WEBVTT - Unexplained History

0:00:02.279 --> 0:00:06.280
<v Speaker 1>One explanation of the Salem witchcraft trials is that there

0:00:06.400 --> 0:00:11.240
<v Speaker 1>was this kind of collective hallucinogenic event and people imagined

0:00:11.240 --> 0:00:15.360
<v Speaker 1>that they saw witches and made their accusations based on that. So,

0:00:15.920 --> 0:00:17.439
<v Speaker 1>you know, maybe that's true.

0:00:17.480 --> 0:00:27.680
<v Speaker 2>Maybe they were all tripping up at Salem.

0:00:27.760 --> 0:00:31.120
<v Speaker 3>Welcome to one day University Talks with the world's most

0:00:31.120 --> 0:00:36.239
<v Speaker 3>engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This

0:00:36.360 --> 0:00:39.440
<v Speaker 3>podcast is your chance to discover some of our top

0:00:39.520 --> 0:00:44.040
<v Speaker 3>rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Steven Shregis, and

0:00:44.080 --> 0:00:49.960
<v Speaker 3>today's lesson is about historians' biggest challenge, the unknown. There's

0:00:50.000 --> 0:00:53.479
<v Speaker 3>a famous story about how Benjamin Franklin flew a kite

0:00:53.479 --> 0:00:59.760
<v Speaker 3>in a thunderstorm and discovered electricity. Did that actually happen Stanford?

0:00:59.800 --> 0:01:03.960
<v Speaker 3>His professor Carolyn Winterer says, we really have no idea

0:01:04.880 --> 0:01:08.640
<v Speaker 3>Franklin was interested in electricity, but there's no clear historical

0:01:08.680 --> 0:01:12.760
<v Speaker 3>evidence that he actually flew that famous kite. That's just

0:01:12.880 --> 0:01:16.360
<v Speaker 3>one example of the many stories from the past we've

0:01:16.440 --> 0:01:20.240
<v Speaker 3>embraced as fact when the truth is far more ambiguous.

0:01:20.920 --> 0:01:23.160
<v Speaker 3>So what do we really know when it comes to history?

0:01:24.120 --> 0:01:27.160
<v Speaker 3>Professor Winterer dug into this question for a one day

0:01:27.240 --> 0:01:33.280
<v Speaker 3>university lecture titled Unexplained History What Historians Still Don't Understand.

0:01:33.840 --> 0:01:37.320
<v Speaker 3>She's a professor of history and American Studies and department

0:01:37.400 --> 0:01:40.880
<v Speaker 3>chair at Stanford University and the author of quite a

0:01:40.880 --> 0:01:45.720
<v Speaker 3>few history books. The idea that our historical understanding may

0:01:45.760 --> 0:01:49.720
<v Speaker 3>have large gaps is quite unique, so I asked her

0:01:49.760 --> 0:01:54.880
<v Speaker 3>about the origins of the idea.

0:01:57.680 --> 0:01:59.800
<v Speaker 1>This is how I remember it. We were chatting on

0:01:59.840 --> 0:02:03.840
<v Speaker 1>the phone about ideas for lectures and this sort of

0:02:03.880 --> 0:02:07.200
<v Speaker 1>popped out, like, how could we bring people into the

0:02:07.360 --> 0:02:10.560
<v Speaker 1>workshop of the historian, because usually we just go out

0:02:10.600 --> 0:02:15.440
<v Speaker 1>and present all these lovely polished findings, and we thought, Oh,

0:02:15.480 --> 0:02:17.480
<v Speaker 1>wouldn't it be fun if we could just let people

0:02:17.520 --> 0:02:20.440
<v Speaker 1>see how real historians actually work.

0:02:20.840 --> 0:02:23.480
<v Speaker 3>You've said that before eighteen hundred, it gets a lot

0:02:23.560 --> 0:02:26.799
<v Speaker 3>harder to figure out what was going on.

0:02:27.040 --> 0:02:30.680
<v Speaker 1>Why is that, Yeah, Well, we think that before about

0:02:30.680 --> 0:02:34.920
<v Speaker 1>eighteen hundred, ninety percent of the world was illiterate. So

0:02:34.960 --> 0:02:37.919
<v Speaker 1>that means that most people in the world are neither

0:02:38.080 --> 0:02:43.680
<v Speaker 1>producing nor consuming print materials. So if they're not producing

0:02:43.680 --> 0:02:46.680
<v Speaker 1>them or consuming them, it means that we don't have

0:02:46.760 --> 0:02:52.080
<v Speaker 1>any record of what they're thinking. Before fourteen fifty. There's

0:02:52.120 --> 0:02:56.600
<v Speaker 1>no printing press, so there's very little broad dissemination of things,

0:02:56.800 --> 0:03:00.000
<v Speaker 1>and things tend to be in one copy in handwrits,

0:03:00.240 --> 0:03:04.280
<v Speaker 1>which historians called manuscript so if that one copy is lost,

0:03:04.560 --> 0:03:06.959
<v Speaker 1>then the whole thing is lost and we never even

0:03:07.080 --> 0:03:11.240
<v Speaker 1>know it happened. In some cases. There's also very little

0:03:11.440 --> 0:03:15.480
<v Speaker 1>in terms of what historians call eye documents or ego documents,

0:03:15.639 --> 0:03:19.160
<v Speaker 1>things like diaries that give you a sense of people's

0:03:19.240 --> 0:03:22.560
<v Speaker 1>interior landscape. So the only thing we have by the

0:03:22.600 --> 0:03:25.080
<v Speaker 1>time we get to about two or three thousand BC

0:03:25.639 --> 0:03:29.800
<v Speaker 1>are documents of trade receipts, like a grain receipt. You know,

0:03:29.880 --> 0:03:33.000
<v Speaker 1>you gave me three bushels of grain, and I have

0:03:33.080 --> 0:03:35.960
<v Speaker 1>a clay tablet that records that. But we have no

0:03:36.120 --> 0:03:39.320
<v Speaker 1>sense of how you're feeling about things, how you're thinking

0:03:39.360 --> 0:03:42.760
<v Speaker 1>about things. So by the time we get into the

0:03:42.800 --> 0:03:47.080
<v Speaker 1>deep archaeological record of ten thousand BC, we're really almost

0:03:47.080 --> 0:03:49.040
<v Speaker 1>in a no man's land in terms of what we

0:03:49.160 --> 0:03:49.480
<v Speaker 1>can know.

0:03:50.600 --> 0:03:53.040
<v Speaker 3>You showed up with a number of examples. I've picked

0:03:53.040 --> 0:03:55.040
<v Speaker 3>a few of them that we'll talk about.

0:03:55.400 --> 0:03:55.840
<v Speaker 1>We're going to.

0:03:55.840 --> 0:03:59.080
<v Speaker 3>Start with my favorite, and that is what Accent did.

0:03:59.120 --> 0:04:01.920
<v Speaker 3>The founding far have you want to tell us about that?

0:04:02.200 --> 0:04:05.839
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, So just to set the stage, the founding fathers,

0:04:05.960 --> 0:04:08.680
<v Speaker 1>you know, the big ones, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, et cetera.

0:04:08.720 --> 0:04:11.400
<v Speaker 1>They're all born in the seventeen thirties and seventeen forties,

0:04:11.400 --> 0:04:15.320
<v Speaker 1>so technically they're citizens of the British Empire, so perhaps

0:04:15.320 --> 0:04:18.039
<v Speaker 1>they have a British accent. But the American Revolution comes

0:04:18.040 --> 0:04:20.560
<v Speaker 1>along in seventeen seventy six and they become Americans. So

0:04:20.600 --> 0:04:23.359
<v Speaker 1>it's an interesting question what accent do they have. And

0:04:23.400 --> 0:04:26.919
<v Speaker 1>when we look at movies, the bad guys who are

0:04:27.120 --> 0:04:30.359
<v Speaker 1>the British have these British accents like Darth Vader, and

0:04:30.440 --> 0:04:33.400
<v Speaker 1>the Americans have these American accents like you and I

0:04:33.480 --> 0:04:36.000
<v Speaker 1>have Stephen today. So the way we often think about

0:04:36.040 --> 0:04:38.080
<v Speaker 1>it is that there is a thing called a timeless

0:04:38.120 --> 0:04:41.840
<v Speaker 1>British accent that sounds like BBC English Today or you

0:04:41.880 --> 0:04:44.719
<v Speaker 1>know whatever, Jane Austen movies people like to watch, and

0:04:44.760 --> 0:04:48.240
<v Speaker 1>that after seventeen seventy six, the American accent that you

0:04:48.320 --> 0:04:52.479
<v Speaker 1>and I have appears and we all start talking like

0:04:52.560 --> 0:04:57.320
<v Speaker 1>I'm talking now. But in fact, what happened is that

0:04:57.760 --> 0:05:02.239
<v Speaker 1>before about eighteen hundred, there was a common accent shared

0:05:02.279 --> 0:05:07.039
<v Speaker 1>by many British people and many people living in British America,

0:05:07.120 --> 0:05:10.599
<v Speaker 1>what we know is colonial America. And they actually sounded

0:05:10.880 --> 0:05:13.279
<v Speaker 1>a little bit like I do and you do. In

0:05:13.360 --> 0:05:17.479
<v Speaker 1>that they pronounced the r as in car, So we're

0:05:17.600 --> 0:05:21.240
<v Speaker 1>hearing the hard R. Why do we think that this happened. Well,

0:05:21.279 --> 0:05:23.599
<v Speaker 1>we don't have sound recordings, but we do have what

0:05:23.680 --> 0:05:27.920
<v Speaker 1>are called pronouncing dictionaries, and they show us that they

0:05:27.960 --> 0:05:30.599
<v Speaker 1>guide people about how to pronounce words, and they show

0:05:30.680 --> 0:05:34.880
<v Speaker 1>British people in the seventeen nineties being told to pronounce

0:05:35.000 --> 0:05:40.320
<v Speaker 1>words like car as call. So why did they do that? Well,

0:05:40.520 --> 0:05:43.640
<v Speaker 1>this is hard for US Americans to swallow because we

0:05:43.720 --> 0:05:45.880
<v Speaker 1>think we're at the center of the universe. But it

0:05:45.920 --> 0:05:49.839
<v Speaker 1>in fact has nothing to do with the American Revolution. Instead,

0:05:49.880 --> 0:05:53.680
<v Speaker 1>it has everything to do with the industrial revolution in England,

0:05:53.720 --> 0:05:58.520
<v Speaker 1>where wealthy capitalists wanted to now distinguish themselves in society

0:05:58.760 --> 0:06:02.080
<v Speaker 1>from the poor, and so they began to develop this

0:06:02.200 --> 0:06:05.960
<v Speaker 1>new accent. The non rhotic are to say things like cod,

0:06:06.880 --> 0:06:10.160
<v Speaker 1>whereas the poor would say things like card.

0:06:10.600 --> 0:06:12.880
<v Speaker 3>It makes sense you're telling us that the English accent

0:06:13.320 --> 0:06:16.680
<v Speaker 3>is the fancier accent, so at least I'm comfortable with that.

0:06:17.040 --> 0:06:20.159
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what we suspected all along that the British are

0:06:20.279 --> 0:06:23.400
<v Speaker 1>in fact fancier than we are, and they sound better

0:06:23.440 --> 0:06:25.080
<v Speaker 1>than we do. So there it is.

0:06:25.800 --> 0:06:28.880
<v Speaker 3>Okay, let's move even further back in history, the sixteen

0:06:28.960 --> 0:06:33.760
<v Speaker 3>hundreds and the Salem witch Trials. It's a famous historical event,

0:06:34.080 --> 0:06:35.719
<v Speaker 3>but do we really know what happened?

0:06:35.960 --> 0:06:38.719
<v Speaker 1>So, you know, we love the Salem witch Trials of

0:06:38.800 --> 0:06:43.240
<v Speaker 1>sixteen ninety two and sixteen ninety three up there in Salem, Massachusetts,

0:06:43.279 --> 0:06:46.960
<v Speaker 1>a little north of Boston. It's a big tourist destination today,

0:06:47.040 --> 0:06:49.960
<v Speaker 1>and we know that something really creepy happened that involved

0:06:50.080 --> 0:06:55.239
<v Speaker 1>young women and hysterics and bigot administers and various deaths

0:06:55.320 --> 0:06:59.520
<v Speaker 1>and hangings and whatnot. So it's exciting and everybody is

0:06:59.640 --> 0:07:03.040
<v Speaker 1>interesting said in this, So you know what do we know? Well,

0:07:03.080 --> 0:07:05.960
<v Speaker 1>we know that at Salem in sixteen ninety two there

0:07:06.000 --> 0:07:09.680
<v Speaker 1>were two hundred people accused of witchcraft, many of them

0:07:09.760 --> 0:07:14.120
<v Speaker 1>young women. Nineteen of them were executed. And we think

0:07:14.200 --> 0:07:17.240
<v Speaker 1>this sounds like a lot until we look at the

0:07:17.280 --> 0:07:22.040
<v Speaker 1>European context, where around the same time, over about a

0:07:22.080 --> 0:07:25.600
<v Speaker 1>two or three hundred year period, between fourteen hundred and

0:07:25.680 --> 0:07:32.640
<v Speaker 1>seventeen hundred, there were fifty thousand witchcraft executions. So you

0:07:32.720 --> 0:07:37.960
<v Speaker 1>take that European context, fifty thousand witchcraft executions over a

0:07:38.000 --> 0:07:40.840
<v Speaker 1>three hundred year period, and then you look at Salem

0:07:41.160 --> 0:07:45.560
<v Speaker 1>with its nineteen executions in one year, and you reverse

0:07:45.640 --> 0:07:49.840
<v Speaker 1>the question. It's not what happened at Salem, it's why

0:07:49.880 --> 0:07:54.160
<v Speaker 1>weren't there more witchcraft executions at Salem? What's wrong in

0:07:54.240 --> 0:07:58.240
<v Speaker 1>North America that they weren't hunting down which is more

0:07:58.280 --> 0:08:01.160
<v Speaker 1>so that's you know, that's an example of how knowing

0:08:01.240 --> 0:08:04.440
<v Speaker 1>the broader contexts of a historical event can really help

0:08:04.520 --> 0:08:07.480
<v Speaker 1>us to reframe it. So, you know, what are our

0:08:07.520 --> 0:08:10.480
<v Speaker 1>sources for the witchcraft trials? So a lot of it

0:08:10.560 --> 0:08:13.800
<v Speaker 1>is legal evidence that is written in Latin or in

0:08:14.040 --> 0:08:17.520
<v Speaker 1>English handwriting that is very hard to read. And from

0:08:17.560 --> 0:08:22.280
<v Speaker 1>that historians have come up with several hypotheses. So the

0:08:22.320 --> 0:08:27.280
<v Speaker 1>first hypothesis is what I call the rich hating hypothesis.

0:08:27.680 --> 0:08:32.560
<v Speaker 1>And historians mapped onto Salem where did the accusers live

0:08:33.000 --> 0:08:36.640
<v Speaker 1>and where did the accused witches live? And what they

0:08:36.720 --> 0:08:39.920
<v Speaker 1>found was that many of the accusers lived on the

0:08:40.040 --> 0:08:43.840
<v Speaker 1>poorer side of Salem, on the wrong side of the tracks.

0:08:44.120 --> 0:08:46.800
<v Speaker 1>Whereas the people who were more likely to be accused

0:08:47.040 --> 0:08:50.000
<v Speaker 1>lived on the wealthier side of Salem. So this is

0:08:50.040 --> 0:08:54.199
<v Speaker 1>an economic argument, and it basically says that the accusers

0:08:54.400 --> 0:08:57.720
<v Speaker 1>were envious of the wealth of the accused and they

0:08:57.800 --> 0:09:02.160
<v Speaker 1>lodged a witchcraft accusation based on that. So there's some

0:09:02.360 --> 0:09:06.200
<v Speaker 1>evidence to support that hypothesis, but it doesn't account for everything,

0:09:06.280 --> 0:09:08.760
<v Speaker 1>because there's a lot of economic envy in the world

0:09:08.800 --> 0:09:11.960
<v Speaker 1>in sixteen ninety two, but we only have one incidence

0:09:12.120 --> 0:09:15.160
<v Speaker 1>of an event like Salem, so it answers some questions,

0:09:15.320 --> 0:09:18.760
<v Speaker 1>doesn't answer all of them. During the nineteen sixties, there

0:09:18.880 --> 0:09:23.040
<v Speaker 1>was a second hypothesis, that is the ergot hypothesis. So

0:09:23.160 --> 0:09:27.520
<v Speaker 1>the biologists out there might know that Ergot's ergot is

0:09:27.559 --> 0:09:32.200
<v Speaker 1>a hallucinogenic rye fungus, so it grows on wheat and

0:09:32.280 --> 0:09:35.079
<v Speaker 1>rye and barley grains you might store, as they did

0:09:35.120 --> 0:09:38.080
<v Speaker 1>in the seventeenth century over a long winter, and that

0:09:38.160 --> 0:09:42.679
<v Speaker 1>if you ingest this fungus you basically get high. So

0:09:43.640 --> 0:09:47.800
<v Speaker 1>one explanation of Salem witchcraft trials is that there was

0:09:47.880 --> 0:09:52.720
<v Speaker 1>this kind of collective hallucinogenic event and people imagined that

0:09:52.720 --> 0:09:56.400
<v Speaker 1>they saw witches and made their accusations based on that,

0:09:56.600 --> 0:09:59.600
<v Speaker 1>So you know, maybe that's true, maybe they were all

0:09:59.640 --> 0:10:02.600
<v Speaker 1>tripping up at Salem. The trouble is that there was

0:10:02.679 --> 0:10:06.760
<v Speaker 1>a lot of Rye fungus throughout the colonies, throughout the

0:10:06.920 --> 0:10:10.360
<v Speaker 1>other parts of the world, and it didn't manifest necessarily

0:10:10.400 --> 0:10:14.679
<v Speaker 1>in witchcraft accusations. So, just like the economic explanation, it

0:10:14.720 --> 0:10:18.240
<v Speaker 1>has some things that it explains, some things that it

0:10:18.280 --> 0:10:23.120
<v Speaker 1>doesn't explain. You know, there's many more hypotheses, but you know,

0:10:23.280 --> 0:10:26.800
<v Speaker 1>at the end of the day, will never really understand

0:10:27.000 --> 0:10:31.080
<v Speaker 1>what happened at Salem because our evidence is pretty paltry

0:10:31.240 --> 0:10:33.280
<v Speaker 1>when you think about the kind of evidence we might

0:10:33.400 --> 0:10:35.080
<v Speaker 1>have today for such an event.

0:10:36.440 --> 0:10:40.880
<v Speaker 3>After the break the mystery of Cleopatra's legendary beauty and

0:10:40.920 --> 0:10:56.959
<v Speaker 3>why some people believe aliens built Stonehenge, let's go back

0:10:57.200 --> 0:11:00.640
<v Speaker 3>another like sixteen hundred years, so it really gets are now,

0:11:01.000 --> 0:11:04.560
<v Speaker 3>to put it bluntly, what did Cleopatra look like? Why

0:11:04.559 --> 0:11:06.400
<v Speaker 3>do we think that she's so beautiful? What did she

0:11:06.520 --> 0:11:08.719
<v Speaker 3>actually look like? Why did you.

0:11:08.679 --> 0:11:12.400
<v Speaker 1>Tell us possibly the most famous woman who has ever lived,

0:11:12.640 --> 0:11:16.760
<v Speaker 1>trailing all kinds of legends about her beauty. But the

0:11:16.800 --> 0:11:19.599
<v Speaker 1>fact of the matter is that we really do not

0:11:19.920 --> 0:11:23.520
<v Speaker 1>know what Cleopatra looked like. So you know, when I

0:11:23.520 --> 0:11:27.800
<v Speaker 1>say Cleopatra, the members of your audience, who are perhaps

0:11:27.880 --> 0:11:30.160
<v Speaker 1>over the age of the half century mark, are going

0:11:30.240 --> 0:11:35.120
<v Speaker 1>to immediately think of Elizabeth Taylor with her great blue

0:11:35.200 --> 0:11:38.520
<v Speaker 1>eyeshadow looking like Cleopatra. So that's, you know, that's the

0:11:38.600 --> 0:11:42.440
<v Speaker 1>image in our mind, but we in fact don't know,

0:11:42.559 --> 0:11:44.800
<v Speaker 1>and that was kind of an invented image. So what

0:11:44.960 --> 0:11:48.800
<v Speaker 1>do we know, Well, we have very very little evidence

0:11:48.880 --> 0:11:54.280
<v Speaker 1>because we are around the decades right before the BC

0:11:54.520 --> 0:11:58.880
<v Speaker 1>era ends, right, so we're around thirty BC. And given

0:11:58.920 --> 0:12:01.280
<v Speaker 1>how much we think about that time period, you know,

0:12:01.320 --> 0:12:03.760
<v Speaker 1>the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and Romans, we imagine that

0:12:03.800 --> 0:12:06.240
<v Speaker 1>we have tons and tons of evidence, but we don't,

0:12:06.480 --> 0:12:09.000
<v Speaker 1>and a lot of it is very contradictory. So the

0:12:09.040 --> 0:12:12.000
<v Speaker 1>first thing we need to realize is that Cleopatra is

0:12:12.080 --> 0:12:16.160
<v Speaker 1>not in fact Egyptian. She is Cleopatra the Seventh. She

0:12:16.240 --> 0:12:21.440
<v Speaker 1>is from the Ptolemaic dynasty PTol e Naic, and the

0:12:21.440 --> 0:12:26.520
<v Speaker 1>Ptolemies are in fact Greek. They conquered the Egyptians during

0:12:26.559 --> 0:12:30.040
<v Speaker 1>the third century BC, and she's one of the later

0:12:30.440 --> 0:12:35.120
<v Speaker 1>queens of the Ptolemaic dynasty. So when you are in

0:12:35.160 --> 0:12:38.720
<v Speaker 1>the Ptolemaic world, you are in a world of what

0:12:38.840 --> 0:12:43.240
<v Speaker 1>we know as royal incest. So your listeners can take

0:12:43.240 --> 0:12:47.520
<v Speaker 1>away a new vocabulary term for today. Royal incest comes

0:12:47.520 --> 0:12:50.880
<v Speaker 1>from a time period when they believe that royal families

0:12:50.880 --> 0:12:54.199
<v Speaker 1>were in fact manifestations of gods on earth. So why

0:12:54.200 --> 0:12:56.559
<v Speaker 1>would you want to marry outside of the royal blood

0:12:56.600 --> 0:12:59.600
<v Speaker 1>and sully the royal blood with the blood of mere

0:12:59.640 --> 0:13:02.560
<v Speaker 1>common know, you want to marry within the royal family.

0:13:02.880 --> 0:13:05.920
<v Speaker 1>So we believe that her parents were brother and sister.

0:13:06.760 --> 0:13:10.040
<v Speaker 1>So she is not Egyptian at all. She is Greek,

0:13:10.400 --> 0:13:13.680
<v Speaker 1>extremely Greek. We have to get out of our heads

0:13:13.760 --> 0:13:16.800
<v Speaker 1>a kind of Egyptian appearance, whatever that might be at

0:13:16.800 --> 0:13:19.840
<v Speaker 1>this time, and imagine a Greek appearance again, whatever that

0:13:19.920 --> 0:13:22.680
<v Speaker 1>might be. Okay, So there's first of all, what is

0:13:22.720 --> 0:13:26.320
<v Speaker 1>her ethnicity. Second of all, we might be asking, well,

0:13:26.760 --> 0:13:29.560
<v Speaker 1>she's a queen. There's probably a ton of statues of

0:13:29.600 --> 0:13:33.240
<v Speaker 1>her that we can look at. But that's also a

0:13:33.320 --> 0:13:39.319
<v Speaker 1>problem because Ptolemaic and ancient Egyptian statuary is very formulaic.

0:13:39.679 --> 0:13:43.679
<v Speaker 1>They're not all about expressing individualism. So they have all

0:13:43.720 --> 0:13:47.360
<v Speaker 1>of these protocols for how you show a queen, so

0:13:47.440 --> 0:13:49.840
<v Speaker 1>you have a certain hairstyle, you have a certain way

0:13:49.840 --> 0:13:52.760
<v Speaker 1>of showing their lips and their neck and all of that.

0:13:53.040 --> 0:13:55.760
<v Speaker 1>What that means is that our images of what may

0:13:55.840 --> 0:13:58.840
<v Speaker 1>or may not be Cleopatra are very generic, and we

0:13:58.880 --> 0:14:02.120
<v Speaker 1>don't know if it's her or another queen. Same thing

0:14:02.200 --> 0:14:05.600
<v Speaker 1>with coinage that was issued during her reign. There is

0:14:05.640 --> 0:14:10.320
<v Speaker 1>a woman's head on coinage during Cleopatra's reign of Egypt,

0:14:10.679 --> 0:14:14.840
<v Speaker 1>but it's so formulaic and it's intended to express her power.

0:14:14.960 --> 0:14:18.559
<v Speaker 1>So she looks very masculine on the portraits on coins,

0:14:18.760 --> 0:14:21.680
<v Speaker 1>so we don't know if that's actually what she looked like.

0:14:22.080 --> 0:14:25.280
<v Speaker 1>So so much for statues, so much for coins. We

0:14:25.360 --> 0:14:28.920
<v Speaker 1>also know that eventually a further complication is that the

0:14:29.040 --> 0:14:34.000
<v Speaker 1>Romans conquered Egypt, and many people in Rome hated Cleopatra

0:14:34.200 --> 0:14:37.880
<v Speaker 1>because she was this outsider queen brought back to Rome

0:14:37.960 --> 0:14:41.320
<v Speaker 1>by Julia Caesar and then Mark Antony. So they had

0:14:41.320 --> 0:14:46.640
<v Speaker 1>this anti Cleopatra propaganda in which they called her a witch,

0:14:47.120 --> 0:14:51.480
<v Speaker 1>a whore, an animal worshiper, and of course very strange looking,

0:14:51.680 --> 0:14:53.600
<v Speaker 1>because they didn't want her around.

0:14:53.880 --> 0:14:56.720
<v Speaker 3>They didn't like Cleopatra. Everybody likes Elizabeth Taylor.

0:14:57.640 --> 0:15:01.880
<v Speaker 1>Yes, everybody likes Elizabeth Taylor. People in Rome didn't like Cleopatra.

0:15:02.600 --> 0:15:06.120
<v Speaker 1>And so we come away from this with this astonishing

0:15:06.200 --> 0:15:10.520
<v Speaker 1>realization that for all that she's famous, we really don't

0:15:10.600 --> 0:15:12.960
<v Speaker 1>know what Cleopatra actually looked like.

0:15:13.280 --> 0:15:17.760
<v Speaker 3>The next one I can almost sum up in one word, Stonehenge.

0:15:18.000 --> 0:15:18.800
<v Speaker 1>Stonehenge.

0:15:18.960 --> 0:15:21.360
<v Speaker 3>Aliens built that, right, that's the quick answer.

0:15:21.560 --> 0:15:25.760
<v Speaker 1>Aliens built it, and there it is, and they beamed

0:15:25.840 --> 0:15:28.800
<v Speaker 1>down and put up a bunch of stones, and you

0:15:28.840 --> 0:15:31.320
<v Speaker 1>can go there and communicate with the aliens.

0:15:31.400 --> 0:15:34.400
<v Speaker 3>All right, Well, just in case that's not true. What

0:15:34.600 --> 0:15:35.120
<v Speaker 3>is true?

0:15:35.200 --> 0:15:38.400
<v Speaker 1>What is true? So we're fascinated by Stonehenge. The first

0:15:38.440 --> 0:15:41.360
<v Speaker 1>thing we should know is it wasn't built by the Druids.

0:15:41.800 --> 0:15:45.880
<v Speaker 1>The Druids are kind of manifest in England right around

0:15:45.920 --> 0:15:49.000
<v Speaker 1>the time of the Romans, which is around first century

0:15:49.600 --> 0:15:54.240
<v Speaker 1>BC for century AD. It's not a Druid temple. It's way, way,

0:15:54.560 --> 0:15:58.800
<v Speaker 1>way way older than that. What we do know about

0:15:58.840 --> 0:16:01.440
<v Speaker 1>Stonehenge is that, first of all, we don't know a

0:16:01.440 --> 0:16:03.960
<v Speaker 1>lot about it because it's about three thousand years old.

0:16:04.440 --> 0:16:08.440
<v Speaker 1>And the way to think about Stonehenge is not as Stonehenge,

0:16:08.440 --> 0:16:11.480
<v Speaker 1>but as stone Henges, like many of the monuments that

0:16:11.520 --> 0:16:14.840
<v Speaker 1>are scattered around Stone Age England and the continent. So

0:16:14.880 --> 0:16:18.200
<v Speaker 1>we think that an outer ditch started to be constructed

0:16:18.200 --> 0:16:21.600
<v Speaker 1>around three thousand BC that was made of wood, so

0:16:21.640 --> 0:16:25.640
<v Speaker 1>it's actually it starts life as Woodhenge, and then over

0:16:25.720 --> 0:16:28.920
<v Speaker 1>time they started to bring in all of these sarcins

0:16:28.960 --> 0:16:31.520
<v Speaker 1>and bluestones those are the big rocks, and that those

0:16:31.560 --> 0:16:35.120
<v Speaker 1>stones got moved around a lot over the next hundred years,

0:16:35.320 --> 0:16:38.640
<v Speaker 1>and that finally the site was abandoned. What we need

0:16:38.680 --> 0:16:42.120
<v Speaker 1>to do to kind of retrain our consciousness is to

0:16:42.240 --> 0:16:46.360
<v Speaker 1>constantly imagine that this is not one thing that's locked

0:16:46.360 --> 0:16:50.000
<v Speaker 1>in time. It is used by multiple people at multiple

0:16:50.040 --> 0:16:55.600
<v Speaker 1>different moments. What we imagine today, based on new archaeological research,

0:16:56.160 --> 0:17:00.000
<v Speaker 1>is that Stonehenge is actually part of a much wider

0:17:00.400 --> 0:17:04.400
<v Speaker 1>ceremonial landscape that we weren't paying attention to before. We

0:17:04.400 --> 0:17:07.840
<v Speaker 1>were just focused on the stones themselves. But our chaeologists

0:17:07.880 --> 0:17:12.359
<v Speaker 1>have started to look much more broadly, several kilometers outside

0:17:12.400 --> 0:17:14.600
<v Speaker 1>of Stonehenge, and they think that it's part of what

0:17:14.640 --> 0:17:18.320
<v Speaker 1>they call a ritual landscape, so that a couple kilometers

0:17:18.359 --> 0:17:21.560
<v Speaker 1>away you would have had a ceremony to mark let's

0:17:21.600 --> 0:17:24.879
<v Speaker 1>say my death, right, So my death, we start ceremony

0:17:25.080 --> 0:17:29.359
<v Speaker 1>a couple kilometers away, and that we then marched towards Stonehenge,

0:17:29.720 --> 0:17:32.560
<v Speaker 1>which moves us from the world of the living into

0:17:32.600 --> 0:17:36.560
<v Speaker 1>the world of the dead, and that Stonehenge functions as

0:17:36.560 --> 0:17:39.840
<v Speaker 1>a kind of portal into the afterlife. But you know,

0:17:40.040 --> 0:17:43.160
<v Speaker 1>at the end of the day, the trouble with anything

0:17:43.560 --> 0:17:48.439
<v Speaker 1>that before about two thousand BC is that we just

0:17:48.560 --> 0:17:51.760
<v Speaker 1>don't have any writing from that time period. When we

0:17:51.840 --> 0:17:55.280
<v Speaker 1>don't have writing, we really have a hard time getting

0:17:55.280 --> 0:18:00.280
<v Speaker 1>into people's mindsets, into what they are actually thinking. So

0:18:00.359 --> 0:18:03.720
<v Speaker 1>I fear that the Stonehenge stones are going to live

0:18:03.920 --> 0:18:06.680
<v Speaker 1>mutely forever more, just as they do today.

0:18:06.960 --> 0:18:09.480
<v Speaker 3>Okay, one last question. Then we've gone back now a

0:18:09.520 --> 0:18:12.560
<v Speaker 3>few thousand years, just for the fun of it, let's

0:18:12.640 --> 0:18:16.520
<v Speaker 3>go forward maybe a thousand years or so. Imagine we're

0:18:16.520 --> 0:18:21.199
<v Speaker 3>there and historians like you are looking back saying, we

0:18:21.240 --> 0:18:24.120
<v Speaker 3>don't quite get what went on in twenty twenty three.

0:18:24.480 --> 0:18:27.240
<v Speaker 3>We can't piece it together. We have some ideas, what

0:18:27.440 --> 0:18:29.680
<v Speaker 3>is it you think historians won't be able to figure out?

0:18:29.920 --> 0:18:32.520
<v Speaker 1>I thought a lot about this question. I think they're

0:18:32.520 --> 0:18:37.880
<v Speaker 1>going to really ponder the fate of democracy and why

0:18:37.920 --> 0:18:40.760
<v Speaker 1>we weren't thinking in the right directions about how to

0:18:40.800 --> 0:18:43.960
<v Speaker 1>save democracy. So, you know, democracy is a new idea.

0:18:44.119 --> 0:18:47.439
<v Speaker 1>It's only been on the earth for about two hundred

0:18:47.440 --> 0:18:51.160
<v Speaker 1>and fifty years, and we're at a moment of reckoning

0:18:51.240 --> 0:18:55.160
<v Speaker 1>right now. Does democracy or autocracy rule of the day?

0:18:55.720 --> 0:18:57.800
<v Speaker 1>And I don't really think that they're going to wonder

0:18:58.000 --> 0:19:02.280
<v Speaker 1>about the rule that informative podcasts played in saving democracy.

0:19:02.840 --> 0:19:07.840
<v Speaker 1>And you know, this has been a huge revolution, unexpected

0:19:08.040 --> 0:19:10.639
<v Speaker 1>in the last couple of years, and the pandemic probably

0:19:10.720 --> 0:19:14.040
<v Speaker 1>had something to do with it. But everybody's listening to podcasts.

0:19:14.480 --> 0:19:17.560
<v Speaker 1>Some of them are listening to murder podcasts. I'm one

0:19:17.560 --> 0:19:20.439
<v Speaker 1>of those true crime junkies, I admit it, But a

0:19:20.480 --> 0:19:24.280
<v Speaker 1>lot of us are also listening to podcasts like this one,

0:19:24.640 --> 0:19:29.360
<v Speaker 1>where you have people talking about certain topics of their expertise.

0:19:29.960 --> 0:19:34.919
<v Speaker 1>And John Adams actually said during the American Revolution that

0:19:35.080 --> 0:19:39.840
<v Speaker 1>knowledge is power. And I think that historians in the

0:19:39.880 --> 0:19:44.720
<v Speaker 1>future may wonder about the role that informative podcasts played

0:19:45.280 --> 0:19:49.560
<v Speaker 1>in helping Americans to think through the problem of democracy

0:19:49.600 --> 0:19:52.359
<v Speaker 1>and how we get an informed citizenship. And they're going

0:19:52.440 --> 0:19:54.919
<v Speaker 1>to try to measure the role that podcasts played in that.

0:19:55.359 --> 0:19:57.520
<v Speaker 1>I honestly believe this. I'm not just saying this.

0:19:57.760 --> 0:20:00.760
<v Speaker 3>Well, thank you to John Adams then, and even bigger

0:20:00.800 --> 0:20:04.080
<v Speaker 3>thank you to Professor Carolyn Winter. Thank you so much

0:20:04.119 --> 0:20:09.119
<v Speaker 3>for doing this all right, Thank you. Thanks for joining

0:20:09.200 --> 0:20:11.879
<v Speaker 3>us here at One Day University. Sign up at our

0:20:11.880 --> 0:20:16.000
<v Speaker 3>website one dayu dot com to become a member and

0:20:16.119 --> 0:20:19.960
<v Speaker 3>access over seven hundred full length video lectures from the

0:20:20.000 --> 0:20:24.200
<v Speaker 3>world's finest professors. You can also download our app. There

0:20:24.280 --> 0:20:27.600
<v Speaker 3>you can learn more about today's episode and watch Stanford

0:20:27.600 --> 0:20:32.199
<v Speaker 3>Professor Carolyn Winterer's lecture on Unexplained History, as well as

0:20:32.200 --> 0:20:35.920
<v Speaker 3>her talks on Benjamin Franklin, the Roman Empire, and more.

0:20:37.160 --> 0:20:39.600
<v Speaker 3>Join us next time when we talk about the literature

0:20:39.680 --> 0:20:40.960
<v Speaker 3>that shaped our presidents.

0:20:41.359 --> 0:20:45.000
<v Speaker 4>George Washington loved to read etiquette books. These books that

0:20:45.200 --> 0:20:49.080
<v Speaker 4>teach us how to gracefully accept or decline a dinner

0:20:49.119 --> 0:20:52.960
<v Speaker 4>invitation or I imagine the updated version of Emily post

0:20:53.000 --> 0:20:57.000
<v Speaker 4>would Feeley how to gently unfriend someone on Facebook.

0:20:57.400 --> 0:21:01.199
<v Speaker 3>One Day University is a production of iHeart Power and

0:21:01.320 --> 0:21:04.879
<v Speaker 3>School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a

0:21:04.920 --> 0:21:07.960
<v Speaker 3>review in your favorite podcast app You can also check

0:21:08.000 --> 0:21:12.000
<v Speaker 3>out other Curiosity podcasts to learn about history, pop culture,

0:21:12.320 --> 0:21:13.960
<v Speaker 3>true crime, and more.

0:21:20.160 --> 0:21:21.040
<v Speaker 1>School of Humans,