Latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding for cspan two comes from these Television Companies and more, including charter communications. Broadband is a force for empowerment, that is why charter has invested biions, building infrastructure, upgrading technology, empowering opportunity, and communities big, and small. Charter is connecting us. Charter communications, along with a Television Companies, supports cspan 2 as a public service. Im david ferio graining from the National Archives like building in washington, d. C. , which sits on the Ancestral Lands of the peoples. I am david ferriero, archivist of the United States and it is a pleasure to welcome you to todays conversation about boyles new book the shattering, before we began i would like to tell you about two programs coming up soon on our youtube channel. On wednesday, january 26th at 1 pm david mickey and will tell us about his new book, watching darkness fall. Which recounts the rise of the third reich in germany and the road to war from the perspective of four american ambassadors and key western european capitals. London, berlin, rome, paris, and moscow. And, on tuesday, february 1st at 1 pm we will hear from sara, who will discuss her book in american memory, roosevelt and the making of an icon. She analyzes roosevelt as a cultural icon in american memory, historical leader who carefully and intentionally built his public image. Kevin boyle begins his look at the 1960s with a story of ed cahill, the 1961 organize his neighbors to duck their houses with american flags for the fourth of july. Boyle wasnt spired by a photograph of cahill and his neighbors that he had seen years before in a book published by the National Archives. In the book, which are produced more than 200 images from our photographic holdings was called the american image, boyles book about america in the 1960s, the shattering, takes us a decade beyond the american image and focuses on the periods transformative complex. The New York Times calls the shattering a rich, larry count of the 1960s, history is not simply the unfolding of events, but it is the story of individuals behind the events. In the shattering boyle introduces us to the people who propelled changes. The Washington Post review declares that boyle has a gift for synthesizing and translating the off and dry arguments and analysis of formal scholarship into artful and empathetic storytelling. Kevin boyle is they William Smith mason professor of American History at northwestern university. His previous book, arc of justice, won the National Book award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. He is also the author of the uaw and the heyday of american liberalism, and coauthor of muddy boots and raegan abrams. His essays have appeared in the Washington Post, the u. S. New york times, the baltimore sun, chicago tribune, and the detroit free press. Suzanne a smith is a professor of American History at george mason university, and teaches african American History, 20th century cultural history, history of death in america, american popular music, and African American religious history. She is the author of dancing the strait, motown on the cultural politics of detroit. Now lets hear from kevin boyle and suzanne e. Smith. Thank you for joining us today. Let me begin today simply by letting you know that professor smith was not able to join us at the last minute, they were complications that made it impossible for us to have her here, i am very sorry that she is not here. I would love to be sharing the afternoon with her. But, i am honored to be sharing it with you. I just want to say how much i appreciate the National Archives giving me the opportunity to talk with you, today. Particularly i want to thank Susan Clifton for putting together todays program. I want to start today by doing one of those things that i think you are not supposed to do when you talk about your book, i want to start with somebody elses book. And, in particular what i want to do is start with a book by a woman who has been in the news a bit lately because of her passing, i want to start with john didions second book of essays, the white album. Particularly when i want to do, just for a second, is wray just the start of it. It is a famous start, this is the start, the very first essay of the white album, a collection of essays that didion wrote in the late 1960s, and early 1970s. This is what she said at the start. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the imposition of the narrative wine on disparate images, by the ideas by which we have learned to phrase the shifting, phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or, at least we did for a while. Such a beautiful, elegant way of describing what historians actually do. What we do, as historians, as we take all of the fragments, the complicated pieces of the past and we try to shape them into a coherent story now. And then, overtime we start to wonder whether the story that we shaped me is really the best way of telling the events of the past. And so, we start to think the way did he ended. Whether we need a new story, and that is what the shattering is. It is my attempt to take the phantasmagoria of the 1960s, these extraordinary sprawls of events. And to reshape them into a new story of the 1960s. And, a lot of that story centers on powerful figures of the 1960s. The book deals to a considerable extent with the president s of the 1960s, john kennedy, lyndon johnson, record richard nixon, and, to my surprise, with Dwight Eisenhower who hovered over the 60s to an extent that i had not realized when i first started working on this book. It deals with those people who tried to become president , mary goldwater, bobby county, hubert humphrey, george mcgovern, george wallace. Who runs through so much of the 1960s. Talk about Supreme Court justices, talks about a general or two, talks about the towering activists we have associate with the 60s, darton dr. Mountain luther king junior, malcolm x. But, if there is one thing that animates my sense of the past, my sense of myself as a historian, i also really believe that ordinary people are central to history as well. Ordinary people who way do not know help us understand whose name we have never heard of, they help us understand the passed in a new way. And, ordinary people in the american past change this nation. So, alongside all of those famous people who run through the shattering, what i also try to do is tell the stories of ordinary people. What i want to do today is i just want to tell you for stories. And this is the first one. This is the 4th of july, 1961, on the sixday 100 block of west and east street in the northwest quarter of chicago we. The day before new ad cahill and his neighbor, clarence mitchell, draped their block in 38 flags. That is a lot of flags given that they are only 36 houses on the entire block. Rand, ed, being ed, had written to the chicago tribune, one of the major true newspapers in chicago, to announce what they had done. And, the trip decided that they would send a photographer out to take a picture of this block. And so, the neighbors all gathered on the lawn, right next to ed cahills house. And ad, and clarence should that got pride and place mill that is ed right there, that is clearance right there. And to a beds kids got in the picture as well. That is his son, terry. Standing at attention up at the top of the steps. And that is his daughter kate. Way in the back, right back there where you can barely see her is eds wife, stella cahill. Smiling into the 60s. Stella had good reason to be smiling. Stella was born a couple of days after christmas in 1916, deep in the polish ghetto of chicago. Where she, where her parents lived the, on what her father, who was a tailor, managed to bring home from his trade. She had an older brother, chester, and the four of them lived in a tenement deep inside the ghetto. Just about two years after her birth, her father died, killed by the spanish flu that was then raging through the poorest neighborhoods of american cities. And, her mother was with two Young Children to raise, she faced the prospect of tumbling into the worst forms of poverty. She tried to break the families fall by getting married again in 1920, she married another polish immigrant. This time a man who did not even have a trade that her now deceased husband had had, made his living as an unskilled labor. Which meant he made his living on the power of his back. A power that he tended to dissipate, it turned out, by drinking he could not control. And so, all through the 1920s, stella, her brother, and her mother, and now stepfather lived on the edge of poverty. There is no clearer sign and that then the facts that they moved every single year. Every single year, all the way through the twenties they lived in this part of town, then that part of town, then they move to that part of town. The way people do. And then, in 1929 the economy collapsed around them, by the spring of 1930 stella stop father was unemployed. And, the family was getting by on whatever money her mother could bring home from her job boxing candies in a candy factory the. Was not enough, within a year or so stellas older brother last school to take a factory job that he was lucky to get. That brought and just enough money that they could keep stella in school through the two years of a commercial course she was taking in one of chicagos public schools. And, the moment that course was over they pulled her out and sent her off to work as well. She was 15. Stella math add cahill on a blind date in 1938. The family who are hardly well to do. But, in the working class world of chicago, they were step above stellas family. Considerable step above, eds father, who had been born and downstate illinois of irish immigrant parents, his father worked as a foreman for a Construction Company that did road work for the city of chicago. What that meant, especially in the 1920s, was that work was steady. In a way that it had never been for stellas family. And, with that steady work he earned enough, eds father earned enough that in the late twenties he was able to buy a house. On the 6100 block of west at east rate. The block you are looking at now, though in those days it was a half finished, brandnew Development Going up way on the outskirts of town. It was a completely white neighborhood, much of the new developments that were going up and chicago in the 1920s were wrapped in restrictive covenants, those little clauses that were put up, developers put on their deeds to say this property can never be sold to a negro, and oftentimes, to a jewish american. But, i have no evidence whatsoever that when ads family bought that house they thought, at all, about race. Chances are they took it as a natural thing, that neighborhoods were going to be segregated, that is how deeply that Racial Discrimination was written into the fabric of american society. What they saw was that they were buying a 900 square foot house of living space, with an unfinished attic up above, that they could finish off, where the boys could have a place to sleep. What they saw was that they were buying a house with a little backyard, and a little front yard. Set and a half finished neighborhood, six blocks away from a brandnew catholic parish that they could join, st. Ferdinands. It was such in your parish, in fact, it did not have a church yet, but it did have a grade school where ad and his brothers could go there. As part of the commitment to the family, the deep commitment to the cahill family to catholicism. And that is where ed grew up. At an stella got married in may of 1940. 1942 they had their first child, a baby girl they named judy. In november of 1943, when judy was about a year old, and got drafted that. He was gone for two and a half years, most of that time he spent in europe. In the signal corps, trailing along behind the front line troops as they marched towards berlin and the end of the war. And stylist at home with a newborn. Now, stella knew on some level that ed was safe. She knew that, of course, some of the letters here at home, this weight, personal letters that he sent as often as he possibly could. But, you have to stop for just one second and think about this young woman in chicago, in 1943, in 1944, in 1945. Living surrounded by war, living surrounded by death. By the gold stars that she would see in the windows as she walked the baby along the streets. For the prayers for those boys who had gone missing, the prayers at sunday mass for the boys who had gone missing from that parish that she was a part of. And you have to believe, i believe with all of my heart that deep in the night, that fear came creeping up to her. That it would have been impossible for her not to imagine not the Western Union messenger coming to her door with that notice. And, if that were to happen that she would become her mother. In 1918, a two young widow with a toddler at her skirts and her life collapsing around her neck. That is not what happened, and got through the war just fine and he came home, in the spring of 1946 as part of the massive demobilization of that year. Within a few months few months, no one surprise, stella was pregnant again, and ed decided that with a new baby coming he could not really afford to take all of the benefits of the gi bill. He needed to go get a job. And he did, he got a job as a clerk in the front office of the vacuum company of chicago,. The vacuum can company of chicago made industrial strength coffee urns. And, one of their major clients was United States military, the u. S. Navy really likes their coffee urns. As did the army. In 1948, larson was born in 47, that is terry. Right up here. In 1948 this now young family, ad and stella and their two kids, moved into his fathers bungalow over on west at the street. And they moved in partly because they needed to take care of him, his wife had recently signed everybody knew he could not take care of himself. And partly because at had such a powerful sense of place, he wanted to go home. And so, they did, in 1948. That neighborhood was still half finished, half of the houses on the block had not been built yet because the development that had started back in the 20s had stalled during the depression, and then stalled again during world war ii. But, over the next few years from 48 on into the early 1950s the neighborhood started to fill in. As developers came back to put and small, reasonable houses. And the empty lots. Houses that they then sold, overwhelmingly, to Italian American and polish americans. Who are moving out of the center city of chicago in a process we call white flight. As that neighborhood filled in, as the population filled in, it became a more prosperous area. In the mid 1950s developers built a brandnew shopping mall, not that far from the straight, one of the first shopping malls in chicago went not that far from the street. And that catholic parish that was so important to add finally got the church it had never had, gorgeous, Beautiful Church wrapped in marble. A place for families like them to feel a sense of solidity that neighborhood had never had. And the family started to do well for themselves as well, and slowly started to move himself up in a vacuum can company, until, by the end of 19 50s he was the ad head of sale. They had a third child in 1952, that is kathy, down here. And, the family were not extravagant people not, but they had more money than ever before. And so, in 1953 and 54 they bought their first car. They had never had a car before. But, now they did not see the need for ed to take the bus all the way down to the vacuum can company down in center city anymore. And, in 55 they bought a tv, put it in the little living room. And, when the kids were old enough, judy was old enough, they sent them all off to the school, to the grade school that was connected to their parish. To saint ferdinands. And then, when judy, there all the starter got a High School Age they center it is a catholic high school, and when she finished there in 1959 they sent her to depaul university, one of chicagos two, large, catholic universities. Now, there is no doubt that this was a parochial world, that they lived in this. They lived inside of this tight, upper working class lower middle class catholic world this. There is no doubt that this neighborhood was wrapped around racial exclusion, and discrimination, you can see that just in the picture of the folks standing out here in 1961. And, the cahill family, at least. Their ability to buy the car, so by the tv, to send their kids off to school, private schools was paid for in part which by the vacuum cans connection to what Dwight Eisenhower would call the military Industrial Complex. Because the military Industrial Complex was not all about Missile Systems and bombers. It was also about industrial strength coffee urns them. But, you also have to thank just for a minute about what this world looked like for stella. Here was a woman who grew up right on the edge of devastating poverty. Who never had a stable place to live. And now, she an ad on their own home out on the street. He was a woman who in her early days of her marriage and her early days of motherhood was not sure whether her husband was going to come home. Now living in this extraordinarily Stable Family centered world go. Here was this woman who, in 1961, had her older daughter and college when she had had to leave school at 15 me. Is it any wonder that stella was smiling into the 1960s . And, already that worlds built around the eddy strait, already there were cracks in the exclusions that that world had created. None more dramatic, none more important than the one symbolized by this young woman. Elizabeth eckford. Elizabeth eckford, and her story would have been completely different, really, if her mother and father had had a phone. But they were working people, and t