September 16, 2020 • 35 mins
These are episodes that we’d love to do as a full-length episode, and we’ve gotten listener quests for most of them. But there’s a book that’s so central to the subject that the book is really the place to go.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It's time
for us six Impossible Episodes. If you are new to
the show. Every once in a while, we do an
(00:22):
episode where we cover six topics that, for one reason
or another, we can't really do in a full length episode.
This ums to happen about every six months. But I
just didn't have six things it's conveniently as simpled um.
Sometimes this is because there's not enough information for a
whole episode for a particular topic, or maybe because taken together,
(00:45):
all the topics as a group kind of tell a story.
We've done a few of these in which the subjects
are just so similar to other episodes that we've already
done that it almost feels like historical deja vu. So
there's lots of different reasons that we go with this format.
Some times we are calling today's episode six Impossible Episodes.
There's a book about that, because these are episodes that
(01:08):
we would love to do as a full length episode.
And in some cases we've gotten listener requests and sometimes
a lot of listener requests, but there's a book, like
one book that is so central to the subject that
the book is really the place to go for the
information rather than our podcast. Yeah, Tracy and I have
talked about these before, and it's like, at that point,
(01:30):
aren't we just doing a book report? Yeah? Yeah, uh So,
first we're going to kick off with William Dorsey Swan
and before we get to the topic that inspired today's episode,
we also wanted to quickly recap how we research and
write the show. Typically, we record two episodes a week,
with each of us researching and writing one of them.
(01:52):
Our research processes are similar, but not identical. We have
each figured out what works best for us over the years,
and it's a little different for Tracy versus me. But
regardless of which of us is researching or what topic
we're doing, we are drawing in information from multiple sources
and we're synthesizing that into an outline that we have
written ourselves. So even if there's one source that's doing
(02:14):
some heavy lifting in that process, there are also lots
of other ones that we're using to fill in gaps
and confirm details and provide multiple perspectives on the subject.
But for the topics that we're talking about today. As
I mentioned earlier, there's just really one book that would
provide almost all of the end depth research. The basics
might be out there in the world through multiple sources,
(02:35):
but not the deeper details. So either the author did
all the research to write the first ever book on
a subject, or maybe they translated a work into English
for the first time, or like did some analysis that's
just become an irreplaceable part of our understanding of the topic.
Number One, those authors and historians really deserve the focus
(02:57):
and the credit for having done all of that work,
because if you are the one person researching a book,
you're doing so much footwork, uh, if it is not
previously established research. And number two, if we try to
just summarize that one work into an episode, well, as
we just said, that's that's a book report, or that's
(03:18):
the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that
it kind of verges on plagiarism in some cases. Um
trying to distill a unique original work down to a
thirty or forty minute episode, it just feels a little
bit incongruous with what our processes and kind of our
our mission for the show. Yes. Sometimes when we say
that to folks, they say, we'll just have the author on.
(03:40):
We do have authors and historians on the show to
talk about their books, but most of the time those
books are newly released, and so they're coming onto the
show as part of their publicity work for the book.
Usually we have either met the author before, or we've
gotten some kind of publicity email from the publisher, or
maybe we have a contact with the publisher that we
(04:00):
can ask. Um. I'm not saying it's impossible to get
an author on the show without any of that, but
I have for sure gone down some real and very
unsuccessful rabbit holes trying to track folks down. This is
not a solicitation for advice on how to do it. Here.
If you're about to say, why don't you just tweet
at them, well, that's the thing that we've tried before
(04:23):
hasn't necessarily worked out. Yeah, I promise we do know
how to reach out to people. Sometimes it is not fruitful. Um.
And this brings us to the topic that inspired today's episode,
which is actually a forthcoming book, but it's one that
we have gotten so many requests for over the last
few months. Thanks to some post that have gone viral,
(04:44):
and as I mentioned earlier, it is William Dorsey Swan.
So fifteen years ago Channing Gerard Joseph was taking a
class in investigative reporting at Columbia University and stumbled over
the name William Dorsey Swan in an old Washington Post
article when we say old. This article was dated April
(05:04):
eighteen eighty eight, and the headline read quote negro dive
rated thirteen black men dressed as women surprised at supper
and arrested. William Dorsey Swan, who called himself a queen
of drag and was known as just the Queen, was
among them. Joseph wrote an article about Swan that was
published in the Nation in January of which seems to
(05:27):
have been the information source for various viral posts that
have circulated since then, catching listeners attention and leading to
a lot of episode requests. And yes, Swan absolutely seems
up our alley. He sounds fascinating. He was enslaved from
birth and then went on to be a huge part
of the drag scene in Washington, d C. After the
(05:49):
US Civil War, he tried to get a pardon from
President Grover Cleveland in the first documented legal action to
protect lgbt Q rights in the United States. SWA story
really touches on so many things, including the history of
drag balls, gender, race, cross dressing, and trans history. But
(06:09):
the book does not exist yet. Once it does, we
are hoping folks go to read it. We are for
sure looking forward to doing that. That forthcoming book, based
on Joseph's original research into William Dorsey Swan is titled
House of Swan Where Slaves Became Queens And at present
it is expected from Crown that's a subsidiary of Penguin
(06:30):
Random House, UH, to publish in the US in one
and from Piccadore that's McMillan in the UK. Yeah, I
would say it might. I don't know if it's optimistic
or not that it will be out in I know
the pandemic has totally shifted a lot of public publishing schedules.
And I also know um that I have had this
(06:53):
one particular book on my list to try to to
get in touch with the author. Uh, and it's like
noted in my little list, And it originally said forthcoming
in twenty nineteen, and then it said forthcoming in and
now it's hiss forth coming in, so book deadlines and
timelines can shift around sometimes. Just so folks know we've
(07:15):
gotten so many requests about him. Yes, he does sound
completely fascinating um and hopefully in the future a book
to read. Next up is the one topic that we're
talking about today that I don't actually think we have
gotten a specific requests from listeners about, and this is
Ethiopian st well a lot of petros So, as we
(07:36):
talked about in our episode on the rock hewn churches
of Lollibella, Christianity was established and what's now Ethiopia during
the time of the Oxymite Empire. Christianity was really widely
practiced there by about the sixth century, and this was
a lot earlier than Christianity was established in many other
parts of Africa for centuries. People living in the Horn
(07:57):
of Africa also didn't have that much content act with
other Christian communities, So the Orthodox Christianity that developed there
was unique in a lot of ways, with beliefs and
practices that could be more similar to Judaism than to
what would become the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches.
But in the sixteen hundreds, Ethiopian Emperor Lebna Danel asked
(08:19):
Portugal for help in fighting off an invasion. In the aftermath,
Portuguese Jesuits arrived and started trying to convert Ethiopian Orthodox
Christians to Roman Catholicism. And that brings us back to
Aletta Petros Well. A lot of Petros lived in Ethiopia
in the early seventeenth century and was married to one
of the emperor's counselors. All three of their children died
(08:42):
in their infancy, and while a lot of Petro's decided
to become a nun, she sort of felt like she
was she was done with the more material world after
all that. After the king was convinced to make Roman
Catholicism the state religion, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Toahadow Church
was banned. She's are did a nonviolent resistance movement, even
(09:03):
as the king exiled her and threatened to kill her family.
She also founded her own religious community and developed a
reputation for being a very skilled preacher. This also touches
on so many things that we love. This is the
earliest known book length biography of an African woman, and
it's one of the earliest written documents detailing African resistance
(09:24):
against European influence. It also details will Letta Petro's lifelong
partnership with another woman that was another nun named ahead
of Christos. It's one of only a few hagiographies of
Ethiopian women's saints, and it is a huge source of
information just about what daily life was like in seventeenth
century Ethiopia. So the book about her is the life
(09:47):
and struggles of our mother a lot of Petros, and
it was written by a disciple in sixteen seventy two,
that was about thirty years after her death. Often something
that old is something we would just refer to about
a lot of uh concerns, because you know, it's it's
it's a classic document in the public domain. But this
was translated into English for the first time ever by
(10:09):
Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner. Belcher is a professor
of comparative early Modern African and European literatures and grew
up in Ethiopia and Ghana, and Kleiner is a translator
who specializes in, among other things, Yeaz, which is the
language that this work was originally written in. This translation
(10:30):
earned multiple awards, including the Best Scholarly Edition in translation
from the Society for Early Modern Women. It is also
fairly long. It's more than five hundred pages for the
full version, although there's also a concise edition that is
just over a hundred and sixty pages. Let's take a
quick break before we get to a particularly popular one
(10:52):
of these. Now, next up, we have another very frequent
listener request. I would say this is one of the
topics we have gotten almost the largest number of requests
(11:12):
for over the years. Yeah, if I were placing bets,
I would say this has the most requests. Yeah, it's
definitely in the top five, if not the most. And
this is also something that we alluded to in our
listener Q and a episode that we did earlier this summer.
It is Henrietta Lacks. And we've gotten so many requests
to talk about Henrietta Lax over the years, and we
haven't for two reasons. One is that a big part
(11:36):
of her story is that her body and her privacy
were violated without her consent, and in some ways, are
doing an episode on her felt like a continuation of
that invasion. That is compounded by our second reason, we
would really just be distilling down a book by someone
who actually did work with the Lax family. That is.
Rebecca Sclute, author of the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,
(11:59):
spent years researching Henrietta LAX's story in her life and
the impact of her cells on medical science, as well
as earning the trust of the Lax family before publishing
the book, and in her acknowledgements, Scalout describes Henrietta's daughter
Deborah as the soul of the book and her thanks
to the other Lax family members and friends. It goes
(12:20):
on for paragraphs after that. So here are the basics.
Henrietta Lax was a black woman who was diagnosed with
cervical cancer in nineteen fifty one. She had five children.
The family was poor. They were working as tobacco farmers
in Virginia. Lax was treated at Johns Hopkins, which was
a segregated hospital at the time, but also one of
(12:40):
the very few leading hospitals that actually treated black patients.
Lax died less than a year after being diagnosed, on
October fourth, ninety one, at the age of just thirty one.
While Lax was being treated, a doctor named George Gay
collected cells from her cervix. He did not tell her
he was doing this, he did not ask her permission.
(13:02):
This really wasn't unusual at the time, since the ideas
of informed consent and patient privacy didn't really exist in
the same way that they do today. What was really
unusual where the cells themselves. At that point, researchers had
not been able to keep cells alive outside the human
body for very long, but the cells from LAX's body
(13:23):
kept on living and multiplying. They doubled almost every twenty
four hours. This was the first immortal cell line ever
to be discovered. They were named HeLa cells, after the
first letters of Henrietta LAX's first and last name. These
cells became a fundamental part of medical and pharmaceutical research.
(13:43):
The polio vaccine was developed using HeLa cells, so were
drugs to treat leukemia, Parkinson's disease, and influenza. Researchers used
HeLa cells to isolate the human immuno deficiency virus. In
the early years of the space program, they were into
orbit to study the effects of low gravity. They have
also been used to study the effects of radiation and poisons.
(14:08):
More than seventy thousand published studies have relied on HeLa cells,
and at least two Nobel Prizes have been awarded to
research that used them. This list goes on and on
and on. Johns Hopkins offered these cells to other researchers
and institutions freely. It didn't make money from them, but
that is not true of the companies that used them
(14:31):
to develop things like pharmaceuticals. As Debra Lax clearly spells
out Insclutes book, HeLa cells were part of all this research,
and some companies turned huge profits from their use, and
yet members of the Lax family couldn't afford to see
a doctor. Henrietta LAX's story is a lot better known
now than it was when we first made the decision
(14:53):
to direct listeners to Rebecca Sclutes book rather than do
an episode ourselves in the interim. There was even an
HBO movie about it that came out in Since the
publication of the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Johns Hopkins
and other hospitals and organizations have also started to take
a more critical look at issues involving racism, medical ethics,
(15:13):
and informed consent, and that is work that is definitely
still ongoing. Henrietta Lacks's descendants have also talked about how
they want people to know about her story and about
how much her cells have contributed to medical science. So
talking about her on the show feels like way less
of an invasion of her privacy now than it did
back when we first made that call. But Rebecca sclutes groundbreaking, original,
(15:39):
and deeply influential work continues to be the best source
for all of this. I know a lot of people
who love to listen to podcasts want to listen to
other things and audio format, and this is also available
as an audiobook. Also, this year is the hundredth anniversary
of Henrietta A. LAX's birth and there is a year
long centennial seller ration ongoing. You can find more at
(16:03):
HELO one hundred dot org. That is h E. L
A one hundred zero zero dot org. Okay, moving on.
Martha Moore was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, in seventeen thirty five.
When she was about nineteen, she married from Ballard. Later
they moved to Hollowell, Maine, where Martha Ballard became a midwife.
(16:24):
On January one, five, when she was fifty, Ballard started
keeping a diary of her daily life and work. That
was something that she kept up for the next twenty
seven years, ending on May twelve, eighteen twelve, and that
diary ended up totaling up with ten thousand entries. We've
talked about other diaries on the show, like the ones
kept by Anne Lister and Samuel Peeps, and how they
(16:46):
give us a look not only at the diarist, but
also at the time and place that they were living,
and this is true for Ballard's diary too. It details
her work as a midwife and a healer. She documented
more than eight hundred birth she attended over those twenty
seven years. She also documents what life was like in
the Keunebec River Valley region in the late eighteenth and
(17:08):
early nineteenth centuries. So this diary is a unique and
important document. It's full of information about the medicine and
midwiffery at the time, written in an era when many
white women could read at least a little, but often
could not write at all. It also includes a wealth
of information about people who are never mentioned in a
lot of other primary sources, including tax and census records
(17:31):
that would typically be used for that kind of information.
Ballard kept her diary in this collection of little booklets
that she made herself, and then those booklets were passed
down through her family, ultimately being given to great great
granddaughter Mary Hobart. Hobart was a doctor and she was
given these diaries as a gift when she graduated from
(17:52):
medical school. Hobart put them together in order. They had
been sort of in disarray, not really chronological anymore, so
she put them in order and bound them together in
this handmade linen cover and then donated that to the
main State Library in n There are a few ways
to get a look at Martha Ballard's diary today. One
(18:12):
is the website do history dot org, which has a browsable,
searchable scan of the document. As is the case with
most historical diaries, it's tricky to read, both because of
Ballard's handwriting, which is rather cramped, and because her system
of abbreviations and marks for keeping up with midwiffery work.
And she also had phonetic spellings for words, so it's
(18:34):
not a natural flowing read for your casual researcher. I
often have a really challenging time deciphering handwritten documents from
long in the past, or even my own handwritten documents
from yesterday. Fortunately, do history dot org also includes text
(18:55):
transcriptions of the scanned pages of handwritten diary. These were
done i husband and wife team, Robert R. Mccosland and
Cynthia mcalmond mccosland. They spent about ten years on this project.
There is a print version of their transcription that is
almost a thousand pages long. It seems to be out
of print now, but it's still available in a lot
(19:16):
of libraries, particularly university libraries. The third is the reason
Martha Ballard is in the category of there's a book
about it. It's a Midwife's Tale, the Life of Martha Ballard,
based on her diary, which was written by Laurel Thatcher
all Rich. That name sounds familiar. It maybe because we
mentioned her in our episode about the women of Gettysburg,
(19:37):
which we titled Fearless, Feisty and unflagging. All Rich as
a person who coined the phrase well behaved women seldom
make history. She also wrote the introduction to the mccaslin's
transcription of the diary. In a Midwife's Tale, she follows
selections from the diary with context and analysis. There are
(19:58):
these brief notes about your Ballard went and who she
saw on a particular day become a narrative about her life,
along with just a wealth of context about gender, medicine, religion,
domestic life, and crime, including a mass murder and a
trial for rape. This is rich and fascinating, and it
(20:18):
earned All Rich the Pulitzer Prize in History in and
it is also an audio book, and it was made
into a PBS American Experience film called A Midwife's Tale
in that doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere at the moment,
but it is available on DVD. And now we're going
to take another quick sponsor break. Over the past year
(20:47):
or so, I have tried several times to figure out
how to approach an episode on Trauta of Salerno or
the Trotula, which is a medieval compendium on women's medicine
and cosmetics. A lot of sources conflate Trata and the Trotula,
creating this impression that the compendium is the work of
(21:08):
only one author who was either named Trata or Trachula. Well,
of course it's gotta be the same thing that there
are no duplicate words in history. Um. But the reality
is that the Trotula is really a compilation of three
texts by three different people, one of them being an
Italian medical practitioner known as Trata or Tracta. These three
(21:31):
separate works were copied, revised, and shuffled around over centuries
until an editor rearranged them into one volume in four
and that addition became the dominant version for the next
four hundred years. But the manuscripts really date back to
about the twelfth century. I kept running into trouble with
this research because there's just virtually no biographical information that
(21:55):
has survived about Trata, and the wide spread had trot
to slash Trachola confusion just through a ranch into my
research process. Every time I found a document that seemed
promising that then made it seem like those were the
same thing, I was like, well, now I don't trust
this at all, um. And then also as I kept
(22:19):
picking away at it, I realized that the sources that
were the clearest about this distinction between the person and
the work we're all by the same author. Dr Monica H. Green.
It's not unusual for us to use more than one
article or book by the same historian as research for
(22:40):
an episode of our show, but in this case, it
would feel like the entire source list was stuff by
Dr Green. Dr Green has been working with the Trachella
for many years, including separating out those three different manuscripts.
Those are on the Condition of Women, On the Treatments
for Women, and on Women's Cosmetics and Dr Green determined
(23:01):
that On Treatments for Women was by a real historical
woman named Trata, and this brings up something really cool
about the Trotula. It's likely that the other two works
were written by men whose names have been lost, so
a woman was ultimately the one credited for this work.
It so often goes the opposite way. In addition to
(23:22):
publishing numerous papers and articles about this subject, Green has
also edited and translated an addition of the Trachula that
came out in two thousand one, and that includes an introduction,
the Latin text and an English translation, and then an
appendix that details all the medicines that are referenced in
the text. This is the first English translation of the
(23:45):
work that has used medieval texts as the starting point
rather than later versions. In the words of the Medieval
Review quote, this is the definitive Trochula, a new edition
of which will not be necessary. This book will be
useful to history of medicine of women's studies of medieval
culture and of southern Italy, and to graduate and even
(24:06):
undergraduate students interested in grappling with the actual practice of
medieval medicine. I really feel like that's the most glowing
review of any historical source I have read in seven
years of working on this podcast. Also, if all of
that talk about different versions seemed a little confusing, it's
(24:27):
enough of a tangle, but it's actually broken down in
Green's edition of The Trocolo with a chart. There are
so many different versions. So this last thing that we're
going to touch on has a lot going on. There
is a gruesome mass murder, suicide, possible incests, so we
have left it for last. If that is not folks bag.
(24:49):
If any of that sounds like you're just not down
for it, now is your time to say you have
learned about five things and go up um. In Germanton,
North Carolina, on Christmas Day nine twenty nine, a tobacco
farmer named Charlie Lawson killed his wife and six of
their seven children. The seventh child, His oldest son, Arthur,
(25:09):
had left home on an errand, and he was the
only member of the family to survive. Sometime after killing
the rest of his family, But before Arthur had gotten back,
Charlie Lawson took his own life in the woods outside
their home, and by that point other people had already
stopped by the house to wish the family married Christmas,
and they had discovered the crime. They actually heard Lawson's
(25:31):
final shot in the distance while they were there. The
crime scene itself was bizarre, with the exception of the
youngest children. Lawson had shot and then bludgeoned each member
of the family. The youngest three, including the baby, he
bludgeoned to death, and then he had arranged their bodies.
For his wife and the children that Lawson killed inside
(25:53):
the house, he put their heads on pillows from their beds,
folded their arms over their chests, and closed their eyes.
For the two daughters that he killed while they were
outside near the tobacco barn, he arranged their bodies but
used rocks in place of pillows. When Charlie Lawson's body
was found, there were two notes in a pocket written
(26:13):
on receipts, neither of which contained a complete sentence. After
all of this, Lawson's brother Marion turned the home into
kind of a tourist attraction, which sounds a little callous,
but huge crowds were flocking to the crime scene anyway.
They were doing things like picking the raisins off the
cake that the oldest daughter, Marie, had made that day
(26:36):
for their Christmas treat, So Marian Lawson was basically trying
to keep things under some kind of control and also
provide an income for Arthur Lawson so that he didn't
lose the family farm. The crime also became the subject
of a murder ballad called Murder of the Lawson Family. So,
of course there are questions that are natural. Why did
(26:58):
Lawson murder his family? Why did he so carefully arrange
their bodies? Why did he wait until his son, Arthur
was away from home to carry out this crime. Was
it just because Arthur and the friend he was with
that day were big enough to try to stop him,
or did Charlie have some other reason that he wanted
his son to survive? And why had the whole family
(27:18):
gone into Winston Salem a couple of weeks before that
to buy all new store bought clothes and have their
portrait taken. That would have been a huge and unusual
expense for a poor farming family at the start of
the Great depression, so we don't really have answers to
any of that, but there is a lot of speculation.
One is that Charlie Lawson wasn't actually the culprit, that
(27:40):
he had witnessed some other crime, and that perpetrator had
then killed them all in retaliation. Another theory blames a
head injury that Charlie Lawson had experienced some time before,
which reportedly caused severe headaches and changes to his behavior.
And the last theory was first publicized in the book
about this that is White Christmas, Bloody Christmas, written by M.
(28:02):
Bruce Jones and True D. J. Smiths. In nine just
before the book was going to print, Stella Lawson Bowles,
Marian Lawson's daughter, contacted the authors and told them that
she had heard rumors that seventeen year old Marie was
pregnant at the time of the murders and that the
baby was her father's. So in terms of this book, M.
(28:24):
Bruce Jones and Trudy J. Smith were father and daughter.
Jones had a lifelong fascination with this crime. He was
a child living in the area when it happened, and
he had compiled a wealth of research over his lifetime.
The two of them collaborated on the book, which they
self published in nine It is really hard to find now,
although there's a twenty five anniversary hardcover that came out
(28:47):
in Smith also published a follow up called The Meaning
of Our Tears, which is available as an e book.
The Meaning of Our Tears isn't focused only on this
crime and it's aftermath um. It's also focused on the
years of hardship and grief that this family had lived
through in the years before the murders. It's like halfway
(29:07):
into the book when the murders actually happened. This particular
instance is also an example of how other podcasts with
different styles and resources can approach material that probably wouldn't
work as well for us. These murders are, for example,
covered in an episode of the podcast Criminal, hosted by
Phoebe Judge, and the Criminal team goes on the road
(29:27):
and interviews people who have some kind of connection to
a crime, whether they're the perpetrators, the victims, or the investigators,
and they describe it as quote stories of people who
have done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in
the middle. So in this case, they actually went to
Stokes County, North Carolina, and they talked directly to local
residents and to Trudy Smith. They weren't talking to people
(29:50):
who knew Charlie Lawson or his victims personally, but to
people who have some kind of connection to this story.
All of this comes together in Criminal episode number twenty five,
which is called The Portrait. There is also a limited
series podcast from w g HP Fox eight in high Point,
North Carolina that tells the story, including archival interviews with
(30:10):
relatives and others with more firsthand knowledge, that is called
Deadly Secrets, The Laws and Family Murder. In both cases,
they went out and did legwork and talked directly to people,
where we would be just summarizing someone else's book. Yes,
since our show is not a show where we go
out and do field work. UM, something like that is
(30:33):
just not really accessible when everything is speculative. As awesome
as it would be to go out and do field work,
it is not something that's conducive to a show that
puts out two new episodes a week every week. It
takes more time than is is existing for our episodes.
(30:55):
So yeah, that is six things, five of which we've
gotten lots of our us for uh, where a book
is just the number one place to go to learn
more about that. Do you have listener mail, Tracy? I
knew it is from Katie, and Katie says, Hello, Holly
and Tracy. I'm one of those wacky people who listened
(31:16):
to the whole archive from the beginning, and I'm finally
caught up on the latest podcast. I'm almost sad that
I don't have a ton of new episodes waiting for
me to jump into. I wanted to thank you for
making such a great podcast. I so admire your commitment
to kindness and justice and how will you research each subject?
I've learned so much from you guys, and laughed and
grab my teeth the log with you and all the
(31:36):
things we've covered. I have a question and then a
podcast recommendation and some possible pandemic reading. The question is
who is the person on the cover art? Is it
a historical painting or drawing or done by someone connected
to stuff you miss the history class. I've been wondering
this for months. I feel so happy when I see
this French question mark face pop up on my phone.
(31:58):
Um my podcast recommendation for your extremely long recommendations list
is Thomas Downing Um, I'm gonna go right Thomas Downing
on the list, which is very long. Uh, and so
I'm going to skip ahead to the synopsis of some
Thomas Downing stuff. And then Katie goes on to say,
this is a throwback, but when you talked about Lolli
Bellah in the history of Ethiopian Christianity, I remembered a
(32:20):
history rabbit hole I fell down a while back. The
Sign and the Seal is a very interesting, if slightly
wild book on the ark of the Covenant and the
Ethiopian tradition of it traveling to Lake Tana. It's by
Graham Hancock, who eventually went completely off the rails, but
during this time I think he was doing some pretty interesting,
if slightly dubious work. To be clear, I don't mean
(32:40):
that the tradition itself is dubious. I'm in no position
to judge another culture, but it definitely has been incorporated
into some wild Holy Grail type stuff. I read it
several years ago, so I can't remember many details beyond
it being a fascinating ride. If you're looking for some
pandemic reading about important traditions conducted by a pretty eccentric
and passionate white guy from out side the culture. I
(33:01):
definitely recommend it. Thank you again, Holly and Tracy for
all your great work, even when the podcast topics are difficult.
I feel a level of comfort when I listened to
you because of the respect, compassion, and intellect you bring.
And then we can talk about cheese or something else
delightful before you too long, Sincerely, Katie UM. I snagged
this one in part because of the reference to Alabella
(33:21):
and Ethiopian Christianity, which came up again on today's episode. UM.
I have never read our possibly even heard of the
book that Katie has mentioned, so I cannot speak to
um its quality or anything like that, but I found
the connection interesting. And to answer the question, who is
a person on the cover art, it's Marie Antoinette as
(33:45):
drawn from like a cameo jewelry piece that uh, somebody
who worked with our show many years ago put together
for us, almost a correct guest with French yes, technically Austria, right. Um. Yeah.
We were trying to come up with a new logo
(34:08):
at that time, and we wanted something that suggested history
and suggested, uh, some of the things that we talked
about on the show like, for example, including women, but
we also wanted one that didn't feel like we were
appropriating something just for the sake of making a podcast logo,
(34:28):
and Marie Antoinette seemed to fit that bill. Plus, as
we've talked about, I think we both enjoy reading, slash
learning and talking about various things related to Marie Antoinette.
So thank you again, Katie for that email. If you'd
like to write to us about this anither podcast, we're
at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com, and
we're all over social media at Missed in History. You
(34:51):
can also subscribe to our show on Apple podcast and
the I heart Radio app, and anywhere else you like
to get podcasts. M Stuff You Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(35:17):
H
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It's time
for us six Impossible Episodes. If you are new to
the show. Every once in a while, we do an
(00:22):
episode where we cover six topics that, for one reason
or another, we can't really do in a full length episode.
This ums to happen about every six months. But I
just didn't have six things it's conveniently as simpled um.
Sometimes this is because there's not enough information for a
whole episode for a particular topic, or maybe because taken together,
(00:45):
all the topics as a group kind of tell a story.
We've done a few of these in which the subjects
are just so similar to other episodes that we've already
done that it almost feels like historical deja vu. So
there's lots of different reasons that we go with this format.
Some times we are calling today's episode six Impossible Episodes.
There's a book about that, because these are episodes that
(01:08):
we would love to do as a full length episode.
And in some cases we've gotten listener requests and sometimes
a lot of listener requests, but there's a book, like
one book that is so central to the subject that
the book is really the place to go for the
information rather than our podcast. Yeah, Tracy and I have
talked about these before, and it's like, at that point,
(01:30):
aren't we just doing a book report? Yeah? Yeah, uh So,
first we're going to kick off with William Dorsey Swan
and before we get to the topic that inspired today's episode,
we also wanted to quickly recap how we research and
write the show. Typically, we record two episodes a week,
with each of us researching and writing one of them.
(01:52):
Our research processes are similar, but not identical. We have
each figured out what works best for us over the years,
and it's a little different for Tracy versus me. But
regardless of which of us is researching or what topic
we're doing, we are drawing in information from multiple sources
and we're synthesizing that into an outline that we have
written ourselves. So even if there's one source that's doing
(02:14):
some heavy lifting in that process, there are also lots
of other ones that we're using to fill in gaps
and confirm details and provide multiple perspectives on the subject.
But for the topics that we're talking about today. As
I mentioned earlier, there's just really one book that would
provide almost all of the end depth research. The basics
might be out there in the world through multiple sources,
(02:35):
but not the deeper details. So either the author did
all the research to write the first ever book on
a subject, or maybe they translated a work into English
for the first time, or like did some analysis that's
just become an irreplaceable part of our understanding of the topic.
Number One, those authors and historians really deserve the focus
(02:57):
and the credit for having done all of that work,
because if you are the one person researching a book,
you're doing so much footwork, uh, if it is not
previously established research. And number two, if we try to
just summarize that one work into an episode, well, as
we just said, that's that's a book report, or that's
(03:18):
the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that
it kind of verges on plagiarism in some cases. Um
trying to distill a unique original work down to a
thirty or forty minute episode, it just feels a little
bit incongruous with what our processes and kind of our
our mission for the show. Yes. Sometimes when we say
that to folks, they say, we'll just have the author on.
(03:40):
We do have authors and historians on the show to
talk about their books, but most of the time those
books are newly released, and so they're coming onto the
show as part of their publicity work for the book.
Usually we have either met the author before, or we've
gotten some kind of publicity email from the publisher, or
maybe we have a contact with the publisher that we
(04:00):
can ask. Um. I'm not saying it's impossible to get
an author on the show without any of that, but
I have for sure gone down some real and very
unsuccessful rabbit holes trying to track folks down. This is
not a solicitation for advice on how to do it. Here.
If you're about to say, why don't you just tweet
at them, well, that's the thing that we've tried before
(04:23):
hasn't necessarily worked out. Yeah, I promise we do know
how to reach out to people. Sometimes it is not fruitful. Um.
And this brings us to the topic that inspired today's episode,
which is actually a forthcoming book, but it's one that
we have gotten so many requests for over the last
few months. Thanks to some post that have gone viral,
(04:44):
and as I mentioned earlier, it is William Dorsey Swan.
So fifteen years ago Channing Gerard Joseph was taking a
class in investigative reporting at Columbia University and stumbled over
the name William Dorsey Swan in an old Washington Post
article when we say old. This article was dated April
(05:04):
eighteen eighty eight, and the headline read quote negro dive
rated thirteen black men dressed as women surprised at supper
and arrested. William Dorsey Swan, who called himself a queen
of drag and was known as just the Queen, was
among them. Joseph wrote an article about Swan that was
published in the Nation in January of which seems to
(05:27):
have been the information source for various viral posts that
have circulated since then, catching listeners attention and leading to
a lot of episode requests. And yes, Swan absolutely seems
up our alley. He sounds fascinating. He was enslaved from
birth and then went on to be a huge part
of the drag scene in Washington, d C. After the
(05:49):
US Civil War, he tried to get a pardon from
President Grover Cleveland in the first documented legal action to
protect lgbt Q rights in the United States. SWA story
really touches on so many things, including the history of
drag balls, gender, race, cross dressing, and trans history. But
(06:09):
the book does not exist yet. Once it does, we
are hoping folks go to read it. We are for
sure looking forward to doing that. That forthcoming book, based
on Joseph's original research into William Dorsey Swan is titled
House of Swan Where Slaves Became Queens And at present
it is expected from Crown that's a subsidiary of Penguin
(06:30):
Random House, UH, to publish in the US in one
and from Piccadore that's McMillan in the UK. Yeah, I
would say it might. I don't know if it's optimistic
or not that it will be out in I know
the pandemic has totally shifted a lot of public publishing schedules.
And I also know um that I have had this
(06:53):
one particular book on my list to try to to
get in touch with the author. Uh, and it's like
noted in my little list, And it originally said forthcoming
in twenty nineteen, and then it said forthcoming in and
now it's hiss forth coming in, so book deadlines and
timelines can shift around sometimes. Just so folks know we've
(07:15):
gotten so many requests about him. Yes, he does sound
completely fascinating um and hopefully in the future a book
to read. Next up is the one topic that we're
talking about today that I don't actually think we have
gotten a specific requests from listeners about, and this is
Ethiopian st well a lot of petros So, as we
(07:36):
talked about in our episode on the rock hewn churches
of Lollibella, Christianity was established and what's now Ethiopia during
the time of the Oxymite Empire. Christianity was really widely
practiced there by about the sixth century, and this was
a lot earlier than Christianity was established in many other
parts of Africa for centuries. People living in the Horn
(07:57):
of Africa also didn't have that much content act with
other Christian communities, So the Orthodox Christianity that developed there
was unique in a lot of ways, with beliefs and
practices that could be more similar to Judaism than to
what would become the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches.
But in the sixteen hundreds, Ethiopian Emperor Lebna Danel asked
(08:19):
Portugal for help in fighting off an invasion. In the aftermath,
Portuguese Jesuits arrived and started trying to convert Ethiopian Orthodox
Christians to Roman Catholicism. And that brings us back to
Aletta Petros Well. A lot of Petros lived in Ethiopia
in the early seventeenth century and was married to one
of the emperor's counselors. All three of their children died
(08:42):
in their infancy, and while a lot of Petro's decided
to become a nun, she sort of felt like she
was she was done with the more material world after
all that. After the king was convinced to make Roman
Catholicism the state religion, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Toahadow Church
was banned. She's are did a nonviolent resistance movement, even
(09:03):
as the king exiled her and threatened to kill her family.
She also founded her own religious community and developed a
reputation for being a very skilled preacher. This also touches
on so many things that we love. This is the
earliest known book length biography of an African woman, and
it's one of the earliest written documents detailing African resistance
(09:24):
against European influence. It also details will Letta Petro's lifelong
partnership with another woman that was another nun named ahead
of Christos. It's one of only a few hagiographies of
Ethiopian women's saints, and it is a huge source of
information just about what daily life was like in seventeenth
century Ethiopia. So the book about her is the life
(09:47):
and struggles of our mother a lot of Petros, and
it was written by a disciple in sixteen seventy two,
that was about thirty years after her death. Often something
that old is something we would just refer to about
a lot of uh concerns, because you know, it's it's
it's a classic document in the public domain. But this
was translated into English for the first time ever by
(10:09):
Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner. Belcher is a professor
of comparative early Modern African and European literatures and grew
up in Ethiopia and Ghana, and Kleiner is a translator
who specializes in, among other things, Yeaz, which is the
language that this work was originally written in. This translation
(10:30):
earned multiple awards, including the Best Scholarly Edition in translation
from the Society for Early Modern Women. It is also
fairly long. It's more than five hundred pages for the
full version, although there's also a concise edition that is
just over a hundred and sixty pages. Let's take a
quick break before we get to a particularly popular one
(10:52):
of these. Now, next up, we have another very frequent
listener request. I would say this is one of the
topics we have gotten almost the largest number of requests
(11:12):
for over the years. Yeah, if I were placing bets,
I would say this has the most requests. Yeah, it's
definitely in the top five, if not the most. And
this is also something that we alluded to in our
listener Q and a episode that we did earlier this summer.
It is Henrietta Lacks. And we've gotten so many requests
to talk about Henrietta Lax over the years, and we
haven't for two reasons. One is that a big part
(11:36):
of her story is that her body and her privacy
were violated without her consent, and in some ways, are
doing an episode on her felt like a continuation of
that invasion. That is compounded by our second reason, we
would really just be distilling down a book by someone
who actually did work with the Lax family. That is.
Rebecca Sclute, author of the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,
(11:59):
spent years researching Henrietta LAX's story in her life and
the impact of her cells on medical science, as well
as earning the trust of the Lax family before publishing
the book, and in her acknowledgements, Scalout describes Henrietta's daughter
Deborah as the soul of the book and her thanks
to the other Lax family members and friends. It goes
(12:20):
on for paragraphs after that. So here are the basics.
Henrietta Lax was a black woman who was diagnosed with
cervical cancer in nineteen fifty one. She had five children.
The family was poor. They were working as tobacco farmers
in Virginia. Lax was treated at Johns Hopkins, which was
a segregated hospital at the time, but also one of
(12:40):
the very few leading hospitals that actually treated black patients.
Lax died less than a year after being diagnosed, on
October fourth, ninety one, at the age of just thirty one.
While Lax was being treated, a doctor named George Gay
collected cells from her cervix. He did not tell her
he was doing this, he did not ask her permission.
(13:02):
This really wasn't unusual at the time, since the ideas
of informed consent and patient privacy didn't really exist in
the same way that they do today. What was really
unusual where the cells themselves. At that point, researchers had
not been able to keep cells alive outside the human
body for very long, but the cells from LAX's body
(13:23):
kept on living and multiplying. They doubled almost every twenty
four hours. This was the first immortal cell line ever
to be discovered. They were named HeLa cells, after the
first letters of Henrietta LAX's first and last name. These
cells became a fundamental part of medical and pharmaceutical research.
(13:43):
The polio vaccine was developed using HeLa cells, so were
drugs to treat leukemia, Parkinson's disease, and influenza. Researchers used
HeLa cells to isolate the human immuno deficiency virus. In
the early years of the space program, they were into
orbit to study the effects of low gravity. They have
also been used to study the effects of radiation and poisons.
(14:08):
More than seventy thousand published studies have relied on HeLa cells,
and at least two Nobel Prizes have been awarded to
research that used them. This list goes on and on
and on. Johns Hopkins offered these cells to other researchers
and institutions freely. It didn't make money from them, but
that is not true of the companies that used them
(14:31):
to develop things like pharmaceuticals. As Debra Lax clearly spells
out Insclutes book, HeLa cells were part of all this research,
and some companies turned huge profits from their use, and
yet members of the Lax family couldn't afford to see
a doctor. Henrietta LAX's story is a lot better known
now than it was when we first made the decision
(14:53):
to direct listeners to Rebecca Sclutes book rather than do
an episode ourselves in the interim. There was even an
HBO movie about it that came out in Since the
publication of the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Johns Hopkins
and other hospitals and organizations have also started to take
a more critical look at issues involving racism, medical ethics,
(15:13):
and informed consent, and that is work that is definitely
still ongoing. Henrietta Lacks's descendants have also talked about how
they want people to know about her story and about
how much her cells have contributed to medical science. So
talking about her on the show feels like way less
of an invasion of her privacy now than it did
back when we first made that call. But Rebecca sclutes groundbreaking, original,
(15:39):
and deeply influential work continues to be the best source
for all of this. I know a lot of people
who love to listen to podcasts want to listen to
other things and audio format, and this is also available
as an audiobook. Also, this year is the hundredth anniversary
of Henrietta A. LAX's birth and there is a year
long centennial seller ration ongoing. You can find more at
(16:03):
HELO one hundred dot org. That is h E. L
A one hundred zero zero dot org. Okay, moving on.
Martha Moore was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, in seventeen thirty five.
When she was about nineteen, she married from Ballard. Later
they moved to Hollowell, Maine, where Martha Ballard became a midwife.
(16:24):
On January one, five, when she was fifty, Ballard started
keeping a diary of her daily life and work. That
was something that she kept up for the next twenty
seven years, ending on May twelve, eighteen twelve, and that
diary ended up totaling up with ten thousand entries. We've
talked about other diaries on the show, like the ones
kept by Anne Lister and Samuel Peeps, and how they
(16:46):
give us a look not only at the diarist, but
also at the time and place that they were living,
and this is true for Ballard's diary too. It details
her work as a midwife and a healer. She documented
more than eight hundred birth she attended over those twenty
seven years. She also documents what life was like in
the Keunebec River Valley region in the late eighteenth and
(17:08):
early nineteenth centuries. So this diary is a unique and
important document. It's full of information about the medicine and
midwiffery at the time, written in an era when many
white women could read at least a little, but often
could not write at all. It also includes a wealth
of information about people who are never mentioned in a
lot of other primary sources, including tax and census records
(17:31):
that would typically be used for that kind of information.
Ballard kept her diary in this collection of little booklets
that she made herself, and then those booklets were passed
down through her family, ultimately being given to great great
granddaughter Mary Hobart. Hobart was a doctor and she was
given these diaries as a gift when she graduated from
(17:52):
medical school. Hobart put them together in order. They had
been sort of in disarray, not really chronological anymore, so
she put them in order and bound them together in
this handmade linen cover and then donated that to the
main State Library in n There are a few ways
to get a look at Martha Ballard's diary today. One
(18:12):
is the website do history dot org, which has a browsable,
searchable scan of the document. As is the case with
most historical diaries, it's tricky to read, both because of
Ballard's handwriting, which is rather cramped, and because her system
of abbreviations and marks for keeping up with midwiffery work.
And she also had phonetic spellings for words, so it's
(18:34):
not a natural flowing read for your casual researcher. I
often have a really challenging time deciphering handwritten documents from
long in the past, or even my own handwritten documents
from yesterday. Fortunately, do history dot org also includes text
(18:55):
transcriptions of the scanned pages of handwritten diary. These were
done i husband and wife team, Robert R. Mccosland and
Cynthia mcalmond mccosland. They spent about ten years on this project.
There is a print version of their transcription that is
almost a thousand pages long. It seems to be out
of print now, but it's still available in a lot
(19:16):
of libraries, particularly university libraries. The third is the reason
Martha Ballard is in the category of there's a book
about it. It's a Midwife's Tale, the Life of Martha Ballard,
based on her diary, which was written by Laurel Thatcher
all Rich. That name sounds familiar. It maybe because we
mentioned her in our episode about the women of Gettysburg,
(19:37):
which we titled Fearless, Feisty and unflagging. All Rich as
a person who coined the phrase well behaved women seldom
make history. She also wrote the introduction to the mccaslin's
transcription of the diary. In a Midwife's Tale, she follows
selections from the diary with context and analysis. There are
(19:58):
these brief notes about your Ballard went and who she
saw on a particular day become a narrative about her life,
along with just a wealth of context about gender, medicine, religion,
domestic life, and crime, including a mass murder and a
trial for rape. This is rich and fascinating, and it
(20:18):
earned All Rich the Pulitzer Prize in History in and
it is also an audio book, and it was made
into a PBS American Experience film called A Midwife's Tale
in that doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere at the moment,
but it is available on DVD. And now we're going
to take another quick sponsor break. Over the past year
(20:47):
or so, I have tried several times to figure out
how to approach an episode on Trauta of Salerno or
the Trotula, which is a medieval compendium on women's medicine
and cosmetics. A lot of sources conflate Trata and the Trotula,
creating this impression that the compendium is the work of
(21:08):
only one author who was either named Trata or Trachula. Well,
of course it's gotta be the same thing that there
are no duplicate words in history. Um. But the reality
is that the Trotula is really a compilation of three
texts by three different people, one of them being an
Italian medical practitioner known as Trata or Tracta. These three
(21:31):
separate works were copied, revised, and shuffled around over centuries
until an editor rearranged them into one volume in four
and that addition became the dominant version for the next
four hundred years. But the manuscripts really date back to
about the twelfth century. I kept running into trouble with
this research because there's just virtually no biographical information that
(21:55):
has survived about Trata, and the wide spread had trot
to slash Trachola confusion just through a ranch into my
research process. Every time I found a document that seemed
promising that then made it seem like those were the
same thing, I was like, well, now I don't trust
this at all, um. And then also as I kept
(22:19):
picking away at it, I realized that the sources that
were the clearest about this distinction between the person and
the work we're all by the same author. Dr Monica H. Green.
It's not unusual for us to use more than one
article or book by the same historian as research for
(22:40):
an episode of our show, but in this case, it
would feel like the entire source list was stuff by
Dr Green. Dr Green has been working with the Trachella
for many years, including separating out those three different manuscripts.
Those are on the Condition of Women, On the Treatments
for Women, and on Women's Cosmetics and Dr Green determined
(23:01):
that On Treatments for Women was by a real historical
woman named Trata, and this brings up something really cool
about the Trotula. It's likely that the other two works
were written by men whose names have been lost, so
a woman was ultimately the one credited for this work.
It so often goes the opposite way. In addition to
(23:22):
publishing numerous papers and articles about this subject, Green has
also edited and translated an addition of the Trachula that
came out in two thousand one, and that includes an introduction,
the Latin text and an English translation, and then an
appendix that details all the medicines that are referenced in
the text. This is the first English translation of the
(23:45):
work that has used medieval texts as the starting point
rather than later versions. In the words of the Medieval
Review quote, this is the definitive Trochula, a new edition
of which will not be necessary. This book will be
useful to history of medicine of women's studies of medieval
culture and of southern Italy, and to graduate and even
(24:06):
undergraduate students interested in grappling with the actual practice of
medieval medicine. I really feel like that's the most glowing
review of any historical source I have read in seven
years of working on this podcast. Also, if all of
that talk about different versions seemed a little confusing, it's
(24:27):
enough of a tangle, but it's actually broken down in
Green's edition of The Trocolo with a chart. There are
so many different versions. So this last thing that we're
going to touch on has a lot going on. There
is a gruesome mass murder, suicide, possible incests, so we
have left it for last. If that is not folks bag.
(24:49):
If any of that sounds like you're just not down
for it, now is your time to say you have
learned about five things and go up um. In Germanton,
North Carolina, on Christmas Day nine twenty nine, a tobacco
farmer named Charlie Lawson killed his wife and six of
their seven children. The seventh child, His oldest son, Arthur,
(25:09):
had left home on an errand, and he was the
only member of the family to survive. Sometime after killing
the rest of his family, But before Arthur had gotten back,
Charlie Lawson took his own life in the woods outside
their home, and by that point other people had already
stopped by the house to wish the family married Christmas,
and they had discovered the crime. They actually heard Lawson's
(25:31):
final shot in the distance while they were there. The
crime scene itself was bizarre, with the exception of the
youngest children. Lawson had shot and then bludgeoned each member
of the family. The youngest three, including the baby, he
bludgeoned to death, and then he had arranged their bodies.
For his wife and the children that Lawson killed inside
(25:53):
the house, he put their heads on pillows from their beds,
folded their arms over their chests, and closed their eyes.
For the two daughters that he killed while they were
outside near the tobacco barn, he arranged their bodies but
used rocks in place of pillows. When Charlie Lawson's body
was found, there were two notes in a pocket written
(26:13):
on receipts, neither of which contained a complete sentence. After
all of this, Lawson's brother Marion turned the home into
kind of a tourist attraction, which sounds a little callous,
but huge crowds were flocking to the crime scene anyway.
They were doing things like picking the raisins off the
cake that the oldest daughter, Marie, had made that day
(26:36):
for their Christmas treat, So Marian Lawson was basically trying
to keep things under some kind of control and also
provide an income for Arthur Lawson so that he didn't
lose the family farm. The crime also became the subject
of a murder ballad called Murder of the Lawson Family. So,
of course there are questions that are natural. Why did
(26:58):
Lawson murder his family? Why did he so carefully arrange
their bodies? Why did he wait until his son, Arthur
was away from home to carry out this crime. Was
it just because Arthur and the friend he was with
that day were big enough to try to stop him,
or did Charlie have some other reason that he wanted
his son to survive? And why had the whole family
(27:18):
gone into Winston Salem a couple of weeks before that
to buy all new store bought clothes and have their
portrait taken. That would have been a huge and unusual
expense for a poor farming family at the start of
the Great depression, so we don't really have answers to
any of that, but there is a lot of speculation.
One is that Charlie Lawson wasn't actually the culprit, that
(27:40):
he had witnessed some other crime, and that perpetrator had
then killed them all in retaliation. Another theory blames a
head injury that Charlie Lawson had experienced some time before,
which reportedly caused severe headaches and changes to his behavior.
And the last theory was first publicized in the book
about this that is White Christmas, Bloody Christmas, written by M.
(28:02):
Bruce Jones and True D. J. Smiths. In nine just
before the book was going to print, Stella Lawson Bowles,
Marian Lawson's daughter, contacted the authors and told them that
she had heard rumors that seventeen year old Marie was
pregnant at the time of the murders and that the
baby was her father's. So in terms of this book, M.
(28:24):
Bruce Jones and Trudy J. Smith were father and daughter.
Jones had a lifelong fascination with this crime. He was
a child living in the area when it happened, and
he had compiled a wealth of research over his lifetime.
The two of them collaborated on the book, which they
self published in nine It is really hard to find now,
although there's a twenty five anniversary hardcover that came out
(28:47):
in Smith also published a follow up called The Meaning
of Our Tears, which is available as an e book.
The Meaning of Our Tears isn't focused only on this
crime and it's aftermath um. It's also focused on the
years of hardship and grief that this family had lived
through in the years before the murders. It's like halfway
(29:07):
into the book when the murders actually happened. This particular
instance is also an example of how other podcasts with
different styles and resources can approach material that probably wouldn't
work as well for us. These murders are, for example,
covered in an episode of the podcast Criminal, hosted by
Phoebe Judge, and the Criminal team goes on the road
(29:27):
and interviews people who have some kind of connection to
a crime, whether they're the perpetrators, the victims, or the investigators,
and they describe it as quote stories of people who
have done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in
the middle. So in this case, they actually went to
Stokes County, North Carolina, and they talked directly to local
residents and to Trudy Smith. They weren't talking to people
(29:50):
who knew Charlie Lawson or his victims personally, but to
people who have some kind of connection to this story.
All of this comes together in Criminal episode number twenty five,
which is called The Portrait. There is also a limited
series podcast from w g HP Fox eight in high Point,
North Carolina that tells the story, including archival interviews with
(30:10):
relatives and others with more firsthand knowledge, that is called
Deadly Secrets, The Laws and Family Murder. In both cases,
they went out and did legwork and talked directly to people,
where we would be just summarizing someone else's book. Yes,
since our show is not a show where we go
out and do field work. UM, something like that is
(30:33):
just not really accessible when everything is speculative. As awesome
as it would be to go out and do field work,
it is not something that's conducive to a show that
puts out two new episodes a week every week. It
takes more time than is is existing for our episodes.
(30:55):
So yeah, that is six things, five of which we've
gotten lots of our us for uh, where a book
is just the number one place to go to learn
more about that. Do you have listener mail, Tracy? I
knew it is from Katie, and Katie says, Hello, Holly
and Tracy. I'm one of those wacky people who listened
(31:16):
to the whole archive from the beginning, and I'm finally
caught up on the latest podcast. I'm almost sad that
I don't have a ton of new episodes waiting for
me to jump into. I wanted to thank you for
making such a great podcast. I so admire your commitment
to kindness and justice and how will you research each subject?
I've learned so much from you guys, and laughed and
grab my teeth the log with you and all the
(31:36):
things we've covered. I have a question and then a
podcast recommendation and some possible pandemic reading. The question is
who is the person on the cover art? Is it
a historical painting or drawing or done by someone connected
to stuff you miss the history class. I've been wondering
this for months. I feel so happy when I see
this French question mark face pop up on my phone.
(31:58):
Um my podcast recommendation for your extremely long recommendations list
is Thomas Downing Um, I'm gonna go right Thomas Downing
on the list, which is very long. Uh, and so
I'm going to skip ahead to the synopsis of some
Thomas Downing stuff. And then Katie goes on to say,
this is a throwback, but when you talked about Lolli
Bellah in the history of Ethiopian Christianity, I remembered a
(32:20):
history rabbit hole I fell down a while back. The
Sign and the Seal is a very interesting, if slightly
wild book on the ark of the Covenant and the
Ethiopian tradition of it traveling to Lake Tana. It's by
Graham Hancock, who eventually went completely off the rails, but
during this time I think he was doing some pretty interesting,
if slightly dubious work. To be clear, I don't mean
(32:40):
that the tradition itself is dubious. I'm in no position
to judge another culture, but it definitely has been incorporated
into some wild Holy Grail type stuff. I read it
several years ago, so I can't remember many details beyond
it being a fascinating ride. If you're looking for some
pandemic reading about important traditions conducted by a pretty eccentric
and passionate white guy from out side the culture. I
(33:01):
definitely recommend it. Thank you again, Holly and Tracy for
all your great work, even when the podcast topics are difficult.
I feel a level of comfort when I listened to
you because of the respect, compassion, and intellect you bring.
And then we can talk about cheese or something else
delightful before you too long, Sincerely, Katie UM. I snagged
this one in part because of the reference to Alabella
(33:21):
and Ethiopian Christianity, which came up again on today's episode. UM.
I have never read our possibly even heard of the
book that Katie has mentioned, so I cannot speak to
um its quality or anything like that, but I found
the connection interesting. And to answer the question, who is
a person on the cover art, it's Marie Antoinette as
(33:45):
drawn from like a cameo jewelry piece that uh, somebody
who worked with our show many years ago put together
for us, almost a correct guest with French yes, technically Austria, right. Um. Yeah.
We were trying to come up with a new logo
(34:08):
at that time, and we wanted something that suggested history
and suggested, uh, some of the things that we talked
about on the show like, for example, including women, but
we also wanted one that didn't feel like we were
appropriating something just for the sake of making a podcast logo,
(34:28):
and Marie Antoinette seemed to fit that bill. Plus, as
we've talked about, I think we both enjoy reading, slash
learning and talking about various things related to Marie Antoinette.
So thank you again, Katie for that email. If you'd
like to write to us about this anither podcast, we're
at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com, and
we're all over social media at Missed in History. You
(34:51):
can also subscribe to our show on Apple podcast and
the I heart Radio app, and anywhere else you like
to get podcasts. M Stuff You Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(35:17):
H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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