Stuff You Missed in History Class

Another 2017 fave! In the late 18th century, Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler, also known as the Ladies of Llangollen, abandoned their life in the upper tiers of Irish society and made a home for themselves in Wales. And they became rather famous in the process.

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Tracy and Holly discuss their favorite parts of this week's Unearthed! episodes, as well as the way that our current situation causes the unearthing of new information every day.

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In part two of Unearthed! in spring 2020, we're talking about edibles and potables, shipwrecks, books and letters, and other cool stuff.

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In today’s episode, we have some stuff that was reported during the last couple of weeks of 2019, which missed the cut for the year-end Unearthed! episodes. Also, episode updates, crime, animals and games. 

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This 2011 episode from previous hosts Deblina and Sarah covers the time when Mexico was ruled by a Habsburg prince: Ferdinand Maximilian. While Maximilian was unwelcome, he upheld liberal reforms and modernized the government. As his support dwindled, Mexico's rightful president worked to take back the country.

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Holly and Tracy discuss Carlota of Mexico and how that topic was chosen, as well as the many connections between subjects of history. Then, talk turns to the ways that we still benefit from Larrey's work today.

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While serving as a surgeon with Napoleon’s army in the 1790s, Larrey developed a system for getting wounded soldiers off the battlefield and into treatment. His dedication to providing care to anyone who needed it earned him the respect and admiration of France and its enemies.

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Charlotte and her husband Maximillian became the rulers of Mexico through a plan concocted by France's Napoleon III. But the strain of conflict there, and French finances being withdrawn, caused the empress' mental health to decline.

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This 2016 episode delves into how industries and governments had a really weird preoccupation with protecting people from margarine way before it was made with the hydrogenated oils that led to its unhealthy reputation in more recent years. There's even bootlegging involved.

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Holly and Tracy talk about Annie Londonderry's cavalier relationship with the truth and the challenges of travel with the wrong clothes and bike. Then talk turns to a strange paper that Tracy read while researching rinderpest.

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The declaration that rinderpest had been eradicated was less than 10 years, but rinderpest’s history goes back much farther than that. And the process of eradicating the disease really illustrates how it took a coordinated, international effort to do it.

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Annie Londonderry gained fame for being the first woman cyclist to circumnavigate the globe. Sort of. In the 1890s, she DID circle the globe, but there are a LOT of inconsistencies in the details of her story, including why she did it in the first place. 

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We're jumping back just a couple of years to an episode on Ignaz Semmelweis made a connection between hand hygiene and the prevention of childbed fever in the 19th century.

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Holly and Tracy talk about selecting subjects for the show while living in strange times, and venture into talk about Emily Dickinson.

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Ida Lewis lived most of her life fairly isolated on a tiny island off the coast Rhode Island. But it was a life she deeply loved. In her words, “I could not be contented elsewhere.”

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Tracy and Holly discuss what it feels like, as people who study history, to live through an event that you know will be historically significant. To all of our listeners: Please stay safe, and thank you for being part of the SYMHC family.

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This 2014 episode coverts he 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which killed somewhere between 20 million and 50 million people. Nobody cured it, or really successfully treated it. A fifth of the people in the world got the flu during the pandemic.

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Holly and Tracy discuss the advance casualness of recording entirely from home, as well as Max von Pettenkofer's psyche, and the fairly recent rise of the poison control hotline.

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How did the U.S. get to the point of having this one resource, specifically for poisoning, that’s so reliable and available that it gets printed on the labels of consumer products? 

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Pettenkofer's ideas about how cholera spread weren’t exactly right, but they still had really beneficial impacts on the way we live.

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In this 2010 episode, previous hosts Sarah and Deblina trace the life of Tagore through his childhood to knighthood and beyond.

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Holly and Tracy talk about aspects of Zanzibari culture that Holly had not considered prior to this week's episode, and Tracy's rewatch of "A League of Their Own."

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In fall 2017, we talked about a strange cultural phenomenon. For a brief window from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, people in the United States were watching train wrecks for fun.

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In 2017 we covered the offbeat life of Marchesa Luisa Casati. While many have admired heiress Casati over the years for her life led entirely based on her aesthetics, she was also entirely self-serving.

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In 2015, we talked about Franz Liszt, who was a pianist, a composer and a conductor, and basically the first rock star who drove fans into fits of swooning and screaming. Some fans even stole the detritus of his life (unfinished coffee, broken piano strings) to carry with them.

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The second part of this offbeat revisit! As the New York Sun's series of astonishing moon discoveries concluded, most people recognized that it was a hoax. But what made people buy into the tall tale in the first place?

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This offbeat 2015 episode covers a series of 1835 news articles about some utterly mind-blowing discoveries made by Sir John Herschel about the lunar surface. The serial had everything: moon poppies, goat-like unicorns, lunar beavers and even bat people.

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It's a 2019 show about urine! Spoiler alert: Hennig Brand discovered phosphorous by boiling pee. But he was trying to do something else: He thought the secret to the philosopher’s stone might be found in urine. 

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Back in 2014, we tackled SPAM's story. This famous Hormel Foods product was invented in the 1930s to make use of a surplus of shoulder meat from pigs. It played a huge role in WWII, and shaped the cuisines of many Pacific Island nations.

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In October 2017, we talked about mysterious prints that looked like hoof marks appeared all over the English seaside county of Devon in February 1855.

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We continue out offbeat 2015 story. Once the effort to import hippos to the U.S. got the backing of a politician, two men with intertwined histories, Frederick Russel Burnham and Fritz Duquesne, were brought on board to serve as experts and advocates.

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An offbeat episode from 2015: In 1910, the U.S. a meat shortage, and a water hyacinth overgrowth problem. The obvious solution to the dilemma: Import hippos from Africa.

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The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was founded in 1943, and it went on for years after WWII. These women were athletes, some of whom thought they were starting on a career in professional baseball.

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Zanzibar is a relatively tiny place, but its place in history is significant, largely because of its geographical position. Its value as a trading port led it, over time, to be the location of what’s often called the shortest war in history. 

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This 2011 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina covers an often-requested topic. Shakespeare is typically associated with cultural sophistication rather than violent bouts of near-anarchy. But this wasn't the case during the Astor Place Riot.

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Tracy and Holly discuss diabetes, insulin, and the moral complexities that are often part of scientific research.

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Last time we talked about how diabetes has been described through history, including treatment before the development of insulin. Today, we’re telling the insulin part of the story, which was at times fraught and contentious. 

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To lead into discussing the discovery of insulin, today we have a history of diabetes and its treatment in the centuries before insulin was developed, including the starvation diets that were used in the years just before the discovery. 

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This 2015 episode delves into how peanut butter got its name in the 18th century, but it's been around in some form for hundreds and hundreds of years. Its modern history features changes to the recipe and even a little litigation with the FDA.

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Tracy and Holly discuss the ways in which the sexes were perceived during the time of Anna Morandi Manzolini and the aspects of Kemmler's story that made Holly very angry during research.

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After committing a brutal murder, William Kemmler was the first man to be put to death in the electric chair, at a time when a great deal of conflict and controversy swirled around the death penalty. 

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In 18th-century Bologna, one of the most skilled and renowned anatomists and wax model makers was a woman named Anna Morandi Manzolini. Working first with her husband then on her own, Anna contributed to the medical and scientific fields immeasurably. 

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Today we revisit a 2013 episode about the Boston Massacre. That sounds like the slaughter of many innocents, but the reality is smaller and not nearly so one-sided. But there's a reason why we call it a massacre. And that reason is propaganda.

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Holly and Tracy discuss the relationship between the Hemingway brothers and the challenges of claiming one's own island. Holly also shares her experiences spending an afternoon at the Atlanta History Center.

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Holly was joined in the studio by historian Dr. Calinda Lee to talk about her work with the Atlanta History Center, and specifically the new exhibit "Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow."

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Leicester Hemingway's life was very much lived in the shadow of his brother. It isn’t until after Ernest Hemingway’s death that Leicester made his boldest moves in life. 

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This 2015 episode revisits an event that was half performance for the British troops, and half actual sham. It led to an attack on Dover by the Pennacook tribe in 1689.

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Holly and Tracy cover their experiences with croquet and historical stories that didn't fit into the episode, and then discuss the challenges in researching North America's indigenous nations histories when most narratives are written by white colonists.

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King Philip’s War was an armed conflict primarily between English colonists and Indigenous nations in what’s now New England, although there were some Indigenous peoples who were allied with the colonists. 

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Croquet's origins are murky, but because of its relative ease of play and low barrier of entry, it went through a surge in popularity almost as soon as it was documented.

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