Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we're
going to talk about the Mirabal Sisters, who are a
really frequent listener request, including from Magdalena, Chanelle, Sophia or
(00:26):
maybe Sophia depending on where she's from, a different Tracy
who is not me, Jennifer, and Jamie. These sisters fought
against the brutal dictator Raphael Trujillo, who was nicknamed eLife
or the Chief in the Dominican Republic. There were actually
four Mirrabal sisters. They were a Minerva Patria, Maria Teresa,
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and did A. Minerva Patria and Maria Teresa were the
most heavily involved in this fight against Trihio. Dady carried
on their legacy after they were murdered. Today, the sisters
are national heroes in the Dominican Republic, but they were
not really well known elsewhere until starting about twenty or
so years ago. They became the subject of the historical
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novel In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez.
Her family was involved in the same struggle against Trichillo,
and they fled the Dominican Republic shortly before the sisters
were assassinated. That book also was made into a movie
starring Sanahayak in two thousand one. Today we are going
to set the stage for all this with a quick
look at the colonial history of the Dominican Republic and
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its neighbor Haiti, and that will help put Raphael Trichio's
rise to power in context. And then it will also
help us get a sense of exactly what it was
that these sisters were fighting against. And I also want
to note that this episode includes a lot of violence,
particularly violence against women and including sexual violence. So for background,
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Hispaniola is one island that is home to two nations,
the Dominican Republic in the east and Haiti in the west.
In the northern part of the border between these two
nations is the Dahabone River that has also been called
historically the Massacre River. It initially had that name after
a massacre was committed there in seventeen twenty eight, although
today it is also associated with a later massacre that
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we were going to talk about shortly. Like a lot
of other islands in the Caribbean and the fifteenth century
Haspaniola was inhabited by the indigenous Chino people. Christopher Columbus
landed on Hispaniola during his first voyage in fourteen ninety two,
and Spain was the first European nation to establish a
colony there. Spain later seeded the western side of the
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island to France, and then the French side of the
island became independent after the Haitian Revolution, which ended in
eighteen o four, and the newly established nation of Haiti
later annexed the eastern side of the island, which was
unified from eighteen twenty two to eighteen forty four, and
what's now the Dominican Republic first declared its independence from
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Haiti in eighteen forty four, and then it became independent
from Spain in eighteen sixty five. At about the same
time that the Dominican Republic became independent from Spain, the
United States started to express some interest in controlling the
whole island, and part because of its strategic location in
the Caribbean, and after various involvements with both nations, that
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finally started to happen after World War One, first with
Haiti and then with the Dominican Republic. The US occupation
of Haiti began after the assassination of Haitian President Jean
Vilbrun Guillaume Sam on July nineteen fifteen. The United States
had already been concerned about the nation's overall stability, and
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after the assassination, the US took control, ostensibly to keep
Haiti from descending into anarchy. Then, the Haitian American Treaty
of nineteen fifteen formalized American control over various aspects of
the Haitian government and economy. The United States occupied the
Dominican Republic in nineteen sixteen, and a lot of the
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justification for this was really similar. The United States was
concerned about the increasing presence of German businesses in the
Dominican Republic, as had been the case in Haiti. American
troops were deployed to the Dominican Republic before that point,
including seven hundred and fifty marines deployed after the nineteen
twelve assassination of Dominican President Ramos as Saris. These two
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occupations had a lot of similarities. Both were ostensibly motivated
by concerns over instability, including presidential assassinations and increasing German
influence in each nation. Both of them followed years of
American involvement in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, including
troop deployments, and both occupations were marked by racism, violence,
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and ongoing unrest and uprisings. At the same time, in
the case of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the
United States took the opportunity to try to make these
nations friendlier and more accommodating to the American government and
to United States and business interests. This included manipulating elections
to favor candidates that the United States approved of, and
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putting pressure on both governments to pass laws that would
benefit US interests. The United States began withdrawing from the
Dominican Republic in nineteen twenty four and from Haiti in
ninety nine. Then in the nineteen thirties, President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt announced his Good Neighbor Policy, which at least in theory,
stressed non intervention in other nations affairs in Latin America.
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The U S didn't physically occupy the Dominican Republic or
Haiti after this point, but it did continue to try
to influence both nations through things like military assistants and loans.
We have really really barely scratched the surface of these
occupations were just setting the stage for what happened next,
which is that Harassio Vasquez was elected president of the
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Dominican Republic in nine four. That was in an election
that had been supervised by the United States, But in
nineteen thirty he was overthrown in a coup. During this coup,
General Raphael Leonidas Truchillo Molina kept the Dominican Army from
becoming involved rather than defending the government. Once the coup
was successful, Truchio ran for president, but also established a
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police force to assassinate his rivals and their supporters. So
with nominal interruptions, Truchio had total control over the Dominican
Republic for the next thirty one years, starting in nineteen thirty.
And he was a product of the American occupation of
the Dominican Republic. He had been trained by the U. S. Marines.
He had been part of the Constabulary Guard, which was
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a police force that the Marines had established. An incident
in n seven really illustrates what Truchillo was like as
a dictator because they had been colonized by two different nations.
The Dominican Republic and Haiti had totally different languages, cultures,
and priorities. Often the relationship between the two nations had
been somewhere on a spectrum between tense and violent, but
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when Trujillo became president in nineteen thirty, the two countries
had a mostly cordial relationship. The border region between the
two was in many ways by cultural, with many people
living there speaking some combination of French, Spanish and Haitian Creole.
Trio found this bicultural border region to be a really
unacceptable threat. It was a threat to his regime, it
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was a threat to the Dominican Republic as a whole.
He also thought the fact that parts of it were
really remote and not well defined would offer a way
for rebels and insurgents to escape from the Dominican Republic
into Haiti. And some of this was also connected to race.
In general, the population of Haiti had a higher proportion
of African ancestry and darker skin than the population of
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the Dominican Republic, so Trihio really wanted the border region
to look more like the eastern part of the nation
in terms of culture, economy and race. Truehio toured the
border region between the two nations in August in September
of nineteen thirty seven to inspect a highway that was
being built, and after that he decided that the Haitian
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presence at the border was an urgent problem that needed
to be dealt with. On October two, nineteen thirty seven,
he ordered the killing of about three hundred Haitians at
the border, describing it as a solution to purported thefts
and infractions committed by Haitians. It was a solution he
promised would continue. This led to a tremendous massacre in
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which as many as twenty thousand people were killed, most
of them Haitians or Dominicans of Haitian descent. Dominican troops
and conscripted civilians mostly used machetes so this would look
like the military hadn't been involved. This is known as
the peede heel or Parsley massacre because, according to some accounts,
the Spanish word for parsley was used to try to
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separate dark skinned Dominicans from Haitians. If the person couldn't
roll the r in pede heel very well, they were
assumed to be Haitian and killed. This is just one
example of what was going on in Truchio's dictatorship. In
the years before the massacre. He had placed the Dominican
Republic under martial law and renamed the capital after himself.
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After the massacre, he continued to stoke anti Haitian sentiments
and policy. He continued to have political opponents murdered as
he had leading up to his own election. He arranged
monopolies and kick back so that he could personally benefit
from Dominican business. He controlled virtually every aspect of life,
including the press, the mail, passports, and air travel. So
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this is who the Mirabal sisters were fighting against, and
we will talk more about them after a sponsor break.
Evenuted earlier, there were four Mirabal sisters. The oldest was
Patria Mirabeal born on February. She was named Patria because
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she was born on Dominican Independence Day. The next was
Belgica Adela Mirrorbal, who was known as Daday, born on
March one nine. The third sister was Minerva Mirabal born
March twelfth, ninety six, and the youngest was Maria Tresa
Mirrabal born on October fifteenth, nineteen thirty five. They were
born and grew up in ojoda, Agua, in the northern
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part of the Dominican Republic. The family was relatively well off,
and the girls attended a Catholic boarding school. Their upbringing
was fairly conventional for their social class, and all four
women married respectable men and had children. Patria was the
first to marry in nineteen forty one, becoming Patria mirabald
di Gonzalez. After Patria had gotten married, but before any
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of the younger sisters had, the Mirabal sisters caught the
attention of President Trujillo. Truchillo's relationship with women was predatory.
He had a squad of beauty scouts who traveled through
the Dominican Republic to find a track to young women
and girls to bring back to him. Some of these
girls were still in school. The women were essentially kidnapped
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and raped and forced to either spend a night with
Truillo or to stay with him for a much longer stretch.
When Truhio traveled himself, families typically tried to hide their
female members to keep them away from him. The mirror
Balls were invited to a party at Trujillo's estate in
San Cristo Ball, not far from the Dominican capital. Invitations
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like this were really not something that could be turned down,
and so they all went, and while they were there,
Minerva Mirraball in particular, caught Trujillo's attention. There's some disagreement
about exactly what happened. Some witnesses say they heard or
saw Nerva slapped Trullio across the face after their conversation
became heated. Members of her family later said that there
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had been a very loud argument, but there wasn't a
physical slap. Regardless, Raphael Trujillo had made advances on Minerva
Mirraball and she had spurned him. Not only had she
done that, but she had done it in front of
other people, and this launched a personal revenge campaign against
the mirror Balls in general and Minerva specifically, and that
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went on for years. Past podcast guest Jason Poorath has
a rejected Princess's entry about the sisters, and he describes
Truchio as quote a man for whom no slight was
too small, no grudge too big. The sister's father sent
repeated letters of apology to President Truhio, but he was
ultimately imprisoned. Minerva and her mother were also held under
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house arrest in a hotel until Minerva agreed to meet
with Trhio again. He tried to coerce her into having
sex with him in order to secure her father's release,
but she refused. Although her father was ultimately let out
of prison, he died not long after he was finally released.
Trujillo's retaliation against the Mirrorball family went on and on,
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and it drove them into financial ruin. He was so
public about it that people refused to do business with
the Mirror Balls. The family was under constant surveillance by
the Dominican Military Intelligence Service, who was always willing to
hear tips about how the Mirror Balls had misbehaved or
been disloyal. Minerva in particular, was reported for everything from
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refusing to toast the dictator's good health to telling a
car salesman that true he has owning a particular model
was a reason for her not to buy it. People
who associated with the Mirror Balls were taken in for questioning,
and that questioning often involved imprisonment or torture. This vendetta
against Minerva Mirraball also affected her ability to study and
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practice law. First, she was denied enrollment for her second
year of law school until she gave a public speech
in praise of the dictator. Then, once she actually finished
law school, she was refused a license to practice, even
though she had graduated at the top of her class.
After all this ongoing harassment, abuse, and retel creation, it's
not surprising that several of the Miraballs became involved in
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a revolutionary movement to try to unseat Raphael Trujillo in
the nineteen fifties. By this point, all four sisters had married,
and Patria Minerva and Maria Theresa's husbands were also involved
in the movement. But this wasn't just about their own
family's experiences. The sisters wanted the Dominican Republic to have
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peace and democracy. By the late nineteen fifties, several organizations
had formed to try to resist President Trujillo, and on
June fourteenth, nineteen fifty nine, exiled Dominicans returned to the
island of Hispaniola to try to overthrow him. Many of
these exiled Dominicans had trained in Cuba and had been
part of the Cuban Revolution. The Dominican military put down
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this uprising and most of the participants were killed. This
incident inspired the name for the revolutionary organization that the
Mirabal sisters and their husbands helped found. This was called
the Fourteenth of June Movement. It it was formally established
on January tenth, nineteen sixty, in the home of Patria
Mirabal and her husband, Pedro Gonzalez. Within the movement, the
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sisters were known as Las Mariposas or the Butterflies. In
January of nineteen sixty, the Fourteenth of June Movement formulated
a plan to assassinate Trichillo with a bomb at a
cattle fair. There are stories of Patria and her husband
and children dismantling firecrackers to make bombs around their kitchen table.
But the day before this planned assassination, most of the
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members of the Fourteenth of June Movement were arrested, and
this included Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal, their husband's and
Patria's husband, although Patria herself was not jailed. Then, in
July of nineteen sixty, with anti Trichio activities going on
in the Dominican Republic, Trichillo attempted to have Venezuelan President
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Romulo Bettencourt assassinated using a car that was filled with dynamite.
He had repeatedly criticized Trahio, and although Trichio had already
been involved in other plots to assassinate him, this was
the one that drew international attention. The Organization of American
States unanimously voted to condemn Trhio's actions and to implement sanctions.
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The nation's condemning Trujillo's actions included the United States, which
until this point had taken a relatively tolerant stance of
his dictatorship because he denounced communism. But after this assassination attempt,
the United States withdrew its ambassador and closed its embassy,
facing widespread criticism and an international fact finding mission into
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what was happening in the Dominican Republic. Trihio freed several
women from Dominican prisons, including Minerva and Maria Theresa miraball
their husbands, though remained incarcerated. Eventually, the Mirabal sisters husbands
were transferred to a prison in Porto Plata on the
Dominican coast. Getting there from Oho to Agua required a
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drive over a relatively isolated mount range. The Mirrable sisters
made at least two trips to visit their husbands there
without any trouble. They had to get official permission to
make these visits, so they knew that they were probably
being monitored and that they were making this trip at
a great risk to their own lives. They were trying
to work out a way to rent a house in
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Puerto Plata so that they could be nearer to their husbands,
but on November, while returning home from a visit, they
were overtaken by Truchio's agents. Patria Mirrabald managed to flag
down a passing truck and tell the driver to please
send word to their family and ohod Agua to tell
them what was happening. Then Truchio's agents beat all three
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of the sisters and their driver, strangled them and put
their bodies back into the jeep that they had been
traveling in, and the jeep was pushed off the side
of the mountain to try to make it look like
it was an accident. We'll talk about the aftermath of
this assassination. After another quick sponsor break, President Trujillo had
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made it clear that he thought the Mirrorbal Sisters were
the source of a lot of his problems. He was
facing international condemnation over the assassination attempt of the Venezuelan president,
and unrest was ongoing in the Dominican Republic, even though
at this point most of the male leaders of the
Fourteenth of June movement were still in prison. On November two,
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nineteen sixty, he had remarked that his two remaining problems
were the Catholic Church and the Mirrorbal Sisters. So it's
really clear that he thought that killing them was the
solution and would fix all these problems he was having.
But their assassinations had the opposite effect, and today that
action is regarded as the beginning of the end for
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Truchillo's reign. Nobody bought the idea that their deaths were
an accident, apart from Patria's effort to raise the alarm.
When their bodies were recovered, there were clear finger marks
on their necks from where they had been strangled. The
deaths of Minerva Patria and Maria Theresa Mirabal got attention
in a way that all of Trhio's prior crimes really hadn't.
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They were young, attractive women. Patrio was thirty six, Minerva
was thirty four, and Maria Theresa was twenty four. All
of them had children. Trahillo started to lose the support
of the army and elites that had previously backed his rule.
Maria therese husband Leandro Gooseman, described it as quote they
fertilized the earth with their blood to bring about Trhillo's end.
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Six months later, on May nineteen sixty one, Raphael Trujillo
was killed in an ambush. Some of the people involved
were members of the Dominican Army. Although Trujillo's son rounded
up most of them and had them executed, at least
one survived. In the Dominican Republic, Today, the killing of
Truchillo is generally regarded as justice being done rather than
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as an assassination. In nineteen sixty two, the about sister's
assassins were put on trial, and this televised trial began
on June that year. Although the men were convicted and
sentenced to twenty to thirty years of hard labor, they
escaped from prison in nineteen sixty five. During the Dominican Crisis,
which is also known as the Dominican Civil War, they
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weren't apprehended after that war was over. The assassination of
Raphael Trujillo unfortunately did not put an end to unrest, violence,
or dictatorial control over the Dominican Republic. Trujillo's successor was
Juan Bosh, who intended to reform the government, but was
overthrown in a military coup in nineteen sixty three. This
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led to the civil war that we mentioned a moment ago.
As several factions tried to take control of the country.
The United States intervened out of fear that the results
would be a communist dictator, basically what was called another Cuba.
More than twenty two thousand troops were deployed, and they
arrived on April nineteen sixty five. In the end, the
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Dominican Republic's next president was Joaquin Belagaire, who was elected
in another election that was overseen by the United States.
He had been sure he was vice president, and he
remained in power for much of the next thirty years
until nine. He definitely didn't have nearly the tyrannical reputation
that Raphael Tracio did, but his later terms in office
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in particular, faced allegations of human rights abuses and electoral fraud.
After her sister's deaths Dade Maraball helped raise her nieces
and nephews, and she protected her sister's legacy. She became
known as Dona de Day, founding the Mirrabal Sisters Foundation
in nineteen and the Mirrabal Sisters Museum in nineteen ninety four.
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She also wrote a book whose title translates to Alive
in Their Garden, which was about her sisters and their work.
Dada died from natural causes on February one, fourteen, at
the age of eight. Members of the Marrable family have
gone on to be part of the Dominican government. After
the nineteen nineties six election, Dada's son, Jamie Davide Fernandez Mirrabal,
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became Vice President and he has served in other roles
in the government as well. Minerva's daughter, known as Menu,
became the Deputy Foreign Minister. Her father and Minerva's husband,
Manuel Tabaris Eusto, continued to be involved in the movement
after Minerva's death. He was assassinated by former Trucheio generals
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in nineteen sixty three. Today, there are memorials to the
Mirrabal Sisters all over the Dominican Republic, Virtually every town
has something to commemorate them, whether that is a street,
a school, a plaque, or some other monument. On March eighth, nine,
an obelisk that Truchillo had built in honor of himself
was painted with a mural depicting the Mirabal Sisters. In
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two thousand seven, the Dominican Republic Salceto Province was renamed
Harmona's Mirabal Province. The museum that data Mirabal established is
in the last house that the sisters lived in, and
on November twenty, two thousand, the sisters remains were exhumed,
along with those of Minerva's husband, and they were all
reinterred on the museum grounds. In the United Nations General
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Assembly issued a resolution naming November twenty five the International
Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in commemoration
of the Marrable Sisters. The day had been similarly observed
in Latin America and the Caribbean since nine that is
the Marrable Sisters. And before we move on to listener Mail,
I'd like to give a shout out to Eve's Jeff Coat.
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She did some research for the episode of this Day
in history class that was about the Parsley massacre, and
I picked up that research for this episode during the
context setting part of the beginning. So you mentioned you
had listener mail, I do. It's it's not exactly our
traditional listener mail. It is a throwback to our previous
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Hosts episode on the War of the Worlds, which was
also recently an episode of this day in History class.
And it's not mail from a listener. It is mail.
It is mail that was sent to me by a
family member that was so cool that I had to
share it with everyone. We were having a family email
conversation in which my uncle brought up the War of
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the World's when it was originally broadcast, and he sent
along a scan of my great grandfather's journal. My great
grandfather was a minister, and his journal entry from October
lists the three different sermons he gave that day. It
was a Sunday, he worked a lot. And then it
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goes on to say when we arrived home from church,
a number of people were there who had been greatly
frightened because of a radio program which had depicted a
visitation from the planet Mars, and a number of great
warriors that were destroying the world, and I just thought
that was incredibly cool, especially because there has been some
discussion in more recent years about whether people really were
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panicked hearing this radio program, and here we have a
first person source, a primary document from my family suggesting yes,
it definitely did cause some people to panic. So I'd
like to thank my uncle for sending that to everyone.
It was a super cool thing. Um, It's not very
typical that I get email from family members that is
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relevant to my job in that way, So thank you,
my uncle. Tal. If you would like to write to
us there about this or any other podcast where history
podcasts at how stuffworks dot com. We're also all over
social media at missed in History. That's where you'll find
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our website at mist in history dot com to find
show notes for all the episodes Holly and I have
(25:45):
ever worked on together, and a searchable archive of every
episode ever uh and you can find and subscribe to
our podcast on Apple podcast, I Heart Radio app wherever
else you get your podcasts. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
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M