Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about Kasimir Pulaski this week, whose name in Polish. Even with practicing, I feel like I said very badly the one time that I tried to say it.
I wow.
So, as I said at the top of the episode, he wound up on my shortlist back in twenty nineteen when that Smithsonian Channel episode was happening, I did not watch the episode at that time, so mostly what I had to go on was like the stuff that came out from Smithsonian Channel writing about it, news reporting about the thing, and I was really intrigued by the idea that this person who had fought, you know, been an
officer in the Revolutionary War may have been intersex. But then doing the actual research into this episode, looking into it a lot farther, I feel like people are gonna come at me. I just don't think those are his bones from the monuments.
I don't either. So while I.
Appreciated the opportunity to talk again about how there have always been always all through history, all over the world, always people whose lives and whose bodies just don't line up with the place and time that they're living in terms of the sex and gender expectations.
I just I don't think those are his bones.
I said in the episode that I watched this Smithsonian Channel thing on the very last day of research, and the reason that it was on the very last day of research was that, like, in doing all of the reading, I was like, I don't think those are his bones. What did they actually say on this TV show about the DNA research? And it was mitochondrial DNA research, which has passed through the maternal line, and I couldn't find
clarity on exactly what was said. There was just a lot of vagueness and the various writing about this TV show and the research that led into it, and so I was like, well, I guess I'm going to have to get Paramount plus to watch this thing, because that was.
The place where it was available.
And I watched it, and I had a lot of frustrations because a lot of the episode is not really about, like the DNA research is kind of the big capstone at the end, and the announcement of yes, there's a match, the big that's just the big reveal at the end of the episode, but a lot of the episode is more about building a case that this person could have
been intersex, gotcha? And so they kept doing things like comparing portraits of Casimir Pulaski to a medical illustration illustrating someone who had congenital adrenal hyperplasia, and I was like, Okay, that doesn't really have anything to do with whose bones these are, or whether that was Casimir Pulaski, or whether like you're you're seeing a similarity between like an eighteenth century or maybe nineteenth century from later on portrait and
a medical text illustration like this, that's not really proving anything, right, But you understand that's the narrative structure, is it there? Ye, building the audience to want them to be that right, right, want that outcome for the bones.
Yeah.
There was a portion of the episode where they had an intersex person dress in the uniform of what he would have worn, and I was like, this is also not about the DNA research. You only wanted a half hour show of DNA results. Yeah, I wanted.
I really though.
That was the only thing that I was really there for was to find out, like, what did they actually say about this DNA research. And then when they got to that moment in the show and the answer was there's a match between this talis bone and this other bone, I was like, I think I said what out loud because that is not what I thought was going to happen.
I was expecting that it was going to be something else that was inconclusive, and that it was just going to sort of be like based on all of this other stuff that we have talked about over the course of this episode than this, right, but that when they were like, no, this is this there's a match, I was very surprised. Oh see, this makes total sense to me, and how you would write an episode like that for television It does to me too, But it was still irritating.
Does that make sense? Like I feel like, you know, they know.
What answer is coming, and they need to make it such that by the time you land the plane there the audience can accept that information. Yeah, because otherwise there are just one bazillion questions that will irritate other people of like, wait, so what did he look like in his uniform? Are you sure nobody knew?
How did this? You know what I mean? Like, Yeah, that's really why they're writing it that way.
It was one of those things where I was like, I understand how these shows work, and I like, I understand how a one hour documentary TV show, Like I understand conceptually what's happening, but I still found a lot of it very frustrating. I also, the tests that were done on these they were not in any way non invasive. It was like drill a sample out of the bone, right,
and that's there. Has you know, have been less invasive methods for things that were done that have been developed in the more recent years, but this was that's not what was done in this anyway. I just I by the time I finished watching it, I was like, I I needed to watch this so that I could understand what was actually set, like what was said and what was the substantiation for what was said. But then I was like, I wish I hadn't had to spend an hour of my life on that. I'm going to ask
you a question that's going to sound obnoxious. Okay, why didn't you just jump to the end?
Then? Why didn't I just.
At the end, Because I mean, it might just be like the result of my kind of ADHD brain.
I'm like, I'm not If I'm not in it, I'm not in it.
I'm going to step ahead and see what I can find that actually like hits the dopamine receptors and get out. Yeah, I think I I I didn't know that there was not going to be useful material in the rest of
the episode until I had seen it. What I really would have appreciated it would be if there had been a publicly available transcript of it that I could have just read through you, because that would have gotten a lot faster and it would not have had the things about it that it would not have had some of the things in it that would have frustrated me. So anyway, and now I have Paramount Plus things that I can watch, Well, it's a good Star Trek time coming to you. It
is a lot of Star Trek time. And it was a weird irony because Patrick and I had just gone through our streaming services and we had weeded things out because we were subscribing to a lot, a lot of them, and I was the only one at that moment who
was watching anything on Paramount Plus. And both of the things that I was watching had gone on, like the mid season hiatus and I was like, we can just get rid of this and I will probably come back to it at some point later, and then not very long at all after that was, oh, I need to watch this thing from Smithsonian Channel, and.
That's where I could watch it.
So I was really interested in the way that Kasimir Pulaski has been talked about, like as a figure from the American Revolution, as a figure related to like Polish immigration and Polish national pride, Polish American pride, all of that. Multiple articles that I read that talked about that talked about how today is Koshuko whose name I'm pronouncing that's, to the best of my ability, was a more influential and important figure in terms of Polish people in the
Revolutionary War. And there were like at least three or four different articles that were like, he probably didn't get as much attention because his name is a lot harder for English speakers to say, And I was like, that, honestly, probably true, and it's sort of made it made a layer of it, like sense making how this person who was had such a reputation for being kind of arrogant and quarrelsome and writing long letters to the Continental Congress
that are like you are treating me very very badly. Wound up being kind of the illustrative example of Polish involvement in the Revolutionary War, Right, you're doing it wrong. The Kasimir Pulaski story, Laski story. Yeah, yeah, just yeah. Also, I am aware of Sufyan Stevens's album Illinois's Illinois that then became stage production. There is a song on it about Kasimir Pulaski Day. I know that exists. I probably
own that album. I just i'd imagine getting lots of emails from listeners saying, are you aware that there's a Kasimir Pulaski Day song on this album? Yes, I know, I'm aware. Anyway, I don't think I have anything further to say.
How about all of this.
I'm just tickled by what a pill he apparently was to everybody. Yeah, well, and that he was not the only officer from Europe who had that reputation, right. There's definitely a cultural, yea clashing element problem to all of that. Yeah, And this is something that may or may not come up again on a reasonably near future episode that I
don't know if it will happen or not. But a sort of about the difference between the professional standing armies of Europe and the Continental Army, which especially in the early years, was like just volunteers who had maybe been out drilling with their militia two or three times a year if they were very young, they might have done that one time or no times, and were up against armies that had been you know, drilling and practicing and
subjected to continual discipline for for years of their lives. And then a bunch of guys just doing their best. Yeah, a bunch of guys doing their best. So you had officers coming over from a tradition of you know, ongoing service and discipline in a standing army to you know, volunteer militia members doing their best. So anyway, maybe that episode will happen, maybe not. I have not figured it out yet. Talked about Rebecca Smith Pollard this week on the show. I said this kind of off Mike in
and aside. I did not know about the anti Toime novel when I picked this, and it reminded me of when we chose and Royal as a live show topic, and we had all already like we had advertised the we had advertised the live show, we had had t shirts made for the live show, and then I was like, Oops, there is racism I did not know about in this
That is troubling to me. And I would not have chosen for a live show topic had I known ahead of time that that was going to happen, because I mean, we are we don't shy away from discussing that on the show. No, but live show episodes are supposed to be fun in theory. Yeah, that one was not. Really we haven't really done a live show in a while.
But this sort of similarly, even though I was looking for things that were not like Raw Raw USA USA to potentially tie into America's two fifty, I would not necessarily have picked one that or we would need to discuss Anti Tom novels at length. Holly, do you remember learning how to read a little?
Okay?
I'm wondering if I had a similar situation to you. I about to find out a little frustrated at the pace of instruction. Oh okay, I took matters into my
own hand. Okay, So my mom read to me a lot, and really the only television that I was allowed to watch as a small child was Sesame Street and Mister Rogers, and that was it, And through the combination of Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, and my mother reading to me, I walked into the kitchen one day when I was four and said, I can read, and my mom said, I don't think so, and I sat down and read her There's a Monster at the end of this book, which is the book
that she read to me every night because it was my favorite. And my mom was like, I think you have that book memorized. So I went into another part of the house and like pulled a book off the shelf that I had never been exposed to before that I.
Think was like.
A school textbook that had been handed down from somewhere. Like it wasn't it wasn't a novel, it wasn't anything that I had ever read. But I took that into the kitchen and just opened it to a page and started reading from it, and my mom kind of went, Okay, I guess you can't actually read. Then I stand corrected, which is evidence of both my existence as an early reader and also the fact that I had to be right. Mine is early evidence of what a little shrew I was,
which is come up many times. But I remember I have older siblings significantly older than me, and I remember at one point in time one of my siblings thought they were gonna have didactic time with Holly, and they had like sat down and done this thing where they were like gonna teach me the word cat and how to read it, and I apparently just looked at them and said, do you think I'm stupid? I was similarly around four or five, yeah, real early, yeah, with like
the police done with this. I also remember distinctly there was a I don't know if it was like a yard sale or a second hand shot, but I remember being quite tiny and looking through books at a secondhand situation, huh, and picking out a bunch and my mom kind of just buying them for me without really like perusing what they were sure, and a lot of them were like spelling and reading instruction books, and I just kind of, yeah, had my own little private classroom in my room that
I don't think anybody realized.
Was going on. Yeah.
I grew into one of those kids that got in trouble for reading in class, oh when I was not supposed to be doing that, or reading ahead of what we were supposed to be reading out loud. Because I read a lot faster in my head that out loud.
And even though I already knew how to read when I started in kindergarten, Like, I very viscerally remember the process of sounding things out and being taught to sound things out when when I came into a word that I did not know, And so when I learned that there's kind of a generation of kids that didn't really learn that at all, yeah, I was like, what do
you mean? And I do want to say that, like, I don't think there's one way of teaching that works for everybody, Like there are a lot of kids that have disabilities or learning differences or whatever that like make one particular thing just not work for them, and some other form of instruction is necessary. So I think that's part of it too. But the idea that there was just no phonics, I was like, what do you mean? Yeah, what do you mean people didn't learn how to sound things out?
Yeah?
I feel like I got more of the at least in like the class work that I was exposed to was more of the word whole word stuff. But a lot of my like interest in reading was just driven by wanting to know things.
Oh sure, yeah, you know what I mean?
Like that was and it wasn't necessarily stuff I was going to get taught in school. Yeah, so I would just be proactive about it, and I don't write bossy and.
What do you think I'm stupid?
Yeah, yeah, what a brat. Pollard's methods and the level of granularity in all of the different phonemes does sound to me kind of tedious. The fact that there was so much that she just called busy work. I don't know if other people were calling things busy work in the nineteenth century that was just like part of the lingo, But the fact that it was called busy work, I was like, yeah, this does sound like busy work to me.
Marking all of the phonemes and your reader. Oh but those kids, like their level of mastery was probably like so far ahead of anybody else in.
Their age group. Yeah, that's the thing.
Sometimes that stuff that feels like busy work is really like drilling things in a way that you will never ever in your life.
Forget it for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Side note.
I went to Stratford upon Avon on my trip to England, and I went to the schoolroom where Shakespeare would have gone to school. I'm not actually sure if there's evidence that he did go to school there, but it would have been the school he would have gone to. And it is a school that's still in operation, and they don't start tours until eleven because there is a morning class that meets in the classroom, the historic classroom that's
still there. And the tour group did just sort of a little simulation of how students would have learned by wrote through memorizing things. Yeah, which is not at all how it worked when we memorized things when I was a child. You faced the person across for you, and you set it into each other's faces over and over. I was face to face with someone who I think may have also been there by herself, and had a tote bag that said, though, but she is little, she
is fierce. I'm saying that wrong, but anyway Shakespeare quote, Yeah, I think it is those though she'd be but little, she is fierce.
It sounds right. I think that's right.
I suddenly needed to call it up into memory and it wasn't there anyway. Though she'd be but little, yeah, those she'd be, but little, Yeah, she is fierce. I will work it out. We'll get there. A couple of things to talk about. What the poem, the trist poem that she and another poet each wrote to one another and had published in the journal.
Yeah.
I feel a modern reader reading this today would go, that is the most sapphic thing I have ever seen. Yeah, you know, in the era when it was published, if anybody had thought that, it wouldn't have been in the newspaper. But it also had this note from the editor which did not really fit in that moment in the episode. But I found I don't know, it's said quotes our gallantry is shocked at the thought of the spirits of two charming young menstrual girls wandering about at midnight by
themselves in this bad world without a protector. And I was like, they were they were not actually outside. I know that, and you know that. But I think this was him going, of course, we don't want young ladies to do this, because he was anticipating the people that were going to write in and be like, why would you suggest this, And instead of going they're not really doing that. This is a theoretic galbal he could just go, of course, we would of course not ever never.
Yeah. Yeah.
The other thing that I had noted here was just that, Like we have talked before, it has come up on the show, like in almost side mentions of people people who were enslavers but also fiercely against secession from the Union during the Civil War, and like that has just sort of come up in passing sometimes. And this I think is the first time that I have really been reading the thoughts of somebody who apparently was anti abolition but also a staunch, staunch unionist. It's a weird, a
weird tangle to wrap your head around. I have series here they are, and you had thoughts about this that you were going to share. I really really do. I
think this is purely my conjecture. I didn't even do the research for this episode, but based on all of the information we have about her, I feel like she might have been a case of one of those people who is a very clever person, probably got told as much a lot growing up, and when she hears new information, she digests it and thinks it through and then has ideas about it. And because she's a very clever person, people encourage her to voice those ideas without necessarily really
talking through what it all means. And I bet that that's part of why she went on her little weird tyret because then later on in her life she seems to have taken a different stance.
Yeah, that's my only thinking.
I suspect she was young and processing information she had a hand somewhat influential in her life had said like, these people are ruining the union with their oh, sure upstart ways, and she was like, you know what, they sure are. I didn't really like get through all of the bigger picture stuff about what was going on.
That's my guess.
Yeah, I can definitely say I held some opinions in my teams in early twenties that were bad.
We all did, like, very bad.
And when I was Yeah, when I was exposed to other information, I was like, oh, that is a bad opinion.
I will say.
There will probably be something between now and the end of my life that I think right now that I will be like, oh, that was a bad opinion that I had. Yeah, now I've learned from that. And that was one of the reasons that I kind of went to try to see, like what were her thoughts on this later.
I'm also not.
Fully clear, but the parts of this novel that I read, there are conversations that happen that are it's clear which side is the side that she is setting up as the correct side, right, But then there are conversations that it like one of the characters will be basically saying, hey, these are people like we are we are all human beings, right? And I'm like, are are you on the we're all human beings side? Because it kind of sounds like you
might be from this passage. Are you more concerned with this idea of preserving the union and that's what drive That's what's driving it rather than being like explicitly pro slavery for racist reasons that you know that there were also people that had those opinions. And I really didn't get to the bottom of that. And I might have if I had been willing to read the entire book, but that was too much. It was too much. She had just enough information to be dangerous. I'm telling you, Yeah,
I believe it advice. So yeah, she's a complicated person who the fact that she from what I can understand, she put together this instructional method that was very motivated by what she thought actually helped children learn and also making sure teachers had what they needed to be able to teach. Yeah, that part I thought was really good, terrific. Yeah, you know, even though I sort of think the amount of diacritical marking of textbooks might have been a little much maybe maybe.
Maybe, But also I'm telling you, those kids knew their stuff. Yeah.
Yeah, So anyway, those Rebecca Smith Pollard, Uh, whatever's coming up for you on the weekend. We you know, I hope it's great. There was just a strange noise outside my house, and I hope that's not a harbinger of anything. Oh, is there any strange thing is happening in your world? I hope none of them are harbingers of worse things to come, and that everything that's coming your way is going to be better than what was before. We will be back on Monday with a brand new episode, and
tomorrow we'll be back with a Saturday classic. 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.