>> up next, pulitzer prize winning author taylor branch discusses the challenges of researching biographies. he chronicled martin luther king junior's life. the graduate center from the city university of new york hosted in this event. it is about one hour. host: tonight we are here to honor taylor branch. taylor is best known for his trilogy on the civil rights movement. the first volume one the -- won the pulitzer prize in 1989. the two subsequent volumes still remain essential texts to understanding the role martin luther king junior played in transforming our nation. along the way, taylor won the dayton peace prize, the national

humanities medal and many other prizes. but i think he would agree that this extraordinary career really began in 1970, when he took a very low-pay job with charlie peters, the legendary founder and editor of "the washington monthly," a very small political opinion and reporting magazine which still exists. i suspect taylor learned his trade as a journalist and book author while working for peters for three years. a few years later i went through a similar process myself, working for victor novaski at "the nation" magazine in new york. both of us became authors after immersing ourselves in journalism. taylor and i also worked on the 1972 campaign for george mcgovern. he didn't know this but i was

just a lowly canvasser, knocking on doors in california, nebraska and minnesota. taylor, however, had a more elevated campaign position in austin, texas, where he happened to share an apartment with one bill clinton. that friendship survived in the mcgovern electoral debacle and taylor later was routinely sneaking into the clinton white house, to record bills thoughts -- two record bill's thoughts about the presidency. this resulted in taylor's book about the clinton presidency. taylor has led a colorful life as a journalist, historian, and biographer and now he's going to share a few words about the perils of biographical history. taylor branch. [applause]

taylor: thank you. thank you to the leon leavy center. i don't need to be a dame or a sir, i'm just happy to be here with previous speakers for this occasion. i once spent an evening wonder ing whether we could survive multi-decade, multi-volume enterprises and i'm pleased to see that we have, so far. it is an honor to be here and to discuss biography, and a wants to say right from the beginning that my topic is perils of

biographical history, but it -- i don't want and have you who are doing biographies to believe the can't just go blithely along without any perils writing biographies. my perils have to do, specifically, with biographical history in the area of race, where i believe we grossly underestimate the subject at hand. and i'm going to try to explain why, and why that is both a burden and a huge opportunity for citizens and scholars in this era. i think biography meets history at the beginning, in basics like vocabulary and point of view, which are crucial in that. i'm always asked, how can you read a book about a black man when you are a white southerner? but i am also asked, i thought

you were black, so it just goes to show you the quicksand in the terrain here, when you approach that. i began to learn lessons about the special properties of trying to understand race through people, long before i ever dreamed of becoming a writer. in 1969, less than a year after dr. king was killed, i was a graduate student at princeton and i was haunted by the fact that the civil rights movement had changed the direction of my life's interests against my will. growing up in atlanta, it was relentless thrall my childhood, from when i was in first grade two when i graduated from college in the your dr. king was killed, and all through those formative years the movement was hounding away and it scared of

everybody to death. it was only later that it learned most people are lying, who say they were in the middle of the movement, and where dr. king's best friend. it was a scary event. but i was upset that i had missed it, other than picketing the white house wants when i was with al loewenstein. but if you were with al loewenstein, you were going to picket the white house. i couldn't take much criticism = credit for that. i had missed it, and i really wanted to have some experience with it. so when the summer of 1969, between my two years at the woodrow wilson school, i defied the program, which was that you were supposed to work for the ford foundation or some policy-relevant institution, and i got a job from john lewis and vernon jordan at the voter education project in atlanta. they told me the head 20 counties and far southeastern

georgia that were so small they didn't even have any names on their rolodex about people who might be willing and able to run a vote or-registration project in counties with black majorities and virtually no black registered voters. this was a shock to me because it was four years after the voting rights act and i thought since i had seen black people voting for the first time on tv, that was a universal experience. so it was a shock to go down there and find that was not only like it was before 1960 five, but like it was before maybe 1865 in some of these counties, where i saw black prisoners come out of the jail on the courthouse lawn on saturday morning with shoes of the local upstanding citizens that they had shined, for them to go to church come on the way to mow their lawns. this was really like a time capsule, to go there. and i was profoundly unprepared to be alone.

and i had three days to go sight-unseen into these counties to find somebody. somebody that vernon and john lewis could talk to. columbus was not more lost when he set sail for the west than i was when i went into these tiny little counties, looking for the next martin luther king. and all the preachers through me threw me out, instantly. so did the school principals, and especially the funeral-parlor directors, who gave me lectures about how they had things very well under control. then i went out into the juke joints, thinking i could recruit the rebels, the stokely carmichael's, the black power types, who didn't exist in places like bubba doo's big apple, where i was arrested for being on the wrong side of town. i was lost in it to me about a month before started talking to

women, which i never would have done at the beginning. you go through your preconceptions at the time and that was difficult until one day i was recommended, that this old, the culture and 1800s person, i matriarch in this tiny county in georgia. if anybody know anybody that was brave enough to be interested in this voting stuff, it would be she. i got these directions, old country style, you go down this road until it had ends and then go until you see two big dead trees on the right and then you take the next left. anyway, there she was on her porch, rocking. and i started talking to her about voting in the county and how important it was, and she didn't say a thing. she didn't acknowledge my name. i talked for a long time and i was beginning to panic that it was the wrong person. and finally she said, "young

man, do you really believe we landed on the moon last night?" because this was july 23, the day after neil armstrong landed on the moon. and i said yes i do, i thought it on the motel tv last night. we landed on the moon. and she looked to me and she did not say a word. she just kept rocking. and i'm try to figure out whether that has anything to do with voter registration or whether she was just a fan of the space program. something so weird, i knew she knew at least something about current events, and she had a wise, craggy face. i kept talking and she insane thing and she didn't -- and she didn't say anything. and when graduate students get nervous they try to use bigger

words, and i'm trying to explain to her what a 501(c)(3) see organization is, and grants are necessary, and statistics about voting, and she didn't say anything. it went on for at least five minutes and then finally the next question out of her mouth was, she said, "have you ever seen the simonize whacks -- wax commercial?" [applause] and i was flummoxed and i said, do you mean the one where the children right across the invisible shield on the floor of the kitchen floor and they don't scratch it, and she insane -- she didn't say anything. and i said, that's a commercial and they can make it look like the kids are on an invisible shield. and now i'm trying to explain the difference between a commercial and a news show about what is real and not real.

anyway, this conversation went on for about an hour, but she only chipped in every now and then, with questions like, "have you ever been in a fist fight?" and she could prove that we didn't land on the moon because if we had come all we had to do was fill up our tank on the moon and on the next leap we could make it to heaven, and you know god would let us do that. so we didn't land on the moon. and i only knew that meant that she wasn't interested in voter registration in this county. because it went to the mero of -- the marrow of life and death, people trying to vote. but the way she made this point was so indelible to me, and so dumbfounding to me, that i went back to the motel and scribble down every bit of dialogue, everything i said, everything she said. and it was the beginning of a summer diary that reached 400

pages by the end. it's the first thing i ever wrote that wasn't assigned, that was not meant for publication. i turned it in to princeton and i got in big trouble at the graduate program because i was supposed to write a memo. but one of the editors sent it to charlie peters who publish the "washington monthly" that he published it, almost without asking me but that's the way charlie was. and it led me into journalism. the point of this though, was that i had been reading everything i could about the civil rights movement to try to find out what had happened that had so much power on southerners, and so much power on the nation. and most of it was analytical and full of labels about who was militant, who was radical, what was economic, what was religious, and political labels. and none of it felt like the

movement that i saw. but the personal discovery that i had, from people in georgia like this simonize wax woman, made me discover that race gets very personal and all these labels scrambled and you can put them back together later. and i resolved that if i ever wrote about the civil rights movement, i would write a narrative style about the people involved instead of the analytical concepts which float over the head like paper airplanes. my books on race are stories and it raises the tension about the reality of stories that are personal, versus the historical impact that comes from the concepts that we really do with.

and that is, to me, the peril of historical biography, grounded in race. it was only the beginning of my troubles with the point of view. after a few years with the "washington monthly" i realized i am never going to grow up. i thought it was in journalism just until i could decide whether to be a professor or a political activist, and the journalism was a good place to bide my time and be an observer. but i thought it would become a writer in the way to break into book writing in those days was as a ghost writer. my first ghost-written book was with john dean, about watergate. i lived in his house, in the basement with mo. [laughter] and i wrote "blind ambition" which ruined my wikipedia page, because conspiracists say i

helped perpetrate the conspiracy of john dean blaming watergate on nixon and the republicans when in fact he was the mastermind, he was the evil person. but it gave me experience and writing from the point of view of someone else. i was john dean, in this book. and the next one i did was with bill russell, to write with someone is different as john dean as possible. so i went and lived with bill russell in seattle. and it was an amazing year and i learned from him that he not only had the world greatest laugh and a cracker barrel philosopher, but he said each sport is its own mix of art and war. and anybody who is going to be good in a sport understands that.

there are many uneducated top-tier athletes but there are no dumb top-tier athletes to understand the nature of the sport. i thought having finished the russell book, which he insisted be co-authored by him and me, in his voice, so that the point of view really didn't make a lot of sense, but i wrote it in his voice. then i thought this is what novelists do you read they create lots of characters and the writer writes in a lot of these different points of view, so i'm ready to write a novel. so poor alice mayhew, who had done the deed book, sign me up for novel and a guy very good reviews and sold about 500 copies. i said to alice, how many more books to have to do until like to do the civil rights movement? i want to write a narrative history of the civil rights movement and she said, race books don't sell. you probably need to write

another one. i wrote some other books and came back. and i didn't enjoy reading novels, anyway, which is what novelists do. i'm going to redo the preface to "parting the waters" because i think it stands up after six years, immersed in the research for "parting the waters" the first question i wanted to addresses the question we are here to talk about tonight, the tension between biography and history were race is involved. because i think it goes to the tension i want to discuss about how our history so screwed up now, because of race. but i didn't know that at the time. this was written in 1988, 20 years after martin luther king and 19 years after i met the simonize wax lady.

it's only two paragraphs. almost as color defines vision itself, race shapes the cultural. what we do and do not notice, the reach of empathy and the alignment of response. this subliminal force recommends care in choosing a point of view for history grounded in race. strictly speaking, this book is not a biography of martin luther king jr., although he is at its heart. to create the perceptions within his inherited world would isolate most readers, including myself, far outside familiar boundaries. but to focus upon the historical king, as generally established by his impact on white society, would exclude much of the texture of his life, which i believe makes for unstable history and collapsible myth.

to overcome these pitfalls of race, i have tried to make biography and history reinforce each other by weaving together a number of personal stories along the main seam of an american epic. like king himself this book attempts to rise from an isolated culture into a larger history by speaking more than one language. so that is how i undertook to spend 24 years, writing the movement in three volumes, "the king years." i thinking is the best symbol of a movement grounded in race that spread far beyond race. and the question is, how well do we understand the blessings that that engendered, and the lessons of that that leaves for us now?

and the answer is, not very well. not very well, so far. and i think a lot of this is because of this tension of race being personal and our history being the concepts, the vocabulary, the lessons, the framework, the point of view that we have for all of history. though i told stories in the book, and i were to give you three examples that i think resonate with larger lessons, but that the lessons are loss. one is, i told the story of the "new york times" versus sullivan case. it is the prevailing law about libel, a supreme court decision. it grew out of the citians. -- out of the sit-ins.

going to talk about the sit-ins. sit-ins meant to king. but in the citians, in 1960 they around thet-ins alabama capital in montgomery. and at the same time, king had been indicted for income tax evasion on a trumped up charge and they had these sit-ins around the capital. and harry belafonte wrote an ad in the "new york times" to raise money for his defense and his tax trial, and it was a full-page ad and it said here on the rising voices and there was a picture of the rest in montgomery. and it said that constitution-breaking enforcement officers arrested students for protesting segregation laws. for this ad, the governor, the police chief, assorted officials in alabama, filed a libel suit against the signatories at the bottom of the ad, many of whom

did not know what was in the ad, and against "the new york times" and took it to court where, under alabama law there were two factual errors that they proved. the text said they surrounded the alabama capital when in fact they were only on two sides and not the other two sides. and it said that they sang "my country' tis of thee," when in fact they sang "america the beautiful." these two facts, under alabama law, allow the jury to decide whether these two errors were libelous, and they heaped upon the signatories, ralph abernathy and the people there, and the "new york times" $3 million in libel judgments. 50 times larger than they had ever done before. this is the governor, the mayor, all of these people, trying to break the movement. law students today read new york

times versus sullivan and have absolutely no idea that it had anything to do with race. because the case and reasoning is all about malice and evidence of malice and so on, and so forth it is so denatured that you have no idea of the chief reality here, which was the nature of american race relations at this time was that the supreme court could not afford to say that these lower courts and juries in a whole region of our country are running wild with racial malice, and this is a ridiculous case, it never should have come. you can't say that. they had to invent a new standard of constitutional law for students to still study, in order to rescue this case by stealth. another case i spent for

-- four chapters on was birmingham, 1963. when the sit-ins started king said our movement was based on the deep wells of democracy. this is not about race, this is about justice. this is about redeeming the soul of american democracy. and he laid out all the principles and he preached himself to death in the 1950's. but when the sit-ins came he said he was the only adult black leader, even though he was just a few years older than these kids, he said this is a breakthrough because certain aspects of human nature are so stubborn that words and principles are not enough. you must amplify it by sacrifice. these kids, you can't boycott the place that won't let you in. these kids have figured out a way to accent there faith -- their faith in the american dream of sacrifice. and he said there are two principles they understood, that america is about self-governing

public trust, and citizens willing to put themselves on the line for it. three years later, in 1963, the movement had gone through the sit-ins, the freedom rides, ole miss, and king was terrified no landmarks would be laid and he went into birmingham on a great gamble, trained people for months. he didn't tell his father he was going to go because he knew his father would object. he went in there, mounted this struggle, and it was a tremendous failure. people were too scared to go to bull connor's jail. he was on the verge of leaving birmingham in retreat when young aides came to him and said we don't have any adults willing to go to jail, but children will.

and on may 2, 1963 they had 12 adults ready to go to jail. and on may 3 they had 600 kids marched out of the church. and on may 3, then they had 1000, mostly children and girls. these are images that went around the world and in my view, melted the emotional distance that the rest of the country had on civil rights, under which people were saying, this is terrible, a new leader should do something about this. president kennedy should do something about this. but when people saw these photographs of the dogs and fire hoses loosed on small children, they said we need to do something about this. and it had an explosive effect on black communities, such that there were 700 demonstrations in

100 cities in the next six weeks. this is why king said we are going to have the march on washington. this is why jack kennedy introduced the civil rights bill. he said we have to stop this. this is a wildfire. this is a wildfire, growing out of birmingham. i argue in the books, historically that the birmingham children's marches are almost biblical, like the passover in ascribing changes in a great nation to the witness of schoolchildren. to me, the salient fact is that you can read phd dissertations today on a minor modification in an attack ad that might affect the senate race. but i know of no phd dissertations on the birmingham children's marches. hundreds didn't know anything about it. they didn't know how it became -- how it came about. they didn't know about the

titanic struggles of black parents who accused martin luther king of being criminal, to subject their children to terminal records in a losing movement, and yet they were converted by the witness of these children, their own children, so that these same parents supported him. to me, this is a turning point in all of american history that is unanalyzed, that is unrecorded, unstudied by the american academy, by american journalists, by american pundits, because it's too embarrassing and it is too far outside of our accepted reality, which is precisely why it needs to be studied. another story in that same year, 1963, king gave a speech in which he said george wallace is delivering minor little speeches that i think will be significant in the american future. this is the same george wallace who had started 1963 saying,

segregation forever, the preeminent symbol of racial bigotry in the united states. after the march on washington and the kennedy assassination, george wallace modified his stump speech because he was going to run for president. he expunged all references to race. he claimed he never made a statement that reflected poorly on anyone because of race. and that his campaign had nothing to do with race, that he wanted to restore local government against 20-headed bureaucrats,aded biased media, tyrannical judges and centralized government. and he basically invented the vocabulary of modern politics. king recognized it and said these are little classics. at that same time he recognized nbc did a three hour special on race in which, with no commercials, a three-hour

primetime special on race. and they interviewed the governor of mississippi who said, this is obvious what is going on here. this is a conspiracy by liberals in the national media to concentrate all effective power on the central government. they are overemphasizing the race issue in american politics. i told all of these stories and to me, this is the beginning of modern politics and how we have this unbelievable mismatched march in the last 50 years. changes for immigrants, who have been welcomed from all over the world with the immigrant act. king said it was causing the widest liberation in civilize

history, the fall of russia, all of these changes beyond the imagination of people. marriage equality, people couldn't -- i was in college in 1965 and there were no women at the university of north carolina, by state law, except nursing students. these changes were set in motion by equal citizenship, i think, and the emotional swap of the freedom movement, dealing with equal citizenship in ways that apply to senior citizens, the disabled, and ultimately gay rights. so these empirical blessings have flowed even as our political discourse followed george wallace and ross barnett in the predominant idea that government is bad, which is transparently a way of adjusting politically to race issues. and trump is the epitome of it.

at the end of the 60 year cycle he has to be explicit about the racial base of it and at the same time, the emptiness of the anti-rhetoric government, where you don't have to think of a constructive program, all you have to say is washington is bad, i want to preserve choices for people and get rid of central government. the emptiness is now manifest but no one ever claims the lessons of the years from the movement that drew upon the heart of patriotism. so i am just going to sketch, what do we do about this? on going to sketch it from what i do now, which is to look at all of american history and the point of race and politics. i think that we are paying a

price, for not understanding how deeply the civil rights movement grew up on the best lessons of our political history, in a way that goes to the profundity of the democratic challenge, and what the democratic experiment is about. the civil rights movement had a tremendous memory. the failures are in for -- in four different areas, i'm trying to argue. one is memory. two his constitutional principle. three is optimism, or outlook. and four is the centrality of violence. on memory, dr. king said we are drawing on the memory of revolution, because we don't have armies, we don't have

money, we don't have businesses, we don't have police forces. we are largely invisible. what we have? we have an appreciation for the example in the professed values of american democracy. and they have not been remembered, ending king's speech speeches, you can go through them. we didn't remember them in the civil war, lincoln says the civil war is the great, and the second inaugural, that this is a great lesson about the census -- offenses for the ages, and in the next 50 years we forgot that entered the civil war into a contest of regional valor. and the academy in the north named the process by which terrorism restored white rule in the south, and forgot all three of the civil war amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th, as we are now learning. they called that process redemption. that's the official name.

even revisionist historians, who are doing yeoman's work, go by the title redemption for the terrorism that eliminated black voters in the south, because that is the official name. there is no other way to do it. that's the vocabulary. just like scalawag and carpetbagger of the only words that came into language from that era. there is no word that came into the language for somebody who wanted the freedmen to vote. so the whole history that grows out of our politics grows from a forgetfulness where race conflicts with american values. so that in the 1860's, there were great lessons, courageously recognized by lincoln and then systematically forgot the men turned upside down in the next 50 years, until, by 1915 the whole country comes together, white people, in "the birth of the nation" film, and woodrow wilson segregates washington,

and shows that film in the white house. it was also shown and the supreme court, by the way, because the chief justice was a former klansman. the lessons of the civil war, dismissing lincoln. king had a better memory and he said we have to go beneath this forgetfulness to come up with an accurate history of america, because race is the gate to freedom. that is my title, "freedoms gate." it is what blocks our perception of freedom but it is also the hope, in rare cases when you deal with race, we push freedom forward. the constitution, king went right back to the revolution and said there are a lot of structural things about why americans felt that they could reconstitute a republic after 2000 years of l you're in a

world of universal monarchy and dictators and sultans. he said psychologically, what madison came up with was that the political experiment rested on the capacity of mankind for self-government, and the capacity of mankind to build public trust. all our political experiments rest on the capacity of mankind for self-government. no form of government can secure liberty unless we build virtue in the people. public trust. king said this is a profound intellectual challenge, but the founders also said citizens -- that is white he recognize that the sit-in students, beyond the abstract qualities of this, that citizen involvement and taking personal risks in that discipline, like the freedom writers did, he said nothing is more patriotic than a freedom writer who looks in the face of a klansman who is about to hit

him, and saying you may hit me and may never treat me as a voter, but i believe our children will come into a political relationship of equal citizenship because of what you and i are doing here. that's about as patriotic as disciplined as you can be. the ultimate example was mickey schwermer, honored here when he was shot in the summer of 1964. his last words were, sir i know how you feel, looking at the klansmen with a pistol to his chest to kill tim. trying to make some contact with a bloodthirsty klansman, and they convinced him, and they convinced the fbi that they had believable confessions when they got the same words from two different clansmen.

this belief that we can create some sort of boundary, a relationship across the racial boundaries that divide us. the third element the movement had is optimism, so sorely lacking now when sarcasm, political correctness passes for wisdom in a central society. king said we will win our freedom, i mean i get there with you but we will when our freedom because the goal of america is freedom. and he drew that right out of the constitution that begins with "we the people" and he talked about how the constitution is a miraculously-optimistic document. i think all politicians should have to recite the preamble before every debate. "we the people of the united states, in order to establish justice, insure the mystic tranquilitymestic

do ordain and establish this constitution for the united states of america." unbelievably audacious but also optimistic, and totally at odds with the cynical government is bad, who say, i am here to strangle washington. there are elements in this country that, if the choice is between democracy and giving up racial divisions, they will give up democracy to keep racial division. that's how stark the choices. and lastly, violence. dr. king said that madison was trying to make a government that was based on loyalty and armies and the kings discipline. a government run on votes, instead. and what is a vote? a vote is a piece of nonviolence. that is why madison was such a

wimp in the war of 1812. that's what embargoes are about. they had to have the war to prove themselves respectable in the world of violence that. this democracy was fleeting, and about to go. but it was about establishing the vote. dr. king would say, if you think nonviolence is oddball stuff about diets and indians who won't step on insects, and you think it is crazy, but if you believe in democracy you believe in votes, you believe in nonviolence. you should study the relative impact of violence and nonviolence in society. most of you have never seen violence because you live in a society where votes govern your little league teams, churches, universities, everything, plus your politics. and you believe in those votes and that is the strength of america. that's the only thing i have in common with racists. that so far at least, we've been building something that is about votes instead of violence.

so we should be studying violence and nonviolence. i took a course at princeton from a professor who told us all political science taught that violence of power were synonymous, that they were an extension of one another. she said in a modern world that is interdependent and built on cooperation, you could build justice good a case that power and violence are opposite. it was deep in martin luther king's belief that nonviolence is at the heart of american democracy because votes is what the hope of the american experiment is based on. votes are the greatest invention of nonviolence, and yet we have

1000 words in our vocabulary of violence. i argue that universities and citizens should be studying the civil rights movement as a model of constitutional future, not the quaint past of segregated bus stops. the tremendous power to benefit ecumenical movements all over the world, because it strong on the constitutional power and the promise, almost a nuclear energy, inside the model that was formulated in the american revolution. so king and james madison should be studied some aside for lessons. we don't go back to the fundamentals of democracy any longer, and we don't recognize the civil rights movement is right there, as modern founders,

alongside it. so, our vocabulary is stunted. currently, most of the scholarship i see, the only choices of race relations are you are either a racist or anti-racist. it is a binomial theorem that is grossly impoverished. the best people i know say we should dismantle racism, but what does that build? in a weird way, i would like to look forward in an imaginary world a couple of hundred years from now in which race is not, the world racist draws its meaning entirely from our negative view of race, the view that race is all about war and hierarchy. and that has been inherited, and that has been a reality. i'm not denying that. but in galileo's day the same was true of science, and the word scientist now draws its

meaning and its valence from the way we feel about science. if the world of race were studied for its roots and its strength for the good side of democratic potential, and not just the best site on a racist is somebody who sees how the different families of man come together to overcome that in a society not that much unlike the united states, where we have crossed racial boundaries but it is also true, that race still governs where we live, most of who our friends are, our habits, our habits of mind, and our vocabulary, so that we are stuck with racists, we're stuck with violence, and nonviolence is the only word that we have when we still think it is quaint. and what race and violence have in common is that people want to talk about them just long enough to find a safe ground and then and the conversation.

race and violence are separate worlds instead of integral parts of one another. when you talk about democracy in the united states, if you are not talking about race you are not at the root of democracy, either as problems or its promise. because that is the lesson that i think comes out of the perils of biographical history, when we are trying to address race in america. thank you. [applause]

>> thank you so much, taylor, for that passionate exploration of race in america through biography. it was incredible, and we are all very thankful for your remarks. those of you who signed up for the dinner, it is on the ninth floor in the skylight room, and we should adjourn for that. thank you so much, taylor. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

>> you are watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span 3. @c-spanon facebook history. is touringc-span cities. across the country exploring american history next, a look at our recent visit to burlington, vermont. you're watching american history tv all weekend, every weekend on c-span 3. the ticonderoga is one of the most visited sites here at the shelburne museum. it just stands out as what the , heck is this? what is this big boat doing in the middle of a field? it begs you to come on board. here at the shelburne museum, it's a campus of structures that sit on about 40 acres, and it is a village setting in many respects. but within that village, every