Kevin Costner, Jon Baird, and Rick Ross offer a splendidly designed, action-packed, globe-trotting adventure in “The Explorers Guild.”
A Note from Hope Katz Gibbs, Publisher, Inkandescent Kids magazine — Behind the staid, public rooms of an old-world gentlemen’s club operates a more mysterious organization: The Explorers Guild, a clandestine group of adventurers who bravely journey to places in which light gives way to shadow and reason is usurped by myth.
The secrets they seek are hidden in mountain ranges and lost in deserts, buried in the ocean floor, and lodged deep in polar ice. The aim of The Explorers Guild: to discover the mysteries that lie beyond the boundaries of the known world.
Set against the backdrop of World War I, with Western civilization on the edge of calamity, the first installment in “The Explorers Guild” series, “A Passage to Shambhala,” concerns the Guild’s quest to find the golden city of Buddhist myth.
The search will take them from the Polar North to the Mongolian deserts, through the underground canals of Asia to deep inside the Himalayas, before the fabled city finally divulges its secrets and the globe-spanning journey plays out to its startling conclusion.
What inspired Kevin Costner, and co-author Jon Baird and illustrator Rick Ross, to write this 784-page epic tale that they describe as “graphic fiction” — a marriage of text and images?
On the East Coast leg of their book tour, Costner, Baird, and Ross sat before a packed room at the National Press Club last month, explaining how the journey of the book began eight years ago.
While the story was originally conceived as an animated movie, after the big studios turned down their 22-minute clip, Baird went to Plan B and began turning the tale into a book.
Initially, Costner acted as his guide in the adventurous project, but “at a certain point, it ceased to be something that was mine,” Baird said. It was something that “he was giving input on and it became something we were working on together.”
A masterful storyteller himself, Costner explained: “It was very important to me that this be what it wanted to be. It wanted to be a novel. Let’s let it exist as that and I’ll go carve the movie out of it someday” if Hollywood decides that it now likes the idea.
Adding the graphic illustrations to the book was Baird’s idea, because he had written books using this engaging technique to hook readers and advance the story. So he went hunting for an illustrator on Craigslist of all places.
It didn’t take long for artist and filmmaker Rick Ross to see the ad and respond. The gig was right up his alley.
As the publisher of the online, graphic fiction anthology Agitainment Comics, Ross was the lead artist for the graphic novelization of Spike TV’s “1000 Ways to Die,” and he created artwork for numerous animated-motion comics, including for the Cinemax television series “Femme Fatales.”
Together, the three-man team gives us a wonderful way to end 2015. Here’s their message to us: Gentle Reader — It is the boast of modernity that Man has mapped and measured, claimed and contested this Earth down to its last inch. He has tamed its moods and subdued its monsters, and lit it from end to end with the fires of his ingenuity. So we are assured. Yet we who have been canvassing this same Earth through the centuries — who have been every place in it that you would care to go, and many more that you would not — we incline to a different view.”
What is Costner’s big dream for this giant adventure story?“My lofty goal is that 150 years from now, ‘The Explorers Guild’ will be held in the same regard as the novels penned by Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad,” he says. “And my greatest hope is that it could be an heirloom. Thank God for storytelling. It helped me find my place in the world.”
It also has the ability to make you smarter, especially if you start young. According to a study by researchers at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, “Music training not only helps children develop fine motor skills, but it also aids emotional and behavioral maturation as well.”
Here’s how they know.
Using a database from the National Institutes of Health Magnetic Resonance, scientists analyzed the brain scans of 232 healthy children ages six to 18, specifically looking at brain development in children who play instruments.
“What we found was the more a child trained on an instrument,” said James Hudziak, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont and director of the Vermont Center for Children, Youth, and Families, “it accelerated cortical organization in attention skill, anxiety management, and emotional control.”
The cortex, the brain’s outer layer, changes in thickness as a child grows and develops. Previously, Hudziak and colleagues Matthew Albaugh and Eileen Crehan found relationships between cortical thickening and thinning in various areas of the brain responsible for depression, aggression, and attention problems.
This research, announced last month in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, was different.
“I wanted to look at positive things, what we believe benefits child development,” Hudziak said. “What I was surprised by was the emotional regulatory regions. Everyone in our culture knows if I lift 5-pound, 10-pound, 15-pound weights, my biceps will get bigger. The same is true for the brain. We shouldn’t be surprised we can train the brain.”
Because the study’s participants were all mentally healthy children, Hudziak thinks the positive effect of music training on those who are not could be significant. “A kid may still have ADHD,” he said. “It’s the storm around it that improves.”
Check out this book: In musicians Ellen Harper and Sam Barry’s new book, Always a Song,you’ll find a collection of stories about the life of the folk music matriarch — including nurturing her son Ben Harper who grew up to become a Grammy-winning musician. Jackson Browne calls it: “An eloquent searching account of a life lived for truth, love, and music.”
“To put it simply, Personality Poker is a game that helps you identify and understand your innovation style and, more important, the innovation styles of others,” explains author Stephen Shapiro, an innovation and collaboration specialist who trained more than 20,000 consultants in innovation during his 15-year tenure with Accenture.
Shapiro believes that by pinpointing how everyone contributes to—and detracts from—innovation in your particular setting, you can create a more powerful organization.
As a management tool, Shapiro says Personality Poker can help you:
Hire the right people, and put them in the right roles
Manage your team dynamic more effectively, and achieve higher levels of efficiency
Understand why some employees become frustrated when your organization’s culture conflicts with their innovation styles
Diagnose the reason your company is struggling to grow
Shapiro realizes that being successful in your career or business requires more than simply finding your strengths. “It’s about finding how your strengths work best with your team and others,” he shares. “When you do this, you will discover that you enjoy your work more, and that your organization thrives—even in difficult times.”
So let’s play!
The game is played like a regular poker, except that the best hand is one where you have five words that best describe your personality.
Here’s how it works:
Deal five random cards to each player.
Have each player rank the words, from “most like” to “least like” their personality. Examples include personality traits such as: philosophical, driven, cheerleader, critical, rigid, visionary, oversensitive, and impulsive.
Have players trade with one another to improve their hand.
Take the extra cards and spread them on a table or floor and allow people to swap their cards to improve their hand.
When players in the group know one another, have them give each other cards. This gives players an idea of how others see them. Keep these cards separate from the five self-selected cards.
After trading is complete, it is time to interpret the results.
The Innovation Process and the Four Suits
Shapiro mapped out the four suits in the game to dovetail with the way he defines the four phases of the innovation process:
Define the Challenge: Spades. This aspect of the innovation process ensures that a problem is identified and on its way to being solved. This first step is ideal for those who prefer facts and principles. Spades identifies these analytic types because they like to dig for data. Think über-successful investor Warren Buffet, who relies heavily on facts to make decisions.
Generate Solutions: Diamonds. In step two, the team begins to develop creative solutions. This area is suited best for multi-faceted individuals who prefer ideas and experiences to solve problems. Think investor and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson, a leader who regularly develops game-changing ideas.
Plan and Execute: Clubs. In step three, the team sets up the structure and accountabilities for successful implementation. This approach works well for those who prefer plans and action. They like movement, such as the swing of a golf club. Think Jack Welch, GE’s former CEO, who prided himself on getting things done.
Engage Hearts and Minds: Hearts. For those who prefer people and relationships, this fourth step of the innovation process is well-suited. They get employees and customers on board and use each person to the best of his or her ability. Think talk-show host and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey, who is often seen as a caring heart who has changed the lives of millions. Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh also appears to be a heart-driven leader.
Are you ready to play to your strong suit? If so, this fun, playful handbook that comes with a deck of cards, and interesting ideas to chew on, may be worth a look: personalitypoker.com.
About Stephen Shapiro
Stephen Shapiro specializes in innovation and collaboration, and in the last two decades has taken his message to leaders in 40 countries. “Innovation only occurs when organizations bring together divergent points of view in an efficient manner,” he believes.
He has trained more than 20,000 consultants in innovation during his 15-year tenure with Accenture. In addition to being an advisor, speaker, and author on innovation, he serves as the chief innovation evangelist for InnoCentive, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of open innovation.
A Note from Actuary and Author Peter Neuwirth, FSA, FCA — I invite you to tune in for this month’s episode of my podcast and video show, Money Mountaineering, where for 30 minutes, financial experts help us answer the question: What’s your future worth?
Today’s topic: When to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em
Pete says: QUIT, by Annie Duke, is an extraordinary book by an extraordinarily practical author who thinks like an actuary. This new book provides a great deal of practical advice for almost anyone who struggles with important life choices. This book will help people get better at making all kinds of decisions, including “knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.”
This and the many other gambling metaphors that Annie employs throughout the book will not surprise anyone familiar with her life story which includes 20 years as a professional poker player. Annie is one of the most successful women poker players in history, having collected over $4 million in winnings while playing against some of the best players in the world.
While much of what she writes is based on Annie’s very solid understanding of probability, statistics, and the theory of interest to evaluate the present value of alternative scenarios, what sets this book apart is Annie’s acumen as a cognitive psychologist. She earned a Master’s degree in that field from the University of Pennsylvania but decided to quit just short of becoming a Ph.D. This story is told in Quit and provides yet another illustration of how and when to decide to stop doing what you are doing and find another plan. I found Annie’s personal story to be one of the book’s highlights as it provides a rare opportunity for the reader to get to know the author and how she thinks when focusing on her own life choices. I, for one, find it much more impactful when an expert tells me not what they recommend I do but rather what they have done when facing decisions that are similar to my own.
Perhaps the best reason to read this book, however, is to hear Annie’s understanding and practical advice regarding the cognitive errors and biases that we are all prone to as human beings. For example, in one of the extremely helpful summaries she includes at the end of each chapter, Annie notes that “Thinking in expected value helps you figure out if the path you are on is worth sticking to ……if you feel like the choice between persevering and walking away is a close call, it is likely that quitting is the better choice.”
About Annie Duke: An author, corporate speaker, and consultant in the decision-making space, as well as Special Partner focused on Decision Science at First Round Capital Partners, a seed stage venture fund, Annie’s latest book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, released October 4, 2022 from Portfolio, a Penguin Random House imprint. Her previous book, Thinking in Bets, is a national bestseller. In the book, Annie reveals to readers the lessons she regularly shares with her corporate audiences, which have been cultivated by combining her academic studies in cognitive psychology with real-life decision-making experiences at the poker table.
For two decades, Annie was one of the top poker players in the world. In 2004, she bested a field of 234 players to win her first World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet. The same year, she triumphed in the $2 million winner-take-all, invitation-only WSOP Tournament of Champions. In 2010, she won the prestigious NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. She retired from the game in 2012. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her master’s degree. In 2021 she returned to her alma mater as a Visiting Scholar, and also teaches executive education there.
Annie now spends her time writing, coaching and speaking on a range of topics such as decision fitness, emotional control, productive decision groups and embracing uncertainty. She is a sought-after public speaker, with engagements ranging from keynote remarks to workshops with executive teams and one-on-one coaching with C-Level executives. Her clients have ranged from CitiBank to the Big 10 to Susqehanna International Group. Annie regularly shares her observations on decision making and critical thinking skills in her newsletter and has shared her poker knowledge through a series of best-selling poker instruction and theory books, including Decide to Play Great Poker and The Middle Zone: Mastering the Most difficult Hands in Hold’em Poker (both co-authored with John Vorhaus).
Annie is a master storyteller, having performed three times for The Moth, an organization that preserves the art of spoken word storytelling. One of her stories was selected by The Moth as one of their top 50 stories and featured in the organization’s first-ever book. Her passion for making a difference has helped raise millions for charitable causes. In 2006, she founded Ante Up for Africa along with actor Don Cheadle and Norman Epstein, which has raised more than $4 million for Africans in need. She has also served on the board of The Decision Education Foundation. In 2009, she appeared on The Celebrity Apprentice, and raised $730,000 for Refugees International, a charity that advocates for refugees around the world. In October 2013, Annie became a national board member for After School All-Stars. In 2014, Annie co-founded The Alliance for Decision Education to build a national movement that empowers teachers, school administrators and policymakers to bring Decision Education to every Middle and High School student. In 2016, she began serving on the board of directors of The Franklin Institute, one of America’s oldest and greatest science museums. In 2020, she joined the board of the Renew Democracy Initiative. Annie resides in Philadelphia. Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or LinkedIn and visit her website: annieduke.com
2026 marks the 160th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865.
To commemorate the solemn event, we talked to Civil War expert Adam Goodheart, the author of “1861” and the upcoming “1865” — two books that capture the essence of the battles and the time.
A historian, essayist, and journalist, Goodheart has written articles for National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the director of Washington College’s C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He splits his time living there and in Washington, DC.
Scroll down for our Q&A with Adam.
Author and Historian Adam Goodheart
Inkandescent Kids: Your book introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes. Among them, an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer’s wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, and a young college professor who would one day become president. So tell us, what inspired you to write “1861”?
Adam Goodheart: It actually started with the discovery of buried treasure.
It was related to my work as a college teacher out on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. If you’ve been to the Eastern Shore, you know that in many ways it feels like the land that time forgot. The area is filed with lots of old, crumbling plantation houses and little colonial villages tucked away along the tidal rivers. So when I’m teaching American history out there, I love to take my students out to explore the environment, because you can feel history come alive.
About eight years ago, I took a class to one of the old plantation houses, a place that had been in the same family since the 1600s. And as we roamed through this old brick house, we found old steamer trunks in the attic that were stuffed with family papers.
The papers ranged from land records from the 1660s, up to somebody’s credit card statement from the 1980s, all jumbled together. And mixed up in this treasure trove, we found a bundle of letters from the spring of 1861 — letters written by a man who had lived on this plantation. The letters were tied in a bundle with silk ribbon that clearly hadn’t been undone since the 19th century, and hadn’t been read in 150 years.
As we read them, we found that he was trying to figure out what it all meant as the country fell apart, as the South seceded, as the leaders of Maryland were deciding to be a Union state or a Confederate state. It was clear to me right then that I wanted to write a book about it.
Inkandescent Kids: In the book, you bring so many great characters to life — including James Garfield and Jessie Freemont. It’s a very eclectic group.
Adam: When I started out, I didn’t expect to write about James Garfield at all. But I came across excerpts from his letters and diaries that made it clear that 20 years before he was president, he was just an ordinary young American man in his 20s trying to figure out what it all meant, similar to the man whose writings I discovered in the plantation house. Garfield’s personality and his words just pulled me in, and he became an exciting character in my book.
Inkandescent Kids: Tell us more about the women of the time, such as Jessie Freemont.
Adam: Jessie Freemont worked behind the scenes to try to keep California in the United States. She’s a little-known hero of this era, who not only worked to save the Union but stretched the limits of what a woman could achieve in the very restricted political environment of the time.
She was most famous, perhaps, for the famous men she was associated with. Her father was Thomas Hart Benton, a US senator who gained fame by challenging a man to fight a duel with pistols only five feet apart.
She married another tough frontier character, John Freemont, who was a great explorer of the American West and ran for president. Jessie herself tried to step into the political spotlight even though upper-class women were banned from the political arena.
Inkandescent Kids: Having spent so much time with James Garfield and Jessie Freemont and Abner Doubleday, that whole clique, do you feel like you got to know them?
Adam: Absolutely. One of the things I love about writing history is that you feel like in some ways you can get to know these people almost better than they knew themselves, or at least you can get to know the circumstances that they were working in better than they could know them. For example, you can read about President Lincoln and what he was thinking as the Civil War began, and you can also read what Jefferson Davis was thinking as he figured out his strategy for the war. Putting it all together gives you a perspective that somebody at the time couldn’t have gotten. That’s very powerful.
Inkandescent Kids: Would you say that the Civil War was the beginning of civil rights?
Adam: I think the Civil War marked the moment when the struggle against slavery became the struggle over the definition of citizenship in our country. It’s amazing to think that many people who believed in American slaves being freed didn’t think that African-Americans should be or could be citizens.
For African-Americans, the Civil War wasn’t just about gaining freedom, it was also about gaining citizenship. The hundred years following the war is the story of making sure that the full promise of what was given in the Civil War would be realized.
Inkandescent Kidss: The Civil War era seems to have been a very romantic time. People spoke in flowery language. They were thinking about big changes, and how they wanted society to be structured. Is that accurate?
Adam: Absolutely. People wrote amazing letters — and I’m not just talking about Abraham Lincoln, but ordinary folks. The soldiers wrote absolutely beautifully. This was a time when people were just steeped in great literature. They were reading Shakespeare. They were reading the Bible. They were reading the great 19th century poets Byron and Tennyson. And they were absorbing the rich language and writing that way themselves.
Inkandescent Kids: Tell us why you believe the Civil War period is important for everyone to understand today — especially kids?
Adam: For one thing, it is just an amazing story. History is all about storytelling. And the Civil War really has it all — it’s somewhat like “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” It’s a modern-day Greek myth that we keep telling and retelling through the generations because it speaks to us so much as human beings.
The Civil War is also important because it helped us define our identity as Americans. While we don’t all share the same ethnic background, religion, or political ideas, we do share the same history.
Inkandescent Kids: How do you transmit that feeling to kids and adults so that they want to know people like Garfield or Freemont?
Adam: You have to try to put people today in the shoes of people at that time. Some historians write as if people in the past are robots whose actions are determined by certain economic and social and political forces. But people then had all the same passions, all the same doubts, all the same wants we have now.
So I think it’s most important to create fully rounded characters who aren’t perfect. Lincoln in my book is really blundering and stumbling a lot of the time before he finds his footing as a leader. So we historians have to avoid making people into gods and also try not to make them into repositories for our pet academic theories. We have to bring them out on the page as actual human beings.
Inkandescent Kids: The US Marines talk about getting your “boots on the ground.” It seems that you believe in “boots on the ground” teaching and learning?
Adam: I do! Kids and parents should get out there and walk the places where history happened, walk the battlefields, walk through the towns and villages, and explore. Take a book out to one of these places. I’ve had such powerful experiences by taking a book to a Civil War battlefield and reading about what happened there on the spot. You just see it unfolding. Read aloud to each other when you go to a place like that.
Talk to people as well. For instance, near where I live and in many places are African-American communities founded by freed slaves right after the Civil War. I take my students there sometimes. There’s a wonderful church out in Maryland, not far from Washington, founded by the descendants of freed slaves, and the descendants of those families still live there.
You can go to the church services and experience probably much of what African-American religion would have been like in the 19th century. Then stick around afterwards and talk to people about when they were growing up. There are people alive today who remember Civil War veterans. It’s not that long ago, so talk to old folks and hear those stories, and you’ll hear things that nobody else knows.
What are three big ideas your family can talk about tonight at dinner about “1861”? Adam Goodheart suggests:
1. Freedom. “One of the stories I like best in the book is on how freedom really began for enslaved African Americans,” he says. “This isn’t the story that most people think of when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and then Congress passed a congressional amendment setting all slaves free. This is a story about how the slaves, the African Americans, decided in the very first days of the Civil War to seize freedom for themselves.”
It starts with three completely unknown young men — Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend — who, in the first weeks of the Civil War escaped from a Confederate encampment where they were being held in bondage as laborers. They made their way across the river into a Union fort and were taken in and given their freedom by the Union general, starting an absolute flood of enslaved people running to the Union lines, joining the Union cause, and forcing the issue of slavery on to the table at a moment where almost nobody — including Abraham Lincoln — wanted it there.
2. Elmer Ellsworth and the Zuave movement. A young colonel named Elmer Ellsworth came out of nowhere and led the Zuave movement. These guys would go in to battle dressed in weird uniforms — little fezzes and big baggy red pants. And when they were fighting, they would jump into the air and pirouette and twirl their muskets and turn somersaults. They were sort of like the Navy Seals meet Cirque du Soleil.
3. Lincoln getting his sea legs as a politician. My book portrays Lincoln as a man who comes to Washington, DC, as a complete political unknown. He is very naïve in many ways about politics and does not understand how the federal government works in many respects. Yet, in the weeks and months to come, he transforms himself into one of the greatest leaders, if not the greatest leader, America has ever known.
Her many honors include the 2001 Person of Vision Award (from the Arlington County Commission on the Status of Women) and the James A. Jordan Award for Outstanding Dedication and Excellence in Teaching (from Penn State University). She has also written four books related to Eleanor Roosevelt as well as teacher guides for PBS documentaries.
Inkandescent Kids: We are celebrating a number of important anniversaries right now, including the 50th anniversary of Selma and the 150th anniversary of the Lincoln assassination and the end of the Civil War. How do you think Reconstruction would have played out if Lincoln had lived?
Allida Black: I can only say this: It would have been different. We know that within a week before John Wilkes Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln was in fact talking publicly about voting rights for African-American soldiers who fought in the Civil War. Some historians of great note argue that that was the tipping point that pushed the assassin to murder.
If in fact Lincoln had lived, it’s open to debate whether or not voting rights would have been extended. But I can’t believe that Lincoln would have not launched a national debate on voting rights for African-Americans who fought and risked their lives.
And if the debate had taken place, we would have a whole new concept of Reconstruction — but we don’t know how that debate would have ended. It could have made the white Democratic South even more crazy. Or it could have sent a signal that said, “We fought this war and we have to figure out how to come together. We have ended slavery, but emancipation is not just freedom from slavery; it is the freedom to become a citizen.”
Had the nation debated that latter point, the huge battle would have been over “What does citizenship mean?” I think that is the quintessential conversation that we are still having today, and that Lincoln could have played a huge role in helping frame that debate.
Inkandescent Kids: How would Lincoln have assessed emancipation today? There are really more slaves now than there ever have been before, if you include female slavery and drug slavery.
Allida: There is certainly sex trafficking and forced slavery all over the world, but it is hard to project the definitive numbers. What I do know is that were they alive today, Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt — two of the most articulate, risk-taking voices — would have spoken up against trafficking and for a living wage. And they would have challenged us all to understand that we have the courage to be the better angels of our nature.
Inkandescent Kids: Tell us more about the connection between Roosevelt and Lincoln. What did Eleanor Roosevelt learn from him and some of the Founding Fathers she greatly admired?
Allida: Eleanor believed that we were always on trial to show what democracy means and that America was always growing and always changing. She felt that democracy was like a rubber band — you could stretch it and it would contract a little, and you would stretch it again and it would come back a little bit. Benjamin Franklin certainly thought that, too; you could see him flirting with that.
The Founding Fathers whom Eleanor embraced the most were Franklin and Thomas Paine — but for very different reasons. Ben Franklin because he understood where we would be down the road. For example, Franklin was the only Founding Father who argued over slavery. He really understood that women needed to be educated; he understood that all citizens needed to be educated. In fact, that philosophy spurred the creation of America’s public schools as well as public libraries. Eleanor was devoted to Franklin.
She also loved Paine’s “These are the times that try men’s souls,” essay, which was published in the 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense,” which argued for America’s independence from England. Eleanor believed that for people to take risks, especially to take risks to build a new nation, they had to have a vision that was not only about themselves, but that was about others.
In 1789, as the French Revolution shook Europe to the core, the new United States was struggling for survival in the face of financial insolvency and bitter political and regional divisions.
In his book, “When the United States Spoke French,” author François Furstenberg explores the republic’s formative years from the viewpoint of a distinguished circle of five Frenchmen taking refuge in America.
“When the French Revolution broke out, these men had been among its leaders,” Furstenberg explains. “They were liberal aristocrats and ardent Anglophiles, convinced of the superiority of the British system of monarchy and constitution. They also idealized the new American republic, which seemed to them an embodiment of the Enlightenment ideals they celebrated. But soon the Revolutionary movement got ahead of them, and they found themselves chased across the Atlantic.”
In the book, Furstenberg follows these five men: Napoleon’s future foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord; theorist-reformer Rochefoucauld, the duc de Liancourt; statesman and army officer Louis-Marie Vicomte de Noailles; lawyer and writer Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry; and philosopher, abolitionist, and politician Constantin-François Chasseboeuf, Comte Volney — who left their homes and families in France, crossed the Atlantic, and landed in Philadelphia. The city was then America’s capital, its principal port, and by far its most cosmopolitan city, in addition to being the home of the wealthiest merchants and financiers.
Furstenberg vividly reconstructs their American adventures, following along as they integrated themselves into the city and its elite social networks, began speculating on backcountry lands, and eventually became enmeshed in Franco-American diplomacy. Through their stories, we see some of the most famous events of early American history in a new light, from the diplomatic struggles of the 1790s to the Haitian Revolution to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
By the end of this period, the United States was on its way to becoming a major global power. Through this small circle of men, we find new ways to understand the connections between US and world history and gain fresh insight into American history’s most critical era. Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, “When the United States Spoke French” offers a fresh perspective on the tumultuous years of the young nation, when the first great republican experiments were put to the test.
Scroll down for our Q&A.
Inkandescent Kids: What inspired you to write this book?
François Furstenberg: I began thinking about something connecting French and American history when I moved to Montreal for my first job in 2003. My training had been in American history, without really any French focus. My dissertation, and later my first book, were on George Washington’s image in the 19th century, and on its connections to slavery. I approached these as pretty US-centric issues. Two things pushed me toward the research I eventually undertook.
The first was my new home. I was living in Montreal — in a part of North America that still speaks French — and teaching in French. I thought that looking at French connections in the early republic would be a good way to connect my research to the interests of my students and colleagues.
The second motivation was the wealth of wonderful new scholarship coming out on what historians were calling the Atlantic World. Amazing studies were coming out showing all the ways that the history of Colonial America and the history of the early United States were embedded in a larger Atlantic history. They were showing how provincial many historians had been in framing our studies around the nation. And so this work exerted a real influence on my own historical thinking.
Inkandescent Kids: What are the three big lessons you hope readers will take away from it?
François Furstenberg: It’s pretty hard for me to say. The book is out there now, and people will take what they want. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of writing a book is discovering how people read that book in really unexpected ways.
But if I had my pick, I guess I would hope that readers might come away with a different portrait of the early years of the American republic. I’d want them to think less in the ways that so much of this history has been framed — as a story about great Founding Fathers — and more about the ways that our history emerged out of, and was intimately intertwined with, bigger struggles and fights, including those over the French and Haitian revolutions. I’d want readers to understand the impossibility of separating our history from the history of Europe and the Caribbean.
I might also hope that readers get a more contingent sense of the early American republic. It’s so hard for us now — in this moment when the United States is such a dominant global power — to understand how fragile the nation was back then, how close it was to disappearing completely. The emergence of this puny set of states hovering along the Atlantic coast into a continental and then global power was as much a matter of luck and coincidence as it was anything else.
And finally, I think I’d like for readers to get a sense of the connections between different historical fields; how political history connected to diplomatic history to economic history to family history to material culture, portraiture, and more.
Inkandescent Kids: When was the moment in your childhood or life when you developed a passion for American history? And what do you think can be done to inspire more kids to get excited about learning about the past?
François Furstenberg: I guess I’d be hard-pressed to remember a single moment. I think of it more as a growing interest over time. I remember being a big reader when I was a kid. My grandfather (my mother’s father) was a historian, which might have had some influence. My teachers in college were a big influence on me.
As for inspiring kids, too many people get to college thinking that history is just about memorizing lists of facts and dates. I once told a college professor of mine that I doubted my talents in history. “I can’t even name all the presidents,” I explained by way of illustration.
He had no patience for my concerns. “Why would you ever want to do that?” he asked me. “You can always look that up. That’s not what history is about.” (I’m paraphrasing here of course. Anytime you see a conversation quoted from memory, know that the exact words are made up. There is a free historical lesson for your readers.)
I try to encourage students to think more about problems in history. About how to read texts and criticize them. About causality and contingency. About the importance of imaginative reconstructions of the past. About the ways that American history — indeed, probably all history — is made up of this fascinating commingling of horror and inspiration. I like to think that can be more inspirational than rote learning.
What inspired Kevin Costner, and co-author Jon Baird and illustrator Rick Ross, to write this 784-page epic tale that they describe as “graphic fiction” — a marriage of text and images?
Check out this book: In musicians Ellen Harper and Sam Barry’s new book, 
Pete says: 
