Have you send them to hashtag Literary Lawn Party or hashtag ms book festival. I would like to introduce you to the sponsor of our session today. Our sponsor today is humanities council, Mister Stewart rockoff is the director. [applause] thank you very much. Im here to do two things. One is to say the session is sponsored with the National Endowment for the humanities as part of their race initiative. And then pamela junior, was previously the director of the Smith Robertson museum down the street and several months ago, the director of the mississippi civil rights museum. Which will be open to the public and to the people of mississippi, december 9th, who better . Pamela. Thank you so much. I am a big fan of these folks. What i decided to do is ask individual questions than a general question. Very good. I will introduce everybody, Charles W Eagles and i was told your students would be in here. The university of mississippi since 1983, his books include outside agitator, the Civil Rig
Cell phones, please feel free to take any pictures and if you would like, we would love to have you send them to hashtag Literary Lawn Party or hashtag ms book festival. I would like to introduce you to the sponsor of our session today. Our sponsor today is humanities council, Mister Stewart rockoff is the director. [applause] thank you very much. Im here to do two things. One is to say the session is sponsored with the National Endowment for the humanities as part of their race initiative. And then pamela junior, was previously the director of the Smith Robertson museum down the street and several months ago, the director of the mississippi civil rights museum. Which will be open to the public and to the people of mississippi, december 9th, who better . Pamela. Thank you so much. I am a big fan of these folks. What i decided to do is ask individual questions than a general question. Very good. I will introduce everybody, Charles W Eagles and i was told your students would be in here.
Legacy and the fact that it started with doctor billington, the 13th librarian of congress, i am the 14th and laura bush, the first lady at the time. It emphasizes the prominence of the joy of reading and promoting reading and it was outside and there were concerns that if it gets rained out it has moved to the Convention Center in washington dc, you dont have to worry about rain. It is bigger, there are all kinds of venues that it has that mall feel, you walk around and there are all types of things, you can buy the book and have the books autographed by the author and as always a thrill. When does planning for the start . It starts as soon as one festival is over, within a week, what happened, what works, what didnt work, was we want to do and improve and start working on it right away. Do you have direct involvement or get updated on what is happening . I have to tell you i have more involvement than you might think because this is the essence of what we are about at the library of
Mississippi or their hometown in many instances. They were going overseas to fight for a cause. They were really behind it of the most part all of the ones that i found were willing to go and serve and in some cases people wonder why we had not been there before. I had one letter from an individual who fought with the Canadian Expeditionary forces. He went early went early because he thought it was a just cause. We always read about people saying, what if the south had won the civil war . What my question is, what if we had not entered that war . The world would be a vastly different place. As for its relevance today i would not have know this if id not been researching this book, again i was not aware of the consequences. All of this trouble in the middle east that we are having right now, so so many of those countries involved, involved after world war i. Promises were made after world war i and we do not look up to them. Conflict is still resulting today because of that. So if it is
Great depression, other gaps we had, and so i started plunging in the collection and i happened upon this is years ago Works Progress administration papers, the wpa in mississippi compiled county histories, and one of the topics was war. Block. They were. That meant there was a lot more out there. In addition to looking at private collection at world war ii started reading county newspapers from all around the state. I did want to try to cover all areas of the state. I have succeeded to some degree but actually not as much as id like to because some towns where i thought there would be letters to the editor about publication from the boys overseas were not any. There could be just to the addition of the paper to get a microfilm that was not the addition that had the letters. The different additions used to be. I do not know if early on if there are two or three editions of the paper. I did the best i could. I found some wonderful letters. I tried to have men who served, i found a lot o