India provides has a written form. It is an oral culture. It's always been an oral culture even now as print literacy has improved and it's around about I don't know 70% it is still in the ways that it uses media technologies it is still an oral culture so digital media and apps and people nodding that that's what it is. In the 70s the king decreed that Zonka only naturally spoken by half the country. Zonka would become the national language. It's part of unifying the country that everybody learned Zonka and that everybody learns English because it's international language. So both languages are an ongoing project in the country which is the context for my project. So this is the project. Number one to influence how Bhutan is represented on English Wikipedia because some of it's good some of it's excellent and some of it is cringe worthy because references used are lonely planet rather than the you know the written material out of Bhutan rather than the local experience because you know to go to Bhutan you go for a holiday you're there you're there for a week that's the access that you can have as an outsider that's why lonely planet reads like it does but when that's the reference for the Wikipedia pages it's a problem. So influence to influence how Bhutan is represented on English Wikipedia means Bhutanese need to engage step up you know know how to and represent Bhutan themselves on English Wikipedia. Once that's stage one of the project once that's completed and Bhutanese understand the logics the referencing all of the rules and why they're there the traditions all of how Wikipedia has a bowl then Zonka Wikipedia is there and is ready to for them to take charge and the third one is that they should be part of the global movement. So I have a couple of I have a whole host of research partners but the ones I want to point out is University of Bhutan who are embraced this project they see they understand the potential the Wikipedia has for their citizens so they're very keen. The other one is the Bhutan advisory committee so it's not appropriate for me to come into the country and here Wikipedia. So I have a series of various civil leaders who have all agreed to be this advisory panel that will constantly check what we're doing and how it's working. My research friends the Wikimedia community Australia has already stepped up. India have been in contact with various members over different times and as the project develops I'll be calling on you more. The Wikimedia Foundation has already funded one round of me doing the pilot and that pilot then led to me getting funding from the Australian government to do a 3D project for doing this. That's where we're up to. English Wikipedia was started and I haven't got it in front of me now but some years ago as part of a particularly near where there was a drive to bring new communities in and a Canadian man who'd spent many years in Nepal and was currently in Bhutan and who can do Zonka created Zonka for Linux and is who was hired by the Zonka Development Commission. He is a Wikimedia so he helped create Zonka Wikipedia and he did all these initial stubs and it's gone nowhere and in the last year no visits except me to check who knows. So the possibilities as I have pitched it to the Bhutanese communities is education you know you will understand immediately why education is just fabulous. Tourism and they do have lots of fantastic for teaching historical documents that would tell the some of the history of the Himalayas in general beyond their own borders. They're an important part of the whole Himalayan story over history so all of that's good. The possibilities for Zonka Wikipedia are where I get really excited as a researcher. So because it's a national project for everybody to learn Zonka there's just so many opportunities. What's that? Is it made top running at a time? No. It's a site of inclusion for all Bhutanese languages. Now the fact that all the others are oral without a written form shouldn't mean they can't be included on the Zonka site. The ways that Bhutanese use digital media show that they think literally they do it in new ways and that's what I'm excited about how they might use the audio and video affordances of the platform to actually be representative of their other languages. So the example that I give is there's a fabulous place called Mbazolay. It's on the tourist charts and English Wikipedia. Yep, you can get all the information on there. But on Zonka Wikipedia, they could record and upload oral interviews in different languages for that area. And that can sit alongside whatever it is that comes up on Zonka. So because that's the creative innovative and I look forward to seeing how that unfolds. So this was the first pilot and I wanted to present it in a year back and understand what the concerns were, where it landed. I had a group of Zonka newspaper editors and I did a training session with them in Tim Poole. And that was in 2019. And it was just fabulous. They were so engaged, so into it.  And they were horrified once they actually looked at some Wikipedia pages about Bhutan and realised, but that's terrible. So COVID hit. My project was due to start March 2020. So I went back to teaching, didn't take the time off to do the, take the research leave. And instead I pivoted. So there is an outside Bhutan, Australia has the highest population of Bhutanese. It's a weird quirk of we have a really strong and weird connection. It's about 15,000 Bhutanese living in Australia now. Most of them, about 12,000 of them are in Perth and about 3,000 are in Canberra. And the rest are sort of dotted around. And they're mostly here for study, for tertiary study. They bring their families. So I pivoted it to the Bhutanese community. And this is this year, starting some in the Australian community, turning up beautifully to help. It was a modest success. I'm not sure. Yes, well, let's just hope that improves. So that was the starting point. So what I'm hoping to do now is go back next year. In 2023, I'm going to go in around March and re-engage with that advisory committee. And with the various groups of knowledge holders that the Royal University of Bhutan and I had identified. And that includes retired civil servants, editors, schoolteachers, monks. And I forget the other ones. We had six. Anyway, and to create these editing circles with those knowledge holders. And that will be that that's how we're going to do it. Now that I have managed to engage some in Australia, then there will be a hopefully a cohort that can connect virtually. And that's the plan. So that's Bhutan. The second project I want to tell you about, because this one I really need help with. So in 2019, just before COVID hit, I went with a group of Australian University of Sydney researchers. There was something like 60 of us. And we went around India with the idea being we were to make collaborations. And all part of encouraging better, better collaborations between Indian universities and Australian ones. And at TIS, Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, we had we did it under this umbrella of anthropomorphic change. How can you help? So there was a room full of 50 researchers from University of Sydney, from medicine, architecture, me from, you know, media and comms, right across the board that there were law. Anyway, geography, and the same, the people who are interested from TIS stepped up. And we did this mad speed dating, where we ended up with all these key words, you had to go to a corner, where your key word was, or group of key words. And out of that, I sat with six people. And the two TIS professors were gerontologists, which is all about active aging. And that so we had to come up with a theoretical project that combined all our research interests. And this is what we came up with. So it's, naturally, I came up with what we're competing, we can train old people on Wikipedia, brilliant. And they started to get excited how would that work. And then we got into the internet. We had to stretch it and whatever to fit the anthropogenic migration, but we managed to, I'll just speak of those groups, all that funding kind of language. So that's a next week, I'm going to win here for the first meetings with our whole team, because we're actually now going to do this. And we're going to do this with a cohort in Mumbai, of Tamil diaspora, and a community of the Tamil diaspora in Sydney. And we're going to train both labs. We're going to, you know, intergenerational transfer of knowledge is what my TIS professors are excited about. In Australia, it's actually been really easy to find Tamil Wikipedia editors. I've had more trouble in Mumbai. So that that's the next step in why I would like to help. So in the last session, what will we sort of, you know, in five years, I would love to see people here that are part of a really healthy Bhutanese chapter. And to be able to report back that the Tamil seniors is a fantastic project that was a huge success. We have funding from the University of Sydney to do the first to do this, to get this far. And then I'll be coming to the Wikimedia Foundation for funding to actually do the project. And it will then, you know, hopefully form a paper and a case study of how we could do it. Okay, thank you. Let's get right up to the question. Because we will give it to the floor. If you have any questions to Dr. Wendy, please press your hand. Yes, sir. All that. I'm going to microphone to you. You're meant to introduce your name. The computer is your final introduction. I work for the Wikimedia Foundation and I live in India. And but here I have had a couple of conversations about this. So it's not a question. It's just, I think it's, it's wonderful to see in a way like a cross regional collaboration, you know, whether we have easier from our perspective that we have some as well, which is also something that we're looking at from how do we make different regional communities work with each other. And if this would be kind of like, I don't know, like an example of that, build on further from it, because you see, technically, it's a straight and Sudan, it's South Asia, and ECM, you know, we're from our regionalization perspective. And I think it's amazing. So of course, we will continue to offer any help possible, hopefully find some time and independence in more place. But I just want to say it's amazing what you're doing. If you really do need a, you do want to build a community in Sudan, that's one of the things that goes forward. It was very, sort of an attribution, but I think Can I just say that there are editors in Bhutan, and they're all working sort of disparately and I've contacted various and so it's sort of all there. And there is a Bhutan Wiki project page that started years ago long before me. And there's all sorts of somebody's done so much for probably the guy who did the set up Zonka. There's lists, there's a whole, it's just waiting to kind of get chipping forward. Thank you so much. Let's give another round of applause to Dr. Nguyen. Now, we're discussing a very interesting project in the database related to the US Pointless, along with the impact for queer and Joyce, we are going to discuss about the data and independent art space in Taiwan. So here is Kani's media admin from contemporary art theory, master researchers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We do need a time to talk about the national reference. Don't use that. Time based media are conservative and research. So without further ado, the standard choice. Hello. I'm Confuyang, this is Joe. Yes. I'm going to use Chinese to speak. The English part is on the BPD, so don't worry. BPD is all, it's all okay. Everybody knows my English is very bad. right not very very bad so I use Chinese yeah okay you go back to today but the chine year Uh, in 2002 and then we we we went back to the committee and made a burnout at the emergency and then we did this plan and then this is the new new artificial space then our plans of course can be divided into 3 first we are on vc on the inside to enter the art team and then the information on the art team is to be an artist and then gradually expand to other different types of materials, such as documents, books, works, exhibitions, etc. For example, you can see artists, works, or artists and publishing things, his book of paper, right? Linking data, okay. Okay, the second goal of the project is Wikidata Taiwan Society. We hope to get the opportunity to get the technology of Wikibass. What is Wikibass? To ask the German people. After we actually get the technology, we hope to give this technology to other professional users. Then you can see the picture. It is the project of Wikimacy. And we link it to Wikidata. And Wikidata to Wikibass. I won't say the English word for Wikibass. Then Wikibass link to Linking Open Data Web. Fuck. Okay, right. It's Linking, Linking, Linking, Linking. And I have said, this is a future. Then there is the first and second goal. We hope through this Linking Open Data technology, we can let Wikibass, Wikidata in Taiwan's art circle, just get in, just get into the art circle, and then be able to get into the discussion of the art field and its ecological changes. So what? Linking to the art circle. Okay, but then, that Linking Data, Wikidata to, Linking Open Data to Museum, blah blah blah, Glend. Okay? Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay, then the results we have so far can be divided into three. First of all, we have seen 4,500 pieces of information. 4,500 pieces of data. These are all based on the data of the artist. Including the data of the artist, his birthplace, his education, or his personal relationship. Then we think that if we do this, we can provide a basic study of the art field. Then this is, you know, Wikidata page, on piece, Wang Junjie, he's my teacher's friend. Teacher's friend. Not my teacher. Okay, then in the Wikidata part, we also chose a few Taiwanese magazines. Art magazine, and then the number of entries, for more than ten years, the document, and then, you can imagine, is to put on piece and page Linking, you can, you can do the search, research, right?   Don't talk about this on the stage. Oh, so this, you know, Wikidata page for on piece, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, okay. Then the second part, we are also in the Wikidata part of Wikidata, our Wikidata community has really got to Wikidata's technology. Then after that, we hope to be able to discuss how to enter the content of Wikidata, and then, at the same time, to fight this part, to discuss, to think. Then the third part of the plan, which is also in the part of the plan, we hope to be with Ryan, with the library, with the library, to learn more about their experience, and then use these experiences to promote the changes in the Taiwan art circle, and then, that's it, change, some change. Oh, this is, Rhino on base is, it is based on Wikidata's data pool. Then in the part of the plan, this part is more serious, more serious to talk about. Okay. Oh, okay. Okay, okay. Okay. Oh, just like that, I'm here to talk about Wikidata's theory. Different people in the field, everyone knows, everyone in the field is independent, but their nose is connected to each other. Then I think in Wikidata's work, we can share three areas. The first one is the plan, the second one is the community, the third one is the relevant one. First of all, I want to mention the part of the project plan. When Wikidata plans, it mainly focuses on the content, the content development, for example, it focuses on the information, data, or various media, etc. Then this is the main goal of our work in the past. But there is a problem that we found in this plan is that if we only pursue the development of a Wikidata project, for some of the relevant people, it is not the main goal. Then, because these interests are not necessarily taking care of these things, but it is the main goal. Then if we keep strengthening the content development, it will limit our influence. Then the second part is about the community. I think the community is mainly thinking about the development of its content. Then, then I also mentioned some basic technical capabilities, like Wikidata, Wikidata's software editing capabilities, etc. Then in the past, we often put the content development of the Wikidata project and the community's brave development together. But in some of the projects, like the Wikidata project, or some very professional or professional activities, we can see that for the community, there are many people with different aspects, and then for these different professional people, to provide services, the courage to develop the community is more important. Then finally, in the first part of the relationship, I think this is the most serious, and it is also Asia, Asia, the biggest problem is that we have a lot of different situations with the European and American regions. For example, a lot of units are not willing to open up these projects. Then the workhorse in our process will affect our work, willing to invest in these projects or these editing directly, etc. Then in the case of the social security, in the case of the Asian and American media movement, it may be more directly involved to affect the relationship. That's right. OK. Then Xiao Jie The three people who are involved in the Wikidata project are all different, but it doesn't mean that we have to have a common opinion, whether it is the opinion of the person who is involved or the part of the content of the project both of them are not good. So what should we do? I don't know. Oh, no. What should we do? Maybe we can try to ask ourselves what is the future of the 15 years that we want to be together? The future is not just our Wikidata media movement, it is the future of all of you including the whole future of the so-called world. Then our relationship with Wikidata is very clear. Our purpose and purpose of thinking habits are different. But we still have a way to link it. So we are going to finish our work. We are going to open one question for the person who is going to hand it. Yes. What's wrong? Do you want to challenge me? No, I won't. Can you just please say that? And what other aspects do you have? I will ask you three questions. You have the biggest challenge in the evolution. And then you have established which partner relationship and then what kind of relationship is between these partner relationships. Challenge. Challenge. Challenge. No challenge. Challenge. Or all the challenges. No, equal say. Equal say. Can you say it? So he's concerning about is it okay to speak up here? Lyndon, watch out.  Mainly an artistic party. Then the biggest problem is like I mentioned earlier, different western countries different western media museum and museum already have complete information. Then their classic or the fund will teach us that the system has the most or a common future to open these materials or to send them out. But for our Taiwanese artists there are a lot of their materials are actually not complete or not complete. So that means they have to do the information they have to do through the materials. Yes. But the materials must be spent on time and money. Then they will not want to develop. This is a the biggest problem. So because this project is mainly focused on our archive, our data, but by learning from like western contexts which were mostly introduced from all the beginning of movement, it is not really workable in our compact. It's because most of the museum in Taiwan that like people who hold those are data, their data are not complete. And usually a lot don't have a lot of need to do a lot of ad for before it turns into a data. And that also costs take longer time to be open. And my my own personal opinion is because I also work in the museum before. And those those data are mostly not in public domain. And cleaning up data also not with my archive for most museum and glam workers. So it's kind of like stop stop it there. And so for him who complete doing the data cleaning and looking and we we found it quite easily to get all these data that we can get right now. But it doesn't mean that we get everything done. It's only being sad. There is only very few a lot of that for us available to put into the data. And there are still a lot of other other data need to we have to wait for them to clean up digitized and then we can do that. Eugene? Maybe we can save it for yeah in the end of the sessions before we have time. Yeah. We can do that. Yeah. And let's give a round of applause to once we get to the finish and then we can go to the end. Thanks. We will be taking quite a little bit for you to come over to the stage. See the director of the analysis and policy of circuitry or a load and all of that access evidence platform for public policy and practice. I look at the professor who did already work in the government and I think he's I've had him here since back in the day about public access to public evidence based policy without any for the study tour. Thank you. Thank you. I just want to quickly personally acknowledge that we are on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. Let me see. Well, okay, cool. I've got two computers. I'm going to talk about the Wikimedia Alliance Fund project we started a few months ago and in particular how I've gone about engaging with the Wikimedia community to date and how we can do more of that as the project progresses. This is a bit of context on new to the Wikimedia community. So this has been really eye-opening and positive experience. So just a little bit about the analysis and policy observatory. APO was established 20 years ago by academics at Swingburne University based in Melbourne. That was in 2002 one year after Wikipedia was found good. APO is Australia and New Zealand's largest open access repository of policy and research reports and other material published by organisations. This is also known as Grey Literature. Because Grey Literature is not published by professional publishers it is scattered across the internet. So at APO we source this content and we create metadata for it so that it's discoverable and searchable on our open access repository as well as across the internet on internet search engines. APO also plays an important role in disseminating policy and research. We've got 15,000 newsletter subscribers across Australia and New Zealand and we don't have a guaranteed source of funding so we raise income from a range of products and services. We have a full-time editor who sources and catalogs content and we have more than 39,000 resources. In addition to this anyone can sign up for a free APO account and add published material to APO. This is moderated by our editors and it has to meet our content policy. So APO's vision is that society is improved through evidence-based decision making because there is open access to policy and research and so our mission is to make policy and research as accessible as possible. So APO does play a central role in Australia, New Zealand's free knowledge ecosystem. So thanks for commanding for these slides. So here are just some examples of the types of reports we have on APO. So you can see here we have major international non-government and quasi-government organisations such as the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations, the OECD and we also have reports from universities, research institutes, government departments and agencies, community groups and advocacy organisations as well. I know that some feedback I've got from the WIC community is not to solve advocacy organisations but that gets a bit tricky because advocacy organisations are realising more and more that to put a good case forwards they need to engage with and commission rigorous research and get academics to produce research to help their work as well. So our project being funded through the Alliance Fund is called the Missing Link Incorporating Policy Reports into the free knowledge ecosystem and the aim is to improve the presence of valuable policy and research material and coverage of important policy issues in Wicca media. Policy reports and material published by organisations is not a common type of publication both in Wikipedia at the moment the most common type of sources the new media websites and commercially published material such as books and journal articles but there are three reasons I think material published by organisations that aren't commercial publishers is a useful source of information for Wikipedia. The first is currency so while news media contains the latest and most up to date information it often doesn't present in-depth research or policy on a particular issue and while books and journals do fill this gap the time taken to publish this leads to a loss of currency it takes a lot of time. The second is accessibility so the other issue with the reliance on academic sources is that they are often written for an academic audience whereas material published by organisations is usually written for the general public and it often is a great source of academic work so academics when they want to reach a wider audience will publish their own material and finally small organisations such as those that are First Nations led or from the Pacific and the other unrepresented communities are more likely to publish their own material rather than through commercial means. So what we're aiming to do in this project is the first step is using APO's database to verify the most reputable and notable publishing organisations and sources beating APO report metadata into wiki data and then the next step will be then to have an editor phone on a public policy issue to try and use those sources in wiki data. Okay so the first step in this project was to determine of the publishing organisations we have on APO which ones can be considered reliable so that we can upload their report metadata to wiki data. So the most obvious place we went to was the reliable sources notice board where discussion takes place on whether a publication is reliable. However we faced a bit of resistance from the community on the notice board in getting an assessment on whether an organisation could be considered as a reliable source this is because this decision is often the result of assessments of many articles that have been sourced in Wikipedia so that was fair enough. So from there we were directed to the village pump and wiki project called source metadata where we asked for some more advice on how we were going to determine what a reliable source was. Throughout this process we uncovered and keep uncovering various guidelines on the subject of reliability and sometimes they don't always match up for our consistent and always prevent it in a slightly different way. So when we're engaging me in these forums I didn't get as many answers as I was expecting. In fact I just got a lot of information and you can't do that but I was able to send that information and turn it into an approach that we could use. So overall my experience was collaborative and I received some positive feedback and as someone who is very passionate about evidence-based decision making I was very happy to receive this little piece of feedback here which someone said user<PHONE_NUMBER> you can hear thank you and they said your candle and willingness to apply fact-based principles is refreshing so I thought that's really good. Well okay so when I presented yesterday I received some useful feedback and interesting viewpoints about whether I should upload everything from ideal wiki data and some people were saying you should just put it all onto wiki data everything you've got on IPO but I've also over the last two days heard some stories of where there has been use of unreliable sources which have been really difficult to manage and to stop as well so at this stage I think it's important to do a bit of filtering and see how we go first up so by being selective I think we will support the use of reliable sources as well as make the life of editors will be easier as well for their work so our approach would be to select reports that could be given the no consensus rating that's used on reliable sources not as board so it would be reliable depending on the context and an in-text attribution will be required so our first step is that we're going to select a number of publishing organisations across Australia and New Zealand that we have on IPO and we'll be excluding advocacy organisations at this stage because that's a clear direction we've got and the second step is then to select make sure that the reports of those publishing organisations could be considered reliable so we'll be focusing on policy statements and reports that are based on research just so that we're excluding those opinion-based articles and reports so the most important project is encouraging the use of these new reports that will be in Wikidata and so we have proposed to conduct an editor's phone but I'm really interested in exploring other ways we can support editors to use these sources in Wikidata to create new content on public policy issues for Australia and New Zealand one idea I had was to curate a thoughts or bibliographic list on a particular issue so we say these are all the sources we're having with Wikidata on homelessness and so then when someone wants to go and create or edit content on homelessness they'll have the sources there in easy reach so that was just one idea and Toby Hudson who was here also suggested that maybe we could have separate to this project have a button on APO on every report on APO that would enable you just to click a Wikibutter which enable you to source that material on Wikipedia so I'm looking about any other ideas you may have so I'll just end by saying I hope this is the beginning of a very beautiful relationship between Wikimedia and APO within the free knowledge ecosystem and we hope that this one is going to be very useful Unfortunately, due to a constant of time we need to end this sentence but don't worry after this we have another sentence and allow me to hear a couple of appreciation for our speakers today from the community so I would like to play all the speakers from Let's give a big round of applause to all the speakers today


Community Financial Lyrice is a non-profit organization which was founded back in 2008 just with the goal of empowering immigrants and refugees with financial education for a better future. We tried to provide financial training so that people can be able to learn a new system as they move in this country from a different part of the world. Today we have a workshop. We are teaching a course called Savings to Build Wealth. So we have two series of classes and this is the second class which we teach just the principles of savings after people have learned how to budget and plan. So we take them to another level to learn how to save and understand the importance of savings. Why it's so important and what they have to do to be able to save money. As long as you have to deal with money, you really need this class because it doesn't only talk about what people think but it talks about things like budgeting, how to set financial goals, how you can establish credit or how you can fix credit for people who have been here for a long time making just few mistakes can damage your credit, how you can fix that, like myself after being here nine years I didn't know how to order my credit report I didn't know how to read my credit report but after being in the class I was able to do that and that's why we are teaching them. We are teaching these are tools that everybody needs in their life in order for them to emerge. The American financial system is completely different because we never learned how to do credit. We never understand anything about credit score. So we rarely used the credit cards, it's a little bit different story. So for us to be here in this country and be able to build a better credit to be able to utilize the system is to be able not to use cash but to live like the American dreams which is we need to learn how to set some financial goals, be able to buy assets if you can afford it with a good credit lower our interest rate. So all these systems were now functioning in some of the countries where most of our refugees and immigrants come from. The instruction we get here help us more to know what does it mean living in our state. The university is like moral personality and dealing with someone in institution we have to know him. The class help me to respect in our state and to call in our state to respect me. That's the conclusion I can get. Community financial literacy provide classes to all refugees regardless of where they came from because whether you came from Europe, whether you come from Asia or Africa most of these students still face the challenges of learning how this new system works. We have had all kind range of students from Iraq, from Iran, from Sudan, from Congo, from Somali, from Djibouti so all kind of students anybody who is a refugee really can find this program very helpful to them. Coming from different countries, coming from different financial systems it's very hard to adjust but once they start practicing they understand what we are teaching them and it gets easier over time after they practice. Some people who have been here longer may just assume that they understand the financial system. It's so complex. Even Americans were born here are still struggling to understand these terminologies of financial education programs. The first time I took Claude's class was in 2009 after being in the United States for nine years and I thought I knew but I didn't know so when I took this class in 2009 it really changed my life because I was able to correct some of the mistakes I was making financially. We provide also financial counseling so folks who may be home don't have time to attend the class they can still come to the office which is located at 309 Cumberland Avenue they can come and learn on their own time. Our website is www.cflmain.org and our office is located at 309 Cumberland Avenue, Poland Main and we are open Monday through Friday from 9 to 5.30. Our office number is<PHONE_NUMBER> It's so helpful to see how people, some of them really can learn this and be able to utilize that so quickly without any problem be able to save a couple thousand dollars within a year.


As full reigns set in, most streets in Maccardi, the Benway State Capitol, are in a dilapidated state. Some residents of the affected areas are worried that if Governor I, Senator Lear, does not act fast, many parts of the town will be caught out from the center city. And whenever it rains, major streets and roads in the state capital become debt traps for motorists. Apart from the flooding, some streets are now debt traps due to total neglect or substandard construction in the past. The residents are however hopeful that the Governor will give the state's capital a facelift. Earlier, the Governor, Alia Tukatou, of some major part of Maccardi with some contractors with a view of looking into the conditions of some of the roads and streets. If you come to Maccardi, the few streets that are tied, there are already points. I don't know what the government is doing because Maccardi has a metropolitan city in Benway State. You need to have standard roads that even the road contrasted in Maccardi don't have standards. I think that's why when it comes to rainy season, water will spoil everything because Maccardi is in the valley. So if you have been in a road where it is a valley, then you should know the standard you are giving to the roads. The government has neglected the local roads, especially the cedar roads in Maccardi. And when you see that during rainy season, you will find it very difficult even to move from another part of Malibu to other states because if you see the condition of roads, they are very deporable. It's very, very bad. But when it rains, you will not be able to at least look to some places because of the part question of some of the roads. But I believe the government of Pasantaria and in collaboration with the government of Malibu will set everything in order and Benway State to look as if it's a state capital.


Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington D.C. which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Neil Thompson about his new book, The First Kennedys, which tells the story of Patrick and Bridget who left Ireland following the Great Famine and launched the Kennedy Dynasty in America. Before we begin I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up this month on our YouTube channel. On Monday March 7th at 1 p.m. Megan Kate Nelson will discuss her new book, Saving Yellowstone, which gives the fascinating and complex historical context behind the National Park's establishment 150 years ago this month. And on Tuesday March 8th at 1 p.m. Mary Sarah Bilder will speak on her recent book, Female Genius. Bilder introduces us to Eliza Harriet Barron's O'Connor, a path-breaking female educator in the 1780s. She argued that women had equal capacity and deserved an equal education and political representation and her University of Pennsylvania lecture was attended by George Washington. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the first United States president to address the Irish Parliament when he visited that country in June 1963. He declared that no country contributed more to building my own than your sons and daughters. They came to our shores in a mixture of hope and agony and I would not underrate the difficulties of their course once they arrived in the United States. 115 years before this historic visit President Kennedy's own great-grandparents had left Ireland for America in hopes of a better life. They endured hardships in Boston, their new home, but established a place for themselves and their children. Their oldest son Patrick Joseph became the first American Kennedy elector to public office and set the family on a path culminating in the presidency. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, part of the National Archives, holds numerous records of the Kennedy family, including the personal papers of Patrick J. Kennedy, JFK's grandfather. Our guest author today, Neil Thompson, made extensive use of these recently open papers and other documentary resources in the library. We all look forward to hearing the story of the Kennedy family that he has put together. Neil Thompson is the author of five highly acclaimed books, including A Curious Man, Driving with the Devil, and Kick Flip Boys. A former newspaper reporter, he has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and The Wall Street Journal. Joining the author in conversation is Neil Bascombe, a national award-winning and New York Times best-selling author of a number of books focused on inspiring stories of adventure and achievement. His work has been translated into 15 languages featured in several documentaries and optioned for major film and television projects. Now let's hear from Neil Thompson and Neil Bascombe. Thank you for joining us today. Wonderful. Well, I'm here, Neil Bascombe here, to speak with Neil Thompson, the two Niels this evening, this afternoon, about Neil's new book, The First Kennedys. And, Neil, I just want to sort of start off this conversation. I do want it to be as much a conversation as we can make it. Just to give viewers an overview or describe a little launching pad for this conversation. Yeah, thanks, Neil. Thanks for being here and for doing this. Thank you, David, for the generous introduction. I'm really excited to talk about this book with the National Archives and your viewers. And it's just an honor. The book just came out last week, so it's been fun to get out in the world and talk to folks like you and tell you a little bit more about the book and where it came from. And we'll get into some of the details of what's in it. But, Neil, to your question, sort of how did things begin? The book, for me, actually goes back more than 20 years. My first kind of introduction to the idea that I wanted to write about The Kennedys at all goes back to 1999, when I was a newspaper reporter working for the Baltimore Sun and was sent up to Hyannisport to cover the disappearance and then subsequent death we learned of JFK Jr. It was that summer of 1999. I was part of the sort of hordes of reporters stalking that town and hanging outside the Kennedy compound there and came away from that experience sort of awed by our ongoing passion for and love for the Kennedy family in general. There was so much heartache after John Jr. died. When they found his body, I was actually at a bar interviewing the bartender who'd given me a Jameson, so I'm sipping my Jamesons and we learned that they found the plane, the wreckage in the bodies, and she starts crying to me, then says she feels like she lost a family member. And I think a lot of people felt that way after he died. And so that incident which was followed by my drive back home to Baltimore through New Jersey, which is where I'm from, and I came within two miles that day of the cemetery where my grandparents were born, my Irish immigrant grandparents named Patrick and Bridget. And so somewhere in there, something got tripped. I'm half Irish. I was raised Catholic. I spent 16 years in Catholic schools, but I never really thought about the Kennedys or my Irish heritage or any of that until after that incident. So over the next few years, I got more interested in Irish history, read a little bit more about the Kennedys. I traveled to Ireland and started thinking about this book, but I could never find a way in. I felt like so much has been written about the Kennedys. Every angle must have been covered and I couldn't figure out what new story there was to tell. But along the way, my Irish immigrant grandmother Bridget sort of kept speaking to me like there's a story here. Her experience on my side was not all that dissimilar from Bridget Kennedy's experience when she came to America and worked as a maid, separated by 70 years. Anyway, I'll jump forward a little bit. Probably 2016, 2017, as we started to have some new and different conversations about immigration in America at that time, I realized we still haven't resolved this question of whether we are a nation of immigrants or whether we have mixed feelings about that like some people certainly do. And so that renewed my interest in this book and it coincided with, David mentioned the PJ Kennedy papers at the JFK library. It coincided with my discovery that those were, that they existed, that the library was processing those papers, that they might be open to researchers soon. It took longer than I expected to actually get my hands on those. But I did start diving into this story 2017 into 18 and 19. And actually thought I was in a good groove sort of late 2019 only had a few more things to fill in in the book. And then COVID hits and 2020 as I finished the book created some interesting challenges, but ones that I learned a lot from as it relates to what you and I both do researching and finding information to do online. And I'll sum it up just quickly. I wanted to tell a different Kennedy story. I wanted to go back and show where this family came from, what life was like for them in America when they got here. I wanted to tell the story that begins two generations before Joe Kennedy, who's the person many of us think of as the starting point of the Kennedys. And really, this is the alternate version of that. This is like the prelude to the Camelot version of the Kennedy saga. Right. Yeah, I mean, I was envious in a way as a fellow nonfiction narrative writer that you found this incredibly inspiring story and heart wrenching story, particularly starting with Bridget and her experiences that forced her to leave Ireland. Her experiences about crossing to Boston. Did your family, did your grandmother and extended family relate to you other stories similar to hers that connection to sort of emotional searching and writing? Yeah. Yeah, I think there were some family connections that kind of provided some underlying emotional inspiration and context for my research into the Kennedys. You know, I describe in a couple of moments in the book, a little bit of my Irish background, my grandparents were Bridget and Patrick, who came over from Ireland. The Kennedys were Bridget and Patrick, who came 70 years prior to that. And in fact, earlier in my research, I thought maybe there's a personal story here. Maybe I explore my own Irish roots and my family's heritage and sort of tie it into the Kennedys somehow. And it just never felt quite right. I really just wanted to bring to life those early Kennedys, but do so in a way that kept my own family in mind. Unfortunately, my grandmother, my grandfather, Patrick died similar to Patrick Kennedy. He died when he was in his mid 30s, leaving my grandmother widowed and alone raising three kids, including my mother. And it was interesting to learn that similarly the first Kennedys, Bridget and Patrick, Patrick dies nine years after getting to America, leaving Bridget, widowed and alone raising four kids, including her son, PJ, who we might talk about, who's JFK's grandfather. So those connections always made me feel like I was not just telling a new piece of the Kennedy story, but sort of exploring a little bit of my own story as well and getting to understand a little bit better what it was like for my grandparents to come to a new land and start at the bottom, just like the Kennedys did. My grandmother was a maid. My grandfather was a truck driver. Their story is similar to almost every other class of immigrant who's come to America hoping for a new life, but often having to settle for less, settle for hardship and settle for working at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, settle for poverty and loss and disease, all the things that affected the Kennedys as well as my family at certain times. So it became a personal project, even though it's not a personal story per se. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things I was struck by, particularly in the early parts of the book, was the sense that this was really an American story, right? I mean, it is the Kennedy story. It is specifically about Bridget and her coming to the United States and then her raising a PJ and her family and her struggles there. But I was amazed at your ability to just sort of, again, make it an everybody's story, make it an immigrant story. So that, yes, it's important that it was the Kennedys and yes, this is their origin story. But in many respects, it's all of our story because we're all immigrants here.  Were you cognizant of that? Or were you sort of focused on, okay, I'm telling the, I got to tell the Kennedys? Yeah. No, you're right. I really did try and keep that in mind. And I'd say there were probably two tracks, getting the Kennedy story right. And ideally going a little bit further than others have gone as they've tried to research that piece of the family, the 19th century Kennedys. But I really wanted to get not just their particular story, right? But the story of others around them, you know, what life was like for other Irish immigrants and other immigrant groups during the period that I write about, which is mostly the second half of the 1800s, because I wanted it to be universal. And I wanted the story to ideally tell us something about who we are as a nation, who we were then, and who we are now. And I was, you know, when I got started, I thought I knew a little bit of our own history as it relates to the how we handled Irish famine refugees and how we handled other immigrants and some of the darker moments of that history of trying to keep immigrants either out or down. But I was pretty shocked to learn how aggressively there were forces aligned against newcomers to America. Across time, really, I mean, it hasn't changed. We are a nation of immigrants, but that's kind of despite our best ever efforts in some quarters to keep immigrants out, or to prevent them from succeeding, to prevent them from voting, to prevent them from holding office, to prevent them from becoming citizens, all these efforts were being made back then by, for example, the Know Nothing Party that was in power in the mid-1850s. So I was trying to really explore that, have it hinted at what we've seen in recent years as we have different conversations about immigration in America, and have it, you know, hopefully show us a little bit of who we are at our best and at our worst. And both of those are in this story, and they both speak to, like you said, not just the Kennedy experience, but the experience of any immigrant group who's come here and started over and started often at the bottom. So I really wanted that sense of it doesn't just have to be the Kennedy's, you know, fill in anybody's name.  But to show that they came from nothing like many others did, I find it to be a pretty inspiring story if I'm bridge it to be an inspiring character and someone who's been, you know, largely overlooked in the history of others writing about the Kennedy family.   I was particularly sort of impressed by those sort of parapetetic journeys that she would make across East Boston from one house to the other, just trying to get just an inch above where she was before. And just sort of, you know, almost leapfrogging her way up the, you know, American ladder, as it were. So talk to me a little bit about what made Bridget capable of taking this journey alone. And then what it was about her in those particularly those early days in East Boston where she shows up basically alone and tries to find her way in this new world in this new city. Yeah. And, you know, a new city in a new world that didn't want her. Exactly. So, so there were there were just so many challenges to her escape from Ireland and starting her new life in Boston. It's, you know, it's amazing that she made it at all. And I describe in the book how so there were so many points along the way where she easily could have lost it all lost her kids that, you know, that family could have easily gone away. And we would never have heard of the Kennedys. But the fact that she overcame all the obstacles in her way and ascended to a place of, you know, achievement and success modest, but enough to, you know, get her family to a level of where they could take it from there, essentially, is remarkable to me. The framework is, you know, she leaves her farm in County Wexford in the late 1840s, like millions, or almost 2 million Irish did between the 40s and 50s, gets on a ship, probably alone, like many women did. I found it remarkable to learn that more Irish women than Irish men came to America during that period of immigration from Ireland. They were a pretty spirited bunch. Life wasn't going to be that great for her back in Ireland anyway. You know, she'd work on a farm. She'd become a farm wife. So I view her as someone who stepped up. She was the first in her family to leave home. She was the first one to leave Ireland and go to America. And I think it says something about her character that she sort of raised her hand, if you will, and said, all right, I'll be the one to go. I'll scope it out. I'll get, you know, establish a hub for the family in America and then I'll send for others to come over later, which is what happened. But she gets to America and steps off the boat and she's surrounded by tens of thousands of other poor, unemployed, impoverished Irish just like her. I describe, you know, one of the diaries of a famine refugee. I got my hands on, described the reaction of another Irish immigrant stepping off the boat at East Boston, which is where Bridget landed and looking around and thinking, this is America. Like this is what I came here for. This is the new land that I dreamed of and was going to be my hope and salvation. So from the very first days in America, life was hard for Bridget. She worked as a maid, not a great job for anyone. But I also found evidence that she and many of the other Irish maids had this interesting relationship with their employers. They were pretty uppity as they were described at the time. They were cocky. You know, they needed the job and they were deferential when they needed to be, but they would also kind of talk back if they found things not to their liking in their job. They would walk off the job if they didn't like it.  And I think of Bridget that way. I think she's someone who constantly stood up for herself and had ambitions beyond just being stuck as a maid. And little by little, you see her, as you described it, taking these baby steps forward. You know, a little bit better job with each job transition, a little bit better apartment each time. Later, she becomes, you know, a hairdresser at a department store in downtown Boston, which really got her out of the muck of being discriminated against made. But with each step or two forward, there's always a step back. She loses her first son, John Kennedy, dies at just 20 months. Couple years later, she loses her husband to to consumption or tuberculosis. So and he Patrick dies when they have just welcomed into the world their fifth child, their second son, Patrick J, PJ. So Bridget's left with this infant son and three daughters and no husband. And so she kept getting pushed back. And then she would push forward again. I think she's a remarkable character. She's tenacious and and had sort of a vision for what she wanted to accomplish in America, I think. And I think in time she got there or got far enough along to feel like, OK, I established, you know, a place for my family here in America. And she saw the early successes of her kids. And and that was a lot.  And yet that the death of her husband Patrick is is in some ways the sort of leaping off point where she becomes an entrepreneur. And she, you know, decides or realizes that, you know, my husband's not going to be the one who is going to help me establish this beachhead for my family. I'm going to have to be that beachhead. And so, you know, she makes this leap into starting her own store, which, you know, sounds sort of trivial and small, you know, sort of corner bodega as we have in New York City or elsewhere.  And I was I was, you made this point really well, how even as she's beginning to sort of triumph in this world, that doesn't want her, that is pushing back and doing everything that's power to sort of keep the Irish out. She's also fighting the, you know, the other legions of sexism. And so every reference to her and all the directories is is the, you know, widow Kennedy. And you keep making that point that it really sort of worked really, really well. I thought as, you know, I'll call it a device because I'm a writer, but it was, you know, it's true and it really worked. Talk to me a little bit about before we sort of go into that, talk a little bit more about this anti Irish sentiment and all the laws and, you know, power structures that were pushing it back against, you know, these quote unquote dirty immigrants, you know, no Irish need apply. I mean, the echoes to today are on every level. And so I just I felt like, you know, at some times I was reading a newspaper report that I, you know, just picked up at the corner newsstand, just the way that they were talking about immigrants, what they were doing to keep them from voting to various other things, trying to keep, you know, the current power structure in place. And so talk to us about the no nothings and other things that Bridget was fighting. Yeah, some of those anti immigrant anti Irish sentiments. Again, I knew they were there back then. And I was shocked and at times pretty dismayed to just learn how aggressive that attitude was, how aggressive the efforts were to keep those immigrants down and out and the specific steps that were taken to keep them down and out and how those echoes to today. I mean, I read headlines or quotes that were word for word. Some of the things that we see in recent years, send them back, build a wall, you know, all these all these attitudes toward people who were just trying to find a new life and find a job and work, they weren't bringing their, you know, crime and their drugs. I think what was unique then, but it also has echoes to today, the big fear that many Americans or you know, people in America at that time had when it as it relates to the Irish was the religion. You know, we were a very Protestant country. Bridget and Patrick end up in Boston, which was a very Protestant, Brahmin, blue bloodish city. And what people feared more than anything was Catholicism or papism, these papists and their freaky religion. That's what a lot of the forces that we're talking about here were trying to keep out or down. So, you know, examples that I came across, efforts to prevent any kind of Catholicism in the schools. They taught religion, but they taught the Protestant version of certain prayers and the Protestant Bible.  Your only choice was to go to that. And if you if you opposed doing those things, like, for example, the requirement that you recite the the Protestant version of the Lord's Prayer, you were whipped or expelled. You know, they were just punished for trying to protect the religion. Just one of many examples, the know nothings you mentioned. I'm here in Boston, the Kennedys lived, you know, across from downtown Boston and on the island of East Boston, it was a hub of know nothingism, you know, these nativist political parties that that came into power and prominence and popularity, huge popularity in the mid 1850s, the American Party, the Native American Party, they were all kind of lumped together as the know nothings as our viewers might know. And their mission was to prevent Irish from holding elected office or being allowed to vote. They, you know, if I came across the constitution, proposed constitution of the Massachusetts state, know nothing party. And they proposed and this was proposed many over many times over the subsequent years that an Irish immigrant had to live here for 21 years before they could apply for citizenship and before they could even be considered after citizenship for, you know, the eligibility to vote or hold public office. There are proposed literacy tests, reading and writing for people coming from other countries because they believe that the Irish didn't know how to write and therefore they shouldn't hold public office or vote. There were there were, you know, gangs of thugs, you know, hanging out around polls on election day, listening for Irish Brogues and demanding to see papers to prove that they were allowed to vote. And then there were riots all over the place, not just Boston, Philadelphia, Louisville, Baltimore, you know, often aimed at Irish Catholics trying to, trying to vote. So they were, they were up against a lot. I describe one scene where this group of know nothings paraded down the streets of East Boston to with the intent of sort of destroying the Kennedy's church in East Boston, throwing bricks through Irish businesses and windows, you know, pummeling anyone that they believed to be Irish. I mean, it was a full-on assault. So for Bridget to and her husband to have survived that and then once her husband is dead for Bridget to continue to confront those forces and still manage to move her way up to a level where she could open her own grocery store is just remarkable to me. She was a remarkable character. Yeah, I mean, that's a good transition point because, you know, as as the book is structured, you know, it's sort of two people's story, right? It's the story of Bridget and then it's the story of her son, PJ and and his sort of rags to riches rise and and sort of evolution into the power structure of Boston, which really was the point where that allowed the Kennedys to become the Kennedys that we know today become the first family. But before we go there, I'd like to talk about the research here. And maybe this is again, because I'm interested in it and and the writing of the story because, you know, no one's ventured to do this book before. And it's it's very likely not because someone hadn't thought of it. Or to have done, you know, biographies of the Kennedys, you know, there were there seem to have been a lot of challenges in terms of the research of this. And I'm just, you know, sort of bowing down a little bit to your, you know, persistence in following these sources and getting to the root of the story of Bridget and PJ. So maybe talk to us about how the National Archives or other archives were a launching point for you. Yeah, you're right. And it's fun to talk to another researcher or historian about this kind of stuff, because there were huge challenges. And there were many points along the way where I thought, this is nuts. I'm not going to find this story. I thought I was going to find no wonder nobody's gone down this path before. It's just not there. But but yeah, the research was a fascinating experience. Because I think I initially assumed I can figure this out, you know, between my connections to different archives and libraries, and with the JFK library here in Boston being super cooperative and communicative, every step of the way, I thought, surely buried in those archives is a little bit more about Bridget, a little bit more about PJ, all I need to do is dig deeper and find it and bring this whole thing to life. I should say, you know, I really, my first stab at this was back in 2006, I went to Ireland, I went to the Kennedy Homestead, as it's called, where Patrick Kennedy came from. It's still there, it's still in the family. I talked to, you know, extended relatives, I did some archival research there. And so I thought I had a good sort of foundation to continue this once I got back up to speed on this book a decade later. And my first stop was the JFK library. And they were incredibly generous and helpful and sent me a lot of the information that they did have on PJ, which was not insubstantial, not a whole lot on Bridget, you know, she was a poor immigrant maid, she didn't leave behind her collected papers or letters or, you know, any really easily accessible information for a historian to just latch on to and tell her story. So they helped dig the Massachusetts Historical Society, helped dig for me, you know, the archives at Boston College and other universities here in Boston helped me dig. What I had to do to bring Bridget to life was come at it from a bunch of different angles and try to tell the story of her as I knew it and then of others around her because there was information I was able to find, for example, about Irish maids who were doing the same job as Bridget at the same time in the same places, you know, letters, for example, at Boston College from a woman named Bridget back to her family in Ireland. You know, I was able to find grocery store account books to help understand what the accounting was like and what kind of stuff was on the shelves. We talked briefly earlier about or David mentioned it in the beginning about the PJ Kennedy papers at the JFK library and I became aware of them in 2016, 2017 and was thrilled. I thought, all right, once those are open, I've got this story. Surely everything's going to be in there. And I was in touch with the archive folks at the JFK library regularly every six months. I'd say, hey, when are those going to be open to the public? How far along are we? And, you know, there are short staffed, overworked. They've got a lot of people like me and you coming to them every day saying, can you help me with my book? So it took a while for those papers to get processed and digitized. So I had to be patient. Maybe I wasn't patient all the time, admittedly. But they were patient with me. Then they finally started processing them and said, we're on a path now, it's in our budget, we're taking the first steps to get things going. And then they started the actual digitization and then COVID hits. And people start working remotely and that those efforts sort of ground to a halt. So I was already pretty far along in the research. I was terrified that I wasn't going to be able to access those papers in time. To their huge credit, the head archivist and the other woman who was doing the processing of those papers made it a priority. And I got this Christmas day email one day, hey, we processed the first two thirds. I think it was a couple hundred pages and here they are. They just made them available online and sent me the link. I can't remember if they sent me the digital documents directly. But it was Christmas. It was awesome. These were letters that PJ Kennedy had written throughout the course of his career from late 1800s into the early 1900s. And they helped me describe who PJ was. This generous, empathetic guy who was focused on helping his community, on helping others, helping new immigrants to America find a job or a place to live. This is all as it related to his role as a politician or later in his life, just sort of a helper. Backroom sort of ward boss as he was described. But someone who helped others. And what those papers and that bit of research helped as it relates to Bridget was I could trace back these traits in PJ and how he conducted himself in business back to his mother and show that these were things that she valued as well. I describe her in the book as this neighborhood hub around which family members and neighbors and other maids and children all sort of circulate. And she was remarkably at her death in 1888 described in print in the Boston Globe in an obituary as this sort of woman of noble traits and community pride. I forget the exact wording, but she created something for herself and her family in the neighborhood and then PJ intern did the same. And the research that I was able to get at the JFK Presidential Library helped bring some of that to life for sure. It was invaluable. Yeah, that's awesome. And not as an advertisement for archivists and the national archives, but they've been absolutely more than generous many times for me too. And I, you know, we couldn't do what we do without them.  And, you know, what I liked about what you did there was you, it's so descriptive and you really do feel like you're there and you understand what she's seeing and feeling and experiencing on every level, which is, you know, often very horrific.  But what I liked about how you did it is that you made clear in points when you didn't know exactly what she would have experienced, what she experienced, because you weren't on that boat and she didn't leave a letter. You had assembled all these other sources and all these other experiences of young women who had come across that it felt very, very authentic to me. And I knew when I was reading what's the history of these ships and these experiences of the young maids and then what was Bridget's specific experience. And I just want to say, you know, again, how nicely you did that. Just talking about the writing a little bit, because I think I'm curious, you know, it felt very contemporary to me. The writing did. I was, you know, I noted in particular, correct me if I'm wrong here, but even your prologue was written in present tense, which I found, am I right? Which I thought was a really interesting choice.  For instance, you call Liverpool like Mordor from Jared Tolkien's books. And you quote modern writers, modern refugees, you quote Obama, experiencing the, you know, what their experiences as immigrants were or the like. And I just, why did you make that choice? What was the sort of, I know these choices are carefully made. Sometimes. And I just want to get your sort of thought process. Yeah. You know, they're all great observations because there was definitely an intent there to bring in some contemporary voices and sensibilities because I wanted this story to tie, tie into what has been happening more recently. And so to your point, you know, section breaks in the book, I have quotes from other authors talking about the immigrant experience via Tan Nguyen. And you mentioned the Obama quote saying, you know, in no other country is a story like mine even possible. So, you know, I wanted to have the story kind of look forward a little bit here and there without overdoing it, hopefully, and give it sort of a sense of currentness because I feel like some of the themes that I had to try to explore throughout this story are still very current. So I didn't want it to feel too dusty and historical. I wanted to show that some of the things that Bridget and her family were up against are the same things that a lot of folks are up against today. So yeah, I wanted to have to have that sort of freshness just a touch. Briefly back to your comment about the ships, the coffin ship that Bridget came across on and that ties into some of the research we were talking about. I did try and walk this very fine line of saying, not saying I knew Bridget's experience specifically, although at times I did. I wanted to come clean. Maybe it's Catholic guilt or something. I didn't want to fake it. I didn't want to say, you know, she probably went like this or she must have been thinking that, you know, there are other devices that other writers have used and in some cases it works. It just wasn't for me. I wanted this to be the real version of the story and because we don't know, I wanted to say we don't know. And one reason for that is Bridget as a first name and Murphy as a last name, two of the most common names in Ireland at the time. So trying to find documentation to show that this Bridget Murphy on this ship was our Bridget Murphy. I couldn't do it. You know, there were scores of Bridget or Biddy or Brydie Murphys that I came across and ship passenger manifest lists, for example, same with Patrick Kennedy. Super common name. We can't look at one particular ship or one specific document and say, oh yeah, that must have been our Patrick Kennedy. So I tried to find the right balance and really go deep on the experiences of others as they were coming to America or experiencing, you know, the hardships that that my characters experienced at the same time. So it was a balancing act. And I just, I don't need to make you blush, but there's some great writing in here. And I pulled out one sentence. I just want to get your reaction to it. Just, you know, how do you feel after you write a line like this, which is actually I thought absolutely beautiful. This is page 103 here and it's right when Patrick Bridget's husband is dying from consumption. And so it was Patrick died at home bits at a time and then in November 1858 all at once. I just thought that was just magnificent. Throw yourself a little party. You never know what's going to work. You never know what's too much or not enough. But I really did want to bring his do the best I could with that scene. You know, I wasn't there. We don't know exactly what his final days were like, but I do know what death by consumption was like for many others.  So it was able to, you know, I found doctors reports from the 1800s describing how that disease progressed in a person. But I didn't want to get too scientific with it or medical with it. I wanted to show what it was like for this one family watching their husband, their father just sort of waste away little by little. And then all at once he was gone. And it felt like just a terrifying moment in the lives of that family that we think of as on the one hand, being so powerful and impervious to certain hardships. On the other hand, we've seen tragedy affect that family time and time again. And this was one of the first and it echoes throughout the rest of the family saga, you know, early death by whatever means. So I'm glad that wine stuck out. The saga element of the story and I do want to, you know, we have about 15 minutes left. So I do want to launch a little bit into the PJ, because he certainly is the kind of rags to reach.  Tell us a little bit about PJ and his sort of his rise because it felt like it came at the time when the Irish and Boston were on the ascent. You know, you have Bridget, in fact, but as PJ begins his rise, the Irish are in some ways coming into their own and it's a very different story to Bridget's and it's the nicer coda to her. Yeah, it was it was interesting to you know, the book is sort of divided in those two parts, Bridget's coming to America in her early years, trying to make it opening her own grocery store, finally getting to a position of of success and independence. And handing off to her children, in this case, PJ, whatever she was able to learn and hand off to them. And then PJ's story, you know, roughly halfway through the book picks up from there. And I knew little bits and pieces about his sort of ascent to political power. I knew he was a politician. I didn't know how influential he was during his time. And as you said, it was a time when the Irish Democrats, in their case, were just starting to come to power. And PJ was at the forefront of that transition. You know, we talked earlier about Boston being a very Protestant, very Brahman, very old school city. It was also very Republican at that time. And so the Irish, in PJ's case, he was a saloon keeper. He opened a saloon in South Boston, and was fairly successful there, open another one in East Boston, and then over time, opened a handful of others. And that sort of got him to a level of not just success financially, but he was interacting with a lot of the other politicians of the day, who would come to his pub, who would get to know him, you know, he'd serve them beers. And little by little, he got pulled into Irish Democratic politics, really early on, just street level, Ward politics. He was, you know, his first official role was with the Ward 2 Democratic Committee in East Boston, where he would just go around and try and solicit votes, knocking on doors. I mean, it was like a community organizer. And little by little impressed the Ward elders and then the larger Democratic establishment, who were at that time really looking for people like PJ, who could represent their kind. And it was interesting to learn more too about how I'm describing PJ as a scent into that sort of political realm. And then alongside him is John Fitzgerald, JFK's other grandfather, who's doing the same thing. Also a immigrant grocer's son who grew up poor, also working his way up into Ward politics in Boston. And the two of them were part of this, you know, first wave of Irish Democrats who started getting elected to the board of Alderman, the city council, and then in time state elected office, and then national office. It just didn't happen for decades, you know, and it's really only in the 1880s. PJ runs for, he actually leaps ahead and ends up running for the state house for state representative in Massachusetts, sort of seven terms in a row as either a representative or senator. John Fitzgerald same deal runs for state office. He's a state senator and then later becomes a congressman. So that shift in politics in this city and then more broadly spreading out from there was a remarkable time because these first generation Irish in many cases were finally finding their way in to the establishment and finding ways to help their people. And I just love seeing, again, back to the PJ Kennedy papers later after he's out of elected office and he's kind of this Ward elder and someone that people come to for help and advice. He was part of this board of strategy that I write about in the book. But he continues to help his kind all the way until his death. Many of his letters are about as I described earlier about helping other people. So that period I found just fascinating. And PJ Kennedy was part of that core group of Irish who, you know, you think of Boston as a today as a pretty Irish democratic city politically. And it really all started with PJ back then.  I mean, he seems almost like a foil to his son, Joe, in some respects.  But, you know, he just not a big drinker didn't seem like he was much of a womanizer, very devoted to family, very devoted to, like you said, to helping people in the community just seemed to be that individual who was always there. If you, you know, the sort of patriarch of the Irish in Boston. And so, you know, sort of drawing it down to bring it to JFK and Robert and other members of his grandchildren. Like, could you talk to us a little bit about the certain characteristics that you found had been inherited if not by Joe, by Joe and Rose's children? Yeah. Yeah, I find that interesting that sort of transition from PJ, who's all about helping his people and and really working it on the ground. I describe actually Joe talking years later about his father giving away too much to people, you know, he lost a fortune just giving making loans to people in his community or just giving money away to people. And he was just too generous with his time and his finances. You know, I think Joe, interestingly, saw what his father did and said, that's not for me. I'm not going to become a politician. I'm going to get into banking and make some money, which is what he did. Interestingly, though, his first job in banking or second job, but his most prominent one was at his father's bank, this bank where Joe got his start was founded by and run by his father and some other Irish folks in East Boston. So, you know, that transition from PJ being genuine and helpful and sort of straight, as he was described later in life, remarkably straight for a saloon keeper turned politician. Then you get to Joe, and he doesn't have this sense of necessarily loyalty to his community and to the Irish and to his heritage. He wanted to become American fast. And he wanted his sons and daughters to be American. And he wanted to and he wanted more, more, he wanted power and money and all of that. So he's fascinating, you know, he's often sort of depicted as the patriarch of the family. But I'd argue, you know, PJ was the true patriarch or more accurately Bridget was the matriarch of the whole plan. But to your question, I think you see the sensibilities of both Bridget and PJ, maybe skip Joe to some extent, but with help from Rose, sort of make their way into later generations of that family. Many of those children of Joe and Rose did have this sense of giving back and this sense of service and helping, you know, I, Eunice Kennedy's, you know, helping start the special Olympics. I had a sister who had Down syndrome and we went to the special Olympics regularly. So, you know, thinking that that family helped that, that effort to happen. And others like that, you know, I think JFK and RFK did have a sense of caring about those who are less fortunate than them in ways that maybe their father didn't necessarily. So quickly among the traits I saw were like, you know, empathy sense of community sense of helping others at the same time as ambition and tenacity and grit and resilience. I think you see that transfer from Bridget to PJ to Joe and Rose's kids for sure. I'm just a question from the audience here today. Can you talk to us about research or what you learned about the early history of the Fitzgerald talent? Yeah, I didn't go back as far with the Fitzgeralds. You know, in part I felt like Doris Kerns Goodwin did an amazing job in her Kennedy's and Fitzgerald's book. A lot of that focused on the immigrant, Irish immigrant Fitzgeralds and their early days in Boston. I didn't want to cover that same ground. I was hoping to find a new angle to the story. But I did do some research starting with John Fitzgerald's political ascent and ha and learned a lot about the relationship between Fitzgerald and PJ Kennedy. They didn't like each other. They were contemporaries. They came up the same in the book I described. They should have been soulmates. American-born kids of Irish immigrants, parents were grocers who also sold liquor on the side. They both come up through the ranks of Irish democratic politics. They both vacationed together at Orchard Beach in Maine, which is where Joe and Rose first met and eventually fell in love. So they were part of each other's lives from an early age and for the rest of their life. At times they didn't like each other. PJ considered Honey Fitz as he was known kind of a buffoon. He was way more flamboyant and out there and more of a typical politician than PJ was. PJ was quieter and behind the scenes. But they needed each other. I described this one fascinating moment that I found and I think the photograph of this is at the JFK library. Honey Fitz is elected to Congress, but he's been just charging so hard campaigning and going back and forth from Boston to Washington. And he comes down with consumption, the disease that killed PJ's father. The doctors say you need to get away and take a break. He decides to go south to Asheville, North Carolina. And he takes PJ with him. So that's his companion as they go south so that Honey Fitz can recover and relax. And his partner on that trip and back is PJ, his sometime foe, the guy whose children, the two of them, wanted to keep apart and weren't able to do so. So there was a really interesting relationship between the two of those. And so I do explore some of that in the book. Right. Good. So yeah, I do recall reading that section of the book and wanting to be a bit of a fly-in-the-wall at that journey those two took would have been absolutely fascinating. We only have a couple of minutes left. And I just want to ask a sort of umbrella question, which is, you've spent a long time on this project and spent a lot of time researching the Kennedays and thinking about the Kennedays. And from that point where you started, you were in the JFK Jr.'s death to the point where you're now on tour talking about this great book of yours, how has your view of the Kennedays changed? How is it different than maybe what you perceived to be the Kennedays at the beginning of this journey of yours? Yeah, that's a good one. I always had some, but call it generic sense of appreciation for that family, the service that they've been given to the country. You know, they're less prominent, obviously now than ever before. I think given the loss of Joe Kennedy, the third, I think a few years back, we now for the first time in decades don't have a Kennedy in Congress. So I've seen the family rise, hit by tragedy, rise again. And I admire their resilience and their commitment to serving the country. I know there are probably many complicated feelings out there about the other members of the family and their history. And I think as a dynasty, it's not what it was. And maybe that makes sense. Dynasties just don't last. But I developed a deeper appreciation for all the things that different generations of that family confronted over time and find it remarkable that they've had such a lasting impact on our national politics and culture and sort of sensibilities. I don't love this idea of the royal family in Camelot, you know, sort of the sexier or timescedier parts of the family history. Those kinds of episodes that, you know, you see in the tabloids are unfortunate and they are part of the family saga. But I also think there are so many good things that came from that family that we're experiencing today. We're living with today because of their efforts. Right. And it started with Bridget and Vijay. Exactly. So I'll conclude it there. I want to thank the National Archives for hosting you, Neil, and for having me moderate here. And I encourage everyone to read the first kind of news. It's a very, very illuminating book and just an absolute pleasure to read. Thank you, Neil. Neil, thanks so much for doing this. Really enjoyed talking with you. And thanks to everyone who joined us. And thanks, big thanks to the National Archives for doing this. Wonderful.


Hi friends, so in the last session we discussed about the basic definition of circle what a circle was and we learned that Circle is nothing but a path which is also called locus again re-emphasizing the word locus Locust is in Greek so hence Greek word locus means path so path traced out by a point on a plane Such that its distance from a given point on the same plane is always a constant So hence you can see here again. We have taken a circle with center a and B is a point on the periphery So now first let's learn what is concentric circles all the circles having the same center are Called concentric circles if you see let me draw another circle. So this is another circle Center a and this circle is concentric to the circle C another circle We can draw so this is another circle and we can if you see there are infinitely many Infinitely many concentric circles, you can you know for a one center with different different radii We will have different different circles, right? So these are called concentric Circles beautiful isn't it so all these circles are concentric circle now We'll talk about some parts of the circle. Okay, so first is the arc. So let me draw a circle So I'm drawing this circle now B is a point. Let me take another point on the same circle Let's see now this particular curved feature BC is called the arc guys. Okay, so let me see What is this? This is nothing but the arc BC. Okay So if you see this BC is an arc, okay, similarly if you see the these two points B and C are dividing the Circle this is circle and dividing the circle into two parts One is this smaller portion BC and the other one is this larger one Okay, so hence this smaller BC curve is called minor arc. Okay What is it called minor arc and this bigger? Side curve BC is called major arc. I hope this is clear. So Let me write so it is arc a R C Okay arc. Okay. This is BC is a major arc. So we usually denote BC by we write B like that and We write C C and then we put a curve like this So this is BC and always when we write BC like this. It is assumed to be the minor arc Okay. Now if I Join these two points from B to A to C if you see this is okay, let me Gather around C A B so if you see guys, it is forty nine point zero three degrees. Let me also join the two Radio like that, okay Yeah, so now let me zoom in. Yeah, I hope you're able to see this So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just take away this here So you can see alpha is so a is the center and alpha is the angle. Can you see this angle guys? Now, let me change this point C. Let me move this point C. So You can see Let it be here. Yeah, 90 degrees. So hence if I now change B So you can see, okay B is the first point. So it's changing the circle itself Nevermind. So you can see this is 90 degree and as I move away from B the angle is increasing Isn't it's angle made by AB and AC, right? So here it is 180 degrees okay at this point and this point 180 degrees Can you see that and here it's it's like a clock, right hand moving on a clock. So here it is 270 degrees, right? So similarly you can see and it goes till 360 is one complete revolution means 360 degree, right? So you can see 358 and then it finally merges on the point B Which is 0 degrees or 0 is as good as 360 degrees and again it increases So this particular angle BAC is called the central angle, okay?  So angle BC Sorry arc BC subtends an angle alpha 42.97 and as alpha at point C changes the angle subtended by BC on the center Changes, can you see that this is that obtuse angle here and perfect 180 degree here and then back 270 and then 0 like that Okay, so RBC is subtending this angle. Okay, this angle BAC is called the central angle BC is minor arc and This side is the major arc. Okay, or you can say, you know, when we when we talk about we take When we write CB, so CB is anticlockwise guys. Okay, so CB If you move from C to B, what do I mean? If you move from C to B, you're moving anticlockwise, isn't it? When you are moving anticlockwise, so we write C to B in anticlockwise direction That represents minor arc and if you write B to C that means for BC in this case In this case BC means you have to move from B to C in anticlockwise direction So if you see you have to move from B to C like that, then this BC represents the major arc Usually this is the convention and hence If you write BC, it will in this case, it would be major arc But if C is like that, then this is the minor arc BC, right? And if C is like that here, so hence BC means you are going from B to C Like that in anticlockwise direction. So this in this case represents Major arc. I hope you understand. I just am repeating if you're writing from if you're writing BC like this Then you're going from B to C in Anticlockwise direction always so hence if I have to go from B to C in anticlockwise direction I will take the major path and hence in this case Writing BC represents the major arc Okay, and if I am I have to write BC as a smaller arc Then I have to write CB right in this case CB I've write first C and then from C in anticlockwise direction. I am hitting towards B. So hence CB represents Minor arc and the minor arc angle is 34.63 degree and the major arc angle will be very easily You can find out 360 minus alpha whatever the value is. I hope you understand the meaning of arc Minor arc major arc how to represent minor arc and major arc and what is the central angle?