nt out i brought copies of the book so far that are out in the series. i wanted to do this series for many many years. it was in my head. i envision exactly the kinds of books these women have produced or are producing, books that point to the lives of interesting women, some famous, some not particularly books that point to the way in which you can understand american history through the lives of women not simply through the eyes of men. you want to catch your breath? >> i am all caught up. >> okay. robyn spencer teaches courses on the black freedom movement litter areas of research include civil rights black power, urban radicalism and gender, the rising of the black panther

party appeared in the journal of women's history radical teachers and many collections of essays on the 1960s. she is completing a book on gender and organizational evolution of the black panther party in oakland, rebuking the risk the press and starting a second book product on the intersection of the movement for black liberation and the anti vietnam war movement. next to her is barbara winslow, professor in the women's and gender studies program, the department of secondary education at brooklyn college and one of my oldest and best friends. there's a little message involved in my selection, not because they are my friends but because i know them well enough that i know they write well they want to communicate with college students and the general public and they are interested

in women's history. barbara is founder and director of the shirley chisholm project 1945-present and she is the author of "shirley chisholm: catalyst for change". next to her is lara vapnek the author of "elizabeth gurley flynn: modern revolutionary". she teaches history at st. john's university. she specializes in the history of gender, labor and politics in the nineteenth and 20th century united states. previous publications include bread winners:working women and economic independence 1865-1920 as well as several articles on women's labor history, she is a distinguished lecturer for the organization of american historians. cindy lobel, a former student of mine, i want to get the message

straight, is an assistant professor of history asked lehman college, at the city university of new york also on the faculty of honors college and the graduate center. cindy and a be a from tufts university and a ph.d. where she wrote a brilliant dissertation on u.s. history from the graduate center. her first book urban appetites:food and culture in nineteenth century new york was released in april of 2014 by the university of chicago press. the manuscript for urban apatite, not surprisingly won the dixon ryan prize for the best manuscript that year on new york history. she has published in the winchester portfolio in commonplace and in history now. her current research includes this biography of catherine beecher to be published soon by

westview press in the lives of american women series. and her next book will be a biography of nineteenth century new york african-american oystersman thomas downing. i have questions for all of them to start things off and i will make sure they keep their answers brief enough that you will have time to ask questions too. i want to ask all of them very briefly to tell me to your subject is and what were her most important accomplishments. cindy you want to start? >> thank you all for coming. i hope nobody had too much difficulty with the subways. my subject is catherine beecher a nineteenth century woman

reformer and educator. catherine beecher is different from some of the other biographies in that she really does reflect more nineteenth century developments than 20th century developments. she was a little bit like a martha stewart of her age in that she really was a proponent of kind of wife style land rhetoric about the sort of emphasis on domesticity and motherhood and she herself was neither. but she also made a name for herself as an education reformer particularly in women's education. >> thank you all for coming. i want to thank my fellow panelists for coming together to discuss this interesting group of women and i'm excited to put them together because they are not often put together.

elizabeth gurley flynn live from 89 because in 1964 and she was a tireless advocate for socialism, feminism and free-speech. she started her career as an agitator for the industrial workers of the world which was a group that was also called the wobblys and later became a leader of the communist party. she defended the right to free speech very strongly through two red scares, the one that followed world war i and world war ii. she spent the majority of her life trying in her own words to persuade the majority of the american people that socialism would be happier, more secure and peaceful more just and equitable system of society than capitalism is or can be. needless to say this was a very controversial message and that is one of the reasons she was

such a strong advocate for free speech because she was a dissenter all of her life. >> shirley chisholm in one of her last interviews she said she did not want to be known as the first african-american woman elected to congress in 1968 from the twelfth district in brooklyn. and she did not want to be known as the first african-american and the first woman to mount a serious campaign for the presidency of the united states. i assume looking at most of view that probably 90% of view know that about shirley chisholm but when i speak at high schools, no one has heard of the woman who paid the way for the election of barack obama. she wanted to be known as a woman who lives in the 20th century and tried to be a catalyst for change which i

believe she was. i think i want to address one very specific achievement that resonates for all of us in new york city. when she was a legislator in albany she was responsible for the seek legislation, seek enlightenment education and knowledge and this was legislation that enabled high school students from underserved high schools to come to the university of new york and get the kind of support services they needed to stay in school, thrive in school and graduate and today come as the least three of us will attest because we are all attuning students at the city university of new york lookalike the city of new york, population of the city of new york can talk to any professor and the reason we say is for the incredibly high wages and easy working conditions, the

wonderful students we get to teach. >> thank you all for coming out. i get the pleasure of writing about angela davis who like many of the women on this panel, many of the subjects of the biographys is a very well-known and legendary activists but is still with us today. angela davis is still making history. she is a contemporary figure as well as a historic figure so that makes my task as a biographer really interesting. angela davis, you may have seen her, she comes to new york quite often, she gives presentations and speeches and seminars at universities and for the general public but she is well known for her activism in the 1960s as part of the communist party, as part of the black power movement and as part of the movement for black feminism. she is also well known for her

physical damage. angela davis, her afro in 1960s is iconic, it was a symbol of resistance, the liberation the free angela davis, from her incarceration was the global movement so angela davis is known all over the world and the image of her is also very familiar. so for me as her biographer the task is on tap for contemporary activities back to her historic activities and think about the ways in which her incarceration in the 1960s, involvement in the movement for radical social change and her empowerment of women black women in particular, working class women can all be brought together to understand the conflicts, it is

exciting to be working on her. >> thank you. i want to throw out some other questions now and whoever feels moved to answer can do so. what elements of your subjects childhood being most important in shaping her into a strong woman as she became a strong woman? what will did her family and community play? >> that is a good question. because catherine beecher was a member of the most famous family in the nineteenth century. she was extremely influenced by her father. you may recognize the name catherine beecher because her brother was henry ward beecher his church of the pilgrims and her sister was even more famous

than her brother was carried beecher's though, the author of uncle tom's cabin which book abraham lincoln said basically he said of her that i am paraphrasing, though lady who started the big war. catherine beecher came from a famous family of reformers, a family of evangelicals, her father was a pretty famous evangelical minister in connecticut and without question that influenced her development, placed expectations on his children that they would work to reform society which is necessary to the evangelical project in the nineteenth century. the great awakening, second great awakening in particular was a perfectionist music to perfect societies to make it

ready for the second coming. he really sent his children out to the world to make change and catherine beecher very much rose to that challenge. she was not a radical like some of the women represented here, but she was a reformer and some of that will come up. >> i know you want to talk to this. >> i could talk about surely day in and day out. but i won't. i should have begun with the brooklyn historical society to lara vapnek initiated this and all of you. shirley chisholm's childhood was extremely important to what she became she was a working-class daughter of caribbean immigrants, as a young girl who parents who were very poor

living in brooklyn send her to live in barbados and she was raised by very strong but stern grandmother and she worked in barbados at the moment when the movement for independence from britain began and it was the beginning of the working class the socialist movement and when i went to barbados to do research what i found from reading black newspapers was the socialists, labor and working-class organizations were far more advanced than the public of women's suffragette birth control and reproductive rights for women than the united states, i can only assume being raised by strong black women in a majority black island at a moment's in great struggle that

is important to her consciousness as a woman, a woman who had tremendous pride in being of african descent. >> let me throw out another question. and the 1970s professor laura all right coined the phrase will be gained women seldom make history. tell me if you agree. what rules to your women break and what rules did they follow and why? >> angela davis despite the fact that her upbringing was one of the ways in which she was influenced and became amenable to ideals of communism and the left her mother being an activist, she was also politicize in college as well angela davis coming into her own, she was born in 1944, she

was growing up at the time of the civil rights, black power movement and in a lot of ways, she stepped aside from the ideals of nationalism, strong black identity politics and confused that by deep analysis, the connection between oppression and class. also on speaking to the question of women in particular. in a lot of ways even though she was part of a movement of people who were trying to make the social change she was also a little bit on the outside of that because of her radical ideas, and people who embraced her in a symbolic way, there were many times the actual angela davis, her politics were rejected by people who may have aligned with her. she is somebody who has her own

path and she was not a pioneer walking on the path many leftist organizations and leftist women opened the doors to. she is very influential in that way and in a lot of ways she continues to do that to blaze her own path and break rules. >> elizabeth gurley flynn was known as the rebel girl so she was certainly famous for that image and in a way it reminds me of angela davis because her image was so significant to the movement, this image of this young woman with flowing hair, on a soapbox proclaiming in nearly 20th century, this striking image that the i w w used and elizabeth gurley flynn embrace that it as the rebel girl but one thing the interested me in the research

was she was very far left of the left, rebellious in terms of her politics, and her personal life in some ways she was more conventional she never got married but when she got pregnant when she was 17, she did get married briefly when she got pregnant. the guy was incidental to the baby, but she didn't feel she could be an unwed mother, even though she wasn't really that interested in this man she felt like she had to marry him. i think part of that was also her family was very radical, her mother was a feminist, her father was a socialist, in certain ways they had victorian values and expected their daughter to behave respectably

and she was very aware she wanted to be a significant feature in the labor movement, they didn't share her kind of radical ideas about sexual allenby and she didn't want to alienate them. that was another reason she felt she had to get married when she got pregnant. >> how about catherine beecher? >> she was very bad. having described her as the smartest to word of the nineteenth century, martha went to jail. >> catherine beecher was not a radical. she definitely advocated a very prescribed roll for women and she was really addressing

middle-class white women primarily although catherine beecher also did have ratings for working-class women, she had some manuals for servants for example but those were house servants at act, she did not believe that women should go outside of their domestic world. she did not believe men and women were equal. she emphasized as many people did of time the differences between men and women and the ways in which women should capitalize on those differences or emphasize those differences in order to create at space for themselves in the policy. catherine beecher believed women had a role in as they call that the public's fear, but she didn't think that role should be a role of employment or a wall

of political protests she argued against suffrage for within which put her, another one of her sisters was a suffragist she definitely had a kind of prescribed sense of where women should be but even with that she did believe women should play this role that women should empathize domesticity and have a role in the polity because they were mothers and they were responsible for the home and raising families. how could they do that if they -- if they were not aware or if they were not involved in some way in reform. that is the link between her work with domesticity and her work with education, she really believe women's education should not be in finishing school but should be educated in order to

raise well-rounded children who take a role in the policy. >> what do you think was the most surprising thing you discovered when you were working on a biography? i am biographer as well but always something that i didn't expect this or i never realized. you have a thought on that? >> one of the most interesting things is learning about the history of barbados and the connections between barbados and the united states you mentioned the domino sugar building brooklyn's wealth was based on sugar and most of the sugar came from barbados so the connection between shirley chisholm's 20th century life and sugar and wealth are connected but the one thing i will say that i knew

about but didn't realize the depth of it was the misogyny against shirley chisholm. misogyny is sort of like so unreal and so deep and so hateful, someone i interviewed for the book told me when shirley chisholm was in congress and would sit at meetings when she would get up from her chair to leave the meeting, a white southern males congressman would washdown her seat. disgusting behavior some of you who remember nixon and his dirty trick, the letter that made muskie cry in public and all sorts of dirty tricks but if you read it you will see what the nixon administration did was absolutely execrable, i mean

that word and despicable and it was very gendered and very racial bias. congressional black caucus, the men in the congressional black caucus, their dislike of her and the misogyny toward her was really mind-boggling, they've jealous and debris that she ran for president and the things she said about her bothered me very deeply. >> in the end we should not be surprised. it catherine beecher here's my favorite question, if they sat down together for dinner not what would they meet, are there commonalities and experiences,

in race, chronology and political orientation. >> and all of the historical women sitting down and said what they would talk about, and four suspects off the wall and after a couple glasses of wine they might get to is the question of who does your hair. each one of these women has a really distinctive hair style that communicates a lot about her. if you think about catherine beecher with those girls that is very labor-intensive. angela davis, her afro is so iconic and i know from talking to barbara you talk about

shirley chisholm's wig. when elizabeth gurley flynn went to prison for being a communist, one of the things she wrote about was visiting the hair dresser every week and getting her hair done. i just thought about what these here stiles mean to these women? they are very much part of their public image. >> if you look at this election to congress, you really see the impact of the large breeds that she wore. >> any other topics? >> i really liked that. it would be something i talked about too. >> in a more open way, i think they might talk about the personal politics or what it meant to be an activist, a mother, partner, family member

how do people respond to the joyces that they made to what extent did that leave them isolated and lonely nor did bring them community? those questions are often not focused on. women who are activists are rooted in all of those questions, embodied humans as they go around changing the world and they do make sacrifices and some of the my deeply political mandate to face consequences that are deeply political and they have joys that are personal and political too so i would be curious to find out those kinds of topics. >> two of the women were married and two briefly and two were single. do you think fit this would be a topic of conversation about what was gained and what was lost by these two physicians?

>> definitely. i think when you have the brief marriage, she was really married to her work, she was so devoted to her activism she really didn't feel she had time to have a family and she missed that and her mother and her sister really had to raise her son because she was just so busy with all of the work. >> i want to say i would want to talk about what was served for deer -- dinner. but i think in some ways this is a commonality between catherine beecher and elizabeth gurley flynn even though they do not have a lot in common. catherine beecher was engaged to be married, at that point she made a decision to not follow into a lifetime of domesticity, to not create anything of her

own but women's education and open schools and the venture will be lots of books about education and domesticity and the lecture circuit, she was very much a public figure and for her in the nineteenth century it was done, it was difficult to be a married woman and also have a public role. i was flippant about the marxist reference but that is what i mean about catherine beecher. to be an advocate for domesticity in public, to be a female lecturer, in order to be a female education reformer she had to be a woman who was not running a household. that was a decision that made her different. that really placed her in her time as the nineteenth century

american woman. >> shirley chisholm was married twice. perv first husband commented, more or less mr. shirley chisholm. he was very supportive of her the first seven or eight years when she was both in albany and when she came in to congress in washington, he worked for a detective agency so he was her bodyguard and one thing i think she may have had in common with some of the women is she loved to dance. she was the first on the dance floor and the last one off. i don't know about the rest. elson was very close and considered to be the best dressed woman washington d.c.. i wanted to raise something else. i think it was a dinner party, they would be a bit wary of each other at first. i don't know who drink was a.

may have been teetotalers. i know that angela davis would have said thank you for being the only member of the black congressional caucus to raise money for me and shirley chisholm did and was seen by the black panthers. i don't know the details that she was wary of the communist party but who knows how members of the communist party would have felt about her as an active member of the democratic party. i would love you to speak about having her show at a dinner party with two black quivering -- she would be very confused. confused about why everyone was sitting at the cable. that would definitely be an illustration of being a foreign country, like she came from an

alien world into this 20th century realm. she might find some things to celebrate. would be going through college and being educated devotion to education, that would be point of contact between the two women. were any of your women

teetotalers actually the difference the twin the seriousness of angela davis, i'm getting them confuse fact that these reformers from the nineteenth century recouped. they followed strange diets and went to the table rappings so they were engaged in a lot of activities that were much more alike with the 60s hippies and less what you would picture

people who were seriously engaged in temperance and reform and abolition and in their personal life they were a little nutty. the 1830s is stuck into the 1960s. in terms of reform and reform. there are links -- bringing it back, the diet reformers, precursors to the health food movement, some environmentalism. catherine beecher not only fit talked-about education but was very concerned about health and that was because she had bad health and a lot of those figures did. a lot of health reformers had health problems. there was a rich diet, industrialization, reasons for

that, they were very nervous. there are definitely links in terms of her reform era and angela davis would be surprised at the direction those reforms. taking. >> i want to open it up to the audience because i would imagine you have questions. i could sit and listen to them all night but is there anybody who would like to ask a question? >> over here. >> of question in terms of the subjects, when they started, and thought they had made it change or an impact or thought they

hadn't. >> success or failure. definitely she had made an impact so long. she was born in 1890, and she was 15 and asked of all away until her death in 1964. she saw huge changes, women's roles transforming, she actually was opposed to suffrage during the suffrage movement, wasn't radical enough for her, she evaluated it, and women's consciousness had become politically active.

was really important. and civil mid birdies her activism and the activism helped establish for free speech and she died in the 1916s, a new generation and she was encouraged by the upsurge of activism. >> in a lot of ways angela davis was purposeful, purposes asian and the way it dovetailed with education. and seeking knowledge and information revising what she was thinking, was a deep thinker on many issues and trying to embrace nonconformist answers to questions of things like crime

and punishment, male-female hierarchy's, social organization of society i feel she was moving through this new you of people doing the same thing so even as she is a college student interacting with leaders of the growing black freedom movement, as she was moving through her activist world was aware of many changes going on around her and an active agent of that, commonly remade herself and embraced platforms where she could really talk to people about what she thought were potential solutions to crises that we're facing society and when those conclusions were things like challenging the prison industrial complex or questioning mail/female relations back to enslavement

and speaking against sexism in favor of communism, the world was changing and she was an agent of that change. >> i think when shirley chisholm died in 2005 she felt she had accomplished a great deal. she probably was extremely aware of the problems that had not been resolved but when she looked back at her life she played a pivotal role transforming the old white democratic party in brooklyn. of course being, opening the way for african-american women to get elected to congress, founding the congressional black caucus. in her book the good fight about her attempt to run for the presidency in 1972 she ends it by saying maybe i opened the door just a little bit for the next woman or the next african-american which clearly

she did. she did know that she was a person who made a significant accomplishment 1945 u.s. society. >> i recognize the commonality which may not be an accident they all had long lives and careers. that allows them to have some retrospective. you can figure out the part -- 4 catherine beecher, her career spanned the nineteenth century, she was born in 1800, died in the 1870s, talk about change. she was born into a rural society and when she died the united states was on the cusp of

being the world's industrial power and she changed as well. she did move away from hurt evangelical reasoning, for a woman's role in policy to a more professional role for women. i see her as a bridge, republican motherhood, the eighteenth century and early national period where mother's role was seen as raising good republicans sons to enter into the polity. >> not as in the republic. >> as in the early republic. the idea of raising a virtuous citizenry. a bridge between thatch and the tide of social worker, municipal housekeeping model for women and she really did bridge that and at the end of life that is what she was seeing education going.

she certainly had an idea she played a role in offering those and paving the way even though she might not have approved of the direction it took much a way for the reformers of the twenty-first century who were more radical in their political ideology. >> throughout your research in these broader topics how did you land on law woman he chose to write about? >> the publisher told me to. [laughter] >> i knew that you could not resist that. >> the press and i have a list of some women who we thought

really illuminated -- one of the girls of these books eliminates a historical moment in which these women lived, these are not biographies that are just personal biographies these are biographies that use these women in a way come as a window on the movement, the technological changes for the crises or the economic changes that going on in the third time periods. you could read american history as well as the history of these women. so we have a list but some of the women when i approach scholars who want to write a book like this they came up with women i had never heard of. rebecca dickenson, women who i knew nothing about. and i was supposed to know everything. i knew nothing about them and it turns out that they were perfect

subjects to eliminate something about the era in which they lived so i said go with it. doesn't matter if they are not household names like shirley chisholm or angela davis. these are women who when you finish reading these books than you say now i understand the >> host: century. now i understand the progressive era now i understand periods that i never really got from reading a book about -- there is a real mix of famous women hands of women i signed and women who you all picked so you can speak to why you picked them.

>> i started the shirley chisholm project at brooklyn college. the question might be why did i do this, why did i teach at brooklyn college, and what i found out is nobody including half of the faculty had never heard of her so to me this erasure especially of african-americans, women of color, working class women from history books is something that is more than heartbreaking for all of us. it means that students as they got in the world don't understand the country and the world in which they live because they don't know the complexities and real challenges facing us. so i started the shirley chisholm project. but i already started research on that. that is why i did it. >> my work in the 1960s, angela

davis always comes up. i am always asked about her, it is always assumed she was a card-carrying member of the bat black panther party. even though she was not the direct subject of my research, she was someone i wanted to know more about because of the contemporary way she would be merged, she organized black feminists to speak out in conjunction with the million man march for example, she came out and spoke about changing diet and food processes and revolutionary way so she would constantly be in the news in terms of challenging and changing, the angela davis of the 1960s and the angela davis, she has written several books, philosophical books, political books, talking about historical topics talking about contemporary issues, very well published author as well, i read

her work in that way so i felt i knew her in all of these different ways but i didn't know didn't have the opportunity to put all that together into a life and fink about her in a more intimate way interior way, who was she really? especially being so iconic, a figure that is very different from people imagine so i wanted to open that door and ask those questions. >> i was really intrigued by her because i knew that she was an important person but she doesn't really fit into women's history or labor history, not clear where she sets because in the era when she was active the main thing is supposed to be the suffrage movement and she was not really a part of that and

for the labor movement i think the fact that she was a communist made her a problematic subject for a biography so people put her aside. i felt like she had been a little bit neglected and i was also intrigued because she has this memoir called the rebel girl that is just about the first 20 years of her career and a really vivid first-person accounts but it is only 20 years and i knew her career lasted almost 60 years. i disinterested to find out what happened with the rest of her life. >> one thing also, that elizabeth gurley flynn and shirley chisholm had in common. they both were very flirtatious with men. shirley chisholm was really proud of that and i know from your book even when flynn was older and by conventional misogynist standards not a

skinny busty sexy jake and so forth she had all sorts of lovers and flirted like crazy. >> that was one of my favorite things to di these columns or letters, 50, 16-year-old woman, 70 she definitely kept going. second half of her life, this period when she lived with a lesbian woman, in portland, ore. volunteers as well. >> there is another area of commonality. i was a little bit flipped

because she said who would you think would be representative of the area that you study, i thought catherine beecher was a very good example, representative of a small slice of women's experience. touches on so many areas in the united states. she went west from this event, this housekeeping reform, she didn't embody, represented him in any way. a very interesting window into a lot of major developments --

>> any other questions? >> this was a question directed towards shirley chisholm and angela davis. contemporary context, and the current black lives matter movement, and structural development, where it is right now? >> angela davis is a big supporter of black rights. and against racism and even thinking about connecting that movement to the larger global developments against imperialism and things like that so she has been up compromising voice in that way. it is exciting to think about her because she was politicized, education was a part of how she

expressed her politics but then even though she is a professor and i love that being a professor, her job, her day job as the professor but through her class for, coursework, and activism on and off campus she really has been one of the figures like cornell west, one of the voices in the wilderness taking on subjects that are not popular or oftentimes received as controversial but she has been very uncompromising in her support. that is a good question as well. because she was and is, remains a member of organizations of political resistance, the criminal industrial complex and she has a great book called

business being obsolete. it is something like this. and pushing people to challenge how they understand things, whether it is the role of capitalism in a larger society, very broad but also she has followed the same ideological track in some way in that she remained on the left, critical of capitalism advocate socialism, communism, feminism, she was associated with particular ideological strains. the contemporary movement has not had that. the language of it has been different. she might have a comment on that. >> this year the shirley

chisholm is devoted to black lives matter. as a historian i can say what shirley chisholm would say today because we have to focus upon what the person did, she was active and police brutality, one of the issues that would overturn the democratic party. she was one of the few called in. she supported the black panthers raised money for angela davis when no other member of the congressional black caucus would do so and for

other black revolutionaries, and in boston and the good fight, she understood the danger of young african-americans why was express the way it was and when asked to denounce the fact the panthers supported the presidency, she answered in a beautiful way, she said you should be glad this black militant organization is coming back to life for politics as opposed to denouncing them. >> when i think about empowered women i am curious about their relationship to their fathers. what was the relationship to follow? >> her father was a very

important figure in her life and he was a strong socialist and the whole family converted to socialism, and in that way, she influenced elizabeth gurley flynn and supported her. when she was just 15 or 16 would travel around with her around new york city where she would speak and places like philadelphia or new jersey and she was often accompanying her, and was very proud of her and one of the interesting famous, he was proud of her but one of the reasons i was able to write this book is they saved all these clippings of her appearances, rare newspaper clippings would be very difficult, to secure papers and

the family to get all and saved her and paste it into these books. >> shirley chisholm adored her father, lifting cuba and came to brooklyn. he was working class if a staunch unionist, shirley chisholm always said if her father had been able to go to college he would have been a great professor and he supported her and before he died he became an admirer of the growing black militancy that was developing in brooklyn. >> i don't know much about angela davis's relationship with her father. i jotted that down as an area of future inquiry for me but her mother had an important role for her sister in particular.

when you ask people about her, it is not sort of angela davis, she always appears with her sister as two people who continue to be public in terms of their support, whose friendship was well-known and things like that. sort of exploring her relationship to different family members. >> i spoke to catherine, catherine beecher's relationship with her father and his influence. an interesting figure too because even though he didn't approve in any way, shape or form, he was fire and brimstone wrote about him so lovingly and so supportive and adored her father and he was very ripped

about, torn about her failure to convert which was very important to an evangelical minister. that was the point of contention between the two of them for a while but certainly approved of her past in terms of reform. >> that was very interesting. i wanted to ask about their mothers being a mother, that was an interesting question. beyond our time when met, but i would imagine that over a glass of wine you could corner any of these historians and talk to them. they will sign books and i do want for those of you who are teachers these are books that can be read by high school students, these are books that definitely your sons and brothers ought to read.

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>> is there a nonfiction author or book you'd like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail, tweet us or post on our wall, facebook.com/booktv. ♪ ♪ this land is your land, this land is my land. ♪ from california to the new york island. ♪ from the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters, this land was made more you and me -- for you and me ♪ >> welcome to tulsa oklahoma, on booktv. located on the arkansas river it's the second largest city in the state where the population of almost -- with a population of almost 400,000. in the early 20th century it earned the nickname the oil capital of the world. with the help of our cox

communications cable partners we'll learn about the history and literary scene from local authors. we begin with oil magnate frank phillips and the founding of phillips petroleum. >> and now on booktv a literary tour of tulsa oklahoma, with the help of our local call partner cox communications -- local cable partner cox communication. michael wallis takes a look at tulsa resident frank phillips who went from being a barber to one of the great oil barrens of the 20 -- baer barons of 20th century. >> frank phillips was an oilman. first and foremost, he was an oilman. phillips 66 was a company he founded just north of us here in tulsa which became the headquarters for phillips 66. and today you still see the familiar phillips 6