Sense of history, thank you for joining us today. It is my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, historian joanne freeman. Doctor freeman is a professor of history at yale university. She specializes in Early National american politics and culture. She is the author of several influential and awardwinning books and i will mention two of them. Affairs of honor from 2001 and most recently, feel the blood congressional violence in antebellum america, which i found particularly helpful for my own work. It seems like a reverse echo of the current and contemporary political scene in the United States. I will leave it at that. Dr. Freeman is known for her understanding of hamilton, which she rediscovered, i would say, before broadway did a couple of years ago. I asked doctor freeman about her relationship with history and she was kind enough to respond to my request for the information. It really reads like a love story. She fell in love with history beginning in 1776. I am sorry. She is much younger than that. The bicentennial 1976. I do remember that time. I was fascinated as well. I developed a hobby of coin collecting. From there she went to the hamilton papers, became a public historian consultant, educator, very active in what we now call public history. She received a phd from the university of virginia and has had a very distinguished career at yale. One last thing because we want to give as much time to her as possible, dr. Freeman is profoundly grateful for her teachers, and mentors who led the way. Im glad to see she has paid back, and demonstrating a generous commitment to education and americas teachers. Please welcome dr. Freeman. We are excited to hear what you have to say. Thank you. Thank you. We are grateful for the support he showed us. Joann, we are excited to have you here. That was a great introduction. We have got a number of questions from those who posted on social media. I just want to say that we are still taking questions. I know you have questions because you love hamilton. Put those in the chat box. Could you tell us a little bit more, it sounds like 1976 was a pivotal time for you and your interest . What draws you to the early american period and Alexander Hamilton in particular. I want to first say, thank you for the introduction. I also want to say, looking at what has gone on, to convert a real conference into an online conference, it has been amazing to see. Even as a board member, i applaud the work that went into making this possible. I am excited. As far as what draws me to that time, i think in some ways, it is not that different for me to begin with. I think what got me interested was the human component of it. That is what the bicentennial did for me, to show me that the events that i always learned about as events, i began reading biographies and that was my entry. Even as a mature historian, what i am really interested in in this time is two things. The human component and whether that means people behaving badly, which i seem to write about a lot, or, just generally speaking, the underlying emotions and intentions and the things that drive politics that are not just pure policy, that are not just demographics. Im interested in getting to the root of that kind of behavior. That is great. What is it particularly Alexander Hamiltons character that you find fascinating . Initially, i started reading biographies. I think i started i remember reading john adams and kind of going. When i got to hamilton, he was different. Again, i was like 14 years old. He was different because he had a dramatic beginning and a dramatic end, as opposed to other biographies i had been reading. And he was a young guy who want to achieve great things and as a kid, i think i identified with that somehow. Also, there was not a lot written about him, which intrigued me. I read a biography of him and i did not like it. I did not believe it. I do not know what in my 14yearold brain drew me to draw that conclusion. I asked a librarian what the person who had written the book had read that give the person the right to say what they were saying in the book. A librarian showed me the hamilton papers. The 27 volumes of hamilton papers, everything they had written more received over the course of his entire life. I started reading those and that was the most exciting thing of all. My response to primary sources, was that this is real history. No one is going to tell me what this means. I get to read it and figure out what it means. I beamed into him because he was different. I ended up being fascinated by what i found in reading those papers. I would finish and go back and start again. I never stopped and i did not know that historian was a job. I did not know anyone who had been a professor. I had no goal. It was just a thing i did because those fascinated in hamilton. He is so flawed and selfdestructive in some ways and yet so central to the politics of that moment, that by being interested in him, i became interested in the time period. Eventually, i was just interested in that period. It all started with hamilton. Many of us watching the history educators, it is a level of commitment i am not sure we all have, 27 volumes. I do not know if i would do it now. [laughter] camberley is saying in the chat box that this is proof that librarians are modernday heroes. Librarians, we are all proud of you and the work you do. The almost relationship with Alexander Hamilton is fascinating. Many of us might have the feeling that we have come to know Alexander Hamilton and that we are close to him now, even those of us who are not historians but listen to a cd in the car and are lucky enough to have seen the play, very much influenced by your work. But what are some things we may not know about Alexander Hamilton, even if we feel we know him, what are historical to its that are fascinating that advocate average americans do not know . The biggest answer and the most serious answer is that the play draws a particular image of him. It does a good job capturing his personality to some degree. He is difficult and he never shuts up. He gets and a lot of fights. You can see all of that in the play. With the play does not do enough of, but as a politician, he had very strong feelings. They were not all progressive or democratic. So the play kind of makes him out to be raised up his bootstraps, modern and forwardlooking and jefferson was a backward looking guy attached to slavery. To a degree, that is true, but jefferson was the guy comfortable with democracy and hamilton was not. One of the last letters he writes, not long before the duel, maybe even a night before the duel, he won his friends that the thing that might bring down the republic is democracy. He felt democracy, in the way they understood it, was popular participation on a level that was not controlled in any way. He had a more aristocratic kind of view. He was distrustful of the people. He was not thrilled with immigrants having a lot of political input, which is odd because he himself came to the north american colonies from somewhere else, but immigrants tended to vote jeffersonian republican. This did not thrill him. Things he wrote in the late 1790s about, can we do something so only american americans can vote . There are sides of hamilton that are not as attractive and more complicated. To me, really important because it is a big argument or conversation. There was no one right answer. Hamilton was not the right answer and nor was jefferson, nor was anyone else in that picture. It was the banging up against each other of all of those ideas that causes us to end up with what we end up with, for better and worse. To me, that is missing from the play. I do not criticize the play for it. The first time i saw it, one of my responses was, the singing George Washington farewell address, singing about the assumption of state debt, how is this humanly possible . I was already impressed that any of that got on the stage. Im willing to talk about this more later. To me, holes and absences and things that should not be in the play, there are teaching opportunities. Our job as teachers is to say, what is not on the stage . Let me show you what really happened and it is even more interesting than what the play showed. I am sure many out there have experienced this, there are so many young people at throughout my decades of teaching, my attitude is, excellent. It is the worlds best teaching opportunity. No matter what were doing, that is a great starting point. We have young people watching this right now. I thought i would take some questions from our young historians. That was all very fascinating. I do have a number of you typing into the chat box. That is fabulous. A q and a box might help me organize it better. We do have some Great Questions and i will take the ones from youngest audience members first. We have a fifthgrader who would like to know if hamilton had a say in how money looked . There was certainly discussion about the amount it should be. Hamilton thought there should be very small amounts of money like pennies, things of the very low value because that would encourage americans, rich and poor, to use currency. So he was thinking in a practical way. There was a debate about what should be on coins. Congress did debate if George Washingtons face should be on the coin and there was a lot of up opposition. That moved into, are we treating him like a king . Will he sooner or later become king george . We have to be careful. We do not have kings in a republic. Your question is a good one because it was a big question. Hamilton ultimately did not influence that. I have a couple of questions about elijah. Our eighth grade friend says she would like to know what role elizah played in hamiltons death. The musical makes it look like she did a lot and did she really . Speak to elizas role in general. Organized a volume of his correspondences afterwards. If you could speak to his legacy, really. She is fascinating, because she did a lot of what i think wives and sisters of elite, political guys did, particularly wives, which is, hide or destroy her personal correspondence with her husband to maintain their privacy. In the play, she talks about burning letters and the fact that she is angry at her husband. She did destroy a lot of correspondence with hamilton. To some degree, we do not know some things about her role during their marriage except it is in the 27 lines. You can see she really organized and ran the household. She was the one family finance. A letter from hamilton, i will not be able to put the year right now. He is the secretary of the treasury and he lost his own personal bank took. Elizah is the one who really maintained that family and he was not an easy person to be around for any number of reasons. She had to be really strong to whether the whole relationship. An interesting thing, as you suggested, what she does after his death, she really put herself at the center, the effort to preserve his memory, collect papers, get someone to write a biography, and mostly James Hamilton to some degree some degree, they really dedicated themselves to doing what they could do to preserve his reputation. A lot of what we know now is in part because they were carefully collecting papers. We have a lot of letters from jefferson and adams. They had a long time to organize their papers. Hamilton did not. He couldnt carefully arrange them. He did nothing. He went off one day and died the next. So elizah was important in that role in addition to what she did on her own. She will really was significant in the founding of an orphanage. She is really a strong character. She lived well into her 90s and was one of the last people of that generation to live. At the end for life, she was living in washington, d. C. , with her daughters. One of her daughters. Former president james monroe came to visit her and said Something Like, mrs. Hamilton, we are among one of the among the only ones left. Monroe is being sort of cordial expresident. She said something along the lines of, if you think me being one step closer to the grave means i will forgive you, i do not. She stormed out of the room. We do have a question about how you organize those 27 volumes of material. Hamilton did have family members working on that afterward curating the legacy which they ultimately sold his papers but what is worth noting is nowadays, there are all of the paper projects. The washington papers and a hamilton papers. These are documentary projects and their job is to collect as much if not all of correspondence and writings from these individuals. Everything to and from them. They hunt all over the world for these things. There are amazing amounts of work that go into that project that allows us, and right now, a lot of it is coming out from the national archives, there are a lot of papers of those people. All of that comes from the documentary edition projects, it is a huge amount of work and it is great. I get the opportunity to apply because so much of these of what these historians do would be impossible without all of the work they do. To those of you watching, if you want to read some of those hamilton papers, joann has edited two volumes of those hamilton papers. The most recent is paperback and kind of a best of. I believe the library of congress has many of those papers digitized. The library of congress is check out those hamilton papers. We have a lot of questions coming in, which is wonderful. A question, my understanding of Alexander Hamilton is was he was involved in corrupt have we gone too far and if so, why and why now . That is a good question. Beginning from his lifetime, there were a lot of assumptions about him being corrupt, benefiting somehow privately. When you look at his account books and finances, it is not apparent if that happens. I do not know if where the money would be. It is entirely conceivable, and i know this happened, he would go to dinner parties and his wellconnected friends would sit at the dinner party and ask questions and watch his response so they could judge what the government would do, and so they could do whatever they wanted to do to benefit themselves. Was he himself speculating . No. Would i say that somehow others benefited whether he intended them to or not . Probably. I am sitting in new york city right now and you can probably hear the sirens. Can you address hamiltons view on slavery and what stance he took . That is a good question. The play suggests that he was an abolitionist. I would not make that claim. When you read those 27 volumes, one thing you see is that hamilton took up a cause and went all out. Slavery, he talks about it from time to time. It does not appear as a major focus. He is against slavery as a practice. He is helping to create schools, free schools, africanamerican new yorkers. So he is on the side we would want him to be on. But ending slavery, i would say, was not a main cause of his. If you think about him is the guy who was really concerned about property and property rights, it would make sense that that is not a guy who would say ok, lets just upset everything and free all of these people and not deal with pragmatics of it. Other people might say yes, that is a good thing to do. Hamilton would not have been one of those guys. When he talks about slavery, one of the interesting things worse, in the play. John, a friend of his, comes up with the idea to arm slid arm enslaved people and give them freedom the face of if they fight. Hamilton supports that. In a letter he writes to the continental congress, there is a sentence where he is talking about what he thinks of africanamericans. You can tell he is trying to figure out how to say what he thinks. He would write something and cross it out and put Something Else in. He is struggling with, what does he think about the capability of africanamericans. It is interesting. You can see him on the paper, not sure what he wants to say or what he is thinking. When you are studying manuscripts from this time, cross outs are sometimes the most revealing of all. There are not many more times that they that he talks about it. That is most interesting to me because he is grappling with how he will say what he wants to say. Interesting. It is a good question and students need to understand there is not just a pro and cant. There is a spectrum. You can be antislavery but not very strongly antislavery or you can be kind of proslavery but unwilling to do anything to promote it. Some are positive and some are negative but it is complicated. The field of blood, it has a main character at its center. Not a guide. One thing you think is you see him trying to see what he thinks about slavery. A sense of the book, he says, i think congress should not discuss slavery at all and the matter needs to be settled. I think it is really bad and we should have nothing to do with it. It is a series of things where he cannot make a sentence that comes up with how he could be against it and then want to do nothing to end the practice. I think those complexities and failures, including on hamiltons parts, are crucial. You there is a huge story that is not really addressed very much, you know. For those of you who do know the play, in the room where it happens about the dinner deal that he moves the capital to washington, there was probably an africanamerican servant in the room. That is a teaching opportunity, to me. I think it is important to tell kids that this is not yes or no. Whether or not different people supported it. Thank you. That is interesting. You we have a lot of questions coming in. The play was influenced by the manuscript you edited. Would you speak to the play what is accurate, what is not, what you love, what makes you cringe, tell us what it is like to see her lifes work on the stage . The play is based on rons book. My work influenced the play. A good amount of the writing, sentences, appear in the play. At some point, i handed Linmanuel Miranda the book. I was probably the only person sitting in the audience, saying, that is the 1793 letter and that is the 1798. So i knew, i think at some point, he is a host within himself. That is a jefferson letter. I wish there was a war, that is from a hamilton letter. One thing i was doing in addition to being stunned that they were sitting singing about this and hamiltonss farewell address, was recognizing all of the actual quotes from letters that made their way into play which dumbfounded me. In and of itself, i dont know what i expected, but i didnt necessarily expect as much history as there was in the play to get woven into it. The things that make me cringe . I think initially i wasnt cringing because i was so stunned somebody had done that with history. The day i went to see it the first time off broadway, when i knew it was coming to broadway, i went and all of my friends wanted to see it with me. I bought all of these pairs of tickets on different nights to go with my friends, and at that point you could do that and it wasnt very expensive early on, when i went to see it, there were a lot of history teachers in the audience. A lot of history teachers in the audience. They were having some of the response i was having they are singing about that . There was a woman im not going to remember the details there was a woman a couple of rows down with tears because she couldnt quite believe someone had and that with the history she teaches. It had changed the way people reacted, interacted with it. The things i dont like . Id dont like the hamilton good guy, jefferson bad guy story. I dont think thats right. I think they are both good and bad in different ways and i think thats the point there are no just good guys in American History. There really arent. For us to understand how we got to where we are, we need to accept that. There is no Golden Moment where everyone was good. There just wasnt. In all of my work, i write about politicians fighting. So i can say with authority, there is no Golden Moment. From the very beginning, it has been partisan, it has been angry, that is way small are republican politics does. The good guy, bad guy thing, i did not like so much. I did think about the fact that the play does suggest eight guys sort of did everything. Again, its a musical theater, so some part of me was like eight guys did not do everything. So i in a sense took a step back, but i could see that as a criticism of the play. Thats an old fashion way to think about history, eight guys in a room did everything, eight guys in a tent did everything during the revolution. Obviously, its much more complicated than that. For everyone, the American Revolution institute put out a bunch of different things. Obviously, when you are writing a short play, theres only so much you can get in, but its important for us as educators, we are the ones to teach that. I think thats very important. That relates back to what i said. Theres no way you can understand where we are now if you dont understand that complexity all the way back to the beginning. I know i keep saying for better and worse. We cant downplay the worst part. You really cant. We have to acknowledge the parts that are admirable, but not in isolation. There is no country that has those moments in absolute isolation. To understand the roots of how we got to where we are, we really have to look at the roots. Luckily, we do have lots of young historians looking into all of this. We have a question from josiah in third grade. This echoes the question rich has people are very curious about the hamilton and burr relationship. How is it different in reality that in the play . You guys are asking excellent questions. It was different. On one hand, to use the modern term, they were kind of frenemies. They were friends and enemies. They were lawyers in new york, politically minded lawyers in new york. They did bump up against each other a lot. They were fighting the revolution, they were both in the legal world. They sometimes practiced cases together as cocounsel and had a lot of the same friends and went to a lot of the same parties. They had a lot in common. That said, they were not as absolutely sidebyside as the play suggests. Burr was not at hamiltons wedding. Almost no one was at hamiltons wedding. It was a very small wedding in the living room of his fatherinlaws house. But burr would not have been there. They are not Close Friends. That said, over time, burr hamilton thought burr was an opportunist in his politics, willing to do anything if it would get him ahead. He also thought burr was just as ambitious as he was. So he saw burr as a dangerous man because he thought this was an unanchored ambition, that he would do anything to get what he wants and that was dangerous. So beginning in 1792, hamilton writes a letter and it says Something Like i consider it my religious duty to oppose burrs career. That is a statement my religious duty. From an early point, hamilton is opposed to burr and keeps coming up against him and burr sometimes doesnt react or steps back and allows it to go. There is evidence in the election of 1800 that they almost fought a duel. When they are negotiating the final duel in their letters, hamilton says once before we almost did this, and her says twice before we almost did this, so at least once, if not twice, they almost came to a duel. Hamilton had a lot of distrust and dislike and some of it was because burke came from this noble background, the president of the college of new jersey, his ancestors were the equivalent of new england royalty. To hamilton, that was dangerous because he could be a demagogue. He had a great background, all of these people would follow him, but he was a pup a republican playing to the public. So hamilton decided that was the case and never stop deposing him. Thank you. On that same sort of theme, rich wants to know if you could put the burrhamilton duel in the context of the political role of dueling from the American Revolution through the civil war. How was it a how was it viewed as a political event . I will give the quick and dirty version of it. A lot of people liked to say dueling began in the colonies during the who can benir defendnrr nisonr politicians arenrw3 ue y worried about theirni reputations. nrhamilton is extra worriedninii because he was poor, he wasnrnri illegitimate, so79 s always a bit pe sonal, but it is to some degree political as well. ni ninrnrokin the 1790s, before te already throu jp oundnrninr dars for duels to make axdconrnr poio show upl]tezi willing to fight for this cause and make political points with duelingni talk, dueling languag, nicn you get ietm it,c thing. Northerners begin to seeninrnr s a barbaric southern practice. As one of theirconini nipeculiar institutions. ninortherners begin,ni particuly politicians who seem willingjfco engage in that krd ofni xdcoa5nininininico ninorthern feel comfortable engaging inxdni duels and taunting them. It. Nowingnr they can get awayco southerners use. nin0 southerners will standcop and say really . nryou want to say qn. Really . Lpnrnrnhrnrare you accusing me. nr back down. N effectiveni tool until close to the vilni 5awr who begin to fight back. Its a good question nrbecause t shows a lot about sectionalism in the unitedninrqi]nrnijf stat. Zvnrninini it is a fascinati. niconin2othat is thq politicali nrninr5 in which they werew3nini conijot being nights nininico nrlike f old andco hamilton got down jjph p thats what that was about. An interesting thing the play flips on its head, the play, for those of you know it, there a moment in which angelica asks hamilton about a misplaced co mma. You wrote me a letter and it said my dearest, angelica and she wants to know if hamilton meant it. In reality, the reverse happened. In reality, angelica misplaced the comma and he writes the letter back like she basically answers no, i did not mean anything special by that, but thank you very much. So it is interesting for plot or character element, the play puts that on its head. They were Close Friends. He was Close Friends with the entire skyler family. Back that estimating stop people say that is fascinating. Sometimes this is fascinating stuff the complex, fascinating, personal history. Related to that, thats a uniform thing people say that history is boring. If history were just a bunch of dates and events, i would be bored. Anyone would be bored. But its not. It is a human story. Its a human story of making choices or not being able to make choices. In one way or another, it is a human story. The way i like to teach it and my American Revolution course, it is online, its free, its 26 lectures or something and you will see if you watch that lecture course, its centered around people at the time. What did they think . What were the possibilities, what werent there possibilities . If you can really convey to students that these are people looking ahead in time and not looking back, they dont know whats going to come, they dont know its going to work. They dont assume theres going to be a declaration of independence or constitution. They dont assume it going to work. If they do, its not necessarily what happens. That is one thing the play does well. When you look forward in time, you are restoring contingency to American History. The play does that in a way by getting down on the ground and having a huge way of looking at things. You see in the audience that the revolution wasnt this doesnt necessarily happen, you can see people working through things. Contingency is huge in teaching about the founding era because no one thinks its there. When you take a human perspective and look forward in time and realize they dont know what they are doing, sometimes, my first book, i write about first politicians not knowing what an american politician is supposed to dress like. How fancy are they allowed to be . There is an improvisational component to early politics that fascinates me and that is part of the same idea that everything is contingent. Nothing is absolute. For a lot of us, we are feeling at this point in history, we are feeling our way forward, we are not sure what we are doing. We have a question here for a lot of reasons, these are unique and unsettling times. What advice would hamilton give us in 2020 and why . When people ask me questions like that, which is what would hamilton think now, what immediate thought is what is that talking box in your room . What are these things flying over your head . There they would never make it to politics. I think probably he would be surprised the constitution lasted as long as it did. When you look at his writings, and i have given one or two talks probably floating around online, he was never absolutely sure the american experiment would succeed. He writes a memo to himself about 10 days after the Constitutional Convention and it is like a lawyerly memo. Maybe it is, maybe washington will become president , and if he does, he will pick wise people to be around him and probably people will trust those wise people and they will cooperate with the new government and we will probably have a chance. Or maybe he wont pick wise people or people wont trust the people he appoints, in which case, probably other nations will sweep in and begin to swallow pieces of the United States or the states will turn against each other and that will be the end of the experiment. Whats fascinating is the kicker at the end of the mo, he points to the apocalyptic image at the end and says thats probably what is going to happen stop whats going to happen. He says im going to fight for this republic idea that you think is going to work. Im going to push it as hard as i can toward what i think is better, which is monarchy, which is why he so controversial. But by his logic, im not going to overturn it, im just going to push it and if it doesnt work, then i will step in and help get put back together again. I dont think he is alone in thinking that but i dont know if he was fully convinced a government that grounded on Public Opinion could survive. He might be, oddly enough,. That we lasted this long pleasantly surprised that we lasted this long. A lot of folks in our audience are history educators stop even are history educators. This is an unsettled time and theres a lot going on. A lot of people are feeling their way forward. Can you tell us about the importance of History Education in teaching history, teaching government, relating to students, speak to the importance of History Education. It couldnt be more important stop its always important. That at this particular moment, this is not the first time in American History we have been uprooted and redefining. There are other moments like the civil war, civil rights, there are other moments when it felt like society was scrambling and something new is going to emerge and we didnt know what it was. This is one of those moments and in a general way, its really important to be able to look at the past and understand how you got to the present. Its not useful to just look at whats happening now and say i hate this. Instead, what happened that got us to this point . What can we do knowing that to move to Something Different . On a practical level, that is important. We are watching in some ways, the present and the past being rewritten. Politicians always do that. They create the past they need, they use a jefferson quote however they need. I tell students they will never be able to listen to politicians again because they will listen to it and say thats not what that means. That is always true. I think we need our students to be aware of the fact that history matters, historical fact matters, the way we understand the present and past matter and we need students to be skilled at evaluating evidence. This is a concrete thing, and i work with it on my students all the time and im sure so many of you do as well. History is about evaluating evidence, finding evidence, weighing it, and drawing conclusions. Thats the most important job skill, life skill you can have right now. You go online and how do you know what to believe . Some of what we are teaching as history teachers is how do you do that . You have to think about where information comes from. You have to think about whats being said and what isnt being said. You have to think about who is writing it, you have to think about all the things history teachers think about. Thats a pragmatic skill that you need because Everybody Needs it, but to teach it to our students is so important. On another level, there is a remarkable degree to which people dont know anything about the constitution. I know i am mighty active on twitter. The thing that initially got me going rather than just being on it is i became upset by something in the 2016 campaign. I went online i apologized i know this is really obvious, but i feel the need to say this because people should be thinking about this. I said what felt to be the most obvious thing in the world there are three branches of government, separate but equal, checks and balances. Separate but equal, checks and balances, balance of power, three branches. At the end, i apologize. I know thats obvious but i felt the need to say that. What i got was a lot of responses from people for saying thank you for teaching me that. They didnt know. And it was like my stomach dropped and then i thought now im not going to shut up. Now im in. Now im going to talk a lot about what the constitution has, what it doesnt have in it, why sometimes it matters what the founders thought and why sometimes it doesnt. We need people to understand the constitution and what it set in motion and how it is a living document and it doesnt move through time as a block of marble and we need to understand that. People need to understand the structure of the government, how it works. How different branches are independent. Why checks and balances are important. All of those things that we have always sort of taken for granted, they are really important for people to understand. Thats another way that in the old days, some of these would have come in civics classes. When i was in school, we took civics. But it is not some abstract, hoitytoity, lettuce discuss political institutions. Im talking about fundamentally how is the government supposed to work . Its different, its not a monarchy, so what does that mean . Why the checks and balances . Why the three balance why the three branches . Why the balance of power . All of that stuff is beyond important and since 2016, i have not shut up. Im sometimes saying ridiculous things on twitter like everyone else does but,z n some of the , im aggressively talking about thinking about history, thinking about politics, thinking about the constitution, and asking good questions and that is what we do as history teachers. That is very important. I know its not just history educators in the audience, but we do think that is important students learn to analyze documents and learn about the different structures of the government. Thats important no matter who you are. I have been saying it over and over again and i know explicitly because we are in this weird moment where no one knows whats going to happen and thats normally true and every thing is up in the air, ive been encouraging people over and over again online to record what it feels like. Not well today, this senator said this, but more like wow, i heard this today and this makes me nervous or scared. I wrote not a journal, but on 9 11 or the day after, i realized in some ways, i was experiencing a flickering of what some of my people felt in the early republic. They felt the republic was vulnerable and these other nations could come in and take us away. Since 9 11, i had been marching along thinking america strong and suddenly i was thinking we are vulnerable in a way i had not felt before. I wrote a page reflecting on that, which i ultimately ended up publishing because it captured, when i went back and looked at it later, what that felt like. What that felt like at that moment when all of these assumptions were blasted and you had to rethink things you had always taken for granted. For students and everyone else, this is a great moment to do that. Im thinking like a historian. Down the road, some future historian is going to be singing hosannas because you committed that to paper and thats the best evidence of all. But it will be useful to you as students or teachers or educators to have that on paper, to remind yourself what feels like. That becomes historical evidence for you as well as others. Especially for all of you, some of you have your kids home today. In the chat box, folks are pulling them off the couches and having them watch right now, so thank you for helping with the childcare crisis. But this is a wonderful idea. Not only are skills as historians and history educators important, but we are part of history and can be sharing these things with the children who are home with us. This has been a wonderful experience for us to hear about hamilton, about the play we are all excited about, but also your role as a historian and the way you address those primary sources. That has been inspiring for everyone. We want to thank you for the work you have done. It has been wonderful. Thank you guys for being there and for caring and being willing to do this experiment. I was worried about this because i will totally convince totally confess, when i speak, i engage with the audience that i like making people laugh and i was nervous about this and maybe you will be laughing but i wont know. I get just as excited even without the audience there, so i learned something also. Thank you for caring about what you do. I am applauding you guys. If you get a chance to look at the chat box, they are applauding you as well