This is about one hour welcome to the fifth annual book festival at the department of archives this panel is titled American History, renegades and is sponsored by the Mississippi Library commission. Tracy carr was with the Library Commission was in the room for the very first organizational meeting of the festival. We couldnt do this without the Mississippi Library commission or the libraries from all over the state to thank you very much for your support. And we are in the room today courtesy of the law firm and our gratitude goes to them. Our panelists you can purchase copies of their books from vendors outside and find the times are authors will be signing in the program. We will hear from our panelists for about 40 minutes and then open up the floor to questions please come to the podium in the center of the room to ask yourse questions. Now help me welcome our moderator for the panel director of the Mississippi Department of archives and history. [applause] im going to tell you about these guys and then we will start the conversation. Tom was a reporter for the New York Times and editor of the weekly newspapers before turning to writing fulltime. For this except the New York Times bestsellers, the heart of everything that is and the last stand of fox company. Company. Wild bill was published by Saint Martins press in february 2019 and this nnovember Harper Collins wilnovember harpercollid in new york. Eric is the author of 13 books including leviathan the history of whaling in america named one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and boston globe and also won the 2007 john weinman award for the u. S. Maritime history. His most recent book was brilliant beacon a history of the american white house. He lives in massachusetts with his family, and on the end, peter is a freelance writer and in his career as an emergency medical technician, hes written a number of articles related to his profession including the impact of ptsd on first responders. Hes written a number of book reviews forres the papers, hea native of Southern California and he now lives in Fairfield County connecticut and this is his first book. Soel im going to ask each of yu to say a few words about your book and give us an overview and then we will come up with some questions. Speak to okay. Thank you for telling me. Okay. Can you hear me . Youve got that at the right time. Thank you. I will talk very briefly about my book which is about Wild Bill Hill talk. It was a book i had no intention of writing. It sort of snuck up on me. I have done a book that came out a couple of years ago about when they were younger or more men together in kansas and when the book came out it was successful and i had been working on a different a world war ii story, but my editor looking at the bottom line said is there another iconic western figures you can think of for maybe deserves to have some treatment, and i said the name that popped into my headphones while phil because it was a name i think we all recognized. We all recognized the name of the other thing we might think about him is that he was a gunfighter and i said if all the key was i not really that tcinterested. Oglet me do some research. And the book that came out of that portrays him as a fervent abolitionist, spy behind confederate lines in the civil war, deputy u. S. Marshal in abilene kansas, he was a broadway performer, star of theater and of course a gambler that finished up his career in deadwood south dakota and one other thing i will add very briefly, one of the joys of working on the book i discovered shed been associated with and was a big love affair goes back to the movie with jean arthur as the love affair of the two of them. Actually, the advice and the woman that he eventually married was one of the most remarkable women of the 18 hundreds. She was one of the major rivals of barnum and bailey and the ringling brothers and nobody knows who she is. She had an amazing career and fell in love, took a few years, so that is one of the unexpected pleasures of l the book to porty this remarkable person who literally had been lost in the midst of history, so thank you. First id like to give a shout out to john evans because he is one of the reasons im here. He read my book and asked if they would invite me down so i would like to thank him for doing that and think thehe mississippi book festival for inviting me to come down and it got really hot this morning im not used to that. [laughter] h but i just want to tell you a little bit about how this book began as well. Usually i just go to libraries and read a bunch of books and try to find something im interested in and then pitch it to my agent and publisher. For this book i did something quite different. I got my teenage children in the room and have three or four ideas and started telling them enwhat i wanted to write about d when i mentioned pirates, both of their eyes lit up and they said thats it, you have to. And i got excited because although ive written plenty of books, neither of my kids had read any of them. [laughter] and i have to report since my daughter just graduated from college, she actually read the book and said she enjoyed it. My son who is a freshman in college has only agreed to read it perhaps by the time he is 50yearsold, so i am one for two. Anyway it is about the pirates of the golden age which stands for about 1726 and thereve been a lot of books. My book adds to that literary evlineage but with a slight twi. I focus on those that either upgraded out in the american colonies or plundered along the american shore, so the book is split up into two sections before 1700 after. Before 1700, pirate pirates ande colonies were welcomed with open arms because here they were on the edge of empire. They were starved of currency. They didnt like how england was treating them and pirates were coming from the caribbean and also from the red sea. They were going there for muslim ships and bringing their riches back to the w colonies, so governors were getting paid off to take letters to pirates to go off and when they came back to the colonies with their money, they were reintegrated into those colonies. England shut down about 1700 then after the succession in 1713, piracy came roaring back the type most of you no doubt are familiar with and that is when blackbeard was upon the seas. I always find it funny that its the most outside the one most people have heard about but only for about a year and a half. She didnt have a particularly successful career and when he died they cut his head off and before the British Naval lieutenant took it back to williamsburg. Anyway, the book got a lot of gihangings and it. A lot of death and destruction but also it is a book about American History and it just uses pirates as a backbone to tell the story. And i had a lot of fun writing the book and researching a it. Well, we have cowboys and pirates and i got a bank robber. [laughter] other than vampires, you have got four of the mainstays of things that have remained. My story is about a group of young men led by a bornagain christian with strong end times beliefs who attempted a takeover robbery of the pacific bank in norco california just outside of los angeles on may 9 and it turned into one of the most violent events in american Law Enforcement history. When it was over there were three dead, 15 wounded including seven sheriffs deputies and there were 32 police cars, either disabled or destroyed by gunfire or explosive devices. There was a Police Helicopter and itt was shot down over San Bernardino county. The scope of this is what attracted me to m it. Im a native from Southern California, as was said. And i grew up right near a where this happened, but the scope of the event is what drove me to it. These are five heavily armed. Young men shooting civilian grade military, civilian versions of the military grade weapons. Theyve made homemade fragmentation that they can launch out of the perils of their shotguns and as luck would have it, and a lot of bad planning the minute they stepped outside of the bank they came facfacetoface into just eruptd into a wild fire fight in a crowded intersection on a friday afternoon which over 100 pounds over 500 rounds were fired and then to a bombing gun battle to the suburban streets of riverside and San Bernardino counties onto a crowded interstate highway where they were throwing out fragmentation shooting, Police Helicopters and ended up 6500 feet upon a fire road clinging to the mountainside where the road is launched out and i dont want to give too much of this the way that they ambushed so this is the scope of it and the context that itnt fits after the Los Angeles Area beginning at about 1980 and then extending into the middle of the 1990s which is one of the backdrops on it and the impact has a lot to do with the way the local Police Forces are armed and the way they deal with posttraumatic stress disorder. All of the people chose to come to this panel over others including Supreme Court justice, so let me ask you all why do the readers enjoy books about bad guys, violent stories, renegades, what do you think the appeal is . Im not casting aspersions. [laughter] for this perspective theres nothing more gripping or a dramatic and to read about a horrid chick act. It just grabs your attention. And its like why do people rubberneck when they are on the highway and theres an accident. Why do these headlines grab your attention. And theres also something in the nature of not just American History, but world history. It is incredibly violent. Theres something about our own human nature that tend tends tod violence in many different forms going back as long as we have recorded history and certainly before that so maybe theres something very animalistic about it, wanting to read about it. I also think that there is an aspect in the sense that you can read about these acts but hopefully none of you would ever want to perpetrate that you can sort of maybe put yourself in a perspective and think what would have been like and maybe there is an input to say better than ban me. Theres no doubt death, destruction, these acts of violence attracted your attentin like almost no other topic. [laughter] i also think when you take a hard look at someone who does something almost unimaginable tw you, you know, in my case these were five young men with no criminal records. They just threw away their lives and the lives of other people in a single day bu single day but s also the fascinationle with how someone gets to that point that they take a step like that, or in the case of pirates or mythological figures like wild bill boys father was a fascination with the steps that get someone more like me or us or you to somebody thats doing something extraordinary and almost unimaginable. I think that is a fascinating thing tord look at. Absolutely. Just to add something in the case of wild bill, there is a romanticism about the lone gunmen and the person that is living a life that most other people certainly many of us dont live. I mean, he was a unique figure. Physically he was unique, 6 feet tall at the age when the average height for a male was probably 5foot five or 5foot six tall, muscular, lena, here down to his shoulders, the moccasins, sombrero, he was ambidextrous, he had a gun on each side and could shoot accurately withme eh hand and up until the day that he died, said he lived a life where he ruled all overht the place and had adventures on the prairie anprairie and on the pli think for most of us we dont have a life you are never going to havto have that life comes we closest we are going to get is this feeling of okay im going to read this story and live this life the next 360 pages because i know when i put the bookk down its back to im going to mow the lawn. Ive got to get the Laundry Basket or the laundromat or that kind of thing. All three of you frame the story is in your book against the backdrop of the historical period and the larger society. Lets talk about that. And i was especially interested in the civil war connection and wailed the father. Another reason he was kind of unique, his parents are from new england and they came out with was the frontier than in the 1830s to be farmers and illinois. His father and mother brought with them their abolitionist views to illinois and they believed that the farm became a station in the underground railroad. It wouldnt be unusual for the young james butler to go to the farm and there would be a family of escaped or runaway slaves waiting until the next night or two nights later when they were loaded into the back of the wagon with some hay thrown over them. His fathe father was taken to tt station along the way. And it wasnt surprising the civil warar broke out and he joined the union army and saw the early battles of the war, the sharpshooter, but he became a spy and always had this coolness under pressure. One of the things that made him effective as he had a perfect belief, he really did come up witdid, thecouple that havent n manufactured that could kill him. So, when someone comes around, and when there is a gun battle to make believed he was going to persevere, and he did, but in the civil war, he actually wore the confederate uniforms and infiltrated the staff to listen as they were strategizing things and getting this information back to the union lines and i think there was another aspect that made him a renegade at any point. He could have been on task and shot as he was found out and put in the shed to be shot at dawn he managed to find his way through. So there was a renegade aspect of him doing a job that most people either couldnt do it effectively or didntsh want to because there would be r no tri, there would be immediate death for the most part. I definitelyth think that running a haven for runaway slaves on the underground railroad is a different version of taking justice into your own hands. Its a fascinating connection. Do you all have any there are really two things where the era in which thisre tk place had a big impact on it. As i mentioned, the leader, the young man who put this bank robbery together was a bornagain christian with a very heavy end of times belief. Theology is steeped in the book of revelation. Now im certainly not suggesting that does lead one to bank robbery, but in the case of George Wayne Smith and he came out of Orange County california where there were these in the 1970s there were these ministries that were aggressively evangelicals and this is the book of revelation rapture, end times theology and george began to believe that that was going to happen soon. And when he looked out at the world and try to match up Current Events with prophecies, there was a lot to see in the 1970s, not the least of which was the very real threat of nuclear obliteration. So, george was really preparing to be able to survive vicataclysmic events and he bece heavily armed and turned his house into a fortress along with his friend also took part in the bank robbery. The other is that not too many people know that los angeles is the Bank Robbery Capital of the world. Y for many years, for decades, its only recently changed. One out of every four Bank Robberies in the United States takes place r within the jurisdiction of the field office of the fbi. And there are a number of reasons, but the main one is you rob a bank next to a freeway and fiveon the freeway and minutes later in the good old days of los angeles, driving down rush hour two or 5 miles of a probably cruising beside the streets of a completely Different Police jurisdiction. 1980 was the sort of beginning of that. By 1990, therehe were 2600 Bank Robberies in that region, 14 at a a better height and 28 in one day. So it is Fertile Ground for Bank Robberies. When people go looking out for money, quick money in los angeles, they usually look more so after paying stand a doing other areas, so fitting within the context of that epidemic that ran between about 1980 and 1990, 97, those are two aspects of which it took place. One of the things history has taught me is that the root of a lot of action is lack of money, desire for money and the way that plays out prior to 1700 the american colonies was a very small place on the outskirts of the empire, it was treated by the mother country who viewed it as a source of good. It was starved of currency coming and even back then in the late 16 hundreds, there was the sort of echo of what would later bbecome the cry during the american revolution, no taxation without representation. All that sort of stuff, there was a lot of presentment. So even though piracy was against the wall in the late 16 hundreds, the colonies decided that they would and could profit from it. When it was claimed on in 1700 it came back to the 17 teams, money then played again on other central role because by 1715, the american colonies were larger than they were more prosperous, merchants were a more powerful group from england was treating them a little bit better, and all of a sudden they were attacking muslim ships halfway around the world and bringing key then send money back to the colonies. It was the Welcome Pirates before and wanted their money and now that it was in their own bottom line they teamed up with the mother country and waged an allout war that ultimately ended in 1726 which was the last hanging of the pirates in bost boston. It was the key factor determining peoples motivations and why they did what they did u. Might not necessarily like, respect or identify with, and i want to start one of the strengths of your book is the incredible complexity of the characters. The bank robbers are all fascinating, complicated people, and above poli