>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. ^M00:00:05 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:18 >> John Cole: Well, good afternoon and welcome to the Library of congress. I'm John Cole, I'm the Director for the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, so I'm the lucky person who gets to have as his major job promoting books and reading and literacy in libraries. And it's a program that was actually created by a history group here. It was created by Daniel Borschton [phonetic] when he was Librarian of congress in 1977. And the idea of was the Library of Congress needed an office dealing with the public to help promote books and reading and especially to reassure people that books and reading were important. In the face of the new technology of the time. And if you think back to 1977 that new technology which Dr. Borschton viewed is something that needed combatting was television. And in the very beginning our major reading programs were related to connecting television and making use of television and of subsequently all new technologies. To promote books and reading to which we have added literacy and libraries as the years have gone by. And also we have been able to through this program, this noon time lecture program stress of, the encouraging of the historical study of books and reading and literacy in libraries. The Center for the Book quickly also has national networks, we have affiliates in each state that help us at the state and local level promote books and reading. And we have reading promotion partners, nonprofit organizations. We ourselves are a public, private partnership with our programs including the National Book Festival, which is a major project, not just for us but for the Library of Congress. Is an example of a program that requires private funding but we also -- is administered by the Center for the Book and others. This has been the pattern actually for our growth, the Center for the Book in recent years has expanded and are able to work now with a new part of the library that promotes reading. Reading Administrators of the Young Reader's Center which is in the Young Reading Jefferson Building. And also now re-administer the libraries poetry and literature program which includes the Poet Laureate which is a major Library of Congress activity. That we're able to look at this ins a central sort of way to see what is needed for outreach in this area on the part of the library. Thank you for coming to Books and Beyond, it's a special program that we started in 1997 to mark books that have been recently published books that had some kind of special connection with the Library of Congress. And today is an example of a book that depended in part on the Library of Congress but on other research libraries as well. But we have found that by having this program which today is cosponsored with the European Division, that we are able to help advertise the Library and it's collections. Because these programs are all filmed for the Library of Congress' website and are by themselves a kind of a standing example of the value of libraries in some ways and the way that the Library of Congress is trying to reach out to talk about our collections. And to let people know the value of our collections and the fact that in fact the Library of Congress is a major research institution that we feel doesn't quite get the publicity in many circles that we want it to have. So the other part of the outreach is working hard to show off our wonderful Jefferson building, which by itself is a historical monument and to work with the library in a [inaudible] program now for tours of the Jefferson building which is a, by itself really a monument to books and reading. It opened in 1897 and it's filled with names of authors and aspiring Americans and a great show of American cultural nationalism. We will have -- we'll hear from our speaker Janet and then we'll have a chance for questions and answers. Because I would like you to remember to turn off all things electronic since we're being filmed. And a chance to purchase the book and to get it signed when the program is over. I also have a couple of handouts on the back table for you, one is the latest, second to the latest Library of Congress magazine. We now have a magazine that appears six times a year and we got out just in time for this year's National Book Festival in September and it's dedicated to the joy of reading but it does talk a lot about Center for the Book activities. Then I cannot resist also handing out one of our products, our latest publication which is an announcement about the Library of Congress literacy awards which is a project funded by David Rubinstein who also is the generous donor to half of the cost of the National Book Festival each year. But were able to give awards to organizations around the country and to honor them for the work that they're doing in literacy and this is a five year program for the Center for the Book and for the Library of Congress. But back to today it's my pleasure to introduce Grant Harris who is representing our cosponsor, the European Division. And Grant is the head of the European reading room and he will introduce our speaker and get us started. Let's give Grant a hand. Thank you, Grant. ^M00:06:49 [ Applause ] ^M00:06:53 [ Background noise ] ^M00:07:07 >> Grant Harris: Well, thank you John. I get to work in that Jefferson building that John Cole described, he's actually authored a great work about the Jefferson building. But I actually get to work there every day and John you're stuck over here in the Madison building I believe most of the time. >> John Cole: That's enough Grant on that. >> Grant Harris: All right, I am honored to introduce Dr. Janet Polasky who has authored the book we'll be talking about today, Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World. Dr. Polasky's title if I can embarrass her giving the full title is Presidential Professor, History Department, University of New Hampshire. Her earlier monographs published by university presses look largely at revolution and reform in Belgium but also at 19th century labor reform in England. Today Professor Polasky will talk about her new book, Revolutions Without Borders which is published by the prestigious Yale University Press for it she conducted much of her research here at the Library of Congress. And especially in the manuscript divisions collections. This book has received praise by critics, high praise. The New York Review of Books says this, Revolutions Without Borders does three things and does them well. It identifies and traces the fortunes of the most zealous promoters of the universal cry of liberty in the tumultuous 28 years after 1776. It demonstrates the importance of understanding the failures, the dead ends, the unrealized dreams, as well as the successes of past eras. And it contributes to our knowledge of Atlantic history, a solid and imaginative work of scholarship. The Economists magazine says this, instead of telling the usual heroic national story, she ranges wherever her wayfaring revolutionaries take her. To Paris and Washington but also to Poland, Sierra Leona and the Caribbean. Instead of confining herself to the deeds of valiant men, she also gives the stage to women and slaves. The result is a spectacle the conveys the thrill of the enlightenment as well of the delirium of revolution. Janet Polasky herself has written about her book of course and she says this among many other things. To limit our history of the 18th century to the revolutions that prevailed, the American and French Revolutions is to forget that history is replete with dead ends, movements that surged and fizzled or were suppressed. Uninformed we cannot imagine the rich variety of revolutionary alternatives in our own world. Well, with that I will turn it over to Professor Polasky, thank you for being here, please give her a hand. ^M00:10:13 [ Applause ] ^M00:10:17 >> Janet Polasky: Thank you and you can tell first of all where I've been already today because I have my Library of Congress reading card in my pocket so I've been ^M00:10:27 [ Applause ] ^M00:10:29 coming from the reading room. So thank you very much and it is wonderful to have a chance, let's see if that actually -- sorry I can rearrange -- to have a chance to thank the Library of Congress. Because this is really where I began my research and I'm back here now. I've just started my next book and so where better to begin than in the main reading room from which I will then hopefully branch off to archives or to the manuscripts and rare books. So what I want to talk about today are the interconnections, the interconnections between revolutions. And the interconnections of today's global society are inescapable. So why should we imagine that the founding fathers dreamed of freedom in isolation. The Atlantic world I argue in my book was never more tightly interconnected than it was at the end of the 18th century. From the Americas to Geneva, the Guinea coast, the Andes, revolutions challenged the rule of tyrannical kings and of overreaching nobles. On plantations carved out of the Caribbean Islands by enslaved labor and among the slave holding entrepreneurs of West Africa the possibility of insurrections lurked. Terrifying overseers and government officials alike. Rumors course the Atlantic with the ocean currents, this as one of my predecessor wrote was a world in motion. Today no one would dispute the obvious fact that ideas travel, revolutionary ideas above all. Protestors in a park in Rio de Janeiro declare quote we are the social network. A banner quotes Bertolt Brecht quote, nothing should be impossible to change. But difficult though it is for us to imagine an interconnected, cosmopolitan world before the invention of the internet. In fact revolutionary ideas travelled back and forth across the Atlantic. Starting in America and reaching four continents before 1800. Two centuries before the Arab Spring without electronic social media or even in international postal system, ideas of liberty and equality in various languages inspired philanthropists transporting freed slaves to Sierra Leone, haunted governors of Caribbean colonies. Informed novelists and were proclaimed by revolutionary armies marching down the Italian peninsula. How, well that's where the Library of Congress, not, never fear is a fomenter of these revolutionary currents. But rather and maybe more appropriately as a preserver of the documents. In the 18th century documents had legs. They travelled, words travelled they were no respecters of borders and this goes from the obvious, pamphlets, newspapers, diplomatic decrees, the kind of documents that we as political historians are accustomed to working with but also I've argued from letters, novels and even rumors, words were invested with the power of persuasion. Fortunately for historians we have a paper trail to follow and for me as will all of my books in fact it began at the Library of Congress. I found letters sent home on package ships by husbands and lovers who had been dispatched on diplomatic missions. Pamphlets transported in pockets and annotated in margins by previous readers. Newspapers reprinting accounts of clandestine meetings in Warsaw and Charleston. Diaries, some intended for publication and others not and rumors that tell us more than the teller intended. And these are all at the center of my book. Not just the pamphlets, that are available today to our students on the internet who say why go to a library, I can all find it online. But actually the manuscripts and rare books that require visiting the Library of Congress. Now most Americans know that Thomas Paine proclaimed quote, tis time to part. Goading the Americans to battle for what he pictured as quote, the free and independent states of America, in July 1776. The common sense was filled with uncommonly frank language. Charging quote, there is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of a monarchy. But fewer of my amused students know that he cast the king as a worm or William the Conqueror was in Paine's words, a French bastard landing within [inaudible] and establishing himself King of England against the consent of the natives in very plain terms, a very paltry, rascally original. Paine who claims there is something very absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island. But less well known is his line at the end of common sense, quote we have it in our power to begin the world again. In our modern age when nation state reign supreme we look to the 18th century for the roots of the nation states that have endured into the present. For the united States, France and sometimes in more recently Haiti, that should probably be true for the Library of Congress though that's an assumption that I want to question in the next half hour. If Thomas Paine or his contemporaries were thinking within national boundaries, why, I've asked did they travel so widely? What did Paine me by, we have it in our power to begin the world again? To answer that I think we need to look beyond our borders, even in an age that founded our nation. And that's to me at least a much more compelling story in what Paine saw as a wide open rollicking world. So what I'm arguing is for readers of revolutionary history and for our students. Including my students what we've done is to reduce the rowdy world when revolutions seem to be erupting everywhere into the tidy American revolution of the founding fathers. And that isn't to reduce the sales of the biographies that are all down on the shelves of the bookshop downstairs. And there is that section on founding fathers. Or even all of the books that aren't downstairs but on the terror of the French Revolutions. It's just that I don't think that's the way the contemporary saw their world in the decades after America revolted in 1776. In our obsession with nation states of our own world we forget that no inexorable logic led from an old regime of fragmented empires to a set of modern nations commanding the loyalty of geographically bound citizens. A Belgian pamphleteer proclaimed as his neighbor unfurled patriot flags over utrecked, [phonetic] quote, over half of the globe all men utter but one cry, they share but one desire, humanity united in action, after being oppressed for so long under tyranny rises up with pride to reclaim a majestic and powerful liberty. Now these are the pamphlets that are in the American imprint collection in rare books along with then the American responses such as James Chalmers, Plain Truth. Which are in the Oliver Walcott pamphlet collection. As reported in newspapers and recounted by entrepreneurial merchants form the Americas to Geneva, the Guinea cost and the Andes revolutionaries challenged the rule of these tyrannical kings and over reaching nobles. The possibility of insurrection depending on your perspective either lurked or loomed on all of these areas. In plantations in the Caribbean islands, and novels written by about Dutch housewives written actually by Dutch writers raising their children on manuals inspired by John Lock and among the and in west Africa. Where these rebellions founded independent nation states, that have endured, we celebrate them. The others struggles in Sierra Leone, Guadalupe, Tuscany and Geneva equally hard fought have been largely forgotten, consigned for the most part to the dust bin of history. I chanced on this topic as an undergraduate, not [inaudible] not in the Library of Congress but in public records office in London, now the National Archives in [inaudible]. But then and this was back in the 1970's when they removed the lightbulbs to save electricity and what you really needed to research was one of those miner's hats with the light on the front. I filled out my call slip and then again it was by hand, one of those lackey things we don't do anymore. So I filled out my call slip and have terrible handwriting even though I'm the granddaughter of someone who taught penmanship. And so I got back the wrong folio, well in the time of course that it would take was raining so I didn't bother to go outside and get a cup of tea, so in the time it took to get the ones that I really wanted to get. I thought well I've got this in front of me, what else am I going to do for the next hour I might as well sit down and read it. And it said chicken farming on it and I thought oh great this is going to be real interesting. And as I started reading it in the midst of all this we're letters form Thomas Paine. They had been misfiled they had just been stuck there. And I was a senior, I was on a study abroad program working on a paper on London radicals and what I discovered in this reading that I had not expected at all. Were the connections between Paine and the barristers he was running into in London but also Jacoven's in Paris and finding connections with Germany. And suddenly I discovered all these interconnections that weren't in the secondary sources that I had read leading me up to write this project. So I thought about it and obviously what do you do when you're an undergraduate, you running up to the Arch of the Saint, look what I found. And so here are the letters and I think now they're properly filed and back in my mind what I kept doing was filing away Paine's itinerant friends. And every time I would run into them over the last more than 30 years, this sort of would put the note card aside or now would write it on a file and kept it away. So I found them negotiating with barbary pirates to find free hostages, distributing shoes to French armies on behalf of the English radicals, spearheading the insurrection in Saint-Domingue with money that had been raised in London and Charleston and sliding down bedsheets to escape a hanging in Dublin. I just kept filing these away as I wrote other books but these characters were compelling and what was really interesting to me were the connections that they made from one revolution to another. Let me just give you -- and so these are the characters that are in my book, there is the Tuscan merchant, Filippo Mazzei, whose memoirs I found in used book stall in [inaudible]. My husband does not like travelling where I can read the language because that's where you always find the great books and you can also always then make it into the library. He was Thomas Jefferson's Virginia neighbor who served as the Polish king's liaison in revolutionary Paris. Or Anna Falconbridge who's the wife of a British abolitionist who founded Free Town in Sierra Leone. And recounted her encounters among the Temne people. And there's Vanson Oget [phonetic] who was frustrated by the laborious, equivocating French debates over slavery and so sailed back to Saint-Domingue to lead an insurrection demanding rights for all people quote, without regard to race. He was joined in his insurrection by veterans of the American Revolution. These were not founding fathers, they're not the subjects of the books on the shelves in the down stairs. Instead these were people who were on the move. So the revolutionaries that I kept encountering in the archives men and women, black and white ignored borders and what I also found that their international struggles for what they called universal rights. Or we would called universal human rights. Do not fit neatly into national histories. So what I began to wonder was as I was teaching French history, why do historians divide this revolutionary period into self-contained national stories. Why do we keep buying and selling biographies of founding fathers on this side of the Atlantic, or grisly accounts of the terror and it's humane guillotine on the other. History doesn't repeat itself even if Napoleon said it did, but as I've discovered historians do. Especially because our histories and our documents are organized or divided is perhaps more apt into national categories. With borders more ridged than those of the revolutionaries and certainly more divided than the revolutionaries discovered at the end of the 18th century. And again these are the revolutionary some of whom we know quite well. When Thomas Paine handed George Washington the key to the Bastille that had been entrusted to him by the Marquis de Lafayette. He reminded George Washington, this is October 1789 that quote, a share in two revolutions is living to some purpose. And this is a theme that gets repeated over and over. There's a Dutch writer, Harry Pop and he asked his wife, who he left behind, nice man, to tend to their family business. He took off and he writes what could be more enticing than to join revolutions that would humble aristocrats and dethrone kings. He set off to skies with a hat and a wig and two false passports and a sleep sack and he found his way into four revolutions. Or there's the English poet, a lot of these people we know for other reasons. Helen Maria Williams and she arrived in Paris on July 13, 1790 the eve of the first celebration of the storming of Bastille and she woke up the first morning in revolutionary Paris to witness right out of her window processions of men and women assembling on the Champ de Mars. Led by Lafayette including not only peasants from the provinces but John Paul Jones, who's house is -- John Paul Jones' house is right down the street from where I live in Portsmouth. Leading an American delegation but also delegations from Geneva, from Poland, from Italy, from the United provinces of the Netherlands, from Ireland, England and Prussia. And at the center of course was Lafayette on his white charger. The press reported quote, all national differences vanished. All prejudices disappeared. Helen Maria Williams wrote home, how am I to paint the impetuous feeling of the immense, that exalting multitude. It was man reclaiming and establishing the most noble of his rights. And all it required was a simple sentiment of humanity, to become in that moment a citizen of the world. And so you find these statements over and over again, some we know well, Anacharsis Cloots for example who writes the trumpet announcing the resurrection of a great people has sounded to the four corners of the world. The cries of joy from a chorus of 25 million free men will awaken the people's long asleep in slavery. So my question as I found these documents was, so how in the 18th century do ideas travel? Again before social media, 50 years before the barricades of 1848, before Garrosh dies on the barricades of Les Mis in 1832. A century before the socialists founded the second international. So, I found the travelers that I'd encountered, first of all in meetings, in conversations, sometimes aboard ship, hammocks slung across the back deck of the appropriately named ship, the Salseble [phonetic] with the young John Quincy and a young diplomat, Francois Barbe-Marbois who observed the keel hauling of a slave aboard a passing corsair. We find them talking in cafes and salons, the English poet Williams conversed with we know the French Jacovan Robes Pierre, the journal chronicler the Gayard Forrester, the Venezuelan General Miranda, the Polish revolutionary Koscuiszko and others in her Paris apartment. How do we know that, well sometimes they leave us their journals or their memoirs but we also have the reporting of spies, intelligence agencies obviously weren't organized in the 20th century. And we have their records as well including their records of reporting on other spies who were they thought were the fomenters of the revolution, one of whom ended up finding his way into prison because there was no way not to expose the whole expedition. Or it's fun to read and to figure out what their interpreting as the signal John Horne Tooke sends out all these what turned out to be dinner invitations. But let's assemble at 6 PM at. And then he gives an address and of course the spies then you see through those records took this as the assembly of ne'er do wells who were going to start the next revolution in England. And you can only imagine what they felt like when they showed up. We also can find in the pamphlets and this is why you don't just find them on line but go look for them in rare books. Because in the margins you find who had read them before and you find comments as they get handed from one person to another. Encounters on the age transformed readers into revolutionaries, I suppose that's maybe not something you want to promote from the center of the book. But ideas did travel and what's important then in the 18th century is this is the time when people took the written word seriously which is wonderful for all of us who are historians. But I came to realize that what really pulled me in as a historian and what all of you who work at the Library of Congress know was that it was the documents themselves. And I think we historians and it sometimes looks like what we really are out to do is it's our conclusions that the draw us in, but I think it's not. I think it's actually the documents. And it's actually holding the documents and I came to realize that John Bowle, who is a former colleague, when I started taking students down, since I'm in New Hampshire I obviously can't bring them to the Library of Congress, so I took a group of seniors to work in rare books at Harvard. And they had all been working on their papers first of all they were really excited because the librarian thought they were graduate students and then assumed of course they'd come from a private institution. I could say no we're the State University of New Hampshire. And she was so impressed because these students had taken a Saturday, we all found a common day, we took the bus down, they had all been doing all the secondary research and what they could find of primary documents online. But what was so exciting was watching them actually get the letters and the journals that they had been reading about. And to realize and they'd come up and say but I think doesn't this suggest and then it would be a conclusion that was completely different than they had been reading. And you'd say yeah, that interpretation Christina makes a lot of sense. I couldn't get them out of the library, the bell rang, they did not want to leave. I've taken freshmen down to work in rare books at the Boston public library and so here are students who have just started studying French and they find there's a great collection of pamphlets from Saint-Domingue in Boston so they would find pamphlets in French and they could read them. And they would sit there opening these pamphlets so it's not only. You know first they get excited because it's actually a letter of Thomas Jefferson that they get to hold. But they find that here are the real documents that went into the writing of history. And I can tell when I can take students to do that, they become historians. I can take a class where they all came in as engineers and business students but a few of them will overcome the skepticism of their parents and become historians. So, that's what I decided, it's actually it's my students that encourage me and that convince me that the way to write a book was to write a book organized around the documents themselves. And so what I did in terms of organizing this book is as I was telling John, the complex organization that about did me in is that each chapter looks at how we read a different kind of document. So that of course it starts out with pamphlets and Thomas Paine but I'm also looking at the novels written by these Dutch novelists. Looking at how do we read rumors, what do we do when we read what some other historians have called reading against the grain. So it's using the documents themselves, because I think that's what's exciting to all of us is to return and you all know this. It's to return to those documents, now not all these documents were, some of them are obvious but not all of them are easy to find. And let me just give you one example. From lots of and this is from lots of examples from emails that I've sent out that were generously answered by archivists and librarians. Not to mention all the visits to municipal archives and national libraries and these -- so these are the letters of one of my characters. Not all my characters move, some were sort of the telegraph poles that stayed still that transmitted messages and one of those is Nancy Shippen [phonetic] who lived in Philadelphia, she was the daughter of the continental army surgeon general. And she was courted by the French attache, Louis Otto and those documents, those letters are excerpted in. They were published a century ago by Ethel Arms who had found a chest of documents when restoring the Strafford Hall in Virginia. And she realized that most of the correspondence had been classified by the Shippen's and cataloged in letter books deposited in the division of manuscripts at obviously the Library of Congress. Which I then read mostly on microfilm here. From this correspondence we learn in great detail, probably more than ever they wanted us to know about the courtship of Louis Otto and Nancy Shippen. And let me just read you one quick example of this, why we love these documents. So Otto took to walking past the Shippen's elegant three story red brick, Georgian house on Fourth Street every day. Nancy suggested a rendezvous with him on the corner of her garden. But guided by his French manners and concern for her reputation he rejected what he writes as your contrivance of the corner. What's interesting to me is he's complaining all along of his struggle to write in English quote, a language that is not my own. But he seems to have no difficulty expressing his sentiments. He asks Shippen to read his true feelings quote, and these are the letters that are down stairs. In my eyes, in my whole conduct or if it is possible read them in your heart. He leaves her house and he rhapsodizes in what I think is fluent English. Quote, you image is entirely present to me, all my thoughts are so entirely directed towards you that I see or feel nothing in the world but you. So we have this whole collection of letters, and but in the end Shippen is courted also by Henry Livingston who's presumably the most eligible bachelor in the United States at the time. He's a military veteran from a very well connected family, Nancy chose him, Otto was devastated and writes saying how could this possibly happen, I thought you know that you and your parents had allowed me to visit you every day that meant that everything was going along and she gets married the next day. Her father won't even let him see her because he's sure that this will turn Nancy back to Otto. Well, Nancy and Henry did not live happily ever after. Based on her letters home, which again are downstairs, to her parents and her brother from her new home on the Hudson. Let me just read you a bit of that. So, there are two years of disguised references and whispers and Nancy Shippen Livingston learned from her mother-in-law of Livingston's plans to install his illegitimate children of whom there were apparently many, in their household to be raised alongside their daughter. If her husband had known [inaudible] fit the bill of a stated ruffian of a Henry Fielding novel, then it followed in her mind that she was quote the virtuous female in distress, the wronged wife. Although she ached after her daughter she ended up going to her mother and having to leave her daughter with her mother-in-law. Nancy Shippen Livingston was so convinced that her husband would make her miserable at home with his taunts of infidelity that she chose to endure solitude in Philadelphia. So again we've got the letters between Nancy Shippen and her mother-in-law. It's really in keeping with the novels that were in the earlier, the chapter just before that by Wollstonecraft and [inaudible]. And Wollstonecraft's novels are not things you want to read on rainy days in Brussels, they were -- And in fact like Nancy Shippen all the characters end up going crazy and dying prematurely and that is indeed what happens to Nancy. Not so Otto, so I learned from a chance reference in some diplomatic papers in [Foreign language] in Paris that I was reading for the last chapter on diplomatic correspondence that Otto married the amazingly named daughter of the famous writer, St. John de Crevecoeur. Her name is America Francis de Crevecoeur, she was known as Fanny. And Thomas Jefferson was their principle reference. Her story is pretty amazing and you can piece it together from her father's papers also at the Library of Congress which had been exchanged with [Foreign language] with some Jefferson documents. So what we do know is, this is from de Crevecoeur writing, quote, cruel death had taken their mother, the misfortunes of war had driven their father to Europe, the flames of savages had reduced their paternal house to cinders. The subsistence that he had left them was destroyed and then this Fellows who's had, the father of two boys that he rescues came to their aid. He took them under his roof and placed them among his own all because five Americans had escaped their imprisonment in England. Four feet of snow had prevented Crevecoeur's immediate departure from Boston when he finds out that that's where daughter is. But the evening that he arrives the Crevecoeur family is together again at the Fellows household in Boston and Crevecoeur adds for the benefit of his European readers, quote to this image of domestic happiness, he describes them dancing with violins playing. To this image he says must we join those of order of economy, of cleanliness and of industry, and that's what all American households look like. And he adds, quote, this happiness was to be found in almost every American household. What it contrasts then to this salon centered society that he described. So that set me on what turned out to be a four year long search because what I wanted to find was I knew that Otto then ends up in France. Right after St. John de Crevecoeur is over there, that he ends up in Berlin and that there are long periods of time where he's separated from Fanny but I could find no letters. They just, she just like disappears without a trace and so of course part of the problem is how do you trace someone who's maybe America Francis de Crevecoeur, maybe American Francis de St. John, maybe America Francis Otto, maybe Fanny Otto, maybe fanny Otto, maybe Mrs. Louis Otto, all of these attempts but -- Louis Otto's papers are very clearly carefully cataloged, the diplomatic ones are preserved in Paris. So I found various, you know those tantalizing hints, for example the family of a Boston merchant had rescued her as a child from the snowdrifts and they had written their memoirs. It's a funny little book called Fanny St. John a Romantic Incident of the American Revolution. And then in a familiar story all of those who work with manuscripts they had been loaned to a friend, the letters and gone missing. Did they ever exist, did they go missing what happened to them, we don't know. But I didn't find them. We find great nephews who had papers that he supposedly loaned to various people writing histories of the letters from an American farmer. I knew they had been written but nobody could find them. And the break came in 2009 when Barbara Baer then acting early American specialist in the manuscript division here found notes indicating that the Crevecoeur papers had been for sale in 1976. This was just like I couldn't believe it, it was like yes. You know you look for these forever, but unfortunately they were offered at such an exorbitant price that neither the French nor the Americans, meaning here the Library of Congress could afford them. So the letters were auctioned individually. And widely dispersed on the autograph market. But I have to say that Barbara Baer was dogged on my behalf and her notes tracing the family papers are invaluable. The Library of Congress is an amazing resource for those of us who are doing historical research. At the end of how to do historical research, is what we tell our students not to do, you know when you get bored one of those random Google searches, I did find, I hit the right combination of phrases that the French ministry of foreign affairs had recently acquired some of the letters. As soon as I found that I rushed and wrote my email in all my best French to say could I please look at them. And they were moving out of Paris so they were closed for a year and a half. So, I patiently waited for a year and a half and the last week of my term in December a year and a half later in the rain I showed up at the doors of the [inaudible] yes I can finally look at them. I had written that I was coming of course and they said oh yes, they were almost warm in welcoming me. Here we will take you up to read the microfilms. I said the what? The microfilms and I said no, and I luckily I could convince them. That I needed to see how the letters were put together and we all have our ploys, right. To see how they were folded and so they actually did then let me see the originals and work with the originals. And it really was worth all of that wait because in that I could actually see then who this woman was and it showed me a lot about this relationship. That had gone from America to France and the couple that was said to be the model of an American household in Europe. First in revolutionary Paris and then in Berlin. So I did come to know them and I think maybe it's one of those things where it becomes all that much more important because you've spent so long looking for it. So those are the kind of documents that are at the center of the book. And what I've tried to do also is to talk about how we find out documents, not only how we read them. So it's these documents that reveal what I can see is an alternative political spear, so it's not only that it's crossing borders but it's that it is not founding fathers. That is this is the time when we really need to expand our definition of what we mean by political because it's the time when Miraw [phonetic] talks about removing of the blindfold. When everyone does become involved in discussions of politics from the people who brought me there in the first place. The merchants and the small tradesmen in London who had put a penny in the cup after smoking their pipes after dinner. And gather to discuss the politics in London of the French revolution. And because they crossed borders these are all also the people who will call into question what the compromises that seem so obvious to founding fathers who stayed at home. So it's the ones who call into question whose ideas sometimes they seem like Don Quixote's ideas. And other times now they seem so common place. When the Yale graduate Abraham Bishop returns for example from France and he's back and he can't believe when he hears that under Thomas Jefferson that we're opposing the freeing of slaves in Saint-Domingue. That the U.S. could possibly be standing against freedom. And so those are the kind of documents that I wanted to find. So my book has been really also an argument for cosmopolitanism. It's a challenge to nationalism as our only modern political story. And it's arguing against I think the historians who have a lot at stake in perpetuating their view of a revolutionary world of the founding fathers. Who are defending claims of nationalism and I think these historians are sometimes as virulent as saber rattlers on the stage of foreign policy. So my argument is that history restricted then to founding fathers as was said in the introduction that that history limits the way we understand our own world. That we need to instead study the history of dead ends, we need to understand history of revolutions that fizzled out because otherwise. I think we assume that revolutionary movements against autocratic regimes of our own day will eventually, with just a little assistance follow in the steps of George Washington or Robes Pierre. I think then we're baffled by uncertain outcomes of uprisings of Tunisia, in Libya, we're surprised by Egyptians or Syrians who like the 18th century revolutionaries in [inaudible] or Geneva or Freetown. Borrowed their ideas of citizenship from dispirit sources. Sometimes from their neighbors often times from legends of their own past. So what I'm suggesting is we can't just look for liberal democracy in every upheaval from Romania to Egypt. Because if we do we will inevitably be frustrated by what we find. Revolutionaries who challenge dictators will not necessarily turn out to be liberals. Nor will their struggle follow a path any of us had expected based on what we know from our national history as we tell it. So as a historian I'm boldly suggesting that understanding flows in both directions, from the past to the present and from the present to our understanding of the past. To forget the messiness of the past is to be condemned to judge the present limited by the blinders of a small set of national narratives. And my friend John Bowle,[phonetic] from the Center for Muslim Christian Understanding suggested as I was finishing the book that like the 18th century revolutionaries who ventured beyond borders. In John's words, quote, Muslim militants are working to create nonnational revolutionary narratives, and many or our policy makers have difficulty in understanding that. Revolutionaries from out of the way places who struggled against unbeatable odds 200 years ago have much to say to readers living in a world where revolutions of all sizes had varied, unpredicted and interconnected outcomes. I'm suggesting that we ignore them at our peril, thank you. ^M00:51:40 [ Applause ] ^M00:51:48 Some questions, yes? >> Have you as you're doing your research for your various books, do you find that you [inaudible] that you're looking for and so you go to an institution. Possibly outside the country or is it that you know that certain institutions might have interesting stuff and you go to those institutions to see what you might find? >> Janet Polasky: Probably -- oh so when I go to a different library, do I go looking for certain documents or do I go because I know they might be an interesting repository that would house documents that might prove of interest, is that? And I would say it's both, usually I'd go because I know they have a certain document, a certain set of letters. I know from looking through catalogs that they have a certain set of pamphlets for example. But while I'm there I never stop at that. I mean you always have to give yourself time to see what you will just upon by serendipity as I did when I started out by finding those letters by Thomas Paine. Not usually because I've ordered the wrong folio but you know you'll look through, in the old days, you know looking through the cards to see what they have. It's often by talking with librarians and archivists to find out what's there as well. I was working on a biography of a study of the finding of social democracy at the end of the 19th century and I was working in the archives of the socialist party in Belgium and the archives is in Brussels. And she said oh you might be interested in these boxes, you know we didn't have any place to put them, I mean and we all have these stories, you know. We didn't have any place to put them and you're in luck because they're in the women's restroom. And there they were you know, there was this pile of boxes and there was this whole great set of correspondence that no one had yet had time. Or the funding to again, that's a major issue, to catalog. So, I think it's both but that's a great question, thanks. Yes, please. >> It strikes me that at least among the American revolutionaries, which is a group that I'm familiar with, there were some definitely identified with the international revolutionary impulse [inaudible] where others very much did not. And of course as you know Paine in part because of his rejection of traditional Christianity, was close to being a pariah by the time he came back to the U.S. at the very beginning of the 19th century. >> Janet Polasky: Right and yeah I think what's interesting too is if you look at overtime. I mean it's the 1790's where you really find the sort of strident, we aren't French, we're Americans and you find that rhetoric, the national rhetoric I think that becomes distinguished from everything else. That's outside there whether it's the Caribbean, which is even more frightening than France. And I do tell my students that if think political rhetoric is charged now, they read the accounts of Thomas Paine trying to come back to American shores when he wants to come back. There are these great newspaper accounts of Paine being caged in France with the animals in a zoo and being fed you know handouts and -- yeah I mean Paine is, well because he had taken on George Washington saying -- Paine almost went to the guillotine. And he appealed to George Washington to help him get out. Paine's cell mate Cloots did go to the guillotine, Paine was too sick so actually just barely escaped but Washington wouldn't help him at all. So he wrote an open letter attacking George Washington. So if you're faced with who do we side with, George Washington, Thomas Paine, guess who won, George Washington. And so then Thomas Paine comes across -- yeah part of it is his religion and part of it also is that he had dared to take on national institutions and he doesn't find the revolution going the way he wants to. So he ends up being denied to vote which I think is one of those really telling stories. So yes, and I guess the other answer to your question about the nationalism is that as these revolutions develop that's where I do see the nationalism come and so to say there's cosmopolitanism is not to say there's not nationalism. I think it's -- I mean I think Cont [phonetic] defines cosmopolitanism in this period precisely because it is a period where nationalism has its roots as well. So that's an important point. Other questions, yes? >> Looking at documents in French and English, did you [inaudible] or primarily French and English? >> Janet Polasky: Yeah, so what languages were my documents in? The ones I could read were in French and English and Dutch and Spanish and some German. Some Latin actually, some of the Belgium pamphlets. When I got to Polish I ran into trouble, but I happened to be at a conference in Budapest where they needed someone to represent -- it was for Central European, this was years ago looking at roots of liberal democracy in western Europe. Where arguing could nationalism and liberalism work together and to find that they went back and looked at the 19th century. But they couldn't find someone to represent both halves of Belgium so they ask me to do it, which was really exciting. That was great fun but so I had colleagues that were there that were native Polish speakers and so I called on their skills. But language is something that -- I mean that's one of those things I keep telling my students you need languages, John Bowle has made a career of telling our students that as well. That they really -- those languages are absolutely essential, so yeah I did have to read in other languages as well. But now it's going to be just as bad with our students who can't read cursive. So I can't write comments on my papers anymore I have to hand write, I mean I have to print them. And I think how are they going to read, how are they going to come down to manuscripts and read the documents? That will be a really interesting issue, so yeah. >> Was the handwriting by Americans, I would like to think better back then than it is today? >> Janet Polasky: Yeah it's more regular so that's absolutely true, but you know obviously it's different from one country to another as well, from one culture to another so you get used to it. And you forget how hard it is, I was just working on a legal case actually in my neighborhood where we had some documents from 1913 that had been written. And I was so excited I scanned them, I sent them off to the lawyer and I said look I found the documents that described the garden that went with the house. And he said well I can't read these and I thought oh, to me they were just as clear as you know typing but they couldn't. >> You obviously have [inaudible] real educational niche opportunity for somebody to teach a new language called the way we used to write. >> Janet Polasky: My Grandmother would have taught that. >> I must apologize, sort of missed my question because I don't want to take away from the subject matter you specifically discussed in your book which definitely [inaudible] a copy of that, it's a wonderful book, a fascinating presentation. But I was also struck during it by the fact that it seems like we might be living in an age of international, non-nation state based cultural revolutionized [inaudible] of the west. Almost like Marks again or I mean and the question I have for you is [inaudible]. >> Janet Polasky: To John, yes. >> Is where might one go to be informed about the kinds of interconnections and the kinds of elements in thinking there are going to have to be synthesized or they're attempting to be synthesized or not being very well synthesized now in this era? >> Janet Polasky: So where do we go to understand a world that crosses borders in this particular age when we think so much within national borders. And we think that the way to solve things is just fortify national borders. >> Somehow maybe there's some answers, some useful pieces of information, I'm wondering what you're aware of in terms of the work that's being done in that? >> Janet Polasky: Well, I will defer to John on that because I think one of those interesting things about how do you go from history to understanding our world is more that what history teachers us is not to expect what we expect. And to always be prepared for something completely different and the fact that we do have learned to understand the past in our own way. Does give us those skills I think to understand what we see around us but it's never what we've seen before and John -- >> Would you like to add to that please? >> Yeah,[inaudible] in terms of contemporary. I think there is, to me there's an 18th century model that's slightly different that comes out of the scientific revolution. And there was an old phrase called the invisible college which were people who had interconnections that Janet is talking about. And now the difference is that the informal gossip and rumors stuff can now be available on the internet. But as I like to tell my graduate students in particular I say if your name is Aukmed [phonetic] or Mohammad or something like that don't spend too much time on the internet looking at the Islamic state website because Homeland Security might come and visit you. But it's now it's scattered, the difference is that there isn't yet a full Library of Congress collection that I can go to for the contemporary Islamic state stuff. But the process is still the same. >> Janet Polasky: Forever. >> John Cole: All right well thank you John or thank you Janet in particular ^M01:03:42 [ Applause ] ^M01:03:46 You book is wonderful and you're also a terrific speaker giving us your enthusiasm and also your knowledge. And your own conclusions which are also in the book but it was great to hear you in person and to have a chance to host you at the Library of Congress. I forgot two items that are out there, we also would love to have you fill out if you have a chance after you buy the book and are waiting for the autograph. The event survey and we also have a list of our future talks that I see needed replenishing, but I'll bring it back down and for the signing [inaudible] time when you're filling out the form. But let's give Janet one more round of applause for a wonderful book and a wonderful performance. >> Janet Polasky: Thank you very much. >> This has bene a been a presentation of the library of Congress, visit us at loc.gov.