← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
701 Emerson's Struggle with Slavery (with Kenneth Sacks) | My Last Book with Victoria Namkung | We Had Sex Inside Moby-Dick!
01:11:31
Loading summary
Transcript92 lines
- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
- [00:09]
Alan Sisto
Abercrombie's Shorts and Swim Sale is live and they're giving Spotify listeners an extra 15% off with code SWIM AF. Abercrombie shorts and swim trunks come in so many fits and fabrics it's easy to find your go to pair prep for summer during Abercrombie's Shorts and Swim Sale excludes clearance. Online price reflects discount. Use code SWIMAF to get an additional 15% off almost everything at checkout from May 8, 2025 through May 12, 2025. Offer valid in US and Canada. Exclusions apply. See details online. The new McCrispy Strip is here. Dip approved by Ketchup Tangy Barbecue Honey Mustard honey mustard Sprite, McFlurry Big Mac sauce Double Dipped in Buffalo and Ranch More Ranch and creamy chili McCrispy strip dip now at McDonald's.
- [00:55]
Jack Wilson
Hello. He was America's first public intellectual, developing and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his early 30s. His essays and speeches made him a national figure. The most gifted of Americans, friedrich Nietzsche said. The author of America's intellectual Declaration of Independence, said Oliver Wendell Holmes senior My master, said Walt Whitman. Ralph Waldo Emerson was an ordained minister in the Unitarian Church and a champion of individuality and freedom and the possibility of human achievement. I have taught one doctrine, he said, the infinitude of the private man. Henry David Thoreau was a friend and protege. Thoreau, who famously went to prison for refusing to pay his taxes, I cannot for an instant recognize as my government one which is the slave's government. Also, he said. This was 1846. Slavery was wrong. They knew in Massachusetts something needed to be done, and yet it was entrenched, baked into American society, the same America that promised equality for all men, a promise made by men who wrote the words but couldn't bring themselves to live by them. Thoreau took a stand. It didn't have an immediate impact, but what did Emerson do? Emerson, who had known about slavery for decades. As a young teacher, he traveled down to South Carolina and Florida in search of warmer weather. For health reasons, he attended a meeting of the Bible Society, where a slave auction was being held in the yard outside. In one year, the Christian message, in the other, the brutality of humans being sold. That was 20 years before Thoreau spent his night in jail. Enough time, one might think, for Emerson to join the abolitionist movement wholeheartedly and without reservation, and to push for the freedom he was claiming for himself intellectually. And yet he was Tangled up in how all this fit together, or what exactly to do what was right, to impose, how to bring it about, how to be in engaged. We'll talk to a scholar today who has explored Emerson's long struggle with the issue of slavery and what it meant and what it means for an intellectual most at home in the world of ideas to take a stand and join a movement, become politically involved and being intellectually consistent or inconsistent. At the same time. We'll talk about what it meant for Emerson and what it might mean for others. All that and more today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. Episode 701. We're starting afresh with a new hundred, a new start. It's not too late to change, to view the world anew, to correct one's past. And, boy, do we have the right topic for that today. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Wouldn't you think that a man who was that intelligent would be against slavery in an uncomplicated way? It's an easy and obvious choice, it would seem, especially for someone living in the heart of abolitionist territory up there in Massachusetts. And he was against slavery. He knew it was wrong, but he struggled with knowing what to do about it, which rings oh so true to me even today. We can judge these things with hindsight, but in the moment, it can be harder to know what exactly to do. What do you do that makes something happen? How do you do it without provoking a backlash or wasting everyone's time, or which direction? What do you do? Do you join a rally? Do you hold up a sign, donate money to? But to who? Do you chain yourself to a fence? Today, we might think. Do you go online and argue with strangers or old friends? Is that counterproductive? You show up at meetings. Which ones do you go to? Do you. You demand change, but how? And how to get there? You break the law to save the law or improve the law? Or do you work through the democratic process to change the law? But what if it never changes? It can be incapacitating to have this much doubt and to not know exactly what to do. We'll hear exactly what stymied Emerson and how he overcame it eventually. But first, some items of business. Many thanks to those of you who have emailed me expressing your condolences after listening to episode 700, Butterflies at Rest. I do appreciate it. We've got some news here at the podcast. We're still on the six episodes a month schedule, a bit tapered back from our other eight to nine episodes two a week. We'll do two every other week and we'll do one in those weeks in between. We're going to do that until I get my head above water personally, professionally. And we have some very exciting news to announce soon. Speaking of professional and personal involving our Patreon account, my appreciation, deepest appreciation, and heartfelt appreciation to all of our Patreon supporters. And guess What? This is patreon.com literacy, by the way. And guess what? We'll have some more literal appreciation for you, hopefully in the fall. It is in the works. Some goodies are coming your way. Goodies you didn't even expect. We will explain it all soon. Now let's catch up on some news in the world of literature. This is from the Guardian newspaper, the online version, the headline, we're having sex inside Moby Dick. Okay, click clickbait for Jack Wilson. Mm. Sex inside Moby Dick. Where is this happening and how? And I would say why? Subtitle the Wild architectural world of Japan's Love Hotels. Okay, Japan starting to make a little more sense now. And it turns out that this isn't really about Moby Dick, but about love hotels. 37,000 of those things in Japan, places to inspire the libido. They are themed castles, alpine chalets, tiki huts, ships and so on. This is all part of a tradition that was started in the 17th century when buildings, I guess businesses called lovers tea houses opened up to offer couples a place to meet in private, away from disapproving eyes of family and society. And these buildings kept getting more creative and eye catching so that people would recognize what they were, kind of like billboards for themselves. They're kind of. They look like those restaurants you used to see in Hollywood. Do they still have those? The Brown derby that looks like a hat and all that stuff. By the 1970s and 80s, these love hotels in Japan had had become almost like a theme park, a one building theme park with dinosaurs and science fiction spaceships. They were cute and cartoonish, which for a place for lovers to meet illicitly. It kind of takes us deep into the Japanese psyche, doesn't it? What makes it appealing to be in kind of a cute and cartoonish place to make it seem less sinful. I suppose we don't need to go there because what we're wondering about on this podcast, the history of literature, is what Moby Dick is doing in the headline. And I would have to say I kind of fell for this clickbait a little bit. The story lets me down. I thought that might be A quote from a real person who was excited. Who was excited. But no, it seems to be the fantasy, so to speak, of the headline writer, because the story merely says this quote. Or might you live out your Moby Dick fantasy at the huge pink concrete whale of Hotel Festa Quigiella in Okayama, which waits ready to swallow you inside its grinning mouth? Or embrace the kinky King Kong spirit at the Lala resort in Kobe. It features a massive gorilla climbing up its bright red and orange striped facade and a model tiger keeping watch over the underground car park. Hmm. So that's what it was. It wasn't a quote of somebody saying, we're having sex inside Moby Dick. Which kind of made me think, who are these people? This is just a reporter saying, might you live out your Moby Dick fantasy? Nobody actually says they have one of those. And would it really be a huge pink concrete whale? Moby Dick was famously, famously, famously, famously a white whale. And as a whale, you don't go inside Moby. That whale is impenetrable. There's no having sex inside Moby Dick. Come on, people. I am glad that Melville's novel is so prominent in our collective minds, in the headline writer's mind and the author of the article's mind, that they basically say, well, if we're going to talk about a love hotel shaped like a whale, we can just assume that people might have Moby Dick fantasies, just like they think a big gorilla. That's King Kong spirit. It's not actually King Kong, but a big gorilla is King Kong, just like, apparently, a big pink concrete whale might as well be Moby Dick. Well, if you've read Moby Dick and you had amorous inclinations, you wouldn't be looking. You wouldn't be trying to live out a fantasy inside a whale. You'd be at the Spouter Inn, a crowded place that makes you share a bed with a harpooner covered with tattoos. Moving on, Melville. Speaking of Melville, he was strongly antislavery. His quote was, it puts out the sun at noon. He wrote about it most famously in Benito Sereno, the story of a Spanish slave ship where the slaves revolted. That novella was published in serial form in 1855 and 1856, around the time that Emerson was going through some of his own transitions. But that's getting a little bit ahead of our story. So let's have Kenneth Sacks here to tell us the full story after this foreign.
- [13:01]
Alan Sisto
I'm Alan Sisto, the man of.
- [13:03]
Jack Wilson
The west here at the Prancing Pony.
- [13:04]
Alan Sisto
Podcast and I'm Sean Marchese, the real life Lord of the Mark. Every week here at the Prancing Pony.
- [13:09]
Jack Wilson
Podcast, along with Sean or other co.
- [13:11]
Alan Sisto
Hosts, I explore the works of J.R.R.
- [13:13]
Jack Wilson
Tolkien, author of the Hobbit and the.
- [13:14]
Alan Sisto
Lord of the Rings, bringing along lots.
- [13:16]
Jack Wilson
Of pop culture references, plenty of nerd.
- [13:18]
Alan Sisto
Humor, and the occasional bad pun. It's just a couple of friends hanging out at the pub talking about our favorite books. We cover just a few pages every episode, reading important sections of the books.
- [13:27]
Jack Wilson
And having a chat about what we've read.
- [13:29]
Alan Sisto
Now we do a ton of research for each episode so that we can bring as much background information to our conversation as possible.
- [13:34]
Jack Wilson
We do all the heavy reading so.
- [13:35]
Alan Sisto
You don't have to. It's a great way for first time readers to learn the basics of Tolkien's world, while for Middle Earth veterans it's a deep dive into their favorite stories. The Tolkien fandom is like no other, so we spend time in the community giving talks at Tolkien events, recording live episodes, and hanging out with our listeners on Discord to engage with our audience every chance we get. So if you're ready to dive into the most beloved world in fantasy literature and become a part of a vibrant, active community of listeners, then look for the Prancing Pony podcast wherever you listen.
- [14:04]
Jack Wilson
Find Mom's Best Gift at Target now.
- [14:07]
Alan Sisto
Through Mother's Day, get up to 40% off gifts for her.
- [14:10]
Jack Wilson
Discover trendy apparel and swimwear that'll elevate any wardrobe, jewelry that'll make her smile.
- [14:16]
Alan Sisto
Shine brighter, and even chocolate that'll turn any moment into something sweeter. There are endless options to choose from.
- [14:22]
Jack Wilson
To show her she's the best.
- [14:24]
Victoria Namkung
Hurry.
- [14:25]
Alan Sisto
Save 20 to 40% on select apparel.
- [14:27]
Jack Wilson
Jewelry, chocolates and more this Mother's Day only at Target.
- [14:31]
Alan Sisto
Restrictions apply. This episode is brought to you by Chevy Silverado. When it's time for you to ditch the blacktop and head off road, do it in a truck that says no to nothing. The Chevy Silverado Trail Boss get the rugged capability of its Z71 suspension and 2 inch factory lift, plus impressive torque and towing capacity thanks to an available Duramax 3.0 liter turbo diesel engine. Where other trucks call it quits, you'll just be getting started. Visit chevy.com to learn more.
- [15:16]
Jack Wilson
Okay, Joining me now is Kenneth Sachs, who is a professor of history and classics at Brown University. He's the author or editor of seven books on classical history and American intellectual thought, and he's here today to discuss his new book, Emerson's Civil Wars Spirit and Society in the Age of Abolition. Ken Sachs, welcome to the history of literature.
- [15:38]
Alan Sisto
Thanks Jack. Thanks so much for having me.
- [15:41]
Jack Wilson
So the history of the United States is filled with these deep and fundamental problems, undeniable problems like racism and in this case slavery. And also with people, even well meaning people who struggle to figure out what course of action to take. And what I appreciated about your book is Emerson is just this great example of someone who's conscience was propelling him forward toward some kind of obligation, even as he was uncertain about what was necessary and what would be effective. But let's go back and start at the beginning. You write that Emerson wanted to live his life entirely devoted to philosophy and career. So at the start of his adult life, what did he view as his calling? And what kind of philosophy and career was he hoping to have?
- [16:29]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, that's a really good question. At the beginning of his career, I mean, he was struggling because he grew up poor. He grew up poor, but privileged in a way. Because he had access to higher education, he was virtually guaranteed a position at Harvard College, which in those days was really a finishing school for 14 or 15 year olds. In fact, one class actually burned down the library and was expelled. So they were dealing with adolescence. And Emerson avoided most of those shenanigans. But he grew up poor and probably was going to be eventually did become a minister. That was the family profession. Six or seven generations of Emersons had gone into the ministry and he went in at a time when New England was having kind of a religious crisis. Because Trinitarianism, which was represented by the traditional Congregational Church, was to some extent yielding to a new vision of Christianity, which was called in 1825, was labeled officially Unitarianism, which presented a real crisis for many traditional Christians in the sense that was Jesus divine? Was he separate from God? Was he similar to God? Was he different from God? These questions had been besetting Christians since the third century at least. But in the 19th century, with the age of rationalism, these ideas challenged the belief that you could have a separate divine force such as Jesus. And Emerson's father was one of the first of these proto Unitarian ministers. And Emerson himself became a Unitarian at Harvard, which pivoted very strongly in the 1820s and 30s towards Unitarianism, which was linked to commercialism too, because rational belief in rational religion was strongly tied to the commercial interests of the banking class in Boston. So Harvard was very much aligned with that banking class and with the belief that in a rational sense of religion. So Emerson was going to be a Unitarian minister. And he was. But then he shockingly resigned his pulpit because he felt that members of his congregation still wanted to have some sort of reflection of traditional Christianity, the celebration of the Last Supper, for example. And so he felt like you couldn't even offer that as a symbolic sacrament. It was just too close to kind of a pagan notion. So he resigned, and he set out to become what was really the first American public intellectual. He made money by speaking publicly, and it was a terrific challenge for him to do this. It was revolutionary, and he was very courageous to essentially break off from the church, which guaranteed him an income, and go around speaking on some sort of philosophy which was evolving in the 1830s and making it also a practical philosophy for the middle class to listen to. So this was his real aspiration, was to become a professional speaker and professional writer in a more secular way, but inspired and infused by religious sentiment.
- [19:45]
Jack Wilson
Would he go so far as to have believed in those years that slavery was a political question, that that was sort of mundane and earthly? And what he was pursuing was something that was more about the spirit or about the individual, you know, something within maybe one's role in the cosmos or with spirituality? And did he view slavery as kind of beneath the pursuits that he was exploring?
- [20:12]
Alan Sisto
Yes, exactly. So the earliest commentators in the Western tradition on slavery are the Stoics. I mean, Aristotle precedes them, but the Stoics really expanded the notion of what is slavery? What is chattel slavery? And to them and to Emerson, they thought that, well, that's physical bondage. And physical bondage is not nearly so important as mental freedom, spiritual freedom. So they came to this position, which today we would think of as just a terrible position to take, which is, you can be physically constrained, physically enslaved, but as long as your mind is free, you're a free person. And Emerson embraced that, as did many Stoics and other philosophical groups and religious groups at the time. That it's really, what's important is the salvation of the soul, the liberation of the spirit. There are many different ways to think about it. And so Emerson rationalizes in many people as merely a physical limitation, but not a limitation in the most important way, which is in one's soul or spirit.
- [21:18]
Jack Wilson
Right? And then, as you note, those plans of his, and that kind of what appears like, from our vantage point, to be a kind of blindness or a willful blindness or a turning away. But you've given some reasons why it might not have seemed that way to Emerson, at least at the time. But then you note that there was this Growing obligation to address a profoundly immoral crime whose time for resolution had finally arrived. And yet it seems like he had this realization came across or came along in stages, and maybe before he even spoke out publicly. What do his private journals look like in those years, as he was wrestling with this question?
- [22:01]
Alan Sisto
His private journals are at times inspiring and at other times despairing. Emerson created these journals when he was a college student. And quickly as he became a public speaker, these journals evolved into what he called his saving bank, which is to say that he wrote spontaneous thoughts and then would go back and call them and pick some out and use them in his talks and in his lectures. So they were both spontaneous and intimate on one hand. On the other hand, they were many of them designed for public use. So difficult. And they're massive. There's almost 2 million words. It's one of the great literary works. Harold Bloom, the great literary critic, called. It's called sort of the authentic Emerson, one of the great works in American literature. And it's remarkable. I think I've read them cover to cover, 14 volumes two or three times. And in those volumes in his journals, the intimate Reflections, but also ones designed for the public, he really wrestled with the idea of slavery. He certainly was opposed to slavery, but he felt that if he spoke out against it, he would be somehow compromising his sense of self reliance. The core of Emerson is the sense that one has to talk from one's soul. One has to discover what is most important in your inner genius. And everyone had an inner genius. It's not a Stanford Binet test. It's a sense of soul's individual makeup. And it was desire to understand who you are and what your alignment is to the cosmos, to the greatest soul in the world, in the universe, which was the ultimate good, this ineffable one that he believed in, that was the divine force that oversaw the entire universe. So that if he became an active abolitionist, he would be doing what other people wanted. He would align himself with political activism, and that compromised his own individuality, his own exploration for what is true to him.
- [24:09]
Jack Wilson
So it's about self reliance. It's about, I need to go my own way, I need to find my own path. If I take up the cause of slavery, I'll be joining an abolitionist movement that is already well established and formulated. And I'll end up saying things that are maybe almost like slogans or things that other people have already thought.
- [24:31]
Alan Sisto
That's true. There are many, many parts to abolition. It's an extremely complicated force because. And I'M talking now about white abolitionists, black abolitionists, clearly, who were very, very important. They clearly had a much more sort of self interested stake in this. White abolitionists were doing it for what they saw as a moral obligation, more so than obviously black abolitionists who were doing it for their own correct purposes, obviously. And the fact was that no two abolitionists could really agree on one course. This was an intractable problem. It was perceived as intractable growingly in the late 1840s and nearly 1850s. So abolitionists, white abolitionists, took many, many different stands on whether they could be politically active or whether the politics were so corrupt they couldn't even involve themselves in politics, what strategies they should use. And many of them frankly were racists and were willing to help to liberate the enslaved, but frankly didn't want free blacks unnecessarily among their own population. So what do there. So there's a lot of cross current and a lot of confusion among the abolitionists. It was a, it was a moving target. And Emerson was bewildered a great deal of the time by the various strategies that were proposed by these abolitionists.
- [25:57]
Jack Wilson
Right. And yet at some point he did change his mind and begin speaking out. He wrote about so much, but as far as I know, he didn't specifically write about that decision or kind of give us a roadmap to his thinking at the time. Do you think there are reasons why he did this that we can discern? And are there reasons why he didn't himself kind of leave us an essay where he said, this is why I decided it's time to talk about this?
- [26:28]
Alan Sisto
That's a good question. I think there are a couple of ways to look at it. One is, I'm not sure that in the end he believed he had made a sudden. I think that it was a gradual awakening on his part. A gradual expansion of his philosophy, a gradual expansion of his notion of self reliance, a gradual better understanding of race or what it is or what it is not. A gradual liberality of temperament about black people for whom he was despairingly prejudiced for a long time and never fully gave up, I believe on that prejudice. And I think that this was a gradual evolution towards activism that he had. And there was a crisis that triggered his full abolitionism in the 1856, which I discussed. But I'm not sure that he really fully understood that. That's one explanation. Another explanation is that Emerson himself, by the early 1870s was becoming cognitively impaired gradually over the course of the next decade of his life, until he died in 1882 and his work became less introspective, less original. And we don't know what it was, we don't know if it was Alzheimer's or a series of strokes or aphasia. But whatever it was, clearly Emerson by the early 1870s to the mid-1870s was less acute, less self reflective than he had been in the past. So had he lived longer, cognitively intact, he might have reflected back and given us a better sense of the, of why he made that decision if he could have acknowledged that it was in fact a decision.
- [28:08]
Jack Wilson
I was struck by something you said after he decided to start speaking out and you write, quote, short of a presidential endorsement of abolition, Emerson's might have been the greatest prize the anti slavery movement could claim. End quote. What was it about Emerson at that moment that made him such a prize?
- [28:27]
Alan Sisto
I'm not sure we really know. It's extraordinary what Emerson did. In the 1830s, he was pretty much an unknown. He had resigned from the ministry, became a public speaker in what is called the Lyceum Circuit. Lyceums were sort of self help opportunities for people to listen to speakers that oftentimes were self help advocates, but also gave them useful and sometimes non useful information. Some people spoke on tourism, et cetera. And Emerson was one of the first to climb into the Lyceum Circuit and made money that way and, and gradually evolved into this very powerful speaker through all kinds of rhetorical and oratorical tricks that he used to make himself very successful. And then in 1837 he really kind of exploded as this public speaker. He was invited to go to Harvard to give the Phi Beta Kappa address, which was one of the most important oratorical moments in America at the time. He was kind of accidentally chosen. The person who was chosen had to back out. And he was a friend again. Emerson had lots of social contacts. He had a friend who was on the committee who asked him to give the talk. And rather than giving the same kind of celebratory talk that most of the orators did celebrating Harvard, he did the opposite. He attacked Harvard and he attacked contemporary scholarship as uncreative and safe and philosophy is too safe and materialistic. And he reflected what was at that time known as Transcendentalism, which was much more of an idealistic, personal, revelatory type of philosophy. And this made a lot of waves. And then he followed up the following year when Harvard made a mistake of inviting him back again to the Divinity School to give a talk to the divinity graduating students. And there he essentially challenged the notion of Christology or the notion of a trinitarian God, and imposed his own sense of what I consider to be kind of a Neoplatonist version of. Of the divine. And those really made him semi famous. And then in the 1840s, he followed that up with going city to city, town to town, all the way through, all the way as far as California at times to give these talks on his philosophy and his ethics and his morality. And people started coming in waves and waves. And he was invited to England to give a series of talks in 1847 and 1848, his famous trip to England. And people lined up overnight night standing in line, sort of like Rolling Stone tickets. And the British dubbed it Emerson Mania, which was. He was only the second or third person, depending Jenny Lin was tied with him in the same year getting mania. This was. Lord Byron was the first to have mania, actually. Franz Liszt also had it then, too. So these were the four people that were called. Whose popularity was called mania, like today, you know, Beatlemanians and, you know, things like that. Emerson became world famous at that point. And so he was easily the most important private citizen in America in terms of shaping public opinions or reflecting public opinions. And so I think that's why he was the prize catch for abolitionists. Could they get him to speak on abolition in a consistent, coherent, heartfelt way? And if they could not, what did that say about his beliefs? And what did it do in terms of encouraging other people not to be committed to abolition if he was going to speak for abolition? That was kind of a crisis for the most radical abolitionists. How to get Emerson to commit so that it would look like he cared a lot. Because if he didn't care a lot, that would say a lot on the other side about that it was okay not to feel as strongly about abolition as the radical abolitionists did.
- [32:15]
Jack Wilson
Is there a distinction that's meaningful here between being anti slavery and being an abolitionist is the issue. It's. I'm guessing that it wouldn't have surprised people to hear that Emerson disapproved of the institution of slavery. But was the prize here that Emerson would be active in saying, and therefore we must abolish it and kind of staking out that territory?
- [32:40]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, that's exactly right. Emerson was a gradualist because he didn't understand anything else. I mean, he didn't understand how any kind of immediate resolution could possibly occur short of a civil war, which eventually he very enthusiastically embraced and probably helped bring on in some small way. But many Northerners either profited from slavery through cotton and other products, or just were fearful of any kind of immediate resolution, which almost certainly had to involve armed conflict. So Emerson embraced gradualism, which was also very consistent with his philosophies of progress and social progress, again going back toward the sort of Stoics. So the Stoics believed, and Emerson had a certain Stoic strain to him. Stoics believed again that the soul, the spirit, was the most important thing. But the Stoics also believe that if events in one's life become difficult and deflect you from your spiritual journey, that it's better to turn to them, solve those problems, and then return to your spiritual journey. In other words, get rid of the noise. Take out the noise in your life by addressing it. And Emerson occasionally did that, occasionally came out of his shell and identified things that he felt he could quickly address and then went back in. And gradualism kind of conforms to that notion of doing things in small increments, to not solve problems, but to make problems less intrusive into one's spiritual journey. So both for economic reasons, for reasons of fear and conflict, and because it was consistent with, with his broader philosophy of kind of a Stoic Neoplatonism. And Neoplatonism envelops large elements of Stoicism, that this was what he initially wanted to see happen, this kind of gradual evolution in the south, where the Southerners themselves would become enlightened, where Southerners would gradually realize that it was immoral to hold other people in captivity. And this was his belief. Today we would think of it as benighted, but it was safe. It was an easy, comforting feeling for him.
- [34:44]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Ken Sachs.
- [35:00]
Alan Sisto
Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days?
- [35:06]
Jack Wilson
Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted?
- [35:08]
Alan Sisto
If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back.
- [35:21]
Jack Wilson
Welcome to the now it pays to Discover.
- [35:24]
Alan Sisto
Learn more@discover.com credit card Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, this episode is.
- [35:33]
Jack Wilson
Brought to you by Disney's Lilo & Stitch, only in theaters this Memorial Day. A reimagining of Disney's animated classic Lilo and Stitch is the wildly funny and.
- [35:44]
Alan Sisto
Touching story of a lonely Hawaiian girl.
- [35:47]
Jack Wilson
Lilo, and the fugitive alien Stitch, who.
- [35:50]
Alan Sisto
Helps to mend her broken family.
- [35:52]
Jack Wilson
Lilo and Stitch crashes into theaters May 23rd rated PG. Get tickets now Foreign. So, Ken, we have this figure, Emerson, who's determined to pursue his own path and to think things through for himself. And then he joins this, or he allies himself with this cause that he starts speaking out on. And they're abolitionists that at one point he had called them odious. He's. It's not a group he's necessarily eager to adopt wholesale. But what did he do then? Did he find his own way? Was he viewed as someone who was advancing the thought behind the abolitionist movement in an unusual or interesting way? Were there camps and he was on one side or the other or where did he fit into the abolitionist movement?
- [36:55]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, well, he tried not to fit at all. I mean, I think he feared being labeled any sort of abolitionist and he feared being too closely aligned to any one particular group. Most of his friends in Concord and relatives in Concord sort of followed Garrison and therefore were labeled radicals. And he saw them as people who were so devoted to abolition that they sacrificed their individuality. And what I mean by that really is he sacrificed their soul. They compromised their soul's connection to the one, their soul's sense of being a part of the broader cosmos, that they were trying to solve a practical problem on earth rather than being concentrating on something that was more divine, more sacred. And he's very clear that he feels that he's the only person in America who is trying to safeguard people's souls, that he goes out and speaks and tries to teach people how they should be self reliant. And self reliant, again, is a spiritual journey. It's not sort of a Wall Street Journal definition of making money, although many people thought that's what Emerson was saying. And he was popular to some extent because of that misunderstanding. But this sense of a personal spiritual journey was what he was trying to promote. So how do you do that and align with the various different people? There was no one group of people that he wanted to align with. He wanted to create for himself a separate act, a separate statement about himself. At one point I say something like, Emerson didn't fit himself into abolition. He fit abolition into himself, which is to say he became an abolitionist. But he stood apart from the abolitionists. He was careful to parse his words. He was careful to state how he was a believer in the immediate abolition of slavery. But at the same time, he tried to avoid some of the rhetoric of the abolitionists. And he was very careful in most times not to associate socially with the abolitionists. At times he did. But most of the time he tried to stand apart from them, both in terms of his rhetoric and philosophy and in terms of his social connections.
- [39:05]
Jack Wilson
It's really a dilemma, right? Because on the one hand, you could see it as, well, changing hearts and minds is the only way that this is really going to work. And you could see value in explaining to the Southerners or persuading them of the impact that this was having on the nation's morality and that this was wrong. And on the other hand, you could hear objections to that of people who would say, well, we could wait forever for that to happen. We need to make boots on the ground, real changes here. We need to have something practical in place to end the institution. And I guess the answer it could be, well, of course, why not do both? But at times there are choices you have to make where you're doing only one or the other. And you could see where there would be criticism kind of in both directions, saying, well, you're doing it wrong and the way you're doing is going to backfire on the one hand. And on the other hand, well, no, you're doing it wrong and the way you're doing it will mean we'll never have change.
- [40:10]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, that was the situation that everyone in America faced, not just in the, the south. The north was obviously very, very complicit in the preservation of slavery. And even people who spoke piously about doing away with slavery were economically participating in its stability. So it was all around, it just infused all of American economics and society. And it was a moving target in terms of the abolitionists, what they were going to believe and what they were going to do. So when Emerson embraced gradualism, he was being optimistic, overly optimistic. Clearly, there was no easy solution to any of this.
- [40:54]
Jack Wilson
Would Emerson, I mean, when you say that he was embracing the gradualism of it, I mean, some people would say, we have to end slavery by any means necessary. It sounds like for him it would be, well, if you go about this the wrong way, it could end up being something that's, that's, that's harmful. Or, or we could, it could have costs that would outweigh the benefits.
- [41:19]
Alan Sisto
For Emerson, the biggest cost wasn't the slaughter that followed of almost half a million individuals, for him, the biggest. And that might have been the biggest cost retrospectively for Emerson, but when he was approaching the problem, the biggest cost was the compromise of one's soul, compromise spiritual spirituality, compromise of one's self reliance. That was for him the greatest loss any human being could suffer. Right.
- [41:44]
Jack Wilson
Which is interesting because we would probably say that the cost to one's soul is the biggest reason for abolition.
- [41:52]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that Orlando Patterson for example, makes great point, of course, that enslavement and racism is essentially the death of one's soul. It's the killing of a soul. So this was very, very much against the stoic notion that the soul can be preserved even if the body is enslaved.
- [42:10]
Jack Wilson
One of the things I learned from your book, which I found really fascinating, is how Emerson's anti slavery work has been viewed over time. And I hope I'm stating this correctly, but I think what you were saying is that his resistance to embracing an anti slavery position, it was viewed by philosophers as being, well, this demonstrates his intellectual integrity, that this didn't fit into his, the intellectual program that he had. And it shows that he was willing to be consistent even if he was staking out what seemed like an unpopular or not a position of the day. And by historians and political scientists and literary critics would see it as, no, this isn't his intellectual integrity and consistency. This is a moral blind spot. And it was produced by this radical self reliance and it made him, his philosophy, made him miss a really important issue of his day. And yet you say that now the positions have largely reversed among these two different groups and the way that they view Emerson. So what exactly happened? How do things stand now? And maybe you could just unpack that for us a little bit about how these different, depending on what you're looking at Emerson for, you might see Emerson's position on slavery in a different light.
- [43:31]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, this is actually a really interesting problem in history, how interpretations change over time. So what happened was that Emerson, in the late 19th century, the historiography on Emerson, just before he died and after he died, there was a whole spate of books written on Emerson by contemporaries, many of whom knew him well. And overall it's a bit reductive. But overall those books reflected an Emerson who was conservative and somewhat resistant to the notion of abolition. So that became the tradition coming out of the late 19th century. And as you say, philosophers looked at that and said, what do we think about this? Well, we think that Emerson was self reliant, again, not the Wall Street Journal way, but in a way of following his own soul, following his own spirit, exploring things on his own. And this is good, this is the hallmark of American democracy. Every individual should come to their own decision. So this is really the philosophy of America. And so philosophers embrace this. Whereas of course people who were academics, who were more interested in Change over time, as it were. That's how historians define history. Change over time. Solz, as you said, is a moral blind spot. At the time of the direst moment in American history, this philosopher, self reliance, couldn't understand that this was a crime that transcended one's privilege of looking into one's soul. And that's the way it pretty much stood. And stood this way largely because Emerson did not publish his anti slavery speeches, except for the first one in 1844, which actually was a celebration of British emancipation of the West Indies. And he published it because it would sell in England, which it did. After that, he always said he was going to publish his anti slavery speeches, but he never did. So the actual materials that people were reading on Emerson reinforced this lack of abolition. This was a lacuna. This was an absence of slavery speeches that people really paid any attention to. Now they were there, they were available if people wanted to look hard, but. But no one really did. And then finally, in the 1990s, a scholar named Len Gujian started looking more closely at these documents and they became more published and realized that Emerson had in fact actually spoken out against slavery several times. And Len wrote a great book. I don't agree with many of its conclusions, but it was a really important book. Arguing that Emerson was an early abolitionist based on these speeches. Well, well, everyone applauded. Think Emerson had finally understood that a crime that's so huge, so monumental, has to trump your one's indulgence in a spiritual journey. Whereas philosophers said, oh no, that self reliance is the hallmark of American democracy. Is Emerson somehow compromising that? So that kind of flipped. And what I tried to do in my book was say no. I think that there's a middle ground here, that Emerson, Emerson did struggle and he did hold on to his philosophy of self reliance a lot longer than current historians and others believe, and that he changed. And the good news about Emerson, it wasn't, you know, self reliance or non self reliance. It was self reliance and then an evolution of self reliance. His notion of self reliance, his notion of philosophy, his notion of race, all evolved in the 1850s. And we could map that and we can appreciate how an intellectual comes to grow, as all intellectuals do or should, and that that growth was actually for the common good. And in my mind, that actually celebrates the notion of freedom, individual choice and democracy.
- [47:08]
Jack Wilson
This may be a question that's a little broad and difficult to answer, but would you say that movement that he was undergoing is kind of in step with a movement that the broader public was undergoing at the same time.
- [47:24]
Alan Sisto
That's a really interesting question. I think there was a growing sense, I think it was the Kansas Nebraska act of 1854 which suddenly awakened many northerners to the sense that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 in terms of what territories or states would be free and which ones would support slavery. 1854 Kansas Nebraska Act I think awakened and many, what we call cotton wigs, wigs who were liberal but essentially enjoyed the profits of the cotton trade, made many of them into what we call conscience Whigs, Whigs who understood that their conscience had to triumph over their material concerns. And I think that was really a benchmark in the growth of abolition. And so it was really to some extent a political awakening on their part. And Emerson was affected by it as well. But Emerson really even in 1854 fully embrace abolition. It was really two years later in 1856 when his very close friend Charles Sumner was caned in the Senate chambers. In the Senate almost died. It was the violence that came from abolitionism that was violence of what I call white on white violence rather than white on black violence. Emerson unfortunately seems to have been accepting or closing his eyes to white on black violence which was deep and profound and enduring and instead focused on the, the violence against his friends and acquaintances, white friends and acquaintances, because that was near to him, that was familiar to him, that was shocking because he could actually see and feel it and suffer with them in their consequences. So that I think was a turning point and the Kansas Nebraska act was certainly a background to it. But it was the subsequent violence that the Kansas Nebraska act triggered that I think brought Emerson along while others had already started, I think making a move by 1854.
- [49:17]
Jack Wilson
More significantly, when you go through this and see his struggles and see his history, I mean we do have the benefit of hindsight, but even given that, let's accept that, that we have a better moral position and moral stance and we're viewing him through that lens. Do you find his struggles to be inspiring and the way he's thinking about this is, is something that maybe gives us something we could aspire to or do you find yourself looking at it as these are pitfalls we should avoid? Here's an example of somebody who couldn't quite get over the hurdles that he needed to get over maybe as quickly as we might have liked him to have gotten over those hurdles. That's a long sentence, but yeah, no.
- [50:05]
Alan Sisto
That'S a fair question. I think that if Emerson had become an abolitionist say 10 years earlier, full throated abolitionist, 10 years earlier, say in 1844, when abolition really starts to be united among the intellectuals in the Northeast, I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference. It would have been comfort to other abolitionists, but I don't think it would have changed the hearts and minds of the cotton wigs. It wouldn't have changed the hearts and minds of the owners of the enslaved in the South. So it wouldn't have made much of a difference. So I have a easy way out of that question. In a sense that Emerson's journey was a noble one, in the sense that we can examine it because of his extraordinary number of his writings, both confidential writings and public writings. We can examine it and we can trace it and we can see how he came to what Al Gore reminds us about the environmental crisis, An Inconvenient Truth. We can see how Emerson eventually awakens to that. But he awakens to it in a way that he wakes to it because he feels it. He actually comes to understand in his heart and mind different thoughts about slavery, different thoughts about himself, different thoughts about community. He becomes much more community oriented by the 1850s. And he talks about that, that it's important to not just love other people, but to act in accordance with other people in an affinity way. Stoics had a term called oikosis, which comes from the word oikos, which means family. And we get the word economy from it. How do you order your life? How do you order the life of your house? How do you order people around you? Oikiosis means a familiarity or affinity. And how do you expand morally your connection to other people gradually over time. And Emerson embraced that sense of expanding gradually over time. A familiarity, a commitment, an association with other people. And this happens really in the 1850s. Earlier than that, he was on the single minded sense of his own personal spiritual journey. But by the 1850s, as he gets older, he's wearier about life. He lost his firstborn son, which was a catastrophe for him. He started to learn a lot about grief. And how do you gradually expand your feelings towards other people and expand the scope of those feelings so it's not just your family or your neighborhood or your town, but even to people that you don't know. How do you start to feel empathy for those who you'll never be in touch with? And that was the journey that Emerson was on. And by reading about Emerson, as I hope I try to make clear in my book, we can appreciate this journey that we all go through in our lives as we suffer body blows in life, as we become wiser in life, we understand that we're not singular in this universe. And that other people that we don't even have any contact with and never will have contact with, that they matter to us. And that's his journey.
- [52:58]
Jack Wilson
Did he recognize that his personal racism was antithetical to that movement towards empathy and wanting to feel an affinity with other people? Did his views on race evolve as he was going through this? Or was that a blind spot he never got over?
- [53:14]
Alan Sisto
Well, he sort of got over it. I think that there's really kind of. This is a very difficult question. I don't think I resolved it fully, and I don't think anyone will ever resolve it fully. Emerson, Emerson, in his journals, which were the more important subject because there he could write sort of confidentially. As I said, there's kind of two voices of Emerson in his journals. One is the one that's confidential to himself. The other is the voice of someone who is writing things to himself that he knows he wants to use in talks and in publications. But there. There's really kind of two ways again. Two ways, many ways. He's struggling with his views towards black America. Some of his statements are. Are horrifically racist. And others of them are almost heroic in terms of his own conscience. And gradually, the better Emerson emerges over time and he completely denounces the sense of. I would say he pretty much denounces the sense of racism that Robert Knox had proposed in 1850, the sense of Anglo Saxon superiority, and opens himself up gradually and inevitably to understanding. In fact, many times he says that race doesn't matter. He doesn't even know what race means anymore. But at the same time, other times in his journals he will say things which today we would certainly consider racist. So racism is never completely absent from Emerson's thoughts. But more and more he speaks out against racism. More and more he takes bold statements, makes bold statements about races joining together if they, in fact, they do exist as a category. So he never fully, to answer your question directly, he never fully comes to a conscious sense that I have to get away from racism if I want to be an abolitionist. But all these things work in lockstep. Racism subsides, I think, diminishes almost to the point of non existence, but never to that point. At the same time as he's an avid abolitionist and at the same time that his sense of self reliance embraces community, and at the same time that his Neoplatonism, which had been singular and not geared towards political activism, starts to become rationalized towards involving political activism. So all of his major challenges towards abolitionism change. Not just. They're not lost, they change over time. They all come together. By the mid-1850s.
- [55:39]
Jack Wilson
I have a question that I had in mind for you. And I realized what I was probably going to get as an answer would be all of the above. And so I'm going to change the question a little bit and I'm going to ask about your title, Emerson's Civil wars, and I'm going to ask you to rank the potential civil wars in terms of importance to your book. And basically I'm wondering, because the way I read the title is that it could refer to Emerson's struggles with abolitionists and with pro slavery advocates and with sides of himself. So of those three, which would you say is kind of the most central to what your goal is in Emerson's Civil Wars?
- [56:25]
Alan Sisto
Well, I use abolition as the entry point to this. That's a really good question. I use abolition as the entry point. But Emerson always worked in dichotomies. His whole notion was to pose to himself the opposite, often of what he had just said the moment before and try to resolve it in some way, see how he could move. And abolition becomes one of those very important contradictions in his mind. Being anti slavery but not being an abolitionist was inherently a contradiction to Emerson. But abolition is an external thing. For him, it is still changing the world. And for him, exploring one's soul through posing these dichotomies, these contradictions, was the default for Emerson in every way. So perhaps the most difficult passage in all Emersonian literature, which is vast, was his essay experience, published in 1844, which shocks many literary critics, in which he talks about the death of his firstborn son, Waldo, a few years earlier, in which he says in that essay that his son died. Well now to him it's just a specter. It's just something that's out there. It's no different from him than losing money in the stock market. He didn't use the word stock market, but the equivalent of investment. And people are shocked by that. But that wasn't. And when you read his letters and you read his diary, he was in deep, deep, deep despair over the loss of his son. It grieved him so much that many scholars believe that it changed Emerson forever. That you can read pre death of his son and post death of his son as two separate Emersons or different Emersons. And yet in this inexperience, he puts this shocking thing out there because he wants to shock himself so the point of exploration of self reliance is to always contest and to struggle and to look for truths in, in unexpected places by posing these dichotomies and shedding light on them. And abolition is one of those instruments. I don't think Emerson intentionally wanted to embrace abolitionism that way. It was forced on him because abolitionism again is an external thing. He wants to look for internal things, internal moral issues. To him, abolition only becomes a moral issue later in the 1850s. Before that it was important to him, but it wasn't so much moral because he, he rationalized this sense of gradualism as a way of, as a placeholder for abolitionism. So he could kind of put that to aside. He was focusing more on these internal issues that he had, not the external issues like society and progress and reform, things like that.
- [59:09]
Jack Wilson
Well, as someone who is a fan of literature and has thought through the reasons why literature appeals to me, I do feel like I'm at my best when I'm being challenged or when I'm challenging myself and when the ideas are not simple and easy and maybe kind of prefabricated for me, but when I'm wrestling with something. And so it does seem like in that sense at least, Emerson is kind of a guiding light for how to approach a problem like this and not just satisfy oneself with kind of conventional wisdom or what might end up being a comforting position to take, but to find the areas where even that comforting position has some prickliness to it or some things that don't quite sit right or don't quite fit.
- [60:05]
Alan Sisto
Yes, but the irony of course is you can't really learn from Emerson. If we do that, then Emerson's failed. We have to learn for ourselves.
- [60:13]
Jack Wilson
Right? Right.
- [60:14]
Alan Sisto
We can take the invasion of the model of understanding how a free mind works and taking some comfort that in Emerson's case, a free mind, a free and unencumbered mind. Not completely. So nobody is completely free of that. He was certainly influenced by people, even if he denied it. But how it came to a position on this particular issue of abolitionism that most of us could applaud, but it took a long time for him to get. We can take some solace from that, but we all have our own journeys, as this was Emerson's journey and each of us approaches it differently. And that's what Emerson would certainly say.
- [60:48]
Jack Wilson
Okay, well, the book is called Emerson's Civil Spirit and Society in the Age of Abolition. Ken Sachs, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [60:57]
Alan Sisto
My pleasure. Jack, thanks so much for having Me.
- [61:04]
Jack Wilson
Foreign. Finally, today, we talked to Victoria Namkung, who is here to tell us all about Sui Sin Far, the chronicler of life in early Asian American communities on the east and west coasts. After our talk, I asked Victoria a special question. Okay. We're joined now by novelist Victoria Nam Kong, an expert in the life and works of the pioneering writer Sui Sin Farr. Victoria, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [61:55]
Victoria Namkung
So asking an author about her favorite book is a huge question. But the book that I always say I would read forever if I could is Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. It's a Dickensian novel that was published in 2017. It's also the basis for a Apple TV series that's airing now. And Pachinko takes place during the Japanese occupation of Korea and World War II, and it follows a Korean family who immigrated to Japan. And so it's this sweeping, epic historical fiction novel that's just populated with characters who just will stay with you forever. I've recommended it to so many different people, and they've all been non Koreans, and they've just adored it the same way I have. My Korean dad actually grew up in Tokyo, and he attended American schools there. And he grew up playing this game of pachinko, which is a mechanical arcade game. It looks a little like pinball, so that's what initially drew me in. But the main character, Soonja, who we follow from her girlhood in Korea all the way to being a grandmother in Tokyo, she just reminds me so much of my own Korean grandmother's story. And this book is just one that I hope is the last book I read.
- [63:19]
Jack Wilson
You know, it's so interesting to me that it's from 2017, because so many of our guests, it just occurred to me as you were talking, have chosen books that have been classic. You know, it's George Eliot and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, and all of those would be handed down to them as classics, that they would have been a classic for their entire lives. Like the day you're born, that book is already there, and it's waiting for you to find it. But you probably already hear about it and know about it, and everyone around you is maybe kind of aware of it. But this is something. I mean, you were already pretty far along in being a novelist yourself when this book came out. I think I have that right. The timeline. But did you get the feeling of this is the book I've been waiting for or did you feel like. I didn't know a book like this was possible. What was your reaction when you started to read it?
- [64:18]
Victoria Namkung
Yes, I mean, this book, it's not only the book I was waiting for, it was the book I had no idea I was waiting for. When you grow up in a family like mine, you get very used to not seeing yourself represented in the media. And as I mentioned, we spoke about the author Suis and Farr. I related so much to her because she was a biracial Eurasian woman and that's what I was. And even though we lived in totally different eras and lived different lives, I just appreciated that so much. So with Pachinko, even though it's a universally beloved book and you certainly don't have to be Korean or Japanese to enjoy it, this book in a lot of ways tells part of my own father's story and his own life. And my dad, as I was growing up, he would often tell us stories about how they had to hide being Korean in Japan due to discrimination, or that boys would be waiting for him after school to beat him up just because he was Korean. When you grow up going to elementary school and junior in high school in the US you're not taught about the Japanese occupation of Korea. I didn't. I was so ignorant to so many of those historical times. And so as I was getting older, of course I could study this myself. But we all know sometimes the best history you learn is through a sweeping epic that just pulls you out of your life and sort of consumes you. And that's what pachinko is. To me, Min Jin Lee is just an American treasure. You know, she's a Harlem based author and she has written two books about the Korean community. And she has a third book coming out soon, so I can't wait to read that as well. But Pachinko is just so beautifully rendered. It says so much about family and discrimination and power and it will just sweep you away.
- [66:14]
Jack Wilson
Now, do you recommend that people who have Apple plus watch the series or would that spoil the book? Should they read the book first? Or what is your. How should they come at Pachinko?
- [66:28]
Victoria Namkung
Yeah, I mean, obviously if someone can only have time to do one or the other, the TV show is equally beautiful and is just exquisitely acted and shot. But there's nothing like the book. And I think we all know that sometimes when you've read the book and watched the film, the film cannot capture everything that's going on in the novel. And so I definitely would read the novel first and then watch the series because it's really fun to see, you know, some of the changes that are made or some of the parts that are left out or possibly added in, but both, both are done incredibly well.
- [67:09]
Jack Wilson
Okay, that's Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Victoria Nam Kung. Thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [67:18]
Victoria Namkung
Thank you so much for having me.
- [67:24]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. That's going to do it. My thanks to Kenneth Sachs and to Victoria Namco for joining me today. On Thursday, we're going to talk to Australia's queen of the Regency romance. Yes, yes, it's Springtime, which is a good time for a look at how a contemporary author sets her work, works in the world of Jane Austen and how she got started doing that. We'll be talking to an expert in literary atrocities soon, someone who really dove into that topic and found some surprising things. And Mike will be here for the weirdest F. Scott Fitzgerald story ever, or one of them. And who else? D.H. lawrence is on our radar. And an anthology of black humor, Virginia Woolf, Icelandic Folk Tales, Einstein Meeting Kafka, Johannes Gutenberg. All kinds of fascinating topics to cover in this next hundred episodes. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. I'm Shirley Leung, columnist at the Boston Globe and host of say More where we go beyond the headlines with bold, intimate conversations about the biggest issues shaping our world. In a new special series, we're going to confront the C word. That's right, cancer. It's a disease that touches us all, but it's hard to talk about. In a new five part series, I open up for the first time about my own battle with breast cancer and explore the science, history and deeply personal stories behind this disease. There is life beyond cancer. Join me for the C Word stories of cancer. Follow say More from the Boston Globe. Wherever you get your podcasts, you've likely.
- [69:40]
Alan Sisto
Heard about touching grass to reconnect with nature.
- [69:43]
Jack Wilson
But have you heard about hunting for.
- [69:44]
Alan Sisto
Fossils in conflict zones or saving an endangered species of butterfly while incarcerated? These are just some of the amazing stories we're sharing on Going Wild, the.
- [69:54]
Jack Wilson
Chart topping and award winning podcast produced.
- [69:57]
Alan Sisto
By Nature on PBS, hosted by me, wildlife ecologist Dr. Ray Win Grant. In the brand new season of Going Wild, we're talking to some of the most interesting champions of nature ranging from TikTok's black forager, Alexis Nicole Nelson and.
- [70:12]
Jack Wilson
Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist Ed Yong to Nat Geo Explorer Stand up comic.
- [70:18]
Alan Sisto
Ella Al Shamahi to explore what led them to create change within themselves, their community and and the natural world. Get inspired all while exploring our place in the wild. Listen to going wild with Dr. Raewyn.
- [70:33]
Jack Wilson
Grant wherever you get your podcasts.