Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History class, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast, I'm Holly Frye.

And I'm Tracy V Wilson.

Tracy, how much do you know about Isadora Duncan?

Well, very influential in the modern dance movement.

A horrifying accidental death.

Right, that horrifying accidental death is what most people know about.

But as you said, like she was very influential in dance.

Her life was also really full and rich and full of ups and downs and completely fascinating in my opinion.

And all of that gets lost because her story tends to get reduced to that freak accident that took her life.

So I thought this would be a good time to talk about the woman who is often called the mother of modern dance.

You'll also see Martha Graham get that title.

But Isadora was really the first doing some of the things that she did.

She had an unconventional upbringing.

She had a very unconventional life.

She is in some ways hilarious and sometimes very enchanting, occasionally frustrating.

But she is someone that's a little bit admirable because she really did live entirely according to her own compass.

She did not care about social mores in the least.

And she also was just immensely resilient.

And I got so deep into researching her and reading her memoir in particular that this became an accidental two-parter.

So in this first episode, we're going to talk about Isadora Duncan's early life, which was full of struggle but seemed overall to be really quite happy.

And the second part, we will get into her life after she became famous.

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