Subject, but i know perfectly well that if they did not have tests or papers, if they were not held accountable, none of the seats would be empty. None of you have to be here, but you did come, so i find that very flattering. I could, i suppose, give you a test at the end. The title of my talk, which i forgot until jamie just mentioned it is the unknown aaron burr. I will read a bit about my book about aaron burr. The title of my book is called the heartbreak of aaron burr. Whole story you the without giving away the ending. I dont want to give away the ending because its not just that i want you to buy the book and read the book and enjoy it and hang around till the end, but it has to do with the reason i wrote the book in the first place. This goes back to my experience of writing, my experience of reading and in particular, my experience of listening to a question that my mother has been for the last 23 or 24 years. The question i will get to in a moment, but it goes to the heart of why people write and why people read. Theach history at university of texas and i teach writing. I teach writing to graduate students. The graduate students in my writing seminar also completed a couple days ago come from history. They come from communications, journalism. They come from the english department. They come from fine arts. They are students. They are apprentice writers. And they are working on developing their craft, their skill, their art in various genres. Some of them, that historians are going to write nonfiction. Journalists are going to write nonfiction of a somewhat different view. But i also had novelists. I have poets, playwrights and screenwriters. And they are sharing to accomplish Something Else. Except one of the things we talk about his what we are all trying to accomplish. This gets to the question of why people write and why people read. I could put the question to you. Youre all readers, i assume. You probably would not come to an event like this if you did not read. I could ask you, why do you read . In fact take that question and , hold onto it because there will be a questionandanswer time at the end. And typically the questions come from the audience. The answers are supposed to come from the speaker but we can turn , it around. If you care to volunteer why you read later, id be happy to hear what it is. But i will tell you what kind of reactions ive gotten over the years when i pose this question to various audiences including my students and including my mother. I had time waiting for the lecture, i was talking to my mom who is in oregon, and i am pleased to say, she is doing very well. She is 86 years old. Thank you. I will tell you that i couple of you applauded. Is that for the fact that she reached 86 years old, still in good health, still interested in my writing . All of the above. Anyway, about 15 years ago, i was teaching in undergraduate history seminar. It was for seniors, history majors. It turned out that the 15 students in the class were all history majors, but half of them are english majors as well. They redouble agers. And it just so happened that that is the way it fell out. The students were reading various great works of history but the particular genre that i , chose for that semester was great biographies, including autobiographies. So, they read selections from boswells life of johnson and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and the confessions of Saint Augustine and julius caesars commentaries on the war. One work that particularly caught their attention was the autobiography of benvenuto cellini. How many of you have read it . You should all read it. Its fantastic. The thing that makes this so interesting is that it is a work of supreme egotism. Cellini is convinced that he was the greatest artist that god ever put on the earth and it comes through on every page. But he tells the story in a charming enough fashion that you are not really put off by this. You are willing so i have the to go so i have the along with it. Students read a selection where cellini is creating one of his masterworks and he becomes very frustrated with the technicians. Mold, cast the original and now it is left to the technicians to melt the bronze and pour it in. Its a very complicated mold with a statue of hercules with the head of medusa in his hand. It is really complicated, because it has to go from the heel all the way to the tip of his arm, through the snakes coils and everything. He chose this wonderful story about he is on his deathbed. The technicians cant get enough fire gang get the fire hall enough, so they start airing the panels off the walls and throwing that in. His fever is raging while the fire is burning and they pour it in, and he collapses on the floor. He wakes up four days later not knowing if he is dead or alive and he realizes he is alive and it occurs to him, how did it turn out . They knock the mold off and it is this really an masterpiece. The end of the story is, no one could have done it but me. The students dont know quite what to make of this. So i asked the students, you know, any time there is a work presented to you as being true, you have to ask yourself whether it is in something you read or something you encounter in daily life or some political speech that a candidate gives, do you believe them . You dont have to take things at face value. Do you believe this story . I asked them, how would you corroborate a story like this or any story . I mentioned to the students that any time you encounter anything, you need to ask, is it true . This is especially true these days, when my students get so much of their information off the internet. It has always been an issue when you pick up a book out of the library. Just because it is in the book do you believe that . , i will tell you that one of the lessons my students learn and this is a very good lesson for them is, after a while, come into the class and think im just their teacher. Eventually some of them catch on that i have written some books, and, it is an interesting lesson for them to realize that the person who is standing in front of them because most of them havent confronted an author before that i say stuff and im the guy who wrote this stuff in the book and they recognize when im talking i try to get it all as accurate as i can, but ordinary people, you try to get things right, but some of the stuff you get wrong. They realize its an ordinary person who wrote this book. Now i will tell you that some of them are mildly impressed when they discover ive written a book or one book or another. But really gets street credibility of my students is when they see me on tv because all of a sudden hes somebody. Anyway, the students all agree that this is a fascinating story and they say, great story, great drama, great characterization on and all this. It occurred to me at that point to ask a question that had never occurred to me to ask before because i thought i knew the , answer. I said, suppose you had read this story suppose id erased the name name of the author. Suppose i hadnt told you whether this was a true story or a fictional account, whether this was something that actually happened, or something that Somebody Just ate up. You didnt know this. You just read the story and you all agreed, great story, great story. Now, suppose after having read the story, i presented you with one additional piece of information. The additional piece of information was you know what, that great story you read actually happened. Its a true story. What would that do to your evaluation of the story . Would it make it a better story or no different . Well, i was flabbergasted by the response, and i was flabbergasted by the response because i didnt give the third alternative, which hadnt even occurred to me to ask them. The third alternative is that it makes it a worse story to know that it was true. Now, i guess i hadnt really confronted the degree to which i am a nonfiction kind of person. It seemed to me if you go to a , movie and its a great story based on a true story, that seems to be a marketing pitch. The Marketing Department thinks that makes it better because , they certainly advertise it. Well, of this group, when asked the question, how many of you think that it would make it a better story . About half of the students raised their hands. I was surprised it was only half. Was i think seven out of 15. Then, of the other eight, i think five of them said no different. A good story is a good story. But then three of them were the ones who really amazed me by saying, it made it worse. And i was trying to figure out why in the world how in the world it could be worse. And i thought about this for a long time. I will tell you the answer that i came up with because the answer that i came up with is related to the question that my mother has been posing to me how to me all these years. I mentioned that i teach writing and one of the things that i convey to my students, my apprentice writers is that above all, writing is an act of communication. If you are going to communicate effectively with your readers, you have to have some idea who your readers are. What expectations they have, what knowledge they bring to the subject. Unless you have a reader in mind, you cannot hope to convey whatever youre trying to convey effectively. So every reader excuse me every writer has to have a model , reader. You know, the reader in the back of your mind, that sits on your shoulder the reader you are , imagining is going to read your stuff. So youll know, is this too much information, too little information, is the reading level about right . It is quite different if you are writing for young adults or which are adults. Anyway, so for years and years i had the very good fortune to have the best possible model reader, namely, my father. And when i say the best possible model reader the first couple of books i wrote were written for the purposes of getting a job at the university and getting tenure. So the audience there was the academic community, the specialists who wanted to know that this is cuttingedge in a particular sub discipline i was writing in. After i accomplish that i , decided i wanted to reach out to a larger audience. An audience very much a suppose like you, people who are not probably specialists in history, people who have a general interest in the world, who, some who come with some experience, who come with some background in reading, but just want to know more about their world. My father fit this category very well. He was a selfemployed businessman. He had run a business for his entire working life. But then he retired and in his retirement he started reading more than he had. While he was working, he rarely read books. He read the wall street journal. He read fortune magazine. He read business staff. He had a cutlery business. He read iron age. I grew up reading iron age. An interesting magazine. I dont know if it still exists. But in his retirement he wanted to read he liked to read history. He liked to read biography. He liked to read the kinds of books i was writing. He read every book that i wrote. I know this because he would offer his critique of my books. And he was pretty candid. When he liked something, he would say billy, you did a good , job on that one. When he did not like it, he would say billy, not your best. , i learned my fathers standards from watching him eat meals that my mother would cook for him. A traditional relationship. My father died four years ago. For the entire sixty years of their marriage, my mother would cook breakfast for my father and dinner for my father. She refused to cook lunch for my father. He was expected to be working and find his own lunch. She put it, i married your father for better or for worse but not for lunch. Upon my fathers death, my mother announced that she was retiring from cooking and she has not cooked ever since. She eats out. Anyway, my father would read my books excuse me, and he showed me how to deal with their meals that he wasnt particularly fond of. He was very diplomatic about this. If my mother liked made something that he liked, he would say, that is wonderful. If she tried something new that didnt work out so well, he just wouldnt say anything and my mom understood from that means ok, no comment means dont do it again. It worked out very well. Anyway, my father was more forthcoming with me. He would tell me, the first three chapters are ok, but it bogs down after that. My father read every book i wrote. My mother tried to read each book that i wrote. She says that she finished two of them. One was on Benjamin Franklin. The other one was on California Gold rush. Now, im not really sure she finished those, but as a dutiful son, far be it for me to cast aspersions on my mother. She says she did, she did. But it was very clear that getting through a work of nonfiction was a task for my mother. She read out of some sense of duty to me. And every time after i wrote it after i wrote a book, she used to say she had it by her bedside and she would pick it up and read a few pages and it put her right to sleep. Well, anyway after each such she gave upnd after trying to finish it, she would say, bill when are you going to , write a novel . I tried to ask going, mom, i like good stories. I write history, because i think historys stories are theres stuff that happens that you just couldnt make up. Her reaction to that made me realize that was the point. , the point of novels is quite different in one basic way. I am going to contend that in a more basic way it is the same, but it is quite different from the writing of history, and this gets i would ask my mom, so what is it about novels that she that you like that makes them preferable to history . And she said, well, one of the things i like is that i get inside the heads of the characters in a way that i dont when i read works of history. And i had to grant that that is generally true, because if you adhere to the typical standards of history, where we dont get to make stuff up, we cannot motives, ideas, to our characters, unless somehow, we can get them to say it. Unless they write it down. We cant just out of the blue say that on the morning of july 4, 1863, Abraham Lincoln woke up in a fine mood unless he told , somebody who wrote it down or wrote a letter. When you write novels, thats exactly what you do. But i said, mom, i have been working my way around that problem by writing biographies. Because with biographies, they are all about character. And i do get inside the heads of my subjects because they do tell me what they are thinking. They write letters. They write diaries. She says okay, yeah, but theres Something Else that i like about novels. And that is, there is a romantic interest in novels. We can find out about the love lives of our characters. And i said yeah, that is true, too. But, with certain works of nonfiction, with certain biographies, you do get right to the heart of the matter. Well, not entirely, because once again, we are constrained by what our characters say, what they write down. And here is where the paths start to part, and i would ask you, do you write down your deepest thoughts . Do you write down your candid emotions . Some of you do, but i would bet that most of you dont. And even those of you who do, probably dont do it in a form thats going to survive 100 years, so historians coming along in the next century can have access to it. So, it is indeed true that it is hard to write about the love lives of our characters in a nonfiction form without injecting our way into their lives in a way that history writers do not get to. In the lasto this biography which i wrote which , was about franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. In fact, a very large part of the story is about the relationship between the two. A complicated relationship. A relationship that involved all sorts of things, besides and in addition to love. One that was fascinating, but one, again, i dont think you could make this up. This gets to the heart of the difference between novels and nonfiction. And here i will throw in the category of movies. Movies that are not documentaries. And that is precisely this, that the whole idea of of a novel is to pull the world together in a way that makes sense, in a way that has a particular story, that has a form. Novels are not just any old thing written down on the page. Novels have characters they , typically have a protagonist. Novels have conflict. There is usually an ascending arc of the conflict and the drama, and here is the critical thing novels, like most movies, have a resolution of the conflict. At the end of the book, at the end of the two hours of the movie you know how it turned , out. Now, nearly everybody who reads novels recognizes that that is not exactly the way the world is. The world isnt quite so tidy. The world is much messier than that. And i am going to throw out some thing to you and you can agree , with that or disagree with it. If you disagree vehemently, say questions and of we will talk about it some more. But i would suggest that people who im going to get pretty inflammatory in the moment. The people who prefer novels to to history are people who like their stories tidied up. They like stories to come to some kind of conclusion. It doesnt have to be a happy ending, but it has to be an ending, whereas, most history doesnt really have an end. Life does not conclusions. We strive for closure. But most of the time we dont get it. Life just kind of goes on and you go to the next thing. Well, that is part of what my mom admitted to. But what she really said i said mom, how about historical novels . How about the novels that are connected to history . She liked those okay. But she said the best novels i like are the ones that just dont have any connection to reality at all. I scratched my head over that until she said, i get enough reality in my daily life. The whole reason i read books and the whole reason i go to movies is to turn off the real world for a while and go someplace that is not at all connected to the real world. And it was this that finally made me realize what those students in my seminar were talking about when they said it made it worse to know that it is true because they really wanted a separation between their stories, their entertainment and the world. Now, thats not really fair to the students to say their entertainment as though merely entertainment, because of course , people have been justifying for years, for centuries, although well, i write in undergraduate writing seminar. The students read great works of history from herodotus to the present. One of the things they discover some of you already know this that novels were invented until 400 years ago. And before then, there was this there was not this distinction between what really happened and what was clearly made up. Anyway, so ive been thinking about this distinction between novels and history. I have been listening to my mother all these years, saying, bill, when are you going to write a novel . I wanted to please my mom. Just once. Shes not going to live forever. I actually tried to write. I finished a couple of novels. They are sitting in my drawer at home. I havent done anything with them yet. But meanwhile, i thought, you know, theres got to be a way to borrow some of what makes novels attractive to readers and apply it to real historical tales. And so, the book that im supposed to be here promoting, the heartbreak of aaron burr is the second installment in what is projected to be a series that i am writing. The series is published by random house and its called american portraits. The first book came out a little over a year ago and it is called for theder of jim fisk love of Josie Mansfield. It is a story that it gilded age love triangle gone badly wrong. So that was the first installment. E heartbreak ofth aaron burr. Now, if you should choose to buy the book, you will see i will sign it for you by the way. You will see that it has the appearance of a novel, for example, theres no table table of contents. There is no author is preface, the chapters dont have chapter 3, 4, they are just 1, 2, and so on. You might think if you hadnt come tonight i would be delighted if you thought it was novel and you were just drawn in. But in fact, its a world that exists i wanted to use the techniques of novel writing. I dont use the technique of making up dialogue. Every bit of dialogue in there was really spoken or written by the characters. Now, you cant do this about every character. What you need is the Raw Materials of history. Case, i was fortunate it is one of the reasons i chose the topic by the existence of correspondent letters between aa very remarkable daughter, who he called theo. Wasletters begin when theo a young girl, and they continue until this is why i dont know if i should tell you about the heartbreaking end. I will not tell you exactly what happened but eventually the , correspondence is broken off by her death. Anyway, i had a chance to use this correspondence. It was some of the most candid correspondence i have encountered in all the years i have been working on and writing history. So it does allow me to accomplish that one aspect of my of what my mom was looking for in novels, namely kid inside namely get inside the hearts and heads of the characters. There is another reason i chose to write on this subject and the same reason i chose to write on the murder of jim fisk. My writing is American History, and those who write American History face a daunting challenge in one regard particularly. And that is its really hard to write about women in American History. In the following sense it is hard to write about women who play a large role in public life , because the nature of American Public life has been, until fairly recently, that women did not play a large role. I have been writing a series of biographies that started with Benjamin Franklin, the next installment is coming out on Ulysses Grant in the fall. It is going to carry the story of American History from the 18 century to the 21st century. The last installment is going to be a biography of ronald reagan, and every one of the subjects is male. For a woman subject for one of these. And, in fact, i found one, but my publisher wouldnt let me do it. Can you guess what woman i was looking for and found . Eleanor roosevelt. I mean, just the fact that its a very short list of women who played a large role in American Public life on whom i can hang a tale of four or five decades of American History. Women have had, of course, their roles in private life, but its in the nature of private life that it usually doesnt survive in historical record. Why did people start saving the letters of Eleanor Roosevelt . Because she was important. Do your correspondents save your letters that you write to them . And then do they deposit them in the local Historical Society . [laughter] well, maybe. And if they do, you will become i use my words advisedly here you will be become, literally, immortal. Youll become immortal in letters because future historians will find those letters and say, ah. So thats what life was like at the beginning of the 21st century. But anyway, so i wanted to write about women. After all, women have been half the population, and women have been a very large part of what happened even if it was hard to find them in the public record. So i decided that i could get at the story of women by not looking at the big issues of public life, but looking at some of the smaller issues. And so this is when i ran across the subject of my murder of jim fisk for the love of Josie Mansfield. Josie mansfield was a woman who had no particular talents other than her, well, one could say her beauty, but im going to tell you the problem i had with this. Josie mansfield clearly was very attractive to the men who knew her. And men lost their senses when they got around joseph my mansfield. And they did crazy things like one murdering another for the love of Josie Mansfield. And so i wrote this book, this earlier book about Josie Mansfield. And the book is really about josie. Its less about jim fisk. And, but because its nominally a history book, my publisher wanted to include a photograph of Josie Mansfield. After all, its a history book, and theres a photograph of this femme fatale, lets see it. But i didnt want to use the photograph. And i didnt want to use the photograph because two reasons. One is if you look at the photograph of josie, its pretty the camera does not capture that essence that drove men crazy. You look at it and say, really . [laughter] the other thing is that novels dont have photographs. Novels dont have illustrations of the main characters. The whole point of writing is to create a word picture. And so if i wrote a description of josie and then had a photograph of josie, either the writing would be it would either be wrong, or it would be redundant. And either way it would lose its force. But my editor insisted, and so theres a picture of josie. Anyhow, josie was one story, theo burr was another. And i knew the end of the theo burr story. I guess ill go ahead and tell you, many of you already know. Theodocia burr disappeared at sea. She got on a coastal ship from South Carolina heading for new york where her father was waiting for her. Her father had not seen her in years. Her father was living under an assumed name in new york, aaron burr. And theo was coming to see him. And the ship disappeared. Nothing was ever heard of or found of the ship or of theo, and to this day no one knows what happened. Its assumed the ship went down in a storm, but nobody knows. In fact, fairly recently, within the last couple of years, somebody wrote a novel based on the idea that theo had survived and wound up on an island somewhere. Anyhow, so this was my entry into writing about aaron burr. But the heart of the story, in fact, once again the title of the book was going to be, my proposed title in my thinking the whole time was the disappearance of theodocia burr. And i thought, thats kind of intriguing. People dont just disappear. But my publisher thought aaron burr had more cache. It was a name that people knew. So it became the heartbreak of aaron burr. And its the story of aaron burr who is considered generally to be one of the great scoundrels, villains of American History. And ive always thought that the villains, the scoundrels are far more interesting than the heroes. And i also thought that anybody who was despised by Alexander Hamilton, john adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison had to be somebody who had something going for him. [laughter] and so i thought i would try to tell the story. But i would tell the story through the relationship between aaron burr and his daughter. Because the story of aaron burr is fairly well known, and i wasnt going to include any revelations on what exactly was burr up to when he traveled out to the west . Was he engaged in what Thomas Jefferson announced to the world even before an indictment came down was treason . Was he trying to destroy the United States . Well, im going to tell you that you will not find a definitive answer to that question in my book because like so many important questions in history, it has no definitive answer. Im pretty sure that aaron burr himself didnt know exactly what was intended. Now, here im going to, im going to cite a distinction. You remember several years ago when Donald Rumsfeld was up lampooned, certainly criticized for drawing distinctions when he was talking about theyre the known there are the known knowns and the unknown knowns and all of this. And jon stewart and the late night, jay leno, they got a lot of mileage. They thought this was great fun. Well, in fact, i thought this was one of those instances where rumsfeld had it exactly right. Because those people who are in the intelligence business, and i have this from some authorities in the intelligence business, William Casey used to distinguish between secrets and mysteries. And in the intelligence business both of these are of interest if they involve something that your enemy or somebody else is going to do. But theres a fundamental difference between secrets and mysteries. Secrets have a concrete existence. A secret is how many missile launchers did the soviet union have in 1985. And the cia spent a lot of time, effort and money trying to figure out what the answer to that question was. But it had an answer. But then a mystery is will israel bomb iran . Next week . Well, that doesnt have an answer, not at this point in time. Because it hasnt happened. And likewise, what was aaron burr going to do in the west . That falls in the category of a mystery. Im quite sure that he himself didnt know. But what took him out to the west . Well, briefly ill tell you his story of how he got there. Aaron burr was a soldier, an officer in the continental army, he was a capable enough officer, he was also a lawyer, a very gifted lawyer. He was a man who, against the expectations of his friends, fell in love with a woman named thoedocia who was the widow of a british officer. Now, the officer had died in the west indies years earlier, and he fell in love with theodocia and married her. Now, there was an odd aspect to this. And the oddness lay in the fact that theo, theodocia, was ten years older than aaron burr. I should mention that aaron burr was quite a dashing and a relatively young man, handsome, charming. Theodocia was ten years older than he was. She was neither beautiful, nor rich. But he fell in love with her. And they married. Now, one asks across the centuries, what did he see in theodocia . Because plenty of people married rich widows, and this is the way ones fortune was often made. He didnt. He married her quite clearly out of love. But love for what . Well, love for her mind, love for her character. And they had a child, a daughter, whom they named he insisted that it be named after his wife, theodocia. Aaron burr was decades, centuries ahead of his time in believing that women were fully the intellectual equal of men. And that it was only their lack of education that prevented them from attaining the intellectual accomplishments of men. So he decided that his daughter, theo, was going to have the best education that his money could buy. The education was conducted by tutors that were brought in, was conducted by him in letters, when he was home he would quiz theo. They would talk about summits of public affairs, history, of literature, of the classic, of the whole thing. And theo became his close friend, became something of his educational project, became his protege. And to read the letters is to see a father spending a great deal of time and effort on the education of his child. And watching her mature, watching her grow, watching her achieve the intellectual accomplishments that he was sure she could achieve. Thoedocia, the mother, contracted cancer and died after a painful illness when young theo was 11 years old. And she became the first lady of the household. They had, burr had a mansion in manhattan, Richmond Hill was its name. And she, even when burr was not around, she would host elaborate dinner parties for diplomats, for the his community of new york, for distinguished visitor, for indian chiefs who happened to be in town, and everyone was quite amazed. And wonderfully impressed by the selfpossession, by the maturity of this 14yearold girl. Anyway, burr meanwhile begins his career in politics, and he delivers new york state for the republican party. This is the jeffersonian republican party. In the election of 1800. And hes on the ticket, and jeffersons on the ticket. But you know the story of the, well, contested yes election. It was contested by accident because burr and jefferson tied. This was under the original constitution where each of the electorates got two votes. And it was at this point that some of the innuendos began to swirl around burr. And it was almost certainly due to the mischief of the federalists who realized they had lost the presidency, but they thought that maybe somehow they could weaken their political foes. And be i would remind you all that this was in an age when Political Parties per se were still considered illegitimate. The founders wanted to part of Political Parties. The founders thought that in a republic as opposed to a monarchy, in a republic loyal, patriotic citizens would always put the interests of the country ahead of the interests of party. And they thought that parties would be the downfall of the republic. But parties emerged despite the best efforts of the founders. Maybe the no, despite the satisfaction of George Washington who never admitted that he had any party affiliation, but Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson formed their own parties very quickly. And, well, anyway, jefferson did win the election of 1800 with burr as his vice president. But jefferson, jefferson, a wonderful individual who could say the most philosophically highminded things and then do the most pragmatically lowminded things, jefferson was as dismissive of legitimacy of parties as anyone, and he was also the first and one of the most effective political bosses in American History. And he decided that burr had to be pushed aside, that the presidency the next time around after jefferson left office would go to another virginian, James Madison. So burr got pushed to the side. Meanwhile, Alexander Hamilton had been pushed to the side because he had fallen out with the mainstream and the federalists. So both of these men were in a position where their prospects were not quite living up to their ambitions. And so they got afoul of each other because hamilton had said some very nasty things about burr in one of the political campaigns, and burr asked him to retract, at least either to acknowledge and to corroborate or to retract. And hamilton got stiffnecked about this and said, no, no, you have no business asking me this sort of thing, and one thing led to another and then to that fatal duel in new jersey in 1804. Now, hamilton was killed, burr was burr was not disgraced by the duel per se. It was really the machinations of Thomas Jefferson that made very clear that burr had no political future. So burr decided whats he going to do . Hes an ambitious man, and he did what generations and generations of ambitious young men have been doing, and that was he went to the west. What was he going to do in the west . Ah, this is the question. Well, it almost certainly included either inciting or exploiting a war between the United States and spain. Spain was then in control of florida and then in control of mexico. And spain was bottling up the United States from territorial expansion which burr, like most everybody else in the United States including Thomas Jefferson, believed was inevitable and a good thing. I live in texas. I wasnt born in texas, i grew up on the west coast, but ive been living in texas since the 1980s. And i can tell you that what burr was accused of doing was what one of the Founding Fathers of texas, sam houston, actually did 30 years later. Namely, go off into mexican territory and by then it was mexican rather than spanish territory and foment a war and seize part of this foreign territory for the United States. This is what made Andrew Jackson famous in the wake of the war of 1812. He, without authorization, rode into spanish florida and drove the spanish away. Burr lived long enough to appreciate the irony of this. Burr didnt get accolades for what jackson and houston did. Burr instead got an indictment for treason. And the treason trial forms a large portion of my book. Why do i spend time on the treason trial . In part because it allows me to bootleg some of the big stories of history into this little story. And also because in writing this book, after writing that book about the murder of jim fisk, the love of Josie Mansfield at the heart of which are three murder trials, i realized what dick wolf discovered years ago. [laughter] dick wolf is the inventer of the franchise of law and order, or whoever created the original perry mason show. Trials are naturals for telling stories. Whether its in novel form, ask john grisham, or in, you know, movie form or in nonfiction. Why are novels, excuse me, why are trials such an attractive form for the reader . I dont know im not sure for the reader, ill tell you why theyre an attractive form for the author. Because, in the first place, trials have dialogue, and this is something that you dont find a lot of in nonfiction. And this is one of the appeals of novel bees. People talk to each other back and forth. Its rare that you find a work of nonfiction where you get much in the way of dialogue unless its writing about a trial. Because in a trial you get dialog and, furthermore, unlike the ordinary conversation of you and me where you Wander Around the topic and do this and that and start over and all this, in trials the conversation, the dialogue always has a point. And theres a builtin conflict, a protagonist and an antagonist, and theres a resolution. Theres either a conviction or an acquittal. So a large part of my story is this treason trial. And i get to weave in not only aaron burr, but Thomas Jefferson who was, had taken up the role of prosecutorinchief, and he put the full weight of the federal government into the prosecution of aaron burr. But he was frustrated by burr who defended himself. He had very distinguished help. He was also assisted by the judge in the trial. And the judge happened to be that other bete noire of Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall. Sort of the last of the federalists. In the days when Supreme Court justices were also circuit cut judges court judges. And marshall sat for the Circuit Court in richmond. And the treason that burr was alleged to have committed aoccurred in kentucky which, excuse me, when kentucky was still no, im sorry, West Virginia. When West Virginia was still part of virginia. And so it was John Marshall who presided over the trial. And who was not going to let Thomas Jefferson get away with any sloppy prosecution for treason. And, in fact, the burr trial became very important in american jurisprudence because under the constitution treason is very narrowly defined. It consists of waging war against the United States or abetting those countries at war with the United States, and it has to be witnessed by two eyewitnesses. Well, the prosecution couldnt get the eyewitnesses because the stuff that burr was said to have done actually happened when burr was far away. And secondly, there was no war. And marshall ruled on this, and he instructed the jury you have to acquit. Well, anyway, the rest of the story is i cant tell you the rest of the story, because i want you to read the book. [laughter] in fact, im going to stop there and ask if you have questions, and if, by the way, if you have any answers to the questions ive thrown out, ill be happy to listen to those. So if you have any questions, raise your hand. And since we have a cspan group in the back, i will repeat the questions for the audience. Yes, sir. [inaudible] okay. The question is, since i said i had a hard time coming up with women, how about the suffragists . Heres a basic problem. I write books for the purposes of expanding knowledge of history, and i will say quite candidly, i write books that i hope people will buy. And you could name susan b. Anthony, Elizabeth Katie stand stanton, and i have run names like that by my publisher, and i get a yawn. Because compare that to, i dont know, lets say Abraham Lincoln. Theres a huge market for all things lincoln. Theres quite a small market for studies of the suffragists. Im going to tell you a story about a historical colleague of mine who had written, he was trying to come up with a subject for his third book. He got tenure, he was faculty member at one of the colleges in the philadelphia area, and he wanted to write for a broader audience. His field is military history. So he was thinking, he was trying to come up with some general that he could write about. And his area was world war ii, so he presented, oh, Joseph Stillwell and the editors hes talking with, ah, not that many people know the name of stillwell, and i dont think theres much of a market. And he mentioned a couple of other sort of secondranked generals. And then sort of at a loss and his field was in particular the Pacific Theater of the war and so he couldnt think of anything else, he just kind of threw up his hands and said this a tone, a throwaway line, he said, well, i mean, i guess i could write, you know, another biography of douglas mac arthur. But thered been a dozen biographies of douglas mcarthur, and the editor said, yeah, thats because people are interested in douglas mcarthur. [laughter] so i suppose if i were sufficiently imaginative and i had the sufficient sources, maybe i could elevate a relatively obscure woman, for that matter a man too, to a level that would grab peoples attention and make that person famous. Maybe. But its a, i will say, a tough sell especially in this market. Other questions . Yes, maam, in the middle. [inaudible] a very good question. How is it the letters were saved . Before i answer that question, im going to give you sort of a broader reflection. And this, actually, gets to the question that was asked here, how about the suffragists or how about people who arent so famous . It is almost a truism of history that it is possible to write about Extraordinary People or extraordinary times. Or you can write about Extraordinary People in ordinary times. So we can write a biography of George Washington because George Washington was one of the extraordinary individuals, and by extraordinary here i mean famous to the extent that people saved his letters. And people remember what they felt, what they heard when they encountered washington. If somebodys famous, the finding the record of famous people is not a problem. I wrote about Benjamin Franklin, and i have to say that the first 30 years of Benjamin Franklins life go by like this in my book. Why . Because there are no sources on it. The one source is franklins own autobiography. In fact, you can measure this in a wonderful published collection of the franklin letters that is about 37 or 8 volumes, published by Yale University press and the american philosophical society. Took them 50 years to publish it. Now, volume one, volume one goes from franklins birth til the age of 30. And its about that thick. Volume 38 if thats the last one is equally thick, and it covers three months. Not three decades, but three months of franklins life. Why . Because then he was world famous, people saved everything. So you can write about Extraordinary People in ordinary times, you can write about ordinary people in extraordinary times. For example, you can write the ordinary persons history of the civil war. Why . Because it was sufficiently extraordinary that people wrote down what they were thinking and feeling. Soldiers went off to war for have many of them, theyd never been away from home before, and they wanted to share that experience with the folks at home. Or else they kept a diary, a journal. I wrote a book about the California Gold rush. There is no lack of information about ordinary people who went off to california. Why . Because they knew this was a once in a lifetime thing. In those days before cameras, before cell phones with cameras, how did people record the adventures that they encountered, the things that they saw in a new place . They wrote em down. Nowadays i dont know whats going to happen, you know, because people arent saving their photos, i guess, from their cell phones and everything else. Thats a different matter, and we could talk about emails and what that means for future historians. But anyway, so, but for some reason a great many of the letters between aaron burr and his daughter theo were saved. I dont clearly not all of them, because there are gaps in the correspondence. And its really hard to reconstruct why some of the letters were saved and some were not. There was a moment when, in fact, i cite a letter that aaron burr thought might be his last letter to theo. It was written on the night before his duel with Alexander Hamilton. And he knew perfectly well he might not survive the next day. So he wrote a letter to theo explaining what she should do with his letters and papers, and this is one of the reasons for the negative opinions that had developed over time regarding aaron burr because he said burn all these letters, especially the ones that are bound up in this red ribbon. And, well, he survived. But the letters didnt. And whether theo did away with them, whether they were lost at sea with theo, i dont know. But there is one interesting aspect about all this, and that is that relationships like burrs with theo are a rich source for historians, but only when the individuals in the relationship are far apart. Ill bet that many of you in this room read David Mcculloughs biography of john adams. And youll know that mcculloughs secret weapon in that book was Abigail Adams. In fact, i was at a conference or a meeting where somebody asked dade mccullough, well, now youve written about john adams, are you going to write about Abigail Adams . And he said, i already did. In fact, thats sort of what i did with Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. The book is called its only Franklin Roosevelt in the title, but its real a dual really a dual biography. The best parts of the book, the parts in particular that reveal a relationship wonderful relationship, provocative relationship between john and Abigail Adams they occur when they are far apart. Itits a wonderful love story, its a wonderful story of a marriage, but it only works because they were apart for a very large part of the marriage. When they were together, they simply spoke. And what they said to each other over the dinner table at night no one knows. So thats a case where, and its true with my book. I mean, i dont make a big deal of it in the book, i just have to pass over those sections where theyre not writing to each other. But i cant offer a good explanation as to why some letters survived and others didnt. Yes. Um, thank you. Your description of the story as a part of a way to present the facts in a trial is a theme of the american presidency. Franklin roosevelt, for example, used the fireside chat as a very effective tool to tell the story of what was happening in the United States. And the current president , obama, has been accused of being too legalistic or not telling a story. So where does this fit into your [inaudible] the question is, how does the nature of story and how stories are told and how it has related at times to american politics, in particular how american president s have cast their time, particularly how american timesents have cast their. Its a wonderful question and you gave me an opportunity to tip my hand about a project i have them working on for years and it is based on the title of this book its going to be a book one day. I cant tell you which day. I dont know. The title of the book is going to be best story wins. And the we aspoint of the book is humans are i guess we will say we are suckers for a story or at least there is something brain, butng of our we respond to stories to read water stories . I will put it this way. Stories are simplification of complicated reality that gives us some kind of purchase, some kind of grip on the world. These stores can be creation also, for example, that explains how the heart of religion is a very powerful story that tells us why we are here and perhaps where we are going. Politics is all about stories. Franklin roosevelt, his fireside s. At he could make the American People believe the government was taking their side amid this great crisis in American History. Oflifted a great deal despair that had settled in on the country and it seemed to be infallible as long as he was in white house. Every president tells the story. Barack obama was one of the greatest stories and by the way, when i say stories, i am not weighing at all whether the stories are true or not because theyre certainly true stories. When i say barack obama spun a campaign ofin the 2008, i dont mean to say he was making this stuff up. But what he did to convince voters, at least 53 of them that a vote for barack obama was a vote for a better vision of it was i have aver seen in my observation political candidate that goes back to john kennedy, in my study goes back to George Washington, i have never seen a better political candidate them barack obama. In large part because he was well, he was a little bit like rr in this aaron bu respect. Ordinaryle to allow American Voters to project on him what their hopes for the country could be. The message is hope. Cane slogan is yes, we thats very attractive, ofecially given the context 2008. Its also a reminder that being a candidate is different them being president and its one of the reasons that many of obamas liberal supporters of thing quite disappointed because he did not live up to, well, the projection they put on him. A lot of it has to do with the fundamental distinction between being a candidate and being an office holder. When you are a candidate, yes, we can go only, that is a appropriate phrase. When you run officeholder, it is much more no, you cant. Because you have to decide. Candidates can promise the world. Once you get an office, you have to say one thing and another worried yes, maam . [indiscernible] prof. Brands please do. I get into this like its a novel, and i have been there at the during the third day of gettysburg. The first thing after picketts said, you need a sister, i will be your sister. I will punch that guy in the nose. Prof. Brands interesting. I am not sure i can do justice to that. The essence of the statement was she reads history because she likes to get involved, she likes to get in the middle of the story. I will tell you, as a professional historian i try to avoid that, but i dont always succeed. I try to keep my distance. I make a real point and they do succeed in this and not passing judgment on my characters. Inill tell you, the readers my book on Franklin Roosevelt, i will tell him was that she was a great president , but great in the sense of having a great effect on the world around him. I will not tell you if i think he was a good president or a bad president. I lay out what it was. I lay out the reactions, the justifications, but i leave it. O the readers i think not all historians do it this way. I would say the most successful dont do it this way. I once asked David Mccollum if he would ask if you would write about someone he did not admire. A lot of people go to history, to go to biographies to be able to cheer for somebody. Thatule of thumb is a broadway if musical works, if people come out whistling, well, it works. I do like to do that. I wrote a book on frequent roosevelt called traitor to his think thats a thumbs up on roosevelt or a thumbs down . Traitor, thats a bad word, but not a traitor to his country. Traitor to his class. I try to give my distance. Every so often, i cant. The last year of Benjamin Franklins life, he was coming back from paris. He was coming back because he was sick and he wanted to die in america. He had been estranged from his william by the revolutionary war and his grandson wanted to get the two men temple was the grandsons name. He waited to get them back together. So surreptitiously, williams and temple arranged a meeting. It was going to be the last chance for Benjamin Franklin to see william franklin, who was living in an site as a tory loyalist. Brought the two of them together. , somethingal moment old, for one man. He has decided his father will not live together will not live forever, and a much longer. He holds out his hand to make amends with his father benjamin, ridingm sitting there this part of the story and trying to keep my distance, but trying to imagine what is going through Benjamin Franklins head. I have three children and i cannot imagine anything that any of those children would do that ld cause me to permanently especially if they had done something and after had said lets let bygones be bygones. I found myself, without wanting to, rooting for ben franklin. Most of the time he did the right thing. Handhe was holding out his , i wanted to reach out across the centuries and say take his didnt. Ke it but he he went back to america and he well,forgave his son for, doing what his conscience told him to do, to side with his king. Reason,d a particular part of it was the father and me saying, come on, youre son is holding out his hand to you. I confess theres another part of it. And that is, it was one of the very few acts of franklins life that i couldnt explain. Because he was, on the whole a very reasonable person. And he had followed that with many in england during the but he madey war, up with them and i could not figure out what was going through franklins head and through his heart at the time. Least thetorians, at more modest office, we dont claim to have all the answers, this was a big part of franklins emotional life and i realized i did not know why he did this very important thing. , i dont know. Maybe he snowed me all along. Maybe theres this dark franklin character i am not getting. Quickly get to the end of the book. I still know the answer. Other questions . As a former student of history prof. Brands former student . Are there such things . Us a lot aboutd did. Burr most of us are used to thinking of him as a villain. Would you think was in his heart . Prof. Brands i think he was ambitious. Ambitious. Burr was i think he saw the path to political achievement was closed in the east because both major parties were dead set against. Im, so he wanted to go west he recognized something we have forgotten, and that is before andage of steamboats railroads, once you got past the appellation mountains, gravity pulled you to the west. There is very little that said a continental republic could survive. That there iswing no particular reason to believe that it should survive. Thomas jefferson himself had been an author of the kentucky resolutions which laid the groundwork for nullification. Especially if you believe in the , it was entirely consistent with that view that if the people of kentucky in louisiana and tennessee decided their political interest, their self interest was better served by independence from america than by sticking with the united then that was the logic of the declaration of independence. Andrew jackson, first of all celebrated that he had killed Alexander Hamilton. Rverybody else thought that bur was a great man. Its hard to know what he said, but when he talked about a possible independent future for it had a lot to do with politics, but even more inevitablet was the outcome of geography. All ran downstream. They were the essence of commerce. They were the avenues of transport. Of jefferson himself sometimes wondered whether louisianas fate was with the United States. Was simply i do not orw if he was articulating letting people articulate what they thought their future might be. Because if you lived in new in 1805 it took forever to get to washington or new york and you could well ask yourself, how can those people in the east govern us . That was part of what he was up to. Would he have waged war against the United States . I doubt it. He didnt have an army he could wage a war with. He did hope a war would break out between spain and the United States. So did Andrew Jackson. So did james wilkerson. Way, was the real traitor. For decades he was on the payroll of the Spanish Government unbeknownst to his superiors and the u. S. Army and the u. S. Government. Rs logic strikes us assuming he did what he is alleged to have done, having separatehis scheme to the Mississippi Valley from the , butof the United States heinous crimeed a to most People Living in the west at the time. I will simply add there are plenty of People Living in the states of these former confederacy today who think, you the, the confederacy lost argument on the battlefield, the argument that states have a right to chart their own futures. Make of it. T i can how my doing . Www. Cspan. Org [indiscernible] of yourt let you out without at least the possibility of buying a book. Thank you. [applause] history bookshelf features the best history writers of the about theirtalking books. You can watch it here on American History tv on cspan3. Historyn lectures in we visit the classroom of the university of texas at austin niel joseph, who thesers a lecture on civil rights career of ronald walters. Here is a preview. The electjoseph Power Movement will really excite walters and mark a shift in his own scholarship. The movement from black studies that arguesvement black people are being disservice by eurocentric or white supremacist educational institutions in the United States, really from kindergarten all the way to higher education. Its an interdisciplinary perspective, really on all of the fields, methodologically, political science, anthropology, studies,udies, womens all of these different disciplines. But it does it from what walters called a black perspective, right . Its a perspective that western civilization, critiques slavery, and argues that africans had intellectual abilities. In slave africans had real perspectives that should be shaping how we think about that history enslaved africans had real perspectives that should be shaping how we think about that history and democracy. You can watch that lecture tonight on lectures in history at 8 p. M. And midnight eastern. A 90s of the nine, a Small Network with an unusual name rolled out a new idea let viewers make up their own minds. Cspan bringing you unfiltered content from congress and beyond. Today, that is more relevant than ever. On television and online, cspan is your unfiltered view of government, so you can make up your own mind. Brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. This weekend on American History tv, leading up to the 50th anniversary of the apollo moon landing, watch the apollo 11 prelaunch interviews tonight america. Thehe lunar module operation of the lunar module system, and the control of the descent. We will go through the planned 2man excursion on the exiting the neil spacecraft first. As he goes down the ladder, i will be taking pictures of him with a 15 millimeter camera through the window. Another camera will be recording his difficulties. Should difficulties arise, my job is to rescue the lem, and then i find myself being the active partner in charge of a very complex be a poll very complex job. Watch tonight on American History tv on cspan3. Cornell College Professor Catherine Stewart talks about racial dynamics in the 1930s, including the federal writers project, an effort together to gather narratives from former slaves. We recorded the interview at the organization of american historians annual meeting in philadelphia. Catherine stewart, your book, what period of time are you talking about here . Prof. Stewart its entertainment because it focuses its very interesting because it focuses on a project that came out of the 1930s and specifically out of the roosevelt administrations attempt to do something to create work for all different types of occupations. It created a number of Arts Projects to put unemployed writers and artists back to work. It happened in the 1930s that they created the federal writers project and decided to start
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