November 28, 2016 • 45 mins
Author and illustrator Jason Porath joins Tracy and Holly in the studio to talk about women from history featured in his new book, including the Mancini sisters, Sayyida al-Hurra, Tomyris and Noor Inayat Khan.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class is
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I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, host of the new house Stuff Works
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You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(01:11):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. We have an amazing, awesome special guest today. Yes,
it's pretty exciting. Do you want to tell us who
you are? Hi? I'm Jason Pora. I do a project
blog turned book called Rejected Princesses. Yeah, Hi, Hi Jason.
(01:32):
So what's funny is we've gotten several letters over the
last couple of months of people so excited to tell
us that you exist. Um, and we've been planning this
episode of the show for more than a year. Yeah,
it's been a while. We've been in contact for quite
a bit, quite some time. So for the folks who
have not heard about it, tell us what Rejected Princesses is.
(01:57):
So it is an exploration of badass woman of history
and myth and uh like one or two literary figures
that would never make the cut for animated princess usually
because there's a few too many beheadings. There's a lot
of beheadings, a lot of beddings, but I illustrate them
(02:17):
in that style anyways, and do as researcher write up
as I can. Um. I'm not a trained historian and
I'm not a trained artist, but you know I'm getting better,
and yet you are published in both. Yeah. Yeah, it
feels weird. It feels weird, but it came out Okay.
Nobody has yelled at me too bad yet. Well, and
you have this giant book that we were just remarking
on before we started rolling. That is quite an impressive
(02:41):
heft of your collection, lots and lots of my artwork.
My first impression, upon like taking out getting the actual
physical copy, I was like, oh my god, this is
like a murder weapon. My second impression is why was
that my first impression? It is like a legit book.
I mean, it's it's as Tracy said, it's signific can't
in size. Well, and I think when you have been
(03:02):
writing about things like pirates and murderous queens and and
people good people too. For sure, we're going to talk
about some of them in a bit, but I can
see how the first thing your mind leaps to might
be I can knock somebody out with this. Yeah, yeah,
it's pretty amazing. So we're gonna talk to Jason about
some of your favorite princesses, and then we're going to
(03:25):
talk about a little bit more generally about rejected princesses.
Along the way. Also, yeah, okay, so who are some
of your most favorite princesses in this book? Um, So,
I'm actually gonna give you all a different answer than
I give everybody else, because I think that y'all will
appreciate this. These these two sisters, uh in a way
(03:48):
that I think most people could not, Hortense and Marie MANCHENI.
I think I labeled them the divorce pioneers of the Renaissance.
So Marie was in very nearly married to Louis the
fourteenth and Hortense was very nearly married to Charles the
second of England, and both of those fell apart, and
they had arranged marriages to shall we say, suboptimal. Her
(04:13):
tenses was worse. Marie's only tried to poison and kill her. Um.
Hortenses locked her up in a convent, and then when
she continually sort of got rowdy in there, uh, he
tried to put increasingly uh strict restrictions on her and
(04:35):
would take her inheritance, which was one of the greatest
art collections in all of France at the time. And
um any pit of a fit of passion, shall we say,
her husband went through and knocked off all of the
Genitalia on all the sculptures and then took a bucket
of black paint and painted over all the naked people.
(04:57):
He had issues. Yeah, that pains me from an art history,
like I want to when I build my time machine,
I just want to go back and punch him in
the face. I'm right there with you, like if you
want to, like, I'll hold um. But yeah, from there,
the two sort of became this um uh talk of
(05:18):
the town as they they ran across Europe fleeing their husbands,
and everybody was sort of talking about because they were
all trying. They were trying to get divorces, and they
were taking lovers male and female as they went uh,
and they were talking of the town in multiple uh countries,
all the while taking them to court, all the while
trying to sort of get a divorce, which is not
(05:39):
impossible at the time. And we're some of the only
the first women to write their own memoirs in their
own name and clear their name and sort of take
control of their own story. They were really phenomenally interesting
human beings that I had never heard of, who are
now some of my favorite people in his I have
heard the whole family of sisters because they were what
(06:01):
five sisters? Yeah, they were the Mazarine nets that there
were three Mancini sisters and there were two other cousins.
I want to believe they were all underneath their uncle, uh,
Cardinal Mazarin I think was his name. Yeah. So I've
heard them described as like the Kardashians of the Renaissance.
Does that seem like an apt comparison that would fit?
(06:23):
I mean, I would argue that they had more substance
than your average Kardashian or but um, yeah, I think
that generally fits in terms of the scope of their fame. Okay, well,
and I think the part about them taking control of
their own stories actually fits with the Kardashians in a
way that I think the Kardashians don't get quite enough
credit for. That's true, That's true. Good point loves the word.
(06:47):
Holly and I sometimes don't agree on everything. I feel
ways about things. Uh. Do we want to talk about
specific incesses? Yes, so we also have some specific princesses
that we want to talk about. So these are these
are folks who um listeners to the podcast have written
(07:11):
in to ask us to talk about and and some
of them are ones that we have had not quite
enough information to make a stuffy missed in history class
podcast about them, because it takes a lot for a
half an hour podcast, But often there is enough information
for Jason to make beautiful artwork and the explanation of
(07:32):
this person's life. Yeah. And then this is sort of
where what y'all do differs a bit from mine, Like
I'm I'm very focused on like, oh, I want to
see this movie, And a lot of times the sourcing
on the people that I write about is pretty thin,
like they usually you know, in many cases there's only
one source and can you like they're the very questionable
it's like how truthy they really were? Um, and it's
(07:55):
oftentimes in languages that I don't speak, so I try
to be transparent about that. But um, a good story
is a good story. Yeah. So one of our really
frequent listener requests, which you and I had a conversation
really recently about how I wanted to do this for
a long time and I have not been able to.
But you have a wonderful piece of art and write
up on her, and that is uh Nora and I
(08:17):
at Khan, can can you tell me about it? I
think one of the most amazing stories that I've not
seen a lot that contradicts this story, and I've I've
gone and looked. So Nora and i At Khan was
a honestly got Indian princess. Her mother was white or
(08:37):
dad was Indian. And she was a Sufi mystic, which
is a sect of Islam that uh will not let
you lie. Um is strictly pacifist um. And she was
a children's book author. She was a musician. She was
kind of a clutzy air head. She was someone that
I identified with very personally. I was like, oh Iyah,
(09:00):
I want to be your friend, um. And then World
War two broke out and the Nazis invaded Paris, and
she went and signed up for the British s O,
the spy Unit, basically which she was an unlikely candidate for,
you know, entering the service. I have to wonder if
(09:21):
that whole not being allowed to lie thing would not
have made her right. You think that wasn't necessarily the
job for her, and the pacifism part, and also the
part where she was not really a great fan of Britain. No.
She she I believe in the interview, went in and
said Hey, just f y I. Once this is all over,
(09:41):
I'm going in agitating for India's independence from y'all because
I hate all y'all. But somehow she she passed the interview.
They really needed people on the ground there. The average
lifespan of a radio operator and occupied Paris was, I
believe six weeks at the time is the And if
you go and look at the what her instructors wrote
(10:04):
about her and her reviews, they didn't think she was
going to last very long. She was basically a sacrificial lamb,
as best I could tell. And yet she's air dropped
in and it's on the second or third day that
she's there that there's a massive roundup of virtually every
radio operator and occupied Paris and she's the only one left,
(10:25):
I think day two or three, and she's offered an
airlift out and she declines. And she then goes on
to be the soul radio operator and occupied Paris for
five months um, which is far far longer than anyone
expect her to go. When she's finally brought down, and
(10:46):
she she employs various really clever techniques of like sleeping
on the rooftops and like dying her hair and changing
clothes and darting in and out of the subways like
memorizing all sorts of stuff. She eventually is called goes
down kicking, punching, biting, despite being a lifelong pass fist,
and then is UH imprisoned and makes several escape attempts,
(11:10):
lying to her captors all the while, and then nimbly
darting out across UH rooftops. Despite being a klutz and
having many many UH instances during her training that spoke
to such. Was only caught during these escape attempts because
UH there would be air raids at the same time
that she had no idea would be happening, and so
(11:31):
they battened down the hatches, realized that she'd escaped, and
found her. She was eventually reclassified as one of the
most dangerous prisoners and subject to incredibly brutal torture which
she never gave up any information. A lot of what
we know about her final days apparently comes from her
having scratched information on the bottom of a cup that
(11:51):
was passed around to different prisoners who would hear her
in one of the cells but didn't know who who
she was, and she would scratch on the bottom of
the cup and that's how they figured out where she
was at the very end. Uh. And she died just
a week or two before her concentration camp was liberated,
and according to the tales, she died screaming liberty. So uh.
(12:15):
The she's somebody that I have wanted to do a
podcast about for a long time. And the reason that
she first got deferred to later on was because of
that ending of the story. We had just had a
whole series of just tragic things and I was like,
I can't have another downer right now. But then the
other thing was that that, like, there's basically one book
(12:38):
about her, and you can verify some of the stuff
in it, but it's it's tricky for us as a
podcast to just rely on one book. Yeah. Schrebonni Busso
I think is the name of the person who wrote it. Uh.
And they source about as well as they can, but
they're not an impartial uh narrator, I would say. And
(12:59):
there are are calls that have been written in response
that take issue with some of the particulars. I think
that there's one that was going around that's extremely long
that goes into a lot of detail as to which
concentration camp she was in at the end of her life,
and makes the argument that it's not dach House is
a different one. Um, it's hard to tell. I think
(13:21):
that the basic outlines of it are probably true, and
that perhaps part of it was inflated. A lot of
what we know about her final uh days, I think
comes from what was her named Vera Atkins, the woman
who was running the s o E, who went personally
and tried to find out what had happened all the
women that she'd put in the field. And so you
(13:42):
have to take everything that Vera said, you know, as
verbatim truth, which is also quite difficult. Yeah, that's I
love her story. I did too. I I certainly have
a little bit of a fondness for stories of occupied Paris. Obviously.
I think about when we had April Callahan on the
show and we talked about how many women were the
(14:03):
resistors through fashion, and I have that like sort of
fantasy thing where I'm like, I wonder if any of
them helped her change, like helped her with her her
various disguises. Yeah, there's all sorts of stories to be
written here. Um. I would love to see her pop
up in more stuff, because she's amazing. Everybody I've written about,
(14:24):
I think she's the one that I can most personally
identify with because you know, she was a weirdo, outcast
artist and I'm like, yeah, I get that, who then
was incredibly like brave in her own and she she
stepped up. And that's something that I've tried to take
to heart whenever I'm up against like unbelievable odds or
just the entire world seems to be going crazy. You know,
(14:48):
you realize that she stepped up. She was a normal
human beings. So we're so many people in this book, Uh,
so many people that you all have covered. So many
people in history were ordinary people have just stepped up. Ye.
So before we get to some other amazing women from
this book, let's take a movement for a word from
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(15:10):
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of our listeners, go to the Great Courses Plus dot
Com slash Stuff once again. That is the Great Courses
Plus dot Com slash Stuff. Holly, I think the next
person that we wanted to ask Jason about is one
of your favorites. Yeah, because it bumps up against our
episode about the Achimen and Empire. So of course I
(16:37):
love it. Uh, tomyris yeah, so to Myrus. According to
a number of sources, I think Herodotus is the main one.
Uh was a queen of one of the Scythian or
Scythian I've actually never been sure how to pronounce yet.
I will not speak with confidence on that. Okay, I'm
gonna go with Scythian, and I apologize to people who
(16:59):
know better out there or if you just suddenly conjured
an image of Darth maul go um so Uh. She
was one of the Scythian tribes that sure, the sort
of nomadic um tribes is a loose confederation that the
Greeks are just like, Yeah, they're over there near the
Black Seat somewhere, and they've were the inspiration for a
(17:20):
lot of the Amazon legends and have been tied to
various ethnicities as far as Uh like Mongolia proto Iranian,
Uh from the Caucass Caucasus, Uh, Caucusus. There you go.
I can't talk. It's okay, we often can't. But yeah,
(17:40):
nomadic step step people that were incredible horse archers um
and she was their queen. And so, as the story goes,
Cyrus being on his role running over different countries and
taking them over comes to her and it's like, hey,
so your husband's dead. You wanna you wanna ah, And
(18:03):
she's like no. It's like, well fine, I'm gonna conquer
you then, and she's like, don't come over here, and
he's just like, I'm coming over there, don't come over here,
coming over and she after some some back and forth
where he like lays out a banquet and gets everybody
drunk and then it kills them and like takes her
son hostage, and the son commits suicide. Bad stuff happens.
(18:25):
She gets sick of him and wages war on him,
uh and ends up defeating him in battle and cutting
off his head. And the big stinger to the whole story,
as Herodotus tells it, is that she stuffs his head
in a wine sack full of blood and says, blood
thirsty as you are, you have now had your fill
of blood. I've given you your fill of blood. He
(18:46):
doesn't surprise me that you thought of your book as
a murder whipping. It's it's a great story. It's um.
There are other accounts of how Cyrus the Great died. Uh,
So it's really hard to tell whether that one is
true or not um, but to Mirus is nevertheless held
up by you know, various cultures as one of their
(19:06):
four mothers. And so, uh, she's now the playable character
in the Newest Civilization game. Yeah, I've heard that. I
haven't played y. When I was confirming how to pronounce
her name, the first thing that came up was like
the video about the game, and how like, here's our
new playable character. Here you go. Yeah, And what's funny
about that is that they actually built it into the
(19:28):
game mechanics reference to her story where she kind of
had a truce going with Cyrus at the beginning of
it and then he basically betrayed her and she got
bloody revenge on him. So if you betray her, if
you come up with an alliance with her in the
game and betray her, she will like get really mad
at you. I like, how you skipped past the part
(19:49):
where her culture uh allegedly Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I
mean there was god knows how many hoary stories about
the misogyny. They would eat their their elders and they're
sick and just yeah, all sorts of really bizarre dietary habits.
(20:13):
And as I was reading through that, I got down
the rabbit hole of like whether that was what really
happened or whether that was you know, their enemies. Yeah, yeah,
I don't know. It's fascinating to think about. Uh, you
know it is. I mean we've talked so many times
on the podcast at various points on the curve about
(20:35):
the taboo nature of certainly cannibalism, but also how you know,
when writing about a particularly brutal enemy, you start to
attach really weird behaviors to them that are taboo to
kind of like shore up your defenses, and that's a
better person in the conflict. Yeah. A lot of times,
(20:55):
to me, the brutality is already bad enough, like you
didn't really need to go at in all of that
other stuff. But yeah, I mean that that runs throughout
pretty much every story I've ever covered. Like the most
outrageous things about say jinga bonde of of Nidoga, mother
of Angola, that she you know, conquered a tribe of
cannibals and you know, eight babies and drank blood and
(21:18):
murdered her own brother. Like all of that is probably false,
uh you know, come up with by Portuguese, but she
was still an enormously fierce woman who really like fought
the Portuguese from the jungle for forty years. Uh. It
happens in almost every entry that I've written about this
is it's it's a bizarre running feature of history that
(21:38):
women warlords are ascribed I think, far more fearsome qualities
than perhaps they actually had. Yeah. Yeah. One of the
things that comes up in your your writing to my
wrist story is your use of paraphrase, where you write
in modern parlance. I used vernacular. It's true what is
(22:02):
really being communicated, which is very very funny. Um, And
I'm wondering, like, when do you decide it's time for
that versus not. I don't know, it's whatever makes me laugh,
I guess, um. Like I my my whole goal for
the voice of the project is that if I'm telling
you this story at a party, I don't want it
(22:23):
to be an ivory tower thing that's really inaccessible and
while I talk, you know, in kind of a ridiculous fashion. Anyways,
some of the reviews of the book are just like,
it's a little unseemly that, you know, we're supposed to
believe that a thirty four year old man uses phrases
like besties. I'm like I do. I'm just a weird dude.
(22:44):
It's okay if you don't like me, But I don't
say that I'm doing it as an affectation. That's just
how I talk. Odd criticism people have had to say,
not so much anymore. But when Holly and I first
came on the show, there were people who like insisted
that we were affecting the way that we spoke because
we were young and we were in Yeah, I was,
(23:07):
I was the thirty nine at that point, so I
think it was thirty nine. There's a lot of so much.
Oh yes, Next we get to one that Tracy picked
and I know she's excited about. Yeah, uh said to
al Hera for so many reasons. Number one, there's piracy
involved and another amazing woman. So the story of Sa
(23:31):
is also very thinly sourced. We don't actually know her
real names. Idel He is a title that means like
honored lady or something aft exactly how it translates out.
But the story as it goes is that um come
the Spanish Inquisition time. She was living in um A Landolus,
(23:52):
the Morrish region of Spain. It was kicked out by
Fernando and Isabella's inquisition goes to Morocco, ends up through
various intermarriages, sort of running part of it. So yeah,
she ran things for thirty years and was repelling different
Portuguese and Spanish fleets. Uh. The Iron Lady of the
Arab muscle world was her title. She got many titles, actually,
(24:16):
the ruler of Tetuan a barbaros and pirate of Tetuan.
Uh took the reins from her husband, who was sort
of the good cop to her bad cop. He died,
then she remarried and made her new husband come to her,
which was kind of unheard of, and just was a
boss for quite some time, and then kind of faded
(24:37):
into obscurity according to most accounts, as I think her
stepson UH sort of deposed her and from there we
don't really have any record of her UM. But yeah,
also thinly source of very few of the records are
in English. I found all of one book that really
got into the nitty gritty of it UM, and it's
(24:58):
a pretty old book, and that's an inhal algy of
like here's all the interesting people ever to come out
of Morocco. UM. But I don't think anybody doubts that
she existed, but what her actually name was, what she
looked like, all the details of that. I think even
her birth and death years are kind of unknown. I'm
glad we've gotten to talk about some of these less
(25:20):
sourceable women. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one of those things
that we've talked about. It like when we do our
six and possible episodes episodes, uh that there are some
that are just so compelling, but there's not enough for
us to fill outcast hoarding little bits of scrap papers
to try to make a whole episode totally. Yeah. I
(25:41):
did an entry on a woman uh named Turga Tao
who has all of one paragraph written about her anywhere
and now Pollyanus I think that's the name of the
Pollinus the historian, and I managed to sort of fill
it out from Infer and says of like, okay, well,
this is what the audience at that time would have known,
(26:04):
like if she's coming from this region, she would have
also been a Scythian queen much like to myrus, and
like fill out all of that. This is probably what
she looks like. I can give her tattoos that would
be of that ilk and like flush it out to
a decent enough story, but like the source on that
is one paragraph, like there was not much. So there's
a lot of questions when you go through history, especially
as you go back farther. So we're gonna talk a
(26:25):
little bit more about your process and that kind of stuff.
After another brief word from a sponsor. The holiday is
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So I also wanted to make sure that we talk
to you about your process of working on this whole thing.
How do you decide which of these amazing women to
write about and draw? Uh, it's kind of ad hoc. Uh.
(27:55):
Part of it is what sources do I have available? Um,
there's many that I've just sort of had to give
up or put a pause button on because I can't
find out more about them at least yet. Um. And
all I've got various readers has been enormously helpful in
helping source stuff, but it takes a while. Most of
what I look for person has to have a personality,
(28:16):
agency and conflict. Uh. If you don't have any conflict,
it's boring. If they don't have any personality, you know,
it's also if you don't you know, any conflict, it's
a resume. They sort of skate to the end, right,
It's just they can do whatever they want. If they
don't have any personality, it's boring. If they don't have
any agency, it's a tragedy. Uh. And I don't want
to cover any of those. So I want someone who
like doesn't have to win, doesn't even have to be
(28:37):
a good person, but puts up a good fight and
has an interesting story to it, Like I come at
it from sort of a movie making background. Uh, So
that's sort of what I look for and in terms
of doesn't even have to have much of an arc,
but like this happened, this is interesting, um and interests me.
And like those aren't steadfast rules. I've certainly covered people
that you know, don't quite hit that, but that's sort
of the guidelines I look for. And then I just
(28:59):
try and go for as diverse as humanly possible. Like
putting together the table of contents for this book, I
had this massive spreadsheet that was tracking different eras sort
of different personality types, rating whether it's p G PG
thirteen or are uh, and then different representations like LGBT
and UH, you know, different ethnicities and different religions, disabilities,
(29:23):
like I wanted to have a very wide range of people.
Beyond that, I've got a map interface on the website
at Google Maps of like with different pens for all
the different entries, and I sort of use that as
a to do list, Like wherever there's not a pen,
I'll try and look up. It was like, Oh, I
don't have anything for Chile, I'll go find a Chilean heroin.
(29:44):
That's perfect. You kind of uh segue delightfully into our
next question, which is that, Uh, you do have a
lot of diversity, and you talk about women often that
are from minority or press cultures, but at the end
of the day, you are a white guy, straight white
dude for Kentucky. So how do you sort of approach
things in a way, like what is what's your sort
(30:06):
of um kind of personal ethics going into that and
how you write about them. Everybody's the hero of their
own story, so I'm not gonna write something just to
slag someone off, um, and I'm trying to harold and
celebrate different cultures and different types of stories. There's so
many different things that just are far more interesting to
(30:29):
me than a bunch of Frozen sequels. Especially have Like
I've got a degree in film criticism and I worked
in the animation industry for a number of years. I
know movies backwards forwards, upside down, and I get really
bored seeing the same things over and over and over again,
especially knowing that they could have been more interesting and
more different, and get boiled down to something that feels
(30:51):
very similar. So I try and get stuff that is
uh more farther afield in terms of how I go
about rep presenting it. UM, I try and find sources
written by people that are close to the subject matter. UM. Obviously, like,
I'm not the ideal candidate to be writing about a
(31:13):
lot of this stuff, and the Internet is all too
happy to let me know that. UM. But I do
my best, and I admit fallibility where you know I can,
and like I issue corrections. I have a whole uh
certificate that I give out that says, uh, so and
so is smarter than me in perpetuity uh for a
(31:34):
good correction, because it's better that it be correct than
my ego be intact. Um. Beyond that, I try, And
when it's an when it's a culture that takes its
storytelling as a sacred art and has had it repeated
(31:55):
verbatim through the years for centuries, on and on and on,
and I it would be remiss of me too in
any way alter that I do everything I can to
contact that that tribe or that people and sort of
get sign off on that. I've talked to U. Mescalero
Apache about story I did on lows In one of
(32:18):
the Lows and and and Gullion, two of the Apache women.
I talked to the Wardman tribe of Northern Australia about
a legend they have about tree gollam thing that was
defeated by sticky bread. It was a pretty fun story um,
but in the bounds. It's not in the book, but
(32:38):
it is on the web for fruit. Look up the
entry on one Gala, look on the map and look
from the pin on Northern Australia. Ums making the best.
It's pretty great. I love when baked goods saved the
day is absolutely what happens in that story. I talked
to uh Pollowan people that Native Tasmanians, regarding depictions of
(33:00):
one of their number, because there's cultural taboos about um
depictions of the dead for Palawan people. So there's a
lot of stuff that all stumble over. But I try
to be very transparent about it, and like I'm trying
to do my best. This isn't coming from a place
of like me personally profiting or anything. I just want
these stories to get out there. If that's appropriate, great.
(33:23):
How long does it take you to do one of these,
you know, image story combos. I'm imagining based on our
show that there's a wide range. There is a wide range. Um.
The fairytale ones tend to go a lot quicker because
there's not as much historical checking, but there is a
lot of trying to situate. Okay, when did this fairytale arise?
(33:45):
What uh um cultural reference would it be making? Like
you know, when say Disney does Beauty and the Beast. Okay,
they clearly set that in a very specific time period
in France. Why So it's a same sort of hunt
for visual reference for any sort of fairy tale I
doe um and those. So for the book, it's sort
(34:08):
of the one big poster image and those can take
anywhere between you know, averages eight to twelve. There's one
in here that features every single person in the entire book,
and that took a hundred twenty hours to do. Um.
It is a ludicrous amount of time to do that one.
But most of them are eight to twelve hours per
per illustration. Recently, I started doing more of a comic
(34:32):
style format, whereas opposed to just one image and here's
a wall of text, it's here's one poster and here
it's sort of the cover to a comic that's got
text interspersed with it. It's sort of like an infographic
meets comic info comic. I don't know what i'd call it, but, um,
those take a lot longer. Uh, that is easily fifty
(34:55):
hours of work her, Um, which is really I mean
the fact that I'm able to put out twenty page
comic every two weeks by myself, I think it's pretty good,
especially because I'm I'm also doing a ton of research.
Like I'll read a book or two per entry, and
like I read pretty quick, but it'll still take me
like two three days to get through that then do
(35:16):
all the visual reference. Meanwhile, I'm trying to keep up
with the website and people are like, why haven't you posted?
Are you coming back? And I'm like, I'm working so hard.
Please sleep is for babies, Jason, Yeah, that's what I understand. Yeah,
we haven't really touched on your art very much in
all of this, and I know you said that you
(35:38):
are uh not necessarily like a classically trained artist at all.
So can you tell us a little bit about your
art background and how you kind of came to start
working in this animation style and apply it to historical stories. So, Uh,
I used to work a DreamWorks animation, but not as
(36:00):
what people would think of in terms of an animator.
I wasn't drawing and stuff. This is a closer to
physics programming. It was very very technical sort of artwork fire, smoke, water. Um,
it's a lot of programming. Uh. And so I didn't
really know how to draw. I would go to life
drawing classes, but they were uninstructed, uninstructed, so just have
(36:20):
a model there and you draw and you'd I had
us most from people sitting next to me were some
of the best artists in the world that were just
whipping out amazing stuff. And I'm like, I want to
do better. Um. And when I left DreamWorks, I knew
that I wanted I had a bunch of different um
ideas and stuff I wanted to do at a novel
fully written, a couple of graphic novels ready to go. Uh.
(36:45):
The Princess thing came out of weirdly enough, just a
lunchtime conversation I had with a bunch of coworkers when
Frozen came out. Uh, there's a really terrible clickbait article
going around about Frozen as like twelve reasons the Frozen
girls are bad role models, and it's like, well, if
they're bad role models, we can come up with way
worse ones. What is the worst idea you can come
(37:07):
up with? And it's one of these, you know, lunch
time conversation. We just bandy back and forth, and the
worst idea we came up with out of that conversation
was Nabokov's Lolita, which is a truly terrible idea. It's
such a bad idea that I had to see it
exists because I'm a terrible human being. Um, I wouldn't
do that entry nowadays, but that's sort of where it
(37:28):
started from. Weirdly enough, but I was also tossing out
a bunch of people that I'd heard about on Wikipedia
just because I'm an info junkie, like Budhica, the first
century English queen who burnt in London to the ground
killed seventy thousand Romans, or Jingle Bondi, the mother aing
goal that I've mentioned earlier. Uh, and my coworkers are like,
how do you even know all that? And it's like,
how do you not? Everybody should know this? And so
(37:52):
when I left DreamWorks it was sort of a lark.
I put up twelve of them that sort of ran
the gamut. The tagline was awesome, awful or offbeat. It
was just people that were morally gray and just weird.
And it was also stars of Wikipedia. It was not
It was not good, but it went viral nonetheless, and
(38:13):
people really wanted me to do more. So I kept
doing more, and I got more thorough with my research,
better with the drawing, and it's evolved a lot since
its early beginnings. That's so cool. Now, Yeah, I have
to wonder if you'll ever de rejected princes. I do
have a little burn folder sitting around of different people
(38:35):
that I'd love to cover that are like really odd
dudes like Joshua Norton, the Emperor of the United States
and Protector oft of Mexico. Oh man, I really want
to go as him for Halloween one year, But if
you look at pictures of him, he basically just looks
like a Confederate war general with like a crazy feather
in his hat and that doesn't fly. No, Uh, did
(39:01):
you have other stuff? Thank you so much, thank you
treat Yeah, tell everyone where they can find you and
your book. So the website has rejected princesses dot com.
I continue posting stuff on there almost every week or two.
I should have another one up today or tomorrow. Uh.
And the book is available anywhere you can get it Amazon, Barnes,
(39:25):
and Noble, pretty much any bookstore, but support your local bookstores.
Local bookstores are great. Yes, you are going to be
You're we're leaving from here to go to one. That's true.
It's true. Indicator. Nice, nice, Thank you again so much
for spending time with us. And now everyone knows what
to get the princess in their life. Maybe isn't exactly
(39:49):
the song you dance, I will say. The language tends
to be a little. Yeah. You have the stories rated
in the books. Parents know what they can and can't share. Yeah,
the rating them. So every single entry has sort of
a one to five. PG two, PG thirteen two are
sort of rating kind of as well as content warnings. Um,
(40:09):
I've stripped down the swearing. There's only like a very
very small amount of swearing in the book, and it's
usually quotes from other people I guess opposed to me
doing it. Um. But there's some rough content in there.
It's not it's not stuff that I shy away from.
And even people that you know about, like I cover
the stuff that often gets stripped out from their stories,
(40:32):
like you know, Harriet Tubman is arsonist, spymaster sort of stuff, um,
or what Lynching actually entailed. So that's more towards the
end of the book, but so people will know what
they're getting when they get into it. But it's there's
a lot of really interesting stories in there. This is
the book that I wish I had i'd had when
(40:52):
I was twelve. I would have killed for those I
think most twelve year olds would have killed for this.
So laring uh, do you have listener mail tracing to
this is from Mark and it is about our recent
podcast on the Attica prison uprising. He sent it to
us after part one and Mark says, unfortunately, the conditions
(41:15):
described in part one of your Attica podcast are still
the conditions in California prisons today. The thirty cents a
day is a bit high. My brother in law had
a very good office job at eighteen cents a day.
There's no hot water except in the kitchen, i e.
If you boiled some, and that the doctors are okay
if you can see them. People die of diabetes due
to insulin shock on the way to prison because they
(41:35):
have no access to insulin for prolonged period of time.
English language mail often takes a month to reach the recipient,
partly due to staff shortage and partly because the prison
workers doing the work decided to keep mail, especially magazine
for themselves. To get your own cell with a luxury,
Most inmates are triple bunked in a dormitory that was
once something else, like an indoor basketball court, and because
there wasn't enough medical care, doctors, or money for the population,
(41:58):
a toothache often meant pulling the tooth rather than fixing
a cavity. This is not just one prison that was multiple.
As my family member was moved. Over the years, illegal
drugs and cell phones were available for sale from the
corrections officers, although I'm not sure how they were paid for.
In the early some of this became more widely known
and conditions improved somewhat. Triple bunks no longer had the
top bunk filled. Inmates were allowed to use a camera
(42:20):
at the prison hospital to communicate with doctors outside, but
even as recently as certain valuable inmates would not be
released because their jobs in keeping the prison running was
too important. After federal oversight started, my family member was
asked to create fake menus as part of the prisons
reporting to the federal board to show that nutrition levels
had been improved, but he said the food served did
not improve bologny sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and
(42:44):
tofu based food where the typical meals. Occasionally they received
fresh vegetables, often when recalled due to salmonella or arriving
in create smart quote not been for human consumption. The
Supreme Court ruled that California could not imprison slave labor
like that and ordered these inmates released. It's a bit
of a conspiracy fer theory, but family members who were
caught complaining, either through the male sensor or outside of
(43:05):
prison well on parole, often found their family member was
given additional demeaning work, tortured, or, in the case of parole's,
had drugs planted on them to have them convicted. Yet again,
I could go on, but as a family member supporting
a highly educated inmate for a white collar crime, it's
disappointing that even after this incident forty years later, things
hadn't improved, at least in California. What they're missing, though,
(43:26):
is activist population. Most of the prisoners were in there
for drug dealing or possession, which can which continued with
the help of officers, and no longer have the mental
capacity to organize a rebellion, although there were some hunger strikes.
If this seems far fetched and I don't blame you,
I can send you links to websites where family members
have been discussing this for years, and online forums and
how to make our family member inmates more comfortable. I
(43:48):
don't want anyone thinking Attica is a chapter that's behind us.
It's not just history. It's also very current. But because
family members believe the corrections, officers, unions are out to
get them, no one is reporting it to the press.
It's ad uh. I know that's a very dark note
to end on for what was a very chipper podcast.
It is bound and Mark sent us this literally within
(44:11):
hours of the first part of our Attica UH podcast
going live. We do talk a little bit more in
the second part about how a lot of the conditions
that we were talking about have not changed. But this
is much more detailed than we went into and it's
also not at all the only first person account that
we have heard since the first part of that podcast
was released. So thank you Mark for writing. Thank you
(44:32):
again Jason for coming to hang out with us today.
You want to just say, work out of our offices
going forward? Sure, uh, if you would like to write
to us, We're at history podcast 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 tumblers miss in history dot tumbler dot com, or
(44:54):
on Pinterest and Instagram at miss in history. You can
come to our website, which is missed in history dot com.
You will find show notes for every episode that we
have ever done. We will have a link to rejected
Princes in there. You will Yeah, you'll also have an
archive of all of our episodes that we have ever done.
And you can come to our parent company's website, how
stuff works dot com to learn about anything your heart desires.
(45:16):
So you can do all that and a whole lot
more at how stuff works dot com or missed in
History dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.
This episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class is
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everywhere else that fine podcasts are found. Welcome to stufh
You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(01:11):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. We have an amazing, awesome special guest today. Yes,
it's pretty exciting. Do you want to tell us who
you are? Hi? I'm Jason Pora. I do a project
blog turned book called Rejected Princesses. Yeah, Hi, Hi Jason.
(01:32):
So what's funny is we've gotten several letters over the
last couple of months of people so excited to tell
us that you exist. Um, and we've been planning this
episode of the show for more than a year. Yeah,
it's been a while. We've been in contact for quite
a bit, quite some time. So for the folks who
have not heard about it, tell us what Rejected Princesses is.
(01:57):
So it is an exploration of badass woman of history
and myth and uh like one or two literary figures
that would never make the cut for animated princess usually
because there's a few too many beheadings. There's a lot
of beheadings, a lot of beddings, but I illustrate them
(02:17):
in that style anyways, and do as researcher write up
as I can. Um. I'm not a trained historian and
I'm not a trained artist, but you know I'm getting better,
and yet you are published in both. Yeah. Yeah, it
feels weird. It feels weird, but it came out Okay.
Nobody has yelled at me too bad yet. Well, and
you have this giant book that we were just remarking
on before we started rolling. That is quite an impressive
(02:41):
heft of your collection, lots and lots of my artwork.
My first impression, upon like taking out getting the actual
physical copy, I was like, oh my god, this is
like a murder weapon. My second impression is why was
that my first impression? It is like a legit book.
I mean, it's it's as Tracy said, it's signific can't
in size. Well, and I think when you have been
(03:02):
writing about things like pirates and murderous queens and and
people good people too. For sure, we're going to talk
about some of them in a bit, but I can
see how the first thing your mind leaps to might
be I can knock somebody out with this. Yeah, yeah,
it's pretty amazing. So we're gonna talk to Jason about
some of your favorite princesses, and then we're going to
(03:25):
talk about a little bit more generally about rejected princesses.
Along the way. Also, yeah, okay, so who are some
of your most favorite princesses in this book? Um, So,
I'm actually gonna give you all a different answer than
I give everybody else, because I think that y'all will
appreciate this. These these two sisters, uh in a way
(03:48):
that I think most people could not, Hortense and Marie MANCHENI.
I think I labeled them the divorce pioneers of the Renaissance.
So Marie was in very nearly married to Louis the
fourteenth and Hortense was very nearly married to Charles the
second of England, and both of those fell apart, and
they had arranged marriages to shall we say, suboptimal. Her
(04:13):
tenses was worse. Marie's only tried to poison and kill her. Um.
Hortenses locked her up in a convent, and then when
she continually sort of got rowdy in there, uh, he
tried to put increasingly uh strict restrictions on her and
(04:35):
would take her inheritance, which was one of the greatest
art collections in all of France at the time. And
um any pit of a fit of passion, shall we say,
her husband went through and knocked off all of the
Genitalia on all the sculptures and then took a bucket
of black paint and painted over all the naked people.
(04:57):
He had issues. Yeah, that pains me from an art history,
like I want to when I build my time machine,
I just want to go back and punch him in
the face. I'm right there with you, like if you
want to, like, I'll hold um. But yeah, from there,
the two sort of became this um uh talk of
(05:18):
the town as they they ran across Europe fleeing their husbands,
and everybody was sort of talking about because they were
all trying. They were trying to get divorces, and they
were taking lovers male and female as they went uh,
and they were talking of the town in multiple uh countries,
all the while taking them to court, all the while
trying to sort of get a divorce, which is not
(05:39):
impossible at the time. And we're some of the only
the first women to write their own memoirs in their
own name and clear their name and sort of take
control of their own story. They were really phenomenally interesting
human beings that I had never heard of, who are
now some of my favorite people in his I have
heard the whole family of sisters because they were what
(06:01):
five sisters? Yeah, they were the Mazarine nets that there
were three Mancini sisters and there were two other cousins.
I want to believe they were all underneath their uncle, uh,
Cardinal Mazarin I think was his name. Yeah. So I've
heard them described as like the Kardashians of the Renaissance.
Does that seem like an apt comparison that would fit?
(06:23):
I mean, I would argue that they had more substance
than your average Kardashian or but um, yeah, I think
that generally fits in terms of the scope of their fame. Okay, well,
and I think the part about them taking control of
their own stories actually fits with the Kardashians in a
way that I think the Kardashians don't get quite enough
credit for. That's true, That's true. Good point loves the word.
(06:47):
Holly and I sometimes don't agree on everything. I feel
ways about things. Uh. Do we want to talk about
specific incesses? Yes, so we also have some specific princesses
that we want to talk about. So these are these
are folks who um listeners to the podcast have written
(07:11):
in to ask us to talk about and and some
of them are ones that we have had not quite
enough information to make a stuffy missed in history class
podcast about them, because it takes a lot for a
half an hour podcast, But often there is enough information
for Jason to make beautiful artwork and the explanation of
(07:32):
this person's life. Yeah. And then this is sort of
where what y'all do differs a bit from mine, Like
I'm I'm very focused on like, oh, I want to
see this movie, And a lot of times the sourcing
on the people that I write about is pretty thin,
like they usually you know, in many cases there's only
one source and can you like they're the very questionable
it's like how truthy they really were? Um, and it's
(07:55):
oftentimes in languages that I don't speak, so I try
to be transparent about that. But um, a good story
is a good story. Yeah. So one of our really
frequent listener requests, which you and I had a conversation
really recently about how I wanted to do this for
a long time and I have not been able to.
But you have a wonderful piece of art and write
up on her, and that is uh Nora and I
(08:17):
at Khan, can can you tell me about it? I
think one of the most amazing stories that I've not
seen a lot that contradicts this story, and I've I've
gone and looked. So Nora and i At Khan was
a honestly got Indian princess. Her mother was white or
(08:37):
dad was Indian. And she was a Sufi mystic, which
is a sect of Islam that uh will not let
you lie. Um is strictly pacifist um. And she was
a children's book author. She was a musician. She was
kind of a clutzy air head. She was someone that
I identified with very personally. I was like, oh Iyah,
(09:00):
I want to be your friend, um. And then World
War two broke out and the Nazis invaded Paris, and
she went and signed up for the British s O,
the spy Unit, basically which she was an unlikely candidate for,
you know, entering the service. I have to wonder if
(09:21):
that whole not being allowed to lie thing would not
have made her right. You think that wasn't necessarily the
job for her, and the pacifism part, and also the
part where she was not really a great fan of Britain. No.
She she I believe in the interview, went in and
said Hey, just f y I. Once this is all over,
(09:41):
I'm going in agitating for India's independence from y'all because
I hate all y'all. But somehow she she passed the interview.
They really needed people on the ground there. The average
lifespan of a radio operator and occupied Paris was, I
believe six weeks at the time is the And if
you go and look at the what her instructors wrote
(10:04):
about her and her reviews, they didn't think she was
going to last very long. She was basically a sacrificial lamb,
as best I could tell. And yet she's air dropped
in and it's on the second or third day that
she's there that there's a massive roundup of virtually every
radio operator and occupied Paris and she's the only one left,
(10:25):
I think day two or three, and she's offered an
airlift out and she declines. And she then goes on
to be the soul radio operator and occupied Paris for
five months um, which is far far longer than anyone
expect her to go. When she's finally brought down, and
(10:46):
she she employs various really clever techniques of like sleeping
on the rooftops and like dying her hair and changing
clothes and darting in and out of the subways like
memorizing all sorts of stuff. She eventually is called goes
down kicking, punching, biting, despite being a lifelong pass fist,
and then is UH imprisoned and makes several escape attempts,
(11:10):
lying to her captors all the while, and then nimbly
darting out across UH rooftops. Despite being a klutz and
having many many UH instances during her training that spoke
to such. Was only caught during these escape attempts because
UH there would be air raids at the same time
that she had no idea would be happening, and so
(11:31):
they battened down the hatches, realized that she'd escaped, and
found her. She was eventually reclassified as one of the
most dangerous prisoners and subject to incredibly brutal torture which
she never gave up any information. A lot of what
we know about her final days apparently comes from her
having scratched information on the bottom of a cup that
(11:51):
was passed around to different prisoners who would hear her
in one of the cells but didn't know who who
she was, and she would scratch on the bottom of
the cup and that's how they figured out where she
was at the very end. Uh. And she died just
a week or two before her concentration camp was liberated,
and according to the tales, she died screaming liberty. So uh.
(12:15):
The she's somebody that I have wanted to do a
podcast about for a long time. And the reason that
she first got deferred to later on was because of
that ending of the story. We had just had a
whole series of just tragic things and I was like,
I can't have another downer right now. But then the
other thing was that that, like, there's basically one book
(12:38):
about her, and you can verify some of the stuff
in it, but it's it's tricky for us as a
podcast to just rely on one book. Yeah. Schrebonni Busso
I think is the name of the person who wrote it. Uh.
And they source about as well as they can, but
they're not an impartial uh narrator, I would say. And
(12:59):
there are are calls that have been written in response
that take issue with some of the particulars. I think
that there's one that was going around that's extremely long
that goes into a lot of detail as to which
concentration camp she was in at the end of her life,
and makes the argument that it's not dach House is
a different one. Um, it's hard to tell. I think
(13:21):
that the basic outlines of it are probably true, and
that perhaps part of it was inflated. A lot of
what we know about her final uh days, I think
comes from what was her named Vera Atkins, the woman
who was running the s o E, who went personally
and tried to find out what had happened all the
women that she'd put in the field. And so you
(13:42):
have to take everything that Vera said, you know, as
verbatim truth, which is also quite difficult. Yeah, that's I
love her story. I did too. I I certainly have
a little bit of a fondness for stories of occupied Paris. Obviously.
I think about when we had April Callahan on the
show and we talked about how many women were the
(14:03):
resistors through fashion, and I have that like sort of
fantasy thing where I'm like, I wonder if any of
them helped her change, like helped her with her her
various disguises. Yeah, there's all sorts of stories to be
written here. Um. I would love to see her pop
up in more stuff, because she's amazing. Everybody I've written about,
(14:24):
I think she's the one that I can most personally
identify with because you know, she was a weirdo, outcast
artist and I'm like, yeah, I get that, who then
was incredibly like brave in her own and she she
stepped up. And that's something that I've tried to take
to heart whenever I'm up against like unbelievable odds or
just the entire world seems to be going crazy. You know,
(14:48):
you realize that she stepped up. She was a normal
human beings. So we're so many people in this book, Uh,
so many people that you all have covered. So many
people in history were ordinary people have just stepped up. Ye.
So before we get to some other amazing women from
this book, let's take a movement for a word from
some sponsors. So we have been fans here for a
(15:10):
while of the Great Courses Plus. We love watching their
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and Cultures of the World. I love this. I feel
like culture is the best way to really understand history.
That's always been my inn It's why I love fashion
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of our listeners, go to the Great Courses Plus dot
Com slash Stuff once again. That is the Great Courses
Plus dot Com slash Stuff. Holly, I think the next
person that we wanted to ask Jason about is one
of your favorites. Yeah, because it bumps up against our
episode about the Achimen and Empire. So of course I
(16:37):
love it. Uh, tomyris yeah, so to Myrus. According to
a number of sources, I think Herodotus is the main one.
Uh was a queen of one of the Scythian or
Scythian I've actually never been sure how to pronounce yet.
I will not speak with confidence on that. Okay, I'm
gonna go with Scythian, and I apologize to people who
(16:59):
know better out there or if you just suddenly conjured
an image of Darth maul go um so Uh. She
was one of the Scythian tribes that sure, the sort
of nomadic um tribes is a loose confederation that the
Greeks are just like, Yeah, they're over there near the
Black Seat somewhere, and they've were the inspiration for a
(17:20):
lot of the Amazon legends and have been tied to
various ethnicities as far as Uh like Mongolia proto Iranian,
Uh from the Caucass Caucasus, Uh, Caucusus. There you go.
I can't talk. It's okay, we often can't. But yeah,
(17:40):
nomadic step step people that were incredible horse archers um
and she was their queen. And so, as the story goes,
Cyrus being on his role running over different countries and
taking them over comes to her and it's like, hey,
so your husband's dead. You wanna you wanna ah, And
(18:03):
she's like no. It's like, well fine, I'm gonna conquer
you then, and she's like, don't come over here, and
he's just like, I'm coming over there, don't come over here,
coming over and she after some some back and forth
where he like lays out a banquet and gets everybody
drunk and then it kills them and like takes her
son hostage, and the son commits suicide. Bad stuff happens.
(18:25):
She gets sick of him and wages war on him,
uh and ends up defeating him in battle and cutting
off his head. And the big stinger to the whole story,
as Herodotus tells it, is that she stuffs his head
in a wine sack full of blood and says, blood
thirsty as you are, you have now had your fill
of blood. I've given you your fill of blood. He
(18:46):
doesn't surprise me that you thought of your book as
a murder whipping. It's it's a great story. It's um.
There are other accounts of how Cyrus the Great died. Uh,
So it's really hard to tell whether that one is
true or not um, but to Mirus is nevertheless held
up by you know, various cultures as one of their
(19:06):
four mothers. And so, uh, she's now the playable character
in the Newest Civilization game. Yeah, I've heard that. I
haven't played y. When I was confirming how to pronounce
her name, the first thing that came up was like
the video about the game, and how like, here's our
new playable character. Here you go. Yeah, And what's funny
about that is that they actually built it into the
(19:28):
game mechanics reference to her story where she kind of
had a truce going with Cyrus at the beginning of
it and then he basically betrayed her and she got
bloody revenge on him. So if you betray her, if
you come up with an alliance with her in the
game and betray her, she will like get really mad
at you. I like, how you skipped past the part
(19:49):
where her culture uh allegedly Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I
mean there was god knows how many hoary stories about
the misogyny. They would eat their their elders and they're
sick and just yeah, all sorts of really bizarre dietary habits.
(20:13):
And as I was reading through that, I got down
the rabbit hole of like whether that was what really
happened or whether that was you know, their enemies. Yeah, yeah,
I don't know. It's fascinating to think about. Uh, you
know it is. I mean we've talked so many times
on the podcast at various points on the curve about
(20:35):
the taboo nature of certainly cannibalism, but also how you know,
when writing about a particularly brutal enemy, you start to
attach really weird behaviors to them that are taboo to
kind of like shore up your defenses, and that's a
better person in the conflict. Yeah. A lot of times,
(20:55):
to me, the brutality is already bad enough, like you
didn't really need to go at in all of that
other stuff. But yeah, I mean that that runs throughout
pretty much every story I've ever covered. Like the most
outrageous things about say jinga bonde of of Nidoga, mother
of Angola, that she you know, conquered a tribe of
cannibals and you know, eight babies and drank blood and
(21:18):
murdered her own brother. Like all of that is probably false,
uh you know, come up with by Portuguese, but she
was still an enormously fierce woman who really like fought
the Portuguese from the jungle for forty years. Uh. It
happens in almost every entry that I've written about this
is it's it's a bizarre running feature of history that
(21:38):
women warlords are ascribed I think, far more fearsome qualities
than perhaps they actually had. Yeah. Yeah. One of the
things that comes up in your your writing to my
wrist story is your use of paraphrase, where you write
in modern parlance. I used vernacular. It's true what is
(22:02):
really being communicated, which is very very funny. Um, And
I'm wondering, like, when do you decide it's time for
that versus not. I don't know, it's whatever makes me laugh,
I guess, um. Like I my my whole goal for
the voice of the project is that if I'm telling
you this story at a party, I don't want it
(22:23):
to be an ivory tower thing that's really inaccessible and
while I talk, you know, in kind of a ridiculous fashion. Anyways,
some of the reviews of the book are just like,
it's a little unseemly that, you know, we're supposed to
believe that a thirty four year old man uses phrases
like besties. I'm like I do. I'm just a weird dude.
(22:44):
It's okay if you don't like me, But I don't
say that I'm doing it as an affectation. That's just
how I talk. Odd criticism people have had to say,
not so much anymore. But when Holly and I first
came on the show, there were people who like insisted
that we were affecting the way that we spoke because
we were young and we were in Yeah, I was,
(23:07):
I was the thirty nine at that point, so I
think it was thirty nine. There's a lot of so much.
Oh yes, Next we get to one that Tracy picked
and I know she's excited about. Yeah, uh said to
al Hera for so many reasons. Number one, there's piracy
involved and another amazing woman. So the story of Sa
(23:31):
is also very thinly sourced. We don't actually know her
real names. Idel He is a title that means like
honored lady or something aft exactly how it translates out.
But the story as it goes is that um come
the Spanish Inquisition time. She was living in um A Landolus,
(23:52):
the Morrish region of Spain. It was kicked out by
Fernando and Isabella's inquisition goes to Morocco, ends up through
various intermarriages, sort of running part of it. So yeah,
she ran things for thirty years and was repelling different
Portuguese and Spanish fleets. Uh. The Iron Lady of the
Arab muscle world was her title. She got many titles, actually,
(24:16):
the ruler of Tetuan a barbaros and pirate of Tetuan.
Uh took the reins from her husband, who was sort
of the good cop to her bad cop. He died,
then she remarried and made her new husband come to her,
which was kind of unheard of, and just was a
boss for quite some time, and then kind of faded
(24:37):
into obscurity according to most accounts, as I think her
stepson UH sort of deposed her and from there we
don't really have any record of her UM. But yeah,
also thinly source of very few of the records are
in English. I found all of one book that really
got into the nitty gritty of it UM, and it's
(24:58):
a pretty old book, and that's an inhal algy of
like here's all the interesting people ever to come out
of Morocco. UM. But I don't think anybody doubts that
she existed, but what her actually name was, what she
looked like, all the details of that. I think even
her birth and death years are kind of unknown. I'm
glad we've gotten to talk about some of these less
(25:20):
sourceable women. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one of those things
that we've talked about. It like when we do our
six and possible episodes episodes, uh that there are some
that are just so compelling, but there's not enough for
us to fill outcast hoarding little bits of scrap papers
to try to make a whole episode totally. Yeah. I
(25:41):
did an entry on a woman uh named Turga Tao
who has all of one paragraph written about her anywhere
and now Pollyanus I think that's the name of the
Pollinus the historian, and I managed to sort of fill
it out from Infer and says of like, okay, well,
this is what the audience at that time would have known,
(26:04):
like if she's coming from this region, she would have
also been a Scythian queen much like to myrus, and
like fill out all of that. This is probably what
she looks like. I can give her tattoos that would
be of that ilk and like flush it out to
a decent enough story, but like the source on that
is one paragraph, like there was not much. So there's
a lot of questions when you go through history, especially
as you go back farther. So we're gonna talk a
(26:25):
little bit more about your process and that kind of stuff.
After another brief word from a sponsor. The holiday is
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and type in stuff that stamps dot com and enter stuff.
So I also wanted to make sure that we talk
to you about your process of working on this whole thing.
How do you decide which of these amazing women to
write about and draw? Uh, it's kind of ad hoc. Uh.
(27:55):
Part of it is what sources do I have available? Um,
there's many that I've just sort of had to give
up or put a pause button on because I can't
find out more about them at least yet. Um. And
all I've got various readers has been enormously helpful in
helping source stuff, but it takes a while. Most of
what I look for person has to have a personality,
(28:16):
agency and conflict. Uh. If you don't have any conflict,
it's boring. If they don't have any personality, you know,
it's also if you don't you know, any conflict, it's
a resume. They sort of skate to the end, right,
It's just they can do whatever they want. If they
don't have any personality, it's boring. If they don't have
any agency, it's a tragedy. Uh. And I don't want
to cover any of those. So I want someone who
like doesn't have to win, doesn't even have to be
(28:37):
a good person, but puts up a good fight and
has an interesting story to it, Like I come at
it from sort of a movie making background. Uh, So
that's sort of what I look for and in terms
of doesn't even have to have much of an arc,
but like this happened, this is interesting, um and interests me.
And like those aren't steadfast rules. I've certainly covered people
that you know, don't quite hit that, but that's sort
of the guidelines I look for. And then I just
(28:59):
try and go for as diverse as humanly possible. Like
putting together the table of contents for this book, I
had this massive spreadsheet that was tracking different eras sort
of different personality types, rating whether it's p G PG
thirteen or are uh, and then different representations like LGBT
and UH, you know, different ethnicities and different religions, disabilities,
(29:23):
like I wanted to have a very wide range of people.
Beyond that, I've got a map interface on the website
at Google Maps of like with different pens for all
the different entries, and I sort of use that as
a to do list, Like wherever there's not a pen,
I'll try and look up. It was like, Oh, I
don't have anything for Chile, I'll go find a Chilean heroin.
(29:44):
That's perfect. You kind of uh segue delightfully into our
next question, which is that, Uh, you do have a
lot of diversity, and you talk about women often that
are from minority or press cultures, but at the end
of the day, you are a white guy, straight white
dude for Kentucky. So how do you sort of approach
things in a way, like what is what's your sort
(30:06):
of um kind of personal ethics going into that and
how you write about them. Everybody's the hero of their
own story, so I'm not gonna write something just to
slag someone off, um, and I'm trying to harold and
celebrate different cultures and different types of stories. There's so
many different things that just are far more interesting to
(30:29):
me than a bunch of Frozen sequels. Especially have Like
I've got a degree in film criticism and I worked
in the animation industry for a number of years. I
know movies backwards forwards, upside down, and I get really
bored seeing the same things over and over and over again,
especially knowing that they could have been more interesting and
more different, and get boiled down to something that feels
(30:51):
very similar. So I try and get stuff that is
uh more farther afield in terms of how I go
about rep presenting it. UM, I try and find sources
written by people that are close to the subject matter. UM. Obviously, like,
I'm not the ideal candidate to be writing about a
(31:13):
lot of this stuff, and the Internet is all too
happy to let me know that. UM. But I do
my best, and I admit fallibility where you know I can,
and like I issue corrections. I have a whole uh
certificate that I give out that says, uh, so and
so is smarter than me in perpetuity uh for a
(31:34):
good correction, because it's better that it be correct than
my ego be intact. Um. Beyond that, I try, And
when it's an when it's a culture that takes its
storytelling as a sacred art and has had it repeated
(31:55):
verbatim through the years for centuries, on and on and on,
and I it would be remiss of me too in
any way alter that I do everything I can to
contact that that tribe or that people and sort of
get sign off on that. I've talked to U. Mescalero
Apache about story I did on lows In one of
(32:18):
the Lows and and and Gullion, two of the Apache women.
I talked to the Wardman tribe of Northern Australia about
a legend they have about tree gollam thing that was
defeated by sticky bread. It was a pretty fun story um,
but in the bounds. It's not in the book, but
(32:38):
it is on the web for fruit. Look up the
entry on one Gala, look on the map and look
from the pin on Northern Australia. Ums making the best.
It's pretty great. I love when baked goods saved the
day is absolutely what happens in that story. I talked
to uh Pollowan people that Native Tasmanians, regarding depictions of
(33:00):
one of their number, because there's cultural taboos about um
depictions of the dead for Palawan people. So there's a
lot of stuff that all stumble over. But I try
to be very transparent about it, and like I'm trying
to do my best. This isn't coming from a place
of like me personally profiting or anything. I just want
these stories to get out there. If that's appropriate, great.
(33:23):
How long does it take you to do one of these,
you know, image story combos. I'm imagining based on our
show that there's a wide range. There is a wide range. Um.
The fairytale ones tend to go a lot quicker because
there's not as much historical checking, but there is a
lot of trying to situate. Okay, when did this fairytale arise?
(33:45):
What uh um cultural reference would it be making? Like
you know, when say Disney does Beauty and the Beast. Okay,
they clearly set that in a very specific time period
in France. Why So it's a same sort of hunt
for visual reference for any sort of fairy tale I
doe um and those. So for the book, it's sort
(34:08):
of the one big poster image and those can take
anywhere between you know, averages eight to twelve. There's one
in here that features every single person in the entire book,
and that took a hundred twenty hours to do. Um.
It is a ludicrous amount of time to do that one.
But most of them are eight to twelve hours per
per illustration. Recently, I started doing more of a comic
(34:32):
style format, whereas opposed to just one image and here's
a wall of text, it's here's one poster and here
it's sort of the cover to a comic that's got
text interspersed with it. It's sort of like an infographic
meets comic info comic. I don't know what i'd call it, but, um,
those take a lot longer. Uh, that is easily fifty
(34:55):
hours of work her, Um, which is really I mean
the fact that I'm able to put out twenty page
comic every two weeks by myself, I think it's pretty good,
especially because I'm I'm also doing a ton of research.
Like I'll read a book or two per entry, and
like I read pretty quick, but it'll still take me
like two three days to get through that then do
(35:16):
all the visual reference. Meanwhile, I'm trying to keep up
with the website and people are like, why haven't you posted?
Are you coming back? And I'm like, I'm working so hard.
Please sleep is for babies, Jason, Yeah, that's what I understand. Yeah,
we haven't really touched on your art very much in
all of this, and I know you said that you
(35:38):
are uh not necessarily like a classically trained artist at all.
So can you tell us a little bit about your
art background and how you kind of came to start
working in this animation style and apply it to historical stories. So, Uh,
I used to work a DreamWorks animation, but not as
(36:00):
what people would think of in terms of an animator.
I wasn't drawing and stuff. This is a closer to
physics programming. It was very very technical sort of artwork fire, smoke, water. Um,
it's a lot of programming. Uh. And so I didn't
really know how to draw. I would go to life
drawing classes, but they were uninstructed, uninstructed, so just have
(36:20):
a model there and you draw and you'd I had
us most from people sitting next to me were some
of the best artists in the world that were just
whipping out amazing stuff. And I'm like, I want to
do better. Um. And when I left DreamWorks, I knew
that I wanted I had a bunch of different um
ideas and stuff I wanted to do at a novel
fully written, a couple of graphic novels ready to go. Uh.
(36:45):
The Princess thing came out of weirdly enough, just a
lunchtime conversation I had with a bunch of coworkers when
Frozen came out. Uh, there's a really terrible clickbait article
going around about Frozen as like twelve reasons the Frozen
girls are bad role models, and it's like, well, if
they're bad role models, we can come up with way
worse ones. What is the worst idea you can come
(37:07):
up with? And it's one of these, you know, lunch
time conversation. We just bandy back and forth, and the
worst idea we came up with out of that conversation
was Nabokov's Lolita, which is a truly terrible idea. It's
such a bad idea that I had to see it
exists because I'm a terrible human being. Um, I wouldn't
do that entry nowadays, but that's sort of where it
(37:28):
started from. Weirdly enough, but I was also tossing out
a bunch of people that I'd heard about on Wikipedia
just because I'm an info junkie, like Budhica, the first
century English queen who burnt in London to the ground
killed seventy thousand Romans, or Jingle Bondi, the mother aing
goal that I've mentioned earlier. Uh, and my coworkers are like,
how do you even know all that? And it's like,
how do you not? Everybody should know this? And so
(37:52):
when I left DreamWorks it was sort of a lark.
I put up twelve of them that sort of ran
the gamut. The tagline was awesome, awful or offbeat. It
was just people that were morally gray and just weird.
And it was also stars of Wikipedia. It was not
It was not good, but it went viral nonetheless, and
(38:13):
people really wanted me to do more. So I kept
doing more, and I got more thorough with my research,
better with the drawing, and it's evolved a lot since
its early beginnings. That's so cool. Now, Yeah, I have
to wonder if you'll ever de rejected princes. I do
have a little burn folder sitting around of different people
(38:35):
that I'd love to cover that are like really odd
dudes like Joshua Norton, the Emperor of the United States
and Protector oft of Mexico. Oh man, I really want
to go as him for Halloween one year, But if
you look at pictures of him, he basically just looks
like a Confederate war general with like a crazy feather
in his hat and that doesn't fly. No, Uh, did
(39:01):
you have other stuff? Thank you so much, thank you
treat Yeah, tell everyone where they can find you and
your book. So the website has rejected princesses dot com.
I continue posting stuff on there almost every week or two.
I should have another one up today or tomorrow. Uh.
And the book is available anywhere you can get it Amazon, Barnes,
(39:25):
and Noble, pretty much any bookstore, but support your local bookstores.
Local bookstores are great. Yes, you are going to be
You're we're leaving from here to go to one. That's true.
It's true. Indicator. Nice, nice, Thank you again so much
for spending time with us. And now everyone knows what
to get the princess in their life. Maybe isn't exactly
(39:49):
the song you dance, I will say. The language tends
to be a little. Yeah. You have the stories rated
in the books. Parents know what they can and can't share. Yeah,
the rating them. So every single entry has sort of
a one to five. PG two, PG thirteen two are
sort of rating kind of as well as content warnings. Um,
(40:09):
I've stripped down the swearing. There's only like a very
very small amount of swearing in the book, and it's
usually quotes from other people I guess opposed to me
doing it. Um. But there's some rough content in there.
It's not it's not stuff that I shy away from.
And even people that you know about, like I cover
the stuff that often gets stripped out from their stories,
(40:32):
like you know, Harriet Tubman is arsonist, spymaster sort of stuff, um,
or what Lynching actually entailed. So that's more towards the
end of the book, but so people will know what
they're getting when they get into it. But it's there's
a lot of really interesting stories in there. This is
the book that I wish I had i'd had when
(40:52):
I was twelve. I would have killed for those I
think most twelve year olds would have killed for this.
So laring uh, do you have listener mail tracing to
this is from Mark and it is about our recent
podcast on the Attica prison uprising. He sent it to
us after part one and Mark says, unfortunately, the conditions
(41:15):
described in part one of your Attica podcast are still
the conditions in California prisons today. The thirty cents a
day is a bit high. My brother in law had
a very good office job at eighteen cents a day.
There's no hot water except in the kitchen, i e.
If you boiled some, and that the doctors are okay
if you can see them. People die of diabetes due
to insulin shock on the way to prison because they
(41:35):
have no access to insulin for prolonged period of time.
English language mail often takes a month to reach the recipient,
partly due to staff shortage and partly because the prison
workers doing the work decided to keep mail, especially magazine
for themselves. To get your own cell with a luxury,
Most inmates are triple bunked in a dormitory that was
once something else, like an indoor basketball court, and because
there wasn't enough medical care, doctors, or money for the population,
(41:58):
a toothache often meant pulling the tooth rather than fixing
a cavity. This is not just one prison that was multiple.
As my family member was moved. Over the years, illegal
drugs and cell phones were available for sale from the
corrections officers, although I'm not sure how they were paid for.
In the early some of this became more widely known
and conditions improved somewhat. Triple bunks no longer had the
top bunk filled. Inmates were allowed to use a camera
(42:20):
at the prison hospital to communicate with doctors outside, but
even as recently as certain valuable inmates would not be
released because their jobs in keeping the prison running was
too important. After federal oversight started, my family member was
asked to create fake menus as part of the prisons
reporting to the federal board to show that nutrition levels
had been improved, but he said the food served did
not improve bologny sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and
(42:44):
tofu based food where the typical meals. Occasionally they received
fresh vegetables, often when recalled due to salmonella or arriving
in create smart quote not been for human consumption. The
Supreme Court ruled that California could not imprison slave labor
like that and ordered these inmates released. It's a bit
of a conspiracy fer theory, but family members who were
caught complaining, either through the male sensor or outside of
(43:05):
prison well on parole, often found their family member was
given additional demeaning work, tortured, or, in the case of parole's,
had drugs planted on them to have them convicted. Yet again,
I could go on, but as a family member supporting
a highly educated inmate for a white collar crime, it's
disappointing that even after this incident forty years later, things
hadn't improved, at least in California. What they're missing, though,
(43:26):
is activist population. Most of the prisoners were in there
for drug dealing or possession, which can which continued with
the help of officers, and no longer have the mental
capacity to organize a rebellion, although there were some hunger strikes.
If this seems far fetched and I don't blame you,
I can send you links to websites where family members
have been discussing this for years, and online forums and
how to make our family member inmates more comfortable. I
(43:48):
don't want anyone thinking Attica is a chapter that's behind us.
It's not just history. It's also very current. But because
family members believe the corrections, officers, unions are out to
get them, no one is reporting it to the press.
It's ad uh. I know that's a very dark note
to end on for what was a very chipper podcast.
It is bound and Mark sent us this literally within
(44:11):
hours of the first part of our Attica UH podcast
going live. We do talk a little bit more in
the second part about how a lot of the conditions
that we were talking about have not changed. But this
is much more detailed than we went into and it's
also not at all the only first person account that
we have heard since the first part of that podcast
was released. So thank you Mark for writing. Thank you
(44:32):
again Jason for coming to hang out with us today.
You want to just say, work out of our offices
going forward? Sure, uh, if you would like to write
to us, We're at history podcast 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 tumblers miss in history dot tumbler dot com, or
(44:54):
on Pinterest and Instagram at miss in history. You can
come to our website, which is missed in history dot com.
You will find show notes for every episode that we
have ever done. We will have a link to rejected
Princes in there. You will Yeah, you'll also have an
archive of all of our episodes that we have ever done.
And you can come to our parent company's website, how
stuff works dot com to learn about anything your heart desires.
(45:16):
So you can do all that and a whole lot
more at how stuff works dot com or missed in
History dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.
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