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Sylvia D. Hoffert, "Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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New Books Network Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Sylvia Hoffart about her book titled Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle, Gossip, Rumor and Reputation in a Small Southern Town, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2025. This book makes sense of a ton of different sources, which is a really interesting way to get a perspective on a particular place in time, which obviously, as historians, we're interested in generally. But what we're able to understand from this is not just sort of networks of gossip and who liked who and who didn't, but what this was doing more broadly, what this was doing in terms of challenging or maintaining race relations, for example, or gender norms. It turns out, you know, by taking something seriously like gossip that maybe we wouldn't otherwise there's a lot that we can understand about sort of general social relations. So, Sylvia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to Tell us about your book.
- [02:41]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Okay, thank you so much for having me.
- [02:43]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could we start off with you introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book.
- [02:49]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Yes. I'm a historian. I have a PhD from Indiana University, and my special field in American history is women's history. Most of my books have been about women, but I decided I wanted to. Well, as a matter of fact, most of my books have been about the north or the western part of the United States. And since I began talk teaching at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, I became interested in women in the South. And so this book resulted from two things. Number one, I wanted to do something local, and number two, Covid hit and I needed to keep myself busy. So I had the research mostly done. And So I used 2020 to start this book. And that's sort of the origins of the idea. I'm from a small town in the Midwest, so I know all about gossip. And so what I did was to sort of take my background as a small town resident and apply it not to the Midwest, but to the. To the South. And I picked Hillsborough. It's only 30 minutes drive from Chapel Hill. When I, at one point I was asked to be on the board of directors of a 19th century historic site, which was a girls school. And they put me on the board and put me on the research committee, which made sense. That samo historian and I discovered an amazing cache of primary documents related to the school, its founder, its students. And that sort of got me started on, you know, the town was there, it wasn't far away, the documents were amazing.
- [04:40]
And so I just sort of used that as the base and built the book around those documents.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a very helpful backstory because I think so often projects are created for those sorts of reasons. Right? Multiple reasons, and often quite practical reasons embedded as well. So always useful to hear about kind of the reality behind research. A very useful starting point for us. And of course, the other one is something I mentioned a little bit in the beginning, that gossip may not always be an object of study, but clearly it's a focus here. So can you tell us why you think studying gossip is important?
- [05:20]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Yeah, I think one of the things that historians have really ignored is the fact that people's relationships, no matter where they're living, even if you're living in a city, you're living in a neighborhood, and their relationships really are based on what they tell each other. And as I said, my background from a Midwestern small town is that I know that small Town personal relations are completely wrapped up in what we say about each other, our interest in each other, and then what we say about each other. So I think historians have ignored gossip and in doing so have.
- [06:03]
Made the discussion of small town lives less rich than it might be had they considered, you know, talking about gossip and rumor and how it influenced the relationships among people in these small towns or neighborhood, so to speak. I also think that people tend to think of gossip as trivial. Interestingly enough, it's attributed to women. Women gossip when men do exactly the same thing. It's called sharing intelligence.
- [06:39]
So I think that what we need to do is to consider gossip as a phenomenon that is pretty universal. And it has various characteristics. It can be true or untrue, it can be benign, or it can be malicious.
- [06:58]
It helps to establish and sustain relationships among people who know each other. And they use it in various ways. They use it to public to. To monitor people's behavior and private conduct and to. To make judgments about that behavior. So in some ways what they're trying to do is to establish standards of proper behavior and sanction unacceptable behavior in order to make people comfortable relating to one another. So in that sense, it's an important mechanism for community building. It helps to establish in groups and out groups and people who identify as part of one or the other.
- [07:45]
It's definitely judgmental.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely helpful to clarify as a foundation for our discussion. The other thing I want to make sure we're clear on is whether gossip is the same as rumor. Is that the case?
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Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Well, I distinguish between the two. I say that gossip tends to be focused on judgmental assessment of an individual concerning their public or private behavior. And so it's sort of past behavior, like what have they done and what do we think about it? Whereas rumor is spread among people who don't necessarily know each other. And it tends to be speculative and anticipatory, which is to say that it usually concerns something that somebody thinks is about to happen, and it usually suggests that you need to do something about it. So for example, in the south, there were various and sundry. At various and sundry times, there were rumors about.
- [08:48]
A potential slave rebellion. And those rumors served the purpose of alerting whites that there is danger and suggesting that they should do something to prevent this slave rebellion from occurring, or at least protect themselves. So gossip tends to be about the past behavior and rumor tends to be anticipatory. Something is about to happen and you need to do something about it. Another good example would be rumors about bankruptcies businessmen who are talked about by their creditors, for example, could lead to, and I give an example in the book, did lead to bankruptcy. So it's about what you should do. So if you hear that somebody's credit is questionable, you want to start call. You want to be the first one to call in your loan because if you're not the first, you may end up being the last and not getting your money back. So it is very a dynamic that demands action.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's very helpful clarification and quite a useful, you know, easy to understand framework to keep in mind. So great to have that early on in our conversation. The last piece I think of sort of background we probably want to discuss is you've already given us some reasons that you focused on Hillsborough. Can you give us more of an introduction to the town for those of us who don't have it as a 30 minute drive away?
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Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Sure.
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Well, it still is up there, 30 miles north of Chapel Hill. It's town right now about 7,000, but it's in an area called the Piedmont. The Piedmont in North Carolina is between the coastal region and the mountain region. So it's beautiful and hilly and lots of trees. There's a river there called the Eno river. And it's on that river that the Indians first settled. They settled in an area of Hillsborough because there was a really good ford across the Eno river there. And they were trying to control trade from Virginia that went down through North Carolina to Georgia. The town was founded in the 18th century. It had 474 inhabitants in 1800, and it didn't grow very much in the 19th century. It's estimated that there were only 942 inhabitants in 1860, just before the Civil War. So it's a small town. It remains relatively stable. It has a courthouse square, as many southern small towns do. It has a two block shopping area as many small towns do. It started with log cabins and by the time of the 19th century those log cabins had been replaced, were gradually being replaced by clapboard houses with dependencies. So what you had were these large lots of. And if you can picture what you might view of a plantation, picture the plantation with the big house. These houses weren't terribly big, but a house and all of its dependency. So each of these lots would have had a house, a chicken coop, a privy, a barn, and the usual dependencies that a farm might have. But these are in town houses. So they have no land being there's there, there are no crops being being grown and there are no pastures Although there might be a fenced in area for the domestic domesticated animals. But. So that's the town. And around the town are the bigger plantations with the land that is that where crops are being grown. So it's a little town surrounded by larger farm. That's where many of the very wealthy slave owners lived. Although there were plenty of enslavers living in the small town, about a third of Orange County's population was enslaved. So that kind of gives you a picture of what it might have looked like.
- [13:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that does help us get a sense of the kind of many different people in the society. If we're talking then about these questions of rumour, I think I'd like to go to first. Mary Smith is a figure you discuss in the book who owned other human beings who had enslaved people.
- [13:20]
What rumour was started about this? And how can we kind of not fall into the trap of just assuming, oh, this is mean spirited, or the word you used earlier was frivolous. Like what's going on with this particular rumour?
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Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Okay, well, we found out about the rumor from a letter. And the letter is written by the best friend of Mary Smith and her name was Marie Spear. And she's writing to another friend who lives in Raleigh. So she's in Hillsborough, she's writing to a friend in Raleigh. And she basically says, so I ran across this letter in the archives and so I'm reading this letter and the first line of it says, more or less, don't believe what you're hearing about Mary Smith. It's a four page letter. And so I keep reading the letters like, what are we hearing about Mary Smith? And we, I get to the last page and she still, she explained why this, why this gossip could not possibly be true, on and on and on. But she doesn't say what the gossip is. And I'm going, please, please, before you end this letter, tell me what the gossip is. And the gossip is the following. She says the gossips in Hillsborough have been saying that Mary Smith has abused her family's enslaved servants. Number one, she has whipped a slave and poured boiling peas down her throat. The second is she, she's cut another with a knife and then whipped her for letting her wings be seen. And the third is that she's beaten, she had beat a third with a pair of fireplace tongs. I mean, this is just horrendous.
- [15:00]
And of course, gossip, it can be true or not true. So we don't know whether this actually happened or somebody who really doesn't like Mary has made it up to ruin her reputation, but that's what the gossip was. And Maria, her friend, is saying, please don't believe this. It can possibly be true. And she gives all kinds of reasons why it couldn't be true. But that's the kind of thing that, that was particularly malicious. Some gossip is not malicious. Some gossip is just basically hearing news. But this is a particularly vicious charge against Mary Smith. And of course she has no way to combat it. You know, she can't say, well, no, I didn't do that. She can say that. But the gossip tends to be stronger than the denial. So that, that's how I start the book with that story.
- [15:50]
And basically what I say is, you have to understand that gossip within the context of the abuse of slaves and the fear of slave rebellion. And so basically what this is really all about is that whites in Hillsborough in the 1830s, this letter was written in 1831, are terrified. They don't talk about it. They're terrified of slave rebellion. A substantial number of the inhabitants of Hillsborough are enslaved, and a small number of freed blacks also live in Hillsborough. And as far as whites are concerned, free blacks are a danger because they are an example of how you could be free. And so. And they also believe that free blacks would be collaborating with slaves in order to free themselves. So free blacks and slaves are a danger whites don't talk about. And whites need to justify slavery so they can't talk about how cruel and, and how cruel it is and what a bad situation these people find themselves in. And so what they do is they say, okay, this, we don't, we don't believe that, that beating slaves is a good idea. Why? Because they might retaliate. And what would happen if they did? Then we might have a slave rebellion on our hands. So what they do is, I mean, this gossip, I think, is a way of them to.
- [17:26]
Sort of subliminally expose their anxieties about the dangers inherent in a slave economy.
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And.
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Allows them to be very self righteously angry about such behavior on the part of Mary.
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It directs attention towards her and ignores the fact that there were a lot of people they knew who were doing that, who were abusing their slaves. And it reassures them that their standards of behavior in regard to enslaved people was that they should not be beaten, that this is not a good idea. And so what they're doing is condemning Mary for behavior which may or may not have happened, but assuring themselves that they really think this is a bad thing, even though they know other People who are doing it. So it serves as a sort of psychological crutch for, you know, people who are gossiping to acknowledge their fear, acknowledge that this is happening, but, you know, place themselves in a position where they're criticizing their, where they're condemning it and thus making themselves feel better about the whole thing. So I think it's really this, this particular story illustrates how complicated gossip was in terms of community relationship. I mean, what they're doing is setting her aside as someone who is, whose behavior is unacceptable given community standards. And the other thing I talk about when I talk about Mary Smith is why she's so vulnerable to this kind of behavior. For example, Judge Ruffin, who is a Supreme Court justice in North Carolina, was a notorious slave abuser. I mean, he. I also write about that. They're not attacking Judge Ruffin. They're attacking a young woman who's in her 20, who family is not among the elite of Hillsborough. So who is vulnerable to this kind of.
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Attack and has very little, very few resources to counter the attack. I mean, as I said before, she can deny it, but, you know, she doesn't have much standing in the community.
- [19:54]
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- [23:11]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Well, as I said, whites considered free blacks suspect. First of all, they were example of, you know, people could be free. And so they were a daily presence in the community. So any enslaved person who saw them could say, you know, this could be me. What do I need to do to gain my freedom? Second thing is that they are they are allowed to exist in Hillsborough on sufferance, which is to say that they provide important services for whites in Hillsborough. So while they're suspect, they're also needed. And so what happens is that free blacks in Hillsborough in the early 19th century needed to manage a reputation that made them less suspect. So they needed to be respectable if they wanted to.
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Survive in any comfortable way. And the example I give is a young man whose name was Henry Evans. Now, Henry Evans was a free black. He was a furniture maker. He apparently was enormously talented. And he established a business in downtown Hillsborough and Churton street, one of those two blocks right across from the courthouse. And it was important for him to establish a reputation for.
- [24:40]
Respectability so that he could have a successful business. So he did that in all kinds of ways. And talk about him would have resulted in, for example, he became a member of the Episcopal Church. Okay, well, talk about him have been negative. The chances of him becoming a member of the Episcopal Church would have been minimal. Talk about him as a businessman. He had to nurture a reputation that his skills were superb, that his pricing was fair, and established himself as someone you wanted to do business with. And all of that reputation was based on what people said about him. So gossip about him. He needed to manage it in such a way as to avoid malicious gossip and to encourage positive gossip in order to establish his ability to support his family and to run his business.
- [25:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And what were in his particular case, for instance, what were the ways in which he could manage that gossip? Like, was that something to any extent within his control?
- [25:53]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Well, of course, to some extent it's not as his control, but this whole idea about respectability. So, for example, talk about him. There would have been talk about him when he got married. That was a good thing. There would have been talk about him when he had children. Now he's a family man, so he's respectable family man. Talk about him when he became a church member. Talk about him when he produced.
- [26:17]
A really fine piece of furniture.
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Talk about him. He had him. He was so well respected in Hillsboro that he was allowed to post bonds for people who needed someone to speak to their credit worthiness. And so the court actually allowed him to post bonds for people who needed that kind of support. And so the court acceptance of him as a reliable and credit worthy individual would have led to talk about, you know, this is a guy you can trust. This is a guy who, if he posts a bond, you can, we know that he has enough money to pay off this bond. So building this reputation based on public discussion of his behavior was to some extent something, you know, he could control it to some extent, but of course you could never. I mean, gossip is very.
- [27:19]
Undependable. You can't always assume that people are saying good things about you. All you can do is just keep your head down and behave yourself and hope that, you know, people are saying good things about you, to allow you to function and support your family and build your business. And, you know, that kind of behavior is respected even though you're a member of the black, free, black community.
- [27:46]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that definitely is interesting to think about kind of what is within control and not for freed people of color. What about enslaved people? Right. We've talked about gossip around the people enslaving. We've talked about the people freed. In what ways could communities of enslaved people use gossip either amongst themselves or between enslaved people and the people in charge of them.
- [28:12]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Right. Okay. So most. The slave culture is basically an oral culture. These people can't read and write. So whereas white and trump free blacks, I mean, Henry Evans was literate. Some free blacks could read. For slaves, it was all about oral communication.
- [28:34]
So, for example, it could help them in the sense that if a new worker showed up in the fields, for example.
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Just been purchased, doesn't know the culture, gossip about what the work expectations were, gossip about who was going to supervise you. So if there's an overseer, what is this guy like? What do you need to be careful of? Is he lecherous, for example? Do you need to, you know, if you're a woman, do you need to stay as far away from him as you can get? So information about their work environment and their domestic environment is really an important way to acclimate people new to the household or the plantation. The other thing is that you can use it to. You can. It will help you if, for example, one of the examples I gave was an enslaved woman whose name was Elizabeth Keckley, who later became. Actually later bought her freedom and became Mary Todd Lincoln's dressmaker in Washington D.C. during the Lincoln administration. But she starts out in Virginia, is moved to Hillsborough, and in Hillsborough, she's abused her mistress, Anna Burwell, who was the headmistress of a girls school, though I was on the board of the same school. Anna Burwell took a dislike to her and asked her husband, Robert Burwell, to discipline her. And Robert refused to do it, but sent her to a schoolmaster and he beat her more than once. And she says in her autobiography that basically the beating stopped when it became public knowledge that these two men were beating her. So she was able. She didn't use the gossip to stop. To stop the beatings, but she appreciated the role that gossip played among the townspeople, who of course condemned beating the enslaved, at least publicly. So she was. She benefited from the gossip that was spread about the Burwells and about their behavior towards her. So that's one way they could do. You could also use gossip to anticipate problems, which is to say that, as I pointed out, if, for example, you were an enslaved person in a household in town or a plantation outside of town, to know, like, if your mistress is known to sleep very soundly, if master and mistress are known to sleep soundly, it gives you some faith. You can manipulate that information into space of your own time, of your own. You don't need to worry about them if they're sound asleep. So it had all kinds of very subtle implications for the way that they were. You know, they were. They were. They were to live their lives. Gossip about their behavior also would determine the degree to which they were overseen by whites. So, for example, if you were a trusted worker, you might have more freedom of movement and freedom from the observation of whites than if you were known to be recalcitrant or disrespectful. Those slaves would have much more.
- [32:14]
They would have been watched more carefully than a slave who was trusted, who you could trust to run errands, or who you could trust to.
- [32:27]
Be out and about. So slaves couldn't control them. Slaves had a limited ability to control what was said about them. Part of it had to do with their behavior and their willingness to. To defer to white.
- [32:46]
Not to look them in the eye or to yes, ma', am, no, ma', am, or whatever. So they could control that to some degree, but it was limited because they weren't free.
- [32:58]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. So, again, this goes back to questions of agency, which we've kind of seen throughout this. I mean, even the example right at the beginning of the judge wasn't the one being gossiped about.
- [33:07]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Right.
- [33:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
The younger woman was. But I want to talk more about some of these instances where gossip is relevant in business. You talked a little bit about carpentry. You mentioned banking earlier, but especially with this connection with the school. How, for example, was gossip relevant for that kind of business?
- [33:25]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Okay, well, the school that you're referring to is called the Burwell School for Young Ladies. It was set up in the 1830s, and it lasted in Hillsborough for 20 years, from 1837 to 1857. It was run by, I mentioned before, Anna Burwell and her husband Robert. Robert was the Presbyterian minister. And so the person who was really in charge is Anna, because he had other things to do.
- [33:53]
And gossip played two different roles in Anna's life as a school mistress. First of all, she was a minister's wife. And there's a great deal of literature in the 19th century. And by literature, I mean novels written by ministers, wives about how they are always being observed.
- [34:15]
People in their congregations check them out. How well are their children behaving? What kind of clothes does she wear? Does she show up for prayer meetings? How much time does she spend tending to her congregation's needs.
- [34:31]
And that kind of thing. So Anna was very, very self conscious about the fact that she was being watched all the time for her behavior in the community. But she also had to be concerned about the gossip that surrounded her running at the school. And so there were a couple of really revealing comments in her diary and her letters to her daughter that talk about how she has to be worried about what the people in the community. And actually not just in Hillsborough, but they brought in students from all over the state. So Fayetteville, Wilmington, they would advertise in newspapers all over the state. And while some of those students at her school were from Hillsborough, a great many of them were not. They were from communities outside. And so she had to worry about what was said about by parents whose children went to that school instead of what did they say in their own community about whether anybody else should send their children to that school. So, for example, she writes in one letter that someone has been gossiping about the way she allows her students to dress. And in this case, they are saying that her students don't wear collars. Now, when you think about collars, think about white collars and think about how dirty they get, okay? So white collars need to be laundered. So if you're really cheap, you have them wear something other than white collars. And in this case, the gossip is that she doesn't allow them to wear collars because she's too cheap to pay for the laundry. Instead, she has them wear ribbons or around their neck. And she writes to her daughter, I don't know what to make of this. This is not true.
- [36:26]
And I don't know how to counter this. And then another example would be her reputation as a school mistress, if you had unhappy parent. So she, for example, has a student who is local in this case, and the student comes to her. And the standards of the school were really high, given the time. I mean, they had science, they had philosophy, they had English grammar, they had English literature. So the curriculum was really demanding. And apparently this child didn't really like to study. And so at one point, her parents pulled her out of the Burwell school and sent her to Raleigh. Well, that only lasted for a year. And then they wanted her to come back. But they didn't want her to be a year behind, which, of course, intellectually she was because she missed a whole year. And so they put her back in school and insisted that she resume her usual place in the classroom. And she couldn't. She couldn't do the study. And so her father got really, really upset and again pulled her out of school. And she writes to her. Anna Burwell writes to her daughter. You know, I. This is. This is troublesome because I don't want him basically badmouthing my school in town because I need these. You know, I need students to come and pay tuition. So he's very, very sensitive about. About what is being said about her and how it would reflect on her ability to continue to recruit students both in town and, you know, in other towns around the state.
- [38:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, there's a very direct line there between gossip that's running around and kind of can she keep the doors open? So thank you for helping us see that connection. Another topic that gossip seems to be very prevalent around we actually haven't mentioned yet. And I want to make sure we don't lose this thread in the book. And this is the topic of mental health and sort of physical and mental stability, which seems to be kind of maybe especially relevant when talking about wealthier white women. We can discuss that. Why was this something that kind of kept coming up, and was it related to these questions of, like, damaging someone's reputation or were there other things going on?
- [38:43]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Yeah, I don't think in this case. Let me give you some. Just some background. Basically, what I found was an unusual number of prominent women in Hillsborough suffered either from embolism or were charged with being insane. And this is a very small town, and when I find five or six people in the same time period, all of whom knew each other, that are suffering from this, I was just astounded by this. So I found that very interesting. And of course, the way gossip plays into this is that you have women who are sick in one way. Well, let me back up and give you some background here. One of the problems with diagnosing mental illness was that medical science did not have refined definitions of what exactly it was. And three, a number of things were going on in this. In this situation. Number one, these women are living in an unhealthy environment. Southeast, the south of the. In the United States at the time was just not a really very healthy place to be. Now, the Piedmont where they're living is healthier than the coast, for example, but it's still not A very healthy environment. Number two, doctors treated everything from a common cold to cancer with opium. So if a woman complained of ill health, she would have been given opium. And the more she complained, the more opium or its derivatives she would have been given. She became a drug addict. All right, so there's. There's that part of it, and then the other part of it is that medical science at the time assumed that. And these are all male doctors assumed that a woman's health, and her mental health in particular, was related to her childbearing function. So they assumed that. I mean, puberty was particularly fraught, child childbirth was particularly fraught, and menopause was particularly fraught. So no matter what age a woman was, once she got to puberty, that doctors assumed that her mind was being affected by her bodily functions. So what that meant was that they were prepared to accept a diagnosis of insanity and gossip. Role in that is that you start with a woman whose behavior is either either she's debilitated and she's suffering from ill health, she's taking drugs, so she's behaving strangely, or she is indeed insane. And where the discussion of that starts is in the family. And then friends notice that she's behaving strangely, so that then they start talking, and eventually they decide that something needs to be done. And so they go to the doctors, who, as I said, do not have a refined sense of what exactly mental illness was. And so gossip serves as a diagnostic tool, which is to say that the family describe the symptoms. And they say, you know, this. This would indicate that she's not in her right mind. And the doctor would go, yes, you're right. She's not in her right mind. What do we do about it? And two things were happening at just this time. Number one, mental asylums were being built in the United States as a place where you could send your relatives who you deem to be mentally ill. Now, this was a real change because before that, you just had to deal with them at home. There was no place. If you had money, you dealt with them at home. If you had no money, you sent them to the county, and the county put them in a kind of jail and kept them there. And the cost of this.
- [42:42]
Was borne by the taxpayers. So you have new places where you can send these people. You were optimistic about their ability to.
- [42:53]
Be cured, because doctors not only came up with hospitals, places where you could send them, but a theory about how you could treat them. And it was a very optimistic theory. And it said that if you just remove Them from the environment that made them crazy. You could cure them. So they have the optimism of both a cure and a place. The second that. The last thing is that there were doctors who were just beginning to specialize in women's problems.
- [43:26]
And so you could send them to places like Philadelphia, where there were doctors who could. Who specialized in trying to cure these women of whatever was wrong with them. They were not particularly successful. So between the doctors that were available in private practice and the asylums that were available as a way of treating a public, this was a new phenomenon that was taking place in. In the 1830s for 1850s. And so gossip serves as the basis for which women are sent to these doctors or sent to these asylums.
- [44:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm, that's really interesting. Again, right. Paying attention to what might sound like frivolous gossip about, like, oh, the lady at the end of the road is a bit strange, actually, kind of opens up this whole. Things are changing in American medicine more broadly.
- [44:17]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Right.
- [44:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Like what a connection there. So that was definitely something I was not particularly anticipating in finding out about when I started reading the book, which was fascinating then to uncover. Can I ask if there was anything that really surprised you in looking at all these sources, putting this all together, Whether it's a big thing or a tiny detail, Anything that kind of particularly jumped out at you?
- [44:39]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
I think this whole thing about insanity, which I didn't really know much about, and I think that that was, for me, that was the most interesting. And I had to do a lot more research to find out, you know, to try to fit gossip into this. And, I mean, it made perfect sense to me once, you know, I'd done all the research that, you know, gossip was the diagnostic tool that they used to convince doctors who would then go to the county and have a woman committed to the insane asylum. And I think the other thing is the degree to which ill health, just general ill health.
- [45:16]
And ill health combined with drugs, combined with insanity sort of was a reality that these families had to face. Now, what's interesting is that, of course, the documents that I had were all.
- [45:33]
A social elite of Hillsborough. I have no documents that document, you know, what happened to the enslaved people who were mentally ill or the free blacks or just the ordinary citizen of Hillsborough who, you know, would not have had access to doctors even necessarily because they couldn't afford to consult a doctor. So I found that the most interesting because I didn't know anything about it to begin with.
- [46:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, neither did I. So interesting to hear that that part was shared. So thank you for figuring it out and telling us about it. And I think that's probably a good place to conclude our discussion about the book, leaving me to just ask whether there's anything you're currently working on or looking to work on next that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of.
- [46:23]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
Well, the answer is no. There's nothing I am working on. What happens when I write a book is that I love. I love the research, I love the writing. I get it published and I'm tired.
- [46:37]
And so. And so once it's published, I sort of give myself some time to think about, you know, what else I might be interested in. I tend to have a relatively short attention span, so I don't like to write about the same things over and over and over again, which means I need a brilliant new idea about something that I don't know anything about. So I'm a guest that in about six months I will wake up at 2 o' clock in the morning and say, oh, I should write a book about whatever it is. So that's my answer.
- [47:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a great answer. I'm curious to see what will happen when you next wake up at two in the morning with an idea. But of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Wagging Tongs and Tittle Tattle Gossip, Rumor and Reputation in a Small Southern Town, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2025. Sylvia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [47:33]
Dr. Sylvia Hoffart
You are so welcome. It was absolute pleasure.