because how else do you explain it? most people were afraid of this thing and as a matter of fact, you might think we were all loving it, we love innovation, we're new york, we're americans, but actually this thing looked a little scary. the poor guy that had this building was not too happy. he couldn't rent it out or sell it. nobody wanted to be in the building. >> this weekend from cooper union, lectures in history, architectural historian barry lewis on new york city in the late 19th and early 20th century. later today at 6:00 and 10:00 eastern, part of american history, on c-span3. next saturday may 12th "american history tv" will be live from jamestown. the first permanent english settlement in the united states. the long-lost 1607 fort was rediscovered in 1994 by william kelso director of the

archaeology project. we'll meet senior curator bly straw who explains life in the colony while showing us some of the 1.5 million artifacts collected at the site. join us saturday may 12th beginning at 1:30 p.m. eastern. each week "american history tv's" "american artifacts" takes viewers behind the scenes at archives, museums, and historic sites. in 1215, a group of noblemen confronted the king of england demanding that their rights be recognized, written down and confirmed by royal seal. king john agreed, binding himself and his heirs to the magna carta or the great charter, granting fundamental legal rights to the noblemen, including trial by jury, habeas corpus and no taxation without representation. the 1297 version is still a law on the books in england and wales and that version was the first to apply these rights to all english free men.

the charter was later cited in the writings of some of the founding fathers as they sought the same political writes leading up to the american revolution. in 2007, co-founder of the carlyle group, philanthropist, david rubenstein, purchased for $between million one of only four original 1297 magna cartas and the only original copy in the united states. in 2009 mr. rubenstein permanently loaned the document to the national archives as a gift to the american people. it was taken off display in 2011 to undergo conservation treatment and to be placed in a new protective case. "american history tv" attended a press briefing for the unveiling of the newly encased magna carta. >> i'm david ferreiro, and i am

happy to welcome you here today to one of our conservation labs. for years the only copy of the magna carta has been out of sight, undergoing conservation treatment. we're showing you the result of our staff's painstaking work, displayed in a new encasement designed and fabricated by the national institute of standards and technology. the 700-year-old document looks better than ever. when the magna carta is back on public display beginning on february 17th, interactive displays will enhance the educational value of viewing the record. visitors will be able to read an annotated translation of the latin document and learn how the magna carta influenced america's founding charter, the declaration of independence, the constitution, and the bill of rights. the connection between the magna carta and freedom and the effects to secure liberty and law over the centuries have inspired a new gallery which will be the future home of the

magna carta. this new permanent exhibit will allow visitors to examine important records of our evolving ideas about who has rights and to see the links between those ideas and the forces that shape our lives today. the new gallery will be named in honor of david m. rubenstein to whom we are indebted three times over. first his decision to acquire the magna carta and make it accessible to the american people at the national archives, second for his tangible contributions to make the new display possible and to develop our new orientation and exhibit spaces, and third, most heartfelt, for his personal commitment to the preservation, access, and understanding of our documentary heritage. this past november, it is my honor to present david with the foundation's records of achievement award acknowledging not only the aid he's rendered this organization but his many contributions to the storehouses of our cultural history.

david's enthusiasm for using great historic records and his tools for advancing civic understanding is self-evident. and we have with us today lilja bundles, who is right here in front of us, who is the new head of the foundation of the national archives, welcome, lilja. now david. >> david, thank you very much. david ferreiro has done an extraordinary job as archivist of the united states and i want to thank him on behalf of all of our citizens for the job you're doing to help preserve the important documents of our country. when i first heard of the magna carta being for sale, i was surprised that it was for sale and i was surprised that the only copy in private hands, i was afraid it would probably leave the country, and although it wasn't drafted in this country or written here or an important document for hundreds of years because it was really drafted before our country came into existence, i thought it was important that it be kept in the

united states because it was as david said the inspiration for the declaration of the independence, the bill of rights and the constitution and so many other important principles that our country's founded on. so, i was fortunate to be able to get it and put it on permanent loan here, and i am very pleased that people from all over the world now have a chance to see it. it's encased in an encasement that will hopefully last at least another 800 years or so. we will be celebrating in three years the 800th anniversary of the original magna carta 1215 and there will be a lot of ceremonies in the united states and england for that and the archives will no doubt be involved in that as well. it's my privilege as an american to be able to give this back to the archives and let them preserve it as they have done and to let them display it as they're going to do, and i am very honored that they're willing to do so and they've done so with an extraordinary attention to detail and extraordinary love of this document.

so, i'm very pleased and honored to be here today. i want to thank david and all of your colleagues for doing such a wonderful job in making sure people know the magna carta's here and making sure it will be available for everybody to see. thank you. >> do the unveiling now. ready? >> okay. this is the hard part. >> very gently. i think a nuclear bomb would not be able to destroy this. >> please, please, please. it's now my pleasure to introduce kitty nicholson, and she is the deputy director of the conservation center, and she was the project manager for the magna carta conservation, and

she'll tell us a little bit about the process. thank you, kitty. >> thank you very much. the document conservation lab of the national archives was really honored and pleased to be asked to be involved in ensuring the long-term preservation of the 1297 rubenstein magna carta. in taking on this project, we were building on the expertise that we acquired in the recent treatment and encasement of the charters of freedom, and being able to apply it to the preservation of another great charter from an earlier era in english history. the project had separate lines of work that came together flawlessly. one was the conservation examination and treatment of this great document. another was the design and fabrication of this really remarkable state of the art encause encasement that be

filled with inert gas. and the third was the design and fabrication of the exhibit case to hold all of of this and protect it. and as i said, those strands have all come together just in the last week or so, and we're very, very happy and excited. the conservation goals for this project were to remove old repairs and old adhesives that were detracting from the document. this is a document on parchment and just parenthetically, parchment is a specially prepared and stretched animal skin. this is not paper. and it's from an era where parchment was the preferred support for very important documents, public laws and things of that nature. so it's totally understandable why it is on parchment and part of the reason it's come to you in such incredible condition. in our conservation work, two of the conservators carried out a careful examination of the parchment, the ink with which the text was written, the wax seal at the bottom and also look closely at the old repairs that were present and the old adhesives. based on that examination, they

wrote a treatment proposal, and they also arranged for very detailed photography of the front and reverse of the document. at that time we also carried out special photography using infrared and ultraviolet, which can sometimes magically, seemingly magically, reveal things the naked eye can't see. in this case the document when you get to see it closer, there are areas where some liquid dripped on it and you can't see the text there, what we found was that the ultraviolet photography revealed and captured that ink text that is now lost to the naked eye. so, we're very excited and pleased to be able to do that. the treatment itself began with a very careful removal of the old repairs and the old adhesives, which were causing contraction of the parchment. after those were removed, they repaired the small holes and

tears that existed, using a long fiber handmade paper, adhered with wheat starch paste and gelatin. and the fills that were made in areas where there was loss of the parchment were toned to match the surrounding parchment. when you look at it with the naked eye, actually it's a remarkable job and i have really great pride in my colleagues who did this work. sometimes colors don't read the same on the web and i think you'll see on the web, you can see where the fills were made but they're much less obtrusive. after all that work had been done, the parchment was carefully humidified to relax it and then it was dried between felt for many months. because once it's sealed in this encasement we want it to rest in a relaxed format and not contract or do anything to change. parchment's very responsive to humidity and we wanted it to be perfectly stable. all the materials that were used in this conservation treatment are stable and longlasting

materials, so we have every reason to believe 800 years from now they will still be in fabulous shape, just like the document itself, and it's incredible clear ink which if we could read medieval latin it would be perfectly legible. national archives conservatives wrote the requirements for this wonderful encasement as part of a memorandum of agreement with the national institute of standards and technology who became our partners in the discussing the design and the details of the design of this encasement, so it would both protect the document and look really fabulous on exhibit as it should. for more than a year, archives conservators, scientists and exhibit staff met with nist engineers and we talked to every possible detail to make sure it was just right. that led to the design of the encasement you see here today, and i'm pleased now to introduce

to you design engineer jay brandenburg. jay works for the national institute of standards and technology and he'll tell you about the nist side of this project. >> probably the biggest question i always get asked is how did nist get involved with such a project. we've had a tradition of working with some of the most important documents inside the beltway, basically preserving them for both the national archives and the library of congress. this encasement itself has some unique challenges. as you can see, the document comes out at you, so it's almost a three-dimensional image. coming at you. the floating document created a lot of design and manufacturing problems to us that we were able to overcome. the design of the encasement, i don't know if it will withstand a nuclear blast, but there are a

lot of inherent things that ten years ago would not have been in any encasement, you know, found around. we've made this to be able to take a lot of the expected environmental issues that could occur, even something as simple as changes in barometric pressure can have a large impact when you're trying to seal something and prevent oxygen degradation ruining the seals. another issue we had was, and you'll see this when it was on display, was the lighting to make an absorbing background when you can't see something. typically when we're machining surfaces, we try to make them as polished and reflective as possible and typical. in this we had to change our way of thinking basically to make it somewhat rustic and make it so that it did not reflect any light. the design process itself we started in the middle, at the

document. and our primary focus was on preserving the document and providing the best thing for the document. there's basically three large components -- or i should say four large components in this encasement and hundreds of little ones that you don't see. there's a frame on the outside. this started out as a three-inch, 300-pound block of aircraft aluminum that was machined down. the bottom what you see, the chamber of the other side, the back side of the chamber was created out of an 800-pound block of aluminum, all reduced down, which itself when you remove that much material creates a lot of stresses and making the machining process very iterative to get to it and maintain a very good sealing surface. the platform which is the custom machining that we mentioned. another difficulty was matching the feel on it and being able to suspend the seal so there's no

pressure as kitty had mentioned on the document. that was something until we could physically have it set in there, we had to do some modifications. and with all of our technology and all, it came down to a lot of hand grinding and hand polishing when it got to those specific details. and the fourth component is the glass itself. because of the lighting and the ability to display this, there's a lot of research that goes into the design of the glass material used to give the outer face that the public will see. and i'd like to thank some of our partners, solutia and some local companies, alexander metal finishing and american stripping for their participation in this process as we went from what we

did in-house to get some of the finishes that you see on the final project. and i think that's all i have. >> thank you. >> are there any questions? yes? >> we were here when you first delivered the magna carta, and you talked about your time on capitol hill as part of your basis for your interest in -- can you tell us that story again, please? >> i worked on capitol hill when i was very young, i was 25 years old. i was the chief counsel for the senate subcommittee on constitutional amendments and in that capacity i spent a fair amount of time thinking about and working on the constitution and some of the documents that led to it, so perhaps one of the inspirations for my being interested in these kind of things, and in recent years i bought some other documents that were early american historical documents i think are very important to the history of the country, but many of these documents all really are based on the magna carta and the principles in the magna carta.

so, i am very pleased that i was fortunate enough to be able to do this for the american people, and i hope many people come to watch it and look at it and learn about it. >> for people who are unfamiliar with the magna carta, could somebody please give us a magna carta 101? >> actually -- i'm sorry. >> i can do it. on june 15th in 1215, in runnymeade, they insisted on certain principles so that they would not feel like they were being taxed without representation in effect. king john agreed to with a seal the principles that the noblemen had asked him to agree to, and it include s hab jus corp russ.

punishment should be proportionate to the crime involved, and no taxation without representation, many principles like that. it was written in medieval latin. unfortunately one of the principles according to king john's view of it would result in his being excommunicated because the king of england then was really subordinate to the pope. the pope said this isn't a very good principle because the principle said that 25 noblemen could come together and overrule what the king wanted and if that were the case, maybe sometime somebody could overrule what the pope wanted. the pope said i don't like that, the king said i don't want to be excommunicated and several weeks after he actually attached his seal to it, he abrogated it. that resulted in a war. he died in the war. his 9-year-old son became the next king. regents basically came up with a new version of it, and that kept the peace for a while. when that king, king henry died, his son, king edward, became king. and he needed money to fight wars in france, he sought from

noblemen some more money. they asked him to agree to a new magna carta and he actually did so in 1297. this comes from 1297. the advantage of this one over the 1215 one, though, that's perhaps more famous in some respects -- this became the law of the land of england and is still the law of the land of england, so this actually became something that really set the trend for common law in england whereas the 1215 version was abrogated and while the 1215 version has many things in it has to in this version, this is the one that's really law of the land of england and that's why it's so important. does that -- >> well, that's very good. take it one step further and what of the magna carta is in our founding documents? >> well, in the -- our bill of rights we have in effect -- well, the whole government is based on no taxation without representation. representative government. we have the right to habeas corpus. we have punishment that is in proportion to the crime, trial

by jury, things like that, are the inspiration for our bill of rights. but if you read the early writings of hamilton and jefferson and adams and madison, many times they say, it's because of the magna carta that we're doing this. and remember, these people who were breaking away from england, they viewed themselves as englishmen and they said we don't want to break away from england. we are englishmen and we are entitled to the same rights of all englishmen and that includes the rights to the magna carta, and ultimately the parliament and the king said you are not entitled to the magna carta rights, you're different. that's what really led to the breakaway, the rights they thought they had as english member living in the colonies were not ones they wanted to give to people living in the colonies. it was the magna carta principles that made people feel they deserved certain rights and not having them, they should break away.

>> you come from baltimore, did you ever come down here on field trips? >> i did. >> do you think kids will see it and get an impression from it? >> i was brought here like everyone from the eighth grade is brought here in march or april of their eighth grade year. i was brought here. i was -- i did come to see the archives and other buildings in washington. and i don't know if in the recesses of my mind that was part of what was involved, but i'm very happy to be able to come back here now, but, yes, i did come here as a young boy. [ inaudible question ] -- backstop when things go wrong and -- >> there are people that have many more resources than i do and i'm sure the federal government have a lot more than what i have to give. but when i can find something that i am interested in and i think i can be helpful to, i'm

happy to do so, and one of the things i'm most proud of what i've done at the archives, the archives has really moved forward even more than it had been before in making sure that people can see these important documents and doing other things to make sure the national archives are accessible and it's one of the things i'm most pleased that i am involved with. >> beyond your generosity to the national archives, you just turned 62, i think. >> thank you. for reminding me. >> what happens after that? do you bequeath it to the archives or what will become of it? >> well, everybody in life has certain things that they like and i guess one of the things i like is buying these documents and owning them. and as an owner of them, i am responsible for the insurance on them. i'm responsible for the expense of the encasement and so forth. but you can't be buried with these documents as far as i know, so you can assume that the appropriate place will see these documents when i'm not on this earth.

>> is there any other questions? if not, if you all would like to come up and take photographs. remember, i'm sure you've been told before, no -- and then we'll take you up for a tour in the rotunda and you can actually learn more about the document there. >> what's your name? >> my name is marvin pinkert and i'm director of the national archives experience which is the name we give to the museum here. so, the encasement that you saw downstairs actually will slide into the case on my right. and that will be the home for the magna carta. this is where it was prior to the reencasement project. but what's really different is that we've created these interactive units that allow visitors for the first time not only to take a close look at the magna carta but also to be able to read it, since not many of

our visitors speak medieval latin. let me show you a little bit of what's on the unit. it is the tree of liberty running from the roots of the magna carta through the document itself, and this allows you to take a closer look at the document, see its detail, see things like the lost text. there's a section in the magna carta which appears to the naked eye to be white, but when we put it under ultraviolet light, we were able to reveal the text is still there in the document. as i mentioned, for the first time, you can read the document in english, in its entirety. you can also look at some highlights of the document. for example, the issue of rule of law. and here in the language of the document itself, in translation, no free man is to be taken or

imprisoned or deceased of free tenement, of his liberties, without lawful judgment of his peers. all the provision of the magna carta applied to noblemen and people of property. whereas the bill of rights was a document intended to cover a much larger swat of the population. we saw some examples of the magna carta on american life. the way it was used as an emblem of the rights of englishmen in our early history. here we have patriot engraved by paul revere holding magna carta. another example is john dickinson's "the patriotic american farmer" and his elbow rests on magna carta. but it also continues later in our history.

what you're looking at is franklin roosevelt's third inaugural address, and the detail here says the democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. it blazed anew in the middle ages. it was written in magna carta. so, as late as the onset of world war ii fdr is still referring back to the legacy of magna carta. so, we think that this new interactive device is going to give a lot more strength to the display of magna carta, allow our visitors to have a deeper understanding not of just why the document is important, but how it connects to our charters of freedom.

>> you can watch american artifacts and other "american history tv" programs any time by visiting our website, cspan.org/history. here with is the flatiron building going up in 1903. it's not the first and the tallest. we hear that all the time, but stop and think what is the technology. basically back in the 1890s when they were introduced, they were explained as a railroad bridge on its end. how else do you explain it? most people were afraid of this thing, and as a matter of fact, you might think we were all loving it, i mean, we love innovation, we're new york, we're americans, but this thing looked a little scary. the poor guy who had this building was not too happy. he couldn't rent it out. they couldn't sell it.

>> this weekend from cooper union, lectures in history, architectural historian barry lewis on new york city in the late 19th and early 20th century. later today at 6:00 and 10:00 eastern, part of american his 40ive to th40 ive history tv on c-span3. >> i seem to have earned a certain place where people will listen to me and i've always cared about the country, and "the greatest generation" writing that book gave me a kind of a platform that was completely unanticipated, so i thought i ought not to squander that. so, i ought to step up as a -- not just as a citizen and as a journalist but as a father and a husband and a grandfather and if i see these things, i ought to write about them and try to start this dialogue, which is what i'm trying to do with this book where we need to get to next