Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I don't think we've talked very much on the show about the Shakers. They're more formally called the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearance, and there were as many as six thousand Shakers in the middle of the nineteenth century, but their numbers started declining after that point. Today there is only one active Shaker community remaining. It's in Maine, and over the last few years that has had between two and three members. Today's subject was a Shaker, but was also something of an outlier among the Shakers. Shakers were known for their rural, utopian communities, but Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson established a community in the city of Philadelphia. This was the only known urban Shaker community. Nineteenth century Shaker teachings also included racial equality, and Shaker communities were open to believers regardless of their race. But at the same time, most of these communities were very predominantly white. Like if you see photographs or illustrations, often there are one or two people of color. At most Jackson, on the other hand, was a black woman who focused a lot of her religious work on the black community, and most believers in the community that she established were black women. So that's who we're going to talk about today. And just a heads up, there is some violence in this episode, including a little bit of discussion of intimate partner violence. Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson's autobiography begins with a conversion experience that she had in July of eighteen thirty. She was thirty five years old at the time. She makes scattered references to her life before that, but they're mostly in the context of dreams or visions connected to those earlier moments. Her journals also end abruptly years before her death, and her autobiography is almost exclusively focused on her spiritual and religious life, so there are gaps in what we know about her adult life, and we don't know much about her life before the age of thirty five at all. We do know that she was born on February sevente in Horntown, Pennsylvania, and at the time this was a small village outside of Philadelphia, but as the city got bigger, Horntown was pretty much absorbed into it. Rebecca's mother was a free black woman named Jane, and we don't really know much about her father, except that his last name was Cox. He probably died not long after Rebecca was born. She went to live with her grandmother until she was a toddler, possibly because her mother just couldn't afford to support the whole family by herself. At that point, Jane had at least two other children, Joseph and John. Jane remarried at least once to a man whose last name is Wilson or Whisson. He died in eighteen o one, when Rebecca was about six. Rebecca had her first vision just before this one, in which she foresaw her stepfather's death. During her lifetime, she had visions that predicted the deaths of other family members as well, including her young nephew John. After that vision, he converted and was baptized on his deathbed. Rebecca's grandmother died when she was seven, and then when Rebecca was about ten, she became responsible for looking after two younger half brothers and her adult writing, Rebecca described herself as the only one of her mother's children who quote had not learning. That's probably because she was the only one who couldn't go to school because she had all these other duties to her siblings. Rebecca's mother died when Rebecca was thirteen, and she went to live with her thirty one year old brother, Joseph Cox. He worked at a tanning yard and was also a preacher and an older at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. He was probably a widower. Rebecca's writings never mentioned a wife. Rebecca started working as a seamstress while also keeping her brother's house and looking after his six children, and at some point she got married to a man named Samuel S. Jackson, and her writings suggests that two of them after they were married, lived together in her brother's house. As we said just a moment ago. Joseph Cox was an elder at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church or a m e now known as Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. This is one of the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregations in the United States and one of the first black churches of any denomination in the country. The church was at the heart of Philadelphia's free black community, with ties to the abolitionist movement and to the underground railroad. The African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in the face of racism and discrimination among other Methodist congregations, but the Methodist Church had been at least somewhat more welcoming toward black members than a lot of other denominations were, and they had actively ministered to black communities. This is something we talked a little bit about not long ago in our episodes on William APIs. So by the time Rebecca Cox Jackson got to adulthood, there was already a tradition of black Methodist communities, including black clergy and lay ministers, and black lead prayer groups. While the clergy and other church leadership were typically men, a lot of prayer groups were formed among women and focused specifically on women's spirituality. Although Rebecca Cox Jackson eventually became a Shaker, her early religious experiences were largely within more mainstream churches like the African Methodist Episcopal Church. As we said earlier, Jackson's autobiography starts with a religious experience in that she had in eighteen thirty, when she was thirty five. She saw that as the true beginning of her life. She had always been so afraid of thunderstorms that she would hide from them in her bed. During a particularly bad storm, she started to feel like the storm itself was announcing the end of her life. She prayed either for death or for redemption, and suddenly everything shifted. Instead of being a messenger of death, the lightning became quote the messenger of joy, peace, and consolation. Her fear of thunderstorms immediately fell away, and she saw them instead as messages from God. About six months after this experience, Jackson made a public confession and was baptized by Mary Peterson, who was the wife of a Presbyterian minister from Philadelphia. Peterson was part of a women's prayer circle or covenant circle that Jackson was involved with, and Jackson eventually became its co leader. Jackson didn't offer much specific detail about her relationship with her husband, but she does mention that he liked to gamble and that he used obscene language. But after Rebecca's conversion, Samuel seems to have been pretty supportive of her religious pursuits, at least at first. Rebecca started a smaller prayer group with her husband and a couple of other people so they could talk about their experiences in a more private setting some of the prayer groups that formed within Methodist communities during this time. We're focused on sanctification, so when a person converted to Methodism, they felt that their sins had been forgiven through divine love and grace. But then sanctification went beyond that to fully free a person from sin. Sometimes people of color who wrote about their own religious experiences in the nineteenth century also framed sanctification as freeing them from any racism or oppression that they had internalized while living in a racist and oppressive society. So those factors obviously still existed, but they didn't feel as emotionally and spiritually burdened or bound by them. Rebecca Cox Jackson had a sanctification experience in eight thirty one, and that experience, in her words, quote, destroyed the lust of my flesh and made me hate it. She came to believe that her body was God's and God's alone, and that sex was sinful, even in the context of a marriage. She talked to her husband about this newfound conviction, and her description of what happened during this conversation sounds almost otherworldly. He had gone into the cellar to get some firewood and he'd left the door open, and there was also a pot of coffee boiling on the stove in the kitchen. Jackson kept placing her hands on the stove and then walking toward the open cellar door with her eyes closed, but the stove never burned her and she never fell down the stairs into the cellar. She upened her eyes after doing this several times, and Samuel was looking at her as though he was afraid of her. Rebecca explained to Samuel that her newfound conviction wasn't about her personal desires or about her feelings about him. It was that her body no longer belonged to her. It belonged entirely to God. Jackson describes her husband as understanding this as a divine experience and attending prayer meetings with her for several weeks with the hope of having some kind of revelation of his own, but eventually Samuel stopped being supportive. Years later, when the two of them separated, Jackson said that she had become afraid of him, including being afraid for her life, and that she had only survived the last years of her marriage because her gift of foresight had made it possible to avoid the worst of his violence. We'll talk about how Jackson's life changed after this sanctification experience after we take a quick sponsor break. Rebecca Cox. Jackson started having more religious visions after her sanctification, but at first she didn't always act on them. In one case, there was a woman she knew who was sick, and Jackson felt that she should pray for this woman, But then she thought, quote her husband as a Presbyterian, and don't know you, and if he comes in and sees an old black woman in his chamber praying for his wife, he will push you into the street. So she didn't. Was woman later died, and her family said that she had thought Jackson was coming to pray for her and did not understand why she had not. In another incident, Jackson had a premonition that another woman was going to die in about two weeks and that Jackson needed to tell her so that she could put her affairs in order, But Jackson was again afraid she thought that she might be branded as a false prophet. This woman also died, and Jackson felt deeply remorseful. After all of this, Jackson committed herself to trusting her visions and to always obeying God's commands to her, and in her mind, this was a binding covenant. At around the time that all of this was happening, Jackson also learned to read. Her brother, Joseph Cox, had agreed to teach her. They had agreed that he would give her an hour or so of lessons after supper or before he went to bed, but in her words quote, his time was taken up as well as mine. This became a big source of frustration. But a bigger frustration was when Jackson realized that Cox was not just taking dictation when he wrote out letters for her. He was editing her words as she spoke. And she realized this she told him quote, I don't want THEE to word my letter. I only want THEE to write it. Jackson was really hurt by her brother's actions, but then, in her words quote, these words were spoken in my heart, be faithful, and the time shall come when you can write. Later, when she was sewing, another message arrived in her mind, quote, who taught the first man on earth to read? Answer? God? Well, God is unchangeable, and if he taught the first man to read, he can you. After this, she opened a Bible and realized that she could read it. She told her husband that she could read, and he said she had probably just memorized those verses, so she turned to some verses that she did not know she read them as well. After this, she read from the Bible every day and eventually realized that she could read whatever she wanted. She also learned to write, and afterwards she regularly kept a journal, something that she kept up for about three decades. She also felt called to write about religion and spirituality as it was told to her through things like visions and dreams and divine revelations, saying quote, I am only a pen in his hand. Just as her sanctification experience had shifted her relationship with her husband, her experience with literacy really shifted a relationship with her brother. She had always really looked up to Joseph, almost as a father figure. She had even idolized him, so his failure to teach her to read was a huge disappointment. But then beyond that, she began to think that it had been wrong of her to idolize her brother in this way in the first place, and she realized that she could not simultaneously defer to her brother as a father figure and the head of their household, and also adhere to her conviction that she be unconditionally obedient to God. As Jackson became more able to study the Bible on her own, she also became more active in her covenant meetings. This caused controversy as men other than her own husband started to attend them. Although Jackson had been baptized, she wasn't formally a member of any specific church, and she had no plans to join a church at that point since God had not commanded her to do so. But her brother's role in the A. M. E. Church also meant that her activities reflected on him, and people started putting pressure on him to try to make her stop. She was accused of dividing up church congregations and of quote a leading the men. Ministers and leaders from various denominations started investigating what she was doing. Although many of them denounced her, some actually wound up on her side. For example, Bishop Morris Brown of the African Methodist Episcopal Church attended one of her meetings. His intent was that he was going to make her stop preaching, but then afterward he said, quote if ever the Holy Ghost was in any place. It was in that meeting let her alone now. Jackson also found that ascetic practices like fasting and seclusion heightened her spiritual gifts. These gifts included visions and dreams, tames that were sometimes violent and disturbing. She saw herself and various members of her family coming to harm. She didn't do any kind of introspection about whether these images had some kind of root cause she saw them as direct messages from God. But some of the people who have written about her have speculated that some of this imagery was a response to the place and time where she was living. In the early nineteenth century, there was a violent racist backlash against the free black community and the abolition movement in Philadelphia and in Pennsylvania more broadly. We have talked about this in a couple of previous episodes of the show, including our episode on Lucretia Mott and our interview with historian Callie Nicole Gross, in which we talked about ongoing racism and racist violence in Philadelphia after the Civil War. This violence included things like a white mob burning down the abolitionist meeting venue Pennsylvania Hall, four days after it opened. Bethel A. M. E. Which was damaged in this same act of arson. Yeah, we're gonna have that episode on Lucretia Mott as a Saturday classic coming up for folks who want more of that context up. So in addition to that, racist violence was also escalating in other parts of the Northeastern US in the decades before the Civil War. That means that when Jackson started traveling as an itinerant minister, she was taking a big risk, especially since Samuel did not go with her. She traveled all over the Northeastern United States preaching and healing. She found both black and white converts in response to her preaching, but there were also a lot of people who denounced her, or disrupted her meetings or threatened her life over what she was doing. In addition to the fact that she was a black woman preaching to racially integrated congregations, some of what she was preaching was deeply controversial, especially the idea of celibacy even within the context of marriage. She was also doing all this while experiencing some kind of chronic or recurrent illness. She wrote about three different times that she thought she was going to die, but lived because she was needed to do God's work. Some of her descriptions from her journals suggests that she may have been experiencing seizures. There's a gap in what we know about Jackson's life that stretches from about eighteen thirty six to eighteen forty, but at some point during those years, she became part of a group in Albany, New York that became known as the Little Band. This was a perfectionist group that was predominantly white. So perfectionism isn't one specific theology, but it's rooted in the idea of it being possible to spiritually perfect oneself to become fully free from sin, So it has some common elements to that sanctification that we talked about earlier. During these years, Jackson also met Rebecca Parrott sometimes spelled with two T s pe r O t T. Parad was born in eighteen sixteen or eighteen eighteen and was about eighteen when she and Jackson first met. In eighteen thirty six. Parad became Jackson's closest companion, and the two women were together for the rest of Jackson's life, so for more than thirty five years. We mentioned Jackson's sometimes frightening and violent visions and dreams earlier. Her journals just detail so many of them, but not all of her visions were violent or frightening. Some of the ones that involved Rebecca Parrot are actually the opposite. Here's the one that she wrote about from eighteen fifty one quote. I dreamt that Rebecca and me lived together. The door opened west, and there was a river that came from the west, and it ran eastward, passing our house on the south side, and one part came front on the west, a beautiful white river. I stood in the west door, looking westward at the beautiful river. I saw Rebecca Parat coming in the river, her face to the east, and she a plunging in the water every few steps, head foremost a bathing herself. She only had on her undergarment. She was pure and clean, even as the water in which she was a bathing. She came facing me out of the water. I wondered she was not afraid. Sometimes she would be hid for a moment, then she would rise again. She looked like an angel. Oh, how bright. Gene McMahon, whom is who edited a collection of Jackson's writings, describes this relationship as one that combined elements of motherhood, marriage, and sisterhood. Other people's writings from the time sometimes described Jackson and Parrot as mother and daughter, or as a spiritual mother and daughter. Jackson also kept Parrott's journals within the pages of her own. Paratt could not read, so she would dictate her journal entries to Jackson, who wrote them down with her own journal entries. We'll talk about how Jackson and Parratt joined the Shakers. After a quick sponsor break at the end of eighteen forty two, several members of the Little Band, including its founder Alan Pierce, visited a community of Shakers. So, like we said at the top of the show, the Shakers are more formally known as the United Society of Believers in Christ Second Appearing. They started out in the seventeen forties near Manchester, England, as an offshoot of the Quakers, also called the Religious Society of Friends. The name Shakers actually started out as a nickname, kind of insulting nickname that outsiders gave them because their mode of worship included a state of ecstatic dancing that could involve shaking or trembling. Shaker leader Mother Ann Lee, immigrated to New York with a group of followers in seventeen seventy four, seeking freedom from religious persecution. The United Society of Believers in Christ Second Appearing then established another member of communities in the US. These communities were focused on simplicity, communal living, and celibacy, including strictly dividing the community by gender for everything from living spaces to work duties. When people joined the Shakers, they settled their debts with the outside world and then turned any money or property they had over to the collective. Shaker communities became known for simple, practical clothing and for simple but also finally made handicrafts like furniture and brooms. Because the people living in these communities were celibate, they could only grow through recruiting new adult members or through adopting, fostering, or indenturing children. That was something that led to accusations that Shakers were really kidnappers. Leaving the UK did not ultimately protect the Shakers from religious persecution. There was a whole anti Shaker movement in the United States and the nineteenth century. Shaker beliefs were also connected to millinaire as um, or the belief that before the Last Judgment, Christ would establish a Kingdom of God on Earth, which would continue for a thousand years. Mother Ann Lee died in seventour and some of her followers came to believe that she had been the second manifestation of the Divine Spirit to take a human form on earth, the first one being Jesus Christ. This aligned with Shaker beliefs that God had both male and female manifestations, and about the eighteen thirties a new belief arose within the Shakers, which was described as Mother Ann's work. This was rooted in the idea that Mother Anne was continuing her religious work in the spirit world and that was leading spirits to manifest themselves to Shakers who were still living. Has had some parallels to the spiritualist movement that was developing at about the same time, including mediums who acted as conduits for spirits and seance like rituals. The number of Shaker believers peaked in the eighteen forties at about six thousand, living primarily among eighteen rural communities in the northeastern US and what was at the time thought of as the Western Frontier. The largest of these communities was in Mount Lebanon, New York, and it was right around this time that Alan Pierce and the Little Band visited a Shaker community. Pierce felt that it was God's will for the Little Band to become Shakers as well. Over time, sixteen members of the group did, including some children, but not all of the Little Band converted, and some of those who did ultimately wound up leaving. The Shaker way of life could be really difficult and involved a lot of strict rules and hard work, and existing families were separated into new living and working groups after they became part of the community. Jackson was one of the people from the Little Band who didn't join the Shakers right away, although she did see a lot of overlap between her own beliefs and Shaker teachings. This included her belief in celibacy and the idea that a person could experience divine revelations directly from God. Shakers described these revelations, prophecies, and spiritual manifestations as gifts, and the gifts the Shakers experienced were much like the religious and spiritual experiences that Jackson had in her own life. Even though she didn't become a believer right away, Jackson did find a new level of zeal and urgency in her own religious work. She had been experiencing religious visions for years at this point, but after learning more about the Shaker belief in the dualism of God, more of the spiritual teachers who she saw in these visions were women. In eighteen forty seven, Rebecca Cox Jackson and Rebecca Parat formally joined the Shaker community at water Voleet, New York, just north of Albany. A few members of the little Band who hadn't yet converted, became believers at the same time. This was a little more then four years after Jackson's first visit to a Shaker community. She and Parat continued to live together, and they were often known as either the Two Rebecca's or the Black Rebecca's. Rebecca Cox Jackson's relationship with her husband, Samuel had really been deteriorating four years. She had also come to the conclusion that it was just not possible to maintain both her religious life and her marriage, even if that marriage was celibate. When she joined the Shakers. She and her husband finally separated, and then he died At some point after that, although the exact date of his death is not clear. Samuel continued to appear in her dreams and visions, though including an eighteen fifty five vision in which quote, his countenance was sorrowful, such a one I think I never saw upon immortal. Its expressions seemed to implore mercy. She describes him as seeing and feeling that he had to put all his things in order and right all his wrongs, and that when he saw that she was ready to forgive him quote, the tears of contrition flowed in abundance. In spite of all that commonality and overlap between Jackson's belief that she had come to you on her own and Shaker teachings, she really had some trouble adjusting to the Shaker's way of life. Shaker communities tended to be rural and self contained, but Jackson's own spiritual calling involved working among people to spread God's word. Believers were also beholden to the rules of their communities and two directions that were handed down by Shaker elders and eldresses, but Jackson was used to following what she saw as directions given directly to her from God. At the same time, she got a lot of praise for her work. For example, Shaker Rufus Bishop described her speaking at a public meeting in eighteen fifty this way quote, I do not know as I ever heard the spectator's lectured in a more suitable and feeling manner in my life. Every sentence and word seemed to come with weight and power and breathed forth love and goodwill to the children of men. In eighteen fifty the Two Rebecca's got permission to make a brief visit back to Philadelphia. It seems like the leaders that water Volie hoped this would ease some of the tension and disagreements that had been going on. It didn't, though, and after briefly returning to water Volie, the Two Rebecca's went back to Philadelphia again. In eighteen fifty one. Jackson essentially established an unsanctioned Shaker community. She really focused her work on Philadelphia's black community, and although this is what she felt like she was called to do, she felt really guilty about this rift with Shaker leadership in Philadelphia. Jackson and Parrott attended seances and spiritualist meetings. Jackson's journals described sensing many spirits in the room at some of the science as they attended. Both of them had visions and prophetic dreams, which Jackson recorded in her journals. In one of parat dreams, she Rebecca Jackson and a Shaker woman were all in England, where the Queen of England crowned Rebecca Jackson King of Africa and Rebecca Parrot Queen. Then she saw Africa quote with all her treasures of gold, together with all her inhabitants, and this was all given unto our charge. In eighteen fifty seven, the two Rebecca's went back to water Volie, and they stayed there for about a year. Jackson was very ill during this time, describing pain and swelling in her eyes along with blindness. She eventually recovered, and in October of eighteen fifty eight she was given leave to establish a small Shaker community in Philadelphia. Sometimes this is described as an out family. Permission to do this came from Eldress Paulina Bates, someone Jackson respected but had previously argued with over their differences in approach. Bates said she was speaking on behalf of mother and Lee. According to Jackson's journals, Bates said, quote, now Rebecca, you may go to your people and do all the good you can. Now you can go in the gift of God, and then the gift of the ministry and elders. Now you are endowed with power and authority. Now the Lord hath sent you. You have waited for the Lord, and you go under a blessing. The two Rebecca's left for Philadelphia again on October eight fifty eight, after being given some money to cover travel expenses and some books on Shaker theology that Jackson had asked for. Jackson was holding quote solemn meetings in Philadelphia by the following April. Paulina Bates visited this little community several times a year until her death in eighteen eighty four, and she eventually became somebody that Jackson loved and respected deeply as a religious companion and a mentor. The Shaker community that Jackson established in Philadelphia was primarily made up of black him in and all of its leaders were black. Some accounts described them as living in a house on Erie Street, but several other addresses connected to the same community are shown in Shaker records as well. It seems as though the whole community followed Shaker teachings and practices, but only Jackson and Parrot received divine gifts and practiced healing. Although the journals of other Shakers mentioned visiting this Shaker community in Philadelphia, or they note that it existed, we don't have a lot of specific documentation of what day to day life was like there or Jackson's activities while she was leading this community. As we said earlier, her journals stopped abruptly seven years before her death, and that happened on seventy one, probably from a stroke. Rebecca Cox Jackson was then buried near some of her blood relatives in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. After Rebecca Cox Jackson died, Rebecca Parrot took her name, sometimes becoming known as Rebecca Cox Jackson Jr. Or as Rebecca Parrot Jackson. Eventually she became known as just mother Jackson. Sometimes this is described as an effort to honor Jackson and continue her work, but there are also less charitable interpretations, like that it was more about her own self aggrandizement. There are no known pictures of Rebecca Cox Jackson, but there is one of Rebecca Parrot which is sometimes labeled as Jackson and error. Most likely because of this whole name change. Rebecca Cox Jackson left behind a lot of writing, most of it remained unpublished for more than a century, though Rebecca Parrott gave a lot of it to Shaker leaders. Two different Shakers each made a copy of it, sometimes also making edits. These wound up in various libraries and archives, and two books that came out in the early nineteen eighties compared these different versions when they're being prepared. Rebecca Parrott continued to lead the Shaker community in Philadelphia for years after Jackson's death. She and four other members retired to Water of Leet in eighteen ninety six, and she lived there until her death in nineteen o one. The Black Shaker community in Philadelphia seems to have continued for at least a few years after that. The last written mention is in a New York Times article from nineteen o nine. That article is about elder Ernest Pick, who had been dismissed from the Shakers and had been trying to document Shaker communities, which by that point we're really dwindling. The Times describes him traveling quote from Pittsfield to Philadelphia, where there is a colored community of Shakers, small in numbers, as we've alluded to, There are two works about Jackson that include a lot of our writing. Both of these came out in nineteen eighty one. One is called Gifts of Power, The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary Shaker Eldress. That's by Gene McMahon Whomes. That includes introductory material and analysis on Jackson with her complete writings from eighteen thirty to eighteen sixty four. The other is called and Chosen The Story of Mother Rebecca Jackson and the Philadelphia Shakers by Richard E. Williams. That one has biographical material and analysis. They're kind of interspersed with quotes, some of them very lengthy from Jackson's writing. Some sometimes it's like a little bit of analysis in a very long passage of her journals. Um. The journals are very fascinating to read. A lot of them just in very straightforward and matter of fact language, just sort of chronicle these visions that she had or dreams that she had, or the person that she met with, or her own thoughts and theology. And I wish we had ones from those gaps to fill in some more detail about parts of this story. Do you have a little bit of listener mail to fill in details of other lives? This is from Sarah. Sarah writes Kia from Outer ro in New Zealand. As you mentioned on the podcast, one of the issues of The Mercator and many other projections is that it's Eurocentric. One of the results of this is that alter to row in New Zealand and other Pacific nations are of course off the edge. This has led to the Great Map Conspiracy, where New Zealand has left off maps all over the world, which begs the question does New Zealand actually exist? There was even a joking maybe suggestion that New Zealand diplomats carry New Zealand map stickers to add ourselves back on when we find we've been left off maps. I've linked a video made by Reese Darby of Flight of the Concords fame and Prime Minister just Sinda Ourdarn, which includes lots of Kiwi humor and a bunch of other famous kiwi's. There's a link to this video. Thanks for all the podcasts they've kept me company over many many years, sewing, sitting up with babies, traveling for my own work. I've attached photos of my mouse she Bingi and my rescue cat ru which is the word in Rayo Maori for our native owl which he has similar colorings too. So that's from Sarah. Thank you so much, Sarah for sending this. Uh. We sure did not mention how often New Zealand has left off of maps. And what's bizarre is sometimes there's a space right there that like New Zealand logically would be end and it's not there New Zealand, which is a pity because so much good stuff comes from New Zealand. Yeah. Being from the United States means that we very often see US maps that have this just weird, weird ways of adding in Alaska and Hawaii since they are not contiguous with the other forty eight states. Um. And I remember there being COVID maps early in the pandemic that just didn't have Hawaii on there at all, and people were like, but where's Hawaii though, Like that also is a state. Uh. And then of other places which are territories are otherwise connected to the US, which are also not included on these maps at all. Um. This made me think of this with this email. But then in this video which I watched, and it is delightful. Uh, they kept they keep finding all of these world maps like out you know, it's just in day to day life and a lot of them. I'm like, but that's the space for New Zealand right there, even to scale with the rest of the map, like why is it gone? Uh not actually something to be laughing at necessarily, but the video is made with a humorous spin. So thank you so much for sharing that with us, Sarah. We'll put a link to that in our social media when we uh tweet about this episode. Oh and also thank you for these animal pictures. I love them. Um. I did the thing where when I printed out this email to read it, I accidentally printed out the pictures also, and so now I have these giant eight and a half by eleven print outs of pets. Uh. If you'd like to write to us, we're history podcasts that I hit radio dot com. I'm gonna say I hope I did okay pronouncing the words in Mary, I did try very hard to listen in practice before reading this email. We are all over social media at missed in History. 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