Bill Moyers Journal: 11/9/07: Thomas Cahill

Bill Moyers interviews best-selling historian Thomas Cahill in a far ranging interview that takes viewers from the Coliseum in Rome to death row in Texas and examines what our attitudes toward cruelty can tell us about who we are as Americans.

"We are the only democracy that is still executing. We're it. There's nobody else," says Cahill, who is best known for his The Hinges of History series of books, which includes the widely read How the Irish Saved Civilization. Cahill says his books ask how we became the people we are: "It's human cruelty that is evil....We're not willing to acknowledge that this is inside of us. It's there," he says. "I'm really interested in...what's good about us."

Also on this program: Bill Moyers sat down with Archbishop Tutu in 1999 discussing his chairmanship of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Plus, the story of Dominque Green, executed at 30 by the State of Texas and the subject of recent research by Thomas Cahill.