Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we talked about Madeline Pollard and William Breckinridge this week. There was lots of growling. There will be more. Um. I did want to mention though, I I said during the episode we would probably regroup back on um the spy that that Breckinridge had had hired. One of the books that I read about this trial went in a little bit more to Jenny's backstory. So uh, that was of course Jane Armstrong Tucker. And she too, I mean, was a woman. It's easy to make her a villain to say that he hired a spy. This was not a person who was like I will uh dig dirt on people for money. She had like worked as like an administrative assistant type role in an office. I think of breckin Ridges or of one of his friends, and they kind of were like, we need a young woman of roughly the same age who could maybe you know, make friends with this person. And she was also from a family that had had had financial difficulties and so she is also in some ways kind of I don't know if exploited is the right word, but she is a woman who is in a position where she couldn't really say no to this offer, and you know, from very powerful men. So I just want to make sure we acknowledge that, Like, there are many layers to the awful privilege that is exerted in this story, um pretty much everywhere you look, and she is one of them as well. There is a book published that is like the notes that Jenny kept about the whole thing, and it's kind of interesting because she when you read about their relationship, I mean, she was stayed close with Madeline throughout all of this, Like she would go visit her as her friend. I'm using the air quotes, you know, as the trial was playing out after she had left the convent, which apparently one of the things that really just like was too much for her to handle was that they didn't eat very well. Um as she couldn't take it. But she you know, would show up and it was like she was still having a heart to hearts and she kind of suspected several times that Madeline knew what the scoop was and that she was in fact relaying information back to Breckinridge, but they still kept this strange Whether it was staged or genuine is unclear to all of the parties. I think, um, this strange friendship, and that's just kind of an interesting rabbit hole. But it's all speculative in terms of who knew what and understood what and how they might have been manipulating one another. Boy. This story is an angry maker for me. Something I didn't get into is his kids and how this impacted them, because it did seem like, I mean, he is a complicated man, because he clearly was in many ways a jerk. He also seemed to be a very loving and adoring father who was always worried about his kids throughout all of this, even though like they were kind of coming into adulthood some of them. Um, but yeah, he had been married well before he met her. Louise was his third wife. The part where they were reading her writing as evidence reminded me of the Reynolds pamphlet Yes, and how Alexander Hamilton's was printing like Mariah Reynolds letters to him as evidence of her like character and that like her tone and writing. When we did that episode, there were people who got really upset that felt like I was making fun of her literacy. And really, what it was that Captain aided me about her letters is the tone of them was like breathless in a way that uh just seemed like constantly on the edge of like I don't know, there was a just a like a breathless energy to all of it. But then he printed those letters complete with all of their like nonstandard spelling. How embarrassing that must have been for her to like have that kind of dragged out to be like, well, here's evidence of what this person is like. I mean, can you imagine you maybe don't have this problem as much as I do, but I walk in text Can you imagine if someone just published your text history? Yeah, people would be like, Holly Fry isn't uneducated ding dong who does not know how to spell a single word? Had Remember when that that when the bad art Friend article came out and like went viral and that was all everybody talked about for about forty eight hours. I was like, I really hope nobody ever subpoenas my group chat's right, I don't need that. Yeah, it's it's awful and it really is I mean again, it also comes with this whole unsavory thing of making fun of people's earnest art, which is just like one of those things that gets my hackles up anyway. You know, those were not things she was writing, everythinging like, oh this will be read aloud in court to determine whether or not I really mean to be a writer or not, Like every single writer I know published unpublished, incredibly skilled versus like I'm pretty good, but I'm getting better, Like every writer I know looks back at their older work and it's like, yikes, because you're theoretically progressing throughout. So like I would not want anything that I had not put out for public consumption suddenly thrust into the spotlight as a determiner of my value or my intent. Ye smokes. The last time I moved there was definitely like a trove of old notebooks. I found that I was like destroying this right now, running all these pages through the shredder. Right, how much fire can I make without becoming dangerous? Yeah? Yeah, the I am the one thing that gives me a little a bit of comfort. And all of this is how women's groups really did mobilize very quickly to be like they pointed out the problems with this. It wasn't like we're looking back with a lens and being like, there's a horrible double standard. People at the time, we're like, are y'all seeing this? Are you understanding that? Like he went from claiming she was just promiscuous and that that made it okay for him to have an affair with her to saying that she was like some sort of you know, vampiric temptress who was the life out of him and taking all of his money. And and you know, that shift in tone even evidenced like he's a weasel. He's a weasel in this regard, and he's trying to weasel out of his weaselly weasel nous, like for many a very big touchstone. Like I said, people some people thought like, oh, she really got, you know, run through the mill by this much older man who had all of the power. And other people were like, oh, she's you gotta be careful, don't have sexual agency, because that's bad. It's a good lens to look at and think about how far we have and have not come. As I often say when we discuss matters of social moories, I am very glad that she went on to have a very fun later life. Yeah, same fan had just like what sounds awesome. She had a best friend she traveled around the world with. They. I didn't go into it, but like in her travel she was often like at the center of interesting things happening, or like as you know, you know, like she was in Paris at the same time that like the salons of Paris were turning out, like the famous writers that you know, we all think about, like all of the expats that were living in Paris in the twenties and having this amazing life. She was there for a lot of that. M So she really got to do some pretty cool stuff, which makes me happy after the horrible situation she went through. Ye, may we all find happiness and hopefully not have to go through horrible situations. But if we do, I hope there's happiness after that week on the show, we talked about unicorns, which was like a weird opposite of the Platypus episode. Yes, because that was a real animal people thought was fake. Yeah, and this uh more of a mythical animal that various people thought was a real, living, breathing thing. Yes, I mentioned that there is a fictional thing in pop culture that I wanted to talk about, And it's actually two things, but related to one thing, which is Futurama. Okay, Futurama had two different instances where kind of unicorn mythology made its way in. One is a very funny episode called Spanish Fry where the inhabitants of Omicron Percy I eight uh, which is lure if you've ever watched Futurama, it's that that big giant, slightly lizard e species that is very hilarious. Um, they believe that human horn is an aff dgiac, by which they mean a nose, and so they steal from at one point, and it basically is like the unicorn story, but just applied in a completely different context and you start to realize pretty quickly what a silly thing that would be. And the other is a much later story that they had when they Futurama, for anybody that doesn't know, kind of like came and went. It was, you know, canceled and re picked up and like Fox dropped it. I got picked up by Cartoon Network and then Comedy Central had it for a while and they put out at a point like a bunch of new stuff, and in one of them there's this whole crazy time travel thing, but there is a narwhall that responds really really well to one person who we end up finding out is Um, a main character that has time traveled and her name is Lulu. And it's like this idea of like only one person can connect with this animal and and it is depressed until it meets this person and is loved in the proper way, and it's both of them. I'm like, somebody loves unicorn lore on this ship. Yeah. Having been in elementary school in the nineteen eighties, I feel like that's prime overlap to be a kid really into unicorns. Was definitely really into unicorns. I had lots of unicorn stickers, had my little ponies, had little plush unicorns, all of that stuff. And then that also meant that when Ringley Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus came through with that unicorn, did you go Oh? I sure did. My mom was like, you're gonna you're gonna be disappointed, Like you're you're gonna it's not gonna look like you think it's supposed to look. You're gonna be disappointed, and I think I had even seen ads that showed it, and I still somehow thought that it was going to be more like a horse and less like a goat in person. It was not. It was a very it was a goat. It was it looked like a goat. Yeah, And then of course, obviously there's the whole other animal rights conversation with the goats specifically in the circus more generally. But you know, I was eight, so yeah, I was disappointed. The big thing I recall from the eighties and unicorns is of course Legend sure, yeah, which is just in case any of our listeners don't remember or Nita an update. That was Ridley Scott's movie that came out and I think eighties six Um, Tom Cruise, uh Mia, Sarah and of course Tim Curry. Um, it's amazing and there's a lot of unicorn lore in that and it is very beautifully shot, I must say, But like I think for a lot of kids in the eighties, that was also a big touchstone of like, yeah, the apex of how a unicorn should look and be on screen. Yeah, gorgeous. There was also the film adaptation of the Last Unicorn, which is the two I don't think I have ever seen that. Somehow that one got through my great and I never never got to it. As sort of just a weird side note to all of this. The thing that had led me to be like I want to talk about this was the lady in the unicorn tapestries. We talked about that. So I live in a house that is more than a century old, and our front door has needed to be replaced for the whole time that we have had this house. We've just had other things to do and also a pandemic going on. It does it is not even with weather stripping on there. It is not effective at keeping the cold air out of the house. Um and we have had some just bitterly cold weather over the last couple of weeks. And as I was working on this, I was like, they always hung those tapestries on the wall and castles and things try to keep the drafts down. Hey, I have spring rods. I have curtains that I have used in various like podcasting setups. What if I hung a curtain over the front door and that was surprisingly effective, I have no doubt whatsoever, especially because it was like a thermal curtain that I had gotten and before we moved into this house, and like my old podcasting set up, it was what I used to to make the room less echoy um yeah yeah, surprisingly effective. So if you, like me, have a front door that just really it needs to go, we gotta like move that up to the do maybe you can make do for a little bit with a you know, the curtain rod and some curtain. Yeah. We similarly have had a lot of work being done on our house just kind of some one some fun stuff that we wanted to do, but also like we had general maintenance that had been neglected and needed to happen. Um, Like our front porch was a hazard and had to be replaced. But our back door that goes to our deck similarly a little drafty, like you could see underneath it if you were sitting on the couch. And so that was one of the things that we prioritized, like, hey, could you guys also add on the work order to put some fresh weather stripping in here and fix this, And they ended up putting in a whole new door and it's magical now to not walk past it and be like whoa yeah, yeah, yeah, well, and our the weather stripping on ours like was professionally done. It's like the just the fit of the door is too bad for that a lot of help. Uh So, anyway, that's your update on unicorns and tap streets. If you want to send us a note or a history podcast that I hear radio dot com. Since this is Friday, hope folks are having a good a good weekend, as great as possible as your weekend can be. We'll be back on Saturday with the Saturday Classic and Monday with something brand new. You can get all of that if you just subscribe to the show from the I heart Radio app wherevery else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we talked about Madeline Pollard and William Breckinridge this week. There was lots of growling. There will be more. Um. I did want to mention though, I I said during the episode we would probably regroup back on um the spy that that Breckinridge had had hired. One of the books that I read about this trial went in a little bit more to Jenny's backstory. So uh, that was of course Jane Armstrong Tucker. And she too, I mean, was a woman. It's easy to make her a villain to say that he hired a spy. This was not a person who was like I will uh dig dirt on people for money. She had like worked as like an administrative assistant type role in an office. I think of breckin Ridges or of one of his friends, and they kind of were like, we need a young woman of roughly the same age who could maybe you know, make friends with this person. And she was also from a family that had had had financial difficulties and so she is also in some ways kind of I don't know if exploited is the right word, but she is a woman who is in a position where she couldn't really say no to this offer, and you know, from very powerful men. So I just want to make sure we acknowledge that, Like, there are many layers to the awful privilege that is exerted in this story, um pretty much everywhere you look, and she is one of them as well. There is a book published that is like the notes that Jenny kept about the whole thing, and it's kind of interesting because she when you read about their relationship, I mean, she was stayed close with Madeline throughout all of this, Like she would go visit her as her friend. I'm using the air quotes, you know, as the trial was playing out after she had left the convent, which apparently one of the things that really just like was too much for her to handle was that they didn't eat very well. Um as she couldn't take it. But she you know, would show up and it was like she was still having a heart to hearts and she kind of suspected several times that Madeline knew what the scoop was and that she was in fact relaying information back to Breckinridge, but they still kept this strange Whether it was staged or genuine is unclear to all of the parties. I think, um, this strange friendship, and that's just kind of an interesting rabbit hole. But it's all speculative in terms of who knew what and understood what and how they might have been manipulating one another. Boy. This story is an angry maker for me. Something I didn't get into is his kids and how this impacted them, because it did seem like, I mean, he is a complicated man, because he clearly was in many ways a jerk. He also seemed to be a very loving and adoring father who was always worried about his kids throughout all of this, even though like they were kind of coming into adulthood some of them. Um, but yeah, he had been married well before he met her. Louise was his third wife. The part where they were reading her writing as evidence reminded me of the Reynolds pamphlet Yes, and how Alexander Hamilton's was printing like Mariah Reynolds letters to him as evidence of her like character and that like her tone and writing. When we did that episode, there were people who got really upset that felt like I was making fun of her literacy. And really, what it was that Captain aided me about her letters is the tone of them was like breathless in a way that uh just seemed like constantly on the edge of like I don't know, there was a just a like a breathless energy to all of it. But then he printed those letters complete with all of their like nonstandard spelling. How embarrassing that must have been for her to like have that kind of dragged out to be like, well, here's evidence of what this person is like. I mean, can you imagine you maybe don't have this problem as much as I do, but I walk in text Can you imagine if someone just published your text history? Yeah, people would be like, Holly Fry isn't uneducated ding dong who does not know how to spell a single word? Had Remember when that that when the bad art Friend article came out and like went viral and that was all everybody talked about for about forty eight hours. I was like, I really hope nobody ever subpoenas my group chat's right, I don't need that. Yeah, it's it's awful and it really is I mean again, it also comes with this whole unsavory thing of making fun of people's earnest art, which is just like one of those things that gets my hackles up anyway. You know, those were not things she was writing, everythinging like, oh this will be read aloud in court to determine whether or not I really mean to be a writer or not, Like every single writer I know published unpublished, incredibly skilled versus like I'm pretty good, but I'm getting better, Like every writer I know looks back at their older work and it's like, yikes, because you're theoretically progressing throughout. So like I would not want anything that I had not put out for public consumption suddenly thrust into the spotlight as a determiner of my value or my intent. Ye smokes. The last time I moved there was definitely like a trove of old notebooks. I found that I was like destroying this right now, running all these pages through the shredder. Right, how much fire can I make without becoming dangerous? Yeah? Yeah, the I am the one thing that gives me a little a bit of comfort. And all of this is how women's groups really did mobilize very quickly to be like they pointed out the problems with this. It wasn't like we're looking back with a lens and being like, there's a horrible double standard. People at the time, we're like, are y'all seeing this? Are you understanding that? Like he went from claiming she was just promiscuous and that that made it okay for him to have an affair with her to saying that she was like some sort of you know, vampiric temptress who was the life out of him and taking all of his money. And and you know, that shift in tone even evidenced like he's a weasel. He's a weasel in this regard, and he's trying to weasel out of his weaselly weasel nous, like for many a very big touchstone. Like I said, people some people thought like, oh, she really got, you know, run through the mill by this much older man who had all of the power. And other people were like, oh, she's you gotta be careful, don't have sexual agency, because that's bad. It's a good lens to look at and think about how far we have and have not come. As I often say when we discuss matters of social moories, I am very glad that she went on to have a very fun later life. Yeah, same fan had just like what sounds awesome. She had a best friend she traveled around the world with. They. I didn't go into it, but like in her travel she was often like at the center of interesting things happening, or like as you know, you know, like she was in Paris at the same time that like the salons of Paris were turning out, like the famous writers that you know, we all think about, like all of the expats that were living in Paris in the twenties and having this amazing life. She was there for a lot of that. M So she really got to do some pretty cool stuff, which makes me happy after the horrible situation she went through. Ye, may we all find happiness and hopefully not have to go through horrible situations. But if we do, I hope there's happiness after that week on the show, we talked about unicorns, which was like a weird opposite of the Platypus episode. Yes, because that was a real animal people thought was fake. Yeah, and this uh more of a mythical animal that various people thought was a real, living, breathing thing. Yes, I mentioned that there is a fictional thing in pop culture that I wanted to talk about, And it's actually two things, but related to one thing, which is Futurama. Okay, Futurama had two different instances where kind of unicorn mythology made its way in. One is a very funny episode called Spanish Fry where the inhabitants of Omicron Percy I eight uh, which is lure if you've ever watched Futurama, it's that that big giant, slightly lizard e species that is very hilarious. Um, they believe that human horn is an aff dgiac, by which they mean a nose, and so they steal from at one point, and it basically is like the unicorn story, but just applied in a completely different context and you start to realize pretty quickly what a silly thing that would be. And the other is a much later story that they had when they Futurama, for anybody that doesn't know, kind of like came and went. It was, you know, canceled and re picked up and like Fox dropped it. I got picked up by Cartoon Network and then Comedy Central had it for a while and they put out at a point like a bunch of new stuff, and in one of them there's this whole crazy time travel thing, but there is a narwhall that responds really really well to one person who we end up finding out is Um, a main character that has time traveled and her name is Lulu. And it's like this idea of like only one person can connect with this animal and and it is depressed until it meets this person and is loved in the proper way, and it's both of them. I'm like, somebody loves unicorn lore on this ship. Yeah. Having been in elementary school in the nineteen eighties, I feel like that's prime overlap to be a kid really into unicorns. Was definitely really into unicorns. I had lots of unicorn stickers, had my little ponies, had little plush unicorns, all of that stuff. And then that also meant that when Ringley Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus came through with that unicorn, did you go Oh? I sure did. My mom was like, you're gonna you're gonna be disappointed, Like you're you're gonna it's not gonna look like you think it's supposed to look. You're gonna be disappointed, and I think I had even seen ads that showed it, and I still somehow thought that it was going to be more like a horse and less like a goat in person. It was not. It was a very it was a goat. It was it looked like a goat. Yeah, And then of course, obviously there's the whole other animal rights conversation with the goats specifically in the circus more generally. But you know, I was eight, so yeah, I was disappointed. The big thing I recall from the eighties and unicorns is of course Legend sure, yeah, which is just in case any of our listeners don't remember or Nita an update. That was Ridley Scott's movie that came out and I think eighties six Um, Tom Cruise, uh Mia, Sarah and of course Tim Curry. Um, it's amazing and there's a lot of unicorn lore in that and it is very beautifully shot, I must say, But like I think for a lot of kids in the eighties, that was also a big touchstone of like, yeah, the apex of how a unicorn should look and be on screen. Yeah, gorgeous. There was also the film adaptation of the Last Unicorn, which is the two I don't think I have ever seen that. Somehow that one got through my great and I never never got to it. As sort of just a weird side note to all of this. The thing that had led me to be like I want to talk about this was the lady in the unicorn tapestries. We talked about that. So I live in a house that is more than a century old, and our front door has needed to be replaced for the whole time that we have had this house. We've just had other things to do and also a pandemic going on. It does it is not even with weather stripping on there. It is not effective at keeping the cold air out of the house. Um and we have had some just bitterly cold weather over the last couple of weeks. And as I was working on this, I was like, they always hung those tapestries on the wall and castles and things try to keep the drafts down. Hey, I have spring rods. I have curtains that I have used in various like podcasting setups. What if I hung a curtain over the front door and that was surprisingly effective, I have no doubt whatsoever, especially because it was like a thermal curtain that I had gotten and before we moved into this house, and like my old podcasting set up, it was what I used to to make the room less echoy um yeah yeah, surprisingly effective. So if you, like me, have a front door that just really it needs to go, we gotta like move that up to the do maybe you can make do for a little bit with a you know, the curtain rod and some curtain. Yeah. We similarly have had a lot of work being done on our house just kind of some one some fun stuff that we wanted to do, but also like we had general maintenance that had been neglected and needed to happen. Um, Like our front porch was a hazard and had to be replaced. But our back door that goes to our deck similarly a little drafty, like you could see underneath it if you were sitting on the couch. And so that was one of the things that we prioritized, like, hey, could you guys also add on the work order to put some fresh weather stripping in here and fix this, And they ended up putting in a whole new door and it's magical now to not walk past it and be like whoa yeah, yeah, yeah, well, and our the weather stripping on ours like was professionally done. It's like the just the fit of the door is too bad for that a lot of help. Uh So, anyway, that's your update on unicorns and tap streets. If you want to send us a note or a history podcast that I hear radio dot com. Since this is Friday, hope folks are having a good a good weekend, as great as possible as your weekend can be. We'll be back on Saturday with the Saturday Classic and Monday with something brand new. You can get all of that if you just subscribe to the show from the I heart Radio app wherevery else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.