Guest africanamerican communities involved gender as well as power, but beyond that, i dont know. Host well, professor hahn, what do going to the topic of the book, what do we know wrongly about slavery in the u. S. . Guest well, one of the issues that i try to deal with in the book is the process by which slavery ended, and the Geographical Reach of slavery. I think the view that tends to be handed down is by the 19th century, certainly, a country neatly divided between the socalled free states and the socalled slave state, and, of course, the civil war growing out of that conflict. My issue is not whether slaverys at the root of the civil war, which it certainly was, but what interested me was the relationship between the early emancipation of slaves in the northern states, and the later emancipation of slaves much larger in scale in the Southern States. Slavery was legal in all of the british colonies and all of north america at the end of the 18th century, and gradually, northern s
A they have so a few men to start with. Then they have to use units. They are constantly deploying troops to prevent slaves from running away to the enemy and joining the union army. They also have to divert troops to contain the deserters. They dont have any extra troops, so the pressure on them on numbers by the end by late 1864, by 1863 the secretary of war said there are no more white men to be had. And at that point, the conversation starts seriously about whether they have to use black soldiers. Its bizarre but i think the perfect arc of justice from slavery as an element of strength to, we have to consider emancipating the slaves to force them to enlist in the confederacy. So that is another story i tell in the book. They dont contemplate emancipation out of the goodness of their heart. A lot of people think that the confederacy chose independence over slavery because by the end, some people were willing to enlist slaves in the army but the Confederate Congress and the Virginia
My parents didnt have an answer. It became kind of a quest to find out about it in the sense that there was enormous power and that would change the direction of my life. When i wasnt looking for it to happen. Cspan how many of your years did you think about this . Guest i started after i got into a book career in the late 70s after magazine journalism. I wanted to write about this period because i hadnt answered the question what is it made of and i thought in 1981 with what was proposed to be a three year history of the teen years and its now been 16 years and ive done it in two volumes is now projected to be a trilogy or will be a trilogy after i finish it but i would have 20 years. Definitely turning into my life work but im thankful for the privilege of it. Cspan the first book, parting the waters, 1,056 pages. This but there are 546 pages. Whats been your approach . Guest to do it in storytelling. One of the reasons i wanted to do it is i knew this had an enormous impact like the
Is a memoir and a history book. In the book you talk about your personal journey and you are very candid about your life, and you also cover new insights as a historian to the life and legacy of dr. Martin luther king, jr. What prompted you to write the book this way . Guest well, i wanted to write something for the anniversary and this is 50 years of my life and kings legacy and my life coincides with my coming of age, so part of it was to do those two tasks. I felt that my life had been connected to the king legacy, and i felt there was something about my life that needed to be told to understand how king impacted me and how i got involved in this amazing journey of editing team newspapers. Host its an excellent reading and you and buy your of the same generation, and why too was coming of age in the 60s. The book i might say was bittersweet to me because i knew dr. King, i knew him the last two years of his life and i am bitter because of the way that he was taken from us because of
Host Walt Mossberg, has technology plateaued . Guest oh, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Technology is always changing and always coming up with Technology Companies are always coming up with something new, and there are new Technology Companies all the time incubating, a lot of them are in what we call stealth mode. We dont even know who they are. Certain technologies plateau and things move on, but in general, no. Not at all. Host i guess i ask that because the last couple years weve had the explosion of smartphones, weve had tablets come online. Whats out there . Guest well, first of all, there are vast numbers of people especially in the less developed cups, but even in the developed countries who dont own a smartphone and, certainly, there are vast thurms that dont own numbers that dont own a tablet. To give you a rough example, apple which leads in the tablet market has sold somewhere around 160 million ipads since 2010. Thats a remarkable achievement and for people that own