Jamaica's Maroon Wars

Maroons are Africans and people of African ancestry who escaped enslavement and established communities in the Caribbean and parts of the Americas. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Jamaica's Maroon communities clashed with British colonial government.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you 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 Fry. Today we
are headed to Jamaica, which, yeah, not a place who
talked that much about on the show even in the

(00:24):
past archive not a whole lot about Jamaica. So we're
headed to Jamaica to talk about a pair of wars
between the Jamaican Maroons and the British colonial government. For
listeners who are not familiar with that term, Maroons are
Africans and people of African ancestry who escaped enslavement and
established communities, usually in remote and hard to access parts

(00:46):
of the Caribbean and some of the America's, sometimes also
intermarrying with the local indigenous population. The term probably comes
from the Spanish cimarron for wild or untamed, or maybe
the French maha on which meant brown uh and although
particularly summern was initially used to describe wild animals and

(01:07):
escaped livestock, it's one that Maroon communities still in existence
today used to describe themselves. In Jamaica, specifically, the word
maroon came into use around sixteen seventy. Some of the
Maroon communities during the days of the trans Atlantic slave
trade didn't survive very long due to disease and starvation

(01:27):
and the efforts of slave catchers and others to find
and capture and destroy. But places that had a combination
of an enslaved labor pool and remote inaccessible territory were
likely to become home to a marine settlement, and that
settlement was typically heavily influenced by the African and indigenous

(01:47):
cultures of the people living there. There were, and in
some cases still are Maroon communities all over the Caribbean,
as well as parts of North, Central and South America,
anywhere that the jane was difficult. So this included the
Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina, the Bayous
of the Deep South, uh Surinamas Jungles, and the mountains

(02:11):
and ravines of Jamaica, which is where we are talking
about today. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Jamaica was
inhabited by the Chino people, who were also called the
area Walkins. These indigenous people lived through a combination of
agriculture and fishing, and also inhabited other parts of the
Caribbean besides just Jamaica. We really don't have a thorough

(02:32):
sense of their history or culture in Jamaica. Though Christopher
Columbus arrived in Jamaica on May five, four during his
second voyage to the West Indies, the first permanent Spanish
settlement followed in Jamaica fifteen years later. The Spanish quickly
enslaved the Chino people, who did not survive long thanks

(02:53):
to smallpox and other introduced diseases, warfare, and essentially being
worked to death. Even as the Chino population was driven
to extinction, the Spanish population in Jamaica didn't grow particularly quickly.
By sixteen fifty five, there were about fifteen hundred Spanish
people living on Jamaica, and they had an enslaved workforce

(03:14):
of between five hundred and fifteen hundred people. The estimates
on that number vary, which is why it's so wide,
and about one hundred of those enslaved were Chinos, who
were by this point the last of their people, at
least the last of their people in Jamaican. They basically
were driven to extinction all over the Caribbean, but the
timing varies from one island to another. In addition to

(03:37):
the eradication of the indigenous population. Spain did not make
particularly good use of Jamaica. They had hoped to find
gold on the island, but didn't, and once they gave
up on the gold mine idea, they basically approached Jamaica
as something they were occupying so nobody else could have it,
not as an actual valuable resource to exploit. Consequently, that

(03:58):
same year, which was sixty five, when an English fleet
arrived off the coast of Spanish Town, the island had
very little in the way of defenses. The fleet, commanded
by Admiral Sir William Penn and General Robert Venables, had
been directed by Oliver Cromwell to uproot Spain's presence in
the Caribbean. Even though they had close to forty ships

(04:19):
and eight thousand men, the fleet had just failed to
drive the Spanish out of San Domingo. Jamaica, still kind
of cobbled together and poorly defended after almost a hundred
and fifty years of Spanish occupation, really seemed like a
much easier target, and it was. Spanish colonists. Many of
them immediately fled north to Cuba, leaving their enslaved workforce behind.

(04:42):
The Spanish colonists who stayed withdrew from Spanish Town and
other settlements that were under immediate threat from the English,
and they fled to more remote outposts, or in some
cases hid and less hospitable parts of the island's interior.
The enslaved people who had been left behind, Some of
them explicitly set free, but others essentially abandoned, armed themselves

(05:05):
and retreated deeper into Jamaica's interior, where they would form
the first permanent Maroon communities on the island. They hunted
and began at least some crop cultivation, but they also
survived through harassing and raiding the English plantations and settlements.
The Maroons organized themselves in these earliest years into three bands,

(05:25):
one of them we really don't know much at all about,
but the other two each had their own leaders who
made their way into the historical record. There was Lubolo
a k A. Wand Lubol or sometimes Wanda Bulus. He
was the head of one faction, and then Wanda Sarah's
was head of the other. Don Christopher A. Saucy, the
last Spanish governor in Jamaica, attempted to mount a resistance

(05:48):
to the English invasion, and he looked to the Maroons
under Lobolo for aid. The Marions were at this point
a much bigger threat to the English than the Spanish were.
There were more of them, they were better armed, and
they were increasingly far more familiar with the island's more
mountainous territory, and they were becoming adept at guerrilla warfare.

(06:08):
While Lubolo's men were not at all willing to go
back to being enslaved, they did think that it would
be better if the Spanish retook control of Jamaica rather
than staying in the hands of the English, because, to
use the basic figure of speech, the Spanish where the
devil they knew. Over the next five years, Spain made
several attacks on British plantations and settlements. In all the

(06:32):
ones that have made their way into the historical record,
Maroons were present as well, and in addition to aiding
with the attacks on the British, the Maroons were also
acting as guides and guards to the Spanish in the
Jamaican back country, in some cases even supplying their food.
By sixteen fifty eight, English Governor Edward Doyley was fed

(06:52):
up with the perpetual skirmishes with the lingering Spanish presence
in Jamaica, so he went to Lubolo himself, offering him
and his people freedom and self governance if they switched sides.
The below, recognizing that the fighting was starting to jeopardize
the crops that had become the island's primary food source,
and really finding it appealing that he would officially have

(07:16):
self government, self governance, and liberty, agreed. Although the Spanish
presence in Jamaica ended by sixteen sixty after the English
and the Marines teamed up against them, the island would
not be formally ceded to English. To the English for
another decade, Lovolo and his people were given their promised
freedom and thirty acres of land a peace, with Lobolo

(07:39):
named magistrate and his fighting force becoming known as the
Black Militia. He worked with the English for roughly three years,
at which point someone possibly Wanda Sarah's, killed him, viewing
his shift of allegiance from Spain to England as a betrayal. Yeah,
I found one source that said definitely that's who it was,
and and I found another source that had all this

(08:01):
information about warrant to Siris and did made no mention
of it at all, which seems like a huge thing
to leave out if it's that's if that's how it
went down. The First Maroon War in Jamaica grew out
of England's efforts to establish its governance once it had
gotten rid of the Spanish, as well as shifts in
the island's use of enslaved labor, and we will talk

(08:23):
about that. After a quick sponsor break in sixteen sixty two,
after Jamaica was free of the last of the Spanish
stragglers and England was attempting to establish a colonial government,
it was obvious that there needed to be some kind

(08:43):
of consideration of the Maroon population. They were certainly not
going to return to being enslaved, but their presence was
also outside the bounds of English society. Eventually, instructions to
this newly created English government read quote of encouragements as
as securely you may to such Negroes, natives and others

(09:06):
as shall submit to live peaceable under His Majesty's obedience
and in due submission to the government of the island.
The peace between the English and the Maroons didn't last, though.
By sixteen seventy Wanda Sara's and his band had been
outlawed and placed under a thirty pound bounty apiece. And
at the same time, England took a completely different approach

(09:29):
to the island than Spain had. It moved towards establishing
huge sugar plantations and importing enslaved Africans as labor. Yeah,
there were lots and lots of enslaved people who were
imported into Jamaica as a result of this decision, which, uh,
basically England was like, man, we can grow so much

(09:49):
sugar here and makes so much money, whereas Spain had
sort of been like, if we have this, no one
else can have it, and it would a lot at all.
For the next few decades, as these plantations grew and
their enslaved labor forces grew as well, Jamaica saw a

(10:11):
huge series of uprisings by the people who were enslaved
on the sugar plantations. In sixteen seventy three, two hundred
enslaved people rose up against a planter, killed him and
several other white people, plundered surrounding plantations, and then retreated
into the mountains. More revolts followed in sixteen seventy eight,
sixteen eighty five, sixteen eighty six, sixteen ninety and sixteen

(10:35):
ninety six. It was basically an ongoing series of uprisings
on the plantations Simultaneously. The Maroon population grew, both through
the survivors of successful revolts and people who just managed
to escape in the chaos, and it grew further in
sixteen sixty nine or sixteen seventy when a slave ship

(10:55):
wrecked off the coast of Jamaica, and the people whom
were able to make it to the shore mostly wound
up moving into the interior and taking refuge with the Maroons.
Soon Jamaica was home to two broad groups of Maroons,
the Windward Maroons, who lived on the eastern part of
the island, and the Leeward Maroons, who lived in the

(11:16):
northwest part of the island. In spite of malaria, tropical illness, heat,
a devastating earthquake and tsunami in sixte two, and being
constantly harassed by the French, the Maroons and pirates congregating
in Port Royal. The English presence in Jamaica continued to grow. However,
the white population was progressively more outnumbered by its enslaved workforce.

(11:40):
By seventeen o three, there were about forty five thousand
enslaved Africans on Jamaica. Only about ten percent of the
people in Jamaica were white, and in some places the
ratio was twenty five to one. By seventeen two, English
sugar plantations had spread over most of the arable land
in Jamaica. They had started to cut off the scattered

(12:02):
Maroons settlements from one another, disrupting trade lines and lines
of communication. And because the British planters and slave owners
had become increasingly prosperous, most of them had started sending
their children back to England to be educated, and then
they followed themselves. So Jamaica basically became a nation of
absentee landlords, with plantations that were run by agents and attorneys,

(12:26):
under the rule of a governor who was really the
Crowns representative on the island, and a system of laws
that either ignored or disadvantaged the Maroon population. According to
Maroon oral history, the uprising skirmishes and raids on plantations
we've already talked about. We're all part of their first
war against England, which they waged for eighty years. But

(12:49):
from the British point of view, it was a lot narrower,
starting only in the late seventeen twenties when they started
making a more orchestrated effort to find Maroons settlements and
conquer the people in them. This more orchestrated effort, the
British had a lot working against them because they were
so vastly outnumbered by their enslaved workforce, and they didn't

(13:10):
have like an official military support provided by the Crown
to help them in this effort. They had to train
enslaved men as gunners and also used their enslaved workforce
as porters when searching and fighting against the Maroons. Unsurprisingly,
a lot of these men abandoned their posts, taking their
weapons and their to cargo with them to join the Maroons.

(13:33):
So there was like a lot of desertion that also
robbed the English of their supplies and weapons. In my head,
this plays out as such like a Benny Hill sort
of confused, you know, just cannot get anything organized and
like to go according to planned situation. Yeah, there's a

(13:54):
they're One of the reasons that I wanted to do
this episode is that there's kind of a perception that
that during slavery there was not a lot of resistance
against slave owners. This is an example of how that
was false, uh, and how the British were just continually

(14:14):
like constantly being rated and constantly losing. Uh. You know
that the people they had trained to be soldiers in
this context and like just being harassed and uh and
bothered continually by the Marion population. And another disadvantage that

(14:35):
they had was that by this point, the Maroons were
living in some of Jamaica's most inaccessible areas, and they
were deeply familiar with the terrain. They combined this knowledge
with guerrilla warfare techniques, including the use of camouflage, ambushes,
catching people in crossfire, communication through horns and drums, and
extensive espionage work, including among enslaved people on the plantations themselves.

(15:01):
One of the maroons key strategists was a woman known
as Nanny, also Queen Nanny or Granny Nanny. She was
from the Windward Maroons. Uh. Nanny described herself as Coramanti,
which was the English word for people from the Ashanti
Empire and what's now Ghana. Although there's not a lot
conclusively known about her biography, she's credited with having masterminded

(15:24):
the strategy for the Windward Maroons resistance during the First
Maroon War. In addition to her strategic work, Nanny was
also an obi a woman. Obia is a belief system
that involves the influence of spirits in daily life, as
well as medicine and healing, ritual and magic. Today, she
is the only female national hero of Jamaica and her

(15:46):
image is on the Jamaican five hundred dollar note. In
seventeen thirty two, the British took Nanny Town, which was named,
of course for Nanny. The Windward Maroons recaptured it in
seventeen thirty three, and the English can heard it once
again in seventeen thirty four after a massive five day battle.
Nanny herself was rumored to have been killed in seventeen

(16:08):
thirty three, but she was at this point actually still living.
She wasn't when it came to making negotiations with the
Windward Maroons UH. Those generally happened with um male captains
in the in the Maroon society, but Nanny was the
person that had like the absolute respect UH and influence

(16:31):
in terms of how they were doing the fighting. After
the fall of Nanny Town, the survivor split up about
three hundred of them, including children, made a one hundred
mile march to try to meet up with the Leeward
Maroons to a town under the leadership of a man
named Cudjoe. But the British tried to attack and disperse
the column before they reached that town, but they failed,

(16:52):
and they became worried of what would happen once they
had joined forces with the Leeward Maroons. However, the refugees
from Nanny Town weren't welcome in the Leeward settlement, partly
because there wasn't enough food to support that many newcomers. Additionally,
though cud Joe, while he had a reputation for being fierce,
also had a reputation of being somewhat ambivalent about the British.

(17:16):
He was definitely willing to raid British plantations when it
suited him and to fight back against the British incursions
into his territory, but he was a little more pragmatic
as far as thinking it was probably not going to
be possible to completely drive the British off of Jamaica,
which is what some of the Windward Maroons seemed to
really want to do. He was more interested in securing

(17:38):
freedom and autonomy for himself and his people, even if
that meant that the British were still on the island,
so he didn't entirely agree with the Windward Maroons more
aggressive and continual attacks on the British. As the Windward Maroons,
who hadn't fled to Cudjo's people regrouped and Cudjo's men

(17:58):
took a cautious but aggressive stance, there was a brief
lull in fighting in seventeen thirty six. In seventeen thirty seven,
the Windward refugees went back towards Nanny Town, feeling both
unwelcomed by the Leeward Maroons and anxious to return to
the fight with the British. When the British tried to
put a stop to this conflict in seventeen thirty nine, they,

(18:19):
perhaps unsurprisingly given his previous behavior, started with Kujo and
the Leeward Maroons, not with Nanny and her captains and
the Windward Maroons. We'll talk about how the first war
came to an end and then also wound up leading
to the second one. After another quick sponsor break in

(18:44):
late March of seventeen thirty nine, Governor Edward Trelawnee commissioned
Colonel John Guthrie to negotiate a peace treaty to end
the Maroon War. Guthrie started with Captain's Cudjoe and Acampong
of the Leeward Maroons. Trelawney himself was eager enough to
get this over with that instead of just staying in

(19:06):
town to wait for a treaty to be brought to him,
he hiked out to a vantage point near the negotiations
so he could be on hand to sign the treaty
as soon as it was finalized. Cudjoe signed the fifteen
Point Treaty on March one of seventeen thirty nine. The
treaty put an end to hostilities between the British and
the Leeward Maroons, and it granted them freedom and liberty,

(19:28):
along with fifteen hundred acres of land in northwest Jamaica,
stretching out from Trelawney Town, the main lyward settlement, through
what's known as Cockpit Country. The Leeward Maroons had the
right to hunt on the island as long as it
was not within three miles of a white settlement. They
also had the right to plant crops and raise livestock
and sell what they grew and raised at the market,

(19:49):
as long as they had a license to do it.
The treaty also offered the Leeward Maroons some legal protections
and assigned them some obligations. The Maroons had the right
to petition officers and magistrates for justice in the event
that a white person did them harm. The Leeward Maroons
could also handle justice for crimes that their own people committed,

(20:11):
as long as those crimes were not severe enough to
warrant the death penalty, in which case that was supposed
to be handed over to the British court. They had
to have an annual meeting with Jamaica's Commander in chief,
who was British as and to white people, whose roles
were not really defined in this treaty, were to live
with the Maroons in Trelawney Town. I'm imagining that these

(20:34):
were almost like ambassadors who were living but they did
it didn't really specify what they were supposed to be
doing in this treaty. It was also up to the
Leeward Maroons to maintain roads between their settlements and the
British towns. Some of the treaty's terms instantly earned the
Leeward Maroons a lot of enemies. They had to quote take, kill, suppress,

(20:56):
or destroy rebels on the island, which usually and other Maroons,
but more controversially quote if any Negroes shall hereafter run
away from their master or owners and fall into Captain
Cudjo's hands, they shall immediately be sent back to the
chief magistrate of the next parish where they are taken,
and those that bring them are to be satisfied for

(21:18):
their trouble, as legislatures shall appoint. In other words, following
the signing of this treaty, if people escaped enslavement and
made their way to Kujo and the Leeward Maroons, the
Maroons would send them back. This made Jamaica's enslaved population
incredibly angry, and this was the case for some of
Kujo's own people to one faction attempt at a last

(21:42):
minute coup to keep the treaty from going into effect,
but when Kjo heard about it, he arrested four of
the ringleaders and turned them over to the governor. Especially
considering how much maroons survival until this point had evolved
had involved rating, plantations and liberating people who were enslaved.

(22:02):
There people saw this as a huge betrayal, quite understandably,
and like that continues still today. The governor, recognizing that
the deep anger stemming from these provisions had the potential
to make the situation on the plantations worse instead of better,
sent troops to one of the plantations where descent had

(22:23):
been the loudest, severely punished the people enslave there and
executed many of them. For the most part, the Windward
Maroons did not even know that these negotiations had happened
once those treaties were signed, But once they learned about it,
they realized that between the British and the Leeward Maroons
they were vastly outnumbered. So under drest they signed their

(22:45):
own very similar treaty on December twenty three. The captain
from the Windward Maroons who I signed this was a
man named Kow. Things were relatively peaceful between the British
and the Maroons for more than fifty years, but the
British population on Jamaica as before, continued to grow, including

(23:07):
taking over land that was supposed to be allotted to
the Maroons. Uh skirmishes started to flare up again, and
the Maroons stopped returning escape east from the plantations, and
they started raiding those plantations again. Then two Maroons were
convicted of stealing pigs and they were publicly flogged. This
punishment was carried out by the foreman of the prison

(23:30):
in Montego Bay, who was black, and it was done
in front of some people who had escaped from enslavement,
who the Maroons had returned, and watching from the prison.
These returned escape ease taunted and jeered the two men
as they were being punished. The Maroons anger over this
incident was twofold. They felt number one under the terms

(23:51):
of the previous treaty they should have been able to
handle dolling out their own punishments, and the way the
punishment had been carry it out was also particularly humiliating.
This time, the conflict was much shorter. It lasted only
about a year. Governor Alexander Lindsay ordered the Maroons to

(24:12):
stand down by August twelfth se but nearly all of
them refused. He extended the deadline to December twenty one,
and then to January one of the following year. Finally,
it took the recruitment of additional forces and a shipment
of hunting dogs brought in from Cuba to finally get
the Maroons to surrender. Yeah, that previous conflict had been

(24:34):
a lot, lot, lot longer, but this one was a
lot more vicious um and that surrender finally happened in
March of seventeen ninety six, although many of the Maroons
didn't actually lay down their arms until a little later.
Even when the fighting was over, Governor Lindsay considered the

(24:54):
situation way too precarious to allow the Maroons to return home.
He was particularly worried about the ones from uh Trelawnee Town,
which was the largest Maroons settlement in Jamaica, so he
boarded five hundred Trelawney Town Maroons onto two transport vessels
that were waiting in the harbor by Port Royal, with

(25:17):
the plan of deporting them in this he had no
destination in mind, no plan, and no authority from the
British government or the Crown. Eventually he decided on Nova Scotia,
where after the Revolutionary War enslaved Africans who had fought
for the British had been sent. The governor got a

(25:37):
deportation law passed by Jamaica's House of Assembly on May one,
of sevente Even though this plan sounds very bizarre in
a lot of ways, he was completely certain that the
government was going to be like, yeah, you do that,
because this is a bad situation. Meanwhile, the Trelawnee Town
Maroons from the transport petitioned to be released under the

(25:59):
ground that they had laden down their arms under the
condition that they would not be deported. At first, they
suggested that they be given some other territory besides Trelawney
Town that would be further removed from British settlements, such
as deep into the Blue Mountains. When that failed, they
instead requested deportation to another Caribbean island Instead. The transports

(26:22):
set sail for Nova Scotia on May eighth. The Governor
wrote to Sir John Wentworth, Governor of Nova Scotia, on
June three, to inform him of the incoming five hundred deportees.
The transports landed in Halifax on July twenty two and
twenty three. H Lindsay's letter to Wentworth arrived in August.
Of course, having had no notice that any of this

(26:45):
was about to happen, there was not a lot that
Governor Wentworth could do about it. Once these two surprise
transports of Jamaican maroons arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and
that first winter after their arrival and Halifax was particularly brutal.
Even if it had not been particularly brutal, the the

(27:06):
comparison of winter in Halifax, Nova Scotia to literally any
season in Jamaica could almost not be more opposite. Yeah,
it would have been brutal to them, even if it
had been Nova Scotia's mildest winter on record. So they
wound up petitioning to be relocated to somewhere with a
more familiar climate, and those petitions were ongoing for three

(27:30):
and a half years. They were finally sent to Freetown,
Sierra Leone, which was by then home to many of
the enslaved Africans that the British had freed during the
Revolutionary War, who had also previously been sent to Nova Scotia.
This whole Nova Scotia plan is so bizarre to me. Yes,
that's all I have, And Sierra Leone is a whole

(27:51):
other story in and of itself, so we're not gonna
dig into that. But no, yeah, that's a whole tale
that could be its own episode or episodes. Yeah, this
is one those things where we have to stop the
story somewhere. UH. Sierra Leone and its settlement by previously
enslaved people did become the model for later attempts to

(28:13):
settle Liberia UM. So there is some similar history elsewhere
in our archive about that. And as we noted at
the top of the show, there are still multiple marine
settlements in Jamaica today and the people living there generally
continue to observe a culture and traditions that have roots
in Africa, particularly the Acon people in what used to

(28:36):
be known as the Gold Coast and is now Ghana,
And there are also influences from what's now Togo, Beneen, Nigeria,
and Madagascar. So, as we UH sort of referenced earlier
in the show, this is an example of how uh
we don't hear about it as much in history classes.
But there was ongoing resistance to the institution of slavery
for a long time in places um that it was

(28:58):
practiced in the America's and the Caribbean UM, especially before
the signing of that treaty that so many people viewed
as a betrayal. I watched an interview as I was
preparing for this um with some of the Jamaican Maroons
living today, and I don't remember which African nation their
interviewer was from, but he asked very pointed questions about

(29:22):
that part of the treaty, um about like whether they
agreed that having peace with the English was worth than
saying that they were going to return people who escaped
from the plantations, and then also whether if that were
happening today they would have made the same decisions. He
was very direct in his his questions about that. Do

(29:45):
you have a little bit of listener mailed to polish
this one off? Sure do. It is from Jade, and
it is about our recent episode on Ed Roberts and
the Independent Living movement. Jade says, Dear Tracy and Holly,
I recently listened to your podcast, Ed Roberts. I just
wanted to let you guys know that you do amazing
work and make a difference for people, including myself. I'm

(30:08):
gonna skip a little bit of personal detail, but Jade
writes about being diagnosed with a fairly rare disorder that
causes a defect in collagen to continue. As a result
of this defect, I'm extremely flexible and prone to numerous injuries.
I suffer from chronic pain every day and can't do

(30:28):
much of the things that a normal person would be
able to do. What makes this disorder so hard isn't
just the pain, because this is but because this is
an invisible illness. There's not any symptoms you can see
from the outside. People can't see how much pain I feel.
Since I've been diagnosed, my condition has only gotten worse. First,
I had to listen. First, I had to learn how

(30:49):
to use a cane than a wheelchair, which I'm still
getting used to. Coming to terms with my disability has
been extremely hard. Having people stare at me to be
rude or because I quote don't look like I'm just
sabled is something I struggle with daily. I thought Mr
roberts attitude about the staring was great and something I
should learn to copy. It's all too easy to be

(31:09):
anxious about it or get upset with someone. I wanted
to tell you that this episode was incredibly moving to me.
I never learned about Mr Roberts and any of my
history classes. Sometimes living with a disability feels very lonely.
I can feel like you're the only one who You're
the only ones who have ever gone through what you have.
That's why what you ladies do is so important. You
give people like me someone to relate to. You make

(31:31):
us feel like we're not alone. Thank you for all
that you do. You guys are amazing and I am
so thankful for people like you. You make the days
that I can't get out of bed so much more bearable.
Please keep making podcasts like you are now. We need
all the role models we can get. With love, Jade,
Thank you so much, Jade. This letter number one incredibly kind,

(31:53):
um and thoughtful and moved us both a whole lot
when we got it, uh, and then number two like
this is one of the reasons that I want to
talk about disability history on the show so much. UM.
I feel like we get a lot of requests for
some of the worst parts of disability history. UH, but

(32:17):
I think it's also really important to give more visibility
to people whose lives were about living with a disability
uh and representing that aspect of it um. Because while yes,
there are a lot of parts of disability that are
or of disability history that are horrifying today, we also

(32:40):
have a lot of stories um of basically people in
history who were disabled or became disabled. Um that like,
that's a part of their story and a a normal
part of the human experience. Um and not like a

(33:00):
sideshow of horror. Yeah, it's one of those things where
I I there's part of me that is the ninive
part of me wants to go. Of course, there have
always been disabled people. Why is this so weird? But
I recognize that there has also been a lot of
effort to not discuss any of those things. So I'm

(33:23):
so glad that Jade got something out of that. That
was Tracy's wonderful pick and her fabulous research so well
in a wonderful, wonderful suggestion from a listener I think
her name was Alyssa. She sent us a note to
remind after I was like, I didn't write that there
on and I should have. Yeah, you and I have
talked about wanting to It's a tricky balance to strike

(33:44):
on the show in terms of disability history, because we
really want to avoid stories that come off as being
inspiration for non disabled people. Right. Uh. And while it
is important to talk about the how things have progressed
and how things used to be, in a lot of times,
the way things used to be, we're horrifying. UM. It's

(34:07):
also really important to have representation that disabled people have
always been here. If you would like to write to
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(34:30):
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(34:50):
com or missed in History dot com for more on
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