The History of Blue Jeans

Kelly  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.

In 1854, Jacob Youphes, a 23 year old Jewish tailor, emigrated from Riga in what is now Latvia to New York City, where he changed his name to Jacob Davis. For the next 14 years, Davis moved around the United States and Western Canada in search of work, finally landing in Reno, Nevada, in 1868. By this point, Davis had married a German immigrant named Annie, and they had started a family, which would eventually include six kids. In Reno, Davis invested all his money in a brewery. When that venture failed, he returned to what he knew best, tailoring, opening a shop on Virginia Avenue. Davis didn't just make clothing. He also sewed things like tents, horse blankets and wagon covers, using a sturdy off white cotton duck cloth that he sourced from a San Francisco wholesaler, Levi Strauss and Company. As Davis later told the story, one day a frustrated customer came to him with a special request, paying him $3 ,a princely sum at the time, to make a pair of pants as strong as possible for her husband, who kept wearing through his pants quickly. While sewing the pants out of duck cloth, Davis had a flash of inspiration, realizing that the copper rivets from his horse blankets might strengthen the pants; and he attached them at strain points, like the pockets and the bottom of the button fly. His genius idea worked and the pants were an instant success. Davis sold 200 pairs within 18 months, and he started using rivets on other fabrics too, especially denim. Davis knew he needed to patent his innovation, but patent applications cost money, a lot of money. And after the failure of the brewery, his wife was leery of another costly gamble. But Davis knew his idea had merit. So he reached out to his fabric wholesaler, Levi Strauss, explaining his rivet design and offering a proposal. If Strauss would pay the $68 patent fee, the equivalent of over $1,500 today, Davis would share with him the rights to make and sell, "all such clothing riveted according to the patent." At the time, Strauss, a German Jewish immigrant, was running the West Coast branch of his family's thriving dry goods business. He imported items like clothing and purses from his brothers in New York, selling them in San Francisco. Strauss and Davis made a deal, and on May 20, 1873, they jointly received US patent number 139,121, for, "improvement in fastening pocket openings." Although the Levi Strauss Company still celebrates May 20, 1873, as the birthday of blue jeans, they didn't actually call them jeans back then. Instead, they called their product waist overalls. Davis moved his family to San Francisco at Strauss's invitation, and oversaw the manufacturing process, which quickly outgrew their homes, and they set up a factory in San Francisco. Those original waist overalls, then called X X, after the XX blue denim sourced from the Amokeag Mill in New Hampshire, from which they were sewn, eventually became known as the 501. The basic design, cut, and fit of the pants wasn't revolutionary, but the addition of the rivets was. The 501s had four pockets, two main front pockets, one pocket in the back, and the tiny little front pocket designed to hold a pocket watch. It wasn't until 1901 that the second back pocket was added. From the beginning, Levis included arcuate stitching on the back pocket, the familiar bow design. It's been there ever since, although during World War II, the bow was painted on to conserve thread for the war effort. In 1890, their rivet design patent entered the public domain, and other companies began production of riveted pants. But the added competition doesn't seem to have hurt Levi Strauss and Company, which today has a net worth of around $7 billion. During the 1930s, as fascination with the Old West grew, Americans, or at least those who could afford, it became enamored with a new vacation destination, the dude ranch. The 25,000 families a year who visited dude ranches wanted to look the part and that meant buying denim pants. To capitalize on this trend, Levi's introduced a new line in 1934, the 701s, also known as Lady Levi's. The following year, a Vogue Magazine article on dude ranches, recommended that women who were headed out to dude ranches should wear their Lady Levi's cuffed with a Stetson hat and a scarf. It was American teens in the 1950s who started to call these pants blue jeans, and they wore them rebelliously, taking their style cues from James Dean, Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. As teenagers opted for sartorial subversiveness, schools responded by banning jeans altogether. Levi's answer was to start an ad campaign, calling jeans "right for school." Today, many students throughout the world regularly wear jeans to school. But jeans can still inspire strong reactions, and not just in schools. In 2021, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un outlawed skinny jeans along with other style choices that show capitalist flair. Despite the occasional controversy that jeans can still stir up and even with a shift toward athleisure in recent years, blue jeans are still wildly popular. Globally, the jeans market is expected to exceed $100 billion by 2025, as new consumers, especially in Asia, embrace the denim pants. Joining me now is historian, writer, and screenwriter, Dr. Carolyn Purnell, author of, "Blue Jeans," part of "The Object Lesson Series."

Hi Carolyn. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  10:02  
Hi, Kelly, thanks for having me.

Kelly  10:03  
I am so excited to talk about blue jeans. So let's start with how did you come to write a book about the history of blue jeans?

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  10:12  
You know, it's actually a good question because my background's in French history, so it's not intuitive. But there are these kinds of two strands that converged at just the right moment. One is that I have been very long interested in this series called, "The Object Lesson Series." It's put out by Bloomsbury and the Atlantic. And there are these brief, wonderful little books that are an introduction to an object. So they have one on stroller and sock and doll. And I knew I wanted to contribute to that series, but never really had something compelling that, you know, really was my topic. And then I had been doing a lot of research into the history of color, and went down a long rabbit hole about the color blue and started learning a ton about indigo and then thought, "Oh, my gosh, here it is, I can write about blue jeans, because a) they don't have a book on it, and what is more commonplace an object than blue jeans?" And so it really was just like Kismet, it felt like at the at that moment, and I pitched it, and they liked it. And I guess I wrote a book about it. So that's how I got into it. And it really opened up a whole world to me that I hadn't thought about. And I'm so grateful, I learned so much along the way.

Kelly  11:22  
Could you talk a little bit about this series and what it's like to write this format of book. It's a very particular format. It's a lot shorter than a lot of other books, which makes it a really fun read. But I imagine that makes it a little challenging to write and to figure out what all to include.

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  11:38  
It is. And I will say that the series editors are very open minded about approach. And so every object lessons book feels kind of different. Some have more of a memoir component than others. Some have more of a literary focus. Some have a historical focus, so they kind of run the gamut. And one thing that, you know, was really important to me was to have this historical angle, but also to maybe branch out a little bit. So I do mention my own family history, which does intertwine with blue jeans. And I also talk a lot about social theory stuff that I actually taught at University of Chicago in the Self, Culture, and Society section. So it gave me a chance to kind of stretch my legs where I didn't have to be a strict historian, quote, unquote. But it does have its challenges too, because as you say, the books are short, they're about 30,000 words. And so that keeps your focus really tight in a certain way. And it also means you can't go down as many of the research rabbit holes as you can within an academic monograph, which is both good and bad. But I really had to pare back and prune and try to figure out what was most important for me to tell in this story. And thankfully, the editors were great about helping form that along the way, too. But it's a very different exercise than, you know, my first book, which was it came out of my dissertation. So this was really a much more creative exercise.

Kelly  13:05  
So since you started with the color blue, let's start there with the color blue. How do we get from this point where blue as you discuss in the book is, you know, it's an unusual color. It's a difficult color in a lot of ways. It's only for the upper class people with means. And now we get to a point where blue is essentially a neutral, but it's everywhere. It's everybody's favorite color, like how does that transition happen?

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  13:33  
Yeah, so as you mentioned, when colors were primarily derived from natural sources, or natural colorants, meaning rocks, minerals, plants, animals, blue is incredibly rare to harness. You can see it in nature, but it's harder to actually extract as a natural dye. So that meant that blue pigments were extremely valuable. They were often used by the wealthy as a sign of their class, their standing, and that applied to textiles and to painting. But one thing that was instituted is as the system of colonialism grew much greater, indigo cultivation became much more prevalent throughout European colonial systems. And so unfortunately, the popularity of blue or at least the availability of blue came at the expense of a lot of lives and a lot of livelihoods. But one thing that happened was woad, which was the native European source of blue for textiles. It had a few problems, it could produce blue, but it had a low dye content, and it also depleted the soil. And so when Europeans found Indigofera tinctoria, which is the indigo plant, it's a tropical plant, they kind of went nuts for it because it's a much richer blue, it lasts much longer, and it doesn't deplete the soil in the same way, and it was a perfect mate for cotton, which was another growing luxury crop at the time. Cotton can be a bit finicky when it comes to dyeing, but indigo and cotton just really love each other. And so it was kind of a match made in heaven, and they both boomed at the same time. And one of the things that happened is as indigo and cotton both became more readily available, they also became much more accessible in terms of price point. And people were able to suddenly satisfy this centuries long craving they had unmasked for blue. It's no longer the province of the wealthy, so they started dyeing sugar wrappers, and aprons and all kinds of things suddenly became blue. And it was almost just like a blue explosion in the 18th century across Europe. And then it of course, over time, lost its veneer of wealth and prestige, and just kind of became commonplace, as you say. And now, blue goes with everything if you're wearing blue jeans. It's almost like we don't see it anymore. So it's it's a really interesting trajectory.

Kelly  15:52  
And can you talk a little bit about how rather, so it's, it's dangerous, you know, to get to get the indigo, you know, all of that, but it's also rather disgusting. They're using urine to make this color work. I mean, this must have been just a terrible, terrible way to work, a job to have. I assume that people in this needed the work and you know, so but must have been just miserable.

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  16:19  
Yeah, it absolutely would have been. I mean, it's, it's a very difficult, the process for making indigo is pretty complicated. You have to mix it with lots of things, including, as you said, a source of ammonia, which typically was stale urine at the time. It's the most readily available source of it. It took a lot of muscle power, because you would actually have to agitate the dye until it frothed up and the sediment starts settling. And so it smells, you're actually if you're an indigo worker, you might very well be standing in a pool of this stuff, you know, to stir it, to get it to the consistency it needs to be. It would have been a fairly unpleasant process. I will say that, traditionally, because indigo has been cultivated and turned into a dye for 1000s of years, it was a very respected craft, it was very specialized knowledge. But as the colonial system of production ramped up, obviously doing this on a mass scale, it was pretty inhumane, and, you know, terrible for the workers who were involved. And there ended up being a lot of riots and kind of rebellions because of the way that they were treated. So yes, a very messy, very smelly, very, from my perspective, not desirable job, but it yielded, you know, some really beautiful objects, but I think it's important we that we don't forget that bloody messy past as well. 

Kelly  17:44  
So denim or jean, or whatever we want to call it in this early time period exists before blue jeans, as we know them now, before Levi Strauss Company before all of that. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, the importance of that material and the way it's used and why it's important?

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  18:04  
Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, the first kind of, I guess, I'll call it proto denim, but the first proto denim fabric was actually made in a fishing village in India called Dongri. And they use this very robust cotton based textile, you know, for sailing and things like that. When Europeans encountered this fabric in Dongri, they started using it for their own ships and taking it back to Europe. And as the sails would get worn on the sea journey, this was a very robust fabric, so it wouldn't totally disintegrate. So they would actually take the remnants of the torn sails and turn it into trousers for the sailors. And they would have very hearty garments that could withstand the sea salt and the winds and keep them safe, and mostly keep them warm too, because it was very tightly woven. And so they would get back to Europe. And at the time, one of the bigger ports was Genoa, where, you know, a lot of the the international trade was coming in, and other sailors would see these folks coming out of India with these trousers and they wanted them too. They were like, "Oh, those are amazing. Where can I get them?" And so often the fabric was too expensive, or they couldn't procure it, so enterprising Genoese textile makers started making their own kind of knockoff dungaree, as they called it from Dongri. And instead, this time, because it was produced in Genoa, the French called Genoa at the time, Genes. So the fabric came to be known as Genes, or jean in English. So they started making a killing in Genoa producing this jean cloth. And the at the time, the French were the kind of European Center of textiles and they looked over at Genoa and went, "Oh, no, you can't have our trade. So we need to step it up and make our own version." So in Nimes,  they started producing a fabric called serge de Nimes, which got shortened to denim. And essentially, these fab these three fabrics are very close to one another. Dungaree was, I guess, more akin to what we think of as a canvas. But it often didn't come in blue, the blue color characteristically. Jean, there were two dyed threads, so it would have been blue on the inside and the outside. And then the surge de Nimes actually only had one dyed thread, so it's more akin to like modern denim where the outside is blue, and the inside is white. But over time, that kind of faded into kind of an inconsequential bit of history, and everyone just started referring to it all as jean or denim. And as you can see from that history, the reason that the fabric is so important, and the reason it appealed to Levi Strauss when he started making miner pants is largely because of the durability. Also, because as I mentioned, the the production had ramped up of both cotton and indigo. So they were at a reasonably affordable price point by the 1870s when Levi Strauss is sourcing his materials, and it was just kind of the dream team in terms of durability, comfort, it breaks in the cotton gets softer as you wear it. So it's actually more comfortable, even though it keeps you protected. So it really was kind of the ideal fabric by the time blue jeans hit the scene in the 1870s. Although I will say they also weren't really called jeans until much, much later. They were called waist overalls when Levi Strauss and his business partner patented them. 

Kelly  21:25  
One of the things about this really strong material, anyone who sews might know this, it's really hard to sew because it you know, it is so strong and so durable. And you've you mentioned at the top, you had this family connection, could you talk a little bit about in general, the way that jeans have to be sewn, and how that process works. And then, you know, your own personal connection? How what that means for the people who have to run things through sewing machines, and what that actually looks like and feels like.

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  21:58  
Yeah, so denim production, one thing that I learned as I was researching this book that I think I vaguely knew, but I hadn't really thought much about but denim production is fascinating because your jeans are probably more well traveled than you are by the time they get to you. Because often the cotton is sourced in a place like Azerbaijan, and then it goes somewhere else to be processed, maybe Italy is a big production area to get turned into the actual textile, it goes somewhere else to be dyed and then to be cut and then to be sewn and then to be distressed and that there. So it's traveling all across the globe, these different places before it even comes to us. So I will say each stage of production comes with a different kind of experience for the workers. But especially in the sewing that family connection that you mentioned, as I grew up in a small town in northeast Texas named Marshall. And there was a big blue jeans sewing facility here that actually closed shortly before I was born. And as I was researching this book, I learned initially my mother's parents both worked there. My grandmother was a seamstress. She put pockets onto jeans and my grandfather was a mechanic, he serviced all the machines. And they would work there together. And the way that they kind of described it to my mom was you know, there's blue fluff flying everywhere. It's really bad if you're asthmatic. The breathing issues are terrible. It's hot, it's cramped. Especially in Texas in a giant warehouse, it is very humid. But there was also from them no real sense that it should be any other way. This was how they put food on the table. And so I think for me, just actually, I moved back to my hometown during the pandemic, and actually getting to stand in the space where they worked and learning this about my family. And then right as I was writing the book, I was talking to my my dad's mom, and who I had always known as a teacher, and she said, "Oh, yeah, I used to work at the Blue Buckle factory too." And it turns out that she also had been involved in sewing these jeans. And she you know, would talk about the calluses on her fingers. And you know, so it was a very intensive job. And I will say that also looking at now that the scale of denim production is even more massive, industrially speaking, there is a town in China called Xintang, which is where the majority of the world's jeans get dyed, actually. And it's the water is toxic. It's turned blue. It's created tons of problems for the people who live there. Apparently, it's so bad they can't even give away homes there because people know that the land has become so basically invaded by toxic chemicals, they don't want it. But I will also say that one thing I saw in my grandparents on experiences, it also forges a sense of community. And at least for our town, I would say a good half of the town was supported by the presence of this factory. And so there are all of these kinds of interesting social relationships, even if we can step back and look at it as, "Oh my gosh, that's terrible labor practices. And you know, people are developing respiratory diseases and things like that." It also was very important grounding a community economically. And I think, to make to feel that on a personal level was pretty special for me in writing this book.

Kelly  25:20  
One of the things that surprised me in reading this was, you know, you're talking about the environmental impacts is the environmental impacts, not just of all the things we might normally think about, but the distressing of the jeans. I of course, was a kid in the 80s and think about like, "Oh, like acid wash." It's not just that. It's like, even just a typical pair of jeans that you might be buying at the store had been distressed in ways that we probably aren't even thinking about. Could you talk a little bit about that and that process?

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  25:50  
Yeah, it is. So every pair of jeans does go through some kind of distressing process, even if it's just to kind of set the chemicals, the dye for this, because now they use synthetic indigo. So there are all different kinds of layers. I think the things that are most interesting to me, and you can actually Google or YouTube, some of these videos are of workers who actually sit with razors or little kind of like almost like hair clippers, and very quickly, but meticulously put in all of the little rips or scratches or things on jeans. And you know, fuzz is flying everywhere. And they have, you know, they're covered in it, and they have these giant masks on, but they're just, they know the exact proper placement of where customers are going to want those wear signs. And it's interesting, because a lot of those wear signs actually come from historical movements of the body. So certain movements, or, you know, like miners would squat a lot. So they have what's called whiskering that emerges around their pelvis. And so a lot of the things that we think of now just as kind of fashionable, or oh, that's the wear sign of blue jeans, that's where they get holes first, etc. That's actually it comes from the labor history of like the physicality of people in the past that we've just kind of reappropriated and moved down the line and now outsourced in terms of this distressing process. But there are all kinds of, you know, chemicals used or sandpaper used. There's even some implements that have diamonds in them to scratch the jeans a certain way. So there are all kinds of different distressing processes. And I highly recommend I mean, just going down a rabbit hole with those is fascinating because I had no idea that there's literally a person sitting there coming up with no it's not machine it's every single little scrape and scratches is done by hand. So it's really impressive if you think about it.

Kelly  27:41  
You talked about this some in the book, but let's discuss what makes a pair of blue jeans a pair of blue jeans, like the platonic ideal of blue jeans and yeah, thinking about you know, I don't know that I have worn actual denim jeans in a really long time. Like I wear jeggings and they have rivets, they look like jeans. They've got top stitching, and they're blue so there's that, but you know what, how far away from the prototypical denim jean can you get and still call it jeans? What does that look like?

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  28:14  
Yeah, that's one of the things that as I was researching, I found so interesting because there are kind of like deviations on a style level where right before, I was saying like 2020, there was a vogue for something called "invisible jeans," or or at least you know, in trendy fashion sites and invisible jeans were essentially like you keep the seam and remove every other large panel of fabrics. So it's essentially just like little strips of fabric hanging off of your waist. And you know I look at it and I go, "I guess it's kind of a jean, but is it really? It's just a seam at this point." And you know, if you do a search for for blue jeans on a fashion website like ASOS or Shein or something, you're gonna get 1000s of results, many of which, as you mentioned, aren't actually even made of denim so you would get rubber jeans or poly urethane jeans or translucent jeans, some had translucent knees. There are all these different kinds of quote unquote jeans that aren't made of denim. And then you have quote unquote jeans that don't have what I would consider to be the integral part of denim like those invisible jeans. They don't really have legs, or some don't have waist bands. Some are only waist bands. So you could get lots of creative cutouts. And then in terms of the actual fabric, very few people as you mentioned actually even wear raw denim anymore because it is very stiff and very difficult to break in. According to denim connoisseurs, once it does break in, it's incredible, because it's the most foreign fitting wonderful you know shape to your body garment you'll ever own, but it takes a while to get there. Before that it kind of actually is very uncomfortable to sit in or to maneuver in. So most of us are wearing denim that isn't even really denim anymore. It's got some kind of elasticized material inside it. So at what point, I feel like that platonic ideal is still what we all think of when I say blue jean. But yes, we've all developed this kind of conversancy where we can use the term very freely, but it doesn't actually cling to that platonic ideal anymore. I almost feel like it's become a kind of shorthand for the qualities that we assume go with jeans. So comfort, it's a comfortable or casual garment, we can call them jeans. Or if they have one out of maybe five or six criteria, we can call them jeans. But it is interesting to start looking at how easily we use that term, and how often it doesn't actually signify the thing that we think it's signifying.

Kelly  30:46  
Yeah, it kind of goes over the line of hard pant and soft pant at this point. Yeah, it's I like one of my sons, like is totally against hard pants. But you know, if you give them like a soft pant pair of jeans, he might be okay. Yeah.

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  31:00  
Which is funny, because one thing I actually had a conversation with a former professor about this, he said, you know, you talk about jeans being comfortable all the time, I don't actually find them comfortable. And I was like, actually, I think you're right, I just have almost assumed this idea of comfort, because it's become such a talking point around jeans, but they're really not the most comfortable pants that I own. Soft pants are definitely more my go to. So I even think it's interesting in how we formulate our own preconceptions about jeans, I just assumed it's comfy, but it really isn't, you know, that kind of you have to wrestle a little bit after you wash them to get back in them, or at least I do. I'll speak for myself, you know, so I think blue jeans have kind of developed this masterful over time, they've developed what I kind of think of as like a sleight of hand as where they've come to signify so many different things politically, or even in terms of the way we think about them like comfort. But we, we kind of take those ideas as second nature at this point, and we don't investigate them. But really, there's like a much deeper history of how those associations came to be. And blue jeans are kind of sneaky that way. They're they're really rich and deep, but we don't think of them on that deep level. 

Kelly  32:16  
So you talk some about the imagined ideal of the westerner of the hardy stock cowboy kind of you know, idea of that we have in this country that that comes from Hollywood that comes from advertising more than it comes from actuality. And I think stepping outside of jeans, we see that that whole ideal a lot. Right. And you know, Heather Cox Richardson talks a lot about sort of this imagined idealized west in the US. So putting the the jeans into that, I think really sort of made a lot of things click for me that "Oh, right. That's the you know, you can just envision like Ronald Reagan in a pair of jeans." That's a very easy sort of image to bring up. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. And the the way that of course, then that ideal becomes actuality, right? Like cowboys now do wear jeans that that? Yeah, that's what becomes the truth. But it really originates not totally in what's happening, but in what people want to imagine is happening.

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  33:26  
Right. So the historically, the way that that kind of happens is, as I mentioned, Levi Strauss has his miners' pants, those are for the working class, that's primarily their use. And I would say most people in the middle class wouldn't have dreamed of wearing those in the 1870s, 80s, 90s, etcetera. But one thing that happens is in the 1930s, as the Great Depression hits, as economic problems start happening, the jeans companies, which have been doing pretty well up to this point, with just their working class market, they start realizing that the working class can no longer afford to buy new garments. That's not where their money is going to go when there's they're stretched. So they decide very consciously that they have to pivot and if you look at the the Levi's archives or any of the kind of secondary material about Levi's history, this was one of the smartest things that they did, but they start looking to middle class and upper class Americans who are at that point, very steeped in the the Hollywood Western like the Lone Ranger and all of these 1930s, like wonderful myths of western America. And they start trying to sell them this dude ranch fantasy, and in that period, all across America, I think something like 25,000 dude ranches start popping up in like a decade. And there are dude ranch departments in department stores on the East Coast. And there's this whole kind of western look that denim companies really kind of start pitching and advertising very consciously because they need new markets. And so in 1934, Levi's launches Lady Levi's, and they start, you know, I love some of these advertisements. It's like a woman and her husband leaning on a fence, you know, talking to a cowboy, while their son runs around with a little lasso. And it's just kind of this idealized version of what they think farm life looks like, or what the west looks like. Meanwhile, you have people like Dorothea Lange, kind of memorializing what is actually happening in the West, and those people are still wearing their grubby old denim that they've been wearing forever, which miraculously, often is still durable enough to last. And so you kind of get this conflation of the down and out west with this, like glamorous New West. But it is very much a construction. I mean, as you mentioned, cowboys didn't wear jeans, like actual cowboys didn't really wear jeans, they were wool trousers. It was kind of a Hollywood fiction about denim being the wear of cowboys. And then over time, cowboys started wearing denim. My dad's a cattle rancher, when I told him that he just kind of shook his head and clucked. Like disappointed that his denim originally came from Hollywood. But you know, it was very much this conscious fictionalization of the West. And I think this is actually one of the things that I'll see if I can, can articulate this. But I've always wondered how we can get luxury denim that still has rips and tears and you know, can cost $900. And it's, it's already kind of destroyed. And I think it's partly what I was talking about earlier, as you we've subconsciously decided that we can buy this backstory that is in jeans, it's almost like a nostalgia for the work that we associate with blue jeans, but we don't actually want to put in the work. And I feel like that vision of the Old West is kind of the same. It's like this nostalgia for the rough and tumble, but you don't actually want the rough and tumble. And I feel like blue jeans are this garment that perfectly crystallizes that very sepia tone longing without actually having to put in the labor to get the wear and tear that that you're kind of idealizing.

Kelly  37:12  
So speaking of storytelling, you just had a film at Sundance. When people think about what you can do with a PhD in history, they might not think about writing films. So can you talk about that? 

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  37:25  
Absolutely. So as I mentioned, I moved back to east Texas during the pandemic, and my husband is a film director. And we were both really inspired by being in this landscape again, and kind of for me seeing it with adult eyes and being steeped in American iconography versus the reality of what I grew up with. My dad is a rancher, it's not that glamorous a thing. And so we decided I wrote a script. It's a it's a short film about an 80 year old woman who becomes infatuated with the younger married man at the Cowboy Church, which is actually a thing. They, you know, have baptisms and a horse trough, and people wear hats. And you know, it's, it's a rural community church. And in the film, we kind of play with exactly what I'm talking about this, like the tropes of the American West, there's a lot of borrowing from the iconography of the Marlboro Man and Levi's in the film. And I think history is, being a historian really helped me think about not only a fun, fictional story to tell, but kind of how I wanted to tell it. And so we kind of play with like the harsh reality versus this fictionalized West. And I think that's one of the most potent things in the film was just kind of like using what I've learned, as a historian to say something more creative about the past and the present that we live in. And, you know, the juxtaposition of those two, but it was definitely a fun process. I will say that, you know, it's very different from writing history books, because in history books, one thing I've noticed is you get to explain an idea. But in a film, or in a screenplay, you have to illustrate it in a in a visual way. You don't want to be too didactic. So it was a very fun exercise. And we had a great time running around east Texas with a film crew on my parents' lands. And it was it was wonderful, highly recommend.

Kelly  39:21  
Well, your book about blue jeans is delightful. And I learned a ton. Can you tell people how to get a copy?

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  39:28  
Absolutely. It's available on you know, the large conglomerate that is Amazon, but it's also available for order in most small local bookstores. Or you can go to my website, CarolynPurnell.com, and I have links there to different places you can find it and the publisher is Bloomsbury so if you go to their site, it's also available there. 

Kelly  39:48  
Yeah. It makes me I think want to just get that whole series. So 

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  39:52  
Oh my gosh. Yeah. They're incredible. I have read so many of them and there are so many left but my bookshelf is full of them there. It's I cannot recommend this series highly enough. You don't know what you're getting with each book which makes it so special.

Kelly  40:07  
Carolyn, this was such a pleasure. Thank you for joining me.

Dr. Carolyn Purnell  40:11  
Thank you so much for having me

Teddy  40:50  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. You can find the sources used in this episode @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 or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, and review, and tell your friends.

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