the same place anyway. >> "after words" airs every saturday at 10 p.m. and again sunday at 9 p.m. eastern. and you can watch all previous "after words" programs on our web site, booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to barnes & noble upper west side. tonight i have the distinct pleasure of introducing author sean wilentz, a george henry davis 1886 professor of american history at princeton university and author of the vancroft prize winning the rise of american democracy, bob dylan in america and many other works. he brings us today his new book, "the politicians and the egalitarians: the hidden history of american politics," in which he reminds us of the commanding role party politics has played in our struggle against economic be inequality. at nation's founding, americans believed that wealth extremes would destroy their revolutionary experiment in republican government. that idea has since shaped national political conflict. mr. wilentz transforms our understanding of this nation's political and moral character. historian and intellectual henry louis gates jr. writes: wilentz influences a vast knowledge of the american past while exploring in his unique way the interplay between raw party politics and the ebb and flow of reform efforts. in offering his take on pivotal figures from jefferson to duboise, lincoln to lbj, wilentz challenges us to debate history and ideas in a way that honors the best of the democratic system he has written about so provocatively throughout his career. even when i most disagree with him, his arguments are always vigorous and passionate, lively and engaging. so without further ado, please join me in welcoming author sean wilentz. [applause] >> thank you, maya, for that lovely introduction. thank you all for coming out on this rainy night. it's great to be back at barnes & noble on 82nd. i'm back home. it's great to be here. it always seems to rain when i'm here. i don't know why that is. at any rate, okay. the book tonight is "the politicians and the egalitarians." a few words of background. i'm going the read a tear amount -- to read a fair amount because that's the best way to get across what this book is about. but a little bit of background. sometimes you write a book without realizing you're writing it, and that was very much the case with this book. back in 2001 i wrote an essay about egalitarianism in american political life. and it was about economic egalitarianism, it was called the lost egalitarian tradition, and it came out just after 9/11, and nobody cared. it bombed. as far as i know, the editor and i are the only two people who read it. some years later i was thinking about politics and post-partisan ship, and just at time when the president, president obama, was beginning to become even more partisan so that kind of fell away too. but i realized that, in fact, those two essays put together actually had an argument to them. and the more i thought about that argument, the more i realized that i'd actually been making that argument for a very long time. in one way or another, in a variety of essays and reviews and all sorts of things. so i looked over that a lot and thought, well, you know, with a fair amount of work, there's a book here on this theme of politics, equaltarianism, party politics and how they work together and how they have worked together in the american past. so here it is. this is the result. "the politicians and the be egalitarians." two groups -- and maybe the key to the entire title is this very nice, sweet -- provided by the publisher who's actually here -- this wonderful ampersand in the title. the ampersand is about the and. very often americans think of political life as pitting politicians against egalitarians. egalitarians against the politicians. they're always at odds. politicians won't do anything unless pushed, egalitarians -- the politicians think -- are all a bunch of kooks. well, american politics, i argue, works at its best when those two groups converge. indeed, you can actually understand american political history, the great events in political history in those moments, and they're very unusual very often. they don't happen all the time, when the politicians and the egalitarians actually converge. and that's really what that book is about. but it is a book of parts, and it begins actually -- and i want to open this up. it's not simply about hard headed politics, it actually has a moral purpose as well. and that moral purpose is underlined in the epigraph which comed from reinhold neiper. i'll read it. it may be well for the statesman to know that statesmanship easily degenerates into opportunism and cannot be distinguished from dishonesty. but the prophet ought to realize that his higher perspective and the uncompromising nature of his judgments always has a note of irresponsibility in it. francis of assisi may have been a better christian that pope innocent iii, but it may be questioned whether his moral superiority over latter was as absolute as it seemed. nor is there any reason to believe that abraham lincoln, the statesman and opportunist, was morally inferior to william lloyd garrison, the prophet. the moral achievement of a statesman must be judged in terms which take into account the limit of human society which the prophet need not consider. that is the moral underpinning of this book. and i lay it out in the introduction, and i'll read some more from there. there are two keys to unlocking the secrets of american politics and american political history. current historians in their enthusiasm for incite of a new and attractive sort have mislaid these keys, and now they are hidden from sight. once recovered, though, and put to use, the keys quickly demonstrate their usefulness. the first key is to recognize both the permanent be reality and the effectiveness of partisanship and party politics. americans have been loathe to believe these things. the founding generation distrusted parties. the frame beers of the constitution designed a national government they hoped would avoid partisanships, debase ambitions and destructive tendencies. americans in our own time, we think likewise. we deplore partisanship. we want government conducted in a lofty manner without adversarial confrontation and chaos. but more than 200 years of anti-partisanship has produced nothing. this is because despite their intentions, the framers built a political system which inspired partisan politics. after some badly-needed constitutional tinkering, the system soon fostered the rise of professional mass-based national parties. a nation as large and diverse as united states has required parties both to turn discontent boo laws and institutions -- into laws and institutions and to prevent chronic political breakdown. americans devised election rules that hand victory to the winner of a plurality of votes which, according to the axioms of political science, virtually assures a two-party system in which third parties do not last. possibly politics is built in -- partisan politics is built into human nature. it is certainly built into the the american version of human nature. and partisan politics has survived because in the united states it's worked well or well enough. historians nowadays dismiss this basic truth. they regard political parties as hindrances to democracy and glorified political outsiders and social mental cruelties. movements. they point with justice to the countless and unending episodes of partisan politicians corrupting our politics and sustaining social wrongs. yet the great issues in our history have been settled not from friction between politicians and egalitarians, but from the convergence of protests and politics. party democracy has succeeded even in addressing the most oppress i have of all -- oppressive of all american problems which was slavery. impeded by a party system designed to keep slavery out of national politics, anti-slavery partisans and politicians built parties of their own, and the carefully-rigged party system fell apart, and the election to presidency of one of those, abraham lincoln, forced the crisis that led to the slaveholders' rebellion and, in time, emancipation. ever since all the great american social legislation from the progressive era to the new deal to the great society has been achieved by and through the political parties. the second key to american political history is the recognition that from the very start americans have recognized -- and sometimes been consumed by -- the need to combat economic privilege and to strengthen what walt whitman called, quote, the true tbraffation hold, a vast intertwining articulation of wealth. sometimes breaking through the surface be, sometimes returning underground. americans have fought endlessly about the meaning of democracy and about government authority and about rights and about social justice. running through these fights has been a recurring insistence that vast material inequalities directly threaten democracy. this, too, we've been reluctant to see. the founding generation did not proclaim economic equality as the founders believed that sound political institutions would sustain a just and harmonious society. we don't read about it in the declaration of independence and the constitution or the bill of rights. we do read about it though in numerous pamphlets and speeches as well as in the correspondence of thomas jefferson and james madison and conflicts over economic privilege dominated american politics, national politics, from the battles between jefferson and alexander hamilton to the furious clashes of era of andrew jackson. slavery first stunted and then deformed american democracy and its racist legacy is complicated, distorted and sometimes disrupted the politics of economic inequality. not only does white racism sustain and deepen great disparities of wealth, it has stashed american history so strongly that economic inequality has become symptomatic of racial injustice. to talk about one has often meant talking about the other. thus, when anti-slavery forces attacked human bondage as immoral, they also attacked it as the cornerstone of hateful economic and political privilege as exercised by the aristocratic slave power and its northern accomplices. the war became a war of emancipation, but it was also from the start a fight to vindicate american democracy against a domineering and finally secessionist slaveocracy, its wealth and power be concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite. after the egalitarian impulses of the civil war years dissipate bed, an ideology of individualism, white supremacy and the blessings of big business subdued all talks of ine what until -- inequality. efforts were crushed after the overthrow of reconstruction and created a new class of industrial workers which suffered harsh repression. the so-called progressive movement and even more the new deal brought the issue of economic inequality back front and center as in time did lyndon johnson's great society which transcended the new deal by joining the fight for economic equality to the one for racial justice. but in the late 1960s, the egalitarian politics unleashed by the great depression and then recast by the civil rights movement began losing steam and losing its way. the long conservative era heralded by the election of ronald reagan to the presidency in 1980 seemed a repudiation of great society egalitarianism. conservatives advanced regressive economic and fiscal policies and launched a divisive and politically devastating culture war based on race and religion. disscenting egalitarian -- dissenting egalitarian politics became framed, pundits wondered why so many ordinary americans seemed to willing to vote against their economic interests. historians tried to explain the shortcomings and continual failures in american politics. yet the issue of economic equality has been the great perennial question many american political history. -- in american political history. in the has come back into focus -- this has come back into focus since the great recession of 2008, between the wealthiest americans and the rest of the country. how long the refocusing will last, it's hard to tell. but it does prompt us to look at where -- it does prompt us to the look where we have not wanted to look when considering past politics in the united states and to see things that we have a failed to see. so with these two keys, the primacy of party politics and the eternal underlying question of economic privilege and inequality, whole of american political history begins to emerge more clearly. in the beginning, democracy in america rested on the proposition that vast inequalities of wealth were relate threatening and intolerable. securing that proposition since then has required fitting it into party politics, which has not always been ease is city to do. political leaders otherwise hostile to economic privilege have been crippled by their connections to slavery and jim crow segregation. at times neither national party has been alert to widening gaps of power. relations between party politics and protest politics have sometimes been fraught, and in the absence of capable leadership, they have become destructive. till, the drive -- still, the driving force in american political history has been the effort to curb the power of concentrated wealth whether the power of the slaveholders or industrial pollute cat -- plutocrats. often egalitarians berate politicians as slow-moving wafflelers and politicians despair of the obliviousness to democratic government. but just as it is crucial in a democracy for egalitarians to agitate, so it is vital that politicians do all they can to advance equality within the limits of public opinion and the constitution. sometimes to the point of amending the constitution as with the final destruction of slavery. american political history can be understood as the fitful history of the politicians expect egalitariansbe of the fateful occasions when their labors converge. i should have stopped then, because that's basically it. that's what i came here to argue in this book. but there's more. there's a lot more. basically, there are two essays at the start, one on partisanship and post-partisanship and anti-partisanship this america and the contest over whether parties are a good thing or a bad thing. arguing in the end the post-artisans and anti-partisans, they always come to nothing. a second essay on the egalitarian tradition updated to get through 2008 to show how, in fact, that idea has been -- the idea that, in fact, these wide disparities of wealth will ruin american democracy, how it's changed, how it's altered, how it's threaded through american history sometimes plunging underground, but sometimes coming back up as it very much has since 2008, as is very evident in the current presidential campaign. and having done all of that in two essays, i then move on to look at some specifics. so we have chapters on thomas jefferson -- well, starting with tom paine to thomas jefferson, there's a piece on john quincy adams, lots on abraham lincoln, two chapters, on through to lyndon johnson. so what i think i'll do before taking questions -- and how much more time have i got? let me make sure. is maya out there? how much more time have i got? >> [inaudible] >> 5-10 minutes. well, let's see. in 5-10 minutes, what do you want, do you want to hear thom jefferson or w.e.b. dubois? >> [inaudible] >> dubois wins right away. that's good. i'm happy to the read that part. he fits chronologically in the middle of book, and he's important because, well, you'll see. in his mysterious education printed in 1907, the aging henry adam belatedly ushered in the century with accelerated historical time. a few years earlier, his fellow new englander and harvard man, the young w.e.b. dubois, ushered in the new century with his poetic, equally mysterious "the souls of black folk," and with it a prophesy of his own. quote: the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. both prophesies still live with as many por tents for the rest of the century ahead as for the one just passed. the two men apparently never met or corresponded. adams left his teaching post at harvard 111 years before du -- 11 years before dubois arrived, although he did end up working with adams'ty signing -- disciple, hart. one was the chronicler of insiderhood, the other was the chronicler of marginality. yet their careers and legacies bear comparison. both trained in berlin as well as harvard without enslaving themes to its ponderous prose style. neither intended to become a historian, and both wrote master works of american history fixed on what each believed was the nation's development. both wrote novels in which a woman was the protagonist. more famously, both were men of autobiographical imagination who wrote achingly of leading double lives, grandly acquitting the burdens of that doubleness with america itself. long after his death, adams was remembered as an important historian, but was read mainly by professionals. his reputation revived roughly 60 years ago, achieving nearly cultish proproportions mainly because of the education. the post-world war ii vogue for american studies picked up adams as the great ironist of the gilded age, and the education became an undergraduate talisman of bookish sensitivity in the 1950s, a declaration of sophisticated alienation and the quest for illumination. the refined sophomores on the road. i forgot to say -- okay. i'll keep going. duwois, who lived until 1963, has enjoyed a different kind of rekyle over the past 30 years. always admired as an architect of what became the modern civil rights movement, dubois suffered in america for his traveling capped by age 93 in the communist party. by a cosmic coincidence, he died in ghana on the eve of the march on washington. and the next day, roy wilkens -- the head of the national association for the advancement of colored people which dubois had helped to found in 1909 -- respectfully informed the marchers of the news while carefully remarking, quote, in later years dr. dubois chose a different path than theirs. it took the upheavals of the late 1960s and the two decades of continuing racial turmoil and two decades of continuing racial turmoil for a new generation of professors and activists to repair dubois' reputation not simply as a propagandist and organizer, but as an intellectual. the early incarnation of what has become the african-american studies movement deserves great credit for retrieving the souls of black folk and black reconstruction in america which were all prom innocently in -- prominently in any collection of american classics. indeed, on campus and off, dubois and his writings are almost impossible to avoid. his major books and essays, although curiously not black reconstruction in america, are enshrined in the library of america. there are endless lectures devoted to race consciousness and the color line, often with dubois' work as their teachstone. and his life is subject -- touchstone. both volumes of which separately won the pulitzer prize. so he's become a big deal. but he was a big deal back then too. and i want to make that point. from the moment it appears in april 1903, the souls of black folk caused a sensation. among black readers, james wheldon johnson claimed it had the greatest impact of any book since uncle tom's cabin. william james -- excuse me, dubois' undergraduate mentor at harvard, dispatched a copy to his brother henry who privately praised it, a little backhandedly, as the only southern book of distinction published in many a year. dubois, of course, is from massachusetts, but never mind. [laughter] in jerusalem -- in germany, it was pronounced a splendid effort and went on to work finding a translator. within two years, dubois' american publishers had arranged for a third printing as the book became the discussion in periodicals across the country with the conspicuous exception of most southern white newspapers and most controlled by friends and supporters of booker t. washington. for a collection of mainly reworked, previously-published essays on race relations and the negro by a young black sociologist and historian at atlanta university, it was an extraordinary success, unprecedented in the history of american letters. the flash part of controversy was the third essay. dubois had once been an admirer of washington, he had praised him for his famous atlanta compromise speech, but he had moved in a more radical direction over the previous be five years. dubois's objections were political. he was scornful about washington's spanish -- circumspection about equality. barely one generation out of slave slavery, but washington's view was anticipated by a fundamental pessimism about worth of black people's cultural resources. he had little faith that their potential extended beyond gaining the most practical knowledge about raising pigs and getting on in the world. to dubois, who was all for practical knowledge, washington's pessimism was a lie. elevating a philistine materialism that denied black folks soul. or, more precisely, their souls. the plural was critical to book's larger purpose of establishing black america's cultural presence and identity. duwois, who has lewis points out, mounted his essays with a jeweler's precision, was very exact about the title. the souls of black folk. not the soul of black folks. quote: after the egyptian and the indian, the greek and roman, the mongolian, the negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this american world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness but only lets himself see himself through the revelation of the other world. it is a peculiar sensation, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others. by measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. one ever feels his tunis, an american, a negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. the history of the american negro is the history of this strife, this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. in this merging which is neither of the older severals to be lost, he would not africanize america because america has too much to teach the world in africa. he would not bleach his negro soul, for he knows that the negro blood has a message for the world. he simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a negro and an american without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face. .. it is part of what do boys was talking about making an audacious book but a strange one as well. this is how i conclude. finally the strangeness and audacity of the souls of black folk arose less from historical services and the strangeness and audacity of its author. dubois picked his arguments for quality folk who pride themselves on being representative negroes. as his ideas took place the young dubois may have felt himself to be the most marginal man in america. the future profit of the color line had been born from the lotto, quote, one half more in negro than french and dutch he claims in one letter. in massachusetts, the northern state considered the cradle of abolition was a state that was hardly free of racial prejudice. at harvard, the seventh man of african descent admitted he won abundant praise from his teachers but felt distance from his fellow students, he would later write he was asked but not of the place. lewis observes dubois spent the most exuberant carefree days of his life soaking up all he could in the classroom. awestruck, proud, determined to make the most of his miraculous if not fully merited opportunity. in germany the confusion in his soul deepened, he heard his teacher, one of the intellectual founders of prussian nationalists. and explode from the lecture podium. the translation is the lotto's are inferior. they feel themselves inferior. dubois's notebook is filled with self-conscious acts of precocious graduate student abroad but special twists and turns. descriptions of solitary midnight ceremonies by candlelight with prayers to the zeitgeist about fulfilling his destiny and the prescriptions of mornings given over to contemplation and singing to himself in his german boardinghouse america the beautiful and steel the way to jesus and after his return as he completed his doctrine at harvard america's for most young black scholar found himself confined to his first teaching post to the lower reaches of the black academy in the third raines local college in ohio knowing he would never teach at any white college or university. in short he suffered a singular fate raised by his heroic education to scholarly levels and reached by all but a handful of american whites who lives in a civilization for color markkula nonperson, one who when he traveled road in a car. a man of reason, he would not forsake his achievements but the world of reason turned out to be utterly unreasonable casting him of all people as a pariah. here, with all its idiosyncrasies, was the matrix of double consciousness. it was an atypical experience that could be imagined. brilliant and arrogant as he was with prestige he could command among fellow blacks and the pathetic whites, the souls of black folk to translate his personal dilemma into a universe of race and render it convincing. and continue to do that for the rest of his life transforming himself, moving around various places but constantly propelled by this idea of universal drama coming out of his own soul. never satisfied, never at rest dubois kept his alienated consciousness and continuing autobiography view of himself, carrying his wounded sensibilities to segregation's downfall. over these momentous decades the souls of black folk, who dubois admired, and with its -- it will surely endure. in its endurance, the greatest ironies, if in its own time souls were a peculiar thing jim crow's subsequent demise doubled identity far more prominent. not just black individuals but black middle class on whom the competing claims of acceptance in an america where racism powerfully abides it is harder. dubois's double consciousness is inadequate to these pressures, reducing universal ambivalence and anxiety to purely racial terms but it imparts a heavy uplifting love of blackness and the soul of sorrow songs and with that more dubious passages of fabricated racial mysticism, also describes an act of refusal, refusal to allow alienation to become a surrender to self reference already cramped conception from race, quote, i sit with shakespeare and he wins us not. across the color line i move on and on, where smiling men lie in gilded halls. from out of the caves of evening that swing between strong wings earth and tracery were seminal we are nests and what soul i will. mail come graciously with no scorn. in his reclamation of the spirituality of the oppressed, dubois wrote something that was glibly stigmatized as culture of the oppressors. for all their phrasing, to write these words in 1903, assertion of individuality and genius and racial pride. today in a different and racialized america their beauty has not dimmed. thank you. and if it were up to lyndon johnson, the most hard-nosed politician you can imagine, and the same story of politicians and egalitarians. and should we turn to questions? >> i will talk to you. >> you probably could tell -- we will take it from there. >> we have our first question over here. >> the nature of politics today where you have people being rejected by a majority of those. >> which people are we talking about? >> trump and clinton. >> being rejected -- this is a wacky year. there were stresses in both political parties, some of which we saw in advance and what we didn't. political parties are important but there are always coalitions and stresses within them and in the case of the republican party what we seeing some solace coming, was the old reagan coalition of small government, pro-business and the cultural war wing of the party white resentment, fell apart, came unglued and donald trump took the nomination because of that split. the establishment had little offer to its own people turning back the clock culturally nor did it have much to offer in 2008, tax cuts, cutting social security this won't appeal, trump saw that, a different kind of candidate. if donald trump is taking over the republican party, above and beyond the nomination let alone if he wins the election, the republican party will have control of the level of government from the state government all the way to all 3 branches of federal government and take over the supreme court appointments and that is extraordinary. if he loses there is a big fight in the republican party. what party it will be is unclear. no matter which democrat it was, things will be different, a democrat in the white house, you won't have a democratic senate and a democratic supreme court, liberal supreme court, haven't had one in 40 years. country at a crossroads but the craziness we are seeing at the crossroads, neither party to deal with the problems we are facing. don't know if that answered the question. >> two people running. >> i don't think they have been rejected by majority of the voters, polls are a funny thing, we will see who gets rejected by who by the time we get to november. >> questions, questions. >> you mentioned the black middle class, if one sees politics, the initial comment, politicians always faceup with profits, when the group that is marginalized, economic mobility, they also come into politics and how does that play out? how will you see that with emerging with the black middle class who gets into politics and how do they do the words, where does that -- >> out of the civil rights movement there is a political class of african-americans, this book is dedicated to one of them, congressman john lewis is the enemy of being a politician and egalitarian and so forth. no question, if you look at the black political class you can see pretty much held to values informing the civil rights movement, you created a black middle class but it is fragile and interesting to see how black voters are voting in this election, in a way that is not taking chances hard won victories being wiped away which in fact some would very much like to do in the realm of voting rights, voting rights in great stress and black voters get it. and the most sensible in my view in terms of their interests and what they are up against. is there a senior side of politics? sure. that is politics. this is america, this is democracy, you won't have the seamy side undone but if you fix it, we give up politics altogether and forget what else is there. someone like lewis or many others, there are people like jesse jackson and so forth who did not go to the political system the jackson -- there is a limited area where politics and egalitarianism commingle and that is quite interesting and healthy and a lot to keep it going but the black political class is under great pressure for the last 20 or 30 years. we have the president of the united states. >> your hypothesis as i understand it is the importance -- can there be too much partisanship so that it becomes counterproductive to the ideals you are talking about? >> what would be too much partnership between them? >> there was too much partnership. >> we got it. >> the leader of the senate when he started his role, his major goal was to prevent a second term for obama, and also right now we can't get a supreme court justice confirmed. that is what i mean by too much. >> another difference between partisanship and hyperpartisanship or partisanship that is obstructionist, to block more than anything else is mitch mcconnell said, our main job is to get rid of obama. that is the dynamic in the republican party going back to the 80s but especially after speaker gingrich in the early 90s in the republican party because it gutted its moderate to conservative wing it got into a positive feedback loop, kept moving further and further and further to the right. it moved so far to the right that it is completely unstable and it is old establishment, could not hold on anymore because it is so riled up the base, sick of the establishment. that is an unusual situation, not all partisanship is necessarily a good thing. there is healthy partisanship and unhealthy partisanship and what we have seen in the republican party these days is unhealthy. it will be cured with other partisans. it will be cured by another party coming along and either rebuilding the republicans into something less crazed or they will just be defeated. that could happen too in this election, they may have a sweep election, much as in 1932, they learned to reconstruct themselves differently. it is not that partisanship is always the thing we have to look to to get us through but without a we cannot cure the problems, what is good about america, what is bad about america, it is with partisanship as well. >> my question is about the role and influence of 21 stoop century media. how has it morphed and how has its influence morphed? >> talking about a profit, network, and ilia kazan, a movie that predicts the face in the crowd which saw andy griffith. the media thinks it will run the show anyway and has done so in ways that are distorting to say the least from fake scandals to giving donald trump billions of dollars of free advertising. all he has to do is to tweet. that is not a normal political campaign but the media has a lot to do with that. it also dumbed things down a lot. in every way i can't think of many ways in which the contemporary media has enlightened or expanded enlightenment of american politics so we deal with that as well. if we get a manipulator, someone who figures out how to use it as trump has things get very dangerous indeed because the media becomes complicit. remember those days? we will remember or heard about what happened when the first manipulator of television in american political life was senator joseph mccarthy with the mccarthy hearings which were televised around the country, our parents all saw them. we who world enough saw them as well. in no small part of the downfall of senator mccarthy was edward armer a division edward mira -- are murder a on the media scene. not with the guts but the authority. walter cronkite was the last person who had that kind of authority when johnson said we lost concrete, we lost the country. by losing all gravatar's, the media has abandoned, abdicated its role of authority it can exert. who cares what they think? people cared what cronkite thought. these were matters of standing. now they are entertainers. i won't say any tames but if any of them stand up to anything or for anything, would you really care? would you be moved? i don't think so. as the kids say that is very concerning. something to be concerned about. you go back and see a face in the crowd again and realize it might even be worth -- the other example i give a plug to a friend in plot against america, these are things you should be watching and reading today, things turn out okay in the end. it is said the almighty looks after children, drunks in the united states of america. so far so good. i don't want to start a prayer session. that is not my intent but we have been very lucky and hope our luck holds out. thank you very much for a lovely evening. >> big round of applause for sean wilentz. thank you, ladies and gentlemen, have a copy of the book over here. line up through these stanchions next to the stage. we will be signing books over here, thanks, you will be fantastic. [up -- >> you are watching the tv on c-span2 television for serious readers. here is a look at what on prime time tonight. we kickoff the evening at 7:30 eastern with james stone of the us commodity futures trading commission who offers solutions to national issues from saving social security and reducing inequality to making education and healthcare more affordable. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ we think of the word gene, it has suffused our culture and seems to be an abstract concept that lies outside ourselves, people talking about laboratories. genes have to do with family, has to do with us, how you and i are made, who in this room doesn't have a relative who is affected by what you can ultimately track back to some interaction between genes and environment? when i look back at that little thing, six or seven pages, this is really -- this is really about family, about ourselves as living organisms that emanate out of these things called genes. >> host: you wrote this and before i ask about the history and amazing figures you write about, you write this with a sense, i got a sense of urgency that you feel it is important to get this down because there is a lot going on in science, you and i talked about this earlier today, you had a sense that it is important for people to understand themselves, not just leave this up to the experts. >> let me give you a sense what is going on that helps us have the conversation moving forward, we are trying, learning to read and write the human genome. let me explain what that means. by reading, i mean obviously all of you know in 2001-2002 we obtained the sequence of the human genome. let's define what the genome is, the entire repository of genetic information that is in your cells, in an embryo, human embryos, it is written in four bits of code, a cgd. i don't have them memorized. here is what is interesting. the list goes on for 3 billion letters. if you imagine it as an encyclopedia, this encyclopedia would be 66 pool sets of the encyclopaedia britannica. it would line up all the edges of this room and if you picked up one of these sets it would read a cgg cct -- it would be inscrutable to you and me. here is what amazing is, out of that seemingly inscrutable four letter code, you and me and everyone else in the room, an astonishing fact that that code becomes you, becomes me, small variations in that code are responsible in some part for the difference between you and me. going back to understand what the technologies allow us to do, we are beginning to read that code, and beginning to be able to predict what might be or what might happen in your future. when example, if you have one gene mutation, it is not 100% chance you are going to have breast cancer but your risk of breast cancer may be ten times higher than women who don't have that mutation. if you have cystic fibrosis gene in both your father and mother the chances are nearly 100% that you will have the disease in your future. i could tell you that when you were an embryo. i could tell you from your embryonic cell chances that you will have that disease is 100%. that is reading the genome. now we are getting to more complicated things, potentially more complicated things about illness. people have started to explore not just illness but complicated things about their identity. that is already entering territory that we should have moral concerns about. >> you can watch this and other programs online. >> booktv records hundreds of other programs, here is what we are covering this week. at kramer books in washington dc, brookings institution senior fellow elaine explains why americans become disenchanted with political leaders and how to re-forge their relationship. in mountain view, california, antonio martinez, former advisor for twitter and product master for facebook will provide an inside look at the future state of social media. friday at barnes & noble in south lake texas former sniper nicholas irving will discuss his missions as third ranger regiment, a look at some other programs booktv is covering this week, many of these events are open to the public, look for them to air in the near future on booktv on c-span2. [inaudible conversations]

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