Assassination of William Mckinley and to accommodate her family, first Lady Edith Roosevelt renovates the second mansion,the executive thus adding a west wing. By adding a secretary to the payroll she creates the office of first lady and changes the name from executive mansion to the white house. Edith roosevelt, this sunday night at 8 00 eastern on cspans series, first ladies. From Martha Washington to michelle obama. Sundays at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv on cspan 3. Sees this year, cspan is touring cities across thecountry and exploring history. This week we are in a gusto, georgia. Youre watching American History tv all weekend, every weekend on cspan 3. The Augusta Canal is a manmade waterway. The water comes from the Savannah River, our main river here. It travels to town in about 7. 5 miles. Here, the son of the first mayor of augusta was in massachusetts and saw how they built the canal and how they built the mills. Augustas economics came to a standstill. People are leaving town to go out west. He says, we have to think of something. Said,ught of lowell and we can do this. We can build a canal and pull that Savannah River and bring high so it canp flow and we can bring in job. The canal was his main purpose was hydropower. A second use was travel. There were long barges bringing goods to town. They had to shoot the rapids of the river. As the river drop, there were rapids down the river. They were very pleased when it was built for hydropower. They had a nice, smooth ride. As the civil war began, the need for gunpowder was foremost importance. And colonel George Washington raines was hired to look for a spot to build the gunpowder works. N trainsed and rode o and chose augusta. He was looking for several things. One was a source of water. One was a source of power. Workforcea skilled which augusta had because we workforce for manufacturing during the civil war. We were very secure behind the fighting lines at the time. The augusta how to works with a large complex of buildings 28 or more that were built more or less in a year. One of the interesting things about the works is that were separate buildings. There was a reason for that. If you had an explosion of one, you wanted space between one building and the next so they would not all blow up. The first step is a building called the refinery. Wascoal was burned, sulfur wasved, purified, and it moved by special wooden railcars and took great pains to keep the sparks down. And it went through a whole series of grinding and pulverizing and sifting and refining and eventually it was sorted into grains of various sizes that were appropriate for different pieces of artillery. There were a number of accidents reported in the local press that resulted in injuries, but no deaths. Finally in late october 1864, there was a major explosion when one of the buildings blew up. They say the explosion went at least five stories high and nine people were killed. A boy, the men working in the area and a mule. , it rattled the windows all over town. It was quite a tragedy. Because this building was separated from all the others it , was the only one damaged. A very short order, the works were back in business. Another interesting thing about processes is a couple of points during the war as shermans troops were moving closer and closer, it became a real worry there sherman would send his army to augusta and attacked the power works. It made sense to think it would be one of his objectives. Disassembleraced to the works and the machinery so vital as he put them on railcars and shipped them off to columbia, south carolina, for safekeeping while they waited to see what sherman would do. Sherman had another objective in mind and he bypassed augusta and went to savannah which is where , he ended up at the end of his through georgia. Marchhe spent christmas there and then it was time to swing back up. Augusta is on the alert that sherman may be coming the other way so once again, they disassemble the machinery and send it to columbia again. They determine sherman is not coming. They did bring it back. Fortunately they brought it back shermanthat is where went and burned it. That would have been a tremendous loss. The war was in its final stages. After the war ended there was no need to continue manufacturing gunpowder, so manufacturing ceased. The building set and before a time. The land was federalized and the federal government sold the land and the buildings on it back to the city of augusta in 1870. Augusta tore many of the building downs. Asked for that you need remain as a war memorial. The rest of the buildings were torn down. The bricks were cleaned and save you not long after that, the canal was enlarged to allow for more water power and those bricks were built back into plants. After expansions, the factories that were built are the same ones as the ones you see on our boat ride. This Enterprise Building was built in 1877 and then you have muills that are very large complexes and they were built in the early 1880s. Industry in any area, today as well as yesterday, you are creating a lot of jobs for people. You are creating better ways to make money. More stable careers for people. You have people moving to town. Anytime there is economic growth, people will look to the city, especially a city in the south where industry was so sparse. The building of the augustine factory, the first big textile mill, really gave augusta and economic boom. It was a five Story Building for lots ofortunity workers. It was seen as a gateway to the future. Most of the workers in the textile mills in the early days were poor white women and children. They did not have a lot of opportunity for Employment Security outside of domestic labor. They worked about 11 hours a day, six days a week, monday through saturday. Not a lot of breaks. Not a lot of attention paid to safety. The noise is what you hear stories about. Just deafening. They were used to hard work. Even the children were used to hard work. The children that worked in the anl, if we had still been Agricultural Society they would be working the farm. Working in the mill was not that foreign an idea to them as it is to us when we think about children working in factories. Everyone carried their own weight in a family. Everyone worked very hard to survive. That mentality, i think we have lost a little bit over the years. Im sure they have lots of aches and pains. It was hard. But they were thankful to be able to have food on the table for their family. How history has been influenced by geography is a huge element here. Inhout that location we are and the Savannah River, none of that would be possible. The decision made by forward thinking leaders more than 150 years ago to build a canal to try to stabilize the economy is still reverberating today. If the canal had not been built in 1845 it is possible this town would have gone away. Find out where cspans city to her is going next online at www. Cspan. Org citiestour. Youre watching American History tv all weekend, every weekend on cspan 3. History bookshelf features popular American History writers and airs on American History tv every weekend at this time. This month marks the 70th anniversary of the end of world war ii in the pacific. Next, author Tsuyoshi Hasegawa discusses the pacific war, which influenced trumans decision to drop the atomic bomb on japan. He reflects on the book. The Woodrow WilsonInternational Center for scholars hosted the event in 2006. It is a little under 90 minutes. With that, let me introduce our distinguished speaker, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa