or she might be, is above the law. not in the united states and that's part of i think the glory. as unpleasant as all get out and especially not fun for those wrapped up and, of course, for president clinton and hillary and chelsea, this is a horrible episode to go through. so at a personal level yes, lots of costs, but in terms of who we are as a free people in in a constitutional democracy, isn't it reassuring to know that truly no one is above the law? >> to access all of the c-span and booktv archives on impeachment visit our website, c-span.org/impeachment. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2, with top nonfiction books and authors at the weekend. booktv, television for serious readers.

>> hello, everyone. can anyone hear me? sounds good here awesome. thank you all for coming out tonight and supporting your local independent and employee owned bookstore. [applause] before we begin tonight speaking with holly jackson, "american radicals", to mention other great program it coming up later this week we have romance writer here with "boston globe" love letters columnists meredith goldstein on thursday. next week on tuesday we are hosting former poet laureate robert pinsky along with a few contributors for the new anthology, the mind. next wednesday where hosting nancy for the atlas of boston history. we have many more events coming up and you can find more information on our website and

in the brochures by the registers when to pick up your copy of the book tonight. tonight we're so glad to be hosting holly jackson for her new book "american radicals: how nineteenth-century counterculture shaped the nation." book page magazine calls the book magnificent saying this incisive and well-written overview of americans who protested wrong in the society deserves wide readership in many find academic studies have covered the subject but this account is an authoritative and fast-paced and visibly portrays a crucial period publishers weekly wrote electric, this is essential reading for anyone interested in how the u.s. became what it is today. holly jackson is an associate professor of english at the university of massachusetts boston. her writing has appeared in the "new york times", the "washington post" and the "boston globe" as well as a number of other scholarly venues. she is author of one previous book, a scholarly study of family values politics in

19th-century american literature and culture published by oxford university press. she lives in cambridge, massachusetts, and were glad to have her here tonight. so thank you for joining us. [applause] >> thanks so much or come yet tonight. it's kind of a blustery wet night and it's a good to see you all and it's an absolute thrill to be here at porter square books which is my neighborhood bookstore, and for those of us who live here, it's just such an important institution in our community as i really want to encourage you to make some purchases tonight. i think you should start by bike out their stock of "american radicals" but after that you to buy a couple children books and just support them, the holidays are right around the corner. this book, my book is a history of social justice, activism in the united states from around

1817-1877 and if you are not regularly immersed in 19th century history, that can send really remote. if you think of it as the civil war era or westward expansion or of industrialization, but the social issues that mattered at that time ago so clearly still in her own moment that he think they will likely sound very familiar to you. the people who drive this story were americans who are outraged by family separation, by the idea of federal agents who are hunting refugees, bisexual assaults on women, by the devaluation of black lives, by economic 1% that it size control of the government. they were any moment of real political crisis and they were deeply concerned the country was on the wrong track. they felt called to do something about it so you set out to accomplish some specific legal reforms and i think of those,

those legal reforms of the 19th-century activism that we are most familiar with but more and partly i wanted to write about people who wanted a deeper cultural transformation. it wanted to reeducate the conscience of the american public so it with the inequality as a moral failure and as a national disgrace. they pursue this with a range of tactics, protests like a lot of things in this book. it's individual lifestyle choices and consumer choices. they figured out ways of exerting pressure on the economy and on public opinion and on elected officials. the tactics went all the way up to attempted armed coup against the government. there's a kind of paradoxical relationship with the nation that is at the heart of this. in that idea that they wanted to overthrow society and many of them interest in overthrowing the government but they did this in the name of american political values. they saw themselves as a true heirs of the founders and that's

a tension that i try to capture in the title and also that really informs the whole book. they saw themselves as engaged in a second american revolution one of them called it a second and more glorious american revolution. they thought of the first american revolution that had been bought by the fathers and grandfathers, the book starts right in the moment when the founding generation was dying. the question about what the meaning of what the direction of the nation would be going forward. they saw that first american revolution as merely political, like important but political. the goal was to break away from england to establish a new political system but the people in my book thought that a social revolution was absolutely necessary as a follow-up in order to make good on the ideas that initial revolution had articulated but had never made real in american life. i think they succeeded is the argument i make to a surprising

degree though it is incomplete and certainly imperfect, and i have tried to show that they were not just responding to the really singularly turbulent conditions of the time but protest movement shaped this. innocent away and we should understand that. the first half of the book, the big story of the the first half the book is the rise of radical anti-slavery movements which was really the first political project that brought together americans across lines of race, class and gender on a national scale. the rise of that movement inspired a much broader and more textured culture of critique in antebellum america. once the institution of slavery which was a centuries old institution in the united states, it was completely the basis of the economy, supported at every level, once that was called into question, , basicaly nothing was off the table for

interrogation. so we moved from the beginning of anti-slavery into a broader interrogation of religious observances, sex and marriage and family, private property and capitalism. in this first part of the book i established the network of activists that i will follow through the remainder of the century, and so that network includes leaders of free black community in philadelphia and boston ticket includes a a scottish heirs named francis wright who is this incredibly charismatic character who in set being a really cautionary tale. it includes a local hero william garrison whose conventionally known as the leader of the antislavery movement that was headquartered here in boston. he did a much better job than francis wright at the kind of intersectional and coalition work i'm interested in this book. also you'll find chance additional us and socialists on utopian communes, polyamorous

vegans, and another thing i want to emphasize is that this growing culture of dissent was met in this moment by a really reactionary mainstream opposition that as people started to articulate a real resistance to the way things were, we say huge backlash and its in that conflict that i start, that a see them as drivers of history rather than just as responders. the second half of the book is all about the civil war and reconstruction which was obviously a real watershed moment in national history, but it also about how it transformed these activists that i'm writing about as well. for instance, people who had been really principled pacifists, for example, came to condone violence or even to participate in violence. there was a very, there was a major right of 50,000 people in

boston where a deputy federal agent was killed, and the community in boston had previously before that moment had been defined by either working through political channels or working through these moral suasion channels that were devoutly pacifists and that was real changing of the guard moment that kicked off a very violent decade leading up to the civil war. another example of a figure from the book that is transformed as a black nationalist martin delaney who had been ready to abandon the united states and create a project to take african-americans to make a new nation in west africa. during this time he was among those who started a rally around the flag, he served in military, served in the reconstruction government after that he had backed john brown's raid before that so he been willing to back and armed coup. so this three in the reconstruction it was really an unprecedented opportunity for social reengineering, but it

ended really tragically and really violently, especially for african-americans and the south and for workers in the north and out west. the figures that i follow had accomplished so much that really had seemed impossible, and everyone, most people in america thought was impossible and crazy. but at the same time by the end of this time we do see a breakdown of the values are rethinking at some of the fundamental strategies and also sadly the splintering of a lot of the coalition relationships between movements that it really defined their work in the previous period. i in with a conclusion to the book that kind evaluates what they succeed, , what they succeeded with and also their failures, and just review some of the really ambitious goals that remain ours to pursue.

so i'm going to read a short passage just about three pages long and i can report after we talk if that's what you want to do. but this particular passage takes place in the late 1850s essentially right on the brink of the civil war and its at a big meeting of reformers in vermont so there are a lot of interesting settings in this book like free love dance parties and comments and various things and also a lot of conventions where people would come out and just try to hammer out strategy and argue and i think this scene is on because it captures the kind of wacky multi-issue counterculture that a really want to emphasize in this book about how we see ideas and personnel overlapping in movements that generally we study and isolation or we think of as separate. but i also like this moment because it shines a light as i try do also on how those overlaps and collaborations sometimes just couldn't work in

practice because in one, there were interpersonal dramas but on the other hand, they were real and necessary and very significant disagreements about strategy and about priorities, and you'll see that here. in the course of this short passage there will be four terms that might be unfamiliar just because there's a lot in 19th century activism culture that is been forgotten so wanted to define those for you so you know i'm saying when i get there. so spiritualism, spiritualism was not a radical political movement. they were like fellow travelers and they don't figure in this book really significantly outside of this passage is is e only place you see them. you may have heard in the 19 century that people were communicating with the dead. there were spirits coming around wrapping on tables, ouija boards, spirit medians, that kind of thing. free love. free love is a really big subject in a book that goes all the way from the 1820s to the

1870s and it looked like a lot of different things. there a lot of varieties of it but basically it was a movement to reform or abolish the institution of marriage and it will overlap to a surprising degree with other movements like socialism and anti-slavery that i have tried to highlight. nonresistance, a very important controversial strain of the anti-slavery movement. they were radical pacifists but more than that they completely rejected the american government. they didn't want anything to do with the legal system. they wouldn't vote. they wouldn't serve in the military. they wouldn't sue in a court of law. they didn't recognize the american government at all and it was controversial within anti-slavery. finally, the come outers. that come out as were also abolitionists. their targeted critique was religion and specifically the northern northern churches, like the kind of outrageous and appalling that northern churches were not absolute vanguard of abolition.

and so they withdrew from the own churches but there really wasn't even enough. this one guy you meet stephen foster was particularly famous for these direct action protest he would do sometimes on sunday mornings in which her to go into a church and he would stick with the congregation quietly through the beginning and then when the minister got up to start talking, he would rise in the eyes and just deliver a barn burning speech until people in the congregation grabbed him and he was very tall and lanky and you would just like golden and there would have to carry them out. he was beat up, he was beat up every time. he was kept, thrown out of the window. he went to jail. they made it a crime to interrupt the church service in new hampshire where he was by merely doing this but he did it anyway. you will see him. he's in and is one of my favorite figures in the book.

in the last week of june 1858, they stepped off the trains into sunshine and the small but bustling town of rutland vermont. short and women long-haired men sporting bloomers and columns conspicuous hats and checkered suits. as the smirking of times reporter would write in his evening dispatch, there were a people of all sorts of shapes, white, black, partial black, badly sunburned. who convened to discuss abolitionism, spiritualism can free love, free trade and all other things. find the vacant lot on the east side of grove street a bot root beer and gingerbread from the locals who it set up booths around the perimeter of them gathered under a tent from 100 feet across decorated with bunting that stacked heavily in the airless heat. they talk all day and late into the evening barely breaking for meals and musical interludes from the harmonia glee club. colorful countercultural pipes can out of the woodwork. the times reporter claims to

walk into one gathering any hotel bar just as a woman free study and accompanying herself on it and take according was in run by an adolescent and a transpacific inflating around the room mumbling messages from a departed spirit. the conventions resolution of from the belief in spirit communication rejected war, definitely. they stated the american union was a crime information and approved the curse ever since. the influence of the radical abolitionist was evident in these declarations and, indeed, among the first to speak when a founding nonresistant. his most impassioned remarks at the convention pertaining to sham marriages, abortion and the gender politics of sexual consent. it turns out he chose to be a traveling agent of the antislavery cause because he did not stand to be at home with his wife. he confided in his journal around this time, no marriage love is between us. it is many years since we had slept in the same bed. staying in other peoples homes

as he travels he was tortured by the sight of happy couples embracing newborns nursing and other blissful domestic scenes that he was denied turkey felt he was trapped in his marriage as an a living death. his travels present other opportunities as well. passionate affairs with a least one and likely multiple women in europe led him to question the traditional standards that dean to sexless marriage the only legitimate form of intimacy. by the time of the rutledge convention and while still actively at work for you at the slavery, he published a book called marriage and parentage that called for sex to be taken up as an object for full reform in movements like abolition. extending his no current governt principles to private life, wright declared no human law or license or authority or social customs can make a true marriage. his call at rutland for the immediate abolition of all external authority was a wide net cast to encompass that only the slave power in government and the churches but the institution of marriage as well.

all participants have their own causes to add to this list of external authority to be abolished and do practically climbing over one another for the floor. spiritualist butting in after freethinkers one upping abolitionist. and a passionate passionate advocate for native americans tried to call attention to a recent massacre but could gain the tracking with the crowd as it jumped from one topic to the next. julia branch, was a star of the convention. for the "new york times" reporter it produced an odd sensation to see good-looking woman rise and devout herself the free lover. she said women are bought and sold, bought and paid for as the negro slave is. this feminist talk of marriage was matched by others decrying mental slavery, spiritual slavery, and enslavement by religious conventions. they seemed to compete over which of these could prove worse than the slavery of the body practice in the south. stephen foster the cantankerous

come out was there as well listening intently to two days of such speeches. he had engaged in the free love discussion with an open mind insisting the real problem was gender inequality but granting truly egalitarian marriage did not work for others, the way it did work for him and he would support them in trying an experiment of a different kind. .. >> not allow the reformers to feel comfortable while in the south. frankly disgusted by so much talk proctor demanded action. my heart has been pained as i listen to the discussion which has been going on before this audience he said. i call upon you in the name of

4 million slaves to go to work. when his listeners sit and chat, they fall death to the cries of millions of living people bound and chained. in the very moment that enslaved women were being raped in newborn babies torn away from mothers. the free convention threat and the view to splinter activists energy into seeming distressingly apolitical. doing nothing to save lives and just suffering. he made his commitment clear. let me say here and now that i never intend to lay aside the question of slavery. i never intend to turn my eyes from the slave until the last shackles fall. ending with a note that was becoming inescapable in the late 1850s, even in the rhetoric of devoted nonresistance, he warned diver responsibility to you. if you go down to the grave with

this crime upon your soul, my soul. the foreboding remarks logged in to what it been a boisterous reformer shindig suggesting which day in the entire country tiered. in a few short years, all americans would be living in the shadow of mass death and the crime of slavery would end in apocalyptic bloodshed. there would soon be little time who should be emancipated less. long desired finally arrived. [applause] okay. let me hear from you. what interests you. what questions do you have?

>> i was wondering, is there anything that you learned from the coalition building from that time that could apply now? >> yes. there are examples that are incredibly inspiring of people working together across movements and across difference. there are a lot of just cringe worthy moments of failure that are cautionary tales in the book one of the first examples is in the first part of the book, you have these communities in the north that have been four years of civil rights and anti-slavery in their communities. when white activists come on the scene, the first example i have is francis right tiered she was aware of the work that was being

done. she had every opportunity to collaborate from them and learn from them and understand what she thought the solutions were. she just wanted her own grand adventure instead and had her own ideas of how things should be. it ended really badly. she founded a socialist commune. she ended up purpose inc. -- slaves themselves. shipping them off to haiti. the african-american community had abandoned the haitian movement they had previously backed. that, i think, is a lesson a lesson about looking around and being willing to follow the leadership of the people that have some skin in the game. probably the best known moment of a coalition that fell apart really graphically was when these movements that have been the anti-slavery movement turned into a land grab for who would get the right to vote first.

white women really had a bad moment there. susan b anthony. that is probably the best-known example. yes. >> i read this book. i love this book. i had a great time reading this book. one of the things i learned was there was a moment when reparations happened. people actually got 40 acres and a mule. and then we [bleep] it up. i wonder if you talk a little bit about how that happened. >> sorry c-span. you are absolutely right. [laughter] you are absolutely right that in the wake of the civil war, and while the civil war was still going on, there were programs in the south for land

redistribution. many african-american leaders put this out there is the number one priority. what they could do for generational lasting economic sustainability was to have some land to farm and to pass down. also create a building block, et cetera, once there was suffrage. this had started. parcels of land, many thousands of acres of land redistributed by the bureau. president johnson stopped it and came in and put an end to it. the republicans had a super majority in congress and were able to pass a lot of legislation which was kind of amazing. he put a stop to that part of it there was still massive support behind this. african-americans were calling for this, but petitioning before congress in 1980 with thousands

of signatures for people that wanted programs of land-grant, farming equipment and et cetera. it became an easier concession because, i think, it was easy to take away and practice. the idea was we will give these communities, these communities should look at themselves with the vote and protect themselves with the vote. that simply was not possible in the context that followed. >> what do you think you have learned about leadership in writing this book. >> wow. that is a really good question. i think that for these movements , that inspirational leadership was really important.

these leaders -- there are a few of these, you know, colts mention in this novel that had full on charismatic leaders that you would imagine. multiple wives and the whole thing. in terms of these political movements, many of the most inspirational leaders, succeeded where fannie right failed in that he was able to position himself as a megaphone for the black community in boston. he picked up the work that they were already doing. when he started the newspaper, the most radical newspaper of the century, many were african-americans. many of the contributors were african-americans. he really brought people in. he championed women. joined the movement. also in leadership positions. he had this far-reaching insistence on human rights.

not just a single issue of slavery. he was willing to do things like sit in silence and protest. he was considered the most important abolitionist leader in the world. he would just sit there and not speak. people would try to applaud him into saying something. he would not. he would sit and protest. he was really there for the people in the coalition that he cared about. one example of leadership that stands out to me as having been really successful. writing the emancipation proclamation. >> you mentioned as one of the connections, people speaking out about sexual violence. i was wondering in what context

people were doing that. who is speaking out about it and how that went. what happened. >> thank you. that is a great question. i love to talk about this because, also, we are in a moment where we are celebrating the passage of the 19th amendment. the women's suffrage amendment tiered such an important time to think about the role that we have. in another way, i think that we think of the 19th century women's movement as a suffrage movement from the jump. in my mind, this is, in the moment where the book ends for me in the 1870s, the women's movement was turning its focus to constitutional reform just at that moment. the women's movement before that, that is the entirety that i cover in the book. sexual violence is very important to them.

economic power, social power, all of these things are very important to them. a women's liberation movement. sexual violence and marriage. this was something that became the women's rights movement. they believe that women had to be empowered to have command of their own bodies in the institution of marriage. an interesting actor about critiquing the whole institution marital rape is outlawed now. at the time, this is a really controversial thing to talk about in public. these conversations about women's rights, sexual rights and marriage also open the door

for this slippery term voluntary motherhood. it meant that since women for the very dangerous consequences at the time of giving birth, they have the responsibility for caring for these children that they ought to be the ones to decide when conception can take place. when they are having sex in their marriages. voluntary motherhood was a nice term that could be used by birth control activists to talk about more active ways for planning for one's family. we see in both the women's movement kind of an overlap and thinking about reform. i think it largely dropped out of the conversation. we think about this public political focus in terms of women's rights. maybe now in the kind of me to movement, we are thinking about a psychological and private dynamic that very much concerned women in the 1840s and the rest

of the century. >> at some point when you are doing research, did you think i have to tell this, people need need to know this. was there something new to you? >> i have been studying this for a long time. i went to graduate school to study 19th century american culture. i have been a teacher, i've been a college professor working in this area since, i guess, 2008. that is kind of a long time. i read another book about it. i felt like i went all the way through this research that i was learning about things that were not familiar to me and i did not really know even as a suppose it expert on the subject.

i really felt like these stories are so resonant right now. that is why i thought they were as broad as i could marshall. thinking about specific things that were particularly, i don't know. some of you i think i've already read the book. you can help me out. anything that you found surprising. i know about john brown. he is in there. it gives me goosebumps when i think about it. i knew about him. a lot of the labor stuff i did not know. 1877 was this incredibly violent terrible year in american life. there was a workers strike that started because of railway workers in pennsylvania. it just flashed across the country and almost turned into a workers revolution. it was one of two instances in the book where the president of the united states deployed the military to put down civilian protest. the military came out and killed

about 100 protesters and restored order. the first time that the government had been put to use to protect corporate interests. protect the interest of the railroad corporation that had elected the very president that deployed them. that really set the tone for the relationship between corporate money and the government and people going forward that was really different. i was less familiar so i learned a lot by leaving that into the story that ours may be more familiar with. >> a little related to that story. where, in terms of the squabbles that society has about what free speech means now versus then, what remained consistent that you have seen and what changed? >> stability?

>> thinking about zuckerberg's facebook speech recently. >> thank you for asking. she is asking about free speech, activist speech, and public what can be said. one of the main ways, one of the main forms of opposition that activist face in the 19th century was on a real crack down around speech. really believing in the power of the written word. they were right. it worked, to a surprising surprising degree, it worked. the government responded in a number of ways that were relatively consistent. the anti-slavery movement developed and to make pamphlets and the liberator and other newspapers, the self outlaw the distribution of those. clamping down on active speech.

it was not just the south. the federal government and congress have rules. any proposal having to do with abolition could not be heard by the elected people. this incredibly important movement that was growing and growing and at hundreds of thousands of people in it, congress was just saying outright we simply will not consider it. we will table all of those proposals. there was that. the criminalization of those materials. later on you see this again around other laws. it becomes illegal for the free lovers in the women's right magazines talking about birth control are really talking about sex at all. a lot of them were locked up in jail. one of my guys was locked up several times. cut tuberculosis the last time and died after that. also called the comstock laws.

i talk about a lot of forms of opposition. some of it was like a mob comes to your house and build yellows in your yard. beats you up in the streets or murders you or throws your printing press into a river, et cetera. some of it was the government passing gag rules or deploying the military. i think i mentioned the protest here in boston. that was the other occasion where the president sent the military under martial law for part of the summer. 1954. that was a core way to try to silence. thank you for asking that. >> from a lot of what you said and read, i got the impression

that there was a lot of rowdiness and a lot of anger and the events that you describe in your book. also some people who said we have two be righteously angry about things that i ran and not settle for anything less than justice. let's also know when to use strategy and respect our fellow human beings just because they are human beings. >> they were kind of across-the-board, the reformers were less rowdy. the the opposition was really rowdy. mobbing people in the streets. as i said, for a good, for half the period that this book covers, most of the people involved in this book were nonviolent. i will say, it also includes, people, people that work

carrying out violent uprisings. also constituting protest in the book. kind of a separate issue. they really believed in the written word in the spoken word. this should be familiar to you now. climate strike or whatever movement you want to think of. you remember them. all of them really wear out here to find or construct or circulate these narratives as part of this project as reeducating the american conscience. this thing that is been part of my life forever and has existed for hundreds of years, i think it is supported by the bible.

something in me is saying that is not right. sentimental narratives has been a really effective, has been really effective in 19 century history. that was a big narrative. we are seeing that now. obviously seeing that with the outrage that people are feeling around the border. even, i was was just thinking about that video that was really big a few years ago. the whale and the baby whale. the mother whale. that is the same narrative. that gained a certain kind of currency for the same reason. there were many kind of rhetorical and textbased ways of going about this. walking off of their jobs, i think that's them important way for not letting my kid up candy

even though it's very hard. lots of people refusing. >> what narrative do you see that could be written whatever the causes. >> i would hire you. i think a lot of the same strategies are still effective. writing this book made me a little bit less cynical about protests and the effect that it can have. are the straws, are we going to save the planet? all of these things that really need to be addressed. can i just have a straw.

now i do understand that these individual choices and this rigorous attempt to lead a life that you and your don't find disgusting and hypocritical i think is important. one thing that really strikes me is that it took, incredibly diffuse. it took people who said i am going to work or the political system and make a new political party. it also took people saying i will have nothing to do with the american government because it is corrupt. it took this guy over here that no one saw coming. i'm going right to the capital with the gun. ultimately bringing slavery to a head. it took a long time for americans to be ready to die in a war. it took a long, long time. this diffuse pressure, we see it coming from all angles.

i do think you see it now with some of the movements in our own moment where you feel like, you feel like there are enough corporations to have the response there. yes. yes. i think that there are strategies. it really shape the conditions in this. rather than just responding to them. they also failed in a lot of ways. none of the communes are existing today. i wanted to reevaluate the ways

in which they were successful. i ended up wanting to think a lot of it how failure is built into social justice. we have to face it. facing a radical kind of hope and relentless antagonism to just keep trying things in the state of almost certain failure. they have been elevated to reformers and national memory. the weirder elements of the counterculture that nourish them edited out. looking now at their portraits and lace collars preserved and tooled leather cases, one easily forget that they were hated, mocked and feared by most of the

countrymen. looking to overthrow american life as they knew it. they knew it was utopian and had every reason to expect defeat. all that they accomplish was fired by this mix of unrelenting antagonism. their willingness to hazard failure rather than accept the world as they found it. the history must be a history of a certain kind of failure. we completely metabolize the wild idea that 19th century america that succeeded, women and pants, the the telephone, regular bathing. [laughter] that the original and cause ability is lost. success carries the feeling of inevitability as it represents a march of history. just barely caught. only it the ideas that were dropped. the stories of these activists, some a variety of potential

americas that have not come to be, at least not fully, at least not yet. what success can we credit the radicals of the revolution. thoughtless personal virtue certainly, achievement of some crucial goals to be sure. we may look not to the perpetuity of their outcomes but to the rightness of their principles. prefiguring at least at a time a different and better world. most of all their motivation to act on these principles. to try something when it is easier and safer by far to do nothing. devoting their lives to a struggle with no end. they dared to begin. [applause] thank you. [applause] if you buy a book, i will give you a little button and i will sign it. [laughter] >> thank you so much, holly.

thank you so much for coming. we have copies of the book up at the register. we will do some reshuffling of the furniture. thank you all again. [applause] it is martin luther king jr. day. tonight we want to show you a couple of programs from our icon about the civil rights leader. beginning at 8:30 pm eastern tune tune in for three programs that look at doctor king's politics in the last hours of his life. find more schedule information in your program guide. book tv recently visited capitol hill and asked tom cole of oklahoma what are you reading. >> i'm reading a book about an english author, kind of new historian. chamberlain, hitler, churchill and the road to war. just finished up an