May 17, 2010 • 16 mins
Born in 1783, Simon Bolivar grew to become known as the George Washington of South America. But how did this happen? Listen in and learn how Simon Bolivar left a life of luxury to pursue liberation from Spain in this podcast.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downey. And for our
subject today, we're gonna be talking about Simone Boulevard. And
(00:20):
I have a kind of unusual connection to the man.
I took a stage makeup glass in college and one
of our units was on facial hair. And for I
guess the final project for the facial hair unit, we
had to design our own facial hair. And I didn't
just want to do a beard or a mustache or
(00:40):
an ironic. An ironic that's the worst. So I googled
mutton chops and came up with a big picture of
Simone Boulevard. It's like, this is my guy. I'm gonna
replicate this facial hair. I think I did a pretty
good job of it. It was a little harder to
make my nose look like this, uh Venezuela in man's nose,
(01:03):
but you know, I did my best. And she keeps
saying she'll bring in pictures, but I have yet to
see any such Now they're they're terrifying. I'm wearing a
very feminine shirt which does not go with the mutton chop.
Look beyond his predilection for odd facial hair and lying
in hammocks, Bolivar was a lot more than that. A
(01:24):
lot of people call him the George Washington of South America,
and we're going to start with pretty fantastic quote from him.
I have been chosen by fate to break your chains,
and today we'll be talking about independence. So Simolan Bolivar
was born in in Caracas, and Katie has her own
(01:46):
personal story about Caracas. To the only reason I know
so many South American and Central American capitals is because
my sister, who's a Spanish major, learned some sort of
sing songy version of all of them. So whenever I
hear Caracas, it's automatically Caracas, Venezuela and goes into the
whole Lima, Peru, Bogota, Colombia, until you know, my whole
(02:06):
family wanted to strangle her. But because of her, I
know all of these things. It's a useful ear at least,
thank you to my sister. But back to Bolivart. He
comes from a rich family, but his parents die when
he's really young, and like a lot of our subjects recently,
actually in our our sad childhood series. Um, but he
also marries a woman who dies young, so he has
(02:28):
a a tragic youth, I guess, he'd say, but it
also has a lot of good points. He's very well educated,
both at home and in Europe, and he had the
opportunity to acquaint himself with the work of very influential
Enlightenment writers. So we're kind of setting a foundation here
for some of his future adventures, and we want to
(02:48):
give you some background to some social contact for what's
going on. So to set this scene, we need to
start with Napoleon. And Napoleon made a lot of European
powers pretty comfortable. Obviously, he keeps invading the countries, but
as we mentioned in our episode that we did on
the Haitian Revolution, Napoleon's effect goes far beyond Europe, and
(03:10):
it in fact goes all the way to Latin America
and Bolivar is even at his coronation. Before this, of course,
we had the American Revolution kicking everything off, and then
the French Revolution shortly after this. It's all these ideals
influencing other countries. So it's a period of ideas of
freedom taking root and turning into bloody revolutions. Now one
(03:32):
revolution inspiring another. We've got a chain going on here.
And Spain, of course had colonized large swaps of the
America's but now Spain has something else on its mind
besides governing there. They're trying to deal with Napoleon invading
their country, so you know, after they'd helped him, especially
ungrateful Napoleon. But if you're in a Spanish colony in
(03:54):
Spain isn't paying as much attention, It is the perfect
time to fight for independence, get from under their thumb.
And that's exactly what Bolivar is thinking in eighteen ten
when the Spanish governor is kicked out of Venezuela, so
Bolivar goes to England. He's hoping he can get help,
because obviously the English don't like the Spanish very much either.
He doesn't get English help, but he does get Francisco
(04:17):
de Miranda, who is recruited from England, and he's a
pretty fascinating revolutionary himself. He'd already been in jail for
treason and he was generally scheming against Spain, so he
seems like the perfect guy to be in charge of
a Venezuelan revolution. Right. So when Venezuela declared independence in
(04:39):
eighteen eleven, with Bolivar giving lots of good speeches, My
favorite quote is, let us lay the cornerstone of American
freedom without fear. To hesitate is to perish. So basically,
let's go for it. The time is now. But the
public opinion of Miranda quickly soured, as did Bolivar's opinion
of him. Bolivar was a lot more extreme. He thought,
(05:00):
for example, that counter revolutionary should be killed. Well, Miranda
was a bit more moderate. And then Miranda signed an
armistice with Spain that basically gave them almost even more
power than they had to begin with. So that was
seen as traitorous by the revolutionaries of Bolivar, especially, so
he and his colleagues made sure Miranda didn't leave the
(05:20):
country and then handed him over to Spain, and Miranda
spent the rest of his life in prison. He died there.
But just because Miranda has blown things, Bolivar is not
about to get out of the game, and there's still
a strong push for Venezuelan independence and the fight for
independence is now Bolivar's personal calling, so he sets off
(05:41):
for New Granada to sort of plan, his approach, mull
over the whole thing, and this is where he starts
writing the pieces that really make his name, in their
grand political statements, and they speak of his dreams for
the continent and the need for a strong government, really
inspirational writing. Especially, he thought maybe the reason that it
fell to begin with was because they didn't have a
(06:03):
strong government. So this will be something that he maintains
throughout his his quest, a revision in his in his
way of thinking. But he thinks it's time at this
point to get back to Venezuela um and get back
again against the Spanish and the loyalists. And he won
in eighteen thirteen, and the whole country called him the
liberator and he became their dictator. But again this this
(06:26):
doesn't last. And if you remember our podcast on Tusson
Liverature and the Haitian Revolution, that's just kind of the
way it goes. You win, some lose, some couple steps forward,
a couple of steps changed his hands every every few months, practically,
there's a lot of turmoil and a revolution, and Spain
takes back Venezuela and they've got cowboys on their side
(06:46):
this time, and they're very vicious cowboys. Don't think of
some romantic western movie. They're actually called the Legion of Hell,
and for very good reason. And Bolivar is forced to
leave the country in in the face of these new
cowboy arrivals, and he starts writing again, setting down what
(07:08):
he thinks will be the best government, you know, making
more revisions, and he's thinking something along the line of
Great Britain's government with the different houses. Yeah, with the
houses and all that. But a different and rather unusual twist,
and that's that he thinks Venezuela should have a president
for life. Yeah, that's his idea of a strong government.
(07:28):
And of course, you know the president's got to be him, right, Well,
it only makes sense. But at this point Spain starts
upping the antie. Their Legion of Hell is not enough,
and they send a guy named Pablo Mario across the
seas to go and fight Bolivar. And he'd fought in
the Napoleonic Wars and distinguished himself there, so he's a
(07:50):
pretty powerful enemy to have. Yeah, and he's gonna hopefully
show Venezuela that Spain is the boss of them. Bolivar
is still an exile at this point. He's in Haiti,
ironically by this point, and he decides it's time to
head back toward the action. He hears the call of battle,
and this time he thinks, you know, maybe he's worked
(08:12):
it all out, Maybe things are going to be different.
So he heads to New Granada, which now is Colombia,
and stakes out a spot, sets up shop, and develops
his plan to liberate this country. So he recruits soldiers,
he selects a capital, and once he's organized, he starts
talking to other revolutionary groups and spreading propaganda about his
(08:35):
own successes. And never underestimate the power of propaganda when
you're telling people about all these victories and making sure
it spreads throughout the country, whether those victories are real
or not, they inspire a certain sentiment in the people.
And if you're going to set yourself up as president
for life eventually, you better be good at propaganda. So
this is it, This is his moment, and this leads
(08:57):
us to what a lot of historians call the boldest
military campaign ever, or at least one of the boldest.
So he has a small army and they've got impossible
odds in front of them. The place they want to
get to or the place they think they can succeed
as the most lightly guarded by the Spanish. But to
get there they have to cross basically impassable terrain. They're
(09:22):
going through the andies, which you know, freezing to death,
not bringing a lot of food. They're going through floods,
they're going through swampland they just have a few of them.
Their horses are drowning, they're freezing, they're starving, and they
make it somehow. They beat the Spanish there, and they
beat the entire Spanish army there in nineteen It's so
surprising that they made it. And of course they're they're
(09:43):
going to the most lightly guarded part, but but the
Spanish are so surprised to see them. They never thought
they'd make it there. And after this, South America will
never be the same. And that's not hyperbole, it's true.
So now that Bolivard has arrived and he's amid all
this chaos, it's time to establish some structure. They don't
(10:05):
want things to fall apart again like they did last time.
And with Bolivar in charge, he tries to set up
a republic, tries to bring order to just this this
chaotic land. But while all of this is happening, we're
still fighting. You have to remember that through all of this,
as cities and countries are changing hands back and forth,
(10:26):
the battles don't end. It's supposed that during this there's
something like seven hundred battles in this fight for independence. Um.
But Bolivard met with Mario in eighteen twenty for a treaty.
Both sides decided there should be six months of peace,
you know, and after that all bets are off. But
during those six months, that's the way it's going to be.
When it's over, Bolivard battles again and manages to free Venezuela,
(10:50):
which of course had been his dream. That's that's his home.
So it was a big deal for him. And in
the midst of all this fighting, as a side note,
he met a woman named Manuelis Ends who was pretty
much the love of his life. And you know, well,
Bolivard apparently comes back pretty strong from the six months
of peace because in addition to liberating Venezuela, as you
(11:13):
just mentioned, by the end of it all, we have Columbia, Ecuador,
and Panama all free. In a series of battles which
there's so many, we're not going to go into details
about all of them. It would be a lot of
back and forth. But but that's the end score and
still missing as Peru. But that enormous amount of territory,
I mean, it's it's a large part of South America
(11:35):
is not enough for Boulevard. He wants more and he
has bigger dreams, but there is a possible obstacle to
freeing Peru. There's another revolutionary, Jose de Saint Martin, who's
from Argentina, and he's been just as awesome as Boulivard
at fighting, but he's been doing it in the south.
So he's basically doing the same thing that Boulevard was doing,
(11:56):
just in the southern part of the continent. And that
puts the two a bit at odds because they're both
such strong, charismatic, powerful people, but they have slightly different
ideas of how this all should go. So they have
a meeting that we don't have any records from. But
after this, Saint Martin stepped aside, perhaps because he thought
(12:19):
Bolivar was the better man for the job, by which
we mean ruling an entire continent president for life, but
leaving Bolivar to go it alone and Bolivar goes on
to win Peru's independence in eighteen four, or at least
part of it. We still had Upper Peru left, but
his army ended up conquering that as well, and now
it's the country of Bolivia named after our dear Bolivar.
(12:42):
But again, the government that he sets up, which is,
you know, with him as lifetime president, has nothing to
do with the ideals that he's espoused in all of
his writings, which is kind of weird, don't you think.
I was wondering if it had something to do with
the whole Napoleon thing, you know, the man Napoleon was,
as in the man Napoleon became and his his ideas
(13:03):
versus who he actually was exactly that That's that's my
current theory. But as far as political power goes, at
this point, saman Bolivar was on top of the world.
And another cool thing that he wanted to do was
bring all of South America together, like as a continent,
you know, not as as separate countries. Think of kind
of a league of nations, like there would be strength
(13:25):
in unity. Well, that idea obviously didn't gell but it
was pretty revolutionary. I mean started to say revolutionary and
everything he did as a revolutionary, but I mean it
is it's way before before his time, so he set
a standard there After this, his influence declined as well
as his health, and Civil War and various other fights
(13:48):
took something out of him. An assassination attempt was made,
but it was tuberculosis that killed him in eighteen thirty.
And another interesting thing we were reading about we should
mention that he was an abolitionists who freed his own
slaves but didn't pass any sort of abolition loss. We
were wondering what you all thought about that, if you'd
like to email us at History Podcast at how stuff
(14:10):
works dot com. Because of course, he had the idea
that South Americans were slaves to Spain, so maybe he
thought that was far enough. I'm not sure, so as
und us your thoughts. Yeah, we'd also like to emphasize
just how daring he is, I mean facial hair choices aside,
in some of these fights, he is so outnumbered, ridiculously outnumbered,
and his armies, you know, ragtag bands, old weaponry, bad equipment,
(14:35):
and they're fighting bloody battles on several fronts. So he
himself has to deal with all the internal fighting that's
always going on with rebellions. Uh, I mean you remember
the Taiping rebellion, that kind of thing, in addition to
to fighting the cowboys and and the Spanish. So it's
pretty amazing that he's able to prevail through all of
(14:57):
this when it must have seen completely impossible. Well, but
even when they lost over and over again, they just
came back because the fight for independence was that important.
And I don't want to romanticize war, but there's something
about this story that's just very stirring to me. And
we'd like to end with a great quote from Bolivar.
(15:18):
People that love freedom will in the end be free.
And that wraps up our story and brings us to
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(15:39):
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(16:01):
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one page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downey. And for our
subject today, we're gonna be talking about Simone Boulevard. And
(00:20):
I have a kind of unusual connection to the man.
I took a stage makeup glass in college and one
of our units was on facial hair. And for I
guess the final project for the facial hair unit, we
had to design our own facial hair. And I didn't
just want to do a beard or a mustache or
(00:40):
an ironic. An ironic that's the worst. So I googled
mutton chops and came up with a big picture of
Simone Boulevard. It's like, this is my guy. I'm gonna
replicate this facial hair. I think I did a pretty
good job of it. It was a little harder to
make my nose look like this, uh Venezuela in man's nose,
(01:03):
but you know, I did my best. And she keeps
saying she'll bring in pictures, but I have yet to
see any such Now they're they're terrifying. I'm wearing a
very feminine shirt which does not go with the mutton chop.
Look beyond his predilection for odd facial hair and lying
in hammocks, Bolivar was a lot more than that. A
(01:24):
lot of people call him the George Washington of South America,
and we're going to start with pretty fantastic quote from him.
I have been chosen by fate to break your chains,
and today we'll be talking about independence. So Simolan Bolivar
was born in in Caracas, and Katie has her own
(01:46):
personal story about Caracas. To the only reason I know
so many South American and Central American capitals is because
my sister, who's a Spanish major, learned some sort of
sing songy version of all of them. So whenever I
hear Caracas, it's automatically Caracas, Venezuela and goes into the
whole Lima, Peru, Bogota, Colombia, until you know, my whole
(02:06):
family wanted to strangle her. But because of her, I
know all of these things. It's a useful ear at least,
thank you to my sister. But back to Bolivart. He
comes from a rich family, but his parents die when
he's really young, and like a lot of our subjects recently,
actually in our our sad childhood series. Um, but he
also marries a woman who dies young, so he has
(02:28):
a a tragic youth, I guess, he'd say, but it
also has a lot of good points. He's very well educated,
both at home and in Europe, and he had the
opportunity to acquaint himself with the work of very influential
Enlightenment writers. So we're kind of setting a foundation here
for some of his future adventures, and we want to
(02:48):
give you some background to some social contact for what's
going on. So to set this scene, we need to
start with Napoleon. And Napoleon made a lot of European
powers pretty comfortable. Obviously, he keeps invading the countries, but
as we mentioned in our episode that we did on
the Haitian Revolution, Napoleon's effect goes far beyond Europe, and
(03:10):
it in fact goes all the way to Latin America
and Bolivar is even at his coronation. Before this, of course,
we had the American Revolution kicking everything off, and then
the French Revolution shortly after this. It's all these ideals
influencing other countries. So it's a period of ideas of
freedom taking root and turning into bloody revolutions. Now one
(03:32):
revolution inspiring another. We've got a chain going on here.
And Spain, of course had colonized large swaps of the
America's but now Spain has something else on its mind
besides governing there. They're trying to deal with Napoleon invading
their country, so you know, after they'd helped him, especially
ungrateful Napoleon. But if you're in a Spanish colony in
(03:54):
Spain isn't paying as much attention, It is the perfect
time to fight for independence, get from under their thumb.
And that's exactly what Bolivar is thinking in eighteen ten
when the Spanish governor is kicked out of Venezuela, so
Bolivar goes to England. He's hoping he can get help,
because obviously the English don't like the Spanish very much either.
He doesn't get English help, but he does get Francisco
(04:17):
de Miranda, who is recruited from England, and he's a
pretty fascinating revolutionary himself. He'd already been in jail for
treason and he was generally scheming against Spain, so he
seems like the perfect guy to be in charge of
a Venezuelan revolution. Right. So when Venezuela declared independence in
(04:39):
eighteen eleven, with Bolivar giving lots of good speeches, My
favorite quote is, let us lay the cornerstone of American
freedom without fear. To hesitate is to perish. So basically,
let's go for it. The time is now. But the
public opinion of Miranda quickly soured, as did Bolivar's opinion
of him. Bolivar was a lot more extreme. He thought,
(05:00):
for example, that counter revolutionary should be killed. Well, Miranda
was a bit more moderate. And then Miranda signed an
armistice with Spain that basically gave them almost even more
power than they had to begin with. So that was
seen as traitorous by the revolutionaries of Bolivar, especially, so
he and his colleagues made sure Miranda didn't leave the
(05:20):
country and then handed him over to Spain, and Miranda
spent the rest of his life in prison. He died there.
But just because Miranda has blown things, Bolivar is not
about to get out of the game, and there's still
a strong push for Venezuelan independence and the fight for
independence is now Bolivar's personal calling, so he sets off
(05:41):
for New Granada to sort of plan, his approach, mull
over the whole thing, and this is where he starts
writing the pieces that really make his name, in their
grand political statements, and they speak of his dreams for
the continent and the need for a strong government, really
inspirational writing. Especially, he thought maybe the reason that it
fell to begin with was because they didn't have a
(06:03):
strong government. So this will be something that he maintains
throughout his his quest, a revision in his in his
way of thinking. But he thinks it's time at this
point to get back to Venezuela um and get back
again against the Spanish and the loyalists. And he won
in eighteen thirteen, and the whole country called him the
liberator and he became their dictator. But again this this
(06:26):
doesn't last. And if you remember our podcast on Tusson
Liverature and the Haitian Revolution, that's just kind of the
way it goes. You win, some lose, some couple steps forward,
a couple of steps changed his hands every every few months, practically,
there's a lot of turmoil and a revolution, and Spain
takes back Venezuela and they've got cowboys on their side
(06:46):
this time, and they're very vicious cowboys. Don't think of
some romantic western movie. They're actually called the Legion of Hell,
and for very good reason. And Bolivar is forced to
leave the country in in the face of these new
cowboy arrivals, and he starts writing again, setting down what
(07:08):
he thinks will be the best government, you know, making
more revisions, and he's thinking something along the line of
Great Britain's government with the different houses. Yeah, with the
houses and all that. But a different and rather unusual twist,
and that's that he thinks Venezuela should have a president
for life. Yeah, that's his idea of a strong government.
(07:28):
And of course, you know the president's got to be him, right, Well,
it only makes sense. But at this point Spain starts
upping the antie. Their Legion of Hell is not enough,
and they send a guy named Pablo Mario across the
seas to go and fight Bolivar. And he'd fought in
the Napoleonic Wars and distinguished himself there, so he's a
(07:50):
pretty powerful enemy to have. Yeah, and he's gonna hopefully
show Venezuela that Spain is the boss of them. Bolivar
is still an exile at this point. He's in Haiti,
ironically by this point, and he decides it's time to
head back toward the action. He hears the call of battle,
and this time he thinks, you know, maybe he's worked
(08:12):
it all out, Maybe things are going to be different.
So he heads to New Granada, which now is Colombia,
and stakes out a spot, sets up shop, and develops
his plan to liberate this country. So he recruits soldiers,
he selects a capital, and once he's organized, he starts
talking to other revolutionary groups and spreading propaganda about his
(08:35):
own successes. And never underestimate the power of propaganda when
you're telling people about all these victories and making sure
it spreads throughout the country, whether those victories are real
or not, they inspire a certain sentiment in the people.
And if you're going to set yourself up as president
for life eventually, you better be good at propaganda. So
this is it, This is his moment, and this leads
(08:57):
us to what a lot of historians call the boldest
military campaign ever, or at least one of the boldest.
So he has a small army and they've got impossible
odds in front of them. The place they want to
get to or the place they think they can succeed
as the most lightly guarded by the Spanish. But to
get there they have to cross basically impassable terrain. They're
(09:22):
going through the andies, which you know, freezing to death,
not bringing a lot of food. They're going through floods,
they're going through swampland they just have a few of them.
Their horses are drowning, they're freezing, they're starving, and they
make it somehow. They beat the Spanish there, and they
beat the entire Spanish army there in nineteen It's so
surprising that they made it. And of course they're they're
(09:43):
going to the most lightly guarded part, but but the
Spanish are so surprised to see them. They never thought
they'd make it there. And after this, South America will
never be the same. And that's not hyperbole, it's true.
So now that Bolivard has arrived and he's amid all
this chaos, it's time to establish some structure. They don't
(10:05):
want things to fall apart again like they did last time.
And with Bolivar in charge, he tries to set up
a republic, tries to bring order to just this this
chaotic land. But while all of this is happening, we're
still fighting. You have to remember that through all of this,
as cities and countries are changing hands back and forth,
(10:26):
the battles don't end. It's supposed that during this there's
something like seven hundred battles in this fight for independence. Um.
But Bolivard met with Mario in eighteen twenty for a treaty.
Both sides decided there should be six months of peace,
you know, and after that all bets are off. But
during those six months, that's the way it's going to be.
When it's over, Bolivard battles again and manages to free Venezuela,
(10:50):
which of course had been his dream. That's that's his home.
So it was a big deal for him. And in
the midst of all this fighting, as a side note,
he met a woman named Manuelis Ends who was pretty
much the love of his life. And you know, well,
Bolivard apparently comes back pretty strong from the six months
of peace because in addition to liberating Venezuela, as you
(11:13):
just mentioned, by the end of it all, we have Columbia, Ecuador,
and Panama all free. In a series of battles which
there's so many, we're not going to go into details
about all of them. It would be a lot of
back and forth. But but that's the end score and
still missing as Peru. But that enormous amount of territory,
I mean, it's it's a large part of South America
(11:35):
is not enough for Boulevard. He wants more and he
has bigger dreams, but there is a possible obstacle to
freeing Peru. There's another revolutionary, Jose de Saint Martin, who's
from Argentina, and he's been just as awesome as Boulivard
at fighting, but he's been doing it in the south.
So he's basically doing the same thing that Boulevard was doing,
(11:56):
just in the southern part of the continent. And that
puts the two a bit at odds because they're both
such strong, charismatic, powerful people, but they have slightly different
ideas of how this all should go. So they have
a meeting that we don't have any records from. But
after this, Saint Martin stepped aside, perhaps because he thought
(12:19):
Bolivar was the better man for the job, by which
we mean ruling an entire continent president for life, but
leaving Bolivar to go it alone and Bolivar goes on
to win Peru's independence in eighteen four, or at least
part of it. We still had Upper Peru left, but
his army ended up conquering that as well, and now
it's the country of Bolivia named after our dear Bolivar.
(12:42):
But again, the government that he sets up, which is,
you know, with him as lifetime president, has nothing to
do with the ideals that he's espoused in all of
his writings, which is kind of weird, don't you think.
I was wondering if it had something to do with
the whole Napoleon thing, you know, the man Napoleon was,
as in the man Napoleon became and his his ideas
(13:03):
versus who he actually was exactly that That's that's my
current theory. But as far as political power goes, at
this point, saman Bolivar was on top of the world.
And another cool thing that he wanted to do was
bring all of South America together, like as a continent,
you know, not as as separate countries. Think of kind
of a league of nations, like there would be strength
(13:25):
in unity. Well, that idea obviously didn't gell but it
was pretty revolutionary. I mean started to say revolutionary and
everything he did as a revolutionary, but I mean it
is it's way before before his time, so he set
a standard there After this, his influence declined as well
as his health, and Civil War and various other fights
(13:48):
took something out of him. An assassination attempt was made,
but it was tuberculosis that killed him in eighteen thirty.
And another interesting thing we were reading about we should
mention that he was an abolitionists who freed his own
slaves but didn't pass any sort of abolition loss. We
were wondering what you all thought about that, if you'd
like to email us at History Podcast at how stuff
(14:10):
works dot com. Because of course, he had the idea
that South Americans were slaves to Spain, so maybe he
thought that was far enough. I'm not sure, so as
und us your thoughts. Yeah, we'd also like to emphasize
just how daring he is, I mean facial hair choices aside,
in some of these fights, he is so outnumbered, ridiculously outnumbered,
and his armies, you know, ragtag bands, old weaponry, bad equipment,
(14:35):
and they're fighting bloody battles on several fronts. So he
himself has to deal with all the internal fighting that's
always going on with rebellions. Uh, I mean you remember
the Taiping rebellion, that kind of thing, in addition to
to fighting the cowboys and and the Spanish. So it's
pretty amazing that he's able to prevail through all of
(14:57):
this when it must have seen completely impossible. Well, but
even when they lost over and over again, they just
came back because the fight for independence was that important.
And I don't want to romanticize war, but there's something
about this story that's just very stirring to me. And
we'd like to end with a great quote from Bolivar.
(15:18):
People that love freedom will in the end be free.
And that wraps up our story and brings us to
Listener Mail. We got a lovely postcard of the Winchester
Mystery House from Carrie and Ariadne, and it's also addressed
to Candice and says history ladies, thanks for being our
(15:39):
before the tour tour guides. We love your podcast, so
this one is going on the wall with our other postcards.
If you'd like to send us mail, please do it again,
does up your chances of appearing in Listener Mail. And
if you would like to follow us on Twitter, where
it missed in history. We also have a Facebook fan
page and we have a article on the Winchester Mystery
(16:01):
House by Molly of Stuff Moon Never Told You So.
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