September 18, 2017 • 33 mins
Emin Pasha's story connects to so many other historical things, particularly in the context of both the Ottoman Empire and African history. First, we'll talk about his time in Albania and how he made his way to Africa and took a new name.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Before we get started today, we want to
make sure everyone knows about our upcoming live shows. First up,
Holly will be at Salt Lake Comic Con September one, three.
I won't be able to make it to that one,
so past guest and friend of the show, Brian Young
will be talking with her about laun Cheney. Then on
(00:23):
October six am, we will be appearing as part of
New York Comic Con Presents and we'll be talking about
the first comic book. You can find out more information
on all of this ticket links everything like that if
you go to missed in History dot com and click
the link that says live shows. Welcome to steph you
(00:45):
missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Fine. Earlier this year, I went to
the World History Association's annual conference here in Boston. It
(01:06):
was an awesome time. I also picked up a lot
of ideas for potential podcast topics or got my memory
jog about ones I already wanted to do previously. So
the conference reminded me that I had wanted to talk
about Ibn Batuta so that's why we finally got our
Ibn Batuta episode not long ago. It also planted the
seed for this week's episode, so along with of course
(01:29):
more that will probably come at some point in the future.
One of the presentations I saw was about a mean
pasha who's rescue in the finger quotes whether it was
really a rescue or not, it's kind of questionable. Rescue
from Uganda by Henry Morton Stanley became this incredibly popular
story in the nineteenth century. Today people are probably more
(01:52):
familiar with Stanley's expedition to find Dr David Livingstone, which
is about fifteen years earlier. But this meeting between any
and Iman Pasha and just Eman Pasha himself wound up
being the subjects of articles and stories and books and
then being on like all these consumer products, from matches
to bullion to chocolate, just an array of things got
(02:15):
labeled and branded I Mean Pasha. In addition to all that,
though I Mean Pasha story connects to so many things
in history that we have not spent a lot of
time on, particularly in the context of both the Ottoman
Empire and African history. He's one of those people who
kept finding himself in the midst of one huge event
after another. So we are going to talk about his
(02:37):
story in two parts. And today we've got his early
years and his time in Albania and how he made
his way to Africa, taking a new name in the process,
and the next time we will get to how he
wound up meeting or maybe not really needing to be
rescued by Henry Stanley. And just as one note before
(02:57):
we start, Pasha is an horrific title and it indicated
a high rank in the Ottoman Empire's military and political system,
and it is the last and highest of several that
he actually held during his lifetime. But I mean, Pasha
is really how everyone knew of him by the end
of his life. It's how he's most often sided sided historically.
(03:19):
So at some points we will probably wind up saying
Emin Pasha, when at that point he had a different
title than Pasha. Mehmed Emin Pasha was born Edward Schnitzer
on March eighteen forty and what's now Opola in southwestern Poland.
At the time it was up Elm Silesia, which was
(03:40):
part of the Kingdom of Prussia. His father, Ludwig, was
a merchant and although the family were German Jews, they
were under enormous pressure to assimilate with their Christian neighbors.
When the young Edward was two, they moved the family
to nissa Uh, that's near what's now the border between
Poland and Germany. And then when he was five, his
(04:00):
father died, his mother, Pauline, remarried a Lutheran man, and
then after Pauline's marriage, the family officially converted. When Edward
was baptized, his name was recorded as Edward carl Oscar
Theodore Schnitzer. He also had a sister named Melanie and
several other half siblings, not quite sure how many. They're
not typically named in his biographies. They're just sort of
(04:23):
mentioned as existing a group of siblings on mass We
don't have too much detail about his childhood or his education,
but we do know that he eventually studied medicine, zoology
and ornithology at the universities of Breslau, Berlin and Konigsberg.
He did quite well in university, and he was praised
as a diligent and industrious student, and he also started
(04:46):
publishing his research in journals before he graduated. Although he
really loved the comforts of home, and he was devoted
to his family. He was also more at ease in
intellectual pursuits than in social life at Cool. His family
also didn't have a lot of money, and he found
that some of his friends did not have quite enough
time for him when he was short on funds. So
(05:09):
over his university years he became somewhat isolated. He spent
more time with books than he spent with people, and
at the same time, he was very careful and particular
in his address and appearance, and when he did have money,
that was what he usually spent it on, and that
comes up over and over and over in other people's
accounts of him throughout his life. I can't judge. I
(05:31):
completely understand. Uh. Edvard earned his m d in eighteen
sixty four, but he had trouble getting certified to actually
practice medicine in Prussia. He didn't immediately apply to take
the required state examination after he graduated, and once he
finally did, he was turned down on a technicality too
(05:52):
much time had passed since the end of his m
d work for him to be eligible to sit for
the exam. Biographers have sugged us that a number of
possible reasons for this delay between the end of his
m d work and his attempt take to take this exam.
One of them is that even though he was an
overall good student, he had been particularly focused on the
(06:12):
more practical parts of medical school and on other courses
across the sciences. He has. Interests within the world of
science were pretty wide ranging, and that meant that he
was not so focused on the particulars that he would
need to pass the state exam. Another is it perhaps
he'd already started itching to travel, but his family really
(06:36):
wasn't in favor of him going away, so being unable
to practice medicine at home would have given him a
convenient excuse to leave without so much resistance from his
mother and sister. There's also some suggestion that anti Semitism
may have been a factor in his being turned down
for the exam, even though he had converted to Christianity
(06:57):
as a child. Regardless of whatever the actual reason was,
Edward decided to move somewhere that his failure to take
this exam would not be an issue, and he had
a couple of options that were open to him. One
of them was actually to enter the military and to
travel to Mexico. With Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, who's covered in
(07:18):
our archive in the episode Maximilian Mexico's Habsburg Prince. But
in the end he instead went to Ottoman Turkey with
a plan of either entering the service of the Ottoman
Empire in some way or finding some kind of other
employment as a doctor. He soon settled in the port
of Antivari, Albania, which is now bar Montenegro, where he
(07:40):
became the personal physician to several families living in the area.
He set himself up with a very tidy and precisely
furnished department, where he described his personal study as quote
small but the envy of all Antivari. He also had
a little garden where he could experiment with agricultural techniques.
The position of the port in Antivari and the breadth
(08:04):
of the Ottoman Empire meant that I mean Pasha, who
at this point was still going by Edward Schnitzer was
surrounded by people who spoke a huge variety of languages.
He already spoke French, Italian and German, and so he
got by on other people's knowledge of those languages, while
he set himself to learning the ones that were spoken
more frequently locally like Greek and Turkish, and because of
(08:28):
the wide ranging backgrounds of the other people he met,
he often found himself conversing in four or five languages
in a given day. Soon he started looking for a
position that would give him more long term stability than
his private practice allowed. And this was his start in
a life of working for the government. And we're going
to talk about that more, but first we're going to
(08:50):
pause for a little sponsor break. Still going by the
named Edward Schnitzer Mean Pasha's first government position was as
a quarantine officer in Antivari. This job was highly suitable
to his temperament. He was a fastidiously clean person, and
(09:14):
as quarantine officer, he was in charge of medical and
sanitary inspections of vessels that came into the port, along
with letters and parcels and other goods that came in
from other parts of the world. And then, obviously, if
someone contracted a contagious illness like cholera, he was the
one responsible for making sure they stayed in quarantine to
prevent the disease from spreading. He even got approval for
(09:37):
funding to build a quarantine house for this purpose. He
was also named Sanitary officer for the district of Antivari,
where he developed regulations to improve public health and sanitation,
like how the streets should be cleaned and how deep
the ditches should be. Even though he had the backing
of the police in enforcing these rules, he found this
(09:57):
to be an uphill battle, and his description quote the
usual Turkish las fair was a bit of an obstacle.
So the fact that he was so clean comes up
a lot, along with his fastidious appearance. Of the panel
where I learned a little bit about him was about gender,
(10:21):
and the portion that discussed I mean, Pasha was all
about the idea of masculinity and how a lot of
people were like he just doesn't quite fit in with
what we expect from a man, and part of it
was because he is so clean. So he really did
liked this work, though unsurprisingly, he continued to be the
(10:44):
quarantine and sanitary officers along with being the district's surgeon
until eighteen seventy and his government positions did mean that
he had less time for his private practice, and that
was work that he missed doing as his government work
took up more and more of his time. In eighteen
seventy one, he decided to make another move, and he
joined the service of Ismael Hockey Pasha, who was governor
(11:06):
of Northern Albania, as a medical officer, and it was
around this time that he was granted the title of Effendi.
He also adopted a Turkish name, which would morph into
memit Amine, which is the name he would end up
using for the rest of his life. This name change
was at first a largely practical move. As a port
Antivari saw a lot of visitors from all over the world.
(11:30):
They had various nationalities and faiths, and although he learned
local languages and adopted local dress there, he hadn't really
felt the need to change his name or his religion.
That was not so true in some other parts of Albania.
A lot of the places he was traveling with the
governor were a majority Muslim, and the Ottoman Empire itself
(11:50):
had aggressively tried to get the remaining Christian population of
Albania to convert to Islam. He thought he could do
better work and endure fewer prying questions as memit Amen
than as Edward Schnitzer. If he felt upset by this
and feeling like he should change his name, he did
not let on to any sort of dismay in his letters.
(12:11):
At the same time, though, he did take a lot
of care to reassure his mother and his sister that
his new name didn't mean that he wasn't German or
Christian anymore. He wrote to his sister in eighteen seventy
one telling her not to worry that he had just
changed his name, but that he had not, in his
own words, become a Mohammedan. The following February, he wrote
(12:32):
to his mother about how much he missed his family,
and he simultaneously described himself as quote completely naturalized and
called his Turkish name a disguise. While Amine was working
for the governor, and uprising swept through northern Albania along
with the rest of the Balkans. The Ottoman Empire had
ruled Albania for centuries, and those centuries had been marked
(12:54):
with ongoing cycles of uprising and revolts, and starting in
the sixteenth century, with the aggressive campaign to convert the
Christian population that we mentioned a moment ago in Albania
in particular, the Ottoman Empire's hold had been pretty tenuous.
Albania was far enough removed from the rest of the
Empire that it hadn't really shared all that much of
(13:15):
the bounty from the Ottoman Golden Age, and then, even
though it was just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy,
Turkish rule of Albania meant that it was pretty much
excluded from the Renaissance as well. So Albania felt doubly
cut off from a lot of the advancements that a
lot of its neighbors had been through, as well as
being stifled and oppressed by many aspects of Ottoman rule.
(13:39):
Into the nineteenth century, many other Balkan nations, including Greece,
Serbia and Bosnia, went through their own revolutions for independence
from the Empire. Albania became concerned that it might be
annexed by one of its neighbors, replacing Ottoman rule for
some other regime. That is all centuries I mean not,
I'm not exattera exaggerating centuries of complicated political, religious, and
(14:04):
social issues and history boiled down to a couple of sentences,
but in short. When Amine joined the governor's service in
eighteen seventy one, Albania was right on the cusp of
what's known as the Albanian National Awakening, which is a
series of revolts and nationalist uprisings that would ultimately lead
to declaring independence in nineteen twelve. In other words, when
(14:26):
Amine went to work for the governor, his employer was
part of the ruling class that was in the process
of being overthrown, So when the uprising moved through northern Albania,
the governor and his family were forced to flee from it.
In the wake of this unrest, hockey Pasha was recalled
to Constantinople, dismissed from his post as governor, and banished
(14:47):
back to his home of Trebizon on the Black Sea
in Turkey. Amine was entrusted with the famili's care. He
traveled to Constantinople and made arrangements for them to be
reunited with the former governor. Along after he had reunited
the governor with his family. A means life too kind
of an odd turn. His male hockey Pasha was much
(15:08):
older than I mean I mean described him as being
like a father figure, and meanwhile, the governor had a
much younger wife, with their relationship rumored not to be
particularly happy. So when Hockey Pasha died, his widow, their
children and a number of household servants and slaves were
all left in a means care. Madam Ismael had been
(15:31):
born in Transylvania, which was facing its own unrest, but
she spoke French, German and Italian, perhaps thinking she might
better be able to make a home in Western Europe.
Amine took her and the rest of the household, which
was a total of eleven people home with him for
a visit to his family in Nissa. It would not
(15:51):
have been appropriate for the two of them to be
traveling together unmarried, so Amine presented her as his wife,
but it seemed like she was hoping that he would
marry her for real. Amen, on the other hand, had
thought this was a pragmatic way to get her out
of Albania at like out of the Ottoman Empire. Not
(16:11):
only did he not want to marry her, he was
not really financially able to support such a large household, so,
leaving no word of what he was going to do,
he cut off his connections with the governor's family, his
own family, and everyone he knew in the Balkans, and
he left Nissa on September eighteen, eighteen seventy five. He
(16:32):
visited some old school friends, and then he vanished all
this quite understandably raised a lot of suspicion and rumors.
This is compounded by the fact that I mean, who
had always been a really regular correspondent with his family,
hadn't written to them for at least a year before
arriving in Nisa. He didn't write to them again for
(16:53):
many years after disappearing. Meanwhile, Hockey Pasha's widow and children
stayed with a means mother for a few weeks before
they left Germany as well. There's not really a lot
of detail about how exactly all of this drama unfolded
or what happened to the governor's family after that. People
who had access to Amin Pasha's letters and journals in
(17:15):
the decades after his death generally declined to reprint that part,
often with kind of a hand wavy you don't really
need to know about that aside, Yes, some of it
is like you probably have heard already, so I don't
need to put that part in the book. Uh. In
my imagination, he was like, man, I don't I did
(17:38):
not mean to get roped up into all this, and
I'm not sure what to do, so I'm just gonna
go away. Uh. Regardless, though, when he reappeared. It was
in Egypt, and we will talk some more about that
after another quick sponsor break. So having that east for
(18:00):
the moment, cut ties with his family and his prior
connections in Turkey and Albania. I mean, Pasha went to Egypt,
he kept working as a doctor and learning even more languages,
including Arabic. It also appears that at some point, in
spite of his prior assurances to his mother and his sister,
he did convert to Islam. For example, his journals of
(18:22):
his time in Africa include a whole long exchange with
a tribal leader who insisted that he had asked for
a Christian to negotiate with. He was disappointed that he
had instead been sent a mean who was a Muslim.
I think regardless, I mean, based on what I have
read of all of his journals and letters and stuff
like that, it does not seem like he thought or
(18:43):
talked about religion all that much. Uh So it's all
kind of a little cloudy, but that seems to be
where he ended up. In eighteen seventy six, Amen went
to work for General Charles Gordon, governor of Equatoria and
what's now South Dan Equatoria is still a region in
South Sudan covering the same basic territory, but at the
(19:06):
time it was its own province. Although he was brought
arm to Gordon's service to be a doctor, I mean
skill with languages, his diplomacy and his willingness to assimilate
with his surroundings meant that he was soon put to
work on diplomatic missions. Gordon was expanding the province along
the Upper Nile, establishing forts and ousting slave traders from
(19:27):
the region, so in addition to his medical work, I
mean essentially became an ambassador, learning even more languages, negotiating
with local leaders, and undertaking expeditions into neighboring territory. In
July of eight seventy eight, Charles Gordon was promoted to
Governor General of Egyptian Sudan, and I mean Pasha was
named to take his place as the governor of Equatoria.
(19:50):
A lot of past episodes on our show that have
talked about colonial governments and administrators have generally fallen on
this sort of spectrum between blunderingly ham fisted and flagrantly
exploitive and inhumane. But I mean Pasha didn't really fit
on that spectrum. In all the accounts that we have,
he seemed to approach his work with fairness and compassion.
(20:12):
I kind of hate that we have to note exception.
He was so weird because of how thoughtful and level
headed he was. Yeah. I I sent a text to
a dear friend of mine who was a world history teacher,
and said, have you heard about Eman Pasha? And she
said no, And I said, so he was this guy
(20:34):
who worked for the Ottoman Empire. He was the governor
of Equatoria, and apparently he was really nice and thoughtful,
and she was like, that is bizarre. So anyway, one
of his biggest priorities, which had also been true of
Charles Gordon, was to stop the slave trade from operating
in the province. So slavery existed in a variety of
(20:55):
forms and a lot of Africa long before the trans
atlantic slave trade was a stabbedsh but existing forms of
slavery in Africa were generally a lot different from chattel
slavery as part of the trans atlantic trade. His existing
forms of enslavement were overall on a much smaller scale.
They often, but not always, involved prisoners of war or
(21:16):
people who were convicted of crimes, and generally people were
treated more like dependence than property. We are not at
all suggesting that it is okay to enslave people, but
we just want to make it clear that chattel slavery
was much different and in many ways much worse, and
the slave trade had huge ramifications all across Africa. Demand
(21:38):
for enslaved Africans led to colossal population laws and increased
warfare as opposing African nations attempted to capture more prisoners
of war to sell. So as a result, about twelve
million people from Central and Western Africa were sold into
slavery between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. To add
to all of that, payment in some cases included weapons,
(22:01):
which led to an escalating cycle of violence as African
nations went to war with their neighbors using the weapons
that they had gotten as payment for the people they
had previously sold. These are really just examples. This whole
slave trade had tremendous and often devastating effects that reverberated
across a lot of the continent, even in areas that
weren't directly involved in any of it. By the time
(22:25):
Amen came to Equatoria, the Transatlantic slave trade had largely
been abolished. However, Brazil continued to illicitly import enslaved people
from Africa until eighteen eighty eight. Even though the practice
had been officially banned. Slavery was also still legal and
practiced in much of the Ottoman Empire, and people were
(22:46):
still being captured in Central Africa and sold through the
trans Saharan and East African slave trades. So even though
it seems like this timeline is a little later than
slavery was abolished in a lot of the America, there
were still a lot of people who were being captured
and sold from this part of Africa. So both Gordon
(23:06):
and Amine worked to stop slavers from capturing people within
the province of Equatoria, and they also worked to free
people who had been captured and returned them to their families.
Their efforts were really successful. They did put an end
to the practice within Equatoria, but unfortunately that just means
that slavers instead turned their attention to places outside the province,
(23:27):
like it wasn't something that they could stop in all
of Africa. An introduction to an addition of his Letters
and Journals written by Dr RW Falcon summed up his
work this way. Quote. He had added large districts to
his province, not by the use of the sword, but
by personal negotiation with native chiefs. To all this must
(23:48):
be added the cultivation of cotton, of indigo, of coffee
and rice. The establishment of a regular weekly post through
his dominions, the rebuilding of nearly all his stations that can,
destruction of better and more permanent roads, the introduction of
camels and the transport of goods by oxen. And last,
but not least, he was able in that year to
(24:09):
show a net profit of eight thousand pounds, whereas on
his taking up the reins of government there was a
deficit of thirty two thousand pounds per annum. Well, our
archive is also full of stories of sort of imperial
administrators who, in one way or another, used their positions
to increase their personal wealth. I mean, Pasha scrupulously documented
(24:32):
every gift he received, valued it, and then charged it
to his personal account. He was fastidious in every single way.
He's one of those people that I much admired, but
I think if he met me, he would just hate me.
He also developed the province's military, which was recruited from
the local population. In a book called The Truth About
(24:53):
I Mean Pasha, published in the nineteenth century, his approach
was described this way quote I mean inspected the books
at the store depots, had uniforms served out to the troops,
and made inquiries as to the state of affairs, by
asking each one whether he had any reason to be dissatisfied.
In this way he heard complaints and grievances, which he
(25:15):
inquired into and redressed when necessary. He reviewed the troops,
admonished them to serve the government faithfully and obediently, promoted
deserving soldiers who as to encourage them and so spur
the others on to follow their example. In a word,
he interested himself with wonderful zeal and fatherly care in
the most trifling matters, with the object of fostering content
(25:38):
and maintaining order among the troops and the inhabitants, just
in case people were confused. Bay is another one of
the titles that he had before he was given the
title of Pasha. So throughout his time as governor of Equatoria,
he also continued his work as a naturalist, making extensive
studies of Central Africa's flora and fauna as well as
(26:00):
its whether. He made anthropological studies of the people's living
there and documented numerous languages. He sent regular reports of
his findings, along with specimens, to European museums and journals,
as described in his obituary in the Geographical Journal in
eight nineties three quote of the value of his geographical
(26:20):
and scientific work, there can be no doubt every portion
of the wide region entrusted to his care became known
to him by personal observation, and his descriptions of the
countries through which he passed, and the care with which
he mapped his roots, may serve as patterns to all
engaged in the exploration of Equatorial Africa. His collections to
(26:41):
have enriched the museums of England and of his native country,
and the esteem in which a Mean is held by
naturalists is quite as great as that entertained for him
by geographers. And according to a letter from German explorer Dr.
Vilhelm Younger, he did it all with quote almost unctilious
neatness and great care in his dress. While a Mean
(27:05):
does seem to have approached his work in Equatoria with
compassion and thoughtfulness, and a lot of dedicated organization and
scrupulous note taking. We don't want to give the impression
that he was perfect. Although he took great care to
understand the people and customs around him, he was also
definitely influenced by the underlying idea of white supremacy. Additionally,
(27:27):
the written records we have of his time in Equatoria
we're all written by people from Europe, not from Africa,
so we don't have a lot of firsthand detail about
how the people of Sudan felt about all of this.
And although it's easy and for a lot of us
even instinctive to think of things like roads and crops
and a cash flow positive administrative state as improvements, these
(27:48):
things are not automatically better. The fact that I mean
Pasha himself seems to have been doing a pretty good
job like doesn't erase the many issues associated with with
colonialism and giant empires governing people that aren't actually connected
to them. Yeah, he was doing a really good job
of administering in a place that never asked Europeans to
(28:12):
come and a minister. Yeah. Well, and even though at
this point we're going to get into this morning part two,
Sudan was under the administration of Egypt, which is it's
it's near neighbor, but still like the Egypt was a
vastly different place from Sudan, and people in Sudan did
not feel particularly connected to the government in Egypt, didn't
(28:32):
feel particularly represented by the people of Egypt or the
people that were allegedly representing their interests in Egypt. Like,
it was a whole complicated situation. So, I mean, Passia
seems to have been a pretty stand up guy. Colonialism, uh,
imperial governance of distant places, like, all these things still
have problems, And I mean, Passia's time as governor of
(28:54):
Equatoria actually did not end happily, and that is exactly
what we're going to talk about no time when we
do part two of this episode. In the meantime, Tracy, Yeah,
what you got in the way of listener mail? I
have some listener mail that is from Jessica. It is
on our episode about Mamie Till Mobley, and we've gotten
(29:15):
a lot of really lovely, thoughtful emails about that episode.
So thank you to everyone who has written in about it.
And Jessica says, Hi, Holly and Tracy or Tracy and Holly,
you choose the order. It's like a choose your own adventure. Anyway,
I wanted to write a thank you for your podcast
on Mamie Till Mobley. The Emmett Tell Story is one
of my pet subjects that I love to hear about.
(29:37):
It sounds strange, I know, but let me explain. I
taught junior high English for a good number of years
before quote retiring to stay home with my son. Thanks
to some of my college professors, I had done an
emphasis in African American literature and had spent some time
with a professor slash author who wrote both the historical
fiction and a non fiction book about Emmett Till geared
(29:58):
toward junior high age readers as a white girl who
grew up in an area of the country that until
very recently had little to no diversity. It wasn't until
I hit college and took some of these courses that
the idea of racism became real to me. It was
something I read about in textbooks, but the experiences, fortitude,
and trials of those who lived through it were beyond
(30:18):
my scope to that point. This is why I loved
teaching the Emmett Tell Story to my junior high kids.
Like me. Most of them hadn't had much experience with
the kinds of tensions and terrors that they read about
in their history books. By learning about Emmett, a kid
their age, and both seeing and hearing what happened to him,
thanks to Mamie's insistence that those pictures be published, I
(30:39):
watched the lightbulb turn on for many of these kids. Suddenly, racism, bigotry, lynching,
discrimination all became real because it happened to someone just
like them. As we went through the trial together, some
of them nearly sprang from their chairs at the injustices
that were being flaunted around that courtroom. Many of them
would stay after class to discuss further the now reel
(30:59):
for them details leading up to the Civil rights movement.
I often taught this in conjunction with discussions in their
history classes of Rosa Parks. One of my favorite quotes
to tie to the two classes together comes from her quote,
I thought about Emmett till and I could not go back.
My legs and feet were not hurting that as a stereotype,
(31:19):
I paid the same fare as others, and I felt violated.
I was not going back. At the end of any unit,
we always had the discussion that started with the question, now,
what now they had? Now that they had read this
piece with me and they had learned what they had,
what were they going to do about it? The discussion
following this unit was always my favorite. I could see
the fire in the eyes of these kids, who are
(31:40):
all now adults, who have the potential to change the world,
and I will forever be grateful that I got to
see them feel and know that they have the responsibility
to change the world for the better. This is why
I went into teaching English. My book nerds side was satiated,
but I could make what they read real with context,
and could help them see how the history they had
learned could apply to them through the characters we met
(32:00):
in our books. Uh anyway, sorry ramble, but I was
thrilled to see that Mami was a topic today. As
we told the story, as it does every time I
hear it, my heart hurt for her and my gut
twisted as the events unfolded. I especially appreciated to go
look at her fortitude and determination. As often the focus
is on Emmett, which is not undo, but she was
an amazing woman who allowed and pushed for his story
(32:22):
to be one that changed the world. Thanks for the
wonderful podcast that helps me feel excited and smart as
I clean toilets and do laundry and read Curious George
for the thousandth time. And then she goes on to
say that after every episode, her son asks Um where
she gets her episodes, because we always talk about where
to get things after the end of every show. Thank
(32:43):
you so much, Jessica. I wanted to read this letter
for a couple of reasons. Wanted is such a touching letter, Um,
and the other is uh ROSA Parks reflection on Emmett
Till comes up a lot in discussions of the civil
rights movement, and it is not a thing that made
it in that ticular episodes. I wanted to make sure
that we had a chance to bring it up now.
(33:04):
So thank you again, Jessica, and thank you also to
all the various people who have sent us such wonderful,
thoughtful letters about that particular episode. If you would like
to write to us about this or any other podcast
or history podcasts that how Stuff Works dot com. We're
also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in
History and on Twitter at miss in History, our tumbler
and our pinterests and our Instagram are all also missed
(33:26):
in History. If you come to our website at miss
in history dot com, you will find show notes for
all the episodes Holly and I have ever worked on
a searchable archive of every episode ever. Lots of other
cool stuff, so you can do all that and a
whole lot more at missed in history dot com. For
(33:46):
more on this at thousands of other topics. Is it,
how stop works dot com
Hey everybody. Before we get started today, we want to
make sure everyone knows about our upcoming live shows. First up,
Holly will be at Salt Lake Comic Con September one, three.
I won't be able to make it to that one,
so past guest and friend of the show, Brian Young
will be talking with her about laun Cheney. Then on
(00:23):
October six am, we will be appearing as part of
New York Comic Con Presents and we'll be talking about
the first comic book. You can find out more information
on all of this ticket links everything like that if
you go to missed in History dot com and click
the link that says live shows. Welcome to steph you
(00:45):
missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Fine. Earlier this year, I went to
the World History Association's annual conference here in Boston. It
(01:06):
was an awesome time. I also picked up a lot
of ideas for potential podcast topics or got my memory
jog about ones I already wanted to do previously. So
the conference reminded me that I had wanted to talk
about Ibn Batuta so that's why we finally got our
Ibn Batuta episode not long ago. It also planted the
seed for this week's episode, so along with of course
(01:29):
more that will probably come at some point in the future.
One of the presentations I saw was about a mean
pasha who's rescue in the finger quotes whether it was
really a rescue or not, it's kind of questionable. Rescue
from Uganda by Henry Morton Stanley became this incredibly popular
story in the nineteenth century. Today people are probably more
(01:52):
familiar with Stanley's expedition to find Dr David Livingstone, which
is about fifteen years earlier. But this meeting between any
and Iman Pasha and just Eman Pasha himself wound up
being the subjects of articles and stories and books and
then being on like all these consumer products, from matches
to bullion to chocolate, just an array of things got
(02:15):
labeled and branded I Mean Pasha. In addition to all that,
though I Mean Pasha story connects to so many things
in history that we have not spent a lot of
time on, particularly in the context of both the Ottoman
Empire and African history. He's one of those people who
kept finding himself in the midst of one huge event
after another. So we are going to talk about his
(02:37):
story in two parts. And today we've got his early
years and his time in Albania and how he made
his way to Africa, taking a new name in the process,
and the next time we will get to how he
wound up meeting or maybe not really needing to be
rescued by Henry Stanley. And just as one note before
(02:57):
we start, Pasha is an horrific title and it indicated
a high rank in the Ottoman Empire's military and political system,
and it is the last and highest of several that
he actually held during his lifetime. But I mean, Pasha
is really how everyone knew of him by the end
of his life. It's how he's most often sided sided historically.
(03:19):
So at some points we will probably wind up saying
Emin Pasha, when at that point he had a different
title than Pasha. Mehmed Emin Pasha was born Edward Schnitzer
on March eighteen forty and what's now Opola in southwestern Poland.
At the time it was up Elm Silesia, which was
(03:40):
part of the Kingdom of Prussia. His father, Ludwig, was
a merchant and although the family were German Jews, they
were under enormous pressure to assimilate with their Christian neighbors.
When the young Edward was two, they moved the family
to nissa Uh, that's near what's now the border between
Poland and Germany. And then when he was five, his
(04:00):
father died, his mother, Pauline, remarried a Lutheran man, and
then after Pauline's marriage, the family officially converted. When Edward
was baptized, his name was recorded as Edward carl Oscar
Theodore Schnitzer. He also had a sister named Melanie and
several other half siblings, not quite sure how many. They're
not typically named in his biographies. They're just sort of
(04:23):
mentioned as existing a group of siblings on mass We
don't have too much detail about his childhood or his education,
but we do know that he eventually studied medicine, zoology
and ornithology at the universities of Breslau, Berlin and Konigsberg.
He did quite well in university, and he was praised
as a diligent and industrious student, and he also started
(04:46):
publishing his research in journals before he graduated. Although he
really loved the comforts of home, and he was devoted
to his family. He was also more at ease in
intellectual pursuits than in social life at Cool. His family
also didn't have a lot of money, and he found
that some of his friends did not have quite enough
time for him when he was short on funds. So
(05:09):
over his university years he became somewhat isolated. He spent
more time with books than he spent with people, and
at the same time, he was very careful and particular
in his address and appearance, and when he did have money,
that was what he usually spent it on, and that
comes up over and over and over in other people's
accounts of him throughout his life. I can't judge. I
(05:31):
completely understand. Uh. Edvard earned his m d in eighteen
sixty four, but he had trouble getting certified to actually
practice medicine in Prussia. He didn't immediately apply to take
the required state examination after he graduated, and once he
finally did, he was turned down on a technicality too
(05:52):
much time had passed since the end of his m
d work for him to be eligible to sit for
the exam. Biographers have sugged us that a number of
possible reasons for this delay between the end of his
m d work and his attempt take to take this exam.
One of them is that even though he was an
overall good student, he had been particularly focused on the
(06:12):
more practical parts of medical school and on other courses
across the sciences. He has. Interests within the world of
science were pretty wide ranging, and that meant that he
was not so focused on the particulars that he would
need to pass the state exam. Another is it perhaps
he'd already started itching to travel, but his family really
(06:36):
wasn't in favor of him going away, so being unable
to practice medicine at home would have given him a
convenient excuse to leave without so much resistance from his
mother and sister. There's also some suggestion that anti Semitism
may have been a factor in his being turned down
for the exam, even though he had converted to Christianity
(06:57):
as a child. Regardless of whatever the actual reason was,
Edward decided to move somewhere that his failure to take
this exam would not be an issue, and he had
a couple of options that were open to him. One
of them was actually to enter the military and to
travel to Mexico. With Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, who's covered in
(07:18):
our archive in the episode Maximilian Mexico's Habsburg Prince. But
in the end he instead went to Ottoman Turkey with
a plan of either entering the service of the Ottoman
Empire in some way or finding some kind of other
employment as a doctor. He soon settled in the port
of Antivari, Albania, which is now bar Montenegro, where he
(07:40):
became the personal physician to several families living in the area.
He set himself up with a very tidy and precisely
furnished department, where he described his personal study as quote
small but the envy of all Antivari. He also had
a little garden where he could experiment with agricultural techniques.
The position of the port in Antivari and the breadth
(08:04):
of the Ottoman Empire meant that I mean Pasha, who
at this point was still going by Edward Schnitzer was
surrounded by people who spoke a huge variety of languages.
He already spoke French, Italian and German, and so he
got by on other people's knowledge of those languages, while
he set himself to learning the ones that were spoken
more frequently locally like Greek and Turkish, and because of
(08:28):
the wide ranging backgrounds of the other people he met,
he often found himself conversing in four or five languages
in a given day. Soon he started looking for a
position that would give him more long term stability than
his private practice allowed. And this was his start in
a life of working for the government. And we're going
to talk about that more, but first we're going to
(08:50):
pause for a little sponsor break. Still going by the
named Edward Schnitzer Mean Pasha's first government position was as
a quarantine officer in Antivari. This job was highly suitable
to his temperament. He was a fastidiously clean person, and
(09:14):
as quarantine officer, he was in charge of medical and
sanitary inspections of vessels that came into the port, along
with letters and parcels and other goods that came in
from other parts of the world. And then, obviously, if
someone contracted a contagious illness like cholera, he was the
one responsible for making sure they stayed in quarantine to
prevent the disease from spreading. He even got approval for
(09:37):
funding to build a quarantine house for this purpose. He
was also named Sanitary officer for the district of Antivari,
where he developed regulations to improve public health and sanitation,
like how the streets should be cleaned and how deep
the ditches should be. Even though he had the backing
of the police in enforcing these rules, he found this
(09:57):
to be an uphill battle, and his description quote the
usual Turkish las fair was a bit of an obstacle.
So the fact that he was so clean comes up
a lot, along with his fastidious appearance. Of the panel
where I learned a little bit about him was about gender,
(10:21):
and the portion that discussed I mean, Pasha was all
about the idea of masculinity and how a lot of
people were like he just doesn't quite fit in with
what we expect from a man, and part of it
was because he is so clean. So he really did
liked this work, though unsurprisingly, he continued to be the
(10:44):
quarantine and sanitary officers along with being the district's surgeon
until eighteen seventy and his government positions did mean that
he had less time for his private practice, and that
was work that he missed doing as his government work
took up more and more of his time. In eighteen
seventy one, he decided to make another move, and he
joined the service of Ismael Hockey Pasha, who was governor
(11:06):
of Northern Albania, as a medical officer, and it was
around this time that he was granted the title of Effendi.
He also adopted a Turkish name, which would morph into
memit Amine, which is the name he would end up
using for the rest of his life. This name change
was at first a largely practical move. As a port
Antivari saw a lot of visitors from all over the world.
(11:30):
They had various nationalities and faiths, and although he learned
local languages and adopted local dress there, he hadn't really
felt the need to change his name or his religion.
That was not so true in some other parts of Albania.
A lot of the places he was traveling with the
governor were a majority Muslim, and the Ottoman Empire itself
(11:50):
had aggressively tried to get the remaining Christian population of
Albania to convert to Islam. He thought he could do
better work and endure fewer prying questions as memit Amen
than as Edward Schnitzer. If he felt upset by this
and feeling like he should change his name, he did
not let on to any sort of dismay in his letters.
(12:11):
At the same time, though, he did take a lot
of care to reassure his mother and his sister that
his new name didn't mean that he wasn't German or
Christian anymore. He wrote to his sister in eighteen seventy
one telling her not to worry that he had just
changed his name, but that he had not, in his
own words, become a Mohammedan. The following February, he wrote
(12:32):
to his mother about how much he missed his family,
and he simultaneously described himself as quote completely naturalized and
called his Turkish name a disguise. While Amine was working
for the governor, and uprising swept through northern Albania along
with the rest of the Balkans. The Ottoman Empire had
ruled Albania for centuries, and those centuries had been marked
(12:54):
with ongoing cycles of uprising and revolts, and starting in
the sixteenth century, with the aggressive campaign to convert the
Christian population that we mentioned a moment ago in Albania
in particular, the Ottoman Empire's hold had been pretty tenuous.
Albania was far enough removed from the rest of the
Empire that it hadn't really shared all that much of
(13:15):
the bounty from the Ottoman Golden Age, and then, even
though it was just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy,
Turkish rule of Albania meant that it was pretty much
excluded from the Renaissance as well. So Albania felt doubly
cut off from a lot of the advancements that a
lot of its neighbors had been through, as well as
being stifled and oppressed by many aspects of Ottoman rule.
(13:39):
Into the nineteenth century, many other Balkan nations, including Greece,
Serbia and Bosnia, went through their own revolutions for independence
from the Empire. Albania became concerned that it might be
annexed by one of its neighbors, replacing Ottoman rule for
some other regime. That is all centuries I mean not,
I'm not exattera exaggerating centuries of complicated political, religious, and
(14:04):
social issues and history boiled down to a couple of sentences,
but in short. When Amine joined the governor's service in
eighteen seventy one, Albania was right on the cusp of
what's known as the Albanian National Awakening, which is a
series of revolts and nationalist uprisings that would ultimately lead
to declaring independence in nineteen twelve. In other words, when
(14:26):
Amine went to work for the governor, his employer was
part of the ruling class that was in the process
of being overthrown, So when the uprising moved through northern Albania,
the governor and his family were forced to flee from it.
In the wake of this unrest, hockey Pasha was recalled
to Constantinople, dismissed from his post as governor, and banished
(14:47):
back to his home of Trebizon on the Black Sea
in Turkey. Amine was entrusted with the famili's care. He
traveled to Constantinople and made arrangements for them to be
reunited with the former governor. Along after he had reunited
the governor with his family. A means life too kind
of an odd turn. His male hockey Pasha was much
(15:08):
older than I mean I mean described him as being
like a father figure, and meanwhile, the governor had a
much younger wife, with their relationship rumored not to be
particularly happy. So when Hockey Pasha died, his widow, their
children and a number of household servants and slaves were
all left in a means care. Madam Ismael had been
(15:31):
born in Transylvania, which was facing its own unrest, but
she spoke French, German and Italian, perhaps thinking she might
better be able to make a home in Western Europe.
Amine took her and the rest of the household, which
was a total of eleven people home with him for
a visit to his family in Nissa. It would not
(15:51):
have been appropriate for the two of them to be
traveling together unmarried, so Amine presented her as his wife,
but it seemed like she was hoping that he would
marry her for real. Amen, on the other hand, had
thought this was a pragmatic way to get her out
of Albania at like out of the Ottoman Empire. Not
(16:11):
only did he not want to marry her, he was
not really financially able to support such a large household, so,
leaving no word of what he was going to do,
he cut off his connections with the governor's family, his
own family, and everyone he knew in the Balkans, and
he left Nissa on September eighteen, eighteen seventy five. He
(16:32):
visited some old school friends, and then he vanished all
this quite understandably raised a lot of suspicion and rumors.
This is compounded by the fact that I mean, who
had always been a really regular correspondent with his family,
hadn't written to them for at least a year before
arriving in Nisa. He didn't write to them again for
(16:53):
many years after disappearing. Meanwhile, Hockey Pasha's widow and children
stayed with a means mother for a few weeks before
they left Germany as well. There's not really a lot
of detail about how exactly all of this drama unfolded
or what happened to the governor's family after that. People
who had access to Amin Pasha's letters and journals in
(17:15):
the decades after his death generally declined to reprint that part,
often with kind of a hand wavy you don't really
need to know about that aside, Yes, some of it
is like you probably have heard already, so I don't
need to put that part in the book. Uh. In
my imagination, he was like, man, I don't I did
(17:38):
not mean to get roped up into all this, and
I'm not sure what to do, so I'm just gonna
go away. Uh. Regardless, though, when he reappeared. It was
in Egypt, and we will talk some more about that
after another quick sponsor break. So having that east for
(18:00):
the moment, cut ties with his family and his prior
connections in Turkey and Albania. I mean, Pasha went to Egypt,
he kept working as a doctor and learning even more languages,
including Arabic. It also appears that at some point, in
spite of his prior assurances to his mother and his sister,
he did convert to Islam. For example, his journals of
(18:22):
his time in Africa include a whole long exchange with
a tribal leader who insisted that he had asked for
a Christian to negotiate with. He was disappointed that he
had instead been sent a mean who was a Muslim.
I think regardless, I mean, based on what I have
read of all of his journals and letters and stuff
like that, it does not seem like he thought or
(18:43):
talked about religion all that much. Uh So it's all
kind of a little cloudy, but that seems to be
where he ended up. In eighteen seventy six, Amen went
to work for General Charles Gordon, governor of Equatoria and
what's now South Dan Equatoria is still a region in
South Sudan covering the same basic territory, but at the
(19:06):
time it was its own province. Although he was brought
arm to Gordon's service to be a doctor, I mean
skill with languages, his diplomacy and his willingness to assimilate
with his surroundings meant that he was soon put to
work on diplomatic missions. Gordon was expanding the province along
the Upper Nile, establishing forts and ousting slave traders from
(19:27):
the region, so in addition to his medical work, I
mean essentially became an ambassador, learning even more languages, negotiating
with local leaders, and undertaking expeditions into neighboring territory. In
July of eight seventy eight, Charles Gordon was promoted to
Governor General of Egyptian Sudan, and I mean Pasha was
named to take his place as the governor of Equatoria.
(19:50):
A lot of past episodes on our show that have
talked about colonial governments and administrators have generally fallen on
this sort of spectrum between blunderingly ham fisted and flagrantly
exploitive and inhumane. But I mean Pasha didn't really fit
on that spectrum. In all the accounts that we have,
he seemed to approach his work with fairness and compassion.
(20:12):
I kind of hate that we have to note exception.
He was so weird because of how thoughtful and level
headed he was. Yeah. I I sent a text to
a dear friend of mine who was a world history teacher,
and said, have you heard about Eman Pasha? And she
said no, And I said, so he was this guy
(20:34):
who worked for the Ottoman Empire. He was the governor
of Equatoria, and apparently he was really nice and thoughtful,
and she was like, that is bizarre. So anyway, one
of his biggest priorities, which had also been true of
Charles Gordon, was to stop the slave trade from operating
in the province. So slavery existed in a variety of
(20:55):
forms and a lot of Africa long before the trans
atlantic slave trade was a stabbedsh but existing forms of
slavery in Africa were generally a lot different from chattel
slavery as part of the trans atlantic trade. His existing
forms of enslavement were overall on a much smaller scale.
They often, but not always, involved prisoners of war or
(21:16):
people who were convicted of crimes, and generally people were
treated more like dependence than property. We are not at
all suggesting that it is okay to enslave people, but
we just want to make it clear that chattel slavery
was much different and in many ways much worse, and
the slave trade had huge ramifications all across Africa. Demand
(21:38):
for enslaved Africans led to colossal population laws and increased
warfare as opposing African nations attempted to capture more prisoners
of war to sell. So as a result, about twelve
million people from Central and Western Africa were sold into
slavery between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. To add
to all of that, payment in some cases included weapons,
(22:01):
which led to an escalating cycle of violence as African
nations went to war with their neighbors using the weapons
that they had gotten as payment for the people they
had previously sold. These are really just examples. This whole
slave trade had tremendous and often devastating effects that reverberated
across a lot of the continent, even in areas that
weren't directly involved in any of it. By the time
(22:25):
Amen came to Equatoria, the Transatlantic slave trade had largely
been abolished. However, Brazil continued to illicitly import enslaved people
from Africa until eighteen eighty eight. Even though the practice
had been officially banned. Slavery was also still legal and
practiced in much of the Ottoman Empire, and people were
(22:46):
still being captured in Central Africa and sold through the
trans Saharan and East African slave trades. So even though
it seems like this timeline is a little later than
slavery was abolished in a lot of the America, there
were still a lot of people who were being captured
and sold from this part of Africa. So both Gordon
(23:06):
and Amine worked to stop slavers from capturing people within
the province of Equatoria, and they also worked to free
people who had been captured and returned them to their families.
Their efforts were really successful. They did put an end
to the practice within Equatoria, but unfortunately that just means
that slavers instead turned their attention to places outside the province,
(23:27):
like it wasn't something that they could stop in all
of Africa. An introduction to an addition of his Letters
and Journals written by Dr RW Falcon summed up his
work this way. Quote. He had added large districts to
his province, not by the use of the sword, but
by personal negotiation with native chiefs. To all this must
(23:48):
be added the cultivation of cotton, of indigo, of coffee
and rice. The establishment of a regular weekly post through
his dominions, the rebuilding of nearly all his stations that can,
destruction of better and more permanent roads, the introduction of
camels and the transport of goods by oxen. And last,
but not least, he was able in that year to
(24:09):
show a net profit of eight thousand pounds, whereas on
his taking up the reins of government there was a
deficit of thirty two thousand pounds per annum. Well, our
archive is also full of stories of sort of imperial
administrators who, in one way or another, used their positions
to increase their personal wealth. I mean, Pasha scrupulously documented
(24:32):
every gift he received, valued it, and then charged it
to his personal account. He was fastidious in every single way.
He's one of those people that I much admired, but
I think if he met me, he would just hate me.
He also developed the province's military, which was recruited from
the local population. In a book called The Truth About
(24:53):
I Mean Pasha, published in the nineteenth century, his approach
was described this way quote I mean inspected the books
at the store depots, had uniforms served out to the troops,
and made inquiries as to the state of affairs, by
asking each one whether he had any reason to be dissatisfied.
In this way he heard complaints and grievances, which he
(25:15):
inquired into and redressed when necessary. He reviewed the troops,
admonished them to serve the government faithfully and obediently, promoted
deserving soldiers who as to encourage them and so spur
the others on to follow their example. In a word,
he interested himself with wonderful zeal and fatherly care in
the most trifling matters, with the object of fostering content
(25:38):
and maintaining order among the troops and the inhabitants, just
in case people were confused. Bay is another one of
the titles that he had before he was given the
title of Pasha. So throughout his time as governor of Equatoria,
he also continued his work as a naturalist, making extensive
studies of Central Africa's flora and fauna as well as
(26:00):
its whether. He made anthropological studies of the people's living
there and documented numerous languages. He sent regular reports of
his findings, along with specimens, to European museums and journals,
as described in his obituary in the Geographical Journal in
eight nineties three quote of the value of his geographical
(26:20):
and scientific work, there can be no doubt every portion
of the wide region entrusted to his care became known
to him by personal observation, and his descriptions of the
countries through which he passed, and the care with which
he mapped his roots, may serve as patterns to all
engaged in the exploration of Equatorial Africa. His collections to
(26:41):
have enriched the museums of England and of his native country,
and the esteem in which a Mean is held by
naturalists is quite as great as that entertained for him
by geographers. And according to a letter from German explorer Dr.
Vilhelm Younger, he did it all with quote almost unctilious
neatness and great care in his dress. While a Mean
(27:05):
does seem to have approached his work in Equatoria with
compassion and thoughtfulness, and a lot of dedicated organization and
scrupulous note taking. We don't want to give the impression
that he was perfect. Although he took great care to
understand the people and customs around him, he was also
definitely influenced by the underlying idea of white supremacy. Additionally,
(27:27):
the written records we have of his time in Equatoria
we're all written by people from Europe, not from Africa,
so we don't have a lot of firsthand detail about
how the people of Sudan felt about all of this.
And although it's easy and for a lot of us
even instinctive to think of things like roads and crops
and a cash flow positive administrative state as improvements, these
(27:48):
things are not automatically better. The fact that I mean
Pasha himself seems to have been doing a pretty good
job like doesn't erase the many issues associated with with
colonialism and giant empires governing people that aren't actually connected
to them. Yeah, he was doing a really good job
of administering in a place that never asked Europeans to
(28:12):
come and a minister. Yeah. Well, and even though at
this point we're going to get into this morning part two,
Sudan was under the administration of Egypt, which is it's
it's near neighbor, but still like the Egypt was a
vastly different place from Sudan, and people in Sudan did
not feel particularly connected to the government in Egypt, didn't
(28:32):
feel particularly represented by the people of Egypt or the
people that were allegedly representing their interests in Egypt. Like,
it was a whole complicated situation. So, I mean, Passia
seems to have been a pretty stand up guy. Colonialism, uh,
imperial governance of distant places, like, all these things still
have problems, And I mean, Passia's time as governor of
(28:54):
Equatoria actually did not end happily, and that is exactly
what we're going to talk about no time when we
do part two of this episode. In the meantime, Tracy, Yeah,
what you got in the way of listener mail? I
have some listener mail that is from Jessica. It is
on our episode about Mamie Till Mobley, and we've gotten
(29:15):
a lot of really lovely, thoughtful emails about that episode.
So thank you to everyone who has written in about it.
And Jessica says, Hi, Holly and Tracy or Tracy and Holly,
you choose the order. It's like a choose your own adventure. Anyway,
I wanted to write a thank you for your podcast
on Mamie Till Mobley. The Emmett Tell Story is one
of my pet subjects that I love to hear about.
(29:37):
It sounds strange, I know, but let me explain. I
taught junior high English for a good number of years
before quote retiring to stay home with my son. Thanks
to some of my college professors, I had done an
emphasis in African American literature and had spent some time
with a professor slash author who wrote both the historical
fiction and a non fiction book about Emmett Till geared
(29:58):
toward junior high age readers as a white girl who
grew up in an area of the country that until
very recently had little to no diversity. It wasn't until
I hit college and took some of these courses that
the idea of racism became real to me. It was
something I read about in textbooks, but the experiences, fortitude,
and trials of those who lived through it were beyond
(30:18):
my scope to that point. This is why I loved
teaching the Emmett Tell Story to my junior high kids.
Like me. Most of them hadn't had much experience with
the kinds of tensions and terrors that they read about
in their history books. By learning about Emmett, a kid
their age, and both seeing and hearing what happened to him,
thanks to Mamie's insistence that those pictures be published, I
(30:39):
watched the lightbulb turn on for many of these kids. Suddenly, racism, bigotry, lynching,
discrimination all became real because it happened to someone just
like them. As we went through the trial together, some
of them nearly sprang from their chairs at the injustices
that were being flaunted around that courtroom. Many of them
would stay after class to discuss further the now reel
(30:59):
for them details leading up to the Civil rights movement.
I often taught this in conjunction with discussions in their
history classes of Rosa Parks. One of my favorite quotes
to tie to the two classes together comes from her quote,
I thought about Emmett till and I could not go back.
My legs and feet were not hurting that as a stereotype,
(31:19):
I paid the same fare as others, and I felt violated.
I was not going back. At the end of any unit,
we always had the discussion that started with the question, now,
what now they had? Now that they had read this
piece with me and they had learned what they had,
what were they going to do about it? The discussion
following this unit was always my favorite. I could see
the fire in the eyes of these kids, who are
(31:40):
all now adults, who have the potential to change the world,
and I will forever be grateful that I got to
see them feel and know that they have the responsibility
to change the world for the better. This is why
I went into teaching English. My book nerds side was satiated,
but I could make what they read real with context,
and could help them see how the history they had
learned could apply to them through the characters we met
(32:00):
in our books. Uh anyway, sorry ramble, but I was
thrilled to see that Mami was a topic today. As
we told the story, as it does every time I
hear it, my heart hurt for her and my gut
twisted as the events unfolded. I especially appreciated to go
look at her fortitude and determination. As often the focus
is on Emmett, which is not undo, but she was
an amazing woman who allowed and pushed for his story
(32:22):
to be one that changed the world. Thanks for the
wonderful podcast that helps me feel excited and smart as
I clean toilets and do laundry and read Curious George
for the thousandth time. And then she goes on to
say that after every episode, her son asks Um where
she gets her episodes, because we always talk about where
to get things after the end of every show. Thank
(32:43):
you so much, Jessica. I wanted to read this letter
for a couple of reasons. Wanted is such a touching letter, Um,
and the other is uh ROSA Parks reflection on Emmett
Till comes up a lot in discussions of the civil
rights movement, and it is not a thing that made
it in that ticular episodes. I wanted to make sure
that we had a chance to bring it up now.
(33:04):
So thank you again, Jessica, and thank you also to
all the various people who have sent us such wonderful,
thoughtful letters about that particular episode. If you would like
to write to us about this or any other podcast
or history podcasts that how Stuff Works dot com. We're
also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in
History and on Twitter at miss in History, our tumbler
and our pinterests and our Instagram are all also missed
(33:26):
in History. If you come to our website at miss
in history dot com, you will find show notes for
all the episodes Holly and I have ever worked on
a searchable archive of every episode ever. Lots of other
cool stuff, so you can do all that and a
whole lot more at missed in history dot com. For
(33:46):
more on this at thousands of other topics. Is it,
how stop works dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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