The Invisible Lady
The Last Archive
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2020
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1804, an Invisible Lady arrived in New York City.
She went on to become the most popular attraction in the country. But why? And who was she? In this episode, we chase her through time, finding invisible women everywhere, wondering: What is the relationship between keeping women invisible and the histories of privacy, and of knowledge?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:07.0 | Imagine there's a place in our world where the known things go. |
| 0:12.0 | A quarter of the mind, an endless |
| 0:16.4 | vault crammed with evidence, proof, clues. Me, I like to go there and poke around. |
| 0:24.0 | A book of poems by Emily Dickinson. |
| 0:30.0 | Flowers pressed between its pages. |
| 0:32.0 | Oh. Flowers pressed between its pages. |
| 0:38.0 | Oh, I wonder if this old radio still works. I must interrupt the dance music for a moment. |
| 0:40.0 | I have an urgent message from police head. |
| 0:42.0 | Oh, creepy. |
| 0:44.0 | Imagine that this place, this chamber of knowledge, is all that stands between a reasonable |
| 0:49.1 | doubt and the chaos of uncertainty, that it lies somewhere in a time between now and then. |
| 1:00.0 | The sign on the door reads, The last Archive. The Last Archive. |
| 1:04.0 | I'm Jill Lepore. |
| 1:07.0 | Step outside to a noisy street in the bustling rowdy city of New York. |
| 1:12.0 | In the year, this time we don't have to go very far. |
| 1:15.0 | The year 2019. |
| 1:20.0 | 15. 25. Maybe we could get in behind. Maybe there's an alley on one side. This area is under constant videotapes or bills. Just in case she |
| 1:36.1 | comes back that's 19. On a sweltering day in July, my producer Ben and I went |
| 1:41.0 | to New York to find an invisible woman. |
| 1:45.1 | She was invisible and she was also dead, long dead, so not an easy search. |
| 1:50.5 | But I have a rule about doing historical research, which is that you should always go to the scene of the crime, even if it wasn't a crime. |
... |
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