i was inspired and guided by the journal of sir john franklin, who was sent out by the british admiralty in 1819 to explore the coastline of the arctic ocean as part of the search for the northwest passage. after a year traveling up rivers, following the fur trade routes, he arrived at great slave lake, the farthest outpost of the hudson bay company. he started up the yellowknife river in august with three canoes and 27 men, but inadequate supplies. he was completely dependent on chief akaitcho and members of theellowknife tribe as guides and hunters. he lost half his men to st winter but was hailed as a hero on his return to england. i planned to follow is route, but with a more tasty diet of grayling and quinoa. before leaving the city of yellowknife, i saught out an elder of the yellowknife tribe, fred sangris. i wanted to acknowledge that i would be traveling across his people's homeland and i wanted to do that with as much awareness of his culture as possible. we talked about my route and his life living on the land, hunting and trapping. i asked him how he honors the land as he tra

so i called john hope franklin and he said yes, that's why nobody knows who she is. and that's why she deserves those pages. and so i said well it doesn't have to be there. i was famous for just pulling things. and so i i pulled it and and that sat there then until we did that conference. so it was written much earlier. um, so in terms of 1837, we thought that we should find people and we should trace it through this history through from 1837 right on up into the more recent period of that time and that's what we did. we had no idea that this was going to turn into a major book. but 19 18 37 was a beginning point, but as lisa tetrault has explained and others now who have published so many books. we know far more now than we knew then but what we wrote the scholars wrote. about black women these two were seminal works for all of those people. some of them were working on dissertations and all kinds of things. so that's how we came to that point. now martha has has written in her wonderful book. a lot about the transitional period and both martha and i wrote about tha

phillips also served on a board of directors for tulsa's john hope franklin center for reconciliation, a group working to address the area's tumultuous past of racial violence. the rampage that killed phillips can one day after the 101st massacre when a white mob pillaged a neighborhood killinging hundreds of residents. these are weapons of war with designed to kill numbers of people and that's literally their design purpose. it is a easier to purchase an ar-15 than it is to buy sudafed or a beer. we regulate swimming pools, food, we regulate ladders because lad remembers dangerous. a primary cause of serious, even fatal injuries for workers, and yet we do nothing about assault weapons, even as the violence continues with separate shootings in the midwest just yesterday and even as families in uvalde bury that's preshd loved ones. joining us from uvalde is -- i can't imagine what it was like being at one of the funerals and if you can give us a sense of how the family is doing and the community is doing. >> the community is crushed. before attending the funeral i went over and actuall

had no shyness about lobbying politicians, according to your telling of the tale, including franklin pierce. john: he would lobby everybody. he would bring gifts to people, a great gift giver. he would engrave the arms and the most flamboyant manner, put them in fancy cases and present them to people he thought could do him some good. he gave a wonderfully engraved couple of revolvers to prince albert in england, queen victoria's husband. he gave some to czar nicholas in russia. he gave them to franklin pierce. he would lobby like mad. he tried to bribe somebody in the ordinance -- long before his second wind. so much so that his cousin, i think it was treasurer, remonstrated him in writing saying i don't want you to get contracts bypassing money to people or passing gifts. but colt was very happy to curry favor wherever he could. host: how wealthy did he eventually grow? john: the exact dollar figure i don't remember, something pops up in my head, 15 million or so. in the time, he was one of the wealthiest people in connecticut. when he died, he left a considerable estate that benefited substant

ben benjamin franklin and john adams were already there as ambassadors, as ministers to friends too.tony joined them. and adams and jefferson had worked together in the continental conference. congress. and they bonded together. his family inherits jefferson visited adams in english and they towards some of those english gardens together, so they were very close friends. they broke apart bitterly, you know, over the politics of the 17 90s. and then in their retirement, they rekindled the correspondence. they did not talk about slavery, almost never, in the letters. and i suspect it was because adams didn't bring it up, because he knew this was a painful subject, it was one that jefferson didn't have a good answer for. he didn't like confrontation, jefferson didn't. he was a wonderful, he was a magnificent letter writer. there are almost like poetry. and he was a wonderful conversationalist. but he would certainly shy away from one-on-one confident confrontations. our atoms. in a way that jefferson off the hook. he didn't push him on slavery in the correspondence. and jefferson didn't

three of our founding fathers thomas jefferson benjamin franklin and john adams negotiated a treaty of friendship and commerce with frederick the great in 1785. establishing a basis for the special in relationship that we enjoy today. americans were affected in other ways by this city when some of the best and brightest people active in berlin came to the united states. albert einstein george gross arnold schoenberg kurt vile mice vander rao the list of former residents of this city who changed the face of modern america is practically limitless. all right. he is just told me and now they want to create heaven on earth. the we celebrate with you today. well. thank you. thank you. when i thank you very much and i wish you well. so we do celebrate with you today remembering the heroic deeds. of these here on this platform and all berliners and the longstanding relationship between our two countries. but let's not forget the painful lessons of the not so recent past and draw on those experiences. together we can build a better future for this city for europe and for the world. and as we l

was one of it was kind of an all-star lineup of diplomats when jefferson got there benjamin franklin and john adams were already there as ambassadors as ministers to france too. so he joined them and he they had you know, adams and jefferson had worked together in the continental continental congress. they bonded even more and and he with her whole family there in paris. he visited jefferson visited adams in england and they toured some of those english gardens together, so they were very close friends. they broke apart bitterly, you know over the politics of the 1790s and then in their retirement, they rekindled the correspondence. they did not talk about slavery almost never in in the letters and i suspect it was because atoms didn't bring it up because he knew this was a painful subject. it was one that jefferson didn't have a good answer for he didn't like confrontation jefferson didn't he was a wonderful. he's a magnificent letter writer. they're almost like poetry and he was a wonderful conversation list, but he was certainly shy away from one-on-one confrontation on so adams in a way l

john f. kennedy looks different from dwight eisenhower. and from franklin roosevelt and from ronald reagan, but all those four presidents were in the top 10 of all presidents, but for very very different reasons. but but by god if you love your country and you give us your very best things are probably going to wind up pretty pretty well for the american people and for the world. each other. yeah. i think the microphones are working away around here. 10 edelman? yes. thank you very much for this. it's a wonderful discussion mark. your books are great. you're four-part series with lbj is great. so it's a wonderful occasion. two questions number one is we all learned that character is primary it's very important. and it's very odd that kennedy's character of public service. was so exemplary and so inspiring and his personal character was not so exemplary and so inspiring and there seems to be a total split between you know, the public service that he did and the values that he had and the private values that he had which are pretty despicable if you look back

john f. kennedy looks are different from dwight eisenhower in from franklin roosevelt in from ronald reagan. but all those four presidents are in the top ten of all presidents, but for very, very different reasons. but by god, if you love your country and you give us our very best, things are going to wind up pretty well for the american people and for the world. -- >> i think the microphones are working their way around here. >> -- >> yes, thank you very much for this, it's a wonderful discussion. mark, your books are great, your four part series with lbj is great. it's a wonderful occasion. two questions. number one is, we all learn that character is primary, it's very important. it's very odd that kennedy's character of public service was so exemplary, so inspiring. his personal character was not so exemplary and so inspiring. there seems to be a total split between the public service that he did and the values that he. and the private values that he had, which were pretty despicable if you look back at it now. second point is, you are absolutely right, the cuban missile crisis was a trem

john adams, right? but beside that i don't i think that number unless you're you know, benjamin franklin, right? and yes, i'm sorry and benjamin franklin, so why not hamilton? why why do you think given all that he did? why he is not at the four like that with others. why do you think that it? well, i think with the exception of franklin in part is because they're all presidents, right and we understand what presidents are and what they do and we, you know on the president's generally speaking so it's easy to kind of know what they do, even if we don't fully understand it franklin is kind of so notorious in so many ways kind of makes sense hamilton is you know the coordinator like the you know, he's the person. figuring things out. that's not the person you normally celebrate. so i think in some ways there wasn't really space that there were people didn't they really just didn't and it's very interesting to me when i talk about this people. don't believe it when i say that people really just didn't know who he was didn't care who he was he wasn't a president and you had to argue for the ways in

johns university and fellow at the robert h. jackson center. he's the biographer of justice -- [inaudible] and editor of jackson's acclaimed 2003 posthumous book, quote, that man: an insider's portrait of franklin d. roosevelt, the last new deal insider's memoir. also with us, paul blumenthal, former new york times reporter and continues to be a periodic contributor of the times. the author of five books including "the believer" about the harvard psychiatrist john mack who investigated u if fos -- ufos and alien encounters. we'll talk about this in a minute. we'll starlet with professor if barrett. -- start with professor barrett. give us a little bit of your background, specifically your work on justice robert jackson. >> thank you, paul, for this opportunity and really the privilege to be at the roosevelt library and homestead in every sense except actual. the path that led he to all of this us -- was really being a lawyer at first. i worked in the bureau of investigations for about seven years and then became a law professor. among hi areas, public life, public figures, legal ethics and constitutional law. and sort of a converging on the supreme court and the people on the court. and robert

after that, we see where franklin roosevelt died in office in 1945, and there was this major event but it was unplanned because no one expected him to die. and that leads us into john f. kennedy, the next president to die. and just very quickly, after john f. kennedy, who also died unplanned, is when presidents started to do this pre-planning of funerals. and one ring binder that turned into three, that grew overtime. so that's when we see the modern, the modern-day state funeral that we are so familiar with now, really start to form after kennedy, really herbert hoover's was the first one who had the pre-planning that had gone into it. >> yeah. and as you pointed to, as we both pointed to, the plan element of it, as jean has said, okay, well you don't know when it's going to happen. my gosh, with john f. kennedy, you really, really don't know when it's going to occur. yet a funeral still needs to take place, and needs to take place relatively quickly. so, nicola, if you could talk to us, you've got this fabulous museum here in dallas, the sixth floor museum. but a great deal of it covers jfk's funeral. how were they able to do that? >> well, i think the last thing