Pivotal meeting between british Prime Minister winston churchill, president franklin roosevelt, and soviet leader joseph stalin. Welcome back to the metal and Paul Hilliard Conference Center here at the higgins hotel. I hope everybody enjoyed their lunch. We spent this morning doing highlevel analysis of the political and strategic situation that existed amongst the allied leaders. As we know, wars are fought on battlefield, not in boardrooms. These summits, though they dictated much of what would happen on the ground, they would not have mattered much if we did not have armies in the field. Our next session will look at how yalta affected the execution of the closing months of world war two. To do this we have asked rob citino. His executive director of the museum of democracy as well as at the world War Ii Museum. He is an awardwinning led terri historian. Military historian. He has published 10 books, primarily on the german army. He has taught for three decades including stints at
Cspan3, American History tv. Patrick thank you, steve. let me begin with the origin of the National Rifle association. How did the organization come about and why . Patrick it came about during the civil war. There was poor marksmanship, so two officers decided to form the nra based out of new york with two purposes. Facilitate, build, and grow longrange rifle ranges , and the other was to assist the state National Guards in marksmanship. The nra initially, just so you know, was kind of working to get appropriations from the government and they started off with one organization. They grew to 1700 by 1929. They also are, just so you know, built on, there was an english National Rifle association. In 1859. A predecessor this is supposed to be the american version. The only thing that differentiated the two to start off with was the franchise like model where you could build a rifle club, statewide and you were a nra affiliated rifle club and those rifle clubs within compete in state, loc