Bonus: A Humble Origin Story

Kathryn Gehred  00:04

Hey everyone, thanks for listening to our first episode of season four. As you know, I end every episode with the line, "I am as ever your most obedient and humble servant," which also happens to be the title of the podcast. I get a few questions every now and then about this, and I thought it would be fun at the start of the season to remind you about my sign off and the title. My background is in women's history, and for about seven years, I was an editor in the Papers of Martha Washington. My job was finding, transcribing and editing the historical letters of Martha Washington and publishing them into a volume. When a historian explores a collection of letters, they're usually looking for sources connected to the argument that they're making. A lot of times, they'll just go right to the index to find the arguments that they want. Almost nobody just reads a full volume of collected letters. Most of the time, these are tools. They're not something for somebody to just read. But as a documentary editor, I had to read every single letter in its entirety, and I was working on them a lot. I ended up getting a really in depth look into every single part of these letters, including how they addressed people and how they signed off. And one of the things that I noticed was the way everybody would sign off their letters with your most obedient and humble servant. But when you're actually looking at the letters, I noticed that they actually don't write it all the way out almost ever. People would abbreviate it within an inch of its life this sign off your most obedient and humble servant. So yes, they would use it, but they would write something like y, r, O, B, T, H, B, L, E, or Y, M, O, H, s, they would not write out the entire thing. And there's actually one great letter from one of Thomas Jefferson's granddaughters where she basically like, I don't have time to write the whole thing. And then she signed her name. And so I thought it was relatable that these people who could feel very distant and proper. We're using abbreviations and sort of the way that we do today, in a way that's really relatable. And that's kind of the point I want to make in my podcast, is to take these people from a time that's very different, and bring in what they were like as people in a way that could be relatable and could help us understand them. So I thought the title would be an insight into what the podcast is about, because I'm featured in letters by women, where we read the whole letter. So we're reading the whole signature out, and by looking at the entire letter, we get to know the whole person. So now you know why I am as ever, your most obedient and humble servant.

Kathryn Gehred  02:40

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I'm Kathryn Gehred the creator and host of this podcast. Jeanette Patrick and Jim Ambuske are the executive producers. Hayley Madl is our Graduate Assistant. Special thanks to Virginia Humanities for allowing me to use their recording studio. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend and be sure to rate and review the series in your podcast app. For more great history podcasts, head to R2studios.org. Thanks for listening.