>> John Haskell: Welcome, everybody. We're ready to get started. Sorry for beginning a little late. My name is John Haskell. I'm the director of the Kluge Center here at the library. The Center brings in scholars conducting research in the library collections. Our mission is to bring their work to policymakers in the interest of the public in various forms, including conversations like today's. African American Passages: Black Lives in 19th-Century America. This one features different perspectives. Our conversations all feature different perspectives on the issues. This time with a prominent historian and a prominent journalist. Adam Rothman to the left is professor of history at Georgetown University and the author of three books on slavery and 19th-century US history, including the award-winning Beyond Freedom's Reach. Adam was in residence here at the Kluge Center at the library as a distinguished visiting scholar in the fall semester, working on bringing to light through podcasts and blogs the writings of slaves contained in the Library of Congress Collections. Jesse Holland has reported on politics for the Associated Press in all three branches of government, at the Supreme Court, the White House and in the Congress. He was the first African American elected to the Congressional Standing Committee of Correspondents who were charged with credentialing reporters for the House and Senate. He is currently the race and ethnicity reporter for the AP. Jesse is the author of Black Men Built the Capital: Discovering African American History in and around DC, as well as a major work on slavery, Inside the White House. More recently, in tandem with the Black Panther movie last year, Jesse developed the novels and wrote the novels. I was just talking to him about it. A little more attention for those novels than things he had written for the AP in the last two decades or the excellent books he's written. Please join me in welcoming Adam and Jesse. [ Applause ] >> Jesse Holland: Well, good afternoon. I appreciate everyone being here today. I will apologize for my slight tardiness. I got stuck behind a motorcade, so this is DC. That sort of thing happens here. You have to plan for these things. So I really appreciate being here, and I always appreciate being back in the Library of Congress. As a writer, as a nonfiction writer, and I have to say that I started writing nonfiction before I started fiction. And that's where my heart is. I've been a journalist for almost 30 years which is nothing but nonfiction writing. And then I got into nonfiction writing in my books. And one of the things that you learn quickly as both a writer and a reporter is that you have to do research. Research is essential to everything that we do as nonfiction authors and as journalists. And one of the best databases in the entire planet is right here at the Library of Congress. Back when I started my first book which was called Black Men Built the Capital: Discovering African American History in and around Washington DC, I basically lived in this building. Actually, at that time I lived in Capital Hill. I actually lived right down on 16th Street. And so I would come down here on weekends, on Saturdays when it was open, and after work because at that time I was actually working inside the capital. And I would spend as much time as I could going through photographs, going through old newspapers, going through documents, going through everything I could find here that would support my thesis that there was a strong African American history in Washington that wasn't just in Anacostia. It wasn't just in Georgetown. It wasn't just on Yew Street. That there was African American history here on the National Mall. And I was amazed at some of the material that you could find if you just had time to look. And one of the best things that has ever been done for me and any other researcher in the United States is the Library of Congress's website, where we can now look through some of this material 24 hours a day. You're no longer dependent upon the library being open and being able to get into the building to do the research you need to do on your projects. So I owe a lot to my start as an author to the Library of Congress. And I was really dependent on the Library of Congress for my second book which was The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House. There is so much material available here at the Library of Congress, at the National Archives, through the White House Historical Association, but it requires someone to look. And that's what's so great about this material being available to us as Americans. Because when I travel overseas, I just spent some time in Kazakhstan back in September. The things that we take for granted, that we can come into the Library of Congress and we can look through government material, we can look through old newspapers, those freedoms aren't available for researchers everywhere around the world. And we sometimes take that for granted. So we really need to appreciate places like this for the access to the material that they give us. It's just amazing and I think we should be really, really happy that we have places like the Library of Congress to help us find this type of material that we need so we can understand not only our past but ourselves. >> Adam Rothman: Jesse, I totally agree. The Library of Congress is really an extraordinary repository. When we think of a library, we think of books but we also here at the Library of Congress have this incredible manuscript collection. Now the manuscripts at the Library of Congress are generally collections of powerful people, politicians, presidents. And so at first glance you might think it's an unlikely place to search for and find material connected to African American history. But as you just heard from Jesse, I think that's exactly wrong. This is actually an extraordinary place to research and write about African American history using manuscript collections. I would love to hear from Jesse, what kind of collections you used to write that book, The Invisibles. What kind of manuscript material were you sifting through to find that evidence that you needed? >> Jesse Holland: Well, especially when you're writing about slavery, it's very rare to find an actual account from a slave in the area that you're looking for. Now my area of expertise is slavery, the slaves who were owned by US presidents. That actually started out as my thesis. I got my master of fine arts in creative nonfiction from Goucher College up in Towson Maryland. And my thesis started out as a paper about the slaves of the first five presidents. I say five because we know John Adams didn't hold slaves. But I wanted to look at those first five presidents. And so I was looking for a specific slave at a specific location at a specific time. Now it's difficult to find those type of stories, especially when you're looking at a specific location. But the way -- if you're studying slavery, a lot of times what you do is you end up reading stories that other people are telling about their slaves. So for example, you go back and you read the papers of George Washington. You read the papers of Thomas Jefferson. You read their correspondence and inside those correspondence, they will talk about their slaves. And then you try to build a picture of what that slave was like. What I tell a lot of people about writing The Invisibles is that I had to study George Washington to figure out who Oney Judge was. Because only late in her life was Oney Judge able to tell her story to newspapers. But Martha Washington talked a lot about Oney Judge. George Washington talked a lot about Oney Judge. Some of the things that I was able to find was an ad that George Washington placed in a newspaper that described Oney Judge because Oney Judge had run away from him. She had escaped. So that was one of the first descriptions that we actually had of what Oney Judge looked like, was the newspaper ad that George Washington placed after Oney Judge ran away from him in Philadelphia. So unlike doing contemporary history, you don't actually get to hear from the person. You take everything else that has been written about them and you try to build a picture around that person. One of the examples I use, I teach research and reporting at Goucher now. And one of the examples of stories I use is Gay Talese's Frank Sinatra has a Cold. Because it's an entire story that's written about Frank Sinatra that doesn't have Frank Sinatra in it. Frank Sinatra never speaks. But Gay Talese builds this picture of Frank Sinatra by talking to all the people around him. So we build the pictures of the slaves that I use in The Invisibles by taking the account of the presidents, their wives and their children. And you build this picture up of these individuals who never had a chance to tell their own stories. And a lot of that -- honestly, it requires so much reading of so much material to find that one sentence that says that Oney Judge got to go to the circus in Philadelphia. To find that one piece of information that you're looking for throughout all of these newspapers, these documents, these letters, this correspondence, these records. That each one is a small piece of the puzzle. And a lot of that material was here, especially when it comes to Thomas Jefferson. You find a lot of that material in the archives here and at the presidential plantations where I also of course had a lot of work done there as well. >> Adam Rothman: I had the great opportunity to spend some time last semester here at the Library of Congress looking in the manuscript collections for precisely the thing that is so hard to find in these collections. Most of what we do as historians of slavery is to research what other people said about the people they owned, as Jesse points out. But there are these needles in a haystack where you can actually find manuscript material words written by enslaved people themselves. So my task here at the Library last semester was to find some examples of that kind of material. And we did a few podcasts and other kinds of media about what we found. So let me just tell you one. Jesse mentioned presidents and their slaves. I found a letter that was written by a man named Harry who was a blacksmith who was owned by James K. Polk. He wrote a letter to Polk just after Polk was elected president in 1844. Let's see, 1844, did I get that right? Yeah, 1844. He wrote this letter. And this letter is here at the Library of Congress, and in fact it's been digitized along with the rest of the Polk correspondence. And we're talking about millions of pages of manuscript material to find one letter written by a person who was actually held in bondage. The letter is sort of mind-blowing. He writes to his dear master -- that's the salutation, "My dear master." He congratulates Polk on being elected president. And he says -- so Harry was actually in Mississippi and Polk was in Tennessee. He had been hired out and was working as a blacksmith in Mississippi. He tells Polk that he had actually gotten -- he had done electioneering for him in Mississippi. He had been campaigning for Polk, a slave campaigning for Polk. Not only campaigning for Polk; he was betting with his white neighbors that Polk would win the election. Apparently he had been doing this for many elections and losing a lot of money on Polk. Because he tells Polk that you know, finally he won. Finally he won. So most of this letter is sort of buttering up Polk, and then at the end of the letter he sort of gets to the chase. He says that basically he wants to be hired out to a better person, somebody who will treat him better. So at the end there's this request that Harry makes as a slave to try to induce Polk to get him treated a little bit better. So it's a really remarkable letter. It's sort of a unique kind of document and a needle in the haystack. But these things do exist if you look hard enough for them. But it really takes time and it takes a lot of reading and it takes some advice. So I was pointed to that letter by a historian at Penn State University named Amy Greenberg who's just coming out with a book on Sarah Polk, James Polk's wife, and her state and her relationship to her slaves. And she said, "Adam, you've got to take a look at this letter." So I owe a lot to her. Even professional historians need guidance in the archives. But that's the kind of thing you can find. >> Jesse Holland: Right, and I mean this is one of the things that I keep having to bat down when I talk about slavery. A lot of people seem to think that there's nothing new that can be told about America's slavery period. And I keep having to remind people that we keep finding new things every day. When things get digitized, when someone in another state or even another country does a new piece of research, it points us in a different direction. I wrote Black Men Built the Capital -- I started working on it back in 2005 and it was published in 2007. And Adam and I were actually talking about this earlier. Through my entire work on that book -- I actually started writing it in 2005, but I had been researching it for two or three years before that. The one thing I never could find was an actual photograph of a slave building the capital. Because that's what I wanted for the picture of the cover, you know, Black Men Built the Capital. You want a picture of a slave building the capital. And I knew there had to be one somewhere. And so for about five years I searched and searched and searched, National Archives, Capital Historical Society, Library of Congress. So about four years ago, I'm doing research on something else and I'm over in the photograph room across the street, just flipping through photos, hard copy of photos. Just flipping through these. And I run across a photo that I had never seen before of someone who looks like an African American slave getting ready to hoist one of those columns on the front of the capital. Now the picture has no identification on it, no time period, nothing. But it's the closest that I have been able to come to finding someone who looks like -- it looks time-specific. The dome is not yet built on the capital. It looks like the exact thing that I was looking for, and I have a copy of it now. I paid for a copy of it. It probably was there the first time I was looking for it. But the physical ability to be able to go through each photograph in that time period in the photograph division, I just did not have the time to spend to go through every single photograph. Now once again, now that things are being digitized, it's a lot easier. But we're finding new things all the time. I tell people -- I mean, when I talk about this issue, I tell people all the time, there is a document in someone's attic right now that is incredibly important to the history of this country and that person doesn't know it. I have a lot of people who come and ask me about writing their family's histories. And I say, "The first thing you need to do, you need to go look through every photograph your mother, your father, your grandparents have. You need to take photographs of those photographs with your iPhones." Because a lot of our history is stuck in these attics, stuck in these basements, stuck in these boxes in people's houses and we don't know about it. So a lot of times, every day we are finding out new things about slavery, new things about America's history. New things about periods in America. Once again, I'm a journalist with the Associated Press and so over the last few weeks I've had the occasion to study up on blackface. Not something that I would ever figure I would study. >> Adam Rothman: Jesse, why are you doing that? [ Laughter ] Satiric. >> Jesse Holland: And I was able to find things that I didn't know about blackface. For example, blackface is where we get the name Jim Crow from. But I didn't know that Jim Crow actually started as an African trickster, and was then converted. And then Thomas Rice turns it into a minstrel show, cultural appropriation. And then African Americans take the name back and turn it into a description of discriminatory laws in the south, Jim Crow laws. So maybe there were historians out there that knew that whole path, but I didn't. So we are able to discover new things about ourselves as a people every day. I mean, once again, if you have unlimited money, this would be the place I would be sitting every day just going through records. Because you learn so much. You learn about things that you didn't know you didn't know. So this is why the library of Congress and the manuscripts here are so fascinating. Right now I'm reading through some Library of Congress manuscripts still about the whole Jim Crow era. Because there are parts of that story that haven't been told yet. And just sitting as both an author and a journalist, being able to point back to an original source that says this is what happened -- I mean, honestly in the world that we live in now where we doubt everything and everybody, you have to have your original sources to say, this is how I know this. And that's what the manuscript division, the photograph division, that's what this place is so great about being able to give you as an author: that stamp of approval to be able to say, "You don't have to believe me. Here's the original document. Go read it for yourself." I'm going to give you the link to the Library of Congress site. Go read this and see if you don't come to the same conclusion. And so once again, this is why this place is so vital, especially to me as both an author and a journalist. That I'm able to point to a photograph that you can download and see that of course this is what this was. Because here's the photograph that shows it. Of course there were colored only signs in this place, because here's a photograph from Memphis, Tennessee on Beale Street that I just looked at. Download yourself, see if you don't believe me. So a lot of the stuff that I do both as a journalist and as an author revolve around the material that's here. >> Adam Rothman: Jesse, the things that you're saying are spinning off so many ideas in my own mind. And just something about discovering things that are new. I think there's two things here. One is if you spend time in the archives, you will discover things that are new. Stories that have not been told. Although of course our discoveries as researchers depends a lot on the work that archivists have already done to catalog these materials. >> Jesse Holland: Right. >> Adam Rothman: And it's very important to keep in mind. We do discover -- keeping that in mind, we do discover things that allow us to tell some new stories about the history of slavery and emancipation. And we discover new documents that tell us things that we didn't already know about people who might be familiar. So one example of this, there was a man named Robert Pin who was actually a free man of color who was born in Oho, born free in Ohio in the early 19th century. He eventually joins the Union Army and fights in the Civil War. He fights in one of the US colored troop regimens, because he is of African descent. And he had tried to enlist at the beginning of the war but was rejected because black people were originally not allowed to fight. But as the war goes on, Lincoln authorizes the use of black soldiers and Pin gets his opportunity to enlist. He fights bravely. He fights in a battle called the Battle of Chaffin's Farm in which he gets injured and loses the use of his right arm. And for his bravery in that battle, Pin wins the medal of honor. He's one of a handful of African American soldiers who wins the medal of honor during the Civil War. And so for that he's actually not an unknown figure. He's not a well-known figure, but he's not an unknown figure. And here I think there's something important, which is that there's knowledge that a small group of scholars and historians know that the public doesn't know. >> Jesse Holland: Right. >> Adam Rothman: So one of the things that we have to do as historians, and part of what was motivating my project here at the library last semester, was to try to find some new ways to tell these stories that would reach people beyond my students and colleagues at Georgetown. So that's the idea of the podcast. But here's the thing about Pin. In the fall of 1865, he writes an essay for a left-handed penmanship competition sponsored by a newspaper editor who is trying to highlight the cause of disabled veterans, a man named William Olan Bourne. There are hundreds of entries, hundreds of essays that were submitted to this contest. And all of those essays are now here at the Library of Congress in the William Bourne collection which has been digitized so you can find them, including Pin's essay. Where he writes about his life and his military service and the sacrifice that he made for his country. So here is somebody that at least some people already know about. But I'm pretty sure nobody knew about this essay that he had written for the left-handed penmanship competition which I think opens up a whole set of questions about African American military service and how veterans, black veterans and especially disabled black veterans, navigated the landscape of post-Civil War society. So we've got a podcast episode called Robert Pin's Left Hand about his essay. But we have more than that. Jesse mentioned photographs. There's a photograph of Robert Pin. It's a fairly well-known photograph. It was actually collected, compiled by W. E. B. DuBois, none other than DuBois for an exhibit that he was putting on in Paris celebrating African American achievements. So we have his essay, we have his photograph in which he's proudly displaying the medals that he won in the civil war. And the combination of the written document and the photograph gives us I think a more three-dimensional portrait of him than we might otherwise have had if say all we had was his pension record. So you spend enough time in archives, these are the stories that you can cobble together with a collection of different documents. >> Jesse Holland: And I want to bounce of something he just said. I found when I first moved here -- I've been in DC since 2000. And once again, I started working full-time on Black Men Built the Capital in 2005. And as I'm going through all of this material about Washington DC -- because of course I start at the National Mall, but I spread our around Washington DC. And one of my favorite stories has to do with something in Capital Hill, Lincoln Park. So the statue of Lincoln Park, the statue in the center of Lincoln Park is of course of Abraham Lincoln. And it was one of the first statues in America that was funded by African Americans. It was funded and put there by an African American society. It's a statue of Lincoln and at Lincoln's feet is an African American slave being released. So the model for the African American slave is also a real person. And I was able to track him down, track some records from the statue being put there through the Library of Congress. But then I started calling historians about this. And every historian, every DC historian I talked to, I was amazed to find this out. Because at that point in my research, I was looking for representations of real African Americans in the District of Columbia. And at that time there were only two. One was the slave in Lincoln Park and the other one was the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. in the rotunda in the capital. At that point there were only two in all of DC. Now there's a third, there's a statue of Carter G. Woodson over off of Rhode Island Avenue. And there have been more put up around DC since that time. But at that point there were only two. And every DC historian I talked to about this statue said, "Yeah, of course we knew it was there. Of course we knew who this guy was." But I was like, "Nobody else does. Who did you tell? How can anybody else find out about this?" And so that was one of the things that inspired me to move out of journalism and start writing books, because there's a lot of information, a lot of this history that only historians know. And it doesn't do the general population any good for only a few people to know this, and for the general population to have no way to access the information. So that was one of the reasons why I started working on Black Men Built the Capital. Because I was hearing all of these great stories from historians in DC. But if you didn't talk to that one particular historian, you wouldn't find out the information. There was so much about the city that's fascinating but only a few people know. Once again, this is before the digitization of all the material here at the Library of Congress where you had to actually be here to find out. Like for example, one of the few African American women to have her own statue in Washington DC is also in Lincoln Park, and that's Mary McCleod Bethune. Lincoln sits in the middle and Mary McCleod Bethune sits in the east end of the park. Well, one of the fascinating stories I was able to track down through one of the newspapers here was when the statue of Lincoln was originally placed in that park, it faced west because of course they want President Lincoln to be looking at the US capital. So then the statue of Mary McCleod Bethune is added to Lincoln Park, but it's added to the east end. So Mary McCleod Bethune is now looking at Lincoln's back. So there were some people who thought that would be wrong, that Mary McCleod Bethune was such an impressive woman that Lincoln would never turn his back on her. So the statue of Lincoln was picked up and turned. So now Lincoln's back is to the capital and he's looking at Mary McCleod Bethune's face. That was the honor they did for Mary McCleod Bethune in Lincoln Park. Now those type of stories I think are worth remembering. But if you weren't in DC and read the newspaper that day or if you weren't here and didn't know that story, it would be lost. And that's one of the reasons why we do the things we do, that we spend these hours in archives looking for these stories, looking for these fascinating pieces of America. Because those are stories that everyone should know, not just a selected few. That's knowledge that should be shared nationwide and internationally and not just condemned to a file somewhere where maybe someone in the future will read it. No, we have to share this kind of information. >> Adam Rothman: Well, just let me ask you a question, and this might be painful for me and my historian colleagues. But why do you think that happens? Why do you think that there's a gap between the world of scholarship, what scholars know and public understanding of history? Where is that gap? Why does that gap exist and how do we bridge it? >> Jesse Holland: Well, I mean I have to say I now straddle those two worlds, so I have to be fair to both sides. It takes effort to become a specialist in any one area of history. And for a lot of us, our goal is to find out this information because it's so hard to find it out. It's a whole different thing to be able to publicize that information, you know? All historians aren't authors. All authors aren't historians. These are two specialized skills and they don't always combine into one person. So a lot of times when I talk to historians for my journalism job, what we find, what I find personally having done this for 30 years, what I find personally is that historians and experts in any category speak to people as if you already know everything they do. And it's very hard for them to pull their minds back to the Joe mechanic level after having spent 30 years researching quantum mechanics. It's hard to explain the interesting thing about your field to someone who knows nothing about quantum mechanics. So a lot of times it's difficult for historians and experts frankly on any topic to be able to not only explain what they're doing and the importance of it, but to be able to convey that explanation in words that everyone else will understand and understand its importance. So I've been lucky enough to have been a journalist for 30 years. My whole job is explaining things to people. That's what I do. Especially for the time that I worked over at the Supreme Court, you learn to take these difficult topics and be able to break it down to their most simplest forms where everyone could understand. And there's a secret phrase I use when I'm talking to an expert. I say, "Talk to me like I'm a six-year-old." And then if they can talk to me like -- a lot of newspapers will tell you to tell people to talk to you as if they're sitting at a bar, you're telling this story at a bar. Well no, I'm like, "Talk to me like I'm a six-year-old. Explain it to me in the simplest fashion you can." Once I understand it, I can then make it more complicated for my reader. But a lot of historians have spent their entire lives -- I was actually talking to someone today about voter suppression in the south, and he told me he'd been studying it for 45 years. Now it's hard for someone like that to come in to someone who knows nothing about the subject. And you say, "Well, explain to me voter suppression in the south." He cleared his throat and said, "Do you have an hour?" Well, of course, no I don't have an hour. But I think that's the barrier there. When you get to a point where you're such an expert on the subject that it's hard for you to understand that there's probably nobody else on the planet that's an expert the way you are, so you have to figure out a way to explain it that's simplistic. But all of our topics are never simplistic. So it's hard to break it back down to a level where other people can not only understand it, but you are satisfied in the way that you're explaining it, if that makes any sense. >> Adam Rothman: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I think that professional historians and other kinds of scholars are really invested in making arguments about history. And that can be a little bit dry sometimes if it's not clear what the stakes are. >> Jesse Holland: Right. >> Adam Rothman: But I think what really captures public imagination is historical storytelling. >> Jesse Holland: Right. >> Adam Rothman: If you can find a good story -- I mean, the stories you're telling are wonderful stories. I think storytelling is one way that we can really bridge that gap between scholarship and popular understandings of history. And that's something we've been trying to do in these podcasts, tell stories about real people using the manuscript collections to pain the portraits of these lives. I was struck by one thing you said, you were really interested in looking for stories about African American women. >> Jesse Holland: Right. >> Adam Rothman: And that was part of the motivation of looking at the Bethune statue. And that was an interesting challenge for this manuscript project, because we're actually able to find a number of sources that were written by enslaved men and free men of color. But at least for the 19th century -- now I'm not talking about the 20th century where there is a much broader range of material. For the 19th century it was very difficult to find in the manuscript collections material written by black women. So that was a real challenge. But I did come across a really intriguing set of manuscript materials in a collection here known as -- it's called the Black History collection, and it's really a hodgepodge of a lot of different kinds of materials connected to slavery and emancipation in the 19th century and beyond. And this collection has been processed. There's a finding aid online but it's not digitized. So you can't just flip through it online. You actually have to go to the reading room and look through this material. So there was one folder and the title of the folder was Adeline Henson, a woman's name. And this is what was in this folder: a bill of sale, a letter and two photographs. That was all that was in this folder. The bill of sale was a bill of sale from December 1861 in which a 41-year-old woman named Adeline Henson was sold to a Mary Price. That was the bill of sale. This was in Baltimore in December of 1861. Then there was a letter. The letter was from Mary Price's daughter donating this bill of sale to the Library of Congress and explaining who Adeline Henson was. Adeline Henson was an enslaved woman who was about to be sold from Baltimore to Georgia just on the eve of the Civil War. But her owner basically at Adeline's pleading sold her to the Price family where she had been working as a servant. She remained with the Price family for the next 50 years. And according to the letter from Ida Grimnald, the daughter of Mary Price, she was a faithful and devoted servant to the family. That was how the letter described her. And the family thought so much of this woman that they wanted her story preserved in the Library of Congress, preserved in the record. There are also two photographs along with this material. One was a photograph of Adeline Henson around 1860 as a 40-year-old woman. This is the photograph, if you go to the African American Passages Podcast web page, that's the photograph on the front of the web page. And to me it's a stunning photograph. It's a woman with a kind of downcast look -- everybody who looks at this photograph finds it filled with sadness. It's a very moving photograph, but then there's another photograph from about 1910 or 1911 in which Adeline Henson is now an elderly woman. She's in her 90's, sitting on the stoop of a house in Washington DC where the family had moved. So I just thought this was captivating. And so we did a podcast about her life just using these manuscript materials and other information we can find out about her through the census and things like that. So it was a real challenge to try to piece her life together. But here is somebody who's completely lost to history but because there is this documentary record sitting in the Library of Congress, we can now reconstruct her life. And I found that to be a very moving experience. >> Jesse Holland: Well, let me just add on to that about being able to find things here that just take you down roads that you never would have expected. While working on Black Men Built the Capital, once again I'm over there in the photograph room flipping through all of these old photographs. And I find a map. And it's a map of a village in Arlington, Virginia. And I start looking at this map and behind the map there's a photograph. And it's a photograph of African Americans in period dress holding books in their hands, all lined up in a row. And I remember taking this photograph up to one of the researchers and saying, "Hey, is there anything you all can tell me about this photograph?" Because it's a great photograph. And the researcher points me to a couple of other sources that I can look at. And I find that this photograph is a photograph of the people who lived in Freedman's Village. Now a lot of people don't know what Freedman's Village is. I didn't know what Freedman's Village was at this point. But Freedman's Village was a black town that sits where Arlington National Cemetery is now. Freedman's Village started out as a city, as a town where the slaves of Robert E. Lee lived. Now at the time of the Civil War, Robert E. Lee lived in Arlington House right across the river, big house on top of Arlington National Cemetery. So when Robert E. Lee takes on his position as general of the Confederacy, he is living in Washington. So he has to leave. So he leaves Arlington House and goes to Richmond. Well, he doesn't take his slaves with him. So the US government crosses the Potomac and takes his house. Now one of the legends of Arlington National Cemetery is that how Arlington National Cemetery got started is the US government never wanted Robert E. Lee to come back. So how they felt they would keep him away was they started burying dead soldiers in his front yard, and that's how Arlington National Cemetery gets going. Well, the second thing they did was they gave another part of his land to his former slaves for them to live on. And this becomes Freedman's Village. And over the years during the war, Freedman's Village gets bigger and bigger. Because not only does it take on Robert E. Lee's former slaves, slaves who escaped from Virginia come up to Washington and start living in Freedman's Village. So it becomes not a village, it becomes a town or a small city that sits right across from Washington DC. And it apparently becomes a national phenomenon. Harper's Bazaar writes about it. There are newspaper articles about this city. Sojourner Truth moves into Freedman's Village. And there's the famous painting of Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln inside the White House. Well, it was from Freedman's Village that Sojourner Truth crosses the Potomac to meet with Abraham Lincoln. And she then starts working at Freedman's hospital which goes on to become Howard University Hospital. So this entire city sits across the Potomac and no one knows about it. And the only way I found out about it is that one photograph and that map that's sitting still to this day over in the photograph room. That you can find this material that takes you down all of these great paths that have these great stories. And by the way, let me cosign the whole story thing here, because as Americans, we live by the narrative. Everything is a narrative. We don't remember things if people don't tell us stories about them. But once you hear a great story, it's unforgettable. One of my favorite books, in fact one of the books I'm teaching from in my writing class this year is Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson's story about the Great Migration. And for a lot of Americans, they would not know about the Great Migration if not for that story that Isabel Wilkerson pulls together from these great stories, this great research and these people that she interviews. So I would say the best way for historians to start sharing their stories with the world is to find that compelling narrative, find that compelling story. I mean, who would have thought that a book about the first treasury secretary would turn into a play that more people now know more about Alexander Hamilton from that play than years of teaching and research about him? But Lin-Manuel Miranda found a way to tell that story, to create a narrative about it. Now of course there are some arguments about whether his narrative is correct or not. But at least that we now know more about Alexander Hamilton than probably any other generation in the United States since Alexander Hamilton's time. Because Lin-Manual Miranda was able to find a story to tell about him. >> Adam Rothman: My eight-year-old daughter saw a statue of Alexander Hamilton recently. She only knows Hamilton from the musical. She saw a marble statue of Hamilton and she says, "That can't be Hamilton because Hamilton's black." [ Laughter ] So anyway. But these stories start in the archives. So I think we're going to open it up to some questions now, right? >> John Haskell: Before we get into questions, I wanted to first of all thank Adam for his time in the library and the Kluge Center on the other side of those doors, which ended in December. But he keeps giving back through podcasts, blogs that you can consume and I hope you will. And of course this event. And Jesse, great to have you back at the library. We hope to have you many more times. Thank you both. [ Applause ] So between this and a reception with wine and other things, we would like to see whether there's questions. And we have two folks with microphones, and this lady over here has a question. >> Thank you. Thank you so much. I have a question as a family historian, an amateur historian. You mentioned that we are collecting information in our research. But who is collecting those stories? Where each of us as family historians, we're collecting tidbits of information -- like you mentioned the stories in Isabel Wilkerson's wonderful book. But all of these stories are being collected by thousands of us across the country. Where is a repository for these so that someone can weave the thread of this? >> Jesse Holland: Well, I will tell you that there are several organizations that collect these stories. You have organizations like Story Corps. If you don't know who Story Corps is, they're an absolutely fabulous organization that literally allows people to tell their story. Whatever the story is, Story Corps is a great one. I don't know if they still do it now -- I know they did it when they first opened, but the Smithsonian Museum, National Museum of African American History and Culture. There was a booth there when they first opened where you could come in and tell your story. And I've actually written stories from the stories that they collected just through that booth. And always -- I mean, talk to your local museum, talk to your local library. There are always people who are out there collecting these stories. Every story won't make it into the Library of Congress. Every story won't make it into the Smithsonian. But I promise you there are always people out there who are willing to help you organize, collect and save this vital information. And as my last piece of advice, there's always you. There's never anything stopping anyone from writing their family story. Now does this mean that you're going to be published and be in Oprah's Book Club? Maybe, maybe not. But I guarantee you, your descendants will remember you for writing your family's history. My mom has been working on my family's history book for the last 30 years in fits and starts. I know relatives I wouldn't have known any other way if my mom had not started writing the book she has tentatively titled, The Backwoods of Bentham County, because that's where she grew up, Bentham County, Mississippi. It does not take a historian to save this material. It only takes someone who cares. So if this material is important, all it takes is you deciding to get a photo album, an archive-safe photo album, starting collecting this material and putting these photographs in. Taking a digital tape recorder, sitting down at your family reunion saying, "Tell me your story." Now it was much harder -- I will tell you it was much harder in the past for this type of work to be done with cassette tapes and their deterioration. I really wish I had sat my grandmother and my grandfather down, even with those old materials, and had them tell their life stories before they passed. Because now that they're gone, I only have secondhand stories of what it was like in 1930's Mississippi as an African American. I know what they told their children, but as I become a parent, I've begun to understand how the stories get sanitized as you start telling them to your children. But when you tell them to other adults, the story becomes a bit different. So I would say to anyone with iPhones, with digital tape recorders, with 1-terabyte storage drives, there's no reason for this information to ever be lost from this point on. All it takes is one person to decide that it's worth saving. >> John Haskell: If you wonder where he gets all this teaching from, both of your parents are teachers, if I recall, right? >> Jesse Holland: Both of my parents were public school teachers in Mississippi and Tennessee. >> John Haskell: Exactly. Do we have any others? Right here. >> Awesome. Thank you so much for your colorful stories today. I think it's really important to put a name and a story behind someone because it humanizes them. >> Jesse Holland: Right. >> So I wanted to kind of hit upon your point of this call to action from researchers. The conversations that we're having today are pretty privileged to be able to be in this room and understand what's going on, especially about a lot of the people that we're talking about -- they're the ones being represented. >> Jesse Holland: Right. >> So can you speak about like the call to action that researchers do have to get this a little more mainstream for people who may not have the luxury to have a photo album or to come to talks like this? How do they kind of get this information to know, "Hey, this wasn't just an enslaved individual, but this was John whoever and this was their story"? >> Jesse Holland: Well, one of the things that I have been grateful of just in the past 20 years is there has been an explosion of interest in African American history. Where we've seen researchers who actually want to find out this information, want to write articles about it, want to write books about it, who want to do the research about it. Back when I started back in 2000 -- and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this. Back when I started in this area in 2000, I really didn't find much enthusiasm for interest in the subject of African American slavery in the United States. When I started writing Black Men Built the Capital, I did not find many people who wanted to A, help, B, endorse, or C, read. But literally since 2000, I have seen such a great desire for this information. And with the technological advancements we've had since then, even if you're not here, you can listen to the podcast. With the digitization of archives, not only here but at the National Archives, at the Presidential Plantations, you're able to access information in a way that you were not able to in the past. And frankly, just over maybe the last decade, maybe last 15 years, people have started to monetize this desire for African American history. If you go down south, I grew up in Holly Springs, Mississippi which may be about 40 miles south of Memphis. Every year that I lived in Holly Springs, here was the Hollis Springs pilgrimage, which was a tour of the old southern mansions where people would dress up in period costumes, hoopskirts, et cetera, et cetera. I will tell you to this day, I've never been to the Holly Springs pilgrimage because I wasn't interested. But just in the last five years or so, there's been an addition to the Holly Springs pilgrimage called How the Other Half Lived, that actually talks about the people who made the lives in the southern mansions actually possible. That I'm interested in. Same thing in Colonial Williamsburg. My wife took me to Williamsburg -- I married a woman from Washington DC. And my wife took me to Colonial Williamsburg for a birthday trip. And we spent a day there and it was really fascinating colonial America, really fascinating. But once again, there was one tour that was also called, How the Other Half Lived. And to this day, that's the part that I remember. The tour that talked about how the Africans who were enslaved and brought over to Jamestown and Colonial Virginia, how they lived. So people are now figuring out that there are people who want to hear those stories. So it's becoming a lot more accessible than it was a decade ago or two decades ago. And the literature about the period is just exploding. You can find such great work that's being written by historians and amateur historians like myself who are looking for those great stories. The information is there. You still have to have a desire to go out and find it. But it's a lot more available now than it was 20 years ago, and definitely a lot more available than it was when I was a child. >> John Haskell: Do you want to add to that? >> Adam Rothman: I would just add that most people don't get their history from history books. It's just not where most people absorb their sense of history. They get it from TV and movies like 12 Years a Slave for instance. They get it maybe from museums. And I think that those of us who are sort of steeped in the history of slavery and emancipation really need to find ways to collaborate with these other kinds of culture makers to try to infuse people's sort of broader historical consciousness with true stories. True and compelling stories that really shed light on what actually happened. So I firmly believe that scholarship should keep writing scholarship, articles and books. But we also need to do more than that. We have to collaborate with the people who are really on the front lines of crafting a sense of history. But those people also have to be willing to work with us. >> Jesse Holland: Right. >> Adam Rothman: You know? It would be nice if that collaboration went both ways. >> John Haskell: Great point. Any other questions? >> We have someone over here. >> John Haskell: Yes. [ Inaudible ] Hold on one second. We'll get you on a microphone. >> Sorry, one second. She actually -- >> Nice. >> You can go right after here. >> John Haskell: Two more questions and then we'll move to the receptions. >> Thank you for your talk. I really enjoyed it. My question comes from the perspective of someone who's a scholar of Iberia and Brazil. I wondered if -- I know you focus very much on manuscripts. I wondered if you take other cultural texts into consideration. I know you mentioned the lack of the storytelling availability of the slaves and so on. So are other cultural texts considered, for example religion or music and dance? Are those taken as the voices of slaves? And my second question very quickly, I was just wondering if you take a trans-Atlantic approach in your research. I know that from an Iberian perspective, there are cultural texts that exist. For example, I'm thinking of the epic poem written by one Latino in the late 1500's. So can fruitful results be gained from perhaps looking across the Atlantic to look for close parallels or contrasts? Thank you. >> John Haskell: That's a great question. Adam, do you want to start? >> Adam Rothman: Yeah, let me say one thing about the trans-Atlantic context. The first podcast in the podcast series is about a man named Omar Ibn Said. Many of you may have heard about Omar Ibn Said because the Library of Congress recently acquired Omar Ibn Said's autobiography which he wrote as an enslaved person in 1831 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in Arabic. He had been born in what is today Senegal around 1770, captured in a war around 1807, shipped across the ocean to Charleston where he was sold to a man he considered an infidel. He ran away, made his way to Fayetteville, North Carolina, was basically captured and eventually purchased by the Owen family in North Carolina. And he stayed with that family until his death in 1863. But that's a trans-Atlantic story. That's a story that spans West Africa and North America. And it's such a remarkable text because he wrote it as a slave in Arabic. And that text has survived, the only one of its kind at least in the United States. I think when we consider the history of slavery, precisely because for the most part enslaved people were prohibited from reading and writing, it is imperative that we look to other kinds of sources to try to tell the stories of their experiences. There are cultural artifacts like song and dance and music. There's archaeological evidence of the way people lived. There's just a whole range of other kinds of material besides manuscripts. It just was just that I happened to be working in the manuscript collections here at the Library of Congress. And we're both trying to say there is so much material in the manuscripts collections that it just rewards research to no end. >> Jesse Holland: And let me just add in quickly, and frankly sometimes it's about funding. I was literally just having this conversation, maybe three weeks ago. I wrote a story -- I wrote the first part of a bookend series for the Associated Press. I wrote about the first Africans to come into English North America at Jamestown. And another reporter wrote about the last slave ship to come into America that came into Africatown, Alabama. Which Zora Neale Hurston wrote about Barracoon. So we both found out we were working on these projects completely separately from each other. So we decided to make it into a series, first and last. Well, the first Africans to come in through Jamestown were actually from Angola. And Angola was not -- Angola had been colonized by Portugal already at this point. So there's a written history in Angola about who these people were and where they came from. But it's not digitized. So it would require someone to go to Angola or to call and hire a researcher in Angola to find this information and bring it back over here so we can complete the story. We know who that first 20 and odd were, who came to America on the White Lion and the Treasurer to Point Comfort and then up to Jamestown in colonial Virginia. But what we don't know is who they were in Angola. And that requires research which requires funding, which requires someone to be able to say, "This is worth the money for us to find out who they were." And I will say that there are people who are working on that right now. Frankly, I know of at least two books coming out in the next year and a half about those first Angolans who were brought to America in bondage on the White Lion and the Treasurer, because of the 1619 anniversary this year. So we do understand that the stories are not complete when you stop at the Atlantic. Sometimes it's just the difficulty of being able to complete the story by crossing over the Atlantic and finding the information from the original sources in Africa. Believe me, we do know that the work is lacking by not having it, but it's just the access to the material and the ability to get to it. >> John Haskell: One last question. >> Thanks. I'm Joretta Hechsure. I'm the early American specialist in the main reading room. I wanted to thank you both so much for what you said today, and just to say two quick things. One to all of you, don't overlook the needle in a haystack stuff that can also be found in published 19th century sources which you would access through the general collections, including in the main reading room. But as far as a question to our speakers today, I'm also the wife of a middle school history teacher. What in the world can historians do to get through to the material that is taught to kids which can just -- it's such a battle to keep it from being dry, rushed, defined by rubrics which have nothing to do with compelling narratives. I'd love your thoughts. >> John Haskell: Great question. >> Adam Rothman: Well, I would say the most important thing that we have to do, and it's very difficult in this educational environment, is we have to get out of the textbook. We cannot teach history to seventh- and eighth-graders or even to high school students through a textbook. I mean, textbooks have their place and they're very useful for historical context. >> John Haskell: And you're the author of one, just for full disclosure. >> Adam Rothman: Yeah, except for mine. >> Jesse Holland: Full disclosure. >> Adam Rothman: Mine is full of rainbows. But I think the most important thing that we can do is introduce students to original source material. Have them look at this photograph of Adeline Henson. Have them look at a list of the end-state people whose owners were paid wages to work on the capital. Have them directly examine those -- well, not the originals but copies of those materials. And have them think about what this means. How do I read this? What does it say? I think when you do that, students will get excited about history because it becomes a puzzle and a mystery and an enigma that they have to then think their way through. It's not something to be memorized. History is not something to be memorized. It's something to be studied. >> Jesse Holland: I can't say things better than that, so I'm just going to say ditto. [ Applause ] >> John Haskell: We hope you'll stay for the reception, and you can corner these guys if you have more questions. >> Adam Rothman: Thank you. [ Applause ]