Behind the Scenes Minis: Unearthed! Wrap-up

Tracy and Holly discuss the ways that events in the real-world impact choices of what goes into the show. They also discuss the anonymous purchase of historically significant items, and library collection maintenance.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio, Hello, and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This week we had our
latest installment of Unearthed. I don't feel like we often

(00:23):
remind folks that we are too human beings living and
working through all of the things that are happening in
the world that are also affecting everyone else. But I
worked on these episodes as the Supreme Court was issuing
one decision after another that was like monumental and has

(00:49):
wide reaching effects, and regardless of how you personally feel
about any of these decisions, it was definitely a kay
atic uh and often, from my point of view, demoralizing
series of days. Yes, I did a lot of all

(01:11):
caps swearing on social media because I just couldn't help myself. Yeah. Yeah.
A lot of these are related to things that um
that we have talked about on the show before. I
think the first thing that comes to people's minds is
probably ro versus Wade, But there were also decisions that
affected things like tribal sovereignty, which has been something that

(01:32):
has come up on the show so much, and that
also like that decision seems to foretell other decisions that
might also have a damaging effect on tribal sovereignty. Like
there was just a lot. There was so much that
was happening. And one thing that has been true of
Unearthed episodes going back since starting to do them is
that as I work on them, I usually have hundreds

(01:55):
of links to articles to go through for them. Uh.
And the farther I get into them, like, the more
aggressive I will get and being like, that's confusing, we're
not talking about it. That seems like them something we
already talked about before, We're not talking about it again,
Like it just I start to feel increasingly draconian in
my approach to choosing what things to talk about, and

(02:19):
in this particular set of Unearthed stuff, I feel like
that was the case from like minute one I was
trying to go through this, like I had something like
three hundred and seventy six links bookmarked, uh. And I
feel like from the first moment of working on them,
I was like, I don't like this headline, don't want
to talk about it. To feel like this is confusing

(02:40):
and doesn't make any sense not talking about that either,
and that's I don't know, it was just it was
one of the weirder unearthed preparation periods that I can recall. Yeah,
I mean I had I had aside a subject to
be working on in these last couple week that I
was kind of excited about. It's weird and esoteric. It's

(03:02):
still happening, but one of the main books I was
I was hoping to use I got delayed in transit
and so I couldn't work on it, and I just
remember being like, but that was my mom. That was anything.
It's like it was like that, damn, let us all
over again, like touch a break, Um, but we got

(03:27):
I will say there was a thing included in this
that was one of those um items that made me
um super angry, which is the tall chief statue being
cut apart and sold for scrap. I mean that's like
on multiple levels, right, It's like an indigenous person and

(03:48):
their memorial representation being destroyed. It's art being destroyed, and
it's one of those things that this is not a
case where a thing got stolen because of private lector
wanted it. I'm not saying that's good, but it's better
than cutting it up. Yeah, there's so many layers of anger.
In an earlier draft of the outline, I had various

(04:11):
expressions of of anger over that that that I wound
up deleting because a lot of the other things that
we were going to talk about we're also anger inducing.
Something we didn't specifically say about this is I really
think the person who stole that statue just took the
first one they found, because the way those five statues

(04:33):
are arranged, Marjorie Tall Chief was on the end, and
I really think, like I haven't personally been to that park,
but the fact that it was just the one on
the end was probably just the one that somebody came
to came to And like, part of me wants to
believe that nobody would do that unless they were so
desperate for money that they could not. But even so,
I'm like, you stole that statue, when you cut it

(04:55):
to pieces and you sold it to scrap dealers, that
takes a lot of effort. Again, It's one of those
things where I'm like, there was no other way to
make a book really than all of the time you
took to do all of these things that were probably
rather labor intensive, Right, Yeah, I don't know. One of
the things that's like just sort of the comes with

(05:17):
the territory of working on this episode these episodes is
that they are just a reflection of what I saw
in the many many RSS feeds and now also websites
that I go visit individually to see what people are
reporting on UM and the collection of stuff that I

(05:37):
got this time around, I felt like was a lot
more Eurocentric than some of our more recent other episodes,
Like they're just I just did not see as much
reporting on things that were happening in UM in Africa, Asia,
or South America. A lot of it was from Europe
and North America, and I UM, I was sort of
I had to be limited by the news that I

(06:00):
had access to through these hundreds of links that I
had bookmarked or the span of three months. So I
did want to acknowledge that, even though like I don't
I don't know if there is a reasoning behind, like
why this time around, so much of the reporting seemed
to be so focused on just these parts of the

(06:22):
world and not write other parts. Some of it is UM,
Like I just like things that it seems like we've
talked about these so many times, like coin hoards, lots
of coin hoards in places that are not Europe in
North America. But like then then it's just like I
included a coin hoard for the sake of having things
that were not in Europe and North America. Right, I

(06:45):
want to talk about salmon vertebrae. Okay, let's do because
I really think we need a craft project. Yeah, this
is not stuff that's hard to get, right, Like you
can buy a whole salmon, so I feel like with
a little gumption we can make some beats. Yeah. I
don't know if there's uh anything you would need to

(07:07):
do to like specifically preserve fish vertebrate, Like, I don't
know how, I don't know how bony they are. Does
that make sense? Oh? Do you mean? Like, I'm not
sure if you're asking how to preserve them so they
don't degenerate, or how to preserve them so they don't
bite you what you're wearing them. I know. I was

(07:29):
more thinking, I don't know if they are more cartilaginous
than bony, And if they were more cartilaginous, then I
would think it would be hard to there would be
something that you would need to do to keep them
from just deteriorating. But I don't actually I actually knew,
I don't know enough about fish physiology. Those ones lasted

(07:49):
a long time. You could always if you really wanted
to be you know, fancy pants and unicorn and didn't
want to actually wear fish bones, you could asked them.
You know, you can make a mold and then cast
them in like reson or something, and just make them
as needed. There's so many projects we can make with fishbones.

(08:21):
I also mentioned that I had thoughts and feelings about
anonymity when it comes to auctions of large scale items. Yeah, okay.
On the one hand, I, of course we study history
all the time. I understand the desire and concern that
people have around knowing that something of historical importance is
going to go to a place that will appreciate and

(08:44):
understand it and preserve it and do But at the
same time, there's part of me that's like, how someone
spends their money, if it is not nefarious, is nobody's business, right,
So like if I had to like report every time
I bought something I don't know, say, over like three dollars, Like,

(09:04):
can you imagine how weird that would be if you
were like, yeah, I bought another bolt of fabric. I
promise it's going to a good home. Like I imagine
if you have millions of dollars that you're throwing at
purchases of that nature, you were accustomed to the game
of having to like disclose on occasion. But right, that's

(09:24):
always a weird thing when people get in an uproar
about yes, but who bought it, and it's like, well,
it's an anonymous perch. Yeah. I think I think the
Charlotte Bronze one in particular, had like a lot of
feelings around it, Like there's the the emotional attachment that
a lot of people feel to the Brontes. Not saying
everybody feels that way, but like sort of like there

(09:46):
were Jane Austen Fines like people, a lot of people
I think would have similar feelings. Uh. The fact that
like that was the last of her tiny books to
be in a private collection instead of in a museum,
I think it was a thing that brought up a
lot of feeling because the articles that I read that
were about it being sold at auction before it became
clear who had bought it, had this very dismayed tone,

(10:11):
and it was very quickly afterward that it was like Oh,
the friends of the library bought it and they're donating it.
And there it was like then there was this tone
of like a sigh of relief, and all the news
reporting Yeah, the metal that's in a good home now
like that, that wording just still cracks me up, pretty funny.
I mean, it's interesting, right. I also think about the
fact that there are people, and I'm just conjecturing people

(10:33):
are organizations who could be purchasing things like that to
some end that is good and has goodwill around it,
but they don't want to disclose it initially, you know
what I mean, Like I'm thinking about a weird thing
that's not the same at all, But like I'm thinking
about when Walt Disney set up a shell company to
buy property in Florida because he didn't want people to

(10:53):
know Disney was buying it, so it would falsely inflate
the price. And I imagine similarly, if there is somebody,
like you know, a Bill Gates of the world who
decides I'm going to start an art museum and I'm
gonna start buying up amazing things. The second that news
got out, it would artificially inflate the price on a
lot of things, so like, there are things like that
to consider as well. And I don't know. I just

(11:16):
I have feelings that I'm like, yeah, but I shouldn't
have to tell people what you're buying. But then again,
if that bolt of fabric that I bought was something
that was public knowledge in an auction, maybe I don't know,
maybe I should be the be able to um or
be willing to say no, no, that was mine. I
don't know. It's just a strange thing. Uh. It's totally

(11:39):
possible that whoever bought that medal will publicly disclose it
at some point. Who even knows it's even possible that
they'll disclose it in the window between when we recorded this, Oh,
it probably happened right after we finish, or or it
happened sometime between when I wrote this episode and today
when we're recording it. Because I sent it over to
you on Friday before the fourth of July holiday weekend, um,

(12:01):
and I have not looked at any news headlines related
to this, because why would I do that. Yeah, I
don't know. You gotta have time off. I also mentioned
that I certainly have theories about how a tiny book
could be in the library's collection and uncataloged. Going back

(12:23):
to my library cataloging days, where there are times when
large palettes of things show up um and depending on
how they're arranged your store, you could potentially have an
itty bitty thing inside a bigger thing and not even
know it was there at the time, especially if it's

(12:45):
like part of a large um a session situation where
like someone has willed a library their collection, or a
large donation from someone or any number of you know,
those large drops that happen in which they do sometimes
depending on what's going on. I mean, there are a
million reasons that someone might be a little speedier with

(13:08):
a session in catalog ng than than would be ideal,
but it has to happen for whatever reason. They might
miss something that happens so it's not mysterious, or they
might just have however, many linear feet of somebody's papers
that were donated, nobody has gone through all of the papers.
And I also have that thing when things show up

(13:29):
missing in a collection and it's like we didn't even
know it was missing. I have a flashback to a
particular book I was trying to track down when I
was working in acquisitions, and I had called a library
overseas a library in England, and it was one of

(13:51):
those things where I was trying to check a copy
that was being offered to us for sale against one
that like someone else at an an accredited institution would
recognize and be like, yes, that seems to be the
same the same run or the same edition. And I
ran into a problem when I was on the phone
with a lovely person who said, we believe we have

(14:14):
that book, but we still haven't recovered everything that was
covered in rubble in the bombings from World War two.
So like, there are things that happened like that where
parts of buildings get damaged in a way that might
reseal something up away from the libraries circulating collection or

(14:36):
even their archive collection, and then they kind of know
it's on the premises, but they can't access it. Those
happened too, And I always wonder whenever, whenever I'm looking
at any of these um unearthed that you put together,
and there's like they didn't know it was gone, and
I'm like, I wonder if they thought it was in
the rubble, Like, oh yeah, that's always my first thought.

(14:57):
That just reminded me of how our local library had
a water intrusion into the local collections room during a
major storm, and it was like they had to get
everything out of that room fast. Uh. And I mean
I was not there. I was not involved in any
of it. But I can absolutely imagine people just trying

(15:18):
to get everything out of a room that was flooding
as fast as possible. And you gotta deal with it
at some point in this case when everything was closed
because of COVID. Yes, I had to do that after
I like the frame water intrusion that flood at a

(15:40):
library that I worked at. I don't want to talk
ill about anybody, but we had an archivist that was
maybe not super motivated to stay on top of things,
and one of our rooms of archival materials had been
flooded and it had not been realized that it had
flooded until their staffer went looking for something in that

(16:02):
room like a month and a half later and came
back and said, everything is covered in mold. And so
we had to like start pulling stuff out of that
room really quickly. Aside from like the archival materials, which
is a loss, is dangerous to have a room full
of mold in a building where the public can come.
So that was like a whole ordeal, and I imagine

(16:22):
that it's not unique to my experience. Other libraries have
had similar things happen. So stuff goes away. I'm sure.
I'm sure that at some point in history at some
libraries some staffer has been in that position and been like,
I'm not even going to try to discern what this was,
and they throw it away and then they don't know
if they have that book anymore. Right, Those are my

(16:47):
my thoughts on tiny things items in libraries. Yeah, when
I was in middle school in high school, I shelved
books in the school library. It was like I was
a library helper, and I remember the librarians being like,
you got to put them back exactly where they go,

(17:10):
And looking back on it, I'm like I was a
teenager showing before school. Listen, it happens all the time,
and even at the college level, like people that are
doing work study not always. I mean, I'm not shading anybody.
I was not always as careful as I should have
been either when I was in college and working in

(17:31):
those jobs. I mean I tried to be, but I'm
sure there were days where I was like, I think
it's here, and I just shoved it in. That happens
all the time. So libraries are are amazing places where
it is legitimately difficult to maintain the orderliness of a
collection of any size. If it's a circulating collection, it

(17:51):
gets so hard, especially since they tend to be understaffed
and under fundays. Yes, and I will tell you, I mean,
this is like a thing that I'm just not good at.
But like you'll do audits where you're like, okay, we're
doing a shelf read this week, and you kind of
go through. At the time when I was doing it
was like print out, and you would go through your
print out and like tick off every book and make

(18:12):
sure it was in order down the shelf. I have
a hard time with shelf reading, just like that form
of visual recognition scrambles my brain in a hurry. And
so I'm sure I'm not the only one who's like,
I think these were in the right order. I don't
check it off because I'm really hungry, which will also

(18:32):
make your cognitive powers for us. Yes, my executive function
is not. Frankly, I'm not. Yeah. So anyway, that was
our unearth this time around. One of the more angry,
frustrated unearthed writings of Maybe Ever, Possibly Ever. It's Friday,

(18:58):
so whatever is happening on your weekend, I hope it's
gonna be great. We have a classic episode that will
come out tomorrow, something brand new on Monday. You can
drop us a note if you would like history podcast
that i heart radio dot com. I hope everybody's doing well.

(19:18):
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