Transcripts For CSPAN2 Megan Kate Nelson The Three-Cornered War 20240713

Cspan2 with top Nonfiction Book authors every weekend. Book tv, television for serious readers. Good evening, everyone, welcome to the bookshop, we are happy you are here tonight to we are happy to have Megan Kate Nelson with us with her new book, the threecornered war, the union, confederacy and native people and the site for the west. This is an engrossing narrative account which shows how the civil war, the indian wars in western expansion are all interconnected, the 1860s were a time of National Conflict which involved not only the north and south but also the mark in west. Her primary Source Research involves letters and diaries, military records and oral histories and photographs and maps from that time and nelson write specifically about nine individuals who worked toward Self Determination in the fight for the region. Some of these people are fairly known to us like frontiersmen, and wanita who we get to know their stories lost to history until now. And nelson unearth their stories to show the importance of actions even in the midst of a larger military conflict. The book earned a star review and Library Journal and indeed it is history that keeps the reader turning the pages. Megan kate nelson is a writer and historian living in lincoln, she has written about the civil war, u. S. Western history and American Culture for several publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post and smithsonian magazine. She earned her ba in history and literature from Harvard University and her phd in american studies from the university of iowa. She taught at texas tech university, cal state, harvard and brown and is the author of ruination and troubling earth. Tonight she will talk to us about three cornered war, tell us how it came today, and sur se some antidotes during the Research Process and read a passage or two then well open it up to questions from audience. Please help me give a warm welcome to Megan Kate Nelson. [applause] thank you guys thank you everyone for coming out on this drizzly cold dreary night. Before we begin i would Like Technology that we meet her tonight on the traditional lands of the wampanoag people. So the threecornered war tells a story of the civil war and the far west, most of the action takes place in new mexico which would become arizona during the war as well as texas and colorado and california. At this point you may be asking yourself i have never heard this of the war, i thought it was about gettysburg and basically virginia. So i thought the same thing myself when i first started teaching and researching the Civil War History 15 years ago which seemed like a very long time i group in colorado, i had never heard that there were civil war battles in mexico or colorado soldiers were really important to the Union Victory in that theater and i had no idea Indigenous People were involved at all because in colorado we got history, silver mining history and indian wars but they were a little bit later and then the ski industry. In the denver broncos. So i wanted to find out more about the theater of the war and i wanted to find out why never heard of this conflict at all before. So some things i found out, between 1861 in 1868, that is the correct year, leisure tecra 61 65 but into the war history when you expand the geography you expand the chronology. It becomes flatter and longer when you look at it from this way. The union and the confederacy struggled to control the region they wanted the left for the gold and specific ports. Each of them also saw the west as part of a really important vision for the future. So the north was envisioning an empire of free labor, free of slavery from coast to coast. In the west was pivotal to the project. In the confederacy saw their future as an empire of slavery. Also from coast to coast. They thought if they could secure the west then they could jump off from there and move south and invade mexico and create a hemispheric empire of slavery including the caribbean and latin america. Apaches and navajo who had been living in the southwest for hundreds of years saw this as an invasion of their territory in both the union and confederacy saw the indigenous groups as obstacles. Obviously to their attempt to control the west in their vision of the national future. Soy also learned that after the union successfully defended new mexico territory from confederate invasion in the spring of 62, they turned to the other enemies and initiated hard work campaigns against them. What this meant, at the same time that the union was fighting the war to an answer paid enslaved men and women in the east they were fighting a war to exterminate or remove native people in the west. I figured all of those things out, i thought it was an interesting aspect to the where the people never thought about. And then i figured out some things about why i had never heard about this before. First i think the Civil War History focuses on the east and virginia and also focuses on eastern battlefield in the homefront in politics. And of course no subjects are extraordinarily important but what that means is rarely do we move outside that kind of area. Also there is a tradition in Civil War History of referring to the trans mississippi west which is where we get the battle of shiloh, the invasion of tennessee in general, all the area around the Mississippi River and the historians call the west. So that is a problem with the words that we use, what can be west of the west. Like it seems impossible. Also, if you open up any Civil War History and you see a map of the seat of war, usually ends right around the 100th meridian, if you have the book you can flip to the front to where i have included a map that does not and at the 100th meridian which is actually in the middle of the twopage map in the book. If you in the map there, you are actively erasing 40 of the nations landmass. You are literally erasing it from the story of the civil war. It was important when i was talking to the people of the book production and said i wanted to have the map in first thing, if the entire continent that you see all the territory, the western territory and states as they were organized in the beginning of the war and you also see the navajo and apache homeland. On the map layered three different layers of the map intercontinental map from the atlantic to the pacific. Also what is interesting, what i found out when i went on my trip is that even though the sites of the civil war in the southwest are really wellpreserved and everywhere because if you go to virginia and youre trying to find battlefield sites in important areas, theyre not preserved there under parking lot or stripmall and theres not that intensive suburbanization or urbanization in large areas of the southwest what happened a lot of the sites you will read about in the threequarter work are actually there. It is just they are very far apart, they are run at all different kinds of federal agencies, theyre not particular well signed and most tourists go to the southwest for the southwestern culture, the indigenous culture, the open adobe architecture to bring chile into lagos theyre not going for Civil War History. There is a great example of this in Santa Fe Plaza, if you go to santa fe and if you ever have been there. But right in the middle of Santa Fe Plaza is a memorial to the Union Soldiers who fought in the war against the confederates and the savages. And theres a little protest action around that monument for savages. It is overly interesting but everyone ignores it. So i went for a research one day and i went around and talk to people and i said you know where that is and they were all like no and i was walking the path of the plaza and all the shops around and they had no real idea, theres not anything calling your attention to the Civil War History and you will read about it, one of the protagonist in the book, john clark takes part in the fundraising for that memorial in 1866. In the plaza itself is actually created a civil war site because it was built by Union Soldiers with their officers were like we need to put them to work otherwise they will start carousing around, one of the officers had them build the plaza in santa fe. That itself is something you never know because it is not noted. For various reasons and through various mechanisms the history of the war has been sometimes arrays, sometimes forgotten, sometimes not even mentioned. So during all this research i also discovered how complicated the civil war west was, how many different groups of people were involved in the work and how the fight took place over hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles, theres an in normas region in all of these armies had to march in different groups of people had to march sometimes 400 miles at a time in the longer stretch was a hundred miles my challenge was how do i tell the story, its a massive story and i didnt want to tell it an academic way or are driven dramatic oriented way soy started think about all the ways i could tell the story and at the time i was reading a lot of novels in one of the novels was game of thrones. And this is very surprising, right, that i would be reading this novel. I am not usually down with a misogynist and violent novels. But he was making me turn the pages, i was devouring this book and i tried to figure out why so i went in and looked at it and i actually mapped it out and started taking notes on what he was doing and what he was using was actually a form that is common in literature which is multiperspective narrative. So if you go into the book and you look at the table contents, you will see that each of these chapters is named after a person, theres only three that are not in those are the names of battles in which multiple people come together. So in each of these chapters you will follow that person through space and time and you will go to somebody else enter come back to them a little later. Each person has anywhere from two to three chapters. Some only stay for a short time and some day the entire time, one dies, i will not tell you who so you can save that for later. And be intrigued. I decided to try this approach to bring the leader through the experiences of nine different people. With nine different communities in different war actions. Im not going to introduce them all to you because that would be overwhelming and probably take too long, but im going to talk about three in particular to give you a sense of the books range, if you do have the book with you, there is an insert in the middle if you would like to look at it so the second image here on the left page, this is John Robert Baylor who i affectionately started referring to as crazy eyes. [laughter] because i think his eyes are very light blue in the photography at the time washes out. He looks particular crazed in this picture, hes actually holding a sword but it looks like hes holding an buoy knife or something in the picture. But when i started thinking about the project i knew i wanted to start with baylor because i wanted to start with the confederate invasion of new mexico territory in the summer of 1961 and baylor was at the head of the invasion. He was born in kentucky along with several of the people born in kentucky along with carson, thats a weird connection. But baylor was born in kentucky moved to texas in the 1840s, he was lowered, to the promise of rich cotton land and the right to own slaves. And he actually is a family, his uncle is whom Baylor University is named. This is a long history in texas, he got married and started a family and over the next 15 years he worked as a farmer and rancher and he enslaved men and women in both of those ventures, he read the law, admitted to the bar and elected to the texas state legislature, he also became the editor of a newspaper called the white man in 1860. This is sort of the thing i appreciate about mid19th century racist because theyre very open about it. They are just like we will start a paper and it will be called the white man. In 1860 he became the editor of the newspaper, they printed a lot of pieces about attacks on anglos in texas and they use this for comanches and was a product texas ranger and would gather people and write out after comanches before the war and when he rode into the new mexico he was wearing a belt buckle that said csa and one was made out of silver he melted down from macomb he had taken from a Community Warrior comanc. He was pride to join in defense of slavery and the right of white man to get land away from native people and by all accounts he was charismatic, he was a capable commander, about 63 which is super tall for someone in this. In opposing strong guy he was impetuous and ambitious and resentful and all of those characters reflect his actions in 1861 in 1862 preview will meet him in chapter one, he is quite a character. To bring you into this context of the civil war west. The next person is the last image, wanita who dawn mentioned in her introduction. Wanita was a teenager when she married a powerful navajo headman with a long history of spanish and mexican and american incursions in the homeland. Pretty soon after their wedding before the war began and leaders of the threecornered war will follow wanita as she and him in their band would negotiate with manipulative and invade union forces in their homeland and forced my impending starvation to the u. S. Army in the fall 1866. Wanting to story of the long walk in incarceration at the union army reservation in a place we can think of as a prison camp dominates the final part of the book, juanitas wartime experience was one of suffering but a persistence and survival. Of all the protagonist, she is the heart of the book, she learned from the beginning to the end. And her story really reveals the extent to which the civil war in the west was a the threecornered war. So the last person i just want to tell you about was john clark whose picture is in here in the middle on the righthand side of the page, you will not have heard of john clark adult in your life, he was a surveyor, a lawyer, a land owner in illinois when the war began, he was too old in his early 40s. But he had really helped to serve the union and other ways. So president lincoln who was a friend of his from illinois law circuit days appointed him survey general of new mexico territory in the summer of 1861. Clark left his large family in illinois in order to pick up his post which he held until 1868. He also was in new mexico consistently for the entirety of the book, he took a couple of furloughs and went home at one point he went as he fled santa fe and went to d. C. When the confederates were marching upon the city and went to go report to lincoln and stanton in the General Land Office. So he had a d. C. Vacation in the midst of the most intense part of the new mexico conflict. But clark was the voice of the Lincoln Administration and new mexico territory. A dedicated republican who believed in the parties vision as a landscape of free white labor, cleared of both perfectionist innovat native pe. He was responsible, he not only surveyed the reservation, he also did a survey of the arizona gold country in 1863 after gold was discovered a little bit north over the town of prescott is which is north of phoenix. So he went out there to confirm that the gold had been discovered and it was legit mining that was going on and came back and reported to santa fe citizens into the union army that there was gold and there was more than 1000 minors in the mountains and they needed protection and they also needed to clear navajos from the area because the road from albuquerque to the gold mines went through navajo territory. The letters that he wrote to his superiors in washington help the lincoln diminished in the conquest of the west and i would say clark was my Biggest Surprise because i found his diary, they were hidden or anything, i just hid in the metadata that the archivist had put together, i knew he was a surveyor general and had been in santa fe for this period of time and when i called the items, the john clark diary, when you go to these Research Trips you will never know what youre going to get or what it means, sometimes its a teeny pocket diary and a little penciling of what they ate or if it rained but what i got was enormous box a page long entries everyday talk about what he did every day, talking about his feelings, talking about going to seances at night after dinner amazing amazing content for the entirety of the war and when i went to the national archives, all the letters that he wrote to his bosses at the General Land Office also in a super huge box because he wrote very regularly from new mexico and sometimes his original maps were there, he did a flat map of santa fe and i truly believe that i was maybe the second person to open those letters ever. They were in pristine condition. The all the folds still perfectly there, very crisp, no stains, no marks of where in terror. Often with a wax seal that he had. He was really an amazing person who again and unusual suspect, you would not really think that the surveyor general would be an important person in the history of the civil war. And yet he is. I think you would be interested and intrigued coming to get to know him. So i think overall looking at the civil war with an unexpected place, the far west shows us a couple of important things, that the civil war was a the threecornered war in a couple of different ways, the concept took place in the north, south and the west between the Union Confederacy and native people in these comfort symbol anglos, his pianos in native shoulders, those are three by three which is very pleasing to me. As a writer. The threecornered war complicate her notion of the unions were. And it has as a continental conflict, national war that involved all regions and all People Living within its borders. I will stop there so we have more time for questions. Should you have any about the topic or about the Research Project interprocess or writing process of the threecornered war. [applause] megan, picking up on clark, are you inclined to doing more with him, about him, has anybody ever done the question is about john clark in my attempt to pursue him more and maybe write a longer biography of him. I know more about him, where he went, he left new mexico and was a surveyor general very briefly of utah, he was in salt lake when the transcontinental, the golden spike was humored in. I cannot document that he was actually there at the ceremony but he was nearby. And he was obsessed with railroads, i would not be surprised if he was there then he went east and worked for Kansas Railroad company as a railroad surveyor, then he died of cancer when he was older and had a long and fulfilling career. I think i have done a mess of the biographical work to scratch that itch and to help you get to know him in those fullscale biographies are a little hard, you want the person and he obviously does catch a lot of different points, when he leav leaves, spoiler alert, when he leaves in 1868 to go back to d. C. , he decides hes going to go home but he will drop by d. C. First so he can attend the impeachment trial of andrew johnson. [laughter] thats going to be interesting. So no, i dont think ill write a whole different book about him but there is certainly more to learn and more the other writers and historians can do with people like this who you think is a government functionary but theyre actually really fascinating and they have a lot of different roles to play that can be really surprising. I have a question, based on that, how did you select the characters, you mustve had a large group of people chosen from so incurious about how you made that. The question about how i chose the line. Some i just knew, i knew baylor was significant because he was singlehandedly just decides to invade the mexico territory without orders. So hes the one they get the dog. And he successfully occupies and forces the surrender and sits down and creates the confederate territory. So i knew about him and three or four days, i knew he needed to be in it plus what they started reading more about him and his letters which are at the university of texas, i knew i had to write about him because he was a really complicated guy, he loved his lif wife so much he wrote her poetry but virtually i did not find, i really wish i had and i send out a plea to the people of texas to check their addicts to see if these exist because i think they would be amazing. I think some of the things he wrote in the letters were very valentines day like. But its always more interesting to write about really complicated people. I knew that i needed people who are not really important moments, davidson who is a texas soldier, when i started to read his account of the war, i figured out he was in every single moment of the campaign. He marched from san antonio to apostle, he fought in valverde, he was ahead of the troops marching northward after the victory forging because he was assigned to be the lead forger so he was in albuquerque when they took it, santa fe when they took it, he fought in both Apache Canyon and glorieta which were the bigger battles at the end of the campaign and then he came back to santa fe and was nursed by another protagonist. And i knew i wanted to leave the candy because she was a fascinating viewpoint on the civilian experience on the war. And she was an army wife so i thought that was interesting because she went with her husband to almost every single posting that he has, hes a professional military man, for 20 years she was with him. That gives readers the back story of what the army was actually like before the war and what life was like because she was in california and 1850s when it first came in as a state, she was in utah during the utah war and in fact one of youngs wife wrote a poem and published it in the news and it was addressed to basically louisa and the other women in the army, to the wives of army lives, how dare you come to our land. So i had all this material, the challenge with her, i only had one letter in her own voice and later in the war. But this is one of the ways that you choose who to write about, you dont necessarily need to have everything but you need to have something. Because she was married to a pretty senior officer in the u. S. Army, i tracker, and knew where she was and other soldiers talked about her so i could kinda find her in the documents and because she led the effort after the battle glorieta to nurse the soldiers, they wrote about her, they call her the angel santa fe. In the santa fe newspaper printed a piece on her although they were skeptical because she was helping the enemy. The only problem with louisa is that she seemed too nice, she seemed too nice to be true so i kept trying to figure it out angles on her that would give her a little more texture, she was also one of the attendees of the seance. That was one way. She was very interested in contacting the spirits which that gave her good context. It was a combination of who could i think about in the context that would give me enough sources so i can build their lives on a page but who would also allow me too talk about the Larger Community and their rolls in it. Great stuff, i want to ask the second of the trios, the three by three, anglo, indigenous black communities, i want to say little bit more about that i want to hear more about examples or people youre think about. One of the reasons the theater of the war is interesting, a lot of different reasons, one is it had the first multiracial in the field in the civil war. This is also something we dont think about when we focus on the Eastern Theater were focused on then its a patient proclamation, the american soldiering and those biracial armies coming into the east and the trans mississippi. But in the fall of 1861, his beano volunteers and officers were joining the first new mexico in his beano malicious and native spies were joining volunteers, some from colorado, gold miners who had been recruited and u. S. Army regulars, the professional soldiers that had been there and elected to stay with the union and not leave with the confederacy. This army was really interesting, this is a small army and give person to the army of the east, it was the fighting forces between 354500 and given day. But they were much like the fighting forces of the east and not many had any experience in doing any of this. But to his piano soldiers were defending their homeland its one of the theaters of the war where the confederates are the invading so you see defenses and they were quite willing to pick up arms and fight for the union, not necessarily because they supported the federal government because the new mexicans had only been citizens for 12 or 13 years. And they had an un uneasy relationship with the federal government but more than anyone they hated texans. In 1841 texas had invaded mexico because they believed santa fe was part of texas. So they decided to march into new mexico to take santa fe and that ended disastrously. So they were actually taken prisoner and marched to mexico city. But new mexicans remember that moment and they were very eventful and literally of them marching into the territory again. This is a big misjudgment that henry came after baylor which a much larger force and he just assumed that the hispanics and mexicans will be on his side. He was wrong on both counts. And that was a huge disaster because he was counting on them to provide food for his army on the march and his piano soldiers and officers fought with apaches and officers, they were reorganized inputting the first california azul to fight apaches in the south and navajos in the north, so its a really interesting army to study and some military people have done o but theres more work that needs to be done, the reason carson comes into play because his commander in charge of that regiment. I just read the first few chapters and where soldiers are marching and basically they defeated by dehydration and the landscape, im just wondering how much the landscape becomes another character or factor in all the fighting. That is a great question, i was talking to a podcast or the said he thought it was the tenth for under protagonist in the book, i think that is true in many ways because say you have been to the southwest especially from here, it is shocking, you get off the plane, its high on elevation and its extremely dry, the distance the soldiers were traveling on horseback were spending two or three months out on the road in west texas, the water surfaces once you get past the pecos river were very few and far between. In the result of marching in another army marching under carlson who is the protagonist of california who the desert from los angeles to tucson also water sources few and far between, you see how the armies dealt with that logistically, one ways they didnt which is interesting is they staggered their company so you would only go forward a hundred members at a time rather than all 3000 at a time so if you did get to a spring you would not just suck it dry they would have to give it time to replenish, thats one thing they tried to do to help the army survive, carlton has very light colored eyes and looks a little crazy in his picture but he was a meticulous type a commander and he oversaw everything about everything when they were carrying water with them and he did not lose a Single Person in that march except the engagement with confederates simply on the other hand by the end of the campaign they lost 30 in most of it was exposure because they started marching and fall and i think a lot of people who havent been to the desert it does another gets very cold in the winter. And a lot of these, you hear from davidson complaining of how wet and cold there and often if there in a part of the desert with trees they cannot start fires, i guess how do you. So the soldiers in the theater are more vulnerable than any other theater of the war, there also more reliant on the wagon train coming with them and this is part of the reason why the confederacy lost, again spoiler alert, at glorieta past in the march of 8062 the union forces was commanded by a guy who was a denver lawyer and had no experience whatsoever commanding a military but he is there and read a lot of books. And he sent half of the army around to march up the mesa income around the back of the confederate and they destroyed the wagon train which was 80 wagons and killed some of their animals and let most of them go and if you dont have a wagon train or animals to move either your bodies or the rest of the stuff you have left the desert during this. You are basically dead man walking. They had to retreat and they retreated all the way back to san antonio and they did that retreat in the spring and summer and in fact jumped off from rio grande to san antonio in june and july of 1862. So that was the environmental aspect of the theater is really extreme and you see climate impacting them in ways that may be more romanesque than recent conflicts fighting in the middle east fighting the challenges. But of course they have much more helpful transportation now from wagons and animals in one of the only other interesting tidbit about that is that when he first came he had a huge wagon train which they nicknamed mexico because they had mexican drivers. Just like one of these weird things, wears mexico, coming out. But they have these wagons made out of wood from east texas and once they started getting to higher and drier areas it would start to shrink and spit out meals into their wagons were falling apart on the road. And then where are they going to get more wagons with a hostile population. Who are not going to give them any help at all. So the environment is working in really interesting and challenging ways and both sides, mostly for the confederates were the invaders and more vulnerable of the two. This is great. If the environment is protagonist, my question would be the potential 11th, was there somebody who broke your heart in the sense that you cannot include the person or you did not have enough, i think that would speak nicely to the hard choices that historians make all the time when you wish you had something more but it did not work either for methods or the narrative. I think there were multiple people who i could have included all my original list, the soninlaw which note was a major player as well, i decided to go with him because he is a more intensive experience with the union army and his interaction had a pull to fullscale war with the army. The chief was with him in most of the locations and you will hear about him quite a bit. He is almost like the best supporting actor. You will hear about them but he does not come into focus. In a do wish i couldve included more hispanic protagonist, kit carson because he was the head of the first new mexico was in all of these places in narrating all of these actions and a lot of his officers and many soldiers were hispano and we know a fair amount of some of them but the demand of the storytelling wouldve created repetition. I brought in hispano actors and move them whenever i had the chance and use kit carson to talk about because he was married into the Hispanic Community from a very prominent family in new mexico and also because his work as commander of the first new mexico, i can bring in all the stories about the soldiers and their experiences and their morale and why they were fighting in the motivation, of course i always wish for more women who were there writing diaries, like john clark but a woman who is here and unfortunately we all run into situations where theres sources and then this particular. There was not that much material being generated and i would get intriguing elements where i could track people in the senses in santa fe and they were circulating in the world and i would hear about them in john clarks diary or other places but i could not put enough of their story together, they did not have the advantage or wanting to also married and with him the whole time, i could track her through the entire conflict. But it was more challenging for other women for me too include other women in there. But i kept going to the archive and hoping for that moment where you find someone in your like yes, yes. This is the person. There are definitely more stories to tell of this region because i think there are caches and sources that we may not know about now that are in the archives but not fully broaden and we have not found the map. Thats what im hoping, im hoping people will read the threecornered war and get a better sense of the civil war and white was meaningful in the moment and i hope that they finish it think it was a really good read but also i hope they read it 19 i wonder what else is out there because this is a story primarily of the gateway to the larger west, theres so many other communities engaged in the war during this time and we need to know more about them. For sure. That was my question about wanita. What sources did you uncover that helped you fill in her story and find her voice. Juanitas story, i was extremely lucky to have the research of the navajo historian who is juanitas defendant jennifer, she had wrote a book about wanita and her husband and has written several articles about her and her role and also several navajo historians and oral historians who have collected stories and those in particular of women and their role and i was able to write a great book about navajo women basically in the 19th and 20th society but living traditionally. I felt like that book could give me some good contacts for her and knowing what her life wouldve been like and what domestic tasks she wouldve been in charge of and also juanita we know was a believer. So theres a lot of good work out there on navajo textiles because they were currency in the southwest. They were really well known for being wellmade, watertight and so they sold which is one of the trade items for navajos along with enslaved people, theres a whole discussion of slavery in new mexico which took a different shape on slavery in the east but i was able to talk about that also with juanita because there stories that given her name juanita and she also had a navajo name but she was also known as juanita, there were stories and suspicions that she may have been a spanish captive that had been enslaved in some sort of raid or warfare event and brought in to the navajo tribe and was absorbed so that allowed me too talk about that aspect of navajo culture into reading allowed me to talk about she freezing and weavin sg in the work that women do to close their family and keep them warm in all the work that they do in agriculture and cooking and storytelling, women are the storytellers of the navajo tribe. I went to the Navajo Nation museum and looked at a lot of the material and i could see the lesser of the early. Blankets and dresses in the style in which she wouldve made and then also other things like baskets and other items they wouldve had with them and also what is interesting about juanita, she along with kit carson which is ironic are the most photographed people in this book. The reason for that she went with her husband to washington, d. C. Part of the navajo delegation and 1874 so the photograph is from a trip although she was also photographed several times at redondo. I have all these visual images of her, a lot with weaving and you can see the dresses she is wearing so i could describe as well, that in building juanitas story is an interest disciplinary biography building because i was using visual culture, military records, to tracker and oral history that have been collected to hear defendants and also by the community. Any other questions . You mentioned you hope people take this is a good read. I was thinking about how most of us are introduced to the civil war through history textbooks although this phrase has never been said but this is a good read. So much of the reason why many of us do not pursue history, to me this idea of taking in bringing people into multiperspective narrative economics read like fiction and be engaging seems like a radical way to disrupt how traditional history is taught and how we think of history, i dont know but i have a question but have you thought about the potential for this type of narrative to be a way to bring new students into history or open the field up to people who dont want to read about this in this but will follow a person. Exactly. That is my hope, i have always advocated for but never got a chance to try until this book, writing about history differently, what are the different ways we can experiment because i mimic history so argument driven and humanity structured and everybody looks the same although the arguments are very different. So i would love to see any kind of boundary pushing along those lines and if you think about a project that you want to do in history and how you might write about it, i used to do the project or an exercise with my student called the five by five and they had to think about, here is my project, how would i structured five different ways with five different sections. The first three are easy. Like all do it, ill do it chronologically and then maybe do it one other day. But the fourth and fifth are really interesting. Like how i wrote this backwards or series of letters to historical actors or how might i do that in this way we have so much fiction written in so many ways and i hear a lot from people if they really do love the civil war, one of the things is a documentary. One of the reasons that is so successful not only because it has photographs that he used in a completely innovative way, now its named after him. The reason it was so compelling it was about people. They picked out individuals who they followed through the war in the five months of the documentary and read their words aloud of what they were speaking to you. One of the things i tried to do here was a quotation that i have with the diary entries instead of using as evidence which is how they would usually do as a stranger compile evidence and you say december was uniquely cold that year end then you have three soldiers saying how cold it was. So instead i have dates using the quote from the diary for telling someone else or actively writing in his diary insane how horrible it is that using as dialogue instead of a paragraph or of compiled evidence. I would love to see more history written in different interesting ways. I think we have a lot of good narrative history but i think you can write narrative history in different ways and it would be really cool to see how people can experiment with that. Of course as an academic history that would require departments allowing such things which some people audience are saying thats when you be hard. But i do hope that this is assignable for students because one thing that is not except the prologue in the first chapter, you cannot take a chapter from the middle and photocopy it for your students and have them read it, it would make no sense, that would be like taking a chapter from the novel in the middle insane read this. Its not a short story youre in the middle of the action. Youre the learned and know whats happening if you read from the beginning. Ill be interested to see from my colleagues who are teachers if they can assign this book in a way where they can read it from beginning to end. I think thats one of our challenges, and people are reading it for class, how do you give it up and work it into the syllabus and more workable chunks. But hopefully for people who are reading it have another bedstand and reading along im hoping they can devour it like they would a novel. Thank you all so much for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] you are watching be on cspan2, every weekend 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books, coming up this evening on our Author Interview program, after words the twoparty system is damaging americas democracy. Also this weekend Columbia University Jennifer Hirsch looks at the social roots of Sexual Assault on college campuses. Former chicago mayor and chief of staff to president obama rob emmanuel provides a firsthand account of how innovation is taking place in cities across the country and attorney jill reflects in her legal career that included her role in the watergate case as one of the three assistant federal prosecutors. Check your Program Guide or visit booktv. Org for more information. Here is a look at some books being published this week. Former Charlottesville Virginia mayor michael offers his account of the unite the right rally and cry havoc, and capital and ideology french economist thomas weighs in on how to correct wealth inequality. And in in our prime university of michigan communication and media professor Susan Douglas argues against the negative portrayals of older women. Also being published this week investigative analyst gerald reports on the pharmaceutical industry with pharma, greed lies in the poisoning of americans and the smart phone society, nicole explores how new technologies have empowered community organizing. New York Times Beirut Bureau chief examines the rise of Saudi Arabian crown Prince Mohammed in mbs, and in pursuit of disobedient women the New York Times reporter deon reflects on her time as a papers bureau chief, look for these titles and bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv on cspan2. Tonight at 2 00 a. M. Most americans will set the clocks ahead one hour. As Daylight Savings time begins. Up next from book tv archives Michael Downing provides a history of Daylight Savings time. The looping idea that became the most his any book spring forward, the annual madness of Daylight Saving time no s there gives as detailed look at something we all participate in, although we have little understanding white we spring forward and fall back each year. Almost 100 years ago, congress and