We know from early historians how devastating this variety of smallpox was, 90 of all indigenous deaths were attributable to smallpox, tell us about that. There was a point of scholarly discussion. One of the sources we have, most of the media is a chronicler, spanish chronicler arrived in spain, he wrote a diary or memoir, talks about the actual mortality rate, keeps talking in terms of 50 but some of the other sources we have, people like cortez himself cortez writes and cant stand, and in europes time. From 1522 january 15, 21 is one of smallpox was introduced, theres a very early source, talks about him and writes a letter to charles v in 1520 and this is the first mention of smallpox in the new world from a spanish source. He was surprised when he arrived, there were very few people there and he attributed to dying of smallpox, he heads off and finds immediately upon arrival of the expedition, the native people began dying of smallpox fairly rapidly, very rapid phase but a number of places are very very high. How quickly do you say it moved through the population . In my own research, from the chronicles, you know there was trade up and down the course in latin america and we know tribes are communicating with each other to traitor they were at war or for some reason or other the smallpox epidemic reached the coast of peru and ecuador and affected the in car emperor who died of smallpox before the conquistadors arrived there was a quick communication. Theres some interesting sources like the animals of the check to overcome abuses a mired course. It is a Spanish Group houston the seventeenth century but it United Number of epidemics of the first one is talks about seems to describe smallpox and it was before the arrival of the conquistadors, just a few months before but we dont know what is happening from native populations moving from the islands but one important thing cortez does tell us, he does say the death that is occurring on the mainland is exactly the same but he saw on the island and he definitely relates the 2 and there is the story of the introduction of smallpox, the possibility being that it was done by ethiopian slaves, a slave who had been with one of the expeditions who introduced it. What is interesting is they only have one source copying from that source but it shows the important aspect of the way the spanish were thinking of this disease, they had a theory of the disease, they had the idea that it had to be transmitted and somebody knew what was going on so they learned, even just historians chronicling this, the earliest periods of contact, they were thinking about it. You work at the library of congress in your director of this fantastic collection which is on permanent exhibit at the library and it is a collection of all kinds of artifacts, textiles and objects, jade and all sorts of things and masks even. Can you tell us those artifacts and those chronicles and masks and things, do they educate us about the pandemic or how disease spread . What is interesting about them is obviously there are some very important sources. Some of the actual indigenous sources themselves, theres some extremely important work, the florentine codex which was put together by sam groom has images and engravings that show the Indigenous Peoples with smallpox, see things like the codex on cruise which is the earliest from 1550s in the earliest image of actual smallpox in the indigenous population and other things, at the library, things like the codex which show botanical in formation, copies of hernandezs work, a physician in spain on an expedition in the 1550s in 1570s chronicling plants and indigenous medicines, he chronicled over 3000 plants. He also did autopsies on Indigenous People who had died of smallpox and he is an amazing source. A lot of these sources that give us insight into the indigenous minds, how they pictured their world give us a lot of insight how they reacted to it and the spanish, how they reacted, how they reacted, what are they thinking of and like all populations like this they have their own medicine, there was lots of botanical in formation but we also have actual sources which tell us about the plants they are using, something called the fan r, used as something to help fever in smallpox and various other uses for it, also tells us it is a different work and the only way to help cure smallpox is to burn the gallbladder of the hummingbird. This makes in the indigenous world how they are reacting to disease from the spiritual side from attempting to control their world through ritual but there is also detailed and extremely complex with no botany and pharmacokinetic things they are trying to use. The historical collections at the library and other libraries around the world are important to looking at this, not only looking at science epidemics but what was the human cost and what is the human reaction and we see that today, we have all kinds of scientific masks people are generating but also drawings of lockdown masks to proceed their way with how they are feeling at this time. Host when a novel medicine that he is now in medicine is equipped to deal with it but how sophisticated exactly was the disease highly developed precolumbian empire, how sophisticated was there medicine . Very sophisticated. For botanical perspective the plants they used, some of the other things they use to develop medicines, it is something we dont really understand that well. There are some important manuscripts, one that did deep into nobody and medicines, a lot of those medicines today have analgesic properties or certain properties, anesthesia properties there is a movement and has been for many years to look no botany and these traditional treatments for what is going on today to help cancer treatments and things like that so it was very sophisticated. We are not really sure how it develops because when you are living in a place where there are 50,000 different plants and you cut into 2 or 3 that are going to have certain analgesic properties, how you get there is an interesting question, the empirical way Indigenous People develop this but when the spanish arrived there was quite a healthy medicinal way of looking at disease and treatment besides the ritual. So the question of ancient knowledge and medical sophistication brings us to the question of how does this tie to the present day . What can history tell us about what is going on right now and what we are going through right now. What do we know with any certainty about the patterns of disease in the early americas and what does history teach us about the viral spread of covid19 today. One can begin to look for the way patterns of viral transmission. We dont have maps from the earliest period of the americas but we have these ideas of how the virus spread. We have letters, we have knowledge through written sources, we look back into history, people look back into the records of european transmission and we begin to get a sense even without scientists of what is going on. We have something we see in europe isnt really causing a large pandemic or epidemic of people dying and then we see those death records arent really telling us the disease had serious Global Implications and then we see the incidental textual knowledge coming through, telling us that people are dying in the americas, ideas from the early spanish chroniclers, how the disease is being transmitted. They give us a sense of the way it is moving in the time frame. When you look at it from a more scientific perspective especially today there is a lot more scientific tools to look at so in the case of smallpox the archaeological evidence combined with ancient dna and the technology we have today gives us a real sense of how those historical sources are correct or incorrect, however it may be but the way these things actually occur and spread. Other sources, as we get into epidemics that have occurred through the exploration of the americas we get a sense of how some of the spread but it is not as good as we have today and how we are trying to figure out the spread of covid19 and where it came from. Sitting and analyzing diseases like the great influenza of 1918 or hivaids or sars can predict patterns of infection and transmission. You spent a great part of your career in the study of maps and the scholarship of mapping and you are working with a number of organizations mapping covid19 and the possibility was transmitted from an animal host. This is ongoing work and as much to study still to be done but tell us what exactly mapping has told us about covid19 so far. We are in a situation now where because we have a worldwide pandemic and laboratories all of the world sequencing dna we are getting really good sense of what overall genetic structure, the genome of covid19 is. Covid19 is part of a larger group of coronaviruses, and that is because it looks like a crown and has spikes coming out of it which are glycoproteins and it is part of a larger family of viruses which find their hosts in a genus of horseshoe bats and what we have really found is the sequence, the amino acid sequence of covid19 which is actually sars covid192. 96 of that genome is found in the version that is found in this particular bat so people believe it actually came from a bad, making the crossover to human beings. The mechanism of that crossover is not well understood but what allowed us to do is as time goes on and cases spread around the world we can develop a phylogenetic tree which is made of a couple things, it shows where the test was done, a person in new york or seattle or somewhere in europe, we have a location come we have a location and time and the actual genome and what we are trying to do, what were trying to map is the mutation to time and space and in the case of covid19 we can look at the figures that are on screen and use the the highrise journey of the virus the time and we can look at important moments, you see the rise and the transmission through china. When we start looking at the colors entry you can see that there are reds and those reds are the transmission to north america and the United States and there are two groups, one at the top and one at the bottom. What is interesting and with the mapping can actually tell us is the fact that the part that came to seattle, the initial seattle and illinois are actually from china so they have the mutations that are very much like the chinese virus but the one that is up at the top is really from europe, it has the mutation that comes from a european strain so we can see and get an idea, very detailed idea like we never could before, this is really new technology, really mapping this pandemic in a way that we have never done before and the details but we can get. Besides the genetic trees, built by very complex computer algorithms and mathematics and mutations of the virus as it goes along but there is a historical metaphor because the phylogenetic tree that you see before you are like i said based on mutations, errors accumulating in the virus. Its like what a medieval historian look at a manuscript as they look at mistakes in the manuscript as it moves through time and space and you can get a sense of his the initial manuscript and heres how it changed and it went to this place and because this error happens to be in a manuscript that came from germany and also in a manuscript that is in england that you could say came from the same place, they have the same errors. The error is transmitted time and space into a thick certain extent that is what we are doing with the viral mapping. There is a lot of data being put out, some really amazing organizations who are making this data, all the sequence Data Available in real time so there are people all over the world who are able to work on this project. Host those links are very remarkable, so interesting but lets talk about the book you have written with the Publishing Office at the library of Congress Called collecting for a new world and it describes the rich trove of free colombia artifacts the library holds. What role does any library or archive have in the ongoing business of mapping and understanding covid19 . Every archive or Library Collects for a reason. When we talk about the free colombia question in the americas at the library of congress and the contacts period collection, the ginsburg collection kind of straddled the line between contacts period material and free colombia material and when you look at that material as a whole it really is giving a snapshot of really important moments in the history of the world. When we think about what it must have been for europeans to arrive in the americas, what must have been for Indigenous Peoples to have the europeans arrived. Anybody knows there are horrible moments so collecting that material gets its insight not only to broader histories and big events but put it into how the real lives of those people and artisans looked at it and what might be considered people like hernandez, natural historians of the day and build a picture of a moment of time. We are in a situation now which is no different, we are talking about covid19, we have mobilized a huge amount of scientific and geospatial and biological research for a profound historical moment for the world, something we have never seen before in any of our lifetimes and in the lifetimes of several generations before us. The closest thing in any recent time is the 1918 flu pandemic. But i think collecting in this period has the same role. We are going to collect the maps and the data that talk about how scientists are actively trying to map the genome, how they are trying to fight the disease. Those are the obvious things but also the library of congress, one of the Great Institutions of the world for doing this, collect the cultural moment, the photographs, peoples thoughts, peoples drawings, collect how it is that they thought through this moment in time. There has been great mapping on the web and several news organizations, lockdown maps where people are drawing maps of their neighborhoods and how they are proceeding them now, not just geospatial maps but cultural information, this is close, this is open, this is where my dog likes to our, this is where i used to get a treat for my dog. Libraries like the library of congress, institutions have a responsibility, the library is one of those great places to take that responsibility seriously from the scientific side and then the cultural side and they have a huge part to play not just at this very moment but certainly as we get through this and you begin looking back at what happened to us. It is an extraordinary testament to the memory bank the situation like this can be, a Great Institution that can tell us something about what has gone before. Epidemics will come and go, pandemics will come and go and this is so and lightning to see how they can connect for us. We have some questions that came in from some tweets from around the country. Here is one from cleveland, ohio. My name is caroline. Im a historian of european history and my question is how will historians be able to write objectively about this pandemic of 201920 without the political nature and controversies over covid19 revisionism . Historians face the same problem with almost any event they are trying to write about that has importance to peoples lives. Obviously any of us who have been informed of what is going on right now see a differential effect in how it is affecting different populations, the demographic effect, the geography effects, the race a factor. In that sense it is no different than any other historical event and i think historians will take their perspectives and will probably in the end have more evidence for a shattering event like this then they have had for a lot and i think historians will get down to the business of doing their work. Objectivity, that is an open question, whether history in itself no matter how it is written is completely objective is an open question but i think historians will get down to doing the hard work of writing about what happens at the mistakes that were made. The great things that were done in any world shaking events, there are heroes and villains and that is why we look to historians and why historians look to places like the library of congress, we collect all the evidence we can and it is for them to interpret. Host the other question from monterey, california. What does the transmission of disease look like in california at the time of the report, expedition in 1770 . Was in immediate . Did that first group of explorers bring disease with them or was it later waves of europeans . Guest that is an interesting question and theres a couple answers to that. I do believe they did bring this disease with them. There are two particular indigenous groups, two were really affected by measles and smallpox that were brought in by that expedition. There is an amazing diary call the crispy diaries which give a sort of day by day interpretation of the two years that expedition, might have been a little longer was traveling in the region. In the earliest part of that, narrated very well and even talks about the indigenous perspectives so it is a really great resource but those two groups were affected nearly immediately on the arrival of the expedition. So i think it was a fairly immediate effect and one of the things that hasnt been well studied obviously smallpox is something that attracts historians of the contact period, the flu pandemic of 1918 has been very well researched, some great books written on it but some of these smaller contacts and the effect that it had on more mobile indigenous groups as you mentioned going down into peru have not really been written about in a really detailed way and it is somewhat of a good moment right now historically now that we are involved in Something Like covid19 to look at how can we look at this, both looking at the sources we have from the period and using modern Genomic Research and ancient dna to enlighten how disease move during these periods. Host there are very few people who can range from pregoogempucky history to covid19 history at this time and chasing it down and see where it is going. We are grateful to you. Thank you for joining us here at National Book festival presents. Guest a buddy stay safe. Host thank you so much. Sunday night on booktv on afterwords, Tara Westover talks about growing up with survivalists parents in her book educated a memoir. My mother did a decent job homeschooling. By the time i came along she was a midlife, there wasnt a lot of homeschooling going on. I never took an exam, never anything like a lecture. At 10 00 pm eastern the Surgeon General with his book to gather on the impact of loneliness on health. Miniseries is talking to friends on the phone and mindlessly going through my email, a question that came up, i dont need to do that. I just fall into it but science tells us very clearly we do when we think we are multitasking we are task switching from one thing to another very rapidly. This is why i think it is so important to ask the question how do we strengthen not only the economy but the quality of time. Watch booktv this weekend on cspan2. Sunday night on q and a a look at american president s through the lens of book favorites with craig fairness. The story has often been, you saw it in that pearson quote the kennedys father was pulling the strings but that is not true. Jack kennedy wanted that millet surprise, multiple times he talked about the pulitzer prize. Because he had a strong desire for literary fame even though he didnt really want to do literary work he got himself the prize. In new york city, in washington dc people have been gossiping did kennedy really write that book . I wonder who really wrote that book, i wonder how much money they are getting out of those royalty checks but the pulitzer changed the equation and made it a moral question and ethical question, when i was at the kennedy library, librarians were sending him letters, schoolteachers were sent a letter saying to you really write this book and they were responding to that interview, that is not the right thing to do. Watch sunday night at 8 00 pm eastern on cspans q and a. Television has changed since cspan began 41 years ago but our mission continues, to provide an unfiltered view of government. Already this year we brought you primary election coverage, the president ial impeachment process and the federal response to the coronavirus. You can watch cspans Public Affairs programming on television, online, or listen on our free radio apps and be part of the National Conversation through the Washington Journal Program or our social media feed. Cspan created by private industry. Americas Cable Television company as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Host longtime Technology Journalist and author Stephen Baker is the coauthor of this new book called hop, skip, go. You write that this book is about the coming age of mobility. What do you mean by that