Interview with Jane Kamensky about her book, The Exchange Artist
[Jane Kamensky, a native of New York City, earned her B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Since 1993, she has been a member of the History faculty of Brandeis University, where she teaches courses on early American history and culture, and on the writing of history. She has won two university-wide awards for excellence in teaching. ]
The Exchange Artist tells the story of Andrew Dexter, Junior and the first American skyscraper. Equal parts entrepreneur and confidence man, Dexter erected his swagger building, the Exchange Coffee House, through sheer financial legerdemain. Weaving together the biography of this once-notorious, now-forgotten man with the history of his enormous building and the pyramid scheme that served as its foundation, The Exchange Artist dramatizes the birth of modern money culture in the first decades of the American republic.
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Q. Why did you write The Exchange Artist?
A. Almost by accident. In early 2001, I was working on what I thought would be a different book: a history of American coffee culture from the 1690s through the late age of Starbucks. In the course of that research, I stumbled across old images of the Exchange Coffee House, perhaps the world's largest building of its type. Though it stood for only nine years, the building was famous into the early 20th century, and many drawings of it survived. I thought they'd make fun illustrations for my coffee book.
But then I wandered into the building's back rooms, and its back-story, where I met up with Andrew Dexter. I was fascinated by his life and, perhaps even more, by the loss of his biography. In 1810, nearly everyone in the eastern United States would have known his name. For a time, he was an archetypal villain, reviled in scores of newspapers from Massachusetts to Kentucky to Alabama. "The man behind the curtain," one editorialist called him. Yet by the early twenty-first century he had become, at best, a footnote to the history of finance. The more I delved into the archives, the more convinced I became that his compatriots had it right. Dexter's story was emblematic, and important. His was a life for its times, full of the reckless daring and dreadful comeuppances that built the United States. To really understand the beginnings of our speculation nation—indeed, to understand where we are today—we need to reckon with both our ambition and our failures. Andrew Dexter's biography promised plenty of both.
Q. How did you research the book?
A. It's often said that the victors write the history, and in a way, that's true. Winners tend to leave more and better documents of their lives. And though Andrew Dexter was an educated white man, one of the "middling sort," as people said in the nineteenth century, he came out a loser, and he left behind a pretty fragmentary record. So piecing together his story was a bit like sifting through the ruins of the Exchange Coffee House.
A lot of the documents from which Exchange Artist emerged were generated by Dexter's enemies. His nemesis, the Boston merchant Nathan Appleton, kept voluminous personal papers, and his descendants carefully safeguarded that archive before turning it over to the Massachusetts Historical Society. Dexter's creditors left their traces, too. Court records showed some of the devastation he left behind. The Rhode Island officials who investigated the Farmer's Exchange Bank in the spring of 1809 discovered in its vault a treasure trove of incriminating letters that they preserved for posterity in pamphlet form.
And as in every historical project, there were happy accidents. Early American newspapers offered some tantalizing fragments of the daily lives of builders and other laborers. A complete set of floor plans for the Exchange Coffee House—huge, fragile folios, probably made for insurance purposes—survived, almost miraculously, in the archives of the Bostonian Society. When combined with the narrative record of the building, those remarkable documents helped me to "read" the space. Two insightful architecture students made interactive, three-dimensional CAD drawings from those plans, which allowed me more fully to visualize the Coffee House.
Read entire article at http://exchangeartist.com (date unknown)
The Exchange Artist tells the story of Andrew Dexter, Junior and the first American skyscraper. Equal parts entrepreneur and confidence man, Dexter erected his swagger building, the Exchange Coffee House, through sheer financial legerdemain. Weaving together the biography of this once-notorious, now-forgotten man with the history of his enormous building and the pyramid scheme that served as its foundation, The Exchange Artist dramatizes the birth of modern money culture in the first decades of the American republic.
###
Q. Why did you write The Exchange Artist?
A. Almost by accident. In early 2001, I was working on what I thought would be a different book: a history of American coffee culture from the 1690s through the late age of Starbucks. In the course of that research, I stumbled across old images of the Exchange Coffee House, perhaps the world's largest building of its type. Though it stood for only nine years, the building was famous into the early 20th century, and many drawings of it survived. I thought they'd make fun illustrations for my coffee book.
But then I wandered into the building's back rooms, and its back-story, where I met up with Andrew Dexter. I was fascinated by his life and, perhaps even more, by the loss of his biography. In 1810, nearly everyone in the eastern United States would have known his name. For a time, he was an archetypal villain, reviled in scores of newspapers from Massachusetts to Kentucky to Alabama. "The man behind the curtain," one editorialist called him. Yet by the early twenty-first century he had become, at best, a footnote to the history of finance. The more I delved into the archives, the more convinced I became that his compatriots had it right. Dexter's story was emblematic, and important. His was a life for its times, full of the reckless daring and dreadful comeuppances that built the United States. To really understand the beginnings of our speculation nation—indeed, to understand where we are today—we need to reckon with both our ambition and our failures. Andrew Dexter's biography promised plenty of both.
Q. How did you research the book?
A. It's often said that the victors write the history, and in a way, that's true. Winners tend to leave more and better documents of their lives. And though Andrew Dexter was an educated white man, one of the "middling sort," as people said in the nineteenth century, he came out a loser, and he left behind a pretty fragmentary record. So piecing together his story was a bit like sifting through the ruins of the Exchange Coffee House.
A lot of the documents from which Exchange Artist emerged were generated by Dexter's enemies. His nemesis, the Boston merchant Nathan Appleton, kept voluminous personal papers, and his descendants carefully safeguarded that archive before turning it over to the Massachusetts Historical Society. Dexter's creditors left their traces, too. Court records showed some of the devastation he left behind. The Rhode Island officials who investigated the Farmer's Exchange Bank in the spring of 1809 discovered in its vault a treasure trove of incriminating letters that they preserved for posterity in pamphlet form.
And as in every historical project, there were happy accidents. Early American newspapers offered some tantalizing fragments of the daily lives of builders and other laborers. A complete set of floor plans for the Exchange Coffee House—huge, fragile folios, probably made for insurance purposes—survived, almost miraculously, in the archives of the Bostonian Society. When combined with the narrative record of the building, those remarkable documents helped me to "read" the space. Two insightful architecture students made interactive, three-dimensional CAD drawings from those plans, which allowed me more fully to visualize the Coffee House.