you were born in it? think carefully about that question. when you live in the north country, when you live in a state where the weather spends six months of the year trying to throttle the life out of you, one thing you understand is the fragility of civilization. back in the spring i was walking on abandoned road behind my house with my two boys one morning when we noticed a huge mama bear rearing up in the trees just off to our left and then just ahead of us we noticed one little cub and, behind us another little cub. and we were in the middle. [laughter] and my boys were excited. [laughter] but a little scared. and that's the way i feel as we embark on this critical half-decade. i feel excited but a little scared and i wonder if our society still has the survival instinct of that mother bear protecting her cubs? if you disagree, don't wait for messiah to descend from the heavens on a tuesday morning in november. we tried that in 2008. we entrusted a multi-trillion dollar enterprise to a guy who has never created a dime of wealth in his life and then we were surprised for some reason it didn't work out. this time it's up to you. ordinary citizens need to do this year and next year as they did in 2009-2010 and move the meter of public discourse. in my book i quote milton friedman. milton friedman says, don't elect the right people to do the right things. create the conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right things. every time -- [applause] that deserves a cheer. there should be nothing controversial of that because he is absolutely -- every time you see obama, go and give a speech and someone has taken the precaution of loading up some lame boilerplate into his prompter about how we need to get our fiscal house in order and we need to control the deficit, the only rain reason he is even pretending to care about it is because the meter of public discourse was moved in 2009 and 2010. he is the wrong person being forced to pretend that he wants to do the right thing. let's keep changing the discourse until the wrong people are actually forced to do the right thing. milton friedman is right about that. when i first moved to new hampshire, i carelessly assumed that general staff had said live free or die before some battle or other. i thought it was a bit of red meat to rally the boys for the george. a touch of the old henry the 5th routine. i discovered our state's great revolutionary war hero had made his creed decades after the cessation of hostilities in a letter regretting he would be unable to attend a dinner. in a strange way i found that even more impressive because next dream circumstances many of us can rouse people to rediscover the primeal impulses the way brave men on flight 93 did. they took off what they thought was routine commuter flight. when they realized it wasn't they went to general mode and cried, let's roll. it is harder, it is harder to maintain that live free or die spirit when you're facing not an immediate crisis but a slow, unceasing ratchet effect which is in stable societies unthreatened by revolution or war within their borders, always the way liberty falls. traded away to the state, incrementally, painlessly, all but imper septemberably. live free or die sounds like a battle cry, win this thing for we'll die trying, die an honorable debt by in fact it is a prosaic statement of the obvious. of the reality of our lives in the prosperous west. you can live as free men but if you choose not to, your society will surely die. live free or die, it's new hampshire's choice, it is america's choice. so make the right call because the fate of our world depends upon it. thank you very much indeed. [applause] >> for more information own mark styne and his work, visit, steynonline.com. >> professor adam green of the university of chicago, your book, selling the race, culture, community and black chicago, why 1940 to 1955 only? >> well, one of the things that people have really begun to do in terms of thinking, not only about african-american history but african-american history and its, its establishment of a sense of change in relation to the situation, the circumstances of black folk. many people have really tried to move the way that we think about the history back from the classic years so-called of the civil rights era, to think about change, challenge, different senses of community, different senses of the potential of people, going back in many cases decades, sometimes to the '30s, the '20s. for example, some years before i did my work studies on the harlem renaissance were really trying to imagine the ways in which cultural initiative and cultural genius was something that had really changed the fortunes of black people in new york and beyond. i felt that 1940 was interesting to look at. one, of course, because of the ways in which the federal government, the state is beginning to approach african-americans and their place within the polity within a different way. the also the ways in which the market society, consumer society, was beginning to pay more attention to how african-americans, not only were agent or individuals who needed to be appealed to but in a sense also potentially a source of profit, revenue, various kinds of capacities for market expansion. for commodities, for cultural works and the like. and i think finally, african-americans themselves, largely as a result of the renewal of migration, mass migration, making cities larger enclaves, larger communities, capable of greater leverage, meant that after 1940 one was beginning to see a different kind of assertion, a different kind of claim, that african-americans collectively were seeking to, to, advance in relation to institutions that they had relationships with in the country. so in that sense, 1940 is an interesting cuttoff point in terms of thinking about an earlier sense of existence that, while, dynamic, while, open in terms of its possibilities, was not necessarily fully consummated and realized in terms of being able to leverage the capacity of people to assert their will and their agenda. after 1940 you begin to see much more of that. >> what's the importance of chick bow in black history? >> well two things. as i was saying a moment ago, chicago is in many ways one of three key centers in relation to black migration. the transformation not only coming from african-americans moving from the south to the north, but african-americans in a more existential sense moving from agrarian to an urban environment. it is one seeing playing out in chicago in a particularly exemplary way. second, chicago in many ways is really the center of what could be thought of as black cultural media. my book is trying to think about the ways in which the emergence not only of individual african-american artists not only individual episodes or instances of black creativity but what could be called a media infrastructure, almost a culture industry that chicago really more so than los angeles, more so than new york city, is the center of that sort of activity in the middle part of the century. so in that sense it is almost as if one could think about an amplifier effect. that chicago is able to provide to black perspective, to black aspiration, to black identity. in that way what is going on in chicago whether it relates to music, whether it relates to newspapers and magazines, whether it relates to trying to influence advertisement and the kind of integration of african-americans into the consumer market system, chicago really is the nodal point in the middle part of the 20th century and that is what i base my argument understanding chicago as pivotal in relation to what is happening in materials of african-americans collectively at mid century. >> professor green, some examples of chicago music, chicago media. >> sure. chick bow of course is the -- chicago is the center of genres in terms of music many people see as foundational to the turn towards modern popular music. most signified i think by rock and roll, rythym and blues and eventually soul music. gospel is a musical form really taking root in chicago and being institutionalized by emergence of national administrative bodies by virtue of the establishment of producers and songwriters thinking about how to move gospel from the himmal, to -- h were. ynal to the crossover audience, black to white, and secular from sacred. blues is similarly undergoing a transformation in terms of its modernization. record companies are emerging in chicago, elsewhere to be sure but the central companies, companies like chess records, for instance, are centered here in chicago. as well, radio and the capacity of radio to establish, establish play lists and create djs who will be able to be known primarily as broadcasters of that style of music. people like hal benson and sam evans. this means that blues not only will be disseminated broadly within chicago but by virtue of word of mouth in some cases relay is actually going to be something that people recognize as a distinctive style moving out to areas outside of chicago and even down the railroad line to southern centers. and when one thinks for instance, just about these two genres, gospel music on the one hand during the 1940s, blues music during the late '40s into the '50s, one can see the way that synthesis of gospel and blues for instance, two forms thought by many team people to be antithetical will give rise to rythym and blues and soul. >> the importance of ebony magazine? >> "ebony" magazine is many ways the first movement on the part of african-americans within journalism publishing to come up in essence with a successful lifestyle formula for media. and there are several components to this. one is editorial. quote ebony" was very interested in trying to find ways to encourage african-american readers to think about individuals coming out of their community, being able to convey stories, narratives, trajectories, arcs of unquestioned success. and so, so you would have whether it was a major movie actor, a musician, an important entrepreneur, increasingly organizational and political leaders, civic celebrities in a sense. they would be brought out and not only sort of thought about or covered in terms of their work but also their family life. what are their tastes in relation to clothing or food or fine wine and spirits and such. for some people this was a disregard of the realities of life for most african-americans because it was a sort of decidedly bourgeois approach or bourgeois view to how to think about african-americans. ebb any was editorially saying blacks could identify with as per rational americans. what could aspire to higher station than historically available to them. what are ways their success could be understood as the potential road to success for other individuals? reading the magazine. second, because ebony was a picture magazine as well as a text magazine, indeed i think the great accomplishment of ebony during the 1940s and 1950s was to as sem a extraordinary group of photographers who brought their own modernist style how they were portraying individuals being covered, that meant there was visual appeal to the stories presented in the magazine and indeed a visual appeal, aura or charisma, if you will to the ways in which those individuals corresponded to others. third, the fact that "the ebony" was a magazine that sought to revolutionize the way consumer marketers thought about african-american consumers meant that in addition to the stories, in addition to the photographs, you had all of these different examples of ad advertisements, chesterfield cigarettes, seagram whiskey, eventually cadillac automobiles all of which using african-americans has plausible staged consumers for those products. and we're so used today to thinking about african-americans as inserted within the language of advertising to see that as sort of inconsequential or beside the point but never before had there been a publication that has successful any been able to get national marketers to see african-americans as agents of consumption. . . >> in terms of where the address and the appeal needed to go to. after "ebony," and there was a great deal of lobbying, surveying of consumer markets, a great deal of making the black consumer legible to national marketers. you would see people like joe lewis, gnat king cole, dorothy can dribble and others who would be presented as the exemplar of the black customer to whom that company now need today appeal. in its own way beyond laws, beyond the capacity to vote, this is a softer form of desegregation but one that's no less significant, of course, given this is a country that's built as much on the capacity to build consumer markets as it is to enjoy rights and reform laws. >> professor green, is that where the title, "selling the race," comes from? >> yes. and in that title i do want to convey that we have to understand the inherent contra duction behind this -- contradiction behind this because we don't want to purely see this as a teely logical story. being integrated, as it were, into the world of the consumer market meant, for instance, that much of the vitality, much of the idiosyncrasy, much of the e collect schism of african identity began to be sort of pushed down and softballed out and homogenized so that with someone like nat king cole, someone like joe lewis, lena lea horneone is presented with a version of how to be a successful african-american, rather than all of the successful somewhat fascinating stories of how people had made their way in earlier decades. another important contradiction is, of course, that the history of african-americans going back to the founding of the country is one this which their relationship to the market is not only as individuals who are prevented from being able to consume, but as entities who are being consumed. after all, african-americans come to this country largely through slavery. and much of what one sees during the 1940s in "ebony" in the "american negro exposition," in some of the initiatives to attempt to bring african-americans in greater alignment with the market is a puzzling over how to make this turn seem credible in the face of a much longer history in which black folks were face with the the heritage of their enslavement within the united states. and i think to some degree today going well past the sort of span of this book and thinking about what kinds of lessons it brings up in the present day, the fact that we still see many african-americans who are economically dispossessed, who are put in situations where they really do not have the capacity to exercise initiative, to transform their lives; they might be incarcerated, they might be in places this which jobs are very difficult to come by, they might be in places in which the wage scale or costs make it difficult for one to realize the kind of viable sort of economic condition. these n a sense, remind us that coming into the market is not necessarily a wholly empowering turn for individuals. and so at the same time that we celebrate and learn from those individual stories such as "ebony" would cover, we also have to think about the ways in which those stories distract us from other realities and distract us from the heritage that i was speaking about before. the market was not always african-americans' friend. >> you mentioned the american negro exposition. what was that? >> it was interesting, it was a world's fair that was put on specifically by african-americans meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary -- now thinking about the ways in which the story of slavery connects with the story of modern black life -- meant to celebrate the 75th anniversary of emancipation in 1865. and this that sense the exposition was both an attempt to think about all of the different ways in which progress could be marked whether in agriculture, whether in industry, whether in the ways in which black enclaves in cities like memphis, los angeles, detroit and chicago were putting together their own sorts of exhibitions and kiosks that conveyed a sense of how people had advanced. particularly important at the exposition was the story of african-american artists, visual artists put together this tremendous bigger than anything had ever been seen before in relation to african-american arts exhibit of some 200 different black artists and 200 different works. but at the same time, and i write about this toward the end of the chapter on the exposition in my book. one of the things that the exposition could not really address -- because in a certain sense it was going to jam the message of this idea of black progress -- was what sense to make of the fact that the 75th anniversary of slavery was something that made clear that one had to reckon with that history of slavery in order to understand the condition of the present that people found themselves in. so you would have some instances of dioramas by the famous sociologist e. franklin frazier that would convey the life of the black family during slavery and the black family during the latter part of the 19th century and the black family post-migration. you had officials like l.d. roedick who was the associate curator -- actually, the head curator of the schaumberg library in new york city who edited books that were commemorated the slave era. but what you didn't see was a real historical wrestling with and engagement with what the heritage of slavery meant to african-americans today. this was going to come later in relation to black communities in the new york and also in chicago in the form of a kind of black power-oriented approach to knowledge, in the form of emerging fields of black studies, in the form of revisionist approaches to slavery. but in 1940 it was, in a sense, a kind of history that dare not speak its name. and because of that one learns, as one often does from history, seeing what it is that people don't say that reveals something about who they are as much as what it is that they do say. >> ad a. green -- adam green, who is on the cover of your book, "selling the race"? >> it's a disc jockey, and this is actually a picture that wayne miller, the photographer who supplied me with most of the photographs that i used in my book, and i would be remiss in speaking about this book without thanking him for being so generous in terms of providing these photographs. wonderful, wonderful photographer who, incidentally, worked as a freelancer with "ebony." in any event, he's receiving a pitch from somebody who's representing anonymous woman, actress or singer -- likely singer -- and in the background are other pictures of women who have been contracted to appear at clubs or come on to radio shows. and the point of the photo in many ways is to encourage us to think about the fact that cultural initiative, cultural accomplishment, cultural product is something that emerges out of a process. it's not just simply a statement that comes out of the artist's mind or artist's mouth or off of the artist's hand. there needs to be a series of different mediating points. in some cases a disseminating mechanism or institution like a radio station or "ebony" magazine. in some cases the capacity to convene and organize a market such as the sorts of turns that took place in advertising. in this case, a publicity agent, a middle person who finds a way by looking at that individual who's being presented as a potential candidate to go on to greater publicity, greater fame, greater acclaim, to look at that person and say, well, how's that person actually going to translate? what are the steps that need to be made in order to package that person's art and person's appeal in this a different way? again, something that is completely ubiquitous in the world that we live in today with publyists all over the place for any number of people from movie artists and stars to politicians. at this point, though, this was novel in the case of african-american life. and to think about the fact that in 1940 to 1950 one is looking at a turn in black life where people are beginning to really understand that there needs to be these different institutional mediators in order to create the capacity to broadcast african-american identity and african-american appeal out to a wide audience. ultimately, a national audience. that's something that in many ways is at the heart of the chicago story in the 1940s and 1950s. i begin with this story, in a sense, this photograph with mckee fits hue. i end the story with a -- end the book with a story about martin luther king. and the fact that we understand him as an iconic figure in the last half of the 20th century. and many people understand this to be a result of the ways in which whites, white liberals, mainstream media embraced king as reform in the country. what we don't perhaps know is many years before king was actually brought up to that level of prominence, king was being presented as an iconic and exemplary african-american public and celebrity figure by "ebony" magazine, 1955, 1956, directly in the wake of the montgomery busboy cot. so that promotion alma chien, the ability to make people appear larger than life for good and sometimes for ill that it had on african-americans individually and collectively is something that comes out of the black community, i think, even more so than it comes out of the broader community. >> what courses do you teach here at the university of chicago? >> i teach an african-american history class in chicago which draws in part off of this research as well as looking at a great deal of wonderful scholarship that is being done in the period before i'm writing about and after i'm writing about. that class goes from approximately 1893 to 2007, 2008. i generally end it with the election of barack obama as presidentment i also -- president. i also teach a class on great documents or great texts in american history during the 19th century, that's called american civilization ii, and that has to do with the 19th century running all the way from tocqueville to william graham sumner and others. i do graduate classes that relate mainly to 20th century african-american history, often in an urban focus n an urban context. and this year i'm preparing to put together a class on approaching american popular culture from the standpoint of its industrial structures. so how do markets begin to emerge in relation to the music industry from the copyright act of 1909 to the reemergence of new platforms of disseminating music in the '70s and '80s. how does the movie industry move from its consolidation within the studio system to its disintegration and reconditioning around different finance structures and so on and so forth. so it's really, it's a wonderful, wonderful opportunity and a great treat to be able to teach to these fine students in this university. >> and we've been talking with professor adam green of the university of chicago. here's his book, "selling the race: culture, community and black chicago 1940 to 1955." >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here online. type the author or book title in the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can also share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> and now, barbara earn right discusses her book, nickel and dimed, about the difficulty of living adequately in america on low wages. this is about 45 minutes. [inaudible conversations] >> my goodness, i've got to say i'm just a little bit overwhelmed at the number of you. um, it looks as if we've got standing room only, so make yourselves as comfortable as you can. i just can't thank you enough for coming out tonight. i'm more than pleased to introduce to you barbara aaron right who will be speaking about her latest book, "nickel and dimed." it's the fruit of two years of experience within the ranks of those struggling to make ends meet while making full-time jobs. simply put, ms. aaron right decided to test for herself the truth of welfare reform rhetoric which promises that a job, any job, is the ticket to prosperity and sufl sufficiency. in 1999 and 2000 she left her comfortable life inkey west as a journalist and moving to right here in minneapolis, she worked

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