March 26, 2014 • 30 mins
Ambrose Bierce was a soldier, a journalist, an editor, a satirist and a philosopher. He was a complicated man with an unwavering moral code and a life of experiences both fantastic and horrific, which informed his writing. Read the show note for this episode here.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson and uh, Tracy,
are you watching or did you watch True Detective? I
did not, which you still can. But thanks to its popularity,
(00:24):
as you may have earned, it actually crashed HBO go
on its finale night. I did hear that because so
many people were trying to watch it. Uh. Many people
have found are renewed or perhaps a new interest in
the writing of Robert W. Chambers because of a book
of short stories that he wrote in the late eighteen
hundreds which is called The King and Yellow And this
book is referenced throughout the season one story arc of
(00:45):
True Detective with references to the Yellow King and the
wearing of masks in the city of Carcosa. And in turn,
Chambers influenced, uh a whole subgenre of writers of so
called weird fiction, including people like HP Lovecraft. Definitely weird.
Well it's actually called weird fiction. Just me going that's weird.
(01:07):
I'm just saying, and I love weird fiction. So, but
influencing Chambers. So going back before the work of Chambers
was actually a man who has been on my list
for a long time. Uh. So now seems like the
perfect point to focus on him, since True Detective pointed
at all of this work so much recently, and all
of those mentions of Carcosa and True Detective that come up. Uh,
(01:29):
that name actually shows up in chambers work, but it
was borrowed from the man we're going to talk about today,
who is Ambros Beers, who first mentioned it in a
short story which was called an Inhabitant of Carcosa and
that was first published in and Ambrow's. Beers is a
really fascinating character. He was a soldier, he was a journalist,
he was an editor, He was something of a philosopher,
(01:50):
He was a cynic. Uh. He was a very complicated
man with an unwavering moral code. And his life experiences
he such so many things that are historically significant in
his time. Uh And much of it was fantastic, much
of it was horrific, and it all sort of informed
his writing. Ambrose was born Ambrose Gwinnette Beers on Dune
(02:15):
forty two in Ohio. It was in a settlement called
Horse Cave. His parents, Marcus Aurelius and Laura Sherwood Beers
had thirteen children, and Ambrose was the tenth. And here's
a fun fact that you can pull out at a
cocktail party if you have a conversation law. Marcus and
Laura only named their children names that started with the
letter A. So, in addition to Ambrose, they were Andrew, Aurelius, Arthur, Abigail, Augustus,
(02:42):
and Aurelia, so the female version of Aurelius, Addison, Albert, Amelia, Adelia,
and al Maida. I feel like at the end they
were just swapping around some consonants to try to make
new names. It seems that way. But thirteen kids in yeah,
creativity might fall away. There's no there's no Amanda. Did
(03:03):
we have that name yet? When Ambrose was still a
young child, the family moved to Indiana and eventually settled
in Elkhart, and Marcus had a really pretty impressive library,
which served as a major source of education and inspiration
to Ambrose in his early years. He enrolled in the
Kentucky Military Institute at seventeen, and while he excelled, he
(03:24):
wound up leaving the school early to take odd jobs.
Uh so this is right on the cusp of the
Civil War, and Beers ended up having a really impressive
military record during the course of the American Civil War.
At the start of the war, Beers's uncle, General Lucius
Varius Beers, established two companies of Union marines. This was
(03:46):
in April of eighteen sixty one. His nephew Ambrose was
among the men, and it was mere days after Lincoln's
call for volunteers when the younger Beers enlisted. Lucius had
instilled in Ambrose a strong opposition to the concept of slavery,
so he had been really eager to join the war effort. Yeah,
just as many other UH figures we've talked about, and
(04:09):
some even recently, UH. The Beers family was very much
part of the abolitionist mindset. When Major General George McClellan
led an invasion on West Virginia, Ambrose was part of
that campaign. The following year, eighteen sixty two, he was
at Shiloh in Hardin County, Tennessee when it was attacked
by the Confederate army. That battle was devastating for the
(04:30):
Union forces, who were taken by surprise, but Beers was
one of the survivors who rallied under General Don Carlos
Buell and catalyzed a Confederate retreat, and the Shiloh Battle
was one of the bloodiest of the war, with more
than twenty three thousand casualties, and it's something that came
up a lot in his work. Two months later, the
newly promoted second lieutenant Beers saved his commanding officers life
(04:55):
at the Battle of Stone River, and I'm going to
start that totally over. Two months later, the newly promoted
second lieutenant Beers saved his commanding officer's life at the
Battle of Stones River in Murphysboro, Rutherford County, Tennessee, and
shortly thereafter, in February of eighteen sixty three, he was
promoted to first lieutenant, and in his role as first lieutenant,
(05:18):
Beers served with the ninth Indiana Regiment and he fought
at Chickamauga in September of eighteen sixty three. Beers was
also part of the Atlanta Campaign under General Sherman, and
this campaign was pretty rough for him personally. He lost
his closest friend during the fighting and he was also
struck in the head by a musket shot on June
twenty three, eighteen sixty four, during fighting at Kennesaw Mountain,
(05:41):
which is close to us. That kind of brings this
particular story very close to home. But yeah, the whole
we're in Atlanta. We're in Atlanta right now. Uh. Beers
was treated for his injury and he returned to the
front lines in September, so just a few months later,
and he served for several months before being discharged the
following January. Uh chronic dizziness and fainting spells that were
kind of brought on by this head injury had ended
(06:03):
his time in the war, but just a few months
before the conflict officially ended. It's not really surprising to
say that the Civil War changed him, because how could
it not. He was only eighteen when he enlisted, and
the horrors of battle affected him pretty deeply. The idealism
with which he had entered the service was replaced with
this cynicism that would become one of his most fundamental traits.
(06:26):
And his time in the war also, as I mentioned earlier,
informed a lot of his writing. There have been other
authors that wrote about the Civil War, and some of
them even served, like Mark Twain I think, had a
brief service, But Ambrose Beer served more than any of
those other writers. He was in the thick of it
for almost the entirety. I mean he enlisted days after
things began and was only a couple of months before
(06:47):
it ended when he was discharged. So those years he
was just constantly involved in the war. And a sad
commentary on how deeply his time and the war had
changed him. Beers wrote later in his life, when I
asked myself what has become of Ambrose Beers, the youth
who fought at Chickamauga, I am bound to answer that
(07:10):
he is dead. Yeah. He was uh, pretty open about
how much it had changed him and how sort of
bluntly it had ended his idealism. After leaving the war,
Ambrose worked in Alabama for a while as a treasury agent,
and then in eighteen sixty six he was employed by
General W. B. Hazen for an expedition into Indian territory.
(07:34):
And Beers had worked as a topographical engineer under Hazen
for a period during the war, and the general wanted
his map making skills again as his team made their
way west. Let's travel with Hazen took Beers all the
way to California. They arrived in San Francisco in eighteen
sixty seven and Beers decided to stay on the West
Coast and he found employment with the U. S. Mint.
(07:56):
But he had begun to work on writing in earnest
at the same time, and he started submitting essays and
short satire pieces to local papers. He was eventually published
in the San Francisco Newsletter, and when the managing editor
of the newsletter resigned in eighteen sixty eight, Beer spilled
the vacancy. Yeah, even though he really didn't have any
formal journalism training, he kind of decided he was going
(08:18):
to become a journalist and studied on his own and
came managing editor of a paper, uh. And as managing editor,
he made a name for himself by taking over the
weekly column called The Town Crier, and he really used
this as his soapbox to lampoon government officials. We mentioned
earlier his sort of uh rigid moral code, and he
(08:38):
basically if he thought anybody was doing anything wrong, he
would call them out publicly in his column and right
really derisive things about them. Just pretty aggressive. Yeah. While
he was still working as a managing editor, he was
also developing another talent outside of journalism by working on
short fiction and so much. In the same way as
(08:59):
he started HISALSM career by submitting essays while working for
the Mint, he started submitting his short stories to literary journals.
He eventually published his first fictional story, The Haunted Valley,
in the Overland Monthly. And before we get to his
life sort of blossoming in terms of becoming a family man.
Is it cool if we pause for just a second
for a word from our sponsor? Let's do it. So
(09:21):
back to Ambrose. On December eighteen seventy one, Beers married
a woman named Mary Ellen Day, and just a few
months later, in March of eighteen seventy two, he quit
his job at the paper so that the couple could
take an extended honeymoon in London, although they ended up
moving to Bristol not long into their stay abroad because
the weather there was more hospitable to Ambrose's asthma. While
(09:44):
he was in England, he also works submitting his writing
to British journals. He eventually published work in the journal's Figaro,
London Sketchbook and Fun and he ended up with a
regular column and Figaro. Yeah he was writing comedy even
though I will talk a lot, and that's about how
sort of dark some of his writing is. Uh. A
lot of what he was writing was really, uh, you know, funny,
(10:06):
little satirical sketches. And this time while he was in
England was productive for both his career and his family.
The couple's first child, named Day, was born in eighteen
seventy two, and their second son, named Lee, was born
in eighteen seventy four, so they really were having an
extended stay in England. And in between these babies, Beers's
(10:27):
first three books were born, The Fiend's Delight, Nuggets and
Dust and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull uh. And after
baby number two, the Beers's returned to California in eighteen
seventy five, and not long after they returned to California,
they had a third child, who was a daughter named Helen. Meanwhile,
(10:47):
Ambrose returned to his writing career. Once they were stateside again,
he got a job as an editor of the journal Argonaut.
In another case of kind of repeating patterns in his life,
he wrote a weekly column. It often called out public
officials for their moral failings. However, this column, which was
called Prattle, also had the leeway to give him an
(11:08):
outlook for publishing fiction on a regular basis. He wrote
Prattle as editor of Argonaut for three years before setting
out on a surprising enterprise, you know, surprising and short lived.
In eighty Ambrose took a position as a general manager
of a mining company in South Dakota. And while the
(11:28):
allure of the job was probably the promise of you know,
significant income, the gold rush had really peaked several years earlier,
and the corruption in the general depravity that he encountered
uh soured him on this position almost immediately. I mean,
we've mentioned how he liked to really call out people
that he thought were morally corrupt, So you can imagine
(11:50):
an entire business that he felt was just filled with
those people. Was really distasteful. And so by the end
of that year he was back in San Francisco. Pierce
was about to start writing Prattle in but not with
Argonaut this time around. His column was featured in WASP.
In addition to using it as a soap box to
call people out for their behavior and for using it
for short stories, he also used the column to share
(12:12):
pieces about the Civil War, as well as short satirical
blurbs that would become the foundation of the Cynic's Word
Book and that would eventually be retitled The Devil's Dictionary.
Is the first thing I ever read by him, and
that's kind of how I fell in love with Ambrose Beers.
And we'll talk more about that in a bit. Uh.
And after leaving the Wasp in eighteen eighty six, and
(12:34):
that's one of those things where, uh, when you see
it written about, there's always there were lots of reasons
he left like he was, as you might imagine, not
always the easiest man to be around, because he did
have this sort of very strict code in his head
about how people should be and behave, and he was
very opinionated and very outspoken about it. So that there
(12:56):
are many factors to that exit from the Wasp, and
they're not always clear, uh. But having burned many bridges
with his critical column, he had a lot of difficulty
finding work after that, so for about a year he
went without a job. However, a man with a huge
reputation for being difficult in his own right came into
the picture and changed everything. So Prattle was revived by
(13:19):
none other than William Randolph Hurst, who offered Beers a
position at the San Francisco Examiner. This was before Hurst
was the media giant that he would later become. The
Examiner was his first paper, and Beerst took the job
on the condition that he could write whatever he wanted, uh,
like no editorial shut down of anything. And those were
(13:41):
terms that Hurst actually agreed to. You know, he had
sought out Beers, so presumably he was willing to be
pretty generous with his deal. And so Prattle once again
became a combination of Ambrose Beers's fiction and his social commentary.
And this time he built on the work that he
did at the WASP, and he published a much arger
volume of his Civil War writings, including an occurrence at
(14:03):
Owl Creek Bridge, which is probably his most famous work.
In this tale, which was published initially in serial form,
a southern gentleman contemplates his life and reminiscence about his
home and his family. Is he's about to be hung
by Yankee soldiers. And it's much more complicated than that.
Beers is sort of a master of sort of shifting
what you think is real and what is actually happening. Uh.
(14:25):
And the tone of the piece is cold, and in
it a steady diet of violence has kind of jaded
all of the players. Uh, which is something that comes
up again and again in his work. This one's my
first exposure to Ambrose Bears. Did you like it when
you initially read it? It might have been in school,
So it was in school, and uh, I don't remember
(14:50):
liking or disliking it. It's also been made into a
film several times. Yes, I also remember watching a film
of it in school, so uh, yeah, there's it's it's interesting.
I feel like having come in from the Devil's Dictionary,
which is much funnier and kind of absurdist in some ways. Yeah,
I have a much different sort of relationship with him
(15:12):
than people that were assigned Civil war stories by him
when they were kids. Well, it's one of those things
that I feel like I read it at the same
approximate time as reading Romeo and Juliet, which there's It's
one of those things where, in hindsight I kind of go,
is that really the best thing for middle schoolers to
get there? You know, first taste of this thing with Anyway,
(15:35):
while Bears had achieved a certain level of success as
a writer at this time, his home life was kind
of unraveling. He and Mary had grown apart, and he
had started to suspect that she was being unfaithful, although
there was really no evidence of infidelity. Yeah, it's one
of those things that, similar to when he left the WASP,
there's a lot of fuzzy nous around it. There's not
(15:57):
a lot of hard details. He thinks that she received
two letters from an admirer, and it kind of seems
like his pride may have caused him to draw conclusions
and be dug in about something that really there was
no substance to. Uh. Which is a pity because then
after almost seventeen years of being married, they separated in
(16:18):
Then just a year later, their oldest son, Day was
killed in a gunfight over Day's fiancee, who had run
off with another man. Both of the young men wound
up dying as a result of their wounds. And despite
all of this turmoil that was going on in his
private life in the late eighteen eighties, UH the early
eighteen nineties were some of Beers's most successful years as
(16:41):
a writer. He published several books, all very quickly, tales
of soldiers and civilians, aggregated his Civil War stories, and
got a lot of critical acclaim. The Monk and The
Hangman's Daughter is written as a diary of a man
struggling with morality, and that was promoted as a translation
(17:01):
of a lost German text. Then there's Can Such Things Be,
which is a collection of supernatural short stories, and that
one includes an inhabitant of Carcosa. And he also started
at this time to mentor younger writers. Uh. And that's
something he would do for years, although apparently, you know,
he remained a rather critical human being, Like he was
(17:22):
very judgmental and critical of others, and he would distance
himself from his students and writers he was supposed to
be mentoring that he thought weren't very talented or didn't
have very original ideas, Like he wouldn't it sounds like
he wouldn't really address it and be like, I don't
really think you have what it takes. He would just
sort of quietly shut them out. He's a complicated and
(17:45):
difficult man, I think so. Right as Beerce's career was that,
it's apex Hurst sent him to Washington, d C. What
Hurst wanted to do was kind of enlist Ambrose Bierce's
vitriol and sense of justice uh into his fight with
against the dealings of Collis Huntington's. So Huntington's had been
(18:07):
accused of being politically corrupt before, and he was trying
to slide a bill through Congress, which, if it passed,
was going to forgive all the outstanding loans that the
government held. Some of these had paid for the construction
of the Transcontinental Railroad. And the reason this is important
to Huntington's is that he was basically the last man
(18:27):
standing of the group that was responsible for building the project,
so he was not super interested in bearing the financial
burden and paying back all these loans that he now
was responsible for. Hurst had gotten wind of Huntington's scheme
to shirk all these loans, and he basically sent his
journalist attack dog after him. Beers was not a blind
pawn in all of this. He thought that the railroad
(18:49):
was correct and that Congress shouldn't be helping, and so
his skilled rhetoric drew attention to the bill, which was
ultimately defeated. And that's the whole episode that I mean.
There have been book just about that event, about the
fight of the railroad and Congress being involved in the
legalities of the corruption, and UH, if anybody wanted to
explore that just know it's out there. Uh. Beers returned
(19:13):
to California after all of this for a while, but
soon he has to be transferred to Washington, d C.
Permanently and he and Hurst, as you can imagine, two
very opinionated, very outspoken men, were known to butt heads
uh and argue over things like this. But the request
was approved and Beerst moved to d C and started
(19:34):
writing his pieces for the Examiner as well as The
Cosmopolitan from his new home on the East coast. And
that was in eight so the nine hundreds did not
start off especially kindly for him. His remaining son, who
had followed in his father's footsteps as a journalist, died
in nineteen o one from pneumonia, which might have been
(19:55):
complicated by a drinking problem. And in nineteen o five,
his wife, Mary, from whom he'd been separated since, died
of a heart attack. And she had actually only filed
for divorce a few months prior to her death, citing abandonment.
And there is a whole other um theory that she
thought that Ambrose wanted to get remarried, so she was
(20:16):
sort of freeing him from their legal marriage, but he didn't.
He didn't ever marry again. From nineteen o nine to
nineteen twelve, Beers worked exclusively on a twelve volume collection
of his work that was published by Neil Publishing Company,
and he wasn't working for Hers anymore. During this time,
he seemed to be kind of done with new writing
(20:37):
in general, and once the publication project of that twelve
volume collection was complete, Beers began a tour of Civil
War battlefields while he was en route to Mexico to
witness ponto Villa's Revolution, which, as you can imagine, was
a rather dangerous place for a foreigner to be wandering.
(20:58):
He also squared away all of his personal business in
this time, although whether that was just the cautionary preparedness
of somebody getting ready to travel to a foreign country
that was potentially dangerous, or a man who pretty much
recognizes that he's at the end of his life tying
up loose ends is a little bit unclear. You know,
it would have played out pretty much the same way
either way. He wrote a letter to his niece just
(21:19):
before he left, and one of the things that said was,
if you hear of my being stood up against a
Mexican stonewall and shot to rags. Please note that I
think that a pretty good way to depart this life.
It beats old age disease, are falling down the cellar
stairs to be a gringo in Mexico. Ah, that is euthanasia. Yeah,
(21:41):
it's kind of jovial, but also a little ominous. Uh.
Many people have wondered if he really was just going
to Mexico sort of with the intent that he would
not ever come back. Uh. There continue to be rumors
and theories about that. Uh. And we don't know what
precisely happened to him on his travels while he was there.
His death date is generally listed as nineteen common nineteen
(22:05):
fourteen question mark. Uh. Sometimes it's just listed as nineteen
fourteen question mark. We have no way of knowing how
long he lived after his last correspondence, which was a
letter that he sent from Chihuahua in late December. In
that letter, he wrote as to me, I leave here
tomorrow for an unknown destination. And some people have read
into that that that was like a suicide note, and
(22:26):
others whore like, no, he he was just wandering. He
didn't have a plan, and we don't know. But after
it became apparent that he had disappeared and no one
had heard from him. His daughter Helen, petition the US
government to investigate what had happened to him, and they did,
but nothing was ever found. He really kind of did
a thin air move. And of course there've been sightings
(22:47):
and theories about what happened, but Ambrose Bears disappeared pretty thoroughly.
There was really not any kind of trace to turn
over or obsess about. You don't know if he was
killed by Federal two troops, rebels Pontoville himself. Nobody really knows.
Some scholars have pointed to the siege of Ohinaga Chillawa
in January nine, fourteen as a likely place of his death,
(23:08):
but there's really no substantial evidence that's ever been found. Yeah,
it's just, you know, a big violent event that happened
near where he was last known to be. Uh. So,
theoretically that could have easily been a place where he
could have died and been lost kind of in the
carnage of the battle. Uh And when you read Beers's work,
as I've said, there's definitely this sense of darkness and
(23:30):
futility and reality juxtaposed with surreality and his war stories
in particular, I find extremely affecting. Chickamauga, for example, tells
the story of this young deaf boy who is on
a battlefield, but he believes it's all a game. Like
he thinks he's in either a dream situation or his imagination,
and he's so lost in this this imaginary play that
(23:51):
he fails to recognize the horrible reality around him, even
though beerst describes the carnage of war with extremely graphic detail. Uh.
And similarly, in Coude Gross, the story centers around a
man who kills a friend of his in a mercy killing.
The man was wounded and really suffering, and as a consequence,
(24:12):
the man that did the mercy killing is executed as
a killer himself. And this sort of darkness and cruelty
of war is always present in his works, as well
as a certain detachment even in this, you know, pretty
intense description of truly grizzly scenes. And that's that's one
of the reasons why uh spoiler alert if you have
never watched Jacob's Ladder. A lot of people look at
(24:36):
Jacob's Ladder as a like a reworking of occurrence at
Owl Creek Bridge for the Vietnam war. Yes, that comparison
is often made, but his work is not without humor,
even though the tone of the humor is usually black.
The Devil's Dictionary, like I said, I find hilarious. It's
really snarky. And so to end on a humorous note,
(24:57):
I thought we could read a couple of definitions from
that work, because it is laid out like a dictionary,
with words and then their meanings. As written by Ambrose Beers,
Sarah would love nown a temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Quotation noun the act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
I love that one. I know the Internet needs to
(25:18):
see that one. There's prey verb to ask that the
laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a
single petitioner. Confessedly unworthy politeness nown the most acceptable hypocrisy. Well,
and this, this next one is funny to me because
my brother calls the lottery a stupidity tax, and sometimes
I call it a daydreaming license. Lottery noun attacks on
(25:41):
people who are bad at math. And finally, if I
just love this one, it's so absurd and wonderful hash
It's categorized as X. It gets no part of speech assignment.
There is no definition for this word. No one knows
what hash is corn beef and deliciousness a commentary on
sort of the mash together of things that hash often is.
(26:05):
So yeah, that's Ambrose Beer. I highly encourage people to
read his work. It is easy to get a hold
of because almost all of it is on Project Gutenberg, uh,
and also many other places online. I mean you need
to do a quick search and find just about the
entirety of the body of his work. His letters are
a little bit harder to get a hold of. Speaking
of letters, Yeah, do you have some listener mais? I do.
(26:26):
I have two pieces of listener mail, both of which
UH clear up some information and add uh an insight
that we would not have otherwise hand. The first one
is from our listener Alex, and it is about the
Judge Crater podcast. She says, I wanted to clear up
something on the Judge Creator podcast, which is a fun
bit of trivia. While Judge Crater was an Associate justice
(26:46):
on the New York Supreme Court, that job is not
as impressive as it sounds. All of New York's lower
courts are called Supreme courts. The highest court in New
York is the New York Court of Appeals. I think
the professor's told us that about ten times during the
month of law school. And then, uh, she makes this
suggestion for a podcast topic, and she gets all the
points for mentioning the clash. This is my personal point
(27:10):
assignment system. Uh. The second letter is actually one of
the message that we received through Facebook from our listener NEMA,
and this is in response to part one of our
Everest podcast, and Nema says, Hi, guys, just listen to
your podcast episode on Everest part one. The U. S.
Air Force flight surgeon in me cannot help but point
out that you're mixing up H A C E with
(27:30):
hypoxia altitude sickness that results in high altitudes. Serebrilladema is
a slow biochemical process that involves damage to the brain cells,
while hypoxia is a relatively quick lack of oxygen that
temporarily causes you to not think clearly. While hypoxia is
a symptom of H A C, H A C E
is not hypoxias. He's referencings specifically when I talked about
(27:51):
my dad's altitude sickness story. He says, also before you ask, Yes,
we still do something very similar to what your dad described.
It's done as part of regular aircrew training to teach
folks how to recognize it and how insidiously it occurs. However,
version is much safer and more supervised, and my dad
would have been doing that decades ago, so I can
(28:12):
only imagine how much it's advanced. Well, and I didn't
talk about it at that time, but that story reminded
me of a friend of mine who, when he was
doing research in the rainforest, became dehydrated and had that
same surreal sense of realizing that his his mental faculties
were not entirely present, and then being like, no, I'm okay.
(28:33):
Oh no, wait, I'm not okay. It's so weird how
you become compromised and it's like your brain stitches together
a narrative that everything's fine. I'm very fascinated by that
aspect of brain science. If you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcast, Discovery
dot com. Do you mind us on Facebook at Facebook
dot com, slash missed in History. You can visit us
(28:55):
on Twitter at mist in History, at missed in History
dot tumbler dot com on pin Drift dot com slash
mist in History and you can just go to www
dot miss in history dot com and explore our shiny
new website. It's very exciting, which has access to just
about all these other things you just mentioned. The two things.
There's two things that excite me the most about a
(29:17):
new website. One is there's a search function. Yes, so
if you were wondering if we have an episode on something,
you can search for it. It's right there. Yes, we're
still finishing up the tagging of older episodes. Yeah. Tagging
is the second thing that is I'm very excited about
because one day soon you'll be able to click on
something like South America and you'll see all the South
(29:37):
America stuff. Yeah. It's very very cool, and the back
end team that worked on it did a great job,
and Tracy and I are excited to have this sort
of new framework to put information into in a new
home online. You know, we hope you visited if you'd
like to do some research on some of the things
we talked about today. You didn't go to how Stuffworks
dot com. And if you type in Civil War into
(29:59):
the search far, you're gonna get so much content on
the Civil War, and it was such a huge part
of Ambrose Beers's writings that it's worth exploring. Uh, if
she would like learn about just about cleaning else your
mind can conjure. You can also do that at how
stuff works dot com and when out Day for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has
(30:20):
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson and uh, Tracy,
are you watching or did you watch True Detective? I
did not, which you still can. But thanks to its popularity,
(00:24):
as you may have earned, it actually crashed HBO go
on its finale night. I did hear that because so
many people were trying to watch it. Uh. Many people
have found are renewed or perhaps a new interest in
the writing of Robert W. Chambers because of a book
of short stories that he wrote in the late eighteen
hundreds which is called The King and Yellow And this
book is referenced throughout the season one story arc of
(00:45):
True Detective with references to the Yellow King and the
wearing of masks in the city of Carcosa. And in turn,
Chambers influenced, uh a whole subgenre of writers of so
called weird fiction, including people like HP Lovecraft. Definitely weird.
Well it's actually called weird fiction. Just me going that's weird.
(01:07):
I'm just saying, and I love weird fiction. So, but
influencing Chambers. So going back before the work of Chambers
was actually a man who has been on my list
for a long time. Uh. So now seems like the
perfect point to focus on him, since True Detective pointed
at all of this work so much recently, and all
of those mentions of Carcosa and True Detective that come up. Uh,
(01:29):
that name actually shows up in chambers work, but it
was borrowed from the man we're going to talk about today,
who is Ambros Beers, who first mentioned it in a
short story which was called an Inhabitant of Carcosa and
that was first published in and Ambrow's. Beers is a
really fascinating character. He was a soldier, he was a journalist,
he was an editor, He was something of a philosopher,
(01:50):
He was a cynic. Uh. He was a very complicated
man with an unwavering moral code. And his life experiences
he such so many things that are historically significant in
his time. Uh And much of it was fantastic, much
of it was horrific, and it all sort of informed
his writing. Ambrose was born Ambrose Gwinnette Beers on Dune
(02:15):
forty two in Ohio. It was in a settlement called
Horse Cave. His parents, Marcus Aurelius and Laura Sherwood Beers
had thirteen children, and Ambrose was the tenth. And here's
a fun fact that you can pull out at a
cocktail party if you have a conversation law. Marcus and
Laura only named their children names that started with the
letter A. So, in addition to Ambrose, they were Andrew, Aurelius, Arthur, Abigail, Augustus,
(02:42):
and Aurelia, so the female version of Aurelius, Addison, Albert, Amelia, Adelia,
and al Maida. I feel like at the end they
were just swapping around some consonants to try to make
new names. It seems that way. But thirteen kids in yeah,
creativity might fall away. There's no there's no Amanda. Did
(03:03):
we have that name yet? When Ambrose was still a
young child, the family moved to Indiana and eventually settled
in Elkhart, and Marcus had a really pretty impressive library,
which served as a major source of education and inspiration
to Ambrose in his early years. He enrolled in the
Kentucky Military Institute at seventeen, and while he excelled, he
(03:24):
wound up leaving the school early to take odd jobs.
Uh so this is right on the cusp of the
Civil War, and Beers ended up having a really impressive
military record during the course of the American Civil War.
At the start of the war, Beers's uncle, General Lucius
Varius Beers, established two companies of Union marines. This was
(03:46):
in April of eighteen sixty one. His nephew Ambrose was
among the men, and it was mere days after Lincoln's
call for volunteers when the younger Beers enlisted. Lucius had
instilled in Ambrose a strong opposition to the concept of slavery,
so he had been really eager to join the war effort. Yeah,
just as many other UH figures we've talked about, and
(04:09):
some even recently, UH. The Beers family was very much
part of the abolitionist mindset. When Major General George McClellan
led an invasion on West Virginia, Ambrose was part of
that campaign. The following year, eighteen sixty two, he was
at Shiloh in Hardin County, Tennessee when it was attacked
by the Confederate army. That battle was devastating for the
(04:30):
Union forces, who were taken by surprise, but Beers was
one of the survivors who rallied under General Don Carlos
Buell and catalyzed a Confederate retreat, and the Shiloh Battle
was one of the bloodiest of the war, with more
than twenty three thousand casualties, and it's something that came
up a lot in his work. Two months later, the
newly promoted second lieutenant Beers saved his commanding officers life
(04:55):
at the Battle of Stone River, and I'm going to
start that totally over. Two months later, the newly promoted
second lieutenant Beers saved his commanding officer's life at the
Battle of Stones River in Murphysboro, Rutherford County, Tennessee, and
shortly thereafter, in February of eighteen sixty three, he was
promoted to first lieutenant, and in his role as first lieutenant,
(05:18):
Beers served with the ninth Indiana Regiment and he fought
at Chickamauga in September of eighteen sixty three. Beers was
also part of the Atlanta Campaign under General Sherman, and
this campaign was pretty rough for him personally. He lost
his closest friend during the fighting and he was also
struck in the head by a musket shot on June
twenty three, eighteen sixty four, during fighting at Kennesaw Mountain,
(05:41):
which is close to us. That kind of brings this
particular story very close to home. But yeah, the whole
we're in Atlanta. We're in Atlanta right now. Uh. Beers
was treated for his injury and he returned to the
front lines in September, so just a few months later,
and he served for several months before being discharged the
following January. Uh chronic dizziness and fainting spells that were
kind of brought on by this head injury had ended
(06:03):
his time in the war, but just a few months
before the conflict officially ended. It's not really surprising to
say that the Civil War changed him, because how could
it not. He was only eighteen when he enlisted, and
the horrors of battle affected him pretty deeply. The idealism
with which he had entered the service was replaced with
this cynicism that would become one of his most fundamental traits.
(06:26):
And his time in the war also, as I mentioned earlier,
informed a lot of his writing. There have been other
authors that wrote about the Civil War, and some of
them even served, like Mark Twain I think, had a
brief service, But Ambrose Beer served more than any of
those other writers. He was in the thick of it
for almost the entirety. I mean he enlisted days after
things began and was only a couple of months before
(06:47):
it ended when he was discharged. So those years he
was just constantly involved in the war. And a sad
commentary on how deeply his time and the war had
changed him. Beers wrote later in his life, when I
asked myself what has become of Ambrose Beers, the youth
who fought at Chickamauga, I am bound to answer that
(07:10):
he is dead. Yeah. He was uh, pretty open about
how much it had changed him and how sort of
bluntly it had ended his idealism. After leaving the war,
Ambrose worked in Alabama for a while as a treasury agent,
and then in eighteen sixty six he was employed by
General W. B. Hazen for an expedition into Indian territory.
(07:34):
And Beers had worked as a topographical engineer under Hazen
for a period during the war, and the general wanted
his map making skills again as his team made their
way west. Let's travel with Hazen took Beers all the
way to California. They arrived in San Francisco in eighteen
sixty seven and Beers decided to stay on the West
Coast and he found employment with the U. S. Mint.
(07:56):
But he had begun to work on writing in earnest
at the same time, and he started submitting essays and
short satire pieces to local papers. He was eventually published
in the San Francisco Newsletter, and when the managing editor
of the newsletter resigned in eighteen sixty eight, Beer spilled
the vacancy. Yeah, even though he really didn't have any
formal journalism training, he kind of decided he was going
(08:18):
to become a journalist and studied on his own and
came managing editor of a paper, uh. And as managing editor,
he made a name for himself by taking over the
weekly column called The Town Crier, and he really used
this as his soapbox to lampoon government officials. We mentioned
earlier his sort of uh rigid moral code, and he
(08:38):
basically if he thought anybody was doing anything wrong, he
would call them out publicly in his column and right
really derisive things about them. Just pretty aggressive. Yeah. While
he was still working as a managing editor, he was
also developing another talent outside of journalism by working on
short fiction and so much. In the same way as
(08:59):
he started HISALSM career by submitting essays while working for
the Mint, he started submitting his short stories to literary journals.
He eventually published his first fictional story, The Haunted Valley,
in the Overland Monthly. And before we get to his
life sort of blossoming in terms of becoming a family man.
Is it cool if we pause for just a second
for a word from our sponsor? Let's do it. So
(09:21):
back to Ambrose. On December eighteen seventy one, Beers married
a woman named Mary Ellen Day, and just a few
months later, in March of eighteen seventy two, he quit
his job at the paper so that the couple could
take an extended honeymoon in London, although they ended up
moving to Bristol not long into their stay abroad because
the weather there was more hospitable to Ambrose's asthma. While
(09:44):
he was in England, he also works submitting his writing
to British journals. He eventually published work in the journal's Figaro,
London Sketchbook and Fun and he ended up with a
regular column and Figaro. Yeah he was writing comedy even
though I will talk a lot, and that's about how
sort of dark some of his writing is. Uh. A
lot of what he was writing was really, uh, you know, funny,
(10:06):
little satirical sketches. And this time while he was in
England was productive for both his career and his family.
The couple's first child, named Day, was born in eighteen
seventy two, and their second son, named Lee, was born
in eighteen seventy four, so they really were having an
extended stay in England. And in between these babies, Beers's
(10:27):
first three books were born, The Fiend's Delight, Nuggets and
Dust and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull uh. And after
baby number two, the Beers's returned to California in eighteen
seventy five, and not long after they returned to California,
they had a third child, who was a daughter named Helen. Meanwhile,
(10:47):
Ambrose returned to his writing career. Once they were stateside again,
he got a job as an editor of the journal Argonaut.
In another case of kind of repeating patterns in his life,
he wrote a weekly column. It often called out public
officials for their moral failings. However, this column, which was
called Prattle, also had the leeway to give him an
(11:08):
outlook for publishing fiction on a regular basis. He wrote
Prattle as editor of Argonaut for three years before setting
out on a surprising enterprise, you know, surprising and short lived.
In eighty Ambrose took a position as a general manager
of a mining company in South Dakota. And while the
(11:28):
allure of the job was probably the promise of you know,
significant income, the gold rush had really peaked several years earlier,
and the corruption in the general depravity that he encountered
uh soured him on this position almost immediately. I mean,
we've mentioned how he liked to really call out people
that he thought were morally corrupt, So you can imagine
(11:50):
an entire business that he felt was just filled with
those people. Was really distasteful. And so by the end
of that year he was back in San Francisco. Pierce
was about to start writing Prattle in but not with
Argonaut this time around. His column was featured in WASP.
In addition to using it as a soap box to
call people out for their behavior and for using it
for short stories, he also used the column to share
(12:12):
pieces about the Civil War, as well as short satirical
blurbs that would become the foundation of the Cynic's Word
Book and that would eventually be retitled The Devil's Dictionary.
Is the first thing I ever read by him, and
that's kind of how I fell in love with Ambrose Beers.
And we'll talk more about that in a bit. Uh.
And after leaving the Wasp in eighteen eighty six, and
(12:34):
that's one of those things where, uh, when you see
it written about, there's always there were lots of reasons
he left like he was, as you might imagine, not
always the easiest man to be around, because he did
have this sort of very strict code in his head
about how people should be and behave, and he was
very opinionated and very outspoken about it. So that there
(12:56):
are many factors to that exit from the Wasp, and
they're not always clear, uh. But having burned many bridges
with his critical column, he had a lot of difficulty
finding work after that, so for about a year he
went without a job. However, a man with a huge
reputation for being difficult in his own right came into
the picture and changed everything. So Prattle was revived by
(13:19):
none other than William Randolph Hurst, who offered Beers a
position at the San Francisco Examiner. This was before Hurst
was the media giant that he would later become. The
Examiner was his first paper, and Beerst took the job
on the condition that he could write whatever he wanted, uh,
like no editorial shut down of anything. And those were
(13:41):
terms that Hurst actually agreed to. You know, he had
sought out Beers, so presumably he was willing to be
pretty generous with his deal. And so Prattle once again
became a combination of Ambrose Beers's fiction and his social commentary.
And this time he built on the work that he
did at the WASP, and he published a much arger
volume of his Civil War writings, including an occurrence at
(14:03):
Owl Creek Bridge, which is probably his most famous work.
In this tale, which was published initially in serial form,
a southern gentleman contemplates his life and reminiscence about his
home and his family. Is he's about to be hung
by Yankee soldiers. And it's much more complicated than that.
Beers is sort of a master of sort of shifting
what you think is real and what is actually happening. Uh.
(14:25):
And the tone of the piece is cold, and in
it a steady diet of violence has kind of jaded
all of the players. Uh, which is something that comes
up again and again in his work. This one's my
first exposure to Ambrose Bears. Did you like it when
you initially read it? It might have been in school,
So it was in school, and uh, I don't remember
(14:50):
liking or disliking it. It's also been made into a
film several times. Yes, I also remember watching a film
of it in school, so uh, yeah, there's it's it's interesting.
I feel like having come in from the Devil's Dictionary,
which is much funnier and kind of absurdist in some ways. Yeah,
I have a much different sort of relationship with him
(15:12):
than people that were assigned Civil war stories by him
when they were kids. Well, it's one of those things
that I feel like I read it at the same
approximate time as reading Romeo and Juliet, which there's It's
one of those things where, in hindsight I kind of go,
is that really the best thing for middle schoolers to
get there? You know, first taste of this thing with Anyway,
(15:35):
while Bears had achieved a certain level of success as
a writer at this time, his home life was kind
of unraveling. He and Mary had grown apart, and he
had started to suspect that she was being unfaithful, although
there was really no evidence of infidelity. Yeah, it's one
of those things that, similar to when he left the WASP,
there's a lot of fuzzy nous around it. There's not
(15:57):
a lot of hard details. He thinks that she received
two letters from an admirer, and it kind of seems
like his pride may have caused him to draw conclusions
and be dug in about something that really there was
no substance to. Uh. Which is a pity because then
after almost seventeen years of being married, they separated in
(16:18):
Then just a year later, their oldest son, Day was
killed in a gunfight over Day's fiancee, who had run
off with another man. Both of the young men wound
up dying as a result of their wounds. And despite
all of this turmoil that was going on in his
private life in the late eighteen eighties, UH the early
eighteen nineties were some of Beers's most successful years as
(16:41):
a writer. He published several books, all very quickly, tales
of soldiers and civilians, aggregated his Civil War stories, and
got a lot of critical acclaim. The Monk and The
Hangman's Daughter is written as a diary of a man
struggling with morality, and that was promoted as a translation
(17:01):
of a lost German text. Then there's Can Such Things Be,
which is a collection of supernatural short stories, and that
one includes an inhabitant of Carcosa. And he also started
at this time to mentor younger writers. Uh. And that's
something he would do for years, although apparently, you know,
he remained a rather critical human being, Like he was
(17:22):
very judgmental and critical of others, and he would distance
himself from his students and writers he was supposed to
be mentoring that he thought weren't very talented or didn't
have very original ideas, Like he wouldn't it sounds like
he wouldn't really address it and be like, I don't
really think you have what it takes. He would just
sort of quietly shut them out. He's a complicated and
(17:45):
difficult man, I think so. Right as Beerce's career was that,
it's apex Hurst sent him to Washington, d C. What
Hurst wanted to do was kind of enlist Ambrose Bierce's
vitriol and sense of justice uh into his fight with
against the dealings of Collis Huntington's. So Huntington's had been
(18:07):
accused of being politically corrupt before, and he was trying
to slide a bill through Congress, which, if it passed,
was going to forgive all the outstanding loans that the
government held. Some of these had paid for the construction
of the Transcontinental Railroad. And the reason this is important
to Huntington's is that he was basically the last man
(18:27):
standing of the group that was responsible for building the project,
so he was not super interested in bearing the financial
burden and paying back all these loans that he now
was responsible for. Hurst had gotten wind of Huntington's scheme
to shirk all these loans, and he basically sent his
journalist attack dog after him. Beers was not a blind
pawn in all of this. He thought that the railroad
(18:49):
was correct and that Congress shouldn't be helping, and so
his skilled rhetoric drew attention to the bill, which was
ultimately defeated. And that's the whole episode that I mean.
There have been book just about that event, about the
fight of the railroad and Congress being involved in the
legalities of the corruption, and UH, if anybody wanted to
explore that just know it's out there. Uh. Beers returned
(19:13):
to California after all of this for a while, but
soon he has to be transferred to Washington, d C.
Permanently and he and Hurst, as you can imagine, two
very opinionated, very outspoken men, were known to butt heads
uh and argue over things like this. But the request
was approved and Beerst moved to d C and started
(19:34):
writing his pieces for the Examiner as well as The
Cosmopolitan from his new home on the East coast. And
that was in eight so the nine hundreds did not
start off especially kindly for him. His remaining son, who
had followed in his father's footsteps as a journalist, died
in nineteen o one from pneumonia, which might have been
(19:55):
complicated by a drinking problem. And in nineteen o five,
his wife, Mary, from whom he'd been separated since, died
of a heart attack. And she had actually only filed
for divorce a few months prior to her death, citing abandonment.
And there is a whole other um theory that she
thought that Ambrose wanted to get remarried, so she was
(20:16):
sort of freeing him from their legal marriage, but he didn't.
He didn't ever marry again. From nineteen o nine to
nineteen twelve, Beers worked exclusively on a twelve volume collection
of his work that was published by Neil Publishing Company,
and he wasn't working for Hers anymore. During this time,
he seemed to be kind of done with new writing
(20:37):
in general, and once the publication project of that twelve
volume collection was complete, Beers began a tour of Civil
War battlefields while he was en route to Mexico to
witness ponto Villa's Revolution, which, as you can imagine, was
a rather dangerous place for a foreigner to be wandering.
(20:58):
He also squared away all of his personal business in
this time, although whether that was just the cautionary preparedness
of somebody getting ready to travel to a foreign country
that was potentially dangerous, or a man who pretty much
recognizes that he's at the end of his life tying
up loose ends is a little bit unclear. You know,
it would have played out pretty much the same way
either way. He wrote a letter to his niece just
(21:19):
before he left, and one of the things that said was,
if you hear of my being stood up against a
Mexican stonewall and shot to rags. Please note that I
think that a pretty good way to depart this life.
It beats old age disease, are falling down the cellar
stairs to be a gringo in Mexico. Ah, that is euthanasia. Yeah,
(21:41):
it's kind of jovial, but also a little ominous. Uh.
Many people have wondered if he really was just going
to Mexico sort of with the intent that he would
not ever come back. Uh. There continue to be rumors
and theories about that. Uh. And we don't know what
precisely happened to him on his travels while he was there.
His death date is generally listed as nineteen common nineteen
(22:05):
fourteen question mark. Uh. Sometimes it's just listed as nineteen
fourteen question mark. We have no way of knowing how
long he lived after his last correspondence, which was a
letter that he sent from Chihuahua in late December. In
that letter, he wrote as to me, I leave here
tomorrow for an unknown destination. And some people have read
into that that that was like a suicide note, and
(22:26):
others whore like, no, he he was just wandering. He
didn't have a plan, and we don't know. But after
it became apparent that he had disappeared and no one
had heard from him. His daughter Helen, petition the US
government to investigate what had happened to him, and they did,
but nothing was ever found. He really kind of did
a thin air move. And of course there've been sightings
(22:47):
and theories about what happened, but Ambrose Bears disappeared pretty thoroughly.
There was really not any kind of trace to turn
over or obsess about. You don't know if he was
killed by Federal two troops, rebels Pontoville himself. Nobody really knows.
Some scholars have pointed to the siege of Ohinaga Chillawa
in January nine, fourteen as a likely place of his death,
(23:08):
but there's really no substantial evidence that's ever been found. Yeah,
it's just, you know, a big violent event that happened
near where he was last known to be. Uh. So,
theoretically that could have easily been a place where he
could have died and been lost kind of in the
carnage of the battle. Uh And when you read Beers's work,
as I've said, there's definitely this sense of darkness and
(23:30):
futility and reality juxtaposed with surreality and his war stories
in particular, I find extremely affecting. Chickamauga, for example, tells
the story of this young deaf boy who is on
a battlefield, but he believes it's all a game. Like
he thinks he's in either a dream situation or his imagination,
and he's so lost in this this imaginary play that
(23:51):
he fails to recognize the horrible reality around him, even
though beerst describes the carnage of war with extremely graphic detail. Uh.
And similarly, in Coude Gross, the story centers around a
man who kills a friend of his in a mercy killing.
The man was wounded and really suffering, and as a consequence,
(24:12):
the man that did the mercy killing is executed as
a killer himself. And this sort of darkness and cruelty
of war is always present in his works, as well
as a certain detachment even in this, you know, pretty
intense description of truly grizzly scenes. And that's that's one
of the reasons why uh spoiler alert if you have
never watched Jacob's Ladder. A lot of people look at
(24:36):
Jacob's Ladder as a like a reworking of occurrence at
Owl Creek Bridge for the Vietnam war. Yes, that comparison
is often made, but his work is not without humor,
even though the tone of the humor is usually black.
The Devil's Dictionary, like I said, I find hilarious. It's
really snarky. And so to end on a humorous note,
(24:57):
I thought we could read a couple of definitions from
that work, because it is laid out like a dictionary,
with words and then their meanings. As written by Ambrose Beers,
Sarah would love nown a temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Quotation noun the act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
I love that one. I know the Internet needs to
(25:18):
see that one. There's prey verb to ask that the
laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a
single petitioner. Confessedly unworthy politeness nown the most acceptable hypocrisy. Well,
and this, this next one is funny to me because
my brother calls the lottery a stupidity tax, and sometimes
I call it a daydreaming license. Lottery noun attacks on
(25:41):
people who are bad at math. And finally, if I
just love this one, it's so absurd and wonderful hash
It's categorized as X. It gets no part of speech assignment.
There is no definition for this word. No one knows
what hash is corn beef and deliciousness a commentary on
sort of the mash together of things that hash often is.
(26:05):
So yeah, that's Ambrose Beer. I highly encourage people to
read his work. It is easy to get a hold
of because almost all of it is on Project Gutenberg, uh,
and also many other places online. I mean you need
to do a quick search and find just about the
entirety of the body of his work. His letters are
a little bit harder to get a hold of. Speaking
of letters, Yeah, do you have some listener mais? I do.
(26:26):
I have two pieces of listener mail, both of which
UH clear up some information and add uh an insight
that we would not have otherwise hand. The first one
is from our listener Alex, and it is about the
Judge Crater podcast. She says, I wanted to clear up
something on the Judge Creator podcast, which is a fun
bit of trivia. While Judge Crater was an Associate justice
(26:46):
on the New York Supreme Court, that job is not
as impressive as it sounds. All of New York's lower
courts are called Supreme courts. The highest court in New
York is the New York Court of Appeals. I think
the professor's told us that about ten times during the
month of law school. And then, uh, she makes this
suggestion for a podcast topic, and she gets all the
points for mentioning the clash. This is my personal point
(27:10):
assignment system. Uh. The second letter is actually one of
the message that we received through Facebook from our listener NEMA,
and this is in response to part one of our
Everest podcast, and Nema says, Hi, guys, just listen to
your podcast episode on Everest part one. The U. S.
Air Force flight surgeon in me cannot help but point
out that you're mixing up H A C E with
(27:30):
hypoxia altitude sickness that results in high altitudes. Serebrilladema is
a slow biochemical process that involves damage to the brain cells,
while hypoxia is a relatively quick lack of oxygen that
temporarily causes you to not think clearly. While hypoxia is
a symptom of H A C, H A C E
is not hypoxias. He's referencings specifically when I talked about
(27:51):
my dad's altitude sickness story. He says, also before you ask, Yes,
we still do something very similar to what your dad described.
It's done as part of regular aircrew training to teach
folks how to recognize it and how insidiously it occurs. However,
version is much safer and more supervised, and my dad
would have been doing that decades ago, so I can
(28:12):
only imagine how much it's advanced. Well, and I didn't
talk about it at that time, but that story reminded
me of a friend of mine who, when he was
doing research in the rainforest, became dehydrated and had that
same surreal sense of realizing that his his mental faculties
were not entirely present, and then being like, no, I'm okay.
(28:33):
Oh no, wait, I'm not okay. It's so weird how
you become compromised and it's like your brain stitches together
a narrative that everything's fine. I'm very fascinated by that
aspect of brain science. If you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcast, Discovery
dot com. Do you mind us on Facebook at Facebook
dot com, slash missed in History. You can visit us
(28:55):
on Twitter at mist in History, at missed in History
dot tumbler dot com on pin Drift dot com slash
mist in History and you can just go to www
dot miss in history dot com and explore our shiny
new website. It's very exciting, which has access to just
about all these other things you just mentioned. The two things.
There's two things that excite me the most about a
(29:17):
new website. One is there's a search function. Yes, so
if you were wondering if we have an episode on something,
you can search for it. It's right there. Yes, we're
still finishing up the tagging of older episodes. Yeah. Tagging
is the second thing that is I'm very excited about
because one day soon you'll be able to click on
something like South America and you'll see all the South
(29:37):
America stuff. Yeah. It's very very cool, and the back
end team that worked on it did a great job,
and Tracy and I are excited to have this sort
of new framework to put information into in a new
home online. You know, we hope you visited if you'd
like to do some research on some of the things
we talked about today. You didn't go to how Stuffworks
dot com. And if you type in Civil War into
(29:59):
the search far, you're gonna get so much content on
the Civil War, and it was such a huge part
of Ambrose Beers's writings that it's worth exploring. Uh, if
she would like learn about just about cleaning else your
mind can conjure. You can also do that at how
stuff works dot com and when out Day for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has
(30:20):
stuff works dot com. This episode of Stuff you Missed
in History Classes brought to you by Linda dot com.
You can learn it at Linda dot com, an online
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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