Review: Miles Harvey. The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020.

Authors

Amy DeRogatis

Keywords

Clarke Historical Library, daguerreotype, James Jesse Strang, photograph, Miles Harvey

Abstract

A little over a year ago I was in the Clarke Historical Library in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, sifting through documents with librarian John T. Fierst to answer a nagging question regarding the provenance of a remarkable daguerreotype. As we were musing about the limits of what could be known about this material object, he happened to mention that another person who was finishing a book about James Jesse Strang had recently visited and looked at the photograph. Like any other academic hearing about scholarly competition, my heart froze, and out of my dry mouth I managed to croak, “Oh, really, who was that?” When he said “Miles Harvey,” my brain raced. I knew the name but could not place it among any scholars of early Mormonism, or of North American religious history, or anyone else in the field of religious studies. But I knew the name.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

DeRogatis, Amy (2022) "Review: Miles Harvey. The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020.," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 9: No. 1, Article 24.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol9/iss1/24