Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio, Hello, and a Happy Casual Friday.
Speaker 1: I'm Holly Fry, I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So this week
Speaker 1: we talked about Crisis. Yep, oh, Crisus, Bless your heart.
Speaker 1: The one thing that I mentioned in the episode that
Speaker 1: I was kind of saving for this was the discussion
Speaker 1: of Cresus Son, who had a very mild disability, which
Speaker 1: also has kind of a happy ending. We talked about how,
Speaker 1: in the writings of Herodotus, Crisis basically says like this
Speaker 1: kid doesn't even exist to me. He was just mute.
Speaker 1: There was nothing wrong with him, he just didn't speak.
Speaker 1: And it came up in one of his many consultations
Speaker 1: with the Oracle of Delphi that the day your mute
Speaker 1: son speaks will be a day of like I I
Speaker 1: don't know the exact quote, will be like a day
Speaker 1: of misery for you essentially, and basically the story he
Speaker 1: goes that as a Persian soldier was rushing at creases
Speaker 1: as that invasion of Startus was going on, that the sun,
Speaker 1: whose name I never found, kind of runs towards this
Speaker 1: Persian soldier and says no, no, you must not kill Creasus,
Speaker 1: And that's the first thing he ever says, but then
Speaker 1: he speaks completely normally for the rest of his life,
Speaker 1: which is just an interesting and weird thing. It's never
Speaker 1: like contextualized as like what happens to that kid after
Speaker 1: creasus death, um, or his leaving to go to the
Speaker 1: Land of Giants, or his becoming part of the court
Speaker 1: of Cyrus the second. It's just an interesting thing that
Speaker 1: this this character I'm I'm kind of using ear quotes
Speaker 1: since so much of this is fictionalized and not verifiable,
Speaker 1: becomes sort of this strange prop where their disability gets
Speaker 1: used as like part of the oracle story. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: is just interesting and I just wanted to point it out.
Speaker 1: Should anybody go looking for this, like obviously, um, I
Speaker 1: don't think we need to say like different times. It
Speaker 1: was clearly different times and things like disabilities were looked
Speaker 1: at very differently, but also like it becomes a weird
Speaker 1: thing when you use it and say like no, no,
Speaker 1: but they will also be a harbinger and then their
Speaker 1: life will seem fine. But there's a lot of mess there.
Speaker 1: I feel like it's almost a precursor of ways of
Speaker 1: tropes about disability that still exists today. Like the tropes
Speaker 1: about disabilities, like people disabled, people having like some other
Speaker 1: superpower is like just a fictional a trope that's used
Speaker 1: in fiction a lot um and the like. Also the
Speaker 1: attitudes about disability in general. It's like the an overlap
Speaker 1: of things that still persist in culture and in the
Speaker 1: world today, but also in like a slightly different tone
Speaker 1: at the time. Yeah, yeah, I mean it does make
Speaker 1: entirely clear, right, we talk out things all the time,
Speaker 1: not just you and I, but culturally it is often
Speaker 1: discussed all of these tropes and like the damaging nature
Speaker 1: of some of these ideas, and it's a lot to
Speaker 1: undo and to fight against. And just know, for anyone
Speaker 1: who feels frustrated trying to like move the discussion forward
Speaker 1: in a positive way, that that we are fighting things
Speaker 1: that have been going on since the BC times. Like
Speaker 1: it is a long process and I'm glad for the
Speaker 1: progress that has been made. There is still a lot
Speaker 1: more to go, but like know that that this is
Speaker 1: deeply ingrained and that is why that it is so
Speaker 1: hard to make progress sometimes. Anyway, that was my little
Speaker 1: didactic moment. I definitely love the idea of um the
Speaker 1: Kingdom of Lydia getting rich off of King Midas washing
Speaker 1: his hand. Yeah, that's pretty fun um. I like all
Speaker 1: the beats of all of the oracle stories. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: they also are so similar to things that you will
Speaker 1: read in like Greek tragedies and whatnot, and like that's
Speaker 1: the thing where I'll just be like, did it did it?
Speaker 1: This seems like a thing in the story that's there
Speaker 1: to learn a lesson more so, which is uh additionally
Speaker 1: funny to me because so much of the way we
Speaker 1: talk about history in a less obvious way of the
Speaker 1: lot a lot of times is also about reinforcing a lesson,
Speaker 1: like like the the way especially like nations look back
Speaker 1: on their own history and teach their own history. Like
Speaker 1: a lot of it is about reinforcing ideas in a
Speaker 1: didactic way, even if it's not quite as obvious as
Speaker 1: as like and then Cresus had done the thing that
Speaker 1: the oracle said, but he didn't realize. Yeah it is.
Speaker 1: There's definitely right, Like there are narrative conventions at a
Speaker 1: that have clearly been driving the bus in terms of
Speaker 1: how some of these histories and you've got to use
Speaker 1: the air quotes at that point are written because you
Speaker 1: just picture you know, Herodotous writing and being like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know what make this really cool? And then
Speaker 1: there's a rain cloud sent by Zeus. This is amazing,
Speaker 1: you guys. Anyway, that is Crisis. It's interesting. I like,
Speaker 1: I like looking at some of these really really ancient
Speaker 1: history pieces because you see how they start to fit together.
Speaker 1: Like I said, we had covered the Acumenant Empire and
Speaker 1: this dovetails on that. But also a Stracy said, it
Speaker 1: makes it wildly apparent that even the histories we know
Speaker 1: have roots in reality, we we still don't know so
Speaker 1: much about them. Yeah, I mean there is still a
Speaker 1: lot of archaeological interest in Lydia and finding more evidence
Speaker 1: of Crisis and his palace and his lifetime him uh
Speaker 1: and hopefully one day we'll get like a mother load,
Speaker 1: but one never knows, but it does sort of evidence
Speaker 1: how hard you still have to work to kind of
Speaker 1: get to the bottom of the matter, especially when we're
Speaker 1: talking about the sixth century BC. One of our episodes
Speaker 1: this week was on the Women's War in colonial Nigeria,
Speaker 1: in which, as I said in that episode, was something
Speaker 1: I just found a passing reference to while researching another
Speaker 1: show and immediately put it on the list. It reminds
Speaker 1: me a tiny bit of the War of the Golden
Speaker 1: Stool that we talked about in a really old episode,
Speaker 1: because it was similarly an uprising against British colonization and colonialism.
Speaker 1: But the other thing that I didn't get into in
Speaker 1: this episode at all, UM, is that back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, a woman named Judith Van Allen wrote an
Speaker 1: article called Sitting on a Man, Colonialism and the Lost
Speaker 1: Political Institutions of Ebo Women, and it was originally published
Speaker 1: in the Canadian Journal of African Studies UM. And this
Speaker 1: has become a really foundational paper about specifically Ebo women
Speaker 1: in this aspect of African history. UM to the point
Speaker 1: that the Journal of West African History and had this
Speaker 1: whole issue that was like a retrospective on that one paper.
Speaker 1: And I read so many of the papers from that issue.
Speaker 1: One of them was by the original author who was
Speaker 1: kind of talking about her her process of writing this
Speaker 1: this paper and how when she originally wrote it she
Speaker 1: was angry about so many social issues that were happening
Speaker 1: at that moment. Uh. And then another was a really
Speaker 1: fascinating one by a professor in an African History program,
Speaker 1: talking about how a lot of her students who were
Speaker 1: like taking their first African history class, a lot of
Speaker 1: them were like very well meaning white students who were
Speaker 1: pursuing this education with the intent of like then going
Speaker 1: to Africa where they were like help and the original
Speaker 1: sitting on a man paper being something that like completely
Speaker 1: shifted their viewpoint from being like it is the responsibility
Speaker 1: of white Americans and Europeans to help the people of Africa,
Speaker 1: to like recognizing that in a lot of ways colonialism
Speaker 1: was not helping the people of Africa or the women
Speaker 1: of Africa, and like the whole paper was about this,
Speaker 1: like this one paper becoming a light switch moment for
Speaker 1: generations of students that finned And I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: that's how much impact to have, uh in this one paper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting, Right, we are still breaking down the ideas
Speaker 1: that colonialism entrenched in the white Western world, right, Like
Speaker 1: there are still so many stories of fiction even but
Speaker 1: also again well meaning but not uh well informed, instances
Speaker 1: of like white savior syndrome. And it's like this all
Speaker 1: goes back to that, you guys, like we have been
Speaker 1: told for literally centuries at this point that we know
Speaker 1: better than other people, which is just mind your business. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it is the very is the very blunt and
Speaker 1: not necessarily informed way to put it either. But like
Speaker 1: it's so presumptive and it's hard to get over, Like
Speaker 1: we have all fallen into that trap and it's hard
Speaker 1: to get over. So I'm not even saying that as
Speaker 1: a judge thing. It's like a reminder to myself as well, like, no,
Speaker 1: you have one lens and that's great, but like that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you're perceiving everything as it is in reality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like number one, Like I would say that that both
Speaker 1: of us on this podcast have definitely had times that
Speaker 1: we have like inadvertently fallen into that trap, and that
Speaker 1: it's like a lifelong learning process to undo a lot
Speaker 1: of those thought patterns and that we will always be
Speaker 1: working on it. Another thing is that it was really
Speaker 1: important to me in this episode to get sources that
Speaker 1: did not feel like they were just parroting the colonial
Speaker 1: view and so like if if the book that I
Speaker 1: was reading, you know that it's authors were American or
Speaker 1: or not not from anywhere in Africa, Like, it was
Speaker 1: super important to me to then go read reviews of
Speaker 1: that book by African and preferably Nigerian people to be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: how does this book hold up? Is? This? Is this
Speaker 1: what I should be spending my time on? Um? It
Speaker 1: was like an extra layer of diligence with this, so
Speaker 1: hopefully I got to the write space with it. UM.
Speaker 1: I also just kind of love the practice of sitting
Speaker 1: on a man um. Some of the songs by British standards,
Speaker 1: we're very racy, which of course like made the whole
Speaker 1: British response to it even more like and like baffled
Speaker 1: horror of what was happening, such pearl clutching. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: lot of it. Uh So, thank you once again for
Speaker 1: joining us here on Stuff you Missed History Class for
Speaker 1: our casual Friday. If you would like to write to us,
Speaker 1: you can do that at History Podcast at i heart
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