Quotes from Miles Harvey

James J. Strang, innocent target of religious persecution—like all his personae, this one proved to be a mask. Yet it was exactly those masks—those endless layers of ambiguity—that gave the man his charisma

I was good with maps, plain and simple. But what obsessed me about them was never their scientific utility. I did not look on them as mere tools but as mysterious and almost sentient beings.37 Maps spoke to me. They still do.

Strang had already perfected his talent for telling other people just what they wanted to hear, so a dose of skepticism is in order for any belief he professed—a double dose for the ones he professed passionately.

I [author] was beginning to understand...the clash of cartographies. When the adventurer John Lederer had rambled down the Great Indian Trading Path in 1670...he was not just sight-seeing. Working under the auspices of Virginia's governor, Lederer was at the vanguard of a systematic effort to appropriate land--an effort in which maps often played as big a road as guns.

Today we use the word cult to describe a small group of extremists cut off from contact with the outside world by an all-controlling leader. People in antebellum America, however, struggled to find language for the phenomenon, largely because they had never seen anything quite like it before. As recent scholars have attested, "The historical record indicates that utopian and apocalyptic cults and communes first appeared as a major form in the United States during this epoch.

confidence artist to the very end.

A "businessman," meanwhile, was not just a craftsman who made goods or a merchant who traded them, but a more fluid kind of capitalist, constantly finding new ways to turn a profit.

The Castle—a man haunted by the feeling that he was losing himself or wandering into a strange country, farther than he had ever wandered before, a country so strange that not even the air had anything in common with his native air, where one might die of strangeness, and yet whose enchantment was such that one could only go on and lose oneself further…

is my contention—my superstition, if you like—that he who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support The tale has a root there: it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words…. As he studies [the map], relations will appear that he had not thought upon.