Silence your cell phones. It is truly my pressure to introduce martin baron, moderated by matt hackman. Matt hackman is the executive Vice President at the beacon counsel greater miami it is truly my pleasure to introduce matt hackman the executive Vice President at the beacon council. Greater miamis Public Community miami focusing on mentioning the miami of 20 40 and helping build it. Was the Miami Program created and built a Foundation Program that played a pivotal role in jumpstarting propelling miamis rapidly growing tech and startup unity. Numerous efforts funded and supported under his leadership are pillars of the Economic System today. Prior to that he was an Award Winning journalist at the miami herald and his award included the highest honor in business journalism. Just seven months into his new job at the Washington Post, longtime journalist and newspaper editor and amazon founder would buy the paper. Just over two years later, donald trump who can pay tickets the press is the lowest form of humanity won the presidency. The Washington Post exported the nature of tech, media and power in the 21st century. Please come on stage. Thank you. Thank you very much. What an honor this is and what a treat we are in for to be here with marty. Right to be here, thanks everybody for coming. This was an amazing book. Felt it was a little sad when it ended because i enjoyed it. If you want to listen and read, leave shriver azure narrator, huge win. He came to the party to launch the book and he and i were talking and we concluded that we are the same person. For those who may have forgotten he played marty and spotlight, the academy Award Winning film. In writing this book, there is an illustrious history of Washington Post leaders writing books about their time, 1995, 1998, now you with the collision of power, what were your primary motivations in writing this book . What were some of the things sought to share with readers in doing so . I was living through an incredible moment in history and the paper had been owned by the graham family for 80 years sold to one of the richest people in the world, they tried to transform us and set a whole new strategy and along comes donald trump, a candidate unlike any weve ever seen before. Is that somebody should tell that story. We in the press play an Important Role in democracy and the press plays an Important Role in all of that and nobody else is going to tell that story. I could tell that story and i felt i should. We have this mission statement, democracy dies in darkness and i thought i should shed some light on our own role in that democracy. Secondly i felt i wanted to give the public a vivid sense of what its like to be the top editor of a major News Organization in this country. I think there are a lot of stereotypes and preconceptions on how we do our work. I wanted people to live to the judgments and decisions i had to make and understand that. People can agree or disagree with the judgments made but they should have a full understanding of why i made them. Just how difficult this judgments really are. There were some trends in our field that had me concerned and i felt they had something to say and i wanted to get some of it off my chest i guess. It was more like compounding my own ptsd, i felt like i needed to say it and say it in a way where i could discuss these things in full and explain my reasoning and thinking and that means not doing it on twitter but in a book where i can explain it. I want to dig into each of those, obviously talking about covering the truck presidency and jeff bases coming on any transformation of the post and journalism. Lets start with trump. You and he became cut youre going to read about a dinner you had at the white house with him with other fellow leaders at the Washington Post but he would call you on the phone. Give us a sense of what these exchanges were like and if it was even a conversation or a lot of listening. s were calls and they occurred after the dinner we had at the white house, five months after he began to occupy the white house. He called to complain about some stories, one came at about 9 00 at night after he met with the leader of india and he complained about a story by two over white house correspondence and said the story portrayed him as a child. Then he said words i never thought i would hear from the president of the United States, he said i am not a child. I have to say, i thought it was kind of childish. A few days later he called again as we were wrapping up her morning meeting and he complained again about a story and he went on a rant about this being because of amazon and jeff bases. I heard him say that during the campaign and on other occasions even after he took the white house. I was so sick of it and i responded and said thats not true and you know its not true. I dont think he was accustomed to being spoken to that way. He then broke out to a bunch of profanities. He said the post is nothing but a hate machine and a big fat lie. This is all jeff and amazon. He went on like that pic this socalled conversation which was just him talking went on for so long that i was looking at the time thinking, i have work to do today. I dont really know about the president of the United States but i dont have the time to keep talking or to let him talk. I said thank you, i appreciate your call and sharing your perspective and that was the last time i heard from him. In the book he pulled no punches. You talk about how he was dehumanizing the press, celebrating balance at rallies, hateful language and dog whistles, continued lies and misrepresentation, i want to be autocrat but of course in talking about all this, its not just history, here he is likely going to be the nominee for the republican party. From all of your time leading the coverage of him, what you think those lessons, how should we be covering him Going Forward . How do you think journalists should be covering him Going Forward . I think some of that coverage is beginning to take place now. Like to see more of it. What will he do if he gets back into the white house rather than paying attention to the standing in the polls. Obviously politics is a bit of a horse race so you cant ignore it but where should the emphasis in coverage b and i think it should be on what would he do on his first day anyway house . He has been quite open about that. He has not hidden anything. He is quite open with what he intends to do. Its all out there. What he has been saying has been the definition of authoritarianism. Its not even an opinion. If you were to define authoritarianism this would be the characteristics. Hes the only politician ive ever heard talk about suspending the u. S. Constitution from the same individual who when he took office swore to uphold the constitution of the United States. Talked about using the military to suppress legitimate protest in this country. His talk about Treason Charges against the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and most likely having him executed. Talked about Treason Charges against nbc for coverage he deemed to be unfavorable. For all his complaints about weapon i think the u. S. Government, he talks openly about weapon icing the u. S. Government, is talked about a defunded and reconstituted department of justice to prosecute his enemies and ideally imprison them. Maybe worse. All of that is the definition of authoritarianism. That is the nature of authoritarianism and on top of that he continues to talk about crushing the press, free and independent press, i think we need to focus on that and how he expects to achieve that focus a bit less on the political horserace. Is your view as well, talking about the support that is there, where that is humming from . We really need to understand that. Think we should do a reporting on that. I think its a mistake we made before he became a candidate. A talk about that in the book. Think its one of the most serious mistakes we made. We did not anticipate a candidate like donald trump. We did not understand the legal level grievance this country. People were talking about the former governor of the state, jeb bush. He didnt go anywhere. People mentioned to everybody else is a potential front runner except that it was donald trump. We did not understand this grievance in the country and i think we need to and we need to understand it today. The reality is there are many people in this country who live in communities that are really struggling. The communities have lost industries and they are not working at jobs that pay them what they used to pay in their not opportunities for kids and a lot of people blame the elites in washington, they feel they are being condescended to her being held in contempt and they accuse the press of doing that. I think its important that we not hold people in contempt but that we understand who they are and reflect all of that in our coverage. That way we understand people in all corners of this country and i think we should do that today just as we should have done it before donald trump ever announced his candidacy. There will be two and a. I want to talk about jeff bezos buying the Washington Post. He didnt lavish tens of millions of dollars on the post treating it like a personal charity but instead tried to run it as a business, a something to stand on its own two feet. Is there from this lesson a blueprint that can be applied to other newspapers. We all know newspapers have been so disrupted trying to figure out that revenue model and how they should operate. Other lessons from this experience that can be applied to other ones . To some degree i think there are. Its true he wanted us to be a Sustainable Business. He did not treat it as a charity. I always told people we should be glad for that because if he ever got tired of the charity we would be in bad shape and we should use this ownership as an opportunity to create a Sustainable Business. The first thing he did was change our entire strategy. We had been focused on our region, washington, the district , northern virginia, maryland, that meant we covered politics but other than that we focused on a region. He did not like that was the right model anymore and we had this Incredible Opportunity to be national and global because we are based in the Nations Capital and because we had a name that can be leveraged. We had history going back to watergate where there were millions of people around this country who never read a word of the Washington Post but had the idea pick the internet had given us a gift. That the gift is you get to distribute journalism everywhere digitally which is at no additional cost so take the gift. So we did and we changed. The lesson there, that did make a huge difference for us. Have not done that, i think the post would be in terrible shape today. It was in terrible shape when he bought it which is why the graham family sold in the first place. The importance is the strategy and understanding it and committing to it and making hard decisions that are necessary in order to execute on the strategy. Also understanding who our readers are and what do they want from us. This model we had is famous which is democracy dies in darkness which was a real struggle to come up with. Anything i could think of was the serenity prayer. Cannot change it, most marketers dont use darkness and death in the motto but were going with it. It worked incredibly well. One of the things he talked about was he wanted this to be not a newspaper that people want to subscribe to the idea that people wanted to belong to. He understood newspaper is different than other products. There is a real relationship between us and our readership and they have expectation was to serve a mission, to be a product. Need to think about every News Organization, what is that mission we are going to serve it went down some interesting paths. He talked about this, we are focused on the reader and work from there to an analysis of who in the organization is working to directly impact readers and indirectly impacting. Those including editors they needed fewer of. It was pretty disappointing as an editor myself. I believed in editors. The idea was direct, indirect. We should put our resources in the areas that had a direct impact for the consumers. That would be reporters, social media people, things like that. You could see the direct connection with the readers. Editors, he kind of thought on the complicated stories are sensitive stories or investigative stories we need editors but on the others we probably dont need that many editors. He thought of us as a bureaucratic administrative layer. I did not like that. I protested that and made clear that editors actually had a direct impact on the coverage and he had a clear misconception of what editors did. I think he is come around to better understanding the role of editors and the importance of editors but at the time he was not. We had a really difficult time getting approval in the budget to hire additional editors. Every opportunity we had we tried to come up with a different title for them. Strategist, analyst, things like that and that was our way of disguising the fact that they were editors. One of the things you are really clear on is that jeff bezos did not engage in any of the journalism that the Washington Post took. He did not pick there were a lot of worries at the beginning. Here is a person who had a huge commercial interest with amazon in a lot of controversies. Would also before he came published the most sensitive documents that were leaked by Edward Snowden and i made the final decision to publish those documents. There were people in government and the intelligence agencies and congress felt people like me should have been thrown into prison for that decision and one of the big businesses for amazon Cloud Computing and they had a big contract with the cia so i really wondered if we would be able to do this anymore and how he would react to coverage of his company for amazon had this reputation of when they were asked a question by the press, they had one answer, no comment. It was asked that the first town hall, how can you buy a newspaper when amazon always says no comment and he said you have the right to ask the questions in amazon has a right not to answer them. You do what you need to do in amazon will do what it needs to do. I was concerned but he said at the beginning, you can cover amazon or me anyway like and he reiterated that to me the entire time i was there and he never interfered in the substance of her journalism. I think my biggest take away from your book is that is a ringing defense of traditional journalism values namely objectivity which arguably has been lost. Talk about that. You raise real concerns about how journalism is practiced today and how the standards that you came up with are quickly disappearing. Not everywhere but in some instances for sure. I was very concerned about that. I think we need to define what we mean by objectivity because i think its been miss. It is a concept that goes back more than 100 years to Walter Whitman who wrote a small collection of essays called liberty in the news. He popularized the concept, the idea was we should take the approach of scientists. You have a hypothesis going into the story and you have to tested and you go over the evidence need you to go but you do it with an open mind. You acknowledge your own preconceptions and your own feelings but you move beyond that and say im going to do an independent job, openminded job, ill be comprehensive and thorough and what weve done all of that we tell people what weve found. Theres no requirement that you do all this work and pretend you didnt do the work and ignore what you did in everything is 5050 even though the evidence shows otherwise. It also acknowledges that it requires recognition on our part that we dont know the answers before we start. We should go seek the answers. And journalism your often thing the world to a keyhole and you try to work to push the door a little bit open so you can see through the crack in the door and if you get lucky you get the door wide open and you see the entire picture but often we are only working with part of the picture and the best we can get. We need to acknowledge that in my concern is that there are too many people in our profession who think they know the answers before theyve embarked on the reporting. What does reporting mean if you already know the answer you just confirming your own preconceptions and i was concerned about that. Concerned about people expressing their opinions on social media and twitter and i think it has a corrosive effect on public trust in public trust is already greatly threatened in our business. I dont know why people would view, steve mannan said the press is the opposition party. I dont think we should behave like that or think like that, we should not be pursuing personal agendas. Our agenda should be to find the truth wherever the fax file. Whoever they benefit, whoever they hurt, thats what we should do. Our agenda should be the truth, facts and the context in which things are occurring. Not be pursuing her personal agendas and assume we have the answers before we do the reporting. At one time he famously said we are not at war, we are at work in talking about your posture. Of course we are covering someone who is at war with the media and at war with democracy, is your point that the journalism is the work and you how you can bet somebody is at war with democracy and journalism . A little context, that came about because trump on his first full day in office went to the cia and he stood in front of the memorial and what did he choose to talk about in a place like that . The media. He said as you know i am at war with the media seemingly wanting to enlist cia agents in his war with the media because they were work for him. I was asked by reaction and i said we are not at work, we are at work. I think we have to go back to the origins of the first amendment, why we have a first amendment. Why we have a free and independent press and collect the principal author of that, James Madison what he said. He talked about the need for freely examining public characters and measures. Examining means its not stenography. We are not practicing stenography, we are practicing journalism. Who is doing what and who influenced those decisions and who is going to be affected by those decisions, going beneath the surface and behind the curtain and that is what journalism is. Thats what we need to do. The public characters are the politicians, the government officials and the powerful individuals and institutions who influence them. You measures are the policies. That was the original assignment given to the press in this country. It is the reason we have a free and independent press. It was the assignment during the Trump Administration and remains so today during the biden and menstruation and for all and ministrations yet to come. We need to be holding our Public Officials accountable and shining a light on what they are doing and who their actions affect. Its not a war. Its just our job. Thats what i meant by that. Please be thinking of your questions. That does deserve a hand. I want to take a minute to talk about local news. Euros now include being a trustee, the approach that the Washington Post brought in that you brought was to go from a model where you had a few people paying lots of money to buy a newspaper to lots of people paying a little bit of money to read. That is harder to do for local News Organizations. Right now we have news desert. That is probably contributing to so much of the polarization we see in our country and the democracy. What are some of the things youre hopeful about as it relates to local news . Its a really difficult challenge. I think the greatest challenge in the press right now is the sustainability of local News Coverage. I urge all of you to subscribe to your local newspaper and i think we need it, otherwise who is covering the cops and the city council and environmental issues, all of the issues we face in our communities . If they arent doing it, nobodys going to do it and that would be undermining our democracy because it begins at the local level. Its really critical. In terms of what im optimistic about . So i think there is some promise out there among nonprofits and i see that some are working pretty well. Im glad to see those things working well. I dont think we know the full answer here to that. Which ones are going to work and which ones are. I dont believe there is in the philanthropic money in this country to have an entirely nonprofit media sector. Im quite sure there is not. I dont think that is the answer. We have to come up with a commercially sustainable model. I do see some promise. Liquor organizations around the country that have a newspaper legacy, boston where i work is doing pretty well. They have a pretty Sustainable Business model. Minneapolis, San Francisco and some other places around the country seem to be doing reasonably well. I am encouraged by that. It remains a huge challenge. Organizations that arent doing well should be taking a look at ones that are figuring out what they are doing right. We have to make some hard decisions things we have to stop doing because there arent enough people interested in that we have to focus on the mission and who we are serving. Think about that fundamental concept i thought to myself the different areas that want to hit our adhering to strong journalism values which you talk about and using technology in smart ways and being really customer focused. And a News Organization when i first got to the l. A. Times, i worked on a manual typewriter. So people were resistant when we started introducing it to the publication in the design. People were sinking what a terrible thing it was to focus on the aesthetics over the substance. It looked really terrible. And so we didnt use what we had to tell the stories. If we went to color, by the way , and some people were so horrified. I remember i was with the New York Times when they went to color. They thought it would be a perfect time which was the yankees victory, by the way. You got the nice blue on the front page. People were very reluctant to do the basic things that were necessary. There is a different form of storytelling that doesnt work on the internet. People want to do the same thing they have always done. We very much need to hold onto those traditional values and we need to change the way we disseminate the story format. It is much more visual and people are more visual in their approach to information these days. We cannot hold that in contempt and looked down our nose at it. How do we adapt to that . Not just adapt, but embrace that to become successful and how do we become expert at that. If we dont, with the legacy News Organizations, somebody else will and they will win the competition. I will hand you the book so that we can read a little bit but literally democracy is at stake in finding answers to what you are talking about in terms of local News Coverage and how we practice and get in front of people. Yes, the authoritarians look to crush News Organizations and the reality is true that the press cannot survive without a democracy and the democracy cannot survive without a free and independent press also. Its important that we look at sustaining and how to thrive and how to give the public the information it needs and deserves itself to no to govern itself. Its important to embrace the change that is necessary and that we hold onto our values. Lets hear a little of the book. Okay. I hear it is highly readable. Lets see. Okay, the white house, june 15, 2017, the dinner with the president was to be kept confidential and he would not talk about it and we would not either. To this day, the meeting has never been reported. No one in the newsroom suggested to me they were aware of it. Reporters who had dug up secrets about the Trump White House somehow missed this one. The black suv carrying jeff phase those would be allowed to the white house grounds at 6 50 p. M. Waved on at the entrance gate so he could be entering without being observed. 2017 with temperatures in the low 80s, this editor and isc executive news editor who oversaw news quite rich would walk up to the white house grounds were we would almost certainly be spotted by journaling journalists entering and exiting. I had not met trump even though reporters had spent hours with him. Outside natural curiosity, i did not feel the need to. What good can come from spending time with him that evening. Surely he would see dinner as a favor and expect something in return and believe that bayes owes had a hand in News Coverage. He sought to allay my concerns about how trump would interpret it. He had made one thrilling thing clear the white house should not expect this get together to influence News Coverage. Why would the white house agree to have us over for dinner if trump felt he had nothing to gain. Skipping ahead here, two things stayed with me from the dinner. First trump governs to retain support of his base. He pulled a sheet from the jacket of his pocket and the statistics appeared above his photo. This is the latest rasmussen poll and i can win with that. The message was clear that if he held key states, thats all he needed to secure a second term. What other voters thought of him would not matter. Second, his list of grievances appeared limitless in the top of the mall was the press and with the press was the post. We were awful he said repeatedly. We treated him unfairly and with every utterance he would poke me in the shoulder with his left elbow. Physical jabs were annoying but harmless. There were hard punches to come. Skipping again. The occupant of the white house, the worlds most powerful person aiming to bring the post to submission with attacks on journalists and unrelenting pressure on the organizations owner. The owner with power of his own was one of the worlds richest humans seeking to avoid open confrontation with trump but avoiding censure and confrontation. The Washington Post aggressively revealing the administrations unsavory secrets, persistent lies, flagrant constitutional sabotage and unfettered sentiment. [ applause ]. Lets turn to some questions. We have a microphone right here. Lets jump in. Yes, sir. My name is david in a couple of your former colleagues are my sister and her husband and they say hi. Thank you for fighting the good fight. A simple question, what is to be done in the next year so you dont have to write a sequel . [ laughter ]. That is up to the american people, actually. The press does not decide who is president of the United States and that is up to the public. The best we can do is provide information that as i said before they deserve and need to no. What we focus on right now is what trump would do if he got back into the white house. People should know they are choosing if they choose him and he has been open about that. He is someone who intends to implement measures in an authoritarian way. That will be the decision of the american public. The decision they have to make and we in the press have a role to play. That is to tell people what we think might be coming. Thank you. All right, the dinner you just talked about at the white house was confidential. What is the process and what happened that allows you now to reveal what happened at the dinner . Sure. Once everybody says what they need to say privately, there is not really any confidentiality that attaches to what they said. Once they Say Something publicly , once they say it publicly there is not really any confidential reality to what they said in that meeting. First of all, the people who wanted the meeting kept confidential, mostly, was the Washington Post because we didnt want people to see that jeff bazos was there. And those who published the editorial in the records of who actually goes into the white house, that should be made public. We ran an editorial on that before and we kept it before we had our meeting and then we wanted our own meeting to be kept secret. To me, that was an act of hypocrisy and i dont think i should be part of that active hypocrisy any longer. Of thank you. [ applause ]. Hi, i was wondering if you could speak to the heritage project for 2025. I dont know if you are aware of that. They are Backing Trump with a lot of money and influence to bring authoritarianism to the United States. The Heritage Foundation is very influential. I dont know specifically about their involvement and i am afraid i dont have the details. Clearly trump has a lot of support from a lot of people who support the agenda that we just talked about. All right, we have about seven minutes and i think we can get to everyone. Hello. Can you compare and contrast nixon and watergate with the treatment of the post with trump and his scandal in his treatment of the post . Sure. Well, i think it got worse. Nixon attacked the press all the time. Remember his first Vice President , spiro agnew with negativism. He said worse than that. Nixon tried to portray the Washington Post watergate investigation as a partisan venture. A lot of people in this country felt it was that. His attacks on the press even though he had an enemies list and members of the press were on the list, his attacks were not nearly as consistent or as vicious and dehumanizing as those that came from donald trump who made it part of his Campaign Strategy and made it part of his strategy in the white house. He said before he actually won the election and entered the white house that he acknowledged to leslie stahl of cbs when she asked why he continued to attack the press and he did so so that nobody would believe what you say when you criticize me. That is exactly it. His idea was to constantly try to undermine the credibility of the press so the country would not believe anything written. By the way, the media environment is different that it was at the time of nixon which is an important distinction. Got three networks at the time and you didnt have fox news or any of these outfits. You didnt have the internet and that has changed a lot. In communities you had one or two dominant newspapers and a couple of local tv stations. But, that is about it. So, the environment is completely different and now people do gravitate to sources of information and often they are sources of misinformation that confirm their view of the world and often disseminate wild, bizarre, and unhinged thes conspiracy theories. The media environment is completely different as well. Hi, ive heard you with the outlook for journalism organizations and how they should be adapting for the future. What is your advice to young journalists who are looking at legacy media organizations like the Washington Post who are laying off and promising verticals. What should a young journalists do to stay in this industry . Sure. I think people should follow their passion and i got into this field in 1976, a recession year and i started work with the miami herald. It was a bad year for journalism and has been a bad year every year since and i recommend you do the same. No, every young person with parents will tell them, dont do this but i dont think you should listen to them. [ laughter ]. So, the field will change dramatic we. With the post, its not at layoffs but maybe they will get to layoffs. There were 940 people in the newsroom and it was 580 the day i got there and i had to cut staff by 35 people in the first year. I was expecting to have to cut another 50 or more every year after that. Now, they have 940 and that is a pretty big newsroom in their are a lot of startups and nonprofits. There are ones that specialize in certain areas. It is changing and i dont think you should judge the future of journalism by what is happening at the legacy News Organizations. For anybody interested in journalism, you will be good at what you feel passionate about and you should pursue your passion. There are difficulties in other fields. Look, after two years in journalism when i was working at the miami herald, my mother said, dont you want to be a lawyer like all of your other friends . And then i said, theyre not really my friends. [ laughter ]. And no, i dont really want to be a lawyer. Im interested in law but i dont want to be a lawyer. For me, it was not interesting enough and i wanted Something Interesting and meaningful. I think i found that in the field of journalism and i am glad that i did it. The field is going to change and as long as we remain in a democracy, which is an assumption, as long as we remain in democracy, there will be a need for journalism of a certain type and formats will change and they should change in young people will learn it. For anyone with the skills and in the wet, they can leapfrog over the people who are unwilling or find it unnecessary to adapt. We have one minute left. By the way, the formats will change but our values wont. Im keeping my answers concise. What do you see in a Trump Administration against the media . What actions do you think they could actually take . What should we be preparing for . I think they have thought of them all already and im not making suggestions here. I expect on National Security measures they will prosecute the press and i wont be surprised to see that. I think they will have allies in the Business World to acquire them as has happened in venezuela and other countries where allies of the government acquire these News Organizations. And, there will be libel suits brought more than have been brought in the past to harass us. All right, lets give a hand. [ applause ]. Thank you. My name is rachel olsen and i am the director of education at the National Academy and we are standing in front of the burlington depot in red cloud, nebraska where the railroad arrived in 1879. Later in 1882, it was a stop on the mainline between kansas city and denver for the burlington railroad. Also an important stop for homesteaders traveling to nebraska. A busy depot that saw eight passenger trains daily, this is where in 1883 two people arrived to start their lives on the divide. We are standing in front of the house built in 1878 and located one block away from the childhood home. As a child, he wouldve spent a lot of time in this house. Both because she was good friends with the children children and with the matriarch and she got to no their Domestic Worker who worked here as a teenager. Willow wouldve gotten to no anna and her experiences as part of an immigrant family trying to homestead on the great plains. In this inspired a famous novel. If you walk inside the minor home, you will see a parlor followed by a formal dining room. You will walk through there into the kitchen where there was a small bedroom that she stayed in when she was employed by the minor family. You would also see a hallway that served as a parlor for julia miner to entertain guests and where she played piano. He would see the bedroom that served as mr. Minors office. It developed in the 20 years and that wouldve included the childhood here. From the 1880s to the turnofthecentury and she wouldve witnessed a town in the making. So, the businesses and the services that we take for granted as always being available in our hometown and communities were still in development as heather grew up. That evolution is a town made a strong impression that came out in her writing. We are standing in front of the farmstead about 16 miles north of right cloud in nebraska. This is where they raised their 10 children and this is also the site where they were reunited and 1916 during a visit page to nebraska. This has proved to be very important and served as an inspiration for a book published two years later. Many of the beautiful and final scenes are written at this farmstead. It is far different from the dugouts that many homesteaders lived in in the early 1880s just like anna did with her family. Its a great representation of the larger homesteading culture and the immigrant farm life that she endeavored to capture in her novel. Weeknights at 9 00 eastern time, see the young corn presentation of our series, the books that shaped america. With library of congress that supports pieces of literature with an impact in our country. Tonight, we feature a 1918 novel addressing the immigrant experience in womens issues of the time. Our guest is a professor from the university of