Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio, Hello, and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This week we had our latest installment of Unearthed. I don't feel like we often remind folks that we are too human beings living and working through all of the things that are happening in the world that are also affecting everyone else. But I worked on these episodes as the Supreme Court was issuing one decision after another that was like monumental and has wide reaching effects, and regardless of how you personally feel about any of these decisions, it was definitely a kay atic uh and often, from my point of view, demoralizing series of days. Yes, I did a lot of all caps swearing on social media because I just couldn't help myself. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of these are related to things that um that we have talked about on the show before. I think the first thing that comes to people's minds is probably ro versus Wade, But there were also decisions that affected things like tribal sovereignty, which has been something that has come up on the show so much, and that also like that decision seems to foretell other decisions that might also have a damaging effect on tribal sovereignty. Like there was just a lot. There was so much that was happening. And one thing that has been true of Unearthed episodes going back since starting to do them is that as I work on them, I usually have hundreds of links to articles to go through for them. Uh. And the farther I get into them, like, the more aggressive I will get and being like, that's confusing, we're not talking about it. That seems like them something we already talked about before, We're not talking about it again, Like it just I start to feel increasingly draconian in my approach to choosing what things to talk about, and in this particular set of Unearthed stuff, I feel like that was the case from like minute one I was trying to go through this, like I had something like three hundred and seventy six links bookmarked, uh. And I feel like from the first moment of working on them, I was like, I don't like this headline, don't want to talk about it. To feel like this is confusing and doesn't make any sense not talking about that either, and that's I don't know, it was just it was one of the weirder unearthed preparation periods that I can recall. Yeah, I mean I had I had aside a subject to be working on in these last couple week that I was kind of excited about. It's weird and esoteric. It's still happening, but one of the main books I was I was hoping to use I got delayed in transit and so I couldn't work on it, and I just remember being like, but that was my mom. That was anything. It's like it was like that, damn, let us all over again, like touch a break, Um, but we got I will say there was a thing included in this that was one of those um items that made me um super angry, which is the tall chief statue being cut apart and sold for scrap. I mean that's like on multiple levels, right, It's like an indigenous person and their memorial representation being destroyed. It's art being destroyed, and it's one of those things that this is not a case where a thing got stolen because of private lector wanted it. I'm not saying that's good, but it's better than cutting it up. Yeah, there's so many layers of anger. In an earlier draft of the outline, I had various expressions of of anger over that that that I wound up deleting because a lot of the other things that we were going to talk about we're also anger inducing. Something we didn't specifically say about this is I really think the person who stole that statue just took the first one they found, because the way those five statues are arranged, Marjorie Tall Chief was on the end, and I really think, like I haven't personally been to that park, but the fact that it was just the one on the end was probably just the one that somebody came to came to And like, part of me wants to believe that nobody would do that unless they were so desperate for money that they could not. But even so, I'm like, you stole that statue, when you cut it to pieces and you sold it to scrap dealers, that takes a lot of effort. Again, It's one of those things where I'm like, there was no other way to make a book really than all of the time you took to do all of these things that were probably rather labor intensive, Right, Yeah, I don't know. One of the things that's like just sort of the comes with the territory of working on this episode these episodes is that they are just a reflection of what I saw in the many many RSS feeds and now also websites that I go visit individually to see what people are reporting on UM and the collection of stuff that I got this time around, I felt like was a lot more Eurocentric than some of our more recent other episodes, Like they're just I just did not see as much reporting on things that were happening in UM in Africa, Asia, or South America. A lot of it was from Europe and North America, and I UM, I was sort of I had to be limited by the news that I had access to through these hundreds of links that I had bookmarked or the span of three months. So I did want to acknowledge that, even though like I don't I don't know if there is a reasoning behind, like why this time around, so much of the reporting seemed to be so focused on just these parts of the world and not write other parts. Some of it is UM, Like I just like things that it seems like we've talked about these so many times, like coin hoards, lots of coin hoards in places that are not Europe in North America. But like then then it's just like I included a coin hoard for the sake of having things that were not in Europe and North America. Right, I want to talk about salmon vertebrae. Okay, let's do because I really think we need a craft project. Yeah, this is not stuff that's hard to get, right, Like you can buy a whole salmon, so I feel like with a little gumption we can make some beats. Yeah. I don't know if there's uh anything you would need to do to like specifically preserve fish vertebrate, Like, I don't know how, I don't know how bony they are. Does that make sense? Oh? Do you mean? Like, I'm not sure if you're asking how to preserve them so they don't degenerate, or how to preserve them so they don't bite you what you're wearing them. I know. I was more thinking, I don't know if they are more cartilaginous than bony, And if they were more cartilaginous, then I would think it would be hard to there would be something that you would need to do to keep them from just deteriorating. But I don't actually I actually knew, I don't know enough about fish physiology. Those ones lasted a long time. You could always if you really wanted to be you know, fancy pants and unicorn and didn't want to actually wear fish bones, you could asked them. You know, you can make a mold and then cast them in like reson or something, and just make them as needed. There's so many projects we can make with fishbones. I also mentioned that I had thoughts and feelings about anonymity when it comes to auctions of large scale items. Yeah, okay. On the one hand, I, of course we study history all the time. I understand the desire and concern that people have around knowing that something of historical importance is going to go to a place that will appreciate and understand it and preserve it and do But at the same time, there's part of me that's like, how someone spends their money, if it is not nefarious, is nobody's business, right, So like if I had to like report every time I bought something I don't know, say, over like three dollars, Like, can you imagine how weird that would be if you were like, yeah, I bought another bolt of fabric. I promise it's going to a good home. Like I imagine if you have millions of dollars that you're throwing at purchases of that nature, you were accustomed to the game of having to like disclose on occasion. But right, that's always a weird thing when people get in an uproar about yes, but who bought it, and it's like, well, it's an anonymous perch. Yeah. I think I think the Charlotte Bronze one in particular, had like a lot of feelings around it, Like there's the the emotional attachment that a lot of people feel to the Brontes. Not saying everybody feels that way, but like sort of like there were Jane Austen Fines like people, a lot of people I think would have similar feelings. Uh. The fact that like that was the last of her tiny books to be in a private collection instead of in a museum, I think it was a thing that brought up a lot of feeling because the articles that I read that were about it being sold at auction before it became clear who had bought it, had this very dismayed tone, and it was very quickly afterward that it was like Oh, the friends of the library bought it and they're donating it. And there it was like then there was this tone of like a sigh of relief, and all the news reporting Yeah, the metal that's in a good home now like that, that wording just still cracks me up, pretty funny. I mean, it's interesting, right. I also think about the fact that there are people, and I'm just conjecturing people are organizations who could be purchasing things like that to some end that is good and has goodwill around it, but they don't want to disclose it initially, you know what I mean, Like I'm thinking about a weird thing that's not the same at all, But like I'm thinking about when Walt Disney set up a shell company to buy property in Florida because he didn't want people to know Disney was buying it, so it would falsely inflate the price. And I imagine similarly, if there is somebody, like you know, a Bill Gates of the world who decides I'm going to start an art museum and I'm gonna start buying up amazing things. The second that news got out, it would artificially inflate the price on a lot of things, so like, there are things like that to consider as well. And I don't know. I just I have feelings that I'm like, yeah, but I shouldn't have to tell people what you're buying. But then again, if that bolt of fabric that I bought was something that was public knowledge in an auction, maybe I don't know, maybe I should be the be able to um or be willing to say no, no, that was mine. I don't know. It's just a strange thing. Uh. It's totally possible that whoever bought that medal will publicly disclose it at some point. Who even knows it's even possible that they'll disclose it in the window between when we recorded this, Oh, it probably happened right after we finish, or or it happened sometime between when I wrote this episode and today when we're recording it. Because I sent it over to you on Friday before the fourth of July holiday weekend, um, and I have not looked at any news headlines related to this, because why would I do that. Yeah, I don't know. You gotta have time off. I also mentioned that I certainly have theories about how a tiny book could be in the library's collection and uncataloged. Going back to my library cataloging days, where there are times when large palettes of things show up um and depending on how they're arranged your store, you could potentially have an itty bitty thing inside a bigger thing and not even know it was there at the time, especially if it's like part of a large um a session situation where like someone has willed a library their collection, or a large donation from someone or any number of you know, those large drops that happen in which they do sometimes depending on what's going on. I mean, there are a million reasons that someone might be a little speedier with a session in catalog ng than than would be ideal, but it has to happen for whatever reason. They might miss something that happens so it's not mysterious, or they might just have however, many linear feet of somebody's papers that were donated, nobody has gone through all of the papers. And I also have that thing when things show up missing in a collection and it's like we didn't even know it was missing. I have a flashback to a particular book I was trying to track down when I was working in acquisitions, and I had called a library overseas a library in England, and it was one of those things where I was trying to check a copy that was being offered to us for sale against one that like someone else at an an accredited institution would recognize and be like, yes, that seems to be the same the same run or the same edition. And I ran into a problem when I was on the phone with a lovely person who said, we believe we have that book, but we still haven't recovered everything that was covered in rubble in the bombings from World War two. So like, there are things that happened like that where parts of buildings get damaged in a way that might reseal something up away from the libraries circulating collection or even their archive collection, and then they kind of know it's on the premises, but they can't access it. Those happened too, And I always wonder whenever, whenever I'm looking at any of these um unearthed that you put together, and there's like they didn't know it was gone, and I'm like, I wonder if they thought it was in the rubble, Like, oh yeah, that's always my first thought. That just reminded me of how our local library had a water intrusion into the local collections room during a major storm, and it was like they had to get everything out of that room fast. Uh. And I mean I was not there. I was not involved in any of it. But I can absolutely imagine people just trying to get everything out of a room that was flooding as fast as possible. And you gotta deal with it at some point in this case when everything was closed because of COVID. Yes, I had to do that after I like the frame water intrusion that flood at a library that I worked at. I don't want to talk ill about anybody, but we had an archivist that was maybe not super motivated to stay on top of things, and one of our rooms of archival materials had been flooded and it had not been realized that it had flooded until their staffer went looking for something in that room like a month and a half later and came back and said, everything is covered in mold. And so we had to like start pulling stuff out of that room really quickly. Aside from like the archival materials, which is a loss, is dangerous to have a room full of mold in a building where the public can come. So that was like a whole ordeal, and I imagine that it's not unique to my experience. Other libraries have had similar things happen. So stuff goes away. I'm sure. I'm sure that at some point in history at some libraries some staffer has been in that position and been like, I'm not even going to try to discern what this was, and they throw it away and then they don't know if they have that book anymore. Right, Those are my my thoughts on tiny things items in libraries. Yeah, when I was in middle school in high school, I shelved books in the school library. It was like I was a library helper, and I remember the librarians being like, you got to put them back exactly where they go, And looking back on it, I'm like I was a teenager showing before school. Listen, it happens all the time, and even at the college level, like people that are doing work study not always. I mean, I'm not shading anybody. I was not always as careful as I should have been either when I was in college and working in those jobs. I mean I tried to be, but I'm sure there were days where I was like, I think it's here, and I just shoved it in. That happens all the time. So libraries are are amazing places where it is legitimately difficult to maintain the orderliness of a collection of any size. If it's a circulating collection, it gets so hard, especially since they tend to be understaffed and under fundays. Yes, and I will tell you, I mean, this is like a thing that I'm just not good at. But like you'll do audits where you're like, okay, we're doing a shelf read this week, and you kind of go through. At the time when I was doing it was like print out, and you would go through your print out and like tick off every book and make sure it was in order down the shelf. I have a hard time with shelf reading, just like that form of visual recognition scrambles my brain in a hurry. And so I'm sure I'm not the only one who's like, I think these were in the right order. I don't check it off because I'm really hungry, which will also make your cognitive powers for us. Yes, my executive function is not. Frankly, I'm not. Yeah. So anyway, that was our unearth this time around. One of the more angry, frustrated unearthed writings of Maybe Ever, Possibly Ever. It's Friday, so whatever is happening on your weekend, I hope it's gonna be great. We have a classic episode that will come out tomorrow, something brand new on Monday. You can drop us a note if you would like history podcast that i heart radio dot com. I hope everybody's doing well. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart 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 Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This week we had our latest installment of Unearthed. I don't feel like we often remind folks that we are too human beings living and working through all of the things that are happening in the world that are also affecting everyone else. But I worked on these episodes as the Supreme Court was issuing one decision after another that was like monumental and has wide reaching effects, and regardless of how you personally feel about any of these decisions, it was definitely a kay atic uh and often, from my point of view, demoralizing series of days. Yes, I did a lot of all caps swearing on social media because I just couldn't help myself. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of these are related to things that um that we have talked about on the show before. I think the first thing that comes to people's minds is probably ro versus Wade, But there were also decisions that affected things like tribal sovereignty, which has been something that has come up on the show so much, and that also like that decision seems to foretell other decisions that might also have a damaging effect on tribal sovereignty. Like there was just a lot. There was so much that was happening. And one thing that has been true of Unearthed episodes going back since starting to do them is that as I work on them, I usually have hundreds of links to articles to go through for them. Uh. And the farther I get into them, like, the more aggressive I will get and being like, that's confusing, we're not talking about it. That seems like them something we already talked about before, We're not talking about it again, Like it just I start to feel increasingly draconian in my approach to choosing what things to talk about, and in this particular set of Unearthed stuff, I feel like that was the case from like minute one I was trying to go through this, like I had something like three hundred and seventy six links bookmarked, uh. And I feel like from the first moment of working on them, I was like, I don't like this headline, don't want to talk about it. To feel like this is confusing and doesn't make any sense not talking about that either, and that's I don't know, it was just it was one of the weirder unearthed preparation periods that I can recall. Yeah, I mean I had I had aside a subject to be working on in these last couple week that I was kind of excited about. It's weird and esoteric. It's still happening, but one of the main books I was I was hoping to use I got delayed in transit and so I couldn't work on it, and I just remember being like, but that was my mom. That was anything. It's like it was like that, damn, let us all over again, like touch a break, Um, but we got I will say there was a thing included in this that was one of those um items that made me um super angry, which is the tall chief statue being cut apart and sold for scrap. I mean that's like on multiple levels, right, It's like an indigenous person and their memorial representation being destroyed. It's art being destroyed, and it's one of those things that this is not a case where a thing got stolen because of private lector wanted it. I'm not saying that's good, but it's better than cutting it up. Yeah, there's so many layers of anger. In an earlier draft of the outline, I had various expressions of of anger over that that that I wound up deleting because a lot of the other things that we were going to talk about we're also anger inducing. Something we didn't specifically say about this is I really think the person who stole that statue just took the first one they found, because the way those five statues are arranged, Marjorie Tall Chief was on the end, and I really think, like I haven't personally been to that park, but the fact that it was just the one on the end was probably just the one that somebody came to came to And like, part of me wants to believe that nobody would do that unless they were so desperate for money that they could not. But even so, I'm like, you stole that statue, when you cut it to pieces and you sold it to scrap dealers, that takes a lot of effort. Again, It's one of those things where I'm like, there was no other way to make a book really than all of the time you took to do all of these things that were probably rather labor intensive, Right, Yeah, I don't know. One of the things that's like just sort of the comes with the territory of working on this episode these episodes is that they are just a reflection of what I saw in the many many RSS feeds and now also websites that I go visit individually to see what people are reporting on UM and the collection of stuff that I got this time around, I felt like was a lot more Eurocentric than some of our more recent other episodes, Like they're just I just did not see as much reporting on things that were happening in UM in Africa, Asia, or South America. A lot of it was from Europe and North America, and I UM, I was sort of I had to be limited by the news that I had access to through these hundreds of links that I had bookmarked or the span of three months. So I did want to acknowledge that, even though like I don't I don't know if there is a reasoning behind, like why this time around, so much of the reporting seemed to be so focused on just these parts of the world and not write other parts. Some of it is UM, Like I just like things that it seems like we've talked about these so many times, like coin hoards, lots of coin hoards in places that are not Europe in North America. But like then then it's just like I included a coin hoard for the sake of having things that were not in Europe and North America. Right, I want to talk about salmon vertebrae. Okay, let's do because I really think we need a craft project. Yeah, this is not stuff that's hard to get, right, Like you can buy a whole salmon, so I feel like with a little gumption we can make some beats. Yeah. I don't know if there's uh anything you would need to do to like specifically preserve fish vertebrate, Like, I don't know how, I don't know how bony they are. Does that make sense? Oh? Do you mean? Like, I'm not sure if you're asking how to preserve them so they don't degenerate, or how to preserve them so they don't bite you what you're wearing them. I know. I was more thinking, I don't know if they are more cartilaginous than bony, And if they were more cartilaginous, then I would think it would be hard to there would be something that you would need to do to keep them from just deteriorating. But I don't actually I actually knew, I don't know enough about fish physiology. Those ones lasted a long time. You could always if you really wanted to be you know, fancy pants and unicorn and didn't want to actually wear fish bones, you could asked them. You know, you can make a mold and then cast them in like reson or something, and just make them as needed. There's so many projects we can make with fishbones. I also mentioned that I had thoughts and feelings about anonymity when it comes to auctions of large scale items. Yeah, okay. On the one hand, I, of course we study history all the time. I understand the desire and concern that people have around knowing that something of historical importance is going to go to a place that will appreciate and understand it and preserve it and do But at the same time, there's part of me that's like, how someone spends their money, if it is not nefarious, is nobody's business, right, So like if I had to like report every time I bought something I don't know, say, over like three dollars, Like, can you imagine how weird that would be if you were like, yeah, I bought another bolt of fabric. I promise it's going to a good home. Like I imagine if you have millions of dollars that you're throwing at purchases of that nature, you were accustomed to the game of having to like disclose on occasion. But right, that's always a weird thing when people get in an uproar about yes, but who bought it, and it's like, well, it's an anonymous perch. Yeah. I think I think the Charlotte Bronze one in particular, had like a lot of feelings around it, Like there's the the emotional attachment that a lot of people feel to the Brontes. Not saying everybody feels that way, but like sort of like there were Jane Austen Fines like people, a lot of people I think would have similar feelings. Uh. The fact that like that was the last of her tiny books to be in a private collection instead of in a museum, I think it was a thing that brought up a lot of feeling because the articles that I read that were about it being sold at auction before it became clear who had bought it, had this very dismayed tone, and it was very quickly afterward that it was like Oh, the friends of the library bought it and they're donating it. And there it was like then there was this tone of like a sigh of relief, and all the news reporting Yeah, the metal that's in a good home now like that, that wording just still cracks me up, pretty funny. I mean, it's interesting, right. I also think about the fact that there are people, and I'm just conjecturing people are organizations who could be purchasing things like that to some end that is good and has goodwill around it, but they don't want to disclose it initially, you know what I mean, Like I'm thinking about a weird thing that's not the same at all, But like I'm thinking about when Walt Disney set up a shell company to buy property in Florida because he didn't want people to know Disney was buying it, so it would falsely inflate the price. And I imagine similarly, if there is somebody, like you know, a Bill Gates of the world who decides I'm going to start an art museum and I'm gonna start buying up amazing things. The second that news got out, it would artificially inflate the price on a lot of things, so like, there are things like that to consider as well. And I don't know. I just I have feelings that I'm like, yeah, but I shouldn't have to tell people what you're buying. But then again, if that bolt of fabric that I bought was something that was public knowledge in an auction, maybe I don't know, maybe I should be the be able to um or be willing to say no, no, that was mine. I don't know. It's just a strange thing. Uh. It's totally possible that whoever bought that medal will publicly disclose it at some point. Who even knows it's even possible that they'll disclose it in the window between when we recorded this, Oh, it probably happened right after we finish, or or it happened sometime between when I wrote this episode and today when we're recording it. Because I sent it over to you on Friday before the fourth of July holiday weekend, um, and I have not looked at any news headlines related to this, because why would I do that. Yeah, I don't know. You gotta have time off. I also mentioned that I certainly have theories about how a tiny book could be in the library's collection and uncataloged. Going back to my library cataloging days, where there are times when large palettes of things show up um and depending on how they're arranged your store, you could potentially have an itty bitty thing inside a bigger thing and not even know it was there at the time, especially if it's like part of a large um a session situation where like someone has willed a library their collection, or a large donation from someone or any number of you know, those large drops that happen in which they do sometimes depending on what's going on. I mean, there are a million reasons that someone might be a little speedier with a session in catalog ng than than would be ideal, but it has to happen for whatever reason. They might miss something that happens so it's not mysterious, or they might just have however, many linear feet of somebody's papers that were donated, nobody has gone through all of the papers. And I also have that thing when things show up missing in a collection and it's like we didn't even know it was missing. I have a flashback to a particular book I was trying to track down when I was working in acquisitions, and I had called a library overseas a library in England, and it was one of those things where I was trying to check a copy that was being offered to us for sale against one that like someone else at an an accredited institution would recognize and be like, yes, that seems to be the same the same run or the same edition. And I ran into a problem when I was on the phone with a lovely person who said, we believe we have that book, but we still haven't recovered everything that was covered in rubble in the bombings from World War two. So like, there are things that happened like that where parts of buildings get damaged in a way that might reseal something up away from the libraries circulating collection or even their archive collection, and then they kind of know it's on the premises, but they can't access it. Those happened too, And I always wonder whenever, whenever I'm looking at any of these um unearthed that you put together, and there's like they didn't know it was gone, and I'm like, I wonder if they thought it was in the rubble, Like, oh yeah, that's always my first thought. That just reminded me of how our local library had a water intrusion into the local collections room during a major storm, and it was like they had to get everything out of that room fast. Uh. And I mean I was not there. I was not involved in any of it. But I can absolutely imagine people just trying to get everything out of a room that was flooding as fast as possible. And you gotta deal with it at some point in this case when everything was closed because of COVID. Yes, I had to do that after I like the frame water intrusion that flood at a library that I worked at. I don't want to talk ill about anybody, but we had an archivist that was maybe not super motivated to stay on top of things, and one of our rooms of archival materials had been flooded and it had not been realized that it had flooded until their staffer went looking for something in that room like a month and a half later and came back and said, everything is covered in mold. And so we had to like start pulling stuff out of that room really quickly. Aside from like the archival materials, which is a loss, is dangerous to have a room full of mold in a building where the public can come. So that was like a whole ordeal, and I imagine that it's not unique to my experience. Other libraries have had similar things happen. So stuff goes away. I'm sure. I'm sure that at some point in history at some libraries some staffer has been in that position and been like, I'm not even going to try to discern what this was, and they throw it away and then they don't know if they have that book anymore. Right, Those are my my thoughts on tiny things items in libraries. Yeah, when I was in middle school in high school, I shelved books in the school library. It was like I was a library helper, and I remember the librarians being like, you got to put them back exactly where they go, And looking back on it, I'm like I was a teenager showing before school. Listen, it happens all the time, and even at the college level, like people that are doing work study not always. I mean, I'm not shading anybody. I was not always as careful as I should have been either when I was in college and working in those jobs. I mean I tried to be, but I'm sure there were days where I was like, I think it's here, and I just shoved it in. That happens all the time. So libraries are are amazing places where it is legitimately difficult to maintain the orderliness of a collection of any size. If it's a circulating collection, it gets so hard, especially since they tend to be understaffed and under fundays. Yes, and I will tell you, I mean, this is like a thing that I'm just not good at. But like you'll do audits where you're like, okay, we're doing a shelf read this week, and you kind of go through. At the time when I was doing it was like print out, and you would go through your print out and like tick off every book and make sure it was in order down the shelf. I have a hard time with shelf reading, just like that form of visual recognition scrambles my brain in a hurry. And so I'm sure I'm not the only one who's like, I think these were in the right order. I don't check it off because I'm really hungry, which will also make your cognitive powers for us. Yes, my executive function is not. Frankly, I'm not. Yeah. So anyway, that was our unearth this time around. One of the more angry, frustrated unearthed writings of Maybe Ever, Possibly Ever. It's Friday, so whatever is happening on your weekend, I hope it's gonna be great. We have a classic episode that will come out tomorrow, something brand new on Monday. You can drop us a note if you would like history podcast that i heart radio dot com. I hope everybody's doing well. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.