A look at our recent visit to charlottesville, virginia. I call it a president ial cold case. There were always questions about this house. Architects look at the little house and say that does not really look like a wing of a president s house. Similarities to other dependency buildings from other plantations. The questions were lingering. When i got here, there were answers to questions i did not quite fully understand. Maybe it is just a willingness to say that i dont understand that. Because maybe it is perfectly clear but i just dont understand. Lets look further. We are standing now in the center of the spot where James Monroes original main house stood. This is where we discovered the well preserved foundations just below ground surface. We have covered cap while we are not excavating. That is how we preserve an archaeological site. We laid these down on the Ground Service to get a sense of the footprint of the house. It was laid specifically over the places that we have excavated and have identified the walls. It is also speculated a bit in between those spots. This is the outline of the 1799 monro house. We see some of the houses some of the walls we indicated are marked by these surface flagstones so you can really get a sense of the relationship of this house to the smaller 1818 guesthouse that is behind the 1870s house. It was excavated a couple dozen squares around here. The interior and exterior around here last fall. The grass has not quite grown back yet. Eventually, our research will uncover this area and also the cover this area and also the yard. Our work on the yard will be able to tell us a lot of the activities that were happening here and we will get the house orientation. We dont know whether the main entrance was on this face for or the southern was on this face or the southern face. We will be able to determine that. There is a smaller wing to the west that is probably more service oriented. Cellar. A kitchen we are eager to get into that. We will have great discoveries there. We have really good evidence of burning. We think the house was destroyed by fire sometime between the mid 1830s and early 1850s. We have not yet found contemporary newspaper accounts of the destruction, which is surprising. Any day someone will come up to me and have discovered the missing newspaper account. That will happen, i am sure. We found a chimney base. We found burned planks, the archaeological small fines are numerous. There is good documentary of documentary evidence corroborating that. Lots of wine bottles. Glass, wine type bottles were used over and over again for all types of liquid storage and transport. Some ceramics, which is interesting. That will tell us what the monroes were eating off of, the dishes they used. That is always a really exciting moment, to understand the Consumer Choices that they made. The house continues behind me and probably goes under the 1870s house that belongs to the massey family. It continues 20 feet or so underneath the house. That was impacted by the construction in the 1870s. Otherwise, the part of the house that is not covered by that is really well preserved. It is an archaeological pressure that im eager to get into. James monroe is an interesting character. He is maybe the most popular president of his time, and one that is least known today. We have a great challenge and opportunity to share his story. James monroe purchased the property in 1793. When he was away, he was minister to france during the 1790s. His good friend and mentor Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were both involved in setting up the plantation prior to his moving here in 1799. They moved here late in the year in 1799. James monroe, unlike the other local president s, did not grow up in this area. Monroe himself is from West Moreland County out east. He was born in 1758 and moved here from fredericksburg where he settled with his young wife just after their marriage. The property is now on the grounds of the university of virginia. This property became available and he saw it as being closer to jefferson, being a larger tract of land and hopefully more productive. He purchased the property in 1790 three and moved in in 1799. 1793 and moved here in 1799. He had his property oak hill in loudoun county. That was closer to washington. During his presidency, he very likely traveled with his wife. Sometimes his elder daughter also accompanied them. His family would come. There were certainly enslaved people during monroes lifetime. He claimed ownership of about 250 souls. That is cumulative, not at one time. That was based on what was happening with the properties. That is important to recognize is that monroes latency is physically fairly diffuse. This is the one that is open to the public. He spent time in fredericksburg and new york city. Of course he was born in the eastern part of the state. During the main portion of his public career, highland was his home. This represents his ministries abroad where he was twice minister to france and england and briefly to spain. It also represents his time as secretary of state. He was elected to four individual oneyear terms. He was secretary of state and eventually a wildly popular twoterm president. James monroe seems to be an easy man. They say he was able to put men and women at ease in social situations. I think he enjoyed dinner table conversation. He really was kind. People say he had a great sense of humor. We see that in accounts of him. He seems to poke fun at himself and others. He went to campbelltown academy, which was a good school. It really prepared colonial young men for a real professional life. John marshall was at least briefly one of his classmates. After both of his parents died by the time he was 16, his maternal uncle, joseph jones, who was his first real mentor and role model, sent james monroe to william and mary, where he studied for about two years. I like in particular a story about monroes start there. He should have been well prepared and well regarded school. He got there and found he was he got there and found he was really deficient in one or more subjects. He wrote about this later, that he went home and revised and studied really hard over the summer and worked hard to get where he thought he should be. When he came back, his professors were impressed. He then made the cut and was where he would where he should have been. That is a central piece to understanding monroe. Understoodalways that the standing house is not the entire munro main house. We thought it was the remnant ofghing remnant weighing remnant wing. Three of them show sketches of two wings together. This is clearly one wing. When i started here and 2012, i really got to understand the history of the property itself. The wing that is no longer here, we should be able to find traces of it underground. I wasnt really satisfied with the sense that it is there and we havent found it. I thought, lets keep looking. We ended up excavating all around the main house. It was in the front of that 1870s house, that yellow victorianstyle building, that we found a big deposit archaeological debris. We needed to open up larger explanations larger excavations and figure out what contributed that debris. We were very lucky to find well preserved geological foundations there. The structures that are on the property today come from the different phases of occupation. Nroe period buildings behind me were built for him when he was president. , he was coming here as president and needed more space. I think when you travel as president you have more people visiting you. You need more accommodations for people who either come with you are come to you while you are president. So the 1818 guesthouse is one part. That has a small one over one room piece added to the eastern part. That connects to this large building, this taller, yellow building from the 1870s from a later owner. The white pieces from the 1850s. You see circular saw marks all through the framing of it. That gives us a good date, corroborated by our tree ring dating. We have an overseers house as well that seems to be original to the property, and a smokehouse. Otherwise we have later monroe buildings and reproduction buildings or reconstructions of buildings that were here. We do know the names and or occupations of about 250 people that were enslaved as part of monroes lifetime ownings. There was a variety, of course. One of the things we really appreciate is getting to know peoples names and their specific occupations. 6, example, in september 1818 letter that monroe wrote, he talks about building this president ial guesthouse. Theentioned one by name and other by occupation of the two enslaved men who did that work. He speaks of a carpenter. We think that man was peter mallory. You see his name in other places. He also mentions a man named george, who may have been another carpenter or craftsman. Two were thethese people who were in charge of building the house that we still have standing really brings a richness to our understanding of the property and its history. We see people and the roles they play, the connections or not with the monroe family, who ultimately saw them as labor, but may have in certain seen these people as people with whom they did share a space. It is a very complex story, and we do know some, but not enough. We are still looking. The discoveries we have made at highland are not only an opportunity to reexamine the also aney are opportunity to reexamine monroe himself. We are very excited to look back on what we thought we understood about monroe. Our research is ongoing. We continue to read and do archaeology. Are two projects, neither of which are in the field at this moment, are the larger landscape, including the slave quarters that we may have discovered there in the field, and what we want to do now is really raise the funds for the big phase, the excavation that will take place over the course or years, open for months at a time. It would be really crucial archaeologically to open those up and see whos stuck was in the seller when the house was destroyed. We think the house was destroyed after monroe left. There are all indications that it been between the 1830s and 1850s. Of course, monroe was gone by then and deceased. We want to open that up. The sellers will be able to tell us in closer detail when the house was destroyed. It will be able to tell us the finishes of the house, the ,laster, the types of what work the hardware. We have a long season of archaeological excavation ahead of us that we are in the Development Phase for because we need the resources to be able to open that and keep it open for a good period of time. Our best days are still ahead of us, and we look forward to the time when archaeology is a daily occurrence here. [indiscernible] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2016] our cities to her staff recently traveled to charlottesville, virginia to learn about its rich history. To learn more about charlottesville and other stops on our tour at cspan. Org cities tour. Americantching history tv, all weekend, every weekend on cspan3. Announcer check out our cspan classroom website at cspan. Org classroom. It is full of free Teaching Resources for cspan classroom members. The layout gives teachers easy access to ready to go resources for the classroom, including short Current Events videos that highlighted for events in washington, d. C. , constitution clips that bring the constitution to life, social studies lesson plans, as well as on this day in history resources. Allowsrch function cspan Classroom Teachers to search and filter by date, person, keyword, topic, and grade level. Our bellringers video clips are teacher favorites. They are short videos paired with vocabulary and discussion questions that make the federal government and politics more accessible to your students. I love the bellringers. A lot of times i dont use them as actual bellringers, but in conduction in conjunction with an activity we are doing that day. The new website is just fabulous. My students use it regularly, and it is so easy that they are right now working on clipping thats and making questions they can design and turn into their own bell ringers. Probably my favorite aspect to see in classroom is the deliberations page. It is a perfectly set up, ready to go classroom deliberation discussion on a variety of topics that are current and relevant today. Announcer if you are a middle school or high school teacher, join thousands of fellow teachers across the nation as a number of cspan classroom. It is free and easy to register at cspan. Org classrooms. You can request powerfully our free classroom sized president s timeline poster of all 45 president s. See more about it at cspan. Org classrooms. Announcer you are watching American History tv, 48 hours of american programming of programming on American History on cspan3 every weekend. To keep up with the latest history news. Announcer recently, American History tv was at the american historical Associations Annual meeting in denver, colorado. We spoke with professors, authors, and graduate students about their research. This interview is about 20 minutes. Medlock, with chelsea a history professor at Oklahoma State university. One of the more interesting we have seen is the use of war animals. How common was a for the u. S. And other military forces to use animals in world war i and world war ii . Chelsea it was really quite common up until right after world war ii going into the korean war. In world war i, you had all types of animals, such as horses