there were 8 million unprocessed documents. when i left in 2016, we had 15,000 names in the database itself. that is just a small, a very small percentage of what is in the larger elections. those documents folder names of children and families.

>> norman oklahoma is home to the national weather center. learn moreide as we about the work being done to better understand severe weather patterns in the united states. >> the national weather center is a really unique confederation of federal, state, and academic units all housed in the same building and we are working on differentall of the time and space skills of the atmosphere so we can figure out what is going on. we have a variety of different folks that make up the building. it is part university of oklahoma and part national oceanic and atmospheric administration here it is a collaboration between the two groups. this is technically a university of oklahoma building, so we have amenities on both sides, in addition to from the state of oklahoma as well. we have meteorologist's, climatologists, students,

faculty, staff, technicians, everyone working together to study earth's atmosphere. we officially broke ground for the national weather center in november 2002 and opened and dedicated the building september 29 of 2000 6:00 p.m. we are almost at 12 years operation here at the national weather center in 2018. the building did not exist before we opened the doors in september of 2006. book the amenities for the university of oklahoma and -- were in sector -- separate buildings. this was a way to build -- put everyone together in a collaborative space. we are now standing in the atrium of the national weather center and behind me, this is a showstopper in the building. it is installed in over 100 locations across the globe. if you go to the science center or another agency, you find these on display. the global display system, the globe itself is six feet in diameter. i use four surrounding

projectors to project on the surface and we stitch them it iser so it looks like one unison image. we can bring up atmospheric products, ocean, astronomy, literally anything you wanted to be. it can be the death star, it can be a fifth goal, it can be a disco star, and it can be for promotional purposes. there is really a showstopper in the building. now, we are the vehicle bay, number one in the nation in severe weather and you get a good image behind me. we have a lot of tools we use to get our information from storms. we have here one of our mobile resin that displays. we have observations scattered all over the u.s. in various places. the problem is they are static and they don't move. they're not always where storms are located. we want to figure out what is happening in both parts of the storms. we made those mobile by

attaching them to vehicles as you see right here. we have a hill proof guard on top of the vehicle here to make sure if we are underneath the storm producing some large and damaging hail, it won't damage the windshield or anything here. then we will take out of these and get information inside the storms, everything from windspeed and when direction using this at the top. temperature and moisture measurements, here sitting on the front here pressure measurements, a variety of different instruments that do all of that. is an antenna and gps at the top to communicate with everybody in the field campaign so we know where to situate ourselves and make sure everyone is collecting the information they need to in those. we have one here, one in the outside vehicle bay area entering larger experiments we will get additional vehicles, anywhere upward of 10 of these so we can do a lot of

observations from a variety of different storms happening all over the place. these are our local ones here at the weather center. we are number one in the nation in radar research. the reason is doppler radar in the u.s.. it started with the national severe storm. we have 159 doppler radars all over the u.s., but the problem again is they are not always exactly where the storm is. if we look at a storm really far away, we are looking several tens of thousands of feet above where the actual storm is. earth is tilting away when we send that out. we got the idea to make those radars mobile. we have one of our shared mobile .tmospheric smart radars this is a joint project between the school of meteorology here the university of oklahoma and also the national severe storms laboratory. it is a really impressive system.

we have two of the smart radars in the -- and the storm has another radar part here. we will take these anywhere we have the funding to do so. we have taken them to the east coast and the gulf coast, her when they make landfall, obviously to look at severe weather here in the central and southern lance. taken our radars to vancouver to scan snowfall during the olympics. we have also disassembled these radars and sent them across oceans to do a variety of different projects. we sent one of these radars to france to do a lightning and precipitation project. doalso sent these to tropical rainfall experiments. anywhere that we have funding, we will take these. they are not just locked to the ground here in the u.s. we will take them anywhere we have funding to do so. this is why our severe weather here in here is so good

radar technology was developed during the early days of world war ii. primarily in england, contributions from the united states, and the idea was to detect planes and went on to detect missiles later, but mostly to detect planes and some rains in early days. the weather was not something that they wanted, it was a problem. they were looking for point targets. after the war, it became obvious you could protect weather in distributed targets. radars were modified and being improved. the first weather radars came from the military prayer they had been in airplanes and defense installations. they transferred to the civilian part of the federal government. a lot of weather radar research was right here in oklahoma by the national severe storms laboratory and the university of oklahoma. many of the improvements, we are because we have

in large part done that development. radars send out a pulse of a lecture mad at -- electromagnetic radiation. those pulses bounce off of targets. in the case of the weather radar, the targets are precipitation particles. we can return energy back to the radar. that, we get the location and intensity of precipitation, and then you get the velocity information, and we have something called dual polarization where we alternate our waves horizontally and vertically. from that, we get a lot of size and types of precipitation and particles, we can discriminate one particle type from another. the weather radar does all of that now. it did not used to during the time of my career, many of those things have been added. data now collected in many different locations around the united states, the primary network is federal government network.

agencies of the federal government. department of commerce, the national weather service, department of defense, primarily the air force, and the department of transportation, we network andadar those data are collected for the use of the agencies and then shared with anyone who would like to get the data. ours is a different system than other places in the world where even the government felt that radar data or other weather data to the public, in our country, we don't do it. we share the data and make it available. onyou see weather radar data television, it could be coming from one of our government radars. we have a long history with radar. we want to continue to make radars at her. where we are going now, the beck -- the next big innovation that will provide improvements to the forecast that we give, it is

something we called to -- we want to take the data from the ther and other sensors, surface stations and other kinds of data from aircraft or drones, whatever we can get, but a lot of it is driven by radar. we want to simulate that entire run those, be able to models in real time, and we want to be a look to forecast the future state of the storms even to the point of predicting tornadoes 30 minutes or even one hour ahead of time. we could issue warnings with longley time. long lead time means we would have to figure out how to treat them because of you tell someone a tornado is coming in one hour, he may not take shelter right then. groups whoeople in need long lead times. we want to give them information public into knowledge of the weather and knowledge of the warning and knowledge of what to do to be safe.

stuff we do here at the national weather center impacts everybody. as is a one-of-a-kind facility. it does not exist anywhere else in our galaxy. this is the only national weather center. are a tourist destination for the state of oklahoma and for the entire country because everybody is interested in the weather and a want to see what's going on in our facility. >> our cities tour staff recently traveled to normand, oklahoma to learn about its rich history. learn more about normand and other stops on our tour at c-span.org/cities tour. you're watching american history tv on c-span3. next on lectures in history, tulane university professor blake goldman teaches a class about moonshine drivers and the origins of nascar.

he describes how after the civil war, particularly in the south, moonshiners became antigovernment folk heroes. this mythology continued into the 20th century. many of the moonshine drivers would compete to see who had the fastest car. this led to the creation of professional stock car racing. his class is about 50 minutes. >> all right. i'm going to tell you about nascar today. i wanted to go over quickly what we talked about on monday. what i told you about, or what i hope you took away from monday's lecture, were key ideas that are going to be fundamental to what i'm talking about today. the first of those is how whiskey making came to the american colonies, mainly in the persons of scotch/irish immigrants.