January 11, 2017 • 30 mins
The American sculptor was a celebrated artist in her day, but she receded from the spotlight; her final years remained a mystery for quite some time. Her marble works are striking examples of the neoclassical style popular at the end of the 19th century.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today's
subject is a little bit of art history. It's not
a little bit, it's quite a bit of art history.
(00:21):
But also it ties into abolitionist history. It's also an
interesting study of identity and like public presentation, UH, and
it also touches on a particularly long and circuitous path
that a specific piece of art can sometimes go on
before finding its way to the safety of a museum collection.
So we're talking today about UH sculptor Edmonia Lewis. Typically,
(00:46):
when we're talking about a person as the subject of
a podcast, we start with the early life, with their
birth and what we know about their parents. And this
is one of those cases where it's tricky to do
that because Edmonia spoke very little about her childhood it
and even gave some varying and inconsistent information about her
childhood throughout her life. Yeah, this is one of those
(01:07):
cases where the subject kind of blurred the picture a
little bit themselves, and we'll talk about why she might
have done that later on in the episode, but estimates
put her birth most likely sometime in eighteen forty three
eighteen eighteen forty five UH in upstate New York or
possibly Ohio. I've also seen it suggested that it could
(01:29):
even have been New Jersey uh And. She was born
as Mary ed Monia Lewis and her father was from
the Caribbean and her mother was part of Jibway and
after her parents died when she was still very young
she was possibly not even five years old at the time,
it was her mother's family that raised her. The tribe
that her mother had been part of was nomadic, and Lewis,
(01:51):
who went by the name Wildfire when she was among
her Native American ken, lived that life until the age
of twelve. She also had an older brother named sam Rule,
who was also known as Sunrise, and her brother was
more than a decade older than she was. In the
eighteen forties, he left his relatives in the eastern United
States to pursue gold mining in California, who's reasonably successful
(02:13):
at it, and it was because of her brother's success
that Wildfire left the nomadic life of her tribal family
to attend school. Samuel actually paid for her to attend
a school in New York, and eventually, in eighteen fifty nine,
Edmonia enrolled at the Young Ladies Preparatory department of Oberlin
College in Oberlin, Ohio, and this was also paid for
(02:35):
by her older brother. And it was during this time
that she dropped using the name Wildfire completely and switched
entirely to Edmonia. She also kind of abandoned her first
name Mary. This is a significant point in her life
as the abolitionist movement was very active at Oberlin and
it really impacted her as a young student. But two
(02:56):
other important things also happened to Edmonia during her colloge education,
both good and bad. One was that she developed into
a skilled sketch artist, and the other is that she
was accused of poisoning two other young women at the
college who were her roommates with Spanish Fly. According to
her accusers, Edmonia served the two of them mulled wine
(03:20):
before they went out for a sleigh ride with two
young men, and while the young women were out on
their date, both of them became violently ill. This accusation
caused an immediate rift in the culture of Oberlin. The
school was dedicated to progressive causes and social justice, and
prided itself on admitting African Americans and women since the
(03:42):
eighteen thirties. The two girls ed Monia had allegedly poisoned
were white, and a white vigilante mob forms to punish Louis,
they seized her and beat her, and then left her
for debt in a field. When she appeared in court
weeks later, she had a shattered collar bone and needed
crutches to walk. Her attackers were never brought to justice.
(04:03):
Edmonious lawyer John Mercer Langston, who went on to great
fame himself, had argued that her roommates stomach contents were
never tested for poison, so that the entire accusation was
really hearsay and she was acquitted, But it was not
the end of her troubles at the school. Her reputation
was really deeply damaged by scandal. Uh there I read
(04:24):
some accounts that suggested that basically she couldn't walk anywhere
without people whispering about her, which I can only imagine
had to be terribly demoralizing. And she was later accused
of stealing art materials, and she wasn't allowed to register
for her final term or graduate as a consequence, and
those charges were dropped again for lack of evidence, but
she still was not allowed to complete her degree. This
(04:46):
really reminds me of our episode on Molly Spotted Elk, Yeah,
the performer, and how when she was working at a
camp where the girls she was working with really loved her,
but and then she had all of these accu zations
as the only Indigenous person working at the camp that
seemed like, we're probably false and made against her, not
(05:08):
for any real evidence. It's very very parallel. So through
the financial assistance of her brother once more, she moved
to Boston, Massachusetts, and while Oberlin had exposed her to
her art potential and to the abolitionist movement, Boston really
built on that exposure with a lot of new connections.
She met abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison and the
(05:29):
two became close friends. She also met sculptor Edward A.
Brackett via an introduction that Garrison made between the two
of them. Yeah, So, just as a little bit of
context on those two men. William Lloyd Garrison was the
publisher of the Liberator, which was an anti slavery paper
that ran from eighteen thirty one until the end of
the Civil War in eighteen sixty five. And Edward Augustus Brackett,
(05:52):
who he had introduced in Monia too, was a self
taught sculptor, very well known for busts and dramatic concepts,
including uh a marble piece that he carved depicting a
drowned woman and her baby. He also served in the
Civil War, but then in the eighteen seventies he left
behind his career in art to head up the Massachusetts
Fish and Game Commission. So also very fascinating men in
(06:15):
and of themselves that could be podcast subjects in the future.
Through her friendship with Brackett and Monia began to sculpt.
He served as a teacher and a mentor to her.
In this new medium. She started creating clay and plaster
medallions representing abolitionist leaders including William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner,
Wendell Phillips, and John Brown, and she earned both acclaim
(06:37):
and some commercial benefit for her work in the early
eighteen sixties. Yes, she is one of those cases where
she really was able to make a living for herself
with her art, and her rapid rise to fame came
from a piece that she did in eighteen sixty four,
which was a bust of Colonel Robert Shaw. So the colonel,
in case you did not recognize that name, was the
white Union soldier who led the fifty fourth Massachusetts that
(07:00):
was the first all black regiment in the Northeast and
one of the first all black regiments in the war.
He also led a wage boycott to protest the lesser
pay that black soldiers received compared to white soldiers. Uh
and Shaw died in battle at Fort Wagner in July
of eighteen sixty three, and so he kind of had
this very heroic image. So this bust was incredibly popular.
(07:24):
Lewis made so much money selling copies of it that
she was able to pay her way to travel to Europe.
She toured multiple cities, including London, Paris, and Florence, but
though it seemed briefly that Florence would be her new
home in Europe, she wound up settling in Rome, and
in eighteen sixty five she rented a studio there adjacent
to the Piazza Barberini. And Rome was a fairly natural
(07:48):
choice at the time. It was a haven for a
number of artists ex pats Uh, and it was a
particularly attractive location for sculptors to set up studios because
of the ready availability of white marble. Additionally, there was
an abundance of skilled stone cutters in Rome who could
take an artist plaster or wax model and copy that
work into marble. And as a sculptor studying the neo
(08:11):
classical style that was popular among the city's other sculptors
at the time, they really expanded and refined Louis's skills.
But though she had access to skilled laborers to assist
in her work, she really didn't engage many. There are
a couple of theories as to why she opted to
go the more difficult route in creating marble pieces. For one,
(08:32):
she didn't have a lot of extra money to pay
for other people's work. But for another, she was concerned
about debate about the purity of a work that had
been copied onto marble by other workers who weren't the artist.
One of her friends had already faced criticism that her
work was really the artistry of Rome's workmen rather than
her own artistic work. And in Monia really quickly picked
(08:54):
up Italian and she settled into Roman culture. And she
also made some very close friends, one of which we
just mentioned were both American women who were also living
in the city. One was sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who was
the person that had faced that criticism that her work
was not her own, and the other was actress Charlotte Cushman.
And the three women were part of a larger group
of women artists in Italy at the time that Henry
(09:17):
James once described as quote that strange sisterhood of American
lady sculptors who at one time settled upon the Seven
Hills of Rome in a white Marmorian flock. We'll talk
about some of the work that Edmonia Lewis created while
living in Rome next, but before we do, we will pause.
We're a word from one of our sponsors. As Lewis
(09:43):
continued to create in her new home in Europe, her
art reflected themes of her deeply held religious beliefs, as
well as references to the lives of African Americans, though
it was certainly not confined exclusively to those subjects. This
was a period of great productivity for Lewis, although unfortunate
only many of her works have not survived and they
are lost forever but after she had moved to Rome,
(10:05):
she also traveled back and forth to the United States
pretty frequently to showcase and sell her original works as
well as plaster copies. One of the interesting pieces she
created during this time was a copy of Michelangelo's Moses.
She made this and other copies of classical sculptures in
order to study them and improve her technique. Yeah. This,
I may be completely naive. This sort of blows my
(10:28):
mind because her copy is quite good, and I I
just to me, it seems amazing that people could just
make copies of such a beautiful piece and and do
it in uh, you know, pretty good style. Uh So.
In eighteen sixty six, she also began a series of
sculptures featuring Native Americans that were inspired by the Longfellow
poem The Song of Hiawatha. She created a sculpture titled
(10:52):
the Old Arrowmaker first, and you'll also see this work
listed with variations in the title such as the Old
Indian Arrowmaker and his Daughter or simply Arrowmaker. And this
piece features a Native American man and his daughter as
he teaches her how to make arrows. And that piece
is currently in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
On May twenty one, two thousand nine, another sculpture in
(11:14):
the Hiawatha series, The Marriage of Hiawatha, sold at auction
for three hundred and fourteen thousand, five hundred dollars. Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow visited her studio in Rome to sit for
a bust, and it's likely that he saw some of
these sculptures that his works had inspired. He was among many,
many people who flocked to Edmonia's studio. She became a
(11:35):
very popular figure in the art world in the second
half of the nineteenth century, with a really devoted fan
base and and many prominent people visited her to have
their likenesses sculpted. Yeah, it's definitely one of those things
that it's sort of hard, I think, I know for
me when doing the research to really it took me
a while to realize, like, oh, she was famous. Like
(11:59):
you tend to think of art kind of doing a
artist doing their thing on their own in their studios
and they sell works that go out. But people really did,
like sort of have this cult of celebrity around her,
which to me is sort of fascinating. So she also
created an anti slavery piece in eighteen sixty seven, which
is titled Forever Free, and it shows a man and
(12:19):
woman breaking free of their bonds, and that particular sculpture
is now part of the collection of Howard University Gallery
of Art in Washington, d c. She did several chair
and pieces in a series, including Awake, Asleep and Poor Cupid.
Awake and Asleep both feature would appear to be the
same to cherubic infants, and they are very similar except
(12:40):
for the fact that they're awake or asleep. Poor Cupid
is a depiction of the cherub reaching for a rose
in the ground, but his hand has been ensnared in
a trap. The expression on cupid space is not a
pained grimace, but he looks more like petulantly irritated. Awake
and asleep or both in the San Jose Library and
(13:01):
Poor Cupid is in the Smithsonian's collection. I seriously love
the expression on Cupid's face in that one, like he
just looks so bothered. It's a really really lovely capture
of emotion. Uh and funny. Edmonia Lewis continued to create
busts as well. Those were really like a pretty standard
(13:23):
way to keep money flowing in, and she made several
of them of prominent public figures, including President Abraham Lincoln
and General Ulysses S. Grant. The end of Edmonia Lewis's
life story is a lot like it's beginning. It's kind
of hazy. It was long believed that she had lived
out the remainder of her years in Italy, but in
fact she died in London, England in seven This is
(13:46):
pretty new information. It was unearthed by historian Maryland Richardson
through diligent efforts at tracking down her grave and records
of her final years. For a long time, her year
of death was completely inconsistent and source material, and her
place of death was pretty much assumed to be Rome. Yeah.
Marilyn Richardson has done a lot of work, uh, studying
(14:09):
in Monia Lewis's life and has just a broad, broad
scope of revelatory information. Uh. And as the eighteen hundreds ended,
the neo classical style that Lewis had been so skilled
in was falling out of favor, and Rome had really
been surpassed by Paris as the vogue city for artists.
(14:29):
So we know that by nineteen o one, according to
census records, Lewis had moved to London already she died,
it turned out of kidney disease. Church records indicate that
Lewis was laid to rest in London St Mary's Roman
Catholic Cemetery for a fee of five pounds fifty two
pence according to her final wishes. Her death was announced
(14:50):
only in a British Roman Catholic bulletin called Tablet, and
that posting made no mention of her art career. Her
will listed Lewis as a sculptor and spenced and one
of the more fascinating aspects of Lewis as a historical
figure is her legacy as a Native American slash African
American sculptor. It's one of those things where if you
(15:10):
just look up her name, that's kind of like the
very brief blurb you'll see, like America's first prominent Native
American African American sculptor, but like her nebulous origin story,
there's actually a great deal about her that's unclear, and
this identity becomes very interesting and shifts a little bit,
and it seems, at least in part to be due
(15:31):
to a degree of shrewdness on her part. She was
pretty comfortable allowing press coverage of her work during her
life to characterize her based largely on that Native American
or African American heritage, but ignoring the fact that she
was well educated and really quite worldly. In an interview
with The Toast, in historian Marilyn Richardson said of Edmonia
(15:53):
Lewis quote, she worked both sides of the street, depending
on her audience and her patrons. She emphasized her blackness
or her her Native American origins. She was very savvy
about how to keep her identity and play, and this
portrayal of her in the press at the time as
something of a novelty of under kinnd may have helped
elevate her visibility as an artist. So that was no
(16:16):
small feat for a woman of color in the eighteen hundreds.
And additionally, press coverage at the time that spoke of
her as this sort of mysterious, exotic, almost childlike creature
who had suddenly appeared on the European art scene meant
that her previous scandals at school could pretty much go unmentioned.
It was like she had divorced herself from that life
and was creating this new identity for her public persona.
(16:39):
Next up, we'll talk about one of Lewis's most important works,
which has its own unique history. But first we'll have
another quick pause for a word from a sponsor. One
of Edmonia Lewis's largest sculptures, and somebody even argue her
most important, was a piece titled A Death of Cleopatra,
(17:01):
which weighed a whopping two tons, and it depicts the
Egyptian queen in the moments after her suicide, still seated
on her throne. And while it was not uncommon for
artists to represent Cleopatra in the moments before her death,
Lewis's realistic representation of the actual death was actually considered
somewhat distasteful by some critics. But in eighteen seventy six,
(17:24):
soon after its completion, The Death of Cleopatra was shown
at the Philadelphia Exposition to a great critical reception. It
was shown again in eighteen seventy eight in Chicago. At
the Expo. It was one of five dred sculptures on display,
but it really stood out. It was called quote the
most remarkable piece of sculpture in the American section by J. S.
Ingram and his books. His book about the Expo's Art
(17:46):
Offerings Centennial Exposition described and illustrated artist William J. Clark Jr.
Wrote of the Cleopatra statue in eight seventy eight, quote,
this was not a beautiful work, but it was a
very original and very striking one. Cleopatra is seated in
a chair, the poison of the asp has done its work,
and the queen is dead. The effects of death are
(18:09):
represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellent. And
it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly
characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of
legitimate art. Unfortunately, when Edmonia returned to Rome, the Death
of Cleopatra had to stay behind in the United States
because while she hadn't sold it, she also couldn't afford
(18:29):
the return shipping costs this enormous work of art. We
have talked before about how it can be quite difficult
to move large sculptures across an ocean. Uh And it
went into storage and after Edmonia left it in the US,
this piece had an interesting life. It first reappeared as
a piece of decor in a Chicago saloon on Clark
(18:51):
Street in and then at some point it ended up
in the possession of a gambler named Blind John Condon,
who installed them horrible piece at a race track in
Forest Park, Illinois. The massive work sat on top of
a horse's grave. The horse had been named Cleopatra, and
when the land there was purchased by the U. S.
Navy to become military housing, the statue remained kind of place.
(19:15):
A covenant in the properties deed that step that stipulated
that the horse's grave and its impressive, impressive statue had
to stay there undisturbed. When the property was later purchased
by the Edmere Construction Company to build a new shopping mall,
the statue finally moved. They did not care about that
covenant apparently, but this time the statue just sat in
a workyard and was more or less forgotten. Some years later,
(19:37):
a sister of fire chief named Harold Adams was inspecting
the property and saw this Cleopatric statue. He was taken
with its beauty and wanted to help make sure it
wasn't completely lost the time, so first you moved at
the higher ground in the yard. He also wanted to
try to clean up the sculpture because there was graffiti
on it, so his son's Scout Troupe painted over this
(19:59):
graffiti with why latex paint. Adams later told the Chicago
Tribune that they did so quote so she'd look decent
until somebody came along he would know better what to
do for her. And over the course of a decade,
Adams really did try to kind of find a way
to get this statue into a more proper setting. He
placed notices in the paper, and sometimes the paper would
(20:20):
cover his work as like a special interest story, and
he did this hoping someone would know about its past
and come forward to help. And eventually a few people
did start to share information about the sculptures time as
a grave marker, and this got the attention of the
Forest Park Historical Society. The historical group took possession of
the statue in the nineteen eighties and they moved her
(20:42):
to a shopping mall storage area, and then in the
president of the Historical Society, a dentist named Frank Orland,
reached out to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art
for any possible information about the artist because her name
was carved in the back of the sculpture. The museum
m connected with Marilyn Richardson, who had been researching and
(21:03):
Monia Lewis and gave the historian Orleans phone number. Initially,
Orland didn't return her calls, Sir Richardson flew to Chicago
to find him. He allowed her to see the statue
still in the Forest Park Mall storeroom, right along with
all the seasonal decorations, and initially it seemed like there
was some tension between them. While the Forest Park Historical
(21:23):
Society felt that the marble piece was part of their history,
Richardson worked to convince Orland and his colleagues of the
statute's import in the larger context of American art history. Yeah,
it's kind of funny. There's one article that will be
in the show notes that was one of my sources,
where it is a contemporary article from when this discovery
had really come to light and they were trying to
(21:45):
figure out what was going to happen with it, and
the quotes from each of them are like these very stilted.
I don't want to do what they want to do,
Like he very clearly doesn't want somebody coming in and
telling the Historical Society to do with They're fine, And
she is very concerned that they don't appreciate what this
piece of art is. It's quite quite uh. Yeah, it's
(22:09):
very carefully worded, but you can tell there is tension
going on. But eventually the Art Institute of Chicago and
the Smithsonian Museum came into the picture. George Gurney, the
American Art Museum sculpture expert, advocated on behalf of the
Smithsonian to assure Orland that the museum really would be
the best home for Lewis's historically significant work, and the
(22:29):
Smithsonian was finally allowed to take possession of the piece
and it was restored for display at the Smithsonian American
Art Museum's Loose Foundation Center, where it remains. This restoration
was intensive and it cost thirty thousand dollars. There's only
one existing photograph of the work and its original condition
to work from, and several pieces of the sculpture had
(22:50):
broken off. Several fingers on Cleopatra's right hand had to
be replaced, as well as the asp that claimed her
life and the sandals on her feet. Restoration work was
carried out with extreme care and a manner that can
be reversed and edited should better source material come about
about what the sculpture looks like in its original state,
(23:13):
and and now it still sits in the Smithsonian's collection,
which I love. Uh. It's a really beautiful and it
is very striking sculpture. Uh. And today Oberlin College, where
Ammonia went to school, is actually home to the Edmonia
Lewis Center for Women and Transgender People. The center is,
according to its website quote, a collection of students, staff,
(23:33):
and administrators who strive to transform existing systems of oppression
based on sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, age ability, size, religion, nationality, ethnicity,
and language. Lewis's own sexual orientation remains kind of nebulous,
similarly to her early and last years of her life.
She was rumored during her life to have had romantic
(23:56):
relationship with the women, but these claims really are really
very difficult to substantiate. One way or the other. Accounts
of her life will sometimes suggest that this whole poisoning
incident that she was accused of in college was actually
an instance of her attempting to use authorities which is
Spanish fly and the hopes of catalyzing a sexual encounter
(24:16):
with her roommates and her close knit group of female
friends in Italy is similarly hinted at as being sexual
in nature, but while she never married or seemed to
have any publicly known relationships of any kind, and she's
sometimes dressed in men's clothing, she never identified on the
record in any particular way. Yeah, so it's one of
those cases where I know she is often Uh, she
(24:39):
does often show up in like lgbt lgbt Q histories
um as as an artist that they would claim as
their own, which is great that she's getting exposure, but
she never you know, we usually don't like to assign
any sort of sexual identity to someone after they are
no longer with us to speak for themselves. Right. Well,
(25:01):
we've we've we've had some like episodes and listener mails
before we've talked about how like it's really important to
talk about the broad spectrum of human relationships and history
and identities and how people have lived their lives. But
at the same time, like it's I think really important
to both of us not to just assign people identities. Yeah,
(25:23):
I don't want to assume anything. I mean, it's there
could be any number of of points on the spectrum
where she was uh, and since she was not willing
to give up that information. The rest is conjecture, so
certainly possible, but I would not claim anything is fact
because we just don't know. And that is aid Monia
(25:46):
Lewis who She's one of those those people that I
had in the back of my mind for a long
time but never actually put her on a list, and
I don't know why. And then I was doing research
for another thing and it stumbled across her and I
had that moment of why have we not done her?
On the podcast, well, I had the opposite, like, even
even though uh, I don't consider myself to be like
(26:09):
completely ignorant about art, it was not a name I
really recognized. And then I googled her and went, oh,
this seems awesome. Yeah, And it is one of those
things that makes you, It makes me anyway, think about
kind of how easily people are lost to the passage
of time. Because she was very famous in the eighteen sixties,
(26:32):
eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, so for her to be
a name that people don't always know now, it's a
very interesting transition to have happened. And the sculptures, there's
there are photos of a lot of her sculptures online
and they are beautiful. Yeah there. I mean her marble
work is just so striking. Like I said, that expression
on Cupid gets me every time. Uh it says mix chuckle,
(26:54):
it's very fun. I like that he looks really your
tat if you also have some less nor mail I'm do.
This one is reaching back a little bit to our
pre uh era, to my discussion with Jerry Hancock about
this the building that we work in in Sears history,
(27:15):
and it is from our listener Laura, and it's sort
of a wonderful uh tale of of how the Sears
catalog impacted her as a child. She says, Dear Holly
and Tracy, I absolutely love your podcast listening as weaned
me from my habit of listening to the news in
the morning while getting ready for work, and it's taught
me some interesting facts and puts me in a much
better mood than the news often left me in. I
(27:36):
listened to your interview with Jerry Hancock about the history
of the of Sears and the building it occupied in Atlanta. First,
let me say thank you to Mr Hancock and all
of the enthusiastic teachers who devote their careers to inspiring
our children to love learning you know, I second that
I have so much gratitude and respect for teachers like him.
And you discussed how beloved the Sears Catalog was to
(27:57):
children as a wish list, I wanted to mention how
I also used to actually play with the Sears Catalog
when I was a child. My friends and I would
make up all sorts of imaginative scenarios in which I
and whoever was playing could close their eyes, open a
page and point to something on the page. And sometimes
we would make it a price's Right game in which
the other would hide the price of the item we
(28:18):
pointed to and read the description, and then the chooser
would guess the price, and we would do this a
few times, keeping up with the difference in how close
our guesses were to the actual price, and the player
who had the best guess would, in our imagination, get
to choose one of the items that were chosen to
keep in retrospect. We were learning math skills and probably
some shopping skills as well. It didn't even matter that
(28:41):
we were not actually getting the prizes, because imagining it
was just as fun. It kind of cracks me up
to think about how different my own children's play was
and is their fourteen, eighteen and twenty six. With all
of the media and technology that's become part of modern life.
I'm not claiming it's better or worse, just different. I
don't have any great suggestions for future podcast because I've
never been much a history buff until the last couple
(29:01):
of years. Thank you for igniting my inner history buff
that I didn't know existed, Laura, Laura, thank you so much.
That's a lovely thing to think about that it was
actually teaching kind of some consumer skills and mathematics. Yeah,
I never would have thought about that, but I'm sure.
I mean, lots of play that children engage in is
actually doing that, whether we're conscious of it or not.
(29:23):
But I like that it was the Sears Catalog, which
is still beloved to me even though it doesn't exist
and it's uh previous form. So if you would like
to write to us and share your stories of how
you learned math through shopping, through catalog or anything else,
you can do so at History Podcast at housetu works
dot com. You can also find us across the broad
(29:44):
spectrum of social media as missed in History. That's on
Twitter at mist in History, Facebook, dot com, slash missed
in History, missed in History dot tumbler dot com, Pinterest
dot com, slash mist in history, and on Instagram as
at mist in History. And we also have a website
you want to guess what it is, it's missed in
History dot com. There you can find show notes for
(30:05):
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Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today's
subject is a little bit of art history. It's not
a little bit, it's quite a bit of art history.
(00:21):
But also it ties into abolitionist history. It's also an
interesting study of identity and like public presentation, UH, and
it also touches on a particularly long and circuitous path
that a specific piece of art can sometimes go on
before finding its way to the safety of a museum collection.
So we're talking today about UH sculptor Edmonia Lewis. Typically,
(00:46):
when we're talking about a person as the subject of
a podcast, we start with the early life, with their
birth and what we know about their parents. And this
is one of those cases where it's tricky to do
that because Edmonia spoke very little about her childhood it
and even gave some varying and inconsistent information about her
childhood throughout her life. Yeah, this is one of those
(01:07):
cases where the subject kind of blurred the picture a
little bit themselves, and we'll talk about why she might
have done that later on in the episode, but estimates
put her birth most likely sometime in eighteen forty three
eighteen eighteen forty five UH in upstate New York or
possibly Ohio. I've also seen it suggested that it could
(01:29):
even have been New Jersey uh And. She was born
as Mary ed Monia Lewis and her father was from
the Caribbean and her mother was part of Jibway and
after her parents died when she was still very young
she was possibly not even five years old at the time,
it was her mother's family that raised her. The tribe
that her mother had been part of was nomadic, and Lewis,
(01:51):
who went by the name Wildfire when she was among
her Native American ken, lived that life until the age
of twelve. She also had an older brother named sam Rule,
who was also known as Sunrise, and her brother was
more than a decade older than she was. In the
eighteen forties, he left his relatives in the eastern United
States to pursue gold mining in California, who's reasonably successful
(02:13):
at it, and it was because of her brother's success
that Wildfire left the nomadic life of her tribal family
to attend school. Samuel actually paid for her to attend
a school in New York, and eventually, in eighteen fifty nine,
Edmonia enrolled at the Young Ladies Preparatory department of Oberlin
College in Oberlin, Ohio, and this was also paid for
(02:35):
by her older brother. And it was during this time
that she dropped using the name Wildfire completely and switched
entirely to Edmonia. She also kind of abandoned her first
name Mary. This is a significant point in her life
as the abolitionist movement was very active at Oberlin and
it really impacted her as a young student. But two
(02:56):
other important things also happened to Edmonia during her colloge education,
both good and bad. One was that she developed into
a skilled sketch artist, and the other is that she
was accused of poisoning two other young women at the
college who were her roommates with Spanish Fly. According to
her accusers, Edmonia served the two of them mulled wine
(03:20):
before they went out for a sleigh ride with two
young men, and while the young women were out on
their date, both of them became violently ill. This accusation
caused an immediate rift in the culture of Oberlin. The
school was dedicated to progressive causes and social justice, and
prided itself on admitting African Americans and women since the
(03:42):
eighteen thirties. The two girls ed Monia had allegedly poisoned
were white, and a white vigilante mob forms to punish Louis,
they seized her and beat her, and then left her
for debt in a field. When she appeared in court
weeks later, she had a shattered collar bone and needed
crutches to walk. Her attackers were never brought to justice.
(04:03):
Edmonious lawyer John Mercer Langston, who went on to great
fame himself, had argued that her roommates stomach contents were
never tested for poison, so that the entire accusation was
really hearsay and she was acquitted, But it was not
the end of her troubles at the school. Her reputation
was really deeply damaged by scandal. Uh there I read
(04:24):
some accounts that suggested that basically she couldn't walk anywhere
without people whispering about her, which I can only imagine
had to be terribly demoralizing. And she was later accused
of stealing art materials, and she wasn't allowed to register
for her final term or graduate as a consequence, and
those charges were dropped again for lack of evidence, but
she still was not allowed to complete her degree. This
(04:46):
really reminds me of our episode on Molly Spotted Elk, Yeah,
the performer, and how when she was working at a
camp where the girls she was working with really loved her,
but and then she had all of these accu zations
as the only Indigenous person working at the camp that
seemed like, we're probably false and made against her, not
(05:08):
for any real evidence. It's very very parallel. So through
the financial assistance of her brother once more, she moved
to Boston, Massachusetts, and while Oberlin had exposed her to
her art potential and to the abolitionist movement, Boston really
built on that exposure with a lot of new connections.
She met abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison and the
(05:29):
two became close friends. She also met sculptor Edward A.
Brackett via an introduction that Garrison made between the two
of them. Yeah, So, just as a little bit of
context on those two men. William Lloyd Garrison was the
publisher of the Liberator, which was an anti slavery paper
that ran from eighteen thirty one until the end of
the Civil War in eighteen sixty five. And Edward Augustus Brackett,
(05:52):
who he had introduced in Monia too, was a self
taught sculptor, very well known for busts and dramatic concepts,
including uh a marble piece that he carved depicting a
drowned woman and her baby. He also served in the
Civil War, but then in the eighteen seventies he left
behind his career in art to head up the Massachusetts
Fish and Game Commission. So also very fascinating men in
(06:15):
and of themselves that could be podcast subjects in the future.
Through her friendship with Brackett and Monia began to sculpt.
He served as a teacher and a mentor to her.
In this new medium. She started creating clay and plaster
medallions representing abolitionist leaders including William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner,
Wendell Phillips, and John Brown, and she earned both acclaim
(06:37):
and some commercial benefit for her work in the early
eighteen sixties. Yes, she is one of those cases where
she really was able to make a living for herself
with her art, and her rapid rise to fame came
from a piece that she did in eighteen sixty four,
which was a bust of Colonel Robert Shaw. So the colonel,
in case you did not recognize that name, was the
white Union soldier who led the fifty fourth Massachusetts that
(07:00):
was the first all black regiment in the Northeast and
one of the first all black regiments in the war.
He also led a wage boycott to protest the lesser
pay that black soldiers received compared to white soldiers. Uh
and Shaw died in battle at Fort Wagner in July
of eighteen sixty three, and so he kind of had
this very heroic image. So this bust was incredibly popular.
(07:24):
Lewis made so much money selling copies of it that
she was able to pay her way to travel to Europe.
She toured multiple cities, including London, Paris, and Florence, but
though it seemed briefly that Florence would be her new
home in Europe, she wound up settling in Rome, and
in eighteen sixty five she rented a studio there adjacent
to the Piazza Barberini. And Rome was a fairly natural
(07:48):
choice at the time. It was a haven for a
number of artists ex pats Uh, and it was a
particularly attractive location for sculptors to set up studios because
of the ready availability of white marble. Additionally, there was
an abundance of skilled stone cutters in Rome who could
take an artist plaster or wax model and copy that
work into marble. And as a sculptor studying the neo
(08:11):
classical style that was popular among the city's other sculptors
at the time, they really expanded and refined Louis's skills.
But though she had access to skilled laborers to assist
in her work, she really didn't engage many. There are
a couple of theories as to why she opted to
go the more difficult route in creating marble pieces. For one,
(08:32):
she didn't have a lot of extra money to pay
for other people's work. But for another, she was concerned
about debate about the purity of a work that had
been copied onto marble by other workers who weren't the artist.
One of her friends had already faced criticism that her
work was really the artistry of Rome's workmen rather than
her own artistic work. And in Monia really quickly picked
(08:54):
up Italian and she settled into Roman culture. And she
also made some very close friends, one of which we
just mentioned were both American women who were also living
in the city. One was sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who was
the person that had faced that criticism that her work
was not her own, and the other was actress Charlotte Cushman.
And the three women were part of a larger group
of women artists in Italy at the time that Henry
(09:17):
James once described as quote that strange sisterhood of American
lady sculptors who at one time settled upon the Seven
Hills of Rome in a white Marmorian flock. We'll talk
about some of the work that Edmonia Lewis created while
living in Rome next, but before we do, we will pause.
We're a word from one of our sponsors. As Lewis
(09:43):
continued to create in her new home in Europe, her
art reflected themes of her deeply held religious beliefs, as
well as references to the lives of African Americans, though
it was certainly not confined exclusively to those subjects. This
was a period of great productivity for Lewis, although unfortunate
only many of her works have not survived and they
are lost forever but after she had moved to Rome,
(10:05):
she also traveled back and forth to the United States
pretty frequently to showcase and sell her original works as
well as plaster copies. One of the interesting pieces she
created during this time was a copy of Michelangelo's Moses.
She made this and other copies of classical sculptures in
order to study them and improve her technique. Yeah. This,
I may be completely naive. This sort of blows my
(10:28):
mind because her copy is quite good, and I I
just to me, it seems amazing that people could just
make copies of such a beautiful piece and and do
it in uh, you know, pretty good style. Uh So.
In eighteen sixty six, she also began a series of
sculptures featuring Native Americans that were inspired by the Longfellow
poem The Song of Hiawatha. She created a sculpture titled
(10:52):
the Old Arrowmaker first, and you'll also see this work
listed with variations in the title such as the Old
Indian Arrowmaker and his Daughter or simply Arrowmaker. And this
piece features a Native American man and his daughter as
he teaches her how to make arrows. And that piece
is currently in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
On May twenty one, two thousand nine, another sculpture in
(11:14):
the Hiawatha series, The Marriage of Hiawatha, sold at auction
for three hundred and fourteen thousand, five hundred dollars. Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow visited her studio in Rome to sit for
a bust, and it's likely that he saw some of
these sculptures that his works had inspired. He was among many,
many people who flocked to Edmonia's studio. She became a
(11:35):
very popular figure in the art world in the second
half of the nineteenth century, with a really devoted fan
base and and many prominent people visited her to have
their likenesses sculpted. Yeah, it's definitely one of those things
that it's sort of hard, I think, I know for
me when doing the research to really it took me
a while to realize, like, oh, she was famous. Like
(11:59):
you tend to think of art kind of doing a
artist doing their thing on their own in their studios
and they sell works that go out. But people really did,
like sort of have this cult of celebrity around her,
which to me is sort of fascinating. So she also
created an anti slavery piece in eighteen sixty seven, which
is titled Forever Free, and it shows a man and
(12:19):
woman breaking free of their bonds, and that particular sculpture
is now part of the collection of Howard University Gallery
of Art in Washington, d c. She did several chair
and pieces in a series, including Awake, Asleep and Poor Cupid.
Awake and Asleep both feature would appear to be the
same to cherubic infants, and they are very similar except
(12:40):
for the fact that they're awake or asleep. Poor Cupid
is a depiction of the cherub reaching for a rose
in the ground, but his hand has been ensnared in
a trap. The expression on cupid space is not a
pained grimace, but he looks more like petulantly irritated. Awake
and asleep or both in the San Jose Library and
(13:01):
Poor Cupid is in the Smithsonian's collection. I seriously love
the expression on Cupid's face in that one, like he
just looks so bothered. It's a really really lovely capture
of emotion. Uh and funny. Edmonia Lewis continued to create
busts as well. Those were really like a pretty standard
(13:23):
way to keep money flowing in, and she made several
of them of prominent public figures, including President Abraham Lincoln
and General Ulysses S. Grant. The end of Edmonia Lewis's
life story is a lot like it's beginning. It's kind
of hazy. It was long believed that she had lived
out the remainder of her years in Italy, but in
fact she died in London, England in seven This is
(13:46):
pretty new information. It was unearthed by historian Maryland Richardson
through diligent efforts at tracking down her grave and records
of her final years. For a long time, her year
of death was completely inconsistent and source material, and her
place of death was pretty much assumed to be Rome. Yeah.
Marilyn Richardson has done a lot of work, uh, studying
(14:09):
in Monia Lewis's life and has just a broad, broad
scope of revelatory information. Uh. And as the eighteen hundreds ended,
the neo classical style that Lewis had been so skilled
in was falling out of favor, and Rome had really
been surpassed by Paris as the vogue city for artists.
(14:29):
So we know that by nineteen o one, according to
census records, Lewis had moved to London already she died,
it turned out of kidney disease. Church records indicate that
Lewis was laid to rest in London St Mary's Roman
Catholic Cemetery for a fee of five pounds fifty two
pence according to her final wishes. Her death was announced
(14:50):
only in a British Roman Catholic bulletin called Tablet, and
that posting made no mention of her art career. Her
will listed Lewis as a sculptor and spenced and one
of the more fascinating aspects of Lewis as a historical
figure is her legacy as a Native American slash African
American sculptor. It's one of those things where if you
(15:10):
just look up her name, that's kind of like the
very brief blurb you'll see, like America's first prominent Native
American African American sculptor, but like her nebulous origin story,
there's actually a great deal about her that's unclear, and
this identity becomes very interesting and shifts a little bit,
and it seems, at least in part to be due
(15:31):
to a degree of shrewdness on her part. She was
pretty comfortable allowing press coverage of her work during her
life to characterize her based largely on that Native American
or African American heritage, but ignoring the fact that she
was well educated and really quite worldly. In an interview
with The Toast, in historian Marilyn Richardson said of Edmonia
(15:53):
Lewis quote, she worked both sides of the street, depending
on her audience and her patrons. She emphasized her blackness
or her her Native American origins. She was very savvy
about how to keep her identity and play, and this
portrayal of her in the press at the time as
something of a novelty of under kinnd may have helped
elevate her visibility as an artist. So that was no
(16:16):
small feat for a woman of color in the eighteen hundreds.
And additionally, press coverage at the time that spoke of
her as this sort of mysterious, exotic, almost childlike creature
who had suddenly appeared on the European art scene meant
that her previous scandals at school could pretty much go unmentioned.
It was like she had divorced herself from that life
and was creating this new identity for her public persona.
(16:39):
Next up, we'll talk about one of Lewis's most important works,
which has its own unique history. But first we'll have
another quick pause for a word from a sponsor. One
of Edmonia Lewis's largest sculptures, and somebody even argue her
most important, was a piece titled A Death of Cleopatra,
(17:01):
which weighed a whopping two tons, and it depicts the
Egyptian queen in the moments after her suicide, still seated
on her throne. And while it was not uncommon for
artists to represent Cleopatra in the moments before her death,
Lewis's realistic representation of the actual death was actually considered
somewhat distasteful by some critics. But in eighteen seventy six,
(17:24):
soon after its completion, The Death of Cleopatra was shown
at the Philadelphia Exposition to a great critical reception. It
was shown again in eighteen seventy eight in Chicago. At
the Expo. It was one of five dred sculptures on display,
but it really stood out. It was called quote the
most remarkable piece of sculpture in the American section by J. S.
Ingram and his books. His book about the Expo's Art
(17:46):
Offerings Centennial Exposition described and illustrated artist William J. Clark Jr.
Wrote of the Cleopatra statue in eight seventy eight, quote,
this was not a beautiful work, but it was a
very original and very striking one. Cleopatra is seated in
a chair, the poison of the asp has done its work,
and the queen is dead. The effects of death are
(18:09):
represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellent. And
it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly
characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of
legitimate art. Unfortunately, when Edmonia returned to Rome, the Death
of Cleopatra had to stay behind in the United States
because while she hadn't sold it, she also couldn't afford
(18:29):
the return shipping costs this enormous work of art. We
have talked before about how it can be quite difficult
to move large sculptures across an ocean. Uh And it
went into storage and after Edmonia left it in the US,
this piece had an interesting life. It first reappeared as
a piece of decor in a Chicago saloon on Clark
(18:51):
Street in and then at some point it ended up
in the possession of a gambler named Blind John Condon,
who installed them horrible piece at a race track in
Forest Park, Illinois. The massive work sat on top of
a horse's grave. The horse had been named Cleopatra, and
when the land there was purchased by the U. S.
Navy to become military housing, the statue remained kind of place.
(19:15):
A covenant in the properties deed that step that stipulated
that the horse's grave and its impressive, impressive statue had
to stay there undisturbed. When the property was later purchased
by the Edmere Construction Company to build a new shopping mall,
the statue finally moved. They did not care about that
covenant apparently, but this time the statue just sat in
a workyard and was more or less forgotten. Some years later,
(19:37):
a sister of fire chief named Harold Adams was inspecting
the property and saw this Cleopatric statue. He was taken
with its beauty and wanted to help make sure it
wasn't completely lost the time, so first you moved at
the higher ground in the yard. He also wanted to
try to clean up the sculpture because there was graffiti
on it, so his son's Scout Troupe painted over this
(19:59):
graffiti with why latex paint. Adams later told the Chicago
Tribune that they did so quote so she'd look decent
until somebody came along he would know better what to
do for her. And over the course of a decade,
Adams really did try to kind of find a way
to get this statue into a more proper setting. He
placed notices in the paper, and sometimes the paper would
(20:20):
cover his work as like a special interest story, and
he did this hoping someone would know about its past
and come forward to help. And eventually a few people
did start to share information about the sculptures time as
a grave marker, and this got the attention of the
Forest Park Historical Society. The historical group took possession of
the statue in the nineteen eighties and they moved her
(20:42):
to a shopping mall storage area, and then in the
president of the Historical Society, a dentist named Frank Orland,
reached out to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art
for any possible information about the artist because her name
was carved in the back of the sculpture. The museum
m connected with Marilyn Richardson, who had been researching and
(21:03):
Monia Lewis and gave the historian Orleans phone number. Initially,
Orland didn't return her calls, Sir Richardson flew to Chicago
to find him. He allowed her to see the statue
still in the Forest Park Mall storeroom, right along with
all the seasonal decorations, and initially it seemed like there
was some tension between them. While the Forest Park Historical
(21:23):
Society felt that the marble piece was part of their history,
Richardson worked to convince Orland and his colleagues of the
statute's import in the larger context of American art history. Yeah,
it's kind of funny. There's one article that will be
in the show notes that was one of my sources,
where it is a contemporary article from when this discovery
had really come to light and they were trying to
(21:45):
figure out what was going to happen with it, and
the quotes from each of them are like these very stilted.
I don't want to do what they want to do,
Like he very clearly doesn't want somebody coming in and
telling the Historical Society to do with They're fine, And
she is very concerned that they don't appreciate what this
piece of art is. It's quite quite uh. Yeah, it's
(22:09):
very carefully worded, but you can tell there is tension
going on. But eventually the Art Institute of Chicago and
the Smithsonian Museum came into the picture. George Gurney, the
American Art Museum sculpture expert, advocated on behalf of the
Smithsonian to assure Orland that the museum really would be
the best home for Lewis's historically significant work, and the
(22:29):
Smithsonian was finally allowed to take possession of the piece
and it was restored for display at the Smithsonian American
Art Museum's Loose Foundation Center, where it remains. This restoration
was intensive and it cost thirty thousand dollars. There's only
one existing photograph of the work and its original condition
to work from, and several pieces of the sculpture had
(22:50):
broken off. Several fingers on Cleopatra's right hand had to
be replaced, as well as the asp that claimed her
life and the sandals on her feet. Restoration work was
carried out with extreme care and a manner that can
be reversed and edited should better source material come about
about what the sculpture looks like in its original state,
(23:13):
and and now it still sits in the Smithsonian's collection,
which I love. Uh. It's a really beautiful and it
is very striking sculpture. Uh. And today Oberlin College, where
Ammonia went to school, is actually home to the Edmonia
Lewis Center for Women and Transgender People. The center is,
according to its website quote, a collection of students, staff,
(23:33):
and administrators who strive to transform existing systems of oppression
based on sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, age ability, size, religion, nationality, ethnicity,
and language. Lewis's own sexual orientation remains kind of nebulous,
similarly to her early and last years of her life.
She was rumored during her life to have had romantic
(23:56):
relationship with the women, but these claims really are really
very difficult to substantiate. One way or the other. Accounts
of her life will sometimes suggest that this whole poisoning
incident that she was accused of in college was actually
an instance of her attempting to use authorities which is
Spanish fly and the hopes of catalyzing a sexual encounter
(24:16):
with her roommates and her close knit group of female
friends in Italy is similarly hinted at as being sexual
in nature, but while she never married or seemed to
have any publicly known relationships of any kind, and she's
sometimes dressed in men's clothing, she never identified on the
record in any particular way. Yeah, so it's one of
those cases where I know she is often Uh, she
(24:39):
does often show up in like lgbt lgbt Q histories
um as as an artist that they would claim as
their own, which is great that she's getting exposure, but
she never you know, we usually don't like to assign
any sort of sexual identity to someone after they are
no longer with us to speak for themselves. Right. Well,
(25:01):
we've we've we've had some like episodes and listener mails
before we've talked about how like it's really important to
talk about the broad spectrum of human relationships and history
and identities and how people have lived their lives. But
at the same time, like it's I think really important
to both of us not to just assign people identities. Yeah,
(25:23):
I don't want to assume anything. I mean, it's there
could be any number of of points on the spectrum
where she was uh, and since she was not willing
to give up that information. The rest is conjecture, so
certainly possible, but I would not claim anything is fact
because we just don't know. And that is aid Monia
(25:46):
Lewis who She's one of those those people that I
had in the back of my mind for a long
time but never actually put her on a list, and
I don't know why. And then I was doing research
for another thing and it stumbled across her and I
had that moment of why have we not done her?
On the podcast, well, I had the opposite, like, even
even though uh, I don't consider myself to be like
(26:09):
completely ignorant about art, it was not a name I
really recognized. And then I googled her and went, oh,
this seems awesome. Yeah, And it is one of those
things that makes you, It makes me anyway, think about
kind of how easily people are lost to the passage
of time. Because she was very famous in the eighteen sixties,
(26:32):
eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, so for her to be
a name that people don't always know now, it's a
very interesting transition to have happened. And the sculptures, there's
there are photos of a lot of her sculptures online
and they are beautiful. Yeah there. I mean her marble
work is just so striking. Like I said, that expression
on Cupid gets me every time. Uh it says mix chuckle,
(26:54):
it's very fun. I like that he looks really your
tat if you also have some less nor mail I'm do.
This one is reaching back a little bit to our
pre uh era, to my discussion with Jerry Hancock about
this the building that we work in in Sears history,
(27:15):
and it is from our listener Laura, and it's sort
of a wonderful uh tale of of how the Sears
catalog impacted her as a child. She says, Dear Holly
and Tracy, I absolutely love your podcast listening as weaned
me from my habit of listening to the news in
the morning while getting ready for work, and it's taught
me some interesting facts and puts me in a much
better mood than the news often left me in. I
(27:36):
listened to your interview with Jerry Hancock about the history
of the of Sears and the building it occupied in Atlanta. First,
let me say thank you to Mr Hancock and all
of the enthusiastic teachers who devote their careers to inspiring
our children to love learning you know, I second that
I have so much gratitude and respect for teachers like him.
And you discussed how beloved the Sears Catalog was to
(27:57):
children as a wish list, I wanted to mention how
I also used to actually play with the Sears Catalog
when I was a child. My friends and I would
make up all sorts of imaginative scenarios in which I
and whoever was playing could close their eyes, open a
page and point to something on the page. And sometimes
we would make it a price's Right game in which
the other would hide the price of the item we
(28:18):
pointed to and read the description, and then the chooser
would guess the price, and we would do this a
few times, keeping up with the difference in how close
our guesses were to the actual price, and the player
who had the best guess would, in our imagination, get
to choose one of the items that were chosen to
keep in retrospect. We were learning math skills and probably
some shopping skills as well. It didn't even matter that
(28:41):
we were not actually getting the prizes, because imagining it
was just as fun. It kind of cracks me up
to think about how different my own children's play was
and is their fourteen, eighteen and twenty six. With all
of the media and technology that's become part of modern life.
I'm not claiming it's better or worse, just different. I
don't have any great suggestions for future podcast because I've
never been much a history buff until the last couple
(29:01):
of years. Thank you for igniting my inner history buff
that I didn't know existed, Laura, Laura, thank you so much.
That's a lovely thing to think about that it was
actually teaching kind of some consumer skills and mathematics. Yeah,
I never would have thought about that, but I'm sure.
I mean, lots of play that children engage in is
actually doing that, whether we're conscious of it or not.
(29:23):
But I like that it was the Sears Catalog, which
is still beloved to me even though it doesn't exist
and it's uh previous form. So if you would like
to write to us and share your stories of how
you learned math through shopping, through catalog or anything else,
you can do so at History Podcast at housetu works
dot com. You can also find us across the broad
(29:44):
spectrum of social media as missed in History. That's on
Twitter at mist in History, Facebook, dot com, slash missed
in History, missed in History dot tumbler dot com, Pinterest
dot com, slash mist in history, and on Instagram as
at mist in History. And we also have a website
you want to guess what it is, it's missed in
History dot com. There you can find show notes for
(30:05):
every episode that Tracy and I have worked on together,
as well as a complete archive of every episode of
the show ever of all time. And you can also
visit our parents site, how stuff Works if you would
like to go there hows to works dot com. Type
did something in the search bar about art, You're probably
going to get a lot of interesting articles back that
will keep you occupied and entertained and informed for quite
(30:26):
some time. So do indeed visit us at miss in
history dot com and how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics because it
how stuff works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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