Amy tyson from the History Department to present and interview them. I also want to thank all of you for being here. It is always so meaningful to feel support for artists and the arts. I think especially during this difficult time when bombast and quick takes seem to rule the day, a lot of us realize it is the quieter, more thoughtful and intelligent creations that actually sustain us. That said, i encourage you, if you like what you hear tonight, to support these great writers. I will post links to their books in the chat, and i know they are also on display at the depaul bookstore. We have one technical constraint that i would ask your help with potentially. We are limited to 100 participants tonight. I see we are at 52 right now. I anticipate that will grow in the next few minutes. If we do start to approach 100, i would ask some of you to go over to the link on facebook and watch it on Facebook Live so more people can continue to come in. Thank you very much. I will introduce amy tyson from the History Department. I am from the English Department. She is an associate professor of history and the author of the wages of history emotional labor on historys frontlines. This summer, she began the lincoln oral history project, to stories ofe individuals who performed in public as Abraham Lincoln and contemporaries. Thank you, amy, for hosting. Amy it is a pleasure to be here, in my house, and to see all of you in yours. What we are going to do tonight is i am going to briefly introduce both miles harvey and kathleen rooney. Both will read from their most recently published works. And from there, we will have a conversation. But if you have questions, put them in the chat, and dan, just introduced me, will help moderate the questions from you. Please feel free at any time to drop a chat in there, and then towards the end of the hour, we will be looking into that chat and have your questions come to the floor. Miles and kathleen, i am so excited to be here with you tonight. I have been living and dreaming breathing both of your books these last few weeks. I want to start by introducing the things that i know you have for aside from a penchant Historical Research in your writing. You both teach creative writing at depaul. You are both devoted coffee drinkers who share the same High School Alma mater here in illinois. Long before, you wrote your bestselling books, you also shared a history of disliking jobs you once held in the food industry. Kathleen was briefly a sales smiling greeter at tgif, and miles had a stint as a mcdonalds cashier turned milkshake guy. Both share that they have both long been writers. Among other achievements, kathleen is the author of the national bestselling novel inspired by the real life of margaret fishback, and perhaps also inspired by her own love of walking. She is also the writer of my life as an object, which is a memoir based on her experience as an artist model. This august saw the release of the novel we will talk about tonight, a fictional story based on the real events of world war i. Miles latest book takes us a little further back into the antebellum era of the United States, tracing the history of james jesse strang, the leader of the strain of the mormon faith. His is a tale of utopian dreamers, frontier schemers, true believers, false prophets, and the murder of an american monarch, has already been listed as a New York Times editors choice selection and he has has authored the island of lost maps, which i just purchased online last night and he is also the writer of the acclaimed painter in a savage land. Thank you for being here tonight. Kathleen, would you begin by introducing cher ami and major whittlesey . Prof. Rooney thank you. Those introductions were great. The title kind of contains most of what you need to know. It is about two main characters, and one is about a messenger pigeon, cher ami, and the other is a major, and both are involved in the forest in world war i. The book is a war book, but it focuses on their joint trajectories to how they ended up there in the first place and what happens after. That is what you need to know now, so just to give a sense of what exactly i had to do to research to get the pigeon and the soldier perspective, i was going to read the first couple of paragraphs in the first chapter and the Second Chapter because it goes back and forth. It is first person cher ami, and then that pigeon soldier back and forth. This is the beginning of chapter one where we hear from cher ami. Monuments matter most to pigeons and soldiers. I myself have become a monument, a feathered statue inside a glass case. Unless i was both a pigeon and a soldier, and in death, i am taxidermy collecting dust in the Smithsonian Institution museum of American History. The museum has closed and everyone has gone home. The last guest took their leave at 5 30, as they do every weekday, and even the janitorial staffers finish their tasks, and a few hours remain before midnight. This is the eve of the 100 Year Anniversary of what, according to the United States army, was the most important day of my avian life. October 4, 1918. I am not sure i agree. That it was important, certainly, but days dont carry the same meanings as they do for pigeons. My life comprise of other days, equally worth note, if not to the army, but to me and those i loved. Pigeons can love. Pigeons cannot fight. Yet, i was once as well known to any schoolchild or human hero to what was then called the great war. I will stop there. That is cher ami. You get a few more pages of her, and then you get to chapter two, the start of the majors story. Monuments matter most to pigeons and soldiers, some more than others. None matter more to me than the soldier monuments on the upper west side. It is not a monument from my war, the great war, the war that has caused me to be known these past three years as go to hell whittelsly, instead, it is for the union army which won the civil war almost 60 years ago. The soldier and sailors monument has personal significance, one that has nothing to do with war. It is where i, fresh from harvard law school, naive and lonesome, met the man who would be my entree into the life i lived until i left the war uninterrupted. I will stop there. Amy thank you, miles, would you introduce your book and then read a bit . Prof. Harvey my book is about a strang. Name of james j he declared himself king of the universe, him and his sector took over Beaver Island in the middle of lake michigan. I will just start with a few paragraphs from the first chapter and it introduces where james strang came from. In august of 1843, a man from a small town in western new york vanished into the night. Such disappearances were not uncommon in those days. The panic of 1837, the deepest and longest lasting economic crisis the Young Country had ever faced, had hurtled countless americans and poseidon financial ruin. For some, the humiliating prospect of having the sheriff take possession of their goods and real estates to satisfy a creditors claim was too much to bear. One pennsylvania man who owed 250 gone, i cant tell where, where put it in his 1842 suicide note. I am gone and forgotten, numbered with the dead, where the creditors, upon me no more. But for others, there was a way to end ones miseries without putting a bullet in ones brain. To lose ones life without actually dying. For years, those who helped to outrun hoped to outrun creditors sought refuge in the fast expanding frontier. The man who disappeared from the new york town of randolph had faced mountains for years, putting off his creditors with increasingly ornate moves, until his only hope was to get out of town. In many other periods of history, a missing man might never have been heard from again after his disappearance, but he lived in an era of sudden transformation, when you could be broke one day and rich the next, Anonymous One day, and famous next. Where wild dreams and lunatic fantasies could quickly morph. Such a precarious time, when nothing felt stable or certain anymore. They favorite millions like the man note chameleons like the man who was no longer there. Although he was a few inches over five feet, called and a bulging forehead, he had one distinguishing feature, his dark brown eyes, which one acquaintance described as rather small but bright and piercing, giving an extremely animated expression. Another witness claimed the mans eyes seemed as though they could bore right through a person. But more than any tangible description, he possessed ineffable aura called confidence. In those days, before electrical power, confidence was what made the antebellum era. Confidence was black magic, good fortune and hard cash combined. Confidence could turn booklist paper into glittering gold, empty lots into a businesses, losers into winners, poppers into millionaires. Confidence with a charm deployed by bankers and merchants, philosophers and politicians, clergyman alike. Confidence was the sole of trade soul of trade. Without it, added hermann melville, commerce between man and man and between country and country would, like a watch, run down and stop. In an age before the federal government began printing paper and money, an age where you had to trust and privately issue banknotes, glorified ious, confidence was the de facto national currency. Amy thank you, both. When i teach about history, i always start with students talking about how historians are never really telling you the truth about the past because all we have are the remains of what i used as a broken stained glass metaphor, so that there are shards of glass everywhere, and the job of the historian is to piece all of the shards back together again to create a picture, and it will never be as hearing it once was, it can never be fully repaired, but we do our best and we do our job to present the best picture that we possibly can. Would you talk about your role as rican structures of role as structures of stainedglass windows into your respective path . Prof. Harvey that is a good metaphor. Some ways and what i do, just as way a writer, and i dont know how this strikes you two, but it is generation. I feel like i am a great person to build these long timelines, right, like i think my timeline for this book was 250 pages long. It is everything with strang and every thing going on around him. Near it is like a story making machine. In some ways, i kind of feel like what i am doing is saying, look at this. Think about this. Sort of curating the past. I do feel like the writers job you in the digital age has become the curators job. Amy kathleen . Prof. Rooney i like the stained glass and the curatorial work. First, before i get into it, i should say that this book would not exist if not for depaul. I was teaching a class in 2013, all and a student, ryan, turned in in a poem that referenced cher ami. I had never heard of cher ami, but i always tell my students, look it up, like a broken record, like if i had a dollar for every time i said that, so he put it in a poem, and it was a throwaway line of an old guy sitting on a park bench surrounded by pigeons, and it said, but this was no cher ami story, look it up. I looked it up, and i thought it was appropriate to share at a panel like this, looking stuff up. I was struck by the story. So to go to your question, amy, for me, what i like about being a fiction writer is i dont have to assemble the whole stainedglass window exactly. I can become excessively fixated obsessively fixated on a couple of pigeons and their relationship. That is what i did with cher ami and major whittlesey. Once you look up cher ami, you cannot hear about her without hearing about whitt. My process is almost eight mapping process, where i will find the object of my fascination and admiration, and i will drop a pin there and be like, there is cher ami, i want to talk about her, and then i will walk the perimeter and then drop a pin and then start plotting it out from there. Amy could you talk, kathleen, as a followup to that, i know your other novel is based on a real person, and it is a work of fiction, as i understand, but this novel is really based on two bona fide person and pigeons. How did you decide to write about real people and then take the fictional lead . What was that process like to fictionalize parts of their story . Prof. Rooney thats a great question. I think, you know, with lillian boxfish, and as you can tell from the title, i am taking greater liberties. You i invented more of that story, and i felt like i definitely wanted the book to call attention to the real margaret, but i do not want anybody to read my book and think it was a biography. That was important to me. Whereas with these two, i knew i had to use their names because they are historical figures. Cher ami really is taxidermy and in the smithsonian. You can go see her, but this applies to historical and any kind of fiction. There are lots of conversations now about whose stories are or are not given writers to tell. I think because how i wanted to depict them in the first place but how i wanted to give them personalities, a big thing i have done that i have not seen anyone quite do, i am pretty sure that major whittlesey was gay. I am almost 100 . If i was a biographer, i would not be able to find a smoking gun, but he signed on if his suicide notes, which at the end of it, it would have been away for someone to come out on coming out. I felt like i was under a huge obligation to be responsible for two characters. I have never been a pigeon or a gay soldier, so i thought a lot about toni morrison. She has this great thing in one of her books, where she says on page 15, the ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystified the familiar is a test of their power. I thought, i wanted to take over familiar and give it back to people in a strange way so they could see it again. To me, it is strange to be a gay man or a pigeon, so i wanted to make sure i wrote that in a way that did not mystify it or get it wrong. I like that you put it as a test. Research is the way that i tried to pass that test. Amy thank you. Miles, could you talk about when you first how did you get taken in by this confident man . What sources lead you to finding him . Prof. Harvey so, i got lucky with this. The source that led me to this was an editor at little brown. I got a call from my agent one day and he said, guy from little brown once to talk to you about a book. It was a wonderful editor ben george, and he said, i have been reading your work and i think you might be right for writing this book. I dont know, amy, my career was not exactly flying then, so, course, i wanted to hear him out. No i had opportunities like that in the past. It was stuffed i would just be bored with and i would not do, and i would get in trouble for, and i would have to give back my advance and stuff like that. This one instantly hit me like as a book i really loved and the character, and strang is so amazingly complex. They were so much information about him, including from his journals during his years as a young man. I was struck by his story. Also, i just quickly realized that the times he lived in had certain echoes to the times we live in. Echoes that allowed a confident man like him to thrive in a time where we get the term confident man because there were so many around. That interested me a great deal, too. Amy would you tell us, miles, about those journals as a source . They are coded, he writes in his own language. How does did an archivist decode them . How did you find this man in his late teens and late 20s as this is a window into i know he wanted to marry the future queen victoria, and then he ends up becoming king, selfproclaimed king of earth and heaven . He makes it happen. Prof. Harvey there was such a wealth of information. The journals are interesting, yet, he is sort of putting it on the table. He talks about his dreams of royalty and power, and he talks about how he wants to be a lawyer and legislator and a king. In fact, this was the great age of selfrealization, the period of the selfmade man. Strang was the king of that. He kind of lived out all of his dreams in some weird way, and was a very famous man in his time. I think of another selfmade man, Abraham Lincoln, who had much in common with strang. He was a country lawyer, self educated and served in the legislature. They were both postmasters. For much of their parallel lives, because they were contemporary, strang was the much more famous person. He is just endlessly fascinating to write about. A real bad person in many ways, and in some ways, very principled person. In one way, a very principled person. Amy are you referring to is abolitionism . Prof. Harvey yeah, that is one thing my Research Help pinned down. I can talk about it later, but i think i pinned down some stuff that shows he ran a criminal operation, absolutely for sure, and that he was an abolitionist. And i think i got the routes to his abolitionism in archival research. Amy i will get to that. I want to draw an odd comparison between your two works. I realized that in some way, both whitt and strang were confident man in different ways. Strang, in the mail billion cents, but melvillian sense, but whitt, they were so successful that it led to their own demise. I guess, kathleen, i need for you to explain what i said and then both of you can talk about what it is like to research a confident man. Prof. Rooney sir Charles Whittlesey was an unlikely war hero. He went to college in massachusetts and then harvard. He became a lawyer, worked on wall street. If you google him, he is tall, 63 and he had up her first oriole means, and the last person anyone would expect to be a war hero. This is one of those things you find out only if you go to war. He was very good at being a commanding officer. Unlike you are saying, amy, he was a diligent person and his men respected him so much, that in the battle of 1918, the plan up and down the line in the classic world war i trench warfare style, all the allied forces at the same time would push Forward Together and breached the german defenses. And all the higher ups said, no surrender, no first aid, advance into the last man drops. They sent them there with no extra supplies because they were so confident that everyone would succeed and it would end the war. And long story short, whitt was the only one who did that. Everyone else gave up and retreated that they did not know but they did not know who that is how they ended up in the pocket, where instead of being a line that projected out, they were by themselves. So they were surrounded quickly by the germans, and there was a friendly fire incident when americans tried to save them, and that is where cher ami comes in and has the message to save them. It was unexpected for him to be the kind of leader that did what he was able to. Should i answer how i researched him . Sorry. Amy yes, that is the question here. How what were the sources . A classic historians question is going to be what are the range of sources you started to collect and how did you organize them . What was the history how did the history process of the project look . We will start with kathleen and then go to miles. Prof. Rooney fermi, the organization of how i approached the resource for me, the organization of how i approached the research and organized it as a writer, it was a map thing. With concentric circles, i know my question is, how did this guy, who no one really even knew who he was, how did he become this leader that everyone was so loyal to . I go way out in concentric circles and, ok, what was world war i . I know, but what was it . And then gradually, on the western front, specifically in france, specifically when the americans arrived in 1918, and just gradually zoom in. Then, and that is more like history books. But then, i like i cannot remember who i heard it from but i like to follow this advice, about not just reading from the time period but in the time period. For me, it is newspapers at the time. A gift to me as a writer, the last battalion was mainly men from new york. So newspapers world over kind covered them, but because the press industry was based in new york at the time, as it still to a large extent is, there was all this media and coverage, especially when the last battalion got famous. And then also, soldiers accounts. There were a couple of soldiers who wrote their own accounts. I went high and low in the sense that none of them were people who are highly educated, and they were more the officers, like mcmurtry. And there was another guy, private john nels who was barely literate and published his moving account at the end of his life. You got the feeling that, i have got to tell somebody what went an down before i die, so stuff like that. Whitt is in the middle of it, which is good for a fiction writer. He did not keep a diary or journal, but when he killed himself, he jumped off of this ocean liner because he cannot and handle being a hero and he was full of survivors guilt, so he jumped off the ship on the way to havana. This moved me so much. It speaks to the meticulousness and passion. He left nine suicide notes to the different people in his life. All different notes. He put them in his cabin so everybody would know what to do when he got there and that is where i got a few of the personal tidbits which were really helpful. Amy miles, could you talk about your process . There was a major difference between strang and whitt. There is a lot of record as i understand by comparison to whitt, in comparison. In that way, it you are blessed with many things to cover, so how did you tackle the organizing and the collecting before you even got to the part of interpreting . Prof. Harvey what i am not blessed with those that historians basic knowledge. You i just read up on the period. One of the joys of this book was i am an english professor, and so, i had some knowledge of antebellum literature, but, you know, not that much. It was something that was really touched on for me. Also, i had not really read a lot, like margaret fuller. Gender relations are really important in this book and i found her to be a revelation. So smart. Talking literally about gender fluidity. There were two great archives. At yale, there is a huge strang archive and one in central michigan. I was also blessed with some of my predecessors. This great revolution in the 19th century on my newspaper databases. I was making breakthroughs in my basement at 1 00 a. M. , sitting around in my underwear. The other thing i just benefit from is being stupid and pursuing some stuff a trained historian would not do. I went down rabbit holes and farther down rabbit holes. My organization is i really believe this timeline is a narrative generating machine. Seeing things in context to each other. I am working on another book proposal right now. I have a 90page timeline. I am still a great photocopier. Amy was there any material or photographs, and i think there might be a film, too, that also informed your historical inquiry . Prof. Rooney first and foremost, the first thing i did was to go to the smithsonian. I knew i had to see her and it blew my mind that this was the way the government chose to commemorate her. Monuments and what is a monument and the idea that you can take the body of this sentient animal and make it a monument. That was the first thing. She was the most inspiring text. She is not stuffed very well. She is tiny. Homing pigeons are just pigeons. You can see her injuries. When she flew her mission, she lost an eye. When she landed this is a testament to her storys remarkableness. They knew she was so important, so they had medics stitched her up. They made her a little wooden leg. She was assumed her whole life to be a male bird. When the taxidermy guy said, she is a female bird. They did not even bother to change it on the smithsonian plot. Good enough. Whitt was this war hero and nobody talks about his sexuality. How he was able to be the kind of leader he was. There is this film, and this is completely i still cannot get over the fact that they did this. In 1919, after 1918, they were there for five days. No food, no water, getting friendly fired, surrounded by men who could do nothing to do to help. And in hollywood, lets make a movie about this. Lets have the guy who survived star on it. Whitt played himself in this silent film from 1919. That was wild to me. Just that he was of a culture who would think doing Something Like that would be fine. Prof. Harvey photographs play an Important Role because strang was murdered by his own people. One of his murders was a photographer. One of my chapters is based around this picture, and one of the things about this picture, and it was a blast to learn how to read old photographs. I think i discovered something about strang, he is holding a book in a certain pose and it was coded. What is this book . It is not the bible and it is not the book of mormon. I measured it. I think it is his own holy book that he was having his people read. That was an interesting thing. He was losing power and eventually would be murdered and this photographer was in on the conspiracy. This guy taking his picture who soon will be plotting to kill him and strang is trying to assert authority. I think one of the many joys of research is learning how to see how other people saw things and decode the past in a certain way. Amy would you also talk about another photograph in your book . There is a photograph of a certain mr. Douglas. Would you tell me about him and her . Prof. Harvey Charles J Douglas strang went around a long tour fundraising and recruitment on the east coast and he was accompanied by a young man named Charles J Douglas. He introduced him to everyone as his nephew and private secretary. Charles j douglas posed for a photograph. He was not a he. He was all elvira field. It says a great deal about the weird gender relations. They did that for everybody, right . A lot of people were like, who was the woman strang is traveling around with . A lot of this had to do with the displays of femininity, ornate displays of femininity. The people did not know what to make of this person. This woman is a fascinating figure in her own right. Many of the conmen and true believers that strang surrounded himself with. Amy thank you. Kathleen, i am wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about how you used cher ami and whitt as a window into world war i more broadly. Prof. Rooney i have always really been fascinated by world war i. It has always been my favorite war. That word is not exactly right. It is the war that has drawn me the most over the years. Any war is hard to understand. I know people think i am a cockeyed fool, but i believe humans can choose to live without violence. World war i was such a deliberate choice to use this cataclysmic, utterly annihilating selfdestruction. I was really interested, trying to figure out why that would happen. I wanted to write a world war i book for a while. Why do people do that . I did not just want to write a world war i book. It would be a massive. It took me until that is my way in. A birds eye view of this thing that is hard to see. I feel like i also needed the human perspective. Once my field of vision got narrowed and i was able all of my research was guided i did some secondary courses. The point was more to see these two sets of very different eyes. One of the things i was trying to do, and there is this idea that research objective. Fiction can do this more. I had such an agenda, such a focus. I wanted it to be an antiwar book, and animalrights. That helps me. If i went in looking at world war i research, i would not be here. I will never understand it that way. Having those two points of reference to guide my Research Helped. I know we are not jumping to the audience questions yet. Somebody asks, how long did you research . Sometimes, there is a Research Phase and a writing phase. Sometimes they are, for some people. I have a year of research before i start trying to write. In a way, i never totally stopped researching it as i was writing. Thank you. Prof. Harvey the research in this book is wonderful. I totally agree that it feels like such a dichotomy of things. I am always writing and researching. I was finding important stuff late in the process of this book. I just dont know how people segregate that out. I just have to keep going. Amy even writing does not look like writing sometimes. I was making a joke to my family over christmas. I was taking a walk around the house and somebody asked, what are you doing . I am writing. Before we turn to some of the questions that are popping up on the chat, i would like miles to have an opportunity to talk about how strang the unique perspective you took as an historian of strang was different to some others in terms of you are not taking a Church History perspective. You are not taking a michigan perspective. Here is a quintessential figure that helps us understand something important about antebellum america. Could you talk to us about how he was a reflection or product of his time rather than a unique figure . Prof. Harvey there are three good books about him. They are really quite good, and they are all admirable. I was proud and lucky to build on the shoulders of these researchers. Strang has mostly been treated as a mormon figure or a midwestern michigan figure. One of the books is called the fascination of a michigan king. One of the things i realized, usually my brain works really slowly, one of the things i realized was i saw strang as a lightning rod for all the weird religious enthusiasms, political enthusiasms and the strange power of the antebellum era, which was a very unstable era. I came to see the antebellum era trump is not in the book and there is no mention of 2020, but people are reading it in a certain way as an allegory for our own times. It is not something i dislike. I definitely amy, you would slap me. I know that is a big mistake. I do think that we can learn from other periods. The idea of the liberal arts of letting us see our own period to the past. The book was a blast to write in that way. Writing in the trump era, which is what i did, and the book took me five years to write or something. I dont think it would have been the same thing if i would have written it in a different time. It sounds like for you, too, kathleen. Amy dan, are you there or would you like me to go into the chat . Dan i have been writing down some of these questions. A former student asks if either of you how to concrete moment where you felt your book was finished. Was there ever a temptation to go back and revise . Did you have to train yourself to let that feeling go . Prof. Rooney i always have a concrete moment when i know something is done. But that is because i am an outliner. I am a huge believer i go back to this map thing. I will have little arcs for each character and what needs to get covered. Writing is so architectural. I get to the end and i say, i did it. I knew it had to end with cher ami in the smithsonian. Getting a finished draft, i think it helps to have an outline because you know when you are done. Getting feedback and subsequent drafts, you are not going to get lost in the process if you outline. Hopefully. Prof. Harvey normally, i never feel anything is done. I felt more control from start to finish. That may Say Something about me. I was going to argue with you, kathleen, and say, i find the architecture by building a house. The editor said i am interested in having you write this book and i wrote 100page proposal. I am trying to capture the architecture of the book and also the tone and the approach to the material. That came with the research. I had a huge amount of research before i could even do the stupid proposal. Dan here is a question i really like. From parker bennett. Any interesting tidbits from your research that did not make it into the book . Prof. Rooney lots. That is part of it. When you do all of this research, you find so much great stuff. It is like a treasure chest. For fiction, you cannot put it all in because it makes it more nonfictiony. Genre is fluid. I run a hybrid genre press and i am not trying to lay down the rules. For anything commercial, you have to zip along to some extent. If you start encrusting everything with all that tidbits, it cannot move anymore and it loses the aerodynamic nature. I will share one. My agent made me take it out. A machine gunner had this noble, tragic death where he lost the leg. If somebody can keep loading my gun for me, i can keep fighting a little longer. He was a great guy by all accounts, and he had his fiancee waiting for him back home. A whole generation of women did not get married because the men died. Every thanksgiving, there was a lost battalion reunion. All the survivors could reminisce and have a meal. She never attended. She always sent a bouquet of lilacs to sit at the place where lieutenant peabody would have sat. It is so far outside the purview of the story. If somebody wants to write a sequel, i would read about that fiancee. She seems cool. Prof. Harvey i had many subplots and even just fascinating characters. Strang surrounded himself with so many conmen. There was a guy i say in the footnotes, you could write about this guy and he is not even named in the book. Parker, thank you for the good question. I am in a writers group. Hello, writers group. I love you. One of the members of the writers group, when i got a draft of the book done, she said, you need to lose the first 90 pages. That is really exciting. She was totally right. We have this language to talk to each other. I thought, this is such a blessing to have someone who understands your work so well and they can help you see what needs to be there and what needs to not be there. Dan a question from sandy. The epigraphs were a joy to this librarian. What was your process . Prof. Harvey i dont know. I hunted them down. I guess they kind of gave me a way of letting the mid19th century speak without me having to speak at all. I see them as the chorus in the book. As far as footnotes go, they made me cut down those footnotes. I would write endless footnotes. I love footnotes. I hate the process because i am really disorganized. I had to drop footnotes because it was like, i cannot find this quote. I love the process and having this place where i can tell stories that cannot be in the book. Dan we have a question from andrew fitzpatrick. Having recently benched on the vow prof. Harvey Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1841 and he was struck by americas fascination with this type of person. He went to Southern Illinois and he saw this land fraud scheme and was asking people about it and said, isnt this guy a bad guy who ripped you off . Didnt he steal a lot of money . You still like them . Yeah, we like him a lot. He is a smart man. They were showing clips of in the middle of debate was talking about how he does not pay taxes. He said, im smart. There is something about it that is in the american character. Obviously existent in every culture. Dan kathleen, do you think they did not correct cher amis sex because they thought a male would be more appropriate hero . Prof. Rooney war is traditionally a very masculine pursuit and in world war i, that is writ so large. So many sources about americas involvement in europe and globally had to do with this urbanization that was beginning. Or doing some kind of manual thing but beginning to do these effeminate pursuits like working in offices or having indoor power. So many people writing about american and european manhood growing soft. A lot of people became involved in the war because they thought it would be a fun boy scout adventure. It was more palatable to the audience at the time. She was toured around as a piece of propaganda. It is unpalatable to think of bad physical things happening in war to anyone but especially a woman. It is a he. That is what we want to believe. Dan the question from maria. Im not sure how to pronounce the last name. I would love to hear miles talk more about learning to read historical photos. Prof. Harvey i would not call it a skill. I know my limitations. It allows me to be stupid. We are blessed to have a colleague from the English Department who knows a lot about photos. I just kept asking people and reading books. I want to just for the student writers out there, i need to repeat what kathleen says in her class. Three words look it up. It is not a burden. It is a joy. There are incredible archives you can use. Newspaper databases, for instance, perhaps not you would find at some institutions but they are quite good. I think that so often students come to me with this there is a story in my family that soandso was a bank robber. Is it true . And they are like, i dont know. Look it up. Dan we are at one minute till 7 00. I could do a couple more questions or we could say can night. From andrew fitzpatrick, do you have to make time to make yourself right . Are you so inspired and captivating captivated or somewhere in between . Prof. Rooney i love it. I respect all points of view. Whenever i hear writers say writing is so painful and it is like opening a vein and bleeding, i am like stop, dont do that if it hurts so much. It is fun. I would not do it if it was not so fun. If i am writing a project, it is all i want to do. Novelists you are living in this whole other world with these people. I have these other people i have to get back to. With the research, even before the characters, it is a joy to look stuff up. So often you dont even know what you are looking for and you trip over it. Aha, there is my next point. I do not know if that is an obnoxious answer or not. Prof. Harvey kathleen and i have many things in common. But i clearly love writing, too. It is the only thing i have been moderately good at in my life. I write so slow that the difference between writing and Writers Block just blurs together. I find it incredibly boring. When you are spending 20 minutes on a verb, your life speeds up. I could spend five hours on that paragraph. At my age, five hours i will not get back. I love it and i do it. This research thing, it is like a portal into another world. It is so exciting to do those. We have never had more opportunities to do them. Dan should we do one last question . A short one. What does your revision process look like . Prof. Rooney that is a short one . Dan there were not any yes or no questions. Prof. Rooney avery is a former student of mine. I am a big believer in phased revisions. I will not worry about anything else. I will do a dialogue revision and i will ignore everything else. I will do an accuracy revision. That may not work for other people. But otherwise, it makes a daunting process seem doable to me. Prof. Harvey it is the one time i truly have fun writing. When students say i dont want to revise my hunch is, we loved George Saunders because he talked about revision and how great it is. All of the professors are elbowing. I do not even know what i am saying until i get to revision. Oh, ok, this is the story i want to tell. This is the approach i want to use. Revision, to me, it gets better and better until i finally somehow think i like this. Prof. Rooney revision is awesome. Thank you for coming. Thanks to everybody who made it happen technologywise. Thank you for a lovely night. Prof. Harvey an honor to work with you. Michelle marano, one of our colleagues, is starting an event right now another channel. I urge you to tune in. It is a doubleheader of lit stuff tonight. Amy thank you for merging history and creativity. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] is American History tv on cspan3, or each weekend, we treacher 48 hours of programs expiring our nations past. Jonathan jones of Penn State University talks about widespread opiate addiction among civil war veterans. Explains how prescribing opium and morphine, common treatments used for wartime injuries, grew into lifetime drug dependence for many. 415 p. M. M. Eastern, pacific, the National WorldWar Ii Museum oral historian talks about veterans, serviceman assigned to nuclear bomb tests and cleanup. Many suffered longterm Health Issues from radiation exposures. At 8 00 p. M. Eastern, 5 00 p. M. Pacific on lectures in history, Professor William blake teaches a class about new deal era politics. The role of Public Opinion on issues such as Court Packing and executive power. Tonights event speaker is dr. Jonathan jones. He has been in this chair at penn state civil war era center. Atis a postdoctoral scholar penn state. Next year, he will take up a new position as assistant professor of history at the Virginia Military institu