 Well, in addition to the dramatic moments of the takeover of the embassy in November 1979, the failed rescue mission of April 1980, the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war of September 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan on November 4th, 1980, which was immediately revealed to the captives, to the hostages, and then, of course, the liberation in January 1981. Another striking feature of the diary is how it records the audacity and the resistance that Mr. Odi and his American colleagues displayed. And you can find elements of this on almost every page. In a thematic level, the document is heavy with their uncompromising refusal to recognize the validity of their captivity, their repeated demands that they be released or that their immunity be respected, their occasional rebellion against something that their captors were doing. Every once in a while, a captor would make blindfold one of them and make them go outside or would insist on blindfolding them while they were walking to the shower facilities, and they would refuse. They would say, I'm not going to do that, and they would tear the blindfold off. So small inconsequential acts of resistance, perhaps, but one can sense that they were no doubt important to the captives to be able to make a stand and to insist that their integrity and that their rights be maintained. The hostage takers had the goal of trying to embarrass the United States on the world stage, and most historians agree that they did achieve that objective. The Jimmy Carter administration had the responsibility of dealing with the hostage crisis. President Carter initially decided that he would use peaceful means to try to liberate the hostages. Again, probably calculating that they wouldn't be there very long. A few days, a few weeks at most, after a few weeks passed, maybe a month, certainly they have to let them go by then. No one in the Carter administration anticipated it would last that long. And when President Carter initially decided he would use peaceful means, he rather stubbornly insisted that he would continue to use peaceful means. About five months after the crisis began, he decided to shift gears and go to military means. But then we had the failed rescue mission of April 1980 that was deeply embarrassing to the U.S. government and that led to a feeling worldwide that, boy, the United States maybe is just an empty shell of what it used to be if it can't even carry out a small-scale rescue operation against a third-world country without ending in disaster and profound embarrassment. And then President Carter went back to the diplomatic mode, trying to work every angle he could to spring the release to the hostages as quickly as possible. He probably calculated that if he could get the hostages released unharmed that there would be massive celebrations at home and ticker tape parades and that somehow that ticker tape would fill the ballot boxes in the presidential election of 1980, meaning that he would coast to an easy re-election against his Republican competitor Ronald Reagan. What happened and said is that the captors held on to the hostages until after the election. Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. There were lots of reasons why the voters preferred Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in the presidential election in 1980. The economy, Carter's sense of leadership, other issues certainly are worth mentioning, if the Iran hostage crisis is very near the top of the list, perhaps one of the most significant factors determining the outcome of that election. So the captors were very successful at reaching their goal and embarrassing the U.S. government. In fact, they probably directly caused the downfall of the Carter administration after a single term in office. At home, the hostage crisis for odd political reasons emerged as a celebrity event. That was in part because President Carter encouraged Americans to think about it every day. He encouraged Americans to light candles, to hang yellow ribbons, to pray for the hostages, to take acts of sacrifice on behalf of the hostages and so forth. That's Carter did that because he was trying to build a certain political context so that when the hostages came home, before the election, as he hoped, he would coast to reelection because of the euphoria that would follow. Ironically, that backfired on him. Because of the attention being invested in the hostage crisis, it became a subject of angst and frustration and embarrassment for many people. And that probably came back to haunt him in the election of 1980. When I teach the hostage crisis to modern-day students, most of whom are too young to remember or certainly were not born at the time, I have first to spend time emphasizing to them what a big event this was for the people who lived through it. Because when they look at the facts, they don't understand why it emerged as such an amazing drama at the time that it unfolded. I mean, after all, it was only 52 American officials taken hostage. They were maltreated, of course, but none of them died. Eventually they came home. That doesn't really compare to something like the Vietnam War or the Korean War or World War II. So their first question is, what's the big deal? Why are we even talking about this? We've had other episodes of hostage taking in Lebanon and other countries around the world and we don't give them that kind of attention. So it takes some background work in explaining the political context of the late 1970s, early 1980s, and the long legacy of the U.S.-Iranian relationship, and the connection between the hostage crisis and the presidential election of 1980, which put Ronald Reagan in charge of the country. And only then do they begin to understand why it was such an important event and why it seemed to those who experienced it in real time to have been at such an important event.