♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ good evening everyone. we are delighted to have you with us, welcome to book talk tuesday. the center of digital history of the washington library. happy new year to you all and ow year end glad you could join and is spent your evening with us. tonight very excited because we are going to have an opportunity to explore the challenges, the opportunities that early americans face will living under british military rule in the american revolution. before we get to that, before guitar distinguish guests this

evening a programming nobody want to encourage us all on generally 27th, next week will have a special symposium entitled leadership for more perfect union. this is a symposium, it is a one day supposedly done at that working in situ but were going to be timeouts on the serious issues that are facing this country at this time. and some solutions for the way forward. will be joined by some esteemed figures from government, from philanthropy and business including former secretary of state colin powell, current governor of maryland, and current associate justice of the supreme court. so please go to mount vernon.org, check us out there we can register for this free event. we encourage you to join us in these important discussions. we look forward to seeing you there. i also want to encourage you to support mount vernon and other sites over this difficult time here we are delighted to bring programming like this to bring you free

every so often. that does come with a cost but if you are able and have sent means to do so, we would appreciate you throwing a few clams are away. you can find a way to do that by going to mount vernon.org and clicking that donate button. all right, let's talk about tonight's main topic. in 1815, as many of you might know john adams wrote to thomas jefferson and argued that the revolution is in the hearts and minds of the people in the 15 years before a drop of blood was spilt at lexington and concorde. : : :

revolution. if you like to copy at this time, the privilege to welcome john mechling owner, thank you for bringing us my correct your coming -- >> yes temperature right now this morning when i drove to work was about 5 degrees above so a little nippy. >> you have a human long as i understand. >> yes. >> thank you, i am really excited to talk to you about this book. i was fascinated find your findings your experience people faced during the revolutionary war. i want to start with a big picture question. a lot of our colleagues have been writing a lot these days

about ordinary americans during the revolution at women, slaves escaping and pursuing what was missing from that conversation? >> specifically from the question of loyalists and patriots, what's missing is people who wouldn't have identified either or could have identified as both throughout the world. there's this whole category people called different things like sullivan's recent book called the disaffected, these people who at certain points side with crown, revolutionaries and that, they side with neither. i felt like those people weren't well served in this category we

have pagers on one side and loyalists on the other. it's a much more complicated story mother has to be room for change over time for people's loyalty to be more complicated by their day-to-day existence. in terms of experiences, women, enslaved people, native americans, there has been a ton of great history on that written in the last decade or so. it takes the exceptional, these disenfranchised but it doesn't integrate their stories into coherent narrative. it doesn't integrate with what everyone else is doing. i was trying to get out ordinary

people, different races and genders and backgrounds and how ordinary experience shaped political ways. >> i'm curious in our ancestors being predecessors in the historical profession shaped this narrative early on because you said been accustomed categories, patriots and loyalists and the people in the middle of the gray area in between writing history of the war and make those determinations. >> absolutely earliest historians of the war were ones involved in it themselves. david ramsey. they knew -- nancy writes the

history south carolina revolutionary war multivolume history and american revolution, first decade of the 19th century, ramsey himself was a prisoner of war in occupied charleston. warren was witnessed to a lot of occupied boston and newport. it would have known from their personal experience, the nuances during this period photos in their interest as the ruling elite of the new republic after the war not to cast the struggle itself like that. it's like adams quote you opened with. he writes that something -- going to protect us but the revolution was complete before the first was fired.

everyone turned against the british well before the war and the aftereffects of this change in people's lives. people, it was in their interest to create this narrative of a patriotic revolutionary to which people could claim and their own experiences didn't necessarily that put them claim "afterwards" and say i was always a patriot or always on the side. in reading one of the things are going back through with an eye toward how they define loyalty and political region, it's how very few loyalists made outright. many times the people they name our loyalists, joseph galloway martha brothers in philadelphia

have already fled the united states or else there is this group of the loyalists but never with an actual definition and they bend over backwards to forgive people straight the patriot. >> after the war there is a chance at reconciliation and they were all across in the 13 colonies. >> absolutely. it's one of the things even some of the heil profile founding fathers are involved with john j and alexander hamilton. decided early on because they are contributing a good deal to

society. they have money expertise and the tools people need to build a nation so if you're going to have strict during the war, you could not be part of the american then you will have to exclude half a million people and arms in the crown or took action. to exclude that many people, that is a quarter of the population. >> that would be offered pretty fast. i want to take the opportunity to remind the audience you have chance to ask questions the second half. post your questions comments wherever you are watching from this evening. a second ago you mentioned boston, your book looks at

cities exclusively, what we get from urban spaces may not want to get from hinterlands or the backcountry? >> i looked at urban basis for two reasons. the first records are more likely to survive these places in greater concentration than the hinterlands this is the sources i spoke to the experiences of the occupation and survived. second, places where occupation was the most intense and had the highest stakes. in terms of intensity, the british occupy elsewhere in america pretty much the entire state of georgia and south carolina, most of new jersey, large parts of new york and

pennsylvania in the countryside and places network occupied by the british, ordinary people might go months or weeks without seeing a single british soldier. people are living cheap you're in it every single day and things move more quickly with greater intensity. then the cities were crucial to the plan on both sides. for the british, the strategy was to take the cities and use it to consider loyalty from the surrounding countryside. if there is anywhere welcoming of the british army, it was likely these duties

cosmopolitans, much more transient of the population largely depended on the british empire for their livelihoods before the revolution and in many places, newport rhode island welcomes the british army with kind of a council of higher citizens reading proclamation for henry quinn so a lot of these places there were people who welcomed the chance to get back to business when the british arrived but over the course of the war the kind of realized the cost of having soldiers were there and the experience made them realize the empire wasn't a place to go back to. >> i want to come back to the british occupation but one of the things that struck me about your book and maybe think about things in different ways, the

revolutionary regimes that come into being in the immediate months or early months of the work were themselves an occupying force. but to the government look like and how do people respond to them in this dramatic change occurs 75 and 76? >> a lot of people didn't know what to make of them. they were groups of citizens that formed themselves into committees, councils, malicious, resistance organizations and starting around april 1775, they started using apparatuses of power. the cities i'm looking at here in the book were each capitol of their respective colonies. in order to obtain legitimacy

and the sanction of a proper government, revolutionaries made moves almost immediately to kind of secure those places, the records, secure the apparatus of the government. it took place kind of and somewhat of a comical way. one of my favorite examples happened in savannah, georgia where the clerk of the kings council in savannah, the person in charge of record-keeping at the connie house in savannah was woken up at 6:00 a.m. by a neighbor say hey, the congress, this revolutionary organization broken to the courthouse and we got the keys to your office so we can get the colonial records and basically says i'm not going to give you the keys so they come back a couple hours later and threaten his life and say

basically we're going to rough you up if you don't let us in and give us the records but he still says no, i'm not going to give you the keys to my office and become back a couple hours later it's a who broke into your office, we can't make heads or tails of the record, at least show us what what. he says all right, if you already broken, at least you're not going to make a mess of it. he let them organize the records and take everything packed private and go about his way but it is this kind of occupation, this seizing of public buildings and records and the power at the beginning of the revolution. >> didn't have a hard occupation with the british new york, savannah and charleston and other cities, what does it look like? he mentioned a moment ago one of

the goals is to conciliate the american colonists back to the crown and the king of government, what does that process look like and what is the role of collaborators? >> collaborating is a great word. i use it in the book in the sense that historians of the french -- german occupation of france kind of almost everybody for living under collaboration in one way or another but what the british do is pretty much immediately when they land retake cities starting with new york and the adelphia, savannah and charleston, they start disturbing and they first do it in new york in the fall of 1776 the get people to sign -- you

guys are ahead of me. they give out these little slips of paper held in duplicate, one is a book at military headquarters and one is given to the person assigned to them. it hasn't renounced any revolutionaries and find revolutionaries to the crowd in some cases promised to defend the crown so they are not usually interested in making people they have loyalties to fight for them but they get an affirmation of their acceptance of royal and they hold out the prospect of returning to the kings peace which is reconnecting to the old british empire, getting back access to trade group, getting back access

to royal court, the ability to sue and reclaim property debt, getting back all of these old connections to the british empire. a lot of people, especially people living in urban centers, this was attractive. a lot of them make their living based on transatlantic trade and depended upon the british empire for that livelihood so a lot of people kind of signed on they would get their lives back essentially though it turned out to be very different. >> how successful were the british in the best sense, in their life restoring the civil government? maybe we could look at new york city and savannah which i think are two critical places where these experiments are taking

place. >> the great to compare and contrast because they are different in the ways that they succeed. new york, the british conveyed in the late summer of 1776, long island, manhattan island, staten island, what we now think of as the boroughs of new york city and surrounding areas are never able to penetrate deeper into the country so there exists this kind of no man's land, this hard water in between evolutionary new york and british occupy new york. because of this, the british are unwilling to restore full civil government to be areas they occupy. instead there is this mix of military government led by commanding general of the army, william and sir henry and

carlton the city of new york itself responsible for keeping order on the street. they work with a series of a group of civilian of former officials led by andrew elliott, a collector who is given the title of chief of police or superintendent of police depending on which source you read and he is kind of responsible for the civilian apparatus keeps order in the streets reports back to the military offenders. they give civilians a stake in the administration and provide lodging for the poor and people who couldn't afford it based on

loyalty and adherence to the crown. they compensate the estate and the houses of knowing what they call traders and revolutionary and it goes out to loyalists or people who adhere to them coming into the city and they have street cleaners and clerks, rent collectors and so forth so there is this weird civilian administration but it never really has the full force of law as long as it's only backed by the military, there is this idea that it could end at any time when the military comes out especially the examples of boston, newport and philadelphia which the british army does leave before the war ends which

loyalists who collaborated with the british or helped the british and up very poorly and even savannah were british bring back the rural governor for james wright, here able to conquer all of georgia by the end of 1779, 1780 they are able call the colonial assembly in 1780 back into session. savannah and later charleston they attempt to do the same thing. it's kind of their best help to restore and show that there will be restored peace. it does work for about a year but again the british army marches north of the low country

toward yorktown, a kind of goes away. you get revolutionary guerrilla forces fighting in the back country through the swamp and feuds between people of different allegiances break out. even though he tries his best as governor to conciliate the situation, he's never able to change power he had previously. even while civil government is technically put in power while the world is raging, it is the end-all be-all. >> british army is trying to take various cities and some vastly holding at least some of them sitting in my heading toward yorktown, how are the people you spoke of earlier in this middleground trying to figure out how to survive, how

are they reinventing and ruining themselves in the process? >> a lot of them are doing ingenious things. there is an innkeeper in new york city who runs this skin with continental courtesy where she opens her house to prisoners of war the continental army, houses them, takes their rent continental dollars but not a lot of them were due and then she asked military authorities for a pass to go outside of the lines from across the river to new jersey, uses that currency to buy a bunch of food, comes back to new york and sells it at three or four times the price she paid for it in british

currency and pocket the difference. if there's a lot of people working these angles, these kind of schemes to enrich themselves and in her case, she breaks away free of an abusive husband who she's able to throw out of the house and break free from because of this new source of power and income. other people are more fundamentally reinventing themselves. one person i fault in the book is an enslaved carpenter, boston king. his.on the plantation outside of charleston, south carolina, provender, he flees to the british lines from a british offering freedom to enslaved people of revolutionaries who were behind the lines willing to serve in the army he served in a

british regiment as a maxillary or a grunt kind of worker. that ends up escaping to new york were had another free slave and worked as a carpenter, a hairdresser, manservant eventually ends up reinventing himself as a free person even with the british and living out the rest of his life in nova scotia, a free black community. there's tons of people like this that are totally changing their circumstance through the occupation. >> that raises a question about source material, to write about circlet or folks like that because they have papers, george washington of course these folks we don't often seek or write

about the people who are tracking across large spaces in time, where did you find these individuals? >> through a lot of digging. however was going to historical societies just digging through people's papers and seeing what they had. part of the reason is going back to the beginning of our conversation, some of them hide the extent of the activity during the occupation one of the stories i found fascinating was mary, the only owner of a boardinghouse. a diehard loyalist even though her husband served in the continental artillery. she wrote a series of letters to him during the battle over at rhode island where he was commanding a unit attacking newport and she writes letter

saying i hope the continental army burns to help and the commander dies a horrible death and your pink marched through the streets in a prisoner of war but then she hides that. newport reverts to revolutionary, to evacuate in october 1779 she takes this bundle of letters, hands them to a friend of hers and says hi please until long after i'm dead. after she continues to operate the boardinghouse with her husband while into the 1790s even as a legendary washington connection where he stays at this house when he comes to newport in the 1790s and they have a blanket they say washington slept on.

but they don't find these papers of hers until 1845, 1851 her grandchildren are going to the attic and they find grandma was a royalist. a lot of people went to great lengths to hide their activities, hunting for their stories made it that much more challenging and rewarding when we could find. >> that's amazing and a good example of through grandma's things. [laughter] it's an example of how reality occupation in the work depends on individuals and families and we made a joke about it being cool earlier because it was winter and is outside the other day chopping down trees splitting box with my mighty acts so i was thinking about that i was reading your book you have a wonderful discussion about the stress the occupation puts on the natural landscape

and the ways in which people from their homes built shelters, can you tell us more about those stresses? >> the army was an extraordinary drain on resources in these cities especially when you consider these places were not set up for large influxes of populations. the largest in philadelphia had about 25000 people during peace time and that was with trade open from the countryside and took an incredible amount of food and fuel to keep these people alive in the british army in new york comes with 35000 troops rhode island who comes in with a thousand, it almost

doubles a population of about 10000 on the islands. by the end of the first year of the occupation of rhode island, it cuts down every single tree on the island and they are beginning to tear down fences and buildings and bonds and go to the connecticut coast for lumber and even as far away as long island. you see also prices for food and shelter, there are tons of complaints even from well-off people in new york city that prices for rent are skyhigh. prior to beginning, and the city will rule because so many

folders house helper with priority over the local population and a lot of places. then there is people going hungry and even freezing to death on the streets in newport, the winter of 77, 78 we know by climate science one of the coldest of the second half of the 18th century and accounts of people freezing to death and even burning things to try to survive. new york city, regular brown, ordinary stuff goes up by about five times in three war and this is kind of despite british efforts to protect these

populations so there is dire straits for a lot of people living in these towns. >> what were they able to restart especially when the british take places like new york and savannah where they have control. are they able to resupply themselves put back into place a market economy? >> in a sense, yes and no. they are able to bring it a lot of what we might think of as luxuries. for example, a day after the british plans, he started writing in birmingham saying send me hardware, silverware, ceramics. send me all of this stuff because there is this desire for british manufacturing that people have not been able to get in the outbreak of the imperial crisis and there is a great

deal, a lot of these goods selling cheaply in these cities just because there is supply built up england during intervening periods and a lot of demand for american merchants sell it. if you're in the market for a set of nice queens where, occupy new york might be replaced but at the same time, they are not able to connect to the local economy, they are not able to reconnect food supplies, fees fuel supplies that kept the cities going on a day-to-day basis. the british army goes so far even to ship from ireland on the way and never really worked but they try to ship drive grain,

coal and it just never really works. >> that's fascinating. for our audience after, we are coming to your questions in a minute but please submit one if you haven't already. feel free to get questions they come to mind. how medical you mentioned the fact that the experience of occupation eroded loyalty many felt for government by virtue of experiencing and going through this, can you tell us more about that process? pleasant sort of all at once some people decided enough was enough or was it a slow burn by 1783 they decided they were not going to go into exile but stay in the united states? >> it's a full burn and i compare it to muscle memory

almost when a lot of these people even if they had this voice loyalty, the beginning of the occupation because of hardship, the strain the british army puts on communities, they are forced to break the law turn them in order to survive. for example, the family of rhode island which has branches in boston and new york, it's constantly smuggling food and resources to one another across and reminds. one brother newport, one brother in occupy new york, one brother in boston, they are constantly writing to each other sending to the food and money and other things kind of illicitly under the nose of the british brief same thing the south, you see

people keeping ties to revolutionary neighbors, relatives not necessarily out of ideological reasons but for practical reasons, that's how they survive and people revolutionary, keeping ties to british occupied areas say that. by having to constantly undermine these governments occupation regimes, it erodes their authority, the idea that fresh trafficking personally but the king's forces can the needs of the population. while it doesn't necessarily turn people into revolutionaries, at least give them this alienation from royal

governments that didn't necessarily before for. >> that makes a lot of sense i do want to note you did teach two classes for being here today so i want to thank you for thinking of. i would ask you, what you often tell your students is the most important thing he ought to know about the occupation or maybe even better, what surprised you most about this project from the station wreck mostly the project and are was really kind of good faith people put into making society work under british occupation and we often kind of think of when the military comes, this catchall, this dire

situation where people are positive. a lot of people -- i feel like this category of in between hatred and loyalist, cap get a backdrop. i think it's a lot of these people have strong opinions but they didn't necessarily have the luxury of acting on them. one of the best sources i found was a book of poems from a woman in new york, a quaker merchant and poetry? program revolutionary, romantic revolutionary heroes virtue and then she goes and marries a british soldier and ends up living and moving to british

canada and it is this disconnect fascinating to me if it doesn't mean she didn't hold deep beliefs. she obviously did but in her day-to-day life, she didn't have the luxury of acting upon fun. i think that shows a lot of what happens during revolutionary upheavals. >> thank you for talking with me, now let's talk to the audience. we gotta russian about the transition capitol city from places like harrisburg charleston columbia. to what extent debating the occupation of these cities lead to removal of these capitals and other places in these days. >> it's an interesting question. i've never really thought of it that way. the traditional narrative is

that frontier versus establishment that leads to the movement of capitals, savannah to atlanta occupation may have had something to do with it as well. again i'm not sure the timing so a lot depends on the question but that is interesting. >> research topic. [laughter] who got a question yorktown and jamestown, the struggles cities facing the british occupation as long as they could. >> you could argue yorktown does get occupied in the end of the war for about two months and 11

virginia at the beginning of the war basically burned by patriot leaders to prevent the base by governor john moore really, the towns tended to be too small for the reddish to worry too much about. it's one reason -- and i mentioned this in the book as well it's not a coincidence the cities talking about boston, new york newport were the biggest cities in north america and the most important economically. in the most important strategically. williamsburg, yorktown, jamestown weren't on that map of an imperial view. they did face them at various times in the war but only

circumstantially seeking an escape back to new york. they are just not as important economically to the trade. >> thank you very much for our next question is looking at whether or not what you would regard as a failure are some common themes we saw in these various places? >> i think they all fail in the end because they all caps returned to the united states. the british when they negotiate for peace, there is a movement because of the battle of yorktown, the british old new york, savannah and charleston and there is a directive by the

ministry to save new york, keep it as an american trading outpost to which the british can keep some of their economic cost in north america and station there navy and strategic holdouts but the populations of all of these cities turn against the british by the end of the war. by the end of the war even the people who had been most excited about reddish will occupation new york, they are exhausted, tired. ready to make peace with the revolutionary government. even junior, one of these loyalist basically said enough

is enough, the population here won't follow you if you try to hold them as an american or british post in north america. they ultimately have to give it up because the population has turned against them so the common theme is they collapse after british military defeats. >> this makes me wonder about what lessons the british learned in various cities and the extent to which they apply blessings they may have learned in boston to new york or places like that. >> it does evolve over the course of the war. the system they create new york gets replicated in philadelphia savannah charleston and i believe in newport, the records

sink to the bottom when the british evacuated and the ship carrying town records sink these systems evolved and charleston, former attorney general creates this elaborate plan for different districts and even ideological indoctrination of the population but largely it's not necessarily these officials that are military officers willing to put conciliation in front of military victory. >> confiscation actually post revolutionary regimes and british authorities use this

tool, in what ways are they using confiscation as a means to entice people to one side or the other? >> one of the things in the occupied south in south carolina and georgia about the british see a large number of plantations, a large number of enslaved people when they initially invade georgia and south carolina and they kind of thought out as rewards to people who return to their loyalty if they can reclaim their property is safe people some people stuck with the crowns even before occupation, they are given the land former revolutionaries enslaved people to do what they will during this period of time.

ultimately, new york and charleston have the power to kind of take away property, agitate, to cease land material goods. there's a lot of using people's property in people's wealth as a way to entice or punish them alternatively. >> speaking of taking territory, we have a question about how far in the they occupy the country during the war. >> it depends on the region. in most of the places i'm looking at, they didn't go in that much further than the territory of the actual city. in boston for never the control beyond the city itself in

philadelphia they controlled the city and it's the inner suburbs but the lines were pretty narrow. in the south from it's a little more all encompassing. they occupy georgia up to acosta, they got pretty far into western georgia, south carolina as far back as 96 my frontier settlement -- sorry, south carolina and were able to exercise control over entire states so varied place to place and then there are places both sides claim, the regions around new york city for about 100

miles in either direction, no man's land or places where militia are loyal to the revolutionary, they kind of fought one another for control neither side really had a clear advantage. >> we have a question coming about a section amongst citizens and i want to build on what you said because i'm wondering the british army were contesting no man's land, to what extent that lead to the -- need to one side or the other? >> i think property whichever side were ready to win the war.

i found correspondences between family in different places where they say all right, maybe next month is the time to jump ship and come to the revolutionary side or in a couple months they went to battle, switch to the crowd. his a lot of swapping -- site swapping in these areas. in terms of disaffection, there's a lot of people who are militantly anti- both sides. i could draw a comparison to the english civil war where there are groups called rotman would defend their towns against the loyalist and parliamentary. you see that more the backcountry of the carolinas georgia, he's people beyond the

mountains, tennesseans and kentuckians who want to defend their settlements attack anyone who comes to their region so i would say there is definitely disaffection there. in terms for question experience different occupied cities, yes and no, i tried shoot in the book is draw common threads and in each city. a hopefulness at the beginning when the british arrived among a lot of the population to be reconnected to the british empire that things will get more peaceful, this is the beginning of the end of their travails and then there is this period of deprivation and hardship of military rule and the other thing that occurs that violence.

a lot of militaries and british army was a violent society and there's assaults and rapes and murders and all kinds of violence in these cities and that is common to all. there are certain things that set people off that don't and others. one of the things bostonians are looking at is the british soldiers not respecting the sabbath on sundays not letting pemco into their churches. one of the things carolinians are complaining about is how the british are with enslaved people and allowing blacks to have more liberties than they are used to so there are regional and cultural differences like that but there are a lot of common

experiences. >> one final question and i want to build on these questions a little bit, he's asking about william and his son, an example the revolutionary telling. the long-lasting effects of occupation in the postwar period, what does it mean for people who have been divided and exiled? kind of lasting effects does the occupation have on their lives? >> that's a good question and i can't -- there were definitely a lot of families divided this way. the family i mentioned earlier about half of them end up in nova scotia and england with the

other half in rhode island. both sides continued to correspond, shows that one side can't come back under penalty of execution so there is a lot of this, benjamin franklin governor of new jersey going into exile whereas franklin himself is becoming prominent and it hangs over a lot of people but in a certain way they are able to sweep it under the rug and forget it and going back to the beginning of the power of conversation, there is a permissiveness the early republic or filling this gap a lot of the complexities and nuances of the wartime experience. one thing is someone a lot of

thesaurus earlier -- a political economist in the department of the treasury under both washington and jefferson administration and his younger wife, he is a diehard loyalist. he lived in occupied philadelphia, married the daughter of a prominent family member, he made his mind money profiteering off the occupation, licenses to selkirk to the british west indies from new york the caribbean philadelphia but he's someone who switches sides of the right time when he gets word that the british are getting ready to evacuate, he writes to relatives outside of the town from a filled out cap before the british leaf and decides to the state of

pennsylvania. he comes back and right his contact at new york but he's basically breaking contact with them and he writes he's going to be the most perfect american if they will accept it he's able to make a career in politics. he's elected to congress confederation of the 1780s and the treasury department in the 1790s and 1800s. it comes up every now and again when running for office he's in public you see as a useful discretion. they are like you can't blame him for that, here's a link 20. it was warm so there is this let's let bygones be bygones. but part of that is everyone has something like that but they wouldn't want brought out so is critics are never able to get

any traction because there is this forgive and forget mentality remark i hadn't read much about his life so he showed up in your book and i'm like, what the heck is he doing there? is a great example of the ways in which you talk to people reinventing themselves. >> absolutely. another one ended up mutilating this. if you look at his records, you can see portions in his books are ripped out from the occupation. in the one hand it's frustrating but it's interesting to see the way people reshape their lives. >> this is a fantastic, thanks so much when we are able to

travel, occupy a table at a pub. i've enjoyed our time together and i want to thank you and our audience for terrific questions. thank you for tuning in and thank you to sam schneider and patrick behind the scenes working their magic as usual. hope to see you soon and everyone else have a good evening. good night and good luck. >> thank you, it's been a pleasure. ♪♪ >> weekends on c-span2 bring the best in american history and nonfiction books as weekend marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. saturday 9:10 a.m. on american history tvs american artifacts, will tour the flight 93 national memorial here shanksville pennsylvania. heading for washington d.c.

then 2:00 p.m. eastern on the presidency, president bush's address to the nation on the night of september 11. 5:30 p.m. eastern a former white house chief gary walters recalls the events within the white house walls after the terrorist crashed into the twin towers and pentagon tv features authors discussing the latest nonfiction books. sunday 2:55 p.m. we will continue a look back on 11 with historian garrett in his book, the only plane in the sky, oral history of 9/11 4:15 p.m. eastern, lawrence wright in his book, the looming tower, al qaeda and the road to 9/11. watch american history book tv every week and on c-span2. find a full schedule on your program guide or visit c-span.org. ♪♪