thursday night at 8:00 eastern, the iowa fourth district of it between u.s. representative stephen king and democrat jim mowrer. >> c-span's money 15 students can competition is underway. for middle andn high school students will award 150 prizes totaling $100,000. create a 5-7-minute documentary. videos need to include c-span programming, showed varying points of view, and must be submitted by january 20, 2015. go to studentcam.org for more information. get started today. >> american history tv traveled to the library of congress's cody center and washington,

d.c., which was established in the year 2000. the center welcomes over $100 every year to pursue their research interests. up next, we speak with one of their 2014 fellows. >> joining us on american history tv is kevin kim, a senior lecturer in history at vanderbilt. what can you tell us about the book you are writing? -- it is mainly a political history of the cold war from the perspective of henry wallace and herbert hoover whose working title is "worlds unseen." figuresy uses these two as vehicles for exploring what the cold war, how it felt, how it was experienced, how it was thought about as a vibrant phenomenon. it starts focusing on these two figures, their biographies, what made them tick, their

upbringing. at the heart of it, it focuses on their experiences in world war ii, because it is a pivotal event for how both men saw the coming, and then the cold war, focusing from its inception in late world war ii up until vietnam, which is about when both men are in their later years and pass away. unseen" meanrlds in the context of the cold war? >> it has a couple different meanings. the broadest meaning is that ,oth men did stand for things for worlds that literally didn't come to pass. that aspect is true. they both envisioned and fought for until their last dying breaths visions they hoped would

come to pass as far as america's role in the world. , that is the biggest sense, but there are other meanings for it. people even today are not fully aware of the extent to which these men fought for these visions. i think it was very well covered in the literature, a lot of influential temperature -- interpretations, but really the activities,of their how long and how broad it extended politically, isn't fully known. even at the time, what they did wasn't fully known. cia, foreign governments, the u.s. government, what people did when policy wasforeign

something private. a lot of it was controversial. a lot of it involved interaction with other people, both in the u.s. and outside the u.s., who couldn't see the light of day at the time. you only saw glimpses. i try to marry what we know behind the scenes with what we saw visibly. >> tell us about herbert hoover and henry wallace. who are they, and why did you choose them? >> i don't know if i chose them or they chose me. the project started -- i had the same concerns i had about the cold war. the cold war was a very important topic. i was drawn to it because it was such a huge event. so many consequences for so many nations, not just the united states. the more i studied it, the more i felt it was something that was not just inevitable have -- an inevitable phenomenon. it was something people thought about and tried to influence.

the project started by looking at a cast of characters from left to right. as i was doing the research, the story and activities of what they were doing stood out as the most original, neglected, not surprisingly because they are the rightmost and left most of the center that i was looking at. they spoke to me and told me, there is enough here for me to talk about. herbert hoover, of course, we know him from his presidency. he is most associated with the great depression. how does he connect to the story of the cold war? >> that is a great question. as many people will remember, he was very much disgraced and the great depression. many people don't realize he was given a raw deal with how he

handled the depression and the political fallout. his connection to the cold war emerged because by the time he was president, he was very much a self made, wealthy man. he had a lot of means. i don't mean to say that he was a businessman and interested in the cold war for those reasons, but he cared about public affairs and remained active as a behind the scenes figure in the republican party. what thrust him into the limelight after many years of trying to emerge on his own was when harry truman became president as a result of fdr's death in april of 1945. truman, being the generous person he was, talked to hoover about advice about how to handle the tremendous responsibilities on truman's shoulders and asked .im for advice

that really is what put him into the cold war limelight. henry wallace, many may remember, was vice president under fdr in late world war ii. had he has been vice president and so truman, things might've been very different. instead, he was vice president and became secretary of commerce later. he was famous for being the most prominent u.s. politician in the early years of the cold war for standing up against what he saw and many saw was a wrongheaded, overly confrontational policy with the soviet union. has your research complicated your understanding of the views of those two men and how they relate to one another? >> absolutely. not just those two men, but many others. realize first that

their ideas were very much, as henry wallace, he was a man seeing himself as the legacy of the fdr and the new deal and the desire to extend those democratic policies of the world. that is what people recognize that the time. that is what scared a lot of people. that is what made a lot of people like hoover very skeptical. by doing the research, you get to see both figures as beyond the slogans. see them behind the scenes, marrying those slogans with concrete interventions they tried to create in civil rights or relations with china, you come out with much more nuanced appreciation for these two figures, both their contradictions, their deep flaws , but also their real sincerity and their power and their desire

to make things different. >> how long have you been at the center? >> i has been at the center all too short, and my time is coming to an end. i have been here since july. i've been researching for about a month and a half or two months. actually longer than that. i've been to the library of congress before. my work stems from my recognition early on that many important papers are here for me to look at. i'm still digging through them. i'm actually going back a little bit to look some more. >> can you tell us about the collections you've been looking through and how that differs from the ability to research and other archives? >> the library of congress is an exceptional collection. many people who couldn't place their papers in different places chosen for their papers here because they have papers of

national and international significance. over a dozent papers of prominent people, which doesn't sound like a lot, but each person left hundreds or thousands of boxes. i have learned how to navigate them. some of the papers i've been looking at recently which i found very interesting are whors of harold dickey's was secretary of interior under roosevelt as part of my quest to put hoover and wallace and more context. many people who were with them had similar trajectories across the new deal or will or two. the simple question i have is, what do they feel about wallace? the literature has a lot of liberals very sympathetic following wallace, but others are not. some were critical that he was too procommunist. of those closest to him really -- how do those

closest to him really negotiate that? it is seeing the way they reacted to same events. on hoover's side, i've been looking at john calvin laughlin who was the editor of a navy journal in d.c. i've seen his papers at the hoover institute in california. he was a crucial figure forgiving hoover a lot of inside information into the military thinking of washington during world war ii and the cold war. all i had were these letters. sure how -- i wasn't influential -- it seemed like maybe he was one of these obsessed editors. by coming here and digging into his papers, i saw he was an assistant secretary of state under theodore roosevelt.

he had a very close counsel with george marshall and many other important figures. he was a very active hoover supporter for many years. i got to see a deeper connection. >> did you arrive with a set of questions? >> yeah, i did. always, you have a set of questions, and you leave yourself open to what the research shows you. the broad arguments relate to hower and wallace, influential were they? those were the main questions i wanted to answer. i am getting that, as well as, what do other people reveal in terms of how other people saw them and how they did things? washlin, for example, relating a lot of his conversations with u.s. military officials with hoover, which you don't get just by looking at letters.

, he had ae of hickeys more contentious relationship. that shouldn't be too surprising because he was known to be an outspoken person. he had a certain fallout with wallace even before the progressive party tried to run for president against the cold war. all of those things help you situate how to critically about -- think about wallace and hoover. >> have you been led in any unexpected moments? >> one of the bigger moments of ofking through the papers the spouse of henry luce, the owner and publisher of "time life" -- she was an influential playwright and writer for "vanity fair" in the 1930's, i believe, and became steadily politicized. she is kind of known in most people's minds as a very liberal republican trying to reform the

republican party from its isolationist, hooverville depression image. indeed, she actually turns out to be much closer to herbert hoover than i expected. they are very apart on a lot of key issues, but over , i thinke of my study i have a closer grasp for why she ends up supporting barry goldwater as a presidential candidate in the 1960's. there is hope for american policy being more independent and assertive than it was as they perceived under democrats. >> how influential were wallace and hoover in the debates during the cold war period that you are looking at? >> it depends on which phase you are talking about. their influence was never as

large as they hoped. let's be quite honest. if you would take the entirety of the world they were trying to create, they both failed. if you look at different phases of the cold war, the influence is very interesting. it is something that needs to be studied more. if you consider things about my site on, how he became the leader of the chinese communist encouraged andry positive about wallace's ideas about china and his activities on behalf of china, and to the extent of telling u.s. representatives, we think his ideas are great, and we should engage those -- when you consider that someone like mao is noticing that and saying that in 1945, and that wallace's contacts with communist china are still quite strong into the late 1940's where people he knows from the progressive party

are still being introduced via wallace to different businessmen on herbert -- and hoover's side, when you realize he is still around, and barry goldwater is very close to hoover's death, a month before barry goldwater goes up for election -- to the extent that barry and herbert are very close in communication on herbert hoover's deathbed -- there is a lot there. the important story is not to try to raise up these two figures as heroes or icons. that is something i am really resisting. of that. intention what is more interesting is seeing the different phases and influences they exerted over a period of time with different

people that tells us much more about the complexity of america as a place where people really did debate these things very vibrantly. >> kevin kim, thank you for being on american history tv. >> monday night on "the communicators," technology and the 2014 campaign. >> historically, digital tools were thought of as the e-mail tools, and the online contributions, the website, but i think it has evolved. our company also offers tools that enable the shoe leather side of the campaign, the canvassing, the phone calling, the direct mail. i think you are seeing more marketing channels come online where there are personal online ads. you can do person addressable interactions through social networks. now there is a pretty wide swath of what you would call digital. >> we have moved from the

broadcast era. we are still at the tail end of what we've known from the early 1960's as broadcast television dominated. as we evolve into addressable television, it is moving into a relationship era. we have known that in the commercial sector that when you build a brand advocate and you have somebody advocating for and influencing their sphere of friends, how do we move from not only knowing what the messages, because we have gotten good with the politics of knowing with the right message is -- we have to do a better job of making sure we know who the right messenger is. >> monday night on "the communicators" on c-span2. >> each week, american artifacts takes you to museums and historic places. from the founding of the united states, george washington encouraged the creation of about 10 a garden in the nation's capital that would inspire and

educate citizens on plants and their uses. the vision was realized in 1820 when congress created the u.s. botanic garden on the capitol grounds. the most recent addition, the national guard and, features plants from the mid-atlantic, including a rose garden and regional garden. the curator bill mclaughlin and thed the history uses of some of the country's indigenous plants. myrtle got the name from early colonial use. there was no electricity back then. the wax would come up to the top of the pot. they would skin that off and use it to make candles. this is a source of light in our early colonial days. it is very aromatic. sometimes it is used as a seasoning ends on dishes -- seasoning in some dishes. there are lots of goldenrod native to the united states.

foliage this was actually made into an herbal tea. this has a little bit of history because after the revolution and the boston tea party, americans looked for native sources for herbal beverages and this was one of the favorites. they were copying the native americans. harsherd it to get down medicinal teas. this is the common hop tree. the little waferlike fruits but it makes are attractive enough, but they were used as a substitute for making homemade brews back in colonial times. it was used as a hops substitute. >> you can watch