national conference for history education move their conference online because of the coronavirus outbreak. the session up next features to mystic unrest during and after world war i, including anti-german sentiment, race riots and arrest of suspected communists. he's the author of "to end all wars." >> it is 11:00, so i think we know you are excited to be here and to hear about the legacy of the first world war today. thank you for being with us over these past three days stop it has been a exciting for us to see how engaged history educators are even when they can't either. i'm the executive director of the national council for history education. we are loving doing this online conference with you. >> it is a pleasure to be with you because there is no kind of person i more enjoy talking with ben teachers of history. teachers of history have been tremendously important in my life from high school, from areege, and also people who involved in teaching public history while -- by working in museums and historical sites. all of that has had a huge influence on my life. i don't think i would be writing forory today were it not two very good history teachers i had when i was in high school. let me tell you a little bit about how i came to the subject i'm going to talk about today. time, as longlong as i can or member, ben obsessed with the first world war. -- as long as i can remember, been obsessed with the first world war. i had several members of my family who have fought in several different armies. it has always seemed to me, as one historian put it best when he described the first world war as the original sin of the 20th so much of what has conflicted us in the last 100 years comes directly out of that war. fascinatedlways been by it. i did a book called "to end all wars" that came out about 10 years ago which was about the first world war, focused on the british experience because that they conflict was sharpest between people who thought though war was a noble and necessary crusade and the people who thought, correctly i think, that it was absolute madness and would make the world turn for the worst in every conceivable way. mentioned that i just finished, "rebel cinderella" is the story of an american woman who lived through that time and that kind of woke life in the united states was like in the first world war and its immediate aftermath. that is what i am writing about right now. so the thoughts i'm going to share with you today are not from a book that is published, but from a book in progress. just wanto ahead -- i to make sure -- are you folks seeing my screen or do i have to click share screen again? good. you are seeing mine -- that's fine. let me go ahead. describe thest usual way we remember americans in the first world war. about aspect of that history that we tend to ignore. the way the story is usually told, the european powers had been battling themselves to a stalemate for nearly three years , starting in 1914. the british, the french, the .ermans the war produced untold millions larger numbereven of wounded and destruction beyond that of any previous european war. it left a devastated landscape still, the carnage went on and on, leaving the powers of the old world exhausted. then, german submarines started sinking american ships. president woodrow wilson, who was in power at the time, declared enough is enough. and on april 2, 1917, he went before congress and asked it to declare war and congress probably did so. john jpicked n roll pershing to lead the u.s. troops who went to europe. -- picked general john j pershing. he went to france, claimed lafayette we are here, and by mid 1918, some 2 million american troops were in europe. they fought bravely, they helped swiftly, ther, armistice came, which was really greeted withender tremendous fervor here and all the warring countries, tickertape parades welcomed the american troops home, general pershing was greeted as a great hero. on that is where the chapter world war i in so many american history textbooks and. the country is at peace. the next chapter of american history begins, the 1920's, flappers, prohibition, speakeasies, babe ruth, the model t ford, and so forth, right? but this skips over a great deal. so i want to go back and look at the war years more closely and then at the two years that followed the so-called peace. from the moment the united states entered the war, there was a fierce up again the barrage from the government stop -- from the government. this is a u.s. army recruiting poster. look at it for a moment and the image of ferocity it contains. tremendous paranoia about spies. why? not because there actually were a lot of german spies in the united states. almost alleen, but of them had been rounded up fairly early in the war because their paymaster made the mistake of leaving their reef case behind on a new york elevated train and it was promptly collected by the american agent who is tailing him. so there really were no german spies by the time the u.s. ended the war, but there was this tremendous paranoia in the air, i think in part because the huged states had a foreign-born population. the first reflection was a paranoia about spies and then a paranoia about everything german, sometimes mixed with a long-standing anti-semitism. look at this poster, for example. the people spy has a german helmet, but may be a jewish nose? atmosphere ofthe this time from my father who was 25 years old in 1917. he was the son of a jewish immigrant from germany. the family spoke german at home, but they were terrified of doing so on the street. some states actually passed laws against speaking german in public. german language instruction stop at schools and universities across the country. signs appeared like this one in a park in chicago. and amazingly, there were burnings of german books. here's a bonfire outside a high ofool in marabou, wisconsin german language books and textbooks. another picture of that fire. if you read the slide, it says of german the remains in baraboo high school." inert prager was a minor illinois who tried to enlist in the u.s. navy but was turned down because he had a glass eye. he had the bad luck to be german born. was seized1918, he by a mob, wrapped in an american flag, forced to sing the star-spangled banner and lynched. here are the people who lynched him. they were put on trial. the jury deliberated for 10 minutes and found them innocent while a military band played --side the courthouse stop outside the courthouse. there was anti-german craziness everywhere. the rotors no german views it play. weddings were played without mendelssohn's wedding march. berlin, iowa became lincoln, iowa. east germantown pennsylvania became pershing. indiana became pershing, named after the general. the frankfurter became the hotdog. ferocity in the air at the very highest level. for example, this is the former secretary of state of the secretary of war, senator from new york. special he was a emissary of president wilson. he told an audience in new york in the summer of 1917 that "pro german tracers" -- pro german traders" were threatening the war effort. he said there are men walking about the city tonight who ought to be taken out and shot for treason. newspapers published in this city every day, the editors of which deserve conviction and execution for treason. with his hatred of the media, he would be right at home in the trump administration. people like him were as appears as they were about the war because there was considerable resistance to it. this is another thing that gets left out of our history books. there was a group called the women's pieced party that agitated against the war, both before and after the united states turned. here's an advertisement for an antiwar meeting that was to take place on the very eve of the war itself the day before wilson went to congress to ask for the declaration. two days later, this organization's office two blocks away from the white house was vandalized and smeared with yellow paint. were popular antiwar songs and there were newspapers, publications that took a strong antiwar slant like this socialist newspaper in new york city. a national magazine that was a strong voice against the war, which was the liveliest magazine at the time, a magazine that published john reed, walter lippmann, sherwood anderson and many others, many of the best artists and cartoonists of the day. in many ways, it was a precursor of today's "new yorker." it published antiwar cartoons like this one, christ shot by a firing squad. if you look carefully at the hats and helmets, you will see all of the warring countries are represented in the firing squad. prominent lyrical figures who spoke out against the war like socialist party leader eugene debs, the five-time socialist candidate for president stop -- for president. anarchist leader emma goldman who started organizing against the draft. senators were strongly against the war, the boldest voice was that of robert le pollock of wisconsin. he asked if this is a war to make the world safe for democracy is wilson probably proclaimed, why shouldn't there be self-determination for ireland, for egypt, for india? he told his fellow senators that you can still be a patriot and oppose a particular war and in the 19th century, he gave examples of how both daniel webster and abraham lincoln had done so. missives ineiving the mail, he was hanged in effigy at the university of wisconsin, and is low senators shouldan investigation, he be expelled from the senate? debs and goldman had worse fates, but we will come back to that. quickly toent moved suppress antiwar demonstrations. and anyone who refused -- militaryervice service was sent to prison are locked up in camps like this one in fort douglas, utah. here is one such resistor, and antiwar activists and social worker named robert altman who was sent to prison. we will come back to him. -- robert baldwin. we will come back to him. one thing that characterized this time was the rise of vigilante groups. organizations sprang up around the country. the largest was called the american protective league. this is the badge its members got to wear. operative american protective league, auxiliary to the u.s. department of justice. because the organization did indeed have justice apart -- justice department support. by the end of 1917, the american protective league had more than 200,000 members will stop it was made up of men, only men, no women, who are too old to fight but who wanted to feel they were defending their country at home. what did they do? among other things, they carried out what they called slacker raids, to find people who had not registered for the draft and make citizens arrest. sometimes a slacker with somebody who had failed to buy a war bond. example are some of the young men who were arrested in a slacker raid in 1918 in which 60,000 people were rounded up because they had no draft cards will stop but these slacker raids by the american mildctive league were a side of the vigilante lit -- vigilante is him that took off stop other expressions were much worse. glorifiedike this vigilante violence and sometimes people acted on that urge. a newspaper headline about one such episode involving mosties -- members of the military group, the industrial group. were tulsa, oklahoma eaten, tarred and feathered. what this article does not say is one of the leaders of the mast vigilantes who carried out this action was the local police chief who had tipped off the newspaper in advance to have a reporter on the scene. another photograph of victim of tarring and feathering fromman who was a farmer luverne, minnesota, who was attacked by a group of masked men in 1918 because he refused to buy war bonds. the men who attacked him were put on trial and found innocent. someone else, a wobbly organizer , had a worse fate. he was seized from his bed in butte, montana in the middle of the night and hang from a railroad village -- railroad bridge outside of town. here is his body. frank little, 38 years old. to organizes coming workers for the wobblies in a mining town in butte, montana, where an underground fire several weeks earlier had taken the lives of more than 160 minors. that brings us to an important point. the real target of oppression was not really draft dodgers or alleged pro-germans, it was the left, and it was organized labor. norma's an era of in labor strife -- of in norma's labor strife. there were huge strikes every year with hundreds of thousands of workers walking off the job each year. they were met with force. sometimes, it was national guard or state militia that put down strikes. these are state militia men in massachusetts. some striking closing mill workers. that is a striking garment worker being arrested. the war gave the federal government and big business the perfect excuse to crack down on organized labor in every way. so was onlye to do exacerbated by the rise of the bolsheviks in russia. the american establishment was terrified at the prospect of the russian revolution spreading to the united states. i think this is what led, starting in 1917 for the next two years or so, to the worst time of political repression in the united states since the end of slavery. it is an error that has largely been forgotten about. i want to emphasize this political repression happened not just during the first world war, it continued for more than two years after the war ended and it happened on several fronts. there were a series of laws passed, the most important of which was the espionage act of .917 actually, an amended version of that law is still with us and people like national security whistleblower edward snowden has been arrested under it. but the law of 1917, the espionage act that year, among other things gave the government the power to censor the press. remember the magazine "the masses" that i talked about? its issue, august 1917, was last. that issue is printed, but it was banned from the u.s. mail. why? because sensors objected to several pieces of text and several cartoons. here's one of the cartoons they objected to and thought subversive. the liberty bell crumbling. so, the best magazine in the country was forced to cease publishing. years, thext four spring of 1917 through the spring of 1921, more than 400 issues of american newspapers or magazines were banned from the mail from 75 different obligations. in many cases, that meant the publication shutting down entirely. was america's chief press center? it's the guy in this picture. albert s burleson. he was the postmaster general and the law gave him the power to censor what went through the mail. he was a former congressman from texas, actually the first texan to serve -- very conservative, and arch segregationist. his family owned 20 say it -- his family owned 20 slaves. he loved being the chief sensor. right after the armistice in november 1918, president wilson declared an end to censorship. the war was over, so why do we need censorship anymore? burleson paid no attention. he kept on banning publications he didn't like. wilson didn't seem to mind, paid very little attention, and on occasion, explicitly backed him. facet was the way the government moved to jail critics of the war. i showed you a picture of eugene the, socialist leader and leader before that of the rail workers union. here is sentenced for speaking out against the war. like so many were critics, he was still in jail two years after the war ended. in november 1920, while debs was convict number 9653, he was the socialist party candidate for president and received more than 900,000 votes. far from the only person sent to jail for speaking out against the war, someone else imprisoned was kate richardson o'hare, a fiery activist and martyr. in prison, she became good friends with emma goldman, the war opponent we talked about earlier, also jailed for opposing the war. goldman spent two years in, but after that, the government deployed another weapon against her. it deported her from the united states, where she had lived for more than 30 years. and 248 other radicals the government was eager to get rid of worshiped off to russia just before christmas of 1919 on this decrepit troop ship. feels eerily familiar today, in 1919, the united states was swept by a frenzy about deporting people. eyeing than three people the democratic and republican presidential nominations in 1920 were campaigning on promises of mass deportations. this deportation frenzy began in 1919, the war was over, but the cost of living had soared, we were in the midst of the biggest strike wave in american history, one in five american workers went on strike during the year 1919. these are chicago police called out because of the steelworkers strike in chicago. the year 1919 was also the year of some of the worst racial violence in american history. why? in part because of returning war veterans. and severalks million whites were competing for jobs and the jobs were scarce because the war industries had closed down. be as a tough time to black person in the united states. this is a crowd of white people in chicago stoning a black man. you can't see him because he's trying to hide under the back porch of that house. in several cities, martial law was declared and the national guard or state militia called out, like these soldiers questioning a man on the street in chicago. north,a lynching in the in omaha, nebraska and that attempt to hang the mayor of omaha came when he intervened to try to stop a lynching. he was cut down just in time, but the black man he was trying to save was not so lucky. martial law was declared in omaha and in a number of cities in 1919. year, 76 like americans were lynched, the highest total in more than a decade. 76 black americans were lynched. all but a handful of the dead were lack. mentioned various people hoping to campaign for president in 1920 were doing so on a let form of deporting people. one of them was the attorney general mitchell palmer. his name, we were member best today in connection with the so-called palmer raids of late 1919 and early 1920 in which an estimated 10,000 radicals around the country were arrested, namely those who palmer hoped could be deported because they were not american citizens. this was a country filled with recent immigrants and some not so recent from decades before like emma goldman. many of these folks have never bothered about getting officially naturalized because it was a time when the country had been welcoming. but now this was a tool that could be used against them. here are some of the people palmer ordered arrested, rounded up and awaiting deportation at ellis island in 1919. had previously been a place of great hope because it was the first site of the united states tens of millions of immigrants had as they sailed into new york harbor. in the course of these palmer raids, they also seized and destroyed radical literature. federal and local police in boston with some of their hall there. justice department agents and local police also took the occasion to trash the offices of the radical groups where they made their arrests. this is the new york city office of the industrial workers of the world and what it looked like after the palmer raids stop note that the raiders were proud to have done something like this. newspapered photographers to come in and take pictures of their handiwork . there was, however, an unexpected hero of this very dark time. his name was lewis f post and he was the acting secretary of labor. here is how he came into the picture. peopleest of the attorney general palmer wanted deported were carried out by the justice department. but deportation had to be approved by the immigration bureau which fell under the department of labor. post happened to be acting secretary of labor because the secretary was sick, the number two person had just resigned to run for congress, and so post, who was a progressive former newspaperman was in charge of the labor department stop he was -- in charge of the labor department. he was outraged that thousands of people could be expelled from the united states slowly -- solely because of their political opinions. shrewdalso a very bureaucratic maneuver, he was a lawyer and knew the law and used his position of power to invalidate warrants on which many of these folks had been arrested, to let them out of jails where they were being held, and he was able to save several thousand people from being deported from the united states. enraged course, attorney general palmer and it whoged palmer's assistant was the real architect of the 20-year-old j edgar hoover, then head of the justice department's radical division and not long afterward, the head of the bureau of investigation that became the the -- athe -- a post post hoover occupied for gaetz. occupied for decades. hoover got congress to investigate post, but post held on and kept his position. hoover lost his battle with post but he went on to win many others. hoover greatly enlarged government infiltration and surveillance of left-wing groups of all sorts, something that would last for a century to come. that work included the planting of professional provocateurs. for here is the front page of a newspaper from pittsburgh about some people arrested in an in 1919.ombing plot there were three suspects, but look closely at the one in the upper right. localthe secretary of the branch, supposedly named leo walch, but his real name was louis wendell, agent 836 of the bureau of investigation. for two years, he had been active in the branch in pittsburgh, periodically slipping away to meet j edgar hoover in washington and new york and brief him. some of what the pittsburgh wobblies were accused of doing was actually instigated by him. aspect of these very repressive years, 1917 to 1920, not only did the justice department greatly increase in progressive activists of all sorts, but so did the american military. the key figure here was a man na med lieutenant colonel ralph h. van dean. he started with intelligence war, 1899e philippine to 1902, an extremely brutal conflict where torture was routine by the u.s. army who wantedipinos their country to be independent. intelligencemy vasttions and set up a operation on filipino independence advocates and mobilized u.s. army officers across the island to feed him information. in thee had other posts military, but was stationed in washington when the united states entered the first world war, and he immediately went to the secretary and asked to set up an army intelligence operation. but this was not army intelligence to find out what the germans were up to, because the british and french had been doing that for several years already. it was rather an excuse to spy on so-called subversives here at home. deman hadear, van over 1000 people working for him in the united states, military and civilian, gathering information on black activists, one of the people they spied on was martin luther king's grandfather. on labor activists of all kinds and people who were against the war, massing tens of thousands of pages on such americans here at home. thedeman moved on, but practice of military intelligence, spying on american civilians, continued for decades. active in the was antiwar movement in the 1960's, working against the vietnam war, and in the 1970's under the freedom of information act, i was able to get records that army intelligence compiled on me and that perio -- in that period, as they had on thousands of american citizens. going back to 1919-1920, the military in this era were very worried about trouble from many sources, and they thought always in ethnic terms. the italians were possible anarchists. jews were possible socialists and communists. irish were possible irish republican army sent with either's. black americans were an all-around threat to be contained. here is the reflection of military thinking at the time, part of an ethnic map of new york city. jews in the northeastern corner of manhattan. by theprepared in 1919, former head of military intelligence for new york. bys color and letter-coded ethnicity. red is for russian jews, showing where they lived. c for italians. "negro," as, for they were called then. the bottom right, for irish. the numbers refer to union halls, iww offices and the like. the blue stars with numbers are offices of suspicious publications, from the naacp magazine to socialist newspapers in english and other languages. the military fear of an uprising was so great, the army actually prepared a contingency plan for putting the united states, the whole country under martial law, complete with the wording of a proclamation the president should issue. happily, things did not reach that point, but it is a reminder of how close to the brink we came. basically, several things happened to still the hysteria. by the early 1920's, the economy picked up, was booming, the on employment rate was low. the russian revolution did not spread to the united states, and the labor movement had been effectively crushed. but those who had been active against the war did not stay put. remember, the young social workers sent to prison for refusing the draft. here he is, decades later outside the supreme court, the institution on which he had a huge impact, because he became the founder of moving spirit -- and moving spirit for decades of the american civil liberties union. remember kate richards o'hare, the jailed antiwar activist i mentioned earlier. once she got out of prison, she led a cross-country march demanding release of other political prisoners, and they picketed the white house for two months with the support of the aclu, and she was finally successful. in 1921, warren harding became president, and under pressure hem those demonstrations, finally let the remaining prisoners out of jail. toeven invited eugene debs visit him on the way home from prison. harding'sbs, leaving office after that visit. he joked he had run for president five times, but this was the first time he'd actually gotten to the white house. so, what can we conclude about this era? i think it was a time when american democracy came very close to losing its soul, and a lso a time that reminds us that there are currents of xenophobia, nativism and a hunter scapegoats that have long run below the surface of this country and still run there today. tohink it's a good time remember, words that emma goldman said in court in 1917 just before she was sentenced to prison. remember, she was on trial for organizing against the draft, and was accused of being unpatriotic. she said to the jury, gentlemen of the jury, we respect your patriotism, but may there not be different kinds of patriotism? our patriotism is that of the ma n who loves a woman with open eyes, is enchanted by her beauty yet sees her faults. it was a good definition of patriotism then, and i think it still is today. and iank you very much, would be glad to hear any comments or questions people have. >> we do have a number of questions coming in to the question and answer box, and please continue to type them and we will be happy to take them. before i get to those, i am wondering, just because what is happening today, i wonder if you could speak to the role of the flu pandemic in 1919 and its relationship to all these other events? is it just something also happening then, or is there an interplay between some of the violence and unrest happening in 1919? >> well, the flu pandemic was closely tied to the war, and spread by the war. deadlyst case of that influenza that actually drew notice from doctors was at an army base in kansas that was one of the bases where u.s. soldiers were being trained to be sent in vast numbers to europe. then, you can trace how it spread from there, across the from the french part of brest where many of the ships carrying american soldiers landed. today, we're all being told correctly so to practice social distancing. event wherend of you cannot practice social distancing is warfare, because you are jammed together with other soldiers in a barracks, in a crowded troopship, in a trench in france. so the flu spread like wildfire, and the press censorship at the time did not help, because many newspapers were under pressure to downplay the urgency of the epidemic. >> thank you. certainly seems a difficult time period. we have a number of questions, sifting through here. let's see. werewants to know if there legal challenges to censorship during and after world war i? >> legal challenges? yes, there were. i am not as up-to-date on the cases as i should be, because i have not gotten yet to that part of the book that i'm writing. [laughter] i am still in 1917, 1918. but there were legal challenges. one of them was turned down by the supreme court, and it was th en that oliver wendell holmes famous statement in writing the opinion that freedom of speech does not extend to the freedom to shout "fire" in a crowded theater. actually later that same year, 1919, he and justice brandeis actually dissented from another supreme court case on freedom of speech, the so-called abrams case, and wrote a very vigorous dissent that essentially said this censorship has gone way too far. ask me in a year, and i will have a much better answer for you when i reach that point in my book. .> also, a legal note any wants to know, is there legal basis for martial law, is there a way it is constitutional? >> good question. again, because i'm not a lawyer, it's not something i know as much about as i should. certainly, in national emergencies, the state governor has the power to declare an emergency and call the national guard, and under certain circumstances, the president has the power to federalize the national guard or call out the army. enforceer did that to school integration, in the city of little rock. but the full legalities of that i don't know. on whatit would depend one's definition of a national emergency would be. i can imagine many people trying to challenge that in court, if a president declared one today. >> thank you. rob wants to know, in what ways did the oppression of this era inspire or shape the movement for civil rights, with the actions of organizations like ly formed and new organizations like the aclu and national women's party? >> well, i think the establishment of the aclu was a tremendously important thing for civil rights in this country. left, progressives generally went into a period of considerable hibernation in the 1920's, because the movement was smashed so ruthlessly in 19 18-1920. the iww, for instance, was essentially eviscerated by the government. mosthe most militant labor unio. than 100 top more officials of the iww, raided every single office around the country, confiscated five tons of documents which were later burned by the justice department. put more than 100 wobblies on trial in a four-month show trial and sento in 1918, these folks to prison. the largest mass trial ever in american history. essentially a signal that the government was crushing the most militant wing of the labor movement. in the early 1920's, even the very moderate american federation of labor lost millions of members. the united states, warren harding, calvin coolidge, herbert hoover, was not friendly to the left in any way, and the labor movement didn't really come back to life in a big way until the 1930's under franklin roosevelt. >> thank you very much. we have again just wonderful questions coming in. this is a group of history educators, of course. >> i can see. [laughter] >> you can see them? , i'm seeing a number of questions about your primary sources, if some of them are available digitally, particularly that matthew showed, -- map you showed, or will they be cited and reproduced in your upcoming book? >> that amazing map i found online. i couldn't tell you exactly the website involved, but i think if you google "ethnic map of new york, military intelligence 1919," it will very quickly bring something up. one set of resources that are online now, through an --anization, a website cald , associated.com with ancestry.com, has digitized a vast number of military records. they've also digitized the records of the bureau of investigation's spying on subversives during this period, because this is a military, patriotic group and they regard these folks as having fought the war at home. hoover'segard bureau of investigation as being patriotic by my definition, but i am delighted to find hundreds of thousands of pages of their records online. another tremendously useful resource, which i am sure almost all of you probably know about, congress'sary of chronicle of america database of old newspapers, the period before the copyright law kicks in in the mid-1920's. there's many millions of pages of newspapers. that's a useful source. and of course, those of you connected with universities and other institutions that have subscriptions through their libraries know about the happy trust, which has digitized millions of pages of old newspapers and other publications. so, there are a lot of things, a lot of things out there, that are a lot more easily available than they used to be. and i'm discovering new ones, all the time. fascinating case i stumbled on the other day, thanks to someone i met who told me about it. thee was a clothing mill in state of georgia, which somehow or other, somebody at georgia tech found out this company had a stash of old paperwork and records and so forth in its basement, and the georgia tech library people asked, can we have a look at this stuff? they took it over, went through the collection, discovered all sorts of business records going back to 1900 or so, and among privatee reports by detectives who had been hired to infiltrate the labor force of this plant, and reporting to the managers on what they found in the labor force. i love sources like that. because normally, reports of undercover agents is the kind of thing you can't easily find. they get destroyed. they get hidden. so, there's an awful lot of sources out there, and when this book is done, just as all the other books i have written, historical books, there will be very full source notes that tell you exactly where to find the material. a member of the library of congress consortium, so i'd make a pitch, for chronicle of america, if you are not using it, do use it, it goes all the way to 1963 now. if you have a moment, sylvia wonders if you could address the impact of black soldiers protesting, following the war. the vets who camped out outside d.c. following the war. >> black americans had a terrible time during this period, because they were eligible for the draft, 400,000 black men went into the army. were alwaysy confined in segregated regiments, and often assigned the worst jobs. but ta great many of them were n combat. they came back to the united states, where there was a boom whitechings, and where workers were terrified that the jobs they expected to come home to might be taken by a black man. seat's what produced this, the terrible writing and protests. of course, when the police charged them to break up fights and so on, it was almost always the blacks who got arrested, and sometimes killed, and very seldom the whites. there are at least 10 or 12 cases of black returning vets who were lynched in their army uniforms in the south. >> thank you for addressing that. to finish up, we have a question about you and your work. oliver wants to know, you have done and continue to do great work as a historian on many among serious students of history and popular history. anyone with a cursory interest in searching will find your name. how do you reflect 20 years later that this particular book has taken this place? >> it has been quite amazing to me, for a couple of reasons. very hard time getting that book published. at the time i went looking for a publisher, which was now about 25 years ago, i had a good literary agent, i'd published three other books, won minor awards, nice reviews in the "new york times " and so forth. but of the 10 publishers who received the book proposal for a veryeopold's ghost," detailed memo, of the 10 publishers who received it, three of whom i knew personally, nine of the 10 turned them down. i still have letters from some of them saying, we think it is a good idea but nobody is interested, and there isn't even an african history shelf in most bookstores, or why don't you try this as a magazine article first? but the 10th publisher sort of got it, and that's the publisher i have been with ever since. partnk, you know, i think of the reason the book caught on was that i tried to tell a story in a way where i could tell a story through the people in it, and history had handed me some extraordinary characters. as if handing me the ingredients on a platter for a great dinner, and all i had to do was just to mix them up. here was this brilliant, voracio usly greedy king in belgium, who was an absolute master of public relations. he could have taught 20th century tobacco companies a thing or two about public relations. here were explorers, missionaries, crusading white,lists, black and american, european, african, trying to expose the things the king was doing. thator me, it was history demanded to be told to the characters. i think one of the problems in history writing often is that, although there is a tradition in certain areas of telling stories, i mean, look at the number of biographies and collected biographies we have for example of the founding fathers or abraham lincoln, the people around, or books about the civil war, world war ii, particular generals, particular people who went through those wars. in many other areas, the people writing don't tend to tell history that way, because they are scholars writing for other scholars. often doing extraordinary research, finding out things that people like me can make use of, but they think of their main audience as being other scholars in that particular specialty. i'm trying to reach a general audience, and i never went to graduate school, so i have no special training as a historian. but i spent 10 years as a magazine editor, and i think in many ways that was very good training. what a magazine editor is thinking about all the time is, what do we have to do to make people read the story? is it too long for the space? is it too short for the space? could it be enlivened by the addition of certain characters? is there enough suspense? that is where i went to school, in a way, and i've just tried to apply those skills to writing history, while at the same time trying to be absolutely accurate, have source notes, bibliography, all of that kind of stuff. well, thank you. we are all very grateful for your work. we are going to close out in just a moment here, but we actually have a request. if you could read that quote about patriotism one more time? >> ok. let me find it here. >> not to put you on the spot. >> all right. this was something emma goldman said. she and her longtime comrade alexander berkman were put on trial in 1917 for organizing against the draft. gentlemen ofs, " the jury," because of course in those days there were no women on jerry's, and here's -- juries. and here's what she said. "gentlemen of the jury, we respect your patriotism, but may do be different kinds of patriotism? our patriotism is that of a man who loves a woman with open eyes. he is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults." it is really one of my favorite quotations, and i'm condensing it from her full speech, which i think you could pretty easily find online, because again, anything of that era without a copyright, the books are going to be on google books. if you search a few phrases from that quote, you can find the whole speech. >> thank you. i think that's a wonderful way to end. we so appreciate you being with us, adam, especially in a changed format. your willingness to be flexible is really quite extraordinary, so we thank you, all the history educators who have been here, about 100 people joining us today. not just history educators, but enthusiasts from across the country. we really appreciate that. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> this is american history tv, exploring our nation's past every weekend on c-span three. yearsn "reel america," 75 ago from april to june 1945, the battle of okinawa raged in the pacific. over 82 days, the japanese launched nearly 2000 kamikaze attacks on american ships. the fleet that came to stay is a u.s. navy film assembled mainly from combat was assembled mainly from aerial and naval footage, directed by a hollywood director who made many low-budget westerns. we see at 7:00 the restored 1878 council house in oklahoma that was taken from the tribe in 1907 but reacquired in 2010. he talks about the roots in alabama and georgia, forced removal and the struggle to remain new lands and sovereign government. 7:00 eastern, the national constitution center in philadelphia hosting a virtual town hall about george washington's influence shaping the revolutionary war and his role making it work. on the presidency, a conversation about c-span's book the presidents. ranking america's best and worst chief executives. david ackerman, david stewart and brian lamb. that is what is coming up on american history tv. ♪

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