Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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david rubenstein
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stacy schiff
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Cleopatra's Shadow00:15:16
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rights in the NBA and around the world.
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America's Book Club is brought to you by these television companies and is supported by the Ford Foundation.
From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein.
As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
unidentified
Now from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., winner of the Pulitzer Prize, best-selling biographer of Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams and Cleopatra, Stacey Schiff.
Stacey, what I'd like to do is go through your background a bit and then how you came to write the various books that you wrote.
But let me say at the beginning, you have a very eclectic group of books you've written about.
Benjamin Franklin, The Salem Witch Trials, Cleopatra, the author of The Little Prince, among other things, the book on Vera Nabokov, who was the wife of Vladimir Nabokov, the writer of Lolita.
So how do you pick subjects?
Because I can't figure out how you figure out who you want to write about.
I think there's a hidden thread in some ways invisible to the naked eye and often to me among the books.
And here's a perfect example since we're sitting in the National Archives.
I went to France, moved our kids and our family to France for a year and a half so I could research the book about Ben Franklin's years in France, which are the years of the American Revolution.
He's there for eight and a half years, the most difficult assignment, most taxing assignment of his life.
And the paper for those years, which is in the State Department Archives in France, is two and a half times as great as the rest of the documentation we have for Ben Franklin's life.
I would say moreover that it is not necessarily as beautifully preserved as some of our documentation is here, and that French archivists, unlike American archivists, go out on strike.
And also the room isn't heated.
Did I mention that the light is bad?
So it was a very difficult book to research.
And I think after that many years, that much time in those archives, I realized two things.
One, I didn't really want to research my next book in France.
That was the third time I had done so, because I found the systems extremely difficult to navigate and sometimes the documentation very difficult to request.
But also that I was more comfortable with the question of doubt than I had been previously, because you can read through those mountains and mountains of Franklin material and still not have essential answers about parts of his life, like who was the mother of his son.
And I think that made it possible for me on some level to think about a book about a woman for whom we have no documentation whatsoever, which is to say Cleopatra, where we have possibly at best one instance of her handwriting.
And I thought I could write a book where you actually were able to say on the page, we don't know, or we will never know the answers to certain questions.
And I don't think I would have been ready to do that had it not been for the monumental Franklin documentation.
I picked her because I was thinking about marriage, and I wanted to see if it were possible.
I was trying to increase the degree of difficulty, which was idiotic on my part, but I thought I had written about one individual.
Was it possible to write about a relationship?
And I think I thought about a whole bunch of different combinations.
I think at one point I was thinking about the Marx brothers.
And somehow that led directly to Vera Nabokov.
And she's very much present on every page that he writes.
Every book except for one is dedicated to her.
His biographers had both written that there was a hole at the center of Nabokov's story and it wouldn't be, and you couldn't get your hands around that until you wrote about her.
And that was like a red flag.
It was like, wait a minute, why is there this hole?
Why doesn't somebody talk about her?
And I thought it was possible to understand him better if you understood, if you turned the carpet over and could see the other side.
So for me, it was really a book about him as much as it was about her and about how this machine that they had built together, which was Vladimir and Nabokov, worked because it took two people.
And needless to say, you don't get the telegram before someone in publishing calls you or NPR calls you and says, did you know you've won a Pulitzer Prize?
And then you think that must have been a prank phone call pretty much, yeah.
I think if we're outing all secrets tonight, I probably always wanted to be a writer, but it was a very hard thing to say, and it was a hard, it's a hard profession in which to start.
And so I started out in publishing and made my way from publishing to writing.
The Adams book took a little longer, and I don't know if that was because it was COVID and I was ordering Purell around the clock or archives were closed, it was harder to get material, or if I was just slower.
So the smart ones are the ones who research, write, and research, write.
I belong to the other school.
I do all the research for three or three and a half or four years, and then I sit down and write.
And then inevitably, I sit down to write, and I realize that I failed to research what it was like to live in Paris during World War I or something, and I have to go back into the archives.
I mean, email has chipped away at my focus just as it has at everyone else's.
I find it really hard to resist email, and I don't know what exactly I think I'm waiting for from my email, but I can write three good sentences and then think I must check my email, like everyone else.
It was an idea that we were literally sitting at dinner one night and the question of what did Cleopatra do all day came up.
And this became kind of a family joke of like, you should write a book about what Cleopatra did all day.
And then the joke became when her diaries turn up, you can do this.
And it just kind of got tossed around.
It was on all my lists of possible subjects for a long time.
And then, as I said, I went to France and wrote and researched and wrote the Franklin book.
And somehow at the end of that process, I thought, you know what?
The idea of someone where there's a great deal of just give around the edges of the story where we don't really know the narrative was an interesting narrative challenge.
And I went back to read Plutarch, as one does, and realized that we have like actual quotations of, we have actual speeches between Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
And that's when I thought, you know, we have, if we have dialogue of some kind, you could maybe write an episodic, you know, Cleopatra in five scenes kind of book.
And then the more I researched, the more I realized there was actually a fabulously rich vein of material, and that if you wrote the book with a certain, from a certain angle, you could actually weave a complete narrative.
You see, that's one of the reasons to write a book about Cleopatra.
No, decidedly not.
And all the ancients are very clear on this subject, that she was not a beauty.
But, as Plutarch writes, the contact of her presence was bewitching, that she was charming beyond all measure, spoke nine languages, and the tenth was flattery, that she was incredibly charismatic and incredibly ingratiating in her manner.
So there's a real, I mean, you definitely get the sense of a woman who changes the temperature of a room when she walks in.
I mean, it helped that she's the richest person in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Okay, so as we get ready to celebrate the 250th anniversary of this country, you've written books about the colonial period or post-colonial period of time, and why don't we go through those books for a moment?
The feeling, the Declaration, let me just go back a step.
The Declaration from a certain perspective is like an SOS.
The Declaration is indeed what the colonies would like to broadcast to the world about their feelings of, you know, having been abused by the Crown, but it is also an attempted outreach to the rest of the world for someone else to support them.
And they realize they cannot fight this rebellion, this revolutionism, or revolution yet on their own.
They must have some kind of benefactor.
And the question in Congress in these months is, do we declare independence first or do we seek an alliance first?
So the Declaration is made in July.
Franklin is dispatched.
The job is accepted in October.
He's dispatched in December of 1776.
And the mission is essentially to get France to underwrite this nascent republic, which is a pretty interesting assignment.
He's being sent to an absolute monarchy to solicit aid to found a republic.
When he comes back, he comes back, the news of Lexington and Concord reaches him, would have reached him on the high seas.
He comes back to the news that the first shots have been fired.
And no one is certain at that moment if he's going to, which side he's on.
Is he going to be, you know, along with his friend Galloway, someone who is going to resist what's happening, or is he going to throw himself into this conflict?
Remember that months earlier he has been roundly denounced in the Privy Council, roundly humiliated.
That may have had some part of his thinking.
It's pretty clear if you go back and read what he's writing that he's watching what's happening and he's very much on the side of some kind of revolt or some kind of redress in any case, that his heart is very much in America at this point.
Remember that it's one country.
When we say he was a citizen of Great Britain, everyone is a citizen of Great Britain still.
But his loyalties at this point have definitely shifted to the colonial side.
When he was at the Second Continental Congress, which drafted and passed the Declaration of Independence, did anybody think you've lived in England so long, we really think you're probably British?
When he first comes back, Arthur Lee and a few others think he must be a spy.
I think Samuel Adams even has a little hint of distrust of Ben Franklin.
Very quickly that evaporates and it's clear what side he's on.
It's difficult because, as you mentioned, the son is the royal governor of New Jersey, remains very loyal, extremely loyal to the crown and in fact to, you know, he's a counter-revolutionary in many ways.
So in the end, when the war, when the Battle of the Revolutionary War has ended, or the fighting has ended at Yorktown, then it takes about two years to get the treaty done.
The war, the last battle was in 1781.
And 1783, the Treaty of Paris was agreed to.
So for those two years, was Franklin working on the treaty?
Was he the principal person working on the treaty or who else did he have helping him?
It is clear that John Jay and John Adams would like to proceed to make a peace without consulting with the French, which is precisely the opposite of what the earlier treaty and Benjamin Franklin had agreed to.
Franklin reluctantly goes along because he realizes he cannot really outvote his two colleagues.
And so in a somewhat underhanded way, the peace is made with England, not somewhat underhanded, in an underhanded way.
The peace is agreed upon and then reported later to the French, and that mission is entrusted to Ben Franklin.
You know, I really would like to know who the mother of the son was.
I mean, just because it's annoying that like nobody, over all these years that nobody's spilled, right, who was the mother of the son with whom he was so close.
I think the real question would be, at what point does he throw in his lot with the colonies?
He writes a very angry, 196-page letter on the trip home in 1775 from England.
And it's clear from that letter, if you read it closely, that he's already lost his respect for London, for the Crown.
But what is the thing that actually turns the tide for him?
Because he's tried really with every ounce of ingenuity, of which he has a great deal, to hold what he calls this noble China vase together, and he fails.
What is the thing that finally makes him concede defeat?
So in 1692, two little girls, a nine-year-old and an 11-year-old girl, start to suffer what we would consider to be hysterical symptoms.
And fairly quickly, what they are suffering from is diagnosed as witchcraft, and fairly quickly after that, three women are named as the culprits who are in some way afflicting these little girls.
And in the following nine months, those accusations against those three women blossom into accusations against hundreds of people in 24 different Massachusetts towns.
So in the course of that epidemic, a witchcraft court is formed, and some of the accused and jailed witches are brought to trial.
You could be the sort of outcast of society, or you could be the richest man in town.
You could be a minister.
The person who is ultimately fingered as being at the center of the satanic conspiracy is actually a minister who had previously served in Salem Village.
The trials go through the summer of 1692 and there are separate hangings.
And the interesting thing I think about the way it proceeds is that it begins as a simple case of garden variety witchcraft as it was understood in 1692.
And remember that this kind of witchcraft is not Margaret Hamilton witchcraft.
This kind of witchcraft is someone is attempting to within confederacy with the devil, someone is attempting to attack your soul.
And this is actually a religious offense.
So that when the Massachusetts Bay Colony is founded, the first, in the penal code, the second offense you could create was witchcraft.
And I think the third is blasphemy and murder comes forth.
So, you know, this is a sense of what we're talking about.
It originated in almost every country you can name.
There had been witch trials over the previous hundreds of years.
What happens with this case is that Massachusetts, as I've said, which is a fairly, you know, has brought these ideas with it, has not understood that there is now skeptical literature on the subject because the ministers who very much control the flow of information have made it impossible for anyone to read a book that in any way undermines the belief in witchcraft because to undermine the belief in witchcraft undermines the belief in religion.
And so there's this sort of lock on the understanding of the community.
Or you confess, in which case no one really knows what to do with you, but you don't get a trial and you stay in prison for a while, then ultimately, in theory, you get let out.
The startling thing about that year is not that people were accused, but that everyone who is accused and walks into the courtroom is convicted.
It's a 100% conviction rate.
So everyone who goes to trial that year is found guilty, which tells you something about the court procedures and how much the deck was stacked against you and how fervent was the belief in witchcraft.
I'm trying to remember, 14 women, five men, and then one person, one very valiant person who refuses to enter a plea, so he therefore can't be taken to trial, is pressed under stones, which was the rather medieval torturous method of dealing with someone who refused to enter a plea in court.
They can't sit in the meeting house and listen to witchcraft testimony much longer.
The trials have gotten out of control.
People have been accused of every walk of life in so many communities, and ultimately at a fairly high level, People who were fairly respectable were beginning to be accused.
The newly installed governor reaches out finally to another colony, reaches out to the New York ministers and asks if the Huguenot and the Calvinist and the Huguenot and the Episcopalian minister and the Dutch Calvinists in New York can answer some of his fundamental questions about witchcraft.
That begins to sort of undermine some of what the court is doing.
So after the witch trials are ended and people go about their business, does eventually Massachusetts say we've made a mistake and we're going to vindicate these individuals.
And to me, one of the most interesting things about Salem is how quickly a silence falls on the entire episode.
And you can really read how much guilt and shame there is in how the record goes cold.
And I mean, startling things.
Like there's a fabulous Boston minister named Samuel Willard who publishes a book called The Complete.
It's basically a complete compendium of his sermons.
From April of 1692 to August of 1692, there's a lacuna.
There's no similar lacuna in 1691 or 1693.
The church record book is expunged for those months.
Personal correspondences are missing.
Diaries jump from 1691 to 1693.
It's as if the year didn't happen.
So there's this tremendous, you can just read in that throbbing silence how much pain there is.
Slowly, a few people begin to sort of apologize for their roles.
They are looked down upon by their, one of the witchcraft judges apologizes, and his colleagues very much disapprove of what he's done.
A little girl who had accused almost everyone who hangs apologizes.
The apology takes the form of essentially the devil made me do it, which is a pretty good way of putting it.
And then finally, early in the 18th century, some of the families are encouraged to apply for reparations for their dead relatives.
And what's interesting even then is that they apply for these reparations in like 1710 and 1711, but the word witchcraft is missing from their application.
So they'll say something like, in the recent unpleasantness, we lost my mother.
There's still an inability to be able to name names or point fingers.
And I should say that the belief in witchcraft doesn't end in 1692.
They just think they've murdered innocents, but they haven't necessarily got the right people.
I mean, there's still witchcraft at work, and that survives for a little bit longer.
Well, let's talk about your most recent book, Samuel Adams.
Now, growing up, I heard a lot about John Adams, a very famous person, first vice president of the United States, and second president of the United States.
And Samuel Adams, when I was thinking about another Adams other than John Adams, I was thinking he was a beer company.
There was a Samuel Adams beer company.
So was Samuel Adams really brewing beer mostly, or what was he really famous for?
And why would you think he deserved a book more than John Adams deserved a book?
I will just tell you one thing about John Adams, which explains something of the animosity he has for Benjamin Franklin, which is that when John Adams goes to France to join Franklin, or not really to join Franklin, but to work alongside Franklin, people think he's Samuel Adams.
And they say, oh, the famous Mr. Adams, and he has to say, no, that's somebody else.
And you can imagine how that felt to very vain John Adams.
So in the day, Samuel Adams was the more renowned of the two Adamses.
If you had asked any of the founders who the leading exponent of the revolution was, it would have been a contest between George Washington and Samuel Adams.
He's completely, he's utterly, I mean, as Thomas Jefferson says, he's the earliest, the most active, the most persevering man of the revolution.
He's a tax collector, which is pretty funny since he's pretty inept with finances.
And the way the tax collection worked at the time, it's a job nobody wanted, so there's some desperation implied in the fact that he wanted to do this.
The way tax collection worked is that you collected taxes and you, the tax collector, got a premium on the monies that you were able to get, but you also were on the hook for the monies that people didn't cough up.
So after a year or two of this, Samuel Adams was by far the most indebted of the tax collectors in the town of Boston.
He inherits a certain amount of debt from his father because his father had been part of something which is a sort of, it's almost like a preview of the American Revolution, which was a bank that his father is very instrumental in founding, which Parliament shuts down.
And it's this kind of, I mean, if you really, you know, groove on Massachusetts economic history, it's a fascinating chapter.
But it's a moment of parliamentary overreach in which a group of, after which a group of Massachusetts businessmen, not the elite, but the middlebrow businessmen, actually consider violating an act of parliament for the first time.
He most markedly does not participate in the Boston Tea Party.
I would say that it is his masterpiece, however, because his fingerprints are all over it.
And you see that we know that at the moment that the tea is being tossed into the harbor, Samuel Adams and John Hancock and a few of their friends are very conspicuously back at the meeting house where they had been discussing what to do about the tea.
But when 12 sailors are then deposed later in London, they point their fingers directly at Samuel Adams.
So when the British say that the colonies are not listening to them about the importance of paying these taxes, the British send some troops over eventually.
They call them regulars.
And eventually they're not happy with Samuel Adams or his colleague John Hancock.
And so, as I understand it, the regulars were sent to capture them in around 1775 or so.
And that was one of those things where you, you know, at three in the morning, you wake up and you think, oh my god, this is where the book has to start because we know Paul Revere's ride, and we know that Paul Revere is out announcing that the British are coming.
But where in the world was Paul Revere actually going?
And the answer is to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams of their imminent arrest.
So that is the other side.
If you actually think about, you know, Longfellow misses that part, but why is he riding into the countryside?
It's because those two are the two most wanted men in America.
And that speaks to something which I don't think we talk about a lot, which is the misconception or the complete cluelessness of the British ministry, who think that if they could simply arrest these two malefactors, they could really shut down this whole, you know, troublesome revolt.
So ultimately, the colonies have a Continental Congress, the first one, the First Continental Congress, and Samuel Adams is a delegate there, is that right?
And it's interesting to see what the Massachusetts delegation does at those congresses.
They're very much working behind the scenes.
As they have made their way, these are very provincial men, and these are very divided, heterogeneous colonies.
So as they make their way to that Congress, they are being told by everyone they meet in the New Yorkers and New Jersey: you have to really be careful because people think that you're a bunch of, you know, obstreperous, hot-headed vandals.
And they get the message, and they realize by the time they get to Philadelphia that they need to work behind the scenes and let Virginia basically take the foreground.
You see Adams, you see Samuel Adams working behind the scenes, negotiating things, and then you see that all the major decisions were left to the Virginia government.
I think he always, I mean, he's 12 years younger, so he obviously, and he looks up to Samuel Adams in a very starry-eyed way.
I mean, Samuel Adams is the person who has, as he has with many young men, brought him into the cause.
Samuel was the person who, if you gave a tremendously good Harvard oration on American rights or liberties, he would be on your doorstep the next morning.
And so he had very much, very much enlisted John Adams.
I don't think there was a sense of being overshadowed at all.
His shining moments are really those years of opposition, the years of being able to identify and articulate and broadcast these ideas about the invasions of American liberties.
Once the country is founded, once we're on a steadier footing, he's a part of this old world.
He's very much antiquated by this point.
He talks about the ancient purity of principles.
He's an old New England Puritan, and the country is rushing on to this very commercial, very opulent future in which he plays.
I mean, he's a governor of Massachusetts, but by default and not out of any competence, more just as a gesture of thanks.
And if you look very closely, I think you see that he lives on the handouts of friends.
And that is, I think, largely part of his relationship with John Hancock is extremely hot and cold.
It's a very vexed relationship.
And I think a lot of what you see with Samuel Adams in terms of familial support were handouts from John Hancock and other friends, but largely Hancock, who's extremely rich.
I don't think he's a man of resentments in any way.
There's a real disagreement between the two of them about essentially what is important.
Samuel Adams is really set on these Republican principles and this idea that everyone should participate in a democracy, that a democracy can be undermined very easily by men of avarication and ambition, avarice and ambition, is very, very sensitive to the invasions of rights.
He doesn't believe in institutions, and it is up to John Adams and the first couple of presidents to build the kinds of institutions in which Samuel Adams has no particular interest.
But when the Samuel Adams beer was started 10, 20 years ago, they must have put Samuel Adams' name on it because he must have been involved in the beer at some point, no?
I don't think I'm getting the story wrong, but I think that Jim named the beer because his fifth grade history teacher, civics teacher, was very infatuated with Samuel Adams.
And actually, I may go further.
She was infatuated with Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and Jim thought that a Samuel Adams made a better bar call than a John Hancock.
He's quite, I think there's a little bit of senility at the end.
He's quite frail.
And the last comment of John Adams that we have about him is about how he doesn't want to end the way his cousin Samuel had ended in this kind of hideous.
So when I pitched this book to my publisher, they loved the idea.
And now when I talk about it, I think people's eyes glaze over.
So I'm not sure how to describe it.
It is a book about Ben Franklin, and it's about the last years of his life.
And it's really the summation.
It's Franklin's sensibility and the Franklin who comes back from France, still very vital, enormously wise, the presiding genius in many ways at the Constitutional Convention, and a man until his very last days who is, in this case, writing a satire against slavery.
And at the Constitutional Convention, he's one of the few people who was both at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he signed it and signed the Constitution.
Was he, by that time, he was in his early 80s, I guess, and he went there, I remember it, by people carrying, he couldn't walk anymore.
The son, before he's jailed, or in the course of being arrested and jailed, does some rather nefarious things which lead to him being in further disfavor with George Washington.
So he's thrown into a dungeon where he spends eight months in solitary confinement, ultimately is exchanged for another prisoner and sent to London.
And then will spend the rest of his life trying to somehow arrange for reparations as a leading loyalist.
Franklin, who's in Paris during many of those years, will read about the activities of his eminent loyalist son, this loyalist hero who's in London.
And finally, only in 1785, on his way back to America, will the two meet again for the last and only time.
And remember that Franklin has with him in Paris two grandsons I mentioned.
One of them is the illegitimate son of Franklin's illegitimate son.
So he has kept Temple Franklin from communicating with his father in London for those years when he's in Paris.
He seems to have, I don't think I'm overstating this, he seems to have made a certain substitution.
He knows he's lost his son.
It's extremely, obviously, you can imagine how wrenching it must have been.
He puts none of this on the page in any way, but he consoles himself with this grandson, whom he turns into a little bit of a Frenchman, interestingly, because during his formative years, Temple Franklin Williams' son is in Paris with Franklin.
I mean, just for the American books, you can't understand who we are and where we've come from if you don't.
I mean, if you don't know that Samuel Adams is somehow encoded in the Declaration, right?
If you don't know what that passage is about, how do you understand who we are?
How do you understand what the country was, what the principles on which this country were founded?
And I just think if you can find a life that can somehow illuminate one of those chapters or some of that sensibility, it's a remarkable thing.
And I like to read history through the life of one sensibility.
I like biography for that reason, because it gives you a very intimate view of events that you might not approach in quite so, but you might not be able to see quite so close up.
America's Book Club host David Rubenstein and biographer Stacey Schiff visited the vault of the National Archives to view the Treaty of Paris and other priceless documents.
So these are Oath of Allegiance from Valley Forge.
So the Continental Congress passed a resolution in February 1778.
They wanted Army officers to sign an oath of allegiance to the former United States.
So we still have oaths today.
Today, our oath, if you work for the federal government, politician on the hill, if you're in the military, our oath centers around the Constitution.
This predates the Constitution, so it's a very different type of oath.
So the irony is that they sent these preprinted forms to George Washington to fill out the paperwork for the verbal version of the oath signed by the officer, witnessed by another officer.
The irony is that his army is coming out of the famous horrible winter of Valley Forge, where they could barely afford to feed them, clothe them, house them, supply them with arms and ammunition.
Great time to ask, so I'm going to fill out paperwork.
unidentified
And return.
So we've always been a bureaucracy founded on paperwork.
So this is in his hand.
The army number lived.
So Washington's number one.
George Washington, Commander in Chief, the Army of the United States of America, to acknowledge the United States of America to be free, independent, sovereign states, declare the people thereof owe no allegiance or obedience to George III, King of Great Britain.
So very different than our oath today.
So today we say swear or affirm.
There's a space in the middle of the preprinted form where they had to pick swear or affirm.
There's a few religious groups.
There's a passage in Matthew in the Bible they take very literally that says you can't swear.
Do the utmost of the power, support, maintain, and defend the said United States against the said King George III, his heirs and successors, and his or their bettors.
Whole royal family covered.
Signed by Washington, has sworn before me, camp at Valley Forge, May 12, 1778.
Major General Sterling witnesses Washington.
Washington ends up witnessing most of the major generals, so Charles Lee, Nathaniel Greene, etc.
So you actually have three.
And this is the Treaty of Paris.
So this is the exchange treaty.
I would have loved to have shown you the American original that had Benjamin Franklin's signature, but most of those are out because of America 250.
It's like the most prominent everybody wants for now.
So what is this?
So this is England's skip it.
So this one you can actually see is still connected.
So it actually goes in the side there and then comes out.
You can see it right there.
It comes out the side there.
And then again, sewn in the side.
This is on parchment.
The first page is all the various titles of the King of England, George III.
He's over most of the world, like that's what he's telling me.
And then when you get to the last page, same thing where it has D. Hartley and then Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams on the original.
And then because it's the signature of that country, this is George III's signature.
They'll have D. Hartley and then the three representatives from the U.S. are on those.
Okay.
See more with Stacey Schiff in the vault of the National Archives on America's Book Club, The Treasures.
Available at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
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All in high school students, join C-SPAN as we celebrate America's 250th anniversary during our 2026 C-SPAN Student Cam Video Documentary Competition.
This year's theme is Exploring the American Story through the Declaration of Independence.
We're asking students to create a five- to six-minute documentary that answers one of two questions.
What's the Declaration's influence on a key moment from America's 250-year history?
Or how have its values touched on a contemporary issue that's impacting you or your community?
We encourage all students to participate, regardless of prior filmmaking experience.
Consider interviewing topical experts and explore a variety of viewpoints around your chosen issue.
Students should also include clips of related C-SPAN footage, which are easy to download on our website, studentcam.org.
C-SPAN's Student Cam competition awards $100,000 in total cash prizes to students and teachers and $5,000 for the grand prize winner.
Comcast's Flag Replacement Program00:00:58
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Entries must be received before January 20th, 2026.
For competition rules, tips, or just how to get started, visit our website at studentcam.org.
C-SPAN. Democracy Unfiltered.
We're funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast.
The flag replacement program got started by a good friend of mine, a Navy vet, who saw the flag at the office that needed to be replaced and said, wouldn't this be great if this was going to be something that we did for anyone?
Comcast has always been a community-driven company.
This is one of those great examples of the way we're getting out there.