Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, I'm Molly Frying,
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Uh, and welcome one skin to
Speaker 1: casual Friday with the stuff you missed in History Class.
Speaker 1: So this week we talked about Joan Curran, who is
Speaker 1: a scientist that has just not gotten her due in
Speaker 1: the public sphere. In my opinion, I don't know how
Speaker 1: I stumbled across her. This is I do not remember.
Speaker 1: I literally have uh, multiple lists that I keep in
Speaker 1: various states of disarray. I have one on my phone
Speaker 1: that are potential episodes. But then I also have like
Speaker 1: kind of my adaptation of like a bullet journal style
Speaker 1: notebook that I keep with me and keep all my
Speaker 1: stuff in and literally scrawled on one of the pages
Speaker 1: like two months ago is the name Joan Curran. And
Speaker 1: I don't remember how I got to it. But then
Speaker 1: I went back to it recently and I was like, wait,
Speaker 1: why didn't I jump right on this, uh? And I
Speaker 1: don't know why, maybe because I've been talking about a
Speaker 1: lot of science lately, but I it was one of
Speaker 1: those things where the refreshing and beautiful part of it
Speaker 1: to me is how over and over the men who
Speaker 1: were her colleagues and friends, we're always very quick to
Speaker 1: correct people who did not recognize that she was a
Speaker 1: heavy hitting, brilliant scientist in her own right, which is awesome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not something that you always here. Like there was
Speaker 1: one instance I'm going to get some of the details
Speaker 1: wrong because I don't have the notes right in front
Speaker 1: of me, but where one of her friends recounted when
Speaker 1: he was like first meeting their family and they were
Speaker 1: at some like academia event and she was sitting at
Speaker 1: this table with other physicists and it was I believe
Speaker 1: when her her husband, Samuel was was head of the
Speaker 1: University of strath Clydes um science department, and someone said
Speaker 1: some thing about, you know, what a good sport she
Speaker 1: was to sit there and listen to them, and like
Speaker 1: two of the men at the table were like, um,
Speaker 1: she's smarter than the rest of us put together. So
Speaker 1: like that is a really lovely thing that her colleagues
Speaker 1: were never she seemed to not uh suffer that situation
Speaker 1: that happens with a lot of women scientists where it's like,
Speaker 1: that's cute that you did research. The men are talking
Speaker 1: that never seemed to happen, particularly considering that she was
Speaker 1: working in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties when it
Speaker 1: was a lot less common for a woman to have
Speaker 1: a seat at the table in terms of the level
Speaker 1: of research she was doing, and clearly, like the Royal
Speaker 1: Air Force and British leadership recognized that this was a
Speaker 1: smart person who needed to be utilized for her intellect
Speaker 1: to make contributions to the war effort, which was kind
Speaker 1: of to me the best takeaway from that whole thing.
Speaker 1: You know, talking about war is very difficult in general.
Speaker 1: As I get older, it gets harder and harder to
Speaker 1: read some of these accounts, because, uh, the more you
Speaker 1: learned about the world, the more you recognize, like the
Speaker 1: depth of impact of even sometimes seemingly small gestures or
Speaker 1: small moments. But we like I never really learned the
Speaker 1: degree of devastation of Hamburg during the raids during Operation
Speaker 1: gomorra Um. I remember getting a very very brief version
Speaker 1: of it, like in high school, of like, these were
Speaker 1: very big bombing raids, there were civilians killed, but I
Speaker 1: literally had not ever until I dug into her story
Speaker 1: and that particular result of her work like how horrifying
Speaker 1: it was, and everyone who lived through it and later
Speaker 1: spoke about it talked about being really like a hell
Speaker 1: on Earth. And what's really interesting in that as well
Speaker 1: is even the men who were involved in that raid
Speaker 1: on the Allied side talking about how at the time
Speaker 1: they were like cheering because they thought it had gone
Speaker 1: so well, and when they realized what had really happened
Speaker 1: and how completely destroyed Hamburg was, like, they all felt
Speaker 1: a weird sort of um conflict and guilt about it
Speaker 1: that I think a lot of them were dealing with
Speaker 1: for the rest of their lives. Yeah. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: I said in the show, but I feel like the
Speaker 1: bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki yet a lot more attention,
Speaker 1: at least here in the US um than all of
Speaker 1: the other destruction leading up to that point, when it
Speaker 1: like that wasn't something that was unique to the end
Speaker 1: of the war. No, and it and you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's just one of those things that makes you think
Speaker 1: about the things that humans will do to one another
Speaker 1: in the names of strange strange efforts. Yeah. On a
Speaker 1: on a potentially lighter note, As you were researching this,
Speaker 1: did you find anything about like the clean up effort
Speaker 1: of all of this material that was dropped around, because
Speaker 1: it just seems like a lot um you know what.
Speaker 1: I didn't, But it is a good question. I mean
Speaker 1: I kind of suspect that what happened in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases, although I don't know for the D Day prep,
Speaker 1: where they were using it really more as a a
Speaker 1: sort of wartime theater effort, this would not have been
Speaker 1: the case, but when they were using it during bombing raids,
Speaker 1: I suspect that there was so much destruction in general
Speaker 1: that kind of that material got lumped into the general
Speaker 1: clean up without really separating out what that was versus
Speaker 1: you know, collapsed buildings versus you know, the loss of
Speaker 1: human life. It all kind of got lumped together as
Speaker 1: one big problem to rebuild from. It would be my guest,
Speaker 1: But I don't know, And that's a good question. Other
Speaker 1: than knowing that a cow ate some I really don't
Speaker 1: have a lot of info about what the cap was
Speaker 1: on all that aluminum. There are still some places that
Speaker 1: have those strips of aluminum that have been recovered as
Speaker 1: like museum pieces, right. I saw some of those when
Speaker 1: I was rousing around the internet. It was one of
Speaker 1: those things that I was just curious about. And there
Speaker 1: are also things that are surely much more damaging than
Speaker 1: window that is left behind during wartime. I mean, we
Speaker 1: have unexploded ordinance that we need to talk about on
Speaker 1: Unearthed pretty free, but I was just curious. It is fascinating.
Speaker 1: It was painted black because they didn't want the reflective
Speaker 1: nature of aluminum to give away anything either. So in
Speaker 1: some cases I suspect people didn't recognize that it was
Speaker 1: aluminum stripping versus part of a damaged building or other
Speaker 1: bomb damage because it didn't look like a shiny metal thing.
Speaker 1: That would be my guess. So the second thing that
Speaker 1: we talked about this week was mir Saki Shikibu and
Speaker 1: the Tale of Genji. My introduction to this, as was
Speaker 1: the case with say Shown, was a class that I
Speaker 1: took in college called Medieval Women Writers, which has actually
Speaker 1: inspired a number of episodes of this show at this
Speaker 1: point because other people that we read included Marjorie Kemp
Speaker 1: the Book of the City of Ladies. We read in
Speaker 1: that class. Like there was a lot of things that
Speaker 1: over the past several years have eventually made their way
Speaker 1: into episodes, but this was a class, unsurprisingly a class
Speaker 1: about medieval women writers, which was an elective taught in
Speaker 1: the literature department of a university that had more women
Speaker 1: than men at It was taught by a woman and
Speaker 1: had a majority people in the class, mostly women, And
Speaker 1: boy did we think Genji was gross. The translation that
Speaker 1: we read was one of was by Edward Scheidensticker in
Speaker 1: the seventies, and we did not read the whole entire
Speaker 1: book because that's just not reasonable in the course of
Speaker 1: a college class where you have like ten different works
Speaker 1: that you're gonna read, when's a thousand pages long. Um.
Speaker 1: But we had this abridgment where all of the chapters
Speaker 1: that we were reading were from the earlier parts of
Speaker 1: the book. So all of the chapters that we were
Speaker 1: reading were about Genji and his fair ers and just
Speaker 1: the very schevy part of abducting a ten year old
Speaker 1: and grooming her to be his wife. UM. And we
Speaker 1: were all like, we don't like this guy. He seems
Speaker 1: like a player. He's you know, breaking all these women's
Speaker 1: hearts and causing all this emotional wreckage. Um. And our
Speaker 1: professor was like, yeah, this was like this was the
Speaker 1: addition of the book we had available to us. It's
Speaker 1: unfortunate that it only includes material from the early chapters
Speaker 1: of the book, because you only see like, uh, player Genji.
Speaker 1: You don't see old sad Genji from later on, when
Speaker 1: it's like all of his youthful pursuit of all of
Speaker 1: these women has like caught up with him and he
Speaker 1: is sad and wistful and wants to just become a
Speaker 1: monk and leave the world. Um, And we were all
Speaker 1: like we have we don't really care, though we still
Speaker 1: think he's greats. I love that you have such an
Speaker 1: academic introduction to that and the Pillow Book, because my
Speaker 1: introduction of the Pillow Book is from the nine Peter
Speaker 1: Greenaway film of the same name, which I don't know
Speaker 1: if you've seen it, I don't think so. Um it
Speaker 1: is say Shanagon is listed as one of the writers
Speaker 1: along with Peter Greenaway, but it is not. Um. It
Speaker 1: stars Vivian and Ean McGregor, and it's a really beautiful film.
Speaker 1: If you love Peter Greenaway, which I do, he is
Speaker 1: not for everyone. So I then after seeing it was like, wait,
Speaker 1: this is it lists like a writer from hundreds of
Speaker 1: years ago as one of the writers. So I looked
Speaker 1: it up from there and that's how I got introduced
Speaker 1: to that similarly, not entirely similarly, but the Tale of
Speaker 1: Genji I got introduced to because I was working as
Speaker 1: an acquisition specialist in a college library and we got
Speaker 1: a CD ROM version of the Tale of Genji that
Speaker 1: was a really beautifully designed thing that was intended to
Speaker 1: like be a new way that you could take English
Speaker 1: speaking students through that whole thing. But it became very
Speaker 1: apparent to me, even with my limited knowledge of the
Speaker 1: original text, that this particular piece of education seemed to
Speaker 1: focus a lot more on explaining like the hierarchy and
Speaker 1: the court culture part of it, and they really skipped
Speaker 1: over a lot of like the sexual interludes and the
Speaker 1: romantic part of it, because I don't know how you
Speaker 1: would do that on a CD rum in the early
Speaker 1: two thousand's without it being really really Yeah. But yeah,
Speaker 1: So I came up both of these from a very
Speaker 1: pop culture place, and then just because I was curious
Speaker 1: and did my own reading, learned about them, but not
Speaker 1: from a literature class. Yeah, it seems like, um, when
Speaker 1: I was researching the one about the Pillow Book that
Speaker 1: came out how those years ago, at this point I
Speaker 1: kept finding YouTube videos from an anime, and I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to check that out at some point, but
Speaker 1: I never. I never did, so maybe I'll manage to
Speaker 1: do that at some point. Anyway, I'm glad I finally
Speaker 1: got to move for up to the top of the list,
Speaker 1: because she's been on that list literally since day one,
Speaker 1: and at various points people have been like, Hey, could
Speaker 1: you do an episode on her? And every time I've
Speaker 1: been like, Ah, is it too similar to the thing,
Speaker 1: And then I was like, Oh, it's been so long,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter at this point. It might have been
Speaker 1: weird if we had done them back to back, but
Speaker 1: not not a big deal. There is a strange odd
Speaker 1: satisfaction with finally getting a topic off your list that's
Speaker 1: been there for years. Yep, Yep for sure. Okay, Taylor
Speaker 1: Genjie check Yep. Thanks so much for listening to our
Speaker 1: casual Friday everybody. Stuff You Missed in History Class is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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