c-span is touring cities across the country exploring american history. visit toook at our texas. you are watching american history tv all weekend every weekend on c-span three. >> we all know that our grandmother loved taking pictures. we saw the scrap she would keep -- the scrapbook she would keep of pictures of all of us. i didn't realize how much she kept from her entire life until i was starting research for my book and i was able to go down to college station and they have the archives there. my co-author would walk in and mary finch who works at the library was like, where do you want to start. she opens the door and it is millions of different scrapbooks. books and tapes and videos and things. we only have a day and a half. we started in her scrapbook.

my grandmother had kept scrapbooks from every part of their life together. >> while at the george h.w. bush library and museum, director warren finch showed us one of many scrapbooks containing mementos from their life together. >> we are here in the research room. we are going to take a look at 120 scrapbooks that misses bush -- mrs. bush began keeping shortly after she and president bush became engaged. she was an avid scrapbook or and documented their entire history avid scrapbooker and documented their entire history and his political history and their lives together for their entire marriage. this one is from 1944 and 1945i believe. misses bush his granddaughter

-- mrs. bush his granddaughter was doing a book on the president and misses bush. half -- mrs. bush. and she was using the scrapbooks as a resource for that book. one of the things she found because it was sitting inside this envelope was what we think is a scrapbook from their first thanksgiving. she has the guests that were there and what kind of funny is she even has the one guest who couldn't come because he got sick. this is the kind of stuff she kept. pictures of him. baseball scorecards. she annotated it all in her own handwriting. she was so much in love with him

that she wanted to document their life together. the children, the grandchildren as time went on. at some point she stopped the scrapbooks. but then she had a digital camera and she would send us digital photos and all the backup with the photos. if she was at a dinner she would take a lot of pictures and send us the invitation and the program, the menu from the dinner. at some point i think someone said that from an archival standpoint, gluing the pictures in the scrapbooks wasn't the greatest idea. it's hard to get them out for preservation purposes. they are a great resource. we did the museum about 12 years ago because we discovered all these great artifacts and we said, we've got to use them. i told misses bush, thanks for the scrapbooks.

we are going to put this stuff in the museum. a lot of the photos and stories are from her scrapbooks. she's a big part of the museum also. >> our cities tour staff learned about bryan and college station as we -- station. you are watching american all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. >> american history tv is on c-span3 every weekend and all of our programs are archived on our website. you can watch lectures in college classrooms, historic foot -- historic sites, and see of upcoming programs. next features up

yale university history and studies professor joanne freeman , editor of "the essential hamilton." morning. i'm a professor of history at the university of central florida and a proud member of the board of the national council for history education. i trust all of you are doing well and keeping safe. these are very strange times. even for historians who have a long-term sense of history, thank you for joining us today. it is my pleasure to introduce speaker, historian joanne freeman. dr. freeman is a professor of history at yale university.