Want to thank the commentators and everyone for assembling this deeply honor especially to be giving the William Roger lewis in the flesh. We were on the state Department Committee suffering through a lot of bows and arrows back in the decade prior, and i got to know him well and i feel really honored to give a lecture that is in his name. This book came about and so many of you, my friends, have heard this origin story. This came about because lewis liked the review i had done and mentioned the series that helen was doing that would use my biography to teach history that would pick biographical topics or would use a representative biography to get a broader subject of history. They had just published their first volume. It was on pocahontas. And issues regarding native American History, they were looking for somebody to do something on foreign relations, he offered me the opportunity to put together the perspectives. These were supposed to be short and concise books, that was the idea
She found this by while researching her previous book on nobel physicist. So lets go at it. I was asking you why close a few cars. I actually got interested in him when i was doing this because i had a lot of family papers, i had huge numbers of letters and diaries. In those, during the late thirties when he was there, he was always showing up in some little piece of paper that i had, he was showing up is very nice person. He took their children out to the movies. He played cards with them. He was in their little music on stumble. People liked him, he was very quiet, very shy but he was a nice person and all of a sudden he was a spy and they were dumbfounded and i came into this information as i did, i did know much about him when i was first working on it. So, at that point as i was writing about him i thought i should find out more about klaus fuchs, hes an interesting person. I went to the archives in london and there were three little skimpy files. The very last one that i looked a
That was a grand introduction. If you just want the major accomplishments of David Rice Atchison, thank you, it has been a lovely evening. [laughter] needless to say, his administration is a little less impressive than maybe truman or anyone else who was ever president. However, David Rice Atchison is someone you should know about. He was a significant player in the days leading up to the civil war and the term what we call bleeding kansas. He was one of the people who really began the push to get kansas as a state and he tried to direct it in a certain direction that he felt was beneficial for the union. Was he misguided . Very possibly. Was he successful . Absolutely not. And, but what is important was who this person was and why, unfortunately, he disappeared from everything. The library came up with the davidfor this program, rice atchison, president no one knows. Looking at that, i realized that long ago in another lifetime as a journalist, i wrote a column for the newspaper i wor
Nancy i was interested in him when i was working on my on bourne. I had a lot of papers on the bou rnes. Letters, diaries. In the late 30s, when he was there, he was always showing up in some piece of paper. He was showing up as a very nice person. He took their children to the movies, played cards with them. As germans do. He was in their music ensemble. People liked him. He was very quiet, very shy, but he was a nice person. All of a sudden, he was a spy, and they were dumbfounded. I came into this information. They did not know much about him when i was first working on it. So, at that point, i thought i should find more about fuchs. I went to the archives in london and there were three little skippy files. Skimpy files. The very last when i looked at, had a letter from somebody in the administration saying, what am i supposed to do with all of fuchs files from his trial and everything . The person who received it said through them away. So i was astounded. There is not anything. Bo
That the arts have been a considerable help that i had from the archives in writing this book. The destructive flash, which seared here she meant to history, was really the culmination of 50 years of scientific creativity and of more than 50 years of political and military turmoil. Generations of scientists had contributed to that moment in physics. Yet when they first began to tease out the secrets of matter, not even future nobel Prize Winners i think couldve predicted how their pioneering insights would combine with exterior of vents to produce such a defining military history. For the time this of many nations this journey of discovery began way back in the 1890s. Researchers like mary carey, which we will see in this for slide here, researchers like mary kerry working alone or in small teams with rudimentary equipment. They started to identify the minute Building Blocks forming the world around them. Blinding discoveries were often matched by blind alleys. People rushed to publish