Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin’s Crystalline Chemistry, Part 1

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Today we have another episode
inspired by my recent trip to England. While I was there,

(00:21):
I kept running into references to chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.
She was in the History of Science Museum in Oxford
and the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum in London. And then
after I got home, I realized my phone had tagged
a bunch of pictures from the Oxford University Museum of
Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum as being on

(00:42):
Dorothy Hodgkin Road. It started to seem like the universe
was trying to tell me something. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin has
come up on two of our previous episodes, the one
on the discovery of insulin and the one on the
discovery of penicillin, because she earned the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry in nineteen sixty four for her use of X

(01:05):
ray crystallography to determine the structures of important biochemical substances,
including those two. By the end of her career, as
well as vitamin B twelve. These discoveries were a step
and being able to synthesize these molecules and to find
other similar molecules that could have the same effects on
the body. A lot of important things came out of

(01:27):
this research. This is a two part episode. In part one,
we are going to talk about her early life and
some of the really formative moments in that early life
that led her to this career in X ray crystallography,
and then in part two we will talk about her
research and all those discoveries that she made. Also, usually

(01:49):
in my episodes, once someone is out of their childhood,
I usually call them mostly by their last name, unless
that would be confusing. I think this is kind of
a holdover from Earth earlier style guides that were part
of my career. Yeah, writing and editing stuff. During her life, though,
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was really insistent that people call her Dorothy,

(02:12):
and I saw so many people say this about her
that I started to feel a little weirdly formal calling
her Crowfoot or Hodgken. In this episode, she wanted to
be called Dorothy, and a lot of people said that,
So that's mostly what we'll do. Dorothy may Crowfoot was
the first of four daughters born to John and Grace
Mary Crowfoot. Grace Mary was known as Molly. She was

(02:36):
born on May twelfth, nineteen ten, in Cairo, Egypt. The
family was living there because of John's work. Britain had
established what is sometimes called a veiled Protectorate over Egypt
in eighteen eighty two, making it nominally still part of
the Ottoman Empire, but under British administration, and John worked
in the Ministry of Public Instruction in both Egypt and Sudan.

(03:00):
When Dorothy's mother, Molly was growing up, she had wanted
to become a doctor, and while this wasn't completely impossible
in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
it was really difficult, and her parents did not see
the need for women to attain an education beyond finishing school,
so Molly instead trained as a midwife. This training probably

(03:25):
played a role in her marriage to Dorothy's father. Mollie's
attraction to John was immediate, but he didn't seem to
be all that interested in her until about a decade
after they first met, when she wrote to tell him
she had gotten this training and was prepared for overseas service.
She was particularly interested in the idea of being able

(03:45):
to provide pregnancy care where women didn't have access to
medical practitioners, or where it was considered inappropriate for women
to be examined by a man, or for a man
to attend their birth Yeah, to kind of re between
the lines, that sort of seems like he might have thought,
I don't know if this person can keep up with

(04:06):
my career that involves living and working in Northern Africa
and sometimes in places that don't have a lot of resources.
And then she was like, I'm on board with it.
Actually be me. Yeah. Although she was denied access to
a formal higher education, Mollie had a lot of self

(04:26):
taught and experiential knowledge and subjects like art, botany, and
ancient textiles. Over the course of her life, she came
to be seen as an international expert in archaeological textiles
in particular. She was also an advocate of educational opportunities
for girls, and she helped establish schools for girls and
places where John worked. All of this certainly played a

(04:50):
role in how supportive Molly was of Dorothy's interest in
becoming a scientist. The fact that Molly and John didn't
have any sons, may have played a part in how
open they were to this as well. John and Molly's
work in Northern Africa meant that Dorothy and her sisters
had an upbringing that was unusual for most British children,

(05:11):
but not unheard of among the children of colonial administrators
and other people working for Britain overseas. At the start
of the nineteeneens, Dorothy and her sisters were with their
parents in Northern Africa for part of the year, and
then in England with grandparents during the hottest months of
the summer. When World War One started in nineteen fourteen,

(05:33):
Mollie took the girls, Dorothy, Joan, and Elizabeth, who was
known as Betty, to England, where they lived with grandparents
for the duration of the year. Molly returned to Africa
and only saw them once before the war was over.
She gave birth to their youngest sister, Diana, during the war.
These separations from their parents have to have been difficult

(05:54):
for the girls, but Dorothy also attributed her independence and
her adult life to having been apart from her parents
so often and for so long as a child, while
being raised mostly by nurses and grandparents, she started attending school,
and she became extremely determined to learn. At one point,

(06:15):
a nurse wrote a letter to Molly about how Dorothy
kept exhausting herself studying, saying, quote, even in her sleep,
she was at school and this was not something that
Dorothy grew out of. While she was working on her
fourth year project at Oxford University, a friend described her
as working for almost forty hours straight, really looking like

(06:38):
a ghost, and losing weight because she was spending so
much time in the lab. After the end of World
War One, when Dorothy was about eight, she and her
sisters were reunited with their mother, who seems to have
wanted to make up for the lost time with them.
They found a home near Beckle's, close to where John
had grown up. Mollie taught them at home for about

(06:59):
a year with a curiculum that she had developed herself.
Now was focused on subjects like poetry, history, natural history,
and geography. After that year, Dorothy and her sisters briefly
attended a school that was established by the Parents' National
Educational Union, which was an organization to help parents establish

(07:19):
small private schools in people's homes or in rented rooms.
As an alternative to local schools that could also help
with homeschooling. The Union also trained teachers to work in
these schools. This very small school was where Dorothy had
her first experience with chemistry and a lesson that involved
growing crystals from a solution. Dorothy was ten, and she

(07:43):
later said of this quote, I was captured for life
by chemistry and by crystals. Before long, Dorothy was putting
together her own chemistry lab in her attic room at home,
buying materials from the local chemist with her pocket money. Apparently,
he didn't put a lot of thought into which chemicals

(08:04):
were safe to sell to a child, and her parents
trusted her not to do anything really dangerous. Although her
experiments did involve using a burner in the house. That
was the limiting factor in the chemistry set I had
growing up. I had to have parental attention to use
the burner, which mostly meant not doing Berner experiments. In

(08:28):
addition to her growing fascination with science, Dorothy loved to
draw and paint. As she got older, she continued to
do this as a hobby and it also became an
important part of her work in crystallography. Biographer Georgina Ferry
described Dorothy as approaching the work of a scientist with
the soul of an artist. When she was eleven, Dorothy

(08:51):
started attending Sir John Lehman's School in Beccles that was
a co educational school. Although it had separate entrances, dining halls,
and plague for boys and girls, there were also classes
that were considered only appropriate for one gender, one of
those being chemistry, which was only for boys. That doesn't

(09:11):
seem totally surprising given ideas about education and gender in
nineteen twenty when this was happening, but it did seem
odd considering that the chemistry teacher, Chris Deeley, was a woman. Eventually,
Dorothy and her friend Nora were allowed to take chemistry
under the argument that they both planned to go to
university and that they would need it. Dealey encouraged Dorothy

(09:34):
and her chemistry studies, and Dorothy was also getting encouragement
from outside of school. When she was twelve, she and
her sister Joan went to visit their father in Sudan.
Dorothy met her father's colleague, doctor Af Joseph, who worked
at the Welcome Laboratory in Khartoum. Joseph taught her about chemistry,
helped her do experiments, and gave her a surveyor's kit

(09:57):
that she could use to identify minerals. During this trip,
Dorothy also started to become more aware of the effect
of British colonial rule on local people. While the same
things were true in Egypt when she was born, she
was only about four when she was taken to England
in the wake of World War One, so she didn't
really remember or know what was going on there, but

(10:20):
she started to hear about ongoing problems with poverty and disease,
and uprisings against British authorities, and the suppression of those uprisings.
These were often things she was hearing about rather than
directly seeing, although sometimes she did see the aftermath of
violent incidents while she was traveling. Molly wanted Dorothy to

(10:41):
understand the context of the world she was living in,
including these kinds of issues. Dorothy's father was a colonial administrator,
but in a lot of ways, he and Molly were
idealists and progressive thinkers, at least in the context of
their time. For example, John helped establish schools for girls
and places where that whole idea was deeply controversial. Molly

(11:05):
established a midwiffery school in Khartom, hoping to reduce the
practice of genital mutilation also called female circumcision, by offering
training to traditional birth attendance. Mollie also joined the League
of Nations Union, a peace organization established to support the
League of Nations, and she enlisted the children in fundraising efforts,

(11:27):
including putting on a pageant to raise money. Molly also
established a Brownie troop and then a Girl Guide troop,
which her daughters participated in. When Dorothy was sixteen, her
mother gave her a gift that had the same kind
of impact on her as a first chemistry lesson growing crystals,
and we will get to that after a sponsor break.

(11:57):
When Dorothy Crowfoot was a teenager, her mother gave her
Sir William Henry Bragg's book Concerning the Nature of Things
that was published in nineteen twenty five. This book was
a collection of Bragg's nineteen twenty three Christmas lectures at
the Royal Institution. The Christmas lectures were meant to be
accessible to a general audience, including young people, covering science

(12:20):
in an engaging and understandable way. Bragg's first lectures that
year were on the nature of atoms, gases, and liquids,
and the last three were on crystals. One of the
things Bragg talked about in these lectures was the use
of X rays to study molecules, which is a very
new idea. In nineteen fourteen, Max von Laua had been

(12:42):
awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the diffraction
of X rays through crystals. Basically, Von Laua realized that
if you passed an X ray through a crystal, it
created a diffraction pattern on a photographic plate, sort of
like the way light passing through a screen creates pattern
of shadows. William Henry Bragg and his son, William Lawrence

(13:04):
Bragg built on this discovery, finding mathematical relationships between the
X rays, the crystals, and the diffraction patterns, and building
an X ray spectrometer to study these patterns. The Bragg's
discoveries were possible because of the nature of crystals. The
atoms of a crystal are arranged in a regular repeating pattern,

(13:26):
So when an X ray passes through a crystal, the
diffraction pattern that it creates correlates with the pattern of
those atoms, creates dark areas that X ray crystallographers can
use to figure out the location of each atom and
then determine the physical structure of the molecule. The Brag's
early work was on the structure of several salts and

(13:48):
relatively small molecules, and they were jointly awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physics for this work in nineteen fifteen. In
her own Nobel lecture, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin cited one particular
passage from William Henry Bragg's concerning the nature of things.
That passage was quote, broadly speaking, the discovery of X

(14:09):
rays has increased the keenness of our vision over ten
thousand times, and we can now see the individual atoms
and molecules. But beyond this one quote brags writing about crystals,
and these lectures really struck her and I personally find
it really beautiful. For example, he wrote, quote order and

(14:30):
regularity are the consequence of the complete fulfillment of the
attractions which the atoms or molecules exert on one another.
When the structure has grown to a size which renders
it visible in the microscope or even to the naked eye,
the regularity is manifest in the form of the solid
body it is what we call a crystal. It is

(14:51):
bounded by a number of plane faces, often highly polished
in appearance, so that the crystal has a certain charm,
due partly to ge and sparkle, partly to perfect regularity
of outline. We feel that some mystery and beauty must
underlie the characteristics that please us, And indeed that is

(15:12):
the case. Nature is telling us how she arranges the
molecules when given full opportunity. Later on, he went on
to say, quote through the crystal. Therefore, we look down
into the first structures of nature, though our eyes cannot
read what is there without the use, so to speak,
of strong spectacles, which are the X ray methods. In

(15:35):
these lectures, Bragg wrote at length about X rays making
it possible for people to see things that would otherwise
be unobservable, including atoms and molecules. He also wrote about
the physical structure of crystals, making it possible for people
to observe things that they would not otherwise be able
to see. Reading this in her mid teens, Dorothy was

(15:57):
absolutely fascinated. Another formative event in Dorothy's life took place
more around the same time that she was first reading
Bragg's work on X ray crystallography. In September of nineteen
twenty five, when Dorothy was fifteen, her mother took her
to the sixth Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.

(16:18):
The League of Nations was established in the wake of
the First World War to promote international cooperation and to
work toward peace through disarmament and the non violent resolution
of international disputes. The League of Nations also promoted international
cooperation in addressing issues like human trafficking, drug trafficking, the

(16:38):
arms trade, and maintaining fair and humane working conditions, not
just in the member countries but in other countries where
they had commercial or industrial relations. The Protocol for the
Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, also called the Geneva Protocol
of nineteen twenty four, had been passed the League of

(16:58):
Nations General Assembly the previous year. It called for compulsory
arbitration among member nations to settle disputes and outline procedures
for how that arbitration would be handled. This protocol had
received preliminary approval from the member states, but Britain ultimately
had not ratified it. One of the speeches Dorothy and

(17:21):
Molly listened to was by French delegate Joseph Paul Boncoeur,
who was calling for the League to save what it
could of the protocol in spite of its failing ratification.
While this protocol did not come into effect, the Assembly
did call for a disarmament conference that took place in
September of nineteen twenty six. Dennis is a whole protocol

(17:43):
that was meant to try to prevent war through peaceful
negotiation of international disputes. Dorothy described the atmosphere of the
General Assembly in the midst of all this as a
feeling of quote hope struggling against a sense of doom.
Even though the nineteen twenty five or Geneva Protocol went unratified,
Dorothy had witnessed the process of nations coming together to

(18:07):
try to resolve their differences through dialogue rather than violence.
Molly's ongoing anti war activism was shaped in part by
the loss of all four of her brothers during World
War One, and Dorothy's really started to grow after attending
the Assembly with her This idea that problems should be
solved through dialogue was something that she would carry with

(18:29):
her for the rest of her life. In nineteen twenty seven,
Dorothy took the exams that were required to attain her
school certificate, earning distinction in six subjects. She also earned
the highest overall marks of any girl who took the
exams through her local board that year, and those high
marks earned her a cash prize. These high scores were

(18:53):
not altogether surprising, considering how bright and dedicated she had
already demonstrated herself to be as a student. She had
earned really high marks at other times in her education.
Sometimes she had been placed in classrooms with students who
were a year or more older than she was. But
her parents also thought formal schooling was only one of

(19:15):
an array of educational experiences that their children should have,
So Dorothy had some big gaps at her time at
the Lehman's School, including an entire spring term spent with
her grandmother in Italy. So she got these really high
scores in spite of just like not having been present
for a lot of the material. Ironically, one of the

(19:37):
subjects that she did not earn distinction in was chemistry,
and earlier on in her education she had been ranked
in the bottom half of the chemistry class. Dorothy's goal
at this point was to go to Oxford, and it
seems to have been her father's goal for her as well.
She wrote of him wanting her to be educated in
the same way that a son would have been. But

(19:59):
it really SEMs like nobody had really looked into the
requirements for attending Oxford, not Dorothy, not her family, and
not any of her teachers at the Lehman School. She
didn't know she would need to take an entrance examination
in Latin, a language that she had no familiarity with
at all. She didn't know that her math and science

(20:20):
instruction were insufficient. She needed to learn a whole other
science besides chemistry, and she needed more advanced math than
she had gotten. So Dorothy and her family started planning
for her to take the Oxford entrance exams in March
of nineteen twenty eight. That was when she was going
to take them, not when they started planning, and so

(20:41):
that gave her about a year to try to get ready.
During that time, she learned botany from her mother and
Latin from George Watson, who was head master of the
Lehman School. The math part was a particular challenge. Dorothy
had multiple people who could help her, including a former
student at the Lehman's School who had gone to London University.

(21:02):
But she really struggled if she could not understand why
a particular answer was the right one. Even if she
knew that the answer was right, if she couldn't explain
why it was right, she would get really hung up
on that part of it. Her sister Elizabeth described finding
Dorothy crying over her math homework because she knew that

(21:24):
it was right, but she could not explain why. We
will get to what happened when she went for her
entrance exams after we paused for a sponsor break. Dorothy
Crowfoot sat for her Oxford entrance exams in March of

(21:46):
nineteen twenty eight, and she was interviewed at Somerville College,
named for scientist and science writer Mary Somerville, who we
covered on the show in twenty twenty three. Somerville College
was one of the first women's colleges established at Oxford,
and there were several women's colleges by the time Dorothy
applied there, but isabel Fry had encouraged Dorothy to apply

(22:08):
at Somerville. In particular, Isabelle ran a school that two
of Dorothy's sisters were attending, and Isabelle's sister Marjorie was
principal at Somerville. Beyond that personal connection, Isabelle thought Dorothy
had a good chance of being accepted at Somerville because
very few women were applying to study science. Somerville also

(22:29):
had the strongest academic reputation of the Oxford women's colleges. Ultimately,
all of Dorothy's preparation over that year and maybe also
that connection to the principle paid off, and she was
admitted to Somerville College, Oxford, to start in the fall
of nineteen twenty eight. Before she went, she participated in
an archaeological dig in jiash and what is now Jordan,

(22:53):
and that was co sponsored by Yale University. In the
British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, Dorothy's father, Jo had
been appointed director of the school. He had retired from
his British Civil Service job in Khartoum, Sudan a couple
of years previously, at the earliest age that he could
retire and still receive his full pension, and it seemed

(23:15):
like the family might be reunited in England after years
of long separations because of his work in Northern Africa.
But then he accepted this appointment. It might seem strange
for John to have accepted this job when he was
really on the verge of retiring and being with his family,
but he had always wanted to be an archaeologist. Before

(23:38):
he started working at the Ministry of Education in Cairo,
he had studied archaeology and he had gone on some digs,
including on behalf of the British Museum. Not ignoring the
fact that there's a lot of problematic stuff at the
British Museum, this is more about the trust that was
placed in him going on these sticks. One of his
earlier jobs in Northern Africa had included being acting Conservator

(24:02):
of Antiquities in Sudan, but he just did not have
the kind of wealth that was required to fund his
own archaeological digs, and he also didn't have the kind
of academic appointment that could allow him to pursue archaeology
more full time. So this directorship was basically his dream
job that came along later in his life, and it

(24:24):
was a big enough deal for him to just put
off actually retiring. One of the things that Dorothy did
at this dig was work on the excavation and documentation
of mosaic floors dating back to the Eastern Roman Empire
in the fifth and sixth centuries, and she was really
fascinated by their geometry and their repeating patterns, much like

(24:45):
the regular patterns of the atoms in crystals, and she
started drafting a reproduction of two of these mosaics at
one tenth scale. The tiles measured about a centimeter square,
and she represented each of them with a dot of
She worked on these reproductions for about two years after
leaving the dig site, and eventually sent them to Yale.

(25:07):
She also spent some of her time at this dig
studying physics, using a textbook that her Oxford tutor sent
to her, since the science she really needed to go
along with the study of chemistry was physics, not botany.
Dorothy Crowfoot was eighteen when she started at Oxford. Her
classmates described her as very quiet, which had been true

(25:28):
in her earlier education as well, but they also said
that she had really interesting things to say if you
could just get her to start talking. She also had
some limits and how much time she had available to
connect with her classmates. An education at Oxford involved a
lot of independence study, and that was something that Dorothy
was really well prepared for given how much learning she

(25:51):
had already done on her own and how often she'd
been responsible for her younger sisters when her parents were away.
She really threw herself into this independent study, especially because
Oxford was not actually teaching X ray crystallography yet, so
she was having to study everything involved with that on
her own. In addition to that, Somerville students were allowed

(26:13):
to attend lectures at the other Oxford colleges, and since
there weren't many scientists at Somerville, Dorothy was spending a
lot of time somewhere else. She came back to her
college a lot of the time only for meals and sleep.
At the same time, she participated in a lot of
activities at Oxford. She worked on archaeological digs at Roman

(26:34):
sites in the area. She was in the Labor Club,
the Archaeological Society, and the Junior Scientific Club. Marjorie Frye
also ran the Somerville Crime Club, which was focused on
penal reform and the abolition of capital punishment, and Dorothy
was a member of that as well. There were a
lot of rules around women and their behavior at Oxford,

(26:57):
including how and whether women were allowed to interact with men,
and there were also rules that affected the very existence
of the women's colleges. Their enrollment was capped. They were
prohibited from expanding beyond one woman for every four men
studying across all of Oxford. The women's colleges were a

(27:19):
lot newer than the other colleges at Oxford. Those other
men's colleges had large endowments a lot of the time
thanks to generations of alumni making donations to them. The
women's colleges didn't have that history or that money, and
then because of that one in four limit, they were
also barred from just bringing in a lot more paying

(27:40):
women's students to try to bring in more income to
the colleges. The women's colleges tend to just have less
in the way of money and supplies and equipment than
the men's colleges did. In nineteen thirty one, Dorothy was
preparing to start on her fourth year research project, which
was required for graduation. From home. One of the centers

(28:02):
of chrystallography in Europe was Germany, and a lot of
papers on physics and chemistry were being published in German,
so she took a trip to Germany to both work
on her German and to get some more lab experience.
In spite of her interest in things like the peace
movement and the League of Nations, really does not seem

(28:23):
like she had a clear idea of what was happening
in German politics in nineteen thirty one, or if she did,
she might not have taken it very seriously. This was
really a pattern in her life. Sometimes it seemed like
she had an overly optimistic or even naive belief in
the power of international cooperation and peace through dialogue, to
the point that she did not see or fully believe

(28:46):
negative or even horrific things that were happening. I didn't
put it in the outline, but in I think nineteen
thirty six, she took a trip to Spain when the
Spanish Civil War was about to start. Like this happened
more than once. When she made this trip to Germany,
the Nazi Party was gaining support but had not yet
taken control, so to a lot of people, the situation

(29:08):
there was escalating and scary at the same time, though
her hosts in Germany were Jewish, and Dorothy thought that
they did not seem to be very worried. Although she
did get some lab time. On this trip, she did
not do much to improve for German because her parents
came through Germany on their way back to England from

(29:28):
a trip, and they took her on a trip to
visit archaeological museums in Berlin, so not as much pressure
while traveling with her parents to speak a lot of German.
By the time Dorothy was ready to start her fourth
year project, Oxford had set up a basic crystallography lab.
Before that, she had thought she might have to go

(29:49):
to London, where the Brags were working, and work on
her project there, but Herbert Marcus Powell, known as Tiny
for his small stature, had just been hired as a
demons at Oxford in the mineralogy department. Demonstrator was essentially
a junior lecturer position. Powell had hand blown an X

(30:09):
ray tube and acquired a camera, creating a very basic
crystallography setup. Dorothy was Powell's first student. Yeah, when we
say very basic crystallography set up, there was an interview
that I saw her doing very late in her life
where she described this camera as horrible. Apparently it was
very rudimentary compared to what actually would have worked really

(30:32):
well for doing this kind of work. The two of
them worked on determining the structure of dimethyl thallium halides,
which were somewhat more complex than the compounds that had
already been studied through X ray crystallography. Dorothy grew the
crystals and she illustrated them, and they would bombard these
crystals with X rays. The crystals would diffract the X rays,

(30:56):
which would be picked up by a photographic plate, and
Dorothy would also document all of this, including drawing illustrations
of it, and analyze the results. Figuring out how the
patterns on the plate corresponded to specific atoms required trial
and error and a lot of math, which Dorothy found
very difficult. She also found Powell difficult to work with.

(31:18):
It seems she thought he was more of a micromanager
than a visionary or a mentor, as she had so
often done before. She worked herself to exhaustion, leading her
friends to try to look after her and make sure
she ate enough rested when she was sick, and spent
at least some time out of the lab. When I
say difficult math, as somebody whose math instruction ended with

(31:43):
pre calculus in nineteen ninety three, not only did I
not understand this math. I could not figure out how
to explain just the basic concepts that she was using
or the tools that she was using to help her
do it. Math beyond my understanding, beyond my education. Really,
if I had ever been taught it, I might could

(32:05):
explain it, but not with an education, stopping with pre
calculus in nineteen ninety three. After finishing this project, in
nineteen thirty two, Dorothy Crowfoot was awarded a first class
degree in chemistry from Oxford, making her the third woman
ever to earn that distinction. She also earned a scholarship

(32:29):
that she could use toward doing further research, and the
research that she conducted with Herbert Powell was published in
the journal Nature that year under both of their names.
And we will get into what happened next in her
life after she left Oxford next time. This is a
little cliffhanger today kind of. This is sort of a

(32:49):
moment where her life is about to make a lot
of big changes. Bye bye, bub Yeah, I have some
listener mail. It is a listener mail correction. This email
is from Scott, and Scott wrote Hi your June first,
twenty twenty six episode The Literary Life of Villa Rosebroo
repeats a mistake in reference removed from Wikipedia entries for

(33:12):
My Antonia and Villa Roseboro on June twenty eighth, twenty
twenty six, based on new research described in Who's Antonia.
AI attempts to reconceive Jim Burden, published in the Spring
twenty twenty six edition of The Willa Cather Review. So
the email then quotes from the episode that is being

(33:32):
corrected here, which is the part where we talked about
Willa Cather getting rejected a bunch of times when she
tried to get My Antonia published, and then Villa Roseboro
reading it and saying that it needed to be rewritten
in the point of view of Jim Burden. The email continues,
my Antonia was never offered to let alone rejected by

(33:55):
any publishers. Cather's regular publisher, Hutton Mifflin. Did it sight
unseen when she first offered it to them. The remainder
of the anecdote referenced is equally mistaken. Whose Antonia uses
original source material to explain where it originated, why it
is incorrect, and to whom it really refers. Next in

(34:16):
this email, there is a link to the full edition
to this paper at the Willicather Review, which is behind
a membership firewall for a year, an abstract in excerpts
and the work sided of this paper at Academia dot edu,
and then a YouTube video of the presentation of this paper,

(34:36):
which was at the June twenty, twenty sixth seventy first
Annual Willicather Spring Conference. And then Scott continues, as you
will see you are not the first to be misled.
Attempts are ongoing to rebut the references to the Errant
Roseboro anecdote where it has appeared, including an Oxford, Cambridge
American Literature teacher's Guide. If you have any questions or

(35:00):
additional information, please do not hesitate to ask regards Scott So.
Scott is the author of this paper. Thank you so
much Scott for sending this. This is not information that
existed when we did the episode, because we recorded it
on something like May fifteenth, and I did want to clarify.

(35:22):
I don't know if the reference to it being removed
from Wikipedia entries is a suggestion that we might have
used those entries to research the show. We do not
research the show using Wikipedia. I was very curious, though
I looked back at my resources that were part of
the episode, and I did not go through all of them,

(35:44):
but this little anecdote was in three papers by two
different authors. At least that's where I stopped looking. And
then I looked at the Wikipedia edit history, and it
appears that Wikipedia's original source for this information is two

(36:04):
of the papers that were part of my research. So
like Wikipedia and I used the same resources for this.
If this paper had happened, or if this episode had
happened two months later, this might have been something I
would have found and I could have said, this is
a thing that has been repeated so many times and

(36:25):
we've just learned that it's wrong. But time did not
align for that to happen. No, it happens so often
the second we publish a thing, the universe goes, hey,
we're going to do something here that's going to make this,
by the way, item you wished you had done two
months later, it just happens. Yeah, I know, you didn't
expect new information about someone when one of the things

(36:48):
that we talked about is there being only one biography
that was six hundred or something pages long, and yeah,
doesn't exist in many collections. So anyway, thank you again,
and Scott for sending this. We do not often get
emails from folks about the research that they have done

(37:09):
that has related to the show, but when it does happen,
I'm always appreciative, also appreciative to have something corrected that
you know we would have avoided had it been possible, hopefully,
if you would like to send us a note or
at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and if you
want to see the source lists for all of our episodes,

(37:31):
including the source list of the Villa Roseboro episode that
is at our website which is missed Inhistory dot com.
You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio
app or anywhere else that you'd like to get your podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

(37:53):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Us

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