You have a front row seat to every minute, all beginning on monday, july 8 seen. July 18. Fromxt, we will hear adrian harrison, discussing her , the a powerful mind selfeducation of George Washington. She talks about the books he read and collected throughout his life and how the first commander in chief inspired her. The Fred W Smith Library for the study of George Washington at mount vernon hosted this hourlong program. Host good evening. I am the founding director of the National Library for the city of George Washington here at mount vernon. You are in the library and i would like to welcome cspan here as well tonight. This is our forward evening book talk. Evening book talk. Were thankful to be sponsored by the ford motor company. We like to see that. That is what we see right there. Maintained and managed by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association since 1860. It was built before that by the washington family. It was expanded by none other than George Washington in. Of course, the association has maintained this property so that everyone can learn about the life and lessons of George Washington. Theyve done this without taking any government money. They are a privately funded institution and it is part of the mission to help people everywhere learn about the principles of the founding. The topic tonight is perfect for what we do. We are really excited to have this special presentation for you. Please welcome Adrienne Harrison. She is a graduate of west point who later went on to earn her phd degrees from rutgers university. She has been an assistant professor at west point. She served as 12 years as a commissioned officer in the u. S. Army including three combat tour is in iraq. She brings a certain amount of experience to this project. She will talk to you a little bit about how personal it is for her to explore the life of George Washington in this way. She is here tonight to talk about her great new book. She is doing exactly what we would like to do in mount vernon. Not the person that is just a marble statue although we love the great icon of George Washington. We want to recognize that he was a human who lived in the world. It was through his mind. We do have a chance to have questions from the audience. My colleague, the chief made a special effort tonight to bring out some of the items from his library and you will see two tour it in the holy of holies. You will get a chance to get in there behind the scenes. It is a special evening and it is this an exciting one. Everyone give a big hand. [applause] adrienne good evening everyone. It is a privileged to be here i wasnt expecting that so thank you for having me and for allowing me to indulge you in one of the biggest things i have ever done. I just want to say by info of introduction, why i gave this talk. I was on facebook and when i was on facebook, it was the same day where i received this invitation and saw a suggested ad pop up. Like Mark Zuckerbergs minions are figuring out what you want to purchase on who you are and what your interests are. As it happens, there was an ad that popped up and have you never heard of it, it is a company that makes military themed clothes. It was this particular ad that got my attention. It had a picture on it of George Washington crossing the delaware river. Underneath the Screen Printing it said one single phrase, get some. The tagline was what, a attention because it said, if you insult George Washington in a dream you had better wake up. And apologize. Total stud. It struck me when i saw this because this is why i wrote this book. We think of these swaggering g. I. Joe type terms. This is how we think about it. He has ceased to be a regular person to us. He is the myth. He is the guy that is in a painting. He is at now to us, he is two dimensional and far removed so there has to be a way to make him a real person again. For me, it was something that was intensely personal. I8 interest in washington going back to my childhood. It was something that had stayed with me all the way up to when i was an undergraduate. I did my thesis on washingtons tour of the south in 1791. It was something that i carried with me in the army. It hit me when i was a brandnew second lieutenant. I was 23 years old and there i was. All army stories start with the quote, there i was. I was in the 82nd Airborne Division on the first stage of Operation Iraqi freedom. I have the lives of 27 soldiers in my hands as well as the soldiers we transported in the back of our trucks to the Different Missions we were assigned. I was in baghdad where we ended up after the invasion and it struck me after one mission that we had that after we got back, we had narrowly evaded an ambush. The traffic in washington dc does not compare to what you see over there. It was one of those experiences that you are drained afterwards. It hit me, how did washington do this . How did he experienced armed combat for the first time. Here i am in the rack and my mind randomly goes back. Everyone needs a bit of a mental escape. The days and nights all started to blend together so you needed something that was going to get you through so you could face the next day. For me, it was reading. I had a steady stream of books sent to me. One of my old thesis advisors who ive actually spoken here as well. He sent me all the latest books on George Washington so he kept his example. I was thinking about washington and how did he do it . Although we were separated by more than two centuries and vastly different circumstances, there were some similarities. I was a little bit older than he was when he let his first troops that he and i both had very limited or no professional experience at that point. When we were given the opportunity to lead and so fundamentally i thought our response must have been fundamentally the same in some level. Then the comparison had to stop. Reality comes back into play. I had the benefit of west point education behind me. I had been taught the fundamentals of how to lead people. I had extensive military training. I had all of that that could undergird my consequence. He was younger than me and has some fencing lessons. That was it. No wonder his actual execution did not go well. Lets just say that. After leading his troops bravely out into the wilderness, he picks the absolute worst on how you could put a fortification. Worst place ever nothing but trees. That wasnt going to go well. He went well beyond the stress of his orders. He attacked a party of frenchmen and diplomats and soldiers and he started those seven years war. We were different in that regard and then we had the first lesson that we had. He found himself in a position where he did not have the professional training to set up the fortification. He did not speak the language of his enemy. In this first firefight, he had no control when these four frenchmen who have been mortally wounded. When they descended on him, they were pleading for their lives in french. He lost control he vowed at that point that he was not going to make the same mistake again. He learned from the experience. I wont belabor it. There was nothing about him but said future father of the nation. There was nothing about that. He was charged with leading these officers who also had no experience. He says something prophetic. Having no opportunity to learn from example, let us read. He was exposed in the british army to the professional benefit of reading. You read to gain the background requisite knowledge to go out there and put it into execution. He didnt have the benefit of a formal education that he was going to go out there and do the best he could. And he expected his officers to do the same. That was something that stuck with me. That he was lucky as a leader. Even though i had more of an education was something that i took to heart. This question of how did he do it. How did he turn into this. The indispensable man. There is a part of the legacy of the steely eyed charger. There is a reason why we remember him that way. There is more to it than just that he was a tall guy who looks good in a uniform. I carried this question with me to graduate school. I got to go back to school and i was going to make my mark on the world. I said that i had an idea. For my dissertation. I want to write about how George Washington fashioned himself. And he said, thats a terrible idea. [laughter] there was a grain of truth in what he was saying. The challenge facing any washington historian is what else is there to say about this man . He is the most talked about in the world. Youre going to go to a bookstore and find something on George Washington there. I was told to go back to the drawing board and try again. I was undaunted and how i kept this idea. I was going to convince them that this was a viable product. I read a book that was focused on william drake. He was a political coal operative who learned political operative who learned the art and science of being a political figure through reading. It was something about what he had argued. He said that reading was essentially something that is political and it is specific to time and places. We think about our own reading and that is pretty much true for all of us. Our predilections, our beliefs inform how we receive the things that we read. Somehow it will inform the way that you receive things. Also, he put forth the idea that reading is useful and practical. I thought about a different book about washington. In that, i found an opportunity. He included an appended to his book. This is something where he said that washington the reader was practical but not really all that bright. He is not that much of it intellectual. Im sure if you are, he would argue that with me. That is the fun of being a historian, we debate rings. Taking what sharp what said about reading being political and Practical Knowledge that you can apply to your civic task force in front of you. There was my opportunity for the dissertation. I wanted to look at washington and how he did this self fashioning and presentations by looking at his reading. You will not find a whole lot of biographies that talk about it to any great extent. Many of them tend to be dismissive of his reading efforts because he is not something that we see. We remember the guy on the charger and here is the books are under the table. It looks like he would rather not in this picture. That was my idea and i was able to sell it sell that to my advisor. The next question for me was, how you approach that . So what, what he do about it . I started with this 1799 inventory that was her hired by required by law when he passed away. When he passed away, there were over 900 volumes and 1200 different works that were there. Everything ranging from history to mass. Political pamphlets and the like. 900 volumes, that is a lot. Off that, what did he read . Think about that, whether you have real bookshelves. We all have books on our shelves that weve never read it the book that some wellintentioned person gave you as a gift and you went thanks. I will treasure that, as you consign it to the shelf, never to be touched again. Bearing that in mind about ourselves, it will tell you something about what you are. My shelves are almost all history. I am a historian. That is what i enjoy so you will find almost all history and not a Science Fiction title on there. That is just me. It will tell you something about your priorities. Mind are history because i am trying to make a living out of it. It is less than 1 anything else. If thats true, why would that be different for washington . What is on his shelf . What is not there is also telling. I have a lot of history, politics, military, agriculture and all the things washington did his live is what jumps off the shelf at you. What is not there is literature. He had no time for that. Maybe it wasnt all that interesting. There is information that can get from that. There are conclusions we can draw. How you get further . That is one of what i want to spend the rest my time talking about. I looked at the volumes and what do we know . We know that washington did not know any of language other than english. Anything that was printed in a Foreign Language i excluded. For things like don quixote, that he had an english translation of, that is a good example. He actually got a copy. Maybe he did read them. English translations are a little bit different in that was easy. This is where it gets hard. Washington did not talk about reading. He rarely recommended reading to other people. He made few literary allusions so how do we know what he read and what he didnt. You approach the idea of book ownership itself. Books in the 18th century are luxury items. They are hard to come by especially in virginia. There is a Printing Press down there but they do not do a lot of book importing. He had to order his books during the colonial. From england so if you took the time to order it and specifically order a certain title or addition. That means he intended to use it. Im going to make that assumption because he is not going to line the shelves on red not going to line his shelves classics. D he never invited anyone into his store the study. Books were hard to come by. Another assumption i made is that for the books that he had, in 1799, the state counted everything in the house. Martha washingtons books, it was also counted. Anything about womens literature, i assumed washington didnt have time for that. For his books, there were 397 volumes that had either his signature or his book plate, or both in them. You look at his signatures and if you go on a tour, you can see an example of this right in front of you. His signatures are meticulous. Even though he wrote with a quill pen, everything was perfectly centered. They were not haphazardly written. If you take the time to do that, that was something that was important to him. There are other books in their that the gifted books dont all have marks of ownership on them. We know they are his because they came with a letter. If you didnt bother to do that, he may not have even touched it. I narrowed it down by looking at that. Now we have a smaller list and now this is approachable. When we do with that information . I had a choice to make. I can either take a somatic approach and taking what he had started and go into more depth. I could do that or i could take a chronological approach. For me, i decided that after figuring out when and how he acquired them, i would do the chronological thing. In order to make sense of what washington red, i need to put it in the context of a wider world. There are only a handful of books that have his writing in them. He did not quote things verbatim in his writing. Contextualizing him made the difference and i could see him when he first married martha and took possession of the library. I have that inventory and it was made in his request. I had to compare against that the inventory that was made on his stepsons death. She dies at the siege of yorktown. I can balance that against the washington collection and see. Then i had the inventory done in 1799, that was also a good one. To get further at this i had the Auction Catalog from when the Washington Library went up or sale around the time of the civil war. When that both went for auction, everything to do with washington was worth money. Anything with his signature are handwriting was worth that much more. People were good at picking out the fakes. It was in everybodys interest to make sure this was right. It shows what specific volume has signatures on them and what had marginal note that. If the book was given to him, some of the religious books that came from his mother was given to him. They had notes like that. That was my handbook going through this process. It was able to help me find where his books were. I had a framework and i had to go about figuring out, lets put the books with the context of what he was doing. In that i learned something about the practicality of what he was doing. If you want to find his books now besides what is here in this library, some are scattered all over the place. The biggest concentration is in boston. That is the Subscription Library if youre not familiar. They tried to collect as many of washingtons volumes as they could. They thought it was a shame that this was all going to be split up and we would lose track of them for prosperity for posterity. I have a catalog and went to boston. It was given after many provisions. I got to handle his real book. I will give you a quick example of the relativism. Reading this one book by Gilbert Burnet called and exposition on the 39 articles of the church of england. Page turner. [laughter] it wasbook about how organized. When washington came to possess this book, and it was in the early 1760s, so i am reading this book, it has gotten signature on it. There is really nothing else there. I reading it, and is dry. And i cannot find anything that was relevant that washington would have used. I am trying to approach these books as washington would have read them. What will he get from them that he will put into immediate use, because it seems to be what he has done with the things we know about him. I am approaching this book, reading it, i am not getting anything. I am like, i made a mistake. I started to have a panic attack, this whole thing is going to fall apart. Now i am only a third of the way through, i keep going, and i see two glorious big thumbprints in the margins of the book, much bigger than mine, belonged to hands that were much bigger than mine. They were smudges and they were perfect. It is as if someone was holding the book up to the light, under the light, it is the window, maybe a candle, firelight. So book ownership, the oil on your hands, ink stains, smudges, dirt, people did not wash their hands as much. The nature of the party that they are printed on as well. I cannot prove these thumbprints are his, but to me it was like, all right, these are here for a reason. Somebody thought this page was interesting because they were gripping it. The page was about the organization of bishoprics and diocese in the church