Good evening and welcome the bancroft prize program. Columbia university is honored to cosponsor this annual celebrate with the Columbia Department of history each year. The history. Selects one of its leading historians to chair a panel of three jurors chosen the finest scholars in the field hailing from Top Research University across the country. We are delighted that American History tv elected to expand its partnership with us this year by Recording Program for airing an archiving on its website. We will circulate word when the air date and Online Access are available. Were also thrilled that so many guests are joining us for tonights program which features brief interviews with the book prize winners. Their scholarly works delving the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It is a joy to celebrating books tonight. In addition to the important prizes that are awarded the endowment left to Library Libraries by, Frederick Bancroft enables us to continue to acquire both rare archival material and new publications of Scholarly Research conducted by historians around the world. It is a privilege to work alongside very best staff working anywhere in libraries today and to have such strong faculty champions and partners and it is my honor to introduce our emcee for this evening. Dr. Andrew lipman of columbia and barnard history departments and a winner of the bancroft prize in 2016. Please welcome andrew lipman, associate professor of history, Barnard College and chair of the 2023 bancroft prizes jury. Good. On the behalf of the columbia and barnard history departments, delighted to welcome you all tonight to celebrate three remarkable books. Now, as anne mentioned, beginning last year, the library introduced a new format for this ceremony. Instead of having the winners give acceptance features. Were now featuring interviews, the authors, so we can really get into the meat of their books. But before we get to that, ive been asked to offer some short about the juries process and thinking, and i have say our work was only possible thanks to the absolutely stellar faculty and staff at columbia libraries. Under the leadership of ann thornton, they offered wise counsel, managed the complex logistics of delivering and organizing submissions and also planning this beautiful ceremony. Tonight. And on behalf of the jury, id like to thank you all. You made this so much easier for of us. And i was similarly fortunate to work with two distinguished jurors. One unfortunately cannot join us this evening, though she sends her sincere best wishes to the winners. That is out of farah julius silver, professor of history, latin american and Caribbean Studies at new york university. And the other juror is here tonight. Youll be seeing on the stage shortly is Margot Canaday. Professor of history at princeton university. Now our main job as jurors to read. Now i elected for physical copies and for several weeks i felt like the sorcerers apprentice having unwittingly cast a spell that unleashed an endless parade of box after box after box into my office, spilling 200 new hardbacks on every available surface. But when the deliveries finally ceased, we had divided the list into and began to intense months of reading in our final deliberations. We picked this eclectic book, three books that might at first seem to be utterly unalike. They belong to different genres micro history, transnational history, biography one confines us to Lower Manhattan in the early 1790s. Another takes us back and forth across mexican u. S. Border. In the first two decades of the 20th century. The other situates us around a Single Person who spent his entire life in washington, d. C. From 1895 to 1972. And yet, despite their differences, these books shared number of important and admirable qualities. Each scholar dazzled with their method and craft, whether combing through multilingual archives in two countries, using troves of recently unredacted documents, or harnessing digital mapping tools to recreate a long city block by block. All three historians relied on years of shoe leather work, exhausting every avenue of sources to give their interpretation oceans, depth and command. Each also writes in silky and inviting prose unspooling gripping narratives with vivid set pieces and plot twists that have all engaged general readers. But at the same time, each makes signal contributions to their fields that will excite academic audiences as well. And thematically, there are that correct that connect them. I think all three winners can be described. Political histories told at an intimate scale. Their stories all hinge on the workings of the state or overlapping states, and they all center their analysis on a main character in search of justice. One of sawyer, Ricardo Flores mcgown and john hoover in. Their journeys. All three overcome some substantial to achieve varying degrees of Popular Support for their cause, but also find their goals undermined by bitter ironies and, also by painful betrayals and selfpity. Perhaps the greatest all three historians here tonight is their extraordinary sensitive city. The way they make profound points about their subjects with close attention to private details. Its there. When gage points out that the very moment Calvin Coolidge appointed 29 year old edgar hoover as fifth director of the bureau of investigation when he was still living with his mother kissing her goodnight, going sleep alone in his childhood bedroom and feeding his table scraps to his beloved airedale puppy speedy bozo. Its there, too, in hernandezs portrait of the ambitious radical journalist Ricardo Flores mcgahns in 1905, san antonio. As ricardos one good suit fell to tatters from overuse, he got in the habit of backing of rooms during his public appearances. Avoid turning around to that. His seat of his pants was in patches. And its there too. When sweet depicts the far more harrowing details from the hot september day when a 17 year old lorna sawyer having just survived a violent rape night before, wander the streets in a traumatized daze wearing ripped and hastily repaired dress and her bloodstained shift underneath. These historians know that its all there in the details. Edgars precociousness ricardos sense of dignity. Lornas unbearable pain. Its there in the literal fabric. Their subjects lives. And these books are also about things as well as small things. They offer us complex insights into, the mechanisms and structures of power in the form of a single man whose. Ambition was so massive it overshadowed the federal government in the form of real and unrealized revolutions that could not be contained within or in the form of a city elite that was asked for the first time to reckon with the unpunished of its sons. And thats what makes them all instant classics. Both timely and timeless studies they both speak to and transcend their moments. Books that will be read for decades to come. And now to the best part, the discussions with the authors. Im going to read the jury and then invite them and their interviewer the stage. Our first winner is kelly lytle hernandez. Her book, bad mexicans, race empire and in the borderlands is an ambitious and exciting study that reimagines the beginnings of the mexican revolution as a fundamental and indispensable by National Process focused on the rebel Ricardo Flores morgan and men and women that surrounded him. Little hernandez little. Hernandez constructs a riveting story that stretches from mexico city to saint louis, missouri. The displacement of mexicans from their land by u. S. Economic penetration contributed to the rise of migration and then the horrendous treatment of mexican migrants in the us fueled opposition to the u. S. Allied of Porfirio Diaz as antigovernment dissidents across the border to the United States, their politics became increasingly radical, creating a Transnational Movement of writers and readers miners and workers. Migrants and nationals and their ideals would influence the coming regime change in their home country. Just as the revolution, the border, so too did the counterrevolution. As u. S. Federal and local authorities collaborated with the Mexican Government to surveil and neutralize melgen and his fellow revolutionaries. This is a book that down and redraws the boundaries of mexican u. S. History. Interviewing i hernandez tonight in the place of jaw out of ferrer is karl jacoby alan nevins professor of history at columbia university. Please welcome kelly and karl to the stage. So, kelly, i just wanted to start by congratulating you on the remarkable achievement that youve done with this book. Its not the first time, though that youve written about the mcgowan brothers. You actually touched on them in your previous book of inmates. So can you just tell a little bit about who they are and yeah, id be happy. First, thank you everyone for coming out. Its wonderful to see your beautiful faces in person. So the mahoneys just for a group of dissident journalists who were working in mexico city to try to throw out of office a dictator, a man named Porfirio Diaz. And they were suppressed in mexico city. Diaz had them arrested. Raided their offices. Destroyed printing presses. And after many years of this, including a gag against them, they fled mexico and came to United States to rebuild their revolution. And its pretty extraordinary. I mean, theyre journalists. Theyre but they also begin to work with Cotton Pickers and miners, Migrant Workers who are going back and forth across the border to, not just relaunch their newspaper, but to establish a Political Party and even establish an army that raids mexico four times from the United States. So theyre an Incredible Group of who build the social movement. Thats transnational and helped to sow seeds of rebellion and revolution in mexico. And so what made you feel you needed to revisit them in bad mexican . What what more did you feel like you had to say about them . So i am absolutely love with the migrant business. Im from borderlands. Im from san diego, california, and i really wish someone told me about them when i was younger. There had been a revolution that had been created in my own, my own homeland, my own. So thats one of the reasons im writing it for kids of the borderlands, including my own children. Theres also a lot of reasons you remember a certain man who was running for president who called migrants bad press. Well, that stirs an incredibly violent history and narrative. And one of the biggest problems is that many people in United States dont know much mexicanAmerican History. They didnt know. Dangerous. That rhetoric was. And so it was that moment. I was like, i got a book i need to write and has to do with the history of racial violence targeting mexican immigrants, mexicanamericans. But how i tell that story, i got to give it to you in a vehicle that people want to read about. And so the organizers are a cinematic riveting story that i could smuggle into the broad mainstream narrative, these histories of racial violence. And can you tell us a little bit about the challenges involved in researching mag on these tools . And i ask this because theyre a group thats trying to keep their activity secret, then theyre a group thats constantly on the run trying to outfox the police of mexico and the United States. So theyre not leaving an obvious document to trail behind them. Yeah. So this is like an awesome, awesome archive. So the early fbi are actually established. They cut their teeth on trying to hunt down these revolutionaries. And so the fbi is falling around their spies and by the Mexican Government. And one of the things that theyre doing is theyre stealing the letters of these revolutionaries and theyre taking them down to mexico and theyre archiving them. So we have all these stolen, stolen letters written from the front lines of revolution, which are the heart of this archive. The issue is that the revolutionaries knew that they were being followed so they started to write in secret code. So many of these letters are written in secret. So you get to not just do Research Spanish and english, but also in secret code, right . So you get to break the code. So thats one of the challenges. But the blessing is that there have been generations of historians, mostly mexican and mexicanamerican historians who have done the work of finding of these records wherever they were on both sides of the border, even in europe, and making them available even digitizing them. So its a real honor to able to step into this after those decades work and be able to tell the story now and central to the story that youre is the mexican revolution itself. And i was just wondering, do you what were you hoping that american readers of your book will learn about the mexican . Oh, well, its a its a phenomenal revolution. Right. So for me, the best i can. Revolution both anticapitalism and antiracist. And so we want to think about a revolution that happened on the north American Continent thats within our reach and within our grasp, and that its also a revolution that led the migration of more than 1 million mexican migrants to the United States. Those migrants become the of the foundation of the mexicanamerican population. Im sure my husbands own family can date back to the mexican revolution and so forth to understand the demographic transformation of this country over the course of the 20th century. We have to understand the mexican revolution and how it sparked this migration and also what are the incredible political and intellectual legacies that people bring them. So i all history is this dialog between past and present and are there ways in which recent events have caused you to rethink the migrant story and the story that youre telling about mexicans . Thats a hard one, right . So of course, there a current event that helped trigger the writing of this book and think if i had a chance to to take another whack at this book, one of the things i would talk about is the violence that journalists are facing in mexico today. And thats certainly a part the story the journalists were at the heart. What im writing about in this book as, i said experienced arrests and, destruction of property and gag orders. But matter of fact, they were writing under a dictator and he did not assassinate them. Right. But were dozens of mexican journalists being assassinated every year right now. And so thats something i think i would have threaded, i could have thread into the book a little bit better. I would do again. Interesting. And when youve been out, you know, talking about the book what has the response been from readers . What is the most meaningful feedback that youve gotten from from audiences. Well, i think it would go back to were talking earlier about how so few people know mexicanAmerican History and that includes many mexicanamerican elders. And so one of the greatest experiences ive had with this book out on the road is when im giving book at libraries or even coffee shops or in community organizations, is when elders come out. And they often have first question after the talk and, its tears, right . I didnt know why my parents came here. Didnt know why my grandparents came here. I didnt know what they confronted in mexico. I dont know what they confront here in the United States. And i feel a void has been filled for myself and for my family. And so that is very, very when individuals can carry their history on the other of that is when talking to you that talked to a lot of social Movement Actors and members and many people dont sort of the long history and legacy that there are working with. And so when i am talking with young latinx who are really at the front of immigration mass incarceration and the movements both are to end immigration control and mass incarceration, they often dont know the history of them. Organizers, their foremothers and forefathers who really made it possible for them to engage in this antiracism, anticapitalist campaigns. And they feel strong anger. They feel empowered theyve got these incredible shoulders to stand upon. And so thats very meaningful to me as well. And so one final question here, which is sort of maybe an academic question, but let me run it you anyways, which is, you know, think of this book as a work of borderlands that is trying to integrate both mexican history and u. S. Together. And im just wondering, in what way did and writing this book make you rethink standard divide we have between those latin history over here and u. S. History over there . Well, it certainly true for us in mexican history. I dont think i had thought about it as clearly before writing this book that, well, mexico is the laboratory or the workshop us empire. I dont think that i had quite understood that. We cannot write modern u. S. History without having a really fine grained and expansive incorporation of at least mexico as landmass or as a land base, but also as as a population. Mm hmm. And so its the integration of those two stories that i dont think ill ever write u. S. History the same again or without the inclusion of mexico. But thats also im a borderland, right . And so its always been my center of gravity growing up in san diego now living los angeles, is that everything sort of orbits around that relationship between the united and mexico right. I think thats all the time we have for. But that was really fascinating. I urge everyone to read the book. Our second winner tonight is beverly gage her stunning biography of J Edgar Hoover gman j. Edgar hoover and the making of the american century, both perfects and trends, its genre. In the first biography about hoover written in 30 years. Gage has done Exhaustive Research in recently released materials that early biographers could not access. The result is a hoover pulled back from the villainous caricature that we thought we knew. Its not so much that the wiretap devious, destructive and above all, white supremacist hoover misses the mark is this only gets at one side of him. What gage to view is hoover the non partizan, the state builder, the professional professionalism, the pragmatist . Not in order to redeem hoover, but to explain how inseparable one part was from the other. The payoff is more than is a more nuanced view, not only of hoover, but of the American People who shared his historical moment and were generally far more admiring than critical, as well as. The eight president s he served. Villainizing hoover. The rest of us off the hook. Gage skillfully shifting account from one mans life to the history of the 20th century. Us large. Never for a moment, losing command of her vast subject for our interview, please welcome beverly gage and Margot Canaday to the stage. It is such an honor to be here with you tonight. And i congratulations on your magnificent book. One of the things about serving on this committee is while it is a ton of reading it really reminds you historians can do and its inspiring and i was so inspired by man. So thank you. So its been 30 years since the last major biography of. Edgar hoover appeared. What made you want to revisit hoover and how does your account of him depart from those of previous biographers. Well its wonderful to be here and to see so many people out there and course to be getting this exciting prize. Its especially meaningful to me because i was a graduate student here at columbia, and this is i first encountered j. Edgar hoover when i was writing my dissertation, which looked at the early 20th century, a period before he was fbi director, nonetheless ran into him, a very young man in doing that research. And a couple of things struck me in that moment that made me think i wanted to move on and do a biography. So one was that in that previous book, which was about anti radical and political violence, the teens and early twenties in the u. S. , he was there is a very young man already learning to do many of the things that he was going to go on expand dramatically forms political surveillance in particular. And he was already articulating a set of ideas that were going to go on to really dominate and shape the 20th century anti commun ism central among them. So i was interested in kind of tracing that story which gave a little bit of id say different chronology about we might think about 20th century u. S. Politics. I realized were lots of new sources that had come out as well, particularly in the wake of the cold war. And then i, you know, realized that there were a whole new fields history that had come about or that were reinventing themselves, and that hoover was a great subject for that so not only sort of the of political history, that was when i was a graduate student here, but new ways of thinking about the history of sexuality, new ways of thinking, the history of conservatism, all of which made me think that here was this household name, this villainous figure. Unlike kelly, i did not come to this project because i liked my so much, but that even even edgar hoover was important and too complicated to just sort leave as this as this one dimensional figure. So all biographies, of course, present research challenges, but writing a biography of, a figure who was himself obsessed with secrecy seems especially daunting. So talk to us about surmounting that challenge, the process of your research for gman and tell us a little bit about the questions about hoover that werent able to answer. Well, for those of you who are not as as deep into the law of J Edgar Hoover, as i been or who havent maybe read my 800 page book yet. I know thats coming for everyone. Hoover was the head of the fbi for 48 years. So he became, as you heard earlier, had of the bureau of investigation 1924, at the age 29, he died that same job in, 1972. 48 years later, means that he was appointed under Calvin Coolidge and he died in the same job under nixon. And during that time, he built this huge that had to features that are really important for historians, as you said. Is there a very wedded to secrecy and even now when you get fbi documents through the free information act or through other, many of them are still very redacted and you cant always find out what you want to know. And then, on the other hand, he wanted everyone to write everything down all the time. It actually makes fbi documents a great social history of a certain sort, as we were as we were hearing. But it means that for a researcher, you have to at once, which is not enough information and far too much information than you could ever possibly digest. And that was think where a lot of the subjective decisions in the book had to come in. You know how far was i going to go reading files that could have hundreds of thousands of pages and, then what did i really want to know . And and could i find it out fascinating as a historian of sexuality, i was especially intrigued with the way you hoovers sexuality. So us a bit about how you thought about that and how you went about that. Right well you cant write about J Edgar Hoover without taking one of the big and famous questions about him, which is about his his sexual, his personal life. And when i started thinking about this as a real biog raphe, that is on the one hand about the state and the 20th century and it is about a very particular individual. You know, i wondered how far i was going to be able to get with question which again, is a combination like the fbi itself a very public and open and that a lot of secrets you want to know that you cant quite get access to the big of his life as an adult was his with clyde tolson who was not only second in command at the fbi but was basically hoovers life. His social partner. They had all their meals. They traveled together. They socialized together. They were really treated as social couple. And it turned out that there was a lot of information about that piece of things because it was so open, so. Its in the gossip pages theyre writing, you know, to their friends. They just sign their christmas cards together. Its edgar and clyde, right . And so you have a lot of documents in there. And then other aspects were harder to at. How did they feel . How did they understand themselves . Was this a sexual or not . And there i tried to do what i could a his private photo collection. I got very interested in and there are lots of interesting quite intimate photos reprinted in the book that i tried to read as sources. And of course, then further complicating all of this, they in charge of our federal political and for much of 20th century sexual police. Right so they were in charge of policing other peoples sex lives, firing and investigating many people working in in the federal government. So its a complicated story like, many things in hoovers life, but i felt i was able to recover actually more of it than i thought that that i would when i started out. So gman is, of course a biography, but more than that, its a history of bureaucracy its a history of policing and surveillance surveillance. It speaks to carceral. Its a history of 20th century politics. I think its a history of sexuality. And in all of that, i love to hear you say a bit about how why you think jim can to our own moment and what is the relevance for us half a century after hoovers death. I confess there was there was a moment in writing the book in which i called my editor. And i said i figured out what its really about. This is a book about pure chrissie. And she said, this is not a book about this. So it is secretly a book about bureaucracy margot just said, but dedicates so you can learn about how to, you know, run your institution and maybe not some of those mistakes. You know, i think whats really fascinated me about our moment is how much the politics the fbi have been shifting and transform being, you know, at the moment that hoover died the left really hated him. Im sure many people in this room some pretty visceral memories of in that moment and he a great he was a sort of beloved hero of the right and weve seen the right now kind of on the attack against the fbi and those really really changing. You can some hints of that in the book i think. So finally, bancroft is of course the historians prize, but its also columbia prize. You did your phd at columbia and i wanted to ask if you wanted to reflect at all on how that training has found its way into your scholarship or what it means to receive this incredible recognition not only from the profession as a whole, but also from the institution where you the practice of history. Well, its great. And its a great honor, though. This part of columbia actually didnt exist when i was a graduate students who were on the fancy new campus and i see many people in the who were incredibly influence social in my in my own thinking and kind of coming age as a scholar. I would say looking back i didnt realize at the time that i was here in the nineties and 2000s studying under under alan brinkley, who is no longer us. But i was happy to see was in that video that it was a moment of a real of renaissance and rethinking of what it meant to do political and a moment when political history was starting to draw in. You know, insights from cultural history and the history of sexuality in a whole range, other fields that were really enlivening it. And we were all engaged in that. I dont know that we all recognized that we were engaged in that project the time, but i think youve seen it kind flower and make a real change in the history profession. Great. Thank you and congratulations again. Our third winner is john sweet. His book, the sewing girls tale a story crime and consequences in america revisits the notorious 1793 rape of a teenage seamstress named lorna sawyer. Sweet narrates how the assaults ensuing trial roils new york city just a few years after the ratification of the constitution. Writing in engrossing prose, he conflict builds and expands scholarship on sexual violence, class conflict, material culture and the law while deploying tools to recreate 7093 manhattan in high. The result is a precise, layered analysis of new yorks social hierarchy, just as it was becoming the leading metropolis of the early republic. Still sweet takes never to let his masterful accumulation of detail and context overshadow the person at the heart of the tale. He accounts for lorna sawyers physical and psychological ordeals, taking note of each. And every time the survivor told and retold the story of her and her stymied pursuit justice in. This study of a crime that so often goes unreported and unrecorded sweets work is a testament to an ordinary young woman who refused to suffer in silence. Please welcome john wood sweet to the stage stage. And. So congratulations. Can you just tell us a little about your reaction when you found out you won the prize . Well, of course, i was thrilled. And its thrilling to be here and to see all of you. I was also so you know, its a great honor, i must say. It also was was of in a weird way, a kind of a relief, you i spent so long working on this book, i spent more than ten years writing this book of mostly by myself feeling pretty isolated, not really knowing exactly where it was going or whether it would readers. And so i feel tremendously gratified every time somebody says that they picked up the book and took a chance it and found something of value in it. So what drew you to l. A. Or your story when and how to decide to begin the book . This is a that ive known about a long time since i was a graduate School Graduate student in the 1980s. I was working with christine stanzel at princeton at the time and. Its a story that at first i thought i understood. It seemed like a really vivid and welldocumented, harrowing case of acquaintance rape or date rape. This was right around the time that. Ms. Magazine first coined the term date to distinguish stranger and acquaintance assaults. And for a long time, thats really how saw the case. And i didnt really think i had anything much to add to it. And then about 15 years ago, 12 years ago, a graduate student i was working with came across a piece of evidence in a new york newspaper that kind of threw me a loop. It challenges my assumptions about the case made me curious to know more. And i began researching and poking and pulling it threads. And the more i learned, the more surprising the story became. It turned out that the story on for years after this rape trial. In ways the more harrowing the story became, and in some ways, it seemed to me, the more relevant to the present it became well off that i think knowing how long ago you began the book you must have been writing during the fall 2017 when the harvey story broke and the hashtag metoo led to a flood of revelations of sexual assaults by rich and powerful, much like the story you tell. How did that moment sort of inform or influence your writing and your process when . Yeah, i a couple of different thoughts about that question. First, this is a case Delano Squires prosecution of henry bello in 1793 is a case involving a young woman from a modest background and facing a elite man from a from a wealthy, wellconnected family. And i think that it has that in common. A lot of the cases we hear about these days. The weinstein case, some others, one thats going to trial. I this week in the city and i think thats kind of a problem that we focus so much attention on assault cases involving men that we care about because of their wealth and because of their because we think theyre people who matter and. We know from all kinds of research that all kinds of men are sexual predators and all kinds of men and women are survivors. And i think obscures the real dynamic and the broader on second, i would say that the metoo movement, i think, was really powerful. I also had been at usc during the time when andrea pino and, annie clark were leveraging title nine regulations to help universities do a better job of keeping students safe. And all of that activism really sent focus my mind on the extent which i really wanted to keep on a sawyer at the center of the story. So i tried to make this a book in which the man kept trying to take over, but i tried to make this a book as much as i could about lanas and her character and her and her motivations and her sense of what was possible and the risks she was taking. Part of that for me was making it clear that this is all did not define lana sawyer did not define her life, that this was a moment and experience, an important experience. But i spent a lot of time researching her child hood, finding out what i could about her background, her familys background. And i spent a lot of time trying to trace forward in time to see how she recovered from what had happened how she rebuilt her life and quite literally, how she moved on in the aftermath of all this. So this book has i think pretty obviously she one primary audience being from a trade press of the general reader someone curious in this period and and this history and this is a story and at the same time you know we were struck as a jury is the of methodological innovation and numerous interventions that youre making as a scholar, as an academic as one. If you could talk a little bit about how balance the needs of speaking to general public and also wanting to write a that your fellow academics would learn from and profit from just how you manage that as best could. I this is a book that was based on a tremendous amount of research, or at least lot of research for me. I, you know, i did my best to, to uncover the evidence that was relevant. But its also a book that was informed by, an extraordinary body of scholarship on early america, on the city of york, on sexual assaults, on suicide. So i was certainly felt myself to be in conversation with other historians. But this isnt a book. This is a book in which i wanted to tell character driven story and. So its not a book in which im making a explicit tendentious, historiographical, scholarly argument. There are a couple of things that obviously the scene that they stand out for me. Looking back on this project and one is theres a real tension in this book between much has changed. 1793. Its been more than 200 years. And how much has not. At the same time, one of the challenges i in writing this book was telling the story of somebody like lorna sawyer who was from a working class family. Was a young person. Was a woman. So she was from social class. That was of modest means for, you know, if her family was poor enough that she. To work as a sewing girl at relatively low wages to help her family make ends meet and. Shes the kind of person who is very poorly documented in archival record of early america. And in fact, if had not responded to this assault in a really unusual way, then as almost all sort of most a large majority survivors of sexual assaults dont make public reports. So if she hadnt done that, there literally be no trace of her in the historical record record. So just to switch a little bit here, beyond being about this person, this is also very much a about a place and now i mentioned in comments several times how i really feel reading your book like ive been to new york in 1793. And can you tell us a little bit more about the sources methods you use to immerse your reader in this place in time. Yeah, i was very very. One of the things was really rewarding for me was learning about the city of new york in this period. And trying to imagine the world that lorna sawyer inhabited and these characters inhabited. And i wanted to. Help readers kind of bridge the 200 odd year gap between the city now, which this big sprawling metropolis and the city of new york in 1793, which was like 40,000 people, all living pretty much below city hall hall. And so i tried to help readers visualize city as best i could by describing the layout of the street and the views from the public parks and the buildings that i knew about. I tried to document the weather when i. Knew what the weather was. So i can think what the. What the air felt like and whether it was wet or dry or. Hot or cold. I wanted to know what buildings looked like. I wanted to know what the smells were. So there was a lot of for me and sensory information i wanted, i spent a lot of time, as you mentioned, to map the city so i can figure out who lived where. And so i used a lot of the conventional historical sources like diaries and letters and newspaper bears and paintings and engravings, and maps. But also did things like i walked the. Route that lorna saw and henry bethel. I went on there was a dark room that lunched whats important to the trial. And i spent a lot time when i visit Historic Sites that have the same kind of shutter eye. Wait till the guides not there and then i sneak over and close the shutter to see how dark it gets. Fascinating. Thank you so much for talking. Thank you, dr. For emceeing this evenings program. Thank you to the jurors and hearty congratulations to all of our winners. Please join me in another round. Applause for their dedication and expert work