Behind the Scenes Minis: Paddles and The British Museum

0:01 Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy B.

0:13 Wilson.

0:14 And I'm Holly Frey. We talked about six Supreme Court episodes, six Supreme Court cases this week. Yeah. We did not do six episodes, although it is what I call it as six impossible episodes. A couple of these probably could have stood on their own as full episodes. There was enough detail. A lot of the time when we talk about Supreme Court cases, most of those have been mine to research. And a lot of times there's a more in-depth exploration of who these people were, what their whole background story was, all of that. And since these cases have not gotten the same level of historical attention as things like Brown v. Board, there wasn't as much of that. So...

0:56 The two that maybe could have stood on their own made more sense as this collection rather than just doing one or the other of them. Paddles, man. Oof. I just... I cannot imagine any person I know who teaches school today, number one, ever striking a child. Right.

1:20 Right.

1:20 Number two, having an implied threat of a paddle displayed in their classroom. I just, like, that's just not... Yeah. That's not how any of the teachers I know today work. Places I have lived, though, corporal punishment is still legal in schools. In North Carolina, where I grew up, it's one of the states where there's still a law on the books, but as far as I know, it is banned at all of the school board levels. Yeah. So it's not supposed to be implemented anymore. Yeah, you had asked me when you were first starting this one if I had remembered similar things, and I was like, absolutely.

2:01 And I got to thinking, and especially after you sent over the outline, because I moved when I was nine from the Pacific Northwest to Florida.

2:12 Right.

2:13 And I don't remember there being any... In the Pacific Northwest schools I was in.

2:19 Yeah.

2:20 Because I remember having a culture shock when I saw one on a teacher's desk in Florida and being like, what? Right. Yeah. I mean, I was not this eloquent about it as a kid, but I was definitely like, there is an implied danger of violence always at school, like from an adult. What is this?

2:41 Yeah. Yeah.

2:42 Yeah. We didn't read the part of the decision. There's a part of the decision that's like, well, there's no move whatsoever for corporal punishment to go away at schools. And I would say that's not fully true because there are still a lot of states and school systems where it's legal. And then there's also the whole issue of private schools being a whole other thing. But I would say there is a lot more consistent messaging from things like academies of pediatrics, teacher unions, those kinds of groups saying that disciplining kids by striking them does not work in the long run and is not good for them or anyone, really.

3:32 Right.

3:32 No, and it's weird because I'm sure you have run across this, right? Like, you will see this issue coming up, like, on social media. And there are always people that pop in and go, well, I got beat and I'm fine. And I'm just like. I keep saying it in every behind-the-scenes, but please go to therapy. I'm not sure you are fine. I don't mean to tell you your business. But I don't think that's great. And moreover, even if you are.

4:01 It kind of goes back to the same thing as like, I paid my student loans, everybody else should. It's like, okay, you got beat, but why would you want that for somebody else? Like, I don't understand that. I can't remember if I've said this on the show before, but when I was young, my mom started putting, I really think it was $ 50 per paycheck into a savings account for me.

4:30 And with $ 50 a paycheck, was able to save up enough money for me to go to four years at a state-supported school. I had to save up enough money. I had to get summer jobs and things to pay for books and spending money. So mom had tuition, room, and board covered, state-supported school, four years. If I needed more than four years or if I had to go to summer school, that was going to be on me or we would need to take loans. So I was able to graduate from public school debt-free. That's what I meant.

5:02 Public college in four years, debt-free. That school costs like more than four times more than it did when I was there. It is not an amount of money that can be saved up by $ 50 a paycheck anymore. And I don't think children should have to go into tens and tens or hundreds of thousand dollars of debt to go to school. No, me either. That's another thing that feels really messed up to me because I definitely remember the whole conversations about financial aid for school being told that that was good debt. Yeah, I mean, I definitely had debt when I graduated because I wanted to go to a private school.

5:50 Right. And....

5:54 When I graduated, there were two big loans and my dad kind of made the deal of like, I will work on one, you work on the other. But it took me a long time to pay that off.

6:02 Yeah.

6:03 But I did. But I similarly am like, yeah, I remember how awful that was and how stressful it was as I was also like trying to start my life to have that hanging over my head. Why would I want to do that to anybody else? Yeah. That was also the why I didn't go to graduate school thing. I had applied to some graduate schools that were part of state-supported universities where I would probably get like a teaching assistantship, that kind of thing. I did not get into any of those. And I cannot remember now if I did get into one of the private schools or if I was waitlisted. It's been 30-something years. But I was going to wind up at least $ 60, 000 in debt.

6:49 Yeah.

6:50 With a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

6:53 Yeah.

6:54 That big money-making job. Yeah, right. I didn't go to graduate school for that reason. So anyway, I have a lot of feelings about a lot of things that we've talked about today. On a much lighter note, reading about the school newspaper, The Spectrum. Yeah. The first summary of that case that I read described the principal as deleting the articles before it was published. And I was like, how were they making the school newspaper? Because I was on the newspaper staff in like 1993, 92, 93 is when I would have been on the newspaper staff. And that case was a school newspaper that was made in 1983 and the case decided in 1988. So I'm imagining that their process for creating the school newspaper probably involved

7:57 manually pasting paper copies of the articles onto a blue line sheet that would be sent to the printer. So cutting and pasting for people who were not doing newspapers during this era... you were physically cutting and pasting your columns of print onto these things to send to the paper. So when I read something that said that the principal deleted the articles, I was like, there was no delete. Like, you would have to... That key was not a thing. No, you would have to pull the things off of the paper and replace them with something else or just have blank space there. That would not work. And it wasn't until I got to the actual full reading of the entire decision that I said, oh, right, okay, there were

8:52 two full pages of the newspaper that would be a page front and back, effectively, that withheld those whole pages. That makes a lot more sense. Yeah, because you couldn't... I mean, that's the thing, based on his explanation of, like, there was no way to get it to the printer in time. Yeah.

9:11 Like, re....

9:13 Doing the layout of two pages when you have eliminated big chunks of them would have been a nightmare. That's a time-consuming task.

9:22 Yeah.

9:23 It was a time-consuming task, and at least for my newspaper staff, it was an all-hands-on-deck time-consuming task. Yes. And one of my friends who was on newspaper with me, I think two issues in a row missed layout day because... He was ill or something. I don't remember why, but I do remember us being very mad at him for missing two consecutive layout days that we were all having to make up for not having that person there to lay out the pages. Next kind of offbeat thing from the research on this was saluting the flag. Yes, thank you.

10:01 And how the flag salute was described as looking too much like a Nazi salute. I don't know if anybody still does this, but in the early decades of the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag in the United States, there was the Bellamy salute. I didn't write down Bellamy's first name, but he drafted one of the early versions of the Pledge of Allegiance. And it was a stiff arm, hands outstretched, definitely looking like what we think of today as a Nazi salute. At the time, the Nazi party didn't exist. It had not adopted a similar salute as the salute that is most known as the Nazi salute today.

10:47 But the fact that people were still doing a salute that looked like that in the 1940s as World War II was going on, I was like, wait a minute. That's weird. That's a little odd. Maybe a different salute than that. Or no salute. Yeah, I feel like our... When I was in school, it was just hand over heart. Yeah, it was... Our teachers would be silly and say, put your right hand over your left heart, which is... Probably only one in there, unless you're a Time Lord. I mean, that you know of, maybe. Maybe some of those kids were from another planet. That's possible. Possible. So, yeah, also, I just personally find the Pledge of Allegiance to be a little weird. And I don't remember if I ever abstained from doing it when I was in school, but

11:38 I would abstain from doing it now. Yeah, I... Aside from any, like, what the words you're saying, whether or not it invokes religion, etc., I just, on a strict, like, person who has watched horror films, get real creeped out by children speaking in unison. I'm like, oh, no good will come of that. Yeah.

12:06 Yeah.

12:08 My last random thing that I have written here is just the Warren Court. Yeah. I would say that of all the Supreme Courts, which are, you know, if you don't know that they are usually whoever is the chief justice, like they are known as that court for the amount of time that that person was the chief justice. So the Warren Court is my favorite of the Supreme Courts.

12:32 Sometimes I look at Supreme Court decisions and think that the Warren Court was the only good one. I would not say I agree with all of the Warren Court decisions by any stretch of the imagination, but the Warren Court is definitely the court that seems to be trying to progress the country in a lot of ways that other courts have been trying to do the opposite of.

12:57 And I have on my short list of things... the Warren Court. I don't know if that will ever happen because I don't actually know how it will tackle it. I've also thought about doing an episode on Earl Warren, who was governor of California before becoming a Supreme Court justice, and his actions as governor of California, as we have talked about on other episodes, were very different from a lot of the things that the Warren Court decided because he was governor of California in like during the removal and internment of Japanese people and their citizen children during World War II. One time I said that I had speculation that one of the reasons that the Warren court was so progressive was that he was kind of atoning

13:39 for that. And I got livid emails about it. So I'm saying it again. If you want to send me irate email about Earl Warren, I guess go ahead. Holly, did you have anything else you wanted to talk about? No! I mean, you know, it's a weird thing, the whole idea of, like, how children have been treated and perceived and legally protected or not through the years. Oh, sure.

14:10 Always kind of hurts my heart that some of these discussions even have to be had.

14:16 Yeah.

14:18 And I know, like, It is hard to be a teacher, to be a school administrator. Like, those are jobs that are thankless. And it's very tricky to even discuss these because in some cases, like, nobody wants to vilify the profession of teaching. But there are instances where, you know, bad judgment has been exhibited. It becomes a very tricky and fraught topic to me. Yeah.

14:44 Anyway. Yeah.

14:45 Nuance in all things.

14:47 Yeah.

14:48 My first draft of the outline ended with the sentence, in conclusion, children are persons with rights. And I deleted that sentence. I don't remember why. I said it now, though. There it went. Yeah.

15:03 Yeah.

15:12 We talked about Ashurbanipal and Ashurbanipal's library this week on the show. We sure did. I really was. I don't remember if this was before or after. I really hit a wall in the British Museum because it was very hot and I was very tired. And we had accidentally arranged the day where we did not have lunch in between our museum stops. And we were in an area of the museum that's devoted to the ancient world. I don't remember where specifically where I said, okay, I have got to sit down and eat or I'm going to lie down on this floor. Those are the options. And then it was either before or after that that I had become incredibly transfixed by this ancient library, which was...

16:09 really what drew me to learning about Ashurbanipal. And then I was like, oh, wow. Also, ruthless is the term that gets used a lot. Definitely apt. I'm not laughing at you being hungry in the British Museum. I'm laughing at my own thing when you were talking about what section you were in. And I remember being there at one point and my friend Woodrow was coming to meet me who lives there. And I said, we're in the room with the big giant head. And I just got the like, typing not typing typing not typing and then he was like holly that could be like 30 rooms there are a lot of rooms.

16:43 Yeah i'm just like okay i'm sorry as i as i was reading about all the various assyrian art sculpture material that's in the british museum i was having to sort of think, did I see that?

17:02 Or did I see a different sculpture that could also be described similarly?

17:07 Oh, right.

17:07 Also, we have also in the archive a two-parter on the Parthenon marbles. I have a lot of complicated feelings about the British Museum.

17:19 Yeah.

17:19 And to the point that when we were planning the trip to England, I went back and forth about whether I wanted to go. Because, like, there are incredible things there, and some of them are incredible things that I would love to see in person. But then I also have the knowledge of how so much of what is in the museum has this very, at best, questionable history of how it got there, including all of these library tablets, which were just sort of sent without having been kept up with. Some of that being connected to just the priority of we need to get this. And then some, the evolution of archaeology as a... Yeah. As a field.

18:12 I was kind of reminded of several years ago, Harvard was doing an archaeological dig on the campus looking for the Harvard Indian School. And Holly, you and I went out there to do some video.

18:27 Yeah.

18:27 A little video field trip.

18:29 And.

18:30 We were standing next to the area where when the students sifted what they had dug up from this like, you know, carefully plotted out area that they were excavating, there was an area where they would sift through what had been dug and see what was in it. And in the sifted area was what was obviously a roof tile.

18:54 Yeah.

18:55 And we had a whole conversation with, you know, the professors who were overseeing this about how, like, now this roof tile is effectively lost. Like, we don't know where the roof tile came from. We have no way at this point to trace it to where in the layers of the dig, which square it might have been in, any of that. And I thought about that when I was thinking about, like, that was one roof tile. This with the library is... roughly 20 000 tablets and fragments yeah i'm curious while you were at the british museum yes i'm gonna guess the answer's no but did you chat up any of the staff i really did not because i did when i was there last and we talked about you know the need for repatriation and stuff

19:45 and i will say it was very refreshing they are all on kind of on board but they're all like when you're in it, though, and you realize how many things have to be. sorted through annotated it's so much you have to have a plan for how to repatriate all of them that's not going to further damage anything delicate that also will right ensure its safety they're like it just takes so much time and we understand that people want us to just give everything back yeah but like it's a decades-long process if you want to do it properly And I said, I guess I hadn't thought about how long that timeline has to be. Oh, sure.

20:22 But I was very delighted to talk to them. And they were always really, really lovely with me. And nobody was like, why are you asking these questions? So it was great. It was great. I, on the other hand, was typically like, I do not want to speak to anyone or be perceived or chat anybody up. I want the inside scoop.

20:37 Yeah.

20:38 At all times. Something that I did notice that I had previously felt like was kind of lip service when it came to the British Museum specifically was there's a whole idea of we have made this collection that's accessible to anyone. But the reality is it's in England. So it's the most accessible to the people in England. But when we were there, there were so many people who were there at the same time that we were. who were clearly from or closely connected to other places, speaking other languages, you know, groups of people together who, you know, maybe they live in the UK now, but are fluent in some other language. They are speaking together out in the world. And so that did not erase any of

21:29 my qualms but did kind of make me go okay there are there is a there's a larger spectrum of people here than i thought that then i just sort of imagined in my head that there would be oh yeah yeah yeah yeah a couple of other things that kind of jumped out at me one is uh the shift in how we talk about the origins of civilizations Because when I was in school and even into when I was in college in North Carolina in the 1980s and 90s, there was this idea of Western civilization. You took American history and you took Western civilization. And Western civilization was this framework of looking at history outside of the United States, but it kind of was a progression of Mesopotamia to Egypt to Greece and Rome to Europe

22:33 and making this idea of this is Western civilization. Today, I would say the more common framework for looking at this is world history, which is broader in its focus. My college alma mater is had a big humanities focus and a liberal arts focus for the curriculum. That has also been expanded out from... It was not called Western civilization when I was there, but it was a very, quote, Western focus. And that has become a lot broader. And reading through the research for this episode... And sort of seeing the focus from much older material versus the focus from things that have been written a lot more recently.

23:21 You could really see that shift in the thought process from, like, Western civilization to a more global world history. There is a book about this library. I have not read it, but it does exist. It is called The Library of Ancient Wisdom, Mesopotamia, and the Making of the Modern World. That is by Selina Wisdom. That's W-I-S-N-O-M, not Wisdom with a D. And I did read, I think, a couple of papers by the author, and I think listened to one interview. I did not try to read the whole book.

24:07 It's only a couple of years old. That was just more than I had the capacity to do.

24:11 Yeah. Wow.

24:13 Preparing this episode. But yeah, that's another foray into much longer ago than the 19th century were. I was delighted that there was a reference to the possible hanging gardens of Babylon. Oh, yeah. Because, as you may recall, we talked about that briefly in our episode on hydroponics. Uh-huh. This was a good reminder to me that I need to finish resetting all of my hydroponic systems. Oh, yeah.

24:40 I'm in the middle of, like, big, long reboot of everything, which, you know, since it's getting harder and harder to safely purchase lettuce. Yeah. I'm very eager to go back to just growing my own right here in the office. Yeah, we shifted away. We were doing mostly leafy greens and herbs. Yeah. And we had shifted almost entirely to herbs.

25:07 Oh.

25:08 And then all of the Well, and then we also had an aphid incident that caused us to lose a couple things. But we had gotten into a more herb-focused thing right when all of that started with the lettuce problems. And I was kicking myself for having harvested and eaten up all the lettuce. Same. I was like, we had spider mites, which are just persnickety as heck. And even if you do all the stuff, sometimes they just won't vanish.

25:41 So I'm like, great, we're just going to pull everything and restart everything. And I've been so slow about that process. Partially because we do always keep at least four active jalapeno plants growing because my beloved loves them. And also I like to use them in cocktails. They're great for mocktails if you are not a drinker. They'll still give it a nice little kick of that same sense of drinking like an alcoholic drink anyway those things are hanging on man even though some of them are like the mites have gotten us but look behold our glorious bounty of fruits yeah so I'm trying to let those die out but this is a good reminder this is the universe going holly do the thing just clear that biz

26:22 out move those outside and let them live or die we don't know what's gonna happen the thing we have multiple of is basil yeah have a lot of basil we always love a basil Anyway, I liked learning about a person that I most associated with the They Might Be Giants song called the Mesopotamians, in which the Mesopotamians...

26:47 are a band that is touring, and it's Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh. Those are the four members of the band. I knew already a bit about Gilgamesh and Hammurabi. I don't know a lot about Sargon. I don't know if there will be a Sargon episode at some point in the future. Do you know what I really want after this episode? What's that? Because as you recall... I used to work in cataloging in a university library. Oh, yeah.

27:15 I want someone to decipher Ashurbanipal's cataloging system. Yeah. Well, some of it is a bit. Like, I read some papers that were about looking at the colophons and what they said and how there are specific annotations that are used only on specific types of texts. And I don't know... if that has been reconstructed into, like, this is what the whole system looked like. It's possible that that knowledge is in the book, The Library of Ancient Wisdom, Mesopotamia, and the Making of the Modern World. Listen, I just look forward to a new phase when not only can we pit Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal against each other, but also a new contender has entered the ring. I'm ready.

28:04 Yeah.

28:04 I have a membership to a private library where the classifications are Library of Congress and Cutter. Cutter is part of Library of Congress.

28:13 Oh.

28:13 Cutter numbers are the extended, like, CODA numbers of a Library of Congress number. Maybe I'm misremembering, because there's two different classification systems in use at the library, and when you look for books, it tells you which of the classification systems it is filed under. Now it is possible, now I'm looking it up really quick.

28:37 Yeah.

28:38 That if you are in, yeah, I always, Cutter numbers were always part of Library of Congress. Yeah. There's the Library of Congress Cutter table. I'm not losing my mind. I am misremembering then what the results say. My curiosity, though, is that because it's a private library, if they have a section that is very specifically one thing, they may do away with the earlier half of it and only work with the cutter numbers. Oh, sure. You know what I mean? Because those get into, like, really fine-tuning how you designate where things will go on the shelf.

29:12 Yeah.

29:13 I have also had on my short list for a long time dewy as a person me too but i just like i know i just don't i don't have the patience for such a terrible man yeah yeah yeah and i'm not a fan of his system i know it's very good for elementary and public libraries i know it is sure but it's so limited sometimes it is yeah Just the dumb, just the stupidest thing to get irritated by, but there we are. Anyway, we're all going to adopt this new form that we're going to discern, fully flesh out and develop.

29:53 Yeah.

29:54 No, we're not. No, we're not. Well, whatever is happening on your weekend, If there's a trip you're going to make to a museum or a library or someplace where you can find some knowledge that you haven't had previously, boy, do I hope that's great. Whatever is happening on the weekend, I hope it is going as well as possible. If you're working, I hope everyone is great to you, both your colleagues and any members of the public you may have to face during your working time. I don't know why I suddenly got a little hoarse while trying to talk, but Hope it's a combination of restful and productive in whatever balance is best for you. We will be back on Monday with a brand new episode of the show and tomorrow with a Saturday classic. Stuff You Missed in

30:48 History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.