To speech or not its the people you dont have to be here. There will be no tests. I say this sincerely. im very flattered you took the time in your evening to come listen to me. I think that my students by and large are interested in the subject, but i know perfectly well that if they did not test, academic papers or rather, the seats would be empty. None of you have to be here, but she did, and i find that very flattering. I could i supposed to be a test at the end. The title of my talk on the title of my book is called the heartbreak of aaron burr. I cant tell you the whole story without giving away the ending. I dont want to give away the ending because its not just that i want you to buy the book and read the book and enjoy it and hang around till the end, but it has to do with the reason i wrote the book in the first place. This goes back to my experience of writing, my experience of reading and in particular, my experience of listening to a question that my mother has been putting to me for the last 23 or 24 years. And the question i would get to in a moment. But it goes to the heart of why people write and why people read. I teach history at the university of texas. I also teach writing. I teach writing to graduate students. The graduate students in my writing seminar also completed a couple days ago come from history. They come from communications, journalism. They come from the english department. They come from fine arts. They are students. They are apprentice writers. And they are working on developing their craft, their skill, their art in various genres. Some of them, the historians are going to write nonfiction. Journalists are going to write nonfiction of a somewhat different view. But i also have novelists. I have poets, playwrights and screenwriters. And they are sharing to accomplish Something Else. Well, except the one of the things we talk about is what it is we are all trying to accomplish. Can this gets to the question of why people write and why people read. I can put the question to you. Youre all readers i assume. I could ask you, why do you read . And may in fact take that question and hold onto it because there will be a questionandanswer time at the end. And typically the questions come from the audience and the answers come from the speaker, but we can turn it around. If you care to volunteer why you read later, id be happy to hear what it is. But i will tell you what kind of reactions ive gotten over the years i pose this question to various audience including my students. Including my mother. I would just that i had some time waiting for the lectures was just talking to mom who lives in oregon and pleased to say shes doing well. Shes 86 years old. Anyway, thank you, yes. I will tell her you applauded. At least a couple of you. Is that an applause that she received 56, is still in good health, reads my writing . All of the above . About 15 years ago is teaching an undergraduate seminar. It was for seniors, history majors. It turned out that the 15 students in the class were all history majors, but half of them are english majors as well. And it just so happened that would allow. The students were reading various sort of greats of history, but the particular genre that i chose for that semester was great biographies including autobiographies. And so, they read selections from boswells life of johnson and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and the confessions of Saint Augustine and julius caesars commentaries on the war. One work that particularly caught their attention was the autobiography of benvenuto cellini. How many of you have read it . You should all read it. Its fantastic. The thing that makes this so interesting is that it is a work of supreme egotism. Cellini is convinced that he was the greatest artists that god ever put on the earth and it comes through on every page. But he tells the story in a charming enough fashion that you are not put off by it. Youre well enough to go along with it. So i have the students read a selection where cellini is providing a masterwork and becomes very frustrated with the type missions. He has cast the original mould and now just left the technicians to mount the bronze in poorer then. Its a very complicated mould with a statue of hercules with the head of medusa in hand. And its real complicated because it has to go from the heel all the way to the tip of the arm through the snakes coils and had them everything. He chose this wonderful story about how he is on his deathbed. But the technicians are not getting it right to come off his deathbed and they cant get the fire hot enough to melt the metal hot enough and so they throw it all the fire but theyve got a miniature when the furniture and start tearing the paneling off the walls and throw that in. He is developing these the various preaching while the fires burning any poisoning to indicate the mold and then he collapses on the floor and he wakes up only four days later not knowing if hes dead or alive. And so he realizes hes alive than to curse them eventually and says how does it turned out . May knock the mold off and it turns out theres this brilliant masterpiece. The end of the story is no one couldve done it to me. So the students come that they dont know quite what to make of this. So i asked the students, you know, any time there is a work presented to you as being true, you have to ask yourself whether it is in something you read or send in your encounter in daily life or some political speech that a candidate is you believe them. You dont have to take things at face value. Do you believe this story . I asked them, how would you collaborate a story like this or any story . I mentioned to the students that any time you encounter anything, you need to ask, is it true . This is especially true these days when my students get so much of their information off the internet. It has always been an issue when you pick up a book out of the library. Just because it is in the book do you believe it . I will tell you that one of the lessons my students learn, and this is a very good lesson for them, this after a while most of them come into my class and think im just their teacher. Eventually some of them catch on that i have written some books. And it is in interesting lesson for them to realize that the person who is standing in front of them, because most of them have not confronted and author before, and that i say stuff and then i am the guy who wrote the stuff in the book. They recognize that when i am talking, im going to try to get it all as accurate as i can. But ordinary people, you try to get things right but some of the things you get wrong. They realize its just an ordinary person wrote this book. I will tell you that some of them are mildly impressed when they discover that i have written a book. What really gets street credibility with my students is when they see me on tv because then all of a sudden hes somebody. Anyway, so the students all agree that this was an fascinating story and they say great story, good drama, great characterization, all of this. It occurred to me at that point to ask a question that had never occurred to me to ask before because i thought i knew the answer. I said, suppose you had read this story. Suppose i had raised the name of the author. Suppose i had not told whether this was a true story or a fictional account. Whether this was something that actually happened or something that someone just made up. You did not know this you just read the story and you all agreed great story. Now, suppose having after read the story, i presented you with one additional piece of information. The additional piece of information was, that great story you read, actually happened, it is a true story. What would that do to your evaluation of the story . Would it make it a better story . Or no different . Well, i was flabbergasted by the response and i was flabbergasted by the response because i didnt give the third alternative which hadnt even occurred. The third alternative is that makes it a worse story to know that it was true. Now i guess i hadnt really confronted the degree to which i am sort of nonfiction kind of . But it simply seemed to me. If you go to a movie and its a great story based on a true story, that seems to be a marketing pitch. The Marketing Department angst that makes it better because they certainly advertise it. Well, of this group, when asked the question, how many of you think that it would make it a better story . About half of the students raised her hand. I was surprised it was only half. I was seven out of 15. And then it got there, i think i have a friend said no different. A good story is a good story. But then three of them were the ones who really amazed me by saying, it made it worse. And i was trying to figure out why in the world how in the world it could be worse. And i thought about this for a long time. I will tell you the answer that i came up with because the answer that i came up with is related to the question that my mother has been posing to me how the series. I mentioned that i teach writing and one of the things that i convey to my students, my apprentice writers is that of all, writing is an act communication. If you are going to communicate effectively with your readers, you have to have some idea who your readers are. What expectations they have, what knowledge they bring to the subject. Unless you have a reader in mind, you cannot hope to convey whatever youre trying to convey affectively. So every reader every writer has to have a model reader. You know, the reader in the back of your mind is this on your shoulder, the reader you are imagining is going to reach her stuff. So youll know, is this too much information, too little information, diverting novel about right . Is quite a difference if you are writing for young adults and if youre writing for a mature adult. Anyway, so for years and years i had the very good fortune to have the best possible model reader, namely my father. And when i say the best possible model reader. The first couple books were written for the purposes of getting a job at the university and getting tenure. So the audience there was the academic community, the specialist who wanted to know that this is cuttingedge in a particular set discipline i riding in. But after i calmed her side that i decided i wanted to reach out to a larger audience. An audience very much i suppose, like you, people who are not probably specialist in history, people who have a general interest in the world, who come with some experience, who come with some background in reading, but just want to know more about their world. My father fit this category very well. He was a selfemployed businessman. Yet when a business for his entire working life. But then he retired and in his retirement he started reading more than he had. While he was working he rarely read books. He read the wall street journal. He read fortune magazine. He read business stuff. He read iron age. I grew up reading iron age. An interesting magazine. I dont know if it still exists. But in his retirement he wanted to be he liked to read history. He liked to read biographies. He liked to read the kinds of books i was writing. He read every book that i wrote. I know this because he would offer his critique of my books. And he was pretty candid. But he likes something he would say billy, you did a good job. When he did like it he would say billy, not your best. I learned my fathers standards from watching him eat their meals by mother would cook for him, a traditional relationship. Another coat my father died four years ago. For the entire six years of their marriage, my mother would cut records for my father and dinner for my father. She refused to cook lunch for my father. He was expected to be working inside is a lunch. I marriage or father for better, for worse, but not for lunch. Upon my fathers death, another announce she was retiring from cooking that she has not cut every sense. Anyway, my father would read my books excuse me, and he showed me how to deal with their meals that he wasnt particularly fond of. He was very diplomatic about this. If my mother made Something Like he was a wonderful. She took some pain or try something new that didnt work out so well, he just didnt say anything and my mom understood from that but okay, no, it means to do it again and it worked out very well. Anyway, my father was more forthcoming with me. He would summon the first two chapters were okay, but it all down after that. My father read every book i wrote. My mother tried to read each book that i wrote. She says that she finished to of them. One was on Benjamin Franklin, the other she says she finished was on the California Gold rush. Now, im not really sure she finished those, but as a dutiful son, far be it for me to. She says she did, she did. But it was very clear that getting through work of nonfiction was a task for my mother. She read out of some sense of duty to me. And every time after i wrote it took and she either well, she is to say she had it by her bedside as she would pick it up and read a few pages and put it aside and went right to sleep. Well, anyway after each such experience and that she she gave up she would say though, when are you going to write a novel . And i try to explain, mom, i like good stories. I read history because they think history stories theres stuff that happens that you just couldnt make a. And then, her reaction to that made me realize that was the point. The point of novels is quite different in one basic way. I am going to contend that in a more basic way is quite different from the writing of history and i would ask my mom, so what is it about novels that you like that makes them preferable to history . And she said, well, one of the things i like is that i get inside the head of the characters in a way that i dont when i read works of history. And i had to grant that that is generally true because if you adhere to the typical standards of history, where we dont get to make stuff up, we cannot impute thoughts, motives, ideas to our characters and must somehow we should get them to say it. Unless they write it down. So we cannot just say on the morning of july 1, 1863 Abraham Lincoln woke up in a fine note unless he told somebody who wrote it down or wrote a letter. When you write novels, thats exactly what you do. But i said mom, i have been working my way around that problem by writing biographies. Because with biographies, they are all about character. And i do get inside the heads of my subjects because they do tell me what they are thinking. They write letters. They write diaries. She says okay, yeah, but theres Something Else that i like about novels. And that is there is a very romantic interest in novels. We can find out about the love lives of our characters. And i said yeah, that is true, too. But with certain works of nonfiction, with certain biographies, you do get right to the heart of the matter. Well, not entirely because once again we are constrained by what our characters say, what they write down. And here is where the paths start to part and i would ask you, do you write down your deepest thoughts . Do you write down your candid emotions . Some of you do, but i would bet that most of you dont. And even those of you who do, probably dont do it in a form thats going to survive 100 years, so historians coming along in the next century can have access to it. So it is indeed true that it is hard to write about the love lives of our characters in a nonfiction form without injecting into a way that History Matters dont get to. And i will say that i try to do this in a the last biography i wrote, which was about franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. And in fact, a very large part of the stories about the relationship between the two. The complicated relationship. The relationship involved things in addition to the, one that was fascinating, but one again i dont think you could the whole idea of a novel is to pull the world together in a way that makes sense. In a way that has particular story art, that has a form. Novels are not just any old thing written down on a page. Novels have characters. They have a protagonist. They have conflict. There is usually an ascending art of the conflict and the drama and here is the critical thing. Novels, like most movies have a resolution of the conflict. At the end of the book, at the end of the two hours of the movie, you know how it turned out. Now, nearly everybody reads novels recognizes that that is not exactly the way the world is. The world isnt quite so tidy. The world is much messier than that. Im going to throw out something to you and you can agree with it or disagree. If you disagree with it vehemently, please tell me and i will talk about some more. But i would suggest royal im going to get pretty inflammatory in the moment the people who prefer novels to history are people who like their stories tidied up. They like their stories to come to some kind of conclusion. It does not have to be a happy ending, but it has to be an ending, whereas most history books dont really have an and. And realize there is not necessarily a conclusion. We strive for closure, but most of the time we dont get it. Life kind of goes on and you know go to the next thing. That is part of what my mom admitted to. But which i said mom what about historical novels . What about novels that are connected she said yeah, i like those, but the best ones i like are the ones that dont have any connection to reality at all. I scratched my head over that until she said, hey, i get enough reality in my daily life. This is the whole reason i read books. The whole reason i go to the movies is to turn off the real world for a while and go somewhere where nothing is connected to the real world. It was not that made me realize that with most students and my seminar what were talking about. They said it made it worse to know that it was true because they really wanted to the separation between their stories, their entertainment and the world. That is not really fair to the students to say entertainment as though it is merely entertainment, because of course people would justify novel for years, for centuries, although well i teach graduate writing seminars about that. Students read great works of history. From the pass to the president. One of the things they discover is that novels were not invented until about 400 years ago. Before then there was not this distinction between what really happened and what was clearly made up. Anyway, so, ive been thinking about this distinction between novels and history. Ive been listening to my mother all these years saying bill, when we write a novel . I want to please my mother. She wont lift forever. At least one. I have actually tried to write i finished a couple of novels. They are sitting in my drawer at home. I have not done anything with it. But meanwhile, i thought, theres got to be a way to borrow some of what makes novels attractive to readers. And so, the book that im supposed to be here promoting, the heartbreak of aaron burr, is the second installment in what is projected to be a series than im writing. This series was published by random house and its called american portraits. The first book came out a little over a year ago and it is called the murder of jimmy this, for the love of jane mans field. It is a story that it gilded age love triangle gone badly wrong. So that was the first installment. The second is the heartbreak of aaron burr. Now, if you should choose by the book, you will see it appears to be a novel. You will see that it as the parents of a novel. For example, there is no table of contents, theres no authors preface, the chapters dont have chapter names. They are just one, two, three, four and so on. You might think if you can come tonight, i would be delighted if you read and be delighted if he thought it was a novel because as is the case, you wouldve been drawn into a world i had created. But in fact, its a world that really exists. So i wanted to use some of the techniques of novel writing. But i do not use the techniques of making up dialog. Every bit of dialog in there was really spoken or written by the characters. Now, you cannot do this about every character. What you need is the Raw Materials of history. In this case i was fortunate. I was fortunate by the existence of correspondence letters between erin burke and his remarkable daughter. These letters began when she was a young girl and they continued until, i dont know if i should tell you about the heartbreaking and, i will not tell you exactly what happened, but eventually the correspondents was broken off by her dad. Anyway, i had a chance to use this correspondence. It is some of the most candid correspondents i have encountered in all of the years ive been working on writing history. So it does allow me to accomplish that one aspect of what my mom was looking for in novels. Namely get inside the heads and hearts of characters. There is another reason that i chose to write on this subject, and its the same reason i chose to write on the murder of jim fist for the love of joe seat mans field. My field of writing is American History. Those of us who write American History face a daunting challenge in one regard particularly. That is it is really hard to write about women in American History. In the following sense. It is hard to write about women who play a large role in public life. Because the nature of American Public life has been until fairly recently, that women did not play a large role. I have been writing a series biography that started with Benjamin Franklin. The next installment is Ulysses Grant and will be published in the fall. It will carry the American History from the 18th century to the 21st century. The last one will be a biography of ronald reagan. Every one of the subjects is male. The reason for this is the books were conceived as a history of the United States through this told biographies. I was looking for a woman subject for one of these. In fact i found one that my publisher would let me do. Can you guess what woman i was looking for and found . Eleanor roosevelt. Just the fact, its a very short list, of women who played a large role in American Public life on whom i can hang a tale of four or five decades of American History. Women have had, of course, the rules and private life but its in the nature of private life that it usually doesnt survive in the historical record. Why did people start saving the letters of Eleanor Roosevelt . Because she was important. Do your correspondence save your letters that you write to them . Do they depend deposit them in the local Historical Society . Well maybe. And if they do, you will become i use my words advisedly here you will become literally a mortal. You will become immortal in letters. Because future is torrents will find those letters and say, so thats what life was like at the beginning of the 21st century. But anyway, so i want to write about women. After all, women have been half the population and have been a very large part of what happened even if it was hard to find them in the public record. So i decided that i could get at the story of women by not looking at the big issues of public life, but looking at some of the smaller issues. And so, this is when iran across the subject of my. Murder of jim fisk for the love of Josie Mansfield. Josie mansfield was a women who had no particular talents other than her, well one could say her beauty, although but a problem that i had with this. Josie mansfield clearly was very attractive to the men who knew her. And men lost their senses when they got around her. They did crazy things like murdering one another for the love of Josie Mansfield. And so i wrote this book, this earlier book about Josie Mansfield. And the book is really about josie. Its less about jim fisk. And, but because its nominally a history book, my publisher wanted to include a photograph of Josie Mansfield. After all, its a history book, and theres a photograph of this femme fatale, lets see it. But i didnt want to use the photograph. And i didnt want to use the photograph because two reasons. One is if you look at the photograph of josie, its pretty the camera does not capture that essence that drove men crazy. You look at it and say, really . [laughter] the other thing is that novels dont have photographs. Novels dont have illustrations of the main characters. The whole point of writing is to create a word picture. And so if i wrote a description of josie and then had a photograph of josie, either the writing would be it would either be wrong, or it would be redundant. And either way it would lose its force. But my editor insisted, and so theres a picture of josie. Anyhow, josie was one story, theo burr was another. And i knew the end of the theo burr story. I guess ill go ahead and tell you, many of you already know. Theodocia burr disappeared at sea. She got on a coastal ship from South Carolina heading for new york where her father was waiting for her. Her father had not seen her in years. Her father was living under an assumed name in new york, aaron burr. And theo was coming to see him. And the ship disappeared. Nothing was ever heard of or found of the ship or of theo, and to this day no one knows what happened. Its assumed the ship went down in a storm, but nobody knows. In fact, fairly recently, within the last couple of years, somebody wrote a novel based on the idea that theo had survived and wound up on an island somewhere. Anyhow, so this was my entry into writing about aaron burr. But the heart of the story, in fact, once again the title of the book was going to be, my proposed title in my thinking the whole time was the disappearance of theodocia burr. And i thought, thats kind of intriguing. People dont just disappear. But my publisher thought aaron burr had more cache. It was a name that people knew. So it became the heartbreak of aaron burr. And its the story of aaron burr who is considered generally to be one of the great scoundrels, villains of American History. And ive always thought that the villains, the scoundrels are far more interesting than the heroes. And i also thought that anybody who was despised by Alexander Hamilton, john adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison had to be somebody who had something going for him. [laughter] and so i thought i would try to tell the story. But i would tell the story through the relationship between aaron burr and his daughter. Because the story of aaron burr is fairly well known, and i wasnt going to include any revelations on what exactly was burr up to when he traveled out to the west . Was he engaged in what Thomas Jefferson announced to the world even before an indictment came down was treason . Was he trying to destroy the United States . Well, im going to tell you that you will not find a definitive answer to that question in my book because like so many important questions in history, it has no definitive answer. Im pretty sure that aaron burr himself didnt know exactly what was intended. Now, here im going to, im going to cite a distinction. You remember several years ago when Donald Rumsfeld was often lampooned, certainly criticized for drawing distinctions when he was talking about theyre the known there are the known knowns and the unknown knowns and all of this. And jon stewart and the late night, jay leno, they got a lot of mileage. They thought this was great fun. Well, in fact, i thought this was one of those instances where rumsfeld had it exactly right. Because those people who are in the intelligence business, and i have this from some authorities in the intelligence business, William Casey used to distinguish between secrets and mysteries. And in the intelligence business both of these are of interest if they involve something that your enemy or somebody else is going to do. But theres a fundamental difference between secrets and mysteries. Secrets have a concrete existence. A secret is how many missile launchers did the soviet union have in 1985. And the cia spent a lot of time, effort and money trying to figure out what the answer to that question was. But it had an answer. But then a mystery is will israel bomb iran . Next week . Well, that doesnt have an answer, not at this point in time. Because it hasnt happened. And likewise, what was aaron burr going to do in the west . That falls in the category of a mystery. Im quite sure that he himself didnt know. But what took him out to the west . Well, briefly ill tell you his story of how he got there. Aaron burr was a soldier, an officer in the continental army, he was a capable enough officer, he was also a lawyer, a very gifted lawyer. He was a man who, against the expectations of his friends, fell in love with a woman named thoedocia who was the widow of a british officer. Now, the officer had died in the west indies years earlier, and he fell in love with theodocia and married her. Now, there was an odd aspect to this. And the oddness lay in the fact that theo, theodocia, was ten years older than aaron burr. I should mention that aaron burr was quite a dashing and a relatively young man, handsome, charming. Theodocia was ten years older than he was. She was neither beautiful, nor rich. But he fell in love with her. And they married. Now, one asks across the centuries, what did he see in theodocia . Because plenty of people married rich widows, and this is the way ones fortune was often made. He didnt. He married her quite clearly out of love. But love for what . Well, love for her mind, love for her character. And they had a child, a daughter, whom they named he insisted that it be named after his wife, theodocia. Aaron burr was decades, centuries ahead of his time in believing that women were fully the intellectual equal of men. And that it was only their lack of education that prevented them from attaining the intellectual accomplishments of men. So he decided that his daughter, theo, was going to have the best education that his money could buy. The education was conducted by tutors that were brought in, was conducted by him in letters, when he was home he would quiz theo. They would talk about summits of public affairs, history, of literature, of the classic, of the whole thing. And theo became his close friend, became something of his educational project, became his protege. And to read the letters is to see a father spending a great deal of time and effort on the education of his child. And watching her mature, watching her grow, watching her achieve the intellectual accomplishments that he was sure she could achieve. Thoedocia, the mother, contracted cancer and died after a painful illness when young theo was 11 years old. And she became the first lady of the household. They had burr had a mansion in manhattan, Richmond Hill was its name. And she, even when burr was not around, she would host elaborate dinner parties for diplomats, for the his community of new york, for distinguished visitor, for indian chiefs who happened to be in town, and everyone was quite amazed. And wonderfully impressed by the selfpossession, by the maturity of this 14yearold girl. Anyway, burr meanwhile begins his career in politics, and he delivers new york state for the republican party. This is the jeffersonian republican party. In the election of 1800. And hes on the ticket, and jeffersons on the ticket. But you know the story of the, well, contested yes election. It was contested by accident because burr and jefferson tied. This was under the original constitution where each of the electorates got two votes. And it was at this point that some of the innuendos began to swirl around burr. And it was almost certainly due to the mischief of the federalists who realized they had lost the presidency, but they thought that maybe somehow they could weaken their political foes. And be i would remind you all that this was in an age when Political Parties per se were still considered illegitimate. The founders wanted no part of Political Parties. The founders thought that in a republic as opposed to a monarchy, in a republic loyal, patriotic citizens would always put the interests of the country ahead of the interests of party. And they thought that parties would be the downfall of the republic. But parties emerged despite the best efforts of the founders. Maybe the no, despite the satisfaction of George Washington who never admitted that he had any party affiliation, but Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson formed their own parties very quickly. And, well, anyway, jefferson did win the election of 1800 with burr as his vice president. But jefferson, jefferson, a wonderful individual who could say the most philosophically highminded things and then do the most pragmatically lowminded things, jefferson was as dismissive of legitimacy of parties as anyone, and he was also the first and one of the most effective political bosses in American History. And he decided that burr had to be pushed aside, that the presidency the next time around after jefferson left office would go to another virginian, James Madison. So burr got pushed to the side. Meanwhile, Alexander Hamilton had been pushed to the side because he had fallen out with the mainstream and the federalists. So both of these men were in a position where their prospects were not quite living up to their ambitions. And so they got a foul of each other because hamilton had said some very nasty things about burr in one of the political campaigns, and burr asked him to retract, at least either to acknowledge and to corroborate or to retract. And hamilton got stiffnecked about this and said, no, no, you have no business asking me this sort of thing, and one thing led to another and then to that fatal duel in new jersey in 1804. Now, hamilton was killed, burr was burr was not disgraced by the duel per se. It was really the machinations of Thomas Jefferson that made very clear that burr had no political future. So burr decided whats he going to do . Hes an ambitious man, and he did what generations and generations of ambitious young men have been doing, and that was he went to the west. What was he going to do in the west . Ah, this is the question. Well, it almost certainly included either inciting or exploiting a war between the United States and spain. Spain was then in control of florida and then in control of mexico. And spain was bottling up the United States from territorial expansion which burr, like most everybody else in the United States including Thomas Jefferson, believed was inevitable and a good thing. I live in texas. I wasnt born in texas, i grew up on the west coast, but ive been living in texas since the 1980s. And i can tell you that what burr was accused of doing was what one of the Founding Fathers of texas, sam houston, actually did 30 years later. Namely, go off into mexican territory and by then it was mexican rather than spanish territory and foment a war and seize part of this foreign territory for the United States. This is what made Andrew Jackson famous in the wake of the war of 1812. He, without authorization, rode into spanish florida and drove the spanish away. Burr lived long enough to appreciate the irony of this. Burr didnt get accolades for what jackson and houston did. Burr instead got an indictment for treason. And the treason trial forms a large portion of my book. Why do i spend time on the treason trial . In part because it allows me to bootleg some of the big stories of history into this little story. And also because in writing this book, after writing that book about the murder of jim fisk, the love of Josie Mansfield at the heart of which are three murder trials, i realized what dick wolf discovered years ago. [laughter] dick wolf is the inventer of the franchise of law and order, or whoever created the original perry mason show. Trials are naturals for telling stories. Whether its in novel form, ask john grisham, or in, you know, movie form or in nonfiction. Why are novels, excuse me, why are trials such an attractive form for the reader . I dont know im not sure for the reader, ill tell you why theyre an attractive form for the author. Because, in the first place, trials have dialogue, and this is something that you dont find a lot of in nonfiction. And this is one of the appeals of novels. People talk to each other back and forth. Its rare that you find a work of nonfiction where you get much in the way of dialogue unless its writing about a trial. Because in a trial you get dialoguing and, furthermore, unlike the ordinary conversation of you and me where you Wander Around the topic and do this and that and start over and all this, in trials the conversation, the dialogue always has a point. And theres a builtin conflict, a protagonist and an antagonist, and theres a resolution. Theres either a conviction or an acquittal. So a large part of my story is this treason trial. And i get to weave in not only aaron burr, but Thomas Jefferson who was, had taken up the role of prosecutorinchief, and he put the full weight of the federal government into the prosecution of aaron burr. But he was frustrated by burr who defended himself. He had very distinguished help. He was also assisted by the judge in the trial. And the judge happened to be that other bete noire of Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall. Sort of the last of the federalists. In the days when Supreme Court justices were also circuit cut judges court judges. And marshall sat for the Circuit Court in richmond. And the treason that burr was alleged to have committed aoccurred in kentucky which, excuse me, when kentucky was still no, im sorry, West Virginia. When West Virginia was still part of virginia. And so it was John Marshall who presided over the trial. And who was not going to let Thomas Jefferson get away with any sloppy prosecution for treason. And, in fact, the burr trial became very important in american jurisprudence because under the constitution treason is very narrowly defined. It consists of waging war against the United States or abetting those countries at war with the United States, and it has to be witnessed by two eyewitnesses. Well, the prosecution couldnt get the eyewitnesses because the stuff that burr was said to have done actually happened when burr was far away. And secondly, there was no war. And marshall ruled on this, and he instructed the jury you have to acquit. Well, anyway, the rest of the story is i cant tell you the rest of the story, because i want you to read the book. [laughter] in fact, im going to stop there and ask if you have questions, and if, by the way, if you have any answers to the questions ive thrown out, ill be happy to listen to those. So if you have any questions, raise your hand. And since we have a cspan group in the back, i will repeat the questions for the audience. Yes, sir. [inaudible] okay. The question is, since i said i had a hard time coming up with women, how about unidentified speaker the suffragists . Heres a basic problem. I write books for the purposes of expanding knowledge of history, and i will say quite candidly, i write books that i hope people will buy. And you could name susan b. Anthony, Elizabeth Katie stand stanton, and i have run names like that by my publisher, and i get a yawn. Because compare that to, i dont know, lets say Abraham Lincoln. Theres a huge market for all things lincoln. Theres quite a small market for studies of the suffragists. Im going to tell you a story about a historical colleague of mine who had written, he was trying to come up with a subject for his third book. He got tenure, he was faculty member at one of the colleges in the philadelphia area, and he wanted to write for a broader audience. His field is military history. So he was thinking, he was trying to come up with some general that he could write about. And his area was world war ii, so he presented, oh, Joseph Stillwell and the editors hes talking with, ah, not that many people know the name of stillwell, and i dont think theres much of a market. And he mentioned a couple of other sort of secondranked generals. And then sort of at a loss and his field was in particular the Pacific Theater of the war and so he couldnt think of anything else, he just kind of threw up his hands and said this a tone, a throwaway line, he said, well, i mean, i guess i could write, you know, another biography of douglas mac arthur. But thered been a dozen biographies of douglas mcarthur, and the editor said, yeah, thats because people are interested in douglas mcarthur. [laughter] so i suppose if i were sufficiently imaginative and i had the sufficient sources, maybe i could elevate a relatively obscure woman, for that matter a man too, to a level that would grab peoples attention and make that person famous. Maybe. But its a, i will say, a tough sell especially in this market. Other questions . Yes, maam, in the middle. [inaudible] unidentified speaker how did the letters come out . A very good question. How is it the letters were saved . Before i answer that question, im going to give you sort of a broader reflection. And this, actually, gets to the question that was asked here, how about the suffragists or how about people who arent so famous . It is almost a truism of history that it is possible to write about Extraordinary People or extraordinary times. Or you can write about Extraordinary People in ordinary times. So we can write a biography of George Washington because George Washington was one of the extraordinary individuals, and by extraordinary here i mean famous to the extent that people saved his letters. And people remember what they felt, what they heard when they encountered washington. Unidentified speaker if somebodys famous, the finding the record of famous people is not a problem. I wrote about Benjamin Franklin, and i have to say that the first 30 years of Benjamin Franklins life go by like this in my book. Why . Because there are no sources on it. The one source is franklins own autobiography. In fact, you can measure this in a wonderful published collection of the franklin letters that is about 37 or 8 volumes, published by Yale University press and the american philosophical society. Took them 50 years to publish it. Now, volume one, volume one goes from franklins birth til the age of 30. And its about that thick. Volume 38 if thats the last one is equally thick, and it covers three months. Not three decades, but three months of franklins life. Why . Because then he was world famous, people saved everything. So you can write about Extraordinary People in ordinary times, you can write about ordinary people in extraordinary times. For example, you can write the ordinary persons history of the civil war. Why . Because it was sufficiently extraordinary that people wrote down what they were thinking and feeling. Soldiers went off to war for have many of them, theyd never been away from home before, and they wanted to share that experience with the folks at home. Or else they kept a diary, a journal