and doing routine paperwork when at 11:18 in the morning there was a thunderous explosion. you could feel all 505 feet and 8400 tons of destroyer quickly and violently thrust up and to the right. it's almost like we seemed to hang for a second in the air as this ship was dog this od three-dimensional twisting and flexing. we came back down, lights went out, seceiling tiles leapt up. i literally grabbed the nr side of my desk until the ship stopped moving. >> more sunday at 8:00 on c-span's q&a. >> up next, cornell university history professor mary beth norton discusses women's roles in colonial america. she argues that there were elite and influential women but that they're often overlooked by historians and the general public. professor norton also discusses

the salem witch trials of 1692 and her book on the subject "in the devil's snare." this 30-minute program took place at the organization of american historians meeting in milwauk milwaukee. >> american history tv is at the annual meeting of the organization of american historians, meeting in milwaukee. mary beth norton is a history professor with cornell university. a lot of your work focuses on -- a lot of your teaching focuses on pre-colonial and colonial women. you've written a lot about it. what interests you in this subject? >> well, for one thing, very few people really think about women in the colonial period very much. or if they do they think of them just as -- i don't know -- houseworkers, workers around the house. they don't think of their potential public roles. one of the things i'm very interested in, in the 17th century, is women who actually take prominent public roles in the colonies because there are some, and in the 18th century

i'm interested in -- i did a whole book on women in the revolution. i'm interested in the -- how women perceive their relationship to the public realm, how men see women in the public realm in the run-up to the revolution and during the revolution. >> what would be some of the early examples of women in the public realm prior to the revolution? >> prior to the revolution, one of the most interesting examples is a woman named margaret brent who was essentially the chief financial officer of the colony of maryland for 18 months in the 1640s. somebody that very few people know about, but when the governor died suddenly he named her the executor of his private estate, and he was the largest land holder in the colony or had control of the land of his brother, the proprietor, and the colony was in dire financial straits and there were some soldiers who needed to be paid. so they needed to pay off these soldiers so the legislature essentially designated her as

the financial officer, the official financial officer of the colony, so she would have access to the pry pry tore's estate to pay off the sailors. >> is that example rare? >> it is pretty rare. but what's interesting to me is there are a number of these high-status women in the 17th century who do take prominent roles because in the 17th century, status was actually more important than gender in determining people's public role. so that high-status people of either sex were to be deferred to by lower-status people of either sex. that also explains anne hitchen son who of course is an important religious leader who divides the massachusetts bay colony with her herrette cal ideas. but the reason people listened to her is she was one of the highest status women in the colony. her husband was one of the leaders of the colony, and so people deferred to her. and it wasn't just the attractiveness of her religious ideas. it was also the fact she was

high status who everybody knew she should listen to. so they listened to her and they liked what she had to say so she became a very, very prominent leader in the colony. >> what are some of the things commonly taught about women in the colonial period that you look at and say, no, you're getting it all wrong? >> well, i think it is the idea that all women are somehow subordinate to all men, as i just said, high status men and women really ruled the society. we have to rethink how we conceive of the roles of women in the colonial period because there are these high status women. for example, in my most recent book i have a chapter on lady frances barkley, the wife of the governor of virginia at the time of bacon's rebellion. when her husband died, she became one of the most important political leaders of the colony. she became the focal point of the opposition to his successor and shethis pawarted

him for about 18 months. he actually died early of disease. he was replaced by a virginian, in a temporary position, and that virginian somehow knew how to placate her and so she lost -- you know, she lost her power at that point. but the guy who replaced her husband was just so frustrated. he stept kept sending letters t england saying, she's thwarting me at every turn and nobody said this is not what she should be doing. >> you mentioned your most latest book, i read that this was the third in a series of books that you've written. >> yes. >> what's the purpose and the point of the series? >> well, the purpose and the point is actually the sort of thing we've been talking about, that is, the relationship of women to the public realm. it is the third that i wrote, but it's actually the middle of the trilogy.

i started off with a book on the women in the revolution called "liberty's daughters," and then i went back to the 17th century, the founding of the colonies, and wrote a book called "founding mothers and fathers." that's where i talk about margaret brent and ann hutchison. so i had the beginning and end of the story but i didn't have the middle of the story. the middle of the story is what this last volume is, separated. >> you've also written about the salem witch trials. >> i have. >> tell us a little bit more. >> well, i could go on and on forever. i think that my understanding of the salem witch trials was really changed once i realized in the course of my research that the absolutely crucial factor in explaining the salem witch trials was the concurrent indian war which very few people know anything about. but if you know that there is a major indian war going on that salem village and all of essex county, massachusetts, was

actually filled with refugees from the maine and new hampshire frontier, which is where the war was raging, and that a number of the afflicted people were among those refugees and that you can trace their biographies, as i did, and find out that they had traumatic experience as young people. one of the things that i argue is that we could today say, in modern terms, they seemed to have been suffered from post-traumatic stress. and if you pay attention to it, there are indians all the way through the salem records. people say they see the specter of the devil in the shape of an indian. people talk about having nightmares of indians. and actually a little-known fact is that there was a major indian attack within 20 miles of salem while the trials were going on. >> what year did the trials happen? >> 1692/1693. it went on for about 15 months

total. we talk about the salem witchcraft trials mostly through the vehicle of the special court that was established to try the witches, accused witches, and that special court sat in june through september of 1692. but even when that special court was dissolved in october, there were with still hundreds of people in jail, and they had to be tried or dealt with in some way. so the trials actually continue into 1693 in regular courts. everybody is acquitted but three people, and those people who are acquitted then are -- are not acquitted are pardoned later by the governor. so the crucial set off the trials is during 1692. >> would those special courts have been set up by the colonial government of massachusetts? >> set up by the governor, yes. he had the power to set up a special court, an he did. and he named a bunch of prominent men in massachusetts as the judges. none of them had legal training.

the only person who was a trained lawyer in the whole sequence was the first prosecutor. >> with all that's going on, you talk about the refugees from the frontiers and the indians and the attack, where does witchcraft come in as a practice? >> yeah. witchcraft is for people in the 17th century, the default explanation for something that they can't figure out an answer to. so, for example, this is a period before the scientific revolution. this is a period before anybody understands germs. this is a period before anyone understands animal diseases. so if a cow suddenly falls ill after it's really in great shape, it dies the next day and no one has an explanation for it, it would be an attempt by the person who owned the cow to say, what could have caused this? and oh, my goodness, last week i

had a fight with my neighbor when this cow got into her cornfield, and she said, you better watch out, and i think she bewitched my cow and my cow is now dead. and this would be done with the deaths of children or mysterious accidents. >> was this a thing that was unique to the colonies, or was this happening in the uk at the same time? >> no. it happened in england at the same time. it happened on the continent of europe. it's a very common prescientific revolution kind of way of thinking. and i came to the conclusion, as a result of my book, that many of the small villages of new england had someone that they thought was a witch, that stories had built up over the years about this person, you know, mysterious happenings after someone had a quarrel with this person or something like that. and so one of the things we see happening in 1692 is bits and pieces of information being pulled together. if you look at the trial records, you'll see people come in and testify about things that happened five years earlier, ten

years earlier, 20 years earlier. so you can see that suspicions in different areas built up, not just in salem village but throughout essex county, about particular individuals. so once that person is formally accused, then everybody comes in and says, yes, i've long thought this woman was a witch or this man was a witch. i've long known it and i'm so glad you're now bringing this person to justice. >> so there were men accused. >> yes. and in fact it's a little-known fact that five of the people hanged were men. five of the people. so there were 19 people hanged, 14 women and 5 men. >> let's go up to just before the revolutionary war. >> sure. >> when with you teach about that time period and into the revolution, what do you point out as the role of women leading up to the revolution? >> well, one of the most important roles comes in the immediate pre-revolutionary period when the revolutionary leaders are attempting to attack

the british. not physically but by consumer boycotts and then, as now, women were the shoppers. so they had to persuade the women not to buy british goods or not to drink tea. this was a really crucial thing because tea -- i talk about this in my new book -- is really important in socializing in the 18th century, and it's something that women control, tea parties something that women do, and they host men. they're in control of the situation. so when they decide to boycott tea in particular, they have to persuade women to do that. otherwise it won't work. so there are all kinds of essays in the newspapers about ladies, come to the aid of the cause, boycott tea. one woman, very funny, i read a letter from her, she said, all my friends are boycotting tea. we're now drinking coffee and it's ruining my stomach. i can't stand it. i have indigestion all the time.

so women trade recipes for local herbal tea. you know, how do you make tea substitutes for the tea imported from england? so actually in it also as a part of it is making homespun cloth, another way women are sort of brought into it and there are groups of women who hold spinning bees in public spaces, not so much that they're spinning that much yarn at that time but sort of as exemplar so they can persuade women to spin in the privacy of their own homes and weave with their own cloth. this is a way you get away from buying british goods. >> so for references to history, we have for men a lot of great men that leave memoirs, war records and things like that. what do you find are your best sources for, written sources, writing about women in the -- >> mostly correspondence because women did not, for the most part, keep diaries in this period. keeping a diary requires a very

high degree of literacy because it's kind of writing to yourself. and women didn't have access to paper, which was very scarce and expensive for the most part, and they didn't have leisure time. that's what a diary is. so in the 19th century you get a lot of women who leave diaries but in the 18th century and certainly not the 17th century, you just really don't have very many diaries. what you do have is correspondence, and they write to their husbands. they write to their siblings and so forth if they're far away. but it is hard sometimes to find this material for the colonial period. >> it's interesting, though. you point out they didn't have leisure time. >> no. >> so letter writing was an essential. >> it was essential if someone is a long ways away. if someone is not very far away or not gone for very long, they didn't write. so most of the surviving correspondence is by people who are separated for long periods of time. and that was actually a wonderful thing about working on women in the revolution, which i didn't realize when i started

it, because women and men are separated for long periods of time. the men are off in the army or in the continental congress and their wives are home. so they're writing letters to each other so things that would have been in conversations between husbands and wives get written down. and furthermore, it's very important for historians that these letters get saved because, oftentimes, families in the 19th century might come across old letters from the 18th century and say, oh, it's trash, i'll throw it out. but if it's from the revolution, you know, it's grandfather's letters from the great and glorious revolution to grandmother so we save these and then give them to a library. so i benefitted greatly from that. >> in general, how did you find the tone of the correspondence? was it stiff and formal, or were they very personal? >> some tremendous di -- some very stiff and formal, some husbands and wives who address each other in very formal terms, what we today would regard as very formal terms. but mostly very down to earth, a wife writing and saying, what do

i do about the back 40 this year? do i plant it in barley, in oats? can you make a decision? and if she didn't hear from him, then she would make the decision herself as to what to do. then sometimes he wouldn't be real happy about the decision she made and he would write back and be a little upset with letter and so fonch. some of the fun letters i found were women saying, i'm here, i know what's going on, you're not around so let me take over. >> sort of like a husband or wife might just say to somebody on a long business trip, you're not around to raise them. >> exactly. you're not here to raise the kids. and one of the really dramatic moments actually comes from something like that, which is in this period smallpox was, of course, the great killer, and as the armies moved around the countryside, it didn't matter whether it was the american or british army, they often carried smallpox with them. and smallpox inknock laigs carried with it the danger of death because they hadn't

figured out cow pox yet. they couldn't figure out you could be vaccinated with a nondeadly disease and survive easily. so to get knock lated against smallpox required you to be deliberately infected with this deadly disease. and so women would have to make the decision for themselves and their children when their husbands were away. and some of the most affecting letters that i read were from women saying, i don't know what to do. i have to decide. do i deliberately put my children at death's door and risk about a 5% chance that they will die from this disease deliberately? or do i leave them unprotected and maybe there's a 20% chance -- they don't know the percentages but that was about it -- they'll die if they take it, quote, in the natural way. it's a terrible decision and she had to make it without their husbands there. >> outside of the family structure, when you read these correspondences, what's your

sense of how women feel about their stature in society, their rights? do you see some of the early inklings of wanting equal stature, equal rights with men? >> very little of it. women tended in these -- one of the things that was interesting to me was how much women denigrated themselves in these letters. >> why would they do that? >> well, they would say, my little concerns or they would say, i'm really -- they would apologize for their handwriting, for one thing. because they knew they wfrnt as well educated as their husbands or brothers or fathers. they would apologize. abigail adams, for example, is always apologizing. she hardly went to school. she was very smart and tutored at home. she always had terrible punctuation, terrible capitalization and not good spelling so she would apologize a lot. other women apologized even more. they had reason to in effect because she didn't know the rules and didn't spell very well. but that was one of the things that got me into this new book because i wanted to know the origins of this thinking of women that was that -- because i

didn't see it in the 17th century but i vau saw it in the later 18th century, this deny i grace of themselves and this notion that they had very little role in the public. so that's what i was trying to investigate in this book that went between 1670 and 1750. >> abigail adams is a good example of a lot having been written about her correspondences with her children. >> right. and her husband. >> and her husband in reese end years. why is she such an important figure? >> for one thing, she wrote reams of letters. you know, partly because, for exactly what i've been talking about, abigail and john were separated for so long. so we have this huge amount of correspondence. then it was all saved. i mean, the addams family were great pack rats. they just saved everything for hundreds of years. so that's one reason why we have so much. we don't have it for thomas

jefferson. he burned his wife's letters. we don't have it for george washington. we have his public correspondence but after his death, martha burned his personal letters to her. and we don't have her letters. i mean, so one thing is that they saved everything and other people burned it. it's not that other letters didn't once exist. it's that they're it's that they're gone. >> as you continue to research and teach about this time period and write about it as well, what still interests you? what do you have to find still? what are you looking into that you haven't written about yet? >> i still am interested in examining more about this notion of public and private and how the ideas develop that there's this private realm that women belong to and they shouldn't be involved in the public realm. the idea, because women in the 18th century, even abigail adams when the revolution begins and they write about public events, they write in their letters this is beyond my sphere. i know i shouldn't be writing

about it, but it's so interesting i have to write about it or men say, women are doing something that's outside their sphere, outside their appropriate realm. again, that language didn't exist in the 17th century. so i got very interested in why it exists, how it comes to exist, and the history of pursug that. >> do you have any early inklings what are some of the causes of that? >> yeah, it comes from england. the idea originally develops in england at the turn of the 18th century. and it is then incorporated into american belief systems by people low very au counterwith what's going on in england. the educated people in america prided themselves on reading english publications and keeping up to date. some of the most important progenitors of this idea are addison, the famous essayist and steel and their series of essays

"the spectator" which gets published in book form which i discovered is the most advertised book in 18th country america after the bible advertised for sale. people just thought "the spectator" was the be all and end all and told everyone how they should behave and it said it was absurd for women to think about politics, absurd for women to think about public affairs, and if they did that, they would be neglecting their families. they would be creating sort of slovely households. one of my favorite lines actually comes from aid son. addison says i never knew a political woman to retain her beauty for more than one year. so i say this to my students and i think what does this mean? on the day 366 after a woman who's been active in politics, her beauty completely disappears? but he seriously argues that a woman who becomes engaged in

party rage as he calls it will destroy her beauty. therefore she has to stay out of the realm of politics. >> what do you think some of those early ideas about women and their opinions on politics have done to the view of women and politics today? >> i think we still see some of the results of it. we still don't have the 50% representation of women by any monies in congress or in state legislatures or anything. there's still this notion that women should be in the home taking care of children rather than in the public realm rather than making public policy, that public policy is somehow what man is to do. how many women have we had run for vice president? only two. >> mary beth norton from cornell university here at the organization of american historians, the annual meeting. thanks for joining us here on american history tv. >> glad to be here. >> you're watching american history tv. all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. for more information, follow us

on twitter @ c-span history. each week, american history tv's american artifacts takes viewers into archives, museums and historic sites around the country. the smithsonian national museum of african-american history and culture will open a new building on the national mall in 2015. we traveled with lonnie bunch, the museum's founding director to a storage site in a washington, d.c. suburb where he showed us some of the artifacts that will be on display in the new facility. >> right now, we're in the storage units of the national museum of african-american history and culture. in essence, this is the heart of the museum because what's behind me and what we'll see today are many of the objects that are going to be the soul of this museum. so this is an opportunity to sort of preview some of the material that the public will see when the museum opens its doors. this story of the

african-american experience is both a story of resiliency and achievement, but it's also a story of struggle. and one of the hard parts of exploring this history is that often, the people who were at the worst tenned to be other americans. so that makes it hard to interpret this because americans aren't used to beinging the bad guys. one of the things that's powerful is objects like this that convey the sort of strong anti-black sentiment. this is a ku klux klan banner from the 1920s. the four ks would be the knights of the ku klux klan. as you know, the clan began after the civil war, sort of goes underground and sort of bursts new as a result of the film the birth of a nation and the klan becomes not a southern phenomenon but a national fon na

in the 1930s. this kind of banner is the kind of thing that people would use to celebrate their investment and their participation in the ku klux klan. so these are the kind of things that we have to make sure we tell the painful stories, as well. and then i think that one of the things that is really interesting to me is to recognize that so much of what shapes a community is work. and so we wanted to make sure that we found things that would give people an understanding of the way black america worked. and one of the most important stories often a story that's not clearly understood, is the story of the pullman porter. this is a wonderful hat and in some ways, we've come to a point where pull man porters were seen maybe in a stereotypical way as people who only served who actually worked on the railroad to make sort of you know, the travel of the elite white community comfortable.

but the pull man porters played even a more important role. they were in some ways the communicate indicative heart of the african-american community. they began to bring to different regions of the country an understanding of what was going on in the south, what was going on in california, and they became one of the earliest black unions so they were very successful in the early 20th century in unionizing and sort of establishing a pattern that many african-american entities and businesses would follow in the future. so for us, the pull man porter is both a story of work, it's a story of the limits of what people were able to do because they were african-american, but it's also a story of how people transcended the limits of their job and created a way to help the entire community. and then in some ways, the whole notion of struggling against racism battling segregation is really at the heart of trying to

understand this story. these two artifacts that we're about to look at speak volumes about segregation. on the one hand, we have what was something that was ubiquitous throughout the 20th century which were colored drinking fountains, things that were sort of insured that the separation of the races were enforced. and as we know, that segregation was the law of the land throughout part of the 19th century and all the 20th century and so colored theaters, colored hotels, colored drinking fountains were part of the way america lived. and what's so fascinating is they're hard to find now. but what really moves me in addition to things like the colored drinking fountain is really looking at the depths one went to segregate america and one of the things that is so powerful is this lally kemp

which was a charity hospital in independence this louisiana. what i love about this is this tells you clearly that race matters. when you look at the schedule of actual hospital services. but on monday, the colored could go to the gynecologist. but on tuesday, that it was whites who could go for pediatrics or internal medicine. and on wednesday, whites went to their gynecologists or had the dental services. so the notion that we were so rigidly segregated that hours of the day were determined based on the color of your skinny think this is really one of the most powerful objects we've collected. this was an object that is not 100 years old. this is an object that really was sort of used from the sort of mid-1950s until medicare came