Jane Kamensky

Events: Hoaxes, Frauds, & Forgeries

Book: The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse

Jane Kamensky chairs the Brandeis history department and is professor of American Civilization. She offers courses in colonial American history, women’s and family history, and the writing of history. In addition to The Exchange Artist, her publications include Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England, The Colonial Mosaic: American Women, 1600-1760, and Blindspot, a novel written with Jill Lepore. She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution.

The Exchange Artist is the true story of a young Boston businessman who defrauded thousands of Americans with paper money and then absconded to Canada. Andrew Dexter, Jr., a Harvard-educated son of a respectable New England family, took advantage of the possibilities offered by the new paper money economy of the early 1800s to engage in a vast real estate speculation, weaving together a network of small-town banks to back the scheme. At the same time, he built the Boston’s Exchange Coffee House, a massive 153-room, marble-encrusted, gold domed architectural wonder that, at seven stories high, was the tallest building in the U.S.