Behind the Scenes Minis: Anglo, Communist, French

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

00:00:14
Speaker 2: And I'm tray cy V Wilson. So we talked about brunnen Burgh this week, which is full of mystery. Yep, I have, I have, I have some thoughts, Okay. One was an interesting thing that came up while I was looking at the website for Rural Archaeology, which was a quote that reads, the English Battlefield Register only has forty seven battles that are recognized and whose locations are accepted. Given the length of history of that place, where there are hundreds of battles, that is a very tiny number. And it just got me thinking about loss of information, because there were a lot of things that I read that were like, people forgot all about this battle, and I'm like, well they didn't, because there are people today that make their entire careers studying it. Yeah, it may not have been as well known, but parts of it certainly were lost. And it got me to thinking about the way that in cultures where history has largely been shared through oral traditions, there is always that thing of like, of course we know where the Great Battle happened, it was right over there, and then we'll tell the next generation, and then they'll tell the next generation. But that eventually breaks down. It doesn't take into account like the way the world might change going forward, and so I just find that super interesting. You know. It's not as though I feel like in the US we have a different vibe on the whole thing, because by the time the US was founded, we had all of this European history behind us, where we were like mark those battlefields people. Yeah, so there has been kind of a quicker mood, yeah, to put up historical markers in places like that, whereas all over Europe there are places that a lot of important stuff happened where it's.

00:02:10
Speaker 1: Like I think this is the place, I'm not sure.

00:02:13
Speaker 2: There's also an element to that that is like it's one of those things that's culturally and socially constructed in a way that people might not even think about because like it seems obvious right that like we would mark where the side of the battle was, but like the idea that that's something that needs to be marked and commemorated, like that comes from a specific culture and a specific mindset, and not every culture necessarily works that way, sort of like the idea that historic buildings should be preserved that comes out of a specific cultural context. Not every culture thinks that's what needs to happen, right. I also wanted to talk a little bit about Michael Livingston because his work is really interesting and a lot of people really revere him and reading his books.

00:03:06
Speaker 1: I was like, Oh, I see why. If you are at.

00:03:08
Speaker 2: All interested in any of this, I highly recommend checking out his work. One of the things that came up in several instances where I was reading kind of assessments by English historians is like, well, you know, Michael Livingston is from the US, but he still seems to know what he's talking about, which is kind of funny in and of itself. But the intro in particular for Never Greater Slaughter that he wrote, which really dives into all of this, had some really interesting things where he talks about the ways that writing about and talking about history have changed over the years, Like he just seems to have a very broad minded understanding and grasp of the way things have shifted.

00:03:58
Speaker 1: That I really like.

00:04:00
Speaker 2: He talks about how in some circles Anglo Saxon is kind of perceived as not cool anymore as a term because in a lot of cases it's been co opted as people who are you know, weaponizing racial identity. Yeah, it's been co opted by white supremacy things, right, And he's like, but you know, in some cases, right, I still want to use the term Anglo Saxon because in a lot of cases it helps avoid confusion. Right, Yeah, we are talking about the Anglo Saxon chronicle. There's not really a way to rename it that, right, everyone's going to get at the same time. And he talks about a lot of things like that with that kind of thoughtfulness, which I really liked. Yeah, the terminology of Anglo Saxon was something that I was thinking about as I was reading the outline after you sent it over, Like for exactly that reason. There's an idea of like Anglo Saxon as sort of a quint essentially white and also quint essentially British identity that like a lot of then like eighteenth and nineteenth century writers kind of glommed onto.

00:05:10
Speaker 1: And it number one.

00:05:12
Speaker 2: As as we said in the episode, like the term Anglo Saxon is kind of an umbrella term that encompass, encompasses a lot of different mostly Germanic peoples, but also these were Germanic peoples. They were immigrants to Britain. They were not Britain's like native population. They came from somewhere else. And so when I'm working on like, for example, Unearthed episodes and we talk about some kind of find, a lot of times I will just say Early English instead of Anglo Saxon. But in that context, Early English still makes sense to people in a context where the key source that we're talking about is the Anglo Saxon chronicle that has like a slightly different right. I mean, if you were to time travel back to nine thirty seven and be like, hey, are you the Anglo Saxons, they'd be like, we don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, Like it's a term that came after all of this. Yes, there were Saxons in Britain and there were also Saxons in what's now Germany, and the term Anglo Saxon was initially kind of to differentiate between those two different groups, but then it also expanded to incorporate all of these other Germanic peoples who were not Saxons but were part of what became this like cultural group of early England.

00:06:33
Speaker 1: Yes.

00:06:35
Speaker 2: The other funny thing that I wanted to note in Livingston's writing is the way that he talks about dates, because he mentions that, you know, the Anno Dominie BCAD thing is inherently religious, and so a lot of historians don't do that. We don't on our show, for example.

00:06:58
Speaker 1: Although he feels like.

00:07:01
Speaker 2: It actually doesn't really remove the religious axis for what he says, it just kind of hides it. So he tends to go in BC and AD. But he has this great quote about it that tickled me so much last night as I was putting like the finishes on this that I started laughing, just cackling to myself and I hope the neighbors didn't hear. And he writes, quote, if this offense, I am sorry, but I also offer up the solace that the Christian monks who devised the system so completely botched their calculations that it isn't at all accurate to what they were trying to achieve. And I was like, I think, I love you. If that kind of historian sounds fun to you, highly recommend his books. I really really enjoyed them as this research was going on Yeah, it's been a super long time since we've like talked specifically about using BCE and CE on our show. Like I think the last time we specifically said something about that was in a Listener Male episode from like a decade ago. But like, it is an imperfect system, it's still based on the same ideas that BC and AD are based on in terms of like when the calendar shifts. But I don't know, it's just we have the imperfect systems to work within.

00:08:19
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:08:20
Speaker 2: Uh, and it seems like a slightly more inclusive choice within our imperfect choices.

00:08:27
Speaker 1: Oh, agreed, Agreed. I mean, I don't.

00:08:29
Speaker 2: Here's the thing, it is one of those things that still gets kind of bickered about, as he pointed out, and I don't. I My take is kind of that I don't slight any way a historian wants to do it as long as they are doing it thoughtfully. Like in his case, he's like, I'm doing this because it is easier for readers to understand, and I'm like, I get that, and he understands the context of why other people don't. And then he he's like, in my head, it's all kind of meaningless because they screwed the whole problem up anyway, which I kind of love, so, like, you know, whichever works anyway. I quite enjoyed his work a lot. It made me think about all of the things that happen every day that we aren't annotating. But there's really no way to annotate everything.

00:09:17
Speaker 1: Although this was a.

00:09:18
Speaker 2: Huge, huge, I think that's part of it too. It was such a huge battle at the time, there was so much bloodshed. It was considered the biggest battle that had ever been fought. Everyone's like, no, one's gonna forget this ever, We'll know all the details forever because look, it's huge, which isn't the way the world works. We forget all the stuff. We're still trying to figure out stuff about, you know, ancient Egypt, and it's a mystery. So although we do know a lot more than we used to, but still there's so many evidences of like how everyone goes. Of course, everyone's going to know about this forever, no, which I find an odd sort of solace in.

00:09:55
Speaker 1: But yeah.

00:10:07
Speaker 2: One of our episodes this week was on Ettian Cabet and his effort to build a communist utopia. I meant to say this in the episode and forgot just because I think the term communist has some specific connotations in like today's world.

00:10:25
Speaker 1: Yes, some of which is going to come up on an upcoming episode.

00:10:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, bitch, this was very early in the history of communism, like the idea of having an equal distribution of wealth and everyone cooperating. That is an old idea that's been around for a long time. Yes, this is the root the root word commune, right, not necessarily what all of the imagery we have in our heads about what it is, having grown up in the twentieth century. So his writing about these ideas predated things like Karl Marx predated the communist Manifesto, well, predated the first establishment of like the socialist republics that eventually became the USSR, like well before all of that, but based on so, you know, similar ideas to not having completely unequal wealth distribution, everyone contributing, you know, each to their own abilities and getting things according to their own needs, that kind of stuff. I described this in very brief passing in the Narcisse Montreal episode as a failed utopian experiment. What they try to do in Texas absolutely a failure.

00:11:49
Speaker 1: That went poorly. Yes, that went very badly.

00:11:51
Speaker 2: I'm less I am less apt to describe the entire rest of the project as a failure. They did have a lot of siss really, a lot of it was the same schism over and over again. But they did manage to keep one community going for forty six years, which is a long time.

00:12:10
Speaker 1: It is.

00:12:12
Speaker 2: And there have of course been uh you know, utopian or communal living efforts by religious orders that have lasted much, much, much longer than that, But in terms of ones that like did not have that religious element, this is the longest lasting.

00:12:32
Speaker 1: One that we know of.

00:12:33
Speaker 2: So. Yeah, one of the things that I sent a message to you about when I was working on this was how complicated the history of France is. Specifically during the time that Ettiankabe was living in France. There is just so much Oh yeah, it's busy, so much revolution and counter revolution and like many many things going on in a not very long span of time. And every time I got to another one, I was like, and then there was another revolution that we need to explain at least briefly. Right, Yeah, it's you know, French history is. I love it, but I find I have to take it in bites to parse it out. Like it's so hard to look at the totality of French history and be like, wait, what, there's no single through line for a big chunk of it. There are like a lot of things going on at the same time. Yeah, which is it makes it very interesting, but it also makes it sometimes hard to like hone in on one part of it without having to like connect all the disparate threads that are simultaneously going on. I think we've talked about this before. I'm obsessed with the concept of utopian communities.

00:13:49
Speaker 1: Oh sure, yeah, agreed.

00:13:50
Speaker 2: I mean I can trace it back to the moment I first heard that they were a thing, which was when I was in high school and my English teacher, mister Holly shout out to mister Holly had mentioned that he thought I would find the brook Farm community really interesting.

00:14:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he was right.

00:14:12
Speaker 2: And we've talked about it here on the show because I'm so interested in it. But I really it's like I, I, like many of us, have that idea of like, oh, wouldn't it be great to go and form like a little commune with my friends, But I know realistically it would never work.

00:14:28
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:14:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, We've talked about several of them. A lot of the ones that get brought up in the same context as Akari because a lot of them were all happening in the nineteenth century in the United States, Like there are several and a lot of them we've done episodes on because we've done Brook Farm, We've done why is suddenly the name escaping me of New Harmony? There was New Harmony which was you know, we had that recently as the Saturd Classic before this fruit Lands, which is the one that the Alcots were involved with, And a lot of them have a pretty similar story in terms of like people who have a really idealistic sense of what they want to accomplish coming together to try to do something, not necessarily being prepared for the work that is going to be involved, to really sustain themselves. And then a lot of times there's just a lot of people getting sick and dying and moving away. And there was some of that, especially in Texas. Texas went very badly for the Okarians, but like later on, there was a lot more of like really hard work trying to make things go, Ideological schisms being seeming to be more of an issue than illnesses and unpreparedness, which is the case in some of the others. Yeah, yeah, it makes me I mean I get very quickly into the bigger question of like, is it really realistic for anything like this to ever work?

00:16:02
Speaker 1: Yeah? I don't think maybe it is.

00:16:08
Speaker 2: I mean, just the right the basic concept, even if it's a small number of people, Over time, people are gonna want different things, even if you're all on the same page when the whole thing starts, people change and grow and evolve, and what they wanted when they all agreed to it may not be what they want five years down the road or longer, and the people that they trusted to be put in charge may also change and shift and no longer represent you know, what they thought they were signing on to you, Like, I just I don't know how they ever work. They're no is there a story of any of these ever really working long term? Like long long term, Well that's been lasted for forty six years. Long long term, long long term, at least from my knowledge. The longest term gets into communities that have a religious underpinning, right, Like they're Quaker communities that you know, have gone on the long time. There are still two surviving Shakers as of right like a week ago, and I've thread I don't remember which publication this was in, maybe the New York Times. Just read a really fascinating article that was like a long form look at the last two surviving Shakers and how they are still upholding the ideals that brought them into becoming Shakers. But they also have a support of people who are more like community supporters and friends. Right, who are you know, keeping this this community of two basically still functioning that It's like there are some I would say monastic orders that have been around for centuries, but then that gets into having a little bit of big yeah and having the wider support of a religious community that's not taking monastic valve. I laugh only because I immediately thought of chartreuse and the musks that make chartreuse sure, and I'm like, they're very important. We need to keep them going forever because chartreuse is one of my favorite liqueurs. There are two things that are very silly pop culture things that this story in particular makes me think of. One was when we were discussing the idea of you know, because everybody's doing the work, the work is easy and it doesn't take much time, and I was like, well, that's the Jetsons, but that's because machines were doing it. But I just always remember laughing at the Jetsons when George was.

00:18:56
Speaker 1: Like, Oh, this three hour day is killing me.

00:19:00
Speaker 2: And the other thing is that as we were talking about Navoo, I was like, did George Lucas get the name of Naboo from this, because that's kind of an idealistic, art driven culture. Yeah, I have no idea, but I had the same question in my head. Two things kind of connected to that. Some of the articles that were part of the research talked about businesses that still exist today that were established by Akarians, generally like after the community had dissolved or after they had left the community. One is Baxter Winery in Navu, and that was established after the Navu community was disbanded. The Akarians really had a big influence on wine making and vineyards in that part of the United States. Baxter Winery is the oldest winery in Illinois. The other one, though I don't think, was actually connected directly to the Akarians, but kind of comes up in articles, and that is Dayton and Son's b Supplies, which was founded by the Daydent family, and that connection to the Akarians is kind of tenuous. Like Charles Dayton did immigrate to the United States from France in eighteen sixty three, settled south of Navu on the Mississippi River, probably had some connections to the community because communities are interconnected. His son later married somebody whose family had been part of the Akarian community at Navu, but their marriage was like, well after the community disbanded, so it's.

00:20:40
Speaker 1: Like they're only kind of yeah, only kind of.

00:20:43
Speaker 2: And I found one thing that had been written by Camille that was saying, like, Hey, I keep seeing this idea that my father was one of the Akarians, and I think you all are just confused because I married a former Karian, like my dad did not really have much to do with that. So I took that out of the outline because I was like, this seems a little, uh, a little more tenuous than it really makes sense to have the other is I just I kind of wanted to acknowledge that we've gotten some requests over the years to do some kind of an episode about the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. So I just want to say broadly that like I don't think it's in our lane to do episodes about the establishment of a religion that people practice today.

00:21:30
Speaker 1: Right, Like, there's there, this is.

00:21:34
Speaker 2: A perfect example of how it comes up in it, and you kind of got a touch on it. But right it starts to feel like we're representing people that we are not connected to and don't have context for in a deeper sense, right, And I think people specifically, there are two varieties of email of people who are asking for an episode on the establishment of the church, and one is people who are members of the church and like want that perspective on it, and the other is people who want us to do an episode debunking it. And like, neither of those requests would likely be satisfied with any of any episode that we could do on the subject. But I also like there is a lot involved in religion and in people's sincerely held religious beliefs that is not easily encapsulated in a history podcast where we are trying to take a thoughtful, multiple considered from multiple directions to get things. And so we have plenty of episodes that are about either spiritual movements or religious movements that don't really exist in that way anymore. I just I find it weird for our show, in particular, to try to do an episode discussing the creation of a religion that people are observing and being members of today, Like that just is weird.

00:23:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, the thing is, there's almost no way.

00:23:11
Speaker 2: For it to land in a way that isn't perceived as us commenting on it in a positive or negative right, which, like is one of the reasons we don't generally talk about people that are still alive accepting kind of specific circumstances, right, nobody needs our take on their existence or their belief system. Like, we're just trying to present the information as best we can, obviously acknowledging that there's inherently going to be biased no matter what.

00:23:42
Speaker 1: You know, based on a number of factors. But yeah, it just it.

00:23:46
Speaker 2: Then becomes a thing of like, I don't want anybody to think I am criticizing their way of life if it's you know, benign and not hurting anybody. I don't want anybody also to think that I'm endorsing anybody's way of life that I'm not a part of in any way and don't have that information. It's just it's too it's too tricky. Yeah, yeah, so I could just I could imagine the flood of emails following the couple of mentions. And while there are times that we have, you know, talked about an event in history that is connected to a particular group, like, that's a little bit of a different thing from do an episode about the foundation of this group, Right, we can do that with the Koreans because they're not around anymore. And also it was explicitly not a religious commutery, right. Anyway, did you have anything else that you were itching to talk about with this episode? I know you said that you had lots of thoughts, you know, I just I want I want a commune of nerdery where we play video games and watch Star Wars stuff.

00:24:51
Speaker 1: That's all us. Yeah, yeah, great.

00:24:54
Speaker 2: When I was in my early twenties, I was like, are there secular monastic community? I I'll tell you what always hangs me up and makes me know that I could not be part of any community like this. I want stuff. Oh, I am a stuff aholic. I would not be cool with No. You can't have your own thing, you don't have individual property like I am such a stuff aholic that even recently when I finally got around to watching Dune. I was like, do these people have toys?

00:25:26
Speaker 1: Do they have?

00:25:27
Speaker 2: Like?

00:25:27
Speaker 1: What are they? It's not germane to the story at all, but that's what my brain thinks.

00:25:31
Speaker 2: Of, so sure, sure. So anyway, where's where's their expressover? She?

00:25:43
Speaker 1: Yes?

00:25:43
Speaker 2: I think had I done such a thing, this would have it would have been much earlier in my life, before I acquired so much stuff and so many habits. Anyway, if you'd like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we're at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can find us on various social media at missing History. Whatever's happening on your weekend, you know, I hope it's great. If you're going to take a little trip out to a communal, a former communal or even current communal living situation that's now some kind of a museum or whatever, I hope that's great. If you are in such a thing yourself, I hope that's great. Basically, I hope everything's great. We'll be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow and 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.