Crowned Heads Under the Beds: Satire, Sedition, and the Circulation of Fake News in the Reconstruction-era United States Event
- Time:
- 16:00
- Date:
- 21 February 2024
- Venue:
- Online only
Event details
On a stormy evening in early 1869, three men met in a New York boardinghouse to plot the downfall of the United States. Declaring their eternal hatred for democracy, and their belief that only a monarchy could secure stable government, they proposed to establish a new ‘Empire of the West’ on the ruins of a war-ravaged republic. Over the following months, rumors of a coming coup - mostly emanating from the pages of a brazen advocate of hereditary government in Manhattan, The Imperialist - spread across the Union. Such monarchist scheming met a barrage of denunciation and pockets of praise.
The Imperialist conspiracy of 1869, I will show in my paper, was an elaborate hoax. But like more recent concocted conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, that hoax reveals much about the viral spread of information, the parlous state of a polarised political culture, and the ways in which frustrated producers of news could turn to forgery in order to turn a quick profit and expose the ‘humbuggeries’ of their employers. Part Bohemian prank undertaken by acquaintances of Whitman and Twain, and part conservative thought experiment that reflected real anxieties about the long term viability of republicanism, the Empire of the West is a joke worth taking seriously.
Speaker information
Andrew Heath, is a lecturer of American Hisotry at the University of Sheffield. His interests lie principally in the political economy of Nineteenth Century America, especially urbanisation and class formation. His first book, In Union There Is Strength: Philadelphia in Age of Urban Consolidation, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. Beginning amid social and sectional crisis in the 1840s, and ending in the strikes and economic stagnation of the 1870s, the volume explores how a generation of Americans navigated years of civil wars, which extended from northern fields to southern streets. His next project, Let the Empire Come: Monarchy, Modernity, and Conspiracy in Reconstruction Era America builds outwards from a short-lived but wildly-popular newspaper from post-Civil War New York that proposed replacing the republic with a polity somewhere between the constitutional monarchy of Victorian Britain and the highly-centralised state of Bonapartist France.