Speaker 1: One explanation of the Salem witchcraft trials is that there
Speaker 1: was this kind of collective hallucinogenic event and people imagined
Speaker 1: that they saw witches and made their accusations based on that. So,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe that's true.
Speaker 2: Maybe they were all tripping up at Salem.
Speaker 3: Welcome to one day University Talks with the world's most
Speaker 3: engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This
Speaker 3: podcast is your chance to discover some of our top
Speaker 3: rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Steven Shregis, and
Speaker 3: today's lesson is about historians' biggest challenge, the unknown. There's
Speaker 3: a famous story about how Benjamin Franklin flew a kite
Speaker 3: in a thunderstorm and discovered electricity. Did that actually happen Stanford?
Speaker 3: His professor Carolyn Winterer says, we really have no idea
Speaker 3: Franklin was interested in electricity, but there's no clear historical
Speaker 3: evidence that he actually flew that famous kite. That's just
Speaker 3: one example of the many stories from the past we've
Speaker 3: embraced as fact when the truth is far more ambiguous.
Speaker 3: So what do we really know when it comes to history?
Speaker 3: Professor Winterer dug into this question for a one day
Speaker 3: university lecture titled Unexplained History What Historians Still Don't Understand.
Speaker 3: She's a professor of history and American Studies and department
Speaker 3: chair at Stanford University and the author of quite a
Speaker 3: few history books. The idea that our historical understanding may
Speaker 3: have large gaps is quite unique, so I asked her
Speaker 3: about the origins of the idea.
Speaker 1: This is how I remember it. We were chatting on
Speaker 1: the phone about ideas for lectures and this sort of
Speaker 1: popped out, like, how could we bring people into the
Speaker 1: workshop of the historian, because usually we just go out
Speaker 1: and present all these lovely polished findings, and we thought, Oh,
Speaker 1: wouldn't it be fun if we could just let people
Speaker 1: see how real historians actually work.
Speaker 3: You've said that before eighteen hundred, it gets a lot
Speaker 3: harder to figure out what was going on.
Speaker 1: Why is that, Yeah, Well, we think that before about
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred, ninety percent of the world was illiterate. So
Speaker 1: that means that most people in the world are neither
Speaker 1: producing nor consuming print materials. So if they're not producing
Speaker 1: them or consuming them, it means that we don't have
Speaker 1: any record of what they're thinking. Before fourteen fifty. There's
Speaker 1: no printing press, so there's very little broad dissemination of things,
Speaker 1: and things tend to be in one copy in handwrits,
Speaker 1: which historians called manuscript so if that one copy is lost,
Speaker 1: then the whole thing is lost and we never even
Speaker 1: know it happened. In some cases. There's also very little
Speaker 1: in terms of what historians call eye documents or ego documents,
Speaker 1: things like diaries that give you a sense of people's
Speaker 1: interior landscape. So the only thing we have by the
Speaker 1: time we get to about two or three thousand BC
Speaker 1: are documents of trade receipts, like a grain receipt. You know,
Speaker 1: you gave me three bushels of grain, and I have
Speaker 1: a clay tablet that records that. But we have no
Speaker 1: sense of how you're feeling about things, how you're thinking
Speaker 1: about things. So by the time we get into the
Speaker 1: deep archaeological record of ten thousand BC, we're really almost
Speaker 1: in a no man's land in terms of what we
Speaker 1: can know.
Speaker 3: You showed up with a number of examples. I've picked
Speaker 3: a few of them that we'll talk about.
Speaker 1: We're going to.
Speaker 3: Start with my favorite, and that is what Accent did.
Speaker 3: The founding far have you want to tell us about that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So just to set the stage, the founding fathers,
Speaker 1: you know, the big ones, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, et cetera.
Speaker 1: They're all born in the seventeen thirties and seventeen forties,
Speaker 1: so technically they're citizens of the British Empire, so perhaps
Speaker 1: they have a British accent. But the American Revolution comes
Speaker 1: along in seventeen seventy six and they become Americans. So
Speaker 1: it's an interesting question what accent do they have. And
Speaker 1: when we look at movies, the bad guys who are
Speaker 1: the British have these British accents like Darth Vader, and
Speaker 1: the Americans have these American accents like you and I
Speaker 1: have Stephen today. So the way we often think about
Speaker 1: it is that there is a thing called a timeless
Speaker 1: British accent that sounds like BBC English Today or you
Speaker 1: know whatever, Jane Austen movies people like to watch, and
Speaker 1: that after seventeen seventy six, the American accent that you
Speaker 1: and I have appears and we all start talking like
Speaker 1: I'm talking now. But in fact, what happened is that
Speaker 1: before about eighteen hundred, there was a common accent shared
Speaker 1: by many British people and many people living in British America,
Speaker 1: what we know is colonial America. And they actually sounded
Speaker 1: a little bit like I do and you do. In
Speaker 1: that they pronounced the r as in car, So we're
Speaker 1: hearing the hard R. Why do we think that this happened. Well,
Speaker 1: we don't have sound recordings, but we do have what
Speaker 1: are called pronouncing dictionaries, and they show us that they
Speaker 1: guide people about how to pronounce words, and they show
Speaker 1: British people in the seventeen nineties being told to pronounce
Speaker 1: words like car as call. So why did they do that? Well,
Speaker 1: this is hard for US Americans to swallow because we
Speaker 1: think we're at the center of the universe. But it
Speaker 1: in fact has nothing to do with the American Revolution. Instead,
Speaker 1: it has everything to do with the industrial revolution in England,
Speaker 1: where wealthy capitalists wanted to now distinguish themselves in society
Speaker 1: from the poor, and so they began to develop this
Speaker 1: new accent. The non rhotic are to say things like cod,
Speaker 1: whereas the poor would say things like card.
Speaker 3: It makes sense you're telling us that the English accent
Speaker 3: is the fancier accent, so at least I'm comfortable with that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what we suspected all along that the British are
Speaker 1: in fact fancier than we are, and they sound better
Speaker 1: than we do. So there it is.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's move even further back in history, the sixteen
Speaker 3: hundreds and the Salem witch Trials. It's a famous historical event,
Speaker 3: but do we really know what happened?
Speaker 1: So, you know, we love the Salem witch Trials of
Speaker 1: sixteen ninety two and sixteen ninety three up there in Salem, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: a little north of Boston. It's a big tourist destination today,
Speaker 1: and we know that something really creepy happened that involved
Speaker 1: young women and hysterics and bigot administers and various deaths
Speaker 1: and hangings and whatnot. So it's exciting and everybody is
Speaker 1: interesting said in this, So you know what do we know? Well,
Speaker 1: we know that at Salem in sixteen ninety two there
Speaker 1: were two hundred people accused of witchcraft, many of them
Speaker 1: young women. Nineteen of them were executed. And we think
Speaker 1: this sounds like a lot until we look at the
Speaker 1: European context, where around the same time, over about a
Speaker 1: two or three hundred year period, between fourteen hundred and
Speaker 1: seventeen hundred, there were fifty thousand witchcraft executions. So you
Speaker 1: take that European context, fifty thousand witchcraft executions over a
Speaker 1: three hundred year period, and then you look at Salem
Speaker 1: with its nineteen executions in one year, and you reverse
Speaker 1: the question. It's not what happened at Salem, it's why
Speaker 1: weren't there more witchcraft executions at Salem? What's wrong in
Speaker 1: North America that they weren't hunting down which is more
Speaker 1: so that's you know, that's an example of how knowing
Speaker 1: the broader contexts of a historical event can really help
Speaker 1: us to reframe it. So, you know, what are our
Speaker 1: sources for the witchcraft trials? So a lot of it
Speaker 1: is legal evidence that is written in Latin or in
Speaker 1: English handwriting that is very hard to read. And from
Speaker 1: that historians have come up with several hypotheses. So the
Speaker 1: first hypothesis is what I call the rich hating hypothesis.
Speaker 1: And historians mapped onto Salem where did the accusers live
Speaker 1: and where did the accused witches live? And what they
Speaker 1: found was that many of the accusers lived on the
Speaker 1: poorer side of Salem, on the wrong side of the tracks.
Speaker 1: Whereas the people who were more likely to be accused
Speaker 1: lived on the wealthier side of Salem. So this is
Speaker 1: an economic argument, and it basically says that the accusers
Speaker 1: were envious of the wealth of the accused and they
Speaker 1: lodged a witchcraft accusation based on that. So there's some
Speaker 1: evidence to support that hypothesis, but it doesn't account for everything,
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of economic envy in the world
Speaker 1: in sixteen ninety two, but we only have one incidence
Speaker 1: of an event like Salem, so it answers some questions,
Speaker 1: doesn't answer all of them. During the nineteen sixties, there
Speaker 1: was a second hypothesis, that is the ergot hypothesis. So
Speaker 1: the biologists out there might know that Ergot's ergot is
Speaker 1: a hallucinogenic rye fungus, so it grows on wheat and
Speaker 1: rye and barley grains you might store, as they did
Speaker 1: in the seventeenth century over a long winter, and that
Speaker 1: if you ingest this fungus you basically get high. So
Speaker 1: one explanation of Salem witchcraft trials is that there was
Speaker 1: this kind of collective hallucinogenic event and people imagined that
Speaker 1: they saw witches and made their accusations based on that,
Speaker 1: So you know, maybe that's true, maybe they were all
Speaker 1: tripping up at Salem. The trouble is that there was
Speaker 1: a lot of Rye fungus throughout the colonies, throughout the
Speaker 1: other parts of the world, and it didn't manifest necessarily
Speaker 1: in witchcraft accusations. So, just like the economic explanation, it
Speaker 1: has some things that it explains, some things that it
Speaker 1: doesn't explain. You know, there's many more hypotheses, but you know,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, will never really understand
Speaker 1: what happened at Salem because our evidence is pretty paltry
Speaker 1: when you think about the kind of evidence we might
Speaker 1: have today for such an event.
Speaker 3: After the break the mystery of Cleopatra's legendary beauty and
Speaker 3: why some people believe aliens built Stonehenge, let's go back
Speaker 3: another like sixteen hundred years, so it really gets are now,
Speaker 3: to put it bluntly, what did Cleopatra look like? Why
Speaker 3: do we think that she's so beautiful? What did she
Speaker 3: actually look like? Why did you.
Speaker 1: Tell us possibly the most famous woman who has ever lived,
Speaker 1: trailing all kinds of legends about her beauty. But the
Speaker 1: fact of the matter is that we really do not
Speaker 1: know what Cleopatra looked like. So you know, when I
Speaker 1: say Cleopatra, the members of your audience, who are perhaps
Speaker 1: over the age of the half century mark, are going
Speaker 1: to immediately think of Elizabeth Taylor with her great blue
Speaker 1: eyeshadow looking like Cleopatra. So that's, you know, that's the
Speaker 1: image in our mind, but we in fact don't know,
Speaker 1: and that was kind of an invented image. So what
Speaker 1: do we know, Well, we have very very little evidence
Speaker 1: because we are around the decades right before the BC
Speaker 1: era ends, right, so we're around thirty BC. And given
Speaker 1: how much we think about that time period, you know,
Speaker 1: the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and Romans, we imagine that
Speaker 1: we have tons and tons of evidence, but we don't,
Speaker 1: and a lot of it is very contradictory. So the
Speaker 1: first thing we need to realize is that Cleopatra is
Speaker 1: not in fact Egyptian. She is Cleopatra the Seventh. She
Speaker 1: is from the Ptolemaic dynasty PTol e Naic, and the
Speaker 1: Ptolemies are in fact Greek. They conquered the Egyptians during
Speaker 1: the third century BC, and she's one of the later
Speaker 1: queens of the Ptolemaic dynasty. So when you are in
Speaker 1: the Ptolemaic world, you are in a world of what
Speaker 1: we know as royal incest. So your listeners can take
Speaker 1: away a new vocabulary term for today. Royal incest comes
Speaker 1: from a time period when they believe that royal families
Speaker 1: were in fact manifestations of gods on earth. So why
Speaker 1: would you want to marry outside of the royal blood
Speaker 1: and sully the royal blood with the blood of mere
Speaker 1: common know, you want to marry within the royal family.
Speaker 1: So we believe that her parents were brother and sister.
Speaker 1: So she is not Egyptian at all. She is Greek,
Speaker 1: extremely Greek. We have to get out of our heads
Speaker 1: a kind of Egyptian appearance, whatever that might be at
Speaker 1: this time, and imagine a Greek appearance again, whatever that
Speaker 1: might be. Okay, So there's first of all, what is
Speaker 1: her ethnicity. Second of all, we might be asking, well,
Speaker 1: she's a queen. There's probably a ton of statues of
Speaker 1: her that we can look at. But that's also a
Speaker 1: problem because Ptolemaic and ancient Egyptian statuary is very formulaic.
Speaker 1: They're not all about expressing individualism. So they have all
Speaker 1: of these protocols for how you show a queen, so
Speaker 1: you have a certain hairstyle, you have a certain way
Speaker 1: of showing their lips and their neck and all of that.
Speaker 1: What that means is that our images of what may
Speaker 1: or may not be Cleopatra are very generic, and we
Speaker 1: don't know if it's her or another queen. Same thing
Speaker 1: with coinage that was issued during her reign. There is
Speaker 1: a woman's head on coinage during Cleopatra's reign of Egypt,
Speaker 1: but it's so formulaic and it's intended to express her power.
Speaker 1: So she looks very masculine on the portraits on coins,
Speaker 1: so we don't know if that's actually what she looked like.
Speaker 1: So so much for statues, so much for coins. We
Speaker 1: also know that eventually a further complication is that the
Speaker 1: Romans conquered Egypt, and many people in Rome hated Cleopatra
Speaker 1: because she was this outsider queen brought back to Rome
Speaker 1: by Julia Caesar and then Mark Antony. So they had
Speaker 1: this anti Cleopatra propaganda in which they called her a witch,
Speaker 1: a whore, an animal worshiper, and of course very strange looking,
Speaker 1: because they didn't want her around.
Speaker 3: They didn't like Cleopatra. Everybody likes Elizabeth Taylor.
Speaker 1: Yes, everybody likes Elizabeth Taylor. People in Rome didn't like Cleopatra.
Speaker 1: And so we come away from this with this astonishing
Speaker 1: realization that for all that she's famous, we really don't
Speaker 1: know what Cleopatra actually looked like.
Speaker 3: The next one I can almost sum up in one word, Stonehenge.
Speaker 1: Stonehenge.
Speaker 3: Aliens built that, right, that's the quick answer.
Speaker 1: Aliens built it, and there it is, and they beamed
Speaker 1: down and put up a bunch of stones, and you
Speaker 1: can go there and communicate with the aliens.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, just in case that's not true. What
Speaker 3: is true?
Speaker 1: What is true? So we're fascinated by Stonehenge. The first
Speaker 1: thing we should know is it wasn't built by the Druids.
Speaker 1: The Druids are kind of manifest in England right around
Speaker 1: the time of the Romans, which is around first century
Speaker 1: BC for century AD. It's not a Druid temple. It's way, way,
Speaker 1: way way older than that. What we do know about
Speaker 1: Stonehenge is that, first of all, we don't know a
Speaker 1: lot about it because it's about three thousand years old.
Speaker 1: And the way to think about Stonehenge is not as Stonehenge,
Speaker 1: but as stone Henges, like many of the monuments that
Speaker 1: are scattered around Stone Age England and the continent. So
Speaker 1: we think that an outer ditch started to be constructed
Speaker 1: around three thousand BC that was made of wood, so
Speaker 1: it's actually it starts life as Woodhenge, and then over
Speaker 1: time they started to bring in all of these sarcins
Speaker 1: and bluestones those are the big rocks, and that those
Speaker 1: stones got moved around a lot over the next hundred years,
Speaker 1: and that finally the site was abandoned. What we need
Speaker 1: to do to kind of retrain our consciousness is to
Speaker 1: constantly imagine that this is not one thing that's locked
Speaker 1: in time. It is used by multiple people at multiple
Speaker 1: different moments. What we imagine today, based on new archaeological research,
Speaker 1: is that Stonehenge is actually part of a much wider
Speaker 1: ceremonial landscape that we weren't paying attention to before. We
Speaker 1: were just focused on the stones themselves. But our chaeologists
Speaker 1: have started to look much more broadly, several kilometers outside
Speaker 1: of Stonehenge, and they think that it's part of what
Speaker 1: they call a ritual landscape, so that a couple kilometers
Speaker 1: away you would have had a ceremony to mark let's
Speaker 1: say my death, right, So my death, we start ceremony
Speaker 1: a couple kilometers away, and that we then marched towards Stonehenge,
Speaker 1: which moves us from the world of the living into
Speaker 1: the world of the dead, and that Stonehenge functions as
Speaker 1: a kind of portal into the afterlife. But you know,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, the trouble with anything
Speaker 1: that before about two thousand BC is that we just
Speaker 1: don't have any writing from that time period. When we
Speaker 1: don't have writing, we really have a hard time getting
Speaker 1: into people's mindsets, into what they are actually thinking. So
Speaker 1: I fear that the Stonehenge stones are going to live
Speaker 1: mutely forever more, just as they do today.
Speaker 3: Okay, one last question. Then we've gone back now a
Speaker 3: few thousand years, just for the fun of it, let's
Speaker 3: go forward maybe a thousand years or so. Imagine we're
Speaker 3: there and historians like you are looking back saying, we
Speaker 3: don't quite get what went on in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3: We can't piece it together. We have some ideas, what
Speaker 3: is it you think historians won't be able to figure out?
Speaker 1: I thought a lot about this question. I think they're
Speaker 1: going to really ponder the fate of democracy and why
Speaker 1: we weren't thinking in the right directions about how to
Speaker 1: save democracy. So, you know, democracy is a new idea.
Speaker 1: It's only been on the earth for about two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty years, and we're at a moment of reckoning
Speaker 1: right now. Does democracy or autocracy rule of the day?
Speaker 1: And I don't really think that they're going to wonder
Speaker 1: about the rule that informative podcasts played in saving democracy.
Speaker 1: And you know, this has been a huge revolution, unexpected
Speaker 1: in the last couple of years, and the pandemic probably
Speaker 1: had something to do with it. But everybody's listening to podcasts.
Speaker 1: Some of them are listening to murder podcasts. I'm one
Speaker 1: of those true crime junkies, I admit it, But a
Speaker 1: lot of us are also listening to podcasts like this one,
Speaker 1: where you have people talking about certain topics of their expertise.
Speaker 1: And John Adams actually said during the American Revolution that
Speaker 1: knowledge is power. And I think that historians in the
Speaker 1: future may wonder about the role that informative podcasts played
Speaker 1: in helping Americans to think through the problem of democracy
Speaker 1: and how we get an informed citizenship. And they're going
Speaker 1: to try to measure the role that podcasts played in that.
Speaker 1: I honestly believe this. I'm not just saying this.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you to John Adams then, and even bigger
Speaker 3: thank you to Professor Carolyn Winter. Thank you so much
Speaker 3: for doing this all right, Thank you. Thanks for joining
Speaker 3: us here at One Day University. Sign up at our
Speaker 3: website one dayu dot com to become a member and
Speaker 3: access over seven hundred full length video lectures from the
Speaker 3: world's finest professors. You can also download our app. There
Speaker 3: you can learn more about today's episode and watch Stanford
Speaker 3: Professor Carolyn Winterer's lecture on Unexplained History, as well as
Speaker 3: her talks on Benjamin Franklin, the Roman Empire, and more.
Speaker 3: Join us next time when we talk about the literature
Speaker 3: that shaped our presidents.
Speaker 4: George Washington loved to read etiquette books. These books that
Speaker 4: teach us how to gracefully accept or decline a dinner
Speaker 4: invitation or I imagine the updated version of Emily post
Speaker 4: would Feeley how to gently unfriend someone on Facebook.
Speaker 3: One Day University is a production of iHeart Power and
Speaker 3: School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a
Speaker 3: review in your favorite podcast app You can also check
Speaker 3: out other Curiosity podcasts to learn about history, pop culture,
Speaker 3: true crime, and more.
Speaker 1: School of Humans,