In this episode of Summer Reading with UEN LitFlix, Matt and Jenn are joined by Cassie Clark, a Public historian for the Utah Divison of History, sharing her expert knowledge on the importance of understanding how history is recorded and shared. Listen and see why learning about history helps us better comprehend our interactions with each other and the world around us.
In this episode of Summer Reading with UEN LitFlix, Matt and Jenn are joined by Cassie Clark, a Public historian for the Utah Divison of History, sharing her expert knowledge on the importance of understanding how history is recorded and shared. Listen and see why learning about history helps us better comprehend our interactions with each other and the world around us.
Podcast about Utah's History: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/speak-your-piece-a-podcast-about-utahs-history/id1499564731
Utah History: https://history.utah.gov/
Explore classic films and related booklists with UEN LitFlix: https://www.uen.org/litflix/
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Jen, I'm very excited about our guest today. It's rare that I get a chance to sit down and talk to a legit historian who has a huge background in Utah history, but also worldwide history. And one that really reinforces the importance of different styles of narrative and the importance of individual narrative not dominating the whole historical narrative.
Oh, me too. I'm so excited about this conversation, Matt. I love history. I, for a hot minute, thought about majoring in it but went into writing. I'm glad, but I see so many parallels between the work that writers, editors, and literary scholars do and what historians do. But there are some very important key differences. So I'm really looking forward to exploring that with a legit historian. That's super cool.
Absolutely. And narrative is one of those things that, depending on who you're talking to, depending on what sources you're looking at, depending on tons of factors that our guests today talk about, can change that narrative and how we view that narrative.
Yeah. And the term itself, narrative, is a really funny one. So when I teach creative writing classes, for instance, it comes up as often it's a term that we all think we understand, and yet when we really talk about it there are some real differences in how we understand it.
So I like to start with the basic definition of a narrative as being a story, a.k.a. The telling of a series of causally related events. So they line up like dominoes. And then the word event is also a really fun one to plug into. It's deceptively simple. We're like, OK, we know what an event is.
But when you take it in the context of literature and film-- keep in mind, that we're depicting something. So an event in a bit of writing or in a film can include not just what the characters are experiencing in their shared character world-- let's call it a reality with quotation marks around it or something-- But events can also be subjective experiences, like memories. Or we can get really fancy and we can look at how some writers and filmmakers treat specific language, sound, and image choices and treat those as events, as links in the chain of events in the artistic production.
So the prime experiencer of those kinds of events may not be a character, but actually the viewer. Or in literary theory, some people call it the narratee. So look that up if you're intrigued. I won't go into that.
Obviously, I love this subject, but to wrap it up around to leading us into our conversation with our historian today, interpretation is a key part of forming any narrative. So, again, I'm just super excited to talk to Cassie and hear more about how a historian thinks about these relationships between narrative and how history gets made.
That leads us right to our guest. So our guest today is Cassie Clark, she is a public historian for the Utah Division of History. And she is dynamite. I'm super excited to jump in with her. So let's get into that interview right now.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So, Cassie, we're just excited to talk to you today. Thank you for joining us.
Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited as well. Honestly, I love literature. I love writing. I love history. And I love film too. All for different reasons to be-- so yes.
That phrase, those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, it's fairly common. But why is it important that we understand history in general? And why is it important to understand how history is recorded and shared?
That's a great question. And I agree, that phrase is used so much these days of, those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. And it's kind of a contested phrase now. I've heard some people say, oh, history never repeats itself. For example, we've never had another Holocaust, or we've never had another Civil War. And that's when we take the phrase too literally.
Nothing is-- it's not on repeat. We're not playing a song or watching a movie where the events play out once over and over again. But when we study history and when we study the past, we're actually looking at ideas. We're looking at the way that ideas shaped people or people used ideas to shape their actions and to shape the way that they interacted with one another.
And those ideas even in-- Civil War is a really good example. Because if we look at the Civil War, the Civil War ends, and slavery is officially and legally abolished. But the ideas that enabled slavery, that created this institution of slavery, remained, that African-Americans were inferior to Euro-Americans. That type of ideology shaped things like policing, shaped things like Jim Crow laws, and segregation, and shaped things like lynching. And so just because the institution of slavery legally ends does not mean that the way that people thought about African-Americans changed the way that they-- or helped to shape new systems.
So when we study the past what we're really doing is we're looking at history so that we can look at the roots of something. And this is a really good visual to be able to understand it. A lot of times people when they go to tackle a historical understanding or even something important in our own lives, we're going to therapy, or we're having some type of crisis, or we just really want to understand why we do things the way that we do them, sometimes we'll go and-- if I picture it as a tree, we go and we look at the branches, and we start hacking off the branches. We're like, oh, I'm really bad at organization. I'm going to hack off that branch.
But when we dig into the soil and understand the roots of why we have these issues-- so if we look at the Civil War, why did we have slavery? How does it route back to early ideas in the middle-- from Europe and Western Europe and the way that they thought about Africans and the African people when they begin to explore or basically colonize parts of the world and trade? Then we can see how those ideologies shifted to the Americas. And then how those ideologies changed but also adapted, and how they continue to carry to the present.
And so by digging up the roots, that's how we truly solve things. And history is central to being able to understand those roots. And so I think that overall what our commitment to that is and why it's important that we share the history and that we understand its complexity is so that we can understand really the foundational roots of the way that we understand our interactions with everybody. And so that we can work towards change, or we can at least understand why systems play out the way that they do.
I absolutely love that, Cassie. And I'm not a historian, but lots of history classes in my background. I love learning about history and going to historical sites. And one thing I've always noticed and I think is core to history is that you'll look at an artifact and that will move to a historical understanding.
You might be looking at a specific pictograph in Southern Utah, and how does that help us to influence our understanding of that culture, or that group, or their history as a group? How can we help as educators-- or as community members, how can we help encourage appropriate movement from artifact to historical understanding?
And then just to get that film component, have you ever seen a film that actually does that accurately and well done? Because we hear that a lot where, oh, that's not a historical representation of the film. This is based on a true story, but it's kind of not. So I'd love to hear if you have any film suggestions on that as well.
Yeah. All right. So I'll start with an artifact, and then I'll move into the film. And I'll kind of contextualize what I think about films, which I think would help people generally in the way that we're understanding everything that's even going on in our current day.
First, how we get from artifact to history is such a long and complicated process. It's not-- And I think that a lot of times people will be like, look at the Declaration of Independence. And they read that document and they're like, I know history. Or let me go and look at this-- go to this monument, or let me go to this statue that has a date on it, and now I know history. And history is way more complicated than that.
In my work, I really love to use text-based sources. Because when you look at text-based sources you can look at the difference between-- or you can start to kind of dig into the psyche of whomever you're studying. The more text that you have and the more context that you have, the better that you can understand someone.
And so if I'm reading someone's-- and I really like social history, which is the study of just average everyday people and how they interact with one another. So if I can find a diary or personal letters that people didn't intend to be published, like didn't intend that the whole world would read, those are the ones that I feel like I can piece together people and their decision-making process much better because they didn't filter themselves a ton. Every source is biased. And that's what's important. If your great-grandma wrote a journal, she kind of expected somebody was going to read it one day. So we can't look to that journal as being absolute truth.
And so when we walk into a historical event and we find an artifact like a petroglyph, or if we find an artifact like a diary or the Declaration of Independence, we have to recognize that there is a bias in that document. There is something that's filtered out. The words were originally life, liberty, and property, which is a tie to John Locke. Property is replaced with the pursuit of happiness.
Why is that there? Well, there's a lot of analysis that goes into it, but do they really want a government where they have to guarantee everybody in it with the property? Or were they intentionally excluding individuals from owning property because they didn't trust them to vote because voting rights were tied to the property? That's why it's important that we look at a historical artifact, study the context around it, which takes hours upon hours of research, and understand the context of the date.
How did slavery fit in? What did the signers and the writer of the-- and Thomas Jefferson of the Declaration think about women? What did they think about Native Americans? And how did they write that document to try to exclude the people that they believe did not deserve-- or even white male nonlandowners who they did not trust to make decisions. How did that influence their decisions?
So every time I go into a moment the number one thing I do first is, how do I understand this moment? Who was this person? What was their race? What was their class? Where did they live? What was their gender? What was their sexuality? How did they interact and relate to one another? What was their religion?
And then once I can determine all of that, what is the history? What are the major events that were going on? And how does this one artifact fit into this broader context? And when we do that, then we start to see perspectives coming out. We start to see how this perspective differs from someone else's. And that's when we start to understand the history much more, than if we just look at the artifact and think we know everything about what happened.
In terms of films, I actually love this question, because I said I do love to watch movies. And movies are never historically accurate. And so I literally sat there and I was like-- when I thought about this in the past, I was racking my brain, like how can I come up with an example? And I think I do have some examples.
But I'll start out with this, the one thing that I think our society would do better is if we would stop going to movies to learn our history. I think that if we would just stop seeing movies as history lectures or history classes and just see them for what they are, entertainment based on historical events, and just recognize that we need to question every single historical moment that's mentioned in any type of movie, or television show, or whatever, or newspaper article, or tweet, or meme, or whatever. If we would just say, the purpose of these is not to tell me history, it's to tell me a story, give me a narrative. And it's based on the past. It's based on history. If we would do that, we would get a lot-- we would improve so much in being able to understand the past, understand one another, and everything else.
So with that context, do I think of some films that transition from artifact-- and I kind of think that this is a really good example of this is, one, I love Indiana Jones series. Not the newer ones, but the older ones. And in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there's a scene where he goes in, and he's talking to the guy who ends up being the villain. And he shows him the Grail tablet that's broken in half.
And when he's looking at that what-- if everybody goes-- it's on YouTube. You don't have to watch the whole movie. If you watch that scene, Indiana Jones walks up to it and he says-- and the other guy asks him, do you know what this is? He's like, can you read it? And he starts-- and he's like, well, he looks at the dating. He looks at the way that the stone is written. And he starts contextualizing it.
He starts thinking, when was this made? What type of language is it written in? What does the writing tell me? How is the way that the tablet was produced? What does it tell me about when it was produced and who might have produced it? You see that playing out.
Then Indiana Jones reads it. And it gets to the bottom of the tablet and it says, the blood that contained the cup of Christ, or I'm paraphrasing. And he goes, Oh, OK, so the Holy Grail. And he said, so if-- and he says it, which I-- he says if you believe that story. So he's questioning it. He's allowing his objectivity to remain in that moment. And then the whole thing goes to Hell from that point forward. Then they go off, and he actually finds the cup, and he drinks it. And he's immortal as long as he stays in the castle.
But there's little bits of historical truth in there, they kind of flesh it in, but they start expanding it. And they lose their objectivity. And even in the moment at the end of the movie when he gets into the room with all the cups and he has to evaluate, he goes through a historical process.
Who was the historical figure of Jesus Christ? Well, he was the son of a carpenter. His family was not hyper-wealthy. So let's find a cup that would fit within the context of their race, class, gender, and where and the place in which they live. And that's how he properly selects the right cup. Right? And then the thing goes to Hell after that too. But the point is that it doesn't, because if we're looking at it as a historical documentary or as a historical lecture, then it would go to hell, but in this case, it's not. Because what's happening is it's they take these pieces of history and then they create this excellent narrative that is so fun to watch.
It's so fun to watch. But it doesn't mean that it's giving us the truth. It just means that it's giving us a way of understanding or thinking about something and relating to other people, but we shouldn't be looking and seeking truth in those moments. Another example is in Da Vinci Code at the very beginning when Robert Langdon is showing the symbols.
There's this scene where he-- and this is on YouTube as well if you haven't watched the whole movie-- where he shows, if you see this, what do you automatically think of? And it's a hooded figure. And people say white supremacy or racism and hatred. And he zooms out and their Spanish priests or Spanish monks or something, like that. And he shows the swastika and he shows how those symbols change over time. That's a really good way of understanding the historical process.
And then, of course, it plays out dramatically differently as it goes forward. But still, there are those moments in there where there are good depictions of how to do historical analysis, woven around a greater narrative that's really entertaining and fun to engage in.
First of all, this is very fun, Cassie. Thank you. But I'm particularly intrigued by what you're saying about the discipline of a historian. And you're human, so it must be sometimes hard not to get super excited if you're starting to see things line up and want that support a particular interpretation.
How are you trained as a historian? What are some of the key things that you do to be able to tap the brakes when you-- so that you don't go Indiana Jones entertainment movie, Da Vinci Code entertainment movie into off the rails?
That's a great question. How I do it, I think, is probably the best way I could answer it because I don't really want to speak for everyone else. How I'm trained, I can't even really say looking back that I ever was specifically told, hey, this is how you remain objective. I think that over time the more that we read other historians-- one way that we did it in graduate school is we would read really old books. It's called historiography.
So historiography is the study of how other historians wrote about the past. So when you go in and you write your own narrative, you have to know the historiography of the historical event that you're addressing. So in my case, I've published an article on eugenics and Mormons in Utah, and so I have to study the historiography of eugenics and how have other people written about Mormons in Utah. And how does what I'm studying fit into that broader-- has someone already argued what I want to argue? If they haven't, why is that?
How I remain objective is you really have to take a step back when you're reading something. You have to let people-- and one of my professors of my masters-- his name is Nick Syrett. I'll never forget him saying, you've got to let books and people exist in the places in which they were alive. You just have to let them live in that space. You have to let that book.
Can you critique it? Yes. Can you be upset with it? Absolutely. But when you write about it and when you retell it-- teaching's a little bit different, because you can put the nuance in there. You can kind of get passionate if you're talking about it. But when you write about it, you really want to take yourself out of it. You want to take your current judgments out of it. And you want to lead people and let people make decisions for themselves.
So in terms of my study of eugenics overall in the West, and my study of insane asylums in the West, oh, they're horrific places. They are terrible places of just despair, and poverty, and people that are just really struggling with whatever issue, or if they don't even have issues and their family just shoved them in there because they had behaviors that they didn't agree with. They're not the best. They're overcrowded. I'm not even sure that any of them were really all that clean.
But do I say any of that myself? Do I pass that judgment when I'm writing? Oh, absolutely not. When I write about it, I write it in terms of perspectives of what people were experiencing and how things like ideas about race, about whiteness in 19th and early 20th century America, influenced the way that these asylums were functioning, in terms of how race science influenced the way that those things were functioning, like eugenics. And even old ideas about phonology, how these types of things were influencing how these institutions ran. And then I stop.
Before I make a judgment and say, this is a horrible practice, and it was terrible, and I feel really bad for these people, I analyze it out and then I write it in just a way that allows people to draw a decision for themselves. I give them as many quoted and cited details as possible to let them make the decision for themselves. And that's how I keep the objectivity in there.
Another way I do it is to share tons of perspectives. If I focus only-- a couple of the chapters in my book manuscript focus specifically on just the superintendents of insane asylums in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona. And they are writing in legal papers that they're giving to their state or territorial legislatures. I just acknowledge it right off the bat in the introductions of these. This Is only the perspective of these people who are filling out bureaucratic forms. And we're going to study what those bureaucratic forms tell us about the process of managing or convincing the legislature that they should continue to manage this institution the way that they manage it.
And so by acknowledging that, I'm leaving the space open to being that this is only a small piece of this story in a much bigger puzzle. And so I think that that's a way of-- when we all study history, the thing that we should check ourselves constantly is, how do my religious views influence my understanding of this specific moment or the past?
How do my cultural views and background-- how does my class influence the way that I understand this event? How does my gender? How does my sexuality? All of those things. If we just would humble ourselves slightly and just pause and be like, I am not the only person on this planet, and my perspective and community are not the only ones that are important, and just check our bias at the door and then try to see it from everybody's perspective, that's how we can understand history or even think about an event in a way that is more objective than if we're just really implanting bias on it.
There's so much good stuff in there that you're talking about there, Cassie. And I absolutely loved your discussion about your historical background in there and how you approached research to remain unbiased, specifically talking about mental institutions across the West, Mormon heritage, and things like that.
I'm curious, what is the relationship between a community's history and its identity over time? And what are some of the challenges and benefits we experience when we encounter different ways of viewing the same historical events? And if there are any Utah-specific examples, whether you've come across in your research, we'd love to hear about them.
I think that the questions that you asked here are really relevant to helping us all kind of sort through everything that our communities and our-- whether it be our local communities or our national community and identity is going through. So one thing that I've noticed is, what are the problematic parts of thinking we know history kind of loops back to what I said at the beginning about talking about the Declaration of Independence.
A lot of times we start out with history, like these are the things that happen on this specific date, and even maybe some explanations of why. But over time, that story, especially when the story is coming from a group that's typically been benefited in society, they tend to be-- it tends to become heritage.
So the difference between history and heritage is a one-sided view of the past. It is told from one perspective and it's only loosely based on something that happened. So if we take an example in Utah to understand history, heritage, and identity.
A lot of times Utah history is told from the perspective that 1847 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints arrive in the Salt Lake Valley. That's when Utah's history begins. And even looking at the past, everything either extends from that 1847 moment or forward from the 1847 moment. That puts members of the LDS church and leadership at the center of everyone else's experience. Everyone else's experience.
So the complication with that is that there are some people that-- obviously, there are native people, Shoshone, Goshute, Ute, Navajo, Paiute, whose people and their ancestral peoples have been living in the Great Basin for at least 13,000 years. And they don't relate to the LDS historical narrative.
They see the arrival of anybody-- and especially if we just take 1800 to 1900 in Utah history, and we look at the way that influenced-- or what any other perspective and any other narrative, we see the first people come in other than the native groups that I just identified are the Spanish. And we have French fur traders. And they're coming in and their interpretation of the land, their interpretation of their relationship to the land, and the relationship to all the native people that already live in the Great Basin are dramatically different. And every single one of their stories is also dramatically different.
You are going to be-- they're going to think of the Spanish in a way of where they're interlopers, which they were. That's the reality. They define homeland much dramatically differently than the Spanish do.
And then if we even break it down more, if you look at the Spanish, they're thinking about the Great Basin dramatically different than Mexico thought about it once they won their independence in 1821. And Native people are still stuck in the middle of all of these changing colonization efforts just trying to maintain sovereignty over their homelands and be able to interact with their homelands in the way that they always had, and not be forced to conform to a Euro-American way of identifying with the land.
And so that 1847 mark is a really bad way to start looking at Utah history because Utah history is much bigger. It's much more complex than using that as that moment in which we pivot our understanding of all of it from.
But in relation to what you said, what's the relationship between a community and its history, is that when the dominant narrative shifts from history to heritage, then all of a sudden the relationship is that everyone either has to find a way to relate to that heritage story or they are marginalized and pushed to the outside of society. They are seen as someone who wants to rewrite history and include false facts, alternative facts, or whatever the buzz terminology is. The same idea is, if your view of the past doesn't line up with my view of the past, then you're wrong, especially when it's coming from people who have predominantly been in positions of power for a short period of time if you really want to look at it in terms of Utah history.
And so when we see that, then we start seeing people be very defensive. And they start attacking other people who bring in different perspectives. They start attacking people and saying, we need to stop focusing on the negative. We need to stop looking at the past through such a negative lens. Look at all these positive things that happened. But that's not history.
History is not, let's look at the positive, or let's only look at the negative. History is, let's just look at what happened. And it's not a progressive moment either. We can't look at historical moments and say to ourselves, OK, well, what's the progress here? Like, how did this improve?
If we just let the past play out as it did, some people's stories didn't end well. Some people died. Some people lost multiple children. Some people lost their lands, like native peoples, but they still endured. They still are here. Native peoples are still here. They've still made their place. They still have their identity. They have ideas about home. And everybody else does.
And so when we challenge ourselves to pull away from heritage and recognize that history is complex, it doesn't come in a neat box where we say, let's go look at the Constitution for all of our answers, and not recognize that industrialization dramatically shifted, the way that we understand anybody's identity. If we pull away from that deep commitment to our heritage or the historical narrative that we most identify with, then we can actually start understanding history. And we can start humanizing people who don't share the same historical identity as we do.
And once we start to humanize that, history gets so fun. I love complex history. I love to sit there and be like, I don't understand why these people made these decisions. I need to read more, and I need to piece more of this puzzle together. And humanizing people is always such a rewarding process because we can really identify and grow a better and more communicative community, as opposed to one that is so divided and so defensive towards one another.
Yeah, Cassie, as you're talking, I'm thinking of parallels between history and between your work and then in literature. So one of the things that are really eye-opening for me in this conversation is the genre, we have different types of narratives of the past that we create. And correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm hearing is, that history is one kind of a narrative that we tell about the past, the one that we seek to, as best we can try to get as many of the sides of the picture as are available to us.
And then we have our heritage stories. And I think they're precious. They're precious to us, but when we conflate our community's heritage story-- or my family's heritage story is easier for me to discern from my neighbors. I don't really get upset. They have their own family history, right? And their way of interpreting how certain things that my family may have experienced.
But I'm like, that's easy peasy because I'm like, we're different families. It doesn't take anything away. And community to community, I think that we can see it that way too, of like, you can have your heritage story, but maybe don't conflate it with our whole region's history, our whole nation's history, our whole humanities history.
Right. And don't call your heritage story truth. I think that's the point here too is that heritage-- and even one person's history or one group's history is not truth. Is it true for them? And one thing I really like, there's discussion and it's called-- there's a book where there's a man who gave oral histories. He's an African-American man and he gave a ton of oral histories. And oral histories were taken decades after the fact.
And they ask him-- it's Ivory Perry is his name. And they start looking at historical documentation, like newspapers and other things, the author does, to see how his oral history matches up with how the history was documented. And there's so much overlap. He had an excellent memory of things that happened.
Sometimes we don't. Sometimes the way that we remember something gets skewed over time. It's like playing on the telephone. We start remembering it. We start kind of remembering what we heard in the media, as opposed to how we actually felt about it. We start implanting cultural identity and cultural stories with our own memories. And that's when it gets shaky. So that's why we can't even look at any newspaper and say that that is giving us absolute truth.
So if we stop trying to tell everyone, no, I have the truth. My version of history is the truth and yours contradicts that, so then therefore you are not true. That invalidates people and that creates a ton of tension. It creates a ton of invalidation. And creates a ton of division overall.
So when we look at history and notice that it's not one narrative, it's a million narratives, a billion narratives, then we can start to piece them all together and always recognize that we're silencing someone. Someone's story is not told, and that's one of the complicated parts of reconstructing history archives don't share-- or don't store everyone's-- I have an excellent example of this.
There's a lady in some of my research. She came to Utah. She did all of this work. And I was looking for her papers. And I found an archive repository that said that they had her papers. So I inquired about them. And they replied back to me that, in fact, her son had donated his papers to the archive, and they wanted to make room for her son's papers so they threw hers away. And so hers are in a landfill somewhere to make space for her son's papers. And so in a society that's heavily shaped by patriarchy, the archivist at that moment-- and this was decades ago-- made a decision that the male's papers and his story and voice were more important than his mother's. And now we have lost that perspective.
And I can't fill it. I can't even-- think that I had the authority to fill in her narrative without her actual record or papers would be too arrogant of me. And so I just have to acknowledge that I'll never truly know her because all of those things are gone. And we have to know that too. If we humble ourselves to recognize that people are not one-dimensional.
And I see this a lot on memes. Historical memes drive me crazy. Other people love them, but they just drive me nuts. Because people take too much from them. If there's a George Washington quote that fits anybody's narrative, you're going to see it. And that is really an insult to George Washington. He was way more complex than a quote on a meme with a picture of him that may or may not be an actual portrait.
So we have to stop thinking that just because we a small quote or a small document, and we've read that of one person, we now know that person. It's insulting. I'm complex. All of you are complex. The decisions that we make on a daily basis are influenced by our lives.
And the more that we allow space for three-dimensional or even four-dimensional people, the more forgiving but also the more that we can stand up and hold people accountable for their choices, but give them a little bit of grace, especially people in the past. Give them grace, but still say, I'm not going to perpetuate what those people did.
Cassie, so many great things in there. And I think it's a great encapsulation of how we have to understand the narrative of history from multiple perspectives and take a lot of things into context. And I think that the big takeaway from this episode is understanding what those narratives are and giving them the ability to breathe and really get the life back into them so that we can understand the full picture.
It sounds like this is a lot of the work that you do at the Utah Division of History. Can you tell us a little bit about where we can find you on the web? And what kind of programs you might have for our Utah community?
Yeah. So we will be launching a website here in probably the next month or so for the Utah Women's History Initiative. And that website will be kind of the go-to space for being able to look at the new content that we're creating for Women's history.
I have appeared on Brad Westwood, who's a senior public historian for the Utah Department of Community and Cultural Engagement. I've appeared on his podcast three times now. We have another episode coming up this month. The first one just dropped. The first episode is now available.
So you can go to Speak Your Piece. I always Google it. I have no idea what the thing-- I Google Speak Your Piece Utah and it pops up in the Google search. Brad and I discussed our take on historian, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book, A House Full of Females, which is about Utah Women and polygamy and political activism. And my take on it, more specifically, on healing, because I work on the history of medicine. And so we had a big discussion about that. And we have two-hour episodes coming up. And we'll keep doing this throughout the year.
Another thing that I have on that website when it launches is, that we did a brown bad during Women's History month where I talked with historian Sasha Coles about her work about the silk industry in Utah. And that will be on the website. But it's currently on the Utah Historical Quarterlies YouTube channel. And you can view that there. And it's just about, well, women's silk.
Another project that I'm helping with is the upcoming Peoples of Utah Revisited Project. There's a website for that, and I can provide you all with that. And it is a big project in honor of America's upcoming 250th birthday. I'm not sure if everyone's celebrating that right now, but it still is a historical moment to remember.
And so the Peoples of Utah Revisited, we seek to tell the stories of every Utahan. And so we are taking submissions for that. If you have a diary from a family member, if your grandma left behind a dress, a hat, political buttons, she has a handkerchief she embroidered, if your grandpa left-back his fishing gear, anything like that, we're looking for any type of submissions, written articles of studies, poetry, artistic, anything for the broader public. You can go to the Peoples of Utah Revisited. There's a submit form button. You can click the button, and you can just share your ideas.
If you're not even sure you have something but you're kind of thinking about it, submit it anyway. We are open to taking and helping you form that idea so that you can be a part of this great project and make sure that your story and your history become part of Utah's history and the broader narrative. So those are a couple of things that I'm working on right now.
Those are all fantastic. And thank you so much for sharing those, Cassie. And thank you in particular for sharing your perspective today and your amazing historical knowledge about how we can form narratives in our communities and talking about heritage versus history. It's been fascinating. And we really appreciate your time.
Well, you're welcome. And thank you so much for having me. I've had so much fun talking about this stuff. These are things I think about all the time. It's nice to have a medium to be able to share them.
Yeah. Thanks so much, Cassie. And one of my first-- well, still one of my all-time favorite movies is The first Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I know. The Indiana Jones series is just its own artistic moment. You can criticize it all you want, historians do, but again, I never look at it to learn history. I look at it because it's just dang fun to interact with.
It was movie magic to me. I just--
Yes. Yeah. And in fact, just to share, because I have to give a shout-out, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the train scene at the beginning of the movie, as well as the moment when he runs into the building where his dad is and he tells his dad, Oh, my gosh, they're coming. And his dad makes him speak. That is from where I'm from.
So I'm from Southern Colorado. And they filmed that, and I remember driving by the train scene-- I was young. I remember driving by the train scene and seeing it. And they were just testing it. And the train car with the drafts was open, and just their heads are at the top.
And so when you look at the movie, if you scrutinize it, they're kind of wobbly. But when they were just testing everything, you could see through the car. And you could just see the heads, and there was nothing actually in the cart. And so I'm from all of that.
The house where that thing took place is still-- and it's in this tiny town called Antonito in Southern Colorado. You can go and look at the house today. And then go eat at the Dutch Mill Cafe. Some of the best Mexican food that you can get in Southern Colorado.
Excellent. Thanks.
You just added another bucket list item for me, Cassie.
Oh, you have to go. It's so fun. And you can ride that train. You can ride that track. It's called The Narrow Gauge. You can ride it from Antonito to Chama and back if you want. Or just up to Chama. And it takes you through-- the narrow gauge is a historical railroad moment where they had to create a gauge that is much narrow to pass things through, like coal and mining towns, things like that. So you can ride it.
And it's really good to ride it in the fall because then you get to see all the fall colors. But the fall colors there happen earlier than in Utah. So you have to get there in early September or you'll miss them.
Very cool. That literally is my top three favorite movies of all time. And I probably watched it several times at this point in my life.
You can ride the track. You can ride it. It goes right across the-- right when you start out on the rail-- I've actually never ridden the train myself. But right when you start out before you get into the mountains is where that took place. You kind of go across the prairie a little bit and that's where that scene played out.
Very cool. Well, thank you again, Cassie. This was fantastic.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Oh, my gosh, Matt. That was so fun talking to Cassie about history and how it gets made.
Absolutely. I'm still kind of blown away that she brought Indiana Jones into the conversation and actually talked about it as not a bad representation of historical work. And so I got to go rewatch that for probably the 700th time in my life and watch it through that historical lens. She's just a fantastic person. And hopefully, you get a chance to check out all of her resources. Check those out in the show notes.
If you have historical documents or different things that are in your life from your family, she has some great opportunities to make those official parts of Utah history and do some great things with it. So really enjoyed this conversation. I can't wait to see what we got next.
Thanks, Jen.
Thanks, Matt.
[MUSIC PLAYING]