Peter is the author of the winner of the National Jewish book award. Ofis the first curator history at the smithsonian has written the book, the available in, the gift shop. He will be signing books. Please welcome him to the stage. Him,e very excited to have peter manseau. [applause] could you keep clapping while i pour my water . [laughter] im actually going to levitate that table later on, so be prepared. It is great to be here. Around the corner on Willow Street for a little bit. Willow street west Truman Capote street. Im sure it is no accident having lived there for some time that i set out to right the in spirit geography books. You can tell me if i have been successful in that effort. I would like to begin tonight by asking a question. Who has a camera with them . Something you can take pictures with . Had i asked that question 10 years ago, who would have said yes . A couple. How about 20 years ago . And who has one now . We all do. During our lifetime, we have seen a radical change in the way we interact with images. There is not a moment we cannot capture whenever the mood hits us. Take oneo, we do not picture, we take picture after picture. Globally, all of this adds up very estimates are currently that we take one billion. Hotographs every day one of them will be perfect, i am sure. Might find because of this new capability, there has been a shift in our relationship with memory, maybe with loss, what it means to lose people close to us. And possibly with experience itself. I see this in myself and especially in my children. I have a nineyearold daughter and a 12yearold daughter. Especially ond the fourth of july when we were all watching fireworks, she was watching her camera to watch the fireworks. There seems to be among this generation the sense that only recording reality confirms its significance. While this change has been a abrupt in our lifetimes, it is part of a much longer history. It is the inevitable consequence of a significant shift in human development. This would be the invention of photography in the 1830s. With that moment, forever was changed how we see ourselves, how we see the world, and maybe our understanding of what it might be possible to see. Onestory about how this is so. It does so by asking a few questions i think are as relevant now as they were 150 years ago when the action of the book unfolds. Betweenthe relationship seeing images and believing them . What do we Hope Technology might do to our lives and our connections to each other . What do we Fear Technology might do to those same things . When we know images can be manipulated, do we ever trust an image again . I wanted to find a nonfiction story i could research and tell as a way of exploring how those were relevant at another point in American History. It occurred to me there would be no better way to explore those things than through a ghost story. The story unfolds throughout the 19th century. It actually begins with a selfie. 1862, an amateur photographer stood in a boston photography studio and he took a photograph that changed his life. This is part of that photograph, a crop of that image, cropping and framing is one way that we all now manipulate images. As he would later describe the circumstances, he was still learning the photographic process at the time. When he was experimenting with his camera and chemicals on the glass plates, he decided he would take a picture of himself to work on his development technique. After he prepared the plate and put it in the back of his camera, he pulled the camera cloth off the front, exposed the glass plate for about 20 seconds, the required time. And then he went back to the back of the camera to remove the plate and begin the rest of the process. It was when he began to develop the negative that things started to get a little weird. That though he had been alone in the studio when he took the picture, he was not alone in the photograph. A faint figure of a girl sat in the chair beside him. He wondered if maybe he had made a mistake. As an amateur, perhaps he had not cleaned glass plate properly and it had been used for a prior image of this girl. But the more he looked at it, the more he thought it did not seem like a mistake. He could see the girl sitting in the chair, bent at the knees, her arm on the table. And yet he could also see the chair behind her. He did not believe in ghosts. But the woman who owned the photo studio in which he was working did believe in ghosts. This is Hannah Stewart green. She was a spiritualist, and she was a magnetic healer, someone who had great skills with a force then known as animal magnetism. By her, it was walking photo studio in seeing her through the large plate glass window that let in all the Natural Light necessary for photographs, it was seeing her that first let him to think maybe i should start making photographs, too. He started hanging around her photo studio teaching himself how to mix photographic chemicals, trying to help her out as best he could. When she saw the image he had made, she convinced him it was a lingering spirit he had inadvertently captured on a glass photographic plate. They were both entrepreneurial types. Mler was a metal engraver by trade but he had also been a tinkerer. He had recently come up with a miracle cure for dyspepsia that he was selling to anyone who had a rumbling stomach like he did, apparently. Hannah stewart for years have been fighting any number of schemes finding any number of schemes to make money off of peoples spiritual interests. She had been a hair braider. It was someone who braided the hair of the dead into jewelry you would include small photographs with, which is why she got into the photographic business herself. These entrepreneurs, when they looked at the photograph of the , they decided they would prince a few of them. They began selling them out of their photographic studio in boston. This image became quite popular. It brought them together so much so that they eventually married. They began taking these socalled spirit photographs. First in boston and then later in new york. Here is Hannah Stewart again. She was not only the studio owner, she was also a client. She had her own ghost photograph taken. That as aed who is a physician named dr. Benjamin rush. He had taught her everything she needed to know about healing and he was good enough to pose with her for a photograph. The crowds began to come out, hoping to have those images of their own. These were respectable, apparently reasonable people and they crowded into the boston studio hoping to have these images taken of them. During the civil war and immediately after, the hunger for the connection with the dead was so strong that even the fantastic claims of the mummers gave many people solace. Saga ended there are a decade later, they had made headlines around the world. Their lives soon intersected with some of the major cultural figures of the day. From the world of photography, the likes of Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner, again to suggest that photography was somehow implicated in these depictions of the debt. In 19th century technology, including samuel morse, introduced technology that radically changed americans understanding about what it was like to live alongside invisible forces. Abolitionists like William Lloyd garrison are pictured here, people like that wondered if it might suggest that souls were treated equally in death. When mumler was arrested years later, pt barnum showed up to testify. He loved a good scam, of course, but he preferred those he could control and profit from. Most infamously, the promise of his abilities brought Mary Todd Lincoln to his studios twice. The first time was right after Willie Lincoln had died and she hoped to have a picture taken with her dead son. Later, after Abraham Lincoln died, she returned to his studio and he made what is perhaps her most famous photograph. It is a picture of Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghostly image of Abraham Lincoln standing behind her. It is on one hand the picture of a single woman in her grief, some would say struggling with her sanity. Seen another way, a broader way, it is the portrait of a nation that was still grieving from the loss of the president. In his trial for fraud in 1869, it was said the intensity of interest, manifested by the public, has never been surpassed in reference to any criminal investigation. There are thousands, they said, thousands who believed. That is what is interesting to me about William Mumler. There is one way to tell his story in which he is just a petty con man. We can look at these images and see that he was exploiting peoples sense of loss. But there were thousands who believed in him. It would be easy for us to think of them as being less sophisticated than we are. They were naive to fall for this. But it does not take into account how belief works. To understand how thousands believed in him, we need to consider to histories that run parallel with each other throughout the 19th century. Those would be the development of spiritualism into religious idea, which is basically the understanding that the dead linger around us and we can communicate with them. And they want to communicate with us. And, surprisingly, the way that history is entwined with the development of photography. To start with spiritualism, though we often remember it, if you think of it at all as an undertaking as a seance, that was a major force through the 19th century. To compare with it to minority religions which were, at the time, building their reputation and trying to find a place within the protestant United States, in the 1860s, there were more spiritualists then there were jews. There were more spiritualists mediums, the practitioners of spiritualism, then there were catholic priests. Unlike most catholics and jews, the majority of spiritualists were men and women from established and moneyed east coast families. Their pedigrees could not protect them from the losses at the war and in the civil wars wake, Many American cities became home to this form of spiritual searching that was peculiar and poignant. A story begins with three sisters, leah, margaret, and kate fox. Any hamilton fans in the audience . When my book becomes a musical, the fox sisters will be my skyler sisters. In their farmhouse in upstate new york, the fox sisters were bored. This was in a village outside of rochester. He decided to start making mysterious tapping around their house, perhaps to scare their parents. It worked. There parents again to believe that the tops and knocks were coming from inside the house, inside the walls and under the house. They believed that a man had been murdered in their house before they moved in, and he was now trying to communicate with them through their sisters. The fox sisters, when they began to do this, it seemed to be a local affair. Dozens came, friends and families, came to year the sounds coming from the walls of the home. But then hundreds and thousands begin to come. Word spread and others said, fox sisters, please come to us and show us this marvel. They began to tour the United States and would perform their communication with the dead. Soon enough others wanted to get in on this act. Spiritualists mediums spread and sprung up throughout the country. Some made taps and knocks like the fox sisters. Others found various ways to communicate with the dead. Some believed in automatic writing. The idea that you could hold up in and it would race across the page. You could write the words of the dead coming to you. Others believed you could have messages written on your body by the dead. You could roll up your sleeves and there would be a hello from the other side. This spread quickly for a surprising reason. We think today of technology as being a counter to superstition. Advances in technology often seem like ways of living a more reason led life. At the opposite happened in the 19 century. The major technological advances of the age spread this idea of spiritualism. Particularly the telegraph. The ability to communicate hundreds of miles to electric pulses in a strip of wire. This was astounding and it seemed a short jump to think, if we can communicate between boston and new york, maybe with a little bit more electricity, we could communicate from the world of the living to the world of the dead. In a nation haunted by loss, the possibility that technology might bridge that chasm between the living and the dead became an unlikely source of solace for many. So the fox sisters actively compare themselves to be telegraph and they would say that their work predated samuel morse. The spiritual telegraph came first. But the man who really gave a structure to this way of thinking was Andrew Jackson davis. He was known as the seer of poughkeepsie. He suggested i wanted to point out that these spiritual telegraphed was the name of a major spiritualist newspaper popularized by Andrew Jackson davis. He was in a way the st. Paul of spiritualism. The one who gave form and structure to the original gospel of the fox sisters. He popularized the idea of the spiritual telegraphed and suggested that in anticipation of laying of the transatlantic telegraph, that spiritualists could step in and be the ones who sent messages from one side of the ocean to the other. He thought it would work like this. Can you see that . He felt that the best way for people in new york to talk with people in london would be for new yorkers to talk to their dead and the dead wood talks to the dead in london and send the message. If you look at this, you would think, that is crazy. [laughter] peter but when you think about laying thousands of miles of cable at the bottom of the ocean and sending messages across, this seems less crazy. One man thought he should hire more spiritualist correspondents for his newspaper. Other than communication with the dead, what did they actually believe . The most poignant illustration of this that i have seen can be found in a paper published out of boston known as the banner of light. The banner of light was founded by a man named william barry. He wanted to found a publication that would reach the tens of thousands of spiritualists around the United States. The banner of light found its voice when it crossed paths with a particular medium, a woman named fanny condon. She is pictured here in her own spiritual photograph. What she discovered was discovered by William Berry. She made it known that she had the ability to channel the voices of the dead. The dead would speak through her. William berry was so taken by this that he made her his personal medium. They would meet in a room for hours and she would convey messages from the dead. She would write them down and publish in the banner of light in a column that he called the message department. The message department sent messages from the dead to subscribers of the banner of light. So with the benefit of subscribing, you might hear messages from those you were hoping to reach. But the message department became such a popular feature in the banner of light that the readers decided they would like to be in fanny commons presence themselves. So she would hold seances and give voices to the people of the dead for the benefit of people in the room. During the war, it would often be voices from the men in the front, people who were not coming home. And the voices of children who were not coming home who were trying to communicate with their parents and families. In one circle she began to speak in the voice of a child and she said, i want to tell my mama that daddy does not drink here anymore. So this was a popular feature in the banner of light and the circle room they had became overcrowded. William berry started to get jealous that his personal medium was becoming the most famous medium in boston and possibly the country. While this was happening, he had heard that there was a rumor among spiritualist that the Confederate Army had spiritualists working for them. They were giving intelligence to the leaders of the Confederate Army and jeopardizing the war. So William Berry decided to enlist in the union army to bring spiritual muscle. He enlisted in 1862 and was shipped down to the front and killed in antietam. When William Berry passed, he created a problem for fanny condon because the expectation of those they brought together was that he was the leading spiritualist and so when he got to the other side, he would send back what people needed to know. So what would fanny say when it came to speaking in the voice of William Berry . Days and weeks passed and people wondered when William Berry was coming back. Fanny finally spoke up and said, this is the voice of lieutenant barry speaking to you from the spirit world. Im sure youre wondering why it took so long for me to get back to you. I have been busy because on the other side i was publishing a newspaper. [laughter] peter the newspaper on the other side had a circulation much larger than the banner of light. He had a number of assistance he had to manage. And it was a terrible headache and, im sure you can understand, and i am here speaking to you now but i regret to say i will not be back. So that moment tells us a great deal about what spiritualism meant to americans during the time of the civil war. In the face of this violent disruption to the lives and nation, spiritualism offered a strange kind of normalcy. The suggestion that despite hundreds of thousands dead, on the other side, there were all of these mundane details of life to get through. Much like life used to be before the war. So if the world to come was somehow normal, maybe this world could get back to normal, as well. That is what spiritualism was. It started with a parlor trick but ends up becoming, in an accidental way, this receptacle for the greatest loss the country experienced. There are no photographs known of William Berry. I would have shown one to you. When i was in massachusetts i tracked down his grave. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in jamaica plain. His tombstone identifies him as first lieutenant, a member of the sharpshooters, killed at the battle of antietam in 1862, age 37. It says he was one of the founders of the banner of light, with which he was committed until the breaking out of the civil war. So he never visited fanny condon or her circle again but it is fairly certain that she visited him there. That is the spiritualist context of the story. But photography, how is it implicated in the believe that so many had in William Mumler . You could say that from the beginning of a something spooky about taking pictures. It is easy to forget now the miracle of it. The idea of freezing a moment in time. The magic of suddenly things stop. But that uncanny ability had unexpected of facts on how we see and how we remember. This is one of the earliest photographs of deguerre, the inventor of photography. It captures living people but you can barely see them. Do we have a laser . They are right here, can you see them . This is thought to be a man and his clients. But it looks like an empty street, right . This is a boulevard in paris. You see it and think, there is no one out and about. But the fascinating thing about this picture was that at the time he took it, it took 20 minutes to expose a photographic plate. And the only parts of it that are going to be captured are the things remaining still for most of the 20 minutes. When he took this picture, from the moment he began to expose it to the end, the street was crowded with people. People coming and going, carts and horses on the street, all of the commerce you would expect on a boulevard in a major city. That was photographys tradeoff. The ability to immobilize a vital scene allows it to be preserved and enjoyed, seemingly forever. 200 years later we are talking about it. But in that mobility, the vitality is lost. Photography changed forever our understanding of time and what it means for a moment to pass and be gone forever. Photography at this time began to provide people with a new view of seeing the world and their place in it. This is the first aerial photograph of any city in america. Do you recognize it . It is boston. It was taken by a photographer in 1860 by jw black. He enlisted the help of a hot air balloonist. They attached a camera to a basket and rose 1200 feet over boston commons. They took several images of the city of boston. Not everyone was impressed. Some of the journalists of the day said cow pasture quality of boston had been preserved. Well. Boston considered itself the hub of the universe, the home of the great minds in the nation. Then you get 1200 feet above it and you begin to see how small it really is. Photographs were also beginning to allow us to see things we wanted to turn away from. This is the first photograph of an eclipse. The things that were damaging to the eye, that you could not look at, photography gave you a second site, it made hidden things manifest. What was significant and emotional was that photography played a role in how we remembered the dead. Before photography, the faces of our lost loved ones begin to fade as soon as we closed the coffin. Only those with the means to hire a portrait painter might be able to remember the features of their grandfather, their mother, and look act at them a generation or two later and say, this is what this person looked like. Photography suddenly allowed that to happen for many more people in a way that had not been unimaginable. Of all of the 19th century technologies, photography offered the greatest consolation. Photography in and of itself seemed miraculous. The most miraculous was the ability to capture the features of those that were loved and look back on them and see them. So the dead turned out to be perfect portrait models. When samuel morse traveled to france, he had been trained as a torture painter and he saw immediately the possibility of taking portraits with photographs. Deguerre said it would never be possible to take a portrait of a person because we need 20 minutes of exposure. No one will be able to keep still for so long. But it turned out that some humans could keep their faces still. So postmortem photography became one of the early uses up photography, this idea of capturing the faces of the dead before you would never see them again became popular. Particularly with children, children who died in a family, parents would pose them in their sunday best and put their living brothers and sisters around them and post them so they would have some remembrance of, once our family included all of these souls. So photography developed an early connection with death. This took on a particular meaning with the coming of the civil war. At the very moment that William Mumler was taking his first photographs, the photographers of the civil war, Matthew Brady and his protege Alexander Gardner, they were off in the battlefield, becoming the pioneers of photojournalism. In the work they were doing, they were also becoming pioneers of what we would call today fake news. Many had been trained as painters. Im sorry, he is still staring at you. It gets worse. So when they went out to the battlefield to capture the carnage, they were as interested in composition and light as they were in making a record of history. So you can see in this, one of the earliest civil war photographs at the battle of antietam, it is very painterly. It is not a snapshot. It is no surprise that he took time to compose it. You see these lines dissenting upon each other, the fence and road in the distance, the bodies along the fence. The fence acting as a symbolic dividing line at time in which the nation was divided, suggesting that the debtor only on one side. Civil war photographers were almost exclusively photographing the confederate dead. By the time confederate photographers got there, the union dead had been taken away and only confederates were on the battlefield. So these photographs which purport to be objective become a type of wartime propaganda. When shown back home, they are suggestive of a war being won on one side. Another gardner image of the same day. There was an idea that the scarcity of detail in the corners of this photograph are drawing the eye in to the bodies in the sunken roadway and the two Union Soldiers become, in a way, the standin of the viewers of the photograph. It adds a viewer to all of this death. So as the photographers were sending these images home, they began to learn that this is what americans most wanted to see. As difficult as it was to see, as difficult as it is for us to see it on hundred 50 years later, this is what americans wanted. They wanted to see the real effects of the war. One month after the battle of antietam, Matthew Brady staged an exhibit of Alexander Gardners photograph from the battle of antietam. It caused such a stir that the New York Times ran an article saying that the viewers on broadway cared little for the dead at the battle of antietam, but there would be a gathering of skirts and a careful picking of the way down the street. Conversation would be less lively and the general air of pedestrians more subdued as the dead of the battlefield come up to us rarely, even in dreams. Suddenly, photography filled the dreams of the living with the bodies of the dead. Almost immediately, the possibility of seeing what had previously been hidden, not only changed Public Perception of the war, it created competition for more and more of those types of images. Alexander gardner, famously walked the battlefield after the battle was done with a rifle so he could put it near bodies he found so he could take a picture and it would look like he captured the moment right after a soldier was shot. On one occasion, he took a series of photographs of the body at gettysburg on the left and after he was done photographing, looked up a hill 40 yards and found a photogenic spot. He and his assistants dragged the body up the hill and posed it. He put the prop rifle pointed up at the sky and put a blanket under the dead soldiers head. Matthew brady, when he arrived a few days later in gettysburg, the bodies had been taken away. So he went to a particular spot where fighting had been intense and asked an assistant to lay down in the frame and he took his picture and when he sold the picture in his gallery, the caption said, confederate dead at battle of gettysburg. Sure enough, because figures like Alexander Gardner and Matthew Brady were doing this and making a name for themselves and selling their images, other lesser photographers decided to get in on the action. Four months after gettysburg, a local photographer named peter weaver decided that he wanted to take images of the dead of gettysburg. So he enlisted several living Union Soldiers, brought them back to the same spot where Alexander Gardner had taken his picture of the dead, and he had them lay around on the rocks. He put the rifles down and threw hats here and there. They are all tumbling down the rocks and he had one or two of them standing as if they just discovered bodies. After the picture was taken, they dusted themselves off. It might be going too far to compare moving bodies with claiming to move souls, but all of this understanding, the way photography was picturing data for time, it helps us explain why mumlers arrest for fraud in 1869 captured the imagination of the nation and filled headlines for months. In all of this coverage of mumler there was this feeling that photography had death and there was an understanding that what we now know about photography and what people were learning at the time, the possibility of a photograph that told the whole truth seemed as unlikely as any ghost. So his trial in 1869 was a novelty. It became a circus that drew national and international attention. It was something to lighten the mood of a very dark decade. There was something at stake in this. It was a time when questions of belief were inseparable from new technologies that were remaking the nation. Telegraph, electricity, photography. It was all new. It was all baffling. All of it seemed utterly fantastic until suddenly it was everywhere, making it difficult for many to separate genuine marvels from shams. Even though those creating images do not fully appreciate the difference of the time. Some were moving bodies, some claiming to move souls. They were all drawing a line between fact and fiction in their art. For all of these apparition is, this is the reason why my book has this in the title, it is not just the story of a single photographer, but all of the artists that had been learning about their responsibility of their art and possibilities of deception. The ability to make and see images as never before was deeply unsettling and challenged perception. If all of this begins to start sounding familiar about technological disruption that makes it difficult to tell fact from fiction, you begin to get a sense of why i wrote the book and wrote it now. We have a power now to make and share images as never before. We should ask ourselves, to what extent we are also held in the power of those images. These people believed mumler. What might the images that we see cause us to believe . As it was 150 years ago, this is a moment when we are all newly implicated in the creation and manipulation of pictures and personas. No less than him, we are surrounded by invisible forces. In our social media feeds, it is impossible to know if some of the entities we encounter are actually flesh and blood. On twitter, they could be russian ghosts. On facebook, currently there is a dead population of 60 million. If you look at these accounts, these accounts have been dead on facebook. The living interact with them, talk with them. If you stumble on one of these conversations and you do not know that one half of the conversation is deceased, it seems perfectly normal. More and more it is becoming a way we memorialize and remember. We are all becoming apparitionists of a sort. The question that binds all of us to those who believe in mumler is the question that continues to haunt me after telling his story. That is, how will we know when we can no longer tell the difference . Thank you. [applause] i would love to hear some questions. I have a microphone. Please give me one moment to get to you, ok . Two quick things. In the beginning, that transcendentalists come to the picture and all of these people who appear as apparitions, were the actors . Were they paid . Peter mumler had two moments of notoriety. In boston he is first celebrated. Everyone comes to him. Boston is the spiritualist capital of america at the time. But then they begin to turn on him. They think, we believe this might be possible, but we are not sure if we believe and trust mumler. But we believe it is possible to photograph ghosts so lets find out if this is happening. So some of the spiritualist began to notice that mumlers ghosts were alive and walking the streets of boston. A woman who had been on the scene took straightforward portraits. So presumably they had a back catalogue that could be used as ghosts. The one woman who is known who was made aware that she had become a ghost in one of his photographs was very upset about it because in the picture they used she was wearing a hat that was so much out of style, she did not want to be depicted that way for eternity. So the spiritualist of boston rose up against him and took him out of town. He needed a bigger place to practice so he went to new york city. So yes, some of the living recognized themselves as being depicted as the dead. And spiritualism and transcendentalism to be seen as different responses to more conventional religious perspectives in the 19th century. You would find some who had some overlap but they are two responses to the need for a different type of religious expression. Today, we think of people who define themselves as spiritual but not religious because they do not like the sound of one of the terms that they like the other. Both spiritualists and transcendentalists wanted in some ways to leave behind traditional new england religions and find new ways of expressing. Spiritualists communicated with the dead, traditionalists focused more on the east. What does it take to be put on trial for fraud . There seems to be a lot of fraud going around but we are not taking everyone to trial for it. So what allows us to actually put someone on trial for fraud . Peter at the time it was a matter of the mayor of new york wanting to protect tourists. There was this idea but there were too many city swindlers in new york that were targeting tourists. There was one scam, you would go to a store and buy something and they would say, let me wrap that up for you and say they would wrap it up and you would bring it home and when you opened it at home it was a box of sawdust. So the mayor wanted to put an end to these petty swindles so he put his chief marshal on the case to try to bring down mumler. He had also had a couple complaints. It was brought to his attention by someone who had interacted with him and went down to city hall and wrote down his concerns in the complaint book. You could go to city hall in manhattan and there was a big book and you could write your complaint and the chief marshal would look through the book and sort out which complaints he wanted to deal with. So it happen in this context of a lot of swindles happening and trying to put an end to it. And it blows up from there because there is this crusading prosecutor who recognizes this as an opportunity to rise up from a low level lawyer and to make his name in a case that had some press attention behind it. So he decides it is not just going to be one small trial, he is going to put spiritualism on trial. Hes going to show that this set of beliefs is not appropriate for what he determined was a christian nation. How do these spiritualists reconcile themselves with their christian upbringings . How did the mainstream christian protestants deal with this . In particular, i would think this would not go over well. Peter great question. Most of the spiritualist would not have said that they were not christians. They thought of this as a new development within christianity. But the technologies allowed us to now communicate with spirits in a way that had been missing. They also were quick to point out the number of spirits that appeared in the bible. This becomes a point in the trial itself. Mumlers defense attorney insists on reading a chapter in the bible to point out the number of spirits that appear to show that this was within Orthodox Christian belief and he poses the question, had there been cameras in biblical times, if they had taken photographs of the spirits, would you have objected to that . At the same time you do find various protestant denominations trying to put an end to spiritualist circles meeting in their churches because they were disruptive. [indiscernible] was there any room for it , an example of laughing and having fun with this or would that have been inappropriate . Peter i think that was entirely right. You find a lot in the press at the time, in this headline, goblins of all sort. There were referring to the people who were there to watch the trial. So there was a lot of having fun with the spiritualist and mocking them for their earnest beliefs. Certainly while those who believed in this wholeheartedly, much of the tone in the press was very mocking. There are articles every day in every paper at the time continuing to make this a spectacle, all the while laughing about it. I cant believe this is going on in our courts. But still feeding the spectacle. So there was certainly a lot of derision. Mumler, when he tells his story, he takes pains to say he was not a believer and he used to mock spiritualists. He may be said that to lay the claim of conversion, trying to take, even i who would make fun of spiritualists, if even i now believe, it must now be a truth thing i am telling you. Please wait for the microphone to come up. Two questions. If spiritualism was on trial, this might be difficult to measure as of numbers of practitioners, but did this cause people to renounce their beliefs and back away . Was it an opportunity for other alternative groups or people who might have been competing for alternative space or decry spiritualism, you know, not like, somehow the fake alternative spirituality . Peter there was a huge amount of good and bad publicity. For everything that you had, you had remarkable testimony and the genuineness of the photographs. So there was a need in the press of presenting both sides, even though one side was ludicrous. The one side who believed did not believe less by the end of the trial. The press presented many of the testimonies verbatim. Sitting in court and defending their believes did not trouble them. They would even say, i do not understand it, but i believe these photographs. You look at them, and they are very convincing. That is something worth dwelling on. When we look at these photographs, they are not convincing to us at all. Anyone who has had a oneday experience in photoshop can create these images. At a time, photography was new enough and they do not see images the way we do now. They were willing to encounter them as a possible reality in a way that we are not. So the consequence of the trial did not hurt the spiritualist business. There were several million spiritualists at the time. So there was this idea that it was growing and, look out, it is coming for your churches. But it did not convince those who believed to stop believing. You can look back at the Mary Todd Lincoln photograph. She sought him out three years after his trial. Three years after he had been in the press and derided in the press, Mary Todd Lincoln still sought him out and had a photograph taken and believed in it. She showed it to her friends and said, here is proof that abraham is still with me. That gets directly to my question. Other than hannah green who said she got advice from her ghost doctor, i am curious whether you came across accounts of these living subjects of the photographs, my first thought was, maybe he had gotten some photos of relatives, but now that i know there were living people walking around, i am curious what it is they were deriving from those particular incarnations of ghosts, especially if they did not know them or recognize them. It did you come across any specific accounts of what they were seeking and what connection they drew . Peter there is a fellow, mr. Adams of massachusetts, he founded adams express. He was the fedex of his day. He shipped things between boston and new york, traveling on cart, boat, and rail. The business grew and it became a major transport company during the civil war on the union and confederate sides. During the war, not only did it ship arms but it became the major mover of corpses from the front back home. They transported coffins back home. So this fellow who became a spiritualist got rich in part by moving bodies around. So he was haunted by this. The account that mumler provides about his interaction with adams is that he provides adams with photographs and the spirit in the photograph is a young man, it is representative of the many thousands of young men who his company were moving around the country and suddenly he is allowed to see a spirit representation. So you come across stories like that where it makes sense that an abstract of an unrecognizable image would still be meaningful. You also find accounts where a wife has lost her husband and she will swear that the picture she sees as her husband, even though it is not a photograph that has ever been taken of her husband. So a lot of it is this relationship between seeing and believing. If you believe the image you see is your dead husband and you are allowed to have this understanding that he stood in the room with you at least one last time, it conditions how you see the image. So it is not always the case that they were clearly recognizable and that others would recognize them in the same way as those who were emotionally convinced would. One last question. Was there any relationship tween the spiritualists who thought they could photograph images of people and communicate with them with any kind of Police System at the time about things like haunted houses or haunted battlefields or stories for example of someone saying, like in gothic novels, a mans wife passes away and he takes a new wife and the old wife comes back to haunt them . Was there any of this at the time . Peter spiritualists didnt see a haunting as a negative condition. They tried to create the circumstances where haunting occurred. They felt the dead were always around us. So it was perfectly normal for the dead to keep company with the living and to try to communicate with them. Today we are a haunted nation and we have always been. The numbers i have heard lately are that 30 of americans today believe they have seen a ghost and many more believe they can communicate with the dead. That they are in touch with some spirit of someone who has gone. This has endured throughout American History. There is a great passage in the legend of Sleepy Hollow where Washington Irving talks about being delighted as a child about stories of haunted bridges barns and houses. This has endured. It continues today and, as i said, i think the hauntings we soon begin to experience will be wrapped up in our rapidly changing technology. Especially as we start to have immersive realities, it will be impossible to know when we are dealing with entities that are flesh and blood on the other side or ideas. That is really an exciting place to be but also frightening. It remains the haunted part of this story for me. Thank you all. [applause] once again for peter, thank you for being here. [applause] if you would would like to get the book, it is in our gift shop. If you have a copy and would like it signed, please form a line where i am and you can bring the book up to the table and have peter sign it. Otherwise, have a wonderful evening and stay on the lookout for strange things. [laughter] in the 1968 olympics, does that relate to what were seeing today with Football Players kneeling for the National Anthem . You can be featured during our program. Join the conversation on facebook at facebook. Com cspan history, and on twitter at cspan history. American history tv is on cspan3 every weekend, featuring is in tours, archival films, and programs on the presidency, the civil war, and more. Heres a clip from a recent program. Todd,e is lincoln, mary lincolns oldest son robert todd , who actually posed for a first graph that within me used for the painting. For art in this time, i want to get you out of the idea that its all about emotion, expression, artists who paint from their souls. Media, itsusiness, about striking while the iron is hot, while people are interested. You imagine that, your father is assassinated, you go to a Photographers Gallery and then have your portrait taken the way you thought you might have been morning when you were in that room that is much too small. It was called the rubber room, the room just keeps getting bigger as people into. They have to show everybody that came that night. Watch this and other American History programs her website, where all our video is archived. history. W. Cspan. Org next, looking at the complicated history between u. S. And russian leaders over the last century. The discussions included assessments of roosevelt, kennedy, nixon, bush, and clinton, as well as their russian counterparts. The focus of the program is the postworld war ii relationship that is just under one hour. First, the board of distinguished professor at the university of connecticut where he teaches