This goes all the way back to henry ford who provided the first fire engine to keep the mansion from burning down. We like to see that. That is what we see right there. It was built before that by the washington family. It was expanded by George Washington. Of course, the association has maintained this property so that everyone can learn about the life and lessons of George Washington. 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. We have 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 this green 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. 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. 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. \it was something that i carried with me in the arm. 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 had the lives of 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 barely debated 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. I had the benefit of west point education behind me. 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. s actual execution did not go well. Lets just say that. After leading his troops bravely he picks the absolute worst on well. 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 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 energy 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. 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 said something pathetic. Having no opportunity to learn from example, let us read. He was exposed in the british army to the professional benefit of reading. He didnt have the benefit of a formal education that he was going to go out there and do the best he could. 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. There is a part of the leg and see on 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 got to go back to school and i was going to make my mark on the world. I said that i had an idea. I want to write about how George Washington fashioned himself. And he said, thats a terrible idea. [laughter] the challenge 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. What else is there thats different . 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 was set. It it was in a different grad School Course but i was exposed readingk called revolutions by kevin sharp. Named sir on a guy William Drake who was a political operative that learned the art of being a public figure through reading. It was something about what he had argued. In talking about drake, 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, whether you are conservative, liberal, religious. Of england formed inform the way you receive things. Also, he put forth the idea that reading is useful and practical. I thought about a different book about washington. I thought about another about George 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. The appendix talks about the main topics youll find in washingtons library. He sums it by saying hes not much of an intellectual. Opportunity to look at his shortfall. 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. That was something you wont 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. He has been there and done that. That was my idea and i was able to sell that to my advisor. How you approach that . So what, what he do about it . I started with this 1799 inventory that was her hired 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 military science to religion. Political pamphlets and the like. 900 volumes, that is a lot. Of 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 bethink it looks fascinating and you never get to it. Or the book that some wellintentioned person gave you as a gift and you went thanks. You can sign 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. Im a historian. That is what i enjoy so you will find almost all history and not a Science Fiction title on there. Thats just me. It will tell you something about your priorities. 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. I looked at what is on his shelf. What is not there is also telling. I have a lot of history, politics, military, agriculture and. Maybe it wasnt all that interesting. There is information that can get from that. We know that washington did not know any of language other than english. 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 is a good example. He actually got a copy. 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. What does that mean . Books in the 18th century are luxury items. They are expensive and 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. He has to order them 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 just going to make that assumption because he is not going to line the shelves on red unread classics. 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. If it had the markings of ownership, 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 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 slapped on there with too much haste did it was done deliberately and with care. 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. I had to connect some more of the dots. 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. He died at the siege of your town of thai photo. An inventory was done then. 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 those books went for auction, everything to do with washington was worth money. People were good at picking out the fakes. It was in everybodys interest to make sure this was right. The Auction Catalog shows what specific volume has signatures on them and what had marginal note that. Any sort of other notes that might have come with the book 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. The guy who compiled it was a guy named pc griffith. That was my handbook going through this process. It was able to help me find where his books were. I could see them up for myself. 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. I learned a lot of things. 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 a subscription library. They pulled their resources together with a big auction was going to happen. They tried to collect as many of washingtons volumes as they could. They thought it was a shame. I have a catalog and went to boston. I was given after many permissions, and archivist watching me like a hawk. These books were worth a lot of money. I got to handle washingtons real books. I will give you a quick example of the relativism. I was reading this one book. Page turner. Its a book about how the church of england is organized. Its not a theological book. Its the Church Structure book. I know when washing and came to possess this book. It was in the early 1760s. I am reading this book and has his signature on it. There is really nothing else there. Its dry. I couldnt find anything that was relevant that he wouldve used. Im trying to approach these books as he read. What is he going to put to Immediate Use . Im approaching this book and read it. I am not getting anything. And im not getting anything. I made a mistake. I started to have a panic attack. Then i turned the page and i am only a third of the way through the book and i turn the page and keep line. I see two big some prints in the margins of the book. Much bigger than mine. From Hansen Clarke much bigger than mine. It was this is somebody was holding the book up to the light , a window, the candle. The oils on your hand, the ink stains, smudges. People didnt wash their hands that much. It was easy to smudge a page of that old book. Im looking at these thumbprints and i cannot prove that they are his. Somebodywas like thought this page was interesting. I was reading what was on the page and it was about the diocesen of the within the church. I put it into context of what washington was doing at the time when he might have read this book. He was in the house of burgess is about paying the salaries of pairs priests parish priests. Not theether or archbishop should petition for virginia. Understanding the organization of the church of english my theory seems to be holding way. Wait. When i talk my the organization of the book, how did i approach it . I brought the chapters down into. There werere transformational things that happened to him. Starting out with his formative years, what with some of the first things he read and why. Even though he starts out reading this commentary as along Young Melissa military officer, as soon as the war is over he steps aside. His interest to other things. What is it that was going on that contributed to this change of interest . It was an enthralling anymore . It was hugely important and now its not . He had moments where things would change. Where circumstances in his life would change. New opportunities would open up. Thet chapter concludes with end of the seven years war where he knows once and for all there is nobody waiting for him. That will never happen. He is done. He is done with the military at that point. Martha, he is now in the top stratosphere. Now he is a burgess. Politics, history and religion are important to him. He is a leading revolutionary. Ideologically, he is more committed to independence earlier on in some of his earlier founding fathers. When its clear that he will be the commanding general of the army, he doesnt kn