Stephen berry always brings to his research incredible, beautiful writing. With rich insights, and what i think many of us like so much, and that is a good thing because his work is so good, you want to succumb to jealousy but you just cant because he is such a wonderful guy. He is a fantastic teacher as well. Many of us have worked with him over the years, at the university of georgia, he is not only a terrific scholar, he has written or edited six books, my favorite is all the makes of man, love, ambition, and the civil war south, that was his dissertation done sometime ago at the university of north carolina. William varney was his advisor, who is still there, another book that i would highly recommend, that he edited, a fantastic book called, wielding the war stories from the civil wars ragged edge. And, he has many of his students, graduate students working on this project as well. My favorite of all the digital projects, titled, private voices , American Civil War letters, many of the letters and private voices come from soldiers who were either semiliterate or illiterate. And what is best of all about the project, all the letters are transcribed, you dont have to fuss with the handwriting so much, and you get private voices, a fantastic digital progress. Today, he is going to speak to us on the language of the common soldier. Let me welcome, Stephen Berry. Thank you all so much, i am delighted to be here, thank you for that very generous introduction. As pete mentioned, i am Stephen Berry from the university of georgia , i specialize in civil war studies, but i am involved in the running of our center for virtual history which specializes in digital projects. One of our first projects is this one, invasion of america, it animates every native American Land session. As you might guess, all of those sessions were made over the course of a century, the United States seized 1. 5 billion acres, depending on estimate, that is an eighth, so you have to imagine this playing out in pieces and parts as native americans make their land sessions from coast to coast. Between 1776 and 1887. You might guess that this plugged into the contemporary debate about who is an immigrant , or an american anyway. It went viral and crashed our servers. This is another of our early projects, u. S. News maps, this one allows you to search 11 million newspaper pages between 1789 in 1922. And, you can see on the map and through time, you can essentially watch things go viral across the United States map, in 1922. This project was awarded an award from the meh, and from the library of congress. This is my baby lately, csi dixie, it was called a beautifully conceived and profoundly mournful digital site. You dont know me, but beautifully conceived and profoundly mournful is something i would like to see on my tombstone. But, my focus today is on one of our other projects, one that is way more ambitious, it has not gotten enough attention. The website is devoted to the language of the civil wars common soldier, it is private in the sense that most of the men we are looking at our privates. All of the civil war letters on the side, and we are closing in on 10,000 have been painstakingly selected from archives across the country by my partners in crime and i have to give them a shout out, michael ellis, professor at missouri state, and michael montgomery, distinguished professor at university of south carolina. Now, i say, all of these 10,000 letters were painstakingly selected, what i mean is the letter could only be included on our site if it was written by someone who was transactionally literate, these are men and some women who learned their letter sounds but dont know proper spelling syntax, punctuation, etc. For instance, the majority of the men on our site spell family famly because that is the way it sounds, that makes sense, why not spell it that way . If you dont have your nose in the book, you spend most of your life drawing with friends, and most of these men did, so famly is good enough. I understood that abigail was in a family way, and i would be glad to come home but i cant come home, but i cant, or please tell mother that she must not trouble herself about me for i was just the boy for a good soldier, please take care of my dog and dont let my gun rest. Best respects to the family, and all requiring friends. 174th, pennsylvania, and you know that kid was drafted. Or, our people just absolutely hate the idea of the silent e , they are stupid, why bother with them . So they are married to their wif which is good enough for them. It is with the greatest of love and pressure pleasure that i drop you a few lines and answer to your letter that you sent, or, dear wife, you never said in your letter how much money you have received from me, i would like to know how much you have received from me, i want you to let me know in your next letter. Dear wife, i have more money to send, if i could get a chance to send it to you, i could send it. Or, my dear wife, i sorrow that you sorrow, i sorrow to hear that mother has been sick but i hope that god will restore her to Perfect Health again. I can say to you that i do want to see you and your dear little children, the worst i ever did in my life, may god bless you and them with the best of health, until i come home again, it is my prayer or prar. This is a little shout out to my young man at home, dear son, i take my pen in my hand to write you a few lines that will inform you that i am well, hoping that those few lines may reach and find you enjoy and the same good blessings. Or, i want to send you something good to eat, if you can get the chance, for our rations are very scanty. That is something will would write down in a text, while playing video games. I must come to a close tonight, my hand is so numb, i cannot write anymore. I want to see you so bad, sometime or another, i could say much more but it is so cold. Signed, george. One last want to complete our family, daughter, i find the gh so stupid, i love the english language but it is not logical, dauter makes so much more sense. Why not just pepper the place with silent es, and my little daughter, nora, if i was there, it would be some enjoyment, but as it is, i can only study about the loss of a daughter, and the absence of a loving and kind wife, i hope god will spare us and let us live together on earth and live in a way that we should live. So, in all of these cases, what you see is men who are using what they know, of individual letter sounds to approximate the way things should be spelled , if english made any actual sense. Okay. And this is back to my point, i hope i dont need to point out what an effort it was to assemble and transcribe 10,000 renters letters by soldiers who cant spell. You cant use a spellchecker, you cant use autocorrect, you have to get every letter right, there is erroneous punctuation marks everywhere that arent being properly used, you have to get those exactly right, too. And you can imagine, they dont have the greatest handwriting in the world, this is a great example. This is a classic of the genre. Men who are illiterate dont always have the greatest hand, not the greatest penmanship. But, for some of the men in the collection, these are the only letters they ever wrote, many have never been out of their home counties, never have been so far from home, never had the need to write. The point is, these things are scarce. I like to put it this way, in a tiny fraction of archives, there are a tiny fraction of letters like this one, this letter is like a needle in a haystack. I know michael spent a decade and a half assembling a haystack of needles. To what end . What is my point . What can we do with a haystack of needles . That is what i came here to talk about port. First, you can hear what a Civil War Soldier sounded like, essentially these men are fanatic writers, and in this case, the brother tenant is not thing ought to, he says order, we order go. That is what he writes. We saw the same thing, i mentioned jordans letter in the prior side, he spelled letter litter because that is how he says it. Same thing with the word chair, they spelled it cheer, or take this example of isaac holton, they keep a heavy guard around the night, nobody goes out nor comes in, dont know when we will draw but i hope it will be soon, but i hant got little money, nor tobacco. Now, maybe this is a truly useful but i find it interesting, and we can imagine reenactors or hollywood script writers, or maybe actors using our site to try to improve the pronunciation of the characters, how they might actually have talked. Other linguistic values, he wasnt the only man in the army that said order, instead of ought to. There are tons of other orders and litters in our archives. There is no national job market for them, they dont take a job in san francisco, that doesnt happen for them, it is absolutely true that movement west was a seminal aspect of life in that time, but these are the boys whose families mostly stayed put. That means, that is not just that they come from their home counties, their language comes from their home counties. And, that means we can map it. So in this case, what we are looking at is what is called a prefix, so im agoing , im a hurrying, these are the kinds of origins that individual authors tended to use a prefixing. So everybody does it, at least the illiterate man, they are all agoing, acoming, and it is not distinct to either the north or the south. This one is writing to me, howdy , that is something that is more often said in the south, they didnt say howdy partner, like hello, it is a contraction of how do you, so i hope we will get together again, so i give howdy to all of the blacks and whites. This one surprised me. I didnt realize pronouncing creek into crick was so northern at the time. That is what our data reveals. This one is something many of you may be familiar with, dixie is what the north called it, so all of our letter writers that used the word dixie are from the north. Do you use this . Is this a word up here . It means late morning, essentially, but it is truly a northern phenomenon, even a pennsylvania phenomenon. This is a northern one, too. Gain, for us, if we are gaining weight, that is not a good thing, the average weight was 143 pounds, i dont know about you boys, but i left 143 a while ago, the average weight of the american male is now 200, but they are pretty lean, and when somebody is gaining weight, that is a good thing, but again, it was a northern one. These are ones that i cant figure out, maybe you can help me. So, when using the word fairly, it tends to be in the north only the word middling. For example, our grub is middling, that is what they used in the north, especially here in pennsylvania. They dont use it in the south. They have a comparable term, which is tolerable, meaning rather somewhat or fairly. The south uses the word connection for kinship network, and the north doesnt use it at all. They dont use the word connection. Give me respect to all of the connection, or the right to meet where all of our connection is. It is something that southerners tended to use only. Since it is fathers day, i thought i could finish with a section on regionalism by looking at what people called their fathers back in the day. Honestly i would have thought that there was no southern word then daddy, i hear that a lot in georgia, and it is more so then we see from this, but it doesnt hold a candle to the use of the word pap. That word has ruled the age of the 19th century, this is confirmed by google, if you look at the word, it is running stronger through the 1900s, and it is only relatively late that daddy comes on as a term. Again, because it is fathers day, i will give you one more, that is the word father running at the top, that is a very formal word, and ingram is a very formal body of literature, so i would discount that altogether. But what you are seeing here is that poppa was running much, much stronger until relatively recently. And dad only had quick gains in the lower line only in the last few years. So there is a shout out to mine. Other linguistic values, looking at the emojis, everything that we have talked about so far, you might say, okay, it is interesting but, who cares . I spent a lot of time thinking about Civil War Soldiers, i like the idea that we might get to hear from them, i like thinking about how they talked but some of you might say, you know, i dont think the battles of gettysburg has to do with what these boys called their daddy. Fair enough. This is a way of looking at a way to measure the impact of the war, it is the impact they leave on a language, and novel circumstances and experiences, all of them demand elasticity and expression. So, why not ask what impact it had on the language . Okay, one of the classic examples is the word skedaddle which basically didnt exist anywhere on the earth, and by 1862, it was in every americans mouth. For all the years, i have never seen a curve that steep to be looking at lower left, it is just overnight, everybody has been talking about skedaddle. Lets ask why. Why wasnt the word invented before . It is not like 1861 was the first time an American Army got routed, George Washington ran away a lot, one of the soldiers described the battle in this way, i cant describe the confusion and horror of the scene, men running in every direction, and everywhere we turn, we meet the british, men up to their knees in mud, screaming for help, everybody else running to save their own skin. I would skedaddle. Everyone knows exactly that is what a skedaddle looks like. But, he didnt know the word then when he recorded that, and nobody invented anything like it until 1861. I can think, maybe the bull run , perhaps, that is one heck of a skedaddle, and the scale of the American Army, it makes retreat seem less personal, more like a pandemonium, like an entire city evacuating at once. But my larger point is what the soldiers did with this neologism. In the first two examples, the rebels have possession of this town, and because we have skedaddled essentially come in the second example, we have been skeddaddling for days. This is what the common soldier would do with that word, dan morehead had skedaddled. If we would stay, we would have a full battery, but after they get their bounty, most of them will skedaddle as many have done. So, what you are seeing them doing is essentially appropriating a military term to create a synonym for desertion. They do this a lot. Civil war soldiers had a love for taking the terry terms and making them ridiculous. So the synonyms were desertion and there are many, half of them are repurposed military terms, so all of this means is desertion, i am going to take a brocade, i am going to break the guard, this is their argot, remember, these men are transitional illiterate, many of them cant write pretty well, that doesnt mean they arent creative in the way that they use which, they are facing a dire reality and they need an argot to match, that is what you see them doing. It is a lot of work. And, they are making a demand on us in some ways, in the way that they write. They did this with other military terms, the idea of being a high private, there is no high private but for a man who sorta wants to comically claim that he has dignity, he is a high private, and he is proud of it. For him, that is as good as it gets, that is the highest thing in the army. Or the kentucky quickstep, that is the synonym for the trot, or bodyguard. They are taking this military terms and they are applying them to an experience that is really about desertion and pain and indignity and trying to make some kind of meaning, trying to reclaim some kind of dignity from that. Actually, they did this not just with military terms, anything they wanted to take the air out of, and they wanted to take the air out of everything, and they would do it. We all talk about the elephant, we dont really examine it that much, the dominant metaphor of getting a taste of battle, doesnt it mary this sort of weird error with your serving idea that the whole word is an obscene circus . Or lesserknown terms, i have seen the monkey show. And i did not enjoy 6 april as i have enjoyed some sundays. Hes talking about shiloh, the great bloodbath, i didnt enjoy it as much as i have enjoyed some sundays. I saw the monkey dance. I have seen this before. This kind of ironic minimizing and misdirection. I call it surrendering to the fatal absurd, and attitude that amounts to, i am dead anyway, so bring it. As for me, i made up my mind to die, it made things seem easier, in the circumstance, there didnt seem to be anything else to do. As soon as he got past that point, the rest is gravy. His time went a lot easier. But, you see that in the civil war, too. I had been living in hopes that they would do something, but they have been talking about it for so long, and i cant see that they have done anything, so we have given up to the idea that we have to fight until we are killed. Same idea. Same notion. Same conclusion. If i hadnt been a student of the civil war, i would have been a student of world war i, there is an old argument about world war i, which i accept, the inexplicable definition of eight many people actually has a cultural effect. So, the argument that paul makes in great war and modern memory is that world war i was the midwest of the moderns, it destroyed the victorian time and gave birth to irony, a new age that was more wistful, less trusting, more sad. He pointed out in literature, if you go back to the greeks, all of literature is about characters that have more power than most men usually have, whether it is hercules or achilles, even into the medieval age, you are writing about heroes, men who have more power. You get to dickens, and you get to an orphan that wants a little bit more in his bowl, and the best thing that happens, he gets another bowl. And after world war i, we tell stories of men who wake up as cockroaches and worry about most just getting to work. You see it everywhere across european high culture after world war i. In art, there is cubism coming in before world war i, it becomes Salvador Dali and these nightmare dreamscapes of surrealism. You see it even in science, science will bend to culture, yes, eight many people are killed, it will. Before you have newtonian physics, the newtonian fist physics are destroyed, it becomes popularized in the notion that things are relative or sigmund freud, that we are driven by irrational urges that go back to childhood. All of that is an attempt to explain what they just did to themselves, it marks their culture, 8 million dead, that makes a difference. So, my question has always been, did Something Like this happen after the civil war . Most historians have said no. Outside of a few outsiders, men who work directly damaged by the war like mark twain, the dominant culture managed to absorb the 700,000 dead and to see their sacrifice as pure good. The lost cause, and later, emancipation as an almost lifelike dream in the inevitable march of american freedom. Leaving private voices, i am just less sure, the more i read of the letters, the more i realize common men manage to weird the english language and make an answer for the way they felt, and the way they felt was cynical. If we actually want to assess the words, we should not look too high culture at all, we should look to the low, we should look to the haystack of needles. So, lets do it. What do i think about the most important lessons i have learned so far from working with private voices . Lets start with this question of literacy. Literacy rates are typically estimated at 80 for confederates, 90 for union soldiers, and im not disputing that. What i am disputing is this idea that literacy is one thing, some kind of uniform condition that we all either are or not. It is not that, it is a continuum. Take this letter for example, another letter dated the 13th of february, 1864, the father was dead and the sister was also dead. I am sorry to hear that news, i want you to write me as quick as this letter comes to hand, for i dont get any letters from you by the mail. Okay. The soldier who wrote this letter is jordan from ashe county, north carolina, serving as a private in north carolina, and i said he wrote it because he is perfectly literate, he got one of his buddies to write this letter for him because he is desperate. Whoever wrote the letter doesnt know how to spell many of the words, but, he was his buddy and they were desperate. And, i think we have to treat his condition seriously, can you imagine how helpless it would feel, you dont know if his dad is dead, he doesnt know if his sister is dead, he doesnt know how to get a letter to them, that is the kind of helplessness that we commonly recognize because we can get answers to anything, i could call my son right now, he wouldnt answer, but he could. We can google anything in a second, we have information and people at our fingertips, we close distances like magic, but they are far away, very remote and often underdressed. As it turns out, the father and sister were fine, but he never learned that before he was killed. At the far end of our literacy spectrum are the enslaved, this is john hamilton, we are used to black people, there is a black boy here, we pull a good deal of fun out of him and a good deal of information, too. He cant read or steal, but he is trying to learn, he is a smart boy to not be educated, i love this idea that hamilton is a pennsylvania soldier saying this guy cant spell and he is uneducated, and he clearly doesnt see that he is in a transitional literacy state, too. And that is my point. We need to realize that all of the Civil War Soldiers are operating on a spectrum of literacy that needs to be taken seriously. They are not habitual readers, or they would have figured out proper spelling, then you have to understand that the information work is effectively spoken, not written. What does that mean for you . You are dependent from your information from the people that you talk to and you trust, that means that none of your information is being verified by outside sources coming to you as a written text. That means that rumor and accurate intelligence are left on a level Playing Field within a very tight circle of men and a sort of information bubble and endless feedback loop, Civil War Soldiers were much more in the dark, much more information blind and information starved. The other great thing about the haystack of needles is that i can deploy it against what i called the civil wars high church, our urge to transform the civil war into an american iliad. I love this series, the civil war series breaking all records for a pbs program, 40 Million People watched it the first night, that is more than the population of the union and confederacy combined. One of those was me. I was a freshman come home from college, and my clueless freshman ways, i had gone to college to answer one simple question, how can i be a good man . And in a bad, broken world . In my parents television, i found an answer, at the end of that first night when the narrator read, to the swelling found of a farewell, the letter by a young major to his wife, sarah. My love for you seems to bind me with mighty cables, and my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly with all of these chains to the battlefield, if i do not return, my dear sarah, never forget how much i love you, and when my last breath escapes me, it will whisper your name. I remembered this moment very distinctly because it was the moment i became a civil war historian. In my young brain, it was everything i wanted to be, a tangle of love of a country, love of a family, and serving back to me as truth. But it wasnt well into graduate school that i learned that the body was turned into a corpse and jewelry. That wasnt my point. My larger point dates back to history which, whoever wrote this letter, wrote it and what i call the civil wars high time, inflected through the signature of shakespeare and the king james bible. Because they belonged to families, families with drunks and addicts and property, that they transfer down the line because they built our archives and our universities, because we love the high time, it is irresistible. All of our history has been written in it, and all of our Civil War History has been effectively overwritten. An example will help, i remember the first time i read this, my heart was a fountain of waters, i might weep it away, for this my ruined country. I thought i never read anything so beautiful about what it means to watch a nation that you love suicide itself, it is perfect. It is gorgeous. I have learned to appreciate the second example even more. It appears our country is ruined and distracted forever, i feel we will never be a happy people again. So i think we would all better try and prepare for death. It is the exact same sentence, it isnt as beautiful, but heres the thing, mcguires version is dependent upon her understanding of other literary sources, in this case, she is channeling the bible, john 737 on the last day, the great day jesus stood up and cried out, anybody that thirsts, let them come to me and drink. So, she is sort of marinating in this kind of high language back to the King James Version of the bible in shakespeare, so she can spend that out to express her feelings, and the thing that i think about, she doesnt have access to those to express her feelings, they come so much harder to him to find this language and think about this letter, he didnt write this one either, he perfectly is illiterate. He needed his buddy to write it down and send it home. It takes a greater act of empathy on our part to fill in the emotional parts that make that moment for him. I agree it is harder and that doesnt mean that it is any less true. So what would happen if we went for it, rewrote the war in the low tongue . What would the war look like . I think it would have a directness, a toughness, a rawness, these sources at the private voices always put me in a world they will never know, which basically means a cultivated coolness, a sense of having no more to give. So, please let me know, in your next letter, whether i can talk or not, right . I cant imagine a wife getting this letter on valentines day, what a romantic about our children. But, there is an honesty to it, that is what he wants to ask. Or, this letter from christmas, 1862, i can tell you, we have a heap of men here who have complaints, that is that they get drunk and run after negros and white women, but with a clear conscious, i take no part with them. If i was a white guy, i wouldnt be sure, i wouldnt be able to do this. But it is just wrong, their life is lived close to the bone, it is just naked, honest. Ive got a sore throat, i lost my baby, she lived nine days, the rest of the family as well, hoping this will find you both well, we have nothing to write about. That is a tough cookie, right . Do you want to know why men could stand in the 80s and have casualties in a cornfield and then get up the next day . If you want to look at who we used to be, these people are just plain tougher than we are. As tough as they were, as hard as they got, there was exactly one thing that they were soft about, or even softer, this is what i like about our website, when they are just hanging around the office and wondered, i wonder what the Civil War Soldiers thought heaven was going to be like. And what you could find, none of the boys talked about saint peter, or pearly gates, or a place where sins are forgiven, where believers sit at the right hand of god, they all described it simply as the place where families meet two part no more, for many poor white families, the civil war marked the first and only time they were together. Absence as much as violent defined what the war meant. I never knew what it was before to be from home, one soldier wrote his family, but i know something about it now. I still hope that the time is coming that we will meet again, and if we dont meet in this world, i hope we will meet in heaven where we will part no more. I read this again and again. All i want is to go home. What sounds like heaven to them is family, permanents. And that is another difference between them and blue. Blue said his love of country came over him like a strong wind and dragged him back to the battlefield, and that is beautiful, and some of the boys in private voices were literally dragged to the battlefield because they thought they were forced to. What would it have been like if that first night ended with this letter . Would i even be a civil war scholar . My dear wife and children, i have a troubled heart, and a stressed mind, to try to write a few lines to let you know that i heard my sentence read yesterday and it was very bad. Im very sorry to let you know. I am sorry to inform you that i have but seven days to live, but i hope and trust in god, when they have slain my body that god will take my soul to rest where i will meet my little babe that has gone before. Now, maybe that is unfair, that you would and the first. I thi the mercies of god i will see you all again in a short time and this will shortly come to a close but it looks like we came to not stand it much longer. He was killed shortly after. Oh my dear, you are my only dearest friend in this world, if ever i live with this war i will always take your advice hereafter in anything you say. But it appears i will never get to see you anymore in this world. Could i just see one hour it would do me more good the best thing that ever could be, i never craved anything as much of my life but if it not be the good lord will spare our lives hope we meet each other in a happy world will be whenever part again and he was killed shortly after in virginia. We said at the outset that we have to give credit where credit is due and in october 2017, the magazine admitted that we had discovered the first ever known use of the phrase kick [ null ]. Now to be honest they discovered our oddity in the post appeared honest swearing blog about swearing. Now, if we gonna talk about swearing we actual have to start with peter carmichael. That sort of came out wrong but what i mean is we have to start with this had a and what he wrote for my collection now his book. He asked the writer if his comments would be quoted verbatim it with characters in print, think like the soldiers really do the way to tidy it up and make it proper. Im talking about swearwords, the writer has no intention of writing the rough language, hes not convinced telling the other that he does have an undoubted desire to be daring. I believe the key to reversing the trend is to do exactly what pete called for a decade ago and barack called for a half century ago we need to pay careful attention to language. So lets do that by ending on this kick [ null ] letter. The writer is John B Gregory in the 1860s he was a farmer from pennsylvania county, virginia residing on his farm was wife, martha and for Young Children ages one through five. In february, 1862 he wrote his wife id be glad to see tom oakes, if hes going to fetch my box, be paid one hour and a half for a pint of whiskey but were obliged to buy some. Somebody has drunk nearly every day and they dont do nothing with them, meaning without. They fight them and then they put them in a guardhouse until they get sober. Getting us to volunteer, he thinks everyone not to stay. Okay, you have to know your timing, your civil war chronology. Since 1762 many of the terms of enlistment are coming up and thats whats going on and thats why the old captain gilbert is being about how drunk everyone seems to be. That would mean they would have the institute addressed to to forcibly constrict people too much longer tourism and the duration of the work but, heres the thing amid the cavalcade and imagine i want to be kick [ null ], thats what he wants to do. He writes it in between his own lines, with all his griping gregory was in it to win and in it for the duration. This letter was killed right here on the ground at gettysburg in an assault on Cemetery Ridge with more than half of his regimen killed, wounded or captured. He left for children and a wife at home and never knew where he was buried or what he was dying for. I dont know if gregory kicked [ null ] but i know he got his [ null ] kicked. Second including the slate article the article noted that the gregory letter is one tantalizing example of many that should turn up in the private voices archive as the site grows. Wants to 4000 letters from states, 6000 marvyn subscribed and expected in the coming year along with the dynamic mapping feature where readers can explore word usage and speech patterns and as the article concludes that sounds kick [ null ] to me. Indeed it does. Thank you very much. [ applause ] you have a civil war book written in the same context because it was first written in the early 1900s and people rejected it because it was written in the vernacular, so i wonder what your thoughts are. That would be a fantastic idea, i hope someone would take that on, i mated that on. I dont know that everyone is aware of what their 20s but its the story of a slave the last reported the last slave but its written in the vernacular of the slave telling the story. As opposed to be in written in polite english. Thank you, thats a great idea. I appreciate it. Im curious and the website, the way its all put together, do you have them identified by which regimen therein or if you want to search a specific regimen you can search by regimen . Back by regimen, state her last name and cannot go to a local tech search for individual words. During keyword searching, a site where everyone says whatever they want to its a little more interesting. And this is very fuzzy indeed so you kinda have to be careful when you do your searches to make sure you get everything you want but theres lots of ways to get inside. It sounds like something overdue. Yes, thank you. I have a question in regards to where you think this is going from here in the modern age. I see a lot of students write very phonetically. And they are told, sounded out, theyre going full circle or is there another reason why you think thats coming back . I think thats a really interesting point and they speak in text, so its the quickest way home. But do they actually know how to sail, im not sure. But their spelling phonetically other spelling shortly, to get everything is an acronym that three letters and its just an entirely different kind of language that does. When i first read it i was like oh, but i love books and im watching a generation, i know for a fact the student has been born that will go to the university of georgia never read a whole book in their life cannot cover to cover. So at first i was like well im cranky about that and their awash in different kinds of information and are communicating in a slightly different way. I dont think they read less than we do but differently than we do. Maybe because im a historian i dont like to predict the future but im not sure yet what it will do to our language i do worry that is much as i appreciate the low tone and im trying to my man for insight about the common soldier which weve been after forever, thats my favorite thing in the world, thats our soul. So, i would worry about that deep the but im not sure that is whats happening. Im not sure. Great question. Thank you all so much. I really appreciate it. [ applause ] campaign 2020, watch live coverage of the president ial candidates on the campaign trail and make up your own mind, c spans campaign 2020, your unfiltered view of politics. In 1979 a Small Network with an unusual name rolled out a big idea that viewers make up their own minds, cspan open the door to washington policymaking for all to see, bringing you unfiltered content from congress and beyond. Lettuce changed in 40 years but today the big idea is more relevant than ever on television and online, cspan is your unfiltered view of government so you can make up your own mind. On march 17, 1980, president jimmy carter signed a refugee act after it was unanimously passed by the senate and high bipartisan support in the house. The act raise the annual ceiling for refugees allowed in the United States established the office of Refugee Resettlement and created a process for addressing refugee emergencies. Next con American History tv that the former government officials and Refugee Rights advocates discuss the history of refugee policy prior to 1980 as a legacy of the refugee act since that time. This is an hour and 15 minutes. Good morning. I am dr. Meredith evans and the director of the president ial library and museum. Im so excited for you to be here today. We are commemorating the refugee act of 1980