Futility Closet

In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell two stories about people who spent years confined in miserably small spaces. North Carolina slave Harriet Jacobs spent seven years hiding in a narrow space under her grandmother's roof, evading her abusive owner, and Irishman Patrick Fowler spent most of World War I hiding in the cabinet of a sympathetic family in German-occupied France. We'll also subdivide Scotland and puzzle over a ballerina's silent reception. Intro: During a printers' strike in 1923, New York newspapers put out a paper with 10 nameplates. Henry Hudson's journal reports an encounter with a mermaid in 1610. Sources for our feature on Harriet Jacobs and Patrick Fowler: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861. Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life, 2004. Jean Fagan Yellin, ed., The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, 2008. Daneen Wardrop, "'I Stuck the Gimlet in and Waited for Evening': Writing and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," Texas Studies in Lite