Touring History 6-12-25

TOURING HISTORY PODCAST SCRIPT

June 12th, 2025 - Episode 49

 

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LANE: Welcome back to Touring History, the podcast where we discover that every single day in the past was somehow both completely inevitable and totally bananas. I'm Lane.

DAVE: And I'm Dave, and before we dive into today's emotional rollercoaster of human achievement and catastrophe, we need to talk about something that's been consistently inconsistent throughout all of recorded history—TimeFlakes cereal, now with 47% more temporal confusion!

LANE: You know, Dave and I have been doing this show long enough to realize that no matter what's happening in the world—wars, elections, pandemics, the rise and fall of empires—people have always struggled to understand what time it actually is.

DAVE: TimeFlakes represents that kind of temporal bewilderment. Each bowl contains cereal pieces from different eras of human history. Medieval oats, Renaissance wheat, and Industrial Revolution corn syrup, all mixed together in a way that makes absolutely no chronological sense.

LANE: Which is perfect for today, because June 12th includes everything from medieval battles to civil rights milestones to one of the most heartbreaking stories of the 20th century. So grab your favorite historically confused breakfast—preferably TimeFlakes, available nowhere because we just made it up—and let's see what humanity accomplished on this particular day.

 

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BIRTHDAYS: FROM TRAGIC TO TRIUMPHANT

DAVE: Let's start with birthdays, because June 12th decided to give us one of the most emotionally complex birthday lists in history.

LANE: Anne Frank, born 1929. And this is where we need to pause, because Anne Frank's story is probably one of the most important stories of the 20th century, and it starts with a birthday present.

DAVE: June 12th, 1942, Anne Frank receives a diary for her 13th birthday. Just a regular diary, the kind any teenager might get. But within a month, her family would be in hiding, and that diary would become one of the most important historical documents ever written.

LANE: Anne Frank wrote about being a normal teenager—crushes, arguments with her parents, dreams about her future—while hiding in a secret annex during the Holocaust. It's like if your diary became a window into one of the darkest periods in human history.

DAVE: What gets me about Anne Frank's diary is how ordinary it is in some ways. She's worried about typical teenage things, she's frustrated with her family, she's figuring out who she is. But she's doing all of this while literally hiding for her life.

LANE: And the fact that we're talking about her today, 80 years later, means her diary accomplished what she hoped it would—it made sure people remembered.

DAVE: On a much lighter note, we've got Adriana Lima, born 1976, one of the most successful supermodels in history.

LANE: Lima was a Victoria's Secret Angel for almost 20 years, which is like being a professional beautiful person for two decades. That's a career that requires both genetic luck and serious business skills.

DAVE: And then we've got Dave Franco, born 1985, who's basically living proof that being James Franco's little brother doesn't automatically ruin your life.

LANE: Dave Franco managed to carve out his own career in Hollywood, which is impressive when your older brother is... well, James Franco is a lot.

DAVE: It's like if your older sibling was really famous but also really weird, and you had to figure out how to be successful without people constantly asking you to explain your sibling's life choices.

 

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MEDIEVAL