James adovasio, who has been leading Archeology Research there for almost 50 years. We are currently 46 kilometers southwest of pittsburgh, pennsylvania, in washington county, on the north bank of cross creek, which is a small tributary of the ohio river. In 1972 there was a vacancy in the Anthropology Department at the university of pittsburgh. I joined the faculty there. One of the parameters of which job was to set up an archeological Training Program that would train not only graduate and undergraduate students in anthropology and archaeology in the protocols of modern excavation, but also to train people in ancillary fields, geologists, climatologists, flora and fauna specialists and so forth. Because i didnt have the opportunity to search for a location for the Field Operation due to research commitments in the eastern mediterranean, i circulated word amongst my colleagues, who directed me to see this particular site, which had actually been discovered in 1955 by the land owner, albert miller. At that particular juncture in time, we thought we understood everything there was to understand about the initial human occupation of the new world. There was a prevalent model about how that event took place, when that event took place, what their lifestyles may have been like that literally everybody believed. And the excavations here and at a series of other locations have profoundly altered our perceptions of the past in such a way that literally everything we thought we knew, we dont know anymore. Cross creek flows into the ohio river directly west of us about 12. 22 kilometers from here, a little more than 6 miles from here. With just a little more water in the stream, you could canoe down to wellsberg, west virginia, on the ohio, with only a couple portage points necessary where you would have to move to pedestrian traffic. Any human populations moving up or down cross creek, to and from the ohio river prehistorically, whether it was euroamericans, whether it was native americans, late in the day would have seen this rock shelter and stopped here for varying periods of time, sometimes just an overnighter, sometimes for a longer time. What attracted us to the site in 1973 when we first saw it was the size of the overhang, the fact that even during periods of heavy rain and snow, youre protected from the elements inside. The fact that even when the creek floods, as it has several times during the course of the exvacations, the rock shelter is always high and dry. There are permanent springs that provide Drinking Water both west and east of the site, as well as the prepolluted state of cross creek itself would have provided Drinking Water. There is an abundance of edible wild plant and animal food in the area, which is a prime attraction. But the protection from the elements is a big deal. It sort of renders this into a kind of prehistoric holiday inn, as it were, and all of the native americans at the time, whether they belonged to a group that had stayed here before or not, would have been aware that this site existed, and would have, by wordofmouth, transmitted that information either to their own kinsfolk or other groups would have found out about it or rediscovered it. So essentially, if youre going to spend the evening anywhere between here and the ohio river or the little town thats nearby, this is where you would stop and this is what attracted us to this location. And its the exact same thing that would have attracted prehistoric people here, too. Back when the initial excavation started here in 1973, we thought we understood everything there was to know about the first people in the new world. In 1933 there were excavations near a town in new mexico called clovis. And from that particular location, which is called Blackwater Draw locality number three, they recovered a particular ly distinctive kind f spear point with two channel flakes or flutes taken from either side, probably to facilitate hafting. Now, these points had been known previously. In fact, weve known about their existence for several hundred years. Theyve been found all over most of unglaciated north america, on down into mexico and south america. The people who made these points were, in fact, the first people in the new world, that they had come over from siberia, walked across the baring platform at a time when it was exposed, and then basically sprinted all the way down to the tip of south america in less than 500 radio carbon years, killing off 32 genera of ice age animals on their way. It was thought to have been by american and canadian archaeologists the greatest killing event at the time on the plan planet. Skeptical because they had material as old as clovis, but clearly unrelated to it. And the u. S. And canadian response, as we like to stress was those guys on the other side of the atlantic havent the faintest idea what theyre talking about. And those guys in south america dont even speak english. Consequently, we ignored all that data, and in 1973 when we started to work here, none of us believed that the site would be particularly deep in terms of the sediment pile or particularly old. We were all subscribers, as was everybody, to the clovis first hypothesis. And according to that, the makers of these points crossed the baring straits, again, about 12,000 or 14,000 years ago. They were rapidly moving, big game hunters, and they were critical in the extinction process of most of the ice age animals. And between 1933 and the exvacations here, more than 500 localities in north and south america were claimed to have been older than clovis, and they would ar all shall share a simi trajectory. You would read about them in the local media first or hear about them, then you would find a scientific publication or two about them, and then some fatal flaw would manifest itself. They either had imperfectly defined strata or layers, they had artifacts that werent of human manufacture or there was some other flaw that rendered them they had 15 minutes of fame and then they disappeared. Each time one of these sites was found to be not as old as claimed, it reinforced the clovis model, so that by the time we started work here in june of 1973, the clovis model was so firmly entrenched that there practically, except in south america, was no one who didnt believe it. Again, we started to work here because a local historian had been a friend of albert miller, the property owner, who had discovered the site in 1955, and had been looking ever since for somebody to validate his supposition that native americans had camped here. And we were or i was a part of the group that validated that proposition, that in fact this had been a campsite, for the reasons we indicated. There are other attractions here. He the rock shelter is south facing, so the daily trajectory of the sun, the sandstone which forms the roof and walls of the rock shelter, provide a micro environment, than it is at the bottom of the creek or up top. So that in conjunction with all the other attributes, a level floor, a high ceiling so that the prevailing wind, which normally blows from west to east across the mouth of the rock shelter, any fires that you ignite in the interior are rapidly and efficiently ventilated. Any insects or pests that might want to bite on you are usually vacated by the prevailing wind. So theres a variety of things that would have drawn you or me, or anyone watching this, to stay here, and clearly that was the case prehistorically. So while we believed for those reasons that people used the site, we had no idea whatsoever how old it would turn out to be. What we wanted to do here was to make sure that in the process of training students the very latest technologies, the very post High Resolution technologies, of which i or any of the staff were aware, were used here. It was always meant to be a methodological tour deforce, and how you got the data was more critical to us than whatever we found, at least at the beginning. Later on, as it turned out, as the site proved to be both older and deeper, we recovered indications that we never imagined would be here that caused an enormous controversy at the time, and only when other sites like this, or even older than this, were discovered in various parts of the world, was it clear that the clovis first proposition was in error. When columbus originally got here in 1492, before he was the admiral of the ocean sea, so to speak, he encountered aboriginals wherever he landed, and he or members of his entourage posed a series of questions about these folks that weve been asking ever since. Who are they, where did they come from, via what routes did they employ to get here, and when did they arrive . And a question they didnt ask, but which we obviously have addressed here, is what were they doing, what were their lifestyles like . He thought he knew the answers to all of his own questions because he thought he was in the east, not the west indies, so he called them indios, or indians, a term weve used ever since, and the supposition was, at least within 100 years, that they had arrived here 2,500 years before he did. And that benchmark arrival date has been pushed further and further and further back through the years, but it would take a series of intellectual developments in western europe before we could actually answer any of those questions appropriately. The rock shelter has changed dramatically through time, both in terms of its scale or size. The overhang once went clear out to where you see those lights, and now it is located way back in the vicinity of that rockfall event there. So in the last 15,000 years, the roof has been steadily retreating to the north. The sediment pile that you see here has accumulated in a number of ways, the most common of which when these big rooffall blocks on the west and eastern edge of the site were in place, was by the grainbygrain erosion of sand particles from the roof and walls of the rock shelter, which was a slow and very steady process. That grainbygrain erosion would be punctuated at various points in the past by the detachment of roof blocks, first fist sized and then progressively larger until one of these big blocks came off. Then the whole process would repeat itself again, so that never in any two successive years did this site look exactly the same as it did the year before. And we would learn that later on in the course of the excavation. We began a trench out here where were standing outside the drip line, which proceeded from south to north. The purpose of which was to explore the deposits, the sediments, the layers that had been least disturbed by human activity first before going into the interior where the principle dwelling area would have been, the principle activity area, where the disturbance conceivably would have been much more extensive than out here. So we plumbed these deposits first, moved to the north toward the wall of the rock structure, then subsequently expanded to the east and west. Again, the kinds of things we were able to do here in many instances had never, ever been done before on the planet, contrary to most archeological sites this enterprise, from the very beginning, was very heavily funded. We had money from the foundation from the university of pittsburgh and a whole bunch of pittsburghbased corporations, alcoa, mellon, buhl. So we always had more than ample money since you could torture students in those days way more than you can do now, labor was never an issue because we mandated four years of field school. And the duration of the project was such that it would usually begin in may or june and run until september. 12 hours a day, six days a week. And so with a captive audience and all the money in the world, so to speak, we were free to explore issues here in particular ways that had never been done before. One of those involved the construction of a series of buildings, of which the one were in now is only the most recent, that prehistorically or historically looked like that portion of the one building that is still adhering to the rockfall event. It let us big basically indoors where we could control not only the temperature and the ventilation, but we could control the hue, intensity and chroma of the lighting system so that the excavators could maximize their ability optically, and then by a series of other attributes, to distinguish one layer from another. Probably at least you or some of your viewing audience have eaten multilevel desserts consisting of layers of cake or icing or nuts or whatever. And the tags that you see here are marking boundaries between layers. Theyre basically nupneumonic devices so that if you wanted to know whether you were eating the nut layer in your dessert, you might mark its boundary. Thats what all the tags are for. They mark boundaries between levels, which there are 11 at this site. The deepest level, stratum one, in roman numeral terms, is the birmingham shale, which is a much softer rock than the sandstone which makes up the bulk of this particular phenomenon. The most recent level, 11, is the stratum that you see there gradually slanting down toward the creek, minus, of course, the vegetation that would have grown upon it, and minus the remnants of the living tree, the stump of which you can see over there. So that is the original 1973 Ground Surface. The surface that you see down here represents a much earlier Ground Surface at the site. Its about 13,500 years old, and all of that sediment has accumulated since 13,500 years ago. When we got down to the area where you can see a step, we were essentially at a timeframe that would have been equivalent to clovis. We decided to remove the rocks from there, not because we expected to find earlier material, because none of us did, but we wanted to get to the birmingham shale to understand the geology of the site. And as soon as those rocks were peeled off and we began to find earlier material, we began to appreciate that the site may be far older than we imagined and might have represented a very different kind of lifestyle than what the current wisdom was in 1973, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. Specifically i think we can demonstrate that man was here by at least 14,000 bc, if not a few thousand years earlier. And that, in turn, relates to the whole problem into the new world, because clearly if hes down here in southwestern pennsylvania by 14,000, then he must have come across the baring straits land bridge perhaps as early as 25,000 or 30,000 years ago. And so during the course of the excavations here, signs of a human presence took many forms. There were obviously artifacts of indisputable human manufacture, made of various kinds of raw materials, usually highgrade flint, as theyre popularly called, or jasper from a wide array of quarries. Some of this raw material came from flint ridge in ohio, some of it came from the outcrops in new york, some of it came from the pennsylvania jasper quarries in eastern pennsylvania. In any case, we dont think that the populations that were using stone from these farflung areas were, in fact, visiting all of those places, and that their territory would have been thousands of square miles. Instead, we think theyre exchanging it, along with other things, back and forth with other groups that lived in a widely distributed situation like that. Of course because the site is relatively wet, the most durable items that are recovered from here are usually made of stone, like they are at most archeological sites. Its worth stressing that when you only get stone or ceramics later in time, youre only getting about 5 or less of what they actually made or used. When a site is very, very dry, like some of the caves and rock shelters in the west and elsewhere, you get a full representation of what these hunter gatherers made and used, in the form of plant fiber objects, bone, wood objects, which are far more common than stone. Nonetheless, here we only have a hint of those nondurable technologies. We have some burn basketry, we have bits and pieces of cordage. We have some bone and wooden artifacts, to give you the idea of what the other side of the technology looked like. But most of the stuff here in the way of artifacts is, in fact, stone. And most of it was used either in the procurement, transport or preparation for consumption of wild plant and animal foods. However, unlike the clovis model, its clear that the earliest people who came to this site were, in fact, what we called broadspectrum subsistent folk. In other words, like college guys, they would eat anything in the refrigerator. They were eating elk and mousesized animals, and an incredible assortment of plants. We got 1. 4 million plant remains from here, 956,000 animal bones, representing over 105 different species, and theyre clearly doing things here all the way through time, all the way up to a. D. 1775, which is within striking distance of the Miller Family taking possession of this property as the Virginia Land grant. So theres a juncture here between history and prehistory thats very real. In fact, one of the very first things we encountered when we started to excavate was a large stone line historic fire pit at the very top of which were aluminum fliptop beer cans and as you worked your way down, you encountered at progressively greater depths beer cans without flip tops, steel beer cans, early beer bottles and at the very bottom, glass that had been flaked by native americans into tools. So the juncture of history and prehistory is very vivid here, and all of the stages of prehistory that are represented in Eastern North America are known from here, beginning with the paleoindian, which is whenever people first got to the new world up to about 10,500 years ago, and during which time the environment was rather different than it is presently, not dramatically so, but different enough that you would notice, and ice age animals were still around. And then about 10,500 years ago, most of them go extinct, not due to human predation in many instances, but because of the stresses of environmental change, and you start a very long archaic. Now, theres a peculiarity to the english language and all the indoeuropean languages. We like to divide things into threes. So theres an early, middle and a late archaic, and if youre particularly anal, theres an early, middle early, late early and so on and so forth. But whatever is the case, during the archaic, you have native americans gradually increasing in numbers in this area, late in the archaic theyre actually going to be settling for several months at a time at various open sites in the area. Throughout the sequence of the archaic and paleoindian, the populations that are a very difficult proposition, tracking. Were it not for the literature, for instance, the archaeological evidence for the invasion of the mongols and the huns of europe, its practically nonexistent. We arent exactly sure where they are when they are here. We have studied how many other archaeological sites there might be here. In the 12000 hectohtares that m this up, representing the meanderings of hes these populations through time. It is not until about 3500 calendar years ago that you begin to see the large seasonal camps. And even later, the equivalent of the kinds of villages that would have existed when the europeans arrived. When you have ceramics and domestic plants such as say, for example, sunflowers, corn beans, squash, pottery alive in the woodland period starts. The woodland, of course, has an early midland late and we put an end to this by driving american native indians out of here or killing them off. All of those statements are represented here by varying pits or configuration areas, we have a series of early overnight fireplace remnants. From the very first folk that were here, and then later on in time you get more elaborate pits that may have been reused that are lined with clay and so forth. But all of the way through that long sequence of a human presence, now known to be in excess of 15,000 radiocarbon years or 19,000 calendar year, the people are using the site the same way. To collect wild plant and animal food. Even after the appearance of settled village, its still a place to supplement their domestic diet with wild plant animal field. Im dave scholfield. Director of the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter. In the east face of the excavation there is an interesting profile here that has evidence of campfires. All of these reddish stains here, you would also see bits of charcoal and ash. That indicates were campfires were build. In that roughly six foot profile there are literally nows of years of campfires represented. In that fire pit, that was what i like to refer to at the sweet spot of the collapse of the new roof fall. When that collapsed it changed the dynamics in the site. So subsequent activity took place in the west, but for thousands of years that was the center of activity here at the site. Theres another fire pit location here. In the center of this fire pit, right there, is a fresh water mollusk. That is a, a species that would have been found in the ohio river requiring a deeper and fastermoving water, and that is where that was uncovered in the center of of that fire pit. So roughly 4,000 years ago that mullosk was presumably eaten here and the remainder left in the fire pit. Further to the east, right here, is a rib from a white tailed deer. Right around the corner is the end of a long bone from that same deer poking out. That would have been butchered here 400 years ago. So thats just two of the 956,000 remains. Those recovered from this site. All of the tags that you see in the profiles indicate the strata of the sight of the site. So the f number is the top surface layer. Each of those indicates a particular layer as it is encountered. There is also a few tags, this one reads 1875. So that inscribed line at that level indicates where the ground level was in the quarter of the 13th century. So all of the areas excavated as you see, has been excavated over the course of many years. So all of the excavated area that you see has been excavated over the course of many years. A number of field school, but with nothing larger than an archeologist trowel. This was done very slowly. And in a painstaking manner that really illustrates the care and the precision of this archaeological site. And the area remains is about a third of the site. So there is still more to excavate, but that was left intentionally. Archaeology is a destructive science. So in the process of studying the site, you actually destroy it. So thats why documentation is so important, but also some of the site has been left for future excavations. There are portions of the rock shelter where different activities were contacted. Were contacted. Theyre called activity areas. We have places in the site where they would occasionally burn off the trash that had accumulated here from previous vice its. Visits. Those are called fire floor areas. It is either accidental or intentional. They could have done it on purpose. The point is, many of the layers represent a discreet activity are thinner than the edge of a trowel blade, and the excavators would remove those layers with singleedged razor blades. The whole purpose of what we were doing, again, was to be as methodologically precise as we possibly could so that we could study in micro detail 16,000 years of environmental change and then the human adjustments to those changes, that the site turned out to be old was kind of a bonus. It was icing on a cake that we never intended to bake. Part of the emphasis of the a good part of the emphasis on the Archaeological Program here at pitt was in the excess of material culture, were fortunate in having a relatively large number of student thats have been trained in various courses for the analysis of different kinds of artifact material, and no matter the size we think we can get the most, so to speak, that the class material has to offer and in turn we learn a great deeg about the deal about the makers of the materials. When the excavations close down for the winter, as much as six hours of Laboratory Study is required for each hour spent in the field. Unfortunately because of the favorable conditions of preservation, recovered some of the older material that is kind of recovering east of the mississippi river. So we can say quite a bit how the meadowcroft population manufactured this and what they possibly used these containers for. The artifacts themselves are the medium through which used meadowcroft were articulated throughout their environment. As long as most organize in additions are feet, there is an isotope of carbon in the at most atmosphere anded transfer process radiocarbon 14, which breaks down at the rate of onehalf of its mass every 5,731 years. So when you or a plant croak by measuring the amount of carbon interest in your carcass we can tell when given a few years. So when the first dates began to come back from those early fire pits and we begin to realize that the site was probably a lot older than we imagined it to be, there was great skepticism among the crew, because thats not supposed to be that way. Gradually we became convinced ourselves that it was oldser than what we thought. And it became a very controversial place because there werent any other ones for the longest time. And as with any field, when you challenge the received wisdom youre going to deal with grief. Whether its about how to tune a race car, how to produce a documentary, how to excavate and archaeological site. If its contrary to what you thought you knew, it must be wrong. Oftentimes, a person, whatever his or her field, doesnt want to change their mind, even though science says thats what were supposed to do, because in so doing, we somehow think we are about abdicating ourselves. We dont want to say they are dumber than a brick. Because what you derive from these types of locations, in fact, undermines oftentimes previously existing models. And so as a result, had we been filming this in 1973, the vast majority of the field would have reacted very negatively about the information that seemed to be coming from the site and a variety of reasons why it must be wrong. Now that we have a whole bunch of cases indicating the old model is wrong, its a different story. But early on, at least, we were as skeptical as our audience was, our professional audience and our lay audience, and we certainly were not contemplating that the people who lived here were here long before points were made or that their livestyles were different and that they may have arrived here very differently than was hypothesized. Other sites ban to afear, and now there are sites from both nouth north and south american that demonstrate clearly here in all of these deposits is camping debris from thousands of separate visits in different areas horizontally of the site. They arent coming here every year. Theyre not staying here very long. We know from the flowering period of the plants that are available that theyre coming from late august to at most early november. And its a time when the local animal populations would have been the densest. The mass vegetation would have supported white tailed deer, elk and other forms. The little animals would have been most common. They may also have been coming here briefly in the spring. We get bird eggs from the site, but they also could have been living here at the same time as humans and humans might not have been responsible for those bird eggs, but in any case we know the major use of the site is in the fall. And its by groups that are purely migratory, either in the course of a seasonal round where they go from place to place to place and this is but one of their stops, or from settled villages that they were foray out from to visit this place in order to collect plant animal foods. If you and i were familiar enough with the vegetation that currently exists in the drainage in the animal life, we could live here comfortably with five, six, seven or eight of us for, at most, a couple of weeks. Then we would exhaust those resources and have to move on. And it looks like at times the site more heavily used at other times than probably because of climate and micro climate changes at this location. Sometimes its colder than it is today, its drier than it is today. Sometimes its warmer than today or wetter than it is today, and those subtle changes have subtle adjustments that the people have to make when they are, in fact, visiting the site. The excavations here were done in such a way that we could, in fact, maximize the retrieval of data over however long the site was lived in to address questions about the past that may either have been addressed imperfectly at other locations or never asked at all. One of the things that people tend to forget is that the ab t aboriginals are just like us. The same mental, linguistic powers that we do. They are us. Theyre dealing with problems and issues perhaps different in degree than we do, but how they resolved those issue, whether its sea level change florida or lord knows what else is instructive for us to appreciate, and because they are us, its easier to identify with their lives and their trajectories here and in other places like this than, perhaps, if you just read about it in a book. When you have a gifted staff, which we were fortunate in having that addressed not only what the actors and actresses of antiquity were doing here but the geological stage upon which they performed and knew what they wanted to learn and we could, in fact, buy or get whatever we needed to do that, you can pose questions, you can ask things, as you might imagine, that you just cant do in other places. We had a telephone on the site that was connected by modem to the mainframe computer at the university of pittsburgh. We could computerize data instantaneously. Dr. Joel gunn, codirector of meadowcroft project designed the computer methodology integrating information from every area of meadowcroft research. Computer analysis makes it possible to dry an accurate picture how the people who visited the rock shelter interacted with their environment. I take the raw data and generally use a technique called factor analysis, which is a data reduction process. It looks for things that behave together. People at one time, say, were eating a lot of fish, and because they happened to be down by the stream picked ut af of crabs, carried them to the site and deposited crab claws and fish scales on the site. And during other times when they perhaps didnt favor marine things like that, they would have gone to hunting deer or Something Like that. So theres going to be a simultaneous dropoff in fish scales and crab claws. Well, thats whats known as a correlation. Things will come out of the bone material about their hunting patterns. Things will come out of the stone tool material to tell about how theyre stone toolmaking habits changed. All of these things will add to an evergrowing array of information about how people behaved when they came to visit Meadowcroft Rock Shelters through 16,000 years worth of time whankts weve tried to do through the years is incorporate since 1973 any new technologies that might possible possibly yield data about the site, which we hadnt currently collected. And so in thes recent past within the last several weeks we collected soil samples for environmental dna retrieval from several locations in the site that are focusing on what kinds of plants and animals may have been here on either side of the socalled ice age, modern time period boundary, and is there any human dna preserved in these sentiments . Of course, when we initially excavated dna was in its infancy and wasnt used, and just as you try and employ the latest generations of cameras and sound equipment that you can, we have tried to incorporate the latest techniques oftentimes from other fields to ask questionses that had never been asked before about the past. From 1973 and the initial stages of the excavation on we have invited both professionals and the lay public to come and visit the site. Since the Meadowcroft Foundation conjoined with the John Heinz History Center, they have more formalized the public viewing process. So that tours are offered here during the seasons that, that the area is open for visitation. And four time as year i give tours of the site insider tours, where i explain some of the things ive explained to you about what might have transpired here. Archeologists have a responsibility, especially if youre spending public money, to translate the story of the past to an audience. If we dont do that, and many of my colleagues dont like to do that, then were failing on some level. If i spend your tax money to excavate here, the least we can do is tell you what we found in a way that is easily comprehensionable, and at the same time, addresses the scope and sweep of the nast ways that you can understand. And unfortunately, in so many excavations whether its a roman site around the mediterranean, or whether its an early site here in the new world or a later site in the new world, the archeologists dont do that, and the John Heinz History Center exists to tell a variety of stories. They have exhibits on the vietnam war and the landings on the moon and so on and so forth. This is but one of many stories that they try and tell the public, and that we as participants in the collection of the stories attempt to translate for the public, and so thats what we do here. Winston churchill, the late Prime Minister of england during world war ii, and a more than casual historian observed on one occasion in one of his books that a society that doesnt value its history or by extense its prehistory, doesnt have one. A society that has no past has no presence or present, and sure as hell doesnt have a future. And so by understanding where we as a species have been in the past, we are, in fact, understanding how we got to be this way. And where we might be going. Thats why we do this. Besides the fact that it is fun to take bits and pieces of information, put them together like a forensic scientist does when constructing a crime scene except our scenes are 10,000 or 12,000 not days or weeks old, theyre generations or millions of years old in some cases. Were doing the same thing. Were taking palpable evidence about the past to try to figure out where weve been so that we know better where were going. You can learn more about Meadowcroft Rock Shelter visiting heinzhistorycenter. Org and watch this at cspan. Org history. Sdwrshgts youre watching American History tv. Every weekend on cspan3 explore our nations past. Cspan 3 created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Weeknights this month were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available on cspan3. Tonight we visit eight parks across the country, including Mount Rushmore national memorial, and Gateway Arch National park, featuring a mixture of Natural Beauty and history. Watch beginning at 8 00 eastern and enjoy American History tv every weekend on cspan3. Every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv on cspan3, go inside a Different College classroom and hear about topics ranging from the american revolution, civil rights and u. S. President s, to 9 11. Thanks for your patience. And for logging in to class. With most College Campuses closed due to the impact of the coronavirus, watch professors transfer teaching to a virtual setting to engage with their students. Gorbachev did most of the work to change the soviet union, but reagan met him halfway, reagan encouraged and supported him. Freedom of the press, i mention, well get to later, madison often called it freedom of the use of the press and it is indeed freedom to print things and publish things. It is not a freedom for what we now refer to institutionally as the press. Lectures in history on American History tv on cspan3. Every saturday at 8 00 a. M. Eastern. Lectures in history is also available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. The largest stone fort in the United States sits at the mouth of the