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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 Frey. This is part two of the latest installment of Unearthed. We have, in this second part this week, so many books and letters. I don't think we've ever had this many things to file under books and letters in one episode before. There are so many, we have to take a break in the middle. We've also got some shipwrecks and some Neanderthals. And we're starting, as always, with the things, the random things that I call potpourri.

And we're going to jump right in with toilets. We have talked about Roman latrines carrying evidence of pathogens on other installments of unearthed, especially parasites like tapeworm. There's a lot of interesting finds that happen in these places. A team in Poland has examined human waste remains from Roman toilets dating back to the 2nd through the 4th century CE and found the expected parasites. But they also found the protozoan parasite cryptosporidium, which until now has been believed to have originated in Central America. It's being described as the earliest reliable evidence of cryptosporidium in the region, and of course, evidence that it was in Europe prior to contact with the Americas. When I first saw the headline that was something like,

researchers find parasites in Roman toilets. I was like, no kidding. We are aware the Romans were full of parasites. But then I said, okay, this one's actually interesting and new. Next, researchers have identified a glass bottle found in York, England in 1983 or 1984, which dates back to the second century as a coal bottle, K-O-H-L, the substance used to line the eyes in Egyptian culture. This is the first and only one of these ever found in Roman Britain. The style matches bottles that were made in Egypt, and coal was used almost exclusively in Egypt and Sudan in this era. It also was not really traded far beyond that region. The bottle's shape and size make it really impractical for most other uses, so, conclusion, it is a coal bottle. how did it get there?

The area where this was found was a rubbish dump in the second century, but it is, as Tracy said, unclear exactly how it would have ended up there. It is possible that it belonged to a Roman soldier, either one from Egypt or one who had spent a significant amount of time there before arriving in Britain.

Yeah, it's kind of a good reminder that while this, we don't know for sure how it got there, the Roman Empire was a multicultural, multi-ethnic empire, and that included Roman Britain. Next, researchers examining Ming Dynasty surgical tools, dating back about 600 years, have discovered that they were treated with a numbing agent. This was a topical anesthetic that was likely made from plant secretions. The residue on the tool contained trace amounts of aconitine, which is found in plants like monkshood and wolfsbane. Creating this anesthetic would have required people to figure out how to extract these toxic compounds from the plants without harming themselves, and then how to reduce their toxicity so that they created a numbing substance without that substance causing other issues like poisoning the patient. According to this research, this weakening process was done by soaking the plants in urine, black soybean soup, or vinegar.

And lastly, according to research published in the journal iScience, Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici and Grand Duke Francesco de' Medici both died of malaria. This was already believed to be their cause of death, but there were also persistent arguments that the two men had really been poisoned because the Medici's are just associated with poison. Researchers came to this conclusion by analyzing the brother's skeletons, finding evidence of two different species of malaria parasite. One was a novel strain of Plasmodium falcoparum, which causes the deadliest form of human malaria today.

I guess it's within the realm of possibility that they had malaria and were poisoned

the malaria was actually poisoned and I'm just making it people love to like they love the cloud of mystery and drama around the Medici's and I think that feeds it yeah

now we're going to move on to so many books and letters that as I said at the top of the show we're going to have to take a break part way through a papyrus fragment from the archives of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo have been found to contain 30 previously unpublished verses by Empedocles. Empedocles was a pre-Socratic philosopher who lived around the 5th century BCE. These verses have now been published in a book. Its title is in French, but means Empedocles of Cairo, along with a translation and a commentary.

This previously unknown fragment is the first original text that we have from Empedocles' work, rather than a summary or a quotation from a later philosopher like Plato or Aristotle. Analysis of the original text suggests that it's the source of a passage Plutarch wrote in the second century CE, and that it also influenced other philosophers, again, including Plato and Aristotle. A press release from the

University of Liège, characterized the importance of this find in this way that I really love. Quote, imagine that in a few centuries' time, all that remains of Victor Hugo are excerpts from Les Miserables in school textbooks, the musical Notre Dame de Paris, and the program for a performance of the play Hernani. The discovery of a few pages from an original edition of Hugo's work would then be a momentous event. And speaking of previously unpublished writings,

Professor Christian Tournau of the University of Würzburg discovered two previously unknown sermons by Augustine of Hippo while deciphering a 12th century manuscript housed in a monastery in Poland. The manuscript was known to contain works by St. Augustine, but not that two of the works were previously undiscovered. An edition of these texts is expected to be published

sometime this year. Next, two fragments of a stele were found at the Wolsong Palace in what's now Gyeongju, South Korea. One of them was found at the palace site in 1937, and the other was found during excavations of a moat surrounding the palace in 2020. In 2024, researchers noted that there were some similarities between those two pieces, and further research revealed that they were made of similar stone. And ultimately, a 3D scan of each of the two fragments showed that they had a broken edge and they would fit back together like puzzle pieces.

This stele dates back to the Scylla Kingdom around the 4th or 5th century. And fitting these two pieces together has allowed researchers to read a character that was previously illegible because it was broken in two. it is not enough though for a full interpretation of the stele. It is a small bit of a larger inscription with only a few characters visible. The ones that are included are words like tribute, white, heaven, and call, which was the character that had been broken through the middle. These fragments are on display at the Gyanju

National Museum until August. Archaeologists in Egypt have found a fragment of Homer's Iliad under the wrappings of a mummy that was found during excavations in late 2025. This piece of Homer's Iliad appears to have been intentionally included in the mummification process, making it the first known Greek literary text to be used in such a way.

This particular passage is from Book 2 of the Iliad in a section known as the Catalog of Ships. Right now, the reason for its use in the mummification process is unclear. The team leading the work gave a statement to Smithsonian Magazine saying they were studying and proposing various hypotheses. I personally hope it just turns out he loved it.

Yeah, my hypothesis is this person really, really loved either Homer or Boats. Uh-huh. Next, three historians have worked together to decipher a secret diplomatic letter dating back to the end of the 15th century. This letter was written by Toledo nobleman Pedro de Ayala, who was a diplomat in service to Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, and he wrote this letter from Scotland in 1496 after being sent there to try to negotiate a peace agreement between Scotland and England. This letter is 11 pages long. Now that it's been deciphered, we know it contains all kinds of information about the court of Henry VII of England and James IV of Scotland and the voyages of John Cabot to North America, as well as other subjects, this text, when it was written, was partially encrypted using symbols, and the same letters were sometimes represented by multiple different symbols, which made the deciphering process challenging.

This research has been published as an open-access paper in the Journal of Renaissance Studies.

Speaking of letters, eight letters from John Keats to Fanny Braun were discovered to be missing back in 1989, and they have now been found and returned to the Whitney family. The letters had been previously in a volume owned by John Hay Whitney, who died in 1982, and they were part of a set of letters that had been broken up and auctioned off to multiple people back in 1885.

These letters were rediscovered after someone tried to sell a book at B&B Rare Books in New York in 2025. The store owners were suspicious and looked up the book in a stolen art database called the Art Loss Register and also got in touch with Susan J. Wolfson, a literature professor at Princeton. New York's Antiquities Trafficking Unit also started an investigation leading to the discovery and return of not just the John Keats volume, but also 16 other books that had been part of the Whitney collection. While the investigation is ongoing, the man who tried to sell the books said he inherited them from his grandfather, so the circumstances of the book's original disappearance are still unclear.

Multiple people involved with this find have described it as very meaningful, including Wolfson, who called it the find of a lifetime, and various members of the Whitney family. The Keats letters were auctioned off in June, and according to reporting in Smithsonian Magazine, the proceeds were to be donated to the Whitney Family Foundation.

Lucy Monroe of King's College, London, has found documents confirming the location of the house William Shakespeare purchased in London in 1613, three years before he died. These documents include a plan of the Blackfriars' precinct created in the aftermath of the 1666 Great Fire of London. This plan shows the layout and size of the house, as well as the buildings surrounding it. Monroe also found documents relating to the sale of the property by Shakespeare's granddaughter later on, showing that it remained in the family until 1665.

According to this plan, part of the Blackfriars' house is now the site of 5 St. Andrews Hill. And that's a 19th century building that now has a historical blue plaque that says that in 1613, Shakespeare purchased lodgings near the site. Now we know that it was actually on the site. Right there. We are going to take a quick sponsor break and then...

we're going to have more Books and Letters.

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only at legends with a z.com our next book and letter find is that scholars from trinity college Dublin, who were working at the National Central Library of Rome, found a previously unknown copy of the oldest known poem in the English language. That is Cadman's hymn. It was found in a rediscovered copy of Historia Ecclesiastica, which was written by the Venerable Bede. The Venerable Bede was a monk who lived in the 8th century. This rediscovered manuscript is a fairly early copy of Bede's work, and it was transcribed in the early 9th century. It is the third oldest copy of Cadman's hymn in existence.

And this is a short poem. It's only nine lines long, and it's attributed to a cowherder known as Cadman. According to the lore around this poem, Cadman was illiterate and this poem was divinely inspired. While it was written in Old English, many of the surviving copies of it are in Latin, sometimes with the Old English text included, as a margin note or at the end. Older copies of the Venerable Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica include a Latin version of the poem, but it appears that the transcriber of this copy replaced the Latin version with the original Old English one, or was copying from a version of the manuscript that had already done that. This suggests that people who were copying this text roughly 100 years after Bede finished his history thought the Old English version was important enough to include, rather than the religious and scholarly default of Latin.

Next, the Danish National Museum has embarked on an effort to digitize and analyze its collection of cuneiform tablets in a project called Hidden Treasures, the National Museum's Cuneiform Collection. These tablets come from what's now Iraq.

in Syria, and some of them are at least 4,000 years old. Until now, the museum's focus has been largely on preserving these clay tablets, not on deciphering them. So knowledge of what's actually written on a lot of them is very recent. Some of the ones that have been analyzed so far include 3,000-year-old tablets from the city of Hama, which include a lot of medical treatments, magical incantations, and an anti-witchcraft ritual. There is a copy of a list of rulers that includes a reference to the legendary King Gilgamesh from the Epic of Gilgamesh,

and there's also a receipt for beer. Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a non-destructive method for analyzing parchment manuscripts. Parchment is made from animal skins, so cellular material can provide a lot of information about what kind of animal the skin came from and when and where the animal lived. Over time, this can also contribute to knowledge of animal husbandry practices in the places where the parchment was prepared.

This technique involves swabbing parchment with the same sort of brush that's used to collect cellular material from humans during pap tests. If you've had a pap test and you're in disbelief that this is a non-destructive method, I know it does not feel good a lot of the time, but it is collecting the cellular material without harming the parchment. So the fears about causing damage to manuscripts has really been a barrier to this kind of research into their materials before now. So researchers are hopeful that this project, which involved non-destructive sampling from 91 different parchment manuscripts, will help gain some trust in this method.

It's more bathroom talk for me. Archaeologists in Germany have found a notebook in a medieval latrine. So unlike today's paper notebooks, which would probably be ruined if you drop them in a latrine, don't do that. This one was made from leather and wood, very tightly bound, and eight of its 10 pages were coated in wax. This wax would have made the pages erasable so the person using them could mark their notes with a stylus and then refresh the wax to reuse the page. And they also, as a consequence, helped preserve the notebook while it was in that latrine.

This notebook is small. It's about the size of the palm of the hand. The pages are largely still legible, and the notebook seems to have belonged to a merchant in what's now Paderborn, roughly 700 years ago. The pages are written in Latin in a cursive style that was popular from about the late 13th to early 14th centuries. Researchers are hoping to analyze the visible text and to see whether earlier layers of wax might still be legible if they use the right imaging technologies. They are also going to research the leather binding, which is decorated with embossed lilies.

Researchers from Heidelberg University have deciphered a Roman curse tablet made of lead dating back to about the 2nd century and found in what is now the Netherlands. Its text is not in Latin like most of the cursed tablets that have been found in Northern Europe. It's in ancient Greek written in an Egyptian style.

The text was deciphered with the help of reflectance transformation imaging, which involves taking multiple pictures of something through different lighting conditions, and then those images can be combined into one that can be adjusted with different variations in the lighting to see different parts of the surface and variations in the surface. So that includes things like the etchings on this tablet, which are incredibly hard to see with the unaided eye. Looking at pictures of this thing, I almost mistook it for leather because it is so worn.

This cursed tablet includes magical symbols along with the names of two women and two men who are referred to as fellow slaves. It's not clear whether the four enslaved people were working together to curse someone or if this is an account of the curse being against the four of them.

The plan for this tablet is for it to be displayed at the Hereland Museum and for the text to be made part of a scholarly publication so that it's available for other people to study.

The idea of virtually unrolling scrolls scrolls has come up on several installments of Unearthed. That's using CT scanning, x-rays, and other imaging techniques, along with other technologies, to read what is written on scrolls that are too delicate or damaged to physically unroll without destroying them. One that made the news in June was a scroll that was badly damaged in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79. This is the first time that researchers have fully unwrapped a whole scroll and recovered all the text from it, although analysis of that text is still in progress. We talked about the

partial unrolling of this scroll back in 2023. The virtually unrolled scroll has text covering about 1.5 meters or 4.9 feet written across 20 columns. It is being described in a lot of reporting as having been deciphered with AI. And this is a great example of how blanket use of the term AI is kind of muddying the distinctions between all the different kinds of technology that are described with this label. This is not in any way a case of researchers putting an inscription through a chatbot and having it spit out a translation. Researchers trained the AI to recognize ink that the unaided eye cannot easily differentiate from the charred surface of the scroll. And then, once the AI had figured out which parts of it were ink, eight qualified papyrologists, all of them being actual human beings, analyzed those renderings. Computer science professor Brent Seals, who's been a big part of the Vesuvius challenge that this work is part of, put it this way, quote, this is no longer just about imaging or machine learning. Now we need experts who can read, edit, and understand what they are saying.

Our last bit of books and letters is also a music find. The National Library of France has found a previously unknown manuscript by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, written in collaboration with a student in a stack of anonymous manuscripts. This discovery came about thanks to curator Francois-Pierre Goy examining the manuscript and thinking something seemed familiar about it. Goy had been recently examining manuscripts that were known to be Mozart's work.

Yeah, it started to look a little familiar. This manuscript likely dates back to when Mozart was tutoring Marie-Louise Philippine de Bonnière de Guine, whose father thought that she could be trained to be a composer. She played the harp, and her father played the flute, and he wanted pieces that the two of them could play together. The National Library of France announced this

find on June 19, and the compositions made their debut three days later in a performance that was broadcast on Radio France. Harpist Nicola Tullez and flautist Mathilde Calderini had to rehearse in secret to prepare for this performance. Armand Brenzing, the director of the Mozart Library at the International Mozartium Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, told the New York Times that this is the most important Mozart discovery in decades. I really love the idea of the musicians having

to secretly rehearse this before it was announced. So no one can hear it but them. Now we're moving on from the books and letters to the shipwrecks. Marine archaeologists have found the Danabrage, which was sunk in the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, as was the case with some of the finds off of Copenhagen that we talked about in our last installment of Unearthed. This was at the site of new housing, which is going to be built on an island that will be made in Copenhagen Harbor. So divers are working to recover as many artifacts from this ship as possible before the whole area becomes a construction site.

Next, the University of Cadiz has embarked on a project called Project Heracles to identify shipwrecks in a bay near the north end of the Strait of Gibraltar. This area is home to the Pillars of Hercules, thus the project's name. As of April, the project had identified 151 archaeological sites in the bay, and 134 of them were shipwrecks. So far, 34 of the shipwrecks have been documented. 23 of those are Roman ships, 24 are from the early modern period, and others are kind of scattered across history. The oldest dates to the Punic era in the 5th century BCE. The researchers are making virtual models and 360-degree videos of the sites to make them more accessible to the public, and of course, this is an ongoing project.

Next, divers off the coast of Cornwall, England, may have discovered the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Tampa, which sank in 1918 after being torpedoed by a German submarine. The Tampa had been escorting other ships back and forth between Gibraltar and the U.K. when it was sunk. 131 sailors were on board the Tampa, making this the largest launch.

loss of life for the U.S. Navy due to marine combat during World War I.

Divers had been looking for the ship and had gone on nine unsuccessful dives before finding it in April. The ship is in deep water, so they were not able to stay very long before needing to return to the surface, probably less than 15 minutes. It is hoped that future dives will be able to collect more evidence and conclusively determine the ship's identity. Yeah, it basically

took them so long to acclimate to the depth that they were getting to that once they were down there, they did not have a lot of time left. The USS Herring was sunk by a Japanese shore battery in 1944 after attacking and sinking two Japanese merchant ships. The Herring was a submarine and all 83 of its crew members were killed when it sank. A Russian expedition found a vessel that was believed to be the herring in 2017. And the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command confirmed

the ship's identity this year. And in slightly different and very cool shipwreck news, scientists at Aalto University in Finland have used surplus pieces of a 17th century shipwreck to make dresses. The wreck was found in 2019 under the parking lot of a hotel that was being renovated. Wood from the wreck was expected to be discarded, so researchers salvaged that wood, processed it into a silky fiber using a process called ion cell, and then spun that fiber into yarn. The dresses were machine-knit as one intact, seamless piece, with a pattern made with the help of an evolutionary algorithm software tool. Another thing in this installment of Unearthed that's under the label of AI.

But similarly, not a large language model chatbot. So yeah, these are like two identical maxi dresses. One was sent to the Olu Art Museum for an exhibition called Tomorrow's Wardrobe, which I looked at briefly and it's full of a number of very cool and funky dresses. The other was sent to Alto University for a forthcoming exhibit called Designs for a Cooler Planet. Other wood from the wreck has also been used to create a hand-shaped art exhibit called Ottie's Palm.

We are going to pause here for one more sponsor break before we wrap up Unearthed for the quarter.

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There was so much research about Neanderthals over the last few months. Of all the extinct species of humans, Neanderthals are our closest relative, and they come up almost every episode of Unearthed, but I don't think we have ever had this many different papers and articles in one session.

First, researchers in Germany have re-examined findings from an amateur archaeological dig that was carried out in 1948. One of the things that was found was an eight-foot-long wooden spear between the ribs of the skeleton of a straight-tusked elephant. This find dated back 125,000 years, at which point only Neanderthals were known to live in the area, so of course it had to be a Neanderthal spear.

Well, this find was kind of controversial, though, especially since an amateur carried it out. An obvious interpretation was that Neanderthals had hunted the elephant and had used that spear to kill it. But at that time, researchers also thought of Neanderthals' primitive scavengers not capable of hunting, so some argued that the spear was really a digging tool and that its discovery with the bones was just a coincidence. This new research, published

in the journal Scientific Reports, has found cut marks on the elephant's ribs and spine, suggesting that it was butchered while it was fresh. Analysis of the teeth suggests that the elephant died at age of about 30, meaning it was an adult in its prime. We have also talked about other research suggesting that Neanderthals ate elephant meat. All of this adds up to suggest the interpretation that Neanderthals intentionally hunted this elephant, meaning the spear was probably a hunting weapon, not a digging tool that just happened to wind up near some elephant bones.

In addition to the outdated idea that Neanderthals were primitive scavengers, there's been a general perception that they were less intelligent than Homo sapiens. A couple of recent studies challenged this idea as well. One study published in Science Advances builds on earlier work about human genetics and language abilities. This led to research into the human genome and genetic regulatory elements known as human ancestor quickly evolved regions that have an outsized influence on language ability. It turns out that the Neanderthal genome includes some of these same genetic elements, the same ones that are in human beings today, so they were present before Neanderthals and Homo sapiens diverged from a common ancestor. That means the capability for language might also be a lot older than was previously thought. Other research published in

of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that while Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had differently shaped skulls, that doesn't mean Neanderthals had significantly different brains or cognitive abilities than the Homo sapiens that existed at the same time. The researchers point out that there's a lot of variation in today's brain anatomy. They compared the brains of ethnic Han Chinese people and Americans with European ancestry, finding that in most regions of the brain, there is a bigger difference between people of Chinese and European ancestry than there would have been between Neanderthals and early modern humans. And another study published

in Royal Society Open Science examined ancient baby teeth and bones and concluded that Neanderthals grew and developed in their very early years similarly to the way modern humans do, suggesting

there might also be other similarities. Next, another paper published in Scientific Reports concludes that Neanderthals hunted European pond turtles, primarily not for their meat, but for their shells, which they used to make tools. The shells that were analyzed had scrape and cut marks on the insides, suggesting that the meat and organs were thoroughly removed and the insides of the shells were cleaned. But these turtles are very small, so this process wouldn't have yielded much.

edible meat, leading to the idea that they probably were not a major food source. The resulting shells could have been useful as containers or scoops, and turtle shells have been found in locations that Neanderthals probably used for rendering grease. This paper also documents the hunting of turtles much farther north than was previously known. The idea that

a particular food source wouldn't have yielded much food comes up relatively often in these kinds of articles. They're just like, oh, these clams would have been really small. It would have been really inefficient to be trying to get the meat from them. And I don't know if I fully believe that argument because maybe the turtles were really delicious. Maybe it was in fashion sort of to have turtle. We don't really know, but that's sort of the general conclusion here. Something else that Neanderthals may have used as tools was rhinoceros teeth. This conclusion comes from the study of fossil rhinoceros teeth that had unusual marks and fractures. This research involved analyzing those fossilized teeth as well as experiments done with modern rhinoceros teeth, including using the modern teeth to retouch stone tools and for things like napping and for other tasks. Researchers concluded that Neanderthals probably used rhinoceros teeth primarily as percussion tools and that they preferred using the teeth of older animals, possibly because those older teeth were flatter due to wear and that made them easier to handle.

Research published in the journal PLOS One suggests that Neanderthals had the understanding and the manual dexterity to treat tooth infections by drilling into a tooth and removing diseased pulp. This conclusion comes from examination of one nearly 60,000-year-old molar. A hole drilled into the center of the tooth goes into the pulp cavity, and the microscopic grooves in the hole are similar to ones made by stone point tools found in the same cave as the tooth. The tooth also has wear patterns that would have been made after the tooth was drilled while the person was still alive, suggesting they lived for some time after going through this procedure, or enduring this procedure, since it would have been very, very painful. If this interpretation is correct, this is the world's oldest successful dental treatment that we know of.

An ongoing topic of research into Neanderthals is what exactly caused them to become extinct. A modeling study published in Quaternary Science Reviews suggests that neither changes in the climate nor increased competition with Homo sapiens can fully account for Neanderthals' extinction. Instead, it concludes that increased networks among groups of Homo sapiens might have given them an advantage that the Neanderthals did not have. With greater networks of allies and relatives, groups of Homo sapiens who started to struggle due to something like climate or natural disasters or demographic changes or some other reason would have had more options for places they could go, communities they could join and find support, that kind of thing.

Arianne Burke, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Université de Montréal and head of the Quebec-based hominin dispersals research group, led this study. In Burke's words, quote, These networks act as a safety net. They allow for the exchange of information on resources and animal migrations, the forming of partnerships, and temporary access to other territories in the event of a crisis.

Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences comes to a slightly different conclusion about the Neanderthal extinction, and that's that declining genetic diversity may have played a role. This lack of genetic diversity could have made different groups of Neanderthals more susceptible to those same kinds of changes in climate or natural disasters that were referenced in the earlier study. This conclusion comes from analysis of mitochondrial DNA among Neanderthals at six sites in Belgium, France, Germany, and Serbia.

On the other hand, other research published in the journal Nature examined genetic data from 27 Neanderthals from what's now Belgium and France from shortly before they became extinct and concluded that they were more diverse than was previously thought.

Yeah, I did not try to compare those two studies line by line, but came to slightly different conclusions. We have one final thing. Before we wrap up, on the 4th of July, the United States Domestic Policy Council issued a 162-page report called Saving America's Story, How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institute Constitution's National Museum of American History erases our heritage. Since this happened in July, it is normally something that we would talk about in our next installment of Unearthed, but given the scope of this and the connections to things that we have already been talking about on Unearthed, it seemed weird to just not mention it at all. I have not read this report in its entirety because, again, it was issued on July 4th, and I heard about it on July 5th, and we are recording this installment of Unearthed on July 7th. I spent the entirety of July 6th writing about all of the things that I had already flagged to talk about. There was no time left for a 162 page Smithsonian report rabbit hole. It was a long, long day just with the work that already needed to be done besides that. But here is the crux to quote from the report. Quote, As this report shows, the museum purportedly presents America as a problematic country, irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the museum's current telling, the country is above all defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, via misogyny and systemic injustice. The report identifies a broad pattern. The founders are minimized, if not entirely excluded. Traditional patriotic narratives are treated with suspicion, if not outright contempt. And the basic symbols and stories that once helped unify Americans are presented not as reasons for gratitude and inspiration, but as objects to be inherently questioned, dismantled, problematized, and reinterpreted to achieve ideological ends. So to reiterate something that we said more than a year ago when we started talking about the restoring truth and sanity to American history executive order, this idea that the purpose of history is patriotism and national pride, as suggested by that passage, that is an ideology. the kinds of changes that are being promoted through these kinds of publications and government orders are attempts to erase our heritage there is only one heritage that is of interest to the people who wrote this paper what's being erased with the kinds of changes that are made to these museums and other sites is largely the heritage of anybody who is not white or christian or

probably male. As I said, I have not read this entire thing, but the bits that I did look at in order to write this paragraph are full of bad faith readings and cherry-picked out-of-context examples. So I just want to say straightforwardly, we stand with the Smithsonian, and we stand with all of the historians and archivists and librarians and researchers and teachers who are out there trying to do accurate and nuanced and non-whitewashed history in the face of all of this

nonsense. Amen. I also feel like I know I invoke William Blake all the time, but his whole thing of like, you cannot be truly good unless you have known evil. Like if you are just a good and innocent thing that is never tempted and never faces, you know, dark things or does anything bad that's really meaningless. What makes people great is rising above all of that and like living through it and knowing they want to be better so essentially this is like would you like the most bland pap version of this that offers no ideological growth in terms of like how we could be better than our forebears and learn from their mistakes and overall the country gets better and better yeah it's just like this is for four-year-olds come on yeah one of the things that

this report explicitly takes objection to is somebody saying that loving America is complicated. And I'm like, if loving America is not complicated for you, I don't understand what you're doing. Like, I just don't. I just don't. I have, I didn't pick this on purpose to go along with that final statement. It just happens to be the next unread listener mail that I have in the stack. And it is from Kiki. and it is about Shenandoah National Park and Black Work. We discussed the many complexities of the establishment of Shenandoah National Park in that episode. I love our national parks so much. There are also complexities in their history that make loving them complicated. So Kiki wrote, hello to you both. I'm writing today because I finally have some pictures of one of the memorials for those displaced... the park. This one is in Augusta County outside Grand Caverns. I took my six- and four-year-old to see the caverns, and then we headed back home via the Blue Ridge Parkway. They loved the whole trip, even the mountain road. They were not as interested in the history as I hoped, and due to a problem with my backup battery, I was not able to play your shows during the trip this time. They both want to see more caverns, so I'm sure I'll get another chance to play them the episodes soon. When I was in elementary school late 1990s, we had a day camp with another school system and were bused out to Madison County in Virginia where we learned about science, music, history, and art within whatever theme they picked. One year I was lucky enough to be in the history class and we learned about the Shenandoah Valley and spent time learning about the creation of the Shenandoah National Park. We spoke with rangers and visited one of the few houses not torn down inside the park. It was extremely interesting, and I'm glad to say it was not something I missed in history class. Finally, I'm doing a catch-up right now, and I just listened to your embroidery episodes. I was amazed to hear about Blackwork because I just watched a video of someone hand-embroidering it. Here's a link to Bernadette Banner recreating Renaissance underwear complete with Blackwork collar. I don't know if you two are fans, but she makes such lovely recreations. For pet tacks, have this meme of our new cat, Yari, who literally ran into our house in May demanding hugs and is now the best kitty we could hope for. He is named for a cat-like cryptid beast from New Zealand. Hope the heat is not getting you down this summer, your faithful listener, Kiki. Thank you so much, Kiki, for this email. Thank you for adorable kitty cat pictures. The cat distribution system really went hard on that one. Yeah. I like the cat just running inside the house The cat that I had for many, many years starting from my childhood is a cat who just arrived in our backyard one day.

For whatever reason, Outlook is really just not wanting to open the pictures at full size. They're right there, but, oh, here we go. So it is a plaque that is the Augusta Memorial. It's in memory of Augusta County families who were displaced in the creation of Shenandoah National Park. And then a couple of other sites that have other interpretive information and an adorable kitty cat making, I'm going to say, a kind of goofy face. I love it. So thank you. Thank you so much, Kiki. If you would like to send us a note, we're at historypodcasts at iheartradio.com. You can find the very long source list of these unearthed episodes at our website, which is MissedInHistory.com. And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in 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. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.