Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Alfonse Bertillon and Bertillonage this week. Yep, whsh I have so many thoughts on this man. First of all, I want to mention there was a really interesting article that I found on the site Public Books, and this was written by Amanda Lewandowski, and she makes a very good point that I had not considered at all that this entire system was built on data that for the most part, was collected without people's consent. Right, Like we know that he used family members and colleagues, but he also was going to prisons and basically just measuring people, which was something I had not considered. That article is really about like the use of things like face recognition and in law enforcement and what that means and the consequences and implications of it. But that was an aspect of this that I had not considered, so I want to make sure we mention it. One of the other things that came up as a piece of information about him that wasn't really to me like as important to include in the episode. But is really interesting, right we talk in the episode about how you know, people could just lie when they got booked in at the jail and be like, my name is Darron, it's not right, it's right whatever, And I know for us, there's got to be a lot of like what ID cards were not standard at this point in time, and in fact, Bertillon is one of the people who was the first to mandate once he had a little bit of power that in particular, again this is such biased stuff that the homeless population of Paris needed to carry identification cards, right, that was like where a lot of that started. And that is really the of mandatory IDs in a lot of places. So, I mean, there are so many things about his work that carry forward today, and yet I'm like, oh yeah. So there is also a story of him talking with Francis Galton, who was a man who was really lobbying for the use of fingerprints during this time, and they were friends, like they worked in similar fields and that they would you know, see each other all the time and they had this cordial relationship. I read one account of him that said that even though he was you know, arrogant and bossy, he would never like carry a grudge in that regard, Like you could have an argument and he would be like, you're a wrong idiot, and then it would be like, let's go to lunch. Like he compartmentalized in that way that he didn't think an argument with someone was in any way related to whether or not they could be friends if they disagreed on these issues. And so he and Galton were very good friends. But apparently there was an incident and I willn't able to verify it where Galton had come to his office and unlike his usual thing where he would just be like, yeah, let him in, like we'll talk about it, he made him sit in the hallway for a long time, and then he finally threw open the door and basically said all you do is undermine me, and slammed the door and went about his business. All because Galton was like, we should really add fingerprints to the system. Yeah, it's like the tiniest criticism just set him off down this weird that's not even a criticism to me, that's like a suggestion, right. I think he took it though, as you didn't think of everything. That's exactly the way his brain perceived it. And so he just thought like that he was being attacked from all sides by people going, hey, fingerprints really work. That's great. Yeah, as a person who can struggle with unsolicited criticism, like, I get that that initial impulse to be like uh huh, But the fact that he just doubled and tripled down for all time and could never be wrong, Yeah, even when he was demonstrably conclusively wrong. Yeah. He Okay, I'm not a psychologist. I'm not diagnosing anybody, but I do so I'm just talking about, to be clear, a pattern of behavior I know. I have seen a lot of people fall into in my life, and I feel like he's in a similar one. So I'm not diagnosing anything. I'm just I don't I don't know what causes this, but I have known a lot of people who grew up feeling like an outsider or a black sheep, or like they were picked on, or like they could never fit in, and then they reach a point in their lives where they start to be a bit of an achiever and recognized as as great in some way, and then they become air again as hell and almost unbearable. And I've seen this happen so many times that this weird boomerang effect takes place where like it's like the second the flip of feeling like an outsider to feeling like someone valued happens. There's almost a weird like I was always great, you just didn't see it, and then they can't. It's that same thing the doors close on any sort of like hearing different than what you believe or think. I have seen this so many times, and I'm like, el Fonse Bertillon, my darling. I wish someone had been able to get through to him, but clearly nobody could have been because even when his brother is like, you are actually hurting my family and your bias is hurting my wife, he was like, well, yeah, too bad. Yeah. We got a request recently to run the two parter on The Dreyfus Affair as a Saturday Classic. It's newer than we normally yeah, significantly newer than we normally use a Saturday classics. And also it's difficult to do a two parter as a Saturday Classic because it's like you either have a very long one, yeah, or it spans two weeks, which is tricky. That was such a horrific national schism in France. And the fact that his obstinacy and his own bias was such a key part of it. I hate that, and I hate that he like never acknowledged the wrong that he had done. I do too. It's like, in some ways it feels like he is was willing to enjoy the benefits of being considered a respected authority, but he was never willing to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with that power. To be a little spider man about it, I was exactly thinking, the spider man, it really is that that those you know, if you're in that kind of position where you really can sway public opinion, you need to be careful and measured and certainly not pretend to be an expert in a thing that you just made up some very weird assessment of, like that whole thing of Like he must have used a grid And I'm like, how many mental somersaults did this take you to get to you? I don't know if this is something that's revealed in the research at all, but when I read that, I was like, are you just making stuff up? Or do you genuinely believe that you figured this out? I think both of those are true. Yeah, Like, I again I could be wrong. I'm not there and I didn't ever. I didn't see it may exist out there, but I did not come across it. Like what led him to that way of thinking about it? And I don't know if he not so much made it up but believed that it came to him out of the blue because he was a genius, right, because people lauded him as a genius, and even today there are a lot of people who will talk about he had to have been a genius to put the system together. Whether it works or not, it's so unique in the way it functions, and it did work, it just had problems with implementation that you know, possibly if someone had not been so arrogant and stubborn, they could have continued to refine it in a way that would have really worked. But it's like you can be a genius and also be an ignorant jerk at the same time, Like those two things can happen, and he's the embodiment of that. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, I've been trash talking au fALS Bertillon all day, So if anyone out there really loves him, I'm sorry. Yeah, buffals Bertillon. We talked about the Rebecca Riot this week. Yes, indeed, something that's been on my list for a really long time, but only bumped up to the top with my frustration about people using the word luddites in a way that I don't And I know, I know, We've had so many conversations about language evolving, but I think the word luddites can be used in a really dismissive way to dismiss people's concerns about a technology, when a lot of times those concerns really do have a lot in common with the actual Ludite uprising, because it's like, yeah, but like this is gonna eliminate a lot of people's jobs and also make the work they were doing worse in quality. Yeah, well, there's also the tricky aspect of it, right where Like, on the one hand, because language has evolved, it's probably the fastest shorthand I can think of to convey the idea that someone doesn't like a piece of tech, sure without having to like, because you know, like taking into account the nuance of everything is great, But in conversation it's sometimes like that that will drag you off course. Yeah, so I understand it's why it is favored by so many, but yeah, yeah, I also just I have a fondness for all of the worker uprisings that involve smashing things. Back when we had a totally different website that had tags that we could use to like group together related episodes, I had a tag called smashing Things, and it wasn't just worker uprisings. It also included things like when people were staging train wrecks as a spectator, sport, prohibition protests, and things like that. We're also in the smashing things carry a nation, Yeah, nation was definitely in the smashing things category. I had a quote. So we read a couple of things from this book by Henry Tobit Evans that came out in nineteen ten. It was about these riots slash this uprising, and there was a thing that I had in the outline that I wound up taking out because it felt kind of ancillary. So I'm going to read it here in the behind the scenes. So this book was called Rebecca and her Daughters, being a history of the agrarian disturbances in Wales known as the Rebecca Riots. And here is a quote that was just sort of a description of one particular incident. Quote. A number of persons tumultuously assembled at dawn on seventeenth February and pulled down the toll bar erected near the village of plantherog not content with that, They actually set fire to the materials and totally consumed them, together with the toll box belonging to the said bar. A reward of fifty pounds was offered for the detection of the offen. The day previous, a person had applied to the toll keeper and offered him five shillings for the passage of a wedding party which was to go that way on the seventeenth. The toll collector had refused to accept anything under ten shillings. However, the hole was destroyed as before mentioned and the wedding party passed free. The whole wedding party account just kind of cracked me up. In the account of this. We did not talk about women much at all in this episode because it was largely a protest carried out by like working men for the most part. That the big attack on the workhouse did include. It was not a crowd of only men, that was a crowd of everyone basically, but there were a lot of women who were kind of spectators cheering on the destruction of the gates as all of this was happening, and of course, always any kind of movement movement like this, overwhelmingly there are like women behind the scenes who are keeping things moving and feeding the demonstrators and laundering all those white dresses that people are wearing to then commit arson and teardown teardown gates. Presumably those dresses got pretty dirty pretty fast. So that was something that came up in a couple of my sources, and a lot just sort of described this as a pretty specifically Welsh event in history that sort of drew together a lot of other things in Wales, like the caphil Prine mock trials that we talked about in the episode. There's the Marie Lloyd holiday tradition with the big horse's skull that happens around holiday times and parts of Wales, which I have to point out also appeared on Bob's Burger's. Yeah, but out of proper holiday context. They appeared in a Halloween episode. Oh funny. I'm pretty sure I remember this also being in the some of the DLC for Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Folks can expect a possible Assassin's Creed inspired episode having nothing to do with Wales at some point, probably a few weeks from now, because having finished balder Skate three, finally I moved on to Assassin's Creed Mirage and immediately found some historical figures that I wanted to talk about on the show. So anyway, I'm glad I finally got to talk about the Rebecca Riots. It's such a kind of wild collection of imagery of the figure of Mother Rebecca and the donning address to smash down the toll gates because people were had too much, too much happening, too much going on, too many stressors going on in their social and economic life lives. I hope everybody is having a great Friday, and I hope whatever's happening over your weekend is going to be fun. I know this is, you know, Thanksgiving holiday time, which for a lot of folks is a time of fun stuff and family and all kinds of food. Not so much for everybody. So whatever's happening on your Thanksgiving weekend, celebrating or not, I hope it is as great as it can be. We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and we will have a brand new episode on Monday. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Alfonse Bertillon and Bertillonage this week. Yep, whsh I have so many thoughts on this man. First of all, I want to mention there was a really interesting article that I found on the site Public Books, and this was written by Amanda Lewandowski, and she makes a very good point that I had not considered at all that this entire system was built on data that for the most part, was collected without people's consent. Right, Like we know that he used family members and colleagues, but he also was going to prisons and basically just measuring people, which was something I had not considered. That article is really about like the use of things like face recognition and in law enforcement and what that means and the consequences and implications of it. But that was an aspect of this that I had not considered, so I want to make sure we mention it. One of the other things that came up as a piece of information about him that wasn't really to me like as important to include in the episode. But is really interesting, right we talk in the episode about how you know, people could just lie when they got booked in at the jail and be like, my name is Darron, it's not right, it's right whatever, And I know for us, there's got to be a lot of like what ID cards were not standard at this point in time, and in fact, Bertillon is one of the people who was the first to mandate once he had a little bit of power that in particular, again this is such biased stuff that the homeless population of Paris needed to carry identification cards, right, that was like where a lot of that started. And that is really the of mandatory IDs in a lot of places. So, I mean, there are so many things about his work that carry forward today, and yet I'm like, oh yeah. So there is also a story of him talking with Francis Galton, who was a man who was really lobbying for the use of fingerprints during this time, and they were friends, like they worked in similar fields and that they would you know, see each other all the time and they had this cordial relationship. I read one account of him that said that even though he was you know, arrogant and bossy, he would never like carry a grudge in that regard, Like you could have an argument and he would be like, you're a wrong idiot, and then it would be like, let's go to lunch. Like he compartmentalized in that way that he didn't think an argument with someone was in any way related to whether or not they could be friends if they disagreed on these issues. And so he and Galton were very good friends. But apparently there was an incident and I willn't able to verify it where Galton had come to his office and unlike his usual thing where he would just be like, yeah, let him in, like we'll talk about it, he made him sit in the hallway for a long time, and then he finally threw open the door and basically said all you do is undermine me, and slammed the door and went about his business. All because Galton was like, we should really add fingerprints to the system. Yeah, it's like the tiniest criticism just set him off down this weird that's not even a criticism to me, that's like a suggestion, right. I think he took it though, as you didn't think of everything. That's exactly the way his brain perceived it. And so he just thought like that he was being attacked from all sides by people going, hey, fingerprints really work. That's great. Yeah, as a person who can struggle with unsolicited criticism, like, I get that that initial impulse to be like uh huh, But the fact that he just doubled and tripled down for all time and could never be wrong, Yeah, even when he was demonstrably conclusively wrong. Yeah. He Okay, I'm not a psychologist. I'm not diagnosing anybody, but I do so I'm just talking about, to be clear, a pattern of behavior I know. I have seen a lot of people fall into in my life, and I feel like he's in a similar one. So I'm not diagnosing anything. I'm just I don't I don't know what causes this, but I have known a lot of people who grew up feeling like an outsider or a black sheep, or like they were picked on, or like they could never fit in, and then they reach a point in their lives where they start to be a bit of an achiever and recognized as as great in some way, and then they become air again as hell and almost unbearable. And I've seen this happen so many times that this weird boomerang effect takes place where like it's like the second the flip of feeling like an outsider to feeling like someone valued happens. There's almost a weird like I was always great, you just didn't see it, and then they can't. It's that same thing the doors close on any sort of like hearing different than what you believe or think. I have seen this so many times, and I'm like, el Fonse Bertillon, my darling. I wish someone had been able to get through to him, but clearly nobody could have been because even when his brother is like, you are actually hurting my family and your bias is hurting my wife, he was like, well, yeah, too bad. Yeah. We got a request recently to run the two parter on The Dreyfus Affair as a Saturday Classic. It's newer than we normally yeah, significantly newer than we normally use a Saturday classics. And also it's difficult to do a two parter as a Saturday Classic because it's like you either have a very long one, yeah, or it spans two weeks, which is tricky. That was such a horrific national schism in France. And the fact that his obstinacy and his own bias was such a key part of it. I hate that, and I hate that he like never acknowledged the wrong that he had done. I do too. It's like, in some ways it feels like he is was willing to enjoy the benefits of being considered a respected authority, but he was never willing to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with that power. To be a little spider man about it, I was exactly thinking, the spider man, it really is that that those you know, if you're in that kind of position where you really can sway public opinion, you need to be careful and measured and certainly not pretend to be an expert in a thing that you just made up some very weird assessment of, like that whole thing of Like he must have used a grid And I'm like, how many mental somersaults did this take you to get to you? I don't know if this is something that's revealed in the research at all, but when I read that, I was like, are you just making stuff up? Or do you genuinely believe that you figured this out? I think both of those are true. Yeah, Like, I again I could be wrong. I'm not there and I didn't ever. I didn't see it may exist out there, but I did not come across it. Like what led him to that way of thinking about it? And I don't know if he not so much made it up but believed that it came to him out of the blue because he was a genius, right, because people lauded him as a genius, and even today there are a lot of people who will talk about he had to have been a genius to put the system together. Whether it works or not, it's so unique in the way it functions, and it did work, it just had problems with implementation that you know, possibly if someone had not been so arrogant and stubborn, they could have continued to refine it in a way that would have really worked. But it's like you can be a genius and also be an ignorant jerk at the same time, Like those two things can happen, and he's the embodiment of that. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, I've been trash talking au fALS Bertillon all day, So if anyone out there really loves him, I'm sorry. Yeah, buffals Bertillon. We talked about the Rebecca Riot this week. Yes, indeed, something that's been on my list for a really long time, but only bumped up to the top with my frustration about people using the word luddites in a way that I don't And I know, I know, We've had so many conversations about language evolving, but I think the word luddites can be used in a really dismissive way to dismiss people's concerns about a technology, when a lot of times those concerns really do have a lot in common with the actual Ludite uprising, because it's like, yeah, but like this is gonna eliminate a lot of people's jobs and also make the work they were doing worse in quality. Yeah, well, there's also the tricky aspect of it, right where Like, on the one hand, because language has evolved, it's probably the fastest shorthand I can think of to convey the idea that someone doesn't like a piece of tech, sure without having to like, because you know, like taking into account the nuance of everything is great, But in conversation it's sometimes like that that will drag you off course. Yeah, so I understand it's why it is favored by so many, but yeah, yeah, I also just I have a fondness for all of the worker uprisings that involve smashing things. Back when we had a totally different website that had tags that we could use to like group together related episodes, I had a tag called smashing Things, and it wasn't just worker uprisings. It also included things like when people were staging train wrecks as a spectator, sport, prohibition protests, and things like that. We're also in the smashing things carry a nation, Yeah, nation was definitely in the smashing things category. I had a quote. So we read a couple of things from this book by Henry Tobit Evans that came out in nineteen ten. It was about these riots slash this uprising, and there was a thing that I had in the outline that I wound up taking out because it felt kind of ancillary. So I'm going to read it here in the behind the scenes. So this book was called Rebecca and her Daughters, being a history of the agrarian disturbances in Wales known as the Rebecca Riots. And here is a quote that was just sort of a description of one particular incident. Quote. A number of persons tumultuously assembled at dawn on seventeenth February and pulled down the toll bar erected near the village of plantherog not content with that, They actually set fire to the materials and totally consumed them, together with the toll box belonging to the said bar. A reward of fifty pounds was offered for the detection of the offen. The day previous, a person had applied to the toll keeper and offered him five shillings for the passage of a wedding party which was to go that way on the seventeenth. The toll collector had refused to accept anything under ten shillings. However, the hole was destroyed as before mentioned and the wedding party passed free. The whole wedding party account just kind of cracked me up. In the account of this. We did not talk about women much at all in this episode because it was largely a protest carried out by like working men for the most part. That the big attack on the workhouse did include. It was not a crowd of only men, that was a crowd of everyone basically, but there were a lot of women who were kind of spectators cheering on the destruction of the gates as all of this was happening, and of course, always any kind of movement movement like this, overwhelmingly there are like women behind the scenes who are keeping things moving and feeding the demonstrators and laundering all those white dresses that people are wearing to then commit arson and teardown teardown gates. Presumably those dresses got pretty dirty pretty fast. So that was something that came up in a couple of my sources, and a lot just sort of described this as a pretty specifically Welsh event in history that sort of drew together a lot of other things in Wales, like the caphil Prine mock trials that we talked about in the episode. There's the Marie Lloyd holiday tradition with the big horse's skull that happens around holiday times and parts of Wales, which I have to point out also appeared on Bob's Burger's. Yeah, but out of proper holiday context. They appeared in a Halloween episode. Oh funny. I'm pretty sure I remember this also being in the some of the DLC for Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Folks can expect a possible Assassin's Creed inspired episode having nothing to do with Wales at some point, probably a few weeks from now, because having finished balder Skate three, finally I moved on to Assassin's Creed Mirage and immediately found some historical figures that I wanted to talk about on the show. So anyway, I'm glad I finally got to talk about the Rebecca Riots. It's such a kind of wild collection of imagery of the figure of Mother Rebecca and the donning address to smash down the toll gates because people were had too much, too much happening, too much going on, too many stressors going on in their social and economic life lives. I hope everybody is having a great Friday, and I hope whatever's happening over your weekend is going to be fun. I know this is, you know, Thanksgiving holiday time, which for a lot of folks is a time of fun stuff and family and all kinds of food. Not so much for everybody. So whatever's happening on your Thanksgiving weekend, celebrating or not, I hope it is as great as it can be. We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and we will have a brand new episode on Monday. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.