it's about clarence king and henry adams, john hey and very interesting lives. in the five of them had the kind of social group. in the book king was the sky, they were all very intellectual people. from east. in the book, king would sort of blowing from the west all sunburned. and everybody seemed to be in love with him. male and female. this is really interesting subject. really should be a book about him. i kept telling my writer friends, you really need to write a book about clarence king. he's really a great character. a friend of mine used to work for the new york times, so the wise thing once that i've never forgotten witches you just can't give away a good idea. and part of this what makes a good idea good is your enthusiasm for it. so eventually i just said, i will write it myself. so i did that. as i said in the beginning, that's what led me to matthew brady. with both the king book and the barnum book, i was very lucky that there had been very good academic biographies about both figures. so they help me out. in fact the biographer from barnum, named a

photography led her to work on the expeditions that mapped the western landscapes and the career of clarence king. her accounts of king's life "passing strange: a gilded age tale of love and deception " returnse color line to the biographical arts she learned about inviting about gilpin and the archival patients she had mastered. what animates "passing strange" though is race, the color line that snakes its way through the post-emancipation united states. her own work in a way a survey of that color line. it shakes her extraordinary project, the web-based collaborative that she led him on princeton and slavery. videos, stories unearthed have left us with a campus changed by the materials they have found to record and represent the many roles of enslaved people in the history of that university. so let me end this intellectual wedding toast by turning to las vegas's other industry, until you one other story about your president as a gambler. [laughter] you wonder about this. it did happen. i went to see her in santa fe. just as she had to fort worth. it worked again in santa fe. come see me, she i

bob is the author of matthew portions of the nation a biography of clarence king. it is the editor of the emergent scholar a former editor of preservation, and the founding literary editor of civilization. a former book editor and columnist for u.s. today, and a former editor at the washington post book world. his essays reviews and fiction, have appeared in numerous