Behind the Scenes Minis: Mixed Opinions

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V.

00:00:14
Speaker 2: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about the Stone of Schoon. We did this this week, something people still have incredibly strong feelings about. Like here is a quote from a twenty twenty one piece in Scotland's The National by Hamish McPherson. Quote, Today is the seven hundred and twenty fifth anniversary of arguably the greatest theft in Scottish history, if you exclude the Act of Union and our removal from the European Union against the will of the Scottish people. I have no idea what the rest of this piece says, because it is paywall, and sadly I cannot pay to unpaywall every single thing that crosses my radar. One of the books I read on this is by someone called Professor Warwick Rodwell, and Professor Warwick Rodwell works in a consulting role with the Deanon Chapter of Westminster. I forgot to write down the exact title, and his entire book sounds so irritated, so irritated about the stone having been sent back to Scotland, so irritated about the nineteen fifty removal of the stone, so irritated about all of the mythology around it, just profoundly irritated the whole way through. So for example, there's a section about the authenticity of the stone that says, quote, A great deal has already been written about this subject, and it would consume too much space to rehearse all the wayward arguments here. So yeah, the whole tone of that, I was just like, man, you sound like you just want to.

00:01:59
Speaker 3: Put up, put out everyone involved with this in detention.

00:02:02
Speaker 1: Right.

00:02:04
Speaker 3: One thing that I had in the outline.

00:02:05
Speaker 2: That I took out because it felt like a digression that it's also interesting and funny to me, so I want to talk about it now is what happened with the Coronation Share and the Stone of Schoon during World War Two. Okay, people in London were really afraid that something was going to happen to the Stone and the Coronation Share, like being bombed. I mean this was a reasonable fear, right Britain was under attack directly during World War Two. So the chair was taken to Gloucester Cathedral. It was put into a sort of recessed space, and then it was walled in with sandbags. And then the stone was placed in a burial vault under abbot Islap's chapel in Westminster Abbey. They thought that would be a safer place for it in case the abbey was like directly hit with a bomb. However, they were also afraid of the location being leaked and afraid that if there was a major attack on London, if they like really limited who knew where the stone was, it would be possible that everybody who knew would be killed. So they needed to take some extra steps to make sure that there was information about where the stone was hidden outside of England. So they sent a sealed letter to the Prime Minister of Canada, which was placed in a bank in Ottawa. And then they were like, what if something happens to that, So they sent a backup copy to the Lieutenant Governor they probably say Lieutenant Governor that was placed in a bank in Montreal. A third copy was kept in the UK until they had word that those two other envelopes had arrived safely in Canada. This maybe seems a little excessive, it honestly, it was not all the correspondents relating to all of these plans. Was in the office of the Dean of Westminster when it was hit by an incendiary bomb in nineteen forty one, and the documents did survive, but like there's some burned parts. So anyway, I found that whole story kind of wild. Also, we alluded to the fact that most of what we know about this heist today is from the perspective of people who were part of it, telling stories a lot of times in a very dramatic, colorful way, particularly Ian Hamilton. Ian Hamilton talked about this a lot. He comes across in a lot of accounts like almost as the sole perpetrator of the whole thing, which is really not the case. He definitely made it sound like a very Robin Hood rob from the rich and give to the poor kind of thing. They all come across as kind of like roguish scoundrels, and he comes across as kind of self promotional. So I found it very funny that in that two thousand and eight movie version of this which I watched over the weekend, eventually every person that he has a dialogue with at some point tells him basically, you are sure full of yourself. I found that very funny. So yeah, a lot of stuff that it's like we sort of think this is how it went down, but we're we're having to draw from a narrative that's like intentionally written to be entertaining. Right.

00:05:20
Speaker 1: For a lot of it, we Chris crossed with an episode of Criminalia that we did several seasons back regarding Margaret made of Norway. Okay, because I don't know if you came across this anything, but ten years after she died at the age of seven, tragically, a woman came forward claiming that she was, in fact Margaret. I did not find that She's known as the false Margaret, and it's there were people that believed her, even though there was so much evidence against it. Like Margaret's father had identified the body. Margaret would have been seventeen with this woman came forward and she was like estimated to be in her forties. Like there were just people that wanted to believe so badly that this was really Margaret and that everything was going to change with all of those thirteen claimants in the whole chaos that had happened, And it made me think about I want to put this very carefully because I don't want anyone to feel like their position or their opinion on the Stone of Schoon is denigrated. But it made me think about just the ways that people will put their faith in a thing that doesn't have supporting evidence because they want it so badly. And it's like, we don't really know the scoop on the Stone of Scoon, but it is so hotly contested, and so it just kind of, I don't know if tickled me. It's right word. It occurred to me how there are these interwoven pieces of this story that similarly have people believing things really hard even though they can't really prove that their belief has like factual backup.

00:07:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are people who are hardcore believing the various conspiracy theories, either that Edward took the wrong one or that the wrong one was returned, or possibly both.

00:07:18
Speaker 3: Like like, there's.

00:07:20
Speaker 2: Some arguments that like both of those conspiracy theories are true, that not only did he take the wrong one, but also the wrong one was then returned in nineteen fifty one, And it really does seem like both of those conspiracy theories came about way later. Some of the specific things that people cite as evidence are things that are demonstrably untrue.

00:07:43
Speaker 3: Like there's an argument of like.

00:07:45
Speaker 2: Well, Scotland did not ask for the stoneback because they already knew that they had the real stone, and it's like, but no, they did, though they did ask for the stone back. We have it written down, so anyway, it's kind of funny to me, how like they are definitely, for short, one hundred percent of people who have incredibly strong feelings about this today. But what I found written about it in recent years is more broadly written like a heist adventure than stuff written in the fifties when people were largely appalled and outraged. There are accounts that make it sort of seem like everybody like they took it back to Scotland and everybody was cheering in the streets, and there were some people who were excited, but there were a lot of people who were like, whoa, no, that what you stole from a church on Christmas? Like what is wrong with you? And of course people who were like politicians who wanted to seem respectable, who wanted to, you know, keep a generally positive relationship with England's It comes across as like a universally more embraced heist than it really was. Yeah, yeah, and again am I thing about all of that? It just I, in fact want to convey the opposite of what that might sound like, where I'm like, why is everybody getting wanted up about a thing they don't know for sure?

00:09:14
Speaker 1: But it's more like it points to the importance of these shared concepts of history that we cling to, right like that, There's there's something interesting that humans are inherently prone to wanting to find those touchstones that are things they can like connect to, even if they don't always have the backup on it, And that to me is just a fascinating part of being a human.

00:09:43
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:09:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, we talked about the Banu Musa because I played Assassin's Green Mirage.

00:09:58
Speaker 3: We certainly did.

00:10:00
Speaker 2: I do not know if this is accurate, and I only found one source that said it, so I didn't put it in the episode. But I did find a source saying that the House of Wisdom was the first library in the world to organize its collection by subject. Fascinating, no idea if that's actually accurate or not. Did not really have the ability to run it down. This is right up there with our recent episodes about Catalonia, in that we did not learn a lot of this in school. No, and even having done multiple prior episodes related to either the Islamic Golden Age specifically or the period right after that, there was still just a ton of stuff that I was like, mine did not know about this at all, anarchy as Samara didn't know. I got to the part about how you know, when they were kids their dad was an astrologer and astronomer to a man who later became the caliph. It was not written about in the like the brief write ups that I read as though that had involved a civil war.

00:11:11
Speaker 3: So like when I just put.

00:11:13
Speaker 2: Their names of al Amin and al Rashid into Google, suddenly I discovered there was something called the Brothers War, and I was like, did not know that that ever happened. So this was definitely an episode that involved stumbling on a lot of things that were a major part of history in this part of the world that I knew nothing about, and also feeling like the resources that we had in English were not entirely sufficient, right, I would like for there to be just a much richer body of work in English on the body Musa than we actually have. And of course I also want to talk about Assassin's Creed a little bit. Yeah, so I enjoyed this game a whole lot. Reviews I have read of it by like Arab Americans, people who grew up in Baghdad, people who have lived there, I would describe as mixed. Like I read a lot of people who were like, I was so happy to have a video game set in the Islamic Golden Age. It was so great to be in a video game and hearing people speak Arabic and not having those be the terrorists cell, which is, you know, a trope in a lot of video games, and just people talking about little details about the world that are that they found really good and like good representation to use that idea. I also read some reviews from folks that were more like I was so excited that there was going to be a game set in the Islamic Golden Age, and I really felt like it was just the backdrop of a game that was mostly about assassinating a corrupt cabal of people. And I'm like, that's number one, totally fair as a criticism. Number two, that is sort of what the Assassin's Creed games are, Like, It's a game where you assassinate a lot of people from a corrupt cabal, right at least that is how the game frames it. Some things I personally really enjoyed about the game, As you know, a person who just has never been to this part of the world.

00:13:19
Speaker 3: I liked a lot how beautiful it was.

00:13:22
Speaker 2: There are little in game elements that you can interact with in this game that are historical sites that tell you something about the history of this place.

00:13:30
Speaker 3: It's just really nice.

00:13:31
Speaker 2: There are some places you can find that don't play an actual part in the story that are significant in some way, and there's, you know, an explanation of why that was significant. And I really like you sort of build a whole encyclopedia of Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age over the course of the game if you interact with all of these elements in the game, which I thought was pretty cool.

00:13:52
Speaker 1: I love it.

00:13:53
Speaker 2: A thing I felt awkward. I only noticed this happening at sunset in the game. I don't know if it happens more then at sunset. That was when it would catch my attention. Is the call to prayer. You hear the call to prayer happening, which is like a super important part of, you know, a Muslim country. I would stop what I was doing because I felt like it was really disrespectful, oh right to assassinate some people during the call to prayer. I was like, that feels wrong to me. I don't want to do it. I have no idea how anyone else feels about that. That was just what I felt like as a player. So anyway, game I was pretty into, and then my us as I opened up the game one day, it was like Black Friday sale, would you like to buy Assassin's Creed origins for fourteen dollars? And I was like, absolutely less, yes, I would. So like now I'm playing that one which is said in Egypt, which I have not played before.

00:14:50
Speaker 3: I know it's older.

00:14:52
Speaker 2: I did not start playing the Assassin's Creed games until Odyssey, because Patrick bought it for me as a Christmas present, having heard that it was a game he thought I would like.

00:15:03
Speaker 3: That was correct. I love that game. It's really good.

00:15:06
Speaker 2: So Happy Friday. Whatever's happening on your weekend, if it involves some video games, I hope you have so much video game fun. If you're having to work this weekend, I hope that goes great. And that everybody is great that you have to work with, and that if you're working with the public, the public is also great. We'll be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow, and we will move back with something brand new on Monday. 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.