he talks about how early films glorified the lost cause. and how if idea of the white savior is often stilt central to the narrative. tonight atcal p.m. eastern. enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span3. >> up next on american history tv, representatives from thomas jefferson's mont shello, james monroe's highland, and james madison's montpellier depict slavery at the presidential plantations. >> hi, good afternoon, everybody. i want to welcome everyone to this afternoon's panel, public history and public memory, talking about slavery at

presentation plantations. i'm jennifer morgan, a professor of history at new york university where i work on colonial histories of enslaved people. i am very excited to be part this afternoon's conversation. though my role here is primarily to facilitate and to learn. the presenters here have all spent their careers working in public history and have been at the front lines of important efforts to situate the presidential plantations back into the history of slavery or to situate slavery back into the history of the presidential plantations. i am not entirely sure -- i went back and forth on how to say that. i am not entirely sure which is the right way to say it. but what i think is the crucial thing to say is that we are considering the prophecies that erased the obvious location of the enslaved in the histories of the presidencies. and everyone here on this panel and many of you in the audience are involved in efforts that precisely do not assume that

slavery is some sort of addition or add-on to the presidential histories, but, rather, that the two are inexstrippable. to that end i am really excited to hear each of this afternoon's speakers talk about the work they are undergoing at the presidential plantations. i am going to introduce all of them to you now in the order in custom they will speak. we had planned the presentations to allow for significant time at the end for the panelists to both engage each other and the audience to ask questions. so first we are going to hear -- oh, we switched it around so many times. first, we are going to hear from nancy sttz from james monroe's highland. she hires and trains new interpreters, coordinates school and gun tours and managing public programming. she created a slavery at

highland program, and provides training to equip staff with the ability to interpret slavery at highland through primary resources and individual biographies. prior to her work there, she served as volunteer coordinator at the impeer center for the arts and science and as a tour supervisor and interpreter at monticello. she as a bs in middle grades education and ba from appalachian state university. next we will hear from brandon billiard. he has been with the thomas jefferson foundation since 2010. for the past eight years he spent most of his time in front line interpretation. he also studies anthropology at the university of west virginia. i believe he's lass bartender of some renown, has a bit of a cult following, according to my sources. christian cotz is director of education and visitor engagement at james madison's montpelier

where he began in 2000 as the student education coordinator. he everysee as staff of approximately 50 interpreters and habitat forefront of montpelier's efforts to build and maintain relationships with descend nts from the montpelier community. so, please join me in welcoming them, and we will start with nancy. thank you. [ applause ] >> all right. well, i'm really glad to be here with you all today. it is my first ahaa conference. i wanted to give you kind of a sense of where we are at highland. i had the good fortune of starting my position four years ago when your executive director

was at the beginning phases of her research which would eventually reveal a whole different house the monroes lived in and help us depict the structure of their house. when we first started we were ash lawn highnd. we thought we had monroe's original house. now here highland, monroe's original name. and now we have a guest house and more arc dwrolg do. which is fun. to give you a sense of how do we interpret slavery at highland. it is required on the guided tour that guides mention slavery on a national context as well as individual slaves by name. we have a slavery at highland drop in station on fridays and saturdays where you can see an interpreter in action there. they have a table full of primary resources and guests can come and engage as long or short a time as they wish. we attempted to have a formal walking tour and found the guests didn't have the time budgeted.

by switching to a drop in situation we were able to multiply our engage men, which we were really happy about. we also interpret slavery on the property just through the structures that are there. behind me you can see a reconstructed slave quarter that was done in the 1980s. here's another angle of that flanked by an original 1821 overseer house on the left and an original monroe smoke house on the right for kind of a service yard area. highland was, at its height a 3500 acre plantation right next to thomas jefferson's monticello. their property does still border, even today in 2018. you see a lot of green space there. there is that line of buildings you saw ier. i think this is also kind of symbolic of everything we still have left to discover at highland. we are very much in the infancy of archaeological efforts there. we know from monroe's letters,

from advertisements, there are a more buildings at highland, a blacksmith's shop a grist mill a saw mill. lots more slave quarters and a slave cemetery we have not found yet. my boss would say that's an opportunity rather than a challenge for us to find. stay tuned. we hope to be making those discoveries. we know from the 1810 census we copture the snapshot where you see monroe's name highlighted there is 49. a lot of times we are trying to size up and compare what were the similarities and differences between highland and monticello. highland was on the smaller tied but monroe is funny in terms of numbers. when you look at his numbers, one thing that stood out the me is when he writes about how many slaves he had you see at love approximate numbers, about 30, between 30 and 40, a sufficient

number, he says, about 6 or 70. i think some of this comes from the fact that he is largely an abt tenantee owner of highland. most of his political career he was living abroad or in different cities in the united states. he is relying more on his overseers for that day to day information. another way i think highland is different or unique is that these are not init had slaves that are living here. we see when monroe is 16, in his father's will he inherits his first slave, a negro by, ralph, and my colt and saddle. for the rest of his life he is actively buying and selling slaves which would very much add an uncertainty to being a clav at highland. one of our colleagueses charted monroes properties.

he owns highland, the piece of property university of virginia is built on. and oak hill. we try to give the maka takeaway of being a slave at highland as uncertainty. monroe is gone, there is multiple properties, and he is always buying and selling. one thing we did become more certain of with our the 016 announcement that we had found the foundations of the monroes' original house is that the tree ring dating informed us this white vur with the porch was actually an 1818 guest house built 19 years after monroe's original house, not the original house thought to be. what's better and infrms our knowledge about slavery when you looks at the writtenrd you can see monroe mentioning when he is updating his son-in-law in 1818 when the house is built he says

this is done by a carpenter i bought for $450 in george. we now know who built that, two enslaved men. that's our interpretation, a guest house built by peter and george. if you look at the paperwork you can determine who the carpenter was, it turns out to be peter. in the yellow rectangle, peter mallory carpenter. then we see a george later on down in the inventory. we can piece together that monroe brought these two men down to build this guest house structure for him. one way we would really like to, and are excited about interpreting slavery at highland is through augmented reality, which will be coming soon. and we wanted to really people visually the landscape through this tour and to give you a sense, it is kind of split.

part of it is centered in the year 1819, during monroe's presidency. since that 1818 guest house is part of the scenery, we wanted to make sure it was year after it was built so that it made sense in the landscape. but we wanted to make sure that it was revealed how that guest house was built through the enslaved since we know it was through enslaved carpenters. several of the scenes set in 1819 do involve frgs cans between slaves on the property. that became an interesting process through our team of working to create this of who do you select to be slaves? and what should they be talking about? had he we looked at the historic record we wanted to choose people that would have been in that historic core, would have been probably seen the guest house being built and been aware of it. is he we found that monroe had a cook named hannah. in 1796 she's a young mother with three small boys. fast forward a little over 20 years. she's probably approaching 50 by

1819 when the tour is set. we also selected for her to be speaking with a blacksmith named nelson because he could have potentially had a role in that guest house of blackity soming perhaps accessories for the shutters or something. so you see his name hilighted, nelson, a blacksmith. he's a young man at that point. i also wanted to point out with hannah we recently found a document where it is an inventory of items man row is happying madison will buy from him and mentioning a soup spoon currently with hannah. that expressed to me she would be a person of importance around the property. and i am going to give you two sneak peek previews from our augmented reality tour of these conversations between the enslaved. the first is going to be a conversation between nelson and hannah where they will be talking about how they remember

peter and george being down here and kind of wondering what was gone on with them. >> i wonder how peter and george are doing back at oak hill. when mr. monroe brought them down from loudoun county last summer to build this house all they talked about was missing their wives. it was so hard for them to be apart. and never know when and for how long they can stay in the same place. i know they are glad to be back together. >> i wanted to really just underscore the fact that separating families would have been something that was no doubt not missed by the enslaved community of noticing that that was happening. then there is a second one i will show you. hannah then will go into a room and have a conversation with an enslaved spinner. we purposely hose not to give her a name just to really represent the many unnamed by their masters slaves in american

his free and kind of irony and paradox is that monroe is one of those classic examples of a plantation in virginia where grain is the pramary export, but it just can't keep up with the cotton revolution that's coming. in the earlier seen you could see monroe talking about how highland is not making the profit it should. so they are talking about the fear that monroe may sell highland. he does do this. and i ronically they are sold to a cot on plantation in florida. we see that fear becomes real and what actually happened nine years later. >> you have to move it to the next slide. >> all i know is wool, washing, car again, spinning, weaving. here the women and the men have terrible conditions in those cotton field down south, and it's a lot rougher than here. lord, i hope mr. monroe does not

sell us south. it is worry enough never knowing when he is going to rent you out or send you off to oak hill on one of his projects. >> hush, i hear someone coming. >> just in case it's not obvious when you do take the tour you will see these scenes on an actual background. it won't be black like that. we chose intentionally to do illustrations instead of having live actors. we thought that allowed for more scope for the imagination. whereas when you see an actor you he no you are working with an actor. whereas you can let your mind explore with the illustrations. we are eager to have you visit highland this year and we will take any questions following all the presentations. [ applause ]

>> something that i omitted from my bionotes is that i also have a degree in philosophy which i got 12 years ago which is why i was a bartender for 20 years. i don't know how jennifer heard that i was a bartender. i thought that joke would go over well in an academic room. you know what i am talking about. the philosophy firm is never hiring. i found myself at monticello eight years ago now. i spent many of those years just interpreting, i was bar tending in the evenings and working as a tour guide during the days. i have talked to literally thousands of people from all over the world about the institution of slavery and that that means and thomas jefferson and mont carmelo.

-- monticello. the differences between memory and history are not the same thing. the average visitor to monticello is not thinking about that difference. it says nothing about your intellect. but it means if you were trained in engineering the last history course you took was in high school. i am sure most of you were good in that class but that probably isn't the case for mathematically minded people. it is just another class to go through. monticello is a beautiful place. we have operated tours for the public since 1923. in the century since we have been offering tours we have changed a lot. the message has changed a lot. and the tour has changed. i think something that jen said early in the introduction here in terms of the processes that erased slavery, you know, when people do visit a presidential home they are there for a very

specific reason often which is about this idea of heritage, the idea of memory and what that means as an identity as americans. ilike to show this picture when i talk about thomas jefferson because i think it underscores the point. we talk about not putting historical figures up on a pedestal, instead of celebrating memory we want the talk about history as a nuanced idea. but that's the biggest pedestal i have ever seen, right? and we can get into a conversation about how we have blasted four dead guys on the most sacred site for american indians in the west, but when you are having a conversation at monticello talking about washington, and his idea to create america, it is hard to transfer into slavery.

here a slavery sculpture. having conversations with folks at monticello we have a of the hoff interesting conversations. some people understand the institution. they want to get into the deputies of jefferson's involvement, they want to talk about the individuals who were enslave there had and what their lives were like. and some people come to monticello and they don't know if they are at thomas jefferson's house or thomas edison's house. they haven't studied in a long time. but most of it, they see a beautiful botanical garden on a beautiful landscape and it is hard to imagine that as a living breathe plontdation where people were held in bondage. over the last if you years we started talking about slavery more.

we started offering slavery tours in 1993. we started archaeological excavations specifically focused on slavery in the 1950s. it has been in process for a very long time. in the 1980s slavery about the same time part of the exhibitions and in the '90s as part of the interpretation, and that's changed over the years as well. to understand thomas jefferson better we have to understand the institution of slavery and the lives of people he held in bondage with which he was so entangled. this is a road that runs down monticello next to the house. this was taken maybe five years ago. you can see the beauty of the mulberry trees. this was a vibrant street. many buildings were up and down it. it was dynamic in jefferson's

life. but he held 600, 700 people in bondage. buildings up and down this row primarily served as industrial centers. there was a black submit's as soon as possible, a nailery. one of the first restorations took place in 2014. and this building is a store house for iron. beyond it there would have been a nail had been making shop but it was only there for a couple of years. so there have been lots of conversations about what to build, and how. as it changed so much over time, you can't rebuild every building. which buildings are going to be most representative to what life was like? we have learned a little bit about that as we go. this is the inside of a building that was further up. this was interpreted as a gnome for two people enslaved at monticello. i am sure the hemmings' name is familiar to many of those in

this home. he was a head carpenter and his wife was the nursemaid. they lived in a small house. he noticed after building that that lots and lots of people had an interesting reaction. we could hear it with our guests. they would come out and say it is not so bad. on tours we would have guests say, my great grand father lived in something worse than that. the complication there is obvious, which is thomas everyson took care of his i have been slas, which is sometimes stated directly to you. so we had conversations about this. we can't get every visitor on tour to engage in a dialogue about this. now inside a sign in big red letters, not so bad, question mark. and then it discusses whennor children can be sold for you it doesn't matter what kind of

house you live in. it is a conversation we have worked on. in my role as manager of special roles the primary role that i engage in is to help our guides develop ways to talk with visitors about the ideas of slavery and what it means to people how are processing through it sometimes for the first time. so you have a really interesting conversation. the best ones are when everybody talks to each other and the guide just gets to stand there and say, that's interesting. so the big thing that we are about to engage in -- and we have been on this multiyear project of restoring the landscape of slavery at monticello. and we are coming into the final big push. this is the south terrace wing, which is one of the wings off the side of the main house at monticello. it is an old picture, but it shows the way it has been discussed for many years. these are small rooms. there is a kitchen, there is a

smoke house, and two rooms that were servants quarters. servants quarters is what jefferson called them. and when the thomas jefferson foundation opened in 1923, when virginia was still a seg bratted state it should surprise nobody in this room that conversations about race and slavery were not paramount. so the decision was made in the 1940s to build public rest rooms in two of those spaces. that takes a lot of time and money, the removal of that began just this past year. you can see the restoration of some of those sites here. this is again in 1904s when there is an original structure there. that building is the oldest standing structure on the monticello mountain. that's the small building where thomas jefferson moved in 1772 with his young wife just after they got married. and below it it was a slave quarter, the original kitchen. that was the men's room for years and years. now it's not.

and it's an empty space. we are hoping to open it in june of this year, fully restored with more of a conversation about slavery. one of the things that we found that was most surprising that was the base of a stew stove. when jefferson had this area remodeled he had it backfilled which means there was about this much dir from the 1770s piled on cop of a base we didn't know existed. that would have been used by james hennings. he took hiss him to paris and he learned the art of french cuisine. it was big fine. we are going to leave that exposed so we can talk about jims enhadding. he could read and write in two languages. he was invited to be a chef at the white house you about declined because thomas jefferson did to the ask him himself and then who took his own life. we don't know why. but it shows us what it was like to operate in the worlds of

white and black. jefferson's original diagram for that wing. our plan for what it is going to look like when it is open. the two rooms i want to talk about are in the center. in over the past 25 years, interviewed over 200 descendants of people who were enslaved at monticello. those interviews are available online. just google monticello and you can hear some of the oral histories of people who were descended from those who were enslaved by jefferson and his family. that project is ongoing. the director is also in this room. so it's something that helps us engage with a very important and invested community into how we talk about slavery, and we are in constant communication with descendants of the enslaved community of monticello to talk about how best to work on these things. that will be an exhibit space. it will be a pretty standard museum exhibit space with panels

on the walls and probably some digital stuff so you can go in and learn. the room next door would be sally hemmings' room. probably the biggest change is when the thomas jefferson said we believe thomas jefferson is the father of sally hemmings' children. as the research got bigger and bigger and deeper and deeper, it got to a point where it was fairly difficult to deny that thomas jefferson was the father of sally hemmings' children. notice i did not say impossible, because people still do, but most academic historians do not. one of the lines i use to talk about this is thomas jefferson was the father of sally hemmings' children more than there is evidence that he is the father of his wife's children, which is true. so we're going to have a conversation about that. we're going to have a conversation about her living in this small quarter with her children with thomas jefferson. and, of course, people now, they don't really want to argue so

much about whether the relationship happened. they want to know what it was like. did they love each other? was it rape? did they love each other and was it rape? so we're hoping to allow for that conversation and to provide a space where people can really think about those things and talk with each other and with us about them. we're probably not going to provide answers. we can't do that. and saying specifically that we know it was one way or the other, that denies sally hemmings the exact same agency she was denied in life. we don't know how she felt. so the entire plantation is a big place, and it was 5,000 acres, almost eight square miles. today we own about half of that, and a lot of it is opened up to the public for various reasons. but this big effort is to restore the idea of what monticello was as a plantation so that people don't come in and have this reinforcement of an idea that slavery is this idyllic, pastoral thing that

you see whenever hollywood portrays slavery. there's this anti-bellum slavery of the deep south. it's something that existed but very different than what west virginia slavery looked like. people were not separated from each other in the way we've developed in our minds through public memory. our goal is to make sure if you come to monticello, no matter what tour you take, you're going to have a conversation about slavery, you're going to have a conversation about what lives were like for the people who lived there and how they were entwined with each other. we focus on agency, we focus on telling the individual stories. one of the things nancy said was monroe's numbers were approximate. with thomas jefferson, we have the opposite, right? we have thomas jefferson counting the shovelfuls of dirt it took to bury his friend's body. come on, y'all, that's creepy. that's real specific. thomas jefferson was a man really focused on precision.

we know a lot about the people who were enslaved there and we know it not only from his records but from their own oral histories, their own records, their primary documents, archeology and just ongoing history that teaches us more and more about it. so we want to focus on those stories. we want to tell about the lives of the people who suffered most here at monticello but whose lives really impacted american history and helped us understand who we are as a people. i want to close with one last thing. anybody know what that is? this has been a very strange year to live in charlottesville, virginia. and i will say that, yes, our focus is on individual agency, and yes, we are committed to telling the stories to recognize the agency of those who were denied it. but we're also committed to understanding the legacies of slavery and helping our guests understand that as well. one of the things i hear most often from people, we didn't invent slavery in america. that's true. we didn't. slavery didn't end with the emancipation proclamation. that's also true.

but slavery in america was different from slavery everywhere else in the world because of the way it was inextricably combined with the concept of race that was created at the same time. you want to talk about having a difficult nuanced conversation in 36 minutes where you have to talk about the declaration of independence, the beauty of the architecture and help your guests understand that race is a sociological bioconstruct and that our race is about developing hierarchies? i just did it in 30 seconds, folks. it can be done, it can be done. but these guys don't hear it and they have no idea. quite frankly, for some of them, it's not really their fault. i would ask this in closing. what can we do? as historians, what can we do to help challenge that? i think that what we're doing is important. and i think that telling these

stories and remembering slavery as something that is so integral to american history and understanding how that reinforces systemic racism today, that's our challenge. and hopefully it can make things like that become part of history as well. thanks. [ applause ] well, good afternoon. my name is christian cotz. i'm the director of education at james madison's monticello. i've been there for 17 years.

hopefully we all those montpelier is home of the co-author of the federalist papers. it was also home to his parents, siblings, grandparents, his beautiful bride dolly and to over six generations of enslaved african-americans who lived at montpelier of the slavery ownership which lasted about 10 years. montpelier is unique because we have the ability to track three centuries of american history. we have enslavement that ran through the 1820s through the 1840s. we have the restored montpelier

ka cabin of slaves which was built in 1910. we have restored it to that segregation look with the white and colored waiting rooms, and we have an active descendant community that works and advises us on our interpretation today. and throughout those centuries, it's really been the african-american community that has been the constant presence at montpelier. much more so than the madison family, right? the madison family, dolly sells the place in the 1840s, they have no kids and the madison family has never really come back in a meaningful way to montpelier. where the african-american community that lived there first in enslavement and later in semi forms of freedom are still around and still active at montpelier today. i want to tell you a little about what we've done the last 20 years which gets us to the

big project we just opened in june. the point here is that what we did, the exhibit that we opened in june would not have been possible without the 20 years that preceded it, okay? this is really important for historians to think about. you can't just get a chunk of money and have this big, meaningful exhibit. you have to put in your time with the community. so in 2000, or in 1999, rebecca gilmore coleman who is in the far right approached us about the falling-down cabin that was across the street from our main gate. in the 1980s when the national trust acquired montpelier, there were over 160 structures on the property, and the only ones we really knew much about were the montpelier main house which had 25,000 square feet added to it by the dupont family and the temple which sits right next to it, which was also madison

construction. everything else was late 19th century or 20th century buildings. we didn't much care about them and we didn't have the funds to care about them. so this was more than the 158 buildings that was falling down on the property. so rebecca comes and says, that was my great-grandfather's home. he was a montpelier slave and he built that during reconstruction, and i think you should restore it. we said, we agree with you. that's really cool. we did the research and we figured it out. that restoration took five years. that little cabin took five years because we had no money to do it, right? we would start and stop, start and stop. right after this opened, we started the reconstruction of the main house of montpelier. that took five years but we had $25 million to do it, right? and that really started this engagement with the descendant community. her family came out and participated in the archaeology under the cabin. she opened doors for us into the

orange county community. so we were meeting all these descendants who were coming to us with their stories and who wanted to be involved in montpelier. we had descendant reunions in 2001 and 2007. i don't have pictures because nobody had digital cameras back then. but in 2009, we met the family of paul jennings. paul was madison's enslaved man servant. paul was the guy who saved that picture of george washington when the british came with the torches to the white house. they met obama, and they got their photograph taken in front of the painting, which is really pretty cool. i did not get invited on that trip, unfortunately. we also started public archeology programs and we had those going for a while, but we really started making a concerted effort to bring the descendant community into those programs, right? so you have descendants of enslaved people digging on the sites where their ancestors lived, pulling objects out of the ground. the last people who touched

those objects were their ancestors. that's really cool, meaningful stuff. in 2014, the picture of everybody on the porch was an advisory committee meeting i put together to ask the descending community what else we should be doing in the current interpretation of montpelier, what would they like to see? we were at a turning point where we had completed a few products and we didn't know where we were going next and we wanted their opinions on it. the big thing that came out of that meeting was you had to restore the south yard. the south yard is those buildings we're going to see off the side of the mansion where the slaves who worked in the mansion for the madisons lived, kitchen, smokehouses and three quarters. and we had done archeology in those spaces between 2008 and 2011, these sort of exploratory excavations, because we didn't have the money to do complete excavations. and our director of archeology, matt reeves, said let's frame out the structures.

let's put these ghosted timber frame structures there. i said, matt, dumb idea. these are going to look like jungle gyms and the kids are going to be climbing all over them. he said, that's okay. that's exactly what happened, but he said, some donor is going to see this. they're going to say why didn't you finish those, and we'll say because we need the money to do the archaeology and build the cabins the way they should be. and i said, it's never going to happen. lo and behold, in november of 2014, david rubinstein came through with a $10 million gift to do just that, which is pretty amazing. i got to stand on the terrace of the mansion looking down at the south yard explaining matt's idea to him. i left out the part of giving his money to do it, but it must have been been a good idea. we took down all those structures that we had built and we started doing the archeology. as we did the archeology, it sort of moved slowly, right? so we did archeology, and we restored buildings. while these buildings are being

restored, archeology is being done on small buildings in the middle, on and on. right now there are four buildings that have been restored and two left to go, but the archeology is done. his gift was to finish the archeology, restore the six structures and then refurnish all the spaces in the mansion that had yet to be refurnished, okay? that included about a third of the rooms above stairs and the entire cellar level of the mansion and then the six new buildings in the south yard. and my job was to furnish those cellar spaces and the new six buildings and the south yard. and what we decided pretty immediately was that we could do a better job of telling more meaningful stories by not refurnishing those spaces in the traditional way, right? we knew we didn't want to have that exhibit about slavery that you see at so many plantations that revolves around hard labor

and poor living conditions, right? we wanted to tell more meaningful stories that pushed things into the present tense. so we came up with this idea, the exhibit title is "the mere distinction of color." it comes from a quote from james madison. i love this quote. madison does not talk in sound bites like other people, but at the constitutional convention he said, we have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time aground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man. okay. if you take the constitutional convention away and the data way and james madison's name away, you could really stop and ask yourself, when was that quotation spoken? we have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time aground of the most oppressive

dominion exercised by man over man. through our work with the descendant community, we knew that we needed to treat the stories of the enslaved with humanity and dignity. we wanted to attack it from a point of empathy, right? we wanted our visitors to think about shared universal experiences rather than hard work, right? none of us will ever know what it feels like to plow a 40-acre field. none of you will ever stand behind a mule and do that, unless you're really strange. but you know what it's like to be a mother or a father or a child or grandchild. you can imagine what it would be like to have those people taken away from you, right? those are concepts and

characterizations and experiences that people can relate to, okay? so we took photographs from the library of congress, and we sort of ghosted them on these glass panels, and we used projections of shadows on the walls that faded in and out that lent some idea of these universal experiences that we wanted people to think about, and there are little text blurbs with them that don't try to share somebody's biography, right? these aren't historical individuals that we're talking about in particular, right? but, rather, again, those universal concepts that people could relate to. so the woman in the middle who is nursing a child in the photo -- i don't know if you can see it. it says, i was a wife. i was separated. i was raped. i was afraid. i was hopeful. i was a survivor.

i was property. right? and all seven of these glass panels end with that phrase, i was property. you'll also notice there is no punctuation which was a really long conversation. that's how museum people are, right? so these images share these emotions, right? the shadows share the emotions. we also have these listening stations spread out through the exhibit where you can sit down and listen to the voices of the descendants. because we had this great community, we thought, why should we tell these stories in an academic or institutional voice that will feel cold and removed, right? why don't we let the descendants tell the stories of their ancestors? so we have this beautiful black and white photography that scrolls behind the words of people talking. i'll just play you a short clip of that. >> i think with montpelier, we're trying to look at addressing the people who were

here and providing as much dignity to their spirits and to their history as we can. it won't be fully restored. we know that. this is the step in the right direction to tell their story. their stories need to be told. they weren't invisible. they were someone's great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandfather. it's etched in their dna. they are us. >> she does talk in sound bites. she is a gold mine. as we recorded these people, these were not narrations. we asked people open-ended questions, they responded and then we edited them to make these recordings, which are really pretty cool. we also stenciled the 280 names of the known people enslaved at montpelier on the wall. this goes along with the vietnam war memorial. why is that so moving? because when you start to think about the slaves as individuals,

it's much more meaningful than it is when you're looking at them as a monolith. this happened to one person at a time. every person is somebody's child or somebody's parent. it makes a real difference. we also used photographs of our living descendant community in the south yard structures in the living quarters where their ancestors lived. so you walk into this quarter and you see a full-size picture of lee anthony or rebecca here. there are others. you see a text blurb about the historic family that lived there, and you push a button and you hear rebecca talk about the artifact in a glass case, which in this case is a piece of pencil and a writing slate. she talks about how important literacy was to her ancestors. her great-great-grandfather is

recorded as one of six african-americans in orange county who were literate. paul jennings' descendants, hugh and mary alexander and paul jennings in their family. joe mcgair is also part of it, and next to joe is this mosaic made up fragments out of brick shards that were excavated. and there underneath the kid is a full-sized brick that was excavated that has the fingerprint in it of an enslaved child who would have made that brick. in part of the cellar we also decided to tell this national story about slavery, right? how does montpelier fit into the nation's history? how does the plantation fit into the economic world? how does slavery fund these states? how does the wealth that slavery created ascend to the presidency or translate into the presidency?

how does that wealth or the people spouting the idealogy around slavery sort of get the stage in the 18th century? how do those ideas reach the national stage? and how do those ideas eventually translate into the constitution that madison created, right? our guy is the guy who created the constitution, and it protects slavery in like a half dozen different ways. we needed to call that out. we needed to acknowledge that. then we needed to acknowledge that slavery, even though it ends in 1865, the story doesn't end in 1865, right? it doesn't end when madison dies. it doesn't end when dolly sells everybody. it doesn't end with abe lincoln. this legacy of slavery continues today. brandon is going to say what do we do about this legacy of what

happened in charlottesville this summer? this tells you a little bit about what we're trying to do, and we did this before charlottesville happened. >> i think our problem as americans is that we actually hate history so we can't really connect the dots. what we love is nostalgia. we love to remember things exactly the way they didn't happen. and history itself is an indictment often. and people hate to be indicted. ♪♪ ♪♪ >> don't shoot him. don't shoot him. he has no weapon. he has no weapon. [ gunshots ] >> four black hands inside of one car with one hip-hop album,

ten decibels too loud, driving ten miles above the speed limit will always guarantee one pullover by two racist cops. >> when you're living constantly with the fear of going to jail because you fit the description or because you can't afford a lawyer. if i'm walking down the street picking up milk, i can be accosted, you know? that fills one with an intense amount of dread. >> the negro is still languished in the corners of american society and finds himself in exile in his own land. >> don't you put all our boys in jail and charge them with treason because you deserve to be charged with treason. because any time you force people to live that way, you deserve to be charged with

treason. you are guilty, not us. >> there are days when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. >> amazing grace. amazing grace. may god continue to shed his grace on the united states of america. >> i'd show you more but then it goes into the ray charles music, and we had to pay a lot of money for that and we're not allowed to show it on the screens. that video piece is about the legacies of slavery, and i showed you the middle, right? it starts with madison and the constitution and it goes to the 19th century and how slavery was so important to the economy of the nation. and after this bit it goes into a piece with rebecca gilmore coleman who talks about being three generations removed from

slavery at montpelier and what that means to her. she gets into conversations about rape in that monologue that she has. anyway, we used that as the sort of centerpiece of our opening in june of 2017 where there were over 900 mostly african-american faces under the tent in the backyard, right? and i am pretty sure i can guarantee you that's the first time there were ever that many african-american people at montpelier in its history. i think it speaks volumes about how building relationships and doing, you know, your due diligence really pays off in the end. [ applause ]

>> all right. well, thank you very much for these presentations. i guess i wanted to start by asking if listening to each other, you have thoughts or responses or questions for each other so that we could start there. we have a little more than a half hour for conversations. so let's start there and i have some questions, and then we'll open it up to the audience, so you all get ready. but are there things that occurred to you about the ways in which the projects -- one of the things that occurred to me was the project of interpreting must be very different based on the kind of support and the structure of each house and each site in ways that aren't visible to me. but as i'm listening to it, i'm wondering if there are ways that you think your jobs are different because you're at montpelier or you're at another

site? >> i'll start off. actually, i think we all benefit from the fact that we have really strong and courageous leadership at our sites that have not only allowed us to go to these places, but pushed us to go to these places, right? and who haven't backed down when we've been edgy or pushy. >> i would say the same. just an ongoing effort, you know, from the board to the donors to the leadership to everybody that's at monticello, it's been this constant push to try to talk more and more. further, the relationships we have with each other. so many of us are in this very small area in central virginia that we know each other pretty well. we didn't really have much of a preliminary conversation before this panel took place. it was like, okay, let's do that, you know? >> can you push the mic closer? >> how is that? better? >> one thing that's really unique about these sites is we all do a guide training together

once a year where we get all our staff together. i love it because that keeps the spirit of the friendship of our founders together. >> there is also a great barbecue place that's kind of centrally located and we get together there and talk about what's happening at the different sites. >> the best restaurant in charlottesville is actually in gordonsville. >> i have another thought and this directly relates to what kristin just said in answering the question i raised. first a comment, which is to say i've had the opportunity to say the exhibits of color twice now. i can't commend montpelier enough for what this has done in terms of raising the bar for this conversation, and that exhibit is incredible. it really does engage what we're trying to talk about in a way that is undeniable and not cult and not sterile. i think people really do respond to it, and maybe not always positively, but they definitely

respond to it. my question, christian, is if you would just talk us through a little bit of the process of the creation of the video, how that happened, and just thoughts that went into it. >> sure, yeah, the video -- we knew we wanted to do something about the legacy of slavery, and we really didn't know, you know, in the concept design, it was like, okay, that room is going to be the legacy of slavery. but we didn't really nail down what that meant. we came up with the idea of doing the multi-screen video show. so now we're going to do a multi-screen video show about the legacy of slavery, right? that could be a six-hour documentary, right? and we had 10 to 12 minutes that we thought we could realistically work with. so how do you boil down the legacy of slavery into ten minutes, right? that was pretty challenging. we beat our head against the wall about that for over a year, and we came up with ideas that we threw away, and we finally decided to bring in about 20 people from all across the country to a think tank, a three-day weekend. it was martin luther king weekend last year, actually.

we had academics, activists, artists who came and participated with us in this think tank. we filled a room of whiteboards with ideas that related to the legacy of slavery. and then the facilitator said, okay, this is great. erase everything but three ideas. which was so painful, right? it was like six hours of work gone. but what it did was it really narrowed it down for the filmmakers to come up with this sort of story line. as the weekend developed, the filmmakers kind of saw these different people engaging in conversation with us, and four of the participants of the weekend became the talking heads in the film. so you saw reggie talking, who is a spoken word artist in boston. it also includes rebecca, as i

said, ed ayres, the president emeritus of the university of virginia kind of kicks things off talking about the 18th and 19th century, and hasan jeffries from ohio state talks about issues of education and slavery and talks about how students today have this notion of slavery in the 18th and 19th century that is very disney-ish that he has to combat all the time. does that answer your question? >> yeah. >> one of the things, doug, that you said when you were talking as you talked about the different ways that visitors think about history and about memory and about why to visit a presidential home, what brings them there or to visit edison's home, for example. i wondered if each of you could talk a little bit about moments in which you feel that you had succeeded or failed to convey this different sense of history or this different reason for a person to visit a presidential home.

and i guess i'd like to hear a little more specificity about your interaction with visitors or your hopes, like what you -- when you have a moment where you say, oh, yeah, we got this right, or we're still struggling with this. >> we have those every day with a new exhibit, right? we put a lot of money and time and energy into training our staff because we knew that people would react to this exhibit very differently, right? it was not going to be what most people expected, and there were going to be very visceral reactions to it, both in a positive way and a negative way. we have people coming out of the exhibit bawling and they need a shoulder. they need somebody to talk to. they want to just -- they just want somebody to hear how moved they've been or how they've begun to think about things in a new light which is so amazing, right? that's when you know you nailed

it. then there are people who come out who are really pissed. they want somebody to yell at. they want somebody to vent to. and how do you train your staff to deal with that, right? basically, the answer is you provide somebody who will listen. not necessarily agree, but listen. anyway, that's really boiling it down. but we also kind of feel like we got it right when we see those reactions, right? because you're making people rethink their notions of history. your making people -- you're making them have a conflict in their own mind about the history they want to be true and the history they're being presented with with this museum. people believe what museums say for the most part, right? and they have this huge conflict with it, especially at the home of a president, of a founding father, of one of their guys, their history, the history that

they've related to so much for their entire lives. all of a sudden, that's totally being turned on its head and they have a really hard time with it. >> our department, which is the education and visitors program department at monticello, it's big, about 100 people, and we have core values that we adhere to or aspire to, i should say. they include unity of effort and visitor focus. so it's really about the guest. the third and final is provocative interpretation. we thought a lot about that as well, about those words, lots of conversations about words. but we really want our guests to think. it's about provoking thought. it's about the reflection on the car ride home. get the family back in the minivan and they're driving down the road, and they say, what about when they said blah, blah, blah? we see that most successfully when the visitor is processing on-site. we have a guest who will take a tour. then they'll come out and find somebody wearing a badge and

they'll say, hey, they said this. that shows us they're really thinking about it. or, is that true, because i read blah, blah, blah. at monticello, it often has to do with slavery, with jefferson and hemmings most frequently. on a personal basis, this stuff is hit or miss. i remember one tour in particular from the business school of darden uva. i was 20 minutes in. i was spitting gold. it was awesome. and a guy pulls me aside and says in a very thick accent, so thomas jefferson and abraham lincoln, they were friends? i said, i should have done more research on this group because none of them were from the united states. sometimes you miss easily and sometimes it goes very well. same thing christian said, i've had visitors, like an 80-year-old african-american woman cry and thank me. that feels like a win. i would say the same, when somebody says it's horrible the way you discuss slavery, when

someone is telling you that slavery is wrong, you've done right. >> well said. >> i would say on the upside for us, when we made the research announcement in 2016 that we had found the foundations of monroe's original house, one of the most absolutely wonderful things to come from that was a man posted on social media named george monroe, an african-american, that he was owned at highland. that was his ancestry. our director was able to make contact with him and he was able to introduce us more and more to his cousins. so when you share with a visitor that last week we met a slave descendant here, they get really excited that they're literally hearing living history right now, that we're making these connections. i'm envious of the decades and decades of research that you have, and i know we'll get there, but we're still very much in our infancy. but i'm inspired by looking at

all the pictures of who came to your opening. i would love for that to be our goal at highland, to make contact with that many descendants. on the down side, some may be familiar with monroe's support of the american colonization society, sometimes i could see guests taking that as monroe kind of trying to do something nice for the enslaved, and when you hear that, you're like, okay, we need to talk more about this. this is not the takeaway we want from that. but i would say, you know, our kind of burgeoning relationship with the highland descendants and where that will go will add an incredible depth and richness to where we're going, and i'm really excited to see what happens next. >> i have one more question and then i'll open it up, if you don't mind. one of the things -- this is a carryover from the earlier session. i was surprised to see what a big role the descendant community played at montpelier in moving this particular aspect

forward. and i wondered how the institutions navigate -- and i'm going to be blunt here, the race of the interpreters. so having the descendants as such an integral piece of the process of putting that exhibit together and having them really sort of there in the exhibit seems to be an incredibly powerful way of dealing with that. but i wondered if, at the other two sites, like how -- you know, are there african-american interpreters? are they folks who have a particular relationship to the site or are they professional historians? and what does that do to the dynamic, you think, of the visitors' experience or of the ability to be kind of open to this conversation about slavery? because it seems like what you did at montpelier, which i always want to say as montpelier as if i'm french, which i'm not.

it seems like what you did there was really just take that on. so how is that happening in the other sites? >> i do think that's a challenging question that we get a lot. it is true that of the hundred interpreters that i just mentioned, the most african-american interpreters we've ever had at one time, three. a couple latin american interpreters, a couple asian-american interpreters, and we're very keenly aware of that. of course, diversifying staff is a goal. it's an institutional goal, but so is diversifying the audience. so is diversifying interest. and i also think there is a part to it that people like us play as well. there have been many times when i've stood up to talk about slavery, and i'm sure you can tell from my accent that i'm not from new york, right? my ancestors were slave holders. i know that for a fact.

my grandfather's name was robert e. lee, literally. so somebody like me talking about slavery, it's a different voice. but sometimes certain people will listen to it and there is an audience that needs to be reached. but some people will not listen to me, because who am i to tell them about their history? so understanding the legacies -- i'm a southern white man. the privileges that i experienced in my life, the onus in my life is about slavery. would i like to see more african-american interpreters at monticello? absolutely, and i think that we will. but i also say, look around this conference, right? this is a conversation that we all have to have. and it's a conversation about academia, it's a conversation

about wealth, it's a conversation about systemic bias, it's a conversation about generational oppression. it's one we all have to recognize. we're working on it. >> i can't add anymore to what brandon said, but we're working on it too. [ applause ] >> so we need you to use the mic if you have a question. so come on up. >> we're on camera. >> this is more of a question for all y'all, but as someone who lives in the middle of harper's ferry and gettysburg, we have a lot of conversations about slavery when we have guests visit, especially when you're a volunteer and a young person giving the talk, and especially when you have an accent that most of them are not familiar with and they're from either the north or the deep south and not used to how we sound. we get a lot of people who seem to think that african-americans need to thank white people for the civil war and for freeing them and also a lot of people

who when descendants of slaves holders are brought into the conversation get really upset about the fact that possibly, like, the slave holders' descendants might feel attacked. it's a racist hodgepodge of kkk members, and how would approach that? >> that's a small question to start with. okay, thank you. >> i'll give a friend of mine some advertisement here. a guy named sean halifax from the charleston county parks department, the parks department just acquired a plantation down there called the mccloud plantation that they opened up as a historic site. sean had worked for the parks department, he was an interpreter. he got the role of putting this interpretation program together, and they decided to interpret the plantation from the point of view of the group of people who had lived there the longest, which was the enslaved community

and then the freed descendants of them. they don't talk about the white family at all. they just talk about the african-american families that were there. what sean did was cobble together ideas and chapters from a series of books that the aslh has put out about interpreting african-american history, interpreting slavery and interpreting difficult history. he took ideas from all those books and sort of developed a curriculum for interpreters called ethical interpretation. and he will come to your site for a small fee, sean halifax, and he will run your interpreters through this program. it's really great. you can do it in two days, you can do it in five days, you can put as much or as little into it as you want to. but it makes you think about your own internal biases and helps you unpack that a little bit, and then it makes you think about how your visitors are coming with those biases, right,

and how you, as an interpreter, don't have to agree with them or disagree with them. you just have to realize where they're coming from and start the conversation from that point, right? at some point you have to recognize you're never going to move some people, and maybe the best thing to do in that case is disengage and let them go away and be mad, and that's fine, right? but for everybody else, you have to sort of realize where you are in that relationship with your guests, where they're coming from and then walk the ball down the field as slowly as it takes. which is hard if you're under the gun of a 45-minute tour or something like that, right? there's no great answer to this. and this is something that the field of interpretation is wrangling with, you know, in the present day, right? so we're all working to find a solution to this, i think. >> thank you. >> i think we all just stand united in knowing that the presidents we interpret could

not have achieved what they achieved without slavery, so that's always a good fallback. >> thank you so much. >> hello, i'm from howard university. i've been doing work on montpelier and also monticello. i've never been in james monroe's plantation. but i ask myself -- and i think it is commendable what you are doing. i think that we can see the transformation that is going on in these two different sites. but i think that jennifer, she touched a point that i think is important on how much these communities that you call descendants, they are engaged in what is being done. then i have the impression that montpelier you are doing something different with this new exhibition. i recall when i was there the

last time, the cabins were not yet reconstructed that i think now they are. during the visit to the mansion, there was some work to be done with that. and i asked myself, what is being done, because the impression that i have in these spaces is that a visitor, most of them, i think that they are white visitors. there is a minority of african-americans who go there. and you can ask why, why african-americans they are also not hired to be interpreters, because they don't want to have a relation with this space, or because there are no efforts being made. but when you were talking about the dimensions, usually what i had an impression in two places, and mt. vernon is the same thing and mt. vernon is not even here, but the mansion is sort of a sacred space of the presidents where we don't talk about slavery inside the mansion. we talk about slavery outside,

and you don't talk about this inside. and i was impressed by what you are doing, for example, in montpelier in this exhibition that you used the term "rape." the last time i was in a conference about this issue, there was a descendant of jefferson and hemmings on the table, and she said that she doesn't like to use the word "rape," which is apparently what is being done in monticello. and i ask myself whether or not the stories are being incorporated inside mansions and whether or not i can go there and simply not see anything that you are showing me here. for example, i can visit the gardens, i can visit other places, other spaces inside the mansion, for example, and not hear anything about what you are doing. and one last example is, for example, what you do elsewhere? i don't know about monroe, but i know that the social media

accounts of monticello and montpelier, you are doing a nice job in showing issues related to slavery. but i know there is another house of a president that is mt. vernon, the social media account. it's how george washington was so nice with his slaves. and i think that all of this work of interpretation goes also beyond the spaces because there are people in this country who will never be able to go there, but they are able to visit your websites and perhaps follow you on facebook and twitter. thank you. >> thank you. >> i'll try and address some of that. the first thing, you're right. i mean, many, many visitors for many years, you come to monticello, you go, you buy the ticket, you take the house tour. in your head going to monticello is going to the house. you take a 45-minute tour, you go to mickey's tavern, you have a nice colonial lunch and drive back to where you're going.

that's a thing, right? we don't script our tours. every guide writes their own tour. you are required to say two things, that thomas jefferson was the father of sally hemmings' children, and that the levy family, the jewish family that bought the home, saved the home from destruction because of their interest in freedom. if i get through a tour and the guide has not mentioned the declaration of independence at all, we're going to have a talk, right? but the idea is that you have to talk about slavery. you have to. now, we don't script our tours. i can't watch every single tour. and all of those conversations we just had about heritage and identity and memory, remember that most of the people who are giving tours at these sites are wealthy enough to afford to work there. most of them are retired. most of them are white. most of them want to work there because they love, love, love their subjects. that's not true across the board, but it is true that we have to have a lot of

conversations about, okay, but you really got to talk about slavery. you really got to talk about it on tour. we think we're making progress. we think we're doing that. and one of the things we're very excited about at monticello is we're going to change the tour. so starting in 2018, once these rooms are done, you don't go to monticello unless you start by talking about slavery. every tour. every house tour. and that segregation of the ideas, it's a 20th century holdover. it's an early 20th century holdover. we're doing our best to break those barriers. we've been doing it at both institutions for a long time. we always talk about this with our guides, and i think we're making progress, but i think your observation is right. and this was mentioned at a session before, there was an op-ed that appeared in the "washington post" a few years ago, a woman named desiree melton who is a professor came to monticello, did not take a tour. walked around and said, this institution whitewashes history. i can absolutely see how she could say that. and i could see how an

african-american female academic might pass by this redneck guy wearing a tie and a blue uva blazer and not want to listen to what i have to say. there is a lot there about identity, understanding, full range of opportunity of the sites and hopefully we'll make more progress as we go forth. >> i would echo a lot of what brandon said. we also don't script our guides, and we are also thinking about changing around our house tour and we also insist that every room has something to do with slavery incorporated into the interpretation. >> i would just add that i did a mt. vernon tour, but -- so it was connected to a conference. and the guide in every room said, this is the kitchen. there were four enslaved women who worked in this room every time. and i asked her afterwards, i was like, are you giving this tour just to us because we're

here as slavery scholars? and she said, no, this is the tour that i give all the time. but it did make me wonder, so was it her? she was young and really, like, scrappy and excited, right, or was it something that the entire -- you know, that all the tour guides gave. something that was so impressive, she would say, the washingtons had this reputation for being amazing hosts, and that's because there were four enslaved women who worked upstairs and did all the laundry. she did it in every single room, but it seems like that has to happen, because the split between the house and the outbuildings is clearly a point of contention. but we have a lot of questions. >> i was going to say something. >> i'm sorry. >> i would like to say just in terms of highland, likewise, we don't have scripted tours. guides are required to talk about slavery as the main narrative.

because we still have a long way to go in terms of monroe's papers being transcribed, one of our strategy was to use a springboard to talk about slavery. we might not have the primary source to talk about a slave being in a specific room, but we do have the objects. instead of saying monroe's presidential china and talking about his presidency, how can you use that china to maybe springboard into the missouri compromise and what's the future slavery of america? that's one of our strategies. >> maybe we can do some short questions and take two at a time, okay? yes, thank you. >> the framers of the constitution were very articulate about rights of the individual and freedom and all that stuff and yet we had 600,000 or 700,000 people die in the civil war to free the slaves, but it wasn't necessary in europe. what's different? what's different about this place? >> you didn't have race-based

slavery in europe the way you see it in the americas. and it's not as central to the economy of europe. >> even though the money that's made in the americas, both north america, latin america and the caribbean, is crucial to fuelling the development of european national sovereignty and the wealth of european states. so while europeans didn't have race-based slavery in europe, they benefited tremendously from the existence of race-based slavery in the americas. >> i'm will levi. i'm from christopher newport university. my question had to do with education and interpretation as it pertains to kids essentially. over the last summer i worked at harpers ferry and i was -- part of my job was to teach middle schoolers about john brown and the anecdote oftentimes used was

john brown witnessing a slave being beaten brutally with a shovel and how that inspired him in his anti-slavery movement. i like to use that example because it instilled in their minds that you can't forget that slavery was a violent system and you have to not forget. the thing is i could also notice it wasn't so much effective on the older kind of more a the tick teenage, high school kid. in terms of presenting this to children, what kind of strategies or examples do you think are more effective? that's my question. >> well, christian used the term universal when talking about the color exhibit. i would talk about that. what can they relate to in their

own life. imagine your own parents being sent away to another place. those types of scenarios do well. >> she brought that up. nancy's husband is the student program director at montpelier. >> told you we were friends. >> what she described is a program he just created with students. that's what they do, focus on universal experiences that could go back and forth through the time periods. >> thank you. >> thank you very much. my name is ann bailey. i'm from binghamton university and i write about slavery. so interesting to hear the progress being made at all these sites. some of familiar with. it's great to see this. my question is similar to the question before wondering how you try to reach, or if you can reach, people beyond the visitors who come. it's hard to get to these spaces just financially for some people

in terms of how far away they are and so forth. i was thinking about a curriculum, k-12 curriculum and whether that's been bandied about as a potential idea for actually bringing that voice of the enslaved that you're trying to recover more into the mainstream. that's just one kind of quick question about that. also, curious whether or not you are thinking about reaching out to college students? i could see a number of our college students would be interested in internships and you could get maybe more minority college students interested if there was out reach in that respect. i don't think they realize these changes are happening. that's what i'm saying. i think they would be very excited to know they are. >> this is not my area. i hope i don't botch this. at monticello we do the monticello teacher institute. grade school teachers come and

spend a week there and work on projects and create a curriculum which is available online at the monticello classroom. it has a lot of different lesson plans that engage some of the conversations we're talking about. we've begun a program with digital field trips where we have a guide skype with the classrooms so students can ask what they're thinking about. that's been immediately very popular. it's brand new. it's working well. we're working on revamping our website. we'll see how that goes. just a lot of work that, you're absolutely right, we hope to push forward and keep working with it. as for the colleges, the most we've ever had is five african-american interpreters, they were all from the university of virginia.

you saying college students don't know what's going on. that to me is a loss. we know how important slavery is to all of us in discussions. if somebody can go and walk away and say we don't feel that come with having physical structures and they can only sort of show a certain snapshot. so how do you deal with that difficulty in showing a large chronology of time as it relates, and also the interplay between the throw locations being so close in virginia and the idea of slaves being mobile within those communities? >> i should clarify the augmented reality to our only

one is set in 1819, and probably because that helped us con dense a huge body of knowledge into what is about 20 minutes of the tour. that was kind of the reason behind that and also to make relevant monroe's presidency. tell me the other part of your question again? >> when you have certain structures, they portray a certain snapshot when the buildings may not have been all around at the same time or more buildings were added later, and so the visitor sort of get an image of it as it is today. >> static. >> yeah. how do you show the fluid chronology with a sort of static limitation? >> i think you all could probably speak to that with your app. >> one of the things we did year before last is we created an app that's available through android and iphone. it's just a free downloadable app that shows digital rendering and it gives chronology and it's

geolocated. as you walk along monticello, you can look at it, you can see where things were. they'll tell their ancestor stories. anybody can google that real quick, find it on the app store. it's real strength in doing exactly what you're saying and how it changed over time. >> we also had an outdoor audio tour that helped people with buildings that might have been there outside the interpretative period. we tracked montpelier back to 1886, and that's the period we chose to interpret. >> i think we have time for just one more question. >> yes, hello. my name is heather scarlett from kent state university in ohio.