 Good afternoon and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased you could join us for this afternoon's program. Whether you're here in the theater with us or joining us through Facebook or YouTube, before we hear from Harlow Giles Unger about his new biography of Thomas Paine, I'd like to tell you about two other programs coming up soon in the McGowan Theater. On Thursday, October 17th at 7, we'll host a panel discussion connected with our special exhibit, rightfully hers, American Women in the Vote. The program is called Women's Suffrage and the Men Who Supported Them, The Suffrages and Their Role in the Struggle for the Vote. And on Wednesday, October 27th at 7, another panel will explore the role of traditional media in our 21st century representative democracy in a program entitled The Credibility of the Fourth Estate Past and Present. Our partner for this program is the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress. To keep informed about events throughout the year, check out our website, archives.gov, or sign up at the table outside to get email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives programs and activities. And another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports our education and outreach activities, and you can find more information about them at archivesfoundation.org. Thomas Paine was a highly influential founding father, but you won't find his portrait in the two murals in the rotunda that celebrate the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. He didn't serve in the Continental Congress with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and he didn't serve in the field with George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. But his words were instrumental to this success of the revolution. His famous pamphlet, Common Sense, predated the Declaration of Independence and laid out the argument for a break with Great Britain. The American Crisis pamphlet inspired and encouraged Americans to persevere against the British Army. Even today, the opening line is familiar to us. These are the times that try men's souls. Though Thomas Paine's image is not memorialized on our rotunda walls, his words are immortal. So let's hear from Harlow Giles Unger to learn more about Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for Independence. Harlow Giles Unger, a former distinguished visiting fellow in American history at George Washington's Mount Vernon is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, educator and historian. He's the author of 27 books, including 10 biographies of the founding fathers, among them Patrick Henry, James Monroe, Lafayette and George Washington. Cited by Florence King in the National Review as America's most readable historian, he's appeared on the History Channel and C-SPAN's book notes and spoken many times at Mount Vernon, Valley Forge, Yorktown, Williamsburg and historic sites in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington. Mr. Unger spent many years as a foreign correspondent and American Affairs analyst for the New York Herald Tribune, Overseas News Service, The Times and The Sunday Times of London and the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Harlow Giles Unger. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It's always an honor to appear here at the National Archives, one of the homes of the Declaration of Independence and our other great documents. I didn't know this until quite recently, but they've just discovered manuscripts that show that Thomas Paine actually had a hand in drawing up the Declaration of Independence. As much as any hero of our American Revolution, Thomas Paine embraced both the Revolution and its leader, George Washington. Of the Revolution, Paine said, the sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. And of Washington, he pledged, I shall never suffer a hint of dishonor or disrespect to you to pass on notice. Washington felt the same way about Paine and ordered his officers to read Paine's words to the troops on the banks of the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776. Paine's words rang out through the darkness, these are the times that trimen souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink from this crisis and service to his country. But he that stands now deserves the thanks of all mankind. With Paine's explosive words in every soldier's mind and heart, Washington's troops rose as one that night. They boarded rafts across the Delaware River through huge chunks of ice and stormed into Trenton, New Jersey. Paine landed with them, firing his musket in concert with theirs. After months of humiliating defeats, the victory at Trenton that Paine inspired lifted the morale of an entire people and it convinced the American army that it could win the war of independence against a much stronger, better equipped British army. George Washington hailed Paine as a hero. He said Paine's words had convinced Americans of the righteousness of separating from Britain. Paine became the most widely read author in America. He wrote dozens of essays earning tens of thousands of dollars of which he kept not a penny for himself. He ordered his printers to give every cent he earned to Congress to buy war supplies for George Washington and the Continental Army. And that result was that by war's end, we won the war but Thomas Paine was dead broke. When Washington learned of Paine's distress, he wrote to Paine immediately. He said, if you will come to this encampment and partake with me, I shall be exceedingly happy to see you. Paine accepted Washington's invitation but he was so broke he had to borrow a dollar to get there. But now let's fast forward a few years for just a minute and suddenly we see Paine accusing Washington of treachery, reviling Washington as a cold blooded traitor and those are Paine's words, a cold blooded traitor. What on earth could have happened between these two close friends? Well that's why I'm here this afternoon. I'm going to tell you. Let's go back a lot of years to Paine's origins. He was the son of an English tradesman who made corset stays for a living in a small English town 75 miles north of London. Paine was headed for the same life except for his father's insistent that he attend Quaker meetings every Sunday. As congregants sat silently in the Quaker meeting house awaiting a signal from God, all young Tom Paine heard were the shrieks from the town whipping post outside the meeting house. He was unwilling to believe those shrieks were the voice of God. He quit the church, he left home and decided what he needed was an education. I do not believe in any church, he said. All churches appear to be nothing but human inventions. Although England had no free schools, King Charles II had founded the Royal Society of London for improving natural knowledge. It offered free lectures by noted scholars and scientists and access to one of the world's largest libraries at the time. Like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and many other great men in those times, Tom Paine educated himself. He devoured books on philosophy, Greek and Roman history, mythology, sciences such as electricity, hydrostatics, mechanics and astronomy. He was brilliant. He absorbed enough for the equivalent of two or three university educations by himself. To support himself, he got a steady but low-paying job as a tax collector and he also wrote newspaper articles. He was a freelance writer and he submitted articles for a little money to local newspapers and publications. He became quite skilled as a writer and because of those skills, his fellow tax collectors asked him to write a petition to parliament for higher wages. The petition was a beautifully written work and it got him fired. It left him bankrupt and facing debtor's prison. Some of his writings though had caught the eye of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was in London at the time. He was serving Pennsylvania and several other states as their agent in parliament. He in pain became close friends with Franklin introducing pain to deism which rejected the teachings of all religions except for a belief in God. As the law closed in on pain, Franklin gave him the money to flee to America and he gave him letters of introduction to important figures there including his brother who was governor of New Jersey. One of those letters got paying a job as editor of a startup magazine and one of the essays he wrote captured the attention of readers across America, England and the Western world. In it he declared that Britain which claimed to be a free country owed all its subjects freedom, owed all its subjects sanctity of their property and free exercise of religion. In absolute governments the king is law, pain wrote, but in free countries the law ought to be king and there ought to be no other law than the rights of mankind. He urged Americans to overthrow the king. He asked why should someone rule over us simply because he's someone else's child? He called it absurd. After all there had once been no kings. Hereditary rule defied common sense which is what he called his essay. Common sense shocked the Western world. It universalized the war of independence in America by claiming the cause of America is the cause of all mankind. It was heresy. Church leaders and royals across the world insisted that God had appointed them to power and most people they governed were too ignorant not to believe them. Thomas Payne did not believe them and his words convinced tens of thousands of ordinary Americans to agree. They and their forebears had crossed oceans and tamed the wilderness with their bare hands and the help of God. No noblemen, no churchmen, no kings had helped them clear their lands and grow their crops. So when tax collectors showed up demanding that they give the king and parliament part of what they earned they echoed Thomas Payne's words of defiance. They picked up their muskets and rebelled against royal rule. Common sense became the most widely read work in the Western world after only the Bible. Someone said that without the pen of pain the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain. And John Adams said, I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence in the inhabitants or its affairs than Tom Payne. Call it the age of Payne. The essay that began, these are the times that Trimans souls was only the first of 14, each of them called American crisis and numbered American crisis one, American crisis two and so forth. All 14 continued to feed the fires of the American revolution that he had lit with common sense. He wrote several crisis essays as letters addressed to British military commanders asking Lord how how do you expect to conquer America? He said the war was like a game of checkers. We can move out of one square to let you come in while we take two or three of yours for one of ours. We can always prevent defeat. How do you expect to conquer us? In another crisis essay he mocked parliament asking why haven't you conquered us? Who or what has prevented you? Your armies are the world's largest. They arrived in America without incident. No uncommon fortune has intervened. Why haven't you conquered us? And then in a letter to the people of England he said he couldn't understand Britain's motives for going to war. You enjoyed America's whole commerce before you began to try to conquer us. The country and commerce were both your own. As they had been for 100 years, what then in the name of heaven would you go to war for? It was the kind of indisputable logic that pain offered the world. It infuriated the British who had no answers, of course, and made Americans double over with laughter while firing up their spirits. It was all common sense. Well, I think you all know we won the war of independence. But as I said, it left Tom Payne a pauper. By then George Washington loved Payne like a brother, invited him to live with him at his encampment, and Washington then worked furiously to get the great writer his just compensation. He convinced a few state leaders and Congress to award Payne some money, and New York gave Payne a farm of several hundred acres that had seized from a tori just north of New York City in New Rochelle. Payne thanked Washington for, in his words, the friendship you have shown me and the pains you have taken to promote my interests. Payne was an accomplished poet as well as essayist, and he gave Washington a song whose lyrics he wrote for the general to the melody of rural Britannia. The money and land that Washington secured for him gave Payne enough security to settle on his farm and begin practicing self-taught engineering skills. Like Franklin, he was a great tinkerer and inventor, which is another aspect that drew them together as friends. The greatest and most famous of Payne's inventions was a self-supporting, single span, arched iron bridge that helped revolutionize bridge building. And he is, he and his bridge designs are in every engineering work on the history of bridges in the world. Franklin thought it was great, and he urged Payne to take it to his, a model of it to France and England where legislators were more enthusiastic about industrial advances than we were here in America. But while he was in Philadelphia, Payne got involved in politics there. Independence had left Congress conducting foreign affairs and every other aspect of government by committee. But Congress only met for a few weeks every year, and most members spent most of their time at home. The committee on foreign affairs needed a full-time secretary to correspond continually with foreign leaders. Franklin turned down the job, he was the obvious choice, but he cited his age and his ailments. So John Adams moved to appoint Thomas Payne, who was well known everywhere in Western Europe as well as in America. Franklin seconded the appointment and Congress named Thomas Payne the staymaker refugee from England, secretary to the committee on foreign affairs. Although he was only responsible for keeping committee records and drafting member correspondence, long member absences left him without instructions and forced him to write his own replies to many of these leaders from overseas to ensure the attention of the people he wrote to. He inflated his title a bit to secretary for foreign affairs. In effect he appointed himself America's first secretary of state. The absence of Congress also allowed him to organize official documents. Many showed that merchants in Congress had profited from the war by charging the army more for supplies than they charged civilian customers. He had contributed all his own earnings to the war effort and he was outraged when he learned what members of Congress were doing. He wrote to the newspapers charging congressional leaders with plundering public money and he called them unfit for duty in Congress. It was a bad move. War profiteering by public officials was not against the law then and merchant banker Robert Morris who had profited most from the war was furious. By becoming a delegate in Congress Morris argued I did not relinquish my right of forming mercantile connections and Gouverneur Morris an unrelated partner of Robert Morris was even angrier. He vowed revenge and demanded Payne's ouster. He got it and Payne was out. Fortunately a sharecropper was working his farm in New York and providing Payne with a steady stream of income. So he took Benjamin Franklin's advice and took his sketches and a small iron bridge model to Europe. In contrast to the bad feelings he left behind in Philadelphia France cheered Thomas Payne as a celebrated author of Common Sense. And when Payne displayed the model of his iron bridge the French Academy of Sciences hailed it as an engineering marvel. But the people of Paris were in no mood to build bridges. They were hungry even starving. Too many foreign wars had bankrupted the nation uncontrolled rioting erupted in Paris and across France and Payne who couldn't speak a word of French wisely left for England with his bridge model. He arrived there just after a major bridge had collapsed across the Thames. So British civic officials besieged him with requests to see his sketches of his iron bridge. It was so popular a British iron works built a scale model large scale model in a field outside London and thousands visited it. Officials promised dozens of orders. It was hailed in the press as a spectacular advance in Bridge building because the theory behind it was the the the arch over it was had to be a perfect semi circle which meant that the the larger the span it could it could hold any length span by simply making the circle bigger and bigger and bigger and keeping it perfect and it would hold the span up. But the orders were not issued very promptly. They had to get subsidies to to finance these bridges. Payne got tired of waiting when he learned that the Bastille prison in Paris had fallen and that his friends from the revolution Lafayette and American ambassador Thomas Jefferson were trying to help establish a French constitutional monarchy. Payne decided to join them. He wrote to Washington boasting that a share in two revolutions is living to some purpose. So for the second time in a dozen years Payne wrote off like Don Quixote to change the course of world history. He joined Lafayette and Jefferson and helped write the great preamble to the first constitution in French history. It was called the declaration of the rights of man and the citizen. It anticipated America's bill of rights. It granted French citizens freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and other so-called natural rights. With another revolution under his belt, Payne then wrote a book he called the rights of man. He dedicated part one to Washington and part two to Lafayette. Like common sense it proved outrageous for the times. He wrote that every history of the creation agrees that all men are born equal. And then he quoted the Bible and God said let us make man in our own image. From that payne concluded man existed before governments, before religions. So that men like William the Conqueror who invaded England seized power and declared himself king, a Frenchman of all places, men like that were nothing more than thugs who then united with priests to create the myth of divine right and get rich by enslaving the people and exploiting the natural resources of the countries they ruled. Like common sense the rights of man flew off the printing presses. London's printer alone sold 60,000 copies. The Irish bought more than 40,000. Europe absorbed another 30,000. And in America the Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson who had returned from France by then, paid for the printing of an American edition. But as you probably guessed, Payne's rights of man enraged King George and England's parliament. They banned it, ordered all copies seized and burned. They considered Payne still a British subject and ordered his arrest for treason, a crime punishable by an especially cruel death of being drawn and quartered by four horses. Payne's friend the great poet William Blake helped Payne escape from London and he barely avoided capture at Dover, jumping aboard a boat for France just as British police approached the pier. But when he arrived in France the next day thousands cheered him and his rights of man. Four towns elected him to the French National Assembly which voted him honorary French citizenship even though he still couldn't speak a word of French. But the cheers of entry faded away a few months later when the radical lawyer Maximilien Robespierre organized radicals in the National Assembly and moved to execute the French King for treason. With a translator at his side, Payne stood in the National Assembly defying Robespierre calling execution in humane. He urged exiling the King to America where he said the King was a hero for having supported American independence. Ironically as the French National Assembly debated the French King's fate in Paris, a court was debating Payne's fate in London. Both verdicts were the same. Guilty. Payne tried and almost succeeded in saving the King's life and only lost the final ballot by one vote. The King died on the guillotine a month later and although British authorities couldn't seize Payne, they sent 30 of his friends to prison and charged his printer with treason. Several Payne friends escaped to France, most notably Mary Wollstonecroft, the courageous woman's rights activist in Britain. Payne's effort to save the King cost him dearly. After Robespierre and his followers gained control of the National Assembly, they seized and executed political opponents and began months of what became known as La Terreux, the terror. Thousands of innocents died on guillotines without even a trial. Infuriated by Payne's opposition to the King's execution, Robespierre ordered Payne's arrest and imprisonment but he didn't dare send him to the guillotine yet. By then all Europe had gone to war with France and Robespierre held off executing Payne for fear of alienating France's only remaining military ally, the United States. So French police dragged Payne to prison but didn't kill him and Payne wrote to the American ambassador for help. The ambassador turned out to be Gouverneur Morris, the former member of Congress who had sworn to avenge Payne's exposure of his wartime profiteering. Morris not only left Payne's letters unanswered, he tried to get Payne killed on the guillotine. He told Robespierre that Payne had been born in England and was not an American. Fortunately for Payne, Robespierre's enemies had grown numerous enough to have him arrested and sent to the guillotine, thus delaying Payne's execution indefinitely. In the weeks that followed, Payne used much of his time in prison writing a new book that raged and organized religion for supporting the cruelties of royalist rule around the world. Payne also wrote a letter to the friend he loved most, George Washington, by then president of the United States. When Washington failed to reply, Payne concluded that Washington had abandoned him. Ten months after his imprisonment, a new American ambassador, James Monroe, arrived in Paris. When he learned of Payne's imprisonment, he badgered French officials to release Payne and the French let him go. It was then that Payne wrote the blistering letter to Washington that I cited earlier. Washington, of course, had never received any of Payne's letters. Translatic mail service was not very predictable in those days, and the jailers probably seized most, if not all, of Payne's letters. Washington, meanwhile, assumed the reason he hadn't heard from Payne was that Payne was too busy steering the French Revolution to write letters. Even Monroe didn't know of Payne's whereabouts when he arrived in Paris and only learned accidentally a few weeks later. So Payne's angry letter to Washington, while understandable from his point of view, it was actually unjustified. And because he sent copies to the newspapers for publication, it cost Payne much of his popularity when he later returned to America. Adding to public indignation was the book he had written in prison attacking every national church and religion. He called it Age of Reason and an infuriated churchman and the churchgoing public across America. Every national church and religion, he wrote, established itself by pretending some mission from God. Each accuses the others of disbelief. I disbelieve them all. Payne didn't stop there. Every church, again these are Payne's words, every church claims its books reveal the word of God, but when anyone claims a revelation and repeats it to someone else, it is hearsay and ceases to be a revelation. If it was not a revelation to me, I have only someone else's word that it existed and I have no reason to believe it. Payne insisted that Adam, if ever there was such a man, had to have lived as a deist, simply because he was the first man on earth before the founding of any religion. Well only Thomas Jefferson and New York Governor Clinton, both of them deists, like Payne, welcomed Payne's return to America. Other figures and much of the general public rejected him and as he sat reading by himself in his farmhouse one evening north of New York, a would-be assassin lay in wait in the bushes and fired a bullet through Payne's living room window. Payne only barely missed death. When Payne finally did die of natural causes, no one of consequence attended his funeral or noted his death and later crazed Englishmen, even prevented Payne from resting in peace. He sneaked on to Payne's farm one night, dug up Payne's bones and destroyed all traces of Thomas Payne's body. Since then, many publishers of history books, especially high school and elementary school history books, have sought to make Thomas Payne a virtual non-person by omitting much of his written work from such books. In doing so, of course, they hope to avoid antagonizing church leaders, church goers and public officials. But truth, like water, always seeks its own level. And that's why I wrote this book. Thomas Payne's truth still inspire those who embrace the rights of humankind. More than the clarion call for American independence, Thomas Payne sounded the clarion call for abolition, for women's rights, for free public education, and for the rights of all men and women to govern themselves and live free. I hope my new book will help Americans once again listen to Thomas Payne's clarion call for liberty and human rights, especially when they go to vote. For evil still lurks in our land and these are still and will always be the times that try our souls. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'll be happy to answer your questions if I can. There are microphones at either end of the seating area that you'll have to use so that others can hear your question, please. Well, thank you very, very much. Thank you. I don't think I knew much more about Thomas Payne than Common Sense, and I kind of had written him off of, oh, that's not going to be someone so interesting. But what I've taken from you is how much he was before the times that he has really thinking about things that Americans and French and the British had not yet articulated. I mean, even his view of the, as being a deist, and having the courage to stand up to the churches, we haven't even gotten to the point where we're allowed to do that anymore. But he wasn't the only one. People like Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, all of those people are part of our history, and yet we tiptoe so much as to not offend people in the broad width of our populace. And so I truly appreciate how you ended your talk and you're absolutely right. What was happening then, these two are times that try our souls. Now, can I just... Do you have a question? Yes, I do. Thank you. So, the getting to the question is, so you talk to... Is there any more that you would like to say about his deism or the fact that he criticized the churches? That was very much ahead of his time. And you're right. I'm sorry I went on for so long. That's why I wrote this book. Okay. All right. I'll buy the book. I had a question. I want to know, did Thomas Paine take on the issue of slavery? Was he an avid... I'll take on the issue of what? I'm sorry. Slavery. Oh, yes. Was that... You mentioned the church. Absolutely. And he and Lafayette grew closer because of that. Lafayette was appalled by slavery. And he and his wife, when Lafayette returned to France, he wrote a letter on behalf of him and his wife. They had bought huge tracts of land in South America. The area now called... It's called Guiana. It was French Guiana. And they were going to settle slaves there and apportion land and give all the slaves their own land and declare them free. And he wrote to George Washington asking Washington to join him and join them in that project. And Washington wrote back a rather mealy mouth letter saying he was so proud of what a good man Lafayette was and he would think it over. But so yes, the answer is yes, Thomas Paine was a strong advocate of abolition and he was a strong advocate of women's rights. He was far, far ahead of his time in that. And was a close friend of Catherine McAulay, became a close friend of Catherine McAulay and especially Mary Wollstonecroft who was the real pioneer in women's rights and had to flee England because of that. And she and several mutual friends stayed with Paine at his home in Paris after they fled England. Thank you. Oh, sorry. You alluded to the fact that Thomas Paine worked with Thomas Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence. There were some portions of it that he was maybe involved in. Of course, some of the concepts that you... The principles you've spoken to relative to the... All men are created equal abolitionists. I think in the Declaration of Independence initially there was a line in there that was to make all men free and it was written stricken out. How much of that Declaration of Independence do you think they collaborated on between Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson? There is a Thomas Paine Institute in New Rochelle, New York, which is where his cottage is. And they are continuing to do all sorts of research. They help develop with the help of four professors from various colleges, but two of them from my own college, which is in New Rochelle. A system of evaluating written materials to see whether it's authentic or not authentic. And they've now discovered more than 2,000 documents, some just partial, some complete, written by Thomas Paine. He was just a prolific writer. And he wrote treatise after treatise on abolition and the cruelties of abolition. His involvement in the Declaration of Independence has just been discovered as has his involvement in the writing of the Constitution. But the Declaration of Independence, as we all know from our history books, the final draft was written supposedly by five men, Adams, Franklin. And apparently Thomas Paine was there as well because they were all writing in freehand. And the documents all have their initials on it. And they have unearthed, and I've forgotten where, excuse me, but they've unearthed a number of pages with the words of the Declaration and the initials T.P. on it. And that he was a close friend of Ben Franklin. And so it can only be Thomas Paine, but they're still in the throes of authenticating much of his material. And by the way, they've thrown out a lot of his material. Some of the stuff that was attributed to him in that magazine that he edited, not his writing. He was the editor, but he didn't write a lot of those things. Thank you for all your work. Thank you. Yes. While Paine was in France, do you have any information or did he have any interaction with Talleyrand at all? No. Talleyrand is after his time in France. He had interactions with Napoleon though. His last year or two in France, he lived with a French family. Actually, the man was one of his printers. And it was a knock on the door one day and he was out there with Napoleon. And they had, they dined together several times and Napoleon consulted him on a number of things, including abolition of slavery. Yes, sir. Thank you for being here. My question is, how much has the erasure of Thomas Paine impacted the American origin story? And by that, I mean, there's a lot of people who believe that the revolution begins at the Declaration of Independence, not giving credit to Thomas Paine and the folks at Lexington and Concord, that sort of thing. Do you think that if they promoted him more or your thoughts on that? Should I rephrase it? I'm not sure. I understood your question. I'm sure. So towards the end of your talk, you said that Thomas Paine has been sort of edited out of history books because of, you know, and how much does that impact the American origin story for generations that have come beyond it? I think a lot of people who read history books believe that the revolution starts at the signing of the Declaration of Independence rather than... Yeah, you've got two problems with children's history books, history texts in secondary schools, especially. Number one is the short length of the school year. It's shorter than any place in the Western world. And the short amount of time, the small amount of time given to study each subject. Now, no place in the Western world lets kids play half the day at school. They go to school all day and sports is their business when they have a day off. Schools don't have anything to do with sports. So that's one problem to try to compress 230 years of history into a little book that kids who can barely read are going to get through in 30 weeks, rarely doing any homework. So that's one problem. The other problem is a religious problem. School boards are run by ordinary people. Again, the only place on earth that educators don't control school systems. So you have school boards. And usually in most places, most small towns in this country, these are churchgoers, and they just simply will not tolerate their kids reading any of the things that Thomas Paine wrote. And the problem with letting them even read these are the times that try men's souls. Well, A, you've got to explain it to a kid. And B, what else did he write, mommy? And eventually you get to age of reason. And I've devoted an appendix in my book to age of reason. And you'll see why most school boards in America would not tolerate their kids ever seeing that. We have such a cacophony of voices today, competing with one another. Is there a contemporary voice whose eloquence rises above others that you are listening to? Well, I think all of our founders had much to say. This was I meant a contemporary voice. Is there someone living and writing today whose work you find worthy? Not in the sense that it lays any gives us any insight into American history. And I specialize in writing on American history. So I don't follow too many of the those who write about other things today. Well, thank you again for coming, ladies and gentlemen. I appreciate it. And I'm not sure is there a book signing? Yes, there will be a book signing one level up at the archives bookstore, books will be available at the cash register. Again, thank you very much.