This episode of Stuff you Missed in History Classes brought to you by square Space. Start your free trial site today at square space dot com. When you decide to sign up for square Space, make sure to use the offer code history to get ten percent off your first purchase. Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we have an interview today. One of the yeah, one of the really cool things about doing a podcast like this is that after a while you start getting on the mailing lists of publishers and academic presses. You get to see what kinds of history books are on the horizon. And I got a catalog from Oxford University Press last fall and there was a title that immediately caught my eye and made me say, I've got to read this book. And it was called Hannah, Mary Tabs and the Disembodied tor So, a Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America by Dr Cally Nicole gross. So. I asked for that book immediately, but then we put off actually talking to Callie until after the book was actually available. So that listeners, if you're understood, you can get it and read it too. Callie is an associate professor and the Associate Chair of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and this is actually her second book. Her first was Colored Amazon's Crime, Violence and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love eighteen eighty to nineteen ten. So, as you can probably glean from both of those titles, both of these books deal a lot with criminal justice. Hannah Mary Tabs and The Disembodied Torso tells the story of a crime that was committed in Philadelphia in eight seven. The investigation started after a torso, which was missing its head and limbs, was found on the bank of a pond. Once this torso was identified as belonging to a man named Silas Wakefield, gains Ana, Marry Tabs, and George H. Wilson were eventually arrested and brought to trial for the murder. And this first part that we're going to start with uh is Tracy talking to Callie and Callie giving an overview of who Hannah Mary Tabs was. First off, thank you so much for being on the show. I'm really excited to talk to you about your book. And about this story and about the the world that this story plays out in, because I think there are a lot of things in your book that are still really relevant today, and it's a story that's not the sort of story that we talked about a lot on the show for a lot of reasons. So to start off, who was Hannah Mary Tabs? Okay, Well, first of all, thank you so much for the opportunity. I'm really looking forward to talking about this book. We've you So, Hannah Mary Tabs was a black woman unlike any other that I read about who lived in the late nineteenth century. For what I could gather, she was from Anna Arundel County, Maryland, who was born in the eighteen fifties. Um Marilyn was this slave state. She came into her womanhood during the Civil War, and in eighteen eight seven in Philadelphia, she participated in the murder and dismemberment of her parabore. A thing that you've alluded to in other interviews is that when we tell the stories, especially of black women in a historical context, a lot of times the ones that we focus on are the stories of women who were activists or women who had a heroic story in some way, And this book is a book about really she was basically an ordinary woman who was who played a part in this crime. How did you find her story in the first place. One of those things that I do in my work is I try to write against this idea of respectability. UM. Respectability sort of an uffless strategy that black folks adopted as a way to combat these negative stereotypes about black people UM. And it's an important strategy and it has its place in history, but it's also played out a lot in history in historiography. What I mean is in terms of the kinds of histories that historians right usually focused on Black women who are really heroic. And one of the things that I've learned is that that kind of work is important, but it's not the only stories to tell. And if we want to continue to make black history relevant and to speak to ongoing issues, we have to sort of expand our vision, and for me, that meant looking at the experiences of black women in the justice system. So I would doing research for my first book, which looked at black women's experiences in the country, sort of first penitentiaries which were founded in Philadelphia, first of Walnut Street, jail and penitentiary house and at least later Eastern State Penitentiary. In any way, the administrator that Eastern Eastern maintained a scrapbook and they sort of took out newspaper clippings with all the sort of quote unquote famous sort of prisoners that they had. And it was there that I first sort of stumbled across this Torso case. They were just pages and pages about this bizarre sort of case and these folks who were involved in it, And once I picked it up, I really just couldn't put it down. So the title of your book is Hannah Mary Tabs and the Disembodied Torso, A Tale of race, sex and violence in America. This torso that we're talking about, when it was originally found at the crime scene, uh, the investigators didn't know who it belonged to, and they weren't sure of the victims race. How did that affect how the investigation of this murder played out? So the ambiguity around the torso's race really shaped the investigation in a couple of significant ways. The first is that because they fear it belows to a white man, it gets a lot more sort of police activity and attention. Um, they are really concerned about the loss of a white man's life. They also, i think are driven in part two to kind of resolve once and for all the actual race of the victim. This is this period where what it means to sort of be black and white in some ways appeared to be shifting, and we had this sort of influx of Eastern European immigrants and all these other sort of others, and so there was speculation about kind of who was in the social mantle of whiteness who wasn't. So both of these factors, I think really play into investigators kind of doubling down and really wanting to solve this case. Um. But the ambiguity also kind of stymies them because black and white folks lived in very different worlds, and so not knowing the race definitively kind of hampered them in terms that they didn't know sort of which world to actually look into. Um. Once they do figure out that is a man of color, most likely a mulatto, then they sort of go hard into the black community at that point, in part because the case had attracted all this detention, had become already sort of a media sensation. So I don't want to ask you to basically tell us everything that happened, because I've read the book and I know that you would like readers to experience the discovery of all the elements that played into this crime. Uh, and and not have basically the ending spoiled for them before they even get started. Um. But but the basics is that this torso discovered was discovered. A woman named Hannah Mary Tabs was indicted for the crime, and then she implicated another man in her testimony. So this whole book going into the story and how it all came to trial. Uh, it reads like an academic true crime novel. How did you go about researching this this thing that sort of blends these two worlds of academic study and true crime. Yes, I'm so glad that that's the way it reads. That's the goal. Um, an academic true crime novel. That was the goal. Um. It was it was complicated. On one hand, there was a wealth of newspaper coverage because the case was still sensational. Papers covered this thing from Philadelphia to Missouri to Ohio. Um. There was even a German language newspaper published out of Maryland that covered this case. Um. The Deutsch correspondence, believe it or not. So I used the media coverage to sort of serve as the spine of the book in the narrative and also to guide my research. So from that I could kind of piece together how this story unfolded and evolved, and in along the way, I would use the articles to kind of read against each other. I read for inconsistencies, for names to address, for any information that I could find about all of the folks involved, from witnesses to the police, to the suspects, to the jurors, to the judge. And then I followed it up with other historical documents, so sences data, city directories, police UM intake records, bills of indictment, you know, chunks of trial transcript that had been reprinted. I found out that the husband of you know Tabs basically was the Civil War veteran, so I managed to track down some of his records and UM pension files. So I used all of those documents to kind of corroborate and verify the narrative as best I could. But I ultimately I wanted the story to unfold the way that I read it, because I just could not believe it yeah, and that's that's really what the book does, is it gradually reveals all these little details that happened, and it's clear from the end. I'm going to encourage readers who find this, our listeners, who who think this story sounds interesting, to to find a copy of the book and read it. You make it very clear in the end what you think happened, which which I think is good because a lot of writers don't do that for whatever reason and sort of leave it up in the air, like it's clear in the end that that that you have thoughts on on what happened. You know, I struggled with that decision because for me, there's so much about the case that's still sort of a mystery. That point I sort of debated back and forth over one what I thought actually did happen, and into whether I should sort of included in a book or not. In the end, it just seemed wrong not to sort of put out there what what I thought happened, but trying to sort of frame it too. Isn't it This is where I being happened. But that's pretty much the extent of it, which I could never really quantity, you know, quantifiably say who actually kills this fan. Okay, we've spent the first piece of this interview talking about Hannah Mary Tabs and the crime she committed and how Callie researched that crime. Next, we are going to talk about some historical and social context of in the world where all of this played out. But first we're going to pause for a record from a father. Next up, Tracy and Kelly are going to talk about what racial attitudes were like in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which had been a free state before the Civil War when this crime took place. So one of the reasons that I really wanted to talk to you about your book and about the events that your book is about is the a lot of things that existed in the world when this happened are really still relevant today. So one of the things that we have talked about a lot on our podcast lately is the misperception that that racism is a Southern problem and that after the Civil War, racial violence and discrimination were only really problems in the states that had been allowing slavery when the Civil War started, And of course neither of those things is true. And this book in particular is documenting things that happened in Philadelphia after the Civil War, and Pennsylvania, of course was a free state when the Civil War started. So what were racial attitudes like in Philadelphia at this point in history. You're right on both fronts. The racial attitudes in Philadelphia were not terribly different from those held in the South for all intended purposes, partly because Philadelphia, before could becoming a actually was a colony that had slavery, like most of the other colonies in the north to New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, all of these places had slavery prior to independence um and for short time thereafter. So it's they had freedom longer. But they also have a legacy of inflavement um, as you point out, And so in Philadelphia, even though enslavement is gradually abolished in seventeen eighty, these sort of black folks are not citizens yet either until the passage of the fourteenth Amendment. Basically, so you have a population of free blacks who had in some respects established certain things in their own community, but also faced heavy, heavy discrimination. They also were kind of fighting against jobs, sort of competition where a newer industries were emerging in Philadelphia, particularly in the late nineteenth century, Black people found themselves largely shut out. They were mostly confined to domestic service, and they were profoundly disappointed by that. Um. They also faced daily kind of street harassment. Black women in particular was very vulnerable kind of walking to and from work, traveling on street cars. It was a very difficult time, and they were removed from justice in the sense that police were incredibly biased. Right, you have racial profiling going on in Philadelphia. Violence was considered a part of policing, and black people were especially vulnerable. Police manuals instructed officers to stop anyone who looked poor and like they didn't belong in the state. And this is a moment where you have many newly freed black migrating in Philadelphia, in part because it had been a free state longer and it had been a robust abolitionist movement, so they thought this was going to be like the Land of Milk and Honey in terms of civil rights. It was a profound disappointment, in shocks to find the same kind of racism UM operating, not just in in terms of you know, employment, but in housing as well as an in justice system. They also don't have a lot of protection from police that's the other thing that the case really highlights that Tabs is a woman who has no criminal record in Philadelphia. The once this investigation gets underweight's clear that she had been committing all kinds of crimes in her community against black people that they're so removed from justice that they're basically kind of trapped. One of the things in the book is a picture of the caption is Chief Kelly and his private office from the Philadelphia Police and it's a picture of this police officer and he's standing or he's sitting in front of what it looks like a wall of weapons and struments of harm. Basically, I was I was astonished to see that, And was this sort of a show of threat or was or were these things that were all actually being used in policing. I actually think that those were these sort of confiscated Keith stakes. A lot of them are various sort the skeleton keys, um and tools I think that folks are using in the commission of crime. So in part, some of that stuff that kept me are things that they had taken off of you know, the the quote unquote professional crime class that seems to be emerging in Philadelphia at this time, um, it's also a weird kind of testimony to the ionies of the city being called, you know, one of brotherly love. I had not thought of that at all. So today, when we talk about things like incarceration rates and disparities and sentencing, a lot of the foe fists in the media right now is on black men. And one of the things that you've pointed out is that, um, like, while there's definitely a wealth of evidence that that black men are disproportionately represented in the justice system and they tend to be given longer sentences than white men for the same crimes. Uh In in the nineteenth century, so when this this one this is happening, black women were actually much more disproportionately imprisoned than black men. What were the reasons for that? So the reason to a black women were more disproportionately represented in prisoned in black men in the nineteenth century, actually in the early twentieth century as well, in part related to domestic service, right, is this sort of I call it the domestic service to prison pipeline because at n black women working in Philadelphia work and domestic service there's the only job that they could obtain. They worked for job mostly in white households. So when when any sort of fact occurred a real or imagine and white employers kind of called the police and brought these black services before white justices injuries, they got convicted at a higher rate, more than anyone else in the city. So in the early part, for example, of the early part nineteen century, black women were convicted, sent Black women who went before Philadelphia criminal courts were convicted, and so those dynamics kind of coalesced to produce this disproportionate representation of them in the prison system. So it was really like the middle of the twentieth century when the when it shifted so that men were that black men were more disproportionately represented in the prison system. What led to that shift? So I'll tell you, ironically, it's not really clear that that shift occurred in the mid twentieth century. When I visited the prison in n I was astonished to find that black women were still more disproportionately represented in black in prison and black men, at least in Pennsylvania. Now, what's different, or what has remained consistent, is that the numbers of men are greater than that of women in prison. So there are more black men in prison than there are black women, but in terms of their disproportionality black women, um that disproportionality has remained fairly consistent. It's only been in the last few years that the rate of inconceeration for black women have dropped, and that's to part due to the changes in the drug laws and their enforcements. So to kind of tie this to how the how this is relevant to the world that we're in today, Uh, why do you think so much of the focus is on black men when it's still such a disproportionate issue among black women. Also, I think there are a couple of reasons why the emphasis is still on black men, partly because their numbers are so much greater, but also I think it was about a kind of patriarchy that still sort of operates in society. It is certainly in the black community that a lot of times we are accustomed to sort of rallying around injustices that impact black men, particularly when it's from the state state violence. Right, you have black women who have also you know, been this, you know, died, who are unarmed in in incidence with police, but they don't seem to garner the same kind of attention or response when the victims are black males. I mean, it's something that folks are working to change, but at the end of the day, I think it speaks to a kind of enduring sort of patriarchy. After another brief word from a sponsor, we're going to get back to talking about the parties involved in this crime, and we're going to talk about the early life of George H. Wilson, who Hannah Mary Tabs implicated in her testimony about this crime. And this is one of the things that came up in the book that I immediately put on the list to ask Callie directly about, because it's that's a little up staying. Okay, So to wrap up this really fantastic interview that Tracy did, uh, they're gonna talk a little bit about George H. Wilson's early life, and then it will wrap up with some thoughts about why Callie believes stories like Hannah's are important to tell. To move back to the players in this particular crime, a man named George Wilson was invited along with Hannah Mary Tabs for this murder, and you write about how his having lived in Philadelphia's House of Refuge for colored youth, and how for some black families living at this time, which was after the Civil War in Philadelphia, their only option to to prevent starvation and homelessness and just being absolutely desertate was basically to surrender their children to this house of refuge under the grounds that they were encourageible. So when I read this, it sounds like they were basically putting a child into juvenile detention as an alternative to homelessness. Is that is that really what this was like? That's the impression that the records certainly give that many many of the commitments were doing large part to families being incredibly impoverished and just not having many alternatives. Wilson, for all intention purposes, had been orphaned at that point. His father wasn't in the picture, his mother had just died. Her well were very very poor. Um, he had some issues with the truancy in school, and so all face taken together, they decided to commit him to the House of Refuge. And his story was not unlike many many black children who had been confined. There was breaking part about that. Piece of the story for me too, was the shock that his own mother had actually been incarcerated. There as a young person herself. So it was for me this very early kind of example of a cycle of institutionalization. UM I found profoundly disturbing, and I still sort of troubled by all of this historical legacies in the study history, in part because I wanted to be a beacon for where we are today and certainly some sort of guiding light for going forward. But I was pretty horrified by just how much these issues around race and confinement and law enforcement resonated with issues that are ongoing today, and did not expect them to be so directly related to our current kind of crisis. Yeah, that's that was definitely one of the reasons why I wanted to to talk to you on the podcast, because so many of the aspects of this case are things that are are still existing today. I UM. I was sort of filling Holly, my co host, in on uh what this interview was going to be about, and I had told her about UM George being our George Wilson being committed to this house of refuge and how his mother had been committed there also, and she said, what kind of start is that for a child? And I said, that's exactly exactly my feeling like that that this just sort of speaks to social conditions that were tremendously disturbing and continue to be tremendously disturbing. One one thing that I wondered was did did white families who were destitute at this point have options to surrender their children that didn't involve basically putting them into a juvenile justice system. Right, this is a great question. So there are alternatives. You have other kinds of charities and houses for poor people and poor families, and certainly destitute women and children. They tended to be segregated, which is why so many of the poor black children ended up in the House of Refuge for colored youth. That said, there also is a house of refuge for white youth, and so there were white children who were there as well sothern them also under this sort of you know, the heading of incorrigibility. And I don't doubt that a number of those cases may well have stemmed from destitute poverty. Also that they certainly had more avenues for benevolence and charity than most black families at that time. So one thing that was really new to me as I was reading your book. I think most people who listen to our show are probably familiar with the idea of passing. There's someone who who was a black person, who who was having a white identity to try to move through white society, and like the really real and serious risks that came along with doing that. That you know, if someone was discovered to be passing for white, they could be fired from their jobs, they could be punished, they may even be killed. It's just some things that were really horrifying. A piece of this equation that never ever occurred to me until I read your book was that there was also a corresponding fear among the white community that there were black people moving secretly among them. Can you talk about that a little. Certainly, this fear about infiltration was was pretty new to me. I mean, on one hand, I suspected that was a big part of the concern um with round miss Agnation Right's twofold. On one hand, miss Agnation kind of challenged the supremacist idea that black and white folks are basically sort of entirely distinct animals. If you will write, the idea that they could breed successfully undermine this notion of whiteness is separate and above so misgenation has always been sort of looked down upon, but in some respect there was less fear about kind of mulattos or incredibly light skin makes people because most of them have been regulated by the institution of slavery. They were in the South, their a plantations, everyone sort of knew who they were. There was sort of the risk of infiltration in the way that it sort of existed after inflamement, and kind of with the mobility and the anonymity, particularly in these urban environments. Right, somebody who could pass the white could presumably leave Virginia migrate to Philadelphia, and white families would be none the wiser. Right, they could be working next to one of these flops, they could intermarry, and all the rest. So there was a tremendous sphere that they would be able to pass and blend in in ways that white people would never be able to discerned. So I know that this this is a fear that still exists today as related to the LGBT community, like that there's a there's plenty of research about about the fear that there are gay people or that there are transgender people that and you don't know, do you think it is still present today in regards to race. You know, I haven't given that's the great question. I haven't given it a tremendous amount of thought. I'm sure, given the current climate of our country that they probably are pockets of folks who are concerned that there may be black people passing and infiltrating among them. But I don't think it is the same as it was in the late nineteenth century. No, Um, is there anything else that you want to make sure our listeners know about this book or about Hannah Mary Tabs or the world that she was living in. I do actually thank you for this opportunity. I think that Hannah Mary Tad is important for a bunch of reasons. I mean, for me as a black woman. As they said, it was the first time that I ever encountered a black woman like her in history, right, ordinary yet sort of infamous. But also in looking at her history in the case, it opened up this whole other window onto the complexities that of the social stresses that impacted black families and black communities. Uh. It shed a light on the history, the other longer history in terms of bias, policing and criminal justice visus the waste and discrimination. But for me, it's also important to look at her because I think it's important for black women to have the space to be flawed or fraud or damaged in history. I don't want black women. I've said it before, but I try to say that every chance I get. I don't want black women to have to be clean in order to Marrick Sky only attention or to have their humanity respected. So these kinds of stories for me are important because they are a different kind of affirmation of black women's humanity, and I think one that's important for us to take a look at and to consider. So to close out our interview, UM, as a historian, you have written a lot of op eds about racism, and about criminal justice, and about a lot of other social issues, and this has become my favorite question to ask historians that I talked to. Can you spend a few minutes talking about how historians can help people understand and contextualize the world that we're actually living in today? I think so. I mean that is for me, the important part of history as a project is trying to have it served as this beacon for the president and ideally going forward, So framing out our history and contextualizing these issues is my sort of aim is to help kind of get us to a point where we can speak intelligently on the issues that are plaguing us today. It's for me a paramount importance, and I think most historians would agree that I don't think we've really stand a chance in terms of combating these issues, particularly one as so deeply entrenched and so charged as racism and sexism and and issues around gender and sexuality in the justice system and in our society without having a real and complicated understanding of how these issues developed and took roots historically. Thank you. That's one of the things that I really really loved about your book was seeing the deep roots that that are just documented right here that parallel l a lot of the things that are in the news day and are going on in the world today. So thank you so much. Oh my goodness, no, thank you. And you know, for me, the other piece of that history is to move the conversation along right now. Whenever these instances arrived, we get stuck in this issue of debating whether or not it is racism, whether or not racism is applying the justice system, And what I'm trying to sort of demonstrate is it. We have a whole history that shows that it is, so we don't need to sort of waste time debating when these instances arise whether or not it's it's relating to systemic justice system. It categorically in. We need to stop moving that discussion forward now that we know that, what are we gonna do about it? I'm so glad that I got to talk to Kelly nicoleger Is about this book. Like number one, the book is fascinating. Number two, she had so many awesome things to say about the book itself and the crime that happened in the world that it happened in. Thank you again for being on the show. I know I said it before, I'll say it four or five more times. Thank you, thank you, Thank you so much, um Kellie for your time and for being on the show. I will say thank you as well because she was amazing. I so loved listening to that interview. While I was listening to the raw audio of it, I literally was I Am and Tracy like every three minutes, going, oh my gosh, this is fantastic. Uh, we don't we don't normally wind up listening to the raw audio of of each other's interviews, but this was one where you were so excited about it that you I don't think you wanted to wait, and I still I don't want to wait. I couldn't couldn't wait on that one. Uh. Do you have some listener mail to close out this fabulous episode? I do. This is from Gabrielle, and it's about our recent podcast about the Women Air Force Service pilots. But it's also about, uh, how the conversation we had at the end of the second part about how we learned about history, And so Gabrielle says, and need to start out by thanking you for your podcast. Honestly, I'm not sure how I could get through commutes or half marathon training runs without you. The podcast keep my mind active and stress free. Also happened to be a high school history teacher, so hopefully my students won't miss some of this stuff from history class. I just listened listened to part one while driving in part two while running of the WASP interview. Wow, as a lover of history, I enjoyed so many details about a topic I was only briefly informed about. This brings me to two points that you made at the end of Part two about teaching history in a date slash name and oversimplified manner. I understand from an educator's perspective why it is easy to fall into the style of presenting history. I primarily teach world history and have experience at the middle and high school levels. The state of New Jersey, for instance, expects us to teach high schoolers the history of the world from the Middle Ages to modern day in ten months. Ten months. For this reason, we skip over ideas and individuals that can be incredibly fascinating and oversimplify for the sake of time. We can't help but to miss some stuff. I just finished teaching World War One in five eighty minute classes. Yet I was able to teach students about the changes in war and technologies, Gallipoli campaign because of your podcast, My students want to celebrate Anzac Day in April, the Armenian genocide, Russian Revolution and more. It is my goal to make history as relevant as possible, so I constantly connect my topics to current events to explain why the world is the way it is today. But I have only one teacher. I hope others can have the same perspective, so I appreciated your comments. I'm bringing historians to speak or right to the public. Your podcast is another example history can be taught in accessible and engaging ways outside of class books and documentaries. So thank you again. I constantly crave new knowledge and understanding of our world. So I love spending my time with both of you. Best wishes, Gabrielle. Thank you, Gabrielle. Uh, that was the point that you and I have talked about. You didn't really come up in that discussion that, like, we know so many awesome history teachers who love what they do, and they love their kids, and they love to teach, but they're kind of confined to teaching expectations that are set like not at their individual classroom level, at at a state level, like at a curriculum level, and a lot of times the curriculum's focus is sort of on, uh, teaching patriotism sometimes. Yeah, Like that was definitely the case when I was growing up. The focus of history classes was a lot of times on how great the state I was growing up in was and how great the United States is as a nation. Uh, And to me, that was an enormous shortcoming in my history education. Like I didn't leave school with the history education that helps me understand why the world is the way it is, um, and instead helped me understand that the United States had a big part in a bunch of big wars like which you know was was not the faults my individual teachers. That was really the curriculum they were expected to teach was oriented it that way. So, UM, I definitely wanted to talk about that because I we when we had that discussion, we definitely weren't trying to disparage teachers at all. We love them. We love all the awesome teachers who write us and and talk to us about their kids and what they're doing in their classrooms. Yeah. I mean, I think in a case like this where she specifically mentioned like how she tries to make these lessons relevant and teach kids what's going on today as a result of things that happened in the past, like that's exactly how you get minds engaged and thinking about cause and effect throughout history. And I definitely like you. I I didn't think I liked history growing up because it was a lot of like date name repetition and uh memorization. But even then, I don't think those were necessarily bad teachers. They were constrained by what they were, you know, required to do and ridiculously short periods of time often so absolutely no shade to any of the teachers of the world. I know you guys are doing like incredible work and a very hard job that I could never do and so appreciate. So yeah, yeah, thank you. Awesome. Teachers are awesome. I also wanted to quickly update about the loft Um, the bill to reinstate their privileges at Arlington National Cemetery un unanimously passed in the House. As of one we're recording right now, it is still pending in the Senate. Uh and that may change between when we recorded this update and when this episode comes out, because there's a lead time between when we do things. Um. But yeah, that is underway. So you'd like to write to us about this or any other podcast or a history podcast at how Stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in History and on Twitter at miss and History. Our tumbler is miss in History dot tumbler dot com. Our pinterest is also missed in History. If you would like to learn more about what we talked about today, you can do. Our parent company's website and is how stuff works dot com. There is all kinds of awesome information about anything you can think of. You can also come to our website, which is missed in History dot com. You'll find show notes for all the episode Polly and I have ever done. We will have a link to Kelly's book if you are interested in that you want to learn more about it. We also have an archive of every episode we have ever done on the entire podcast, so you can do all that and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or missed in History dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics because it has stuff works dot com

This episode of Stuff you Missed in History Classes brought to you by square Space. Start your free trial site today at square space dot com. When you decide to sign up for square Space, make sure to use the offer code history to get ten percent off your first purchase. Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we have an interview today. One of the yeah, one of the really cool things about doing a podcast like this is that after a while you start getting on the mailing lists of publishers and academic presses. You get to see what kinds of history books are on the horizon. And I got a catalog from Oxford University Press last fall and there was a title that immediately caught my eye and made me say, I've got to read this book. And it was called Hannah, Mary Tabs and the Disembodied tor So, a Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America by Dr Cally Nicole gross. So. I asked for that book immediately, but then we put off actually talking to Callie until after the book was actually available. So that listeners, if you're understood, you can get it and read it too. Callie is an associate professor and the Associate Chair of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and this is actually her second book. Her first was Colored Amazon's Crime, Violence and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love eighteen eighty to nineteen ten. So, as you can probably glean from both of those titles, both of these books deal a lot with criminal justice. Hannah Mary Tabs and The Disembodied Torso tells the story of a crime that was committed in Philadelphia in eight seven. The investigation started after a torso, which was missing its head and limbs, was found on the bank of a pond. Once this torso was identified as belonging to a man named Silas Wakefield, gains Ana, Marry Tabs, and George H. Wilson were eventually arrested and brought to trial for the murder. And this first part that we're going to start with uh is Tracy talking to Callie and Callie giving an overview of who Hannah Mary Tabs was. First off, thank you so much for being on the show. I'm really excited to talk to you about your book. And about this story and about the the world that this story plays out in, because I think there are a lot of things in your book that are still really relevant today, and it's a story that's not the sort of story that we talked about a lot on the show for a lot of reasons. So to start off, who was Hannah Mary Tabs? Okay, Well, first of all, thank you so much for the opportunity. I'm really looking forward to talking about this book. We've you So, Hannah Mary Tabs was a black woman unlike any other that I read about who lived in the late nineteenth century. For what I could gather, she was from Anna Arundel County, Maryland, who was born in the eighteen fifties. Um Marilyn was this slave state. She came into her womanhood during the Civil War, and in eighteen eight seven in Philadelphia, she participated in the murder and dismemberment of her parabore. A thing that you've alluded to in other interviews is that when we tell the stories, especially of black women in a historical context, a lot of times the ones that we focus on are the stories of women who were activists or women who had a heroic story in some way, And this book is a book about really she was basically an ordinary woman who was who played a part in this crime. How did you find her story in the first place. One of those things that I do in my work is I try to write against this idea of respectability. UM. Respectability sort of an uffless strategy that black folks adopted as a way to combat these negative stereotypes about black people UM. And it's an important strategy and it has its place in history, but it's also played out a lot in history in historiography. What I mean is in terms of the kinds of histories that historians right usually focused on Black women who are really heroic. And one of the things that I've learned is that that kind of work is important, but it's not the only stories to tell. And if we want to continue to make black history relevant and to speak to ongoing issues, we have to sort of expand our vision, and for me, that meant looking at the experiences of black women in the justice system. So I would doing research for my first book, which looked at black women's experiences in the country, sort of first penitentiaries which were founded in Philadelphia, first of Walnut Street, jail and penitentiary house and at least later Eastern State Penitentiary. In any way, the administrator that Eastern Eastern maintained a scrapbook and they sort of took out newspaper clippings with all the sort of quote unquote famous sort of prisoners that they had. And it was there that I first sort of stumbled across this Torso case. They were just pages and pages about this bizarre sort of case and these folks who were involved in it, And once I picked it up, I really just couldn't put it down. So the title of your book is Hannah Mary Tabs and the Disembodied Torso, A Tale of race, sex and violence in America. This torso that we're talking about, when it was originally found at the crime scene, uh, the investigators didn't know who it belonged to, and they weren't sure of the victims race. How did that affect how the investigation of this murder played out? So the ambiguity around the torso's race really shaped the investigation in a couple of significant ways. The first is that because they fear it belows to a white man, it gets a lot more sort of police activity and attention. Um, they are really concerned about the loss of a white man's life. They also, i think are driven in part two to kind of resolve once and for all the actual race of the victim. This is this period where what it means to sort of be black and white in some ways appeared to be shifting, and we had this sort of influx of Eastern European immigrants and all these other sort of others, and so there was speculation about kind of who was in the social mantle of whiteness who wasn't. So both of these factors, I think really play into investigators kind of doubling down and really wanting to solve this case. Um. But the ambiguity also kind of stymies them because black and white folks lived in very different worlds, and so not knowing the race definitively kind of hampered them in terms that they didn't know sort of which world to actually look into. Um. Once they do figure out that is a man of color, most likely a mulatto, then they sort of go hard into the black community at that point, in part because the case had attracted all this detention, had become already sort of a media sensation. So I don't want to ask you to basically tell us everything that happened, because I've read the book and I know that you would like readers to experience the discovery of all the elements that played into this crime. Uh, and and not have basically the ending spoiled for them before they even get started. Um. But but the basics is that this torso discovered was discovered. A woman named Hannah Mary Tabs was indicted for the crime, and then she implicated another man in her testimony. So this whole book going into the story and how it all came to trial. Uh, it reads like an academic true crime novel. How did you go about researching this this thing that sort of blends these two worlds of academic study and true crime. Yes, I'm so glad that that's the way it reads. That's the goal. Um, an academic true crime novel. That was the goal. Um. It was it was complicated. On one hand, there was a wealth of newspaper coverage because the case was still sensational. Papers covered this thing from Philadelphia to Missouri to Ohio. Um. There was even a German language newspaper published out of Maryland that covered this case. Um. The Deutsch correspondence, believe it or not. So I used the media coverage to sort of serve as the spine of the book in the narrative and also to guide my research. So from that I could kind of piece together how this story unfolded and evolved, and in along the way, I would use the articles to kind of read against each other. I read for inconsistencies, for names to address, for any information that I could find about all of the folks involved, from witnesses to the police, to the suspects, to the jurors, to the judge. And then I followed it up with other historical documents, so sences data, city directories, police UM intake records, bills of indictment, you know, chunks of trial transcript that had been reprinted. I found out that the husband of you know Tabs basically was the Civil War veteran, so I managed to track down some of his records and UM pension files. So I used all of those documents to kind of corroborate and verify the narrative as best I could. But I ultimately I wanted the story to unfold the way that I read it, because I just could not believe it yeah, and that's that's really what the book does, is it gradually reveals all these little details that happened, and it's clear from the end. I'm going to encourage readers who find this, our listeners, who who think this story sounds interesting, to to find a copy of the book and read it. You make it very clear in the end what you think happened, which which I think is good because a lot of writers don't do that for whatever reason and sort of leave it up in the air, like it's clear in the end that that that you have thoughts on on what happened. You know, I struggled with that decision because for me, there's so much about the case that's still sort of a mystery. That point I sort of debated back and forth over one what I thought actually did happen, and into whether I should sort of included in a book or not. In the end, it just seemed wrong not to sort of put out there what what I thought happened, but trying to sort of frame it too. Isn't it This is where I being happened. But that's pretty much the extent of it, which I could never really quantity, you know, quantifiably say who actually kills this fan. Okay, we've spent the first piece of this interview talking about Hannah Mary Tabs and the crime she committed and how Callie researched that crime. Next, we are going to talk about some historical and social context of in the world where all of this played out. But first we're going to pause for a record from a father. Next up, Tracy and Kelly are going to talk about what racial attitudes were like in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which had been a free state before the Civil War when this crime took place. So one of the reasons that I really wanted to talk to you about your book and about the events that your book is about is the a lot of things that existed in the world when this happened are really still relevant today. So one of the things that we have talked about a lot on our podcast lately is the misperception that that racism is a Southern problem and that after the Civil War, racial violence and discrimination were only really problems in the states that had been allowing slavery when the Civil War started, And of course neither of those things is true. And this book in particular is documenting things that happened in Philadelphia after the Civil War, and Pennsylvania, of course was a free state when the Civil War started. So what were racial attitudes like in Philadelphia at this point in history. You're right on both fronts. The racial attitudes in Philadelphia were not terribly different from those held in the South for all intended purposes, partly because Philadelphia, before could becoming a actually was a colony that had slavery, like most of the other colonies in the north to New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, all of these places had slavery prior to independence um and for short time thereafter. So it's they had freedom longer. But they also have a legacy of inflavement um, as you point out, And so in Philadelphia, even though enslavement is gradually abolished in seventeen eighty, these sort of black folks are not citizens yet either until the passage of the fourteenth Amendment. Basically, so you have a population of free blacks who had in some respects established certain things in their own community, but also faced heavy, heavy discrimination. They also were kind of fighting against jobs, sort of competition where a newer industries were emerging in Philadelphia, particularly in the late nineteenth century, Black people found themselves largely shut out. They were mostly confined to domestic service, and they were profoundly disappointed by that. Um. They also faced daily kind of street harassment. Black women in particular was very vulnerable kind of walking to and from work, traveling on street cars. It was a very difficult time, and they were removed from justice in the sense that police were incredibly biased. Right, you have racial profiling going on in Philadelphia. Violence was considered a part of policing, and black people were especially vulnerable. Police manuals instructed officers to stop anyone who looked poor and like they didn't belong in the state. And this is a moment where you have many newly freed black migrating in Philadelphia, in part because it had been a free state longer and it had been a robust abolitionist movement, so they thought this was going to be like the Land of Milk and Honey in terms of civil rights. It was a profound disappointment, in shocks to find the same kind of racism UM operating, not just in in terms of you know, employment, but in housing as well as an in justice system. They also don't have a lot of protection from police that's the other thing that the case really highlights that Tabs is a woman who has no criminal record in Philadelphia. The once this investigation gets underweight's clear that she had been committing all kinds of crimes in her community against black people that they're so removed from justice that they're basically kind of trapped. One of the things in the book is a picture of the caption is Chief Kelly and his private office from the Philadelphia Police and it's a picture of this police officer and he's standing or he's sitting in front of what it looks like a wall of weapons and struments of harm. Basically, I was I was astonished to see that, And was this sort of a show of threat or was or were these things that were all actually being used in policing. I actually think that those were these sort of confiscated Keith stakes. A lot of them are various sort the skeleton keys, um and tools I think that folks are using in the commission of crime. So in part, some of that stuff that kept me are things that they had taken off of you know, the the quote unquote professional crime class that seems to be emerging in Philadelphia at this time, um, it's also a weird kind of testimony to the ionies of the city being called, you know, one of brotherly love. I had not thought of that at all. So today, when we talk about things like incarceration rates and disparities and sentencing, a lot of the foe fists in the media right now is on black men. And one of the things that you've pointed out is that, um, like, while there's definitely a wealth of evidence that that black men are disproportionately represented in the justice system and they tend to be given longer sentences than white men for the same crimes. Uh In in the nineteenth century, so when this this one this is happening, black women were actually much more disproportionately imprisoned than black men. What were the reasons for that? So the reason to a black women were more disproportionately represented in prisoned in black men in the nineteenth century, actually in the early twentieth century as well, in part related to domestic service, right, is this sort of I call it the domestic service to prison pipeline because at n black women working in Philadelphia work and domestic service there's the only job that they could obtain. They worked for job mostly in white households. So when when any sort of fact occurred a real or imagine and white employers kind of called the police and brought these black services before white justices injuries, they got convicted at a higher rate, more than anyone else in the city. So in the early part, for example, of the early part nineteen century, black women were convicted, sent Black women who went before Philadelphia criminal courts were convicted, and so those dynamics kind of coalesced to produce this disproportionate representation of them in the prison system. So it was really like the middle of the twentieth century when the when it shifted so that men were that black men were more disproportionately represented in the prison system. What led to that shift? So I'll tell you, ironically, it's not really clear that that shift occurred in the mid twentieth century. When I visited the prison in n I was astonished to find that black women were still more disproportionately represented in black in prison and black men, at least in Pennsylvania. Now, what's different, or what has remained consistent, is that the numbers of men are greater than that of women in prison. So there are more black men in prison than there are black women, but in terms of their disproportionality black women, um that disproportionality has remained fairly consistent. It's only been in the last few years that the rate of inconceeration for black women have dropped, and that's to part due to the changes in the drug laws and their enforcements. So to kind of tie this to how the how this is relevant to the world that we're in today, Uh, why do you think so much of the focus is on black men when it's still such a disproportionate issue among black women. Also, I think there are a couple of reasons why the emphasis is still on black men, partly because their numbers are so much greater, but also I think it was about a kind of patriarchy that still sort of operates in society. It is certainly in the black community that a lot of times we are accustomed to sort of rallying around injustices that impact black men, particularly when it's from the state state violence. Right, you have black women who have also you know, been this, you know, died, who are unarmed in in incidence with police, but they don't seem to garner the same kind of attention or response when the victims are black males. I mean, it's something that folks are working to change, but at the end of the day, I think it speaks to a kind of enduring sort of patriarchy. After another brief word from a sponsor, we're going to get back to talking about the parties involved in this crime, and we're going to talk about the early life of George H. Wilson, who Hannah Mary Tabs implicated in her testimony about this crime. And this is one of the things that came up in the book that I immediately put on the list to ask Callie directly about, because it's that's a little up staying. Okay, So to wrap up this really fantastic interview that Tracy did, uh, they're gonna talk a little bit about George H. Wilson's early life, and then it will wrap up with some thoughts about why Callie believes stories like Hannah's are important to tell. To move back to the players in this particular crime, a man named George Wilson was invited along with Hannah Mary Tabs for this murder, and you write about how his having lived in Philadelphia's House of Refuge for colored youth, and how for some black families living at this time, which was after the Civil War in Philadelphia, their only option to to prevent starvation and homelessness and just being absolutely desertate was basically to surrender their children to this house of refuge under the grounds that they were encourageible. So when I read this, it sounds like they were basically putting a child into juvenile detention as an alternative to homelessness. Is that is that really what this was like? That's the impression that the records certainly give that many many of the commitments were doing large part to families being incredibly impoverished and just not having many alternatives. Wilson, for all intention purposes, had been orphaned at that point. His father wasn't in the picture, his mother had just died. Her well were very very poor. Um, he had some issues with the truancy in school, and so all face taken together, they decided to commit him to the House of Refuge. And his story was not unlike many many black children who had been confined. There was breaking part about that. Piece of the story for me too, was the shock that his own mother had actually been incarcerated. There as a young person herself. So it was for me this very early kind of example of a cycle of institutionalization. UM I found profoundly disturbing, and I still sort of troubled by all of this historical legacies in the study history, in part because I wanted to be a beacon for where we are today and certainly some sort of guiding light for going forward. But I was pretty horrified by just how much these issues around race and confinement and law enforcement resonated with issues that are ongoing today, and did not expect them to be so directly related to our current kind of crisis. Yeah, that's that was definitely one of the reasons why I wanted to to talk to you on the podcast, because so many of the aspects of this case are things that are are still existing today. I UM. I was sort of filling Holly, my co host, in on uh what this interview was going to be about, and I had told her about UM George being our George Wilson being committed to this house of refuge and how his mother had been committed there also, and she said, what kind of start is that for a child? And I said, that's exactly exactly my feeling like that that this just sort of speaks to social conditions that were tremendously disturbing and continue to be tremendously disturbing. One one thing that I wondered was did did white families who were destitute at this point have options to surrender their children that didn't involve basically putting them into a juvenile justice system. Right, this is a great question. So there are alternatives. You have other kinds of charities and houses for poor people and poor families, and certainly destitute women and children. They tended to be segregated, which is why so many of the poor black children ended up in the House of Refuge for colored youth. That said, there also is a house of refuge for white youth, and so there were white children who were there as well sothern them also under this sort of you know, the heading of incorrigibility. And I don't doubt that a number of those cases may well have stemmed from destitute poverty. Also that they certainly had more avenues for benevolence and charity than most black families at that time. So one thing that was really new to me as I was reading your book. I think most people who listen to our show are probably familiar with the idea of passing. There's someone who who was a black person, who who was having a white identity to try to move through white society, and like the really real and serious risks that came along with doing that. That you know, if someone was discovered to be passing for white, they could be fired from their jobs, they could be punished, they may even be killed. It's just some things that were really horrifying. A piece of this equation that never ever occurred to me until I read your book was that there was also a corresponding fear among the white community that there were black people moving secretly among them. Can you talk about that a little. Certainly, this fear about infiltration was was pretty new to me. I mean, on one hand, I suspected that was a big part of the concern um with round miss Agnation Right's twofold. On one hand, miss Agnation kind of challenged the supremacist idea that black and white folks are basically sort of entirely distinct animals. If you will write, the idea that they could breed successfully undermine this notion of whiteness is separate and above so misgenation has always been sort of looked down upon, but in some respect there was less fear about kind of mulattos or incredibly light skin makes people because most of them have been regulated by the institution of slavery. They were in the South, their a plantations, everyone sort of knew who they were. There was sort of the risk of infiltration in the way that it sort of existed after inflamement, and kind of with the mobility and the anonymity, particularly in these urban environments. Right, somebody who could pass the white could presumably leave Virginia migrate to Philadelphia, and white families would be none the wiser. Right, they could be working next to one of these flops, they could intermarry, and all the rest. So there was a tremendous sphere that they would be able to pass and blend in in ways that white people would never be able to discerned. So I know that this this is a fear that still exists today as related to the LGBT community, like that there's a there's plenty of research about about the fear that there are gay people or that there are transgender people that and you don't know, do you think it is still present today in regards to race. You know, I haven't given that's the great question. I haven't given it a tremendous amount of thought. I'm sure, given the current climate of our country that they probably are pockets of folks who are concerned that there may be black people passing and infiltrating among them. But I don't think it is the same as it was in the late nineteenth century. No, Um, is there anything else that you want to make sure our listeners know about this book or about Hannah Mary Tabs or the world that she was living in. I do actually thank you for this opportunity. I think that Hannah Mary Tad is important for a bunch of reasons. I mean, for me as a black woman. As they said, it was the first time that I ever encountered a black woman like her in history, right, ordinary yet sort of infamous. But also in looking at her history in the case, it opened up this whole other window onto the complexities that of the social stresses that impacted black families and black communities. Uh. It shed a light on the history, the other longer history in terms of bias, policing and criminal justice visus the waste and discrimination. But for me, it's also important to look at her because I think it's important for black women to have the space to be flawed or fraud or damaged in history. I don't want black women. I've said it before, but I try to say that every chance I get. I don't want black women to have to be clean in order to Marrick Sky only attention or to have their humanity respected. So these kinds of stories for me are important because they are a different kind of affirmation of black women's humanity, and I think one that's important for us to take a look at and to consider. So to close out our interview, UM, as a historian, you have written a lot of op eds about racism, and about criminal justice, and about a lot of other social issues, and this has become my favorite question to ask historians that I talked to. Can you spend a few minutes talking about how historians can help people understand and contextualize the world that we're actually living in today? I think so. I mean that is for me, the important part of history as a project is trying to have it served as this beacon for the president and ideally going forward, So framing out our history and contextualizing these issues is my sort of aim is to help kind of get us to a point where we can speak intelligently on the issues that are plaguing us today. It's for me a paramount importance, and I think most historians would agree that I don't think we've really stand a chance in terms of combating these issues, particularly one as so deeply entrenched and so charged as racism and sexism and and issues around gender and sexuality in the justice system and in our society without having a real and complicated understanding of how these issues developed and took roots historically. Thank you. That's one of the things that I really really loved about your book was seeing the deep roots that that are just documented right here that parallel l a lot of the things that are in the news day and are going on in the world today. So thank you so much. Oh my goodness, no, thank you. And you know, for me, the other piece of that history is to move the conversation along right now. Whenever these instances arrived, we get stuck in this issue of debating whether or not it is racism, whether or not racism is applying the justice system, And what I'm trying to sort of demonstrate is it. We have a whole history that shows that it is, so we don't need to sort of waste time debating when these instances arise whether or not it's it's relating to systemic justice system. It categorically in. We need to stop moving that discussion forward now that we know that, what are we gonna do about it? I'm so glad that I got to talk to Kelly nicoleger Is about this book. Like number one, the book is fascinating. Number two, she had so many awesome things to say about the book itself and the crime that happened in the world that it happened in. Thank you again for being on the show. I know I said it before, I'll say it four or five more times. Thank you, thank you, Thank you so much, um Kellie for your time and for being on the show. I will say thank you as well because she was amazing. I so loved listening to that interview. While I was listening to the raw audio of it, I literally was I Am and Tracy like every three minutes, going, oh my gosh, this is fantastic. Uh, we don't we don't normally wind up listening to the raw audio of of each other's interviews, but this was one where you were so excited about it that you I don't think you wanted to wait, and I still I don't want to wait. I couldn't couldn't wait on that one. Uh. Do you have some listener mail to close out this fabulous episode? I do. This is from Gabrielle, and it's about our recent podcast about the Women Air Force Service pilots. But it's also about, uh, how the conversation we had at the end of the second part about how we learned about history, And so Gabrielle says, and need to start out by thanking you for your podcast. Honestly, I'm not sure how I could get through commutes or half marathon training runs without you. The podcast keep my mind active and stress free. Also happened to be a high school history teacher, so hopefully my students won't miss some of this stuff from history class. I just listened listened to part one while driving in part two while running of the WASP interview. Wow, as a lover of history, I enjoyed so many details about a topic I was only briefly informed about. This brings me to two points that you made at the end of Part two about teaching history in a date slash name and oversimplified manner. I understand from an educator's perspective why it is easy to fall into the style of presenting history. I primarily teach world history and have experience at the middle and high school levels. The state of New Jersey, for instance, expects us to teach high schoolers the history of the world from the Middle Ages to modern day in ten months. Ten months. For this reason, we skip over ideas and individuals that can be incredibly fascinating and oversimplify for the sake of time. We can't help but to miss some stuff. I just finished teaching World War One in five eighty minute classes. Yet I was able to teach students about the changes in war and technologies, Gallipoli campaign because of your podcast, My students want to celebrate Anzac Day in April, the Armenian genocide, Russian Revolution and more. It is my goal to make history as relevant as possible, so I constantly connect my topics to current events to explain why the world is the way it is today. But I have only one teacher. I hope others can have the same perspective, so I appreciated your comments. I'm bringing historians to speak or right to the public. Your podcast is another example history can be taught in accessible and engaging ways outside of class books and documentaries. So thank you again. I constantly crave new knowledge and understanding of our world. So I love spending my time with both of you. Best wishes, Gabrielle. Thank you, Gabrielle. Uh, that was the point that you and I have talked about. You didn't really come up in that discussion that, like, we know so many awesome history teachers who love what they do, and they love their kids, and they love to teach, but they're kind of confined to teaching expectations that are set like not at their individual classroom level, at at a state level, like at a curriculum level, and a lot of times the curriculum's focus is sort of on, uh, teaching patriotism sometimes. Yeah, Like that was definitely the case when I was growing up. The focus of history classes was a lot of times on how great the state I was growing up in was and how great the United States is as a nation. Uh, And to me, that was an enormous shortcoming in my history education. Like I didn't leave school with the history education that helps me understand why the world is the way it is, um, and instead helped me understand that the United States had a big part in a bunch of big wars like which you know was was not the faults my individual teachers. That was really the curriculum they were expected to teach was oriented it that way. So, UM, I definitely wanted to talk about that because I we when we had that discussion, we definitely weren't trying to disparage teachers at all. We love them. We love all the awesome teachers who write us and and talk to us about their kids and what they're doing in their classrooms. Yeah. I mean, I think in a case like this where she specifically mentioned like how she tries to make these lessons relevant and teach kids what's going on today as a result of things that happened in the past, like that's exactly how you get minds engaged and thinking about cause and effect throughout history. And I definitely like you. I I didn't think I liked history growing up because it was a lot of like date name repetition and uh memorization. But even then, I don't think those were necessarily bad teachers. They were constrained by what they were, you know, required to do and ridiculously short periods of time often so absolutely no shade to any of the teachers of the world. I know you guys are doing like incredible work and a very hard job that I could never do and so appreciate. So yeah, yeah, thank you. Awesome. Teachers are awesome. I also wanted to quickly update about the loft Um, the bill to reinstate their privileges at Arlington National Cemetery un unanimously passed in the House. As of one we're recording right now, it is still pending in the Senate. Uh and that may change between when we recorded this update and when this episode comes out, because there's a lead time between when we do things. Um. But yeah, that is underway. So you'd like to write to us about this or any other podcast or a history podcast at how Stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in History and on Twitter at miss and History. Our tumbler is miss in History dot tumbler dot com. Our pinterest is also missed in History. If you would like to learn more about what we talked about today, you can do. Our parent company's website and is how stuff works dot com. There is all kinds of awesome information about anything you can think of. You can also come to our website, which is missed in History dot com. You'll find show notes for all the episode Polly and I have ever done. We will have a link to Kelly's book if you are interested in that you want to learn more about it. We also have an archive of every episode we have ever done on the entire podcast, so you can do all that and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or missed in History dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics because it has stuff works dot com