Behind the Scenes Minis: Stairs and Trains

Tracy talks about her visit to the Bunker Hill monument. She then describes a very early morning start when she went to visit Oxford on her recent trip to England.

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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 Friday. This week we talked about the
Bunker Hill Monument because I had a little field trip.
I told you I had a question about the field trip.

(00:23):
Please tell me. Did you do the steps? I did
do the steps. I walked up all of those steps.
I walked. It was not that bad. But I also
walked more slowly than anyone else. I several times moved
over to let somebody else go past me, and some
of the people that were pushing themselves past me. I

(00:46):
then got to the top and they were ready to collapse.
So I did do it, but I did it slowly.
And then I spent some time up there taking pictures
of the view from the top of it. It was
a clear but overcast day, so there was a you
could see a long way, which is very nice. There's
also just a terrifying grate in the floor that I

(01:07):
used to step on because I was like, I don't
know if that goes all the way to the bottom,
but I feel like it does. Yeah, And so I
just don't want to mess with that, and then weirdly
coming back down was a little bit harder because going
up periodically there is a number painted on the face
of the step, like fifty drafty whatever. You can do

(01:28):
your fractions, yeah, you can know how much farther you
have to go. And then on the way down, all
you really have is occasionally there's a little narrow slit
window and you can look out and try to estimate
how high up you still are. So just you're coming
down and you don't really know how much longer down
you need to go. I immediately wondered because when I

(01:52):
was in Italy and April, uh huh, did you know
you can go up on the roof of Saint Peter's Basilica.
I did not. You can't how many steps as well?
You could take an elevator up. I think it's like
three floors, or you could take the elevator. But then
from the roof you can go up into the dome, okay,
which is like five hundred and fifteen steps or something

(02:13):
around there. And I was we were very debatey, we
were leaning towards something, but then we saw the entry
to the stairwell. It's not open, it's enclosed and it's
very narrow, and I was like, yeah, I'm might have
a panic attack at step one and fifty three and
you won't be able to get other people past me

(02:35):
because I will just collapse and cry because it's literally
so narrow. Like if you and I were passing each
other in that hallway essentially stairwell, we would have to
go like both of us would have to put backs
against the wall. Yeah, just slide through. And I was like, nope, nope,
nope below, So this is not quite that narrow. You

(02:58):
did have to kind of squeeze to get around people,
but you did not have to go like face to
face or back to back to do it. I had
a small backpack on because I was kind of out
for the day doing walking around stuff and I wanted
sunscreen and water and all of that, and I felt
a little awkward with it trying to let people buy
or on the way down work around people. So I

(03:20):
do not think you would have enjoyed that stair climb
at all. So I'm lazy. I would be like, stairs, nice,
is there somewhere to get a breezy beverage? It felt
It was a very warm day that day and it
felt cooler inside the monument that it did outside, which
I think helped. But when I got home, which after

(03:43):
leaving the monuments going to the two Ranger talks that
I went to, I walked from there to North Station
along the Harbor Walk, which nobody who doesn't live in
Boston knows what I'm talking about, but it was a
long walk. I kind of went by the Charlestown Naval
Yard to get there. And then I got home and

(04:04):
I did nothing for the rest of the day. Yeah,
I watched a whole lot of television, So yeah, I
went down there because I felt like when I read
these news reports, I was like, Okay, the quotes belong
there for some reason. I can't tell what the reason
is from any of these articles. And that was across

(04:26):
the board. Every article I read, I was like, I
don't understand what this exhibit is that these have come from. Yeah,
are they all from one exhibit? Are they from different
parts of the monument. One of the articles was straightforwardly
incorrect and said that the quotes were in the museum
that's across the street, which that's not where. I think
there might have been one of them somewhere in there.

(04:50):
But like, that's it's not really what was being talked about,
and so I just went down there on a Saturday
morning to figure it out. A couple of interesting things
besides my I climb up the tower that came from
that little visit is that, according to one of the
ranger talks that I heard, the Marquis de Lafayette, when
he did the cornerstone, he put it in the wrong place,

(05:13):
and so people came and moved it in the middle
of the night so that they would not embarrass him.
I don't know if that's that sounds almost like, you know,
unsubstantiated lord to me, but I don't know. Both of
the rangers that did talks while I was there seemed
very knowledgeable and to know what they were talking about,
and they were both very ready to say nobody said,
don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes, right,

(05:35):
Like they seemed to be on board with the debunking
of things. So maybe that is definitely something that happened,
but I wasn't able to confirm it. Also, the rangers
were also talking about a lot of the things that
are kind of carried through in this exhibit from the
lodge about how liberty has meant different things to different people. Yeah,

(05:58):
between seventeen seventy five and now, and how liberty meant
different things to the men who were there, Like people
could be fighting for very different ideals, but all believing
they were fighting for liberty. So that was great. Saw
a demonstration of firing a musket. That was fun. So yeah,

(06:18):
it was a nice a nice morning. And then not
only on a Friday afternoon, but also while I was
off of work visiting my parents, the order came from
the judge saying you got to stop taking down all
of this stuff. And I have not thoroughly read the
whole order from the judge, but there was sort of

(06:42):
a list of things that had already been removed. It
talked about the President's House site, which was covered on
the show before. There was a section of things that
had been flagged for removal but not removed yet, and
one of them was these quotes from the Bunker Hill monument.
And yeah, I'm sure that there will be an appeal
by the federal government of this, but for now, no

(07:04):
more things should be removed from park signs and whatnot.
Under the Restoring Truth Insanity to American History Executive order
and the Department of the Interior orders that followed it.
I did try to get in touch with the National
Park Service to ask a couple of questions about like when,

(07:26):
for sure was this exhibit created, because I thought the
answer was twenty twenty three, but I didn't know for sure.
I had a couple of other questions there were just
like who wrote this these panels, like oh, right, was
it somebody at the National Park Service? Was a third
party or whatever. The response I got was forbidden, you
don't have permission to access this resource, which was the
result I got when I submitted the web form. So

(07:50):
great great. I don't know. There was no phone number,
There was only the web form and a mailing address.
I can only speculate about why the quote about suffrage
that spawned the whole investigation into the Bunker Hill monument
was not removed. My speculation is that it was more

(08:14):
optimistic in its framing, because it was sort of like,
we don't have suffrage yet, but we're gonna get it,
and this monument is still ours, and some of the
other quotes that were supposed to be removed were more critical. Also,
before I actually went down there, I had thought that
this episode was going to be just about Operation Pow

(08:35):
and the anti Vietnam War march that happened. I don't
know if that will happen at some point in the future,
because once I actually saw what that exhibit was trying
to do, I was like, that's a different story now
in my head than the Operation POW one. So yeah,
I have lived within five to ten miles of the

(08:56):
Bunker Hill Monument since twenty four and have seen it
out the window every time I have gone to the airport,
and now that I live north of Boston, every time
I go into Boston for some reason, and I had
just never been down there until they were ordered to

(09:16):
take down some signs. Then I was like, I gotta
go see what that's all about. There you go, So yeah, yeah,
there is no elevator, so the top, walking to the
top is not accessible to people with mobility issues or
physical disabilities. But in the lodge down at the bottom,

(09:37):
there is a big screen that has live camera views
of the view for me, So like, that's sort of
the way of trying to make that accessible when it's
really not possible to put an elevator in there or
somehow make it not have almost three hundred steps. Yeah,
that's a good solve. Yeah. Yeah, and the like the

(09:58):
lodge is accessible and the museum is accessible and has
elevators also, So yeah, I'm still thinking about Tracy. And
I had an aside while we were recording, Yeah, after
recording the Everett quote about how unlike Egyptian, yeah, yeah,

(10:19):
these would have plaques to explain what they are. And
my of course off the cuff thing was like, just
because you can't read hieroglyphics, right, but also those aren't
the same things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's well. Yeah, and
when they made the Bunker Hill monument, they intentionally did
not put words on it. That was part of the

(10:41):
they they didn't want it. There was a discussion of
putting like all the names on it or something like that,
and they and then were like, Okay, we're not putting
any words on this. I also we read the chunk
of the dedication speech from Daniel Webster that I really
liked the sentiment of a lot of the speech, but

(11:02):
the part that saying that it is only religion and
morals and knowledge that can make men respectable and happy, right,
that was not something that I personally agreed with. Well,
it's also that saying right that, like, people who are
not religious can also have morals. Correct, Yes, if you
have a religion and your religion brings you happiness and

(11:26):
you also feel like your morals are informed by your
religion and that's important to you, I am not criticizing
that at all. Cool, but yeah, the idea that it
is only religion and morals and knowledge, I was like,
I don't like that part, and just snipping that part
out felt dishonest, and also so much of the rest

(11:48):
of what we read tied into what I feel like
the exhibit was trying to do in terms of, like,
this is not just a monument to a battle that happened,
it is a monument to the ongoing work of trying
to have a just and informed and fair society. Like
I wanted to include all of that. So I'm also

(12:08):
sure had we asked him if other religions that weren't
the one he practiced were cool, he would have been like,
oh no, no, no, no, no no no. So obviously
there's some hubris and presumption involved. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, So anyway,
I'm glad I made that trip to the Bunker Hill Monument.

(12:29):
I have no idea what I am going to research
next for the podcast. I got to figure it out
now because I was going to do something that was
related to the Revolutionary War. But we have had three
of those in a row from me now, and I
now feel that, even though it is the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary that I'm feeling surrounded by two fifty

(12:52):
stuff living in Massachusetts, I feel personally done with that
for now. This week on the show, we talked about
Elizabeth Blackwell, a different Elizabeth Blackwell than we have already

(13:14):
covered on the show. Yeah, so, as I said briefly
at the start of the show, I heard about this
person at the Ashmolean Museum at an exhibition about plants
that was in Oxford. I had made a little plan
to go to Oxford from where we were staying, which
was Birmingham, on the train, and then I realized that

(13:37):
the takes an hour direct trip on the train that
existed during the week did not in fact exist on
the weekend. Uh oh, And I then dizzed a lot
about whether I was actually going to go to Oxford
because the connecting train added just enough travel time that
it was like, is this going to feel too cramped
for a day trip when I would like to be

(13:59):
back in time for dinner. Since I am here with
Patrick and friends who are not going with me to Oxford,
right'd like to be back in time to have dinner
with them. And I finally decided that if I woke
up early enough that I could take the earlier train
and not feel cramped, that I would go. And that
is what happened. I woke up incredibly early, terrific, and

(14:21):
then I walked out of the hotel without my hat.
And I am a person who really likes to have
a hat on in the hot, bright, sunny weather. It
had gotten a little cooler by that point, but I
have delicate fair skin, and so I want to have
a hat on. And I had just left the hat

(14:41):
behind because the room was dark when I left, and
I didn't want to wake Patrick up turning on the lights,
and I didn't realize that it wasn't in my bag.
So the first place that I went in Oxford was
the Ashmolean Museum and this flower exhibition, and I felt
it was a huge misstop coportunity in the gift shop
to not have floppy garden hats, because I would have

(15:05):
paid any number of dollars at that point for a
floppy garden hat. Aside from the lack of flappy floppy
garden hats in the gift shop. It was a really
lovely and interesting exhibit. It talked about sort of how
our understanding of plants has evolved over the centuries, different
art about plants, how like how the effort to collect

(15:31):
and study plants has had environmental effects, how it's connected
to colonialism. Some of the last pieces of the exhibition
were works of art by contemporary artists that were really
about that. They were about sort of the environmental toll
that the effort to find and collect and breed plants

(15:55):
has had, and how in a lot of cases, like
the efforts for Youruropeans or North Americans or whoever to
get decorative plants for their gardens has robbed the indigenous
people who originally cultivated and raised those plants of them.
So it's all very interesting. And that was the first
of I think five or six museums that I went

(16:17):
to in one day. Fun I made a route for
myself ahead of time, so that I would go in
a loop and not go way out of my way
like I did in Stratford upon Avin and miss things
because I was on the wrong side of town. Do
you have I'm trying to figure out how to concoct

(16:39):
this question because for me, that is too many museums,
because I'm like, yeah, I got a linger. Yeah, Like
how do you bake in your linger? Time? So cause
I got to stand there and cry in front of
art that takes time, right. So a couple of the
museums that I went to, we're on the smaller side

(17:00):
of museums. One of them was the Bodleian Library's Weston Library,
which is the only place that's opened to visit, I think,
the only one of their libraries that's opened to visitors
without a booked tour, uneployment or whatever. And I had
not planned far enough ahead to do that, and so
that is just two exhibitions on the first floor, not

(17:22):
a whole full sized museum. I went to the History
of Science Museum, which is also on the smaller side
of museums, and then in the Ashmolean Museum, which I
think was probably the biggest of the museums that I
went to on that day. I had also just been
to the British Museum. I had been to other museums
that have a lot of very similar things in their collections,

(17:44):
and so I really prioritized the galleries that were not
things that I had just seen of that same era,
that same location, whatever, in a different museum somewhere in
England a couple of days before. Gotcha, Did you say
hi to the ghost of Mike at the British Museum?
I did not. I also didn't see there were things

(18:05):
that I would have gone to at the British Museum
had I been planning ahead. The British Museum is also
where I really hit a wall in terms of how
tired I was, how hungry I was, and how hot
I was, and I was like, I need to sit
down and eat food. Did you go to the qute
cafe at the top? It was full? Gotcha? So we

(18:26):
wound up down at the bottom. The Story Museum in
Oxford was a beautiful surprise. I had planned to go
to three different museums that had things from the Philip
Pullman's His Dark Materials and the HBO adaptation. It turned
out that one of the museums no longer had those

(18:47):
things on exhibit, but one of the places that did
was the Story museum, and I was afraid when I
went there that I might feel like a weirdo being
at a children's museum without any children, because some children's museums,
I feel, are great for adults, but some of them
are geared in such a way that like it's like

(19:10):
everything is too small for an adult to look at.
Does that make sense? Yeah, I don't know, I'm short,
Maybe it doesn't. Yeah. I've found to a lot of
children's museums and science museums that are like intended for children,
but sometimes it is like geared so much for almost
a preschool level of engagement that I feel a little

(19:32):
like I'm a lot out of place as an adult. Gotcha, gotcha.
But this museum had interconnected through all of the exhibits
things that really were geared toward adult readers who love
children's literature. Yeah, so it felt really welcoming to all ages.
A lot of things there that were like, you know,

(19:53):
child sized things where a child can listen to someone
telling the story, but there's also taller ones where the
adults are also a included. And the last exhibit at
the Story Museum was called the Story Arcade, and that
was a whole exhibit about how storytelling has evolved in
video games since video games were first created, and I

(20:15):
got very emotional about it. It was beautiful. None of
that has anything to do with Elizabeth Blackwell, other than
the fact that one of the museums I went to
was the one that inspired this whole episode. So I

(20:37):
said in the episode that we were going to read
a paragraph from Bruce James in the Lives of Eminent
Men of Aberdeen. Oh yeah, yeah. So it's as we
discussed in the episode, Elizabeth Blackwell was not actually from Aberdeen.
That was a misinformation that dated back to her lifetime.
But she is the only woman in that book, Lives

(20:58):
of Eminent Men of aberde Aberdeen. So here is what
he said about women writing books. Quote. This may be uncharitable,
but it is not unnatural. For there is something offensive
in a woman putting out a book, except on some
such subject as Missus Blackwell handled, or on dancing or cookery,

(21:19):
or anything of that kind, which women ought to know
about and will be the more amiable for their knowledge.
But when they go the length of writing sonnets, political economy,
theories of morals, essays on population, systems of chemistry, and
theological discourses. It is perfectly unbearable. Learned and intellectual women

(21:40):
have never been in great estimation with the more judicious
of the other sex. Literary men are seldom agreeable companions,
but literary ladies are generally allowed to be insufferable. What
sort of husbands and fathers they are who allow their
wives and daughters to write for thefication of the public.

(22:02):
We do not take it upon us to say further
than that they must have strange notions of what is
attractive and amiable and becoming in the female sex when
they do not discourage their literary efforts by every means
and their power and endeavor to keep them in that

(22:22):
place in society where they will be least known and
most happy. This is not being cruel to genius, for
the light of nature, and the word of God, and
the moral constitution of women all combine to show that
they are a people who were not sent into this
world to shine by their own light, but to be

(22:44):
helpmates to the other division of the human family. And
the very first instance which the scripture records of a
woman's advice being taken about the acquirement of knowledge was
followed by the most disastrous consequences. I have a new
use for the time machine, but it might not be
what you anticipate. I just want to pop up in

(23:06):
his house and go bless your heart and then vanish
in Pelucipar. Yeah, so's there's just so much in that paragraph,
and it is simultaneously like to the modern ear, like
it's hilarious, but like it's also the reality that women
were living in and what men thought about women and
their capabilities. And also he felt the need to have

(23:29):
that whole entire thing in a right up of the
only woman in his entire book. So I sort of
hate him. And oh he is also the source of
various of the misinformation, not the source, but like a
popularizer of the misinformation. I do have to wonder though,
which is not to say that women were not going

(23:51):
through living in a world where a lot of people
held those beliefs. But it doesn't like she had enough
support of other men that he's seems like an especially
extreme blowhard on the matter, Like yeah, yeah, yeah, she
did have a lot of scientific men and doctors, and
you know people in the Royal society learned men totally

(24:13):
fine with what she was doing. Yeah, very ready to
endorse her book, and then I mean, we've talked about
a lot of other women on the show who have
published work from earlier centuries that like have had that
kind of introduction by a man to add legitimacy to
what they were doing. Yeah, that sounds like he's trying

(24:33):
to hedge his bets so that other men don't get
mad at him for putting a lady in their man book.
As a side note, another one of the eminent men
is Alexander Blackwell's brother Thomas Hps listen, funny judgment, a
little screwy Louie there. Yeah, so a couple of random
things that I also had on the list to just mention,

(24:56):
what is the Janet Styles Tyson, who corrected a lot
if this information about Elizabeth Blackwell's life, According to an
interview that I read with her, started on the history
PhD that led to this when she was in her
mid sixties. Right on. I like to say, yeah, do it.
If you are in your mid sixties and you want
to start on a PhD, you have my one hundred

(25:18):
percent full support. Yes, you know, as someone at the
age of fifty one who was like, wonder what my
later years will look like I hope doing something awesome
like deciding to go get a PhD. As another Just
a random side note about the herbal is that we
said plants all the way through the episode. It did
include some things that people thought were plants at the

(25:38):
time but are not classified as plants today, which include corals.
Oh right, fun guy. And I am very curious about
how many meanings of the word curious don't exist really today,
like are they're not used to curious is not used

(25:59):
to me a lot of things that it meant three
hundred years ago. I did not go on a quest
to see linguistically if there are reasons for how the
meaning has evolved in that way. Also, something that cracked
me up was that according to the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, there is quote apparently no surviving copy of

(26:23):
Alexander Blackwell's New method of Improving Cold Wet and Clayey Grounds.
I put that into the search bar at archive dot
org and it's there. Huh. So I was not able
to trace, like to figure out where exactly was this
volume before archive dot org scanned it, aside from the

(26:47):
fact that it was on microfilm and was part of
a big collection of microfilm that was scanned and uploaded
to archive dot org, so a physical copy might not
have survived. Yeah, and it's totally possible that whoever wrote
that entry the last time it was updated, that there

(27:07):
was no known copy anywhere, because that you know, microfilm
was sitting somewhere unscanned. But I did find it funny,
So I have a question. Yeah, did you for any
period of time consider calling it her curious herbal since

(27:28):
I know in England they say the H. I did
not just curious. No. If I had thought about doing it,
I probably would have remembered to do it once. And
then the remainder of the time said it the way
I have said it my whole life. Yeah, just singing
of Eddie Izzard, saying because there's a bleeping H in it,
there is an H in it. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway,

(27:53):
I had a very good time on the trip to England.
There are other forthcoming episodes that probably will be inspired
by the trip to England. Hooray. I emailed myself a
number of things that were just the name of someone
or something in the subject line and no other context.

(28:14):
And then I also took a lot of pictures in
museums and when I got back to work, I had
to kind of flip through them because I got to
this point that like emailing myself from the museums, I
got kind of tired of. So I would just take
a picture of the you know, the sign or the
object or whatever, Yeah, and just flip through all of
my pictures when I got home to take all that up.

(28:37):
Whatever's happening on your weekend, I hope it's great if
you want to make yourself a day trip where you
go to a bunch of museums or a bunch of bookstores.
I did that this weekend, or just a little adventure.
I hope you have the greatest adventure if your mind
is on other things, if your time is required in
other ways, I hope all of that goes as well

(28:58):
as it possibly can. We'll get back with a brand
new episode on Monday, and tomorrow we'll have a Saturday classic.
Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(29:19):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.