Lucy Stone

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy he Wilson. And this episode is inspired by me being a ding dong. So I was talking with a person that I am close to recently and I had a need to know her last name, and I wasn't sure what it was. I know, this sounds like I'm a horrible person, but hear me out. She's been married twice once away's back when it was pretty standard that most folks would take their husband's name. Her second marriage was later enough that not everybody would have done that. At that point, a couple of decades had gone by, and I honestly could not remember if she had chosen to change her name again or not.

00:00:56
Speaker 2: I want to say, you're not the only person this is, you know, well, like if you.

00:01:00
Speaker 1: Have friends, like unless you really need their name for like a legal reason or to fill out a form, yeah, it's not always going to come up unless they actually say, hey, my name is now right snakity doo, you'd be like, oh, that's so and so. So. That put me, though, in the mind of just thinking about the practice of marriage related name changes and how much it has changed in our lifetime in terms of like being pretty normal for people to not do it. But that made me think of Lucy Stone, who did it when it was not normal at all to keep your original name.

00:01:35
Speaker 2: Uh.

00:01:35
Speaker 1: And Lucy Stone is sometimes written about as like that person that should be mentioned right alongside Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but she often isn't. That's a pretty valid point. She really was kind of in right in the mix with all of them. She did live an incredibly unique life for a woman of her time and her station. She had a lot of gumption, and she's one of those figures who is pretty central to a lot of important US history moments. So now we're going to give her her day. So.

00:02:06
Speaker 2: Lucy Stone was born on August thirteenth, eighteen eighteen. Her parents, Francis and Hannah matthew Stone, were farmers. They were members of the Congregational Church and lived on four hundred acres on Coy's Hill and west Brookfield, Massachusetts. Lucy was one of their seven children, and according to the lore, when Lucy was born her mother, Hannah said, Oh, dear, I'm so sorry.

00:02:31
Speaker 1: It's a girl.

00:02:32
Speaker 2: A woman's lot is so hard.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: As a child, Lucy was often frustrated because she knew that she was smarter than a lot of boys, including her brothers, and while they were offered some educational opportunities beyond like the basics, she and other girls and young women just were not. At this point, Massachusetts offered primary education to girls, which she got, but the idea of higher learning for women not really a thing, and certainly not in most farming communities. But this desire to get more education for her was driven also just because she wanted to learn Hebrew and Greek, and she wanted to learn those languages because she wanted to read untranslated versions of the Bible because she was real curious if the original versions of it did indeed have that language that gave men power over women, or if that was something that got added in translation. And one of the drivers of her interest in exploring that inequality of women and the challenges they faced was because she watched her mother work very very hard with very little help. She certainly didn't get much credit and she didn't get much rest. And she also saw this common occurrence happening in their community, where a lot of women were being mistreated by their husbands, and that was just kind of accepted as normal, and she did not like it. And her father, even though he was very pro abolition and very anti slavery, did not feel any kind of good way about women being equal. She later wrote of him, quote, there was only one will in our home, and that was my father's.

00:04:13
Speaker 2: In addition to being smart, Lucy was also a self starter. She took a teaching job at the age of sixteen so she could save up money for college. It took five years for her to save enough because she was not paid very much at all, but finally, at the age of twenty one, she was able to enroll at Mount Holyoaks Seminary for Women. Leading up to her entrance, she got one of her brother's friends to tutor her in math, Latin, and grammar, because she thought that her exposure to and mastery of those subjects was really not served well by her early schooling. Mount Holyoak it turned out was not the best fit for Lucy. She had expected it to be a lot more progressive regarding women's equality than it was, and Lucy's abolitionist activism was not especially welcome. For example, she got in trouble because she had her brother send her copies of William lud Garrison's The Liberator and then left them spread around the reading room in the hopes that other students would read them. But aside from her issues with authority there, unfortunately, there was another obstacle that sidelined her education, and that was that her sister, Rhoda, who had been ill for quite some time, died in July of eighteen thirty nine, and Roda was an adult at this point. She had children of her own when she died, and Lucy went home to help with Rhoda's children and also to comfort their grieving mother, and she also went back to teaching. For several years, she'd teach, save up all of her money, and then spend a semester here and there at a private school, first Wesleyan, then Monson Academy, and then finally kvog Seminary. Four years after her time at Mount Holyoke, Lucy once again enrolled in college, this time at Oberlin College. That's the first co educational school in the US, the only one at the time, having opened just ten years earlier, in eighteen thirty three.

00:06:04
Speaker 1: Even Oberlin was not the realization of Stone's hopes, though she had worked so hard to get there, and it was the first time that she had lived away from home. She had left with ninety dollars in cash in her pocket to start this new phase of her life, and she was one of seven women that were enrolled in that first year. In her first year, we should say, it was at the schools, and there were thirty four male students. And Lucy was really really fretful about her finances because her father had paid for her brother's tuitions for college, but he did not do the same for Lucy. So she was really really diligent in seeking out additional income to make sure she could stay in school this time, including arranging to teach at Oberlin's preparatory school and at the Liberty School, which was a town school for black students. She also taught at the town's common schools when Oberlin was on winter break. If this sounds like a lot to have three jobs while you're going to school, it was so much so that Lucy was often foregoing sleep to keep up on her study. She wrote about sometimes only like sleeping two hours a night, and when her father found all of this out, he actually wrote her a very out of character letter in which he told her that he did not want any of his children to have to work the way he had when he was young, and that he would help her with school expenses through a loan. Lucy, though, preferred instead to lean on her older siblings for financial help. She didn't accept any help from her father until her senior year at Oberlin.

00:07:35
Speaker 2: Lucy did very well academically, but she found some disappointment in a couple of important areas. For one, though the school admitted women and black students, it was less progressive than what she wanted. Even most of the professed abolitionists there among both the students and the staff, thought Garrison's idea of abruptly ending slavery was too extreme. They were not in favor of true equality for women either. She described herself as quote at swords points with them, and one Oberlin trustee described Lucy as having quote wild and radical ideas. She had to appear before the Ladies Board to defend her behavior regularly, whether it was taking off her bonnet in church because she had a migraine or the time, she told some of her fellow students that people should not have children they couldn't afford. She also advocated for male and female students who were working as teachers in the college's preparatory school should be paid the same wages. She was so aggressive in that pursuit that, in an outcome that made her a legend at the school, four years the faculty board instituted equal pay for teachers. Yeah, in reading some accounts of that, it sort of sounds like the faculty board was just like whatever it takes to shut Lucy Stone up at this point, like they really gave it because she was so determined about it and what she really wanted to pursue at college with studies in public speaking. She wanted to follow in the footsteps of other abolitionists like Abby Kelly and the Grimkey sisters. But those kinds of lessons in public speaking were not offered to women. They could enroll in rhetoric classes, but they were only allowed to observe the male students. Lucy was not allowed to debate in class, and she was not allowed to join the Debate Society while the school was co ed. That group that was for male students only, so Lucy and one of her close friends started a secret women's debate society at the school. She is recorded as having stated at the group's first meeting, quote, we shall leave this college with the reputation of a thorough collegiate course. Yet not one of us has received any rhetorical or elocutionary training. Not one of us could state a question or argue it in a successful debate. For this reason, I have proposed the formation of this association. In eighteen forty six, she made her first public speech at a West Indian Independence Day celebration, where she addressed the black community of Oberlin in a speech she titled why do we Rejoice Today? She was given a talking to by the Lady's Board for her brazenness, but her brilliance was recognized to some degree. In eighteen forty seven, the school asked her to write a speech for her graduation, but she was not the one who would give that speech that would be a male graduate, so she flatly turned that down. But she did graduate at the ceremony at the age of twenty nine. Though it might have seemed that Lucy was at this point very well educated, for no real opportunities before her, she did find a place in her chosen career.

00:10:46
Speaker 1: Of public speaker. She was hired in eighteen forty eight as a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society, and she was paid six dollars a week. She traveled constantly, which was absolutely grueling, but she was very successful because she was really great at connecting with audiences. Her anti slavery upbringing, and her skills in oration and writing were all of use. The society was also open to letting her use some of her time not just for abolition and anti slavery rhetoric, but also to advocate for women's rights. But in order to make that deal, she had to take a reduced rate of four dollars a week because those speeches were taking away time from her abolition speeches. This meant that she was making at that point a pretty meager income, and at the urging of many other lecturers and speakers, she finally started charging a small fee or passing a collection hat at her lectures.

00:11:43
Speaker 2: Even with more money coming in, this was not an easy job. Lucy became a public figure and a movement that had a lot of hostile detractors. She had books and eggs thrown at her, had ice cold water turned on her, had to run from the occasional angry mob. She adopted the practice of wearing bloomers like a lot of other women's rights activists did, and she was jeered for doing so. There were plenty of people who were not in favor of abolition and certainly did not want to hear that message from a woman. Newspaper writeups would describe her as ugly or manish, and she was accused of having abandoned her womanly purpose. But she was also praised by people like Frederick Douglas, who said she was one of the most effective advocates for the cause. Over time, Lucy was getting so many invitations to lecture that she left the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society job and was working essentially as an independent orator. Coming up, we're going to talk more about Stone's work on the Woman's Rights Convention, and we'll get into that after we have a sponsor break. Lucy was one of the organizers of the first National Women's Rights Convention in Worcestern, Massachusetts, in eighteen fifty. This was two years after the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention, which we've talked about on the show before, and which Lucy did not attend. That superlative first of the eighteen fifty convention is based on it being considered a national convention, whereas Seneca Falls was considered a local effort. Starting with no money to host this national event, Lucy and her fellow organizers advertised their need for donations, and contributions were soon coming in. Everyone involved used their entire network of connections both to get those donations and to invite attendees. The lead up to the convention was difficult for Stone. She wasn't able to be as active in the effort as she had initially planned. Her brother Luther, who lived in Illinois, died that summer of cholera, and his wife, Phoebe, was pregnant. Lucy had been the only nurse maid at his deathbed for that reason. After he died, Lucy packed Phoebe up to move her to Massachusetts, but just three days into the journey, on August twenty third, Phoebe gave birth. Because baby was sadly stillborn, and Lucy and Phoebe stayed in a hotel so Phoebe could regain some of her strength. Then Lucy contracted typhoid while they were there. She did make it to Wooster on October twenty fourth for the start of the convention, though, and that convention was well attended.

00:14:21
Speaker 1: The eighteen fifty Convention is really a key moment in the movement for women's rights, and the introduction of the idea that everything about the way the US operated needed to be reorganized if it was going to be made equitable. It called for in its resolutions quote equality before the law, without distinction of sex or color. That meant that black women should be included in the efforts of the movement. Now, obviously, in eighteen fifty this was not supported by everyone, and it would become an issue of heated contention several years down the road. Even in the immediate wake of the convention, reviews were mixed. There were plenty of newspaper accounts that spoke derisively about the attendees and called the entire event trash. But even within the women's rights movement, there were concerns even outside those disagreements involving racial equality. Prior podcast subject Elizabeth Blackwell, for example, found the message of the entire convention to be two quote anti Mam.

00:15:22
Speaker 2: Among the attendees who signed the convention's resolution document were many names you'll probably recognize, including some we've covered on the show. This is not an exhaustive list, but they included Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Sarah Earl, Charles K. Whipple, and M. C. Goodwin. The next October eighteen fifty one, there was another National Convention in Worcester. In eighteen fifty two, it moved to Syracuse, and then in eighteen fifty three to Cleveland. In eighteen fifty four it was in Philadelphia.

00:15:54
Speaker 1: The year after the first convention, Lucy was given an audience at the Massachusetts State House, speaking before legislators and imploring them to write full civil rights for women into the state constitution. That same year, Lucy met Henry Brown Blackwell. He was the brother of Elizabeth Blackwell, and he was very taken with Lucy. She was at this point quite famous, and he may have been drawn to that, but he was also completely entranced by her quote beauty, charm, and eloquence. As he wrote to a friend after seeing her speak, he asked people that they had in common about her, and while they told him she was not romantically linked to anyone. They also told him that she was not interested in becoming anyone's wife. He still pursued her, though initially through letters, and after a month of writing back and forth, he started hinting that she really should get married to someone someday.

00:16:50
Speaker 2: Lucy Stone's feelings on marriage were still pretty negative. In one of her letters to Henry, she wrote, quote, I have been all my life alone. I have planned and executed without counsel and without control, and have shared thought and feeling in life with myself alone. I have made a path for my feet which I know is useful. It brings me a more intense and abundant happiness by far than comes to the life of the majority of men. And it seems to me I cannot risk it by any change. And then I ask, can I dare change it? Rings an everlasting no. Henry persisted, and Lucy did soften to him, and as the two kind of slowly fell in love, Henry offered Lucy an uncommon kind of marriage for the time. He told her he wanted one of true equals. He wrote to her, quote equality with me is a passion. Henry uh is often described as kind of a romantic one. Biographer described him as falling in and out of love with a lot of young women.

00:17:50
Speaker 1: Prior to meeting Lucy, and in Lucy's case, her odd life, famous but also a lonely outsider really fascinated him, and although she initially told him she wanted only friendship, he did things like go to her lectures. He actually helped organize one of her tours, and then he invited her to spend time in the Blackwell family home, and she really loved the family, and eventually she did agree on a marriage of equals.

00:18:17
Speaker 2: Lucy remained Lucy Stone after the wedding, keeping her own name instead of taking her husband's.

00:18:24
Speaker 1: This was not.

00:18:25
Speaker 2: Initially the route she took, though She went by Blackwell for a little while, but decided to stick with Stone after about a year of trying out the new name and carefully investigating the law to make sure there wasn't a legal requirement for a wife to take her husband's name. She asked people to address her not as missus Blackwell, but as missus Stone. In situations where it seemed like there might be a legal need to recognize the union, she'd write her name as Lucy Stone, wife of Henry Blackwell. Lucy and Henry carefully crafted their vows with the intent that they would be published as an example of equal union. There was no mention of obeyance. Elizabeth Katie Stanton wrote to Stone after the wedding quote, nothing has been done, and the women's rights movement for some time that so rejoiced my heart as the announcement by you of a woman's right to her name. Missus Stone and mister Blackwell did jointly publish a pamphlet regarding the inequity of marriage laws, titled protest, and it read, in part quote, while acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it our duty to declare that this act on our part, implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage, as refused to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man one would exercise, and which no man should possess. We protest, especially against the laws which give the husband one the custody of the wife's person, two the exclusive control and guardianship of their children, three, the sole ownership of her personal and use of her real estate, unless previously settled upon her or placed in the hands of trustees. Four the absolute right to the product of her industry.

00:20:28
Speaker 1: Five. Also against the laws which give the widower so much larger and more permanent an interest in the property of his deceased wife than they give to the widow in that of the deceased husband. Six. Finally, against the whole system by which the legal existence of the wife is suspended during marriage, so that in most states she neither has a legal part in the choice of her residence, nor could she make a will, nor sue or be sued in her own name, nor inherit property. So, just as a spoiler alert, this all sounds really idyllic. It may have been for a time, but this marriage did have its problems, and we're going to talk about some of those in just a bit.

00:21:08
Speaker 2: In the press, the wedding and the decision to keep Stone as her last name both got a lot of attention, and a lot of that attention was negative, like why would anyone want to marry Lucy Stone? She was seven years older than Henry, and journalists wrote about her like she was ancient. According to them, she clearly hated marriage and men, so why did she even bother? And they wondered, especially if she didn't want to take his name. Lucy continued her lecture career and they used the Blackwell home as their home base because they traveled so much they didn't really have time to settle anywhere else. Lucy's letters to friends and family show her very happy to have someone to share her life with. Lucy also wanted a family very much. She had this vision of having four children, and she and Henry had a daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, on September fourteenth of eighteen fifty seven. They later expected a second child, but Lucy miscarried and they did not have any other children after that. When Alice was still tiny and Lucy was stuck at home caring for an infant, she decided to protest taxation by not paying property taxes. Because as a woman, she was not represented in government, so this isn't a case where she just didn't pay her taxes, which is sometimes how this is written. About This was a thought out civil disobedience effort, and she actually wrote the tax collector in Orange, New Jersey, where they were living at the time, and explained this she would not be paying taxes because they were unjust to half the population. As a consequence of this, the Stone Blackwell home was rated. Many of their possessions were seized, and then when the furniture that had been taken was sold at auction, one of their neighbors bought it all and returned it to them. The marriage definitely experienced some strain. Henry had made some investments that didn't really pay off. He had also gone to Chicago to work for a friend for five months when Alice was still a baby, and he and Lucy missed each other terribly. He had to dip into Lucy's savings at times, and they downgraded their home to a smaller farmhouse to try to save money. Yeah, he wasn't like taking that money from Lucy just of his own volition. They discussed it and she was like, of course, you should take from some of the money that I have saved up. But it still was like a thing of you know, not quite what they had planned financially, having a child had also slowed Stone's activism considerably. She really did not trust anyone else to care for Alice, so it wasn't like she could call someone to come and watch the baby while she went and did work things. Then, during the US Civil War, Lucy felt morally compelled to say nothing on the part of the war effort, even in support of the Union, because she was a pacifist and thought all of it was wrong. She still supported anti slavery efforts in other ways, including drumming up signatay for abolitionist petitions. In the later years of the war, some of Henry's investment properties had finally started to pay off. He had purchased quite a few investment properties over the years, and he sold them at high profits during the war, and that gave the Stone Blackwell family a little bit of financial security for the first time since the couple had wed.

00:24:22
Speaker 1: Though their finances were finally in order, though Lucy had other challenges during this time. In eighteen sixty four, her father died. She was often in poor health that entire year. She worried, of course, about the future of the country, and it also seems like she was really grappling with her identity when she was suddenly not doing the work that she had been so driven to do for so many years.

00:24:48
Speaker 2: We're going to pause here for a moment and here from some of the sponsors that keep the show going, and when we come back, we will talk about Stone's place in the rift in the women's rights movement in the US.

00:25:08
Speaker 1: We have talked on the show before about the fissure in the women's suffrage movement over the right to vote being granted to black men before white women. Lucy was mostly and will describe this more carefully in a moment on the side of the conflict within the group that thought it was okay for black men to gain more rights through the fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments. So, for the very quickest recap, the fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, passed by the Senate on June eighth, eighteen sixty six, stated that everyone born in the US, including formerly enslaved people, was a US citizen. And then the fifteenth Amendment, which passed several years later on February twenty sixth, eighteen sixty nine, stated that all male citizens over the age of twenty one should be able to vote. This was the first introduction of language about sex or gender into a constantitutional amendment, and for many in the women's rights movement, they felt that allowing this wording in the interest of conferring black men rights would ultimately hurt the cause of women, and specifically white women. Elizabeth Katie Stanton is often quoted for her written commentary on the matter, quote if that word mayle be inserted, it will take us a century at least to get it out.

00:26:24
Speaker 2: But Lucy Stone saw the suffrage movement as one whole, at least sort of, with any victory being part of forward progress, and as a lifelong abolitionist, she was also supportive of black men's rights and of their gaining forward progressive ground. To be clear, though Stone had absolutely not wanted abolitionists to favor the voting rights of black men at the expense of women's suffrage, she was chagrined at how that played out, but she did support the fifteenth Amendment ultimately.

00:26:58
Speaker 1: As all of this was going on, there was a very odd and unsettling move on the part of her husband, Henry Blackwell. On January fifteenth, eighteen sixty seven, he wrote an open letter titled quote, what the South can do, how the Southern States can make themselves masters of the situation to the legislatures of the Southern States, and in it he makes a case that's really hard to square with the abolitionist in women's rights values that he had been speaking about publicly his entire life. He wrote, quote, the population of the late Slave States is about twelve million, eight million white, four million black. The radicals demand suffrage for the black men on the ground named above. Very good. Say to them, as mister Cowan said to the advocates of Negro male suffrage in the district, apply your principle, give suffrage to all men and women of mature age and sound mind, and we will accept it as the basis of state and national reconstruction. Consider the result from the Southern standpoint. Your four millions of Southern white women will counterbalance your four millions of Negro men and women, and thus the political supremacy of your white race will remain unchanged. He also made the case that black people would eventually just leave because they would get sick of all of this.

00:28:18
Speaker 2: It's not clear to me from this writing whether he's sort of trying to appeal to what he thinks will sway racists or if these are his opinions. Either way, it's gross though.

00:28:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, even if he thinks he's like playing eight level chess and that he's ahead of them and using their own ideas against them, putting it in writing just creates a big problem. Yeah.

00:28:45
Speaker 2: So this is obviously a strange outlier in Blackwell's work and makes it appear that while he may have supported the anti slavery effort, that he also saw the black population as inferior. Really no documentation about how Lucy felt about.

00:29:00
Speaker 1: This, No, that's like one of the great mysteries. In eighteen sixty nine, the division in the women's movement led to a formal split. Stone and Julia Ward Howe formed the American Women's Suffrage Association, while Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony launched the National Women's Suffrage Association. Both of these organizations waxed and waned in their numbers over the years, and they sort of carved out turf in terms of who was going to advocate for what. The AWSA focused, for example, on getting suffrage passed at the state level, working with advocates in each state, while the NWSAY set its sites on national suffrage rights. In eighteen seventy, Lucy and Henry moved to Dorchester, Massachusetts, and started working closely with the New England Woman's Suffrage Association. The couple also started publishing Woman's Journal, which was the American Women's Suffrage Association periodical. When Massachusetts offered women p many strictly regulated voting rights in eighteen seventy nine, Lucy's intent was that she would register, but she would be struck from the voter roles because she had not changed her name to Henry's. She was told she was going to have to sign the voting roles as Blackwell, which she refused to do, so she did not get to vote.

00:30:20
Speaker 2: In eighteen eighty three, an echo of Lucy's past emerged when she was asked by Oberlin College to compose a commencement speech, just as she had when she was graduating. This time, though she was invited to also give this speech. She accepted the invitation and was part of the school's fiftieth anniversary celebration. In eighteen ninety, the rift between the women that had founded the American Woman's Suffrage Association and the National woman Suffrage Association was healed in large part by the daughters of the original founders of those organizations. Lucy's daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell and Elizabeth Gaty Stanton's daughter, Harriet Stanton black bat worked to reunite the two groups under the umbrella of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Katie Stanton was its president and Susan B. Anthony was vice president. It is pretty widely accepted that Anthony was the actual leader of the group. In practice, Lucy Stone was not active in the group though, because her health had really started to decline. This story will once again intersect with another topic that came up recently in our episode on architect Louis Sullivan. That was the eighteen ninety three Columbia Exposition. That event was the stage of Lucy Stone's last public speech in May of eighteen ninety three. Lucy had wanted to make additional speeches there later in the summer, but her health just did not allow for it. In the autumn of that year, in September eighteen ninety three, Lucy was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Ever pragmatic, she very carefully got all her affairs in order. Some of this meant that She was admonishing Henry not to stop looking after his own health because their daughter, Alice, who had become an important collaborator in their work, was going to need him. And there were well wishes that poured in from all around the world, and Lucy assured her friends that she was not afraid of dying, and that even in the next world, she would know when women got the right to vote. When one of her doctors told her with certainty that she was going to die soon and that he hoped she would approach the end with serenity, she told him there is nothing to be unserene about. On October eighteenth, eighteen ninety three, Lucy Stone died. Her last words spoken to her daughter Alice, were make the world better. She was cremated and her ashes were interred at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston.

00:32:47
Speaker 1: Lucy I like her heaps, and I have many thoughts to share on Friday about marriage and Lucy's life and Lucy's husband. In the meantime, I have fun email fun email from our listener James, who writes Dear Holly and Tracy and Team. I have been a listener to your podcast for the last few years and did, in fact catch the Levi Strauss episode when it originally aired, and I was very happy to have it as a classic episode this weekend. I live in Butenheim, the birthplace of Loeb Strauss. When I moved here, my American family my dad was US American, had no end of fun at the fact that I was going to be a Buttenheimer, but they were also duly impressed by the fact that Levi Strauss was born here. As you can see from the pictures attached, we're celebrating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the five oh one gene with a street party in front of the Levi Strauss Museum. I have also attached a picture of the birthplace, which is part of said museum, complete with the statue they put up a few years ago. In fact, my husband and I got married in that museum. It belongs to the local council and the rooms in the town hall are really small. Almost exactly four years ago. Okay, that's like the coolest place to get married and also happy anniversary. So if any listeners are true fans, they should come and visit the museum. Franconia is one of the most beautiful parts of Germany and well worth a visit. Best regards and thanks for the podcast. I am putting that on my list of places that I want to go now because it does look amazing. I want to go to the Levistras Museum real bad. He would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or cool museums or places we should visit. My list can get longer, that's fine. You can do that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on the internet social media's as Missed in History pretty much everywhere, and if you haven't subscribed yet, you can subscribe anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts, or the iHeartRadio app.

00:34:53
Speaker 2: Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.