i'm a.d. and digger halperin, the senior mellon postdoctoral fellow in women's history public history at the new york historical society. tonight's program, the chinese lady gaga way in early america, will. approximately 45 minutes, including 15 minutes for questions and answers at the end. and now i'm delight to introduce tonight's speakers. nancy davis is curator emeritus at the smithsonian and institution's national museum of american history. that's curator. she on exhibitions focusing on material asian influence, american culture, migration and immigration and business history. her scholarly work focuses on women's history, asian influence on american culture and sino-american trade. she has a ph.d. in american studies from

washington university in washington and has taught at the level at numerous colleges universities. book the chinese lady often in early america came out from oxford university press in july 2019. she's currently working on another book based on the english woman, harriet martineau, 1834 to 1836 tour of america. our moderator, renee below is my colleague and. i'm melanie foundation, pre doctoral awardee in women's history and public history at new york historical. she is currently a doctoral candidate in the american studies program, harvard university, where writes about asian american visual culture, 20th century u.s., multi-ethnic literatures and immigration policy. her research has supported by the social science research council, the mellon foundation and the charles warren for studies of american.

alongside her work, new york historical, she's also designed educational materials and public programing for the museum of chinese in america. welcome, nancy and the thank you, anna for that kind introduction and thank you so much for chatting with us here at the new york historical this evening. before we dive in, i did have share just one really quick story, which is that when i was applying for this, i had to catch a public history project as part of my and i decided i was going to pitch a project about orphan white and the time that she spent here in new york. and i have to confess, nancy, that your book provided sort of my template, my compass for putting together this proposal. and then i do have to sort of thank you now for helping me land this scholarship. and i was truly delighted when i learned that we get to do this along together tonight. so i'll begin our conversation

previewing your books, major themes for our audiences. and i highly recommend that everyone pick out for themselves. a copy of the chinese lady at why america. i have a copy of that book with me here today. it's really quite beautiful. and we'll also have a link directly to oxford university press, this website for who are interested. and so your book, nancy presents the first ever researched account of the first ever chinese woman recorded to enter into the united states. more arrived here in 1834, under the care of the coen brothers, a pair of new york based merchants brought my over to serve as a living advertisement of sorts for their imported goods in a series of performances as chinese lady moy would pose various oriental objects that would, of course, later be available for purchase after her shows. your book not only us into moyes world then, but also into the world of those who encountered

her performances, their meticulous archival research. you show how her story intersected with those of celebrities including president andrew jackson and the performer tom thumb. alongside the more everyday men and women who flocked to, catch a glimpse of the chinese lady for themselves. as you observed throughout the book, you take such a wide historical view of life, in large part because of necessity. why left behind? no written records of her life. and so in many ways we know a lot more about how early americans perceive moy than we know about the actual lived experiences of moy to launch our discussion of this complicated history. i'll start with a relatively question, and that is nancy. what drew you to the telling of our family story? well, but just so delighted that i know that it helpful to use the book for you in the new

historical society. that's great information to know. it's really fun and i'm delighted to chat about our family and the interesting part of this is that i of fell into this because i was doing research for my dissertation in the 1980s on chinese goods. for the early 19th century. middling consumer. and stumbled on an 1830 for a newspaper article on a4 moy, which indicated that was presenting goods in new york city. and i noted this in the dissertation, but very briefly, as i began to think about it after the dissertation was completed, i just couldn't let that thought an f on why i go. i kept thinking about her and i just it just piqued my and so i

wanted to know more about her. and i began researching and found it so fascinating that i just couldn't let it go and providing understanding of this person, though, was really challenging, as you mentioned, because she obviously she had no recourse to sort of leave a record for herself. she wasn't an english speaker. she wasn't literate. and all this was immense important to me because i realized that only person, a researcher, could bring her voice forward. and i was compelled field to bring that voice. voice, because i saw her as a person coming from china really sort of entrapped in america and an unwilling sojourner she was, you know, hindered by a language

issue hindered by gender. and also she had bound feet. so all these issues were really for her. but made it all the more interesting for me to understand her, her story and i realized that it was going to be a really difficult undertaking but i decided to risk it and do the research and and find out what i could and which so glad that you did. and i think, you know, something that we've discussed between us is sort of with museum background, one way in which we can kind of get into these is by looking at sort of the objet sites that were kind of surrounding my and sort of reconstructing history that way. and so in one of my favorite sections of your book, you sort of walk us through the different objects that moise sold to the public there. her performance says. and as you show, you know, these not only helped shape american impressions of my aunt her

china, but they were also very useful and increasingly common place items within american. and many of these objects are on display in this sort of well-known lithograph off of orphan boy that now going to share with our audience today. and so, nancy, if you could just maybe walk us through what this lithograph bit and explain sort of how some of the objects within it, reveal that everyday lives and habits of early americans. yes, i think it's a very interesting lithograph if it was done by a new york city firm. lithography was charles rizzo, william brown, who founded their firm in 1832 and is pretty that the khans who brought her who brought far more understood the power of the visual image and

they were the ones who were asking the rizo and brown to do a lithograph of her and probably were those who broadly distributed it the medium of the lithograph was really important. it was something that was cheap enough for many middle class americans to own and. i'm sure that what they hoped was that people would buy this lithograph. they would see the goods illustrated in atomized salon and they'd see her so were both promoting the goods and for my and the interesting thing this is that that image the lithographic image which shows the furniture and smaller goods that were being brought in by

the khans but it also was an image that was reproduced in many newspapers throughout the country. so wherever we went you would get this image of in the newspapers. so it really was the very first time that people an opportunity to see from boy and we sort of have to remark her again as you mentioned, she is the first chinese person that most people, most americans had ever seen. and i think really fascinating. and this brings in a little bit about my work. the new york historical society, because philip hoehn, who was the past mayor of new york city wrote an extensive self diary account of. his visit to our on my and he gives a full page description of what he saw and this description

in the diary is in the new york historical society. and i was really, really delighted to be able to use that the book. but i think important to recognize what he saw when he came to the salon in new york city. a captain bears and this is the captain who brought her from china he said in the diary her appearance is exactly the same as the figures on teach us a large head. small features and a countenance devoid of expression in her foot is great curiosity. it is not four inches in length. so this is interesting to me because is presenting from boy as and her visage an object and because he has seen before chinese people but only on teach

us in his experi and so i just think that's really interesting that we see this visual image that the khans paying for and promoting and that's what american would be seeing. yeah definitely. and i mean there is sort of this long history when you sort of look at chinese women or other marginalized figures looked at as sort of objects for your viewing pleasure and we can of see how this is playing out in these advertisements that are being circulated across households and that find later in an even sort of private that we're reading in the archive and we'll hopefully get a look at tea chest in a minute to that. so here's another i sort of put on the side where often boys holding it in the larger lithograph and it's a handkerchief which i know you write about a bit in the book.

yeah. i think it's really fascinating to me that. of course, the research that i had done in the dissertation was looking at the quantity chinese objects that came into new york city came into american ports, just a huge and i know you and i talked a lot about this. how expansive volume of chinese goods for the middle class americans. i would say maybe about a fifth of all material culture goods in urban centers were of chinese origin. and that's pretty remarkable and i think most people don't realize this aspect of the china trade was so early. the the aspect of chinese goods coming for middle class

americans. we think of that as a 20th century, 21st century phenomenon. but it's not it's come so much earlier. it comes in the 1830s, but here you see this handkerchief which america and women would carry with them in their purse when. they went on afternoon calls and it's, as you say, here you see, ethel, my carrying a handkerchief in the lithograph so she's surely at this point probably going to hold it up and say, look, this object, this is something that you can have, too. this is something that you can purchase and and please do. she's not saying that but the current certainly hopes they do. what i think there's really interesting is that both cultures used the success tree

in china the term sisters meant dear friends and that that's kind heartfelt for me just to understand the way in which she might have been holding handkerchief and thinking so than what her audience would be thinking this would be handkerchief. sister, my dear friend, but also the handkerchief was really broadly in the horn handkerchief dance, which was a very popular, a dramatic presentation. china in america or american women used the handkerchief early on in the in the 18th century as a kerchief and man used a handkerchief. but in a perhaps more rude way, sort of as a serviceable napkin on which they wipe their fork.

but it became much more refined accessory as you move into the mid or early 19th century and into the mid-19th century. and it became an object of status and and an article of display, an accessory up display for both men and women in the early to mid-19th century. and i think that's pretty interesting what i did the book was to sort of look as you say, kantha, broadly. so i would understand how were viewed. i was struck by a part of a little article of a poem as well as a story in lady's book of the 1830s, where we see a young woman who owned a fancy handkerchief but it had been stolen and because it was such a

treasured, it was a huge drama who had stolen this handkerchief because it was it was an important object for the mid-19th century middle class person. i think it's interesting here we see the costume institute handkerchief. this is made of silk and. the current did bring silk handkerchiefs into the port but by and large they were bringing in a grass cloth handkerchief which was made of linen and they were probably paying $0.53. american $0.53 in china maybe doubling this the american market. but even so middling american women and interesting oddly

enough, i think importantly free blacks and enslaved i would also perry chinese handkerchief as an expression of gentility and we do have an inventory a record a store inventory record of an enslaved person purchasing a handkerchief at time. so we see this as a broadly accessible object for people and certainly the koreans knew this and knew they could make good money if they bring in fairly reasonably cost handkerchiefs for the american consumer. definitely. and i just have to say, you know, when you opened and you talked about sort of that this is a historian's that you saw when you located more.

i mean, i think you just demonstrated that because just her clutching the handkerchief can go from the personal level of her thinking, perhaps of her sisters, of friendship, of intimacy, but then outwards and and into kind of this mercantile commercial universe. it's really fascinating. and i think, you know, we we talked about. philip holmes speaking of his his view of our boy and seeing her as a person on a tea chest. and here we have a tea chest and we can see why philip holm might take a look and say, oh, that's that's up on just as i see her on a tea chest devoid of course of character in this way.

but by the time that our family arrived in america in the 1830s, a tea was as prevalent here in the united states as it was in china. and the only here and we see in our lithograph from my taking tea except that the tea that she would be drinking here in america was not the same as she would be drinking in china having been in china. i must say that tea in china is a lot different than the tea that she would have had in new york likely. i also appreciate you thinking the tea time and thinking about the fact that this lithograph

was presenting a very accurate time for far more because her tea time would have been as the american time which was 7 p.m. in the evening. and that is exactly when she was presented the public from 7 to 9. she had 8 hours of presentation to the public and couple those hours were during tea. from 7 to 9:00 in the evening. so it was accurate description, an accurate visual description of her activity and also accurate the sense that if you can see i don't know if you can see closely enough, but it's a handle. handel's teacup and that's certainly would have been what moye was familiar with because

that was the the chinese teacup. the handle is teacup. so i would say that most american households would have a tea chest or a tea caddy to hold the loose tea as part of their genteel tea equipment. this one you're seeing at the new york historical society is of wood and lacquer with, mother of pearl inlay. as you see here. and this is a when you think about this, this is a very sort of specialized decorative form. and it shows the river for tea, the respect that he had being put in such a really beautiful container and. also i think if you notice that there is a discussion and a key a place to put a key so this

like a strongbox i mean, it's it's meant to be, you know, holding this very commodity and but also, of course, it would be shown in parlor. so it was present showing to others. this was a marker of refinement and a marker of of, as i said earlier, gentility. but i think it's really fascinating to see the again, the views of china and of the chinese people, which were figuratively presented on a lot of these objects. this was the way americans knew what they thought. they knew what a chinese person look alike. and i think that's kind of interesting that it would have been the woman in the household who kept the key to this tea chest, who poured the tea, and

who really managed the ritual of tea time. and so the woman's place in the home was one that was of gentility and and the manager of these activities of tea time, the cost of a less decorated tea tea chest was about dollars. and it certainly was not inexpensive for the time, but it still would been just a little bit more than a middling person's weekly wage. so it was something that as a perhaps less formal less expensive object would been in most middle class homes in this time this 1834 period. so a fascinating object and one

that speaks a lot to china, to americans of china. okay. okay. this is a really great object. and again, i think you can get a sense the way in which people were viewing my this is an advertising broadside ride that presented for my and you can see that she's holding a fan and you also see this fixed fan here from the new york historical society american women carried fans as an item again of gentility and accessory.

that was lovely. and very attractive. it was also used coquettishly, i think, and also used for utility. it sort of washed the air and it dispersed flies and its associative connection with china was very clear. americans and of course that's interesting that this advertising broadside would be showing from my with a fan immediately telling us this is an object that is associated with china. i think it's it's pretty interesting that this particular image initially was on a the first exhibition catalog of chinese goods which the khans put out. so it's the very first one in america and. again, it's, it's from a new york collection. it was from the new york public

library, which i found was a wonderful moment to find this catalog. the very first catalog showing. with her fan. i think it's interesting that in again like the issue of the handkerchief in both men and women sharing the fan sort of as an accessory and in southern china as i experienced this very hot and so the fan was used stir the air and was used to shield yourself from the sun and in the united states in america used as i said was somewhat the same point except that you don't see men carrying a fan in as you would have seen in china the currents brought vast vast

quanta of fans because they were inexpensive and because they the appeal that fan had and on one ship they brought in 12,000 paper fans which is what alamo is holding in this broadside and it's also the it's the fan the fixed fan you see here from the new york historical society is a papier maché and lacquer. but paper a little bit more expensive than the fan that for my would have been holding but i wanted you to notice that again in the new york historical society fan you see images of the chinese and images of china. and again, this is very typical

because it's presenting an example stick and illustrative far away place in an item that would be drawing interest in a drawing room or being used to show your or to show your gentility and to show your awareness of a faraway place with an image, with an object, with images such this. so i think pretty fascinating. you know, the connection you can draw, i think object and its culture is so really important and really fascinating and definite. and i'm thinking about how the lithograph my actually shows her sitting in sort of a similar way that this fan is showing sitting but then in this broad such sort of slouching and then kind of looking sort of coquettishly herself at the viewer. and so we can also maybe talk little bit later about sort of

these ways in which she was being presented in contrast, or similarly to the objects that she was helping sell. yeah. yes. right. well, here again, another interesting object that is in the smithsonian's collection of. it does tell us a little bit american women's leisure time, some american women had time to do fancy work. and this particular object was used for that purpose. a goatees lady's book at the time in the thirties provided a lot of interesting instruction about accomplishing these this fancy work. and it's fascinating you go through goatees ladies book, you see them talking about chinese

exercises and making work boxes in the chinese style and applying chinese pattern papers to the surface, these work boxes. so the whole aspect of china and activities that associate with china are very important this point and certainly play into the way in which people are perceiving afar my but i'm sure that our film i found these fancy work exercise is pretty curious and outside of here for its in china she wouldn't have any idea how to present these objects to the public so she probably would have needed some help from someone to figure out how could use it and present it since was not something that was used in china. so when you're working with paper and these paper goods that

you were applying to the boxes, you need a tool. and this was the tool you used because it allowed you to burnish and fold and. and score papers and it calms supplied both these folders, these paper folders, about 4000 of them on one shipment in bone. and i've three. and they also supplied the paper, chinese paper, but thought i think it's interesting when i did the research on paper and they're inventories the current ship inventories it mattered you were going to get just a plain paper folder or whether you were going to get figure of paper fold or this one. in the smithsonian's collection

is figured because again, it has images of china on it and a chinese figure on it. and so you if you were going to want something that was a little more expensive, you would have pay $0.17. but if you wanted just a plain one without the excessive decoration, you could buy one for three and a half cents. in america. so they were certainly available to most american woman, a middle class woman who was interested in doing fancy. and here on the left, you can see the women in the magazine pointing to an illustration of fancy work that they're going to. so i think really interesting that philip, also in his diary, talks about women in china do.

and he chinese women sit or lie day and night and hobble from one side of the prison to another. and the most important object of indulgence and drinking and sleeping their only occupation little occasional embroidery, their only pride in the tinsel ornamentation of their persons. and i when i read that, i thought and yes, upon the idleness meant presenting to the public hours a day in captain wilbur's salon, not really an idle woman. and of course, the chinese women were not either, by and large. so it just fascinating the way in which a philip home who's not an exception, presumes to what chinese women are doing in china having really had having no idea what they doing so a really interesting way thinking about

women leisure time and her time upon boys time in america right. i mean that is a really fascinating point that there's sort of this feedback loop between how perhaps being directed to perform, but then people sort of reading that in an anthropological ethnographic way actually sort of a real truth about what kind of she would do in her daily life. and one of the things i'm going to stop showing my screen now, one of the things that i loved about that, joan quote as much as it frustrates me to hear is sort of his description of her kind of hobbling and that kind of brings us to a question that i had, which is that, you know, my way is exceptional in her travels in the u.s. not only because of her race, the first chinese person woman actually, and also because of her gender, as we've discussed. but on top of that, she was exceptional in her bound feet,

which would have severely her physical mobility as she was doing these. so could you maybe talk a bit more returning to more about these different elements of her identity would have informed her her in the us? you're very right was a really huge challenge for for my both race gender and then her bound feet and we know that from my did to the public in several ways at one point when she in new york and on stage she broke down in tears because people were accusing her of being heathen and said that she would go to hell and if she didn't reform and become christian,

that's she'd go and you know the whole new castigation of her was really a lot to bear as a person who was young and you know in a difficult position as it was but i think you know even baltimore we see in a letter account that everyone was pretty rattled and in a visitor's comment we hear her poor thing she is much to be pitied she seems very timid and confused and so you know you can imagine how challenging it would be to have to live with these kinds of denigrating experiences and i thought it was very interesting that ethel moyes

experiences with race and gender and aspects, her bound feet did differ depending the region. and i was particularly surprised that some of the more discriminatory and commentary and the acrimony was in boston, which i was very surprised about because bostonians were by and large pretty aware of china because they were very early in the china trade. and so most of the citizens would have been pretty familiar with aspects china yet some boston newspaper were really harsh in appraisal of our family and i it's just good to a good but it's interesting to hear that the boston evening transcript had really hard and unpleasant reference as to her. they called her quote, a homely indian squaw. her feet cut off and, her ankles stuck into a couple of turnips

that would be well worth looking at. and they compared her skin with that of an indian of half baked brick and smoked salmon. so her countenance her feet all of these aspects of her bodily features being commented upon. and in charleston, her feet were unwrapped and shown to public in, quote, all of its native nakedness. such an embarrassment and a difficult moment for her. i'm pretty sure. and i know because it something that she never have had the experience to confront in china and so unbinding feet in public was just the most humiliating sure experience that she had in america.

difficult definitely. i mean we've been talking about how we know a lot about how she was perceived. we do about her actual kind of lived experiences. and you can sort of see in sort of the stark and harsh a lot of the times that are being used to describe her in ways that, you know we can talk about later might might be still resonant today. right. and so i think our final question then we'll turn it over to q&a. and i did want to switch gears a little bit to kind of this line of your own process. as we've talked about my, you know, left behind firsthand accounts of experiences. and we actually don't know right where she ended up after. her performances ended. she left the public record. we have really no sense of where she ended up. and so i'd love to hear you speak a bit more about what it's like, you know, to research these figures who live at the margins of our own official records.

you what happens when your search for evidence hits a wall and? what's at stake in the telling of my anyways despite all of these mysteries that surround her life. yeah you're right i think that there were many times when i just had to figure out how to go around the wall, how to come at the research from a different direction and a of times. i was really confounded. one of the ways i did that was just sort of and to think about, what evidence do we have? and i was particularly interested at tong, who is from wise interpreter, trying to figure out how would i know more about him and his relationship to her because there was nothing in any of the records nor in any manifests or ship records about

aton. so what i did was to see if i could find other young chinese men who came to america around the same time as that. tong and i actually did find 2 to 1 was wu lon, who studied at the foreign mission school in, cornwall, connecticut, in the 1820s. and he left a chinese friendship album behind. and it was fascinating for me to take look at his way of presenting. so he drew an image of a chinese woman and a chinese man and it gave me a sense of way he was thinking in his experience in america. i also found another chinese man called alu who lived in frederick, maryland, and a man who lived in frederick recorded

his experience with alu in diary. so these provide strong evidence about the background of our tong who was really important to our family as her interpret for a year or so in america. but ultimately you're right it's really challenging when you to admit that you've a wall and after spending hundreds and hundreds of hours trying to out where our family went after 1851 i was very both it was discovered beijing and and disappointing i had tried through every means going records in new york and new york city in new jersey and barnum's archives trying to find out where she might have gone. i even to hire a very well-known chinese and when she heard so

work that i had already done, she said, nope, can offer you anything on that. and it was so disappointing. so i sort of made a pact with myself that. i would not extrapolate extensively, therefore, and i would just to the secure historical and sort of decided that perhaps the reader may at some point find out what happened to ethel loy and would fill the blanks where i could not. thank you that and we extend that invitation our audience to see if anyone would love to go into the archives and help us start a story. and so now we're going to sort of open it up to so people can continue dropping their questions in the q&a box we have quite a few actually and a lot of people are very curious about

the origins of our family story and have questions about where in that she came from, how old she was when she entered the us and if she has sort of any known any known family that you along the way. well i did go to china with the hopes that i would find record of our the way she was from gwangju which is canton and. you would expect perhaps that there would be some newspaper notice some record of her gwangju with the american captain captain obermayer. i was pretty sure that i would find something but i went through archives in gwangju so i had help with with that from

someone from the guangdong museum and found really nothing disappointingly nothing so no record of her family. i did find one little notice though in the archives that indicated that the months so around the time when i found my was leaving gwangju was a very bad flood and there were huge challenges to feed people and many parents were at their wits end not knowing how they were going to feed their children. and i kind of if perhaps what happened was that after moyes parents who had probably some

affiliation with the maybe they were shopkeepers associated somehow with america and merchants just that this was the best thing they could do for her because of the really difficult situations financially in china at the time definitely wonderful that were able to sort of travel to gwangju as well sort of do the history research on the ground. we had another question which is wonderfully phrased so you mentioned, nancy, that a significant number of imports to us were chinese. so to extent to this day, these objects in coastal cities and how much did these objects make it to the interior, the country? and then following that sort of how much should herself travel and perform beyond the east coast? well, there's a wonderful and i really appreciate because in

fact, what happened was that these objects came the port of new york, and they were auctioned off. and because of the erie canal and because as the possibility of getting this material out was through the erie canal, these objects were going out to the hinterland as out to those were, you know, in in ohio, in new york state, further out in new york state. and that was why the currents were very happy for fermoy to travel. so far more traveled extensively across the eastern seaboard. she went to north to boston providence, hartford and all the

areas in new york, albany and troy and then she went south. so she went all the way south to south carolina, north. and then from there went to cuba because clearly the objects were being sent and wide via the, you know, ship and then came back to florida. that was in pensacola fla, went by steamboat from pensacola to new orleans, and then went all the way up the mississippi river into and into pennsylvania to pittsburgh. so she traveled probably. between 1502 thousand miles across the united states to cuba

and the reason why there was doing this is because the objects were being distributed very broadly so people would both see her and purchase the objects. wow she has quite a map for sort of a network of the united states and beyond the continent as well. and that's really exciting to explore. i think. had a quick question. i know that i mentioned in my introduction that as long as i had met president at the time, andrew, you've noted in your book that she was the first chinese guest to be welcomed the white house. so could you maybe talk little bit? i think this will maybe be our last question for q&a as well about how she was engaging with these sort of political leaders of her time period. at the same time. that's right. and i, i often kind of wondered

why i known about andrew jackson and andrew jackson's meeting up on wye. but i realized as i began to do more of the research that actually in new york city at home, way that met martin van buren and he was a jackson's vice president, and it was clear that she had seen him probably in that early salon period when she was in new york, 1834. and he may have mentioned to jackson. so andrew jackson knew about her, maybe because of van buren, but also because she was widely touted and seen as, you know, the the big attraction at this point in america. and so she did go to the jackson

white house, to the president's house. and we don't have any record in his accounts of what he said to her or. we have is the newspaper of what transpired. and apparently jackson for some reason assumed that arthur moye was an emissary and that she would have the capacity to go back to china and to alert her fellow women who had bound feet that this was an unnecessary and, improper activity and that they should stop it and that she should go back to china and let them know that i'm sure that it was kind of amazing for family

to hear those words since she was not going back to china and was not an emissary and could not do that. but it was interesting that jackson made the assumption that she had the power and the and the will to return to china to make that happen. that is a fascinating it seems like she was sort of and you say this in your book, too, kind of a foil for people to project not only their visions, but maybe their sense influence onto her. so, you know, andrew jackson could make some changes. so, of course, he would assume that i'll find boy. maybe also could have some some cachet that others might not and so i unfortunately kind of have to wrap up our q&a. we had other wonderful about lloyd says play the chinese lady as well that i direct people to on top of reading more of nancy's wonderful book if you want to learn more about this history. and so thank you again, nancy,

for chatting with me here today. and i'll pass it back over to anna. thank you so much. thank you both. and corinne, thanks so much for being with us today. to everyone else, thank you. as well for joining us. please sign up for our mailing list and. follow us at nyu history dot work to get the

i've been subconsciously preparing this lecture for 33 years. the subject i'm about to delve into is so near and dear that the thought of turning it into a talk wouldn't have occurred to me without a prompt. so i'd