he's the author of beneath the american renaissance in the age of emerson and melville, and i certainly found that that s word, subversive, came up quite a bit in his analysis of "uncle tom's cabin "and its impact. and david is the author of faith and fiction, so when you see this list of books, you begin to understand how much he may -- how often he may have run into stowe and uncle tom's cabin in his other work. his latest book that we are talking about tonight is "mightier than the sword: uncle tom's cabin and the battle for america," which as i mentioned will be released by norton on june 14th, stowe's 200% birthday. also released that day will be a new, modern version of the splendid edition of "uncle tom's cabin," an absolutely gorgeous document that you have to wait until then to get. so, please, join me in welcoming david reynolds to the harriet beecher stowe center. david. [applause] >> thanks very much, katherine. um, what i'm going to do is just comment for 15 or 20 minutes introducing my book and then katherine and i are going to have a friendly dialogue and, hopefully, open

that the american south was eternally cursed because of the orignal, quote-unquote, sin of slavery, melville wrestling with other types of issues. yeah, people like that. for me, i just thought, "wow." curses are such a part of what... how americans view themselves, their identity, their history, that i just looked for the dominican version of a very, very big american preoccupation. >> hinojosa: so do you want... you want young people to get a sense of... and one of the things that's great about the book is you have these wonderful footnotes. there are some pages, junot, where i enjoyed the footnotes more than the page itself, which was pretty fascinating. but you want to be, like, this kind of teacher of history to a new generation, and you want them to think critically. i mean, essentially not to forget, right? >> well, i mean, but also the... i mean, again, it's... you've got to know i'm a fiction writerso a lot othe history isn't actually accurate. you know, it's not meant to be a history book. in fact, it's arguing... >> hinojosa: it's the jon stewart form of history. >> well, but even

and i was lucky enough to have some great teachers there, too, who we teach herman melville, and would go out to the home of the professor which was situated on the rocks overlooking the atlantic, and he would talk about ahab and the whale, this was all very real to me. so after college, more hitchhiking. and now i'm trying to become the great american novelist. and i am not making much headway. i'm having a great time, but i find it very difficult to sit down and actually write something that is longer than a short story. so, eventually i just had to come to the realization that i wasn't going to be the great american writer. maybe i would explore something else, and publishing seemed like the next best thing. so, 36 years ago, we started our little company here in maryland. that was after i pounded on doors in new york city, try to find a job in publishing. thousand late 1975. there were very few jobs available. anyway, i've never regretted the choice. publishing is a wonderful business, and although today when i meet people for the first time to say i'm in the book publishing busine

and there's one next week over in melville at the marriott.o we aurnurge all of the survi and family members to appear, participate, make yourself be heard and really it's critical that you contact the congress people, senator schumer, sena r senator -- >> we'll have to wrap it there. i know that there are many different places that folks can go to and obviously those town hall meeting, we'll keep a close eye on. very controversial issue. a lot of people have suffered who worked at ground zero. thank you very much daniel hanson and of course emil for your tame aime and your story, well. >> thank you. >>> remember the big hit, right, that your 401(k) took during the great recession? now wall street is worried that this debt crisis in d.c. is going to mean -- what is that going to mean for the markets and your investment? alison kosik is at the new york stock exchange. a lot of people, it was not long ago, we lost a lot of money. and wall street now is preparing for what might lie ahead. do we see people reacting the same way? >> reporter: oh, y