we're coming to you from the new york historical society where they're featuring the chinese americanusion/inclusion exhibit. chronicling the chinese american experience from the eighteenth century to today. let's take a look. for bronx born amy chin this exhibit is personal.

so when they found the one at the new york historical society, and that was days and days of just going through these written records, and i was like, why am i doing this? and the young man there, his name was fernando, and i went and told him and he said to me, he got really excited. this was his one excitement. he said i could give you this book. you know i can't. and your third question was about when i -- [inaudible] >> yes, ok. so at the schaumburg, the woman had written a book called the free negro in antebellum new york. it was a columbia dissertation from the 1970s, and she died before publishing it. her husband had gotten it published as a book, and then gave the manuscript collection to the schaumburg. -- the book is all and everybody says, go to the recent scholarship. she had really, really done her homework. i mean, she did everything. and i ended up just repeating what she did, just for verifying that everything she had panned out. so she had given it to the schaumburg, so the material i saw in her book, i kind of expected to find there. you know, as a primary source , not

but from another angle, at the new york historical society.o they basically took down my words, turned it into a script. i wrote a little abridged thing combining the two things saying how they joined and i recorded it. the interesting thing was, my books are all recorded by an actor. you hear my new york accent perhaps so i said to my agent recordell maybe i could one. she says, then the price will go down. [laughter] brian: you mentioned lynn nesbitt and this talk that you made on audible.com. for people that have no idea the value of an agent and how important it was to you, tell us how it happened. about lynn nesbitt. robert: that's a good story. i was a newspaper reporter and i wanted to do a biography of robert moses as i thought that was a way of examining how real political power works in the cities. because we are in a democracy and we are taught in high school and college that basically the power comes from people casting ballot boxes and people getting elected. but in robert moses, you have a man who was never elected to anything an