city's inner harbor. for more information about upcoming book fairs and festivals and to watch previous festival coverage, click on the book fairs tab on our web site, booktv.org. >> host: and now on booktv we want to introduce you to kevin young who's an author. his book, "bunk." it comes out this fall, but, mr. young, before we go too far into the book, what do you do for a living? [laughter] >> guest: i'm the new-ish director of the schomburg center this harlem which is part of the new york public library system, as you know. it's been great, we've had some great announcements. we just got the james baldwin papers which we announced in april, and we've just announced two days ago the sonny roll lins papers. so we're really excited to have those archives come home to harlem and be part of the cultural life there which we've

been there 92 years in harlem on the same corner, 35th and lennox, now malcolm x boulevard, and we're really happy to have those materials and those essences come back to harlem. >> host: you say the schomburg is part of the new york public library system, but what's the focus many. >> guest: the focus is african-american and african diaspora, cultural life from history to art to photographs, everything. we have about 11 million items relating to the diaspora on worldwide black culture. i think that's what makes us unique, is both our age -- we started in 1925 as the negro division of the new york public library and carnegie libraries which is still standing, and we got named a national historic landmark in january. so we really are coming full circle, i feel like, with these recent acquisitions which really point to that long history start anything the harlem renaissance of documenting black life and

black culture and to the presence day. and, of course, baldwin and rollins were born in the harlem, ed right around the corner -- lived right around the corner and to see that arc has been really great. >> host: prior to joining the schomburg, what were you doing? >> guest: i was a professor for 20 years, 12 of those at emory university. and there i got archives as well, so that's how i got into the archive business. i'm also a poet and a writer, and i had one previous nonfiction book called "the gray album," and from that i really started getting interested in the subject of bunk which is hoaxes and liars and the sort of american history of fakery. >> host: where did the word "bunk" come from? [laughter] >> guest: it's a great word. it comes from politics, actually. during -- arguing over the missouri compromise and slavery, someone from bunkham county, which is in north carolina,

said, oh, i have to talk more for the people of bunko. and people then started using bunkham and then it became bunk as a way of sort of, you know, political b.s., i guess, is the best way to put it. >> host: so the current term fake news is not really anything new in our culture this. >> guest: it's not. i really trace bunk starting in the 1830, and it's really sort of two centuries of thinking about, well, how did this come about? is it particularly american? what does it have to do with race, and what does it have to do with now? and a lot of it in the 1830s starting with p.t. barnum is sort of where i begin the book really comes about from new media, you know? which sounds familiar, right? and that new media, sort of the penny press, papers used to be a little bit more expensive, then they became a penny and were two

sheets. they were pretty scandalous, you know? and they were filled with hoaxes and filled with fakery which often amused readers, you know? there's the famous -- [inaudible] called the moon hoax where someone pretended they could see life on the moon. and that hoax really spurred on, i think, a lot of what we're seeing now as fake news, but it's as old as 1835. >> host: in your book you write that the transformative advent of the penny press most resembles the current change demonstrated, if not caused, by the internet. >> guest: yeah. i mean, i think the internet is a free press, you know? and not in the media sense that you all are in, but in the sense it's taking a penny press to its extreme. it's access, access, access for folks. and often they're getting reflected back what they like. the penny press was very competitive, much like our news outlets now. and you see a lot of proliferation of them. and there's the similar thing on

the internet. also similarly, it's hard sometimes to debunk, as it were, these things. they kind of circulate and circulate. and that's what's fascinating to me about whether we're talking about the moon hoax or fake news of today and how hard it can be with to untangle ourselves from some of these share notions or notions tata some people have that have become hard to eradicate. >> host: why do you start with p.t. bar numb? >> guest: well, i think barnum is at the center of american culture. he's helping to invent what we now think of as pop culture. he invented pretty much our notions of the circus. he took the sideshow, which was always a thing, but made it kind of professional, and people would pay money and go to elegant places to see these figures of dubious origin, you know, that he would kind of concoct. and many of them also were centered around race. barnum very much -- one of his most famous early hoaxes, the

one that sort of got him going as a successful showman, was his display of a woman named joice heft, and he was pretending she was george washington's nurse mailed. she was a black woman. he said she was 161 years old, you know? and took her around the northeast and said come see george washington's nurse maid. and this was a way of sort of connecting to george washington, the father of our country, and people would, you know, physically examine her. i mean, it's very troubling mostly because then she dies, and then he has a medical theater where he dissects her many front of people. yeah. [laughter] it gets pretty intense. but he also then reveals, oh, she wasn't that old. that's also a part of the hoax, you know? the revelation. and that taught him, i think, a lot about this idea of not only what you could say and make it almost pate9 rottic to

believe -- patriotic to believe in this hoax, but also that questioning the hoax or wondering about it was also part of the hoax, you know? he was really great at making that part of it. and i think you see that kind of now where the accusations of fake news are just as important as the revelations that they aren't fake, you know? and that kind of circle and circus, as it were, is part of barnum's legacy. >> host: trump signals a far more troubling mineset, one in which -- mindset, one in which the truth isn't so much absent or contested as it doesn't matter. >> guest: yeah. well, i don't know if i'm alone in saying that we're in an interesting time where there are these kind of questions about what is true. but those almost predate our current situation, i think, and the proliferation of sort of conspiracy theory as news. but it's almost hard to eradicate and debunk these kind of false notions. take obama's citizenry. what is that about, this kind of

birtherrism that happened? and i'm really interested this tracing why do we have that at all? obviously, i think it's about some of the same things that joice heft's high and death were about. they were about race, citizenry, patriotism, who belonged, who -- birth and death, all the kind of big, cosmic things that i think are part of our fabric as a nation. but you can be kind of evoked and resurrected just from a kind of suggestion. and it's even hard now even though candidate trump, now president, had denied, finally said, oh, that wasn't true, it's very hard to unsettle that and the kind of notion of belonging and self hood, the attack on the birth certificate that president obama represented. i'm really interested why we do that and why we belief as much as why we deceive. >> host: why do we believe as much as we believe sometimes? is.

[laughter] >> guest: well, some of it depends on who the we is, but some of it depends -- i think as people we sort of want to believe. you know, we're almost programmed to. and in the absence of an answer that is complicated and sort of maybe troubling, we sometimes settle for the easy answer. it's easier to believe that my discomfort comes from some fact that is being hidden from me. i think the difference from barnum, say, to now is there was a notion that barnumed had i am an expert, and also he would trot out sort of fake experts. but ultimately, he gave the power to people to decide i'm an expert. i can see that. that looks like a mermaid to me. he had a famous fake mermaid. or that doesn't look like a mermaid. that was part of the interest in the show. and now there's a kind of assertion there is no expert, you know? the scientists don't matter, climate change, eh, maybe, you know? there's a kind of really fascinating denial of expertise

at all. and that, i think, becomes even more troubling and more of a difficult position to be in. >> host: bunk is the name of the book, it's coming out in november. the rise of hoaxes, humbug, plagiarists, post-facts and fake news. kevin young is the author. thanks for joining us. >> guest: thanks for having me. great to see you. >> sunday on "in depth," american educator, tea party activist, author and attorney crisanne hall is our guest. >> and for different reasons, everybody has an idea that the federal government is out of control. and then the most-asked question i get as we teach, what do you suppose that is? what do we do about it? and if we've been teaching the constitution properly for the last 150 years, we would know what