Stuff You Missed in History ClassHolly and Tracy share formative experiences with math classes. Then Tracy discusses a spinning bee, Lafayette in Medford, and her historical fanfiction.
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 the early concepts of the metric system. This week we did I this is one of those subjects that when I read it, I'm going to confess I feel like the stupidest, stupidest stupid tone because my brain would never go, you know, what we should do? We should measure the earth and then slice up part of it and make that how we measure everything. Like, I just can't, I cannot fathom being in that headspace. Right. For a long time, I had on my episode shortlist something about the kilogram, including like the physical object that's sort of the embodiments of the measurement of oh, right, kilogram, and I just couldn't ever find an approach to it that made it an episode right. We were also talking in this episode about uh.
Yeah, So.
When I was in college, I went to a liberal arts university, and people who were majoring in like math or one of the hard sciences, or maybe a social science that involved a lot of statistics like they had, they would take math classes that met their general education requirements that were things like calculus and statistics and whatever. But then those of us who were studying literature or or like another language or something else, who like did not have a need in their curriculum for that kind of math, and also maybe like me, have always strugg with math, we gravitated towards this class that was called the Nature of Mathematics, which was a really interesting class that included about a lot of stuff about things like ancient number systems, and like a lot of what we do is in a base ten number system, like we count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven that starts the next set, right, So base ten number systems pretty easy to wrap your head around.
Base sixty kind of.
Easy because that's how we measure time, with there being sixty minutes in an hour. But then there was there were some that we talked about. There were in like base twelve and just and it hurt my mind to try to think about it, like it was so interesting. I would just be trying to count in whatever whatever non ten unit. Those horror, right, and it doesn't hurt my bright. And so when we were when we were talking about that in this episode, I was like, that reminds me of the nature of mathematics. Yeah, I mean, listen, I'm not going to use this opportunity to once again say I think we should be on metric time.
But I do.
But because I mean, if you think about it, like, oh, no, that's fine, we'll do will do all of these measure physical measurements on a base ten system, but then base sixty with twelve and twelve as your day parts, Like it's just messy anyway, I too took a class like that, but it became apparent that I was just enough in between those two spaces of like I just want broad stroke history information and I can't. I mean, to this day, like no on the calculus. I have a very good friend that I grew up with who was like, her advanced degree is in mathematics, and she was as like, no, math is you know, it's a graspable and I'm like, girl, no, But there was one day that is a formative kind of painful memory, not painful. Painful is not the right one, but I still like get the cringe, the stress cringe when it happens where I was like, there was a formula that our teacher had introduced and it included an element that was negative for no reason that was explained, and I kept begging him to explain why that was the case, and everyone in the class was just like, just shut up and accept it. And I'm like, I don't understand this concept. There's a random negative in the mix here. It's really I cannot move past this, and I just became the scourge of class and I did not want to be, but I also did not understand what the heck was going on.
Yeah, so I was.
I was like, please just explain it to me, and he didn't. He didn't really want to. He was like, I can't. That's more advanced math. And I'm like, okay, but try right. He's like, that's my this class. Like I'm not even shading the teacher on this one. It just was like I was there was no space for me. I couldn't do the higher maths and I couldn't just accept the things they were telling us in the more theoretical maths, and so it was stressy. I will say that anytime I've talked about my lifelong struggles with arithmetic on the show, we get an email from somebody that tells me I'm reinforcing sexist stereotypes about women being bad at math, and I just want to say, I'm not making this up. I have literally struggled with arithmetic since I was a child. I still count on my fingers and I'm forty eight years old. So please don't send me emails telling me I'm a sex stereotype. This is my actual human experience here. I'll counter this, okay, with the example of my beloved who I love very very much, but like he wants to stay away from math at almost every expense.
Like there's a.
Thing we have gotten to this point where like there is a joke in our house where like I've tried to explain like how our property tax is calculated and whatever, and like we have just told our friends. If you ever, like need to keep a secret from Brian and want him to leave the room, just say the phrase millagery.
He will run away. He will run away. I don't understand that either. I just pay the bill.
It's like, whatever is very smart, just as you are very smart. But some people struggle with math, and that's fine. It's fine to admit everybody has strengths and weaknesses. You just got to have a smart math friend. It's like, yeah, yeah, I mentioned to you before we started recording, Uh huh, that while I was researching, I came across a handful of pretty impassioned discussions about the metric system, because I hadn't really thought about it from this perspective before. You know, we in the US, as we said in the episode, have not made it our official system, so it's kind of expected that we're all over the map. But then this goes back to the thing I said at the top of the show about Britain still having some things that are not metric, and I was reading this one of the many discussions of it were there are a lot of people who are like, we either need to get metric or we need to not, but we need to get Metric, like we can't stop it. And they mentioned that like there was, you know, the effort, the decision made that the UK would switch over to Metric, and then I can't find the exact quote, but one writer basically said, we got halfway there and then we just got stuck and never moved again. And so there are a lot of things that are in metric, But then there are a lot of things that are still using the old imperial and that is more confusing when we say we are a metric country. And some of these are very impassion and like really really highly critical of various government entities for not pushing this harder. But I also found some pretty impassioned ones written here in the US where people are like, we really need to like make it official, like yes, there are people using it, particularly in like science communities, engineering, et cetera. But like I remember, I don't know if you had this happen when you were a kid in the seventies, there was a moment, yeah, where it was like we are switching to metric. We're going to start teaching kids metric. And I remember, and I was quite small.
I was prob.
Like second or third grade. I was little, and I remember us kids being like, this is very hard and confusing because it is a different, completely different system. And then suddenly it went away and we never had to try to learn it again. And it does seem like there was this push of like, if we teach the next generation the metric system, they'll get it, they'll be kilogrammers forever. And then we were like ouch hard, and they just gave up instantly, and I don't know what happened there. I don't know if I remember learning it in the context of like we were potentially going to start using only the metric system, but I definitely did learn the metric system in school, and then like middle and high school science classes, like all the science measurements were in metric measurements, so it was like I've always been using both in different contexts.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know if the US will ever get it's act fully together in this way or not.
Yeah, I don't know.
Listen, I'm all for a giant sea change. I'm one of those people that loves change. You want some Swatch Internet time, I want Swatch Internet time. But I also just like, I like the fresh start of a big change. I would love it if there were a week where we were like, don't anybody measure anything this week, and then the next week we're gonna just switch over completely.
Yeah, that sounds amazing to me. Yeah.
I know that's not realistic or practical in any way, but I do think like you kind of got to rip the band aid off. It's gonna have to be like that. This whole like slow ramp is why Britain is like stuck in this weird situation where they're trying to slowly. I was about to say inch forward, because that's I mean, when you think about that, right, that's messed up. A foot is twelve inches? What mm hmm, that's random. I mean, as you had said, like learning about a base twelve system. I feel like I'm a little better at a base twelve system than the average person because of what sewing, Because it's like you calculate everything by a yard r it's like twelve twenty four to thirty six going forward, Like that's how your brain has to do it anyway, when you're measuring out fabric sometimes if you're doing big pieces. So I think I could survive in that world a little. But we shouldn't have to.
Listen.
If you want to do creative stuff, math is your friends. That's probably why I feel like I need to understand math more than the average person who says no, I'm more on the arts and language side because I've needed it for designing things and like executing patterns and figuring out the circumference of a circle to make a skirt, and like these things are important well, and I could do stuff like the equation parts of algebra. Yeah, but I would mess up the arithmetic involved. Yeah, yeah, there are some of those. I will say, doo Lingo has just added a math component.
I saw that.
I haven't looked at it at all. I have and it starts out I mean, I'm in the like, Hi, I'm an adult learner, like just brushing at my skills, and it does start out pretty basic. But what it does that I think is really smart is that it's not like just doing flashcards of multiplication tables or whatever. It's also using visuals so that you think about math in a different way. M hmmm, which I think is really valuable. Like right now, I'm still kind of buzzing through it, going oh, these are baby equations, but like, at the same time, there are moments when I go, oh, that's what that looks like like in a physical space, and that's kind of cool. So I'm hoping it will make my math skills better. I also know children are taught arithmetic in a very different way now, yeah than we were. Yes, And I will say this, I am not a parent, but I do sometimes find myself getting I don't know what the word is, dismayed. With parents when they just want to complain about their kids new math, because then when I talk to people who are much younger who grew up learning it that way, often they have so much more of a flexible, conceptual understanding of math than we got from just memorizing. And I'm like, there is some benefit here, right, at least to some people, Like I know, it's hard to help your kid with homework when it's not the way you learned it. I fully grasp the frustration of that, but it doesn't mean the old way was superior. And the other thing we have to consider is, like all people have different learning styles. We've talked about that recently as well. For some people, this new way is going to be a lot easier than the stress of memorizing a multiplication tape that was very stressful for me as a kid, Like I remember we had to go up to the teacher's desk and she would quiz you through your thing before you could pass on to the next one, and like it was just you and the teacher, but you were in the class and so if you messed up, everybody knew and then they would be like, you're stupid about the number twelve. That whole thing was very stressful that I'm having flashbacks to flash cards. Yeah, flash cards are uh it could be traumatizing in there, I might We talked about Sarah Bradley Fulton the Daughters of Liberty this week. I love all these stories about her, even though we can't corroborate a lot of them. I had various little notes, okay, that I wrote down. Some of them are just things that I did not have a good place to put in the episode, and some of them were just random things that ocurred to me. I read a lot of mentions of people's spinning bees that were happening during the run up to the Revolutionary War, during all of the protests over a British taxation of the colonies, and this was one that I loved, but I was like, this feels redundant, it does not actually add anything to the episode. And I put it over here and says this is from the New York Journal from May thirtieth, seventeen sixty eight. Quote, what a glorious example Newport has set us rouse. Oh, my countrymen, we are well informed that one married lady and her daughter of about sixteen have spun full sixty yards of good fine linen cloth nearly a yard wide since the first of March. Besides taking care of a large family, the linen manufacturer is promoted and carried on with so much spirit and aciduity among all ranks, that we are assured there is scarcely enough flow to be had in town to supply the continued consumption of that article. The rouse oh my countrymen particularly got me.
There were a couple.
Of details that I found in the book that was written by her great great great great granddaughter, which is called a Woman Fearing Nothing, the story of Sarah Bradley Fulton, a Revolutionary War heroin I went to the Medford Public Library in person to read that because there are three copies of it in libraries in my area, two in Medford and one in Revere. And one of the details was that the first house that Sarah Bradley Fulton and her husband lived in in Medford might have been one that they rented from Isaac Royle, Oh Wild, which yeah, was kind of a fascinating little detail. It would make sense because the royals were super rich and owned a bunch of property in Bedford. Uh, it might have been harder to find a house not owned by right right. They did eventually by buy a house of their own, but they were I think they were.
They seem to have been renting one when they first moved there.
And the other is there a couple of different accounts of a later visit from Lafayette, like Lafayette made another trip and was in Medford and she went to go see him, and in one account he was at dinner and she was waiting a long time, and she finally just got tired of waiting and just went into the dining room and kind of berated him. And the other account was like more uh not not did not quite make it sound, as you know, rude as that did. But I had trouble kind of puzzling that out, and I was like, I don't need to find a place to wedge this until here. I will confess to you, in what might be sacrilegious to many people, that every time I hear about Lafayette, all I can think of are the dogs from Aristocrats. Okay, what's your named? Lafayette and Napoleon, And they're funny, funny hound dogs.
Lafayette, Are you awake? It's just like the best. Yeah.
I fixated on two things in this episode, one being the mysterious vessels that were used to serve George, Washington and Lafayette. How those seem to be different? Yeah, and I in my head, of course, I've already like put together a hilarious comedy of like I don't know where that punch ful is.
Just give them this one.
But the other thing is that I now kind of want to make a very rum forward drink called potation.
Yeah, the word potation. I loved that.
I also I went down just a little path forgotten is not the right word, but like the the prevalence of rum in the colonial economy, just like it was not at the top of my mind as I was okay, and so it just mentioned the far famed product of that town, and I was like, far frame, wonder what was the far famed product?
Was it apples? I don't know why apples? Was like what?
And then I was like, oh no, no, it was Medford rum. It was definitely rum. I have a question for you, okay, because you live in that area ish uh huh does Medford still have a lot of like rum distilleries?
Are there? Uh?
I don't know about Medford specifically, but there are distilleries in this area, and there are distilleries that make and market something that they mark it as like Medford rum interest, but I don't know off hand at they are distilleries that are physically located in Medford. So when we talk about like researching queer history, it often involves a lot of reading between the lines. And what I'm about to say is not that it is me making something up, okay, based on no evidence, Okay, like no concrete evidence. Really Tracy's historical fanfic, Tracey, This is absolutely Tracy's historical fanfic. One hundred percent. We have Eliza M. Gill and we have Helen T.
Wilde.
They both knew each other, they both never got married, they both never had any children. One of them lived in her family's home in Medford for like six decades until moving to Waltham for reasons I don't know, and the other lived in her father's house for a long time and then lived with a brother.
There are a a jillion.
Reasons that these this could be these two women's life story, But I one hundred percent just wrote a mental romance of these two women, like these two women school teachers and then City of Medford employees, also local historians and founders of the local DAR. I just made a whole love story about them. And if you know, if anyone is descended from members of that, you know other members of their family and is like angry about Like, I just I made up a whole little love story in my head. They had a significant age gap, right, they did have a significant I mean not that that's like a determiner. Yeah, I'm just trying to like I'm trying. I'm trying to come along in your fanfic and like, you know, make the picture in my head. In my head, the fanfic that plays out is that they both had a crush.
On John Fulton. Okay, that could also be true.
It's just the imagery of the arm in arm with some analyst. I'm like, oh, they like a gentleman color. They're southern in my fanfic. Also apparently they're Blanche Tublah or they're Blanche Jevro rather or Blanche Tubla.
But yeah, I had I love it. I love it. You have a rich rich the whole thing.
You know, we have no letters, no journals, know anything like that that I know of from either of them. Again, this is I don't really encourage making things up to that level about people from history, but I'm just I had a little, let let's make a love story moment. Also, I did not end up putting this in in the episode because I wound up just feeling antler. There are some people who I think have misread.
The the Helen T.
Wild account as saying that the place where people prepared for the Boston tea party was not her brother's house in Boston, it was their house in Medford. And this, like the first couple of things that I read made it sound like it was at her family home in Medford, and I was like, this does not fully make sense to me, because like there was a lot of traffic between Medford and Boston, but like still it was a way to get from and I was like this that just like the timeline wasn't really like were they at a meeting and did they come back to the Medford and then they went together or did they did they go to the meeting in their quote Indian dress, like it just it was not really adding up for me. And running parallel to that, there is a transit project in Boston called the Green Line Extension, and the Green Line Extension is a line of the Tea that runs out to Medford that was in development for a bajillion years. Nobody thought that it was actually I'm maybe not nobody. A lot of people thought the Green Line Extension is never happening, and then the Green Line Extension did happen.
It got built.
It was built so badly that a bunch of the rail is too close together now and has to be redone. And so as I was like thinking through these things that were like and people were, you know, they were getting ready for the Boston Tea party at their house in Medford, I was like, there's like a green Line extension joke that's coming out of this like the process of getting back and forth between Medford and Boston for the sake of the Boston Tea Party. And then I eventually was like, oh, I think people are misunderstanding this passage in this article that was written, you know, in the eighteen whatever, so it's use of language is a little slightly different than today. I like that. You're was like, good luck with that, Yeah, good luck with getting on the green line. I will walk for miles to avoid getting on the green Line. It is my least favorite line of the MBTA Reil network. Uh. When I went to when I went to the Medford Public Library to read that book, I did not get on the green line. In fact, I walked there from Summerville. Uh. Anyway, anyway, I enjoyed researching this episode. I'm not planning to go on any to any of these commemorations. No, No, it's just it is exactly at the window that if I were exposed to some illness there, I would carry it directly to my very high risk mother.
So yeah, don't do that. Not worth it. Now.
I am in the avoid unnecessary crowds phase right when that is happening. Yeah. So yeah, because I don't want to. I don't want to bring the flu or COVID or any of the other things that are circulating to my mom for Christmas. So anyway, happy Friday. If you're going to this stuff down at the Harbor this weekend, man, I hope it's great. I hope nobody re enacting is in quote Indian dress. We should not be doing that fingers crossed cross. I know that's I know there's a historical precedent, but we're living now in the year twenty twenty three, We don't have to make that choice again. You can send us a note if you'd like, or a history podcast atiheartradio dot com, and we'll be back with Saturday Classic on Belinda Sutton tomorrow, something brand new 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.
