clinton were married inside their home in fayetteville, arkansas. next, we visit the site in the ozark mountains to learn how this house helped kickstart the political career of america's 42nd president. >> welcome to fayetteville, arkansas. we are at the clinton house museum, south of the edge of the university of arkansas campus. this house was built in 1931 by a man named scotty taylor. it would have been in the outskirts. ais would have seen like hound stash fancy house for that era. the clintons bought this house in 1975 and did a little remodeling, but the most part it is entirely original. the house became a national historic register property in 2010, and the street came clinton avenue in 2010 as well.

this is the living room, the famous room where bill clinton and hillary rodham were married in front of this big window october 11, 1975. bill bought this house while hillary was out of town and surprised her with it. she came back from visiting friends and family for six weeks and he said, i bought that house you thought was pretty, now you have to marry me. i can't live there alone. and she said yes on the third try. that was the third try he did that. the house is originally a 1931, so the floors, windows, all of those things -- while it is a big room for a living room, it is a small place to get married. the clintons had only 10 guests here for their wedding. is a small place to get married. the two of them, a couple of close friends and family, and that was it. very modest. one of our visitors' favorite things to see is the wedding dress.

this is a faithful replica of hillary's original wedding dress, designed and made by a little rock designer who was a longtime friend of the clintons. hillary bought this dress at her mother's insistence the night before the wedding. they pulled it off the rack for $53. one of the interesting things to note is at the time of their marriage, hillary decided to keep her name and be called hillary rodham, which would have been pretty unusual for 1975 in arkansas and really anywhere. both of their mothers had hoped she would change her name to clinton, but she stayed rodham, and bill was very happy about that. when they came to fayetteville they had just graduated from yale law school, but they were just a young couple like some many others. they didn't have any money. they didn't really have any

furniture. they were just getting started in life, and their lives were very busy with a lot of political activity, lots of friends, traveling back and forth to little rock and doing other kind of campaign things. they also traveled a lot in those years, so they didn't have a lot of money, but they spent a lot of time building networks and friendships. the urge to participate in public service began very early for both. hillary was involved in a lot of political movements and campaigns, and her graduation address at wellesley got a lot of attention. it was fairly radical for the time. bill got the idea to be a political animal from his high school years, and met president kennedy before he was assassinated.

he was involved in a lot of democratic initiatives all across the country, a lot of campaigns, worked hard for mcgovern, for frankel, for j. william fulbright. he always knew this was going to be the path he was going to take, and he gained a lot of experience before running for office himself. before the clintons were married and bill was living east of town, he decided he would run for congress. he talked it over with the dean of the law school, who gave him his blessing and promised his support, and he had decided to run against john paul hammerschmidt. he had actually asked several other people to run against hammerschmidt, a very popular republican in the third district, and nobody else wanted to do it. they wanted to run for other things, and he finally decided maybe it should be him. everyone thought he was fighting a losing battle, and he knew it,

but he said he didn't think it would hurt his future chances with other offices. he lost to hammerschmidt, but by only about 6000 votes, which was pretty remarkable for a newcomer against a very broad republican district. he often says that losing that congressional election enabled him to go to the white house. if he had won the election for congress he would have gone to washington and stay there, but his decision to stay in arkansas, be the governor, eventually led to his bid for the white house. one of the fun things about the dining room, where most people would use it as the dining room, the clintons used it as campaign headquarters. bill had decided to run for attorney general two years after losing to john paul hammerschmidt. he had two primary contenders in the democratic primary.

he won quite handily, actually, in the primary race and did not have a contender in the general election. so he is running his northwest arkansas part of the attorney general's campaign from here in the dining room. because he didn't have a general election opponent, he was able to work on behalf of jimmy carter in 1976, and he was carter's arkansas chair. carter won 65% of the arkansas vote that year. during the time he was running the arkansas carter campaign, hillary actually went to indiana and ran the carter campaign there and helped set up campaign offices and things like that. their lives were very much about political campaigns and working on behalf of democrats across the country. bill became the attorney general rather easily in 1976, and two years later would become the country's youngest governor in

1978. when bill and hillary were married, hillary kept her maiden name rodham would have been unusual in 1975 across the country. she really kept her look. she wore glasses and no makeup and natural hair, that kind of thing. after bill lost his second term as governor in 1980, the two of them really regrouped, and you see at the beginning of the 1980's her transformation and his transformation politically, thinking about what the people needed most, and her transformation into what arkansas would have considered an appropriate first lady. she changed her hair, started wearing contacts, started wearing makeup. you see the clothes change a lot. it is very apparent in the early 1980's, and then in 1982, clinton ran for governor again

and he won, so he was able to go back to the governor's office and had this new first lady with him. the clinton house museum is really the great american story, like so many others. it is a great example of the best of american ideals. people can start from nowhere and work hard and engage in public service, and they can do what it is they set their mind to. when you get a chance to spend time in the same place that other people have lived, you get to absorb some of that energy and think about how people got started in their lives and where they would later end up. our visitors really love that idea. they like standing in this place where these two powerful people, really smart people, spent the early days plotting out their life's course in a house like this.

>> you can watch this and other programs on the history of communities across the country at c-span.org/citiestour. this american history tv only on c-span3. eastern, night at 8:00 historian john furling talks jefferson, pain, munro and the struggle against the old order in america and europe. back andy could come see america today and see that the most important play on broadway now and for the past several years is a play that lionize his alexander hamilton and vilifies jefferson and sees theayne and knowledge division of wealth in the united states and the amount of money in american politics

or fearhey would see that many of these things that are going on in the united states today bore an uncanny resemblance to the england that they had revolted against. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q&a. >> lectures in history, rutgers university professor jefferson decker teaches a class on the history of the environmental movement and laws in litigation having to do with natural resources. he describes the relationship between private property and government regulation. it explores who is legally allowed to represent environmental interests in court. his class is about an hour. >> today, we're going to do a class on environmental law and litigation in the united states. i'm not going to cover everything there is to say about the subject, could be an entire

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