so it's wonderful to see you too katarina. yeah, it's great to be here with you. so can you tell us more about the idea? for how this book came to you? how did it start as a project for you? well, like many whitman scholars, i've been fascinated by whitman's relationship to a variety of cities. he's probably most famously associated with the new york area, long island, new york city, but he also spent some formative months in new orleans as you know, and others know and then a decade in washington dc the time period that i focused on and then at the end of his life, of course he was in the philadelphia and camden new jersey area. so those are the four big places for whitman and it seemed to me that the washington decade had been you know studied but in some ways strangely neglected, it hadn't really been given its due and i started to gravitate toward that i did a digital project on civil war washington that's studied the transformation of the city over the four years of civil war and it's fascinating what happened to the city during that time quadrupled in size a

so it's wonderful to see you too katarina. yeah, it's great to be here with you. so can you tell us more about the idea? for how this book came to you? how did it start as a project for you? well, like many whitman scholars, i've been

going to doi'm katarina bernar'm here with professor ken prize author of whipping in washington becoming the national poet in the federal city, which was