every move. she wasn't far wrong. and i went to columbia in

1960 and i was very shy about getting involved in student movements, there wasn't much in 1960 but as they came along, i was cautious beyond belief.on the periphery, i did go down after selma to partake possibly in students who were going to mississippi and me playing in 65, playing in the summer of 64. at one point i found myself marching in a parade next to norman thomas who i had never heard of, actually. and then came the 68 strike in columbia in which i was not only the oldest person in the occupied buildings, but it had many ramifications to me suddenly the notion that

history as a political fact was on the table in a way that it had not been before. and i was converted in midstream, my doctoral dissertation as i was doing with richard hofstetter, i was his research assistant change course. i had three or four chapters looking at the same issue is political parties from adown different perspective . and that became a collective phenomenon. there was a group of students at columbia in the history department, the graduate department, there were colleagues in harvard and in wisconsin, here and there and we coalesced and we signed on to a project of redoing american history. nothing less.

and we started with a journal, american history review which is alive and well. i'm not involved anymore but it's many decades on down the road. we had conferences, we had and it was trying to indicate with political movements as well. there was a collateral movements in public history terrain. so williamsburg which had been for decades the temple of liberty where jefferson was stronger now it's suddenly being called by the african-american community, by the new cadre of historians, how about the percent of the population who were black slaves? and everything was up for grabs. and we did a lot of organizing around this reconstructing narrative business. and inpart because i was still in the middle of the matrix that was doing this , i had this sense that we had rewritten the narrative, but

nobody knew it. outside of specific arenas. because there was no accessible overview that presented the totalization that we had come up with. and it made it accessible in plain language forordinary full . so with useful insouciance, i set out to write the history of the united states, not new york but the whole of us of a. i enlisted my colleague ted burroughs, a graduate student with whom i've done along on this, short is in my way. the american revolution. and we set out to do this in a narrative style with footnotes and arguing and explaining the debates and discussions and we are at loggerheads, etc..

and we worked on this for several years and had many hundreds of pages and it looked like we had gotten out of the 17th century which we had not. because we were telling the story and the perspective of the european imperial expansion, capitalism etc. there's still the framework within you which you have to understand what happened in the us. and was born on us that this would take a lifetime and we only had to despair. so after another year of being depressed, i thought let's recap all of this stuff into something more manageable, the history of one city. new york. and an important city but the thing most incentive and global and national context that we already worked out. so we did. it took a while to change course and a lot of the work that we've done was available

or nestling inside of that there was a lot of it had to be done so we did it and that was "gotham". and now we have an event, got two and the question immediately arises, new , where is volume 3 going to be? somebody says that the rate you're going it will be 2042 before you get around to it . and mildly reassuring, you just say that in fact he had or i had now because it was a solo operation, i had the second volume would go tothe end of the second world war, 1945 . and it became clear that, this is a know another reason it was so bloodied big compared to the other one in terms of time duration, there

was an avalanche of work that's been done on all of the arenas in which i tried to keep up. economic history, political history, social, architectural, poetry, etc. so there was a flood of new work. also, as this is perhaps not the appropriate place to say this, but i spent decades in the elven room which was the new york public libraries rate gift to scholars. it was the pipeline into the great horde of material that's here. the thing is that i tried to avoid doing primary research as much as possible because the idea was if you got stuck on researching anything as opposed to waiting for other people to do the hard work and then absconding with it

or at least integrating it with this history as grand larceny, so then came google which swept through everywhere and digitized everything. this had the unfortunate impact of saying that well, whereas in the old days i would not have gone to read irving bushes autobiography that gave the inside account of what he thought he was doing by constructing bush terminal, one of the revelations of this period, now it's on my screen. so the temptation to do primary research was overwhelming which is another reason it slow the process down but at any rate it was clear , and i've written a lot compared to the second world war that was done

before the first world war, partly because nobody had even grasp the experience during the second world war and i was bored with the 30s which i knew better so i just jumped. there's a great deal of material written downthrough the second war . so while i won't go on record predicting when volume 3 might come into play, it won't take 20 years, because a lot of it is done already. [inaudible] so this book, volume 2 picks up in 1898 which is a pivotal year the cause it's the year of consolidation of the five boroughs into greater new york city. and this tremendous change and the implications of that and i wondered if you could just talk about the dynamics

as far as how this incorporation happened and who were the primary movers dedicated to making this happen? >> you would have thought that this being a political merger, this is the first largest in fourth largest city in the united states plus many communities that were in ss grouped around the harbor. nothing on the jersey side, that was an irreparable screwup by king james and somebody that we stillhaven't recovered from . it was a political consolidation. and it was sort of part of the political process but it wasn't initiated by the political elite. it was a phenomenon that corresponded with the economic elites decision to

reconstruct american capitalism. and to understand this you've got to understand this is the era of john d rockefeller, j.p. morgan, etc. these two like one another at all. they got on each other's nerves that they were as one in being convinced that free enterprise capitalism was the pits. you had competition between firms, if you had competition between firms, price wars, cutthroat price wars, profits would go down. to build them up again you cut unions, get labor unions then and you brought us up to defendants. labor unions are crushed. through force and violence which leads to socialist movements to overcome capitalism itself so as far as the corporate elite is concerned, this is madness. and the solution was to bring as much competition as

possible out of the economy. and between 1898 and 1904, an incredibly short space of time, thousands had come to competing firms emerged into hundreds of gigantic corporations in which the united states still is the preeminent example. this philosophy that consolidation would, was a progressive move, you've got to understand this. the morgans and rockefellers were convinced and not entirely without reason that this would allow a more rational economy. it would get above the endless school stuff and allow for long-term planning andwithout these , make an awful lot of money for the peoplewho oversaw this corporate movement . but it was also an ideology, a culture that had emerged that argued that this was good in a variety of arenas and one of them was the

lunatic competition between brooklyn and new york and the other towns around the harbor. they should be concentrating on combining to deal with the problems of the harbor, to deal with problems that were the challenge of chicago which was goal growing by leaps and bounds and they were afraid to become the new economic capital of the united statesthe europeans would bypass new york and we go downhill .so they oversaw the consolidation of the political units into greater new york. that's why it's called greater new york.maybe a little different. the cultural corollary of that was to do many

consolidations. again, using the room in which you sent in as an example. the esther lennox and tilden libraries consolidated and formed the new york public library. and then housed themselves in splendor of which we are the beneficiaries. but there was a movement to turn this consolidation on paper into a reality and there was an explosion of propulsive energy and creativity that's been rarely matched in our history. talk about this because there are two different things. the kind of political act of consolidating brooklyn and manhattan and of course the bronx and queens and staten

island and then the other actual physical structure that had to go into making these disparate entities into an actual city there are several things that happened, one of them is that there's a movement to connect new york to the global arena. so the rail tunnels are built under the hudson and allow you now to come up and refurbished grand central station. so your link to the mainland is strengthened. their docs are built, chelsea appears which are now for titanic's shipping operation. >> to complete the circuit on the other side. when those internal ligaments that are constructed, bridges are thrown across the rivers, the subways done throughout the entire arena, populations now free to move about without bounties of any sort. so the subway system.

miraculous transformation. bronx was still largely a bucolic rain. the remnants of the old colonial gentry and they are rapidly appraised, real estate booms take place. tenants soar up all around and by the end of the period, the book covers bronx is considered as an independent entity within the sixth largest city in the united states. in brooklyn, the d agricultural is asian process, it's forgotten now but brooklyn was a huge breadbasket and food basket and vegetable basket for the city. and now subway lines, elevated lines, housing subdivisions instead of cabbages.

now, is this sense that you can bind this on paper entity into reality if you build enough traffic, if you develop the water system, if you develop the electrical grid. there is an enormous infrastructure operation that makes this possible. and it's mirrored in the private sector by the explosion of skyscrapers. these are in fact the physical relative of the corporate organization. they represent themselves in enormous amounts of capital and new methods of organizing it so every black and harry morgan paul senior get together and create and an institution which tours,

which collects and pools capital and puts them into bursts of skyscrapers. >> i think one of the things that's notable to me about the book is that there's a parallel stories. like, you're telling this story of the physical geography of new york and how it is, i thought of it as an adolescence where you can begin to see what the adult version ofthis entity will look like . and at the same time, you're telling the story and that one of the political elites and the physical landscape is also the social and cultural landscape and the populations and what they are experience of this gigantic metropolis is. and i wondered if we might talk a little bit about that. you say very well that new york looked like a plan to

create greater new york looked one way for the architects who were trying to take all of this. and another way to the people who were actually living in the midst of all these changes. >> i've tried to make it out into sections focusing on different aspects of the struggle over the provision of social justice, public goods, housing, healthcare, etc. and it appears to me that there's at least four big, broad classification schemes you can look at. one of them is race, one of them is gender, another is class . this is a period of staggering immigration flow.

and the flow is not of either great uniform mass or entering the country and the city drop by drop, but the newcomers, particularly jews and african americans from the south and caribbean are flowing into existing enclaves that are unlike enclaves in other places. huge, and big enough so you can sustain a national language culture. you have restaurants, religious institutions, newspapers. you can walk through afterwards the jewish lower east side and see, hear no english. read no english.

but this is not new. the irish and the germans before had created enclaves. what's new in this spirit is that there's a new appreciation for this. guidebooks which used to say don't go to the five points, it's worth your life or chickens is coming to town, will give him a police export now the guy is saying visit the lower east side, visit yorkville. visit this and that part of town, and understand that the multinational character of new york city is one of its greatest strengths, something to applaud. even more than that, people like randall bjorn and john dewey and others argue that although this is unplanned, this is the city's and america's great contribution to human society. a possibility for the first

time in human history of these wildly differing cultural communities living next door to each other relatively peacefully. there are classes at the border, borders expand. due to a marketplace or through violence so it's not lovey-dovey. but it's unprecedented. and anybody who tries to reverse this multi-nationality is doing the city and the culture and the country and injustice. and they were in fact people who were doing this, particularly the anglo protestant community who felt that they had a privacy in place in the city's social order . by right of cultural progenitor. it was their city, it's okay to have immigrants and they're always going to know their place and ideally, they will adjust their clothing and all of that, they'll keep

a bit of this for varieties say but basically it will look like, one of the tensions that happens during this period is the debate over the city. its legitimacy. and the desire that it will be constrained. there's an extreme dimension to this that emerges out of the anglo protestant community, largely the eugenics movement which argues not just that some immigrants are of less good than others by virtue of cultures which can be transformed if you pressure them enough . but rather, biological. these people are inherently inferior and they have the capability of dragging down and contaminating the gene pool people like us. and this tension is extremely

visible and growing more so as we drift towards the first world war but let's take that for a bit. >> the cosmopolitan appreciation does not break the color line. the african-american community is as it had been for 100years, jim crow . they are forced into the bottom rungsof the economy . the tin pan alley two songs create a culture of contempt. and there's applications of violence deemed necessary. the opening act in terms of race relations in new york is the race riot of 1900 and this is when a period of time when race riots meant whites invading black churches, killing people etc. this in fact happened. the stories told in detail like everything else in the

volume. largely an irish versus black, the communities on the midwest side were competing for spatial territorial control. and cox had dragged off streetcars, beaten with lead pipes. etc. then the police show up. then the police joined the rioters. and the police drag us back to 37th street police station and make them run a golf club wielding officers. the black community protest, calls for investigation. the grand jury finds nothing untoward happened, the new york city police department has an internal investigation in which not surprisingly, clears all of its members.

so this is the norm. this is continuing and it's heightened i would argue what all of the debate about confederate post confederate statues. are some from this. as his lynching, as his disenfranchisement so new york is nestled in this larger racial repression moment, the worst period arguably in american history for race relations. >> then our however to things that emerge in this is one of them is in fact collective movements by african americans in the city. they kick off the names, we did life is writing ferocious editorials in the naacp's crisis magazine.

hubert harrison, the black socrates was doing soapbox peeking across the city including wall street. marcus garvey is just getting off to a start and thinkingin terms of pan africanism and so is the boy . >> you made mention of one of my personal favorites and african american history which is a philip randolph. >> we associate randolph with a different period of the story but he's on the board at this point in the game. the messenger is his newspaper. but arguably the thing that this point has the greatest impact on this horrible situation is the arrival of black harlem. harlem is white, middle-class. depends on where you were. it's a reproduction of a lot of lower manhattan and all its multiplicity. but then in the aftermath of

the 1900 race riots and the arrival of the subway which comes right up the west side in san juan hill where this struggle was taking place, and then goes up onto the park and lenox avenue, and is a mass migration, blacks had never had a locale that they could call their own there were a few streets, there was a small area . but they were low levels of this kind of outside solace from the old south street area docs to the greenwich village to san juan hill on the west side, then out to harlem but now the numbers are phenomenal and some of this is accelerated by the war in pending story. >> and once in a relatively small spaceyou got 70,000 african-americans , there

white crowd. and no white crowd in his right mind or wrong mind is going to think about invading, particularly after the first world war when the harlem fighters come back from and kill large numbers of germans. >> so that transformation is important. gender, another major upheaval was several different kinds, one is the emergence of the new women reedit. >> they actuallyemerged in the 19th century but particularly home middle-class . women who inched their way into the picture of schools, beginning to overcome the barriers to medicine and law and everything. but now, part of the function of the corporate revolution as the skyscrapers are now filled with turks who used to be all-male and now are in turn female.

department stores expand, explode, especially as they move up from the ladies model on sixth avenue to the luxurious versions of fifth avenue. >> sales girls, hotel maids. the restaurant scene. the fashion industry has gotten creative possibilities, journalism is open to female employment. >> and in addition to this general state of affairs, there is one by one and operation that has a collective movements, most famously the suffrage movement. and the degree of organization and militants that mark the at least 10 years long struggle for the suffrage which means getting an old male electorate to approve granting the right to

their laws such as children, etc. >> and there's an enormous push in 1915 and they lose. so it was a big time. >> and they'd come back again in 1917. it's a complicated story, i tried to map out the ins and outs but in fact they win and they win in november yet? november election day or six or whatever it is, it would be 100 years since the referendum passed getting women the right to vote in new york state which by all accounts was the critical factor in the passage of the 19th amendment. but this is also the beginnings of a movement to have women allowed to control their own bodies.

this is margaretsanger's arrival on the stage . together with emma goldman who combats the comstock laws, comstock, they don't control the crime but even talking about birth at home was criminal. and the struggle over this issue out of the soil out of which grows plant planned parenthood later down the road. last item is class conflict. some of this is relatively familiar. the organized labor movement and people who are sparsely german, anglo, irish who are skilled workers who got a commodity whose withholding gives them muscle. samuel gompers is the large

organizing overlord of this enterprise. but it's a tiny handful of the laboring population. the vast majority is unorganized. then comes the arrival of the italians and the jews and industrial unions are born. in the garment district in particular, in addition, the industrial garment unions are the backbone of the socialist party and socialist parties of force in this era and it calls for the public provision of healthcare, of housing, of, and specifically it's now clear that this period is divided up into three sections in overall macroeconomic terms. there's the boom years around the formation of corporations

, 1898 to 1907. then there's the panic, we call them market corrections in those days. which leads to a period of seven years procession, homelessness, unemployment area which is added to by the arrival of a cascade of orders for weaponry coming from the europeans who are all very neutral companies. so with the recession, requires some response given unemployment. and you get burying perspectives on this.the socialists argue that programs of public works, schools, highways, ridges should be built with public financing. middle-class progressives who , it's very complicated in striations in the various

political economic forces in era but the progressive movement argues as they have with a variety of reforms that the united states and new york in particular should follow the european movements for social insurance. >> and then in the case of the recession, there shouldbe unemployment insurance . this seems to the powers that be the most outrageous thing they've ever heard of. these people are lazy, they don't want to work . either that or let them market, it will be for everybody's good, particularly ours. then there's the anarchists and the wobblies. the industrial workers of the world. and frank tenenbaum was going

to go on to become a columbia university anthropologist. at that point is a busboy working in the hotels. largely unemployed. in march, hundreds strong from one church to another. asking sort of demanding shelter for the night. and food for the hungry. so it's a vast canvas. if you shift from looking at the elite and the skyscrapers and the board rooms, although it's a fascinatingstory , there are tremendous provisions inside that piece to the innovative working class which is exploding out into the subway lines. and you try to assess the tensions between them, it's not easy. but that's the goal.

>> i think you do that amazingly well. when i was thinking about, it is epic. it's a good definition. we had this epic, we use that excessively now in common parlance but it is an epic story when you're thinking about the cast that's involved in this. socialists, suffragists, anarchists, architects. immigrants, philanthropists, politicians, police. crime bosses. reform politicians, crooked politicians. business elites, laborers reedit university presidents, multiple. anthropologists, multiple. so i'm just going through because i have the third version . for the indexing has been done and i was just saying if

i was conjuring up an index of my own based on reading, you'd wind up with this sprawling cast of people who are all integral to the way that the city looks to what's even right now a small city. even now we can talk about this a lot. i want to make sure we have a little bit of time for questions though there is a microphone. if you can ask a question, succinctly if possible, we can get to as many as we can. >> don't be shy, ask your questions. i'm fine with that too. should i call on someone? i can do that. two historians up here. i'll ask you this, there's a question right here.

the microphone. >> john angelo, just giving you a summary moment reading the book, it brings to my mind read time, the novel. i wonder both of you, your reaction to that novel versus mister wallace, which you just done the sql to your firstbook . >> it's been a long time since i've read doctor rose book and i enjoyed it greatly . i would have to comment again after having gotten up to speed with the historical literature but itstruck me as pretty on target. i make a bigger point . i mean, in a sense we in this colloquy or we've reproduced the way that academics necessarily approach a

sprawling entity like this. they divvy up their territory. so there's the economic historians, there's the social historians, the political historians, cultural historians and these can develop a fairly arcane set of terminology and language but in fact usually it's important in carving and deepening our understanding of that fact, maybe life doesn't happen like that. real life happens all at once and i think the only people who really can do it justice are the novelists. now, admittedly he's one of mexico's preeminent novelists . so i get the inside scoop on this process. but doctorow and the great novelists, what they do is

they integrate all of these things but what they're looking at are not the women and the blacks, but they're looking at the major relationships between them. the images that people have of the other, of how it helps to support movements or not. and that's why i've opted for as much as possible telling this as a story. and i'm sympathetic to people who take this thing up which is richard, with your back as it is. many bees have died that this novel might live althoughless so in e-book . and it's a daunting

enterprise. all my god. so i'm here to tell you that while it is true that there are these tracks that run through and underline and tie together the various chapters, looking at the city's changing position on the planet, looking at its changing relations with the country, looking at its points in the ups and downs, boom and bust cycle, all these things are things that are carried over from the first volume and through the second and will continue into whatever it goes into next. but the chapters are modular constructions. even most of the sections that make up these chapters which are big enough to be chapters themselves, they can

be read independently. so my advice to readers is to look at the table of contents, look atthe chapter names . something that interests you and plunge in and you will see that if you come back later and read it again in the larger sweep of things, there are all these elements that run horizontally. but it's an independent, nifty read on its own. mister, is right, that is the intention . >> i want to make sure we get the other questions in . very successfully, i read that and i liked it a great deal but i thought it was an interesting way to approach history but i won't go any further than that. we have another one and two.

you, in the back row's back here. i was wondering if i could ask your comments on another factor which seems to underlie much of the growth of this city. you can't really have skyscrapers without elevators. you can't have the brooklyn bridge without the technology to weave cable. it seems to me that the time was propitious for major changes inside engineering which underlined all of this. and i'm wondering if you would care to elaborate at all about that. >> that's a quick lead and i learned from you what a pneumatic caisson was in discussing this. >> engineering plays a tremendous role and both the engineers and professional

engineers school graduates and the san harms who were digging through the tunnels and the electrical engineers and mechanical engineers. the way that building processes reflected through various labor divisions, i spent a lot of time on that because you're right, they are building the city and there is a tradition in new york dating back at least a year till now being willing to undertake enterprises for which the engineering is just emerging. so they figured out how to build the erie canal which was the most killer since roman days. as they went along. and the graduate engineers who work on that wind up

becoming in the next generation engineer is moving into different territories so electrical,mechanical , etc. . and yes, casons our first used in bridge building but then applied to skyscraper construction. so engineering aplenty . >> i know we are close on time. our last two questions, and if we could ask the questions sequentially and deal with both of them at once. you had your hand up andthen there was someone else .>> hello. in your presentation at the beginning you were mentioning how from a lot of neighborhoods switched from if you are going to go there, you need police protection and a full escort to go, you really should go and check

out these neighborhoods in the tour guide book. many neighborhoods especially in parts of queens and brooklyn are going through that transition and they feel like they are out of sync of being part of new york city, like people who live in that community think as a historian who studied new york from the earliest days, what would you say to people in those communities to assure them that it's okay, that this is part of the fluidity and dynamics of new york city? >> i'd have to confess that in all of my various faculties, hearing is not in the lead. [inaudible] >> your question was about people .. [inaudible]

>> and it's making them very uncomfortable. for you as a historian who sees these changes, that it's okay that ... [inaudible] you're still a part of the cultural compass of new york city. >> she asked, there have been a longtime history of people saying you should not go to particular places in new york city and transitioning to say it is okay to go to these places and that's happening now. what would you say to people about whatever community versus williamsburg or

another that people may have some idea about whether or not you should go there as a tourist>> it's a difficult business . on the lower east side, there were tourists who would come and there were a number of local people who would say get out of my face, you know. >> -- an outfit called seeing new york which runs bus tours and they have special nighttime chinatown bus tour. and they arrange for you to visit a real opium den.

[laughing] and, in fact, there's real police officers just as you happen to arrive there. there's a movie, i think it was griffith who made about the great exposure, chinatown, tourism rackets. so it's a very complicated business because when, at one point the police institute a curfew. there was a murder in which a woman was killed, not in chinatown, in fact, but associated with the chinese issue, and, and the police imposed a curfew, and those who struggle against the vice

economy, the ones who are running real opium dens which are getting defined as an outrage, you're cut off their supply of tourists. so when you get into any one of these, and i do get into several of them because i'm looking at tourism as a phenomenon, it's very complicated and it varies from one to the other. >> a jewish colleague of mine kind of sums up neighborhood change in a way that i found amusing. he said his family was in, was an american success story because us i to look beside and it only took three generations. [laughing] i think we have one more question. >> and all these hours and days you spent in the archive you must have discovered some character that was absolutely phenomenal or interesting or some real person that we've never heard of that you now

discussed in the book. was there someone that just came out and maybe you would never heard of? that did something absolutely phenomenal or a failure? >> it was in niagara falls, amazing. there are 1631 entries in the names index, and the great majority of them nobody has ever heard of. i wouldn't know where to begin. although i must say the thing that if i'm remarkable is the degree to which even the famous and powerful are unknown. i may just for the halibut, how many of you have heard of emily -- [inaudible] >> that's pretty good. >> this is an impressive crowd. >> you're not the demographic --

[laughing] >> can i have one thing? however, i did learn things that i did know previously. even though i had heard of root, i did know some of his involvement in things. >> he arguably was the most, single most powerful man in new york in this time. teddy wanted him to be his successor. he was jp morgan's attorney. he was at the center of the incorporation movement. he remade the american military because he felt they would come in handy as the corporate world expanded, particularly into the caribbean. he was secretary of defense, secretary of state. he was the head of the lawyers organization. he was a political activist on the local scene. the guy operator on all three

levels, local, national and international, and truthfully, i had only the foggiest notion of who root was. you dig down and you keep seeing him. root is omnipresent. he seems to be at the root of this time. but yes, just one endless surprise after another, and the light. >> so the book is available. you will be signing. thank you very much for completing this, the great extremes i had which was informative and engrossing, and i'm looking forward to reading the next volume.

[applause] [inaudible conversations] >> today, live on "in depth" professors cornell west and robert george will be our guests. >> anytime to get a chance to be in dialogue with professor george, my dear brother, we go back now 13 years. we revel in each others humanity. we share a fundamental commitment to the life, the mind and the world of ideas. we have a chance to teach and lecture about the country. and so when i see them i don't see them first and foremost as a

conservative thinker, catholic philosopher, what are the major political apartheid, i see them as my brother. i see him as my friend. and someone come up with the right to be wrong. [laughing] >> if you're going to work together in conversation, even debate, to get the truth, the people involved in the conversation first have to recognize that they are fallible, frail, fallen human beings. they have to recognize that they could be wrong. each one has to recognize, even about my most cherished beliefs, i could be wrong. and if, in fact, one have that attitude and understanding, , nt in a merely notional way, but in a deeply appropriated way, then one will begin to develop a virtue that is indispensable for truth seeking.

>> among the books mr. west is written our race matters, and brother west. mr. george's books include making men moral and conscious and its enemies. during our live three-hour conversation we will take your calls, tweets and facebook questions. watch live today from noon to 3 p.m. eastern on booktv on c-span2. >> a look at some of the authors recently featured on booktv's "after words," our weekly author interview program.

>> there was a great fear this weapon was so powerful that it could really destroy the world in the wrong hands, become something that terrorists could use. all of this was clearly envisioned by its creators really before the war was over. and they began trying desperately to put in place some kind of international controls so that this weapon could not proliferate, you would not have people stockpiling and building nuclear weapons left-right and center. and so this meeting in moscow in christmas eve was so crucial because my grandfather and the americans that went were desperately hoping that they could convince stalin and others

to agree to control the future of this terrible, terrible force. they were very optimistic that it could still be done but by the time they left moscow, they were less convinced that the russians really wanted to participate in these negotiations. >> afterwards errs on booktv every saturday at 10 p.m. eastern and 70 and 19 eastern and pacific. >> okay, i do double duty. i am welcoming steve villano who is next, and he is a native of brooklyn, new york, and is the former head of governor mari cuomo's new york city press office with decades of experience and public service, public education, of the kelp and is ceo of several national and nonprofit organizations. i'm just going to skip to