I said for 28 years for the Library Congress and retired a couple years ago. He told me that the National Book festival was something he needed help with and had been started in 2001 as an idea that came from laura bush, laura bush asked Jim Billington around the time of the inauguration in 2001 whether not there was a National Book festival comparable to the one she started in the texas, the texas book festival he said there is not yet but there will be. He came up with the idea of how to put together National Book festival, the idea was to do it in the mall in a series of tents that were set up for the first year end then it turned out getting sponsorships were more difficult than they thought it would be. So he asked me if i get involved and i told him i would do so and i began to be a sponsor and a cochair of the event, ive done that for ten years or so. It is very important to me that the festival goes well and i enjoyed a great deal is a great gift for the country to have a natio
Skyrocketing drug prices on American Families. I recognize myself for five minutes to give an Opening Statement. Today we are closing this work. The way we started our work with this congress. A hearing on Prescription Drug prices. This is a bipartisan issue. That focuses on the many years. The first witness at our hearing was a woman named antoinette. A mother whose daughter died at 22 years of age after rationing insulin because she could not afford it. It was the subject of our hearing on hiv prevention drugs in may. Today, five patients and a Family Member are here to share their stories. I urge all members who go back to your districts and to talk to your constituents about their experiences struggling to pay for lifesaving drugs. I fear you will discover that we are facing a drug crisis in america. We have seen time and time again Drug Companies, skyrocketing prices, forcing families to make gutwrenching choices every day. Many families and having to choose between caring for the
In california on a hot afternoon in pasadena for our monthly Public Lecture series. Im preston dikes. 50 years ago three human beings set out on a journey across a quarter million miles of space to the moon. Two of them set down in a fragile Landing Craft on the lunar surface, and one of them stepped into history uttering a phrase we all know by heart. For that one human being to make that one small step took the focussed efforts of hundreds of thousands of people over the course of a decade. An industry and universities and in government. For their part, jpl and cal tech didnt play the leading roles in the apollo effort, but for all who contributed to apollo, as for all of us who play even a small role in the Space Program today, the true reward lay not in the glory of the moment but in contributing to something greater. Something that mattered. Jpl ease primary role then and now is to help lead the Robotic Exploration of the solar system including technologies that contributed to apo
The beginning of the conference. My name is seth i teach history at the university. And im here to proceed over this panel. Talking about the 1790s then and now thinking about the relationship between the particularly fragile moment in american political history which was the 1790s. And how we might think about what we can learn from that moment and how it connects or maybe it doesnt connect to whats happening in american political history at this moment. So the way this is going to work is ill introduce the four panelists. Each person will talk for five to seven minutes or so and develop a few lines of inquiry. Ill ask a few questions based upon what people have said. And folks will have a chance to have a conversation here. But then we want to leave the last at least 45 or 30 minutes for questions from the audience. So as we go on, please have in mind things that you want to say or things you want to ask about. All right. So i want to introduce folks from my left to my right. So firs
Maybe. Just so you know youre not on the wrong flight. Im brian balogh and ive been a cohost for backstory for over ten years now. Im going to introduce the panel and then were each going to say a few words about our quite different roles well, nathan and i have the same role. Hes trying to steal the 20th century from me and doing a pretty good job of it, but we all have relatively different roles and backstory. We are going to talk about that a little bit. And then we are going to open it up to your questions. Just for starters, this is not what it looks like behind the scenes at backstory. In fact, were rarely in the same place at the same time. I had to Google Nathan to see what he looked like, for instance, even though i talk to him every week. So introducing myself, im a professor at the university of virginia, i cohost backstory and i direct the National Fellowship program at the jefferson scholars foundation. My cohost nathan connolly, of course, is known to most of you as an ou