habits and forming good ones and wrapping up our look at some of the best selling nonfiction books according to wall street journal is how i save the world. fox news commentators jessie watters on his career and american politics. some of the books appeared on book tv and you can watch their programs any time at booktv.org. >> first of all, i'm delighted to say thanks to the national archives staff and the acknowledgment of men who hated women. it's much appreciated. the activist anthony devoted his career to opposing what he deemed immoral. the 18th 73comsstock act. after passage 8 remarkable women engaged in decade's long fight

in court and the press. in the man who hated women, amy brings life to stories and describes how activism layed gowned work for expansion of women's rights in the future. amy is "the new york times" best-selling author of 11 books which have been published in 11 languages and 5 continents and she has written weekly columns for the new york press and the new york post and was a contributing editor at new york magazine for six years. she has written for "the new york times", slate, harpers bizarre, elle, men's journal and many others. moderator mitchell is the author for nonfiction books and formerly served as executive director at forbes magazine and contributing editor to newsweek. writing appeared in the wall street journal, chicago tribune,

glamor and the nation among others. michelle has been interviewed in radio shows and taught nonfiction writing at colombia university. now let's hear from amy and elizabeth michelle. thank you for joining us. >> hi there. i am so thrilled to welcome amy sung. i'm a huge fan of this book, the man who hated women. and i am excited to get a chance at all the questions i had while i was reading it. so amy, i want to start off just with how you even came across this story, where did the whole adventure of researching this begins. >> thank you so much for doing this. aligned with you in our important work of uncovering women's stories which is not always easy work and thank you

to the national archives foundation for having us, i'm sure we will talk about in a little bit, have den a lot of research at the national archives and so this book i utilized the archives in chicago, new york and college park. so how -- i already forgot the question. how did i get interested in this subject? i've always been interested in ideas around women hysteria and women's sanity or insanity. gaslighting all of the time but very few people have seen from which the term is derived. i learned the story from odd philadelphian woman born in 1857 and i learned that she was visited at night by a ghost husband and through research and

her story i learned that she was prosecuted under the combstock laws and i decided if i wanted to write a book that included story and needed to be broader than that and so i began researching all of the women who i felt had needy, juicy interesting stories and butted heads with him in within way or another, some were prosecuted, eight women in the book, some were prosecuted under combstock laws and under federal. i thought that he was a great opportunity to really tell the stories of what i call sex radicals, incredible unconventional women who -- some of whom we heard about but most of whom we haven't because they were active before and they were in this middle generation of women born gemmily in the middle of the 19th century, some of

them 1830's, 1850's who don't get a lot of attention and some of the viewers have said it's called men who hated women but it's really about the women and it is. anthony combstock is a great foil. i felt like if i could use him to tell the stories, why not? >> it would be exactly what he wouldn't want, right? [laughter] >> exactly. yes, yes. he too is evocative character. >> let's get a schedule of where he comes from. i want to move into the women's stories -- >> yes, of course. >> but who was he because basically he had profound impact on the lives of women going forward for a hundred years and -- >> 150 really. >> the passage of the combstock

act in 1973 so we are now coming up on -- am i adding correctly? 150 years. anthony combstock was born in 1884 in connecticut. part of connecticut, grew up on a farm. he could see long island, the farms and every sunday he and his brothers and sisters and parents in congressional search for many hours. his mother was direct descendant of the puritans and anthony fought in the civil war. his brother samuel died in service and he enlisted afterwards and he appears from his civil war diaries to have masterbaited and the men were

passing around books and pictures and this kind of thing because it had become cheaper for those kinds of materials. he moved to new york 1867 and he wanted to become a dry good salesman and interacting with a lot of men his age who were visiting prostitutes and pursuing what was called boarding life, boxing billiard, saloons, bars, wonderful book low life gets all of this. he became bothered and through small coincidences he was able to be friend of the ymca which was founded in this country in 1852 and through the connections with those guys, samuel, a name

you might know from your tooth paste. and got this law passed that became known as the combstock law even though it has a much longer and more complicated name. so anthony combstock was iconic figure in the sense that he had the classic civil war era biography which was young, religious, christian, fought in the war and then moved to a large city and became overwhelmed by the amount of vice, noise, craziness, manufacturing of new york. and it drove him to become a monamaniac. >> i find it fascinating that

one of the key streets is napa street which i lived on. it was interesting that that was the place that pornography was sold and produced and all the rest and that it was done quite openly and it seems. one of the interesting things is people often have the impression of the era as if it was this really puritan across the board society but, in fact, it wasn't really. it was -- even when you're talking about these women that you're coming across, i too was finding that women had a certain level of liberation in the sort of mid to late 1800's which seemed to have lost once world war 1 came along. can you describe what new york was like. some adjectives there. >> go ahead. >> i mean, how pre hasn't was this kind of society as far as you can tell?

>> i mean, some people if you're familiar with this world at all maybe you read gangs of new york. new york at the time was only downtown. we think of the length of manhattan. he livered on a boarding house on pearl street near your old apartment. this was where a lot of people were arriving by boats. there was shipping, you know, that was what downtown was all about at that time. and you had guard shops. they were cigar shops and you can take a girl to a room upstairs. there were book shops that sold all kinds of materials. some of which by the way is at the municipal archives in new york where you and i have also done work. postcards that had tricked ways

of looking at images. i wish i could find the page in my book. if you find it before i do, you will have to read. one of them was called women's right convention and the idea of pornographic work, women's rights convention. that's all you really need to know but it was really a combination -- one thing that was fascinating to me is anthony combstock is associated with the male and one of the reasons he's associated with it is because the male and the -- the mail and the way the paper was printed really changes because you could have -- often had very small books of images and words that you could hide them very easily and so that was a really big deal to be able to print so small that you could have some kind of discretion. remember all the young men that were engaging in this kind of sporting life, sporting culture, they were living in boarding houses with other men and they were going out all night doing

crazy things and so they were living in close corridors with other meanwhile women prosecuted under the combstock law wrote to common -- one thing shocking to people is that prostitution existed in many forms brothel houses to the waiter girls who would sell you drinks that really they were trying to sell you sex to street walkers. so the idea -- meaning it was not behind the scenes. it was open and you can imagine how shocking this was to your congregation from connecticut. >> can you give sort of concise form what the law was that got passed because this is how he fights all of the women that prop up -- >> yes, there was already an obscenity law before he went to washington, but made the combstock law unique what it

criminalizes the mailing of both obscenity and contraception information and with steep sentences and fines. what it did for the first time was it included in existing obscenity law information about an actual contraception. >> that's where he first gets into this -- he fights with the women. so which women is the first, you know, going up against in terms of what information he's trying to get out there and then what he, you know -- >> the first woman that he butted heads with in a public way really is -- the first ones were wives of sellers because he started by seizing dirty books

and burning places. the very first interactions with women were women that were married to men who were making a living in this trade which again at the time not that unusual. there was a lot of it. but the first time woman he came in contact with victoria and her sister and the sisters moved to new york within a few years of when anthony combstock moved to new york which i loved the parallels that were close in age, little bit older, but this idea of coming to new york to make it in totally different ways. he wanted to be a dry goods salesman and find a nice christian woman and build a family and they wanted to take new york by storm and they wanted to eat at delmonicoss without a man to accompany them. they started a radical newspaper

called wood holland and brokerage house in 1870 and they were said to both have prostituted themselves before they came to new york. we don't know the details on that. we don't know how much of that is true. they were from a large family and their father capitalized on their incredible charisma and, you know, as you have written about this is coming off the civil war when people were wanting to get in touch with dead relatives and so

clairvoyance was big business. >> it's amazing. also i never realized until i read the book that fredrik douglas although he was on the ticket as vice president, alerted that he was -- >> yeah. that whole story is viz or. greated this equal rights party which had a lot of incredible ideas in it but i think he he was used essentially as a publicity ploy and never consented to his nomination and never campaigned with her. they published the two scandalist articles, one about an alleged gang rape that had happened resulting from a mass fall and involved teenage girls and prominent businessman and the other well-known church

preacher henry ward beacher who was having an affair with the wife of one of his accolades. >> yeah. >> in the same issue of this newspaper they published these two explosive articles. one which contains the term the red trophy of her virginity to refer to the heinman and one of the most revered figures at the time saying that he was in an adultery affair. they wanted to ban the newspaper and the short version is that when the combstock act was passed in 1873 it included the terms newspapers specifically to

cover weekly. i feel like this often written about. he passed the law, the specifics of the law were for the direct purpose of getting tennessee and victoria into prison. >> yeah. >> i find it so interesting that it's like sex is not just sex. that the way this crops up is obscenity issue is through actually a fight over political power on a certain level, right? the women that you're writing about for the most part are -- they get entangled because of either issues about women's rights and their rights to their bodies or what have you or like you said, you know, they are taking down one of the biggest, you know, celebrity creatures, sort of, you know, guide to the moral fiber of this country and that's the kind of thing that gets them in trouble. >> they were representatives of a kind of womenhood that was

deeply offensive to him. >> yeah. >> which was they were taking the victorian ideal which was that women should be wives and mothers and devoted to family and to god and completely up-ending it saying that some marriages were worst than prostitution, writing about as you said high-powered political figures and taking them down. there were rumors that combstock was paid off by beacher and associates to go after them. i mean, even if that's not true, they all knew each other and the world of, you know, kind of the walk elite was starting to form at that time and he was incredibly well connected. >> oh, yeah. i wrote about him in my book because he was one of abraham lincoln's advisers and supporters and may have won the election in new york.

so the -- the other thing that's fascinating is that combstock isn't content to do this from a distance. in the think of it and can you talk about the sting operations? >> yeah, this is -- there were many americans that agreed with him from a religious perspective and believed that reading, looking at porn could lead to terrible things. but he walked around with a reinvolver and in spare time tried to shut down and he would take his whiskey and dump it out so no one else could drink it either. it's one thing if you're not going to drink it. he was such a spoiler and party pooper. what he was controversial for

free lovers and free thinkers, his antagonist, radical antagonist, he would decoy people. he would use the crazy names and pretended to be teenage girls. he concocted entire families and he would send decoy letters from post office boxes some in state and some out of state but when he sent them out of state so that he could get interstate mail. he could mail people for that. he walked into abortionists and women's health practitioners offices to buy contraceptives under false names and then revealed himself as

anthonycomstock. i'm talking about using the press and manipulating and especially using false names. he was aware of his power and -- and so many people who -- who agreed that even people who agreed that abortion was wrong and contraception was wrong didn't think that the way he went about getting the prosecutions was right and decoying, they tried many times to get him on that and it never went anywhere. >> yeah. in -- of the women that he tangoed with, which of you do you find the most sort of heroic. >> much of my book, maybe about a quarter of it is about this

woman iada c cradick and a philadelphia in 1870's i think in part connected to the quacker tradition and liberalism of quacker. she was a star student, brilliant and she wanted to go to penn and be first woman of undergraduate program in pennsylvania and they would not accept her because she was a woman so what did she do? she turn to sex rating and the reason she did that was she was interested in world religion and taken a trip to alaska where she saw totem poles and reminds me

of myself. >> did you also? >> well, now i know why we like each other so much. [laughter] >> i don't need to tell you. you were in the peak of semiotics. she went to world fair in 1893 and saw belly dancers at the time and she was interested in sex. and as mentioned before, history comes in these ways and stereotypes that victorian women repressed and never had orgasms and wouldn't be that many years before writings were starting to mick across.

there were books on childbirth and how to have less pain during pregnancy. so everything from marital advice to free love which we can get to but aida cradick over a period about 9 years went to washington, d.c., chicago, philadelphia and new york and was told not to mail her marital sex manual and ultimately went head to head with comstock in new york. what you and i look about the most she's never claimed to have a human living lover and claims that all of her sex information contained in these kind of marriage guides that she wrote came from her ghost husband who was a ghost, a businessman she had met as teenager who in real

life died young of tuberculosis. and no one knows whether she said this because it would be scandalist to claim to have sex knowledge as an unmarried woman or whether or not the relationships she had with the ghost did teach her some amazing things. but you know what's crazy, she didn't always have orgasms with a ghost. >> i thought the writing about the ghost was interesting because it's so nuance. it's not like everything is the best it can possibly be because she's imagining it. but also i found it fascinating that these people seemed to have given her hard time about the whole idea. yeah, ghost husband. >> that's not true. i write about this later in early 1900's in the liberal world -- i usually use the word progressive or radical to

describe the world she was in. she did meet a lot of very rationalist guys. >> yeah. >> who believed she was delusional and insane. what i like about her she was an outcast in every world that she was in because she -- i mean, her mother was a unitarian and the daughter is having sex with a ghost and the rational people, they are like ghosts don't exist. and then even with the spiritualist world she was kind of controversial because she liked her alliances with religious -- with other religious groups. she wasn't a separatist as other spiritualists. she was massive contradiction. >> but her marital books sold pretty well, right? >> yeah, i don't have -- i don't have -- i don't have sales figures on her books.

similar writers of that time sold hundreds of thousands of copies of their books as evanston gynecologist wrote the pregnancy and childbirth guides that did well. haywood, very known free lovers. you and i have hundreds of thousands copies of their books sold, you know, we would just be partying every night. [laughter] >> so it's really incredible to think that -- there was no traditional publishing as you know it today. books -- books were sold to canvassing agents and the way you found out about the books is from reading radical publications that advertised them and what's interesting is there's a whole network of support where aida crodick would sell and the haywoods would sell all these kind of medical advice

books and so they really created like a system of alternative publishing that seems to me like it was working and many, many people, this is how most people were getting their books. >> yeah, it helps that there was no tv or anything else. [laughter] >> but the -- and then, so -- so then how -- how did some of these women actually were his efforts. i mean, i thought one of the interesting things was the way that they were circulating the -- the, you know, syringe, you can talk a little bit about that. >> yeah. oh, yeah. so one of the women who he went after was a doctor named sarah chase. dr. sarah blakely chase. unclear whether she provided abortions or just sold

contraceptives. .. .. was furious at him for reading her home and she believes cut off clients that she got-- lost clients as a result that she started to advertise something called comstock revenge and-- syringes were used for hygienic purposes and they could also be used for contraceptive services following intercourse. you could put all kinds of substances into them that were

said to be spermicide all and they were somewhat effective. it's hard-- what i love about the comstock-- comstock theory is month after month advertising world-famous gift to humanity, the comstock syringe and then in wister county massachusetts they picked up on it and started college the comstock syringe is selling it and he wound up going after them for the issue at their newspaper that included these advertisements they wrote things like, if comstock's mother had had a syringe and known how to use it what a world of while it would have saved us and i can only imagine the fury he felt reading this and it reminded me of the way that i don't know how the people listening to this are, but the

way that rick santorum's name would be used you now just look it up, just look it up. >> and some in the diary you found out his, you said you found a diary like is that right? >> you mean comstock civil war in early marriage diary? i got them from secondary sources. we don't have them beyond a couple of years after the passage of the law. >> i was curious how far they go because it would be interesting. >> everyone wants to get their hands on them. >> i now. but, so can you talk a little bit about like how how intensely he thought some of these things where the point some women ended up in jail. >> well, yeah, i mean, again the title of my book is tricky

because he didn't believe he hated women and if you look at just the statistics in his arrest log book, which now are online, but when i was researching at the library of congress he went after many, many, many more men than women and that has something to do with who was publishing dirty books. abortionists were notoriously very difficult to get in court because witnesses did not want to testify. women who had gotten abortions even if the bad things happen didn't want to talk about it. two of the women in my book-- i guess i won't try to give too much away, but madame ross who was one of the most famous abortionists in the entire country with 67-- was a 67 when he tried to put her in prison for what would have been a second or third time.

and on the eve of her sensing slit her throat twice in her bathtub because she was a certain that she was going to be sent to the women's work house on blackwell island and i imprisoned and there were rumors for many, many years that it wasn't actually her body and that it had been switched. there's a wonderful fiction book about this called my notorious life by kate manning, which imagines what might have happened and she was not the only woman in my book who took her own life and comstock was a sad who have bragged of the suicides he caused at one point saying he caused 16 suicides. >> i think you can safely call your book-- [inaudible]

based on that. i want to say to everyone listening in to post questions on the chat and we will-- >> oh, national archive foundation is selling the book i don't know exactly where the link is, but that is something that maybe someone could put in chat. if you want to support my work, but also the national archives you can buy some of that. >> i think everyone needs to buy the book because the other thing i found interesting is it's almost a primer on activism like effective activism and i mean where there are a few things in there that you particularly were impressed by by in terms of organizing or the tactics some of these women used to try to put their agenda forward because i did think that people might not understand how much brilliance went on in the political arena before you know

maybe the whole modern times. >> it was essentially activism through writing which is probably another reason i was so attracted to these women's stories that almost all of them were writers, meaning someone like-- she wrote these marriage manuals, but also in revisions of her own book talked about anthony comstock being a sadist saying anyone who thought sex was unclean must be comstock in and so many of them were fighting the comstock laws through writing about them in the radical press and this is sometimes called the freestyle world or freethinker world and what it was was a series-- i was about to say at least a thousand publications from around the

1830s to 1880s, 1890s, the sort of heyday of it who advocated for civil liberties. some of them were health oriented and it had health writing and political writing. huge circulations and their letter writers is sometimes became columnist, which i had this column in the 1990s and some of our best letter writers word just hire them. not me. [laughter] and so what really inspired me was the idea of radical-- and they would sometimes include petitions and circulars and things like that in the publications like radical action through radical publication and it's really fascinating to me. >> and so when you are talking about publications first of all i'm curious how many you are allowed to see in the archives like how many are still available and also you can talk a little bit about we are

getting into you know an era where it's actually appreciated to write about women in history and yet it's very difficult. i think we both have found difficult to find source material and can you talk a little bit about that challenge trying to bring women's work to light. >> absolutely. most of these publications existed such places as medical libraries like harvard medical library. if i can get this right, new york academy of medicine library here in manhattan. you know, with all these things you have to go to weird places to get them and you can get like a couple issues at a time in summer and the national archives because they are in the postal record so for example the word which was publication out of

worcester county, you can read issues in the postal records, national archives and in washington d.c. we were talking about women's history, yeah, i've often said i don't know if you make these jokes also but you have to be a total masochist to write human-- women's history because it's the hardest research in the world, i mean, i should add research about underrepresented groups of any kind is incredibly difficult because people tended to only leave records when they were involved with the-- someone famous and you and i and narrative nonfiction authors while we are always trying to get personal material and i did the best i could with these women in terms of shading in the personal details of their life and not every case could i get

diaries and letters of some in some cases i had to rely on court transcripts and as you said sometimes newspaper articles or smaller newspapers could be instructive and contain personal details in them, so you might hunt out-- hunt down a person's a story in one of these newspapers, but it's the real tragedy of the women's history, which is the more unconventional lives that these women led, frequently the less likely they were to marry and have children and kind of have maybe you know the women in my book were not wealthy or they were not well connected and many of them had unconventional romantic lives, so it's tough to find letters and diaries. angela haywood i was happy to be able to find about 30 to 40

letters with the historical society because there happened to have been a prominent radical whose own archives where they are a lot of our work you know, as i'm sure you have agreed with is working backwards, who did they correspond with, who was famous and then getting that person's archives. >> i know and you always with the women i find in desperation i will go on to ebay or something, please let some descendent try to be selling their-- >> i have done the same thing where you are trying. the nice thing is like angela haywood great-grandmother just contacted me last week. >> amazing. >> i don't know at this point whether i know more than she does. she's trying to put together her family history, but it's really incredible to also think that that's not that many generations down. >> exactly. >> the great-granddaughter is still alive. it's not that long ago.

>> that's the one positive about u.s. history is that because it's so young we still have that hope there is some archives somewhere that they are holding these letters or diaries. can you talk a little bit about the national archive itself, what kind of things did you find there that were useful in the research for this book? >> i got a tip from someone-- a woman named amy workable published a book having to do with comstock's visual world that comstock went after and she gave me this tip, you want to look in the postal records and i don't even remember exactly what she said, but i walked into the national archives in washington d.c., and the postal records are pretty wonderful and exhaustive there and using the help of an archivist, independent archivist i met their name john dykes who i hope is listening today, i was able to figure out where to get these files that were individual postal records related to people

prosecuted for doing things connected to the mail and they are basically like fbi files. there was a predecessor at the fbi called of the bureau of investigation and may have even had a different name at the time period i was researching, but they are these-- it's the size of a mailing envelope and they are stuffed in these boxes like that and they have the person's name and case number on the front and you open it up and in some cases these files contain the actual material. >> that's incredible. >> i'm sitting there in the national archives this storied hollowed place and let me tell you this, you are reading about sexual scenarios i'm like with my scanner like-- >> the booth is like small. >> you can find these things but

i'm telling you if you want scandalous material start with postal records. >> i think we both are you now extremely grateful for the national archives because first of all those archivist, you need them when you go in there. >> when you walk in with a vague-- if you start out saying give me everything you have on anthony comstock, it's a beginning. it's just a beginning and you have to know how to look and that's what they were able to help me with. >> that preservation work is just as so crucial, i mean, you never know when one of those documents hidden in their will reveal something crucial to how we understand history going forward. >> it's the best feeling because you are kind of like a detective, i mean, that's how i always feel when i see something no one else has written about her when i was able to read anthony comstock's own arrest

reports of-- it's just so immediate and of course, i don't know if you have discovered this but when you rely on you know you read the secondary persons when you're new at this work and you think it must be correct and then you start tracing the research and you go, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. >> it really requires going back and then you have to battle it out after that. in terms of this is going out the audience of readers hopefully there will be many young readers of the book because it's such an important history, but what would you hope would be the main take away from it? in any aspect of the history. >> it's a twofold. you and i have talked about reproductive rights are under assault in our country right now

for about 15 years in a serious way and about half the country you may only have one abortion clinic within a close distance of your home, so that's scary and upsetting to me and i think that young women, i mean, what i was going to say is don't take your reproductive rights for granted, but i also feel strongly that they already don't take their reproductive rights for granted depending on where they live because they've been stripped away from them. i think what i'm proudest about in the book and the take away i want people to have is that i started out thinking i was going to write about birth control and i realize that ultimately i was writing about pleasure, which is you can't enjoy sex if you are terrified of having your 12th pregnancy that could kill you either while you are pregnant or having a baby and cripple you economically so as i started to learn more about this, i realized that what these women

were writing about was a short women's liberation, but it was women's right to pleasure in the context of not feeling sex could lead to death and that's really what we are talking about because of just the history of pregnancy and childbirth in our country is that it was dangerous especially with each repeated pregnancy and childbirth they became more dangerous so i think what i want young people to think about a lot is you weren't the first radical. in there is such an incredible radical history and radical women's history. i feel that sometimes people that write narratives nonfiction about leftism a lot of times don't include women even though even though leftism includes only wonderful, vibrant,

exciting women like i just had this love affair with, goldman writing this book. i guess the second thing is direct action works and getting control of the narrative through writing and medium is one way to affect change in addition to the boat and another thing i probably should mention is that all of the women in my book lived before they could vote and were tried by all male judges or all-male juries, which was a different world the whole legal system was poised against them. can you imagine standing in front of 12 men talk about your sex writing trying to make them understand it? anthony top-- anthony comstock did know the difference between contraceptive and abortion. >> i think that's what so striking is imagine-- [inaudible] when there was nothing in law

suggesting they should have their equal rights. it's very impressive to see what they were willing to do. >> do you think in some ways not to being enfranchised with the boat made the world seem more full of possibilities? >> very good question, i mean, i don't think traditionally that's how it works. the left, you feel part of the system the more hopeless you usually feel i think and particularly you don't get the feeling you know the suffrage became a little later in terms of full force but it is not like it's a group of people marching in the streets. >> remember 1848. >> but, it felt little bit as if that amazing moment happened and then-- >> yeah, kept having these firsts. what i also wonder is, why was

that publishing so strong in these years we don't really associate-- we don't tend to like you said earlier we don't tend to associate with radicalism slightly before the civil war, the end of the 1800s. >> amazing to think there are people all across the small towns who are buying these publications. you have five children but she has us radical publicly test publication. >> yeah, and i think just to circle back to like why it connects to anthony comstock, the male you know which allows men in the civil war to get pornography in this kind of thing also allowed radical mines to share ideas and exchange opinions because railway service and cheap paper really changed things in this country and so

obviously you could liken it to the internet, the early days of the internet in terms of mail was the connector and was the force of good and that's what he knew better than anyone was he understood-- andrew comstock understood the power of the male >> it's really fascinating. well, i hope everyone goes out and gets the book and then we can all have larger conversations because it really is tremendous work, amy and the fact, i mean, i don't know exactly how many years or what have you put in on this but it's clear-- >> five. >> you dug into the research and we are all grateful. i think we are out of time. >> thank you so much for doing this. i hope we can have more conversations about this in the future. >> i hope so too and we would love to thank everyone at the national archives and swanson and all the rest for putting on

this program and all the programs that they produce because it's a real gift to the country to have people speaking from their research like you, so thank you, amy. >> thank you and i should say one other thing, the book is available through the national archives a story if you would like to support-- what message are weakening here-- if you like to support the national archives foundation meaning some of the money you pay for the book will go to support its work. you can buy it in their store. i think we are waiting-- why don't you say the name of your most recent book. >> it's lincoln's lie, which is the true civil war paper through fake news-- [inaudible] >> it is amazing that yeah, this idea you know so far i haven't managed to say our former

president's name but this idea of things being so cyclical and the use of the media we think of you know it began in the 1990s and you know then our work shows there's nothing new at their-- under the sun. in fact, what did you say when you enter the national archives. >> i always find that quite moving. >> i'm getting a message to say i'm encouraging people to buy this book and independent bookshops which i really, really had a hard time over the past 15 months and are starting to open their doors again to physical shoppers, so bookshop.org is a way you can get it online and support independent bookstores, but of course wherever you live and are watching this from, walk in and order it there. they need you in books like this

need independent stores, so that people like liz and myself can keep writing our books. [laughter] thank you very much. >> here's a look at some books being published this week. in the long slide tackle-- tucker carlson reflects on his journalism career. spencer ackerman of the daily beast looks at the effects of 9/11 on american society in reign of terror. in out on a limb journalist andrew sullivan compiles a collection of essays over the past 30 years. also published this week historian benjamin smith examines the evolution of the next-- mexican drug trade and the dell. in the state must provide adam harris on the atlantic insist american colleges and universities have always discriminated against black students. army veteran graham allen suggests americans should act like they did in the aftermath of 9/11 in zero america.

find these titles this coming week wherever books are sold and watch for many of the authors to appear in the future on the tv. >> weekends we bring you the best in american history and nonfiction books. on the tv atlantic magnate-- magazine staff writer reflects on past and future of what he calls prompts america in his latest book. and on afterwards, conservative podcast ran journalist ben shapiro discusses his new book, "the authoritarian moment" in which he argues the progressive left is pushing an authoritarian agenda in america and his interview by nationally syndicated radio talk show host eric metaxas watchable tv every weekend and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at butch-- book tv.org. >> recently the museum in

houston hosted a virtual event with columbia university professor who explained why he believes future pandemics can be prevented by expanding vaccine literacy. >> i started writing this book about a year before covid 19 began and i think one of the points of the book that what is happening with covid 19 is not the extraordinary event many claim it is, but rather the culminating event of a lot of unraveling that's been happening over the last few years and it's kind of chronicles the collapse -- i don't want to say total collapse, but partial unraveling of global health infrastructure and all the things we have put in place, which includes a lot of vaccine diplomacy and by vaccine diplomacy i define it broadly as cooperation between nations around global health, but particularly vaccines because vaccines are such powerful tools in global health and the

beginning of it actually goes with the beginning of the vaccines so when edward jenner developed the first smallpox vaccine back in the late 1700s, some say 1798, he was immediately called upon to immediate prisoner exchanges between the british and the french during the napoleonic morals and thomas jefferson used his vaccine as a goodwill gesture to send the vaccine to the lewis park expedition in their exploration of the wilderness with native american groups and the more modern version began with albert sabin who not many people realize when he developed the polio vaccine he did it jointly with the soviets at the height of the cold war sending polio strains to the ussr got permission from the state department and his soviet counterpart whose son works at fda and is a friendly

colleague got permission to work together and that's where the vaccine was developed, tested on 10 million school children and was shown to be safe and effective and it happened again for small box eradication so found a way out to scale up freeze-dried production and took it to tropical areas so it would not be destroyed by heat and that's what allowed an american to lead the smallpox eradication-- eradication campaign. some of our greatest successes in global health always relied on international cooperation and cooperation between countries, which generally did not agree ideologically. they are willing to put aside their ideologies to work together and this is something that i was so impressed with is a vaccine scientists over the years.

how can we sort of dusted this off and maybe give it a fresh coat of paint and reinvigorate it and i had that role as u.s. science envoy for the state department and the white house between 2014 and 2016 during the obama white house, a difficult time in the middle east when the isis occupation was a starting. we are were added at the height of the syrian conflict, civil war when-- [inaudible] in saudi arabia beginning in yemen and so very-- very awful time looking at how we could cooperate between them nations and made some progress, but the point is i think this is a time when we need it more than ever and we can talk about what we are seeing now unraveling with what russia is doing and what china is doing to some extent and now as if life isn't complicated enough it's very

aggressive in this science information-- misinformation campaign which is both homegrown and the united states and launched by russia so how do we walk all this back and kind of restorer vaccine diplomacy to its rightful place. >> you can find the rest of this program on our website, book tv.org, search for peter or the title of his book, preventing the next pandemic using the search box at the top of the page. >> up next on book tvs afterwards, ben shapiro podcast houston editor emeritus of the daily wire insist the progressive left is pushing a authoritarian agenda in america and he's interviewed by nationally syndicated radio talkshow host transects. afterwards is a weekly interview program with the relevant guest house interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work appeared? host: i have the privilege and the joy of interviewing ben

shapiro about his new book called "the authoritarian moment". i have to ask you the most obvious question, but it strikes me as not unimportant. your title, "the authoritarian moment", it strikes me as chilling. why is your book titled "the authoritarian moment"? guest: the reason it's titled "the authoritarian moment" is because what we are really experiencing is this moment in time which is sorta unique in american history on the rise of a militant authoritarian movement inside the united states that seems to essentially have taken over all of our institutions and i wanted to tackle the institutional takeover because i think when people think about authoritarianism they think of it as your government, government taking control of everything but the point i'm making with the title at the moment is that we are all experiencing it together, not just the government decided to take control over our