Transcript

8.20.26 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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Speaker 1: I will be reading from a special edition of Smithsonian
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Speaker 1: Magazine America at two fifty the Revolutionary Spark. As a reminder,
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Speaker 1: Radio Eye is a reading service intended for people who
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Speaker 1: are blind or have other disabilities that make it difficult
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Speaker 1: to read printed material. Please join me now for the
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Speaker 1: first article titled in the early nineteen hundreds, a young
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Speaker 1: ecologist shot a wolf and watched the life leave its eyes.
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Speaker 1: That changed his position on conservation. Aldo Leopold's writing reconsidered
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Speaker 1: to place the humans in the natural world and challenged
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Speaker 1: people to be less conquerors of the land and more
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Speaker 1: citizens of it. By Ben Goldfarb, one day in the
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Speaker 1: early twentieth century in eastern Arizona, a forester full of
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Speaker 1: trigger itch, as he later wrote, leaned over rimrock Ledge,
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Speaker 1: readied his rifle and shot a wolf. This was hardly unusual.
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Speaker 1: Wolves and other carnivores were a mammalia non grata, persecuted
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Speaker 1: for their perceived crimes against livestock and deer. In those days,
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Speaker 1: we had never heard of passing up a chance to
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Speaker 1: kill a wolf. The forester, although Leopold would recall decades
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Speaker 1: later more surprising was what followed. Remorse Standing over the
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Speaker 1: fading wolf, Leopold watched a fierce green fire die in
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Speaker 1: her eyes. There was something new to me in those eyes,
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Speaker 1: he wrote, an epiphany that would forever change his perspective
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Speaker 1: on nature and our own. America has been graced with
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Speaker 1: plenty of environmental prophets, yet Leopold's work has arguably had
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Speaker 1: the greatest influence on conservation. His fatal fateful wolf encounter
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Speaker 1: epitomizes his perspicacity. He gazed into the eye of an
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Speaker 1: expiring animal and intuited an ecological truth. Born in eighteen
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Speaker 1: eighty seven to a nature loving Iowa family, Leopold graduated
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Speaker 1: in nineteen o nine from the Yale School of Forestry
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Speaker 1: and headed to the Southwest to serve in the U. S.
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Speaker 1: Forest Service, an agency founded just four years earlier. Conservation
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Speaker 1: was newly urgent. Decades of overgrazing by livestock had peeled
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Speaker 1: away an incalculable amount of very fine soil, as Leopold wrote,
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Speaker 1: and wanton hunting and trapping had laid waste to what
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Speaker 1: he called the richest fauna in the world. Automobiles would
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Speaker 1: soon run roughshod over the American countryside, injecting tourists into
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Speaker 1: once roadless landscapes. America was becoming aware of nature's limits
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Speaker 1: and developing institutions to protect it, while nineteenth century writers
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Speaker 1: like Henry David Thureaux were content to observe and celebrate
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Speaker 1: man Leopold was also a scientist who made substantial contributions
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Speaker 1: to fields including forestry, wildlife management, and the discipline we
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Speaker 1: now know as ecology. He turned out journal articles, op eds,
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Speaker 1: and letters with the indefatigability of a printing press. In
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Speaker 1: a seminole nineteen twenty one paper for the Journal of Forestry,
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Speaker 1: for instance, he championed the preservation of the Hila National
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Speaker 1: Forest in its semi virgin state, an idea that led
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Speaker 1: to its designation as the country's first wilderness area in
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Speaker 1: nineteen twenty four. By far, his best loved work is
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Speaker 1: A Sand County Almanac, a posthumously published essay collection that
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Speaker 1: bent the trajectory of environmental thought, particularly through Leopold's idea
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Speaker 1: that humans are mere players on a biotic team encompassing wildlife, vegetation, soil, water,
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Speaker 1: and other natural elements. Today, our interdependence with the natural
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Speaker 1: world is almost a truism. But when Sand County was
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Speaker 1: published in nineteen forty nine, just a few decades after
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Speaker 1: the near extinction of the bison and at the dawn
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Speaker 1: of the atomic revolution in the interstate Highway system, it
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Speaker 1: was radical to aver that Homo sapiens should transition from
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Speaker 1: conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen
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Speaker 1: of it. Buddy Hufficker, Executive director of the Leopold Foundation,
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Speaker 1: compares what Leopold called his land ethic to the Copernican Revolution,
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Speaker 1: which recast the Earth as a component within the solar
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Speaker 1: system rather than the universe's heart. Leopold challenges us to
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Speaker 1: reframe humans from being in the center of everything to
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Speaker 1: being a part of everything. Huffacker said in an interview
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Speaker 1: that mindset would shape developments from nineteen seventy's environmental legislation
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Speaker 1: to the rise of organic agricul Indeed, to revisit Sand
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Speaker 1: County is to be struck by its prescients. Practically every
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Speaker 1: significant strand of modern environmental thought is woven into its essays.
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Speaker 1: Long before biologists proved that many parks were too small
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Speaker 1: to sustain wide ranging animals like grizzly bears, Leopold noticed
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Speaker 1: that species quote, do not seem to thrive as detached
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Speaker 1: islands of population. And though he had long been a
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Speaker 1: proponent of killing predators to bolster huntable game, he described
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Speaker 1: his change of heart in his essay, thinking like a
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Speaker 1: mountain without wolves, he realized deer browsed every edible bush
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Speaker 1: and seedling to nubbns, starving themselves in the process. Biologists
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Speaker 1: have since documented how the disappearance or addition of predators
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Speaker 1: can shift an entire ecosystem. The effects have been measured
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Speaker 1: in seagrass beds, rainforests, and tide pools, catalyzed by animals
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Speaker 1: as diverse as tiger, sharks, jaguars, and sea stars. But
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Speaker 1: Leopold expressed this concept with matchless concision. I now suspect
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Speaker 1: that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear
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Speaker 1: of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal
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Speaker 1: fear of its deer. His views on wildfire also evolved
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Speaker 1: over time. Like most foresters, he once considered it a scourage.
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Speaker 1: Later he recognized it as a force of grassland rejuvenation.
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Speaker 1: That native people deliberately started fires to promote wildlife habitat
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Speaker 1: did not escape his attention. In nineteen thirty five, Leopold,
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Speaker 1: then a professor at the University of Wisconsin, purchased a
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Speaker 1: Sauk County farm. When he broke the news to his wife,
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Speaker 1: Estella and their five children, they imagined this house with
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Speaker 1: geraniums and white flower boxes in the sas the front,
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Speaker 1: recalled Susan Leopold Freeman, his granddaughter in an interview. The
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Speaker 1: reality was bleaker. The main farmhouse had burned down, leaving
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Speaker 1: behind only exhausted soil, ravenous mosquitoes, and a battered chicken coop.
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Speaker 1: None of this daunted the Leopolds. They planted trees, white
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Speaker 1: pines and jackpines, red oaks and red cedars, maples and tamaracks,
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Speaker 1: alongside shrubs, grasses, and wild flowers like violets and trillium.
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Speaker 1: Around fifty thousand pine seedlings went into the sandy earth.
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Speaker 1: Leopold suffered a fatal heart attack in nineteen forty eight
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Speaker 1: at sixty one, while fighting a fire on a neighbor's property.
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Speaker 1: Restoration remained a family passion. In the nineteen nineties, Freeman
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Speaker 1: and her husband Scott purchased an eighteen acre dairy farm
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Speaker 1: along a damaged stream in western Washington and set about
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Speaker 1: recontouring its channel and replanting its flood plane to the
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Speaker 1: delight of beavers, otters, cougars, and salmon. Legions of volunteers
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Speaker 1: aided the recovery, among them the couple's children and grandchildren.
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Speaker 1: When you work on the land and plant trees, it
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Speaker 1: touches something very deep inside people, Freeman said. Though Leopold
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Speaker 1: lamented the effects of human industry, his writing rarely comes
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Speaker 1: across as misanthropic. As Huffaker put it, Leopold casts people
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Speaker 1: as positive actors in the unfolding drama of the world.
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Speaker 1: People possess the capacity to harm, but also to protect,
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Speaker 1: to cherish, and to restore. An ethical relation to nature,
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Speaker 1: Leopold wrote, must emerge from love, respect, and admiration for land,
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Speaker 1: and Leopold had love to spare, even in the end
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Speaker 1: for the wolf he killed. And accompanying this article, did
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Speaker 1: you know the HeLa Wilderness Area At nearly five hundred
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Speaker 1: sixty thousand square miles, the Heilo Wilderness Area was created
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Speaker 1: in June nineteen twenty four. Visitors to the region can
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Speaker 1: find evidence of volcanic activity, rock spires, steep cliffs, among
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Speaker 1: other natural wonders. The Magolan people ancestors of the Pueblo
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Speaker 1: lived in the region before the arrival of Europeans there.
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Speaker 1: Thirteenth century. Dwellings are still visible in the area and
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Speaker 1: also with this article an American conservation Corps. These forward
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Speaker 1: thinking scientists and policy makers changed our approach to earth,
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Speaker 1: water and air. John Wesley Powell Water eighteen seventies to
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Speaker 1: eighteen nineties. After surveying the Colorado River and its tributaries,
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Speaker 1: Powell issued prescient warnings about Western water scarcity. Bernhard Ferno
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Speaker 1: Forestry eighteen eighties to nineteen tens. The country's only trained
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Speaker 1: forester until eighteen ninety one, Ferno drafted the laws that
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Speaker 1: created the U S Forest System. He also founded the
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Speaker 1: first forestry degree program at Cornell University. George Washington Carver
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Speaker 1: Soil eighteen nineties to nineteen forties. The agricultural scientists studied
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Speaker 1: and promoted crucial techniques for replenishing depleted soil, including crop rotation. J. N.
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Speaker 1: Ding Darling Wildlife nineteen thirties to nineteen forties. The influential
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Speaker 1: political cartoonist led efforts to reverse environmental damage and establish
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Speaker 1: the National Wildlife Federation. Rachel Carson Environmental Health nineteen fifties
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Speaker 1: to nineteen sixties. Her book Silent Spring raised awareness of
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Speaker 1: toxic pesticides and helped launch the modern environmental movement. E. O.
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Speaker 1: Wilson Biodiversity nineteen sixties to twenty tens. Ants were his
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Speaker 1: first love, but Wilson expanded his lens to include larger ecosystems.
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Speaker 1: He argued that preserving the diversity of species was crucial
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Speaker 1: for life on Earth. And Finally, Ada Deer Native Lands
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Speaker 1: nineteen seventies to twenty twenties, the first woman to oversee
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Speaker 1: the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she helped native groups gain sovereignty,
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Speaker 1: including the right to restore and manage their own lands. Next,
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Speaker 1: a blip on a telescope and a Colorado parking lot
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Speaker 1: bolstered a space mission that has found thousands of planets
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Speaker 1: and counting. The Kettler Telescope changed how we saw the sky.
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Speaker 1: It's just one of the devices we've sent out beyond
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Speaker 1: the reach of humans to search our solar system. Linda Shiner.
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Speaker 1: On September ninth, nineteen ninety nine, a twenty five year
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Speaker 1: old Harvard graduate student, David Charboneau, made one of the
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Speaker 1: closing century's most consequential astronomical discoveries using a four inch
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Speaker 1: telescope set up inside a plywood shed in a Colorado
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Speaker 1: parking lot. Charboneau and his advisor Tim Brown, who had
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Speaker 1: built the telescope, had been measuring the light from a
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Speaker 1: sun like star with the undramatic designation h D two
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Speaker 1: zero nine four five eight. They hoped to use a
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Speaker 1: technique called photometry measuring a star's light to confirm speculations
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Speaker 1: that h D two zero nine four five eight had
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Speaker 1: an orbiting planet. At the time, NASA was deciding whether
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Speaker 1: to fund the Kepler mission, a space telescope that would
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Speaker 1: use the same technique. Kepler was a long shot because
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Speaker 1: photometry had never before detected a planet orbiting a star
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Speaker 1: outside our solar system. Brown and Charbonneau were about to
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Speaker 1: change a long shot into a sure bet. In nineteen
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Speaker 1: ninety nine, there were very few confirmed exoplanets or planets
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Speaker 1: outside our own solar system, and these were gas giants
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Speaker 1: on the order of Jupiter, not smaller rocky planets like Earth.
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Speaker 1: They had been confirmed using a method known as Doppler spectroscopy,
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Speaker 1: which registered shifts in the color spectrum over time as
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Speaker 1: the star was tugged to and fro by orbiting planets.
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Speaker 1: Doppler was useful for finding Jupiter sized planets that were
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Speaker 1: close to their stars, but it couldn't always deliver clear
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Speaker 1: data on smaller planets that were farther from their stars.
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Speaker 1: Astronomers using Doppler spectroscopy had noticed something unusual happening around
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Speaker 1: h D two zero nine four five eight, about one
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Speaker 1: hundred and fifty light years from Earth, but the wobbles
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Speaker 1: in the color spectrum could have had another cause, such
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Speaker 1: as the scar star contracting and expanding. In theory, the
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Speaker 1: photometry method that Charboneaux and Brown used would be able
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Speaker 1: to show more decisively whether a planet was orbiting a
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Speaker 1: far off sun. Many photometric telescopes couldn't register changes in
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Speaker 1: brightness that were smaller than a few percent, but Brown
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Speaker 1: designed his telescope to continuously monitor a change in a
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Speaker 1: star's brightness as small as one percent, the dip a
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Speaker 1: Jupiter sized planet would cause as it passed in front
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Speaker 1: of its star. As Charboneaux and Brown trained their sights
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Speaker 1: on HD two zero nine four five eight, computer software
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Speaker 1: graft the star's brightness, Charboneau saw the predicted one percent dip,
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Speaker 1: the first clear photometric evidence of a planet eclipsing or
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Speaker 1: transiting a star. At first, he felt anxious. Here was
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Speaker 1: a phenomenon that no one had ever seen before. He
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Speaker 1: recently said, you really do, asked yourself, Am I delusional?
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Speaker 1: Have I fooled myself? Is there a problem with the
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Speaker 1: telescope or a problem with the data? There was not.
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Speaker 1: Two months later, another team collected similar photometric data on
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Speaker 1: h D two zero nine four five eight. Some believe
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Speaker 1: that Charbonneau's discovery was the moment that led NASA to
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Speaker 1: greenlight the Kepler Mission, a multi year project that has
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Speaker 1: so far confirmed the existence of more than twenty seven
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Speaker 1: hundred planets orbiting other stars. The data is still being analyzed.
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Speaker 1: The mission's principal investigator, William Bourouki, had been pushing for
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Speaker 1: the use of photometry for years. He believed that measuring
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Speaker 1: a planet's transit across its sun was the best way
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Speaker 1: to identify smaller, rocky, potentially habitable worlds outside our Solar system,
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Speaker 1: which was one of Kepler's main goals. I was sure
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Speaker 1: I could develop the transit technique sufficiently to find Earth
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Speaker 1: sized planets and the habitable zone of stars like our Sun,
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Speaker 1: he said in a recent NASA oral history. By nineteen
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Speaker 1: ninety nine, Borouki's team had proved in the lab that
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Speaker 1: the Kepler instrument was precise enough to find a planet
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Speaker 1: the size of Earth. NASA formally approved the mission in
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Speaker 1: two thousand one, and the Kepler Space Telescope launched aboard
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Speaker 1: a Delta two rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, just before
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Speaker 1: eleven p m Local time, on March sixth, two thousand nine.
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Speaker 1: The point nine five meter telescope contained a mosaic of
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Speaker 1: photometric cells that allowed it to detect changes in brightness
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Speaker 1: as tiny as zero point zero zero two percent. It
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Speaker 1: zeroed in on an area of the sky in the
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Speaker 1: Signus Lira constellations, gathering light from the same group of
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Speaker 1: around two hundred thousand stars for four years. The spacecraft
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Speaker 1: was designed to trail behind the Earth as it orbited
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Speaker 1: the Sun, giving it a continuous, unobstructed view of the sky.
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Speaker 1: The mission quickly achieved a thrilling pace of discovery. In
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Speaker 1: twenty ten, the Kepler team announced that the mission had
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Speaker 1: confirmed five new exo planets in its first six weeks.
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Speaker 1: In December twenty eleven, the scientists announced the discovery of
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Speaker 1: the first planet in the habitable zone of its star
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Speaker 1: not too hot or too cold for life to exist.
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Speaker 1: In twenty thirteen, NASA engineers were able to extend the
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Speaker 1: original life span of the equipment, and a second phase
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Speaker 1: of the project, called K two, brought the total number
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Speaker 1: of surveyed stars to half a million. In April twenty fourteen,
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Speaker 1: scientists announced the first Earth sized planet, the kind of
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Speaker 1: rocky world that might be able to support Earth like life.
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Speaker 1: The spacecraft finally ran out of fuel and twenty eighteen,
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Speaker 1: but Kepler had time to detect many wondrous things planet
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Speaker 1: orbiting two stars, like the planet Tatuine in star wars,
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Speaker 1: planetary systems with three, four or five planets, a giant
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Speaker 1: gas planet with the density of a marshmallow. These discoveries
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Speaker 1: vastly broadened the field of exoplanet research, which NASA's test
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Speaker 1: spacecraft has continued, and which the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope
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Speaker 1: will carry on when it goes into orbit within the
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Speaker 1: next year. This new telescope will add to Kepler's findings
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Speaker 1: by detecting the gravitational fields of planets even smaller than
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Speaker 1: Earth and capturing direct images of Jupiter sized planets outside
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Speaker 1: our Solar system. For the first time. By some measures,
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Speaker 1: the Kepler mission was a modest one. Since nineteen fifty eight,
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Speaker 1: NASA has dispatched spacecraft to every planet in the Solar
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Speaker 1: System and measured the faint hum left behind by the
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Speaker 1: Big Bang. The twin Voyager spacecraft, launched in nineteen seventy
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Speaker 1: seven are still speaking to their operators by radio from
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Speaker 1: billions of miles away. Yet the Kepler mission changed the
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Speaker 1: way astronomers understand the whole galaxy. It revealed that planets
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Speaker 1: orbiting around other stars are not rare but commonplace, and
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Speaker 1: that some of them might have the right conditions to
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Speaker 1: support life. Before Kepler, we looked at the sky and
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Speaker 1: saw stars. After Kepler, we see Solar systems and Accompanying
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Speaker 1: this article, the past, present, and Future of space exploration.
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Speaker 1: Mariner two and Mariner four the first functioning spacecraft to
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Speaker 1: reach another planet. Mariner two, the width of about five refrigerators,
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Speaker 1: launched in nineteen sixty two on a mission to Venus,
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Speaker 1: where it found that the planet had a dense Co
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Speaker 1: two atmosphere and a hellishly hot surface above eight hundred degrees.
19:55
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty five, Mariner four transmitted the first close
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Speaker 1: in images of Mars using a TV camera with a
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Speaker 1: magnetic tape recorder. The Pioneers and Voyagers. Pioneer ten launched
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Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy two, crossing the asteroid belt to measure
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Speaker 1: Jupiter's radiation and magnetic fields. In nineteen seventy three, Pioneer
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Speaker 1: eleven headed towards Saturn, where it discovered a new ring
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Speaker 1: and two moons. Voyager one later found vulcanism on Jupiter's
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Speaker 1: moon Io and Voyager two found rings and several moons
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Speaker 1: around both Uranus and Neptune. Galileo Cassini and Juno Galileo
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Speaker 1: spent nineteen ninety five to two thousand three gathering data
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Speaker 1: from Jupiter and its moons, discovering evidence of an underground
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Speaker 1: ocean on Europa with more water than all the oceans
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Speaker 1: on Earth. In two thousand four, Cassini began orbiting Saturn
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Speaker 1: and released the Huygens probe on its moon Titan, where
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Speaker 1: gasoline like liquid rains from the sky. In twenty sixteen,
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Speaker 1: Juno discovered that Jupiter's colorful bands extend to a depth
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Speaker 1: of nineteen hundred miles the Mars rovers. In nineteen ninety seven,
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Speaker 1: Pathfinder deployed a rover named Sojourner, the first wheeled vehicle
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Speaker 1: on the red planet, which used an alpha proton X
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Speaker 1: ray spectrometer to analyze rocks and soil. In two thousand four,
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Speaker 1: larger rovers Spirit and Opportunity arrived, confirming that Mars once
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Speaker 1: had water car sized Curiosity landed in twenty twelve, followed
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Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one by Perseverance, which deployed the helicopter Ingenuity. Collectively,
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Speaker 1: these rovers have traveled more than eighty miles analyzing clues
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Speaker 1: left by ancient lakes and rivers, and finally, Europa Clipper
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Speaker 1: and Dragonfly. The Europa Clipper will arrive at Jupiter's icy
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Speaker 1: moon in twenty thirty to serve for environments that could
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Speaker 1: support life, using tools such as an ice penetrating radar,
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Speaker 1: an ultra violet spectrograph, and high resolution cameras. Dragonfly, scheduled
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Speaker 1: to launch in twenty twenty eight, will send a large
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Speaker 1: rotor craft to Saturn's moon Titan. Equipped with spectrometers, a
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Speaker 1: sample drill, and a camera suite. The craft will fly
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Speaker 1: through the thick atmosphere and alight on frozen dunes and
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Speaker 1: other lunar terrain. Next Born in eighteen ten, Margaret Buller
22:34
Speaker 1: was labeled a child prodigy. She later used her intellect
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Speaker 1: to ask important questions about women's role in America. Her
22:43
Speaker 1: writing posed the novel premise what does it Mean to
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Speaker 1: Be a Woman? Her early death meant she never saw
22:50
Speaker 1: the movement she inspired by Megan Marshall, the New England
22:56
Speaker 1: writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David The row our
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Speaker 1: household names today credited with originating the American ideal. Emerson
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Speaker 1: termed self reliance. Less remembered is their friend Margaret Fuller,
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Speaker 1: who was every bit their intellectual equal. Yet of the three,
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Speaker 1: Fuller is the easiest to imagine in contemporary America. Her
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Speaker 1: breakthroughs in journalism, social reform, and female self determination have
23:24
Speaker 1: become part of the fabric of modern life. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
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Speaker 1: in eighteen ten, Fuller was the first child of an
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Speaker 1: ambitious lawyer politician who experimented with offering a boy's college
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Speaker 1: preparatory curriculum to his very bright daughter. She read fluently
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Speaker 1: at age four, translated Latin at six, and excelled in
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Speaker 1: oral argument and persuasive writing, earning a reputation as a prodigy.
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Speaker 1: By fifteen. She was determined on distinction. She wrote to
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Speaker 1: a teacher, but how although Fuller's capabilities matched those of
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Speaker 1: highly educated men, she couldn't attend college or enter a profession.
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Speaker 1: Her close friend, James Freeman Clark wondered in his journal,
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Speaker 1: why was she a woman? Fuller pondered the question too,
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Speaker 1: what did it mean to be a woman? Or, as
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Speaker 1: she asked a group of Boston women during one of
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Speaker 1: her famous weekly conversation circles, what were we born to do?
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Speaker 1: How shall we do it? By then, she'd joined the
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Speaker 1: group of spiritual reformers known as Transcendentalists. The men in
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Speaker 1: the group honored Fuller by making her the first editor
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Speaker 1: of their influential journal, The Dial. Fuller shaped its contents,
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Speaker 1: favoring literature, the arts and matters of the spirit over
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Speaker 1: theological dispute. She introduced her own vision of the exemplary
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Speaker 1: individual in a July eighteen forty three essay titled The
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Speaker 1: Great Lawsuit, Man Versus Men, Women versus Women. In the essay,
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Speaker 1: Fuller drew on her experience of exclusion from higher education
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Speaker 1: and the professions while being labeled unfeminine for her superior intelligence.
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Speaker 1: She argued that the great radical dualism of male and
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Speaker 1: female was false. There is no holy masculine man, no
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Speaker 1: purely feminine woman. All must be permitted to realize their
25:23
Speaker 1: unique capabilities to the utmost, she concluded, in order to
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Speaker 1: achieve fullness of being. The month her dial essay appeared,
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Speaker 1: Fuller was traveling through Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin to gather
25:36
Speaker 1: material for her first book, Summer on the Lakes in
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Speaker 1: eighteen forty three. In this eye witness account of America's
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Speaker 1: fast developing West, Fuller sympathized with overworked pioneer wives while
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Speaker 1: deploring the treatment of Native Americans, the region's rightful lords,
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Speaker 1: and the destruction of old growth forests. She attended a
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Speaker 1: gathering of Chippewa and Ottawa tribes at Mackinac Island, conversing
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Speaker 1: with the Native women in sign language and joining them
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Speaker 1: and pounding their breakfast corn meal. She wandered the prairies
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Speaker 1: and rode the rapids to offer vivid natural descriptions and
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Speaker 1: raise her reader's environmental awareness. Thereau praised her rich extempore writing,
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Speaker 1: talking with pen in hand, an approach he went on
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Speaker 1: to take in his own books, which were yet to come.
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Speaker 1: When the new York City newspaperman Horace Greeley urged Fuller
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Speaker 1: to expand The Great Lawsuit into a book. The result,
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Speaker 1: Women in the Nineteenth Century, sold out its first printing
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Speaker 1: in a week. The book included accounts of female inmates
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Speaker 1: at sing Sing Prison, many of them jailed for prostitution.
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Speaker 1: Fuller considered them women like myself, save that they are
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Speaker 1: victims of wrong and misfortune. Her book exhorted men to
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Speaker 1: remove arbitrary barriers and allow women to pursue any profession
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Speaker 1: they wished, from scholar to sea captain. She recalled watching
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Speaker 1: young girls happily using carpentry tools. Where these tastes are indulged,
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Speaker 1: cheerfulness and good humor are promoted. Where they are forbidden,
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Speaker 1: because such things are not proper for girls, they grow
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Speaker 1: sullen and mischievous. After Greeley hired her as a front
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Speaker 1: page calumnist for his New York Tribune, Fuller published more
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Speaker 1: than two hundred articles, cultural reviews, and features on the
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Speaker 1: city's asylums, as well as editorials that opposed the death
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Speaker 1: penalty and supported black voting rights and Irish emigration. In
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Speaker 1: eighteen forty six, she sailed to Europe as the Tribune's
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Speaker 1: foreign correspondent. There, she covered the European revolutions of eighteen
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Speaker 1: forty eight and directed a hospital for the wounded in Rome.
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Speaker 1: In eighteen fifty she sailed back to the United States,
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Speaker 1: but died in a shipwreck. She was forty years old.
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Speaker 1: This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your
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Speaker 1: reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and
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Speaker 1: have a great day.