Hurricane San Ciriaco

Hurricane San Ciriaco struck Puerto Rico at a precarious point in its history. The United States had just taken possession of the island, and the 40 or so years leading up to the Spanish-American War had also been particularly tumultuous. 

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Episode Transcript

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 Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry So I
am the first to admit we have some holes in
our archive. Well, covering the entirety of human history is right,

(00:23):
not something that can easily be done. No, yes, because
the world is enormous and history is basically infinite, we
were always going to have holes. But a few of
these holes are kind of glaring. Uh. And there's one
particularly big square mile hole in the archive, and that
is Puerto Rico. So we're gonna make that hole just
a little smaller today with Hurricane San Syriaco, which was

(00:44):
a massive hurricane that struck the island in I also
don't think we've ever done a whole episode just on
a hurricane, and since we're right at the start of
Atlantic hurricane season, it seems like an appropriate time to
do this one. Although there are aspects of this that
are uncannily similar to Hurricane Maria, which struck Puerto Rico
on September, so part of me wishes that we had

(01:05):
done this way before. Now. I like that you used
the metaphor of us having a hole that needs to
be filled in the archive by then covering a topic
that obliterates things and creates massive gaps. Yeah, that was
not intentional at all. It was accidental, but it is, uh,
you know, an important and serious topic. Hurricane San Syriaco

(01:29):
struck Puerto Rico at a really precarious point in its history.
The United States had just taken possession of the island
after centuries of its being controlled by Spain. Christopher Columbus
had claimed the island for Spain during his second voyage
in four and the island's first Spanish settlement followed in
fift eight. Then fast forwarding to the United States took

(01:53):
possession of Puerto Rico at the end of the Spanish
American War. But this precariousness was not only about the
fact that Puerto Rico was suddenly part of a completely
different colonial empire, which had a different language, a different culture,
and a totally different political system from the one before.
The forty or so years leading up to the Spanish
American War had also been particularly tumultuous. By the middle

(02:16):
of the eighteen hundreds, Puerto Rico had a population of
more than six hundred and fifty thousand people, and the
island had developed its own unique culture. This culture drew
from a lot of influences, including Spanish columnists, enslaved Africans,
and the indigenous Tino who had lived on the island
before the arrival of Spain. And the overwhelming majority of

(02:36):
the population was doing agricultural work and living in poverty.
The islands sugar and coffee industries were rapidly expanding, which
was affecting life all over the island. Sugar and coffee
plantations got bigger and bigger, and they crowded out smaller
farms that had been growing other crops. Fewer people owned
their own land, and people who had been able to

(02:57):
subsist on their own crops increasingly came destitute because they
no longer had land to grow on. Public health started
to suffer and mortality rates started to rise. This was
a major shift. In eighteen thirty, less than thirty percent
of Puerto Rico's cultivated land was used for export crops.
By eighteen sixty two, that had risen to more than

(03:19):
fifty the year of Hurricane s and Siriaco. It was
approaching as that percentage of land devoted to export crops increased,
Puerto Rico had to import more and more of its food,
and it often had a food deficit, so you can
imagine it sort of this way. In the decades leading
up to the Spanish American War, both the Spanish government

(03:41):
and the island's coffee and sugar planters were approaching Puerto
Rico more like a capitalist enterprise meant to grow export crops,
unless like a place that was home to a population
of human beings who needed to survive there. A previous
hurricane had put a sharp focus on the problems with
this approach. Hurricane sen Narcisso struck in eighteen sixty seven

(04:03):
at the very end of the hurricane season that year.
More than two hundred people were killed, and local officials
wrote to the Spanish government on the island and to
Madrid about the need to invest more money in the
island's infrastructure to protect its people and resources. Before the
next major hurricane that year, only about three percent of

(04:23):
government expenditures had gone to public works and infrastructure, and
local leaders were clear that this was not enough to
ensure a safe and stable island. As more people started
to shift to work that was related to growing and
processing and shipping export crops. The people and those jobs
started trying to organize starting in the eighteen sixties. There
were recurring cycles of labor strikes and unrest in rural areas,

(04:47):
and as is usually the case when industries start trying
to organize, this whole process was difficult and sometimes violent.
Efforts to organize were also hampered by prejudice against rural workers.
Both Spain and Puerto Rican elite saw the island's rural
labor as lazy and shiftless, so they weren't inclined to
negotiate with the labor organizations that were trying to form,

(05:09):
and all these changes were really just the beginning. Also,
starting in the late eighteen sixties were a series of
civil rights and independence movements, some of them were being
influenced by similar movements in Cuba. Spanish authorities put down
a rebellion in Puerto Rico in September of eighteen sixty eight,
but gradually started allowing the island more freedoms starting the

(05:30):
next year. In eighteen seventy three, Puerto Rico very briefly
became a republic, and it also abolished slavery, but that
republic was overthrown in a military coup. Just a year later,
on November twenty five, Spain granted Puerto Rico the right
to self government. This was in response to a number
of pressures, including the Cuban War of Independence, which had

(05:53):
started in eighteen So obviously that is a lot of
a major change in just a few decades, and this
right to self government had its own layer of controversy.
Some advocates were satisfied with this level of autonomy, but
others wanted true independence regardless. Though this right to self
government did not last long at all. The Spanish American

(06:15):
War started just six months after it was granted, and
then the United States invaded Puerto Rico on July. The
invasion of Puerto Rico was part of a much bigger
conflict that also included Cuba in the Caribbean and Guam
and the Philippines in the Pacific, and initially, the United
States had planned to invade Puerto Rico earlier in the

(06:35):
war and then use it as a stepping stone to
get to the more strategically important target of Cuba, but
in the end, the United States largely skipped that step,
invading Puerto Rico after Spanish forces in Cuba had actually
already surrendered. The US assumed control of Puerto Rico on
October eighteenth. When the United States invaded Puerto Rico, Spain's

(06:58):
ultimate surrender in the war seemed like a foregone conclusion.
In other words, the United States didn't need to invade
Puerto Rico in order to win the war, but doing
so meant that once the United States and Spain sat
down to negotiate terms for the end of the war,
the United States would already have a Puerto Rican presence,
and then that would give the United States a better

(07:19):
claim to the island. The Treaty of Paris of formally
ended the Spanish American War, and the United States gained
control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. The
treaty was signed on December tenth, so, after more than
four hundred years of being Spanish territory, the last thirty

(07:40):
years of which had seen ongoing efforts for self governance
and independence, in the blink of an eye, Puerto Rico
instead belonged to the United States and was placed under
the control of the U. S military. This meant that
Puerto Rico was once again seeing lots of rapid change,
and those changes were playing out right before or one
of the most catastrophic hurricanes ever to strike the island,

(08:03):
and we're going to talk about that after a sponsor break.
When the United States officially took possession of Puerto Rico,
it established a military government that immediately got to work
trying to make major changes on the island. The United
States and Spain each had their own system for dealing

(08:25):
with colonial territory, and the United States was basically trying
to shape Puerto Rico to be more American. That meant
a lot of change and a lot of chaos. The
United States took control of Puerto Rico in October of eight,
and on April two of nineteen hundred, President McKinley signed
the Foraker Act, which established a civilian government. Between October

(08:47):
eight and May one, nineteen hundred, when the island's first
civil governor was inaugurated, there were four different military governors.
These governors implemented all kinds of new policies, some of
which were effective and some of which were not. Coffee
and sugar plantations were really struggling because of the war
and because of other economic issues, so they implemented a

(09:09):
moratorium on foreclosures. This was to try to protect that
part of the economy, but this had an unintended side
effect of causing a credit freeze within the agriculture sector,
which led to its own economic problems. Military governors also
declared an eight hour work day, bandcock fighting, and implemented
a compulsory public education system as well as a new

(09:30):
judicial system. They established a weather bureau and began a
whole collection of surveys, audits, and inventories to figure out
what exactly the United States had come into possession of.
And a lot of this work continued to go on
in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. As I was
reading reports of the military governor in the in the

(09:51):
hurricanes immediate aftermath, there would be some that would be
pages of documents of how the new legal system was
going to work, and I was like, people are starving
right now, this is maybe not the time to be outlining.
I mean that that's important too, but maybe the food
distribution should be a bigger priority. It's almost such a
disconnect that you have to surmise that someone was like

(10:16):
in shock and just going I don't know, can I
make sense of something, even if it's not going to
help in any way. So all of this had been
going on for less than a year when Hurricane San
Syriaco struck, so Hurricane San Syriaco was a cape there
to a hurricane. This is a term used to describe
hurricanes that developed off the coast of Africa near the
Cape Verde Islands. They strengthen into hurricanes before they ever

(10:39):
get to the Caribbean. They're a lot more common later
on in the Atlantic hurricane season, and these storms move
over a lot of warm ocean before they ever pass
over in a land, so they tend to be very large,
powerful and long lived storms. Hurricane San Syriaco began as
a tropical storm southwest of the Cape Verde Islands on
August two. Eight. By August five, it had strengthened into

(11:04):
a Category one hurricane. On the seventh, it passed over Guadalupe,
southeast of Puerto Rico. Weather officials there reported wind speeds
of one twenty miles per hour it's about one kilometers
per hour, and that made it a Category three hurricane.
The hurricane struck Puerto Rico on August eight, the feast

(11:24):
day of Roman Catholic Saint Cyriacus. The United States wasn't
actually naming hurricanes at this point, but in Puerto Rico
they were named for the Saints feast day that they
made landfall on. Hurricane San Syriaco moved from the southwest
corner of the island to the northeast, with the eye
roughly moving over the center of the island. The entire
island was affected. Most sources describe Hurricane San Syriaco as

(11:49):
a category for hurricane. When it struck Puerto Rico, some
parts of the island reported twenty three inches of rainfall
in twenty four hours. Rivers flooded, passing their previous high
water marks. It took roughly six hours for the eye
to pass over the whole island, and the rain persisted
long after the hurricane was gone. The island recorded twenty

(12:11):
eight consecutive days of rainfall. This was the height of
hurricane season and Puerto Rico was used to experiencing hurricanes
and tropical storms, but the island had gone more than
ten years without seeing a major hurricane. The most recent
one had been Hurricane San Felipe in eight seventy six,
and that was nothing in comparison to San Seriaco. This

(12:31):
was the worst catastrophe in Puerto Rican history up until
this point. The island's electrical grid was destroyed, along with
the telephone and telegraph system. Some of the wooden structures
and other buildings in more urban areas survived the storm,
but in more rural areas most homes were built from
mud with thatched roofs. These structures were completely washed away.

(12:54):
The trees that would have provided the thatch were also uprooted,
which meant that there wasn't any roofing material available to rebuild.
Most of the islands cultivated crops were destroyed, including about
half of the sugar crop and almost all of the
coffee crop. This was just before the coffee harvest, and
not only were the coffee plants themselves destroyed, but the

(13:14):
shade trees that sheltered them were uprooted as well. It
takes about five years for new coffee plants to produce fruit,
so this is a catastrophic blow to the coffee industry,
and most of the food crops were destroyed as well.
San Juan, the island's capital and largest city, is on
the more northeastern coast of the island, and the hurricanes
I passed well to the southwest of it, somewhat sparing

(13:37):
the city. But the second biggest city, of Ponce, is
on the north southwestern coast of the island, and it
was hit really hard. More than five hundred people drowned
in the city of Ponce alone, But the municipality that
faced the greatest losses was Utowado, in the mountainous center
of the island, which was the seat of the coffee industry.

(13:58):
About three thousand four people died in flooding or building
collapses on the day of the hurricane. This was more
than three times the recorded deaths of any prior hurricane
in Puerto Rico. Even so, that number is probably a
lot lower than the actual death toll, since disease and
hunger related illnesses spread in the wake of a storm
like this. By the time the hurricane passed, more than

(14:21):
two hundred and fifty thousand people were left homeless and destitute.
That was more than a quarter of the island's population.
A lot of people saw this as a divine retribution,
but against whom really depended on your point of view.
Here's how this was described in the September issue of
the Bulletin Mercantile de Puerto Rico quote, the eighth day

(14:44):
of August will be a day of terrible memory form
Puerto Rico. Before the island had recovered from the state
of perturbation and turmoil in which the Spanish American War
left it, and when all its efforts to reconquer its
previous normality and prosperity were successively and fatally ailing. And
extremely violent hurricane hammered the island, intensifying the measure of

(15:05):
its pains, immersing it in the most horrendous ruin, and
destroying the last hope for its salvation and welfare. There
only remains of this antillian isle, once so celebrated for
its beauty and fit undity. Heaps of rubble spread everywhere,
which represent a history full of tears, death, and misfortune
for its inhabitants. After passing over Puerto Rico, Hurricane San

(15:28):
Syriaco continued through the Caribbean, passing over other islands and
reaching the Bahamas as a Category three hurricane on August twelve.
From there, the storm roughly followed the North American coastline
from Florida to the North Carolina's The eye stayed well
off shore until the storm shifted north and then northwest,

(15:48):
striking the North Carolina Outer Banks as a Category three
hurricane on August seventeen. If you look at a map
of this, it really looks like it was just safely
headed out to see and then went, oh, you know what.
The or Banks looked like a good target, and the
Outer Banks saw extensive flooding, especially on Hatteras and Ocracoke Islands.
Most of the structures were destroyed. On the island of

(16:09):
Shackelford Banks, its whole population relocated, and today the island
is undeveloped and home to wild horses. Water contamination, drowned
farm animals, and unearthed cemeteries were all a major problem
in the Outer Banks, along with the destruction of fishing
equipment and multiple fishing communities. At least seven ships were
lost to Hurricane San Serriaco, including the sixty three ton

(16:33):
cargo ship Priscilla, which wrecked off the North Carolina coast
on the night of the six From the Outer Banks,
the storm returned to sea, following the North American coastline
until August, when it turned east and eventually dissipated off
the coast of Ireland. On September four. Its remains hit
France on September nine. It is still the longest lived

(16:56):
storm ever tracked in the Atlantic. Obviously, this was a destructive,
of and deadly storm everywhere that it hit that was populated.
The aftermath was particularly devastating in Puerto Rico, and we
will get to that after a sponsor break. As is

(17:17):
often the case in natural disasters, people described the immediate
aftermath of Hurricane San Serriaco is something of a honeymoon period.
The wealthiest people, who lived mostly in the cities, tried
to help out with their nations of food and offers
of shelter wherever they could. There was a general sense
of people pulling together. The military governor at this point

(17:37):
was Major General George Whitefield Davis. His administration established an
advisory board, which included Puerto Rican civilians, to make recommendations
on hurricane relief. Davis also ordered for food crops to
be planted immediately to try to replenish the island's food supply.
Although the military government made a lot of the decisions

(17:57):
on what was to be done, those decisions were off
and carried out by municipal councils known as Ayuntamantos, and
since there was a lot of variation and how efficient
and capable all these various municipal councils were, there was
also a lot of variation and how things actually went
at the local level. The military government also created twelve

(18:18):
inspection zones, following the same lines that had already been
used to divide the island into administrative districts. Eventually, some
of these zones were subdivided for logistical reasons, making the
total seventeen military officers were sent into all of these
zones to assess the damage and make appeals for food
and other relief. Davis and many of his officers also

(18:40):
put some of their salaries towards the relief effort, but
this initial period of cooperation wasn't nearly enough to offset
the scope at the damage. Municipal governments and other local
officials in these districts were quickly overwhelmed, and often they
just didn't have any food or other contribution to offer.
Since Puerto Rico's food was mostly import it, and since

(19:00):
it had already been prone to food deficits, there wasn't
much of a stored surplus to provide some people who
now had nothing food distribution was also really difficult because
of the colossal damage to the already shaky infrastructure. However,
the military government in Puerto Rico and the Greater U.
S Government both had a vested interest in seeming benevolent

(19:21):
and organized to the people of its new Puerto Rican territory,
so Davis asked for the federal government to call on
its citizens to provide aid. Puerto Ricans were not US
citizens at this point. That would not happen until nineteen seventeen.
Secretary of War Elihu Root was quoted in the New
York Times on August twelfth, quote, under these conditions, the

(19:41):
President deems that an appeal should be made to the
humanity of the American people is an appeal to their patriotism.
Also for the inhabitants of Puerto Rico have freely and
gladly submitted themselves to the guardianship of the United States,
and have voluntarily surrendered the protection of Spain to which
they were formerly entitled. Confinitely, relying upon the more generous

(20:02):
and beneficent treatment at our hands, the highest considerations of
honor and good faith unite with the promptings of humanity
to require from the United States a generous response to
the demand of Puerto Rican distress. There were other appeals
for aid as well, with numerous elected officials asking for
their constituents to contribute. One of these came from Theodore Roosevelt,

(20:24):
who was then the governor of New York. The State
Merchants Association in New York also became the central collection
point for donations, which were then shipped to Puerto Rico.
In Puerto Rico, a charity board was established with a
central office in San Juan. It was under the control
of Major John van Hoff and there were clergy and
medical personnel on the board. The Charity Board asked for

(20:46):
each of Puerto Rico's municipalities to establish its own committee,
led by three quote people of respectability. For the first
few days after the hurricane, the military government distributed ration
cards which authorized the bearer to collect a weekly allotment
of beans, rice, and dried codfish or bacon for their household.
But on August nineteen, the Department of Puerto Rico issued

(21:09):
General Order one twenty four, which began quote, it having
been brought to the attention of the Department Commander that
idle able bodied men are refusing to work at fair wages.
It is hereby ordered that no such man who so
refuses will be permitted to draw food for himself or
his family. So, as we mentioned earlier in the show,

(21:30):
the rural population of Puerto Rico, particularly its most impoverished residents,
faced a lot of discrimination and prejudice. This had been
true under Spanish rule, it was still true under the
American military government, and it was also true among the
Puerto Rican upper class. Basically, everyone of means thought everyone
else in Puerto Rico was lazy, ignorant, and dishonest and
didn't care about their own poverty or social conditions. There

(21:53):
was a lot of concern that giving people free food
would make them lazier and totally dependent on handouts. So
it's very likely that a lot of the people who
were described in this statement as refusing to work for
fair wages could not find work or had some reason
why they could not work. So a new system evolved
in which aid went to the planters rather than directly

(22:16):
to Puerto Rico's poor. Planters put in a requisition for
laborers to work on their coffee and sugar plantations, and
then the laborers who were hired for those positions had
to present a work card documenting their labor in order
to receive food. This unsurprisingly led to a lot of problems.
Although thirty two million pounds of food were distributed to

(22:38):
a hundred and seventeen thousand people over the span of
ten months, the only people who were able to get
it were the ones who were able to find work,
and this wasn't necessarily easy to do given the massive
destruction of the coffee and sugar industries. That also led
to people accepting lower wages than they had gotten before
the hurricane struck just it could do the work that

(23:01):
was required to get the food. Compounding all of this
was an assumption among the wealthier people that the rural
population was exaggerating how dire the situation was. The prevailing
reasoning was that the rural people were used to being poor,
so they should be able to manage without so much help.
There were apparently several people that propose various bond referenda

(23:23):
to fund rebuilding of public works, employing people to do so,
and I kept finding like the proposals, and I was like,
did you ever do that? Though? Because there's a lot
to the rebuilding effort besides just distributing food to people anyway,
the whole thing was a complicated mess and led to

(23:43):
a lot of people not being able to get the
aid that they needed. And then another aspect of the
relief program was a tax moratorium. Because of the war
and a previous economic crisis, a lot of people had
not paid their taxes for the prior year, and wealthy planters,
local officials, and other prominent people started to petition for

(24:03):
a moratorium on taxes for both the prior and current
tax years. There was a lot of back and forth
over all of this. The vast majority of petitions that
came in for tax relief were from wealthy planters, but
the hurricane had impacted people all over the economic spectrum,
not just the wealthy. Some officials recommended a program in

(24:23):
which only people who could prove that they had suffered
a loss could get tax relief, but others pointed out
that figuring out which claims were legitimate and which weren't
would be a colossal and expensive effort considering the scope
of the damage and the end The military government suspended
taxes on August, but this was temporary, and by nineteen

(24:45):
o two the government was still owed almost three hundred
million pasos and unpaid taxes. Most of those taxes that
were still owed were owed by large planters whose crops
had been destroyed by the hurricane. This tax relief certainly
may have helped both workers and planters in the immediate
aftermath of the hurricane, but it also meant that there

(25:05):
was no money to fund projects and services that had
previously relied on taxation. So while the relief effort focused
on food distribution, there was far less tax revenue to
fund other parts of the rebuilding effort. Although Congress did
not pass a relief bill, it did return two million
dollars and tax revenues on products that had come into

(25:26):
the continental United States from Puerto Rico since the occupation.
This was a tiny amount of money compared to the
scope of the damage that total damages were valued at
an estimated twenty million dollars, and also planters wanted this
returned tax money to go into agricultural investment instead of
into rebuilding efforts. All of this had an ongoing and

(25:48):
long lasting effect on the island of Puerto Rico. In
its coffee exports were only ten percent of what they
had been on average in the five years before the
Spanish American War, and the coffee industry never really recovered.
In addition to that five year growing time before new
plants would bear fruit, the Puerto Rican coffee industry couldn't

(26:09):
really compete with Brazil or Central America, which were producing
cheaper coffee at a much lower labor cost. This was
economically devastating for the island's mountainous interior, which was conducive
to growing coffee, but not too many other crops. The
sugar industry recovered more quickly. Its crop was only about

(26:29):
a third of normal size. The hurricane also destroyed a
number of the industry's older haciendas, which had to be
replaced with more modern sugar processing facilities. The hurricane and
flooding also kind of ironically wound up enriching the soil
in sugar growing areas, so as the coffee industry in
Puerto Rico declined, the sugar industry grew. However, at the

(26:50):
same time, at least five thousand people left the island
after the hurricane to work as laborers elsewhere, including in
Hawaii's sugar industry. This ship if from coffee to sugar,
accelerated in nine hundred after the passage of the Foraker Act.
The Act described Puerto Rico, which it spelled p O
r t O, as an quote unorganized territory of the

(27:14):
United States, with its citizens being citizens of Puerto Rico
against spelled in correctly. The Foraker Act also specified that
Puerto Rico was subject to fient tariff on goods going
to the United States and vice versa. That in one
Puerto Rico became a customs area of the United States
in terms of international trade, so Puerto Rico could ship

(27:36):
sugar and tobacco into the United States without a tariff,
but coffee wasn't produced on the continent, so it wasn't
protected from the tariff. Before the Spanish American War, the
coffee industry had also been sending most of its products
to Cuba and Spain, and now that Puerto Rico wasn't
Spanish territory, it was subject to high tariffs on those
exports as well. All of this had a major economic

(28:00):
impact on the island. Before the hurricane, coffee had been
Puerto Rico's biggest export, but by coffee was only ten
percent of Puerto Rico's exports and sugar was six The
amount of land devoted to farming sugar also roughly doubled
during that time, while the land used for coffee was
roughly halved. The collapse of the coffee industry caused a

(28:23):
major economic crisis in the island's interior. All of these changes,
plus using the planters to distribute relief to the workers,
made the planters much more powerful on the island of
Puerto Rico, and the island became even more dependent on
imports for necessities like food, while putting more and more
of its labor towards manufacturing exports. All of this set

(28:44):
the stage for the way that Puerto Rico developed as
a territory after this point. The hurricane and the relief
effort also played a part in the Foraker Act, which
Congress began working on in January of nineteen hundred. This
was just five months after the hurricane, only halfway through
the ten months of food distribution. Much of the island
was still destroyed when that Act was drafted. All of

(29:07):
this contributed to the decision to make Puerto Rico an
unincorporated territory rather than making Puerto Rico an independent nation.
Puerto Rico's relationship to the United States has continued to
evolve in the decades since then, but at this point
it's the only former Spanish possession in the Americas that
has not become independent. Also, the week that we are

(29:27):
recording this episode is the same week that that study
was released that the death hole in Hurricane Mario was
actually thousands of people more than originally reported. And one
of the things that keeps coming up in reporting of
that study is the same prejudices that we were talking
about affecting the way that aid was distributed here, affecting

(29:49):
the way that aid was distributed in Hurricane Maria, and
the way the people were talked about in Puerto Rico
during Hurricane Maria. So somehow we have not learned anything
in a hundred and twenty years. Do you have a
listener mail? It's less of a bummer maybe, Yeah, I
knew it's from Liz Liza's Hi, Tracy and Holly. I've
been listening for a few years, and I am happy

(30:10):
to finally have a reason to write to you. I
was a few episodes behind, but then I saw you
posted an episode about Prague just before my trip there.
I knew I had to skip ahead. I listened on
my drive to the airport. I visited the site of
one of the definistrations in the old town hall, and
surprisingly they provided basically no information about why it happened.
I would have had no idea for your podcasts, so

(30:31):
thanks for providing an excellent introduction to some check history
at the perfect time. I've attached some photos of the
room where it happened, as well as the official information guide.
I also visited Prague Castle where the other definistration occurred.
They did have signs marking the fourth anniversary and explaining
the historical context. They also vigorously disputed the minor myth,

(30:53):
which unfortunately other historical sites here repeated as fact. I
have established photos from the castle as well. The definistrations
occurred from the far left window in the middle row,
and then there's obelisks that mark where the victims landed.
Thanks again for everything you do keep my commute interesting
and educational. Liz and Liz sent several pictures, as this

(31:13):
email suggests, Thank you so much. Liz. I heard from
a couple of people that were, like historians now recognize
that the manure thing didn't happen at all, and like
I wasn't able to find any historians that really said that. Um,
multiple sources that were using that episode say that the
people that were throwing out the window definitely landed in manure.

(31:35):
So apparently there is some debate about where the the
manure thing. Maybe there was manure, but it didn't really help.
It did not provide the soft landing. I mean, it
seems like it would be a gross landing. There's no
way around that. So, uh, it's we do know that
they were turning out the window and that they were
not seriously harmed the manure thing. Apparently some debate. So

(31:59):
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