there because it is a pleasure for me to welcome manisha sinha back to a to welcome john stauffer here for conversation and now over to manisha. thank you, scott, for that very generous introduction and i thank everyone who showed up here in the middle of the week to help me launch this book. i'd really like to begin by thanking all the staff at the american antiquarian society as scott just mentioned, i did much of my research for this book here in the archives and the whole world was shut down because of the pandemic. i had the privilege of being able to research this book, so i'm extremely grateful to the people at the american antiquarian society, and i think it's only appropriate that i'm launching this book here today. i thank nan will return for inviting me to do this program and i thank my good friend who in my opinion. is one of the best historians and literary scholars of 19th century america today. and for him to do this conversation with me is also a great honor. so thank you so much for helping me do this so we can move to the first slide. great. so of course, my talk toda