facebook. up next, jess mchugh explores history, and then bloomberg investigative journalists reports to the 2018 and 2019 crashes of the boeing 37 max. later on our author interview program afterwards, political scientists barbara walter talks about what can be done to prevent civil wars and what can be done to stop them. for now, jess mchugh. >> like so many of our programs, tonight's program is sponsored by the wishing well foundation and pr, and it's produced in part in support of honoring frank lloyd who was with us in some tough times in louisiana and had great leadership and compassion for museums. we are happy to be able to honor him in this way.

now i want to introduce our guests. peter sokoloski. he will be in conversation with jess mchugh, a writer and researcher that has appeared across national and international publications. she's reported stories from four continents on a range of cultural and historical topics, from present day liverpool punks to activists in greenwich villages. i know you are going to enjoy their company. i am welcoming now to the screen, jess mchugh. hi, jess. >> hi. happy to be here. >> tell our listeners, too, what

time is it where you both are, 1:00 in the morning? >> that is correct. >> we are doubly glad to have you here. peter, can you tell me when i need to come back on. >> sure. this is a treat. it's great to see you again, jess, and we're a little blurry eyed but this is a great opportunity to talk about this book. first of all, congratulations for the great reception of this book, the great attention that has been paid to it and the story that you tell. i -- i kept thinking when i was reading this book it's hard to imagine that this had not been done before kind of an alternative cannon that you have created that explains so much about history and culture and identity and also about myth, and yet we are not talking about literature, we are not talking

about the cannon with the capital "c." i will quote from the quotation you begin with from ralph ellison, and he says our memory and our history are ever at odds. i love that sentiment. he says, you know, this is a story told by inattentive idealists. what an interesting way to describe america and our population, inattentive idealists. i want to begin with the general and then we will move to the specific of your captures. these ideas of myth and identity and aspiration, and i might even say nostalgia, which i got from every one of these chapters. some i felt quite personally, things like betty crocker and

dale carnegie. and the webster chapter which is so detailed on noah webster and his contributions and we'll talk about that in a moment. i do want to ask you to begin with, because your idea seems like such a big idea and it seems also -- now that it has come to fruition, it seems like such a mature idea. how did you come to telling this story, which is to say a grouping of texts, but they are not literary texts? >> yeah, sure, and i am talking to those that have not read the entire book yet, and i was interested in the gap between mythology and a sense of, you know, greek mythology and the stories we tell about america and in wanting to write, what

for me was a book about average life in america, and i love talking about great novels and mark twain, and a lot of people asked why isn't mark twain on the list, and the cannon of books that i was looking at is die tkabg particular books, a book teaching you something, so i wanted to look at books that were daily books, once you would consult every day whether it was a speller or cookbook or dictionary if you have more money, so that was the idea if you were american 1915, and i tried to focus on the books that touched the greatest number of people, and i came to it by way of noah webster, and this is a funny connection between us over

the years, in merriam-webster's twitter's presence, and i remember thinking i wonder what he would make of this new attitude that they would have? that's what led me into writing this article for the "paris review," and we get into quite a vast agenda that he had for the way american language could be used as sort of a bedrock and independent american identity. >> i do think it's interesting, the academic cannon, the literary cannon is almost something we take for granted as an elevated rare heir of culture, and yet most of us have experienced many, if not most of these works, in ways that are simply not literary.

this conversation, i think, we can go into that original -- that first document, that first chapter on the farmers' almanac, something i was familiar with as a kid in new england, and i am seeing it everywhere in peoples' bathrooms -- >> me, too. >> and to this day for sure, and yet it's something like so many of your choices that we took for granted for so long that i never thought much about it, except it seemed to always be there. that's part of your story, isn't it? >> exactly. in some sense it has been there from the start of the united states, this particular almanac, the farmers' almanac, they never missed any years and they still sell something like 3 million copies per year, which is staggering, especially when you think about people may not need to have animal mating tables or

sunset times to run their farms, but it's functioning again as a vehicle for nostalgia, for some people who their ancestors used to farm and they want to connect back to that, or even for us, it was always in my grandparent's house and our house, and it was a new england folklore. it's almost a tool than a piece of literature. it was there to help farmers do everything from crow crops and breed livestock to vote. there were things like here's where to vote and here's the dates and the vocation at dartmouth, and it's laying the ground for the republican farmer, the republican in the sense of republic, an ideal citizen of the land and a thinking person, and it's an

ideal that persists. >> yeah, just comes to mind that the europe model of those who owned land was very different, you know, they were different classes. they were not the citizen farmers and the citizen soldiers and representatives. i think the almanac published -- >> uh-huh. >> there's a wonderful antidote that you tell near the beginning of the farmers almanac, between an editor and clergy men, and there's a quote, the clergyman says you are better fed than taught. could you explain that? >> yeah, this is kind of a fable, and i don't know if it happened but i could see it happening in massachusetts in the 1770s.

>> the farmer doesn't move out in time for him to pass the message, and he said you were better fed than taught, and he said yes because you teach me and i feed myself. and i think that's sort of the idea of why the farmer resinates so much, because we have had this connection in the american imagination and in the american reality to some sense that land ownership is equated with freedom and independence and it's equated with voting powers and economic power and there's an idea as we are cultivating empty land and, of course, it's not empty, they are growing the seeds and this new republic, and they are tilling the fields. i think the farmers' almanac,

it's present in the way how farming works and what it's there for. >> yeah, that's such a beautiful algory of this idea, and it's such appear resident part of the book. another antidote -- the farmer's almanac -- one was about lincoln's use of that. >> yeah, there's a lore, and it's when abraham lincoln was a young lawyer, he was defending a person accused of murder and the primary witness said i saw this person kill this other person and i saw him by the light of the moon in this dramatic

flourish, lincoln whips out his old farmers' almanac, and he says according to this there was no moon, and the case falls apart. there's also this case, and i think that maybe you were going to get to as well in the 1940s, the only time the almanac almost stops publication is because a german spy gets off of a u-boat in -- i think it's manhattan, but anyway he's captured in penn station, and the only book he has on him was the farmers' almanac, and so they fear the nazis are using the almanac to plan an attack, and the editor of the times said, the forecast was switched to general

predictions. alls well, ends well. >> there's two movie screen plays right there. i mean, really, it's to your credit that something we have taken for granted is such a vivid source of information and history. your next chapter is on webster, and we have to give a little place to know webster, given our audience tonight and who we are, and partly because i just learned this about you, i think you are the kind of people, you've said, who as a child would read the dictionary, is that right? >> that is right. i was quite a nerdy child. this might surprise many in the audience, and i wanted to seem smart and to be smart, but especially to seem smart.

so i had the collegiate dictionary, and i would read it, and what it really did was having me mispronounce a lot of words. yes, read dictionaries before you go to sleep. >> yeah, it's a funny thing, i think there are two kinds of people in the world, people that read the dictionary and people who don't. it's that simple. i love that that shows the roots of the story that goes so deep with you, and that makes sense given the way that you have told the story. so webster himself is just a fascinating american character. >> uh-huh. >> without question. obviously we understand he did an important thing. but he also embodied important things. you know, he was an idealist. he was a christianists, if you

will. he was also a federalist. he was a hard-nosed political thinking. all of those things, again, we can see in contemporary culture. yet he also had a passion for language. can you talk about the aspirations of webster that ended up being expressed in a book that was essentially written for the aspirations for a nation? >> absolutely. webster was fascinating and the books he wrote, to me, were so compelling and that's what brought me into the subject matter, again, as i said, i had a long relationship with the dictionary, and i had not thought about it as a person with a goal in mind, and for webster making the speller and the dictionary was a lindquistic declaration from britain and the

post revolutionary era, and it's going to be as different as swedish is from german, and this is how we are going to have a christian and patriotic language, which is the radical idea, and he's saying through spelling and standardization and through the ethos, and it's kind of extraordinary. i think you can make the argument that maybe we did not go quite as far as swedish, but there are certainly many, many differences, and i would argue many are fundamental to the way we concede our identity, whether it's the amount of biblical language used in public speech or the way that so many of the examples tie together the ideals of the post revolutionary era. in terms of, you know, the

aspirations of americans, this struck a cord with people that said, yes, we did just beat the empire and we need to have our own language. and many pick up the book with different aspirations. franklin douglas uses one of webster's later spellers to write, and he becomes a great writer. many people throughout history realize that the dictionary and language and speaking well is a way to a better life, especially in the 19th and 20th century. >> no question. it's so compelling. we could talk all day about webster and his contributions. among other things, he obviously -- as you just said, and so perfectly, he sought with this project a national identity, and there was a linguistic part of this, too, that we all recognize, and just for the benefit i will say it for our audience quickly,

webster is maybe best known lindquisticly for the spelling changes that he brought -- rather a settling of an american-style spell, and he thought he was simplifying things and i would argue he complicated them, because now we are all responsible for the two, and especially the subtle one, he hated -- webster hated silent letters and double letters, which are kind of the same thing. the inflexions of the work would be to travelled, one "l" in english, and two in british. webster also had a weird

capacity for prediction. >> uh-huh. >> in that preface to his 1806 edition, he says american english, again, in 1806 he was an atkpwraeuren nation that was sort of in a weak position internationally, and certainly economically and militarily, and we barely survived the election of 1800, and he said the writing of english will be the dominant one. in 1806, it's quite a prediction. >> yeah. >> one thing i would like for you to speak to about webster is in his connection in work and life, he was a product of the enlightenment to be sure, and a product of the american second

great awakening, and he was a self described born-again christian, and there was a great deal of message in the text of his dictionary, and beyond that, another connection is -- maybe you should tell the story, but if somebody were to buy a copy of the original 1828 dictionary today, in fax simly, they would have to get it where. >> yeah, the christian home schooling group has taken to this book for quite a long time, seeing it as kind of the only -- or one of the only christian american texts, so there's a bible society that digitized the original dictionary, that is 70,000 entries or something like that? >> yes. >> and for a researcher like myself, it's hugely helpful and kind of surprising. i would love to hear you tell that story about the question

that you get asked from people about reprinting it. >> yeah, and that goes back to the very first book fairs and conferences that i attended for merriam-webster, often standing at a table and book stand in a suit and happy to answer questions, as i could. there was a little pattern. i learned a lot -- there was a huge education in doing that kind of thing. one of the questions that i got on a regular basis right away that perplexed me was somebody coming up and saying do you have the original 1828 dictionary, and of course we are merriam-webster and we are selling our newest and current dictionaries, and it never occurred to me we would sell an older one, and they said i wanted it because it's the only one based on the baseball.

webster perhaps paid more attention or a more direct reference to the bible. the fact is i'm glad there is a way to see those entries and it's webster 1828.com or something, and i use it every week. webster has a legacy with merriam-webster, but the original one still has life in it today. >> uh-huh. >> and a great deal of uses. i think we could talk forever about webster, but i can't, we have to move on to benjamin franklin, one of the greatest characters to be sure, and such a huge figure in our political history that some might forget he was also a great author. >> definitely. he wrote many things in his life, and he made also an almanac and he made money in

printing, and his autobiography is one of the first rags to riches, he's recounting his story from being the youngest son of the youngest son from five generations back, and he had no inherited wealth. it may not seem the same genre of the dictionary, and in some ways it's the first self-help group because of the section of the 13 virtues saying if you want to be a good person, you should follow these virtues every day, and it's humility, and humility was the 13th

because somebody said you are too proud, and you could have a franklinesque life, and it's debatable but one that is tempting and has enticed so many people. this book continues to be on 400 plus syllabus in colleges, and elon musk cites this book, and also dale carnegie. i think it's the rise, it's the rise of the american people that people are so fascinated with. >> yeah, and this poor boy that makes good establishes an american ethos of success, doesn't it? >> uh-huh. >> i do think that's a distinctive american trait. we don't see it in other cultures in this way. it's funny, because he cultivated the country

persona -- >> yeah. >> you can explain it better. his appearances in a french court. >> yeah, this is one of my favorite franklin episodes. he's about cod codifying term, and one of the things where i was interested in franklin, and so many is written about his many virtues and many acts, and kind of ma chiefious side. he dresses as the sort of frontiersmen that the french imagine americans to be, and he has these clothes and a cap that he brought from canada and he has his spectacles on, and to

the french, he's so charming. they are charmed by his new world kind of renaissance man, back woods charm, even though he is none of those things except for a renaissance man, and it's rule playing and that's one of the things that gets overlooked is his fake it to you make it notion, especially in the 18th century when america was more up for grabs than arguably by the 19th century, or now when it's much, much harder to kind of claw your way up. in franklin's way, it felt more applaudable than other times. >> brosseau, those were the

underpinings, and this idea of the pure natural states of -- >> right. >> -- of people before they were corrupted by culture or society, and that -- i wonder if part of franklin's performance was not also kind of a sort of bringing to life of the russo ideal. >> yes, uh-huh. i could definitely see that. he was exactly that idea that you could just kind of create. he also reminds me of goth in the sociology, which is a man of many masks and it doesn't mean he is false, necessarily, but is wearing the franklin that is that the most profitable or politically or financially, and whether it's franklin the

scholar, or the man that loves a good french party or what have you. that's part of his charm, and that's why he's such a modern founding father, he has a chameleonesque quality. >> i want to briefly mention the mcguffy reader, and it was not known to me and it turns out to be a massive success in education, and this was when education was one of webster's preoccupations and franklins as well, and mcguffy was prominent and if not longer, and before we would move to katherine beach, you should say how important a textbook can be.

>> yes. mcguffy readers, he's kind of the typical man of the frontier, and you have the self-made man, and the farmer and so he goes up on what is the western frontier, and now it's eastern ohio, and he grows up in a log cabin his parents have constructed out of surrounding trees, and he is teaching a classroom when he's 14 years old, and he leads this hard life, and he ends up writing school books that are meant to help children learning the alphabet up to reading in high school and school-aged kids. he wanted this mix of what he would call frontier values, kids out in nature, a is for ax,

instead of a is for adam. he like webster and other writers of school books is very staunch in his religious beliefs, so his notion is we are going to make a more literate nation, and a more godly nation, and he picked many students out of his classroom as a professor. the book is a best-seller especially at a time when literacy is taking hold in the united states, and the book came out in 1836 and 1837, and over the course of the next century, they sell something like 130 million copies, and that's staggering when you talk about the fact that most copies were shared by several children in a classroom, so the number of people with these teachings is much, much greater, and these people are memorizing these

passages and committing that moral compass to themselves, and it was the book that everybody read. >> i mean, and bringing it -- again, it makes this contemporary residence so easily. many may mistake the power of a textbook because they may still think it has the power it once had to shape the culture and society the way he did with his work, and i suspect a single textbook won't have that kind of influence, you know, in the 21st century. >> right, and it's fascinating, though, because people approach the question of text books with the same zeal, i think, that they did even in the 19th century, which is if you open up the front page of the "atlantic times," there's ideas of

critical race theory, and the question is how to teach our children, and it's not just about teaching letters and numbers and how to read, it's about educating people on what values they should have and how they should be american, so i think it just continues to resonate. >> the whole idea of standards, needless to say, is always in the news. and that was the core of mcguffy. he adopted webster's spellings, and that was a way to propagate in a way webster, himself, could not have done. webster and franklin were personal friends, and the chapters fold on each other. >> yeah, it's been interesting. in the 19th century, you realize that the world of writers and the movers in the political

world was quite small. i remember being so surprised going through many letters and finding one from webster saying thank you for using my spellings, it's very important, and then he says my publisher is not paying me enough money, and it's a funny letter, and then on top of webster's enormous success with his own speller plus the dictionary and it cements not only their practice but the ideology behind them. >> and their enormous influence. i don't want to go to questions before we discuss kathleen beecher and betty crocker. they represent -- first of alla big part of your book is about women and the role of woman in the american culture and they are icons of different kinds of works that were directed toward

women but also written by them. katherine beecher -- >> yes, katherine beecher, the older sister of beecher stow, and she's an activist or education and an educator herself, and the way women could contribute to the american project is through a notion of her republican mother raising and teaching the type of men that would become the leaders of tomorrow, so to speak. it kind of continues through and resurfaces in times of crisis, and for instance we see a lot of the same themes come up in the betty crocker cookbook which is the best cookbook sold in history, and it's sold 75 million copies, and betty

crocker has a similar questions in the '20s and '30s, it's that imperative for you to stay home during the war for the war effort, and it's a message that resinates, and i can do a whole talk on the issues and the way women's are and they are quite limited in the text books because the die tkabg particular books about women are about women's role at home and in the private sphere, and the best-selling books, the ones selling tens of millions of copies are aimed more at women at home and women raising children, which i think reflects the time and can be quite limiting. much to say there.

>> and imposing the morality on -- it's a pervasive idea, it seems to me, to this day. it's a hugely influential idea and i am not sure it's shared the same way in other cultures, in european cultures. >> if you are serving somebody soggy biscuits, is it anyone dur if he goes out and gets into a fight or commits a crime, which is quite a hefty moral duty. and maybe that level doesn't exist today, but even now, and even for working women, if you are bad at cooking or you bring store-bought baked goods to the bake sale, you might be frowned upon. >> yeah, these values seemed to have really stuck. talk about a screen play.

emily post and the way that her career began as a matron of society, and then became kind of a documenter of that society. >> yes, emily post was probably one of my favorite chapters to write other than merriam-webster, and she has a book about etiquette and that's a big seller and i imagined her with white gloves and a perfect life, and she was the taughter of quite a bunch of wealthy career, and her husband cheats on her with many show girls and he's caught, and instead of paying the ransom, so to speak, he goes to court in a public legal fight that emily coast is caught up in in the early 1900s,

and she decides to divorce her husband, which was not done then, and she was faced with making her own money, and she correct the wrong of etiquette after living through some of them herself and in turn is picked up by middle class and rising working-class people that want to make a better life and see this vision of if i can memorize these rules about fork placement and etiquette, i can be more successful. that's something that takes off when the book comes out in the '20s and continues to resonate throughout the 20th century. >> she's basically saying -- and it's very much based on class and education, sort of the description of the manners of the wealthy becomes the prescription for everybody else, right? >> definitely. >> in some ways that parallels the usage guides for language,

you know? >> uh-huh. >> and the way we judge people by their accent or grammar. >> right. >> it's interesting that those kinds of judgments and that kind of prejudice -- for instance, linguistic prejudice is the last socially acceptable one, and the background for that, the reason it has such power is not because of noah webster and emily post, and you can apply that to manners to cooking and education to clothing. >> yes, exactly. i think it goes back to that classic, you know, descriptivist versus prescript tau sreus debate. are these writers and books best sellers because they are describing things as they are, or are they best-sellers because

they are describing things as people would like them to be. there's always a grain of truth in what people are saying, and there's a much vaster aspect that is about aspiration and is this american dream of if you can just do these small things can you have everything you want or you can have more than your parents had. this is inherent in emily post's book as in webster and the farmer's old almanac, it's the presence of better. >> yeah, and that's a good segue to questions in the audience, and that was such a beautiful response. lead us into a deeper discussion into all of your chapters. jen? >> thank you so much. i got to tell you, i could listen to the two of you talk for hours and hours. this has been absolutely

fascinating and so much fun. so the audience, i think you are all stunned and in awe as i am. i actually know a lot about emily post and did research on her etiquette, and one thing that distinguished it is the humor, and it's so funny and she did that deliberately to make it more relatable these days, and can you talk about other books that are featured in americanon. >> i never got this question before, and i think it's a good point. i do think humor plays such a good role in american society, and you do see it if it's the almanac, and ben franklin was

somebody i thought was quit humor kwrous. it could deflect grand jury, and it can also bring people together, the idea of an inside joke is that you are all sort of in on it. there's a lot of that in these books, there's repetition of the humor. everybody can be in on that. >> thank you for that. we were talking earlier about a brief appearance about mark twain in your book. can you tell us about that? >> yes, and i realized there are two brief appearances. the first one is he writes this

very funny satirical essay in the late -- oh, no, young, there's only so many days i can hold in my head, and sometime in the 19th century he writes a saw satirical essay, and it's very funny and i think it speaks to the way that franklin is many people throughout his life, as i said, he's a printer, a diplomat and a writer, and he's so many people throughout history, the way he was seen and understood after his death is different than how he's understand in the late 19th century and even now. when harry beecher stow and katherine beecher, they are living on a farm so they would go over and have these kind of

long dinners and have discussions about suffrage with mark twain, and it was an atmosphere of exchange that was happening among many people at that time in hartford. >> and for people that don't know, there's a neighborhood here right across from one another, and so the center is now a museum dedicated to his legacy and the mark twain house right across the lawn supporting. thank you for being that up. >> yeah, i did research on the farm and now it's coming back to me. >> you have been? >> no, i want to. i love the idea of, you know, writing on a billiard table, so i am desperate to visit. >> we would love to have you. peter, you have been here, right, the mark twain house? >> i have driven by but have not

been inside. i will have to come by. >> you and i will have to take a field trip together. >> you are invited anytime, and we will hold you to that, and i know jim is going to pressure you too, peter, on that one. so connie robertson in our audience asked if there were others you considered writing about in this book? i would add, why did you not? >> yes, there were many that kind of went -- it's very hard. as i say, i don't mean for this book to be an exhaustive list of all of the books that served this purpose, but i wanted to focus on, you know, kind of a survey of books from the beginning of the united states' history until the '80s, '90s. there were a few. one is the big book of alcoholics anonymous. it was a big book and it was

interesting the way it comes out in the '30s, and it was responding to the great depression and veterans that were struggling with alcoholism, and it paints a picture about the way american community should function, and that's a different message that you get from the notion of individuality that we see in so many texts. the reason i ultimately did not include it, is because i thought bill wilson was not really thinking about an american project in the way that so many of these other authors were. i am trying to think. there was another one. oh, dr. spock's baby book. that was a big best-seller. i thought the message was too similar to the betty crocker cookbook and they came out within a year of each other and it seemed to have two chapters so close and i was trying to cover such a time in a relatively short book. >> that was a really good

answer. forgive me if this is not something that you wanted to talk about and you didn't include it on your switch, but everything you wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask is another that you included in this. give us a little context here. i never would have considered it in this context? >> sure, yeah, i was interested when i first started this project back in 2018, 2017, about how-to books. that was the overarching thing. so one of the things people really want to know how to do? they want to know how to spell, they want to know how to act and how to have sex, that's something that comes up. i was curious about that. and this book, the 1969 everything you wanted to know about sex but was afraid to ask, it was a best-seller and it was quite wild for the number of similar books that came out, and

what surprised me with that one is that it's quite a conservative take for a '60s book, and there's a lot of gay shaming, and against racial mixing, as he says. i think the notion of conservative in the sense of trying to conserve something was surprising to see in such a kind of recent text and sort of disappointing, but i think it also speaks to the fact that even books that we may not think are talking about good or bad or right or wrong, or american or un-american, are in many ways speaking to that, in other words sex advice in this book in particular comes out of -- not him, but it comes out of the history of yao jen kwreubgsz, and it was sterilizing people,

and and that's how it has grown in america and in the uk, and i was interested in that notion. >> wow. >> yeah, it seems like a silly book. >> even the title alone suggests it's going to be tongue and cheek. >> right. >> but it really isn't. that's fascinating. fascinating. peter, is there a book you would have liked to have seen included in americanon? >> i had not thought about that. probably my thoughts first go to an encyclopedia, which is a different kind of aspiration. the world book was really important to me, and -- you know, i would read the world book much the way jess was reading the dictionary.

it was clear that world book, for example, was designed specifically for this aspirational purpose, and to the extent -- it sent a lot of people to college for for sure enough to read for an elementary student, but felt grown up. somehow that was the aspiration, too. thaes what i would think about. >> you're so right. my parents bought us the entire world book encyclopedia and the special shelf you could buy with it. it was on display in our front hall. that was clearly symbolic for them in that way too. that was a really good answer. >> i also have a question for peter if there's no questions in the hopper. >> go right ahead, please. >> this is one i think about a

lot and get asked from time to time. i live in france. peter has a french connection in french dictionary. i get asked will that have different types of touch stones and do you think there's something uniquely american about this type of book and the way you use it, the way we use a dictionary strikes me as the way the french do. >> you could do a parallel, but it would not touch. they have the french academy but it's misunderstood by many

people. by world war i, the officers couldn't communicate with their own troops because there was such diversity and it's standardized. that was a deliberate political act. a different story, a different identity, a different ideal. they were so wildly popular in france to depict the middle class but also this idea of

independent think thought. >> that's great answer. can you tell us a bit about your research/writing routine or your approach to writing a book like this. >> sure. i love the research more than the writing sometimes. i think getting to talk to people like peter and getting to travel around is the best part. i got to do this long road trip. this was pre-covid and go to some of the more far flung archives. dublin, new hampshire and the betty crocker general mills archive is out in minneapolis. it's been a while now.

kind of cross culture approach to american food. then the writing process, i'm always, somebody has force me to write. i would prefer to research. i was writing the book during the first wave of blockdowns in france which is not ideal conditions, actually. running in my one kilometer radius that were we allowed and writing and writing and writing. it's not exactly as conducive as one might think, but it did get done. yeah, here we are. >> good for you. peter, i don't know about your writing other than you are one

of the best people to follow on twitter that i know. do you have opportunity? >> yes. it really comes out in two different ways. there's a number of sort of, what i would call academic articles that i published through an academic journals like the dictionary society of north american journals called dictionaries. things like book reviews, surveys of french records. something i'm very proud of fairly recently from the oxford university press chapter on the revision of webster's dictionary in 1864 that was research that i undertook along with my former boss and retired dictionary john

moore. you don't have know of webster's work. we concentrate on today. we concentrate on the now. john morris and i took an interest in our history especially around 2014 when we saw an anniversary year about the 150th anniversary. we decide what was that revision? what did it amount to? we reverse engineer the process done by our old fore bearers. open up the old edition and compare them. then kind of figure out what was done. it turns out, we were both astonished that it was a massive and significant and deeply detailed revision. i have a nice chapter on that and the book is called "the

whole world in a book," which i think is a great title. most of my writing is anonymous because it appears on the merriam webster's website. you might encounter an article on why the word mustache is singular in english. we don't have bylines in those articles. the definitions are written by u by our colleagues but we don't see bylines in the definitions so we decide we're not going to put the bylines in the articles. i do get to scratch the itch of

being a writer. that's my day job. they are on the website. >> i'm so glad to have heard that. >> those articles are great. i'm an avid reader of all of them. >> that's amazing. the most lovely evening. i want you both to promise to come to hartford and visit. thank you both. i can't imagine if you didn't want to purchase this book before this conversation that you're not itching to do so now. the link has been reposted in the chat. take advantage of that opportunity. i want to thank our co-hosts for

joining us this evening. thank you to all of you who made donations to split between the two organizations. this has been a real banner evening. thank you so much. >> thank you, jennifer. thank you, jess. congratulations again. >> thank you. >> we'll see you next time. hopefully in person. recently on our author interview program, michelle easton offered her thoughts on how to pass down conservative values to young women. here is a portion of the program. >> the core principles, religious, faith and freedom are linked. they are linked in a policy sense. they are linked in a personal sense with young women. young women who think a lot about self-esteem and we hear a lot about this in the schools, especially the government schools. okay, self-esteem is okay and this is not unimportant.

self-worth is totally different concept. that's the chapter from god, not government. it's this idea that it's the most important concept for a girl to understand knowing she is uniquely made and unconditionally loved by god will be a corner stone of conservativism. it's something that with the policy at the same time. this notion that the government can substitute. i would argue no. that's really not so. >> visit booktv.org to watch the rest of the episode. peter robinson served as a recipient of the ford best in business awards from the society for advanced business editing and