Company. As a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Welcome everybody, i am the dean at the Journalism School and im very pleased to welcome you to tonights conversation with the 2020 prizewinners, i am sorry we are conducting this conversation virtually rather than in the room at columbia, i hope her back together again next year and the way we annually celebrate these wonderful awards in the memory of one of the great nonfiction narrative writers of any generation, certainly a great influence on the generation of writers that i grew up around. And probably among the folks who are being honored tonight. What were going to do tonight is try to concentrate on the substance rather than the ceremony since zoom is not a capacious place to exchange awards and the like so we will have a series of conversations with our four winners and then walk us through that, when we are done we will take your questions in chat and we will try to wrap up in an hour using the zoom best practice of not leaving you in front of your computer screen for too long of time especially this time of day. As we get started, those of you who may be new to the awards and to the legacy that they honor, we have a short video about the lucas prizes. People talk about they almost always talk about the process of writing, sitting there by the keyboard and writing it down, its in many respects not the most important because the most important part is the report. You been an incredibly diligent reporter but the devotion it was detailed and serious but also and entertaining as well. He had a set of ideas about nonfiction writing and what he really hoped for is he would be an elevation of Nonfiction Book writing to the level of literature. He cared so much and you really cared so much about other people support in this area, and he said i want to do something and Carry Forward the way he carried sebastian. He won this award and have the power and on and on, we think of them as a lead group of american authors who inspired the volume you see. Its a history pride and none of us will be possible without the support. As we talk about what narrative nonfiction, there is an idea of not just this one award. What got the award it allowed me to die even more deeply and take more time, it was also the institutional legitimacy especially for firsttime author, and gave me confidence. The prizes so meaningful, this kind of work, narrative nonfiction with serious and incredibly entertaining is exactly what i wanted to do when i grew up. Tony lucas did in his words, many of our winners do daily, they land storytime with a social conscience. An idea was to hold tony and his work for authors and if you look at the two decades now, i think you can say its kind of an mp on of excellence. Welcome back everybody, you can see why we are so proud at columbia to be the stewards of these prices and i want to think the justice and the Board Members who participated this year in renewing this commitment to the work that tony left us and also to think the past winners for being with us tonight and we look forward to hearing from some of you and what was mentioned in the film, we have a great family for their support of this institution as its become, now let me introduce the four winners that we will speak with tonight and that we are honoring here together. First alex is the lukas prize winter this year for an american summer, life and death in chicago, welcome alex. Hi steve, thank you for having me. Good to see you in chicago. The lukas prize that were celebrating carries a 10000, he is the author there are no children here and several other books including this which has a relationship by family tree with no children here and he works at the times magazine, the new yorker and adapted for this American Life which he also authored and hes a resident at northwestern university. Carrie is the winner of the history prize, also carries the 10000 honorarium and shes being honored for her book black radical, the life and times of William Trotter and carrie has been filmed by zoom glitches but if she is here i welcome her, carrie are you here . There you are. She teaches in tough colonialism where shes the director of the program in american studies and also the codirector of the africanamerican object. She is from massachusetts and we will try to fix her microphone. Now we turn to the two winners of the works in progress award that they talked about so well in the video, its really a distinctive institution of american nonfiction and journalism, 25000dollar prize for two works in progress each year and this years winners are shot on, for his book, american callous, the true story of americas first homegrown is ohmic terror attack, welcome. Thank you and hes a journalist and professor of journalism at the university of Richmond Virginia and he previously worked as a reporter to Christian Science monitor and a grant scholar in india where he researched political slump and then our second work in progress a winner tonight is by elmore for his forthcoming book on the past and future approved. Welcome. Thank you a pleasure to be here. Nice to see you in ohio, bart is an associate professor in a core faculty member of ohio state sustainability and the class of 2017 National American foundation, his first book was fitness and cope as an cocacola, the making of cocacola capitalism and the examined Environmental Impact worldwide operation. So i will try to hold myself to about ten minutes or less with each of the four winners starting with the two work in progress winners and then as we wind down with about 15 minutes to the hour we will welcome your questions and i will try to pass those around to her guests. So let me start with you, your book is about one of the big subjects in American Environmental debate in the global debate can medically have a good thing in a dangerous thing and how impactful they are, i was struck and the reason i understood is the view and the risks and the impacts of dfm that you find that monsanto has not delivered on their promise that genetically engineered seeds have not advanced agricultural productivity to the degree forecasted or promised, can you say a little bit more about the finding in your work. Absolutely, i want to say thanks to the Prize Committee as well, such a crazy moment when were all here on zoom and these prices go along way to help us out to finishing the project. I just want to say thank you so much. I should say when i started this, i really did not think it was not the gmos that first drew me in. When i started it, i was writing the caffeine chapter on cocacola, trying to figure out cocacola got its caffeine from and it turned out monsanto was the supplier. Weirdly they had exchanges around the world in a recycling system. I got hooked on that and i ended up going in finding their archives at Washington University and i just dove into the story. And to your point, i did not know what would be the most interesting finding, being at ohio state is a tremendous Agricultural Institution with top lead scientist, i became fascinated with the questions of what do we actually know that were 20 years or more than 20 years from the first introduction and resistant and herbicide tolerant genetically engineered, really to your point, what stuck in stood out the data on young and 20 years ago that we need these things to feed the yield of these genetically engineered perhaps it would be so much more than what we had before, we have to accept all the other cost and everything else, that did not end up being so. I ended up interviewing the top scientist for the National Academy of Sciences Study at North Carolina state and asked him, am i reading this right, the yield data seems to be the same when we look at conventional and he said yep, that is what were seen, for me that is a really important thing to be discussing. Everything about the future of food, i think historians, what i do, we can weigh in on this, we now have 20 plus years of data and questions about whether the promise of productivity is only true. So not an impressive result, very dramatic effect nonethele nonetheless, you right among santos in this Enterprises Re shaping global ecosystem how has a habit of the 20 years do you have a net assessment as this radical altering and monstrously damaging or beneficial or is it just change and difficult to describe in those terms. One of the most interesting, went to vietnam in the same company that produced h r, we have Chemical Data as well, if you look at volume, production, monsanto produced more and what was interesting there, here is a company that is coming into vietnam selling the seeds of life, interestingly quorum and if you think about the cuisines but you know that location was really interesting, how did something overcome that pass, down the street from the headquarters where i walked in unannounced in a museum that talks about month santos in their impact on the environment, that was an interesting story but i point to brazil when i think about the global impact, one of the big issues right now is a herbicide which is just emerged in the last several years as a way of dealing with roundup resistant weeds, we sprayed so much roundup which is an herbicide that month santos sold since the 1970s that we became resistant to it, so to deal with this, monsanto now in german own company is selling the stack genetically engineered seeds that have both resistance to roundup and resistance to die camera. The problem with that is very volatile. Particularly in hot climates and one of the things that weve seen in the United States is that zicam but has drifted, when you spray the herbicide is volatile and jumps in the air and will spread on to other farms, if you dont have zicam but engineered seeds, your farm gets hit and theres court cases ive sat in and on the United States were farmers are limited about this and been affected by this. When i went to brazil, this scared the heck out of the people there, the farmers i talked to, the wheat scientist in brazil because they were just approving the zicam boa system and if you think about hot climate in the sonata, its tropical environment, the side campus bread in the way that that will force to farmers who dont want to get genetically engineered seeds, it is a really concerning problem for the future, we are talking a lot about roundup, but i think zicam a is the next big story. Thank you, theres so much more here but with an eye on that i will move, i think reading your excerpts in your book proposals is a reminder of what the decade of the 1970s were starting with kent state and indian with events of one bombing after another, this was in a enormous crisis as you point out, i dont remember what was in your proposal but what you would explain to people of what the book was about, they would often say i think first we need to ask you to please remind us what it was exactly as simply as possible, when it happened, where did happen will happen. In three days in march 1977, march 9 through 11, about 40 hours in total with three locations in washington, d. C. Were taken by three armand and all from the same group and they took about a hundred 50 hostages in three locations, we have three locations which is en rhode island avenue in massachusetts avenue. In the district building right across the street from the white house. And they all came from this group who were headquartered in washington, d. C. And under the leadership of this man. For three days straight, it was a completely dominating Network Evening news and it was on the front page of the newspapers across every small town newspaper, big city news paper across the world this was Headline News for three days. And it ended after three days after three local ambassadors decided to enter the neighbors with a hostage leader was and try to negotiate and so the kinds of events if they were to happen today, there is no way i can imagine we would forget about this, considering the elements, there was something about that. , there is a lot happening and what it meant to americans how to the hostagetaking for the sake of our audience. Spoiler alert. It was a deadly event, there were casualties but in the end the ambassador was able to talk, they had a facetoface meeting in the presence of unarmed Police Officers and they were able to convince Office Leader to let all the hostages go to let the hostage leader walked out and he slept in bed that night and that is the third act of the book. Thinking of the kind of narrative, nonfiction that he honors, here you have a tight event that is right for narration with detail and character and setting but in some distance in the past, you need rich sourcing, how did you discover materials or the survivors who could really bring the story beyond the yellow newspaper clipping to a different level of reader experience. I am very lucky to caught this at the moment i did. Because im now 40 years old and a lot of people are around, every kind of moment of the story of the 40 hours there were moments in the negotiating room in the Police Command center, the hostage places where they were being kept hostage, every location ive been able to find people who witnessed it firsthand. And people in their 70s and 80s and some in their 90s, one of the local ambassadors survived, there are three and one of them in the ambassador to the you knighted states listen in switzerland where i was able to meet. Ive been able to find people in a lot of the hostages, but really relying on memory of an event would not have been enou enough, ive been really lucky with his resources and satisfying and as a reporter to be able to get the evidence from Washington Metropolitan Police department and fbi was my main character for over 25 years so ive been able to get those but it took a while. But there was an extent in cases after it all ended in a narrative perspective of somebody crating the narrative of being able to use these an interview with sources but also have really good rich archival material and material to rely on. I could go on as with bart but i want to welcome terry into the conversation, are you with us. Can you hear me . I can. You found a solution. It looks ingenious. It is, i apologize, historian technology is not my strong although i been teaching on zoom for the last couple of weeks, congratulations to you. We have dozens of folks in students and others listening in and i was grateful for the opportunity to read about the life about charter and i must confess that i really did not know much about, i first knew about the time that we lived in but the centrality of the trajectory that he had on the spectrum but the action and response of jim crow was absolutely fascinating and to think hardly because he came from boston but the ideology that he wrestled with and expressed, if its not too difficult, introduce us to why you are drawn with him as a biographical subject and what about his project tree flew the 21st years of the last century and you thought needed to be eliminated at this link and scale and it was neglected in our received history. I approached his life from the perspective that boston, new england in areas outside of the postreconstruction south are often ignored when we have conversations about our political and racial history. And particularly this motion that a place like boston is often is cut in a time. In the civil war and abolitionist in douglas in such in the civil war and not a lot between the civil war in the 1970s and the idea that we have, ive been wanting to get into what was happening in a place that we often dont think of of having number one original footprint outside of evolution in 20th century civil rights and what does it look like when you have somebody like trotter who is arguing for pretty radical notions at a time when historically they would say that that came later. I grew up hearing about trotter for my grandparents who were activists when i went to graduate school and received my doctorate, i went in to do research on him and i would often frustrated that my advis advisor, there was a notion that you could not do a history of black people outside the south between 1865 and 1930s. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. This is a test and with that trajectory and those politics challenges that. You mentioned the black press and those vehicles across this time like the guardian can you tell us about that newspaper and its place in the discourse and the arguments and intellectuals of that. Because you were not a street on a shrinking violet with booker t and the guardian that he used powerfully. And then to be again at that time. And that was by the interest in particular we advocate and also the notion that the press should be away only to highlight africanamerican achievement and not the Economic Issues but something africanamericans followed reconstruction as i argue in the book, it became a vehicle for africanamerican people most of whom i found in my research were not involved in the booker t. Washington washington debate the academic debate those that are living in new york or chicago thats what the people that is talking about in the newspapers a great way to look how it is how this black consciousness is created in the format that was dominated by the interest and political debate. So the newspaper i said something in the introduction and then the 20th century with the power of newspapers and independent for political activism and consciousness who previously were considered disenfranchised and to mobilize that the end of the reconstruction and they could exercise dual activism. The question that you use naturally phrases like conservative and radical so in the context of boston and new york in that period, how would you describe the ideology and context . A radical in the fact of tradition of africanamerican people and how they look at themselves with slavery so with that tradition of somebody who fundamentally believe that africanamerican people should decide based on their own needs and desires and it should not be dictated by people who call themselves race men or women and that for africanamerica