June 15, 2019 • 30 mins
We're traveling back to 2011 for this one! Empress Elisabeth of Austria, better known as Sisi, is often considered the public's "favorite" member of the Habsburgs. She only reluctantly carried out her duties, but her murder created an outcry across Europe -- and the story doesn't end there.v
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. In last week's classic, Empress Elizabeth of Austria,
better known as Cecy, came up as Ludwig, the Second
of Bavaria's cousin and best friend. So we're gonna go
back to the classic episode about her today, which talks
about the Empress herself, why she was so beloved, and
the gruesome end of her murderer. This episode is from
(00:22):
November from past hosts Sarah and Deblina, So enjoy. Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina choker Boarding.
(00:44):
And I'm sure everyone who's listened to the podcast for
a while knows that one of my favorite subjects ever
is Ludvig, the second of Bavaria. He just to recap
for you, since I don't talk about him enough. He's
a Wagner super fan. He built all of those Disney castles,
which are really more the inspiration for Disney castles than anything,
(01:05):
and he died a very mysterious death, which is always
good for a podcast subject at least. But after that
episode on Ludvig Aired, a lot of listeners started writing
in to suggest that we cover another member of the
Vittelsbach family, Lydvig's cousin and his best friend, the Empress
Elizabeth of Austria, who was better known as Empress Ceci.
(01:29):
And Cecy's really considered a prime example of Vittelsbach eccentricity,
but she's also considered, interestingly enough, a prime representative of
the family. She married into the Habsburgs, And that's pretty
ironic because Cecy wasn't really a very good Hapsburg at all. No,
she wasn't. She was headstrong, introverted, and she preferred Corfu
(01:51):
to Vienna. She believed monarchical government was obsolete, and worst
of all, for Habsburg matriarch, she was more interested in
tight laced corsets than having lots of babies. Yet she's
often considered the favorite Habsburg and even the original people's princess,
because she was so popular with her subjects. And you'll
notice a lot of Princess Diana similarities here. At the
(02:12):
one anniversary of her death, obviously a long time after
the end of the Austro Hungarian Empire, you could find
her lovely picture on mugs and kitchy souvenirs, and there's
even a CCI museum in Vienna. Mattel even made a
CC barbie for the European market. So we've got to ask,
what is it about this Habsburg empress and this Vittlesbock
(02:32):
oddball essentially that continues to fascinate people enough to make
a barbie out of her. So Cecy's life story is
often told with this sort of fairy princess kind of spin,
and a lot of that started because of these movies
that came out in the nineteen fifties that really presented
her as the perfect fairy tale young princess who has
(02:52):
an idyllic childhood, meets her prince, lives happily ever after. Um,
but if you stop at h teen, that really does
kind of fit her her actual life story. She was
born Elizabeth amily Eugenie at a castle on Lake Starnberg
on Christmas Eve eighteen thirty seven, and she was the
daughter of the Bavarian Duke Maximilian Joseph and Princess Lodovica,
(03:17):
who was the vittles Buck daughter of the Bavarian king.
And she I know that sounds like an illustrious background,
and it is, but she grew up in a more
rural setting than you'd expect. She grew up horseback riding,
hunting with her father, mountain climbing, doing charity work like
visiting peasants, all again kind of princess e sort of
(03:37):
sounding things. And she really was a country sort of
princess with this relaxed, loving family, a lot of siblings,
and a very close environment she grew up in. But
she was also really pretty. She was considered to be
the most beautiful princess in Europe in fact, so it's
no surprise that in August eighteen fifty three, her twenty
three year old cousin, Franz Joseph, fell in love with her.
(04:00):
And now Franz Joseph had become Emperor of Austria at
age eighteen after his uncle abdicated and his father was
skipped over to reboot the monarchy with a new youthful leader.
But in eighteen fifty three assassination attempt made it imperative
that he get a family going, and so his mother, Sophie,
decided she wanted to keep things in the family. She
really wanted to set Franz Joseph up with her sister,
(04:22):
Ludovika's daughter Helene, and invited the ladies to summer getaway.
It seemed like it would be a good match. Helene
was extremely religious, she was dutiful, probably would have made
a good match for hard working Franz Joseph. But Ludovica
fatefully brought along her younger daughter too, so Elizabeth was there,
and Franz Joseph fell for her instead of Helene. Yeah,
(04:43):
and they ended up announcing their engagement before they even
left the little country retreat. And Ceci is supposed to
have said at least some of the following foreboding gems.
I mean, you can, I guess, pick whichever one you
like the best. She is supposed to have said, I
am so fond of the emperor. If only he were
not an emperor. That doesn't sound very good. Uh, one
(05:05):
doesn't turn down an emperor again, kind of scary sounding.
And oh, if only he were a tailor, which that's
just kind of funny. That one does sound pretty funny.
I don't know if we should dig it too lightly, though,
because cec did, of course, later become one of the
most famous clients of the legendary couturier Charles Frederick Worth,
so she did like clothes. Maybe a tailor would have
(05:27):
been a good match. But whatever she specifically said, it
seems likely that fifteen year old Cecy knew that she
was going to have a really hard time being Empress
of Austria, and trouble really started almost immediately for them.
Even the couple's honeymoon was cut short since Franz Joseph
would have to ride back to Vienna every morning to
(05:48):
deal with the Crimean war, so it was sort of
a choppy honeymoon, I guess, with him going back and forth.
Once installed at court, Cecy did her best to perform
her duties, but she found the formality they're compared to
very just terrible. At the time, to be in the
top tier at court, you had to prove unbroken descent
from sixteen ancestors and the upper nobility, eight paternal and
(06:10):
eight maternal lapses or marriages into the lesser nobility or
middle classes were only acceptable if they occurred before the
great great grandparents generation. So just to show you how
strict that's just getting into court, you can imagine the
kind of rules that regulate court once you're really there.
So CEC did make attempts to loosen up the etiquette
(06:31):
a little bit, try to modernize it some, but she
was only met with disapproval from her mother in law,
the arch Duchess Sophie, who also started to censure her
daughter in law about her constant horseback riding. She would
take lots of horseback riding lessons and the fact that
she'd go out riding without chaperones, which her mother in
law thought was kind of unseemly but also a little
(06:53):
bit dangerous. So cc you know, this young teenager starts
to get pretty stressed out, not just from being away
from home now, but because of stressful court life in
Vienna and all this pressure from her mother in law
about how to act, and eventually she starts to get
sort of sick. She'd have these panics about going down long,
steep stairs, and she'd have coughing fits, and she'd suffer
(07:16):
from what people considered classic vittles Bock melancholy. If you've
listened to the Ludwig episode, you know all about that.
And things really only got worse when her first baby
arrived only ten months after the wedding. She named her
Sophie after friends Joseph's mother, and that was a name
that fit because the baby basically belonged to the Archduchess.
(07:39):
CC was not allowed to play any part in its
care and education and was truly upset about that. And
she wasn't involved in the upbringing of her next daughter either, Gazella.
But she really fell into a new level of depression
when baby Sophie died in eighteen fifty seven. Um Cec
(07:59):
stopped eating. She turned to these fasting cures, where she'd
live on light meals of milk or eggs or what
sounds really terrible, raw beef juice served as a soup.
UM just trying to deal with her her depression in
in this way, and these mood related fast were just
the beginning for CC. Today, many historians looking back at
(08:22):
her habits believe that she suffered from anorexia and also
exercised to excess. She'd ride for hours or in later
years ago on these long brisk walks. She took up
fencing and had gymnasiums installed in all of her palaces
so that she could work out whenever she wanted. If
her weight crept above fifty kilows or about one and
ten pounds and she was five eight, so just keep
(08:43):
that she was really really tall for the time. She'd
start a hunger cure until she lost the weight, and
she'd weigh herself as many as three times a day.
Occasionally she'd eat a lot, but that was rare. In
eighteen seventy eight, for example, she was reported to have
feasted on a meal of a hen and Italian and salad,
champagne and cake. In one she bought an English country
(09:05):
house and had a spiral staircase put in from her
living room to the kitchen I guess, presumably to sneak
down down as yeah, And I mean, I just think
that the fact that these two events are actually of
note in her dietary history gives us a real sense
of her her daily meals. I mean hand the salad,
champagne and cake that doesn't sound like that much. Also
(09:27):
fast thing, however, wasn't nearly as troubling to her family
as her habit of tight lacing corsets. And of course
that was the style for the time, but CC really
took it beyond the style into really kind of outrageous territory.
Her goal waste was fifty centimes. That's nineteen inches. Again,
(09:47):
she is five ft eight, so super tiny, and her
pregnancies really really bothered her because obviously nineteen inch waste
is exact opposite of being pregnant. And after a third pregnancy,
which she really spent trying to hide her figure, which
she saw as kind of grotesque, she finally had a
(10:08):
son and heir named Rudolph, which meant that she could
stop having kids. She had done her her wifely duty
at last. Yeah, and she didn't just stop having kids,
she also really stopped trying to be the empress that
her mother in law had wanted her to be. She'd
sleep only a few hours and stay up all night
reading and writing romantic poetry. There's an article in History
Today by Walter Vandreiken and Ron van Death and they
(10:31):
call this her secret diary that she would write in.
She also took up smoking, and she eventually learned English, French, Hungarian,
and modern Greek. She has a lot of time to study,
as we're going to talk about in a little bit.
By eighteen sixty, she also got an easy way out
of her official role. Suffering from anemia, exhaustion, and a
lung complaints, Cecy's doctor prescribed a curative trip to Madeira.
(10:54):
This meant that she could leave Vienna with a good reason,
so sweet it's an excuse to get out of town.
And after six months in Madeira she was entirely recovered
and returned home, only to have all of the symptoms,
all of the bad health come back after just four
days in Vienna. So I think we're seeing some psychosomatic
(11:15):
things going on here um And this really started a
pattern of leaving for exotic locales like Greece or Venice
or home or Spotsina going and seeing her family in Bavaria,
are going to Austrian spas, and then popping back into
Vienna only occasionally. She was away for almost two entire
years between eighteen sixty two and eighteen sixty four, and
(11:38):
on her way back to Vienna an unannounced trip back
to Vienna, she threw up in her carriage four times.
So she did not like living in the capital city.
I think it's safe to assume no, she did, but
she liked keeping her lifestyle the way it was. In
order to get fresh dairy products on her rambles, which
she loved, she'd only drink milk from her own animals.
(12:00):
She would essentially she'd bring along goats and sheep with her,
so essentially travel sized cows, you know what I mean. Basically,
I think her her dairy obsession is kind of interesting.
I read one thing about how at some of her
estates in Vienna she had full ranges of cow breeds
(12:20):
to choose from, and the cook at the confectionery would
actually specify which cow he wanted milk or cream or
butter from, because they had different flavors and different tastes.
We have to wonder what Franz Joseph thought of his
(12:43):
wife being gone all the time. I mean, after all,
this was a love match, so presumably he had some
affection for her. Not to mention, she's the consort, so
she has a lot of official roles um. Even though
they were frequently separated from the eighteen sixties onward fronts
Off really did stay deeply in love with his wife.
They write a lot of letters to each other. He
(13:05):
would build these palaces for her and her far off
vacation spots or sometimes close to home, trying to trying
to urge her to at least be near him in
Vienna or make it easier for him to visit. He
built a Pompey inspired Palace and Crafu, and this forest
villa outside of Vienna to give her a lot of privacy,
(13:27):
had it decorated with frescoes from Elizabeth's favorite play, which
was A midsummer Night's Stream and It's funny. She acknowledged
the Midsummer Night's Dream reference, but she didn't stay there
very much, and when she did, she'd sleep on a
mattress on the floor near a window so she could
see the sky out the window. Franz Joseph wasn't totally
(13:47):
selfless in this, though he did want a second son
to secure his line, though Cecy's doctors said that her
health couldn't permit a fourth pregnancy. Oddly enough, it was
her growing interest in politics that finally convinced her to
have a fourth child. As we mentioned, CC wasn't the
best representative of monarchy, at least from the Habsburg perspective.
She thought that it was an outdated institution. But she
(14:09):
was really interested in Hungarian politics, an interest that might
have been stoked by her possible lover, Count you La
and Rassi eventually prime Minister of Hungary and uh, we're
not going to go into that too. Much, because there's
just not that much information on them except that they
were good friends and they both obviously had a strong
interest in Hungary. But in eighteen sixty seven, the Austro
(14:33):
Hungarian Compromise made Franz Joseph the Emperor of Austria and
the King of Hungary and by extension, Elizabeth Empress Um
and it divided the monarchy into two halves, and each
half had its own constitution in Parliament, but they were
ruled by one leader and one ministry. And because of
her interest in Hungary and its culture, she had another
(14:55):
villa built there. She'd take her kids to Budapest all
the time. CC became immensely popular in Hungary. She decided
to eventually repay that love of the people by having
a patriotic Hungarian baby, so one that would be born
in Hungary, one that would symbolize the alliance between the
(15:15):
two countries. So CC and Franz Joseph. When I had
and had one more child, Marie Valerie, and she was
born in Budapest April eighteen sixty eight, and this time
I mean she she was the Hungarian baby, but she
was also finally Cecy's baby. She got to raise her
and be in charge of her, her upbringing and her education.
(15:36):
The death of the Archduchess Sophie in eighteen seventy two
gave CC even more freedom to do as she pleased.
She started entering writing competitions as far off as England
and Ireland, and she'd be seen in public for only
the biggest events like the World Exhibition in Vienna and
the wedding of her daughter Gizella or Franz Joseph Silver Jubilee,
so things like that barely ever in Vienna right when
(15:59):
she travel she'd go incognito. So it's probably strange, then,
for someone who's so interested in being unknown to simultaneously
be so interested in her looks. We've already talked about
CC's extreme dieting and her exercising, but she's also associated
with something that's become known as her cult of beauty.
She almost idolized her own beauty, or at least became
(16:20):
a slave to it, trying to live up to her
own reputation. She'd be sewn into those figure hugging clothes
that we talked about to show off her tiny waist.
She'd take icy cold showers in the morning and warm
olive oil baths every evening, and she'd wear night masks
of raw veal and strawberries for her skin, which again
sounds kind of I don't strawberry sounds nice, raw veal
(16:42):
not so much. She also had a lot of hair.
It was dark blonde when she was younger, chestnut colored
when she was older, and it was not only really long,
but really thick. If you look at any portraits of her,
pictures of her, you'll see her with this particular her
hairstyle kind of curled in the front and then just
(17:03):
piles and piles and piles of braids and all of
that hair took three hours of attention every single day.
This is when she would study languages and philosophy and
literature and history. And her hairdresser, who would come on
all of those travels, just like the goats and the sheep,
would wash her hair in what we're called essences every
(17:25):
three weeks, and that day was just totally set aside
for hair care, so she really could say, I'm sorry,
can't go out and washing my hair. Um. For special occasions,
she would really adorn herself and try to draw even
more attention to her beautiful hair. She'd wear this set
of seven specially made diamond and pearl stars, and um
(17:49):
those kind of became associated with Elizabeth to CC's stars.
They're sometimes called. She'd give them as tokens to family
members and ladies in waiting, kind of like a a
calling card almost, and even her minimal use of makeup
played into her own cult of beauty. She wanted to
differentiate herself, her own natural looks, that is, from the
(18:09):
painted ladies that she saw around her. From the eighteen
sixties onwards, she started to collect photos in Venice. In
eighteen sixty two she started an album specifically about beauties
and broke it up into different collections like Beauties from
the East, historical beauties, dancers and skimpy outfits. Things like that.
It's hard to think of c. C as entirely vain,
(18:30):
though she took a strong interest in the poor and
in particular the mentally ill, just like her cousin Ludwig
the Second. In eighteen seventy one, her husband actually asked
her what she'd like for her Saints Day, and she
said she wanted a tiger cub and a medallion, but
quote a fully equipped lunatic asylum would please me. Most. Yeah,
I mean, just sounding so strange, and it's important to remember,
(18:54):
you know, when we when we talk about all these
sort of eccentric things that she does and her own
cult of beauty, just how popular she really was. I mean,
people loved her. We talked a little bit about how
much the Hungarians loved her because she was interested in
their culture and their cause. But the Austrians really came
around to or two when she took care of the
wounded during or after a battle, and people just really
(19:17):
gravitated toward her. But CC's life of eccentric rambling took
a dark turn when in January, her son, Crown Prince
Rudolph killed himself in this bizarre murder suicide with his
seventeen year old mistress. And we got to talk about
Rudolph for just a minute here. He was also kind
of an odd ball. He believed that his father's views
(19:40):
were really old fashioned, and like his mother Cecy, he
wanted a looser court, kind of a more liberal government.
And he actually went as far as to write articles
for a leading liberal newspaper under a pseudonym, which sounds
pretty I mean, I wonder how he got that role
if he admitted who he was and then said, use
(20:00):
my name. But um, that's a pretty radical thing for
the crown prince to be doing. And he also socialized
with people. We we talked about how strict that court
etiquette was. He socialized with people who were outside of
his class. He had a lot of Jewish intellectual friends,
and all of this, instead of making him kind of
the New Guard maybe as he was hoping, really made
(20:22):
him an outcast with his father and with the aristocracy
as a whole. And as a result, he was allowed
no part in government and married off to a Belgian
princess and clearly deeply unhappy and disturbed, and so he
entered into a suicidal pact with the teenage Baroness Marie Vetzra.
And it's possible he first asked one of his other
mistresses to take part in the pact but was refused. So, yeah,
(20:46):
just don't get any ideas that they were some kind
of star cross lovers. It seems like he really just
wanted to just the one who agreed. Yeah, exactly. So
the resulting deaths were called Marling incident, and they were
a huge scandal, and the emperor tried to cover up
all the facts of the case, and there was some
conspiracy theory surrounding us, right, yeah, I mean the main
one is that Rudolf didn't first kill his lover and
(21:10):
then commit suicide, but was in fact murdered, and the
young baroness was murdered as well to make it look
like it was a murder suicide. That's the main theory,
but there are lots of them. So regardless of how
it happened, c c was truly devastated by her son's death.
She took to wearing mourning for the rest of her life.
And just to give you some context to Rudolf's death
(21:33):
wasn't just one unhappy event in her life. It came
right in the middle of a string of family tragedies.
And the first you're familiar with because we talked about
it pretty recently in our Emperor Maximilian of Mexico episode.
He was, of course her brother in law and was
executed in eighteen sixty seven. After that, his wife, Carlo Cha,
(21:55):
was driven mad. Another one we've talked about before in
six CC's beloved cousin Ludwig the Second drown or died
under some kind of mysterious circumstances then in eighteen ninety six,
another brother in law, Carl Ludwig, died from a parasite
after drinking from the river Jordan's. And then the last
(22:15):
blow really came in eighteen seven when CC's sister Sophie,
who was once a fiance of Ludvig's, died in a
fire at um a Paris charity bazaar. So even before
some of those later events happened, even after the death
of Rudolph, Cecy was afraid that she was going to
go crazy from all of the grief in her life,
(22:37):
go mad, and according to that History Today article we mentioned,
she stopped writing poetry. She kind of encouraged her husband
in his relationship with the actress Katerina Schrot and uh
she went on to become his main companion. Really for
the rest of his life. Ceci kept on traveling to
(23:04):
going to all of those spots far away near visiting Bavaria,
just constantly on the move. As we mentioned, Cecy would
usually go incognito on these travels, staying under an assumed name.
But in while she was on a trip to Geneva
to visit the Baroness Julie Rothschild, the hotel owner recognized her,
and so news that she was in town wound up
(23:25):
in the paper. This was perfect timing for a twenty
year old anarchist named Luigi Luccini who was looking to
kill someone important. His original target had been Prince Henri
di or Leone, who was supposed to visit Geneva, but
the prince never showed up, and so when Luccini saw
the Austro Hungarian empress was in town, he decided she'd
make a suitable replacement, especially since she wore all black
(23:49):
and would be easy to spot. So on September tim
he approached Cecy and her lady in waiting on the
street and stabbed her with a homemade file, And initially
cc didn't even realized that she had been stabbed because
she wore such thick corset, she thought she'd just been
pushed to the ground, so she got up. She quickly
walked to the ship on Lake Geneva that she had
(24:10):
been bound for, and at that point she collapsed and
died soon after. The file turned out to have barely
struck her heart. So the assassin was easily arrested, taken in,
and he explained how he had wanted to kill somebody
powerful and said quote, only he who works may eat,
which turned out to be a really peculiar statement in
(24:32):
light of CC's eating disorders. But he also admitted that
he really didn't know who she was. He just knew
that she was somebody important. He had no knowledge of
all of her charitable deeds, her trying to help mentally
ill people and um the poor, all the things that
made her such a popular figure with a lot of Europe.
(24:53):
And Luccini wanted to be executed as a martyr for
his crime. He asked to be killed old, but he
really should have picked the place where he committed his
murder a little better, because the death penalty had by
that point been outlawed in Switzerland, so instead he got
life in prison, and he hanged himself with a belt
(25:13):
um many years later in nineteen ten, supposedly after his
memoirs had been confiscated, and of course Franz Joseph was
deeply upset by what had happened. When he heard that
Ceci had been killed, he's supposed to have said, quote,
you have no idea how much I loved this woman,
And in light of all his family tragedy, he said,
quote nothing has been spared me in this world. So
(25:35):
a sad end to the love story of Phronsie and
Cecy here. But there's a very mccab twist to this
story too, and he knew to Bolina is gonna like
it because there is a preserved head waiting at the
end of this podcast for all of us. So for
eighty seven years after Elizabeth's death, Geneva's morgue contained the
(25:57):
decapitated head of assassin Luigi Luccini, and in the nineteen eighties,
the head, which was preserved in formaldehyde, was sent to Austria.
And there's an a New York Times article from the
eighties um that quotes a doctor old Rich Freik, who
was the chief of Geneva's Institute of Legal Medicine. He said,
(26:19):
quote personally, I am happy we are rid of it.
You could keep it for two hundred or three hundred
years like that. I had wanted to dispose of it,
perhaps make a mass casting of the face, but the
Austrians wanted it, perhaps to see a piece of history
of the Austro Hungarian Empire. Gets weirder than that, though,
(26:39):
because just a few years after the swap, it seemed
like everybody had forgotten how the head got from Geneva
to Austria in the first place. There's an article I
found from the Lancet in the late nineties, and the
head was by that point at the Museum of Pathology,
and it was just a total puzzle to everyone how
it had gotten there. Um. Carl Hlobar, who is the
(27:02):
chairman of the Institute for the History of Medicine, figured, quote,
the Swiss probably thought, my god, what do we do
with this? We'll give it to Austria. So I like that. Um.
They kind of assumed that the Swiss didn't want the
head and figured Austria would, And really Austria did want
the head. Correct. And I would just like to point
(27:23):
out that I'm not the only one in the studio
who's interested in his I know, I think you started.
You started the trend then, So unlike Ned Kelly's head
that we discussed a few episodes ago, no one wanted
this creepy experimented on head of Luccini. The Pathology Museum
director at the time or curator at the time even
(27:43):
said that the head was quote of no scientific worth,
and they've been trying to get permission to have it
interred for years, and that finally happened in two thousands.
And you know why it happened. Why because people kept
on coming to the museum because Emperor CC is still
so popular. People would come, like on the day she
was assassinated and try to see the head. And one
(28:03):
of the stipulations of the HUD being transferred to Austria
was that it would not be on public view because
that's just too gross and creepy. It's it's I mean,
a head and formaldehyde come on with that. In the
stipulation that they I mean, this is gross and creepy
and you can't do it. Those are That's my interpretation
of the transfer. So I think closing with that head
(28:25):
pretty much wraps up the story of um CC's murderers death.
But um I mean I wanted to talk a little
bit more about who she was and the things that
made her so unusual for her time. How strange it
is that those things are are common now or or
not unusual at all. The extreme dieting, the exercising, the
(28:48):
being obsessed with her hair and aging and losing her beauty,
all things that just a few decades later really wouldn't
make her stand out at all, wouldn't have been a
big deal. And yeah, that's a good point, she once
wrote to her daughter Marie Valerie quote, marriage is a
nonsensical institution. One is sold off as a fifteen year
(29:08):
old child, taking an oath that one does not understand,
cannot revoke, and then regrets for thirty years or more.
I just thought that was an interesting quote to end on, because,
you know, after we told this whole story about the
love story with Fronz Joseph, it gives you a different
idea of how she felt when she got married. Thank
(29:32):
you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you have heard an email address or a Facebook you
are l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
since it is from the archive that might be out
of date. Now, you can email us at history podcast
at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast,
(29:55):
the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my heart radio, visit i Heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday, everybody. In last week's classic, Empress Elizabeth of Austria,
better known as Cecy, came up as Ludwig, the Second
of Bavaria's cousin and best friend. So we're gonna go
back to the classic episode about her today, which talks
about the Empress herself, why she was so beloved, and
the gruesome end of her murderer. This episode is from
(00:22):
November from past hosts Sarah and Deblina, So enjoy. Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina choker Boarding.
(00:44):
And I'm sure everyone who's listened to the podcast for
a while knows that one of my favorite subjects ever
is Ludvig, the second of Bavaria. He just to recap
for you, since I don't talk about him enough. He's
a Wagner super fan. He built all of those Disney castles,
which are really more the inspiration for Disney castles than anything,
(01:05):
and he died a very mysterious death, which is always
good for a podcast subject at least. But after that
episode on Ludvig Aired, a lot of listeners started writing
in to suggest that we cover another member of the
Vittelsbach family, Lydvig's cousin and his best friend, the Empress
Elizabeth of Austria, who was better known as Empress Ceci.
(01:29):
And Cecy's really considered a prime example of Vittelsbach eccentricity,
but she's also considered, interestingly enough, a prime representative of
the family. She married into the Habsburgs, And that's pretty
ironic because Cecy wasn't really a very good Hapsburg at all. No,
she wasn't. She was headstrong, introverted, and she preferred Corfu
(01:51):
to Vienna. She believed monarchical government was obsolete, and worst
of all, for Habsburg matriarch, she was more interested in
tight laced corsets than having lots of babies. Yet she's
often considered the favorite Habsburg and even the original people's princess,
because she was so popular with her subjects. And you'll
notice a lot of Princess Diana similarities here. At the
(02:12):
one anniversary of her death, obviously a long time after
the end of the Austro Hungarian Empire, you could find
her lovely picture on mugs and kitchy souvenirs, and there's
even a CCI museum in Vienna. Mattel even made a
CC barbie for the European market. So we've got to ask,
what is it about this Habsburg empress and this Vittlesbock
(02:32):
oddball essentially that continues to fascinate people enough to make
a barbie out of her. So Cecy's life story is
often told with this sort of fairy princess kind of spin,
and a lot of that started because of these movies
that came out in the nineteen fifties that really presented
her as the perfect fairy tale young princess who has
(02:52):
an idyllic childhood, meets her prince, lives happily ever after. Um,
but if you stop at h teen, that really does
kind of fit her her actual life story. She was
born Elizabeth amily Eugenie at a castle on Lake Starnberg
on Christmas Eve eighteen thirty seven, and she was the
daughter of the Bavarian Duke Maximilian Joseph and Princess Lodovica,
(03:17):
who was the vittles Buck daughter of the Bavarian king.
And she I know that sounds like an illustrious background,
and it is, but she grew up in a more
rural setting than you'd expect. She grew up horseback riding,
hunting with her father, mountain climbing, doing charity work like
visiting peasants, all again kind of princess e sort of
(03:37):
sounding things. And she really was a country sort of
princess with this relaxed, loving family, a lot of siblings,
and a very close environment she grew up in. But
she was also really pretty. She was considered to be
the most beautiful princess in Europe in fact, so it's
no surprise that in August eighteen fifty three, her twenty
three year old cousin, Franz Joseph, fell in love with her.
(04:00):
And now Franz Joseph had become Emperor of Austria at
age eighteen after his uncle abdicated and his father was
skipped over to reboot the monarchy with a new youthful leader.
But in eighteen fifty three assassination attempt made it imperative
that he get a family going, and so his mother, Sophie,
decided she wanted to keep things in the family. She
really wanted to set Franz Joseph up with her sister,
(04:22):
Ludovika's daughter Helene, and invited the ladies to summer getaway.
It seemed like it would be a good match. Helene
was extremely religious, she was dutiful, probably would have made
a good match for hard working Franz Joseph. But Ludovica
fatefully brought along her younger daughter too, so Elizabeth was there,
and Franz Joseph fell for her instead of Helene. Yeah,
(04:43):
and they ended up announcing their engagement before they even
left the little country retreat. And Ceci is supposed to
have said at least some of the following foreboding gems.
I mean, you can, I guess, pick whichever one you
like the best. She is supposed to have said, I
am so fond of the emperor. If only he were
not an emperor. That doesn't sound very good. Uh, one
(05:05):
doesn't turn down an emperor again, kind of scary sounding.
And oh, if only he were a tailor, which that's
just kind of funny. That one does sound pretty funny.
I don't know if we should dig it too lightly, though,
because cec did, of course, later become one of the
most famous clients of the legendary couturier Charles Frederick Worth,
so she did like clothes. Maybe a tailor would have
(05:27):
been a good match. But whatever she specifically said, it
seems likely that fifteen year old Cecy knew that she
was going to have a really hard time being Empress
of Austria, and trouble really started almost immediately for them.
Even the couple's honeymoon was cut short since Franz Joseph
would have to ride back to Vienna every morning to
(05:48):
deal with the Crimean war, so it was sort of
a choppy honeymoon, I guess, with him going back and forth.
Once installed at court, Cecy did her best to perform
her duties, but she found the formality they're compared to
very just terrible. At the time, to be in the
top tier at court, you had to prove unbroken descent
from sixteen ancestors and the upper nobility, eight paternal and
(06:10):
eight maternal lapses or marriages into the lesser nobility or
middle classes were only acceptable if they occurred before the
great great grandparents generation. So just to show you how
strict that's just getting into court, you can imagine the
kind of rules that regulate court once you're really there.
So CEC did make attempts to loosen up the etiquette
(06:31):
a little bit, try to modernize it some, but she
was only met with disapproval from her mother in law,
the arch Duchess Sophie, who also started to censure her
daughter in law about her constant horseback riding. She would
take lots of horseback riding lessons and the fact that
she'd go out riding without chaperones, which her mother in
law thought was kind of unseemly but also a little
(06:53):
bit dangerous. So cc you know, this young teenager starts
to get pretty stressed out, not just from being away
from home now, but because of stressful court life in
Vienna and all this pressure from her mother in law
about how to act, and eventually she starts to get
sort of sick. She'd have these panics about going down long,
steep stairs, and she'd have coughing fits, and she'd suffer
(07:16):
from what people considered classic vittles Bock melancholy. If you've
listened to the Ludwig episode, you know all about that.
And things really only got worse when her first baby
arrived only ten months after the wedding. She named her
Sophie after friends Joseph's mother, and that was a name
that fit because the baby basically belonged to the Archduchess.
(07:39):
CC was not allowed to play any part in its
care and education and was truly upset about that. And
she wasn't involved in the upbringing of her next daughter either, Gazella.
But she really fell into a new level of depression
when baby Sophie died in eighteen fifty seven. Um Cec
(07:59):
stopped eating. She turned to these fasting cures, where she'd
live on light meals of milk or eggs or what
sounds really terrible, raw beef juice served as a soup.
UM just trying to deal with her her depression in
in this way, and these mood related fast were just
the beginning for CC. Today, many historians looking back at
(08:22):
her habits believe that she suffered from anorexia and also
exercised to excess. She'd ride for hours or in later
years ago on these long brisk walks. She took up
fencing and had gymnasiums installed in all of her palaces
so that she could work out whenever she wanted. If
her weight crept above fifty kilows or about one and
ten pounds and she was five eight, so just keep
(08:43):
that she was really really tall for the time. She'd
start a hunger cure until she lost the weight, and
she'd weigh herself as many as three times a day.
Occasionally she'd eat a lot, but that was rare. In
eighteen seventy eight, for example, she was reported to have
feasted on a meal of a hen and Italian and salad,
champagne and cake. In one she bought an English country
(09:05):
house and had a spiral staircase put in from her
living room to the kitchen I guess, presumably to sneak
down down as yeah, And I mean, I just think
that the fact that these two events are actually of
note in her dietary history gives us a real sense
of her her daily meals. I mean hand the salad,
champagne and cake that doesn't sound like that much. Also
(09:27):
fast thing, however, wasn't nearly as troubling to her family
as her habit of tight lacing corsets. And of course
that was the style for the time, but CC really
took it beyond the style into really kind of outrageous territory.
Her goal waste was fifty centimes. That's nineteen inches. Again,
(09:47):
she is five ft eight, so super tiny, and her
pregnancies really really bothered her because obviously nineteen inch waste
is exact opposite of being pregnant. And after a third pregnancy,
which she really spent trying to hide her figure, which
she saw as kind of grotesque, she finally had a
(10:08):
son and heir named Rudolph, which meant that she could
stop having kids. She had done her her wifely duty
at last. Yeah, and she didn't just stop having kids,
she also really stopped trying to be the empress that
her mother in law had wanted her to be. She'd
sleep only a few hours and stay up all night
reading and writing romantic poetry. There's an article in History
Today by Walter Vandreiken and Ron van Death and they
(10:31):
call this her secret diary that she would write in.
She also took up smoking, and she eventually learned English, French, Hungarian,
and modern Greek. She has a lot of time to study,
as we're going to talk about in a little bit.
By eighteen sixty, she also got an easy way out
of her official role. Suffering from anemia, exhaustion, and a
lung complaints, Cecy's doctor prescribed a curative trip to Madeira.
(10:54):
This meant that she could leave Vienna with a good reason,
so sweet it's an excuse to get out of town.
And after six months in Madeira she was entirely recovered
and returned home, only to have all of the symptoms,
all of the bad health come back after just four
days in Vienna. So I think we're seeing some psychosomatic
(11:15):
things going on here um And this really started a
pattern of leaving for exotic locales like Greece or Venice
or home or Spotsina going and seeing her family in Bavaria,
are going to Austrian spas, and then popping back into
Vienna only occasionally. She was away for almost two entire
years between eighteen sixty two and eighteen sixty four, and
(11:38):
on her way back to Vienna an unannounced trip back
to Vienna, she threw up in her carriage four times.
So she did not like living in the capital city.
I think it's safe to assume no, she did, but
she liked keeping her lifestyle the way it was. In
order to get fresh dairy products on her rambles, which
she loved, she'd only drink milk from her own animals.
(12:00):
She would essentially she'd bring along goats and sheep with her,
so essentially travel sized cows, you know what I mean. Basically,
I think her her dairy obsession is kind of interesting.
I read one thing about how at some of her
estates in Vienna she had full ranges of cow breeds
(12:20):
to choose from, and the cook at the confectionery would
actually specify which cow he wanted milk or cream or
butter from, because they had different flavors and different tastes.
We have to wonder what Franz Joseph thought of his
(12:43):
wife being gone all the time. I mean, after all,
this was a love match, so presumably he had some
affection for her. Not to mention, she's the consort, so
she has a lot of official roles um. Even though
they were frequently separated from the eighteen sixties onward fronts
Off really did stay deeply in love with his wife.
They write a lot of letters to each other. He
(13:05):
would build these palaces for her and her far off
vacation spots or sometimes close to home, trying to trying
to urge her to at least be near him in
Vienna or make it easier for him to visit. He
built a Pompey inspired Palace and Crafu, and this forest
villa outside of Vienna to give her a lot of privacy,
(13:27):
had it decorated with frescoes from Elizabeth's favorite play, which
was A midsummer Night's Stream and It's funny. She acknowledged
the Midsummer Night's Dream reference, but she didn't stay there
very much, and when she did, she'd sleep on a
mattress on the floor near a window so she could
see the sky out the window. Franz Joseph wasn't totally
(13:47):
selfless in this, though he did want a second son
to secure his line, though Cecy's doctors said that her
health couldn't permit a fourth pregnancy. Oddly enough, it was
her growing interest in politics that finally convinced her to
have a fourth child. As we mentioned, CC wasn't the
best representative of monarchy, at least from the Habsburg perspective.
She thought that it was an outdated institution. But she
(14:09):
was really interested in Hungarian politics, an interest that might
have been stoked by her possible lover, Count you La
and Rassi eventually prime Minister of Hungary and uh, we're
not going to go into that too. Much, because there's
just not that much information on them except that they
were good friends and they both obviously had a strong
interest in Hungary. But in eighteen sixty seven, the Austro
(14:33):
Hungarian Compromise made Franz Joseph the Emperor of Austria and
the King of Hungary and by extension, Elizabeth Empress Um
and it divided the monarchy into two halves, and each
half had its own constitution in Parliament, but they were
ruled by one leader and one ministry. And because of
her interest in Hungary and its culture, she had another
(14:55):
villa built there. She'd take her kids to Budapest all
the time. CC became immensely popular in Hungary. She decided
to eventually repay that love of the people by having
a patriotic Hungarian baby, so one that would be born
in Hungary, one that would symbolize the alliance between the
(15:15):
two countries. So CC and Franz Joseph. When I had
and had one more child, Marie Valerie, and she was
born in Budapest April eighteen sixty eight, and this time
I mean she she was the Hungarian baby, but she
was also finally Cecy's baby. She got to raise her
and be in charge of her, her upbringing and her education.
(15:36):
The death of the Archduchess Sophie in eighteen seventy two
gave CC even more freedom to do as she pleased.
She started entering writing competitions as far off as England
and Ireland, and she'd be seen in public for only
the biggest events like the World Exhibition in Vienna and
the wedding of her daughter Gizella or Franz Joseph Silver Jubilee,
so things like that barely ever in Vienna right when
(15:59):
she travel she'd go incognito. So it's probably strange, then,
for someone who's so interested in being unknown to simultaneously
be so interested in her looks. We've already talked about
CC's extreme dieting and her exercising, but she's also associated
with something that's become known as her cult of beauty.
She almost idolized her own beauty, or at least became
(16:20):
a slave to it, trying to live up to her
own reputation. She'd be sewn into those figure hugging clothes
that we talked about to show off her tiny waist.
She'd take icy cold showers in the morning and warm
olive oil baths every evening, and she'd wear night masks
of raw veal and strawberries for her skin, which again
sounds kind of I don't strawberry sounds nice, raw veal
(16:42):
not so much. She also had a lot of hair.
It was dark blonde when she was younger, chestnut colored
when she was older, and it was not only really long,
but really thick. If you look at any portraits of her,
pictures of her, you'll see her with this particular her
hairstyle kind of curled in the front and then just
(17:03):
piles and piles and piles of braids and all of
that hair took three hours of attention every single day.
This is when she would study languages and philosophy and
literature and history. And her hairdresser, who would come on
all of those travels, just like the goats and the sheep,
would wash her hair in what we're called essences every
(17:25):
three weeks, and that day was just totally set aside
for hair care, so she really could say, I'm sorry,
can't go out and washing my hair. Um. For special occasions,
she would really adorn herself and try to draw even
more attention to her beautiful hair. She'd wear this set
of seven specially made diamond and pearl stars, and um
(17:49):
those kind of became associated with Elizabeth to CC's stars.
They're sometimes called. She'd give them as tokens to family
members and ladies in waiting, kind of like a a
calling card almost, and even her minimal use of makeup
played into her own cult of beauty. She wanted to
differentiate herself, her own natural looks, that is, from the
(18:09):
painted ladies that she saw around her. From the eighteen
sixties onwards, she started to collect photos in Venice. In
eighteen sixty two she started an album specifically about beauties
and broke it up into different collections like Beauties from
the East, historical beauties, dancers and skimpy outfits. Things like that.
It's hard to think of c. C as entirely vain,
(18:30):
though she took a strong interest in the poor and
in particular the mentally ill, just like her cousin Ludwig
the Second. In eighteen seventy one, her husband actually asked
her what she'd like for her Saints Day, and she
said she wanted a tiger cub and a medallion, but
quote a fully equipped lunatic asylum would please me. Most. Yeah,
I mean, just sounding so strange, and it's important to remember,
(18:54):
you know, when we when we talk about all these
sort of eccentric things that she does and her own
cult of beauty, just how popular she really was. I mean,
people loved her. We talked a little bit about how
much the Hungarians loved her because she was interested in
their culture and their cause. But the Austrians really came
around to or two when she took care of the
wounded during or after a battle, and people just really
(19:17):
gravitated toward her. But CC's life of eccentric rambling took
a dark turn when in January, her son, Crown Prince
Rudolph killed himself in this bizarre murder suicide with his
seventeen year old mistress. And we got to talk about
Rudolph for just a minute here. He was also kind
of an odd ball. He believed that his father's views
(19:40):
were really old fashioned, and like his mother Cecy, he
wanted a looser court, kind of a more liberal government.
And he actually went as far as to write articles
for a leading liberal newspaper under a pseudonym, which sounds
pretty I mean, I wonder how he got that role
if he admitted who he was and then said, use
(20:00):
my name. But um, that's a pretty radical thing for
the crown prince to be doing. And he also socialized
with people. We we talked about how strict that court
etiquette was. He socialized with people who were outside of
his class. He had a lot of Jewish intellectual friends,
and all of this, instead of making him kind of
the New Guard maybe as he was hoping, really made
(20:22):
him an outcast with his father and with the aristocracy
as a whole. And as a result, he was allowed
no part in government and married off to a Belgian
princess and clearly deeply unhappy and disturbed, and so he
entered into a suicidal pact with the teenage Baroness Marie Vetzra.
And it's possible he first asked one of his other
mistresses to take part in the pact but was refused. So, yeah,
(20:46):
just don't get any ideas that they were some kind
of star cross lovers. It seems like he really just
wanted to just the one who agreed. Yeah, exactly. So
the resulting deaths were called Marling incident, and they were
a huge scandal, and the emperor tried to cover up
all the facts of the case, and there was some
conspiracy theory surrounding us, right, yeah, I mean the main
one is that Rudolf didn't first kill his lover and
(21:10):
then commit suicide, but was in fact murdered, and the
young baroness was murdered as well to make it look
like it was a murder suicide. That's the main theory,
but there are lots of them. So regardless of how
it happened, c c was truly devastated by her son's death.
She took to wearing mourning for the rest of her life.
And just to give you some context to Rudolf's death
(21:33):
wasn't just one unhappy event in her life. It came
right in the middle of a string of family tragedies.
And the first you're familiar with because we talked about
it pretty recently in our Emperor Maximilian of Mexico episode.
He was, of course her brother in law and was
executed in eighteen sixty seven. After that, his wife, Carlo Cha,
(21:55):
was driven mad. Another one we've talked about before in
six CC's beloved cousin Ludwig the Second drown or died
under some kind of mysterious circumstances then in eighteen ninety six,
another brother in law, Carl Ludwig, died from a parasite
after drinking from the river Jordan's. And then the last
(22:15):
blow really came in eighteen seven when CC's sister Sophie,
who was once a fiance of Ludvig's, died in a
fire at um a Paris charity bazaar. So even before
some of those later events happened, even after the death
of Rudolph, Cecy was afraid that she was going to
go crazy from all of the grief in her life,
(22:37):
go mad, and according to that History Today article we mentioned,
she stopped writing poetry. She kind of encouraged her husband
in his relationship with the actress Katerina Schrot and uh
she went on to become his main companion. Really for
the rest of his life. Ceci kept on traveling to
(23:04):
going to all of those spots far away near visiting Bavaria,
just constantly on the move. As we mentioned, Cecy would
usually go incognito on these travels, staying under an assumed name.
But in while she was on a trip to Geneva
to visit the Baroness Julie Rothschild, the hotel owner recognized her,
and so news that she was in town wound up
(23:25):
in the paper. This was perfect timing for a twenty
year old anarchist named Luigi Luccini who was looking to
kill someone important. His original target had been Prince Henri
di or Leone, who was supposed to visit Geneva, but
the prince never showed up, and so when Luccini saw
the Austro Hungarian empress was in town, he decided she'd
make a suitable replacement, especially since she wore all black
(23:49):
and would be easy to spot. So on September tim
he approached Cecy and her lady in waiting on the
street and stabbed her with a homemade file, And initially
cc didn't even realized that she had been stabbed because
she wore such thick corset, she thought she'd just been
pushed to the ground, so she got up. She quickly
walked to the ship on Lake Geneva that she had
(24:10):
been bound for, and at that point she collapsed and
died soon after. The file turned out to have barely
struck her heart. So the assassin was easily arrested, taken in,
and he explained how he had wanted to kill somebody
powerful and said quote, only he who works may eat,
which turned out to be a really peculiar statement in
(24:32):
light of CC's eating disorders. But he also admitted that
he really didn't know who she was. He just knew
that she was somebody important. He had no knowledge of
all of her charitable deeds, her trying to help mentally
ill people and um the poor, all the things that
made her such a popular figure with a lot of Europe.
(24:53):
And Luccini wanted to be executed as a martyr for
his crime. He asked to be killed old, but he
really should have picked the place where he committed his
murder a little better, because the death penalty had by
that point been outlawed in Switzerland, so instead he got
life in prison, and he hanged himself with a belt
(25:13):
um many years later in nineteen ten, supposedly after his
memoirs had been confiscated, and of course Franz Joseph was
deeply upset by what had happened. When he heard that
Ceci had been killed, he's supposed to have said, quote,
you have no idea how much I loved this woman,
And in light of all his family tragedy, he said,
quote nothing has been spared me in this world. So
(25:35):
a sad end to the love story of Phronsie and
Cecy here. But there's a very mccab twist to this
story too, and he knew to Bolina is gonna like
it because there is a preserved head waiting at the
end of this podcast for all of us. So for
eighty seven years after Elizabeth's death, Geneva's morgue contained the
(25:57):
decapitated head of assassin Luigi Luccini, and in the nineteen eighties,
the head, which was preserved in formaldehyde, was sent to Austria.
And there's an a New York Times article from the
eighties um that quotes a doctor old Rich Freik, who
was the chief of Geneva's Institute of Legal Medicine. He said,
(26:19):
quote personally, I am happy we are rid of it.
You could keep it for two hundred or three hundred
years like that. I had wanted to dispose of it,
perhaps make a mass casting of the face, but the
Austrians wanted it, perhaps to see a piece of history
of the Austro Hungarian Empire. Gets weirder than that, though,
(26:39):
because just a few years after the swap, it seemed
like everybody had forgotten how the head got from Geneva
to Austria in the first place. There's an article I
found from the Lancet in the late nineties, and the
head was by that point at the Museum of Pathology,
and it was just a total puzzle to everyone how
it had gotten there. Um. Carl Hlobar, who is the
(27:02):
chairman of the Institute for the History of Medicine, figured, quote,
the Swiss probably thought, my god, what do we do
with this? We'll give it to Austria. So I like that. Um.
They kind of assumed that the Swiss didn't want the
head and figured Austria would, And really Austria did want
the head. Correct. And I would just like to point
(27:23):
out that I'm not the only one in the studio
who's interested in his I know, I think you started.
You started the trend then, So unlike Ned Kelly's head
that we discussed a few episodes ago, no one wanted
this creepy experimented on head of Luccini. The Pathology Museum
director at the time or curator at the time even
(27:43):
said that the head was quote of no scientific worth,
and they've been trying to get permission to have it
interred for years, and that finally happened in two thousands.
And you know why it happened. Why because people kept
on coming to the museum because Emperor CC is still
so popular. People would come, like on the day she
was assassinated and try to see the head. And one
(28:03):
of the stipulations of the HUD being transferred to Austria
was that it would not be on public view because
that's just too gross and creepy. It's it's I mean,
a head and formaldehyde come on with that. In the
stipulation that they I mean, this is gross and creepy
and you can't do it. Those are That's my interpretation
of the transfer. So I think closing with that head
(28:25):
pretty much wraps up the story of um CC's murderers death.
But um I mean I wanted to talk a little
bit more about who she was and the things that
made her so unusual for her time. How strange it
is that those things are are common now or or
not unusual at all. The extreme dieting, the exercising, the
(28:48):
being obsessed with her hair and aging and losing her beauty,
all things that just a few decades later really wouldn't
make her stand out at all, wouldn't have been a
big deal. And yeah, that's a good point, she once
wrote to her daughter Marie Valerie quote, marriage is a
nonsensical institution. One is sold off as a fifteen year
(29:08):
old child, taking an oath that one does not understand,
cannot revoke, and then regrets for thirty years or more.
I just thought that was an interesting quote to end on, because,
you know, after we told this whole story about the
love story with Fronz Joseph, it gives you a different
idea of how she felt when she got married. Thank
(29:32):
you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you have heard an email address or a Facebook you
are l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
since it is from the archive that might be out
of date. Now, you can email us at history podcast
at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast,
(29:55):
the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my heart radio, visit i Heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!