With new york they pioneered steel frame construction. Then they set limits on skyscrapers. I believe there should be limits on skyscrapers. This was a little too early in the game on that. The gang life in chicago is what it is portrayed stereo typically. It seems as, the new york gangsters really mistrusted people like capone because he was too quick with a gun and a machine gun. And they took care of people like that, even costello. Im not trying to present him as, you know, a man of unalloyed purity. But he never carried a gun, and madden rarely carried a gun either. They had their own enforcers, but it wasnt part of the persona, and they were knit more closely into the city. And i think what gave new york city more stability was tram am actually. And chicagos politics are rampant and wild and mercurial. They form and disappear, and theres never one consistent political machine that can stay in the city. This creates fodder for socialists and reformists and its a stew. Its a boiling caldron i should say. And its a very different cities have personalities, and chicagos is more head long, a more reckless and than, than new yorks, i think. I really do. And there are different types of cities. What happens is in the 19th century, theyre both industrial cities. Now new york is the biggest Industrial City in the country. Now chicago has Big Industries like mill, steel mills and stockyards and gigantic clothing factories. New york is, its the minnows, the small firms in the Garment Industry that dominate, not the big ones, not the big ones. But when america moves see, this is the beginning of i do this in the book. This is the beginning of the decentralization of the city but also the deindustrialization of the country and the Electronics Revolution is coming on. Thats radio. Thats television, okay. Mass communications and things like that. And new york had always been in the forefront of that, since the 19th century, sending packet boats to england, the Associated Press going out and picking up the news, 60 miles offshore and all that sort of stuff. It had always been a Communication Center with more newspapers than any city in the country, and you have this wonderful simbiosis. And the port was very profitable. So it has an industrial base, but its also moving quickly into a new age and pioneering a new type of economy, a new type of lifestyle. And thats what i try to do here in what i call a tale of two cities. One, the quintessential heavy Industrial City of large labor unions and large corporations and lots of labor streikes. And new york in the 20s moving toward a different type of economy, different type of lifestyle where consumption almost becomes more important than production. And maybe its a tale of three cities. Ill make it a tale of three cities and maybe do l. A. In the 50s, which is a complete auto city. Still trying to figure that out. Anybody else . One there and then up here. Hello, hi. Thank you for your talk. Im wondering, you said that, well, i know that people continue to go to the movies, and they wanted to be entertained even during the depression. Mmhm. Well, during, during prohibition, they said more alcohol was consumed than the prior years before they began the whole prohibition era, so i thought that kind of connected it, but also, the gangsters didnt put their money into the banks, so did they have a hard time of it during the depression . I mean, what did they do . No, gangsters dont write letters. They dont put money in banks. They dont write their memoirs. No, they invest in clubs and they spend enormously and not very wisely. But actually, one of the hardest parts of the book was to try to tell the story of gang life without writing a graphic novel, you know what i mean . Because so much of Crime Reporting is anecdotal. And people said dont go into that, thats quick sand. And i find that if you do it right, there are good records. I went down to the new york archives, municipal archives, and i asked for the luciano papers, and he said you are ate only person whos ever asked for them. Theyre in brooklyn, but well get them for you tomorrow. You can come back here and you have your little desk. I thought they delivered a washer and a drier. They were big boxes. And the first thing i pulled out was evidence stuff, you know, revolver and i pulled out a lamp, you know, a lamp with a cord on it that was used to strangle somebody. But then i pulled out all these records. They wired these guys, i mean, they wired their rooms. They wire tapped them. They have all of the, when he was holed up in a hotel with his mistress, they have all, every day they have his menu, they collected all the receipts from the waiters and his order slips and things like that. And despite the code of omerta, theyre not going to squeal, once they got tom dooley on them oncould keep people under custody for months they took prostitutes and put them under the Woolworth Building for months at a time. And they would have consecutive juries where the jury would not be released after a trial and the jury would stay in session for six, seven, eight trials and you could really go after these guys like that. So you have court testimony. You have confessions. And you have terrific crime reporters. Some of the best reporters in the city were crime reporters. So theres a lot of evidence you can compile about the life of criminals, and despite, you know, without reading these ghost written, you know, auto biographies that supposedly luciano penned himself and things like that. And i think unless you do crime was so interwoven in new yorks history, in chicagos history, in detroits history that its impossible to do politics without crime and do it right. And i think historians make a big mistake by not jumping into that territory and looking for those kinds of connections, and it still is that way. Gw bridge. We can talk about that side of it. Anybody else . Yes, sir. First skyscraper built in the United States, and when, where was it built and when . Generally, generally, went into skyscrapers, thats a debate among architectural historians. Most say that the Home Building in chicago was the first built with a steel frame partially, before they were supported by loadbearing walls. You go to the beach and build a sand castle. If youre going to go tall you have to build the base out, so the walls get so thick you cant go any taller. So with the steel frame you hang the walls like curtains, like a cathedral actually. You hang them there, and jenny was one of the pioneers of that, so that Home Insurance building which is no longer in existence, was probably, to my mind, the First American skyscraper. I think it was 1888, i think thats right. Everybody can check that on there. I think that w it was built. Well, thanks. Appreciate it. [ applause ] the cspan cities tour takes American History on the road, traveling to u. S. Cities to learn about their history and life. Weve partnered with timewarner cable for a visit to waco, texas. We began turning over the b sides of the 45s that weve received. First off, gospel music was not widely heard in the white community. And what it was, it would only be the hits if that. But the b or flip side would be heard even less, and what we discovered quickly was how many of the b side songs were directly related to the civil rights movement. Since theres very few databases, and none of them are complete on all gospel music, we didnt know that. We didnt know the sheer number of songs that had very overt songs like there aint no segregation in liheaven, that would be a dangerous thing to possess in the deep south. But singing that sort of song out loud . Thats a risk. The texas ranger hall of fame. It was set up in 1976 for the 175th anverniversary of the rangers. We have paintings or portraits of all those rangers. They really begin with steven f. Austin. Austin was very successful with his rangers. They fought not only, managed to make the area reasonably safe fioricetlement from indian raids, but when the texas war for independence broke out, the rangers played a major role by staving off the mexican army long enough to allow the colonists to build their own army and develop a strategy. And as a result, texas became its own independent nation, the republic of texas for about ten years. Watch all of our events from waco saturday on book tv and sunday afternoon at 2 00 on American History tv on cspan 3. Next on American History tv, elizabeth who hahoffman speaks. She spoke at world denver. This is just over an hour. Thank you so much, kay. Thank you all for being here. I cant tell you how pleased and honored i have be here addressing the World Affairs council. And especially because what i hope we will discuss tonight is i think one of the most critical questions of our time. Which is youre not going to know it, because i didnt turn on the microphone. Good, youre human. Where is the button here, kay . No. The green light, right . The classic green light. So anyway, im here to discuss one of the critical questions, i think, of our times which is why the United States assumed the role of world defender after world war ii. And the question of whether we must continue this role indefinitely. Now this conversation springs from my new book which i hope is available outside. But also from an op ed i wrote for the New York Times last year with the title come home america. And this was subsequently the subject of a morning joe show on the same subject. And in the essay, i observed that everybody talks about getting out of the iraq and afghanistan. But what about germany and japan . And in essence what im trying to raise is a very fundamental question. Where do we go from here . Do i need to make more basic changes that turning point in our national history. Because i think in many ways, for me, and im a historian, that our nation suffered from a lack of historical self awareness about our role. And its the lack of historical self awareness that makes us a target and obscures and confuses our future choices. This is where history is important. Im kind of a cheerleader for history. Because history shows us the big picture. It gives us those longrange trajectories that help make sense of the mess and the turmoil of everyday crises. When i say everyday crises, im aware that that sounds like kind of a putdown. No. What i mean by that is that World Affairs have crises every day. So we need to understand the big picture which helps us make sense of our choices. To give us an example of what i think of this kind of historical confusion, i like to go right to the top here. President obama said last year, when he was addressing our nation about the question of intervening in the syrian civil war, and he said at that time that the u. S. Has been the chief enforcer of International Law for the past seven decades. And then the president asserted, america is not the worlds policeman. Well, what do policeman do but enforce law, right . He also said and this was just a couple of weeks after that. He was addressing un he was addressing the United Nations. He said the u. S. Seeks the world in which state sovereignty is respected. But also in which sovereignty cannot shield a regime from outside intervention. This is a flat contradiction. The whole point of sovereignty is absolute authority within territorial boundaries. Now in a sense what the president is doing is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. What he is really saying is we are seeking a world in which sovereignty is subject to external checks and balances to protect individual human rights, much as the federal government operates in the United States. By the way, i want you to already be sort of listening. Checks and balances is such an american term. But in way this has do with the american view and also, i think, the american role in the world. Now i think that this kind of double speak isnt intentional. And i think we see it in president after president. So this is not a democratic or republican problem. Its an american one that we suffer from not knowing exactly what where weve come from and why. I think it reflects a lack of understanding about the structure of the world in general. And if we dont understand our history, no one else will. Because were the ones who write about it. Were the ones who tell people, this is who we are. If we dont understand it, they wont either. By the way, i hate to be a tease because i cant possibly answer all of the really Big Questions in 45 minutes and my idea here is to give you 300 years in 45 minutes. But i will do my best. Because the fact is that the u. S. Exercises a very unusual role. As the nation with the greatest and yet very limited power in the world. The power to determine outcomes in foreign affairs. When things go wonky, people ask, whats the United States going to do about it . They dont say, whats mexico going to do about it. Or france or iran. 95 of all soldiers serving op soil other than their own are americans. That includes u. N. Peacekeepers and troops. This sometimes creates new problems in the process. This raises very important questions and possibilities. For example, are we the worlds policemen . Or from another perspective, are we a selfimposed bully . Are we an empire . That seeks to dominate the world for its own geopolitical benefit and Economic Prosperity. Thats door number one. Door number two, are we, as many realists believe, instead the only power that stands between the world and armageddon between a repetition of the Great Depression or world war ii or even Nuclear Devastation of the planet . Is that our role . If thats true, must we play that role forever . Regardless of what it costs. What it costs our schools, infrastructure, domestic security, treasury. Our soldiers, are psyche. Door number three. Or is it possible and this is what my research suggests. That the road weve been on for the past 70 years been a detour, a necessary detour on the main path to which World History has actually been heading since about 1648, and now is the time for course correction . If im right, then my book challenges us to transition to the next phase of our national epic. Confidently and affirmatively, learning from both successes and failures, indeed to objective, scholars must be as rigorous with the identifying what went right as with what went wrong. As i said, i cant get all of this material and get it all out there. But im going to come pretty close. And for that, youll have to read my book. Every author has to put this plug in there. So, im hoping you will. What american umpire does is try to take essentially 300 years of history and make sense of it so we can understand where we might go. So in todays talk i want to do three things. First of all, i want to tell you a little bit about why i wrote the book. As kay said, im also a novelist. I have lot of irons in the fire. And i also like to explain why i think the reigning scholarly paradigm, this is my second objective, not only why the wrote the book but the way of looking at the world as i think most scholars adhere to is wrong. This refers to the u. S. As an umpire. Lastly i want to produce an alternative. This is a very persuasive explanation. And, in fact, people all around america are starting to call it the empire. I was watching jon stewart the other day. And my hero said, this big imperial nation. No, john youre wrong, but he hasnt called me yet. So i would like to propose in alternative explanation. Which in a nutshell is that the world as a whole has devised new norms over the past four centuries. And that these norms are not just made in america. They are worldwide. But that under the press of catastrophic events in the 1940s, the United States reluctantly refers the long standing policy of political nonengagement, nonentanglement and adopted a function thats akin, but not identical to one actually used to playing among its own states, the role of an umpire, to compel acquiescence, between squabbling governments, in moments of crisis. At the time we did this, we were the only nation with a relevant experience and requisite capacity. So, why did i write this book . That is a long story. I wont bother you with the whole thing. But it goes back to when i was first interviewing to be a graduate student and i was interviewing for a scholarship. An Important National scholarship. I was very excited and nervous about the process and there was a panel of experts interviewing me. I was going into the field of what is called diplomatic history at the time. I was asked, eager young thing i was, why do you want to enter a dying field . Well, i didnt know it was dying until he told me that. I had to bunt quickly and say, well because we cant let it die, right . This is too important, subject of americas relationship. But he is right. As i discovered. As in the field of history dying, i think for a couple reasons. One is this cultural and social history became very attractive. I think the other reason, i think a lot of Young Scholars repelled by a field in which there was only ever one answer to every question. Which is if you were look at what had happened in the world, the answer was pretty much america messed up. And so whatever the reason, scholars left the field and what happened is that political scientists took it up. And are mostly concerned with modern policy issues. Their knowledge of history is not deep. Thats not their field. And the historians who stayed in the field are historians generally who subscribed and often do generally subscribe to the idea that the american record is one long story of empire and imperialism. And that goes back to George Washington and ben franklin. But empire, i think, is a terribly misleading term that obscures challenges facing us today. And a misdiagnosis, as we know, is often more dangerous than no diagnosis at all. With a misdiagnosis, you can make the wrong prescription. There are groups like al qaeda which also claim the u. S. Is an empire to which th