-I'm living on the power of the cane right now.

-Rubenstein: Alright.

Well, thanks for making the trip up.

And we'll talk about American history.

And as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country's founding, what do you think the Founding Fathers would have thought would be the most surprising thing if they came back today and they saw this country?

[ Laughter ] What would they be most surprised about?

-Well, I think probably -- -That you're on this stage, right?

-Yeah.

That I'm on the stage -- on the stage as a Black person and as a woman.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Other than that, what do you think they'd be most -- -Other than that, that we have such things called astronauts who go off into space.

I wouldn't say that they would be surprised by the success of the United States, but that the United States would be as powerful as it is and notable in the world.

I think that that would be a surprise.

That would be something that they would marvel at.

-Rubenstein: What do you think people be most surprised about?

-No matter how much Ben Franklin knew about science -- And, you know, we all know the Franklin stove and the electricity.

The list goes on and on of inventions -- I don't think anybody could have fathomed a satellite culture of today, the way that, you know, we're exploring space.

But more particularly, I suppose artificial intelligence, and what does that mean for writing and thinking and teaching and civics?

And, then, in a more political sense, I mean, maybe Jefferson would have thought of coast to coast, you know, expansion of our country.

That I think could have been plausible.

But the inventions of the, you know, Silicon Valley world, I don't know who could have thought of such things.

Even science-fiction writers have a hard time kind of having a living when you're having artificial intelligence as this beast in the middle of everything.

-So, when the country was founded, we had 3 million people -- 2.5 million whites and half a million slaves.

At that time, we were on the Eastern Seaboard.

I doubt that any of the Founding Fathers would have expected that we'd become the most powerful country in the world in terms of economics, finance, culture, education, technology -- almost anything you can think of -- geopolitical, military power -- everything.

What do you think are the one or two factors which enabled this country, originally only 3 million people, to rise up and after 250 years be the dominant country in so many different areas.

What do you think it was?

-One thing, the blessings of geography.

I mean, fortunate in terms of a friendly neighbor to the north -- As of now.

I mean now -- [ Laughter ] you know, and less powerful neighbors to the south, an extraordinary land mass, the capacity for agriculture, to grow food and to produce things.

And I would say the population growth and the strength and the diversity of the country.

Also, the institution of slavery helped build one part of the country -- well, built all the country actually -- immigration, all the kinds of things that go towards building a robust economy.

But we were really fortunate in geography, where the country is placed, and the agriculture, the land, and what you're able to produce from it.

-Rubenstein: You don't think it was private equity?

-Uh... [ Laughter ] No.

-Doug, what do you think were the most important factors, one or two, that enabled this country to go from 3 million, Eastern Seaboard, little, tiny country to this incredible power?

-Really, I would look, you know, beyond what we've been studying with the American Revolution for America 250. how seminal maybe the War of 1812 was.

You can look at it as a second revolution in some ways.

But getting control over the Great Lakes and all of the, you know... And look.

Washington burned.

The British burned it, as you guys know as well as anybody.

And the fact that Baltimore, Fort McHenry and the resistance -- You know, Washington was dead in 1799.

But the fact that the Northwest Ordinance, and, then, we got into Ohio and Indiana and Michigan.

And, then, Jefferson, who probably could have envisioned a lot -- and nobody knows more about it than my friend Annette.

But I think that exploration, of the sending of Lewis and Clark and getting all of that information of the West, or Zebulon Pike, who kept all the diaries and going to find the headwaters of the Red River or, you know, the Lake Itasca, the Mississippi, and that march across the land.

But if we had lost the War of 1812 or if the Louisiana Purchase didn't happen, that doubling the size of America, it would have been more of a 13-colony, maybe, you know, 16-colony/state America.

-Well, I think, also, I should have said this at the beginning as a law professor, the rule of law, to have a system of law that present -- -Rubenstein: The rule of law is what?

-The rule of law is important.

[ Laughs ] It is important, the rule of law that allowed for -- you remember that, the rule of law.

-He sat in on the Roy Cohn session.

-I know.

You remember.

We remember that thing that allowed for certainty in contracts, business, opportunity, people to have a sense of trust about things.

Yeah.

I think that mattered, as well.

-Let's suppose that what people expected at the time of the Revolutionary War actually happened, which was the British won.

Remember, we were a ragtag army.

Maybe only 25,000 people actually served under Washington over the course of the war.

And the British had more power and military equipment and so forth.

Suppose the British had won that war.

Would we be part of a Commonwealth, like Canada, or would we have broken away later?

What do you think would have happened?

-Probably broken away later.

We could have been part of a Commonwealth.

We would have broken away, because the main concern for people like Jefferson and others is that as long as we remained part of that empire and did not move West, there was a possibility that you'd be involved in European power politics.

And that's what they wanted to get away from.

I think the likelihood would be that people who were used to governing themselves, creating their own culture would have wanted to leave anyway at some other point.

-Rubenstein: What do you think?

-You know, I hearken back to when you're looking at those founders in their depth and really the last of the dynasty, James Monroe in the 1920s, we started being able to at least envision ourselves as a military power.

The fact that the British were beat in the War of 1812, the Battle of New Orleans, the Battle of Lake Erie, where we're building ships in Erie, Pennsylvania, that we're starting to act like a country that mattered.

But it could have all splintered because of France, Spain, Britain.

It could have been parceled off in any way.

And after all, we all talk about Aaron Burr with the Hamilton duel.

But, you know, Burr was out there trying to create his own country, and Texas was its own country, the Lone Star, for a while.

it could have been a lot of countries, like Latin America or Central America, instead of one United States.

-Now, the most important event that occurred over the last 250 years, some people would say in our country's history, was the Civil War.

The country was split down the middle.

The result of it was that country had stayed united and we eliminated slavery as the two major results of the war.

Suppose the South had won the war.

Where would we be today?

Would we be two separate countries?

And do you think slavery in some form would have stayed for another 50 years or so?

-Well, slavery could have continued -- certain parts of slavery.

Certainly, domestic slavery would have continued -- you know, slaves in the household, slaves, you know, doing that kind of work.

I think all of a sudden, though, if they had won, the Canadian border in a way would have been the Ohio River.

Slaves would have been escaping from the South, going to North, creating a conflict and creating, you know, turmoil from that.

So I think it would have been just endless wars, because -- -Rubenstein: Yeah.

What do you think would have happened if the South had won?

-It was doomed to fail, slavery, eventually.

But as Annette says, who knows?

It could easily go on 20 or 40 more years.

But, then, you have to also look at indigenous people and what started occurring, of relocation, the Trail of Tears, and the role of Andrew Jackson and how we're -- You know, that part is also a rough part of American history narrative to come to grips with.

You know, sometimes we want to think about people dining in taverns you know, saying, you know, look at our foundational documents.

The true foundational documents we're living by really came out of the Civil War, Lincoln's inaugurals, Gettysburg Address.

Emancipation Proclamation I think is like the big reboot for our country, and we're still living in that sphere.

-Gordon-Reed: Because, you know, when they had gradual emancipation plans, one of them, remember, had the last -- Southerners envisioned slavery eventually going away.

People say that often, that people in the South knew that slavery was gonna die.

But they had it figured that the last slave would be freed in like 2001.

So this was not something -- they didn't have a plan for immediate emancipation.

But I think enslaved people by the mid-19th Century, people are voting with their feet.

They're leaving.

And if they had won, they would have continued to do that.

-Rubenstein: Well, suppose Abraham Lincoln had lived to serve his entire second term.

Do you think the Reconstruction would have been much more successful?

And how would the country be in better shape or not if he had lived?

-Wow.

What a thing to contemplate.

He's so frozen in time in our mind due to the death.

But it would have been hard for Lincoln to continue.

Just the very fact he was assassinated by Confederates, you know, that didn't like what was happening, how he could have kept the reconciliation going, the spirit of Appomattox, you know, of Lee and Grant, peaceful surrender.

We're gonna limit punishment.

We're gonna heal the nation and all.

He would have tried that, Lincoln, but I'm sure there would have been mass pockets of resistance against him, you know, because he had become the symbol of a kind of disdain in the South.

With his death, he became the martyr, the Lincoln Memorial, the new America.

And so just like John F. Kennedy or somebody, when you're shot at the height of power and your spirit lives on -- we're living still on that spirit of Lincoln, the reality of him constantly going forward.

And would he have ever stayed as president?

I mean, FDR broke the two-term rule, but, you know, he had won in 1860 and then 1864.

He wasn't going to I think cling to power.

So he would have tried to back somebody, and maybe it would have been Andrew Johnson.

Maybe it wouldn't have been.

-Yeah.

Well, I mean, people suggest that he would have been much more conciliatory than people thought Johnson was gonna be.

Of course Johnson turns out to be the South's best friend.

But if Lincoln had lived and he had seen the kinds of things that were going on in the South, that Carl Schurz went down and did the tour and came back and saw the torrent of violence that was unleashed on the enslaved people -- the former enslaved people -- I mean, would he have remained as conciliatory as he did in the face of all of that?

But I think Doug is right.

If he had remained in power, there would have been real pockets of resistance.

-So, Annette, you won a Pulitzer Prize for one of your books, "The Hemingses of Monticello."

And it's featured, obviously, about Thomas Jefferson.

You spent a lot of your career on Thomas Jefferson.

He wrote a sentence that some people have said is the most famous sentence in the English language -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

How did a man who owned 600 slaves say that all men are created equal?

And what about women?

-Well -- [ Laughs ] What about women?

Well, you could do it in the same way that human beings have a set of intellectual beliefs that they don't have the emotional capacity to live up to.

I mean, you can know something is right, because he certainly thought of African-American people, African people, as men, because in the part of the Declaration that was excised, he refers to Africans as "MEN," in all caps, who had their sacred right to liberty destroyed.

So, that couldn't go into the Declaration, because the Southern states would not accept that.

So he understood that, but he couldn't live by that, because his life was too comfortable.

It was too much a part of his existence for him to say, "I'm going to do without that."

And the flaws of human beings.

We know things are right.

We know what to do, but we don't do it.

And as for women, he would have thought women were equal in their station.

Equality didn't mean that women did the same things that men did, but they were equal in the moral sense.

But there was a sphere for women, and it was separate from that of men, and that's not something that most of us accept today.

-Now, we're at the National Book Festival.

And earlier today, an interview was held with the commander of the Artemis spacecraft that circled the moon.

Doug, you've written a book called "Moonshot," talking about President Kennedy's effort to get us to the moon and back safely before the end of that decade.

Why was that an important event to happen?

And did we really need to get to the moon by the end of that decade?

And why did Kennedy want that idea and nobody else really cared about it that much?

-You know, keep in mind, after World War II, we focused on Manhattan Project, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the end of the war.

But during the war, that hurly-burly economy, everything was getting pushed through.

It was an unregulated society.

Factories were humming.

And the soldiers, the ones that had skills like let's just say radar out of World War II or a new kind of navigational skills or improvements in aviation, they were all there, the innovation of America, and JFK kind of stumbled upon it as an issue.

When Sputnik went up by the Soviet Union in October of 1957 and Kennedy was looking to run for president in '60 and it was a good way to beat up on Ike and Nixon -- "We're losing the space under Eisenhower, Nixon."

He doubled down on that in 1960.

And two of the debates with Nixon that were televised, he'd tell Nixon, "If you're elected president, there'll be a Soviet flag on the moon.

If I'm elected, it will be an American flag."

A lot of hyperbole going on there.

And, then, he's elected in '61, and they put up Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, on Kennedy's watch.

And he kept saying over and over again, using the word "leapfrog," how do we leapfrog the Soviet Union?

Hence he came to Capitol Hill in May of '61, and first time he said, "by the end of the decade."

And all the engineers and radar people, et cetera are like, "Are you kidding me?

We've got no technology to do that."

And yet it became bipartisan in fashion to get it done.

Ike created NASA.

We had picked the Mercury astronauts.

And, then, Kennedy, we had seven astronauts for the Mercury -- six missions under Kennedy, six for six successful, TV ratings galore, the Americans riveted, and no Republicans against funding it, because all the Democrat would have to say was, "Oh, so you want Russia to be on the moon?"

Yeah.

So it became -- And it stands now, the moonshot, as American can-doism.

And we're seeing the reboot* of that with, you know, the Artemis and these potential returns to the moon and how big Musk and Bezos and all of our figures of our time were very influenced by the moonshot.

-So, you're a professor at Harvard at history and in the law school.

You're a university professor, which is the highest-ranked professorship that Harvard has.

So I'm sure you can answer this question.

[ Laughter ] In the 250 years this country has been in existence, who would you say is the most important man and the most important woman in our country's history who have shaped where we are today -- a man and a woman?

[ Laughter ] -Well, Lincoln saved the Union and was martyred for that and created a whole cult of himself that sort of inspired people to go forward, even people who didn't want to, but understood that, you know, what he stood for was an advance for mankind.

So I would say Lincoln.

For a woman, the most important woman?

That's a tough one.

Eleanor Roosevelt... would be someone who I think is -- -Rubenstein: Well, Eleanor Roosevelt -- somebody would say that is a good, good prospect.

There was a woman named Harriet Tubman who was gonna be on the $20 bill.

-You think she is?

-Well, I said she was going to be on the $20.

-So I didn't let you finish.

-Was going to be on the $20 bill.

I think the Treasury has announced that that's not happening now or anytime soon.

So, but would you rank her up there?

-Oh, she would be up there, as well.

But, I mean, in terms of I was thinking mainly in modern times, people who have inspired other folks and have been a good example.

I think she would be somebody that you could point to.

-Rubenstein: Alright.

Doug, who was the most important man in American history and the most important woman in American history?

-The fun of that question is that it's impossible -- -Gordon-Reed: To have a wrong answer.

-Yeah.

And it just depends on the moment.

But since I've been having trouble walking after an operation, I just get stunned at Franklin D. Roosevelt, how in the world he did it and kept going and kept going and the sunny optimism, where people are strapping braces on him and every minute is -- and how he brought us through the Great Depression and World War II.

He's a giant.

But, also, in the spirit of, you know, civil rights maybe, but, you know, I wrote a biography of Rosa Parks.

And she stands as a symbol for everybody that you can have your moments of resistance, her December 1, 1955, "I'd prefer not to, you know, leave the bus or sit."

That lives on.

And if you ask schoolchildren today, they all learn about Rosa Parks in, you know, first grade, second grade.

So her shadow's large.

-Gordon-Reed: Now, now.

-Now.

Yeah.

-Who knows?

-Now, both of you have participated in a book published by the National Geographic on American history the last 250 years.

And both of you were in interviews that I conducted with you.

And why don't we go through the centuries for a moment?

So on the 18th century, the 1700s.

I interviewed you about this, Annette.

Other than the Revolutionary War, which is obviously the key event, I suspect, of the 1700s in America, what would you say is the most important thing that happened in the United States in the 1700s?

-Well, certainly the solidification and the expansion of the institution of slavery was critical during that time period.

I mean, obviously, it leads to a 19th-century war, but everything is set up during that time period.

-In the 1800s -- I interviewed you about the 1800s.

What would you say, other than the Civil War, is the most important thing that happened in this country in the 1800s?

-I would go with America's industrial and transportation capacity, the way we were starting to not build the textile mills, factories to compete in the world.

And then how we became an industrial power where a city like Chicago can be birthed out of the middle of the prairie and become this railroad vortex connecting everybody, getting off of horse and buggy and having the train and then later automobile.

I mean, transportation and engineers in America are big heroes of every generation.

They just don't all have biographies written about them.

Yeah.

-The Erie Canal.

I mean, this.

-In the 1900s, the 20th century, what would you say is the most important thing that happened in that century in the United States?

-Well, winning World War II was important in the 20th century.

And then I would add, obviously, the civil rights movement that sort of transformed not just race relations, but sort of an impetus for other people, for women's rights and gay rights and so forth.

So that's the big change.

And that's where we're sort of retrenchment now.

But that's the big thing.

-Oh, in the 21st century, it's only -- we're only 26 years into it.

What would you say is the most important event?

The IPO of SpaceX or something like that?

-IPO of SpaceX?

-Well, first thing that I thought of when you asked that is I just saw visions of 9/111.

And this is from an American context, but with, you know, the Trade Towers tumbling and the Pentagon hit and George W Bush creating Homeland Security and new types of you're not safe anywhere.

And we could be under attack.

We had that at Pearl Harbor, but that seemed far-flung territory.

And that this happened in the middle of Manhattan has made 21st century a kind of hyper security, even a fear that's crept into society.

So as a single date, that stands very large.

-Yeah.

I would say the 21st century would be the election of Donald Trump.

That's been -- had a huge impact on the country.

So yeah, that's what people will look back to in the 21st century.

-Okay.

So let's talk about the next 250 years.

How many people think they'll be around for part of that?

Anybody?

Okay.

It's obviously hard to predict 25 years in advance, let alone 250 years in advance.

But let's for the sake of this, what do you think is the likelihood the United States will be as dominant a country as it is today?

Right now, we dominate the world in so many different areas.

Obviously, China is coming along, but very rarely in history did you see a country dominate the world for 500 years.

And we didn't dominate for all of the first 250.

But the Roman Empire didn't last forever either.

So what do you think is likely in the next 250 years to happen?

This country will still be an important country, but not as important, we'll be even greater than we are now, what would you say?

And obviously just speculation.

-You're up first.

[ Laughter ] -It depends if we reverse the trend towards destruction of American scientific capability, we might be able to hold on.

If we don't -- [ Applause ] If we don't, we'll be like, and I love the UK, but we'll be like the former British Empire.

But I mean, I think holding on to America's scientific capability, educational capability is key.

And we don't really know what's going to happen with that.

So it's hard to know.

But in the absence of of a turnaround there, I think we will -- We won't have the predominance that we have today.

-I think we see the -- You know, second that.

But I mean, I can see the pivot through STEM and what's happening in the science.

The miracles of medicine, the discovery of DNA.

What are going to be these challenges, and if we're not taking care In Earth stewardship and environmentally, what is our -- what's our future for all countries like?

Sometimes we overfocus on countries.

But the astronauts were looking at a blue-green marble Earth out there.

And, you know, and so I think we've got to wake up with environmental protections of Earth.

And -- [ Applause ] Because I don't -- What good is it to like -- "I'm going to plant trees on the moon" while we're destroying the trees here, but I have full belief the United States of America will be out there and be a leader.

I feel optimistically that our country was built to last.

But it's trying times and, you know -- but I try.

You can't be a teacher and not stay optimistic to young people that our country's got better days ahead.

-Now, what we're engaged in here and throughout the National Book Festival is a series of interviews, principally by authors of books.

This is a relatively novel concept in the span of history.

There are no interviews that I'm aware of, of people 1,000 years ago or even 500 years ago.

There's no interviews, I think, of Thomas Jefferson that I'm aware of, and no interviews of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

So let's suppose you had a chance to interview Thomas Jefferson.

What would be the one question or two questions you want to ask this man who you studied for much of your life?

-Well, I would ask him, is he still bent on the idea of sending people of African descent out of the United States?

Are you going to make white men send their children back to Africa?

-Now, you wouldn't ask him about Sally Hemings?

-No, I would not.

[ Laughter ] I know the answer to that.

[ Laughter ] -Okay.

So, Doug, if you could interview, let's say any great historical figure about whom you've already written, who would you want to interview and what would you want to ask him?

-Oh, boy.

You know, I -- I would love to have talked to Theodore Roosevelt, because he was so many-sided and I think he understood the American spirit in a very unique way, as the intellectual, as the cowboy, as the writer, as the police commissioner, as the foreign policy person.

And I would want to ask him, how do we unite?

How do we pull this country together so we act more as one?

What are we doing that -- How do we stop this disdain of the other side?

And he would be as good as anybody to ask that question.

He broke and ran the Progressive Party and the most successful third party in American history.

So, you know, I'd like to get his take on that, on where we go in this kind of toxic environment.

-Well, he's not an American, but if I could answer my own question, if I could interview anybody, I'd like to interview Henry VIII and say, why didn't you get a prenup rather than just chop off the heads of all those wives?

Wouldn't that have been a lot easier?

But I guess they didn't think of that then.

Okay.

-Well, and strangely enough, his daughter, obviously Elizabeth, went on to be one of the greatest, you know, rulers of England.

So why was he so bent on having a son?

His daughter turned out to be... [ Applause ] -Well, let me ask you.

You teach history, as I mentioned, at Harvard.

You're teaching history at Rice.

Are American students -- When I was in college, roughly 8% to 9% of American undergraduate students were majoring in history.

Now, I think the percentage is like 1% or 2%.

Why is history so less attractive to students today?

And the students that you do teach, why are they interested in history and why do they tell you they want to study history?

-Well, the majors are going down, but people still take the classes.

The majors go down because people's parents feel that they should do something "practical" and business, which is, you know, people who are in business and so forth, say that that's not necessarily the best thing for them to do.

So I think it has to do with what they consider to be the return on investment.

Although every study shows that people who are history majors do well because they learn how to write, they learn critical thinking.

And those kinds of things are important to employers.

So I think it's a mistaken belief that the major will lessen their tractability, attractiveness to employers.

The people who do take it are the people who really love the subject matter and actually see the value of learning how to write and how to think.

-And there -- [ Applause ] There are also a couple of different types of history students and majors.

Some are using it as a springboard for law school.

"I'll do history and then I'll go to law or business," and it's just a way to -- And then there are those rare birds that come up to you and say, "I want to be a historian."

And that's where the parents or loved ones are worried.

How does one get hired in an environment with AI existing and universities cutting the humanities to the bare bones and local historical societies that used to hire people are being shuttered?

And so that's the ones you have to really say you got to go and do it and it's a decade and then hope you get hired.

But you don't have to be at a premier school.

There are a lot of colleges in America, community colleges, and if you're a professor, you get a lot of free time off in the summer.

And if you get -- Well, only half joking.

But you also have the ability to just do what you love because I also meet a lot of people that go into professions, lawyers at 40 who say, "Why didn't I do something different?

I hate my job."

So the question is, you got to love it.

You got to really love history if you're going to make a living out of it.

-So for those who may be watching, and I'll explain this, this is the 26th year of the National Book Festival that is put together by the Library of Congress.

And they've done a very good job, and it's for free.

And we've got more than 100,000 people here today.

But we're also taping this.

We're taping this for a show that C-Span puts on called "America's Book Club," and it's designed to promote people to read books and encourage people to do it.

Why should people read books?

And why should we have a national book festival?

Why not a national memo festival or national tweet festival?

Why do you have to read books?

What's so important about reading books versus memos or tweets or e-mails?

Why are books so important?

-Well, books are -- They were important to me.

I can only tell you why they were important to me because they expanded my horizons.

I mean, I grew up in a small town and reading took me around the world.

It introduced me to different people, different thought processes.

And it also -- Because I wanted to be a writer, it also helped me to learn how to write.

In order to be a writer, you have to read.

And those two things go together.

So I think reading, you know, makes you -- for me, I think it made me a better person to be introduced to all of these subject matters and all these people around the world that I wasn't -- that weren't around me immediately.

-It's just essential you have to have freedom of expression and different point of views.

And a book can be individual.

You know, Kurt Vonnegut, a great novelist I got to know well.

I did once a big cover story on him and all, and his big issue was the book banning.

And what happens in fascist countries when books are banned and burned.

And, my God, though I can't -- Books stand for America.

I mean, the world.

If we start allowing our country to ban books, then you're looking at doom.

[ Applause ] -So, Annette, when you're reading and you're reading for pleasure, who do you like to read?

You like to read fiction, nonfiction, science fiction, biographies, history?

What do you enjoy reading?

-You know, I enjoy reading typically -- more typically non-fiction.

I've gotten back into reading Novels.

I'd sort of fallen away from that because I read -- I read so much for work.

But "Don Quixote" I've been reading.

I've sort of gone back to the classics, things that I should have read or things that I started reading as a young person.

Now I want to get back to it.

"Ulysses," which is tough going.

-Well, I read those books, but I mostly read those with a CliffsNotes version when I was in school.

So anybody remember what CliffsNotes was?

Let's bring back CliffsNotes.

Oh, okay.

So what do you like to read?

-I love reading fiction.

A lot of great writers that I like.

And I used to find one or two books of an author I liked, and I enjoy seeing their backlist, like not just reading "My Antonia" or something of Willa Cather, but reading deep into the backbench or not just reading what you're told to read of W.E.B.

Dubois, but reading deeper into some of his other books.

People that I've encountered and read and seeing the other ones like Jack London, a writer known for "Call of the Wild," but he wrote so many of these other books and novels, and it's just a blast to kind of see ones that just didn't make the wave and aren't remembered as well.

But you can still have the author's voice.

-So this country has 55 million immigrants, more than any other country in the world.

People come here in part because they believe in the American dream, I guess.

Why do you think people come here, and do you think people will continue to come to the United States in the future?

-Well, because of the reputation that we've had up until recently of being a nation of immigrants, a place where you could come and build a life for yourself differently from other places with the rule of law, with an aspiration about all men are created equal, that it's a country that's built upon an ideal.

It's not about blood, it's not about religion.

It's about the idea of American.

If you believe those things, you can become an American.

So I think the openness of the country is what people have admired.

-What would you say is the reason that people come here?

-Because we do waves of immigration and then waves of anti-immigration.

There is no roads paved with gold in the United States.

But the amount of diversity you meet in our cities is quite pronounced and profound.

But we sometimes don't talk about the stories of immigrants enough.

And books, memoirs, people writing about what it was like to to come here are truly essential.

Even something like Irish Americans, how they were treated, most people don't realize, you know, in coal mines of Illinois or the Chinese on the railroads.

And, you know, you have to really go back and see that it is a ticket to a better life, the so-called dream of America.

But it comes out of a school of hard knocks.

You've got to really -- The first generation here has got to work quadruple time and suffer indignities to help the next generation prosper.

-So in American history, if you go back and look at American history, what would you say you're most proud of that happened in this country?

-Um, I don't know.

-We need time to think.

-I want to -- Honestly, I think I'm most proud because the spirit of America 250, of what we've been walking around those foundational documents and how in the world is the power of our Constitution with all of the loopholes that are in it, and we can spend a lifetime talking about, it's still such a kind of sustainable document, or at least sustainable to this moment in time.

So I think that the Bill of Rights, Declaration, Constitution, Federalist Papers that combined that got us going, that it still has gas in the tank this late in the high-tech 21st century is really to me remarkable and something to be proud of.

-Let's talk about the Constitution for one moment.

We have about a minute left.

This Constitution was drafted by white Christian property-owning men.

No women, no Jews.

Very few if any Catholics were in the Constitutional Convention.

One?

-No, there might be two.

-But the country now is much more diverse in many different ways than it was then.

How is it that a constitution drafted by white Christian property-owning men on the eastern seaboard is still the document we're living under?

Isn't that surprising to you?

-Well, it's been changed.

You know, it was changed.

The war changed it, I mean, and made it something that a document -- that the document that exists after the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were added to it transformed it.

So we're living under the 1789 Constitution or 1787-1789 Constitution, but one that was transformed by the Civil War amendments.

-Alright, let me just ask you one final question.

How do we celebrate -- How did you celebrate the 250th on July the 4th?

What did you do?

-I watched, because I couldn't go to all the places I wanted to be due to an operation.

I was amazed by the tall ships in New York Harbor and the beauty of just the age of sail and seeing them there.

Also, I mentioned TR and a presidential library opened up in Medora, and on the heels of it, the Obama Presidential Library in Chicago.

And, you know, for a historian, those are kind of big, big moments.

-Final question.

How did you celebrate the 4th of July?

-I had just had a knee operation too, and I was on the BBC talking about the BBC and then also on C-Span doing a program.

-You were watching C-Span.

Okay.

Thank you both for a very interesting conversation.

Thank you all.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪