Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We spent both of our episodes this week talking about Francisco to Miranda. Because I saw a statue in Philadelphia? Is there any better reason? I mean, it was a great reason. Plus I was getting started on this. I wanted to confirm where I saw the statue because I walked around Philadelphia that sort of general area a bit that day, even though it was snowing and then horribly raining. Once the horrible rain started, I just walked back to the hotel, but I wanted to make sure I remembered, like where the statue was and what it looked like. And it's in front of the Franklin Institute. And as I was looking at Google Maps, I was like, did they drive a Google street View car through the interior of the Franklin Institute, Because there's Google street View of the inside of Franklin Institute. And if you listeners know the story of that. I didn't call up the Franklin Institute to ask, but I did ask a former coworker of ours who worked at the Franklin Institute for several years. That person did not specifically know. Thought it might have been part of like a pilot program that never really got off the ground. But if you look at it on Google Maps, you can get into the inside of the Franklin Institute on the street view. It is not as smooth as a lot of like formally intentionally made three D virtual tours of museums, because there are times where you can see that there is Google street view path going through two different rooms, but you can't get through the door, like oh waituh, But I was fascinated and that whole like the public art that is on the street it includes the Rocky statue, you know, the statue of Rocky at the Art Museum. Also, what is the most over the top monument to George Washington that I personally have ever seen in person. It is not my favorite piece of art in the world. There are like indigenous people at the bottom kind of adoringly looking up, and it makes me go yikes every time I see it. Yeah, I am fascinated by this man. I am fascinated by his hubris. I struggled mightily with writing the episode because there were so many parts of it that we either haven't talked about at all or we've only talked about in kind of broad strokes that I needed to do in a little bit more detail. So like, had never talked about Spain's contribution to the revolution war at all. We've talked at various points about the French Revolution and the French Revolutionary Wars, but the thing that we needed to talk about in this pair of episodes was like how it actually started? What were the steps of things that happened? Right? And I had a real hard time boiling that down into something that made any sense and seemed accurate. There was just a lot of it. I was not expecting a two part episode starting out on it, and I definitely wasn't expecting a two part episode that took me at least two additional days longer than normal to get through. Yeah, it's always tricky. I mean, I find any time I'm talking about the French Revolution, I like have to silo and be like, Okay, there's all this other stuff, but today we just have to talk about this because otherwise my brain goes going, yes, I will confess to my poor studentship. Are you ready? Yeah, you had asked me when you started this, Hey, did you know that Spain had you know, been contributing to the Revolutionary warr And I was like, yeah, but I don't remember much about it. And then after you did your research and I was looking at your outline, I'm like, that's why I knew, And BOYD, is that show that I wasn't paying a lot of attention because I grew up, you know, not far from Pensacola, So I know I got this education that seems like, if nothing else, it would have been part of like Florida state history class. That's exactly what it was. But I tuned out. Listen, I was a bad history student growing up. I just was like whatever. But again, you know, it's a lot of memorizing facts, it didn't really contextualize things. Sure, just not to rip on teachers. It's a hard job, and it's been hard in a variety of ways always. So yeah, I think we've talked on the show before about how the way history was taught when you and I were in like R K through twelve education versus what I will hear public school history teachers talking about now totally different. Yes, Like our history education involved reading. From my point, of view the most boring textbooks ever written, Yes, and then being given what was basically a reading comprehension test about those textbooks that were so boring that I could not get any of the stuff to stick in my head really well hard. Same, And so I like, will hear friends of mine who are history teachers talking about like things their students are doing that involve close reading of primary sources and building connections between different commonalities and different parts of history and interpreting things, And I'm like, this would have number one given me a better foundational knowledge of things, and other also would have been more fun. I didn't get into that kind of stuff until I was taking humanities classes in college, which I've said before was like where I was like, oh I do like history, right, Yeah, I mean unless you can kind of create a thread that ties history to the person you're teaching it to in some way, which usually just involves like giving it broader context. Yeah, it's really hard for a lot of people, myself included, to be like, oh, I understand why this is important, what this is. I see how these are human beings that were doing things that are flawed, like all human beings. Then it gets more interesting in a hurry, but when it's like and then they took Pensacola and then there was this, and I'm like, I don't I'm sorry what I was thinking about Grido, I don't like. Yeah, yeah, I also have this vision of who Miranda was in my head and why he was so kind of not thorough in thinking through his plans. Tell me what your theory is, well, because I see him as the kind of people everyone knows. I've certainly known a lot of these, and sometimes I've been this that person who thinks they know I mean, we know he was conceited, right. I feel like he would come up with an idea and go, I'm so clever. Ah, you guys, I've figured it all out here you go, and like that was it. There wasn't any follow up on, like, oh, I should vet this with somebody, I should talk this through. It would be like I'm a clever man. Here's my clever idea. You guys can laud me for my cleverness. Now it's like, oh, you have fallen into your own trap where you are probably very bright, right, but you haven't learned how to refine ideas or like develop them past what you think is your initial genius. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I'm so clever. It should be on a shirt for him, right. So I read a couple of biographies. One was by Karen Raycine called Francisco de Miranda, A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution I came out on two thousand and three. And the other was like one of the really early English language biographies of him, which was by William Spence Robertson, and that was Francisco to Miranda and the Revolutionizing of Spanish America. And I can't remember which of these authors said this, but one or the other of them was basically like he was really smart and really well read, but not a deep thinker. And as I was reading it, it kind of amused me a little bit because I was sort of thinking about him in also thinking about Natalie Clifford Barney, whose episode was also inspired by the same trip to Philadelphia, and I sort of felt like Francisco to Miranda is to revolution in Spanish America, as Natalie Clifford Barney is to polyamory. They just both had like really idealistic, really like surface level ambitions about things that were way more complicated than how they handled them in a lot of ways. She too was very I'm so clever. Yeah, have you noticed how clever I am? Yeah, she was in terms of like her relationships with other people. She was like, we're not going to be monogamous. We're all just gonna love each other and it's going to be great without kind of wrestling with what it takes to do that in a relationship and have it not fall apart into drama. And at least from my reading, Francisco to Miranda was kind of like, yeah, we're going to have a revolution in Spanish America. It's going to be all about freedom and liberty, and like, in addition to not having really explored all the layers of what that would involve, that was so much territory with vastly different populations and experiences, Like our Saturday classic was on the Tupacumaru Rebellion, and you know, in the highland areas where a lot of that happened, the demographics were very different from areas along the coast. Like so many things, I still find him so fascinating and so ambitious. I do feel like it sort of short changes him to boil him down to these three revolutions, because while it is true that he was involved in all three of them, they are not necessarily in the way that a person might imagine based on that sentence, right, Like when you say he fought in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the revolution in Spanish America, you sort of might imagine him like rolling into Yorktown and then taking the king to the guillotine and then and like that's like, that's not well, not how he was participating. He was busy being clever. He was very clever. He also did seem to perpetually be like work in his angles. Yeah, he had a lot of angles, right, like how can I turn this thing that's not about me into both being about me and supporting the thing that I want to do? Yeah. His story also really highlights how much, in terms of other nations support of revolutions, how much of that has absolutely nothing to do with what the revolutionary's stated goals are, Like, how much of that is really about those nations own self interest and own priorities. And that is something that I think that he understood and also didn't want to think about, because it was like he understood that if you know, if there was an uprising in the Spanish car it would distract their focus from things that mattered to Britain, and he wanted to get Britain's support based on that idea, but like did not quite take that to the point of you're talking about a hypothetical thing when there are actual, real things in front of the British officials right now that are going to take a priority. Yeah. One of the other things that really popped out to me during this episode this may sound like I am a simpleton, and I am in many ways. You know, we talk about how and we of course get a lot of the revolution in the colonies right that ultimately led to the United States, and this idea of like, everyone help us, we are trying to gain our independence, and how quickly it spins around to other people coming to the US for help and them going, oh, we are thinking about how this one maybe right, and I'm just like, whoa, that's a quick turn about. You kind of became the very thing you said you were fighting in many ways, which I think happens in almost every one of those cases throughout history, right, Like, once a revolutionary faction establishes themselves as the government, then they suddenly find that they have to deal with matters of state and where they fit in the global community, and that becomes a whole other problem that they weren't focusing on at all as their ideals when they were just moving forward to gain independence. Yeah, I think this is absolutely my conjecture. I have not looked into like the historiography of this at all, but I think it's very easy, like in school lessons to have this pairing of American Revolution French Revolution ideals of liberty who helped to Yeah, that kind of stuff, and it doesn't work quite as neatly that way with Spain's involvement in the American Revolution. There's not that quite duality there, I think. So if you don't know the term historiography, it's like sort of the whole field of the writing of history, and the historiography changes over time for a lot of different reasons. And I am kind of curious if I went back to history books that were written before World War Two, what would it say about Spain's involvement in the Revolutionary War, Like if I went back basically anytime, going farther back to like any time before the rise of fascism and the Spanish Civil War, like would books written before that point treat Spain's involvement in the American Revolution differently than yours and my experience which was like to not hear that much about it in an American history class, although you likely heard about it in a Florida State's history class. And that's just my conjecture. I don't really know. Also, we did not even touch on all of the famous and influential people that this man met during his lifetime. There's so many. It's so wild how casually he's having lunches and dinners with people. Yeah, I'm just gonna go go have dinner with George Washington. One person that came up in a source that I didn't put into the episode, but I was curious about is James Berry, who was a surgeon. And James Berry is like in the big umbrella of trans history. Based on everything that we know about him and his life, pretty comfortable saying that, like, if this person were living today, we would probably describe James Berry as a trans man. One source that I used said that this was somebody that Francisco to Miranda personally knew, and that Francisco de Miranda knew this about James Berry and helped to keep his secret, and it was one of those things where I was like, this sounds interesting. I would like to explore this, but the one paper that seemed to be the source of this just wouldn't load like the word there was a link to it that kept opening as a blank screen, and I couldn't find another source for getting that paper. And the way it was worded. Number one, it was this was in like a Spanish language source that I was having to run through a translator to just get the sense of, which is another reason why I was like, I'm not confident putting this into the episode based on something that I ran through a translator to try to read. But it also in that translation read as kind of conjectural to me, and I was like, I would like to have more definite information than to just throw something into the episode that I'm not totally sure about and can't find the substantiation on. James Barry is somebody that we used to get a lot of requests about an episode for that we have not done, in part because it's not a lot of documentation, not a lot of yea, not a lot of documentation, but also a story that, in spite of our best efforts, can like reinforce some outdated ideas about gender and about transgender people specifically. So that is just if you're curious why we don't have an episode. That is why. It's also been some years since James Barry has come up in my so that might be that there are better sources now than there were the last time I thought about possible episodes. So yeah, the empty tomb at the National Pantheon of Venezuela with the eagle hold the lid open. That chokes me up a little bit. Me too. It is clear that he has an important place in the history of Venezuela and the rest of the region as well, not just Venezuela. But yeah, so if you've got stuff happening on the weekend, I hope it doesn't involve having to try to get back pay from somebody. And I also but it doesn't evolve like writing two officials to beg for help and something that they don't care about. You know, I hope they do care if that's what you're doing, just because I know how rough it can be to just butch your head against something that's not getting the attention that you want. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. 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 Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We spent both of our episodes this week talking about Francisco to Miranda. Because I saw a statue in Philadelphia? Is there any better reason? I mean, it was a great reason. Plus I was getting started on this. I wanted to confirm where I saw the statue because I walked around Philadelphia that sort of general area a bit that day, even though it was snowing and then horribly raining. Once the horrible rain started, I just walked back to the hotel, but I wanted to make sure I remembered, like where the statue was and what it looked like. And it's in front of the Franklin Institute. And as I was looking at Google Maps, I was like, did they drive a Google street View car through the interior of the Franklin Institute, Because there's Google street View of the inside of Franklin Institute. And if you listeners know the story of that. I didn't call up the Franklin Institute to ask, but I did ask a former coworker of ours who worked at the Franklin Institute for several years. That person did not specifically know. Thought it might have been part of like a pilot program that never really got off the ground. But if you look at it on Google Maps, you can get into the inside of the Franklin Institute on the street view. It is not as smooth as a lot of like formally intentionally made three D virtual tours of museums, because there are times where you can see that there is Google street view path going through two different rooms, but you can't get through the door, like oh waituh, But I was fascinated and that whole like the public art that is on the street it includes the Rocky statue, you know, the statue of Rocky at the Art Museum. Also, what is the most over the top monument to George Washington that I personally have ever seen in person. It is not my favorite piece of art in the world. There are like indigenous people at the bottom kind of adoringly looking up, and it makes me go yikes every time I see it. Yeah, I am fascinated by this man. I am fascinated by his hubris. I struggled mightily with writing the episode because there were so many parts of it that we either haven't talked about at all or we've only talked about in kind of broad strokes that I needed to do in a little bit more detail. So like, had never talked about Spain's contribution to the revolution war at all. We've talked at various points about the French Revolution and the French Revolutionary Wars, but the thing that we needed to talk about in this pair of episodes was like how it actually started? What were the steps of things that happened? Right? And I had a real hard time boiling that down into something that made any sense and seemed accurate. There was just a lot of it. I was not expecting a two part episode starting out on it, and I definitely wasn't expecting a two part episode that took me at least two additional days longer than normal to get through. Yeah, it's always tricky. I mean, I find any time I'm talking about the French Revolution, I like have to silo and be like, Okay, there's all this other stuff, but today we just have to talk about this because otherwise my brain goes going, yes, I will confess to my poor studentship. Are you ready? Yeah, you had asked me when you started this, Hey, did you know that Spain had you know, been contributing to the Revolutionary warr And I was like, yeah, but I don't remember much about it. And then after you did your research and I was looking at your outline, I'm like, that's why I knew, And BOYD, is that show that I wasn't paying a lot of attention because I grew up, you know, not far from Pensacola, So I know I got this education that seems like, if nothing else, it would have been part of like Florida state history class. That's exactly what it was. But I tuned out. Listen, I was a bad history student growing up. I just was like whatever. But again, you know, it's a lot of memorizing facts, it didn't really contextualize things. Sure, just not to rip on teachers. It's a hard job, and it's been hard in a variety of ways always. So yeah, I think we've talked on the show before about how the way history was taught when you and I were in like R K through twelve education versus what I will hear public school history teachers talking about now totally different. Yes, Like our history education involved reading. From my point, of view the most boring textbooks ever written, Yes, and then being given what was basically a reading comprehension test about those textbooks that were so boring that I could not get any of the stuff to stick in my head really well hard. Same, And so I like, will hear friends of mine who are history teachers talking about like things their students are doing that involve close reading of primary sources and building connections between different commonalities and different parts of history and interpreting things, And I'm like, this would have number one given me a better foundational knowledge of things, and other also would have been more fun. I didn't get into that kind of stuff until I was taking humanities classes in college, which I've said before was like where I was like, oh I do like history, right, Yeah, I mean unless you can kind of create a thread that ties history to the person you're teaching it to in some way, which usually just involves like giving it broader context. Yeah, it's really hard for a lot of people, myself included, to be like, oh, I understand why this is important, what this is. I see how these are human beings that were doing things that are flawed, like all human beings. Then it gets more interesting in a hurry, but when it's like and then they took Pensacola and then there was this, and I'm like, I don't I'm sorry what I was thinking about Grido, I don't like. Yeah, yeah, I also have this vision of who Miranda was in my head and why he was so kind of not thorough in thinking through his plans. Tell me what your theory is, well, because I see him as the kind of people everyone knows. I've certainly known a lot of these, and sometimes I've been this that person who thinks they know I mean, we know he was conceited, right. I feel like he would come up with an idea and go, I'm so clever. Ah, you guys, I've figured it all out here you go, and like that was it. There wasn't any follow up on, like, oh, I should vet this with somebody, I should talk this through. It would be like I'm a clever man. Here's my clever idea. You guys can laud me for my cleverness. Now it's like, oh, you have fallen into your own trap where you are probably very bright, right, but you haven't learned how to refine ideas or like develop them past what you think is your initial genius. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I'm so clever. It should be on a shirt for him, right. So I read a couple of biographies. One was by Karen Raycine called Francisco de Miranda, A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution I came out on two thousand and three. And the other was like one of the really early English language biographies of him, which was by William Spence Robertson, and that was Francisco to Miranda and the Revolutionizing of Spanish America. And I can't remember which of these authors said this, but one or the other of them was basically like he was really smart and really well read, but not a deep thinker. And as I was reading it, it kind of amused me a little bit because I was sort of thinking about him in also thinking about Natalie Clifford Barney, whose episode was also inspired by the same trip to Philadelphia, and I sort of felt like Francisco to Miranda is to revolution in Spanish America, as Natalie Clifford Barney is to polyamory. They just both had like really idealistic, really like surface level ambitions about things that were way more complicated than how they handled them in a lot of ways. She too was very I'm so clever. Yeah, have you noticed how clever I am? Yeah, she was in terms of like her relationships with other people. She was like, we're not going to be monogamous. We're all just gonna love each other and it's going to be great without kind of wrestling with what it takes to do that in a relationship and have it not fall apart into drama. And at least from my reading, Francisco to Miranda was kind of like, yeah, we're going to have a revolution in Spanish America. It's going to be all about freedom and liberty, and like, in addition to not having really explored all the layers of what that would involve, that was so much territory with vastly different populations and experiences, Like our Saturday classic was on the Tupacumaru Rebellion, and you know, in the highland areas where a lot of that happened, the demographics were very different from areas along the coast. Like so many things, I still find him so fascinating and so ambitious. I do feel like it sort of short changes him to boil him down to these three revolutions, because while it is true that he was involved in all three of them, they are not necessarily in the way that a person might imagine based on that sentence, right, Like when you say he fought in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the revolution in Spanish America, you sort of might imagine him like rolling into Yorktown and then taking the king to the guillotine and then and like that's like, that's not well, not how he was participating. He was busy being clever. He was very clever. He also did seem to perpetually be like work in his angles. Yeah, he had a lot of angles, right, like how can I turn this thing that's not about me into both being about me and supporting the thing that I want to do? Yeah. His story also really highlights how much, in terms of other nations support of revolutions, how much of that has absolutely nothing to do with what the revolutionary's stated goals are, Like, how much of that is really about those nations own self interest and own priorities. And that is something that I think that he understood and also didn't want to think about, because it was like he understood that if you know, if there was an uprising in the Spanish car it would distract their focus from things that mattered to Britain, and he wanted to get Britain's support based on that idea, but like did not quite take that to the point of you're talking about a hypothetical thing when there are actual, real things in front of the British officials right now that are going to take a priority. Yeah. One of the other things that really popped out to me during this episode this may sound like I am a simpleton, and I am in many ways. You know, we talk about how and we of course get a lot of the revolution in the colonies right that ultimately led to the United States, and this idea of like, everyone help us, we are trying to gain our independence, and how quickly it spins around to other people coming to the US for help and them going, oh, we are thinking about how this one maybe right, and I'm just like, whoa, that's a quick turn about. You kind of became the very thing you said you were fighting in many ways, which I think happens in almost every one of those cases throughout history, right, Like, once a revolutionary faction establishes themselves as the government, then they suddenly find that they have to deal with matters of state and where they fit in the global community, and that becomes a whole other problem that they weren't focusing on at all as their ideals when they were just moving forward to gain independence. Yeah, I think this is absolutely my conjecture. I have not looked into like the historiography of this at all, but I think it's very easy, like in school lessons to have this pairing of American Revolution French Revolution ideals of liberty who helped to Yeah, that kind of stuff, and it doesn't work quite as neatly that way with Spain's involvement in the American Revolution. There's not that quite duality there, I think. So if you don't know the term historiography, it's like sort of the whole field of the writing of history, and the historiography changes over time for a lot of different reasons. And I am kind of curious if I went back to history books that were written before World War Two, what would it say about Spain's involvement in the Revolutionary War, Like if I went back basically anytime, going farther back to like any time before the rise of fascism and the Spanish Civil War, like would books written before that point treat Spain's involvement in the American Revolution differently than yours and my experience which was like to not hear that much about it in an American history class, although you likely heard about it in a Florida State's history class. And that's just my conjecture. I don't really know. Also, we did not even touch on all of the famous and influential people that this man met during his lifetime. There's so many. It's so wild how casually he's having lunches and dinners with people. Yeah, I'm just gonna go go have dinner with George Washington. One person that came up in a source that I didn't put into the episode, but I was curious about is James Berry, who was a surgeon. And James Berry is like in the big umbrella of trans history. Based on everything that we know about him and his life, pretty comfortable saying that, like, if this person were living today, we would probably describe James Berry as a trans man. One source that I used said that this was somebody that Francisco to Miranda personally knew, and that Francisco de Miranda knew this about James Berry and helped to keep his secret, and it was one of those things where I was like, this sounds interesting. I would like to explore this, but the one paper that seemed to be the source of this just wouldn't load like the word there was a link to it that kept opening as a blank screen, and I couldn't find another source for getting that paper. And the way it was worded. Number one, it was this was in like a Spanish language source that I was having to run through a translator to just get the sense of, which is another reason why I was like, I'm not confident putting this into the episode based on something that I ran through a translator to try to read. But it also in that translation read as kind of conjectural to me, and I was like, I would like to have more definite information than to just throw something into the episode that I'm not totally sure about and can't find the substantiation on. James Barry is somebody that we used to get a lot of requests about an episode for that we have not done, in part because it's not a lot of documentation, not a lot of yea, not a lot of documentation, but also a story that, in spite of our best efforts, can like reinforce some outdated ideas about gender and about transgender people specifically. So that is just if you're curious why we don't have an episode. That is why. It's also been some years since James Barry has come up in my so that might be that there are better sources now than there were the last time I thought about possible episodes. So yeah, the empty tomb at the National Pantheon of Venezuela with the eagle hold the lid open. That chokes me up a little bit. Me too. It is clear that he has an important place in the history of Venezuela and the rest of the region as well, not just Venezuela. But yeah, so if you've got stuff happening on the weekend, I hope it doesn't involve having to try to get back pay from somebody. And I also but it doesn't evolve like writing two officials to beg for help and something that they don't care about. You know, I hope they do care if that's what you're doing, just because I know how rough it can be to just butch your head against something that's not getting the attention that you want. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. 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.