i went to an all women's college and was taught by powerful ,ntellectuals, academic women so i begano see possibilities in their lives that i was able to imagine for my own. emily: you were the first harvard president without a harvard degree. -- and ino bryn mawr went on to the university of pennsylvania and became he history professor -- a history professor. student activist and college come involved in politics, civil rights issues, vietnam war protests, and cared a lot about changing the world and having an impact on the world. when i graduated from college i worked in the department of housing and urban development, and i hoped in an idealistic way to move into may be urban planning or some area that would enable me to carry on my concerns about public service and changing the world, but i so missed intellectual life and ideas and the kind of debate that is out the heart of the university, so i applied to graduate school and went back and got a phd. that led me to a faculty position at penn that i held for 25 years. emily: you wrote six books. became as storing of the american s

many people see him as an ntellectual work the randfather of the civil rights ovement. that little community of greenwood erected the first we need those alternative role models, not necessarily heroes, we did a good job at saying it is more complicated than that. what you folks have done with 10 center in buford and raise a monument for reconstruction. this is important. during the says quentin neil, someone said -- says quentin neil -- no one is calling for commemoration of reconstruction, but the national parks service has done something. it is important to talk about those unsung heroes. there are so many of those. these are extraordinary heroes, black and white, who stood against the grain. i think we need to do those. we have historians need to understand that we have be engaged with public history. that is where people are learning their history. you will not change some names, but you can rename them. we can make progress, we can move forward, we can accept our history and build upon it and do what is right in terms of making a better america. i want to call upo