It is published only a week ago and it feels like a little kickoff of what is going to be a number of talks that i will be doing here and there. This is the first one. A chance to try it out on all of you what i might hope to be doing later on as well. I will find out what works and doesnt work when i talk here tonight. Let me just say that my plan for this presentation has 23 different parts. I will start by saying a little bit about how i got on to this project in the first place and something about the process of working with it for a good number of years. Then i will move to a thumbnail, 1520 minute thumbnail of the story that lies at the heart of the book, and then i will do a little reading from the book, a certain passage or two from the book to give you a sense of flavor of what is in between the covers, and maybe at the very end i will say a little bit about what drew me to the project and while i think it was worth spending a few years working on and it might be worth reading a book about. How i came to the project. It was by total chance. Y i have on old friend who has a house in cornwall and one day in the mid90s, my friend invited by wife and myself down for dinner. And as i recall, we were standing around, it was a summer evening, standing around outside with gin tonics in our hands, i think, and one of the neighbors, who was a dinner guest, started telling us of little, what he called a piece of local history. He said it is just a piece of local history but since i am a history guy maybe i would be interested. He began to unfold this story to the tune of a few minutes and i was transfixed right away by the story. I was so intrigued and fascinated that as i recall y d yktd i could not sleep that night. I got up and drove straight to yale and went to our library there to see if anything much was written about this or known about this story beyond the locality of cornwall. And the answer wasnt very much. It is mentioned. I think they are here and there and all are maybe a couple books where it appears to the tune of 1015 pages. But the point is there was no full scale treatment. And i decided i would like to make a commitment as book project. 20 years in time have passed. It wasnt easy to do. I was leaping out of what was my period of history that i made my way as a colonialist and the historian of the colonial period and this was set in the 19th century so i had to feel my way into a new territory. I read a couple books along the way and i never let get of this and i got to a point of finishing this off. If i had not gone to a friends house that night this book wouldnt be here and a lot would be different. It happens that way sometimes. In fact, i have had other projects that were more or less by chance come my way but this was the most extreme case of serendipty in writing for me. Here is my thumbnail of the story. The background is a pattern, national eethos of the opening years of the 19th century. The newly independent United States began around then to reach out in a major way to the rest of the world in commerce, in its political ambation, in its go ahead spirit as it was said at the time. And the epitomy was the china trade of his out reach. A rapid trade with the fareast centering in the city of canton. Dozens of ships heading that way and returning loaded with cargos of tea, and silks, and many other chinamade items on which americans of that era placed an increasingly high premium. Well, travel to china for all of the tradeships involved a mid ocean stop over in the hawiian islands. It led to reshuffling of personal with a few young haw i hawaiian men coming on board and they go wherever the trade ships took them. And some might eventually land in one or another part of the United States, mostly, i think in new england. F fast forward to what is the first major scene or act in my book. It is an autumn day in the year 1809, the setting is yale college where students are passing in and out on their way i suppose to class. I myself see the same thing 200 years later many times. On this particular morning, there is something a little different. A young man who clearly doesnt belong there. He is darkskinned and exotic looking and wearing ragged sa sailer clothes is sitting off to one side quitely weeping. The yale students notice him, and feel concerned and ask him the reason for his apparent distress and he replies because no body gives me learning. He is referring to the fact that all of them are getting lots of good learning and he is not. And this comment is sure to get their attention. He is a hawaiian and worked as two years for crew. He was dropped off in new haven and found his way to the steps of yale. He had a hawaiian surname but took the given name of henry when working with the soldiers. He was taken under the wing of a number of yale students responding to his initial complaint about not learning they give him english language lessons and instructed him in the religious faith as yale was a very religious place at the time. I am not sure one could say the same thing about it today. For sure a lot has changes. One thing leads to another and the education and conversion of henry becomes what you might say campuswide project. I am exaggerating a bit but i think his presence was acknowledged on campus so much so in fact he was taken into the household of a College President who was a protestant minister named Timothy Dwight. And yale has a college of Timothy Dwight and i am a faculty fellow associate there. Dwight, and the students and a fair number of outsiders who come to have a look at the scene all get involved with him. And he makes Good Progress both in learning english and in his spiritual condition as well. And after some months, it is decide he should go else where to continue the same process. He is taken to an academy in massachusetts and passed around different ministers households where he visits for weeks or sometimes month at a stretch. Reports of his arrival and progress are published in religious newspapers and journals and in fact, he is on his way to what almost could be called a celebrity status. If we could have dropped down to hartford even you would have found people that knew about him for sure. His story, his achievements, leave people to wonder whether something similar might be done for others like thim. Other quote unquote heathen people in various parts of the world who like him lack education, quote civilized ways of living and above all lack the blessings of christian face. He becomes the germ and the seed of a powerful new missionary idea. As it all plays out, president diet dwight and others hatch a plan to setup a special school for heathen youth so transformation can be achieved on a wider scale. It will have the official name of the official manner school put it quickly gets dubbed the the heathen school. Its location is in townha hall connecticut and it opens in the spring of 1817. There a dozen students in the first group. Several hawaiians and a couple from india, a native american, and a couple of white new e englanders are training to be missionaries over se overse overseer overseas and feel this will benefit them. There were pacific islanders, china, a few european jews, a couple greeks and that surprised me. I am a greek extraction but in those days greeks were considered to be heathen. Why not . As time passed, there was growing number of American Indians and in all i think about 15 different tribes would be represented at the school. I got to skip lightly over the actual workings of the school buchlt but i want to emphasis and it would be hard to overemphasis the intensely held hopes and ambitions that underlie this project. The idea was the grads would grat go and take what they learned and took it back to their country. If all went well, and they were very explicit about this, the entire world would be saved and that was the key word in every important way, saved in the shortest time imagineable. One particular happening in the schools first year should be mention mentioned. Henry took sick, he was the centerpiece of this, and he had a case of typhus and after a period of weeks, he died. And the School Sponsored and leaders then sensed the chance to constru the passing as a martyrs death. His teacher wrote a book about his memoirs and it became an International Best seller. You can find copies around still. I found a copy of the first astate departments decision in a secondhand bookstore in cambridge. So i think there are about 12 different editions of it that were published through the whole span of the 19th century. And well partly, in response to the publication of the memoirs, interest and support were the school shot up as measured in fundraising, in visits by outsiders, the school became a big tourist attraction. In newspaper publicity and so on. All of the while the leaders of the school were putting out a lot of favorable pr insisting that everything was going splendedly and exactly according to plan. That is what they said. In fact, i think, this was quite far from the reality. There were Serious Problems right from the start. Problems on the academic side. How do you teach people that are various in backgrounds and education. And problems of discipline. Quite a few students had to be expelled for one or another kind of misconduct. But for several years, they manager managed to maintain a good public reputation. And then something happened where romans developed between the students and the fair well woman of cornwall. Not part of the plan. I imagine them thinking it is one think he should bring you here and convert you and another thing you should romance our daughters. The first such case involved a young cherokee man named john ridge and the 16yearold daughter of the schools steward. Her name was sarah northrup. You will get details from these when i read from the book in a few. I will say when the involvement came out there was a big uproar locally and then well across the state as the news spread extending to other parts of the country. Intermarriage between people of different race and color was simply unacceptable. It was not acceptable to a great majority of americans. Eventually they did marry and went off to johns home in the Cherokee Nation what is now north georgia. The school tried to tap down public feelings by in effect claiming it was a onetime thing. And promising it would never happen again. But, within scarcely a year later it did. Another cherokee student and a Young Cornwall woman became engaged and then got married. So the previous controversy was renewed and intensified with lots of impassioned rhetoric and threats to destroy the school buildings. A night with an angry crowd gathered on the town green and burned them in effergy and so forth. With a result of the second pair of intermarrieds left town as quickly as possibly and went off, like the first pair, to the Cherokee Nation. By now the school was domed. Public feels were against it. And the leaders became concerned that its continuous might put the entire missionary movement at risk. They shut it down for good after it lasted a decade and did their best to submit public memory of it. There is a tailend end of the y i want to mention. John ridge and elias became leaders of their nation. And this is where where you might say the little story intersects with development. We are now in the 1830s at this point and the federal government is precedes pressing the cherokees to accept removal from their traditional homelands and relocation much further to the west in what is today oklahoma. I would imagine you know the headlines of this. There is a famous Supreme Court that favors the cherokees saying it would be illegal and not part of administration and Andrew Jacksons causes force removal and this is what is known as the cherokee trail of tears. As leaders of their nation, they were at the center of the whole removal controversy. At first and for years thereafter, they led the opposition of removal going back and forth to washington and negotiating with top officials including the president himself in defense of cherokee interests and the cherokee wish to remain where they were. But at a certain point these two flipped and became leaders of a minority faction that supported removal or as they called it relocation. And they negotiated a treaty that was sponsored by the group and accepting removal on behalf of all of the cherokees and was signed in their living room. This made them in the eyes of many cherokees nothing less than traders. When the removal process was complete and the nation was relocated in oklahoma, they were both assassinated on the same morning, june 22 by their tribal opponents. This was a sensational event and it led to decades of reprisals and revenge killings within the Cherokee Nation and to this day ridge and butte are remembered with bitterness by many cherokees. And finally, why did these two men flip on the removal question . Well, what they said for public consumption was there was no hope if the cherokees tried to remain where they were. They were vastly outmatched by the federal government and the wheat white people of the lower south that insisted on nothing than removal. I think there is something more and something they expressed privately. In effect, they felt betrayed which jackson happened the way he did they felt betrayed then and back at the heathen School Memories came up. They were approved and admired at star students and then cast out when they fell in love with whom in the white student. And crossed the race line. Where potentially explosive issues of race might once again interfere. Thats the end of my thumbnail. So now if you would indulge me i will read a little bit from the book. I would like to read a section that is about the courtships. Let me interrupt myself for a minute. In the mid1820s, when he was a young man but already kind of leaving the nation he sat for a portrait in washington by a famous painter especially for painting indian chiefs. He was a magnificent portrait right now it is hanging in the exhibition of arkansas at the museum. Anyway, it was a wonderful portrait into a kind of indian gallery and then a lot of prints were made from the portrait and they were published in books and so on. I was thrilled when a few months ago i discovered that one of the early prince was coming up for auction at a local estate and i was able to get this into hand colored print as i say it was exciting for me to get it. In many ways, i have to sort of contest that he is my hero in the story. He acted in a necessary and noble part also many people peoe wouldnt agree with me. Anyway, back to the story i will explain a little bit more about the context. He suffered from the kind of green gel or disease that often left him quite went and full of aches and pains and it kind of disabled him. This happened when he was at the school. What they did with scholars is they brought them into the house and cared for them and gave them the best that they could end the sort of medical care. That is where he began to get involved with his daughter. At some point he was confined in their house beginning in december of 1820 were in that herman was the name of the principal. Reports to the american board of commissioners to meet regular reference to his unhappy situation. So in approved very much in his conduct and learning and now seriously disposed he has from a child than feeble and his complaints have rather increased as of late. April 21 he continues to be ill and in june he is in a very feeble state of health. In july he continues to be out of health. In the latter months, the general store he had a family run the shop recorded in the sale to the scorer of mr. Northrup. Through the spring and early summer he was under the local physician of samuel gold however in midjuly he had a specialized form of treatment. Meanwhile, he repeatedly urged the return home to his family, aand the idea that he himself resisted. He wants to stay and pursue his studies. When the reports of the worsening condition. He was a cherokee chief and he decided to undertake the journey to cornwall. The arrival in midoctober was a local sensation. He had white top boots that had ever entered the town and its commanding personal presence a tall and athletic form made the deepest possible impression. He stayed for a full two weeks and nearby litchfield. He was a very famous and eminent protestant minister. And he converts dot length the minister whose daughter catherine described him as, quote, one of the princes of the forest. Perhaps his son was present to serve as interpreter. He was received in th into varis households including that of doctor gold. Decades later the doctors son would write back, quote, no memory is more clear than that of a visit to my home in my sixth year of the cherokee chief in the uniform of a u. S. Officer. They also included this. Where am i . My father exchanged presents with him giving him a small telescope carved in blackstone. The same nearly 3 feet in length the surface with a passage of time hangs today and closed in the glass case and on the living room wall in the home of a gold descendent attached to it is an agent label this pipe once belonged to the major id distinguished chief of the Cherokee Nation presented in 1820 that it had often been smoked in the council. It was generally expected john would return home with his father but when the time came he remained at cornwall. Several months later he declared he chose to stay and still does. He chose to stay and still does. Was it Something Else holding him to the school to the households in which he would remain a patient for about two years. He had a personal connection. It remains the fullest that we have. It does have the feel of authenticity. It centers on one particular occasion and begins. Mrs. Northrup had so much care she would send her daughter into johns room to take care of him. It could. For a time he seemed to improve so much so that they said i do not think it is best to give him any more medicine that he has a deep trouble and you must find out what it is. On the afternoon when sarah had left the house, mrs. Northrup taking her stockings for the students went to sit with john and she said to him you have some trouble and must tell me you have no mother here only me and you have always confided to me. She said i do not want to tell you. You must tell me. That is the trouble. Have you ever mentioned it to her . No. We havent said one word to each other. How can i help it when she has taken such good care of me over the past two years . She said yes i do love john. She saw there was trouble in the camp. It was for that further between the two young sweethearts they m