nothing like that. >> host: chandra manning, when did you get interested in the civil war?host: i can't remember not being interested in 19th 19th century u.s. history in particular. i loved little house on the prairie, believe it or not, when i was a kid, and that really drew me to the 19th century. i was very close to my grandmother, who taught me to read when i was two, and she was fascinated by the civil war, and i can't explain why. our family wasn't in the united states yet. anything about her, i was going to be just like her, so i became very interested in the civil war pretty young, probably eight or nine when i read the "life of johnny reb." and one was 1943, and another one in 1952, and they're descriptive books about civil war soldiers. if you want to know what a soldier wore or what the buttons on the uniform looked like or what kind of practical jokes he played on his friends, if you want to know anything about his daily life, they will never be surpassed. i read those quite young, and the bug bit then. so, i've been interested for a very long time. here at geo

i never watched the paralympics and you know none of my friends did and chandra languages people with disabilities that's a has we tend to forget that this can happen to anybody this can happen to us just so when our friends and i never cared about it as a member. people. you know they are into this for that and they are in every event and they support me. they are all about athletes they know about each of the offloads went to sleep over to their house they don't turn that way from the. contrary they're now keen to know more about this sport and both the athlete as a person chance to bow to his disability. paralympics on t.v. people will never get used to it they will never learn to see beyond his abilities because. it is not your disability that defines who you. just saw the video of the reception your fellow athletes had in the recently departed. there are different ways people come to paralympic sports some alike knew they were professional athletes and then they had an accident or something and then continue as paralympians. others were born with disabilities or they take up spor

. >>> and now on your screen as professor chandra manning the author of this book "what this cruel war was over soldiers slavery of the war." what was your approach to this book? >> the first thing of the approaches that you give me wait too much credit when you say approach. the book is not at all the book i thought i was going to write when i started. i started with an interest in civil war soldiers to read. absolutely no intention at all of writing about soldiers and slavery. i was interested in enlisted soldiers in the regular farmers and the keepers and the non-slaveholders and the number who growers didn't think we ran into gear about slavery very much at all, and i was interested in the war command especially interested in how they differ from each other, not just north and south of how somebody from boston is different from somebody from ohio or have somebody different from the chesapeake from appalachian. so it was very interesting and what people who lived in the 19th century thought about where they lived and connected to this thing called the nation. what did it mean to be

. >> the chandra levy summer, absolutely.august 6th memo that went to president bush from the national security team about the possibility of something like this happening, there was such a confidence this could never happen in america. are we overconfident again? >> that's a really good question. there's a very powerful op-ed column in another newspaper in "the new york times" by kirk ikenwald today that not only talks about that one dial daily briefing that we've all heard about al qaeda determined to strike in the u.s., but warnings that were not heeded or adequately heeded and you kind of wonder now that we know that it really can happen here to us, we like to have the confidence we wouldn't be so negligent or whatever, just not believing, the next time around but you do worry because there is no, nt a daily focus on terrorism the way we sort of imagined there would be day to day in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. 11 years later we have slowed down a little bit, at least some of us. >> certainly there's a lot of public w

broader threats and the most substantial threats beyond that just the exultation of data is what chandra pretty which is the disruption of data, the denial of access today. there are foreign intelligence services that are aggressively pursuing, again, across all domains come and there are terrorist groups that are actively advocating attack on the western world. they're calling for digital jihad. they're looking at targeting not only our critical infrastructure through control systems that they're also looking at our financial services sector. there have been videos that have been released where those that are sympathetic to the jihad because of actively called for attacks on the west. and calls the youth to use their electronic capabilities, use their cyber skills to attack the west. this is their call to jihad, they can have an impact on the cause by using their skill set. so it is broadening beyond the 15 year old kid hacking, defacing a website, into a big business for organized crime groups and into cyber tool or a weapon. cyber is the great equalizer. anybody with a $500 laptop and

. >> watch our entire interview with chandra manning as she discusses her book "what this cruel war was over" tonight at 8 p.m. eastern here on c-span2. spacex, joe jackson, author of "atlantic fever" recalls the 14th 80 users who took part in a $25,000 contest to be first to fly nonstop across the atlantic in 1927. the event culminated in the death of six pilots and was won by charles lindbergh, who guided the spirit of st. louis across the ocean on may 21, 1927. this is about an hour and 10 minutes. >> well, thank you for having me out here and thank you for coming out here tonight. i spoke at one of the place in manhattan today. this, and the time in manhattan where the first times that i've ever given a talk with powerpoint or excel i'll try not to blow anything up. they show me how to push the buttons and it should move forward easily. this is my seventh book, and whenever i start a new book is usually from an idea. when i started thinking about this book, it was 2008, the year of the beijing summer olympics, and the presidential elections. there was a lot of talk in the press and

. >> watch our entire interview with chandra manning as she discusses her book, "what this cruel war was over," tonight at 8 eastern on c-span2. >> so what i'm going to do tonight is give a little talk about how past losing presidential campaigns have shaped the 2012 election and then maybe do a little speculation on how the 2012 election might influence future political history in the united states. and i'm going to begin, well, i'll talk for about 20 minutes and then open up for questions, but i'm going to begin with what i think is a bold prediction which is that on november 6, 2012, there will absolutely, definitely be a winner and a loser. [laughter] but the bold prediction is this. the thing is, we may not know for several decades who was which. because sometimes it's not clear. sometimes the winner has almost no impact on american history. they become kind of nonentities, inconsequential in history, where off times the losing candidate will really change the political dynamics in a whole bunch of different ways. now let me -- before i go into how that works, let me tell you wh