December 14, 2015 • 37 mins
We often get episode requests, but because there are so many episodes in the back catalog, some of the most common requests have already been covered. So in today's podcast we're going to hit the highlights on the episodes people ask for again and again.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy be Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. We're doing something just a little bit
different today, entirely new territory for us in terms of
(00:22):
the different thing that we're doing. So we know we
have really amazing listeners who have been with us basically
since day one, and they were listening to the show
when it was Candice and Josh and it was called
Factory Factor Fiction and the episodes were five minutes long,
and like those folks have stayed with us this entire time.
And then we know we also have other amazing people
who came in later and then went back to the
beginning and listened to every single episode, which I applaud you.
(00:44):
I've only ever managed to do that with Welcome to
night Vale, and that is way fewer episodes than ours. Right,
this is gonna be our seven hundred and eighty second episode,
although the math is a little fuzzy because some of
them are two parts and a few of them in
the archive our reruns. So anybody who has listened to
seven hundred and eighty two episodes of our show Uh,
(01:05):
shout out to you. That's incredible. But we also have
so many new people who are a lot newer to
the podcast and haven't been listening for nearly as long.
And we know this because number one, a lot more
people are listening to the show now than we're in
two thousand and eight, and number two, a lot of
the requests that we get for episodes for us to
talk about are actually things that past hosts have already done.
(01:28):
So in today's podcast, what we're gonna do is give
the highlights on some of these episodes that people really
ask for again and again and again. We will give
a brief hint of what each of them is about,
and then we are going to put links to all
of them on our blog. We're also planning to work
up a playlist from them that will be sharable. So
it's sort of like one of our Unearthed episodes that
we do every year, except instead of things that were
(01:50):
unearthed in other people's addicts there, things were unearthing out
of our own archive. Um, so all of these are
from previous hosts of the show. None of them are
things that Holly and I have worked on together. So
you'll get to hear some new voices if you go
listen to these from the archive. But we've also curated
the list so that it includes the episodes that are
(02:11):
most like what the show has involved evolved into in
terms of the length and the way it approaches subjects,
so probably will not seem completely jarring to hear a
similarly structured podcast, just with different hosts. Uh. A few
of them are a little shorter than our episodes are today,
but for the most part it's because they don't have
(02:32):
a listener mail at the end. So the first time
we're going to talk about is the Edmund Fitzgerald and
the episode that we're referencing is from April eleven, and
it was hosted by Sarah and Dablina. And that podcast
on the Edmund Fitzgerald is admittedly a little bit tricky
to find if you do not already know where it is,
because it is in a bigger episode called five Shipwreck Stories.
(02:54):
So if you just search by Edmund Fitzgerald, you may
have some trouble. Although I think Tracy may have retagged
it's it's easier to find that way. I tried to. Uh, yeah,
we're we've been going back and retagging Tracy has really
been a champion on that. But you know, seven eight
two episodes, there's a lot to go back and retag.
So this is the only roundup episode that we're also
(03:17):
including in this round up, so we don't wind up
in some sort of recursive podcast loop. It's some sort
of Edmund Fitzgerald inception. But but so many people have
asked about the Edmund Fitzgerald that we did not want
to leave this one out. So the many, many requests
for the Edmund Fitzgerald are actually not new at all.
When Sarah and Bblina asked for some shipwreck episode suggestions
(03:41):
at that time, the thinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald was
like far in a way the most requested one that
they got. It's because of that song. Yeah. They theorized
that maybe that's one of the reasons, and that so
in brief, the s S Edmund Fitzgerald, captained by Ernest M.
Mcsorrel sank Lake Superior on November tenth of nine with
(04:03):
the loss of all twenty nine on board. It was
accompanied on its journey across the lake by Arthur m Anderson,
captain by Bernie Cooper, and one of the eerious things
about this story was that the two captains were in
radio contact with each other for much of the voyage
before the Edmund Fitzgerald fell silent. And the exact cause
of that shipwreck is still a mystery, and that is
(04:25):
something that Sarah and Bablina discussed, so when you go
back to that episode, you will get more info on
that mysterious vanishing. Next up in our frequent Request is
Mary Secol which is from February, and that is when
Katie and Sarah are hosting the show together, and Katie
had a particular fondness for Mary Seacole because she was
(04:46):
a nurse and Katie's mother also is a nurse. Mary
Secal was born in Jamaica and developed nursing skills there
during a cholera epidemic. She then put those skills to
youth and other epidemics in Jamaica, California, and Panama before
going to put them into practice on the front lines
(05:06):
during the Crimean War, and Katie and Sarah talk about
the context for the Crimean War before getting into Mary
Secoel's time as a nurse there. She worked at a
hospital where she earned the nickname the Black Nightingale, and
she worked on the battlefields themselves. Mary Secul's work was
really really important and she was way ahead of her
time in terms of nursing and medicine. She also chronicled
(05:30):
her story and the delightfully titled autobiography The Wonderful Adventure
Adventures of Mrs Sea Cool in many Lands. UH. The
next one that's often requested is the Halifax explosion, and
this was covered on December nineteenth, even again by Sarah
and Dablina. And the short version is that on December
six of nineteen, two ships, the Imo and the mont
(05:53):
Blanc collided in Halifax Harbor, and the mont Blanc was
packed with truly staggering amounts of a explosives. When people
on shore and in the neighboring piers saw the mont
Block on fire and they did not realize how dangerous
its cargo was, this big crowd of spectators started to
gather and there were definitely also people who were helping.
(06:14):
There was also a lot of people who were just looking,
and that meant that when the mont Block exploded, more
than eighteen hundred people were killed and thousands more were injured,
many of them with eye injuries that resulted in blindness.
Sarah and Deblina talk in a lot more detail about
exactly what happened and the investigations into who was at fault,
(06:35):
as well as the aftermath of this whole massive incident.
We actually get two distinct categories of emails about the
Halifax explosion, and one of them is the request that
we do an episode on it. The other is a
note from people who have heard that episode and they've
written in to tell us that every year, Halifax sends
a Christmas tree to Boston as thanks for the city's
(06:56):
help after the disaster. We actually got one of these
literally last night. I wrote this episode outline yesterday. A
few hours later, we got another email asking us to
talk about the Christmas tree. And also, by total coincidence,
we're recording this on December the first, and this year,
the Christmas Tree is being lit on December three. Uh.
(07:16):
I don't know if I'll get over there to see
it in person, because I would need to leave work
early to do that, and I already left work early
once this week to go to a lecture about Harvard's
collection of medicine documents. UM, So I'll definitely try to
get over and see it on Boston common and take
some pictures to share with everybody, h regardless of where,
whether I make it over there for the tree lighting.
(07:37):
Before anybody writes to say a medicine podcast would be cool,
we have like seven of them. There are a whole lot.
There's like a series. It's awesome. Uh So the next
one that's off requested is uh chungy Sow And this
was recorded on March nine, also by Sarah Deblina. And
this podcast on Chungy Sow can be tricky to find
(08:00):
because before you even get into the multiple spellings that
are sometimes used for her name, she's referred to by
two different names. Yet depending on where you're reading this,
she is either referred to as Chung i Saw, which
means wife of Chung E, or Chung Shi, which means
Chung's widow. So she's a wife or a widow, depending
(08:22):
Most of the requests that we get to talk about
her asked us to discuss Chung Shi, perhaps because that's
the name that the Rejected Princesses used when they did
a post about her, But in the podcast, Sarah and
Deblina used the name Chungy Sao. They also actually titled
the podcast Don't Cross the Dragon Lady because that was
her nickname. Yeah, But so that's one where I went
(08:44):
in on our website and put her actual name in
the title so that people can find on our website
more easily. So Chineseau was a pirate, and contrary to
the stereotypes that most of us think about when it
comes to pirates, she was a woman, She was from China,
and she was not remotely a loner. She commanded what
was basically a pirate empire. She did become a pirate
(09:05):
by marrying into a pirate family, so that was the
chungy that people name her in reference to, but she
used some real business savvy to take it to a
whole other level and her pirate confederation, Like when we
say a whole other level, it is no joke. She
had six fleets of ships fleets, not a fleet of ships,
(09:27):
six ships, but six full fleets, four hundred junks, and
a staff of seventy pirates. So she was really rather amazing.
Also a very complex character in history. Yeah, And also
in the pretty amazing and kind of a complex story
is Pope Joan, which is under the title, was there
a female pope and that came along on September six
(09:50):
and was hosted by Katie and Sarah. So Katie and
Sarah talk about whether Pope Joan was a real person
or not. The story was that Joan was in love
with a scholar and followed him to Athens, and since
a woman couldn't join the Benedictine monastery where he was studying,
she disguised herself as a man and joined the monastery anyway.
(10:12):
She purportedly rose up through the ranks and then served
as pope for two years before her gender came to
light after she gave birth while riding a horse in
a procession. I hate when that happens. It's just such
an absurd assortment of details, all kind of clambered into
one that. Ah, that sounds just crazy. Uh. There is
(10:35):
a lot about this story that's possibly apocryphal, and Katie
and Sarah get into whether it was real or not,
and they also get into the history of when people
have believed it and when they haven't and why that
has been the case at various points in history. So again,
it's another one that's quite complex. There are a lot
of layers and still some question marks around the whole thing. Uh.
So they covered that Whole Banana's episode. We're going to
(11:00):
talk about another chunk of episodes after we have a
brief word from one of our sponsors to get back
to our most frequently requested archival episodes. Uh. Next up,
we have Emperor Norton and that is from May one
from Katie and Sarah. So I reread the entirety of
Neil Game and Sandman over the holiday as a couple
(11:20):
of years ago, and as I did that, I jotted
down some of the weird and interesting historical characters that
make kind of cameos in that comics series. One of
the ones I got really excited about was Emperor Norton.
And then I got back to the office after the
holiday was over and actually started putting together a list
of episodes that I had thought of. Uh, and I
(11:40):
learned there was a podcast on him already. Joshua Norton
had in fact been a pretty successful merchant in San
Francisco during the Gold Rush. He made quite the fortune
for himself, but he saw most of it vanish in
one bad business decision. He disappeared from the scene for
a couple of years, and then when he came back
to San Francisco on September seven, teeth of eighteen fifty nine.
(12:02):
He did so dressed as Napoleon, and he claimed that
he was the Emperor of the United States and the
protector of Mexico. He held this self proclaimed emperor post
for twenty years. I'm imagining no one was paying him
for this ship, I mean, not officially, but he did
get a lot of his living expenses came from sort
(12:24):
of fans of his he developed. He became a very
locally known character and people people gave him money and
helped him out. And he was not actually homeless. He
was living in a boarding house and it became clear
after his death that that was where he had been
living and UH and overseeing his empire. It was full
of all sorts of documents related to the running of
(12:45):
his empire of the United States. UH. The next one
that gets requested frequently is Cynthia Anne and Quana Parker.
In that episode, there are two episodes. One is novembery
and one is December five. Those are both of two
thousand and twelve UH, and those are Sarah and Debilina
episodes of some of their later episodes. A lot of
(13:06):
folks right in and asked us to do a podcast
on the two of them, but Sarah and Deblina actually
did too, or two podcasts, one on each. We actually
had our biggest spike in requests for this one after
our episode on Olive Oatman, because, like Olive, Cynthia Anne
was captured in her case by members of the Commanche
tribe and wound up living among the tribe. Cynthia Anne
(13:30):
was kidnapped when the four where her family had been
living was rated. Some of her family was killed and
Cynthia Anne was taken captive. She was only nine at
this time, and Cynthia Anne was the only one of
her family who survived and was not ransomed back. Her story,
not Olives, is actually more likely to have been the
basis for the movie The Searchers. We had a few
(13:50):
questions about that once we did the Olive Oatmen episode. Yeah, Cynthia.
Cynthia Anne actually eventually married her abductor. She had three
children with him, and the eldest, Quanta, wound up being
the Comanches last war chief. It's a long and often
a very sad story, and this two part series is
also a way of looking at the war that grew
out of the United States Western expansion into the Great Plains.
(14:14):
Next on our list is another thing about war, and
that is the New York Draft Riots that came out
on April eleventh of eleven. It was another Sarah and
Deblina venture, and most of our requests for it mentioned
the two thousand to Martin Scorsese movie Gangs of New York.
So whenever we get a pile of them in a row,
I wonder if that was just replayed on TV, or
(14:36):
maybe it's on Netflix right now or something. Because they
tend to come in and chunks. They did a clump together.
So during the Civil War, the Federal Congress passed the
Union Conscription Act of eighteen sixty three, which set up
a draft. Basically, able bodied men between the ages of
twenty and forty five were required to register unless they
could pay a fee or have a substitute take their place,
(14:59):
and lottery would determine who would actually serve. An attempts
to enforce this draft on July thirteenth of eighteen sixty
three led to a riot, and that riot included rating
and torching government building. About three people were killed, and
a huge portion of those killed where police officers and soldiers.
(15:20):
One of the many things that Sarah and Dublina talked
about in this podcast is all of the social factors
that led to this riot, including the influx of both
Irish immigrants following the Great Famine in the late eighteen
forties and the influx of recently freed slaves, many of
them competing for the same low wage jobs. It's a
podcast that ties a lot of the themes that we've
(15:41):
talked about in more recent podcasts as well altogether, including
the Harlem hell Fighters and the two parter on the
Irish Potato famine itself. UH, coming interestingly from from this
particular episode when they When they began that episode, they
talked about how they were looking for creative way to
talk about the Civil War because they didn't just want
(16:02):
to do a multipart podcast on the Civil War itself. UH.
Their next the next topic on our list actually came
from listeners responses to that request. It is on Alan
Pinkerton from June twenty seven eleven and also obviously by
Sarah and Bablina. So they had asked for some Civil
War topics and wound up putting together a series on
(16:23):
Civil War spycraft, and one of them is the very
frequently requested by Alan Pinkerton, whose name is so ubiquitous
that he almost needs no introduction. He and the Pinkerton's,
which were his detective agency, became both famous and notorious
in various parts of American history during and after the
(16:43):
Civil War, and while the episode mostly sticks to his
Civil War work, it also talks about his founding of
the first national detective agency, this group called the Pinkerton's,
and his basically creating the job of private investigator, which
had not existed before that time. We have a kind
of fun one the next on the list, and that
is the Bone Wars, which is another one that Sarah
(17:05):
and Bablina covered in two parts that came on on
Decever thirty first and January nine, and our biggest spike
in requests for an episode about this one definitely came
in April of this year when Emmanuel Shop who was
a vertebrate paleontologist at the New University of Lisbon and Portugal,
suggested reversing the previous reversal and paleontological thought about whether
(17:32):
the Brontosaurus and the Apatosaurus are two different dinosaurs. That
question was one of the many oddities of the scientific
feud that has come to be known as the Bone Wars.
This was an intense rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and
Offnel Charles Marsh, and the two men had been friends,
but their competition with one another eventually caused a bitter
divide between them. Their race to be the best paleontologist
(17:56):
did in fact advance the field dramatically by finding in
catach rizing many many fossil specimens, but unfortunately their feud
was so bitter and underhanded that it also actually stood
in the way of progress. The whole Brontosaurus and a
Patosaurus question came into the picture because Marsh found an incomplete,
possible fossil skeleton that he named a Patosaurus, and then
(18:18):
two years later he found a different, more complete skeleton
that he named the Brontosaurus, and they were actually Obviously,
the decision goes back and forth about whether they were
the same species or different species, but most people credit
the fact that he named it something else with the
fact that he was trying to discover more dinosaurs than
(18:40):
cop did. And another great thing about this particular two
parter or is that it it makes callouts to the
other scientific rivalries that Sarah and Deblina covered, including the
gas Wars and Tesla versus Edison. Up next, we have
the Boston molasses flood that is from October fifth, two
thousand and nine, which is a Katie and Sarah episode,
(19:01):
and we actually don't get quite as many requests for
as we used to, in part because we mentioned it
in our first Six Impossible Episodes podcasts that came out
in February of this year, and in that particular episode
we talked about the London beer flood and why there's
not quite enough information on it to flesh out a
full episode, especially since the moston molasses flood is already
(19:23):
in the archive and they're extremely similar stories. In the
nineteen teens, molasses was in fact big business in Boston
thanks to its use in distilling and making munitions, and
on January fifteenth of nineteen nineteen, a tank that was
holding two point three million gallons of it burst. Twenty
one people died, one and fifty more were injured, and
(19:45):
property damage from this huge wave of molasses, which crested
at twenty five ft tall, was enormous. One of the
things that really cracks me up about this episode is
that they're talking about what the weather was like in
Boston at this point, and they referenced superstorms that dropped
twenty inches of snow on Boston. I hate it when
you mentioned bad weather and then somebody comes along and
(20:07):
tells you that the weather is a lot worse where
they live. But having been in Boston during last year's
record breaking uh snow season that had a hundred and
ten inches of snow or something, um, the idea that
twenty was a superstorm made me giggle a little when
I heard it on this show. It might have been
(20:28):
if those twenty inches fell in like an hour, that
would be a superstorm, But twenty inches by themselves is
not necessarily super in New England. And with that, we
are going to pause for just one more moments so
we can have a word from one of the great
sponsors that keeps his show going. So another podcast topic
that is often requested is Oak Island, and this one
(20:49):
was recorded in April of it's April to be exact
that it was published h and it is a Katie
and Sarah episode. So their story about whether there is
an Oak Island money pit isn't just about that question
that the name of the episode is actually is there
a money pit on Oak Island? And it's so it's
not just about yes or no there is or is
(21:10):
not a money pit on Oak Island. It looks at
the whole story of where this idea that maybe there's
a pit full of money out there, where that idea
came from, and the series of attempts that people have
made to try to get to what may or may
not be buried treasure. And at times they tell the
story with a lot of chagrin because it seems like
people were about to answer that question and then they
(21:31):
went home for the night and everything was ruined when
they got back in the morning. That is a it's
a it's a thing that happens in this search for
money pit. Yeah, and uh, in case you want even
more on it, Stuff you Should Know also covered this
one as well, and although there's as much more recent
from February. And it's kind of funny how that goes.
(21:51):
Sometimes like a podcast episode that one podcast does will
inspire a house Stuff Works article, which in turn inspires
the Stuff you Should Know episode, or sometimes that chain
goes in a different order. But it's a funny interconnected thing,
it is. And sometimes we've accidentally done episodes on similar
topics very close together without any of us actually knowing it,
(22:11):
because we don't usually consult with other podcasts on what
they're doing. We sometimes do, but not as a matter
of course, And so it is funny how sometimes something
will happen. And yeah, there's definitely there's definitely some overlap
in the in the listeners of all the various podcasts
How Stuff Works has, but uh, folks that listen to
the stuff you should Know don't necessarily listen to ours
(22:34):
on a regular basis or vice versa. Um. It's also
kind of funny to me how at this point in
the whole Oak Island money Pit story, if there is
actually a pit full of money, there has probably been
more money spent trying to get to it than the
pit would actually contain at this point. Yeah, I feel
like the Oak Island story is the money pit at
this point. I think they make that joke in the episode,
(22:59):
like it's just it's its own whole money pits yep yep.
On a similarly wet but much sadder track is the
Johnstown Flood. We've gotten lots and lots of requests for
this one, and it came out on a December time
another Katie and Sarah. Uh, or no, it's another Sarah
(23:20):
and Deblina. I'm getting the past hosts confused. Uh, it's
another Sarah and Deblina podcast. And the South Fork damn
burst on eighty nine and it sent twenty million tons
of water through Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing two thousand two nine people,
which I think makes it makes sense why so many
(23:42):
people ask us for it, because we get a lot
of requests for really sad stuff we do, and it's
one of those things where the numbers are so staggering
and it's such an extreme and dramatic event that I
think that's part of the appeal of people wanting to
hear more about it. And one of the more surprising
parts of this episode, if you're not already be familiar
with the story, comes right at the beginning, and that's
(24:03):
that Johnstown was so prone to flooding that people basically
had a routine to deal with it, like they would
do things like move their belongings upstairs when a flood
was coming to try to protect those possessions. But this
particular incident was far, far too big to be managed
that way. It's like an hour for the water to
get to the town when a dam burst, but by
(24:23):
the time it got there it was said to be
moving with the force of Niagara Falls, and so in
addition to the thousands of people who were killed, the
property damage was just enormous. And next up is Nellie
Bligh and she is often requested, but there is an
episode about her and it first aired on March was
(24:45):
an episode done by Katie and Sarah and their episode
on Nellie Bligh walks through her career as a journalist
from the early days when she was only making five
dollars a week to the pinnacle when she was earning
twenty five thousand dollars a year, and that is in
late nineteenth century dollars a year, so that was a
pretty significant income. One of the reasons why her story
(25:07):
is so fascinating and so often requested is that the
steps she took as a journalist were often extremely dramatic.
She did things like feigning a mental illness to get
access to a mental institution and then do an expose
on it. She made a record breaking trip around the
world um so and apart from the innate uh excitement
and a lot of these assignments that she had, she
(25:29):
was also these were also definitely not the sorts of
writing tasks that were assigned to women at this time.
And it's really clear if you listen to Katie and
Sarah's episode that they absolutely love her and we do too.
It's a really good episode, So I highly encourage you
to go give that one a listen. Of all the
ones that I listened to in in preparing this episode,
(25:50):
like that is the one that has the most sheer
delight in the voices of the hosts and what they're
talking about, So I I love her. Also, Um, Sarah
and Doublina have done three different podcasts that are in
some way related to Ned Kelly, and usually Ned Kelly
is the person who people specifically ask us to talk about.
(26:13):
They did a podcast on Ned Kelly and then two
podcasts on other bush Rangers in Australia, and so the
one that was just on Ned Kelly came out on June,
and then on September and September twenty one of that year,
the two parter came out on other bush Rangers who
(26:33):
were basically outlaws on the Australian Outback. So these episodes
together wind up looking at about a hundred years of
Australian outlaw history, and they take a look at the
realities and the myths of ned Kelly and the other
bush Rangers, since, as these stories often go, there are
some elements that are real and others that have fallen
into more romanticized mythology, so the facts may not always
(26:56):
be accurate. And they also talk about how Australia became
a haven or outlaw activity and it was not just
because a lot of Bushrangers started as escaped convicts. Yeah.
They spent a lot of time talking about the social
factors that led to people turning to crime as basically
a way of life. Uh. Nick Kelly and the Bushrangers
are actually so far off of my base of knowledge
(27:17):
that the one time we have mentioned Bushrangers in a
past episode, I said it wrong. I said it in
a different way than how it is pronounced. I'm not
going to say it again because that was embarrassing. If
that is your worst crime, my dear. Uh. The next
one is that are our last one? It is the
(27:38):
most exciting, I think. Yeah. This one is the whale
ship Essex, and this was covered by Katie and Sarah
back in September. First aired on September, and the whaleship Essex,
in case you did not know, is the inspiration for
the novel Moby Dick. But it was a real whaling
ship that was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale
in eight and the story of that happened is really
(28:01):
pretty harrowing. So we're gonna leave that to Katie and
Sarah because they did a lot of really good work
on that. We don't want to steal their thunder Well,
and I'm actually really shocked we're not getting more requests
for the whale ship Essex right now because as we
are recording this, marketing for the movie In the Heart
of the Sea, which is based on a book about
the whaleship x Essex, is like it's at a fever
(28:23):
pitch right now. I feel like every time I opened
up a new web page or turn onto television, there
is a commercial for In the Heart of the Seat
with the giant giant whale tail destroying things. Well, I
have a theory completely based in nothing, just I feel
like the way that they're advertising it doesn't make it
(28:43):
clear that it is based on anything grounded in reality.
Um it seems it seems so big and over the
top the way they're pitching it that it seems more
like Michael Bay's history than like a Yeah, I watched
I rewatched one of the trail for it yesterday as
I was working on this podcast, and I had two
immediate thoughts, and one was there's a shot of some
(29:05):
ships in a harbor, and I was like, I am
pretty sure that is the Boston Tea Party museum and
ships shot from the air, Like I don't, I'm I
think that might be what that is. And I thought
about like going to research that and seeing if it
really was a shot of the Boston Tea Party ships
and museum, because it really did look like that to me.
And the other was that whale is just so big
(29:27):
and the whales are large, but I have also been
on a whale watch and the whales we saw were
not nearly as like Leviathan as the one in the
movie is, so uh yeah, I'm wondering how the scale
of the whale actually measures up to the reality of
sperm whales. This is also what I'm really jealous of
(29:47):
past hosts for covering like really early, really really early
in the in the life of us being on the show.
I was putting the little list of things that I
really really wanted to talk about, and I was like,
I want to talk about this we ship they got
sunk by a whale, but I can't because we have
that already, which is fine. I love our past host.
Basically all the folks that have worked on the show
(30:10):
are friends and colleagues, so I'm happy they got to
do it, but sad I did not. And that is
it for our most Requested episode round up. Uh, those
are the things. I put together this list through a
couple of methods. One was just memory of the things
(30:31):
people ask us for over and over, and one was
looking in my Scent items folder and outlook. Uh, and
I've emailed I think it was like two thirty six
emails that were links to episodes that we have already
in my items folder. And then I was really embarrassed
because I realized I had sent the same person multiple
(30:51):
links on multiple days and I never realized it was
the same person because there's so much so we guess
there's so much email. I was sending so much email,
so uh, yeah, embarrassing. Well, I mean I know for me,
like there's there's a point where we get so much
email where uh, eventually I will sometimes like, oh I
remember this person. But it's hard to establish pattern recognition
(31:13):
when you're getting so much. And we've talked about before
how like the podcast is not the only thing that
Tracy and I do, So it's kind of like, oh,
I'm in the middle of editing this article. Oh there's
another history email. I'll kind of shunt it off and
read it later. And so it's like, with the constant
juggle of all the stuff, I have a really hard
time developing pattern recognition and see recognizing people's names over
(31:34):
and over. We do. We do read all of your emails.
We read them all. We answer a bitifully small proportion
of them because there are so many, but we do.
We do read them all. So thank you so much
everyone who sends us these wonderful emails that come into
our inbox all time. We love them. Uh. And so,
as we said at the clap of the show, we're
(31:54):
basically going to put links to all of these inner
show notes that are blog at Miston history dot com.
So people who are interested uh and hearing these for
the first time or in re listening to an old
favorite whichever floats your boat. You can find all these
in one place are awesome. Producer Noll is going to
try to put together a share able playlist of them
also to make them easier to find. Um and we
(32:17):
will post links to all of that as many places
as we can think of. Uh. And if you want
to see whether we've got something you're interested in in
our archive. We also have a blog post that Tracy
put together which is how to find old episodes of
stuff you missed in history class, and it basically has
lots of tips on how to search and how to
hunt for things that might help you. If you are
(32:38):
wishing we would do something, it might already exist, either
by us or previous hosts, and your wish could be
instantly granted. I love it when the wish is instantly granted.
I always feel kind of guilty when somebody has clearly
put so much time and thought into convincing us that
we should do an episode on something and it's something
that we already have. Uh. It could be me overthinking things,
(33:01):
but I always feel like if that were me getting
the email back saying hey, we we love that person. Also,
here's a link to the episode that we have on them,
Like that would kind of take the wind out of
my sales. I don't know if it would or not
for me, but I do feel bad that they spent
time they didn't have to making their case. Yeah. So anyway, Yeah, yeah,
(33:22):
we have so many episodes in our archive and uh,
I would say, um, just because in our archive on
our website and missing history dot com, I have gone
in and tried to put the person's name in the
title for things that uh that did not have their name,
like don't Cross the Dragon Lady did not have the
(33:45):
in there. So I've like gone and I've put the
names in as many of the titles as I can
find to make them easier to find them before and
so it may be a little easier on our website
than in like it teams. Um. So yeah, that is
our most requested episodes that we already have. Do you
have some fresh listener mail that does not in fact
(34:07):
requestion episodes that already exists? Uh, it is so fresh
that it came in this morning. It is from Gabrielle
and it is from our very very recent episode from yesterday.
In terms of when we were recording this podcast on
the Gallipoli campaign, and Gabrielle says, Dear Tracy and Holly,
I have just finished listening to your episode on the
Gallipoli Campaign and it was very good. Despite as a
(34:31):
new Zealander, I couldn't miss it in history class. One
small point that has recently been made more widely known
about the Anzac biscuits is that although it is possible
sweet biscuits were sent over in care packages and ANZACs
are good keepers and travel well, they became iconic because
of the massive fundraising efforts for soldiers aid societies such
(34:52):
as the Red Cross in the early aftermath of the landing.
Hundreds of bake sales and tables of works were set up,
and most of them had a version of this oatmeal
and coconut biscuit that is made without eggs and by
melting together the butter and golden syrup. This recipe was
popular during rationing as it uses minimal amounts of scarce ingredients.
(35:13):
At least one hospital ship was funded in this way.
They also are the only exception to an Act of
Parliament that forbids naming any commercial product after Anzas and
must be one made to the original recipe and two
only called biscuits, never called cookies, and their title. A
well known sandwich chain could not do the first when
(35:35):
attempting to add it to their menu. Half chocolate dipped
Anzac biscuits are becoming more popular uh and during April,
commemorative tins are for sale and the supermarkets all over
the country and in Australia love the show. Gabrielle, thank
you so much for this awesome information about Anzac biscuits. Um, Gabrielle.
My my information that they were uh, that they became
(35:57):
famous for being sent to soldiers actually came I'm a
prior listener mail from several years ago, uh from somebody
who actually sent us a recipe for how to make them, um,
which is delightful. And I have that recipe still and
maybe over the holidays when I have some extra baking time,
I will make them and see what they are like.
(36:19):
So thank you again, Gabrielle sent for sending that. That
is great information. If you would like to write to us,
we're a history podcast at how Stuff Works dot com.
We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash miss
in History, and our Twitter is miss in History. Our
tumbler is miss in History dot tumbler dot com, and
we're on Pinterest at pinterest dot com. Slash missed in history.
If you would like to learn more about something that
(36:41):
we have talked about today, you can go and put
the words oak Island into the search bar at how
stuff works dot com and you will find the article
on the Oak Island money pit uh that was inspired
by our podcast and then inspired a podcast from stuff
You should do if you can also come to our
website where we will have the list of all of
these episodes, links to all of them, where we have
(37:02):
our tips on how to search our archive in different formats.
You can do all that and a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com or missing history dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy be Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. We're doing something just a little bit
different today, entirely new territory for us in terms of
(00:22):
the different thing that we're doing. So we know we
have really amazing listeners who have been with us basically
since day one, and they were listening to the show
when it was Candice and Josh and it was called
Factory Factor Fiction and the episodes were five minutes long,
and like those folks have stayed with us this entire time.
And then we know we also have other amazing people
who came in later and then went back to the
beginning and listened to every single episode, which I applaud you.
(00:44):
I've only ever managed to do that with Welcome to
night Vale, and that is way fewer episodes than ours. Right,
this is gonna be our seven hundred and eighty second episode,
although the math is a little fuzzy because some of
them are two parts and a few of them in
the archive our reruns. So anybody who has listened to
seven hundred and eighty two episodes of our show Uh,
(01:05):
shout out to you. That's incredible. But we also have
so many new people who are a lot newer to
the podcast and haven't been listening for nearly as long.
And we know this because number one, a lot more
people are listening to the show now than we're in
two thousand and eight, and number two, a lot of
the requests that we get for episodes for us to
talk about are actually things that past hosts have already done.
(01:28):
So in today's podcast, what we're gonna do is give
the highlights on some of these episodes that people really
ask for again and again and again. We will give
a brief hint of what each of them is about,
and then we are going to put links to all
of them on our blog. We're also planning to work
up a playlist from them that will be sharable. So
it's sort of like one of our Unearthed episodes that
we do every year, except instead of things that were
(01:50):
unearthed in other people's addicts there, things were unearthing out
of our own archive. Um, so all of these are
from previous hosts of the show. None of them are
things that Holly and I have worked on together. So
you'll get to hear some new voices if you go
listen to these from the archive. But we've also curated
the list so that it includes the episodes that are
(02:11):
most like what the show has involved evolved into in
terms of the length and the way it approaches subjects,
so probably will not seem completely jarring to hear a
similarly structured podcast, just with different hosts. Uh. A few
of them are a little shorter than our episodes are today,
but for the most part it's because they don't have
(02:32):
a listener mail at the end. So the first time
we're going to talk about is the Edmund Fitzgerald and
the episode that we're referencing is from April eleven, and
it was hosted by Sarah and Dablina. And that podcast
on the Edmund Fitzgerald is admittedly a little bit tricky
to find if you do not already know where it is,
because it is in a bigger episode called five Shipwreck Stories.
(02:54):
So if you just search by Edmund Fitzgerald, you may
have some trouble. Although I think Tracy may have retagged
it's it's easier to find that way. I tried to. Uh, yeah,
we're we've been going back and retagging Tracy has really
been a champion on that. But you know, seven eight
two episodes, there's a lot to go back and retag.
So this is the only roundup episode that we're also
(03:17):
including in this round up, so we don't wind up
in some sort of recursive podcast loop. It's some sort
of Edmund Fitzgerald inception. But but so many people have
asked about the Edmund Fitzgerald that we did not want
to leave this one out. So the many, many requests
for the Edmund Fitzgerald are actually not new at all.
When Sarah and Bblina asked for some shipwreck episode suggestions
(03:41):
at that time, the thinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald was
like far in a way the most requested one that
they got. It's because of that song. Yeah. They theorized
that maybe that's one of the reasons, and that so
in brief, the s S Edmund Fitzgerald, captained by Ernest M.
Mcsorrel sank Lake Superior on November tenth of nine with
(04:03):
the loss of all twenty nine on board. It was
accompanied on its journey across the lake by Arthur m Anderson,
captain by Bernie Cooper, and one of the eerious things
about this story was that the two captains were in
radio contact with each other for much of the voyage
before the Edmund Fitzgerald fell silent. And the exact cause
of that shipwreck is still a mystery, and that is
(04:25):
something that Sarah and Bablina discussed, so when you go
back to that episode, you will get more info on
that mysterious vanishing. Next up in our frequent Request is
Mary Secol which is from February, and that is when
Katie and Sarah are hosting the show together, and Katie
had a particular fondness for Mary Seacole because she was
(04:46):
a nurse and Katie's mother also is a nurse. Mary
Secal was born in Jamaica and developed nursing skills there
during a cholera epidemic. She then put those skills to
youth and other epidemics in Jamaica, California, and Panama before
going to put them into practice on the front lines
(05:06):
during the Crimean War, and Katie and Sarah talk about
the context for the Crimean War before getting into Mary
Secoel's time as a nurse there. She worked at a
hospital where she earned the nickname the Black Nightingale, and
she worked on the battlefields themselves. Mary Secul's work was
really really important and she was way ahead of her
time in terms of nursing and medicine. She also chronicled
(05:30):
her story and the delightfully titled autobiography The Wonderful Adventure
Adventures of Mrs Sea Cool in many Lands. UH. The
next one that's often requested is the Halifax explosion, and
this was covered on December nineteenth, even again by Sarah
and Dablina. And the short version is that on December
six of nineteen, two ships, the Imo and the mont
(05:53):
Blanc collided in Halifax Harbor, and the mont Blanc was
packed with truly staggering amounts of a explosives. When people
on shore and in the neighboring piers saw the mont
Block on fire and they did not realize how dangerous
its cargo was, this big crowd of spectators started to
gather and there were definitely also people who were helping.
(06:14):
There was also a lot of people who were just looking,
and that meant that when the mont Block exploded, more
than eighteen hundred people were killed and thousands more were injured,
many of them with eye injuries that resulted in blindness.
Sarah and Deblina talk in a lot more detail about
exactly what happened and the investigations into who was at fault,
(06:35):
as well as the aftermath of this whole massive incident.
We actually get two distinct categories of emails about the
Halifax explosion, and one of them is the request that
we do an episode on it. The other is a
note from people who have heard that episode and they've
written in to tell us that every year, Halifax sends
a Christmas tree to Boston as thanks for the city's
(06:56):
help after the disaster. We actually got one of these
literally last night. I wrote this episode outline yesterday. A
few hours later, we got another email asking us to
talk about the Christmas tree. And also, by total coincidence,
we're recording this on December the first, and this year,
the Christmas Tree is being lit on December three. Uh.
(07:16):
I don't know if I'll get over there to see
it in person, because I would need to leave work
early to do that, and I already left work early
once this week to go to a lecture about Harvard's
collection of medicine documents. UM, So I'll definitely try to
get over and see it on Boston common and take
some pictures to share with everybody, h regardless of where,
whether I make it over there for the tree lighting.
(07:37):
Before anybody writes to say a medicine podcast would be cool,
we have like seven of them. There are a whole lot.
There's like a series. It's awesome. Uh So the next
one that's off requested is uh chungy Sow And this
was recorded on March nine, also by Sarah Deblina. And
this podcast on Chungy Sow can be tricky to find
(08:00):
because before you even get into the multiple spellings that
are sometimes used for her name, she's referred to by
two different names. Yet depending on where you're reading this,
she is either referred to as Chung i Saw, which
means wife of Chung E, or Chung Shi, which means
Chung's widow. So she's a wife or a widow, depending
(08:22):
Most of the requests that we get to talk about
her asked us to discuss Chung Shi, perhaps because that's
the name that the Rejected Princesses used when they did
a post about her, But in the podcast, Sarah and
Deblina used the name Chungy Sao. They also actually titled
the podcast Don't Cross the Dragon Lady because that was
her nickname. Yeah, But so that's one where I went
(08:44):
in on our website and put her actual name in
the title so that people can find on our website
more easily. So Chineseau was a pirate, and contrary to
the stereotypes that most of us think about when it
comes to pirates, she was a woman, She was from China,
and she was not remotely a loner. She commanded what
was basically a pirate empire. She did become a pirate
(09:05):
by marrying into a pirate family, so that was the
chungy that people name her in reference to, but she
used some real business savvy to take it to a
whole other level and her pirate confederation, Like when we
say a whole other level, it is no joke. She
had six fleets of ships fleets, not a fleet of ships,
(09:27):
six ships, but six full fleets, four hundred junks, and
a staff of seventy pirates. So she was really rather amazing.
Also a very complex character in history. Yeah, And also
in the pretty amazing and kind of a complex story
is Pope Joan, which is under the title, was there
a female pope and that came along on September six
(09:50):
and was hosted by Katie and Sarah. So Katie and
Sarah talk about whether Pope Joan was a real person
or not. The story was that Joan was in love
with a scholar and followed him to Athens, and since
a woman couldn't join the Benedictine monastery where he was studying,
she disguised herself as a man and joined the monastery anyway.
(10:12):
She purportedly rose up through the ranks and then served
as pope for two years before her gender came to
light after she gave birth while riding a horse in
a procession. I hate when that happens. It's just such
an absurd assortment of details, all kind of clambered into
one that. Ah, that sounds just crazy. Uh. There is
(10:35):
a lot about this story that's possibly apocryphal, and Katie
and Sarah get into whether it was real or not,
and they also get into the history of when people
have believed it and when they haven't and why that
has been the case at various points in history. So again,
it's another one that's quite complex. There are a lot
of layers and still some question marks around the whole thing. Uh.
So they covered that Whole Banana's episode. We're going to
(11:00):
talk about another chunk of episodes after we have a
brief word from one of our sponsors to get back
to our most frequently requested archival episodes. Uh. Next up,
we have Emperor Norton and that is from May one
from Katie and Sarah. So I reread the entirety of
Neil Game and Sandman over the holiday as a couple
(11:20):
of years ago, and as I did that, I jotted
down some of the weird and interesting historical characters that
make kind of cameos in that comics series. One of
the ones I got really excited about was Emperor Norton.
And then I got back to the office after the
holiday was over and actually started putting together a list
of episodes that I had thought of. Uh, and I
(11:40):
learned there was a podcast on him already. Joshua Norton
had in fact been a pretty successful merchant in San
Francisco during the Gold Rush. He made quite the fortune
for himself, but he saw most of it vanish in
one bad business decision. He disappeared from the scene for
a couple of years, and then when he came back
to San Francisco on September seven, teeth of eighteen fifty nine.
(12:02):
He did so dressed as Napoleon, and he claimed that
he was the Emperor of the United States and the
protector of Mexico. He held this self proclaimed emperor post
for twenty years. I'm imagining no one was paying him
for this ship, I mean, not officially, but he did
get a lot of his living expenses came from sort
(12:24):
of fans of his he developed. He became a very
locally known character and people people gave him money and
helped him out. And he was not actually homeless. He
was living in a boarding house and it became clear
after his death that that was where he had been
living and UH and overseeing his empire. It was full
of all sorts of documents related to the running of
(12:45):
his empire of the United States. UH. The next one
that gets requested frequently is Cynthia Anne and Quana Parker.
In that episode, there are two episodes. One is novembery
and one is December five. Those are both of two
thousand and twelve UH, and those are Sarah and Debilina
episodes of some of their later episodes. A lot of
(13:06):
folks right in and asked us to do a podcast
on the two of them, but Sarah and Deblina actually
did too, or two podcasts, one on each. We actually
had our biggest spike in requests for this one after
our episode on Olive Oatman, because, like Olive, Cynthia Anne
was captured in her case by members of the Commanche
tribe and wound up living among the tribe. Cynthia Anne
(13:30):
was kidnapped when the four where her family had been
living was rated. Some of her family was killed and
Cynthia Anne was taken captive. She was only nine at
this time, and Cynthia Anne was the only one of
her family who survived and was not ransomed back. Her story,
not Olives, is actually more likely to have been the
basis for the movie The Searchers. We had a few
(13:50):
questions about that once we did the Olive Oatmen episode. Yeah, Cynthia.
Cynthia Anne actually eventually married her abductor. She had three
children with him, and the eldest, Quanta, wound up being
the Comanches last war chief. It's a long and often
a very sad story, and this two part series is
also a way of looking at the war that grew
out of the United States Western expansion into the Great Plains.
(14:14):
Next on our list is another thing about war, and
that is the New York Draft Riots that came out
on April eleventh of eleven. It was another Sarah and
Deblina venture, and most of our requests for it mentioned
the two thousand to Martin Scorsese movie Gangs of New York.
So whenever we get a pile of them in a row,
I wonder if that was just replayed on TV, or
(14:36):
maybe it's on Netflix right now or something. Because they
tend to come in and chunks. They did a clump together.
So during the Civil War, the Federal Congress passed the
Union Conscription Act of eighteen sixty three, which set up
a draft. Basically, able bodied men between the ages of
twenty and forty five were required to register unless they
could pay a fee or have a substitute take their place,
(14:59):
and lottery would determine who would actually serve. An attempts
to enforce this draft on July thirteenth of eighteen sixty
three led to a riot, and that riot included rating
and torching government building. About three people were killed, and
a huge portion of those killed where police officers and soldiers.
(15:20):
One of the many things that Sarah and Dublina talked
about in this podcast is all of the social factors
that led to this riot, including the influx of both
Irish immigrants following the Great Famine in the late eighteen
forties and the influx of recently freed slaves, many of
them competing for the same low wage jobs. It's a
podcast that ties a lot of the themes that we've
(15:41):
talked about in more recent podcasts as well altogether, including
the Harlem hell Fighters and the two parter on the
Irish Potato famine itself. UH, coming interestingly from from this
particular episode when they When they began that episode, they
talked about how they were looking for creative way to
talk about the Civil War because they didn't just want
(16:02):
to do a multipart podcast on the Civil War itself. UH.
Their next the next topic on our list actually came
from listeners responses to that request. It is on Alan
Pinkerton from June twenty seven eleven and also obviously by
Sarah and Bablina. So they had asked for some Civil
War topics and wound up putting together a series on
(16:23):
Civil War spycraft, and one of them is the very
frequently requested by Alan Pinkerton, whose name is so ubiquitous
that he almost needs no introduction. He and the Pinkerton's,
which were his detective agency, became both famous and notorious
in various parts of American history during and after the
(16:43):
Civil War, and while the episode mostly sticks to his
Civil War work, it also talks about his founding of
the first national detective agency, this group called the Pinkerton's,
and his basically creating the job of private investigator, which
had not existed before that time. We have a kind
of fun one the next on the list, and that
is the Bone Wars, which is another one that Sarah
(17:05):
and Bablina covered in two parts that came on on
Decever thirty first and January nine, and our biggest spike
in requests for an episode about this one definitely came
in April of this year when Emmanuel Shop who was
a vertebrate paleontologist at the New University of Lisbon and Portugal,
suggested reversing the previous reversal and paleontological thought about whether
(17:32):
the Brontosaurus and the Apatosaurus are two different dinosaurs. That
question was one of the many oddities of the scientific
feud that has come to be known as the Bone Wars.
This was an intense rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and
Offnel Charles Marsh, and the two men had been friends,
but their competition with one another eventually caused a bitter
divide between them. Their race to be the best paleontologist
(17:56):
did in fact advance the field dramatically by finding in
catach rizing many many fossil specimens, but unfortunately their feud
was so bitter and underhanded that it also actually stood
in the way of progress. The whole Brontosaurus and a
Patosaurus question came into the picture because Marsh found an incomplete,
possible fossil skeleton that he named a Patosaurus, and then
(18:18):
two years later he found a different, more complete skeleton
that he named the Brontosaurus, and they were actually Obviously,
the decision goes back and forth about whether they were
the same species or different species, but most people credit
the fact that he named it something else with the
fact that he was trying to discover more dinosaurs than
(18:40):
cop did. And another great thing about this particular two
parter or is that it it makes callouts to the
other scientific rivalries that Sarah and Deblina covered, including the
gas Wars and Tesla versus Edison. Up next, we have
the Boston molasses flood that is from October fifth, two
thousand and nine, which is a Katie and Sarah episode,
(19:01):
and we actually don't get quite as many requests for
as we used to, in part because we mentioned it
in our first Six Impossible Episodes podcasts that came out
in February of this year, and in that particular episode
we talked about the London beer flood and why there's
not quite enough information on it to flesh out a
full episode, especially since the moston molasses flood is already
(19:23):
in the archive and they're extremely similar stories. In the
nineteen teens, molasses was in fact big business in Boston
thanks to its use in distilling and making munitions, and
on January fifteenth of nineteen nineteen, a tank that was
holding two point three million gallons of it burst. Twenty
one people died, one and fifty more were injured, and
(19:45):
property damage from this huge wave of molasses, which crested
at twenty five ft tall, was enormous. One of the
things that really cracks me up about this episode is
that they're talking about what the weather was like in
Boston at this point, and they referenced superstorms that dropped
twenty inches of snow on Boston. I hate it when
you mentioned bad weather and then somebody comes along and
(20:07):
tells you that the weather is a lot worse where
they live. But having been in Boston during last year's
record breaking uh snow season that had a hundred and
ten inches of snow or something, um, the idea that
twenty was a superstorm made me giggle a little when
I heard it on this show. It might have been
(20:28):
if those twenty inches fell in like an hour, that
would be a superstorm, But twenty inches by themselves is
not necessarily super in New England. And with that, we
are going to pause for just one more moments so
we can have a word from one of the great
sponsors that keeps his show going. So another podcast topic
that is often requested is Oak Island, and this one
(20:49):
was recorded in April of it's April to be exact
that it was published h and it is a Katie
and Sarah episode. So their story about whether there is
an Oak Island money pit isn't just about that question
that the name of the episode is actually is there
a money pit on Oak Island? And it's so it's
not just about yes or no there is or is
(21:10):
not a money pit on Oak Island. It looks at
the whole story of where this idea that maybe there's
a pit full of money out there, where that idea
came from, and the series of attempts that people have
made to try to get to what may or may
not be buried treasure. And at times they tell the
story with a lot of chagrin because it seems like
people were about to answer that question and then they
(21:31):
went home for the night and everything was ruined when
they got back in the morning. That is a it's
a it's a thing that happens in this search for
money pit. Yeah, and uh, in case you want even
more on it, Stuff you Should Know also covered this
one as well, and although there's as much more recent
from February. And it's kind of funny how that goes.
(21:51):
Sometimes like a podcast episode that one podcast does will
inspire a house Stuff Works article, which in turn inspires
the Stuff you Should Know episode, or sometimes that chain
goes in a different order. But it's a funny interconnected thing,
it is. And sometimes we've accidentally done episodes on similar
topics very close together without any of us actually knowing it,
(22:11):
because we don't usually consult with other podcasts on what
they're doing. We sometimes do, but not as a matter
of course, And so it is funny how sometimes something
will happen. And yeah, there's definitely there's definitely some overlap
in the in the listeners of all the various podcasts
How Stuff Works has, but uh, folks that listen to
the stuff you should Know don't necessarily listen to ours
(22:34):
on a regular basis or vice versa. Um. It's also
kind of funny to me how at this point in
the whole Oak Island money Pit story, if there is
actually a pit full of money, there has probably been
more money spent trying to get to it than the
pit would actually contain at this point. Yeah, I feel
like the Oak Island story is the money pit at
this point. I think they make that joke in the episode,
(22:59):
like it's just it's its own whole money pits yep yep.
On a similarly wet but much sadder track is the
Johnstown Flood. We've gotten lots and lots of requests for
this one, and it came out on a December time
another Katie and Sarah. Uh, or no, it's another Sarah
(23:20):
and Deblina. I'm getting the past hosts confused. Uh, it's
another Sarah and Deblina podcast. And the South Fork damn
burst on eighty nine and it sent twenty million tons
of water through Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing two thousand two nine people,
which I think makes it makes sense why so many
(23:42):
people ask us for it, because we get a lot
of requests for really sad stuff we do, and it's
one of those things where the numbers are so staggering
and it's such an extreme and dramatic event that I
think that's part of the appeal of people wanting to
hear more about it. And one of the more surprising
parts of this episode, if you're not already be familiar
with the story, comes right at the beginning, and that's
(24:03):
that Johnstown was so prone to flooding that people basically
had a routine to deal with it, like they would
do things like move their belongings upstairs when a flood
was coming to try to protect those possessions. But this
particular incident was far, far too big to be managed
that way. It's like an hour for the water to
get to the town when a dam burst, but by
(24:23):
the time it got there it was said to be
moving with the force of Niagara Falls, and so in
addition to the thousands of people who were killed, the
property damage was just enormous. And next up is Nellie
Bligh and she is often requested, but there is an
episode about her and it first aired on March was
(24:45):
an episode done by Katie and Sarah and their episode
on Nellie Bligh walks through her career as a journalist
from the early days when she was only making five
dollars a week to the pinnacle when she was earning
twenty five thousand dollars a year, and that is in
late nineteenth century dollars a year, so that was a
pretty significant income. One of the reasons why her story
(25:07):
is so fascinating and so often requested is that the
steps she took as a journalist were often extremely dramatic.
She did things like feigning a mental illness to get
access to a mental institution and then do an expose
on it. She made a record breaking trip around the
world um so and apart from the innate uh excitement
and a lot of these assignments that she had, she
(25:29):
was also these were also definitely not the sorts of
writing tasks that were assigned to women at this time.
And it's really clear if you listen to Katie and
Sarah's episode that they absolutely love her and we do too.
It's a really good episode, So I highly encourage you
to go give that one a listen. Of all the
ones that I listened to in in preparing this episode,
(25:50):
like that is the one that has the most sheer
delight in the voices of the hosts and what they're
talking about, So I I love her. Also, Um, Sarah
and Doublina have done three different podcasts that are in
some way related to Ned Kelly, and usually Ned Kelly
is the person who people specifically ask us to talk about.
(26:13):
They did a podcast on Ned Kelly and then two
podcasts on other bush Rangers in Australia, and so the
one that was just on Ned Kelly came out on June,
and then on September and September twenty one of that year,
the two parter came out on other bush Rangers who
(26:33):
were basically outlaws on the Australian Outback. So these episodes
together wind up looking at about a hundred years of
Australian outlaw history, and they take a look at the
realities and the myths of ned Kelly and the other
bush Rangers, since, as these stories often go, there are
some elements that are real and others that have fallen
into more romanticized mythology, so the facts may not always
(26:56):
be accurate. And they also talk about how Australia became
a haven or outlaw activity and it was not just
because a lot of Bushrangers started as escaped convicts. Yeah.
They spent a lot of time talking about the social
factors that led to people turning to crime as basically
a way of life. Uh. Nick Kelly and the Bushrangers
are actually so far off of my base of knowledge
(27:17):
that the one time we have mentioned Bushrangers in a
past episode, I said it wrong. I said it in
a different way than how it is pronounced. I'm not
going to say it again because that was embarrassing. If
that is your worst crime, my dear. Uh. The next
one is that are our last one? It is the
(27:38):
most exciting, I think. Yeah. This one is the whale
ship Essex, and this was covered by Katie and Sarah
back in September. First aired on September, and the whaleship Essex,
in case you did not know, is the inspiration for
the novel Moby Dick. But it was a real whaling
ship that was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale
in eight and the story of that happened is really
(28:01):
pretty harrowing. So we're gonna leave that to Katie and
Sarah because they did a lot of really good work
on that. We don't want to steal their thunder Well,
and I'm actually really shocked we're not getting more requests
for the whale ship Essex right now because as we
are recording this, marketing for the movie In the Heart
of the Sea, which is based on a book about
the whaleship x Essex, is like it's at a fever
(28:23):
pitch right now. I feel like every time I opened
up a new web page or turn onto television, there
is a commercial for In the Heart of the Seat
with the giant giant whale tail destroying things. Well, I
have a theory completely based in nothing, just I feel
like the way that they're advertising it doesn't make it
(28:43):
clear that it is based on anything grounded in reality.
Um it seems it seems so big and over the
top the way they're pitching it that it seems more
like Michael Bay's history than like a Yeah, I watched
I rewatched one of the trail for it yesterday as
I was working on this podcast, and I had two
immediate thoughts, and one was there's a shot of some
(29:05):
ships in a harbor, and I was like, I am
pretty sure that is the Boston Tea Party museum and
ships shot from the air, Like I don't, I'm I
think that might be what that is. And I thought
about like going to research that and seeing if it
really was a shot of the Boston Tea Party ships
and museum, because it really did look like that to me.
And the other was that whale is just so big
(29:27):
and the whales are large, but I have also been
on a whale watch and the whales we saw were
not nearly as like Leviathan as the one in the
movie is, so uh yeah, I'm wondering how the scale
of the whale actually measures up to the reality of
sperm whales. This is also what I'm really jealous of
(29:47):
past hosts for covering like really early, really really early
in the in the life of us being on the show.
I was putting the little list of things that I
really really wanted to talk about, and I was like,
I want to talk about this we ship they got
sunk by a whale, but I can't because we have
that already, which is fine. I love our past host.
Basically all the folks that have worked on the show
(30:10):
are friends and colleagues, so I'm happy they got to
do it, but sad I did not. And that is
it for our most Requested episode round up. Uh, those
are the things. I put together this list through a
couple of methods. One was just memory of the things
(30:31):
people ask us for over and over, and one was
looking in my Scent items folder and outlook. Uh, and
I've emailed I think it was like two thirty six
emails that were links to episodes that we have already
in my items folder. And then I was really embarrassed
because I realized I had sent the same person multiple
(30:51):
links on multiple days and I never realized it was
the same person because there's so much so we guess
there's so much email. I was sending so much email,
so uh, yeah, embarrassing. Well, I mean I know for me,
like there's there's a point where we get so much
email where uh, eventually I will sometimes like, oh I
remember this person. But it's hard to establish pattern recognition
(31:13):
when you're getting so much. And we've talked about before
how like the podcast is not the only thing that
Tracy and I do, So it's kind of like, oh,
I'm in the middle of editing this article. Oh there's
another history email. I'll kind of shunt it off and
read it later. And so it's like, with the constant
juggle of all the stuff, I have a really hard
time developing pattern recognition and see recognizing people's names over
(31:34):
and over. We do. We do read all of your emails.
We read them all. We answer a bitifully small proportion
of them because there are so many, but we do.
We do read them all. So thank you so much
everyone who sends us these wonderful emails that come into
our inbox all time. We love them. Uh. And so,
as we said at the clap of the show, we're
(31:54):
basically going to put links to all of these inner
show notes that are blog at Miston history dot com.
So people who are interested uh and hearing these for
the first time or in re listening to an old
favorite whichever floats your boat. You can find all these
in one place are awesome. Producer Noll is going to
try to put together a share able playlist of them
also to make them easier to find. Um and we
(32:17):
will post links to all of that as many places
as we can think of. Uh. And if you want
to see whether we've got something you're interested in in
our archive. We also have a blog post that Tracy
put together which is how to find old episodes of
stuff you missed in history class, and it basically has
lots of tips on how to search and how to
hunt for things that might help you. If you are
(32:38):
wishing we would do something, it might already exist, either
by us or previous hosts, and your wish could be
instantly granted. I love it when the wish is instantly granted.
I always feel kind of guilty when somebody has clearly
put so much time and thought into convincing us that
we should do an episode on something and it's something
that we already have. Uh. It could be me overthinking things,
(33:01):
but I always feel like if that were me getting
the email back saying hey, we we love that person. Also,
here's a link to the episode that we have on them,
Like that would kind of take the wind out of
my sales. I don't know if it would or not
for me, but I do feel bad that they spent
time they didn't have to making their case. Yeah. So anyway, Yeah, yeah,
(33:22):
we have so many episodes in our archive and uh,
I would say, um, just because in our archive on
our website and missing history dot com, I have gone
in and tried to put the person's name in the
title for things that uh that did not have their name,
like don't Cross the Dragon Lady did not have the
(33:45):
in there. So I've like gone and I've put the
names in as many of the titles as I can
find to make them easier to find them before and
so it may be a little easier on our website
than in like it teams. Um. So yeah, that is
our most requested episodes that we already have. Do you
have some fresh listener mail that does not in fact
(34:07):
requestion episodes that already exists? Uh, it is so fresh
that it came in this morning. It is from Gabrielle
and it is from our very very recent episode from yesterday.
In terms of when we were recording this podcast on
the Gallipoli campaign, and Gabrielle says, Dear Tracy and Holly,
I have just finished listening to your episode on the
Gallipoli Campaign and it was very good. Despite as a
(34:31):
new Zealander, I couldn't miss it in history class. One
small point that has recently been made more widely known
about the Anzac biscuits is that although it is possible
sweet biscuits were sent over in care packages and ANZACs
are good keepers and travel well, they became iconic because
of the massive fundraising efforts for soldiers aid societies such
(34:52):
as the Red Cross in the early aftermath of the landing.
Hundreds of bake sales and tables of works were set up,
and most of them had a version of this oatmeal
and coconut biscuit that is made without eggs and by
melting together the butter and golden syrup. This recipe was
popular during rationing as it uses minimal amounts of scarce ingredients.
(35:13):
At least one hospital ship was funded in this way.
They also are the only exception to an Act of
Parliament that forbids naming any commercial product after Anzas and
must be one made to the original recipe and two
only called biscuits, never called cookies, and their title. A
well known sandwich chain could not do the first when
(35:35):
attempting to add it to their menu. Half chocolate dipped
Anzac biscuits are becoming more popular uh and during April,
commemorative tins are for sale and the supermarkets all over
the country and in Australia love the show. Gabrielle, thank
you so much for this awesome information about Anzac biscuits. Um, Gabrielle.
My my information that they were uh, that they became
(35:57):
famous for being sent to soldiers actually came I'm a
prior listener mail from several years ago, uh from somebody
who actually sent us a recipe for how to make them, um,
which is delightful. And I have that recipe still and
maybe over the holidays when I have some extra baking time,
I will make them and see what they are like.
(36:19):
So thank you again, Gabrielle sent for sending that. That
is great information. If you would like to write to us,
we're a history podcast at how Stuff Works dot com.
We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash miss
in History, and our Twitter is miss in History. Our
tumbler is miss in History dot tumbler dot com, and
we're on Pinterest at pinterest dot com. Slash missed in history.
If you would like to learn more about something that
(36:41):
we have talked about today, you can go and put
the words oak Island into the search bar at how
stuff works dot com and you will find the article
on the Oak Island money pit uh that was inspired
by our podcast and then inspired a podcast from stuff
You should do if you can also come to our
website where we will have the list of all of
these episodes, links to all of them, where we have
(37:02):
our tips on how to search our archive in different formats.
You can do all that and a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com or missing history dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com. M
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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