 Good evening everyone. It's so lovely that you came to see me. You're so kind. So bless you all. It's a pleasure to be in the space with all of you and in Ken Ellingwood and also Tanya Stone and today we have an event called a book reading and discussion with Ken Ellingwood who wrote First of Fall and this is the book that you can see right up here. And also the book is outside the hall if you're interested in purchasing one by Phoenix, which is one of our local bookstores and there will be a signing right after I was told. Yes, okay. Thank you Ken. So I'll also thank you to those who are Zoom on Zoom. It's a pleasure to have you here as well. This event is sponsored by EHS in the library, CCM and the core. We thank you very much for making this happen with us and also new, which is the naming educational whiteness, which is a group is comprised of a few faculty and staff who are invested in examining the genealogy of whiteness within higher education but also outside of other spaces and disciplines. So tonight's event, just to give you a rundown of what you can expect, tonight's event will begin with a dialogue between Ken Ellingwood, author of First of Fall and Champlain Professor, Program Director, Professional Writing and author Tanya Stone and there will be time after for discussion and questions, so please hold on to those. And who is Ken Ellingwood? Well, according to this bio, Ken is a writer and a long time, former correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. During a career for the time spanning two decades, Ken wrote stories for more than a dozen countries, including from zones of armed conflict in Iraq and Gaza Strip in the Israeli-Lebanese border. He has covered earthquakes in Iran and Haiti, palpable visit to Cuba and three protests in Lebanon and devastating drug war in Mexico. Ken has won numerous journalism awards and is also the author of Hard Line, Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexican border, an account of his years covering immigration. He spent early years as a reporter in Waterville, Maine near the childhood home of Elijah Lovejoy, the subject of First of Fall. And after 20 years of life overseas, Ken now resides in Burlington with his wife, Monique Taylor, or our provost, Dr. Taylor, and their daughter, Anselm, now for Tanya Stone. Tanya Stone is on the faculty on Champlain College and is the program director of our professional writing program. She is the author and best known for narrative nonfiction books that focus on telling over looked histories such as Her Courage Has No Color, which earned an image award from an AACP, and also is the author of Girl Rising. Not sure if folks are familiar with that, but that was a pretty prolific book and story. And with that, I'm going to cue Professor Stone and Ken and have them in dialogue. Okay, great. Thank you, Faith. It's so nice to be here with you, Ken. I had the pleasure of meeting Ken on their very first night at the welcome reception, and we quickly kind of discovered that we both do similar things outside of teaching, so I'm really, really happy to be here with you. I'm happy to be able to talk to you about your new book. So diving into this book led me into all sorts of questions, of course, but might we start off by simply establishing the genre this book belongs to, called by a variety of names? Creative nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, literary nonfiction. Can you speak to that a little bit and to your expertise as both a journalist and a writer of narrative nonfiction? Sure. Yes, thank you, Tanya. And I'd like to first thank everyone who was involved in setting up this event, the folks at Champlain, and in particular those in the library. Emily Christ and Erica have helped out a great deal in terms of getting me here and getting this event. I also want to thank Phoenix for co-sponsoring the event. They've got some books outside and we'll do a signing after, so that's not unimportant. And I'd like to thank anyone who's watching this via Zoom. I appreciate as well all of you who braved the rain to come out and spend an hour or so with us tonight. As to the question of the genre, I have always referred to this as a narrative nonfiction. It is the same, we're talking about the same animal, whether it's creative nonfiction. Some people have referred to literary journalism in the past, a form that was kind of emerged in the 1960s through magazine writing, people like Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote. There are various forms of it. The way I look at it is that it is true, first of all. Every fact, every assertion, every quotation, every description is true. And I know it's true because I researched it and I then went back through the book with a pen after I had a manuscript in hand and underlined every single fact and went back and double checked the facts. But the point here is that it is nonfiction that reads like fiction. It should feel like a movie, in my opinion. And that's the way I've approached this story. I think it does in that it has movement, it has characters, it has complexity and texture in the same way that good fiction has all of those elements. In a way, it's harder to write this kind of narrative because it is true. And when you're looking at somebody, we're talking in this, the subject of this book is Elijah Lovejoy, who lived in the story, takes place in the 1830s. So one has to find the sources in order to make that story feel real and urgent. Exactly. And to those journalism students in the room, you've already heard us talk about this ad nauseam, but you can never hear this too much because people mistakenly think that these narrative nonfiction books that read so beautifully like a story are fictionalized or they're historical fiction, etc. But yes, tons and tons and tons of research look in the back matter of his book. So now to the themes of first to fall. Would you like to start just by talking a little bit about and grounding the audience about freedom of the press? But yes, the book, the book is essentially a work about freedom of the press. And it is set during the age of slavery as the subtitle indicates. And it has very much to do with the protagonist Elijah Lovejoy's campaign against slavery as a newspaper editor. So I'll talk a little bit more later about him and his biography. What we put up here is the text of the First Amendment. You all know the First Amendment, but it's never a bad thing to be reminded of what it says, right? The actual words. This is the oxygen of our democracy. Without the First Amendment, we would have essentially an autocracy in many ways that resembles those in places like Russia, China, and other places that I could keep listing. In terms of the press, which is the main focus for us today, it's interesting to, we all think, well, First Amendment, freedom of the press. Look at how little the First Amendment says about freedom of the press, right? Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. That's it. There is no further mention of the press anywhere else in the Bill of Rights. There is no further explanation of what is meant by this. And I should add, the First Amendment, we all think of it as the First Amendment, that must be because it's so important. The First Amendment actually started off as the Third Amendment. There were two others that were discarded in the course of the tussle over getting the Constitution ratified. And the First Amendment rose to two spots to become the First Amendment. But we all rely on the First Amendment. When I say we, in particular, I mean journalists. Without the First Amendment, we can't do our work. This becomes important in the story of Lovejoy because he was operating at a time in American history when the power of the First Amendment and the limits on the First Amendment had never really been tested. And I think we'll have an opportunity to talk a little bit more about that. But at the moment, I just wanted to, you know, kind of put the First Amendment in your mind and then we can discuss what it means to the Lovejoy story. Great. I really found your origin story regarding why you decided to write this story about Lovejoy. Really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about how you were inspired by your students in China and perhaps also how your location at that time affected your research? So after about 20 years at the LA Times where I had a number of assignments, I set off on a new direction carried along by my lovely wife to another life in all, but still overseas in China. And I was named as a visiting fellow at a Chinese university in Nanjing called Nanjing University. And they wanted me to teach about American journalism, believe it or not. And they wanted me to teach practice like technique, you know, reporting. They also wanted me to teach a class on history, history of American journalism. And I love the idea of that because I thought what a great way to learn about American history, you know, with journalism as kind of a character. So I did a section talking about abolitionism and slavery and journalism's role in dealing with both of those. And Lovejoy comes up and he's not a very big, you know, he wasn't the focus of my presentation. I didn't really think much about him at the time. I had heard of Lovejoy, but he wasn't somebody I knew much about. But in the course of talking to the students about him and what he did, and the fact is that I'll tell you now, he is known as the first American martyr to the Free Press. He's killed for his writing. That's not a spoiler. I think we pretty much know how his life goes. And the students that were in front of me, Chinese students, were really moved by his story. They really loved this guy and wrote about him in ways that I found very, very moving myself. And I said, this is really interesting. This story really carries, right? It can go overseas to a place that doesn't know freedom of the press and still have resonance and decided then that I would try to dig into his story a bit more. And I did so, but I'm living in China, which is not a great place to do research on an American who grew up in New England, met his death in the Midwest, or which was then the frontier, and have materials scattered all over library collections everywhere. And so I, facing those obstacles, I set out any way to do what I could. And I found ways to, first of all, mine the internet for an amazing amount of material. I was able, for example, to find letters that his family wrote to each other in the 1820s by hand. And they were collected in boxes and digitized, they were scanned at Texas Tech University. So there I am sitting in my living room in Wenjing, China, on my computer reading letters that were housed in Texas. And then when I came home on HomeLeave, I tried to make it to collections and archives and got a lot of help from very kind librarians all over the country who scanned documents for me, helped me locate things that I needed. And when I was in the States, I moved around and looked as much as I could into whatever collections there were. Any non-fiction writer will tell you, right? The librarians are the real rock stars. The librarians are the real rock stars. It can't be said enough. It really, they're amazing. And they're always up for this challenge. That's impossible. No, it's not. Here's what we'll do. And I was amazed by that. I never get tired of like asking a librarian a question and they say, yeah, we can do that. And every time I'm like, really, you can do that. That's amazing. Yeah, it's really, really marvelous. Well, down in my extra set of questions that I have, if we have, you know, infinite amount of time, I have more primary source questions for you, but I'll let those lie for now. Can you discuss one of the big questions, big with a capital B that you wanted to tackle that you told me about, which was, how can you have a country discuss its greatest problem when you're not allowed to talk about it? Elijah Lovejoy was a newspaper editor at a moment in American history when, and this surprised me greatly, I would say of the things that I learned in researching this book, one of the most striking things that I learned was that in the period leading up to the Civil War, and I'm talking now about the 1830s, which is well before the Civil War, it was not only taboo to discuss slavery or debate slavery, it was actually outlawed in much of the United States of America. People who wanted, like Lovejoy, to write in public in opposition to slavery were in the South not allowed to. There were laws throughout the South that punished up to, including death, anyone who would write what was called incendiary commentary about slavery, that is to say anything that might be construed as provocative or that might inspire what was then called servile insurrection or rebellion by enslaved people. But it didn't stop there. This sort of ban against discussing or criticizing slavery, what I call in the book a vast suppression campaign, the likes of which this country had never seen before during peacetime and has not seen since during peacetime, included a ban on discussing slavery in the halls of the U.S. House of Representatives. It's a remarkable, it's a remarkable act of censorship when the very people we send to Congress, or the people at that time sent to Congress, could not discuss one of the most, if not the most profound and problematic issues of the country's history. That gag rule lasted for eight years. And then there was another thing which Lovejoy eventually experienced personally. The 1830s, pardon me, was a period of a lot of mob activity. And so people like Lovejoy faced violence. And the climate was obviously very, very restrictive. Yeah. Well, that'll lead us sort of into, if you could paint a general picture of who Elijah Lovejoy was, including, you called him an accidental and a reluctant abolitionist in the book. And it was interesting to me because his transformation was gradual, even though he was certainly dogged in that slow march, right? Can you talk about the significance of that? And also kind of expound a little bit more on the vastness of anti-abolitionism in places all over the North, which people may find surprising. Yeah. Yeah. Among the another one of the surprises to me in researching the book. So Elijah Lovejoy was a New Englander born in Maine in 1802, grew up in a religious household in Central Maine. His father was a sort of itinerant preacher, not a very successful guy actually. His mother was more the glue of the family, had been brought up in a very strict religious family as well. And the Lovejoys were sort of imbued with this kind of stern Calvinism of the time that dominated. They were very aware of their religious duties and all of that. He was a great student. He went to the school that is now known as Colby College and graduated at the top of his class, really quite a brilliant young man, a very good writer, and decided to make his way into newspapering as a way to exercise his writing talent. And when I say that he became a reluctant abolitionist, Elijah Lovejoy, one of the things I love about his story is that he was not a very nice person when we first encounter him and he goes through these changes. One of them is that when he begins to write about slavery, he has been ordained as a minister, so he's got this double job. He's a preacher and he's a newspaper editor at the same time. He blends those two things together to use the written word to do God's work. And this is a period of time, the 1820s, the 1830s, of great flowering of religious energy in the country. It's called the Second Great Awakening. There were these revival meetings all over the country where thousands of people would show up at these camp revivals and they'd heave and scream and they'd do all these kind of theatrical things, but be converted at the end of it all. So he emerges during this period of great religious energy which commanded people to be active, to solve the country's sins. And that's the approach that he took, was to find sin wherever it resided. Drinking, for example, he was part of the temperance movement, which is to stop drinking, right, or stop people from drinking. And one of the causes that caught his eye as a church man and as a newspaper editor was the issue of slavery. He moved to St. Louis, which is in Missouri, a slave state, and for the first time in his life actually saw the institution of slavery all around him. He believed still that abolitionism, that is the organized movement to abolish slavery, which was at that time championed by people like William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, were too radical. They were too militant that if we freed all of these humans who had been held in bondage, what would happen to them? How would they possibly be absorbed into American society? And he took a much more sort of religious based at first, a much more religious based attitude, which is to worry after the souls of enslaved people and not so much about their lives. And then he would later evolve and to the point where he became very concerned about their lives and about the conditions that they were living in and the whole idea that there could be people in this country who were held in bondage. And so he becomes by the end a committed abolitionist and he adopts many of the views that were held by people that he had seen as wild-eyed radicals. Now it wasn't just Lovejoy who saw abolitionists as wild-eyed radicals, most of the country saw abolitionists as wild-eyed radicals. And there's a really kind of a, I don't know, I think it's a, I think it's a heartening lesson in all of this, which is that what one day seems really radical and crazy is another day vindicated, right? And we look back at this period and maybe some of us think, well, of course, people were against slavery, except those who owned human beings. But in fact, that isn't true. It took a great deal of courage for anyone to stand up against the institution of slavery. For some of the reasons I mentioned earlier, mob violence and the laws that existed to prevent that, but also the American public didn't really want to hear about it. And including, you know, the North, where, you know, people believe with a great deal of smugness that, you know, we didn't have those problems up here. The North was against slavery. The South was, you know, was in, was practicing. And that's really not true. Much of the resistance that abolitionists encountered was in the North. And it's, you know, worth remembering that, knowing that. Wouldn't be true to my own feminist roots if I didn't throw in a shout out here to all the women who signed all those petitions, right? Because the women made up a huge number of those signatures on those petitions. And we're sort of like out in the trenches getting it done. Correct. Can you talk a bit about Lovejoy's death as well as your view of how he, I think in your view or words even created a modern perception of journalism? Lovejoy was, as he evolved and his writings evolved, he was using a religious newspaper, his religious newspaper called The Observer, to talk about slavery and criticize it. He was under great pressure, both in St. Louis and to, he was under great pressure in St. Louis to stop writing about slavery. He was harassed. He was threatened. His, his, his, his press was destroyed by mobs. He was chased out of the state of Missouri and took refuge across the Mississippi River in the state of Illinois, which was, you'll all remember from your history, ostensibly a free state, right? Well, he didn't have to worry about this sort of stuff anymore, but he was wrong. He in fact did have to keep worrying about it because the southern part of Illinois shares much of the southern sensibilities. And the audience was no more, you know, accommodating of his viewpoint than they were in, in St. Louis. He's for months terrorized. His family is, is terrorized. His, their home is attacked. He meets, you know, mobs on darkened roads and who are all threatening him and trying to get him to stop publishing his articles criticizing slavery, saying that he was a disruptive force in the community. Even community leaders in both places in St. Louis and across the river in, in Alton, Illinois, were organizing in meetings to try to get him to stop. And ultimately, he refused. And he took the two, you know, passions of his life, the crusade against slavery and his deep and abiding belief in freedom of the press. And he, he kind of welded them together into a, into a cause that became kind of where the two were inseparable from each other. And he eventually is chased down in defending one of his presses from a mob is killed by the mob in a, in a, in a riot in Alton, Illinois. When I say that he was in some ways, you know, the force, powerful force forward for modern journalism. What I mean is that Lovejoy believed that journalism, that newspapers should tackle the issues of the day. And that would be, you know, even in, in, even when that, when those, when that writing of those pieces that he was writing were unpopular. And after that, I think we can see that same sensibility dominating in, in journalism, the idea that the public interest must be served by addressing any and all issues, you know, in the public realm. That was, that's a very modern conception. That's not how Americans necessarily thought of, of things before that time. There were state libel laws, for example. You know, we looked up earlier about at, at the First Amendment. Well, the First Amendment is all well and good. But the view that the country had at the time of Lovejoy was that the federal government's protections were not as important as state laws that existed. So you essentially had a federal guarantee of rights that was superseded by whatever was happening at the state level. And the, that problem, and it really, it really was a problem for, for a lot of people, wasn't really addressed until after the Civil War with the, with the passage of the 14th Amendment, in which case the protections in the Constitution were effectively nationalized. But when I say that, you know, he was sort of the, that moment was, was a turning point for modern journalism. I'm talking about his, you know, concern for public issues to be discussed publicly. Hi. I think it was also note, notable that by the time he was killed, he had also escaped attempts on his life many times, including one riveting story where he literally was surrounded by a mob and kind of quelled them a little bit by saying, can you please take this medicine to my ailing wife? Right? Kind of amazing tactic. Yeah. He, you know, it's almost, there's, there's a bit that's almost kind of comical about how often these guys were after him, how often they, they destroyed, you know, you have to remember a printing press in those days was kind of this apparatus made of a big piece of iron and wood and then this big plate that came down. It wasn't a very sophisticated or, or, or daunting kind of piece of machinery, but, and so easily destroyed. And he had three separate printing presses destroyed. And then they would destroy it. And then he would get another one. And they'd have it shipped, you know, to him. And then they destroy that one. And then he'd get another one. And he was just not going to be stopped. When he met a mob or a group of men on a darkened road, while he was out getting medicine for his wife, they were going to tar and feather him. Which is a very painful, yeah, it's a very painful act of violence. And he basically said, you can do whatever you want to me, you know, but at least get this to, you know, at least get this medicine to my wife. And, and they eventually, they let him go. They didn't, they didn't tar and feather him. Okay, so we have two questions left. I'm going to let you pick things. We're running out of time. So this question is, what are some of the parallels of this story to today? Um, as a, as a, as a, as a journalist, one always wants to be relevant, right? I never intended this book to be relevant. I only intended it to be a really good story, which it is. And then about halfway during, in the process of my research, I realized that, oh my God, the attack on the U.S. press is becoming worrisome. And I guess I can say the name out loud, Donald Trump, and his attacks on the news media became to me a very worrisome trend. And I think to a lot of journalists who now detect that the climate in which they operate is in the United States, at least, is much more fraught, is much more dangerous than it was before. I spent much of my professional reporting life abroad in fairly, sometimes in fairly perilous places, but you don't usually have to worry about that reporting, you know, on U.S. soil. The lessons I think of lovejoy, that is killed by a mob who wanted to shut them up, and then to look at a campaign that derides the press as the enemy of the people, and denigrates their reporting as fake news, leads to moments that look like this. We all remember January 6th of 2021. What people don't tend to pay much attention to, pardon me, is that before the mob of that day actually arrived on the steps of the U.S. capital and started bashing it and knocking the doors in and breaking windows, they attacked the news media first. And there's a quotation that goes with this where one of the members of the mob is boasting in a text message to a friend how much damage they did to CNN's equipment. You can see AP equipment here. And I think that this is an example of what a lot of us have been talking about in the last several years in terms of expressing worry over the state of press freedom in the United States. One of the points that I hope to get across in the book is that people like lovejoy had to fight to defend the freedom of the press that we have in this country. We have a First Amendment. It's up there. But you know what? It was kind of half baked. It wasn't fully cooked by the time lovejoy lived and practiced. And those rights had to be established. And they were over the next century and more through various Supreme Court rulings. To illustrate, again, a little bit more about the mood, this is a t-shirt that's actually being sold out there. So it's funny ha ha, I suppose, to some people. But this is a worrisome piece of evidence. And I hope that the lessons of lovejoy help to remind us that freedom of the press isn't a given. We don't have it just because. We have it because people fought for it, died for it, and tried to defend it against attack and erosion. And that it's fragile. And it can go away. And I'm going to know many of you in this room are students of writing and students of journalism. And you hopefully think about these things. But even a broader audience, I hope, will think about those issues in reading the book. Is it time to move to the next? Is it 7.40? 7.38? Okay. Do you want to move to the reading? Sure. So Ken is now going to share a short reading and then do some Q&A. So please, when he's done with this brief reading, please ask your questions. I know a lot of the journalism students have questions. And we have worked in plenty of time for that, so don't be shy. I'm going to. Please do. Please do. Okay. I'll go up there. Can you hear me? Let me set this up just a little bit. How's the audio? Okay. I mentioned earlier that Lovejoy was under various types of pressure in the communities in which he lived to stop writing about slavery. That campaign went on for months and months as the book details. Near the end, and you can see it's getting close to the end of the book. Near the end, there's a critical meeting. It's kind of a do or die moment for Lovejoy. A meeting at which he is being told by the leaders of the community of Alton that he basically needs to stop publishing his newspaper. And there's not a lot of wriggle room left. He believes he's exhausted most of his options. He's tried to defend himself and defend freedom of the press. And he has one last chance to persuade this group to let him continue. What I'm going to read you is a section that describes that attempt. He appears at this meeting, and this is what happens. A racket of voices had swamped Alton during the previous eight days. But one voice had been conspicuously missing from the din, Lovejoy's. His moment had come. The sturdily built minister raised his frame and strode calmly to the front of the room. His round face gave away none of the strain that had enveloped him and his family for weeks, nor of the sentiments he was about to reveal. When Lovejoy spoke, his tone was, quote, deep, tender, and subdued, end quote. Those are the words of a colleague of his who wrote all this in a diary. He struck a deferential note at first, but soon was working his way up and down a scale of emotions that passed through indignation, sorrow, and defiance. I feel, Mr. Chairman, that this is the most solemn moment of my life, Lovejoy began. The editor said he meant no disrespect, but he was prevented by his conscience from saying the words that he knew the men before him wanted to hear. Lovejoy did not know Edwards, one of the leaders, but he expressed surprise that the senator could have placed such a set of resolutions on the table. Mr. Chairman, I do not admit that it is the business of this assembly to decide whether I shall or shall not publish a newspaper in this city. I have a right to do it, Lovejoy said. What I wish to know of you is whether you will protect me in the exercise of this right. Lovejoy argued that presenting the problem as one of insufficient compromise was specious. There was really only one legitimate side here, not two. The only question was what would prevail, the law or the mob's impulses? What have I to compromise, Lovejoy asked? It was true that he had offered to give up control of the observer, but it was one thing to do so voluntarily and quite another to yield to the demand of a mob. The latter be assured, I never will do, he said. Lovejoy was aware that he stood alone against larger, more powerful forces. I am but one, and you are many, he told the group. You can crush me if you will, but I shall die at my post, for I cannot and will not forsake it. Why should I flee from Alton? Is this not a free state? As Lovejoy continued, his remarks gained urgency. The editor said it was not the group's job to indulge him with its mercy. He did not need or desire its purported compassion. Lovejoy was making his final appeal to the jury, while at the same time signaling to the panel that he was above whatever verdict it might render. He had broken no laws, deserved no punishment. Will conduct like this stand the scrutiny of your country, of posterity, above all of judgment day? He asked. His speech now seemed directed to a wider audience than the men seated in Hogan's store. In his seething comments, Lovejoy might easily have been responding to the accumulation of indignities that had been heaped upon him during the previous two years in St. Louis and Alton. The attacks on his presses and his character, the roadside harassment, the siege of his home, the unceasing threats, the utter failure of anyone in a position of authority to intercede on his behalf. You may burn me at the stake, as they did Macintosh at St. Louis, or you may tar and feather me, or throw me in the Mississippi as you have often threatened to do, Lovejoy challenged. But you cannot disgrace me. I and I alone can disgrace myself. Lovejoy's poise broke away in pieces as he ticked off a catalog of woes. He finally yielded to tears while recalling the threats on his life, and the heavy told that the months of ravages had taken on Celia, that's his wife. I am pursued as a partridge upon the mountain. I am pursued as a felon through your streets, he accused. And to the guardian power of the law, I look in vain for that protection against violence, which even the vilest criminal may claim. Lovejoy's audience, which also included some of his friends and the confounding Mayor Crumb, was wrapped by this figure before them. The hard faces of several were wet with tears, even those of his enemies. Beecher would recall this later. Lovejoy had laid bare his beliefs, unfurled his final appeal. He concluded on a note that could best be described as a determined resignation. He was going nowhere, but ready to pay the price. It is because I fear God that I am not afraid of all who oppose me in this city. No, sir, the contest has commenced here, and here it must be finished, Lovejoy vowed. If I fall, my grave shall be made in Alton, and not very many days after this, Lovejoy was dead. I think now would be a great time to take any questions you might have, or points you would like to offer, or comments, or really anything. I'm here to answer. Yes, my biggest challenge was nobody was alive. I'm used to interviewing people, right? I mean, I spent a whole career finding people to talk to, and going to places where they are, where the story is, and seeing it, and talking to people. And this is a whole different, and my previous book was about the US-Mexico border, which I reported on the ground. And I'm used to doing it that way. So what was difficult for me was dealing with a world, trying to recreate a world where there's nobody around who I can talk to and say, is this so? Yeah, but what about that? And then I had to answer those questions in the material that I could dig up in the research. I did go to the city of Alton, and partly, I mean, obviously, you kind of have to, right? But part of my impulse in going there was just to have that sensation of place. As a writer, I've always really loved stories that have to do with place, that set you in a location. And I guess that's why I like being a foreign correspondent. You go to a place, right? And being in Alton helped me see, I could see the river. I know what the Mississippi looks like there. I know that there are these limestone bluffs along the river that are very beautiful. And I could see where his printing shop was once located. And that all really helped, but I never found anybody to interview. Thank you. So, okay. You were saying that Lovejoy's writings were deeply rooted in scripture. I was wondering if, just kind of based on the passage that you were giving us, if the Bible and scripture in any way influenced your style of writing in your work? I guess the question was whether the scripture informed my style of writing at all. I guess I would say no, in that I'm not really a Bible expert. I didn't approach this initially from a religious point of view. I had to actually learn a lot. But that's not unusual for a journalist. I mean, you go into most stories without knowing anything about it, or many stories without knowing anything about it. And you learn about it. And one of the things that I really enjoyed about doing this was learning about religion and learning about the different strains of religious belief in America at that time. And how lively it was. It was a very lively moment of American history. We don't think much about the 1830s. I bet you could rack your brain right now and not think of a single thing that happened in the 1830s. And yet it was wild. There was all kinds of really fascinating stuff going on at the time in terms of religion, in terms of construction in the country, roads being built, canals being completed, movement. People were migrating all over and religion was one of the great areas of energy at the time. What was the business of journalism like in the 1830s? And a follow-up question to that is, would a person like Elijah Lovejoy do any actual reporting? Did he actually visit enslaved people or was he writing more from an editorial stance? The question was about what was journalism like in the 1830s. It's a great question. Because journalism in the 1830s really had very little to do with what we now think of as journalism. There wasn't a great deal of he didn't do reporting. He assembled the newspaper often from stories or newspapers that he received through the mail. The 1820s and 1830s was an era that people in journalism history called the party press. Newspapers were very partisan. You might find parallels to today when I tell you that a person read the newspaper that aligned with his or her political party. So you have a very divided, atomized sort of news reading public. Americans at the time loved news. They read a lot. When foreigners came and wrote about America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about this often in democracy in America. There was a Scottish writer named Thomas Hamilton who came and wrote about the manners of Americans. They all were blown away by how much Americans loved news in the newspaper and how much of a glue the newspaper was in American society. But it was very opinionated, very much a product of the editor's own personal views and it was done on the cheap. Most of the news was borrowed as I said. So these wagons would show up with giant 200 pound bags and they would be with mail and they would be largely filled with newspapers of all things. And news editors would share these newspapers around in a kind of a collective that we would later kind of recognize as the Associated Press, a news collective. So you'd get your newspaper from Virginia and Maine or wherever and you like look through it and figure out which stories are interesting to you in Illinois and you rip them out, you know, you reset them in the type in the press and you run them in your newspaper. And you can imagine the creation then of a national story being formed here. So newspapers became the sort of vehicle for creating a national narrative. When something happened in Virginia, people on the frontier, which was then states like Missouri and Illinois would read about it. And somebody like Lovejoy cut his teeth initially in St. Louis on a newspaper and it was very opinionated and and then he would take that kind of passion and then he turned it into his anti-slavery writing when he went to when he opened his own newspaper. So it was a very it was very much, in my opinion, it was very much like a blog might be a good way to think of it. Very personalized, very idiosyncratic and editors would fling insults back and forth at each other. They would fight in the street over what one wrote about the other, you know, in that week's newspaper. So it was a real kind of rough and tumble world. There was no training for it. They just did it. He just did it because he wanted to do it. We have several online questions. So a first one here is, did Lovejoy have any working relationships with black abolitionists of his day? No. Lovejoy was not really part of any abolitionist movement. He was and this is what one of the things that I find remarkable about Lovejoy is he was kind of this lone operator out there, as I say, on the frontier when most of the energy of the organized white abolitionist movement was located on the east coast. So and in the northeast because there was really no abolitionist movement of that sort that existed in the south. So Lovejoy was not only had really nothing to do with any black abolitionists. He didn't really have much to do with white abolitionists either. He would read the publications that white abolitionists were producing, the American Anti-Slavery Society, which was in New York. He would read them. He would reprint things in his newspaper. But what is really quite interesting about Lovejoy is that he was really just a person acting out of his own sense of principle, whatever that was, rather than as an agent or, you know, the wing of any particular movement. So I have a question kind of pertaining to like, if you look back to like the history of slavery in a sense, how do you think Lovejoy kind of was able to be still committed to like his identity as a preacher, even though like at the times well before then slavery was kind of justified by religion as well as like involved religion in the works of like disarming the argument behind everything and like his work to the end point. Do you understand what I mean? Yeah, I do. Lovejoy was really critical of the conventional Christian defenses of slavery that were issued from the pulpit in churches all over, right? People, you know, at the time, defenders of slavery and it became more pronounced sort of in the 1830s than before when it was relatively, the discussion about slavery was much more open in the 1820s even than it was in the 1830s and as the South became more threatened by criticism of slavery and even proposals to abolish slavery, those who supported the slavery system fought back by trying to convince the American public that slavery was a quote unquote positive good, right? That there's this whole narrative that we all know about now about, you know, the welfare and the happy slave. The problem for Lovejoy and the church and the churches was that religious people, clergy people, were using the Bible to justify slavery and he wrote very passionately against that. He criticized very harshly that viewpoint and called it appalling and said it was, you know, it was awful. Lovejoy's own religious beliefs led him only so far though down the path. He believed, for example, that enslaved people should be allowed to go to church. He worried about the condition of their, you know, eternal soul and he spoke initially largely in terms that are almost theoretical really, like it's about, you know, their soul needs to be nourished and so that's why we should allow religious instruction. Only later did his religious beliefs push him to the next stage which is to say there shouldn't be slavery. It's wrong. It's not only a sin, it should be dismantled and that was a step that he went to but he was very aware and very critical of this religious justification that had long existed to uphold slavery. I could follow up to that question. It might be this one. Do you know what the church's response was to Lovejoy's death or his abolitionism? The church was, now Lovejoy was a Presbyterian and the Presbyterian church essentially split in two at the time of Lovejoy's death. Not because of his death but because in part of the divisions within the church over slavery. Slavery was the issue that drove a wedge into the Presbyterian church that was already sort of fracturing on theological lines for other reasons but it ended up splitting in two as to the reaction to his abolitionism. So there was part of the church that was obviously dead set against his sort of activism. There was no part of the church at the time that really embraced his abolitionism. The Presbyterian church was a very conservative institution. In fact, it was the Presbyterian church that was instrumental in creating a program that was called colonization. Colonization was an approach to the slavery question that emerged around 1816, 1817. Essentially, the approach of the church at that time was that the answer to this problem is that enslaved people once freed should be put on a ship and sent to Africa. And the country of Liberia is the product of that movement. That sort of sounds horrifying to us today. That was the reasonable position at the time. That was a kind of a that was a kind of an almost progressive position to hold at the time. So to give you a sense of the scale of things of where the American of white America's mindset was, the church was in favor for a number of years of this approach which is to deport freed blacks to Africa. So the church, let's say, was not, in the case of the Presbyterian church, was not a force for an emancipation movement. We often think of the First Amendment as a protection from state censorship, but Lovejoy's story and perhaps the Trump era press intimidation seem to point how the state can also be an indirect actor in these encroachments. Could you speak more about the degree to which the government incited or enabled the mob violence against Lovejoy? Yes. The interesting dynamic here is that in the Lovejoy case and perhaps in the dangers that exist today that face the press, what's interesting in the Lovejoy case is that the people who were trying to shut him down were largely acting privately and not as an organized government. In other words, there was no government body that was censoring him. The community leaders where he lived were very much in favor of shutting him down, but they were not the ones who were censoring him. So he had, he lived in this weird position where he was being censored and he defended his right to publish based on the First Amendment, but remember the First Amendment really has to do with laws and Congress. It doesn't have to do with a bunch of people in a mob drunk on whiskey trying to destroy your printing press. So he is in a position where who does he go to for help? There have been no court rulings. The Supreme Court had never until this time had made a ruling on freedom of the press, what it meant, how far it extended, who gets protected, who was the press, how is that defined. In fact, the only ruling in the 1830s that really had anything to do with the limits of the Bill of Rights went in the other direction. The Supreme Court ruled in a case involving Baltimore that basically the Bill of Rights don't apply to the states. So Lovejoy really inhabited a moment where there were no effective protections, even though it's there in the First Amendment. And ultimately who he has to appeal to is the American public. The feeling, the sensation that this is a right, a fundamental right that Americans have, he believed he was free to publish and therefore he acted free to publish. He created the freedom for himself in a sense. And it bears remembering that it was American sort of public opinion after his death that reacted in horror to the killing of an editor over his writings. And there was a great deal of public reaction to his death. Abraham Lincoln spoke about it. John Quincy Adams called it an earthquake that would shake the country. And when I said earlier that I think Lovejoy contributed to a modern conception of modern journalism or a modern notion of what journalism should be, it was largely the reaction to his death that caused people to say we can't let this suppression campaign continue. And he energized the abolitionist movement somewhat. I don't want to overstate the case. But more important I think was the contribution he made to press freedom through that. Well, thank you so much. On behalf of all of us here at Champlain College, thank you so much to Ken and to Tanya. If you are part of the Champlain College community, I just wanted to let you know that we do also have the book available in the library as well as copies that are here for sale if you're interested through Phoenix Books or through their website. Thank you. I will repeat that question. Can we have somebody who wants to know what are you working on now? What have you done for me lately, right? The bane of the journalist's life. That was a great story. What are you doing today? I'm exploring stories. I can say that. Meanwhile, I'm dipping my toe a bit into the world of journalism here in Burlington and doing some editing at seven days. So I really feel that it's the duty, kind of essential to promote good journalism. And I think they're producing good journalism. And so I'm doing a sort of collaborating with them a bit and waiting for the next project to finish percolating in my head. Thank you. Thank you all.