We're taking a week off from our usual format to introduce our team, talk through the origins of the podcast, and chat about some things that haven't made it into the podcast, at least not yet.
You can learn a little more about Joe and Isabel on our blog:
Introducing our Interns: Joe Makuc
Introducing our Interns: Isabel Steven
Transcript (Partially produced through AI, so may not be totally accurate):
Ted Maust: Welcome to a special bonus episode of The Alley Cast, a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia. We're taking a week off from our usual format to introduce our team to talk through the origins of the podcast and chat about some things that haven't made it into the podcast. So first, I think let's do some introductions.
I guess I will start.
My name is Ted Maust. My pronouns are he/him.
I am the Associate Director at the Elfreth’s Alley Museum. And I've been in this position for a little over a year at this point.
And I'm trying to think what other relevant information I might have.
Which of you would like to go next?
Isabel Steven: Hi, my name is Isabel Steven. My pronouns are she/her; I am studying at Temple University. I'm getting my master's in public history. And I am in the summer between my first and second year, and I've been in Philadelphia for two years now.
Joe Makuc: Hi, I'm Joe Makuc. My pronouns are he/him. I'm studying at Temple University's program of public history as well as Isabel. I'm in the same year, so also between my first and second year, and I'm an intern at Elfreth’s Alley with interests in environmental history.
TM: to sort of catch you all up to speed on on how the three of us sort of got together and why the podcast. I actually completed the same program that both Joe and Isabel are in and I did my research on how to museums, which is what got me to a place where I'm working in Elfreth’s Alley , where people are living in, you know, 300 year old houses.
But this summer, both Joe and Isabel started internships with us with the idea that they would be working on research interests that they have and developing cores along those lines.
Do you each sort of want to talk a little bit about roughly what the skirting brief was?
JM: Yeah. So one thing that I had coming out of managing history at Temple last semester in which they met and worked visible was an idea for an interpretive garden Elfreth’s Alley .
So one thing that I spent a lot of time chatting about Ted with kind of in like February, in very early March of this year was how we could make that a possibility and produce an interpretive garden space, focusing on native plants. And Philadelphia, and then an accompanying tour, and ideally a video tour.
So however, that obviously did not happen yet, although I would still like to make it happen eventually.
IS: So my initial interest in office alley goes back a little bit farther.
The first summer that I moved to Philadelphia, I decided to visit and tour Elfreth’s Alley. And I learned about the two women from episode one, Sara Melton and Mary Smith. And I thought you know, how unusual was it for two women to live together and earn a living together and not have any man in the picture in the 18th century? And my interests are in queer history. So I thought that that was sort of an interesting exploration I kind of shelved it. For a couple of years. And then I picked it back up during the spring semester of this program and began doing research on these two women and a few other women actually, were living concurrently to those two. So I talked with Ted about what research and what materials there were on those women.
And as that research progressed, I realized that I could interpret them as queer as living a queer lifestyle according to 18th century norms. And that was something that I wanted to then explore in a public history context and create a tour around and then train volunteers to give that tour. And obviously, like Joe mentioned, with the pandemic, and the stay at home orders in person tours no longer became a possibility, which is then how we pivoted to a part of the reason we pivoted to the podcast.
TM: Yeah, so we essentially, I think there was a middle step where we're like Joe said, we were thinking about doing some video tours or content like that. And then we really got sort of trapped in our own homes. And two years ago, two years ago, maybe during the National Council on public history's annual meeting, Hannah Hethmn who is somebody who's very, on the cutting edge of podcasts for museum contexts, made her her book, Your Museum Needs a Podcast free for the duration of the conference. And I downloaded that and then I didn't even listen to it. And then this spring, as we started thinking about Plan B's and plan C's, I picked it up again. Read through it. It's very quick read but it goes into really granular detail about how how to do a podcast on a really small scale. And we didn't take all of her suggestions. She actually recommended specific mics and things like that, and we've just been recording on our phones. But we saw it as an opportunity. I saw it as opportunity at least to do something that the museum hadn't done before.
And as sort of a proof of concept that this is something that we could do when we have the added help of two scholars like Isabel and Joe. You know, I couldn't I'm a staff of one and I couldn't maintain a podcast on my own. But with these two excellent minds and avid learners, it's been really exciting and possible. Would either of you like to talk about the sort of sketching out what we would talk about in the podcast or the topics?
IS: So I can talk about the conception for the podcast. I think it kind of arose rather naturally that we wanted to focus the arc of our season on the stories of women and in the case of Episode Three, a non binary individual and we wanted to do that for a number of reasons. Obviously, my research interests helped dictate at least the first couple of episodes and then a lot of the content that the museum already interprets and already has access to do focus on the stories of women. But we want to continue to explore that more generally. And we thought that that would be a nice way to sort of have cohesion through this first season.
And then of course, it's also the 100 year anniversary of women's suffrage. Although I should say white women's suffrage, really. So it also kind of worked on that level as well.
So I think that's sort of how we came up with the we decided eight episodes because that kind of fit well with the time that Joe and I wouldn't be working during the summer. It would give us enough time to sort of do front end research, and then write and record and release and then hopefully have some time afterwards to sort of talk shop about what worked what didn't and maybe plan for a second season.
TM: Yeah, I think that really captures it. And, you know, we have these starting points.
With Isabel's research. We knew roughly what the first three episodes were going to be. I wanted to make sure that we got to the sort of preservation stories of the street in the 20th century. So that sort of tied down the back end of the season. And then we sort of had to figure out what how to connect those in the middle.
And, Joe, I think you probably had the most challenging task and a bit in that we with episode four.
We said sort of go find a topic.
And if I didn't even give you you know, like names are really much to start with. Do you want to talk about how you sort of got to the topic?
JM: Sure. So with episode four, we were looking for something to cover the gap, like the chronological gap between early 1900s slash late 1800s where we knew it would be really important to talk about industrialization and then de industrialized it deindustrialization and moving into the preservation and kind of tourist economy scheme of things.
And we wanted to read there was a gap between that like era and Isabel's research, which really, like, really well explored the like period between the mid 18th century, early 1900s.
So that we kind of had this like, question mark something in the early 1800s, mid mid 18, somewhere in between, like 1820 and 1880. In the document for a while I'm from planning the podcast, and there were a couple different ideas originally, like temperance, which is interesting, but I didn't find as much on that in the alley, or abolition was the next big one that I remember doing. A lot of digging for, which ultimately did end up being helpful for other episodes, but not quite this one.
And but in the process of doing the abolition work. I think there was one question that Ted did. Pose in the document that was like were there any black residents on the alley during this time period? And how did they get out of their lives compared to those of you know, neighboring areas? And so that was where I kind of started looking at, and also Ted, you know, posted some census images of me unnamed black woman who are kind of the protagonists in my episode.
And so, that kind of led me down this rabbit hole of trying to track down every single, every single household containing black people in 1840, just based on the census, and then comparing those to kind of see what I could discern from that research, which didn't really lead me anywhere very productive. Ultimately, I think, like, well, we can talk about the exercise a little bit later, but I think that was a very important that I learned some things about researching from that. But it didn't leave me to, I think a very important topic, which is what were the lives of these people like who didn't get as much written about them and to we had a very hard time researching because they still isn't that much of their lie was being collected unlike some of the other vendors that we do talk about.
IS: I think that episode four is an interesting and needed counterpart, point to episode two, which pretty much predominantly talks about the white female heads of household and it shows the different ways that you can use that we have been using the census records, and how over time more and more information has been contained on them. Some of the really early census records have very little except Except for, you know, who is the head of household and so that is almost always in a concentrator going to be white person. And so I think that for a lot of reasons, Episode Four was very needed to make the story a much deeper one.
TM: I think Episode Four also was a really interesting connection to the second set of four episodes that we'll have we planned to produce the first four, and then sort of take a break and think about what the last four episodes might be. And it was around the time that we were wrapping up some of the production on the first four episodes that the murder of George Floyd happened and protests started all around the country. And we wanted to take a moment to sort of reconsider where we were going. You know, I think when we had sketched out the whole season, so much of the things that I was interested in putting in, in the last two episodes were about the preservation movement, which as scholars have sort of described, is almost exclusively white.
Or there's lots of really interesting scholarship about memory work and community museums and those kinds of things in black communities in America, but this sort of singular narrative we have of historic preservation is is blindingly white.
And so we really wanted to think about how to refocus some of those stories. And to me, it felt very natural we settled on, you know, it was obvious in some ways that all we needed to do was to think about the people who were affected by this movement, who, who was not included in this movement. And how did this shift from the industrial or industry industrial straight to a deindustrializing city, to this like heritage tourism? How did that affect people who weren't involved in the conversations? And so that's sort of where we're going with these these next four episodes.
And I think that that sort of pivot at the middle of the season
we spent the first production on the first floor of assessment, daily, I shouldn't even the pronoun we could. It was really almost exclusively Isabelle during the first three episodes and Joe during episode four.
But we started this this season with a really just do it and do it as well as we can and see what's possible. And I think by the point when we started plotting out the back half of the season we had a little more idea of what was possible, and we're still learning about things that we can do better. So I want to talk a little bit about process.
What are the things that have been difficult or fulfilling or that you may have want want to do over again?
Do either of you have any any of those things you want to chat about?
IS: Yeah, so I think for me, um, obviously, I've never done any sort of podcast work. That was a learning curve. But gonna help this book was really helpful and just diving into the process. You know, I kind of got a handle on it. I feel like by the end of Episode Three, maybe I sounded less stilted in my narration. But I think honestly, like, one of the difficulties has been, there's been so many times where I've come up at a research point and just been like, well, I can't go to the archives to go find that information. I do want to say like that. There's a lot of resources that are online and digitize, which has absolutely been so helpful, but there have been times where I do feel like my research has suffered from just the lack of of corroboration, or getting me to detail sources that I need.
And I do think, you know, in some ways, the let's just do it and go has allowed for the time that is necessary to to get that as full research as possible or just time to sit on an episode and think through things and edit and go over it again. And I will say that that is definitely the case with episode three, which there will be a pot of blog posts pending sort of talks about some of the areas that I didn't get it right and that really needed to be edited and thought about differently. And so I'm gonna, I want to talk about basically those that process and I have a colleague who has asked to remain nameless, and they offered a lot of really wonderful insight and expertise. Specifically, a couple of things that I was learning how to do as I was writing this and didn't get right.
Writing from a historical context, the first issue was dealing with the narrative of the born a man or being born a woman, which has a lot of harmful connotations, especially today. So when I talked about the public universal friend, using that narrative, it's difficult because you don't really know specifically how the friend might have identified before and friends transition.
But, you know, I needed to be a lot more intentional about that when I discussed that part of the story and been more intentional about my research on how to write about that. And the same is true as well for using the phone's dead name. And I mentioned that a little bit started the episode by saying, Oh, I use this name, when in specific quotes are right at the start of the story before transition. And again, that needed to be a lot more intentional. Because that is not the name the friend ever wanted to use. And it's not the name that we as I think that we as historians should be using. And part of that challenge is that there are still a lot of like archives that use dead name for archival practices. But um, you know, if I'm making a statement like this is this is the public universal friend, this is their name, like the friend's name, then I need to be a lot more intentional about why and whether or not it was even useful to use the dead name.
You know, there are certain times I think that it maybe wasn't even very useful or didn't convey, you know, sort of like it didn't seem even necessary, but I was putting it in just because maybe it sounded like an interesting quote. So, if I were to re record the episode, it would have changed the amount of times that I used the dead name and then they're much more specific and intentional about why and that it's not that there are is a history of violence toward trans people in using dead names. So did I then as well, I do want to apologize for any harm or pain that I caused.
The way I wrote about it, and that the language that was hurtful and harmful, so I don't want to I want to apply.
It's, you know, learning to write about gender and the history of trans identities is definitely complex. And history as a field, I think has a certain set of challenges that we need to think really intentionally and intentionally about. And so yeah, I don't say any of this to excuse the ways that I didn't get it right. But to sort of reflect on my position, writing about the history of gender in this context, and that is something that I really would have loved at the start of this process is that, you know, there's only three of us and we don't we're not experts in every single topic. And we don't have experience in certain areas, in particular sensitivity readings. And so those are some they'd love to see in the future. You know that the more people you have involved in a project, the better it's going to be. The depth is going to be better, the sensitivity, the nuances will be better. And so those are sort of sort of some of the things that I really noticed this process.
TM: Yeah, I think a lot of that really resonates with me. I had a colleague because they heard that we were working on a topic in in their field later in the season.
And I realized that it was a real like failure of imagination for me not to have reached out to them or other people. Previously, I mean, I think, as Isabel said, the more nuance and nuance comes from people who are familiar with a topic, whether that is scholarly interest, whether that is professional expertise, whether that is you know, issues of identity and race, and I think we're talking a lot about race this season. And we're all white people. And I think if I were to do it again, I would find a way to put other voices into some of these episodes and I think we've we've tried to do that in historic record. But I think just in the in the podcast production, that is something that I would like to do.
I mean, I'm committed to doing better if and when we do more of these episodes.
And it takes time. It takes money. We want to compensate people who are making our product better and doing work on our behalf. But that's not really an excuse. I think we could have we could have and should have done better in that regard.
As well talked about a little bit also about the struggles of conducting research during a pandemic.
Joe, I know you did some like really big quantitative qualitative kinds of number crunching Do you can you talk a little bit about that? Are there things that would have been easier in in non pandemic times?
JM: Yeah. So regarding the quantitative number crunching, because census data was the only resource available that was digitized that I felt like could give like any information on these people's lives, barring, you know, like the macro is directory which is also digitized.
I felt like I needed to put the census data first and try to use that to kind of as a primary I try to use the statistics from that as a primary source about this stuff. I think, if it were not a pandemic, I would have very I would very much like to, you know, see if there were any archives in Philly that did have more, say payrolls, for example, I don't know if they were payrolls for domestic labor is at this time, I'm just spitballing, based on what I've seen other historians use to recover the lives of laborers at this time.
And for example, or, you know, if there are any other sources such as diaries or journals that haven't been digitized or don't have you know, a good finding aid. I looked for some and I didn't really find any on diaries or journals of any of the subjects mentioned in Episode Four. But I'm guessing there might be some.
But so ultimately, I think the really challenging thing with the census data is that although it's digitized, a lot of it doesn't really have. It had a lot of it doesn't really have a good transcript that you know, includes the specific data points and so I had to go through and manually type into a spreadsheet you know, for residents in this house in this age bracket, and racial category, you know, million times and that and I ended up running short cuts as a result, like, lumping together different age categories under like, and no assume gender categories, under like you know, with the label of children, for example, which I think ultimately did not really help me in the process, but it it felt like a right thing to do at the time. I don't think it was very helpful, because it ultimately more reified my ideas of what a child was at the time, whereas after doing the census research, I quickly found out that childhood was conceived very differently, particularly among along racial lines, which it still is today. And so I feel like that quantitative research may be a nice starting point for someone in the future who wants to go in and look at the census data and see if there's anything helpful for them. But I also found that it was too small for quantitative data for me to say that any correlations between any numbers were significant. So I felt like it would be very irresponsible to say I could draw any conclusions from it. And I felt like that was just in general, the, the big challenge, so for trying to make numbers stand in for stuff that where I would want you know, the voices of talking about, especially those domestic workers who again, we don't have that many written records.
We don't have any written records in my knowledge in there.
TM: So I think that is a great example of without a pandemic, you might not have found much more.
But with a pandemic, you'd have a chance to really go looking for some of that stuff. And one thing that I have experience I took sort of the lead on Episode Five for the first time, so I'm sort of newer to the whole research and writing process. But one thing that I found for sure, is that there's always lots of little things that you trails that you want to track down, that don't necessarily make it into a 20 episode.
Do either you have some of those sorts of topics that you learned a lot about but didn't make it into the episode?
JM: Yeah. So I ended up getting a little more abolition research done, and episode four, because someone I mentioned at the very beginning, Esther Beecher Stowe was Harriet Beecher Stowe, sister she was the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the abolitionist tract, Uncle Tom's Cabin, kind of also racist book. There you go. That's the connection. So like, actually, one of the very big things that I learned when doing research in this episode was so much about how white reformers view this kind of work and so much of their perspective and how that in turn dictated you know, perhaps what Robert Roberts who was a Black Butler writing about his work and you know, kind of making manual for other laborers got to publish. Esther Beecher has just like this entire book, basically, you know, promulgating this idea that if you are obedient and you work hard, and you follow you know, the demands of your employers no matter what, then they will be kind to you and you will get what you deserve. Which is very, I think, patronizing and also not really true, especially given how we know like, there was and remains so much racism in the domestic labor industry is still predominantly staffed by women of color and still predominantly they you know, report that their labor is contingent, and a lot of instances of abuse by their employers, right. And so I just, I learned a lot about like, how these specific reformers thought about it, in conceptualizing this work and the ties between these reformers in the north talking about you know, trying to pass this along this these ideas about obedience and virtue for domestic labor and their connections to their connections to abolition etc. But it did not. I did not feel like that was something that I should try to center in this episode.
IS: For episode three. There's so much talk about with gender and all of the different ways that at that time period, it was really being contested and it was very unstable. And something that I really only hinted at and, you know, would have liked to explore more, are they other examples of cross dressing and gender nonconformity that were happening at the time both that were sort of documented through court records, or within popular literature at the time, there are many more avenues to explore with that.
TM: Yeah, I think that's a great segue.
So I talked a little bit about what the rest of this this season will look like. We have three more episodes coming and those will primarily focus on philanthropy and then sort of getting into heritage tourism and preservation and a little bit of urban renewal as well.
And that's going to sort of bring our chronological sweep of this season, from 1762 straight through to 1967 I think is sort of the time frame of this season, and that we'll wrap this up, but if we were to do a second season, what are some topics that each of you would love this like to see us do? Do you want to chat about those for a moment?
IS: Yeah, so exploring religion more connected with the alley is something that I would like to explore I touched on a few of the Quakers who lived on the street at the same time that the public universal friend visited the alley. But you know, the congregation records are the records for congregations. A lot of those are online. And so you know, it would be sort of painstaking work going through all of those records to try and match up names with our data, but that might yield some results as to you know, what types of congregations residents were involved in and what the sort of breakdown of religious affiliation. Residents were, and if that changed at all over time and how it did so I think that religion would definitely be a fruitful angle to explore
JM: Yeah, well, one thing which I which I like remember you bringing up like, early on we were talking about potentially pivoting that was like the idea of talking about other a lot of different other preservation with wisdom for like, specifically those by people of color, and I think we're going to get some of those like some of that talked about in the back half, which is exciting. But I do really feel like it'd be great to you know, learn more about like, you know, preservation in Chinatown, for example.
That's like a really, I think that's a really cool part of the city and I think it's stories one that definitely I would like to learn more about it and like to see what we can amplify there. Perhaps, and from, you know, other people who have already written on it, and you have great stake in it.
But I would say personally, I think one thing that my episode made me think more about is like that, obviously, domestic labor hasn't gone away. I'm guessing there's still, you know, given the word given how, you know, like Alfa Sally is currently gentrified.
I would guess that you know, there's also been more that there's been a long and recent history of it on the street. And so talking about that in more of a like 20th century context, or late 19th century context, I think when there are a lot more sources produced by domestic workers, like Alice child, Driss, the black playwright, and journalist had this really great newspaper column.
Like, where it's all kind of satire written from the point of view of a fictional domestic worker based in part on her own experiences, working in people's houses. And I think that would be super interesting to put into, you know, contrast with what was domestic labor like on the street in the 20th century?
TM: Yeah, I think those are great ideas. I do think that this has been a super learning experience. And we talked a lot about some of the things that you've learned. I mean, for one, I've just learned how much work it takes to to write and record 20 minute piece. And I'm really grateful to have both of you as interns. I could not have done it without you. Yeah, as as we're thinking about a season two if there are topics that are near and dear to your heart that you would like to see us explore. Send us a message on social media or via email you can there's a contact form on our website.
I think that's all for us today.
You can expect a new episode of the alley cast next week and weekly episodes thereafter.
Thank you, Joe and Isabel for joining me today and chatting with me. This was really great. Thank you for listening.
IS: Thanks for getting this all together, Ted. Thanks. Good.
JM: And I feel like we hit on a lot of important points, particularly about reflexivity and about going forward working with people. So yeah, rock out