I'm John Batchelor. I'm with Ron White. His new book is On Great Fields of Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. If you've heard that name before, yes, we're headed to Gettysburg. But right now, we're at Bowden College, one of the esteemed higher learning centers in America.

And Bowden College sees the talent that Lawrence Chamberlain represents and invites him to be a member of the faculty temporarily.

He marries in 1855 to Fannie.

And they go to Bowden College, Brunswick, 100 miles south of Brewer.

And right away, he has interest in the pupils.

Was that unusual for an educator in these days, Ron?

Well, he had a wide-ranging interest, although he very much valued his own education as a student.

He felt that as a teacher, he had to open up a wider range of

possibilities, both in terms of what the students read, but also in the way that he taught.

Sometimes the students were viewed simply by the other faculty as boys who needed to be regimented.

He wanted to teach them what we might call critical thinking.

Let them think for themselves.

He was on probation with the faculty. How did he think of it?

This was a temporary position. The college didn't probably have the funding to do this, so he

wasn't sure whether this would continue. Even in the first six months, he still entertained conversations

with two different churches. Perhaps he would become a pastor. And possibly a missionary.

He wants to travel. Sometimes I would think of him as the Jimmy Stewart character, and it's a

wonderful life. Always trying to get away and always being pulled back. That's a good way to think

about it. He has siblings, younger siblings. Tom, who will be with him in the war, John, who will be a

pastor. Horace is his older brother, is his second, the second son. Yes. And is there a sister in there? There's a sister who goes by the name of

say, S-A-E. She's younger but becomes a very important person in the story. Right. A major

correspondent, a lot of the revelation that Ron's book is very careful about the correspondence.

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