Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I am Holly Frye
Speaker 1: and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about greeting cards
Speaker 1: this week. We did when you said it, like the
Speaker 1: outline of the episode just said something to the effect of, like,
Speaker 1: I'm working through my feelings on greeting cards, and I
Speaker 1: thought that meant something very different than what you actually
Speaker 1: talked about on Yeah, in the introduction to the episode,
Speaker 1: I thought your feelings about greeting cards was going to
Speaker 1: be about I don't know their content, or anytime I
Speaker 1: go to buy one, I can't find one with a
Speaker 1: sentiment that I like, so I always wind up getting
Speaker 1: blank ones. I thought it was going to be something
Speaker 1: along those lines and not what you were actually talking about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: trying to make space in my life. Yeah, it kind
Speaker 1: of did help me make some rules about what stays
Speaker 1: and what goes. I also think I might make myself
Speaker 1: a rule that they have to get integrated into some
Speaker 1: kind of art. They can't just be sitting in a
Speaker 1: drawer somewhere. But that's weird too. One of the things
Speaker 1: that really struck me. I didn't mention it. But it
Speaker 1: was in that report we talked about the at the
Speaker 1: end about the current status of the greeting card industry,
Speaker 1: and one of the people from the Greeting Card Association
Speaker 1: made this very good point of like, you can send
Speaker 1: electronic greetings as much as you want, but you can't
Speaker 1: in the same way hold like a text from a
Speaker 1: loved one that has passed in your hand, the way
Speaker 1: you can a card that they've sent you and like
Speaker 1: keep it as a memento, and like the sentimental value
Speaker 1: of them is I think also a part of what's
Speaker 1: driving new interest among younger purchasers, which is really interesting.
Speaker 1: That has been a factor. And ones that I have
Speaker 1: kept that I might not have kept. Other one I
Speaker 1: mentioned in that Duke d'orleon poem translation that I translated
Speaker 1: part of it because here is why there are a
Speaker 1: lot of translations I see of it that translate a
Speaker 1: section of it literally. And the way it conveys to
Speaker 1: the English ear, the English speaking ear, is not really
Speaker 1: in line with what he is saying, and that is
Speaker 1: instead of saying I am love sick, it says I
Speaker 1: am sick of love, and that makes it sound more negative.
Speaker 1: And I switched it, but I didn't. I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: he's obviously like very sad to not be with her.
Speaker 1: It makes it sound like he's like down time for it.
Speaker 1: So that's if you go looking for a translation and
Speaker 1: you're like, that's not what this says. That's what's going
Speaker 1: on there, Yeah, because you would say in French it
Speaker 1: would be madame or sick of love, but it's like
Speaker 1: sick from love, not tired of it. Here was another
Speaker 1: cool thing that I didn't get into and debated about
Speaker 1: getting into that I really really liked about the Egyptian
Speaker 1: use of scaubs as a greeting and as a way
Speaker 1: to show people you cared about them, Which is that
Speaker 1: unlike we talked about the development of greetings in China
Speaker 1: and in the US and England, really where it starts
Speaker 1: out as something that like rich people are doing and
Speaker 1: eventually becomes affordable for everybody else, it appears have always
Speaker 1: been something that like, we're used this way across all
Speaker 1: of the social and economic strata of that culture, Like
Speaker 1: it was something that was available to everyone as a
Speaker 1: means of showing other people that you love them, which
Speaker 1: I really really like. Just cool. Okay, I read a
Speaker 1: listener mail about figure drawing. Yeah, yeah, and how ballet
Speaker 1: dancers are perfect for it, which is a really good idea.
Speaker 1: Thank you again, kieren So. JC Horseley. John Calcott Horseley,
Speaker 1: who designed what is often called the first Christmas card.
Speaker 1: I didn't know until I was looking up information on him,
Speaker 1: was sometimes called mister J. Clothes Horseley. Okay, not for
Speaker 1: the reason you might think, because I read that and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, was he a dandy? No. Apparently
Speaker 1: he was a little bit of a Puritan and he
Speaker 1: didn't he refused to do life drawing with nudes, okay,
Speaker 1: And as a consequence, like throughout his career, that's one
Speaker 1: of the things that gets criticism is like he didn't
Speaker 1: really know how the human body works. He's not very
Speaker 1: good at proportions on human body because he was like
Speaker 1: so worried about seeing somebody without clothes on that he
Speaker 1: would never do a new drawing class or a new
Speaker 1: drawing study, which is so fascinating to me. Right, you
Speaker 1: think about all of the great artists in history who
Speaker 1: are known for their understanding of how the human body works. M. M.
Speaker 1: Michelangelo pops to mind, of course, and it's because they
Speaker 1: did so many nude studies, like m even a thin
Speaker 1: layer of clothing is gonna change your perception of like
Speaker 1: how the muscles and tendons and everything are connecting to
Speaker 1: one another. And I'm like, hoarsely, oh baby, you could
Speaker 1: have been even better. Yeah, it just made me laugh.
Speaker 1: The only other thing I wanted to talk about was
Speaker 1: end of year letters. Oh sure, I can't even get
Speaker 1: my act together to send cards. Yeah, I don't know
Speaker 1: how people do it. And yet the people in my
Speaker 1: life that do it, I love those letters every year,
Speaker 1: Like they're often super funny, and I'm like, oh, that's
Speaker 1: such a great thing. And then I'm like, I know,
Speaker 1: I'm sure it would only take a couple hours at most. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but like my brain is so resistant to the idea.
Speaker 1: I feel like there's been a year of my adult
Speaker 1: life when I sent Christmas cards, not letters, just cards
Speaker 1: to a lot of friends and relatives. Yeah. And I
Speaker 1: managed to do that once when we bought our house,
Speaker 1: I ahead of time of actually buying the house and moving,
Speaker 1: used one of those you know services we can design
Speaker 1: your own cards to put together a change of address card,
Speaker 1: and I already had those printed and if I recall correctly,
Speaker 1: They also had an addressing service, and so I might
Speaker 1: have had them address it for me, largely based on
Speaker 1: the address list that I had developed for our wedding,
Speaker 1: which was a few years before. Like, I went and
Speaker 1: updated that list, and I sent those cards out so
Speaker 1: quickly after I moved that a friend of mine said
Speaker 1: it made her angry. She because she could not imagine
Speaker 1: having been that on the ball in the middle of
Speaker 1: a move. And that's the only time that I've managed
Speaker 1: to be that on the ball. I have much more
Speaker 1: often done things like bought Christmas cards with the intent
Speaker 1: of sending them and not sending them. Oh yeah, still
Speaker 1: in a stillim a thing. Yeah. Once I bought a
Speaker 1: variety pack of those love pop pop up cards. Oh
Speaker 1: they're beautiful. I love them so much. I think they
Speaker 1: were flowers. It was like twelve months of flowers. And
Speaker 1: my intention was that I was gonna send my mom
Speaker 1: a flower card every month. And that's how much I
Speaker 1: didn't have my act together. I didn't get it together
Speaker 1: to send a card every month to my mom. And
Speaker 1: then the pandemic started and everything shut down, and I
Speaker 1: was like, I have this dozen cards, and so I
Speaker 1: sent greeting cards to like a lot of friends and
Speaker 1: family that like when everything shut down. And then, because
Speaker 1: it was at that time of the pandemic, when we
Speaker 1: really didn't know what was happening and we didn't know
Speaker 1: how it spread and people were washing their groceries and whatever,
Speaker 1: I sealed it with a wet paper towel and I
Speaker 1: wrote across the seal, sealed with a wet paper towel.
Speaker 1: So careful, so careful, and good, I mean in a
Speaker 1: good way. Yeah, I am the only time I've ever
Speaker 1: been even moderately okay at it. Some years back, we
Speaker 1: had a sponsor that printed custom cards, and I had
Speaker 1: New Year's cards that had my wonderful and horrible cat,
Speaker 1: mister Burns on them. And then this is a little sad,
Speaker 1: but mister Burns died kind of early that year, and
Speaker 1: I had not sent a lot of the cards and
Speaker 1: they are still in a drawer somewhere because I can't
Speaker 1: the don't have it in me to toss them. Yeah again,
Speaker 1: maybe they'll become an art project. Maybe we can draw
Speaker 1: something halloweeny on it and make it like ghost mister Burns.
Speaker 1: I don't know, we'll do something mister Burn's. Mister Burns,
Speaker 1: this also did kind of inspire me to think about, like,
Speaker 1: is there a way I can make the card thing happen?
Speaker 1: Because here's my hold up. I think I would be
Speaker 1: okay with it, except this sounds so cocky made me
Speaker 1: when I say it, It's like, how lazy are you?
Speaker 1: Getting to the post office from our house is weird.
Speaker 1: We have a post office that's quite close, less than
Speaker 1: half a mile away, but it's not walkable and it's
Speaker 1: in like a shopping center that getting into and out
Speaker 1: of it is a real pain. In the next I
Speaker 1: was like, I want to do that, and then we
Speaker 1: have another one. The next closest one is actually where
Speaker 1: my PO box is, but I don't go there super often.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like one of those things where I'm like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm having dinner over there, I'll stop by there. I'm
Speaker 1: just terrible at going to the post office. That's the
Speaker 1: biggest problem. One day, You've suddenly reminded me that I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure I got an email about my PO box renewal,
Speaker 1: and I'm like that, I handle that. I'm on top
Speaker 1: of it. I'm on top. Yeah, I'm not actually on
Speaker 1: top of things. Yeah yeah, And then I actually feel
Speaker 1: especially having listened to this and it being inspired by
Speaker 1: me trying to clear out my house. There's also part
Speaker 1: of me that's like, do I want to dump more
Speaker 1: things in other people's lives? What if they don't want cards? Yeah, treachery.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'll ask everybody do you want cards? This year?
Speaker 1: I don't want to give you things you don't want
Speaker 1: to deal with. We have a number of friends that
Speaker 1: tend to send either letters or cards, and a lot
Speaker 1: of our friends who have kids have been sending like
Speaker 1: little pictures of their kids. And I had done some
Speaker 1: tidying and I had discarded like the envelopes things that
Speaker 1: came in that the envelopes that the things had come in,
Speaker 1: the things that were not actually necessary. So I had
Speaker 1: the pictures and the cards, but the pictures had become
Speaker 1: separated from the cards. Uh huh. And there was a
Speaker 1: moment where Patrick came and looked at a picture of
Speaker 1: a child and was like, who is this? Whose baby
Speaker 1: is this? We had to like macked it up figure
Speaker 1: out who was Yeah, I'm pretty lucky in that regard.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think through like my good friends that
Speaker 1: would send me pictures of their kids, and one couple
Speaker 1: in particular, their kids look so much like either one
Speaker 1: or the other of them that I could easily go, oh,
Speaker 1: I know whose kid that is? Well, and in our defense,
Speaker 1: this particular picture did not look as much like the
Speaker 1: other pictures of the child or the child. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it happens. For whatever reason, it was just an angle
Speaker 1: that didn't look the same. I guess. We talked about
Speaker 1: the Memphis massacre, Yeah, we did. We have several similar
Speaker 1: massacres and the archive. We're going to have a related
Speaker 1: Saturday Classic coming up, and several of them are episodes
Speaker 1: I wrote. And I got to this point that I
Speaker 1: felt like we were telling essentially the same story over
Speaker 1: and over, but that it wasn't adding anything new or
Speaker 1: additional to what we were talking about. It just sort
Speaker 1: of felt like we were revisiting the same trauma repeatedly.
Speaker 1: Right with this one, my intent had been to have
Speaker 1: an episode that was about Francis Thompson, because I thought
Speaker 1: there was more information about her than there was Gotcha,
Speaker 1: and I sort of understood that to do the episode,
Speaker 1: I would need to talk about the massacre as part
Speaker 1: of the context, and so I was thinking between what
Speaker 1: we know about her and the massacre there's probably a
Speaker 1: whole episode there. But then I realized that, apart from
Speaker 1: her testimony she gave before the House Select Committee, what
Speaker 1: we know about her is basically entirely in horrifying, incredibly
Speaker 1: disrespectful news articles. If the episode had been about her,
Speaker 1: since our show is on Netflix now and we need
Speaker 1: some visual things to go on Netflix, we probably would
Speaker 1: have needed to use those illustrations of her, which were
Speaker 1: not things like she was not in control of her
Speaker 1: own right depiction there, it was something that she was
Speaker 1: forced to do. And then these are pictures that were
Speaker 1: being printed to make her look bad, And I just
Speaker 1: felt like there was not a way to really focus
Speaker 1: the episode on her without having to draw from this
Speaker 1: incredibly disrespectful and offensive source material. And I, like we
Speaker 1: have said before, it is incredibly important to acknowledge the
Speaker 1: reality that for all of history there have been people
Speaker 1: who have lived in whatever way outside of their society
Speaker 1: standards for things like sex and gender. But it's also
Speaker 1: really important to do that in a way that doesn't
Speaker 1: feel like we are disrespecting the people of the past
Speaker 1: or trans people living today. Yeah, and so like, as
Speaker 1: I read just a series of awful articles, I was like,
Speaker 1: I think the focus here needs to be about the massacre,
Speaker 1: because this massacre does have some aspects that don't feel
Speaker 1: like we're just repeating the same trauma. When we get
Speaker 1: into the part about the influence on things like the
Speaker 1: fourteenth Amendment, and then also spend some time talking about
Speaker 1: her and what happened to her. That's how we sort
Speaker 1: of arrived at the episode that we wound up doing.
Speaker 1: A sort of bit of information that I could not
Speaker 1: find a good place in the structure of the episode
Speaker 1: to include. Is Mary Church Terrell, who was a journalist
Speaker 1: and a suffrage advocate, a civil rights activist. Also, she
Speaker 1: wrote a memoir that was published in nineteen forty and
Speaker 1: she talks about this massacre in that memoir because her
Speaker 1: father was there and her father was shot and left
Speaker 1: for dead, and in her description of this she refers
Speaker 1: to it as the Irish Riot. And that's something that
Speaker 1: she wrote in nineteen forty, so decades later after it
Speaker 1: had happened, which to me was just an illustration of
Speaker 1: how tightly it was still connected to the idea of
Speaker 1: the Irish community and not former Confederates or the white
Speaker 1: community more broadly, even though at that point it was
Speaker 1: not in public memory much anymore beyond people who had
Speaker 1: some kind of direct connection to it, like she did
Speaker 1: through her father. I marvel and don't marvel at how
Speaker 1: quickly this did fall out of public memory. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I wonder because we're watching the same thing happen to
Speaker 1: a lot of things today, right, the difference being that
Speaker 1: today were like inundated with a constant, wildflow of information
Speaker 1: and news all the time, so it's kind of easy
Speaker 1: for your brain to like cycle to the next thing,
Speaker 1: whereas with this, you know, presumably there were not as
Speaker 1: many huge violent outbreaks going on on the daily being
Speaker 1: reported in papers. So I find myself being like, how
Speaker 1: much of this was sort of a purposeful and how
Speaker 1: much of it? I mean, there's no one there's no
Speaker 1: one answer either, right, like how much of it is
Speaker 1: people just being like that was so horrific And this
Speaker 1: incredibly horrifying reminder of the capacity for human cruelty and
Speaker 1: violence is something that like we almost deal with and
Speaker 1: process emotionally or intellectually. So let's put it aside versus
Speaker 1: people just like not caring, Like those are all elements
Speaker 1: of the the ways that people I don't even know
Speaker 1: if they forget, but they just kind of don't engage
Speaker 1: with that information anymore, and I I it's terrifying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there have been there have been some episodes on other
Speaker 1: especially very traumatic incidents, incidents of racist violence, where we
Speaker 1: have gotten more into like the how of how it
Speaker 1: fell out of public memory. Yeah, and sometimes there's been
Speaker 1: an aspect of the incident becoming a taboo among the
Speaker 1: people that it happened to, and people not wanting to
Speaker 1: talk about it among their family members, not wanting to
Speaker 1: talk about it among their descendants, right, not really like
Speaker 1: wanting to revisit that trauma. But then there have also
Speaker 1: been times that the focus was a lot more one
Speaker 1: intentionally burying the history of what happened, often on the
Speaker 1: part of whoever perpetrated the violence. But that's been part
Speaker 1: of a lot of these episodes that we have done before.
Speaker 1: Like I grew up in North Carolina, never heard about
Speaker 1: the Wilmington Coup until I was an adult, if I
Speaker 1: remember correctly, what our episode about the Tulsa massacre. Similarly,
Speaker 1: like the Tulsa massacre kind of was not in the
Speaker 1: public consciousness until it was resurrected by historians and activists
Speaker 1: and people trying to make sure that it continued to
Speaker 1: be part of the history, became re became part of
Speaker 1: the history that was talked about, and then with the
Speaker 1: Tulsa massacre specifically, like the TV show Watchmen. Ye, it
Speaker 1: was part of that TV show, and like that became
Speaker 1: how a lot of people heard about it, And like
Speaker 1: I remember when that show was on, seeing a lot
Speaker 1: of people on social media discovering for the first time
Speaker 1: that that had happened, and not really realizing that it
Speaker 1: wasn't just one thing. It was part of this pattern, right,
Speaker 1: that has happened over and over and over again all
Speaker 1: around the country at points over you know, decades slash centuries.
Speaker 1: I really appreciated the fact that there was, you know,
Speaker 1: a conscious effort leading up to the one hundred and
Speaker 1: fiftieth anniversary of the Memphis massacre that say, Okay, we
Speaker 1: are going to have all of these events, We're going
Speaker 1: to hold a symposium, We're going to like they made
Speaker 1: a website and a blog and a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: to just try to like make people aware that this
Speaker 1: had happened who might not have been aware of it before. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The other thing I couldn't help but think about, which
Speaker 1: might be a weird line to draw between two things.
Speaker 1: Is you know, we talked about Francis Thompson and her
Speaker 1: horrific treatment, which was in the mid to late eighteen seventies,
Speaker 1: right by the time she passed, and then just you know,
Speaker 1: forty five years later, you get Gladys being famous as
Speaker 1: a person who is bucking gender and sexuality norms, right,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, on the one hand, if you're a
Speaker 1: single person living through that, that feels like a very
Speaker 1: long time. But in the arc of history, that's a
Speaker 1: pretty short time. Branted, there are a lot of other variables, right,
Speaker 1: not the same place, et cetera. But it is kind
Speaker 1: of an interesting thing to think about. When we talked
Speaker 1: about Gladys's story, Gladys Bentley, I wasn't really thinking about
Speaker 1: it in terms of like just a few decades earlier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these things we're still playing out, and the really like
Speaker 1: direct ramifications of you know, the ways that particularly people
Speaker 1: of color that we're seen as outside of any of
Speaker 1: those norms were treated was very different and could be
Speaker 1: much harsher. Granted, we continue to see you know, violence today.
Speaker 1: I don't want to act like it rings fine, but
Speaker 1: it is an interesting way that we look at the
Speaker 1: ebbs and flows of how things shift forward. We talked
Speaker 1: in this episode about like the wave that happens after
Speaker 1: that when progress is made and then there's like a
Speaker 1: knee job towards a less less fruitful and less tolerant
Speaker 1: you know environment. Yeah. I mean my hope always, which
Speaker 1: might be naive, is that like each progressive step forward
Speaker 1: gets us a little farther, but who knows, who knows?
Speaker 1: Trying to be hopeful today on in a world where
Speaker 1: it's very hard, Yeah, which makes me feel bad for
Speaker 1: the next thing that I wanted to I was going
Speaker 1: to say, which is that one of the things that
Speaker 1: struck me about the news reporting around Francis Thompson was
Speaker 1: how similar some of it felt to news reporting now,
Speaker 1: where newspapers were basically manufacturing the idea that there was
Speaker 1: this epidemic sort of of cross dressing black people who
Speaker 1: were sexually deviant and like dangerous deviants, Yeah, manufacturing an
Speaker 1: emergency over it, which just feels like the same thing
Speaker 1: happening today. Oh yeah, how like maybe with fewer slurs
Speaker 1: and fewer fewer like intentionally incorrect pronouns, not saying that
Speaker 1: people are never called the wrong pronouns in reporting. Obviously
Speaker 1: that still happens, but like that was one of the
Speaker 1: things that was in a lot of these articles was
Speaker 1: like intentionally wrong pronouns and putting the pronouns in a
Speaker 1: way that to make it sound deviant. But like we're
Speaker 1: still living through a time in which reporting has like
Speaker 1: manufactured made up an emergency about trans people that just
Speaker 1: like it's not real. No, I mean, I would say
Speaker 1: that the difference, if you want to keep it hopeful,
Speaker 1: is that more people recognize now that that is below knee. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we'll say so than probably would have during Francis
Speaker 1: Thompson's time. Yeah, for sure, that's true, same dance, just
Speaker 1: different faces. It's like this is I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: reading an article about the need for bathroom laws, but
Speaker 1: it's no story time. Ago. Don't let drag queens read
Speaker 1: books to kids, except you should. You will never have
Speaker 1: a more fun day in your life. Those kids will
Speaker 1: have a great time. Yeah, I feel so strongly about this. Listen,
Speaker 1: I want a drag queen tosried read to me all
Speaker 1: the time and read me anything you want. It's great,
Speaker 1: it'll be fun. We'll all have a great time. I
Speaker 1: will tip you. Yeah, love it, love it. You've never
Speaker 1: been to a drag show. Get your to a drag show.
Speaker 1: You'll never have more fun in your life. Joy in abundance, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we all need it. I agree. I agree, we do
Speaker 1: need more joy. We need more joy, just across the
Speaker 1: whole spectrum of everything. Yeah. I'm somehow reminded of like
Speaker 1: having recently watched a live stream of an all trans
Speaker 1: table read of Ocean's eleven. So much fun, love it,
Speaker 1: love it anyway, whatever's coming up on your weekend, I
Speaker 1: hope there's joy there, And if you're having trouble finding
Speaker 1: that joy, I hope you have an eye opportunity to
Speaker 1: make a little of it for yourself. And if joy
Speaker 1: is not possible, then maybe peace or some kind of
Speaker 1: little treat. And I hope everyone is kind to each other.
Speaker 1: What in my head it made a flow chart that
Speaker 1: was like joy piece ice cream. I mean that could work.
Speaker 1: If you can't get to joy, at least get to chill.
Speaker 1: And if you can't get to chill, make yourself a
Speaker 1: dish of ice cream, then get some ice cream. We
Speaker 1: will be back on Monday with a brand new episode,
Speaker 1: and we'll have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. Stuff you Missed
Speaker 1: in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows.