Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: It's Not Unprecedented About this episode Tracy shares her desire to see the rest of the letter that was quoted in this week's episodes on Anthony Burns. Talk also turns to the fact that many of the things that are surprising people today are, in fact, precedented.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:10 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. We spent all week talking about Anthony Burns. Yeah, we did. Um, after, after I saw the same quote over and over, I feel like a lot very recently in response to what has been happening in Minnesota. We're currently about two weeks out between when we were recording things and when things are publishing. So I shudder to think. The world is moving, yeah, the world is moving so fast. Who knows what will happen between this moment and when the episode comes out. But I have seen a lot of stark mad abolitionist quotes
3:03 Tracy V. Wilson? recently in response to things happening in Minnesota, the public response to things happening in Minnesota. But I actually think the first time I saw it was months ago when Ross Baraka, mayor of Newark, was arrested, which now feels like that happened eons. I'm like, was that two months ago? It was in, I feel like, May of last year. It was a long time ago. Yeah. I don't know if it was actually May. I did not refresh my memory on when it happened, but like, it was a while ago. And then it has, like, I've seen it again and again on my social.
3:45 Tracy V. Wilson? I am very curious about what the rest of the letter says. Yeah. And I, I could not find a scan of this letter anywhere. It is in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. And I thought about going there to try to read it and did even take preliminary steps toward that end.
4:11 Tracy V. Wilson? But it was not critical to the content of the episode. And I also just realized that the episode was going to be two parts, which means it's going to take longer to finish the writing on because it's two episodes worth of writing. Yeah. And no matter which way I could have tried to get to the Historical Society from my house, it would have been probably the whole of a morning or the whole of an afternoon to get there, look through boxes of documents. Yeah. Get home again. And that was just not an amount of time that I had for that.
4:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Also, I overthought it so much that I had a dream that I went to the Historical Society and got there and could not remember how to write.
5:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, anxiety. Yeah, just think too much about my job. So I stopped trying. Maybe one day I will go satisfy my own personal curiosity going to to read it. One day when the schedule is not quite as packed as it was. Maybe when it warms up a little bit. Yeah, that was the other thing because they are open some hours on Saturdays. And I was like, what if I went on Saturday morning? Because I do like to have a little field trip into Boston proper sometimes for different reasons. And the high that day, I think, was going to be 10. Hard pass. And spending the Saturday morning on work and also doing it in a
5:49 Tracy V. Wilson? a high temperature of 10, it was a little more. Yeah. Little more than I wanted to do. Um, regarding the news that has led so many people to share this particular quote,
6:05 Tracy V. Wilson? I saw multiple articles literally this morning as I was recording this that described the conduct of ICE and Border Patrol and these other agencies as unprecedented.
6:21 Tracy V. Wilson? And I need to say it is not in any way unprecedented. We have many episodes of the show that are about precedents for things like throwing American citizens into detention.
6:39 Holly Frey? Yeah.
6:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Such as Executive Order 9066, when along the West Coast immigrants from Japan and their children, who were citizens, were put in literal concentration camps. Like, this, this is not something we need to look to other countries or the incredibly distant past to find examples of.
7:02 Holly Frey? No, no. I, I think what has made some people, I'm not going to blanket statement because everybody's got their own biases and whatever. I think for some people, they're perceiving it that way because we have so much footage of, of what's going on.
7:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
7:20 Holly Frey? And that's a big part of it. I think that's also, unfortunately, there has been a disparity in outrage over the killing of two white people versus people of color that were killed prior to that.
7:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes.
7:35 Holly Frey? Which some of that is a racism problem, but I do think some of it is also video footage.
7:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
7:42 Holly Frey? That is, that is making people feel more outraged, upset, whatever the, the right word is, everybody's having their own reaction. But I do think that's part of it, even though it is incorrect to say it's unprecedented. Like, they haven't ever actually witnessed. I mean, we've seen old footage, right? There is footage from World War II. There's, but we haven't seen in the modern era footage of people with our own eyes just murdering people in the street in this way, under the guise of government.
8:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, we have had many other, like, extrajudicial killings of people by law enforcement. And in some cases, there was footage, like the officer's body camera. But I think people are not putting those together as part of the same
8:32 Holly Frey? Yeah.
8:33 Tracy V. Wilson? spectrum necessarily.
8:34 Holly Frey? Yeah.
8:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Which is part of the unprecedented. Also, like,
8:41 Tracy V. Wilson? We have an episode about the Bracero program, which was a program to bring Mexican migrant workers into the United States. And part of that episode is about the mass deportation effort that was literally named a racist slur.
8:56 Holly Frey? Yeah.
8:57 Tracy V. Wilson? That had a lot of the same inhumane elements. Also had a lot of people who were either citizens or legal residents who were deported.
9:06 Holly Frey? Yeah.
9:07 Tracy V. Wilson? That's just like another precedent. I don't remember if I had another thing to say about that besides that fact, but the unprecedented language made me very frustrated. And then, as I said at the beginning of the show, like, you don't have to look outside of this century to see a lot of other things that are either parallels or part of the same spectrum in terms of breaking up families.
9:30 Holly Frey? Yeah, the unprecedented part is, my darling's saying this, it is unprecedented for you to realize it, but it's not unprecedented for this to happen.
9:40 Tracy V. Wilson? It does feel like that some of the things that we are being confronted with all of the time are on a slightly different level than before. We have plenty of examples all throughout history of government officials lying to the public, so many of them, so many, so many. But the last couple of weeks, as of when we are recording, have felt like just a whole new level of absolutely obvious, easily contradicted by multiple angles of video footage lies in a way that feels a lot more obvious and a lot more bald lying, basically, like just a
10:18 Holly Frey? Yeah.
10:18 Tracy V. Wilson? a step up from the regular lying that has been happening for so long.
10:25 Holly Frey? Yeah.
10:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Anyway, those were some of the things I just had noted down to talk about regarding the inspiration for this episode rather than the episode itself.
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14:19 Tracy V. Wilson? I am glad that we have some writing of Anthony Burns.
14:27 Holly Frey? Yeah.
14:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Like he said, that he did get some assistance with his response to the church in Virginia when he asked for his letter of dismissal.
14:35 Holly Frey? Oh, I love that response, too. Oh, I love it.
14:38 Tracy V. Wilson? And like, we didn't, we didn't read all of it. There's more of it there. But I like that we have that example of him speaking for himself. And I also like that we have, I like that we have a biography of him that was written with his involvement at the time.
14:57 Tracy V. Wilson? There are always nuances to biographies like that throughout history. We have a lot of biographies of people that were prepared with the assistance of someone else with that biography, then helping that person meet their expenses in whatever way. But the fact that we have his perspective on more of it, rather than just the legal documents having to do with all of it, is something that I like. I had a moment where I was like, I feel like I've been talking about Boston a lot.
15:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Not actually sorry about that. Lot of important things have happened in Boston. Did you have any, any other things that you wanted to talk about from these episodes?
15:40 Holly Frey? The one note I had is tied in a way to his, I mean, I wrote the note down earlier as we were recording, but it's tied to his response to the church and it is that whole issue of like, it breaks my heart to think of him struggling with the morality of escaping.
16:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
16:02 Holly Frey? And I'm glad that he reaches that point where he's like, oh no, that's, this whole concept is completely jacked. But like, just knowing that that's the case. The other thing that sort of breaks my heart is that he was clearly whip smart.
16:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, yeah.
16:22 Holly Frey? You know, the way he was constantly thinking about the logistics of escape and the ways that he had to move throughout the structure of slavery to minimize the number of people that could recognize him, to create scenarios where if he, if he did make a getaway, it wouldn't necessarily be recognized initially. Like, those are all so smart. And I think about like, if when he was, I mean, he was still very young when he died. So it's a two se. It's one, if he was as a young boy and a young man, not having to engage with that, what are the things that someone that's smart could have been doing?
17:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, sure.
17:05 Holly Frey? Like if he had not been needing to like fend for his life.
17:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
17:09 Holly Frey? With every minute, like being thinking about the logistics of survival. And then the other thing is that it's so unfair that he did die so early because,
17:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
17:20 Holly Frey? Again, he was so smart and also had such an incredible.
17:25 Holly Frey? Hard to fathom for most of us, story of how many things he had been through that like, the writings he could have done for years and years would have, you know, been deeply informative to our view of enslavement now. Not that there aren't a lot of really great slave narratives, but we need more always. And, you know, he was in a unique place to have the level, I mean, like his, again, we know he got help with that response, but like his writing, the way he thought about things. And again, how clearly brilliant he was. I feel like could have, he could have produced some really incredible commentary on the whole thing that,
18:09 Holly Frey? that we don't get now, that would have been, you know, incredibly important as historical reference points. So that's heartbreaking.
18:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. I think he's also a really good example of the ways that enslaved people could exercise their agency
18:28 Tracy V. Wilson? where they had agency.
18:30 Holly Frey? Yeah.
18:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Because a lot of times we get kind of a really limited view that, that can be misinterpreted as like, people not taking action for themselves when they knew that taking action for themselves would be dangerous and possibly deadly.
18:50 Holly Frey? Yeah.
18:50 Tracy V. Wilson? And it seems like he made a lot of decisions that might have seemed minor at the time, but were steps that he was taking to take for himself, to influence his own future, where he was able to take influence on his own future within a society where he didn't have rights as a person in a lot of ways.
19:13 Holly Frey? Yeah.
19:14 Tracy V. Wilson? So, yeah. One thing that I just copied and put at the end of my outline here, because I liked it.
19:23 Tracy V. Wilson? And I thought it tied together this and also last year's episodes on Charles Sumner. But it didn't really fit anywhere in the actual episode, so I left it to read for, for behind the scenes. And so this is from the end of the preface to Charles Emory Stevens biography of Anthony Burns. And he wrote, "As I write these lines, the country is passing through its greatest crisis of peril. On the western frontier, civil war is flagrant. At Washington, a senator lies wounded and disabled, having been stealthily stricken down
20:05 Tracy V. Wilson? on the floor of the Senate for words spoken in debate by a member of the House from South Carolina. The whole South, with trifling exceptions, applauds this assault upon the representative of a sovereign state. A national convention of the party in power has given its sanction to the policy of which these events, as well as the extradition of Burns, are the legitimate fruits, and has nominated for the presidency a person who has pledged himself fully to enforce that policy. Should that person be elected and that policy be enforced, the cause of freedom, whether in Kansas, in Washington, or in Massachusetts, would have just reason to apprehend a repetition of similar assaults from the slave power.
20:49 Tracy V. Wilson? To avert such a calamity, every good citizen must labor, and I hope that this history, conceived and executed for a more general purpose, may contribute somewhat also to that particular end." And that was like the, the end of the preface to the biography. I've tried to find some more information about Charles Emory Stevens, and I didn't really. So I don't really know what his deal was. Maybe I will return to that at some point in the future.
21:20 Holly Frey? Yeah, somewhere out there, there is a book.
21:25 Holly Frey? Maybe.
21:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Maybe so.
21:26 Holly Frey? Maybe.
21:27 Tracy V. Wilson? Maybe so. Well, whatever is happening in your world, which is in the faraway time of two weeks from now, based on when we're recording, I hope whatever it is is going as well as possible. And I hope that you're able to take some time for yourself, help your neighbors. My helping of my neighbors today was shoveling out the fire hydrants,
21:56 Tracy V. Wilson? which were buried in snow. So yeah, help one another, be kind to one another. We will be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow. We will be back with something brand new on Monday.
22:14 Tracy V. Wilson? 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.
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