a trademark v for victory salute. no, it was another churchill icon with cigar in his left hand that offended some members of the english speaking union, the organization responsible for the sculpture. in the end, the v and the sigh zar won out. unveiled a year after his death in 1965, the figure seems even larger than its 9-foot dimensions would indicate. almost half a century on, winston churchill still manages to dominate his surroundings. >> by the way, i cannot hull that if mu fay father and ameri and my brother british instead the other way around, i might have got here on my own. >> this is american history tv on c-span 3 and tonight we'll be

live from milwaukee, wisconsin. in just a few minutes a gathering of 2,000 historians will be under with a i to hear about the history of beer and spirits in america. it is the keynote session at the annual meeting of the organization of american historians and national council on public history. while we're waiting for the program in milwaukee to begin, some news. charles colson, the special counsel to president nixon indicted in the watergate cover up and can later founded 9 non-profit prison fellowship died today. in 2007 and 2008 he sat down for extended oral history interviews. in this excerpt he recalls the day that president nixon resigned and a three-hour meeting between the two men soon after charles colson got out of prison. >> where were you the day that nixon resigned? >> in prison. >> how did you feel?

>> well, i was relieved that it was over. disappointed because i would have thought he would have taken his own troops with him if he was going to resign, pardon or commute the sentences, hopeful that probably jerry ford would do that. sad for nixon, personally. i really felt empathe ti c because i knew what an incredibly difficult thing it was for him to do to stand and look at people in shame and how hard that would be for a man that proud. >> did he ever talk to you about a pardon for you? >> nope. >> did you see him afterwards? >> oh, yeah.

the first week i was home from prison i got a call from him. i had said something negative about kissinger on television, barbara walters, and nixon calls me, like old times, and we just chatting away and he got one secretary of state, oh, we got to support him. i said you didn't like what i said on television. i think we should let henry -- he was nicely telling me to layoff of henry. i am sure henry called him. it got us into a good conversation and that's when he said to me you aren't going to go into this religious business, are you? if you would love help people in business would love to hire a guy like you. i said no, no, sometime i will come up and see you if you let me, maybe a sunday morning, and i said i will talk to you about it. i don't know what i am going to do yet. i did go up and spend three

hours with him on a sunday morning. deliberately told him on the phone i was coming out because i knew he liked sunday morning worship officers at the white house, and he wouldn't go to church now and in san clemente but i would conduct a church service for him in his office, and i got there and he had ph lebi ti s and my wife was in the waiting room and i figured i would be there half an hour. i was there three hours. i never got to talk about what i wanted to talk about. all he talked about was watergate. i said what did you go to prison for and i said disseminating derogatory information olzburg and he said i told you to do that. i said i know, that's what i went to prison for and story i have not told beyond any family but my wife is laughing because

i go to prison and spend seven months in prison and he doesn't know why i am there. he wasn't himself then either. he was really shot after he left office. i saw him again a few more times, not in the san clemente but when he came to new york, and saw him getting back on his feet, and always in a good relationship with him, and he was always very friendly to me, and i never really spent much time with him after maybe the first three or four years out of -- no, i was in new york for something, and i called him and he said come on over, so we spent an evening together, and that was maybe the early 80s, and i didn't see him much from then until i took and talked to him a few times. >> did you feel, were you -- when bud went back to see the president after he served his

time, he felt he should apologize to nixon because he felt that he had done something that hurt nixon. my sense to you is you didn't -- you felt that the blame could be shared. >> i didn't apologize to him because basically i was doing exactly what he told me to do. i didn't really think i was involved in watergate, and i had given him turns out henne ruth, the assistant prosecutor told me i was the only one that had done this, the one that gave him the right advice, get rid of the people that did this, hire a special investigator. technically, i left the conspiracy when i did but it didn't matter because i already pled guilty. i realized if he had taken my advice he might still be president. i didn't feel like i owed him an apology, no. >> did he disappoint you? >> you know, sure, of course. i also understood the man.

families disappoint one another sometimes but you're still family. >> thanks for spending time with us today. >> i enjoyed it. >> again, this is american history tv on c-span 3 and we're live in milwaukee, wisconsin, this evening in just a few minutes we'll begin a program about the history of beer and spirits in america and what it tells us about life in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. it is the subject of a keynote session at the annual meeting of the organization of american historians and national council on public history. historians ed ayers, peter onuf and brian ballow host the story with the american history guys and tonight they'll present the show for the audience of historians in milwaukee and then they will take some of their questions. while we wait for the program to get under way, you're watching american history tv on c-span 3, again, and every week we take

you to historic sites, museums, and archives to see artifacts that help tell the american story. a brief look now at former president woodrow wilson's wine cellular. after serving two terms he moved his sclekz from the white house it his new washington home near embassy row in march of 1921 at the height of prohibition. >> coming downstairs we continue to the servant's part of the house, very functional metal stairway, had the best communication from the servant's quarters on the fourth floor all the way down to a wine cellar in the basement. this is a great treat for your viewers to be able to see, a president's wine cellar, and indeed a president's wine cellar during the prohibition years. the 20s were roaring when

woodrow wilson lived here, and the other great historical note is that you could own liquor. you could have and possess spirits. you couldn't sell or trade spirits, and so wilson was able to move the contents of his cellar from the white house, the treasury agents came in and inventoried the contents of wilson's wine cellar and transported it here just after they moved in. we have one bottle, actually it is whiskey and it says there beneath the dust for me disnatural purposes only. there were some exceptions to prohibition. some great bottles of french wine, obrion going back into the '20s and some of the items certainly remain in the cellar and a vintage from 1949 that

edith probably enjoyed in her time in the house as well. we associate woodrow wilson with prohibition but as a constitutional amendment wilson really played no large role in its promotion and in fact wilson actually vetoed the act. it passed over his veto and the volsted act is what led to how the amendment would be enforced and so wilson said there was no prohibition, there was no temperance in the prohibition amendment. he was certainly in favor of temperance, but not a strict prohibition. >> and we return back live to milwaukee, wisconsin, where our history tv program on the history of beer and spirits in america is just getting under way.

a lot of coverage here on c-span 3. >> we have been working at the invitation of our two presidents, ast lis kessler harris and marty blat, and can each five or six years ago i think after this meeting we'll try to meet more often because it has been such a rick collaboration, our two organizations meet together to share ideas and to try to improve our practices of conveying america's history in all of its rich diversity and interpretive challenges and try to convey that to multiple audiences including and this week especially public audien s audiences. alice and marty really wanted to have a truly joint conference so they urged the program committee to try to mix up panels wherever we could and to work together to include practitioner voices, sometimes activist voices, to get a diversity of perspectives around every table where we could and to try to provide also

a rich array of tours and site visits to milwaukee neighborhoods and institutions and we hope that you will agree it has been a really exciting weekend and that it has worked well. if it has, much of the credit goes to the program committee members and the local resources committee members and so we just want to offer a big shout out and thanks to shows who worked so hard to bring this program together. you can wave if you're out there so people can give you a round of applause. above all we would like to thank amy stark and kari dowdy for their heroic work to pull this together and so well and make it such a success. people have been coming up all weekend and talking about how wonderful it has been and how well things worked out and they worked extremely hard to make this happen. are they here? i think i see amy over there. thank you so much.

the oah and the ncph are particularly lucky to be collaborating this year when our conference theme, frontiers of capitalism and democracy speak so directly to the central challenges and questions of our time and our public life. over the last year as we're all very much aware, no state has raised the nation's consciousness about the relationship between capitalism and democracy and the tensions between capitalism and democracy in the way that wisconsin has, and we just want to say that we're truly honored to be meeting in a state where citizens take the responsibilities of self government so seriously and have been such active and vocal defenders of their understanding of democracy. we honor you. so on that note let me also add that we have more sessions still to come in case you're not tired

yet. we have three sessions tomorrow that are open to the public and we really invite anyone here who is interested in continuing the conversation to come along to those. we have a session at 10:30 on occupy wall street, the context and practice of occupy wall street which will have historians with people who have been involved in those events talking about what's happened there, what it means for our democracy, how we understand it in the context of social movement history, and they're going to dig into some of the particulars i think in an interesting way, too, and do we have any teachers here? wisconsin teachers? yay. okay. so we have two sessions also for teachers, specifically geared for teachers tomorrow, one on the teaching wisconsin 2011, the teaching challenge of wisconsin 2011 and then a second session on incorporating labor history into your curriculum and so we invite everyone to come to those, but we especially welcome teachers. really want to have a more

conversation with. with that, let me turn things over to my co-chair kathy france, associate professor of history and director of public policy history at american university and she is going to introduce our featured guest tonight. >> thank you. thanks, nancy, it was a pleasure to work with you and marty and alice and the program committee and the staff from both organizations. i don't know how you do this every year. it is really amazing to watch it come together from behind the scenes. also on behalf of the national council on public history i want to add my welcome to everyone. tonight nancy and i are so glad to see a big group come in. i know this is sort of saturday night. the brewers are in town. thank you for coming to this. i think we have a great topic for you tonight. first i want to add thoughts about the conference to nancy's. for those of us both members of oah and ncph. let me say what a thrill it is to bring two conferences together under one big tent.

as the program chairs we really decided as nancy said that we didn't want to make distinctions between the oah and the ncph sessions or panels because historians really engage in a wide variety of historical practices, and we hope that the historians in the room go the to know each other and there was cross pollination and knowledge sharing and that only happens when historians of different stripes share their various practices. let me say a few words about public history since that's the kind of performance we're going to see tonight. public history comes in many forms. as evidence to the great variety of sessions on this very, very packed program. at its best public history is really co-produced. it has the goal of stepping into the public square and joining the on going conversations about the past and what that past means in contemporary life. it asks not just why history matters but how it matters.

those conversations should address the complex, shared histories of political and economic lives of the american people but they can start somewhere more light hearted if no less provocative as demonstrated by our guest speakers tonight. that brings me to the main event. we are delighted to have the history guys in the house to do a live broadcast of their radio show back story. as we're planning the program we discussed many options for this keynote, but we kept returning to back story and how they effectively engage a wide public audience. they really created the public square in the ether and they have asked compelling questions and raised really relevant topics. as will you see tonight this is no one-way broadcast. it really encourages audience participation and we're going to get all of you participating at some point.

i wanted to just note, too, that i have been reading jason liviglio's work on radio and can i think back story does what he says is create intimate publics. it comes to the public in their cars and their homes and really addresses topics that they're interested in. if you haven't tuned in, let me give you a little background. it was launched in 2008 as a one-hour monthly radio broadcast on public radio. with the support of the virginia foundation for the humanities, it has aired on more than 130 stations in 39 states and get this, the pod casts have been downloaded over a million times. congratulations on that. the producers would like me to acknowledge the generous support for public programming like this by humanities councils nationwide and the important function that they perform and we have someone in the house,

jasmine allender representing the wisconsin humanities foundation so we should give them a round of applause quickly. thank you. and now with a lot of successes under their belt, back story is going to go weekly, may 11th, mark your calendars for that. like all public projects, it takes not only time but money to produce radio programming. they recently got a major production grant from the neh and that along with private foundation individual dollars and all sorts of other funding flows they are going to put this thing on every week which is an enormous, enormous task. if you like what you hear tonight, please tell your local public radio station to carry the broadcast on the air. that would help them tremendously. if you want to get involved and pitch a show, you can go to their website which is

backstory@virginia dot edu and there are all sorts of ways to participate in the program and get involved. there are handouts on your chairs if you look at that. now it is my pleasure to introduce the back story team, i am sure many of you know them by their day jobs, and their many publications which are too numerous to list here. i will give them short introductions. in chronological order. peter is the 18th century guy. he is an expert on the founding period and is the thomas jefferson foundation professor at university of iowa and ed ayers is the 19th century guy, and he is president of history at the university of richmond. brian boe log, the 20th century guy, is compton professor of history at the university of virginia, and chair of the national fellowship program at

the miller center's public affairs. so let me also acknowledge the work that goes on behind the scenes. we have executive producer andrew wyndham also here in the house, and the program's senior producer tony field, and i think they're running the boards here to make sure the sound gets up. let me give you a quick program for tonight so you know what's going to happen and in what order. the guys and the guests will talk for about 30 minutes, and talk, i guess, about beer. then we are going to ask all of you to step into the role of callers and ask questions of the show, and then we'll do wrap up and c-span is filming tonight, so you can watch this on c-span 3, historian's television, and let me give you the title of tonight's program is cheers and jeers, alcohol in america. thank you very much.

>> thank you. >> are you ready, guys? >> ready. >> plug it in. >> all right. >> hey, on the air, dude. >> major production support for back story was provided by the national endowment for the humanities. ♪ >> from the virginia foundation for the humanities in char lolgtsville, virginia, this is back story. ♪ ♪ >> it is october 8th, 1871.

we're in chicago and a fire is spreading. it is a hasorrible fire. nobody is exactly sure how it started, started in the west side of chicago but it spread incredibly quickly and before long the central district is aflame and by the end of two days, 300 people are dead and 100,000 people are left homeless. >> in the weeks following the great chicago fire, people from all over the country rallied to help the great city, business men in places like boston, new york, and cincinnati sent food and clothing and money and chicago's nearby neighbor to the north, the city of milwaukee, also pitches in and it sends something else, something that comes with that special milwaukee flavor. ♪

♪ >> the beer that made milwaukee famous simply because it taste so good. >> that ad in case it is not clear to you is not from 1871. it is from 90 years later. >> my period. >> why are we playing this? well, it is because that tag you heard at the end of the jingle, the beer that made milwaukee famous, hard as it may be to believe, it wasn't because schlitz tasted so good. or at all. that's not what first made its hometown famous beyond its borders. it was because in the wake of the great fire joseph schlitz donated thousands of barrels of beer to chicago, all of chicago's breweries were wiped out in the fire. this was brilliant marketing, a

true loss leader. >> today on back story we're coming to you from the city that was made famous by schlitz, we're in milwaukee, at the 2012 annual meeting of the organization of american historians and the national council on public history. which in case you haven't noticed, guys, means we're surrounded by a lot of people who know more history than us. >> fortunately we're used to that. >> true. >> but not all in one place which is intimidating so hello, milwaukee. >> great to see you. >> hey, milwaukee. >> yay! >> all right. big surprise. our theme for today's show is, guess what, americans relationship with beer. and drinking in general. as we do in each week on our radio show, we'll be bouncing around through the centuries trying to see what a trance

historical approach to the subject like alcohol might reveal about other aspects of american life. as always, i, peter onuf will represent the 8th century. >> and i, will be toasting the 20th century. to kick things off, i want to go back to your period, peter, and just a few basic questions. we want to know who was drinking. i want to know what they were drinking and, hold on, i want to know mainly how much were they drinking? >> you should have asked who wasn't drinking. would have been a short show. we could have shut down right now. they're drinking everything. you might even say that this is the golden age, guys, the 18th century for alcohol in america. actually, it is not a very nice century to be honest, but if --

>> call it home. >> if you're into alcohol, you have all kinds. have you pear trees, paris coming from pear trees, apples, cider, home brew, small beer only 1%, you have to drink a lot to get wasted, and you have rum. you have various disstilled fruit drinks and basically you also have dirty water. i ask you as a sensible healthy american which way will you go? you will drink the chesapeake area, think of the tide water area, you died, and they did, and they deserved to and we're not going to get -- >> that's not endorsed by back story. >> more about the virginian at the time. >> it is ubiquitous. that's the first point to make. it is incorporated into the daily lives of all americans. it is not good to be totally wildly drunk and preachers will rail against that, but they

don't blame it on demon rum. that's ed's century, all mystical about it. if you choose to get drunk, it is, well, it used to be a free country. that's what we say about ourselves now. it is your choice. it is a question of will. this is not an addiction. it is not a disease, it is just your choice and of course there is enough social regulation and longstanding colonial areas that it can be reasonably orderly and, yeah, there is some disapproval but by in large i want to give you an example what my second favorite founding father said about alcohol in -- that would be benjamin franklin and his drinker's dictionary printed in 1737, and what franklin does, and this demonstrates how accepted drinking was because he lists more than 200 synonyms for being

drunk and we're going to give you a sample of that. we have a few very brave audience members who were doing a little drinking before the show, and so they're ready to go. >> that's how we got them, peter. >> they volunteered to do sampling of the beer and to give us a sample from franklin's dictionary. are you ready out there, volunteers? >> we're ready. >> go for it. >> he is afflicted. he is in his airs. he has been at barbados. his head is full of bees. >> he has been too free with the creature. he is fish i, foxed, muddles, footed, been to france. >> he is glad, globular, loose in the hits, clips the king's english and sees two moons. >> pigeon-i'd, gy