on c-span3 or listen on the free cspan radio app. tonight, on american history tv, we kick off a night of programs about gerald r. ford with a tour of the 38th president's museum in michigan. learn about the life story of the college football player, world war ii navy veteran, lawyer, congressman, vice president and president from curator don holloway. that's 8:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv. there are hundreds of statues, paintings and sculptures throughout the u.s. capitol and unique highlights, including in the columns and corridors. next, on american history tv, penn state university history professor matthew restall talks about all visitors to the capitol experience the art and architecture, including the statue of freedom atop of capitol dome. he discusses how christopher

columbus, native americans and females are depicted. mr. restall is a fellow with both the library of congress and u.s. capitol historical society. this is about an hour. >> welcome to u.s. capitol lunch. it's great to see everyone here. our speaker today is a guy named matthew restall. i want to read his title. it's kind of ponderous. not like matthew. i don't want to leave anything out. he is the edwin earl sparks professor of latin american history and director of latin american studies at penn state. educated at oxford, ucla. published numerous books and articles on the spanish conquest. some of you might recognize his name and some of the themes he

will touch on from our last dome where he has an article on how montezuma keeps surrendering and its historical implications. from his various titles and the subjects of his books, you might infer correctly that he is not an art historian, per se. this is a chance for us to highlight how interdisciplinary, approaching capitol it is and allowing us to hear stories because of historians like matthew, it takes a village to tell the story of the capitol. he is publishing a book, it's going to be out next month. might be a nice christmas gift for people. he is a capitol fellow of ours.

we are honored to have him as one of our capitol fellows currently. he is a fine fellow in his own right as well. help me welcome matthew restall. [ applause ] >> thank you, chuck. picking up on what chuck just said, as i'm looking around the room, i'm guessing everybody here knows academics, professional scholars, we're supposed to stay in our cages, by which i mean our cages defined by our discipline in our field. mine is history, mexico and central america, colonial period. i'm not supposed to get out of my cage and wander around the zoo and go other people's cages. being here in d.c. and being a capitol fellow means i have a rare opportunity and a privilege to be able to do that. in august, i enjoyed the time i spent in the archives in the

capitol, where this paper comes from. it's a work this progress. i may be saying things that you already know. i'm hoping that most of what i'm saying are things that you already know but you have forgotten so it seems like it's new material. i also want to thank dr. michele cohen, the curator in the capitol. i don't see here in here. like chuck, her support and encouragement made all of this possible as well as the others who work in the curator's office. i have enough images to get us through about one every 45 seconds. i'm going to move fairly quickly through them. you have been warned that i'm not really an art historian. if you are particularly interested in something, make a note and i can go back at the end and maybe ask one of the art historians in the room to talk about it in the proper

terminology. albert ports, a scaffolding rigger who met the statue at the top of the capitol building. climbing up to give the bronze lady a bath, he would repeat the process countless times across the decades of his adult life. the intimacy of the experience put ideas in ports' head. year after year, he yearned to place his own lips on the statue's oversized bronze lips. he resisted. after all, they were both married and not to each other. for the statue's popular name, the one ports used to refer to her, was uncle sam's wife. in 1923, ports surrendered to impulse and delivered the kiss of which he had dreamed for so long.

but guilt consumed him. four years later, while scrubbing uncle sam's wife's face he fell to the balcony below, breaking an arm and a leg, ports was convinced the cause was her indignation over his adulterous liberties. only after confessing the entire story to a newspaper reporter in 1931 -- you can see that newspaper report right here -- did ports sense that absolution was at hand. evidence of the incident is in the records of the police. november 12, 1928, lieutenant clarence stimler -- if you see me waving fingers, it's to say

quote. some unknown person has broken a sword off of one of the figures for a souvenir from the rogers bronze's door. the lieutenant meant the bronze doors designed by randolph rogers, known as the columbus doors. the victim was possibly anando cores at the, but it was more likely the brother of the man represented inside and outside the building, christopher columbus. the lieutenant said he was soliciting information regards this trick and that he had a man preventing anyone from approaching the doors when the building is closed. today, of course, there is more than one man on guard to ensure

that no visitor can get close enough to the columbus doors to see cortez and colon let alone steal their swords. what are we to make of these anecdotes? how do they offer us a new way to approach a much studied building and its works of art? let me answer that question by way of william carlos williams. after visiting the capitol, the poet physician wrote a poem about it. first published in 1924, the poem was titled "it is a living coral." in his metaphor, the city is a sea, the capitol building an island in the sea and its art and architecture a coral that grows. the metaphor might be applied to any museum with an expanding collision. the capitol is not a museum. nor is it viewed as such by visitors.

therein lies another side to the coral metaphor, the one that struck me most but one with which williams was not concerned. he could not have known during the 20th century they would develop a field of study devoted to coral mortality. to understanding why and how the world's coral reefs have suffered catastrophic destruction as a result of human land use, fishing and tourism. as the human impulse upon visiting a coral reef is to break off a piece of coral to take home, so have visitors to the capitol been tempted to take a piece of it for a souvenir. those souvenirs have in rare cases been physical objects. or they have been memories of physical interactions with the art objects such as the kiss that ports shared with freedom. that physical component of the capitol human experience is the first outline in the next half hour. more often, the takeaway has

been in the realm of ideas, not objects. in the 21st century, thousands of visitors leave with a digital representation of themselves posing with a piece of the building or its art. selfies that fall into a space between objects and ideas, like a hologram of a piece of the capitol's coral. this is not the place to draw any depth upon reception theory. plus i don't understand it. that is the study of how readers and viewers respond to literature, art, cinema and so on. at the heart of reception studies, there's an idea that's very relevant here. the readers respond to a text based on their expectation or the framework they bring with them to the text. with respect to the capitol, visitors come to the building with a sense of proprietorship. a belief they own a share of it, of all that is in it and it tells them something about themselves or it reaffirms

something that they believed about themselves and their nationality. visitor response to, for example, the identity of the statue atop the dome or the meaning of the paintings in the rotunda is determined by the ideas about such imagery that visitors bring with them. the same applied to the historical events that are encapsulated and referenced in the art. the ideological reception of the art is the second topic i will briefly outline. my final section circles us back to freedom. whose true identity i shall suggest to you at the end of my talk. to arrive at freedom on time, i have selected one cluster, a complex one, of visual and historical themes. those are the usage of people and places from elsewhere in the americas, the representation of indigenous people in the capitol and the building's gendered

representation of the americas and its history. those are all vast topics. they are threaded together in the capitol in a way that i hope to show you offers visitors a simple takeaway. something almost as simple as a stolen kiss or stolen sword. that's not me. it's one of the conservators. somebody in the room might know who this is. you can see how tempting it is. right? part one, for a souvenir and that's a reference to a quote i read out a little while ago. the american sculptor horatio greenow complained in a letter to his brother that at that time -- statues had received injury in the few years they had been standing.

you will recognize this because it's in the museum of national history today. soon after, the discovery of america, in place in 1844, was placed on one of the blocks of the eastern front. you can see it in the distance on this 1846 picture. the space behind it was an ideal spot for ball games. shortly before his death in 1852 he grumbled that, i have seen several times boys play on the portico. he was right to worry about the discovery of america.

it is somewhat to the nation's discredit that time and exposure and neglect and vandalism after long years have mutilated in a degree the beauty of the work. among the various sculptures on the east front of the buildings, there were eyelids chips, hands broken off, grapes crushed, a nose was missing its tip and the blade of a short sword was broken. that theme again. due to exposure to the elements and to visitors, the garment that sways the indian girl has a moth-eaten look. from 1871 through to the 21st century, when the building was closed so, too, were the columbus doors. looking into the eastern part of the city accessible to any visitor climbing the steps on holiday or at night. the stolen sword in 1924 was hardly the first casualty.

a self-identified congressional wife wrote in january of 1899 in her diary, quote, last spring a policeman arrived just in time to save one of the high relief figures on the bronze doors of the rotunda from a headhunting savage from indiana. they were frequently suggest to the tugs of souvenir seekers. the chains around the wrists in the columbus in chains scene were missing for almost all of the 20th century. the art inside the building was almost as vulnerable. in the 1890s, father marquette featured indians to whom he was preaching. one had his bow stolen. another lost a finger. soldiers visiting grew rowdy, drink seems to have been involved. when they started stabbing at the artwork with their bayonets. they were thrown out of the building which was then closed to visitors for the rest of the

day with the columbus doors locked, which seems to be one of the few occasions in the history the great key was turned. the rotunda was host to a fair with a barrier put up to protect the paintings. it's extraordinary. it was winter. furnaces were set up to warm the space. by means of an impromptu flew, heat was there and caused discoloration and damage. bearers of a seed. the capitol's archives are full of reports reflecting the ways in which human beings have endangered the building and its art. i suspect the last five minutes if i pursued that topic in of the archives, there would be enough material for some book

length. i'm not sure if it would be that interesting. it would be interesting to me. in 1995, a congressional subcommittee on appropriations received a proposal designed to protect the building from visitors. because people, quote, wear down the steps, brush against the walls, end quote and generally prod, poke and pull at the artwork, an entrance fee should be charged suggested the heritage foundation. democrats in the house denounced the idea as indirect taxation typical of republican dishonesty, arguing the public saw itself as the proprietor of the capitol. quote, don't charge american families use fees to visit what belongs to them declared representative brown of ohio. democrat senators chimed in,

quote, does anybody really believe it's too old-fashion to think those who own a building ought not to have to pay an admission fee to tour it and enter it? lawmakers' sentiments were issued by visitors. i will give you a small sampling. they called touring the capitol, our privilege. we're not visitors. we are taxpayers. this is my house, said deb of new jersey. since we paid for the capitol, we deserve to be here. i pay enough admission every year already commented robin dill from california. we paid for the damn place. best of all, the reverend bassett found it detestable and in violation of, quote, the very concept, the very idea of america.

the notion of ownership of walking into my house is a thread that runs through two centuries of visitor responses. attached to that idea have been related sentiments of duty and patriotism. margaret leach wrote that visitors lingered on the east portico to admire the statues. it was not clear what they made of them, but they all paused to stare. in 1864, a union army officer wrote to his sister that the capitol is a fine affair and the paintings are magnificent. he was particularly taken by images of columbus as historical figures he recognized. their representation splendid. a century later, tom wicker, washington bureau chief for "the new york times," commented on the visitors he had seen year after year bringing their children to the capitol. they would take photographs in

front of the statues, seldom knowing who the figure was. his quote, the meanest of them know he was part of something and they are part of it, too. i have seen fat women in ridiculous tight shorts walking carefully around the hall and the capitol, peering at figures of men so obscure even historians would have to look them up. high school kids wearing confederate caps and popping gum, they are part of the same thing. secret sharers, bearers of a seed. what exactly is that seed? is it one of patriotism? there's no shortage of claims to that effect. we love our capitol wrote mary ames in 1874. not that it's perfect but because being faulty it is still great and worthy of our reverence. may belle pendergast told

californians in 1967 that a visit to the capitol will stir a new patriotism in you. the history of the united states becomes more than just words in a book. you can feel the red, white and blue in your veins. is the seed one of education? the capitol's art serving as a show and tell history lesson. again, there's no shortage of claims to that effect. for example, the official 1955 guide to the capitol stated that john trumble developed his talent and art for the purpose of leaving to the american people historically correct paintings of this struggle for liberty. visitors were reassured that the art was factual and historically correct. or third possibility is the seed a lesson in aesthetics through negative example?

greenow told his brother that, the ornamental department of capitol seems controlled by the demon of bad taste. in 1855, a review of the baptism of popocahontas. we don't live in a world where people make mild criticisms. columbus was tame, ill-arranged and destitute of atmosphere. as for discovery, quote, an abomination. a 1912 guide to washington's art treasures lamented how often one encountered the work of thomas crawford, the creator of freedom, who, quote, of light and shade and sculpture, he was apparently ignorant. a 1915 guide to the city described work in the capitol as

little short of horrible. in 1967, tom wicker thought it ought to be a federal crime. greenow, quick to deliver disdain, argued the masses noticed the ineptitude of those creating the capitol. does anyone fancy that the uninstructed multitude does not feel this? it's not so. later observers were not so convinced. alfred friendly, a reporter for "the washington post," joined a bus tour of capitol hill in 1966, noting visitors in the capitol seldom looked up unless directed to do so. no up lookers. overhead beauty missed. by the end of the 20th century, they wondered if the 4 million annual visitors grasped much meaning from its art. the capitol's paradox is this. it's an easy building to get

into. as i said, end of the 20th century. but it's a hard building to understand. reliable information about what the visitor sees, why it's important is fragmented and difficult for most people to obtain. visitors can find papers about the corridors which are lovely but hardly central to the importance of the capitol. what exactly was the building's meaning at the time? the senate historian at the time, dick baker -- he may still be historian. i should have googled him. i apologize. he lamented, if you ask a visitor the name of the building, while they're touring, in most cases they will say the white house. around the same time an english visitor summarized his impressions. when it comes to monuments and things like this, ours are a lot older but yours are bigger. in 1966, friendly concluded,

real purpose of washington's famous monuments suddenly apparent. backdrops for family pictures. anticipating the culture of smartphone selfies by half a century he asked, do tourists want to see anything or just want to have been seen at the site? there is where the seed bearers are most meaningfully found. for two centuries, visitors may have felt patriotic. they may have pondered issues of historical accuracy. they may have experienced what mark twain called after visiting the capitol, the delirium tremors of art. visitors have entered and exited with a sense of ownership. there's a national home therefor. it's not expected to be history book accurate. as ames put it in 1874, the capitol's defects endear it to

us. these are human. no matter how lonely an american citizen was, yet these historic statues and paintings, these marble corridors, the mighty dome are yours, the highest man in the nation owns nothing here which does not equally belong to you. the goddess of liberty, she called it that, gazing down from her shield bestows no right upon the lofty which she does not extend to the lowliest of her sons. third and final section. the very idea of america. all this suggests the horizon of expectations that visitors bring to the capitol is at best highly abstract. at worst, so vague and contradictory as to be almost meaningless. yet, the building is packed with very specific representations of historical moments and figures. what or who among those emerges

is potentially more meaningful or ors re res netanyahu with visitors. there have been close to 1,000 works of art in the capitol during its history. including items lost or stolen, destroyed in fires or transferred to other buildings. depending on how one counts an object -- for example, are the columbus doors one or nine or dozens? there have been roughly 700 for the past century. of these, about 40 depict non-u.s. individuals. that is, figures from the european and early latin american past such as the columbus brothers, cortez and

others. that's less than 6%. almost half of all those comprise or include columbus. beginning in 1827, sculpted and painted columbus grew. by 1912, just to show you that i'm not being snobbish about people using monuments for family pictures, those are my -- my oldest and youngest daughter. with the navigator, that you can see him twice, staring toeing t the capitol, there were close to 20 representations of columbus. today's tally is 15. roughly one in 50 pieces of art in the capitol feature columbus. until 1958, visitors walked past

the massive sculpture of columbus and until the opening of the capitol visitor center in 2008, through the columbus doors with their nine depictions of the navigator into the rotunda where columbus appears three more times. why columbus? in part, because he is not cortez. the american understanding of the spanish conquest was heavily influenced by protestant writers and between them compert whose books for children were best sellers in many languages. i may not have heard of him. he sold more books than more famous historians. to us today, these are books that aren't supposed to be for young adults. they are full of the most extraordinary violence that we

would never permit into children's books today. descriptions of sacrifices and so on. columbus was first published in english in 1799, the library of congress has a couple of copies. he called them explorers. opposed to idleness. a noble, manly explorer untarnished by massacres. columbus was an acceptable alternative. his vague national identity allowed him to be appropriated as an american. that is not an original statement by me, as you probably know. there's a literature of books about how columbus was invented in the 19th century, particularly in the united states and becomes turned into a

kind of american, as in u.s. rogers was expression the common opinion when he told montgomery miggs -- miggs is an important figure in the creation of the capitol. he was expressing the common opinion when he told miggs, columbus was second only to washington as the man, quote, most intimately connected with the history of the country. who better deserves a lasting monument to his memory? indeed, his reinvention as an american is so profound that even those in the capitol are rendered as columbus like. desoto discovering the mississippi in an echo of columbus's discovery of america. cortez peacefully accepting the surrender of montezuma.

here is a shameless plug for my book. nowhere in the book -- 600 pages long -- do i make that connection because it was only by spending time in the capitol and looking at the art did i realize that, wait, there's another way to understand who all these are. you have to understand how columbus is americanize and they are columbusized. as a side bar, i think a fascinating one, note that the substitution of columbus for cortez took place in the mexican embassy right here in d.c. this is the building that was the embassy through most of the 20th century is now the mexican cultural institute. the americanized is inserted into a mural. you can see where it is on the staircase. ahead of you the depiction of aztec. on the left, you can see a

figure of columbus. that allows you to see him where he is more clearly. that should be cortez approaching. you can see others behind him. you can see more clearly, including figures like -- the man with the red beard. any mexican knows instantly that the red bearded is alverado. it makes no sense that columbus is there. should be cortez. the same reasons i'm talking about with respect to the development of art in the capitol, he was substituted. however, all that is only part of the explanation to the phenomenon in the capitol. the rest of it lies in the parallel depiction of indigenous people who appear in roughly 50 artworks in the building. 7%. these are mostly from within

what became the united states. so historical figures but include some from latin america. as well as generic indians. that small percentage, that 7% is misleading, because it skewed down by the hundreds of portraits of politicians most of whom visitors walk past or no longer are allowed to see. furthermore, it's on the eastern front of the building and in the rotunda, the focal point of tours to the building. as of 1912, the fortunes of the american indians furnish a theme which recurs throughout the decorations of the capitol. east front and rotunda sculptures demonstrated what the coming of the new race was to mean for the old. for capitol visitors, columbus and indians have been inescapable as george washington, arguably more so.

those representations of indians fall into two main categories. either they display indigenous men engaging in acts of violence against europeans or euro-americans. good example is the relieves in the rotunda. or they show indigenous men and women welcoming the invaders in ways that openly accept them or passive. it was captured in the 1830s. as well as the impact on visitors. the comment on early indian portraits could apply to the century of representations of all indigenous peoples. they have, quote, but two sorts of expression. the one is that of noble and war-like daring. the other of a gentle and naive simplicity that has no mixture of folly in it but which is inexpressbly engaging and more touching, perhaps.

from 1844 to 1958, the same duality was presented to all visitors as they climbed the east front. in the controversial form of discovery on the left, you have seen this before and rescue. racist to 21st century eyes, these denounced from the start. survived everything from indignation by a visiting tribal chief to house resolutions in 1939 and 1941 calling for their removal or destruction. finally going into permanent storage in 1958. this duality, the two ways of presenting indigenous people had deep roots going back to columbus himself. when the indigenous people were placed into categories, into invented races, the noble

savages who accepted, embraced civilization and the barbarians who resisted. both are present here. across the americas for the next three centuries, those were reinforced by law regarding the enslavement of indians. those who toiled away peacefully could not be enslaved. those who resisted, could be branded and sold or slaughtered. in north america, that latter category was applied more than the former. the english were less interested than the spanish in creating kol anies that rely on the labor of indigenous converts. as is well-known, yet insufficiently discussed, in 19th century north america, indigenous people were displaced and virtually eliminated. the history reflected in the

sequencing of art in the capitol. thus, depictions of violent indian warriors come earlier with peaceful and passive indians predominant later in the century. for modern visitors, that is largely irrelevant as the two categories are experienced all at once. if you are standing in the rotunda looking around and take it all in. i suspect that visitors grasp that the violent indian is a figure from the distant past, historical, elusive, harmless, possibly even fictional. the passive indian is the more accessible, closer to the present, more suitable as a character in, say, a disney movie. the passive indian is most obviously represented by pocahontas, who appears three times in the rotunda. in all cases, she plays a role as the antidote to the violent indian.

snatched from the fangs to become lambs. in the phrases of a modern art historian, pocahontas is turned into a anglosized demure maiden, diminished. among the awkwardly posed male representatives of pocahontas in the painting, only her sister is court in the light and properly rendered. her passive pose on the ground, scantily clad, almost topless, ties her to larger depictions of indigenous women in the capitol, especially in the rotunda. other indigenous women are passive, prone, half naked, loosely sexualized. this brings us to a crucial piece of the puzzle.

the columbus area bifurcation of indigenous people into two categories was not intended as a division of men and women. over the centuries, the process of discovery, conquest and colonialization was gendered as male with indigenous could be female. this could take the form of how history was narrated. this is an 18th century engraving. that's cortez receiving the indigenous women who goes down in history as being his mistress but was actually a 12-year-old girl. as rromanticism telling, we hav the similar representation. how history was narrated or how the continent was presented.

here we are back to this 16th century image. the naked woman in the hammock is supposed to be america. i will come back to one of these. here are two 17th century representations of, again -- this is america. moving forward to the 19th century and into the capitol itself. columbus and the indian maiden, which i think is absolutely extraordinary and not often discussed piece of art. the only way it doesn't quite fit my argument is how for some reason they decided to portray the indian maiden not as really an indian at all. the clothing is completely wrong. it's a slightly later orientalization in terms of clothing, as opposed to the feathers.

nonetheless, there's a leer on his face which is only -- he gives us what he is really thinking in that way. this is an obscure but highly revealing example of the gendered, even sexualized nature of the phenomenon. the capitol is packed full of this. as befitting its neoclassical category. this view here on the right, as you look up at her, there's three more right in front of her. only one fits into a tradition that's so deeply and specifically rooted in how europeans and euro-americans have depicted and imagined america. that is as female, indigenous, wealthy and ripe for the taking. as captured in these images particularly this piece on the

left first published in london in the 1670s but much copied into the 19th century. it may not be familiar to you, but it would have been familiar to any semi-literate european or euro-american running all the way into the early 19th century, by that time it appears in multiple different variants. the origin of the feathered headdress atop freedom is well-known. at least that is the immediating or -- origin. it was jefferson davis' order to remove the liberty cap, deemed inappropriate by him for a nation where slavery was still legal. as secretary of war, davis oversaw work at the capitol but would become president of the confederacy. the liberty cap was replaced by,

quote, a bold arrangement of feathered suggested by the costume of indian tribes. in crawford's words, repeated right up to the official descriptions by the current curator's office. the deeper origin of the headdress is the role played by feathers for indian. going back to the 1490s. throughout the capitol, indigenous people are stereo typically marked by feathers, a symbol that functioned for five centuries. for that reason, i would suggest freedom has struggled her life to be recognized by her official name. newspaper reports on her as, quote, america's most misunderstood woman or one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted girls in the capitol have been regular. more often than being called what her creator dubbed her, or what the curator calls her, the

statue of freedom, her popular names have evoked her identity as female and indigenous. in my survey of newspapers, i came frequently upon miss liberty, miss freedom, the lonely lady and significantly, miss america. other names marked both her sex and her divinity. the seven ton goddess and on occasion across the decades she's been called the statue of liberty. they look related. crawford imagined the sword and olive branch were emblems the mass of our people will understand, the people would easily identify her as freedom triumphant. it would prove to be the feathers, not even part of the design when crawford wrote those words, rather than the emblems

of war and peace that would be meaningful to the masses. as "the washington post" explained in 1989, freedoms with a cross-eyed look. a very campy headdress and heavy robes. three decades earlier the statue, quote, wears a head gear described as a feathered headdress but as close range it more resembles a dead eagle wrote another reporter, the silly headdress looks more lick a chicken than an eagle. despite or perhaps part and parcel of such disdain, the statue's female indigenous identity was a thread. the indian goddess has been one of her names going back to the late 19th century. in 1939, "washington post" articles stated tourists commonly took the statue to be pocahontas, as well as a replica of the statue of liberty, miss america and various other things, end quote. the post stated in 1945 that because of those miscellaneous

feathers, most people speak of that indian on the dome. in fact, this is ironic, this is 1945, so ironic in view of the alignment of nations in the recently concluded world war, the post said, she's no indian, she's italian. the explanation for that is a footnote. i expect you all know. in 1961, a reporter for this week magazine polled locals and tourists walking in the capitol asking them the identity of the statue. none called her freedom. instead, guesses included, in reverse order of popularity, are you ready for this, dolly madison, betsy ross, columbus, queen isabella of spain, myles standish, paul revere, see san

b. anthony, joan of arc, sitting bull and the most popular guess, you would be able to get it, pocahontas. pocahontas. albert ports thought of her as mrs. uncle sam. most visitors apparently identify her as pocahontas. i suggest to you that since she was placed on the capitol's dome she has been popularly and widely understood in various, sometimes vague, sometimes particular ways as being america in female indian form. in two tiny fresco images hidden on the ceilings of meeting rooms in the capitol bramidi made the connection obvious. this one on the left is on the front cover of the spring 2014 capitol dome issue, by the way. visitors don't need to get special permission to see

america, as bramidi called both of these figures, the black and one obviously on the right and on the left you can see her -- you've seen enough now even if you didn't already know the things i had been talking about this morning, you can see her up there with her colored feathered head dress. you don't need to get the special admission to get into h 144 or s 127. her ornamental position at the very top of the capitol combined with the imagery of the artwork inside the building reinforces visitor expectations that the building, the whole capitol building, is a complex visual expression of history and power racialized and gendered. no wonder persico's discovery was hated, removed and hidden. it made it way too uncomfortably obvious that freedom is really america. thank you. [ applause ]

yes. >> very interesting lecture. thank you. can you talk about the depiction of other non-whites in the capitol building and how that's changed over the years and in particular whether there was any big change before and after the civil war? >> you mean slavery and depictions of african-americans -- >> and asians, yes. >> no. i can't. i could have a guy started to look into that and, you know, i have started this project in august in the archives and, as i started to look into that i realized that there was an entire whole separate topic there and that it has been studied and there were i found references to articles and so on. i'm not sure if there is a whole book on it.

when i began this project by thinking about writing just about the statue itself of freedom and just surprised to discover there is not a serious or even semi-serious entire book just about the statue but there's masses of material in the archives in the capitol building in the curated that would work for that. in that early version of this project there was a chapter just on that exact topic because i discovered, and this is material that if you pay close attention in your tour of the capitol building or you read the little plaques around any visitor would know this, that the statue of freedom when she was cast in bronze right up on the kind of borders of the district of columbia and baltimore that the work was done by slaves and that the timing of when the statue was created, not the original plaster model in rome, but the bronze one that was created here was such that it was right when

the war was happening when slavery was abolished. so there is a particular individual slave who some information is known about and in the archives i found sort of copies of primary source material relating to his -- not his selling, but his emancipation and his owner receiving a sum of money from the government in return for that emancipation and he was the guy who was in charge of the bronzing of the statue. so that's really ironic, right, because of jefferson davis saying, no, you have to take the liberty cap off because it's an emblem of slavery and by the time the statue was put on top of the dome slavery has been abolished. there are all kinds of nice ironies there. of course, i realize that people had spotted this before me and i think that if i was to be able -- if i had done for research and i could give you a fuller answer i would say that would be the beginning moment. that's the anecdote to begin that story and it is one to do

with kind of layers of irony and those stretch all the way up to the present day to -- there is an article that i very quickly looked at, thought, i don't, i can't get sucked down into this rabbit hole here to do with african-american responses to the capitol building. it was -- the responses were not recent, i think it was the 1980s, early 1990s in which somebody had interviewed people coming out of the building and they're saying, yeah, i guess this isn't really about our history. we're kind of not really in there much. okay. wow. but then you go all the way back to the head dress on the top and the feathers and the cap and that kind of opens up a whole other story i thought that was really interesting. i also at some point imagined wrongly that the museum of african-american history -- i'm getting the name wrong -- african-american culture and

history museum that somewhat visible, i had this idea that you could walk up the steps of the capitol and see that museum. that would be a visual sense of how -- the way that buildings are structured on the mall and the art in them reflects the changes in american history and how united states is kind of dealing with all of this, right, and looking back and say, oh, yeah, we don't -- the way that indigenous people's and african-americans are presented in the capitol is very much a 19th century one because those were the attitudes. we haven't changed that. what we've done is kind of put it in silos in their separate buildings, which is either great or terrible, depending on your perspective. but unfortunately when i stood up there and looked around and realized it doesn't kind of work quite like that. can we just move those buildings? they should be right there hovering on the edge of the capitol. does anyone have a question about something i actually know something about would be great. >> that's -- >> i know, that's not -- that's a tough one, yeah. >> i think i understood what you

were -- the point you were trying to make by the substitution of columbus for cortez in the mexican multiral center. i'm not sure what the mexican cultural center was trying to accomplish by doing that. maybe the larger question to what is what do latin americans or mexican americans think when they see cortez's disappearance or the columbusization of conquistadors which is a way to make it look like purveyors of civilization and good guys rather than, you know, conquistadors, conquerers? >> that kind of cracks open an entire topic to do with mexican nationalism and the way that mexican history and culture has developed in the last 200 years as a kind of -- all countries

grapple with this notion of national identity and how you idea with your past, right? that that kind of paradox of wanting to only pull the positive things up in order that you can engender and everybody has a sense of loyalty and patriotism, but then in the course of doing that you are then distorting and rewriting history so you're sort of teaching your children lies. there has been a particularly interesting and well-studied story along those lines in mexico in the last 200 years and i think that mexicans have been very kind of open and transparent in how they have tackled that so they've left it like a superb trail of art and literature and so on that has allowed list historians to pursue t i'm wildly guessing but i imagine if we were to sort of beam thousands of people, mexican nationals from mexico into the old mexican embassy and have them look at that and tell

them about that they would have a lot of things to be able to tell us. they would respond to that is correct about their opinions about columbus and cortez and so on. so i think it's very obvious to mexicans why that was done. that cortez is a controversial figure and mexicans will say, yeah, we don't even have statues of cortez in mexico, in mexico city. you can't find him. there is sort of occasionally there's sort of things that are vaguely named after him, but there's no big monuments. there's nothing even remotely close to what you would see in washington, d.c. for columbus and george washington and so on. nothing like that. so it wouldn't be surprise to go them. what's interesting to me, therefore, is that the parallel in the capitol building or on capitol hill generally or maybe in the whole city and perhaps maybe in the whole of the united states the way that columbus is used i think is not as transparent. not even remotely as transparent. i think every columbus day

different things are said about columbus day, indigenous people's day and so on that show that there isn't that kind of same level of transparency. instead it becomes kind of -- >> we will leave this american history tv program at this point. you can watch the rest of it on our website c-span.org. a number of financial experts are getting set to testify on the cryptocurrency boom and the potential effect on future retirees before a house oversight subcommittee. live coverage here on c-span 3.

good morning, everyone. i'm al green. it is my honor to call the oversight and investigation subcommittee to order. the title of