Thread by @Delafina777

so I was lukewarm on the "Lore" podcast, but I decided to listen to "Unobscured" (which does a season-long deep dive on a single subject) by the same guy, and it is surprisingly great

When I looked at the subjects for the first three seasons, I was like "meh,"

because they are

1. Salem witch trials
2. Spiritualism
3. Jack the Ripper

and, like, yawn, could you pick more overdone subjects (other than, maybe, spiritualism)

but I have been painting a

FUCKING INFINITE

number of cabinets

so I decided to binge it and start with Jack the Ripper, the season that I assumed would bore me the most, and work up to spiritualism

I haven't done a deep dive on spiritualism since college, and it's such a weird influence in American history that I don't feel like I have my head around

like, things covering major historical figures, just sort of mention, almost as a footnote, that they were spiritualists

so that one, I was interested in

but anyway, I started with Jack the Ripper

and HOLY SHIT people

it was actually incredible

instead of focusing on the cat-and-mouse between the police and Jack, or the t e r r o r that London felt(!!!)...

it focused through the lens of the match factory women of the East End attempting to unionize, and the way the police were militarized with veterans of Britain's suppression of people in their colonies to treat poor neighborhoods like alien, enemy territory

which is, y'know, very relevant-feeling

also, for the 900th time, fuck the Victorian British and their association of wealth and morality.

anyway, that is not a lens I've ever seen deployed on this story before, and it was fascinating

(also, wow, the Salvation Army was awful, and also the Quakers do NOT come off well, which I was not expecting)

Like, something I'd never heard before was that Jack wrote a letter to the match factory owner in addition to the ones he sent the police

and it was threatening the match women because they were saying the police were incompetent and *they* were going to organize and find him

you know, like they'd organized and brought the factory owner to his knees

so yeah, that ended up being riveting in a way I did not expect

and then I listened to the Salem witch trials one

and I have read a bunch of stuff on the economic basis for the witch hunts

but this contrasted New York and Massachusetts

and talked about the difference in Dutch-run New York, which was shaped first and foremost by being a cosmopolitan, multicultural community

vs the Puritan settlements, which were first and foremost corporate profit-generators

like even the prisons were profit-generators

you literally had to pay for your prison stay, for straw to sleep on, for food, etc.

people who were acquitted died in prison because they couldn't afford to pay to get out

(also relevant to today, for the 900th time, fuck the Puritans)

and I know that I read those details when I was studying Salem, but they didn't leap out to me the way they do when Puritan colonies as corporate investments is the framing

And now I'm onto the season on Spiritualism

and it's also fascinating, because the lens is its relationship with the anti-slavery movement

Sojourner Truth is a main character