SOLD OUT - The 1835 Lecture: Timothy Egan

SOLD OUT - Please email michael@mercantilelibrary.com to be added to the waitlist.

Pulitzer and National Book Award-winner Timothy Egan delivers the 2025 1835 Lecture.

A historical thriller by the New York Times bestselling author that tells the riveting story of the Klan's rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.

The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows – their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

6 pm reception/6:30 pm program
Free to members/$25 nonmembers
Registration required.

Copies of A Fever in the Heartland will be available for sale & signing courtesy of Joseph-Beth Cincinnati.

Please pre-order the book here - https://www.josephbeth.com/product/fever-heartland-ku-klux-klans-plot-take-over-america-and-woman-who-stopped-them-paperback

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and the author of nine other books, most recently the highly acclaimed A Pilgrimage to Eternity and The Immortal Irishman, a New York Times bestseller. His book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. His account of photographer Edward Curtis, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, won the Carnegie Medal for nonfiction.