conference with you. >> it is a pleasure to be with you because really, there is no kind of person i more enjoy talking with then teachers of history. teachers of history have been tremendously important in my life. from high school, from college, and also people who are involved in teaching public history by working and museums and historical sites and so forth. all of them has had a huge influence on my life. i do not think i would be writing history today were it not for two very good history teachers that i had in high school. let me tell you a little bit about how i came to the subject that i'm going to talk about today. i have for a long time, as long as i can remember, been obsessed with the first world war. i had relatives on both sides of my family who fought in it in several different armies. it always has sort of seemed to me, i think the historian simon put it best, when he described the first world war as the original sin of the 20th century. so much of what has afflicted us in the last 100 years comes directly out of that war. i have always been fascinated. i did a book called to end all war wars which came out about ten years ago, about the first world war focused on british experience because that is where britain conflict was sharpest between people who felt the war was a unnecessary crusade, and those who thought it was absolute madness and made the world turn for the worse in every conceivable way. the book that jenny mentioned that i just finished is the story of an american woman who lived through that period. that kind of woke me up to what life in the united states was like in the first world war and its immediate after matt. that is what i am writing about right now. the thoughts i'm going to share with you today are from a book and progress. let us go ahead. i just want to make sure, are you folks seeing my screen? do i have to click share screen again? okay. good. that's great. let me go ahead. i want to first describe the usual way that we remember america in the first world war. and then talk about aspects 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 germans. the war produced untold millions of deaths. and even larger number of wounded, and destruction beyond that of any previous european war. it left devastated landscape as well and still, the carnage went on and on, leading leaving the powers of the old world exhausted adjourning german submarine started shrinking american ships. president woodrow wilson declared enough is enough. on april 2nd 1917 he went before congress and asked to declare war and congress promptly did so. wilson picked general john j pershing to lead the u.s. troops. pershing arrived in france and declared famously, lafayette we are here and by mid 1918, sent 2 million american troops that were in europe. they fought bravely, they help to win the war. swiftly, the armistice came, which was really a german surrender. it was greeted with tremendous fervor here and all the warring countries. ticker tape parades welcome to the american troops home. general pershing was greeted as a great hero. that is where the chapter on world war one and so many american history textbooks ends. the countries at peace, the next chapter of american history begins. the 1920s, flappers, prohibitions, speakeasies, babe ruth, the model t ford and so on. but this skips over a great deal. 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 proper gander. this is a u.s. army recruiting course. just look at it for a second. the image of ferocity that it contains dog. there was a tremendous paranoia about spots. why? not because there were a lot of german spies in the united states. there had been, but almost all of them had been rounded up fairly early in the war because their pay master made the mistake of leaving his briefcase behind a new york elevated train and it was promptly collected by the american agent who was telling him. there were no real german spies by the time u.s. entered the war. but there was this tremendous trip paranoia in the air i, think in part because the united states had a huge ongoing population. the first reflection of that was paranoia about spies, then paranoia about everything german. sometimes mixed with a long-standing antisemitism. look at this poster for example. the evil spy has a german helmet but, maybe a jewish nose? i heard about the atmosphere at 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 and public. german language instruction stopped in schools and universities across the country. signs appeared like this one in a park in chicago. amazingly, there were burnings of german books. here is a bonfire outside a high school in baraboo is constant. german language books and textbooks. another picture of that fire and if you read the slogan it says here lies the remains of german and dhs. robert was a minor in illinois who tried to enlist and the u.s. navy. he got turned down because he had a glass eye. he had the bad luck to be german born. one day, in 1918, he was seized 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 ten minutes and found them innocent while military band played outside the courtyard. there was anti-german craziness in the air in other ways. no more german music was played. weddings took place without wedding marches. names were changed. berlin iowa became lincoln -- hughes germantown pennsylvania became pershing. he's germantown in indiana became pershing named after the general. it became the hot dog. there was ferocity in the air at the very highest level, for example, this is the former secretary of state, secretary of war, senator of new york, now in 1917 he was a special emissary of wilson. he told the audience in new york in the summer of 1917 that quote, pro german traders northward threatening the war effort. here is what he said in his own words. there are men locking about the streets of the city tonight who ought to be taking off at sunrise tomorrow. there are some papers published in the city every day. the editors of which deserve conviction and execution for treason. with his hatred, he was right at home in the trump administration. people like him were as fears as they were about the war because there was considerable resistance to -- and this is what soften left out of our history books. there was a book called the women's peace party that advocated against the war, both before and after the united states. here is an advertisement for anti or meeting that was to take place on the very eve of the war itself the day before wilson went to congress and asked for the declaration. two days later, this organizations office just two blocks away from the white house was vandalized, and smeared with yellow paint. there were popular anti war songs like this one. there were newspapers, publications that took a strong anti war stand like the socialist newspaper in new york city. a national magazine that was a strong voice against the war was the masses. it was a popular magazine at the time. it was a magazine that published john reid, walter witman, and many others, many of the best artists and cartoons of the day. it was a precursor of today's new yorker. it published anti war cartoons like this one. christ being shot by a firing squad. if you look carefully, there are different hats and helmets. all of the war countries are being represented. there were prominent political figures like eugene, five-time socialist candidate for presidency. the very charismatic emma goldman, charismatic leader, started organizing against the draft. several u.s. senators were strongly against the war in which the boldest voice was that of robert. he asked on the floor of the senate, if this is a war to make the world safe from democracy as wilson proudly proclaimed, why should there not be self determination for ireland, egypt, india? he told his fellow senators that you could still be a patriot and oppose a particular war. in the 19th century he gave an example of how both daniel webster and abraham lincoln had done so. he began receiving this in the mail. he was hanged in effigy at the campus of the university of wisconsin and his fellow senators -- should he be expelled from the senate? goldman had worst states but we will come back to that. the government moved quickly to suppress anti war demonstrations. anyone who refused military service was sent to prison or locked up in camps like this one in fort douglas utah. here is one such resist or an anti war activist and social worker named roger. he was sent to prison. we will come back to him. one of the things that really characterizes this was the the rise of vigilantes. organization sprang up around the country. the american protective league was one of the largest. this was the batch that its members got to where. i think you can read it on the screen. operative auxiliary u.s. department of justice. they did indeed have justice department support. at the end of 1917, the american productive leak had more than 2000 200,000 members. it was made up of men, only men. they were too old to fight. they wanted to feel like they were defending their country. what did they do? among other things, they carried out what they called slack or raids to find people who were not registered for the draft and make citizens erect arrest them. sometimes also a slack or was someone who had failed to buy a war bond. here for example, are some of the young men who were arrested in a slack or raid in new york city in 1918 in which 60,000 people were rounded up because they had -- the slack or raids by the american protectively was on the while the mild side of the vigilante. other expressions were much worse. cartoons like this one glorified vigilante for violence and sometimes people acted on that. here is a newspaper headline involving members of the country's most militant labor group, modern's as they were called. in tulsa oklahoma, men were beaten, what they article doesn't say is that one of the leaders who carried out this action was a local police chief who had tipped off the newspaper in advance to have a reporter on the scene. here is a photograph of another victim of tarring and feathering. he was a mom farmer from minnesota. he was attacked by a group of masked men in 1918 because he refused to buy war bonds. the men who were who attacked him were put on trial and found innocent. someone else, a wobbly organizer, he was seized from his bed in montana in the middle of the night and hanged from a railroad bridge outside of town. there is his body. frank little, 38 years old. his crime was coming to organize workers for them while blurs and the mining town where an underground fire several weeks earlier had taken the lives of more than 160 minors. that brings us to an important point, which is that the real target of repression during this war, during the warriors and the u.s. was not really draft doctors or alleged pro germans. it was organized labor. this was an era of enormous labor strikes. starting about 19 nine for the next 10:12 years, there were huge strikes every year in the united states 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 and men in massachusetts. they are facing some striking mill workers. they were put down by police. this is someone in chicago being arrested. the war gave the federal government big business. the perfect excuse to crack down on organized slavery everywhere. they're impulse to do so was only exacerbated by the rise of the bolsheviks and russia. the american establishment was terrified at the prospect of the russian evolution spreading to the united states. this is what led in 1917 for the next two years or so to the worst period of political repression in the united states since the end of slavery. it is an era -- i want to emphasize that this political repression happened not just during the first world war, but it continued for more than two years after the war ended. it happened on several fronts. there were a series of laws passed. most important of which, was the espionage act of 1917. actually, an amended version of that law is still with us and people like national security agency whistleblower snowden, had been arrested. 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. this issue, august 1917 was its last. that issue was printed and it was banned from the u.s. mail. why? because sensors censored -- here is one of the cartoons that they rejected. the liberty bell. the best magazine and the country was forced to cease publishing. over the next four years, spring of 1917 through spring of 1921, more than 400 issues of american newspapers and magazines were banned from 75 different publications. in many cases, that meant the publication shutting down entirely. who is america's chief press sensor? this guy. albert. 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, the first texan to serve. very conservative and arch segregationist when he was born, his family owned 20 slaves. he loved being the chief censor. right after the armistice in november 1918, president wilson declared another censorship. the war was over. why would we need censorship at all? he paid no attention. he kept on banning publications he didn't like. wilson did not seem to mind. he paid very little attention and on occasion explicitly back him up. another facet of repression was the way the government moved to jail critics of the war. i earlier showed you a picture of eugene, a socialist leader of the railway workers union. here he is as a federal prison. like some -- he was still in jail two years after the war ended. in november 1920, he was convict number nine six five three in the federal penitentiary. he was the socialist party candidate for a candidate and receive more than 900,000 votes. someone else in prison was keith richards o'hare, socialist party activists and in prison she became good friends with emma goldman who we talked about earlier who is also jailed for opposing the war. goldman spent two years in prison, but after that, the government also employed another weapon against her. it deported her from the united states where she had lived for more than 30 years. she and 248 other radicals -- the government was eager to get rid of them. they were shipped off to russia just because just before christmas of 1919. the assist before. in a way that feels eerily familiar today in 1919, the united states was struck by frenzy about deport-ing. no less than three people would find the democratic and republican nomination in 1920, were campaigning on promises of nasty partitions. when this deportation frenzy began in 1919 the war was over, but during that the cost of living had sort. we were in the mid midst of the biggest strike wave in american history. one in five americans went on strike. these are chicago police called out because of worker strikes in chicago. the year 1919 was also weird with some of the worst racial violence in american history. why? in part, because of returning war veterans. 400, 000, and several million lights were competing for jobs. the jobs were scarce because the war industries had closed down. it was a tough time to be a black person in the united states, and some of the worst violence was in the north. this is a crowd of white people and chicago stoning a black man who. you cannot see him because he is trying to hide and the back porch of that house. and several cities, martial lot was declared, and the state militia was called out. these soldiers are questioning a man on the street in chicago. again, a lynching in the north. in omaha nebraska. in an attempt to hang the mayor of omaha came when he tried to stop the lynching. he was cut down just in time, but the black man who is trying to save wasn't. martial law was declared in omaha and in a number of cities in 1919. that year, 76 black americans were lynched. the highest would be more in the decade. the total death toll of 1919 race riots was in the hundreds. all of the handful of the dead were black. i mentioned various people, in 1920, we're doing campaigning on the platform of the pouring people. one of them was a mitchell, attorney general. we remember him in connection with -- in which an estimated 10,000 radicals around the country were arrested, mainly those who palmer hoped would be deported because they were not american citizens. remember, this was a country filled with recent immigrants, some not so recent, they had come decades before. many of these folks had never bothered becoming officially naturalized. the country had welcomed them. but now this was a tool that could be used against them. here are some of the people palmer ordered arrested, rounded up and awaited deportation in 1919. ellis island had been a place of great hope because it was the first sight of the united states with tens of millions of immigrants had, as they say -- in the course of these palmer raids, the raiders also seized to destroy radical literature. these are federal agents and local police and boston. justice department agency local police also took the occasion to trash the offices of the radicals and made arrests. this is the you new york city office of the industrial workers of the world. what it looked like after the palmer ratings. the raiders were proud. they had invited newspaper photographers to come and take pictures there was however an unexpected hero of this very dark time. his lame was lewis f. post. he was the acting secretary of labor. here's how he came into the picture. the arrests of the people that attorney general part palmer wanted deported were carried out by the justice department. that 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. post, who was a progressive newspaper man was in charge of the labor department. he was outraged by the planned deportations by the idea that thousands of people would be expelled from the united states solely because of their political opinions. he was also a very shrewd bureaucratic maneuver. he was a lawyer. he knew the law. he used his position of power. he did so to invalidate the reasons for which these folks were arrested. to let them out of jail where they were being held. he was able to save several thousand people from being deported from the united states. this of course enraged attorney general palmer. took it in ranged palmer's assistant who is the real architect. 24 year old jay edgar hoover, head of the justice department radical division. not long afterwards, the bureau of investigation, became a post that hoover occupied for decades. hoover was in raged against it. he prepared a huge dossier of material against him. he demand that post be fired. hoover got congress to investigate post. but post held on and kept his position. hoover lost his battle to post. but he went on to win many others. hoover really got his start big -- government infiltration and surveillance of left wing movements and all sorts. something that would last almost a century to come. what hoover did included the planting of -- for example, here is the front page of a newspaper of pittsburgh pennsylvania about people arrested in an alleged bomb plot by the eye w. wnem teen 19. there were three suspects. look more closely at the one on the upper right. he is the secretary of the local wildly branch, supposedly named leo walsh. his real name, is lewis when dull and he was ancient eight three six with the bureau of investigation, the fbi. for two years, he had been active in the wobbly branch in pittsburgh, periodically slipping away to meet hoover in new york. some of what the pittsburgh while believes were accused of doing was instigated by -- another aspect of this very vast repressive year, 1917 to 1920, is that not only did the justice department bring the increase of spying of all sorts, but so that the american military. the key figure here was a man named ralph. he was a career army officer. he had gotten his start in intelligence work in the filipino war. i'm not sure if you are familiar with it, 1899 to 1902. extremely brutal conflict with torture by the u.s. army against filipinos who had knee effrontery to want their country to be independent. ask he led an army intelligence operations. he set up a vast system of files on filipino independence advocates and he mobilized hundreds of u.s. army officers to feed him information. then he had another person in the military but he was stationed and, washington when the united states entered the first world war 1917 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 german war up to, because the british and french had been doing it. it was an excuse to spy right here at home. within a year, he had more than 1000 people for him in the united states. military and secretive. gathering information on black activists, one of the people they spied on was martin luther king's grandfather. labor activists have all kinds. people who were outspoken against the war. amassing tens of thousands of pages on such americans. he moved on, but the practice of military intelligence, spying on american civilians continued for decades. for example, i was active in the anti war movement in the 1960s working against the vietnam war. in the seventies, under the freedom of information act, i was able to get records that army intelligence had compiled on me in that period. as they had on thousands of american civilians. going back to 1919, 1920. the military and this era were very worried about troubles from many sources and they always fought and ethnic terms. italians were possible anarchists, jews were possible socialists and communists, irish world possible irish republican army sympathizers, black americans were and all around threat to be contained. here is a reflection of military thinking at the time. it's part of ethnic map of new york city shows the northeastern corner of manhattan. it was prepared in 1919 by the former head of military intelligence in new york. it's color and letter coating by ethnicities. red is four russian jews, showing where they live. brown is 40 talents. dark gray is for negroes as they call them. the numbers on the map refer to union halls, i w. w. officers. the blue stars with numbers, officers with suspicious publications from the naacp magazine to socialists newspapers in english and other languages. the military fear was so great that they prepared a contingency plan for putting the united states, the whole country under martial law. complete with the wording of proclamation that the president should issue if that happened. happily, things did not reach that. but it is a reminder of how close to the brink we came. basically, several things happened. by the early 19 twenties, the economy picked up. it was booming. unemployment rate was low. the russian revolution did not spare the united states, and the labor movement had been affected. those who had been active against the war did not stay quiet. remember the young social worker sent to prison for -- roger baldwin. here he is years later outside the supreme court. he had a huge impact. he became the founder of the moving spirit for decades of the american civil liberties unit. kate richards o'hare that 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, lauren hearting became president and under pressed pressure and those demonstrations, he finally let all the remaining prisoners out of jail. he even invited eugene dips to visit him on the way home from prison. here is deb's leaving office after that visit. he ran for president five times, but it was the first time he had actually gotten to the white house. what can we conclude about this era? i think it was a time when american democracy came very close to losing its soul. it is also a time that reminds us of the dark currents of xenophobic, nativism, scapegoats that had long run low below the surface of the country. i think it is a good time to 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. she was accused of being unpatriotic. she said to the jury, gentleman of the jury, we respect your patriotism, but maybe they're not be different kinds of patriotism. our patriotism is that of the men who has open eyes. loves the woman with open eyes. he is enchanted by her beauty yet sees her faults. it was a good definition of patriotism then and still is today. thank you very much. i would be glad to hear any comments or questions that people may have. >> adam, we do have a number of questions coming in. please continue to type them there. we will be happy to take them. before i get to those, just because of what is happening today, i wondered if you could speak to the role of the flu pandemic in 1919 and its relationship to all these other events. is it something that was also happening then or was there interplay between some of the violence and unrest that is happening in 1919? >> the flu pandemic was closely tied to the war and spread by the war. the first case of that deadly influenza that actually drew notice from doctors was at an army base in kansas. it was one of the bases where u.s. soldiers were being trained to be sent and vast numbers to europe. it can be traced on how it spread from there across the atlantic and outwards from the french port which was where many of the ships carrying american soldiers landed. of course today, we are out being told directly so, to practice social distancing. when kind of event where you cannot practice social distancing is warfare, because you are jammed together with other soldiers and the barracks in a crowded troop ship. in a trench in france. the flu just spread like wildfire and the censorship of the press did not help because many newspapers were under pressure to downplay the urgency of the epidemic. >> thank you. it certainly seems like a very difficult time period. we do have a number of questions. let's see. ross wants to know if there were any legal challenges to censorship during and after world war one. >> 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. i'm still in 1917 and 1918. but there were legal challenges. one of them was turned down by the supreme court and it was then that all -- holmes issued his famous statement and writing the opinion that freedom of speech does not extend to the freedom to shout fire in a crowded theater. a year or two -- actually later that same year, 1919, he and justice brand ice actually dissented from another supreme court on freedom of speech called abrams case. he wrote a very vigorous dissent which said that censorship had gone way too far. ask me in one year and i will have a much better answer for you once i reach that point. >> also, a legal note. rich wants to know is there any legal basis for martial law. is there a way that it is constitutional? >> good question. again, because i am not a lawyer, it is not something i know as much about as i should but certainly in national emergency, the state governor has the power to declare and call out the national guard. under certain circumstances the president has the power to federalize the national guard and call out the army. eisenhower did that to enforce school integration famously in little rock. the fully galaxies of that i do not know. i think it would depend on what ones definition of national emergency would be, and i can imagine people challenging that in court if they declared one today. >> thank you. bob wants to know and what ways that the oppression of this era inspire or shape the movement for civil rights with the actions existing organizations like the naacp as well as newly formed organizations like the aclu and the national moments party. >> certainly, i think the establishment of the aclu was innocent tremendously important thing for civil rights in this country. the left progressives generally went into a period of considerable hibernation in the 1920s because the movement had smashed so ruthlessly near 1918 1919, 1920. the eye w. w. for instance was a set and surely it is serrated by the government. most militant labor unions. they arrested more than 100 officials of the idly uw. rated every single wobbly officer out of the country, confiscated five tons of documents which were later burned by the justice department, put more than 100 wobbly is on trial on a four month short trial in chicago in 1919, i mean 1918. sent these folks to prison. it was the largest -- in american history. and it was essentially a signal that the government was crushing the most militant wing of the labor movement. and the early 19 twenties, even the very moderate american federation of labour lost more than 1 million members. the united states, warren harding, calvin coolidge, herbert hoover, they were not friendly to the left in any way. and the left did not really come back to life in a big way until the 1930s under franklin roosevelt. >> thank you very much. you have wonderful questions coming in. this is a group of history educators. >> i can see from the questions. >> in fact, they are favorites of yours, but i am seeing a number of questions about your primary sources, if some of them are available digitally, particularly that amazing map that you showed. will they be reproduced in your upcoming book? we are pretty enamored with those documents. >> 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, you will very quickly bring something up. one set of resources that are online now, through an organization, a website called fold three .com. it is associated with ancestry .com. it has digitized a number of, a vast number of military records. and they have also digitized the records of the investigation spying on subversive's during this period. this was a military and patriotic group. they regard these folks as having fought the war at home. i don't regard the bureau of investigation and hubert 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'm sure almost all of you know about his the library of congress and their chronic of america database with newspapers. this was before the copyright period kicked in the 1920s. many millions of pages from newspapers are a great resource. and of course, those of you are connected with universities and other institutions have some descriptions through your libraries. it has digitized millions of pages of newspapers. so there are a lot of things out there that are a lot more easily available than they used to be. and i am discovering new ones all the time. fascinating cases. i stumbled on when the other day someone told me about it. there was a clothing male in the state of georgia, which somehow or another someone in georgia found out that this company had a stash of old paperwork and records and so forth in its basement. and the georgia tech library people asked to have a look at that stuff. they took it over, went through the collection, and they discovered all sorts of business records going back to 1900 or so. and among them, there were reports by private detectives who had been hired to infiltrate the labor force of this plant. they were reporting to the managers about what they found. i love sources like that because normally reports of undercover agent says the kind of thing that you can't easily find. they get destroyed. they get hidden. so there are an awful lot of sources out there and win this book as done, just as with all the other books i have written, they will be very full of source notes that tell you exactly where you can find this material. >> i would just like also to make a pitch for chronicling america to teachers. it goes up to 1963 now. we are pretty excited. those digitize newspapers are free and available. you can look at those. if you do have a moment, sylvia wonders if you could address the impact of black soldiers protesting not getting support following the war. >> black americans had a terrible time during this period. they were eligible for the draft. 400,000 black men went into the army. usually, they were always confined in segregated regiments. often, they were assigned the worst jobs. but a great many of them were in combat. they came back to the united states, where there was a boom in lynchings, and where white workers were terrified that the jobs they expected to come home to might be taken by a black man. that is what produced these terrible riots and protests where, of course, when the police charged into break up fights and so on, it was almost always the blacks who got arrested and sometimes killed. very seldom it was the whites. there are at least ten or 12 cases of black returning veterans who were lynched in their army uniforms in the south. >> thank you for addressing that. to finish up, we do have a question about you and your work. all of her wants to know, you have done and continue to do great work on this and many topics. you struck a chord with serious students of history and popular history fans. even today, and even with a cursory interest in the congo will find your name first. how do you reflect, 20 years later, that this particular book has taken on this sort of life? >> it has been quite amazing to me for a couple of reasons. one was that i had a very hard time getting that book published. at the time i went looking for a publisher, which was about 25 years ago, i had a good literary agent that published three other books and a couple of other things. i received awards and nice reviews in the new york times. but of the ten publishers who received the book proposal for kingly upholds ghost, that is a very detailed memo. of the ten publishers who received it, three of them were people i knew personally. nine of the ten turned it down. i still have letters from some of them saying yes it is a good idea but i don't think anyone is interested or there isn't an african history shelf in most bookstores. or they would say a lot of you try this as a magazine article first. but the tenth publisher sort of got it. and that is the publisher i have been with ever since. i think part of the reason why the book caught on was that i tried to tell the story in a way where i could tell the story through the people in it. history had handed me some extraordinary characters, as if handing meeting ingredients on a platter for a great dinner and all i had to do is mix them up. here was this brilliant voraciously greedy kang 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. there were explorers, missionaries, crusading journalists, black, and white, american, european, african, who were trying to expose the things that the king was doing. and for me, it was history that demanded to be told through the -- one of the problems in history writing is that although there is a tradition in certain areas of telling stories. look at the number of biographies on the founding fathers, abraham lincoln, the people around him, or books about the civil war and world war ii, particular generals, particular people going through those wars. in many other areas, the people who are writing don't tend to tell history that way because they are scholars riding for other scholars. often, they do 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 am trying to reach a general audience and i never want to graduate school so i have no special training as a historian, but i spent ten years as a magazine editor. i think in many ways, that was very good training. what i meg zdnet it or 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 spaces? a two short for the space? could it be livened up by the addition of certain characters. is there enough suspense in it? that is where i went to school and i have just try to apply those skills to writing history. at the same time, i am trying to be absolutely accurate, have everything footnoted, have source notes, have bibliography, all of that kind of stuff. >> thank. you i think we are all very grateful for your work. we are going to close up in just a moment here. we actually had a request, though. if you could read that quote about patriotism one more time. >> okay. let me find it here. this was something emma goldman said she and her longtime comrade alexander bergman or put on trial in 1917 for organizing against the draft. and she begins. gentleman of the jury, of course in those days there were no women on juries. here is what she said. gentleman of the jury, we respect your patriotism, but may there not be different kinds of patriotism? our patriotism is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. he is enchanted by her beauty and he sees her faults. it's really one of my favorite quotations, and i'm condensing it from her full speech, which i think you could pretty easily find online. again, anything from that era, we are out of copyright. the books are going to be there. i think if you search a few phrases in that quote, you could easily find the whole speech. >> thank you. i think that's a wonderful way to end. we so appreciate you being with us, especially in a changed format. your willingness to be flexible is really quite extraordinary. we thank. you all the history educators who have been here, about 100 of us today, that's wonderful. not just history educators, but history enthusiasts from across the country really appreciate that.

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