[applause] >> as we mark the 409 anniversary of the pardon, i think the story provides a lesson worth reflecting on for all of us who care about our system of laws and government in the united states, and especially for those in our law schools and our universities, those studying history and great presidential mow seems and library like this who are one day going to be the next generation of leaders. thanks to our panelists, thanks to all of you for joining us in h history event. [applause] >> you're watching american

history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span 3. follow us on twitter at c-span history for information on our schedule, upcoming programs and to keep up with the latest history news. dealer rare map admitted in federal court to steeling almost one00 rare maps worth almost a million dollars. in this event, author michael blanding recounts smiley's career as a dealer and thief and describes the historical significance of the maps he stole from several libraries and universities. this is about an hour. >> thank you all so much for coming here this afternoon. i'm particularly pleased to be giving this talk here at the national archives, such a wonderful repozztoir of old books and manuscripts, and in the reporting of this book i became a great lover of archives going to the institutions that

smiley ended up taking rare maps out of. i got to see a lot of these old documents like myself and there's nothing like seeing an original document to be able to touch it with your fingers and see with your own eyes, and it's really a wonderful service that buildings like this provide in providing access to these materials. so i'm just going to dive right in here with a reading from the beginning of my book. i start with the first sentence of the first chapter, so there's nothing you need to know going in. then i'm going to talk a little bit about the strange character of forbes smiley who i got to know very well over the past three years then show you some images of the some of the maps he stole, particularly focusing on the virginia and washington, d.c. area. so let me dive right in here. this is the beginning of my book "the map thief." e. forbes smiley iii couldn't

stop coughing. no matter how he tried to suppress it it broke out into a hacking cough drawing glances from the pate trons sitting around him. the glass fish bowl at the library at yale university was quiet, except for the low mum of the air conditioning and the clicking of fingers on key boards, making smiley painfully aware of the noise he was making. at one point he pulled a hanker chief out of his pocket to uffle the size, and an blade fell onto the floor. he folded the cloth and put it back in his pocket, oblivious to hat had just happened. when people thought of forbes smiley, as he was universally known by friends, dealers, lie brarnse and clients, a few words sprang to mind. gregarious, jolly, larger than

life. he spoke with a resonance of an italian tenor mangled by. his voice, was full of money. when he made phone calls he made sure to announce he was calling from the vine yard. his upper crust were tempered by a charming self deppry cation. he ingratiated himself with many librarians by inquiring after her spouse or children and resip crated with entertaining stories of travel around the world or progress of the new home he was building. most of all people thought of his laugh. for years friends has reveled in smiley's laugh which rolled up out of his belly. it was the kind of laugh that in college had earned him free ickets from theater producers. it caused people to excuse the pretension that kept into his voice when he was ex pounding on any of his obsessions, architecture, new england history, the blues, and of course maps. whether they liked him or not

his colleagues and rivals in the map business had all been seduced by his knowledge which in certain areas exceeded that of anyone else in the world. on the morning of june 8, 2005 however, none of the librarians at the desk recognized him. had they known him, they would have been shocked at the transformation he'd under gone. in addition to the cough that had developed overnight, he was suffering from a splitting headache left over from a night of drinking. smiley had been drinking a lot these days. it was the only thing that took away from problems that multiplied in his mind whenever he was sober. as gifted as he was at remembering maps, he was abysmal when it came to his lyelihood. the truth was he was overextended. as studious as he looked he was feeling a fresh sense of desperation by the the time he went to get lunch around 11:00. sitting in a coffee shop around the corner he turned his options over in hi mind. he could take the train to new york today and fly to london early before the map fair began.

or he could abandon the whole plan heading back to the vine yard and hoping to find another way out of his financial mess. while he sat pondering his priment without reaching a conclusion, the situation in the reading room had changed. smiley may have missed the blade that fell from his pocket, but a librarian had not. the librarians make regular sweeps of the room to ensure materials are handled properly and to let them know they're being watched. she immediately spied the blade on the floor. few objects could be more disturbing to someone who works in a building full of rare books than a tool that can separate he pages from the binding. so that just gives you a bit of if flavor for how i start the book and also a flavor for this character of forbes smiley. who, as i said i got to know very well in all of his

contradictions. even though that's the beginning of my book, it was the end of the story for forbes smiley. that day, as the librarians found the knife blade they began googling the patrons and the names of the patrons in the library and discovered that forbes smiley was a dealer in rare maps and this of course made them even more nervous, and so they called the police left the and as he library a plains clothe police officer was following behind. this is the map i made for the book, i say i made it, i thought i was originally going to make my own maps. i thought i should have some of my own maps, but it only took 10 minutes of drawing to realize that wasn't going to happen. so i hired an illustrator who happened to be from the netherlands which i was very pleased by because the netherlands was where the golden age of map making was, in the

1,500's and 1,600's. but this was a map he drew of the yale university campus. you can see right up here at the top is the library, and smiley walked down the street past the sterling memorial library, past the tower, all the way to the yale british arts center. it was there that the police officer introduesed himself and said he was with the library and asked the smiley had taken anything with him. and smiley even though he was under no obligation to cooperate he decided that he would go back with this officer and they began looking through his things. and first they looked through his brief case and they found a number of rare maps there, but smiley said that he had brought those with him, and they found no evidence to show that that wasn't true. and then as he was standing there, they noticed him sort of fidgetting with his blazer pocket, and something in his

blazer, and they asked him to take it out. and when they did, he took out this. this is a map of new england by john smith, it was originally done in 1616 and this is actually yale's copy that was done in 1631. and just want to pause for a moment and tell you a little bit about this map and explain what makes it so important and what makes it so valuable. so, we all know of john smith from the virginia colony, down the street from here and his role in founding that, in 1607, but he had sort of a second chapter in his life. after he was sort of drummed out of virginia for reasons i won't go into, he started exploring the area that was known as north virginia, with the idea of founding a new colony there. he thought it needed a snappier name so he came up with new england, john smith is the person who coined that term as a way to claim this territory for

his home country and tell the other countries this is english territory. and he also wanted to claim this territory for himself and make sure that he got credit for discovering it and that he was going to be involved in building it so he put an enormous portrait of himself in the corner. he was so vain that he actually updated the portrait over the years on different versions of the map. so this is a later version of the map and you can see his than otherch bushier versions and his jacket is more decorated. the thing about this map is you probably can't see it from there, but all up and down the coastline here are names of english towns and cities. london is there, and cambridge, oxford and other places. in 1616 before the pilgrims landed in new england, none of those cities or towns existed. the reason i say there on the map is because after he made the map, he brought it to england and he presented it to prince

charles and asked him to change the names of all of the native americans settlements to english towns and cities. so it was sort after a breathtaking act of virtual colony zation that occurred. it did succeed in claiming the territory for england. and interestingly most of the towns and cities on the map have since disappeared, or at least they're not in the places that he put them. one of them has remained, right down in the corner you can see where he wrote plymouth. that was where the pilgrims when they sailed from plymouth with a copy of smith's map in hand on the mayflower they steered to that location and founded their colony there and took the name for the plymouth colony. it's a really important map, and really seminal document in the founding and exploration of north america. it's also a quite rare map. so even though it's not a one of

a kind, there are only a few dozen copies of this map that exist in various institutions throughout the country and the world. and because of that, it's a very valuable map. so at auction, this map could go easily for $50,000 to a map collector. so when smile wri was found with this map that was both rare and valuable, one of the librarians at the time noticed the hand writing at the bottom of the map, and recognized it as belonging to a patron of yale who had donated a lot of rare books and maps to the library so she immediately cried out that use our map and hay put handcuffs on smiley and led him away to spend the night in jail. so the f.b.i. was called in to investigate this case, and immediately they realized they had a problem. as i mentioned, there may have been only a few dozen copies of this map, but it's not so rare that there's only one copy, it's

not like a work of art in a new sem where there's only one copy of it, if it's missing everyone knows that it was stolen. the f.b.i. came in and said i understand that smiley had a copy of this map, that you are missing a copy of the map. but how do i know the copy that you're missing is the copy that smiley took? and they actually got lucky very early on in the case with another map that smiley had on him that day. a map's this one, this is by one of those dutch map makers from the 1500's and this is the world map from his atlas which is even more rare than the smith map. it was only produced in the first edition of the atlas which never sold very well in the first place and very few copies survive. probably worth about $150,000 at auction. and so it wasn't what was on the front of the map that interested

investigators, it was what was on the back of this map. you can see that on the back of the map there were these four little worm holes that had been made by these pests, probably hundreds of years ago sitting on the dusty shelf of a library, and the four holes on the map lined up exactly with four holes in the atlas that was in the yale selection that smiley was looking at that day. and so this was as good as a fingerprint to investigators. it was sort of this c.s.i. that they were able to really catch him red handed and say yes, he took this map and yes it came from this volume belonging to yale. because it was an object worth over $100,000, they could charge him with a federal crime of theft of a object of cultural heritage which carries a hefty sentence. the f.b.i., now that they knew smiley had stolen at least two maps and probably more the f.b.i. agent began to further investigate the case.

and even though he knew nothing about rare maps when he started working on the case, he did know a lot about thieves and he knew when a thief is caught red handed it's usually not the first time they've committed a theft. so he began calling around and sending emails out to other rare book and manuscript libraries around the country. and he asked them two questions. has forbes smiley been in your collection lately and are you missing any rare maps. six institutions answered yes to both of those questions. at yale, both the sterling and the other were missing maps. the boston public library, the new york public library, missing from the map division and the rare books division. the library at harvard, british library in london and the newberry library in chicago. so now it became this treasure hunt where the investigators had to determine what maps from missing from the libraries, what

books smiley looked at, which maps he may have taken and where hose maps may have ended up. the libraries had to go back through hundreds of call slips dating back several years to find which items smiley had looked at. and then compare them to their catalogs for both items and often times as you can imagine with the rare books that are acquired over a hundred years ago they were not catalogged in terms of what maps they contain. so some of them might say map or maps. some of them may list some maps but not others. some of them may have said they were a map but were missing it long before smiley got there. so it was really this difficult enterprise that they had to go into figure out. lucky for them he did come forward when he heard there were federal charges pending against him. smiley did come forward and he offered to cooperate, as dade

said, heavensly admitted to stealing 97 maps, but the libraries to this day accuse him ing more than he admitted. and i'll get to that in a moment and show you some examples of that. the maps that he stole were worth over $3 million in total, so they were the cream of the crop of antique maps, the most expensive and valuable maps that he stole. so all this happened in 2005-2006, and this was all recorded in the newspapers, it was all pretty well known by the time i started on this trail in 2011. i remember reading about this case in the new yorker and other places when it happened. i've always been a map lover myself and i was always very intrigued by these rare objects and the fact that people were willing to pay thousands and tens of thousands of dollars for them. it made me curious to know more about why that was the case. but i also wanted to know more

about smiley. he had never talked to the press before, he had never given an interview. he never explained why he started taking these maps, especially give the fact that he was himself a rare map dealer, and by all accounts loved these maps and celebrated them. what was it that caused him to go to the dark side as it were and start actually taking these maps out of libraries. so that is the test task i set for myself. i was originally going to write an article for boston magazine and update the case, and tell it start to finish. through a friend of smiley's, he actually agreed to talk to me and i sat across the picnic table on martha's vine yard for four hours when he told me that story and by the end i was completely convinced that that was not a magazine article, that this was a book. he was such a complex character, and this world was so interesting. finally the stories of the map makers were just as interesting as smiley's story, if not more

so. i'm going to share a little bit about what i learned about both smiley and some of these maps that he stole. this is another map i had made for the book of new england, showing some of the key locations. smiley grew up in this little town called bedford in new hampshire. despite his name, he actually grew up middle class as the son of an electrical engineer. he didn't come from these vast pools of wealth that you might imagine. he was always fascinated with history. even as a young boy he would read about history and study the history of the air, particularly the history of new england. e went to college in am hurst, massachusetts, and he made history a specialty. history and religion, and he was known for all sorts of eccentric things like reciting the illiad in the middle of campus, or taking a walk and telling them

about every church they passed and the history of the architecture of that church. after college he settled in new york and it was there that he entered the map trade. and he started at this department store which no longer exists, but had a small division that sold rare maps and atlases. it was conveniently located just a dozen blocks from the new york public library and that's where his real education in maps began. he became so fascinated by looking at the different maps and comparing them to each other and realizing which map maker had copied from whom and he couldn't get enough of this topic, and just became incredibly knowledgeable in a very short period of time. and originally as he went on his own as the map dealer he was quite successful. the late 1980's was a very good time to become a map dealer because the prices of maps were suddenly just increasing. and you know people, even

wealthy people were no longer able to afford a lot of fine art, the prices for that had just become unattainable, so maps became a new way of collecting for folks who were wealthy but not billionaires. doctors, lawyers, wall street executives, who would buy these rare maps, put them on their walls and have, if not a one of a kind item, a very rare item that was beautiful to look at and also had this historical story behind it. they became very popular and maps that went for a couple of thousand dollars went for tens of thousands of dollars, eventually approaching hundreds of thousands of dollars. smiley was very successful in riding that wave for quite a while. he put together a collection of maps of the new york and mid-atlantic region, including washington and virginia for a man by the name of larry slaughter, which was donated to the new york public library at the slaughter collection of

maps. he also put together a collection of maps of boston and new england for a developer in boston named norman levin they'll and that's being contributed to the boston public library, both of them ironic given later events and the fact he was taking maps out of the very libraries he was putting them into. as i discovered smiley even though he was very successful in putting the collections and selling that for quite a while, he also had several flaws that were really his undoing. one of them was he was a terrible business person. he was also chasing maps he couldn't afford and buying maps to pay for another one. he became really notorious for bouncing checks to his fellow dealers and some of them stopped doing business with him and hurt his client base. , as maps n addition

became more valuable in the 1980's, there was a lot more competition that ensued. so a number of new map dealers came in and they really looked at it as a business, and may think of maps dealing collecting as sort of rarefied pursuit of people, you know, seriously studying in libraries but it's quite a business, in some ways a cut throat business. people bidding against each other for a very small number of very rare and valuable items. a number of these map dealers didn't like smiley very much either because he bounced checks to them or they thought him sort of arrogant and sort of a know it all. so they would bid against him in auction and sometimes drive the price up on him. sometimes they would band together against him. and lastly smiley was just never a team player.

he always had this go it alone attitude, that he was just going to make it on his own two feet and he didn't need anybody else's help. that attributeded to his financial problems because it was really necessary sometimes for different dealers to sort of band together and bidding on certain items they would split up. so he became even less able to compete because of that. eventually as he told me, he was too proud to sort of admit that he failed in this pursuit and he told me that he was looking for a map at the sterling memorial library on the table in front of him realizing he could fold it down to the size of a credit card, walk out and sell it the next day for $30,000. that was the moment when temptation got the better of him. he sold that first map and told himself it was just this one time thing that he was going to do and get out this financial raft. but of course that started a slippery slope and he began stealing more and more maps and selling them for more and more

money and became the map thief that i write about in my book. i'm just going to talk about a few of the maps that he stole just to give you an idea of the kind of items that he took, and why they're valuable and what he did with them when he took them. this is another map by john smith, it's actually a map he made a few years before his map of new england and it's the map of the virginia colonies. it's a pretty striking map because john smith had very rudimentry surveying materials. he went up and down the rivers with a very small boat and would take sites on different landmarks. sometimes he was able to create this very accurate map of the region that was in use as a map for 200 years after he created it. and as you can see, on this map he did not put a picture of

himself, he put a picture of the native american chief in the corner, and the picture of nother native american here. there's little crosses in some areas along the rivers that he put there and scholars think that was the limits of the area that he actually individually surveyed himself, and the point past that was areas that he actually relied on, the knowledge of the natives of the area to map the rest of the area. you can see how accurate that is as well. it's particularly successful and really quite amazing that he was able to do the job that he did on this. there a map that, and were two copies of this map that were missing from the boston public library, which smiley admitted the maps he had taken he only admitted to stealing one. interestingly enough, the

librarian afterwards did not give up on this, he was sure that smiley had taken the other one as well and he began scanning dealers catalogs and actually saw a copy of this map. went down to new york with the map that was missing from, and was able to match that map against the book by a little impression that was made in the page that was facing where the map was missing. so that's at least one map that smiley did not admit to that was eventually recovered by the library. this is another map of virginia. you can see chesapeake bay here. so on the smith map, you can see that north is actually to the right, and then on this map, north is at the top. you can see the chesapeake bay and the appalachian mountains here. this map was a definitive map of the 18th century of the virginia and washington area.

it was all done from original surveys by joshua frye and peter jefferson. if you're wondering if that jefferson has any relation to thomas jefferson, he was actually his father, and after peter jefferson died, he bequeethed his surveying equipment to thomas jefferson who created the map of his own, including one map of virginia. but this map was made in response to the growing tension between the french and the english. as the cool nists moved in ward into the mountains they began running up against the french who were coming down from canada, and eventually that would erupt in the french and indian war. for almost a hundred years before war actually broke out it was sort of this war that went on between the english and french with them both drawing competing maps in order to claim the territory of the ohio valley

and into virginia. and so this map was actually a mission in order to survey this area here, where these competing hings were taking place. this map was taken from the boston public library. it was part of an atlas of maps of the united states that was made in 1775, right around the time of the american revolution and this is one that smiley took out of that atlas. i just want to show you a few maps of washington, d.c. as well, since that's where we are today. so this is a map that was made

in 1792, it was the first printed map of washington, d.c., by the assistant lonant.es he was the one who designed washington, d.c. and designed it on a model of paris and the grand blards that would go through the center of the city. and unfortunately he put one of those blards through one of the property of one of the main land owners at the time and he wasn't all that thrilled about it, and complained to washington and jefferson who were in charge of plans for the capitol and he was dismissed. so fell to ellicott to continue his plans and actually put them into practice, and he finished

surveying and produced a series of maps of washington, d.c. and the first push published map was done in june of 1792, but there were pirated versions that appeared in magazines before the official map was ever printed. this map that you're looking at was actually in a magazine that was printed in boston. it's incredibly rare. the other map was in a magazine in philadelphia, that one's more common. the boston map is incredibly rare, and after smiley thefts were discovered, both were missing their copy of the map from the addition of that magazine. and of course smiley only admitted stealing one copy of this map. so, after the maps were recovered, a number of the libraries all went down to new haven and to look at the maps

and determine who's was whos. so they had a little bit of a fight over some of these maps and being librarians it was of course a quiet fight. but there was a lot of maps that changed hands, and that went to different institutions who were able to prove through different marks in the map or different impressions or things who's was who. this was actually proven to be harvard's copy of this map, so the boston public library is still missing their addition. this the last map i want to show you, this is also by ellicott, and it was also washington, d.c., but as you can see it's a very different looking map. it was meant to be displayed in this diamond shaped like this, and as you can see, it's all of the topography of washington, d.c. sort of stripped of the landmark thing and street names. his is also quite rare and

after smiley's thefts were revealed, yale university, the sterling library realized they were missing their copy. smiley listed a copy of this map on his website, and in that listing mentioned that he knew of no versions of this map that had come up at auction since 1991 when he had actually helped purchase it for the slaughter collection which ended up at the new york public library. but yale was missing their copy of this map, right around the time it was on smiley's website, the map also appeared in a catalog of a dealer that smile we was known to do business with. smiley never admitted stealing this one and yale didn't have any defining marks that would show that this was actually their map, they didn't have a digital image of it, they didn't have any other kids of evidence. so because of that, the f.b.i.

decided that it wasn't a map that smiley had stolen and it was never returned and never ecovered back to yale. so i just wanted to close about what smiley did with the money he gained from stealing these maps because in some ways i find this to be one of the more compelling aspecks of the stories and one of the things that really convinced me there was a book here. this is a map of a small town up in maine, and it is a little flea bite of a town, you can barely find it on a map in far northern maine, and smiley purchased a farm house here in the late 1298 0's right up here. gwynn his love of history and new england he restored this farm house lovingly to his image of the perfect ideal new england farm house. but he didn't stop there, he decided he was going to restore the rest of the town as well and he began buying up property, including the post office and a

restaurant, a general store. he renovated this children's park with a gazeebo. half of the people in town ooked at him as a robin hood figure. people that worked in his shops and his stores, all in all spent about a million dollars on this project of renovating this town. of course the other half of the town wasn't all that pleased about some new yorker coming up to maine and telling them what to do with their town and how to run their property. so a number of residents of the town got into a feud with him, particularly the folks across the street from him on the lake was a family known as the moriarty. they decided they had a different version of the town they would like to see. it involved an ice cream shop and a speed boat marina, sort of this pleasure boating center, and the two of them really came

at odds and started this feud that really divided the whole town in half so that half of the people would eat at smiley's restaurant and mail letters from his post office, the other half would go next door and send their letters there and eat at the restaurants in that town. and it eventually grew into this legal battle that ended up costing smiley even more money in legal bills on top of the money he was already spending on this renovation project and all the people he was employing and the debts he had had in the first place and it caused him to target new areas, including the library where he was eventually caught. so that gives you a little bit of a sense of who this character was and the interesting contradictions involved in his tale. as i mentioned he did steal upwards of a hundred maps that we know of, as david said the libraries accused him of

stealing at least 150 more. he did spend three years in prison, which a lot of the libraries wish that he had spent ore of a jail term, but he was given time off for the cooperation that he provided to the f.b.i. he currently lives on martha's vineyard where last i knew he was working as a landscaper for $12. he has nothing to do with rare maps anymore, but in prison he did pick up a new hobby of water color painting. and that is a picture of a water color that was on display at an art show that i attended, and you know, just goes to show you how talented a person he is, that just within a few short years was able to produce a water color of this caliber. but, as you can see on the label, there's one change since his map dealing days, he no longer goes by the name e.

forbes smiley iii. now he goes by edward and sometimes even ed. thank you all for coming and i'm happy to answer any questions. there's some microphones here in the aisle, if you have questions lease come up to the mike. > thank you very much. the boulevard in d.c. and the land owner and then a more general, i realize this isn't your area of authority, but how well are institutions doing your days in protecting their goods? >> the first question about, so your question is -- >> in washington. >> more about what boulevard -- >> what was the boulevard and who was the property owner. you said somebody. >> that i can't tell you. i once knew that during my research, but there's so many maps and so many details that some of them escape me. >> how many institutions in your opinion are doing these days in

terms of protecting their materials? >> that i can comment on because i looked quite a bit into that. particularly the libraries that smiley targeted have done a lot to change their security practices. they've installed new cameras, they have in some cases installed new policies for how maps are delivered to patrons, for example yale has a bar code afixed now to every single map, that's scanned in and out of the vault every time somebody wants to look at it. other libraries have instituted digital imaging so if a map has gone missing they can identify it and tell that it's their map. n the other hand, as you know, libraries are chronically short staffed and under funded and so there's a real variation between libraries and what they've done and what they've been able to o.

as long as we're providing access to these materials, unless we want to lock them up, which i think would be a real shame, you're going to assume some measure of risk and the question is how much risk are you able to minimize. >> thank you. >> sure. >> i have a question over here. i got a sense in reading your book at the end that a number of libraries weren't really forthcoming in the maps that they were missing and i was kind of wanting to get your feel for why you felt they felt that way? >> yeah, there was a real variety of the amount of transparency that libraries were able to show, and in some kays that's understandable. you can imagine that if you are looking for donations of materials from people, you know, you don't want to be necessarily

advertising the fact that you have had items stolen from your institution. unfortunately that also plays in to some of these staffs by smiley and other people, and allows them to continue because aren't act that these widely disseminated, it sometimes can allow them to go on longer than the other ones would have. there's a real tension that exists there, and to their credit i think libraries have gotten better about that and have become more transparent since the smiley affair. i was impressed in my research at just how transparent the libraries were with me, many of them just opened up all their files and really were incredibly open and the information they gave me. but there still is that secrecy that exists in terms of these stuff.

>> i think it must be a common nallity between the market for books or and old antiques. in that there's almost a black market that people ignore from where those maps come from. how it would be possible for people to buy these things when they've come from yale or whatever, and i'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that black market and how things can be sold so easily while they so -- have been stolen. is there nothing, do you not have to say what the precedent is? and where they got them? obviously the answer is no. >> yeah, it's really interesting as i started to research this issue, and find out how these maps are bought and sold.

a lot of people ask me is there some kind of black market where they're selling these things, you know. some fence or something and ending up in this private collection in japan or something. and it's actually unlike art theft, that's the rare maps and books can be done quite out in the open, because there are multiple copies of these things. so smiley would go from mailing to three dealers he worked with a number of years and he would say he was selling off maps that were in a collection of an old boston dealer, or old boston collector, and he was going to be coming to them with very rare material over the next few months. those dealers bought that story, they believed him and they bought these maps and sold them onto other collectors, and they put them right on their wall in full display. there's definitely some criticism of whether those dealers should have asked more

questions and whether they should have accepted smiley's story at face value. at the same time, you know, it's very difficult in some cases to prove. once you go back a couple of decades, it can be sometimes hard, even if you know it was sold at auction in the 1990's, then you've got to ask when was it sold before that, and going back more than two or three steps is often very hard. so i think there has been a lot more effort on the part of dealers to look at them and not just to take the word at face value, but i think that is one of the issues inherent in the field. >> there doesn't seem to be no shame either. acquire it ing to ercomes the possibility that perhaps it was taken from yale library. it just astounds me, but i mean

-- >> yeah, i certainly think that's the case, there is this willful ignorance that appears, you don't ask too many questions, but i don't think that represents everybody in the field but certainly something that goes on. >> thank you very much. >> sure. >> i just wanted to answer the question that the gentleman raised a few minutes ago about the location -- >> oh, nice. >> the mansion that got torn down was owned by one of the original commissioners, daniel carol, the brother of the charles carol and so forth. big, big land owner and the mansion was located at the intersection of what is now new jersey avenue and independence avenue, basically in the front yard of the capitol building, and what land was his to play with and what land was private land, he knew that was his land, carol ignored him solo fant went in with his workmen and tore that building down just to prove that was his.

that what helped contribute to his dismiss sal. >> thank you so much for telling that story. just goes to show you the story behind some of these maps that you know politics was alive and well in d.c. even before the city of d.c. was actually created here. >> i'm wondering how much is water colors sell for, and is there possibly a future for him in that field? >> i don't know. that art show was part of a grant that the island cultural commission gave money to different artists to display their work. i think maybe he made like $2,000 or something. but you know certainly i don't know if it has occurred to him that he could sell e. forbes smiley originals and profit just from the name alone, but to my knowledge he hasn't gone and actually sold any of his work. >> first thanks for an engaging

talk. just two quick questions, if there were a movie on the edward smiley story, who do you see playing him since you know him that well. secondly, with the archivist of the united states sitting right in front of you, if you could procure any map in any way without punishment, in the world, what would that be? >> got to be careful what i say here. in terms of the movie, you know, i sort of see william h. macy as the forbes smiley character, that's the one who immediately springs to mind, with brad pitt as the crusading investigate oif reporter telling his story. >> casting is being done as you speak. >> in terms of the map that i , it would if i could probably be a map from yale that i uncovered during my research.

it was by this gentleman by the name of john seller and there's only three copies in the world, it was a very early map of new england and it shows the area of new england around the time of king phillip's war, and so it's really interesting map with all hese pictures of sort of colonists and native americans fighting each other. it's particularly interesting to me. and the interesting thing about that map is that it's actually been stolen twice from yale. it was stolen back in the 1970's and was by another map piece who sold it and it was recovered and then smiley came in and stole it again, and actually put a copy, he actually colored the map, which was just particularly devastating given the fact there were only three of them, he colored it and put it on his website and in the description the map said there was a version at yale that was uncolored, but

that this was a different version which was just really the height of huberis that he would do such a thing but the map itself is really beautiful. i'd love to have it on my wall. >> thank you. i've happy to sign any books you might have. [applause] >> you are watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend. on c-span three. to join the conversation, like us on facebook. >> next on history tv, historian kaplane