Institute. You do not have an acronym for that, do you . Before coming to the roosevelt house, harold previously served as Senior Vice President for Public Affairs at the metropolitan museum of art. The previous 10 years, he coedited excuse me, cochaired the u. S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission appointed by president clinton, and i should add, president bush awarded harold the National Humanities medal in 2008. Harold has authored or books . Red or edited 52 that is what you are up to now . I dont even think i have read 52 books in my life. His latest major book is lincoln and the power of the press. It has won the lincoln prize, we know. Just this week, i saw, it was announced harold has been awarded the empire state award,s and history acknowledging his significant contributions to the profession, and he joins an impressive list of recipients that includes doors kearns goodwin, david mccullough, ken burns, and james mcpherson. The event will be held on september 6 and at the cooper union in new york city. [applause] mr. Carmichael ohs going to ask if you are going to talk about your career into an half hours . Im really worried because cooper union holzer 950 people. There will be buses to take this group of. But lincoln could not fill the hall. What am i going to do . Mr. Carmichael and who is going to help you fill the hall is stephen lang. Mr. Holzer he will be my makingcutor fresh off of avatar 2 and 3. Mr. Carmichael what is your favorite stephen lang performance . As many problems as i have with the script interpretation, i think gods and generals is my favorite. Mr. Carmichael im surprised. What about death of a soldier . Mr. Holzer i did not see it. I fit we were just doing film. Men, he played the nicholson part before nicholson on broadway. Mr. Carmichael full disclosure harold and i have had some email correspondence about this evening. We have a framework. The last email that i received nothing taboo i dont think. With legal counsel, and that gives me just enough to knock down the door and i can ask anything i want. Mr. Holzer i will check with Hunter College before. Go tormichael lets queens, new york, where you are from. About the very, very important assignment you received. Mr. Holzer i should say, really, i feel very honored and grateful to you. Honored to be here. I was here when you introduce the series. I was in the audience when Jim Mcpherson was in the chair, so beis very moving to occupying that symbolic space, which gives me a little time to think about my childhood in queens. I went to sort of a progressive Elementary School in that it was occupying a middle school as we would call it, and it had a rather sophisticated library for our teacherol, and came in one day with a hat full of folded up pieces of paper, each of which contained the name of a famous person. Whenale, as i figured out, everyone stood online. I stood on line to pick the name that changed my life. Our assignment was choose a name , go up to the middle school thinky, get a book from i 973. 1 we had open stacks. That was biography. No one will know what that means. N another three weeks or year i picked lincoln. My best friend who was my best friend because his father owned a delicatessen, who is a good good friend ki to have, picked genghis khan, became a rock n roll promoter. These can have enormous impacts. I went to the library and i the lincoln nobody knows as my book. I read it. I do not remember what i wrote. Two sides of looseleaf paper, but at the moment, the other thing that converged was it was the moment of the civil war centennial, and kids, particularly boys particularly white male people bykids were enthralled battle the creations. I still remember speaking about the unresolved issues we had an hour conference. I remember when president kennedy did something that most people have forgotten. Tookarned in the day he over the civil war centennial observation that the initial going tocharleston was be headquartered at a segregated hotel, and one member of the National Commission was africanamerican, and she was told, well, of course, you will not be staying here. We will find you a hotel somewhere else in charleston, and can be put a stop to it and made everyone go to a naval base nearby, and i remember being pretty moved by that even as an 11yearold. And that i got out of queens as quickly as a could. Mr. Carmichael at queens, did you continue history major, i assume . Historyer i was not a major. There is a major reconstruction caller at queens college, and i went to him you know, there are moments that are positive and moments that are negative and can be fatal in terms of sustaining or building interest or destroying it, and i had a long talk with him about my interest, and he was very negative, so i simply turned my attention to the great issue of emancipation and if it was dictated by Foreign Policy more than a sense of Racial Injustice or political strategy, and i did that is my senior essay for my it,ish class, and i aced but i stayed away from the history department. Mr. Carmichael did you ever see him again when you were a professional . No, he faded into deserved security [laughter] mr. Holzer no, im kidding. He did fine. He just was not a mentor. I really did not want to go to graduate school, and i didnt. Offer to be aus cub reporter on a weekly newspaper in manhattan, long gone, called the manhattan tribune. It was published by a white publisher and an and anamerican publisher peace corps veteran. The idea was to cover the west side of manhattan. For those who do not know, that liberal ferment in new york state and the country, really. And harlem. We covered both areas. Our slogan was this is not very original, but our slogan was black and white and read all over. Remember the old joke . That was our slogan. It was sort of a false narrative because it was not read by anybody in particular, but it was a great gig. It failed miserably. Girlfriend fiance future wife to work with me on it, and we work overwhelmed. One editor quit, another was fired, and we looked around and we were the only two working on the paper, so we put it out for another tenet of years, just the two of us. I think i got up to 115 a week we put it out for another two years. The editor, he had been a reporter on a paper in new york city where his wife was inquiring photographer. Anybody remember that . She was inquiring photographer and the daughter of a newspaper owner, which made her a really interesting person. Mr. Carmichael i wanted to talk about your partner in crime of. Orts, edith she is a very big part of your. Ork it is a lovely tribute, you two are sidebyside in the library of congress. Mr. Holzer edith retired at a very young age. She retired at 41. Im just making that up, but that is the official age we give, so she has been able to spend a lot of time with me on the road doing research, so it has been fun. Mr. Carmichael i think people are interested in the process of research and going to the archives. How does it work . We make a plan first about what year or month we are going to cover. We have spent a lot of time in the library of congress. Until recently i have not asked in the last year i am one of the few people maybe you do, too, get access to the original lincoln papers. They do not like to let people look at the lincoln papers because they are on microfilm. They are online. Guess what i hate to break this to you, but we are totally dependent on online resources. They are not all. It is not all there. The endorsements, the things that lincoln clipped out, the things that people sent him are not included in the transcribed or photographed versions, so we have found a lot of great things. We spent the last year and a half, interrupted a few times, theeing in quest of sculptor of the lincoln memorial, trying to breathe some life into this very professional, buttoned up artist. You will see the result in about a year and a few months i hope. Mr. Carmichael lets turn to some of your early scholarship. Your portal into civil war iconography prints, paintings, sculpture. If that is coming on the screen, some i hope it will soon, of the early work you did with , and harold did tina books. Mr. Holzer we did a book also called changing the lincoln image. We were the only people that decided since we were going to be revising, we might as well revise it a year and half later ourselves. We spent a lot of time in gettysburg. Liz is also here. They were introduced to the public with exhibitions of graphic arts here at gettysburg showge, so there was a those organized and then a confederate image in a terrible heat wave where the air conditioning went out in the art museum, and our third collaborator was not too happy to see, i guess, the Ripple Effect of the humidity on the pictures he had loaned to the exhibition. That is one of my memories. But we had a great collaboration. I enjoyed it. Can i tell you one quick story before we do serious stuff . Before emails,y really the day before computers. Our third author, mark neely, worked for the lincoln museum. He had an assistant who had a computer, so we actually had entree into a computer, but we had typewriters. In new york. Mark lived in ft. Wayne, indiana , and gabor lived in gettysburg. We had few personal meetings. We spent most of our time editing our work on the phone, and they were marathon sessions. Famous sessions, we started sunday morning going over two chapters. 9 00, 10 00, 11 00, noon we worked through lunch, and im arguing with mark and mark is arguing with me, and suddenly, you hear a little boys force saying, hello . Who was on this phone . Down for put the phone hours before, at his fun, who is now a tony winning set designer had gone to make a phone call and found these two clowns on the phone arguing, and then he got on the phone and pretended nothing ever happened, so that was one of our adventures. Mr. Carmichael with the three of you did was something people were not think about in terms of legitimate evidence. To visual evidence or visual culture. I think were all interested in how you interrogate the kind of evidence, so we have a very famous painting in the confederate image book. Mr. Holzer it was one of our choices as the signature image. Dehartburn i love his middle name. Mr. Carmichael very nice. This painting was in the confederate capital in 1864. Mr. Holzer people gave of their poverty generous, i think that is the line. Watches, wedding rings. The thing that interested us and what set us off on the quest of understanding the basically commercial nature of some of these tributes this is an expression of the manifestation of lost cause theology almost. The matron of the plantation, mrs. Willoughby newton i know that because i worked with a man named Willoughby Newton in Public Television and when the book came out, he wrote to me and said, thank you for honoring my grandmother. I had no clue. Mrs. Willoughby newton is insuring the old order will be sustained even in turmoil, that she will maintain the homestead, the plantation with the help of grateful and eternally loyal slaves. The other reassuring message was southernant Confederate Military officer killed far from home would receive a loving burial, and that is the idea. It was an act of passion by the why, we wondered, was the print version of it, which many more people saw them ever saw the painting, which is now i think in the museum of the confederacy under john koskinens tutelage or guardianship why was it published in new york . Of there and offered a sort not pleasant but revelatory clue about the nature of civil war memory, that in many ways, it was commercialized that white publishers could not wait for that theyo be over so could reenter a market that had been denied to them, and they without fear of being , willingf disloyalty to mass produce images like this , so that became a household item in southern homes for generations. We can talk about the loyalty of new york city, but that is another issue. Mr. Carmichael what i am interested in in your, you do a brilliant job in your book, you do a brilliant job conveying what that painting meant to people at the time. The illustrations, they shape and direct peoples views. Mr. Holzer thats what we argued in our books, that they shape reputations more than reflect them. Mr. Carmichael were going to use this as a transition to talk about some other monuments and the landscape today. What is this painting, what is the message that is bringing white southerners together to act politically for the confederate cause . How do you look at Something Like that and make that translation to on the ground Political Action . I think what is unique about this image and one of the reasons it injured it endured for as long as it did, reproductions of this image decorated the homes of ftb people, udc people, descendents through the 1970s and 1980s when we were investigating it. I think this particular image and it is an anomaly for that reason is a nonaggressive image. Robert e. In image of lee at war. It is not an upsetting image of robert e. Lee surrendering. It is not Jefferson Davis in hoop skirts, to be sure. Matron white successfully Holding Things together and acting as if this yankee invasion and incursion and threat to their way of life is not as sanctified is what you see here. It may be out there. It may be raging beyond those hills, but this woman is able to assume the role as clergyman. She is a clergy woman. She is preaching. Mr. Carmichael and the light coming down on her, the heavens have parted. Slavesot overlook those who are truly on the margins. Andholzer on the margins contentedly doing assumedly gratefully christianized, happily digging the grave of this officer who died in the effort to keep them subjugated, so it is a whole topsyturvy image, but it was subtle, and i think that is one of the reasons it endured. This whole image of confederate iconography, which you stress has been undervalued. Really monument in new orleans arem sure all of you familiar. Im curious about your take. Mr. Holzer i dont think this is an easy one. Mr. Carmichael its not. Mr. Holzer i been trying to take a little more global view of this. A veryin a city in which famous statue of king george iii november ofwn in one year and its bronze melted into ammunition to fight the british during the revolution bronze melted into ammunition to fight the british during the revolution. It was not a great statue, from the engravings were seen, but i am also a person who lived through the ive also a person who worked 20 years at an art museum and we lived through destruction by the television and isis. To is not always supposed please everyone. It is supposed to be disturbing. It is supposed to be provocative. It is supposed to signal and manifest Public Opinion at a moment when such things are subsidized, and they arent terribly expensive. Im not sure the right thing to do is to remove them. Terribly expensive. Im not sure the right thing to do is to remove them. On the other hand, the monument in new one lens that celebrated the destruction of an integrated government by violence seems so illconceived that it deserved to be taken down years before. I made the point that if it is really great art, whatever the subject, do we really want to render it to oblivion . I think we are going to be looking at that in a few years in richmond. You have some awfully good lpture there and are sure and arthur rasch and arthur ashe at the end, which is supposed to be a remedial work link inand here is iconography. In the 1870s, the africanamerican communities around the country contributed money to build a monument to lincoln as an emancipator. Thomas ball did the sculpture. It is in a park in washington. It was dedicated by us it was unveiled by ulysses s. Grant and dedicated by frederick this is lincoln lifting a half naked slave. That is something the africanamericans grapple with. This statue is in the shadow of rhetoric jobless the symbolic shadow of Frederick Douglasss home. There are many ideas about what to do with that piece. When lincoln was inaugurated and talked about the sin of slavery, he looked at a statue of George Washington that was in the plaza of the u. S. Capitol for both of his inaugurations, which even that was taken away. People thought it was ludicrous because washington was bare chested. People called him georgie in the bath. In some corner, it used to be in the capital plaza. I like context. Mey gallagher took edith and to see a monument in santa fe, a monument to white victory over the native american tribes. Plaza where American Indian merchants come and sell their wares and it has a phrase, this is the place where the noble white settlers defeated the savage indians. So, the communitys response was to take out the word savage. They just scratched it out. Context means a lot, so there is a way to con contextualize works of art that people may find disturbing. Pressrmichael i want to more on this. It is more than just works of art, it is people understanding the interconnectedness of the past. A monument to the civil war is a area thato jim crow is the context. Why is it if we can remove that, how do we get people to understand the great art of progress . How do they understand through slavery to the war to civil rights when we start removing these pieces . Let me be clear, i can understand why someone would be deeply offended by the monument of r. E. Lee. I have said before, i dont think that is reason enough to remove these from the landscape because i worry we will reach a point where no one is going to was a war that led to emancipation, but against what . Instead of remove that, why not put waysides that speak to the era of jim crow and segregation, that show the connections. The past. Ed remixing i fear that historians i am not sure if anyone listens to it these pieces are slipping away from us, and they are slipping away without a real serious conversation about what the longterm impact is going to have, or how Peoples Stores size the past how people historicize the past. Just because someone is offended, i understand it, i respect why they would want it removed from their community, but there is a bigger issue here, i think. Mr. Holzer that is what i thought conceptualization contextualization is an option. Whereals say a lot about you are raising a hero to be. By i am not an iconoclast nature. Withuseums are filled these gargoyles, spectacular collection of french are going. I once asked my director how we c