You are watching booktv on cspan2. Every weekend the latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2 created by americas Cable Television company as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Good evening, thank you so much for joining us. I am a bookseller and Event Coordinator and featuring miles harvey and donovan hahn. I want to thank everyone for your support of virtual programming, we feel lucky to offer Virtual Events that this time. Wouldnt be able to do that and talk 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. Thank you for doing that. I want to go over our policies and ask you keep your video feed stable. If you and abel it, enabling a second time. We appreciate your cooperation during this call. I want to talk about a reading by miles harvey and donovan hahn, tale of utopian dreamers, frontier schemers, true believers, false prophets, and the murder of an american monarch which was published this past tuesday and donovan hahn reads from his book that was published in june we will hear an extended conversation. We will also have some supplemental images. Once we are done with that, audience q and a. If you have questions for miles harvey and donovan hahn send them my way and i will field those tonight. Now some bios and we will get the reading underway. Miles harvey is author of the national and international bestseller, when night falls terrorism fellowship. It was named best book of the year, he currently teaches, his interlocutor, donovan hahn, author of will be duck, a New York Times notable book, john Kenneth Gilbert award for nonfiction and wilson literary scientist award. The second book the inner coast was published early last month. A lot of us already know this but both these men graduated from the university of michigan. I wanted to show that. Otherwise i wanted to show that. If you dont mind putting your virtual zoom reactions to gather, thank you. Good to see you. It was probably why your book is longer than mine. You teach nonfiction in chicago. It is really nice seeing you. I want to be clear to everyone, sharing the stage, and your reading and your book, the antihero of the book that you will tell us about is getting crowned as king. Somehow this man managed to convince the 235 lonely souls in the tabernacle that it is a royal diadem in the wooden sector comes with energy that is for length red robe stitched together by ladies of the church, enveloped him in righteousness and splendor. We dont have 235 lonely souls in this tabernacle, you, the king with the paper crown, the impresario. I said to you before hand, experts on the subject. Something that will help us with confidence. We will get to that in a minute. I thought i would introduce the audience to the title character of my book. I am going to read about this man james strang, and the antebellum area, leading up to the civil war. You wonder how he managed to establish it and then leave it up. It doesnt look like the most charismatic guy to you. James jesse strang was a few inches over 5 feet and bald with an oddly bulging for head. He did possess one distinguishing feature, his dark brown eyes which one acquaintance described as small but very bright and piercing given an animated expression. They seemed like they could bore right through a person. Many tangible attributes, he possessed visible, ineffable confidence. In those days before electrical power confidence made the antebellum era home. Conference was black magic, good fortune and hard cash, through glittering gold, cow towns into cities, to losers, authors and millionaires. Confidence was a charm deployed by bankers, philosophers and politicians, clergymen and car charts. Confidence was the soul of the trade in the words of one financial publication. Commerce between man and man is between country and country would like a watch run down and stop. In an age before the federal government began printing paper and people had to trust him privately should bank notes, glorified ious, confidence was the national currency. Confidence in his ability to wield it, took him from being an of skewer farmboy in new york, failed lawyer, failed newspaper publisher, failed postmaster to the midwest which we call the far west where he became a Mormon Prophet and a real threat to Brigham Young and the church and ran a couple utopian colonies i will talk about, one of them in michigan but donovan, i want to talk about your book. Took a word out of my title, coasts, what is that all about . My book is called the inner coast, adjective and the noun. Here we are virtually speaking in chicago and over here on the other side of michigan, i grew up on the coast of california, i spent much of my life here by the great lakes and i wanted to make the case for the great lakes, the coast has always been in contact zones between here and elsewhere. Etymologically the word coast the rising latin for red and still offer you a coasts meaning lack of ribs. The seacoast, the rib cage of the land, a place where land ends and the sea begins and in that sense all coasts are by definition outer and oceanic waters. The usual term, the maritime geography is a paradox. Michigan is midwestern and coastal. Shoreline in the lighthouses, and every state besides alaska, with the midwestern beach you can watch freighters slide across the horizon. Keeping the land, we can coast through the heart of north america. Circumnavigating the state east of the mississippi without laying eyes on the pacific. The word coastal is sociological as it is geographic and phrases like coastal living or coastal elites, the word collapses the west coast at east into a conjoined seaboard has supposedly inhabited by decadent sophisticates as if brooklyn werent the next berkeley, chicagoans, holiday goers on the gold coast might qualify as coastal in this sense but not residents of gary or sandusky or dearborn, through the rouge river, on the neighborhood on the northeast side of detroit, becomes popular with immigrants in vietnam. And speak a new about that word coast. Lets go back to confidence. You brought in melville who wrote the confidence man and talk about how the idea of confidence was required economically but also secret power for the charismatic. And quote the newspaper story and introduce it into the mexican. Among all the materials you are trying into the store you are doing a certain amount as i was in that passage of etymological excavation, what parts of the american vernacular, making it strange now as you do a whole thing on the idea, and the confidence man. I kept finding words that were not early enough in the oxford dictionary, the Gold Standard of etymology. In 1890, confidence man, that word comes to us in 1849. This is a period where there has been an economic crash, massive technological revolution, the photograph, the railroad, communications internation people are really displaced. It is such an important thing, new york newspaper called him the confidence man. His game was to say on the streets hey, donovan, you dont remember me . You would be very embarrassed, miles harvey, then got you. Donovan, i am hurt by that, give me a watch a show of your confidence. He would do that and people would give him that. This word spread like wildfire. It describes so many people in so many walks of life and strang epitomized this. Truth was malleable, facts were not really facts. He was able to kind of invent his own truth and pull it off with a kind of bluster that people wanted to believe. Beautiful. A little weird, i want strang as a historical figure from a writers point of view is a treasure for you, you write about it a little bit but i want you to speak a little bit about the index of your book and the acknowledgments. The way i think about how this book works is the central figure in strang almost a planetary object whose force of personality exerts Gravitational Force on the antebellum, 19thcentury, upper midwest, whole nation so your book draws into what all these marbles and wonders and obscurities from that time. I called these items american revolution, anderson, hans christian, angels, part of it, what is wonder is about that, collecting the historical figures you end up gathering, balzac, pt barnum, john wilkes booth, henry way, this guy shores who invented the qwerty keyboard. Somehow you managed this, gathering that up and in your acknowledgments you could talk about that, this is the real and pose story the man of the crowd, how there is this central figure, the man once arrested and absorbed by full attention. Tell me about, is not a traditional biography. How does it work . Three good books about strang. Kind of mormon history or michigan midwestern story, from the start, as a lightning rod for all the enthusiasm and social movements and apocalyptic fears. The embodiment of this crazy time. It is funny because i so admire you but you do something similar. Of the new york review, New York Times book review, from this guy Chris Jennings who is a writer i admire called myself wonderfully the aggressive, the biggest woman i ever had and this work looks like pointlizm, but i got to go back to you on this. I think you are one of the most wonderful nonfiction writers today and doing what you praised me for. I heard the story 1 million times, theres an essay in here, the second essay called a romance of rust and this essay, i always told donovan, this was before i knew him, was a real source of inspiration for me. I read it 20 years ago in harpers, a long time ago and it was at a time when i needed to be inspired by another writer and i picked up harpers and started reading about this antique tool collector in michigan. That is kind of interesting. I have written about collectors before and i was interested in them but the way you draw American History, american commerce, desire for commercial desires, was incredible. If you want to talk about that. Yeah, sure. That for me was an important one because i had been writing nonfiction but came to nonfiction by way of fiction and poetry which is not that uncommon, people come to it from genres that historically were standard genres for writing programs but my first early attempt is clear to the personal essay with a memoir or another essay and this is what i wanted to do what you have done in this book which is i think of it as the art of finding where to capture the nation, the analogy comes from entomology, not etymology. Like an and detecting pheromones. Once you have that it is fascinating and your mind starts generating questions and i have ideas what the questions might be behind the king of confidence a tale of utopian dreamers, frontier schemers, true believers, false prophets, and the murder of an american monarch. I have this uncle i have great affection for, a botanist by training had begun collecting by chance, happened to pick up to wrenches that were identical and he had a vision of symmetry like two specimens of the same plant but it was wrenches. Obsessively began collecting all over the midwest factories, foreclosed farms, all of these artifacts of history and turn the barn on the outskirts near dexter but initially started with one. He turned it into a kind of museum that is not open to the public, where he made taxonomical arrays of the artifacts that looked like specimens, fossils, dinosaurs, 100 spigot handles that are identical to make one array of them. A cabinet of wonders but not natural artifacts. That to me became hugely fascinating and accompanying him into that narrative you create your own from an essay and there is a way you are doing Something Like that, your charismatic figure you are following it allows you to follow your own curiosity and make them speak to each other so that somehow the inventor of the keyboard is adjacent to the guy who introduced the tomato to the midwest, wonderful accidental juxtaposition that came up. We may be working from a similar method which is why i have such information for you as a writer. I dont make many predictions about future writing but one of them, i feel i can talk about an example, writers and curators in the digital age becoming more similar. Writing is an act of creation and creation is increasingly an act of storytelling. For me that is really cool. I love that and increasingly, this book had a 250 page single spaced timeline, what is happening in strangs life in the world and the juxtapositions are there. It is a narrative making machine but i will give you an example, another quick reading if you dont mind. If you could put up the picture, slide number 6. There it is. Here it comes. I thought i am going to read two really short paragraphs. And in between them i will give you explanation but the islands are important to this so i want to read this about the islands. Islands, Edgar Allan Poe wrote in the stormy seas of the psyche, places of perfect security, freedom from all 3 strains could be enjoyed, tiny chasms where normal rules of conduct and normal systems dont apply, frequent locales for experimental communities including the original utopia on an island in his famous sixteenth century book. I will say that there are many things we can say about the community, it is a fascinating place and somewhat controversial but i wanted to talk about the bra, this guy, what was his draw . One of the things we need to understand is what apocalyptic times, in 1848 when strang was starting this colony and push it, this was the year of apocalyptic fevers in the United States and the world and i thought i would read about those and you see why the sea monster is here. Strang described ominous signs including a series of revolutions in europe, the war in mexico and rising tensions between north and south, urging his followers to prepare for the end. Let me warn you the time draws near, prophetic events are crowding close upon each other. Strangs newspaper said mormons and local fishermen spotted a huge sea serpent, one of many such sightings around the world during the portentous years of 18471848. The 21st century perspective, hard to know what to make of such an outlandish claim but one possibility is he tended to equate his late michigan monster with the beast from the sea whose appearance heralded the apocalypse in the book of revelation. Joseph smith claimed such beasts were, quote, the degenerate kingdoms of the wicked world, strang may have hoped to underscore the idea of Beaver Island as the new site of prophecy, Promised Land where according to mormon teachings, saints would help usher in the Second Coming of christ and the end to his 1200 year reign on earth. The picture in front of you is not an illustration of the sea monster strang said was spotted off Beaver Island but was one of the many sea monsters that legitimate people thought they saw in 184748, a Royal Navy Ship that spotted this sea monster somewhere. That gives you a sense of a really intense period we are talking about. Strang, it was not his only reason for going there. He started a criminal enterprise. You can take it down now. He would send his people all over the lake to various towns throughout the midwest tuesday or says and other items. There has been a lot of controversy. Earlier writers said there is no proof strang pulled off these crimes and it was all antimormon bias. There was plenty of antimormon bias, strang pulled up these kinds kinds and one of the the king of confidence a tale of utopian dreamers, frontier schemers, true believers, false prophets, and the murder of an american monarch does is move that along a little bit. There is some pretty solid undeniable realtime reporting on strangs crimes. The chapter on the horse wrestlers in ohio, like this is new research. That is all new. It is lots of fun. There are a lot of great 19thcentury journalists in small towns and the guy who is the editor of the harrisburg newspaper was a wonderful sarcastic writer but this is important because in real time there is a series of stories, one after the other. He comes to this town, a posse sent after him, hes caught, brought back, one of strangs enforcers, the paper reports on strang coming to town and will get this guy out of jail. It is overturned on a technicality, papers in the area write about how that technicality broadly and that it was corruption and sure enough strang stays in a local jail and there is a jailbreak, hes gone and returns to Beaver Island. There is a lot more of. One of the things we both are interested in is the landscapes of the midwest. The introduction out on early june, you are right, the way i think of all these essays, have formally and somatically idea of excavating and for me, somebody who is an adoptive midwesterner, i grew up, my family was very nostalgic for this illinois prairie, i grew up on the mythic midwest, lots of little house on the prairie, the whole project, trying to do certain excavation. This is the midwest like we never imagined. One thing before i jump into my own stuff. I love the idea of islands, feels to me it is a microcosm. We can look at Beaver Island, representative man of his period. You didnt mention his career as a legislator. Amateur meteorologists at the dawn of meteorology, ardent abolitionists as the war approaches, a representative figure but the island becomes a concentrate of america in the middle of Lake Michigan. My First Experience in this country is a farm, i have two paragraphs, it was passed to generations near Lake Michigan but the 1970s the farm was no longer operational, the family held onto it is a kind of heritage site to which the increasingly scattered tribe would make pilgrimages, sharing potato salad while communing nostalgically with an agrarian past, survived in a place that was like a museum of anachronisms, exhibits including empty red barn, outhouse with the door, hand pump that drew water from a well, glistening helixes of flypaper the farm house rafters, a few chickens including one whose beheading i was made to witness as an initiation into this brutally invaluable knowledge farm life sought to impart, headless the chickens body flew a lap around the chopping block, a feat both gruesome and comical. At the edge of this farm was a shallow body of water and according to legend a logger attempted to drive oxen across it, harvested timber which comes up in y