That does seem particularly appropriate because she will be discussing her new book capital dames the civil war and the women of washington, 18481868. Cokie roberts is best known as one of our nations most respected broadcast journalist. Her broadcasts on in the our offer critical insight into the worlds politics, government and washington, and as is the case with every Campaign Season she will be one of the most important voices we all listen to in the months ahead as the 2016 president ial race unfold and i know how busy you will be trying to cover by that time i was going to say the candidates that keeps growing forever. I do want to mention in the r and nbc are her day job. You know the Cokie Roberts grew up in a political family she has seen political life from the inside and out and understand where political dynamics fitting to American History and for that reason it is not surprising that along with her commentaries on contemporary politics shes a student of American History and it is the role of women today and in Previous Year as that has captured her attention as a writer and an author. I can to emphasize enough from my own personal Vantage Point what a contribution she has made to filling in some very big blanks in the story of this nation specifically the role of women at critical junctures over the last 200 plus years. Cokie roberts and i are talking earlier it is actually infuriatingly house so many people think the story of america is already complete and is just a matter of interpretation. It is not complete and thank you for helping and large and enrich that story. She has relied on letters and journals and other accounts by and about women. Her background in those resources present an important new dimension to understanding the colonial experience American Revolution and turn newest book the civil war. In capital dames she introduces a cast of women, some known some long forgotten who wielded great clout in washington at a perilous time and explains how women change the capital and how the war changed them. Not surprising part of the book is when it comes to womens rolls some things never change but i will let Cokie Roberts fill you in on the rest of the colorful, dramatic, and hugely important story about the impact of women in this country. We have plenty of copies up front she will sign them afterwards and give a warm welcome to Cokie Roberts. [applause] thank you. This is the neighbor of mine. We live very close to each other. I live in the house i grew up in, she is newer to the neighborhood. I probably moved there before she was born and what a fabulous contribution Lissa Muscatine made to this community. [applause] really wonderful. In addition to taking on this now legendary store, a legend in washington, during the National Book fair was really a challenge, you guys go . My grandsons were here sit up and pay attention. They did a fabulous job. My College Roommate is here. Another college classmate, the old gained and Barbara Stevens my roommate when i was in college helped me type my papers late at night and she could not help me finish this book and was upsetting to me because i was very late in getting it in. It was great fun to do. I started on this quest about women in history as a result of growing up with my mother and many of you knew her. I watched what i was growing up here in post world war ii washington the women, my mother and her cohorts running everything, they ran the political conventions, all the social Service Agencies and in fact when my father was killed in a plane crash and my mothers and ran for congress she called lady bird johnson, one of her closest friends told her she was going to run, lady bird said how are you going to do it without a wife . That was the very good question and when she had a hard time with because she played both roles, making it twice as hard. It was an experience and way of growing up that really did give me a deep appreciation for the women in politics now and in history. I got particularly interested in the women of the revolutionary period because i have to deal with the Founding Fathers of the time. I know the mall by first names. I am not crazy about them. I admire them but once you start reading their wives at letters you like them less. In congress they are invoked constantly. The founders said this. The people who say that mainly in the United States senate have it wrong about 99 of the time. I was always going back to see what they actually did say about religion in the Public Square or the right to bear arms, why you have to be an american, a child of american citizens to be president. You dont have to be born in america. Canada will do. What seems to put the kenya thing to rest. I had gotten to know the men, and i was curious what the women were up to and i really didnt know anything and so i went back to find out and the reason i didnt know anything is it hadnt been written with the exception of a couple of good biographies of Abigail Adams there really wasnt anything. Since fin, there have been some good books but that wasnt true at the time. Is that any better . Thank you. So that is how i wrote founding mothers and the sequel ladies of liberty, taking us through John Quincy Adams, the publisher wanted the civil war book. I never intended to write a civil war will. All my relatives were on the losing side. They did all fight and lost. It is an awful war, 600,000 dead americans fighting each other but they really did want a book so i started puzzling what it would be. What i did know is whatever it would be i would love the letters because womens letters are fabulous. A are so much better then mens led is they really are because the men news and they were doing something extraordinary. Even the ones that werent. Kosovo they wrote with that in mind, their letters are studied and edited, often pompous and focused and all that. The women just wrote letters. They were full of politics they were deeply political but they would talk about the economic situation, who was having and all too often losing babies, passion. All of life is in the letters and they are funny and frank and feisty and honest in ways that you dont find with the men. Most of them have never been published before so i am always on this quest. I dont know what i am getting so i am reading a long and seeing what it is, what i can learn and my favorite remains one from ladies of liberty, a letter written by six Catherine Adams who was the wife of John Quincy Adams and it was here in washington in 1820 and he was secretary of state and she had written, she wrote these chatty letters to john adams, abigail had died and he was lonely so she had written him at one point saying it was her vocation to get her husband elected president. It is fleer 1820, the year of the missouri compromise, congress stayed in session longer than usual because of the compromise and finally they adjourned, she goes to a meeting of the orphan asylum trustees that Dolly Madison with the local women here founded the orphan asylum after the british invasion so she goes to meet the trustees and one of the trustees said they needed new building,. She said why . What you talking about . The woman said the session had been very long. The fathers of the nation had left 40 cases to be provided for by the public. And our institution was the most likely to be called upon to maintain this illicit progeny. 40 pregnant women left behind and their only 200 members of congress. Some of them could have been recidivists, i dont know. So she says to john adams i recommended a petition to Congress Next session for that great and moral body to established a founding institution and should certainly move that the two additional dollars a day which they have given themselves as an increase in pay may be appropriated as a fund towards the support of the institution. It doesnt get any better than that and when i discovered this i couldnt believe it so i knew what ever this book was going to be that i would come upon wonderful letters and it turned out in fact her daughter in law abigail brooks adams who was married to Charles Francis adams who was here briefly in congress and became the Union Ambassador to the court of st. James and was instrumental in keeping the british from recognizing the confederacy but while they bring your in washington was the infamous 36th congress which was the Secession Congress and she is writing home these and believably frank letters to her son henry adams and she says of president buchanan that he is a heavy gold code and the senate behave like children andtoad and the senate behave like children and selling bonds at that. I would invite any young women who wishes to have uneasy quiet young like not to marry and adams. I knew what ever i did the letters would be great but i didnt know what the book was so i started thinking about again my own growing up here after world war ii and the effects of the war were physically present. The moral was covered with temporary buildings and they had initially gone up to world war i and more had been added in world war ii. I remember asking my parents what temporary meant because they didnt seem to be going anywhere and they were if there for a long time until the big buildings were built on independence avenue so you saw physically how the war had increased the government and made the city of bigger more important city and we knew the stories or at least learned the stories of rosie the river and the government girls who came into town in larger numbers, to staff of bureaucracy and i knew because again i covered it and had written about it, i hadnt covered it before these conventions but i had written about them, after the war the Womens Movement really did come in to focus and the equal rights amendment was introduced and the first Republican Convention after the war and the democrats the next time around so it spurred on the Womens Movement and there was this myth of the women have all gone home after the war but it was not true. Women were occupying all kinds of positions they had never occupied before, 60,000 women took advantage of the g i bill and brought themselves to where we are now, the majority of College Graduates are female. I started thinking i wonder if the civil war had a similar impact on the role of women, the place of women and the role of washington and as i started to do the research i found out absolutely and dramatically so, so that is the book and it turned out to be fascinating to learn about and to write. Rosy the rigor, women came in to work in the arsenals and all over the north but in washington a couple dozen very young women were killed in a horrible arsenal explosion and the newspaper stories about it are horrific because they uncovered the women then next day and their bodies are unrecognizable. But the reporter says they were trapped in their hoopskirt so here they were in washington in the middle of july doing this incredibly dangerous work of stuffing the ammunition, creating the ammunition. They were addressed as proper ladies of the Nineteenth Century. There was a huge funeral from the president and the secretary of war and theres a beautiful monument to them at the Congressional Cemetery but the president giving do to the huge contribution they had made to the war effort. Government girls same thing. Women started arriving in washington just as they did in world war ii initially just to make a living because the men were gone. They needed a job. Then it was fortuitous, just as they started showing up congress authorized the printing of paper money to pay for the board. And the money, many of you have been to see it, it is so much fun. It is that huge sheet and now bills are cut up by machines but then it required somebody sitting with a pair of scissors cutting out each bill and the treasurer of the United States said women are just better with scissors. He also allowed to pay the women were less something i have had several bosses say along the way in occur rear. So by the end of the war, one of the women journalists documents it there were women in every department of government and that had not been true before. Woman journalist is another thin. There were women who came to washington to cover the politics in the war, some had been here before. And abolitionists and suffragist and bomb from basically, she was the first woman who had been allowed to report out of the Capitol Press gallery before the war but she was soon kicked out of the Capitol Press gallery because she wrote vicious truths. She actually wrote that Daniel Webster was a drunk and the men were horrified. I found it so recognizable because the same thing happened when we women journalists started covering political campaigns and got on the bus and the boys on the bus had taken a vow of america and we hadnt and we actually wrote what went on on the campaign trail and i remember coming back after some trip and i was on the brinkley show and i was the only woman and i said something along the lines that we do report, everything is what the candidate is up to end it is relevant. Of course we tell stories from the trail and a lot of our best friends and other correspondentss why of san and this look of total terror came over the guyss faces and the timekeeper for the show said there was 45 solid minutes of silence while they absorb this piece of information and then there are women you do know about but dont know quite how remarkable they are. Within like dorothea dix and clara barton. Before the word for the headaches had come to washington to lobby for a bill for the federal government, she wanted the government to put aside 12 million acres for the mentally ill and povertystricken and she was so influential because of her work for the mentally ill that the senate set aside an office in the capital for her from which to lobby and finally she gets both houses of congress and president pierce vetos it and she left but before she left she got congress to establish st. Elizabeth which is called a Government Hospital for the in sane and she comes back during the war and goes to the Surgeon General and then she will be the superintendent of female nurses but there were no female nurses. Nursing wasnt open to women. That was not an open field. The Surgeon General was terrified of her and said yes maam, you go do that can by the way not only was nursing not open, the field of medicine was barely touched because women had not been allowed into medical school and all this. There were three or four women doctors by the time of the war. One of them, mary walker, was a surgeon. She came to washington to get a job with the union army but had to volunteer the she dressed like a man said they arrested her all the time just on general principles and she is still, mary walker is still the only woman to have won the medal of honor. Carl bar in clara barton, one of those stories from a new england family the abolitionist mother, she came to washington to get a job to make more money. Make as much as men. And they were bivouacked in the chamber. And bringing supplies and nursing them and reading the newspapers and all of that and they started riding home saying there is this woman here who do all this and people all over the country started sending supplies. She went to the quartermaster general and cut three warehouses full of supplies and he sent her where she wanted to go which was to the front and she was incredibly brave and intricate to all the wars which remained antietam which is the single worst day in American History in terms of casualties. After the war one of the last acts lincoln performed was to allow her to set up but missing Persons Bureau and she found missing soldiers but also identified the graves of tens of thousands of soldiers so that they were given the respect of a marked grave and not left the known. Then she goes to europe and discovers something called the red cross and comes back here and establishes the american red cross. This is one of many things that drives me crazy in history books. This kind of statement is a round the bend. And then she established the american red cross. Really . Was it hard . Did anything go before it that . Is there a story if there . Of course it there was. She was able to get a red cross going in the United States but it didnt have the clout of being aligned with the International Red cross to do some work because they had to ratify the Geneva Convention for them to be part of the International Red cross. For two decades she lobbied the senate and finally got the senate to ratify the geneva treaty. A representative to geneva put in the american amendment which allows the red cross to go into disaster zones as well as war zones so right now in nepal after the earthquake with the red cross there it is the result of the lobbying clara barton did 130 years ago. It is a wonderful story and all of these things, showing me how similar it was to world war ii and fascinating me, and of course what i was most interested in, because of what i do for a living and how i grew up was the political women. They were wonderful to read about. Before the war there society was really ruled by southern women. They were a lot more fun, truth be told. They referred to themselves as bells. There was a c