line, the look on lee's face told that subordinate i'm in for it now. but lee has his own way of doing things. he looked around, and he saw the subordinate general's horse. a fine animal. and he complimented the general on his horse. the subordinate relaxed ever so slightly, and then lee made his point. you know what would make that horse look better? regular exercise. riding your lines. if you don't get the message, you are dumb as a box of rocks, and you probably do need to move on. despite such displays of kind firmness, lee also believed that strict discipline remained essential to an army's success, and he expected, even demanded that his officers instill it. "the greatest difficulty i find is in causing orders and regulations to be obeyed," lee wrote in early 1863. this didn't result from a spirit of disobedience, but simply ignorance of what to do. although he pushed his officers hard, he never felt satisfied

with his brigade and regimental commanders' efforts to stop straggling on the march, to prevent unauthorized absences or desertions, to support orders and against enemy non-combatants. even as late as august 1864 he bemoaned the great number of his officers who failed to enforce military standards because they didn't meet with popular favor. he struggled to find effective ways to make them do so even if it confined them to duties in their camps and debriefd them of pleasant visits, dinners, et cetera. he thought well of the professional efficiency of his artillery baa talians and officers but he worried about the leadership quality of the officers in his cavalry regiments. he encouraged the best efforts from his officers and exerted influence with davis and the secretary of war to promote and assign brigade and even regimental commanders who took this charge as seriously as he

did. thus lee was very much an officer's general, but the enduring image of morris robert as a soldier's general is impossible to ignore. unlike the armies of mercenaries, conscripts and disenfranchised soldiers who served in many of the european armies that most military theorists of lee's era wrote about, lee himself never forgot that he commanded an army of citizen soldiers. even though he opposed the practice on a professional level, he appreciated matters such as, for instance, a georgian had to be found to command a leaderless georgia brigade, and his reasoning included phrases such as "because it may be more agreeable to the men." a consideration that he wrote "carries much weight with me." he shared their hardships. he understood that positive reward had a place alongside

strict discipline. to reduce desertion rates he instituted a system of meritorious furloughs to encourage good service with a highly desirable reward. but he still supported execution of deserters if circumstances demanded it. he made time officially for soldiers to attend religious services. he also became at times the soldiers' advocate to address their needs large and small. given some of the large-scale matters i imagine that lee talked to davis about, it must have been an interesting moment when davis opened up a letter in the summer of 1864 that began with "my men need soap." well, it was an important thing that actually reveals much more than four simple words suggest. lee in his mind had made an important connection between the morale of the troops, self-respect of the troops, the basic -- taking care of the basic needs of the troops and

operational success. not every soldier of his era got that link. lee did. why is all of this so important? well, so often when historians make comparisons of the civil war's senior military leaders robert e. lee is cast as the tradition allist, the old-fashioned, perhaps almost even antique compared to grant, who's always the modern one. the one who's forward thinking, the one who represents a quite different age. i would suggest that perhaps we need to reconsider that idea a little bit more. with little guidance from the best military authorities of the era, robert e. lee quickly came to understand that the interrelatedness of the political, social, economic, diplomatic and military matters involved in war and he figured out how to advise his superiors frankly and practically on the most effective ways and not only

military ways to apply the limited resources available to achieving the confederacy's primary objective, independence. indeed, lee's embrace of all the elements of national power in its own way foreshadows the way in which we talk about national strategy and security policy at the war colleges today. we don't encourage our soldiers, our senior soldiers to think only in terms of a military option. we teach them to think across that broad spectrum. we do that today. lee was doing that 150 years ago. it suggests a breadth of strategic acumen far exceeding that expected of professional soldiers in his era, and that's not traditional. that's like very much like today. similarly in his dealings with subordinates, lee followed his own inclinations than the standards of his time. most military writers of lee's

time portrayed armies as machines in which individual soldiers existed as faceless cogs. but lee seldom forgot the essential humanity of the men and boys who followed him. lee understood and acted upon the lesson that many of his contemporaries learned slowly or did not learn at all. that a link existed between taking care of soldiers as individuals and the success of the army and larger strategic objectives they served. a glimpse at the recent headline suggests we still continue to deal with that today. as a general and a leader, robert e. lee actually exceeded the standards of his time in many different ways. he was more forward-looking than perhaps we ever really give him credit for, and there is still a great deal more we can learn from him if we only put him back in his proper historical context. thank you. [ applause ]

>> next week we'll be back at the virginia military institute for another session from this conference organized by the virginia civil war sesquicentennial commission. historians will discuss general ulysses s. grant and the army of the potomac. the civil war airs here every saturday at 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. and sundays at 11:00 a.m. eastern time. you're watching american history tv all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. this year, c-span's local content vehicles are traveling the country, exploring american history. next, a look at our recent visit to wichita, kansas. you're watching american history tv, all weekend every weekend on c-span 3.

>> decided to start on a saturday. the strategy we had was to scatter our seeding. we would show up individually one by one. we did not go as a group. because we went as paying customers. and i happened to be the first one to show up. i sat in the center of the large counter. and the waitress came over to me. and she said -- she took my order. what would you like to have? and i said, well, i was surprised, and i said i'll have a coke. and she brought the coke over to me. and i started drinking it. when peggy came in and she sat down and the waitress looked at peggy and then she looked at me and she came over to me and she said, you're not colored, are you, dear? and i said, yes, i am. and right away her attitude changed. she pulled away and she looked the other way. she no longer had any contact

with me or any of the others. we just sat there, and that was the beginning of the sit-in. >> the drugstore itself was a charn of drugstores nationally known, part of the rexall corporation. there was a number of them throughout kansas and the east coast. the theory being that if we could evoke change through the rexall corporation there would be a good chance that singl single-standing drugstores and even other business establishments would not have any reason to continue, you know, to resist or have segregated seating. >> well, dockham's drugstore was a major drugstore located in the center of wichita. it was a main place for people to go during the lunch hour, for teenagers to go for a hamburger and a coke. the policy of the store was that they did not serve colored, as

we were called at that time. so we wanted to get something to purchase to eat, we would have to take it out or stand at the end of the lunch counter, and then we were served in styrofoam containers. >> it was degrading, dehumanizing. you felt like something was wrong. but you learned to cope with it and to ignore it. and there were exceptions. on occasion you might have seen a black person even at dockum's, and there was another drugstore around here called woolsworth and one on the corner called grant's. it always stuck out like a sore thumb when i would come in those establishments. and across the street is where i used to work. on occasion as i say you might have seen a black person. but it was almost like an unwritten code, just don't take a habit of it and don't too many of you come at one time. that was the -- so it wouldn't be totally accurate to say that blacks were not served. they were but you couldn't count

on it. it wasn't systematic. >> this is 1958. the summer of 1958. most of us had graduated from high school, were either attending a university or preparing to attend a university or working locally. my mother was very involved in the naacp and she had civil rights attorneys coming by. one of them was franklin williams from the bay area in san francisco. and he came by, and he spoke to a group of us at our home. and the idea of sitting in was mentioned. after talking with my cousin, ron walters, he was the president of the youth chapter, and i was the vice president. we agreed that this is something we wanted to do and we wanted to carry it off ourselves. >> and when we heard this idea, we thought it was interesting. but there was a potential down side to that as well. this was the early part of the

1850s, up to about the mid part. we were aware of emmitt till, who was bludgeoned and mutilated in 1855. we were aware of the little rock nine, nine black youth who tried to integrate central high school inittle rock. we were aware of rosa parks' efforts to deseg grait public busing in montgomery, part of the montgomery bus boycott movement. and so we had to beware of the potential for some very negative dangerous things that could have happened. at the same time it certainly seemed like something that was socially just, socially righteous, and made sense. >> so we decided to use the non-violent approach that dr. martin luther king used here in the united states. so we did this role playing at

st. peter claver church, the basement of the respectry. we'd go there and sit on stools and we practiced how we would react if we were pushed or insulted in some sort of way or called out and we did this over and over until we felt comfortable in using the non-violent approach. >> this is the site of the dockum building where the dockum drugstore was located. obviously, it's under reconstruction right now. i'll just point out at least there is one structure that is still located here, and that's this row of elevators that always caught our attention. a lot of people would come in and use those elevators to go upstairs. i point that out because these would have been some of the patrons who would have used the drugstore. there was a revolving door about right here.

so most of us might have -- when we were involved in these sit-ins, actual sit-ins, would have come in this entrance, but we would have also, some come in that back entrance. so that it wouldn't necessarily appear that we were all coming in for the same purpose at the same time. that became evident after we started to take seats along the counters. that would have been on this back wall here. we came there for a purpose. that was to make a purchase. and to challenge a 50-year-old custom. we had drawn up some placards. and unfortunately, we don't have one of them left. but they probably would say "dockum's discriminates. we'd like to have service." something like that. and we would have them up and down the counter behind us so

they'd be at eye level. i was feeling uncomfortable about it. we took them down. but i went back behind the petition where the local manager was and i reinforced that we didn't come to cause trouble, we just would like to make a purchase, receive service like anyone else that comes in. and he went on to say something to the effect that he was not the owner, you know, he's just enforcing the policy of the store, but that he would be willing to arrange a meeting for our attorney, who was one of our mentors. talking about attorney chet lewis. and shortly thereafter i think attorney lewis called the store, made arrangements to have an interview with the owner of the dockum drugstore. and i'm not sure we ever came back to work after that. >> we were the first to start this. and the rexall stores all over our country integrated as a

result of what we did here in wichita. and we didn't know this at first, but eventually it came out that this is what their policy was. all over the nation rexall stores would not segregate to customers. >> there was one article in the white newspaper. and at some point there was an article in the black purp. for t newspaper. for the most part it wasn't talked about. it was almost as if the proponents and the antagonists were working together to keep it as quiet as possible but for different reasons. but in and of itself it was a small piece of a mosaic puzzle that was necessary -- it was important. i don't want to belittle it. but it took greensboro. it took oklahoma city. it took st. louis as well as wichita to finally get justice for all people. >> we didn't intend to be the first in anything.

we were simply trying to change things locally. this is our hometown. and as a result i think the fabric of wichita has changed for the better and is continuing to change for the better. it was just a great achievement for all of us. i am happy that i was a part of it. >> just because there may not have been the extremities of violence, the lack of human dignity is the lack of human dignity. if there's no progress at all, and that happens when good men and women choose to live with and tolerate the status quo, it's better to strive for change than to live with the present when we know that things could be better. this weekend, american history tv is featuring wichita, kansas. our local content vehicles recently visited wichita to learn about its rich history. learn more about wichita and

c-span's local content vehicles at cspan.org/localcontent. next month we'll feature jefferson city, missouri. you're watching american history tv, all weekend every weekend on c-span3. american history tv is at annual meeting of the organization of american historians in milwaukee. we are joined by mark fiege, who is a historian at colorado state university, and his new book is out, "the republic of nature." we'll talk a great deal about that. it's the topic of discussion here today at the annual meeting of the environment of american history. joining us and leading that discussion, moderating that discussion is william cronon who studies american environmental history and the history of the american west at university of wisconsin in madison. gentlemen, thanks for joining us. >> great to be here, thanks. >> thanks very much for having us. >> your book is just out, "the republic of nature."

what do you mean by that title? >> it's a book about the centrality of nature to american history but to events that we never think of as having much to do with nature. so the declaration of independence, for example, or the life of abraham lincoln. or the supreme court decision, brown v. board of education. these are the kind of mainstream events that would appear in a textbook that most people would think of when they think about american history but they usually don't think about in environmental history terms. so that's the origin of the title, "the republic of nature." >> let's start with the declaration of independence. give us an example how your book ties into surroundings of environment hift in that. >> sure. a way of trying to understand the american revolution as environmental history. as an event which arises from and then unfolds in relation to the landscape, the environment. what we call nature. but a really interesting part of that is that the revolution had at its center a fascinating

language of nature. a language about natural law and natural rights and how the american colonies and the experience of people there fit into that. >> how does natural law -- natural law also informs a lot of abraham lincoln's thinking. doesn't it? >> that's correct, yes. and that also became essential to the chapter on abraham lincoln, and how it figured in his politics. >> how does lincoln view the worlds in which he's growing up and tie this into natural law. how does lincoln take that and his ultimate achievement, the winning of the civil war, the emancipation proclamation, obviously. >> it's a really interesting thing, because lincoln actually talked a lot about nature. he used that word quite a bit. i think his understanding of nature informed his politics. he was a guy who experienced nature on a very personal, intimate level, on the level of

the landscape, in the work that he did, on the rivers, in the fields, et cetera. the way he thought about history generally was informed by an understanding of nature. this nature, then, this notion of nature also connected with his political life. so -- >> when you talk about natural law, i'm not sure everybody watching this program knows exactly what that phrase means. either for the revolution, the declaration, or for lincoln and the civil war what exactly do you mean by natural law? >> well, their idea was that humanity was part of nature, too, and there were certain innate in-born proclivity, impulses that were a part of people. part of being a human being, and they felt that a government had to respect those kinds of things. so at the time of the revolution a common saying was that self-preservation is the first law of nature. there is the idea that your need to feed yourself, to defend yourself, even on a kind of

reflexive level, this was the origin of one's natural right to control your labor and to control the things that you produced with that labor. >> so would you say that the term in the declaration "endowed by their creator," is that a viewpoint of a religious -- of a religious nature or is that a few voint of somebody who believes in natural law? >> i would say the latter. it's kind of a secularized version of nature. there's an equation of god with nature. but there is this idea that god, or whatever you want to call the physical creation, that out of that emerges humanity and humanity has these innate kinds of characteristics, these needs and impulses and so forth. >> professor cronon, you are an environmental historian. what does that mean? >> i would say environmental history is a relatively new kind of history that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, which tries to

see the role of non-human nature. plants, animals, diseases. the landscape. geophysical processes in american history, or in world history. it's not limited -- >> not just recent history but -- >> no. all the way back to the glaciers or however far you want to go back. i think the great insight of environmental history, and mark's book is really a fulfillment of this vision, is that we understand the world better, we understand the past better if we don't treat human beings in isolation from the rest of creation. from the rest of nature. we're in nature. our lives are dependent upon natural systems and our relationship with other organisms and many, many historical phenomena aren't fully explicable if you see us isolated from those relationships. >> you see histories in the past

as taught as a series of personalities and more of events rather than saying, including the environment, the topography, the climate? >> well, certainly if you were to talk about the history of history very broadly, you could say that the farther back you go the more the impulse is to see history in terms of the role of single individuals or great leaders. and abraham lincoln told the story of the civil war in terms of one person. but i would say over the last 100 years really there's been a greater and greater tendency among professional historians to think about groups of people, institutions, large processes. but often before environmental history non-human things were not much a part of that. so we could talk about the history of the supreme court or the history of the congress or the history of the standard oil company, but we wouldn't always situate them in their larger natural context. that's been the contribution of environmental historians. >> i'm struck on the east coast when you travel from, say,

virginia into west virginia, you can see how radically different the landscape is. you go into a mountainous area, the people are different there. the people who settled that area were different. and so the states were split off in the civil war. do you find a lot of that in american history in particular, where the landscape itself, the placement of cities, of -- of peoples really influences the political events that happen and what we view now as historical events? >> yeah. and i would say it's not in kind of a simplistic deterministic sense that people live in that landscape, therefore they behave or think in a certain way, people in that landscape over there are shaped in a kind of crude way by their environment. but certainly the ways that people use those particular environments for the kinds of agriculture production, for example, that they use those environments. those processes, those interactions do begin to shape

how they think and how they view sxlikts things like that. >> and what i'd add to that would be one of the early projects of environmental history as a field was to pursue the insight exactly you just offered, which is to situate important historical stories in their landscapes and look at people's relationship to place and region. so much of the early work of environmental history including my own was the history of what you would think of as environmental stuff. the history of farms, the dust bowl, the history of water supply to los angeles, the history of epidemic diseases among native peoples, all of which feel kind of environmental when you think about them. and what's really important about mark's book, what's so bold and ambitious about mark's book is that he chose really way more than he would have needed to to look at phenomena that we don't think of as environmental. the idea you would write an environmental history of brown

v. board of education, the great supreme court case that desegregated schools in the united states, that doesn't feel like an environmental topic at all yet mark does wonderful things with that topic. >> i'd love to hear the sort of condensed version of your take on brown v. board -- >> sure. and maybe before we go there i can add another point to what bill is saying, and that is one of the interesting innovations of environmental ifrt of late is to collapse the boundary of the human body and the environment in which it exists and through which it moves. even in the first book i wrote there's this sense of humanity and then they are in nature. but they are not necessarily of it in quite the same way. so various environmental historians have begun to collapse that difference and they've really pointed out very effectively that it's almost impossible to draw a clear distinct line between an organic, evolved body and then the kinds of things that it absorbs as it moves through the

landscape. so i think it's that collapse of that boundary that's been very interesting. and i tried to build on that in this book. so for example, if it's true, if people go through a rural landscape, the mississippi valley, for example, they are interacting with it, thinking about it. they're being affected by it as a disease environment. what does that mean for somebody like abraham lincoln? this is a guy who comes from that environment. he reshapes it through the labor that he performs and is in many ways shaped by that experience. so one of the questions i ask in that chapter is what's the connection between that and his politics. is it just that he received these ideas through conversation and writing and that is where he got his political ideas, or is there any way in which his actual physical experience through his body of the land reinforced certain ideas that he encountered in books and so forth? so that's kind of the really interesting -- and that does figure into the chapter on brown v. board of education. >> so tell us about the color

line. >> so to me the main point of that chapter is that the color line is -- >> what is the color line just -- >> the color line is the system of segregation that kept people separated along racial lines and of course almost always was an instrument for suppressing, containing, manipulating one group of people, you know, in relation to another. and so for me the color line is not a legal abstraction. it's not just a set of laws or rather abstract customary practices. as i see the color line it's an actual material practice grounded in how people organized the landscape and how different groups of people are situated in that landscape. and so that's the premise of the brown v. board of education chapter. i actually went to topeka, and it's very interesting, for example, when you look at the neighborhoods of african-americans in that city, most of these people were refugees from the american south after the civil war. migrants out of thso