Behind the Scenes Minis: So Many Edwards, Just One Olivia

Tracy and Holly discuss the inherent problems with looking at the story of the princes in the tower, particularly many people having the same name. Then they discuss the frustration of discovering the Montaukett Nation's legal status with the state of New York.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of My Heart Radio. Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This week we talked about
the Princes in the Tower. Uh. I think I have

(00:23):
said before that I find episodes on Royals where everyone
has the same name and there's just a bunch of intrigue.
I just I find them to be very frustrating. But
I chose to do the Princess in the Tower because
somehow in my head I thought there would be less
of that and that I would get to focus more
on the princes. And that was incorrect. Uh. Instead, there

(00:47):
was a lot of intrigue and only four names in
use in the entire episode. There's Richard and Edward and
Henry and Elizabeth, and that's pretty much all I got
to work on. And boy did I just mess up
Edward and Richard in the outline a bunch of times.
Writing this episode took a full day and a half
longer than it should have, and I had a really

(01:09):
hard time, I know, for a lot of people myself
included living through a pandemic and also multiple other intersecting
social and political and climate crises has made it really
hard to concentrate. So when I was not done with
this episode in time to record it on the day

(01:31):
we were planning to record it, I was really like,
is this pandemic brain? Or is it just that there
is too much Edward and Richard and it's taking me
too much time to hopefully correctly sort through it all.
It can also be a layering of all those things
that sure could. Every time we do an episode like this,
I once again thank my lucky stars that I am

(01:54):
not part of any royal family that might have such intrigues,
because who wants that life hoof Nope, not me. There
were a lot of different sources that went into this episode,
but there were two books in particular that were like
the actual whole book length books. One that seemed to
me written clearly from this perspective of someone who thought, um,

(02:15):
Richard the Third definitely did not do it, and the
tone of it was almost angry that anyone would ever
believe that Richard the Third had done it, Like it
would have these passages in it. This was by Dr
John ash Downhill, but it would have these passages in
it that were like and this was totally normal medieval
precedent and anyone who thinks otherwise does not know anything

(02:37):
about medieval precedent. And I was like, WHOA, Okay, I
should have also another book just to balance out the perspective.
And so the other book was just called The Princess
and Tower and it was by Alison Weir, and uh,
that one took a more neutral perspective, but also acknowledged like,

(02:57):
there are a lot of people now and we're a
lot of people at the time that thought that Richard
the Third stole the throne. And a thing that's still
kind of like stuck in the back of my head
about that one is like, I, as a forty six
year old adult human being, have lived through multiple incidents
in world history where everyone thought something was happening and

(03:20):
that's not what was happening. So I don't really know
that everyone thought Richard the Third did it necessarily means
that Richard the Third did it. And after having picked
through all this stuff, I don't know that I really
knew what the real answer is. There is just a
whole lot of circumstantial evidence though, that Richard the Third
really did take the throne from his nephew. Yeah, I

(03:43):
mean that's the thing, right. I feel like with stories
like this, where people do get very attached to it,
it becomes a matter of faith, and like, I believe this,
here is my here's how I substantiate that belief. But
like you said, we're ever gonna know. There's no there's
no certainty, particularly because there is so little that we

(04:07):
know about what was going on in the tower at all. Um.
There's just really I mean, listen the second I say,
we're never going to see it seeing on Earth at
the end of the year, but they literally found Richard
the Third's remains under that car park, right, So you

(04:28):
never ever know, But it does seem like, you know,
thoughts get longer every day. Yeah, yeah, And I should
also note that they're like there are two different questions,
one being did Richard the Third you surp his nephew, right?
And the other being did Richard the Third order his
nephew to be murdered? And those are like two different

(04:50):
but interconnecting questions. Also, we're not putting it into the
feed as a Saturday Classic for various reasons, but there
is an episode, a full episode about Richard the Third
in the archive. It's one of the first episodes that you,
Holly were ever on. Uh and it is from when
they found the remains under the car park. Yes, um,
that talks a lot more about Richard the Third and

(05:12):
how a lot of what was written about him during
the Tutor era makes him increasingly evil, seeming and physically
grotesque from those writer's point of view, which makes it
hard to then sweet out what seems like factually correct
versus what seems more like trying to make the Tutors

(05:34):
look like they were definitely the correct people to be
on the throne. Well, and that's the thing too, right,
There is a level of unconscious bias even in measured
and well researched histories. So even people that aren't necessarily
even aware that they're positioning things based on a presumption,

(05:56):
whether that be conscious or subconscious of guilt or innocence
or question marks, will still inform that text as they
write it. So it makes a whole other layer of
untangle ability because it's somebody else's psychology that they may
or may not even be aware is impacting their work.
So yeah, unless the time machine gets built in a hurry,

(06:20):
we're not gonna know we go back there. Yeah, Yeah,
I'm not sure that would be where I went. No,
probably not for me, although I do love, you know,
other not so much about the royalty things about like
that era of history, but you know, it's probably not
the first place that I would go. UM. I am

(06:42):
glad that we did an episode on the Princess in
the Tower because now it's done and I don't have
to do it in the future. That's perfectly valid takeaway
in my book. This week on the show, we talked

(07:05):
about Olivia Ward Bush Banks, which is the name I
stumbled across and had never heard it before and immediately
was like, I want to know more about this person
who has this combination of like social worker and teacher
and speaker and activist and tribal historian for the Montacket Nation,
all of that. UM, and I really had concerns about

(07:27):
whether I was going to be able to find enough
information about her. I do not know how many feet
of documents are in the library at Tulane, But pulling
together the information UM for the the episode took a
lot of digging and reading PhD theses, which are not

(07:50):
you know, I don't normally spend a lot of time
reading PhD dissertations for the show. That's just not typically
one of the sources of information, but it was this time,
and little did you know that you were stumbling onto
a super angry making thing. Yeah, I the whole part
about the Montaucket Nation's land being stolen and then the

(08:14):
New York Legislature passing legislation about it three times and
Cuomo vetoing it three times. Uh, if we swore on
the podcast, that part would have been all swearing. Um.
I did not find his rationales for vetoing the legislation

(08:37):
to be acceptable. What were they? Well, one of them
was something along the lines of I haven't really reviewed
it yet, and I was like, well, then review it.
That's literally your job. And one of the one of
the vetos at one point it was sort of referred
to the I guess the New York State Department, because

(08:58):
there are genuinely complicated issues that that go on in
the relationship between states and sovereign indigenous nations and the
federal government and indigenous nations, and like some of those
things require some sorting out. But it really seemed like
he just kind of passed the book on that and
then it didn't go anywhere after that, which is why

(09:18):
it then was reintroduced as additional legislation. I was doing
the thing where I like recap my my spouse on
on what I'm talking, what I'm researching on the podcast.
We were walking to the farmers market and I was
telling him this whole saga about about the you know,
the dividing up of the land and the coercing people
off of it, and he said, skipped to the end.

(09:41):
Did they get their recognition back? And I was like no,
and um, what he yelled on the street was also
something we could not put on our podcast. Um, so yeah,
he said, well now that quota was not governor anymore,
like well things changed, And I was like, I honestly
don't know, Like I'm not very that all about New

(10:01):
York state politics beyond what I read researching this show
about this issue. I don't So I don't know. Bills
do sometimes get referred to committee and they kind of
get kind of stuck there in pretty much all legislatures
in the US. So it's like a question marks at
this point, right, frustrating question marks. I also don't think

(10:24):
I said this in the episode, but Olivia word bush
Bank's great granddaughter, who's the person who UH compiled and
edited the collection of her work that was put out
in UM also an enrolled an enrolled member of the
Montacket Nation. So this is clearly something that is still
affecting a lot of people living today. UM. And greater

(10:46):
questions and conversations about people who have both indigenous and
black ancestry continue to affect people in multiple different indigenous
nations all over the Need States. And there's a whole
long history about that, a lot of it very complicated.

(11:07):
So yeah, that's continuing to be relevant today. A thing
I did not expect when I got into this episode,
because it did not come up in any of the
brief little biographies that I saw about Olivia Ward Bush
Banks was the efforts to get the film Birth of

(11:28):
a Nation taken out of theaters in Boston. UM totally
unaware that that had been part of her work at all.
But this was a huge movement all over the United States.
And while I am sure there were some white people
who also argued that the film should not be shown,

(11:51):
in large part the like white communities supported it and
communities of color were like, this has got to stop,
Like this is gonna hard to harm people, UM, which
then turned out to be absolutely true. Yeah, if folks
are interested in more more of Olivia Word bush Bank's work,

(12:15):
that book that came out in is from the Chamberg
Library of nineteenth Century Black Women Writers. It can be
a little tricky to find because it came out thirty
years ago, but it does have all of her work
in there, and uh and discussion about that work. I

(12:36):
didn't I was not actually aware of this particular collection,
like this particular collection specifically of black women writers. But
there are a lot of books in that collection, a
lot of stuff that that was put out basically to
to fill a hole in published knowledge. And as I

(12:56):
was just skimming through the other books that are part
of it, some of them are ones that are totally expected.
Like the first book on this list is Phillis sweet
Lee Collected Works of Phillis sweet Lee, Right, I would
expect that to be. They're also stuff by so Journer
Truth and Mary C. Cole and Elizabeth Keckley. So a
lot of books by names that I recognize, but also

(13:20):
some like names that I've never heard of before. And
so I kind of want to dig up a lot
more of these women and see what I can find.
Out about their lives and their work. Um, because some
of them were just not not nearly as familiar to me.
That sounds like a good plan. Yeah, um. Eliza Potter,
a hairdresser's experience in high life. I'm all over it.

(13:43):
I'm intrigued. So if you'd like to write to us
about this or any other podcast or history podcast, I
heart radio dot com and alub social media miss in history.
It's Friday. Hope everybody has an amazing weekend whatever is
on your plate, and we'll be back with an episode
from a Saturday classic tomorrow and then on Monday with

(14:06):
a brand new show. Stuff You Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
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