Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week as we are doing right now, and you can watch it at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries, so similar to your so-and-so state library. And so we provide services and training to all types of libraries in Nebraska, so you'll find topics on our show that are for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12 schools, corrections, museums, all sorts of archives pretty much are only criteria that it is something to do with libraries. It's something cool. We think they're doing something we think they could be doing. We do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products. And we sometimes have library commission staff that come on and do presentations about things we're offering specifically here in Nebraska, but also do bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. This morning, good morning. Jeremy is with us this morning. Good morning, Jeremy. Good morning. And he is going to talk to us about taking care of ourselves, which many of us definitely, well, it's always been an issue throughout life, but even more so potentially over the last year or so. So I'll just hand it over to you, Jeremy, to introduce yourself and tell us all about our mental maintenance that we can do. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. I'm Jeremy Boland, assistant director at Lincoln Parish Library in Ruston, Louisiana. And that's Parish as a county system for those of you that are unaware of how Louisiana set up. We're back to the French. We have that basis where we call all of our counties Parishes. So I'm on the I-20 corridor in North Louisiana, which we like to refer to as the non-fun part of the state. And all the fun happens in the south, supposedly. But we have two universities in my community, Louisiana Tech University and Gremlin State University, which is a historically black college. Great, both great universities and wonderful to have in our community, especially when it comes to the library and getting things going around here. Mental maintenance is a topic that I'm not normally the kind of thing that I would present at one of these kinds of things, but it came up one part in my life when I needed a little extra boost to get through something a little trying for me. It wasn't actually COVID. It was before all that. So it can happen to us at any time in our life. And the main reason why I guess I feel that I can talk on this subject is because I know that it helps. And I know that it is hard. And I know that it can actually help even the people that I consider the hard to help in that kind of category like myself. Because so I call it self care and mindfulness for the overwhelmed and patient fastidious and quick temper because I'm all of those things. You can also add persnickety to the list because that's definitely me. And, and you mentioned this earlier we all need it and librarians especially and why do librarians need more mental and self care than anybody else is because we do care so much. Not only about a profession but about our patrons and about our daily tasks and what it means to the wider world. So you've got to take care of yourself or you're not going to get very far. And before we begin, we're going to, I just want you to know that the best practice is to just practice and to just begin and try and to make a start. There's no right or wrong way to do any of this and there's definitely no wrong or right way that you should think that you have to do any of this. So just want to put that out there first off before we get started. All right, so self care versus mindfulness, they're actually two different things. And I'm going to separate them out today. The definition of self care is rather scientifically based it says the practice of taking action to preserve or improve one's health but for today, I'm going to concentrate more on mental health. And it's done through a simple question asking what you need and following through with an honest answer and that's the kicker it's got to be an honest answer. And yes, that can include medical care, but it also means taking time off. This is me time. This is what you need to make your life a little bit better. Another good definition is a prolonged pleasurable pleasurable time resulting in peace, happiness and rejuvenation. So that's my favorite definition for self care. Now mindfulness is a tad different it is a form of self care and later on I'm going to say the best practice of self care. But this is the practice of paying attention in a particular way on purpose in the present moment and non judgmentally that definition comes from John Cabot Zen and his book. Wherever you go there you are he is one of the main Americans that brought mindfulness practice and meditation to the common person in the West. So we thank him for that. And you can't mention mindfulness without talking about meditation so we will be hitting on meditation and how that helps with a lot of things, and we will even practice doing a couple of meditations. Traditional meditation usually focuses on the breath, but there's also some other ways to do it which will touch on as well. And I'm good with questions at any time so feel free to type in anything, thoughts, cares or what have you. Yeah, definitely use that question section type it in I've got the I've got it open on my screen I'll see anytime you guys type in we'll jump in. Okay. So the difference between the benefits of self care and mindfulness for self care you've got better health which of course, usually is a reduction in stress. And it can also boost your self esteem and confidence. It's yourself worth reduces burnout which is a really big one for a lot of people. I mean, a lot of this are probably experiencing burnout, and maybe even a little bit of boredom because you've got a little monotonous during lockdown, and, you know, a reduction in services, and just being overburdened completely by having to come up with new service models so quickly during COVID. It increases our capacity for empathy, even though librarians usually don't have a problem with this, but it also helps rejuvenate that empathy muscle that you have. And it builds resilience which is your mental capacity to bounce back so much faster so that when you do fall down next time you're able to get back up a lot better just make sure brain a lot healthier. And then of course it models good healthy behavior to others around you. The mindfulness of course are all of the above but it also includes greater awareness, clarity and acceptance of your present reality, especially through meditation. It strengthens the brain both cognitively and emotionally. Again, this can be done in the minute, or it can be done through meditation and healthier brain equals a healthier body and all this goes together and that will happen also with just basic self care. Some of the other health benefits that have been proven through mindfulness practice and meditation combined are reduced, better sleep, reduction in pain, headaches, all those kinds of things that a lot of people struggle with health wise that can cause problems on a daily basis. So I'm going to go through a rough guide on how to do each of these. So the self care care quick guide again is asking what you need and following through with an honest answer. To me this is living versus existing or thriving versus surviving. This is why we're, we're here we're not just trying to make it from point A to point B. You, you need the pleasurable things to make yourself to renew yourself to be able to keep going to to exist and to survive we're past that fight or flight time in our life and we should be able to take the time to do this for ourselves. So one thing about self care is this is personal and sometimes very private needs, and nobody else needs to know what your self care is or looks like you don't have to share it with anybody. And there's even some tools that you can use and I've got these listed in the handout that you'll be getting that are assessments that you can take where you score yourself through these six different areas in your life to know where you might need a little bit of help with self care. So you've got the physical, the psychological, your emotional, even your spiritual personal I have an asterisk on that because it's not in all tools, but it isn't in the one that I gave you. And then of course your professional needs as well. All of these models actually come from a book called called transforming the pain, a workbook on vicarious traumatization for professional professionals who work with traumatized clients I think it's interesting that this was included in this workbook so that people who are undergoing stressful jobs and training are able to find a way to fall back and help themselves at the same time that their needs are just as important as their clients. So a couple of examples of easy self care and the categories that they would fall under is exercise is a form of physical self care, a healthy diet course again is physical, regular sleeping routine is physical as well. Taking breaks is a good easy way for professional boost relocating at lunch this is one of my definite amens I really like to get out there and get away from work as at least once during the day so lunch is when it can happen. And to use sick leave when you need it a lot of people still come to work not feeling well and trying to make it through the day but it usually ends up adding a little more stress. Now's a good time for you to use your chat window and share some of your ways that you do self care and we can all start listing a couple of mine as well. Yeah, that actually done by the relocating at lunch and taking breaks. For those of us like myself except for I come in here into my office for over the past year I've been coming in here just about once a week to run this show. But most of the time I'm working from at home. And I have a separate computer room but I don't do those things like I should. Yeah, I grab my lunch in the kitchen go back to my desk. Sometimes, and I'm not good at that I know. Well you should take your break. Away from work away from work. Can you go I have elsewhere I have other building rooms in the house to go to definitely but I just figured I'll just go here and it's just keep doing thing cruise through since and I know that's wrong and bad yeah. Are there any anything coming up in the chat window I closed my chat window. And if anybody has any ideas what do you guys do for this or ways that you think some could work for this. You have somewhere you go out to lunch to your way you take breaks here where I am in my office. I know I used to and I was good at doing breaks. We have here in Lincoln, Nebraska, they call the sky walks, which is over the street walkways around downtown. And not have to be outdoors. So in the middle of winter when it's snowing or the middle of summer when it's 95 degrees out, I would walk those, and it was just you get out and walk it and it's about a mile to walk the whole thing. That's, that's nice. That's one of the things you know exercises always good. A couple of other things that you can do for self care or hobbies, of course, are wonderful way to take it to turn your mind off and turn it on to something if you have a compliment file you could build a compliment file all those wonderful cards or notes that you get or a letter of recommendation that you know really touched you at some point to take those out and read through them when you've got a low day. Go outside play with your pets. My dog is one of my happiest things in my in my life. I, when I found her at the pound she obviously knew I needed some self care because she connected with me pretty quickly. We do have things in finally here actually good thing is the yeah so use the question section and you go to webinar interface. I it doesn't have a little thing that lets me know someone's typing so to wait till you hit send and I see it. So I have to wait and I don't know. See, some of the self care for me is a giant thing of veggies to munch on at work instead of munching on salty snacks. Yeah, definitely healthy. That person says when we were at home felt like you had to keep working at work you always could get up and visit. And that zoom meetings do wear you down. Yeah, there's no. Sometimes there's nobody to get up and visit at home, except for maybe your dog or your cat. Yeah. And so the next person says my co-work and I will go on walks when it's nice. And I love doing post work dancing.  Absolutely. A couple of other ones are you can keep a gratitude journal, or one of those pay it forward journals those are really nice. It's, it's funny how taking care of yourself can also end up taking care of other people in a different way that you're not usually And that giving always, of course, you know, releases some, some good hormones as well. And don't be afraid to take a nap. That's a good, good form of self care as well. No, and some of the little crafty things I enjoy scrapbooking and crocheting another person says you. Yep, those are good. Find on something else. Absolutely. Got to click back on my slide to make it go. Anything else I'm gonna go ahead and go on if not. So, this is what I call tips from reality for self care, just the easy, like, just things to remember and you want so you won't get lost. And the one, the main thing is to pay emotional attention. And this is to your attitude to your emotions to your stress factor. It's time and pay attention to that. Don't ignore it.  So pay emotional attention, especially a big one and is to rediscover your joy.   So if you can find that one thing that, you know, always makes you happy. If it's jelly beans, that's great. It's Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, even better.  And the same vein always have an anchor. The one thing that always will recenter you. It's a little different than, than just a little pick me up like your joy. This is the thing that, that basically grounds you and brings you back to an even keel. And usually this is like a, an activity or this would be your hobby, you know, that can turn off everything else and give you a minute to refocus. It could even be something as easy as a happy song or a playlist that you listen to when you need it. I put on here wise venting. It's good to get some of those things out of your, your system a little bit. Be careful that this doesn't turn into gossiping, however. And for professionals, it's really a good idea to have a group of people that you can, you know, vent to safely. I've got an open chat box on in my phone with three other assistant directors in Louisiana that don't live anywhere close to where I do. And we just, you know, share things as they come up just to get them out of our system. It's a wonderful tool. I never, I didn't realize I was missing that until I met those fat group of ladies. Read and listen to advice. It helps to read some of the literature that goes through this and there's so many great books and tools for self care out there. I would add it to your routine. And then the same vein make time for that. Don't say, well, I'll get to it after I finish this book or whatever. Work it in. And if you can maybe take a couple of minutes a day in your work routine and add that in as a professional development tool, self care I think is, is part of our professional development because if you don't take care of yourself, how can you work at, you know, at the level that your employers expect you to work? Absolutely, yeah. So make time and of course, you know, audio books are a wonderful time saver. I do almost all of my reading in the car. I have about an hour commute each day. So I get a lot of reading done and it's one of my favorite times of the day actually. It's a good way to get ready for the day and wind down for the day at the same time. And then of course, keep account. And for this, it's like same way as making time. You can keep a calendar. You can also keep a journal. There's actually some published journals now that will guide you through the self care process at the same time. So look for a couple of those if you need some help without just, or keep a regular diary or a gratitude journal like I mentioned earlier. Journaling, yep. You mentioned the wise venting going back to that that made me think of, and I'm sure possibly you were talking about the chat you have other librarians here in Nebraska and I know I've heard from other states too. We have our library directors have regular in the different regions of the state regular get-togethers. And it used to be in person and with COVID they all kind of switched to online. Usually through Zoom. And it is usually an open forum, whatever you need to talk about, not recorded for any period of time. So people can discuss what they need to talk about what they need to and it is really good. And I think more of them have been able to participate because it's been on Zoom. I hope they continue with doing it as that is an option as well. But that get together and having those like weekly, one of them is weekly once. And two of them do it weekly and one does it monthly. I think I think that's really helped a lot of people to hear what other libraries and other staff are going through. And being able to share their concerns and it has been a really a great benefit to everyone, I think. Exactly. And someone did comment when you're talking about audio books that love audio books and podcasts that make me laugh. Oh yeah, that's laughing is a form of self care. Yes, absolutely. It works different muscles than we use the rest of the day to frown on our computer. Okay, so the quick guide for mindfulness, this one is a little bit deeper than I consider self care can be fun. But mindfulness is actually a little bit of work and it uses part of the mind that we're not that we're not usually used to doing. And as I said earlier, this is one of the best acts of self care. And it exercises the brain in a completely different way. So the way to separate the two is to think of self care as taking care of yourself and mindfulness as an actual practice. And there's three different ways that I think of mindfulness, there's mindfulness moments in its simplest form. Mindfulness is really nothing other than being in the moment, which sounds very simple, but it's how often are we really in the moment. And in Titch Not Han's book, I'm drawing a blank on the name of the book, it's one of my favorite books. But in his mindfulness book, he talks about something as simple as washing the dishes. When you're washing the dishes, are you just washing the dishes? Are you thinking about the football game that somebody's watching in the other room? Are you worried about the laundry that you need to do after you wash the dishes? Are you worried about the dog that you can't see in the other room, making some noise, or are you just washing the dishes? So it's just being mindful of the actual thing that you're doing at the minute. A good way to practice this is if you're taking a bath, when you wash your hair, that's a good one to start with. If you just think and concentrate on washing your hair, it's not as easy as you think it is. It's amazing how fast your mind drifts to a million places. The Buddhists call the mind a monkey mind. It's constantly bouncing everywhere and jumping from tree to tree and thought to thought. So to be able to control that thing is definitely something that takes lots of practice and control. So that's your simple way of having a mindful moment is just concentrating on a very specific task and only thinking about that task. So I challenge you to do that at least once today.  And then you mentioned the shower is kind of funny because I actually know that when I'm in the shower, my mind wanders actually and I start thinking of things. And I come out of the shower with ideas a lot of, oh, here's a new thing I want to do. Here's something for work or something I want to do in the gardens or whatever. I don't calm my mind. Yeah, I'm like the opposite. So I'll try that next time because it may be a struggle for me. It's a big challenge. And the reason why your mind can wander so easily in the shower because you're in a routine. The shower or getting ready in the morning is a routine half or driving to work is usually a routine. So the way to break those routines is to do it in a different order to think about it a little different and driving to work taking a different route. That's a good way to break that habit because there's been times when it's like I don't even remember driving to work or going home sometimes because my mind is so set on something else other than the moment that I'm in. Yeah, when I used to, it seems to be the longer drives, your brain kind of zones out because right now it's for me, it's a five minute drive. So I'm in a downtown busy traffic, but I used to drive up for five minutes to work. And I, yeah, too many times I'm like, how did I get here? That was scary to realize. And then there's also mindful versions of self care that incorporate the two, like yoga is a good example, Tai Chi is a good example. The use of exercise stretching and then of course breathing, which is the big part of meditation, which is really what meditation is all about focusing on the breath. One of the other things I want to say is it's okay to say no to other people to take care of yourself. I always want to make sure and throw that in. I forgot it earlier. That's a form of self care that a lot of people don't practice either. So sometimes putting yourself first is okay, especially when you're about to drown. So don't forget that. And another good mindful self care practice is knowing you're in the zone hobby, the hobby where you tend to lose time or the activity that you tend to lose time. During COVID I was, when we were in lockdown, I rediscovered and I think a lot of people did because there were hardly any to buy rediscovered the fun of doing jigsaw puzzles. And when I would get focused on jigsaw puzzles, I mean I the hours were just gone. And it's like I had to remind myself to stop and actually go to bed because I wanted to finish the puzzle. And I got into it. So those are your in the zone kind of activities. I get that way with the video games that I play. Many nights up late or too many. How many hours, how long have I been sitting here? Oops. Exactly. My brain was concentrating on it and it was calming and it was, yeah, it definitely is a break that my husband and I both love to take. And it really helps. Your mind is totally focused on something else. There's a lot of reading involved and a lot of concentration and strategy and it's a whole different thinking than the things that stress me out. Yeah. And the key to that is to not feel guilty once you do that. Just remember that don't go, oh gosh, I just spent three hours or 30 minutes doing that and I should have been doing A, B and C. No, that is definitely a no no. So you're going to keep to the self care route. Do not blame yourself or anything. Okay, so meditation, we're going to go deeper into meditation and we're actually going to do a couple of practices for each of the different, well, not each of the different kind, but three of the different kinds of meditation. So Tich Nhat Hanh says that breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.  The hardest thing that I think I've ever tried to do in my life. That monkey mind loves to jump from one thing to the other you hear a random sound and you start speculating what that sound is. So it is, it is very difficult to do. And he also said to meditate with mindful breathing is to bring body and mind back to the present moments that you do not miss your appointment with life. And to me that just resonates with it'll actually make your brain healthier. And in the moment when you when you're out of your meditation out of your meditation zone, you can be more mindful as you go through your day and not, and not just keep thinking about the next thing to do the next thing to do the next thing to do. Actually, when you get into the practice on it, it becomes an unconscious habit which is good to get into. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So the three different although four different types of meditation is of course just focusing on your breathing and usually it's counting breaths or setting a timer and just breathing in and out for a specific period of time. That's the most basic, basic meditation practice that there is. There's all kinds of different suggestions on how to think about focusing on your breath. One says to try to feel the the wind passing by your nostrils, which is really difficult for me because I've got a really bad deviated septum so only one side usually feels that strange way so I usually use some kind of visualization when I'm doing my breathing. It kind of came from the app that came on the Apple Watch. It has like a little mandala that kind of blooms when you're supposed to breathe in and then breathe out. It goes away. So I kind of visualize these mandala looking lilies blooming on my field of vision as I breathe in and then they kind of sink back into the water as I breathe out.  A body scan is something you can do to actually help relieve tension in your body and you think of each part of your body and we're going to actually go through one of these in a little bit. We're going to go from the crown of our head down to our shoulders so you'll be able to see what that's a little bit like but to start only thinking about specific parts of your body you'll be able to realize where you carry your stress and how recognizing that can help alleviate that stress and then of course take a large weight off your shoulders. This is also a good practice to do at the end of the day when you're getting ready to go to sleep especially if you have problems going to sleep like I do some days. I will do a body scan to remind myself of all the places that I need to let go of where my tension is. I'm a jaw clincher for some reason and that will be the very last thing that I tend to let go of before I go to sleep. So doing a body scan at night before going to bed will remind me to let my jaw go and hopefully fall asleep quickly thereafter. Visualization meditation is a very poetic meditation thing where you actually use images to visualize your meditation process. So it is a form of mindfulness because you're focusing on each aspect of the visualization. So you can contemplate the snow falling on the mountain, you can contemplate a pebble at the bottom of a stream. You can contemplate monks praying in their way or however but we're going to do a little visualization in just a minute to give you an idea of how that works. And you can actually do meditation walking. I haven't tried these and I really don't have a good space to do it but for those of you that have great wonderful gardens that you're familiar with you can do a walking meditation. You don't have to meditate with your eyes closed. The point is to be able to just be able to breathe and move at the same time and to just focus on that walking and the breathing and it's supposed to be a great way. One of these days I'm going to get there hopefully. And of course I added on guided meditation and that's what we're going to be doing in a minute when I'm going to guide you through a couple of meditations. But there's a lot of apps and recordings out there where you can get some guided meditation help. If you're having trouble getting started or staying in the groove, if you can find one that you like then that would be a good way to go as well. I even include some of those on my handout that she'll be getting. And I'll mention while you're actually mentioning that the handout and the slides and so I think the participant recommendations and some text only slides are available on the session page. I uploaded I added them to there. So if anyone wants to go back to I just did it now over the actual event page for today's show you have links to all of those. Okay, great. All right, so let's go ahead and do their very short practices. You'll be amazed just how a short minute or two can give you at least a taste of what this could be like. So we're going to do a breathing meditation. So the way I want you to set up for this is if you're sitting to just sit straight up with your feet flat on the floor, your hands on your thighs open for an open experience. And you can either close your eyes or close them softly meaning you know half unfocused gaze to the floor or what have you. And we're going to do five breaths in and out.  Okay, take a minute or a moment to bring your eyes back up to focus. How did that make anybody feel does anybody feel like sharing what that little experience did for you or didn't do for you, or if it was hard, because it can be. I had some people say the last time that I did this, they were at the service desk so they couldn't do it at all. I was like, well, I'm sorry. That is, yeah, that is difficult, I'm sure. I definitely can feel at the end by the fourth or last one, much more calm and relaxed. Yeah, usually on the fourth breath is when it when it starts to hit because all that oxygen that you're not normally getting starts hitting and you kind of feel for me that's when usually when I get to the fourth breath is when I start feeling my the crown on my head tingle a little bit probably because I haven't been breathing. I've been breathing too shallow for most of the day because I was, you know, trying to get things done running around crazy so deep breathing, even for a few minutes is a powerful thing to reduce a lot of stress quickly. So don't, don't forget about that. Comments coming in from people some person says I always get so relaxed when I remember to breathe. Yes, yes, something you don't think about. And some other comments is amazing relaxing. It felt great. So if you can even take start with five minutes a day of focus breathing and trying to keep the mind clear that's, that's your starting goal. And then if you can get up to 10, then you're practically a pro 10 is very, very hard. Yeah. And just to be able to do it at least once or twice a day. My biggest thing is just as I tend to hold my breath without realizing it. So yes, great to like actually think about I need to actually breathe, you know, they sell you to do it but actually practicing it is a whole different thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there is a moment between breaths to that that you can focus on like, like I was talking about the flower or the mandala blooming so when you breathe in and then there's that pause where there's really no breath.  So you can take that minute to visualize the, you know, look at the, I look at the flower or what have you and then when I breathe out and then there's another pause and you can just see it float away. I mean it, it sounds kind of silly but it is a way I mean it's very relaxing for me so if you can find that way of visualizing something that works for you then that would be a good way to get going. Any other questions or comments. No, not right now. Okay. All right, so the next one we're going to do is a short body scan and it's not really much of the body it's just going to be the head and to the shoulders so we're going to start at the top of our head. So again, sit straight up with your feet flat on the floor your hands on your thighs open your eyes either closed or softly closed. And as we breathe in we're going to concentrate on one part of the body. And then we will breathe out. So think about breathing into that part of the body noticing what's going on in that part of the body. And then breathing out. If there's any tension or pain there think about it. Going away as you breathe out. All right. Here we go. Think about the crown of your head. Only the crown of your head. Breathe in to the crown of your head and breathe out. Now focus on your forehead. Only your forehead. Breathe in to your forehead and breathe out. Now focus on your eyes. Breathe into your eyes and breathe out. Now think of your jaw. Breathe into your jaw. Now think of your neck. Your entire neck.  Breathe in. Lastly focus on your shoulders. Breathe into your shoulders. Big breath. Breathe in and then breathe out. All right. Take a moment to refocus. Hopefully we lost a little bit of tension somewhere. I know. I do know when I am stressed, I get the back of the head headaches. Oh yeah. That's a thing. And I can, I know that's a place that I will concentrate on for doing this. Yeah. Especially if it gets to a point where it seems to be like a little bug in your bonnet and then a little bit of deep breathing on it. It might actually do a little bit more than you think it would. Just in practice. It's telling me I have a slow connection.  Yeah. Which is kind of odd for us, but. We've been having lots and lots of brain lately. So that may be. Okay. So the last meditation we're going to do is the visualization meditation. And we're going to go on a little. A little journey as a leaf here. So again, sit up straight. Feet flat on the floor, your hands. Calm up on your thighs. Relaxed. Eyes closed or softly focused. And to begin your visualization. Think of a lovely tree. On the edge of a stream. The best tree you can visualize. Breathe in. Breathe out. A breeze goes through the leaves of the tree. Breathe in. And breathe out. One leaf. Breaks away from the branch in the breeze. Breathe in. And breathe out. The leaf floats. Down. On the breeze. Breathe in. And breathe out. And ever so lightly. Breathe in. And breathe out. The leaf floats down the stream and around the corner on another journey. Breathe in. And breathe out. Okay. Take a moment to refocus. Usually there's a couple of. Comments about. That method of doing a meditation. It's a little different. Yeah. So anybody have any, what did you think of that one? Or the. Previous went to type, go ahead and. Share. I like that one. And someone says, I love this. It was calming and relaxing. Yes, I wish I was sitting by the tree. Somewhere where I used to live, I lived in an apartment that was right in the middle of city, but there was a park walking distance. And I used to go to this park and bring magazines and sit. On the grass and just read and it was similar to that. So it was an awesome place to do this meditation. Going from the cars and the noise and. Let's see, let's do guys. A lot of comments coming in for this one. Yeah. I liked that one connecting to nature helps me feel more grounded. Absolutely. Yeah. Another person says I like visual visualization. Can go to a happy place like forests and streams and lakes. Yes. Um. Fall is my favorite. So I was right there by the stream watching the leaf. There's a website at tree.fm, like FM radio, that is nothing but forest sounds from around the world. Nice, nice. That's one of the things actually I'm gonna talk about on the next slide is using sound. So that's awesome. And so in the beginning, unfortunately, this is a different kind of comment. We're getting a new roof and they're up there stopping around right now, very distracting. So this is the perfect time. You might need some of this stress release and use some of these techniques. Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely. Someone else against the tree.tree.fm website, yeah. Okay, great. Okay, so just like before, these are some tips from reality for the mindfulness practice. Of course, again, you can apply the same ones from self-care, pay emotional attention when it's time to practice this. You'll know have an anchor, like your type of mindfulness practice that is an anchor for you to get back into the practice. For me, it's the body scan. It's an easy way for me to remember the value of this practice. Read and then listen to advice. Another thing, there are so many different versions of books out there on how to practice mindfulness and meditation and different points of view from traditional, which is what I give you as my main focus or to the more fun and funny versions of which I think I have a few as well on your handout, but find the voice that you like and go with that version. So do read and listen to different types of material for this as well. And of course, you've got to make time and you can still keep account with this at the same time publishers are starting to make mindfulness journals too, just like the other ones I mentioned earlier. But as well as that, keep in mind that mindfulness is a moment and it is not a monument that you're trying to move. You're doing one thing at a time, one breath at a time and you have to practice, practice, practice. And even when you stop for a long, long time, which I actually did, I was guilty of it. And just to begin again is the point. Tishnod Han said, the future is being made out of the present. So the best way you can take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. So moments, not monuments. You need to recognize, accept and continue, accept your feelings, your faults, your failures and acknowledge them and love them. You have to forgive yourself first and however you feel is how you feel, even regret. So don't beat yourself up over anything when it comes to this practice. Be a tension seeker. Of course, this is going back to the body scan. Know where your problem areas are and seek them out and hunt them down and aggressively get rid of them if you can. And here I've got the soundscapes.  There's in full meditation practice, there's what they call sound baths with the Tibetan singing bowls. I think I even gave you a Spotify soundtrack that has some sound bath things. And then if you can find some music that works for you that kind of makes you drift, then that will do the same kind of thing too. And of course, stay mindful that is easier said than done. But remember your problem will be there later and your mind won't be so fatigued from the worry and you'll be able to handle it a lot more easily if you can take a couple of minutes to be mindful. Give your brain and your stressed shoulders a break for a minute and let go. Let go is one of the hard ones for a lot of people. There is an art to letting go. It is a practice and it may take more than once to succeed because some things are big that we deal with.  John Kabat-Zinn says to let go means to give up, coercing, resisting or struggling in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them. It's akin to letting your palm open to enhance something you have been holding on to. And of course, in the end, just breathe. Breath is what keeps us going and it oxygenates our blood. So at the end of it all, if you can hang on to one thing, just breathe, just breathe. All right. So that brings me to the end of the presentation. I wanna tell you the three main resources that I recommend, if you're gonna read three things, these are the three for you to read. Wherever you go, there you are by John Kabat-Zinn, which I've quoted a couple of times in the presentation and the miracle of mindfulness and introduction to the practice of meditation by Titchhnot Han, which I quoted quite often in the presentation.  So I have to put it as my main one for self-care. It's called wisdom of a humble jellyfish and other self-care rituals from nature. And Shah goes through all of these different animals and their little quirks and how that's their form of self-care and how she translates it into how we can take care of ourselves. So you learn about some fun animals and then you hear all these weird little stories and it helps you remember how to take care of yourself. So it's a great little book, I really liked it. So check those three out if you've got the time. And if not, I've got a handout full of more things from books and audio books to online resources. And of course the couple of guided meditations and then your music and sound recommendations as well. And another one of the handouts that you've got, I did this presentation for the virtual conference for Association of Little Small Libraries and I had a ton of feedback from participants about things that they do and apps that they use and books that they liked. So I've included all of the things that they share during that presentation with you as well. So as I said, there's no right way to do this. You find your own path and it is the right path as long as you walk it. So hopefully you can begin to practice today. Awesome, thank you so much Jeremy. Anybody has any questions or anything else you want to share? Go ahead and type into the chat. I think this was wonderful. I'm really interested in that Jellyfish book. I think I may have to seek that one out. It's good to know that this doesn't have to be work. It can be fun. Yes, it can be fun. I promise. Yeah, yeah. And I think I know for myself, I'm probably going to have a much more relaxing day for the rest of the day. So I did all of this breathing. I feel much more, more mellowed out. And in spite of the heat in my office right now, I'm not as annoyed about it. Yeah, yeah, it does help. Even the little things, I mean a little bit of breathing goes a long way. Same thing with like me, but I was, I got up and I was really tired this morning. Coffee didn't even help. And I was here and I was like, I've got this presentation. I've got to get ready. It's going to be really good. So I'm excited.  We feel as luggage. Wonderful session. Someone does it as well. Yeah. Oh, as a male suggests, it's great to do before a road trip too. In case road trip may be stressful or a lot of things you got to be figuring out and dealing with. Yes. Yeah. If there's an event, you know, coming up, Do some of this ahead of time to just start out with a more calm viewpoint, maybe. All right. I think you have your last slide here with your contact info. Yeah. Yeah, feel free to send me an email or call me if you have a question or anything. And I would suggest we need some of these books in our libraries. Yeah, absolutely. Those titles definitely would be good to check your collections and see if you have them. Or if not, add them for both your use and any of your patrons use. Patrons. Yeah. And if you want to, and if you want to sneak in your own mindfulness training at work, you could do it as a program for patrons and then you could help yourself at the same time. Isn't that funny how we can help ourselves through our work? One of the, and a lot of these titles are available through hoopla if you have hoopla at your libraries. Sure. Sure. We have an overdrive group here. I don't know if they're in there. I'm going to have to look and see as well. It's in there or not. All right, I am going to pull because people have been asking and we've been talking about the handouts and things. I'm going to pull presenter control back to my screen to show you share to all of you guys here. Yes, you'd mentioned the presentation and the handouts that Jeremy had. This is the session page for today's show where you may have gone to register if you did or to log in. Where we have links to the slides that he used today. Text only version of those slides. And then the handout and the participant recommendations. We post these on a side share account that we use here. So you have, you can look at them here, you can download them from here, whatever works for you. So here's some other books and websites and things that what you would recommend saying that from other people who had attended at the library's conference. And, and one of the things on that one is a couple of people shared some great resources to get kids going with mindfulness and meditation. I saw that read like a bear and I'm like, 30 mindful moments for kids. Yeah. If many have a couple of board books that's library that are mindfulness babies already so yeah. And then other websites to go to and ideas from people. So these are all linked from here on the session page. As I mentioned we are recording the show and when I do the recording I'll show you where that will be. And if you just, you guys are here, shoot me if I found the page, but just Google and compass live or use your search engine of choice. We're the only thing called that on the internet right now. So nobody's allowed to use that name. You'll come up with our page and our upcoming shows are listed here by the very bottom of them as a link to our archive shows. And then the most recent one at the top. And so today's will be there should be up and ready for everybody by the latest in the day tomorrow. And what I do is I copy this page with all those links, and then then we added link to, like last week's the view of the recording on our YouTube channel. So that will be there along with the other links this is the one from last week just to show you as an example. So we'll have that up there. And then today, or registered for today's show will get an email from me directly to you letting you know when the recording is ready and available for you to watch. While we're here I'll show you we do have a search feature in our archives so you can search look for any other topics see if we've done a show on it. You can search the whole archive or just most recent 12 months if you want something just current. And that is because this is our full show archives.  And we encompass live premiered in January 2009. So we've been on the show on the on for over 10 years, and we do have all of our recordings going back to the first one here on our site. We're librarians that's we do we save an archive historical information sometimes, and we'll keep them here as long as we can. As long as there's somewhere to host them, but do pay attention when you are watching any of the recordings, look at the original broadcast date. Many of our shows will stand the test of time book reading lists, some session, you know, programming things maybe, but some things may become outdated products and services may no longer exist anymore. They have been changed drastically websites or links might be broken. But we know, as I said we'll keep things up here anyways, but just pay attention to when the date was just in case something seems to be old or missing when you are looking through our archives. So like I said, all of these links will be available when I give you the information for the archive. And I did open up over here that tree.fm site, you can listen to a random forest. I love it. That one's a lot of birds, different birds. Oh, lots of different ones you can listen to here. I'm definitely going to be producing some of those I guarantee. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, I think I might link to it and I'll add it to the session page too, since we have it here. Yeah. And this is a Creative Commons where people have submitted their, I looked at it while I started someone talked about it. Anyone can submit sounds of their forest on to here and it's to help you know, for climate change and everything but they do. Yeah, Creative Commons share like agreement so. Nice. It's resource. All right. And someone just mentioned the tree.fm recordings will loop so just keep playing which is nice. I know sometimes people use this kind of thing and my husband has used things like this sounds on his tablet to help them get to sleep at night. Yeah. So just sleeping in silence was does not work to calm him he needed some things that he would he likes thunderstorms actually, which is now some people do like thunderstorms I just listen to white noise when I sleep. Yeah, I mean that's good. Brown noise. So that'd be good for that too. All right. All right, so. Oh yeah, a fan going fan sound that creates white noise to that would be something someone says absolutely. I'm going to wrap it up today. Any last words Jeremy. Like I said just try it practice and to make a start is the only way to begin. So, yeah, this will inspire you to do a little bit that awesome. All right, so let me get back to our main income page here okay. You'll hear from me tomorrow with the recording. We do have a Facebook page as you can see I linked to it here's our Facebook page here. If you look to use Facebook give us a like over there we post reminders about the show here's reminder login today show information about our speakers. And when recording is ready we announced it on here as well. So if you'd like to use Facebook give us a like over there. Otherwise we do have a hashtag and comp live little abbreviation. What we do post on a Twitter and Instagram as well so if you want to follow us there, or just keep an eye on our website. We have our upcoming shows. We have our shows booked up all the way into August you can see what we have coming up. Next week it's going to be about teaching technology in the library what we have a series we've been starting it's missing that our archives for part series that our technology innovation library and Amanda sweet is doing about teaching technology in the library and part two is next week. Part three is July 14 and part four July 28 part one is already out there recording, but if you want to join us for next week to learn how do people learn about how people learn. So definitely sign up for that one and you can sign up for all the other ones. And any of our other shows we have coming up after that we're going to be talking about something we may need some stress relief to deal with bedbugs in the library. Oh my goodness. It happens. Yeah. So, please do sign up for any rather shows coming up. Thank you. Thank you everybody for being with us this morning. Thank you very much. Jeremy feeling very calm for the rest of my day. And hopefully we'll see you all on a future episode of encompass live. Bye bye. Thank you, Krista. I'm glad to have you. I think it was great. Thanks.


Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, archivist of the United States and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual book talk with Heather Cox Richardson, author of How the South Among the Civil War. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can enjoy online. From Thursday, March 19th through Sunday, March 28th, you may view the greatest good in a virtual film screening presented in partnership with the United States Forest Service and the 2021 Environmental Film Festival in the nation's capital. The film explores the history of the U.S. Forest Service using rarely seen footage and photos and dozens of interviews to tell a complex and compelling story. And on March 30th at noon, author Dorothy Wickenden will discuss the agitators, which uses the intertwined lives of Harriet Tubman, Martha Wright and Francis Seward to tell the stories of abolition, the Underground Railroad and the early women's rights movement. You may find links to both events in our online catalog at archives.gov.slashcalendar. Randall J. Stevens in his Washington Post review of How the South Among the Civil War wrote that Heather Cox Richardson explains Goldwater's crusade and the trajectory of modern conservatism in her masterful book. A timely book it sheds light on what was perhaps the most important political coalition of the 20th century. The coalition was that of the deep south and the west based on a hierarchical view of government. Stevens further stated in his review, Richardson tells the engrossing and deeply relevant story of these connections and she ties that story to the most important political and social developments of American history. Moving from the founding of our nation through the Civil War and Western expansion through the modern era, Richardson points out the ebb and flow of tensions between expansion of rights and the restriction of government activism and its rejection. Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College and the author of six books about American politics. Two of her other books, West from Mathematics and To Make Men Free, A History of the Republican Party were both editor's choice selections in the New York Times book review. Richardson is the national commentator in American political history in the Republican Party. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune among other publications and she writes the popular newsletter, Letters from an American. Now let's hear from Heather Cox Richardson. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome everybody. And thank you for being here. I want to start by saying what an incredible pleasure it is to be with the National Archives and Records Administration. One of those organizations that I think sometimes flies under the radar screen unless you're somebody who uses libraries the way people like me do. Totally worth checking out both obviously the stuff they have in Washington DC, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. There are record keepers for the nation really, but also the records that they have themselves are wonderful for teachers, for people who are doing their own research into their family members. And just to know if you have ideas or questions about silly things like, well not silly necessarily to me, things like our customs houses or any of the many places in America that have kept records through our history. That's where they are. And they also have branch offices around the country as well. So it's an enormous pleasure to be here. And actually I just just talked about the National Archives and Records Administration more than my book, but they've told me I'm here to talk about the book. So I'm going to go ahead and give you a quick rundown of what is in that book and why I decided to write it. And just so you know, I'm going to talk probably for 20 minutes or so, and then I'll take questions about the book or about other things if you're so interested. So just think about throwing questions into the chat. So the story behind how the South won the Civil War is designed to answer a question that is a fundamental problem I think in American democracy or maybe in any democracy. And that is how do democracies fail? How do democracies turn into oligarchies? Because the more I studied American history, the more it was very clear to me that there were times in America when it looked like we were getting painfully close to oligarchy. So how does that happen in a democracy? Why would people literally go ahead and vote to move against their own interests? And the answer to that took a number of years for me to work my way through and what the result conclusion is in how the South won the Civil War. And what I argued in this book was that there is at the heart of American history a profound contradiction. And that is that America is indeed based on really powerful principles. The idea of human self-determination, the idea that everybody should be equal before the law, and that everybody should have equal access to resources. And I could hear you thinking of the caveats to that now. But those highfalutin principles grew in large part because, not in spite of, but because of the fact that those principles excluded any but a small group of white men, essentially, and usually white property men. So the founders who came up with the idea that all men are created equal, for example, started from the premise, first of all, that no women were included in that, that women were not really able to be political actors. So they are already outside the boundaries of being created equal, quite literally by God in the way that they thought about things. They also included in that group of people who could not be included in the idea that all men were created equal were indigenous people, and certainly people from Africa or from the Caribbean, so black Americans. And as the years went by, they put into that category many brown people, black people and brown people, and certainly women. So the idea in America, in How the South Won the Civil War, is that the founding of America depends not only on these enlightenment ideals of human self-determination and equality before the law. But that idea is tied to what I call the American paradox to the idea that there are a majority of people in America who are not part of that equality. They can't be part of that equality. And my argument behind this is not original. It comes from a book that was published in 1970 by Edmund Morgan called American Slavery, American Freedom, in which he said that Americans could conceive of freedom because they enslaved other people. And all I did was I took that idea and I expanded it beyond the idea of black Americans to include women and brown Americans as well, because I think that's really quite accurate. I'm one of those historians who does focus on indigenous history and on the idea that, of course, the first thing out of the box when English settlers came to the United States was to enslave indigenous people as well. So what I was getting at here was not, was first of all an ideological contradiction. So I suggest that the country has begun in this paradox in the idea that freedom depends on unfreedom. And from that, I started to explore the way politics changes in America. And one of the things that we don't focus on, at least in any quantifiable way, is the effect of language on politics. Now we all know that words matter, and certainly since at least the time of Wayne of Buckley Jr. in the 1950s, but really taking off in the 1990s with Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. There was a real emphasis in the Republican Party on the use of language. So you may or may not remember that Newt Gingrich's PAC, Political Action Committee, actually went ahead and produced a number of words that new Republicans were supposed to use when they referred to Democrats. And they were words like socialist and weak and liberal and surrender, sort of negative attributes. And then there was a list of words they were supposed to use when they talked about Republicans, and those were words like champion and, and winning and prosperity. You know, all sorts of very strong positive language. So one of the things about my work in the past has been that I always said I studied the zeitgeist, why the country was a certain way, and how that translated into legislation. But I didn't have the link between how those two things happened. And one of the things that I was trying to do in How the South Won the Civil War was to go ahead and make that link quite explicitly. And what I am arguing in this book actually comes from literary theorists, not from historians primarily. People like Hayden White, people, if you care about this stuff, but people like the more of the most influential figures in this book for me was Eric Hoffer. And who was a longshoreman out of San Francisco in the 1950s who went ahead and thought about how we got the rise of people like Mussolini and Hitler. And of course after World War II that was like a cottage industry. How did we get Hitler? How did we get Mussolini? And he said, who cares? That's not the question. Every generation has would be Mussolini's and Hitler's. The question is how do you develop a population that is willing to follow a Hitler or Mussolini? And what he came up with was a multifaceted view of how politics changes and how language changes politics. And those ideas are played with of course by people like George Orwell and people like Joseph Heller and Catch-22. The idea of the meaning of language and how language can be used. So what I was arguing in how the South won the Civil War was that the way you get from a democracy to an oligarchy is generally about a four step process in America. And that is first of all when they're in the 1850s and then again after World War II a group of powerful people begins to take over the political system. And they are rooted in a certain kind of economy. It's usually an extractive economy which is heavily capitalized. You need a lot of rich people and a lot of poor workers. And what they do is they as they start to take power they begin to pass legislation that hurts a lot of people. Economically in America. The arguments that the people I just talked about apply to other countries. I was focusing only on America. It hurts a lot of people economically and they start to feel economically dispossessed. And increasingly the religion and the society and the novels and the newspapers begin to sort of spin as I used to think of it. Like a tornado almost around the idea that those wealthier people who are making the laws and who are determining how society should function are really the centerpiece of society. They're really the ones at the heart of society. They're the ones who are doing things right. And if you're not part of that group that you're on the outs. And as their situation is the situation of ordinary Americans begins to deteriorate because of that new legislation in for example the 1830s and the 1840s and the American South or after the 1980s in America. What happens is that the people in control begin to tell the ordinary voters who don't like what's going on that the they are in fact having problems but the problems are not the fault of the leaders. The problems are the fault of someone else. And that someone else is people who are trying to become part of the body politic who are asking for equal rights in American society. So in the 1840s or the 1850s that becomes black Americans in the American South or after World War II that becomes first brown Americans and black Americans and of course women. So they start to say yeah you got a problem but the problem is not us the problem is that. And increasingly as those groups of voters turn against those other people they and treat them worse and worse language begins to build that says those people deserve that. You know it's not that you're being bad by saying that the that the Chicanos after the 1960s for example shouldn't vote or that African Americans shouldn't vote after World War II. Or that certain women shouldn't vote feminizes they're called in the present shouldn't vote. The problem is them. They deserve to be treated that way. And once you have gotten to that point it becomes harder and harder for other voices to come into that closed circle. And in the 1850s and again after the 1990s in America those the people who were in charge deliberately silenced the people who were critiquing them. Quite literally in the 1950s in the American South by refusing to let abolitionist newspapers or after 1856 Republican literature or even southern literature that critique the slave system from being circulated in the the region. And of course after the 1990s and after 1987 in America we get the rise of talk radio and after the 1990s we get the Fox News channel. And after the rise of the Internet we get these chat rooms that are bifurcated according to bubble if you will. So you increasingly restrict the voices and then as increasing numbers of people get unhappy with the economic system or with being read out of the system that dominant system. The people in charge are the you know I'm calling them the elite enslavers in the American South in the 1850s. And these are people who are going to be owning more than 25 or more than 50 other human beings. And those would be less than one percent of the population. And in the 1990s and 2000s and 2000 aunts in in America it's going to be the extremely wealthy people running our economy. Increasingly when they get to that position and it's clear that they no longer command a majority of the American people of the voters. Even though they have been turning those turning their voters into very strong voters by telling them to hate those other people. What they do is they cut people out of the vote. They start to suppress the vote in the 1850s. It was literally by not letting people who disagreed with the Democrats in the South vote in the present. Of course we get there first of all by voting restrictions which the Republicans begin to put in place in right before the 2000 election in Florida. Florida is the first state in the country that enacts a voter ID law in immediately before the 2000 election. Obviously it works very well in Florida when more than 100,000 people presumed to be Democrats are kicked off the rolls. And then the 2000 election gives the victory to George W. Bush in Florida by fewer than 400 votes. And those numbers of course have been suspect since that happened because the vote was stopped in progress by of all people Roger Stone. So they begin first of all to cut down who gets to vote. And then after 2010 in the present we get Operation Red Map which went to which was an attempt to redistrict the states in such a way that Democrats simply couldn't win. And that's what happened in places like Wisconsin and Kansas and North Carolina for example. So they increasingly pick who they get to vote. And we're seeing an extreme of that right now in America of course with these laws in 43 states that presumed the proposed laws to go ahead and try and cut more and more people out of the vote. And so what you end up with is this idea from the beginning that everybody should have a say in American society that everybody is equal before the law. But oligarchs as I have called them and as they were called in the 1850s make an effort over time to turn their supporters against the idea of expanding or of hurting the power of the people in charge by going ahead and saying to their voters those people are trying to take something from you because the minute that they get a voice in the body politic soon as women can vote as soon as brown people can vote as soon as black people can vote they are going to vote to take things from you to to hamper your ability to accumulate property. So they are going to hamper your ability to to be free. They're going to hamper your liberty. So what the book tried to do first of all was to set up this paradox and second of all to make this political this linguistic argument about the way that politics works how the language drives American politics. And finally the other thing that it brings to the table in terms of the historical argument is that it treats the American West as a political entity as opposed to being an idea or a colonial entity or an economic entity or even a racial entity it treats it as a political entity to say hey let's take a look at the West and see how people out there were voting. And what I realized early on what is the driving arc of the book is that when the Civil War ends and it looks as if the oligarchs have been put down permanently in the American East that's the very moment when people move across the Pacific into the West in in dominant numbers. And a lot of them come from the South is a brand new book out by somebody else who talks about how they are literally from the South. I didn't talk about that at all. But but I argued that the ideas of the American South move to the West because both the South and the West are based on extractive economies. So you get this idea that a few rich guys should run everything and everybody else should be poor and work for the rich guys. And that's really the dominant mode in the American West. Although we have this image of the West of being the land of the cowboy and the land of the independent person and the land of the free. That's really just an image embodied by the American cowboy that in today that West has always since the Civil War been dominated by a few powerful individuals. It just always has. And that was the most fun of the book was looking at for example the family dynasties in places like Nevada or some of the the long term dynasties in other cities where you know once you stayed in power in those regions once you got into power in those regions it's hard to lose power because it's such a close circle in so many of the Western cities which are really the West people don't think about it this way but the West is our most urban area everything centers around those those poles in the West if you will of the urban areas. So what I found when I looked at the movement of the ideology of the American West the idea that a few people should rule oligarchy in a sense that really was mirrored in the American West because of its own history and that the West and the South actually voted together a lot beginning after 1889 when the Republican Party recognizes that it's got a big problem because the South has become a solidly Democratic part of the country. This is the solid South. It's going to be pretty solid with the exception of Tennessee in 1920 until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 1965 that once the South goes solidly Democratic. The Republicans admit 60 states to the Union between 1889 and 1890 and we get North Dakota and South Dakota and Idaho and Wyoming and Montana and Washington and those states because they are in the West actually have more in common with the South than they do with the East with the Northeast and so quickly the South and the American West especially the Republicans in the American West begin to work together on issues for example of water control because the South's always flooding and it doesn't like that and the West doesn't have enough water so they want to go ahead and pass major legislation to work on the water industry in the West. So we get for example the Newlands Act which Teddy Roosevelt said in the early 20th century was the most important thing he did and that came from the idea of the Westerners who wanted to control the water supply and we're working with the South to get that. But we also get a real pushback on the idea of human equality because in the West where they don't care a huge amount in the early 20th century about the rights of African Americans because without the Great Migration of World War I that hasn't happened yet. They care hugely about the rights of indigenous people and Asians Asian Americans who come to the West and so there the Western Republicans are quite happy to talk about the idea for example of getting rid of the 15th amendment and they literally say you know we're not going to come down on white southerners for suppressing African Americans because we don't want Asian Americans voting. So this is an area in which we can we actually have a lot in common and when we look for example at the failure of anti lynching legislation in the American Congress in the early 20th century we tend to blame the American Democrats in the American South for that but it was actually William Borough of Idaho who was in charge of the Senate Judiciary Committee who killed that panel. So you can see that the idea that of an oligarchy of a place where people all don't enjoy the same rights in America comes from the West and comes from the South and takes root in the West after the American Civil War. So the book did those three things. It established this paradox, it established this idea of language driving politics and it looked at the West as a political entity that worked with the American South to spread the idea of oligarchy and then it took a look at how the weight of the country and the weight of American politics moved West after World War II and the ideas of the American West, those oligarchical ideas of the American West then took over the American nation altogether really beginning first of all with the rise of Barry Goldwater in the 1950s and the 1960s and then with the increasing emphasis on the American West because of the rise of the military industrial complex really out of that region. So from that we of course get this idea of the American West as a place of individualism is cowboy individualism but that individualism was actually rooted in that post war period when the cowboy represents an individual white man which is completely mythological and to succeed in the American West you actually needed kinship networks that were dominated by women but there's this image of the cowboy who is the equivalent if you will of the Yaleman farmer from before the Civil War who is out there in the West trying hard to make it on his own which again is a myth in fact the US government was instrumental in developing settling the US West more than it was in any other region and that cowboy is in represents not only the idea of making it on your own through hard work but also of course that young white man is dominant over indigenous people in the region and the other people the Mexican Americans and occasionally Asian Americans that is in the literature refer the people who are referred to as for example uncivilized or in other negative words. So the that idea of the cowboy comes out of this same argument comes out of reconstruction and becomes the symbol of the rise of the Republican Party today really dramatically of course with a very gold water in as I say the 50s and the 60s but if you think about American television in that time it was characterized by westerns they were there were more than a handful of westerns on TV in the 1950s and we associate that with a sort of American cowboy individualism in the Vietnam war but it was of course a reflection as well on the American polity in the 1950s after the Brown versus Board of Education decision 1954 in which many white southerners looked at that decision which was a unanimous decision by the on the part of the Supreme Court by the way led by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren who had been a Republican governor of California and what they said is no no no this is once again the Republican the federal government overreaching they are crushing white Americans with this decision they're not they don't see that as a way for black Americans to become equal. They see this as a way for the federal government to crush white Americans by using their tax dollars to give benefits to African Americans that white people did not have so the Brown versus Board of Education decision. They literally interpret as a way to crush white people through tax dollars and the year after Brown versus Board of Education we get William F. Buckley starting his national review. Which he said would tell as he said the violated business man's side of the story and that that idea that America really is about individualism and that individualism is restricted to white men with women in the roles that the cowboy image assigned them the roles of being a wife and mother or a sex object become really deeply ingrained in American politics and since the the rise of that kind of new conservatism it was actually called movement conservatism to distinguish it from actual conservatism. It has very different principles and then actual conservatism it was a movement that was designed to overturn the idea that the government had a role in leveling the playing field amongst all Americans. That movement conservatism gains power as I argued in how the South won the Civil War through this language of the idea that yes you're hurting but the hurting is because in this case of African Americans and that's going to expand actually Brown Americans first Mexican Americans then African Americans and then it's going to expand through the 1970s into the present. So I'm going to tell you one more thing about this book but I want to remind you that if you have questions either about the book or anything else about the history of American politics or where we are today go ahead and throw them in the chat if you have access to that and we'll see if we can pick them up. So the other thing that I tried to do in this book was a new experiment in writing and I think those of you who read me elsewhere probably recognize where the modern projects I'm doing come from. And that was that in our new internet heavy world. I think we read very differently than we used to. I know I do in any case. So a friend of mine recommended to me when I was struggling with writing this book I was writing it as a history book which as I write history I always overwrite it. So if I'm planning to produce a 35 page chapter I write 120 page chapter and then I cut. And what that gives you is a very dense kind of argument but it's a very absorbing kind of almost novelistic feel to it. And what my friend told me is he said don't do that. He said nowadays what you need to do when you write and he's a journalist by the way is to go ahead and write very short little pieces that people can read before bed. They should be and I'm really bad about the number of words in in a section but I think in how the south one the Civil War I think they're all about seven pages each which is about all I can manage in bed. So there it is designed if you look at it you will see it is designed to be independent essays so you could read just one of these sections and nothing else. But each independent essay they're for per chapter they all also do hang together and then each one of the chapters of course becomes its own essay and then finally the book itself is again a whole argument of itself. So it's a very different kind of book as I said to somebody I wanted to write it as if I had simply rolled out of bed and said oh here here's something cool. But in fact it was the hardest book I have ever tried to design and I was not at all clear that it would work. In fact I wrote to a friend three times when I turned it into my publisher and each time I said. But Michael is it really a book because it's not the way I never written a book before and he kept saying yes Heather it's a book and I think at this point we can probably all agree that it is actually a book but I had to be convinced of that. So I'm looking here and I am not seeing any questions from and oh here we go. So there is a question here that says so anyway please send me your questions at this point. So the question is the south and the west had large landowners but the north had industrialists who are trying to exploit their employee labor. Most of the immigrants so why didn't that affect the same results. Okay this is a fabulous question and I'm really glad to ask it because people have come into that they felt I underplayed the same sorts of hierarchical ideologies in the industrialists from the 1890s to the 1920s 30s at least in the American north. And I did downplay that only because I cut too much I think at the end of the day from this book I had a whole section on that and I cut it out. And I think the answer to that is that industrialists did pick up this language and you can see this really clearly in Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth for example where he quite literally says that the wealthy in America should be considered the stewards of the nation's wealth. They would use it for things like concert halls and universities and art collections whereas if you gave it to workers they would simply fritter it away on silly things like food and shelter. So they did pick it up but it did not become the dominant way of thinking in the northern there was always significant pushback from this ideology in the north. And I continue to believe that the reason for that is because at the end of the day the northeastern economy and the northern economy was not extractive. There are certainly extractive pieces of it. There were the large industries but it was still possible very possible in the north and in the northeast well into well actually into the present at least into the 1970s for people to go ahead and participate in the economy without working for a large industrialist which was not the case in the American south where you have the rise of the textile industry or in the American west where you have agribusiness, migrant labor. Not to say none of those things existed in the north or in the northeast but there was this not only economic base that was different but also a cultural base. So you could have these novels about farmers in Illinois or something and it would be real. You could actually maintain that those people were the centerpiece of society in a way that nobody had any illusions that there were actually farmers, small farmers in North Dakota for example. Those people faded very quickly with the rise of agribusiness because of the need for irrigation. So I'm thrilled you asked that because I do think there's an answer. Mind you, you could argue with that. What good has come out of these periods of time in our history when our democracy is teetered on the edge of democracy and the edge of oligarchy. So a lot of good about it. So a lot of good has come out. And one of my real complaints about this book is that and I think this is a legitimate complaint and other people do add one of my real complaints about this book is that it's very negative. And I wanted the book to be about the paradox to say, listen, there's some really bad stuff here like America has never been equal. It has never been free. That has always been weaponized. All that is true. But there's this extraordinary hope also in the idea of creating a multicultural democracy that lasts in this country. And there is extraordinary freedom in believing that you can do it on your own. And one of the things that jumps to mind here is when I was a kid, you know, I grew up in a fishing village. And when I was a kid, I was out by the island with a friend who was, they didn't have running water or anything. And he was a fisherman and he was probably not a trajectory that certainly would take him to college or anything. And he said, you know, we don't have a lot of money. But when things get really bad, I come out here and I look at what I do for a living. And I look at this view and I realize that because we don't have any food in the house, we're eating lobster tonight. And I think I'm the luckiest man on earth. And that really hit me because if you look at the statistics of what his life was like, it looks really not so great. He wouldn't have traded it for anything. And there's power in that, I believe. And I wanted that in this book and it isn't there. So, because I cut it, because again, I cut this book too much, I think. But what comes out of these moments when oligarchy starts to rise, not starts to rise, almost takes over, I think, is that we get a recognition of just how much our principles mean to us. That the idea of human self-determination matters. And the idea of equality before the law matters. And I don't mean that in a moral sense, although it certainly is moral to me. I mean it in a political sense with the idea that the minute that we admit the principle that not everybody is going to be treated by the law equally, as soon as we say that's okay, there goes the whole concept of equality before the law and there goes democracy. We're right back to oligarchy. So there's a moment there when we can choose, when we can say, no, we don't like the way things are going. We want to get back to the way things should be. And the moment that I always look to for this is the period immediately after World War II, which is a period of extraordinary questioning and tension and people trying to make America equal. And certainly a lot of people pushing back against that. But there is that recognition, you know, when Superman says to the high schoolers in that famous image, don't ever let anyone tell you that a religion or a race doesn't belong here. That's un-American. That's not who we are. There is that sense that we really could pull this off. And I'm very hopeful now. I'm also terrified now half the time, but half the time I'm really hopeful because right now, I mean, one of the things that's interesting about the end of How the South Won the Civil War is, I tried to end it with, well, you know, we're probably in pretty good shape. I mean, I couldn't tell when I finished this. We're probably in pretty good shape because now people of color and women actually are voting and can vote, and so we're going to keep democracy going. It's almost like I teed up this whole idea of the 43 different states that are trying to get women and African-Americans away from voting, brown people away from voting. That's one of the reasons I'm putting such an emphasis nowadays on HR1 and Senate 1 to protect voting rights. So this is a moment when people, I think, say, wait a minute, this isn't who we, maybe who we are, but it isn't who we want to be. And in the 1860s and in the 1930s, they took America back. So our track record is good. We'll see where we end up this time. How did I get involved in the history of politics?  I did not start in politics at all. My master's is in literature, by the way. I care about power and I care about representation of power. So in America, power is the place where the rubber meets the road is politics. So I actually never intended to study politics and I got involved in it because, as I wrote somewhere else a few nights ago, I was ready to drop out of college. I hated it. I liked learning, but not on their schedule. And I happened on to the story of a bunch of normal people in Maine who had just gone about their lives and somehow at the end of the day, they ended up becoming instrumental in the Civil War and changing the course of American history. And that fascinated me. I love those stories of sort of ordinary people who come out of nowhere, not because they're like, I'm going to be a mighty mouse and take things on right now, but because somehow the world puts them in a certain place at a certain time and they make the right decisions. So I ended up getting involved in politics only because it's also about power. And I think the study of power is endlessly fascinating, not least because I have never wanted any. So it's easy for me to be attached from that, but it's almost like watching a play. The failure, somebody has asked, can I talk about the success and failure of education, civics and history and media in exploring and solving these issues? That is of course a huge, huge, huge topic. And let me start by saying one of the things in both of these issues, both these time periods I'm talking about, one of the first things that happens is an attempt to stop education, to make sure people are not educated. Because the minute you teach people to think critically, the minute it's very, very hard to lie to them. And so the corollary to that is that, you know, if you think about it, and certainly Abraham Lincoln did, democracy is a problem. And I would say this to my students, not in so many words, but the idea is great. Now let's think about, do you really want everybody to vote? And students usually are like, yeah, sure. And I'm like, yeah, what about the fact that, you know, there's not the university I'm at now, but a different university. I'm like, two thirds of the people are supposed to be in this class don't show up. Do you want them to have them say on their final, on what the final is? And I'm like, hey, wait a minute. Yeah, maybe people need to participate. And once you start, you know, what about four year olds? Four year olds vote? You know, there are real questions about how democracy works. And so what's the answer to that?  Well, you could do, if I think those decisions are dumb, I could go ahead and say, well, we're just trying to let those people vote because they're going to make dumb decisions. And that's where we are right now, by the way, with these voter suppression bills that are in these 43 different states. And that's certainly where we were in the 1890s, not only with regard to black voting, but also with regard to immigrant voting. And it's a very common theme. But once again, once you've done that, you just got rid of democracy. So how do you reconcile these two things? And what Abraham Lincoln and the people of his time talked about and what Republicans have talked about until the 1980s, and certainly Democrats have as well, less so until after the 1960s, but they've always been interested in education, is education. You know, we must put money toward education. And one of the things that happened in the 1960s and the 1970s and then fed into the 1980s, first of all, we get desegregation creating private academies, especially in the American South. And they are, they're private schools. They're not public schools. And that breaks down the idea of civic identity and of a body politic. But at the same time, something else crucial happened that we don't talk about nearly enough. And that's that when women started entering the workforce in large numbers out of necessity or out of desire. In the 1960s and the 1970s, they sucked out of the American economy and the American system a huge amount of incredibly qualified, incredibly smart, incredibly valuable volunteer labor. And when that happened, the pressure on the schools and on some other institutions as well got very, very high. But Americans never wanted to pay for what they had been getting for free. So we've got this real beginning in the 1970s and then into 1980s. We've got this real disjunction between how much money we are putting in the schools and how much we are asking them to do. And that's one of the things, and I'm obviously not talking about the political imperatives of changing what's happening in the schools because I think this particular format is better for large questions. But if I could raise a wave of magic wand, I would be pouring money into the public schools and urging people to go to them. I am a huge fan of our public institutions, especially our public schools, where teachers do just an amazing job. All right, so that's not a lot on that, but let's go ahead. And now there's a ton of questions, and we're almost out of time. How do I counter arguments that say the historical past is not relevant to today's politics? I don't bother. Anybody who says something like that, what's the point? So what historians do is that the past does not echo. The past does not repeat itself as a better way to put it at all because we're all individual snowflakes. But what does happen is that what historians do is we study how things change. That's our job description. We look at how societies change. And in order to see how societies change, we need to examine the facts on the ground, and we need to see how things change. And what we do is we make arguments about how things happen. And unless you understand those arguments, you look at change in America today or in a society today, and you have no context. You have no way of saying, oh yeah, things change because of the fact that we're not going to change. We're going to change the world. We're going to change the world. We're going to change the world. We're going to change the world. We're going to change the world. So we're saying, oh yeah, things change because of the rise of women working outside the home or because of social movements or because of a charismatic figure. You have to, it's like saying that you can't, you can't apply math to figure out how many bushels you've got out of these three barrels because math isn't in the present. I mean, that's what we do.  I'm going to speak here for a second to the moderator. Doug, I assume you're going to tell me when you would like me to roll this up. I'm going to go backward now from here in case he does tell me I need to wrap up here. Does my book discuss the role of the lost cause mythology? Yes, in winning the narrative of the Civil War. And what it does is it takes a look at how the lost cause mythology actually builds off of the image of the American cowboy in the 1880s and the 1890s, which is when all those statues go off, of course, and how that feeds into the literature of the time as well. Because what those statues do, tend to do, is they tend to emphasize the idea that the American South, when it fought for the Confederate States of America, was not designing, was not trying to protect slavery, which is ridiculous. That's exactly what it was doing. Look at any of the declarations of causes which are, oh, I don't know, at the National Archives and in our records administration and in places like that. It looked at those, if you look at those, you can see it's all about slavery. But what happens is in the 1880s and the 1890s, the South rewrites what the war was about and starts to say that actually, and it actually begins its rewriting in 1865, and that's in the book too, but the statues and things and the lost cause go up in that 1880, 1890 era. Because what they're saying is that the Confederate soldiers, the lone Confederate soldier, was standing for an individual who was fighting against a large government that was going to take what was his, and here he was standing, making a final last stand, and he kept that vision alive for the Northerners who had this moment of craziness where they wanted to use the federal government to create equality. So I talk a lot about that and about the movies that rose at the same time as well, who are lionizing that right up through the 1930s, right up through 1939. So I've been told to take one more last question and a quickie. Yes, I did an audiobook version and it's good. I had a great producer do that book. So yes, there's an audiobook and let me see. It's something easy here. So a great one here. How do I feel reconstruction impacted the future of civil rights? Could it have been handled differently if it had not been abandoned? So this is the story closest to my heart, and I'm going to finish with this because I think that our history since the Civil War has never left reconstruction. I'm not going to argue about when reconstruction ended. You can come up with a lot of different end dates for it, but that the patterns that we laid down in reconstruction, we are still living with today, literally. And what I mean by that is in the book, but let me just lay it out here, is the idea that during the Civil War, there's a number of things that happened. But one of the things that happens is the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln goes ahead and creates a new expansive federal government that has never existed before, and it finances that in part through the creation of our first national taxes, including an income tax. At the same time, of course, it admits a new body of people into the body politic, and that's going to be African-American men. So coming out of the Civil War, especially out of the 15th Amendment in 1870, we get the linkage of the idea that African-American, that is previously unequal people, are going to have a vote. They're going to be able to say what the government does, gives them a direct influence on other people's money. And as early as 1871, the idea of black voting becomes associated in the American South with the idea, and I am not making this up, of socialism. Americans begin to start to talk about socialism in 1871. The Bolshevik Revolution, of course, is going to be 1917, but they are talking about socialism. And of course, it doesn't mean anything what it's going to mean after 1917, but we get the idea that having previously unequal voices of black people, brown people, women in the body politic will create socialism. That is, they will vote for programs that are going to cost tax dollars that are going to have to be paid for by white people with property. We get that idea in 1871. And one of the places, it's a great place to end because one of the places this book started was the fact that when you read some speeches from the 1850s by people like James Henry Hammond, for example, a senator from South Carolina, his program for America sounds almost exactly like that of Barry Goldwater's ghost written, it was written by Elbrent Vazel, whose brother-in-law to William F. Buckley Jr., Elbrent Vazel is the conscience of a conservative. It's the same language. And that idea that somehow we need to cut people out of the vote now because they're going to vote for socialism, that is absolutely out of reconstruction, absolutely out of reconstruction. What could have been done differently? We could have been more careful about our media, among other things, which is one of the things that drives Americans backing, northerners backing away from the idea of guaranteeing a level playing field. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and thank you for being here and to wrap it up and hope that this was interesting for you. And with luck, there'll be another different book to be talking about in a few years. Thanks for being here.