Programming on American History every weekend on cspan3. Follow us on twitter for information on our schedule, upcoming programs, and to keep up with the latest history news. Welcome to lafayette and West Lafayette, indiana, located on the wabash river. West lafayette is home to Purdue University. With the help of our Comcast Cable partners, over the next hour and 45 minutes, we will look at the history of the cities. Learn about William Henry harrison and the battle of tippecanoe. It was cold and rainy, it was early november. The troops were low on provisions. They had limited manpower and equipment. Harrison complained about his shortage of axis and their poor quality in the building of Fort Harrison on the way up. He had the troops build bonfires to keep them warm and ward off the rainfall, but had them sleep in battle conditions fully dressed on their weapons. Videoer, visit cspans archives which houses over 200,000 hours of Public Affairs programming. The archives started as an idea of a halfdozen professors at Purdue University who felt the longform, unedited content cspan airs is an important audiovisual record of Public Affairs, the entire congress, congressional hearings, president ial speeches. And that video needed to be saved and saved in a way that scholars and the public could use it. First, learn about Amelia Earharts life and career through the George Palmer putnam collection housed at Purdue University. From an airplane, even the watchful purple hills could not see so well as i the state of stain of evening. She would have been 23 whenever she was writing these. But you can see that she has a romanticized view of the height, being able to see nature below her. When she became an aviation editor for cosmopolitan she would write about the beauty of flying and how she loved things like seeing the clouds up there and the serenity of being on her own and being able to look at the beauty below. Amelia earhart was an early woman pilot at a time when many women did not have careers outside of the home. She is most well remembered for having disappeared. It is still a mystery what happened to her. But i think she is also remembered because she was such a pioneer for womens rights and womens education and careers. The quality of the sexes was very important to her as well as promoting aviation as a legitimate travel option. Many people were afraid to fight to fly at that time. It was not until around 1920 when she started really thinking seriously about taking flying lessons. She had to convince her family because not only was it dangerous, it was expensive and they did not have the money to allow her to do that. She started taking jobs so she could pay for her own lessons. One of the requirements her father had was that she take lessons from a woman pilot. It took her longer to locate a woman pilot to give her instruction. Eventually she found nita. She was the first to take her up and planes and start to teach her. If you read things from her perspective, amelia was horrible because she would daydream in the air, she was loving the beauty and the height and the excitement and was not paying attention to the technical think she needed to know should something go wrong with the plane. Today, you are in the Purdue Universitys library. Archives and special collections. We will be looking at items from the collection of Amelia Earhart. Amelia earhart was married to George Palmer putnam. She met him in 1928. George putnam was a big promoter and publisher and he had gotten the rights to publish a biography of Charles Lindbergh. Charles lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the atlantic in 1931. In the 1920s, Charles Lindbergh was a huge rockstar. They wanted to have a woman do similar things, like fly across the ocean. At the time there were several , women pilots who wanted to be the first to do this. George was looking for any woman he could find who had a pilots license and was articulate, would be a good spokesperson and was attractive. He contacted amelia at the house where she was working as a social worker. He interviewed her. Her First Impressions of him was were that he was horrible and pushy and arrogant, which is interesting since they eventually married. He thought she was the perfect person to promote as the first woman across the atlantic. He did not explain that emulate at that time amelia was not going to pilot the plane. When amelia signed on to this adventure, it is referred to the friendship flight because friendship was the name of the plane, a million was aware of the risks of this kind of light because its a longrange flight. A lot of things could go wrong with the plane with weather conditions, any number of things. She wrote these two letters that she referred to as popping up off letters. She met this as if in i die and these letters are read by my family. She wrote one to her mother and one to her father. This one im going to show was when she wrote to her father. Dearest dad, it was worth it. You know that. I have no faith we will meet anywhere again, but i wish we might. Goodbye and good luck to you. Some people have interpreted that as your daughter, but she liked to play with words. I think she was using it in the sense of doting as well as daughter. She and her mother argued a lot. They did have a close loving relationship but her mother was very irresponsible with finances. That irritated amelia. She was constantly trying to bail the family out in that area. Her father was irresponsible with finances, but he was very charming and that covered a lot of things. He was an alcoholic, which is why a milia avoided all stimulants. She did not drink alcohol or smoke or do drugs. She was adamant she did not want to have any sort of stimulants consumed. This is a folder of pilot licenses that belonged to amelia. Most of them do not have photographs on them. This is one of my favorites because it does have a picture of her, it has her signature on it. It tells some interesting things about her personality. She is very idolized and a hero for me as well. She did have some faults and one of them was she was very reluctant to grow old. Her mother, her grandmother and several of the women in her family had lived until their 80s and 90s and above. She was very aware of how much the elderly struggle. It was always on her mind when she was writing about personal matters. At some point, she began lying about her age. On this license here, it asks for her age. You can see this license is dated 1930 and she said that she is 31. As of this time, she would have been about to turn 33 in july. So she is already lying by at least one year here. Not that it matters. She had such a youthful appearance anyway. The other interesting thing about this, we get a sense of her coloring from her description of her hair and her eyes. She was tall and thin. You can see that here as well. She weighed 118 pounds and was five feet eight inches high. This is a compact. It had a place for powder here. You can see she used all the powder. It had a place for rouge, which still has the plastic on it. One of the things amelia prided herself on was she was always camera ready. In the early years of flying her plane she would , often have crashes and someone from a newspaper would drive and driveby and ask if they could take her picture. Famously, she said to her flying coach one time, we have to always be ready for the cameras. Right after crashing a plane, she brings out a compact and puts powder on her nose. It was practical. She had fair skin and the sun would burn her skin if she did not wear powder. I think it is so fascinating that she did not use the rouge side. If you look at images of her, photographs or images of her in the newspaper, sometimes it looks like she was wearing makeup. Usually what happened was the people who were producing the newspaper would draw over her eyes and filling her lips to make it look like she was wearing makeup. She rarely wore it. We do have a few portrait shots where it looks like she might have a little on. But that is very unusual. This will compact tells that story. This is a famous document that amelia wrote the morning of her wedding to George Putnam. According to several accounts of people who knew the couple, George Putnam had proposed to amelia multiple times and she had turned him down. I dont remember at what point she eventually agreed but she clearly did it with much hesitation. P. P. Ys, dear g. They called each other by their initials. She calls him g. P. P. There are things we have talked over before, most of them. You must know again, my reluctance to marry. My feeling that i shatter thereby chances to work, which means most of me. Ve now as foolish as anything i could ever do. I know there is compensation, but have no heart to look ahead. On our life together i want you , to understand i shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me. Shall i consider myself so bound to you. If we can be honest about affections for others which may come to either of us, difficulties of such situations may be avoided. Please let us not interfere with the others work or play nor let the world see our private joys or disagreements. In this connection, i may have to keep someplace apart where i may retreat from an even attractive cage. I must exactly cruel promise. That is you will let me go in one year if we find no happiness together. I will try to do my best in every way and give you fully of that part of myself you know and seem to want. This is a letter she presented to her fiance without any words. And he read it and then nodded and agreed to it and they went forward with their marriage. The things in this letter are extremely telling about her personality, her concerns about marriage and really about how important her career was to her and her concerns she would have to give that up. The other interesting piece is something feminists find particularly fascinating is this is 1931 and this woman is saying to her about to be husband that she does not expect him to be faithful and he should not expect her to be faithful either and she thinks it foolish to get married. It is interesting to think about because it makes you wonder what made her go ahead and marry him. As her promoter, manager, and publisher he was , promoting her constantly. It could be that this was something he felt was critical to their continuing relationship. It is not really known why she went ahead and married him. There have been many people who have speculated that they had a manager relationship, there was not a real love there. What is interesting is you can tell from looking in the collection that is not true because she did write love letters to him. She had various affectionate names she would call him. There are accounts from his side of the family where there were people who would see them together being very loving. It is just that they were just extremely private, especially amelia. After amelia made the friendship flight, she felt she did not really achieve all of the accolades in a way that was true to her. She became instantly famous. She was on newspapers. There were huge parades in her honor. Everyone knew the name Amelia Earhart. She did not feel she deserved all those accolades because she was a passenger on the plane. She did not feel like her skills were needed. A few years later, she decided she wanted to make a solo atlantic flight completely on her own. She would be the only person on the plane. What is interesting about that is there are actual documents in the collection where it talks about how it would be smarter to fly with a mechanic or a navigator. But she knew if she did that the , media would say that she did not fly the plane. She decided to take that risk and be the only person in the plane. And in 1932, she did fly her plane solo across the atlantic ocean. I said earlier amelia was not the worldss best womens pilot and she certainly was not as skilled technically as aviation as many other pilots at the time. But she was very driven, cool under pressure, courageous, and she loved to fly. Those things worked in her favor because on this flight in 1932, because a lot of things went wrong on the plane. We would not know that if she had not kept this notebook. This little notebook was written by her during the actual flight. It is all in pencil, which is difficult to read. She is talking here about her times, whenever she was leaving for the flight. But the piece i find the most fascinating is, first of all, she starts talking about flying through a storm. At this point in the journey she , is 13 hours on the way. She says if anyone finds the wreck, know that the nonsuccess was caused by my getting lost in a storm for an hour and then the exhaust manifold burned out. She thought at this point that she was probably going to die. She is referring to leaving a note for anyone who finds the wreckage of the plane. Amelia published a book about this, the account of this flight , after she successfully landed. She talks about not only did she have this fire aboard the plane, but there was gasoline running down the back of her neck and all sorts of things were going wrong with her measurements. She could not tell how high or low she was flying. If she flew to low too low, she would be close to the water and risk going down there. If she flew too high, it was difficult to see. The conditions could cause ice on the wings and so forth. She was trying to figure out how high she should be flying because her gauges were not telling her what she would do the mesh should do. And then dealing with this flame coming on the plane while she is trying to pilot it 13 hours into what became a 17. 5 hour flight, she would have been quite fatigued at that point. I think it tells a lot about her strength of character and her courage and determination that she pulls out this notebook and is writing this as things are happening on the plane because she clearly thought she might die at that point. In 1934, amelia was speaking at a conference in new york about womens careers. The president of Purdue University was at the same conference. And was her speech inspired to invite her to give a lecture at purdue, which she did later that year. Following that, Edward Elliott approached amelia about some sort of position she might have at university to help encourage women students. As well as perhaps drawing new women students to purdue. The idea of how to educate women was very much on Edward Elliotts mind at the time. This was following the 20 years 20s when women had gained suffrage. They were starting to come to universities more. It was not clear what universities needed to do to support them. Edward elliott approached Amelia Earhart and asked if he could meet with her and her husband about something she might do at purdue. They got to talking over a meal. It was suggested that she serve as a Career Counselor for the women students, which worked perfectly for amelia because she felt strongly that women should have careers. All the way up until world war ii, it was unheard of for a woman after graduating college to pursue a career if she married. One of amelias main goals was to encourage the women students that they could still marry but should also pursue their own dreams as people in professions or whatever else they wanted to do and not set that aside as an outcome of getting married. When Edward Elliott brought amelia to purdue, one of the first things she did was send out a questionnaire to the women students. One of the first questions is, are you planning to seek employment after you leave college . Yes, no, or undecided. If you are planning to work, what is your reason for doing so . The answer she gives here, clearly things she wants the women to consider. Such as economic necessities, the family expects it to attain , personal independence, to secure luxuries that could not otherwise be had to have , something to do, to achieve professional success, to have the mental stimulus of accomplishing something. These are clearly answers she is providing to the women as too things they should think about and not give up on. Things that would keep them busy and engaged and feeling a sense of pride and independent enough to support some things they might want to do and not just rely on income from their husband. This is one of Amelia Earharts flight helmets. It is just a leather helmet with strap underneath her chin here. This is the front of it. She did have a few different helmets throughout her aviation career. But this is the one that came to us directly from her husband after she disappeared. We know she wore this on several of her important flights. It has been loaned to museum s several times throughout the years. She was on the faculty from 1935 until the year she disappeared 1937. ,what a lot of people dont realize is she would really only stay on campus a few weeks, a few months out of the year. She would come during each semester and be on campus for a month or two. After amelia had been here for a year or so, the trustees and the president of the university asked her what they could do for her and she said if she had said she had always dreamed of a plane that could take her around world. She wanted a plane that was faster, have more endurance, could fly longer ranges. The Purdue Research foundation agreed that they would provide a fund for Amelia Earharts aeronautical research. The catch was she could use the plane for around the world flight, which was what she wanted to do. But the plane would also be intended to be used for research purposes. She decided she wanted to make the around the world flight a little earlier than originally planned. She began seriously planning for that around the end of 1936. She worked with an expert on navigation who charted out the route. Once she had the plane here she , parked it in hangar one of the purdue airport. It would stay there unless she was flying in it. The goal always was after her world flight, she would bring the plane back and it would be used for teaching and research at university. When amelia left for that final flight, which her goal was to circumnaviga