>> i think people in general they want to go and teach and understand, wherever that may be on the surface of the planet, a little bit above it, way above it, to the moon, the audit to mars, whatever. i think it is somewhere within us to have this, not a need, but this will, desire to explore. announcer: and on the presidency, an author on the sense of humor of abraham lincoln. >> riding through the woods he met a lady on horseback. he waited for her to pass, but instead she stopped and fortinized him for saying, land say, you are the holiest man i ever saw. yes, madam, but i can't help it. replied, and she replied, no, i suppose not, but you might stay at home.

on --cer: up next, more more from palo alto california. >> here are the records of 40 years' service of the american people in battle with famine and pestilence during and after all these wars. here are the records of dictators, despots and great statesmen. here are the records of what might have been, might have brought peace to the world. and here are the records of the highest idealism and self-sacrifice for great principles, some of which failed. here are the records of the suffering of men, their heroic deeds, and their supreme sacrifices. the purpose of this library is to promote peace and freedom among men.

100 years ago, herbert hoover was in paris and he cabled stanford by telegram offering $50,000, which is almost $1 million today, saying the university should collect the material on war. mr. hoover had been a humanitarian organized food relief to belgium during world war i through a commission for the relief of belgium and he followed that with the american relief administration, which fed millions and millions of europeans during world war i and after world war i so some of the first records to come to us were the records of those non-government organizations on food relief as well as collections around the war in europe. >> and that is the genesis of this institution and we're still continuing mr. hoover's vision of dynamically pointing the road to peace, to prosperity, to human freedom and to the safeguards of the american system. .co the hoover institution and

archives nearly 1 million volumes and more than 6,000 collections on war, peace and other public policy-related topics from both the 20th and and 21st centuries. exports -- experts chose a cross section of artifacts from the collection to show us. >> here we have two items from our world war ii collections. this book, meaning secret in german was the gestapo arrest manual prepared for the invasion of england and the gestapo listed the names of 2,000 people that they wanted to arrest, their addresses and what they did with the exception of jews who were just listed as "jew" and you can see sigmund freud to be arrested, even though at the time the book was published he was already dead. they had a plan for invading the united kingdom and arresting people who they thought were political enemies. here, this is an x-ray of hitler's skull, which came to us with hitler's medical records.

after the war the americans went through germany and collected material to study and understand how this regime was formed and how it operated and what kind of person this monster was and with some of the records came these x-rays. this is not after his death, but these x-rays were done by nazi doctors after the attempted assassination attempt, in which a bomb was placed under a table. unfortunately, the bomb was on the wrong side of the very heavy oak leg of the table. when it went off it did not kill hitler. he complained about headaches and ringing in his ears for a long time, so his doctors parade him to see if there had been any cranial damage. so he was, believe it or not, a vegetarian who ate an enormous amount of cake and if you look carefully you can see his teeth are rotted out here, took an enormous amount of drugs and he was not in great health. so here we have a few items from our russian and soviet collections.

the czar had a secret police force before the revolution that went around the world looking for communists, especially in europe and the paris office produced a mug book which agents could carry around in their pocket and look for various communists and revolutionists in cafes and note where they were and track them. this collection is interesting because it stayed in paris after the fall of the czars for many years until france recognized the soviet union. at that point the ambassador packed up the collection and shipped it to hoover and said please keep it until i die. when he died in the 1950's, we opened the collection up and was an amount of great interest because it showed how a secret police force worked in the early 20th century and the activities of that secret police force affected the way the kgb was organized in the soviet union. it was studied by intelligence scholars, intelligence agents around the world, it's one of our most interesting collections. >> this map shows radio for europe's target countries,

bulgaria, romania, hungary, poland, a total of 80 million people lost their freedom after world war ii. i and my colleagues are exiled through communism. there almost 500 exiles, editors, actors, announcers, researchers, monitors. my job is news casting, reading the news in my native language, polish. [speaking foreign language] >> our largest collection by volume is the radio for europe radio liberty records and broadcasts that are here at hoover. radio free europe and radio liberty were radio broadcasts that were intended to influence the soviets or the soviet bloc towards western ideas and culture.

and so the collection has thousands of broadcasts in dozens of different languages, right? so very large and rich collection. it also as you can see here has a lot of -- we have the corporate records of radio free europe which has wonderful examples of cold war rhetoric and propaganda from the truth dollar campaign that is represented in these images. >> it is the same all over the world. they do have a deep appreciation for our music in europe than they do in the united states. and bucharest, i had to take 20 people in to get their tickets and i had to bring them back stage to get tickets. but it wasn't a huge place like yankee stadium.

>> another interesting fact about radio free europe is that it really featured jazz and lots of jazz musicians. there were tons of talented jazz artists that were broadcast through radio free europe. jazz at the time was seen as modern and cutting edge and revolutionary really so it's wonderful to come across these recordings of jazz artists in various stages of their career. radio free europe and radio liberty no longer exist in their cold war iteration. but they've changed into voice of america, which still sends broadcasts out to other nations. ♪ >> well, the courts have relied almost exclusively on the 14th amendment for authority in this entire field, and the 14th amendment specifies that congress shall pass appropriate legislation to enforce its

provisions so how do you as a lawyer take it on yourself to revise the constitution or is this a part of the famous spontaneity of your administration? >> you are talking about section five of that amendment, which has had a very murky history, exactly what was intended and if you go back and read the discussions -- >> are you implying i haven't read it recently? not implying that. maybe that was a rhetorical way of buying a little more time while i find what i want to say. >> so one of the most frequently used audio-visual collections used here at hoover is the collection of television show firing line which was a public affairs show that ran from the late '60s to the late '90s and was hosted by william f. buckley junior who was known to be witty and to use very large vocabulary when talking with his

guests, and his guest list for this television show is a who's-who of the latter end of the 20th century. he hosted everyone from ronald reagan to the dalai lama to jack kerouac to margaret thatcher. there were 1505 episodes of the show, so we are in the process of digitizing all of these shows and making them available online so that people can enjoy them just, you know, to watch and enjoy, but also to use for scholarship. >> you really then have got to go -- >> now, we're looking at a rare photograph album from world war ii. this comes from our william phillips collection. he was a very interesting man who did a lot of work for the office of strategic services during world the war two and then he worked with prosecutors at the trials in nuremburg. his job was to do profiles of high-ranking nazis. so this album from his

collection is actually the personal photograph album of hitler's foreign minister and the pictures show him signing the nazi soviet pact, and also in the pictures you'll find stalin. now, stalin looks very happy in this picture because he knows that he is going to acquire half of poland. as we know from this, from this pact, and it's very rare to see so many photographs of stalin in one place because he was very superstitious about having his picture taken because he had been hunted by the czar's secret police before the bolsheviks came to power. here at hoover we have wonderful collections that reflect the history of the cold war. this is a very interesting item from that period. this oversized scrapbook documents the life and exploits

of marion miller who was a los angeles house wife who was recruited by the fbi to infiltrate communist party activities in los angeles and she was very successful. her husband happened to be a poster designer and commercial artist, and he put together wonderful scrapbooks that followed all of the media coverage that came when she revealed that she had been a spy and so it includes everything from clippings to photographs of her to a letter from j. edgar hoover himself thanking her for her activities. an interesting fact about her is that her story was actually turned into a film that started -- that starred ronald reagan. >> the hoover institution also has one of the most renowned poster collections on the 20th century with almost 150,000 items in it ranging the gamut from liberation movements, solidarity posters, recruitment

posters and i want to draw your attention to this poster here, this does a poster encouraging -- this is a poster encouraging irishmen to join the armed services to avenge the sinking of the lucitania. that was sunk in 1915. interestingly this is one item , that hoover almost came to own. the ship where he can is owned by a graduate of stanford who wants the hoover library and archives to have it. it sits 300 feet underwater off the coast of ireland, but we haven't been able to accept it yet for various reasons. nonetheless, it's an amazing story about the sinking of the ship and we have a piece of one of the lifeboats that i'm holding in my hand that washed up onshore on the irish coast four days after the ship was sunk with the body of poor civilian victim on the ship and someone from ireland brought it to hoover and donated it to us. so someday we hope to have the actual wreck that will stay in the irish sea as part of our collections.

these are two items from our collections on modern china and taiwan. on this side, we have some youngraphs of some people. some of our most interesting parts of the collection come from journalists who traveled to china in the 1930s and traveled with mao and this collection comes from a woman named nim wales, her nom de plume. she went by the name of helen foster snow and her husband who wrote red star over china traveled to china and interviewed mao. she took these pictures when she interviewed him, and most people don't see young mao but these are original pictures that she took and had developed and donated to hoover. next, it was quite an interesting item. this is the personal diary of general stillwell who worked in burma and in china on the burma road.

by the way, these diaries are also a very popular item here. this indicates day by day general stillwell's interactions and the kind of fraught relationship they had. they didn't like each other and in this diary he refers to him as peanut and he says other things about general stillwell in his diaries also. what you have here is an interesting ability to look at both diaries at the same time and see how they spoke about each other, what they were trying to do and what their ulterior motives were. >> so this is one of my favorite documents that we have in the archives here. this document is from the collection of a gentleman named raymond mulley and he was a renowned speech writer for fdr so he was part of franklin the brain trust. and if you look at this document closely you can see that it is actually the first draft of the speech in which he coins the term the new deal. it's a bit ironic that this document ends up in the collection of herbert hoover, fdr and herbert hoover were

political -- well, they weren't allies we'll put it that way. in 1932, fdr by a landslide beat herbert hoover in his reelection campaign. so how does this get here? actually, once the new deal went into play, ramin changed his mind about it completely. he resigned his incision and became friends with hoover. he decided that he would ironically donate his collection to the library and archives. not only did he do that, but he decided he would annotated as well, so when you see the new deal out in the margin, you see he is written crap and signed and dated it. this is an incredibly valuable historic document. so the archives here at hoover have a wealth of materials about the history of nuclear energy.

one of the most well-known documents related to that is this, which is the original strike order for the bombing at hiroshima. this is on a wool pulp paper. and -- would pulp paper, and if you look closely you can see staple marks in the top corners of this. this was actually hanging in the mess hall on the morning of the attack. and so this was how the pilots knew that today was the day that the attack was going to be carried out. they didn't want everyone to know, and so the bomb run here is listed as special. this document comes from the collection of a gemma name agnew. -- a gentleman named agnew. he had worked on the manhattan project and was instrumental in planning the attack in japan. and he was also very diligent about keeping the evidence of this event because he knew how important it was going to be.

he insisted, for example, that cameras be placed on the planes, which is why we have the footage of the attack, which is actually held in the archives here at hoover so as you can see here there's a picture of the plane and also his dog tags. one thing that makes this library very special is that we provide open access to all. therefore, we have students, professors, historians, journalists, filmmakers, everyone coming and using these materials to promote a better understanding of history. announcer: our staff recently traveled to palo alto, california, to learn about its history. to watch more from that stop and other stops, visit c-span.org/ cities tour. you're watching american history tv.

all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. this weekend, on american history tv, a former astronaut talks about his experiences on the apollo 11 mission that landed man on the moon 50 years ago. he is interviewed by arvin cal. here's a preview. >> you have written that we of the nation like, "exploring, pushing back the frontier, and in a small way space has defined our character." butthen ask three simple important questions. years ago, that i think many of us are asking these days as well. those three questions were, what kind of country are we, what do we stand for, what do we want to be in the next century, that

being the 21st century now? i would like to ask you these questions in a more modern day context and ask your judgment. what kind of country are we today, and what is it that we stand for now? ? i think exploration is a large part of who we have been and who we are and who we will be in the future. i cannot say it is the overriding component of our civilization, but i personally i like to go out and lie down in the middle of a dark night and look up there. i am attracted to that, mesmerized by it. i don't know what i am looking at half the time, but i know i don't want to live the lid over my head. i like to think that we have and that we will continue to explore across the

land of the east coast come cross the mountains and deserts, ,nd finally the wright brothers advance in aviation, and i think i want to see it continue. it is something within us, not everyone, some tribes have been happy to live peacefully in their own secluded valley and never go beyond its borders, but that is rare. i think people want to go to see, to touch and smell and understand, wherever that may be, on the surface of the planet, above it, way above it, to the moon, beyond it to mars. whatever. i think it is within us to have this not a need, but desire to explore. announcer: watch the entire

interview sunday at 6:30 p.m. explore0 p.m. eastern the past here on american history tv. q and a, lincoln the scholar harold holzer and amity slays share their perspectives on c-span's new book the presidents, noted historians rank america's best and worst chief executives. tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q and a. lectures in history, american university professor w joseph campbell teaches a class on the myths about william randolph hearst, yellow journalism, and the lead up to the spanish-american war the end of the 19th century. he debunks the tale that william randolph hearst telegram to one -- telegram one of his correspondence on assignment in cuba, "you furnish the pictures, i'll furnish the war." his class is about 50 minutes.