Behind the Scenes Minis: Hans, Mike, and Nate

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we talked about Hans Sloan in the British Museum this week. Uh huh. There are so many things. One of the things that jumped out to me that I had not realized reading a lot of biographies about him until I got into more of the heavy hitter biographies, was like, at that point, I was already you know, understanding and well acquainted with the extent to which you know, this colonization and enslavement of Jamaica had enabled his work, right, But it wasn't until I got into a deeper biography where I understood the circumstances of his youth and how that was already a sin of colonization and forced occupation that maybe just made him so accustomed to that concept that he didn't even process it to some degree. Yeah, that's just a guess on my part, Like, we don't actually know his opinion about slavery per se, even though it clearly benefited him, and he believed that anyone who was not a white European person must be lying if they said they didn't feel good because they were lazy and trying to get out of work. That is literally how he describes many of these situations. Yes, even when he's listing symptoms that you're like, something was gravely wrong with that person, which is upsetting. But it just was the first time I had that revelatory moment of oh, his whole life parallels that experience of his youth, where this was probably very normalized. Just interesting. While I was at the British Museum, Yeah, and I went in the reading room and I was with one of my very, very dear friends who I just loved pieces, and we were standing in the reading room and all I could think of was Mike the Cat, who you may remember from our episode about historical cats. Mike the Cat was kind of a scrappy cat that would often hang out in the reading room and guarded air quotes the British Museum, and people would try to pet him and he would claw, And I'm just just like, if ever I did want a ghost, it was Mike the Cat in that moment. But no Mike the Cat sightings. Yeah, I didn't think about him. Yeah, Sloan's name was on chocolate until twenty twenty two. Really, yeah, okay, and then the company that was I forget the exact name of the company, but it was something like Sloane Chocolate Company. He didn't own it, it was named in reference to him. Sure, it rebranded to Cocoa Canopy, I think in twenty twenty two. But I'm like, wow, that is a locked a long time.

00:03:00
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

00:03:04
Speaker 1: I Also I think about this sometimes just because I will go down a rabbit hole of like TikTok discourse. People use the word discover to mean a brand new, never before discovered thing, but people also use the word discover to just mean I found out, yes, not claiming that you are the sole discoverer of the thing, right. And so I kind of wonder like whether he did think that he had invented this entirely unknown thing, right or this is probably being more generous toward him than he might deserve in this matter, but like whether he was like I discovered that this is really good, and it just more meant I realized this, not I invented it. Yeah, And it's very unclear. I mean, here's the thing. There are very solid sources that will say without hesitation that he invented either hot chocolate, chocolate milk milk chocolate, like as though it is fact and there are places you would normally trust, huh, but there's absolutely no yeah, yeah, when you told me this was who you were working on, and I had not like the name did not ring a bell at all for me, and so I googled and the first result was like blah blah blah naturalist supposed adventure of chocolate milk, and I was like, WHOA, that doesn't seem right, right, No, No, one of the other things that was interesting that I hadn't really thought about a ton because you know, he had collections from, as we said towards the end of the episode, more than you know, seventy different places around the globe, but he himself was not widely traveled really m right, Like he went to Jamaica on this sign, and he had gone to France for his medical degree. But he didn't do the thing that we talk about on the show all the time that like young men as they're you know, hitting adulthood from aristocratic families would do like their tour of the continent and travel. He couldn't afford to do that. He was from the you know, servant class, right, so it's really interesting that he again, obviously so many problematic issues with his legacy, but he is an interesting case of someone who really went from having nothing to literally, as I joked in the podcast, being the grand puba of all scientific thought in London certainly, and I would say that extended throughout Europe in a big way. Just kind of a fascinating life trajectory.

00:05:53
Speaker 2: Mmm.

00:05:54
Speaker 1: I just thought that was interesting. And then when he purchased the manor house at else that included that garden, his apothecary garden, and he leased it to the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries for five pounds a year. And according to a Garden's Illustrated article that I read that was about the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, maybe his descendants still get paid that. Oh wow, that property is still part of his family legacy and they are still getting paid rent on that garden, which is fascinating.

00:06:35
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:06:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is like that thing we've talked about recently where we always mention when you're translating money over time, it's very tricky. Yeah, But how I had found a few months back, and we talked about it then, like, oh, this is actually quite important to people who live in like Europe, for example, where they actually are on property that their family has owned for three hundred and fifty years and suddenly they have to have a system that everyone agrees they'll at least acknowledge and abide bye. And so I just it was one of those things where I'm like, I the idea of a family owning a piece of property for hundreds and hundreds of years is so alien to most of us that live in the United States that I'm just like, and you're you've been receiving rent since what year, seventeen twenty two? For real? It's very interesting. Yeah, British Museum, they got a lot of cool stuff. I feel like they're trying having been there on site because we've talked about it before and like issues of repatriation. But I will say the vibe I god being on site was we're trying so hard, we're just really bind And I don't know if that's just like a piece an easy piece of copy to put out, but it felt a little different for me being there than when we have talked about it, because it does seem so simple in most regards, but I do think there's some untangling that we probably are not privy to you in a lot of those things, right right, Yeah, Yeah, but it's a cool space. It's hard as heck to navigate, in my opinion, Thank goodness. I had a local who was like, oh, no, that's on floor four, and I'm like, how do you get there? Because I would never have found stuff. Yeah, I've never been there because I've never been to London. Oh, I love it so much. This last trip to Lenon my favorite. I just felt I stayed in a different part of the city than I had before, and I just had a great time. And I don't know, it felt like second home in a way that had not before. So I'm ready to go back again at the drop of a hat. Nice, let's all go. By the time this comes out, we will have been to Iceland. Yeah, so we might have new stories to come out of that. We'll see.

00:09:09
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:09:19
Speaker 1: We also I also talked to Nate DeMeo this week about his upcoming book, yeah, called The Memory Palace. So we have had Nate DeMeo on the show previously. That time, Holly and I both talked to Nate, And this is an example of how our human memories are fallible, because here's how I remember that earlier episode happening. We were going to interview Nate Demeyo. We were going to include a couple of episodes of his show in our episode, similar to what we did this time. We're gonna also like have a focus of the interview around those episodes we were discussing, but there were rights issues with music that had been used in the episode in Nate's episodes of the Memory of the Murray Palace, so we had to take them all out before doing this interview with him. I went and re listened to that previous episode because I did not want to have it be the same questions exactly over again, and there was an episode of his show in there, and I was like, I thought, we had to take all of these out. So I guess what really happened was we had to change which episodes are going to be included to ones that did not have the potential issues involving licensing for the music right, And that was just not how I had remembered it at all. We do like that episode still is in the archive if folks want to listen to that to hear more from Nate. I want to stress number one, Nate is always a pleasure to talk to you. Indeed, it's great. I'm bummed that my schedule thwarted me from being part of this one. Yeah, you had your own book coming out at the same time as we were planning to do this interview with Nate. I did. I had your own book, and so you were off doing things involving your own book. I want to tell people one more time what that book is. Yes, it is Killer Cocktails, which is based on the work that we do on the other podcasts that I'm on Criminalia, which is historical true crime. And every story of historical true crime has a cocktail and mocktail that go with it. So you get half that you may have heard already on the podcast if you listen, and half are brand new just for the book. So perfect Christmas gift if you have someone that likes mixing drinks, history or true crime in a way that's removed and feels less voyeuristic.

00:11:59
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:12:01
Speaker 1: So this is very similar to Nate's book, because Nate's book is also some of it, some chapters are the same story as he has told on an episode of The Memory Palace. Others are news stories that were written for the book. Specifically, I already gushed about the book a bit in the episode where I talked to Nate, but something that he and I talked about after we had stopped rolling, there's two things. One is that, yes, there is going to be an audiobook. The audiobook sounds really cool to me. I don't want to get into the details of how it sounds cool to me, but if you are an audiobook person, if you like to get your books that way, definitely see if this would be one that would interest you, because I find a lot of things about it really awesome. The other thing that he and I talked about was how there were concerns about how this book would sell, because what market is there for a book book of poetic, thoughtful short history stories. And I said, basically, please don't take offense at this, Nate, But like, do you remember bathroom books? Do they still have bathroom readers? Do they publish those? Because now we're all on our phones on the toilet, But those used to be books that you can find near the checkout section of the bookstore and in the humor section and the book of the Memory Palace reminds me of a thing that you might read for a couple of minutes, like you would a bathroom reader. And I also had a time that I would turn to this book that is not nearly as you know private is having your time that you're sitting in the bathroom, which is that during the height of the pandemic, like when we were all in lockdown mode, a lot of us not working in offices, not attending school in person, not seeing a lot of other people, and then also when I was dealing with all of my feelings around of critical illness and somebody very dear to me, I spent a lot of time walking in the woods, and one of the things I took with me in the walking in the woods was my phone which had a collection of poems by Mary Oliver on it. And I would find a place to sit and I would sit under a tree, or I would sit by the pond, or I would sit somewhere and I would like read a poem by Mary Oliver and it would just bring a little bit of peace and focus to my soul. And I think this book would have a very similar role for me. Yeah, on my phone to have you know a walk somewhere and sit somewhere quiet and read a story that moves me in some way about history. So yeah, that book is coming out on November nineteenth. It was again called The Memory Palace by Nate Demeyo. And whatever's coming up on your weekend. If you have a new book you've just gotten, I hope you get some time to read it. If you have a book you are looking forward to with a lot of eagerness, which I know happens to me when there are things that are coming soon by authors or other creators that I like, I hope that anticipation is fun and that you're excited about it. We will 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.