Stuff You Missed in History Class

Grace was an attorney and an investigator who did a lot of work to exonerate people who were wrongly convicted, expose corruption, and, in one particularly dramatic case, solve a murder that police had written off as the victim having run away.

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Lots of foods are named after people, but sometimes the stories of those names are hard to pin down. This episode looks at where Granny Smith apples, nachos, and the Cobb salads get their names.

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This 2018 episode covers one of the United States' first successful Jewish American writers, moving in the New York literary scene of the late 1800s. She also wrote one of the most famous poems of all time, and even if you don't know her name, odds are you know at least some of that work.

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Holly and Tracy talk about the aspects of the stethoscope story that didn't make it into the episode, including the classism related to cleanliness standards that often comes up in writeups about it. Tracy discusses the difficulty in getting a sense of Eunice Newton Foote's personality based on the available documentation of her life.

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In 1856, Foote became the first person to make a connection between the Earth’s temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere, though she’s rarely credited for it. 

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One of the most basic tools of the medical profession is the stethoscope, but it’s a more recent invention than you might suspect. Its invention is credited to French doctor René Laënnec.

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This 2017 episode covers Tudor's clever plan: In cold weather, he would harvest ice for cheap, and then sell it all around the world when it was hot.

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Holly and Tracy talk about the kitties in their lives and Mike's good fortune to have had his meals cooked for him. When they turn to smallpox, discussion covers the inevitable ways in which it informs thinking about the current pandemic.

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Smallpox is a viral disease that has existed for millennia. But it’s now one of only two diseases that’s been eradicated through human activity, and a global plan was enacted to do it.

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From caterer cat to war cat to museum guard, these three cats have their own unique places in history. Rest assured, while all creatures pass on, none of the cats in this episode meet a bad end.

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This 2018 episode covers the famed courtier, explorer, historian, Member of Parliament and soldier. He was part of England's defense against the Spanish armada, as well the Tudor conquest of Ireland, some of which was truly horrifying. According to some people, he is now a ghost.

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Holly and Tracy discuss Jo Nivison Hopper’s complex life story and how frustrating and angering it can be to research biographies like hers. They also talk about the availability of the Kerner Commission report to the public and the reiterative nature of the problems outlined in it.

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Half a century ago, a commission established by President Lyndon Johnson wrote a report that concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal.” The reported listed widespread social programs and reforms to counter the problem, and Johnson refused to accept it. 

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Jo Nivison was an established artist before she married Edward Hopper. But her art career quickly became secondary to Ed's, and their life together, which is often described as a great collaboration, was really far darker than that.

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This 2014 episode covers events from 1921, when coal miners fed up with unfair labor practices and exploitation took up arms against their employers. The resulting conflict lasted five days and has been called the biggest armed uprising on U.S. soil since the Civil War.

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Tracy shares a story of hunting for a Berthe Morisot exhibit and her favorite painting by the artist. She and Holly also talk about scheduling guests and the legendary John Lewis.

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Holly is joined by photographer Andrew Feiler, author of “A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America.” Andrew shares stories of capturing these schools, photographing John Lewis, and the legacy of the Rosenwald schools.

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Morisot primarily worked in oils, watercolors and pastels, and her favorite subjects were the other women in her life, often captured very tenderly in private, domestic moments. Her life is entwined with the Manets, and she was right at the heart of the Impressionist movement.

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This 2019 episode covers a man who's story is tied to SO MANY other notable historic things, including a lot of business with Sir Walter Raleigh. He's really not a household name like many of his contemporaries, even though he was neck-and-neck with them in terms of discoveries.

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Holly and Tracy discuss the many different professional titles that many people in history have and how tricky it can be to select the proper one to use. They then discuss trying to discern when they have enough cultural competence to cover certain topics, particularly when there's a lot of complex context involved.

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Starting in 1755, the French-speaking Acadians were expelled from what’s now the Maritime provinces of Canada and northern Maine, with many of them eventually winding up in Louisiana. But there's much more nuance to the story.

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Torricelli was born in the middle of a heady few decades when the lives and work of people like Galileo and Johannes Kepler were changing humankind’s understanding of the world and the heavens. Sometimes he gets lost in the mix, but he made his own significant contributions to science and mathematics. 

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Back in 2017 with the "Great American Eclipse" everywhere in the news, we walked through some of the famous eclipses in history, all while wearing proper eye shielding.

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Tracy and Holly discuss the surprising lack of biographical writing about Annie Jump Cannon. In contrast, they cover how much effort has been made to uncover and write about the real story of Mildred Fish-Harnack

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Mildred Fish-Harnack was a woman from Wisconsin who found herself at the center of a resistance group in Germany working to undermine the Nazis. But her secrecy in this work enabled both Germany and the Soviet Union to twist her story into propaganda. 

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Annie Jump Cannon has been described as doing for stars what Carl Linnaeus did for organisms. She compiled a massive star catalogue, and became known both as the most famous woman astronomer of her lifetime, and as the “census-taker of the sky.”

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This 2018 episode covers Leeuwenhoek, who wasn't REALLY a scientist -- he had no formal training. But he made dozens of scientific discoveries. He's credited with discovering microscopic life in a variety of forms, using lenses he ground himself.

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Tracy and Holly discuss how much Tracy loves working on the Unearthed! shows, and how they both feel about library fines. They also talk about the Egyptian mummy parade, and misreads of what a historical curse jar was.

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The second part of the July 2021 Unearthed! installment includes exhumations, repatriations, some mysteries that have been solved, and a potpourri of other stuff. There's also another listener mail on the unearthed theme.

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In part one of the 2021 July edition of unearthed things, there are updates to previous episodes, along with books and letters, edibles and potables, and art. 

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This 2011 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina covers the U.S. in the late 1800s, when no one really monitored food additives. After Congress refused to regulate food safety, Harvey Wiley had groups of healthy men ingest poisons for six months. Tune in to learn how these "Poison Squads" shed new light on Wiley's cause.

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Tracy and Holly talk about family and experiential history with headaches, and the persistent problems in what people do and don't know about them. They then cover their swill-milk episode, and how utterly vile the whole thing is.

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In the 1850s, much of the milk supply in New York was anything but appetizing and wholesome – it was often deadly. But efforts to address the problem were blocked by corrupt officials.

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Migraine is one of the three most prevalent conditions in the world along with anemia and hearing loss. But in spite of that prevalence, migraine is widely misunderstood, really at every level.

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This 2017 episode covers one of the first Americans to achieve fame as a Shakespearean actor, and the first black man to do so, becoming a famous figure on the Victorian stage. But Aldridge has largely been excluded from biographies of Shakespearean actors.

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It's divisive figures week! Holly and Tracy discuss the difficulty in sorting out the reality of Lorenz's work, because of the polarized view of him within the medical community. Then talk turns to Hugo Gernsback, and the ongoing divide over him.

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Ray Bradbury said Hugo “made us fall in love with the future.” But he’s also been berated as a hack whose proclamations about what does and does not qualify as science fiction have been problematic and limiting from the start.

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Lorenz is credited with developing treatments that addressed pediatric orthopedic problems. During his lifetime, he was both celebrated and protested within the medical community. 

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Part two of our Fort Shaw classic covers the four months the Fort Shaw Indian School women's basketball team spent at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. The team performed mandolin recitals, literary recitations, demonstrations of gymnastics and calisthenics, and became World Champions.

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Holly and Tracy talk about the localization of copycat companies in the cleaning industry, and Holly shares how her robotic vacuum met its untimely end. The legacy of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg is also discussed in terms of his status as an outlier across various communities.

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The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has come up in a lot of research for the show. Schomburg the man was an Afro-Puerto Rican activist and collector, who historian and journalist Joel Augustus Rogers nicknamed “the Sherlock Holmes of Negro History.”

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Tracking the history of how we clean and why our cleaning needs have shifted also tells the story of human progress in a wider sense. How did we get from natural-fiber brooms to gasoline-powered vacuum cleaners and ultimately to the home-use models we know today?

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This 2017 episode covers the Fort Shaw Indian School , part of a boarding school system designed to make Native American students conform to white culture. In a surprising twist, it also boasted a champion women's basketball team.

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Tracy and Holly discuss the difficulty of covering the Dreyfus Affair, including the contextual history that needs to be covered for it. They also talk about the familiarity of the events of the affair because of similar events happening today.

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The court-martial and exile of Alfred Dreyfus was such big news that it started to be referred to simply as “The Affair.” And it divided French society and became international news.

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Part one contextualizes the Dreyfus Affair by covering the Franco-Prussian War and the founding of the French Third Republic. Then we’ll cover Alfred Dreyfus and the accusation of treason that he faced in 1894.

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We're continuing our classics with Harriet Tubman's story, which came out in 2016. There was a whole lot more to her life and work than the Underground Railroad. During the U.S. Civil War, she worked as a Union spy, eventually earning the nickname "General."

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Tracy and Holly talk about their own experiences with and thoughts about kudzu. They also discuss Harriet Quimby's journalism career, her stance on feminism, and that fabulous purple satin jumpsuit.

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Quimby is most well-known for aviation, but journalism was an even bigger part of her life. Before taking up flying, she had managed to carve out a life for herself by merging her love of adventure with her knack for writing. 

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Kudzu is a semi-woody, perennial climbing vine in the pea family. How did it get its reputation for being an unkillable menace? And was it really introduced to stop erosion, only to get completely out of hand? 

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