walk out the door and right -- write, what you could kind of use but not attribute, and what you were told but could never even tell your wife. that was all gone. that does not exist today. the second great advantage to print people as opposed to roger is we had some leisure. i could take the whole day and think about what happened that day, and write it. people would be quite content picking up the paper the next day and finding out what happened. not only that, if something important happened, i could have another day to call other people and say this important thing happened and what do you think about it. i would have another day, maybe look at thery to big picture of what is going on with the bill. leisure is not the word because

we worked very hard. but we had a better sense of time. in my opinion, the public was better served by that kind of pace than it is today. haven't anyid we more time for questions. i wanted to point out that not only does the public depend on the reporting of people like roger mudd and andy glass, but historians are dependent upon it because this is the first rough draft of history. they were on the firing line writing the story as it happened. going back and reading some of the stories and your accounts of what was going on, you called the story correctly. as an historian, i am relieved to know i can use your materials to try to re-create a time when i was not here and able to see this. i want to thank you and everyone for coming. i want to thank the staff of the senate historical office, betty,

kate, mary. they have been the ones organizing things. i hope you have a chance to take a look at the illustrations here as well after the session. thank you all for coming today. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] >> you are watching american history tv all weekend on c-span3. to join the conversation, like us on facebook. >> ♪ >> in the look at hollywood directors that made films for the government during world war ii, we feature director william aler and "thunderbolt,"

documentary he made about a squadron of planes stationed in italy. to authort, we speak and film historian mark harris. >> a new book out, "five came back: a story of hollywood and the second world war," by mark harris. among the directors featured was william wyler. he became a u.s. citizen in 1928. he served as a major in the u.s. army air force between 1942 and 1945. together three documentaries including the 1947 film "thunderbolt." explain. had made a powerful documentary called "the memphis elle," the first major wartime documentary to show what it was like to fly missions in a bomber over france and occupy germany.

unlike many documentaries from the war, there was no restaging. wyler and his men trained to fly. they went over to europe are they flew five missions. they were shot at. all of that commitment led to this documentary which was made to a "you attention are there" experience. >> in a battle, one of the most important instruments is the interphone. >> there is four of them, 1:00 high. >> they are coming round. b-17 out of control at 3:00. come on, get out of the plane. bailout. >> that movie and the acclaim

led to whether wanting to make a different movie about another kind of ballmer called "thunderbolt." it was during the film are the less filming -- it was during the filming of extra footage that he wanted to get of the italian coastline that he experienced this personal tragedy, which is he got out of the plane and had gone deaf in the air. wyler was shooting in unpressurized cabins. it was freezing cold up in the air. the noise from the engine's was eardrum shattering. hearing.tely lost his literally overnight, his army service was over in this very unexpected way. "thunderbolt" of

became terribly important to him, even though by the time he was recovered enough to finish the movie the war was over and there was no use for this kind of propaganda film anymore about u.s. military might. that is why you have the anomaly "thunderbolt"e intended for wartime consumption not being shown until 1947. even then being barely seen. one wyler finished his friend and took it to washington and showed it to army brass, a general stood up after the screening and said, what is this movie for? because theswer timeline of world war ii had outraced him. picks tou have your give and receive affection.

in return for affection, c rations. as always and affairs of the heart, some have peculiar tastes. >> ♪ >> this is what the germans fear most. we don't blame them. this is the way rommel got it. he is not the only one. clobber a highway, you burn plenty of ammo. 800 rounds a minute. you have eight guns, 106 bullets a second. rockets. year, c-span is touring

cities across the country exploring american history. next, a look at our recent visit to st. louis missouri. you are watching american history tv all weekend on c-span3. >> we are in the museum of westward expansion, the main museum at jefferson national expansion memorial. of thes the story settlement of the american west jarring the 19th century. we are underground directly below the arch. originally, there were going to be surface buildings that would have housed museums and restaurant complexes and things like that. but the national park service which runs the site and the archtect both thought the would be better served to

standalone, to be unrivaled by anything else. so they decided to put everything underground, all the infrastructure to run the arch, all of the visitor facilities would be beneath the ground. that is how this museum came to beneathed where it is, the arch. in terms of what this museum has itoffer, our current museum, tells a capsule story of westward expansion during the 19th century. it is laid out with rings of time above our heads. concentric rings that are almost like ripples in a pond as though you have drop a stone into a pond and ripples emanate outward. that is the same thing that happens here starting with our statue of thomas jefferson and extending through the 19th century. the first time reading is 1800. the last is 1900.

the current museum will not be here much longer. in the next couple of years, we will be reconfiguring the museum so it will tell a slightly different story. right now our museum tells a tory that is pretty common telling a general overview of westward expansion in the western part of the united states. what we want to do in the new exhibits is focus more on st. louis' role specifically in westward expansion, so there will be a shift. whener shift will be that this museum was created in 1976, it was more telling the story of anglo white males going from the eastern part of the continent to the western part. in the way historians have looked at the western expansion era, it has been looked at in a different way.

we start to see deftly telling part of the story. we want to tell the story of other cultural groups who went into the west. native americans who were already living there, hispanic people who were already living there. especially the story of st. louis, which already had existed for 40 years by the time the louisiana purchase was made when thomas jefferson authorized louis and clark to go into the west. immediately after the louisiana purchase, lewis and clarke went on their famous journey of exploration out to the west coast. they opened a new era in american history where there was an idea the government would have explorers, mostly people in the military, go into the west and try to identify important things located in that area.

it was something the 18th century mind of thomas jefferson felt was important. it became a legacy so even after jefferson was long gone there were still groups of explorers officially going into the west. there was a whole section of the army, the topo graphical core with then the 1830's goal of trying to map and described the entire geographical area of what the united states considered to be its territory. the exploration cap going on through the 1870's and 1880's. there were still floors going out trying to quantify everything and qualify everything they were seeing. happen that needed to before people went out to settle or before some of the

exploitation of the west for commercial purposes to waste -- took place, i guess is an open question. but it was the way the orderly scientific mind of the 18th century looked at things. they felt this was the logical first step that we would send people out to explore. unfortunately, we don't have many items from these early explorers. none from lewis and clark. in our new museum, we hope to show a number of artifacts used on the stephen long expedition in 1819 and 1820, which we think are significant. we think visitors will enjoy seeing those. we have a #to the instruments of the type these explorers would have taken with them paid this would have been used to help map areas they were seeing. we have other instruments that would help them to find longitude, their place on the them at any time, and help

to draw the maps of where they were going, what they were seeing, that type of thing. that is what we mostly have, the scientific instruments that would have been used by the explorers. in addition to government exploration, a lot of the west was explored by people we call today mountain men. people who went into the west to fur inaver for hi -- particular to make money for themselves. a lot of them were involved in large for trading companies. they were employees, but they stayed in the mountains year-round. just by virtue of the fact you were trying to find areas where beaver were located, went into areas only native americans had seen before them. it just happened by virtue of this commercial enterprise that

these guys found probably more than the official voyages of exploration did that were funded by the government. this part of the museum tells the story of the overland pioneers up until the time when the transcontinental railroads started to be built. was ana of going west idea of trying to acquire free land, most of it in oregon. the finding of, gold in california opened up a new chapter in the rush for people to get to the west. the idea in the early days was to get from an area like missouri all the way to the west coast. not really interested in settling in between.

they had to find a way to get there. the ideal way was through south pass in wyoming. then the best conveyance to get them there. that turned out to be a wagon like the one you see over my shoulder. this type of wagon was usually billed as a farm wagon -- built as a farm wagon. wagon orok an existing bought one to go west in. it is smaller than a lot of people expect to see. a lot of people think of the famous conestoga wagons which are huge compared to this one. but they were too large to take over the terrain the people were , so it becamenter kind of a system or science going west. you can kind of romanticize the

trip because it was very dangerous. a lot of times in the hollywood movies, we see them circling the wagons and the indians coming to attack. very rarely if ever did that happen. alongwere very few deaths the trail that had anything to do with indians. the indians actually helped the pioneers more than hurting them. the dangers came embassies -- sease which- in di probably killed 10%, mostly cholera, things like drowning, accidental deaths a gunshot -- by gunshot, being run over by a wagon. that happened to a lot of kids climbing on the wagon. fell off and the wheels would roll over them. side to thisim mass migration. really unprecedented mass migration.

we are talking about over 300,000 people who packed up everything and literally went west as horace greeley urged people to do. in the new exhibit, we hope to take the covered wagon and tell the story more from the point of view of st. louis because there are a lot of places in the west that tell the story of the overland pioneers. there are visitors centers and things like that on the oregon trail for you to learn about that. we feel people coming here should know how the overlanders got ready for the trip. a lot of them came through st. louis and purchased anxiety, -- purchased things, wagon, oxen, food, and supplies. that is what we will dwell on more. we will still have the covered wagon on display. we will have a lot of the items they would take with them, real artifacts people can look at, and talk about how they would

pack a wagon and cram all these things in for this long journey they would take. by the 1850's, st. louis was the third busiest port in the united states. just outside where the arches today had hundreds of steamboats lined up side-by-side loading and unloading cargo and passengers, taking goods to all different parts of the country. so it is kind of an exciting part of the st. louis story and one of the reasons it was so central to the settlement of the west. the object behind me is a pilot's wheel. it is a real wheel, i guess you would call it a steering wheel, it was on a riverboat. a lot of people say it is so huge, how did you steer? the way we have it displayed is -- it gives a false impression

because the hub is where the floor was. only one half of the wheel stuck up above the level of the floor. it was still large. you were still grabbing onto the wheel high up, which would not see the entire wheel. most of it was below the deck. this recalls the days when mark twain was a riverboat pilot. he got his license here in st. louis to be a pilot on the mississippi river. 1870's, thes and river transportation based in st. louis started to decline because railroads were taking up so much of the slack of moving things from place to place. there were so many places in the american west that were only accessible by railroad. the rivers were too wild or went

in the wrong direction, so there were some areas that could still be supplied by river but a lot was sent by railroad after a certain time. st. louis is still a port today. largefference is it is a series of barges taken up and down the river rather than theyng with the riverboats used to have, the steam driven riverboats. instead of having the port where it was in front of the arch on today the port of st. louis stretches for 18 miles along the mississippi river on either side of the city center itself. so the port is kind of everywhere but where it was at the time and deals with a different type of boat and than wouldn barges have been dealt with in the 19th century. putdesigner of the museum

the museum together in the early 1970's. he found when he created the a layout -- the layout you see today with the time rings and telling a chronological story, he sort of painted himself into a story because, where does it end? it does not end anywhere. time keeps marching on. the western expansion era may have ended, the united states history keeps going on. that is one reason why at the back of the museum there are pictures of things like the moonwalk at atomic bomb going off, to show history did not stop. the main thing was what to do with the back wall. his wife came up with the solution to that problem, which was the thought they could commemorate the lewis and clark trail and the idea it is still there today. if you want to go out and paddle

or walk or drive the lewis and clark trail, you can still do that. they sent a photographer out along the trail to take images during the same seasons the explorers would have been there. that is what resulted in these floor to ceiling murals you see at the back of the museum. the lewis and clark trail and the west becomes the alpha and the omega. it is what the explorers first saw when they went out there, and it is also you can still see today. >> the author shares the tale of two mississippi's as we visit prospect hill in jackson. >> prospect hill was founded by isaac ross, a resolution very -- left revolution revolutionary war general from south carolina. when he realized he would die and the slaves would be sold or become common slaves, he wrote in his will that at the time of his daughter's death the

plantation would be sold and the money used to pave the way for those slaves to integrate to liberia where the freed slave colony had been established by the american colonization society. they call it repatriation. they talk about going back to africa. but you have to understand, most were americans. they had been here for 3, 4, 5 generations. it was not like they were just going home. they were going back to the continent their ancestors wasinally inhabited, but it quite a risk. it took their culture, with a new here, there. some of them took the bad aspects, too, slavery, but that was all they had known. they built houses like this one because after all, they were the ones that build this house.

there were a lot of greek revival houses the slaves built in mississippi and africa. across the river was louisiana in liberia, settled by free slaves in louisiana. there was a georgia, virginia, kentucky, maryland county. all of those people came from those states in the u.s. and literarytory life of jackson, mississippi, on c-span3. first military burial at arlington national cemetery took place 150 years ago on may 13, 1864. we visit the cemetery with the author of "on hallowed ground." we hear stories from his book about the final resting place for some 400,000 americans. >> we are in section 27 of arlington national cemetery. this is one of the oldest

sections of the military cemetery at arlington. it is where the story of arlington national cemetery begins. historyn has so much tied up in the civil war. cemetery wasof the 1864, reallyof before there was a cemetery. how did that happen? in 1864, the civil war have been going on for several years. washington was hospital city at that time. there were as many as 50,000 soldiers and sailors in the hospitals of washington, temporary hospitals set up all over town. those people started dying. they had to be buried. earlier in the war, a national cemeteries were established at

alexandria virginia, and at the old soldiers home in northwest washington. they were planned to accommodate all of those who died in the washington area hospitals. war wentened was the on much longer and was much luckier than anybody expected -- much bloodier than anybody expected. we soon filled up the graveyards and national cemeteries of alexandria and at the old soldiers home in washington and needed new burial space. the quartermaster's office of the union army looked across the river and found this place, arlington, and thought it would be a good place to begin burying people. arlington happened to be the home of robert e lee, the confederate general. not only was it a convenient place to begin military burials from the civil war, it was also

thought to be a matter of justice, maybe even vindication if you want to call it that. war, things were so desperate there was not any time for tombstones. they have headboards made out of time -- pine or walnut painted white with black lettering. those had to be maintained or they fell apart. in the years after the civil war as we began to clean up, we began to make sense of things. someone came up with a design in the 1870's for the white marble tombstones you see at arlington today. the uniform design. anyone who qualified for burial here qualified for one of these tombstones. the earliest stones were like

these you see here which have the name, company, state, and data burial -- date of burial in an incised shield. later, the later the design was simplified to include the name of the and n, the date of birth, the date of burial. that's the modern other ne you see in sections of the cemetery today. [ gun fire ] visit to the