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foreign [Music] thank you [Music] I'm Heather Marie montia and you are watching PBS books thank you for joining us PBS books in collaboration with WETA is pleased to host a conversation with the 2023 Pulitzer prize-winning author Beverly Gage author of G-Man Jay Edgar Hoover and the making of the American sanctuary PBS books is proud to partner with the Library of Congress to promote their 2023 National Book Festival let's take a moment to hear from the librarian of Congress Dr Carla Hayden I'm Carla Hayden Library of Congress and I want to give a thank you to PBS folks for supporting the national Book Festival hope you can join us in Washington and online for this year's Festival on Saturday August the 12th well if you if you live in Washington DC or in the DMV then don't miss the 2023 Library of Congress National Book Festival as Dr Hayden shared it is on August 12th it is one day it's from 9 A.M to 8 P.M the festival is free and open to everyone it's a quick drive or a train right away for the complete schedule please go to loc.gov bookfest remember if you can't be there you can even stream some of your favorite authors from the comfort of your home the other thing to note is now through August 31st PBS books and PBS stations across the country will host a series of 10 virtual events with 11 authors they will be available on demand on pbsbooks.org and at the national Book Festival website well here is a quick welcome from our station partner thank you heather good evening and welcome I'm Miguel monteverdi Senior vice president and general manager of WETA right here in the nation's capital I'm thrilled to welcome you to tonight's conversation a collaboration between WETA PBS books and the Library of Congress as I'm sure many of you know the Library of Congress National Book Festival is an annual literary event that brings best-selling authors poets and illustrators together right here in the nation's capital with thousands of readers for book Talks panel discussions signings and other engaging activities WETA is proud to support the festival and is committed to sharing the stories of contemporary authors with the DC community and we are especially proud to be a part of tonight's conversation featuring Beverly Gage professor of history and American studies at Yale University her recent book G-Man J Edgar Hoover and the making of the American Century not only won the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 2023 but was the winner of the 2022 National book critics Circle award and biography uh the 2023 Bank off prize in American history and diplomacy it won the LA time LA Times book prize in biography it was named a best book of 2022 by the Atlantic The Washington Post and Smithsonian Magazine it was awarded a top 100 notable books of 2022 by the New York Times I could continue to list the awards and accolades but then we'd have no time left for our uh tonight's panel so I will I will stop there uh wish uh uh Beverly congratulations uh and enjoy enjoy the panel back to you Heather well thank you so very much we're so happy to be able to partner with WETA this year today's conversation features Beverly Gage to discuss not only her latest work but her involvement in the festival we'll be discussing G-Man J Edgar Hoover and the making of the American Sanctuary which is a major new biography about him and it draws from the never before seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait about a man who has dominated history for half a century and has planted seeds for much of today's conservative political landscape so let's meet the author Beverly Gage is a professor of 20th century American history at Yale University her book which won not only the Pulitzer Prize this year it also won the bancraft prize in American history the national book critics Circle award for biography LA Times book prize and biography and many more G-Man was named a best book of 2022 by The Washington Post the Atlantic Publishers Weekly The New Yorker the New York Times and the Smithsonian Gage is also the author of The Day Wall Street exploded which examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th century she frequently writes for the New York Times The Washington Post the New York Times magazine the New Yorker among many other Publications it's my extraordinary honor to welcome Beverly Gage welcome thanks it's great to be here we are so happy to have you and I just want to personally congratulate you for winning the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for in biography for G-Man what a huge accomplishment and you must be thrilled how do you feel yeah it was it was a big thrill you know it's one of those things that uh writers think about and imagine for a lot of their careers and then suddenly it happens so I couldn't be happier especially because I worked on this book uh for so long more than a decade and it's just great to feel that effort pay off okay so I know everyone now knows a little bit and put in your own words if you had an elevator speech what is this what is your book about well it's good to have an elevator speech for this book because it's about 800 pages long but I hope pretty accessible um and it is a birth to death biography of Jay Edgar Hoover who was the director of the FBI for a pretty astonishing 48 years so that was from 1924 to 1972 from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon and it's a story of Hoover and his life it's the story of many of the things that happened in between those years and it's in particular a story about Washington DC which is the city where he was born the city where he died the city where he had his whole career so it's particularly great to be coming to the National Book Festival to talk about it yeah that is really exciting and I we want to get into that a little bit more and and learn your thoughts you know it's interesting because Hoover died a handful of years before I was born um but I feel that he's not only a bit of a mystery but there's also mythology around him he's very controversial what inspired you to write this book and you've already shared it's taken it took you over a Dozen Years or over a decade why why now foreign as you say is one of these figures who is shrouded in Legend particularly for people who still have a living memory of him um I was born two months after Hoover died and so I feel that I personally am very much in this kind of transitional generation that had had heard of him had heard of The Legend but didn't have a living memory of him you know and I think for the period since his death he's really been remembered primarily for everything that he did wrong I mean he's been seen as one of the great villains of the 20th century and my book doesn't try to argue against that I'm pretty critical of Hoover but it does try to take him seriously as a political figure and to kind of take him from uh where he's often depicted in popular culture which is this marginal figure someone that nobody really likes and really put him back in this center of our National story and to point out what I think is maybe the most surprising thing for people about J Edgar Hoover which is that during his lifetime he was actually pretty widely supported he was a pretty popular figure Republicans liked him Democrats liked him presidents of Congress right and he couldn't have had his career without all of that support oh it's an incredible story that you tell and you know the the theme for the national Book Festival this year is everyone has a story and I feel like you are telling his story over such over his lifetime it's so incredibly let's talk a little bit um 800 Pages might seem intimidating to some um I was recently at a party and someone told me the first thing they do when they get a big book like this is they put in a um a bookmark where the notes begin so it's actually only like 7 36. there's a lot of fact better the other thing I want everyone to know too and I really like that you did this um well it's divided into four sections is it not um can you talk a little bit about those if those if that's okay yeah so the book is you know a big long book because Hoover lived for a long time and did lots of things but I did want to make sure that the book was accessible in a way for people to read episodically right very few people sit down and read a book like this from start to finish and so as you say it's divided into four sections and it also has a lot of chapters which are relatively short photos at the beginning of every chapter kind of signaling about the dates and the Thematic nature of each chapter and that was pretty deliberate too to try to make it accessible despite its its weight and heft so part one of the book really looks at Hoover's early years from his birth in 1895 to the moment that he becomes director of The Bureau in 1924 at the ripe old age of 29 stays in that job for the rest of his life and a lot of that's about his roots in Washington about out the way that Washington shaped both his view of government and also his kind of deep social conservatism around issues like race and religion Law and Order so that covers uh the first period of his life part two takes on what I think of sort of the as the building years which are from 1924 to 1945 when he's a relatively young director and when he really makes his name as a champion of government reform government professionalism science and expertise um and all of these values that we tend to think of as being Progressive values or New Deal values Hoover really comes to stand for that the title of the book G-Man suggests that it was both a nickname for federal agents FBI agents beginning in the 1930s but what it stands for is government man and Hoover really was a government man and these are the years in which that begins to uh to kind of come to fruition um and then the last two sections really cover the periods of his life that I think are probably more familiar to people part three looks at the 40s and 50s and particularly Hoover's rise as a devout and passionate anti-communist and then the 60s and 70s take up the last part of the book when I get into his surveillance of the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King of the left and the politics of the 60s more generally well I'm excited to be able to talk a little bit more about some of those sections but I do want to tell you what one of the things I like now first thing is I studied art history as one of my few majors in school so I am biased but I do love and I don't know if it was you or who I mean some of the images you chose are right you have like just the sweetest image of little Edgar and you know and I feel like it sets the tone or you have this right for the government men and it it provides um context and and the the chapters are really readable so it makes it something that you feel like you know I'm getting somewhere and I'm learning a lot and I really I just want to say I really appreciated that that even if you don't know a lot all of a sudden you're learning a lot and the other thing I want to know is I do love political cartoons and they also some chapters have them and I know copyrights are sometimes such but that was a quick a quick view um the center also has gorgeous um black and white images that I really you've done a tremendous job at curating those as well and I think anyone who who gets to have your book in their hands will really love them so as much as um I know I love audio books um I also think having one in your hand you actually get to touch and feel it and see and explore in a in a different way um okay so let's if you could talk a little bit about how Washington DC really influenced the man I know this is a the million dollar question but in influenced who he was and how it shaped him because he was so much a creature of the city if you could talk a little bit about maybe some real threads of your perception being that he always lived there Washington was one of the pieces of Hoover's life that fascinated me because we often talk about Washington as kind of a metaphor right Washington politics etc etc but for Hoover it was both that political world and it was his hometown it was the place uh that shaped him from the moment that he was born he was born there on January 1st 1895 just a few blocks away from the capitol um right up in Capitol Hill so for those of you who know Washington today particularly well um the Capitol Hill Methodist church is on the site of Hoover's birthplace the place that he grew up and what I think is really interesting about his early years in Washington are two aspects one is that he comes from a pretty modest family but it is a family that has already had decades and Decades of government service right they have worked in basically the federal civil service going back a couple of generations and that's incredibly unusual in the late 19th century when the the federal government didn't do all that much but he really grows up surrounded by that government ethic which is quite different from a kind of political story in part because Washington residents during Hoover's lifetime could not vote they did not join political parties and so he's really a creature of that world of government employment government service he's born into it he spends his whole life in that world and then becomes an architect of it and the other piece that was really fascinating to me about Washington as a city that I think shaped Hoover in pretty profound ways is that it was a city that was undergoing racial segregation during the years that he was coming of age so he grew up in mostly segregated institutions he went to the Washington public schools which were segregated um he went to George Washington University stayed in the city for law school and uh that was segregated as well and while he was at GW he joined a kind of white Southern fraternity called Kappa Alpha that was just immersed in kind of a world of segregationist politics a kind of Romanticism about the lost cause of the white South and the Confederacy and those two pieces this kind of progressive ethos and then this this deep conservatism particularly around race stay with him for his whole career and I think he really builds the FBI uh modeled on both of those forces that that he encountered as a Young Man well obviously there was a a long journey to be the head of the FBI but I'm sure you would think but well not he didn't move around but um in terms of when you think about he would wanted to be a reformer and was Progressive in some of his ideas at times and when we look back on it how we sometimes see history as it is a little bit different I think what do you think his goals were for the organization for the FBI I think he understood the FBI as sort of the front line defense of the American way of life and of the social order um and so that's a place that his conservatism and his kind of progressive good government ethos really came together he built the FBI as a defensive organization that meant that it was the front line against the criminal element as he would have described it and it was also the front line against a variety of political threats that he understood to be deep deep causes of concern for the existing political order for Hoover the cause of his life was anti-communism he got his first job in the Justice Department in 1917 just as the U.S was entering World War one but also as the Bolshevik Revolution was happening in Russia and so he's very shaped by this growing up a lot of his early work at the bureau is dedicated to that and then it becomes one of these big through lines in his career to me that FDR um pushes Hoover into domestic surveillance of fascists and Communists and and others during World War II is that a correct takeaway from your book um and and if it is are there any ironies in that or paradoxes I think just the fact that FDR really liked J Edgar Hoover and also is the person who more than anyone in American history actually empowered J Edgar Hoover is surprising to a lot of people FDR we tend to think of as our great liberal president uh Hoover as this kind of deep-rooted conservative certainly by the end of his career although I would argue throughout it as well but it is true that Franklin Roosevelt pushed the FBI into a much more expansive role in criminal law enforcement he pushed Hoover into publicity and public relations which Hoover became very very successful at and then as you say he pushed Hoover and the FBI into a much more expansive role in domestic political policing first against fascists and Communists um later focusing a little more on Communists than on fascists and then by the 1960s on a whole host of movements really all from this directive that the Franklin Roosevelt provided in the 30s so I feel in recent years we are we are more so uncovering more stories of American History I was specifically interested that you write about Hoover and some of his experiences um with German internment in World War One but that he was opposed to Japanese internment at least that was my interpretation um and I didn't know if you could talk a little bit about why why that's exactly right his first job when he was hired into the justice department in 1917 as the United States was going into World War one was to help manage German internment and German registration which were two parallel programs that we've tended to to forget about but were very significant at the time this was not mass internment in the way that Japanese internment became Mass internment during the first world war this was you know a set of pretty subjective and often quite questionable judgments about who seemed dangerous uh and then those people all uh non-citizens uh people of German birth were were often thrown into internment camps several thousand people were interned so Hoover both I think learned from that experience uh this um sense of being empowered to make these judgments about who was dangerous to the United States and then also learned how hard it was to actually do this well there was lots of controversy lots of inefficiency lots of pushback against the German internment program which was not very well run even if one might not have wanted a well-rounded tournament program from certain points of view so when the second world war came along Hoover was determined to do this very differently and he began planning for the possibility of internment really in 1939 to some degree even earlier so that when Pearl Harbor came the FBI went into action and began rounding up people that Hoover had determined were in fact dangerous some of those were once again German Nationals some were Italian Nationals and some were Japanese Nationals so when the idea of mass Japanese internment came along a few years a few months sorry later in early 1942 Hoover opposed it both because he thought the internment of American citizens and that was about half of the people who were interned was unconstitutional illegal ill-advised and also because he felt we already have a good internment program it's targeted at specific individuals and if you want to know who's dangerous you don't need to intern everyone of Japanese descent you need to come to us at the FBI and we'll tell you who to worry about so I'd say it was a combination of a principal experience and self-interest you make a point that Hoover did not run a rogue agency yet you also admit that he could strong arm people and kind of there's a bit of a dichotomy if you could talk a little bit about what you were thinking or what you found in your research and what kind of you're the expert what what do you think did he you know did he sometimes go off the rails or was he really using our original documents our nation's original documents as his guide well I'd say there was some of each there's no question that Hoover used two tools very effectively and very much uh outside of scrutiny often to promote his own career often his own political agenda one of those as you suggested was it was was a little bit of strong arming or at least collecting information on powerful people on all kinds of people um and letting them know that he had that information that they might not want disclosed so Hoover was famous for having files on everybody now he didn't actually have files on everybody but as long as people think that you might have files on them then uh you know it has pretty much the same effect uh the other thing that he used to great effect was secrecy and the FBI during the time that he was director had very few safeguards in part because nobody anticipated how big and how powerful it was going to become and so when Hoover wanted to do something particularly if it involved forms of political surveillance or disruption that he wasn't sure he had authorization for he often just did that in secret and there's an awful lot of that but I think neither one of those fully explain how he managed to stay in office for so long and for that I think you really do have to look to the range of other skills that he had the popularity of not only Hoover but the FBI as an institution incredibly widespread support in Congress partly because Hoover staffed congressional committees with FBI agents their investigative staffs often right so we had all sorts of skills his ability to run his own bureaucracy and to hire men who were going to be loyal to him right all of those were really important to his story as well well it's funny because my I wanted to transition and you did it so very perfectly to personal relationships because I think a lot of his success dealt with I mean I he even gave um one of our presidents a dog that was named Edgar well right so um if we could if you could tell me or share with me who do you think if you were to pick three of Edgar uh J Edgar Hoover's most important relationships during his career who are they and why the first is certainly Clyde Tolson who was a bureau official the number two man at the FBI for most of Hoover's life and career but was also really Hoover's companion um his most intimate relationship the man with whom he did not technically live with Tolson but they did just about everything else together they had their meals together they traveled together they stood up for each other at things like family funerals um in addition to working side by side all day long so of course the great question of Tolson is what kind of relationship was this um you know and the book spends a lot of time thinking about that question uh I think it's quite clear that they loved each other they viewed each other as uh the others deepest and most important companion whether or not it was a sexual relationship we we just don't quite know that but there is a lot of complexity and a lot of really interesting historical material about that relationship which was surprisingly open uh in the city of Washington right if you were going to invite Hoover to dinner you were also probably going to invite Clyde so among the people who did that were I would say the two other relationships that really fascinated me the most which were the last two presidents that Hoover served under Lyndon Johnson who got the dog and Richard Nixon and those are interesting relationships in part because they started so long before either one of those men became president who forgot to know both of them while they were in Congress in the 1940s Lyndon Johnson lived on his street so they were neighbors and they walked their dogs together so that was the dog connection um and Nixon he got to know through really anti-communist politics got very close to Nixon when Nixon was uh vice president in the 1950s and so in all of these cases you know you've got a social relationship you've got a kind of political power relationship and what's fascinating is that I think it does illustrate Hoover's ability to be so many different things to different kinds of people because if we're just looking at this in terms of ideology politics parties Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon look pretty different but through the lens of Hoover they they had somewhat similar relationships and they both really used him and found you know value for better and For Worse um in in cooperating they all had dogs no that's right I don't know if Nixon had dogs oh we had Checkers for sure but that was a gift um if you're just joining us my name is Heather Marie montia it is my honor to be here with the 2023 Pulitzer prize-winning author in biography Beverly Gage who wrote G-Man J Edgar Hoover and make in the making of an American Sanctuary welcome back back to the conversation um Okay so you seem to allude to the fact that if Hoover retired in the late 1950s instead of getting a lifetime appointment that he might be regarded as the single most important or most popular figure in American history um at least that was my interpretation if you could exp expand on that a little bit why do you feel that way you know obviously there's an extra 22 years um in between or excuse me an extra uh decade in between where things changed and I Know It deals with a lot of the the crime fighting and the domestic surveillance um but if if we could maybe just go down that road a little bit and then talk about other things that I really love like research and process and your favorite library and all of that but I'm really curious at this thought of you know um growing up I used to watch Seinfeld and George Costanza always would want to leave at the like when things were going really well right and leave at the up point and I wonder if kind of like did he overstay his welcome or not is is this country just um did we go through things um and where and he was there and he was doing things that had to be done even if they weren't popular I think he did overstay his welcome in in lots of ways I'm not sure I said he would be the most popular figure in all of American history but I did say he would be much more popular one that he is uh which is not popular uh really at all but one of the things that surprised me when I was working on the book was in fact looking at public opinion polls in the 1950s and finding that Hoover was extraordinarily popular he would get approval ratings in the 70s 80s 90 percentiles and that is so deeply contrary to how we tend to think about him today that I thought there was something really interesting to explain I think in the 50s Hoover stood for things that were pretty widely popular in the United States anti-communism above all you know some people at the time and certainly in retrospect we might look back criticize his methods and I think rightly so but even when those methods were known in the 1950s in the early years of the Cold War almost everyone in American politics considered themselves an anti-communist of one sort or another and so being one of the great icons of that view made Hoover enormously popular whereas in the 1960s not only did the FBI's violations uh I think expand pretty dramatically especially through a program called cointelpro which I talk a lot about but Hoover really began attacking movements and organizations that had a lot more currency in American life even if they were controversial attacking the Civil Rights Movement attacking a figure like Martin Luther King attacking liberals in general to some degree attacking the student left attacking the anti-war movement right and these were not kind of marginal institutions in the way that the Communist Party even at the height of its power had been they they had a lot more a lot more grounding and I think the other thing that happened in in the 60s and then expanded in decades that followed is uh that the political parties began to begin to shift right and there were fewer points of consensus as the decade went along and I think in many ways were really represented a certain kind of mid-century Washington consensus of faith in federal power a faith in kind of authority figures and a lot of that changes both on the left and the right in in the 1960s and 70s I read that Hoover is the only civilian government administrator to lie in state at the U.S Capitol from that moment to now his legacy has has changed quite a bit um does his shadow still hang over the FBI it does when the FBI goes to work they're still walking into the J Edgar Hoover building although that may change in years to come both because there are some questions and some pressure um to take Hoover's name off the building more likely because they're just going to get rid of that building and open a new headquarters either in Maryland or Virginia but even once Hoover's name is gone I think it's very much an institution uh that that he built and that bears his stamp you know the strange combination of things that the FBI does which is on one hand a criminal law enforcement and on the other hand intelligence work right those both come out of the Hoover era many of the things that the FBI is most famous for it's lab it's forensics that again comes out of the Hoover era and I think most importantly maybe the the culture of the FBI I think still Bears the stamp of both aspects of Hoover's world view you know on the one hand a real pride in kind of professional non-partisan expert government service just finding the facts and on the other hand a pretty deep conservatism in lots of ways to the FBI's internal culture so all of that I think can be traced back to Hoover even though the FBI looks like and is in many ways a much more accountable and much more diverse and much more I would say uh in in many cases much more law abiding institution than it than it was under Hoover do you you've spoken a little bit about the future of the FBI from a new building to I mean where do you we're in a very Global space but our nation certainly has borders um where do you think things will go from here well I think there are two things that are really sort of interesting about the politics of of the FBI at the moment as compared to in Hoover's day so one is incredible continuity right the FBI is under all sorts of political pressure in the moment because while it's supposed to be a non-partisan just the facts kind of institution uh structurally this was true in Hoover's day it's true now they're constantly being pulled into incredibly controversial political investigations right this really came to a head during the Trump years but has been true for a long time um and so I think Hoover would really recognize that dilemma that the FBI is in now and they're in a very tough spot at the moment in terms of uh being accused of playing politics I think one big contrast from Hoover's life but particularly from his final years and the years after his death that it used to be liberals and Democrats who were the most critical of the FBI certainly people on the left conservatives and Republicans used to be great champions of the FBI you know certainly during the Reagan years and now of course a lot of the attacks on the bureau are coming from the right they're coming from the Republican party and that looks radically different than it than it would have looked even even just a couple of decades ago well this has been incredible and you've shared so much knowledge with all of us today I'm interested a little bit I mean you you alluded to the extents of research um you you did you know and for an 800 page book I can it must have been extensive research what was your process how did you go about it how did you keep it all straight um if you could you know did you have a favorite library either that you worked in or that you visited can you talk a little bit about all of that well without going into incredibly nerdy detail about what database program I use and all of that a couple of things one is that I didn't write the book in Order um I left for myself the parts that I was most interested in uh the parts that really animated me it turned out I was interested in pretty much everything but there were certain places that I really wanted to dig in and I left those to the end so that I could sort of sustain over this enormously long period of time more than a decade working on it I did only use kind of digital files with a few exceptions so even when I was going to a paper archive I would take photographs I thought otherwise I was going to have to build a new wing on my house to house all of the paper so that was an important part of the process and then most of the archives that were the most important the libraries are are in Washington um so it was the FBI itself it was the National Archives and it was Hoover's personal papers which are now in the custody of the national law enforcement Museum which didn't exist actually when I started working on this book it was just an idea but that now exists in downtown Washington um of course there are some Nom libraries things like the Freedom of Information Act files that other people have put up online you know basic stuff like newspaper reports Census Data all of those things I I definitely made use of um but I spent a lot of my summers in Washington DC I have photos of my son who is now a 20 as to an eight-year-old being forced to pose in front of Hoover's grave and Congressional Cemetery because he would come down on these research trips with me it builds character and he'll love you for it later um so in terms of audience right it's there's a really interesting interesting when you think of who you wrote this book for there's the academy and then there's the General Public when you were writing who are you writing for and um I mean and can you share about your choice in in Publisher and why you made that decision from the beginning I really wanted this book to be a book that would speak to both of those audiences and speak to them quite powerfully and there were moments when I thought is this just a fantasy but I'm happy to say you know based on uh kind of the reception that I've gotten both from General readers and from my my colleagues in the Academy I think I think that uh it was effective um you know I think biography is very useful in certain ways because it's a genre that has a public audience I came to like biography because you know it has a very clear narrative to it and a clear way of kind of making human connections with the past sometimes Scholars don't like biography as much but I also thought that Hoover was a very good vehicle for telling a story that's not about an individual but is it a about a much larger story both in terms of where he had his fingers but also in terms of you know the state of the scholarship and the historiography and uh so I'm happy to say I think a lot of historians have recognized that and have been able to to make sense of it even though I hope it's a pretty fun read as well it is um I I really enjoyed it and I I am I know I read a lot but I and I at first the job I'm intimidated but then I was like it's very readable it very it speaks very very well too I think everyone and I think it is something that people wonder about right this mythology this controversial character and to get a new take uh on him it's it's it's worth the read for sure um we were put together though because we're celebrating the Library of Congress National Book Festival which is on this Saturday can we expect to see you there I will be there and I can't imagine a better place not only because this is a book set in Washington but because J Edgar Hoover's first government job was actually not at the justice department it was at the Library of Congress and so we have a Library of Congress to blame for teaching J Edgar Hoover how to use an effective filing system how to gather information and make it available so um you know will credit blame uh we'll we'll leave it to others to decide but there's there's a really powerful connection I love that and you always have to be careful of the power of the librarian they always know so much right I think it might be the most famous librarian uh in all of American History you can correct well you know we could debate a few others but well for those of you who are able to get there remember it's it's just this weekend and it's it's on Saturday um August 12th and it's going to be a fabulous time so don't miss it um Beverly this has been such a delightful conversation I really want to thank you for sharing all of oh wait I know what I did not ask you and I need to I need to know what we can expect next from you have you thought about it at all because I am sure after people read this they're going to be like what is she working on and I'm sure they're going to want to know so do you have you taken a break are you working on something that you want to tell us about well a little bit of each so the first thing to say is I'm writing a short book um because uh I do have other big projects in mind down the line that are going to be decade-long projects but uh my next book is a short book I'm calling it a road trip through US history and it's um in advance of 2026 when we are going to be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States the question that's driving me in writing this book is uh can we Face our past truly face our past and still celebrate our country and to find the answer to that I am spending the next year or two uh kind of going to historic sites in the United States seeing what they're doing uh seeing how they're they're telling the story and and Reinventing history from the ground up super exciting and there are lots of things already happening already um and so I'm looking forward we should talk more about that offline because and I think more people will anticipate that book and we can hopefully have you back to discuss it as we approach America 250. so thank you once again thank you for just being so thorough and doing so much hard work and research it you did all the hard work thank you thank you for reading it thank you so very much um we look forward to getting to see you this weekend um and and thank you for for joining us it's time to close the conversation I always want to thank my library partners and PBS stations more than 1800 strong throughout the country for joining us but we always like to thank you for being here as well in addition we just want to remind you and put up that graphic so you remember to go to loc.gov bookfest for more information for any questions you might have and to remind you that every Wednesday and Thursday and August you can catch more programs right on pbsbooks.org at loc book Fest 23. until next time I'm Heather Marie montia and happy reading [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause]