awr, you to bryn m majored in history, and then you went on to the university of pennsylvania and became a history professor. drew: i was very much a student activist in college, very involved in politics, civil rights issues, vietnam war protests, and cared a lot about changing the world and having an impact on the world. and when i graduated from college, i worked for two years for the department of housing and urban development, so i hope in a very idealistic way to move into maybe urban planning or some area that would enable me to carry on my concerns about public service and changing the world. but i so missed intellectual life and ideas and the kind of debate that is at the heart of a university, so i applied to graduate school at penn and went penn, andot a phd at that eventually led me to a faculty position at penn that i held for 25 years. emily: you wrote six books. tell me about that. drew: i became a historian of the american south and began to explore questions that were not all that distant from some of the questions that i asked as a young child growing up in a segregated