Six Impossible Episodes: More Listener Requests

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It's been
about six months since the last time we did an
installment of six Impossible episodes, but it's been almost six

(00:24):
years since we did one that was dedicated to listener requests.
I guess not really six years, for being exact. The
last one was on December four, so it's been it's
been five years since we rounded up listener requests. So
were you just fibbing to make it all six is? Yeah? Okay,
I wasn't sure. Sometimes I'm slow on jokes. Yeah. When

(00:46):
I looked at it on the counter, I was like, well,
it's been six years. And then I actually did math, which,
as we've said, arithmetic is a struggle for me. So anyway,
we get so many requests from listeners and we love them.
Y'all bring things to our attention that we might not
have ever noticed or thought about otherwise. And then sometimes

(01:09):
something is on our radar, but we get so many
listener requests for it that it becomes clear that we
need to make it a priority. Some of our listener requests, though,
are for topics that just don't have a lot of
information available, and it's totally possible that the information exists somewhere,
like maybe an old town hall records or somebody's gigantic

(01:33):
collection of many linear feet of personal papers that they've
donated to an archive, or somebody's attic. Uh. There are
lots of historians and other researchers who do all kinds
of original research into these kinds of previously unexamined primary sources.
But that is really not compatible with putting out two
new episodes of a podcast every week. Um, Like, we

(01:58):
cannot take a month off to drive down to a
small town and start combing through somebody's old records. So
I mean we could, but it would mean you don't
get a new episode for like months. Yeah, it would.
It would not work out for continuing to have new
episodes of the show. So for folks who are new

(02:21):
to our show, six impossible episodes is when we take
shorter looks at six topics that, for one reason or
another aren't really doable as a full length episode, And
that just lines up nicely with our many listener requests
for topics that are a little bit shorter on the information.
That's what we're gonna do today, and heads up, even

(02:42):
though today's six stories are short, that some of them
are kind of intense. We're going to talk about things
that involve murders, including the attempted murder of a baby,
a tomb that included some human and animal sacrifices, and
there's also some sical and sexual abuse and torture. There's

(03:03):
just a lot. Just because they're short doesn't mean they're
all lighthearted. I would say that collectively, like this doesn't
become an episode that's horrifying to me, But I just
did want to kind of give that heads up. And
so first is from an email from our listener Greg,
which said, in part quote, I don't think you've ever

(03:24):
covered this one, and it may be a part of
your six Impossible Episodes episodes because I'm not sure there's
enough material, But have you ever heard of the Iron
Mountain Baby? So Greg learned about this story after being
cast in a musical called Bright Star by Steve Martin
and Edie Brokell. Bright Star has some of the same
elements as this story, but the show is set in

(03:46):
North Carolina in the nineteen twenties and forties, rather than
when and where this actually happened, which was in Missouri
in the early nineteen hundreds. It was totally news to
me that Steve Martin and Edie Brokell had made a
musical together. I missed that entirely when it happened. It
was not to me, But I'm not a musicals person,

(04:07):
so I had not sought it out to know anything
about it. Sure So. William Helms was a farmer living
outside Irondale, Missouri, and on August fourteenth, nineteen o two,
he was near a railroad trestle that crossed the Big River,
and a train passed by from the St. Louis Iron
Mountain and Southern Railroad. After the train had gone, Helms

(04:30):
heard a sound from the vegetation that was growing along
the river, and when he went to investigate it, he
found a baby who had apparently been thrown from the
moving train, tucked inside a satchel, along with a change
of clothes and some black thread. The baby was probably
just a few days old. Sources contradict each other about

(04:52):
just how badly this infant was injured. Some say it
was just minor bumps and bruises. Other accounts say that
people were arey afraid he was not going to survive.
Efforts to find this baby's parents were unsuccessful, and William
and his wife Sarah took the baby in, even though
they were both in their later years. They named him

(05:13):
William Moses Gould Helms. William after the man who had
found him, Moses because he had been found among the
rushes along the Big River, and Gould after the man
who owned the railroad. The helms Is legally adopted William
when he was six, and he grew up and went
to Southwest State Teachers College in Springfield, Missouri, which later

(05:34):
became Missouri State University. His education was funded by the
Iron Mountain Railroad, which later became the Missouri Pacific Line,
and he was basically famous. His story was widely reported
from the time he was found in the Satchel. An
Iron Mountain Baby Fund was established to help with the

(05:54):
expenses involved with his care and upbringing. The St. Louis
Republic bought a ow and her calf. As part of
these fundraising efforts. Newspapers updated the public on how the
so called Iron Mountain Baby was doing at various points
of his life, and this really went way beyond Missouri.
For example, there was an illustrated story that was syndicated

(06:17):
in papers as far away as San Francisco in November
of nineteen o two, and it wasn't just news reports.
Shortly after the baby had been found, local minister John
Barton wrote a ballad called the Iron Mountain Baby. This
was probably part of an effort to raise money for him.
The song first appeared in print in nineteen o nine,

(06:38):
and it starts, I have a song I'd like to sing.
It's awful, but it's true about a babe thrown from
a train by a mother I know not who. This
poor little babe a few days old was in a
satchel lane. It's little clothes around it, fold and thrown
out from the train. And the song continues from there
and possibly the most straightforwardly obvious mean couplet's ever written. Yeah,

(07:02):
I originally had the whole song in here and was like,
this is embarrassing to have to read one of the
folk song databases that I was looking at with all
the lyrics, and it had this notation that was like,
this song is terrible. It is really bad. I cannot
believe how, just like Pat Lee, obvious the entire rhyme

(07:25):
scheme and like it's not a very original song. William, however,
really didn't like being known as the Iron Mountain Baby.
He eventually got married, had a child of his own,
reportedly did not ever tell his son about this part
of his life. William Moses Gouldhelms died on January thirty one,
ninety three, at the age of about fifty one. In

(07:48):
addition to the musical that we already mentioned, there is
also a novel by evlt Bosworld called The Iron Mountain
Baby that was published in two thousand six. Moving on,
we got an e mail from listener Scott that also
referenced are impossible episodes. Scott included quote a copy of
my role playing campaign Legion of Liberty Superheroes of seventeen

(08:11):
seventy six, an alternate revolutionary war with superheroes. The first
adventure might make a good episode, although it might be
in the impossible episodes category. Leslie's Retreat the weird and
comical incident that almost started the war in Salem in
February seventeen seventy five. Leslie's Retreat, also called the Salem

(08:33):
Gunpowder Raid, happened about two months before the Battles of
Lexington and Conquered. Tensions had been escalating between Britain and
its colonies in North America for years, and Colonel David
Mason of Salem, Massachusetts, had started preparing for the possibility
of war. In seventeen seventy four, he bought some number
of French cannons. Sources contradict about exactly how many cannons

(08:55):
there were, and he hid them. When Military Governor Thomas Gauge,
general in the British Army, heard about these cannons, he
made plans to send troops to Salem to seize them.
But the people of Salem were prepared for that possibility.
When Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Leslie and part of the sixty
four Regiment of Foot arrived in nearby marble Head by

(09:19):
ship during Sunday morning services on February seventy, they really
expected to be able to get to Salem and move
through the town without a lot of resistance. They thought
everybody was going to be busy in church. A lookout
spotted the ship, though, and raised the alarm. By the
time British troops got to a bridge south of town

(09:41):
that they needed to cross, the residents had already started
taking that bridge apart. The British soldiers repaired the bridge
and crossed it, moving roughly north through Salem, but when
they got to the North River on the other side
of town, they were stopped again. This time the bridge
involved it was a drawbridge, and it had been raised

(10:02):
from the other side, and the other side of the
river was where the cannons were reported to have been hidden.
Let's turned into a stalemate, with Lieutenant Colonel Leslie faced
off against Captain John Felt, who was in charge of
the Salem militia. Leslie demanded that the bridge be lowered,
and Felt refused, backed up by a whole bunch of

(10:23):
locals who were just jeering at the soldiers from the
other side of the river. People have compared this to
that scene and Monty Python and the Holy Grail where
they're yelling at the French and they have the whole
Fishop of ash seen. And this went on for the
better part of the day, so imagine the Holy Grail
is eight hours long. When Leslie trying to convince Felt

(10:45):
and his supporters to let him cross, finally promising that
he and his troops would go no farther than fifty rods,
would not harm any person or property, and then would
go back to marble Head. That way, he could honestly
say he had crossed the bridge and looked for the cannons,
but found nothing. Finally, the two sides did reach an agreement.

(11:06):
Leslie and his troops were allowed to cross the bridge.
They marched for a little bit, then they turned around
and went back to marble Head and from there back
to Boston. Very little property was damaged during all of this,
aside from the bridge that had already been repaired. There
were three gondolas that the people of Salem scuttled so
that the troops could not use them. It's believed that

(11:29):
the only person injured in all of this was Joseph Witcher,
who was foreman of the local distillery and was ordered
to stop scuttling those gondolas, but refused. Instead, he bared
his chest and dared the soldiers to stab him with
their bayonets, and the words of a nineteenth century account
by Charles m Endicott quote, they pricked his breast so

(11:52):
as to draw blood. He was very proud of this wound,
and afterward in life was fond of exhibiting it. Yeah,
I got a night fight with a bayonet. Run show
that to everybody. It is possible there could have been
a whole episode on this one. There is a book
about it, but that book is also very short, uh,
not counting things like the index and notes, It's only

(12:13):
about a hundred and twenty pages, and only one chapter
is actually on the retreat itself. A lot of the
book is more focused on kind of picking through all
the contradictory accounts of the day than laying out one
single narrative. Yeah, books like that can be fascinating to read,
but it's trickier to make that information into a narrative

(12:34):
structure for an audio podcast. There are at least two
historical markers related to this in Salem. One is a
marker for Leslie's retreat, calling it quote the first open
resistance to the king by the colonials and the first
blood shed in America's War for Independence. And then about
five feet away there's another one that marks quote the

(12:55):
first armed resistance to the royal authority. We've also and
various re enactments of this carried out over the years.
We will get to a couple of totally different stories
after we take a quick sponsor break next. At least

(13:21):
two listeners have asked for an episode on Lady How,
also called Foo How for being an honorific roughly meaning
the same thing as Lady. Most recently, Mimi came across
her name in The New York Times, not in an
article about her, but as more of an aside in
a review of a book called The Greatest Invention, A

(13:43):
History of the World in nine Mysterious Scripts. Who How
lived during the thirteenth century b c. And, as is
often the case when someone lived that long ago, tracking
down specific information on her is rather hard. A lot
of what we know about her comes from objects that
were found in a tomb that is believed to be hers.

(14:04):
The Tumbe was rediscovered in nineteen seventy six, and at
that point it was still intact. That sets it apart
from other Shan dynasty tombs, most of which were looted
long before they were rediscovered. In particular, we know about
the How from inscriptions on bones and shells that were
used for divination purposes. These ceremonies involved large flat bones

(14:29):
and shells like ox scapula or tortoise shells. These would
be inscribed with statements that described something either going well
or going poorly, or stating something as an affirmative or
a negative, and then the shell or the bone would
be held to a piece of hot metal until it cracked.
Those cracks would be interpreted as revealing which of those

(14:53):
statements was true. Based on these inscriptions and other objects
from the tomb, we know that the How as a
queen and royal consort of Woo Ding twenty one king
of the Shoan dynasty. He is recorded as having sixty
four wives. One story around this number is that he
married one woman from each of the tribes in his

(15:13):
kingdom to try to maintain peace among them. Fou How
was one of the highest ranking women among these wives.
She was mother to the heir apparent and also a
high ranking military general, second in command to Woo Ding.
This was not a ceremonial position. There were generals under
her command who she led into battle. Divination records reveal

(15:36):
these little glimpses of her life, like when she was pregnant,
trying to divine whether things would go well when she
gave birth, or whether a battle she was leading was
going to go favorably or unfavorably. One set of divination
questions involves Woo Ding asking if the How should be
allowed to lead thirteen thousand soldiers into battle. The records

(16:01):
suggest that the answer was yes, but there are also
some questions about this because Shung dynasty army units were
usually more like a third of that size, So it's like,
was this force really that big, and if so, why
was it so much bigger than normal? We don't really know.
Based on some of the inscriptions, she was also likely
a high priestess and a diviner herself. In terms of

(16:24):
her tomb's other contents, there were at least sixteen hundred
burial objects, as well as sixteen people and six dogs
who were buried with her as a ritual sacrifice. The
objects included items made from bronze, jade, stone, bone, and ivory,
about two hundred bronze ritual vessels, sacrificial axes and daggers,

(16:45):
and more than one thirty other weapons. The tomb also
contained about six thousand cow reshells, which were used as
currency for How died at the age of thirty three,
and the cause is not noted anywhere, so there's speculation
that she may have been injured in a battle, or
that she died due to complications from childbirth. After her death,

(17:07):
she was deified, and it's believed that the area above
her tomb was an open air shrine for people to
leave weekly offerings and sacrifices to her. Given her status,
It's really not totally clear why her tomb was not
close to others that belonged to Shan dynasty royalty, but

(17:28):
the fact that it was not is almost certainly why
it was still intact by ninety six. And honestly, this
seems like someone who could be a fascinating full length
podcast or a two parter or even something like a
TV mini series, But gleaning all of that information just
from burial objects and divination records is so so tricky.

(17:51):
I feel like if it were adapted for TV, it
would be a lot of speculation and fictionalized expansion of
the story, and then people might be sugar and it's
not accurate, sort of like we have an assortment of
pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, but like not the complete picture.
Moving on, Listener Grant sent an email and the comment

(18:15):
on one of our Facebook posts asking if we had
ever done a podcast on Bae Tricti Chenchi, who most
English speakers would pronounce as Beatrice. You're thinking these letters
aren't adding up to a name for me. It's spelled
the same way as Beatrice. We had not done an
episode on her, and she and her story have been

(18:36):
depicted in a lot of literature and artwork and music
and theater, and a lot of that has at this
point really overshadowed what's actually documented about this story. Count
Francesco Cenchi lived in Rome in the sixteenth century and
was very widely disliked. He had a reputation for being abusive,

(18:58):
including physically and sexually abuse of and one of the
targets of his abuse was his daughter beatric and she
and others had reported his behavior to authorities in Rome,
but Francesco was rich and powerful and had not faced
any kind of consequences. In fift reportedly, after learning that

(19:19):
Batricci had gone to the authorities, Francesco moved her to
a castle fortress outside of Rome, and he moved her
along with his wife, Lucrezia, who was Francesco's second wife
and Baetracci's stepmother. This castle was isolated, especially compared to
living in Rome, and he became even more abusive there

(19:42):
on September nine, Plata Calvetti, the castle's housekeeper, heard screaming
and went to investigate. She found Baetricchise silently looking down
from her bedroom window. The screaming was coming from her stepmother.
Francesco was dead on the ground below a with part
of the wooden balcony he had apparently been standing on

(20:03):
when it collapsed. He had landed in a rocky steep
area below the window, and ladders were needed to bring
his body up. As his body was being cleaned, it
became obvious that he had not just died in a
balcony collapse. His body was already cold, and his injuries
didn't line up with having fallen from a great height.

(20:26):
Among other things, that looked like he had been stabbed
through the eye. The sheets in his bedroom were clean
they seem to have actually been changed, but an investigation
found blood spatters on the walls. Soon there were rumors
that Beatrice had conspired to have her father murdered. She,
her stepmother, and her brother's Jacomo and Bernando, were all arrested,

(20:50):
so was the castle's castellan or warden, Olympio Calvetti, who
was the housekeeper's husband. Apparently Beatrice and Olympio had been
having an affair and she had convinced him to help
with this plan. There was also a hired hitman involved,
who fled when the conspiracy was discovered and was later
killed by one of the count's relatives. So, as we

(21:12):
said earlier, people did not like this man. He had
a reputation for cruelty and abuse, and in some accounts
he had even been suspected of multiple murders and had
bribed his way out of being charged with committing them. So,
yet and her family had a lot of popular support
and sympathy. People demanded that they all be set free,

(21:35):
but Pope Clement the Eighth ordered them all to be tortured.
Olympio Calvetti died under that torture, and while being tortured
via Tricci's brother Jacomo, confessed everything that had happened. Today,
confessions under torture are not considered to be reliable, but
this confession ultimately led to Batrice, Lucrezia, and Jacomo all

(21:59):
be being executed on September eleven. Her brother Bernardo was
only twelve at the time, and after seeing his family
members executed, he was spared from it. Himself. Instead, he
was made a galley slave. The church sees the Cenchi
family's property, and there is speculation that this had been
the reason for having them executed. As we said, there

(22:23):
are so many written and visual depictions of this, and
at this point all of those depictions and their fictionalized
elements are remembered way more than the historically substantiated details.
There is an oil painting believed to be of the
atride j, possibly painted while she was imprisoned for this crime.

(22:44):
It's been variously attributed to different painters over the years,
including Guido Renny. It is a Beta Sirianni or Generva Knafoli.
An eighteenth century account by Ludovico Antonio Maratoni is the romanticized,
especially in its treatment of bat Ra g as this
like purely innocent teenager. This plus this painting that shows

(23:09):
her as kind of a wistfully tragic person like that,
has formed the template for how other people have approached
her story. That together, the painting and that earlier work
became a source for a lot of other literature, including
Percy Shelley's verse drama The sent Sheet. There's also speculation
that Caravaggio was at the execution and that it informed

(23:33):
his painting of Judith and hollow fernies. We're going to
talk about more impossible episode topics after we first paused
for a little sponsor break. Next up, we have the

(23:53):
comment that really inspired this whole episode and made me go,
it's time for a six impossible episodes. That's just these
listener requests that we need more information on. Sie commented
on one of our Facebook posts asking for an episode
on Ella Williams, also known as Oboma the Giant Test.
She had a link to an article on Aboma the

(24:15):
Giant Test that was written by Jada Hampton at the
Uncle Junior Project. The Uncle Junior Project is dedicated to
the lives and histories of black circus performers, and most
of what I was able to find about Ella Williams
was also in that article. There may be other records
on her somewhere, but what we know about her at

(24:35):
this point is mainly gleaned from things like newspaper articles, advertisements,
and pamphlets about her appearances. According to most sources, Ella
Williams was born Ella Griggsby in South Carolina, and her
family had been enslaved prior to the U. S Civil War.
Ella reportedly changed her last name from Griggsby to Williams

(24:58):
because Griggsby was the name of her family, these and Slavers.
Some accounts say that she was born in eighteen sixty five,
not long after the end of the U. S. Civil War,
but an article about her was published in the Devon
and Exeter Daily Gazette in nineteen fourteen that gives her
age as thirty two. That would put her birth year
almost two decades later, in eighteen eighty two. Now, it

(25:20):
is not unusual for a performer to disguise their age
a bit, but that is almost a twenty year difference.
During Ella's teenage years, it became clear that she was
going to be very tall. There are some accounts that
say her family attributed this to her having about with
malaria just before she was about to enter puberty, but

(25:41):
it's not totally clear who said that, whether they believed it,
or whether this was more part of the myth making
around her stage persona as a Lady Giant. Several newspapers
across South Carolina ran an article on Williams in nineteen fifteen,
and a reporter had interviewed her directly for it. She
is quoted as saying, I was born near cross Hill

(26:02):
in Lawrence County. None of my sisters your brothers are
unusually large. For years, every time a showman saw me,
he would want me to sign a contract, but I
never could make up my mind to leave Columbia. Finally,
in the fall of eight while I was cooking for
a prominent family in Columbia, manager FC Bostock got me
to sign up for a tour. That article also described

(26:26):
her this way quote. Ella is probably the largest woman
in the world. She said yesterday that she has heard
of only one woman in the show business whose height
was anywhere near her seven and one half feet, and
some newspaper articles and advertisements she's described as even taller
than that, measuring almost eight feet. When Williams started performing

(26:48):
as a Giant Test, she went to Europe, likely with
the hopes of escaping some of the racism that she
faced in the US. She became a celebrity, making multiple
tours through Europe as well as performing in Australia, New
Zealand and South America. Her stage name of a Boma,
which is sometimes written as our Boma, is said to
have been for Aboma Capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey,

(27:12):
which was home to the Agoge. That's the women's fighting
force who Europeans nicknamed the Amazons. We have talked about
both the kingdom and the fighting Force in two prior
episodes of the podcast. Some promotional material even implied or
flat outstated that she was one of the Amazons. And
she seems to have taken this stage name both for

(27:32):
publicity reasons and because there was a white woman also
named Ella, doing similar performances. That was Ella Ewing, the
Missouri Giantess, according to that right up in the Devon
and exit are Daily Gazette. In addition to her stage
work as a Giantess, Williams loved to play the piano
and to do needle point, and she was quote exceedingly

(27:55):
clever and in addition to speaking English as a native,
she can also converse in French, Spanish, German, and Italian.
Ella Williams had to return to the US at the
start of World War One as her bookings were canceled
and travel became more dangerous. It's possible that she hoped
to return overseas once the war was over, but in
an interview that ran in South Carolina newspapers. In nineteen fifteen,

(28:19):
she said that after spending about fifteen years away, quote,
I will never stay away from Columbia and my people
as long as that. Again, she mentioned that she was
planning to open a dressmaker's shop. We really don't know
what happened to her after this, though. We don't know
if she married or had children, although in the nineteen
teams various British newspapers reported that she was trying to

(28:42):
find a husband before going back to the United States.
Really not clear though, whether she was looking for a
husband and hoping to get married, or whether this was
more of an attempt to draw people in to see
her performances. Multiple photos of Ella exist, many of them
with someone else in the pit, sure, sometimes with one
of her arms extended straight out from the shoulder, with

(29:04):
the other person standing under it, or at least appearing
to stand under it. Some of these photos look like
there's maybe a little shift in perspective going on, although
others very clearly look like she's a head and shoulders
taller than the people in the photo. She is always
very elegantly dressed. In one picture, she is in what
looks like a wedding gown and our last request was

(29:26):
from Amanda. I think this was on Twitter. Maybe. When
I went to try to find it again to like
fill in these details, I could not find any indication
of this message anywhere, so it's a little bit of
a mystery. This is artist Jannita Scherbakova, who was born
Jennida Lancer on December twel four. At the time this

(29:48):
was in the Russian Empire's Kursk province, but today this
is part of Ukraine. Janda was of both Russian and
French ancestry, part of the prominent Benois family. They were
descended from Louis Jules Benois, who had fled to Russia
after the French Revolution. There were a lot of artists
and cultural figures in this family. Jeneida was the youngest

(30:12):
of six children, and her parents were both artists, although
her father, who had been a sculptor, died when she
was only two, Her uncle was a stage designer for
the Balletus, and some of her siblings were artists in
their own right. Jeneida showed both skill and interest in
art from a very early age, and unsurprisingly, given the

(30:33):
family's background, they really encouraged her This included relocating to St.
Petersburg so she could have access to broader cultural resources
and more prominent teachers. She attended Princess Tennishevka Art School
and later studied under realist painter Uset Bras. Jeneieda married
her cousin Boris Cherabrikova in nineteen o five, and after

(30:56):
they went to France for a time so she could
continue her study of artistic masterpieces in Paris. She also
had two sons you have Guinea and Alexander, born in
nineteen o six and nineteen o seven. At this point,
Jeneida Cherbakova was coming into her own as an artist,
and most of her work was in the tradition of
Russian realism. She painted landscapes of the places she lived

(31:20):
and visited, and lots of pictures of people, with many
of those pictures focused on women, so she painted peasant
women and workers in a way that gave them a
lot of dignity, pride, and beauty. She also painted lots
of pictures of her children. In addition to her sons,
She later had two daughters, Titania in nineteen twelve and

(31:41):
at Katerina in n A lot of her work during
these years suggests kind of a quiet joy and a
sense of really finding beauty and everyday people and things.
Her most famous work maybe self Portrait at the Dressing Table,
which she finished in nineteen o nine. The perspective of
this painting is as though you're looking out from inside

(32:03):
the mirror as Jaabrikova brushes her long brown hair in
front of it. She is in a bright homye room
with an array of bottles, pins, jewelry, and two candles
spread around the dressing table. Although she had really established
a reputation as an artist, Cheribrikova's career went into decline
after the Russian Revolution of nineteen seventeen, also known as

(32:27):
the Bolshevik Revolution. She and her family moved to Moscow,
and in the wake of the social and economic changes
that followed the revolution, they had to live in an
apartment with a group of actors. She tried to take
advantage of this living situation, which to her and the
family was really not ideal, by doing more paintings of

(32:47):
these performers, but she was still really struggling financially. This
was especially true after her husband was arrested and then
he died of Typhus while imprisoned. While much of her
earlier work had seemed optimistic or serene, some of her
work from this period is darker. For example, her nineteen

(33:08):
twenty painting House of Cards shows her children, whose father
had died the year before, building a house of Cards.
The color palette is subdued, and their facial expressions all
seemed to suggest that they're waiting on bad news. In
nine Sheerbicalva sold some paintings for a traveling exhibition in

(33:28):
the United States, and she used the money to go
to Paris with the hope of being able to earn
a better living as an artist. But after she left,
the Soviet Union tightened its border policies and she was
not allowed to return. Although two of her children were
eventually allowed to join her in France, she never saw

(33:49):
her mother or some of her other family members again.
She did manage to find more patrons and sell more
art while in Paris, including taking a six week trip
to Morocco in December of nine under the patronage of
Baron Jean de Blu, a Belgian industrialist. She took other
trips as well, but things once again became more difficult

(34:09):
as World War two began when Germany occupied Paris in
nineteen forty, She had to renounce her Russian citizenship and
stop all contact with her family in Russia under the
threat of being sent to a concentration camp. After the
war was over, she remained in France and became a
French citizen, but years passed before she was able to

(34:30):
contact her family back in what was at that point
the Soviet Union. She lived in France for the rest
of her life. The Soviet government offered to allow her
to return in nineteen fifty seven, but at that point
she was in her seventies and really wasn't well enough
to make the journey. Her children came to visit her instead,
and one of her daughters helped arrange exhibitions of her

(34:53):
work in the Soviet Union in nineteen sixty five, the
first time her work had been shown there in decades.
She died in Paris two years later on September ninety seven.
Janida zabra Kova made a name for herself and reached
a level of prominence in respect that really were not
common for women artists living in the Russian Empire in

(35:13):
the Soviet Union, but her work and life have not
had nearly as much attention as some other women from
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had similar artistic careers.
She was honored with a Google doodle in Russia and
a couple of other countries on December twenty for her
on thirty sixth birthday. So I went through about a

(35:34):
year of emails while working on this, along with going
through some of our Twitter mentions and Facebook comments, but
those are just way harder to try to go through
en mass than email is. I gathered up various requests
beyond this one, so uh, we obviously got more. We've
gotten more requests um for things that would be shorter,

(35:57):
uh than could really fit under this umbrella. So they
are maybe other six impossible listener requests in the future
just already from what I gleaned together while working on this. Uh,
there's enough for like two more episodes in the future. Bomb.
Do you have a listener email to go with all
these listener requests? I knew this is from Greta, and

(36:19):
Greta wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I'm one of those
longtime listeners who finally decided to write in. I started
listening as a student worker in my university archives about
seven years ago and never stopped. I recently listened to
your Unearthed episode and have a funny story related to
the second old canoe found in Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin.

(36:42):
I live in Madison, and about two months ago I
went on a tour of the State Historical Society archival
storage facility. While I was there, I saw the twelve
hundred year old canoe. Our tour guide, an archivist for
the organization, talked about how difficult it is to store
because of its size and the fact that it's being
kept completely submerged for preservation reasons. He went on to

(37:05):
say it was worth figuring out a place for it
because it's not like you find a canoe that old
more than once in your life. It was hardly a
week later when they found the three thousand year old
canoe in the same lake. I'm sure they were scrambling
to find another place to assemble a water tank. As
a funny aside, it's being kept in the same room

(37:26):
as a weener mobile packers, ice fishing shack, and a
giant brewing barrel. It's quite a range of Wisconsin history
in one room. I hope you'll consider doing a live
show in Madison someday. Uh. And then Greta had two
episode suggestions, one the Pastigo Fire obviously this is the
email that inspired our most recent Saturday classic, and the

(37:48):
other is the history of Workers Camp, which yes, that
could indeed be interesting. Greta signed off, Sincerely, Greta. And
then also with the pictures kitty cat pictures. We always, always,
always love the kittie gap pictures. Thank you so much
for this. I find this to be a delightful story. Like, Yeah,
how often are you going to find it? Can do that? Old?

(38:10):
Apparently more often than you would expect. Uh. If you
would like to send us a new about this or
any other podcast where History podcast at i heart radio
dot com. We're all over social media miss in History,
which is where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeart
Radio app or wherever you like to get your podcasts.

(38:38):
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Six Impossible Episodes: More Listener Requests