Booknotes+

The name of the book is "The Vice President's Black Wife." The author is Amrita Chakrabarti Myers. Prof. Myers teaches history at Indiana University. She explains best what is between the covers of her book in the first paragraph of the introduction: "This is the story of an American family. Set in Great Crossing, Kentucky, in the early nineteenth century, it’s a tale that seems typical at first glance: a plantation owner was sexually involved with an enslaved woman and had children with her. The union of Julia Ann Chinn and Richard Mentor Johnson, a congressman from Kentucky who became vice president of the United States in 1837 under Martin Van Buren is, however, anything but standard." Make your donation at: c-span.org/donate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With less than a year to go before the 2024 presidential election, there continues to be a lot of chatter about the possible impact of a candidate on the ballot who is not a Republican or a Democrat. Over the years, third party candidates have made a difference in several elections. The third party candidate to get the largest percentage of votes was Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, at 27 percent. Next was Ross Perot at 19 percent in 1992. His campaign didn't start until the same year of the election. Here he is, from March 1992, talking about his life and politics. Make your donation at: c-span.org/donate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week a conversation with the new host of Q&A, Peter Slen. We discuss the mission of the program, what to expect, and the best parts of hosting a one-hour conversation with interesting individuals. Make your donation at: c-span.org/donate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the cover of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s memoir is a photo of him holding a 3-olive martini. It was obviously his choice and part of a message he chooses to send his readers about his life after 79 years. Mr. Tyrrell founded the American Spectator magazine in 1967. In the author's bio in the back of the book it says: "He has never had another job, though he came terrifyingly close in the late 1960s when the Vice President asked him to join his staff. After strenuous negotiations, the Vice President settled for Tyrrell as a consultant. After that the Vice President resigned." The Vice President was Spiro Agnew. Make your donation at: c-span.org/donate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

British-born author Nick Bunker, our guest this week, has written books on the Mayflower Pilgrims, the Revolutionary War, and a biography of Benjamin Franklin. Lately he has turned his attention to America and the world in 1950. His book is titled "In the Shadow of Fear." Nick Bunker, a graduate of King's College, Cambridge, and Columbia University, focuses on names like Joseph McCarthy, Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, Margaret Chase Smith, George Marshall, Robert Taft, Alger Hiss, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. In addition, Bunker pays close attention to the Korean War. Make your donation at: c-span.org/donate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael S. Bryant, our guest this week, is a professor of history and legal studies specializing in the impact of the Holocaust. He's based at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. Among his many writings he co-edited and contributed an essay to a book titled "Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' and the Holocaust." In the introduction, the editors point out that: "When the Bavarian government's copyright to Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' lapsed on January 1, 2016, the opportunity to reissue the book in German arose for the first time since 1945." Make your donation at: c-span.org/donate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's not normal to hear what a politician really thinks about his or her colleagues in the United States House and Senate while they are still in office. McKay Coppins of the Atlantic magazine, our guest this week, tried to change that with his bestselling book about Senator Mitt Romney of Utah. The book, called "Romney: A Reckoning," is, according to the publisher, "a redemptive story about a flawed politician who summoned his moral courage just as fear and divisiveness were overtaking American life." Make your donation at: c-span.org/donate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the beginning of November, the George Washington Presidential Library in Mount Vernon celebrated its 10th anniversary with a symposium titled, "The Great Experiment – Democracy from the Founding to the Future." Guests on this panel included: Historians H.W. Brands of the University of Texas, Douglas Brinkley of Rice, Joanne Freeman of Yale, and Edna Medford of Howard University. One point of the discussion was the Mount Vernon poll that found that 2/3rds of Americans are pessimistic about the country's direction and dissatisfied with the political climate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Ogilvie spent 8 years studying the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. Her book is called "The Dictionary People." Ogilvie, who has a PhD in linguistics from Oxford University, studied over 3,000 original contributors to the dictionary. In her introduction to the book, she writes: "I was thrilled to discover not one but three murderers, a pornography collector, Karl Marx’s daughter, a president of Yale, the inventor of the tennis-net adjuster, a pair of lesbian writers who wrote under a male pen name, and a cocaine addict found dead in a railway station lavatory." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst who writes about the relationship between politics and media. Gurri was born in Cuba and came to the United States with his parents in the 1950s. In 2014 he self-published an e-book titled "The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium." It was republished in hardback in 2018. Martin Gurri says his thesis is a simple one: "The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of political hierarchies of the industrial age." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices