Rare objects and valuable paintings were destroyed. The New York Times wrote that “the destruction of so many of its fine collections will be viewed as a national calamity.” Dazed soldiers and worried citizens could only watch as the flames engulfed the museum’s castle. On an afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. In today’s episode, we explore the life and death of Mata Hari, a woman who was an excellent performer, perhaps a poor spy, but above all else, never, ever uninteresting.
The only recent the French military charged her with espionage was to distract the nation from France’s poor showing in the war. She inspired books, musicals, and films.īut more recently, historians argued that she was merely a gossip who tried to steal state secrets but never discovered anything that couldn’t be found in the newspapers. Immediately after her death, biographies ran with the juicier narrative and turned her into the femme fatale archetype, who lured high-ranking officers into her boudoir and steal their documents while they were asleep. At her trial, prosecutors claimed that the world-famous exotic dancer had seduced countless men from both sides of the war (definitely true) and leaked intelligence that caused the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers (almost certainly false). By looking into the past we will have a better understanding of this practice, and how much it resembles slavery in the modern world.Even before Mata Hari (née Margaretha Zelle) was executed by a French firing squad in 1917 for spying on behalf of the Germans, her life had already become legend. We are looking at the origins of the practice, why it began, the work that slaves did, what was the “best” sort of work, and how they revolted.
This episode is the beginning of a five-part series on slavery. Others think that slaves were treated rather well in the ancient world, and it was only the weaponized racism of recent centuries that turned the chattel slavery of Africans brought to the New World into such a cruel institution. Some researchers think slavery is common across history in that it leads to the social death of a slave. It is universal yet localized to the particular conditions in the society that enslaves others. Slavery goes back to the beginning of the agricultural revolution. A Roman would answer differently again, describing slavery as the rightful spoils of war and what brought a Greek to his household that tutors his children. He would talk about the African slave trade, albeit the one that went east to Arabia instead of the one that went west to the New World. A medieval Arab would have still answered differently. He would recount the horrors of Barbary Muslim pirates invading the town of Baltimore, dragging his kinsmen off to the slave markets of Algeria.
But if you asked an Irishman in 1650, he would have answered differently. When asked “what is slavery?” most Americans or Westerners would respond with a description of an African slave in the antebellum South, picking cotton and suffering under the whip of a cruel master.