 Ah, there it is. Good evening, everybody, and welcome to the Clinton Presidential Center. My name is Stephanie Street, and I serve as Executive Director of the Clinton Foundation. We are so excited that you all are here this evening. We have a really exciting program. And I know that you all know that March is Women's History Month. And while this is, of course, a time to celebrate remarkable, successful women and how far we've come, it is also a time to roll up our sleeves and continue to fight for women's rights in places like Little Rock, Arkansas and other communities around our country and the world. Now tonight, we are joined by two remarkable glass ceiling-breaking women, Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, who happens to be the first woman to be nominated and confirmed for this office. That's right, that deserves your applause. Dr. Shogan leads the National Archives and Records Administration, NARA, the nation's record keeper. NARA is the agency that preserves some of the nation's most historic documents, such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, just to name a few. In addition, Dr. Shogan and NARA oversee and preserve documents from all 14 presidential libraries, including the documents from the Clinton Administration that are housed right here at the Clinton Presidential Library. And perhaps most importantly, NARA makes the records of the United States government accessible to citizens as a fundamental right of our democracy. Together, the presidential libraries and the presidential foundations are working to underscore the need for compassion, tolerance, and pluralism while urging Americans to respect democratic institutions and uphold secure and accessible elections. Tonight's program is part of our Clinton Presidential Center Presents series and is a partnership between the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Library, and the Clinton School of Public Service. So I'd like to acknowledge my colleagues here that run those two institutions. Dr. Vicky Soto, the Dean of the Clinton School, and Dr. Jay Barth, who I think is behind the magic door here, and you'll get to hear from him later in the program. So I'd like to remind you all to please silence your cell phones so that we can begin our program. And it is now my great honor and pleasure to introduce to the podium or to the stage Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and Dr. Colleen Shogan. Thank you all so much. Thank you, thank you. We are so excited to welcome all of you here for this really special event with our very special guest, the Archivist of the United States. And I'm really looking forward to talking with her because as many of you know, that's one of the principal missions of the Clinton Presidential Center is the preservation, protection, and sharing of the records of the two terms of the Clinton administration. And we do that with a very dedicated group of archivists led by Jay Barth, who is in charge of our team. And it's an extraordinary privilege, but also a lot of work. And so we wanna get directly from the archivist some very useful insights into what it means to be the archivist of the United States and what kind of challenges and opportunities that presents. So I hope you will join me in very warmly welcoming to Little Rock, Dr. Colleen Shogan. Now the National Archives was established in 1934 by President Franklin Roosevelt, but its major holdings date back to 1775. They capture the sweep of our past. Slaveship manifests, the Emancipation Proclamation captured German records and the Japanese surrender documents from World War II, journals of polar expeditions and photographs of Dust Bowl farmers, Indian treaties, making transitory promises with the United States and a richly bound document bearing the bold signature Bonaparte, the Louisiana Purchase Treaty that doubled the territory of the young republic, including Arkansas. So this is something that I have been looking forward to and talking with Colleen about the fact and let me start by really noting that you are the first woman in the history of our country to lead the National Archives and Records Administration. So from your perspective as a political scientist, as someone who's worked in academia at the Library of Congress in the Congress itself and so many other important positions, why is it important for women to be in the room where it happens? Great. Well, thank you so much, Secretary Clinton. I want to thank the Clinton Library and the Clinton Foundation for welcoming me here today to Little Rock and I was able to spend the entire day at the Clinton Library and I'm so impressed by the facility that you've built and entrusted to us here at the National Archives. So yes, I am the first woman. I'm the 11th archivist of the United States, but the first woman and I always say I won't be the last first but not the last. I think it really does matter for women to be in leadership positions and be like you said in the room where it matters. And if I could distill that down to one reason why I would say it's agenda setting because the agendas of what happens in my case a federal agency or it could be an organization, it could be a company, those decisions are made in those senior leadership meetings and not even necessarily the decisions, but what we're going to debate in the first place, what we're going to decide upon, that prioritization. So having women in that room is absolutely the first critical step. I can give you a couple of examples. First, I'll use an example from your tenure on arm services. When I worked in the Senate, you were on arm services and I had to check. I went back to a legislative record and there were three women on arm services when you started to serve on arm services yourself. I believe Senator Dole and also Senator Collins. And now on Senate arm services, there's only three out of about 22, 23 senators on arm services, one of the most powerful committees in Congress and now there are eight women on arm services. That really matters. Because those women are helping to set the agenda of what that committee debates and what they actually legislate about. Another really great example that I like to share during the centennial of women's suffrage, Speaker Pelosi liked to share this anecdote. When she was first elected to be Speaker, President Bush was in office and he called a meeting of the Big Four, which is the Speaker of the House, Minority Leader, Majority and Minority Leader of the Senate. And she was obviously called to that meeting. President Bush acknowledged that she was the first time that a woman was attending this meeting. It was a historic moment. And Speaker Pelosi said she just felt this huge weight of history because finally women had a seat at the table. Finally they were in the room. She was in the room where it mattered. And she always said what my reaction was, well, this is great, but we want more. This is the beginning. And so she was there to be able to help set that agenda in that situation. And that is the first step of leadership. That reminds me of that great comment that Shirley Chisholm once made. She was the first African American woman elected to Congress and then she ran for president. And she used to say, you deserve to have a seat at the table. And if there are no seats left, just bring a folding chair. And I always liked that. So I wanted to ask you to maybe give us a sort of overview of what is the National Archives. I mean, I referenced just a tiny, tiny bit of some of the extraordinary documents that people occasionally can see if they visit the archives in Washington. But that is not even the tip of a very huge iceberg because you have so much that you're responsible for. Yes, we are the repository of federal records in the United States, which of course includes presidential records. To give you a sense of the scope, we have 13.5 billion records in our possession that are just paper or analog records, 13.5 billion. And that does not count the born digital records. We have about 30 billion born digital records in our possession. So the depth and the scope is just amazing. And you referenced really our mission in the beginning, which is to preserve, protect, and share our nation's records. And we do this for a number of reasons. We do this so that we can interpret history. That now we can interpret history, but we can interpret history for the history of the Republic because we know that some of those interpretations will change over time. But the reason that I'd like to talk about when I travel around the United States, and we have 42 facilities, 42 locations all across the country. We're not just in Washington, D.C., presidential libraries. Yes, we have those. We have archival facilities. We have federal record centers. So when I travel around and get to talk to the public, what I like to explain is we are an essential building block of democracy, the National Archives. Records are our basis for holding our government accountable and providing transparency. It is not a nice thing to have. It's not something that should be an afterthought. It is a necessity. And if we don't have accountability, if we don't have transparency in our democracy, then we cannot have a democracy. It is absolutely a building block. So we are a necessary democracy and for the vitality and perpetuation of it. And how many presidential libraries are there? There are 15 presidential libraries all across the country, starting with President Hoover, because actually President Roosevelt created the presidential library system. But then President Hoover said, I'd like to have one too. And graciously, President Roosevelt said, okay, sure, you can come along as well. So we start actually with President Hoover, his library in Iowa, and then go all the way forward to including President Trump, who does not have a physical location, but his papers are with us in Washington, D.C. at one of our facilities. And we'll start to build the background to share those records as well. You know, when I think about the substance of the work that you do, and you referenced a little bit about this, it is so challenging to have have the same version of history throughout time. But if you don't have the underlying documents, you cannot make decisions about how to look at history from the perspective of where you are in time. And that's particularly true for women's history. And, you know, we may not have all of the documents that we wish we had on the history of women in the United States, or the history of, you know, black Americans, or immigrant Americans, or native Americans. But what we have is so critical to trying to figure out how to make sense of it. You're a political scientist, and now as the archivist, what can you say about trying to make sense of the documents? You first have to have them, and you have to make sure that they're, you know, intact and that they are connected to other related documents. But how does all that work if somebody is looking to write a book or write a paper or learn more about themselves? Because, you know, you have genealogy records, you have bankruptcy records, you have military records. Talk a little bit about that. Well, if you want to use the National Archives, there's really, there's many ways you can engage with us. But the two ways that I think are the easiest to engage. The first would be you could look online. We have, we have about 300 million records online in our National Archives catalog. So you can start with a digital search there. If you're not finding what you're looking for, you can contact us and we can also try to help and see if that document or record might be digitized, but you're just not able, currently, to be able to locate it within the catalog. So we have a lot of online engagement and we want to improve that online engagement going forward because we know that many of our users can't travel to facilities or maybe, you know, you live near a facility, but actually you need the record that's in Seattle. I mean, you shouldn't have to go across the country to find that record. So start out by contacting us on our website and we can have an entrance, you know, a discussion with you with an archivist about what you need. Either engaging with us online or if you want to come to see us in person, like here at the Clinton Library, you would make an appointment ahead of time and that's really the best way to go about it because then when you arrive for your appointment, if you're doing an in-person research, then our archivist will have boxes ready for your request and you can look through those boxes and you can see what might be responsive and if that turns out not to be responsive, they can go back to the stacks and look through and find perhaps the records that would be responsive. So we are really working hard at the National Archives. I want to really make the institution as user-friendly as possible. So we are emphasizing access, access, access, and that is through those two mechanisms, either in-person experiences or online digital access. Well, the idea you have 300 million, you know, archival records online is, I think, you know, pretty much overwhelming, but it's a good start. I want to just focus for a few questions on the fact this is Women's History Month and I know you have a particular interest in making sure that, you know, women's history, like everybody's history, is really going to be not just included but lifted up and made available and, you know, resilience is a common theme when we talk about women in leadership, women in history, and we just celebrated the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and we had a great exhibit here at the library about women's history and the history of getting the vote. It was delayed two years by COVID, but it was really exciting for those of us who were part of it. And, you know, the story of suffragists became more mainstream during the centennial and I'm excited because I'm co-producing a new Broadway musical called Suff's, which stands for suffragists. And so what are some of your favorite stories? Yeah, you all have to come to New York and see it, it's going to be great, we're very, you know, it's sort of the women's version of Hamilton, you know? We're telling the women's story by this amazing young writer, lyricist, Shayna Taub, who has put all of this together. But what are some of your favorite stories of these remarkable, resilient women? There's so many, it's hard to choose, but I was really drawn, when I was the vice chair of the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission and I was working with some of these histories, I was really drawn for whatever reason, I was drawn to the very end of the movement. So like starting in 1913 to about 1917, 1918. And that was the era that I got really focused on because I became very interested as a political scientist by sort of this dual approach that the suffragists took during this era. So you had suffragists like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns who took a certain approach because they had been in Great Britain and they had actually worked on the suffrage movement in Great Britain when they were students in Great Britain and they saw what they were doing in Great Britain and they brought those tactics back to the United States which were a little confrontational. They organized a parade in Washington, DC that drew attention to the suffragists and then the suffrage cause and then after that they started to protest at the White House and then they started getting arrested in front of the White House and these women were fearless, you know, resilience. I mean they would get arrested, some of them would get arrested, they would do jail time and they were back on the picket line that day. I mean that's resilience, that's absolutely amazing. They were also very media savvy. They were the original tweeters, okay. If they had seen Twitter, Alice Paul would have been like, you know, 18 million followers on Twitter because they had, all they could do was hold the signs, right? But they were doing it for images, image reasons because they understood they could get their cause out. They were taking advantage of newspapers, mass communication that was changing at that period of time and they would put these really cool slogans on their banners like, you know, Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty, right? These kind of catchy slogans. They were doing that really incredible work and then you had women like Carrie Cat and others who were doing like sort of the grinder work, the lobbying work. They were going in lobbying members of Congress to get the amendment passed in both the House and the Senate. They were doing the hard work to try to convert President Wilson, not a fan of suffrage by the way, to convert him to being a supporter of suffrage. So really running those dual tracks between the outside game and the inside game, in my opinion, as a political scientist, that's what got it done. And so I'm very fascinated by that timeframe. It also highlights the importance, I think, of a component of history that wasn't told maybe at the previous celebrations of the 19th Amendment, but the role of race that race played. And you see that through Paul, you see that through not letting African-American women march in the parade, but then Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells insisting that they march in the parade and really that tension that exists. And you know from some of this work, at the very end, it's actually not about women. At the very end, when the amendment is being ratified, it's actually all about race. And it's really a fascinating history when you dive into it. And I'm so honored that I was able to do that for several years. Well, I think that it was so important that you were part of that leadership of the Centennial Commission and what you just described is what this musical is about because it's exactly about Alice Paul and about Kerry Chapman-Cad and about Ida B. Wells and all of the people you mentioned as well as others. And I think it's a great lesson for people interested in change, politics and history, because as you say Colleen, it was an inside-outside game. You had largely younger, more radical, if you can use that word, suffragists like Alice Paul who borrowed techniques from Great Britain who took the outside game, you know, picketing the White House, going to jail, going on hunger strikes. And then you had leaders like Kerry Cat who were saying, look, we have to persuade these people. And it became like the old Yin and Yang. I mean, the pressure on the outside, the continuing work, the outreach, the persuasion on the inside. And I think it's a great way to understand how change happens in the United States. And as you said, when Ida B. Wells came with a big delegation of African-American women to march in the big suffragist parade, and you know, that caused consternation because there were people saying, well, you know, that'll set us back, we can't do that. And she just would not hear of it and she marched. And she was one of the most outspoken and effective leaders in making the case that this was about all women. And, indeed, it took a long time for it to be actually realized for all women. But I think those kinds of stories, and of course, all the documentation, everything that you have in the archives, are trying to help us understand who we are as a nation. And, you know, I, like I think many Americans are concerned about, you know, the lack of understanding that a lot of people have of how our government works, the lack of civics education being available in our schools, the teaching of American history, the closing of history departments, and, you know, some colleges and universities, in part. So what can we do? And what do you see as the archivist could be done to try to better link America's story, you know, warts and all? I mean, we have a great story to tell, and it's a story that should be told truthfully and factually and completely, because we're old enough, big enough, and mature enough to understand it. And, you know, any story that involves human beings is not a perfect story. So we should be willing to, you know, be able to step up and learn our own history. But what do you see from your position could be done to try to deal with what is, and I think fair to say, a kind of gap in understanding? Yeah, it's a great question. It's something that I really am paying a lot of attention to, and the National Archives has done a very good job historically in working with K-12 teachers on civics and American history education, but we're going to double down, because I'll be honest with you, the test scores are not good. There were test scores that came out last year, and they've shown, unfortunately, a dip in understanding about how our government works, traditional civics knowledge, and also basic knowledge about American history. I was actually at an event this week with Secretary Miguel Cardona, the Secretary of Education, about this very topic, and he used a really good phrase, and I told him I was going to take it, but I told him I'd give him credit for it. He said, we need a civics renaissance, and I'm going to start to use that. We had a renaissance in this country 15, 20 years ago for STEM education for science, technology, mathematics, and it worked. I mean, it brought test scores up. More kids got interested in those subjects. That's all terrific. I don't want to take that back, but we need that equivalent of that STEM push that we did. That needs to happen right now for civics and American history, because if we don't give our students, our young people knowledge about how government works, the history of our government, and the decisions that were made, how can we expect them to understand their role as citizens? It's actually not fair to hold them accountable if we're not giving them that training. And what Secretary Cardona said, he said a lot of things, but a few of the things that he highlighted in the conversation, which I think were very smart, is he said what a successful thing that happened with STEM was that they integrated STEM education in all subjects. So they would show why math is useful for a lot of different things, not just in math class. He said we need to do that with citizenship. It doesn't just have to happen in civics class or social studies class. It has to be integrated across subjects, and I thought that was really smart. He also said we have to double down on technology. Gone are the days when you open up the civics textbook and you read the chapter and you learn about the three branches of government. I mean, that's okay, but it's much, much more helpful if we can provide teachers with engaging online resources and engaging resources that they can push to kids that will illuminate the classrooms. So that's what we're going to focus on at the National Archives. We have really good materials. We're going to double down on outreach of those materials as the 250th anniversary of the United States comes up in 2026. We're going to provide teaching documents for the Declaration of Independence. Why is it important? What are the principles of the declaration? Why are they important? How have we fulfilled these principles? What work have we done and what work do we need to do? Those are the conversations that we need, that's the information we need to providing and the conversations we need to be having in the classroom. The last thing I'll say is we also need some curriculum or basis to start talking to our kids about how to talk to each other in a civil way. I don't think that we should be running away from talking about difficult subjects in the classroom. Now it has to be age-appropriate and we have specialists that are able to do that, but we cannot just run away from these topics and discourage dissent in the classroom or disagreement and we have to teach kids how they can disagree with each other but disagree in a polite and civil manner that is actually productive. There's been some work that's starting on this. The Reagan Foundation is investing heavily in this area and we need more partners to invest in this area. That should be part of civics education as well. I'm very pleased to hear you say that and explain it because we're trying to do that here at the Clinton Presidential Center under the leadership of Jay and the archive team is how we can be a good partner for schools around Arkansas and talk about civics and have model programs and curriculum. I think it's very exciting to anticipate the 250th anniversary of our country and use that as a real goal. How can we get more civics education in time for us to celebrate our 250th anniversary? I'm thrilled that you're going to take that on as a special mission because clearly we need new curricula materials. We need to figure out how to convey these messages in ways that use the media that kids are using. It's not just a school-based program but also more generally available. I-Civics does a great job with this. I-Civics is the major, they use games. This was of course the creation of just a Sandra Day O'Connor and they use games to teach civics. They've made really important gains in getting those games which are free to use into the classroom so the kids can play them in the classroom and they can also play them outside of the classroom. I have to admit that I occasionally play those games too. Even adults can do it. That's a good model for the rest of us. You have a somewhat different perspective than the 10 people who preceded you because you don't come to this role as an archivist. You come as a political scientist. You come with your much more broad-based set of experiences. Maybe just very briefly you could describe some of your own past experiences and how does that influence how you think about this job and how you really set the top priorities. What are the top priorities in your view for the archives going forward now? I was a user of the archives as a political scientist but I also focus on the presidency. I used presidential libraries and many different past careers that I had at the White House Historical Association and my scholarly writings as a political scientist. I bring those experiences to bear and that's why our focus is on access. We are going to have a focus on our presidential libraries as well because I do believe that they are our democracy labs across the United States. For all civics education at presidential libraries but really importantly they focus on the presidency and the role of the presidency in the constitutional system. The president is an extremely important player within that constitutional system but not the only player in the constitutional system and I think that's important. Presidential libraries put that in context in whatever era here at the Clinton Library a great chronology of what happened in the 1990s in the United States. I worked on the Hill for a while. I worked at the Library of Congress for over a decade and I bring those experiences to bear all the time when I'm making decisions. Another thing that we work on at the National Archives is making sure that we have the resources available to be able to execute our mission. So I bring about a lot of my knowledge of Capitol Hill how to work with policymakers how to convince policymakers about the importance of our mission so when I'm not traveling around the United States visiting one of our archival facilities or presidential libraries a lot of what I do inside Washington DC is making sure that the needs of the National Archives are being met by our policymakers and I'm making those effective arguments and I'm glad that I'm a political scientist to be able to do it. It also enables me to put things I think in a larger perspective because I can see larger trends in our politics where we're headed, how Congress has changed over time and that does affect your strategies and how you approach some of these problems. Yeah, I think that when I look at presidential history and you mentioned here at this library we try to really bring people back into the 90s because it's important that you have an understanding of what was happening not just in the world around you but in the Congress, in the courts. What were the kinds of pressures, changes that presidents had to be aware of that they had to respond to and that gives you a much broader view than thinking of any form of history even presidential history as just oh, look at the administration, what did they do on day one, what did they do on day 100? So having that broader view gives you a much richer sense of the real history that's happening. It turns out the 1990s was a pretty good decade. As I was walking around, I was actually feeling pretty good. So yes, absolutely. And putting things also in context as a political scientist with a difference I'm a political scientist who studies history that uses history as my data to inform my analysis of the world and the difference between I think political scientists and historians both really valid inquiries and ways to approach that type of intellectual enterprise is that historians tend to focus in on a particular era or a particular president or actor or episode in history and political scientists were a little bit more of the bird's eye view where the good year blimp view of the football field rather than being on the 50 yard line and we take this longer turn and this longer view and that's why I mean it's just completely, it's so invaluable to political scientists, the National Archives because where else do you have that long arc of history? And also as history evolves and changes other things happen down the road then that causes us to interpret other events differently. So one day we will have a woman in the White House, there will be a woman that will serve as president of the United States I'm confident in that and when that happens it's going to be really important to look back on your historic runs for the White House because then that lens what you did at that period of time will then be interpreted by what we know and all kinds of in political science terms causal factors will come to light that we can't even imagine today because we can't predict what the future will hold but it's very exciting and I'm so honored to be able to lead the agency at this period in time when there's no more important time to think about the long arc of history and why that's valuable. You know I encountered as secretary of state a wide range of diplomatic challenges and I'm wondering how you see the National Archives contributing to the documentation and understanding of diplomatic history particularly in times of international tensions I started off by talking about the Louisiana Purchase which was a huge diplomatic undertaking but how does the archives it's not just about what happened in this country obviously it's about our global connections and how does the archive really cover that and understand that. I'll give you a really terrific story that I was able to witness and it's pretty relevant to today President Zelinski came to visit the United States and he was going to give a speech he wanted to give the speech at the National Archives and we worked with the White House and other entities so he could do that and when President Zelinski came to the archives we asked his team would he like to see some documents and the answer was he would before he would go out and give the speech in our retundent in front of the Declaration the Constitution, the Bill of Rights so we were able to spend some time with President Zelinski and our team and one of the record that he really held on to that he actually ended up changing his speech because he saw the record was this telegram that President Lincoln sent Ulysses S. Grant and at the end of the near the end of the Civil War at the end of the wilderness campaign when Grant was pursuing the Confederate Army and famously Grant was a little hesitant about whether he should keep pursuing or what should he do he wanted to but Lincoln wrote some telegram and said fight like a bulldog, hold on like a bulldog chew and keep going and that was such a powerful thing that bulldog telegram for President Zelinski to see the actual copy of that telegram he was really visibly moved by it and like I said he changed his speech and talked about it several times after that so that's an example of how our history can influence diplomatic history international relations fun things too President Biden obviously Irish American heritage he's going to be welcoming St. Patrick's Day weekend he's going to be welcoming some Irish leaders to the White House and he asked us to come with a facsimile of a document that we would be able he would be able to present to them so we were able to provide him with the first credentials of Irish diplomats that came to the United States I think from 1924 and we were able to make a facsimile I think King George V signed those documents and he will present that to our Irish visitors this weekend we do things like the home of all the treaties in the history of the United States the NATO treaty, it's the 75th anniversary of NATO this summer and that treaty is going to actually be displayed in Brussels we're going to send it over to Brussels so it can be displayed then it will come back to the United States and we will have it on display at the National Archives for a period of time for a lot of different meetings that will take place and in which the State Department will want to bring some of our friends to the treaty so really the breadth and the depth you could just keep going on and on by the things that we house and we're able to provide also to our policy makers so that they can make better decisions because if they don't know our history then it's very very difficult for them to make good decisions well I know I was thinking about that because Bill just was in Prague to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Czech Republic and he was holding a member of NATO and he was invited by that government to come and they were very proudly showing the documents that were signed to enable the Czech Republic to become a NATO member and those documents are so powerful as both reminders and challenges about what has happened and what is still ahead and I love that Zelensky story and you know part of the issue we just touched on earlier about history and about challenges to history and you know as a political scientist now as the archivist what can you say that sort of would explain the importance of looking you know being unafraid to look at history yeah I mean I am teaching of course at Columbia University now I taught last fall I will teach again in the fall on crisis decision making called inside the situation room and part of what we are you know looking at is how do people make decisions under difficult circumstances what information do they have how do they evaluate that information who do they listen to both advisors and outside influences what is the role of the press in dealing with any kind of crisis situation and so much more but if you don't look at all of it you will miss lessons from it and so part of the challenge today is to make sure that people you know really are willing even if you have to get outside your comfort zone to look at what we know about history what we can prove about history and then you know try to not only understand it but work to you know make the future better I mean I see I think that's part of the mission that you are really promoting absolutely right there's a lot of reasons why we want to tell you know a more inclusive history you know there's some of the reasons might be for representation so the people will get excited about history but really and when it comes down to it why we want to tell inclusive history is that it's simply accurate history and if you leave out if you leave out things I once again you know I think of it more as a political scientist so if you leave out variables to a model the entire model is biased so just think about it that's how I think of things because I think of things in that way but if you don't tell the whole story just like the example I use with suffrage is a really good example because if you leave out throughout the entire suffrage story but we're talking about the very end of suffrage the pursuit of the 19th amendment if you leave out the story of how race impacted that debate you're really telling the wrong story because if you go to Tennessee and you read some of the debate the debate isn't oddly enough that much about women at this point in franchising additional African-Americans and how the South is going to deal with that with some people perceived as a threat so that without if you don't tell that part of the suffrage story then you're really not it's not the best history so I always say to people yes we want to be inclusive because I want as many people as possible in the National Archives in our research rooms using our website using our resources so I want everyone to feel included but we also want to tell the right narrative as well so we have a couple of questions from the audience and if there are more just raise your hand and somebody will come and you can write down your question if we have somebody who can do that what do you think, can we get that done so this is a question that we've kind of covered but I think I'll ask specifically as the first woman to hold this office do you believe you will be able to promote more contributions that women have made to our nation's history what's a good question here's one contribution I made we added a specialist in women's history which we didn't have so that was easy okay done check done okay you know my senior staff is great but I think they drew straws to tell me that we didn't have it and then they kind of moved away it's okay it's fine we can fix it so we did now we have an archivist that specializes in women's history and is able to help with that but it's really in everything that I do in doing events like this and when I'm out and about and talking about the National Archives which stories I choose to talk about and tell and also on social media I'm very deliberative about telling all kinds of different stories but also highlighting particularly the contributions of women and by the way March I love it Women's History Month very excited when March 1st comes around I'm yay okay ready to go but it's really all year long we have to incorporate those stories in everything we do all year long you know somebody famously said and I can't remember right now who it was that women were not written out of history they were never written into it and I think you know all of the work that you're doing and the emphasis you're placing is long overdue and personally I'm shocked that there's never been a chief archivist for American women's history but thank you for trying to remedy that are there some items in the archives that are particularly close to your heart there's I mean I work when I'm in Washington DC I work at the location that's right there off the National Mall and you might have visited it so I try if I'm working in that building I try every day to visit the founding documents to visit the declaration the Constitution the Bill of Rights I like to check to see what the crowds are what they're doing but I also think it's really important it's a really brief reminder of me why I'm here and one of my important jobs which is to be the promoter and the protector of those documents now we are going to add to the retunda we are going to be raising we are in the process of raising some funds to build a case and we are going to add the Emancipation Proclamation to those founding documents in the retunda that was another decision made pretty early on so we're going to be doing that which I think is very important so those are some of the touchstones but some of the documents that are really close to me personally you know some of the things that I've seen my father's military records which were actually burned in a fire that we had in the 1970s but were reconstituted so I was able to see those military records have them digitized also get facsimiles and share them with him he's 90 he was able to see recall some of the time that he spent in the United States Army my uncle who served at the end of World War II he's 97 years old he was in the Navy he lives in Florida same thing we were able to have those records digitized I could send them to my cousin in Florida she was able to bring them up on our iPad and show them to my uncle Jim that was really heartwarming to also see his Navy picture his photo is in his record it was a very emotional to actually see that the naturalization records of my great grandfather in the Philadelphia archival location and we got the facsimile of those records that hangs in my outer office because it also is really helpful to remember where you came from my great grandfather on my father's side was a coal miner and emigrated from what was then hungry but now would be Slovakia and I have his record hanging as well so I mean that's the importance of the National Archives you can we want people to learn about our nation's history writ large but you can also drill down and learn about your history or your local history records that matter specifically to you that would be really exciting to see your own personal records for those of you who would like to pursue that do you have some idea about what the weirdest or most unusual things in the archives are that you ever encountered well I have to tell you Secretary Clinton I saw a pretty weird thing today and so I'll tell you about it it's not weird it was nice but it was unusual so in the 90s you know I really like socks so I'm a pet lover I love animals and we own dogs in my household but I you know was following everything and I really like socks socks are cats right and so I actually convinced my parents to adopt a cat in the 90s and it was largely influenced by socks so the lineage is strong and they continue to be cat owners for a long period of time after that and today I actually saw I saw some of I saw socks but socks is apparently you know has gone on and his ashes what they told me were split up and Betty Curry donated some of socks's ashes and they were photographing it today in this lovely urn because we're digitizing all the objects in the collection and they're going to be on a program called e-museum very high quality photographs and it just so happened when I walked in today they were digitizing socks so I had I finally met socks you know it's just what happened that was a little unusual but I said I said a little I said a prayer and for socks well you know I I went to my granddaughter's school this week to talk about women's history months and they wanted me to talk about you know growing up and challenges and running for president so you know I spent about 10 minutes doing that and then it was time for them to ask me questions so they're 60 years and all they wanted to do was talk to me about our pets so I got a lot of socks questions so I think you really saw in many ways the symbol of the most popular member of our White House years you know I think a lot about artificial intelligence I don't know that much about it I worry a little bit about it but we had a chance to talk earlier artificial intelligence can make a very big difference can it in what you can do at the archives can you talk a little bit about that sure yes I mean artificial intelligence you're correct to be concerned I will say that you know president Biden has issued an executive order on the use of artificial intelligence there's going to be office of management and budget guidance about artificial intelligence so there's going to be guardrails up for how we use it in federal agencies but as I said we have 13.5 billion you know analog records 30 billion and going to grow exponentially of born digital records the only way out of this for us to have access to these records in the future is through artificial intelligence is through pattern identification and using artificial intelligence in an educated way one way we have started to use it now use I'll give you a couple examples but one way that has been very successful so far we have military records of everyone who has served in the military for the history of the republic at our facility in st. Louis the national personnel records center and we we have a lot of veterans that need to access their records for their benefits sometimes families need to access for genealogy purposes but more often than not it's actually for benefits today and what we've been working with the veterans department with the VA to digitize records starting from most recent records backwards so we're making some traction it's going to take a long time but we're getting there and for those digitized records we have trained an AI bot to you know a military record can be hundreds and hundreds of pages long and the AI bot can go into that very long military record and pull out the component of the military record which is a summary of the record called the DD 214 which for most veterans not all but for most veterans that's all they need to gain access to their benefits and they can pull out that piece of paper and then email it directly to the requester so then that means I can free up my highly skilled archivist to do the harder requests about medals or about benefits related to where you actually served in theater you know things like that that do require a human being to review the record and analyze it so that's very promising that will reduce wait times and will also really ease up we had a backlog we've eliminated the backlog but it will make the speed of providing those records much much quicker other ways in which we're going to have to use this we're going to use it to generate metadata you know metadata is like a fancy word for how you search the information that is tagged with a record that aids your searching so we can also use artificial intelligence to generate metadata about records that already exist and are digitized that will improve our search function down the road a lot of our records have personal information on them they have social security numbers they have addresses they have phone numbers and we do not want to share that information with the world but we might want to make the record available so we can also work with artificial intelligence to train it to be able to identify that personal information in you know millions and millions of records and to be able to pull that personal information out so that we can provide ease and access to those records because how we're doing it right now is through very highly trained and very skilled archivists and human beings to do that and when we start to get into the billions and trillions of records there is no army of people that we can actually create to be able to go through that we are going to have to rely upon artificial intelligence to provide access to our records you also told us that you have done some modeling with the 1950 census which I found fascinating because I mean I think about all those paper records I mean I don't know how many millions but describe what you were able to do so this was done actually even before I came on board there's a very successful project at the National Archives was to work to train artificial intelligence to read the handwriting on the 1950 census it's not 100% accurate because handwriting being what it is and of course there was a lot of census takers so it's not uniform handwriting but it was very very successful and being able to read those names and being able to read what's written on the census then you can go online on the archives website look for our 1950 census and 1950 census and you're able to search for I was able to search for my parents I was able to find both of them my father a little easier because showing in a little bit more of an unusual last name my mother her name was Patricia Joy Smith and I was able to find her I mean Smith you can't get more common than that I was about to find her I think a little bit less than 20 minutes and I was able to find her using the database so that's incredible for genealogists and for other people researching family history to see who was living in the household wherever they were living occupations of everybody in the household a great treasure trove and we learned a lot from that experiment that we can apply to other records you know when I think about the advances that you're going to have with technology and you've just given us two great examples of upsides but do you worry or is there a legitimate concern you have to protect against that people hack into this that people might you know undermine the online archive you know information I mean how do you guard against that too Colleen well there thankfully there are federal standards that we adhere to and those federal standards are getting better and better a lot of people get concerned because of course our digital records have to be in the cloud I mean you know that that's the way that we store digital information and a lot of people are worried that what if that cloud was was brought down are those digital records in danger and you know this is not a national secret they're held in four different clouds so that is the way that we protect against you know a potential attack upon our records they would not be lost and we're able to protect against them but I mean the truth of the matter is this is totally this is evolving you know the people who want to do bad things are only getting smarter and smarter and we have to keep up with them and security of our records is of the utmost concern because of the preservation and protection and also the maintenance we want to keep those records for the life of the republic that's all you know that's a long time well I think what does that say Tina I can't read that oh five minutes yeah yeah I can't possibly see that you know I think that there's just a couple of personal things that I'd love to ask you as we wrap up I've heard through my sources that you are a huge mystery fan you love mysteries what is it that attracts you is it does it combine with your interest in tracking down information or what do you think makes you such a mystery reader well I was a mystery reader even when I was a little kid so my mom loved mysteries and so she started me I started on Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown and Trixie Belden so that's you know where I started and then oh you know when I got older and I was particularly in graduate school which is kind of a full time in your life and you're in graduate school I would read mysteries in the evening because it was a great you know way to get away from all the other stuff that I was working on it was just a terrific release but today I mean I read mysteries I love to read fiction it's once again just a form of entertainment you wrote a terrific mystery with Louise Penny who is one of the great mystery authors you know and I read mysteries today because I like fiction but mysteries have that added component to it their puzzles right there their puzzles and it enables me to do something that I like but I'm also trying to solve the mystery as I go along or try to figure out what's going on I like who done it's in particular I wrote eight mystery novels and just tell us a little bit about that yeah yeah yeah so I mean this was you know actually this is one of life's greatest mysteries because I had never written a word of fiction ever in my life but I had been a great mystery reader and this is really how it happened I took a walk one day in my neighborhood and was just getting ready for work and I had just finished reading another novel I don't know which one and I thought to myself it was this you know strange thing to think if I wrote a mystery novel what would the plot of that mystery novel be and in the course of that walk I came up with my first the plot of my first mystery novel appropriately titled stabbing in the Senate and and I came because I worked in the Senate and you know I loved and I was at that point in time I was at the Library of Congress but I worked at CRS the Congressional Research Service so I thought I would write something in the Senate I would like to do that and I came up with my protagonist and the good thing that I did the smart thing was I went home and I wrote it down when I got home before I went to work I wrote out the outline and then a few weeks later I just started writing and you know and I didn't stop for like seven or eight years I wrote one after another you know three became six and six became eight and then finally I got the you know this appointment I said I got to stop so I'm on a hiatus for a while but you know you know I'm thinking about I'm thinking about the plots they're there I can see murder in the archives you know that that that will certainly be something I'll look for you know you said I wrote a thriller with my friend Louise Penny who has written the great Gamache series set in Quebec and we had lots of conversations like what's the plot and what you know and she finally said well when you were Secretary of State what kept you up at night so I told her and that became kind of the center of the plot but one thing that I learned which I never understood before I used to see interviews with with writers and they would say things like you know I didn't know where my story was going until I started writing it and the characters took me there and I would say that's ridiculous they're your characters you're writing and of course you know where it's going well indeed I mean you get going into that and all of a sudden like oh that's what that character would do or the character you know takes you somewhere you had no intention of going and did you find that too that it was such a it was like a it was not only your writing down your idea your plot creating characters but it was kind of a discovery adventure for you as well it was and it was also it's just a great release because it's like an alternate reality because you have your day job your working you're doing all that stuff and there's many things that are out of your control as you know every day when you go to work or just in your regular everyday life but when you sit down to write actually you are in control right and you enter this other universe and you can control that universe you can let your character speak to you and talk to you and my characters change in really interesting ways throughout my eight books and that's mostly because I got to know them better and I wanted to steer them in in certain directions so it was yeah one of the great mysteries in my own life about doing that and I you know I can't do it today because a lot of reasons ethics reasons I'm also just way too busy to be able to do it but there is just a little part of me that misses it because that escapism at the end of the day or on weekends I think was a terrific really method of relaxation for me yeah no I mean it saves your sanity and also the thing I like about mysteries is usually the bad guy loses in the end so for me that's part of the real pleasure of reading a mystery and so Jay over to you over to you there we are secretary Clinton Dr. Shogan thanks to both of you all for a truly superb conversation during this women's history month with two individuals who have thought so fully about these issues related to women in American history and who are themselves vital parts of that history so thank you all both so much for the conversation as you all know we have tens of millions of documents in the archives the presidential library the museum here and when Dr. Shogan became archivist through the United States we got curious whether she showed up in any of them and as someone who came of age in the 1990s of course she did in September of 1995 she wrote then First Lady Clinton's office asking her to come speak to a student group at Boston College quote if Mrs. Clinton is in the Massachusetts area for any other event we would like to request a possible meeting time to discuss issues pertaining specifically to students also I'm sure there will be specific issues of discussion especially pertaining to Mrs. Clinton's expertise in health care women's issues children's rights in the consummate 1995 manner she closed the request please contact me via mail or the internet Patty Solis the director of scheduling for the First Lady politely replied well it is likely Mrs. Clinton will be able to accept your invitation please be assured that we will keep it in mind and contact you if we can accommodate your request so Dr. Shogan thank you so much for accepting our invitation to come to the Clinton presidential center this is a wonderful day as Dr. Shogan spent time with our team the Clinton presidential library and museum and thanks to again to Secretary Clinton and Dr. Shogan this was a wonderful evening so thank you very much not only is this women's history month but I'd be remiss if I didn't also note that this week is also Civic Learning Week and I so appreciate the portion of the conversation dedicated to the very real civics crisis in America as we all know the civic health in our state of Arkansas is among the most troubled in the country with Arkansas voter turnout at 51st across all states and the District of Columbia Civic Learning Week is a week when a number of organizations including the National Archives come together to focus on the fundamental role civic education has to play in sustaining and strengthening our constitutional democracy that is a role we take seriously here at the Clinton presidential center as we strive to be a hub for helping individuals of all ages learn more fully about our constitutional democracy and how they can use their unique skills and talents to be a part of continually reshaping it so again thank all of you for being here we can't wait to see you back at the Clinton center safe travels and if you're not ready to go home 42 bar and table is open this evening so thank you all very much thank you all thank you