of mine and i d like her because she is a real storyteller. she is always fiercely intelligent. her analysis of the characters always amazes you and yet that isn t all. she doesn t just do that and say be happy with that. she tells the full story. before he turned his back over, i want to ask a personal favor of you and ask you to sign this book. [laughter] [applause] by the way you will have a chance to do the same. while they are signing i just want to introduce myself, dale gregory vice president for public programs and how thrilling it is to have you all here and these two charming gentleman. i am sure you will agree and i just want to remind you the book is on sale and the books are on sale in our museum store, and the book signing will be out back, by the back doors. and so, i am so happy that you came and you said yes and we want to thank you charles osgood, for agreeing immediately on the phone to come and ken follett for also agreeing. it must have been immedia
one of these beautiful seats are available for your name, your name, a friend s name, to honor and support wonderful programs like these. thank you, again, so much rick brookhis brookhiser. tha y. each week at this time american history tv features an hourlong conversation from c-span s a sunday night interview series q and a. here s this week s encore q and a on american history tv. this week on q and a, a new biography of supreme court justice louis brandeis, the author is melvin urofsky. melvin urofsky, can you remember when you first thought you might like louis brandeis? in fact, it s a memory that s well seared into my consciousness. i was a graduate student at columbia in the early 60s and the great biographer, woodrow wilson, arthur link, had written in one of his books that louis brandeis was the architect of the new intellectual freedom. so i did all the paperwork, you know, and researched brandeis a little bit. got it approved. and then in the
this was a rebellion of slaves who slaughtered the white masters. it was impossible for a southern dominated one to recognize that. but john adams did send a console. yeah, but we didn t diplomatically recognize it. the federalists were very keen on having relations with the haitian government. again, the federalists have come up in the eyes of scholars over the last 20 years, through much of our history, through the 20th century. it s the jeffersonian who dominated scholarly attitudes. they were the party of the democrats and they were the party of the small farmers and so on. and the federalists were a bunch of aristocrats. now recently because of the development of anti-slave feeling, and women s movement, people like hamilton and many of the federalists are much more liberal on these issues than the southern dominated jeffersonian republicans. so they have recovered some of the press that they lost through the first half of the 20th century. the rural vote has come
he was talking about equality. and he felt this connection that i think we continue to feel. i mean, people ask me questions like, you know, what would george washington think of the invasion of iraq? no other i mean, people don t in other countries do that. people don t ask, what would what would charlemane say. they don t ask that question. they don t have that kind of connection with the past. as history-minded as they might be, the brits don t have that kind of connection. so i have a lot of sympathy for the tea party. i know they distort the past, but i understand the emotional need because i think it s there for everyone in some sense. because there s no other basis for our americanism. except these ideals that they created. and one of the points you make in your book is that this sense of our ideals was very early on accompanied by a sense that we were an example to the world because of those ideals. louise mentioned the show right here is on the american a
they don t ask that question. they don t have that kind of connection with the past. as history-minded as they might be, the brits don t have that kind of connection. so i have a lot of sympathy for the tea party. i know they distort the past, but i understand the emotional need because i think it s there for everyone in some sense. because there s no other basis for our americanism. except these ideals that they created. and one of the points you make in your book is that this sense of our ideals was very early on accompanied by a sense that we were an example to the world because of those ideals. now we mentioned the show right here is on the american and haitian and french revolutions which all happened in a pretty contained timespan. shall we talk about how we reacted to those revolutions? yeah. well, i think we started with the notion you think, this is the little colonial rebellion. this is 4 million people by 1790. what did it matter? and yet they thought that th