Götz of the Iron Hand

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. In our most recent installments
of Unearthed, we talked about a hand prosthesis that had

(00:22):
been discovered in Bavaria that dated back to sometime between
the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in reading about this,
articles mentioned various other prostcees that had been found in
archaeological sites and a mention of Gutfried von Berlisingen, also
known as Goods of the Iron hand. What really caught

(00:44):
my attention and that this mention was that his prosthesis
sounded a lot more complex than I really would have
imagined for the time that he was living in. I
want to stress upfront that more complex prostses are not
inherently better than less complex ones. So much depends on

(01:05):
what the person actually using the prostsis needs and wants
and can find most comfortable and can access and afford,
and some people don't want to use one at all.
We also live in an age in which there are
a lot of very well meaning engineers designing very complex
prosthetic limbs without the involvement of the people who would

(01:27):
actually be using them. That has started to shift a
little bit, but the prosthetics industry is still really not
being led by prosthetics users, which is something that applies
to adaptive technology more broadly. Also, so I don't want
to give the impression that the prostsis there's two of
them that the process we're going to be talking about
today were like automatically better than ones that were a

(01:49):
little simpler, like what we talked about on on Earthed. Also,
some aspects of this research were complicated because a lot
of what is out there about him is in German.
Some of the more recent English language work has been
written or published by white nationalists. Aside from his own story,
which is a story about you know, historic German figure.

(02:11):
There was an ss Panzergnadier division named after him during
World War Two, So he's somebody that white nationalists have
kind of appropriated in some ways. We'll talk about this
more in the Friday Behind the Scenes, but it did
mean that there was some stuff that was off the
table as research material because I'm not buying a book
from a white nationalist publisher for the podcast What all Right?

(02:35):
So Guttfried von Berlishingen lived during the transition from what
we think of as the Medieval period to the Renaissance.
Most historians frame the Medieval period in Europe as starting
with the end of the Roman Empire in the fifth century,
although there are various arguments for earlier and later events
and dates. In terms of the start of the Renaissance,

(02:56):
different scholars cite different years, stretching all the way from
the thirteen hundreds to the fifteen hundreds. So we've talked
about on the show before. These historical periods are a
framework that scholars have created to help us understand and
conceptualize the past. And one reason that the end of
the Medieval period and that transition to the Renaissance can

(03:17):
seem a little fuzzy, maybe more so than the beginning
of the Medieval period, is that a lot of the
changes involved were really gradual. It was not like somebody
flipped a switch and Europe was suddenly in the Renaissance.
There were changes in political, religious, and economic structures that
took decades to really develop. A lot of the time,
you can point to various pretty clear cut historical moments

(03:41):
like the Black Death from thirteen forty seven to thirteen
fifty one, or Martin Luther writing his ninety five THESS
in fifteen seventeen. But these more discrete moments were part
of these ongoing, overlapping changes, and some of these gradual
changes from the Medieval period to the Renaissance were happening
over the course of Gutfried's lifetime. They affected him directly,

(04:04):
and this included the Protestant Reformation and a military shift
from knights to professional military forces. Gutfried von Berlishingen was
born in fourteen eighty or fourteen eighty one in the
Duchy of Wurtemberg, presumably at Jagdousand Castle also called Gutzenburg,
which was the Berlishingen family home today. This is in

(04:27):
the German state of Baden Wurtemberg, and at the time
it was part of the Holy Roman Empire. Guttfried's father,
Killian von Berlishingen, was a reich Ritter or an imperial
knight of the Holy Roman Empire, meaning his fealty was
to the Holy Roman Emperor, not to the Duke of Wurtemberg.
This was both a military and administrative role. Reichs Ritter

(04:48):
were typically both warriors and landlords. Killian had been married
twice before marrying Gutfried's mother, and Gutfried was the youngest
of all of his children. So Gutfried had a lot
more wealth and influence than say, people in the peasant
class and even some of the members of the more
provincial nobility, but being the youngest son of a minor

(05:10):
noble put him at a disadvantage compared to people like
his older brothers and a lot of other men in
the same class. Much later in his life, his autobiography
would frame this as having pulled himself out of just
total poverty through his valorous service as a knight. When
he was young, Gutfried went to school for about a year,

(05:31):
but he was far more interested in horsemanship than in studying.
When he was fourteen, he became a page to a
knight named Konrad von Berlishingen, who was one of his
father's cousins. Conrad died in fourteen ninety seven, at which
point Gutfried was sent to serve in the court of
the Margrave of Ansbach, which was another principality of the
Holy Roman Empire. This apparently did not go well. Gutfried

(05:57):
was described in terms like wilful, hot headed, and headstrong,
and he also doesn't seem to have been at all
interested in what was going on at court, so he
was squired to another knight, Vite von Leedersheim, who was
in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian the First.
In fourteen ninety nine, at the age of about nineteen,

(06:19):
Gutfried was considered to have completed his training as a knight,
and at first it seems like he wanted to follow
in his father's footsteps as a reichsch Ridder, but it
also seems like he decided he wanted a life that
had more excitement and less responsibility instead, so within a
year he had left the service of the empire and

(06:39):
joined up with a robber knight known as Hans Talliker
von Messenbach. Earlier, we mentioned a shift in the way
that militaries worked, with knights being replaced by soldiers. Knights
typically went through a lengthy training period with other knights,
like Gutfried's time as a page and a squire, but
soldiers were being recruited from outside the nobility, and they

(07:01):
were trained more quickly by professional military instructors. Knights had
been sworn to serve members of the nobility and they
were typically of noble birth themselves. So this shift meant
that knights and nobles had progressively less power and influence.
Some of them then turned to other means to try
to gain power and wealth. The term robber knight could

(07:24):
encompass anything from a landlord who was treating his tenants
unethically to try to bring in more money to knights
who literally robbed people or kidnapped them and held them
for ransom.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
Hans Talliker von Messenbach was apparently more of the latter.
One of the sources that was used in this episode
described him as notorious. He and his men attacked trading caravans,
and they ransacked villages, and they did so much of
this that the Swabian League took up arms against them.
The Swabian League was an alliance of cities, states, and

(07:56):
individual nobles who mutually agreed to defend one another from
this kind of rating and to band together against things
like imperial tax increases and land seizures. Gutfried von Berlishingen
and the Swabian League had a lot of encounters over
the course of his life. One of Gutfried's cousins decided
that he was going to get himself killed if he

(08:18):
didn't find something else to do with his life, and
he convinced Gutfried to leave Hans Talliker. After this, Gutfried
became a mercenary during the Lanschut War of succession, which
we will get into after we pause for a sponsor break. Briefly,

(08:43):
the Landshad War of succession was a dispute within the
House of Vittelsbach, which ruled Bavaria. In thirteen twenty nine,
Holy Roman Emperor Louis the Fourth, who was a Vittelsbach,
had signed the Treaty of Pavia, which divided Bavaria into
two portions, with each of those portions ruled by one
of his brother's sons. Under the terms of this treaty,

(09:06):
if the family line that was ruling either one of
these regions came to an end, meaning if somebody died
without a male heir, the other one would take possession
of it. More than one hundred and fifty years later, George,
Duke of Bavaria Landshut, had no son and tried to
name his daughter Elizabeth as his heir.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
Instead. Duke Albert the fourth of Bavaria Munich, who was
supposed to inherit Bavaria Lanshut. If George died without an
heir went to war over this. Gutfried von Berlishingen fought
on Albert the fourth side, working as a mercenary. In
this case, Gutfried and the Swabian League were on the
same side, but he was fighting against two of his

(09:49):
brothers who had sided with Bavaria Lanschut. Another of Albert's
allies was the Imperial city of Nurnberg, and on July fourteenth,
fifteen oh four, Gutfried was injured when a cannon fire
from Nurnberg's forces hit their allies lines and a cannon
ball struck his right hand. Goodfried was fully armored, but
the impact of this cannon ball forced the pommel of

(10:12):
his sword in between his gauntlet and his arm piece,
and it crushed and nearly severed his hand. His injured
hand had to be amputated at the wrist. He was
lucky to survive this injury. We've talked on the show
before about the work of surgeon Amboise Parret, who made
huge advances in European methods for performing amputations. We're going

(10:34):
to have that as an upcoming Saturday Classic, and some
of the techniques typically involved in amputation before Parrey did
his work actually damaged the tissue and made it harder
for people to recover. Parret's work included things like the
reintroduction of ligatures to control bleeding, and this work was
still about forty years away when Gutfried was injured. Joseph

(10:56):
Lister's antiseptic surgical techniques and even developments like the turn
kit disclosevere bleeding, those were all still centuries away. Gutfried
spent more than six months recuperating, barely leaving his bed
until February of fifteen oh five.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
Even given the state of medicine and surgery at this time,
there were, of course other people who had also survived
these kinds of injuries and amputations, And while Gutfried was recovering,
he remembered another Knight who had used a prosthetic hand.
He decided that he would have one made for himself,
so once he was well enough, he went to a

(11:33):
blacksmith to commission one. This prosthesis was made of sheet
iron about a millimeter thick and painted to resemble his
skin color. It was attached to a cuff to fit
it to the wrist. The fingers moved in pairs, so
the index and middle finger moved together, and the ring
and pinky finger moved together, and the thumb could move
as well. Using the other hand, Gutfried could move the

(11:57):
fingers and thumb into different positions and lock them into place,
and he could release those with a button.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
For a long.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
Time, it was assumed that this prosthesis allowed Gudfried to
wield a sword with his right hand, and he may
have held a sword with this prosthesis, but he probably
did not fight with it. It wouldn't really have been
strong enough for that kind of movement and impact, so
he learned to fight left handed.

Speaker 1 (12:24):
But he could have.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
Used this prosthesis to hold like the reins of his
horse or the strap of a shield or other similar objects.
And this prosethsis also had a more cosmetic function. Wearing
it meant that he still looked like people expected a
knight to look. Soon he was being known as Goods
of the iron hand or the Knight of the iron hand.

(12:47):
Gufried's return to combat involved a lot of feuding over
the years. Historians within and outside of Germany have offered
different interpretations about the feuds that were such a big
part of life among the nobility the Holy Roman Empire.
Some have framed feuds as a way for the nobility
to preserve their rights going into battle against other nobles

(13:09):
or cities or states that threatened them in some way.
Others have viewed feuding more as an almost ritualized way
for nobles to try to preserve their honor or to
seek retribution after being wronged. There were also some connections
to the world of robber knights that we talked about earlier.
Aside from all these nuances, though, feuding overall was a

(13:31):
way of using violence to resolve conflicts. Unsurprisingly, this caused problems,
and it caused enough problems that in fourteen ninety five,
Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian the First issued the eveger Landfrieda,
translated as the Perpetual Public Peace or Eternal Domestic Piece.

(13:51):
This outlawed feuding. After this, disputing nobles were supposed to
resolve their problems through legal channels, not through fighting. A
lot of nobles, though, they just ignored it and kept
feuding with one another anyway.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
It's a way of life. In fifteen eleven, the Electorate
of Cologne demanded that Guts repay a debt. He refused,
and he raised a mercenary company to fight a years
long feud about it. Then, in fifteen twelve, he in
about one hundred and thirty mounted mercenaries attacked a merchant caravan,
leading to feuds with multiple cities who either had merchants

(14:30):
or travelers in that convoy or sent forces to try
to deal with the attack. After the caravan attack, Maximilian
the First placed Goots under an imperial ban and tried
to seize all of his estates, but he managed to
transfer them to family members. Before that could happen, the
Swabian League demanded he pay reparations, and ultimately the imperial

(14:52):
ban was lifted in May of fifteen fourteen after Guts
paid fourteen thousand guilders. Also in fifteen f fourteen, peasants
in the Duchy of Wurttemberg rose up with members of
the poorer urban classes and they rebelled against the duke.
This was an uprising that came to be known as
the Poor Conrad movement. Guts was one of the people

(15:13):
who was hired to suppress this uprising, and he also
kept feuding and captured nobles to hold them for ransom.
He made a lot of money through these various feuds
and kidnappings and mercenary work. In fifteen seventeen he bought
Hornberg Castle as his personal stronghold in residence. In fifteen nineteen,

(15:34):
Gutz was hired by Duke Ulrich von Wurttemberg to fight
in a war against the Swabian League, during which he
was captured. He was held at an Inn for three years.
In fifteen twenty two, he finally negotiated a settlement for
his release, including taking a vow not to participate in
any more feuding.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
Goods basically retired at this point, and it seems that
he also converted tot Stanism. He doesn't spell that out
in his autobiography, but reading between the lines, this seems
to have been. When this happened, he went back to
Hornberg Castle. He spent some time with his family, but
a few years later he was drawn into another conflict

(16:16):
that took him out of retirement. We will get to
that after a sponsor break. The Poor Conrad movement that
we mentioned earlier was one of a series of peasant
uprisings in the sixteenth century. Another is known as the

(16:39):
German Peasants War of fifteen twenty five. Like the Poor
Conrad movement, this was a response to taxes and duties
that had been imposed upon the peasant class by the
Swabian League. The Peasant's War was also connected to the
Protestant Reformation and the idea of a person's individual faith
and relationship with God rather than the supremacy of the

(17:02):
Catholic Church. The peasants involved in this uprising drafted a
set of demands to present to the Swabian League, known
as the Twelve Articles. These included the right for each
community to choose its own pastor, and provisions for how
tides given to the Church should be used. Some of
the demands really highlight how few rights the peasant class had.

(17:24):
They included things like the freedom to own property and
the freedom to hunt fish and cut wood. These are
things most peasants could not do since nearly all the
land was owned by the nobility, who did not allow
anyone else to use it. There were also articles about
fair rent and an end to oppression by the nobility. Yeah,
this is a pretty interesting human rights document. By late

(17:48):
April of fifteen twenty five, the Protestant Fraternity of Peasants
had a fighting force numbering about twelve thousand, known as
the Bright Shining Band, led by George Metzler and vandel Hips.
Their numbers and the fact that about a quarter.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
Of them had firearms meant that they had successfully attacked
some nobles estates, but it was clear that they needed
somebody more experience to lead them. In some accounts, this
was motivated by an incident in which the peasants had
massacred the nobles in a city they had attacked. That
had caused reformer Martin Luther to denounce them, So they

(18:24):
decided they needed to find a leader who would not
let something like that happen again. Regardless of the exact motivations, though,
they went to Hornberg Castle and they lay siege to it,
demanding that Gutfrid Vaughan Relishingen joined them. According to his
later court testimony and his autobiography, he really did not

(18:44):
have a choice in this, and he probably could not
have withstood an ongoing siege at Hornberg Castle against a
force that large. While he probably wasn't all that moved
by the Peasants' situation or their demands, aligning with them
did pit him against Thisabian league and against a lot
of nobles he'd previously had feuds or other disputes with.

(19:05):
So while some of the more modern accounts kind of
paint him as kind of an early Renaissance robin Hood
rising up with the poor against the nobility, he really
had his own reasons to participate, which seemed pretty self serving.
He signed an agreement to take command on April twenty fourth,
fifteen twenty five. He and the Bright Shining Band then

(19:27):
went around to other estates recruiting, that is, forcing other
nobles to join them. This meant that there were progressively
more and more people with the bands who had experience
in combat and tactics, and it also meant that Goods
had more people to back up his story that he
had been forced into this as well. On May fifth,

(19:47):
Goods and Vendall Hipler issued a declaration that significantly weakened
the demands made in the twelve articles. Goods had already
faced criticism from within the band, since there were people
who knew about the role that he'd played putting down
the poor Conrad rebellion, but this weakening of their demands
made people dislike him even more. On May eighth, the

(20:08):
Bright Shining Band lay siege to Wurtzburg, and eventually Marienberg
Fortress was the only thing there they hadn't captured. The
band tried to lay siege to it, but this was
not nearly as effective as their earlier attacks on other
towns and estates had been. This fortress was up on
top of a hill, and it was very well fortified,

(20:29):
and the land around it had been entirely cleared of
trees and other cover as a precautionary measure as word
had spread about this advancing peasant army. So if they
wanted to attack, it was up a hill. There's plenty
of like line of sight from the people being besieged,
and like nowhere to hide on the way to get

(20:50):
up there. The Peasant's army assaulted the walls of the
fortress on May fifteenth, which was something else. The force
inside had already taken steps to get ready for. Although
the nobles were vastly outnumbered, they had prepared things like
boiling water and pitched to dump on the attackers. This
whole thing sounds like it was a truly gruesome battle,

(21:11):
and the Peasants army faced heavy losses. They didn't give up, though,
and after this they got some miners who had joined
their cause to try to tunnel under the walls. Eventually, though,
reinforcements arrived from the Swabian League and Goots and the
peasants withdrew. Morale started to fall in the Bright Shining
Band after this, and people started deserting. On May twenty eighth,

(21:35):
Gutz said he was going out to do some recon
and he left and he never came back. In some accounts,
he then led a force that destroyed another branch of
the peasant's army. Ultimately, whether he was involved or not,
the peasant armies were defeated and a lot of the
people who had joined them were killed. Guts was subpoenaed
to answer for his role in all of this in

(21:57):
fifteen twenty six. He argued that he had been forced
into helping the peasants, and he said he'd strategically tried
to minimize the damage that they were doing without them
realizing it. He was exonerated by the Imperial Court that October,
but the Swabian League, who at this point had a
very long and checkered history with Gutz van Berlishingen, they

(22:19):
were not satisfied. They either lured him to a meeting
by saying that they were going to clear him of
some charges related to an earlier war, or they just
captured him while he was traveling. Either way, he was
imprisoned for two more years and only released in thirteen
fifty after he paid reparations and swore an oath that
he would not go far from home or even mount

(22:42):
a horse. His second prosthesis was probably made some time
after he was released. This one was more complex than
the one that he'd had made in fifteen oh four.
It went up to his elbow, and each of the
fingers had three articulated joints, while his thumb had two
ratchet Mechanisms inside the fingers and thumb meant they could

(23:03):
individually be locked into position and a button released them.
The wrist could also be rotated fifteen degrees in either direction,
changing the angle of the hand. This allowed him to
use the prosthesis to grip things that needed to be
held at different angles, like the angle needed to hold
a quill versus the angle needed to hold playing cards.

(23:25):
There were pros and cons with this prosthesis Compared to
the earlier one. The fingers could be moved individually, and
the joints could be locked into more positions. In general,
the second prosthesis could also be used to grip smaller,
more delicate objects, but it wasn't as sturdy as the
older prostsis had been, and at the same time, it

(23:46):
was a lot heavier. It weighed about fifteen hundred grams
while the older one was only about six hundred that's
about fifty two ounces or three point three pounds, as
compared to the smaller prosthesis, which was only about twenty
one ounces or one point three pounds. It's possible that
he used both both prostises for the rest of his
life for different purposes, like one for combat and the

(24:09):
other one for leisure and sundays. I don't know why
the idea that one is for leisure cracks me up,
but it does, especially because it's heavy. Like if it's heavy,
but you can hold your playing cards with it, maybe
better than the other one. Yeah, presumably your year also
supporting it with maybe a table, because yeah, if you

(24:29):
carry around three point three pounds, that sounds like not much,
but over the course of like a day or even
a couple hours, it starts to feel really heavy. Well,
and this is one of the criticisms of like today's
increasingly complex pristisis like made without input from prosthetics users
of This is so much heavier than the other one

(24:51):
that I had before. This does not help me. We
mentioned that he might use one for combat, and that's
because in spite of the that oath he took, he
did return to combat. In fifteen forty Charles the Fifth
released him from his oath so that he could fight
against the Ottoman Empire. In fifteen forty four. He was

(25:11):
also part of Charles's campaigns against the French. He did
finally really retire sometime after the French campaign, and he
really spent most of the rest of his life living
at Hornberg Castle. He had been married twice, and over
the course of his life he had ten children. He
died in his sleep on July twenty third, fifteen sixty two,

(25:31):
at the age of eighty two, which I just find
incredible given that he spent so much of his life
at combat. He spent a lot of his time in
deadly situations and lived until the age of eighty two.
His tomb is at Chantal Abbey in Baden Wurttemberg. In
the last years of his life, good to become blind,

(25:53):
and a year or so before his death, he narrated
an autobiography to a scribe. Tracy has not read this since,
she said earlier. The only English language version that she
could find was published by a white nationalist publisher, but,
based on critical commentary on older German language versions, is
a pretty self aggrandizing work which often does not match

(26:14):
up with the historical record. Like we said, it makes
it sound like he pulled himself up from poverty through
knightly valor. This autobiography stayed within the family in manuscript
form until the eighteenth century, and then about twenty years
after it was first published, Johann Wolfgang von Goutte used
it as the basis for his first play that was

(26:36):
called Gouts Fund Bernish Gent, which debuted in seventeen seventy three.
Guts had not really been a well known figure in
Germany before that, but Gutta's play framed him as a
freedom fighter and it turned him into something of a
national hero. And then he became a character in multiple
other German works, including operas, poems, and novels, and then

(26:58):
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart referenced him in at least two musical works,
one of them being a cannon called lechmia marche or
lick my arse. This title is a reference to a
quote attributed to Gutz Vanderlishingen, which was popularized in various
fictional works about him. The story is that in one

(27:20):
of his encounters with the Swabian League, he was besieged
in order to surrender, and he refused, calling out the
window quote, tell your captain that for his imperial majesty
I entertain as ever all due respect, but for himself
he may kiss my arse. Sometimes that epithet is known
as the Swabian salute.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
Gouts von Berlishingen's two hand prostthecees have gotten a lot
of attention over the years. In eighteen fifteen, engraver Christian
van Mechel produced detailed diagrams of the second prosthesis and
its inner workings. He had the actual prosthesis, or what
we believe may have been the actual prost thesis, and
he had permission from the family to take it apart

(28:03):
for this purpose. Much more recently, in nineteen eighty two,
Guncher Quasi Crook worked with the same prosthesis, although without
dismantling it, concluding that it had not been used for
actual sword fighting. In more recent years, there have also
been a number of projects to build three D recreations
of both prostses and computer aided design reconstructions. There are

(28:26):
two Prosses in the collection of Yaks Thousand Castle Museum today.
They are generally described as the ones that actually belonged
to Goods of the Iron Hand, but it is not
one hundred percent certain that they actually were the ones
used by him.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
Oh Goods. Oh Goods. That'd be a great name for
a cat. By the way, Yeah, except that it has
now weird associations. Yeah, a little bit. We'll talk about
them more Friday. Do you have unweird association email? I do.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
This is from Kathy and Kathy wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy.
I'm a longtime listener of Stephi misson history class and
a proud Philadelphian. I was just listening to the behind
the scenes on Rebecca Crumpler when you mentioned an archive
collection at Drexel University about early black doctors, compiled by
Margaret Jaredo. I thought to myself, that has to be

(29:19):
the same collection. Let me explain. Two years ago, I
was privileged enough to take a special section of the
course Web du Blois and Philadelphia's seventh Ward for Philadelphia
Teachers with doctor Amy Hiller at the University of Pennsylvania
through the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia. The next year, doctor

(29:40):
Hiller taught this course again for penn first year students.
She invited the teachers who had taken her class previously
to watch her current students present their final projects. I'm
gonna pause from the letter to say the next Kathy
describes this project by these two first year students at Penn.

(30:01):
I listened to this podcast that they made. I thought
it was very good. I don't want to like direct
people to it. It makes me uncomfortable to like send
a big podcast listenership toward first year college students school project, uh,
because I know what can happen when things escape the

(30:24):
sphere you made them for on the internet, right right.
It was a very good episode of the podcast, though,
And you know, if I were to hear from either
of them that they were totally comfortable with me sharing
it with the entire world, I would do that, but
I don't want to do that without their permission. Back
to the email, you will hear in it that the
collection was not easy to access. So don't feel bad

(30:46):
that you did not go to it on your last trip.
But maybe one day you'll have the time to return,
search through it, and do a podcast on several on
what you found out. I loved the podcast the two
students made, but it left me wanting to learn more.
Thank you for all that you do has a history
nerd and history teacher, I appreciate your podcast both professionally
and personally. PS I am allergic to shedding animals, but

(31:09):
as a pet tax here is a picture of some
of the beautiful snails in our fish tank. Sincerely, Kathy.
These snails are beautiful in the fish tank. It looks
like there are two of them, and the shell of
one of them has this very lovely pink tone on it,

(31:30):
and what I think is the snail's face is also pink.
This is a very beautiful picture. So yes, as I said,
I listened to this podcast episode that these students made.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
I really like it.

Speaker 2 (31:44):
What Kathy is referencing regarding the collection not being easy
to access is they make a point that the library
facility that it is in is open in sort of
a Monday through Friday nine to five situation, and it's
also not at the main library branch. It's in a
residential area. So like, personally, had I been in Philadelphia

(32:09):
with a day off during the week, that would have
been something that I could have dealt with. But like,
having your collection only open from nine to five Monday
through Friday means that it's like out of bounds for
a lot of researchers, especially since another point that's made
in the interview with Margaret Jaredo, like there's just not

(32:30):
a lot of funding and there's especially not a lot
of funding for black historians trying to research black history,
and so a lot of people are doing this work
in addition to other jobs. So having a collection that
is only opened during the week in quote business hours
and is not like with the rest of the library

(32:50):
facility just makes it harder for people to access that.
So thank you so much, Kathy for this email. Thank
you so much for sending me the link to the
podcast episode that the students did. Thank you for snails
and the snail picts are really really pretty.

Speaker 1 (33:08):
Yeah, I will take a snail. I'm telling you, I
can't think of an animal that's off limits, even if
you have a pet, roach, tarantula, scorpion, I love tarantula there.
My brother had a tarantula when we were kids. He
sort of inherited the classroom tarantula. I don't. There was
a whole story of like how this tarantula came to

(33:30):
live in the classroom. Tarantulas can live for a very
long time. We had to keep crickets in the basement
to feed to the tarantula. There are still crickets down there.
I had lots of tarantulis as a kid because we
lived in Arizona, and I would scoop them up off
the street like a dummy. Oh fun, Okay, then, uh so,

(33:51):
if you'd like to write to us about this or
any other podcast, we're a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot
com and we're on social media at miss and History.
It's where you'll find our Facebook and whatnot, mostly just
where we put notifications. The new episodes are live.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
You can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app
and wherever else you want to get your podcasts. Stuff
you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,

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