[inaudible conversations] good evening i am tony clark from the president ial library. Were delighted to have you for this book and where we are because of the ties of atlanta and the stories i think many of us have never heard before about frederick. But you know the thing that i really like is tonight the author is typical of the type of author and book that we have here, i encourage you to pick up one of these about upcoming authors in effect this thursday cbs 60 minutes correspondent scott kelly will be with us to talk about stories that he has done over the years and ill tell you i read the book it is a fascinating book and scott is a great speaker. We have wonderful author programs coming up and i would encourage you to pick up one of the sheets. I would also encourage you to come back to the museum, we have a fabulous exhibit, its called georgia on my screen. I dont know if you know when jimmy carter was governor he established the Film Commission to bring movies to the state of georgia and now georgia is number one in the country and having films and movies made, it is a fabulous exhibit, everything from oscars from driving ms. Daisy or gone with the wind, costumes from movie movies ive gone braindead. The sweet home alabama, my cousin vinny, a whole bunch, a lot of tyler. Stuff. This set from stranger things, things from marvel movies, its really good. I would encourage you to come back for that. But tonight is a special night. Tony is a bestselling author, a poets prizewinning journalist, a graduate of brown and Columbia University graduate school of journalism, he spent a decade overseas as a journalist covering wars and conflict in the middle east, africa and the wall street journal. In 1995, he won the posted price for National Recording for his stories about the working conditions and low weight america. He also wrote for the new yorker before devoting his fulltime to writing books. He has written seven books, including confederates in the attic, voyage, longing string, midnight raising, one for the road, but tonight as i say it is really very special spying on the south stories that i dont think we know about him and we are very fortunate to have allison, she is the host of the podcast literary atlanta, the house interviewer for a partner a cappella books for the monthly writers at the wrecking ball event. For more broadcast journalist and we are fortunate to have her interviewing tonight. Please join me in welcoming allison law and tony horowitz. [applause] hi cody. Great to be here. I thought we would do a mic check. Can everybody here is okay . I am normally very loud. I want to thank tony and the jimmy carter president ial library for having us here, are brick selling partner a cappella books. In first and foremost thank you all for being here. On a monday night. To talk about this book and i know your eager to get started so i thought i would ask the question that is on everybodys mind, what did you think of the final episode of game of thrones. [laughter] when you go as an author on book tours youre competing against something, usually at sports. I have been on this for confederates in the attic which was in march in North Carolina and i think there were five teams in sweet 16 that year and i was the first few nights, two people which show up and i thought this is what it is like and i had that against the Golden State Warriors on the barrier where i started. And last night and never imagined being up against game of thrones. Which i also love, and i would not go see my brother talking about because he was up against that. Remarkably we did discuss game of thrones but we worked in some other subjects. We will see if we can do both. But, no spoilers here, he seems to have a writing career. But most of us know him as a Landscape Architect behind the urban and scapes like central park just a few hours from here, what was it in his late 20s, early 30s that was going on in his life that he wanted to prove and to pursue a career in writing christian work. Part of the reason i was attracted to the subject in the first place is the making of the peculiar genius, he does not have a typical path, particularly for that day, he is kind of a lost soul. Hes from a privileged family, his father is a merchant in hartford, his brother goes to yale university, he leaves as a teenager and goes off as a marine to china, he cannot find himself. And theres wonderful letters in the library of congress between the family, they recognize he is got some kind of genius and if he could get it together, he might make something of himself one day. And he really would Landscape Architecture, he is in his mid mid30s before he begins and really in his mid40s before he settles on that career. So he is a rather bohemian figure in that way. So we know him a little later on in his life, but in the south, we are introduced to homestead who were tried started traveling and what were his moments and what did he hope to accomplish, and saying i want to travel to the macon south and write about what is happening. At this point, homestead is 30, he is a father on staten island, he has also got a hopeless love life, he is insulted by his fiancee, the guy really needed a dating app, he faces a roommate pixel with falling in love with everybody but cannot find the right one. In part he wants to escape the farm and his heartbreak but he also is an aspiring writer and he calls himself an honest growler, he is a hardheaded connecticut yankee who wants to see the south for himself. Rather their northern stereotype. Understand it and also see if there is room for Common Ground and reason this course at this moment when the nation is pulling apart over slavery in the 1850s. So that is largely the emphasis for his trip. Im thinking we should talk about that. So what is happening in our country at this time . Right, there is a long lead up to what ultimately leads to the civil war. But its in the wake of the mexican war, what are we going to do with all this new territory, there were steps along the way, Uncle Toms Cabin is published just before he heads off and it is getting increasingly tense. The 1850s is kind of disappear when they keep being added to the bonfire that will finally interrupt. So that is kind of the environment he leaves and they get much worse while he is away ultimately in kansas and leaving the Kansas Division over that. He takes his southern trips against the backdrop of growing national crisis. Lets talk about the signs that start appearing especially in this region that he is visiting where instead of gone fishing, it is a gtt sign. What does that stand for . This wonderful phrase that was common in the area and homestead really popularized by writing about it in the New York Times. It stirred for gods of texas. And it connoted that you had fled georgia, carolinas, tennessee, other parts of the south because of trouble with the law or your spouse or cannot pay her debts and you would write this on the door of your home or fencepost or someone else would put it there after you are gone and they were off to texas. At that point the booming frontier of the southern kingdom a second chance. Instead in the course of his first trip to the south he senses a great migration and decides to follow it. He is also a farmer clean his life and much of my book is about that. The Movement Across the south to this Promised Land or so it seems to many people. Lets take a step back, you pitched the story that he is going to go december and spend a few months in the south and thinking its going to be a quick jaunt in hell right travelogues for the near times on the road and as you mentioned, this ends up taking up about a decade of his life. He takes multiple trips to the south, how did he plan his trips . So he sets off with a fairly vague notion on winter away from the farm in the New York Times has offered me money and the amenities out there as a former newspaper journalist, hes very familiar griping about his editors and his expense budget. And he does not like the food. And he has sickness which is his word for writers log. But his first trip i would say he takes what was traditional tour along the seaboard state of virginia, the carolinas, georgia, alabama and gets on a vote to new orleans and sees a little bit of louisiana income zone. Thats the first trip. But he is so possessed that he then sets off soon after for a much more ambitious trip through the upper south and down the Mississippi Valley and across louisiana and texas all the way into mexico because that was a destination for fugitive slaves that he went to interview. And then rides all the way back to virginia. He takes a much more extensive trip and thats the one i chose to follow. Because you know that is still a little bit what is the stop when he says im going to go and travel the south. The nice things about on the south, you have not seen that show with two different routes that he took. So you can follow along. And while he was against slavery and you pretrade him as someone who is passionate and loves to debate about everything. Perhaps to the detriment. He was not considered an abolitionist at this time. What were his motives in writing about slavery and we can talk about how they transformed over the course of his journey. At the point he sets off in the race very frankly in his personal letters because he is friends who are redhot abolitionist who wanted the immediate decision to slavery and full citizenship for freed slaves. He was much more in the moderate camp and really his development tracks Abraham Lincoln very closely. He was in those days called free labor, antislavery but we should contain it. So it cannot expand but constitutionally and practically it is not feasible to end it now. And that is one reason the New York Times hires him because they viewed themselves as a moderate of the day. His youth changed dramatically as he traveled through the south. And later on right through the civil war, like lincoln by the middle of the civil war this whole system must die. So it is interesting to see his arc but its quite representative of where many antislavery northerners were. Abolitionist small minority before the civil war and homestead like many others do them as cranks as overly moralistic and he had an uncomfortable relationship with his religion and he was not comfortable with christianity of the Abolitionist Movement and he was not unusual in that regard. They were really a minority at the time. So they hire him to go out and select the matteroffact matter. They want him to be objective. Just the facts. And like we mentioned before, this turns in to those volumes of work that he collected over time. You call this book spying on the south. Why did olmsted travel incognito and post under names. The title is and refers to homestead and myself. He writes under a different name and was traveling at a time that northerners in the south particularly northern reporter were often suspected of being abolitionist snoops and stores and occasionally targeted. So traveling incognito was a personal security to a degree and also just the style. So i am not duplicating that level of covert operation, i am wondering around the south with the spiral reporter notebook and anyone can tell a two minutes i am not from the south. But in the opening episode of my own troubles i describe a woman in a bar in West Virginia who sees right through me and says i get it. You are a yankee boy and spying on a sublease. So the title was also a joke on myself. And that was a direct quote. [laughter] the subtitle of the book is an odyssey across the american divide and, you mentioned you have mapped the roots, what did he consider the divide between north and south and what do you consider the market divide that you were approaching when he retraced his steps beginning in 2016 . Or when did you start. Most of my travel was 2016 and 2050 in the little bit of 2018 when i wrapped it up. It was free states and slave states. And he was entering what was to become Enemy Territory with the north and for him. It is clearly harder to define today, perhaps our polarization in the ideological divide, the north and south defined part of that but in my own mind we certainly are after this journey, i came to fuel the rural urban interior split is much more significant than looking at it anymore as north, south. Although i would say many people in the north still you without way, this office become a stand in for what northern progressives oppose and it is a convenient marker whether its alabama or the news of the day. So there is an element of that but with you obviously not in the way that it was in the homestead. In 1953 there was not a single volume of homestead travel journals. It was a book called the cotton kingdom. This is a book that you encountered at two different times in your life. How did you come across the cotton kingdom and what inspired you to ask to pursue that as your own work . Is the starting point for the book, with previous books i had something earnest and highminded to say about how i got the idea, my lifelong passion for the civil war were great discovery in the archives, at this time it happened while cleaning house. My wife is also a writer and i lived in 18th century farmhouse in new england where everything sags and are over flowing books definitely do not help. And we were fighting over shelf space a few years ago in a barn we were fixing up to accommodate all these books and she said it is finally time you ruthlessly call all those books from college youve been toting around the globe. So for all these years claiming youre going to revisit them. So i was forced to glumly go through them and throw away four years of liberal arts education. [laughter] it was tough but then i came to the cotton kingdom that i had forgotten that i had been assigned in our history class, my senior year in college and i read a few pages, i read a few more, i went to my computer and ordered a whole bunch of biographies and histories, relevant, i sold several shelves and i think it was really a vividness of his writing about the south in the era and my curiosity of how he got from their to central park and also his mission of yes, im going to go and cross this divide and try to understand what is happening at this country at this moment, it seemed a relevant mission for our own time. So i got parallel turning, 160 years apart what he saw then what i see no and beyond that i had very little really no outline for itinerary. Did you. Reporter the entire book and make notes about certain things or certain areas you wanted to visit and see if those places still existed . How did you prepare for the trip . Cotton kingdom allowed me to the other writer. And he wrote three books that were then most together in the cotton kingdom which is really an apology. That led me back to the original dispatches for the times and personal letters, there is a lot of material in it ultimately decided to follow the path of the second trip partly because for confederates, i traveled through much of the territory he did on his first trip. Coastal and virginia, the battle fielding in court confederate states. In his second trip a lot was new to me including nearly the entirety of texas that he was particularly fascinated with and he saw as a crucible of the struggle over slavery. And for complicated reasons i had barely set foot. So i chose to follow that path and geographically it is quite closely. And he goes through as he was known to his friends and family, fred. I came to think about. I wanted to call the book travels with fred. [laughter] but did not pass. Maybe for the paperback. He goes through many different modes of transportation in the 1850 rails stagecoach, riverboat, all very slow modes of transportation and yet on one of your very first trips he managed to find the slowest mode of transportation possible. We you tell us about your trip on a barge in West Virginia. Whatever possible i wanted to go not only where he went but by the memes of transport he is. I have a fetish of it. I checked out whether you can find the stagecoach anymore. [laughter] i found one in kentucky and you needed a bourbon distillery it did not fit. But when possible, often i had to improvise. And he went down the ohio river, in those days it was West Virginia, it did not yet exist to kentucky on a lavish steamboat of that day they called them floating white pulses. There are no longer steamboats on that part of the ohio. But he also wrote about all the barges of coal that were floating down from pittsburgh and they are still there. These guys were 21 phase shifts around the clock. No booze and no diversion of any kind. Delivering this call to these power plants along the ohio. 1000foot smokestack, very industrial setting. That was how i traveled. In some instances, olmsted made arrangements with gentlemen, people he knew or his family knew or connections that they had to yale. Im thinking of one gentleman he knew who he met with and nashville. The same for you, you had some judgment or friends who hosted you on your travels but its in nashville that olmsted really sees class in a different way. Talk about why this was a turning. For him and his beliefs. Generally speaking as a writer, im a little leery about convenience or biographers or novelists and i think we all know in our own lives, they are very rare but i think olmsted has midway through his travels, he set off as this kind of moderate open eye, openminded approach to the south but he hit the wall in nashville where he has a particularly vivid exchange with slaveholders, one of them very arrogant, a classmate of his brothers at yale. What crystallizes for him is that not only are the needy men of the south as he calls them, completely in transition on slavery, they have other contempt with the common man in democracy itself that truly believes that their case found Feudal Society is superior in every respect to the north because the common man is incapable of governing or uplifting himself. This defends his sensibility on every level. But it sends him in a new direction that ends up a central part. One realizes this is the dangerous class in america. He sees seven years before the civil war. These people are going to lead us to terrible conflict. He also realizes north meets the south preaching to the south about its sins. Theyre not listening anyway and instead reform and fortify its own house by demonstrating the real power and promise of the free and democratic society. Almost a review to this seventh division. In the sort of Reform Program he lays out his letters and writings, one part of that which at that time did not exist whe where, the rich and the poor, jew and gentile, native and immigrant would come together and assemble it and be uplifted. This whole vision of what we think of is this sort of peaceful green space where it conflict. For olmsted, almost war by other means. So he had when he was forced and grounded to travel, he had to overcome sickness right after and thats where he started writing that there should be places and times where the rich and poor, cultivated and well bred selfmade people shall be attracted together and encouraged to assimilate. This was a radical notion not just in the south when he begins work at central park, newspapers and others are saying this is a waste of time and money, theres no way joe the fivepoint. , particularly the rough part of manhattan and after, wellborn new yorker can share the same space. This was a genuine experiment. A bold one and it worked. Unfortunately, it opened right before the civil war. So the pieces he thought would demonstrate to the south, this is what we are doing, this is a counter to your ideology. That piece of his plan did not work. Some of the towns you travel to, 2015, 16, you visited olmsted park. Or the suburbs like atlanta, olmsteds sons i believe were commissioned to do there. Do you think all of these years later, of all classes coming together and sharing public spaces have been success . Its a tricky one. It was kind of a utopian vision. I think it certainly worked in his time but central park was an immediate hit and virtually no friction. The only crime was people writing too fast on their horses. So generally speaking, i think it was a success, that i expect of it but there were things he couldnt possibly anticipate. Late in his career, as a Landscape Architect, he get commissions in the software up to then, the want the Economic Resources to hire the great olmsted. In those ted, it was kind of like a professional ball team today. Major league city. So first louisville and new orleans, montgomery, at the very end of his career with the parts that tragically, his vision was partly undone by jim crow so for instance in louisville, he designed what many consider his masterpiece, his entire system. They then designate one part of it. He excludes black people from the other part. The same happened with his suburbs through redlining and other things that it ran counter to his vision of bringing people together so i think not only in the south, all of these things but on in the north as well but perhaps most vividly in the south, a very democratic vision of all backgrounds coming together was undercut. Spying on the south, generally began each chapter talking about olmsted observations are what he wrote in different geographies and thin you common and parallel them. You either tackle that or their different issues. Maybe we can talk about a few examples. You mentioned earlier that olmsted wasnt a very religious person. You talk about what he did believe and your tour of kentucky and some of its religious landmarks. Olmsted was a little unusual in his day because he was educated by country pastors in connecticut. His father was a very traditional congregationalist of that era. He was also beaten, he was scarred by the religious education of his years. So he becomes a quite profound religious skeptic that scripture should not be followed as the absolute truth. He was very spiritual in other ways but not when it comes to traditional observance. One of the Interesting Times that i come on, i think maybe what you are referring to, one of his biggest sins was Charles Darwin who was reading his work about the south as he is writing the origin of species. They ultimately have correspondence so theres a lot of interesting intellectual parts that ties into slavery because darwins views and also homesteads that people were shaped by their environment contrary to the common view of that day that africanamericans were genetically inferior. Darwin saying essentially is a family of man, abolitionist picked up on that right away and recognized the message. So i talk in the book about that and partly in the context of one of the places i stumble across my travels, trying to travel wherever my curiosity led me and im following his path in kentucky and there was a Creation Museum and some of you may know about it, its designed indicators to what are called young earth creationists who believe the literal dates in the bible, which they calculated the creation of the earth, i believe its 4000 bc and constructed a whole belief system about that including dinosaurs getting on the ark, dinosaurs did not perceive humans and stuff. I had an interesting, particularly when i talked to a minister, an employee there about where do i as a jew fit into this picture but i hope in that sense in my marking fact, i was trying to explore it because this is what this particular museum, hundreds of thousands of visitors and certainly in kentucky and much of the area i was traveling through, serious bible belt so that was an aspect in my travels. In his travels, he is accompanied by his brother, you invited your brother to come with you and he not so politely declined. Olmsteds second southern journey, i think his brother invited himself along, hes gone to yale, hes doing medical training but he has tuberculos tuberculosis. Obviously in that day, really no way to treat it and stop that horse back riding in that area of texas which was the ultimate destination of olmsteds second journey so hes along for the ride. Somewhat jokingly, i invited my brother, josh who i knew wasnt going to come. [laughter] he basically said i have a life. [laughter] but weirdly, and australian friend, didnt know him well was fascinated when i told him what i was doing and he called americas outback. [laughter] he does not fit the american stereotype of australians, hes not a big bear slapping, backslapping beer swelling type, hes the kind of small, thick glasses, wonderful guy whos sort of latenight tv personality. The equivalent of jon stewart. Yes, kind of a similar sense of humor. I was a little worried about him but he appears and accompanies me from new orleans across louisiana, part of texas and i hope provides some comic relief in his rather jaundiced commentary on the south in america while claiming that im killing him with heavy foods. Louisiana really is heart attack on a plate. I love it but, and i wont tell the end of this story but some of the issues involved. I do want to talk about who can strike a balance between entertaining and funny stories and comic relief that not only your friend but you and the people you meet, how do you strike a balance between the things they say . Perpetuating stereotypes or coming up with these characters. First, humor, its just my personal thing and i dont know why, life is hard and depressing enough that im always looking for the laugh. I like to think one could combine seriousness of purpose in dealing with big issues. It comes when appropriate. I hope leaders will be entertained while they are being educated. So thats just my general approach so somehow when i sit down to write, yes, theres always a kind of mixed up tone there that i try and balance in that respect. Your other question about, which is really a kind of trickier one, particularly as a non southerner approaching the south, and i have a historian friend was a wonderful phrase where he talked about all of these northerners in the 19th century and really up to the present day, going on southern safaris. You are the exact south filled with strange creatures. Proceeding olmsted, theres a tradition of that. He makes fun of it. He makes fun of that. I certainly dont want to add to that. The south, if we are going to generalize is a wonderfully colorful region, wonderful characters and talkers. Id like to think one can write about that without perpetuating stereotypes. Other than one i think is genuine, subtle but one that comes to mind, just a general geniality, now that i have lived in new england, we have a lot of cranky yankees, ive been there 12 years now. I lived in a very small community, ill be walking down the sidewalk in the winter and someone coming the other way from 100 yards away and will avert their eyes. So when i come south, have to readjust, make good eye contact, acknowledge other human beings. I find myself saying yes, maam, no, sir. All that social grief that i think is genuine that also makes it so much easier for me as a writer because a lot of what i do is wandering around, essentially assaulting strangers. Because people just acknowledge each other, it gives you a little more entree. Which im sure is a little far from your question. No, i think you have perfectly led into your leads, telling us. I do have some questions, if you do have a question, let us know where you are so you can have the microphone. Give us a second to get there. Anyone have a question . I know your friend was not fan of Southern Food and northwest rhetoric. Fred complained the whole time. Quite humorously but what he said was bad copy, basically at every meal four months. He writes quite amusingly about that. I enjoy your wifes book, too. My wife is a historical novelist and poet prize for her novel, our lives have been so interconnected as not just as spouses but as writers, we met in journalism school, we went around the school the world together, for a long time we shared a computer even. Its only recently that she kicked me out to the barn behind our house to get a little distance. We are not literally working in the same room now. I would say its very different now that she writes fiction because she began as a journalist and wrote some nonfiction books. Then she went to the dark side. [laughter] she started making stuff up. [laughter] i feel she is still of tremendous help to me because we edit each others work. She is still tremendously useful to me but i have never written fiction, at least not intentionally so i can read her work and say this works for me or this doesnt for make this character stronger but i dont know how to fix anything. So its pretty great, actually. We have quite complementary styles. I write a lot about landscapes and im a Little Nature impaired in my writing. I dont love nature but i struggle to identify plants and describe it vividly. She was really helpful, she is great at that. You need to bring that landscape alive. I may be a little more of a dialogue and action guy in my writing and i would like to think that i help her a little in those areas of her writing. I like that, you are very honest about that in your book book i will say olmsted greatly improved me in that regard. Spending a couple of years with him on the road so i came home with all of these great ideas about how to improve our untamed farmstead in massachusetts. My best idea was that i should never mull it again because. [laughter] he hated lawnmowers and manicured lawns. That didnt go over too well. But i am better. Having followed olmsteds travels, obviously 1150 or so years later, what kind of differences did you encounter during your travels compared to when he went through the south . Or the major things you saw that made a change in what were the things that didnt change . And the 400 pages of my book, ill try to boil it down, i think he would be appalled by what weve done to our landscape, theres a phrase that colleagues had for him that i love, they say he was wrongheaded, meaning he always looked far into the future what he called distant objects so he would see if we dont plan this carefully, there will be no green space in the city, he saw where landscape and also American Society itself was headed. As hes traveling through the south, he had a critical eye on what he called much room development. With no real planning or any consideration other than economic. No aesthetic considerations. It was a little painful going to some of the places he most loved. Perhaps, kentucky, he writes about it at length as one of his favorite landscapes. Its still quite beautiful but covered in track housing in a real lack of planning. Suburbs generally, he was a real pioneer of suburban development but he saw them as villages, each of them distinct for each other. Linked to the city and to say its a more typical model of a suburb today is a cookiecutter development that is often almost offer urban center by freeway. There was certainly one take away. With the union army able to use any of the information he had in his books. The civil war breaks out and hes working in central park but like many northerners, he had recently shattered his leg in jackson, is a little old to enlist anyways, he wants to be in the navy but he cant so his desire is to run an agency for slaves who are fleeing, freeing themselves. That didnt get exist and he becomes head of the u. S. Commission which was a kind of soldier aid, medical release, and a red cross type agency and is quite brilliant at it but he grounds that they are not interested anywhere in washington and what he feels are his insights about slavery and hes very intent on giving assistance to freed slaves. This is not going to be an easy process. He was not an abolitionist earlier, a great line in a piece of his writing, simply removing the bullet does not necessarily repair the wound. You recognize this would be a very hard process. He foresaw the failure of reconstruction so he testifies before various commissions, he was strongly in support of of listing black soldiers he had some influence on the basis of his southern writing during the work but certainly not to the degree that he would have liked. You seemed like someone who would talk to anybody and have positive view of life but i wondered if you found any reason for optimism in talking with people, any Common Ground . I think its kind of a time not to be optimistic. Its hard to generalize about glasnost, 1000 encounters over two years across the region, depending where you draw the line, over 100 Million People so i am a bit weary of generalizing. I would say about worrisome side because i was channeling olmst olmsted, certainly the echoes of the 1850s an extreme in the way we demonize those we dont agree with. In a government that seems paralyzed by its divisions and able to deal with serious issues. A general loss of institutions so i saw a lot of that which did make me not so optimistic. In a more positive thing, i do think americans are at a level, they are different than they are in the craziness of social media or viewing each other through the prison or fox or msnbc. If youre visiting your church or their home or workplace, im very conspicuously brother journalist that we could sit and discuss our differences in a very simple way. Lower the temperature on that. I think we all need to do that but i think our media, it amplifies and exaggerates our differences at times. I guess i came away less pessimistic on that. I could mention other areas, particularly young people, particularly concerning race in the south and for instance, the whole debate about monuments, etc. Which i looked at a lot, they were watching as i was following a different story at this time. I was very struck by how younger people are much less invested in the confederacy than the whole debate and want to move on in a way that older generations were marinated in this, imprisoned by it in some ways, depending on where you are. I thought there was a lot of change there as well. You have any sense for how he remained maintained it . Did he have a cover story . Olmsted traveling undercover and how he did it, hes a little coy in his writing. I was definitely trying to figure that out. He was very good at certainly not standing out. He writes that there was nothing at first approach that would distinguish him from a southern gentleman. He was reasonably well dressed, good at mimicking southern manners and speech, he was a farmer, he could talk about agriculture, he was a writer, i think he had a capacity to fit in, certainly there were instances where he was carrying a letter of introduction but he often just seems to present himself as just a traveler for his health or whatever. Sometimes he relays dialogue where they say where are you from . He will say new york. He will have fun with that. The differences between north and south in their manner and how acquisitive southerners are. Sometimes it annoys him. In texas, he couldnt find anyone to say a bad thing about texas. [laughter] he has a lot of fun with these differences so sometimes he was genuinely undercover and other times i think it was not a journalist, just a northern traveler. Did you find differences in texas from the rest of the south when you were there . What did he find in texas being different from the rest of the south . Many people today wouldnt regard texas as even part of the south, really. In his days, and absolutely was. It was really the future of the south and it was settled overwhelmingly by people coming from other Southern States and if you look at the, when Southern States succeeded and explained themselves, it causes a secession. Texas stating bluntly that we believe slavery should last forever. I think texas partly, 50 or so years later chose to recast itself as more in the way we still see it somewhat stereotypically asked cowboy culture and all of that. Today its such a diverse state and its growing so rapidly changing so rapidly so i spent a lot of the time in the area that olmsted did the most settled which was eastern texas. That i would say remains very southern. The racial dynamic, good and bad, you feel you are in the south. Texas kind of debates, where does the south and in texas . If youre in south texas where heavily hispanic or west for north texas oil fields, southerners is much more attenuated. Its a tricky one to define. Its like florida. The northern parts of florida to me, feels very southern. The rest of florida, which was also member of the confederacy and clear in the south, not at all. As an interesting discussion about what is the south . Likewise, i could be in parts of southern ohio or indiana that feels quite southern to me so its a tricky question. I see a number of you have copies of spying on the south and he will be signing them up front. After hearing this delightful conversation, you will want to get a copy of this. He also has some of his other books for sale and hell be signing them. Let us thank them for a wonderful conversation. [applause] [applause] thank you both. Join us in the lobby, hell be signing books there. Thank you all very much. [inaudible conversations] lift. Well, good evening. Good evening, everybody. Im bradley graham, the coowner of politics prose along with my wife, lissa muscatine. On behalf of everybody at the