Washington post columnist, thriller writer who writes about the cia and such. This month, Pulitzer Prize winning author, Colson Whitehead as our guest. His most recent book is the under ground railroad. Mr. Whitehead, whats the appropriate response new book is appraised by oprah, president obama, you won the National Book award, what is the appropriate response . If only it took the pain aw away. [laughter] has taken off in a way thats unexpected and startling and wonderful. Just try to enjoy it despite my best efforts. Why does it put you in a better mood . Ive been writing for 20 something years doing fiction 20 some years, sometimes we write a book and people dig it and understand it sometimes write a book and no one cares and its sort of disappears so i have the pride the job i did with the book. Either you dig the groups of two prospectors or you dont and so you are either along for the ride description or not. Definitely when i was writing was my second attempt at a novel. My fir
Life. There is a component of this that a lot of people do not understand. Not only is there a relationship between Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Kennedy, but a relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and john f. Kennedy. We will start with the beginning, which is the relationship between Franklin Roosevelt and joe kennedy. Joe kennedy made most of his money in the 1920s in the stock markets. Kennedy asppointed the head of the Security Exchange commission. Some said that was putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. This created a relationship in which joe kennedy really became a very close confidant of fdr. He became ambassador to the court of st. James. You want to talk about how he managed that posting in london right before the war . It is an interesting time. I almost want to go back a tiny bit before that. As you could imagine, when young people are in the age where they are graduating from high school, whoever is the president in that moment has a profound impact on them. Shapes
History of slavery, and in particular, the experiences of enslaved women. We already had a chance to look at the case of Harriet Jacobs, one of the best remembered of the slave narratives. There, jacobs introduced us, if you will, to that dimension of slavery that is exemplified, and we might say central to the experience of slave women, and that is sexual violence. We will come back a little bit to talk about jacobs in comparison to our case today, that of celia. We also looked at the wpa narratives, and one of the things we noticed about those narratives was the extent to which some issues, including sexual violence, violence generally, and sexual violence, in particular, was rather muted in the slave narratives. And so here we have an with this case to take another pass at this question, to try to see this dimension of slavery through the experience of celia. So, why do i say try to see this dimension of slavery . As you have all begun to see in your readings for today, there are ma
That is Sexual Violence. We will come back a little bit to talk about jacobs in comparison to our case today, that of celia. We also talked about wpa narratives, and one of the things we noticed about those narratives is the extent to which some issues, including Sexual Violence violence generally, and Sexual Violence, in particular was rather muted in the slave narratives. And so here, we have with the celia case the opportunity to take another pass at this question, to try to see this dimension of slavery through the experienceli so, why do i say try to see this dimension of slavery . As you have all begun to see in your readings for today, there are many ways in which the record and the evidence upon which we rely to discover, explore, and understand the case of celia is a challenging record to make use of. So part of our work today will be to talk about the evidence in the celia case, how it is we recover from what is in essence the record of a trial a rather fragmentary, carefully