Truman daniels exploring the american story. What American History tv tonight on cspan3. Good evening everyone and thank you so much for joining us area my name is bennett and im a bookseller and Event Coordinator and im going to be your host tonight for athome literati field featuring miles party. Before we get underway i want to explain a big thank you to everyone for your support of our virtual programming in particular. We feel incredibly lucky were able to continue to offer Virtual Events release through the difficult times and we wouldnt be able to do that and gather and hear about the intricacies it wasnt for you all showing and stopping by and continuing to be supported so that for doing that. I like to go over our zoom policies for event. We ask your video feed disabled for the duration of the event and if you do enable us he will disable it for you. If you enable a second time you will have to be removed from theevent. We appreciate your cooperation. I wanted to briefly go over our format for. Miles donovan to start us off. After my from thinking of confidence which is published this past tuesday donovan reads from the interposed which was published early last month in june, were going to hear an extended conversation between the two of them for about 30 to 35 minutes and also have a few slides as needed to add some supplemental images. His book is named a Chicago Tribune best book of the year. He currently teaches at depaul university. The author of mobile duck the true story of 28800 bad boys lost at sea and is out for the john Kenneth Gilbert award. The second book the inter coast was published by [inaudible] last month and i think a lot of us already know this but both of these men graduated from the msa program at university of michigan. Its a few blocks away from the book store so i want to share that for those who are not familiar with that but otherwise i would appreciate it if you wouldnt mind putting your virtual zoom reaction together for tonights first reader, rv. Hello miles. Hello donovan. Good to see you. Yeah, you are fiction and i was poetry and its probably why your book is longer than mine and then then we both teach nonfiction here in chicago and i do in detroit. Its nice seeing you here. I want to be clear to everyone that this is miles event and he kindly is sharing his day with me. I will get ahead of you with your reading and a quote in your book when the antihero of the book whom you will tell us about tonight is getting crowned as king and you write somehow this man established the king and managed to convince 235 lonely souls that his paper crown was a dazzling royal diadem in his wooden scepter homes with energy and that his floor length red robe hitched together by ladies of the church enveloped him in righteousness and splendor. In tonights event we dont have 235 lonely souls gathered in this tabernacle but you are the king with the paper crown my friend and i will be george adams but why dont you start and i want or as i said to you before hand with nonfiction books we end up being experts on the subject but i love your prose. We want you to read something and if you will go with something that can help us understand the title, the king of confidence. And i your prose but we get to that in a minute. If you could just put outside one i thought i would introduce [inaudible] to the title character of my book. All right, there he is. I will read a little bit about this man james chase strang and his time which is the antebellum era which is the decades leading up to the civil war and this is the guy and you wonder how he managed to establish or you can leave it up. You can leave a slide one oh and i will read over it. There we go. [laughter] so, it doesnt look like the most charismatic guy to you and listen to this. Although James Jesse Strang was physically unimposing and a few inches over 5 feet and bald with an oddly bulging for head he did possess one of the distinguishing features, his dark brown eyes which one acquaintance described as rather small but very bright and piercing giving an extremely animated expression to his whole confidence. Another claimed that those eyes seemed as though they could bore right through a person but more than any tangible attributes strang possessed an invisible, ineffable aura called confidence and in those days before electrical power confidence was what made the antebellum era home then confidence was black magic, good fortune and hard cash combined. Confidence could turn worthless paper into glittering gold, cow towns into cities, empty lots into bustling businesses losers into winners and into millionaires. Confidence was a charm deployed by bankers and merchants, philosophers and politicians, clergymen and card sharps alike. Confidence was the sole of the trade in the words of one leading financial publication without it, added herman melville, commerce between man and man as between country and country would, like a watch, rundown and stop. In an age before the federal government started putting paper money, and age when people had to trust in privately issued banknotes glorified ious confidence was the de facto national currency. That is what the sky possessed and confidence in his ability to wield it was what took him from being an obscure farmboy in north new york and a field lawyer, feel newspaper publisher, field postmaster to the midwest which we then called the far west which he became a Mormon Prophet and a real rat to Brigham Young and the church and where he ran a couple of utopian colonies which i will talk about, one in michigan. Donovan, i want to talk to you about your book too. I thought we took a word out of my title so lets take a word out of your title. Coast. What does that all about . Yeah, my book is called the inter coast and i talk a lot about [inaudible] and sent here we are virtually speaking you are in chicago and im over here on the other side of michigan but part of what i was thinking about was i grew up on the coast of california but as a son of misplaced midwesterners and i spent much of my life here by the great lakes and i kind of wanted to make the case for the great lakes. Coasts have always been contact zones between here and elsewhere and analogically it derives from latin and in middle english they can still offer you coast of lamb meaning a rack of ribs. The seacoast was the cage of the lambs and its primary sense coast referred to the place where land and sea begins and coasts who are by definition outer and oceanic ones. Its a term for the edge of the lake or stream as bank or shore but the mayor tone geography of the midwest is a paradox in michigan is midwestern and it is also coastal and pendant sealer and. Its shoreline is speckled with lighthouses as new england is longer than californians, florida and the other states besides alaska and standing on a midwestern region watch freighters slide across the horizon and nautical terms to coast is to travel by water while keeping the land nearby and in that sense you can coast to the heart of north america. Circumnavigating all the states east of the mississippi without ever laying eyes on the pacific. These days the word coastal is a sociological as it is geographic and in phrases like coastal living or coastal elites word collapse is the west coast and east into a conjoined seaboard supposedly inhabited by decadence system for seconds and is were next berkeley or boston in commuting to seattle. In seattle the holiday goers michigans on gold coast might qualify as coastal in this sense but not the residents of sandusky or milwaukee or dearborn home to the largest Muslim Community for the afternoons paddle down the rouge river from lake erie and a neighborhood on the northeast side of detroit have become popular with immigrants from vietnam and i will stop there with a little taste of what of trying to make and talk about that word coast. Lets go back to confidence. You touch on and you brought in melville who wrote the confidence man and he talked about how this idea of confidence most required economically but also a secret power for the charismatic and you talk later so could you tell the story of the origins of that word where you quote the newspaper story that introduced it to the lexicon so what about [inaudible] among all the materials were drawn into the story youre doing a sort of amount of in that passage etymological excavation like you are reminding us what parts of the american vernacular originated in this antebellum. And some of it is strange now that you do this whole thing on the idea of thinking which i love but what is the origin of that in the confidence man at the time. It is interesting you say that because one of the fun things i did with this book is i kept finding words that were not early enough in Oxford English dictionary as a lot of the people in her audience know if the Gold Standard for etymology and i look up a word that i found in a newspaper straight from 1820 and would be like 1890 and i dont know if they changed it because they never wrote back but the confidence man came in 1849 and this is the time when there has been an economic crash that the country is still to recover from the massive technological revolution you got the telegraph in the photograph and the railroad and there is the Communications Revolution that might be the internet superhighway and people are displaced and the confidence become such an important thing. In 1849 guy was arrested in new york and the new york paper called him the confidence man. His game was to go up to people and say on the street hey, donovan, donovan, you dont remember me and come on man, you dont remember me and then of course youd be embarrassed and you would say its mild, mild harvey and theres a miles ive got you and i was a donovan, im hurt by it but could you just show your confidence and he would give me a watch and people would do that in this word spread like wildfire. Its fun to watch it spread through the american lexicon at this time because it describes so many people in so many walks of life and i think strain epitomize this and he was a guy who was able in this time where truth was malleable and facts werent facts and its a lot like our own time in some ways. People like string five on those and he was able to invent his own truths and pull it off with the bluster that people wanted to believe in. Thank you. I will do something a little weird, miles, because string as a historical figure and from the writers point of view is this treasure for you, as you know and you discover and write about it a bit. I want to make you speak about the index of your book and your acknowledgment that it is amazing and the way i think about the way this book works is you got this central figure in strand but hes almost like a planetary object that who is like force of personality exerts like Gravitational Force on the antebellum 19th century of the upper midwest in the whole nation and your book draws into it all these marvels and wonders and obscurities from that time so from in your index are pulled these items abolitionism, American Revolution and Hans Christian and angels so part of it seems what wonders about the book but its collecting all the historical figures that you end up guiding into your narrative and the honorary and pt barnum and emily bronte and Charlotte Bronte and John Wilkes Booth and henry clay and darwin in the sky who invented the keyboard and somehow you managed to, its this magnetic power to gather all that up and in your acknowledgment you talk about that and say at the beginning talk about this post story, a man of the crowd and how there is the central figure and he spots a manhood once arrested and absorbed my whole attention and so tell me about how you think of the way, i dont know if you want to explain that analogy but how, its not a traditional biography book. How does strength work with all the rest . String at least three good books about string and they are very good but im not being the least bit dismissive here. They tend to treat him as either a footnote to mormon history or a michigan story, midwestern story in one of the books called assassination of a michigan king. From the start i saw string as this lightning rod for all the enthusiasm and social movements and apocalyptic fears of the age and so i just saw him as this embodiment of this crazy time and as far as my writing style goes, its funny because i so admire you we dont do the same thing but you do something similar in the new york review or the New York Times book review and i just got a very nice review and we like truth reviews and what he called my style wonderfully digressive which was the biggest compliment ive ever had and talked about and i had not thought about this but where you get the big picture and these little maps but donovan, ive got to go back to you on this, i thank you are one of the really most wonderful nonfiction writers today doing exactly what you just praised me for. Donovan ive heard the story a million times but isnt there an essay here for the second essay, right donovan in the inner coast called the romance of rust and this essay i always tell donovan this was before i knew him was a real source of inspiration for me. I read it one day and i did not know what it was, 20 years ago, 15 years ago . A long time ago and was just a time i needed to be inspired by another writer. I picked up harpers and started writing about this antique tool collection or in michigan and im into collectors and written about it before and i was interested but the way in which you brought American History and american commerce and our desire and our commercial desires into that piece was just incredible. Do you want to talk about that . Yeah, sure. That one to me was an important one because i had been writing nonfiction but i came to nonfiction by way of fiction and poetry which is i think not all that uncommon the people come to it from one of those more pseudo genres that historically was the standard genre writing programs but my initial or my first early was search of the personal essay or memoir or to a confessional essay and this was the first one where he wanted to do what youve done in this book which is due that and think of it as the act of finding where something known what the analogy i use when i teach is comes from entomology not etymology and its like an and detecting pheromones so you follow it but once you have that like this is fascinating and then your mind starts generating questions and its that kind of where i have some ideas about what questions may be behind the king of confidence so to that essay months i have that uncle and i have great affection for who lives on the outskirts of ann arbor who is a botanist by trade and has begun collecting kind of by chance in ann arbor happen to pick up two wrenches that were identical and had this vision of symmetry like he found two specimens of the same plant but it was wrenches and, you know, obsessively began collecting from all over the upper midwest factories, state estate sales, foreclosed farms and all these artifacts of history and he turned this barn on the outskirts out near dexter but initially he started with one and turned to this museum but it was not open to the public where he makes these arrays of like the artifact look like specimens and they look like fossils or dinosaurs or frankly he had hundred spigot handles and he would make one array of them so hes got this kind of cabinet of wonders but not of the natural artifacts and that for me became fascinating and then accompanying him was the narrative and you get to try to tweak your own museum of an essay actually, i think. I think youre doing something similar here and [inaudible] but then he allows you to just follow your own curiosity and questions and make things so that somehow the inventor of the keyboard is adjacent to the guy who invented or introduced the potato to the midwest as a medicinal plant. Its a wonderful, at or accidental juxtaposition. Yeah, i think we may be working from a similar message and why i have so much admiration for you as a writer but i always tell my students that i dont think many predictions about the future writing but one is that i feel in my own work it would be interesting to see from you guys and i can talk about an example of it but is that i feel like writers and curators are in the digital age becoming more and more similar like writing is increasingly an active storytelling and for me that is all really cool and i love that and i think increasingly i find myself this book had a turn 50 singlespaced timeline where i just list what was happening in strings life and in the world and i just the juxtapositions are there and its a narrative making machine but i mean, let me give you an example. I do another quick reading if you dont mind. Bennett if you could just put up the picture, slide number six. There is. Here it comes. Love this. I will read to really and then i will just, i just, in between them i will give you explanation but the island was important to this and so i want to read this little bit about island. Island Edgar Allan Poe wrote in the stormy seas of the psyche of places of perfect security where freedom from all restraint can be enjoyed. Tiny cosmos where normal laws, normal rules of conduct and normal systems of logic do not apply. Their frequent locales for experimental communities, including the original utopia which thomas moore in his famous 16th century book. I would just say that there are many things we can say about the community and that string had to be and its some of it is controversial but i wanted to talk about the draw and i think sometimes people think this guy what was he or what was the job but one of the things we need to understand is what apocalyptic times these were. In 1848 right when the string was starting to start the colony and really push it that this was the year of just apocalyptic fevers in the United States and in the world and i thought i would read about those and then you will see why. String spent the summer of 1848 pointing to what he describes as ominous signs, including a series of revolutions in europe, u. S. War in mexico and rising tensions between north and south. For months he been urging his followers to prepare for the end and now let me warn you the time draws near he looked wrote that prophetic events are crowning close upon one another and strings newspaper even reported that local fishermen had spotted a huge sea serpent off the coast of the islands and one of many such sightings around the world during the pretentious years between 47 and