A Geek History of Time - Episode 260 - The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt with Michael Vann

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Item one, hit the grocery store. Item two, laundry. Item three, over through capitalism. You know, for somebody who taught Latin, your inability to pronounce French like hurts. Damn. Look at you getting to the end of my stuff. Motherfucker. But seriously, I do think that this bucolic, luxurious, live your weird fucking dreams kind of life is something worth noting. Because of course he had. I got into an argument essentially with with some folks

as to whether or not punching Nazis is something you should do. And they're like, no, then you're just as bad as the Nazis. I was like, the Nazis committed genocide. I'm talking about breaking noses. Drink scotch and eat strychnine. All right. You can't leave that lying there. Luxury poultry. Yes. Yes. Fancy chickens. Yes. Fancy chicken.

Pet pet fancy chickens. Pet fancy chickens. Pet Fancy Chickens? Pet Fancy Chickens. This is a Geek History of Time, where we connect nerdery to the real world. My name is Ed Leilani. I'm a world history and English teacher here in Northern California. And just a few nights ago, I got to explain to my mother, who is a member of the silent generation, how to subscribe to a podcast. Because she has heard me talking about this podcast and wanted to know, how can I find your pod thingy?

And of course, this is in the visual medium, but she did what I'm doing right now into our camera and kind of twirling her finger your your thingy And I said well, okay and I walked her through the process of finding the icon for podcasts on her her Apple device and like okay, you know And here's the name of it type it in look it up and then I got to try to find a way to explain to my mother who is And look it up, and then I got to try to find a way to explain to my mother Who is? 17 gonna be just about to turn 79 years old that um You should be aware that I swear a lot

Just so you know um the joke that we make is that I swear more often but Damien is more vulgar And And she said oh, yeah, I said yeah I'd recommend the podcast to dad but he he he probably like he really doesn't doesn't go for the whole four-letter word stuff and So that would be a turnoff for him and it might not be as much of a turnoff for you but you should be you should be aware and she said well you know you might you might get more of an audience if you you know did it with a

little bit less of the ranting and I said well the ranting is the point the problem isn't really the ranting the problem is the is the profanity and you know for our for our actual fans That's almost part of the charm which I didn't actually say to her, but that's kind of what I've heard from people So yeah, I I eagerly and she subscribed right then and there and I eagerly await hearing from her after she's a couple of episodes I'm just gonna tell her okay, if you can just stay subscribed so we keep the number, but you don't have to listen to it anymore from her after she's listened to a couple of episodes.

I'm just going to tell her, OK, if you can just stay subscribed, so we keep the number, but you don't have to listen to it anymore. That's fine. So that's been my news. How about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a U.S. history teacher up here in the high school level in northern California. And I recently had a friend cancel a dinner date with me,

as happens, right? And they said, what are you gonna do instead? Like, they're bummed that they'd have to miss dinner, but they wanted to make sure that I had something to do. I said, oh yeah, yeah, I've been reading all day about fascism and professional wrestling from the 1910s and playing video games where I'm shooting at zombies. But I won't tell you which is a break from which. And if ever, like the D&D group that I play with, they play a game of how quickly can Damien connect something to white

supremacy. And the answer is always twice. Like, it's just in two steps because it's an American history. Yeah, but But like if ever there was something that would encapsulate who I am, you know It I might have stumbled upon it. Like maybe that will be on my tombstone He read about fascism pro wrestling in the 1910s and shot zombies. Yeah Each is a break from the other. It's it's that's weird rock-paper-scissors So yeah, that does that does oddly encapsulate so much mm-hmm right there. Yeah, yeah So anyway, I brought to you a guest tonight. Yes, you need a night off. I need a night off and we should get someone else to work for free because

You know, that's that's how it works for us teachers. So actually what I have is I read a really cool book and I went out and found the author of said really cool book and I got him, suckered him into, got him, oh now he's here, good. I asked him kindly To join us and just discuss that book with us. So without any further ado We've got dr. Michael van professor of history at Sac State and the undisputed world's toughest French historian This is a thing that is true in both jujitsu circles and at history conferences. So

Dr. Van May I call you Mike? Yes, please. And always pick your own metrics. Sure. Yeah. Set your own parameters. Yeah, by all means. So welcome to our show. So you are? Yeah, I'm I am delighted to be here It's fun to hang out and talk with some Some educators about fun fun history things and geek out on them Thank you. Thank you And you wrote and one of the reasons that you work for our podcast like in terms of like I wouldn't just thought I was doing

This for free you right I'm working for you now well yes but for free so it's we're all family here there's a term for that I'm not an Americanist but there's there's a term for that. Go on. I interrupted and apologize. It's called internship. I finished graduate school I don't have to do this. It's for the kids. You do it for the kids because you love it. No, what I was going to say is that the reason that you as an author works for our show, because we tend to stay toward geeky things, but you wrote a graphic novel, what The Uninitiated might call a comic book even, and I think that qualifies for a geek history because you wrote a graphic novel called The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt, and it's in

graphic novel form. So there you go. Wow. So, OK, first issue of the evening. This may be the origin of the the bane of many a university professor. You teach high school. What what what is a novel? Define that to the guy who teaches English, because I don't I only taught Latin. And what is it? What is it? What is it? Oh wow I didn't even see that bus coming and you throw it under me. Now you see the underside. Yeah. Tell them what a novel is sir.

A novel is a work of fiction over a particular length. I don't have my handbook in front of me But the the definition that we're using when we talk to sixth graders primarily So so this is this is several levels down the chain but when we're introducing students to the concept of a novel it is a work of fiction that is of a particular length. It is longer than a short. It is long enough to be not a single short story, basically.

Right. Divided into chapters, 150, 200 pages. The main thing was work of fiction, right? Yeah. So, sir. Yes. Introducing this as a graphic novel. Okay.

I mean, it took a while for the American public to actually say the term graphic novel and to treat comics with a little respect as they do in France or Japan or more sophisticated cultures around the world. Right. And it was Spiegelman's mouse that sort of got us to say graphic novel, even though Art Spiegelman hates the term graphic novel. He doesn't use it. And he, he likes comics with an X because he's with an X cause he's edgy.

Right. And, and, and smokes interest. But graphic novel, that's a work of fiction. And novel that's a work of fiction. Okay, and this is not a work of fiction. This is a work of Years of historical research in the archives. That's true Okay So a historical is a it is a graphical. Okay historical comic book or a graphical history graphic history graphic scholarship, graphic scholarship? A graphic monograph.

This is a debate amongst... There you go. Yeah, a monographic. Monographic, yeah. Monographics with an X. It's a debate amongst some of the scholars that are producing this work. I mean, Trevor Goetz, who did Abena and the Portent Man, who is the urtext of graphic history. Have you guys seen Abena and the Portent Man?

Trevor Goetz? I have not. I have not, but I need to, clearly. Yeah. It's fantastic. It's the first in the Oxford Graphic History series. He's a professor at San Francisco State, and he found a case of a West African woman in the 1870s, maybe 1880s, who went to the British colonial courts to sue against her unjust

enslavement. So it overturns all sorts of ideas about race and gender and empire and agency. And he presented this in comic form, the comic format. And that was the first of the Oxford Graphic History series, which my book got fortunately placed in. We all been sort of writing on his coattails. And Trevor will say graphic novel because he was of that vintage of just trying to get that level of... Respect for it.

Acceptance, right? Respect, right? But I'm pushing back against that. Well, from his shoulders you can jump, right? So it was acceptable at the time, and now it's time to find a new term. So that works. I hope that works. I'm pushing for graphic scholarship, graphic history. Yeah. It's hard because of our misuse of the word graphic

in so many other ways. Like this movie depicts graphic violence and it's like, that just means very visceral. So graphic history just sounds very much like, it's blood and gore. Bloody history, yeah. Yeah. Spartacus shit.

Yeah, yeah. Almost, what do you call it, a passion project, if you will. But yeah, so okay, so we've already got a bit of a problem of what to call it, which is fine. I think calling it any of those things gets the idea in people's heads that it's not a serialized comic. It's a one shot. Yeah, no, no, no.

And done. Even though it's got six chapters, I wanna say. That's a darn good question. I don't know, how many chapters are in there? I haven't looked at this in a couple of years. My copy is sitting on my desk. Oh, no. Like, God damn it.

No. No, seven chapters with a prologue and afterword. Right, right. Yeah, it's about 100 pages. And if it was, I've talked about this a couple of times, if it was put into more conventional or conventional academic prose, I think it would be more than a monograph, maybe a monograph and a half. I threw everything and the kitchen sink in there.

And at times, I think readers will feel that. But yeah. What can I tell you? It was drawn from my doctoral dissertation, and it was initially just something I found by chance in the archives. And it was the section in my doctoral dissertation that multiple people said, hey, you got to do something with that. You got to do something with that.

Right. Because it's very original and unique. Yeah. Yeah. And published it as an article and then it had a certain trajectory there. I mean, do you want me to tell the story or what do you guys- Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, I'd like to go from brainstem up and forward.

Like, yeah, let's- Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, because I mean, one of the I mean, one of the reasons I was drawn to the graphic format is especially like things like mouse. The genre is very meta and there's these different scales and levels of focus and it's very common in comics to pull out, right? And you see this in serious comics like mouse, but also in kind of goofy stuff where Mickey Mouse

will talk directly to the audience and so forth. And I thought that was a great way for slipping in some methodology and historiography. So there's both the story of sewers and bubonic plague and urbanization in French colonial Vietnam, but then there's also the story of how I found this research or found this topic and research and and wove those two together. Yeah, I'm sorry. And there's also a self-insert. I mean, it's literally at some point you are talking in a what I assume is a fictional classroom, because I't never been in a classroom like that at Sac State.

No, those are, those are, those are, those are draws from, from photos of, of Sac State classrooms. Really? Holy moly. Yeah. Okay. I guess I just stayed in Brighton Hall the whole time. No, I think that was our Brighton classrooms, but with the new podiums.

Oh, it's, I, it's been 20 years since I was an undergrad. So yeah But also speaking of 20 years all the all the all the renditions of me are 20 or 30 years Much thinner much younger. Yeah, don't have the big beard. Yeah But pick your metric Representation Pick your metric, your representation. You know, present yourself in the best way possible. Yeah. If you can get away, Rob, do it. Yeah.

Well, what I what I what I liked about it was in that you had you had essentially a self insert with a Robin character. So you are lecturing to a group of students who then can ask the question that the reader might not have gotten to. So you are lecturing to a group of students who then can ask the question that the reader might not have gotten to, should have gotten to, or that allows you to spring off to the next point. And it's a wonderful shorthand because then it allows

the story to pivot in a way that seems organic, but is actually you taking us through it in graphic form instead of like, here's 30 pages to get you from here to there. And so they would ask a question and then you get to, there's some spots where there's just like these glib little responses where it's just like, you let it hang like a fart in the church.

It's just, it's fantastic. So I love those moments. You're just like, yeah, and that's a thing they did. You're like... Reo secular, I'm not sure of the function of a role before in church, but okay. Yeah, I mean, and this, there's a couple of inspirations for the book. And one of the main sources was that I'd been telling this story from my research in my lectures for years.

And the questions that the students ask in the book are more or less the questions that students have been asking me as I've been giving the lectures over the years. And so again, it's that meta aspect of storytelling and pulling the focus in and out. Much of this is for me reflecting on how I teach and how I tell my stories and craft a fun narrative and actually fun. The book's pretty funny. I think so. I think professional right there.

Bring that into the classroom and use that to again create narrative and move it forward, but with serious social economic political analysis. You're engaging them into that kind of thought through a tongue-in-cheek kind of humor, but it's much drier than that. And yeah, all told with a brown corduroy jacket. I, yeah. Patches with patches on it.

Yes, well naturally. Which is the professor uniform, right? Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so yeah, go on. I mean, do you want, shall I tell the rat hunt story? I mean well I actually I want to get back to a little bit before we get to that I want to get to how you so you found it as a Side piece in if I recall correctly a rat shit

infested and chewed through card catalog in in a library And also there was or was this the part that you found in the archives and it was just like a note that was taped to another note Yeah, it wasn't quite as glamorous as what you described What I found was A dossier just a simple very clean doss clean dossier. I was just a... I don't think we even addressed this, but I was doing my doctoral dissertation research on colonial Vietnam. And I was doing a study of the history of the city of Hanoi.

And I was doing urban planning. And I had this thesis that, well, or hypothesis that, surprise, surprise, race structured urban planning in the case of Hanoi. And I got into the archives and what did I find? Oh yeah. They built a French quarter, they called the white quarter, they built a Vietnamese quarter, they called the Native quarter or the Asian quarter, and race shaped every aspect of life in the city. The built environment, economic system, access to political power, you name it. It's totally structured by race, right? Access to clean water. Okay. Well, access to clean water. Yeah. Urban infrastructure, everything.

Storm drains, better in a French neighborhood than in the Vietnamese neighborhood. And so how do I go about proving this in a dissertation of a couple hundred pages? Well, you got to do the grunt work, right? You got to look through the urban planning records, the tax records, all this really boring shit, right? Right. Super dry stuff. And the archives are in Aix-en-Provence in Southern France, the home of Cezanne,

which is just absolutely beautiful. That's where the French colonial archives are. And so I'd be in these archives, like reading these tax records and like looking at tables of how many kilometers of roads were paved in a given month as the city was built. And it was really boring. And so, um, because I'm a wild and crazy guy, um, I would, uh, go through the card catalog and, and kids who are listening, um, you may find this hard to believe, but in, in an era before computers, it used to be these things called card catalogs, but actually take our fingers and touch pieces of paper that someone had typed or written out the subjects with names of books. And I'd go through, I'd be looking for urban planning stuff.

And every now and then I'd see a funny card and would write down the number. And I was allowed to call it 10 or 20 dossiers per day. I'd have the crazy dossier. I'd just see something odd sounding and I'd pull that up and that would be a fun little treat in the afternoon when I wasn't on the Cormoran boat drinking pasties and watching these ex-sois walk by in their absolute elegance. I saw a dossier called Destruction of Animals in the City. I say, okay, bam,

that's my crazy dossier for Tuesday afternoon, right? And so I put in all my requests. You had to write it out in those days and wait half an hour and then you get the dossiers from the archivist. And this surly, coarse-skinned guy who's always angry at us. And give me the dossiers and, you know, oh, there's my crazy dossier. I'm going to save that for when I'm really tired and I really want to go out and drink pasties, right? As a treat. As a treat, right? Yeah. This is how exciting the life of a historian is. The stack of government documents over here. I'm going to save that for dessert.

Yeah. Again, I'm reading fascism and wrestling from 1910. You don't know which one's a break from which I I'm with you. I get it. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So so it did 245 or 310 as I really wanted to leave the place. Okay. Time for the crazy dossier. Keep keep me going. And I open up this dossier and I could see it's about 100 sheets of paper in there. It's from 1902. And the first page says something like 72 rats were destroyed in the first Arn de Smolles or neighborhood of Hanoi and 120 rats. I'm just making those numbers up, but it was, it was like below a hundred and just over a hundred. Um, on, I think,

I think it's, it's March or April 1902. Okay, cool. Uh, and they flipped the page, the next page, exactly the same. So they're using a, they're using a form and, uh, the numbers start to go up and it goes from 72 and the first hour and do small to 150. And then within the space of a couple of weeks, it starts going, getting over a thousand. And then both R&D smalls, they're reporting the deaths of 5,000 rats in the city and then six, seven, eight.

And it starts to get into the teens and this is going on for a couple of months in 1902. And I forget the exact date, but it was, I think it was in June, over 20,000 rats are killed in the city of Hanoi in, uh, and, uh, it's a really dark day for it in rodent history. And, um, and then all of a sudden in July, the numbers dropped dramatically in the space of three days and then zero rats. And then I get to the last page and then there's no explanation.

None whatsoever. What the fuck? Yeah, exactly. I'm like, I found the fucking crazy dossier. This is wild. What the hell does this mean? There's no explanatory information just for, and this is 1902 and I'm doing this research in I think 1995. So

for almost a hundred years, this has been sitting in the archives, like, you know, next to the arc of the covenant and, and, and, and waiting, waiting, waiting for Mike van to find it. And I, what the fuck does this mean? Like, what, they're killing a lot of, oh, not rats. I mean, is that a lot of rats? I don't know. I mean, there's like 20,000 rats. Let me just zoom out here for a second.

So you're doing research on urban planning, and you are in the colonial archives of a place that used to be the colonizer of a place halfway around the world from where you are. You've gone to school for all of this and you find a dossier that just suddenly starts reporting an increasing, almost logarithmic increase of rat deaths and then it drops off and there's no explanation

on either end of it. Like that is so wonderful. Like, it was, and I'm excited and I'm nudging the, the French graduates to this next to me. I mean, look at this shit. You were insane. Like what's going on? There's something there about like someone, someone decided to keep track of this. Like I can just imagine, someone decided to keep track of this. I can just imagine someone chose to keep track of this through its peak and valley,

and then just go off the books. Someone saved it. Got it done. Someone saved it. Right. But no explanation. So what does this mean? I spent a couple of years triangulating in that archive,

and it's in Provence that's the the old colonial archives in Le Faro and Marseille, which is like the Institute of Tropical Medicine, which is the colonial doctors. And so this the reason I was in France is that in 94, 95, it wasn't very easy for Americans to go to Vietnam. A little thing called the Cold War had just ended, but there were still some concerns, especially if you look like a, when I'm shaved a CIA agent, although maybe now with the beard, a CIA agent as well.

Yeah. And assigned to a different spot. Yeah. And so it took me a a couple years to get to Vietnam I got to Vietnam, I think in 97 and and poked around the archives and it was there that I encountered Going through the National Library looking for Hanoi stuff, but also looking for rat stuff. That's where I ran into the rats Okay, one of my buddies David del testa said, don't get anything out of that card catalog, the shelf, whatever it is, the drawer.

It's up real high. Something's living in there. And I forgot one day and I opened it up and I had to stand to reach in there and I hit something furry and there was a loud squeak, which was me screaming. Everyone in the library turned around and looked at me and anyway, I decided whatever was in that drawer I didn't need for my dissertation, so lost to history, into the dustbin of history. But anyway, so I triangulated in probably about five or six different archives in France, in Vietnam, in the United States,

and began to piece the story together. And had to look at medical archives that were talking about disease, archives looking at urban planning where they're talking about laying sewer pipes, memoirs of colonial officials and colonial civilians who just sort of recorded daily life in Hanoi. And through that fun journey, pieced the story of the great Hanoi rat hunt together. I mean, this is way better than National Treasure, or anything that Indiana Jones did,

just because again, it's fucking rats like also also It's its actual history as opposed to really really really badly done archaeology Right. I didn't I didn't get to punch any Nazi is Sadly, that's like that's the only thing Well, that was that was that was one of your other podcasts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Heroes that weren't it's okay. You guys come out on it being okay. It's okay. Yeah, not the punching Nazis. Oh, yeah Yeah, yeah But it's also okay to not punch nazis if you want to offer ice to the person who did punch nazis

Offer. Yeah comfort. Yeah, You can Walter Winschel it or you can Meyer Lansky it. It matters not. Either way. You either tell people who are going to do it where they are or you can go with them. It depends on what your mortgage is and stuff like that. But yeah, it amortizes. So, but okay, so you followed this trail of breadcrumbs left by the rats, and I love that it kind of ends with a rat. Oh, those are really breadcrumbs. Right, I know.

They're raisins. That's how we got the rats, right? Right. Stop eating in the library. Don't eat those. Right, true, yeah, knock it off with it. But like, you end this it like it almost feels like the end of the story ends where you meet the rat librarian and He's keeping the rest of his people safe by guarding that information from you

There's there's something about it, you know, so yeah What I found out was that this, this rat hunt moment, like trying to kill these rats opened up all these windows into colonial Hanoi. So what I was, what I was doing was initially a very conventional social history, you know, find looking at the demographics, looking at urban planning, looking at how many kilometers of rotor belt, looking at the urban infrastructure in terms of freshwater, sewer, when gas and electricity go in, and looking at how the different parts of the city are served unequally. Surprise surprise, the French neighborhood, low population density, great buildings, great

infrastructure. Vietnamese neighborhood, about a third of the city, 95% crammed in there. Very, very rudimentary urban infrastructure. And what I found is that the urban inequality that was above ground was also mirrored below ground. So the French neighborhood had these state of the art sewers. I mean, like the top sewers, I mean like the best sewers in 1902 late insertion modernization when you modernize later like you get the best stuff, you know,

and then the in the Vietnamese neighborhood for the Chinese and Vietnamese neighborhood where again It's about a third of the land of the city and about 95% the population lives in there Very very overcrowded sure they didn't even get underground sewers They they got improved gutters on the side of the road and they didn't get running water They got public fountains where people would still have to go out and collect the water so they don't get the same infrastructure and the French when they're rebuilding Hanoi, and this is between about 1897, 1898 to 1902 and to 1905, they put out all this colonial propaganda pointing to all the great work they're doing, but it's in the French neighborhood, right?

But they're saying, hey, look, we're getting rid of disease, we're getting rid of all these backwards problems of Asia, and it's, it's very racist. It's very condescending. Um, uh, I mean, they, they, they flat out say Asians don't know how to build cities, like you need to look to, to France. And this is, this is, if you know your French history, this is coming just after, um, uh, Napoleon the third and, and, and Houseman rebuilt the city of Paris, right? And sewers are so important in the French modernist imagination, you know, L'Immusera,

Victor Hugo, and sewers are this big thing, right? But they're not taking care of the people they conquered, who they taxed and then forced to build the sewers. Right. But they don't, they don't give them that urban infrastructure. So that's all, that's all fine and good. Um, I mean, it's the order of the day. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, this is the nature of colonialism, right. And so, so, okay. Well that, okay. Great Mike van, you, you, you, Mike Van, you have found the documents to prove the obvious, what everybody knows, right? I was really curious about like, what's the lived experience and also like, what are some

of the contradictions and paradoxes of these colonial cities? And what I found is that at the same time that the sewers have been prisoned, they also had built this railway line from Hanoi up into Yunnan in southern China. They've got local steamship lines connecting Hanoi to Haifeng to ports in China, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. And unbeknownst to the French, in those trains and in those ships, there's stowaways, little brown rats who are not indigenous to Vietnam and Southeast Asia. They're an invasive species.

They only start to come in with industrialized transportation. And when that invasive species gets to Hanoi, unlike the indigenous rats, which like to go up and would live in the rafters of houses and so forth, those rats- Roof rats. Yeah, roof rats. The rats from Southern China like to go down. And what do they find? This brand new ecosystem underneath Hanoi. And it's got all the things rats love.

Like, it's like, big shit, right? And food. And it's safe. And there's no predators. The sewers are this brand new ecosystem. So there's no predators. There's an infinite amount of room to spread out and multiply. You know what rats do, right? They're safe. And they start overpopulating these sewers. So within the space of a year or two, they have this... And again, the sewers are all brand new.

They've been created by the French. Vietnam never had sewers before. These industrialized transportation networks are all brand new, created by the French. And that allows this invasive species to come in for the first time. They jump in the sewers, start multiplying. And I got to read about rat demographics and boy, they get busy. They get a couple of litters a year. As I say.

The sewers fill with rats to the point where people are seeing rats crawling out of the manhole covers and things. And there's even reports of rats climbing up through the pipes and poking their little furry wet faces out of the flush toilets in the French villas. So that's, that's, there's a technical term for that, which is yucky or gross. Right. And that happens. I love that people speak foreign languages on our podcast.

You know, it's nice. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. Fucking disgusting. I can only I can only imagine the the absolute shrieks of of horror right revulsion But compound that with colonial racial arrogance And the colonial gays like they're there to teach the Vietnamese about modernity. God damn it. We built this beautiful fucking city. Look at this thing,

but rats coming up through our toilets, like in the most intimate places. Right. The place where not even your husband looks. Yeah. Yeah. That's yeah. These are French. So yeah, that's, that's kind of embarrassing, but also what's going on in the world at this time? The third bubonic plague pandemic. Right.

I mean, you're right. Okay. Yeah. Bionic plague comes out of Yunnan and makes its way to first, what was known as Canton, Guangzhou, horribly mispronouncing all the Chinese place names, I apologize. Let me just break in real quick. This was the Yunnan province and Canton.

There was, I wanna say it was specifically copper, yeah, copper mining that gathered a bunch of people there for extractive work to support electrification. Or the British, largely, because it's the British who get really serviced by this copper, if I recall correctly. And if I got my quarters wrong, let me know. But you have extractive colonial policies

bringing people together to bring these rats, because there had been bubonic plague in that area in waves previously, but it never hit huge numbers because you had mostly countryside, and until there was a revolution or a rebellion of some sort, and I don't remember the name of it, where people then retreated back

and took it back to their home villages, and then it kind of settled back out. But then you have these mines, and you can imagine the, what do you call it, the sanitation in these mines, and now because of British extractive colonialism, it just adds to a problem and makes it a huge problem, if I recall correctly.

Yeah, and that's compounded with industrialized transportation. Right. Which allows for the infected rat to move faster. So in the past, uh, plague rats and ships would normally die at sale. Right. But when you've got, uh, you've got them in steam ships, they can get to port before they go through the cycle and the,

and the rats die and yada, yada, yada. Um, but the, uh, yeah, so the plague gets, of you in 1850s. The mining, yes, there's also some longer term things. Without going too far back, the volcano, not Krakatoa, but Tambora, explodes in 1815 and then changes climatic patterns around the world, ruins the vacation of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley, and leads to Mary- Right, Frankenstein. Maybe Frankenstein.

Right. That's what happens when you're stuck in an apartment for a whole week with Byron. With fucking Lord Byron, yeah. He knows what he did. Okay. Yes. But by the way, if you check out Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine about the new book on

Luddism that is a revisionist history of Luddism and gets into the contributions of Byron and the Shelly's particularly Mary Shelley, who was actually really inspired by Luddism and Frankenstein is also a reading of Luddism. No kidding. I digress, yeah. Brian Merchant's Blood and the Machine, great stuff. He's a tech columnist at the LA Times. I love that a tech columnist is writing about Luddism.

Yeah. It's just, you know, hmm. I don't know, it would be like if a Rokusaki wrote a history of rats, like it would be. But so the, yeah, the volcano leads to the disruption of various agricultural patterns in China and climate leads to opium production in Yunnan, which actually increases Yunnan's trade with the coast. A couple other things happen, and there's a little thing called the Taiping Rebellion. 20 or 30 billion people die in China. Everybody's looking for tutors for keyboards.

Right? Is that the Taiping Rebellion? Taiping, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ouch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ouch. That one kind of hurt. Now you know what I go through. I've heard a couple of them.

I mean, some of those jokes about your guys' beverage choices were refining the ciders. I'm actually drinking a cider right now. There's a couple of these spice ciders I really like. There's the nutmeg, one's flavored with maize, another with cumin. Okay. Yeah. And we're walking. So anyway, opium production in Hunan province. Yeah. Yeah. There's a whole series of social disruptions over the course of the 19th century. And in the 1890s, plague makes its way out of Yunnan into Canton and then into Hong Kong. It's in Hong Kong that it gets the world's attention. Right.

And all sorts of international scientists are deployed to Hong Kong to study the plague. And the British scientists, the British, you know, treaty port, Japanese scientists, um, and the French send Alexander Yertsin who, um, was a promising, um, uh, but very socially awkward. And, um, we now know, uh, somewhat scandalous, uh, young scholar. Um, I've, I've looked, I've published a little bit on him and he was probably a serial pedophile. Oof. Yeah.

Okay. That's a whole nother thing. I did an infectious historians podcast about Yartzen and nobody wants, the whole thing about the, he's part of the Institute Pasteur and scholars who want to work in the archives as the pastor can't see anything bad about the pastorians because it's like, it's like a, yeah. Yeah. You will get access to the archives, but I've, I've given up on that. So I'll talk trash.

Anyway, Yertson gets sent up to, to Hong Kong to study the plague. And he's actually, and he's treated very poorly by the British authorities. And there's actually, we've got some of the letters where they're making fun of him. And in very, what we would recognize now is very homophobic insults to him. But it's also a little problematic because he's always traveling with young Asian boys. Right. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's just a whole onion of unplanning.

Yeah. They're getting it right for the wrong reasons. Yeah, that's one way to put it. That's one way to put it. But he was probably a serial, uh, predator, but also was subject to various, various, uh, insults. Anyway, they, they marginalized him to British authorities, won't let him use the main hospital. He has to build a, uh, a lab in a hut,

right? Um, like a woman hut and has to, has to bribe guards to, um, to get cadavers out of the morgue to take samples. Oh, wow. But he's the one who cracks the code and isolates the plague bacillus and wins a bunch of money and the plague gets named after him. Right. Yersinia Pestis. Yersinia Pestis after Yersinia Pestis after Yersin. And so he comes back to Hanoi and he's the plague guy, right? And in 1902, they want him to establish the Hanoi Medical School and he's the authority. And he's there just by a chance of history.

The plague expert gets brought to Hanoi to build a medical school the same spring that they've got these goddamn rats crawling on their toilets. And he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is more than just gross. This is a threat to public health. It's deadly and gross. I'm sorry, Damien. Yeah, I was going to say, if I may, history gives us these wonderful little gifts every once in a while. So I do a unit in my US history class

about the San Francisco bubonic plague. Didn't realize there was a whole PBS documentary about it that I could have just cribbed. So again, I do things the worst and hardest way possible. But my favorite part was when it really hit hard in San Francisco, when it was like, it was undeniable that it was the bubonic plague in San Francisco, it was the year of the rat. And it just, there's these little gifts that history

gives us every once in a while and just accident of history, right? So, Yersin's there just in time to see the problem. And I don't remember, is he the one or is there another fella who figured it out that it's the fleas that are spreading it? So, yeah, it's another scientist. It's Paul Simon in Bombay. So the plague before it goes from Hong Kong, then kicks off in Bombay, and the pastorians are sent there. And Yertzen gets into,

there's all these moments in Yertzen's life where something happens and we don't know what happened, but he suddenly leaves, which again, gets us thinking that something happened. Yeah, sketchy. So he leaves right before Simone does the experiment that establishes that it's the flea that's transferring the plumpus cells. So it's not necessarily the poor rat, the much maligned rat or marmot or whatever it

is. The squirrel in Golden Gate Park. And it's a necessarily the poor rat, the much maligned rat. Or marmot or whatever it is. A squirrel in Golden Gate Park. And it's a certain flea, it's only a certain flea that carries the plague. Right, and there end up being two because there's one in America where it's proboscis is just a little bit smaller and the bacteria doesn't transfer to the hosts as easily.

And that's pretty much the only reason we didn't have an enormous outbreak because it damn sure wasn't our ability to lock down in. Luckily we've learned and we successfully did that in 2020. But. Well, they locked down Chinatown. They did, but not.

And they identified the plague with Chinese and Chinese bodies. And so again, we've learned so much that we wouldn't fall in these patterns of racializing disease- No, why would you? And maligning an entire city. Oh, certainly not. Right. God, why would you do that?

That wouldn't make any sense. Yeah. Did you pick up on one of the ideas to deal with the plague in Chinatown was? To burn it down? Yeah, that was from Honolulu's example too. Like, where shit got way out of control. They called it the Honolulu solution. Yeah!

Which is just like, oh my God. They burned down the entire Chinatown. Unclear if it was by accident or by accident on purpose. Buildings were on purpose. The other 25 caught fire and they didn't do anything about it is from what my, my understanding of it was. And then white people gathered around it with baseball bats to not let anyone out.

Yeah. Because we had baseball. That's my hometown right there. That's my hometown. Oh, there you go. So, but anyway, yeah, but by chance of history, you've got the plague guy in Hanoi opening up a medical school,

and Governor General Paul DuMare, who's been overseeing this transformation of Hanoi, for whatever reason loves Yartzen, and wants him as his guy. He's like his Dr. Fauci of the time, if you will. And the U.S. says, Hey, we got to do something about these rats because we're going to have a plague outbreak and plague does start to happen in Hanoi and kill or it happens, there's outbreaks of the plague in the French neighborhoods because that's where the rats are and that's where the fleas are.

And that's just too much because disease is racialized as associated with the subject, Vietnamese and Chinese populations. So what are you going to do? Well, eliminate the rats. So engage in a policy of eradication. Nice. And I believe they had to get that. I write my own material.

Well done. They had to get it ratified, if I recall. They're going to kill all the rats in the city, kill all these damn rats. So how are you going to do that? I mean, how would you go about, Ed, how would you go about killing all the rats in this new colonial city that you built? Jiminy, fucking Christmas. I have no idea. Like just the scale of the problem would be. Let me set up a little bit more. We're both French colonial. Build a wall.

And make Laos pay for it. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Okay. Thank you Monsieur Le Tromp. Actually, what they did just brought Laos into the French into China. So build a wall and make the ties pay for mix

Yeah, right. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm pay for it. All right So we're both French colonial officials right Maybe design the sewer system, but we sure didn't actually build it. Oh, yeah Yeah, so maybe we tell those guys ask those, tell those guys to send those guys down there and catch them, catch and kill as many rats as you can. Kill those damn rats. Well, you're going to have to incentivize it because capitalism is Jesus's gift to these

people. Well, hold on. Before, I mean, they're municipal employees. And so they send the Vietnamese sewer workers down there and tell them, hey, go kill the rats. And after about two days, these sewer workers come up and say, hey, screw you guys. We are trained construction workers. We built these things. We're not rat killers. That's for coolies, derogatory term for the lowest laborer. We're not doing this work.

Oh my God. So now we get a layer of classism on top of the racism. Labor and labor activism. In colonial historiography, supposedly Vietnamese didn't learn collective action and the strike until they were exposed to it in France during World War I. But here you see Vietnamese engaging in collective labor organization and going on strike and refusing to do this. So now the French authorities have to come up with another solution.

And so they turn to incentivizing it, right? Turning to- Paying a bounty? I'm turning it to, um, about new forces and put out, put out a bounty. Yeah. Okay. So put out a bounty. Well, hold on first four, four pennies for every, every rat. So go kill a rat, bring in a dead rat. We'll give you four pennies. And that's the start of that. The dossier I found, the first couple hundred rats are coming in the first few days. And what I found in the archives is that they were supposed to hand in the dead rats at

one of the two police stations, the Commissar Central in the first arndusmo and the second arndusmo. The guys at the police station after two days were like, hey, we don't want all these dead rats coming in here. Especially that Yertzen guy, as us as he is, is telling us that they're carrying the plague. So could we do a little rethink on this? And so someone says, okay, okay, right, right, right. Don't, don't bring in the dead rat, just cut off the rat's tail and we'll pay you for the rat's tail. And so they start bringing in hundreds and then thousands of rat tails. This is about three or four months. And this is what's called perverse effect, if I recall correctly.

Well, perverse, well, hold on, hold on, hold on. We gotta get to the punchline here. So they're bringing in the rat tails, right? And the colonial officials are like, oh, this is great. You know, hey, look, over 20,000 rats killed in a day because all these rat tails are coming in. How many tailless rats did they run into? Well, that's exactly what happens.

After about three, four months, there's a colonial official who's, um, at the edge of the city limits and the city of Hanoi was very well policed by the French. Um, once you get out of the municipality, which is a very porous area, um, it's under, um, indirect control and they don't have the same level of policing. And one of these colonial officials sees a rat run by with no tail. So god damn it, they're catching the rats and cutting off the tails. But wait, wait, wait, hold on. That's the best part. That's the best case scenario. They're not only catching rats and cutting off the tails. They're farming rats.

Right. And so they find rat farms in the suburbs around the city. And then they find evidence of smuggling networks across all of Tonkin, Northern Vietnam, where rats are being smuggled into Hanoi to cut off their tails. And then they, and some of them, it turns out some of them aren't even rats. They're voles. I don't know what a vole is. They're cutting off their tails.

And the wrong kinds of rats. So all these tails are coming in that are totally worth this. And the French just throw up their hands in frustration. And that's why the rat numbers just suddenly drop off. And then what I didn't know when I did this research and when I initially wrote the article was that this is an example of the economics principle perverse incentive. When you implement a policy to eliminate something and it actually leads to the increase of that. Okay. Right. Wow. So anyway, all this was part of my dissertation.

It's just a small section and my advisor said, you really, you should turn that into an article. So in 2003, I published it as a journal article in French colonial history. And as with most journal articles, I expected incredible success of maybe two or three dozen people reading it and disappearing into wherever old journals go. And about a decade later, so I think it was 2012, I think I was getting ready to leave for Indonesia on sabbatical, I get an email from Freakonomics producer and said,

hey, can we talk to you about your rat hunting article? I was like, oh, Freakonomics, okay, that's kind of cool. 25 people read this. All right. Yeah, yeah. So I said, okay, sure. And I talked to them like, yeah, we're doing a whole episode on perverse incentive. We have a book on French colonial history.

It was a great example of perverse incentive. And can we get you on the podcast and talk to Stephen Dibner? And I was like, yeah, sure. So I hang up the phone and then immediately Google perverse incentive. I don't know what that is. I've never taken an econ class, right? And so as as a trained researcher, I go to the Wikipedia page and And and learn what perverse incentive is and then scroll down to the citations and who's the first citation on the Wikipedia page

It's got two thumbs. Seriously? Yeah. That's amazing. So, so then I realized the Freakonomics producers are doing some really sophisticated research too where they're going to the Wikipedia page and calling up the first guy like the first footnote. Yeah.

And so I did that interview and decided was going going down some articles, like, oh, I should turn this into a book. Should I do it as a traditional monograph of 250 pages and maybe four dozen people will read it? Or this is actually a pretty darn good story. That's not just a cool story, but has all these windows into colonial power relationships, history of disease, political economy, history of urbanization. That can reach a much wider audience. So then that's why I went down the geek path.

And I was literally sitting in my office at Sac State and saw Trevor's book on my desk, A Bean on the Appartheid Man, and it was like, oh, you know, Trevor's story about the West African woman who used the British colonial courts to sue for her unjust slavery, that's kind of a quirky story. Like I understand why they made a graphic history of that. I've got a quirky story. So I sent an email to the editor at Oxford, say, hey, I've got this story and I've given a pitch.

And the editor said, he got me on the phone, he said, hey, that's really great, but graphic histories are character driven. It's a Bena and the important man. There's another one called Mendoza the Jew. It's about the heavyweight champion in Britain at the turn of the century about the Sephardic boxer who, you know, is this great boxer and it upended British notions of nationalism and anti-Semitism and so forth. And so Charles the editor says, well, who's your main character?

And I said, the city of Hanoi. He said, shut up. It's not a character. You need a character. The problem is when in history, these characters move in and out. And so Governor General Paul DuMare is there, Alexander Yertson's there, various people move in and out of the story, but there's not, it's not, you know, it's not, I don't have an Indiana Jones character.

Right. But what's my point here? Oh, just, yeah, how you got it to be a graphic history. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And create a narrative. And so one of the things we did, and this is maybe why I'm a little touchy about that N-word about novel right there, that we created two composite characters.

There's these two French guys in white suits and pith helmets, colonial stereotypes who are always drinking wine and they walk through the story and they're sort of like a Greek chorus. There are psychopomp. Yeah. What's that? There are psychopomp. They're the ones that are carrying us through the whole story.

Yeah. They are the watchers. They are the watcher. Yeah. Yeah. And they the watcher. Yeah. Yeah. And they're, they're in, in the French tradition, they're flanners like Baudelaire would describe these elite privileged men who can breeze through the city and observe it. They're, um, Walter Benjamin talks about, um, you know,

the flanners or just observing Paris and that they're doing this in, uh, in colonial Vietnam and they sort of drive the story through. So to do it in a graphic format, we had to actually do some things that were a little different in terms of constructing narrative and make it a story. And I also, as you pointed out, inserted myself into it. You see Young Mike Van in the archives. Yeah.

Yeah, young Mike Van in the archives, finding the story. And then as we get into the core of the book, I'm narrating the story in the classroom. And at the very end is when I go to Hanoi for the first time and experiencing Hanoi and then go back to Hanoi after about 15 years and saw the way it changed. Again, all drawn a much thinner, well-shaved, well-groomed Mike Van that you may encounter these days. You know, the two fellows that carry us through it, they almost disappear.

Like, I've read a lot of comic books in my life, so here's what I liken them to. They are in many ways the box text, and then the Michael Vann stuff is the notes from Stan. You know what I mean? And that's very similar, but also, and I don't know, Mike, if you've read Order of the Stick,

I kind of doubt it, given what your focus hasn't been. But Order of the Stick is this wonderful graphic novel comic of stick figures who are D&D characters, and it's very meta. And there's these two fiery demon roaches that are in the bottom of the frame through probably a third of the book who make little commentary the whole time. And that's what those two fellas in the white outfits reminded me of is they were the demon roaches. And I absolutely loved that because like you said, it's a Greek course.

It's the it's a psycho pump. It's the thing taking us through the story and making sure that we're led along so that we know what questions to ask ourselves and stuff like that. So I really appreciate that insert. They are our Virgil. Oh, God damn. See, this is why I have him on the show. So I really appreciate that insert. They are our Virgil. Oh, god damn. See?

This is why I have him on the show. And then Liz Clark, who I should have mentioned earlier, who did the art and is just an absolute genius. I mean, the art's so gorgeous. And what a fascinating style too. Yeah, yeah. And she came, she and I worked together with sort of laying out the pages and so forth. And she came up with a couple of things and one of which was

at the very end of the book, start talking about the unraveling of French colonial Vietnam, particularly with terrorist attacks. And she came up with the idea of blowing up the The two Flauners so they actually they tie in a terrorist bombing in a no way Which maybe I shouldn't be laughing about but it was kind of fun. That's okay. They're they're fictional characters. Number one. Yeah number two They had it coming. Um speaking of of miss Clark There were two things one that I wanted to mention about the artwork. Number one, I absolutely love the style.

At first it knocked me out of it, but then it was like this, I don't want to say hyper-realistic because it wasn't, but it was like, it kind of reminded me of Archer on some levels. Yeah. Looking at the images of the TV show. Yeah. Yeah. Because you have these beautiful backgrounds. But the characters are very clearly outlined. We don't do phrasing anymore. No, we don't do phrasing. You want rats?

This is how you get rats. There's the way I use his character, who is drawn. Your boobs really has a serious progress. Yeah, exactly that. No, but just the the the outline aspect of it. Go on it. Well, what I was going to say was what I can see

looking at what I've got here in front of me. And there's there's a very, very distinctive kind of boldness to the line. Yes. Of of the artwork that that is that is very similar there. So I see I see what you see what you're saying in that comparison. But yeah, it is gorgeous. Yeah. Yeah. Because I'm working in the age of photography, I gave her hundreds of images of the city.

That's cool. And some of the corners, hundreds of images of the city. Oh, that's cool. And some of the corners, like there's one page where the poster for the bounty on rats is being tacked up on a pole. I sent her four photographs of that intersection of different angles. And so she could, in her brilliant mind, sort of triangulate and take us into a different angle and present the image of the city.

And it was amazing for me because we're doing this in 20, starting in 2015, 2016, 2017 is when we're doing this. And I started this research over two decades before that. I've been reading about this stuff, these places, these street corners, and looking at black and white photos and so forth. But then to have it rendered in this comic format where we're brought into the city and there's action going on, it totally blew my mind. And it was so much fun. It was I I really really nerded out

That is so very very cool my question About that is is one of the most innovative things I found in in this whole thing was the talk balloons You had a different color for when you were talking you had a different color for when you were talking, for when the French were talking, and for when the Vietnamese peoples were talking. Who came up with that idea? And I almost wanna say there were different shapes

to the balloons as well, but I might be off on that. I don't remember. Different color and different shape, yeah. The French were in sort of oval blue when the Vietnamese are. Right, the standard talk yeah. Yeah. They're in hexagon, uh, red and the English is in a, in a black square. Right. And, um, Liz and Charles, um, the editor from Oxford and I developed that together because one of the things I wanted to get at is in the colonial city,

it is, um is a multicultural environment. Right. In that there's people are speaking different languages and living in different cultures, but also in really close physical proximity to each other. So while they're occupying the same physical space, they're living in different cultural worlds and not understanding each other. So in some of the pages, the bubbles are sort of mixed together, but there's the visual cues of the color and shape to remind you that they don't understand what they're saying.

And in some of the pages, they're talking about each other. Like they're talking trash about the French or the French are talking trash about the Vietnamese. That's so at the core of this darker side of the multicultural environment, this colonial multiculturalism. The power dynamic. The social scientists talk about dual cities. Dual cities, yeah, with The power dynamic. The social scientists talk about dual cities.

Dual cities, yeah, with this power dynamic. And again, in terms of like, sort of like vulgar cultural anthropology, like the lived experience of the city, what's that like? What's it like to be literally bumping up against somebody and you're living in two different linguistic worlds? And in many ways, you're abrading each other in the

world that you live in because otherwise your worlds are also separate despite occupying the same space. Exactly, exactly. And Liz also does some really great things with the tones and the color schemes of the different parts of the city where it's a little rougher in the overpopulated, less wealthy, poor urban infrastructure section of the city where the Vietnamese and Chinese population lives. And in the shady villas with the wide streets and the cafes and the French neighborhood, it's got a different color scheme. You get this feeling as you're looking through her images that this is all Hanoi, but there's

a real big difference between French Hanoi and Vietnamese Hanoi, even though they're all colonial Hanoi. Were there instances, and I'm not remembering genuinely were there instances where a Vietnamese character spoke French I feel like there were a few times where they Answered in French and you see their talk balloon change Yeah, yeah, and I love that because then you're showing code switching and you're showing that some people actually hear what these assholes are saying about them You know and stuff like that. I really I really liked that I thought I saw that but it was one of those like did I just imagine that or or what?

Yeah, and actually, you know what I was when I was doing research in Hanoi in the National Library I was I was looking at all sorts of cultural documents, like locally produced plays, written and produced plays. And that bored Frenchmen and French women were doing, because they had all this downtime because they're not doing much work, right? And they're all pretty well educated and they like to put on plays. And there'd be these plays that were like, you know, like the analog would be minstrel shows in American history, right? Where they have Vietnamese characters talking in exaggerated accents.

And not being a native French speaker, trying to look at the text of someone making fun of a Vietnamese person trying to speak French. Like I couldn't, I couldn't read that. So I'd have to, have to sound it out and like mutter it under my breath. But then I'd be really careful cause I was in the national library and there'd be these absolutely brilliant Vietnamese scholars next to me, some of them spoke French, like looking at me like, what are you doing?

With a horrible peasant accent. Because the French colonists, many of the French colonists who were sent there in the administration were so well educated and had all this downtime, they produced all this culture, the sort of ephemeral cultural productions like plays and also cartoons, which is something I've worked with in my research, that were much more accurate and honest portraits of the colonial lifestyle than what was appearing in the official documents. Naturally, because the audience is going to be different for that too. documents. Naturally, because the audience is going to be different for that too.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And one thing that I didn't mention is that in the research I had done for my dissertation, it's on my first couple articles of my career, I'd actually used cartoons produced in the 1890s and the early 20th century as a source to look at French colonial culture. How they viewed themselves, how they viewed the city, how they viewed race relations and so forth. So I was already kind of primed to think about

graphic representation of history and it was really fun to have used cartoons as a primary source, right, and then to produce a secondary source in cartoon format. Cartoon form. Now, one thing you didn't get to in your narrative yet was the World's Fair that occurred. And I loved the urgency and the drive that the French had to show the trappings of, look at how we've civilized these people and Actually, the reality is you've made things worse for them

literally by by bum rushing this trapping aspect even too because I was hoping you could you could just kind of give a few minutes of That narrative of the unless of course you want people to read that chapter The dozen of listeners that we have I don't care if they read it, just buy the damn book. Right. College is expensive. Yeah. So that's one of the things that the industrializing cultures are starting to do at the end of the 19th and early 20th century is have these fairs. There's the World's Fairs and then there's local fairs and so forth. And especially in the colonies, if you could put on a fair, if you could put on an expo, that was like your coming out party.

That was like you've arrived. And Governor General Paul du Maire, who is appointed to be in charge of French into China in? 1897 like that's good. He's on this political trajectory President of France that gets assassinated For totally ridiculous reasons But he well it doesn't that man's successor end up Having a heart attack in flagranteau or am I two guys forward from that? Oh boy, yeah. Or I might be thinking about a prime minister.

In his office, in his office. Yes, yes. Yeah. I think that was before. Okay, because I did a bunch of research on Alfred Jerry, the author of Uber Roy. Yeah. When I was talking about the far side naturally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that that popped up in there. So yeah, is that 1890s?

I yeah, I think so because then the guy who took over from him was the most bland milk toast guy that they could find because they're like, hey, we're not all sex sex pests. Like, let the boring people be in charge now. Like, yeah. Admittedly, being president of France in the Third Republic is like being vice president of the United States in the 19th century.

It's just a fake job. Like, you don't really do much. Prime Minister has the real authority. The president just sort of hangs out and cuts ribbons and so forth sure But um, but anyway the governor general was on a trajectory to become The the vice president of the United States. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So as as part of Part of his sort of resume building is he's he's gonna rebuild Hanoi He actually got the

colonial Vietnam's finances in order by instituting monopolies on salt, alcohol, opium, all sorts of exploitative things. And then he's going to cap everything with this fair. Like I've modernized Vietnam, French in China. I've built up the city. I'm going to have this big fair and it's going to be a demonstration of all the great works we've done here. A little bit of orientalist stuff about Asian cultures. And we're going to invite representatives from other colonies around Asia. So the Americans had recently taken the Philippines, so they get a booth and they've got Filipino women rolling cigars and Dutch East Indies had representation. And then the British had an exhibit and it's very possible that those were the crates that brought more of the plague. We know there's plague coming in via the trains and so forth, but Bombay had a big plague outbreak where Yertz and Paul Simone were.

And it's very possible that rats rats came with plague from, for the British exhibit. I mean, it's, it's, it's tough to say, but that's what the French said. That was the, the French official line is that the British brought it. I think the steamships and the railways, um, but, um, they, they're this like breakneck speed to get this fair built and they're building these incredible exhibition halls, but the whole thing's a Potemkinville. And it's just this thin veneer. And it leads to the plague breaking out and they have to burn some of the buildings that get infected with, invested with the plague. So they're actually, like, this is supposed to be the big,

the big event, the big, you know, we did it, Joe, moment, and they went to coming to burn these buildings. And then, and then the next year, Typhoon comes in and undermines the foundation of the main exhibit hall. And the whole thing starts listing. Yeah. the main exhibit hall and the whole thing starts listing. Again, history gives us these little gifts of just, you know, like you're trying to show off how wonderful and modern you are and how like you've come so far forward and it's like you have to do

the same thing to what this place as the British had to do in 1660. Like you're gonna have to burn it all down. Yeah. And it's, you know, those fairs and expositions really become this ritual of these industrialized societies in the United States, in Western Europe, Japanese start doing it. And that's how you put your modernity on display. Right. It's a debutante ball for your, your, your whiteness, quite honestly.

Like there's an aspect of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your, your entry into civilized, modern society. Right. Western African society. modern society. Right. Western African society. Yeah. There's a famous colonial exhibition in Paris in 1931 where they build a replica of Angkor Wat in the Wat de Vincennes.

They bring in West Africans and create a village and do West African things and French tourists can come in. It's about two steps back from being a human zoo, but real darn close. Things were worse 30 years previously with the human zoo tradition. But in the 1930s, it's pretty darn close. They built these Moroccan minarets and all sorts of stuff and they're demonstrating to the French, here is the empire that we've created for you. And revel in this and you can gaze upon it. And it's something that can be controlled, understood and reproduced for

you here. It's that song from Mary Poppins about why I should give tuppence to the bank. You know, it's railways through Africa. You know, it's tuppence, tuppence, like, but much larger than than a British Bank a Thing that that I really liked about this was that it's I mean, it's literally history from the ground up, right? Subterranean even but what I really liked was the So often I mean history is the written record, right? And so often history is a history of what people did, and it's so often a history of what people

who wrote shit down did. And it's really easy to fall into the trap of teaching history, certainly at the secondary level, I assume at the tertiary level as well, but the trap of humans exist in a vacuum on this planet. Like there's nothing else that we're interacting with. The trees are there to be cut down. There are cattle that are there to be eaten. There are buffalo there that get in the way of our trains. Like that's about it as far as the mention goes. Like, oh, there were rats in a boat in Venice

and that killed like two thirds of Europe. But we're moving on because the printing press. And this shows the braiding of our lives as human beings with rats. On top of all the other things, I loved that you had, I mean, the, I don't want to say the protagonist of the story because it's, they're not, but at the same time, like they are the, they are the jaws. They are, they are the shark in jaws. Like these rats are.

We were trying to, we were trying to avoid the ratatouille fallacy. There was no anthropomorphizing. And then, oh, there was, there was, there was, there was a push to have a rat in a pithelm, but I said, no, that's just up too far. At one point there's a rat eating a map of the colonial world. That's right. Yes. And that's about as far as we got. That's, see, that's, that's brilliant though. That, that, yeah. What, what you said Damian reminds me of John Green in Are you familiar with crash course world history on YouTube?

In in one of in his episode actually about the black the black death, uh-huh He he talks about how you know, we like to think that our history is this unbroken tale of advancement and our conflict with one another and our cooperation with one another and everything, but there is this element of absolute random, no, no, the universe is going to throw a viral element at you all. There's going to be this massive infection that we have no control over.

And the theme that I keep twigging on as I'm listening to all of the different elements of this story is there's this whole idea of empire trying to impose a very particular kind of order on other people and on the world with square corners and straight edges. And in one way or another, it always fails to entropy. Right. Like you just can't make it stay because the laws of entropy are just going to fuck it up. Like.

There go the best laid plans of rats and men, you know? Yeah. Oh, nice. Well done, sir. Yeah, no, absolutely. And that's what I found so much fun about this event. Like in terms of agency, like the Vietnamese are outsmarting the French. Always. They come up with some of them, which is delightful. But also, again, that term Potemkinville, you realize what a facade this whole colonial edifice is.

And everything's built on such shaky, shaky, unstable ground. But getting back to what you were saying, Damien, like the interaction between humanity and the animal world, I think is really important, really understudied. The animal history is becoming a developing field, but also environmental history. We think about environmental history, we think about some of the big stuff, and it's cutting down forests and the plains and the destruction of the bison in North America. But why don't we do environmental history in the city? That is also an environment. And there are, I quote, I forget the author, but the term he uses is that rats are the

totem animal of modernity. And rat demographics are completely tied to human demographics as we get into the 19th and 20th century, as we urbanize, as we move, as we create, look at the chart for the population of humans from 1800 to the present, just shoot straight up over the course of 19th and 20th century, rat numbers do the same thing. We coexist with them, we create ecosystems for them in our cities. Look at all the reports on rat overpopulation in New York City, especially during the pandemic. Everyone's got to email me the article and Eric Adams points a rat czar for New York

City. Eric Adams, that's the mayor, Eric Adams, right? I don't know my New York. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I stopped after they named a airport after one of them. I forget which one, though. Maybe.

Some things have happened. Yeah, even a Beastie, even a Beastie Boy lyric. Yeah, well the reason I know LaGuardia so well is because of two things. The Giants-Pirates rivalry in 1908 because as a young man he snuck in and his sister is I think one of the only Americans to die in a concentration camp in World War II. His sister was over there and the Germans made a big deal about it. And he was like, that's my sister. There's not much we can do. And he was very much a backer of Jack Kirby, who famously helped create Captain America.

So those three things I remember. After that I think Ed Koch and Dinkins, and then I'm done. Yeah. Yeah. You're a Tribe Called Quester. Exactly. Yeah, as a king, be their mayor.

Be my mayor. Exactly. So, okay, so like you were saying, with them just so intertwined like that and I like that where the humans go the rats go. There's a thing that I say in a lot of role playing games that I play is because I will try to bring rats and I will try to bring animals into it not necessarily as anything you have to fight but just as things that are in the setting, right?

You know, it's a very common thing. And I will often say, you know, cause I take my kids through and Star Wars, we play Star Wars role playing game. And I will say, oh yeah, humans are everywhere. They're the rats of the galaxy. So I always tie it to that because I always think it's just- Triples, triples, if have you done the Star Trek?

Exactly, see I'm teaching them, I'm showing them the TNG first, the next generation first, but I am gonna need to show them the Tribble episode before I take them to Deep Space Nine. So it's gonna be cool. But yeah, I mean humans, where humans go, so go the rats, which you would think that we would use that as a metric, speaking of choosing your metrics.

But the French did develop a whole system for that. A rat system? Metric system. Oh, okay, gotcha. Yeah. I'm not a professional comedian, sorry. No, it takes real stones to do that. That's a good one.

Or at least a metal cylinder. Right, as it were. So, I just, it just occurred to me that with the ending of a certain copyright, Steamboat Willie has a whole new meaning to it. Because you have a steamboat bringing a rat somewhere. Yes. Oh boy. Wow. Second edition. I might need to work that in there. And just the entire underground. There's a couple images of rats stolen away on ships in there So, yeah, that's a little too anthropomorphic. There's also the whole underground world of Disneyland

and their whole empire is built on a mouse and yet they've done a lot of work to exterminate those very creatures from that area as hard as they can. And they've got their underground tunnels and they've got all their food stuff and all that kind of stuff. So it's... I got a potential guest for you guys.

An enormous cat. She just wrote a dissertation on the economic history of Disney. That's definitely an off air ask. I think you guys would enjoy that. So I really, as a historian, as a teacher, actually let me ask you, you are an historian. Do Ed and I get to call ourselves historians? We teach history. We do research for the purpose of teaching it, but we've never published. As I told you, I

didn't know about Clio until I was done. Do we get to call ourselves historians or do we need to just stick to teacher? I don't know, that's a good question. So I'm gonna duck that question by sort of reframing it. And so I host for New Books in History. And I've done a bunch of, so it's New Books in History, it's supposed to be academic monographs with professors and so forth.

But I bring on a lot of journalists. I'm gonna do Brian Merchant. And I also have interviewed a bunch of podcasters, like Matt Crispman from Choppo Trap House and so forth. And they do history podcasts. They're communicating history to a much broader audience than the average professor cranking out journal articles and academic monographs,

reaches. Yeah, but Steven Ambrose also publishes for the masses. Yeah, I mean, it's a story. I don't know. Yes, we're all historians. Especially when you're producing things for the classroom and you're selecting documents to teach. I mean, because you guys, you know, put together packets of things and that is historical research, right? Yeah. Okay. Cool.

Yeah. We got the okay from Dr. Michael. There we are. No kidding, academic. This is not a good move for podcasting genre, but I'm anointing you with my hand. Yeah, well the dozen or so listeners, plus the entire town of fucking Austria, they are huge fans, we're huge in fucking. So, you know, we have a whole fucking fan base.

It's actually, it's actually. So. Thanks. There is an email that I get every once in a while to tell me, based on some metric that they've done how well we're doing throughout the world. And Austria always seems to be at the top of our list. And I'm like, okay.

So I automatically assume it's the town of fucking because Ed speaks of them so often. But okay, so as my great, so my great aunt's husband, Uncle Ting, who's an admiral, lot of stories about her, but he was in charge of the American sector of allied occupied Austria at the end of World War Two, Just as Germany was divided, Austria was divided. She bought up all sorts of... My grandfather was stationed in China in the 20s and 30s. He was a naval surgeon, which meant that his doctor, he played golf and was the best golfer in the fleet. And so all the admirals wanted him as their partner, his partner, their partner for golf games, matches, whatever they call them.

And where am I going with this? And so he wrote to his sister in Virginia and said, hey, come on out here. There's money to be made here in Shanghai in the early 30s, right? She started a business buying antiques from Chinese noble families impoverished by the Civil War, buying the antiques on the cheap, packing them up. She had a shop right on the boon in downtown Shanghai, right on the river, packing them up. Because her brother was the best golfer in the officer corps, she could get the boxes, these crates put on US Navy ships for free, sent across the Pacific through the Panama

Canal up to Newport News. She had an agent in DC who was supplying Chinese antiques to DC elite, and she's got this booming business in antiques. Her and Uncle Ting wound up being in charge of Allied Occupied Austria after the war. In the 90s, right before she died, I went to visit her in her retirement home in very, very, very nice place. She had a little foyer. And I kind of had to get away from her at one point. She was of a certain era of Southerners.

And there were these two chairs in the foyer, and I sat down and I was pre-cell phones. And so I don't know what I was doing, just staring. Being alone with my thoughts, I guess. And she comes in and goes, oh, oh Michael, you found Hitler's chairs. What? What, Aunt Carolyn?

And she's like, those are Hitler's chairs. What are you talking about? She's like, look underneath, get down the floor and look underneath. And I get on the floor and look underneath and it like it on the floor and look underneath. And it had the provenance documentation was stapled to the bottom and she had bought them at auction and they were from the Eagles nest. Now she had liquidated the vast majority of her collection,

but held on to two chairs from, from Hitler's. Wow. Vacation. Yeah, that's a little window into, uh, into, um, to two chairs from Hitler's vacation home. That's a little window into that side of the family. My father and I were like, oh wow, she's got millions of dollars of antiques. When on Carolyn goes, the money's going to flow. She sold everything, put the money into a trust to have flowers that National Cathedral Every Navy Day in DC. You know what we don't have anymore

Hitler's Navy Day. Oh, yeah Anyway, not quite sure why I got on Hitler's chairs, but um Never sell to Austria Austria. Yeah, they're fucking the fucking Hitler's chairs. Yeah Well, no there that was a different town. And that was history from the bottom up. Right. Exactly. Well done. Well done. Wow, that beats the hell out of the time where I touched a fountain that people got their water from in Pompeii. That's pretty cool. Yeah. no, I love moments like that. I don't. Wow. That's that's. John Snow's fountain in London. Maybe you don't want to do that. Yeah, I don't know. That's the way they figured out cholera was coming from. Yeah. Right.

Right. I was thinking other John Snow. Not you know, different different John. Yeah different different historical not nerdy, right? Yeah Sorry wrong podcast. I mean this you get the geek and you got the history in the title Using it's okay. It's okay. We we like to use all code switching. Yeah Yeah, you know we we say, you know, why do one thing well when you can do two things marginally like Start slow taper off. That's always my motto. So the back of the book, all right, which is what I was gonna ask about 15 minutes ago,

as an historian, the back section, after you finish with the graphic representation of the history, you have an entire section on sources and you have brilliantly written a couple paragraphs that I use to try to encourage history teachers to think of using this as a text. But you talk about the importance of primary source documentation and then you give pages and pages and pages of,

you show us a picture of a postcard and then you have the translation show off, and I love it. And, but like, it's just pages and pages and oodles of it showing us all of your sourcing, which is way better than like an end notes bibliography and stuff like that. But what possessed you to ask for the space to do that? Because printing ain't cheap and getting good representations of that.

And also, I mean, you're really doing a service to history there instead of just letting us see all the good work you did and then calling it a day. Like what possessed you to take that next step? Yeah, well, a couple of things there. First off, that's what the Oxford series does. I think there's maybe one or two that doesn't do that, but starting with Trevor Goetz's Abina, he includes, I believe, the entire transcript

of Abina's court case. Oh, wow. Okay. So that he tells the story in the graphic format. Liz Clark did the artwork, but there's much less text than mine. Okay. Like, mine's very, very text heavy. Some librarians don't like it.

Oh, whatever. Fuck them. But read, kids, read. Yeah. But anyway, so that's what's done in this series. But as you said, it works for the citation because as you're reading those primary sources, having previously read the graphic history, little lights will turn on. You're like, oh, he's talking about plague around the Pacific and there's a document

from Manila and San Francisco. It's like, oh, okay, that was that page. I was really frustrated as a historian not to be able to footnote. I wanted to footnote every page. And editors said, no, I mean, what are you going to put numbers in this? That will not work. You can't do that.

It'll take people out of the text. Yeah. Yeah. Pull people out. Exactly. And so at the end of the graphics section, there is a very brief end notes section, which I would like, if I redo this, I would like more of that. And one of the, so surprise, surprise in graduate school, no one trained me in how to design a graphic history or graphic novel.

That wasn't part of what they were teaching me at UC Santa Cruz. So I just read lots of examples. It's obviously what I read a lot of Alan Moore and, um, hence the beard. Yeah. Yeah. And the dark view of human nature. Um, but, um, uh, from hell, which is his history of Jack the ripper, which is pretty darn good, but. It's more. Yeah.

Yeah. But if so, at the end of the graphic history, or that is, that is indeed a graphic novel, he's got probably about 15 pages of very dense notes. And every page, he lists the documents that he pulled for each page. And I thought that was a really great way of doing that citation. But what I got to do with the graphic history is just put in a section of documents. And here, there's a whole subsection on Vietnamese voices. In the French archives, if you're encountering Vietnamese voices, more often than not, it's

the translation into French of a document submitted by Vietnamese, like officially submitted document that would be translated, right? Very, very little in the Vietnamese language. And those are so mediated. Archiving is a political process. Anything that makes it in the archives goes through a selection. Translation into French is very suspect. Translators hold a lot of power.

Look at the history of Lama Linche and the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. What we do have surviving is poetry and popular songs from the era, songs that people would be singing in Hanoi or reciting poetry. And it was very common at the time for people to throw in a couple lines of poetry and casual conversation. And that's a big part of Vietnamese culture. So I got to include those poems at the end to get... I've got a scarcity of Vietnamese voices in the official archive,

but we've got these other sort of non-archival sources to work those in. And then some of the images, and show you all some of the images that we used to design the book. So, most people, I think, read the graphics section, and then hopefully get into those primary sources. I had a lot of fun putting together and I tried to be pretty creative with them and

they draw from around the world. I liked it. I could follow the red line. Thanks for the kind words you said about the introduction I wrote for that, but that was one of the 49 things I'm trying to do with the book, is talk a little bit about historical method and how we write histories. I found this dossier because I was literally fucking around in the archives and I wanted to be drinking pasties and flirting with French girls on Coramero, right?

No, no, I was doing my research. Right. Like a good young historian, right? But I mean, that vibe is the, what I love, what I remember loving about doing the research that I did for my masters or for my undergrad was the traipsing through the shelves. The, oh, this is interesting, a graphic history of, you know, stuff like that. And I mean, I remember I found a wonderful book in the Sac State Library,

The History of Bare-Knuckle Boxing. And it was a manual. And it was there were, you know, engravings and all kinds of stuff. And I learned all kinds of things like that kind of stuff. I just, I absolutely adore those, those, you know, the, the academic equivalent of a New York moment, you know, it's just, um, and you don't get that online. Here's the, no, no, you're not going to get that in the archives anymore because they're all being digitized.

No, no, it's okay. You're not going to get that in the archives anymore because they're all being digitized You mean the access so my chance encounter getting my hands dirty in the card catalog Hopefully the one without the rats living in it, right? Sure. Um that looking for the crazy dossier That doesn't happen anymore because you go to the computer terminal and they give you set search words Sure, um, you don't you don't get to touch that. Like what I was looking through in the 1990s was the card catalog put together by, is that Paul Boudet? I think it was Boudet. Your listeners will write in if I get this wrong, but he was the librarian in Hanoi in the 1920s, which everybody knows, right? Well, yeah. Key timers. Let us know.

Hashtag good day, not bid day. But it's so cool to be touching the card catalog, put it together by the guy who was living in this world that we're doing research on, you know, 70 years later, a hundred years later. They're like, Oh, there's, there's croissant oil stain on the card. That's, that's a neat thing. I can see what he ate. You know, you used to be able to smoke in the French archives, not that well,

okay. The nineties was a while ago, but 90s seems like yesterday to me, but I think up through the eighties, you could smoke in the French archive and I'd open dossiers that has cigarette ash in there that someone else had looked through. That's crazy. That's something. You picture it with white gloves and like a sterile environment. No, there's people ashing Yeah You know there's there's a whole tactile experience to being To to being in a library like that. Yeah, it is that is

Disappearing yeah, yeah, you know and I mean on the one hand and we're we're sitting here kind of romanticizing It where you know I remember tearing my hair out and shields library, you know, as an undergrad trying to, okay, no, look, I've found five things on one side of my topic and like three things on the other side. I can't, you know, how do I triangulate, you know, but, you know, but, but there is is there was something Wonderful at least for those of us who were who were of the bent to to be history nerds of of being surrounded by The physicality of all of that. Yeah your your voice The sound of your voice would carry into those and get absorbed by you would open it and you would, I remember opening the Fabian documents and spelling them.

And the last person who had looked at it was from 1965 or something. Like, you know, all those kinds of things. Like, absolutely. Now that being said, when they digitize, theoretically, it could be democratized. Anybody could be looking at that postcard or anybody could be looking at that poem,

provided it makes it, provided the servers up, provided you didn't, I mean, there's so many provisos. Just like there were provisos of who gets to get into the archives, because I mean, famously, W.E.B. Du Bois was not allowed in. And he should have been, you know? And going the way back machine in 1993, I've got this great idea for a dissertation

and my advisor says, okay, now fund yourself to get over to France and Vietnam. Well, you can't go to Vietnam right now because you look like a CIA agent. You know, so I to apply for grants, I applied for a Fulbright. Actually, I remember I was just about to leave for winter break, leave UC Santa Cruz

to go back to Hawaii for winter break. And just by chance went to go check my mail. We used to get letters in mail. Kids will find this hard to believe. And it was a very thin letter from the Fulbright Association. I was like, oh, thin letters are no good, especially this early. I didn't get it. And I almost just threw it out and I opened it. And it was a, hey, dummy, you didn't sign your application, sign this and send it back immediately. I was like, oh, I almost didn't get that in and then wound up getting the full right.

It took me a year to get funding to then go the next year and do the research. Then with the rat thing and so forth, I'm like, oh, well, to finish this work, I now need to go to Hanoi because that was opening up a bit. But to go to Hanoi, I got to go back to California, find funding for the next year. So it was this drawn out process. Doing colonial history, we got to go in a couple of different countries. So it was a long drawn out process just to get the money to go to these archives. And then when I got to Hanoi, again, looking like a CIA agent, I've got all my papers.

I go to the archives and present myself and, and they say, okay, come back later. I'm like, well, okay, it's nine o'clock. I mean like 10 30, 11. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Like, okay. After lunch. And they're like, no, no, no. I'm like, tomorrow?

Yeah. A couple of days later, like next week, it took me six weeks before they let me into the archives because they were checking me out. I can work in the National Library next door where I found all sorts of cool stuff, like lots and lots of cool stuff in the National Library, but I couldn't get into the archives. And then one day this very clean cut, very athletic looking mid twenties Vietnamese guy came up to me and in really great English, which in Hanoi in 97 was kind of surprising, wanted to buy me coffee and practice his English and asked me questions about, you know, did

I like Top Gun? Oh my gosh. No, I don't. You got profiled. Not a big fan of Top Gun and like just like sounding me out about politics in a weird way. Like, well, actually my dad was protesting the war and so forth. The next day I get into the archives.

You got spooked. He was like doing this very, very subtle like process. But anyway, what is my point here? Like it was such an ordeal just to get to see these documents. Right. Now, many of those collections are digitized. So it was so difficult. Took years to do this research in the mid ninetiess. In the teens, what do we call the teens?

The teens. The teens of the 21st century, as I was preparing this book, I was trying to fill some holes and I did a short trip to Hanoi and a short trip to Aix, but I found so many things that were now digitized online. And it was great, but I knew where to look, and I knew what the titles were. So that chance encounter is lost, but again, there is that democratizing aspect. So, I don't know. And with putting things, and I think I'll use this to kind of wrap it up,

but with putting things into graphic format like you have, you've again democratized that information. My 11-year-old has read your, she read it before I did for part of her summer reading because I was like, okay, well, I haven't gotten to it yet, so you can go at it first. Because I was like, okay, well, I haven't gotten to it yet. So you can you can go at it first and To hear her talk about it and how weird it is and all this kind of stuff and she's talking about with the tails and all these kinds of things like Like you you've made it accessible to children to sixth graders. Um, yeah Brilliant sixth graders. Oh, well, my children In a way that really in sixth graders. Oh well, they didn't my children so but Very very sharp right? Yes. Yeah

That's one thing I really like about the graphic format It's that it's very scalable and this is from my own personal as as a nerdy precocious kid I was reading Doonesbury right right? And like there a lot of stuff I wasn't getting at the time sure that later on As a nerdy precocious kid, I was reading Doonesbury, right? Right. I was one of those kids. And there was a lot of stuff I wasn't getting at the time that later on I understood. And the cartoons are very scalable. So yeah, the book could be used at high school level. It is used at high school level. It's used for undergraduate introductory courses. It's used for undergraduate introductory

courses. It's used in upper division undergraduate courses. It's used in graduate courses. It's community colleges, University of Chicago, Yale. I think someone's using it at Harvard. All over the place. And it's read at different levels and for different purposes. Yeah. It's in world history classes, it's used in Southeast Asian history classes, it's used in historical methods class. Yeah, good. Okay.

Mona Siegel, Sac State was using it for the theory class. Right. The historiography classes, yeah. Yeah, for micro, because it's a micro history. Right. Not a Michael history, but a micro history. Well, it's both. I mean, you've supplanted, you know, Ginsburg, or no, is it Ginsburg? Yeah. The cheese and the worms. Cheese and the worms. Yeah. Yeah. You've supplanted that. I remember her assigning that to me. She actually famously looked me dead in the eye across a group of 20 of us grad students and

You know, we're gonna write about this topic, you know the annalise school of of thought, you know or something maybe a Heidegger or something and she looks at me and she's like Damien no more than seven books. It's a three-page paper I don't I don't have the skills to do less than that. I have to hit you with volume. But I wish, I wish I had heard that story before I agreed to do this podcast with you. Oh yeah.

But yeah, I mean. That's how you get eight episodes on the Hatfields and McCoys, right? That is, as a matter of fact, how you get eight goddamn episodes on the half feels McCoy's For seven on V the TV series But the loser however many we did on Batman for God's sake nine or ten. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah or you know four on on Henry Ford and square dancing. So, but you know, graphic representations of history

is usually the, cause I'm a nerd dad and I make my kids do reading in the summer, but I always tell them you have to read two or three graphic histories and then you get to pick what else you're gonna read. And because of that, my son has read, they called us enemy. And my daughter has read They Called Us Enemy, and my daughter has read They Called Us Enemy,

and We Hereby Refuse, which is a wonderful companion piece to that. My son has read all of March. He and I had a conversation two, three years ago about what the N-word was, because he'd never heard it used in the company that he keeps and he and I had a long discussion based on a book that he had read, you know, and stuff like that. And so I'm always looking for graphic representations of history because

I think it's a wonderful entry point in, like you said, it's so scalable, but I think it's a wonderful entry point in for kids to actually get interested in history Before their middle school teachers make it really dull and boring and awful for them I'm getting the thing that our high school teachers really fucking oh god There is their high school teachers just turn it all into a polemic and fly everything up. Yes but like but also to get it the The the fact that we're not doing mythology here. We're not here to fuck spiders. Like this is actual history like this is this is what we're supposed to be, you know, and so I love that you that you've given us a look at something that

Unless you're an historian you wouldn't know shit about and now you know There's a sixth grader out here in Northern California, and an eighth grader gonna be a ninth grader who's gonna read it for his summer reading. You know, and it's because you've democratized it on some level by making it graphic. And I hope that more people start to do that. Because I don't think we'll lose the book market

for history, like, you know, plenty of historians still write books. That said, not everything should be or needs to be in graphic format. Also true. And I've seen some pretty serious object lessons in that. I was really excited about this biography of Hannah Arendt that came out. It's a character, right? And it's called the three escapes of

Hannah aren't and you know covers you know fleeing Germany and it is terrible it is it is bad caricatures of German philosophers talking to each other with huge speech bubbles it It does nothing with comics as As a medium media like right like there's there's things you can do with film There's things you can do right with with painting. There's things you can do with poetry There's things you can do with comics, right? If you're not exploring that aspect. What's the point? Yeah, my dinner with Andre should have been an audio play, not a movie. Well, and so I think that's probably

the most egregious example. And I think that the historians need to work with the artists and really understand, it's sort of intentional design, use that kind of speak, like what can you do with the image? And like, so with, with the, the languages and the, and the speech bubbles and so forth, that was one thing we were trying to show. I work with a lot of maps in my research.

You can integrate those into the images. So I think there's some really great things that could be done, but I'm also a little hesitant to say everything should be in graphic history like this. There needs to be a pitch for why something should be in the graphic format. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, I can agree with that as well, yeah. Check out that Hannah Arendt book,

The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt. It's terrible. Okay. Okay. It's just, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, it's fine. No. There goes our Three our three escapes from Hannah Arendt sponsorship. The Rosa Luxemburg book is really good. Kate Evans, Rosa Luxemburg. Okay. I forget what the full title is. That is fabulous and does beautiful things with the images.

And she's both the author and the artist, which you know, preys me. Well, to draw this to a close, first off, I just wanna make sure, is there anything that you want to make sure that you tidy this up with a bow with or should we go into our tail end of our? Oh, I've got stories about the funny afterlives of this and but the Freakonomics was just the tip of the iceberg.

I found out that the rat stuff had been plagiarized for the 10th grade curriculum for a little country called India. Really? Yes. So the 10th grade English language textbook for NSERD throughout India completely lifts my research. Wow. And I was giving a talk on this in Bombay and one of the graduate students in the audience was texting furiously when it came to the question period. She's like, I'm sorry I was on the phone.

I was contacting my little sister. She was telling me about the things you're talking about. I just checked it's in the 10th grade history textbook here. And that's so that's amusing. But also because of Freakonomics, Bank Director Magazine referenced Rat Hunt. Bank Director Magazine. I let my subscription. Okay. Yeah, right Right, I just hate seeing it on the shelves before I get mine, you know, that's Because of Freakonomics it got and the whole perverse incentive thing the story got picked up by a lot of

Deregulation folks Took my history and as you know a good Bernie bro, this just drives me crazy and use it as an argument against government Crazy and use it as an argument against government The world better talk about perverse impact. Yeah Had me at perverse well Yeah, yeah now but thanks for letting me prattle on about all this is oh well Thank you for coming on and prattling on about it. It's been awesome. It's amazing. I love this I it lends gravitas to us to have somebody who's been published and it saves my voice for an entire week. So and also and

Unselfishly like this is that I've been this has been on my radar for so long to get you on here. So I'm really grateful for the chance. Normally we go into book recommendations. And so, top of the order, I'm going to recommend your book. The Three Escapes of Honor, right? What's it, yes, The Three Escapes of Honor. The Three Escapes of Honor, right? Obviouslycapes of Honour. I want everybody to read the graphic novel representation of my dinner with Andre. No, but Michael Van and Liz Clark's

The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt. That's going to be the obvious recommendation. But I also want to recommend Stephen J. Pine's Fire, Nature, and Culture. Because we're talking about animal history is a new thing, he took an element and dug into that. But mostly Michael Vance, great rat Hanoi rat hunt so Ed what were you gonna recommend well all of this talk of imperialism and you know the the white supremacy lying at the root of all of it reminded me

very strongly of honor in the dust by Greg R Jones, which is about the American imperial adventure in the Philippines and specifically the Philippine revolution and the impact that that had on domestic US politics with the two, yeah, two divide essentially divided wings of the Republican Party the imperialist and anti-imperialist groups there, but it's in in a post US war in Iraq world There are some really it's it's compelling evidence that history Doesn't always repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes

So and Mike what are going to recommend for everybody? I would recommend Unflattening by Nick Sousanis. And Unflattening was Nick's doctoral dissertation at Columbia, and he's an artist. And he's getting his doctorate in education. He's a graphic artist. And so it's about the comic format, genre, art form, but about so much more. It's about the way that we see and understand. And he's absolutely brilliant. He's at San Francisco State and runs the comic studies program there.

And it was amazing that Columbia let him submit this 400 page graphic scholarship as a doctoral dissertation. And then I think Harvard published it right away. It's just, it is, it has such a level of deep, words fail me, unflattening by Nick Susanis. I mean, it's just so profound and moving. Excellent. Very cool. Thank you. Well, do you want to be found on any other medium? In any other way now is the time for you to get to plug it because, um,

I don't know. Do people follow anybody on Twitter or whatever it's called? But, uh, I'm still, I'm still tweeted on that. I don't know. Do it. Yeah. I moved, I moved mostly over to blue sky, but yeah. Is that what the party is now? I like it. Yeah. Look me up. I'm on academia.edu and I've got links to a bunch of articles. I gotta find, I gotta, if people made it this far through this interview,

then they would really enjoy my article, Sex in the Colonial City, about cartoons of prostitution in colonial Vietnam from the 1890s and what they reveal. Nice. I kind of wish that it happened higher up in the episode, because now I want a little bit like just, okay, cool. I kind of do want to check that out I'll send it to you guys. Yeah Well, you can find you can find me at the comedy spot in Sacramento the first Friday of every month at 9 p.m March 1st April 5th

May 3rd for instance 9 p.m. With capital punishment spinning that wheel on battle win Ed where can they find us? We collectively can be found as I mentioned to my mother on the Apple podcast app we can also be found on Spotify and Wherever wherever you subscribe for podcasts. Amazon too.

And Amazon, yes sir. And our website of course is wubba wubba wubba dot geekhistorytime dot com. And wherever it is that you have found us since you're listening, you've found us someplace, please take a moment to subscribe and give us the five star review that you know our guests deserve.

Oh, yeah. Cool. Well, Dr. Michael Van, thank you so much for joining us this evening. It's been an intense pleasure. And I'm very grateful for Geek History of Time. I'm Damian Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock. And until next time, au revoir.