 Hello all. Thank you so much the National Archives for hosting this exciting event. Welcome to all of you who are here. I'm so enthusiastic to have this chance to talk with Rob, Robert Parkinson about his really compelling and accessible new book, 13 o'clock. Rob, you tell us a little bit about this book, which tells us a lot about the founding of America. Sure. Thank you, Serene, and thank you for the National Archives for hosting this. This is a lot of fun to get to talk about this book, which we'll talk about over the next hour. It comes from a much, much bigger book. So I guess I would start with the title of where the title comes from. So I could have the next slide, please. The title comes from a quote from John Adams. John Adams, when he was a very old man, close to the age of the portrait in the corner, he, when the revolutionary generation was sort of dying off, there was this need to try to find out what sort of unpack the brains of the founding fathers as they got older. And so a Baltimore journalist named Hezekiah Niles, a printer in Baltimore, wrote letters to John Adams and other people wanting to know, hey, what went down in 1776? What was your take on it? And so John Adams had thought a lot about this over the years. He'd written to Thomas Jefferson about this over the years. So this was his response to Niles in 1818. He's in his early 80s in 1818. He said to Niles, the colonies had grown up under constitutions of governments so different, and they were so great of a variety of religions, and they were composed of so many different nations. Their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that's a long list of problems, that to unite them in the same principles and theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprise. Next slide, please. Adams continued, the accomplishment of it in so short a time and by such simple means was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind. Thirteen clocks were made to strike together a perfection of mechanism which no artist had ever before affected. And by when people of Adams' generation talk about an artist like that, he actually might even be referring to God. So even God might not have could have done what we did in 1776. Look how awesome we are. Adams is very much saying, talking about the miracle of unity, the miracle of the so-called common cause, or all these thirteen colonies coming together as becoming one United States. And so this notion, and again, I think John Adams is very much right about how long the stakes were, or I'm sorry, how long the odds were, how great the stakes were. If I could have the next slide, please. We talk about, this is a very famous image, right, and we, and I asked my students this in class, when is it that the colonies are going to decide to join rather than die, and it's much, much, much, much, much later than we like to think it is, right? Benjamin Franklin, of course, draws this very famous cartoon in 1754, but it is a disaster. The colonists are going to choose or die all through the 1750s, all through the 1760s, and much further into the 1770s than we might even think about. So, so Adams is right about this. He says, it was, it was, it was a miracle. It was certainly a miracle that this happened, and this is, this has always been something that's very much fascinated me. How did people who didn't know each other, didn't like each other, had all these problems going on, who fought about, who were having horrible border crises, who thought of a religion, slavery was becoming even more of a difficulty. Some people thought that the imperial crisis was a way to get rid of slavery. Some people thought that it was a way that should be protected, that slavery should be protected in the empire. They didn't agree with each other. And then on top of all that, you have the loyalists sort of counterattack saying that what the Patriots are doing is itself against the law and a breaking of all sort of order in the empire. So you have all these things as what, as what Adam says, there's so many things going against it. As I say to my students all the time, the surest bet is to take all of your money and go to Las Vegas and bet it against the 13 colonies staying together. Everybody thought so. Everybody in England thought it was, it was a joke. They would immediately fall into civil war. And it was just going to be a huge problem. So, Adams says in the same letter, if I have the next slide please, how are we going to find out what happened in the revolution? Well, Adams in 1815, when he still is an old man, he says, this is what we should do to find out how this happened. Young men of letters in all the states should undertake the laborious, but certainly interesting and amusing task of searching and collecting all the records, pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills of the 13 colonies to find out how the temper and views of the people had changed. And that how question is really what I'm interested in is the sort of the procedural things. How did these colonies with all these problems come together? That was the big question. And Adams writes this to Jefferson and their sort of correspondence. He talks about this also in his letter to Niles and other things. Again, like I said, Adams is thinking about this towards the end of his life quite a bit. So, I began thinking about this. This is 13 o'clock this short little guy, which is very thin and as Serena and Levely said, readable and accessible. It comes out of something that is not so much. It comes out of this book, which is, as you can see from the wide-angle lens, something much, much bigger. It waps in at 750 pages. I've been thinking about this for 20 years. Really, it started out as a dissertation in that I started researching in the year 2000 and the big fat book came out in 2016 and 13 o'clock came out last year. So, I've been thinking about these issues very much. How did they do this? And this letter from Adams about the newspapers is what really where I started this. So, I began trying to figure out in many ways what was the news feed to use today's parlance, kind of like a Twitter news feed. What was the news feed like in 1775, 76? What did people know about what was going on in the Revolution? They tried to track on the ground what their arguments were. How were they talking about trying to get people mobilized? What were the things they were trying to, the stories they were trying to tell, the images that they were constructing, the arguments that they were making. So, I followed Adams' advice and I went to the newspapers and I started reading them and reading them and reading them and reading them and reading them and reading them and reading them over the course of a couple of years. And because this is the American Revolution, we have almost all of them, unlike lots of other kinds of history. We have a very, very thick archive for this, which is lucky. And I began to be surprised. Well, first of all, one of the reasons why this book is this thick is because of all the stuff that I found there. I found a tremendous amount of material, a tremendous amount of material that was about a couple of things that surprised me. One was about how much, how often, how deeply, and how repeatedly I was reading about slave insurrections in those newspapers and how I was reading about native hostility on the frontier. I was reading about that, those two things, a lot, a lot more than I expected to find. And that archive was getting thicker and thicker and thicker and thicker. And I was also, so I was reading about those things and I also, in my very luddite research method, I was also then going through all the papers of the Founding Fathers that our federal government has paid for these lovely projects of the papers of Thomas Jefferson and Henry Lawrence and George Washington and Ben Franklin and the papers of Congress and the letters that delegates to Congress, all that stuff that we have these glorious, lovely letter press editions of. And I was going through and pulling out all of the references that they were writing to one another about, about those two topics, slave insurrections and British involvement with them and native hostility and British involvement with them. And for 17, and so I collated every single one and for 1776 alone, just that year, single spaced, all of those things together, all those stories ran to more than 1,000 pages of Microsoft Word documents about those issues, right? So I would, in my old graduate school computer laptop, I would pull up 1776 and then I'd go get breakfast because it led to load a 1,000 page document that I could then search. And then if I touched it at all, the whole computer would crash. It was so, so, so big of them talking about these issues. So I'm seeing it in the newspapers, I'm seeing it all the time in here and I'm not exactly seeing it as much in the historic, the scholarship that we're doing, yes some, but not to this effect, not about these issues about African-American serving in the Continental Army, yes. About African-American serving in the British Army or fighting in the Revolution, yes. Lots of scholarship on that. About native participation in the Revolution, for sure. But about the patriot leaders trying to use it in terms of mobilization, not so much. So the other thing that I also learned from these newspapers was I was reading the same thing over and over again. Over and over and over again, I was reading the same story in the same words, the same language. And I began to think, well, that's super weird. Why, what's going on here? If I could have the next slide, please. What I was also beginning to understand is how much these guys, and they're mostly men, are understanding the power of the press and how to propagate, to get these stories out into the public. And so this, now this is taken from John Adams' diary in 1769 when he looks much closer to this picture as opposed to an old man. I love this one too because he's kind of giving you a little bit of the side-eye in this picture. Like something might not totally be up and up in this. I love it because what he's saying in his diary is the evening is spent preparing for the next day's newspapers, a curious employment, cooking up paragraphs, articles, occurrences, working the political engine. What Adams is referring to in this diary is he and his cousin Sam and James Otis were in the offices of the Boston Gazette working with Benjamin Eads and John Gill, the printers, making stuff up. What we might today call fake news about all sorts of... Rob, can you hold on just one moment? We're just going to start. We lost the audio feed for a moment. Okay. So can you just... I'm sorry. Can you just back up a few minutes maybe as maybe back to where you started talking actually I'll back you up a couple minutes, to seeing the same stories repeatedly in the papers. Okay. I'm going to take this opportunity to do not disturb myself. Okay. So back to... Is that okay? I think so. Okay. All right. So one of the things that I was seeing is I was seeing in the newspapers the same story over and over and over again, in the same words and the same sentences, same articles. And I began to think about what that meant for sort of this movement of trying to get people to overcome all of their problems, all of the things that were going on. And I also began to sort of understand how involved the John Adams's and Ben Franklin's and Thomas Jefferson's and George Washington's of the world were in putting these news feeds of people together. And so this is from a diary that Adams... John Adams' diary from 1769. And it says in this... And this is a picture of John Adams closer to when he is the age of which he writes this in 1769. He says in his diary, the evening was spent in preparing for the next day's newspaper, a curious employment, cooking up paragraphs, articles, occurrences, and working the political engine, which suggests that he's in some ways manipulating the news. Adams writes this on a Sunday night and the next day's newspaper, the September 4th edition that comes out on Monday is full of things that may or may not be true. And John Adams is there with his cousin Sam Adams and James Otis and the two Boston Gazette printers and they're putting things together that may or may not be exactly what the news is. And so you're seeing a lot of kind of editorial management going on to what people are doing. And the things that are in this Boston Gazette newspaper that comes out on September 4th would then just be reprinted in other places. The parlance of the term then was called the exchanges. There were no reporters or journalists at this time. So the bulk of the news that new people are seeing in the newspapers and there are about 36 newspapers in most of the port cities of America at this point, they've given the bulk of their news from one another. It's called the exchanges. So the things that Adams, the Adams cousins are putting in the newspaper in Boston could then be repeated in Philadelphia or Annapolis or Williamsburg and you might not know if it's true or not true. And so I began to think about what's going on here and how this could be something that enables the clocks to work together. It enables the clocks to work together. For me also, I wanted to think especially about the war itself. Can I have the next slide please? The war as its own thing. In that same letter to the Jefferson that he talks about what do we mean by the revolution where did we find the answers for it? It's in the newspapers and things. He says what do we mean by the revolution? The war, that's no part of the revolution. It's only an effect or a consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people and this is affected from 1760 to 1775. So Adams says the miracle that happens to bring the 13 clocks together happens before the shooting starts. And this I think is not entirely true or the case. It's kind of this John Adams side eyeing us cooking up paragraphs John Adams as opposed to the old guy on the left. There's a lot more going on here to make these clocks strike together than he would like to admit it's not kind of an organic process. There's a lot of management. There's a lot of cooking up that has to do. Can I have one more slide please? We don't think of the war being really super important because we have been, historians have been trained by books like this very, very, very famous book that's now 50 years old called The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Probably the most important book I would say last half of the 20th century Serena I would think. And two chapters of this book are started with epigraphs that come exactly from this quote. What do we mean by the revolution? The war? The war had nothing to do with it. John Adams writes that to Jefferson in 1815 and he plagiarizes himself in 1818 when he writes it to Heads and Kiles and says the exact same thing. So this book has taught us that the big bulk of the work happens before any bullets fly. And that's also what I want to look at is now that people's bodies are on the line and they really have to put their families and their futures at stake and might get killed for this, does that raise the stakes? And I think it does. And so to my mind, we begin to see these things happening more and more and more. And I want to wrap this up really quickly by talking about some of the things that I'm seeing. Could I have the next slide, please? Here's what I'm seeing in these newspapers after the shooting starts that I wasn't seeing before in that time when, what do we mean by the war? I had nothing to do with it. Stories like this, the Canadian governor Guy Carlton and British superintendent Guy Johnson is meeting with natives 1,500 miles back in Quebec to make them great offers to take up arms against the colonists. You're seeing that kind of story pop up and then be repeated and then over and over again. That would be in the New Hampshire Gazette, but then it would be also in Philadelphia newspapers and the Norfolk newspaper and the Williamsburg newspaper and the Norfolk printer actually turned it into 15,000 miles, which always cracks me up. And then the following week, another report saying that Canadian, or I'm sorry, British superintendent Guy Johnson is suspected of endeavoring to stir up the Indians against the colonies. And that's also in all of these newspapers too, but in New York and then in Connecticut and then in Boston and then in Salem and then again in New Hampshire. Next slide, please. And then we see stories like this one. This is one of my very favorite ones. This comes from a letter written by Philip Schuyler, he of the very famous Three Schuylers, Sister's Daughters from the musical. He writes a letter to the Continental Congress saying the Indians delivered us a speech on the 12th in which they related the substance of all the conferences that Guy Johnson or Colonel Johnson had with them in the summer of which they ordered or invited us to feast on a Bostonian and drink his blood. And that letter ends up at the Continental Congress and they ordered it printed and it's printed all over the place in Philadelphia and New York and Baltimore and Boston three times in Williamsburg, et cetera, et cetera. We're seeing those kind of things happening more and more and more and they're being officially ordered to be printed and so people are learning these things more and more and more. Can I have the next slide, please? In 1775, very famously, the Virginia Governor, Lord Dunmore, offers freedom to any able-bodied male slaves who are the slaves of patriots who can make it to his lines. We think about a thousand do but that also then becomes this really big sort of propaganda moment where you're seeing stories of those things go over and over and over again. This is what I think is the thing that John Adams doesn't want us to think about but is so much more about on people's timelines in 1775 and 76 which is what this book is all about. Could I have the next slide, please? Yeah, and I'll finish with this. We can talk about the declaration because it's very much in the declaration but this is one of the people who becomes a victim of this, a British official, says the newspapers were full of publications calculated, cooked up, to excite the fears of the people, massacres and instigated insurrections were in the mouths of every child, words in the mouths of every child. And that was what I found so much in these newspapers and in what people are talking about at the time and I think we've underestimated how much patriot leaders embraced and used stories about race, about the potential of slave insurrections and the potential of native hostility as a way to get these clocks to strike together which is more than I wanted to say but I think that probably sums up most of the book. What do you think, Serena? Thank you. Yes, I think that was a really helpful overview of the book and I wonder now if I could ask you to dig into two pieces of what you said that will maybe explain a little more to our audience your subtitle. So the book is called 13 Clocks, How Race United the Colonies, that's part one, and Two, Made the Declaration of Independence. So that last part, you only sort of waved out so we're going to get there. You talked to us first, largely about the newspapers. So here I want to ask you a question that maybe I'll read a little naive but I think it's worth asking, right? Which is, you talked about how you read these newspapers and you saw lots about slave insurrections and native conflicts on the frontier and that that surprised you. But I'm wondering, why don't you think that there were just a lot of insurrections and native conflicts? Why don't you think that the newspapers were actually just reporting the news? So you can start with explaining that to us. I think that will help us see the first part of your subtitle. Sure. Well, when the news of this crazy, crazy thing, Civil War and the Empire, which has never happened before, sort of comes out of Massachusetts that there's going to be shooting now. This Imperial Crisis has reached this whole new level. Everybody in many ways has to make a calculation about how this is going to affect their lives. Men and women all over North America are going to have to think about this. And this is exactly what, I mean, patriot leaders want people to pick their side. When they say this is what liberty means, you should follow our side of this. And slave people are going to think themselves about what's going on here. This is an opportunity that has never really happened before. It certainly hadn't happened for many people in the 18th century. Not social disturbances of this magnitude. And it's going to shift many calculi all over sort of what we would refer to as the back country, all the way from Canada to Florida. There's going to be a new kind of dynamic going on here about the Civil War. And so people are thinking about what this means to them. There are some potential... There are some slave revolts that happen in North Carolina. There's rumors of some in South Carolina. There are some happening in Virginia, even before Dunmore's proclamation. But for the most part, there isn't a little bit surprising. There's not a massive rising. And what's really ironic is Jefferson and the declaration refers to the merciless Indian savages, very famously in the declaration. But until the declaration, Native peoples had been merciful to the Americans for sure. There had been very, very little. Only in like the four weeks before the 4th of July was there any real actual hostility happening. But everybody was worried about all of it all the time. If you trace the story of Lexington and Concord down, especially as it gets into Maryland, Virginia, and then Carolina, almost immediately the people in those places begin to think about what this means in terms of enslaved people. Oh, my God. What do we do about gunpowder and enslaved people? That happens in Maryland, that happens in Virginia, that happens in South Carolina. So people begin to think about how this is going to affect the worlds that they live in. So there's some reality for sure. But there's also this kind of much bigger, I think, at that time, a number about fear about these things and rumor and what's going to happen, what might potentially happen that makes those things get bigger and bigger and bigger. And we see that in the declaration. The 27th and final grievance of the declaration is about domestic insurrections and merciless Indian savages. The declaration's grievances to me have, they build in climax, they build in drama, they reach a point and that's the very last one. That's the deal breaker, that the king has done this. So there, okay. So what we're saying, if I'm recapping there correctly, is that yes, that there are the upheavals that began really in the 1760s, right? As the French are leaving North America and there's what historians call the imperial crisis, right? As the British empire is trying to figure out, how do we make sense of now a much larger empire than we had before, right? We're going to do all kinds of things to organize and control it. That creates a number of conflicts with colonists and that becomes the crisis. And so as the crisis continues to, what, heat up, right? The British government makes some choices, colonists don't love them, they respond, right? And people become harder and harder edged until finally we get to April 19th, 1775, when one sees the shooting of Minutemen, as we call them, right? In Lexington and Concord, which continues a set of other conflicts. So that you were saying, of course, we know Lexington and Concord really happened, right? Like people really did die there. But as that story keeps moving through the newspapers in something that looks a little bit like an AP News Service, right? That's the exchange you're talking about. They start to collect, to snowball, right? And pick up bigger and bigger ball bits of snow. And the bits that they pick up are not really stories about the particular Minutemen who die or anything about like what actually maybe happened on Lexington and Green. The stories that they pick up are really stories of this racial conflict. And they're also not, at this point, they're also then not talking about constitutions or consent, right? Or representation anymore or taxes in any way. This is what stories become to be about. Yeah, so that's really helpful. So then because then in 76, right? A year later, we get in whatever 15 months when actually the Continental Congress meets and constructs the Declaration of Independence. They don't forget about that language of rights that were violated, but they also don't forget about these arguments about race that have been showing up in the newspapers, right? Yeah, right. So talk to us another minute about that last complaint. The complaint about race? Yes. Yeah. So one of the things that, yeah. So the R word, which is in the subtitle, right? How race unites the columns. That's the only place in the book where I actually use that word because it is a word that is very much under construction in the 18th century. And this is what I think in many ways is the magic formula that overcomes all these problems that Adams lays out in that 1818 letter, all these things that they don't have in common. When patriot leaders who are very desperate to try to find something that can stick people together, when they open the sort of cultural toolbox, what's laying right on top are these fears about our colonial attitudes that have grown up in the 17th and 18th century about enslaved people killing them and their families, which stands to reason. And about native hostility that's really grown sort of the generation since the 1750s and 60s. They've been very much, it goes way back, but very much reminded in the Seven Years' War and Pontiac's War about what that can look like. And that, I think, is what they embrace. Those things are unifiers for these colonies. More than sort of slavery itself, if you agree or disagree with slavery, that's a different thing than this kind of racialized fear about the place of African-Americans in colonial and then sort of United States society and the Republic rebuilding about that. That's the kind of, that's where I think these things really matter. So I'm going to step back a minute and I think eventually we'll come back to that question about what really matters, right? What work in some ways is this, are these stories doing? To something that you said at the beginning of your introduction, when you held up for us the common cause of 750 pages, right? And said this book is sort of derived from it, but it's not the same book. So could you talk a little bit about what's different about this book from your 2016 book and why you decided you needed to write something smaller besides the fact that it's hard to ask undergraduates to read 750 pages in a term? Well, right. So it's many ways. The answer to that is having my cake and eating it too. And part of it also was the, what I mean by that is writing something that people like you, Serena, my scholar colleagues would read and sort of think about how they think about the revolution and then being able to write something that 19 year olds would also not hate reading. So that's what I mean by having my cake and eating it too. But a core reason why the first book is so bloody long is because I wanted to sort of put out there how much of the stuff I was seeing. I wanted to kind of, I wanted to convey the heft of the archive. This is not just kind of a epiphenomenal thing. This is not, this is a central part of the revolutionary mobilization campaign, the common cause argument that we've really missed, that this is an important part of this. And these stories are what, the two things that the American leadership don't have a lot of is time and money. So when they, what they spend their time and money on tells us how important it is to them. And they spend a lot of time and money on putting these stories together and getting them to the American people as much as they possibly can. Whenever there's a problem, when the war goes terribly badly, they almost always go back to these stories. They write proclamations that feature them. They put them in addresses. They go back to these over and over and over again. So I wanted to sort of convey that. And throughout the entire revolution, but the 13 o'clock part is something, we don't really do this anymore. We used to do this as a profession much better than we do now, which is to abridge big, thick scholarly books and make it much more accessible. We used to do that when I was thinking about this, I went back and looked at Gary Nash's Urban Crucible and so-called Fat Phoner and Thin Phoner, right? The Eric Phoner's, you know, reconstruction and then a short history of it. Even Ed Ayers has promised in the New South, he made it a winter Jordan's right over black. There are thinner, more focused, but much more sort of younger and more public facing readers in mind for this. And the, I wanted to do that. I wanted to, again, have my cake and eat it too and present this. And so I would sign it just to focus on what I thought was the most important thing, the 15 months between the shooting starting at Lexington and Concord and the Declaration of Independence and make that kind of the central part of this book and sort of distill the rest of it for everything else. So, yeah, so let me first affirm that when I say that this is, you know, a lovely book to teach, as you say, to 19-year-olds. I mean, one of the reasons that that is so is because it's a book that one can read without a lot of guidance. So those of you who are watching or are not actually in a class, you don't need, you know, someone to help walk you through this book and this, Rob, you do a beautiful job of kind of unpacking this central problem that I think I want to redefine, you know, or restate for you at least, and then ask a question that just spoke to me as you were talking. Because the central problem for both you and for John Adams, which I just find so surprising, is how did 13 clocks, right? 13 different colonies come to strike as one. And so, you know, you start with this, with Adams' own explanation for this, right? Which is that there are all of these different, every colony was so different, they didn't share anything together and yet somehow through some miracle of God practically, and maybe a little bit of help that maybe he's not gonna be too clear about, that, you know, these colonies come together. And you, I think if I understand this book correctly, think, you know, I'm not going to completely buy everything John Adams has to say to be here, right? I want to go a little deeper. But the problem he identifies is the right one. This question of how is it that colonies that were so disparate, that imagine themselves as having a relationship solely to the British Empire or not necessarily to each other come to imagine themselves as a nation? Right. And so that tells us two things. First of all, how fragile the union is always, and again, it's going to fall apart and have to be reconstructed, right? So the union always is an extraordinarily tenuous thing. And also talk, but that's also an argument that I is dear to my heart about contingency. That these, reaching into that toolbox for these specific images is a contingent thing. We would, and it's important to understand that while I agree that with people who talk about how deeply embedded race is to American society, structurally, we have to understand how it got there. And that's the contingent part of thinking about these very specific things about the newspaper. How is it that these things that seem to be these massive sort of cloud banks of attitudes, how do they get fast into the ground? That's a big part of this. So can you just, for a moment, define contingency as historians use that word? Sure. Contingency means things didn't have to turn out the way they did. It's not inevitable that things had to be that way. And so we have to look at the specific time and place and look at the choices people made in the moment, why they did what they did. So some 70 years ago, maybe there was a book and not excellent book, but on the Declaration of Independence, right? But with an excellent title called Miracle of Philadelphia, right? That sort of just implied that somehow the heavens open and the declaration dropped down, right? And your point is that's not the way in which the declaration was constructed. Not at all. It wasn't applied over the language. No. I mean, Jefferson only has a handful of, I mean, Jefferson, one of the things that I talk about in the sort of the construction of the declaration is just how pressed for time he is, that while he's writing the declaration, which he has about three weeks to do, he's also doing other things. He's the secretary of this investigation committee about this disaster that happens in Canada as the Canadian invasion falls apart. And that's the first instance in which we begin to see natives acting with the British. Jefferson is involved in the investigation of what has happened and the potential court-martialing of American officers. And we have all those notes in his handwriting that's happening in the middle of June while he's supposed to be, you know, often his room writing this essay. You know, he's doing these other things like our students are, right? So thinking about this, but for what you, you know, Claire, I have so much enthusiasm as I do. I mean, could you find a favorite part? I don't like talking about your favorite child. Is there a favorite part of this play? Our favorite story or something that really said to you, oh, now I know I've got this right. Now I know I've got this right. Or a favorite piece. Well, a favorite story. One of the things that, you know, about contingency is about how, especially in 1775, we like to think that many of these dudes knew what they were doing all the time. And it just, you know, they weren't fumbling around in the dark and just entirely, in many ways, desperate to try to understand what's going on in the world around them. You know, kind of like we are today. And so, but they are, they're very... And so I... So John Connolly is a loyalist agent in Pittsburgh. And he's big pals with Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia. And he has a plan. He is going to rouse the Shawnee and Delaware and Mingo Indians in sort of Western Pennsylvania, what's now Eastern Ohio. And he's going to get them to fight for the crown. And Dunmore is going to free its enslaved people and they're going to meet together at Washington's house at Mount Vernon. They're going to cut the revolution in half and they're going to meet and they're going to sort of have a sort of big party on the lawn at Mount Vernon. That's the plan. Connolly goes to Dunmore. Dunmore says, sure, I don't care. It doesn't cost me anything. And he sends Connolly up to General Gage in Boston. And General Gage in November of 1775 says, okay, doesn't cost me anything. Knock yourself out, dude. John Connolly's servant, his Englishman named William Cowley, freaks out about this and runs away and sneaks his way, when Connolly's on his way back and he's going to go to Detroit and get people and this is what's going to happen, he sneaks away and he runs ashore in Newport Rhode Island and he makes his way to Washington's headquarters where he sort of knocks on the tent, I guess, dude, I got news for you, right? This happens like four days after the Continental Army's Surgeon General, Benjamin Church, has been found out to be a traitor. And they just finished that trial and then all of a sudden there's a knocking on the tent. Oh my God. And so Washington stays up all night writing letters to the Continental Congress. Oh crap, we got to listen to you. That's the way 1775 is. It's this constant just roiling of concern about plots and what's true and what's not true and insurrections here and rebellions there, potential ones. It's just, it's bananas, I think. It's so much fun, but it certainly wasn't for them at the time. Yes, it's a lot going on at once, right? It feels like things are coming at Washington all the time. All the time everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so he's trying to organize it. Is he, is he trying to organize these politics in the same way that somebody like Adams or Jefferson who aren't, who really aren't in the front line at all are trying to organize it? Is that also part of his story? It is. It is. One of the, one of the, I'll give you a very small thing that's actually in the big common cause that's not in 13 o'clock, but Trenton Christmas to 1776. George Washington spends two and a half weeks organizing all of the logistics for Trenton, right? Trying to keep it secret, wagons, boats, food, trying to get people to be there. For in the papers of George Washington, I think it's 200 pages consecutively that Washington is concerned about just trying to get this thing to get pulled off the night before the Trenton raid. There is a letter to the St. John's and Passamaquoddy Indians that Washington writes who are native peoples in Maine telling them, stay out of this. This is a fight between us and the British. Either join us or stay out of this, but please don't join them. And I was like, look at this, like the night before, it's like, it's like Eisenhower writing the night before D-Day about something else. And you're like, wait a minute, what, why are you doing this this night? Like you've been working on this for months. But that just shows you how much this is still, that's still on his mind that he's writing a kind of, an ambassador's letter. Hey, for them, that's the kind of work that Adams and Jefferson and Franklin do a lot more than Washington, but he does it too. So you there have sort of anticipated my question about, what is it that didn't quite make it from your 2016 book and this 2021 book, right? These important other stories. But I'm wondering then from your, from, from 13 clots, which as you said, of course is meant to be slim. But if there are nonetheless some, some threads in there that you would like to continue to play out, lean forward, things that you would think, oh, there's still more to be said about this particular part. I do think there's, there's more to be said about, I always, I struggled in both books about the, where to put loyalists. Loyalists, loyalists is, is a, is a very difficult, I think it's a very difficult thing to get your hands on. And, and oftentimes when the patriots are trying to really get people's attention about loyalists, they almost always put them in groups with, or in events with, or in league with native peoples and enslaved peoples. They'll always talk about, well, a group of Tories and blacks did this, or a group of Indians and Tories do this. They're trying their best to connect those things together, but it's super difficult to do that. Getting your handle on that, I think is also something else. Now I also think that the inability to do that, to sort of fasten these things together, the slipperiness of that makes it possible to do this other really weird thing that I also don't think we've gotten a super good handle on. A lot of historians are, have tried really hard to understand how easily Americans reintegrate, loyalists into American society. There isn't a purge. There isn't any kind of, there's a little bit, but it's really kind of, sort of letting bygones be bygones. It doesn't make sense to me. I don't, I don't feel like anybody's really nailed it yet. There's some, some good work on that, but then maybe it's not, maybe it's just a mystery that has no solution to it. I don't know, but that, that to me seems like something else that, that I would, I would like to, to try to keep working on myself. I think that's a really interesting point that loops back to something that you started with, which is that at least in 1775, 1776, this feels like a civil war. Yeah. Right. That there are people who, you know, I don't know, to you doesn't feel like the US civil war, they're against brother. Like in what way does it feel like a civil war to you that then opened up this problem of loyalists? It does. I mean, it's, it's very, and it's also very, very hard feelings, right? There's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that we should, we should think in terms of temper tantrums or, or cause it's really hard feelings of betrayal that the king has, has done these, I mean, the king has, has done these terrible things to us. I mean, Jefferson's, the rough draft of the declaration and anybody who hasn't read the rough draft, you should read the rough draft about, especially the bit that gets cut out. And we could talk about that too, about, just looking at the editing process of, of the declaration on the second and third of July, where does the Congress spend their time really getting this right? The bulk of the beginning of the declaration, the first two paragraphs, the preamble that everybody knows, the first 20 or so grievances are just very lightly edited. Where the bulk of all of the, all of the, yeah, you see this on the, on the thing, all that text that you see there is with a few minor, you know, instead of inalienable, it's, it's, it's unalienable. Like they just make the changes. But when we get down to the bottom, if you take the next slide, can I have the next slide? Oh, there we go. The bottom where I've circled it in blue is the last one, that deal breaker that says, he has excited domestic insurrectionists and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers that the merciless entities have just, that's not how that actually first was written. Jefferson had a long paragraph about, an impassioned, beautiful paragraph about how awful and terrible the African slave trade is. In capital, in capital letters, underlying things, he's shouting at us, as we know from texting parlance in these capital letters, things calling it an assemblage of horrors, calling it piratical warfare, calling it all these terrible things. And at the end of that paragraph, he says, and then it's this horrible thing. And then the king is now inciting domestic insurrectionists against us. Using these same people to murder us, that they shouldn't have been here in the first place. And the Congress takes all the beginning part out and keeps that other part. They take out the anti-slavery part and they keep the Dunmore's proclamation part and then attaches it to this last one. That's what's in there. And I think about, if we think about abolitionists in the 1850s, like Wendell Phillips or Frederick Douglass, what they would have done with that language, they would have done some remarkable things with the declaration. They really radicalized some way with the declaration. But if that would have been in there still, oh man, that would have been just so tremendous to keep. But I think it goes away, right? Because that's threatening the union, right? Anti-slavery, ooh, that's a little controversial. Dunmore, no, that's not controversial. So I think we have time maybe for two more questions. Oh, I'll leave myself. So the first one, since you so kindly highlighted it here, just opens up for me that final phrase, right? Where they're talking about destruction of people of all ages, sexes and conditions. And the story that you've been telling us so far is a story of Adams and Jefferson and Washington, sort of our big guy founders. And do important, indeed, essential things for your story quite rightly. But I'm wondering, is there a place for these other people, children, women, right? Right, right. Actually people who are enslaved, as we talked about conditions. I think that was conditions of servitude. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what I, this is a book that's, to me, these stories about race really sort of jumped out at me as I was reading these things. And if there be, patriot, there's been very explicit about them. They're being less explicit and more implicit, I think, about things like protecting families, about masculinity and femininity. Those things are what we would consider today questions about gender. Those things are very there, but they're almost sort of assumed. Like this, you're going to, you're going to take action to defeat enslaved people to protect your families from these things. And they don't make that point as explicitly or as propagandally, although sometimes they do. There's a lot of stories about, about one of the things that's also in 13 o'clock is about the Hessians, the German mercenaries that come, and about how immediately they're also seen as another, which is also in the declaration here about, about foreign mercenaries. They're seen as this other threat, but immediately they go away and they're not seen as that anymore. One of the reasons they're seen as a threat is because they are raping women in New Jersey. And that is something that the patriot leaders talk a lot about is Washington is getting all this stuff for Trenton. He's really trying to get that message out there. You got to defend families from these things. And another story that's also in, in Comcast is also about, and in 13 o'clock is about Jay McCrae, about the, there are, there are three things, three things that I found that were in every single newspaper in America, three stories, Lexington and Concord, Declaration of Dependence, Jay McCrae. Jay McCrae is a loyalist woman who is allegedly killed by natives who are allied to John Burgoyne in the Saratoga campaign in 1777. And she's in New York and she's killed and she may or may not have been in her wedding dress when she was killed. And the fact that they kill a woman who was engaged to a loyalist and maybe won herself just shows you the depravity of the British and their natives for doing these terrible things. Using her story is so important because it's both gender and race to tie together. So there's a lot of that. I haven't focused out that part of it in the story because it's a lot of it's implicit, but I think it's very much there. So, and I think in our final five minutes, maybe you could talk a moment about the resonances of your book for the contemporary moment. What do you imagine that people as they read it right now today? I hope this afternoon. You know, in what ways does it echo and what ways is this a book, as all books are a product of its moment and what moment perhaps? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, you know, historians very much are shaped by the questions of the questions they asked as human beings are questions of the moment. Or how they perceive of them from their kind of, their frame of reference. And what really got me involved, I mean, I knew I wanted to write something about the questions about race and the revolution. That was where I began this, but I had no idea where, how to focus this, right? I had no idea what I was going to do until I started reading those newspapers, until I really began, they began to kind of shout out at me and the idea of seeing the world and the idea of seeing them in the same thing over and over again, seeing Jane McCrae over and over and sort of bombarding me with the same language. I began to think about what that might do. But I was doing this over the last 20 years where, and when I would talk about this book, people would say, oh, that's about Barack Obama. Oh, that's about Laurentaire. Oh, that's about, remember John Ashcroft and his different color-coded terror alert things and about, because it's a story about race and fear. And oh, that's about Tea Party, oh, Donald Trump, birth certificates, like, and it's funny how it keeps coming up and all these things, right? Now, to my mind, I was really focused on those microfilm newspapers, but look at all that talk and it still continues, right? We are still, it's so many moments. It also sort of reinforces just how important race and fear and politics and constitution, especially constitutional change is. Those things all very much go together. It's part of one long sort of conversation, but it's also very contingent. It's choices people are making to talk about these things that I think is something we should be keeping in mind about what is it, we continue to reach into that toolbox and pick up those things. And that's something in American history is something we should really begin to think about. So in those ways, your book turns out to be sort of a telescope for us to be able to see things that are both far away, right? And part of the larger universe in which we live. Thank you so much, Rob. It was such a pleasure to be part of the National Archives program on the founding history of the United States to have a chance to talk with you about this wonderful book, which is a pleasure to read and to think and to talk about. So thank you so much. Thank you.