Florence Price & the Black Chicago Renaissance

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. According to her own papers, Florence Beatrice Smith was born in 1888, although many sources state her birth year as 1887. Whichever year it was, she was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her father, James, was the only African American dentist in the city, and his clients included even the governor of the state. Her mother, also named Florence, was a concert pianist and music teacher who started young Florence on piano lessons at the age of three. In 1903, the senior Florence Smith enrolled her daughter in the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, renting her an apartment with a maid, and listing her daughter's place of birth as Mexico. Although her mother's choices allowed the light skinned Florence to pass while in music school, where she graduated in 1906 with a double major in organ performance and piano pedagogy, after graduation, she chose to teach at historically Black colleges, opting for a role as a race woman. In 1912, back in Little Rock, Florence married attorney Thomas J. Price. As racial violence grew more pronounced in Arkansas, Thomas, Florence, and their children moved to Chicago in the late 1920s, joining the Great Migration. Florence Price had family ties in Chicago. Her maternal aunt, Olive and uncle in law, prominent attorney John Gray Lucas, had already migrated to Chicago, and she'd been on long visits to them before. In Chicago, Price became part of a Black Renaissance. Nora Holt, the first African American to earn a master's degree in music in 1918, with a master's thesis titled, "Rhapsody on Negro Themes," was the first music critic of the Chicago Defender, the first Black newspaper, with a circulation over 100,000. In her columns, Holt wrote about the Black classical music scene, and in 1919, she founded the National Association of Negro Musicians at her brownstone at 4405 South Prairie Avenue on the city's south side. The organization, which still exists today, describes itself as, "this country's oldest organization dedicated to the preservation, encouragement, and advocacy of all genres of the music of Black Americans." Price joined this exciting scene, studying composition and orchestration at various schools in the city, including the Chicago Musical College. In 1928, she published four piano pieces. Two years later, at the 12th annual convention of the National Association of Negro Musicians, pianist and composer Margaret Bonds performed Price's "Fantasie Negra No. 1," which was well received. When Price divorced in 1931, she briefly moved in with Estelle Bonds, a church musician and member of the National. National Association of Negro Musicians. Estelle Bonds was also the mother of Margaret Bonds, whom Price was teaching. To make ends meet, Price also played organ for silent film screenings. In 1932, the Rodman Wanamaker Music Contest issued a call for compositions by African American composers. Price, who was recovering from a broken foot at the time, composed her first full symphony in E minor, for which she won first prize and $500. Bonds, for her part, at just 19 years old, won first prize in the song category with a piece called "Sea Ghosts." Maude Roberts George, who succeeded Nora Holt at the Chicago Defender, and was later one of the presidents of the National Association of Negro Musicians, was quick to highlight these achievements in her columns. She also wrote about Bonds' recitals at Northwestern University, where Bonds earned a Bachelor of Music in 1933 and a Master of Music in 1934, with degrees in piano and composition. As Chicago planned for the Century of Progress World's Fair, which opened In May of 1933, women like Maude Roberts George, Estelle Bonds, and Anita Patti Brown, were determined that African Americans would not be rendered invisible as they had been in the 1893 World's Fair, also in Chicago. One way they achieved that was by planning, and in George's case, underwriting the "Negro in Music" at the Chicago World's Fair Century of Progress Exposition. Thus it was that on the night of June 15, 1933, in Chicago's Auditorium Theater, the all white, all male Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed Price's award winning "Symphony No.1 in E Minor," the first institution of its caliber to bring the work of a Black woman composer into its repertoire. The evening, which also included Negro spirituals, two pieces by Black British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor, and a performance by Margaret Bonds, was sponsored by Maude Roberts George, then president of the Chicago Music Association, a member organization of the Chicago Friends of Music. She paid $250 for the event to occur. Of Price's symphony, Eugene Stinson in the Chicago Daily News wrote, "It is worthy of a place in the regular symphonic repertoire." Price wrote three more symphonies, four concertos, and many more orchestral, choral, chamber and solo works. During her lifetime, her pieces were performed by the Women's Symphony Orchestra of Chicago and the Works Progress Administration Orchestra of Detroit. On June 3, 1953, Florence Price died of a stroke in Chicago at the age of 66. She is buried in Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois. Sadly, after her death, her compositions were largely neglected, and some pieces were lost. In 2009, a couple who were preparing to renovate a previously abandoned home in Saint Anne, Illinois, found a collection of Price's manuscripts, papers, and previously unpublished compositions. It turns out that the house had once been her summer home. That discovery and the acquisition by music publisher, G. Schirmer of her complete catalog have led to something of a well deserved Florence Price renaissance in symphonic performance in recent years. Joining me now to discuss Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Nora Holt, Maude Roberts George, and the Chicago Black Classical Music Scene of the early 20th century, is musicologist and concert pianist, Dr. Samantha Ege, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton and author of, "South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene." First though, here is Dr. Samantha Ege performing Nora Holt's "Negro Dance," composed in 1921. This is Holt's only surviving piece for solo piano. 

Hi, Samantha, thanks so much for joining me today. 

Dr. Samantha Ege  12:48  
Thank you for this invitation.

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:51  
 Yes, I am just thrilled to be speaking to you about these women. I want to start by asking a little bit about how you decided to write this book. I know you're a Florence Price scholar and performer, and I wanted to understand a little bit about why you decided to write about this collection of women, all of these really important women, instead of writing a Florence Price biography, let's say.

Dr. Samantha Ege  13:17  
Well, I've been drawn to Florence Price's story for pretty much all of my adult life. As an undergraduate exchange student at McGill, I learned about her for the first time, and I was just so captivated by the knowledge that Black women had a history in classical music and being a woman of African descent that was so incredibly empowering. And as I you know, later down the line, started doing research on Florence Price at her archives at the University of Arkansas, but also at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago, I realized that actually the story was more Chicago, and the story was this incredible network, because in classical music, we learn about, you know, the Baroque Period, the Classical Period, the Romantic Period, then 20th century music is this kind of big, kind of amorphous area. And Florence Price fits into that, but she kind of doesn't, because it's not specific enough. We need to know where she was, what her network, network was, and what comes out of that is this awareness of the Black Chicago Renaissance, that as a classical composer, she was really at the forefront of, and so I knew that that was a story that needed to be told. And, you know, there was enough information through primary sources and secondary sources telling me that there really is a story to tell around this network, this sisterhood of the South Side impresarios. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:46  
Could you talk a little bit about what those sources are? And of course, in some places, we have incomplete sources, right? There are places, as you talk about in the book, where there are just silences in the archives. Where are the places you are able to uncover, and what, what are the things that you are not able to uncover? 

Dr. Samantha Ege  15:05  
Well, so much of Florence Price's story, especially when her career really takes off, you know, after 1932, is documented in the Chicago Defender. And so when you look at these articles, and then you look at who's writing the articles, you have names like Maude Roberts George, who's the president of the National Association of Negro Musicians, president of the Chicago Music Association, which Florence Price is a part of. And then when you look into the minutes and the the notes and the archives of these organizations, you see many more names. And so this is, you know, really affirming this sense of community. And it's really notable how women are really prominent, you know, in all levels of leadership and community building there. And so those are the kinds of primary sources that really fueled this investigation. But then there are the secondary sources of the late musicologist Rae Linda Brown, whose Florence Price biography was published, unfortunately after Dr. Brown's passing. There's also the research of the late Helen Walker Hill. And so these musicologists are doing so much, or were doing so much of the foundational work to let us know that Florence Price even existed. And so for me, I really saw my work as sort of the sequel to their efforts. We know that Florence Price existed. What more is there to the story? 

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:31  
You mentioned that this is really a Chicago story, which is exciting to me as a Chicagoan. Could you talk a little bit about that, the centrality of Chicago itself? It's a character in and of itself in this story that you're telling.

Dr. Samantha Ege  16:46  
Yes, I mean, I'm aware of the fact that, as you can hear, I'm not from Chicago, I'm not from the United States, and so I'm very aware of my outsider position. But in a way that mirrors Florence Price's outsider position. You know, she found such incredible opportunities in this city. And as someone you know myself, I have lived in Singapore, I have lived in Kuwait, I've lived in Canada, and so I know what it means to reinvent yourself in a new location. So I could definitely relate to that. And I think what is striking as well is Chicago's very segregated geography, because that's a kind of dynamic that we tend to associate more with the South, and especially what Florence Price was leaving as a native of Little Rock, Arkansas. So she goes from one relatively segregated geography to another, which actually seems more heightened in its segregation. And then there's the question of, well, what happens when she arrives? And what's really interesting is when you compare Chicago's Renaissance to the Harlem Renaissance, the fact that Chicago has this concentrated segregation produces a sense of self reliance in the Black population that is very different to the Harlem Renaissance, where you have a lot more sort of white patronage and more sort of interracial dynamics, whether in the form of exploitation or, you know, genuine collaboration. But there's just a different kind of makeup there. But Chicago has this self reliance that is born out of this very specific geography. And one of the eye opening things for me was to realize that when you trace classical music in Chicago and you trace the fact that Nora Holt, who's one of the South Side impresarios, is using the term Chicago Renaissance towards the end of the 1910s what you find is that the Black Chicago Renaissance actually predates the Harlem Renaissance.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:45  
I just have to be a proud Chicagoan and say, "Well, of course." So you just mentioned, you've mentioned a couple times this term impresario, which you have in the title as well. Could you talk a little bit about that? Unpack what that means in the context of your book, what what you're using that term to refer to?

Dr. Samantha Ege  19:06  
Yes, so the impresario is this figure throughout especially European history and the performing arts, the person that works behind the scenes that sorts out the contracts, that gets the person onto the stage. And, you know, does all of that very much behind the scenes work. But it's, it's definitely a loaded term, a gendered term, kind of associated with European men. I kind of imagine a European man with a really thin mustache, that's what I and a top hat. That's the the in my mind, that's the quintessential image of the impresario. But I wanted to, you know, think about these women along such definitions, because that was exactly what they were doing, minus the mustache and the top hat. But, you know, they were organizing contracts. They were creating their own spaces, and really had this, you know, DIY approach to ensure that Black musicians, and especially Black women, would have a place in classical music. And you know, we cannot take their work lightly when we think of the fact that that advocacy and that kind of activism led to Florence Price becoming the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major national orchestra. I think on the surface, it's a story that is kind of attributed to the benevolence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but actually, that is the story of Black women's advocacy, and I really, really wanted to make that clear in the book.

Kelly Therese Pollock  20:37  
Yeah, can you unpack that a little bit? You talk in the book some about showing them as actors in their own story, taking the the role that these Black women are playing, and and not just seeing how they get to be on stage, but, you know, put themselves forward on the stage. So can you talk a little bit about that story, how it is that these impresarios, these Black women are are able to put themselves forward, to put other Black women, like Florence Price forward in, for instance, this 1933 World's Fair to have this chance to showcase their music?

Dr. Samantha Ege  21:15  
Yes. Well, I mean, let's start with the Black press. So in 1917, Nora Holt becomes the first music critic for the Chicago Defender. And what's really significant is that she is writing about classical music, because I'm sure we're well aware that Chicago has this history of blues and jazz and all of these genres that are far more mainstream. So it's really significant that she chooses to write about Black classical musicians, because what she can then do in these news columns is basically, you know, be a hype woman, you know, let people know, "These are the names that you need to be looking out for." So she's documenting, and, you know, she creates this, this legacy, really, of documenting Black classical achievement in the press, which, you know, hasn't necessarily been done to that extent before. The Chicago Defender is, at this time, you know, the widest read Black periodical in the whole of the United States. So she is literally putting Black classical Chicago on the map through this work, so that by the time Florence Price arrives in Chicago, that kind of groundwork for documenting, you know, chronicling, celebrating Black classical achievement is already in place. On top of that, in 1918, Nora Holt begins to explore ideas for National Music Association for Black classical musicians, which then becomes founded in 1919, as the National Association of Negro Musicians. And so instead of having, you know, these small pockets of Black classical activity, there's now this consolidation of efforts. People know who's who. They know who the top violinists are, who the accompanists are, who the journalists and the critics are. So there's, you know, this growing network, and then on top of that, there's the church, as you know, yes, as a place of worship, but also as a venue, as a training ground, so that when you've got these new musicians emerging, they are able to practice and hone their skills within the church, hone their skills within the community, so that the leap from doing that to the Auditorium Theater is not such a huge one. So it's all about you know this groundwork that has been laid, so that when you know, when you sort of trace it through that trajectory, that Florence Price could achieve what she did, doesn't seem so out of the blue, because decades, you know, even stretching back to the late 19th century, Black women in particular, were always looking for ways to share their talents, and they knew that this could not be you know, solitary endeavor. Community was so important. And so I answer in that way, just to show that the depth of work that was behind Florence Price's, achievements, Margaret Bonds, is another person that I talk about as well, so it gives you an idea of just exactly, you know, the the rich activity that's going on behind the scenes.

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:22  
Yeah, and it may be obvious, but perhaps we should pull this out a little bit, that people like Nora Holt and Maude George, that these are society women, right? That that they are, of course, wealthy or, well to do women, and even the the women who themselves are the the performers, people like Florence Price, you know, they're they're coming from a, at least a comfortable background. And so you talk about this in the the book as well, that, of course, these are people with certainly, they're facing all sorts of challenges. They're facing racism, they're facing lots of problems, but they do have some advantages that other Black musicians or potential musicians may not have had. Wonder if you could tease that out a little bit, all the potential classical musicians, classical composers who could have been, what else we may be missing in the annals of history because of people who just were, you know, forced to make ends meet.

Dr. Samantha Ege  25:28  
I absolutely wanted to approach this with a specific understanding of who these women were, because I think that to suggest that, you know, Florence Price, you know, it was kind of any other Black woman is to sort of misrepresent the nuances, you know, is to misrepresent circumstances of class, circumstances of colorism and access, and what it means to be the descendant of several generations of free men and women. And so I wanted to get into the messiness of that. And so I do acknowledge these women as the term that I use is a historical term called race women. And this stems from an ideology that WEB DuBois held around the Talented 10th. So this was the idea that the top 10% of the African American population would be the leaders of the race, and they would set an example to the wider, sort of uneducated masses, and would sort of be that bridge between Black and white, which is very aspirational, but it's also very problematic. It's very patronizing as well. And so I didn't want to shy away from the fact that these ideologies, you know, birthed this generation of women. They perpetuated these ideologies as well, but they also challenged them. You know, it's, it's not clear cut, and I think that's really important to to be able to celebrate, but not sort of venerate, as if they were beyond any sort of critique. Because Florence Price, had she been born in, you know, where I'm from, in the UK, it's unlikely that she would have been recognized as a woman of African descent, because we have a different kind of racial language. And again, I think being an outsider, to to the US as a non American, made me think about, I guess, the the the way that race changes. It can change depend on the geography that you're in. And as someone you know, Florence Price was racially ambiguous. Nora Holt was racially ambiguous. There's really, I find it very amusing this story about how she, her fourth husband dies, and she, you know, decides to reinvent herself in Paris, and she dyes her hair blonde and pretends that she's this exotic Creole woman, and she's not. But that's how she's received over there, because she knows that she can play with race. Race is not a fixed category. On the one hand, it is and it dictates our lives, but on the other hand, it's fiction. And so she's playing with that. And so I wanted to, you know, explore the fact that this is a particular class of women who have particular advantages, but also, as we see by the end of the book, those advantages are no guarantee, you know, for a stable life. And what's also really interesting is the way that you know the wealth isn't always there, but the perception, the perception of wealth and appearances are there. And so it shows just how fragile actually, this ecosystem is as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:41  
One of the ways that race is important is the way that they are using race in their music, that they're using spirituals in their music, that they're incorporating those, that people like Florence Price and Margaret Bonds are using those in their compositions. Could you talk some about that?

Dr. Samantha Ege  29:02  
It's really interesting to hear, as well, as you know, to write about and tell the story of but to hear the sonic worlds that these women were creating. Because at the turn of the century, there is this ongoing discussion about, what is American music? And Dvorak, in the late 19th century, says, you know, it's the music of basically, to paraphrase, people of African descent, it's the music of American soil. You know, that is real American music. But you know, with, you know, in a society where blackface minstrelsy is the most popular form of entertainment, to absorb, or the idea of absorbing Black folk music into the classical music genre is blasphemous to some. And so Florence Price and her generation, which actually even the generation proceeding, including Harry T. Burleigh and also my fellow countryman, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, over in England, you know that this generation is exploring the ways in which Black folk music can be a part of a national musical, classical music identity, just in the same way that, you know, Brahms explores his Hungarian dances. And you know, it's so normalized in old world Europe. What is really interesting, though, is what seems like quite an overt kind of steering away from jazz and the blues. And that's where the issues of class come in, because they are seen as, you know, the popular music, music for the masses, music that might undermine the, you know, the ideology of racial uplift, because this is a sort of lowly kind of music, or not as intellectual. And so this is, this is the messiness that is, you know, that I love to write about, because it just reveals more of our complexity as human beings. So with with Florence Price and her generation, you do hear, you know, this very strict sort of loyalty to the spirituals. But then with Margaret Bonds' generation, you can hear that she's playing with jazz, and she's playing with the blues and embracing, you know, a more modern vernacular. And I think that's representative of, you know, the shift across generations. Margaret Bonds said, you know, when I basically, when I was studying Florence Price said, "You can't write orchestral music." And Margaret Bonds then proceeded to do that and prove her wrong. And you know, that kind of represents something that's very familiar to us, where the next generation will take things further and kind of prove the prior generation wrong, you know. So there is a shift that happens, and I think that's also part of the the shift towards, you know, what we know as the civil rights movement, where there is a sort of new lease of energy into the ongoing activism.

Kelly Therese Pollock  32:01  
So you, of course, don't just study these, these musicians, especially Florence Price, but you play them as well. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what it means, what you get out of this music as a performer, how that helps inform your writing, about these pieces, you know what that interplay looks like for you.

Dr. Samantha Ege  32:26  
When I'm playing the music of Florence Price or Nora Holt or Helen Hagen or Margare Bonds, what I'm absorbing is a part of their language and a part of who they were that will never come to me through print. It will never come to me through reading their interviews or what someone else has written about their life. I hear them in such a different way, and it becomes a conversation as well, because I'm thinking, you know, as I'm reading the handwritten manuscripts, did they mean that harmony? Did they mean this or, "Oh, that's really unexpected. Where is that going?" And they tell me, they tell me, as we work together through through the the experience of learning the music and preparing it for performance. And there, I know that in the book, I don't elaborate too much on the performance side, but it creates a sense of intimacy, which I think does come through in the book, because I have the experience of, you know, sometimes I play this music in places where these women were. So I can give you the example of Helen Hagan's Piano Concerto, which I recorded on my third album, "Black Renaissance Woman." And Helen Hagen was the first Black woman to graduate from the Yale School of Music, and she wrote this piece as a student there. And after my recording came out, a few months later, I received an email from the Yale School of Music asking if I wanted to play her piano concerto. And I found myself sitting on the very same stage that Helen Hagen had sat on and performed in that space, and it was just and it was exactly 110 years after she did that. And so, you know, some of these things don't fully feel like coincidence. I feel like these women are rewarding me for putting the time in to learn, learning their music and inviting me into these spaces. Just recently, I performed at the Palmer House Hilton, and that's where Margaret Bonds used to play as well. And at one point I was playing the voice of Margaret Bonds in that space, you know. And it's just something about performance unlocks something that is kind of difficult to intellectualize. And I think that's a good thing, because I don't think we need to intellectualize everything. I think we can just feel an experience and just be grateful for the fact that these women were alive, and how they bring me into their lives, and it's very exciting.

Kelly Therese Pollock  34:54  
And we don't have all of their music, right? We have some of the pieces that they've written famously. Of course, some of Florence Price's music was discovered long after she had died. Could you talk about that? And I think that speaks some to sort of the people determining who is important and who's not and whose work gets saved and whose doesn't.

Dr. Samantha Ege  35:21  
Yes. I mean, there's this sense in which, you know, people say, "If these composers were good, we would have heard about them." Well, if you are a woman of African descent, coming of age during Jim Crow segregation, it's going to be very difficult for your records to be preserved. And it's not just that as well. There's a whole infrastructure that allows for us to know about the composers from the past, and that in for infrastructure involves money and it involves institutions, and we know that those things you know have a bias towards uplifting white male creatives, and as a result, a lot of voices from people who do not have that identity get lost. And that is no reflection of whether or not they were good. It's a reflection of all of these things that are just so far beyond their control. And so in my book, I use this concept of the unfinished symphonist, so that, yes, we know about Florence Price, and that's really, truly wonderful. But what she should make us think is not "Wow, she was the first Black woman. Who else was out there?" That's that's the question, you know, and it's very difficult to tell a history of people that we don't know, but Florence Price should really be a sort of an opening, not, you know, "Oh, we have our Black woman representation. Let's close that door." Actually, there's so much possibility, and I think as historians, we should spend more time with that, the possibility and be imaginative. You know, because Florence Price was the first to achieve that level of prestige, but there's no way we can possibly believe she was the first Black woman to write a symphony or to be capable of writing one.

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:14  
So you end your book in a slightly unusual format. It's an open letter to Mrs. Maude Roberts George. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why you chose that format, what you were hoping to do with that, and sort of reflect on the writing of that.

Dr. Samantha Ege  37:32  
The conclusion was an experiment, because, well, conclusions are quite hard to write, because that's the realization that, oh, this book is done. And so knowing that there was a very difficult aspect of Maude Roberts George's story that I wanted to address, as an experiment, I just decided that I would write it to her, because it was such a sensitive issue that having this sort of objective academic voice, you know, the distance felt like not a comfortable decision. And I guess on a personal level, I thought I'm not sure that I would want someone to treat a sensitive aspect of my life story in such a cold kind of way. And I think as well, because it's quite different from the tone of the rest of the book, which I think has a lot of warmth because of the stories of sisterhood. So there is a shift of tone. And I think it, you know, as I was experimenting, it required a shift of voice. So I wrote the conclusion as an open letter, you know, in the second person talking to Maude Roberts George directly. And then once I'd done that, at one point, I changed it to that more sort of objective voice, and it just didn't make sense to me. And I realized this is, this is the way to end this book. And so I can imagine, you know, some some academics might think that's not how you end an academic book. That's not how you write. But you know, these women I think, deserved something different. I think, I think the the ending deserved and required a different kind of storytelling. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:19  
So this is an incredible book, and I want to encourage listeners to read it. Can you please tell them how they can get a copy? 

Dr. Samantha Ege  39:27  
Thank you. So the book is called "South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene." You can get this book from the University of Illinois Press on their website, and if you go to my website, which is www.SamanthaEge, Ege spelled EGE.com, and you click on books, you can find a discount code for 30%.

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:50  
Can you also tell people about your your other works? You, as I mentioned, are also a performer. So can you tell people how they can listen to your performances and perhaps get your albums?

Dr. Samantha Ege  40:02  
All of my albums are available on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, wherever it is that you listen to and stream music, and you can buy the physical albums, if you like, from the website lorelt, LORELT.co.uk, which is the label on which I have recorded many of these albums. And there are sleeve notes as well. So if you would like more information, you can get the CD. And also, I have a very active YouTube channel with various music videos of music by Florence Price, Margaret, Bonds, Betty Jackson King, all of the women that I mentioned in my book, and also a new piece that I've had commissioned especially for my book called "Bravura" by Camila Cortina Bello.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:46  
Samantha, thank you so much for speaking with me today. I have had the pleasure of hearing the Chicago Symphony Orchestra perform Florence Price, and I am just delighted to have been able to learn more about her and all of the other incredible women you write about, and it was just a pleasure speaking with you. 

Dr. Samantha Ege  41:04  
Thank you. It was really great to talk about this book, and I thank you for your questions and your really engaged understanding of what I was trying to do with this book.

Teddy  41:28  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode of suggestions, please email kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!