Reading University Press and University Pressth week. Im cow, one of the managers here and i think i speak for all of us at book called was a University Press, especially our friends at columbia University Press, nyu press and fordham University Press take up a large part of what we do here for the past 20 years. They are heavily featured in a dense programming, our displays are often at in a weekly annual bestseller list though it shows our Customer Base loves them as well. A couple of housekeeping before i move over to our lovely panel. We have a lot of books for sale here we do not have register up here so if youre free to take a bunch, give insight to make sure to pay for them on the way out. Well be here for years to come during this event. You may have noticed the cameras. Cameras. Cspan is here so we get to the q a portion, if you have a question make sure you wait for the mic to get to you so that you can hit the question as well as see. I will turn it over to our panel. Great. Thank you, kyle. Hello and welcome to our University Press week celebration. My name is fred and a director of fordham University Press picked this is her eighth annual u. P. Week. Been a of the task force since 2014 and chairperson for two of those years. This year the theme is read, think, act. To help us prepare for the 2020 election and do with the tumultuous political and cultural environment of theon fd ourselves in now. How the Universe Press contributes to the conversation and createbo a sense of committe and collaboration as we unpack these difficult and often controversial topics such as immigration, race, artificial intelligence, Climate Change and so muchh more. Why do we do what we do and why do authors choose to publish for University Presses . Thats why we are here will hear from editors and authors from three major new york city University Presses, colombia, fordham and in what you. We our Mission Driven and willing to take chances. Unlike commercial presses that are looking for bestsellers and unless we develop rigorous scholarly methodology. Au presses the contractor peter said University Presses champion authors whose work can make a real difference in how all of us think about r politics, religio, economics, science, technology, human rights and the natural world, among other important topics. Without University Presses many of these ideas would never make it into broader conversation. We are proud to make this aspect of our communities work and the impact they can have. Our theme for University Press week 2019, read, think, act. Id like to know theres a reading list including an online gallery of covers highlighting books from 75 University Presses the best represent the theme of read, think, act. Go to au presses. Org and click on the link. I highly recommend you check it out. Its a visual and intellectual feast. More than 40 have signed up to riches but in the 2019 blog tour, organize around these things. How to be a better global citizen, how to speak up and speak out, how to be environmentally steward, how to build community. How to practice compassion. Last week i was interviewed by a journalist from fox meeting and she asked me how do readers engage with University Press books, and i told her that they should go into stores like book culture, look around and are so many University Press books, its fantastic and we need to do more to the local independent book shows. Thanks to book culture for continuing to support University Presses and for hosting this event tonight. I want to mention we created these great bags for University Press week. Read think act, and fordham University Press, although plug for us so if you buy a book youll get you also get a read up bookmark. By lots of books. So id like to be editors and authors from a Universe Presses to introduce themselves and give a brief overview of the book and have ties into this years theme of read, think, act and afterward ill ask them questions and then turned over to the audience to ask their own questions and so we will start with columbia. Its called whistleblowing nation, a history of National Security disclosures and the cult of State University and so everyone knows theres a lot of talk about whistleblowing in the news today and any contemporary politics more generally but outside of a few major figures, the history of that phenomenon is really under examined and so this is an edited volume that examines the vast history from the era of world war i to the present. And it really attempts to apply interdisciplinary approaches so we have historians, we have political theorists, literary scholars trying to move beyond clichcs that tend to dominate the way we talk and fight over whistleblowers so generally speakingwhistleblowers are heroes or traders. How can we break past that binary and examine more structural developments that have happened over the past century with respect to this phenomenon so its really trying to get more systemic to think about the whistleblower phenomenon, the states response to it , the historical consciousness of that phenomenon, popular clincher of that phenomenon and needless to say, it would be difficult to publish that kind of book with a commercial press. There are loads of books about whistleblowing but they tend to reinforce the clichcs that we are trying to get past. Whistleblowers are heroes, whistleblowers are traitors. Weve always had whistleblowers, its as american as apple pie or the state only clamps down on whistleblowers, theres nothing in between so its really the place of University Presses i think that value a more nuanced approach, more indepth approach and also a multialtered look, the idea of an edited volume is becoming increasingly difficult to publish even withinUniversity Presses but certainly in a commercial environment , impossible. So briefly to dig deeper into the phenomenon of whistleblowing, think beyond the tired binaries that too often constrain the ways we think and talk and act about in relationship to whistleblowing and act supporting whistleblowers, certainly but not just in partisan ways, not just thinking about the current moment and people who are speaking out about trump though thats great but howdo we think in a more antisystemic fashion about the whistleblowers that dont get attention . That historically both democrats and republicans have persecuted and jailed and also protecting journalists who are increasingly being threatened in the same ways that whistleblowers have historically so rethink , act. So im will serve on, i work in University Press and the bookim here to discuss along with the contributor to the book is another edited collection , whose middle ages, teachable moments for an ill used past. This one is also a very interdisciplinary book of the kind that could only happen at a University Press. We have a lot of art historians talking with literary people, with historians and the spectrum of people who study the premodern field. This book is growing as a longstanding need within that field which is afield that attracts a great number of reactionaries. Adolf hitler was a huge fan of the middle ages for a lot of reasons as are a lot of spree shooters. The shooters in norway and new zealand both consider themselves crusaders and were not only using the language of civilizational warfare but were also exciting crusades scholarship in their manifestoes and in their construction of what they were trying to do. So in many ways the need for work like this has existed since the 20s. And its been happening but its been happening within the confines of the academy. Occasionally people will go and speak out, but more so the middle ages have existed as a space for imagination and play and really just putting whatever you want to communicate on to them. They are a canvas. So in the wake of the charlottesville protests, the unite the right rally, there was this moment when a lot of legalists said thats enough, we need to do something about this. And this book came out of that. That was of course not the only such effort. I should mention jonathan hsu and julie are nancys partial bibliography of race in the middle ages. The media list of color collective that has enacted for years trying to bring about structural change in the economy and how we deal with vested power structures, especially in the field of medieval studies but also outside of them so what this book looks like in about 25 essays is stuff thats broken through into the popular consciousness, Something Like sharia law which is used as a punching bag but actually means something much drier and more benign than a sean hannity is going totalk about it. Its a, look at trade routes. Theres so much ivory in Medieval Europe and its coming from africa so obviously there was context with africa. Its just this basic thing that gets left out of most history, most popular history. When people think historians dont know about this because historians do know about it and they tell University Presses. So among those various responses to charlottesville and just all of the heated and heightened rhetoric around the past, i like to think of this as distinctly you. Response, it is written for general audiences but in that writing, the authors are all constrained by the rigor of the economy. Its not like, its a bit like a textbook. But it is, it maintains the things that make scholarship different from other writing. Its original scholarship. It is careful writing. That makes an especial point to be rigorous and peerreviewed and all that stuff makes it a University Press book. I would be remiss s not to mention that as a product of the University Presssystem , this book contains, and replicates many of the power structures that groups like the media list of colorhave been speaking out against and continue to speak out against. It questions about what kind of work counts and what kind of work is feasible which may not be the right crowd to discuss this with but this is something that we need to our self rethink and act about. As we build our publication programs. But above all, University Press publishing is an t ecosystem. Not every book that we published, many books that we published do not indirectly address the presence of social media and every book that addresses a pressing social need is necessarily going to leave awhole lot out but as long as we listen generously and Work Together , we are contributing to the better world that is knowledge and thoughtfulness can create. Thank you. Im lauren nancy, one of the authors in this collection and imgoing to tell you a little bit about my essay so you get a sense of the kind of work we are doing and im also an assistant professor at of history. And there are editors of this volume asked me as a specialist to respond to the book the benedict option which was published in 2017 by rod drager and rod is a Christian Conservative who is actually one of the favorite go to darlings of the liberal media. The liberal media enjoys rod dreher as they quote him often, they interview him often, there was an america piece about him and david brooks called his book the most important religious book of our decade and this book spends time speaking to Christian Conservatives and saying the republican establishment has betrayed Christian Conservatives. It has not protected them from the sort of ideals of the enlightenment, of capitalism, from the lgbtq agenda and they should make this 16 century mark and they should live in the little arcs amidst the barbarity of the world. He spends the book outlining how they should go. Based on his reading of medial monastic texts and his experience living with this Benedictine Community in england and one of the first things i do to critique his argument is to note that medieval monks did not call what they were doing living in arcs amidst the barbarity of the world. He instead called what they were doing living in tabernacles, its a dwelling place among the people and monks in establishing monasteries were not interested in monastic environments, they were interested in monastic environments and reconcile reconciling experiences people came with instead of sort of streamlining them and making them all one they had to lireconcile with that couple get a diversity. And the point of this essay and one of the reasons why it does well in a University Press book is that its trying to make its way in history instead of the black and white, similar to what anna was saying before but people look at the middle ages and say barbarians or oak, a dark age or arcs in the middle of a barbaric age and instead what we need to understand is that medieval people were wrestling with a diverse and complicated society in the same way we are and in order to understand our diverse and collocated society we can look to historical societies that have wrestled with something similar and can understand how they grappled with the gray area instead of just demoting it to a blackandwhite understanding of the historical past. Fabulous. I learned a lot already, thank you. My name is halo lopez and i am a political scientist, a professor at the school for conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason University which is in arlington virginia, mostly, were also in fairfax and i am coauthor with tina swat smith of our book, a peoples guide to making allblack lives matter and there process for us working with nyu press has been fabulous and very much the idea for the book that started in house at the press and it came to canada and you should probably be the one telling the story in a way but since were going in order i guess ill tell part of that. And so because candace had published previously with nyu press and they knew that this was part of her wheelhouse is to look at black politics in the United States, and seeing whats happening, whats unfolding with black lives matter, that she was an obvious person to say you need to be interested in writing on this and she and i have the time were trying to collect data in a nationwide survey about peoples opinions about black lives edmatter. So she asked if i want to be part of this and as we started to craft the book, it started to become a different book than what we had originally thought it would be. It wasnt going to be so much a book about what people thought about black lives matter or precisely what were the politics involved in black lives matter so much as why was this even happening at all . What was setting the stage for this and why was it necessary and we like to say and point out in the second term of americas in the biracial president , so we started writing this book to fill what we felt was a void in our syllabus, to talk to our students and get them ve engaged and to make this information that she and i have been ridding other University Press books, learning about the United States and race and racism and trying to distill it in a way that was accessible not only to our students but also to readerships beyond the classroom and so we ended up writing this book which has now like something that digs deep into uncomfortable questions that is providing some guidance and some questions to mull over in Group Settings together. So i feel like i should spread this around a little bit. Theres a small emergency inthe back. These people cant see. My name is Candace Watts smith, associate professor of politicalscience and africanamerican studies at penn state. And hamer is coauthor, i mention this is my second book with nyu press. Its my third University Press book. And i wanted to highlight two things i think really just kind of mimicking and mirroring some of what folks have contributed already. I think people who are really interested in, who follow the news, we tend to interact as if everything is an anecdote or a thing thats happening for the first time. And we know that many scholars spend their lives just digging in to one particular set of patterns and so it turns out that there are an array of scholars who know a lot of stuff about sometimes one thing but its the thing that were talking about at the moment likewhistleblowing. That there are people who study patterns and we know that anecdotes are not data, data is data. So thats one of the for me, one of the Important Reasons to shift ahead and give tattention to University Presses. I think the book at University Presses is that form, its really important to because in academia, one of the kind of currencies of academia is the article. And the article is often published in a place where very few people can access that thing. Or its very expensive. And eileen and the folks at nyu press have been, i dont know how tthey do it. You can explain. But our work becomes more accessible just by the sheer being in a bookstore and being affordable in a way that the kind of highly technical hard to read Journal Articles arent. So those are two reasons i would say that that makes University Presses important to me in my work and my career, that just to dovetail at the University Press process produces credibility because our peers are reviewing it, our peers are critiquing it, our peers are helping to make what we do better. So that allows us to produce a work that people can read and think about and can better understand d the way that our world works. We can act. We can call our legislators. We can rant on twitter and we can inform our neighbors on particular issues of the day. Hello, im ilene kalish and im executive editor of the sled at nyu press so i get to work on all manner of books in the civil sciences. I do books on politics, current events. Books on womens studies, on lgbtq studies and im always looking for books that ithink are important , that are cuttingedge, that have something to say. And i think one thing to think about is that the University Presses do really well which is to go out and to think about what are the ideas and the atmosphere out there that are important and how can we distill them and in a serious, thoughtful, deep way to a broader audience. So i think that this book is a great example of the ideas behind black livesmatter. And putting this book together, i think r,both for a general reader, this isnt written like a journal article. This is absolutely written in a way thats meant to be accessible, thats meant to be for anyone whos heard about the movement, wants to know moreabout the movement. There are great images that you produce in the book that were really important to visually show some of the ideas , how can they do that . So its for a general reader but importantly we are also often always thinking about the classroom and students and whats happening on College Campuses and we know students who care about this movement and they want to know more about it and they want to know more than just what can be written on a postcard. They want thoughtful, serious but also in a lot of ways fun. This is a great read, this is an easy to read book so we were really happy and excited to work on a book like this that could reach such a broad audience on such an important topic and i will say that yes, this book was different than what you first proposed because i think if you remember, they said two things which is that it was going to be about half as long. And they said its going to also be written in three months. Neither of those things happened. Ha but i think in some ways tits the book that it was supposed to be. So yes, whatever they tellyou theyre going to write it in three months. Thats great, thanks everyone. Its great to see such diversity of books and the andifferent formats and have developed as different presses and as some were kind of home grown and developed within the processes and ive worked at both commercial, trade houses and Academic Presses, commercial Academic Presses and University Presses and University Presses are adMission Driven and the foundation of a University Press is the process of peerreviewed and thats something that when i entered the world of University Presses i wasnt familiar with that process it really does make a difference and it really does make a book a better book. I always tell my authors dont get defensive. This is something thats really meant to improve your work and improve your methodology and provide a real framework for why youre doing this work and what your theory means and what your audience is and what your point of view is so i think its important and i just wanted to ask, a lot of this was already unpacked in your presentation but why our our pUniversity Presses and the process of peerreviewed important . Should i start . I think theres nothing comparable to peerreviewed in the sense that youre getting feedback from people who have thought about and wrestled with these ideas for in many cases as long or longer than you so it also gives you a chance to step outside your headspace and see what theyre reading. And almost always, forces you to clarify and refine your own ideas in waysthat you didnt imagine. I coeditor this book with kaitlyn mistry, to us it was very clear we had to bind the concept what to the peerreviewed it wasnt so clear so we had to define what we mean by whistleblowing, can be set mythology from the very beginning so that was invaluable. I would add not all University Presses are equal. I know this is a forum for celebrating presses, University Presses in general g but its been my experience that the best University Presses also are good at finding the best peerreviewed and some of the bigger University Presses put less energy into that. And put less energy into individual books were generally. And if youre not this star author, you wont get that attention. So i think this is also a chance to celebrate the presses that are not the biggest. And to see that that makes also better work for more scholars and not just the elite few whose books are often read by, that their already wellknown. So i would say peerreviewed but also peerreviewed for all authors, not just the famous ones. Thats a good point actually and i think authors should choose University Presses based on their trends so you can go to fordham for medieval studies or philosophy or literary theory and nyu for sociology politics. Columbia for environmental studies and economics and so forth so know your presses before you submit your proposals and your rights, itthere are presses that take your review much more seriously and we do i know as the new york presses and we follow, the best practices in peerreviewed put out by the association ofUniversity Presses and wetake that seriously. Its very important. I have on anecdote from a couple of days ago. This ties into, i want to talk about the post truth world that we live in because its kind of a deadmetaphor. But there really is, theres so much Information Available to people, especially people who are outside of the University System who dont necessarily know how to critique sources and to look awfully, not to keep using were thoughtfully what theyre reading and sort of come to their own conclusions about it. So i was engaging in some guerrilla marketing whereby i was arguing strangers on the internet and ended up citing the book in order to get people to look at it, it was an argument about whether or not there were dark skinned people in bohemia in 1400. There were. And i said check out this book, this book will tell you all about it and the gentleman said that cant be a real book, it only costs 20. So being able to come back and say no, thats not what matters, what matters is a good book really does give it a certain cachet, does sort of invites the wheat from the chaff in terms of facts. If that makes sense. The other thing i feel University Press books insure is the originality of arguments, not only the rigor but originality of that so in peerreviewed, part of the process is just to triangulate what youre reading as a reviewer with the scholarship thats out there to make a persons argument fly beyond where the scholarship already is. Thats something as somebody whos been interviewed by journalistswho are renting trade books about the middle ages , theyre not necessarily interested in or even have the training to make arguments about e intervention in scholarship, th theyre making arguments based and tolerate entirely on the scholarship so peerreviewed is starting new roads where there was roads for. When i can add up the process for our book was that when some of the chapters of our book went out for review and of course then fully at the end of the process, before it went into publication, was to get feedback about their clearly trying to make an intervention, clearly trying to bring this mto people, make it accessible and usable. And then doing something feels a little bit unorthodox in a really good helpful way, the rigor which is what the peerreviewed brings is clearly there. Yet look like youre trying to break out of the mold and the mold being that kind of academic article and since we wanted to make it guide worthy, our peerreviewed and really encouraged us to break out of the box and so a tip of our proverbial to the press for saying lets do that, lets make something we havent seen before and that means that chapters are going to be different, the layout is going to be different because were trying to build , we have in chapter 2 is a bit like a dictionary of sorts so ill you create that in a book that is not in the back of the book, its quiet in the front of the book so the peerreviewed process was encouraging to us as the authors and was also encouraging to the press itself to say that there was, there were other people besides us who thought we were on to something lets really bust out. That process could be very helpful if you dont get that third party, that creative and informed thirdparty you may not get that kind of feedback and maybe another press form, certainly not from an academic standpoint are not going to get so that was helpful to us. It gave us encouragement to do some different things. I would just say i totally agree and they do, they have chapter 2 is definitions called all the words we throw around. It its probably one of the coolest things. Weve gotten the most feedback so far actually. Great. So in the maritime, we want to open up to the audience, i may jump around a little bit. How have other University Presses and scholars shape your own work . Countless ways. I would just hear talk about teaching as opposed to scholarship that ive produced. The reality is we spend many of our days teaching, and the books that we assigned to our students are often those that are published by University Presses. So one example, just today i teach a course called collective memory of atrocity and injustice, and its a course about how people, artists, scholars, politicians wrestle with the legacy of the past and the present andnd what are the politics of it. Just today were talking about a book by john torpey called making whole, what has been smashed, the politics of reparations. Its published by harvard University Press. Its a fascinating book because similar. A lot of people talk about the dateta reparations and torpey aa sociologist is really trying to figurere out how we can organize questions around different types of reparative modes, from tribunals and trials, to commemorative justice, to material compensation. That really breaks open a whole new conversation for students to think about. Provocative. He asks progressives, is this the most productive way of making social change to dwell on the past . Is this dwelling on the past or is this a way forward . Those are the kinds of questions i think are really actually important for students to consider. Its only a University Press that is going to address reparations at that level as opposed to just reparations for or against . Thats just one example that are just endless actually. Is something that the authors might not appreciate is how tightly knit the you p community is and how much mentorship and professional developments and everything like that goes into bringing people into that world. Its sort of, not to get pollyanna about it but it sort of like that ideal of the academy where people go and Exchange Ideas so that we can all figure stuff out together. Its a beautiful world to work in. To build on teaching, i often advise my students when they are writing papers is to you look at University Press books so they can trace the historiography of the subjects vacancy abthe middle ages was treated this way, during world war ii it was treated that way. I scholars who live in asia is treated this other way. They often can find for the tracing of the history which happens either in footnotes or introductions University Press books they can find that historiography other paperwork topics. And an understanding there is interest one series of historical facts that have always been true but rather interpreted over time. And they can be part of that interpretation. Just to add, our jobs as faculty at universities is to walk toward truths to try to figure that out whatever that is in order to do that we have to stand on the shoulders of giants and we have to depend on people to have written and produced something we can rely on as a Strong Foundation to move to the next step. When you open abfor example if you open any available facility bibliography here that we relied on a great number of individuals to set a that we perched on in order to launch an argument in order to show that there is more nuanced they are then what is typically being treated around various issues. And say we really making an effort to say state walk is mostly about the black lives Matters Movement but its also about racism. Our goal in that book is to make claims of ignorance around racism illegitimate to say that if you look here at the back of this chapter of every chapter there are many people that i work towards answering questions around structural inequality around residential segregation around School Inequality around reconstruction and what that means for possibilities for change in our political present. For what each of us can do and what has been done. But most of that is in University Press books. She simply we rely on the knowledge produced by others to get us toward a more equitable future anymore. The question for eileen and will. What has changed working at a University Press. The book acquired the mission of the University Press. When we start with you eileen. What has changed since when you say of the past 5 to 10 years. You and i have worked together with eileen and why you before that privilege. A lot has changed. A lot has changed. When i think about ive been in publishing for a really long time like 25 years i think. Weve seen a total change. One funny thing that happens now is no one males back their contracts anymore. In fact, actually i have someone i feel really bad she was posted to this code should as an attachment where she was in california and she had to flee from the fires. Then she managed to get back to her house and printed it out and mailing back to me. Technology has changed so much of how we physically produce these things. In our contract it says youre supposed to turn in the doublesided typewritten manuscript and nobody does that anymore either. Its all on disk all on the cloud somewhere. We were actually just talking about like how many ebook have sold of this. Just the whole way that knowledge is transmitted, turned over to one another and thought about, the one thing that i would say has not changed is my editing process. I still print it out and use a pencil and edit it by hand. I swear by it and i swear theres Nothing Better than doing that and seeing the physical thing in front of you you can react to it in a different way than i think you can on the screen. For the most part i still prefer to read a book. I definitely read things on my phone and so forth. For me thats one of the things to think about about whats changed is technology and thinking about the future. Thinking and talking about eileens comment about Technology Even the way people find books is change. Its all about the keywords and the data and how you transmit information about the books to the world. The amazons and other fine retailers and Library Platforms like jstor and project news. When your writing copy for these books, you no longer have to build up this great description of the book. Keywords upfront so when they are doing a search that book says preparations or whistleblower or coopting middle ages by the works of promise. Get it up there so that what the book is about is up there. That for me has changed drastically and i come from a marketing and sales background moved over to editorial at fordham so ive seen that change. I dont know if you have anything to add . Ive only been in the game for 10 or 15 years depending on how you count it. I came in at the end of the salad days when he stopped printing a thousand copies of whatever. Just because the Consumption Patterns have changed one of the biggest things that has happened in the last several years was the emergence of the big jstor ask aggregation platforms where you dont see the sales necessarily. You might kind of feel like you are not accomplishing as much. But those are now available to a much wider audience then back in the day when every library ordered every book. In terms of discoverability theres a thing you may have noticed about the covers which is that the titles got way bigger because you need to be able to read the title and the amazons unveil. Theres a reason for that. Thats true. We have about 10 minutes i will do my last question we will do it like lightning round. The last you p book read not from your press that everyone should read now. I heard this author speak at the last conference of University Press her name is sophia noble and she wrote this book called algorithms of oppression by nyu press and shes a great speaker and she really just drove home how these online searches are built to perpetuate racism and stereotypes. She showed examples which was mind blowing. I would recommend that book. Algorithms of oppression and its by sophia noble. I would recommend kelly little hernandez book history of the u. S. Border patrol. Theres a lot of great books coming out on border stuff is particularly well done and gives you a much deeper sense of the kinds of backgrounds to the xenophobia and institutionalize xenophobia along the border. I will recommend the book by joshua expect, redmeat republic a hoped table history of princeton you p. Im a lifelong vegetarian so it was weird for me to read but its a fascinating commodity history of beef and how really the production and mechanization to fill the need for beef as an identity piece really radically reshapes the huge plots of the United States and touches on indigenous history because you have to eradicate the above logo to replace them with cattle. It touches on labor history because you get into the meatpacking plants and so on. Transit history because the railroads were built just to move the cows in a lot of cases. Its a wild read for how much our society is built on cows. Am going to recommend one of my colleagues books called writing on the wall by karen stern its about ancient jewish graffiti. The cool thing about it is that is using sources that havent been looked at material culture and graffiti to tell the story of ancient and late antique judaism where usually we use theological sources is very cool. The past couple weeks in my classroom i believe in an edited book by rupa benjamin called Captivating Technology capturing technology . I think its Captivating Technology. Its racecar smell tech moral science and resistance in everyday life. Some of the chapters we been touching on have to do with the use of food in prisons and thinking about that as a Technology Predictive policing the surveillance used in retail stores. A whole host of issues that will make you very anxious but make you abnow that youre reading about it its ubiquitous. And problematic. We knew this question was coming and i was really struggling. And he reminded me you been under a rock of writing your own other book. That book is called rachel spaces the millennial generation and stagnation of Racial Attitudes coauthored with Krista Santini was at iu bloomington. That book is mostly about the idea that we tend to think about millennials as very racially progressive but when you get to the nittygritty there very similar to gen xers and boomers. The author is cook lenahan jamison shes a political scientist and its called cyber war. She is someone who just had maybe 30 or 40 years of studying Political Communications and elections. Polling and had such a depth of knowledge how elections work. She picked apart the 2016 election and shows what happened in that election really was an act of war a cyber war committed by russia on the u. S. And should be seen as such. She breaks it down as only a very seasoned scholar can. I think is very convincing and i know shes actually working on the second edition of that book because we know that the cyber war continues and hasnt stopped. I would recommend that. Good list of recommendations. We have a few more minutes. Do we have questions from the audience . What is the black girl magic . I happen to know about that. [laughter]. Black girl magic is one of the many concepts you talk about one of our viewers suggested adding it. To the glossary of words that might help us better understand inequality in the u. S. Black girl magic is the idea that black women have something to contribute and have always contributed. Any other questions . Any other thoughts . Do we have time we can ask one more question i didnt ask all of mine so i can continue. Edited ask this question but i think it was kind of built into all your answers on the other questions but ill ask it anyway and see if you have any other thoughts you want to add. Why did you choose University Press for your book and how did you choose the one you went with. As tama mentioned, nyu press wanted a book about black lives matter and were willing to give us a space in the time and the manpower. It takes a lot of people to make woman power. Thats right. To make a good book. Just having that space was something that nyu provided. Eileen and her team were really supportive of that. For your first book with nyu press did you send a proposal or did you meet at economic conference. What is that process like . I think i sent a proposal and a couple chapters i remember you so clearly at access. She had on all black and she was like, why are you excited about this book. [laughter] okay when youre done, send it i was like oh god. Its never to work back you see how she laughs now. Back she encouraged me and there are other presses that were like, this is cool could you do this or this. Same with stay woke where people wouldve tried to constrain it in a certain way. And nyu press didnt call for that. I could add a couple of things. One thing i keep going to nyu press for and i went to them and their website prior to being involved with them at all was because they had such a great concentration of books that are in my lane of interest. Every press has their specialties. To see a price that was so dedicated to issues of race and not just like it wasnt just like race and black people. A lot of things just get blackness somehow is means race and then thats the end of the story. And theres nobody else that pertains to. Nyu its very clear they are treating a series of different groups different identities different intersections. Its really attractive. I love that about the press and different presses have different strengths. That was definitely a reason to go to nyu. This project, fordham has a fantastic center for medieval studies. Which boasts of a lot of medieval lists. Know exactly how many but its something ridiculous like 40 or more. Its little Incubation Center for medieval studies and that has the University Press associated with it was the institution. Allowed for this bunch of editors all at fordham some of whom are specialist in the crusades summer historian some of whom are english professors some are abprofessors some musicologists all working together and i guess they pitch to you. Tell me how it happened. It was homegrown projects i approached are series editors in the midst of charlottesville stuff. Everybody just called up and pulled out their phones and follow their contact list. I saw who had initially wanted to get. On a fast track we had a zeitgeist with the book and sold out of its for printing. We are reprinting it abwhich mentioned a book and link to amazon. A lot of things just kind of unfolded tied to the book which was great. Thats kind of what you want as a publisher and you want more books like that. We are very excited. Other books will come out because of this book. More scholarships will be built upon the scholarship that in this book. Thats really an important point to make and something that University Presses do well they start the conversation. You might get critiques, youre missing this or that, maybe we are but we started the conversation i think thats really what University Presses do well. I think this has been great. We demonstrated how we read, how we think, how we act and what University Presses do. Hashtag read up, hashtag you p week. And thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] you are watching booktv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors of the weekend. Booktv, television serious readers. Heres a look at some of the programs you will see this weekend. Find more Schedule Information on your program guide. At a recent talk in Miami University in hamilton ohio, former Ohio Governor in 2016 republican president ial candidate john kasich argued solutions to americas problems need to come from the bottom up. Most politicians listen to us, and im going to give you a couple examples here the civil rights movement. Do you think a pacifist civil rights laws on their own . Martin luther king went to see john kennedy, and kennedy left the white house and he said kennedy didnt care. He was really upset about it. What happened over time because of the king and some of the people ive mentioned, people begin to see that we need justice, and the pressure came from the bottom up. The marches, the gassing, the dog fightings, the jailing. It didnt square with us as free people. We wanted justice and we demand that justice and the politicians ultimately after a decadelong struggle began to pass the laws. Womens suffrage, do you think those guys wanted to give you your power . They didnt. And you think about how long it took for women to get the right to vote. And if you were an african american, you had to wait even longer to get the right to vote because you are not favored. And how did it happen . We demanded it from the bottom up. Im convinced that if we have not had the protests on our College Campuses, we would stl be in vietnam today. They would have some reason as to why we would still be there. It got in bed by the students and adults who finally said enough of this. And the same is going to be true about environment awareness, and some is going to be true about guns. Lets just talk about that for a second. When i i was governor i try to pass this law. I want you to think about this. This law said that if somebody in the workplace was a threat to fellow workers comp for they were threat to students on a college campus, that there would be a judicial proceedings along with maybe input from law enforcement, and the gun would be taken away from somebody who was unstable. To get it back whenever they were stabilized. Thats going to become law. Its going to take a long time. People are going to demand it. Getting tired of this and it will only happen when it comes like this. So, folks, couple things. Join the movement, start a movement, give somebody a hug, put yourself in somebody elses shoes, have a smile on your face, the patient, get out of your silo. This is whats going to heal our country. Because the great news is we are in charge, not them. We are in charge. If we come together all across this country, and i speak, all across this country, people are hungry for this. They just want to know what to do. You dont have to climb mount everest. You dont have to be greta thunberg. You dont have to do all these magnificent things. Martin luther king said if you cant do great things, do Little Things in a great way. Together, we can end the fighting and the vitriol, and we can start to do the things that we want out of our government and in our communities that will allow us to have a healthier and a more together nation, and neighborhood and family. To watch the rest of this Program Visit our website booktv. Org and search for john kasich or his books title, its up to us, using the search box at the top of the page. Now on booktvs after words New York Times magazine contributor Thomas Chatterton williams looks at race and identity. Hes interviewed by author and new times columnist Kwame Anthony appiah. After words is a weekly Interview Program with relevant guest hosts interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work. All after words programs are also avaab