Happy Saturday. This past week. We briefly mentioned Frederick Douglass in our episode on Lucy Stone, and something we spent just a little more time on is an open letter that Stone's husband, Henry Blackwell, wrote to be published in the South, arguing that granting voting rights to white women could offset the effects of suffrage for black men. Something I had totally forgotten even though I wrote our episode on Frederick Douglas, is that Blackwell's argument is mentioned in our episode on him too. So thanks to all of those connections, Frederick Douglas is Today's Saturday Classic. This episode originally came out on July thirty first, twenty seventeen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We are just back from Seneca Falls. Yeah, they were so kind to invite us to Convention Days. Yes, at the Women's Rights National Historical Park. We had a live show there on Sunday this past Sunday it is now Tuesday. We did, Unfortunately, though we had a little bit of an issue with the recording. Yeah, well, it's a there's a combination of factors. We had the just immense honor of doing our live show in Wesleyan Chapel, which is where the Seneca Falls Convention was held. As you might imagine from a chapel dating back to that area, it is essentially a big empty space. It's a big box adjacent to the road. So like for a number of reasons, it just we were not able to get clear audio of the live show that we did that day. So we are still going to talk about Frederick Douglas. Yeah, well just do your version, Yes, a studio version of that show. We do definitely, though, want to thank the folks of the National Park Service and Ashley Nottingham, who was a person who did all of the arranging or a lot of the arranging with us specifically for this, like, thank everyone for having us out because we had a wonderful time. Yeah, we had. I was so delighted by just how fun and kind and welcoming and warm everyone was. It was really lovely. Yes, And it is also a better service to Frederick Douglas to have a nice, clean recording of him rather than the somewhat noisier one from on the day. So today, as we just said, we are going to talk about the life and work of orator, writer, statesmen, and social reformer Frederick Douglas. Frederick Douglas's work was just tireless and prolific, and we could literally fill a whole episode of our show just listing off the titles of all his writings and all the positions that he held, and all the laws that he influenced, and all the speeches that he made, and all the peoples whose rights he championed during his lifetime. He was even nominated for Vice President of the United States on the ticket with Victoria Woodhull in eighteen seventy two, just as an example of a thing that happened that we're not even going to talk about in detail today. So our focus is really going to be on how his early life shaped the truly remarkable advocate that he became, and his work with the two primary causes that he campaigned the most for. He campaigned for a lot of stuff that would all fall under the umbrella of humanitarianism and human rights in some way, but the two biggest parts were the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage. Frederick Douglas was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey around February of eighteen eighteen in a region of Maryland's eastern shore known as Tuckahoe. He was enslaved from birth, and his exact birth date and place of birth are not known. His father was white, and although there was speculation that he may have been the owner or overseer of Douglas's mother, Harriet, his identity remains unknown as well. Douglas was separated from his mother while still a baby and sent to live with her parents, Betsy and Isaac Bailey. Betsy was enslaved and Isaac was free, and Betsy was known for her skills as a nurse and her knack for making and using fishing nets, along with being particularly good at growing sweet potatoes. People from all around would come to Frederick Douglas's grandmother to be like, can you help me out with my sweet potatoes because you are the best at growing them. That's a good life skill to have, ma'am. But Betsy's primary duty was actually caring for children, in particular her five daughters. Children. Enslaved women were typically sent right back to work as soon as possible after giving birth, and they were not allowed to raise their own children, so Frederick had very little memory of his mother until the age of about seven. Those years with his grandmother were an odd mix of relative freedom and a growing comprehension that he was not free. The children had few physical comforts they just they didn't have really playthings or much to eat, but they also had few worries or constraints. In My Bondage and My Freedom, which was one of Douglas's autobiographies, he described the early years of a young enslaved boy as quote in a word, he is, for the most part of his first eight years of life, a spirited, joyous, uproarious, and happy boy upon whom troubles fall only like water on a duck's back. But as he got older, Douglas gradually came to perceive that the cabin that they were living in was not his grandmother's. It and his grandmother, all of the other children, and he himself were in fact the property of someone they knew as old Master, and that was Captain Aaron Anthony, and Douglas faced a dawn understanding that he would at some point be forced to leave his grandmother to begin a life of enslaved labor. That happened when Douglas was seven or eight, and he was sent to the plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd, who had previously been governor of Maryland and a United States Senator, and there a woman known as Aunt Katie was the one responsible for the children, including some of her own, so she was sort of an exception to the typical behavior that women were not allowed to raise their own children. Aunt Katie's treatment of the children was incredibly cruel, and Douglas often went hungry when she would give his share of food to her own children instead, and it was on Lloyd's plantation that Douglas got to see just a little more of his mother, who was a field hand on another plantation. Even then, however, he didn't see her very often at all, and she died when he was not yet ten years old. After her death, Douglas learned that, quite unusually for a field hand, she had actually known how to read, and in later years, when Race's commentators suggested that his skill with language probably came from his white father, he would insist that the credit should instead go to his mother. He still wasn't at this point in his life big enough to do field work, so while on Lloyd's plantation, Douglas did chores and errands, mainly for Lucretia Ald, who was Captain Anthony's married daughter. When Douglas was about eight, he was then hired out to another one of the Alds, Hugh Auld, Lucretia's brother in law, who worked as a ship carpenter in Baltimore. Douglas would later describe this as quote one of the most interesting and fortunate events of my life. Not only was he removed from the cruelty and brutality of the plantation, but he was also introduced to Hugh's wife, Sophia. Apparently unaware that it was illegal, or that its illegality was a technique for controlling enslaved people, Sophia taught Frederick to read. Hugh Auld put a stop to these reading lessons as soon as he found out about them, but it was at this point too late to stop Douglas from learning how to read, and Frederick Douglass had already realized that literacy would be a key to finding his way to freedom. So when Sophia's reading lessons stopped, Douglas started trading his bread to white children that he would run into when he was out on the Aulds errands, and he would do this in exchange for their teaching him a few words out of a Webster's spelling book. He also gradually saved enough money to buy another book, The Colombian Orator, and this was a collection of speeches and essays and poems that had come into use as a school book. It began with general instructions for speaking, and it included the work of men like George Washington, John Milton, Socrates, and Cisco. And this he read and re read, finding a piece called Dialogue between a Master and Slave particularly compelling. And in that piece of writing, a master chastises his recaptured slave for having run away, and the slave, eloquequ dissecting the inhumanity and injustice of slavery, convinces the master to free him. This is to me one of the most amazing things about Frederick Douglas. He was not just teaching himself to read by practicing. He was teaching himself rhetoric and how to make an argument an eloquence by studying this work. And the whole time that he was living in Baltimore, he continued teaching himself, eventually also using old copy books and school books belonging to the Aulds' son in order to teach himself how to write, and as he got older, he started teaching other enslaved children he met to read as well. Baltimore was formative in other ways too. Douglas first heard the word abolition while he was there, and he began to piece together that there was an abolitionist movement working to end slavery. He also became religious, worshiping in an African Methodist Episcopal church, while simultaneously coming to understand that the scriptures were being used to both justify slavery and to convince enslaved people that they should submit to it. He became increasingly aware of the hypocrisy of Christian slave owners who applied Christ's teachings only to white men while treating their enslaved workforce with severe cruelty. Frederick Douglas remained in Baltimore for about seven years. At this point, there was a series of deaths within his owner's family, as well as some inner family drama, and Thomas auld demanded that he be returned to the plantation. Douglas only worked directly for Thomas Auld for about nine months, though he had become, in the eyes of his enslavers, a troublemaker. He tried to start a Sabbath school to teach other enslaved people, and he started standing up for himself and other people. So from Thomas Ald's point of view, Douglas had been ruined. So Thomas Ald hired Douglas out to a man named Edward Covey, who was a notorious slave breaker. So this is a man to whom slave owners would hire out their troublesome enslaved people for free so that he could train them. And, in Douglas's words quote, mister Covey could have under him the most fiery bloods of the neighborhood for the simple reward of returning them to their owners well broken. For the next six months, Covey beat Douglas on a nearly daily basis, and he also engaged in a sort of psychological warfare which was meant to make him feel as though he was constantly watched and constantly threatened. In eighteen thirty five, after his time with Covey was up, Douglas was hired out as a field hand to William Freeland, who was not nearly as cruel as Thomas Auld or Edward Covey had been. Douglas once again tried to start a Sabbath school to teach and educate other enslaved people. On January first, eighteen thirty six, Douglas resolved that he would be free by the end of the year, and he planned to liberate several of the other men enslaved with him as well. He forged passes for the group which said they had permission to go to Baltimore, but unfortunately their plan was discovered and all of the men were captured and taken to jail. After this escape attempt, Thomas Ald decided it would be best to send Frederick Douglass away, especially because of the Sabbath school and the influence that he was having among the enslaved people in the neighborhood. It wasn't just that Thomas Auld was finding Douglas's behavior to be unacceptable, it was also that he was drawing the ire of other slave owners in the area. Thomas Auld was afraid that some harm was going to come to his property, so Douglas was sent back to Baltimore, and it was from there that he ultimately would escape and We will get to that after a quick sponsor break. So back in Baltimore with Hugh and Sophie Auld, Frederick Douglas was first hired out to a shipyard being attacked by a group of white laborers, which is something the authorities refused to investigate because no white witness would attest to it. He was allowed to seek out his own work. He would basically go and solicit work in places that he felt more safe working, and then he would turn over all of the pay that he earned to hew Ald at the end of each week. And eventually Douglas asked for permission to hire himself out during his off hours, and this would allow him to keep the pay above and beyond what was due back to the Alds, and it was viewed as a huge privilege. He secretly planned to save this pay in order to fund his escape, but his permission to hire his time was revoked after he attended a camp meeting one Saturday night instead of delivering his pay to Hugh Auld on schedule. This pushed Douglas's plans to escape into high gear. He was basically afraid that if he made any kind of wrong move, it was going to become even harder for him to escape, they would be keeping an even close on him. At this point, he had met and fallen in love with a free black woman named Anna Murray. She secured a sailor's uniform for him and gave him some of her savings to fund the way, and then he traveled using identification papers that had been borrowed from a free black man. He traveled by train and then steamboat and left Baltimore and traveled to New York City on September third, eighteen thirty eight. For a long time, he would not tell anyone exactly how he had done this, because he was afraid that if he did, that escape route from Baltimore would get shut down. And once he arrived at a safe house belonging to abolitionist David Ruggles, he sent for Anna and they were married on September fifteenth. The pair would eventually have five children together, Rosetta, Lewis, Frederick, Charles, and Annie. Knowing that Douglas had worked calking ships in Baltimore, Ruggles suggested that he'd go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, which had a large whale in shipping industry, as well as a sizeable free black community Douglas had traveled under several names while making his way to New Bedford, eventually landing on Johnson, but once he got there, there were so many other Johnson's in New Bedford that he thought it would be confusing to have yet another one, so he and Anna took the last name of Douglas. At first, the Douglas's life in New Bedford was dedicated to just trying to make ends meet and to find a home in their new community, and Douglas also resumed going to church. After encountering segregation and racism at New Bedford's Methodist church, he joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zionist Church and eventually he became a lay minister there. A few months after settling in New Bedford, Douglas got a copy of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. This was his entry into the anti slavery movement that he had first heard about back in Baltimore. Soon he was attending abolitionist meetings, and an eighteen forty one he attended and spoke at an anti slavery convention in Nantucket. This is his first time really speaking in public, and he didn't think he did a particularly great job. But afterward John A. Collins of the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society asked Frederick Douglas to come and work for them as a speaker. He began to travel around the North and Midwest speaking against slavery. And although Douglas had a remarkable ability to draw from his own experience to change hearts and minds, his opposition to slavery was not about his own enslavement. His focus was on humanity as a whole in the inherent brutality and destructiveness of the institution of slavery. But by writing about his own experience, he was giving potential abolitionists, particularly in the North, something many had lacked, and that was a window into the reality so the institution of slavery. This was incredibly important to the success of the movement for abolition, especially in the North. Slavery affected people's lives, particularly white people's lives, in really dramatic ways that they weren't necessarily even consciously aware of. Many wealthy and prominent families had earned their fortunes either directly through the slave trade or through industries that relied on enslaved labor. So even if no one in a community was currently enslaving anyone. It was incredibly likely that its wealthiest and most influential families were living on inherited wealth that came at least in part from slavery. And people were also traveling on roads and railroads, and attending schools and working in buildings that had been built by enslaved people, including the US Capitol building. So people were living in a nation that had been built on and financed through slavery, but they often didn't have a conscious connection to what any of that actually meant. That changed as Douglas spoke and wrote about fighting off dogs for crumbs of food, sleeping on bare floors with little protection from the cold, brutal beatings, the murder of an enslaved man named Denby at the hands of an overseer, the willful destruction and separation of enslaved families, and the constant exhausting work that continued well after the workday was over, as enslaved people then had to care for their own food, care for their quarters, mend their clothes, and on and on. But it wasn't simply Douglas's documentation of the daily conditions and degradations of enslavement that influenced the abolition movement. He also wrote extensively on how the institution of slavery impacted the enslavers as well as the enslaved. By making enslaved people into a class that was supposedly less than human, enslavers were also corrupting their own humanity. These were all things that Douglas had experienced and learned and thought about during his years of enslavement, and he was particularly adept putting them into words in a way that motivated readers and listeners to act. We should make clear he wasn't the only previously enslave person that was writing and speaking about their own experience, but he did become particularly famous. In eighteen forty five, he published the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in part to debunk critics claims that he was too eloquent to have ever really been a slave, and in it he detailed the experiences that we talked about in the first part of our episode today, including naming who his owners had been, and that was a colossal risk. Under fugitive slave laws, he could be captured and returned to Maryland, and as his book became a bestseller, he left the country, sailing for Liverpool on August sixteenth of eighteen forty five. He arrived in Britain just before the start of the Great Famine in Ireland. As a side note, this was not the only time that Frederick Douglass would have to flee the country. He did again in eighteen fifty nine after John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, after investigators found a letter that Douglas had written that could have led to his being named as a co conspirator. Douglas at that point didn't return home until eighteen sixty as the nation was careening towards Civil war, after learning that his daughter Annie had died at the age of eleven, so jumping back to eighteen forty five. For nearly two years, Douglas traveled around the British Isles and spoke against slavery and four civil rights, and while he was there, British supporters raised the funds to purchase his freedom. Thomas Auld first sold him to Hugh Auld for the sum of one hundred dollars, and Hugh released him from slavery on December fifth, eighteen forty six. Douglas returned to the United States the following year, and he and his family moved to Rochester, New York. Douglas received some criticism for allowing himself to be purchased, since to some it legitimized the institution that he was fighting against. They basically thought he was being complicit in the very thing that he was advocating to have abolished. But from Douglas's point of view, he had a calling and a duty to return to the United States and continue to fight slavery, something he would best be able to do if he was not simultaneously trying to evade capture or captured and returned South. Of course, the Civil War started in eighteen sixty one, and by that point Frederick Douglass was one of the most famous black men in the United States. Although the South was fighting the war in large part to protect and expand the institution of slavery, at first, the North was fighting primarily to preserve the Union. Douglas became an outspoken advocate for making the abolition of slavery one of the Union's goals as well, and he also recruited for the Union Army and two of his sons served in the fifty fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. In eighteen sixty three, Douglas met with Abraham Lincoln about the treetment of black soldiers fighting for the Union and advocated for their receiving equal pay. Of course, the abolition of slavery did ultimately get folded into the Union's goals in the Civil War, and when the war was over, slavery was indeed abolished. Douglas then turned his attention to protecting the lives and civil rights of African Americans, including campaigning for the right to vote. He also encouraged abolitionist organizations to turn their attention to Native Americans, whose condition he called quote the sadust chapter in our history. Frederick Douglas never looked at an accomplishment and then said, Okay, we're done now. If the thing he had been campaigning for was successful, he would then find the next thing. Yeah. And after the war, he also held a number of social and political positions, including Charge da Fair for the Dominican Republic, Minister Resident and Consul General to him, and the Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia. He served as president of the Freedman Savings Bank, and he was on the board at Howard University. The list of accomplishments and appointments that he had goes on and on and on. It is quite lengthy. And even before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass had become a supporter of women's rights. And especially because we were originally giving this episode as a live show at Convention Days in celebration of the anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, made a lot of sense to spend a little more time on that which we are going to do after another quick sponsor break. Frederick Douglas first met Susan B. Anthony in eighteen forty five, but his direct involvement with the movement for women's suffrage really started after he moved to Rochester with his family in eighteen forty seven. That December, he published his first issue of his newspaper, The North Star, which was one of several newspapers he would create and run during his lifetime. The north Star was printed with the motto right is of no sex, Truth is of no color. God is the father of us all, and we are all brethren. And the Seneca Falls Convention began on July nineteenth of eighteen forty eight, and Douglas was one of only thirty two men out of about three hundred attendees. Of these men, he was the only one who supported Elizabeth Katy Stanton's resolution that women be allowed to vote, and he seconded her motion that the right to vote be one of their resolutions. He was one of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments. Another woman's rights convention was held almost immediately in Rochester on August second of eighteen forty eight, and Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Katy Stanton recommended that Douglas be made its chair, although he ultimately wasn't, he did attend and speak at this convention as well, and both inventions were covered in the newspaper of the North Star. This was really like Frederick Douglass was already under a huge amount of scrutiny because he was a black man living in America, and becoming involved in the women's rights movement brought on a whole other layer of scrutiny because men who were involved in the movement were viewed with extreme suspicion and derision. There was a lot of undertone of like something must be wrong with you for you to be into this. Yeah, So there's definitely a lot of bravery in that move And in addition to being actively involved in the movement for women's rights and suffrage, Douglas took those ideas back with him to the movement for abolition. In eighteen forty eight, Douglas presided at the National Convention of Colored Freedmen in Cleveland, and under his leadership, the convention passed a resolution affirming equality between the sexes, and women were actively invited to participate. Douglas presided over and introduced similar affirmations at other abolitionist meetings as well. Although so obviously there were also black suffragists such as Ia b Wells Barnett and Anna Julia Cooper, the suffrage movement as a whole was largely focused on the needs and wants of relatively affluent white women, Like if you read the Declaration of Sentiments, there are parts in it about things like your property becoming your husband's property when you marry. So we're starting from the foundation of women affluent enough to have property. It's kind of a narrow segment of women. At the end of the Civil War, reconstruction efforts to guarantee civil rights, including the right to vote to former slaves and their descendants, clashed with this focus of looking for voting rights for white women. At first, it actually seemed as though these two movements for suffrage could combine. At the first Women's Rights Convention after the Civil War, its name was changed to the Equal Rights Association, which would work toward universal suffrage, not just suffrage for women, and Frederick Douglass was one of the Equal Rights Association's three vice presidents. But as the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution were drafted, a schism developed within the movement. The May eighteen sixty nine meeting of the Equal Rights Association took place after Congress had passed the fifteenth Amendment, as it was up for ratification by the States. This amendment read quote, the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. So this amendment made no reference to the right to vote as related to sex, and Douglas was willing to accept this less than universal suffrage because he knew how much resistance there was to women's voting rights in much of the nation, and he thought it was likely that the fifteenth Amendment could only be ratified if it didn't include women. He also thought that white women wanted the right to vote had other ways to take political action, while overall the black population desperately needed to vote because they had no other means to take political action themselves. Of course, many of the Equal Rights Association vehemently disagreed. In the ensuing discussion, Douglas said, quote, when women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp posts, when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement, when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn, when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads, when their children are not allowed to enter schools, they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to black men. Someone from the audience then asked whether this was not also true of black women as well, and he answered yes, yes, yes, it is true of the black women, but not because she is a woman, but because she is black. So he was basically pointing out that like yes, it was right and important for women to have the right to vote, but the need was a lot more dire for black people to have the right to vote. The debate over the fifteenth Amendment split the Equal Rights Association. At the conclusion of the meeting, it was disbanded, with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Katy Stanton forming the National Woman's Suffrage Association to once again focus only on voting rights for women, even to the extent of directly opposing the fifteenth Amendment. Those who supported the fifteenth Amendment formed the American Woman's Suffrage Association. We should also make it clear that this was not just an ideological dispute over the wording of the fifteenth Amendment and whether it included any references to sex or gender. There was also explicit racism at work, with Elizabeth Katy Stanton, for example, saying quote, what will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights? That would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers. I also kept finding reference to a quote by Susan B. Anthony about how she would rather cut off her right arm than campaign for vote for black people before women I couldn't find the original place where she purportedly said that, but it came up over and over. There were also elements of the suffrage movement who argued that women should have the right to vote because white women would help form a voting bloc that would help maintain white supremacy, even if black people could also vote, and one such advocate of this was Henry B. Blackwell, husband of suffragist Lucy Stone. When the fifteenth Amendment was ratified on February third, eighteen seventy, Frederick Douglas immediately began campaigning for a sixteenth Amendment to grant voting rights to women, and he would continue to advocate for women's suffrage for the rest of his life. Sadly, Charlotte Wodward was the only signer of the Seneca falls Convention's Declaration of Sentiments to live to see the ratification of the nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote on August eighteenth of nineteen twenty. Apparently because of her poor health, she never actually got to vote herself. But even then, the same racially discriminatory voting laws that had already been suppressing black men's right to vote since the end of reconstruction just applied to black women as well. So although the letter of the Nineteenth Amendment gave black women the right to vote, it was not until the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five that many black women and other women who were part of minority populations were actually able to do so. And of course, discriminatory voting laws and attempts to suppress voters still exists today. I feel like every time a turn around, there's another case before the Supreme Court about it. To close out his story, we're going to react turned for a moment to Frederick Douglas's last years. In the eighteen seventies, he moved to Washington, d c. And his wife, Anna, died of a stroke in eighteen eighty two. In eighteen eighty four, he remarried a woman named Helen Pitts, which raised some eyebrows because she was about twenty years younger than he was and she was also white. On February twentieth, eighteen ninety five, Frederick Douglass went to a meeting of the National Council of Women. He came home and began preparing to give a speech at a local church when he died suddenly of a heart attack. He was about seventy seven. He had been campaigning for equal rights until literally the last day of his life. That is Frederick Douglas. We were actually joined by Frederick Douglas there in Seneca Falls. Yeah, it was quite exciting. They had a wonderful reenactor there who was really great, and he came in halfway through and I turned into Buddy the Elf, so you got to see him. Yeah, he was very gracious, he was He was so kind. We had a lot of people who wanted to have pictures made after the show, and he accommodated everyone and was super just gracious and warm and lovely the whole time. Yeah, he was great. Yeah, So everyone we met and while we were in Seneca Falls was gracious and kind and welcoming. The National Park Service staff that we met were all amazing. We sa as I said at the top of the show, we were so honored to be able to do this show there in the Wesleyan Chapel. It is great. So if you get a chance to go to Seneca Falls, especially to go to a future convention days, Yeah, we had a great time. That's a pretty great event. Yeah. Sadly we did not get to spend a ton of time in Seneca Falls. It was a very that was a quick, quick turnaround tip. Yeah, it was a quick turnaround tip for both of us. Oh and I also would like to thank my spouse for writing with me slush driving the car all the way there and back. We made a weekend trip out of it, and I don't think I could have made the drive by myself because it's a stretch. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old house Stuffworks email address no longer works. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of IHEARTRADI d For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. This past week. We briefly mentioned Frederick Douglass in our episode on Lucy Stone, and something we spent just a little more time on is an open letter that Stone's husband, Henry Blackwell, wrote to be published in the South, arguing that granting voting rights to white women could offset the effects of suffrage for black men. Something I had totally forgotten even though I wrote our episode on Frederick Douglas, is that Blackwell's argument is mentioned in our episode on him too. So thanks to all of those connections, Frederick Douglas is Today's Saturday Classic. This episode originally came out on July thirty first, twenty seventeen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We are just back from Seneca Falls. Yeah, they were so kind to invite us to Convention Days. Yes, at the Women's Rights National Historical Park. We had a live show there on Sunday this past Sunday it is now Tuesday. We did, Unfortunately, though we had a little bit of an issue with the recording. Yeah, well, it's a there's a combination of factors. We had the just immense honor of doing our live show in Wesleyan Chapel, which is where the Seneca Falls Convention was held. As you might imagine from a chapel dating back to that area, it is essentially a big empty space. It's a big box adjacent to the road. So like for a number of reasons, it just we were not able to get clear audio of the live show that we did that day. So we are still going to talk about Frederick Douglas. Yeah, well just do your version, Yes, a studio version of that show. We do definitely, though, want to thank the folks of the National Park Service and Ashley Nottingham, who was a person who did all of the arranging or a lot of the arranging with us specifically for this, like, thank everyone for having us out because we had a wonderful time. Yeah, we had. I was so delighted by just how fun and kind and welcoming and warm everyone was. It was really lovely. Yes, And it is also a better service to Frederick Douglas to have a nice, clean recording of him rather than the somewhat noisier one from on the day. So today, as we just said, we are going to talk about the life and work of orator, writer, statesmen, and social reformer Frederick Douglas. Frederick Douglas's work was just tireless and prolific, and we could literally fill a whole episode of our show just listing off the titles of all his writings and all the positions that he held, and all the laws that he influenced, and all the speeches that he made, and all the peoples whose rights he championed during his lifetime. He was even nominated for Vice President of the United States on the ticket with Victoria Woodhull in eighteen seventy two, just as an example of a thing that happened that we're not even going to talk about in detail today. So our focus is really going to be on how his early life shaped the truly remarkable advocate that he became, and his work with the two primary causes that he campaigned the most for. He campaigned for a lot of stuff that would all fall under the umbrella of humanitarianism and human rights in some way, but the two biggest parts were the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage. Frederick Douglas was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey around February of eighteen eighteen in a region of Maryland's eastern shore known as Tuckahoe. He was enslaved from birth, and his exact birth date and place of birth are not known. His father was white, and although there was speculation that he may have been the owner or overseer of Douglas's mother, Harriet, his identity remains unknown as well. Douglas was separated from his mother while still a baby and sent to live with her parents, Betsy and Isaac Bailey. Betsy was enslaved and Isaac was free, and Betsy was known for her skills as a nurse and her knack for making and using fishing nets, along with being particularly good at growing sweet potatoes. People from all around would come to Frederick Douglas's grandmother to be like, can you help me out with my sweet potatoes because you are the best at growing them. That's a good life skill to have, ma'am. But Betsy's primary duty was actually caring for children, in particular her five daughters. Children. Enslaved women were typically sent right back to work as soon as possible after giving birth, and they were not allowed to raise their own children, so Frederick had very little memory of his mother until the age of about seven. Those years with his grandmother were an odd mix of relative freedom and a growing comprehension that he was not free. The children had few physical comforts they just they didn't have really playthings or much to eat, but they also had few worries or constraints. In My Bondage and My Freedom, which was one of Douglas's autobiographies, he described the early years of a young enslaved boy as quote in a word, he is, for the most part of his first eight years of life, a spirited, joyous, uproarious, and happy boy upon whom troubles fall only like water on a duck's back. But as he got older, Douglas gradually came to perceive that the cabin that they were living in was not his grandmother's. It and his grandmother, all of the other children, and he himself were in fact the property of someone they knew as old Master, and that was Captain Aaron Anthony, and Douglas faced a dawn understanding that he would at some point be forced to leave his grandmother to begin a life of enslaved labor. That happened when Douglas was seven or eight, and he was sent to the plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd, who had previously been governor of Maryland and a United States Senator, and there a woman known as Aunt Katie was the one responsible for the children, including some of her own, so she was sort of an exception to the typical behavior that women were not allowed to raise their own children. Aunt Katie's treatment of the children was incredibly cruel, and Douglas often went hungry when she would give his share of food to her own children instead, and it was on Lloyd's plantation that Douglas got to see just a little more of his mother, who was a field hand on another plantation. Even then, however, he didn't see her very often at all, and she died when he was not yet ten years old. After her death, Douglas learned that, quite unusually for a field hand, she had actually known how to read, and in later years, when Race's commentators suggested that his skill with language probably came from his white father, he would insist that the credit should instead go to his mother. He still wasn't at this point in his life big enough to do field work, so while on Lloyd's plantation, Douglas did chores and errands, mainly for Lucretia Ald, who was Captain Anthony's married daughter. When Douglas was about eight, he was then hired out to another one of the Alds, Hugh Auld, Lucretia's brother in law, who worked as a ship carpenter in Baltimore. Douglas would later describe this as quote one of the most interesting and fortunate events of my life. Not only was he removed from the cruelty and brutality of the plantation, but he was also introduced to Hugh's wife, Sophia. Apparently unaware that it was illegal, or that its illegality was a technique for controlling enslaved people, Sophia taught Frederick to read. Hugh Auld put a stop to these reading lessons as soon as he found out about them, but it was at this point too late to stop Douglas from learning how to read, and Frederick Douglass had already realized that literacy would be a key to finding his way to freedom. So when Sophia's reading lessons stopped, Douglas started trading his bread to white children that he would run into when he was out on the Aulds errands, and he would do this in exchange for their teaching him a few words out of a Webster's spelling book. He also gradually saved enough money to buy another book, The Colombian Orator, and this was a collection of speeches and essays and poems that had come into use as a school book. It began with general instructions for speaking, and it included the work of men like George Washington, John Milton, Socrates, and Cisco. And this he read and re read, finding a piece called Dialogue between a Master and Slave particularly compelling. And in that piece of writing, a master chastises his recaptured slave for having run away, and the slave, eloquequ dissecting the inhumanity and injustice of slavery, convinces the master to free him. This is to me one of the most amazing things about Frederick Douglas. He was not just teaching himself to read by practicing. He was teaching himself rhetoric and how to make an argument an eloquence by studying this work. And the whole time that he was living in Baltimore, he continued teaching himself, eventually also using old copy books and school books belonging to the Aulds' son in order to teach himself how to write, and as he got older, he started teaching other enslaved children he met to read as well. Baltimore was formative in other ways too. Douglas first heard the word abolition while he was there, and he began to piece together that there was an abolitionist movement working to end slavery. He also became religious, worshiping in an African Methodist Episcopal church, while simultaneously coming to understand that the scriptures were being used to both justify slavery and to convince enslaved people that they should submit to it. He became increasingly aware of the hypocrisy of Christian slave owners who applied Christ's teachings only to white men while treating their enslaved workforce with severe cruelty. Frederick Douglas remained in Baltimore for about seven years. At this point, there was a series of deaths within his owner's family, as well as some inner family drama, and Thomas auld demanded that he be returned to the plantation. Douglas only worked directly for Thomas Auld for about nine months, though he had become, in the eyes of his enslavers, a troublemaker. He tried to start a Sabbath school to teach other enslaved people, and he started standing up for himself and other people. So from Thomas Ald's point of view, Douglas had been ruined. So Thomas Ald hired Douglas out to a man named Edward Covey, who was a notorious slave breaker. So this is a man to whom slave owners would hire out their troublesome enslaved people for free so that he could train them. And, in Douglas's words quote, mister Covey could have under him the most fiery bloods of the neighborhood for the simple reward of returning them to their owners well broken. For the next six months, Covey beat Douglas on a nearly daily basis, and he also engaged in a sort of psychological warfare which was meant to make him feel as though he was constantly watched and constantly threatened. In eighteen thirty five, after his time with Covey was up, Douglas was hired out as a field hand to William Freeland, who was not nearly as cruel as Thomas Auld or Edward Covey had been. Douglas once again tried to start a Sabbath school to teach and educate other enslaved people. On January first, eighteen thirty six, Douglas resolved that he would be free by the end of the year, and he planned to liberate several of the other men enslaved with him as well. He forged passes for the group which said they had permission to go to Baltimore, but unfortunately their plan was discovered and all of the men were captured and taken to jail. After this escape attempt, Thomas Ald decided it would be best to send Frederick Douglass away, especially because of the Sabbath school and the influence that he was having among the enslaved people in the neighborhood. It wasn't just that Thomas Auld was finding Douglas's behavior to be unacceptable, it was also that he was drawing the ire of other slave owners in the area. Thomas Auld was afraid that some harm was going to come to his property, so Douglas was sent back to Baltimore, and it was from there that he ultimately would escape and We will get to that after a quick sponsor break. So back in Baltimore with Hugh and Sophie Auld, Frederick Douglas was first hired out to a shipyard being attacked by a group of white laborers, which is something the authorities refused to investigate because no white witness would attest to it. He was allowed to seek out his own work. He would basically go and solicit work in places that he felt more safe working, and then he would turn over all of the pay that he earned to hew Ald at the end of each week. And eventually Douglas asked for permission to hire himself out during his off hours, and this would allow him to keep the pay above and beyond what was due back to the Alds, and it was viewed as a huge privilege. He secretly planned to save this pay in order to fund his escape, but his permission to hire his time was revoked after he attended a camp meeting one Saturday night instead of delivering his pay to Hugh Auld on schedule. This pushed Douglas's plans to escape into high gear. He was basically afraid that if he made any kind of wrong move, it was going to become even harder for him to escape, they would be keeping an even close on him. At this point, he had met and fallen in love with a free black woman named Anna Murray. She secured a sailor's uniform for him and gave him some of her savings to fund the way, and then he traveled using identification papers that had been borrowed from a free black man. He traveled by train and then steamboat and left Baltimore and traveled to New York City on September third, eighteen thirty eight. For a long time, he would not tell anyone exactly how he had done this, because he was afraid that if he did, that escape route from Baltimore would get shut down. And once he arrived at a safe house belonging to abolitionist David Ruggles, he sent for Anna and they were married on September fifteenth. The pair would eventually have five children together, Rosetta, Lewis, Frederick, Charles, and Annie. Knowing that Douglas had worked calking ships in Baltimore, Ruggles suggested that he'd go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, which had a large whale in shipping industry, as well as a sizeable free black community Douglas had traveled under several names while making his way to New Bedford, eventually landing on Johnson, but once he got there, there were so many other Johnson's in New Bedford that he thought it would be confusing to have yet another one, so he and Anna took the last name of Douglas. At first, the Douglas's life in New Bedford was dedicated to just trying to make ends meet and to find a home in their new community, and Douglas also resumed going to church. After encountering segregation and racism at New Bedford's Methodist church, he joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zionist Church and eventually he became a lay minister there. A few months after settling in New Bedford, Douglas got a copy of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. This was his entry into the anti slavery movement that he had first heard about back in Baltimore. Soon he was attending abolitionist meetings, and an eighteen forty one he attended and spoke at an anti slavery convention in Nantucket. This is his first time really speaking in public, and he didn't think he did a particularly great job. But afterward John A. Collins of the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society asked Frederick Douglas to come and work for them as a speaker. He began to travel around the North and Midwest speaking against slavery. And although Douglas had a remarkable ability to draw from his own experience to change hearts and minds, his opposition to slavery was not about his own enslavement. His focus was on humanity as a whole in the inherent brutality and destructiveness of the institution of slavery. But by writing about his own experience, he was giving potential abolitionists, particularly in the North, something many had lacked, and that was a window into the reality so the institution of slavery. This was incredibly important to the success of the movement for abolition, especially in the North. Slavery affected people's lives, particularly white people's lives, in really dramatic ways that they weren't necessarily even consciously aware of. Many wealthy and prominent families had earned their fortunes either directly through the slave trade or through industries that relied on enslaved labor. So even if no one in a community was currently enslaving anyone. It was incredibly likely that its wealthiest and most influential families were living on inherited wealth that came at least in part from slavery. And people were also traveling on roads and railroads, and attending schools and working in buildings that had been built by enslaved people, including the US Capitol building. So people were living in a nation that had been built on and financed through slavery, but they often didn't have a conscious connection to what any of that actually meant. That changed as Douglas spoke and wrote about fighting off dogs for crumbs of food, sleeping on bare floors with little protection from the cold, brutal beatings, the murder of an enslaved man named Denby at the hands of an overseer, the willful destruction and separation of enslaved families, and the constant exhausting work that continued well after the workday was over, as enslaved people then had to care for their own food, care for their quarters, mend their clothes, and on and on. But it wasn't simply Douglas's documentation of the daily conditions and degradations of enslavement that influenced the abolition movement. He also wrote extensively on how the institution of slavery impacted the enslavers as well as the enslaved. By making enslaved people into a class that was supposedly less than human, enslavers were also corrupting their own humanity. These were all things that Douglas had experienced and learned and thought about during his years of enslavement, and he was particularly adept putting them into words in a way that motivated readers and listeners to act. We should make clear he wasn't the only previously enslave person that was writing and speaking about their own experience, but he did become particularly famous. In eighteen forty five, he published the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in part to debunk critics claims that he was too eloquent to have ever really been a slave, and in it he detailed the experiences that we talked about in the first part of our episode today, including naming who his owners had been, and that was a colossal risk. Under fugitive slave laws, he could be captured and returned to Maryland, and as his book became a bestseller, he left the country, sailing for Liverpool on August sixteenth of eighteen forty five. He arrived in Britain just before the start of the Great Famine in Ireland. As a side note, this was not the only time that Frederick Douglass would have to flee the country. He did again in eighteen fifty nine after John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, after investigators found a letter that Douglas had written that could have led to his being named as a co conspirator. Douglas at that point didn't return home until eighteen sixty as the nation was careening towards Civil war, after learning that his daughter Annie had died at the age of eleven, so jumping back to eighteen forty five. For nearly two years, Douglas traveled around the British Isles and spoke against slavery and four civil rights, and while he was there, British supporters raised the funds to purchase his freedom. Thomas Auld first sold him to Hugh Auld for the sum of one hundred dollars, and Hugh released him from slavery on December fifth, eighteen forty six. Douglas returned to the United States the following year, and he and his family moved to Rochester, New York. Douglas received some criticism for allowing himself to be purchased, since to some it legitimized the institution that he was fighting against. They basically thought he was being complicit in the very thing that he was advocating to have abolished. But from Douglas's point of view, he had a calling and a duty to return to the United States and continue to fight slavery, something he would best be able to do if he was not simultaneously trying to evade capture or captured and returned South. Of course, the Civil War started in eighteen sixty one, and by that point Frederick Douglass was one of the most famous black men in the United States. Although the South was fighting the war in large part to protect and expand the institution of slavery, at first, the North was fighting primarily to preserve the Union. Douglas became an outspoken advocate for making the abolition of slavery one of the Union's goals as well, and he also recruited for the Union Army and two of his sons served in the fifty fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. In eighteen sixty three, Douglas met with Abraham Lincoln about the treetment of black soldiers fighting for the Union and advocated for their receiving equal pay. Of course, the abolition of slavery did ultimately get folded into the Union's goals in the Civil War, and when the war was over, slavery was indeed abolished. Douglas then turned his attention to protecting the lives and civil rights of African Americans, including campaigning for the right to vote. He also encouraged abolitionist organizations to turn their attention to Native Americans, whose condition he called quote the sadust chapter in our history. Frederick Douglas never looked at an accomplishment and then said, Okay, we're done now. If the thing he had been campaigning for was successful, he would then find the next thing. Yeah. And after the war, he also held a number of social and political positions, including Charge da Fair for the Dominican Republic, Minister Resident and Consul General to him, and the Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia. He served as president of the Freedman Savings Bank, and he was on the board at Howard University. The list of accomplishments and appointments that he had goes on and on and on. It is quite lengthy. And even before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass had become a supporter of women's rights. And especially because we were originally giving this episode as a live show at Convention Days in celebration of the anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, made a lot of sense to spend a little more time on that which we are going to do after another quick sponsor break. Frederick Douglas first met Susan B. Anthony in eighteen forty five, but his direct involvement with the movement for women's suffrage really started after he moved to Rochester with his family in eighteen forty seven. That December, he published his first issue of his newspaper, The North Star, which was one of several newspapers he would create and run during his lifetime. The north Star was printed with the motto right is of no sex, Truth is of no color. God is the father of us all, and we are all brethren. And the Seneca Falls Convention began on July nineteenth of eighteen forty eight, and Douglas was one of only thirty two men out of about three hundred attendees. Of these men, he was the only one who supported Elizabeth Katy Stanton's resolution that women be allowed to vote, and he seconded her motion that the right to vote be one of their resolutions. He was one of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments. Another woman's rights convention was held almost immediately in Rochester on August second of eighteen forty eight, and Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Katy Stanton recommended that Douglas be made its chair, although he ultimately wasn't, he did attend and speak at this convention as well, and both inventions were covered in the newspaper of the North Star. This was really like Frederick Douglass was already under a huge amount of scrutiny because he was a black man living in America, and becoming involved in the women's rights movement brought on a whole other layer of scrutiny because men who were involved in the movement were viewed with extreme suspicion and derision. There was a lot of undertone of like something must be wrong with you for you to be into this. Yeah, So there's definitely a lot of bravery in that move And in addition to being actively involved in the movement for women's rights and suffrage, Douglas took those ideas back with him to the movement for abolition. In eighteen forty eight, Douglas presided at the National Convention of Colored Freedmen in Cleveland, and under his leadership, the convention passed a resolution affirming equality between the sexes, and women were actively invited to participate. Douglas presided over and introduced similar affirmations at other abolitionist meetings as well. Although so obviously there were also black suffragists such as Ia b Wells Barnett and Anna Julia Cooper, the suffrage movement as a whole was largely focused on the needs and wants of relatively affluent white women, Like if you read the Declaration of Sentiments, there are parts in it about things like your property becoming your husband's property when you marry. So we're starting from the foundation of women affluent enough to have property. It's kind of a narrow segment of women. At the end of the Civil War, reconstruction efforts to guarantee civil rights, including the right to vote to former slaves and their descendants, clashed with this focus of looking for voting rights for white women. At first, it actually seemed as though these two movements for suffrage could combine. At the first Women's Rights Convention after the Civil War, its name was changed to the Equal Rights Association, which would work toward universal suffrage, not just suffrage for women, and Frederick Douglass was one of the Equal Rights Association's three vice presidents. But as the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution were drafted, a schism developed within the movement. The May eighteen sixty nine meeting of the Equal Rights Association took place after Congress had passed the fifteenth Amendment, as it was up for ratification by the States. This amendment read quote, the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. So this amendment made no reference to the right to vote as related to sex, and Douglas was willing to accept this less than universal suffrage because he knew how much resistance there was to women's voting rights in much of the nation, and he thought it was likely that the fifteenth Amendment could only be ratified if it didn't include women. He also thought that white women wanted the right to vote had other ways to take political action, while overall the black population desperately needed to vote because they had no other means to take political action themselves. Of course, many of the Equal Rights Association vehemently disagreed. In the ensuing discussion, Douglas said, quote, when women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp posts, when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement, when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn, when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads, when their children are not allowed to enter schools, they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to black men. Someone from the audience then asked whether this was not also true of black women as well, and he answered yes, yes, yes, it is true of the black women, but not because she is a woman, but because she is black. So he was basically pointing out that like yes, it was right and important for women to have the right to vote, but the need was a lot more dire for black people to have the right to vote. The debate over the fifteenth Amendment split the Equal Rights Association. At the conclusion of the meeting, it was disbanded, with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Katy Stanton forming the National Woman's Suffrage Association to once again focus only on voting rights for women, even to the extent of directly opposing the fifteenth Amendment. Those who supported the fifteenth Amendment formed the American Woman's Suffrage Association. We should also make it clear that this was not just an ideological dispute over the wording of the fifteenth Amendment and whether it included any references to sex or gender. There was also explicit racism at work, with Elizabeth Katy Stanton, for example, saying quote, what will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights? That would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers. I also kept finding reference to a quote by Susan B. Anthony about how she would rather cut off her right arm than campaign for vote for black people before women I couldn't find the original place where she purportedly said that, but it came up over and over. There were also elements of the suffrage movement who argued that women should have the right to vote because white women would help form a voting bloc that would help maintain white supremacy, even if black people could also vote, and one such advocate of this was Henry B. Blackwell, husband of suffragist Lucy Stone. When the fifteenth Amendment was ratified on February third, eighteen seventy, Frederick Douglas immediately began campaigning for a sixteenth Amendment to grant voting rights to women, and he would continue to advocate for women's suffrage for the rest of his life. Sadly, Charlotte Wodward was the only signer of the Seneca falls Convention's Declaration of Sentiments to live to see the ratification of the nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote on August eighteenth of nineteen twenty. Apparently because of her poor health, she never actually got to vote herself. But even then, the same racially discriminatory voting laws that had already been suppressing black men's right to vote since the end of reconstruction just applied to black women as well. So although the letter of the Nineteenth Amendment gave black women the right to vote, it was not until the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five that many black women and other women who were part of minority populations were actually able to do so. And of course, discriminatory voting laws and attempts to suppress voters still exists today. I feel like every time a turn around, there's another case before the Supreme Court about it. To close out his story, we're going to react turned for a moment to Frederick Douglas's last years. In the eighteen seventies, he moved to Washington, d c. And his wife, Anna, died of a stroke in eighteen eighty two. In eighteen eighty four, he remarried a woman named Helen Pitts, which raised some eyebrows because she was about twenty years younger than he was and she was also white. On February twentieth, eighteen ninety five, Frederick Douglass went to a meeting of the National Council of Women. He came home and began preparing to give a speech at a local church when he died suddenly of a heart attack. He was about seventy seven. He had been campaigning for equal rights until literally the last day of his life. That is Frederick Douglas. We were actually joined by Frederick Douglas there in Seneca Falls. Yeah, it was quite exciting. They had a wonderful reenactor there who was really great, and he came in halfway through and I turned into Buddy the Elf, so you got to see him. Yeah, he was very gracious, he was He was so kind. We had a lot of people who wanted to have pictures made after the show, and he accommodated everyone and was super just gracious and warm and lovely the whole time. Yeah, he was great. Yeah, So everyone we met and while we were in Seneca Falls was gracious and kind and welcoming. The National Park Service staff that we met were all amazing. We sa as I said at the top of the show, we were so honored to be able to do this show there in the Wesleyan Chapel. It is great. So if you get a chance to go to Seneca Falls, especially to go to a future convention days, Yeah, we had a great time. That's a pretty great event. Yeah. Sadly we did not get to spend a ton of time in Seneca Falls. It was a very that was a quick, quick turnaround tip. Yeah, it was a quick turnaround tip for both of us. Oh and I also would like to thank my spouse for writing with me slush driving the car all the way there and back. We made a weekend trip out of it, and I don't think I could have made the drive by myself because it's a stretch. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old house Stuffworks email address no longer works. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of IHEARTRADI d For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.