[applause] thank you very much indeed. First of all, it is slightly weird to be writing a book called the men who United States at a time when given all the recent troubles in washington in seems more disunited than for a long time. I know good people turn off their cellphones but i can so i am going to play you a short clip of music at the end so i hope that nobody telephones me during this presentation or i will feel like rudy guiliani. I dont know if you remember when he had to answer a phone while addressing a huge political campaign. The scope that doesnt happen. What i want to try to do tonight is tell you about the background of this book which is a big plum pudding of an affair and once i have told you how it will come in to being, two plums from the putting and illustrate what the book is all about but first background. It is the context story. As you might be able to tell i am english. I fell in love with this country quite literally when i first arrived hindered in 1962 as a student hitchhiking. I basically match in london and dublin get to of science fair, schoolchild science fair, i met a young canadian women. I was 17 and she was 16 and we fell in love or whatever one does at that age. I went to oxford. That i would visit her. I worked in a mortuary carving up bodies and earned enough money to go see her. I arrived in montreal in early 1962 and saw carol as her name was and after a while there was a huge continent beyond that i would go see and to my parentss dismay when they learned about it i set off hitchhiking to vancouver and that took not a very long time. Some dispatch, i decided to see america which i had been fascinated by. Who isnt . In english childhood you are raised and champion the wonder horse and all the programs we saw back then. I entered the United States i remember vividly in washington state, the first front the first sign i saw was welcome to the United States, it is illegal to hitchhike or pick up hitchhikers. Slightly disagreeable. I looked bewildered and in 90 seconds a young man in an english convertible sports car stopped and picked me up and said would you like to come to seattle and that was the beginning of the series of unbelievable experiences which i visited every single state in the union except alaska and hawaii. Everyone in the continental u. S. I traveled by think it was 38,000 miles totally. And everyone without exception was kind and hospitable and generous. I remember for instance one occasion south of San Francisco, quite late at night, trying to get a ride south to los angeles, couldnt get a ride all night, standing there ranging slightly and at 5 00 in the morning, stopped and said having trouble . I said yes, dont worry i will look after you so he invited me in a squad car and took me to the Police Station and introduced me to the desk sergeant and took my fingerprint. Why not wear these metal bracelets . But he didnt. This was just for souvenir purposes. He was at the end of his shift, shower and breakfast and in a squad car to a truck stop and ordered an 18 wheeler driver to took me down, was so nice and the next same day, the next ride was a chapter that worked for Nbc Television in burbank and he was connected to the Film Industry and he took me to see the filming of to meet john franken highrise director, seven days in may and i met Burt Lancaster and kirk douglas and the next day had coffee with johnny carson. It went on and on, this kind of thing and i was short of money and i entered with 200 american dollar bills when i entered the plane, 38,000 miles later, 182 of them left. The entire trip cost 18. The following year i went back and that was more specific during my summer vacation. Quite a keen climber and i was going to do soon timing and much the same thing, i was hitchhiking and they picked me up 4 different series of reasons. I had a union jack on the back, this was the year the audience will remember, the perfumer scandal and people would screech to a halt when they saw my union jack and said that i know christine personally . And the great train robbery, they wanted to know if i knew how to rob a train and i knew nothing but kind of poignant side of things i went to the opening of a lock on the st. Lawrence seaway to st. Mary and was pushed forward to shake hands with president kennedy. You can imagine a few months later he was assassinated, it felt particularly poignant so my love affair with this country was based on a fairly Solid Foundation but i didnt come back for quite a while. I went off and became a geologist, practiced geology and for a series of reasons which are not relevant, i ended up not as a geologist but as a journalist and i joined the guardian, and very difficult beginning of the troubles, a reward for that. In washington. I came back professionally to the United States. In 1972 the story was watergate, mostly stuck in washington at the sam irving committee, the Judiciary Committee and when nixon resigned, it was occasionally unleashed and allowed to go and look at it. And september of 1974, the day general ford pardoned Richard Nixon. Had i know and it was going to happen in washington, i was in idaho covering people can evils attempt to jump over the canyon. When i phoned in to the foreign desk with a story, because they had seen on the wires, it is scandalous you are not in washington but you are covering this business where this fella didnt have the decency to kill himself which would guarantee he would be on the front page on page 13 and should have been covering Richard Nixon but anyway, my fascination had now moved from simple legislation to professional fascination and i decided to write a book about it. So i had this idea which i imagine in chicago, will sympathize. I was persuaded that the essence of america, the liquidity of the america of may not on the east coast but or west coast but in the midwest. So i drove up and down and up and down into day 35 which goes from International Falls down through the middle of the country to texas and a book reported american heart beat, was published in the bicentennial year 1976. I have already written a book on north island which had done relatively well and i think i was infected with this hubris of you thinking this was going to be a success but when i got the statement in 1977 it showed the book had sold precisely 12 copies. It was not a commercial success. A few years ago i had a letter from william in the north shore who you are familiar with who wrote a cheery letters saying he had bought a copy recently bringing my total sales up to 13. Not exactly a moneymaker. Then i resumed, getting back into journalism, realizing a way to earn a living and i went off to various places, and the in india for three years and back in london briefly and came to new york for a little while but for 13 years to china and in 1997, when hong kong reverted to chinese rule i had one of those 4 in the road moments where was i going to live in london and establish myself there where i was born or go to new york and i decided it wasnt a flip of the co coin, i thought i would have more success in america so i went to new york and realized i was now paying taxes in america and using the old mantra of no taxation without representation, what was familiar to me as a bridge i thought i should try to get american citizenship. I applied for a green card which i managed to get and then you have to wait five years and then begin the mechanics of applying for citizenship and i finally did that in 20102011 and was called for my interview, they ask ten questions, all sorts of things, make sure you can speak english and write it but they ask me ten general knowledge questions about america, the first of which i managed to screw up royally. They said to me what is the American National anthem . Without thinking about it i blurted out america the beautiful and the immigration officer says we all wish it was not what it is which is the star spangled banner but that is one wrong. You only have nine more shot. There is a distinct possibility we may deny you permission but i managed to get the other nine right. That i was sworn in, complicated story how it came about but we allowed 20 people to take the oath on the after deck of the uss constitution which is a wonderful sailing vessel, the oldest commissioned worship in the world, it doesnt flow but this one does. So the oath was performed on Independence Day 2011 on a hot day and it was magical incredibly moving i have to say. I dont know if you have ever seen an immigration ceremony, the somalis, pakistani, all people who suddenly were free to do what they wish, they could vote and had no fear of arrest, it was wonderful. The judge who swore me and was this remarkable woman who has become a personal friend and i had lunch with her on tuesday. She is called maryann bolar, and with the judge at the moment in charge of the boston bombing case. That young man who has been charged of committing the offense woke up she was at his bedside and said essentially are you awake . You know where you are . Where do you live . I am a United States federal judge. This gentleman here is the prosecuting attorney, and you are in a great deal of trouble. She is a very interesting and wonderful woman and told me, one of the extraordinary things she said was you would be surprised how many immigrants i swear in, a hundred years, four five years later appeared before me in court in trouble. I want to say to them why . They gave use this chance. Anyway, i got my vote registration card the next day. Throw the rascals out as it were or try to. Then got my passport and traveled over, got this about a weekend travel over to london and was very moved. Very sentimental. When i return to kennedy and handed my passport to the immigration officer he smiled, looked at it and said welcome home. That was a great feeling to feel i was part of this extraordinary country. That i had become so fond of. At that moment i decided that i would like to have another go at writing the book. The first attempt had failed so dramatically. I could write another book and the lesson i learned was simply that it should not be in any way, shape or form like a book published in 1976, might have a chance of doing a little better. Then came the question of what should i write about . A huge country full of complexities. The first thought, i put all of these ideas you have to write a 30 page proposal for a 10,000 word essay on why i want to write this, no mean effort. The first was simply that i should write a him to the country, tell the story of some detail of why i had fallen in love with it, in such a dramatic way. No, that was not a very good it at all. Too saccharine, too sentimental. And because i love Railway Trains i realize it is possible to cross the entire United States on class iii freight railways from eastporche to california, and i got a readymade title for the book, 5 45 to parrot dies and the reason for that was on my second visit to america as a correspondent i was looking up when texas appeared and looking at where paris, texas was and notice, this was a page full of things, the column of 18, turned out 18 all called paradise. Chesney, 18 cities, little villages called paradise. Why where they called paradise and where they still parrot dies . I ran an editor in london. This was a time when english magazine and newspaper editors spend money, could not possibly visit all the towns called paradise . No problem at all. So the kind of assignment you would never get today. I set off and first one was parrot dies, fla. A retirement committee, more gave way to paradise than any thing. One hopes anyway. Then there was parrot dies, pa. Which was down the road from intercourse, pa. Which excites everybody. And parrot dies, arkansas, paradise, montana, all ruined one way or another by some aspect of north American Society except for one which was in northern northwestern kansas, the land of kansas and therefore near the Geographical Center of the continental u. S. So i went there and what turned out to be my routine i went to the post office and there was a lady, postmaster, men or women, the post office in this country, and i said i am from england and i am writing at peace about all the towns called paradise and she said here, a little town of 250 people, you have got to stay with the patriarchs of the village as they are called, john and mary angel. I stayed with the angels of paradise and mary angel rising to the occasion, when to the garden and picked cherries and baked me at cherry pie and quite honestly if anything sealed my love for the country was eating cherry pie baked by the angels in paradise. As it happens there used to be a Union Pacific train which would leave in the morning from paradise and come back at 4 30 in the afternoon which the housewife who had been shopping in the markets get back to the farm in time to cook dinner put their husbands and people who worked on the farm. That was train no. 545. That didnt wash. And this was even more juvenile. And the anatomy of britain. Why dont i write the anatomy of america, based it on the structure of grays anatomy, not the Television Program but the book which was published in 1856. It was organized in the cardiovascular system and this could work, the universitys, the Communications System and highways and arteries. And the skeleton is the bridge work. I was really stumped. And i would like to write a book about this country and the United States of america, the word united. How come america managed to keep itself with the exception of the miserable years in the 1860s, united, no large entity on the planet kept itself united in any truly coherent way. Since the soviet union dissolved into a dozen middle states, canada, wonderful boy is, there is a great disgruntled frankowphone chung in the middle of it and as i get close to the Canadian Border the audience will get more restless and i will go to russia. I will tone that bit down. Though viewers where i come from, we tried desperately ever since the end of the Second World War to unify and manifestly not fully, we in britain dont use the euro, try to plug in your shaver in stockholm you need a plug from the one you use in madrid, they sort of glare at each other. That hasnt achieved unity but this place, a mongrel nation full of every color and creed and persuasion and race, linguistic background that you can imagine, and yet an algonquian indian person in maine, and a jewish person in new york or latina in albuquerque, fishermen in oregon can all feel a mystical they are allamerican but how did this happen . It is possible to say that abstract things like language, common language or belief in democracy or human rights or Something Like that has helped this unity but my thought was the physical agencies of man were the real things that healed this country into one. It is easy few are all the same. If you are all norwegian, blond and have the same manner. My wife is japanese. Is easy for japan to unite itself but america, much more difficult. I came up with this idea that inventions and creations and ideas of physical union were actually what you did this country into one. So i sat down and started making a list of all the people i could think of that somehow helped weld the country into one nation and kept it so. This list got longer and longer, familiar people like jefferson and lewis and clark and so forth and a lot of obscure people. I mentioned it to my wife one day and she said you are creating a list of the men who United States and i fought my god, that is the title. I looked it up on amazon and all the various book catalogs, no one has ever used this title. Such an obvious title. But anticipated the question, also a title that gets me in trouble. I find a very good way of bringing yourself down to earth is taking yourself down a peg or two to look at amazons one star reviews where they say this is the most boring book i ever read in my life, cant write worth anything. There is one one star review at the moment from a woman who says i am an unabashed militant feminist and i am so appalled at the title the men who United States. I wont even pick it up and read it. I got one star review without even being read. But her view is one that i anticipated. Why is it all men . Fact is the reality is in the physical uniting of america, it has been the business almost entirely of men. The only woman who appears in this story is sacajawea in the lewis and clark saw the. Otherwise i am afraid to way women play ancillary rules. They have an Important Role in other aspect of america but not in its physical union of the nation. So i started establishing this list which got to 100 people on it which may be 75 you had never heard of but nonetheless who i was convinced played a very important part and then you come to how do you organize it . I once talked the university of chicago for a semester and the university of california, created nonfiction writing and i always thought there were three key elements to the writing of a nonfiction book, one is the idea. The idea is king. You got to have a terrific idea to write a book. The writing has to be good. But it is not the second most important thing. The second most important thing is the structure of the book. You can write lyrically about a wonderful idea but if the structure is all over the map you are going to lose people. How do you look at these 100 people who played such an Important Role in the story of the uniting of america . How do you organize it in a way that will make it readable . You could organize them alphabetically . That would be an encyclopedic book. It would not be at all interesting. You could organize them chronologically but i would argue when you look at it closely, similarly just doesnt work. Puzzle for two or three weeks and one day i was writing a letter to a friend of mine in shanghai, china. Suddenly remembered nearly all eastern philosophical systems, there are what are called the