is it too intrusive? does it benefit society? does it fall into the abyss of racism? can it withstand public scrutiny? these are wonderful questions that i think jurors would have asked. tell us more about these principles and how optimistic you are about them being adopted. >> i wish i was more optimistic, but i feel like i'm sort of asking for not that much, but probably people would disagree. i just feel that i wouldn't mind trading my data for services if i could have some assurances that if it was used against me, i would have some rights that i could challenge the data, that i could see it, that i could sue over it and that it was being used in the public benefit. it wasn't being used against me. so i basically came up with these standards as my own thoughts about what would i want in order to trade my day and feel confident. because i feel like we are in an information economy, and it's going to be -- although i've tried to opt out, it's not actually practical. what i would rather do is participate freely and have some assurances that i won't be harmed. this is -- cars are incredibly dangerous, but we get in them every day because we have some assurances that some safety measures have been taken, and we have redress if something goes wrong, and i want a similar standard for treatment of my data. >> wonderful. ladies and gentlemen, and our c-span audience as well, please, come, first of all, downstairs and buy julia's wonderful book. on c-span, go be to amazon using anonymized browser like tour -- [laughter] and buy the book. come to the national constitution center.org and please join me in thanking julia angwin. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> booktv is on twitter and facebook, and we want to hear from you. tweet us, twitter.com/booktv. or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv. >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week. gail sheehy recounts her life and journalism career in "daring." in "eisenhower, a life," paul johnson examines his military career and his eight years in the oval office. former marine corps sergeant michael golembeski in "level zero heroes: the story of u.s. marines special operations in afghanistan." in "liar, temptress, soldier, spy," karen abbott recounts the exploits of four women in the civil war. "city of lies: love, sex, death and the search for truth in tehran." and kristin o'keefe remembers the life of 19th century medical innovator thomas muter. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and be sure to watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org. >> and you're watching booktv on c-span2. here's our prime time lineup. beginning at 7 p.m. eastern, representative james clyburn presents his biography, "blessed experiences: genuinely southern, proudly black." at 8:30, sylvia jukes morris describes the life of clare boothe luce. then michael lewis talks about flash boys at 10 p.m. eastern, and we wrap up at 11 with the authors of "obama's enforcer: eric holder's justice department." that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. >> next on booktv, an interview from pepperdine university in malibu, california, part of booktv's college series. bruce herschensohn sat down with booktv to talk about his long political career and american foreign policy over the past half century. professor herschensohn also provided his take on president obama's foreign policy issues over the past five years. this is about 45 minutes. >> host: well, joining us now on booktv is bruce herschensohn, a professor here at pepperdine university. professor herschensohn, how long have you taught here, and what do you teach? >> guest: i teach u.s. foreign policy and started teaching here in the beginning of 1998. really when the school of public policy opened up for students. before that i sort of had an affiliation with pepperdine since the mid, early 1970s. >> host: what kind of af
built on grief and what they opened up to me, what the hunters if you will come of the, the prosecutors and the victim's advocate open up to me stories in their own lives of abuse, domestic abuse, those were not ancillary to this or irrelevant because they went to the question of the tension. what in your life dictates how you attended to the world and in this case the story was on the rage discoveries or is it just morality and the way people attended to that depend upon the places they came from and so i think what surprised me the most and i feel truly honored to have been a vessel for it was the outpouring of candor, emotion, all energy from people i think it was once-in-a-lifetime. >> host: to understand this issue we need to look at all the different layers of it. again and again technology throughout history has ended in a manner just what the inventors say or how you use it that moment or what it was when it was first in your pocket so it is a very shape shifting powerful aspect of our lives. what would you hope, and we have a few more minutes but how do you hope that we evolved in our attitudes towards technology? >> guest: i like the idea of taking a critical look and and berries and an elegy in the book that really hits it home in the end i try to add up what all of this means and the scientists did me an analogy that says we would compare technology today to the industrialization of food. add to block out what they meant by that when we industry allies to become a lot of amazing things happen like less expensive food, giving calories to more people, a survival mechanism. but when it got into the extreme actually gave a vending machine and what that is is you walk down the hall and hit the button and get a bag of chips that has all of the sugar that you ever needed to but when you needed it as a cave person you have to walk half way through the jungle, killed the bear, fight off the bat and by the time you were eating at you desperately needed it. now it's going to make you obese and diabetic. so this turns into a problem. the same thing as true today with is true today with our devices. they are incredible. this technology is amazing. we shouldn't lose sight of that fact. it is tantamount to the industrialization of food and we need it to survive everyday. just like that vending machine, it has the potential to short-circuit us by providing that he is like going right to the nerve centers with primitive social three words that can hijack us. so what do i hope? i hope that we become critical of this the way that we become critical of food. it's a metaphor we use called a diet. that's not -- it really takes a concerted effort because we are just at the beginning of understanding what fat, sugar, salt. >> host: we are out of time, but i think that you have left us with so much to think about and so much to be skeptical about and so many ways in which we can think about this issue in new ways. so thank you very much for writing the book. >> guest: it was a pleasure. thank you. >> that was "after words," booktv signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policy makers and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday and 12 a.m. on monday. you can also watch "after words" online. go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the book tv series and the topics list on the upper right side of the page. karen abbott recounts women in the civil war who defended northern politicians to send privileged information to southern generals to be that this is a little under an hour. >> i am thrilled to be here with abbott. i love her book. in the second sentencing which i love you take up and show this entire other view of chicago through the eyes of the two based to become most famous. in american roads we learn about this icon. so now what wired him just despise you hit on things i personally adore. you have unexplored american history. and women with some real spines and really adventurous and incredible women. >> i moved to atlanta in 2001 and i noticed immediately that the civil war seeks in the conversation down in the south in a way south in a way that it never does in the north. but, you know, i saw the occasional confederate flag on the walls wall and there were jokes about the aggression and the point was really driven -- [laughter] and the point was driven home especially that it wasn't a joke when i was struck stuck in traffic behind a pickup truck that had a bumper sticker that said don't blame me, i voted for jeff davis. so we were looking at this bumper sticker for hours and started thinking what were the winning doing as my mind always goes to what the women were doing and of course i didn't have easy access to political discourse or the right to vote. they couldn't influence battle, so i wanted to see what the women were doing and i wanted to find in particular for women who cheated, stole, drink, shop and flirted their way through the war. these are women i want to spend time with. that's why i love the book so much. [laughter] as authors we debate often ask about how we find our stories. find it as a bumper sticker hasn't come up for me quite often. so, once you've gotten intrigued, once the seed was planted, how did you come across these incredible women? spinnaker wanted to touch the need to find find them that touched in some way whose pedantry we been told before. although two of the women do come with a sort of idolized the old confederate spy. they were running into the same people and there was a cause and effect of how one woman speaker would affect the other circumstances and i wanted to sort of leave the stories together in a really interesting way. one of the things i like best about this is there are these four very distinct characters. they each have their own background and experience into and their own views on this particular conflict and they offer the reader a specific view and entry point into the civil war. we know where we are headed back to me but to me this is a really personal way. and these four characters are so distinct and talked a little talk a little bit about the four women who carry this book. they were "liar, temptress, soldier, spy: four women undercover in the civil war." they provided a book of comic relief and she was my favorite in some ways because she was insane. >> she was crazy. >> denise and i were talking before we went on and we said she was think she was like a sissy or path of spring break. [laughter] >> if anybody remembers she's having a good time but there is something off about her. [laughter] the pre- danger to circumstances that they were 17-years-old when the war broke out and she was a confederate sympathizer living in virginia and i will just say she had no filter. if the un and miley cyrus had a baby -- she was very overt -- >> she wrote a great letter to her cousin that sort of sums up how she felt about herself and which is what she thought about most of the time. i weighed 106 and a half pounds, my form is beautiful, my eyes were of a dark blue and are so expressive and my hair is a rich brown and i think i tie it up nicely. my neck and arms are beautiful and life is perfect. [laughter] i wear a size two and a half shoe. my teeth are pro- whiteness i think perhaps a little whiter. beautifully shaped and indeed i am decidedly the most beautiful of all of your cousins. [laughter] by shooting a union soldier that threatened to wave a flag over her home and she wasn't standing for that. so in addition to wanting a husband that she is trying to be in some sort of agreement with her husband. but what does he want in the story? what do those the particular character wanted the story? >> i think she woke up every day wanting something different. but what can i do to advance the position to make myself more famous, which of course was a strange attitude for somebody that purported to be a spy. this is somebody but after she shoots the union soldier dead and she goes to fight with the confederate army that while she is really honestly trying to help the confederate confederate army and to gather and disseminate information that might be helpful in the battle she is trying to do whatever she can to bring attention to herself. she ends up getting attention from a very prominent individual >> she's quite obsessed with general stonewall jackson who is sort of my confederate boyfriend. [laughter] he was an interesting character. he was a rock star of the civil war and there was a great story about him he was in the lobby of the hotel and women just ran after him on the street if he was in the lobby of the hotel they followed him into stonewall was great about this and said at this point leedy's, wheaties, this is the first time that i was ever sounded by the enemy. [laughter] and he was fascinated and obsessed with him and told reporters she wanted to occupy and share his dangers. so he had another idol in her life and rose is another one of the characters and another key figure in the confederate side of the story. talk a little bit about rose. >> she was a difficult position when the war broke out. she lost five check-in the league cup -- lost five children and access to the white house in the 20 years prior to the war she had access to democratic politicians and she'd actually been an advisor to general james buchanan and since the election of lincoln all of the disappeared and she was desperate to regain the position of the society and the influence that she had wielded. would you be interested in washington, d.c. in the federal capital she disregarded the danger of that insight of course of course i want to do that. she immediately began cultivating sources by cultivating i been sleeping with a. the chairman of the committee on military affairs you can imagine the that the talk was quite interesting. the neighbors watched them come and go and called her why you rose. rose know what she was doing and was very curious about her intent to help the confederate army. >> how did they first learned about rose because in a way they kind of want to be rose. >> she went to school in washington, d.c. and she had her societal view. rose at that time before the war broke out rose was still the leading lady of washington society and her invitations were the most coveted in town and they knew about all of the politicians up for in the party she entertained democratic politicians and was quite influential across the board and she knew about this and just sort of ad by your rose even after the war broke out and it became a prominent spy. let's now move to the union and talk a little bit about elizabeth. >> she was the opposite of her. she was a union lady living in the confederate capital. she was a celebrated beauty. she said she was never as pretty as her portrait showed. [laughter] elizabeth was a staunch abolitionist and she was born and raised in richmond and to spend a lot of time being educated and when she came back to richmond she wasn't pleased with the state of things and began bringing the family slaves and after it woke out it was a dangerous position to have before she was just sort of this lady that worked on the house of the hell with her mother after the war broke out she was a traitor, she was a union sympathizer and a somebody that they were desperate to into the confederate started very closely. >> this isn't somebody that needed to. she was well taken care of. did you have any idea of what drove her or motivated her? >> she was moved by the proslavery. she would go and weep openly and write about this in her diary and she would bring the prominent guests to richmond and say i need to show you the situation and again, just be overwhelmed by how horrific situation was. the family needed to be welcomed into the richmond society. so once her father passed she began bringing the family slaves and started bringing her inheritance for the purpose of buying slaves and so this was something that was near and dear to her at the risk of her of life. >> what i found interesting about her that is related to this is of course her relationship with the african-american woman that worked in her home. talk a little bit about that. >> once elizabeth started assembling her spy ring she'd recruit people from all different walks of society that really she was the last person in particular to be the linchpin of the whole operation. she was a former family slaves that freed her when she was young and she was a remarkable woman in elizabeth center to be educated as a proper southern lady i'm offering you one of my servants that might assist you in your needs. she's not a smart woman. she is kind of bubbling that she might fit the bill for you for a while. and so, mary jane goes to the confederate white house and she's high year and little does anybody know that not only is mary jane later it but she's also highly educated and has a photographic memory. >> that's my favorite part. >> while she is dusting his desk and cleaning up children's toys, she's also sneaking peek at the papers on his desk and listening to the confidential conversations. do not drink who ruled out of the contingent in the book. she has edited a tragic back story and has father arranged marriage for her and she had seen what what marriages had done for her sister mainly nothing. she wanted more for herself so she cuts her hair and trades in her dress for a suit and she starts hearing about the abolitionist john brown and the drug beat leading up to the civil war and she has a piece of that. emma wants to live a life of adventure so she enlists in the human army in the spring of 61. the first thing that comes up to their mind, how does that work out for her? [inaudible] [laughter] >> be needed to fill the quota is and they didn't care if somebody had disease, they just needed to have a trigger enough to pull out the cartridges and cared if somebody could march. they wanted to know if somebody could do the job and they shook her hand and said what sort of living has this hand earned and with that she was passing the army and became a private from wisconsin. the units were with which to the civil war and one of the things i liked is that it is so balanced when you were doing your research. >> there were plenty left on the cutting room floor and fortunately the civil war has numerous good characters and interesting people and there were two sisters i was interested in. i'm always interested in the sisters and this was jenny and claudia weber to confederate ladies who like many southern ladies paid all of the manner of goods and smuggled them across and i think that less were at the altar. they not only --. there were also interesting male spies. mail spies. you think they are the only ones cross-dressing and a fellow by the name of benjamin. she was 94 pounds, had these lovely delicate features, blonde hair and according to one of the comrades he had a waste as crispy as a woman. he would he would on an elaborate down and called himself sally and go to the union military goals and dance with the military soldiers and just say what is general grant of two these days and get information that way. so, there were devious people on both sides of both genders. >> frank and emma was my favorite. do you have a favorite? >> i like them all for different reasons. i really appreciated a emma's for vulnerability. here is somebody that is not only having to pretend that she is a man. she's on the front lines in the blood used battle and she also has a really excruciating personal story. she has a situation where she falls in love with a fellow union soldier and to make the choice of who i suffer in silence? i love this man, or do i tell him. dressing the men to enlist in the army in the civil war and i found out that it wasn't -- she wasn't the only one. were you surprised to learn that? >> there were about 400 women that described themselves as men in the north and south and it is fascinating how they got away with it and i came to the conclusion that the biggest reason they got away with it is because no one knew what a woman would look like wearing cans. they were so used to seeing them pushing full densities exaggerated shapes at that the very idea was so unfathomable that people were just like no that can't be. so that was just one of the things that enlisted the soldiers. what do these four women have in common >> is the first time that women took the sword of golf in the public for their or there are the revolutionary war spies and they didn't talk about this. they were the victims of the war, not the perpetrators. they openly defined by the northern government said i'm a rebel woman and i will fight to the death for my cause. it was a conundrum. the first time they made an advance like that. >> one of the great things about the characters is the research that you've done an incredibly flushed out and they are not perfect. the choice is made to show them to show everyone worked and all. talk about why. it's important to me to be true to them as they were she was an atrocious atrocious race just edited a very wild things about african-americans. but as much as you can in that situation rose did not have that sort of same affinity for the women who have served her and i think that it had labeled down to the recent years not only that but her background and you find out a little bit into the book that her father when she was about 4-years-old had been bartered by the slaves and so i think that was something that followed her and shake her throughout her life. .. >> >> >>. [laughter] not only was she on the front lines or being shot out by the confederates but the idea to be discovered as though women. like the supremacist groups and confederates spying on her. if there were strong from the gallows if anybody finds us. >> but am glad the trade everything she was to be associated with to be a soldier you are supposed to be a man. [laughter] anyone who operates as us by is in a position to be trade confidence. but the consequences did not go smoothly for these four women all the time can you talk about these consequences in these unfortunate consequences? >> as i said earlier the government did not always know what to do with them. they were there rebel within and confederate murders they thought that would only exacerbate conditions. and also complications' interrupt the government is interested to get iraq to recognize the legitimacy. so that was a whole other wrinkle they did not know what to do with confederate women answered the their behavior would have warranted tightening and that is the way the debut of how and with quite different experiences in prison was to the different levels to have to fit -- officials take them but suffering in prison quite a bit. >> what was the silent treatment? >> i found this hilarious because. >> she was well-known. this was not some anonymous woman. i should back up and discuss that after she formed her spy ring the first battle of bull run everybody was predicting this would be the end of the war on the union side. we will capture them and move on to the next battle. and then in gathering the requisite information she summoned a 60 year-old carrier to her room she sat down at the dresser and have the piece of black silk and wool set up to make some of the un and gives a dress and says i have so many in my hair right now. [laughter] she leaves on the very important mission and after. they did not even know what you do. they said let's of pretty girl. and with the headquarters let down her hair to produce a note and therein contained very important information for the first battle of bull run that was a surprising victory. after this allan pinkerton is on the case. and becomes public enemy number one. you do have all of these other characters and elements. >> but pinkerton was the name -- the main one but there is somebody that was contracted by the union army to do secret service work. here is somebody just as interested to a finance his own personality. and this is public enemy number one. they're is the great theme of a torrential downpour and within the distance of the white house. she called lincoln.org also -- satan also. she looks in though window but as the union cap density on the couch looking over then passionately making out. he cannot believe this trader gives all these trade secrets. that is bad and pinkerton goes after him. >> talking about the spy ring that has this elaborate story of putting notes in her hair but all the different ways they hit the notes. just give us a couple. >> definitely the hair. they had elaborate hairdos that was conducive. but they also had many cartoons that celebrated confederate women the ability to smuggle a cross the line and crinoline is a rigid page like structure that could span a diameter of 60 so imagine end of volume of things you could attach to this. coffee, favors, silk, boots and several pairs of boots at a time. and she was queen of smuggling. they said there were missing 200 favors it was all the doing of spell. [laughter] >> so you are a pennsylvania girl living in atlanta this season jefferson davis bumper sticker in and johnson to the world of civil war. what was your review or experience with civil war history prior to working on this book? >> i started from scratch i came from not knowing what i was applying and quite pleased from what i could find in how war change women's rules. and back in creating nonfiction i have seen it played longer than i should have to have wasted a good bit of time but the court ship changed during the civil war. i will tell you. prior to the civil war in the antebellum years it was a rigorous process for a marriage to have been. to require of letter of introduction, a formal letter of introduction. >> with perfect fet. [laughter] >> always a selling point. a letter of introduction to meet parents or the process for years before he could even think about being a engaged then move onto marriage. but they had to loosen the rules and the women they gave them a the new-found freedom for real relationships. they went off to the confederate camps with a formal letter of introduction now they were going off with men whose names they did not even know getting the hands kissed and carriage rides and scandalous behavior's that would never happen before the '04. they were flirting in their diaries but a lot more sexual intimacy. after the war there were 60,000 widows there was no expectation of getting married and all the women who said i don't care. i will be an old maid at it doesn't matter the first time they did not expect to marry to carry on that tradition of mothers and grandmothers. >> you started with a blank slate how did you view this moment and how does it evolves. >> one of the startling aspects said it is gratifying is thinking of the women of of weaker sex to be gentle and slow and not educated in genteel. weld they would hide things in their bonds and the hoopskirt its but also with regards to the idea women were not capable of this treasonous behavior. there is some great scenes' where they accuse them to say the women's immediate response is how dare you accuse me of such behavior to make the conduct of the officer in the gentleman and i am a defenseless woman? and i will shoot you right now. [laughter] but just the fact they could exploit the weaker sex i thought was quite brilliant. >> you write about the intrepid of unsound women in their moment in history. did you always want to write about women? >> i always said my grandmother who was 96 always told me the dirtiest stories that i know. [laughter] and not only led three to the 19th centuryà brought fall. [laughter] but the famous stripper of the 20th century. when you think of the word maverick you think about male character, even though the late james garner but with an mavericks' mavericks' with regina's. [laughter] that is my view. >> had to compare this to your former book which is also like mavericks' with vaginas. >> i am jealous of all of them the next best thing is to sit at my a computer to dig into their psyche. it is always a thrill when they do. >> talking about the prodding and the poking do you find you have stages to the process or do you have overlap how you operate? is that process any different? gimmicky would probably agree that i have to research and write at the same time. i know plenty of authors to have to do research firm stand they hoard. i would research for tenures and not write one word i would research the rest of my life. but then you are in trouble with your editor. [laughter] it is the function of journalism i3 have to write and research at the same time said the figure out what is vital to the story you do all the research you can pull back then-- interesting but i cannot spend the next four months on that unfortunately. >> you do such a good job to capture their voices. what resources did you come across in the rabbit hole? becker with tears at national archives which was throwing. that is that the national archives and i was able to hold that in my hand and this confederate spy held this one ended 50 years ago. dissaving with elizabeth that the new york public library i saw her death threats please give us some of yourqr blood to write with. i was chilled by a town in the years later? i often spoke with us that descendent of her brother that gave me information that was never told before. that was thrilling. and also with the re-enactments. >> the question that led, up because through the book and curiosity the cross dressers of both genders was not unusual. did you ever encounter any reenactments that was no woman being a man or a lot of man as a woman in the re-enactment? >> i did not soon after but women had to write -- fights for the right to reenact as men.d [laughter] but there was some movement that women actors cannot dress as men and fight as men but they wanted them to play the traditional role but they said no. we want to be the women soldiers. there wasw1 a movement for that to happen in. >> and i love these anachronisms yvette ice of bull run july 2011 and there was of man and his 10 year-old son and he said he said there is stonewall jackson by the power line. [laughter] you have to love that. >> grab your iphone and take a picture. >> the book is so compelling and is such a of a great read but it there reads like fiction but is that something you ever considered doing? this is such a huge part of what we have done for so long now. is it something that you think about? limit for the next book maybe but not this one. i have 50 pages of endnotes and spent five years researching this book. i talked about the self mythologizing that went on. and with his important 2.0 those instances in the narrative. it is important what they embellishing and leave out as what they did. and also those anecdotes that they blow up and i explain why they embellish. something about their psyche and their role in the war and is as legitimate as the four of the rebellion. the memoirs are a small part of a large body of research to have access for a book like this. >> it comes together suchl radically. we have time for questions. does anybody have questions? >> talk about the southern matriarch don't you think maybe this is more of a comment the southern gothic is so prevalent that pass to be a product of civil war as well? >> that is probably true. intel whole landscape even despise started to change the entire landscape of the user roles and that influenced everything. >> and by women writers with that it is an interesting point. >> tell me the process you can up with for the title. >> is a great title. >> it was pretty torturous. i would send out emails "this is it". no. that is not the title. in the end we wanted something that they all worked and something that would be recognizable to be a very manly book. and it would be fun to tweak that of a little bit. than to say this is the women's side of the story. >> you are the of publisher part of the process. >> i sent many emails to my editor. i will not even raise that with their response program is trying desperately. i cover the war extensively in and i thought that these were great snippets. they were just like no. no. that is now working. [laughter] so finally we came up with this and it clicked. >>o i have a reading request? can you read the description of stonewall jackson? it is page 138. [laughter] >> so we have a request. >> she spent quite a bit of time violate his feet were as pretty as others. >> looking 30:00 a.m. looked more scarecrows and cuban. bright blue eyes and of mangy beard the uniform consisted of us that -- thread their single breasted coat from the mexican war. in the oversized pair of boots for the size 14 feet. the fanciest of only 15 ground held them up. he almost never laughed from there we are occasions when he did the way it went to his mouth open and made no sound whatsoever. once a northerner captured asked to catch and a glimpse of the general than in a turn of disbelief and disgust exclaimed oh my god. laid me down. [laughter] jackson was hideous as brilliant. the brill peculiar legendary he thought of himself being on a balance. tweeting for the blood to establish equilibrium. it made his left leg week and it often made it difficult to to determine the direction. convince every one of his organs was malfunctioning he sells medicated with a variety of concoctions with nitrates and ingesting a number of concoctions. twice a day he was on the edge of a fence and prayed for one hour.m
migration. international migration at the graduate and undergraduate level. i also teach family, and i've taught religion, development. but my favorite course is migration. >> host: what's similar about the current migration patterns from mexico to the u.s. to past immigration in the u.s.? anything? >> guest: it's, the composition has changed. there are more and more women. there are more and more unattached youth. so unaccompanied minors has become a huge part of the migration flow from mexico. there are more and more of the poorest leaving. it used to be migration was more selective. you had to have some resources to make the journey. but the situations have become so desperate, especially in honduras. and parts of salvador can. so it's really -- salvador. so it's really pulling the youngest and the poorest. more and more women, more and more danger. >> host: anyone make it on their own without spending on a coyote or -- >> guest: yeah. i mean, there are seasoned migrants that will travel in groups who will attempt the journey. but our border enforcement policy has really beefed up campaigns and selected crossing points where migrants historically crossed. and in doing so, they've diverted migrants to the more dangerous spots. so many of the, you know, the routes they're taking are unknown, uncertain routes. but, yes, many migrants still cross in groups and alone. and you have to go to a border town in the mexico now, and there's just groups of migrants who have been sent back and deported pack, and they're just sitting there waiting for the opportunity to come back across. and when they leave, they'll be sure to stop and get the blessing of a priest. >> host: "migration miracle" is the name of the book published by harvard university press. "faith, hope and meaning on the undocumented journey." jacqueline maria hagen is the author. >> guest: thank you. >> is there a nonfiction author or week you'd like -- book you'd like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail to c-span@c-span.org -- booktv@c-span.org or post to our facebook page. karen abbott recounts the covert experts of four women in civil war to send privileged information to southern generals. this is a little under an hour. >> okay. i'm thrilled, i'm thrilled to be here with abbott. i love her books, i love all of her books. sin in the second city, which i love, you take us and share with us this entire other view of chicago through the eyes of the two most famous american madams ever. in "american rose" we learn about this american icon, gypsy rose lee who really, you know, hasn't been explored the way that you explored her. so now with "liar, soldier, spy," you hit on several things i personally adore. we have unexplored american history, espionage and women -- [laughter] with some real spines, really adventurous, incredible women. tell us a little bit about what this book is about. >> well, i'll tell you the object of this book to get in there. i was born and raised in philadelphia and moved to atlanta in 2001 and noticed immediately, um, that the civil war seeps into the conversation down in the south in a way it never does in the north. [laughter] you know, i saw the occasionally confederate flag, heard the jokes about northern aggression -- >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> good point. yeah. and the point that was driven home, especially that it wasn't a joke. when i was stuck in traffic for hours behind a pickup truck that had a bumper sticker that said "don't blame me, i voted for jeff davis." [laughter] so i sat there looking at this bumper sticker for hours and started thinking, of course, about what were the women doing, as my mind always goes to what the women were doing. of course, they didn't have easy access to political discourse, they didn't have the right to vote, they couldn't influence battle, so i wanted to see what the women were doing, and i wanted to find in particular four women who, you know, cheated, lied, stole, murdered, fought, avenged and flirted their way through the war. [laughter] these are women i want to spend time with, which is why i love this book so much. >> and, you know, as authors we often are asked how we we find our stories. i have to say find it on a bumper sticker hasn't come up for me quite often. [laughter] so once you got intrigued, once that little seed was planted, how did you come across these four incredible women? >> well, i wanted to find four in particular whose stories touched in some way, whose tapestry rose to retell the story of the civil war in a way it hadn't been told before. and it was important to me even if they weren't physically interacting all the time -- although two of them do -- they were running into the same people, and there was a cause and effect. one woman's behavior would affect the other woman's circumstances, and i just wanted to sort of weave their stories together in a really interesting way. >> the, one of the things i like best about this is there are these four very distinct characters. they have their own background -- they each have their own background, their own experience, their own views on this particular conflict, and they offer the reader a specific view and entry point into the civil war because, you know, it's spoiler alert, you know, here's how the war ends, you know? we know where this is going. >> right. >> but one of the -- what i like about this is we know where we're headed, but this, to me, is a really personal way to look at not just this war, but war in general, how people become involved, what roles they take on, how it affects their lives. and these four characters are so distinct and different. talk a little bit about the four women who carry this book. >> host: yeah. and with apologies to john la carey. i think all the women at the same time for liars, temptresses, soldiers and spies. and the first is belle boyd who provided a lot of comic relief and was, actually, my favorite in a lot of ways because she was insane. >> belle's crazy. >> yeah. >> love my crazy. yeah. >> denise and i were talking before we went on, and we said she was like a sociopath on spring break all the time. [laughter] >> that girl, if anybody remembers spring break where you're like she's having a really good time, but there's something just off about her. that's belle. [laughter] >> and applying in the to the civil war made for some pretty dangerous circumstances. but belle boyd was 17 years old when the war broke out, and she was a confederate sympathizer living in the shenandoah valley, virginia. she had no filter. if sarah palin and miley cyrus had a 19th century baby, i think it would have been belle boyd. [laughter] her opinions and her sexuality. >> it makes you want to see if there are any pictures of belle going -- [laughter] >> i'm sure there are. she wrote this great letter to her cousin that sort of sums up how she felt about herself -- >> which was what she thought about most of the time. >> yes. yes, exactly. i'll just read a tiny snippet of that. i am tall, she once boasted to her cousin, lobbying him to find her a husband. i weigh 106 and a half pounds. my form is beautiful, my eyes are of a dark blue and so expressive. [laughter] my hair of a rich brown, and i think i tie it up nicely. [laughter] my neck and arms are beautiful, and my foot is perfect. [laughter] only wear size two and a half shoes, my teeth the same pearly whiteness, i think perhaps a little whiter. nose quite as large as ever, neither grecian, nor roman, and indeed, i am decidedly the most beautiful of all your cousins. [laughter] and she kicks things off soon after that letter was written on the 4th of july, 1861, by shooting a confederate -- excuse me, a union soldier who threatens to raise a flag over her home. and belle was not standing for that. >> so in addition to, in addition to wanting a husband that she's trying to get via, you know, some sort of agreement with her cousin, what does belle want in this story? what does this particular character want of this story? >> i think belle woke up every day wanting something different. but all of it pointed to what can i do to advance my position to make myself more famous? which, of course, was a strange attitude for somebody who purported to be a spy to have. this is somebody who after she shoots the union soldier dead goes to works as a courier and spies for the confederate army. but while she's really, honestly trying to help the army gather and disseminate information that might be helpful in their battles, she's also trying to do whatever she can to bring attention to herself. >> she ends up getting attention from a very prominent individual. >> yeah. yeah. belle was quite obsessed with general stonewall jackson who was sort of my confederate boyfriend, my civil war boyfriend -- >> we all have one. >> yes. [laughter] >> right now. >> and stonewall jackson was an interesting character. he was sort of a rock star of the civil war. and there was a great story about him. he was in the lobby of a hotel, this was in 1862, and women just swarmed him. they ran after him down the street, if he was in the lobby of the hotel as in this instance, they just followed him and started ripping buttons off his coat and keeping souvenirs. [laughter] and stonewall was great about this, he actually said at this point, ladies, ladies, i think this is the first time i was ever surrounded by the enemy. [laughter] and belle, belle, you know, had -- was fascinated with him and obsessed with him. and she told reporters she wanted to, quote, occupy his tent and share his dangers. [laughter] and so she spent quite a bit of time going after that goal. [laughter] >> so belle had another, another idol in her life, rose -- >> yeah. >> and rose is another one of the main characters, another key figure in the confederate side of the story. talk a little bit about rose. >> well, rose was an interesting woman who was in a very difficult position when the war broke out. she had lost five children within four years. she had lost her husband in a freak accident. she lost her financial stability, and she lost her access to the white house. in the 20 years prior to the war, she had had access to democratic politicians, she'd actually been an adviser to president james buchanan. so with the election of lincoln, all of that disappeared, and she was desperate to regain this position, this, you know, society and this influence that she had wielded. and so when a confederate captain approached her in the spring of 1831 and said would you be interested in running a confederate spy ring in washington, d.c., the federal capital, rose disregarded the danger of that and said, of course. of course i want to do that. and she immediately began cultivating sources. by cultivates, i mean sleeping with -- [laughter] and managed to bed quite a high number of high reactioning union officials -- high ranking union officials including the chairman of lincoln's military affairs. so you can imagine their pillow talk was quite interesting. >> and she entertained these men in her home. >> oh, yes. the neighbors watched the men come and go and called her wild rose. it was a very catty situation going on. [laughter] but rose knew what she was doing and was very serious about her intent to help the confederate army. >> now, how did, how did bell first learn about rose? because belle, you know, in a way kind of wants to be rose. >> yeah. belle went to school in washington, d.c. x she had -- and she had her societal debut. belle was a debutante, of course, and even carved her -- i love this story -- she carved her name with her diamond in the window of her school, you know, belle boyd was here. [laughter] and rose at that time, it was before the war broke out, so rose was still the head, the leading lady of washington society. and rose's invitations were the most coveted in town, and belle knew about all the politicians that would go to rose's home and rose's parties. and rose entertained both democratic and republican politicians and was quite influential across the board, and belle knew about this and just sort of admired rose and even more so after the war broke out and rose became a prominent spy. >> so let's now move, so we have two of our four women. let's now move to the union and talk a little bit about elizabeth. >> yes. van little was sort of the opposite of rose. she was a union lady level in the confederate capital of richmond, so the exact opposite situation. and whereas rose was a celebrated beauty, elizabeth -- one of her contemporaries said, quote: she was never as pretty as her portrait showed. [laughter] which i wish i had a portrait. >> come on. >> true, very true. >> they didn't have photo shop, so things were, you know -- [laughter] they've taken some things out. >> yeah. but elizabeth was a staunch abolitionist. she was born and raised in richmond but spent a lot of time up north being educated. and when she came back to richmond, he was not pleased with the state of things and began freeing the family slaves. .. >> they were overwhelmed by how horrific this situation once. once her family had passed, they explained how they needed to be welcomed into the society. and she started spending her time for the purpose of doing this for the freedom. so this is something that was near and dear to her. and at the expense of her life are and what i found interesting about her is of course her relationship with the woman, the african-american woman who worked in her home. >> yes, when she started assembling her meeting, she a recruited people from all walks of life and really one person was chosen in particular to be the linchpin and that was a former family slave that was freed when she was young. she was a remarkable woman. and of course it was against the law at the time to teach slaves to read and write. and so she went to the confederate first lady and said that i hear you need help. i am offering you a service that might assist you in your needs. she's not a smart woman, but she might just fit the bill for you for a wild. and so maryjane goes to the white house and retired. a little do they know that she is highly educated and has a photographic memory. and so while she is testing his desk, she is also sneaking peeks at the papers on his desk and listening to the confidential conversation and recording every single word back to him. >> i love that. now we move onto frank who is part of a. >> edmonds is a canadian who had seen what a arranged marriages have done but make them miserable. she wanted something more for herself. so one night she cuts her hair and finds her breast and treats her dress and and leads to the united states. and then she got to the civil war and she enlists in the union army in 1861 in the spring. it was remarkable how she got away from that. and the first thing that came to mind, as i'm reading the book, saying wait a minute, didn't she have to take a physical. it was the first thing that comes up in everybody's minds. so how did that work out for her? and the truth was that it the official protocol dictated that all doctors conducted a physical examination by doctors flouted these roles. and, you know, they needed bodies up there and they didn't care if someone had disease, they just needed to have a finger to pull a trigger and that seems to pull out the cartridges and prove that someone he could march, they just wanted someone to do the job. and so then the doctor said what sort of living has this hand earned and what not, he became the private. and i love it. and so with these four women, he has given us given us a unique lenses with which to view this. one of the things i like is that it's so balanced and when you are doing your research, where there any other women that you came across? how did you decide on these poor women because it is such a great fit or was that someone that they said, oh, i wish i could've done this or that. talk about landing and deciding. >> there was plenty left on the cutting room floor, fortunately the war had numerous big characters and interesting people. there were two sisters and of course i'm always interested in devious sisters. they were jenny and lonnie noon, and i think that they just had been at the altar and i wanted to find a way to fit them in, but there wasn't enough for a nonfiction account. and there were all sorts of interesting sides, you think that the women were the only ones cross-dressing. there was a fellow by the name of benjamin stringfellow and they had these lovely delicate features and according to one of his comrades he would put on an elaborate gown and go to union military balls and start dancing with the union soldiers and it's like oh, what is general grant of two up to these days? and get information that way. there were devious people on the sides. >> frank and emma edmonds or absolutely my favorite. >> you know, i like them all for different reasons. and i really appreciated the vulnerability of emma edmonds. here is someone who is not only having to pretend to be a man, but she's on the front lines and she's one that has an excruciating personal story. she has a situation where she falls in love with a soldier and has to make a choice of do i suffer in silence or do i tell him. >> they were very close and we really pursued her strength and vulnerability there. >> i got very curious and i found out that it wasn't -- he was not the only one in resupply us to learn that? >> yes, i was. there were estimated 500 women and it's interesting how they got away with it. be biggest reason they got away with it was because no one knew what a woman would look like wearing pants. [laughter] and they were seen these visuals put into exaggerated shapes with crinolines. the people were just like no, that can't be a woman. and that was one of the things that really hfm. >> i talked a little bit about how they offered this different perspectives. what do you think about these four women and what they have in common? >> i think that they all put together all the women who involve themselves in the civil war it was the first time that woman could take on a role publicly. there were women revolutionaries and they were very discreet and they do not talk about this. this was not something that they openly boasted about. but it was the first time that women made war their business and did so publicly. everybody refers to how they were the victims of war and not perpetrators. it was the first time in american history where women said this is what i am doing and i'm proud of it and i will do it again. and king contents of chamber pots, openly saying that i am a rebel woman and i respect my cause. you know, the union government said what are we going to do with these facile fashionable women spies? and it was a conundrum throughout the war and i think women really needed this to stand up. >> one of the great things about the characters as the research you have done, they are not perfect. and they have laws and a couple of them have difficult views and there's a lot of hate their. and the choices made to show all of them so can you talk about why you decided to do that and why it is important for you to include all of those aspects of these characters? >> is important to me to be as true to them as they were. and they said very vile things about african-americans at the time. i try to understand where she was coming from. but she had a very loving relationship as much as you can in that situation. and that they did not have that affinity for the women and i think that it had boiled down in recent years. not only that, but with her background, you find out a little bit more and i did so later in my research, where she was about four years old have been guarded by the slaves and i think that that really fueled this and something that followed her and shake her throughout her life. >> these women, all of them, you talk about how this is the first time in history that they kind of stood up and said we are willing to fight because this is our war as well. >> they were taking incredible risks in a way and you could argue greater risks than the men if only they were doing something that was not acceptable at all from their gender in that time. so how risky wasn't what they were doing to . >> it was incredibly risky. it was something that was astonishing and prove have devoted she was to the cause. and of course, not only did she go undercover, but just the risk of being discovered and every day she would hear more and more stories about women being discovered. my favorite one, i have a couple of favorites of that variety and one was that a woman forgot how where chaos and started putting them on over her head. and there was a corporal in new jersey they gave birth and did jig was up there. [laughter] because not only was she on the frontlines getting part of this, but the idea of her getting caught in discovered as a woman, these were women who really believed that they were going to be hanged and they even wrote that in their diaries. >> there was an element of the trail in a sense and what they were doing. you know, emma frank was betraying everything that was supposed to be associated with what it meant to be a union soldier. and anyone who operates as a spy where they can be viewed as someone betraying confidences, they did suffer and this did not go away for women all the time. we talk about some of the consequences, the unfortunate consequence is that they suffered. >> as i said earlier, these governments, they were reluctant to make the rebel woman into martyrs. they thought that that would exacerbate conditions and also caused complications with europe. the confederate government was interested in the union government did not recognize as it until it added a whole other wrinkle. so they didn't quite know what to do and they sort of tortured them and i think that that was due to the different levels of having union officials make a threat. the first suffered in prison quite a bit and had a difficult time on a couple occasions. >> what was the style of treatment in this? >> i find it right hilarious. the union officials -- she was well known. and this is not some anonymous woman. and i could backup and discuss what made her so well known and what got her into prison? well, it was july of 1861 in the first one was going to be an enormous battle and everyone was predicting that this would be the end of the war on the union side. and they thought, okay, we're going to move on and the war will be over. but rose after junking jumping into bed and gathering the requisite information summoned a 16-year-old courier to her home named betty duval and she sat her down and she said she would cipher a note. and she ties of this note and rolls it up into betty's hair and gives her a dress. i have so many dispatches and my hair right now. [laughter] she's leaving you in a very important mission. [laughter] >> so she says pretend you are a simple farm girl and sure enough that he passes along and they say oh, what a pretty girl. and she goes to the headquarters and lets down her luxurious native hair and they have very important information that aided them. so after this you can imagine the detective, allan pinkerton, he was on the case with rose o'neal greenhow and she becomes public enemy number one. >> one of the things that you do have is all of these other characters and elements from that time that enter into the history. >> well, pinkerton was the main one and i was surprised by the involvement. here is someone that was contracted by the union to do secret service work. here is someone that was just as interested in advancing his own personality as belle boyd was. and pinkerton becomes focused on rose. public enemy number one. and there's a great scene where there's a torrential downpour and he goes out with two of the best detectives. choice like to say that her home was in distance of the white house and so she called lincoln satan as well. [laughter] and he stands on the detective's shoulders and what does he see but them sitting on the couch, and they start passionately making out. and he becomes enraged and this goes after pinkerton. >> we were talking about the young woman who had this elaborate note in her hair. one of my favorite things is all the different ways that they hit the notes. can you give us a couple of your favorite once? >> definitely the hair and the women had elaborate hairdos and that was very conducive. but they also had many cartoons that celebrated confederate confederate women in particular, smuggling things across the line. crinoline is this structure and you can imagine the volume of things that you could attach to this. people would attach copy, sabers, thistles, silk. several pairs of boots at a time and that was sort of the queen of smuggling, belle boyd was the queen of smuggling. and they were missing a lot with all the doing of belle boyd and that was quite an enterprise. >> here you are and you are a pennsylvania girl living in atlanta so what was your view or your experience with civil war history prior to working on this book two. >> absolutely nothing. i appreciated it because i came to not expect to find anything, not knowing what i was going to kind and i was like please been fascinated with what i did find, especially the way that it women's wars changed. and so you fall down into that rabbit hole briefly. one of those rabbit holes of research -- i probably spent longer than i should have and i wasted a good bit of time. finding out how courtship was seen during the civil war. >> how was it seem? >> well, i can tell you. prior to the civil war in the antebellum times, it was a rigorous process for marriage to happen and it would require a letter of introduction from a cousin or someone. >> someone with perfect feet. >> yes, all of the selling points. meeting the parents, the neighbors, acquaintances, he had to be properly engage before you could even think about moving on to marriage. but when the war broke out, all of that came loose and several parents have to loose in their rules and they gave the women a newfound freedom and more likelihood of heart rate in real relationships. and they went out to confederate camps and now they were going off with men they didn't even know and being serenaded, all of these scandalous behaviors and it would never happen before the war. and of course some of them only admitted to wording in their diaries. but after the war, 60,000 widows were last in didn't have any expectations of getting married. my favorite was all the women he said i don't care, i will be an old lady. it doesn't matter to me. it was the first time that they did not carry on the tradition of their mothers and grandmothers. >> starting with sort of a blank slate, how did you view this moment in history evolving through research and writing? >> one of the most startling aspects was how women -- you even think of them as the weaker sex and they exploited the idea of women being gentle and sort of slow and not agitated and genteel. and so while they were hiding everything in their hoop skirts, it was something they could hide behind with regard to the idea that women were not capable of this type of behavior. so they were great things were detectives would approach women and say, you are in a league with the enemy. and their immediate responses how dare you accuse me of such behavior. and i am a defenseless woman and you are insulting a defenseless woman. worst these women were very upset. and i will shoot you right now. but just the fact that they considered the weaker sacks with white brilliant. >> you have often written about these intrepid women and their roles and significant moments in history. did you always want to write about women? >> i kind of fell into it. my grandmother tells me the dirtiest stories i know. [laughter] and she is the one who not only led me to a 19th century brothel but, you know, when you think of this you think of male characters, you think of malcolm max, even the late great james garner. but now you think of them as maverick. [laughter] >> how did you compare this to your former buck? >> you know, i like to write about women whose lives i wish i could've lived. the next best thing is to sit at my computer and prod and poke and it's always a thrill. >> talking about the prodding and poking and going down the rabbit hole, do you mind that it's like, okay, now i am going to write and edit, or do you have overlap in how you operate? and was the prospect any different in any way? >> you probably agree that being a journalist yourself, i have to write and research at the same time. i know plenty that gather and i would research happily for 10 years and not write a word. i could research for the rest my life and never right. but that can get you in trouble with your editor. and so i think it's fun why have to write an and research at the same time and it saves you -- you find out what is important and vital to the story. you allow yourself to pull back and say, okay, i can't spend the next four months on that, unfortunately. >> do such a great job of capturing the voices. what kinds of resources did you come across while you were in the rabbit hole two. >> you know, i went all over for this one. i went to the national archives where they had a correspondent. it's at the national archives and i was able to hold that in my hands. just know that they had held this 150 years old and it was thrilling and the same thing with elizabeth. i found some of her writing and one of them said please give us some of your ability to write this. and so it so interesting as you talk about how many years later. he gave me some information that had never been told before, so that was pretty thrilling. i spent a lot of time there. >> a question that would come up through the kind of curiosity, to cross-dressers in both genders or not unusual. did you ever encounter anyone in any of these reenactments who was a woman being a man or a man being a woman? >> i wrote an article soon after i finished my research where women had to fight for the right to reenact as men. apparently they decided that they can dress as men and fight as men and they wanted them to play the traditional role whereas we want to be the women soldiers and reenact with them. so there was a movement for that to happen. and so also just be events. i went to see the first battle of bull run reenactment in july of 2011 and there was a man with a 10-year-old son and he says, hey, look, they strung him up by the power lines. [laughter] and so you have a lot of that. [laughter] [inaudible] >> yak, yak. of course. [laughter] >> so you can see that it is the book -- it's such a compelling and great read. >> let's talk about this. >> it is fiction. is it something that you ever consider doing? this is such a huge part of what you've done for so long now. is it something you think about? >> for the next book maybe but definitely not for this one. i spent five years researching this book in a couple of -- there is a lot that went on during the civil war and then on. and so for me it was important to point out that in the end is important that people embellish versus what they actually did in a way. and so i tried to be as true as possible. and i explain why they embellish them. it's important for me to examine that. it says something about their role and it's part of the story and i think it's legitimate and away is the official records of the war of the rebellion which i also consulted extensively and those memoirs are very smart is a small part of a large body of research and i'm lucky enough to have access to or a book like this. >> it comes together so terrifically. we have time for some questions for karen abbott. do any of you have any questions? yes? [inaudible question] [inaudible question] >> it's more of a comment, i guess. the southern gothic -- the women are so prevalent compared to others, that has to be a product of the war as well. maybe? i don't know. >> i think that that is probably true. the whole landscape changed after the war and even some of the spies started talking about women's suffrage and how they do their roles and i think that people prepared for that and that sort of influenced everything in looting southern gothic literature. >> a lot of women writers, especially in this case are very moderate. >> yes, that's an interesting point. [inaudible question] >> it's a great title. you know, it was pretty torturous and i sent out in the mail saying this is a title and i think that in the end we wanted something to try to encapsulate all four women on something that they all were and also play on very manly movies and i just thought it would be fun to sort of infuse it with a little bit of the women's perspective and a sort of say that this is the women's side of that story. [inaudible question] >> it was a collaborative process i sent many e-mails and they ignore them rightfully. the thing that i'm not even going to grace this with a response. hoff uncovered the war white extensively and walt whitman. and i thought that these were great little snippets. and, you know, they would say no, no, that's not working. so finally we came up with this and we all thought that it clicked. >> i have a request. >> okay. >> can you give the description of samuel jackson will. [laughter] >> we have a request for stonewall jackson i imagine that she spent quite a bit of time doing this. [laughter] >> i don't think his feet were as pretty as hers. but samuel jackson had just turned 38 years old and he had a really bright blue eyes and a preferred uniform consisted of a threadbare coat left over from the mexican war. going from size 14 feet from to everyone else called [inaudible] he wrote him to avoid writing on the ground. he almost never laughed and on the and rare occasions when he did, he tossed back his head and made no sound whatsoever. once an injured northerner asked to be lifted up he stared at jackson for a moment and then explained oh, my god, lay me down. and he was as idiosyncratic as possible before he became legendary skill on the battlefield. he was out of balance and even under fire would stop to raise one arm, waiting for the flood to run down his body. he refused to be upset because it made his left leg week. it often made it difficult for him to determine the direction from which he came. convinced that everyone of his organs was malfunctioning to some extent, he medicated with a variety of concoctions. twice today, rain or shine he found a secluded field and he perched on the edge of the fence and prayed for an hour, hands clasped and tears spilling. a ritual that many had something to do with the recurring fear that he was possessed. he was reluctant to read a letter from his wife although he considered himself a genuine admirer without tipping his hat. he was utterly unfazed by the prospect of murder and he would drop in himself. he ordered the execution by a firing squad for assaulting a man of higher rank. the general found, as he always did that god will match up with his own. during one battle he inquired about a missing carrier and was told that the young man had been killed, very commendable and he put the matter out of his mind. [applause] and so as i said, that's my boyfriend. [laughter] and it's interesting to me how these myths and these personas about these individuals builds up in a particular time in history. what role did the media play in this work? in revolutionary times even after the revolutionary battle was going on about taking on the u.s. constitution, newspapers were very opinionated and no one even pretended to try to be objective. what role did the newspapers play in the development of the legends of something like that. >> the first and foremost the duty was to convince everyone that they were the ones who were winning. every battle have different numbers according to the north and the south and that was the first that they wanted everyone to think. and so of course in the south she was a hero. she might have been strange or eccentric, but she was a hero. she was a prostitute and this is a 17-year-old girl wandering through the camps and they have no idea why they let her wander through the camps. and so i just understand that we had the greatest propaganda. there were a lot of reports of the barbarianism about the confederates and how barbaric they were in there were women wearing jewelry made of yankee bones and necklaces made of yankee teat and all of these sorts of things and the confederates were very angry. the union had been starving them of supplies and it was sort of the idea that these people were so brutal and there was a little bit of truth to that there were some wearing yankee jory, but it was mostly each side talked about this and it was in line with what europe was thinking and they were very carefully and that was always in the back of their minds. >> do we have any other questions? >> okay. [inaudible
published as the president but a lot of stuff i didn't publish. one thing corry told me was the diary and write down the stuff that is interesting to you. so i did and i thought it was so important. when young doctors and aspiring writers asked me how do you get started? i say you have to record your reflections. .. i had been in school for 19 years. 19 years after graduating from high school. i had that quantum dot detour. so i was just ready to be done, and reap some rewards for all that all those sleepless nights and what i found was that doctors were very unhappy, and when you're in training, the focus is on the physiology and learning about the heart. it's not really about the culture of practice. so i was largely blinded to that. and then i took on my first role and i'm talking to doctors and i find they're very unhappy with medical practice today. and it wasn't just about the stresses we all know. it upabout the paperwork and the malpractice fears and so on. it was a deeper problem. there was a -- what i started to think of as an existential crisis. it was more that doctors felt they weren't being able to practice medicine the way they were trained to practice the way they aspired to practice and that cass deeply troubling to them. and so i sort of watched this and learned a little bit. i was fairly happy. i was an academic practice. and working with trainees and i specifically chose an academic practice because i wanted to teach -- i wanted to be around young people and -- rather than -- and people who had that naivete that i had, that i wanted to hold on to, and -- but shortly after i started in my practice i found myself with a significant amount of debt and feeling i had to moonlight so make ends meet. started a new family. and most folks will be surprise it that a lot of academic physician does that. they moonlight on the side. one reason we choose academia is we want to be around academics we want to be around young physicians, we want to teach, but the salary structure is very different, and in then medicine today you're rewarded for doing as much as possible. the fee for service model, do more more, more. and one of the reasons why i chose academic met sin, diwant to be in that position where i had to do more and more and more. but then i found i had to start moonlighting and i found a practice in queens, with a cardiology friend of my brother, who offered me this gig going -- doing stress tests and supervising stress tests on the weekends. and this is where i really learned about how medicine is practiced in some parts of this country. now, most doctors are good. but there's no question that there is a subset in my profession that has taken advantage of the fee for service system and it's not -- you can call it whatever you want. some doctors will get upset by the implication there's fraud going on. let's not call it fraud. let's say the system creates moral hazards that encourages doctors to respond to financial incentives and this is happening, okay? when i was a resident when i learned about health care economics there was an example of an orthopedic group that under the fee for service system was doing 200 to 300 total hip replacements for a year. when they went to a bundled model, that number dropped from 200 to 300 -- i don't remember the exact number -- to one. one total hip replacement. you can't tell me doctors don't respond to financial instance senttives. we do. doctors are just us a human as anyone. and so i'm working in this practice and it was a mill. there were literally this line of unsuspecting patients getting ready to have stress tests, many of which were honestly unnecessary. and the more i worked there the dirtier i felt. i felt really dirty that i had to do this. but i felt like i had no options at that point with the financial situation i was in, and so that precipitated a real crisis in me. it was a -- maybe it was a mid-life crisis. i don't know. but it took a toll on me, took a toll on my relationship with my family and the book is about what i call the mid-life crisis of american met din, and also about my own personal crisis, and how i worked my way out of it. and eventually i did. but -- i was able to re-ininvestigate rate my personal relationships and i'm in a much better place today than i was about six seven years ago. howhowever, american medicine is still in a crisis. what are re going to do about american medicine? there's no simple solution unfortunately. i think that the fee for service system does create a lot of problems that eventually, i believe, will need to be addressed and the system will need to be supplanted by something else. i don't know exactly what that system will look like. but it's going to happen. it's happening. anytime you have a huge system that is responsible for one out of every six dollars we spend, and it's so dysfunctional then it's going to get to a tipping point, and i believe it's at that point because you can't have a system that is so gargantuan that affects all of our lives and have no one be happy with it. i mean doctors are unhappy but most importantly, patients are unhappy. you ask any patient. patients are mart. they know when they're getting the short shrift. they know when they're doctor isn't listening to them. they often times suspect they're being asked to undergo unnecessary tests. they know what's going on. they know they can't find a primary care physician today, or if they do they have to wait three months to get an appointment in some parts of the country. so there's a lot of dysfunctionallity in the system. it will change. now, for doctors i think that we have to reclaim what is important to us. the system is in a state where insurance companies, the government, are in many ways telling us how to practice and a lot of doctors feel almost like pawns in this system, and when i graduated from medical school the graduation speaker had some wise words. he said know what is important to you. the ideals you hold near and dear and stick to them. so i think those words apply just as much to me now as a mid-life practitioner, as they did when i was an intern. we have to identify what is important, and for me, in the end, it's about the human interactions and if you talk to doctors who are unhappy, even the unhappiest doctors will say the best part of their jobs is enter acting with people, talking to people. and that is something that no entity can take away. so, for me, it's always about the human moments and what i like to call the gentle surprises. i want to give you one story about the gentle surprises of medicine. i remember when i was a third year resident. i was -- i went to the emergency room in the south bronx, and i had a two-week stint there, and late one night i was asked to drain the fluid out of the belly of a woman with alcoholic cirrhosis. her belly was full of fluid, and it's a very brute force procedure. you put a needle in, hook it up to a tour, put the tube in a bucket and drain the fluid. so i went ins' and introduced myself and said, i'm here to drain the fluid out of your belly. and she said okay, sure, go ahead. and she still had alcohol on her breath. so, i said, okay. i cleaned up her belly with iodine soap and i put in the catheter the needle to the catheter, and put the tube into a bucket, and i started filling the bucket and i said, look, if you move and this comes out i'm not putting it back in. and she says oh, okay sure. so i'm just there watching the fluid drain and a nurse comes in and says doctor you just got paged. she was carrying my beeper. i said, oh, okay. well, can you keep an eye on her while i go out and answer my page. she said sure. and i remind my patient, you move and the catheter comes out i'm not going to put it back in because i have another ten patients to see. she said okay. so i go out and answer my pain. three minutes later i walk back into the room and the catheter is out the buckets are all upturned and there's like fluid all over the floor. and i was like oh my gosh. so i look at her accusingly and i said, i thought i told you not to move. and she said doctor i didn't. a man came in here and had a seizure on the buckets. i was like, oh, god. and then the nurse walks in and i said i thought i told you to keep an eye on her. and she said i did. but then man walked in here and had a grand mal seizure on the bucket. this is what doctors experience. and these are special moments. no insurance company can take that away from you. okay. we doctors have to become more conscious about what kind of physician we want to be. and i write in the book about sort of three professional archetypes. knights, naves, and pawns. and in my parents' era and my grandfather's era, doctors were knights. they were admired like no other professional group. right up there with astronauts. and for good reason. american medicine improved patients' longevity from 65, right before world war ii to 71, less than a generation later. improvement of six or seven years of life and that was because of polio vaccinations and antibiotics and coronary bypass surgery and pacemakers. doctors really delivered. they were knights. and then doctors went through a phase where they became thought of as naves, and the whole culture shifted. when doctors were knights, that was the era of "general hospital." early on when doctors -- when dr. kildare, and then during this navish period, it was the era of m.a.s.h. and hawkeye but hawkeye was a great doctor but he was flawed. and there was "e.r." that painted doctors as human, as flawed. so i talk about knights, naves, and pawns and the reality is that doctors are all three. we all have a touch of these three professional archetypes in us and we have to try to bring out the best, okay? and we have to do it in a culture that doesn't really understand what we're going through. and i'll tell you one last story and then i'll take questions. so when i was a resident, we used to round in the intensive care unit. so there was a -- one night when i had been on call, and i -- the following morning we were rounding on our patients, and anyone has been in expensive care unit knows the horrible tragedies that happen in icus and our intensive care unit was no different. there's a guy who had been misdiagnosed with a slip eddies can and had actually severed his spinal cord and was now completely paralyzed and there were patients who had multiple my loma on ventilators and it was a horrible unit, and so our teamed stayed up all night and we were rounding with an attending neighborhood abe sanders, and he was a great attending. he was a jocular fellow, and so we were going through and we found ourselves in a room of a patient who was on a ventilator, and we were presenting the case and sanders sort of like looked off, looking through the window and any of you who have been at new york hospital know that there's a greenburg pavilion built over the fdr drives and looks out on to the east river. so sanders said, come over here. look out the window. and it was brilliantly sunny day, and there were boats on the river, and we looked down there and there was a boat and there were a few people on the boat, and they looked like they were having a great time. sipping bloody marys and they all looked beautiful, you know, and we were like sweaty and disgusting and had been on call all night and there was a fellow on board who was looking up at the hospital and he was -- turned out he was looking right at the window that we happened to be standing at. and sanders said, see that guy down there? and i looked at him and he was about sanders' age but is fit, tan, and he was with all these beautiful people and he was looking up and he said that guy down there, do you know know what he is thinking? we all looked and oh, are we going through this? we just want to get out of the hospital. you know what he is thinking? i looked down and none of us ventured a guess. and sanders says, that guy is thinking, i should have been a doctor. [laughter] >> and this is what we struggle with as physicians. people still view our profession in simple terms but today, i have a more nuanced view of medicine, and doctors are not perfect, and our profession isn't perfect but i do feel that doctors still want to be knights, and i think that there's a lot that we have to go through in the next ten 15, 20 years; we need to figure out a way to reclaim our professionalism, we need to figure out how we want to practice. we need to improve access to medical care. we need to control costs otherwise we're going to bankrupt our economy. so there's a lot that we have to do but american medicine is technologically the best in the world, and i fervently hope that we'll find some solutions to the mess we're in so that medicine can really reclaim its american medicine can reclaim its place as unquestionably the best in the world. so, i will end there and take some questions. but thank you so much for coming. [applause] >> i'm writing about my mother's end of life issues. this is where i find -- [inaudible] -- my mother has alzheimer's it was clear in her chart and every time we went to the hospital with her, the doctors talked to her and asked her questions she can't speak and this goes on and on and on, and you tell a doctors over and over again, she has no capacity to answer your questions. we're her advocates. but this is gone on and on. with physicians. they don't pay attention. she is obviously gone. and yet they continue to ask her, how do you feel? what do you want? and extremely frustrating. when i finally found a doctor who would listen to me and said no more hospitals, no more interventions, hospice, cocktail palliative care, i literally wept. i couldn't believe he was listening to me. >> that's profound. i think unfortunately your experience is not unique. end of life care is probably the single weakest link in the american medical system and you're absolutely right. unfortunately, your intuition is probably correct the doctors didn't listen to you, and i see this every day. that we go into a patient's room and say, do you want this, this or this? and we present the information in ways they don't understand, sometimes they can't process it because they're sick, and they're anxious, and we do it all in the name of patient autonomy. right? the patient made this decision. we're giving the patient the decision. but patients don't always want the decision. they want to be guided. in many, many cases. and i remember one case -- i'll tell you briefly of a gentleman who came to the hospital and had apparently told all the doctors who were taking care of him that he never wanted to be intubated, and so he was in a situation where he was bleeding into his lungs, and i get a phone call saying that we did all -- question put in the stint and he is bleeding into his lungses and doesn't want to be intubated. and he is a young guy. and the choice was just let him drown, bleeding into his lungs, let him die, or do something about it. and i have witnessed so much of what you described of doctors sort of quickly presenting options, probably i've done it myself and then not really thinking about whether the patients understood the options. so, in this particular case, i knew that the interns and residents hadn't done a good job explaining to this fellow -- they probably asked him, if you were -- would you ever want to be on a breathing machine? and he probably said, no i don't want to -- but he didn't know exactly what he was signing up for. so they were going to actually let him die. ' and i said, i'm sure you didn't have the kind of conversation you needed to have with this fellow. i'm going to put the breathing tube in. so we put the breathing tube in, and even though he had written in the chart do not rhesus rhesus---h -- resuscitate, and we had a tough course and we eventually got the tube out, and i went off service. i came back on service, and i went to his room, and i said i was the doctor who decided to put in the breathing tube, and i know it was written in the chart you didn't want it but you would have died if you didn't get it. and he said, i've been through a lot. but thank you. and so we have to improve the communication because we can't just throw it all on the patient without guiding them. so, thank you for your comment. >> i'd like to say congratulations for making your life an adventure, rather than a goal-oriented, allowing things to bring you greater -- the research and the opportunities you have taken advantage of. i applaud you for that. >> thank you. >> number two the question is, what kind of oppositions or hurtles have you had to -- hurdles have you had to overcome or deal with in doing your research writing your books? i'm sure that everybody isn't patting you on the back. >> no. >> i'm curious. >> i've been pleasantly surprised that a lot of physicians have supported me in my writing. especially my colleagues. because doctors and patients aren't stupid. they see the system the way it is. they know there's a lot of stuff going on. some of it moral hazard nefarious, whatever you whatnot to call it. it's funny that there was a group of doctors, i would say that is shocked. maybe they're shocked i wrote about it or shocked this stuff is really going on. i'm not sure. and they've been fairly negative and vocal in their opposition to the book and then there's this group of doctors many of whom come up to me in the hospital and say doctor i heard you wrote this book and it was in "new york times" best seller. and you write about -- [inaudible] -- everyone knows this is going on. and so it's been a mixed response but i've been pleasantly surprised that a lot of people have been supportive. thank you. >> after seeing your wonderful review of -- i'd like to hear more -- particular live you being a cardiologist and physicist, how you feel technology will change the interaction between patient and the physician. >> i think it's already changed interaction. how many of you go in and good-do see you doctor and he or she doesn't look up from the computer screen. and this happens every day. with electronic medical records. and i think the technology may help us work our way out of that mess with better voice recognition software so that -- he writes about that, where we'll have software that will transcribe exactly what the doctors and patients are saying that you can edit later, but topol writes about virtual visits and telemedicine. i don't know how it's all going to pan out. i'm not sure if the quality will be there. the diagnosis at a distance. i personally feel that i need to see the patient listen to the patient, before i can make a good treatment plan, because every doctor has been through this. you read up on the patient you're going to go see, and they have a million issues, problems you read on the paper and then you walk in and they're reading "the new york times," and then you think that really totally changes how you see them. so i think that the direct face-to-face interaction is critical and not to mention that a machine is never going to be able to confer a healing touch. there's something about just touching your patient that is beneficial. so i think technology will play a role in changing and hopefully improving alaska certification but it's never going to replace a doctor. or nurse. >> i would like to ask -- you talked about what your fellow physicians think about your writing, but i thought you were brutally hospital about your mother, about your father about your father-in-law, and even about your wife. so what did they have to say? >> well, my wife is also a physician, and she has been on the journey with me, and she knows the crisis i went through. so i think she knows what is in the book. and she has read excerpts of it. i think she sort of has adopted a policy of benign neglect, like she doesn't want to read everything because she knows it all already. my brother, he is pretty hearty fellow thick skin, tough skin. he said, you do whatever you want and -- but overall my family has been very supportive, i think, and especially sonya who lets me do these things in and sort of keeps everything going and is a fantastic physician in her own right. so i've been lucky. but it's always that dubious spot when you're writing a memoir and writing about your life because on one hand when your life is into intertwined with other people's lives your story is partly their story so how do you disentangle the two. you can't. so i sort of -- when i was going through what was a tough crisis for me, i sort of adopted the policy of, i'm just going to write what i think, and so be it. and fortunately my family was supportive. >> you say that the system has to change to reduce the cost of health care. and you said you didn't know exactly how. i'm sure you have had some thoughts. i've been involved since 1960 and in 1970 we said it was out of control. and so it's still out of control. one time we thought maybe corporations having to pay the bill would be the catalyst. but obviously corporations just moved overseas and now they've stopped paying for health care. what's the catalyst that will cheat a change? >> when you talked early 1970s, that was in the nixon era, and nixon to his credit, saw the problem and actually instituted price controls on a number of industries, including health care, and then lifted them on a number of industries but kept them on health care. and then he was a republican. so price controls for a republican, you know he knew that the system was careening out of control. i think the percentage of gdp of health care in that era was something like nine percent, and today it's closer to 18-19%. so it's a huge problem. i think the fee for service system had to be supplanted by -- replaced by something else and i don't know how many of you read steven brills' knew new book. i think that he identifies the kaiser model as being the way out of the mess, where physicians and healthcare systems issue their own insurance product. they collect the premiums and they have the natural innocenttive to limit costs. of course you have to put in various protections into place so they don't unnecessarily limit spending, but i think the kaiser model is a very reasonable one. i grew up in southern california, in the '70s and '80s and we went to kaiser and we got perfectly good health care. some people advocate a single payer system. i don't see that happening in this country. what works in -- abroad doesn't -- won't work in the united states. i don't think. i remember one of my professors, who is teaching healthcare economics, was talking about the national health service in england and then someone asked him, why don't we just do that here. he is like, america is too different. in england they live in a rainy climate, they drink warm beer, they learn to tougher it out at a young age. that's not going to work in the united states. and he's probably right. so we have to tweak the system we have. if wore going build the system from scratch, i think the single payer system is the best system. >> enjoyed your books and i think your second book is a wonderful book because it describes the realities of the practice of medicine today. i think a lot of people don't understand the reality of practice of medicine today. i'm also a physician and i can relate to your book, particularly because i also met my wife as an intern at the new york hospital. she is here. the question i have is not a medical question. it's more of a literary question. how does a writer doctor find an agent and deal with an agent which is something you don't learn in medical school. >> i was fortunate because i was writing for "the new york times" so the agent actually found me and reached out to me. but let's talk afterwards. are you a writer? [inaudible] >> well, find me afterwards and we'll talk about it. thank you again. [applause] >> thank you so much. please join me in thanking dr. jauhar again. if you want to get your book signed, please allow him to get to the author's signing tent. we hope to see you back here at 2:50 for karen an about. -- abbott. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] you've been watching dr. sandeep jauhar. our live coverage continues in 20 minutes. karen abbott is next. she has written about women spies during the civil war. live coverage from the savannah book festival begins again shortly. [inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at some books being published this week. "new york times" reporter traces the origins of the board game monopoly. in the age of acquiescence criticizing the politics of fear. assistant professor for environmental studies at new york university proposes the public shaming of corporate and government leaders can be used as a form of nonviolent protest. and to explain the world, nobel prize winning physicist gives an analysis of modern science and travel writer talks about miss time living in rural chinese farming community. look for these titles in book stores this coming week and watch for the authors on booktv.org. >> this past thursday february 12th, david carr, media columnist for the "new york times," passed away at the age of 58. mr. carr appeared on booktv in 2008 to talk about his memoir posterior the night of the gun." >> i would have liked as a person to go back and find out that i was actually just a jolly kid from the suburbs who had a few problems. that's not what i found. in the course of the interviews i found out that i put a lot of people at risk around me and even when i did recover, it was owing to and in response both primarily for the love and attention that other people hold me -- a whole tribe of people came and were lifting and pulling on me, so my little heroic narrative didn't really fit with what i had learned. part of what got me started on the book was my daughters were going to college and tuition tends to focus the mind, tends to beckon the muse, and at the same time they were writing their essays for college and their essays about our life growing up together what it was like to have been born two and a half months premature to drug-addicted parents and then have your dad raise you mostly by himself, was fundamentally different than my own and i thought, after i read their essays, i wonder what other people would say and in my day job i work at the "new york times" and i've never really met a story that didn't get better when you applied the leverage of reporting to it. and so i said go back and interview a bunch of different people. it's all on a web site i made. you can check out the interviews i did. what i found was very different from what i remembered, and i realize that over time actually the truth -- i think you'll find this true in your own life -- between people. it's not -- if you think of the stories your family tells to explain itself to each other, how many of those stories are exactly precisely true? it's a way of creating narrative, of understanding our past and coming up with the version of ourselves in the future not all of these stories are bad. there's a point in the book where i assumed once i sobered up i was the presumptive custodial parent of my twins. so i went and saw a family law attorney who made it happen and i said, i was pretty much like baby jesus when you saw me. i was sober and the mother was not, and it was an open and shut case. she is a nice minnesota lady her name is barbara. you can see her on the videotape trying to figure out how to say what she is about to say to me. which is, you were really huge. you didn't smell very good. you dressed like a homeless person. and we wondered about the ethics of placing children in your hands, whether you fully understood the implications of that. and i'm going so not baby jesus. so says more like unholy mess actually. and the think about that is if i had known how i scanned at the time and how unfit i was to be a parent of these little baby girl i would have found that paralyzing. so this lie or fable i told myself allowed me to hang in long enough to kind of get -- to learn to be these guys' parent. so some of these stories we tell ourselves end up helping us on our way. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> more of booktv's live coverage of the savannah book festival shortly. [inaudible conversations] >> a look now at the current best selling nonfiction books according to "the new york times." topping the list a look at end of life care in "being mortal." norm former mike huckabee's take on culture. next in killing patton bill recounting the life of general george patton. then the investigation of a racially charged murder in, ghetto side. deep down dark comes in tenth place. the account of the 33 chilean miners trapped underground. and up next, steven brill's analysis of the healthcare system, followed by george w. bush's profile of his father george h.w. bush in 41. "the new york times" nonfiction best seller's his continues with the account of the life as a guantanamo bay detainee in guantanamo diary. and in i am malala nobel peace prize recipient recounts growing up in taliban controlled northern pakistan. and wrapping up the list a history of the underground railroad in, gateway to freedom. that's a look at the list of nonfiction best sellers according to "the new york times." >> reuters legal cooperate was an author. her book "breaking in the rise of sonia sotomayor." what did we learn about sonia sotomayor. >> we learned what she has been doing while she has been on the court for the last five years. this book is a political history that tells you how she got on the supreme court, and then what her life has been like since. it picks up where her memoir left off. you learn in the opening chapter how she persuaded her fellow justices to salsa with her. then you also learn how she has been effective behind the scenes on the law, and times when she hasn't been so effective. >> you haveless written a biography of antonin scalia. how are they different? how are they the same? >> well, there are a lot to the same in some ways. both new yorkers, one frommance one from the bronx. both very distinctive personalities, both checking up the court. she has been there since 2009. i would neverunder estimate what she is about to do -- never underestimate what she is about to do. she is a very good agent for himself, not unlike he was for himself, and they both understand the importance of being visible. look our visible justice scalia has been with his own book and look how visible she has been already. >> if you put on your legal correspondent hat for just a second where it's national press club night here at -- author night at the national press club. you just happened to be standing next to ted olson, the former solicitor general, when he gets before the court, what's the reaction of the justices to him and how does he play to them? >> that's a great question. something i've studied for a long time. i've been covering the court at least as long as ted olson has been around. they know him personally. they know him from way back when. he was in the reagan administration just the way chief justice john roberts was in the reagan administration. he social iowaed with antonin schoola. he actually spends new year's eve with justice right baiter ginsburg, justice scalia and elana kagan. they know him and will often refer to him by the first name. so the pay attention when he speaks like they pay attention to the regulars up there, and he has certainly -- let's see. he's been on 60 something arguments before the justices. he has some different quirks of which watches he wears what he argues, howl he does it. it's fascinating to watch him and watch hough the justices respond -- watch how the justices respond. they responsibility especially to many of the former solicitors general, just like seth waxman who was the solicitor general for bill clinton, and ted olson was she solicitor general for george w. bush. >> does he play to the justices? >> well, they all know to argue to justice kennedy. he is awesome in the swing vote position. or they know which justice might be the swing vote in their particular case. whether it's on something like same-sex marriage, that he is doing now or if it's on a pension case. these lawyers know who they need to convince. >> how o. -- you talk about this in "breaking in" how often can the justices have personal relationships with the lawyers that argue in front of them? >> they're all appointed for life but a the all had history before they came on the court. they were either in an administration with some of the justices, some of the lawyers themselves 0 maybe they once worked for them. elena kagan was the boss to several of the men and women who argue before the court now when she herself was solicitor general. there are plenty of professional and personal interactions. >> what's your next book? >> i don't know but it's so much fun. do you have an idea? this is more of a political history than a biography. and i'm kind of running out of the ones with really great personal stories. so, i've got to think long and hard. the other reason you have to think long and hard is you spend so much time doing it, pulls you away from your family and day job so you want to choose wisely. >> "breaking in" the name of the book the rice of sonia sotomayor, and the poll sicks of justice. -- politics of justice. [inaudible conversations] >> now live from savannah, author karen abbott her book, "liar, temptress soldier, spy." the story of four women who served undercover in the civil war. you're watching booktv on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. i'd like to wish you a happy valentine's day if you have forgotten. my name is chris aiken and i'm delighted to welcome you to the eighth null savannah book festival and to thank the presenting sponsors, georgia power and bob and jean fair cloth. we're blessed again to host celebrated authors of trinity unite methodist church beautiful venue made possible by the generosity of jim and ann his by. the international paper foundation, the savannah morning news and the savannah magazine and we would also like to thank c-span for coming to the festival and filming live here today in honor of valentine's day we'd also like to spread some love to all of our sponsors, our members, and individual donors who make saturdays free festival possible. if you would like to lend your support to the festival we welcome your donations and have provided yellow bucks for books buckets at the doors as you exit. before we get started i just like to remind you about a couple of things. please take this moment to turn off your cell phone. we also ask that there's no flash photography and most important thing today, especially as this hall is filled for the question and answer portion we ask that you line up down the center aisle. but also if you cannot get down, we don't expect you to leap from the balcony, i'd like to be sure you come forward if you have any questions up there just to lean -- stand up and speak as clearly as you can so the tv can catch your question. if you're planning to attend the closing address with ann and cliff rice tomorrow the correct time for the presentation is 3:00 p.m., and immediately following the presentation karen abbott will be signing festival purchased books. and before we welcome miss abbott let's thank roy and mage richard who sponsored her appearance here today. [applause] >> i also, before i really talk about karen, i would like to say that i am very honored to be speaking about her today because it just so happens my book club -- it was her book we read for the month of january. and so i am very honored and blessed to be with her and i am also from philadelphia. i have to put that in. my book club is here, i think. i think i see some of them in the audience. they can raise their hand. >> what book did you like? >> i wish. u.s.a. today has called karen an bolt the pioneer of sizzle history. for good reason. her first two books, "sin and the second city" and" american roads" embraced topics as the early club. the most famous brothel in american history, and famed strip tease artist gypsy rose lee. her latest book, "liar, temptress, soldier spy." tells the story of a socialite, a farm girl and abolitionist and a widow who became spies during the civil war. the women in the sub title including bell body who work for the confederacy and elizabeth and emma who were union operatives inch keeping with her other books the tale is extensively researched and clearly written. she is feature ever corrector to smithsonian magazine's history blog and -- a native of philadelphia she now lives in new york city with her husband and two african gray aparts, poe and dexter. please welcome karen abbott. [applause] >> thank you first for that lovely introduction. thanks for the savannah book festival for bringing me her and thank you for coming out here today. i'm very excited to be back in savannah, one of my favorite southern towns. in fact some of the most interesting anecdotes and quote is came across during my research for the book were about savannah women. for example in december of 1864, when union general william tecumseh sherman captured savannah one local woman proclaimed, i wish a thousand pins were stuck in his bed and he was strapped down on them. another woman and her friends were forced to host a group of occupying union soldiers in their homes, and speaking for that group wound woman quipped can just the meteor thought of being among the damn yankees are enough to make all prematurely old. of course there was another craftier side for these women. when they used their southern charges to bewitch the occupying soldiers and they called it, quote, buttering those yankees to serve our own ends. so i'll talk how i got into this book. i am from philadelphia. i was born and raised in philadelphia. so i moved to atlanta, georgia in 2001, and spent six years there are and it was quite a culture shock as you can imagine. i had to get used to seeing the occasionol con fred rat flags on the lawn, the jokes about the war of northern aggression, and just the idea that the civil war seeped into daily life and conversation down south in a way it never does up north. and the point was driven home when i was stuck in traffic on route 400. if anyone has spend time in atlanta you have been stuck in traffic on route 400 -- for two hours behind a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that said "don't blame me. i voted for jefferson davis." [laughter] >> who of course is the president of the confess was si. i was stuck behind the truck for two hours and had quite a bit of time to start thinking more in depth about the civil war, and my mind always goes, to what were the wimp doing? and not just any women. what were the bad women doing? the defiant women, in the revolutionary became doing? some women did things like knit socks and sew uniforms and hold bizarres to raise money for supplies. other women became informal recruiting officers especially southern women. they shamed any man who shirked his duty to fight. there was a great story about one southern lady who was very embarrassed by the fact her fiancee did not enlist so she sent over her slave with a backage and the package contained a skirt and a note and the note said ware this skirt or volunteer. he volunteered. and some women dared to go further. and i wanted to find four such women, women who lied, spied, dranked, and murdered their way through the war, and i think i managed to do that. my goal with the book was to weave a tapestry and tell the story of the civil war, hopefully in a way that had not been told before and it was important to me that their stories intersected in interesting ways. there was a cause and effect. one woman's circumstances would affect another woman's behavior and vice versa. throughout the war. i usually do this talk with a slide show and all of the slide is use are actually in the book. the book is foul pictures of the women and some civil war events and locales. this is the first time i'm doing it like this and i'm just going to tell you 12 of my favorite people, facts and events of the civil war. i'm going to start off with bell boyd; a 17-year-old girl living in virginia, when the war broker out. she was a confederate girl and was interesting to me because she was all -- she had no filter not even for herself. one of my favorite anecdotes of bell body has to do with a letter she sent to her cousin when she was 16, lobbying him to find her a husband. i'll read this letter. i am tall i weigh 106 and a half pounds. my form is beautiful. my eyes are of a dark blue and so expressive. my hair of a rich brown and i think i tie it up nicely. my neck and arms are beautiful. and my foot is perfect. only wear size two and a half shoes. my teeth the same pearly whiteness, i think perhaps a little whiter. nose quite as large as ever, beautifully shaped and indeed i am decidedly the most beautiful of all of your cousins. sobell had no problems with self-esteem. if you have to have a copy of the book you can look it up and make your conclusions about her beauty or lack thereof. she kicks things off in july of 1861. the union small group of union forces are marching up the -- they were planning on having a fourth of july celebration. publish... block... >> she decides to tap into her wide network of confederate family members and friends who are in the army and to get herself a piece of the army, to the contribute her own work for the rebels. and she becomes a courier and spy for the rebel army. and belle is a little bit of a seductress. it was very rare, especially in a 17-year-old girl. i like to say if sarah palin and miley cyrus had a 19th century baby -- [laughter] it would have been belle boyd. [laughter] she was a little bit like civil war girls gone wild. [laughter] and she seduced union men, confederate men. i like to file this one under things you can't make up. this is why i like nonfiction, it's always funnier than fiction. one of her reported paramours was a man by the name of major dick long. [laughter] i must be a 12-year-old boy, i found that really hilarious. [laughter] she also reportedly she told one northern reporter she was quote, closeted for four hours with union general james shields and subsequently wrapped a rebel flag around his head to celebrate this conquest. so men loved belle boyd. women did not like belle boyd quite as much. they had several nicknames for her, one of which was quote, the fastest girl in virginia or anywhere else more that matter. [laughter] but belle would go on to have many exciting adventures throughout the civil war that i talk about in the book. the next person that i want to talk about is a spy named private frank thompson. and private frank thompson comes into the war with a secret. private frank thompson is actually a woman named emma edmunds and has been living as a man for two years. and emma edmunds had quite an interesting and difficult childhood. she was born and raised in canada to a father who was increasingly disappointed by the fact that his of wife kept bearing sons -- excuse me, daughters. he wanted a son. and edmunds did her best to become a son figure to her father but still failed him. and he told emma he was going to arrange a marriage for her just as he had done for all of her older sisters, and emma didn't want any part of this. she craved the life of excitement for herself and she decided that one day she was going to cut her hair, bind her breasts and trade in her man suit for a woman's dress and start living, um life as private frank thompson. and she becomes an itinerant bible salesman and migrates to the united states and starts hearing about abolitionist john brown and decides she wants to enlist. she considers herself a devout christian and is against the idea of slavery and wants to fight for the union cause. so in the spring of 1861 in detroit, she enlists. and you might ask well, how could she pass the medical examination and fool the doctors in order to become a private for the union army? it's a good question, and, you know doctors across the country were told to conduct thorough medical examinations, but they all flouted these rules. they had quotas to fill, bodies to get out there as quickly as possible, so they conducted these rather cursory medical exams. they really only helped if you had powder cartridges, if you had enough fingers to pull the trigger and feet to march. that was pretty much it. so the doctor passes emma into the army, and she takes on the name private frank thompson, and she starts living among her comrades. and you might ask, well, how did they not detect she was a woman? after all, they're sleeping in the same tents etc., and how did they not, you know, discern that a woman was among them? and i came to the conclusion, i should say that emma was one of about 400 women for both north and south who disguised themselves as men and fought in the union or confederate armies. and i came to the conclusion that most of them got away with this because nobody knew what a woman would look like wearing pants. you know people were so used to seeing women's bodies pushed and pulled into these exaggerated shapes with corsets and cent lins that the very idea of a woman wearing pants was so unfathomable that even if she were standing in front of you wearing pants you wouldn't see it. so women sort of brilliantly exploited ideas of femininity and what a woman could look like in order to get away with this subterfuge. emma had to be careful. she was involved in of the war's bloodiest battles, but she had to be careful about being detected. if her gender were discovered, she could be arrested, charged >> these are confederate spies living in washington, d.c. and rose was in a very difficult position. her whole life had fallen apart in the years leading up to the war. she had lost five children in four year, if you can imagine that. she had lost her husband in a freak accident, and she had lost her access to the white house. this is somebody who had been friends with high ranking democratic politicians for years leading up to the civil war. she'd even been a close adviser to president james buchanan, and she lost all of this when lincoln and the republicans came into power and lincoln took over the white house. so in the spring of 1861 when a confederate captain approached rose and asked her to form a confederate spy ring in the capital of washington d.c., rose jumps at the chance and she begins cultivating sources -- by cultivating i mean sleeping with -- [laughter] also several union men. in fact, her most important source and reported lover was senator henry wilson of massachusetts who was not only an abolitionist republican, but he was also lincoln's chairman of the committee on military affairs. and here's a little brief clip of a love letter he purportedly wrote to rose. you know that i do love you. i am suffering this morning. in fact i am sick physically and mentally and know nothing that would soothe me so much as an hour with you. so you can imagine they had some very interesting and lucrative pillow talk that rose took full advantage of. my next favorite thing is rose greene's house cipher which is fascinating to look at. if anybody's familiar with edgar allen poe's story the bold bug it has mysterious-looking symbols that are concealing letters, numbers and words. rose had a very special symbol for president lincoln. it was this sort of upside down triangle bisected by a slash, and lincoln shows up in a lot of her cipher work. rose had two nicknames for president lincoln. weapon was bean pole, and the other -- one was bean pole and the other was satan. [laughter] gives you an idea of her feelings there. and it was really fascinating to learn more about her spy craft. when she didn't have time to write messages in her cipher, she found other ways to communicate with confederate officials. she learned the morse code, for example, and at certain appointed times confederate scouts were told to watch her windows for signals and rose would raise and lower her blinds according to to the dots and dashes of the morse code. and she could achieve the same effect by using the precise flutteringings of her fan -- flutterings of her fan, so pretty crafty there. and her spy craft proved useful very early on in the war. lincoln and the north basically thought the war was going to be over in 90 days. their grand plan was to meet the confederates at the battle of bull run. i once got in trouble for saying bull run in the south, so i won't make that mistake again, the battle of ma nas us, and they would advance on to richmond and win the war. well rose and the confederates had a different idea about this and in the days leading up to the battle, rose -- after seducing senator henry wilson and getting some valuable information -- summoned a 16-year-old courier named betty to her home on lafayette square in washington, d.c., and she wrote up a dispatch and tied it up in a piece of black silk and rolled it up in betty's hair so it was cleverly concealed much like my hair's probably carrying a few dispatches right now. [laughter] and she told betty duval that she was just going to cross over the lines, and the union sentries would think she was nothing more than a pretty girl on her way home from market. they'd wave her on through. so betty goes across the lines and she arrives at general beauregard's headquarters, undoes her hair in a dramatic and romantic fashion and hands over this note which basically told the confederate forces exactly how many union troops to expect and when they were planning on marching so the confederates could position themselves and be ready. and we of course, we we know the confederates kicked some butt and the war would go on much longer than 09 days, obviously. next -- t 0 cays. next american is a union spy by the name of elizabeth van lieu. she was number one a union spy living in the confederate capital of richmond, so they were opposed on that front. and whereas rose was outspoken and brazen, elizabeth was quiet and discreet and really cunning. and whereas rose was a celebrated beauty one of elizabeth's contemporaries wrote that she was, quote: never as pretty as her portrait showed. [laughter] yeah. if you could see the picture of elizabeth, it's quite cruel. but elizabeth also had an interesting upbringing. she was born and raised in richmond but was sent north to philadelphia to be educated and was under the care of an abolitionist governess. when she returned to richmond, she was appalled at the condition of the slaves, and she had become an abolitionist herself and decided to fight for the union cause. before the war people thought elizabeth was just sort of eccentric. she was a strange woman who had never married, she was living with her mother in this grand old mansion in richmond, she was sort of an eccentric character. but after the war it was very dangerous for elizabeth to be outspoken about abolitionist opinions and to have of a perceived northern sympathy. she was the recipient of many death threats from her neighbors, confederate detectives followed her wherever she went. but nevertheless, elizabeth decided to form a union spy ring in the confederate capital of richmond, and she began recruiting people from all walks of life. one of them was her brother by the name of john van lew and i had the great pleasure of calculating with the great grand -- of connecting with the great grandson of one of john's towers, and he told me -- daughters, and he told me incredible things. and just to give you a little taste of that, it mostly had to do with family's hardware businessment they had a prominent hardware business for years in richmond and one of the most impressive buildings in the state of virginia. and he used the hardware business as a front for his spy ring in a way. he would take blank invoices and purchase orders and fill them out as if they were regular business documents but every number he wrote down corresponded with certain military terminology. for example 370 iron hinges might mean 3700 cavalry. so when he crossed the lines and confederates looked at his papers, they would just think this was the normal course of business, but once he got over to union lines and to his contacts, he was able to interpret everything and give them the information they needed. but elizabeth van lew's great coup was in the form of a woman named mary jane becauser. elizabeth had freed all of the family slaves, and many of them had stayed on to work for her, and elizabeth got a bright idea. she had heard that verena davis who was jefferson davis' wife, needed to staff the white house. she was looking for help and she put out a call to the social rideties of richmond to -- ladies of richmond to help her staff the white house and send over any good recommendations for staff. and elizabeth decided to pay mrs. davis a business. and she says well, i have a girl for you. she's not very bright and she stumbles in the kitchen, but she's loyal, and she'll work very hard for you and your family. so elizabeth sends over mary jane bowser who was a former family slave in the van lew household. and little does anyone know that mary jane is not only literate but gifted with a photographic memory. so while she's dusting jefferson davis' desk and picking up the children's toys she's also sneaking peeks at his confidential papers and eavesdropping on his conversations and reporting all of this back to elizabeth van lew. what made all of this even more dangerous and adding another layer of treachery was that john van lew, elizabeth's brother was married to an ardent confederate sympathizer, and they're all living in the same house. so they're conducting all of this business knowing that there's somebody amongst them who, if she had any inkling about what they were doing or any evidence, she would not hesitate to report this immediately to confederate authorities. and elizabeth knew that as well. the next person i'd like talk about is confederate general stonewall jackson who i'm sure, is a very familiar person to many people in this room. and i like stonewall. he was sort of the rock star of the civil war. he was sort of my civil war boyfriend. i liked him such an eccentric interesting, brilliant man. but i like the way that southerners perceived him in particular and the way they treated him. and it was a great story i came across about stonewall jackson in a hotel lobby in the shenandoah valley in 1862. and women are cornering him, they're swarming him, they're ripping buttons off of his coat and keeping them as souvenirs and belle boyd is among this crowd. she reports that she hears him say, ladies, ladies, this is the very first time i've been surrounded by the enemy. laugh -- [laughter] smooth guy right? so belle boyd, of course is obsessed with stonewall jackson. so obsessed that she tells reporters that she wants to quote: occupy his tent and share his dangers. [laughter] which if i were stonewall jack soften, would have frightened me more than anything the -- jackson would have frightened me, just the fact that belle boyd wanted to sleep this my tent. would have been enough to make me run. my next one is blockade runners of the civil war, and i usually show a cartoon with this depicting a woman's cent lin that at the apex of its popularity reached a diameter of six feet. >> southern women were quite expert at this she managed to conceal a roll of army cloth, several pairs of cavalry boots a roll of crimson flannel cans of preserved meats and a bag of coffee. that was the contraband tally for a single crossing. [laughter] belle boyd was sort of the queen of this blockade and she specialized in smuggling weaponnings. and she sort of recruited a group of southern ladies to help her in this endeavor. and one fall morning in 1861 the 28th pennsylvania aa woke to -- awoke to discover 400 pistols cavalry equipment for 200 men and 1400 musket were missing. waiting transfer to southern lines thanks to belle boyd and her network of ladies. and to me, this was one of the most fascinating parts about women's roles in the civil war. they were able to to take society's ideas and constructs about womanhood and perceived weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly to their own benefit. and they used their gender as a psychological disguise. physically, they're hiding things in their hair, under their hoop skirts and psychologically women would have a ready answer if they were ever accused of treasonous activity. and this had happened a couple of times to elizabeth van lew and her response always was how dare you accuse me of such behavior. i am a defenseless woman, you know? [laughter] and it worked. it was something that people did not know how to respond to and it was that and it was quite an effective and brilliant way -- [inaudible] the next person is detective allen pinkerton and i had no idea he was this involved in secret service work during the war, but he was. he was hired to do secret service work for the union army, and his first mission was to conduct a stakeout on confederate spy rose greenhelm. allen pinkerton and two of his best men go to rose's home on lafayette square. rose always liked to say, by the way, her home was quote, within rifle range of the white house. [laughter] and allen pinkerton has to get up stand on two of his detectives' shoulders just to peek in her window, and what does he see, but rose sitting there on the couch with a traitorous union captain, and they're looking over maps and fortifications and papers that clearly have information about the war and about union plans. and pinkerton is furious. pinkerton declares rose public enemy number one and decides he's going to make it his mission in life to get rose which makes for some interesting cat and mouse activity as the war goes on. and this was also another entering part about women's roles in the civil war -- interesting part about women's roles in the civil war. women had always been victims of war, they were never perpetrators, and loyalty was the prime attribute of femininity itself. women's loyalty was always assumed. so for the very first time they're grappling with the idea that women are not only capable of treasonous activity but they're more capable than men. one lincoln official had this great quote that sort of sums it up he says: what are we going to do with these fashionable women spies? and it's something they have to spend quite a bit of time answering. my next person is a fellow by the name of benjamin stringfellow. he is a confederate spy for general jeb stewart. he had blond hair blue eyes, and he weighed 94 pounds. one of his come raids said he had a waist -- comrades said he had a waste just like a woman's. he had sort of an ingenious mode of getting his information. he would dress in elaborate ball gowns and go to union military balls and wait for the men to ask him to dance. and they did ask him to dance. they thought sally martin was very charming. and while sally martin was dancing with these union soldiers, she would find out whatever she could about ulysses s. grant's plans and report it back to general jeb stewart. because -- so i like to include him because it just goes to show the men were in on the cross-dressing action during the civil war too. [laughter] number 11 is spy disguises. i was fascinated by the way people disguised themselves as spies during the civil war. things that seem so rudimentary and primitive today. people would have epileptic fits, one guy removed his glass eye, they would feign a limp, they would pose as peddlers itinerant photographers and some people disguised themselves as slaves which i thought was odd until it makes sense when you think about just as nobody expected a woman to disguise themself as a man, nobody expected people to disguise themselves as slaves. it was all well and good unless it became excessively hot or started raining and your disguise literally started running could down your skin. this actually happened to one of my spies later on in the book. and number 12 my favorite things during the civil war, was how the female soldiers got caught. i mentioned earlier there were about 400 women who disguised themselves a men and en-- as men and enlisted in the war and you know, the reports started circulating as the war went on about women, you know, in the reactions. and people were -- in the ranks and people were shocked about this. even more shocking to me was how they were discovered. there was one private her captain threw an apple at her, and she tried to grab the hem of her nonexistent apron to catch the apple, thereby giving herself away since she was not warring an apron. one woman recruit reportedly forgot how to put on pants. she tried to pull them over her head. [laughter] and the final one and my very favorite, a corporal in new jersey gave birth while she was on picket duty. [laughter] so the jig was up. so anyway those are my 12 favorite people, events and facts of the civil war. if anybody has any questions or any stories or wants to tell me how their own ancestors got rid of the damn yankees, i would love to hear it. [applause] >> [inaudible] line up here. in. >> [inaudible] rose -- came back from europe, whatever happened to little rose who she left in a convent in paris? >> um, the question was about rose and what happens to her after the war. and just to back up a little bit about that later on in the war rose was sent by jefferson davis to be a lobbyist on behalf of the confederacy to try to convince england and france to recognize the south as its own legitimate country which was unprecedented for an american president of the south, you know the south obviously considered itself its own country, to send a woman to do its business. so that was quite a remarkable thing. and what happens to rose's daughter after the war? she grows up and gets married and misses her mama very dearly and there's not too much information about, about little rose. but she does marry and sort of go on to have her own happy and productive life. but she and her mother were very close, and i should say that little rose was an important mother -- part of her mother's spy plans. her mother would often use her daughter to send messages and hide messages and things like that. so rose o'neill greenhowe was is so invested in the southern cause she was willing to not only risk her own life, but that of her 8-year-old daughter as well. >> any more questions? [inaudible conversations] >> well, thank you all. thanks for coming. [applause] >> a great story and a very true story. if you'd like to get your book signed, please allow her to leaf the sanctuary so she can go to telfair square and we hope to see you back here at 4:10 when donald miller will talk about the jazz age. thank you. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> and that was author karen abbott talking about her book, "liar, temptress soldier, spy: the story of four women who served undercover during the civil war." we've got one more panel to show you, and this is about prohibition era manhattan. that will begin in about 20 minutes. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] there are. [inaudible conversations]
please welcome karen abbott. [applause] >> thank you first for that lovely introduction. thanks for the savannah book festival for bringing me her and thank you for coming out here today. i'm very excited to be back in savannah, one of my favorite southern towns. in fact some of the most interesting anecdotes and quote is came across during my research for the book were about savannah women. for example in december of 1864, when union general william tecumseh sherman captured savannah one local woman
proclaimed, i wish a thousand pins were stuck in his bed and he was strapped down on them. another woman and her friends were forced to host a group of occupying union soldiers in their homes, and speaking for that group wound woman quipped can just the meteor thought of being among the damn yankees are enough to make all prematurely old. of course there was another craftier side for these women. when they used their southern charges to bewitch the occupying soldiers and they called it, quote, buttering those yankees to serve our own ends. so i'll talk how i got into this book. i am from philadelphia. i was born and raised in philadelphia. so i moved to atlanta, georgia in 2001, and spent six years there are and it was quite a culture shock as you can imagine. i had to get used to seeing the occasionol con fred rat flags on the lawn, the jokes about the war of northern aggression, and just the idea that the civil war seeped into daily life and conversation down south in a way it never does up north. and the point was driven home when i was stuck in traffic on route 400. if anyone has spend time in atlanta you have been stuck in traffic on route 400 -- for two hours behind a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that said "don't blame me. i voted for jefferson davis." [laughter] >> who of course is the president of the confess was si. i was stuck behind the truck for two hours and had quite a bit of time to start thinking more in depth about the civil war, and my mind always goes, to what were the wimp doing? and not just any women. what were the bad women doing? the defiant women, in the revolutionary became doing? some women did things like knit socks and sew uniforms and hold bizarres to raise money for supplies. other women became informal recruiting officers especially southern women. they shamed any man who shirked his duty to fight. there was a great story about one southern lady who was very embarrassed by the fact her fiancee did not enlist so she sent over her slave with a backage and the package contained a skirt and a note and the note said ware this skirt or volunteer. he volunteered. and some women dared to go further. and i wanted to find four such women, women who lied, spied, dranked, and murdered their way through the war, and i think i managed to do that. my goal with the book was to weave a tapestry and tell the story of the civil war, hopefully in a way that had not been told before and it was important to me that their stories intersected in interesting ways. there was a cause and effect. one woman's circumstances would affect another woman's behavior and vice versa. throughout the war. i usually do this talk with a slide show and all of the slide is use are actually in the book. the book is foul pictures of the women and some civil war events and locales. this is the first time i'm doing it like this and i'm just going to tell you 12 of my favorite people, facts and events of the civil war. i'm going to start off with bell boyd; a 17-year-old girl living in virginia, when the war broker out. she was a confederate girl and was interesting to me because she was all -- she had no filter not even for herself. one of my favorite anecdotes of bell body has to do with a letter she sent to her cousin when she was 16, lobbying him to find her a husband. i'll read this letter. i am tall i weigh 106 and a half pounds. my form is beautiful. my eyes are of a dark blue and so expressive. my hair of a rich brown and i think i tie it up nicely. my neck and arms are beautiful. and my foot is perfect. only wear size two and a half shoes. my teeth the same pearly whiteness, i think perhaps a little whiter. nose quite as large as ever, beautifully shaped and indeed i am decidedly the most beautiful of all of your cousins. sobell had no problems with self-esteem. if you have to have a copy of the book you can look it up and make your conclusions about her beauty or lack thereof. she kicks things off in july of 1861. the union small group of union forces are marching up the -- they were planning on having a fourth of july celebration. publish... block... >> she decides to tap into her wide network of confederate family members and friends who are in the army and to get herself a piece of the army, to the contribute her own work for the rebels. and she becomes a courier and spy for the rebel army. and belle is a little bit of a seductress. it was very rare, especially in a 17-year-old girl. i like to say if sarah palin and miley cyrus had a 19th century baby -- [laughter] it would have been belle boyd. [laughter] she was a little bit like civil war girls gone wild. [laughter] and she seduced union men, confederate men. i like to file this one under things you can't make up. this is why i like nonfiction, it's always funnier than fiction. one of her reported paramours was a man by the name of major dick long. [laughter] i must be a 12-year-old boy, i found that really hilarious. [laughter] she also reportedly she told one northern reporter she was quote, closeted for four hours with union general james shields and subsequently wrapped a rebel flag around his head to celebrate this conquest. so men loved belle boyd. women did not like belle boyd quite as much. they had several nicknames for her, one of which was quote, the fastest girl in virginia or anywhere else more that matter. [laughter] but belle would go on to have many exciting adventures throughout the civil war that i talk about in the book. the next person that i want to talk about is a spy named private frank thompson. and private frank thompson comes into the war with a secret. private frank thompson is actually a woman named emma edmunds and has been living as a man for two years. and emma edmunds had quite an interesting and difficult childhood. she was born and raised in canada to a father who was increasingly disappointed by the fact that his of wife kept bearing sons -- excuse me, daughters. he wanted a son. and edmunds did her best to become a son figure to her father but still failed him. and he told emma he was going to arrange a marriage for her just as he had done for all of her older sisters, and emma didn't want any part of this. she craved the life of excitement for herself and she decided that one day she was going to cut her hair, bind her breasts and trade in her man suit for a woman's dress and start living, um life as private frank thompson. and she becomes an itinerant bible salesman and migrates to the united states and starts hearing about abolitionist john brown and decides she wants to enlist. she considers herself a devout christian and is against the idea of slavery and wants to fight for the union cause. so in the spring of 1861 in detroit, she enlists. and you might ask well, how could she pass the medical examination and fool the doctors in order to become a private for the union army? it's a good question, and, you know doctors across the country were told to conduct thorough medical examinations, but they all flouted these rules. they had quotas to fill, bodies to get out there as quickly as possible, so they conducted these rather cursory medical exams. they really only helped if you had powder cartridges, if you had enough fingers to pull the trigger and feet to march. that was pretty much it. so the doctor passes emma into the army, and she takes on the name private frank thompson, and she starts living among her comrades. and you might ask, well, how did they not detect she was a woman? after all, they're sleeping in the same tents etc., and how did they not, you know, discern that a woman was among them? and i came to the conclusion, i should say that emma was one of about 400 women for both north and south who disguised themselves as men and fought in the union or confederate armies. and i came to the conclusion that most of them got away with this because nobody knew what a woman would look like wearing pants. you know people were so used to seeing women's bodies pushed and pulled into these exaggerated shapes with corsets and cent lins that the very idea of a woman wearing pants was so unfathomable that even if she were standing in front of you wearing pants you wouldn't see it. so women sort of brilliantly exploited ideas of femininity and what a woman could look like in order to get away with this subterfuge. emma had to be careful. she was involved in of the war's bloodiest battles, but she had to be careful about being detected. if her gender were discovered, she could be arrested, charged >> these are confederate spies living in washington, d.c. and rose was in a very difficult position. her whole life had fallen apart in the years leading up to the war. she had lost five children in four year, if you can imagine that. she had lost her husband in a freak accident, and she had lost her access to the white house. this is somebody who had been friends with high ranking democratic politicians for years leading up to the civil war. she'd even been a close adviser to president james buchanan, and she lost all of this when lincoln and the republicans came into power and lincoln took over the white house. so in the spring of 1861 when a confederate captain approached rose and asked her to form a confederate spy ring in the capital of washington d.c., rose jumps at the chance and she begins cultivating sources -- by cultivating i mean sleeping with -- [laughter] also several union men. in fact, her most important source and reported lover was senator henry wilson of massachusetts who was not only an abolitionist republican, but he was also lincoln's chairman of the committee on military affairs. and here's a little brief clip of a love letter he purportedly wrote to rose. you know that i do love you. i am suffering this morning. in fact i am sick physically and mentally and know nothing that would soothe me so much as an hour with you. so you can imagine they had some very interesting and lucrative pillow talk that rose took full advantage of. my next favorite thing is rose greene's house cipher which is fascinating to look at. if anybody's familiar with edgar allen poe's story the bold bug it has mysterious-looking symbols that are concealing letters, numbers and words. rose had a very special symbol for president lincoln. it was this sort of upside down triangle bisected by a slash, and lincoln shows up in a lot of her cipher work. rose had two nicknames for president lincoln. weapon was bean pole, and the other -- one was bean pole and the other was satan. [laughter] gives you an idea of her feelings there. and it was really fascinating to learn more about her spy craft. when she didn't have time to write messages in her cipher, she found other ways to communicate with confederate officials. she learned the morse code, for example, and at certain appointed times confederate scouts were told to watch her windows for signals and rose would raise and lower her blinds according to to the dots and dashes of the morse code. and she could achieve the same effect by using the precise flutteringings of her fan -- flutterings of her fan, so pretty crafty there. and her spy craft proved useful very early on in the war. lincoln and the north basically thought the war was going to be over in 90 days. their grand plan was to meet the confederates at the battle of bull run. i once got in trouble for saying bull run in the south, so i won't make that mistake again, the battle of ma nas us, and they would advance on to richmond and win the war. well rose and the confederates had a different idea about this and in the days leading up to the battle, rose -- after seducing senator henry wilson and getting some valuable information -- summoned a 16-year-old courier named betty to her home on lafayette square in washington, d.c., and she wrote up a dispatch and tied it up in a piece of black silk and rolled it up in betty's hair so it was cleverly concealed much like my hair's probably carrying a few dispatches right now. [laughter] and she told betty duval that she was just going to cross over the lines, and the union sentries would think she was nothing more than a pretty girl on her way home from market. they'd wave her on through. so betty goes across the lines and she arrives at general beauregard's headquarters, undoes her hair in a dramatic and romantic fashion and hands over this note which basically told the confederate forces exactly how many union troops to expect and when they were planning on marching so the confederates could position themselves and be ready. and we of course, we we know the confederates kicked some butt and the war would go on much longer than 09 days, obviously. next -- t 0 cays. next american is a union spy by the name of elizabeth van lieu. she was number one a union spy living in the confederate capital of richmond, so they were opposed on that front. and whereas rose was outspoken and brazen, elizabeth was quiet and discreet and really cunning. and whereas rose was a celebrated beauty one of elizabeth's contemporaries wrote that she was, quote: never as pretty as her portrait showed. [laughter] yeah. if you could see the picture of elizabeth, it's quite cruel. but elizabeth also had an interesting upbringing. she was born and raised in richmond but was sent north to philadelphia to be educated and was under the care of an abolitionist governess. when she returned to richmond, she was appalled at the condition of the slaves, and she had become an abolitionist herself and decided to fight for the union cause. before the war people thought elizabeth was just sort of eccentric. she was a strange woman who had never married, she was living with her mother in this grand old mansion in richmond, she was sort of an eccentric character. but after the war it was very dangerous for elizabeth to be outspoken about abolitionist opinions and to have of a perceived northern sympathy. she was the recipient of many death threats from her neighbors, confederate detectives followed her wherever she went. but nevertheless, elizabeth decided to form a union spy ring in the confederate capital of richmond, and she began recruiting people from all walks of life. one of them was her brother by the name of john van lew and i had the great pleasure of calculating with the great grand -- of connecting with the great grandson of one of john's towers, and he told me -- daughters, and he told me incredible things. and just to give you a little taste of that, it mostly had to do with family's hardware businessment they had a prominent hardware business for years in richmond and one of the most impressive buildings in the state of virginia. and he used the hardware business as a front for his spy ring in a way. he would take blank invoices and purchase orders and fill them out as if they were regular business documents but every number he wrote down corresponded with certain military terminology. for example 370 iron hinges might mean 3700 cavalry. so when he crossed the lines and confederates looked at his papers, they would just think this was the normal course of business, but once he got over to union lines and to his contacts, he was able to interpret everything and give them the information they needed. but elizabeth van lew's great coup was in the form of a woman named mary jane becauser. elizabeth had freed all of the family slaves, and many of them had stayed on to work for her, and elizabeth got a bright idea. she had heard that verena davis who was jefferson davis' wife, needed to staff the white house. she was looking for help and she put out a call to the social rideties of richmond to -- ladies of richmond to help her staff the white house and send over any good recommendations for staff. and elizabeth decided to pay mrs. davis a business. and she says well, i have a girl for you. she's not very bright and she stumbles in the kitchen, but she's loyal, and she'll work very hard for you and your family. so elizabeth sends over mary jane bowser who was a former family slave in the van lew household. and little does anyone know that mary jane is not only literate but gifted with a photographic memory. so while she's dusting jefferson davis' desk and picking up the children's toys she's also sneaking peeks at his confidential papers and eavesdropping on his conversations and reporting all of this back to elizabeth van lew. what made all of this even more dangerous and adding another layer of treachery was that john van lew, elizabeth's brother was married to an ardent confederate sympathizer, and they're all living in the same house. so they're conducting all of this business knowing that there's somebody amongst them who, if she had any inkling about what they were doing or any evidence, she would not hesitate to report this immediately to confederate authorities. and elizabeth knew that as well. the next person i'd like talk about is confederate general stonewall jackson who i'm sure, is a very familiar person to many people in this room. and i like stonewall. he was sort of the rock star of the civil war. he was sort of my civil war boyfriend. i liked him such an eccentric interesting, brilliant man. but i like the way that southerners perceived him in particular and the way they treated him. and it was a great story i came across about stonewall jackson in a hotel lobby in the shenandoah valley in 1862. and women are cornering him, they're swarming him, they're ripping buttons off of his coat and keeping them as souvenirs and belle boyd is among this crowd. she reports that she hears him say, ladies, ladies, this is the very first time i've been surrounded by the enemy. laugh -- [laughter] smooth guy right? so belle boyd, of course is obsessed with stonewall jackson. so obsessed that she tells reporters that she wants to quote: occupy his tent and share his dangers. [laughter] which if i were stonewall jack soften, would have frightened me more than anything the -- jackson would have frightened me, just the fact that belle boyd wanted to sleep this my tent. would have been enough to make me run. my next one is blockade runners of the civil war, and i usually show a cartoon with this depicting a woman's cent lin that at the apex of its popularity reached a diameter of six feet. >> southern women were quite expert at this she managed to conceal a roll of army cloth, several pairs of cavalry boots a roll of crimson flannel cans of preserved meats and a bag of coffee. that was the contraband tally for a single crossing. [laughter] belle boyd was sort of the queen of this blockade and she specialized in smuggling weaponnings. and she sort of recruited a group of southern ladies to help her in this endeavor. and one fall morning in 1861 the 28th pennsylvania aa woke to -- awoke to discover 400 pistols cavalry equipment for 200 men and 1400 musket were missing. waiting transfer to southern lines thanks to belle boyd and her network of ladies. and to me, this was one of the most fascinating parts about women's roles in the civil war. they were able to to take society's ideas and constructs about womanhood and perceived weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly to their own benefit. and they used their gender as a psychological disguise. physically, they're hiding things in their hair, under their hoop skirts and psychologically women would have a ready answer if they were ever accused of treasonous activity. and this had happened a couple of times to elizabeth van lew and her response always was how dare you accuse me of such behavior. i am a defenseless woman, you know? [laughter] and it worked. it was something that people did not know how to respond to and it was that and it was quite an effective and brilliant way -- [inaudible] the next person is detective allen pinkerton and i had no idea he was this involved in secret service work during the war, but he was. he was hired to do secret service work for the union army, and his first mission was to conduct a stakeout on confederate spy rose greenhelm. allen pinkerton and two of his best men go to rose's home on lafayette square. rose always liked to say, by the way, her home was quote, within rifle range of the white house. [laughter] and allen pinkerton has to get up stand on two of his detectives' shoulders just to peek in her window, and what does he see, but rose sitting there on the couch with a traitorous union captain, and they're looking over maps and fortifications and papers that clearly have information about the war and about union plans. and pinkerton is furious. pinkerton declares rose public enemy number one and decides he's going to make it his mission in life to get rose which makes for some interesting cat and mouse activity as the war goes on. and this was also another entering part about women's roles in the civil war -- interesting part about women's roles in the civil war. women had always been victims of war, they were never perpetrators, and loyalty was the prime attribute of femininity itself. women's loyalty was always assumed. so for the very first time they're grappling with the idea that women are not only capable of treasonous activity but they're more capable than men. one lincoln official had this great quote that sort of sums it up he says: what are we going to do with these fashionable women spies? and it's something they have to spend quite a bit of time answering. my next person is a fellow by the name of benjamin stringfellow. he is a confederate spy for general jeb stewart. he had blond hair blue eyes, and he weighed 94 pounds. one of his come raids said he had a waist -- comrades said he had a waste just like a woman's. he had sort of an ingenious mode of getting his information. he would dress in elaborate ball gowns and go to union military balls and wait for the men to ask him to dance. and they did ask him to dance. they thought sally martin was very charming. and while sally martin was dancing with these union soldiers, she would find out whatever she could about ulysses s. grant's plans and report it back to general jeb stewart. because -- so i like to include him because it just goes to show the men were in on the cross-dressing action during the civil war too. [laughter] number 11 is spy disguises. i was fascinated by the way people disguised themselves as spies during the civil war. things that seem so rudimentary and primitive today. people would have epileptic fits, one guy removed his glass eye, they would feign a limp, they would pose as peddlers itinerant photographers and some people disguised themselves as slaves which i thought was odd until it makes sense when you think about just as nobody expected a woman to disguise themself as a man, nobody expected people to disguise themselves as slaves. it was all well and good unless it became excessively hot or started raining and your disguise literally started running could down your skin. this actually happened to one of my spies later on in the book. and number 12 my favorite things during the civil war, was how the female soldiers got caught. i mentioned earlier there were about 400 women who disguised themselves a men and en-- as men and enlisted in the war and you know, the reports started circulating as the war went on about women, you know, in the reactions. and people were -- in the ranks and people were shocked about this. even more shocking to me was how they were discovered. there was one private her captain threw an apple at her, and she tried to grab the hem of her nonexistent apron to catch the apple, thereby giving herself away since she was not warring an apron. one woman recruit reportedly forgot how to put on pants. she tried to pull them over her head. [laughter] and the final one and my very favorite, a corporal in new jersey gave birth while she was on picket duty. [laughter] so the jig was up. so anyway those are my 12 favorite people, events and facts of the civil war. if anybody has any questions or any stories or wants to tell me how their own ancestors got rid of the damn yankees, i would love to hear it. [applause] >> [inaudible] line up here. in. >> [inaudible] rose -- came back from europe, whatever happened to little rose who she left in a convent in paris? >> um, the question was about rose and what happens to her after the war. and just to back up a little bit about that later on in the war rose was sent by jefferson davis to be a lobbyist on behalf of the confederacy to try to convince england and france to recognize the south as its own legitimate country which was unprecedented for an american president of the south, you know the south obviously considered itself its own country, to send a woman to do its business. so that was quite a remarkable thing. and what happens to rose's daughter after the war? she grows up and gets married and misses her mama very dearly and there's not too much information about, about little rose. but she does marry and sort of go on to have her own happy and productive life. but she and her mother were very close, and i should say that little rose was an important mother -- part of her mother's spy plans. her mother would often use her daughter to send messages and hide messages and things like that. so rose o'neill greenhowe was is so invested in the southern cause she was willing to not only risk her own life, but that of her 8-year-old daughter as well. >> any more questions? [inaudible conversations] >> well, thank you all. thanks for coming. [applause]
iraq war, an inside look at google and much more. for more information on this weekend's 48-hour television schedule can, visit us online at booktv.org. >> up next on booktv, s.c. gwynne recounts the life and military career of confederate general thomas "stonewall" jack soften. this program, from the atlanta history certain, is just under an hour. [applause] >> our speaker tonight, s.c. gwynne, lived in austin, texas. he is a prolific writer. he has written for "time" magazine for 12 years where he won a national headliners' award for his reporting on the to columbine shootings. he's written for the boston globe, "dallas morning news", san francisco chronicle, he was executive director for the texas monthly between 2000 and 2008 where he wrote on various high profile subjects from karl rove to the bush white house to the infamous houston surgeon, aka dr. evil, and this was included in harper perennial press' best american crime writing anthology in 2006. gives you an idea of what the doctor was up to. sam gwynne comes from a varied background. he first started out as a french teacher, then he was in international banking, and that led to his career in journalism because, he says, he was one of the few people who could write who didn't mind writing about financial issues. laugh -- [laughter] so among other books, several books on financial issues, and his i last book was "empire of the summer moon" which is about quanah parker and the comanche indian nation, the rise and fall art comanche indian nation in the 19th century. this was a new york times bestseller and a finalist for the pulitzer prize which gave him a lot of latitude to choose his topic for tonight. his latest work is "rebel yell: the violence, passion and redemption of stonewall jackson jackson," which was released today -- that's right, you are the first audience in his 15-city tour, the first audience to hear sam gwynne talk about stonewall jackson. let's give him a warm welcome. [applause] >> it worked. [laughter] i would like to invite you tonight to imagine thomas j. jackson as he might have looked to the world on thursday, april 11, 1861, that's one day before the civil war began. he's 37. he's thin enough that you might have called him gaunt. he's about six feet tall which makes him about five inches taller than the average adult male of his day. you would have noticed his pale, blue-gray eyes, his thin lips which always seemed to be tightly pressed together. you would have also noticed his large hands and feet, so large he did not seem to know what to do with them. you would have found him, as everyone did, shy and very quiet. his silence was the most striking thing about him. you would have found it difficult to engage him, mostly because he refused to go along with even the most routine conventions of everyday conversation. he refused to say that he wished anything was different than it was, meaning he could not bring himself to wish that it were warmer or colder outside than it was or even if some sent had not happened. -- accident had not happened. if you said, boy, it would be nice if it stopped raining, he would say, yes, if the maker of the rain thinks it best. [laughter] he wouldn't say anything bad about anyone else, even when goaded to do it, which meant he could not participate in even the most rudimentary forms of gossip. he refused to talk about himself. he could be maddeningly literal. when someone used the term "you know" in conversation, he would interrupt to point out that he did not, in fact, know. [laughter] he was even worse in large groups. when he stood to speak in a public forum, he often falter ored and stammered and was forced to sit down without finishing, but then he would often rise again to try again only to sputter more miserably and sit down again red-faced while everyone around him cringed and looked away. wherever he was at precisely 9:00 in the evening, he would excuse himself and go home even if someone was in the middle of a sentence. these were the mild eccentricities. [laughter] he was obsessed with his own health. he sought water cures at mineral springs all over the country. he often ate nothing more than cold water and stale bread or sometimes butter milk and stale bread or sometimes cold meat and stale bread. he would bring his own food to dinner parties. he obsessed about anything involving his body starting with his eyes and digestive system but end clueing z his -- including his throat, kidneys and nervous system. he swallowed ammonia. he once became convinced that one side of him was heavier than the other and, thus, did exercises in order to even that out, some of which involved leaping and hopping. though he did have some genuine physical ailments, his brother-in-law believed that he was a hype connedly yak -- hypochondriac. [laughter] in spite of all of this, he managed to hold a job at a military school, the virginia military institute, in lexington, virginia. he taught a course called natural and experimental physiology, we would call it physics today, which included the most difficult concepts of the day including electricity, magnetics, acoustics, optics and astronomy. though it count -- accounts of his eccentricities sometimes differ, there was agreement that he was absolutely one of the worst teachers anyone had ever seen. [laughter] he just assigned brutally difficult assignments and then had the students come up and do recitations at the blackboard. he insisted on rote memorization. when the students asked him for an explanation, he would simply cite the precise words from the textbook which he had committed to memory. you might think such a stickler for detail was also a stickler for discipline. but, in fact, the worst was true. his classes were often pure pandemonium. when he turned his back, pitballs would fly -- spitballs would fly, cadets would walk behind him mimicking his strange steps, and various pieces of cannon would go rolling and spinning down the hill with the professor flailing in pursuit. you would have said in this major thomas j. jackson was, if not a loser, something close to it. to call him a failure is too harsh. there were stories that he had had distinguished service in the mexican war 15 years before. but he just wasn't very good at anything. he was part of that great undifferentiated mass of second rate humanity who weren't going anywhere in life. and though he never changed his behavior to match that of lexington society, over the decade that he thought at vmi -- and by the way, that is vmi as it looked before the war and before the yankees burned it -- during the time he was there, the decade he was there, the town kind of adapted itself to him. he was a harmless, decent, church-going man. he even ran a sunday school for slaves. in his own way, lexington got used to him and even came to appreciate him. he was a curiosity, a sort of minor civic institution. what you would not have known if you were walking the streets of lexington, in april of 1861 -- and this is what it looked like just immediately pre-war lexington. jackson's house is a little that way and his church is a little that way. what you would not have known april of '61 was all of the preceding dingses of jackson are almost -- descriptions of jackson did not begin to capture who he really was. while lexington knew the caricature jackson -- the health crank, the unbending professor, the social bore -- the women in his life saw someone else entirely. this is ellie, his first wife. he lost her in childbirth giving birth to his stillborn son. this is her sister maggie with whom jackson was in love but could not marry because of the rules of the presbyterian church. this is anna, his second wife. seen here with the daughter, julia, who would be born later during the war. concealed behind that carefully constructed social front was a deeply -- was a passionate and deeply sensitive man. jackson loved shakespeare and the architecture of gothic cathedrals. when he did a tour of europe, he paid almost no attention to battlefields, it was almost all cathedrals and art. he was completely fluent in spanish. he had a 19th century romantic's embrace of beauty and nature, glorying in sunsets and mountain views. he had an almost mystical sense of god. behind closed doors he would joke and laugh uproar rousely, he loved to play with children, rolling around on the floor. no one in lexington, no one on the planet earth except these few women knew any of about him. it all happened behind closed doors. this side of his personality was deliberately and ingeniously cloaked, and his neighbors would have been astonished to know of its existence. but this, too, was major jackson. now i would like you to imagine thomas j. jackson as he might have looked to the world on thursday, june 19th, 1862, exactly 14 months later, as the train he is riding pulls into the station at charlottesville, virginia. in the previous 80 days, jackson -- now known throughout the country by his nickname, "stonewall," -- had turned the civil war upside down. during a time when rebel armies were going down to defeat in mississippi, tennessee, louisiana and the klein thats, jackson -- carolinas, jackson had taken a small force and deployed it with such dazzling skill that he had soundly beaten union armies totaling 52,000 men. his troops at one point covered an awe sounding 646 miles in 48 days fighting five major battles. he marched them at a pace unknown to soldiers of the day. his army seemed to appear out of nowhere, striking out of mountain passes and from concealed valleys. he used trains in a way they had never been used before in tactical warfare. by the end of campaign, he had driven four union armies from the greater part of the she man doe what valley, captured 3500 prisoners, 9,000 small arms and a huge quantity of stores and supplies. he had then evaded a massive movement designed personally by abraham lincoln to destroy him. and then when everybody on both sides thought that he had no choice but to flee, he turned on both jaws of the pinser, two union armies, and beat them in succession. but he had done more than just drive union armies from the valley, he had also knocked the entire 150,000-man union offensive against richmond off balance. at one point the threat of jackson was perceived to be so dire that he created even a minor panic in washington d.c. all this made him famous. in a war where techniques were being reinvented almost hour by hour, jackson's intelligence, speed and acompression were the wounders of north and south alike. he was the talk of london and paris where he was already, where his valley campaign was already being compared to napoleon's legendary italian campaign. just at that moment, this would be in june of 1862, he was the most famous military man in the world. and in case you were wonder wondering -- oops -- in case you were wondering, robert e. lee has to point in the war been a sort of glorified military sidekick to president jefferson davis. that will soon change, of course. it was lee's partnership with jackson, in fact, that changed the civil war in the east in 1862 more than any other single factor. but for now lee is just another general with a sketchy civil war record. to the south itself, jackson had won his battles just when hopes were at their lowest. what the confederacy had desperately needed in a war it was obviously losing was a myth of invincibility, proof of notions of the courageous southern character were not just romantic dreams, proof that with inferior resources, it could still win the war. jackson, with his brilliant underdog valley campaign had given that to them. that train he was riding on june 19th that i mentioned a few moments ago was headed to rich where at that moment 120,000 union soldiers faced a mere 65,000 confederates, one of the biggest mismatches of the war. it was thought on both sides that richmond would fall. jackson was coming on that train to save the city, and by extension, to safe the confederacy. that's what people in the south thought anyway. and those were absurd, unrealistic expectations to load onto one disheveled general and two divisionings of exhausted men, as brilliant as their valley campaign might have been. and yet it's a matter of record that jackson did exactly that. two months after his arrival in richmond in the her of 1862 -- in the summer of 1862, mainly on the strength of lee's daring and jackson's astounding maneuvers, the capitol being threatened was no longer richmond, but washington. the greatest military disaster of the war to date, the second battle of manassas. as i was working on this book, people would ask me what it was that got me interested in writing about stonewall jack soften. well -- jackson. well, i rest my case. [laughter] what i have just described for you was an astonishing transformation of an apparently ordinary man or perhaps ordinary is even too kind, slightly eccentric, ordinary man in less than 14 months. of course, the war transformed many people. ulysses s. grant, the most famous of these, was a washout from the army and a miserable failure in business. when the war began, he was working as a lowly clerk in his father's leather shop in illinois. william tecumseh sherman was teaching at a tiny military school in louisiana when the war started. jackson's rise to fame, power and legend was every bit as deep and transfiguring as that of the two union generals, but it happened much faster. his ascent was much steeper, more dramatic. his effect on the first two years of the civil war more profound. now, one measure of fame, i guess, is whether people write songs about you while you are still alive. i'm sure many of you are at the top of your fields, but i'm not sure if anyone has written songs about you yet. [laughter] i'm about to lay you one here -- play you one here that is a very popular confederate song of the civil war called stonewall jackson's way. i'm just going to play you a little bit of it. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> okay. you get the idea. [laughter] many verses. many verses, and the soldiers knew them all. so how does such a thing happen to someone who looked to almost everyone at the start of the war like a very ordinary man? let's start with the battle of first manassas, or as the yankees who like to name battles after water courses had it, bold run. here we can see the early mechanisms of fame at work. we're in the her of 1861 -- in the summer of 186 3, the first -- 1861, the first year of the war. everybody knew that the first great battle would be fought in northern virginia. everybody on both sides believed it would be definitive. the cowards would be sorted out from the heroes x there would be much glory in the sorting out, and both sides were absolutely convinced they were going to win. on july 21, 1861, a union army and a confederate army faced each other across a slow-moving stream called bull run. this was a few miles north of the critical rail cross roads at manassas junction and about 30 miles due west of washington. here is your basic set up. down here we have manassas junction, that's the critical, the strategic rail junction that's the reason the battle was fought there. washington's over here on the curtain somewhere 30 miles away. you have the meandering bull run here, and then you have, essentially, in blue here the union troops battle line on this side, confederates on this side. what you're about to see is a battle animation, but it's a very primitive one. and this is my first speech, and i realize it's a mistake. so, please, do not hold me to this. but it is meant to suggest roughly how the battle worked. my wife and i are going to tweak this and make sure it get better. basically, what happened is this: the union executed a brilliant and largely undetected flank march around the confederate left. confederate high command down here had no idea this was happening. and, thus, putting 18,000, union troops in the confederate rear down here, and this is how the battle started. and now let's see if i can make this work. pretty good, huh? [laughter] for amateurs. [laughter] okay. this is -- okay, there they go. [laughter] okay, so this is very interesting now. this is a military disaster, to have that kind of flank movement in your rear is an absolute disaster. and so what happens is very interesting. some -- both a few confederate brigades detect that movement, and they move to stop the federal advance here. okay. however, we have a little problem. 18,000 federals and about 4,000 confederates, it is a gross overmatch. then what happens is a very sharp battle, a very fierce battle is fought, but it doesn't last that long, and the confederates are routed from the field. all right, now enter jackson. jackson -- oops, goes too fast. jackson, who was in this area here also without orders, moves this way to intercept the oncoming union forces. and what's interesting here is that when jackson arrives here in late morning, what he, what he sees basically is a full scale, bloody confederate retreat. and what he saw in front of him was an absolutely full-blown military disaster, and there was no doubt about it. no sign of rebel troops rallying or union troops withdrawing or no confederate artillery moving forward to blast the federalists from the hill. the scene was complete bloody chaos. they're driving us, general bernard b. yelled to jackson as he and his wounded men streamed past. jackson's response was peculiar and also characteristic of the man. sir, we will give them the bayonet. hardly anyone would die in the civil war of bayonet wounds, but the point was clear enough. a bayonet was an intensely personal way to kill someone. jackson meant business. his first concern was amazingly not whether they should retreat or how soon he could be reinforced or how with only 2600 men and a few cannons he was going to stop the federal juggernaut. his reaction was instinctive and immediate, fight. fight now, hold the line. whoops. now watch this. watch 'em turn around. turn to face the union troops. okay. [laughter] okay, so here wes, he's arrived here with his 2600 men. five virginia brigades. he's up on top of henry hill which is a flat place, it gets steep going down to the warren ton pike, but on top of this hill, it's sort of flat. what he did next was deeply unorthodox. union forces were still arrangedden matthews hill -- arranged on matthews hill. the nominal high ground from which his guns and infantry would have looked down the slope toward the warnton pike. the conventional high ground, right? but instead, he chose the southeastern hedge of the hill, the reverse slope. he went back here to this edge of the field. here on this even though the top of the hill was flat, on this side of it, it was thick with pine trees. jackson could put his by fade there, and they would be unseen by the federal cannons on matthews hill. even better, his own guns could roll forward, fire and be carried back to safety on the recoil on the downward slope. finally, it offered him an unobstructed field of fire, union troops would now have to cross 30 to 0 yards to get to him. again, this is very approximate. in a literal storm of federal artillery, jackson ranged up and down his line here putting his lines into place. around this time the federal high command, bow regard and johnson, final figured out that the battle was not in front of them, but was behind them. now, it took them quite a long time to figure this out. as soon as they had figured this out, they immediately grasped the brilliance of jackson's position, and they immediately began to build the battle around him. the battle of bull run or first manassas was not going to take place here, it was going to take place back here, the it was going to be -- it was going to be, essentially, a battle for the top of henry hill, and the center of that battle was going to be stonewall jackson's five virginia brigades. he became the center of the fight. now, the result, as you know, was a stunning confederate victory. union troops were not only routed, they turned into a wild, unruly mob that fled in panic clear back to washington, trampling over senators and congressmen and their wives who had come out to see the union victory. [laughter] but jackson had been one of the battle's clear heroes, and it was here that thomas j. jackson became or at least started to become stonewall jackson. and it was here that the machinery of fame and legend began to crank into action. while the battle for the top of the hill was raising, barr forward b. had, after hours of searching, finally caught up to what was left of his brigade. this was the fourth alabama, bloodied and exhausted from its morning fight, they were resting about 500 yards behind the spot where jack soften was fighting. -- jackson was fighting. b. found his men about here. he went up to them and asked if they would be willing to reenter the fight. they said they would. b. then pointed to his left up the slope toward the pine ridge where the, where jackson stood fighting. on the edge of henry hill. quote: yonder stands jackson like a stone wall, b. said to his men. let's go to his assistance. at the time b.'s statement -- which was overheard by four witnesses -- probably just sounded like an inspiring bit of metaphorical language. but it became one of the most famous utterances of the war not just because he had less than an hour to live, not just because the battle was about to turn decisively in the south's favor, but also was they gave -- because they gave birth to a name and a legend. something else interesting happened. jackson had ordered his men to wait in the woods until the enemy had come within 50 yards, quote, then fire and give them the bayonet, he told them. jackson had this thing about bayonets. and then he said, when you charge, yell like the furies. curious thing to say. it's not clear exactly what the men took this to mean or how many of them knew what furies were, but when they charged, they made a noise that no one had heard before and whose exact inspiration is unknown, though there are many theories. it was the implausible result of a sequence of sounds that were somewhere between the screech of a bird and the bark of a fox. i would do them for you, but i would embarrass myself. [laughter] the noise sounded unearthly and inhuman, and it was the stuff of union nightmares for years to come. soldiers described it in various ways, among them it was like a corkscrew going up your spine. what's interesting is that historically the rebel yells that people heard tended to be done by old codgers at their reunions in the early 20th century. they sounded kind of fun, but they didn't sound like a corkscrew up the spine. so the museum of the confederates did great work, they got ahold of a couple of soldiers and said you do it all by yourself, what does it sound like, and they did it. and the museum layered in the sounds in order to create the way it would sound with many more people. and i'm going to play you -- and by the way, they have a cd if you're interested in this. it's great. [laughter] i know, i'm not working for them, and i get no cut of the cd. okay, so let's go here. okay, here's the rebel yell. would have scared me. [laughter] anyway, that's changed the perception of the rebel yell. reenactors now more and more do that and not the other one. but back to the mechanisms of fame. when the battle of manassas was over, the lion's share of credit for the confederate victory went to beau regard even though it had rested on the shoulders of b. and jackson acting without orders. jackson's central role -- his brigade suffered the worst casualties of any in the battle -- went at first unnoticed. his role was not mentioned for a full week after the battle. the slight was so obvious that his wife anna even wrote to him to complain about it. he replied to her, quote: so you think the papers ought to say more about your husband? my brigade is not a brigade of newspaper correspondents. it is not to be expected that i should receive the credit that other generals would. but then something interesting began to happen. .. about be were also stories about jackson. there were men who fought on henry hill and knew what jackson did and they spread the word for their letters home. jackson began to arrive in hearts all over the south. the noon nick name had a nice ring to it, stonewall. it was the way the south like to think of its fighters. in the early days a few union soldiers got a humorously ron bloom one regiment gave him to understand they were about to face the dreaded stone fence jackson. the title of the book would be different. note that the nickname attached itself to five regiments, it became for the rest of the war and into history the stonewall brigade. the most famous fighting unit of the confederacy. in a story of great change in a man's life one of the most striking transformation occurs at the end of that life. the meeting 62 jackson had remade himself as an instant legend with the valley campaign, a stunning victories of the army of northern virginia in seven days, second manassas and fredericksburg with a drawn battle against a vastly larger foe at antietam. that winter he fulfilled other ambitions too. after losing his first wife during the birth of a stillborn son and losing a daughter in infancy through second marriage jackson, who had been himself for an that 7 finally became a father. when his wife and baby daughter came to visit him he had finally reassembled the family he had lost. he was a deeply with this man and i believe strongly that if he had had any kind of social and personal skills which he did not have or any public speaking skills which he did not have he almost certainly would have been best presbyterian minister. but he realized that he could not do this and he was right about that but now that winter, the winter of 1862-1863, he became a driving force almost entirely behind-the-scenes of the enormous wave of christian revival but swept through the confederate army. he was also transformed in many ways that winter but in one way he was was physically and this is something his wife noticed and other people noticed. going back to the first photograph or the second photograph that i show you from the late 50s taken just before the war. this is the famous chancellor's photo. a remarkable physical transformation. his wife thought he looked much better and i do too. that kind of photography can lie but that seems like a remarkable change in a very short period of time. there was chancellorsville. robert e. lee and stonewall jackson marched out with 60,000 men to case 130,000 union soldiers and drove the entire union army away. jackson engineered the most brilliant march. robert e. lee had his and the south's greatest victory. one officer put it walking jackson ride out with lee on the first day of the battle comet as a fighter and leader he was all that could ever be given to a man's fate and then jackson was dead, victims of an accidental shooting by his own men and pneumonia that set in after words. he was shot by his own men. his arm was amputated. he was recovering pretty well in this house before the pneumonia set in and worked pretty quickly. this is is death mask. on display at the valentine museum in richmond. it is fascinating to look at that you can also see how easy it it was from the pneumonia that killed him. what happened in the wake of jackson's death was unique in american history ended with characterized by something most other historians fail to notice and that is the fact that jackson's death triggered the first great national outpouring of grief for a fallen leader in american history. that may sound odd to you. national grief? yes. the confederacy was a nation and a large one. to be sure there had been a few big state funerals. benjamin franklin to 20,000 in philadelphia in 1790. about 100,000 came after the death of zachary taylor in 1850 but when franklin died in 84 he was sick and obese, his glory days long past. washington died 67 and quietly with no fanfare as was jefferson who died in the g 3. john adams died and 90 in quincy, mass. but the meaning of jackson, the closest parallel might have been george washington's death on the battlefield at yorktown in 1781 but of course that never happened. jackson's death touched the hearts of every home in the south. there were remarkable parallels with another death two years later that overshadowed jackson's death in american history. that of abraham lincoln. the similarities between the two were striking starting with their symbolism. all that wild grief was not just for the two leaders. their deaths in greece the deaths of all soldiers on battlefields far away. their bodies became the bodies of young men who would would never come home, their funeral stood in for the hundreds of thousands of funerals of dead soldiers that would never take place. lincoln and jackson in death where the vessel in which the heart of the american nation north and south would beat ford. what happened after lincoln's death was called the national funeral. in confederate terms jackson's was too but there were other similarities. both died at the height of their power and achievement and high water marks of their respective countries. bose transported home by train is that wound to the countryside met by thousands of grieving americans. the scale of lincoln was much larger. lynchburg was not new york. richmond was not chicago. the intensity of emotion was the same. there were notable differences. in death lincoln remains deeply unpopular figure in the south. southerners understood correctly that he would have treated them better in the aftermath of the war than the radical republicans but they still hated him. not so jackson in the north. there were many expressions of admiration and morning. many northerners had mixed feelings about it. i rejoice at stonewall jackson's death as a gain to our cause, wrote union general k. warren, one of the heroes of gettysburg, yet in my soldier's heart i cannot but see him as the best soldier in all of this war and grief at his untimely end. [applause] >> am happy to take questions. you want to come to the microphone if you want to ask some questions. >> you describe -- can you hear me? >> i can hear you. >> you describe jackson's brilliance from the beginning of the war. why did lee become the commander and checks insubordinate rhetoric and the other way around? >> that has its roots in the's record before the war. jackson was not well thought of that the beginning of the war. lee was extremely well thought of that the beginning of the war so started in a higher position. jackson was given commission as major. he had to fight to get to colonel and had to fight his way up. lincoln started at the top of the heat. lincoln was offered head of the union army. i think it was largely that. also there is another reason jackson in the larger sense could never have done -- didn't have those skills. he was the most brilliant executive officer the sun ever shown on but he has a weakness and flaws. we were talking about patton. if you ever saw the movie patton he was a brilliant general, had his flaws that you could never have seen him as eisenhower. that is the same with jackson and lee. >> i always wonder what happened at the seven days battle. jackson makes a great march from the valley and get down there and sit down and takes a nap under a 3 or against a fence. what is your opinion as to what happened? >> good question. did you all hear that question? the question is -- i will summarize. is a big historical controversy. the seven days that happened after the brilliant valley campaign jackson did not perform at his best, and historians up and down. seven days was based on a bumbling performance from everybody from lee and his staff on down but people included jackson in that too. the question is how badly did jackson performed? something i address in the book. the seven days was the defense of richmond. in seven days the net effect the big picture of the seven days was leaked mcclellan's army clear across and down to the james river and carat behind mother's kids, the navy gunboats. a larger union on was defeated in raleigh. big picture. small picture, the details are very ugly. jackson's role in the seven days -- i will say what i say about it. he has been challenged, his performance has been challenged and savage station and white oaks swamp. of those i believe he is guilty of only one. the other was bad staff work by everyone, particularly -- lee didn't know what to do. jackson was not responsible for those three of four. swamp which was the actual opportunity lee had to destroy mcclellan's army, the big one where mcclellan strung out halfway across the peninsula, jackson absolutely fails and other confederate generals failed too. my interpretation of that is because what happened was jackson suddenly became not aggressive. jackson, the most aggressive commander america has ever produced, i would certainly rank him with peyton and macarthur and a few others suddenly becomes completely passive. why does jackson -- he is sitting there, has a union army in front of him and he essentially sit down. becomes with the passive. don't send a message to leave it doesn't send one to him either but this inexplicable moment, the only explanation i can find ford because if you have a person all of his behavior is completely consistent except for one time there has to be something that changed. jackson had almost no sleep in ten days. you is quite sick with something that may have been the flu. he was at the end of his physical strength, fell asleep with a biscuit in his mouth, was faced down on the plate when he didn't do anything. we been looking at a person in the middle of a complete physical breakdown. i think that is his fall. he should recuse himself, he should have let somebody else take over the army. it was a mistake on his part and he should be held responsible for it, but there have been -- in the accounts saying jackson screwed up all the way down seven days that really isn't true and it is interesting because in the seven days the big picture is a small confederate army kicked the crap out of a large union armies that is the big picture and the way the nation saw it. they didn't see if this has all kinds of terrible communication problems and logistical problems the confederate army had. also as i said before the interesting thing is from the moment of the end of the valley campaign to the spectacular victory in second manassas when the army is driven back into washington is still only two months so i think we have to look at the way the south looked at jackson, seven days, he is now more famous than ever and very shortly later he and lead drive the union army back to washington. so it was a bit of a matter of perception and also it is mostly something that has been litigated and passed out in the post he bore years. was not such an issue back then. too long unanswered. very good question. yes, sir, somebody come in? okay. speak close to the microphone. >> three questions. one, how long did your research take? >> four years. >> when you're doing research there's always a point when you get excited because it all comes together. they have any of those points and third, how old was stonewalled when he died? >> 39. he looks older than that. it all came together. i don't know. i can't think of a single moment when that happened. it was all so gradual and takes place over a long period of time. there were moments, it is always a pleasure to me anyway. i like civil war battles and there were some moments. i remember standing in antietam with my brother-in-law when the scales finally fell from my eyes and dentists and why lee cook that ground for being at the unfinished railroad at manassas where i suddenly understood the battle. those are really cool. the understanding of his personal side is his relationship with his wives and so forth was much more gradual. didn't come in a blinding flash. >> you mentioned at the start that jackson had been very innovative and i was wondering if you could expand upon that. >> jackson's innovation. in the early war, it was pretty extraordinary, one thing he doesn't even get credit for is at the beginning of the war everybody put artillery with brigades and that became the thing. footing or artillery with the brigade wasn't very good idea. massing or artillery -- very early in march of 1862, i think the part of his innovation -- nobody in washington had a clue that anything could move that quickly. his idea -- a lot of times he would jettison his supply train, they would just take off and the speed that it happened that would be almost as though your friend is in cleveland and an hour later he is in tokyo and wait a second, it is not physically possible for man to go that far. that is how washington saw valley campaign. to them jackson would appear in a puff of smoke because the union did not march -- the speed of the march was innovative. the deceptions were innovative. in the valley campaign one of the ways he made his army disappear, cook them over the blue ridge out of the shenandoah valley and they disappeared from the valley but he had commandeered a series of trains that then brought his soldiers back to the valley. one of the first uses of trains in tactical warfare. teammate the army disappear and reappear in stanton so nobody knew where it came from. puff of smoke. we are in the early war. no one knows how to fight the war yet. it is invented moment by moment. everyone is trying to redefine the mexican war but it doesn't work. jackson's use of supply trains in the civil war every army having zillions of wagons with stuff on it. this was a burden you had to bear. was very good with supply trains. he wasn't a pure tactical genius. his sense -- he was pretty good at it and and tea and you could say was an absolute masterpiece and so was second manassas but he had his moments of tactics but to meet the brilliance of jackson was maneuver. getting the army faster and quicker to a given point where it usually found a smaller force, the valley campaign was faster and more effective than someone else and in a lot of jackson's battles the maneuver had won the battle before anyone else shot a rifle. >> i haven't read the book yet but i am curious to see if you can up with any insight as to who lost order 191 before antietam. >> this is the famous -- the question is about the famous battle orders the details every conceivable part of what would eventually become antietam including jackson's dispatched to harpers ferry and all the movements of the confederate troops came into the hands wrapped around some secondes and the mcclellan guest didn't go i got it and of course he doesn't which is a great punchline. i have not -- i didn't break any ground. i read it like everybody else. just a great moment. sorry. >> hi. i was wondering what sort of data you gathered to form your argument, especially about the relationship with his wife because that obviously is such a subjective topic, just how you gathered that. >> good question. how did i do the research on his wife or wives, there were two wives. anna -- the first answers his second wife rose an amazing book, really well done book. he had plenty of help with that. but it was a well done book so it gives great insight into their relationship and is the backbone and we can see from half of that correspondence too so with an anyway, she wrote that well after the war when she had time to think about it so there are other ways, his first wife's sister wrote extensively in interesting ways about jackson but i think the basic answer, if you were interested in pursuing it would be read and's book about jackson. pretty great stuff. his second wife. >> with stonewall he lived with the south had won the war? >> here's what happened. died shortly before gettysburg which people say thank god because i didn't have to do the research and gettysburg for my books so thank you, some wall. he dies just before that so what i think's -- i agree with leigh that what would have happened is jackson at gettysburg would have held the high ground south of town with the famous big top round talk, that would have been held by the confederates on the following day so all those things that are exciting for the high ground would not have happened. the interesting thing, that is true. what then happened we don't know. one of the interesting things, let's just say jackson instead of stopped and didn't pursue, jackson certainly would have. let's just say if that happened and the confederate won the battle? and let's say that they continued their campaign. where you going to do? bear in philly? what would we burn? where would we move. the interesting thing is i think on some level, imagining a confederate army lose up their having won at gettysburg and that went back and told this to be bled dinner tonight. the yankees -- the north thought the war with one arm behind its back. i think the other arm comes out if you have a victorious confederate army on the rampage in pennsylvania. jackson wanted to burn pittsburgh early in the war, wanted to go clear to the great lakes. i think that might have really changed the war. i grew up in connecticut and connecticut there were not a lot of big battles in the civil war in connecticut. i wrote about the shenandoah valley. by the end of the war the place had been turned over four times. if you lived there you lost your house, your barn, your fence, every chicken, every page, every go, every crop, your sons were dead, your finances were in confederate dollars, you were completely ruined and it is interesting to me to compare the feeling it must have been like to be in mint georgia or south carolina or the shenandoah valley. let's flip that. i'm going hypothetical. let's listen that, put a confederate army up north, say they want to do what sherman did for political reasons, they want to affect the outcome of the coming election, they want elections, they want to specifically bring the north to its knees. how fascinating is that. imagine the philadelphia area experiencing what atlanta did. imagine. i really don't know. i think it would have unleashed demons the likes of which -- almost unimaginable and i do think the resources of the north were so absolutely overwhelming the only way the south could ever win was by bringing the north to the table some how but i don't know. a marauding confederate army of course the author are would have come out from behind the back. it gets very hypothetical but thank you for coming. [applause] >> booktv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you. tweet us, twitter.com/booktv or post a comment on our face book page, facebook.com/booktv. >> here is a look at some books being published this week. glenn beck tells stories of ten americans who he believes are misremembered in dreamers and deceiver is and fields of blood, karen armstrong challenges the idea that virus is an intrinsic quality in many religions. since the story of 20th centuries feminism by examining the creation of the first female superhero in the secret history of wonder woman. kerri chris's book empires in examines the history of new orleans through the struggles that keep the city's placed strict operational. in the south china sea bbc news reporter bill hayden deconstructs the complex history in modern day dispute over the important asian trade routes. kathryn harrison recounts the story of a shepherd is to become a military beater in joan of arc. a life transfigured. the book is in bookstores this coming week and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org. >> here's a look at upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country. all this weekend booktv is live from the texas book festival in austin. also happening this weekend is the boston book festival. look for coverage coming weeks and then november 1st the louisiana book festival will be held in baton rouge and from november 22nd to the twenty-third booktv will be live from the miami book fair international. let us know about book fairs and festivals happening in your area and we will lead them to our list. e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. >> booktv as bookstores and libraries throughout the country about the nonfiction books their most anticipating being published this fall. here's a look at some of the titles chosen by quail ridge books in raleigh, n.c.. first film maker ken burns, geoffrey ward looks at the puzzle and political lives of theodore, eleanor and franklin delano roosevelt in the roosevelts a companion to the pbs seas. next in wayfaring stranger is, the immigration of scott to appellation in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. walter isaacson examines the digital age and the people who made it possible in the innovators. also on quail ridge books, list of the most anticipated fall titles, naomi klein's thoughts on climate change in the global economy in this changes everything and wrapping up the list, in world order former secretary of state henry kissinger weighs in on international affairs. that is look at the nonfiction titles quail ridge books is most anticipating being published this fall. you can visit the bookstore in raleigh, north carolina or online at quayleridgebooks.com. >> karen abbott recounts the exploits of four women during the civil war who defended norman politicians to send privileged information to 7 generals. this is a little under an hour. >> i am thrilled to be here with abbott. i love her books. i love all of her books. singh in the second city which i love, you take us and show us this entire others view of chicago through the eyes of the two most famous american madams ever. in american rose we learned about this american icon gypsy rose lee who really hasn't been explored the way that you explore her. so now with "liar, temptres
soldier, spy: 4 women undercover in the civil war" you had on things i adore. you have unexplored american history, espionage and women with some real sparks in a, really adventuress, incredible women. tell us a little bit about what this book is about. >> i tell you about this book. in eastern philadelphia i move to atlanta in 2001. and at the conversation in the south and a way it never does here in the north. the occasional considered -- confederate flag on the line. i heard about jokes about the northern war of aggression but the point was really driven -- the point and that was driven home especially that it wasn't a joke when i was stuck in traffic for hours baja and a pickup truck that had a bumper sticker that said don't blame me. i voted for jeff davis. so i thought that when looking at this bumper sticker for hours and started thinking of course about what were the women doing. my mind goes to what the women were doing and they didn't have easy access to political discourse or the right to vote. they couldn't influence battles along wanted to see what the women were doing and that wanted to find in particular women who cheated life, murdered, drank shops, fought events through the war. these are the women i want to spend time with and as authors we often talk about how we find our stories. i found it on a bumper sticker. >> once that seed was planted how did you come across the street for incredible women? >> four in particular whose stories touched in some way his tapestry woven to retells story and hadn't been told before and it was important to me that even if they were not physically interact in all the time, although two of the women do, kind of vitalize the old confederate guys there were running into the same people and there was a cause and affect. one woman's behavior would affect another woman's circumstances and i wanted to leave their stories together in an interesting way. one thing that like best about this is there are these four very distinct characters. they each have their own backgrounds, there and experience, their own views on this conflict can say offers the reader a specific view and entry point into the civil war. spoiler alert. here is how all the war ends. we know where this is going but what i like about this is we know where we are headed but this to me is a personal way to look at not just this war but war in general. how people become involved. what roles they take on and how it affects their lives and these four characters are so distinct and different, talk a little bit about the four women who carries this book. >> all the women at different points, at lyres, temptresses, soldiers and spies and the first is boy to provide comic relief and actually my favorite who was insane. we were talking before we went on and said she is like a sociopath on spring break. if anybody remembers, she is having a really good time and there's something to talk about. that is dull. and applying this to the civil war is a dangerous circumstance, but but belle boyd was a confederate sympathizer in virginia. i will just say that she is all it. if sarah palin and miley cyrus and a nineteenth century baby i think it would have been belle boyd. you want to see dirty pictures of her. further on actually. she road is a great letter to her cousin that sort of sums up how she thought about herself and which was what she thought about most of the time. i will read it tiny snippet of that. i am tall, she once boasted to her cousin. i weigh 106.5 pounds. my form is beautiful. my eyes are dark blue and so expressive. my hair of rich brown and i think i tie it up nicely. my neck and arms are beautiful and my foot is perfect. i'll wear size 2-1/2 shoes. i think perhaps a lighter. knows not as large as ever, either grecian the roman but beautifully shaped. i'm decidedly the most beautiful of all your cousins. that -- she kicks things off soon after that letter was written on the fourth of july of 1861 by shooting a union soldier who threatened to raise a flag over her home and she was not standing for that. in addition to wanting a husband, some sort of agreement with her cousin, what does she want in this story? what does this character want in this story? >> i think belle boyd woke up every day wanting something different. all of a pointed to what can i do to make myself more famous? which was a strange attitude for somebody who purported to be a spy. this is somebody who after she shoots the union soldier dead goes to work as a courier and spy for the confederate army but she is trying to hold the confederate army and gather and disseminate information that might be helpful in the battle she is trying to do what she can to bring attention to herself. she ends of getting attention from a very prominent individual. >> belle boyd was assessed with general stonewall jackson who was sort of a confederate boyfriend, my civil war boyfriend. stonewall jackson was interesting character, sort of a rock star of the civil war. there was a great story about him. he lives in the lobby of a hotel in 1862 and women swarmed him. they ran after him down the us 3. if you is in the lobby, they followed him and keeping souvenirs can stonewall was great about this wishy said at this point ladies, ladies, this is the first time i was ever surrounded by the enemy. belle boyd was obsess with financial reporters she wanted to, quote, occupy his tent and share his danger. he spent quite a bit of time going after that. so belle boyd got another idol in her life, rose is another one of the main characters, a key figure in the confederate side of the story. talk a little bit about rose. >> rose was in a difficult position when the war broke out. five children with in four years, she had lost her husband in a freak accident, she lost her financial stability and access to the white house in 20 years prior to the war she had access to democratic politicians, she had been an adviser depression buchanan so with the election of lincoln, all of that disappeared and she was desperate to regain this position, the influence she had wielded so in the -- when the confederate cabinet approached her and said would you be interested in running a confederate spy ring in washington d.c. the federal capital? rose disregarded the danger and said of course i want to do that and she immediately began cultivating sources by cultivating i mean sleeping with. and managed to better high number of union officials including senator henry wilson of massachusetts who was an abolitionist republican and the chairman of lincoln's committee and military affairs a you can imagine that was interesting. she entertained these men in her home and the neighbors watched the men come and go and call her wild rose. was rare but rose knew what she was doing and was very serious about her intent to help the confederate army. >> out did belle boyd learn about rose because she wants to the rose. >> bell went to school in washington d.c. and had her suicidal debut and i love this story. she carved surname with her diamond in the window of preschool, belle boyd was here and it was before the war broke out so rose was still the head, a leading lady of washington society and invitations were the most coveted in town and all the politicians that would go to her home and parties, this entertain both democratic and republican politicians and was quite influential across-the-board and if he admired rose an even more so after she became a prominent spy. so let's now move -- we of two of our four women, let's move to the union and talk a little bit about elizabeth. >> elizabeth van lew was the opposite of rose o'neal greenhow. use a union lady living in the confederate capital of richmond, the exact mirror situation. where rose was a celebrated beauty, elizabeth, one of her contemporaries said quote and she was never as pretty as a portrait showed. hy wish i had a portrait. >> they didn't have photoshop but they've figured some things out. >> but elizabeth was a staunch abolitionist. was born and raised in richmond and spent a lot of time up north being educated and was under the care of an abolitionist government so when she came to richmond, she began freeing the family slaves. after the war broke out this was a dangerous position for her to have. she was a spinster who lives in this house on the hill with her mother but after the war broke out she was a traitor, a union sympathizer, somebody confederate detective started following closely. this was somebody who did not need to do anything. she was well taken care of. any idea what drove her? what motivated her? >> she was removed by the plight of slavery. she would go to the slave pens openly and she would write about this in her diary and bring prominent guests to richmond and say i need to show you what the situation is and give to wars and be overwhelmed by how horrific the situation was and want her father pastor family had owned slaves. they needed to in order to be welcomed into richmond society the winter father passed she began freeing family sleeves and started spending her inheritance for the purpose of buying slaves just to free them so this was something near and dear to her and drove her throughout the war at the risk of her own life. what i found interesting about her which is related to this is her relationship with the african-american woman who worked in her home. talk a little bit about that. >> once elizabeth started assembling a union spy ring she recruited people from all walks of richmond society, but really she chose one person in particular to be the linchpin of this operation and that was mary jane bowser, a former family slave, freed her when she was young and she was a remarkable woman. elizabeth sent her to be educated. it was against the law at the time to teach slaves to read or write comments and so elizabeth went to 3 nick davis, the confederate first lady and said i hear you need help. as a proper suddenly i am offering one of my servants that might assist you in your needs, she is not a smart woman, she's kind of bumbling but she might fit the bill for you for a while and mary jane bowser goes to the confederate white house and is tired and little does anyone know that mary jane is literate but also highly educated and has a photographic memory. so she is dusting jefferson davis's desks, she had sneaking peeks at papers on his desk and listening to confidential conversations and reporting every word back to elizabeth. >> i love that. now we move on to frank. >> demo/frank who rounds out the union contingent in e-book. >> jenna edmonds actually has a tragic back story, she was a canadian whose father arranged a marriage for her hand she had seen what arrange a marriages said than, makes a miserable. emma was determined to have a life of adventure, she cut her hair, binder -- flees to the united states and once here she starts hearing about the abolitionist john brown and the drum beat of the civil war and she wants a piece of that. m1s to live a life of adventure associates lists in the union army in spring of 1861 and was remarkable how she gets away with that. the first thing that came to mind -- reading "rebel yell: the violence, passion, and redemption of stonewall jackson"'s book, wait a minute, didn't she have to take a physical? the first thing that comes up in everybody's mind so how did that workout for her? >> she is quite nervous about it but the truth was the official protocol dictated all doctors had to conduct a pharaoh physical examination but doctors across the country found these roles. they needed to fill quotas. they needed bodies out there and didn't care somebody was prone to convulsions or had disease. they needed to have a finger to pull the trigger, enough to plot harder cartridges and just cared if somebody could march. they needed somebody who could do the job so the doctor should,'s hand and said what sort of living has this hand earned? with that she was passed into the army and became a a private. >> i love it. with these four women, and that has given as four very unique personal liness with which to view the civil war. one of the things i liked his it is so balanced. when you were doing your research where there any other women you came across? how did you find and decide on these four women because it is such a great fit? was there somebody who would be great but -- or a wish i had found -- talk a little bit about landing and deciding on these four. >> there were plenty left on the cutting room floor. the civil war has numerous good characters and interesting people and there were two sisters i was interested in. i am always interested in devious sisters. ginny and lottie moon, two confederate ladies who like many southern ladies it all manner of goods and some of them across the lines and i think quite a few union men at the altar, they not only -- jilted them at the altar and i wanted to find a way to fit them in but there wasn't enough for a nonfiction account. there just wasn't enough there and also some interesting male spies. you think the women were dealing with cross dressing. there was a fellow named jensen strengthfellow, a confederate spy for judge stewart and he was 94 pounds, had these lovely delicate features, blond hair and according to one of his comrades had a waste as wispy as a woman's and he would put on an elaborate down and call himself sally martin and go to union military balls and dance with the union soldiers and what is general grant to these days, and get information that way so there were devious people on both sides, both genders. frank/ammo was absolutely my favorite. do you have a favorite in the book? >> i like a mole for different reasons. every time belle boyd appeared i started laughing but i appreciated emma edmonds's vulnerability, someone not only having to pretend she is a man, she is on the front lines, in the 0 bloodiest battles and also has a really excruciating personal story. a situation where she falls in love with a fellow union soldier and has to make the choice of delight suffer in silence? i love this man. to i suffer in silence for tell him what i really am. >> they were very close. >> i just appreciated her strength and vulnerability there. one of the things when i came across that part, i got very curious about this concept of women dressing as men noted to enlist in the army in the civil war and i found out it wasn't -- she was not the only one. were you surprised to learn that? >> was one of the most surprising bits of research. there were 400 women who disguise themselves as planned fought in the north and south and fascinating how they got away with it. i came to the conclusion the biggest reason they got away with it was because no one knew what a woman would look like wearing pants. women's bodies, exaggerated shakes, the idea of a woman wearing pants little on an entire army was so unfathomable that people would just like no. that can't be a woman. so it was just that was one of the things that aided the women who did this and and listed as soldiers. >> talk a little about how they're different and offer these different perspectives. what do you think these four particular characters, these four women, what do they have in common? >> put together all of these women who were involved in the civil war, it was the first time that woman took this sort of bold publicly in war. there were women revolutionary war spies that they were very discreet, they did not talk about this, not something they openly boasted about but with this in the civil war was the first time women made war their business and did so publicly. everybody was used to women were the victims of war, not perpetrators and it was the first time in american history women stepped forward and said this is what i am doing and i'm proud of it and i will do again. rebel women spitting and union soldiers, and during the combat of chamber pots on their heads, openly defying the northern government and saying i am a rebel woman and i will fight to the death for my cause and the union government had no idea what to do with this. there was a great quote from one lincoln officials, what we going to do with these fashionable women's bias? was a conundrum and followed them throughout the war and there was a stance like that. >> one of the great things about these characters is a research you have done. they are incredibly fleshed out and they are not perfect. they are not perfect. they have flaws. a couple of them have fairly despicable, difficult views to deal with. a lot of age, a lot of sadness, but the choice is made to shows them, to show all of them, warts and all. talk about why you decided is that, why was important to include all of those aspects of these characters. >> they were products of their time. is important to me to portray them as they were. one was an atrocious racist and said vile things about african-americans and i tried to understand where she was coming from. was a product of her time. enyart: had ever loving relationship with her own slave as much as you can in that situation. rose did not have that same affinity for the women who served her. i do think it boiled down to the difficulty of bringing she had had and not only that but her background. you find out a little bit into the book and i found this out later in my research rose's father when she was 4 years old had been murdered by his slave and that really fuelled her hatred and something that followed her and turned around her life. >> these women, all of them, you talk about this is the first time in history they stood up and said this is our war too, we are willing to fight, the breathtaking an incredible risk and in a way you could almost argue greater risk than the men if only because they were doing something that was not expected at all from their gender in that time. how risky was what they were doing? >> it is incredibly risky. rose use 8-year-old daughter in her espionage -- only proved how devoted she was to the cause and and emma edmonds was living in the day with the threat of being discovered. she went undercover quite a few times. the risk of being discovered. every day she would hear more stories about women soldiers being discovered. my favorite one -- i have a couple favorites of that variety. one was that a woman forgot how to wear pants and started putting them on over her head. another, there was a couple in new jersey gave birth on picket duty so the judge was up there. not only on the front lines and worried about getting shot or captured by confederates which happened to emily during the book but the idea of her getting caught and discovered as a woman and elizabeth was suffering death threats everyday and confederate detective spying on her and these are women who believed they were going to be hanged if and they wrote that in their diaries, i am going to be strong by the gallows if anybody finds this. >> there was an element of the trail in a sense in what they were doing. emma edmonds was the train everything that was supposed to be associated with what it meant to be a union soldier. you were supposed to be a man, anyone who is a spy is always in a position where they can be viewed as someone who is the training confidence. they did suffer consequences. this did not go smoothly for these four women all the time. some of the consequences, unfortunate consequences they suffered. >> as i said earlier the union government not only did not know what to do with them but they were reluctant to make the rubble women into confederate martyrs. they thought that that would only exacerbate conditions when they were trying to quell the rebellion and also cause complications with europe. the confederate government was interested in getting europe to recognize its legitimacy and the union government did not want europe to recognize its legitimacy said another wrinkle. they didn't know what to do with the confederate women and where they might have handed them and certainly their behavior would have warranted hanging. they put him in prison and tortured them the best way they knew how. and there were quite different experiences in prison and that was due to the different levels of how the union officials took them and rose o'neal greenhow suffered in prison quite a bit and had a difficult time and came near death on a cup locations. >> what was the style of treatment for rose o'neal greenhow versus belle boyd please >> one was in prison and union officials torture her. she was well-known by them. >> was well known. >> this was not some anonymous woman. >> i should back up a minute and discuss what made rose so well known? what got her into prison? rose after she formed her spy ring it was in july of 1861 and the first battle of bull run which was going to be an enormous battle, everyone was predicting this would be that end of the war. on the union's side we will capture that bull run and move on to richmond and the war will be over. the confederate tad different plans and rose o'neal greenhow after jumping into bed with barry became an official and gathering requisite information, she summoned the 16-year-old carrier to her home named betty duval and sit her down at her dresser and rose had to fight her and has a piece of black silk and ties of the note and makes a neat little bun. end says exactly. so many dispatches. >> an important mission. >> pretend you are simple farmer of passing from the market, won't knows the deal. and wave to the union and what a pretty girl. and general beauregard's headquarters, and the jury is made of hair and produces this note she and seifert and therein contained very important information for the first battle of bull run which aided the confederates. actors that, and she becomes public enemy number one to the union. and all of these other characters and elements from the moment in history that enter, what are some others? >> pinkerton was a name one and i was surprised by his involvement. and secret service where, the biggest ego of anybody, just as interested in advancing his -- the interest that bell was. pinkerton -- this is public enemy number one. and the great theme where there's one torrential downpour, and detectives on lafayette square in d.c.. select to save her home wasn't rifle distance of the white house. she called lincoln st. gone. in rival distance of say in. and stands on detective soldiers, looks in the window and what does he see the rose and the trader sitting on a couch looking over fortifications and maps and then the two start passionate making out. .. >> there were many cartoons that celebrated confederate women, in particular their ability to smuggle things across the lines in cent lin. and if anybody doesn't know, this is this rigid cage-like structure that could structure a diameter of six feet. so you could imagine the volume of things that you could attach to this. people attached coffee, sabers, pistols, packages of guilt braid, silk, boots, several pairs of boots at a time. and belle boyd was sort of the queen of smuggling. there was a report from the 28th pennsylvania that they were missing 14 muskets and about 200 sabers -- [laughter] and it was all the doing of belle boyd. so that was quite an enterprise. [laughter] >> so here you are, you're a, you're a pennsylvania girl, you know, living in atlanta who sees a jefferson davis bumper sticker and ends up in this world of the civil war. what was your, what was your view or your experience with civil war history prior to working on this book? >> nothing. absolutely nothing. i sort of started from scratch, and i appreciated that because i came to it not expecting to find anything, not knowing what i would find and was quite pleased and fascinated by what i did find, especially the way women's roles changed and the way the war changed women's roles. you know, you fall into that rabbit hole of research when you're doing nonfiction, and one of those rabbit holes of research that i stayed in quite a bit longer than i should have, i probably spent, you know, i wasted a good bit of time finding out about how courtship rituals changed during the civil war. >> how did they change? [laughter] >> well, i will tell you, denise. prior to the civil war in the antibell lumbar years, it was quite a rigorous process for a marriage to happen. a prospective mate would require a letter of introduction -- >> from a cousin, perhaps. >> yes, from a cousin -- >> a cousin with perfect feet. if you're interested -- [laughter] >> always a selling point. >> yes. >> but, in the letter of introduction, meeting the parents, neighbors, acquaintances, chaperoned dates that would last for years before you could even think about being engaged and then moving on to marriage. but after the war, you know, when the or war broke out, all of that changed. southern parents had to loosen the rules. everybody was gone. and the women, it gave them a newfound freedom, but it also gave them more likelihood of heartbreak in real relationships -- >> [inaudible] >> exactly. they went off to confederate camps, and before whereas, you know, they didn't have -- they had the formal letters of introduction, now they were going off with men whose names they didn't even know and being serenaded, and all of these scandalous behaviors that would never happen before the war. of course, southern women only admitted to flirting in their diaries, but quite a bit more happened, and a lot more sexual intimacy. and, you know, after the war 60,000 widows were left, 60,000 widows and didn't have any expectations of getting married. and my favorite was all the women who said, you know, i don't care. i'll be an old maid, it doesn't matter to me. and it was the first time a generation of women did not expect to marry and carry on the tradition of their mothers and grandmothers. >> you started, you know, sort of with a blank slate with this book. how did your views about this moment in history sort of evolve as you went from, you know, interest through research through writing? >> you know, it was -- one of the most startling aspects was also interesting and actually gratifying, how women could, you know, you would think of women as the weaker sex, and they exploited that idea. they exploited the idea of women being gentle and sort of slow and not educated and weaker and genteel. and their gender was a physical and a psychological disguise. while they were hiding everything up in their buns and hoop skirts, it was also manager they could hide behind -- something they could hide behind, just the idea women were not capable of this treasonous behavior, and there are some great scenes where detectives would april approach the women and accuse them and -- would actually approach the women and accuse them, and the women's response was how dare you accuse me of such behavior, it's beneath the conduct of an officer and a gentleman, and i am a defenseless woman, and you are insulting a defenseless woman -- >> hiding a pistol in my boot. >> yeah. and i will shoot you right now. [laughter] but, of course, these women were anything but defenseless. and just the fact that they were able to exploit society's notions of the weaker sex, i thought, was quite brilliant. >> you have often written about these intrepid, often unsung women and their roles and significant moments in history. you started out in journalism. did you always want to write about women? was that manager you sort -- was that something you sort of thought to do or fell into it? >> my grandmother, who's 96, always tells me the dirtiest stories i know. [laughter] and she's the one who sort of not only led me to a 19th century brothel -- [laughter] but the famous, most famous stripper of the 20th century. you know, when you think of the word "maverick," you always think of men. you think of male characters, james dean, malcolm x, even the late, great james garner. but i like to find, you know, women mavericks. mavericks with vaginas. [laughter] that's sort of my override, if you want to call it that. [laughter] >> how would you compare this to your former books which were also about mavericks with vaginas? [laughter] >> you know, they all have one theme, it's just i like to write about women whose lives i wish i'd lived. i'm jealous of all of them. and the next best thing is to sit at my computer and dig into their psyches and prod and poke until they start speaking to me, and it's always a thrill when they do. >> you're talking about the prodding and the poking and the researching, going down the rabbit hole, do you find that you have distinct phases to the process? okay, now i'm researching, and now i'm going to write, now i'm going to edit, or do you have overlap in how you operate? and was the process for this book any different in any way than for the prior two books? >> um, i think you probably agree with me that being a journalist yourself, i have to research and write at the same time. >> yeah. >> yeah. if i -- i know plenty of authors who have to do all their research first, and they gather and they hoard -- >> keep finding things. >> i know. and i would research happily for ten years and not write a word, i would just research for the rest of my life and never write. but, you know, that getses you in trouble with your editor. [laughter] they don't like that. >> journalists need deadlines. that's how we function. >> yeah. so i think it's a function of journalism where i have to write and research at the same time, and also it saves you -- you figure out what's important and vital to the story, you know? you go down a rabbit hole of research, but you allow yourself to pull back and say, okay, that's an interesting tidbit, but i can't spend the next four months on that, unfortunately. >> you do such a great job of capturing their voices. what kinds of resources did you come across in all this while you were in the rabbit hole? >> you know, i kind of went all over for this one. i went to the national archives where they have rosa c.'s correspondence which was thrilling. the black scrap of silk that she wrapped up the dispatch in, that was at the national archives, and i was able to hold that in my hands, ask just to know that a confederate spy had held this 150 year withs earlier was thrilling. the same thing with elizabeth, i found some of her death threats. please give us some of your blood to write with -- >> we'll just take it for you. >> yeah. how chilling that must have been for her to get, and i was chilled by it how many years later. and i also spoke with one of the descendants of her brother, and he gave me some information about her ring that had never been told before, published before, so that was pretty thrilling. and i spent quite a bit of time at reenactment which is always -- >> oh, talk a little bit about that. a question that would come up because, you know, through abbott's book and through the kind of curiosity it spawned in me, so the cross dressers in both genders were not unusual -- >> yeah. >> did you ever encounter anyone at any of these reenactments who was a woman being a man or a man being a woman during a reenactment? >> you know what? i did not, but i read an article soon after i finished my research where women had to fight for the right to reenact as men. but they didn't -- >> but they were doing it in the actual -- >> right. yeah. >> oh, my gosh. >> there was a movement. apparently, it was not immediately accepted that women reenactors could dress and fight as men. they wanted them to wear the hoop skirts and play the traditional women roles, and these women were like, no, we want to be the women soldiers. we want to reenact as women soldiers. so there was a movement afoot for that to happen. so that was pretty interesting. and also the act pronhls at these events. i went to see the first battle of bull run in july of 2011 reenactment, and there was a man there with his 10-year-old son, and the man says to him, hey, look, there's stonewall jackson by the power lines. [laughter] so, you know, you've got -- [laughter] you've got to love that. >> grab your iphone, take a picture. >> oh, they all were, yes. of course. >> of course. oh, my -- >> their lattes. [laughter] >> fantastic. wow. so it's, abbott's book is just so, it's so compelling, it's such a great read. its reads like fiction, so let's talk about the f word -- [laughter] >> yeah. >> -- fiction. is it something you ever considered doing? i mean, this is such a huge part of what you've done for so long now. is it something you think about? is it something that -- >> um, for the next book maybe but definitely not for this one. the material was all there. i mean, i have 50 pages of end notes and spent five years researching this book, and, you know, a couple -- you know, i talk in my author's note the self-mythologizing that went on in the civil war in some memoirs. and to me, it was important to me to point out those instances in the narrative and also in the end notes. and to me, it's just as important what people embellish and what they leave out as what they actually did in a way. and i vet the sources as much as possible. and also leave in those anecdotes, though, that they blow up, and i explain why they blew them up, why they embellished them, and it's important to examine that. it says something about their psyche, about their role in the war, and it's part of their story. and i think it's just as legitimate in a way as the official be records of the war -- official records of the war of the rebellion which i also consulted extensively. so to me, it's just sort of -- you know, those memoirs are a small part of a large body of research that i was lucky enough to have access to for a book like this. >> well, it comes together so terrifically. we have time -- >> well, thank you. >> we have time for some questions for abbott. does anybody have any questions? >> i do. >> yes? >> i thought the interesting thing you mentioned about the southern matriarchs being created from the civil war? don't you think that also -- it's more of a comment, i guess, and maybe you can comment upon it. the southern gothic -- the women, the women in the southern gothic writing so prevalent compared to other writing. that has to be a product of the civil war as well, i mean, maybe? i don't know. >> i think that's probably true. i hi the whole landscape -- i think the whole landscape of women changed in the years after the war, you know? even some of the spies started moving towards women's suffrage. it just changed the entire landscape of women's roles and how they viewed their roles, and i think people took notice of that, and that's steeped in everything including southern gothic literature, definitely. >> [inaudible] primarily by a lot of women writers i think, especially in the modernist movement. >> yes. no, it's an interesting point. >> thank you. >> yes. >> can you tell me the process you came up with the title? >> oh. >> it's a great title. >> yeah. it was pretty torturous. my writer friends can attest, i would send out e-mails saying this is it, this is the title. and they'd be like, no, no, that is not the title. and i think that in the end we wanted manager that tried to en-- something that tried to encapsulate all four women on something that they all were, and i thought -- also something that would be recognizable and play on a very manly book and very manly movie and a very, you know, i love john la clay, and i just thought it would be fun to tweak that a little bit and just, you know, infuse it with a little bit of the woman's perspective and just sort of, you know, say that this is the women's side of that kind of story. >> leslie, you were the publisher who fleshed out the title it -- >> i was in the collaborative process. i sent me mails to my editor, and he ignored them rightfully. [laughter] he's like, i'm not even going to grace that one with a response. i was trying desperately to come up with a close from hawthorne, he covered the war quite extensively, and walt whit match. i thought those were -- whitman, those were great snippets of quotes from those writers, and they were like, no, no, that's not would recollecting. [laughter] -- that's not working. finally, we came up with this, and it all kind of clicked. >> yes. >> a reading request? >> okay. >> can you read us the description that you did of stonewall jackson? >> oh, sure. >> that's a lovely one. >> page 138. [laughter] >> it's on 138? >> so we have a request for abbott's description of stonewall jackson. page 138. [laughter] >> i'll remind people that this is belle's, belle's love, her imagined love, and she spends quite a bit of time -- >> talking about his feet. >> yeah. [laughter] i don't think his feet were as pretty as hers. but, okay. stonewall jackson had just turned 38 years old and looked, some said, more scarecrow than human with eerily bright blue eyes and a mangy brown mass of beard. his preferred uniform consisted of a threadbare single-breasted coat, a broken binder to conceal his eyes and an oversized pair of flop top boots for his size 14 feet. his horse, fancy, whom everyone else called little sorrell, stood only 15 hands high, and jackson rode him with his feet drawn up so as to avoid dragging them on the ground. he spoke seldom and almost never laughed. on the rare occasions when he did, he tossed back his head, let his mouth gape open and made no sound whatsoever. [laughter] once an injured northerner captured by jackson's men asked to be lifted up to catch a glimpse of the general. he stared for a moment and then in a tone of disbelief and disgust exclaimed, oh, my god, lay me down. [laughter] jack soften was add his -- jackson was as idiosyncratic as he was brilliant. he thought of himself as being, quote, out of balance and even under fire would stop to raise one arm to establish equilibrium. he refused to eat pepper because it made his left leg weak. a partial deafness in one ear often made it difficult for him to determine the direction artillery fire came. convinced that every one of his organs was malfunctioning, he self-medicated with a variety of concoctions, ingesting a number of ammonium preparations. twice a day, rain or shine, jackson slipped away from camp and found a secluded field. he perched on the edge of a fence and prayed for an hour, hands clasped, tears spilling, mouth forming noiseless words, a ritual that may or may not have had something to do with the recurring fear that he was possessed. he was reluctant even to read a letter there his wife whom he called my little dove on sundays. he considered himself a genuine and ardent admirer of true womanhood and was said to nebraska pass a -- never to pass a lady without tipping his filthy cap. he was utterly unfazed by the prospect of murder or death. he would have had a man shot at the drop of a hat, and he would drop it himself. [laughter] he ordered the execution by firing squad of a soldier, a father of four, for assaulting a man of higher rank. the general prayed over the incident and found, as he always did, that god's will matched up with his own. [laughter] during one battle he inquired sharply about a missing courier and was told that the young man had been killed. very commendable, very commendable, jackson muttered soberly, and put the matter out of his mind. [laughter] [applause] >> that's my boyfriend. >> that's your boyfriend. >> it's interesting to me how these myths and these personas about these individuals built up in that particular time in history. what role did the media play in this, in this war? in revolutionary times and even after the revolutionary war when the battle was going on about taking on the u.s. constitution, the newspapers were very opinionated. >> yeah. >> i mean, they were -- there was not, no one even pretended to try and be objective. it was we're on this side, we're on that side. what role did the newspapers play in, you know, the development of the legend of someone like stonewall jackson? >> yeah. i think the reporters, the newspapers, first and foremost, their duty was to convince everybody that they were the ones that were winning, you know? they wanted to put out propaganda that their side was winning, every battle had different numbers according to the north and according to the south. and that was the first and foremost what they wanted everybody to think. and then they would move into personalities. and belle boyd, actually, got quite a lot of press. in the south she was a hero. she might have been strange and eccentric, but she was a hero. in the north she was an accomplished prostitute, and it's kind of strange, you know, this is a 17-year-old girl, an accomplished prostitute, and she was somebody to, you know, wandering through the camps, and they said we have no idea why they let her wander through our camps, and no doubt she's doing a lot of damage. and yet people would read these reports, and belle boyd would still continue to wander throughout the camps. and i think one of the greatest sort of pieces of propaganda can, there was a lot of reports about the par barrism -- barbarism of the confederates, how brutal they were, how barbaric. women wearing jewelry made of yankee bones and necklaces made of yankee teeth and all of these sorts of things. the confederates, all the southerners were very angry. the union had been starving them of supplies with the blockade. hence, the smuggling business we discussed earlier. and it was sort of the idea that these people were so brutal, and there was a little bit of truth to it. there were some women wearing confederate -- excuse me, yankee jewelry, but it was all exaggerated mostly, and each side sort of played for the best effect and also was also constantly in mind of what europe was thinking as europe, watching the newspapers, and they were very carefully. so that was always in the back of their minds too. >> so interesting. do we have any, do we have any other questions? no? >> [inaudible] >> okay, yes. glenn? >> the memoirs that you read, which for whatever reason had the most influence on you? >> oh, influence. >> which one had the most influence, yeah. >> i don't know about influence -- >> or you town that -- found that you, i don't know, had the most impact any way or the other. >> i really appreciated the memoir when she went to europe to lobby for the confederacy, she wrote quite a bit about her journeys meeting european dignitaries and royalty including napoleon iii. so you can imagine this woman who, you know, had never before been to europe and sort of lobbying on behalf of her country, and it was sort of a last gasp effort. she was the last hope. and it was interesting to read about her frustration at this process. and at some point everything was stupid. [laughter] she wrote, you know, my meeting with napoleon was stupid, these people were stupid,this party was stupid, and all the women were fat and ugly. [laughter] and i stood next to them as long as possible so we could compare and everybody could say that they were fat and ugly compared to me. [laughter] and it was sort of this glimpse into her psyche where here's this dignified woman who presented a very regal picture and was always business, always serious and always had her goal in mind, and she was clearly falling apart. she was somebody who was at her own personal, you know, the confederacy was everything to her x it was falling through her hands. and just to read her words about, you know, it boiled down to something like, "this is stupid." it just sort of, you know, it made it universal. everybody has that thought that something is stupid, and it just sort of was really interesting to find that that was her last commentary on that. >> it meant so much to her at all, one of the great things about abbott's book is it really does come across how much this conflict meant in different ways to each one of these characters. thank you. >> thank you. >> for being with us. >> thank you for having me. [applause] >> this is booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here's our prime time lineup. tonight at 7 p.m. eastern, deborah roadie comments on issues facing women today and questions if the women's movement is powerful enough to address them. at eight, mark whitaker reports on comedian bill cosby's political activism and education philanthropy. at 9 p.m., retired four-star general wesley clark weighs in on america's superpower status. linda taratto remembers living paycheck to paycheck and argues for the need to assist america's poor on "after words" at 10 p.m. eastern. and wrapping up our prime time programming at 11, jack cashill takes a critical look at president obama. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. >> so the package is this one piece of debt that i follow through the book, and it's, i think, helpful to understand that when i talk about debt that's being bought and sold here, we're really just talking about an excel spread sheet. so you have the big banks or creditors, and they try for, say, six months to collect on a debt that's not been paid, and when they can't, they'll typically sell it off for pennies on the dollar to debt buyers, and they will collect whatever they can and sell to the next and the next and the next. and what they're selling is, just as they said, a spread sheet with bare bones information. >> is this information on customers, their balances, where they live? what kind of information? >> yeah. so it will have
good evening, everybody and welcome to tonight's. lecture on the fly girls and what a pleasure it is to welcome a live audience once again to dot auditorium. for the first time in almost two years and of course to those of you who are streaming the program tonight, welcome to you as well. incidentally, i'll tell you it's our plan at this point subject to change. i need not say subject to change but our current plan is to offer the remaining programs this year both in person and via live streaming. and you can always consult our website for updates concerning the venue. now sponsor for this evening's program is one of our oldest chancellor's village. who have been with us for many years? and we are extremely grateful to them for their continuing generous support. this might be a good time to encourage any of you who may be so inclined to make a contribution to great lives. as the continuation of the program depends on this kind of individual and corporate support. and you can do this by once again going to our website for information on how you may contribute. now speak of this evening is keith o'brien author of fly girls subtitled. how five daring women defied all odds and made aviation history. keith was born in cincinnati and graduated from northwestern university. here's a former staff writer for both the boston globe and the new orleans times picayune. as a newspaper reporter who won multiple awards including the casey medal for meritorious journalism. he's also written for the new york times the new york times magazine the washington post politico slate and esquire among others. he has spoken on national public radio for more than a decade including on programs such as npr's all things considered morning edition and weekend edition. he has written two books the most recent of which is the four mentioned fly girls with a third scheduled for publications. this april. titled paradise falls the true story of an environmental catastrophe fly girls has received widespread a claim including two assessments that i will mentioned from authors who have spoken previously in great lives. and you remember may remember them one is jonathan ike who said of that book quote if you liked the boys and the boat or unbroken and i suspect most everybody who's rhythm did like them. you will love fly girls. this story carefully researched and expertly written offers and irresistible cast of characters and high octane drama. karen abbott who was also a speaker at great lives offered a similarly glowing evaluation writing quote. this is more than history. it is a powerful story for our times. it has it all adventure tragedy and heroes who overcame cruel prejudice. to roll the air fly girls reads like a heart-stopping novel. but this story is all true. and thoroughly inspiring. some of you may remember that keith was originally scheduled as part of the 2020 great live series, but that talk was canceled because of the pandemic. well, we've looked forward to having him for two years now. so it's a special pleasure tonight to finally welcome to the great lives podium keith o'brien. thank you, dr. crowley for that introduction. i really appreciate it. i mean he did have two years to work on it though. so and i want to say thank you to all of you for coming out tonight. thank you to the university of mary washington. thanks to the great lives lecture series and thanks to ali heber who works here at the university, you know for two years. we've been trying to make this night work. you know, it was it was on and then it was off and then it was on and it was off and and as recently for me anyways recently as yesterday, i thought this event was going to be live streamed. i was told. know we would not have a crowd tonight. and i would just be standing behind this podium in this beautiful room all by myself. and you know in these times we we've all had to how to adapt. and learn how to roll with the punches, you know, the store might close early the restaurant might not be open our cereal that we like might not be available. so, you know i was willing to do whatever it took to finally make this event happen, but of course it was a little upsetting a little depressing and disappointing that i was coming here to fredericksburg a city that i i've been before and do really enjoy and i was going to be in this empty room and i said to my wife i said yesterday before i got on the plane. should i even bring nice shoes? i mean should i even should i even plan to wear pants up there? and it's fortunate really for all of us. that my wife told me yes. so it's really great to be here and i'm going to be speaking tonight about my book and really excited to finally share it with you. but before we get into that i wanted to start with a confession of sorts. and that is i don't really like to fly. i don't like turbulence. i don't like the little sounds that a plane makes for seemingly inexplicable reasons in the middle of the flight. and i really don't like takeoff. you know that moment where you're barreling down the runway so fast that as you take off into the air, you can feel the weight of the air and the plane on your chest as you move further and further away from the ground. i really don't like that feeling at all. now i do like to travel for pleasure in normal times. and and i do travel for work, so, you know not flying for me is not an option. which means that from time to time you will find me. in the 29th row of coach white knuckling the armrests as if i alone am holding up the plane. a few years ago. i was on a flight like that. i was flying from new orleans to chicago on a hot summer night. and it was one of those flights where the pilot comes on before you even take off. and he said folks it's going to be a bad flight. and he was right. you know in the middle of that night in this summer storm there we were bouncing around in the sky and there i am, you know trying to curl up into a tiny ball in my seats but resisting the urge to do that because that would be an insane thing for a grown person to do on a plane. and the woman next to me she totally noticed. and she finally couldn't take it anymore. and she turned to me and she said honey, i think i can help you. i have xanax. that's a true story. you know that that's me as a flyer. and it's sort of begs the question why someone like this someone like me would spend two and a half years. researching and writing about planes at a time when playing travel was exponentially more dangerous than it is today. why would i do that to myself? why? and the answer is really. that it has nothing to do. with planes you know, i was drawn to the story that ultimately became fly girls. because it is the story of an epic quest. populated by characters who were willing to risk everything. for the thing they loved. who would face adversity after adversity? entrenched discrimination and the deaths of their friends and still they would keep flying still they would keep going only to triumph over the men in 1936 and one of the most epic. air races of the mall you know, that's a story. i would hope anyone would want to tell and it's certainly one. i'm excited to share with you here tonight. so you know whenever i'm writing whether it's for magazines or radio or for books. i like to think about my stories in terms of scenes in terms of moments. you identify early on what are the most important moments here and then build around those? and so i thought i'd begin tonight with with you. with a moment. i want you to imagine september 1933. the winning days of summer labor day weekend in chicago the city had been struggling in the grips of the great depression at that point for years. record unemployment bread lines down the street flop houses as they were known at the time so filled with people that you would sleep on your shoes so that someone else would not steal them. but that weekend labor day weekend chicago 1933 was going to be different. the city was preparing for a crush of visitors 500,000 people streaming in by railcar and automobile. they were coming for an exciting event. they were coming for the air races. we need to forget. about what we know about modern-day air shows, you know those scripted flying events with the world's. most modern planes erasing in the 1920s and 30s. this was a real sport. with winners and losers enormous crowds and jackpots of money for the victors. you know in this little window of time where my story takes place between 1927 and 1936 air racing was one of the most popular sports in america. it was baseball. was boxing it was horse racing and it was air racing. and it was just definitively also the most dangerous. inevitably pilots flying at a high rate of speed lower the ground. would crash and these pilots would sometimes die. right in front of the grandstands. and i want to make clear that it wasn't just erasing that was considered dangerous or dubious at that time. was it was flying itself? you know. for my book. i i did a ton of research of course and read a lot of news coverage from the 1920s and and in one of these stories it was an expose. in chicago tribune of what they termed wildcat flight schools these were flight schools in the chicago land area in 1927. where one could get a pilot's license in a matter of 90 minutes? and and that summer in chicago the the chicago tribune ran a series of stories about problem this obvious problem. and and there was one line in this story that really jumped out of me and i wanted to share it with you now. said officials feel such schools should furnish one or more coffins with each diploma. i mean, this is 1927. in chicago, this is how people felt about flying. so because of these risks because of these dangers because of the crowds at the air races because of the money involved because of the stakes. many men believe that air racing and indeed flying was no place for a woman. it's sexist of course. and obviously wrong. but at the time at the time women were banned from doing all sorts of things. from waiting tables after 10 pm from working in the factory from working night shifts on the east coast of the united states in the late 1920s women were banned from driving taxicabs in every single major american city. and if you were a married woman. in particular if you were a married teacher school teacher it was even harder for you. if you were a single female teacher in the late 1920s in america right here in virginia, perhaps even right here in fredericksburg. and you had the audacity to decide over the course of that school year to get married. at the end of the year your local school board or superintendent almost always men. would force you to resign from your job at the school? because it was believed by these men that a woman couldn't handle the rigors of teaching our children all day. only to go home to raise her own. so women are denied access to jobs. winner denied basic rights and they were denied other basic things, too. you know in in the late 1920s when my story begins there was a major tragedy in washington dc a theater roof collapsed under a heavy weight of a blizzard snowfall. and it was national news. it was a real calamity many people died. including a young boy and the boy's mother wished to sue the theater company for negligence. a case. she likely would have won. but laws denied her that right. only a father only a father had the right to sue in the wrongful death of a minor child. at that time in this boy's father was already dead. meaning the mother in question had no husband. no child, and no recourse. women hoping to fly planes in the late 1920s faced similar challenges you know in the presidential election of 1928. there were 29 million women. who were eligible to vote 29 million women of voting age? out of that number 29 million fewer than a dozen. fewer than 12 had a pilot's license on file at the us department of commerce, which was the regulating agency at the time the faa of its era. and that really made the few women who did fly planes real renegades true radicals. the kind of radical that's almost hard to imagine today. in september 1933 labor day weekend in chicago one of those women was about to do the most radical thing of all. she was going to race her plane against the men. whipping it around pylons placed in a triangular course around the airfield 50 foot towers. she was 29 years old this woman divorced and afraid of nothing. her plane that day called a gb was so fast as to be known to be dangerous this model of plain. in fact had killed many men before. but she knew what she was doing. she knew how to fly it. and as she reached the home pile on that labor day just at sundown right in front of the grandstand the crowd knew it too. screaming into that pile on a 220 miles an hour roughly 50 or 60 feet off the ground. she banked that plane so hard so perfectly around the tower that it stood up on its wing. just look at that girl the announcer said those were his words. just look at that girl. have you ever seen such a beautiful race? she was trailing the two leaders, but she was in third place. she was right there. and then on the eighth turn at the home pylon a problem. the right wing of her speedy gb began to disintegrate in mid-flight. this wing built out of spruce and linen. again to fall apart and flooded to the like so much confett. and with the wind now whistling through the holes and her wing the woman in the cockpit did exactly as she was supposed to do. she peeled off course away from her fellow competitors and the crowd south toward the city of chicago out over glenview road and lake avenue. she was trying to save the people on the ground and she was struggling to gain altitude to save herself. everyone now at the airfield in chicago was watching her little red plane in the sky knowing one of two things was about to happen. she was going to bail out. from a dangerously low altitude where she was going to crash? either way, it probably wasn't going to end well. that woman's name was florence klingensmith. you see her here pictured with amelia earhart one year earlier in 1932 after florence won the first ever all female speed air race the amelia earhart trophy. you know, you probably haven't heard of florence klingensmith. most people haven't. and when we think about women and aviation in the 1920s and 30s we tend to think about one or two women. bessie coleman the first black female aviator in this country and the only one who died in a plane crash in florida in 1926. or of course amelia earhart and when we think about amelia, we like to think of her all alone. you know alone in that plane over the ocean alone flying into those cultural headwinds. but at the time amelia was flying other women were flying with her. each of them was brave each of them was bold. some of them arguably objectively. we're perhaps more talented in a cockpit than amelia. today we have forgotten almost everything about them. their battles and their losses their friendships and their rivalries what they fought for how hard they fought we have forgotten to that seemingly impossible victory over the men in 1936. you know with this book with with fly girls. you know, i set out to change that. you know reminding readers of this time and these characters. women who stood up for themselves and each other again and again defiant in the face of rules that were intended to keep them in their place. and also confident in the knowledge of who they were. now i want to be very clear here. this is not intended to be a comprehensive history of women and aviation in the 1920s and 30s. the sort of textbook history where each woman gets her own chapter. this is not that kind of book at all. if you wanted to write that kind of textbook history of women in aviation at that time, you need 25 or 30 chapters. my story is really. a narrative about a group of friends amelia earhart and her friends and i'd like to introduce you to them now. ruth elder was 24 years old in the summer of 1927 already on her second marriage in living in lakeland, florida where she was answering phones at a dentist office. it was not the life that ruth that imagined for herself growing up and anniston, alabama. she was obviously a beautiful woman, but she also had an electric personality. certain charisma about her and to be frank. she was bored in the dentist office. and so in the summer of 1927 ruth elder crafted a bold plan. she knew how to fly a plane. and she decided she wanted to be the first woman to ever fly across the atlantic ocean. she was inspired of course by charles lindbergh. that spring may 1927 lindbergh had flown the ocean arriving and is now famous spirit of saint louis on long island at roosevelt field that may and and i want to be clear that lindbergh wasn't really flying exactly for the pioneering spirit of it all. he was flying for a jackpot of money. $25,000 about a quarter of a million dollars in today's money had been put up for the first man and it was believed. it would be a man. who would fly non-stop from new york to paris or paris to new york? many men had tried to win that prize and failed in spectacular fashion before lindbergh arrived in new york that may these men crashed on runways and planes loaded down with too much fuel. they burned up and infernos right there on the airfield. or they disappeared over the ocean never to be found or heard from again. lindberg himself nearly crashed on takeoff and may 1927. it had rained all night. in long island his fellow competitors who were also trying to win this prize decided not to fly that day lindbergh's plain, which was quite small sank into the clay runway as it eased out onto it that morning. they set up a flag about three quarters of the way down and told lindbergh if he wasn't off the ground by the time he reached that flag he needed to abort. lindbergh reached that flag still on the ground and kept going. flying straight into a crowd of about 500 people who inexplicably had gathered at the end of the runway. lindbergh's screaming toward that crowd barely gets off the ground just before he reaches them. he's so low to the ground at that moment that the people who were standing there could see his face through the cockpit glass. and we tell the new york times the next day that this young man was suddenly aged by worry. lindbergh was worried because he was flying directly into a wall of trees. which he narrowly missed. sort of flitting through a open hole in the canopy. and then disappearing into the morning mist not to be heard from again for 33 and a half hours. which is how long it took to fly across the ocean in 1927 in a single engine. i don't think i'm gonna ruin this story for you by telling you lindbergh will make it. he will and when he does he's going to win that $25,000 prize. he's going to win a book deal and all the fame that comes with it. he's gonna fly back to america and then take that spirit of saint louis around the country that summer and fall 92 cities and all a goodwill tour that stretched across america. and it was in this moment. this moment of the post lindbergh afterglow that air fever was born in america. that's what they call it at the time air fever. and it had a surprising side effect, or at least one that male aviation officials had not expected. women now wanted to fly across the ocean and unlike lindberg and the men they were willing to do it for free. ruth elder will leave five months later in this plane right here. in october 1927 it was a red plane bright red. with yellow lettering down the side and a curse of script that you can sort of make out there. the plane was aptly called the american girl. this plane was 32 feet from nose to tail. 46 feet across the wing and obviously a single engine airplane with a top speed of 105 miles an hour. just for reference when you're barreling down the runway at takeoff at reagan these days to take a flight. you're already going 105 miles an hour. and this plane had no radio. no way for ruth elder to contact the outside world. for this flight in october. she would earn headlines on two continents and become by the end of 1927 arguably the most famous woman in the world. before this flight with her co-pilot here, george haldeman ruth elder would also pay a really awful personal price. amelia earhart is a social worker from boston who comes next? you know in our quest to remember earhart or to solve the mystery of how she disappeared we seem to have forgotten almost everything about how she actually lived. and the fact of the matter is in 1927 and 1928 amelia earhart wasn't a famous pilot. she was a licensed pilot. but by her own admission, she wasn't doing much flying anymore. she was working at a settlement house. on tyler street in boston what people in boston now call chinatown? and she was helping new immigrants to this country. learn how to speak english. learn how to get a job. it was here at the settlement house in 1928 six months after ruth elders flight. the connected east coast businessmen would discover her including her future husband george putnam of putnam publishing and they would put amelia earhart on a seaplane sitting in boston harbor flown by men. plane that was going to be going across the atlantic. you know on this first flight amelia had no job but to sit behind the two men who were at the controls and take notes. for a book that she would write for george putnam if they made it if they survived. of course they do. see plane lands safely in the water off the coast of wales. june 1928 by the time they opened the door of that plane and amelia steps out. she's already become one of the most famous women in the world. but to her enduring credit amelia knew that what she had done in that flight was really nothing. as she would say that summer. i was just a sack of potatoes on that plane. i was cargo. and she would spend the rest of what would be a very short life. just nine years in the spotlight. making bold flights in an answer to her critics. it would surprise us to think about it now, but even amelia earhart. had critics ruth nichols was a daughter of wall street wealth born on the upper east side in new york and raised in tony, westchester county. and more than any other woman really, it's ruth nichols who will challenge amelia earhart for the title of most accomplished female aviator in this time in the 1920s and 30. and for ruth, it's it's a it's a journey that really begins when she's just a young girl. not much older really than the students right here on the campus at mary, washington. you know when she graduates from high school in 1918 her parents want her to get married? and they want her to marry well. so that the story of her marriage might appear in the new york times. but the first bold decision that ruth nichols makes for herself is that she's not going to do that. she defies her parents' wishes and instead she goes to college. this is a ruth nichols graduation photograph 1924 at college in massachusetts. school for women that of course still exists today? and it was here at wellesley the root nichols decided not only did she want to choose her own path. not only did she want to live her own life. she wanted to fly planes. and in 1930 she would acquire this plane here. this was a lockheed vega. undeniably the fastest most modern plane of its time. she named it the akita. and had borrowed it from a businessman that some of you may recognize his name was powell crosley the owner of the cincinnati reds. and within a matter of months ruth nichols was flying this plane into the record books. she quickly had the altitude record. the transcontinental speed record the short land speed record and in june 1931 she will attempt to fly this plane right here. over the ocean trying to be the first woman all alone at the controls of an aircraft flying over the atlantic. it's worth pointing out. this is one year a full year before amelia earhart would ever dare to make such a flight. and you know were it not for happenstance and bad luck? the kind of happens dance in bad luck that dogged flyers in these days. ruth nichols might have made it. and if she had it maybe she who we remember today. and not amelia. florence klingensmith who i mentioned before with the daughter of a farmer in northern minnesota raised on a plot of land just across the river from fargo, north dakota. and just like ruth elder in 1927 florence was not satisfied with her lot in life. she wasn't doing anything exciting. she was working at a dry cleaners in downtown fargo starching and pressing shirts. what she really wanted to do was fly planes. but like a lot of us in life, she had no clear and obvious path to her dreams. her parents had no money. no connections in this nascent world of aviation. and so florence did the only thing she could do. she enrolled at mechanic school at what is now modern day hector field the airport and fargo for those of you who have been there. she was one woman at a 400 men learning to build and fix airplane engines. and it was here at hector field that a young florence began to press her case to connected businessmen in fargo. she wanted one of them to help her learn how to fly and help her by her own plane. finally one man relented and he said if you're willing to risk your neck. i'm willing to risk my money. and he gave her $3,000 to buy a plane that florence 2 was quickly flying into the record books. you know she her special skill was air racing. that act of whipping a plane around pylons placed on a course in a city or at an airfield. it was an incredibly difficult thing to do. a skill that would require the use of both your left and your right hand. you're left and your right foot as you work the throttle and the flaps to get yourself around those pylons at a high rate of speed. and and the reason why she was invited to race the men in chicago at labor day 1933 is that she had proven herself to be one of the most talented air racers in america both men or or woman. and and for her flight day in chicago it would really change life for women both in the air and on the ground. and finally, there's louise stadium. you know louise to me is is the rarest kind of flyer in these days. she wasn't just a woman who flew and race planes louise was a mother. she had her first child. a son in 1930 and her second child a daughter in 1933. and at a time when culture and society and indeed many husbands expected their wives to stay home and raise children. louise did a very modern thing. she wanted to have it all. you know, she believed she could juggle her responsibilities at home and her love for her children. with her personal goals and ambitions and it really is only because of the sacrifices that louise made in this little window of time that we wrongly erased her from this picture. and this story so now that i've introduced you to them individually, i want to say a few things about them collectively. and then i'll be happy to take any questions you might have. i want to talk to you about. who they were? what they overcame? and why they still matter today? because they do. you simply cannot overstate. how dominated aviation was by men in particular white men in the 1920s and 30s? planes were built by men for men. these planes were often too large for most women. in fact many of my characters in my book would have to modify the cockpits with padding and pillows just so that they could reach the pedals or the controls. and and when these women flew across the country transcontinental as they all did and stop to refuel in wichita or saint louis or kansas city. they would walk inside these primitive airfield buildings and find. there was only one kind of restroom. it was a men's room. and when the modern air races began in the summer of 1928 the women were not invited to compete. those first air races were put on by this man here. his name was cliff henderson. he was an incredible salesman a car salesman in los angeles. and he decided to stage the first modern national air races that summer in this bean and barley field just south of downtown, la. by the way, we know this bean and barley field today by three letters. that is lax. and you know for these air races cliff anderson wanted amelia earhart to come and louise stayed in to come and the others and indeed amelia and louise were there. but they were not invited to race. they were not invited to compete. indeed the only job for women at those first national air races was to hand out the trophies to the men if they so chose to do that. probably wouldn't surprise you to know that these conditions didn't sit well with the female aviators of this era. in particular these three here, you know amelia earhart and ruth nichols and louise thaden. they were really the triumvirate of this time. and and they quickly realized that they could compete against one another in the sky. they could try to fight one another across the ocean indeed amelia and ruth nichols lied to one another about their transatlantic plans. both of them didn't want the other one to know what they were hoping to do each of them understood that the first woman to cross the ocean and solo in a plane would have that key to the room of immortality. but on the ground they recognized right away that they had to stick together. and indeed they would become good friends. because who could understand ruth nichols better? then amelia earhart. or or louise hayden better than ruth nichols. you know i've often thought about louise. in the early 1930s and what it would have been like to drop your kids off at kindergarten and preschool. how little she would have had in common? with the other mothers there. and so they did become really close. and i found a lot of evidence of that in my research. you know in 1932 amelia of course will fly the atlantic solo and in 1935. she wants to add the match set to that record. she wants to fly the pacific solo flying from honolulu to oakland, california. now this is a flight some of you might have made of course a very common flight today. but at the time flying a single engine plane all alone across that stretch of ocean was very dangerous indeed many men had gone missing over that stretch never to be found again. and aviation officials gave amelia about a 50/50 chance of making it. she does of course, you know and and when she lands at oakland 10,000 people are waiting at the airfield having waited all night not knowing when she might arrive. not knowing, you know her timeline or her itinerary. no one was live tweeting anything at the time. and when she does land amelia receives accolades from around the world. but not from her friend louise stadium. that week louise who's back home in arkansas. writes amelia a letter and and louise had a very specific kind of way of speaking a sort of folksy charm about her. and and spoke with a little of a country twang. and she told a million this letter and i'm quoting here. she said dawn your hide i could spank your pants. someday, you have to tell me why you do things. this in this letter louise goes on to tell her friend amelia that she wished amelia would rest on her laurels. and then very prophetically louise tells her you're worth more alive than dead. this is of course two and a half years before amelia will go missing in another very dangerous ocean flight. and you know the same was true of amelia and ruth nichols. they had a bit more complicated friendship. maybe each of us has had this kind of friendship in our lives. where we understand someone and we appreciate them, but we're also sort of competing against them all the time. that was ruth and amelia. and yet, you know, i found evidence of their closeness, too. that summer 1935 after amelia has flown the pacific ocean. ruth nichols has a terrible crash in upstate, new york. not on an air race. not in anything fantastic just on a flight. kind of like that went down in those days. and in the next day's papers across the country front page news says that ruth nichols is in critical critical condition and might not survive. at that time amelia really is at the peak of her fame. and her husband then george putnam is keeping her out on the speaking trail day after day after day. and when ruth crashes amelia is on the road in, michigan. but she took time away from whatever speaking engagement. she had that day. amelia did and she went down to the western union office and she wrote ruth nichols a telegram. and it's not really. what she says in the telegram, but how she says it. for starters amelia doesn't refer to ruth by her name she calls her by her nickname. she calls her rufus. she says dear rufus. we can't bear to have you on the sidelines for long. get well soon. ae and it clearly meant a lot to ruth nichols. because she saved it her entire life. until i found that telegram in a windowless cinder block storage room filled with old dusty air race trophies at a regional airport in cleveland, ohio where that letter and all of ruth nichols papers had been sitting unnoticed for decades. so they overcome much. they are good friends. and they really will change the world. you know some of you have probably heard of the women's air service pilots. the wasps those 1,000 women who flew airplanes during world war two for the military not in combat, but from factory to basis. the wasps from time to time are in the news these days because the last of them sadly are dying off. were it not for these women here the wasps never come to be? if these women had accepted the rules that were stacked against them. if they had accepted their law in life if they had listened to what the men wanted them to do. there would have been no platform for which the women could have argued to fly in the military during world war two. and i really do believe that every female pilot that comes after really stands on their shoulders. and yet there are still challenges in great deficits today. you know in america today just seven percent of licensed. pilots are women. and when you go to airlines major airlines that number gets even lower it's just 2% in fact, some airlines have even fewer than that. now we could have a long conversation about why that might be. i do think there are many factors at play. but one undeniable factor. is the entrenched discrimination that women faced in aviation? not just in the 20s and 30s? but for the bulk of the 20th century. you know at the time my story takes place the first woman was hired at an airline. to fly as a pilot her name was helen ritchie. she was from mckeesport, pennsylvania. and it did not go well for helen. this airline now defunct was called central air. and and by rule, it's central air. you had to be a union pilot in order to fly. but the all men in that union would not admit her. so helen, ritchie is hired at central air. to do a job. because she's good at doing a job. and then told she can't do that job. and after about 10 months she quit. because she wasn't doing anything. and as a as a journalist and as an author as a historian, you're always asking yourself questions. and one of the questions i had when i learned the story of helen ritchie was when was the next woman hired as a pilot at an airline? and i was stunned to learn that it would be 39 more years. 1973 until women were hired at an airline again. that summer 1973 frontier air hired a woman. it was still a very small regional airline at that time. and american airlines hired this woman. she was 24 years old. and from florida a pilot's daughter. she had been struggling for years to get hired at any kind of flying outfit cargo or passenger. and she had failed. some airlines still in existence today denied her and told her don't bother applying again. we don't hire women. but she persistent. and in the summer of 1973 american airlines hired her to be a pilot and a grand ceremony that august the president of american airlines pinned the wings on the lapel of that jacket right there the first ever airline pilot jacket tailored specifically for a woman. and still she faced adversity. snide remarks from her colleagues insulting remarks from passengers at times in the 1970s when a man would get on a plane and see a woman in the cockpit he would refuse to fly. and instead of removing the male passenger from the plane the airlines sometimes removed the female pilot from the cockpit. and perhaps most surprising at least to me is she faced snide and insulting remarks from the press? the same press that at times had dogged my flyers back in the 1920s and 30s. you know, i mentioned that ceremony that summer where the president of american airlines pin the wings on the lapel of that jacket, you know american airlines made a big deal out of that event as they should have. they invited all the national media to come. and that weekend the los angeles times. the los angeles times one of our most prestigious papers both then and now ran a little feature story about this woman. and it ran under a very unfortunate headline. you know when i was told about this headline. i thought it couldn't be real. it had to be one of those things that had been embellished and exaggerated over time. that's the beautiful thing about microfilm. newspaper microfilm never goes away. and because i knew when the woman had been hired. and because i knew when the ceremony had taken place it took me all of about five minutes to find this headline. it's a headline that's memorable for all the wrong reasons. and you know who remembers it the most? the pilot herself for 20 years she flew at american. rising up the ranks of seniority year after year one pilot by one. until she was flying those coveted ocean routes that ruth nichols and amelia earhart had once long to fly. flying from new york to the bahamas, new york to paris her name is bonnie tiburzi caputo. still alive today? she's the grandmother and a mother in new york city. and i've obviously had the the pleasure and honor of meeting her since this book came out. indeed, you know, i've had the honor of meeting so many bold women and in fact pilots from the ages of nine to 92. and and this book, you know, really still inspires me in many ways. and want to close with a few reasons why? for starters in a sort of a backwards kind of way. fly girls and this story inspired my next book which dr. crowley mentioned is coming out this april. it's called paradise falls. and it has nothing to do with aviation. you know as i came out of the fly girls project one thing that really bothered me. was that some of those women including louise stayed in? lived long lives into the 1970s some of them into the 1980s. and no one had found them. no writer. no author. no journalists attract them down. to talk to them about their days flying in the early moments of aviation. it was really sort of crushing actually. to see that you know, there's a columbia university in new york. there's a very large trove of oral histories. it's an incredible resource for historians academics and others and there is a very large collection of aviation oral histories there. almost none of them were with the women who flew in this time. and and so as i came out of fly girls, i thought to myself. well, what are the stories that are around us right now? you know populated by people who had once done something great and are still with us, but may not be for so much longer and and that brought me in a roundabout way to a story some of you may remember the story of love canal. a chemical landfill in the city of niagara falls around which an entire desirable lower middle-class neighborhood of starter homes have been built in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. this was a desirable place to live at the time. it had a school and a playground right in the heart of it. but as some of you know, the chemicals inside that old canal just underneath that school and playground began to seep out in the late 1970s ultimately alarming people in the neighborhood and leading to fundamental changes in our environmental policy in this country. you know in in this window of time between 1978 and 1980, you know, everything would change about how we thought about our own backyards how we thought about the environment how he thought about the modern chemicals that we used inside our houses. and it's really a story of resistance primarily of ordinary everyday stay-at-home moms or or as they were were called at that time housewives. you know these women who were not act not really active or or radicalized in any way before this began to fight to escape their own homes. and in the matter of two years went from being ignored by the local officials in niagara falls to having the ear of jimmy carter and the white house and the national media. so that book is is coming out in april. i wrote it by the way in the thick of the lockdown pandemic with both of my kids inside my house. so it was of course the thing i've ever done. um and if you want, i'm sure you can pre-order it through the bookstore that's here this evening or through my website through any number of booksellers everywhere. so so fly girls really did in a great way inspire this story. i've also been inspired by the fact that we've adapted the story of fly girls into a young readers book. taking this story condensed its and by about half. and and then i wrote it for kids roughly 8 to 12 years old. and you know when i talk about this people often ask me well. what do you think young girls should take away from fly girls? and my my first answer to that question is i hope it's not just young girls reading it. you know, i hope boys are reading it too. and i see that as the father of boys. you know boys also need to understand that a woman can be just as bold just as brave just as strong as they are if not more so and it's had an incredible impact on kids that i've met, you know through the course of this book, you know kids turning their front sidewalks into chalk art for fly girls kids decorating their books with hearts, you know boys and girls reading it. and and once in the spring of 2019 in those gilded pre-pandemic days. i received an email from a mom in just outside of boston, massachusetts. and she had told me that she had a daughter who was a middle school girl. and her middle school like a lot of middle schools was doing a wax museum. where each child had to dress up as a real character from the past and write some kind of report about him or her. and you know, this is a very common activity at lots of middle schools and elementary schools. and usually there's a list of people that the kids can choose from often categorized by sports or politics or you know revolutionary war and when you get to women in aviation, they usually only offer one woman. amelia earhart but this girl had read my book. and she informed her teachers that she didn't want to dress up as amelia earhart. she wanted to go as ruth nichols. and this mother was reaching out to say do you have any photos or artifacts or letters that you could share with my daughter sarah so that she could do her report? and so of course, i was very excited. i sent her what i could and you know, i asked her when this this wax museum was going to be and she told me the dates. and by total luck i was doing an event that very day at wellesley college. which was a mere 15 minute drive from this girl's school. and so of course i had to i popped in just to say hello to the new ruth nichols. and i really do think about these women. a good bit actually and and always when i fly. and i think a lot about ruth nichols. you'll see here on her her pilots license from 1930. it's signed, of course by orville wright. um, and you know when this book first came out i was in new york for the launch. for the first day and i had a busy day, but that morning was unscheduled. and so i decided to do something that morning that i had never had a chance to do during the actual research for the book. and that is i left my hotel in manhattan. and i got on a train and i went to the bronx to visit ruth nichols grave. she's buried in a place called woodlawn cemetery. which is a massive and important cemetery in new york city. you know if you were of money or a fame in the 19th or 20th centuries and you lived in new york. chances are you're buried at woodlawn? and so i took the train up there and i got off and i went into the to the front office there at woodlawn. because when you do go there you are supposed to check in. and i i told him who was there to see. and they gave me a map and on this map. they're a little icons for all the famous people who are buried at woodlawn. and i looked at it and i quickly realized there was no icon for ruth nichols. so i told him who i was looking for and with the help of the associate there and an app that they had me download onto my phone. we triangulated where she was and off i went on foot on this hot summer morning into the cemetery. and when i got to the place where they told me ruth nichols grave would be it was clearly wrong. i couldn't find her. so using the app and the map i i sort of had to start over and walk 15 minutes in a different direction. and finally, i did find her grave. you know at woodlawn there are ornate tombs and mausoleums built by people who wanted us to know. they were important. but when i got to ruth nichols grave, it was just a simple tombstone. weighs high the kind of stone that maybe one day we might be buried under. and and there were just a few words on it. it had her date of birth. her date of death and then down there at the bottom. there was just three words. it said beloved by all. and it and it really stopped me. because she was beloved by all. and they were all the love by all. and i do hope that they will be again. and i want to thank you so much for listening to me tonight. thank you for your attention. thank you for coming out into the real world. i'd be happy to take any questions you all might have. like thank you keith. so we'll take some questions from the audience if you have some i feel raise your hand kelly will seek you out and guess who has a question if it's not bill mock. now one of our regular bill good see you back. all the rest of you as well bill. my question has to do with how the women aviators received support you entity. you had you had five over there 10 of them there. you said one lady? wanted to fly. and so she goes to this man who had money he gave her money by the airplane. so is that the way it worked for all the others did all the other women do that? go that to go to rich man to get money to do that and my question apart second part. what if they had been 24 or 36 or 48 women who wanted to fly would they have been able to receive support? so yeah. i mean almost everybody men and women who wanted to fly in the 1920s and 30s received support of some kind. remember, this is the great depression people couldn't just go down the street typically and and buy a plane some men built their planes themselves. in fact some of the great air racers of that time actually built their planes in their garage and then would fly them at 250 miles an hour. it was really the sort of the the wild west of aviation. and so yes every woman during this early time received some kind of support, you know, amelia received a ton of support. and starters from her husband george putnam, but also from many different investors who helped her by planes over the years louise thaden got her first break selling planes for for a man in in kansas by the name of beach beach craft and and every plane that she ever flew in the air races was a beach made plane. and so yes, they all did receive some kind of support but really it was it's not all that different from a nascar driver today receiving support from his or her sponsors. it was just like it'd be incredibly difficult to purchase and have your own nascar vehicle. it was incredibly difficult and expensive to have your own airplane in 1932. well, there were i mean, like i said there were so in 1928 as i said, there were fewer than a dozen license pilots, but by the end of the 1930s, there were about a hundred and seventeen. sorry end of 1920s by 1930 with about 117 women. who were licensed in this country and at the end of that year december 1929? these women in my book many of them louise and emilia included met on long island to discuss should they form some kind of group some kind of advocacy group for these 117 women. and they sent out letters to every single one of them across the country. and they received responses of yes from 99 of them. so they dubbed themselves the 99s and that organization for female flyers is still in existence today. other questions kelly back i was intrigued by your talking about finding the archive of one of the flyers in a small museum in ohio. so when you decide to write this book, did you have the five in mind at the beginning or did you say i want to write about female aviators in the early history of aviation and through your research find hey, these are the five that i was able to research and and get good information about so, how does the information versus the topic? play out as you write the book. so i actually discovered this story in a very accidental way. in the spring of 2016 i was flying from from boston to pittsburgh for a story i was doing at the time for political magazine about the unlikely possibility of donald trump carrying the state of pennsylvania that fall and for the flight, i grabbed a book that had been sitting on my bedside stand for some time, which is where my to be read pile typically piles up and this is a book some of you may have heard of it's called the astronaut wives club by lily koppel. it's it's a nonfiction narrative of the wives of the mercury 7 astronauts. so john glenn's wife alan shepard's wife and you know. one of my favorite books of all time is tom wolfe's the right stuff, which is of course that seminal work about the mercury 7. and so i wanted to read lily koppel's book to see how she had done it, which is actually a thing that authors do i wanted to see how she had taken this story which we all know. and and flipped it around in reverse and told the sort of from the opposite perspective. and so i'm reading this book very closely on the plane. and i'm very early in the book and it mentioned that one of the wives was a private pilot. who had longed fly in an all-female airplane race that had started in the 1920s 1920s and had once featured amelia earhart. and that's the line that just stopped me. because like most of you i had never heard of air racing. i had never heard of in all female air race. i'd never heard of amelia racing anything. i only knew that story that most of us knew she flew across the ocean. she was the first one to do it. and so because it was 2016 i was able to open my computer get wi-fi off the plane and google it instantly. and i don't know what happens when you do that now, but in 2016 when you googled this race all i really found was a wikipedia page and it just listed the 20 women who had competed in that race. and as i glanced at the list, i quickly realized that i only knew two of the names. i knew amelia earhart, of course, and i knew a pilot by the name of pancho barnes. because as some of you might remember poncho is actually a character in the right stuff. she owns the bar by the late 1950s where the the fly boys the neil armstrongs would go and have drinks after they flew planes out there in the desert. and so, you know by the time i landed in pittsburgh, i knew there was something here, but i didn't really know much and for a little while. i i researched it on the internet and after a short time i started going to the library. i live in new hampshire in a university town. where at least back in those times the library was open until about 3:00 in the morning. and so after my kids would go to sleep. i would leave home and drive two miles and i would go to the library and i would live in the microfilm from august 1929. and you know. what i'm looking for a book idea or even a story idea. i'm looking for a few things i'm looking for. an interesting world i'm looking for characters. you can root for and root against and then i'm looking for some kind of arc some kind of journey. and it became pretty apparent to me even from those early nights in the library. that there was an interesting world here. and at that point it was just incumbent upon me to figure out who were those key characters who who did drive the story forward. and what was that ark and that did take a bit more time. but i i do remember specifically being in the library in the middle of the night. no students there. just me at the microfilm machine. and i remember stumbling on to that story of florence klingensmith in chicago. and i didn't find the exact news story for at first i found references to it, and i had to sort of figure out what had happened and go find what had happened and when i when i found that story of florence in chicago and what happened that day and the ramifications of it. i iii new what i had and i could really see that story at that moment, but it did take a few months. is that kelly is another question back there? because there's one day in front. go ahead. thank you. it was. interesting. i have really two questions one is did any of them have to leave their families their sacrifice their families for their their vision and their spouses must have been pretty special back then to. support them because it was probably against whatever was going on back then. you hit on something pretty important here. interestingly and maybe perhaps not surprisingly based on you know, what we discussed here tonight many of these women never married. and those that did like amelia did not have children. and i think it's plain to me that. these women would have been very intimidating. to a man in the early 1930s you know, they could fly a plane. they could fly a 225 miles an hour in a plane low to the ground. they could fly over the ocean. that would have been very intimidating to most men. now louise did marry and and and and her husband was named herb thaden, and he was a plain builder not not really a pilot. although he fly he built planes. and i do think herb is is a very interesting character because clearly he was was very modern even allowing his wife louise to race in 1936 with two children under the age of six right there in their house in arkansas. but but a lot of them never married and you know, i did wonder about that in particular with with ruth nichols, but it was only after i i sort of stumbled on to her her papers that i realized that she had actually longed to get married for years and simply could not find a man. hi. hi wonderful. thank you so much a friend of mine gave me your book about a year ago knowing that i was doing research on my mom. she got her pilots license in 1937. we're from chicago. she went from chicago to new york city and became a buyer which back then for a woman to do that was amazing. she got her pilots license at flushing meadows. he was a dollar sixty i have her whole fight flight love is a dollar sixty a lesson. when she's so loaded made it sounded like it was no big deal and we know it was right she flew for so long and my question is she met my dad she prior to meeting my dad she interviewed with jacqueline cochran's all female pilots. she was accepted to that. she started with them and then decided she really wanted. overseas because jacqueline cochran's strictly on the us flying the men around from base to base. my question is all these women came from all different parts. mom came from chicago and i never understood what in nor did i ask until it was too late to say what is it that drove you gave you the backbone? gave you the nerve to go and get your pilot's license. and be able to do things like we have said men certainly held women back back then. and yet she kept all mom could say is because i wanted to and so each of these women set their being from all over the united states. where did they get the word barnstorming in all these places? what was it that drove these women to have that love of the air? so, you know early on in my in my research before i had. really gone deep down the rabbit hole and before i'd ever really written a word. but after i knew i was going to do this book, i did try to answer that question for myself. what what did unite them because clearly demographics wasn't it? right? i mean ruth nichols comes from money florence klingensmith is a farmer's daughter, you know, you know amelia's comes from a broken home with an alcoholic father, you know, everything everybody had different kind of upbringing but there were a couple of key things that i think are important. the first is interestingly. in each of these women's cases their fathers supported them in this endeavor from a young age. indeed. it was often their fathers who had bought them their first flight, you know a $5 flight at a state fair or a beach on a saturday or or paid for their first flight lesson. so they had their fathers support. but i think more importantly and i think more telling for for parents and for me as a parent and for all of us as a parent today is from a young age and i mean from the time. these women were little girls. first grade second grade they knew at their core that they were different. you know amelia wanted to wear her hair short. which was not allowed in her house. and not really acceptable in society in the early 1920s. and so she would sort of sneak it by cutting off her hair one inch at a time. um, you know louise is mother was proper southern woman? and she wanted to dress louis up and in frilly white dresses and indeed. there are some photographs of louise as a young girl in these kind of dresses with a pearl necklace the kind of photo that you would have paid good money for around 1914. um, but louise wanted to wear overalls and she liked to get dirty and often when she left her house as a young girl in the dress that her mother had told her to wear. she would go to the barn behind her house change into the clothes that she had left there and then run off to play. so you know for me as a parent now, i just sort of think about my own kids and and kids in general and and look at them a little bit differently because these women didn't know when they were seven or eight or nine or ten years old that they wanted to fly planes exactly, but they did know they were different. they did know they were unlike the girls sitting next to them in school. and that was something that really drove them their whole lives. well before the final. thank you to keith for this riveting presentation in other word of thanks to our sponsor tonight chancellor's village, but for now many thanks again to o'brien and good night to everyone from great lives. thank you. thank you. now