Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly
Speaker 1: Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. We talked about monarch
Speaker 1: butterflies this week. We did, and I didn't once drop
Speaker 1: into my ten year old child self and talk ad
Speaker 1: nauseam about the Monarch from Venture Brothers, which is one
Speaker 1: of my favorite animated shows, and the Monarch as a
Speaker 1: villain question Mark is a spectacular and very fun character
Speaker 1: that show, obviously a little more adult in theme, but
Speaker 1: really really wonderful. And they do have a whole thing
Speaker 1: about milkweed on one of the episode and how the
Speaker 1: monarch became the Monarch who I want, I won't do.
Speaker 1: His voice is pretty great. But this is one of
Speaker 1: those things that I am curious about and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: kind of crowdsource from listeners if they're interested in participating,
Speaker 1: because Tracy, I bet you like me, probably at some
Speaker 1: point in elementary school went to see like a monarch
Speaker 1: chrysalis situation on a field trip, or they came to
Speaker 1: you in some way. Yeah. So I remember this in
Speaker 1: two different places, and one was we had a place
Speaker 1: that at the time was called the Nature Science Center,
Speaker 1: which was a you know, nature museum type place aimed
Speaker 1: at children. Uh and I so I remember there they
Speaker 1: would have like the little stem of milkweed with a
Speaker 1: little chrystals on it, and you could see what was
Speaker 1: going on with lots of interpretive signs about butterflies. But
Speaker 1: then I also remember something that probably was like ordered
Speaker 1: from a science supply store or something that was like
Speaker 1: a little classroom, tiny little terrarium type ing in the classroom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I am wondering, and my question to listeners, if anybody
Speaker 1: has insight, is whether or not they're doing those field
Speaker 1: trips these days, even like pre pandemic, because I feel
Speaker 1: like there are so many more digital resources than we
Speaker 1: I mean, we didn't have digital resources when we were
Speaker 1: in elementary school. So I'm wondering if there's still that
Speaker 1: kind of like in person learning experience or if um
Speaker 1: that's transition more to to digital and online stuff. I
Speaker 1: do know that EPCOT during it during Flower and Garden
Speaker 1: Festival returing Food and Wine Festival, Epcott at one point
Speaker 1: during the year does do like a monarch garden, and
Speaker 1: they'll sometimes have a little roosting area that you can
Speaker 1: go look at but I think that's a it would
Speaker 1: be hard to plan for it. You got to kind
Speaker 1: of catch the right time by accident. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: I'm curious if you have have kiddos that are elementary
Speaker 1: school age and they have done uh Monarch, you know study,
Speaker 1: what if if they're still doing in person or if
Speaker 1: they are as I suspect possibly many doing online these days.
Speaker 1: They're so beautiful. I love them so much. One of
Speaker 1: my favorite running outfits was the dress that I painted
Speaker 1: to look like a giant monarch butterfly, because I am ridiculous. Um.
Speaker 1: I also wanted to mention there was an interesting thing
Speaker 1: about Catesby's two volume work UH Natural History, and his
Speaker 1: why it took him twenty years to get the second
Speaker 1: volume out and a pretty long time to get the
Speaker 1: first volume out and it didn't merit inclusion. We already
Speaker 1: included a lot of biographical information about people to kind
Speaker 1: of give timeline context, and I didn't want to keep
Speaker 1: getting bogged down in that. But when he came back,
Speaker 1: even though the Royal Society had paid for all of it,
Speaker 1: they didn't like pay for his book to be made.
Speaker 1: And he was very much a hands on per person
Speaker 1: and he did not have the funds to like pay
Speaker 1: a printer the normal going rate to get his book published.
Speaker 1: So he learned the book publishing process himself, like how
Speaker 1: to do book plates, how to do everything. Some of
Speaker 1: that delay is a learning curve for him, and then
Speaker 1: he sold it via subscription model. It was like the
Speaker 1: original indiego go or go fund me kind of thing
Speaker 1: where if it meets its goal, I could publish this book.
Speaker 1: I just thought that was all very fascinating. Yeah, We've
Speaker 1: talked about various people that have like like the model
Speaker 1: of getting subscribers to get your book rented, but not
Speaker 1: the learning how to do it yourself part. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: learn how to run a press. I'm gonna figure out
Speaker 1: it appeals to my soul that that kind of that
Speaker 1: kind of d I Y approach. Yeah, And I'm just
Speaker 1: thinking about we were was it when we were in
Speaker 1: I don't know. It was on our West Coast tour
Speaker 1: there was a book binder museum that I went to
Speaker 1: and I was literally the only person in the museum,
Speaker 1: so I basically got like a just by myself guided
Speaker 1: tour of the whole place. U there are a lot
Speaker 1: of steps in book binding methods that involved urine. So
Speaker 1: if you're not schooled in the usage of all of
Speaker 1: the urine parts, that seems like it might be particularly unpleasant.
Speaker 1: There's some there's a lot of work in the whole thing,
Speaker 1: So hats off to you, Mr Catesby in history for
Speaker 1: learning how to do all of that yourself. Um. This
Speaker 1: was a really interesting one because I knew about Catalina's story.
Speaker 1: She since remarried and she has a different last name.
Speaker 1: I didn't include it in the episode because, as we mentioned,
Speaker 1: like while she has done some stuff and she has
Speaker 1: worked with some conservation groups and butterfly in interest groups,
Speaker 1: she's not a big like I to be out there
Speaker 1: in the public eye person, which is why I did
Speaker 1: not include her current last name, even though it's not
Speaker 1: hard to find. Um, and I want her to have
Speaker 1: credit for what she did, but I also want to
Speaker 1: make sure you know you and I normally would not
Speaker 1: include a person who is still alive in the podcast.
Speaker 1: She's an outlier in that regard, so I wanted to
Speaker 1: be as like hyper respectful of her privacy. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: have still living people that come up from time to time,
Speaker 1: but a lot of times they are still living people.
Speaker 1: Who are like a lot more publicly visible then she is,
Speaker 1: and so if so and so is a leading academic
Speaker 1: researcher who does public history all the time. Bl blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. Like that's a different situation from like a
Speaker 1: private citizen who was maintaining a pretty private life at
Speaker 1: this point. Yeah, she has, he said in interviews like,
Speaker 1: I like, I like my quiet life. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: don't want to mess with that. Um. I did notice
Speaker 1: there was an interview she did with a butterfly group
Speaker 1: where someone was asking how she viewed this whole thing,
Speaker 1: and she is saying, you know, people got it wrong
Speaker 1: for so long and it's getting better. But also I'm
Speaker 1: I'm obviously not directly quoting, but basically like, because there
Speaker 1: have now been decades of misinformation, it's really hard to
Speaker 1: course correct for a lot of it, which is just
Speaker 1: an interesting thing to consider. It's kind of like, I mean,
Speaker 1: I wanted to include that aspect of it because we
Speaker 1: talk all the time about how, you know, there are
Speaker 1: versions of history that get completely inadvertently even or vertent
Speaker 1: lye I don't know, um, you know, kind of written
Speaker 1: in a way that eliminates key elements or key people
Speaker 1: in them, and that was one and it was the
Speaker 1: same reason that I wanted to include that discussion of
Speaker 1: the fact that Petiver getting all of his amazing samples,
Speaker 1: which are lauded still as being like such an incredible collection,
Speaker 1: it's tied to really nefarious and not not rosy and
Speaker 1: delightful people history. Yeah. Um. We always joked that every
Speaker 1: piece of history we talked about is we always discover
Speaker 1: is trace back to racism and slavery in many cases.
Speaker 1: But I really had not thought about how much naturalist
Speaker 1: and biological history and our knowledge was tied to the
Speaker 1: slave trade until I read that paper, and then I
Speaker 1: was like, oh yeah, and also in other parts of
Speaker 1: the world like colonialism and right, yeah, yeah, yeah. The
Speaker 1: good news is you can grow milk wheed at home, um,
Speaker 1: which I ordered a bunch of And I literally while
Speaker 1: I was working on this, I texted a bunch of
Speaker 1: my friends. It was basically like, by the way, you're
Speaker 1: all going to start growing milk wheat. I already ordered
Speaker 1: seeds for everybody to be bossy, but the butterflies need us. Um.
Speaker 1: I have had various stabs at growing uh flowers and
Speaker 1: nectar plants for insects here in my yard with varying
Speaker 1: degrees with success. But one of the things that I
Speaker 1: will say, and if you if you go check out
Speaker 1: um Monarch joint Venture dot org, which we mentioned at
Speaker 1: the end of the podcast, they will link you to resources.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that I did read multiple
Speaker 1: times is that you should get local milkweed, like the
Speaker 1: milkweed that naturally grows in your area, because a lot
Speaker 1: of places sell tropical milkweed that will actually confuse sometimes
Speaker 1: insects into thinking it's not time to move on. I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's true. I'm not an entomologist, but
Speaker 1: definitely like local is always better for your area if
Speaker 1: you're trying to participate in a project like this um
Speaker 1: so it's easy Piecy. You'll have some fun flowers and
Speaker 1: then maybe you'll also get cute visitors who doesn't want that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting. One of the things that came up in
Speaker 1: several articles, particularly in this last week where the extinction
Speaker 1: endangered species listing was made UH is that several people
Speaker 1: in the science community have noted like this is one
Speaker 1: of the first species that a lot of people in
Speaker 1: North America feel a natural connection to because they see
Speaker 1: them in their yards. So hopefully the hope is that
Speaker 1: one people will want to do, like take those simple
Speaker 1: steps of like growing local flowering plants so that insects
Speaker 1: in your area that are important to the whole biosphere
Speaker 1: of your area will continue to thrive, but also that
Speaker 1: it will kind of help people make a bigger connection
Speaker 1: to conservation and to making bigger efforts towards conservation of
Speaker 1: species that that they maybe don't have that personal connection to.
Speaker 1: So that is my my hope, my hope, my hope.
Speaker 1: If you start growing milkweed, send us pictures, tell us
Speaker 1: all about it and about your success, because I'm very curious. Um,
Speaker 1: I hope we all do such things because I think
Speaker 1: that would be great. It's easy. You can even do
Speaker 1: it in a planter. You don't have to have a
Speaker 1: big tract of lamp. So hopefully will all improve things
Speaker 1: and the butterflies will bounce back. I hope. Oh, Tracy,
Speaker 1: we talked about Luigi this week. He was tricky for
Speaker 1: me in some ways, which you discovered. There were parts
Speaker 1: where I had started a sentence and just vanished during
Speaker 1: that because I could there were things about his life
Speaker 1: that I did not know how to describe in a
Speaker 1: way that would be appropriate for our show, because he was,
Speaker 1: as we talked about, a womanizer in a way that
Speaker 1: had some very misogynist leanings. UM like. He at one
Speaker 1: point in his autobiography talked about um offering lessons to
Speaker 1: women who wanted to take photography lessons for their hobby,
Speaker 1: and he wrote about them, quote, any woman who takes
Speaker 1: up photography as a hobby has something emotionally lacking in
Speaker 1: her life. She must be emotionally starved as I was.
Speaker 1: So it's like this one too punch where he's like,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't do this unless you you needed a thrill.
Speaker 1: But I also understand because I needed a thrill. Like
Speaker 1: it's a little He always has this kind of duality
Speaker 1: where he is self deprecating at the same time he's
Speaker 1: insulting other people, and I think in his head that
Speaker 1: makes it okay. Um. I was pleasantly surprised though about
Speaker 1: the ways that he championed in his writing, like not
Speaker 1: making spectacles out of people who were different. He had
Speaker 1: this very personal sense of right and wrong, and he
Speaker 1: relays this one story in his his autobiography where he
Speaker 1: was asked for photos of what this editor from another
Speaker 1: magazine that was not New York called Abnormal Fellows, and
Speaker 1: what he meant was men who wore women's clothing and
Speaker 1: in it. In it, we Gi said that he called
Speaker 1: that editor and said, you're not getting the pictures. What's
Speaker 1: abnormal to you is completely normal to me. Like he
Speaker 1: just was like, no, I'm not going to exploit somebody
Speaker 1: for your thing. So he had this voyeuristic tendency, but
Speaker 1: he was also really weirdly protective of of people in
Speaker 1: the fringe of society. It's very, very fascinating. The New
Speaker 1: Yorker had to write up about him, in which they
Speaker 1: they put it succinctly and much better than I could,
Speaker 1: where they described him as both exploitative and humane, which
Speaker 1: is a weird, a weird combo, but it's part of
Speaker 1: what makes him so fascinating to me. We mentioned his
Speaker 1: photos of doctor Strange Love, and if you are doing
Speaker 1: calendar math, you may go, wait a minute. Strange Love
Speaker 1: didn't come out until the nineteen sixties. I don't know
Speaker 1: what the scoop is there. It is always specifically mentioned
Speaker 1: as a thing that happened when he was in Hollywood,
Speaker 1: but he was back in New York before that. Happened,
Speaker 1: So I don't know if it's like a thing where
Speaker 1: And I saw that reported in multiple places, so I
Speaker 1: wanted to mention it here because it is a little
Speaker 1: bit weird. I'm not sure what the scoop is there,
Speaker 1: unless he just got called back by Kubrick for that.
Speaker 1: There's also an interesting side story story about his life
Speaker 1: that when he was working in Acne, he was also
Speaker 1: a fiddle player, and he started playing in a movie
Speaker 1: theater orchestra huh for a while, and that he hated
Speaker 1: talkies because once they became a thing and sound attached
Speaker 1: to picture was more common, he couldn't do that job anymore,
Speaker 1: which he apparently really loved, and he claimed that he
Speaker 1: always hated talkies for the rest of his night. I
Speaker 1: mean that seems like a logical grudge to hold. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one other thing I wanted to mention because I'm sure
Speaker 1: someone will ask he was Jewish. We didn't mention it
Speaker 1: in the show because it's kind of like when we
Speaker 1: talked about Theodo Vera, he would say things like, oh,
Speaker 1: I took this holiday off, but he never talked about
Speaker 1: actually observing any religious practices. It's unclear how connected he
Speaker 1: was to that as part of his identity versus like
Speaker 1: those just being the few days he would take off
Speaker 1: a year because he was a workaholic without question. You know.
Speaker 1: He he both wrote about himself and it's corroborated by
Speaker 1: other accounts that like there would be times when, for example,
Speaker 1: like a gangster was expected to be arrested, and so
Speaker 1: Press would start to camp out around that person's apartment
Speaker 1: building and the other guys would take shifts, and Luigi
Speaker 1: would just stay the whole time, Like even if it
Speaker 1: took three days, he would not leave. Um, so he
Speaker 1: kind of had a his circadian rhythms were different than
Speaker 1: everyone else's. I'll just he could not handle the nine
Speaker 1: to five day job situation. Uh. The other fun factoried
Speaker 1: about him is that he estimates that in his time
Speaker 1: at ACME, he took photographs of more than five thousand murders,
Speaker 1: which is a lot. That's so many, it is so
Speaker 1: many have conflicted feelings about all the crime scene photography. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's um, I mean it's like it's like we said,
Speaker 1: he could be very exploitative and also very humane. It's
Speaker 1: it's really interesting to me, especially like when you see
Speaker 1: the ways he took those pictures is usually pretty unromanticized. Right,
Speaker 1: it is a straight photo of like a corpse on
Speaker 1: the ground. And then when he takes pictures of people
Speaker 1: that were often outsiders, there is often a little bit
Speaker 1: more of a loving warmer set up to them, which
Speaker 1: you can see, like he feels a greater connection to outsiders. Right.
Speaker 1: He even talks about like what other people found beautiful.
Speaker 1: He rarely did. Like he talked when he was at
Speaker 1: Vogue about finding models kind of like just weird. He
Speaker 1: didn't understand them, they didn't seem to understand themselves. In
Speaker 1: his opinion, he didn't find anything attractive about a model.
Speaker 1: But he was perfectly happy to like meet girls on
Speaker 1: the street and just be like, you want to get
Speaker 1: in my car and then they would drive around for
Speaker 1: a while and maybe hook up. It's a little bit
Speaker 1: of a a strange thing, you know, Uigi. Some of
Speaker 1: his pictures are so beautiful, some are so upsetting. There's
Speaker 1: everything in between. If you go looking, know that you're
Speaker 1: probably going to see some blood at minimum. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: find the really distorted ones um un nerving. I don't
Speaker 1: love them, but I don't know if it's because I,
Speaker 1: you know, grew up and came to be interested in
Speaker 1: photography and art at a time when he had been
Speaker 1: so much before that. I had already seen that kind
Speaker 1: of photo playing and editing kind of played out like
Speaker 1: to the point where when I find it, when I
Speaker 1: actually realized that I was looking at his work, I
Speaker 1: was like seeing it. I mean, he you know, his
Speaker 1: pictures of New York at night are the real, are
Speaker 1: the real, like meat and potatoes of his his work,
Speaker 1: and really like the ones that I think most people
Speaker 1: find the most engaging versus his later stuff where he
Speaker 1: was kind of it seems much more purposely trying to
Speaker 1: figure out new ways to make pictures and to make
Speaker 1: them interesting, versus just capturing what was interesting about any
Speaker 1: given scene on its own. Anyway, that was weechie. If
Speaker 1: you have time off this weekend, I hope you look
Speaker 1: at some good art. It's just good for your soul.
Speaker 1: If you don't have time off, I'm sorry, and I
Speaker 1: hope that it is as RESTful as can being. That
Speaker 1: you do find some moments of sawace, look at some
Speaker 1: pretty art that makes you happy. Um, and I hope
Speaker 1: all of your responsibilities play out as beautifully and ideally
Speaker 1: as possible. Everybody be good to each other. You will
Speaker 1: find us right back here tomorrow with a classic, and
Speaker 1: then starting on Monday, we'll have new stuff for you.
Speaker 1: Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of
Speaker 1: I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
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