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you have a front row seat to every minute, all beginning on monday, july 8 seen. -- july 18. fromxt, we will hear adrian harrison, discussing her , the a powerful mind self-education of george washington. she talks about the books he read and collected throughout his life and how the first commander in chief inspired her. the fred w smith library for the study of george washington at mount vernon hosted this hour-long program. host: good evening. i am the founding director of the national library for the city of george washington here at mount vernon. you are in the library and i

would like to welcome c-span here as well tonight. this is our forward evening book talk. evening book talk. we're thankful to be sponsored by the ford motor company. we like to see that. that is what we see right there. maintained and managed by the mount vernon ladies association since 1860. it was built before that by the washington family. it was expanded by none other than george washington in. of course, the association has maintained this property so that everyone can learn about the life and lessons of george washington. they've done this without taking any government money. they are a privately funded institution and it is part of the mission to help people everywhere learn about the principles of the founding.

the topic tonight is perfect for what we do. we are really excited to have this special presentation for you. please welcome adrienne harrison. she is a graduate of west point who later went on to earn her phd degrees from rutgers university. she has been an assistant professor at west point. she served as 12 years as a commissioned officer in the u.s. army including three combat tour is in iraq. she brings a certain amount of experience to this project. she will talk to you a little bit about how personal it is for her to explore the life of george washington in this way.

she is here tonight to talk about her great new book. she is doing exactly what we would like to do in mount vernon. not the person that is just a marble statue although we love the great icon of george washington. we want to recognize that he was a human who lived in the world. it was through his mind. we do have a chance to have questions from the audience. my colleague, the chief made a special effort tonight to bring out some of the items from his library

and you will see two tour it in the holy of holies. you will get a chance to get in there behind the scenes. it is a special evening and it is this an exciting one. everyone give a big hand. [applause] adrienne: good evening everyone. it is a privileged to be here i wasn't expecting that so thank you for having me and for allowing me to indulge you in one of the biggest things i have ever done. i just want to say by info of introduction, why i gave this talk.

i was on facebook and when i was on facebook, it was the same day where i received this invitation and saw a suggested ad pop up. like mark zuckerberg's minions are figuring out what you want to purchase on who you are and what your interests are. as it happens, there was an ad that popped up and have you never heard of it, it is a company that makes military themed clothes. it was this particular ad that got my attention. it had a picture on it of george washington crossing the delaware river.

underneath the screen printing it said one single phrase, get some. the tagline was what, a attention because it said, if you insult george washington in a dream you had better wake up. and apologize. total stud. it struck me when i saw this because this is why i wrote this book. we think of these swaggering g.i. joe type terms. this is how we think about it. he has ceased to be a regular person to us. he is the myth. he is the guy that is in a painting. he is at now to us, he is two dimensional and far removed so there has to be a way to make him a real person again.

for me, it was something that was intensely personal. i-8 interest in washington going back to my childhood. it was something that had stayed with me all the way up to when i was an undergraduate. i did my thesis on washington's tour of the south in 1791. it was something that i carried with me in the army. it hit me when i was a brand-new second lieutenant. i was 23 years old and there i was. all army stories start with the quote, there i was. i was in the 82nd airborne division on the first stage of operation iraqi freedom.

i have the lives of 27 soldiers in my hands as well as the soldiers we transported in the back of our trucks to the different missions we were assigned. i was in baghdad where we ended up after the invasion and it struck me after one mission that we had that after we got back, we had narrowly evaded an ambush. the traffic in washington dc does not compare to what you see over there. it was one of those experiences that you are drained afterwards. it hit me, how did washington do this? how did he experienced armed combat for the first time. here i am in the rack and my mind randomly goes back.

everyone needs a bit of a mental escape. the days and nights all started to blend together so you needed something that was going to get you through so you could face the next day. for me, it was reading. i had a steady stream of books sent to me. one of my old thesis advisors who i've actually spoken here as well. he sent me all the latest books on george washington so he kept his example. i was thinking about washington and how did he do it? although we were separated by more than two centuries and

vastly different circumstances, there were some similarities. i was a little bit older than he was when he let his first troops that he and i both had very limited or no professional experience at that point. when we were given the opportunity to lead and so fundamentally i thought our response must have been fundamentally the same in some level. then the comparison had to stop. reality comes back into play. i had the benefit of west point education behind me. i had been taught the fundamentals of how to lead people. i had extensive military training. i had all of that that could undergird my consequence. he was younger than me and has some fencing lessons.

that was it. no wonder his actual execution did not go well. let's just say that. after leading his troops bravely out into the wilderness, he picks the absolute worst on how you could put a fortification. worst place ever nothing but trees. that wasn't going to go well. he went well beyond the stress of his orders. he attacked a party of frenchmen and diplomats and soldiers and he started those seven years war. we were different in that regard

and then we had the first lesson that we had. he found himself in a position where he did not have the professional training to set up the fortification. he did not speak the language of his enemy. in this first firefight, he had no control when these four frenchmen who have been mortally wounded. when they descended on him, they were pleading for their lives in french. he lost control he vowed at that point that he was not going to make the same mistake again. he learned from the experience. i won't belabor it.

there was nothing about him but said future father of the nation. there was nothing about that. he was charged with leading these officers who also had no experience. he says something prophetic. having no opportunity to learn from example, let us read. he was exposed in the british army to the professional benefit of reading. you read to gain the background requisite knowledge to go out there and put it into execution. he didn't have the benefit of a formal education that he was going to go out there and do the best he could. and he expected his officers to do the same. that was something that stuck with me. that he was lucky as a leader. even though i had more of an

education was something that i took to heart. this question of how did he do it. how did he turn into this. the indispensable man. there is a part of the legacy of the steely eyed charger. there is a reason why we remember him that way. there is more to it than just that he was a tall guy who looks good in a uniform. i carried this question with me to graduate school. i got to go back to school and i was going to make my mark on the world. i said that i had an idea. for my dissertation. i want to write about how george washington fashioned himself. and he said, that's a terrible idea. [laughter]

there was a grain of truth in what he was saying. the challenge facing any washington historian is what else is there to say about this man? he is the most talked about in the world. you're going to go to a bookstore and find something on george washington there. i was told to go back to the drawing board and try again. i was undaunted and how i kept this idea. i was going to convince them that this was a viable product. i read a book that was focused on william drake. he was a political coal

operative who learned -- political operative who learned the art and science of being a political figure through reading. it was something about what he had argued. he said that reading was essentially something that is political and it is specific to time and places. we think about our own reading and that is pretty much true for all of us. our predilections, our beliefs inform how we receive the things that we read. somehow it will inform the way that you receive things. also, he put forth the idea that reading is useful and practical. i thought about a different book about washington. in that, i found an opportunity. he included an appended to his

book. this is something where he said that washington the reader was practical but not really all that bright. he is not that much of it intellectual. i'm sure if you are, he would argue that with me. that is the fun of being a historian, we debate rings. taking what sharp what said about reading being political and practical knowledge that you can apply to your civic task force in front of you. there was my opportunity for the dissertation. i wanted to look at washington

and how he did this self fashioning and presentations by looking at his reading. you will not find a whole lot of biographies that talk about it to any great extent. many of them tend to be dismissive of his reading efforts because he is not something that we see. we remember the guy on the charger and here is the books are under the table. it looks like he would rather not in this picture. that was my idea and i was able to sell it -- sell that to my advisor. the next question for me was, how you approach that? so what, what he do about it? i started with this 1799 inventory that was her hired by -- required by law when he passed away.

when he passed away, there were over 900 volumes and 1200 different works that were there. everything ranging from history to mass. political pamphlets and the like. 900 volumes, that is a lot. off that, what did he read? think about that, whether you have real bookshelves. we all have books on our shelves that we've never read it the book that some well-intentioned person gave you as a gift and you went thanks. i will treasure that, as you consign it to the shelf, never to be touched again. bearing that in mind about ourselves, it will tell you something about what you are.

my shelves are almost all history. i am a historian. that is what i enjoy so you will find almost all history and not a science fiction title on there. that is just me. it will tell you something about your priorities. mind are history because i am trying to make a living out of it. it is less than 1% anything else. if that's true, why would that be different for washington? what is on his shelf? what is not there is also telling. i have a lot of history, politics, military, agriculture and all the things washington did his live is what jumps off

the shelf at you. what is not there is literature. he had no time for that. maybe it wasn't all that interesting. there is information that can get from that. there are conclusions we can draw. how you get further? that is one of -- what i want to spend the rest my time talking about. i looked at the volumes and what do we know? we know that washington did not know any of language other than english. anything that was printed in a foreign language i excluded. for things like don quixote, that he had an english translation of, that is a good example.

he actually got a copy. maybe he did read them. english translations are a little bit different in that was easy. this is where it gets hard. washington did not talk about reading. he rarely recommended reading to other people. he made few literary allusions so how do we know what he read and what he didn't. you approach the idea of book ownership itself. books in the 18th century are luxury items. they are hard to come by especially in virginia. there is a printing press down there but they do not do a lot of book importing. he had to order his books during the colonial. from england so if you took the time to order it and specifically order a certain title or addition. that means he intended to use

it. i'm going to make that assumption because he is not going to line the shelves on red -- not going to line his shelves classics.d he never invited anyone into his store the study. books were hard to come by. another assumption i made is that for the books that he had, in 1799, the state counted everything in the house. martha washington's books, it was also counted. anything about women's literature, i assumed washington didn't have time for that. for his books, there were 397 volumes that had either his

signature or his book plate, or both in them. you look at his signatures and if you go on a tour, you can see an example of this right in front of you. his signatures are meticulous. even though he wrote with a quill pen, everything was perfectly centered. they were not haphazardly written. if you take the time to do that, that was something that was important to him. there are other books in their that the gifted books don't all have marks of ownership on them. we know they are his because they came with a letter.

if you didn't bother to do that, he may not have even touched it. i narrowed it down by looking at that. now we have a smaller list and now this is approachable. when we do with that information? i had a choice to make. i can either take a somatic approach and taking what he had started and go into more depth. i could do that or i could take a chronological approach. for me, i decided that after figuring out when and how he acquired them, i would do the chronological thing. in order to make sense of what washington red, i need to put it in the context of a wider world.

there are only a handful of books that have his writing in them. he did not quote things verbatim in his writing. contextualizing him made the difference and i could see him when he first married martha and took possession of the library. i have that inventory and it was made in his request. i had to compare against that the inventory that was made on his stepson's death. she dies at the siege of

yorktown. i can balance that against the washington collection and see. then i had the inventory done in 1799, that was also a good one. to get further at this i had the auction catalog from when the washington library went up or sale around the time of the civil war. when that both went for auction, everything to do with washington was worth money. anything with his signature are handwriting was worth that much more. people were good at picking out the fakes. it was in everybody's interest to make sure this was right. it shows what specific volume has signatures on them and what had marginal note that. if the book was given to him,

some of the religious books that came from his mother was given to him. they had notes like that. that was my handbook going through this process. it was able to help me find where his books were. i had a framework and i had to go about figuring out, let's put the books with the context of what he was doing. in that i learned something about the practicality of what he was doing. if you want to find his books now besides what is here in this library, some are scattered all

over the place. the biggest concentration is in boston. that is the subscription library if you're not familiar. they tried to collect as many of washington's volumes as they could. they thought it was a shame that this was all going to be split up and we would lose track of them for prosperity -- for posterity. i have a catalog and went to boston. it was given after many provisions. i got to handle his real book. i will give you a quick example of the relativism. reading this one book by gilbert burnet called and exposition on the 39 articles of the church of england. page turner. [laughter] it wasbook about how organized.

when washington came to possess this book, and it was in the early 1760's, so i am reading this book, it has gotten signature on it. there is really nothing else there. i reading it, and is dry. and i cannot find anything that was relevant that washington would have used. i am trying to approach these books as washington would have read them. what will he get from them that he will put into immediate use, because it seems to be what he has done with the things we know about him. i am approaching this book, reading it, i am not getting anything. i am like, i made a mistake. i started to have a panic attack, this whole thing is going to fall apart. now i am only a third of the way through, i keep going, and i see two glorious big thumbprints in the margins of the book, much bigger than mine, belonged to hands that were much bigger than mine. they were smudges and they were perfect. it is as if someone was holding the book up to the light, under

the light, it is the window, maybe a candle, firelight. so book ownership, the oil on your hands, ink stains, smudges, dirt, people did not wash their hands as much. the nature of the party that they are printed on as well. i cannot prove these thumbprints are his, but to me it was like, all right, these are here for a reason. somebody thought this page was interesting because they were gripping it. the page was about the organization of bishoprics and diocese in the church of england. i put in the context of what he was doing when he might have read this book. he was in the house of burgesses debating the twopenny acts about paying the salaries of parish priests in the established church of england here in virginia, and they were debating -- it was a hot and heavy debate

over whether virginia should petition the archbishop of canterbury for an archbishop for virginia. so understanding the organization of the church of england would have been immediately useful for washington. so my theory seems to be holding weight, so i persevered. when it comes to organization of the book, how do i approach it, knowing that is the method of how did i write the book, going in chronological method? i broke the chapters down into periods of time where there are certain transformational things that happened to him, starting off with his formative years. how did he enter into public life? what were the first things he read and why? how his reading interests

changed over time. a young militia officer in the seven years war, as soon as that your is over, he sets it aside. not until you going to be a general. what is it that was going on that contributed to his change of interest that he is suddenly finding military boring? what was hugely important, now is not? he had moments where things would change, things, circumstances in his life would change, things would happen, new opportunities would open up. the first chapter concludes with the end of the seven years war, what he knows once and for all there is a british commission waiting for him. it is never going to happen. he is done. he is done with the military at that point. he will turn his attention to being the planter, the leader of colonial society. he marries martha. he is in the top stratosphere. he has got to know what he is talking about. he is a burgess and he is a vestry men.

religion and politics are important. and closer to the revolution, he is a leading revolutionary. he is more committed to the idea of independence earlier on that his fellow founding fathers. certainly he does that faster than benjamin franklin, for example. it becomes clear he is becoming the commanding general of thecontinental army. i don't know anything up being in an army, much less building one up from the ground. so there are pagans that sharkey commissioned the book buying agents in new york and philadelphia to buy up every military book they could find. everything. he was buying field manuals. things we would give lieutenants and sergeants to read, it is reading as a general. he reads this on the fly as he is establishing a continental army, establishes doctrine,

making time for it as he can. and then there is a political problem. how do you get soldiers to join the military and stay in? that is the perennial regrading question. now we don't worry about their pay. i don't have to worry about that, but back then, they had to. why would you join the army? you are not going to do it for pay or immediate benefit. you are not going to have shoes, being well-equipped or well fed. please join up and stay in. how do you do that? he starts getting political pamphlets. he has thomas payne traveling with him. he starts collecting things like printed sermons, because every pulpit in america was politicized for or against the war. he used these sermons as a message to his troops. he required they go to divine service, as he calls it, every

sunday, or they would hear sermons that reiterate from a different angle the reason why this cause is viable, why they should stay in and continue to serve. he starts to leverage these popular media, for lack of a better term, to his advantage as a leader. he is starting to learn how to harness the power of the printed word. so it really comes into play after the revolution with the confederation and his premises that his presidency. there is an interest personally but also what is going to happen to this confederation, government that really was not going well. he starts advising people on how to pick biographers, people to commemorate the great occasion of the war, and what that says about the american future, and how this history is told. we have letters were he is telling lafayette, advising him what he should do. you see he is starting to use books and media and print in a way that before was about getting the knowledge that is already there on the page. now he is trying to start controlling the message a little bit. so that was kind of an interesting maturation of washington's intellectual use of

reading. and as president, there is a big challenge. who could imagine being the first president? people don't want to be president now. look at the current election. and a way that is shaping up. whatever your leanings are. but washington, you are first. how do you do that? how do you establish legitimacy of this office that you are in, of this government under a new constitution that everybody was on board with. how do you do that? that was all on him. if you read the inspection of the presidency, it is written with him in mind. he had to make that into something legitimate, authoritative, and sustainable. he was setting precedents for all that would come after him, and he knew that. so again, how does he do it?

he chose to use public ceremony, goes on tours, very choreographed appearances. he is charting this path he believes bridges the gap between the monarchical path to great britain and this new american republic future they are starting to sketch out. he has that kind of bridge, and he is using ceremony to do it. ok, that is one way. but like any good politician knows, unit to know about how the people think about what you do. so he had to figure that out. 1790's, no opinion polls. none of that media moves slow. so you had newspapers. newspapers proliferated after the war ended, but during washington's administration, the media -- some media outlets started to turn against him. and it is administration, and him personally. that was difficult to take.

the national gazette, the aurora, attacking him as an individual. they would attack his family, and that is not something he could take. he distrusted newspapers. so ok, you are washington, you are doing this job. you don't know how people think, you can't trust newspapers, where else can you look to gauge public opinion? he looks back to what he has done in the revolution. printed sermons. printed sermons were a way to gauge the way people were responding away from the cities, is a verse, where the stories were being written over and over again. ministers at the time were voices of their community. the pulpits, even when the american revolution ended, the pulpits do not cease to be politicized. they were still talking about politics. you see in washington's

collection, he started amassing all these sermons that cover every policy his administration had anything to do with, from the excise tax on whiskey, the whether we -- some are unfavorable, but they are more in his opinion, i think, more balanced than what he was getting from the newspapers. so it was a way to see how people in all different reaches of these new united states were reacting to his presidential performance, so to speak. so then i moved on, and i concerned myself with the library, the physical structure of the library, and what does that tell us about what washington was doing in his approach to reading?

looking at the reading he had done in his life, how is interests changed over time, there's a kind of, well, where? what do we get out of that? a few things. he retired and came back to mount vernon for his retirement. he was concerned what people would think about him and his legacy as long after he was gone. he knew there would be an enduring interest in him and everything he did. long after his death. he made an attempt to shape the record. he made plans for the construction of a separate building here at mount vernon that was going to be the receptacle for not just his books but also his papers and all of the copies of the different acts of congress, supreme court decisions, and sort of presidential proclamation, everything from the government that he led, the army that he led.

he was asking his former cabinet officers who were serving in the adams administration to send copies. he would complete the record for what posterity would see. we historians would be the benefit of his book, his papers, but then, the official record. you see what is there, but i return to the idea of what was not there. those newspapers. those newspapers that he did not trust. you will not find those in washington's catalog. he did not keep them. he got the sermons that were not altogether complementary of his policies, but the newspapers, he does not. maybe he got rid of them himself. i mean, philip never failed to send him copies every day, but somehow they disappeared. one story maybe washington set up in a bit of rage, toss them, got rid of them. another theory i have heard anecdotal evidence of is that martha cannot bear to have her husband read this stuff, so she burned them. we do not know exactly, but we know they are not there. so that is a telling moment

about washington's life and what he expected people to think of him. he had a vested interest. he understood that books and print and media and were powerful things, were powerful things that would inform not just have people thought about him, but what people would think about the efforts that he and his public service and the country he helped to establish, he certainly hoped would succeed and survive. so, sadly, he passed away before the building happened, so we don't know. but it would have come out to essentially the nation's first presidential library. too bad it did not get built. it would have made this place look very different. but that is ok. it is coming along now. but then there is a study within mount vernon that was a part of washington's expansion project of the mansion, 1774. i am sure most of you, if not

all of you, have been through the mansion on the tour as you are. there is a private staircase. it connects the study below, and washington's dressing room was off to the side, martha's was on the second floor. even the location in the house is telling, i think, about washington's attitude toward reading, his need for concentration, his need for privacy, because he did not want people to see he was studying, reading as much as he was. he did not want to get drawn into intellectual conversations he did not feel prepared for. he has to lead the founding fathers, and he knows he is not in the same league and qualifications as guys like jefferson, adams, randolph, all the rest of them. he did not want to get sucked in, so library saved him. there is no doorway that leads

to that. you go through a series of doors on the first floor to get to it. it was a room his grandson, george washington parker who was raised here, said no one injured that permission. his attorneys to mount vernon never set foot in that library. if they were staying overnight, they would be provided an assortment of newspapers and magazines for their amusement. they were never allowed to go in there and take a book off the shelf, plot down and discuss it. that was not going to happen. so everything about that room, its placement, his design of it says this was something that was for him. you look at the furnishings in that room, is sparsely furnished. when you look at him, he was a sparsely furnished workspace for a neatly ordered mind. this is the place for him to work, he would go there every morning before dawn, up before everyone else. he would return their are several hours in the afternoon, and in the afternoon and evening

before retiring. he would sort through his accounts, managing his estate, catching up on his correspondence. that was his private space that meant a great deal to him. so between the placement of the room and the way it was furnished, reading his approach to it, whether you talk about a book, a letter, whatever the case may be with something that was intensely private for him. when you look at his life, he was always conscious of what he called his defective education. so he did not -- that was his achilles' heel. what great leaders can do is that they know how to present themselves in a way that magnifies and place to their strengths and mitigates or minimizes their weaknesses. it does no good for anyone else around washington, that was working for him or serving him, to see his flaws, his nervousness with the fact that he always felt overawed about the responsibility that he bore.

what would that have done? what confidence would that have inspired? he was always in uncharted waters. he needed to give off the air of confidence. you don't display the fact that you don't read or write in foreign languages. you minimize that. you don't show the fact you are trying to catch up on the latest military documents to command an army. a general with a book? this was something in his interest he kept private. his interest personally, his interest professionally. so in the end, what is the "so what" of all of this? what do i learn, and what do i hope you will learn? i think it teaches us washington was a real person. this is a humanizing book. this is a way to get into his

mind in a way that other biographers who tend to rely on the kind of the image of washington, the iconic image of him on the white charger or standing up there in total command of himself, a lot of his greatness is just a suit. people never before looked at that dimension of how he made himself, how he fashioned himself and his legacy. people have talked about his ascendancy through connections and powerful relationships, the fact he was in a lot of cases and the right place at the right time, or as benjamin frank equipped when he was being nominated as commander for the continental army, the tallest man in the room, he is bound to lead something. there is that elements. he is in the right place at the right time. he had the right qualifications. he was a native born american with military experience, check, check, check.

but beyond that, he had to have done something else. and i think reading is that practical, deliberate, immediate reading helped him prepare for and deal with the responsibilities that he had in different parts of his life, whether that was here in mount vernon with the innovative library, trying to get out of the tobacco planting and diminishing returns, to being the military officer, to being the political leader. reading is how he did that. so i think we see the human watching him. we see washington with nerves. we don't think of washington being nervous about anything. right? he is there, he is in command of himself, and that is all there is to it. he is steely eyed and ready to take on whatever comes at him. but he was a real person with real anxiety, just as we all are and we take on new positions,

whatever it is we choose to do in our public or private lives. he was just like us. he was real. he had flaws and vulnerabilities, but yet strengths and knew how to play to them. this reading program he had helped play to those strengths. it gave him security, the knowledge he needed to do it he did, which was improbable. everything about what he accomplished in his life, nothing said father of the country. nothing. he did, and that is a we learn from it. here is a look at the real person that has been overlooked for all these years. the library that was right here under everybody's noses all this time. for that, i thank you and welcome your questions. [applause] >> ok, we are going to open it up for questions.

i want everyone to wait for the microphone to calm. we are recording of course for c-span, but we have people in the overflow room, and we want people to hear the brilliant questions. i told her you are the best audience in the country. you have got to live up to it. i want to correct one thing on the record. the design of this building is exactly what george washington had in mind. we had a sheaf of paper, there it was. all laid out. [laughter] >> so who wants to be first up? >> do you have any clues about what first book you read as a teenager or in his teens, and secondly, if you want to learn about agriculture or [indiscernible] , how do you order books from overseas? how do you ask someone to select great books for you? adrienne harrison: great question, thank you. as far as the first book that he purchased, we all know about the rule of stability, and as he was a teenager, he committed those memories.

the first book that he purchased was to the late great duke of schaumburg. it was a printed eulogy of this guy, frederick duke of schaumburg who was, he was a huguenot military leader who had some acclaim over in europe. and the eulogy, washington bought it. it is interesting, because it describes the qualities that frederick had, exec lee what washington kind of forced himself into being from one who was a leader of character, physical bravery, took duty seriously. it seemed like washington bought this book, we know he bought it when he was 14 years old, something he clearly took to heart. by the way he did it, the rest of his life. as far as the second question

how he went about finding certain titles, some are discerned from letters exchange with friends and neighbors about certain things like farming. one of the few examples we have of his marginal notes being in a book called animal husbandry, a book of agriculture. washington heard of this book. he writes to his agent, robert carey in london and specifically asks for that title in a certain edition. he has heard about this from somewhere. if you are in a city like new york or boston or philadelphia, there are bookshops and lists of what is out in what you can order, but in a place like this, or you are removed all of that, it really relies on word-of-mouth or written recommendations. things like that. agriculture, you find in asking for specific titles, because it

is a big he felt comfortable talking about. >> just a quick question, as i understand it, he did attend school until his father died when he was 11? adrienne harrison: hmm hmm. >> did he receive any schooling, mathematics, surveying, was that helpful? adrienne harrison: it was. we know that washington was educated up to today, an equivalent would be like late elementary school, maybe middle school level. for a time when he lived with this older half-brother lawrence, he did have a private tutor. he was instructed in the

fundamentals, the three r's, so to speak. looking at his commonplace book, he had a clear gift for mathematics. he seems to take it quite well. he has very neat psalms and math problems written out that you can see him learning and applying this knowledge. but a lot of that, a lot of that knowledge with regards to math, he learned on the practical level when he decided to pursue an early career and surveying. he borrowed surveying books from his mentor, colonel fairfax. he started surveying the form that he grew up on an practice. you see him getting better and better at it as he applied himself. it was a little bit of that formal schooling gave him the fundamentals, but a lot of it was really self-taught after that. >> in your research, was there a

particular topic or topical areas that george washington seems the most focused on? adrienne harrison: i would say the agriculture is where you see him the most focused on. that is where he is the happiest, i think, as a reader to read it is where you see him applying himself as a student. i mentioned animal husbandry. he entered into in the 1780's. he enters into a correspondence with some english agricultural reformers and subscribes to their books coming out. he takes, what we have in his marginal notes is his efforts to take these books written overseas and in the conversion math to make french measurements match virginia's. they were not metric. americans always rejected european measurements, even back then. you can match that with his journals. he key very much a farmer

journal, where he does always experiments and he is always applying it. it is very neat, it is very deliberate. he does the farming, he innovates, build that 18 sided barn. there are evidence of different agricultural books he had mercy is taking notes. he makes himself field manuals. he will not take the expensive book into the field. that is crazy. but if he drops it in some manure? he is pulling ideas from these different books away students would now. if they are pursuing southward of a project, an experimental project. but as for you see this passion come through the most. >> if you are going to do the tours afterwards, you pulled out, what adrienne is speaking about, we have one on husbandry. barlow visited mt. vernon in the

1870's. a gentleman of here? >>thank you. you go to the bookstore in front of ford's theater, you see they stack up all the books on lincoln, several floors. i want to thank you your perseverance actually. fighting to eventually come to what your thesis was about an obviously tonight, we all benefited. you mentioned the importance that washington placed on relationships. and it seems that they were important to him, and he read for military reasons, political reasons, and basically to persevere. you also mentioned he never shared what he read.

he kept a close, close to the vest when he read. did you ever find any evidence of him inquiring what jefferson read or what adams read or what others read? did that influence his, and i want to ask one last question since you mention the political election. with the presidential election. what would all the candidates need to know about washington today? [laughter] adrienne harrison: well, i think they need to know who he is, for starters. and when he did. that is a little iffy depending on which candidate we are talking about. [laughter]