Episode 158: Life's Work

the memory palace

Nate DiMeo

Radiotopia, Publicradio, History, Natedimeo

4.8 • 7.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2020

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Help support this show and the network that makes it possible by making a donation today. Make your mark at Radiotopia.fm/donate

A note on shownotes. In a perfect world, you go into each episode of the Memory Palace knowing nothing about what's coming. It's pretentious, sure, but that's the intention. So, if you don't want any spoilers or anything, you can click play without reading ahead.

Music

Field of Reeds by Leo Svirsky.
Stellify by Federico Albanese.
Opening by Nathanial Bartlett.
Turning 16 by Ben Sollee.

Notes

I strongly recommend checking out Annelise Orlick's Common Sense and a Little Fire, an exhilarating history of Pauline Newman, Rose Schneiderman and other women at the center of the labor movement in the 20th Century.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the memory palace.
0:03.6	I'm Nate Demet.
0:06.7	146 people died in the Triangle's Shirt Waste Factory fire in Manhattan in March of 1911.
0:12.8	23 of them were men.
0:14.8	The rest were women and girls who made blouses in the building's eight floor.
0:19.3	Many died in the fire itself because it moved so quickly, because there weren't enough exits.
0:23.8	And the ones that were there were locked because the men who owned the factory were afraid
0:28.0	that the women and girls who worked there would steal fabric and needles and threads,
0:31.7	and other things they couldn't afford on what they were paid.
0:34.7	The doors remained locked after the fire broke out because the men with the keys had already
0:38.2	fled to the safety of the streets.
0:40.3	And so those women and girls burned to death.
0:42.8	Others were trapped in one of the two stairwells.
0:45.3	The law required a third stairwell, but the building's owners were given a pass because
0:48.9	the building had a fire escape.
0:50.4	But they did maintain the fire escape.
0:52.8	And so it collapsed.
0:54.4	And the women and girls who had managed to climb out onto it died when it did.
0:58.6	Others left from the windows to the sidewalk, down elevator shafts to their deaths.
1:05.2	They were nearly all Jewish or Italian immigrants.
1:08.7	They were loved.
1:10.3	They were daughters, some were mothers, sisters, friends of varying degrees of closeness in
	...

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