there's another section in the book where hiram is in philadelphia. otherst a mentor call moses and it turns out it was harriet tubman. at one point he is walking with tubman and there over the delaware river. and she says, "memory is the chariot and memory is the way and memory is bridge from the curse of slavery to the boon of freedom." in essence, the power of hiram's memory really represents what we, americans, lack in terms of our own understanding of the history of how our country came to be? >> yeah, well, what i will say w withhe thing is conduction, the power is tight always not just a memory, but memories that maybe we would not like to talk about or deal with. it is the excavation of deep and often painful things that we would rather not speak of. and one of the themes in the book is the extent to which the enslavers are themselves actually enslaved by their inability to remember and recall. while i would not tell anybodody how to read the book, i would cecertainly say there's someme amount of allegory in t that in today and how even those

one to some but it got to the center for science near hiram and has been studying the river water forests the lab tests found pollutants such as arsenic zinc lead nickel we have passed this information on to people to the supreme court as well nothing's happened. it took a 2nd lawsuit to finally force the dye companies to close for 11 months and modernize their sewage plants management says the pollutants are being removed. bigger lucia family firm has improved its production methods since the german and scandinavian markets in particular began demanding higher ecological standards. pollution no longer uses talk to chemical plant has built its own wastewater treatment plant but its 2 owners say europe is equally responsible for india's environmental problems. that the countries have discouraged such industries in their own country and their. very started to sing. these products from the developing countries so this shifted the burden of pollution on the revenue base but this was really of the end that humanity the children of these farmers are now looking for work in the cities because as

and hiram is in this search like all enslaved people of the period for freedom.t search is actually connected to many more things and many more people than he thought, and to his memory, or lack thereof. >> stephen: you say you worked on this for 10 years. tell me about the research that goes into this. because i grew up in the south. i grew up in charleston, south carolina. >> did you visit plantations? is that a thing you did? >> stephen: oh, sure we went to middleton and drayton. it was a field trip. >> did they talk about slaves? >> stephen: yeah... but there weren't, like, examples. when i was a child, there wasn't much... wasn't much pointing at it. it was most like like architecture and gardens and things like that. they didn't talk much about who ground the corn or why the gardens were so fancy, and who did all that landscaping. it was m, look at this sort of cultural artifact that is left over." and a lot of talk about how the yankees burned it down. >> i did that. i went to a number of plantations in the course of research. i went to the whitney plantat

he didn't explain that all why he chose to do that not one time by several as hiram's minimum of 3 times at this point so i felt like he was just sort of been sitting around the answer and saying that it's offensive and he understands how he didn't know it and at age 29 and. i just feel like we deserve a better explanation for why he thought it was appropriate to do that ok what would be some explanations that would satisfy you that would make you happy if it just sort of came out with a i mean i think honestly personally i think the truth is he just thought it was in using and funny and he hasn't outraised that so to me on the scene would be better than him sort of dancing around the question ok to be straightforward and stand up and say this is this is what happened i thought it was funny it's not ok. in regards to that you call him a privileged white dude who grew up in a bubble and wonder if you some laughing behind your back it's quite a strong in the say about the prime minister just think other people of color encounter feeling that way today i mean i know definitely within my fri

interested in but beyond that i've also been paying attention to what zimbabweans are saying and is hiram to say his sede his legacy is very complicated on one hand we have young people that see that they're very said that he has died but i think that is more a reflection of the current president that in the last year and a half somewhat way hasn't been able to resolve the economic conditions so there was always a feeling that when robert i'm going to be days everything will get better the economy will get better the political system would get better and that hasn't happened and so i think that's where we hear some of that feeling of free morse or missing robert mugabe but on the other hand there are people that are quite adamant that he's he's straight particularly windy that violence in 2008 that he's legacy is one of violence and brutality in that that's what he'll be remembered for and what was it like for you growing up in mugabe's zimbabwe. i think i was just tweeting about this a couple of hours ago that you know for me personally it's quite a journey to try and unravel all of thos

the book tells the story of hiram walker a gifted man born in bondage. >> the title, what does that meanere being brought over to america. people would talk about how, you know, these folks when they leaped they almost seemed to dance on the waves. >> water plays a key role in this book. >> it does. >> several times. >> what hiram has is memory a need to not forget and remembered what happened and the great power he can pull from that. >> i feel this is one of the few books, tanehisi, that touches on the humanity and the emotion of slavery. you know, in most cases it's painted with a monolithic brush. we don't normally have individual stories. >> right. i wanted to bring that into the fictional realm and center the emotions and feelings of the people. >> for his first novel he based the story in lockless, a fictional plantation inspired by monticello. >> slave labor put this house together. >> reporter: it's the home of president thomas jefferson a founding father himself enslaved over 600 people. >> this is history. history is dirty. >> history is dirty. >> history is dirty. >> what imp

singapore hospital on september the 6th age 95 almost 2 years after a military coup ended his 37 year old hiram it's also has more from. relevant goddess family had a private burial but before that it was a church service a child so people have to come and say good bye we heard from several family members his sister in norton say that he was adamant he did not want to be buried in the national heroes like a cemetery in the capital because he was angry at the way the army removed him from power in $27000.00 he said the way he was treated by the army and the current government was demeaning some traditional leaders don't agree with the fact that he was buried in the rural villages in by they says the founding fathers and why we should be made at the hero's eka signature there are reports that some of the leaders of those chiefs were told not to attend the burial what does involving stink of this war usually in this country when someone dies it takes about a week before someone is buried in a garbage escaped mainly at his residence at his house in the capital harare of the proof was them that some

passage, the klan was among them, and taking credit, imperial wizard, the national leader of the klan, hiram evans, told an indiana audience that now, america has built a stone wall around the nation, so tall, so deep, so strong, that the scum and riffraff of the old world cannot get into our gates. these immigrants, these others were the cause of many problems. i think the largest problem they caused was alcohol. at a time of prohibition. this, too, is a long story. in many midwestern communities, the enforcement of prohibition was the number one policy issue. it had been pushed hard by protestants since the 1840's at least in many parts of the midwest, especially by protestant church women concerned about what they saw as the decline of family life. the growing corruption that came with the sale and manufacture of alcohol. all the more unsettling because it was quite clear that the authorities were not adequately enforcing the law of the land and the law of the states, that some people like this swell crowd, i think this is madison, wisconsin, were mocking prohibition. not just disobeying

hiram maxim. one thing you could point to who probably was unwittingly one of the two architects of the slaughter of the first world war was this guy. he was a frenetic indirect dirt -- inventor. light bolts, airplanes, a child maine and heg in had a shotgun or maybe it was a rifle. he said,nd fired and there ought to be a way to harness that energy, that recoil. that's exactly what he did when he invented the machine gun. he's spent weeks and weeks and weeks. parts was machining the for the first machine gun, which was basically co-opted in germany. anyway he was very savvy as a businessman. maxim aroundir 1901. he was in tight with all of the elites in england. they introduced him to anybody who was anybody. was in tight with the british military 20 years before the first world war. he went all over the world. when he built his gun, china said, we do not want this sort of thing. the spires too fast for us. get out of here. , they said, this could be a really cool device. one of the interesting t

. >> the first senator to come back and serve mississippi with reconstruction is hiram rebels, an african-american think of the passage of the 13th amendment abolishing slavery, he steps in as the first black senator, that is remarkable. he had not been a slave. he was born into freedom and was an educator by nature and occupation and had been a prominent black politician in mississippi. as the republican party grew in the reconstruction south, it sent black members to congress. to the house and senate as well. he is only there for a short time because he is filling out a vacancy, so he is there for about a year, but it is an important year. the single most important -- it was overwhelming. he entered the chamber that day in 1870, and the galleries were packed with african-americans who cheered and applauded as he came in. i can only begin to imagine the emotion that must've brought to this people. many of whom had been five years earlier in slavery. and then in 1875, we get the second senator, also of mississippi. >> he was an interesting senator and human being. he had been born in slavery in vi