at 7:00 on c-span former president barack obama joine the campaign trail supporting vice president harris at rally in pittsburgh. you can watch on c-span now our free mobile video app and online at c-span.org. >> c-span peter unfiltered view of government. we are funded by these television companies and more including cox. >> when connection is needed most cox is there to help your bringing affordable internet to families in need. supporting the boys and girls club and support to veterans. whenever and wherever it matters most we will be there. >> cox supports c-spa is a public service along with these other television providers giving you a front-row seat to democracy.

>> and that was national book festival founder laura bush on september 8, 2001 at the very first national book festival. well, welcome to the f national book festival 2024 held at the washington convention center for the 24th year in a row. c-span's booktv is bringing you full coverage. we are joined here ticket off the festival with the c librarin of congress carla hayden. dr. hayden, your predecessor started this. >> they started ithe and this is one of the best times of the year for me as a library and a book lover. and just first lady laura bush had a successful, very successful book festival when she was the first lady of texas. and it's still going on the texas book festival. so when she arrived in washington, d.c. she met my

predecessor dr. billington and she said sir, there should be a national book festival. he said therend is one now. and then joann jenkins who is the ceo of aarp was the chief operating officer at the library of congress at the time. and she and laura bush planned, started the first t book festiv. it was held right around the thomas jefferson building. and then it expanded to a space right across the street at the capital. and then it expanded to the mall. and now 24 years later we are at the washington convention center. and so it'sst. just wonderful, d aarp is a a major sponsor of e book festival. >> i enjoyed being on the mall because outside of felt like a festival. but i sure enjoy the air-conditioning. >> air-conditioning, and you don't have to worry about the

weather. and so it's wonderful to see now we can have an expo floor, and this year for the first and we will have a stem section, science and t technology, powerd by general motors. so there are all kinds of cool things going on in this big expo floor. so a trulyin exciting. >> it was the numbers of this year's book festival. how many authors? were so many authors you're looking for? >> nearly 100 authors for all ages starting with james patterson who is everybody's favorite. one of my favorites, and i get a little choked up when you talk about her because her book this year is about our personal experiences with her husband, mr. goodwood, doris kearns goodwin. and she will be here talking about living history with them. we also have tamron hall who is a journalist and a tv personality with her new cookbook based on her

experiences learning how to be a confident cook. so i think there are a lot of us who kind of want to do that. we're giving the american prize for fiction to james mcbride who many people were introduced to with his first book the color of water ear canal he's just gone on to literary heights. erik larson is here, and so many people like him here and it kind of surprise, max greenfield, he's the actor in a series called i think it is tv girl. he has a children's book called good night thoughts. and it's a book for young people who might a have anxiety and her staying up at night and one drink, and it's just a wonderful book for i think all of us who have to stay up at night. >> is this a year-round job for the library of congress to blend the? >> as soon as one book festival is over the planning starts for the next. and the main thing is making sure we haveut the authors. and it's all free.

it's going until 8:00 tonight and you will be able to see on c-span some of the authors i just mentioned including david rubenstein who is the sponsor of the festival. he has his book about presidents. so there's just a lot of things that you can tune into are actually come into. and if you would just show if you're in person you get this really cool bag that i can attest will hold a lot of books. and then later you can advertise in the grocery store. it makes i a wonderful -- everything like that and this year's of color, black. >> this book bag if you come down to the book festival, tori overheard one major book bag. you can get w one for free. what you tell our viewers if you are the first 20, 30, 40 viewers to e-mail us at

booktv@c-span.org, send us your name and address we will send you a book bag. so go ahead -- booktv@c-span.org. booktv@c-span.org. go ahead and send that e-mail. dr. hayden, , what is your role today? >> my role is to be not only a cheerleader but also to introduce certain authors, sessions, then i get to actually interview tamron hall and her co-author who is a chef and has appeared on her t show and on te today show, ms. stirling. and talk about why they wrote this book about food and comfort and what it means when it's time when we all are needing a little comfort. and so that's could be a wonderful, wonderful for me. >> you mention david rubenstein, an author, an entrepreneur. what's his role? his famous advocates also avehe

fundraiser. >> is a funder of this and also quite a few literary events and programs at thef library of congress. he believes in the power of reading eddie talks about that because as a young boy in baltimore, as he says he came from modest means and he went to the public library every week and check out ten books. that was the limit. and by the next day he had read them all. and he credits learning to read, reading books, being exposed to libraries as part of his success. and so he is getting back by, and he loved the book festival. he's going to interview -- interview several authors. in fact, is going to interview james patterson. >> david rubenstein since last year when he was on this program made another purchase. >> he sure did. >> with the baltimore orioles thatolug he bought and he had ak night at the orioles so we will show some video here as carla hayden tells us, what's going .

>> well, he believed, , s too, d is kind to see -- kind of fantasy books in baseball because you have these summer days and that's a perfect time for going to again but also going to a game as kind of an incentive for getting kids to read. so he made sure there's a partnership with the local library system, that if young people read a certain number of books, they get tickets to the game. and think about that. you can take your family to a game and be proud because you're a good reader. and that's your payoff. >> the video we are kind of showing here has you in it. >> well, i was asked to throw out the first ball.gi and let's just say it was challenging, but but i had y impromptu lesson from the legendary jim palmer who very thoughtfully took the ball out of my hand while i was practicing and said i think i can help you.

andd he did. i'm holding my figures, i know the seams and everything, and had to tell you come once he did that and put in my hand, i didn't let it go because i said if he tells me what to do, but also cal ripken is part of it and it's a wonderful thing because ripken has aog program called ripken reads. so this idea of mixing sports and reading and literacy is a deep.g that runs >> in an age where everything is available online and everything is speedaish up in a sense, how do you get somebody to invest the time for a book? >> and it is an investment. but think of the time that you invest in other activities. and you could say look, this is something that can be special for you. you can also, and i know some people have asked this, well, what if i listen to a book? yes, , you're reading because yu are hearing those words.

it'' all about absorbing the words. and so if a young person in your life wants to read the graphic novel, it's okay. that's reading, too. so whatever you can do to get young people especially to appreciate reading and not make them feel guilty if they're not reading more. >> well, coming up we have all day coverage here on booktv. a couple of calling opportunities for you as well. doris kearns goodwin will be out here. another pulitzer prize winner will also be after talking about his new memoir. he wrote the sympathizer which became an hbo series a couple of years ago but has a new book out. it's a memoir of his life a man with two faces. so he'll be here as well. stuart eizenstat longtime clement will be added to take your calls. that's is coming up. go to booktv.org you can find a full schedule. with also got lots of altavista

show you. about 50 minstrel show you an event that is about american explorers and it is amanda bellows and hampton sides, two bestsellersou and they're coming up in about 15 minutes. carla hayden will be b back to look at later today to talk about books and what you are reading. we would do a call-in with dr. hayden, the librarian of congress. and, frankly, that's my favorite segment. every we did hear from viewersta talking about books and what they are reading. but in the meantime she mention david rubenstein, a funder of the library of congress national book festival, funder of several things around washington, d.c. there was a kickoff gala last night at the library of congress and mr. rubenstein spoke. here's what he had to say. before? anybody? okay, a few people. how many have never been to the

coolidge auditorium before? how many of you ever been to the national book festival for oak? and how many people here are looking forward to tomorrow? everybody okay, so you'll hear a little bit later about the history of the national book festival. and i won't tell you much about it, but it's an extraordinary experience for those who haven't seen it before. you've got roughly 150 to 200000 people coming into the convention center looking to see their favorite authors are looking to hear from their favorite authors, looking to get books signed, looking to buy books, and for children, particularly the chance to meet with other children who are here, who care about books, to learn more about reading. it's really an incredible experience. and, you know, as i've tried to think about reading and how important it's been to me, it's not called the national email festival. and i called the national magazine festival. it's a national book festival.

and why is it books that are so important to read? because books really focus the brain. when you write these books, when you write a book, it takes a long time to write it, and it really shows you what the human brain can achieve, but also when you read a book, it focuses your brain as well. and so everybody here, i assume, has had a great experience reading books, and that's what the national book festival is about, to get people to be more excited about reading, get more excited about the pleasure of of learning. and that's what life is all about, is learning, improving. and so the national book festival really conceived of about 24 years ago as a spectacular job of, i think, encouraging people to read more. and i just want to give a word about our library of congress. some of you may know the country library started in 1800, but its only had, well, how many people here think that there were a lot of women who served as library of congress before, but how many think there are a lot of

african-americans who served as library of congress? four. and there were only, i think, two other people. sure. who were librarians, who served as librarian of congress, of course. so carla hayden is a triple threat. she is a librarian. she is also a woman and african-american and and from my hometown of baltimore. so really a four, four, four great things about her. and she's done a spectacular job. the library of congress national book festival was conceived of, as you'll hear in a moment, a little bit more why under jim billington. but i think carla has really taken it to a much greater level than even jim could have imagined. so we're we're all proud to be part of it and want to thank you, carla, for doing everything to make it possible. and so for some of you who may not realize this, you know, carla hayden, when she took the job, she was the head of the nonprofit library in my hometown

library. and when she was given this job and president obama, who knew her from chicago, where she had been before, told her she could be the library of congress, obviously have to be confirmed, but she was afraid of telling her mother because the job paid less than being the head of the not correct library. but and so it's a great public service that she's doing. and i should tell you, she knows it doesn't come with a car and driver when she comes to come back and forth from baltimore. she lives in baltimore and drives herself more or less back and forth to board from baltimore as because there's no car and driver for the library of congress. right. so i hope you're not reading too much when you're going back and forth. but just listen. you're listening to books, right? right. okay. so i'd like to thank the some of the other people who've been involved in making this possible. and we have a logo that will show up somewhere on a screen. i think so our charter sponsors, i'd like to thank our general motors. is there a logo for them? there it is. general motors. everybody go out and buy a car that night to thank them.

the institute of museum and library services. so i want to thank them that james madison council, that is the organization many how many here are members of james madison council. okay. well, thank you. this is named after james madison, whose idea it was to have a library of congress. now, he proposed the idea in 1783 and 17 years later, congress finally got around to doing it. but we still admire him for having the idea. took a while to get it. his colleagues in congress agree with it, so i'd like to thank the members on that gentleman madison council. i'd like to thank our patrons and the aarp. and you're going to hear shortly a little bit more about the aarp. i'm going to thank them for their support. the costar group, thank them, the john w kluge center and the national endowment for the arts and the national endowment for the humanities. so thank you all for your support. i'd like to also thank our champion. it's the friends of the library of congress and there's their

logo and our media partners led by npr and c-span. we have their logos. okay. and i guess c-span will be televising some of the interviews tomorrow and some of the authors will be doing interviews with them. and we also want to thank our exhibitors, our many hardworking library staff and volunteers. how many people here are volunteers? tomorrow? anybody? a lot of them. oh, well, thank you very much for doing that. how many people work in the library of congress? staff okay. how many of you are volunteering tomorrow? okay. thank you. and among our most dedicated volunteer ers are the junior league of washington. we've supported the festival since 2003. they have a logo. they're the junior league. i thank them. and so i'd like to thank everybody who is a sponsor because, you know, one of the most popular words in the english language is free.

and the library of congress national book festival is free thanks to the support of all the people i've mentioned. so i'd like to thank them very much for doing it. and that was david rubenstein from last night at the library of congress national book festival gala that is always held the night before. we are live at the 24th annual national book festival. here is the bag that we are handing out, book bag on site. it's library of congress. the other side, of course, book tv. if you happen to come down to the festival, you can pick one of these up for free. the festival is free, as we learned from carla hayden, the library librarian of congress, over 100 authors are here today. children nonfiction fiction, life style, etc., etc. so they're expecting about, oh,

15,000 people or so to be here at the washington convention center in just a few minutes. our first author discussion of the day will be kicking off and that's on explorers hampton sides and amanda bellows. each have written a bestseller about explorers. amanda bellows is called the explorer hours, and hampton sides is called the wide, wide sea. and they will be coming up in about 10 minutes or so. well, david rubenstein spoke at this year's gala in 2001. at the kickoff gala. the late historian david mccullough made remarks. mr. president, mrs. bush, dr. billington, ladies and gentlemen, i am hugely honored to take part in this event, this historic event. there has never been a national festival of the book launched by the library of congress, and with the backing and

enthusiastic leadership of our first lady. i would like to read something from my book. john adams, and to set the scene. let me just say that in 1812, after more than ten years during which they refused to even speak to each other, the rift between thomas jefferson and john adams was broken. when john adams wrote a letter to his old friend jefferson at monticello and thereby began one of the great exchanges of letters in american history, which went on until their deaths in 1826. not just one of the great exchanges of letters in american history, but one of the great exchanges of letters in the english language. jefferson, in his continuing correspondence with adams, had observed that old and worn as they were, they most expected here a pivot there, a wheel now

opinion next to spring will give way. there was nothing to be done about it, he said. meanwhile, he wrote, i steer my barque with hope in the head, leaving fear astern their exchange of views remained a sustaining exercise for both men. whatever the state of their physical opinions and springs. there was nothing whatever wrong with their minds, nor any decline in the respect each had for the other's talents and learning. having run on for several pages about cicero, socrates, and the contradictions in plato. jefferson asked, but why am i dosing you with these antediluvian topics? because i am glad to have someone to whom they are familiar and who will not receive them as if dropped from the moon. jefferson had offered to sell his private library to the government in washington to replace the collection of the library of congress destroyed by the british when they burned the

capitol. it was both a magnanimous gesture and something of a necessity as he was hard pressed to meet his mounting debts after prolonged debate in congress. a figure of $23,950 was agreed to. and in april 1815, ten wagons carrying 6707 volumes packed in pine cases departed from monticello. when adams learned what jefferson had done, he wrote, i envy to that immortal honor. jefferson immediately commenced to collect new books. he could not live without books, he told adams, who understood perfectly. they remain two of the greatest book lovers of their bookish generation. adams library numbered 3200 volumes. people sent him books. overwhelm me with books from all quarters as he wrote to jefferson. yet he wished he had 100,000. he longed particularly, he said,

for a work in latin available only in europe titled act sanctorum. in 47 volumes on the lives of the saints compiled in the 16th century, what would i give to possess in one immense mass one's stupendous draft all the legends, true and false, unable to sleep as long as abigail, he would be out of bed and reading by candlelight at five in the morning and later would read well into the night. when his eyes grew weary. she would read aloud to him. unlike jefferson, who seldom ever marked a book and then only very faintly in pencil, adams pen in hand, loved to add his comments in the margins. it was part of the joy of reading for him to have something to say himself to talk back, to agree or take issue with rousseau. conder say to virgo mary wollstonecraft, adam smith or joseph priestley.

there is no doubt that people are in the long run, what the government makes out of them. adams read in rousseau that government ought to be what people make of it. it of make of it, adams wrote in response. at times his marginal marginal observations nearly equaled what was printed on the page, as in mary wollstonecraft law's french revolution, which adams read at least twice, and with great delight since he disagreed with nearly everything she said to her claim that the government must be simple. for example, he answered, the clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels, but it would not tell the time of day on a blank page beside the contents. he wrote in part, if the empire of superstition and hip autocracy should be overthrown, happy, indeed, it would be for the world. but if all religion and all morality should be overthrown with it, what advantage will be

gained? the doctrine of human equality is founded entirely in the christian doctrine that we are all children of the same father, all accountable to him for our conduct to one another. all equally bound to respect each other's self-love. in all in this one book, adams marginal notes and comments ran to some 12,000 words to the pronouncements of the french philosophers in particular. he would respond with an indignant nonsense or a fool fool, but he could also scratching and proving good or very good, or an emphatic, excellent. your father's zeal for books will be one of the last desires which will quit him. abigail will observe to john quincy in the spring of 1816, as adams eagerly embarked on a french history in 16 volumes,

telling america's stories is an exciting challenge because there are so many different voices in these united states. for many reasons, i think the job of the writer is to share these stories, to be the voice, to provide an opportunity to be heard. and that was the late historian david mccullough speaking at the very first national book festival gala over the past 24 years. he often would come on and take calls. when we were here at the national book festival, where we are, we are live at the washington convention center. if you do happen to come down, come on down and pick up a free book bag. the festival itself is free. coming up in about an hour, so you'll have a chance to talk with historian pulitzer prize

winner doris kearns goodwin. she will be out here to take your calls and talk about the 1960s and the memoir she has written about her life in the sixties, along with her husband, richard goodwin. so that's coming up in about an hour. but right now, we're going to go to our first author event. and this is on explorer. amanda bellows and hampton sides, two best selling authors, historians, the wide, wide see is hampton sides book. the explorers is amanda bellows. here it is. and we welcome you to the salon, the abc at the library of congress national book festival. i'm mark sweeney, the principal deputy librarian at the library

of congress. and if you're interested in nonfiction writers, whether they're tackling some of the most pressing issues facing our country or historians who help readers feel as if they're vividly in the past, you're in the right place today. we're thrilled that c-span's book tv viewers are also joining us. we're thankful for their strong partnership between the library of congress and c-span. and i also want to thank the members of our james madison council, the philanthropic group that supports the engaging project, such as this 24th national book festival. we hope you'll visit the library. up on capitol hill to research about subjects you're interested in, or see the beautiful jefferson building. or attend one of our live at the library events. when we keep the library open till 8 p.m. on thursday nights and present dynamic three

events. and you can be part of helping us produce these free events and others like today's festival for family day by joining the friends of the library just this week. the friends helped bring an exceptional group of 19 librar just this week, the friends helped bring an exceptional group of 19 librarians from around the world togr the libray of congress to share their stories and best practices serving the blind in print disabled. your support extends the reach of the library and allows all people everywhere to benefit, here consider becoming aat frie, find out more at helo .de/donate. our first event at this stage in this room is titled to the edge of the world, rethinking and exploration. amanda bellows is a professor of american history at the new school whose writing has appeared in the "new york times," the "washington post" and the "wall street journal." her new book is titled the

explorers, history of america -- "the explorers: a new history of america in ten expeditions." should be talking with hampton sides, , the author of the best-selling narrative of histories blood and thunder, and hell bound on his trail. among other speeders we believe this to take your life to a briefing with florida governor ron desantis. >> florida emergency director kevin guthrie him florida wildlife and conservation commission director roger young, the market minister deanne criswell, floristic our director and major general john haas from the florida national guard around 8:30 p.m. last night milton hurricane milton made landfall near siesta key in sarasota county. it was quickly across central florida overnight reducing significant flooding and damaging winds near its path. the storm did bring much destruction and damage, tornadoes ravaged parts of the east coast of the state. flooding occurred on on the t and east coast, and strong winds

blasted the status position at no scum hearst hillsborough, manatee and sarasota counties. over the last 24 hours have you rainfall totals upwards of ten to 15 inches has been observed across much of the tampa bay area, nature coast and spreading eastward along north of i4 corridor towards sanford. isolated pockets of up to 18 inches of rainfall were observed in pinellas and coastal hillsborough counties, five to ten inches observed further northward through gainesville along eastern portions of the i-4 a quarter and south of the western i-4 corridor toward sarasota. several rivers reach major flood stage and make a flooding continues along portions of hillsborough river, st. johns river, water levels are forecasted to continue rising along north east and west central florida rivers and waterways with many forecasts remain within our reach moderate flood stage over the next day or so. we had over 80,000 people that

were into shelters, overnight as a storm hit the state. we will better understand the extent of the damage as the day progresses. you have people that are out there assessing damage right now. first responders have been working all through the night to help people who were in distress, and what we can say is the storm was significant but thankfully this was not the worst case scenario. the storm did we can before landfall, and the storm surge as initially reported has not been as significant overall as what was observed for hurricane helene. right now it looks like sarasota county had the most significant storm surge. likely somewhere between eight to ten feet and remember with helene with 15-20 feet up in taylor county. rescue missions have been underway about the night. search and rescue teams reported individuals have been rescued as

of 0630 national guard search and rescue teams have worked overnight successfully executed rescues of families and pets on the west coast and from the distraction of the tornadoes in east, central and eastern parts of florida. the guard continues to work into the morning and have 31 rescue aircraft operational and hundreds of rescuers engage in over 125 active missions in 26 different counties. over 6500 soldiers are deployed throughout the state. florida fish and wildlife commission has made land and water rescues infidels come hillsborough and pasco county. the state cart has been engage in search and rescue. assisting with floodwater evacuations as well as damage assessment. there are currently 3.1 million accounts without power. there have been 635,000 restorations since hurricane milton hit florida. the areas that have the most significant outages as of this

morning are hillsborough, 75% out. hardy, 97% out. manatee 82% manatee 82% out. pinellas 60% out. sarasota 75% out. there are 50,000+ linemen that in pre-staged. pre-staged. a lot of what people do is likely assess the damage and then begin restoration operations very quickly and we appreciate everybody that's in that fight, very important for a lot of people. cut and toss have begun at first light by the florida department of transportation. 328 crews are active in the field with over 350 pieces of heavy equipment and trucks. 150 bridge inspectors were dispatched at first light and had begun performing inspections to open bridges across the impact areas. as i put in my executive order, residents you have a right to be back into their homes as soon as the roadways are deemed safe.

in tampa the gandy bridge and how franklin bridge have been inspected, cleaned and are open. inspections of the sunshine skyway bridge are underway. there is debris on sunshine skyway as well as the courtney campbell but once that debris is clear we anticipate those bridges opening later this morning. other bridges are being opened ascends the state inspections are completed. the tampa airport is repairing minimal damage and should be open no later than tomorrow. seaports are awaiting coast guard channel surveys to reopen waterside but as of now our initial assessment is they will likely be able to resume operations very quickly. we still have a lot of school closures for today. i think floridians should just keep in contact with local officials about what that's going to be. i would imagine a lot of the schools that were not necessarily in the direct path of the storm will be open tomorrow. it may take a few more days for some of the places that were harder hit.

now, as you survey damage and clean up, please be cautious of hazards. we have post-storm fatalities almost every storm and a lot of these the talent is are avoidable, so please be cautious of downed power lines. don't touch them. don't remove tree debris that may be entangled with downed power lines. standing water can conceal downed power lines and other hazards so please be mindful, and never walk through storm waters. standing storm waters can also carry a bacteria that can lead to fatal infections. this type of infection was responsible for fertility following hurricane helene, so please avoid wading through standing water. please use proper ladder safety. please use proper generator safety. do not operate the generator inside your home. it must be outside a safe distance from doors and windows.

visit florida's emergency accommodation modules on expedia priceline will remain available for those of returning to their homes which were evacuated during the storm and sustained damage. or are in need of of the tappet shelter. these models will continue to provide real-time hotel availability and lodging resources making the experience easier for users. if traffic lights are out please drive with caution and treat each light as you would a four-way stop. also remember if you would use a chainsaw very careful with that. we have had mishaps on that after every storm. we are extending the hope florida line for another two weeks, 24 hour '70s week so, so if you need assistance or resources post storm you can call 1833 get hope. 1833 ghetto. 1833 ghetto. hope florida disaster activate hope is broken designed to help people find help following a disaster.

such as a hurricane so you can call the hope fine. you can also visit the whole thoughts which will be in some of these areas very soon and will be announcements about that. florida commerce and the state emergency response team activated the business damage assessment survey in response to hurricane milton. business owners can self-report physical and economic damage caused by the storm. this is his complete, can complete the survey online at florida disaster .biz. florida commerce is activated the small business emergency bridge loan program. we are 50 million available to florida small businesses and it's zero interest loan, very flexible repayment options. you can apply for loans of up to $50,000 through the program. loans of up to to 100,000 are available for agriculture and aquaculture small businesses and votes of 150,000 are available for citrus and cattle

operations. i did this are short-term zero interest loans, get the cash in your hand, repayment terms are very flexible. you can apply at www.florida jobs.org/ebl. florida jobs.org/ebl. we've also active in the florida disaster fund for those who want to make tax-deductible charitable contributions. they will be used to build up floridians who are in need and you can go to florida disaster fund that orc. floridadisasterfund.org if you have any questions. we will continue to support all remaining rescue missions that are underway and that may be needed in the near future. we will also continue to assess the damage that was done from the storm. we also anticipate that because of the amount of water you may see flooding happened not just now but in the subsequent days.

but i think everybody responded very quickly, proud of everybody's hard work. we have more work to do but we'll actually get to this. kevin guthrie. >> good morning, everyone. governor thank you for your leadership, and time again. i know you and the state emergency response team -- respond recovery from the storm. hurricane milton official made landfall, the impacts are still being felt across north and east central florida even now as the last band of rain starts to move offshore. please especially if you're in these areas, even in those areas of northeast florida, east space coast please make sure your sheltering in place until official determine for safe release. in the first of the two hours after a storm there's a parallel effort to search come secure and stabilize the area.

a search and rescue mission continued in response to milton please do not go out and visit the impacted areas. you will be inhibiting first responded by doing so. we need those roadways clear for electrical crews, fire crews, ems, urban search and rescue crews. we have 20 something urban search and rescue teams that will move into the area and do adore by door search even though assured the governor say this was not the worst case scenario we still have damage. we will need to get out there and go to door and make sure you want is okay. so please stay off the road. listen to local authorities for updates. when is it safe for you to return for your poster i know a lot of people evacuated and we appreciate that. do not be in a hurry. check in with your local emergency management agency of local sheriffs offices to see if they're posting anything on if it safe to return home. please make sure you do that. again as the governor said we will open up roads and bridges so you can do so but there may

be extenuating circumstances at the neighborhood level. so please make sure your checking before you come back home. major flooding continues along the hillsborough, st. john's and little rivers. what to take a moment to talk about this going the end of the phase to this particular incident. that is very similar to hurricane ian. we have a lot of rain that is fallen over the center portion of florida. the st. john river basin that comes down into seminole county, portions of brevard, volusia county about up st. john's river to those headwaters have experience a lot of rainfall. that river takes about 45 days to completely flush itself out to the atlantic ocean. what will be seen first simplex data in the seminole county and surrounding county area and then you'll see that move up into -- on up into st. john's, flagler, duval counties. that's going to be a long-term

effort when it comes to making sure people are monitoring the situation on the st. johns river. as well as the ones i mentioned, hillsborough and the little book typo. some roadways are flooded which is not the safe situation for anyone. please do not attempt to walk or drive through floodwaters. actions through floodwaters are 100% preventable. all you have to do is turn around. if you shoulder to place or when you return to your home and looking at the damages around your home now, do one thing for us. take out your phone, take some pictures. inside and outside. all four sides of the house, every room inside the house. one of the things you should be documented. make sure your documenting not just the physical damages but also since this is flooding event would want to make sure you capture will be called high water marks on your home. do that inside and outside. for point of reference when outside of the make sure you get

like the doorknob of the outdoor house. i will give us a reference on how high the water god. if you're on the inside make sure you get like an electrical socket or a light switch or get a a door handle on the inside in the picture so we can get some type of reference as to how high the water is coming. if you're beginning to clean up process please ensure you are wearing the appropriate safety give you do not intend to clean up hazardous debris or downed power lines. report all that your local authorities. do not cut any lines. again we do not need florida man and woman out there having random lines as they go. you don't know whether it's a cable line, you don't know if the electric line and more important is you don't know what is a fiber optic line. most of our 911 lines run across fiber optics. we do not want anybody cutting lines. let the professionals come and identify what it is before it is cut. remember again some roads are still dangerous due to flooding to break potential downlines.

do not risk it. let our crews get out there and get everything back up and running. for assistance as of the truncal state assistance information line, that's information only, 1-800-342-3557. help is available in english spanish, creole. floridadisaster.org/updates for information on the web. of course follow us at fl crt on exim instagram and facebook. there is a most trusted and fastest source that we have. we have several people helping us out on post on social media so that is going to be the best place and the fastest place to get stuff from us. thank you, governor again get together we will overcome this storm. >> good morning ladies and ladid gentlemen, and thank you, governor desantis for reestablishing and resourcing the state the state guard. so we can deliver medical

emergency response capabilities right to the point of need. working alongside director gupta, chuck hoskin director young and rest of the state agencies personnel moving rapidly in order to save lives, rescue our citizens, and minimize human suffering. throughout the night and this morning our special missions unit with search and rescue k-9, paramedic, and swift rescue teams moved threat the most of her impacted as between paschal and sarasota counties. working with local authorities to provide on water and oberlin search and rescue and route assessment capabilities. our maritime unit is also engaged with fwc, with ten boat teams and high water vehicle teams in order to expand the capacity of the local counties abilities for reconnaissance and search and rescue operations. our aviation unit with black hawks and drowns, with live

stream and 3-d map rendering capabilities would begin conducting their operations straight and coastal and inland community areas in order to enable those local authorities to paint the picture and focus their resources. ladies and gentlemen, where laser focus on search and rescue operations today. >> good morning, everyone, and i both like to thank governor desantis for his unwavering support during time of critical need. we're fortunate must live in a state with the governor has such supporters support for state agency that puts floridians first. want to thank director n guthrie for outstanding leadership and support and dem team for the coronation communication with allstate agencies, making us the leading nation, , ladies in the nation r emergency response. privity part of the team to respond to hurricanes as natural disasters is what we do. after b. c. has unique equipment, training and support from governor desantis and

director guthrie to be able to provide support in the wake of natural disasters and hurricanes. this is the use of specialized equipment like air boats, swamp buggies and other equipment to provide high water rescues. that's exactly what we're doing right now. we have doubled one or 35 officers, teamed up with a florida state guard, division of finance services cut teams come forward and lock him florida national guard and tribal enforcement of local shares offices up and down the coast and across the state to provide search and rescue efforts to those in greatest need. teams with your specialist equipment for search and rescue across the state are hard at work now. our search and rescue efforts are ongoing and so far this morning we reported over 42 rescues at several counties. pinellas county with it so far seven by russia's come three water rescues come several welfare checks, two arrested for looting.

and 21 rescued team apartment buildings. these rescue started yesterday in wake of the carnoustie with seven local fwc officers onto a tornado event when he rescued six any backward four and also conducted 30 welfare checks. pasco county operations are ongoing respond to multiple intersections clearing trees and debris allowing emergency vehicles to ask a a storm damd areas in responding to calls for search. in hillsborough county several people assisted from a vehicle and ditch come one pulled from a flooded vehicle, three individuals were removed from a flooded apartment and another 100 evacuated avenue and assisted living facility and another 20 evacuated from a senior facility in tampa. so again this efforts are ongoing, ongoing across the state like director guthrie said the will be flooding events across the state in central and northern florida so please be aware if you're in a flood prone

area be aware of this. our teams will be able to respond and alert all through the state throughout this time. so again want to thank governor desantis for his leadership and support, and fwc is here to work with our partners to make sure the floridians are safe during this time. >> we will continue with the rescue operations as needed. there's a lot of damage assessments that will be going on today, and we are very obviously supportive of the power restoration operations, glad all those folks were staged as it also ensuring fuel is flowing. hopefully we get our gas stations and big-box stores in a bidding open very quickly. i would imagine will likely happen and just get people back on their feet and that's going to be our focus. okay, any questions? >> pinellas county minus ten his deputies are restricting access into the area. any insights? >> i don't. we're going to open the bridges

that i know a couple of them are open. the other two will be debris, it will be removed and the bridges will be open for traffic and floridians can use us as they see fit. [inaudible question] >> not yet. i know they're been that without confirmed any pic that is that mean there's nothing in. there's a process where this happens with the state. i know with the tornadoes it seems very likely there were some with the tornadoes. that's the only reports we've received. no confirmation got imagined debris some confirmation but it's too soon to tell with respect to the west coast and the storm surge and everything. so stay tuned on that. >> is a state of any sort of speed how the hell what a wall street analyst people to know? is been dark all day. like give me a break on some of

the stuff. they're doing damage assessments now. they always say this or that or whatever. i mean what i would say is what i said in the original talkers. we had certain worst-case scenarios in terms of going into tampa bay. a lot of places and pinellas county, they had negative storm surge because it sucked the water out of the day. so in terms of all that we see the entire tampa bay area underwater, that did not happen. the storm surged and it was most acute in sarasota. i think it was a little bit more than sarasota god for helene but it was a like so much more. i think was like eight to ten feet. helene of course, most of 20 in taylor county. i think the fact the storm weakened, i think most come on the saint is not going be damage to the will become cut across the state in a way helene did not. but in terms of just right now the morning after if i think back to like hurricane ian i do

think you're looking at similar amount of damage to ian. then with helene there may end up being more over all damage. there may not i don't know but definitely the surge did not reach helene levels. i mean helene was producing major surge all across the west coast of florida and then in the big bend it was just biblical. that was not necessary what we had. anything north of the storm had minimal surge on the west coast and it was really kind of sarasota, charlotte harbor down into lee, call your. by compared to what they had with hurricane ian that is not on the same level. so we will see. it will be a lot more that will need to be done to assess the extent of the damage but i think we can say is we have a lot of resources in florida to be able to mitigate and get people back on the feet and get the statement linking. people want to get back in

homes, they want to see the roads clear, they want to see the bridges we open so that's what our sole focus so we get people back. >> it's my understanding -- [inaudible question] >> they were relocated. tropicana field is a a routine staging area for these things. the roof on that is not rated for i think it is rated for 110 miles an hour. and so the forecast changes but as it became clear that was going to be something of that magnitude that was going to be within the distance, they redeployed out of tropicana. there were no state assets that were in tropicana field. i think duke also removed all their assets as well. you look, the roof is basically it's like a fabric almost with that, so that was something that we understood and acted accordingly.

[inaudible] >> there was no issue with anything with that. >> my understanding is early this morning -- >> we haven't even talked about that. i know he's been engaged in that. >> so about 1:40 a.m. i received a phone call, woke up, , got ovr here from the building to this building. got over insert a working the issue. right now there are several water main breaks threat pinellas county. different water systems come summer municipal, some are county of what they're doing is slowly raising pressure in those lines to actually figure out exactly where the brakes are at and they will start referring those breaks one by one by one. you may start to see something scum out of the hospital industry. we stabilize the hospital situation. there is one active evacuation of the hospital now, i do not have the name of a hospital. we can get that back to you through our folks but we stabilize the water pressure in

four at a five hospitals from getting any worse. so we will continue to closely monitor that throughout the day but against one active evacuation going on but we stabilize. we have water tankers on-site pushing pressure back into the systems. i think our biggest thing to talk about or i should say talk about but the biggest thing right now in that pinellas saint pete ary would be the water system overworking conjection to see how we can support supplement the cities and county on what resources they need. we voted dispatch logistical folks in the area. we sending engineers on our dime to be as helpful as we can and one situation that may be a gasket or a flange, and of the situation may be a complete water main break but we standridge support pinellas and saint pete and others to help them get the water back on and running because again power and water, we can do a lot with power but we've got to have water.

>> back to the pipeline system. >> jason, i write anything on that particular pipeline system but but i will find that what i can off-line and we will get back with you, yes. >> will that impact any of the post storm clean up a? >> there's some came from jacksonville originally. kevin put them in different places to just write out the storm and come back in. so no, it's not going to have any major impacts at all. these are just things you've got to do. you stage and you figure out kind of how to go. they were staged during helene there and it worked well when the forecasted a may not make it through with the roof, and they adjusted accordingly. but there in the fight and it will continue. thanks. >> on the white house response

president biden said he pre-deployed thousands of federal personnel to areas affected by the storm including more than 1000 coast guard members. c-span will continue to bring to briefings on the response and recovery to hurricanes milton and helene. right now we continue with our coverage of the national book festival here on c-span2. >> supplanted the economic system with a new form of economy. missionaries, you name it. i think it's been called the fatal impact, and cook's voyages certainly accelerated the process. so yeah, iso don't know. it's a mixed bag. we seem to be a species that ourselves. we have a lot of curiosity, and it leads to harm not only to the people that are visited but also sometime to thehe visitors. cook's own then i think were in some cases ruined byse these voyages. so it's something we need to be

careful about, i guess you would say, and to make our voyages around the world, , and be mindl of their impacts. >> iat would agree with you, hampton, that curiosity is innate to the human condition. and and i think my book shows different explorers from a wide range of backgrounds, men, women, african-americans, immigrants, indigenous people, all who share across 200 jews, right, different urges to go and uncover new things about the world. at its best, expiration leads to discovery which adds to human knowledge. i think that's a positive thing. i think there is also so much we can learn from history as we think about new frontiers today. that remain new frontiers today that really exciting, right? nasa has its missions sending people back to the moon. .. xploration

and we know just a tiny little bit about our own seafloor and all the creatures that live there. so there are so many people around the world even today doing amazing kinds of exploratory work in the name of conservation for science. so i think that if we look at the past and we learn the lessons fr >> and we learned the lessons from the past about what people have not done well and we try to apply those lessons to the present. >> when we think about the lessons of the present, i'm going to stretch this more, some people have taken the lesson has the need to sort of take take down a statue or remove someone from our more celebratory discourse. what you seem to be doing is offering up a fuller story as far as what those did. if you're sitting with someone who really disagrees with you

that we should be celebrating these various explorers, what might you say to -- if not to convince them otherwise, but at least to demonstrate to them that maybe they've got a county, but we should do it anyway? how would you bring them along with you? >> well, in my case, i would say that you could argue that up until the time of cook, perhaps the greatest long distance voyagers, arguably, were the polynesians themselves and i like to think about, well, you know, as they made their migrations across the pacific and you could say collonized these islands, populated these islands, inhabited them, kept moving, moving, moving, i like to think

of this sort of hypothetical scenario, well, what if they had just kept on going and what if they had arrived in plymouth, england first, well before, you know, during the stone age of england when, you know, they were building stonehenge or something? i like to think of that scenario and imagine how history might have been changed if the polynesians had discovered england. it would have been interesting, maybe go through a worm hole and kind of have this alternative reality, but i think, again, exploration, it's not just something that the europeans did. the chinese were extraordinary explorers, the polynesians, obviously, and so many other societies and cultures through time. so i would try to expand our understanding of what exploration is to get well beyond just the european paradigm of discovery. >> yeah, i agree that expanding

their understanding of what exploration is and who has done it is very important. i think that history is complex. it's not always black and white and i think having a sense of nuance is important when studying history, and in my book, the explorers, you know, i try to give readers just a full picture of each person and his or her life in the context in which that person lived so that readers can, i think decide for themselves, what they think of this person, what they think of their motives, their objectives, rather than telling people what to think. i think that being honest with evidence and letting people make their own decisions is important as well. >> and my final question before we open it up to the audience, as you are writing and making decisions about what goes in the book, what you almost got in there and decided to take out, and those, also those moments of anxiety and doubt as

a writer. what did you learn about yourself as you were learning about these explorers? >> well, that's a really good question and a little bit imponderable. i think one reason why people love exploration books is that they begin to think, would i have been able to survive that voyage? how would i have experienced ship conditions of those days, you know, with the cockroaches and the rats and the weevilly slops of food and ways to have a vicarious experience and question our own resolve and our own stamina and so forth

and i tend to think, i wouldn't have lasted a minute in these two ships of captain cook's. [laughter] >> these 180 men that went on this voyage. you know, these stories are full of mutiny and scurvy and cannibalism and delightful subjects and, but for some reason, i think we are all drawn to them for all kinds of reasons. yes, they may have been important voyages or expeditions, but we also are drawn to them because we like to put ourselves on the ground or in the ship and try to imagine what sorts of qualities, what sorts of strengths would we be able to summon within ourselves to get to these experiences. these voyages were not easy for any of these guys, any of these characters in your book and i

think that's what i think about with myself. it's like-- and i think the answer is, i wouldn't have survived. i'm a wimp. i'm too -- i love my creature comforts and so forth and i'm amazed that these men, so many of them in cook's case, signed up for one, then two and all three voyages. they were gluttons for punishment. they were sad o-masochists. >> and these people gave me appreciation for resilience and my highlight of explorers, is the chapter about matthew henson and the race to the north pole. so matthew henson was the son of sharecroppers born in maryland not so far from here and he was orphaned about the

age of seven and went home and became a cabin boy and sailed the world and ended up going on seven journeys towards the north pole. in the last one he reaches the north pole with robert perry, and henson is doing this all in the jim crow era. so he's overcoming poverty, overcoming discrimination and throughout his life people said to him, you're not the kind of person who can make it to the north pole because you're black, you can't withstand the cold and things like that. he was just determined to prove them wrong and when he came back having most likely been ahead of the period in reaching the geographic north pole first, or as close as the instruments would have got then to him and the newspapers gave credit to perry. and after all he's been through, being fluent in the language, and expert dog sledder and faces the jim crow

era in the aftermath. what's compelling about his story and others, not only the physical journey that the explorers make, but also the boundary pushing they do in terms of frontiers, pushing against racism, sexism in many cases and that's something that i admire and came away with from writing this book. >> and now we're going to open it up for the audience and there are two microphones here left and right. i will call on you to ask your question, but before we start the question because i am a celebratory type, we're going to celebrate our authors right now. so thank you for that conversation. [applause] >> so here first and then over

here. >> hi, thank you so much for this topic, this is interesting and i'm looking forward to going home and reading the book, amanda. >> thank you. >> and i'm curious, these expeditions how did they contribute to american myth making and what are some of the narratives that emerged in the aftermath? i'm curious about your thoughts on that. >> the question, how did these expeditions contribute to myth making. i would say there are a lot of myths today about expeditions in u.s. history and these stories actually challenge those myths. so, the book starts kind of with a discussion of a well-known figure, daniel boone, who, you know, made inroads in the kentucky territory, across the cumberland gap, that kind of thing and someone like boone has an outsized presence in our popular imagination and even in

his own time he had an autobiography published here and in europe and his face was used to market, and television shows, cold war era, the rugged frontiersman. we have a lot of myths about some of these individualistic frontiersmen that exist and what this book does, it brings in people you don't know like james beckworth, a mountainman who was born into slavery and was on the frontier. or florence expedition was to save birds in an ecological crisis when birds were slaughtered and hopefully these stories counter some of the existing myths. thank you. >> and the gentleman over here. >> i have a suggestion and followed up by a question.

the suggestion is, i wish somebody would write a book called inuntended consequences. cook and perry, there's an argument cook did know the get to a pole and may have claimed mckinley, but he didn't get there. you've said two things, one did perry get to the pole or did he get close to it? at any rate, whatever happened, people believed he did. so edmondson who was ready to go to the pole turned around and went south and went to the south pole and scott. so i wish somebody would write a book tying those four guys together and people have written about not so much about cook, but about the other three. but it hasn't been tied together.

my question is, one, you said perry got to the pole and then you said henson got close to it. so i think there are still arguments about that and i'd like your view on that, thank you. >> thank you. >> the question is who got to the north pole first. and you know, in 1908 and 1909 frederick cook, i was thinking captain cook, no. frederick cook claims to have beaten perry and henson to the north pole. i think that has been largely disproved. i think there has been some debate about how close matthew henson and robert perry and the four inuit men with them got, and as close as you could within a few miles with the instruments of the day. so i think that's a pretty

impressive feat. >> here. >> thank you very much. i really enjoyed your talk and i couldn't help, but wonder some of the parallels between cook and columbus, christopher columbus and i realized, you know, that they were both map makers and the impact that they had with their expeditions and how they put so-called places on the map. but i also am feeling-- and it's a feeling, how columbus in a way in modern times, presently, anyway, seems to be getting unbalanced

interpretation of what he did and how he put the new world on the map and you know, had similar-- similar, what should i say, goals of conquest which involved plundering and all of that. so my question is -- and i don't know exactly how to phrase it. how do you redeem or how do you balance the view of someone like columbus in the present time? >> i'm certainly not a scholar of christopher columbus. >> i'm not a scholar either. >> but, and i do think it's probably although cook has sometimes been called the columbus of the pacific, i think that's an unfair characterization because cook

never left a single person behind. he did not colonize these places. he did not participate like columbus did in the destruction of populations or, you know, mass murder. he moved from island to island to island. he had a few encounters that were violent, a few. but it worked both ways. in one case, 10 of his men were killed in new zealand, for example. so i think it's unfair to kind of compare those two explorers. columbus really was a much darker figure in the history of the world than cook. and now what came immediately after cook, i get it. i mean, like the colonization of australia and taz mania, for

example, that's a dark story, but that's not something that cook himself did. so, you know, i think that is a much larger, darker, and more complicated subject. the story of colonization and the genocide that i think, that is tied up with the legacy of columbus. >> okay. thank you. thank you very much, a very interesting presentation. my question is for amanda bellows. i appreciate how you described in the books and one that you mentioned was the degree, relatively higher degree of personal autonomy that these explorers experienced, especially in the 19th century during their explorations. for example, one of the

examples that you give is the 19th century west. and to varying degrees, many of those same limitations and their knock-on effects that were placed on those explorers because of their gender, tribal statuses, citizenship, skin color, are still imposed today. so i'm curious what you would say are some of the areas where those experiencing those limitations today can be explorers in their own right, and can find a greater degree of autonomy and independence. >> that's a great question. so just thinking historically for a moment, you know, a figure like jim beckworth, he's born into slavery in virginia at the turn of the 19th century and he is moved-- his mother was most likely enslaved. his father was white so he was biracial and father moved them to st. louis and beckworth was

emancipated by his father and went off to do what he want today do which was to explore the rocky mountains. what's interesting for beckworth in this area where slavery is legal in many parts of the united states, he's able to move through different societies. so he actually em beds himself among the nation of the crow nation, indigenous wives, and married someone there, and gold rush in california and all over the country and to illustrate your point, the west provided someone like beckworth with more economic and social mobility than he would have otherwise experienced, you know, say in antebellum virginia. so, no, i think, as i mentioned kind of at the end, i think there are so many frontiers today still in places to explore in the world. hopefully people have good knowledge, the acquisition of knowledge being the primary

objective and i guess i'll make a plug for the explorers club in new york city which has people from all over the world of every different kind of background, as you suggest, and it gives grants to people and public sizes their different kinds of research. so people of all backgrounds should definitely check out the explorers club. it's a place for reaching new frontiers. >> how do you approach collecting research for your books and how do you decide what to include? >> you know, you have an hour? [laughter] >> it's very complicated. especially when you have a subject like captain cook where there is a voluminous amount of material not only cook's own journals, but the journals of his officers and unauthorized books that were penned by members of the voyage. it's just a huge amount of material to get your arms

around. and i-- i'm kind of old-fashioned, first of all, i can't look at digital stuff on the screen all the time. i need to have physical books that i can hopefully market up and i was taught when you go into libraries, you know, you can't markup a book and by the way, a big shout out to libraries everywhere. [applause] >> and a big shout out to the greatest library in the world, the greatest library in this country, certainly, the library of congress. [applause] >> don't markup library books, but, you know, if you have -- i tend to have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books that i markup. they're usually cheap versions of books or sometimes photocopied versions of the books because i need to have things underlined and that's how i begin to absorb my material and get it distilled,

but everyone has their own way of doing it. what is your technique? >> yes, well, i mean, i was thinking about how expansively do you want to look at things? so many of the explorers that i have written about have autobiographies. you can't just rely on someone's autobiography to understand the story. the time which they lived. what did they tell the truth about and what did they not tell the truth about. my best advice to researchers would be to use a wide range of secondary resources to get a picture of someone's life and circumstances. >> so we've got four questions left and about seven minutes. and after those questions, what will happen is you will be able to meet the authors down at

level two and de line 11 or look for them if you want to get your book signed and i recommend doing that. it's quite an experience. so what we're probably going to do to be efficient, we're going to do two questions at a time and that way we get the last four in. first here and then here. >> the explorers, exploring was my job, but i was wondering outside of the job, in their spare time whether they're explorers, enjoy wandering or just sit at home and rest after their journey. >> over here. >> my question is like -- so like in the -- especially in the 19th century era because you talked about, like, well, when they went to like, you know, like cook went to hawaii and like he had one motive.

were there any conflicts, especially when explorers get back home, was there any conflicts like when they go back to their own geographic societies and like the experiences that, like those people have on like the -- like here is the motive that the commissioners of the exploration actually have in mind and like and then the explorer comes back and says, that's not like --. >> i think these questions -- oh, so i changed my mind all the time about things so we're going to do two more questions just to make sure that you two have enough time to fully answer in the time that we have remaining. so here and then there. >> okay. hampton, your book was extremely interesting, i've never read anything about cook before. two weeks ago i was in england, i was over in whitby and i got

to see where he apprenticed with the quaker and ships were built, absolutely fascinating. quick question, i'm a retired nurse, tell us, share with us how he took care of his sailors and their diet and that question. >> i'm so glad i'm not trying to keep four questions in my head right now. first, fantastic presentation, thank you so much. and then second, simple question with regarding your art, is there a favorite moment in your research? we talk about discovery of all of these explorers, but as researchers, i'm imagining that you may have discovered something in your research that you realized either hadn't been found before or had not-- that you had a chance to interpret differently, a favorite moment. >> this is like speed dating here. you've got to do this fast and you know, so you know, historians, i think, have a fantasy that they'll find a

descendent of their main character who has a little-- who has a trunk in the attic full of old yellowed letters and papers and happened to me one time for a previous book i wrote and that's a wonderful thing when you get that treasure trove of original documents never been seen for hundreds of years. that did not happen with captain cook, unfortunately. captain cook's wife inexplicably burned all the family papers shortly before she died, a mystery why she did it and a source of many conspiracy theories, actually. and captain cook the other thing about the question was his understanding of diet and forcing his men to eat fresh fruits and vegetables and fresh meat, led to the fact that his voyages were the first long distance voyages in the history of the planet, as far as we know, where not a single man died of scurvy because he was beginning to understand

something about scurvy and forced this food down their throats sometimes, sort of like eat your vegetables kind of idea. so, those are two of the questions, anyway. you jump in with what you remember all the questions. >> yeah, those questions worked really well together. very quickly, i can say that most of my explorers in the book did not like to rest on their laurels at home. they wanted to get back out there as soon as they could and in order to do that they often had to raise money because not all of these expeditions for government funding, had to raise money for people to go where they needed to go. so there was a practical element to that. and then in terms of favorite moments, i could think of just two that come to mind, one is there's nothing like being in an archive and seeing not just documents, but actual objects that were significant in history, so, morgan state university had some of matthew henson's, the arctic explorer's belongings and seeing his gloves were amazing. and then, also, i took a

two-week journey in the footsteps of the discovery. going from st. louis all the way to the oregon coast and standing in front of the ocean and imagining how they must have felt after their extremely long journey took a long time and looking out on the ocean and you feel explorers with the past and that felt really good. >> so before you all head out to level two, line 11, to meet the authors, let me just thank the authors for rekindling the spirit of discovery. thank you so much. [applause]. ♪♪♪

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

>> and we are live at the 2024 national book festival being held at the washington convention center, several hours of coverage ahead, several author events, call-ins. we'll be joined later by carla haden, library of congress about books and what you are reading. joining us now is pulitzer prize winner doris kearns goodwin, her latest book, unfinished love story of the personal history of the 1960's. doris kearns goodwin, this is your eighth book, was this the toughest to write? >> absolutely. >> why? >> before this the presidents. they were no longer alive. teddy roosevelt, abraham lincoln. and more importantly, this was my husband and my guy and important to finish the project that we started before he died and i wasn't sure i could do

that after he died, but turned out to be probably the most important emotional book that i've ever written. >> you were doris kearnes in the 1960's. you didn't meet him until 1972, but this is a history of the '60s, how did you do that? >> it's true, we always teased each other we should have met. we were in a lot of places at the same time. i was in the march on washington in 1963 and he was there and so were thousands of other people and we didn't meet. chicago convention in 1968. in washington during the riots in 1968. he always said he was looking for me, but he never found me. i loved him thinking that. >> how did you meet him? >> finally in 1972 after he had worked for lbj and jfk and bobby kennedy and i had been a white house fellow for lbj and ended up staying on his staff. he came to my office building in harvard, i was a young assistant professor and he was being given an office there. we all knew who he was, he was

well-known among us nerdy people who loved politics. he had bushy eyebrows and a strange wonderful smile that he'd worked for all of these people, with bobby when he died so i was excited, but i went to my room and he sort of popped into my office and he sat down. he said so you're a graduate student, right? no, i'm aassistant professor, he knew that and was teasing mement he took me out to dinner, and talked all evening and all night and never stopped for 42 years. and when did he pass? >> in 2018, so six years ago. in your book, an unfinished love story, this is what you write. quote, lyndon's a kind of poet said dick seriously, richard goodwin, from the time dick and i met we often referred to the president simply as lyndon when speaking to each other we both

knew them so well, and after all there were a lot of johnson, and only one lyndon, rhyme, sex, and phrases, dick said with wonder, what a recipe for high oratory. >> that's great. one. things we never fully understood how was it that dick got to be from a jfk speech write tower an lbj one there was a fog line between those two especially after the assassination, and then we found a taped conversation with bill moyers, lbj said i need somebody who could put sex into my speeches and rhyme, and the only person would be dick goodwin, but he's not one of us. >> nonetheless, he took him and that's how he worked with

johnson. >> how did he get involved with lbj and jfk. >> he was only in his 20's with jfk. he was graduated from harvard law school, first in his class he would remind me. 19 # 58, 1959 when john kennedy was thinking about running for the presidency and he needed to beef up his staff and another speech writer under sorenson. and there was a contest held. he was asked to write a speech, another speech, another speech and they chose him. and he was on the plane with jfk1960, a little private plane that his father gotten for him and there was a camaraderie and connection, and he was in the jfk white house. >> we'll put up the numbers on the screen, we have a few minutes if you have a question or comment you'd like to make about this book or some of other previous books, team of rivals, et cetera, et cetera, we'll look at those books a lal

little later. and the numbers are on the screen. so go ahead and dial in. what's your read on the 60's? i mean, lbj, rfk, jfk, so much there, is that the entirety of the '60s? . no, the most part of the '60s are the movement coming from the ground up. it's interesting, when dick saved 300 boxes through our entire married life of really a time capsule of the '60s, memos, drafts, diaries, journals, everything kind of crazy, they went with us everywhere, and storage, the big house the end of our lives, and he wasn't ready to open them so long because the '60s ended so sadly. that's one read on the '60s, assassinations, john f. kennedy, bobby kennedy, martin luther king and violence. and by the time he said if there's any wisdom to dispense

i better dispense it now and went through them chronologically and we were able to absorb the excitement. '60s, and lbj before the war and being with bobby kennedy in the '68 campaign before he was killed and we realized that more important than the sadness of the '60s, it was a time when people believed they could make a difference, when there were civil rights movement, the peace corps, gay rights movement, the women's movement. it was excitingly wonderful decade where young people, especially, felt empowered to be a part of politics and public life. >> and you refer to the boxes as your '60s boxes. how many of those did you get through and is there another book in there? >> well, what happened is we got through most of the '60s boxes, but there were still maybe 100 more left from the rest of dick's life, and it was interesting in the last year of his life after he got the cancer that did take his life, he said, i wonder who is going to be finished first, me or the boxes because he looked ahead

at the huge train of boxes, but in some way the boxes were so important to us because i felt as long as we had more boxes to open he would still live because we had too many boxes to open and gave him a sense of purpose in the last year of his life. and couldn't wait to wake up in the morning and go through the boxes and able to relive our lives together. it's a wonderful thing when you're older to think back on it. other people letters and diaries kept in an attic and somehow when the person dies, the child or grandchildren go through them, any advice there would be for people do them now so you can hear the stories now. everybody wants to be remembered for something. and it's often through the stories you tell your children and your grandchildren about your parent or grand parent, the way they're remembered and how much better to do it now before they're dead. i was so glad we got through so many of them, but there's a lot left to go through, but we'll see what happens next. >> doris kearns goodwin, as somebody who spent a lot of time in the archives researching those letters and

papers and et cetera, what do you tell people today when everything is e-mailed or text message. >> i'm so glad i was a historian in this earlier era. nothing better than handwritten letters. you read letters someone had written in lincoln's time and write letters to her not only what happened that day, what was lincoln feeling, and do you see the same moon, my love. and from washington to upstate new york. and you read diaries that people kept in huge detail back in the 19th century. i don't know what i'd do without letters and diaries. you're right, we'll have e-mails, but they're rather staccato and do people keep them? tik tok and instagram, it wasn't be the same intimate

detail and you'll know much more about the people now. and the movie about lincoln with spielberg, we only knew that he had a high pitched voice because somebody said he did. we never heard him speak, right? and then we only knew that he walked like a laborer coming home at the end of a hard day because somebody described that. now we'll see everybody in three dimensions, we'll see them on television, but will we know that as well as we were able to know these people who put their lives into their letters? even the soldiers in world war ii and the soldiers in the civil war when they wrote home to their parents, those letters are treasures because they're such emotion connected to it all. >> and what's the role after public historian such as yourself? >> i look to think what i can do, i liked history so much and i've loved it since the time i was a little girl. i want everybody to know how important it is to understand our history and especially in a terribly hard time like we've been living in now, i'd like to remind people that we've been through really, really hard times before, and remind them of what it was like in the

early days of the civil war, the early days of world war ii and the people then didn't know how it was going to end just like we don't know how this is going to end, and it gives us perspective, it gives us solace and it gives us lessons. so whenever i can be talking in public on television or the radio, what's happening now and put it in historic context, i think that that's what gives people a sense, history matters, history really matters and it can help us get through the present. >> doris kearns goodwin, you mentioned that your late husband was with rfk june 5th, 1968 at the ambassador hotel. what did he tell you about that? and where were you? i don't think i've ever asked you that question. >> well, in 1968 when robert kennedy died, i was working for lyndon johnson and a white house fellow and stay with him. but my husband said robert kennedy would have been a reason greater president through jfk.

he'd been through jfk's death and he read philosophy and poetry and gave the speech where he won the california primary. it looked like he was possibly on his way. and there was that great moment. he was probably happier than he'd been during the campaign. it had been a tough campaign against senator eugene mccarthy then leaves a minute later and killed. and dick was devastated. he thought that was the end of his public life and he went up to maine and became a writer. he never got fully back into it and helped with gore's speech. and telling people young people to get involved in life and-- >> two months prior to that, lbj makes an announcement. were you surprised? >> absolutely. i think everybody in the country was surprised. as you know, he had-- everybody thought he would be the nominee, it would be a

tough fought battle, mccarthy and robert kennedy against him, but he had all the presidency behind him and the primaries didn't have the power they have now. and then on march 31st he comes out there and he gives a speech not only saying he's going to wind the war down, but that he's going to not run for the presidency again so that he can concentrate on the war. i remember feeling really empathetic toward him during that period of time. i thought he made the right decision and i was thinking about it a lot this summer because then what happened, when he made the decision, the next day he goes out on the street and people are saying, yaylbj, instead of hey, lbj, how many kids did you kill today. and with president biden when he hut principles above politics. a few days it might work. april 3rd, the north vietnamese said they would come to the bargaining table and happiest day of his presidency and he filled the plane with generals

to go to hawaii and leave on the night of april 4th at 5:30 he got the news that martin luther king had been shot and killed. it had to be canceled. and then the riots took place in the cities and then bobby kennedy was killed, and by the time we got to the convention, the talks had stalled. i always wondered what would have happened if that had not happened and talks moving forward at the convention, but as it was, it was his birthday on the tuesday night of the convention, i was thinking about this this whole summer, and johnson was supposed to go to give a speech much as biden went to his convention, but they called him and said what was happening in the streets and police confrontations with the protesters were so tumultuous that he couldn't come. he was so sad he couldn't come. i was there not official, but my friends were working for congressmen on the hill. we would stay at a hotel suite, further away. we were watching the convention

last night and somebody said there was somebody on the line for me, it was the president of the united states. and i thought they were teasing. i picked up the phone, and he said-- and i thought he's going to ask me to do something, i don't know what i'm going to do. gets on the phone, it was lyndon johnson, he said last week when you were at the ranch you borrowed a flashlight and i can't find it, where is it? i was so embarrassed in front of everybody. but then i said to him and how are you, then he said, how do you think i am? i've never felt lower in my life. it was my birthday, 60th birthday, supposed to go to the convention they tell me i can't go to a convention of my own party and i really felt empathetic and sad toward him that he gave his life for that, and if only he had known, i wish, that here we are 50 years later, and he's now considered one. really good presidents. medicare, medicaid, aid to education, civil rights, voting rights, immigration reform, astonishing what he did. his children know it, but he didn't know it before he died. >> well, let's hear some other

voices. let's start with charlene who is calling in from bethesda, maryland. please go ahead. >> dr. goodwin, based on your understanding of robert kennedy and of course, your husband's close relationship with him, what do you make of contemporary events, specifically robert kennedy, jr.'s suspension of his presidential campaign in support of donald trump and his statement that his father would have approved? >> oh, i think that, you know, there's the kennedy name is what kept young robert kennedy going. i don't see that he's been, you know, proposing the policies that his father or his father's progressive ideology would have been talking about, and i think what happened to him. he started out as a new voice and people wanting neither trump nor biden. i think at one point he had 20% in the polls and dwindled down to something like 4 or 5% now

and realized he had no voice in the campaign and decided for his own purposes to go with trump, but i think most of the family has not felt close to this decision that he's made. it's up to him to make it, but i'm not sure it will have much impact on the race. i mean, it might in a small way, you know, when everything is very close, then that third party candidate who then endorses trump might make a difference, but i don't think that this is somebody who would necessarily be in the tradition of the robert kennedy that was in the 1960's. >> doris kearns goodwin, this has been an interesting political year, how soon can we write about this year with good perspective? >> it always takes a while, right? but it's going to be-- even the last six weeks is going to be written about. i can picture a historian in 50 years, writing. it allows us to know you think you know where the country is going and then things change.

even thousand they can change between now and november. fate intervenes or something like biden's decision to withdraw comes and then somehow a mood changes. that's how leadership, the myth of leadership is how mood can change. when fdr gave his inaugural address, the country was at the lowest ebb, the depression, rock bottom, and he gave optimistic and joy, and happy days are here again is sung at the end of his inaugural address at a terrible time. it shows you can believe in the future if you sense something is going to happen and you have energy that that can change the mood of a party, not necessarily the country, but we'll see what happens with the country. >> skip, waterbury, connecticut, good morning. >> good morning. doris. >> hello. >> i love your books and i love the way you talk about our history. it seems to me-- i grew up in the '60s, i was in high school in 1967. >> you're one of me, you're

close to me. >> yeah, so, like this is in my memory what we lived through and now i'm 72 years old, and i'm looking at the crisis our nation is into right now, but for some reason, maybe it's just my belief. it seems to me that the american people will join together and say, we're going to stop what is not good for our nation. we, the people are going to get together and do it again. >> thank you, skip. >> doris kearns goodwin. >> i agree with you, skip. i think optimism is the only answer, no matter what in certain times, you have to have brutal realities on the surface as happened during the depression or early days of world war ii, but right now, i feel that the majority of people want a change in the mood of the country and the majority of the people feel like they know longer want the hate and invective that we're seeing, if that can come to the surface, if the conscience of the people can be fired, that

happened in the '60s, over and over again with the civil rights movement braverien and segregation had to be undone in the south, voting rights had to be assured. i think we're at that point right now the majority of people are going to speak up and we want different kind of politics, something less divisive, something less filled with hate. more joy and more optimism and i hope we're on that road and i hope we can sustain that road. >> ronald of washington d.c. sent in a text message. now that we know so much about the kennedy's womanizing, how does that color your memories of the time. >> he might be referring to maureen callaghan's new book. >> it's an interesting question. i think for historians, yes, it colors your information about the private person and the question is for a historian, also, how does that affect

their public personality. when we didn't know about these things before, what would you say is that if their private behavior affects the public personality, affects their policy or ability to govern, absolutely that linkage needs to be made. otherwise it's something that makes you feel better or worse about the individual, but may not affect their judgment in history. people didn't know at the time that fdr couldn't walk on his own power. it's important that we know that now, it makes us know how extraordinary it was for him to be president and how much more powerfulfully we should respect him and it's better that we know these things now. at the time we simply judged him as a different kind of person and i think that's what's important. >> from an unfinished love story, one afternoon dick asked me to slowly recite one of his favorite poems, wordsworth intimations of immortality. when i was finished, he was

breathing deeply and i thought he had fallen asleep. i read until the end and when i finished he turned to me, though nothing could bring back the splendor in the grass, we will grieve not and find strength in what is behind. doris kearns goodwin, book, her eighth, an unfinished love story, thank you for spending time with us at the book festival. >> i'm delighted, thank you, thank you, thank you, guys. >> (applause) >> several more hours, go to book tv.org, but right now we're going to hear from authors, alexis pauline, "survival is a promise", and best seller, tyla miles, "night flyer" is her book.

[inaudible conversations] >> to welcome you all to our next event. harriet tubman icon of resistance. and the author of several works of poetry, but her brand new biography is titled survival is a promise. the eternal life of audrey lord. [applause] she will be in conversation with tia miles, a professor of history at harvard university and received the national book award in 2011 for all that she carries. [applause] >> her latest book is titled

"night flyer", harriet tubman and free people. they will bring conversations through moderator marsha jones, professor of history at johns hopkins university. her work examines the legal and cultural history of black americans, citizenship, voting rights, and the rights of women. enjoy the festival and let's welcome them to our stage. [applause] >> thanks very much. thank you to the library of congress. welcome to this extraordinary crowd to the national book festival. it's wonderful to see you all here and greetings to our friends here on c-span. i want to dive into these books. what a pleasure for me to have a special opportunity to lead them and i'll say to listen to

them which i also recommend as i did on the long road trip this summer. but i want to ask you where these books began for you. harriet tubman, audrey lord, these are historical figures whose names, i think, will be familiar to many of us. certainly they were familiar with you all before you began these projects. so what led you to return to them and what did you learn? what was new by the time you got to the end of this process? alexis, do you mind getting us started? >> i don't mind at all. i'm so happy to be here, thank you all for coming. so i've never left audrey lord. she has never left me. when i was 14 years old in a writers group in the oldest feminist bookstore in the south

caris books, i first learned about audrey lord. it's really because a nearby professor had ordered her books for their class through this bookstore and so i got my copy of the collected poems of audrey lord and i started writing them on my wall. i started using them for my english papers and i wouldn't say i really understood her poetry at 14 years old or exactly why i needed it in my life, but i kept returning to it and i used that book like an oracle. i would just open to a page and i would find something for myself in the complexity of her imagery and the bravery of her words. so when i -- there are so many opportunities in between. i never stopped writing about audrey in college.

my dissertation features her work along with june jordan and alexis defoe. and worked with her papers at spelman college in atlanta, georgia. and it was sitting in that archive, holding her journal and other materials that i discuss in the book, but you'll have to see what those are later, where i felt this responsibility that there's something like an energy exchange that i think happens in the archives and i knew that there might be people like us who we spend weeks and go back and back and back to the archives and get to spend so much time in what i think of as sacred space where like at the library of congress, you can actually time travel and be with those materials, but i also knew that most of the people who lived in my community would not have the

opportunity to sit among those materials leak i did. -- like i did. i started to bring it back in my living room. and i had a night school and i called it school of my lord, ancient school, tiny duplex, and people brought their kids. and the youngest who participated was two months old and the oldest person who participated was in their 80's and everyone in between and we'd have interactive ways to work with the life, legacy, teaching strategies, poet ethics, political work of audrey lord and it was that that really started to bring audrey's people to me, her partner gloria joseph invited me to come live for a little while in st. croix where audrey lived at the end of her life and to work in her writing studio, which is also the place where she took her last breath.

and so the energy exchange continued and i'd never thought i would write a biography. i was like, you know, the form of biography, it feels so constricting to someone who is like-- they call me a poet because they can't actually define how it is that i write, but i came to understand that this was part of my responsibility, holding all of this energy, having not only all of this archival access, but then access to audrey lord's students who have been my mentors and teachers and her loved ones who have supported the community work that i've been doing inspired by audrey this whole time. so, basically at a certain point, yes becomes yes. and i just had to recognize the yes within myself and i think it happened at exactly the right time because my book

before this i'm drowned, feminist lessons for marine mammals was-- oh, you read it? thank you for reading it. it really was a leap for me as a black feminist scholar, black feminist literary scholar to learn so much marine biology and study marine mammals and listen to marine mammals and i realize all along i was missing the fact that audrey lord was a person who did that, too. she was obsessed with science and she would study geology and astronomy and she would collect stones and polish them in her kitchen and if you were wearing that stone on your ring, she would be what stone is that? is it from a volcano. and she was really curious about these things. so the natural imagery in her poetry isn't a metaphor and just this incredible complexity

and beauty that she uses to have us think about our human relationships differently. it's not metaphorical. >> it's part of what i understand her philosophy to be, explaining that earth is a relationship. and so maybe this can be a way to pass it to you, because there's a beautiful scene that your book opens with with harriet tubman was in the storm. when audrey was in the storm during hurricane hugo in st. croix, she had an understand maybe a lot of us have now around climate change. she said that we are in breach of the covenant upon which we live. earth is trying to tell us something about our conduct. ... conduct. and when i read that a letter that she wrote to ashleigh, which was a black lesbian feminist collective in the bay area that was sending supplies to audre lorde's community in saint croix, i thought about the

fact that if i thought about the fact that it will live on covenant, if were involved in some kind of promise with earth that allows us to keep reading and living and growing and knowing each other, then earth is actually a relationship, and every part of this planet is not something that we look at to represent who we are. we are actually part of everything. so the wayth this book we taught audre lorde to me was as a climate theorist, was as a scientist. then i had to learn more, with all, the amount of geology that i read, how much i had to learn of chemistry, all of these things i avoided my whole life up till now really offered an

intimacy in order to be able to get to know but also to offer to the world a person who understood herself as deeply part of the transformation of earth. so i have more to say but it was fascinating to me to learn that as i i was relearning audre le as an environmentalist, you are reteaching harriet tubman as an environmentalist. i will stop there because i can talk about audre lorde forever. [applause] >> we could listen forever, too. that was beautiful. everybody, hello. i think it's still morning, good morning. i know martha said how wonderful it is to be here in this room full of everyone with such positive energy and attitudes,

with what weee have to share wih you today. the same people we katze who are out there in the internet land, and the c-span's land, hello. thank you for being with us. soso alexis comments already hae set the table so beautifully for our conversation, and also for an interest we all have in common, and that is about the future of this planet and all the living creatures upon it which of course include us. and we have all as black black feminist, as black scholars, found a way to connect our work in black women's history, to the question of life today, which is how doo we live with and on earth? how do we face multiple crises?

when we look for examples for inspiration or just comfort and companionship? as we move through this more than likely darkening days ahead? so my entry point into my new book night flyer, a biography of harry tubman, really started with this recognition that earth is in trouble which means we are in deep, deep, deep trouble, too. and i came to this awareness and around 2009 soon after my third child was born. i had been very focused on looking at african-american history,wo especially black women's history as related to native americann history. womeni

realize some point that my fervent focus on black experience and native experience really had no meaning if we didn't have an earth, that part. i just that my attention was a little bit too narrow. and at that moment i decided i wanted to try to see if i could expand it and try to explore how might i expand it. i did that through a number of different kinds of projects, including organizing a community group in southeast michigan. we had a professor jones and i both lived and worked and became friends and this was a group called eco girls, which for environmental and cultural opportunities for girls. this was a day program, a weekend program at a summer camp for girls in urban southeast michigan, in which we learned about the environment and the

natural world and stewardship and in which we to maybe kind of beat on the down teach skills that could be productive useful for these girls as. they grew into their womanhood. and just as an aside, i have to tell you all that i heard from somebody in that camp and see she's texas now and she texted me and she said, have you told us we should learn how to build shelters? and i'm down here working at habitat for humanity building three people, learning how to make places to live. it was wonderful and other people from that program have gone on to work on sustainable food, to teach, to become academics in their own right. and so on. so that was one of the ways in which i tried to face up to what it felt to me to be, you know, a pretty terrifying reality, which is what are we doing to our earth? how will that affect our children and and future generations?

and at the same time that this was all happening for me, i had a colleague more than i had a colleague in the industry, too. taylor, who is an environmental sociologist who's written a number of books on different ways to think about urban environment and the notion of conservation and people of color in, the outdoors and the ways in which they have been sidelined in of the environment. and i figured taylor said to me one day at the hearing, they give a talk, black women who were enslaved. harriet was an environment analyst. and that was one of those moments where it's like, you know light bulb, it stars, you know, flash in the sky because i was already concerned and worried about this issue. but i was not seeing a way to put my work together with this very urgent feeling. and our christina taylor gave me the way. she just gives it to me by

saying harriet tubman was an environment catalyst. and she said she had to be in order to know how to read the trees and read the sky to get free. something that you talk about in your book and around as well. and i can tuck that notion away, continue to do my work, and to publish other books. but i started developing a concept of environmental history of underground railroad. so i'm thinking about what would that be like if we could turn around and really, you know, what would the natural elements be? who would the historical actors be? and i started keeping files and i started typing notes and going back to previous sources and trying to assemble various kinds of materials to conceptualize idea. and then another gift that just came my way, which was to have the chance to write a petite

biography. for a series that's edited by henry louis gates. the series is mostly black thinkers, artists and activists. and i said well, how about harriet tubman? because i read about harriet tubman. and the answer was yes. and i said, can i go to harriet tubman? an environmental perspective. and here i held my breath. that was sort of an unusual and answer came like again, yes, absolutely. absolutely. go for it. and so that's how this particular framework battalion telling harriet tubman story came about, that long history of just a widening lens of attention and concern and interconnecting different of study. so my answer to part b of your question, martha, concerning what was new new in this project would a, they'll be twofold

really. harriet tubman is someone we're surrounded by, you know, especially as kids. i mean, you know, black history month and probably now women's history comes along and she's going to be plastered on the elementary school walls and i think that's good. i hope she sees that there might be some states in which her role in those spaces, you know, could be endangered because of concern about teaching the truth of black history in history. and harriet tubman, whenever the walls is a very flat way of understanding her and this project, the research, the thinking, and especially writing through her life, helped me to see her in a multi dimensional way, which just blew my mind, because as i will admit, and not to my credit, this is something that i feel like embarrassed to admit, but i will admit that i sort of carried along with me

this caricature of harriet tubman. i just i saw her in kind of that action figure mode that we all know, that we see the images that we get and the kind of the folks, the stories and even we that we get in the recent biographical film to have in which was very moved me moving but it still has that of aspects to it of tubman through the woods right and i had to relearn her through this book and as i did that, i saw much more of the depth of her character, like the seriousness and weight of who she was the breadth and sharpness of her thought. i mean, harriet tubman appeared to me working on this project as somebody who was an incredible more astonishing talented early

thinker and the black advantaged american tradition. so abolitionist, yes. moving through the swamps in the woods. yes. you know, and certainly she was a freedom taker. she took her own freedom of freedom, bring her to other people. she was a warrior, but she was also a brilliant philosopher and theorist and analyst i came to know that they're working this book. thank you for that. you know, we could have called this panel, one on black women's intellectual history, and i think that would been as apt. but i want hold on to something else that ran through both your comments and i'll call it place and and how does place matter in these stories ease you know tire you and i both have trekked through the eastern shore of maryland on.

the one hand revisiting those sites in the seasons and and searching tubman, but also witnessing i bearing witness to the way in which the crisis of earth is transforming perhaps irredeemably the eastern shore of maryland and think. but at the same time, i think one of the ways in which tubman is is mythologized that she's a little bit stuck in place. but i took from your book. and the same is true of lord. this is a woman in motion and so can you talk a little bit about how place figures in this story and figures in tubman's life story. mm yes. so anybody who hasn't yet read martha jones's new york times travel article about revisiting harriet tubman's homeplace in

maryland must go and google it and read it immediately. it's beautifully, it's informative. and the photographs are just gorgeous. if you've been to maryland before, you will see it in the way in your article. and if you're on cusp of going, you will have a different frame to bring with you. i'm so glad you asked that question of both of us. martha, that question is absolutely apt for the reason that you said that these two women were always in motion inside themselves and externally in the world. and also because i couldn't have told tubman's story. and i don't think alexis kind of told lawrence story without keen attention to place. it's of our colleagues. the regular at savoy says. everything takes place, right? everything happens and it

happens in place. it happens in a context. it happens in an ecology. it happens on a certain piece of land that happens near a particular waterways, which all interact with one another and every other living thing. and so non-living things to create a vibrant energetic web of existence. so harriet tubman comes out of that place on the eastern shore of the chesapeake in maryland, and this place shaped her. it formed her. it taught her how to do those things that we associate with her, an underground railroad. that period of her life, it's the place where, of course, she learned the waterway. she learned the woods she learned to read the night skies, especially probably from her father. but there's another dimension to the environment and climate change in place that i want to

slip in here. and martha already pointed to it and that is harriet tubman's place is changing and it's changing because change happens. things are always changing. the natural world is changing. we're changing, right? but that change has been accelerated because of climate, which is in in harriet tubman's ecological context. that endangerment has all kinds of potential repercussions. one of them might feel a little bit tangential. i think that it's really important to think about, and that is that harriet tubman and other enslaved people who were able to find their way to freedom in the 19th century did so in environments that were thickly alive. they did so because they had

tree cover, because they had forests, because they were rivers that they could actually follow that weren't completely people and settled. and harriet tubman chose to travel in cooler temperatures in the winter, she chose to travel at night. she liked to move with people who were seeking their freedom. she was 18 at times when the other people, the and the people who were trying to catch enslaved people for would be in their beds. the more that climate change accelerates and we lose our forests and the water rises and, even when we lose our colder temperatures, the less likely it is that we have opportunities for people to free themselves of one another. by partnering in with an intact natural world, this is really important to recognize that the abolitionist network and the

work they did depended on intact natural. environments that we are losing now and know what's going to happen. you know, and our political world, none of us knows. and i am not attempting to offer some kind of the gloom and doom scenario or any kind of conspiracy theory. but i will say, should things that our country turn in a way that we were facing some kind of extreme chaos. i'd actually i didn't see that film about the new civil scenario, but let's just say i heard about such a say something like that. where would the freedom fighters hide? where would the freedom fighters convene? which natural areas would be protected them as they made

their plans and plotted their way forward to defend us all and to defend this country? that is an important aspect to a changing environment that i just wanted to put out there in this space. and let me try to see if i can conclude this comment by going back to my point about movement and change. one of the things about harriet tubman that i wasn't focused on enough, and i think many of us are not focused on enough is fact that her underground activism, which was truly heroic and tremendous and mysterious, took up about ten years of her life. she lived from approximately 1822 to 1913. she lived a long time. and ten years is significant,

but kind of like a blip in such a long lifespan. so what else was she doing in that time? she was traveling all over the place in this country and in canada and quite significantly, she moving to upstate new york to auburn, new york and building, shaping a community, a community of care, a community of welcoming people in who were hungry, who were leading, who had disabilities, who were elderly, who were sick, bringing them in and creating a safety net for all of them. and did this in new york well past the time when she was running into the swamps and the woods. and so in a sense, movement and also coming to know new places,

coming into relationship with new places over time was a part of survival strategy. alexis, there's a moment, moments in this book where you set audrey lord in new york, but in particular at hunter college. so we haven't talked about this, but was a young student at hunter college, lord was there. and so you can imagine how it is. i'm reading this and i'm rethinking all of the all of that time and all that space through arts perspective. but my question really is maybe we don't think of new york city, we don't think of the upper east side of manhattan as the birthplace of an environmentalist. so what happens to audrey lord? where does that happen for her? how does that happen for her? mm well, well, first of all, i

just want to shout out eastern shore. it's anybody from eastern shore, maryland, who's here. you know, again, my ancestors from eastern shore. i'm a descendant of the oyster workers of eastern shore who were part of that waterway underground railroad. i'm going up to staten island, new york. so then maybe. okay, so now we're in new york. okay. so audrey lord was in harlem and also lived much of her life in staten island, new york. she raised her kids in staten island. and, you know, she talks about this in one of her early author statements. she says, you know, i wasn't born in a forest. i was born hemmed in by stone. right. that's what she describes being born in new york city as being, like, hemmed in by stone and there's so much natural imagery in her poetry that when people started to ask her, like, exactly this question, how did that happen?

she would say, you know, really, i grew up. i didn't know the difference between a weed and a flower in a piece of grass and she would make these little bouquets of like grass from little green space between buildings in new york city and give them to her mother as bouquets and her mother is like, well. having migrated from grenada, a place of so much less and some of the most beautiful fruits and flowers in the world, she was just like, okay. and yet even early on, wandering the hallways of hunter college high school, which was a school for girls at that time, she was interested in the ecology of her city. she started to write about roaches. she was like, what is it? what does it mean that there's actually a life form?

it's in relationship with what we're doing heating cooling, building, crevices or waste and trash that is in relationship with us in ways that scare everyone like that. the people of new york are in constant battle against. and yet reflected by and how does that actually shape what her experience was like as a student? she would write about homeless children that she would see in the street and say, okay, how how does this city build and reject itself at the same time? and that is something that you can see in her teenage notebooks. so when she actually has a chance to go to more places, very time is when she goes to mexico as as a student, she studies abroad in mexico city and then lives in kind of back

and travels to oaxaca lorca and. she's like, oh, oh, oh. you know, she's to see the wildflowers and the butterflies and these great expanses of space that weren't part of her experience of new york. and she talks, adrienne rich, the poet adrienne rich, about this she says, this is when i realized that there's so much beauty, the world, that beauty wasn't just something i had to make out of my words and the way i put them together. it was something that i could bring people to. and this becomes one of the major shifts has her looking at the world differently and wondering about a wider set of species and being the type of person that one of her friends describes would go to like a street market and be like smelling everything and putting everything to her face and her friend andrea cain, and says it

was like being with somebody who just got to planet earth, who was like, what is this? what can i taste this? you know, everything. and you can see that sensuous ness in her and her writing. and then she well and maybe it's not all linear, right? because i want to lift the fact that audre lorde as a student was of a group called committee for a sane nuclear, where they were already thinking about what does it mean the way that we use energy, what are the dangers of nuclear energy? remembering that lorde grew up down street from where the manhattan happened, where the atomic bomb was created, and she remembers listening with her family to. the radio. when the first atomic bomb was dropped on hiroshima and her father crying for the only time she ever really saw him emotion in his life, saying that

humanity has now is now capable of destroying itself. and so these questions, which audre lorde in her early life brought to reading science fiction and the early study of of science, she started to do as a pre-teen and as a teenager was thinking about humanity in relationship to itself and planet earth. and then just grew and grew and grew and grew. so when she started to understand as a person from the caribbean, but then who also moved to st croix at the end of her life, when she started to understand stand that what we've done to the atmosphere was actually causing her to be stronger. storms like hurricanes hugo, which she survived, then wrote a lot about that in that not a lot of people have read as a warning for how we respond. these crises. it's very it's interesting to me

that she starts this essay. she wrote hugo letter saying those who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them and then she outlines the us response to hugo and st croix in a way that could absolutely be about katrina. it could absolutely be about some of the other storms that we've faced where people's lives and livelihood are put second to the the interests of property in business anyway, all of this is to say that, i think the there something about audrey lorde's sense that that earth is something process and you know, maybe it comes from early on you know her mom talking about kick kim jenny that underwater volcano near grenada and carioca where earth is becoming itself

where isotopes are still transforming this idea that earth is not a finished project, earth is not a stable for human action earth is something that is in motion itself, not only in orbit, but like from within like audrey was in motion from within. i think that there was identification with that that caused her to look at these different things and say, yeah, i should, i should be thinking about what the nuclear policy is. i should be thinking about what the practices are. i should be thinking about what life is contingent on. and so i think it connects to what you were just sharing about being part of an ecology our freedom work and the work of our freedom fighter. our warriors like audre lorde, self-identified black lesbian feminist warrior poet, just want

to make sure to say that because she always said that wherever she went, she was like, just in case. just in case. and she had a lot of other things that she would say. she would say socialist, she would say sometimes she would say nearsighted, high maintenance, all these things, just to let you know. but there's if we're in a relationship with earth, which harriet tubman clearly was so deeply as an herbalist, as a daughter of a forester forester. it's not not. the natural environments that were part of our more than a resource for our. what's at stake is actually our capacity to be in free relationship with ourselves with each other and with life itself. and so the way that you describe in this book, by the way, just

for that just for that you'll have to read this book as the feasting of flesh as elites, feasting the flesh of other people in order to consume their labor. it's so accurate. it's so much better than any way i've heard it describe it. and more true, it requires so much violence and contain it and captivity to stop us as living beings from being in the relationship with earth. that would be most life giving for us and for all species to force people to grow a monoculture of crops that they can't even eat. it takes violence to force people to act outside of our best interest, which would be what some people would call permaculture. now. but it would be in the

relationship that. and as you also talk about this in your book and this is something that was very important, audre lorde as well, an indigenous relationship land is the most dangerous to a colony project and an enslaving project. and so this. this question of being an environmentalist. i'm so grateful that we get to like from not starting with harriet tubman and certainly not ending with audre lorde, but to understand, like fannie lou hamer was an environmental ist when she said have to be able to feed our people and we're going to use this land to create freedom farms and not cotton plantations. right. but actually voting itself is an environmental because the disenfranchize of the people in mississippi was about stopping them from being in relationship with the land in a way that would make the most sense right?

so i think there's been a separation and this is what had us be like, oh we're we're remaining our same our same ancestors that we love. there's been a separation between black power movement, civil, and then the idea of environmentalism. but when you look at it, all of these women were environmentalists. the whole which probably means all the ancestors that you would draw were also environmentalists. the whole time. there's just been this narrowness, to use that word earlier. there's been this narrowness in. who an ecologist can be, right? who who can be the person who speaks about. and also in erasure, the same erasure that we fight as biographers of black women. that's there's actually a freedom. it's right.

it's with us because. we are actually part of this planet. and we are hearing it in our own desire for freedom and in what the planet is telling. audre lorde talked about it through hurricanes, earthquakes, through every form of communication and. we have to be environmentalists in order to be free. audre lorde really, with what you said she would often say in interviews. we have to work with the creative power of difference and we have to be able to talk to each other across all these differences. but that conversation can't happen if we're not in a relationship with earth that allows us to have any conversation at all and i think that that part of audre lorde legacy is the most important, especially right now. and so audre lorde lives on somebody who absolutely has saved lives, has saved my life as a person who we understand is an icon of identity and speaking

our truth and, claiming our multiple identities and, collaborating across difference. but the depth of what she was really embodying and asking for is a total transformation in our relationship as a planet, not just with a planet, but as earth. and i'm really excited for that aspect of what she had to say to be something that we can all access now. well, i yeah. so i want to i want to stay with one of your key terms relationship and maybe just transform it a bit to relations. yes. because we're hearing just snippets of how these are also women who spend their lives in remarkable and essential webs of of human.

and tie. i wanted to ask you to help us understand better this dimension of harriet tubman life, in part because i think in myth she comes to us is sort of the singular solitary figure in so many ways. but i think you to tell us something about the way in which she is part of a world and an world with with yes, earth, but also with other humans on earth. mm hmm. mm hmm. relationship. also, the word that was thinking in my mind to you, alexis i'm glad you highlighted that, martha, and gave us more space by offering us relations, because this does seem to be a key idea running through our comments. a critical way of being that means being with others.

others who might be human, others who might not be human. and and harriet tubman did both. we know from people that harriet tubman spoke with during lifetime that she found support, energy peace, calm when. she was outside, that she the the features of the natural world as being alive and even in and that this sense of and spiritedness for vibrancy and of spirituality outdoors was deeply interwoven her very strong christian faith. so tubman's concept of relational had to do with her with god maybe even first and foremost. she was a very religious person. mm hmm.

that was something else that learned as was doing this. this work that she wasn't as religious in that. yes, we know that very prayed when she was an underground railroad, but is religious in the sense that her faith in god, this divine being supersede everything in her life. it was her flaw. it was her compass. it was the way she made decisions. this was a very real relationship that tubman existed within throughout her entire life. was a religious understanding and sensibility which connected up with her environment or or ecological understand. because for her, again nature was in spirited or spirited, it was it was alive. it had something about the power of god threaded through it. in addition, harriet tubman was

in a long standing, deeply felt closely held, but always endangered relationships with other people. she adored her parents. she adored her siblings. her parents and siblings adored. and even though she and her and her siblings were often being rented out, leased out by the man who owned her a different person than who earned her father's family was separated. she was always taking risks to, be closer to her family. if her relationship with god we might say, was the bedrock of her her was the soil that was the place. she found richness where she was resourced over and over again, emotionally and physically. she was mistreated, neglected. you know, abused by enslavers. and harriet tubman always had a

dream and a vision of reconstituting her family because they were separated, because she had two sisters who were sold away. and she witnessed and was was distraught about it and had nightmares and traumatic memories of it throughout her life. and this intense relationality, the strong love for her family, this desperate need to bring family back together is partly what i think guide her, because god was her primary guide. always. to developing this community in new, where she could create a new and family, including some of her relatives from down in maryland who she helped to escape, but also other people who she was meeting the very first time when they came and knocked on her door saying, we're hungry, we're thirsty, we no place to sleep tothem was

constantly and caring for relationships, which i think such an important example for right now. mm mm. so yeah, please. yeah. two things about family and relations, i think struck me about lord. one is, is her relationship with daughter elizabeth, which runs through this book and really feels like guide through this book on the one hand. so her children but then i think the other thing is that has this extraordinary i'll say, expansive perhaps a queer sense of what relations in families are. that is as strong in the way you tell it to us. but please say more. yes, i mean, i think this is one of the things i love about night fire understanding and harriet

tubman and community and also understanding her and her intellectual community of other black women survived slavery and knew they could be free. i love understanding our people who again, the title of this is icons, but how we can understand these people who think about what an icon is like on your computer in icon press it and then you go into the the place it represents, whatever the place where you go to type your documents or something, you get access through an icon. and i think it's important for these black women icons. it's not like i could never do a harriet tubman did. i could never be like audre lorde. actually, what audre lorde believed. audre lorde always believed she was a genius, not a humble person, not even as a child. this is why we have all her journals. she was like, i know i'm important to this planet, but she thought that was what she had in common with you.

she was when she would say, i am a black lesbian feminist warrior poet doing my work, come to you. are you doing yours? it was because she thought your work was as important as her work. so you also are a genius. you also are so important to this planet. and i think sometimes we lose that. or maybe it's our copout when look at these people and were like, what a great figure. but me i don't actually have the power to change the and. that's not what audre lorde believed at all. and i'll have you know, as a person who spent a lot of time in audre lorde's papers, she procrastinated to just like you do, just like i do. she didn't know what to say. sometimes she was afraid. a lot of the time she, had nightmares all all of these things that for her were a part of her pathway, of being who she

was. a lot of her poetry came out of those nightmares, those strong images that become a warning or, an opening space or a powerful questioning place for us coming from something that really was a problem. her insomnia and nightmares over, the course of her life. and i think about harriet tubman and her her brain, her traumatic brain event that she had that also was part of her leadership. and so i think about there's so much to think about. but you had asked about this idea family and relation and audre lorde was definitely a person who who she felt that our love is meant to transform us. we are here to transform from each other through reflect and really rigorously. and i think some of this comes out of her growing up as a child

with disabilities profoundly. they would say legally blind at the time. who didn't speak until the age four or five. what it meant to be close was a very serious thing. she couldn't see you if you weren't close. she couldn't communicate you if she couldn't touch you. and that soul lives through her work, her poems are like, you got to be able to smell it. you got to be able to feel it. this isn't the pretty picture from far away. this is like getting close. and she really required that in her relationship. she was like, oh, no, no, we're going we're going all the way. i'm going to tell you what i really think. even if you really want to know it and she created a community of people across her life who she understood be family, who who were we would say may be

close friends. for her, this was like her cohort, her kindred people who she raised her children with together. she. understood. i mean, in this book, i write about it as like a forest. she understood as part of a macro organism, like a forest can shift climate, an individual tree can't shift the climate. so what does it mean to be part of the forest? and how do trees each other alive through their roots? and how do the fungus that are part of that and all the different species that live in the forest participate in that? i think you can look at audre lorde's life, her students, her close friends, her children in her relationships that she intentionally cultivated with women who were working for all over the world as. part of this idea that if we're going to shift the climate, it

happens through deep investment in each other and that that's actually the scale of life. so there's a scale of that audre lorde practice that i'm really grateful for, and i hope that can learn a lot from. i've got 2 minutes and and i feel like we've just begun, but that is just one more reason for us to encourage folks to dive into these books themselves and discover all of the richness that is in them in one minute. one of the things we know about both of you is that you are prolific writers. so what's next time, miles in 30 seconds, 30 seconds. i'm working on a cultural history of harriet jacobs and harriet beecher thinking about

women's friendships and conflicts and tensions across racial lines during that great moral movement and also about to be working on a on climate change and historic sites that are endangered. thank. i'm so excited. i guess home i am writing about change jordan in particular centering her relationship with. fannie lou hamer who was one of her primary mentors. yes. and this this question the ecology that's that's always there and i also have just completed a book of poems inspired by a local, the great painter, alma thomas. oh, i her so much. i love her so much and yes, so

it's poetry that's inspired by basically a year where wrote inspired by her paintings every single day. thank you to ty miles, alexis calling guns rape survivor is a promise. nightflyers. thank you. national bookstore. best of all, thank you. library of congress. thank you. our friends on c-span. congratulations to you both. thank you our friends on c-span. congratulations to you both. [applause]♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> you are watching live coverage of the 2024 national book festival held at the washington, d.c. convention center. several hours ahead, authors that black hawk, erik larson are two of the authors that you will see. joining us now on our set is the

american enterprise yuval levin, his fifth book is called american covenant, how the constitution unified our nation and could again. let's start with the lead. how could the constitution unified? >> i think it's very, very important that the american constitution was intended really as a unifying document. its purpose when it declares its own purposes the first that this is to form a more perfect union. we americans now tend to forget that. we look at the constitution as a tricycle framework. or else we see as part of what divides us, as part of what frustrates us about american politics. but over and over the constitution rises to offer as waste unified across lights of different, to compel americans to disagree with each other, to do with each other, to negotiate, compete, bargain. that is what it try to drive us to do. to fix it with phil to do that now we are failing to practice

american constitutionalism. the way to recover that practice is to recover our knowledge of the constitution. that's really what the book tries to offer, i re-acquaintance for americans to note but maybe don't know as a unifying framework. >> to quote from american covenant, as we consider the particular element of our governing framework, we will see that americans have weakened the capacity of our constitution to unify us. not by accident but on purpose. out of an understandable but ultimately misguided sense of frustration by precisely the means for which our government pursues cohesion. let's start with that line, not by accident. down and it is espey frustrating for narrow majorities in american political life. and of course, narrow majorities are the only kind we've had now for about 30 years. the american, unlike a lot of the parliamentary of europe, for example, which a perfectly

democracies to our system, when you win an election, doesn't give you all the power until the next election when you win an election, you win a seat at the table. and what happens at the table is negotiate eating and bargaining and competing. the constitution always wants narrow majorities to grow before. they can be empowered because you have to win the presidency and the house and the senate and power in the states to really make dramatic change happen. that's very hard to do in a divided time. and what the constitution says to a narrow majority is work with the other side, find some people there who will agree with you too and build a broader coalition. it's really that knack for coalition building that we've lost in 21st century america and. the demand to build coalitions is frustrating. think we just won the election? yeah, we won percent plus one, but we won. why do? we have to deal with those people and our constitution wants to say you have to deal with them so that the outcome is broadly legitimate and otherwise majorities will push their way through.

then they'll lose and the opposite majority will come in, will undo everything they did and will do what they want to do. we'll do it back and forth forever. that's a little bit of what 21st century american politics has felt. and that i think, is a failure. constitutional practice. it's a failure to see that ultimately we have to build in order for our system to function. right now, too many voters don't want that primary voters, too many politicians don't want that. and we have to relearn our constitution that that is what we should want and that is what we should do. mr. levin, would you agree that most of us have a passive membership in democracy? it's true. most even most politically engaged citizens. now think about american democracy, something we watch. we participate every couple of years as voters. i think there's more of a role for us if we want it. and especially in our kind of democracy, which begins from the bottom up and, which works by empowering people at the local level and only then at the state, only then at the national level. americans who want to participate more could, i think,

the nationalization of our politics its tendency to turn into a kind of form of entertainment has led us to think that what it means to be a politically engaged citizen is just to watch politicians in washington. it can mean a lot more than that if we wanted to and. i think it should for our system to work well. we to be more active citizens than we all tend to be. what's danger in the nationalization of politic, in your view? our system actually gives the national government a fairly limited of issues to control the american national government, in charge of defense, of diplomacy of economic regulation. but a lot of the real governance of our country to happen at the state level, at the local. and if we don't see that, if we turn every issue into a national issue, then you have a deformation of politics, both at the national level where the national government tries to engage itself in much more than it needs to in education, in welfare and some of the most contentious and divisive issues that aren't going to be resolved at the national level and so shouldn't be fought at the national level.

and also you have a nationalized ocean of local politics. i live in maryland. in my county, we have people for county council on an agenda that's focused on immigration. now is very important, but it's not a county level issue and i don't really care what you think about immigration. if you're running for the county commission, it's just that people say that now as a way of sending a signal about who they are of a kind of symbolic message of i'm on the right team and that's not really what politics needs to involve. it becomes much harder for our politics to function when we think that it's all one big show in washington. yuval, all of us, our guest, he is with the american enterprise institute of their social, cultural and constitutional study. his numbers are up on the screen case. you want to participate in our conversation this afternoon. he's a contributing editor, the national review. his previous include the fractured republic a time to build but hasn't politics always been relatively performative.

there's always been a performative element to politics, no question about it. part of what it is to be a politician is be a public person, is to convey a kind message that people want to hear and like to hear. i think our politics has become more in the era of social media than is healthy for our institutions. there's always a balance between playing an inside in an institution like congress, participating in the bargaining and negotiating. and that has to happen internally and playing an outside role using congress a way to convey a national public message. in our time, the outside role has taken over and a lot of members see their purpose fundamentally as to be political communicators and think of congress less an institution for them to operate in and which might form their behavior, our politics and more as a stage, a platform for them to stand on and be seen. and so they look at congress as a way to build a social media following to build an audience on cable news or on the internet, and ultimately makes

it much harder for them to do their inside work, their core legislative work. the work of a legislature isn't. and negotiation just can't in public. it has to happen in private. so congress has to have an interior life as well as an exterior. and that's what we've seen diminish in the 21st century. and was that in the review you did an article that congress. absolutely. i and it's part of the book too. i think that the the essential failure of our constitutional system now is congress's dereliction of its responsibility. congress is the first branch of our government. it has to be the moving force of our politics. but a lot of members now don't want to make the hard decisions they want to pass those over to the president to courts, and they want to be observers like everybody else. commentators and pundits, than the decision makers in our system and the the political environment. they operate in now makes it too easy for them to do. they can just be performers, they can youtube clips, rather than producing. and too many their voters, i

think, want that too. so recover the sense of what the institution to be. we have to reacquaint ourselves with the constitution looking in our history. what do you think congress >> looking back in her history what do you think congress has functioned well? >> there has always been reasons to complain about congresses but there have been moments when congress has allowed the country genuinely to overcome significant national division. we think of the error of the civil rights act and of the 1950s and '60s as dominated by presidents and courts. they did have an important role to play but ultimately was congress doing its job in that area of marketing, negotiating, facilitating compromise that allowed those resolutions to endure that allowed those lost to last. we've seen that at other times in the course of world war ii when congress stepped up to facilitate the growth of the american military and a way that we attribute to fdr but it was congress that did work in that

moment. we're any moment now when there is a kind of work to do about immigration, around some of the essential challenges that confront us in american fiscal policy where it can only work if congress bargains its way towards an outcome that americans will view as broadly legitimate. the president can't do that. the president is one person and one person can't represent 330 million. a representative outcome what has been negotiated andnd only cogs can do that. >> 95%, 96% of congress gets reelected. >> right. it's true. people always seem to have a favorableme view of their own member whatle also hating congrs simultaneously. c the problem we confront for it often now is the way in which we begin the process of electing congress. the candidate selection process at the very beginning has been turned over entirely to set the party primaries that tends to prefer candidates who don't want to do the work of negotiating

and bargaining but who want to do the work of performing for the most devoted voters. .. politics of bargaining and negotiation and. we end up with candidates who are just not right for the job, quite frankly, very often, especially in districts, are less competitive. the primaries do all the work and the work they do is to fill congress with people who want to do a the job president the constitutional one. the committees to allow legislation to matter but we also have to think about the electoral system which is not in the constitution and not written in stone. we want a better working system. well, we had an incident this summer where a candidate for a major party was appointed. her party? yeah, that's perfectly legitimate, though, isn't it? it is legitimate. i think that the party's job is win general elections to build broad coalitions, especially in

a two party system. the parties institutions are very useful because they tend to broaden the appeal of their candidates than to narrow them. whereas a candidate who thinks of himself or herself as an contractor, only has to speak to a narrow primary voter, the party as a whole has a broader interest. and i think the parties should see that they don't have to be stuck with candidates that don't have broad appeal. we've been stuck now for 30 years in american politics with two minority parties. they're both at just about 50%. neither of them can build a durable majority coalition, which has actually majority have been the norm in american politics. we generally have broad majority parties. and then after a long period, we have a realigning in which the minority becomes the majority. since the 1990s. now we not had a majority party and that actually more to do with the dysfunction of our politics than we often think. it's not just polarization but deadlock that makes it hard for our parties to learn anything. parties learn lessons from

voters they lose. and neither of parties feels like it's really lost in almost 30 years now. when they lose, they lose narrowly. they think we'll just do the same thing next time and it'll work. and right. it does work. neither has been able to build a broad coalition, and i think that has to do with the fact that neither of them thinks of itself enough in terms of building a broad coalition. 60%, not percent plus one is what it would take for a party to help our system get back into order and the other party would respond. right. when you have a broad coalition, the minority party tries to broaden own coalition and they're both in the business of reaching across lines of difference to find persuadable voters. at this moment, neither party doing that well enough. if you step back from our politics now and ask what the parties doing, you'd think, well, they're they're trying to purify themselves. they're hunting heretics. they're not hunting convert. and that can only change. we have a better understanding of how our system meant to work. the book called american

covenant how the constitu unified our nation and could again. the author is yuval levin. the first call up for him is kim down in houston. hi, kim. hello please go ahead. we're listening. okay. well, had a question for the author. how can. educate our children about the constitution in such a way that the constitution is, um, extremely important and and something that we just don't cast aside. i think it's. thank immensely important question and thank you for it. it's really a question about civic education and do we help americans better know the tradition they're inheriting. i would say that it's very important subject to stress not only in at university level where there has been a kind of

reawakening of civics, but especially at the k through 12 level in elementary school. people have to become broadly acquainted with the kind of society this is to learn about its strengths, to learn about its weaknesses, about what it offers. we certainly have to teach children about the darker sides of our history, but we also have to teach about the resources that are available to them, like the constitution so that fixing the problems we have should not be thought of as something that requires us to throw out what we have and start over. we have a lot of resources to work with in terms of historical to learn from and in terms of actual framework for governing that are alive, for us that we can work with now, that we can strengthen and reawaken today and about the constitution. and that sense is particularly important. that's the purpose of a book like this. and there are a lot of books like that directed to people of all ages and of all levels of historical knowledge. i think in a sense this is a time of a kind of awakening of interest in civic education, and that interest has to be directed

toward younger americans who need to know what they're inheriting and why it's worth their while. gail's calling from d.c. hi, gail. we're listening. my question for the author is how do you feel that the supreme court is making the congress work? i don't know the way you described and dysfunctional it. gail, are you what are your views? well, my views are some of the justices on the supreme. it's about me and they're not reading the constitution. that's how i'm looking at. thank you, ma'am. i think it's very important to think about the purpose of the court in our system and the purpose of the court can be very confusing for us as citizens, because on the one hand, courts resolve disputes and our consists of disputes and disagreement. but courts are not meant to resolve disputes about what the law should be.

courts are meant to resolve disputes about what the law is, and disputes about what it should be have to resolved in congress and in the state legislatures. the places where we argue with each other about what want as citizens. and so role of a judge is actually quite constrained. it is really to make sure that the system is operating as it ought to be, to make sure that people's rights are protected, especially the rights enshrined in the amendments, the constitution and the bill of rights and the 14th amendment, and to sure that the other institutions are doing proper work these days because much of the problem we face is the dysfunction congress. a lot of what the courts themselves doing is trying to push congress to do its job. and so over and over, you find courts trying to insist that it needs to be congress and not an administrative agency and not judges that resolves the big questions of the day. sometimes can be frustrating to us as citizens. we want the question resolved and we want it to be clear. congress often resolves questions in ways that are a little more muddy, that are a little more matters of bargaining.

but i think the court this court right to push congress and over to do its job. there are always going to be people unhappy, particular decisions and particular judges that. i can certainly give you a list of ones. i'm unhappy. but i think on the whole, the supreme court over the past generation has actually recovered its capacity to compel the system to work in the way it's intended under the constitution and broadly, i think that the roberts court has done a good job on that front. garrison winchester bay, oregon. gary, have about a minute left. go ahead. hello. i appreciate your well-reasoned positions. i'd like to hear what you feel. the ranked choice, voting and open primaries. it seems like that would force candidates to come to work, centrist positions, and discuss issues. thank you. thank you, sir. it's subject i talk about a lot in the book, and i ranked choice. voting has a role to play in the kinds of problems we have. i would think about it, though, in primaries not ranked choice in general elections, which would tend to weaken the parties.

but choice in primary elections, which would tend to encourage the parties to choose more broadly appealing candidates. the winner of a ranked choice election is a candidate who is good at being everybody's choice, as well as a lot of people's choice. and i do think that that is the kind of personality we want more of in our politics. yuval levin, his fifth book, american covenant how the constitution unified our nation and could again thank you for your time on this saturday afternoon. thank you so much, peter, and thank you for c-span. and we are returning to another author event at the national book festival. this one is called american history is called native history. ned black hawk, the rediscovery of america. and kathleen duvall, native nation's live on c-span. good morning.

we are about to make history. come at the national book festival. all yeah. ned beckley, black hawk is a history at the university and unenrolled member of the democ. tribe of the western shoshone. the author of many books of indigenous history. his most recent title is the rediscovery of america, native peoples and the unmaking of u.s. history, which won the 2023 national book award. kathleen is a history professor at the university of north carolina chapel hill, where she teaches early american and native american history. the latest book, native nations a millennium in north america was longlist for the canadian

prize in historical literature. the event is moderated by shelley silo, a citizen of the navajo and the chair of the national endowment of the humanities. enjoy the festival and let us welcome them to our stage stage. okay. thank you very much. good afternoon, everybody. this is a beautiful, engaging crowd and i hope that everybody who's online a chance to get a little bit of a glimpse of who's the room. we are so delighted. be here this afternoon with ned blackhawk, kathleen duvall and just want to say, you know, these two books, the of america and native nations, are a reminder that the telling of history is ever changing, that america is complex and fascinating. and sometimes heartrending. and we cannot move forward as a

nation as these have proclaimed in their books or as a people until we understand where we've been. so, kathleen, in that, i want to thank you for being with us today. we're going to delve in a little bit into your books, but not give up too much because hopefully you'll go get it, you'll get it signed and you'll be as immersed. the past two months of reading that, i have been. so. so ned, going to start with the little quote that you have in your introduction and it says finding answers to the challenges of our time racial strife, climate crisis and domestic and global inequities, among others, will require new concepts, approaches and commitments. and it is time put down the interpretive tools the previous century and take up new ones. and i think that you both have taken up new tools in your book. so tell us a little bit about what you are both trying do with in your new books. well, thank you for the kind introduction and for joining us

today. and thank you, kathleen, for coming as well. and thank you. i'm delighted to be here and honored beyond measure. my new book, the rediscovery of america, is an attempt to offer a new vision of american history rooted in the field of native american history. and it takes its title, the rediscovery of america from a generation or two of kind of amazing scholars ship and a profusion of both academic and tribal initiatives that have yielded far more vast conceptions and paradigms for thinking about american history than we've been previously given. and so actually, both of our works are kind of interpretive overviews of broad centuries of american historical formation. and we're both trained in the generation of scholars who've been pushing the field of native american history forward in ways that would have been inconceivable.

20, 25 years ago. and so there has been this kind of monumental seismic reorientation within academic and others adjacent fields to approaching american history that are new. and so these interpretive tools reflect less a kind of anglo centric or eurocentric orientation of american history, less of a teleological kind of kind of narrative of progress and kind of triumphant, either expansion and or democratic expansions. and much of the field of u.s. history is still kind of rooted in those kind of older paradigm, many of which are relics, essentially, of the cold war era. and so we face contemporary challenges that will require new ideas, new approaches, new methodologies, and ultimately a kind of reckoning that many of us have started to engage with in our own work that we're trying to bring into other

areas. i just want to echo nez, thanks. it's such an honor to be here with both ned and shelley and all of you and talk about our books. so, yeah, my book, native nations, also grows on this this huge turn in history toward native american history and incorporating native american history into u.s. history and other sort of global histories. one of the things i wanted to do in my book is, is tell a long, long history. so it's a a millennia of native history. and i wanted to connect the distant past to the present and things in between, because i think what a lot of americans and especially non native americans know about native history is a few flash points, most of which are quite negative, like indian removal and some of the sort of horror stories of native american history and those are in our books right. but there's also what i wanted to do here was to show the much longer history. so native nations begins in the

era before europeans and other peoples of the globe came to the americas centers on change and history that was happening in north america. long, long. before 1492. it stretches through centuries in which native americans had a great deal of power, had most of the population in power on the continent. when europeans were generally here in quite small numbers and for centuries didn't have the power to take over the continent as much as they might have wanted to. but then us also, i think importantly, continues to the present and it's in some ways a survival story, a heroic story of how people who were told over and over that they should no longer exist as indigenous people refused that that lesson and instead survived. and so i think that's why it was really important to include the present in that millennium long history. for me.

thank you, kathleen. you know, you bring up a point that i was kind of gravitating towards in your afterwards. you say in chapel hill, where you're at only 100 miles north of the home in the state where the lumbee are the largest indigenous population, they are shocked at the widespread ignorance of native history and nationhood. the young people faced the unreasonable choice between constantly explaining and defending their identities and simply hiding them to make their everyday lives easier. and so you kind of talk about, you know, these new tools in these books. how do you see these playing out with students in your classrooms and in the work that you two are doing? yeah, yeah. for me, i, i think, you know, for students generally, this is such a tremendously important time. i think they what they do, they see people like usually in the public eye, they see movie and tv, movies and tv and all kinds of places. they see native americans in the world today. you know, they're clearly part of modern 21st century america.

and that doesn't always square with the way they learn native american history. and i think for a lot of americans and for students, when they come into my classroom, it's just like, okay, what happened in between? how is this still true given that we learned a history that didn't you know, if they learned anything, some of them learned absolutely no native american history at all. but but how did they make that fit with the myths of decline and disappearance that just aren't true? and then for native students, i think they have taught me so much by sitting in my classes and what i hope i can provide for them is, you know, they lumbee students, for example, they know infinitely more than i will ever know about being a 21st century lumbee. and most of them know more lumbee history than i do. but. but i hope i can put the numbers in this framework of of a long history of north america. and for them especially, they're a state recognized tribe, sometimes told that they aren't real indians. and i think learning particular what happened with people who lived on the coast hit by colonialism so early, long

before there was a united states. i talked to in my first answer, i talked about that. but centuries that it takes for colonialism to hit most of the continent in large numbers and with a lot of power, people in this part of the continent met colonialism very early and very hard. and the fact that they continue to be native nations today is even more a tribute to just, you know, generation after generation, telling kids, you know, this is who you are no matter what people around you say, yeah, it's kind of amazing how relatively unfamiliar the topography of american history is to so many. well-educated students and citizens more broadly. and i teach a kind of broad introductory survey of native american history and routinely have students tell me they never encountered some of the kind of seminal chapters of the course, or which are now chapters in the book. and we're both very familiar

with revolutionary eras, history, and i have students who, you know, are now in law school and, you know, doing very well in their lives and professionally to say things like, i was never aware that there was a french empire in north america, which was the largest colonial colony in north america before the treaty of paris of 1760. and the relationships between indigenous peoples, as kathleen knows, and many in the field have already established, were very different than the relationships between british and native peoples in eastern north america. and so i made a really heavy emphasis in the early chapters of the rediscovery of america to kind of foreground those relationships and also expose their centrality to the emerging kind of crisis of empire that the british themselves encountered after the decline of french hegemony and authority in the 1760s and the rise of indigenous revolutionaries or kind of militant leaders and

millennial leaders like pontiac and neal and the delaware prophets. so those are kind of familiar themes. and the study of native american history in early america. now, they weren't when i started graduate school many decades ago. so they've become evidence of this kind of larger rediscovery, but it has never really been disseminated effectively until kind of the larger national realm. and you really can't understand the american revolution. and outside of this prior indigenous and imperial context is simply impossible. and so it's not coincidental that some of the most kind of kind of remarkable conflicts between the british crown and their eventual settlers are occurring in these interior spaces. and so chapter five of my new book is on the revolution, and it's called the indigenous origins of the american revolution. it chronicles some of these kind of growing interior conflicts between indigenous peoples and british settlers. and it's not coincidental that those settlers will bring those grievances to the rest of the

colonies. and later on in the sixties and the seventies and the term savages will make its way into the declaration of independence, which is the culminating grievance in the declaration itself. so where do those ideas come from? what are those kind of ideologies? how have they been excluded? you know, these are real important historical questions that are essential to a kind of a civic understanding of this nation. and ultimately, as we're talking about earlier, we haven't been taught these subject matters. they've been kind of reduced or kind of ignored or stereotyped typically excised from consciousness and we've we are all familiar with those stereotypes and those representations in peter pan, which came out in 1953, some of the children tell one another that indians are cunning but not intelligent. you know, there are kind of so many kind of ubiquitous representations of the of the older era that we're still living through and trying to counteract. and ultimately, if we don't do that kind of interpretive and

analytical work, we're going to be left with empty forms and categories of analysis that ultimately won't solve or help us resolve longstanding conflicts in america. i think you know what? i really appreciated about both of your books was really the focus on the native american agency and the role that native tribes had played. actually, in so many important historical moments in this country. and then you say to build a new theory of american history will require recognizing that native peoples simultaneous slave determine colonial economies, settlements and politics and were shaped by them. and kathleen, you do a really wonderful job showing us the role of tribal peoples and how they played a role in trade and how they played a role in between our european visitors who had come in and had early encounters. tell us a little bit more about why it was so incredibly important to tell the story from

that standpoint and to make it something that hopefully when we tell american history from here on out, we start with that kind of viewpoint. yeah, okay. okay. i, i think it's humanized thing, right? i think, you know, one of the things i think we were part of ned and i have been part of in our early work and being trained in grad school and moving into training our own students is, is to turn the tables on perspective. and so for so long and i'm really on purpose this story of american history was told from one perspective and now i think in our classrooms and in our books, we're trying to tell it from multiple perspectives and those early americans, right. who met the first european explorers and the second or third european explorers or traders, you know, they're human beings like all human beings. and they understand these events that we might have heard about in other ways, like the coming of columbus day from their perspectives and their needs and

their histories and their conflict with one another. and so learning about people who who like work through those things from those perspectives, i think just immediate changes. how you see things. so in one of the chapters as i have the it's, it's about mohawk trade with the dutch at in new netherland and there are these letters now and i have come across documents like this all the time that just surprise you and flip the perspective for you and so dutch settlers wrote this petition to complain that mohawk had so much buying power because as they brought in furs and were able to trade those for lots of buying power that they bought up all the white flour in town. they bought all the cakes and the cookies and and everything that and the white bread that the dutch bakers made. and so these dutch european settlers wrote in this petition, all we get to eat is bread.

and then that just struck me as like that really gets at this. how important it is to understand the full set of perspective and the times in which europeans really don't know what's going on and, and have don't have the power in the place that they at the time and for generations forward will claim belongs to them and and should belong to them. it's just not true. right. and it helps, i think, to tell the stories in another direction. yeah. agency is a big theme now in the field to try to highlight the not just historic flow but in economic or social or political, but even intellectual kind of influence that indigenous peoples have had upon, and not just themselves obviously, but those around them. and i carry that theme throughout the 19th and into the 20th century to highlight the ways in which even things that we think of as kind of imposed upon native americans and or

brought to them by washington, have in fact often been either requested for or fought for by native americans. so and towards the end of the book, there's a chapter on early 20th century native american activists who were pressuring the federal government for sets of reforms to kind of end the sets of abuses that some of us may be familiar with. there's a i think there's an exhibition of carlisle indian photographs on the second floor of this facility. for example. and carlisle is the first of the many off reservation boarding schools established by the federal government under the auspices of richard henry pratt, that of in 1879, and that sought to remove indian children to sever, as one scholar has suggested, the effective bonds between native american children and their families. and so by removing children from their families, from from their communities and simultaneously trying to desegregate communal landholdings, the federal government attempted to assimilate american indians into the body politic of the republic and native americans fought those those intrusions as best

they could and eventually brought reforms to indian affairs during the new deal era. and so the laws that we think of as kind of consequential or most consequential in shaping native american 20th century politics essentially were in many ways envisioned by native activists who have been kind of written out of the history of 20th century america and a very few american indians ever appear in kind of contemporary visions of modern america. and so that's one of the themes of both of our books and of the field more broadly is to move past the sense of indigenous victimization and or disappearance, to kind of highlight not just the presence of the survival, but also the creative capacity act of the generative ideas and politics and reforms. and, you know, it's really kind of a remarkable story. and i kind of wish most of us had encountered the modern american indian sovereignty movement as a kind of subject of inquiry prior to maybe graduate

training or kind graduate training or kind of interested in reading on one's weekend or because these are really rude remarks or histories that teach us as a nation a kind of different vision of what constitutes rights or justice or power, even democracy. and so american indian history really offers us a kind of more robust and inclusive and and less familiar and a vision of what it means to be an american. yeah. thank you. you know, one of our former nih council members, dr. patricia limerick, often says to me how, as she has kind of learn more about the board in school era and some of this work that is coming out, like your work, how ironic it is. all the policies that were meant to destroy native cultures and native languages and native peoples in general have seemed to have done the exact opposite. and you both really kind of tie up your work. talking about kathleen, you talk about the renaissance of native

people, especially in the late 20th and early 21st century, that you kind of end with the surprising paradoxes of native resurgence. so you've talked a little bit about what might be driving that, but where do you see this really coming from and how do you see us moving that forward. hey, i just completed a long response, so. below to the 19th century abolitionist and feminist sarah grimm. people would say to her, you know, you're working for women's rights or working for black americans rights, but really, we've never seen any evidence that they're quite as capable, quite as smart as those white men are. and she said, well, take your foot off her necks and then you'll see what we can do. and in some ways, i feel like native nations have had odd decades in some cases centuries of people, powerful people in institutions trying to make them not exist. and now if, you know, maybe

right now that has gone away, that active effort to make native nations no longer nations has gone away with lots of things yet to be decided. but i think that's why we're starting to see or i should say, why we there means someone who's not a member of native nations. right. starting to see just the research agents of of public facing governance and culture in all of its way, you know, language revitalization, his historical preservation, all kinds of things that just, you know, were sort of, you know, limped along out of public view on purpose that now we're coming out and are so important internally to nations, but also are something that the rest of us can learn from outside of native nations. and i think, you know, just it's and i use the word government on

purpose because i think a lot of that, you know, tons happens in families and schools and but so much of it is because native nations are their own government. so one of the things i have my students do is think of a native nation and go to their tribal website and they're expecting to find history and things about the past. you can find that on one of the tabs, but mostly it's about how you govern. it's about child care and all. you know all this right? and it is such a good reminder that that's as a as important as lots of different things are in the arts and such so much of it, i think is happening because tribal governments are able to reemerge, find basis of of revenue, which governments have to have, and then support for their citizens in their individual and community and family ways of of just a wide variety of places in which they're, you know, doing what they want to do. yeah, i'm sure you. it's a remarkable moment,

actually. and i think from the academic perspective, if you can see this kind of transcend dance occurring in the field of american history, there is now something called the native american and indigenous studies association, or nesa, that many of us attend. this is becoming actually one of the growth fields within the academy over the last 20 years or so, publishers or interested conferences are attracting sometimes thousands of participants to. and it's not just the us based. and one of the great things about what we call indigenous studies is it's kind of capacity to speak across national borders or across even continental differences and so scholars from new zealand and australia and north america, europe, latin america are having a conversation about the place of indigenous peoples in the modern world. and many of us are noticing they're kind of commenting on or

writing about this recent resurgence of the un declaration and you have national apologies, you have there were slightly muted during the obama administration here in the united states, but there are kind of moments where you can really identify the kind of visible presence of indigenous consciousness kind of percolating or kind of sometimes even an exploding intent on national affairs. we had much of that in the united states. and, you know, when i was a very young child and don't remember much of it, but the indian american indian movement, two sets of activists, takeovers of places like alcatraz and wounded knee that sets up kind of monumental congressional legislation that was passed during the nixon, ford and carter administrations, the kind of seemingly kind of envisage, well, activism throughout the 1980s and was was kind of a darker time in indian country when very few people understood what indian affairs were kind of going through.

the federal government is getting radically kind of reduced in the early reagan administration. so the dependency on the federal government yielded a kind of interest in finding economic opportunities elsewhere here in this great kind of economic make studies of native america over the last couple of decades that have explored this kind of subject, which i am very proud to have kind of drawn on for the last chapter of my book. so gaming, for example, which comes in kind of a supreme court case in 87, followed by a congressional act in 88, gaming didn't just come out of nowhere, essentially. and so these ideas of government jurisdiction and kind of the private presence and growing power of tribes, the ability to start doing things outside of that kind of dependance on the federal government, these are all kind of historic subjects that help explain our kind of modern moment. and so we're kind of living through this kind of literary and cultural and one might even say media kind of renaissance, but it's kind of paralleling or kind of connected to a kind of larger political and economic

and kind of social revolution that has been occurring across indian country for the past two generations. well, i'm really enjoying this renaissance. let me say. it's been very fact. heavy on their shows that are native made and native characters. but, you know, i know you guys have both been doing quite a few book talks and you've been out presenting. have you had the opportunity to travel into tribal communities to present to tribal members? and if you have or haven't, either way, what have you found to be kind of the response from tribal communities to your work. well, i'm have a your my, my, my work, i think is a few months older than kathleen, but i would say that it's still pretty early to ask that kind of. but i know both of us work very closely with students and have collaborated in all sorts of kind of ways with and i like how you use a lot of oral history and your towards the end of your book and have all these nice like family inclusions that i

somehow didn't quite have this kind of narrative capacity or kind of kind of understanding to yield myself. but i'm generally very pleased to see tribal community members, you are less so tribal council, so to speak, working with me and in this and other regard. so i did have. a small group of students, including many tribal members who helped craft the maps in this book. for example. and so i spent a lot of time in emphasizing the kind of heterogeneity and diversity. of indigenous america through visual cartography and had a set of maps made that highlight in the contiguous united states. all the federally and state recognized tribes. and so you can find that in the in pages of the book. and really, i think communicates one of the arguments and lessons of the project as a whole, that

there are still tribes, you know, all across the united states within, you know, often, you know, 50 mile radius of most large urban centers who maintain governments, who are, you know, who have citizens, who have delegated budgets in economies, who run hospitals or health care initiatives for their for their families and or a government. so that's kind of one of the emphases. and i found tribal members and community community representatives kind of responsive. i have to say that neither of these works are, you know, conclusive, like this is you know, we're just beginning that kind of retelling of america from a new perspective that's going to take a very long time. and so there is no kind of complete history of the lumbee in kathleen's book or of the navajo or lakota or the crow in mind. but they, you know, communities all kind of start making appearances and kind of convey this kind of sense that this is,

in fact, a kind of inner tribal rather than singular tribal subject matter. and so in my civil war chapter, for example, you learn a lot about the contest nation around certain forts in the west, where the shoshone and crow are fighting with the lakota, and they're all expected to show up in fort laramie in 1851 and negotiate a diplomatic accord together. together. and they're very reluctant to do so because their concerns are more with one another than with the federal government. and so that kind of intertribal diversity was is present now. and it was present 50 years ago, was present 20 years ago as president, thousand years ago. so, like, you know, this kind of diversity is essential if one wants to make sense of the subject, which i think we all and some level are all kind of aspiring to do. one has to begin by recognizing the diversity of this kind of subject matter and so this book, for me in some ways came out of conversations with with the tribes tribal preservation officer, because my first book,

my dissertation book, was on sort of early america, and we both come out of early american historiography and copper's feature largely in there. and i you're starting to learn from the past as they also used my book and got to i got to know some people there. but what he and other copies i just kept, they kept connecting me their history to the longer past and to the present in ways that i was. they didn't know to do. on my first book. i'm and and it really was over a decade or so of having those conversations that it slowly sort of sunk in to me that i wanted to tell a longer history and so i was able to sort of bring some of those things into my book, sort of the way that copper and other people that i talk about sort of connect. they're just an ancestors past as different as it might have been. you know, this is not in any way a story of of change and history, but that there is a

long history that connects that. and the very things that are going on today and the very understandings that happened today, that that's all part of a continuous history. and so, yeah, i like ned's book. mine is pretty new, and i'm waiting to hear sort of what some of the wider reception is. but i am i hope, you know, having it rooted in some of those conversations, as is evident. yeah, exactly. well, you know, for these are very informative books. i haven't seen them along. but you know what the the fun thing, they're long and you're like, oh, got to read all that about almost a quarter of both of your books are in notes and references. and so these are very well researched books that aren't over a couple of decades. we're talking about couple of centuries or more, you know, tell us a little bit or tell you know, the aspiring authors and researchers, students who might be in the audience. what was that process like? how did you start the research? how long did it take?

where were you going? what did you find surprising? what did you enjoy the most? yeah, it took a long time in my case, i think for both of us. but but i think, as neta said, several times here where there's this there has been this generational shift or there's been this shift for about a generation or two maybe in people writings, smaller scale books on particular subjects that really show native power and presence in all of these different eras. and so i you know, my book certainly wouldn't be possible without that couple of generations of scholarship. and so those footnotes are very full of secondary sources as well as primary sources like works that other historians have written and published and and so yeah, it was sort of building on that building on primary sources in a variety of way, primary sources being written sources, but also oral histories and an awful lot of other things. i'd say one thing that surprised me, i was writing in the things that happened a thousand years

ago. there aren't written documents for that. so i knew i would use archeology and i would use oral history. and one of the things that surprised me is how when i just started looking at specific places, i was looking at cahokia and which is in illinois, moundsville in alabama and and among the hug them in what's now arizona and the mexican state of sonora. and i was really surprised at how well the archeology and the oral histories spoke to each other, that the oral histories that have been maintained for a thousand years still say things about major changes that happened a thousand years ago. so there's a period of cities falling and across the continent, very different peoples today. some of their oral histories talk about about why those cities fell and why their ancestors created a new way of living on the land. and so i thought i would be sort of, you know, having to test, you know, the oral history tells us more here, but it doesn't, you know, say the same thing. the archeology does. but it it it that really surprised me how in some ways my

job was so easy because the oral history could just kind of lead me through the meaning of the archeology. i think it would really stun our audience if they heard that not only is this now become a very vibrant academic field of study, but it's one that has a roots so deeply entrenched in the kind of scholarly infrastructure of america more broadly. so you can't really like if you go through the national portrait gallery, you walk through the 19th century art section without encountering, you know, dozens of native american imagery through cowan and bierstadt and others who are profiled there, the entire discipline of american anthropology, you know, arose from the study of native peoples. and even in history, which has a slightly somewhat infamous standing in native american studies for having ignored the subject for so long.

you know, many of the most famous kind of american historians from the 19th century were, you know, deeply interested in problematic ways with native americans in the process of western american settlement. and so the kind of archeology of knowledge within native or within american history in many ways has native americans in its foundational spaces. one could look at literature as well, and so the kind of vast kind of constellation of american academic fields of humanistic inquiry, indians essentially have entered into in so many ways. and so there's a universe really of scholarly and kind of academic information to draw upon. you also have tribal, not just oral histories, but tribal and cultural preservation initiatives. and i was astonished having read amy little and trees great book, decolonizing museums, which i teach regularly.

i was astonished when i went back to it. one of the things i learned is that there are over 200 tribal, either cultural centers and or museums in north america and in connecticut, we have the largest as well as the oldest. so and that's something that i had. i not come to yale 15 years ago. i would not have ever really known about. and and so all across the country, there are literally 100 over 200, nearly 200 tribal cultural centers and or museums that offer this kind of new vision or kind of particularly rooted or kind of blended methodological kind of reinterpretation that shouldn't be exciting is from ivy league history departments or kind of leading academic institutions, which they still often still are. so it's very hard to find this information in many kind of well-known academic or campus communities, but it's there. so any of you wanting to learn about this subject. and so it's kind of remarkable

that we're kind of part of a generation that is finally now bringing overviews to a subject that is literally, you know, nearly two centuries old as a professional, right? you know, yeah, very true. so who are some of the scholars or authors or individuals who have you know, you have kind of look to in their work to guide what you've done? mm. i did mention amy who who's a great book on those museums. we know a lot of people in common, so i don't want to you go first, sucker figure because i could even talk about someone. kathleen stevens is okay. so for example, in the last 15 years, several of the most venerable academic institutions in the country have hired and tenured, which is an incredibly important thing in professional academia, hired in tenured native american history professors. this has happened at yale at i then at harvard and columbia and

sorry, so princeton, the princeton recently hired and tenured at one of you and cesar illustrious students named liz ellis or elizabeth ellis, who wrote a remarkable book on the colonial history of louisiana. it's called the the great power of small nations. remarkable. and it's a depth of research and that kind of suggestions and and this kind of major reorientation, i mean, it's not just a kind of history of the colonial era. it kind of critiques the kind of vision of southern history that faulkner and others kind of establish that, you know, knew about in in mystical indigenous presence that seemingly was always fading away or disappearing. but, you know, her research with, i think there five federally recognized tribes in louisiana. you know all kind of highlight this themes of survival and endurance and adaptability. and so they've been small nations essentially throughout the last half millennia, if not for millennia. so the kind of themes of her work kind of crystallize or

embody kind of this larger kind of academic transformation that many are doing. some of our earlier work would fall into a kind of field that i've sometimes called indians and empires, in which in the colonial era, it's so evident to establish and study and kind of identify how indigenous peoples were so central to the evolution of all the major imperial projects in north america and the spanish in the south. whereas to the french east, the dutch along the hudson, to the british and the chesapeake, the piedmont and and in new england, all of those colonial worlds would not have survived without indigenous peoples. it's simply, you know, they're the vast forms of laborers. they provided the vast frontiers of trade. they defended and or fought alongside the french case with french military officials, often against other indigenous peoples. you simply can't understand what used to be called early colonial america and these indigenous subjects. so there's a kind of universe, as i said earlier, of academic

studies that kind of are inspiring us to try to bring together in this kind of unwieldy, centuries long ways with this kind of new vision of america, right? yeah. i have a further reading section in the back that has lots of things everybody should read. i would just throw in, since we mentioned boarding schools, a couple of terrific books about really understanding boarding schools from the inside and in all their complexity by brenda child and amanda cobb greetham. and then since we're at the national book festival, i just sit in my bedside table is about to fall in on me at night with all the novels and poetry that i have there that i haven't even gotten to read. but just tremendous things going on in novels and poetry. my favorite poet at the moment is natalie death, who's just as amazing poet. but i'm not going to start listing because that'll get boring. well, you know, i think you've shared a lot about what's in the

book, how we can kind of reframe our thinking about history and the role of native people. so for the individuals who read your book and for our audience today, you know, what are you really hoping they walk away with either idea is or even more specifically, where do we go from here after we've been introduced to all of this work? i would hope in mine by you know, by looking at this millennium, people or to lessons people take away. one is the long, long history much more than a millennium, obviously, of of native nations on these continents. and then the second is just that word nation and so i think that takes me to third to the second part of your question that native nations have been polities for longer than we can even know, and they still are today. and as we move into the future that they are part of the the landscape of governance as well as just sort of the mosaic of

the american people right there, nations moving us forward. so if you look at the covid relief bill or the infrastructure bill, tribal nations are right there alongside counties and states and i think that is just a tremendous in the united a practical, real thing. but it's also a symbol of that as we move forward, tribal governments are going to be part of our answers. whatever are good or bad answers we get, they're going to be part of the answers to how to we how do we live together and how do we function as as one country that's also made out of many country and ultimately as you kind of conclude and as i kind of gesture that also in my ending, there is an imperiled. kind of challenge constantly across native america that's rooted in part out of non-native ignorance and that federal officials, supreme court justices, and so many other kind of a particularly a state leaders, have never been exposed often to these subjects. and they have recently, you know, we may all know that there

is a kind of rising not just tide of consciousness, but even kind of political standing of native peoples. first cabinet secretary, lieutenant governor of minnesota, who may become potentially governor. several congressional representatives over the last few years. this kind of rising tide is changing. that kind of level of regional, often ignorance or misunderstanding. but it's really incumbent upon all americans to try to reeducate ourselves, to kind of realize the limits of the kind of perceived paradigms of information or categories and analysis we've been given and embrace as a vision of our selves, essentially nationally, that includes this distinctiveness, because if this distinctiveness is conflated as a kind of singular or community of people, it loses its capacity to argue certain political dimensions. and i know you mentioned in the end your several recent supreme

court cases, one of which was a challenge to the indian child welfare act, one of the kind of signature congressional statues that kind of codify the indian self-determination or red power era. and so you really can't understand the modern indian sovereignty movement outside of these congressional laws that native peoples have been fighting for for decades, if not generations, and keeping indian children within their communities have been a longstanding concern for native peoples in terms of foster and adoptive and in removal practices. so that case came before the supreme court last summer, and it was and certain what that outcome was going to be. fortunately for indian country, the justices upheld the constitutionality of that law of electing questions, certain elements or concerns or tribes, essentially political communities or races and if the races can, they essentially legislate or can the federal government legislate certain protections for them against

other people? and so that's the challenge. 14th amendment challenge that has been brought to numerous initiatives designed to protect sovereign native nations. so this is a conversation that we as a nation have never really had, but it's reaching a point where we can start beginning we can start beginning to highlight this. and i would give you a long, boring lecture if you wanted on how the constitution emerged out of this imperial crisis. of the seven aftermath, the seven years war, and how the constitution holds within it a certain protection of the federal government, the supremacy over indian affairs is rooted in article one section. susan and so that's the beginning of what we would call federal indian law and policy, which is a big theme throughout the second half of this book. so i've been teaching this for some time. so i can kind of draw upon that if needed. but i don't have the time to. well, we think you that was very helpful because that leads me to my last question and then we'll open it up to the audience for a couple of questions. so, ned, you know, you write in your introduction our history

must reckon with the fact that indigenous peoples, african-americans and millions of other nonwhite citizens have not enjoyed the self-evident truths of a quality life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness proclaimed at the nation's founding as inalienable rights belonging to all. so, given both of you, your work that you've just done, and maybe you've already answered this question in a way you know, how do you think how would you like to see us commemorate the 250th and what can we what can be done in light of the work that you've done and how you've informed us? oh. i remember the bicentennial. yeah. when i was about this big and, you know, the coins changed the statue of liberty and it all like news hour shows for a year, and there was all this kind of even like apollo creed was dancing then, you know, i'm an uncle sam. i've, you know, all these kind

of icons of of a national celebration, which at the time didn't i didn't think of as exclusive or threatening in certain ways, and that maybe i was being naive and i was just too young and thinking about these things or i didn't have the language to approach it, which obviously i didn't. but i would hope that when we reached this point, we as a nation are not kind of prone to kind of polarized perspectives on the subject, but really informed ones and perhaps learning these subjects will help. lead to a kind of a more informed conversation rather than a kind of shortened one on ultimately the origins and expansion of our republic, which started with 13 former colonies and states and quickly spread across the continent. homeland home to the hundreds of

thousands and eventually millions of others that i was writing about there. thank you. mm yeah. so i remember the bison temple. i think, you know, for all of its shortcomings, it did it. i mean, yeah, maybe i'm misremembering cause i was so little, but i felt. i think it brought americans together in a certain way. and i think this one's going to be different. it's already different even from the top. the american 250 commission includes tribal governments, right there with other governments that are involved in the planning and i think i hope what it will do is, of course, it's not going to, but i hope it will bring all americans together to to this sort of wiser, more sophisticated hearted, but equally hopeful, i think, view of of a more complicated american past and present. and, you know, one of the more practical things is, yeah, at the time of the revolution, most of north america was indian

country. it's and and just to sort of connect that to today that so much of it actually still is would be one of the lessons i hope we sort of learn in the moment and then take forward into the future. thank you. excellent. we have a few minutes for audience questions. if anybody would like to come up. oh, we haven't already. oh, hi. sorry. i want to get in line first. thank you for speaking on the subject with grace and respect reading buffalo woman come singing by burke medicine eagle has enlightened me with a spiritual story of the white buffalo woman. i'm curious if you have heard of the white buffalo calf birth in yellowstone over the summer and what that could mean spiritually for mother earth, the native tribes that follow her story. and if that can usher in a shift in the use of indigenous knowledge to solve modern problems. sorry. okay. um, shelly, are you and maybe shelly can a panelist. i think that yes, i think that for all of us, that's a really

yes, for all of us, that is a really good presence show, things are shifting and we should be paying attention. >> president of the association. we are sore grateful -- [laughter] thank you for your work share with us how important libraries work in your research due to a lack of funding and support, we are at a critical time. ...

[applause] >> speaking to the choir here at this event, but, i mean, if the most visual wayis to see this importance, it just looked at the captions and all the illustrations in my book, library of congress is a full third of them. library of m congress makes high resolution images available on their website toon download on-demand and use as you want, as so many of our federal institutions do. and then the others are from unc library ores other libraries tht give permission for people to use these precious pieces of our past. native american history, things that have toey be uncovered but they are there. like, we couldn't