Behind the Scenes Minis: Problematized

Tracy shares her irritation with word use in a recent government report. There is also discussion of strangers visiting manor houses.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. This week was our latest installment
of Unearthed on Earth. This was an unusually cramped writing

(00:24):
process for Unearthed because I lost a day of working
on it to the fourth of July holiday I'm sorry
on July third, and then also left a little early
on the second to go on a road trip. And
I as I left, I was like, you're making Tracy.

(00:46):
You're making Monday Tracy's life hard. Monday Tracy is gonna struggle,
which I did. I was a little tired from the trip,
but not too tired. But the day was a very,
very long day and also disrupted by irritating government reports
about the Smithsonian. Yeah that I was like, you already

(01:09):
have a twelve hour day lined up, There is no
time to be reading this one hundred and whatever page report. Yeah, Monday,
Holly is often paying for the sins of Thursday and
Friday Holly. So yeah, as I said, I did not
read the whole report, but in my skimming through it
just to sort of be like, is this what I
think it is, Yes, it is. There were a couple

(01:29):
of things that jumped out. One is that the passage
that we read from it used the word problematize. There's
a lot of footnotes. There was a specific footnote for
the source of where someone said that they needed to
problematize history at the National Museum of American History. I

(01:52):
am not confident that whoever prepared this report and whoever
was mad enough to provoke this being created. I don't
think they know what problematize means. No, So problematize and

(02:14):
problematic have taken on meanings through largely Internet discourse that
are not the actual meaning of the words. So problematize
does not mean to come up with a list of
ways that something should be on the your fave is

(02:35):
problematic templer that used to exist, maybe it still does.
Problematize means to strip away the conventional ideas about something
and approach it as a problem. And that doesn't mean
a problem like a negative thing to be solved. It
means a problem like a math problem, a problem to

(02:57):
be studied and evaluated and understood. It does not mean
come up with a list of ways something is racist.
That's not what it means and problematic. Although people basically
use it to mean said something offensive in the past,
in this context, that is also not what it means.

(03:19):
It is having the attributes of a problem. Yeah, similar,
similar thing. I just I can't help but laugh because
I think of the person who's typing this copy out,
like and you know, they're just like, yeah, I'm cooking, man.
So to be even more irritated about this one word
problematized the footnote for you know, the museum saying that

(03:44):
it needs to problematize history. The citation for that is
a lecture that was in the context of public history
as a field. It was not a lecture that was
given at the Smithsonian. It was a lecture given as
at a university as part of a lecture series, and

(04:07):
it was like about public public history is an actual
scholarly and professional field. The idea of problematizing something in
that context should be non controversial. There was also as
I was just I was literally scrolling to get through
to get to the footnotes to see, okay, what are

(04:29):
they referring to you here? And as I scrolled, I
saw a picture of a sculpture I've forgotten the name
of the person who made the sculpture, but he got
named rop on the show not that long ago. But
it is a picture of George Washington as I think
a Greek god a sculpture in that depiction, and it's

(04:51):
accompanied by the text description from the museum, and highlighted
is the word perceived George Washingt perceived strength. The person
who made this report is angry that they were referencing
Washington's perceived strength rather than his actual, incontrovertibly demonstrated strength. Yeah,

(05:17):
so anyway, Horatio Grenow is who you're thinking. That is
exactly Yes, that is exactly who that was. As soon
as you said the name, I'm like, yep, that's who
it was. So anyway that I don't know if we'll
talk about it more on the next on Earth. There
was probably be other stuff to talk about by then,
But I just I found it so maddening and so

(05:40):
frustrating and so infuriating, And the fact that they put
it out on the fourth of July, well, that's the
most patriotic time to release such a report. Let's celebrate
America's two fifty by cherry picking and bad faith arguing
about stuff. To move on to less annoying things. Often

(06:01):
there is an art section in Unearthed. Yeah, and then
we didn't have an art section this time. I know,
you cheated me out of art and made me talk
about toilets twice. I'm sorry, but I gave you the
toilets both times. I had a few things that were

(06:21):
that As I was collating the list of things to
talk about, there were five or six things that were
under the category of art. And then as I was
writing the episode, two things happened. One was I had
two full episodes of content. They were all there. And
then as I was doing a closer examination of the

(06:42):
things that I had bookmarked some of them, I was like, Okay,
this isn't actually a discovery of something. This is like
somebody auctioned something off. Oh right, And we talked about
We talked about auction sometimes because something was newly rediscovered
and then auctioned, but that was not the case with this.
It was just like the story was the auction and

(07:04):
that was it. There were a couple. There was one
thing that was about a search to try to figure
out the identity of the a sitter in a portrait
who was black, and I couldn't There did not seem
to be sort of a call to action, like if
you have information about this, here's suit to contact. And

(07:29):
it was also not something that had any kind of results.
I felt like it was a weirdly vague talking around
the thing gotcha. So ultimately I wound up with sort
of two art things, and neither of them felt like
something that could like neither of them felt critical to
talk about. We did not have some of the incredibly

(07:49):
cool things we've talked about as art before, where like
a restoration process reveals previously unknown details, or somebody realizes
they have a bunch of Salvador DOLLI work in their
attic or whatever. The dream the dream weird dry spell
for art stuff. I guess if we could get the

(08:19):
cursed tablet going, I wanted to find the Dolly that
was stolen from Rankers Island, which I think is destroyed
to the but that would be like a dream. On
my trip to England's back in May, we went to
Bath and I went to the bath. I forgot the
name of the museum, but it's the like the Roman

(08:40):
Baths Museum, I think is what it's called. And there
were so many cursed tablets in a display there. I
was so excited about it. I love curse tablets. Yeah,
a random thing, very silly story. The best flavor the
John Keats letters. Yeah. I think everything that I read

(09:02):
about the John Keats Letters described him as, you know,
poet blah blah blah, including such works as ode On
a Grecian earn. When I was in high school, I
was on the academic competition team, yeah, which some people
might call quiz bole U scholars. Yeah yeah, And so

(09:24):
I was on the English the team for English, and
the area that we really struggled with was poets, specifically
British poets. For whatever reason, it was just like a
whole in our education. And so every single time we
were asked a question that was about which British poet
blah blah blah, we would say John Keats. And if

(09:46):
it was which poem, it was ode On a Grecian
earned by John Keats. And one time we got a
question that was it had four answers. It was like,
identify these four poems, and so we said ode On
a Grecian earned by John k for all four of them,
and one of them was right. So we got a point.

(10:07):
That's very funny yeah, I still remember it all these many,
many many years later. I'm so embarrassed by the source
of my Keats knowledge. Yeah, which is that a problem
person who we didn't know was a problem person as
much back then, I think, I know what you're gonna say, Morrissey. Okay, Morrissey,

(10:29):
you know, saying about So there's a song called Symmetry Gates.
It's some sort of fighting about poets. You're very into
it when you're fourteen, but you know, as an adult,
I'm like, oh, readonk a doodle. But the thing was,
it was like she had Oscar Wilde on his side
and Keats and Yates were on the other side, and
so I was very like, well, let's learn about these

(10:50):
Keats and Yates fellas, so I know what we're That's
how I learned most of my Keats information. That's so funny.
I learned about a lot more British poets when I
got to college. Yeah, so some of some of the
holes were filled in somewhat. Anyway, Holly, did you have
anything else that you wanted to talk about from this

(11:12):
installment of Unearthed? You know, I'm still back on the
listener mail about house tours. Oh, yeah, yeah, because I
just think about it and I'm like, it's ghastly. Yeah,
it's ghastly, but it's it's I have to contextualize it, right,
because it's not like people are running to the movies

(11:35):
for an afternoon when they're bored, yeah, or something else.
Like you got to entertain yourself someway, and if that
is a la mude at the time, then that's what
you do. Yeah, let's go knock on people's doors and
ask them to let us in and see their stuff. Well,
in a lot of the places that people were touring
were the sorts of places where it is an estate

(11:58):
and they're tenants the historic home. There's a staff of
housekeepers and cooks and cleaning staff and that kind of thing.
So it's not just like your personal residence where you
are responsible for keeping it clean and ready for guests.
I am sort of reminded of how Patrick got an

(12:19):
award at work a couple of years ago, and the
acceptance of this award involved having dinner at the dean's
residence of the university where he works, and I didn't
really know what to expect, but it became clear the
course of the dinner that's somewhere in the dean's residence
there's a commercial kitchen, because the food being delivered to

(12:43):
our tables was clearly not being trucked across campus, right
like that, It was clearly there, and the ground floor
of the Dean's residence was clearly a place that was
for these kinds of glattering formal events and stuff. And
so I got kind of in the mental weeds of like,

(13:04):
what if you're the dean and you just want to
sandwich at three in the morning, is there a regular
people kitchen for regular stuff? What is it like to
live in this place where the ground floor is a
banquet space and public restroom. And I imagine that it
might be a little like if you were living in

(13:27):
you know, eighteenth century England and a manor house, there
might be spaces of the house that are for the
family that are not the spaces that are seen by
touring guests who are right traveling through the countryside of
the lake district or whatever. Yeah, and I mean there
are still historic estates, particularly in England, that people can

(13:52):
tour and people are still living there. Yeah, so it happens.
It's just it's such a funny concept to me of
like I heard you you have good stuff. Let me
look at it, bring it out like I yeah, yeah,
I'd be like, here's my Gredo collection, here's a look

(14:12):
at my shoes. I have a lot of fabric. Yeah.
Every time we're on a meeting call, not recording, because
recording we have backdrops. But whenever we have a meeting
call and I can see all of the Gredo around you,
I'm always excited and delighted by it. It's a lot.
I love GREETO. I love Rodeans. They're my favorite. Yeah,

(14:33):
I don't know why. I mean, I do know why,
but it's a long and boring, dairy star warsy nerdy thing.
I just love them, just love them. But that would
be funny if people just showed up at my door.
But also, we also live in a time now where
you don't publish your address right like most people do not,
which is also part of I think what it is right.
I'm so used to living in that like no concealed privacy,

(14:56):
privacy you can't let anybody know where you live. And
this again a very different time where of course people
knew where you live. I think too about Brian's aunt Beth,
who was an amazing woman and very smart and knew
a lot of the history of the area where their
family lived from like the eighteen hundreds on and still

(15:18):
live there herself. Like she could tell you who had
lived in every house at what you know, during what years.
And it's just a different time when people knew all
such things about Oh, of course that's the I don't
know the last names of people two doors down from me. Yeah,
it's a different different contexts. I need to get over

(15:39):
it with my fear of Rando's coming to the house. Yes,
fortunately you are not a You do not own a
manor in the If you come to my house, I'll
make you a cocktail I have. We have taken in
strays during snowstorms. Oh sure, when there's been accidents, because

(15:59):
we kind of live at the bottom of a shallow
bowl and sometimes people are stuck out there going I'm
gonna wait for the tow truck, and I'm like, baby,
it's not coming. Come inside. Do you want to come inside?
I have all the connac Well. I hope whatever is
happening on people's weekends that it's as as good as possible.
It's past weekend. I spent some time in the outdoors

(16:22):
and it was so beautiful and so refreshing. And if
that is refreshing to you, I hope you get to
do some of that. If you're an inside kid, whatever
your inside kid things are, I hope they're great. I
hope that everyone is kind to you, and that you
are kind to others, and that everyone is also patient
with themselves and with other people. We will be back

(16:43):
on Monday with a brand new episode, and of course
tomorrow we'll have a Saturday classic. Stuff You Missed in
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