KATHERINE MAHER: Hello. Hi. Do we have everyone? Great. Those folks online, everything looks like it's working. We've got folks on the chat, very exciting. I am delighted-- Adam, I actually-- how do you pronounce your last name? I'm sorry, I want to make sure I get it right. Hochschild. Did I get it right? All right.

Thanks everyone for being here and thanks to those of you who are online. I am really excited to introduce to you today Adam Hochschild, who is an author, a historian, a journalist, the founder of Mother-- co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, who is a resident of the Bay Area over in Berkeley, I believe-- so he's one of us-- and is here to talk a little bit today about social movements and their history and power over time and what it is that we can learn from them.

I was reading Adam's Wikipedia page before coming here and so I'm going to ask you if these citations are correct. All right. All right. Well there was this wonderful quote that I saw on your Wikipedia bio that talked about the importance of a moral imperative to confront evil and how you tend to focus on subject matters that address that challenge.

But what I really liked was that Adam mentioned in this quote that he wanted to come back reincarnated in a future life as a fiction writer, but lacking the ability to invent characters, he goes looking for them in the real world, which makes me feel like that is actually very much the same truth as many of our Wikipedians who spend a lot of their time looking for the interesting characters in corners of our shared existence.

But what I also really loved was this comment about why you don't use research assistants. Because I think any Wikipedian can identify with this-- why would you want to give away to somebody else the pleasure of exploring? So thank you so much for being with us here today, and we're going to go do a little Q&A after Adam is done speaking and open it up to the crowd. Here you go.

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Thank you. It's great to be here. You can see how old fashioned I am because I actually have my notes on paper instead of on a computer screen.

Anyway, it's a real pleasure to be here. Like everybody who does writing and research of any kind, rarely does a day pass when I don't find myself looking up something on Wikipedia. And for my last book, I also downloaded a number of photographs from Wikipedia Commons, so I feel like somebody in the mid-1400s who had been reading one of Mr. Gutenberg's bibles and then actually got to go and visit Gutenberg's printing press. So here I am at the center of it all.

Since what I do is to write history, I thought it might be interesting to look at a few historical moments where leaps forward in the means of sharing knowledge had consequences, both positive and negative. So going back to Gutenberg for a second, and I'm sure that's an analogy that you all spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, his invention, of course, was the idea of combining movable type with a printing press that could use it.

But I think what interests me is that that leap forward in means of sharing knowledge had consequences which nobody at the time foresaw in any way. First of all, it was not just the Bible that got disseminated by this process, but all sorts of other books as well. It's estimated that 50 years after the first printing, a half million copies of books of various sorts were in circulation in Europe. This in turn led to a vast expansion of literacy. It also lead directly of course to the Protestant Reformation, because no longer was there a single source of sacred knowledge-- you know, these manuscripts that got copied and recopied by monks.

And of course, it also led to restrictions. Because powerful forces-- as still happens today-- were terrified at knowledge spreading out of their control in this way. In 1563, about a century after Gutenberg printed his first bible, printing was forbidden in France without royal permission, and if you violated that law, it was punishable by the death penalty.

The expansion of printing also meant in regimes like that the expansion of censorship. By the time of the French Revolution of the late 1700s, there were 178 full time censors at work in France. Earlier in the early 1600s, Spain outlawed the manufacture of paper in its American colonies in order to keep those colonies subservient-- for anything as precious and valuable and potentially as powerful as that, they had to get it from Spain.

Libraries, of course, were targeted by repressive regimes all through this period and it still happens today. To take one very recent example, one of the-- our century's most colorful autocrats, the late President Niyazov of Turkmenistan who I've always had a soft spot for because he renamed the days a week and the months of the year after members of his own family. In 2005, he closed all libraries in the country except his own. So the free sharing of ideas by whatever new means of communication is available is always a threat to repressive governments. So when Wikipedia is banned in Turkey, you're in good historical company.

I want to look at a couple of other moments in history that I've studied. And there are moments where it wasn't exactly the situation that a new means of sharing knowledge was invented, but rather-- and to some extent, this is really true with Gutenberg as well-- the change was not in technology, but in how an existing means of sharing knowledge that nobody had thought to use in a particular way now suddenly got used differently.

Let's take the example first of Great Britain in the late 1780s. Now this was a country that had had newspapers for well over 100 years and printed books for much longer. But suddenly, a movement came along that used these existing means of communication to communicate something that hadn't been communicated before. I'm talking about the anti-slavery movement which began with dramatic suddenness in Great Britain in 1787. A measure of-- there were no opinion polls in those years, but if you had stood up on a London street corner at the beginning of 1787 and polled people, there's something morally wrong with slavery, you know, nine out of 10 people would have dismissed you as a complete crackpot.

By February 1788, the one measure of what people were interested in that's very accurate that we have from that time is what the topics were of London debating societies, this was a big spectator sport where you paid sixpence and went to hear people debate. In previous years, slavery and the slave trade had almost never been debated at these dozens of public forums around the city. Suddenly, month of February 1788 half the debates on record are about slavery or the slave trade. What had happened?

What had happened basically was that a very well organized small group of ardent abolitionists began experimenting with something. They took the existing means of communication-- books, pamphlets, newspapers, and so on-- and they realized that up to that point in time, all of the debate which few people had paid much attention to in England over the issue of slavery-- and I meant not in England itself, but in Britain's enormously lucrative West Indian colonies-- that almost all of that debate up at that point in time had been in terms of biblical argument. And of course, in the Bible, you can always find a citation to support whatever side in whatever argument you're in.

Suddenly they began using these means of communication for a different purpose, which was to spread eyewitness testimony. And they realized this had a tremendous effect on people-- this kind of thing had not really appeared in print before, but when it did, it had a powerful overwhelming impact. For example, part of their organizing was to organize a number of parliamentary hearings in the House of Commons, the House of Lords, committees of each house about the issue of slavery. This generated enormous amounts of hearing transcripts totaling 1,500, 2,000 pages. There was a debate in parliament coming up for a vote on ending the slave trade and the abolitionists wanted to boil down this great mass of testimony into something manageable. So they put out a thick pamphlet-- about 150 pages-- with excerpts from the testimony-- organized conditions on slave plantations, conditions on slave ships, punishments given to slaves-- all eyewitness testimony by people who'd been there.

This booklet was distributed to members of parliament, they had a few copies left over, they thought, let's see if we can sell any of these to the public. This became the best selling piece of nonfiction anti-slavery literature of all time and it was still in print at the time of the American Civil War 70 years later. And this immediately led-- when they saw the effect that this had, it led to them getting a former slave ship captain to write-- who had turned repentant-- to write about his experience; a former slave ship doctor to write a book about his experience; a former slave who was living in England, Olaudah Equiano, wrote a book about his own life and his experiences and it became a bestseller and he went on a five-year book tour all over England.

It led to the use of other means of communication as well for a different purpose. For example, the printing of black and white graphics had been around, you know, for a century. But they began using this for their purposes, and one result of all that you've seen as a famous poster of a slave ship-- you know, a diagrammatic poster, you're looking top-down and you can see how the slaves' bodies are kind of packed like sardines all around the ship. Very common image, it's on the cover of half the books about slavery today.

That poster was made by a local committee of British abolitionists in the town of Portsmouth in 1788, and when it was produced using that existing tool of graphics but for a radically new purpose which was-- this was, of course, before the days of photography-- who in a diagrammatic way, show what slavery meant, it had an enormous impact. You read memoirs from this period and you find many people writing about the impact it had on them when they first saw the slave ship poster. They sent a bunch of cop-- when they saw how powerful it was, they printed up 8,000 copies of this poster and put it up in pubs all over England. They sent a bunch of copies to their friends, the French abolitionists and Paris, the Marquis de Lafayette among them, and the French abolitionists debated for a long time whether or not they should show this poster to King Louis XVI, who was known to have a weak heart and it was felt the poster might be just too much for him-- they ended up not showing it to him.

So you see what I mean about a couple of existing means of communication, existing means of sharing knowledge suddenly being used with radically different content.

A couple more examples. Jump forward 100 years to the decade 1900-1910. Some of you may have read the book that I wrote about that period, King Leopold's Ghost, which is about the movement to expose the tremendous atrocities that took place in the Congo as King Leopold II of Belgium got his hands on that territory and made it through the use of a slave labor system into an enormously lucrative privately-owned colony.

Well, existing means of knowledge dissemination were there. Newspapers have been around for a long time. Photography had been around for 50 or 60 years. For less than that but for still 20 or 30 years, the means had been there of showing photographs to large audiences by means of so-called magic lantern slide shows, but nobody had thought to use that to dramatize injustice. What really made the movement against the atrocities in King Leopold's Congo take off and become the by far most prominent human rights movement of the first decade of the 20th century was that they had atrocity photographs from the Congo-- people in chains, people being whipped, people with their hands cut off, and so on-- and these were shown to audiences throughout Europe, the United States, as far away as Australia and New Zealand with this magic lantern slide show.

And I think for other means of disseminating knowledge, we can find similar examples. You know, if we come forward in time, film newsreels had been there since the 1920s at least and TV since the end of World War Ii, but I don't think it was until the-- in this country, until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and then the Vietnam War that we saw the enormously powerful impact that moving images could have politically.

I want to end by giving you an example today of something again that's not a new technology, but an example of using some existing technologies for disseminating knowledge in what I find very excitingly different way. And it's the most interesting leap of this sort that I've seen in the last few years, because it's not happening in the United States; It's not happening in Europe; it's something that's happening in the rural south among the very poorest of the poor. It's a project-- I wonder if any of you are familiar with it-- the People's Archive of Rural India? OK, let me tell you about it.

The situation in India is, of course, as you know, is that it's a country with a huge amount of poverty in it, especially rural poverty. More than 800 million Indians are making their living on the land as landless laborers working on somebody else's land or as very small farmers with minuscule plots of land themselves. They are politically lacking power and they're ignored by the country's mass media. You never see stories about farm life on TV, and this is a country where the majority of people are still living on the land. Until a couple of years ago, the daily newspapers in India-- India is a country with a lot of newspapers because it's easier for people to get print than it is for them to be able to afford a computer or TV-- and all the staffs of all the daily newspapers in India, both in English and in the many other languages there, there was only one correspondent who spent full time covering agriculture and farm life.

He's a friend of mine. And a couple of years ago, he quit his job with the newspaper to start this quite remarkable project. Because he realized that with a smartphone-- and these are now cheap enough so that many people in India's rural villages are starting to have them-- you can download or upload almost anything. So he and a bunch of friends created a quite remarkable web site that is partly curated-- in the sense that everything that is finally posted is seen by and approved by one of the editors-- but it's mostly popularly generated where it asks for contributions from people-- contributions of photographs, of film, of written stories, of data-- and there are guidelines for how you can contribute this material.

It also asks for people to contribute translations. There are, I believe, so far at least 12 languages on this site, and some items you have a choice of up to 12 languages in which you can read or view or listen to that story, that film clip or whatever it is. And the translations are contributed by people remotely donating their labor to do this. Everything that's posted is under a Creative Commons item.

And it's exciting to me to read the kind of material there, because it is something which-- and I can tell you this from my own experience because I've lived in India for six months-- it is stuff that is absolutely not covered at all by the nation's newspapers, TV, bloggers, or anything else. Here are the kinds of things that it posts-- there are text and photo stories-- and almost every story is illustrated-- about issues affecting farmers. There's been a huge wave-- the death toll is now in the hundreds of thousands-- of Indian small farmers who've committed suicide because they have gone deep into debt and not been able to repay it.

Articles about drought; articles about what happens when global warming means rising sea levels and there are farmers who are farming land that's only a foot or two of sea levels. There are portraits of people, again, in a variety of media-- text, photos, film, audio; people in different kinds of rural occupations-- well drillers, weavers, camel grazers, migrant fishery workers, the people who climb coconut trees, 50 trees a day to lop off the coconuts and harvest them, a guy in a rural area who lost a child to a car accident and in response has created his own ambulance service with his motorcycle.

There are stories honoring crafts, some of which are dying out, some of which are still practiced. For example, a marvelous visual piece-- film and audio-- about people building a traditional kind of wooden boat in the state of Kerala in the south, and when you have four or five workers working on a boat-- they're all hammering nails because it takes, you know, 20,000 nails or something to build one of these boats-- they have developed certain percussion rhythms with their multiple hammers, so it sounds like a bunch of drummers practicing. There is a portrait gallery of thousands of faces from across the country, closeup faces of people in rural areas, farmers, you know, housewives, weavers, people whose photographs would never be on TV, in a national newspaper, anything like that.

There is a huge collection of traditional songs sung by women in one part of the country as they use a stone grinding mill to grind rice flour or grind turmeric. Scholars began collecting audio of these songs 20 years ago, now they've got a place where they can post them. And it can be added to by people today, adding video as well as audio of the women singing these songs.

You can get on this site and with your smartphone in an Indian village, you can search by the part of the country you're in, by the district, by the village you're in, and most important of all, I think, is you know that if your face, your song, your village, your occupation is on there, that people all over the world can see it and they can see it in a variety of different languages. I think the implications of that is that it's something enormously empowering, and when people can begin seeing their faces and their words on a screen in this way, in a way that's not just a Facebook post but in a way that they know is directed towards a wide audience, I hope that is something which will encourage them to believe that they have as many rights and as much importance as somebody whose face or song is seen on a national TV screen.

So why don't I stop right there and I would be glad to hear your comments, questions, any thoughts that this provokes on your part.

KATHERINE MAHER: I think I'm supposed to host at least a couple of the first questions to get us kicked off. I just wanted to start by saying thank you so much for being here. I remember reading King Leopold's Ghost when I was living in Cairo, Egypt and finding it to be a window into a part of the world that I knew very little about and also a colonial history that I was shocked that I also knew very little about.

And one of the things that we focus on quite a bit these days in the Wikimedia movement and in the Wikimedia Foundation is thinking about how we increase representation of history and culture and backgrounds that are not currently represented within Wikimedia. And I'm interested-- it's perhaps not a question, but I was wondering if in your experience of-- you've mentioned you go to Wikipedia quite often, what is that obligation that you would want us to be aware of when we go out and when we talk to our community members and when we're in dialogue about the role that Wikipedia plays in the world around representation and around finding ways to document these sorts of stories, these histories, and how we think about writing into Wikipedia the-- how we think about writing this into Wikipedia when sometimes those sources are offline. I don't know if that is resonant with you.

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: It's a really important question, I think. I've read a little bit about some of the efforts you've made sometimes to enlist experts to write Wikipedia articles, and I think that's a great thing. I would wonder I guess if there is a way of directing that specifically towards less known, less powerful, less prominent people, events, movements, and so forth that ought to have more known about them, because of course, you know, if you just-- and I don't need to tell you this because I'm sure you all live with this every day that if you just leave it to all of Wikipedia users to do what they want, they're going to generate more articles about porn stars than about women social leaders and so forth.

So I think taking the initiative to think about what kinds of people, what kinds of organizations, what kinds of movements we deserve to know more about and then finding people and encouraging them to do it.

KATHERINE MAHER: One thing I was-- and we can-- I think that we're very lucky in that our community is very active in thinking this through and trying to identify those gaps, and having a global community, very often that's something that doesn't come from us but does come from the community itself.

In the spirit of trying to identify things that we might not know about, I was interested in your observation that the London debating societies are really great historical records of what was the sort of discourse of the day, and I'm interested in, as we think about our landscape that we work within in Wikimedia as-- do you see any similar sort of places that we should be looking to as the weak signals or the strong signals of how discourse is changing? What are the London debating societies of today and how might we, as an organization and as a sort of social movement globally, take advantage or start thinking about how we should be paying attention to those?

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: I think the question there is how do you find things which are truly representative in which somebody isn't trying to manipulate in some way, because of course, you know, one's first answer would tend to be, well, Facebook-- you know, tells you what people are thinking about and so on. But it also tells you what a lot of very powerful and self-interested people want us to be thinking about. I'm not sure I can easily answer that.

I don't immediately think of-- I can't immediately think of something like that that's analogous today, I would have to think on a bit and get back to you. It's much easier for me to see that kind of thing looking back in time, especially to pre-electronic history where, you know, I think a lot of historians in the last 40 or 50 years have really spent a lot of time thinking about, what are the records that didn't get into the traditional history books? And the traditional history books is anything that was debated in the US Congress or was debated in parliament or whatever, because they're verbatim transcripts of all that.

But what isn't there are things like people's letters and women's diaries and so forth, and often whose letters you can find-- if you're a historian, you know, it's one of the great things to rely upon-- but whose letters are they? Well, who are the people who keep their letters and then a descendant donates them to a library or archive or something? It tends to be a professor of this or that or a member of Congress or a member of parliament or something. I've actually found some of my most interesting sources of letters, especially because they didn't come from prominent people, were letters that were intercepted by intelligence agencies who were spying on someone.

Unfortunately-- and, you know, now, 50 years later, you can get them under the Freedom of Information Act-- unfortunately, there's no sort of central repository of that where you can immediately scan it all in and put it online. But I think one has to search carefully for those things and to-- because otherwise, the bias is always going to be towards the records left by the powerful and not diaries kept by the powerless.

I mean, in writing about the Congo for instance, it really pains me that from this period of about 40 years in which the population of that territory was reduced by about 10 million people through this forced labor system, you know, there's the records almost on a daily basis of what different people in the British Foreign Office thought about this, but there is not one single diary or oral history of a Congolese who lived during that time.

KATHERINE MAHER: We talk about the fact that oral histories are not accepted as secondary sources on Wikipedia and one of the things that our community members will tell us is how problematic that is-- and this isn't a question, this is just a observation-- because of the fact that not only are oral histories are often the way that these understandings and different perspectives are passed down in many places in the world, the knowledge that we do have is often an academic paper written by an anthropologist who is working in translation from another culture, so you're not even talking about sort of inequities within societies about the powerful who are having their history captured, but inequities between societies where it's all through some sort of anthropological lens of understanding.

So I don't know if you spent a lot of time thinking about bias on Wikipedia, but--

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Well, you know, I appreciate the efforts that Wikipedia makes to have accurate sources there. And when I use it, I'm always almost-- first of all, I go to the bibliography or the list of notes and then see what the links are and where this information is coming from. And you're right. You know, one can't always take an oral history as the gospel truth. Unfortunately, sometimes you can't take a scholarly study is the gospel truth either, but I think it's important to have standards like that.

KATHERINE MAHER: You mentioned that we are in good historical company in being censored and I think that we would tend to agree. I think that Wikimedians believe very strongly in the value of freedom of information and freedom of expression and are willing oftentimes to accept the consequences when we run into powerful entities.

As a social movement and as a scholar of history, are there things-- censorship is certainly one threat to our work. As you look back at the radicals and the activists and the freedom fighters and the human rights advocates that you've studied over time and the movements that they've created and sustained, are there threats that we should be aware of that we should be thinking about? Ones that sort of crop up that are common to the movements that you've seen beyond censorship for example?

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: I accidentally turned it off, sorry. I think the only common threat is overconfidence or arrogance. You know, a century ago, radicals thought that socialism was going to solve everything and that as soon as the revolution happened in Russia, it was paradise, all problems would be solved, the working class was in control, and so forth. And, you know, we learned things weren't quite so simple. I think there's always the temptation to believe that your particular thing that you're working on is going to be the thing that solves everything-- and of course, it never will. But it can still help.

KATHERINE MAHER: I feel that very strongly. I don't-- I want to make sure we have about 20 minutes left. Are there any questions from folks online or folks here in the room that you'd like to ask Adam about his work, about the experience that he's had, the histories that he's studied? Please? Sati. Need a mic? Got it.

AUDIENCE: Hello. OK. So I wanted to kind of follow up on this threat of distance. Ananya Roy used to be a professor at UC Berkeley of the Blum Center of Developing Economies and Global Poverty & Practice and she speaks about this concept of our willingness to engage with spatially distant neighbors, but we squirm to engage with spatially proximate strangers, those who we might engage in our everyday lives, and yet we feel somewhat more intimate and yet, let's say-- in my own words-- more hesitant or more resistant, right? We don't engage in the same way if it's two groups.

And so if you look at social movements, many of the examples you were talking about had this quality to it, right? These people who are far away from me and I am being brought into awareness of what they're going through. And so for us, as we look to engage with those who are not yet part, let's say, of the Wikimedia movement or we don't engage with yet, how do-- if you look at your broader-- the history of social movements, how do you recommend bridging that space, right? Reaching across that distance and not engaging as a spatially distant neighbor but actually as a spatially proximate neighbor?

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Well, I think that's a very relevant question for today. When we're living in a country that is so divided, one of the phenomena actually going on right now that I think is increasing this as a problem is that-- and political scientists have studied this-- it used to be that 60 or 70 years ago, when Americans moved from one town or neighborhood to another, the prime aim that people cited was to get a better house or get closer to your kids' school or something like that. These days, there's been a startling rise in people saying that they are moving in order to be in neighborhoods, communities, city, states of like-minded people. And that's not what we need right now, we need something else entirely.

Actually, somebody else that you might want to have come and speak here some time is my wife, who's just written a book about this-- Strangers in Their Own Land, which perhaps some of you have seen or read about or heard her on NPR. She spent five years studying a community in southwest Louisiana, a very, very red district in a very, very red state-- virtually all of the people that she studied ended up voting for Trump.

And she was just trying to figure out-- how did they see the world? What were possible ways of communicating with them? And she has since gotten involved and been writing about various efforts that are being made to build those bridges in the United States, and I think that's really important. There are bridges that need to be built between avid Trump voters and those of us who feel differently, between people of different ethnic communities.

You know, and this proximity business, it's interesting. I read-- and I am not an expert on this subject, so I'm just sort of telling you what the last thing I read was, but they did a study of the Brexit vote in England, and of course, the communities that, as you might expect, voted most strongly for Brexit were those that tended to have the smallest number of immigrants in the population. Big cities like London, where people of different ethnicities and communities had lived together for quite awhile-- you know, not always smoothly, but in a place where people had lived together, worked together, and so forth, very high vote against Brexit.

There are various efforts being made like that in this country right now. One of them is a project called Living Room Conversations, where they're trying to organize discussions between strongly right and strongly left people to take place in people's living rooms. There's much else that needs to be done as well, but coming back to where you started, I think you are right that with many-- with the social movements that I mentioned, these were things involving people feeling empathy for somebody or some group that was distant, was on the other side of an ocean or something.

But that's not been true of all social movements, because you look at something like the Civil Rights movement in the United States, this was something happening right here at home. It had consequences right here at home in terms of desegregation of schools and many other institutions. And I think there are certainly those kinds of movements as well, and we have to do everything we can to foster them.

KATHERINE MAHER: Is there anything that we as a community sort of-- this group of individuals in the room is, you can tell, we're all based in San Francisco, we all believe very strongly in free knowledge. I don't want to say that where homogeneous in terms of our political beliefs, but I think that there's probably a strong bias. Is there anything that you think that we could learn from how to-- at this critical point in time as we're talking about the importance of our mission, as we're talking about the importance of some sort of shared truth-- just to be able to have that discourse? Because we can't even start that discourse without some sort of common understanding.

Is there a role that you think that this community can play or is there things that we should learn from what you've seen in the way that social movements are able to generate that empathy within proximate communities? Because I think we're very good at connecting with our communities globally, but that would presume a shared value there and I'm not sure that we've spent as much time thinking about how we expand our community to those who maybe don't see the world the way we do.

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: I don't have any good ideas on that that I haven't said already, but I think it's a great aim to have. And again, I would suggest looking for inspiration at this remarkable People's Archive of Rural India, which took all kinds of things which I never thought of before as something that could be shared with tremendous impact and has done so. I don't know what the analogies would be, but maybe it's something just worth brainstorming some time.

KATHERINE MAHER: I'm delighted-- you weren't-- probably aren't able to see the comments behind you on the screen, but there-- at least one of our colleagues knows exactly what it is that you're referring to and was delighted to hear it from up here.

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: It's also an interesting example, by the way, of how people-- I mean, this project is happening all over India. People with cell phones in villages throughout that vast country are uploading stuff, but a lot of the technology is being voluntarily-- the technological skills to set it up is being voluntarily donated by people from India who are working in Silicon Valley; people from India who are working in Mumbai and Calcutta and other cities have, you know, come over in their spare time to work on this web site, so it sort of brings people from different levels of society together in that way.

KATHERINE MAHER: I want to make sure, are there other questions from folks in the room? Or online? Yes. Thanks, Neil.

AUDIENCE: Hello. Hi, I'm Neil. It's not really a question, it's more of a rambling because my thoughts are not very well organized. But I'm curious about your perspective on the place of history in building movements and building a shared identity. So because we Wikipedians, they keep archives of everything, like, every version of every page is recorded for posterity, but I think that in a way, we tend to be activists instead of historians, and I know that one of the problems of historians is to find the documents, and in a way, we focus on the documents and not really on the history, and to me, that is one of the reasons why we sometimes have trouble taking a step back and looking at the history of our own history as a movement and as contributors.

So I know that Katherine mentioned a few weeks ago something about the emerging communities, and so I guess my broad question is, do you think that history can help us go from emerging communities to actual communities and to being more aware of why we are who we are and who is missing?

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Yes, I do. I wouldn't be spending my time writing history if I didn't think it could be that. I mean, here's an interesting example of how that can happen, I think. I've mentioned, you know, the early British abolitionists. I wrote a book about this called Bury the Chains, about how this anti-slavery movement got started in England, and slavery in the British Empire was ended 25 years sooner than slavery ended in the United States where it took the Civil War to bring it about here.

And it happened because of two things which we did not experience in this country-- one was slave rebellions on a large scale in the West Indies, and the other was this enormously large and potent popular movement in Britain that got going in 1787-1788 and really never stopped until 50 years later, they finally ended slavery in the British empire. And it was remarkable, I think, because it changed people's minds about something which really almost everybody in the world had taken for granted up to that point.

In 1787, roughly 3/4 of the people on earth were in slavery or servitude of one kind or another-- African slaves in the Americas, there was indigenous slavery throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa, there was slavery in the Arab world, most people in Russia were serfs, and so forth-- people took it for granted. This movement came along and by 100 years later, at least on paper, slavery was abolished almost everywhere. Of course, vestiges of it still exist today, so there's still work to be done, but it was a huge sea change.

So I published this book about 12 years ago, and you learn who's reading a book by who invites you to come and speak about it. And for the first few years after it came out, the invitations were from African history classes, you know, groups of people who study slavery, something like that. The last five or six invitations I've gotten to speak about this book-- and I have a show of slides that I use when I do it-- have all come from groups working on climate change. Because they see the analogy between people who changed how the world thought about something that they took for granted more than 200 years ago and what they're trying to do today.

So I love it when we can use history to make those kinds of leaps, and I really do feel that for people anywhere in the world who are fighting for basic rights, to know something about the stories of other people at other times who have fought for those rights and won is tremendously important. You can look, for example, at the ways that the freedom movement in South Africa and the civil rights movement in the United States traded stories, traded visitors back and forth over the years, it's very inspiring to see.

So I think-- yeah, history does have a lot to teach all of us and that's why I do it.

KATHERINE MAHER: So I would hardly analogize us to the anti-slavery movement. We advocate for free knowledge-- we do do it on behalf of the human condition, though, and we do do it because-- to borrow from the conversation we were just having-- because we believe that free knowledge and access to knowledge and participation in knowledge can significantly improve the human condition.

I would love in the last few minutes that we have left, what are the takeaways? That when you go and speak to groups about climate change, what's that overarching message that you want them to hear about how they can learn from the past in order to transform the world? Because when we talk about our vision, we talk about it as being almost asymptotic-- we'll get closer and closer but we know that we may never reach it. But I would love to know, for those who actually have, what can we learn?

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Well, of course, none of these movements actually have fully succeeded. There is still slavery in the world. South Africa, which I just mentioned, underwent a huge and inspiring change in the early 1990s, but there is still enormous disparities of wealth, enormous injustice, enormous corruption, and so forth. We never get all the way to any of these things. But I do think we can learn something from how other people at other times have succeeded in doing some of these things.

For example, the-- I use the example of the anti-slavery movement realizing that eyewitness testimony had a kind of power that biblical argument did not if you were trying to persuade people on this particular issue. Some of the most interesting climate change advocacy that I've seen has been this series on TV which some of you may have seen called The Years of living Dangerously. It was on the Showtime network and now it's shifted to another network-- where they are deliberately doing documentaries about climate change but trying not to have the traditional images of the polar bear on a shrinking iceberg and so on, and instead get-- you know, they film--

I watched one the other day where they filmed an evangelical talking about climate change and why for her this was part of the-- what she believed evangelicals had the responsibility to do and stewardship of the Earth. They have a forest firefighter-- you know, the most sort of tough looking macho men imaginable who rappel out of helicopters and whatever to fight these fires-- talking about what climate change has meant to their work-- more fires, hotter fires, fires harder to fight-- in hopes that images like this are going to get through to portions of the population who maybe didn't take this issue seriously before.

But you know, your issue-- free speech taken to its ultimate, the sharing of knowledge to its ultimate-- that's a powerful one, and I certainly don't need to tell you about all the places on Earth right now where it doesn't exist and where, you know, I mean, how many countries is Wikipedia banned in? Turkey-- it doesn't really exist in China, does it?

KATHERINE MAHER: Turkey, China, probably-- those are the two that we know, I imagine we're not very widely used in North Korea or Eritrea, but not a lot of traffic--

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: You sure you're-- you're not used at all in North Korea. And there are other restrictions on the free flow of knowledge that we have right here. I think American copyright law is absurd-- it's absurdly restrictive, It's insane-- and of course, countries all over the world have been pressed to make their copyright laws conform with ours.

Two books ago, I was writing a book about the First World War period and there was a lot of stuff that-- original newspapers and magazines and so on that I wanted to have access to-- that I found were blocked for copyright reasons to get easy online access in this country, but I could get them if I went to an Australian web site. Then boom-- in the middle of my research, they were gone. Because Australia conformed its copyright laws with the US. So that's a battle that we need to fight right here.

KATHERINE MAHER: I couldn't agree more. And I hope that we can-- not just as a sort of reflection-- I hope that we can find the image that is as powerful-- how do you bridge the abstraction of something as-- like open licensing, which tends to be very difficult to tell through a first person's story. So we'll keep searching for the way that we perhaps repurpose that storytelling in much the same way that you referred to the posters of the ships that made such an impression on the world.

I know that we are at time, but I wanted to-- we can extend it maybe a few minutes over if there's any final questions, and particularly from anyone online? It's a quiet group today, I don't know if anyone's checking IRC. No? Anybody else here? No? All right. Wow! Very quiet group today. Must be right at that post-lunch.

Well I want to say thank you so much, Adam, for coming in, and thank you for all the work that you've done, and I actually would love at some point to find out if we were able to run a-- query against all the citations in Wikipedia to know how many of them come from your work, because I imagine it is fairly non-trivial. That would be an interesting story to tell,

So I really appreciate you giving us your time today. I found it inspiring to think about the way that we can contextualize ourselves in these grand arcs and struggles of history, but also in the way that that individual narrative that you spoke of earlier, the pamphlet of the individual telling their story can really make a difference too. Thank you.

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Well, thank you, Katherine, and good luck to all of you and what you're doing here.

[APPLAUSE]