Offer Virtual Events at this time and to hear about the king of confidence a tale of utopian dreamers, frontier schemers, true believers, false prophets, and the murder of an american monarch if it wasnt for you showing up, so thank you for doing that. We do ask you keep your video feed disabled. If you do enable it, if you enable the second time we appreciate your cooperation. I want to go over our format. We will have a reading by miles harvey to start us confidence a tale of utopian dreamers, frontier schemers, true believers, false prophets, and the murder of an american monarch which was published last tuesday and donovan hahn reads from another book published in june we will hear an extended conversation from 30 to 35 minutes and have a few here and there with supplemental images and once we are done with that we will wrap things up with audience q and a, feel free to send them my way. I will be fielding and screening those. I will read some bios and get the reading underway. Miles harvey wrote the land of lost maps and recipient of fellowship. His book was named Chicago Tribune book of the year. He currently teaches at university. His interlocutor, donovan hahn, the author of moby duck, a New York Times notable book, john Kenneth Gilbert award for nonfiction. The second book, the inner coast was published last month. A lot of us already knew this but both of these men graduated from the msa program at the university of michigan a few blocks away. I appreciate it, if you wouldnt mind putting your actual zoom reactions, thank you. Good to see you. At poetry, your book is longer than mine. And the night wallace function and we teach fiction in chicago and detroit. I want to be clear to everyone, he is sharing a stage with me. I will get ahead of you with your reading, the antihero of the book that you will tell us about tonight is getting crowned as king in Beaver Island, somehow this man managed to convince 235 lonely souls in the tabernacle that it was a royal diadem, with red robe stitched together by ladies of the church, enveloped him in righteousness and splendor. In tonights event we dont have 235 lonely souls gathered in the tabernacle, the kingdom the paper crown, george adams, the theatrical impresario. As i said to you before with nonfiction books and we end of Holding Forth as exports on the subject but i love your pros. I want you to read some and you will go with something that help us understand the title. We will get to that in a minute. If you could put up side one. I thought i would introduce the audience, the title of the book. There he is. I will read a little bit about this man james j string, the decades leading up to the civil war and this is the guy, you wonder how he managed you can leave it up. The most charismatic guy, and it was unimposing, the oddly bulging for him, he possessed one distinguishing feature, dark brown eyes which one acquaintance described as small but bright and piercing, given animated expression was another claimed they could bore right through a person. Staying possessed, and invisible, ineffable confidence in the days before electrical power confidence made the antebellum era hung. Confidence was black magic, good fortune and hard cash combined. Confidence could turn glittering gold, cow towns into cities, empty lots into businesses, losers into winners, authors and millions, confidence was a charm deployed by bankers, and politicians, clergymen and card sharp. Confidence was the soul of the trade for financial publication, how much between man and man as between country and country. Age when people had to trust on privately issued banknotes, glorified are you yous, confidence with the national currency. That is what the guy possessed, his ability to wield it, from being an obscure farm boy in new york and a failed lawyer or newspaper publisher, failed postmaster to the midwest, a Mormon Prophet and a threat to brigham young, a couple utopian counties i will talk about. Took a word out of my title, what is that all about . It is the intercoast and they told a lot, since here we are, i am on the other side of michigan, i grew up on the coast of california but the son of misplaced midwesterners and spent much of my life by the great lakes and wanted to make the case for the great lakes, the coast has always been a contact zone between here and elsewhere. Etymologically it derives from latin and in middle english, could still offer you a coasted lamb meaning rack of ribs. The feed coast was the rib cage of the land and its primary sense, refused to displace where land and sea begins and in that sense all coasts are by definition outer and oceanic ones. These in return for the edge of a lake or a bank or sure, and a paradox. Michigan it ms. Western midwestern, peninsular, with antique lighthouses as new england is longer than californias florida absent all the other states, standing on a midwestern beach you can watch freighters slide across the horizon. In article terms to coast is to travel and in enough sense coast through the heart of north america. Circumnavigating all of the states east of the mississippi without laying eyes on the pacific. These days the word coastal is as sociological as it is geographic and framed like coastal living or coastal elites, the word collapses, the west coast on the seaboard, supposedly inhabited, and berkeley or boston in seattle. Certain chicagoans, on the gold coast might qualify as coastal in this sense but not residents of gary or sandusky or milwaukee or dearborn, home of the largest to the past rouge river, a neighborhood on the northeast side of detroit that becomes popular with immigrants in vietnam. I will start there with a taste of speaking a new about that word coast. You touch on, brought in melville who wrote the confidence man who talked about the idea of confidence required economically and secret power for the charismatics, you talk later, tell the story of the origins of that word quote the newspaper story and introduced it into the lexicon. Among all the materials you are drawing into the store you are doing a certain amount of etymological excavation, reminding us what parts of the american vernacular originated in the antebellum period and some of it is strange like what is the origin of the confidence man . Interesting you say that. I kept finding words that were not early enough in Oxford English dictionary and a lot of people in our audience know the gold standard, in a newspaper story from 1820, will be 1890, and if it ever wrote back. In 1849, this is a period where there has been an economic crash, massive technological revolution, the telegraph, the railroad, communications revolution, internet superhighway, this confidence becomes an important thing. In 1849, a new york newspaper called him the confidence man, to go up to people and say donovan, donovan, you dont remember me . Come on, man. That would be embarrassing. Then say donovan, i am hurt by that, give me a watch is a show of confidence, he would do that and people would give them their watches but this word spread like wildfire and it is fun to watch it spread through the american mexican because it describes so many people in so many walks of life and straying he epitomized this in this period where truth was malleable, facts were not really facts like our own time in some ways. People like him thrive in those times and strang was able to pull off his own truth with the bluster people were willing to believe in. Host beautiful. I want to first strang as a historical figure from a writers point of view is a treasure for you. You write about it. I want to make you speak a little bit about the index of your book and the acknowledgments. The way i speak about how this works is you have a central figure in strang that he is almost a planetary object whose force of personality exerts like Gravitational Force on the antebellum 19thcentury of the upper midwest so your book draws into it all these marvels and wonders and of securities from that time. From under a in your index, american revolution, anderson, hans christian, angels, part of it seems, what is wonders about your book, collecting the historical figures you end up gathering into your narrative, pt barnum, emily bronte, john wilkes booth, henry clay, darwin, the guy who invented the keyboard, this magnetic power of the narrative to gather it all up and you talk about that in your acknowledgments, this poll story the man of the crowd, there is the central figure, a man who had once arrested and absorbed my whole attention. Tell me how you think, i dont know want if you want to explain that analogy but it is not a traditional biography. Houses strang work with it . There are 3 good books about strang. They are very good. They tended to treat him as a footnote to mormon history, a michigan king and from the start i saw strang is a lightning rod for all the enthusiasm and social movements and apocalyptic fears of the age and so i saw him as the embodiment of a crazy time and i know we dont to the same thing but you do something similar, got a nice review, he called myself wonderfully aggressive, talked about i havent thought about this, getting the big picture. I got to go back to you on this, you are one of the most wonderful nonfiction writers today in doing what you praised me for. Donovan strayed 1 million times but there is an essay here, on the intercoast, romance of rest, this is a, before i knew him, was a real source of interest written inspiration for me. I read it 20 years ago, harpers 15 years ago, a long time ago and at a time when i needed to be inspired by another writer. I picked up harpers and started reading about an antique tool collector in michigan. I have written about collectors before. The way you brought american history, desires into that piece, do you want to talk about that . That for me was an important one because i had been writing nonfiction, it is not that uncommon, historically was the standard genres, my first earliest essays, a search of the personal essay or two or that was what you have done in this book. Think of it as the art of finding, captured the imagination, the analogy comes from entomology, not etymology, you are going to follow it. Once you have that this is fascinating and your mind starts generating questions. The the king of confidence a tale of utopian dreamers, frontier schemers, true believers, false prophets, and the murder of an american monarch. And uncle i have great affection for, in ann arbor, a botanist by training had begun collecting by chance in ann arbor, picked up two mentions that were identical. The indigenous symmetry. And upset civilly. And he turns the barn on the outside near dexter, now he has a few of them. It is not open to the public. Arrays like the artifacts, specimens, fossils below the dinosaurs, 100 spigot handles identical or one array of them. A cabinet of wonders but not of natural artifacts that are manmade. Hugely fascinating and the Company Narrative and that narrative. Similar here, and he allows you to follow your own curiosity and questions. Somehow the inventor of the keyboard change to the guy to the midwest. And accidental juxtapositions does that make sense . We may be working from a similar method, such admiration for you. I dont make many predictions about the future, i can talk about an example of it. In the digital age becoming more and more similar, use see it as an act of storytelling. I really love that and increasingly i find myself, this book had a single spaced timeline in strangs life and the world. A narrative making machine. Another quick reading if you dont mind. If you could put up slide number 6. Here it comes. I will read two short paragraphs between them a little explanation but edgar allen wrote in the stormy seas of the psyche, places of perfect security, freedom from all restraint, where normal laws and moral rules of conduct and systems of logic dont apply, they are frequent locales for experimental communities including the original utopia which thomas moore set on an island, and and and was was his draw, one of the things we need to understand what apocalyptic times, in 1848 when strang was starting to start a colony on Beaver Island and push it, this was the year of apocalyptic fevers in the United States and in the world. You see why the seas but the sea monster is here. Strang spent summer of 1848, ominous signs of revolutions in europe and us war in mexico and rising tensions between north and south. Let me warn you, when the time draws near, prophetic events are crowding upon one another. Strangs newspaper reported mormons and local fishermen spotted a huge sea serpent off the coast of Beaver Island, one of many such sightings around the world during the portentous years of 18471848. From the 21st century perspective, hard to know what to make of this claim but one possibility is strang, the Lake Michigan monster with the beast from the sea whose appearance heralded the apocalypse and revelation knowing when joseph smith claimed they symbolize, quote, the degenerate kingdoms of the wicked world, strang hoped to wonderscore Beaver Island as the new zion of prophecy, Promised Land of mormon teachings, latter day saints would gather to assure into the Second Coming of christ and his 1000 year reign on earth. This picture in front of you is not illustration of the sea monster strang spotted off Beaver Island but was one of the many sea monsters the legitimate people thought they saw in 184748, a Royal Navy Ship spotted this sea monster somewhere. That gives a sense of the intense period we are talking about and strang had his own reasons for going to the island and started a criminal enterprise. You can take it down. He would send his people all over the lake to rate various towns and throughout the midwest steel horses and other items. There has been a lot of controversy about this. Really writers said there is no proof strang pulled out these crimes and that it was antimormon bias. He moves moved that along a little bit. There is solid, undeniable realtime reporting [speaking in native tongue] strangs crimes. The chapter in ohio. You did new research. That is all new, lots of fun, 19thcentury journalists in small towns and in this newspaper, a wonderful, sarcastic writer but this is important. In real time there is a series of stories, steel horses, policies sent out after him, hes brought back, one of strangs top enforcers, the paper reports on that and strang coming to town, that he will help this guy out of jail. He is found guilty but it is overturned on a technicality the sheriff didnt form something. That technicality was probably hindered as corruption, and doesnt go to the state penitentiary facing a local jail and theres a jailbreak and he is gone and returns to Beaver Island so theres a lot more one of the things we are interested in, landscapes of the midwest, stuff the introduction, this came out in early june, a couple paragraphs, the way i think of these essays, preoccupation with excavating and as someone who is an adoptive midwesterner i grew up as my family was very nice down chicago grew up on the mythic midwest, the whole project has been to do an excavation. This is the midwest like we never imagined it. It is one thing before i jump into my own stuff. The tiny cosmos, feels like your book is doing the logic of the microcosm. We can look closely at Beaver Island and strang becomes the representative of his period. Didnt mention the rest of his career. Amateur meteorologists at the don of meteorology as a scientific discipline. Really kind of are presented a figure but the island becomes a concentrate of america in the middle of Lake Michigan. My First Experience in this country was a farm that came down to us in our family, i have two paragraphs, this farm was passed down two generations near the edge of Lake Michigan. The farm was no longer operational. There was a heritage site to which the increasingly scattered tribe would make pilgrimages, commuting nostalgically with an agrarian past vestiges of which survived. The place was like a museum of an anachronisms. Exhibits included an empty red barn, an outhouse with the splintered door, a hand pump the drew water from the well, glistening helixes of amber flypaper that spiraled from the firehouse rafters, and a few chicks whose beheading i was made to witnesses initiation into the brutal knowledge farm life, head list the chickens body ran a lap around the chopping block, both gruesome and comical. Lost lake, according to legend a lot are read an attempt to drive an ox in the across it. The harvested timber comes up in your book, green gold have you with harvested timber his wagon had broken through thin ice dragging the logger and oxen with its. In a dented aluminum canoe. You could touch bottom with your paddle. The bottom it was silly and soft, sinking as far as you could plunge it never touching hard ground. Who knew what was down there . I imagined if you fell overboard and tried to send you would get sucked into the muck, disappearing, unlikely prehistoric animals with cloven hooves, sabertooth tigers, and ended up drowned. Which is perhaps how it had gone for the logger and his oxen. The prehistoric mammals of north america, although i never visited them it was a prominent feature on the landscape of my inner life. For me one of the things i need to do as a writer is have images that work as motifs, the idea of things being buried down there that you cant see below the history, especially for collection of essays like a collection of poems means a different unity. If it is different themed you have an actual plot here. I was thinking a lot and wants to make sure we have time in 5 minutes for questions but you are not historic narrative history, credentialed historian where you dont have a phd in history. I tried to work with history. Im curious about your method. You spend many years visiting archives and all the rest, wondering if you did the kind of thing that i know some train historians doing a writer must have done because you are trying to bring it to light with sensory detail and immediacy, there is a throwaway moment, two dramatic climaxes in this novel one of which is what if the u. S. Navy sent gunships to Beaver Island which is amazing which reveals the true ending. The tragic story and the end, one little moment talking about this figure, going out to Beaver Islan