changes to correct laws to prevent future wrongful convictions. progress is very, very slow, but we keep pushing. that is what inspires us to keep going. we are making progress. >> you can watch the rest of this program and all of our book programs online anytime. >> weekends on c-span 2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's story and on sundays, book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span 2 comes from these television companies and more, including charter communications. >> charter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers. and we are just getting started. building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most.

>> targeting occasions along with these television companies the ports c-span 2 as a public service. announcer: you are watching book tv with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. book tv, television for serious readers. ♪ >> i'm sharon mcmahon, longtime government teacher. let's learn about the electoral college. i'm not a political pundit, i'm just going to give you the facts about how this system works. you can then make your judgments

about whether you think it is a good system or a bad system. ultimately it doesn't matter, it is not going anywhere. every state gets various numbers of electors based on how many people live there. this is probably california. 55 electoral votes, you guys. they get a whole bunch of them because there's a crapton of people. then you have other states like wyoming with a very small number of electors. three. any combination you can come up with that equals 270 or more. any combination whatsoever. you win, you are the president, end of story. thanks for watching my gross oversimplification, nonpartisan government educational electoral college video. hit me with your questions and let me know if you want me to make more videos like this. >> sarah mcmahon, what were we watching? >> my goodness. my very first foray into making

government content on the internet. blast from the past. >> and what possessed you to do that? >> there were a few people who were confidently wrong on the internet in 2020, maybe you are familiar with this concept. maybe you've experienced it. people saying things like the electoral college is a university you can graduate from, and that is not a matter of opinion, that's just a fact that it is not. so it was the height of the global pandemic, a very fractious election season, and i just decided to take some of what i have learned from all of my years of edge nation and. since as a classroom teacher and start translating that into easy to understand, nonpartisan explaining videos and the rest, as they say, is history. >> did you get a good response to your electoral college video? >> i did. people sent me questions and i started making more and more videos.

just very simple five minute videos, i started making one a week and at the end of september 2020, as the november 2020 election zoomed towards us, i started getting phone calls, emails from local tv stations and local radio stations around the country who were looking for somebody to come on and explain to their viewers or listeners what was going to happen in the 2020 election just from a fact-based perspective without telling them which candidate was the better one to vote for. because as you can imagine, local tv and radio can't afford to have a strong ideological bend. this is not cable news where you can flip around and find what you want to hear, the narrative that you prefer. if you are just an nbc affiliate in illinois, you can't afford to alienate half the audience by telling them to vote for biden or vote for trump. so it turns out that there was a big need for nonpartisan

government explainers because the american government is intentionally complicated. it's large, and it was designed to be somewhat complicated on purpose. so there was a good response, and then the response just continued to grow. >> you mentioned that you are a government teacher. how long have you been teaching anywhere? >> i've been teaching for 12 years, and my most recent teaching experience was actually in the d.c. area, i taught in montgomery county, maryland. >> and you were at his school government teacher. what is your take on the books, the government books, the history books that were provided to the students? >> we rarely use them. we had a very robust curriculum. i had a very talented, well-educated, department of smart teachers. we had state objective that we needed to meet, and sometimes

there might be something of interest in a textbook, but by and large, textbooks tend to be very dry. they tend to be very rote, guided by these ideas of time marked by wars. they tend to be very heavy on boldfaced names, and that is not to say that more shouldn't be studied or that boldfaced names like george washington are not important, they are. but that is also, what we are doing is leaving large quantities, a very interesting history on the cutting room floor for the sake of time, for the sake of brevity. it is understandable, nevertheless the books were not particularly useful to me and i don't think my students enjoyed reading them very much. >> how do you teach the arc of history rather than big events? >> the big thing that i really think is important but i think so many traditional history books are missing out on is how

these events connect to one another. we tend to learn about them as disparate things, from the perspective of ok, the jazz age, the roaring 20's, and we studied the harlem renaissance. we study this as a separate event from what is happening elsewhere in the 1920's. we don't simultaneously study the second coming of the kkk, we don't simultaneously study the wild west. we don't simultaneously study the groundwork for the great depression. these are treated as separate things in the minds of students. even adults today, they don't realize how many of these things were happening at the exact same time. one example of the very popular book killers of the flower moon which was made into a big martin scorsese movie recently. that is happeng the same time as the harlem renaissance and the jazz age, and yet in

most students of history's minds, these are completely unrelated, totally separate events that don't have anything to do with each other. so in order to fully understand the arc of history we have to understand how these types of things connect with each other. and that to me as one of the most interesting thing that i can bring to the table for my students. whether it is in a classroom setting or adults on the internet for readers of my book. >> what is a governord? >> first of all, it is a way of looking at the world, but it is a name that members of my community have sort of adopted for themselves, and i actually have a funny story about the term. when my community was first formed, people ask themselves what are we supposed to call ourselves? you know how people who are fans

of taylor swift call themselves swifties? this was in 2020 and people said what are we supposed to call ourselves and they came up with the term governor-erd. one time i was invited to speak at the george w. bush presidential library and we were backstage and as he was getting ready to leave at the back door by the secret service, he kind of put his hand on the doorknob and turned and looked back at me and said what do you call yourselves? governerds? and he did his smirk and said i like it. >> here's where it is interesting, and sharon says so. what are those? >> sharon says so is the name of my social media platform. at the time, my name was taken. i couldn't use it as a handle so it was either going to be sharon mcmahon 1234 our some other sort

of memorable play on words. so that was just the name of my social media account and that of course has become something that i am known for. and "here's where it gets interesting" is my award-winning podcast, the top 1% of all podcasts out there. we have over 400 episodes, we have interviews with authors and thought leaders. so that is my podcast available wherever you get your podcasts. >> you just published a book for the first time. 12 unsung americans who changed the course of history from the founding to the civil rights movement. you write that you have long suspected that the best americans are not always famous. >> it's true. if you ask people who is the best person that you know? almost never will they say jeff

bezos's. almost never will they say some tv star. they will almost always say somebody that has impacted them in some really, really important way and very often those people are not famous. they don't have dads money, they don't have their name on the side of the building. and there are thousands of americans who have shaped the course of history, who have changed who the united states has become through their actions, but for a variety of reasons their stories have not been recorded in those boldfaced fonts, history textbooks. and it is their stories that are just incredibly interesting to me and it turns out they are interesting to other people. >> you tell the story about how you got interested in story -- history. what was it? >> i started out as a child, as a 12-year-old with a paper route in northern minnesota where i grew up, and it required me to

get up at the frigid predawn hours of the minnesota winter, sometimes 30 degrees below zero. it is 4:45 in the morning, very dark and cold. difficult to motivate yourself to get out of bed as a 12-year-old. and this was before phones, before ipods. they ran on batteries and they didn't perform well in cold weather, so it was literally nothing to do on my three mile long paper route other than surreptitiously leave the newspaper. so i would secretly kind of read the paper as they walked along and learned the route like the back of my hand and i got very good at refolding the newspapers of the people could not tell i had been reading the newspaper before i delivered it to their house, and that is really one momentous time that i can point to in my life that was the genesis for how i became so

interested in government and in history and it was some early exposure to the newspaper. and also the fact that i grew up one block from the library. so i could spend as much time as they wanted there, and i did. by parents gave me unfettered access to the library. it was a small branch library but when i got to be a little bit older, i would take the city bus down to the main library which had a much larger collection, and could just spend my whole saturday afternoon there just seeing what interested me that day, checking out books on random topics, and because it didn't require money, you didn't have to buy any of these books, you could just take a stack of books home and see if there was anything of interest. so i really point to both my access to libraries and my access to the newspaper early on in my life as very formative. >> which newspaper review

exist?ring, and does it still does still exist. i was delivering the duluth news tribune. i am still a subscriber. >> in your book " the small and the mighty" i've titled this next section lost watches. and you tell the story about how sears and roebuck started because of lost watches. is that if your connection to make? >> ihink so. listen, there's not a single historian who would say that sears roebuck and company didn't change the course of american history and by and large world history. what they did was the mentis. it was amazon well before amazon existed. sears roebuck was helping to bring things to rural america that had never existed before. it was helping to subvert white supremacy in the south because

black patrons could order whatever they wanted without fear of retribution or fear of not being served at a country store. but the way that it got started is so interesting and most people have absolutely no idea. they don't know that it was a man in minnesota who worked at a small train station, who happened to come upon a shipment of watches that were rejected by a local shop. the shop did not want them and so this box of gold watches came into his possession as a railroad employee and he wrote to the company and said can i just keep these on spec? meaning if i can sell them i will pay you for them and the company was going to be out the money anyway so they said ok. and within short order he had sold all the watches, made a tiny profit. selling them to passersby at the train station.

over time he recruits other railroad employees to help him sell these watches and he discovers that he is actually pretty good at it. sears, the man selling the watches, discovers his aptitude for writing compelling sales copy and he begs what becomes the sears catalog that is sent to thousands of people and it encourages people to send in their order no matter how well you speak english. it sent to send us your order in whatever language you speak, don't worry about spelling or getting it right or wrong. this is the turn-of-the-century where the united states has massive populations of immigrants coming from eastern and central europe.

many of them do not speak english and are in the process of learning english. he caters to an audience that many other people would never have thought to embrace. he says in effect send me your orders and whatever language you speak and we will send you your stuff. do not worry about it. not be ashamed of your lack of ability to speak english. eventually he grows this business into such a behemoth that he is unable to manage it. in this case the logistics of sears roebuck and company becomes a two headed dragon. he cannot manage his inventory. sometimes when they get the wrong thing given what happens given the size of the business he would not get paid. it becomes clear he needs to take on more help to deal with logistics.

he takes on a partner named julius rosen bought. -- julius rosenwalt. julius rosenwalt becoming the partner of richard sears changes the course of history in ways you are unlikely to already know and in ways that are still impacting us today. you can still put your finger on these impacts and trace the through line to america as it existed in the year 2024. >> let's not forget the other half of the sears name. sears roebuck. roebuck, was he the watch repair man? sharon: he was the watch repair man and eventually alvah roebuck exits the business and richard

sears becomes the primary owner and he keeps the name and he eventually takes up two partners. julius rosenwald is one of them and julius rosenwald's brother aaron nusbaum. and both rosenwald and nusbaum invest their money into becoming part of the business. eventually things become contentious. richard sears says either i will go he will go referring to nusbaum and rosenwald and a sears force nusbaum out, and it ruins rosenwald's relationship with his brother-in-law. eventually richard sears has health problems, leaving all of the management -- gruesome -- julius rosenwald ascends to the

presidency and has sole control of sears roebuck and company and he keeps the name in part because the names rosenwald and nusbaum would have been signals to people that jewish people were running the business and they felt like that is not the smart business move. sears and roebuck sound far more american. even after richard sears exits the business they keep the name. >> i will note that jane adams and marshall field tell -- play a role in the story sharon mcmahon tells in the small and the mighty. this is on the clara brown chapter. "out of curiosity i became interested in what german immigrants to the ozarks were eating in the 1850's." how did you become curious about that? sharon: who knows?

where your curiosity takes you is something i cannot answer. i think each one of us has things that we are uniquely curious about. you can see many of the things i am curious about in this story and i have a number of interesting asides of how would clara brown have learned how to make sauerkraut? that was an interesting thing to me and i begin to explore it and a lot of these things are just based on -- i discovered because of rabbit holes i was willing to go down. i honestly cannot say why i was curious about it other than it just piqued my interest. what i found made me even more curious when i discovered how unique a dietary experience german immigrants to the ozarks had in comparison to many other people. it just made me even more curious and i went further down the rabbit hole.

that is true of quite a few things in this book. >> how does that tie into clara brown and who was she? sharon: clara brown was a formerly enslaved woman whose family was sold. she is sold when their collective owner dies. her children and husband are sold off. she was sold to a family who has daughters and she helps to raise the daughters and eventually clara is emancipated. she never gives up hope that someday she will be able to find her children or husband again. if she keeps looking come if she dedicates her life to looking that someday there might be a reunion. eventually clara gains employment, paid employment in the central part of the united states, in kansas and missouri. that is how she ends up in this place and ends up becoming employed for pay to a family of german immigrants and she learns

to cook german food. she learns a lot about preserving food, things she would not have had the opportunity to learn on a plantation in kentucky where she was from. those skills she learns and up becoming very important to her later in her life when she becomes an official pioneer of the state of colorado. clara brown has a very important role in the formation of the history of colorado in that she becomes a self-made woman when she migrates there. she becomes very wealthy by the fruit of her own labor. i say in the book that if there was a picture in the dictionary next to the term self-made clara brown should be in that dictionary. she started with nothing. she was enslaved. eventually earns enough money to invest in all kinds of mining claims and to buy all kinds of properties.

she earns the money through becoming a laundress, somebody who takes in the washing of all of the gold seeking and silver seeking minors who come to colorado -- and silver seeking miners who come to colorado. one of the thing she does with her money is she invests in colorado's infrastructure. not the way we think of it today , but she invests in what infrastructure meant at the time , which was ways people conform community with each other. she begins to invest in the building of churches and schools. even churches she had no intention of ever attending. she helped to found methodist churches, presbyterian churches, all sorts of churches because she believed people should have the freedom to worship in the way they felt was right. some of the churches that clara

helped fund still exist today. you can find pictures on the internet. they have beautiful historic interiors. some are still open to the public where you can take a tour of them. eventually clara becomes designated an official pioneer of the state of colorado. she befriends the governor and the mayor. the governor sensor on missions on behalf of of what becomes the state of colorado. she becomes very well known during her lifetime by a nickname which was angel of the rockies. peter: sharon mcmahon, when did clara brown live. are we talking about the 1880's or so when she was in her prime? sharon: eventually -- she is emancipated during the time of the civil war and immediately following the civil war. the late 19th century. peter: are dates important in

history? memorizing dates, knowing dates? sharon: i think more than learning something happened on june 2 1874 -- more important unless that date is important for some reason that needs to be committed to memory, understanding time periods helps you better orient yourself in time and space. if we know we are talking about the immediate time period following the civil war, during the time of reconstruction, that can often help you. reconstruction is a time i know about, here are other things that are happening during reconstruction. more than just committing dates to memory, i think understanding the times and places in which people live, the geographical

places in which they live, the historic errors in which they live helps readers remember the stories surrounding somebody and humans are very adept at remembering stories. we are less good at remembering dates. if we can connect something to a story, we are much more likely to commit it to memory. i think those errors tend to be rather -- i think those eras tend to be important and there are absolutely dates that are very important. if we think about history of the committing of dates to memory, then what a dry and boring field that would be. peter: how did you find clara brown's story? sharon: clara brown was somebody i came upon when i was reading newspaper accounts of other things that were happening during the colorado gold and silver rush.

her name was mentioned in the newspaper. they referred to her as a former negro slave, that is how they referred to her in the newspaper, and yet here she was doing all this investing and owning all of these properties. i stumbled upon her name and begin doing some more digging. peter: in the chapter about bleeding kansas in the 1850's you open that section with this sentence. "many, many bad things in america lead back to my least favorite president, andrew jackson." sharon: he is my least favorite president. most people do have a least favorite president if you study history. there are many bad things that lead back to andrew jackson. it is almost six degrees of

kevin bacon. that game where you can connect somebody to kevin bacon within six moves. it is almost like that. you can connect a lot of things back to andrew jackson if you spend five minutes looking into it. peter: and andrew jackson was president from 1829-18. bleeding kansas happened in t 1850's. you writethe pithy national park service regards blein kansas like this. 'during bleeding kansas murder, mayhem, destruction -- in kansas and western missouri'". what was bleeding kansas? sharon: this was a time where there was contention about how to admit new states to the union and whether they would be designated a slave state or a free state. the southern states in which enslavement was legal wanted to

maintain their share of power. they felt if too many free states were admitted they would find their political power door by the free states and they saw the writing on the wall. they knew what was going to happen. they knew that if there were too many free states admitted they would soon be forced to end enslavement. they were fighting tooth and nail and an effort to maintain this balance of power. they wanted only to admit states that were considered slave states at the same proportion as states that were considered free states. through a lot of back-and-forth wrangling about whether or not we should compromise on this or whether we should compromise on that, how state should be admitted, what ends up happening is the state of kansas becomes almost up forbs about who is going mehere in large enough quantities to see it

become a slaveholding territory or a free territory. these things became important because of the balance of power throughout the rest of the united states. you saw other territories, other states sending large amounts of people to move to kansas in an effort to state a claim, in an effort to vote in local elections, in an effort to tip the hand of kansas towards a slave state or tip it towards a free state. there were abolitionists groups who sent people to kansas and there were a lot of rabble-rousers for lack of a better term. there was a tremendous amount of political violence in kansas during this time as these outside groups who have diametrically opposed ideas all flooded to this one region with very different ideas about how government should work and whether or not they should be able to enslave other human beings.

you reference the national park service which i bring up in the book, which describes in very sustained -- and very sustained -- in very sucicntly -- things like murder and mayhem. the idea that it w murder and mayhem in kansas and there is an actual time period and that state history called bleeding kansas which then bled over into other parts of the united states as that conflict grew more and more well known, it is an example of how political violence has existed in america's past. that is not the only example i given the book of political violence in america's past. it was the place that clara found herself during that time.

she moves into what becomes bleeding kansas. peter: now tie that back to andrew jackson who had been dead for a number of years by the time bleeding kansas happened. sharon: of course andrew jackson was an enslaver and andrew jackson had appointed somebody to the supreme court, roger taney who is the author of the dred scott decision, one of the worst decisions that has ever been made in u.s. history. that is the decision that essentially says that it does not matter if somebody was an african-american, was burned -- was born enslaved or taken to a free state, that they can never be citizens of the country. that because of their station in life, even if they are born free they are not united states citizens.

consequently because they are not united states citizens they are not entitled to sue. that is what dred scott was doing. he was suing for his right to be free when he had been taken to the free soil. this had profound consequences on the entire country. i don't think there is a single legal historian who would look back on the dred scott decision and deposit otherwise. nobody would say that is a good decision on the part of the supreme court. you can connect it directly to andrew jackson because of his relationship with roger taney who authors the dred scott decision. taney is on the supreme court because of andrew jackson. peter: as an aside it is spelled taney but pronounced tawney. throughout the book you give pronunciation. is that the teacher in you?

sharon: it is. many times i read something in a book i checked out of the library but i never heard someone use the word in conversation so i would mispronounce the word when i would bring it up in conversation and people would have no idea what i was talking about. when a word is said in a unique fashion -- when i look at a word and i would think to myself here's how i would say it, i would sometimes -- i do this a handful of times in the book, i tell people how to say it correctly so they do not bring it up in conversation and embarrass themselves. they miss for a county in virginia. -- the same is true for a county in virginia. there are just a little gift to the reader if you don't now how taney is pronounced here you go. peter: you also write that statues of roger taney were

removed over history and the law school name for him was renamed for thurgood marshall. i want to quote something a recent guest on this program wrote in one of her columns. taking noonan. -- peggy noonan. she was on to talk about her book. in that book she wrote an artie called against the terror down movement. she writes "once the tearing down of statuestarts there is no knowing where it will end. edmund burke famously said we have a duty to the past, the present, and the future. in the minds of the tear downers with the present is important and only their higher morality." sharon: i e see where she is coming from. i can see where she -- i can see what's she is saying. the presentism gets in the way of seeing that arc of history.

i also understand this idea that statues are meant to elevate somebody of a special status -- to a special status. we do not put up statues of hitler's. we do not put up statues of villains from history. we don't put up statues of benedict arnold and think to ourselves this is a guy who needs a statue dedicated to him. i also understand the perspective that statues are meant to indicate a communities higher value, that we value this person and they deserve to be remembered in a special way. i think there is a third way of going about this, which is rather than taking down all of the statues, which is to promote education about the statues, perhaps rather than having little plaque that says andrew jackson fought the british in the war of 1812 here, perhaps

instead of having those statues in new orleans -- or instead of tearing down the statues of andrew jackson in new orleans, perhaps there could also be some kind of plaque or educational material at the statue that says here is why this was put up in the first place. here is what we know about this person now. here is why we are leaving it up. so that we can see where we have come from and we can see how we have evolved as a society. that we used to value andrew jackson as somebody who had a big contribution to america's military prowess, a very unique contribution to american democracy, but he also did a lot of really bad things. here is some of what we know. that is perhaps a more fair way of going about this. talking about somebody's entire contributions rather than only their faults, which is what the

tear-downers want, or only their positive attributes, which is what the people who put up the statues to begin with would think. peter: sharon mcmahon, we also learn about levi strauss and denim. how does that fit in? sharon: these are ideas that are pervasive around the country at the time. it is based on my idea that i really enjoy connecting what a lot of people view as disparate things and being able to make sense of them so people can understand the big puzzle of american history better than if you just learn about one person at a time or one event at a time. levi strauss was very famous for creating what we now refer to as levi's. it was not the inventor of denim pants, he was not the inventor of jeans. people had been wearing jeans a

long time prior to that. there are examples of people wearing jeans when they escaped enslavement. you can find advertisements that describe an escape enslaved person is wearing what they referred to at the time as negro cloth for jeans. levi strauss improved on jeans. they were popular with people during the california gold rush. people who needed hard clothes. one of the reasons i bring him up is he is an example of how the entire country, whether or not they expressly brought it up

, the entire country's economy benefited from in slave labor. even levi's sloughs who says -- even levi straussho says on his tags is the -- he is the only manufacturer of denim who uses all white labor, he wants people to know i don't use chinese labor or enslaved labor, i use all white labor, it was almost like a made in america sticker. that is all he wanted people to see at. if you do more digging you can find that very often the cotton levi strauss was using was groaned by enslaved labor. the knowledge of how to die into was brought over by enslaved africans. even people attributed with the invention of indigo as a crop, especially in places like south carolina, even people attributed with this invention of indigo die ain't that knowledge from

enslaved africans who lived -- indigo die gained that knowledge from enslaved africans. the entire country benefited from enslavement. the streets of rhode island were paved from taxes from enslaved imports. there was no aspect of the american economy, even in free states that were not touched by or benefiting from the labor of enslaved africans. peter: i learned in "the small and the mighty" that a woman named catherine lee bates made five dollars from her song "america the beautiful" or from her poem. why so little? sharon: isn't that incredible? one of the most popular and enduring songs in united states history she made a total of five

dollars. catherine lee bates was a woman who becomes educated at a place called wellesley, a school that still exists. when she is an adult she becomes a professor there and she spends the summer on a train trip across the united states. they visit the 1893 columbian position in chicago which was truly a marvel. that event -- people have written entire books on it and it never stops being interesting. all of the things invented for the 1893 columbia exposition. all of the events that took place. she references it in a lyric to "america the beautiful." she talks about alabaster cities and that is a reference to the columbia exposition. her journey eventually takes her

to colorado where she takes a tram up to a beautiful view of the mountains and she says it is almost like this line of poem -- this line of poetry, it is not a song at the time floats into her consciousness and she later describes it -- he does not know how to explain how it gets there. maybe it is some sort of divine inspiration although she is not quite sure what to make of that idea. she jots down these lines and tucks it away and they go back to their life in massachusetts. eventually she takes that poem back out and she polishes it up and she thinks this isn't bad. she decides she will see if she can get it published. she sends it in to a magazine that was published for churches, for congregationalist churches.

her father had been a congregationalist minister. the magazine is called the congregationalists. she sends it to them to see if they would like to publish it. they want to publish it in their july 4 edition and they say we will pay you five dollars for the poem. she accepts it, that was more or less the going rate for a poem in a church magazine. that was, you know, more or less the going rate for a poem in a church magazine. the poem quickly becomes very popular. it quickly becomes popular far beyond her wildest imagination, far beyond the confines of congregationalist churches. people began to adapt it in newspapers, and it begins to be reprinted, and soon, it gets set to music by a man named samuel ward, who writes this melody that occurs to him as he is sailing away after spending a fun day at coney island, sailing

away from the island -- sailing away with a friend, viewing the island off in the distance, and he says to his friend, i wish i had some paper. you know, like a melody has just come to me. i wish i had something to write it down on. his friend just sort of is searching his pockets, looking around for something to write on. he eventually takes off his shirt cuff and gives it to him , and he jots down this melody, and it eventually becomes the perfect melody for catherine lee bates' -- or who i refer to in the book as katie, because that

is the nickname she went by, to her poem, america the beautiful. and later, they have an entire very extensive contest to find an original melody for the poem. the melody that samuel ward had written was not designed to be accompanying the lyrics to "america the beautiful." they have this very extensive contest and they get over 1000 entries, and ultimately, they cannot find anything better than the one they had been using, the one that we know today, and she rewrites some of the lyrics to make it easier to sing them. and then throughout the course of her lifetime, this song, this poem becomes so popular that the correspondence related to this poem becomes nearly a full-time job. the amount of correspondence she receives is so copious that it takes up a tremendous amount of her time. she has to have people help her. and she approves nearly every reprint request that is sent to her. and she approves nearly every single one for free. she could have been making a lot of money on royalties of

"america the beautiful." it was such a popular song that , especially later in her life, given how popular it was, she could have said, yes, you can go ahead and seeing it at your event, but it will cost you five more dollars or whatever it was. we license music today. she could have made himself wealthy and instead, she chose not to. the only money she ever made on her tremendous contribution to american history was the five dollars from the congregationalist magazine. peter: that was around the turn-of-the-century. is that a fair time frame to put on this? sharon: mm-hmm. peter: i want to show some video from the c-span archive that relates to your book, the small and the mighty. [video clip]

norman: it is just hard to imagine that, let's say, in 1942, being evacuated from your home, placed on trains, under armed guard, transported off to camp, and here, some 20 something years later, being able to be sworn in as a member of the congress. peter: sharon mcmahon, you write about norm mineta in your book, "the small and the mighty." sharon: mm-hmm. i love norm. he is a great example of somebody who is small and mighty , and one of the things that strikes me about him is that he served in congress, of course. his family, when he was young, was incarcerated by the united states government during world war ii. incarcerated because his family is of japanese ancestry, not because they had ever been accused of any actual wrongdoing, and the united states government actually incarcerated more than 100,000 people of japanese ancestry,

most of whom were citizens, many of whom, like norm, were children. he went to a camp in wyoming when he was 10 years old. and when he eventually grows up to become the mayor of san jose, california, the first asian-american mayor of a major city in u.s. history, and then later gets elected to congress, he is chen to be in bill clinton's cabinet. and then when george w. bush is elected, george w. bush chooses to keep him in his cabinet. he switches him over to the department of transportation, and it is norm mineta who is the secretary of transportation on 9/11, who grounds all of the planes in the sky on 9/11. a very memorable role on a momentous day in u.s. history . but i asked george w. bush once why he kept norman mineta.

it's not like george w. bush could not have found -- it's not like he could not have found a republican to be the secretary of transportation. in fact, norm was a relatively liberal democrat. that is how he described himself, as a liberal democrat . he's from the bay area of california, the child of immigrants. often, people from that demographic have a very different view of how government should work and what the role of government is. and that was a little different than how george w. bush viewed the role of government, and so i asked him, why did you keep norman panetta in your cabinet, when you could have gotten somebody from your own party to do it? his answer really struck me. he said there was no better servant for america than norman mineta. i thought like what a legacy to leave. not that norm was the best member of the democratic party , or, you know, norm agreed to

do whatever i told him. norm was the most loyal to my 'nor was the most loyal to my view. norm w t most loyal to my views. his view was that the s no better servant for america and what an incredible thing to be known for. peter: one of the stories i had forgotten was his friendship with alan simpson, getting a letter. "remember that fat kid from the pup tent?" sharon: this story really amuses me. alan simpson becomes the united states senator. by the way, he is still alive as of today. he is still alive. he is in his 90's. this is a great example of how history is not that long ago. he grew up in wyoming and belonged to a boy out troop and his boy scout leader said to the families of wyoming that

we are going to go inside this camp, which they called internment camps, not a correct name really, but that is what they called them. we are going to go inside these camps and have a little boy scout jamboree. and many of the families on the outside were like, why would we do that? they are surrounded by barbed wire. there's men with guns. the boy scout leader tells the parents, these are children. they do the same activities and they use the same boy scout manual. we are going. they met when they were 10 years old, and they had what they referred to as a shared peskiness in that they both loved to play practical jokes and they both loved to laugh. they liked to get into trouble, and you can see they some pictures from this time period and then later on in their lives that often, it appears as though alan is the instigator and norm is the one who is kind of just going along with it, and alan is always trying to make norm last. well, they get into trouble one night for digging a moat around

their tent, and it rains, and the moat diverts all this water into somebody else's tent and of course, they had dug it that way on purpose. and they get woken up by shouts of this boy's tent flooding, and it is so hilarious to them, and they get in all kinds of trouble for being too noisy and making trouble. they stayed friends and continued to write to each other and see each other whenever there was a boy scout event, and eventually, they go their own way as they go off to college to join the military. and one day after alan simpson has become a lawyer, he opens his newspaper over breakfast one morning to see the story of norman mineta elected to be the mayor of san jose, and he's like, well, i will be darned, and he fires off a letter to norman mehta and his like, hey, norm, remember that fat kid from cody? that is how he referred to himself. and of course, norm remembered him and later, they are both elected to congress. they have a decades long friendship.

norman said, you know, i am a liberal democrat, and he is a good republican, referring to alan simpson. and you know, we might have fights in committee hearings, but then we always slap each other on the back and say, come on, let's go have dinner. let's go have a drink. when you look at pictures of them, and there are many, you look at pictures of them throughout their life starting in, you know, their 30's, 40's, when they get to washington, all the way up through their 80's, they are almost always in states of uproarious laughter. they are just clearly just enjoying each other so much. even their wives described, like, what is up with them? even their wives were like, these guys are weird. they just have such an affinity for each other. the pictures of them are really quite charming, if somebody wants to look them up. you will get a big tickle out of them. they eventually start a retreat center at the former incarceration camp, heart mountain.

and they stayed friends throughout the rest of their lives. when they got to be old, alan talked about how we no longer go out for drinks. we have what i refer to as organ recitals, where we say, how is your heart? how is your liver? we recite our organs like old guys do. they never stopped loving each other, and it is just such a heartwarming story about friendships that can cross bridges. peter: from "the small and the mighty," you write, "the text to the preamble imagined america its finest, just, peaceful, good, and free. with astonishing regularity, americans have held fast to these ideals, despite the clickbait stories that portend calamity. and america has too often fallen short of the standards. both of these things are true at the same time." why are we writing about the preamble to the constitution?

sharon: the preamble was written by a man names gouverneur morris, whose story has largely been written out of the founding fathers story, somebody who most americans would not know who he was, and yet he was very famous ring his lifetime. he was best friends with alexander hamilton. he did not make it into the broadway musical. but it is his hand that writes down "we the people." some of the most important words , not just in u.s. history, but the preamble has become some of the most -- one of the most important portions of a document in world history. american democracy has had

global impacts, global, and gouverneur morris and the other people of the committee that helped sort of form the text of the constitution laid out in that preamble exactly what the constitution was meant to do, and we know -- many of us were encouraged to memorize this in elementary school. we the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, and i will not recite the whole thing here today, but you probably recognize some of the words of it. it is saying what america at her best will be, and this is, in many ways, america's mission statement. it is the northstar that we can point ourselves to during times of trouble, that america is at her best when we are just. we are meant to establish justice. america is peaceful in that we are meant to do things like ensure domestic tranquility.

america is good in that the constitution was meant to establish principles that exist for the greater good. and america is meant to be free. it is meant to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. if you distill the preamble down to its essence, those are the four principles that americans can take and tuck into their heart, and compare the election of leaders, they can compare laws, proposed legislation. does this make us more just, more peaceful, more good, and more free? that was america at her best. peter: sharon mcmahon, is that one of those things students should memorize, the preamble to the constitution? sharon: it certainly would not hurt, would it? we would be well served by tucking that one into our pockets. peter: sharon mcmahon is the author of this book, "the small

and the mighty: 12 unsung americans who changed the course of history, from the founding to the civil rights movement." she is also the creator of the here is where it gets interesting podcast and the sharon says so social media account. thank you for being our guest on "q&a." sharon: thanks for having me. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2025] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] ♪ >> "q&a" programs are available on our website or as a podcast on our c-span now app. ♪ >> did you know that all of c-span's book tv programs are available to watch online? go to book tv.org and put your favorite author or topic of interest in the search box. thousands of programs from the past 20 years all available online at book tv.org.