Watch American History tv this weekend on cspan 3. You are watching American History tv. Every weekend on cspan 3, explore our nations past. Created by americas Cable Television companies as a public service, and brought to you today by your television provider. Next on American History tv, to bestselling authors discuss how they use Historical Research in their work. Novelist Kathleen Rouhanis latest as the world war one story, and miles harvey focuses on his new nonfiction book, the king of confidence. The conversation was moderated by the Paul University professor amy tyson. Authors roomy and harvey boast teach in the pauls English University department. They provided the video. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us tonight and this is an of vent hosted by the English Department of dePaul University and coast by the Depaul History Department. Its a thrill to get to host with them, to real stalwarts of the English Department, Kathleen Rouhani and miles harvey. Amazing writers and teachers. And because of the role of Historical Research and both of their books, we are very grateful to have amy tyson from the Depaul History Department to interview them. I also want to thank all of you especially for being here. Its always so meaningful and feels important for artists in the arts. Especially during this difficult time, when bombast and quick takes seem to rule the day, a lot of us recognize that its the quieter, more thoughtful, more intelligent creations that actually sustain us. That said, i would encourage you, if you like what you hear tonight, to please support these great writers. I will post links to their books in the chat, and i know they are also on the play at the depaul bookstore in lincoln park. We do have one technical issue or constrain that i ask your help with, potentially. We are limited to 100 participants tonight. I see we are at 52 right now. I anticipate that that will grow in the next ten 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 that more people can continue to come in. Thank you very much. And i will introduce amy tyson from the history department. Amy is an associate professor of history at depaul, the author of the wages of history, emotional labor on public histories front lines. And this summer, she began being a link in World History project. Its aim is to document the stories of individuals who perform in public as Abraham Lincoln and his contemporaries. Thank you for hosting this forest. 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 catherine ronny, then both will read from their most recently published works. From there, we will have a conversation. But if you have questions, please put them over in the chat and dan who just introduced me will be helping us moderate the questions from you. Please feel free at anytime to draw up a chat, and towards the end of the hour we will be looking to that chat and having your questions come to the floor. I am just so happy to be with you here tonight. Ive been living and breathing both of your books the last few weeks. And i want to start by introducing the things that i know you have in common, aside from a penchant for Historical Research in your writing. Do you both teach creative writing at depaul. You both are devoted coffee drinkers who share the same High School Alma mater of downers north here in illinois. Long before you wrote your bestselling books, you also shared a history of disliking job that you once held in the food industry. And kathleen was briefly a failed smiling greed or at teegee eye fridays. Miles, long ago, had a stint as a mcdonalds cashier turned milkshake guy. But i think it is safe to say both have long been writers. Among other right early achievements, kathleen is the author of the national bestselling novel lillian takes a tale thats inspired by the real life of poet and copy ad writer Margaret Fish back, and perhaps also inspired by kathleen zone love of walking. She is also the author of life neutral, my life as an object, which is a memoir of her own experiences as an artist model. This august saw the release of the novel that we are going to talk about tonight. Jeremy and major whittle steam, a fictional story based on the real events of world war i. Miless latest book takes us a bit further back into the antebellum era of the United States, tracing the history of james jesse straying, the leader of the string section of the mormon faith. His book the king of confidence, i have to read this carefully, a tale of utopian dreamers, frontier screamers, true believers, false profits, and the murder of an american monarch, and quote, has already been listed as a New York Times editors choice selection. He has author the national and international bestseller, the island of lost maps, which i just purchased online last night and started reading today that the dentist office. Hes also the writer of the acclaimed painter in a savage land. Kathleen, would you begin by introducing your book and reading from it . Thank you so much for those fun introductions. Those were great, and im going to read a little bit from my book, and the title kind of contains most of what you need to know. Its about two main characters, and one of them as you can see is a messenger pigeon and one is a soldier. The two of them were involved in this incident in the forest in 1918 and world war i. And the book is a war book but it really focuses on their joint trajectorys as to how they ended up there in the first place and then what happened to them after. I think thats what you need to know. Now to get a sense of what exactly i had to research to get both the pigeon and the soldier perspective, i was going to read the first couple paragraphs of the first chapter and the first couple paragraphs of the second chapter. That goes back and forth. It is first person. So you get the pigeon and the soldier back and forth. This is the very beginning of chapter one, where we hear from cher ami. Monuments that are most to pigeons and soldiers. I myself have become a monument, a feathered statue in sight a glass case. And life, i was both a pigeon and soldier. And death, i am a piece of mediocre taxidermy, collecting dust in the Smithsonian Institutions National institute of American History. The museum has closed and everyone has gone home. Guests took their leave at 5 30 as they do every weekday, and even the janitorial staffers had finish their tasks. Miles of floors polished in pine scented, anchors of displays gleaming in silence. A few hours remain before midnight. This is the eve of the 100year anniversary of what, according to United States army, was the most important day of my avian life. October 4th, 1918. I am not sure i agree. That day was an important one, certainly, but days dont carry the same meeting for pigeons as they do for humans. And my life comprised other days, days that might be equally worth note, if not to the army, then at least to me and those i loved. Pigeons can love. Pigeons cannot fight. Yet, i was once as well known to any grownups it isnt as any human hero of what was then called the great war. So i will stop there. That is cher ami. You get a few more pages of her and then you get to chapter two, and thats the start of the story of whittlesey. Monuments matter most to pigeons and soldiers. Some matter more than others. None matters more to me than the soldiers and sailors monument on Riverside Drive on the upper west side. Its not a monument for my war, the great war, the war that has caused me to be known these past three years as go to hell whittlesey, heroic commander of the lost battalion. Instead, the army that won the civil war almost 60 years ago, the soldiers and sailors monument has personal significance for me, when that has nothing to do with war. Its where i, fresh from harvard law school, naive and lonesome, met the man who would be my entree into the double life i head into light show so at the war interrupted. So i will stop there. Introduce your book and read a bit from it, miles. My book is about a guy named james straying, who in the 18 fifties declared himself king of the universe. It was a sect of mormon rogue characters that took over and island in the middle of lake michigan. And this chapter of the book introduces where strang it 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 hurdled countless average americans into sudden financial ruin. For some, the humiliating prospect of having a sheriff take possession of their goods and real estate to satisfy a creditors claim was simply too much to bear. As one pennsylvania man who owed 200 dollars, 250 dollars, go on, i cannot tell, where put it in his 1842 suicide notes. I am hand forgotten, numbered with the dead, where the creditors call upon me no more. But for others, there was a way to end ones miserys without putting a bullet in ones brain. To lose ones life without actually dying. For years. Those who hoped about running creditors had sought refuge in the fast expanding western frontier. The man who disappeared from the new york town of randolph faced mounting debts for years, putting creditors with, putting off his creditors with increasingly ornate loses, until at last his only hope was to get out of town. In many other periods of history, the missing man might never have been heard from again after his disappearance. He lived in an era of southern transformations, where you could be broke one day and rich the next, and Anonymous One day and famous the next. An arrow and wild dreams and lunatic fantasies could quickly metamorphosis into hard facts. Such a precarious time when nothing felt stable or certain anymore. Chameleons like the man who is no longer there were favorite. Although he was physically unimposing, a few inches over five feet, and balled with an oddly bulging forehead, he did possess one distinguishing feature, his dark brown eyes which one acquaintance described as rather small but very bright and piercing, giving an extremely animated expression to his whole countenance. Another witness claim to the mans eyes seemed as though they could bore right through a person. More than any tangible attribute, the vanished man persisted within ineffable aura called confidence. And those days before electrical power, confidence was what made the antebellum era home. Confidence was black magic, good fortune, and hard cash combined. Confidence could turn worthless paper into glittering gold, kowtoweds into empty cities, empty lots into bustling businesses, losers into winners, paupers into millionaires. Confidence was a charm deployed by bankers and merchants, philosophers and politicians, clergymen and card sharks alike. Confidence was the soul of trade, in the words of a leading financial publication. Without, it added herman belleville, congress between man and man, as between country and country, wood, like awash, rundown and stop. In an age before the federal government began printing paper money, the age where you had to trust and privately issued banknotes, glorified iowa use, confidence was a de facto national currency. Thank you both. When i teach about history, i always start with my students talking about how historians are never really telling you the full truth about the past. All we have are the remains of what i use as the broken stained glass metaphor. There is these shards of glass everywhere, and the job of the historian is to try to piece all of these shards back together again to create a picture. We may never be fully prepared, but we do our best and we do our job to present the best picture that we possibly can over the past. Would you talk about your role as reconstructed measures of stained glass windows into your respective pasts . Miles, you go first. I think thats a great metaphor. I think in some ways, what i increasingly do as a writer, and i dont know how this strikes the two of you, is a kind of cure a shun. I feel like i am a great person to build these long timelines. I think my timeline for this book was 250 pages long. Everything going on in strangs life, but everything going on around him, and i started to see patterns and narratives emerge. Its like a story. And in some ways i feel, it may have had to do with my time in life. I am saying look at this. Think about this. I am sort of curating the past. I do feel like the job of the writer is becoming more and more like the job of the curator. Thank you. Kathleen . I like the stained glass and i like the curatorial work. I guess before i get a little more specific about it, i should say this book would not exist if not for dip all. I was teaching a class in 2013 and one of my students brian turned in a palm that referenced cher ami. I had never heard of cher ami, but i always say to my students look it up. Anytime you encounter an illusion or a reference, i say look at, up like a broken record. If i had a dollar for every time i said that. He put it in a poem. It was a throwaway line about a no guessing on a park bench surrounded by pigeons. And he said but this was no cher ami story. Look at up. And i looked up, which i thought was appropriate to share it a panel like this about looking stuff up. I was really struck by the story. To go to your question, for me, i think when i like about being a fiction writer is i dont have to assemble the whole stained glass window, exactly. I can just become really obsessively fixated on a couple pieces and their relationship. So i think thats what i did with cher ami. Once you look up cher ami, you cannot hear about her without hearing about whittlesey. So for me, my process as a fiction writer is almost a mapping process. I will find the object of my fascination and admiration, and i can drop a pin there and say there is cher ami. And i will start walking the perimeter and seeing what else is important and then i will drop a pen at whittlesey and start planning it from there. Did you talk then, kathleen, as a followup to that . I know that your other book is based on a real person, that its an entire work of fiction, as i understand it. But this novel is really based on two bona fide person and pigeon. How did you decide to write about real people and then take the fictional lead, and what was the process like two fictionalized parts of their story . Thats a great question. With lillian, the womans real name is margaret. You can tell from the title that i am taking perhaps greater liberties. I invented more of that story and i felt like i definitely wanted the book to call attention to the real margaret, but i didnt want people to read my book and think this is literally her life. This is the biography. That was important to me. With these two, i knew i had to use their names, because they are historic figures. Cher ami really is taxidermy tent in the smithsonian. You can see her. But i think this applies particularly to historical fiction, but to any kind of fiction. Theres lots of conversations happening now about whose stories are or are not given too riders to tell. I think because of how i just wanted to depicted in the first place and how i wanted to give them personalities, a big thing i have done that i havent seen anyone else quite do is i am pretty sure he was gay, charles whittlesey. Almost 100 . If i was a biographer i would be able to find a smoking gun, but he signed one of his suicide notes, im a misfit by nature and this is a way of ending it. That would be a way of someone to come out without coming out. I had to be under a huge obligation to be really responsible to the characters. Ive never been a pigeon and ive never been a gay soldier. I thought a lot about tony morrison, hauler in the chat if you like tony morrison. She has this great thing in her book where she says, the ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize these strange him mystify the familiar is a test. I wanted to take world war i, which is overfamiliar, and take it back so that they can see it again. To me, it is strange to be a game man or a pigeon so i wanted to make sure that i did it in a way that didnt mystified or get it wrong. I like that she puts it is a test. Research is the way that i tried to pass that test. Thank you. Miles, could you talk about when you first how did you get taken in by this confidence man . Whats sources led you to finding him . I got lucky with this. The source that led me to this was i got a call from my agent one day saying a guy from little brown wants to talk to you about a book. It turned out to be a wonderful editor named ben george. He said i am 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. Of course, i wanted to hear him out. But ive had opportunities like that in the past. Its always been stuff that wasnt interesting that i would just be bored with. But this just instantly hit me as a book i really love dana character i really loved. Strang is just so amazingly complex, and there is so much information about him, including his journals from his years as a young man. I was really just so struck by his story, and also i think we quickly realized the times we lived in had certain echoes to the times we live in. Echoes allowed a confidence man like him to thrive. In fact, its the time from which we get the term confidence man, because there were so many of them around. So that interest to be a great deal as well. Miles, would you tell us a little bit about those journals as a source . They are coated. He writes in his own language. Lead of what was this process of finding these sources of this man in his late teens and early twenties as this is a window . I know he wanted to marry the future queen victoria, and then he ends up becoming self proclaimed king of earth and heaven. He makes it happen. There is