Okay, so we can get started with the talk and I would like to see a few hands Who of you has managed to walk around the Congress Center without seeing a 3d printer? That's one hand there. That's what I thought because they're doing absolutely amazing practical stuff and we will hear a little bit about some background on this kind of technology today, I think and Also, I read a tweet earlier Saying suggesting something for a cause communication Congress bingo and in the up left corner there was something like 3d printed sex toys and I was like, okay the relevance of this talk is a pretty obvious to me right now so Sasha Frisike is going to talk about what we can learn about creativity from 3d printing and he studied industrial engineering in Berlin and did his PhD in St. Gallen during this time he also did a lot of research research at Sanford and currently he's a professor at the University of Würzburg at the Jesus, sorry, he's a professor for management and entrepreneurship and He's just Being in Würzburg for three more days and then he's moving to Amsterdam Continuing his work there. So let's please welcome him Yes, hello. Good evening. Thank you that some people came at this late hour. I appreciate it My name is Sasha as we just mentioned as she just mentioned This is it's kind of an unusual talk for me because usually I don't go to conference where they talk about 3d printing I usually go to conferences where they talk about creativity and For my research, I looked at 3d printing for the past couple of years And I thought this might be a good opportunity to kind of give back and talk to the people that actually are involved into 3d printing and I bucked many of them and my students bucked many of them and asked them questionnaires And maybe someone interviewed you for a study and so on and I thought maybe this is the chance for me to tell you What we're actually doing well This is all about and why anyone should care So whenever I talk about 3d printing what I mean is basically household 3d printing. So this is not like What you have at your big manufacturing? Facilities and I'm not looking into how we can make aircraft slider and so on I look at like the tabletop 3d printing and I look at Communities that use 3d printing and I want to understand how they how they deal with creativity But to jump back a couple years ago We started with the phenomenon looking at 3d printing because everybody told us that this is going to be the next industrial revolution This was actually a cover on the economist They said next industrial revolution and there was a book by Chris Anderson And he said that in a couple of years we will basically not go through the supermarket anymore We will print everything because that's the thing it's going to be and when we looked around We talked to people this was absolutely not the picture that we saw So the first thing that we did was trying to find out what do people use 3d printers for and that was a horrible research question And the results was scattered all over the place and the only interesting Anecdote from that research on what people use 3d printers for was that a lot of people that have 3d printers Print things for their 3d printers spare parts and so on and that we spend like a year on it And then we said well screw it. There's nothing coming out of that and we're never going to publish anything about that and then I Changed jobs. I went to Vilt's book and I found a new group and they were also into 3d printing And they had the same issue that they said well, this is a really interesting phenomenon But we need to find like an interesting angle in this and we we couldn't and at the time I was writing a book on creativity and In 3d printing we looked at the platform platform called Thingiverse the world's biggest 3d printing design platform And they have one interesting thing and on the platform you can upload a design and every single design is under an open license So anyone else can download the design change it upload it again But has to quote where it's from has to reference the original design and this is in in creativity When we talk about creativity We think this is kind of this divine thing where you give like an artist a white sheet of paper and this artist will come Up with something great out of nowhere and we have this concept like an epiphany or in Eureka moment And when we look into the literature the literature just pretty clear about where creativity comes from and what it is And it is usually the recombination of known building blocks in a way that wasn't known before So we consider very creative if something is deeply rooted in things We know and someone brings something into that deeply rooted thing that has never been connected in that way That's what we consider as very creative And the problem is if you go somewhere and ask people well, how did you come up with that? They will either not remember or they will have kind of fear over Interlectual property issues and tell you well I came up with that on my own and nothing has ever inspired me or I don't recall and so on so for people that try to Study creativity. It's really hard to find out where ideas come from because we don't quote the sources as Directly and then we looked at 3d printing and We looked at the platform and what we found is that we can basically look at all all the things that people upload it and see the connections between them and The black here. This is not from me. This is from the talk before so you have to kind of Think that is out of sight So we see is this is basically like a network structure On thingy verse of all designs in one category in the credit Corey is fashion So these are all designs in okay Just up my Machma irgendwie weg hat mich niemand verstanden Okay Gucken mal ist nur weil ich meine Hände so viel bewege Und das soll ich ja nicht okay Okay, I try to be a bit louder than we'll see So basically, okay, this is this is fashion. This is the first thing we looked at and Seeing of us has a couple of categories I think like 11 to 12 different categories where people can upload designs and they basically pick a category Where this design is in and then people can remix them and upload something else also And what we saw is simply by looking at those categories that they are vastly different So this is the first one was fashion and this is the category 3d printing What people upload for instance spare parts for this for this 3d printers And what you can see is simply by looking at this universe and we had one that actually looked like a death star But it doesn't fit the storyline so I can't put that in but So simply by looking at the structure We saw that there's something happening and between the two what's interesting is that the fashion category is very Hedonistic so people that upload something in fashion want to have something very individual They want to have like for instance a ring that says their own name or something that has that nobody else has And that's why you have those big clusters in the middle was simply people Change things slightly so it fits to so it's an individual solution Well, this year is very much the opposite. This is the 3d printing category and the solutions we see here are very utilitarian So basically you have those little scattered things all over the place You have oftentimes these things were only a couple are related to one another So someone developed a solution someone else saw it thought well that could be done a little bit better We could tweak that into something I would rather have and then they kind of had a final solution And that was fine and then they went on to do something else So simply by looking at it We found out well the universe looks completely different so there might be something to that in regards to creativity so and then what we did is We interviewed roughly 80 people we had Questionnaires out for a couple hundred and we looked at the entirety of all designs on the platform This is a couple hundred thousands and then the first thing you do is try to find out Is there is there anything special to the process that people do so it's the creative process in any way Remarkable and and the creative process that we found basically has four aspects that we can talk about the first one We called a trigger so any kind of creative process kick started by some form of a trigger And what we found is that when we when we look into a literature those triggers are often described as a problem So people have a problem and that starts off the creative process What we found is that that's only half the truth Half the people basically started because they had an actual problem the other half started out of some form of Creosities for instance that went to learn something that wanted to get better that we're interested in something so that kicked start The process the second thing we we found is kind of the inspiration phase This is this epiphany moment and this is what we'll deep dive into when we talk about Remixing a little bit more because remixing seems to what be one of the cornerstones in those creative communities in Which way people come up with novel solutions? And then what happens is interesting is when we talk about it's probably not that interesting for people in this room But it's interesting for us as social scientists because we don't develop software often So what happens is they distribute very early if we think about physical object It used to be very hard to have a form of distribution So distribution was always the bottleneck if you produced a CD album You had to find someone who does the distribution for you while here. It's it's very easy to distribute And because it's very easy to distribute what happens is that kind of changes the process people distribute earlier? And they distribute even when they aren't that finished yet in order to receive feedback on on the basis of that feedback Allow an iteration of the process of the design of the of the object that they that they did so Basically in like an analog world you would have the distribution at the very end of the process Well here when we talk to the people they say well, even if I'm not that sure if that's the correct way I simply distributed I asked people I gather feedback and with that I iterate and make it better So the platform the way the interaction that we found in the communities changed the creative process in In in a way that made distribution earlier, which we kind of found remarkable But if you look at it and say well, that's probably what we do in software development for 20 years. So but it's It's interesting in a way, so And now when when social scientists look at a problem One of the things they oftentimes try to do is to categorize the problem in such a way that you can say well This isn't just one problem This is actually a couple of things and this is a neat trick And if you are in if you are a management scholar What you usually do is you come up with a 2x2 matrix and that oftentimes solves problems and explains what it is And in this case we found we kind of zoomed in and wanted to find out those remixes How do they look close up? Can we kind of find patterns of how people? Combine things into something new and what we found is that there are actual patterns and that would that with a couple of patterns we can explain basically the entire universe zoomed in and The first thing we found we call that linear Linear evolution is this basically you have one design someone takes that design and Remixes into something new so you have this bottle Someone sees the bottle and makes a longer bottle That's kind of like a boring story and then we had more more complex ones and the more complex ones fall into two categories So the first category we call them convergent So what happens is several ideas are remixed into something new the first one is It's what called a merge. So this is basically you see several ideas in the case You see two ideas and you combine them into one new one. So one example. We always use it's Someone designed a debate coin So they had a logo of a donkey and the logo of an elephant the US Mascots of the parties and they merged that into a debate coin and you can flip the coin and that kind of decides What you're going to vote or so on The the second one we found we call that retrospect and it's kind of interesting. So what we have is There's like a Grandfather basically and that grandfather has a child and that child has also a child But the child's child inherits something from the grandparents that was not in the parents So this is basically going back in its own history and finding something that was left out in a generation before and then bringing it back One real-life example that people told me was theirs in a Microsoft Windows apparently They brought back the start button after they abandoned it. So basically it wasn't in one version and then they Brought it back. This is also something you see currently in innovation management a lot I don't know if you've ever heard of Lego Gronki wonkeys So when I was a child Lego used to be like just bricks and you built whatever you want And then they started to do like Star Wars and dragons and every kind of story-based things and last year They came out with like a new box and in this box. There's only Bricks and you can build whatever you want and they call that the new thing It's called Gronki wonky and was like a big advertising campaign and that's exactly that So it inherits something that wasn't in the last generation but in the generation before Next thing we found we call siblings and siblings basically is several people Looking at a couple of ingredients and coming up with vastly different solutions So they are not directly related the two things on the left and the right but they have the same ingredients and to think about that as something you would for instance see in a Cocktail bar so in a cocktail bar you have a very limited amount of ingredients But you come up with completely different cocktails even though You might not look at one cocktail and say well, I could do something completely But you look at the ingredients and based on the ingredients you come up with something new and The last one we called in this section We called compilation and the compilation is basically a best-off people look at a couple of things and then turn them into One a compilation one example We found is oftentimes they're called like the ultimate something like that So someone looks at an entire collection of things and then turns them into the final version of it So one thing we found is like the the ultimate Batman symbol So someone looked at every single Batman symbol that was on the platform and then combined them into like the ultimate That's the one we don't need a Batman symbol anymore. It's solved So we found those So all of these patterns Convergent take several inputs and turn them into something new and the other patterns that we found that were convergent So basically what convergent means is Several people look at the same thing and come to different conclusions. What to do with it The first one is it's a fork So two people look at one thing and have a completely different idea what to do about that. This is I Don't know. This will for instance be you have an iPad and then you have an iPad mini and an iPad Pro In the second generation because people have a completely different usage on it Next one we found is it's related to the fork. We call it the bouquet It's when one thing turns into a lot of things and oftentimes this happens when the thing in the middle for instance is a Gear or a tool or or wheels and so on so something that you can have multiple uses for next thing we found and that's Very important for the platform itself. It's called a customizer so customizer is a toolkit on the platform where people with no CAD knowledge can simply tweak a design in a way that they want and Customizers were kind of kick-started The growth of Thingiverse because many people that don't have any knowledge on CAD can very Simply come up with their own designs and customizes also the thing that we saw in the beginning of the fashion slide The big blobs those were customizers where people could do something very simply on the platform with their designs to Individualize it so then we found and we found an eighth one and the eighth one is very much related to the customizer but it has like it has a parent and Someone looks at it at a design and says well That's a cool idea and it would be even cooler if other people could customize it and once the Customizer is kind of call it a template builder once someone turned that into a customizer You have a very successful design because people can very easily tweak it Okay So when I tell this story there's always two questions that come up The first one is well if creativity can be broken down into patterns Can't we simply use AI to come up with new ideas and the emphasis is always on simply And I thought about this a little bit and I have kind of like my relationship to AI is a kind of a mixed back And I don't see it anytime soon. So if you have that question I feel free to try I think the naughty secret about what I just told you is that yes those patterns can explain how creativity how reuse or Recombination works, but it cannot give you The input things the things that you actually remix it can just show you the patterns in which remixing is done So I don't think that creativity will be outsourced by AI anytime soon The second question I always get when I give this talk is that people say well You kind of compare apples to oranges because some of the things that you talk about are very very simple to do you have for instance The customizer you give them Toolkits and a very simple website to customize something for instance They write their name and then that name appears on a ring and that's not really as creative as someone who combines Multiple objects in a very complicated way. So isn't there like a threshold for creativity? should everything be called creative or is creativity only like the divine complex thing and That's kind of a hard question for me to answer because I have a hard time like finding a cutoff and saying well Below that cut of it isn't creative and afterwards it is but what I can do again Categorizing looking at all the things I see and then kind of describing are those creative or not or are those Complex or not and what we found is that basically those the designs we can Group in two on two axes. The first axis is to look at the parents and we'll look at the parents those parents can either be from the same category They cannot also be from fashion that can be from a different category So someone actually made the effort to transfer knowledge from one category to the other So that seems to be more complex or it could be from multiple categories. So people don't simply Merge all Batman signs, but they merge something from fashion with something from 3d printing which is more complicated because you need to find a need to find a way to combine that and Also, we can look at what's the origin of the remix so a very simple thing would be a Customizer you simply have those toolkits you drag and drop write your name in very very easy to do the next step Bit more complicated would be if you only have one parent Use that one parent and turn that into something new and the more complex thing would be if you have multiple Parents and combine them into something new. So we try to group them into a way to show that If you go to the upper right, you have an increasing level of complexity and what what we found is that the when the platform allowed people to customize that that basically kicked-started a lot of traction on the platform and what we also saw is that The idea of customization is a way like like a foot in the door policy So people start customizing and once they learn customizing that kind of hooked on the thing It's a very easy way to get in they get more complicated over time They'll learn more and basically it's a way for them to get familiar with with remixing. It's it's a way of learning One interesting saying I wanted to mention is a transfer remix that we found so someone someone designed Little signs for potted plants so one would say like rosemary one would say time and Someone else looked that out and said well, that's an interesting idea But I don't have potted plants, but I do have an issue like this often times in my office and basically redesigned those Signs for potted plants into paper clips and the paper clips now read please read Please sign may be interesting and so on so basically the person saw design in a completely different category and transferred it into something that Wasn't that that wasn't intended for completely different category and that's kind of what we consider to be more creative than simply Also making potted plant signs, but they are round and not rectangular Okay, that's one more thing We need to talk about and as the initial question that we had what do people use three prayers for and one thing that we now are currently discussing is That it might be interesting to look at the role that remixing plays in that and we have this little little graph Again the black lines are for me So you have on the x-axis. We simply have all the problems on the world I don't know why axis we have the amount of demand for a solution for this problem And what we argue is if there is a lot of demand for a solution for a problem Then someone will probably mass produce it. So you have kind of like a mass production threshold and The argument with this industrial revolution of 3d printing often times was that people will not go to the store anymore But simply go to the 3d printers and what we found is that that is not really The entire story that's only part of it What we found is people design all kinds of things and many of the things that people design in 3d print They 3d print because they cannot buy them It's like an individual solution that only a few people have maybe only them and then they print it and that allows them to have a solution at all and this is very much very much comparable to what we would have if we have a workshop and we simply Don't use a 3d printer, but create something out of let's say wood You would also have an individual solution to a problem that wasn't available before and what we see with remixing is that People use those solutions that someone else did that might not be as Interesting as something that can be mass produced and then remix them into something that also Only a couple of people will will need so when we had the the figure with the From fashion with those lots of little little dots those were an a multitude of solutions That only very few people needed but allowing all those people to very simply remix them Allowed them basically to have a little barcode in an area where prior that would simply be no solution You would have that to do that by hand. So maybe that is One answer to the question though I had at the very beginning what the hell do people with 3d printers for use 3d printers for Maybe it's not as elegant as I thought in the beginning four years ago What might come up, but it might be an interesting approach to that so It's two more things. I wanted to talk about So to wrap it up when we talk about creativity Maybe the interesting thing is is that creativity in itself probably isn't as chaotic as you might have thought before the talk It follows in a way a couple of clear patterns and we can see those patterns all over the world and maybe that will help us organize hopefully in the future creative processes and Making it easy For people to have like a foot in a door to make it very easy to start a creative process Is like a gateway drug to more creativity? And if we want to have people engage in some form of creative process that it might be useful to have a very simple First step for them to do that And on on 3d printing the interesting story that I think is that we found is that We have in 3d printed an extremely creative community and the process that we saw that people follow there Might be something that other communities can learn from and given that here's are a lot of people that are active in 3d printed It might be interesting for you to use the next couple of days and talk to them and maybe get engaged there And if you are if you are already engaged in those communities then please keep doing it And if anyone sends you an email with an with a question about an interview and maybe to fill out a question there and be so kind and do that For us and that is all that I have for you today. Thank you very much for coming out even though it was that late


This is an introductory text to a collection of papers from the CTE 2019, the seventh workshop on cloud technologies and education, which was held in Krivy R.I.H., Ukraine, on the December 20th, 2019. It consists of short introduction and some observations about the event and its future. This article was authored by Arnoldy Kiv, Maria P. Shishkina, Sirhe Osamerikov and others.


17, live at 525, the Preservation Burlington Show. Preservation Burlington is a non-profit 501C3 organization whose mission is to preserve and protect the historic architecture and livability of Burlington through education and advocacy. I'd like to thank everybody for tuning in tonight. It's gonna be easy for me. Preservation Burlington's really excited to partner up with Champlain College on this project, this is a grant funded project and we're the community partner. And I'm gonna let my friend Erica, who we've known each other for a little while, give the background to this stuff because you contacted me about the program, right? And you needed a community partner, Preservation Burlington's a natural fit and it's just like really pertinent to a lot of stuff that we've been dealing with lately, you know, with the downtown area and stuff. So do you wanna tell people what the project is all about? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Erica Donis and I am the Special Collections Director at Champlain College and I'm joined tonight by a couple of our faculty members, I've Jonathan Banfield and Jordan Douglas here and we're so pleased to be here and so pleased to partner up with Preservation Burlington on this grant project. So we have been working with a number of students this past spring semester and then again we will in the fall on a project that's funded by the Council of Independent Colleges and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. So they have this program called the Humanities Research for the Public Good Program and this year there are 13 colleges from across the US who are participating and the point of the project is to bring together undergraduate students, have them do research in archives and primary source material on a topic that has public interest, that's a topic of public discourse. So we picked the topic of urban renewal, the impact of urban renewal in the city of Burlington and so we've had not only a lead student researcher studying this topic and I can tell you a little bit more about what she's been doing specifically but also several classes who have been working on this. Yeah, that was the surprise to me when you guys put the presentation together to show where the kids are at, right? I mean, they're young adults but I didn't know it was gonna be as expansive as it turned out to be. So that was pretty exciting to see how you incorporated these different media and points of view to add to the same story. Yeah, this has been a really wonderful opportunity to do some really deep interdisciplinary research and to introduce students to studying a humanities topic from multiple angles. Yeah. Mm-hmm. We'll do the pitch later too, right? Cause there's gonna be a big presentation at the end, at the end, when is that? We have an event coming up at the end of November. November, yeah. So we'll tell you all about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So thank you guys, both of you for being here. Do you wanna just go this way? You wanna tell me what your students been doing? Sure. I'm Dr. Jonathan Manfield, professor at Chaplain College. I teach in the Interdisciplinary Corps which is kind of a mixture of humanities and kind of publicly focused and applied knowledge going out into the world. I have a background in urban studies. Everything. Yeah, interdisciplinary. Yeah, everything. Everything. And my course was called Urban Sonic Placemaking and it's a course I've been teaching for a couple of years. It's a pandemic course and so we were trying to figure out how to get students to go out into kind of safe environments during 2020, 2021 and then starting to think about it like using the city of Burlington as like a place to open environment that students could explore and kind of engage with. And the way that I did that was through sound and using students using their phones, using kind of microphones to record and gather sounds from the environment and the city environment and the natural environment surrounding us and using that as a way to engage with place. How many students did you send out to? For this class, there are 18 students and we, as the weather kind of warmed up in Burlington over the spring, we started going out into the downtown urban renewal area and students would wander around, listen, use their ears, use their senses and then kind of gather their own little archive of sounds that they would then use and kind of construct into kind of composed soundscapes. So they're really using the city of Burlington and all the things that they might encounter there as an instrument. Right, like what's going on right there and the different noises and sounds that come together. And so they produced everything that was very like one to one relationship with what they just heard to things that were more composed, even like using the sounds of construction or something as like a beat that they then layered kind of larger sorts of compositions, whether musical or poetic or other sorts of things to kind of create a whole piece. And then so our contribution recombinated in producing a whole album where every student contributed a track or part of a track that we then kind of put together in the final weeks of the class and put up on Bandcamp. Oh, Bandcamp, I was going to ask you where. So it's accessible as a kind of auditory sonic document of Burlington around it. Were you pleased with the outcome? I think so, it's like super creative. You never know what quite you're going to get. Like you have students that are, we have a sound study, sonic studies kind of game sound design project. So we have people that are like really, know the software and no microphones, but then you also have amateurs. And so it's like this interesting mix of, and they were teaming up too, right? They were teaming up and they were, yeah. There was a couple songs, like some pretty fun songs. Yeah, yeah, I love the single pebble song. The single pebble. My family loves that place. So a song called Urban Renewal Anthem. But then like some really kind of experimental like compositions, like for instance, that one student recorded all the sounds of like lights kind of around the parking lots and parking garages by the Macy's High School. The hum and the buzz. And like the buzzes and then use that to kind of produce this really like beautiful melancholy kind of soundscape of buzzes and energy, you know, haunting in this weird way. Yeah. But using the kind of, yeah, like that sound. Which is good for an Urban Renewal story, right? Because it is a little bit haunting, you know. I know there were some clips and interviews with people that had grown up there and lost their, their families were from there and lost their homes and stuff. So there's always that sort of darker aspect of, you know, mostly I focus on the architecture, you know. And truth be told, I really don't like most of the architecture that occurred during Urban Renewal all over the country, you know, versus what they replaced. But there's the whole story, the story of the people that were in that area is really the deeper dive and the things that you kind of forget. I'm just, I'm looking at the architecture and the loss here and there, but the loss is to whole families, you know.  Yeah, so I'm Jordan Douglas and I teach the dark room photography classes at Champlain and run the photo lab. And every spring I have an intermediate photo class. Students who are a little more prepared to do more mature work. So it was a perfect opportunity to engage those students with this project and have them go out and capture aspects of the Urban Renewal zone. And my intention was to have them approach it from an artistic point of view and not simply document and, you know, speak objectively, but to see if they could translate those places and see if they can pick up on some of the things that Jonathan was talking about, the sort of vestiges of the past, those resonances that you were speaking of as well, the stories of people, how those changes might still be visible, what's of the past in the present and maybe ultimately start to ponder what comes next. And there's a lot of that happening now. So my students went out with film cameras and each student chose a particular area. I had a smaller crew, seven students, and the college provided some grant money to buy some photo paper for the students and some matting materials. Each student had a project based on this where they presented four pieces and we matted one and that will be part of the exhibition. Do you mind pulling that in front of you and just holding it up in the camera can zoom in on it for us? This is one of the images, a detail shot. So it tells part of the story. This is by Walker Mack and this is right in the middle of the pit. Where? The pit. The pit. I think they like to call it city place now. City place. That's what I meant to say. I still call it the pit also. The students really like to say the pit. The pit, yeah, I'm sure they do. That's great. That's really, I mean, it's funny because we all know what it is, but it's such a, you know, it just focuses in on, pardon the pun, the nuts and bolts, you know, you see the track, you know what it is, but it's just a very artsy shot of the effort going into there now, into that space. Absolutely. Mm-hmm. That's cool. And again, I wanted my students to not feel like they had to tell a whole story, but just to capture, spend some time, feel it, see what they could see and interpret it in their own way. Right, evoke a feeling. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, I think they did a great job. I know at the presentation at the college, one of the first pictures that came up was the top of the cathedral, you know. And I think I'm allowed to talk about the cathedral right now, but we're in the midst of trying to save it, you know, and it's a big part of, there we go. It's a big part of that, I mean, that was its own separate urban renewal, right? You had that burnt, the fire, and then they built this modernist building that served the community really well since, and it's evocative of that time, that whole transition of architectural styles and time, and, you know, obviously, we think it could serve the community well into the future, but that was great, I saw that, and I was like, yes, that's why these things are important, so. And I think for a lot of my students, they wanted to go beyond just simply representing the places, but finding days where there were clouds, one of my students, Autumn Farmer, did double exposures, one student experimented with scrolling and having images overlap each other, and therefore try to convey something about transience and change with a sense of mood. Like you said, I don't know if it's an excuse, but some of them allowed for some of the dust on there to be seen, too, which gives it a bit of an older feel. Yeah. We allowed that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, overall, you're pretty pleased with their efforts. Pretty much so, yeah. And they all expressed really beautiful reflections about it afterward, how important it was to them to kinda hone in and really pay attention to these things that they otherwise take for granted, especially since a lot of these students come for four years and leave, and they don't really think so much about what's beyond their tried and true past. The building's right there at Champlain College. I mean, we all do it. I walk past things all the time, and just don't look up, and all of a sudden it's like when something's suddenly in the news, or it's a pit and it's been there a long time, now we're starting to focus on it, and even that, that's been ongoing for so long now. They just changed some of the design. They're gonna get rid of the rooftop restaurant and go with housing, which is fine. We need a lot of housing, but all the efforts to turn that around and do something. I've been telling people, well, it'll be better. It'll be better, because it's a pit and they're reconnecting the two streets, and so, Lily, right? Yes, so our lead student researcher, Lily Sakaniwa, has been working hard on interviewing a number of different community members who either were connected with the little Italy neighborhood that predated urban renewal, or who are connected with the City Place Project as well, or also some local historians. So she has prepared a podcast, a two-part podcast, and then over the summer, summer she'll be working on a documentary as well. So that content will be available for public viewing, for public listening pretty soon, definitely by the time of our fall event. So she's putting that together now, the podcast. Yep, she's putting it together now. Great opportunity for some sustained research. We went to City Hall. We looked at urban renewal records in City Hall. Of course, we, she did a deep dive into some records that are right at Champlain College in our special collections, and then she's also been to the Vermont State Archives and looked at some records there in relation to the urban studies that happened in what became the urban renewal area in the 1930s. So looking at historical context, primary sources, the perspectives of the people who were directly affected by urban renewal, and then of course, the later view, our contemporary view, looking back on all the change that's happened in downtown. It's a lot of information. She seems to be doing pretty well with it. She's doing a great job. Not overwhelmed at all. Especially because you know, doing background research and stuff like that. Once you start digging into the archives or you're looking at landmaps or it's like a wormhole or a rabbit hole, right? Definitely. Well, the nice thing about this project is she's with us for a full year. She's been working on this project. She will be working on this project for a full year. So she'll have a great deal of time to do some research and talk to a lot of folks who are connected with the project in some way. And she will just have sustained a period of time to produce a really great quality project as well. She seemed really energetic and excited about it. And I love the sound by she got of Dave Farrington's aunt, right? Was it his aunt, her great aunt? I forget. His aunt, Monica Farrington, who's a former resident of the Little Italy neighborhood. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So her perspective, now her nephew is building city place and that's just drawing that parallel, that line from here to what was there to what's coming next, it's pretty interesting to hear and somebody alive from then to now. Yes. And I think another great thing about this project for our students is, of course, we all are familiar with the Burlington area. We have a connection to it as probably many of the viewers tonight as well. But for our students, it might be their first time really doing a experiential deep dive into the history of Burlington, getting out and exploring the city. But they're also uncovering some themes that they can use to investigate places, either their hometowns or other places that have meaning to them in the future. So there's definitely some universal themes coming out of this project, which have been really wonderful to explore with the students as well. Yeah, and it seems like a really good opportunity for the, again, interdisciplinary. So they're working together in your group. They're working together, I'm sure, there. Lily's putting her stuff together and all of them are communicating about this one overarching theme. So it's pretty cool. They seem to be really bonding at the presentation. I saw them making faces of each other and laughing and teasing one another, but in that collaborative way, good natured ribbing. Yeah, and we have more opportunity in the fall because we'll have another round of Jordan's photography students joining us. And then we also have a podcasting class that will be working on this project as well. So we have students coming at it from multiple angles and it's great to have a large cohort working on the same project as well. So what's the, I'm getting the emails because we're trying to be a good community partner and visit and stuff like that. But so there are emails about the larger group that are doing the different projects. Obviously, I like our project best, but what is all that about? So what's the end result of all this and how do you satisfy the grant and what they're overarching, what they wanna see from this project? Oh, I think that's a great question. So we're one of 13 colleges across the US working on projects. Every site has a very different theme, but the end goal is the same, which is to introduce undergraduate students to doing humanities research during primary sources and bring the results of their research to the public in some way. So some sites are doing exhibits, some are collecting oral histories. We will be having an exhibit in the Art Gallery at Champlain College in November and then also we'll have a closing event that will be kind of the culmination of the project that will be on November 30th. So that will be an opportunity for community members for the public to join us to hear more directly from the students about their work and to get a closer look at some of the things they've been working on. Right, right. And there's the public benefit and people will come and they'll gain all that knowledge from what your students have been doing. I don't wanna ruin anything, but what's the art show, the Art Gallery kind of thing? Is there gonna be, again, photographs with some background sounds and documentary playing somewhere? Has that all worked out yet or is that they're still working on that? Who puts that together? Six months to kind of see what the students come up with and figure out how it works best together, but exactly what you were describing is kind of what we have in mind at this point. There may, there's some possibility that we may also have an opportunity for members of the public to participate, maybe record a memory or comment as well. I think that would be a great addition. So the students will be the driver, though, putting this together. And so it's one more thing they're gonna have to do and you guys will just make sure that it's just ushered in a little bit or something. Well, this will fit within the framework of a local history event that I facilitated for Champlain for a number of years. So we have kind of this existing structure. And this just works out that we can put the two pieces together and use the structure to showcase the student work in this case. That's pretty cool. It kind of makes me want to go back to school. Yeah. So other thoughts? Like where you want to see the next group of students? I mean, are you pushing them in a certain direction or what are your... Good question. Well, I think one of the interesting things will be when we pick it up again in the fall, it'll be a different season. The students came out of winter that had its own feel and vibe, texture as it were, mostly in black and white. What'll happen in the fall? How will things have advanced with city center? Is that what it is? Oh, city place. City place, yeah, yeah. And with different students and their interests and sensibilities. So yeah, I'll create another project. I'll have two intro classes. So it probably will be midway through this semester when they kind of dig into it a little bit and see what they can uncover in their own way. Yeah, that's cool. And your gang? I won't be teaching that class again. It's only in the spring that we... Oh, is it? It's a yearly course. But I'll also be working on the exhibition and kind of coordinating with some of the students. Is there going to be putting stuff together anyway? So you can stuff together and we'll figure out a way to have the sounds playing in the exhibit as it's happening in kind of a creative and interesting way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. And so the culmination, the November event, what's that all about? So in November, we have reserved the Art Gallery at Champlain College, which is in our center for communication and creative media on Maple Street. And so we have that space for most of the month of November. So stay tuned for the official dates of the unveiling. And then on November 30th, that evening we'll be having our local history event, our community event. So members of the public will be, definitely be invited to join us for that. And that will take place in an event space that's in the same building. So people who come will have the opportunity to visit the exhibit in the Art Gallery and also sit and listen to the formal presentation part of the event as well. Cool, so it'll be a big production that day. Yeah, lots going on, lots to see and take in for sure. No, that's pretty cool. It's fun, I'm really glad to be part of it too. You know, I hope we're doing a good job as a community partner. Absolutely, yeah. You know what's interesting is when we submitted the proposal for this project and we came up with a theme, it was in that dormant period where the city place construction hadn't started and they hadn't received the full go ahead from the city to break ground again. So the pit was really just a pit. And so we had no idea, of course, that things would develop as they did, but the timing is very serendipitous. And of course the discussion in terms of the outcome of the Catholic Cathedral, the Cathedral Immaculate Conception, that is also come about since we submitted our proposal as well. So things are happening. This is a good time, I think, for this project. Yeah, it's a dynamic part of the city.  And you know, I do think, I mean, there's high, I never liked the mall.  So overall, it'll be better, I think, you know. And the Cathedral has a lot of community support. There's four separate community groups that have all made basically full price offers to keep it and turn it into multiple different, you know, things that would benefit the community, either a venue for music and events or a local history museum. There's a group that's not the Chittenden County Historic Society, but they wanna create a Burlington history space, you know, and have all that. So we'll see, fingers crossed, you know, everything's up in the air right now over there and happening at the same time. So it's really pretty cool to, like you said, serendipitous to have it all come together at the same time, you know, while this project is going on. Anything else you wanna give us a heads up about? Anything coming up? Just that we had talked about regrouping during this program in the fall. So we'll do an update at that point and that will be much closer to the date of our public event at the end of this project. So we'll be able to give more detail as far as the preview of what that event and exhibit will entail. Good, so I can, like, my driving questions, I can really, I'll start now, you know, and put you on the spot. Well, that's really, that's great. I'm looking forward to that, you know, again. I wanna remind everybody at home too that we have the Preservation Burlington Homes Tour first time in four years. We were very nervous about having it come together and it really did. I think it's gonna be great. Seven Days is doing our tickets now. Flintix doesn't do them anymore, so we went with Seven Days, so it's a little bit different. So people that have done it in the past or, you know, we have a lot of regulars. I mean, we've already sold 336 tickets and got a bunch of donations and stuff. So it's really, it's pretty fun. We always hoped for about 400 people or something, you know, so one year we had 550 or something, which was crazy. But interesting houses, it's gonna be a good time. Everybody can go to our website, Preservation Burlington org and check it out and sign up for tickets to go. What is the date of the Homes Tour this year? Thank you. It's June 10th, my birthday. Wow. And it's from 12 to four o'clock, so it's, yeah, it's a four hour stint, we start. And yeah, so June 10th, 12 to four o'clock, everybody get your tickets and go, because we don't wanna sell out and turn people away. We don't. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Thank you guys for coming here and sharing all this information and the photos and stuff, it's amazing. Oh, good, and we're pulling up the raise, rebuild, repeat, save the date. There we go. Everybody, thanks for tuning in. Live 525, Preservation Burlington. For more information on Burlington history, tours or events, or anything we've talked about tonight, go to our website and get a marker for your historic house, preservationburlington.org. And we'll see you next month. Thanks everybody.


John Avalon, welcome and congratulations on Lincoln and the fight for peace. Thank you, my friend. It's good to see you. You point out in the book, John, that over 16,000 other books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, and yet you say, yet few, if any, have focused on his role as peacemaker. Why did you pursue this angle? My guiding light in writing a book, as you can relate probably, is that you should write the book you want to read. But there's a tendency, especially given I wrote this during the Trump presidency, on nights and weekends, as editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast and as an anchored analyst here at CNN. You know, spending time with Lincoln was a pleasure. It was medicine. But that's not a good enough reason to write a book about a guy. I had found a quote more than a decade before that stuck with me from an unexpected source, an American general who oversaw the occupation of Germany, a guy named Lucius Clay, who was born in Macon, Georgia, 30 years after the Civil War. And he oversaw what is known as the good occupation. And this had been the subject of some interest to me in the wake of the Iraq War. What did we do right in Germany? What did we do right in Japan? And somebody asked Lucius Clay that question. What guided your decisions? And he said, I tried to think what Abraham Lincoln would have done south if he had lived. And that was so unexpected and so profound to me that I became fascinated with, what was Lincoln's plan to win the peace? What was it that was thwarted? And the reason I'd never been written before is because he was assassinated five days after Appomattox. He never got to implement his vision. But as I show in the book, if you look at his speeches, his proclamations, his policies, his letters, his statements to generals, his personal actions and examples, particularly in the last six weeks of his life, he has a very clear idea of how he believes we can win the peace after winning the war. And that's one of his revolutionary insights. If you don't win the peace, you don't really win the war, particularly in a civil war, particularly in a democracy. We have to learn how to live together again. And I distill it to a very simple prescription. Unconditional surrender followed by a magnanimous peace. You start the book off brilliantly with a scene of Lincoln walking into Richmond as the south is about to fall. It's April 4th, 1865. And again, this is written brilliantly, almost cinematically. Lincoln, talk about that day and what it says about our 16th president. You know, Lincoln in the fall of Richmond is one of the most cinematic moments in American history. He chooses to go to Richmond less than two days after the city had fallen. The Confederates abandoned the capital, burnt it behind them. The city's not fully secure yet. It's secured militarily. There's no great military guard to meet President Lincoln when he scrapes his shore in a rowboat. And he arrives with his son, Tad, on the boy's 12th birthday. And it is a moment piled high with risk, high with drama. The city is still burning. Lincoln makes his way uphill from the river. He's recognized by newly liberated slaves. They cluster around him. He makes his way as a crowd gathers around him ever larger, going up the hill. And at one point, one of his guards sees a Confederate man in gray with a rifle tracing his path. He could have been killed at any moment. But it was a moment where he was really connecting with the people. There was a feeling with a force of revelation. And it was where his personal touch is most exhibited. And he ends up making his way to the Confederate White House and sits in Jefferson's Davis' chair and looks out the same windows. And all his actions and statements from that day, which somehow gets short shrift, even in two-volume biographies of Lincoln sometimes, are just weighted with the awareness that he is setting a personal example of magnanimity. There are many stories from that day that stand the test of time. But one of them is as he's going to his boat, the Malvern to spend the night, because he's going to have further negotiations with the few remaining Confederates the next day to talk in terms of peace. And the 29-year-old German immigrant, General Gottfried Weitzel, who is overseeing the occupation of Richmond at the time, who had previously been running the 25th Corps of African-American Union soldiers, asked him who was getting on the boat, how should I treat the rebels now under my command? And Lincoln says, I think we are not likely to find harmony through hatred and resentment. If I were in your place, I'd let him up easy. Let him up easy. But throughout that day, every detail, which I cobbled together from contemporaneous journalists to letters home, to memoirs by Black Union soldiers to really build out. It's not only the first scene, but it's the heart of the book in many respects. That day is one of the most powerful in American history. You are looting John to the danger. Why is he there on that? He doesn't have to be there. Why is he in this seat of Confederacy as the civil war nears its end? He wants to be there.  He's been a wartime president despite being a man of peace. He is at the front lines visiting his generals at a place called City Point, which was the Union headquarters for the last nine months of the war. It's actually south of Richmond, right where the siege of Petersburg was happening. Petersburg being a vital transportation hub for the Confederacy. And what Grant knew is that if he could take Petersburg, Richmond would go. The supply lines would be conscious reminder of how often war is an operational question, as well as one of force, as we sometimes are belatedly reminded. And when he got word, he went there because he'd been recently re-inaugurated, or it's given a second inaugural address. He was exhausted. He was tired. He wanted to get out of Washington. He also felt that if he was on the front lines that maybe, just maybe, he could talk to his generals in person about his vision of winning the peace, meeting on the River Queen in a painting that hangs in the White House to this day bought by Harry Truman in 1947, painting called The Peacemakers. Famous painting where, you know, Lincoln's there in the River Queen, which was the presidential steamship, the time talking to Sherman Grant, Lincoln in the center, and then Admiral Porter. And he says in that meeting and many others, give them the most liberal and honorable terms.  We want them to have, to return to the laws of this nation. So on the one hand, he's setting his generals a message about the kind of peace that he wants to see in terms of surrender, he imagines, which basically Grant, when he writes out the letter of surrender at Appomattox, he's taking dictation from the many times he's spoken to Lincoln in the previous days. But he's also there to encourage the soldiers and the officers to press on. That's part of his rationalization. If he is at the front, he does not think they will lose an opportunity to be aggressive. And this has been a constant theme. It's nothing he worries about with Grant, but it's why he's cycled through five generals before. They were being insufficiently aggressive. So he's at the front lines already. And he finally gets word after visiting Grant in Petersburg the day after it falls, spending an hour and a half with them on a porch of a house that still exists, which now apparently is near to be in being. But he hears, you know, back at city point that Richmond has fallen. And against the advice of obviously the Secretary of War, who sees it as reckless, he says, don't worry about me. I'll watch after myself, but I'm going to Richmond. I want to see Richmond. It was the prize. He's been fighting the Confederacy. But he didn't go in with it with a conquering spirit. There's no triumphalism about Lincoln towards the end of the war. There is instead sort of a big hearted humility. And he walks in. He doesn't arrive at the head of a grand army. He walks in and he shakes hands. And when people follow his feet, he says, do not kneel to me. That's not right. Do not thank me for your freedom. Thank God only. And that moral humility is very characteristic of him. But he got to see Richmond. He was always very concerned about making sure he understood how people were feeling on the ground, feeling of the people. It's one of the reasons he hung out in telegraph offices so he'd get the latest information. But that's different than getting the feel of the people. And that's one of the things he hoped to get Richmond. So in the book's first chapter, you asked the question, what accounts for Lincoln's transformation from an untested prairie lawyer to a wise wartime president? What's your answer? Character and the capacity to grow. I mean, I think it's very clear if anyone's spent any time studying history and you know this, that certainly in presidents, but I think with all people that character is the single most important quality. Character gives you the 3 AM courage. Character says what someone's instincts will be. If they have good character, the country will be fine. If they don't, nothing else really matters. The capacity to grow is also key. And you got to remember, and this is part of the miracle of Lincoln in terms of studying his leadership. He is the most unlikely president for any time, but especially at that time. Here's the country on the verge of civil war. It's a powder keg because of the expansion of slavery. He comes into the presidency representing an upstart third party, Republican Party, the most successful third party of all time. It's a moderate progressive party at that time. It's a big tent party dedicated to opposition of slavery. Lincoln has had precisely one term in Congress well over a decade before. He's been a prairie lawyer for most of the last several years. He's had no executive experience, right? A governor, not a mayor, never run a business. He's got no military experience. The only thing he's been as an honorary captain in a Blackhawk war sort of regimen of volunteers where he jokes the bloodiest fights he saw were with mosquitoes. And so he is the most unlikely figure. He is attacked and demonized and dismissed and disregarded, but it's the combination of character plus a capacity to grow. And I think that's rooted in the essential elemental aspects of his personality. I think we often forget how often someone's politics and policies are reflection of their principles and that's often a reflection of their personality. His personality was defined by empathy and honesty and humor and humility. Those are the critical elements of his character as well. There are some, if you look at his psyche, there are some demons roaming around. Oh yeah.  In fact, he even contemplates suicide at a couple points in his youth. And yet he takes the presidency during the darkest hour in our history. So what sustains him during the course of his presidency? It's a great question. And his personality is defined by sunshine and shadow. One of the constants in Lincoln's life is that he combines opposites. He is known as a storyteller, someone who tells jokes all the time, but that's really a form of self-medication because of his own melancholy qualities which were very defined early on. I think growing up in the prairie alone and the pain, for example, of having to build his mother's coffin when she dies as a boy is searing. But it also adjusts expectations. There's no sense that life is going to be all sweetness and light and that you're guaranteed that. Life is difficult, especially if you want to achieve great things. And Lincoln, I think, develops a sense of emotional discipline because he feels so greatly. His pains are compounded by the fact that he and his wife have a very difficult relationship, particularly after the death of their son Willie in 1862. At the lowest point of the war, he suffers the greatest loss imaginable. And I do think that more than a stoicism, I think there is a deepening of faith that you see. Lincoln is not an orthodox believer. He's not a member of any denomination. But he becomes more religious over the course of his presidency, I think, in part due to the pressures of the presidency and just dealing with the bottomless grief of losing Willie. One of the stories that always struck me as being quite odd is that he was seen several times reading the book of Job for comfort. And he would emerge oddly true. I think because the sense that God has a plan, even if you feel unmoored from all of that, surely God must have a plan. And you see that in his second inaugural address, which is a very Old Testament vision of the Civil War as collective punishment for the original sin of slavery, but ends on that Old New Testament paragraph, New Testament leadership, a roadmap to reconciliation. Also his use of humor, which is so characteristic to him. I think many people have a very graven image of Lincoln. It's what's communicated in the photographs, which are, there's no smiling allowed in those photographs given the shutter speed of the time, but also the Lincoln Memorial itself. Lincoln in fact was a man who spoke in parables. He told stories and jokes all the time to the great annoyance of many of his contemporaries. I mean, you wouldn't believe it. There are these objectively historic moments in history like before he signs the emancipation proclamation. He is reading from a pamphlet of his favorite humorists, whether Artemis Ward or Petroleum V. Nasbi. And it seems inappropriate, but partly what he's doing is he understands that storytelling and humor is a way of communicating to the common people in a way they can understand. So it's a communication strategy. It's a time saver, he says too, because often he's able to explain his position through a story rather than going into great detail. But there's one other story I love about the interplay between that sunshine and shadow of his personality, where it's 1862, that darkest of years. And the Union has just lost a devastating battle. And Lincoln's friend Isaac N. Arnold is a congressman from Illinois. Remember, that's the West then. Goes to the White House to see him. And at the time you could just show up to the White House knocking the door of an official doorman that lets you out. And he found Lincoln sitting by the fireplace. He's reading one of his favorite humorists, Sardimus Ward, and laughing. And Isaac N. Arnold is shocked and he is furious. And he says to his friend, how can you be laughing at a time like this? And Lincoln turns to him, Arnold recounts in his memoirs, with tears welling up in his eyes, throws the book down on the floor and says, don't you know that if I could not find some relief, my heart would break and I could not do this job? And it's moments like that that I think are not only so revealing but oddly comforting. You know, when we understand our presidents, particularly our greatest president, as a human being, we take them off the pedestal. We can look them in the eye. I think we make his wisdom more accessible. We make the lessons of his life more accessible. When we make them too distant and imply false perfection or just an overly simplistic view of who they were, they become more distant and therefore inaccessible. And so moments like that I find, it's gut-wrenching. It's also very revealing to realize that he's using humor as a form of self-medication. And they're definitely less healthy ways to handle that in the grand scheme of things. So I've read innumerable books on Abraham Lincoln. But I've not read a paragraph that so vividly describes Lincoln as the one you write in your introduction, which I'm going to read. He was a man of peace in a time of war, tough-minded but tender-hearted. While spurring his generals to be more aggressive on the battlefield, Lincoln embodied an interpersonal absence of malice. He practiced the politics of the Golden Rule, treating others as he would like to be treated. He did not demonize people he disagreed with, understanding that empathy is the pathway to persuasion. He was uncommonly honest and tried to depolarize bitter debates by using humor, logic, and scripture. Balancing moral courage with moderation, Lincoln believed that decency could be the most practical form of politics. But he also understood that people were more inclined to listen to reason when greeted from a position of strength. From this foundation, Lincoln developed his prescription for peacemaking, unconditional surrender followed by magnanimous peace. That is a brilliant way of capturing Lincoln in my view. But I want to ask you, John, so many leaders, so many U.S. presidents have emulated and channeled Abraham Lincoln. I've interviewed seven presidents, not one of them. One of them would tell me that they didn't look at Abraham Lincoln during the darkest hours of their presidency. I wonder, from the research that you've done, from what you can glean, is there someone that Lincoln looked toward as a model for leadership as he tackled the greatest challenge our country has ever faced? It's a great question, and I really appreciate you highlighting that paragraph. You stumbled upon my favorite paragraph in the book, and no one can say that about their own work, but that was one that I... I always try to get the music right, but I spent a lot of time on that paragraph because it's about so many things.  So thank you for likening that. First of all, I'm also really impressed by the president's little drop in the mic moment before you're there. And I'm sure all of them identify with a subtly different facet of Lincoln because he is so multifaceted. He is this sort of archetypal forever American. And indeed, as I make the case in the book, the arc of his life actually follows a classic hero's journey in the Joseph Campbell sense, which is one of the reasons, I think, for the endurance of his story. But that's... you ask who Lincoln looked to. And I'll answer that in two ways. Part of what's miraculous, impressive, sign of genius in Lincoln is that he is confronting a problem without precedent. There's never been a civil war on this scale before. There's never been a Democratic Republic on this scale before. So unlike even the founders, when they're doing out the Constitution in constitutional convention, they can draw on at least the lessons of ancient Greece and Rome and how republics fell in the past, however distant. And they did. Madison would write up treatises based on books Jefferson sent them from Europe to say, look, here's how ancient Greece and Rome and republics fell. What lessons can we take and how can we build fail safes in the Constitution? That was a process they were consciously engaged in. I wrote about it a bit in my last book, Washington's Well, it's fascinating to me. Lincoln doesn't have that. There's no great leader of a civil war, of a democracy and a civil war on that scale. He basically invents a reconciling leadership. It reflects his personal temperament. He's a moderate temperament. He's a reconciler in time of radicals and reactionaries. And the feedback loop between those two is part of what gets us to civil war. But there is no one person he can draw on, which makes his achievement all the more impressive because so many presidents to your point draw on Lincoln. That said, you can see very clearly that as a young man, being almost entirely self-educated, he was very attached to the Parson-Weems biography of George Washington. Many of the founders were still alive in the early years of his childhood. So there was a sense of communion with the examples of the revolutionary generation. And he spoke about that a lot. There's a speech he gives in Trenton on his way to the presidency where he talks about how even as a boy, he understood there must be something more than common about the courage and sacrifice of the founding father's generation. That America had to stand for something more than itself. He calls Americans, God's almost-chosen people, which is a phrase I love. So I do think that he is drawing on the examples of the founding fathers, particularly the courage and fortitude they show in the war. In those Valley Forge moments, Lincoln crossing the Delaware, those moments of great risk and real perseverance in a sense that America means something more than just itself. We're not a tribal nation. We're based on an idea. And so our patriotism is much more than mere nationalism. So I think he has a sacred relationship with the idea of the Union. So is this a uniquely American form of leadership that Lincoln is manifesting during the course of his presidency? No. It goes on to inspire leaders around the world. That's one of the extraordinary things. And actually there's a long list of particularly Nobel Peace Prize winners who cite Lincoln. His leadership, when Nelson Mandela died, his biographer in Africa wrote a obituary for him called Africa's Lincoln. And he made the point that both Lincoln and Mandela did the most difficult thing that most politicians don't do. Most politicians divide in order to conquer. They pit tribes against tribes. They use the old calling card of us against them. It's a very cheap shortcut, leadership, because it's easy to galvanize people against their fellow citizens in some way, shape, or form. You can blame other people. You can become a leader of a tribe. But of course, particularly that old demagogic trick is particularly deadly to a democracy. And what he said Lincoln and Mandela both did was to focus not on what divided people, but focused on what united them, their common humanity. They tried to lift everybody up and make a divided system whole and consistent, which is one of the definitions of reconciliation. And so you look back and you see Mahatma Gandhi praising Lincoln. And particularly what inspires foreign observers of Lincoln. By the way, Willie Brandt and Martin Luther King go on and on. It's not just that he ended slavery and helped the nation move closer to its founding ideal. A more perfect union, something we don't arrive at. But that he extended his hands out to the fellow citizens he defeated. That was actually in many people's eyes one of his greatest achievements. And it's the one we spend the least time talking about or thinking about in the United States these days, it seems to me. Because it goes against all the human instincts. The cycle of vengeance is difficult because it is naturally occurring within human nature. It's far more difficult as a leader to think long term. And that was part of his genius. He is able to look beyond the cycle of violence and vengeance. And imagine a future that's not predetermined by the pain of the past or the present. And then, except the leadership, to steer us toward that horizon of reconciliation. That's remarkable. Because it's so unusual that it so stood out and inspired leaders around the world. So what was Lincoln's vision for reconstruction? He saw the war to its end. Through his inexorable resolve we conquer the Confederacy. We make our nation whole. But what was his vision going forward? Well, let's start with that and then we'll talk about what went awry. There's a lot to talk about there. I don't think we can talk about studying reconstruction in the opposite society. But his vision of reconstruction was practical and non-ideological. But he had certain principles he wanted to guide us. It's very characteristic of Lincoln, by the way. He focuses on great goals for which he is going to be inflexible. He calls them, in many cases, in two occasions where he's negotiating with Confederates. He writes three indispensable conditions down on a piece of paper. So there's no compromise on those. This is totally negotiable. He's going to be enormously flexible in everything else. It's characteristic of the way he thinks about leadership. We're going to get the big things done. How we get there, that'll change. I'm willing to be very flexible, liberal, as he would say. Part of what it is, is that he believes the rank-and-file rebels have been misled. And he's willing and says early on that he wants to give them amnesty. He does not want to be nearly as lenient on the people who misled them, the people who ought to know better. These are the Confederate leaders, the members of Congress and the courts, and the military who left the Union to join the Confederacy, to join the rebellion. He doesn't want them to be able to claw back their power and their privilege and their property quite so fast. On the other hand, he doesn't want to execute them, which is the traditional punishment for treason. He also wants to move black and white Americans. He says over time, and he knows this will take time, towards living themselves out of their old relations with one another. And he wants to move blacks towards not just the rights determined in the 13th and then 14th and later the 15th Amendment, all of which he imagined, but begin on a state-by-state basis. He's actually his very Federalist vision for reconstruction as long as certain conditions are met, part of which is the ratification of the 13th Amendment, ending slavery, and then moving towards voting rights for African-Americans beginning with veterans and what he calls the very educated. He knows it's going to be a process. It's going to take time. But he's thinking in very concrete ways about this early in the war, and he's thinking about it, not just in terms of securing military gains so that you don't have a vacuum of power so vigilantes don't come up. You've got to establish law and order. He's a lawyer after all. But political reform, right? Removing the root cause of slavery, a root cause of the war, which is slavery. You know, he understands, and this is why one of his indispensable conditions is no ceasefire before surrender. If he gives a ceasefire before surrender, he's afraid the country will backslide on its commitment to ending slavery, and then the war will reignite. He says, nobody wants peace more than I, but I'm unwilling to have a peace if on the terms in which it's achieved, would only guarantee more war. He's thinking about economic expansion. He works with Republicans in Congress to pass very ambitious, far-reaching economic agenda in 1862. Again, the darkest year of the war with an eye towards creating conditions for an economic expansion when the war ends that would move the nation's attention west. Take some of the north-south polarization and the irritant out of things. Move everybody west. And in doing so, to create a sense of optimism about a shared prosperous future. And finally, the most difficult bit is the immigration. And that's why he's thinking on a very granular local level. He doesn't want to top down heavy reconstruction. He understands that ultimately that kind of healing is going to have to occur on a community level. And so while the federal government can establish structures and rules in place, ultimately that's the living out of the old relations with one another that has to occur. And that's got to happen on a local level, not a top-down level in his eyes.  Lincoln's first vice president during his first term is Hannibal Hamlin. He's an abolitionist senator from New England. But in his second term, he drops Hamlin from the ticket and he picks up Andrew Johnson. Who is Andrew Johnson and what is his impact on reconstruction? Remember how we were talking about how character is the most important quality character. Character is destiny is the Greek sin. Character is destiny eventually. You know, Andrew Johnson is, first we should say that Lincoln picking Johnson on a political level is pretty inspired. Right? The reason he picks Hannibal Hamlin early on is that he's from the West Illinois. He wants someone from the East, Maine. And you know, Hamlin as vice presidents didn't participate in the cabinet meetings. They didn't participate in the function of the executive government. So Hannibal Hamlin was in Maine most of the war. But Johnson to his credit is the only southern senator who doesn't secede with his state. Right? It's a pretty big deal. He knew Johnson from their one term in Congress. Johnson came from humble beginnings which he was sort of obsessed with, but they shared that in common. And here he was able to run for reelection by rebranding the National Union party. And actually if you look behind me there, I have a little poster from the National Union party there. Because I love that. And he's got a Democrat as his vice president. So this really is a National Unity ticket. No president's ever been assassinated before. And so even though Lincoln's getting death threats all the time and he's pretty fatalistic about it, it doesn't, I think, adequately occurred to him that he could be selecting a successor. Ironically, the radical Republicans thought Johnson was their guy. They thought Lincoln was going to be too lenient to the South and Johnson would be tougher. Lincoln's assassinated. And all his effort to create a magnanimous piece is dashed, right? The pendulum starts swinging back towards vengeance again. And some leading confederates recognize that. General Johnson says when he surrenders to Sherman a few days later when he hears about it, he says, my God, the South just lost the best friend it had. That was not an uncommon attitude. That's not to say there weren't plenty of southerners writing in their diaries that the tyrant got what he deserved because they did. But there was a sense from people who had a larger perspective that this was going to be bad for the country and bad for the South than it was. But they didn't expect what they were getting with Johnson. He is he is alternately radical and reactionary. He is not a reconciler. He is erratic. He is thin-skinned. I found a quote from the Atlantic Monthly at the time which describes him as being egotistic to the point of mental disease. Which, you know, many people say sounds reminiscent. And he does things once he starts getting into his groove that clearly are a departure with Lincoln, even though he always says I'm trying to pursue what Lincoln would have done in 1863. Well, first of all, Lincoln in 1863 is not Lincoln in 1865. Second of all, Lincoln he's undoing things that Lincoln clearly would have supported. I mean, he starts by trying to dismantle the Friedman's Bureau, which is an incredibly important sort of public-private initiative under the auspices of the Defense Department to help move people from slavery to self-sufficiency and to take care of refugees in the wake of the Civil War. He just wants to dismantle it. He vetoes civil rights acts that Lincoln never would have done. He acquiesces to the creation of the Black Codes which are basically slavery without the chains. So ex-Confederates start running local local running and getting control of political office. And one of them in Mississippi, a former Brigadier General says, look, we have to accept the end of slavery but that doesn't mean we have to accept equality. And they start passing laws to fundamentally restrict the freedom in every sense of the newly freed slaves, the formerly enslaved Americans of African descent as one of my favorite journalists, Thomas Morris Chester writes the time. Black correspondent for the Philadelphia Press and the White House. He betrays the ideal of reconciliation and Lincoln's vision of Reconstruction. And it gets the nation often precisely the wrong path because the radical Republicans then overreact. He pulls black troops from the south for fear of offending the Southerners. Well, then radical Republicans send more troops back to the south increasing resentments.  So he is a destructive president when it comes to certainly the legacy of emancipation and reenacting the nation. Section 5 of your book is talks about the evolution of Reconstruction in three different acts. You've started the first act with the Andrew Johnson presidency but take us through the trajectory of Reconstruction. So, you know, President Ulysses S. Grant who has the benefit of hearing and really internalizing Lincoln's vision for how you went a piece early on becomes president after Johnson. So, you know, he has a lot of campaigns on a slogan of let us have peace. And in his inaugural, you know, Grant's presidency often has historically gotten sort of short shrift from historians although it's beginning to make a rebound particularly his first term and deservedly so. I mean, one of the things he does in his first inaugural which he wrote himself was call for the passage of the 15th Amendment. You know, that's a pretty courageous act, you know, at that time. You know, it's a real credit when the KKK and white vigilante groups start terrorizing newly freed black families particularly those who have the temerity to run for office, black legislators. He goes to Congress personally, personally which is very unusual and lobbies for the passage of the Enforcement Acts which is the anti-KKK initiatives that were put in place. And he has the wit and wisdom to a point at a Southern Attorney General taking advantage of a new creation of a new Justice Department. The Attorney General previously had basically been like the White House Counsel. A guy named Amos T. Ackerman who had been a Southerner fought briefly for the Confederacy to be Attorney General to implement those laws, make it a little more just a little more difficult for them to say this was Yankee imperialism. And he consciously reached out to ex-Confederates who were his friends to support his campaign to try to reunite the nation that goes from James Longstreet to Mosby for Mosby's Raiders. And the first incarnation of the KKK actually is crushed. I mean they actually follow Lincoln's dictum even there. The rank and file to witness against the upper crust, they're given amnesty and the top tier of the KKK leaders go spend a decade at a prison near Albany, New York. And other white vigilante groups do emerge, don't get me wrong. But the Ku Klux Klan in its first incarnation is basically snuffed out by those actions. And so that is the brief moment of success. I mean there are black legislators throughout the South serving in Congress, the House and the Senate. We are making too rapid for some people clearly progress towards a multiracial democracy which is consistent with the majoritarian democracy. And one of the things that Reconstruction teaches us in the study of Reconstruction reminds us is that there's been enormous resistance at actual majoritarian and multiracial democracy over the course of our history. Deep. But the economic depression of 1873 really sucks the wind out of citizens enthusiasm for following through on the promise and the premise of Reconstruction. A group called the Redeemers, Democrats start to come back into power and they're calling, you know, even though the South's rebuilding, you know, many of them are calling for cutting taxes and cutting spending in part because they want to defund integrated public institutions. The election of 1876 comes through and Samuel Tilden a Democrat New Yorker, reformer not a opponent of slavery runs on a anti-corruption ticket wins the popular vote. Nobody wins the electoral vote is up in the air because there's a lot of questions. It goes to the month before the days before the inauguration a corrupt bargain is struck where Republicans hold on to the White House for one more term but Reconstruction has ended, troops are pulled and then you have segregation replacing slavery for a century. And what I think is not adequately appreciated often is we date things to that election of 1876 and the corrupt bargain of 1877 which is negotiated at a black socialist hotel, the Wormsley Hotel in Washington. But the court cases that go over decades, ex-Confederate start serving on courts and the Supreme Court certain laws are overturned and then state constitutions are rewritten. And so one of the when we debate sometimes well you know why should we care about accusations of voter intimidation voter suppression, elections of version because of Reconstruction because you can have three constitutional amendments passed and if they're not enforced they don't mean anything. In 1900 I found there are 180,000 registered black voters in the state of Alabama. Two years later there are 3,000 and that entire era of African-American legislators are erased from history. It's just a very sobering reminder of how much enforcing part one rights is absolutely essential because they can take the road. John, there's one inflection point, one point during the course of Reconstruction where we could have pulled together and put our nation on the right course as Lincoln might have wanted. It is a it's an interweaving of factors but if you ask me as I have been asked and it's a difficult question what would Lincoln have done differently which is different than sort of the counter factual histories that some folks want to drag you into that are fun conversations but ultimately kind of useless what I think you can say knowing Lincoln, knowing his policies is that he wouldn't have allowed the freedoms bureau to be dismantled he would have made it more robust and that could have created a landown in class of black farmers that in the long run could have made all the difference in the world I don't think he would have acquiesced to the black codes despite his focus on sort of a federalist vision of Reconstruction because it violated the fundamental promise and premise of the laws that had been passed and that also would have made all the difference in the world and I think he would have done what Grant did with regard to the KKK but he also would have had much more political capital than Andrew Johnson did and one of the things you see and you see this in history and I'm sure you can appreciate this in your own work there are certain windows in history where the cement is not set yet it's a jump ball moment and what happens in those windows has a disproportionate downstream effect and in the spring and early summer of 1865 was one of those moments and Johnson squandered it and let his foot off the gas so to speak with regard to the South White Southerners and that moment in which we could have had a real adjustment of the social contract consistent with treating everyone as individuals worthy of respect was lost and we fell back to group identity and group power politics and the resentments that flow from that and the deep seated races and it was never going to be erased quickly obviously became even more of a powerful cudgel so it's that window that was lost in the spring and summer of 1865 is the real tragedy it seems to be so your last book was Washington's Farewell a lens into the presidency of George Washington through his seminal Farewell address and of course your current book is on Lincoln so you've looked at these two great American presidents who clearly are in the pantheon of Washington or Abraham Lincoln oh man great question well I mean by height very good dodge thank you no I look they are rightly judged together because as is often been said Washington secured our liberty and secured the republic and Lincoln saved it what's more heroic I would argue that defending democracy can be just as heroic as winning it in the first place and that's what Lincoln embodies I think the struggles of Lincoln's time are more relevant to the debates and the fissures in our society today I think the story and this is where you get to being a nation founded on an idea of a tribal identity that kind of a nation depends on stories and a shared history disproportionately because anyone can buy into the story and indeed it needs to be inculcated and the second founding seems to me is a much more inherently unifying narrative more relevant to our times than perhaps the first founding is what also strikes me is the similar qualities they have are different neither is a formal education Lincoln is by far the better writer and thinker Washington's strength was judgment and a military bearing that mask command but both men also even though Lincoln was a real politician and Washington was not they both had a disinterested sense of the office and civic responsibility and a country over party all the way all the time they were men of deep principle Lincoln is a more engaging character he's a more I think relevant and resonant fellow because Washington was so self-monitoring that he kept himself distant even from his contemporaries in a way that Lincoln did not and Lincoln's speeches are are beautiful it's the poetry of democracy but what strikes me is how many commonalities they have and at the heart of it is this this combination of moral courage and moderation a real focus on uniting the nation not dividing it for political gain a focus on and the mere fact that Lincoln could do that in the middle of a civil war also is a great achievement Washington creates the nation he creates a national character through the force of his character but Lincoln preserves it and extends it and reconciles it to be consistent with our founding ideals so if I had to pick I'd put Lincoln one notch ahead of Washington we do this conversation under the auspices of the National Archives the repository of our nation's history why is it important John for our nation's youth to learn about civics and our history as a nation it's absolutely essential it's completely foundational it's the table stakes for being a self-governing society I mean when in Washington's farewell he talks about how enlightened opinion is essential for a self-governing society that requires education that requires understanding requires a sense of perspective it requires an understanding of the sacred trust you've been given and the institutions that have been handed down to you that you have to hand to the next generation better than we found them and without civic education without understanding of American history I don't think that's possible you're flying blind you're not going to adequately appreciate the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in this kind of country it is mission critical that we tell our story and by the way that's the good the bad and the ugly doesn't mean you need to do a whitewashed, overly sanitized version of history I think that's less interesting certainly less real and less relevant but you should celebrate the great good you should acknowledge the bad and you can talk about the ugly because it reminds us that the past generations were not remotely perfect and being a vigorous citizen means you've got to roll up your sleeves and get involved in a number in your chosen field but also think a little bit bigger about the responsibilities of being a citizen of the republic and helping the nation form a more perfect union and I think that's what civic education and American history and museums that are run by NARA and the civic organization these are places that reinforce the America's civic religion which is a term we don't use very often anymore but it's the sense of firmament that America does stand for something larger than itself and that by communing in these spaces and these places and understanding these people that you get a sense of the legacy that's handed down to us the space in which we operate the civic air in which we breathe and our place in it and it can inspire you to reach higher it can inspire you to play your part to write this chapter this great and sacred opportunity as being a member of We the Living as Lincoln Woods so it could not be more fundamental and I do think that when we have when we have downgraded it or when we have disrespected or when we have cut funding from these basic things in the long run you reap the whirlwind so I think we need to make an added and urgent effort right now to tell our story we've got to make the old stories new again that's part of the process but it's absolutely fundamental to being a Democratic Republic and especially at a time when accurately we are in a global struggle between democracy and autocracy perhaps a perpetual struggle it's even more important that's a perfect note on which to conclude this conversation and the book is Lincoln and the Fight for Peace an old story which is renewed and told brilliantly by my guest John Avalon. John Avalon, thanks so much thank you my friend, be well Mark take care