Bonus Episode: Behind-the-Scenes Roundtable

Gladfelter Hall, seen here in a historic photo from Temple University’s Digital Collections is the home of the University’s History Department. Of course, in Fall 2020, the course Managing History was held remotely.

This week we’re taking a little break from our regular schedule, and to tide you over, here is a conversation we had last week about the process of making this season of the Alley Cast. After the first season, Dr. Hilary Lowe and the students in her Managing History class devised pitches for episodes which would become this second season. Hear from Dr. Lowe, one of her students, and a volunteer with the Elfreth’s Alley Museum who has worked on both seasons of the show.

TRAN;SCRIPT

Maust: Hello folks, my name is Ted Maust and I'm the director of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum, one part of the team that brings you the Alley Cast. Today we're taking a little break from our more scripted episodes to take a look behind the scenes, and both introduce the team to you and talk a little bit about the season the podcast, and the process of making these episodes.

Welcome to the alley cast a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, we trace the series of people who lived in New York. On this special Street for over 300 years. The stories we tell often center on Elfreth’s Alley and the surrounding city neighborhood. We also explore threads which take us across the city and around the globe. I'm joined today by a few people who've worked in this season of the podcast.

Enya, Margaret, can you introduce yourselves,

Enya Xiang: Hi I'm Enya, I just graduated from high school from the Philly area. And so, I'm about to start an undergraduate program where I spent two years at William and Mary and then two years in St Andrews and I'll be a history major, and in my free time I like to write or paint, and so pre COVID I started out as a volunteer for Sally, just doing the admissions and talking to people on the streets, and then when COVID happened I helped to work on the podcast for the two seasons.

Maust: Right, yeah, that's perfect. Thank you, Margaret. Yeah.

Margaret Sanford: Hi, I'm Margaret. I'm currently a graduate student at Temple University's public history program. I'm originally from Minnesota and I came out to the east coast to study anthropology at Fordham University. And so I really liked living in Philadelphia, and working in a bunch of different museums, And obviously with Albert Sally on this podcast project has been a really interesting way to work with public history in a really fascinating and accessible way and I'm really excited to talk about it today.

Maust: Great. And we also have with us. Hilary Iris Lowe, Hilary Can you introduce yourself.

Dr. Hilary Lowe: Sure. So I'm Hilary Lowe, and I'm an associate professor at Temple University in the history department, where I teach cultural history and I contribute to the public history program. And I was lucky this last fall, to work with a group of great graduate students on a project with Ted at Elfreth’s Alley. And we were also lucky because we had her building on a project that a previous class had done as well so we have a lot of good research, a lot of great people. And then we have this weird COVID environment, are all working online with no archives, so it was a great experiment, and it was really fun thing to be a part of.

Maust: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that. So last summer, as I think anybody who's listening to this knows our museum started this podcast because we had intern to working with us, and we had to sort of pivot to something that we could work on remotely. But at that point, our museum had already been working with the temple public history program. The previous fall. And that first class did kind of a sweep of work where the publicly available resources in terms of newspaper clippings in terms of archival collections, etc. Relating to Elfreth’s Alley, that the museum can use. So this was that that same class again with different students in that class is called Managing History. Can you tell us a little bit about where that sort of fits within the public history program and the history department as a whole. Sure, so

Lowe: Managing History is kind of an introductory graduate course for students who want to learn about how to do history in and with the public. So a lot of our students go on to do work in museums or archives, do activist work some of them have gone on to work in politics, but really it's a focus on how history functions in relates to the world right now. So, in general, it's a pretty different kind of history course. It definitely looks backward but it also looks at all of the fields that intersect. So, as an introductory course they learn about oral history they learn about present preservation, they learn about museum work, exhibits, archives, and every semester we teach this introductory course, we try to partner with a local institution or community to do a project that students can really dig into and get their hands on and also that will have a real world effect, and contribute to an organization or a community. So that's why we've enjoyed partnering with Ted over the last two years and it's been really great, and it's great because he's an alum too so he kind of knows the way the course works and it's made, working with him, easier in some ways, and, but it's a great class and so Ted and I started talking about this in part because in the summer after or last summer, put it that way. Two of our students interned with him at Alfa Sally and an Indian to get to work with them, they scoped out some research that they've done in that first, that first introductory course managing history, and the work that they did was so impressive, and the podcast that came out the first season that came out somewhat based on much of that research was so impressive. But the thing that, that I was interested in thinking about with Ted and thinking about what the students last fall was something that came up sort of as a as a count as as a result of that and that was that so many students wrote about, especially those interns, and Ted remarked upon this as well, that the writing and historical thinking changed as a result of doing the podcast itself so that idea of really finding a public voice, and really finding a way to communicate outside of the kind of traditional academic papers that they're really having to relearn at a graduate level and dig into. I think it really reconnected them with a new way of thinking about public history so it was a great experience the internship and I wanted to see okay so that podcast experience happened over the summer, can we condense it and make it happen over a fall semester. And so, actually one year ago today, I looked back at my notes Ted and I had a meeting, and our meeting was like what are you going to do for your podcast and it is this reasonable, what kinds of topics would we do and it's all over the place, except I put oral history on pretty much every page which we totally can do, but it's, it's interesting because a lot of the elements I think that made it into at least some of the scripts that students developed over the fall, are really there, and you know that was that, you know, labor, eventually our conversations would have settled on labor, and a day in the life, whether that's on the alley and an almost each script has this like beautiful picture of an imagined past on Elfreth’s Alley, which is something that we love to do and every, and it also said, let me see if I can find it, it's something like. Choose a thread and pull it, and so I think that you know each group kind of chose a thread and pulled it, and they met all kinds of obstacles, and that is one of the best things about a condensed research project like this it's you know the parameters are hard. You've got one semester and you have no access to archives go right, But it was, it was great because the students before had had some access to archives. So there was a starting point, and it's also was wonderful because Ted was there with all his great knowledge about the history of reality and and insights into where people might find things. So, in some ways turned out to be probably one of the better partnerships I've done with this class, even though it had incredible constraints,

Maust: I mean I think sometimes constraints can, can lead to more learning. You know I think there's all kinds of like writing exercises that you put yourself in constraints. I think your comments about the fact that doing this project really does challenge us to work with sources in a different way and sort of find that voice is all about constraints I think the fact that I have a podcast episode that I not only need to write but then record. And so I have a built in time where I'm like hearing myself say it like definitely changes the way that I construct these things and the fact that there's often a tighter deadline that I'd like. And I know that people might listen to this over and over again, you know or like people in the future will find this it's not like a school paper that no one will ever read again, those are all sort of constraints on on everything we do, I would say on this podcast.

Lowe: I want to add one thing that I think is an essential learning thing, and you touched on it is the accountability, right. So, academics, and graduate students we write a lot of papers they say a lot of stuff, but when you put it in your own voice. You are beings, you have to be self reflexive whether you want to be or not right because it's you and saying it and it means that it's you who's putting it out in the world. And that's something like you try to teach as a professor to undergraduates and graduate students and maybe to yourself, you know like this kind of accountability and self reflexivity, but when it is your voice you hear, you realize, it may be sometimes in terribly comfortable ways that you need to be accountable to who you are to your position, and to the work that you're doing in the world and I think that podcast is like is a push for students who might otherwise come to history because it's safe in in the past. And then, a podcast hearing the voice and realizing they're not in the past or they're engaging with humans, even if they don't know them. And I think that's just a huge benefit from the work that you're doing at least with my students and I can see it in you too right it's really pushed you to think about audience in wide ways,

Maust: and you know, it's one of those things where, this is a little different but there's always a moment, every script where I say a line. And I realized that I have just jumped over a gulf of time, or, like, a whole lot of complexity in like, literally half a sentence, and I have this little moment of like, oh no. And then I kind of have to like try it again and be like, Okay, this script is done, this has to be out. It is what it is for now. And like sometimes we have to eat, we can't tell the full full full story we have to make her cut somewhere, and that as a continuing challenge. And I think having that sort of pragmatic approach to this project was really important and it wouldn't happen if we weren't pragmatic about it. And so with that in mind, when we talked about your class, doing this we like set some, I felt pretty pragmatic goals. So one of the things that we did was we, we sort of suggested that we weren't looking for final product, final products from students, we were looking for, like product pitches and draft script. A draft audio, those kinds of things. And I think that was really important. From my perspective, it meant that I felt like there was more time for us to then like build on that, if, if we wanted to and needed to, but I also think that, and Margaret this might be where you can sort of come in but I think, like, in some ways, forcing students to come to what maybe they saw as a final product at the end of the semester, but then also saying you know what, we're not going to be, we're not going to just take that we're going to also revisit that. I think built another constraint, during the semester. You have to finish this process. But did the den gave us another construct. After that semester to sort of refine that a little bit. So Margaret you were in this class. Can you talk a little bit about your experience in that class.

Sanford: Yeah, I mean I really liked having like a practical project to be working on outside of reading theoretical texts and discussing different museums and moments in public history, and it was always a really grounding experience to have. Alongside that, really, like, grad school ask type of conversations. And so during the semester I worked primarily on the child labor script with my colleague Jeff Randolph who's awesome and amazing, and I really liked having the constraint that you're talking about Ted about having not a final product at the end because I think it took a lot of the pressure off, and especially since we were very much feeling the pressure of entering a grad program during COVID, with no access to the traditional archives it really allowed us to play around with what we could find online and that really led to some fascinating discoveries like the child labor episode opens with a baby being discovered on the alley and being taken in by members of the alley, and I honestly don't think you'd have tried to even find, like, even look at that, online database. If we had access to these archives that were really consuming our physical attention. And so yeah, having not a hard deadline at the end really helps us really sit with that material, play around with things. And like you said, then, as I left the class and then continued to stay on with the project over the last couple of months. It definitely forced us to look at the material in a new way, and revisit some of those concepts that you and Dr. Lowe have talked about about accountability, and the audience and how accessible, this is going to be and who wants to listen to it, and it's a really interesting exercise I think going from seeing it as a grad project that I'm really facing the reality that people are going to listen to this and we wanted them to listen to it and enjoy it.

Maust: Can you talk about the fact that you have had this sustained sort of work on the project after the semester ended, you still wanted to be involved. And I know you're working a little bit, at least on the next episode that's coming out. And that you have some sort of new insight into that episode, can you tell us a little bit about that.

Sanford: Yeah, well it's funny, because it really started out with conversations between Jeanette and I working on child labor because we were really interested in focusing on the little voices of Alli, and also positioning ourselves as children who had worked, you know I was a babysitter. I was a nanny. I answered phones for local PBS station. And so we were thinking about ourselves during that process, but it was really as he said Ted going into the food service episode during the semester when we were working on it and when Paige were working on food service, I was really interested in that, but I'd never worked in food service until, returning to work on the podcast, after the semester ended when because of COVID I finally felt comfortable with my vaccine to work in front line again and make some money. And I took on a catering job in my neighborhood, and it's been really eye opening revisiting their material now knowing. First off, what the food service experiences like especially in catering which is an aspect of their research that they touch on quite a bit, and also what Paige and Gwen had done which I really appreciate it was talking about the challenges throughout Philadelphia's history to that industry, And they really reference COVID as a pivotal challenge to that trade, and having worked now in catering during COVID. It's been really eye opening to see that on a local level, I work for, like a neighborhood catering company that's been around for 21 years, and getting to know my boss and hearing about her challenges over the last year. It's really, we've had interesting conversations about historicizing that experience, and we've talked about, you know, outbreaks of smallpox and yellow fever, and the war, and how all that impacted catering as well. And so it's been a really eye opening experience, and I'm really appreciating revisiting their text, having had my own experiences working in the field.

Maust: Hey, yeah. So, I also I wanted to sort of, I feel like we've sort of mentioned this a couple times but that conversation that I had with you Hilary last year really gave me an opportunity to think, and I talked with you about this I talked with Isabel and Joe worked on season one about this, about how to take the podcast forward, that first season, we were working on the sharpest deadlines, and in the sort of lowest tech way possible. We were literally recording on our phones, we were, You know, they were relatively short, just exclusively scripted episodes with few sort of frills and we were in that first season trying to do a really like overall chronological approach from like dahlias created to now, roughly. And so I think having completed that, season two offered a couple of different opportunities to us. And some of those came to fruition, some didn't. So I want to talk a little bit about that. One thing that it allowed us to do was thinking about doing a more feet somatic approach. So, with Hilary with Joe and Isabel. We had conversations about sort of what themes might be interesting to explore. And how do we make it maybe more episodic so that people could listen to one episode in isolation, and still get something out of it, separated from the whole chronology, and we selected work, in part because I think labor history is really interesting, but also because it's something that, that really connects all the eras of Elfreth’s Alley. These are domestic spaces but often they've also been working spaces, and when they haven't been working spaces, these houses have also been still bad Jason forming spaces. During sort of the industrial era. And now during the pandemic. They've become working spaces again. But one other thing that we really wanted to do with the second season was expand the number of sort of voices that we were hearing in season one, we were reading a lot of things we were trying to capture people's voices from the, from the things we were reading, but we didn't physically have their voices there. And so in season two, one goal that I set was to like include more like interview contact. And so both the students in Hilary's class. And then I also said about interviewing a ton of people and I think, incorporating those interviews has has sometimes gone better than others. But the other thing that we've done is included some dramatic readings, which I think is kind of fun. One thing we talked about doing and then I really went out on was including more sound effects and Margaret did a really good job of finding some like free sound for for the child labor episode, and I like started putting it in and then there's like I'm not a good sound designer to do this. So I whipped out but that might be a thing that we do in the future and I think there are some interesting ways to sort of grow that. Now, Enya, You're the other person on this call who worked on both seasons. Do you have any reflections on, you definitely took a more active role this season, but your role last season was also important. And you did one of the. Speaking of oral histories, Hilary ended up worked with one of the few oral history pieces that we had last year when she worked with the transcript of an oral history that Penny bachelor did. And I actually just digitized that oral history. And so I'll share you with you the audio file so you can hear it because it's kind of fun. But for you, how is. Were there any, any differences in your experience from season one to season two, and yeah.

Xiang: Oh sure, yeah I would love to get that interview but yeah, I would say it was pretty much the same, just because I've just been working remotely with you but, but I do think it was more smoother, this time with you, helping you find sources where there might be archives I couldn't reach but overall I just thought that there was a lot of room for creativity for me and I wasn't doing this for a specific project I was sort of doing this because they wanted to and so that was something I never really had experienced as a student, where I could just sort of branch out and work wherever I wanted and it was sort of just exploring the rabbit holes where the research led me. And so for example if I was looking at houses, architecture, mostly for the two seasons. That was where I focused on so I could look at federal style houses, Philadelphia general or a specific person related to alley or any combination of that I just, it was pretty easy to find a thread that related to the alley because it's just gone through so much history and so many people have lived through it. And so, and that was really awesome and with the sofa the penny back for episode was in the first season. That was, I started looking into how windows are constructed and it was just so it was really interesting actually, but it's how changes in that, and how we can look back, can inform us how people build houses and how they live their lives.

Maust: Yeah, definitely. Great. Yeah, I think, chasing rabbit holes. Like, you know, tangents are some of the most exciting. And of course, because we keep talking about constraints. Not all of that necessarily ends up in the episode. So, for Margaret and Enya. I guess one question I have is are there are were there sort of tangents that either like didn't fit in the episode or that we maybe wanted to chase further and you didn't. Margaret or Hillary if there are examples of this from the class that you like, remember, happy to hear those too

Sanford: I think one thing, but the child labor one especially, there are two big tangents that I like Jeanette and I both really wanted to get into, but we were really interested in sort of making this more of a like a, just a general overview especially isolating it to Elfreth’s Alley and based on archival evidence that we didn't have, and also the nature of the neighborhood, it would this these stories we have to wait for an later episode one of that was the experience of children, children of color in the area, and the experience of immigration and childhood that played a role into labor and forcing them to go into certain avenues of work and labor. That was one aspect that we really wanted to get into we did address it a bit in episode but I would have loved to spend more time, just focusing on those children. And then of course the other aspect of child labor was experience of girls especially domestic labor, things like sewing knitting crafting. I would really love to spend. Honestly, we could do a whole episode just on that and about how children, especially young girls are brought up to do those sorts of crafts and handiwork, and how we typically don't look at that as labor viewed either as are reviewed as crafts, but very much played a central role into the house, and also in Philadelphia being an important city to things like navigating and sales. So, I would love to explore that further, and I think that it could have been really nice addition, but like I said we it was hard to tie that directly to Alfa Sally and we wanted to keep it as localized as we could.

Lowe: Me that when, when the mystery that came up, and this came up in market and genetics episode, and it was what happened to the baby, like there's so many, you know like, it still bothers me that we don't know and it's, it's one of those things where you encounter this mystery, and you want to think that you can solve it. One of the things that you can find that thread pulls pulls it together at least let you know what happened to this little bundle that was wrapped in this red cloth, it was written. You know the articles so evocative the way that Margaret and Jeanette wrote about it was so evocative. And you know I'm a parent and you know the whole thing was like you listen to it and, and you read it and it is it is it sets up a question, and it's, it's more typical than I'd like it to be but we can't answer it right and we probably won't ever be able to, and that's the kind of thing that when you hit that sort of wall with a mystery that comes up in the research. It's really depressing, but it's also pretty standard so it makes you really realize like how much we can't tell a child story right at all. And part of that is because you children are the best record keepers, and for children in particular and brown children in particular, we don't get to know that much about them. So, it is, it sets up a really, I guess important learning moment for our class you know here's this story that we all need as soon as, as soon as we learn about what they had found we were all like what, and, and we still on. And that's, that's, it's difficult but there are things like that all the time like where you want to know about a particular person who find his so curious, and such an evocative character and you just can't know you can only guess.

Sanford: Yeah, I hate to admit how long I spent just poring over census records in the years after trying to do the math, like, Could this Miss Elizabeth, be that baby, I think about her all the time. Honestly, I'm glad you brought her up.

Lowe: I had a question for Enya, if that's okay. Sure. So in the you're young, you're a young person that will leave life employment, not really like maybe you're hearing about these, this child labor, episode, and you may have had some hand in everything is so I wondered how you felt about your waivers. As a young person I know you're not really a young child.

Xiang: Yeah, I did have a look over my was episode A while back, and yeah, that was definitely really interesting because, how they look at education has taken so much, and, you know, the idea of having the standardized education system where we go through and go to work is kind of more, more of a modern idea and so hearing about that baby was definitely super intriguing.

Maust: And one of the, one of the things. reasons to me and yeah is one of the talked about a lot of different episodes we could. And one of the ones that we talked about that we didn't end up sort of falling through various reasons, but was doing an episode about school. And the way that school is labor. And the way that that sort of becomes this, both for the labor of teachers and educators, but also the labor of students, and thinking of that as like maybe a part two in some cases in some ways of the child labor episode, because there's a sort of Baton passing from like the main thrust of sort of child labor to required ubiquitous education. And so that would, that is one that like I feel like I would have liked to maybe have pulled a few more of those threads we had leaves that we had where we had a few people who were listed on directories as teachers or tutors or to presses on the alley, but I wasn't sure where the next bit of information would come, beyond that, like we had that, you know, in the late 18th, early 19th century, and then that particular trail didn't necessarily go anywhere like there weren't a ton of features on like late 19th century early 20th century, like census data, and I thought it might be hard to access like school records for for kids, and those kinds of things. So that might be a longer term project, that feels a little bit like one of the ones that got away. In some ways, any other tangents, that folks would have liked to go down, or did

Lowe: I think there are a lot of things that came up in the class that people couldn't necessarily, explore, completely. So I think art on the alley 1970 actor is just such a compelling story. And there's something that people who are still around, to tell us stuff about our own city. Think that's one that I, I'm curious about. I'm always interested in women's history. And so this the stories of murder was talking about children and domestic labor reduction I think is awesome.

And then, one of the threads that came up in in genetics research was indenture. And so that's one of the things that I think under, under study. I mean, studies exist out there but in Philadelphia and maybe within sort of the average person's understanding of how things work in the past, inventor is really high on the basic knowledge, so I feel like an episode that's just on indentured and like that is such a gender thing to, you know, that's the way the laws that are about it. And it's so interesting to me, you know, with things that came up in markets so just like the way that I regret internet research is the way that there were laws that protect young men who were in danger, but there are no laws of protecting young women in hospitals. And so that kind of differentiation between states investment in childhood, is something that's really interesting to me, and I think it's something that could be explored on the alley, definitely in Philadelphia, there's some good stuff. All that stuff is really good, mainly what I wish we had had in our class is more ability for students that we have small glass, but worse things, who could take on the 20th century, you know, like me, we did pretty well with the early bits, and early to middle 19th. But we'd not take on the 20th century in a meaningful way. And so much easier to access and harder to access and all kinds of ways and there are all kinds of reasons why it's difficult to do but I want to I want to I want to follow that labor thread, and see what people were doing here in the 1980s and 90s and a little bit the research that page in winded on restaurant business, CAD with your guidance got into some good stuff on the 30s, and I'm fascinated by that restaurants on the alley so that I can't wait until that gets explored.

Xiang: This might be something for season three, but I would love to interview or hear from the people who actually live on that leave now. Just because you know the first time I came on to the alley I was meeting you said I believe but I was there a little early and I see this man walk out of his house in his bathrobe and slippers and get his mail and it was just the funniest thing and I still remember it and I just, and, you know, talking to the people when I was volunteering they're there, they're so interesting and of course, maybe, tying history to them or to the specific house they live to would be really wouldn't be a cool idea, I think, in connecting the past to the present.

Maust: Yeah I think that's a great idea, it's a great topic and I think, you know, it's one of those things where it could get trickier, because these are people who are living in, it would be like they're known address, you know, so it was a little bit of something there but, but there's definitely people who live here who are really invested in the history of their house. Some folks who have seen a lot of changes on the streets. During the times that they were there, and I would guess that we could also reach out to people who recently lived on the street to sort of do more, you know, as Hilary said oral history. The museum 20 years ago, embarked on, on an attempted an oral history project. And we have I think, like, eight or nine interviews on tape. And then we also have did a mailing campaign where they like made a written questionnaire that people could answer. And those would could be also interesting resources to tap. So I've just started going through those oral history tapes and trying to get them digitized, so the Georgian Penny bachelor one was the first one I did, and now it has like some really fascinating stuff. George has all these stories of like a rainy night when, When the electric went out and Depot had to like set up a tent on the street and like dig under the street to like find the, what was shorting out, or you know he has a story of a quirky handyman who everybody used to like didn't build scaffolding, he would just like nail a couple boards to a tree and like climb up that those kinds of things could be really fascinating. This right about the time you're working but you're sort of in the midst of this project. I went on a different podcast. True Tales from old houses with a couple of years left the longest. And it was fascinating because you know I talked to them a lot and I feel like I know a lot about their house and about their experience living on the alley, and I definitely learned a lot from there, just like a relatively brief interview on that podcast. So definitely, definitely spot an opportunity there. Yeah, and I would love to do another season, I think, I certainly learned lessons last year, in terms of how to both use those constraints we keep talking about constraints but also set set sort of reasonable timelines and benchmarks and those kinds of things. And this year I tried to put some of those things into effect and to some extent they work at definitely haven't worked out all of the all of the quirks of the process in terms of like planning it out and some of that is like things fall through our final episode of the season that's going to be about, like, labor, writ large, and the first interview that I did this season was with Dr. Billy Smith whose work on laborers in early Philadelphia is like the gold standard, but I really wanted to talk to somebody who was working in either an organizing position, or who represented like day laborers or something contemporary, and I tried and I tried and I had brief Facebook messaging exchanges with people, and I just like couldn't make it happen. And so I have delayed and delayed and delayed so that is that script is like the most, loose, amorphous scripting yet, because I was sort of hoping that that would come that would materialize, that I could manifest that interview, and it just didn't happen.

Lowe: So Ted, you should make sure to share that part of your question. In this episode, because a lot of the students in our class, especially Paige, and when you know they were, they were looking at restaurant labor they were looking at the labor of servers in particular and they were really interested in the closure of city tavern, and they had the same thing they were trying to track down servers at a closed institution, and you know they'd have leaves and they follow them and they were, you know, pulling their hair out because they themselves worked in the restaurant industry, and they knew that there were people who had stories to tell, and the constraints of the period was were such that this will be turned in without that element that frustrated a lot of people, and you know it's one thing to have that feeling in the classroom right but it's are the time constraints of the semester. Yeah, I have to turn in grades at some point they have to turn in papers at some point, or projects, but with you, you know like you stretch this out as long as you get right and he's still faced these constraints so I think that's useful, a useful lesson for all of us is that things have to have an end, and cool constraint of a podcast is that they all do. They have a beginning, middle and an end and very nice credits in your case. So, you know, those kinds of things are, are humane as well as practical.

Maust: And one of the things that I said in the first episode of the season, and I really, I really mean this, is that this podcast, despite the fact that we have deadlines for these episodes and have to want to get them out in the world and sort of put them out there. I still see it as a starting point, rather than an ending point. And so one of the things that I've been thinking about is like, what are some things that we covered maybe in season one, or mentioned in episodes in this season that are really worth revisiting either with different voices, shining in maybe different people taking the lead on the script that we could really like continue learning. And, and put the time in to maybe get those interviews, like I you know I think my struggles to get interviews with people working with day laborers or gig workers, this, in this period it was probably exacerbated by the constraints of the pandemic. And so, you know, having a little more patience and trying to like check in with people I've, I've experienced that a couple times, actually, in this in this last year and a half of people that I reached out to us. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry I was trying to record something so I was trying to say something very loud. Oh, so are you good. It's really good, which, oh yeah, for various reasons, some for the podcasts on that, and just never got back to me, but when I reach back out to them in the last few months, they've had a little more bandwidth. And so I think, a reminder that just because we asked once isn't necessarily enough, we have to kind of keep, keep trying to reach out to folks. So I think those are all sort of routes for further learning, and maybe it isn't the podcast you know maybe we dip back into some of these things and they get an exhibit, or a tour or some other product, I don't, I don't know what that what that would be, but do you folks have other thoughts about season two as a whole.

Xiang: I would just say that I love learning and exploring personal stories about individuals and I find those to be the most compelling, is from any time period really any, any house any person who worked just the personal aspect of these individuals who lived, and learned.

Maust: Yeah I think that's absolutely when we can get those glimpses that's the most powerful thing to connect back to something that you all were talking about earlier with not knowing what happened to the baby on the alley, like, there are very basic facts that are just completely lost to me so like, you know, in, in season one, the episode that Isabel took the lead on about the public universal friend. We do not know which widow, the friend stayed with on the alley, and just knowing, like we know that it was a widow. And we know that there are widows on the alley at that time, but like not being able to put a name to that person and then connect that piece of information with other things that we might know, it's like really frustrating. In the boarding house episode like not knowing which boarding house was robbed by this con man in the in the sort of opening illustration of that episode, like, it would have been so interesting to be able to describe the actual house, or like connect that person to like the rest of their life. And we just like don't have records for 1826, so we don't know.

Lowe: Are there police reports?

Maust: Oh that's a good idea. There might be. We got you, that's got to be something that can be solved.

Lowe: Well, I mean, I've tried to find police reports in the past not in Philly strangely, and they're really hard. It can be because people get rid of those records and city records, but it's something to think about but yeah all those mysteries, I think, are fascinating, and it's so interesting cuz you brought up two mysteries that are like they came up in this in the quest right. But the thing that I find most invigorating about the alley as a project is, you have some addresses. You know what I mean, you ask some addresses, and from those addresses you have built a history of people who otherwise we know nothing about. And that is a great lesson for my students, it's one of the reasons I send my undergraduates to upper selling they don't tend to get that they can be like Oh also, but when I make follow an address as a research question, people show up in ways that they don't show up in any other kind of history. Now, still we don't have enough about those people, there are people who are mentioned, under under other people who are are mysterious and vague, but all kinds of humans show up when you study a building, and that's one of the most valuable things, I think the alley can offer because it's not just like a building where we tend to focus on the, the posh owners, and then you stop, right. It's an alley that's a collection of buildings, it's a collection of working people, for the most part for most of its history. And in that way, it's a really incredible resource.

Maust: And that seems like a pretty great note to end on.

So thank you all so much for taking the time to chat with me, and for the various contributions that you've all made to this season of the podcast like I literally could not have and would not have done this on my own. And, you know, so many people have contributed in very small ways, but the three of you definitely contributed in significant ways. So thank you for that and for contributing to this discussion I think this is really interesting.

Thanks to Hillary, Margaret and Enya for chatting with me today. Thanks also to our season sponsors Linode and the History Department, and Center for Public History at Temple University. Music in this episode is the song, “Open Flames” by Blue Dot Sessions used under Creative Commons license.

This podcast is recorded on the unceded indigenous territory of the lending lobby people who were and continue to be active stewards of the land. We recognize the return on enough and we aim to actively uphold indigenous visibility and sovereignty for individuals and communities who live here now and for those who are forcibly removed from their homelands. By offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm indigenous sovereignty, and we'll work to hold the Elfreth’s Alley Museum accountable to the needs of American Indian and indigenous peoples.

Thank you for listening to this episode of season two of the alley cast. Remember that one of the best ways you can support our work is by telling other people about the show and rating us on podcast apps such as Apple podcasts, you can sustain the work of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum. I'm making a donation at elfrethsalley.org slash donate or by joining our patreon@patreon.com/elfrethsalley.

Season 2 is Coming!

If you have been following our social channels, you know that Season 2 of The Alley Cast is on its way, but we wanted to drop a brief note into the podcast feed. The first episode of Season 2 will be released next week on Wednesday, June 23rd! Let us know you’ll be listening with us on the Facebook event page for this premiere!

Bonus Episode: Fire

Hello! We're back with a quick episode about the history of fire (and fire insurance, fire fighting, and historically-clad fire safety demonstrations) on Elfreth's Alley and with some news about upcoming events!

Firemarks in a museum display. Image by Aries McFadden, used under Creative Commons License.