election in his book, roosevelt sweeps the nation. exploring the american story, watch american history tv, saturdays on c-span two, and find a full schedule on your program guide, or watch online anytime at c-span.org dot history. if you are enjoying american history tv then sign up for our newsletter using the qr code on the screen to receive the weekly schedule of upcoming programs like lectures in history, they presidency, and more, sign up for the american history tv newsletter today and be sure to watch american history tv every saturday, or anytime online at c-span.org slash history. >> weekends on c-span two are an intellectual fst, every saturday american history tv documents america story, and on sundays, book tv brings you the

latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span two comes from these television companies and more, including charter communications. >> broadband is a force for empowerment, that is why charter has invested biions, building infrastructure, upgrading technology, empowering opportunity, and communities big, and small. charter is connecting us. >> charter communications, along with a television companies, supports c-span 2 as a public service. i'm david ferio graining from the national archives like building in washington, d.c., which sits on the ancestral lands of the -- peoples. i am david ferriero, archivist of the united states and it is a pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation about boyle's new book the shattering, before we began i would like to tell you about two programs coming up soon on our youtube channel. on wednesday, january 26th at 1

pm david mickey and will tell us about his new book, watching darkness fall. which recounts the rise of the third reich in germany and the road to war from the perspective of four american ambassadors and key western european capitals. london, berlin, rome, paris, and moscow. and, on tuesday, february 1st at 1 pm we will hear from sara, who will discuss her book in american memory, roosevelt and the making of an icon. she analyzes roosevelt as a cultural icon in american memory, historical leader who carefully and intentionally built his public image. kevin boyle begins his look at the 1960s with a story of ed cahill, the 1961 organize his neighbors to duck their houses with american flags for the fourth of july. boyle wasn't spired by a photograph of cahill and his neighbors that he had seen years before in a book published by the national archives. in the book, which are produced

more than 200 images from our photographic holdings was called the american image, boyle's book about america in the 1960s, the shattering, takes us a decade beyond the american image and focuses on the periods transformative complex. the new york times calls the shattering a rich, larry count of the 1960s, history is not simply the unfolding of events, but it is the story of individuals behind the events. in the shattering boyle introduces us to the people who propelled changes. the washington post review declares that boyle has a gift for synthesizing and translating the off and dry arguments and analysis of formal scholarship into artful and empathetic storytelling. kevin boyle is they william smith mason professor of american history at northwestern university. his previous book, arc of justice, won the national book award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. he is also the author of the uaw and the heyday of american

liberalism, and coauthor of muddy boots and raegan abrams. his essays have appeared in the washington post, the u.s. new york times, the baltimore sun, chicago tribune, and the detroit free press. suzanne a smith is a professor of american history at george mason university, and teaches african american history, 20th century cultural history, history of death in america, american popular music, and african american religious history. she is the author of dancing the strait, motown on the cultural politics of detroit. now let's hear from kevin boyle and suzanne e. smith. thank you for joining us today. >> let me begin today simply by letting you know that professor smith was not able to join us at the last minute, they were complications that made it impossible for us to have her here, i am very sorry that she

is not here. i would love to be sharing the afternoon with her. but, i am honored to be sharing it with you. i just want to say how much i appreciate the national archives giving me the opportunity to talk with you, today. particularly i want to thank susan clifton for putting together today's program. i want to start today by doing one of those things that i think you are not supposed to do when you talk about your book, i want to start with somebody else's book. and, in particular what i want to do is start with a book by a woman who has been in the news a bit lately because of her passing, i want to start with john didion's second book of essays, the white album. particularly when i want to do, just for a second, is wray just the start of it. it is a famous start, this is

the start, the very first essay of the white album, a collection of essays that didion wrote in the late 1960s, and early 1970s. this is what she said at the start. we tell ourselves stories in order to live. we live entirely by the imposition of the narrative wine on disparate images, by the ideas by which we have learned to phrase the shifting, phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. or, at least we did for a while. such a beautiful, elegant way of describing what historians actually do. what we do, as historians, as we take all of the fragments, the complicated pieces of the past and we try to shape them into a coherent story now. and then, overtime we start to wonder whether the story that we shaped me is really the best way of telling the events of

the past. and so, we start to think the way did he ended. whether we need a new story, and that is what the shattering is. it is my attempt to take the phantasmagoria of the 1960s, these extraordinary sprawls of events. and to reshape them into a new story of the 1960s. and, a lot of that story centers on powerful figures of the 1960s. the book deals to a considerable extent with the presidents of the 1960s, john kennedy, lyndon johnson, record richard nixon, and, to my surprise, with dwight eisenhower who hovered over the 60s to an extent that i had not realized when i first started working on this book. it deals with those people who tried to become president, mary goldwater, bobby county, hubert

humphrey, george mcgovern, george wallace. who runs through so much of the 1960s. talk about supreme court justices, talks about a general or two, talks about the towering activists we have associate with the 60s, darton dr. mountain luther king junior, malcolm x. but, if there is one thing that animates my sense of the past, my sense of myself as a historian, i also really believe that ordinary people are central to history as well. ordinary people who way do not know help us understand whose name we have never heard of, they help us understand the passed in a new way. and, ordinary people in the american past change this nation. so, alongside all of those famous people who run through the shattering, what i also try to do is tell the stories of ordinary people.

what i want to do today is i just want to tell you for stories. and this is the first one. this is the 4th of july, 1961, on the six-day 100 block of west and east street in the northwest quarter of chicago we. the day before new ad cahill and his neighbor, clarence mitchell, draped their block in 38 flags. that is a lot of flags given that they are only 36 houses on the entire block. rand, ed, being ed, had written to the chicago tribune, one of the major true newspapers in chicago, to announce what they had done. and, the trip decided that they would send a photographer out

to take a picture of this block. and so, the neighbors all gathered on the lawn, right next to ed cahills house. and ad, and clarence should that got pride and place mill that is ed right there, that is clearance right there. and to a beds kids got in the picture as well. that is his son, terry. standing at attention up at the top of the steps. and that is his daughter kate. way in the back, right back there where you can barely see her is ed's wife, stella cahill. smiling into the 60s. stella had good reason to be smiling. stella was born a couple of days after christmas in 1916,

deep in the polish ghetto of chicago. where she, where her parents lived the, on what her father, who was a tailor, managed to bring home from his trade. she had an older brother, chester, and the four of them lived in a tenement deep inside the ghetto. just about two years after her birth, her father died, killed by the spanish flu that was then raging through the poorest neighborhoods of american cities. and, her mother was with two young children to raise, she faced the prospect of tumbling into the worst forms of poverty. she tried to break the families fall by getting married again in 1920, she married another polish immigrant. this time a man who did not even have a trade that her now deceased husband had had, made

his living as an unskilled labor. which meant he made his living on the power of his back. a power that he tended to dissipate, it turned out, by drinking he could not control. and so, all through the 1920s, stella, her brother, and her mother, and now stepfather lived on the edge of poverty. there is no clearer sign and that then the facts that they moved every single year. every single year, all the way through the twenties they lived in this part of town, then that part of town, then they move to that part of town. the way people do. and then, in 1929 the economy collapsed around them, by the spring of 1930 stella stop father was unemployed. and, the family was getting by on whatever money her mother could bring home from her job

boxing candies in a candy factory the. was not enough, within a year or so stella's older brother last school to take a factory job that he was lucky to get. that brought and just enough money that they could keep stella in school through the two years of a commercial course she was taking in one of chicago's public schools. and, the moment that course was over they pulled her out and sent her off to work as well. she was 15. stella math add cahill on a blind date in 1938. the family who are hardly well to do. but, in the working class world of chicago, they were step above stella's family. considerable step above, ed's

father, who had been born and downstate illinois of irish immigrant parents, his father worked as a foreman for a construction company that did road work for the city of chicago. what that meant, especially in the 1920s, was that work was steady. in a way that it had never been for stella's family. and, with that steady work he earned enough, ed's father earned enough that in the late twenties he was able to buy a house. on the 6100 block of west at east rate. the block you are looking at now, though in those days it was a half finished, brand-new development going up way on the outskirts of town. it was a completely white neighborhood, much of the new developments that were going up and chicago in the 1920s were wrapped in restrictive covenants, those little clauses

that were put up, developers put on their deeds to say this property can never be sold to a negro, and oftentimes, to a jewish american. but, i have no evidence whatsoever that when ads family bought that house they thought, at all, about race. chances are they took it as a natural thing, that neighborhoods were going to be segregated, that is how deeply that racial discrimination was written into the fabric of american society. what they saw was that they were buying a 900 square foot house of living space, with an unfinished attic up above, that they could finish off, where the boys could have a place to sleep. what they saw was that they were buying a house with a little backyard, and a little front yard. set and a half finished

neighborhood, six blocks away from a brand-new catholic parish that they could join, st. ferdinand's. it was such in your parish, in fact, it did not have a church yet, but it did have a grade school where ad and his brothers could go there. as part of the commitment to the family, the deep commitment to the cahill family to catholicism. and that is where ed grew up. at an stella got married in may of 1940. 1942 they had their first child, a baby girl they named judy. in november of 1943, when judy was about a year old, and got drafted that. he was gone for two and a half years, most of that time he

spent in europe. in the signal corps, trailing along behind the front line troops as they marched towards berlin and the end of the war. and stylist at home with a newborn. now, stella knew on some level that ed was safe. she knew that, of course, some of the letters here at home, this weight, personal letters that he sent as often as he possibly could. but, you have to stop for just one second and think about this young woman in chicago, in 1943, in 1944, in 1945. living surrounded by war, living surrounded by death. by the gold stars that she would see in the windows as she walked the baby along the

streets. for the prayers for those boys who had gone missing, the prayers at sunday mass for the boys who had gone missing from that parish that she was a part of. and you have to believe, i believe with all of my heart that deep in the night, that fear came creeping up to her. that it would have been impossible for her not to imagine not the western union messenger coming to her door with that notice. and, if that were to happen that she would become her mother. in 1918, a two young widow with a toddler at her skirts and her life collapsing around her neck. that is not what happened, and got through the war just fine and he came home, in the spring

of 1946 as part of the massive demobilization of that year. within a few months few months, no one surprise, stella was pregnant again, and ed decided that with a new baby coming he could not really afford to take all of the benefits of the gi bill. he needed to go get a job. and he did, he got a job as a clerk in the front office of the vacuum company of chicago,. the vacuum can company of chicago made industrial strength coffee urns. and, one of their major clients was united states military, the u.s. navy really likes their coffee urns. as did the army. in 1948, larson was born in 47, that is terry. right up here. in 1948 this now young family,

ad and stella and their two kids, moved into his father's bungalow over on west at the street. and they moved in partly because they needed to take care of him, his wife had recently signed everybody knew he could not take care of himself. and partly because at had such a powerful sense of place, he wanted to go home. and so, they did, in 1948. that neighborhood was still half finished, half of the houses on the block had not been built yet because the development that had started back in the 20s had stalled during the depression, and then stalled again during world war ii. but, over the next few years from 48 on into the early 1950s the neighborhood started to fill in. as developers came back to put and small, reasonable houses. and the empty lots. houses that they then sold, overwhelmingly, to italian

american and polish americans. who are moving out of the center city of chicago in a process we call white flight. as that neighborhood filled in, as the population filled in, it became a more prosperous area. in the mid 1950s developers built a brand-new shopping mall, not that far from the straight, one of the first shopping malls in chicago went not that far from the street. and that catholic parish that was so important to add finally got the church it had never had, gorgeous, beautiful church wrapped in marble. a place for families like them to feel a sense of solidity that neighborhood had never had. and the family started to do

well for themselves as well, and slowly started to move himself up in a vacuum can company, until, by the end of 19 50s he was the ad head of sale. they had a third child in 1952, that is kathy, down here. and, the family were not extravagant people not, but they had more money than ever before. and so, in 1953 and 54 they bought their first car. they had never had a car before. but, now they did not see the need for ed to take the bus all the way down to the vacuum can company down in center city anymore. and, in 55 they bought a tv, put it in the little living room. and, when the kids were old enough, judy was old enough, they sent them all off to the school, to the grade school that was connected to their parish. to saint ferdinand's. and then, when judy, there all the starter got a high school age they center it is a catholic high school, and when

she finished there in 1959 they sent her to depaul university, one of chicago's two, large, catholic universities. now, there is no doubt that this was a parochial world, that they lived in this. they lived inside of this tight, upper working class lower middle class catholic world this. there is no doubt that this neighborhood was wrapped around racial exclusion, and discrimination, you can see that just in the picture of the folks standing out here in 1961. and, the cahill family, at least. their ability to buy the car, so by the tv, to send their kids off to school, private

schools was paid for in part which by the vacuum cans connection to what dwight eisenhower would call the military industrial complex. because the military industrial complex was not all about missile systems and bombers. it was also about industrial strength coffee urns them. but, you also have to thank just for a minute about what this world looked like for stella. here was a woman who grew up right on the edge of devastating poverty. who never had a stable place to live. and now, she an ad on their own home out on the street. he was a woman who in her early days of her marriage and her early days of motherhood was not sure whether her husband was going to come home.

now living in this extraordinarily stable family centered world go. here was this woman who, in 1961, had her older daughter and college when she had had to leave school at 15 me. is it any wonder that stella was smiling into the 1960s? and, already that worlds built around the eddy strait, already there were cracks in the exclusions that that world had created. none more dramatic, none more important than the one symbolized by this young woman. elizabeth eckford.

elizabeth eckford, and her story would have been completely different, really, if her mother and father had had a phone. but they were working people, and they had six kids to raise, and they could not afford that kind of extravagance. and so, on the day before school was to start in 1957, september of 1957, on september 3rd of 1957 the family did not get the phone call from the national association for the advancement of colored people, undulations leading civil rights organization. they did not get the call telling her that elizabeth was supposed to meet with the nine other kids who were going to desegregates little rock central high the next morning. and that together the ten of them would be escorted to the

school. and so, on the morning of that first day, on september 4th of 1957 elizabeth got up early, to make sure that she could get herself dressed in the clothes she had carefully picked out for her first day. she made this skirt. and she had breakfast with her family, and when breakfast was over her mom called the kids together so that they could all pray together, the 27th psalm. and then, elizabeth picked up the binder that her mom had bought her and she put on the sunglasses that she hoped might hide how scared she was. and she took the bus to little rock central high school. the bus dropped her off two blocks from the school, i don't

know if any of you have ever been to little rock central high. but, it is a massive building. it covers two whole city blocks, they frontage runs two whole city blocks. and elizabeth got dropped off near one of the corners, two blocks up but near one of the corners of that big, two block school pm. and she walked down, and as she was walking down towards the school she could see towards the central of the school, on the, straight she could see the white mob. she could say, bringing the score, all the way to the corner, the national guardsmen that the governor of arkansas had called out the night before in order to prevent elizabeth eckford and nine other african american kids from going into the school, and defiance of the central court order. she was 15. now, as she was coming up to the line she could see that the national guardsmen were letting

white kids through, and in that mind of a 15 year old, what she saw was, well they will let me throw as well, but, when she got up to the corner the guardsmen told her that she had to go down to the center of the line, all the way down to the main entrance of the school. and so, she dead, she walked along the street, along in front of this long national guard line, and as she walked the mob came up behind her, trailing along behind her, screaming at her and shouting at her. some of the kids shouting as if it were a football game. two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate! another is yelling racial slurs, , and somebody in that mob yelling over and over again, lynch her, lynch her. and there were newspaper reporters there, because this was a major national story. they trailed along next to her with her notebooks, asking for comment that she refused to give. and the photographers walking

backward in front of her to get this very picture. and she refused to say a word. and, finally she got to the center of the school. the center of the line along the street in front of the school, where she had been told to go. and she came up to the guardsmen who were standing there me. and she asked if she could get through. and they told her she would not be going to school and she needed to move on. and, for a second she had no idea what she was going to do. she could not go back to where she had come from because the mob was behind her. and so, she thought she had no choice but to just keep going. and that is what she did, she kept walking all along the street, the mob trailing along behind her, the reporters gathering around her, they screams, the yells, the threats.

until she finally reached the end of that two block stretch in front of little rock central high. where she saw a bus stop. and she sat down with the bus stop, and she smoothed out her skirt the way a proper young lady should not. and afterwards the reporter said, well, they created a kind of group around her to protect her from the mob, maybe that is true, i don't know. but, beyond them stood the mob, screaming, and yelling, and that person stole their threatening to hang her from a tree. how long she sat there, no one can ever say. maybe about 20 minutes, half an hour? and, at one point an african american man came up and offered her a ride home. but, her parents told her never take rides from a stranger, and

so she politely refused. and then, finally, a white woman came out of the mob. and this white woman started to harangue the other white people around her to say that they were going to be sorry for what they had done this day. and, elizabeth was horrified because she feared that what that white woman was going to do by trying to tell off the mob was make it worse. when annelizabeth really wanted was to be let alone. a warrior of the civil rights movement, sitting on a park bench trying not to cry. the next day this photo ran in all of the major newspapers in the united states, made the front page of every major

newspaper in the united states. and, in that image what happened was that millions of white people were forced to confront, for only a moment the confrontation, the contrast of the civil rights movement wanted them to say, not the individual one. though that obviously is terrifying, but the systemic one. the one between a community that could produce a woman, a young woman of such grace and dignity, and a social system that could take ordinary people like the people you are seeing in this picture, and twist and turn them. into thugs. in the fence of the indefensible. over the course of the 1960s's civil rights movement would twist and turn all sorts of complicated ways.

i tried to trace some of those in my book, but, it would never have more power than when it built this extraordinary contrast that elizabeth eckford brought out. on a glistening september day in 1957. four years later this woman, estelle griswold me, got herself arrested. estelle griswold, once upon a time, when she was young back in the 1920s had dreamed of being a professional singer. she had even gone to paris for a couple of years to try and make a go of it. did not quite work out, in 1927

she came back home to her home state of connecticut, where she fell in love and married and aspiring ad man. and, for the next 30 years or associate trailed along behind his career, wherever it took her, 1945 it took him to germany. where the state department had hired him to help with the occupation of defeated germany, and with the reconstruction of western europe after the devastation of the war. and she went with him. and, from 19 45 to 51 she worked, herself, with a refugee agency is trying to help the massive refugee crisis that engulfed europe in a terribly brutal days after the war. and 51 they finally decided to come home, they settled in new haven, connecticut, came back to connecticut.

and, for a year or so she continued to work with the refugee agency, but its headquarters were up in new york and she got tired of the commute. so she quit, and went looking for other work, but she had a particular set skill set as an administrator that was not enormous demand for a woman in new haven, connecticut, in the early 1950s, so it took her about a year to get a job. finally, in 1953 she got a job that she thought would be interesting. she was hired as the executive director of the connecticut branch of planned parenthood. the nation's leading advocate for birth control. now, she said afterwards she had no idea about birth control, when she took this job, she did not know what a diaphragm was. she thought the work could be interesting and she had administrative skills needed. the work turned out to be very, very interesting, in the late

19th century any number of states had passed laws trying to prohibit in one way or another birth control. and, connecticut was one of two states, massachusetts was the other one, that had particularly stringent laws. in connecticut, from 1879 forward, it was illegal for anyone to distribute, to sell, or to use any form of birth control. when planned parenthood was formed in the early 20th century it made it a special effort and connecticut to get that law repealed. and, for decades and decades in the middle decades of the 20th century planned parenthood kept lobbying the connecticut state legislature to repeal that 1879 law. but they did not really want to do it, there were political costs of doing that. and, the truth is nobody enforced the law.

and so, it sat on the books. and, when estelle griswold took over as executive director of connecticut's planned parenthood in 1953, she also tried to lobby the legislature to get them to withdraw the law. they did not have any lack. and so, in 1958 she decided to change tactics, she arranged for two married couples who are willing to cooperate with planned parenthood to sue the state of connecticut for prohibiting them from using birth control they wanted to use. they wanted to get the law declared unconstitutional, and, in the way these things work, that case wound its way up all the way to the united states supreme court. finally reached the supreme court in 1961. in the spring of 61, four of the nine justices were willing to say that that law was, in fact, unconstitutional.

but, the other five said that there was no real law here, it was on the books but no one was enforcing it. and, as you undoubtedly know, to have a supreme court case you have to have real harm, not just a case it isn't up scrap shun, you have to prove that somebody is being harmed. and, he's married couples could not prove that. and so, estelle griswold's case failed. and that is when she decided to get herself arrested. to be more precise, but she decided was the way to test this law was not to get married couples to say they were being prohibited from using pro birth control. it was to get herself arrested for distributing it. and so, through the summer of 1961 she arranged for planned parenthood's connecticut branch to open a birth control clinic

in new haven where women could come in and could presumably get the information, she thought about it in terms of women. get the information they needed new, on how to use birth control and their families. she always said this was about married women. she opened the clinic on october 2nd, 1961. in direct defiance of the law. and nothing happened. because nobody in a position of authority, in new haven, cared that they were distributing information about birth control. but, at least one person in new haven did. a man who worked for a car rental company, in fact, a devout catholic, with five children at home. who believed, according to the

teachings of his church, that the use of birth control was a san, and therefore should not be allowed by the state. and, they lost said that this was illegal and he wanted that birth control clinic shutdown. and so, he contacted the local authorities in new haven to demand that they go over and find out what was happening, and shut down estelle griswold 's clinic. nobody want to do it, spent the better part of the day being shunted aside, shuttered along from one office to another in new haven by everybody saying, well, you really should talk to this person, talk to that person, talk to this one, nobody wanted to deal with this guy. but, he was so persistent and so insistent that, finally, they prosecuting attorney said, all right, all right, basically to get him off the phone, i will send a couple of policeman over. and he did, he sent over a couple of policeman to estelle griswold's clinic. now, when they arrived she came

bounding out of her office and she grabbed hold of these two people and she brought them into the office and she sat the officers down and, for an hour she gave them every little bit of information she possibly could about birth control. all of the pamphlets, all of the information. she was dredging up every bit of technical knowledge she possibly had, throwing it at them, and they sat politely, taking notes. and when she was finally done they all got up and shook hands, and they walked out the door. two x later she got a letter informing her that she was being charged in violation of connecticut's 1879 statute, exactly as she wanted to be. she was convicted, as she knew she would be, in january of 1962. and find $100 for this enormous crime of distributing birth control.

she then appealed that conviction all the way through the state legal system, up through the connecticut supreme court. and, when she lost, and she was going to do, she then went into the federal court, and in that long, complicated way that court cases have, if you've ever been in a court case you know what i'm talking about, her case finally reached the supreme court for oral arguments in 1964. it was spring of 1965, at the end of their 1964 1965 supreme court term, the supreme court ruled in her case, griswold we connecticut, not only that the 1879 connecticut statute was unconstitutional, but it was unconstitutional because it violated a right that, up to that point them, no american

had. a right to privacy. it was out of that court case, in other words, the planned parenthood cracked through that pro new world that the cahill family had lived in. and, open up such dramatic litigation. the most dramatic of, it roe v. wade. and then there is this young woman. alison kraus. allison had been a graduate of wheaton, john wheaton maryland john f. kennedy high school just a year when the washington post reporter came to the school to ask about her.

he went to the front office, as he was required to do, and when he asked for any information they could give him about allison they really did not have much to say. they pulled out her file, gave him a copy of her grades, of her as a t scores. let him see the letter that her guidance counselor had written on her college application, it said something like allison is a very mature young women. but, really, nobody remembered anything much except how pretty she's been. and even that was not necessarily a memory of her. because, already, the high school graduation photo had made the papers by then. not that anyone really, a john f. kennedy high, and we can, should have remembered allison krause.

she came to the school all the way a lot of kids dead to a place like kennedy high. trailing along behind her father as he pursued his corporate career. he heard of had been hired by the westinghouse corporation in cleveland in 1949. when he was a young man. and there, he and his wife started to raise his family, allison and her younger sister. 1963 her dad was transferred to a pittsburgh office, so the family trailed along behind him to pittsburgh. that, a few years after that he was transport again to the baltimore plant, but, by then allison was a soft more in high school, and her younger sister was in middle school, i think. and they were little worried about how the schools would go, and so, they decided to settle in the washington d.c. greater area, settle into the suburbs, and her dad would get the drive up to baltimore every morning.

and allison and her little sister would get glistening new suburban schools. kennedy high had only been open a couple of years when alison and rolled. but, for some reason or another allison did not really make much of a mark in high school. probably because she had arrived as a sophomore. probably because she was 15 and did not join the sort of clubs that the cool kids joint. did not earn the sort of grades that made her stand out in the classroom. and, when she reached her senior year and decided that it was time to apply to college she only applied to one school. what she remembered was that when she was little, on a sunday, her mom and dad her little sister had all piled into the car and they would drive out of cleveland, out into the countryside in that

way folks used to do. she loved those trips. just driving aimlessly out in the countryside. and so, she decided she would go to a college that was out in the countryside as well. she enrolled at kent state. and, in her first year at kent state the 69 70 school year, the folks back at her high school only heard from her once. she wrote once in the spring, i guess it was in the winter to ask that they send her transcripts to the university of buffalo. because she was thinking of transferring. and nobody had any idea why, she did not think why she was transferring. it turned out she had met a young man from long island and they had become boyfriend and girlfriend. and, the young man did not really fit and at can state. he wore his hair too long, he did not care about football.

his roommates used a homophobic slur about him. they and so he had decided that he had some friends at the university of buffalo and he would like to transfer their and allison was going to follow him, just as her mother had followed her father all of those years. she and her boyfriend were together on the 4th of may, 1970. crouching in a parking lot when a bullet from the national guardsmen ripped through the kennedy high t-shirt she was wearing that they. the next morning the anger was flooding through the country. what would become the most intense moment in the anti-war movement, college campuses shutting down all across the country, and the protests reached kennedy high school as well. a group of kids came out of the

school and they went up to the flagpole in the front of the school and demanded that the flag be lowered to half mast in allison's honor. and another group of kids came out and said no, that's like how to stay at the top, and it was a tassel until the principle came out and he worked out a compromise. a salute the flag and front would be lowered to half mast but the one over the side to be left up at the top. that got the kids back into the school. but at some point in another they took that flag at half mast and a pulled all the way down and they burned it. and a garbage can. it was a few hours after that the post reporters came to find out what he could about allison 's story. and, after he talked to the folks in the main office he wandered around the hallway to see if any of the kids had anything to remember. and they all want to talk about the protests, they wanted to talk about the war. and some of them argued that, why should the flag be lowered to half mast because one kid was killed. when so many young men were dying in war?

but when he asked of the remembered allison most of them said, well, maybe they saw her once or twice in the hallway. but, really, nobody knew her at all. that fourth of july ed cahill put the flags back up already straight, it became a tradition. every year they went, up and ed collected flags. he kept boxes of flags down in his basement. and, every year he would bring them out and draped at a straight. and he added music, he would blast our patriotic songs, and he set up by parades for the kids. and cookouts for the neighbors. in what he proudly called an old-fashioned holiday. and some of that seems the

appropriate thing by 1970. that the displays that he had embraced back in 1961, the world as he had embraced in 61 somehow seemed a relic of the past. i am not trying to say that the social movements of the 1960s were all triumphant. the civil rights movement of the 1960s where her moment has to be understood, had his triumphs in the and i will argue to the day i die that they are important triumphs. there are limits to what the civil rights movement could do. and among them was a segregation that embraced little rock high and ran around the strait all the time that the cahill was there. and, it is true that estelle

griswold and those who followed shattered open those restrictions of the parochial world that was so important to the cahill family. that the issues they opened clearly had not died, we live with them still. this is so clear in what is coming from the supreme court in the next few months. and, it is true that the anti war movements, and i insist there were more than one movement. they did have an enormous impact on the war in vietnam, even as it caused far too many lives. but, the larger framework of america's place in the world was not fundamentally transformed. and that is the story at the 60s i'm trying to tell. a story of the six days that is complex. that is intimate, that is

personal. that is terrifying, and inspiring, and deeply, profoundly ambiguous. a story of the 1960s for our own troubled time. thank you so much for spending some time with me today. now i say that there is a question. now, my mistake. thank you so much for letting me join you today. thank you so much for taking the time. >> american history tv, saturdays on c-span two, exploring the people and events that tell the american story. at 8 pm eastern on lectures in history, kermit roosevelt, university of pennsylvania law professor, and descendant of theodore roosevelt argues that modern america traces its

political sentiments to lincoln and the reconstruction era right on the founding fathers. and, at 9:30 pm eastern on the presidency, historian david, looks at depression era america through the personality and presidency of franklin roosevelt,, and his 1936 landslide election. called roosevelt's let e nation. exploring the american story, watch american history tv, saturdays, on c-span two. and find a full schedule on your program guide, or watch online anytime at c-span.org. slush history. if you are enjoying american history tv, sign up for our newsletter using the qr code on the screen to receive the weekly schedule of upcoming programs like lectures on history, the presidency, and more. sign up for the american history tv newsletter today and make sure to watch american history tv every saturday, or anytime online at