Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Speaker 1: Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And we discussed the
Speaker 1: drama of Thomas Hardy's life this week third did and
Speaker 1: you told me you have strong feelings about Thomas Hardy. Yeah. So. Um.
Speaker 1: My entire K through twelve education, from the time we
Speaker 1: started being assigned homework, I did not do homework. I
Speaker 1: thought it was a pointless waste of my time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I very really did it. I did have a very
Speaker 1: long bus ride, and even though I get kind of
Speaker 1: motion sick in the car, if I sat in the
Speaker 1: right way on the bus, I could usually get like
Speaker 1: my math homework done on the bus on the way
Speaker 1: to school in the morning. So I just didn't I
Speaker 1: didn't do it. I was in trouble for not doing
Speaker 1: homework all the time. However, I read every single reading
Speaker 1: assignment for like English or literature class because I really
Speaker 1: enjoyed reading. And the one exception to that in my
Speaker 1: entire you know, elementary, middle and high school career was
Speaker 1: Test of the Derbervilles, which I started trying to read,
Speaker 1: and I was like, this is the most boring thing
Speaker 1: I have ever read in my entire life. Uh. I
Speaker 1: know this is not how literature class happens for a
Speaker 1: lot of folks, but um, what would happen was we
Speaker 1: would read the thing, and then we would be given
Speaker 1: this multiple choice reading comprehension test. And so we were
Speaker 1: all supposed to read test of the Derberville's. We were
Speaker 1: all supposed to get in like a small group and
Speaker 1: discuss it, and then we were going to take this
Speaker 1: multiple choice tests. And one person in my small group
Speaker 1: had read it, the rest of us had not. The
Speaker 1: rest of us like, this was so boring. I couldnot,
Speaker 1: And so she basically told us the whole plot of it. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then I took a test that I did so
Speaker 1: badly on because I had not read the work that
Speaker 1: when my teacher gave it back to me with this
Speaker 1: failing grade on it, she looked at me with this
Speaker 1: just sorrow on her face and said, Tracy, why did
Speaker 1: you do that? Uh? And so, yeah, and you've hated
Speaker 1: Thomas Hardy ever since. Yeah, I just I could not.
Speaker 1: I could not read it. And so that I was like,
Speaker 1: am I remembering this right? And so I went to
Speaker 1: the project Guttenberg, and I opened up Test of the
Speaker 1: Deerbervilles and I read the first three or four paragraphs
Speaker 1: and I was like, yeah, I can see why tenth
Speaker 1: grade me was like, no, not here for this. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We I read a Jude obscure in high school and
Speaker 1: we my little band of Merriman and I UM made
Speaker 1: a video of about it as our class project, which
Speaker 1: was very silly, of course, as one does. UM, and
Speaker 1: I got to be Arabella and I played it very broadly, UM,
Speaker 1: But I definitely did not, as I said at the top,
Speaker 1: have that connection with Hardy, And like I said, now
Speaker 1: as an adult looking at his work, UM, and I've
Speaker 1: read more of it since and knowing his life story,
Speaker 1: I'm like, good lord, this is all embarrassingly autobiographical. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk a little bit more about Emma
Speaker 1: because she's a fascinating figure and one of the things
Speaker 1: that I loved, But there wasn't really the right place
Speaker 1: to put it in here that didn't feel wedged in.
Speaker 1: It went in and came out like six times while
Speaker 1: I was working on this, is that she she was
Speaker 1: writing throughout their marriage, like she was still trying to
Speaker 1: have her literary career, even though he wasn't really supporting it.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that she wrote that I
Speaker 1: didn't get the original of I got I was reading
Speaker 1: several papers about her, and one of which quoted several
Speaker 1: times this particular piece of writing that I love so
Speaker 1: much because it's an article in a periodical called The
Speaker 1: Animals Friend that she wrote in and it's like just
Speaker 1: about kiddies. And my favorite part is she has this
Speaker 1: whole thing about um, how to pick up a cat
Speaker 1: to keep it happy, and it's all about being really
Speaker 1: sweet and treating it as if it were fine China.
Speaker 1: It's just so charming that she was a cat lady.
Speaker 1: She had a lot of cats up in the attic um.
Speaker 1: This brings me to my next thing that I found
Speaker 1: fascinating doing this research, because every biography you read of
Speaker 1: Thomas Hardy picks a villain in this this triangle of people,
Speaker 1: and they pick different villains depending on the point of
Speaker 1: view of the author, right, so some of them are
Speaker 1: very like Emma was a pain in the neck. Poor
Speaker 1: Thomas Hardy was saddled with this monster who would openly
Speaker 1: say that she was from a higher class than him,
Speaker 1: and like others will be like Florence was really the
Speaker 1: gold digger. She right after that business and everyone knew
Speaker 1: that she was trying to lure Hardy. And Emma even
Speaker 1: does seem to have gotten a bit suspicious eventually of
Speaker 1: like wait, why is this woman in our lives so much? Um?
Speaker 1: And others are like, man, Thomas Hardy just didn't He
Speaker 1: was in love with falling in love and he didn't
Speaker 1: know actually what a relationship was. Yeah, And it's very
Speaker 1: fascinating to look at at all of those because I
Speaker 1: think the bottom line is right, like, probably none of
Speaker 1: them we're really I mean, this is humans, right, Like
Speaker 1: we all have foibles and nobody's perfect. But all of
Speaker 1: them had these idealized views of relationships that no one
Speaker 1: could live up to. You And instead of being like,
Speaker 1: oh that's not realistic, they were like, damn it, you
Speaker 1: didn't fulfill my dreams. Florence the least of all. I
Speaker 1: think she wanted to know Thomas Hardy. She was a
Speaker 1: fan girl. She got married to him and that worked
Speaker 1: out for her. Yeah. I think she kind of got
Speaker 1: the most happy ending of them all. She did. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is another part though, So the cats. I read
Speaker 1: one biography that said that Florence got rid of Emma's
Speaker 1: cats full stop. And I read another version where it
Speaker 1: was like, no, Florence actually wrote a letter to a
Speaker 1: friend about how some of the cats ran away when
Speaker 1: they didn't have Emma to take care of them, and
Speaker 1: some of the cats just died of old age and
Speaker 1: some were killed. It sounded like, and I'm like, what
Speaker 1: exactly happened with those pets? But we know that the
Speaker 1: cats were not cared for after Emma past, which is
Speaker 1: very sad. But yeah, everybody is a villain. Depending on
Speaker 1: who's whose biography you're reading. It becomes one of those
Speaker 1: stories that's really important to read multiple different sources because
Speaker 1: none of them will say the same thing. Um That
Speaker 1: was why I selected that piece that we quoted about
Speaker 1: Emma because it's it was really the most fair handed
Speaker 1: of any that I came across, where it was like, no,
Speaker 1: she probably was a pain in the next sometimes, but
Speaker 1: she was also really unhappy and miserable, and that was
Speaker 1: because she wasn't getting any kind of support. Um So,
Speaker 1: let does be a lesson, don't be anything like these
Speaker 1: people in your relationships. Um Uh. Also, you can turn
Speaker 1: out okay if you never do your homework. I never
Speaker 1: did my homework. It was very bad. Thinking on homework
Speaker 1: has also changed since we were Like, I see increasing
Speaker 1: numbers of educators being like, especially in elementary school, it
Speaker 1: doesn't really serve a purpose, Like the homework that should
Speaker 1: be done is the work that didn't get done in class,
Speaker 1: because that's the practice that's needed. But I always just like,
Speaker 1: I learned this in class, and you want me to
Speaker 1: learn it more home. I guess I don't. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I would rather be doing literally anything else. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was not a great homework doer. When I have the
Speaker 1: fondest memories of growing up in terms of school work
Speaker 1: at home was studying for tests with my dad because
Speaker 1: if I made like flash cards or notes for him,
Speaker 1: he would quiz me on stuff and it was the
Speaker 1: most fun sometimes we ever had. Like I will forever
Speaker 1: remember us discussing the four kinds of algae at length
Speaker 1: and him just laughing at all the different names of algae,
Speaker 1: and like I that was a really fun time. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I was not a good homework doer. I coasted a lot.
Speaker 1: I got pushed through a lot of classes that were advanced.
Speaker 1: I think because my best friend was the smartiest smarty
Speaker 1: pants of smart town. And they were like, we should
Speaker 1: keep her happy, which means just keep putting home in
Speaker 1: the classes. Yeah. Yeah, I was lucky enough that I
Speaker 1: was usually a well to do well enough on tests
Speaker 1: and stuff, having not done my homework that that zero
Speaker 1: on my homework did not cause me to fail. Like
Speaker 1: I never had a zero on a homework, I would
Speaker 1: have died first. I would literally like throw it together
Speaker 1: lickety split. But I would never have done that. However,
Speaker 1: I do also have a good um, well, it's a
Speaker 1: mixed in terms of good and bad our physics class
Speaker 1: in high school, I did none of the work before
Speaker 1: the first test. I still don't know how it happened.
Speaker 1: But I aced that test and all of my friends,
Speaker 1: who were much smarter than me, did not, And so
Speaker 1: then it was like Holly is the wunderkinda physics And
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't know what happened here, y'all.
Speaker 1: I don't understand any of this stuff. Yeah, so the
Speaker 1: rest of that semester was very difficult for me, But ah,
Speaker 1: education everyone responds to different stuff. That's the trick that
Speaker 1: nobody knew when we were kids. Yeah, there's been a whole. Uh.
Speaker 1: Like we heard a lot about learning styles some years go,
Speaker 1: and like there's some research that like learning styles are
Speaker 1: more about preferences than actually whether you are able to
Speaker 1: learn better. But I do feel like the uh a
Speaker 1: lot of people, the things I will hear teachers talking
Speaker 1: about doing with their classes now sounds a lot more
Speaker 1: engaging and relevant than what was happening in classes that
Speaker 1: I was in in the nineteen eighties and nineties, where
Speaker 1: it was really like, you are in tenth grade. You're
Speaker 1: gonna read tests of the Derbervilles for some reason, You're
Speaker 1: going to discuss it in a small group, and then
Speaker 1: you're gonna take a multiple choice reading comprehension test, and
Speaker 1: that is somehow going to be useful to right, right well,
Speaker 1: And I think that's the thing, right, Like, you studied
Speaker 1: literature in college, as did I, and it's like when
Speaker 1: you actually start to like really dig in, and like
Speaker 1: I said, for me, the biographies of it the entry
Speaker 1: point to that too, looking at literature as a lens
Speaker 1: of humanity, even it becomes much more interesting. But you
Speaker 1: don't get that when you're younger, and I know, at
Speaker 1: least we did not. I think now more teachers will
Speaker 1: introduce that concept, but um in a in a way
Speaker 1: that's compelling. Yeah. I also had college experiences where I
Speaker 1: found the reading so dreadfully boring that I was like,
Speaker 1: how am I even going to get through this? This
Speaker 1: is awful? And then when I got into class and
Speaker 1: our professor talked to us about it, I would realize
Speaker 1: things that I, as a reader reading by myself in
Speaker 1: my dorm room, had never seen and was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: this is actually really cool. There are all these layers
Speaker 1: to this that I did not understand upon reading it.
Speaker 1: And that was not how. That was not how my
Speaker 1: tenth grade literature class with tests of the Durbervilles worked
Speaker 1: at all. Oh Tess, Oh, Thomas Harvey and the kiddies
Speaker 1: this week onto the show. One of the things we
Speaker 1: talked about was the women's march on Pretoria, South Africa
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty six, which I stumbled across in some
Speaker 1: random way and then but I want to make that
Speaker 1: an episode of the show, and discovered one of the
Speaker 1: things that can be challenging when talking about a topic
Speaker 1: about something that is uh that far away from where
Speaker 1: we physically are, which is the availability of resources. There
Speaker 1: are various books UM about this specific thing and the
Speaker 1: people who are involved with it. A lot of them
Speaker 1: do not have the book versions, or if they do
Speaker 1: have the book versions, I was not able to find them,
Speaker 1: and they are not in print beyond South Africa and
Speaker 1: in terms of online resources. So you know, I grew
Speaker 1: up in the United States. I speak American English. I've
Speaker 1: read a lot of stuff that was written somewhere in
Speaker 1: the UK or Ireland and so familiar with the like
Speaker 1: stylistic conventions of English in those places. Also to some
Speaker 1: extent Australia, UM reading stuff that was about South Africa
Speaker 1: that was written in South Africa and either in English
Speaker 1: or translated into English. I kept finding stuff like idioms
Speaker 1: I'd never encountered before, and just sort of general slightly
Speaker 1: different stylistic conventions that I just wasn't familiar with, and
Speaker 1: it was kind of like, Wow, this is like a
Speaker 1: just a slightly different, uh, flavor of English than the
Speaker 1: ones I have been immersed in my whole life. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it seems like even syntax is a little different. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like just the way other cultures will construct a sentence
Speaker 1: will put emphasis in different places than we might naturally
Speaker 1: fall into. So it can be a little like kind
Speaker 1: of um tugging apart threads and being like, Okay, what
Speaker 1: is this actually saying? Even though it is a language
Speaker 1: we know, Yeah, so was I don't. It's um. It's
Speaker 1: not the first time that I've done research related to
Speaker 1: South Africa, but it was the first time that I
Speaker 1: was really struck by just like a slightly different English usage.
Speaker 1: Then I have spent most of my time on so
Speaker 1: many of the people who were part of planning that
Speaker 1: march seemed like they have had such uh fascinating and
Speaker 1: important lives and uh, if I can sort of pick
Speaker 1: away it, maybe getting some access to some more international resources,
Speaker 1: some of them may return for full episodes on them. Right. Yes,
Speaker 1: I find more and more lately. I think maybe because
Speaker 1: we have been doing this show for so long, that
Speaker 1: it starts to be easier and easier to see threads
Speaker 1: connecting seemingly disparate things in history sometimes, and then when
Speaker 1: you start following, if you're like, oh, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about that and that and that and that, and
Speaker 1: then I end up with a huge whole long list
Speaker 1: just off of one episode, and then I'm like, mm am,
Speaker 1: I making cluster episodes of these all about things too
Speaker 1: much together. But this is the peril. That's why sometimes
Speaker 1: I'll like intentionally space stuff out. It's also interesting in that, uh,
Speaker 1: most of what we focus on on the show is
Speaker 1: not stuff that you and I lived through in some way,
Speaker 1: not all the time most of the time, but like
Speaker 1: I was in high school and college when apartheid was
Speaker 1: being dismantled um and you know, younger than that was
Speaker 1: you know, aware enough to remember like the boycotts of
Speaker 1: South Africa and different actors and musicians and other celebrities
Speaker 1: like taking really vocal stands against apartheid and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: And so it is interesting too then look back on
Speaker 1: that period from now the perspective of having worked on
Speaker 1: a history podcast. Whenever when we started doing this history podcast,
Speaker 1: I one d percent learned about apartheid because of Stevie
Speaker 1: van Zaaneah starting Artists United Against Apartheid eighties and like
Speaker 1: that being really the first time that I was really
Speaker 1: i think exposed to activism on that level of like
Speaker 1: being like, oh, people who have a certain degree of
Speaker 1: privilege because of celebrity can actually leverage that to make statements.
Speaker 1: That was really the first time I remember being conscious
Speaker 1: of that going on. I think I'm trying to now
Speaker 1: remember when that versus um. You know, all of Bob
Speaker 1: Geldoff's work was happening, like which was first and which
Speaker 1: was second, but they're kind of clustered there together. So
Speaker 1: that's how I learned about activism musicians in the eighties. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I did. I had a haul, just a pile of
Speaker 1: YouTube videos that I had as I was going through
Speaker 1: and uh and corralling um sources. I had a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of YouTube videos that were all naming the Women's
Speaker 1: March in some way, and a lot of them when
Speaker 1: I actually viewed them, were you know, the recent years
Speaker 1: addresses in public commemorations and things like that about the
Speaker 1: Women's March UM, and consistently they all had a message
Speaker 1: of we've come so far and what these what these
Speaker 1: women did was so important, but we also still have
Speaker 1: so far to go, particularly in terms of of the
Speaker 1: rights of women, UM and violence against women and things
Speaker 1: like that in South Africa. UM. So yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It was really interesting to see that really consistent through
Speaker 1: line through all of these different speeches and newscasts and
Speaker 1: things like that from within the last few years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it becomes a study in resilience, right, Like, it
Speaker 1: can be difficult when your protest or your um document
Speaker 1: that you've assembled or your petition doesn't seem like it's
Speaker 1: really moved the needle very much. I know I would
Speaker 1: have a very hard time going okay, but I'm still
Speaker 1: going to keep trying and not going. Well, that didn't work. Um,
Speaker 1: so it I am always impressed by, not necessarily in
Speaker 1: the sense of that word, like, oh, I'm so impressed,
Speaker 1: but just it impresses on me how important it is
Speaker 1: to really retain commitment to a cause. Yeah. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: you don't always feel like you're making any progress for
Speaker 1: getting any wins. Right, But that's how change happens, is
Speaker 1: that you don't get deter urge by what feel like
Speaker 1: setbacks or lack of progress. Yeah. Yeah, So I'm glad
Speaker 1: I stumbled across this reference and some I don't even remember,
Speaker 1: some random place that maybe go, hey, let me look
Speaker 1: into more about that. Since it's Friday, I hope everybody
Speaker 1: has a good weekend coming up, regardless of what is
Speaker 1: on your plates. We'll be back on Saturday with a
Speaker 1: Saturday Classic and then Monday with a brand new episode.
Speaker 1: We'll hope you'll stick around for it. Stuff you missed
Speaker 1: in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from i heart Radio, visit the i
Speaker 1: heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.