September 16, 2015 • 35 mins
These are six (more) subjects frequently requested by listeners, but that aren't really workable as stand-alone episodes for one reason or another. Featuring the Capuchin Catacombs, Sybil Ludington, Jeanne de Clisson, the Kentucky Meat Shower, Elizabeth Bathory, and a collection of research tips.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, Fun Stuff
Works dot Com. Hello and Tracy Wilson. About six months ago,
we put out an episode that was called Six Impossible Episodes,
and it was six subjects that are really frequent listener requests,
(00:24):
but for some reason or another they could not really
stand on their own as individual episodes. And people seem
to enjoy that one. And since then we've collected another
heaping handful of topics that people are asking for a lot,
but which we can't quite be a whole show on.
So today six more Impossible Episodes. All right, These are
(00:45):
fun because it's a you know, a little less intensive
than digging super deep in like a long, full length episode,
and it's like a nice little shworket sport. Yes, and
I am writing on an airplane four times in six days,
so that's why we're doing this today. Yeah, there, it's
(01:06):
going to be super fun. I love it. So. First one,
anytime we say anything about Paul Revere on our Facebook
posts or anywhere else on the internet, really at least
one person, but far more often it is more than
one asks the same question, which is, how come nobody
ever talks about Sybil Luddington, and so in case you
maybe aren't from the United States, on the eve of
(01:29):
the Revolutionary War, Paul Revere was part of a now
famous ride to spread the word of an impending attack,
and later on in the war, Sybil Luddington also made
a different but far less famous ride. So anytime we
say Paul Revere, it's like a call in response somebody
else says Sybil Lendington. You could use that as the
(01:51):
alternate to Marco Polo is a pool game, I'm pretty sure. So.
Sybil was born in Connecticut on April fifth, seventeen sixty one,
and when she was still a abe, her family moved
to Duchess County, New York, which lies along the New
York Connecticut border. Her father, Henry Luttington, had decades of
military experience, so as war loomed between Britain and its
(02:12):
colonies in North America, he quickly became a colonel and
was put in command of a regiment that was responsible
for guarding territory along the New York Connecticut border. This
is a pretty critical piece of land because it was
one of the primary ways that the Loyalists could reach
Long Island Sound from elsewhere farther inland. That's why when
(02:33):
Governor William Tryon and his men rated Danbury, Connecticut in
seventeen seventy seven, a rider was sent from Danbury to
the Luddington home in Duchess County to ask Sybel's father
to send help. Danbury was also strategically important, and it
was home to several Continental Army storehouses that were full
of food, munitions, and other supplies. So this rider that
(02:55):
had been dispatched was too exhausted to continue by the
time he got to the letting and home, and Colonel
Luddington needed to prepare for battle, so he sent his
oldest child, Sibyl, to muster his forces so they could
go to Danbury's aid. It's not totally clear whether she
volunteered for this task or whether she was sent, and
at this point, Sybil had just turned sixteen, and her
(03:18):
ride wound through forty miles of mostly wooded territory at night.
So Sybil's age and the length of her ride, which
was longer than Paul Revere's, are often held up as
reasons why she is really more deserving of a claim
than Paul Revere was. And then there's often this undertone
of well, she should have had that acclaim, and she
(03:38):
would have if she were a man. But as most
of these things go, there's more to it than that.
Paul Revere's ride is famous largely because of Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow's poem, first published in eighteen sixty one, and that
is the one that starts with listen, my children, and
you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
It's not a very historically accurate poem, which is why
(04:00):
a lot of people remember wrong things about Paul Revere's ride,
including that he was not the only one that was
on it. Right, the poem is only about him. But
this poem was written more than eighty years after the
ride in question took place, and it was written after
Longfellow visited the Old North Church in Boston, which is
more more formally known as Christ Church. And the Old
(04:23):
North Church is the one where the one if by
Land too if by Sea signal lanterns were hung. And
there are several likely reasons why Paul Revere is the
star of this poem and not someone else. Apart from
his ride to warn of the attack, he was a
prominent Boston citizen and an active participant in other parts
of the Revolutionary War. For example, he made an engraving
(04:46):
of the Boston massacre that we talked about in our
episode on that event. Paul Revere also served with Longfellow's
grandfather in the service, And just to be really basic
about it, I think we should add that Revere is
easy to rhyme things with. It is much easier to
rhyme things with than Luddington. So when Longfellow was writing
(05:09):
his poem about someone he had a family connection to,
whose ride connected to a place he had just visited,
Luddington's story hadn't even been written down yet. It survived
as family lore for roughly one hundred years before it
was actually published anywhere, and Sybil's great nephew, historian Lewis S. Patrick,
wrote about it in nineteen o seven, at which point
(05:29):
school children were already memorizing the Longfellow poem. So you
could totally make the argument that Civil Lettington's gender meant
she could not make a name for herself the way
Paul Revere did and later become famous thanks to a
historically inaccurate poem. We just don't really know anything about
her beyond the fact that when the war was over,
(05:49):
she got married to a Revolutionary word veteran named Edward Ogden.
They had a son, and they later opened a tavern,
and she died on February eighteen thirty nine. Just was
not the sort of prominent, publicly facing citizen that Paul
Revere had been, and we don't have any primary source
documentation about her ride at all, and even tiny details
(06:11):
like how she spelled her name are different based on
the things like her tombstone, her signature, and census records
literally spelled differently in all of those places. So in
terms of no one talking about her, there are many
many children's books about Sibyl Lannington, and she was commemorate
commemorated on a bicentennial postage stamp in even when she lived,
(06:35):
George Washington himself came to her home to thank her
personally for having written to muster all the men after
the Battle of Danbury. There is a particularly fierce looking
statue of her in Carmel, New York, along with a
number of historical markers along her ride route. So her
story just was not well known at all outside of
(06:57):
her family and maybe local neighbor from the area when
the poem that made Paul Revere famous was written. Like,
that poem was solidly in the collective memory of America
before Sibyl Luddington's story was even written down at all. Yeah,
that poem has great scansion, and so it's really easy
(07:21):
to remember and it's really kind of engaging. But as
the sort of sad coda as well, Colonel Luddington's efforts
were also too late to save Danbury. The British burned
thousands of barrels of food along with tents, shoes, and
other supplies before Luddington and other reinforcements were able to arrive.
So that is the story of Sybil Lettington and also
(07:42):
why people talk about Paul Revere more. Uh. Next up,
we have one that was requested first by Diane long
enough ago that it is number fifty six on our
listeners submitted Ideas list, which is now hundreds and hundreds
of ideas long. It is the Capuchin Catacomb in Palermo, Sicily,
which are home to about eight thousand mummies. The Capucin
(08:05):
community in Palermo was established in fifteen thirty four at
the Church of Santa Maria de la Pacha. At first,
the Friars who lived there were buried in what was
essentially a mass grave, but about sixty years later the
monastery outgrew. That's that mass burial site, so the Friars
decided to dig a larger set of catacombs using natural
caves that already existed in the area. Doing this required
(08:29):
them to exhume the bodies that had already been buried,
and when they did, they found that forty five of
them had been naturally preserved and we're just in a
really pristine condition. Their bodies had dehydrated rather than rotting.
They interpreted this as a sign from God, and then,
rather than proceeding with what had essentially been planned as
(08:49):
a bigger mass grave, they decided instead to keep the
exhumed bodies intact and displayed them as religious relics, and
the new burial site that they created was built with
that end goal in mind. They also gradually refined the
caves natural preservation process into an intentional mummification, which included
removing the organs and stuffing the cavity of the bodies
(09:11):
with straw and placing the bodies on terra cotta tubes
to help them dry faster. The Friars used a number
of other preservation methods as well. Sylvestro of Gubio was
a sixteenth century Capuchin monk, and he was the first
to be buried in these new catacombs. Originally, the only
bodies that were placed in the catacombs were those of
Friars who were part of the Order after they died.
(09:34):
But eventually, as words spread about the catacombs, being mummified
and placed there after death became a mark of high status,
so the bodies of nobility and famous local citizens joined
that those of the Friars, and eventually the Order began
allowing the burial of anyone who requested it in seventy three.
One of the things that makes this place so compelling
(09:56):
is that the bodies, which are very well preserved, are
out in view you. They're dressed. Family members would even
come to change the body's clothes. And some are on shelves,
some hang from hooks, and some are in open coffin
like containers. Some are posed almost as though their taxidermy displays.
And there's one hall that's entirely the bodies of infants,
(10:17):
some of them in cradles, and although they're arranged into
approximate categories like professionals, priests, monks, virgins. Relatively few of
these bodies are actually identifying. The Friars stopped burying new
bodies there in eighteen eighty, and they made only two
exceptions afterward. One was Giovanni Patterniti, who was buried in
nineteen eleven, and the other was Rosalia Lombardo, who was
(10:41):
two years old and placed there in nineteen twenty. The
monks teamed up with the European Union to start a
conservation project on the site in two thousand eight, because
it has become a major tourist destination, but very little
had been done up to that point in the centuries
since it was first built to preserve it. We're going
to put an image gallery of some pictures of this
(11:01):
place on our website because it is incredible to look at.
But most of the information that's available about it in
English as of right now is sort of like travel
god type of stuff. It's it's a tourist attraction at
this point, and most of the things that are written
about it are written in that vein, so I could
not find enough richer information to make a whole episode
(11:26):
out of it, but so many people have asked, we
want to spend a whole time today. Cool, So before
we go to our next impossible episode, you want to
pause from a brief word from a sponsor sounds good.
Our most recent requests for our next subject, who is
jean Ditisson, came from Laramie and Mary and two different
emails very recently, and she, unfortunately, is yet another person
(11:49):
who falls into the not enough reliable information available in
English category. We've had some folks right in to tell
us that we just need to hire some people who
speak other languages, y'all. It's just the two of us
and NOL. Like, we don't have like a staff budget. No,
we we don't have a translation staff. We literally look
so many things up and we still get them wrong
(12:10):
because we are not fluent speakers of every language, because
it is just the two of us and NOL. Yeah,
and we do try to outsource whilm we can, but
sometimes it's just not feasible right when you're working, uh so.
Jeanne de Clisson was a noblewoman and a pirate. In
THTT three, her second husband, Olivier, the third Lord of Clisson,
(12:31):
was executed for treason upon the orders of King Philip
the sixth of France, so n pulled her money. She
bought a fleet of ships, She rallied the support of
other discontented nobles who were unhappy with Philip the six
for some reason, and then she went on a rampage
of terror and piracy. She purportedly painted her ships black
(12:52):
and died their sales red to make her fleet extremely impressive,
and she was nicknamed the Lioness of Brittany. I can
see why lots of people want to hear about her.
She's fabulous, though a little cutthroat and blood thirsty. M
She was so successful in her revenge campaign that she
won the support of King Edward the third of England,
(13:13):
who loaned her more ships and weapons so she could
more effectively fight against France. When she was done with
seeking revenge, she sought and gained sanctuary in the English Court.
And people like to send us Wikipedia articles at starting points,
which thank you, but we actually do not use Wikipedia
for our research, and we're going to talk about our
research a little bit more later. Uh. And the Wikipedia
(13:34):
entry for Jenne Dilisson does have more details about her life,
but they are basically sort of scattered sentences, and it's
not really documented in terms of sourcing. Yeah, so that's
not really a valid source for us, and it's it's
not even the thing the thing that you can do
we can see what the sources were and start from
there because it doesn't say where these random sentences of
(13:57):
facts came from. Who knows. So moving on. Uh, that
I think is the briefest of our six impossible episodes today.
Moving on, So we're not sure when the first request
came in to talk about the Kentucky meat Shower, but
there were a whole lot that came in after X
K c D put out comic number fifteen O one,
(14:17):
which is called Mysteries, and that charts a bunch of
historical mysteries based on how weird they are and whether
they can be explained or not. So the Kentucky Meat
Shower is in the quadrant for stuff that's both really
weird and also explained. And we have episodes about several
of the other mysteries that are in that comic, including
the Mary Celeste D. D. Cooper, the Oak Island money Pit,
(14:40):
I think, the delf Pass incidents, a bunch of them,
a lot of them, really, So yeah, I thought about
doing a whole episode that was just on the mysteries
from the comic that we haven't covered, And I think
some people actually did ask for that specifically. But some
of them are extremely recent and others are basically summarized
in a sentence. So on March three, eighty six, the Crouches,
(15:04):
who lived in Bath County, Kentucky, witnessed what appeared to
be meat falling from a clear sky. And these pieces
of meat were in various shapes and sizes, some of
them just little meaty whisps, and some chunks as big
as a person's hand. The New York Times later wrote
about this event under the headline flesh descending in a
shower and all capital letters. So it also sounds like
(15:28):
a weird um, like the kind of play that you
would see in an experimental college theater. Oh yeah, So afterwards,
Alan Crouch and his wife found that a strip of
their land about a hundred yards long and fifty yards
wide was just covered in chunks of this meaty substance.
Neighbors came by to look at it. Their cat ain't
some of it? Yeah, some people tasted it also. Uh.
(15:53):
They came up with various theories for what they thought
it tasted and smelled like, including mutton, venison, and bear,
and eventually people gathered up pieces of it and sent
it to various labs for testing, and the various labs
came back with various results, including that it was dried
frog spawn, that it was nostock, which is a cyanobacteria
that forms this gelatinous protective coding, or that it was
(16:16):
some actual type of animal flesh, And eventually the prevailing
theory became that it was actually brace vomit, my least
favorite thing in the world, vulture vomits, which would explain
why the cat was so drawn to it from from
vultures that had overindulged on something they had scavenged. That
makes it super gross. As we said that the cat
(16:38):
and a number of people ate some of it. So
there are not really a ton of books or historical
papers or peer reviewed whatever on this event. It's the
sort of thing that would be really fun to research
by going through old newspaper archives to figure out exactly
what people were saying about it at the time. And
the thing is, a writer named Matt Soniac has already
done that in the pages of Mental floss, so trying
(17:01):
to get a whole article together based on that exact
same process, which just feel a little bit too much
like we were cribbing off of his work. There is
a preserved piece of this meat at the Monroe loos
Nick Medical and Science Museum at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.
If you are yearning to see what the vomity meat
(17:21):
looks like, I'm not look on your face pretty much
says it. Also, I won't say the V word anymore. Uh.
And and we have two more impossible episodes, one of
which makes us really sad that it's impossible, and we're
going to talk about them after another brief word from
a sponsor. Uh. That particular sponsor at this moment is
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Build it beautiful. Okay, as we said before the break,
(19:10):
our penultimate impossible episode makes us so sad that it's
been possible. One of our most frequently requested episodes, at
least after we did one on the night, which is
so people stopped requesting that one is infamous serial killer Elizabeth,
or more accurately, Elizabeth Bathory. And Elizabeth Bathory was actually
(19:31):
the second subject ever covered on our show, so when
people ask for an episode on her, we point them
back to that one, which being the second episode ever
on our show. It is only three minutes long, and
we don't normally put out duovers of previous hosts episodes.
History is basically infinite, and even if we would have
approached the subject in a different way from a previous
(19:53):
host take on it, there's just so much to cover
that we haven't already done. Uh. There is an exception.
I did a review of m um one of them, Zenobia,
just because that was like a personal zone of super
interest for me. But normally we don't usually backtrack on
those um But when it comes to Elizabeth Bathory, we
(20:13):
get so many requests and so many disappointed follow ups
when people realize that the old episode is quite brief,
that it made sense to at least talk about it. So.
Elizabeth Bathory was born in fifteen sixty into Transylvaane, his
ruling family. She was very wealthy, very beautiful, and very
well educated, and when she was eleven or twelve, she
was betrothed to a member of another prominent family, but
(20:36):
a couple of years later she actually had a child
by a different man, who her fiance purportedly killed by
having him castrated and then ravaged by dogs. Bathori's illegitimate
child was kept secret from the rest of the world,
and her marriage went ahead is planned when she was fourteen.
Her husband died when she was forty three. In between
their marriage and his death, she had four children. By
(21:00):
the time of her husband's death in sixteen o four,
there were rumors spreading that she was sadistic and cruel,
and these rumors really escalated after his passing. There were
stories that she tortured her servants and the daughters of
peasants who were living in the area. She was rumored
to drink their blood and bathe in it in order
(21:20):
to preserve her beauty and her youth authorities actually investigated her.
In sixteen ten, Count Georgie Thursoh, who was Bathori's cousin,
was sent by King Mattias to find out what was
going on, and he reportedly walked in on Bath three
conducting a torture session. He took depositions from people both
within and outside of the estate, and he concluded that
(21:41):
Elizabeth had killed six hundred girls with the help of
her servants. She was placed under arrest that December. Four
people who were reported to be her accomplices were tried,
and three of them were executed. One was sentenced to
life in prison. She herself was never tried, but she
was confined to a window room in the castle for
the rest of her life, which ended in sixteen fourteen.
(22:04):
She was found dead on August twenty one of that year.
There's some evidence to suggest that the claims against Bath
three were deeply embellished, or were in fact slander. King
Matthias owed Bath three a great deal of money, and
her family apparently waived that debt in exchange for getting
control of her captivity. Those same family members also got
(22:24):
control over all of her land, so unfortunately it became
clear almost immediately when trying to research a full length
episode on Elizabeth Bathory that it just was not going
to happen. There are several brief articles about her from
reputable sources, but the couple of books that have been
written about her in English were both self published. Now,
(22:47):
we're not knocking the idea of publishing your own work
or of reading self published work. Of course, you may
do what you want, but since we are not experts
in a lot of the things we talked about, we
take a number of steps to try to ensure that
the work we do you has been approached with a
high degree of ecademic rigor. We did, actually, very late
in the game find out about one non self published
(23:08):
book in English. But then, uh, neither of us is
really comfortable sourcing an entire podcast from one book whose
facts we can't verify through other independent sources. So that's that, uh,
and that brings us to impossible Episode six. Yeah, a
(23:29):
lot of people ask us to do an episode that's
about research tips or ideas on where they can find
information on particular subjects, and we talked about this a
little bit in our Listener Male f a Q episode
a couple of years ago. But that one was more
devoted to our process of making podcasts, and having a
whole episode on research tips seemed like stretch. But since
(23:51):
we're having to round out our six and to tie
onto the one we just talked about, uh some tips
for research. So when it comes to two books, for me,
the books that I read for episodes are usually person's
memoirs that they wrote themselves about their own lives. And
often if there is some contention about whether the person's
(24:11):
memoirs are embellished, we will say that yes, um and
otherwise most of the books, there are some exceptions, but
most of the books that I used for the podcast
have been published by academic presses, and so you have
some confidence that there has been like an editor involved
in fact checking and helping to make sure that the
(24:31):
whole thing is is as accurate and uh correct as possible.
That's like one of the steps of making sure that
the information that we're getting is right, which is why
for our podcast specifically, I wouldn't normally use the self
a self published book unless it was somebody's own self
published memoir. Yeah, and one of the things that I
(24:53):
do usually it's unusual that I think either of us
would just use one in book for an episode. Uh So,
one of the things that I do, even when they
are meeting all of the criteria Tracy just talked about,
is I kind of do a little pattern recognition, like
where are there some things that come up slightly different,
(25:16):
because I try to trace those back to the root
and find out what is consistent across all of them
and where they may have diverged and what may have
caused that. Um. Because there are cases where things get
a little wiggly, uh in part just in the writing process,
as as one person tries to tell the story of
someone and another person does that, they may use language
(25:36):
that kind of maybe not always even on purpose, conveys
a different meaning in the historical record. So we try
to really root those out across multiple sources. And this
is where I am going to advocate for your local library. UM.
Which may sound ridiculous that a lot of people think
about going to the library and checking out books, but
(25:56):
most public public library systems at this point have databases
that anyone with a library card can access where you
can get a lot more academic information on subjects, things
that have been through peer review, things that have been
through some kind of like more stringent editorial process to
make sure that what is on the page is as
(26:18):
accurate as it can be. So usually my uh, my
research process involves books when they are available, and then
from databases any number of uh like academic papers on stuff,
and then um, when there are not those sorts of
things available, things that are from people who, in one
(26:39):
way or another are the experts in that particular field. Right, So,
local library, that's my big research tip. Anytime anybody emails
us and says, can you give me research tips, local library,
It's gonna help you out a lot. That's usually a
reference librarian who can help you with lots of tips
about like what your specific library system offers. UM being
(27:01):
now in a totally different public library system than I
was when I was actually living here locally to our
office where I'm recording this episode from today. Actually, uh,
different libraries can have vastly different offerings in terms of
exactly which databases they offer and what other services they have.
So each library system's reference librarian will help you out.
(27:24):
And I will say this having um worked in a
library for more than a decade and having still a
lot of friends who are librarians and specifically reference librarians.
They often love it if you go to them with
a juicy research topic. They get so excited because a
lot of times it's just people wanting to like put
together something simple for like I have to do a
research paper, or I have a reference librarian friend who
(27:47):
finally had to put the kaibosh on the person who
kept coming in to do her son's homework. But but
she gets really excited when someone comes to her with
a really interesting research topic. And I think a lot
of times if you develop a relationship with your local
reas librarian, don't drive them crazy. But certainly those are
people you want to make friends with because they can
help you find stuff you never would have even known existed. Yes, yes,
(28:09):
my fiance is a librarian and most of his library
work involves more the curation of data than book stuff
at this point, So whenever we are talking about podcast
things and I bring up some weird subject, he gets
super excited and it's like I'm gonna go into the
stacks and see if i have anything on that. I'm like,
(28:32):
I didn't ask you to do that. Just remember that's
the person that is drawn to the library sciences. My
other big one is I love to find if it's
all possible, uh, contemporary newspaper. Yeah, yeah, that that, and
there are a number of services that will help you
with those, like subscription services. I don't want to name
them my name, just because I don't endorse any particular one.
(28:52):
The different ones off for different benefits. So but if
you find one you like, like, that's a gold mine. Yeah.
And a lot of times your local library will have
an archive of the newspaper, like your local newspaper, and
then often some other big name ones like the New
York Times in the Boston Globe. Uh, some of like
the biggest, most long standing newspapers for US people. So
(29:18):
those are some research tips. I hope they're helpful. Yeah.
I think the other thing to always be careful about
is not looking for research that backs up what you
already think, but actually reading the research. It's easy to do,
so easy to do, but yeah, you have to kind
of keep your mind as objective as possible. That's how
we keep winding up with episodes that we thought were
going to be a ralicky good time and they were
(29:40):
not and turned dark and stormy. Yes, so I have
a couple of emails that are actually kind of related
to this last piece of Impossible episode, and they are
both pretty short, so I'm just gonna read them both.
The first one is from Catherine, and Katherine says, Hi,
Holly and Tracy, a kind of the only made on
your recent USS Cyclops episode about a book she had
(30:03):
consulted for source material reminded me of a question I've
been wanting to ask you all for a while, and
looking through the blog entries and sources for program content.
As an aside, coming from a research profession, I cannot
tell you how much I appreciate that you publicly document
all of your source material on the blog. I noticed
that in your research you often make an effort to
read inside at least one book on the subject in question.
(30:24):
Given all the books you've consulted during your time working
on the podcast, I was wondering if you had any
favorites that you can suggest to some of your BiblioFile
listeners such as myself. Thanks again for all you do
to make the podcast of Delight, Sincerely, Catherine Um And
then she mentions having read one of the books that
we read for one of the episodes, which was pretty cool,
(30:44):
And then the other one is for Monica, and Monica says, hello, ladies.
I recently discovered your podcast about two weeks ago, and
I am obsessed. I am probably about halfway through the
archived episodes, and I'm already dreading the day when I
can no longer binge listen to new episodes. I was
a classic studies minor in college, but have a great
passion for history, especially European. I'm also absolutely obsessed with
(31:07):
British history. I was curious to know if anyone in
your office has a book recommendation or authors that refer
to the Dark Ages in Europe anywhere in Europe, maybe
Holy Roman Empire, or perhaps a book of maps that
shows Europe from eleventh centuries to twenty one century. I'm
always losing myself in the geography of the time, so
(31:27):
to Monica, I'm opening that question up to listeners. If
listeners have recommendation for this books and nothing immediately came
to my mind, um so if you have book suggestions
for Monica sent us a note history podcast at how
stuffworks dot com and for Catherine's note. We did write
Catherine back with some things that immediately came to mind,
(31:47):
but I wanted to read her note for two reasons.
One thank you Katherine and to um. A lot of
folks don't realize that we have show notes for every
episode that we do in our blog, and the show
list out all of the sources, and those sources include
basically everything that we read. So going all the way
back through the Tracy and Holly era, if there are
(32:09):
episodes of the podcast that you listen to and are
interested in and you want to know more, you can
find out where you can read more by looking in
all of those uh and the show notes post for
that particular episode. Um. The the thing that gets tricky
is at this point you and I have each researched
an episode every week for many months, and so it
(32:35):
takes like I am sure that I forgot many many
great great books when I emailed Catherine back, I just
like the two that sparked into my brain immediately were
the ones that I said, but me too, Yeah, my
brain just at this point when we get to the
end of recording, sometimes I have forgotten literally the subject
that we talked about by the time we're in uh
(32:56):
the studio next well, and I think to um, part
of it for me is like, UM, very topic specific.
You know, like I can tell you what some of
my favorite Disney history books are, or my favorite Queen
Victoria history books are, right, but those might not be
the kind of history books that you want to read.
(33:18):
So if we just pick a few off the top
of our heads, like I would probably never pick one
that's just a vast general history book, which isn't to
say that those aren't great, but those wouldn't probably be
the ones that nestle in my heart as favorites. Yeah,
And the books that I recommended to Catherine, we're both
ones where they were memoirs where the person speaking had
(33:39):
such a lovely candor, yeah, that it sounded like I
was like sitting down with that person and hearing him
tell me a story. They were Frankie Manning and Luis Alvarez.
There was those two memoirs that I recommended just because
those both had just a casual, lovely conversational tone which
(34:00):
may float your boat and may not anyway. Yeah, that's
that's one of those ones. It's a little bit tricky,
I know, for me, because everybody's taste is different, particularly
on the um when you're reading on the page. The
things that resonate with one person or not, I'm gonna
be the same things that resonate with someone else. Yes.
So if you know of great, awesome resources for the
(34:21):
things that Monica asked about regarding the Dark Ages in Europe,
please write to us. Or if you want to recommend
other books, please write to us. If you UH have
awesome questions that you want to ask, you can please
write to us. We're History podcast at how stupwork dot com.
We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss
in history and on Twitter at miss in history. Are
tumbler is miss in history dot tomber dot com, and
(34:43):
we're also on Pinterest at pentriest dot com slash missed
in History. We have a spreadshirt store at miss in
history dot spreadshirt dot com. You might be tired of
me saying miss in history, but I'm gonna say it
one more time, which is that our new instagram is
at missed in history. If you would like to learn
a little bit, we'll were about what we talked about today,
just it's tiny bit more. You can come to our website,
(35:03):
but the words Elizabeth Bathory in the UH the search bar,
and you will find the article that actually sparked for
the original very shorts A minute was at the Bathory episode.
You can also come to miss the Mystery dot com
and you will find show notes that list all of
our sources, including lots and lots and lots of books
that you might love, uh, an archive of every single episode,
(35:24):
lots of other cool stuff we do. All that, and
a whole lot more. How stuff works dot com or
missed in hisstory dot com for more on this thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, Fun Stuff
Works dot Com. Hello and Tracy Wilson. About six months ago,
we put out an episode that was called Six Impossible Episodes,
and it was six subjects that are really frequent listener requests,
(00:24):
but for some reason or another they could not really
stand on their own as individual episodes. And people seem
to enjoy that one. And since then we've collected another
heaping handful of topics that people are asking for a lot,
but which we can't quite be a whole show on.
So today six more Impossible Episodes. All right, These are
(00:45):
fun because it's a you know, a little less intensive
than digging super deep in like a long, full length episode,
and it's like a nice little shworket sport. Yes, and
I am writing on an airplane four times in six days,
so that's why we're doing this today. Yeah, there, it's
(01:06):
going to be super fun. I love it. So. First one,
anytime we say anything about Paul Revere on our Facebook
posts or anywhere else on the internet, really at least
one person, but far more often it is more than
one asks the same question, which is, how come nobody
ever talks about Sybil Luddington, and so in case you
maybe aren't from the United States, on the eve of
(01:29):
the Revolutionary War, Paul Revere was part of a now
famous ride to spread the word of an impending attack,
and later on in the war, Sybil Luddington also made
a different but far less famous ride. So anytime we
say Paul Revere, it's like a call in response somebody
else says Sybil Lendington. You could use that as the
(01:51):
alternate to Marco Polo is a pool game, I'm pretty sure. So.
Sybil was born in Connecticut on April fifth, seventeen sixty one,
and when she was still a abe, her family moved
to Duchess County, New York, which lies along the New
York Connecticut border. Her father, Henry Luttington, had decades of
military experience, so as war loomed between Britain and its
(02:12):
colonies in North America, he quickly became a colonel and
was put in command of a regiment that was responsible
for guarding territory along the New York Connecticut border. This
is a pretty critical piece of land because it was
one of the primary ways that the Loyalists could reach
Long Island Sound from elsewhere farther inland. That's why when
(02:33):
Governor William Tryon and his men rated Danbury, Connecticut in
seventeen seventy seven, a rider was sent from Danbury to
the Luddington home in Duchess County to ask Sybel's father
to send help. Danbury was also strategically important, and it
was home to several Continental Army storehouses that were full
of food, munitions, and other supplies. So this rider that
(02:55):
had been dispatched was too exhausted to continue by the
time he got to the letting and home, and Colonel
Luddington needed to prepare for battle, so he sent his
oldest child, Sibyl, to muster his forces so they could
go to Danbury's aid. It's not totally clear whether she
volunteered for this task or whether she was sent, and
at this point, Sybil had just turned sixteen, and her
(03:18):
ride wound through forty miles of mostly wooded territory at night.
So Sybil's age and the length of her ride, which
was longer than Paul Revere's, are often held up as
reasons why she is really more deserving of a claim
than Paul Revere was. And then there's often this undertone
of well, she should have had that acclaim, and she
(03:38):
would have if she were a man. But as most
of these things go, there's more to it than that.
Paul Revere's ride is famous largely because of Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow's poem, first published in eighteen sixty one, and that
is the one that starts with listen, my children, and
you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
It's not a very historically accurate poem, which is why
(04:00):
a lot of people remember wrong things about Paul Revere's ride,
including that he was not the only one that was
on it. Right, the poem is only about him. But
this poem was written more than eighty years after the
ride in question took place, and it was written after
Longfellow visited the Old North Church in Boston, which is
more more formally known as Christ Church. And the Old
(04:23):
North Church is the one where the one if by
Land too if by Sea signal lanterns were hung. And
there are several likely reasons why Paul Revere is the
star of this poem and not someone else. Apart from
his ride to warn of the attack, he was a
prominent Boston citizen and an active participant in other parts
of the Revolutionary War. For example, he made an engraving
(04:46):
of the Boston massacre that we talked about in our
episode on that event. Paul Revere also served with Longfellow's
grandfather in the service, And just to be really basic
about it, I think we should add that Revere is
easy to rhyme things with. It is much easier to
rhyme things with than Luddington. So when Longfellow was writing
(05:09):
his poem about someone he had a family connection to,
whose ride connected to a place he had just visited,
Luddington's story hadn't even been written down yet. It survived
as family lore for roughly one hundred years before it
was actually published anywhere, and Sybil's great nephew, historian Lewis S. Patrick,
wrote about it in nineteen o seven, at which point
(05:29):
school children were already memorizing the Longfellow poem. So you
could totally make the argument that Civil Lettington's gender meant
she could not make a name for herself the way
Paul Revere did and later become famous thanks to a
historically inaccurate poem. We just don't really know anything about
her beyond the fact that when the war was over,
(05:49):
she got married to a Revolutionary word veteran named Edward Ogden.
They had a son, and they later opened a tavern,
and she died on February eighteen thirty nine. Just was
not the sort of prominent, publicly facing citizen that Paul
Revere had been, and we don't have any primary source
documentation about her ride at all, and even tiny details
(06:11):
like how she spelled her name are different based on
the things like her tombstone, her signature, and census records
literally spelled differently in all of those places. So in
terms of no one talking about her, there are many
many children's books about Sibyl Lannington, and she was commemorate
commemorated on a bicentennial postage stamp in even when she lived,
(06:35):
George Washington himself came to her home to thank her
personally for having written to muster all the men after
the Battle of Danbury. There is a particularly fierce looking
statue of her in Carmel, New York, along with a
number of historical markers along her ride route. So her
story just was not well known at all outside of
(06:57):
her family and maybe local neighbor from the area when
the poem that made Paul Revere famous was written. Like,
that poem was solidly in the collective memory of America
before Sibyl Luddington's story was even written down at all. Yeah,
that poem has great scansion, and so it's really easy
(07:21):
to remember and it's really kind of engaging. But as
the sort of sad coda as well, Colonel Luddington's efforts
were also too late to save Danbury. The British burned
thousands of barrels of food along with tents, shoes, and
other supplies before Luddington and other reinforcements were able to arrive.
So that is the story of Sybil Lettington and also
(07:42):
why people talk about Paul Revere more. Uh. Next up,
we have one that was requested first by Diane long
enough ago that it is number fifty six on our
listeners submitted Ideas list, which is now hundreds and hundreds
of ideas long. It is the Capuchin Catacomb in Palermo, Sicily,
which are home to about eight thousand mummies. The Capucin
(08:05):
community in Palermo was established in fifteen thirty four at
the Church of Santa Maria de la Pacha. At first,
the Friars who lived there were buried in what was
essentially a mass grave, but about sixty years later the
monastery outgrew. That's that mass burial site, so the Friars
decided to dig a larger set of catacombs using natural
caves that already existed in the area. Doing this required
(08:29):
them to exhume the bodies that had already been buried,
and when they did, they found that forty five of
them had been naturally preserved and we're just in a
really pristine condition. Their bodies had dehydrated rather than rotting.
They interpreted this as a sign from God, and then,
rather than proceeding with what had essentially been planned as
(08:49):
a bigger mass grave, they decided instead to keep the
exhumed bodies intact and displayed them as religious relics, and
the new burial site that they created was built with
that end goal in mind. They also gradually refined the
caves natural preservation process into an intentional mummification, which included
removing the organs and stuffing the cavity of the bodies
(09:11):
with straw and placing the bodies on terra cotta tubes
to help them dry faster. The Friars used a number
of other preservation methods as well. Sylvestro of Gubio was
a sixteenth century Capuchin monk, and he was the first
to be buried in these new catacombs. Originally, the only
bodies that were placed in the catacombs were those of
Friars who were part of the Order after they died.
(09:34):
But eventually, as words spread about the catacombs, being mummified
and placed there after death became a mark of high status,
so the bodies of nobility and famous local citizens joined
that those of the Friars, and eventually the Order began
allowing the burial of anyone who requested it in seventy three.
One of the things that makes this place so compelling
(09:56):
is that the bodies, which are very well preserved, are
out in view you. They're dressed. Family members would even
come to change the body's clothes. And some are on shelves,
some hang from hooks, and some are in open coffin
like containers. Some are posed almost as though their taxidermy displays.
And there's one hall that's entirely the bodies of infants,
(10:17):
some of them in cradles, and although they're arranged into
approximate categories like professionals, priests, monks, virgins. Relatively few of
these bodies are actually identifying. The Friars stopped burying new
bodies there in eighteen eighty, and they made only two
exceptions afterward. One was Giovanni Patterniti, who was buried in
nineteen eleven, and the other was Rosalia Lombardo, who was
(10:41):
two years old and placed there in nineteen twenty. The
monks teamed up with the European Union to start a
conservation project on the site in two thousand eight, because
it has become a major tourist destination, but very little
had been done up to that point in the centuries
since it was first built to preserve it. We're going
to put an image gallery of some pictures of this
(11:01):
place on our website because it is incredible to look at.
But most of the information that's available about it in
English as of right now is sort of like travel
god type of stuff. It's it's a tourist attraction at
this point, and most of the things that are written
about it are written in that vein, so I could
not find enough richer information to make a whole episode
(11:26):
out of it, but so many people have asked, we
want to spend a whole time today. Cool, So before
we go to our next impossible episode, you want to
pause from a brief word from a sponsor sounds good.
Our most recent requests for our next subject, who is
jean Ditisson, came from Laramie and Mary and two different
emails very recently, and she, unfortunately, is yet another person
(11:49):
who falls into the not enough reliable information available in
English category. We've had some folks right in to tell
us that we just need to hire some people who
speak other languages, y'all. It's just the two of us
and NOL. Like, we don't have like a staff budget. No,
we we don't have a translation staff. We literally look
so many things up and we still get them wrong
(12:10):
because we are not fluent speakers of every language, because
it is just the two of us and NOL. Yeah,
and we do try to outsource whilm we can, but
sometimes it's just not feasible right when you're working, uh so.
Jeanne de Clisson was a noblewoman and a pirate. In
THTT three, her second husband, Olivier, the third Lord of Clisson,
(12:31):
was executed for treason upon the orders of King Philip
the sixth of France, so n pulled her money. She
bought a fleet of ships, She rallied the support of
other discontented nobles who were unhappy with Philip the six
for some reason, and then she went on a rampage
of terror and piracy. She purportedly painted her ships black
(12:52):
and died their sales red to make her fleet extremely impressive,
and she was nicknamed the Lioness of Brittany. I can
see why lots of people want to hear about her.
She's fabulous, though a little cutthroat and blood thirsty. M
She was so successful in her revenge campaign that she
won the support of King Edward the third of England,
(13:13):
who loaned her more ships and weapons so she could
more effectively fight against France. When she was done with
seeking revenge, she sought and gained sanctuary in the English Court.
And people like to send us Wikipedia articles at starting points,
which thank you, but we actually do not use Wikipedia
for our research, and we're going to talk about our
research a little bit more later. Uh. And the Wikipedia
(13:34):
entry for Jenne Dilisson does have more details about her life,
but they are basically sort of scattered sentences, and it's
not really documented in terms of sourcing. Yeah, so that's
not really a valid source for us, and it's it's
not even the thing the thing that you can do
we can see what the sources were and start from
there because it doesn't say where these random sentences of
(13:57):
facts came from. Who knows. So moving on. Uh, that
I think is the briefest of our six impossible episodes today.
Moving on, So we're not sure when the first request
came in to talk about the Kentucky meat Shower, but
there were a whole lot that came in after X
K c D put out comic number fifteen O one,
(14:17):
which is called Mysteries, and that charts a bunch of
historical mysteries based on how weird they are and whether
they can be explained or not. So the Kentucky Meat
Shower is in the quadrant for stuff that's both really
weird and also explained. And we have episodes about several
of the other mysteries that are in that comic, including
the Mary Celeste D. D. Cooper, the Oak Island money Pit,
(14:40):
I think, the delf Pass incidents, a bunch of them,
a lot of them, really, So yeah, I thought about
doing a whole episode that was just on the mysteries
from the comic that we haven't covered, And I think
some people actually did ask for that specifically. But some
of them are extremely recent and others are basically summarized
in a sentence. So on March three, eighty six, the Crouches,
(15:04):
who lived in Bath County, Kentucky, witnessed what appeared to
be meat falling from a clear sky. And these pieces
of meat were in various shapes and sizes, some of
them just little meaty whisps, and some chunks as big
as a person's hand. The New York Times later wrote
about this event under the headline flesh descending in a
shower and all capital letters. So it also sounds like
(15:28):
a weird um, like the kind of play that you
would see in an experimental college theater. Oh yeah, So afterwards,
Alan Crouch and his wife found that a strip of
their land about a hundred yards long and fifty yards
wide was just covered in chunks of this meaty substance.
Neighbors came by to look at it. Their cat ain't
some of it? Yeah, some people tasted it also. Uh.
(15:53):
They came up with various theories for what they thought
it tasted and smelled like, including mutton, venison, and bear,
and eventually people gathered up pieces of it and sent
it to various labs for testing, and the various labs
came back with various results, including that it was dried
frog spawn, that it was nostock, which is a cyanobacteria
that forms this gelatinous protective coding, or that it was
(16:16):
some actual type of animal flesh, And eventually the prevailing
theory became that it was actually brace vomit, my least
favorite thing in the world, vulture vomits, which would explain
why the cat was so drawn to it from from
vultures that had overindulged on something they had scavenged. That
makes it super gross. As we said that the cat
(16:38):
and a number of people ate some of it. So
there are not really a ton of books or historical
papers or peer reviewed whatever on this event. It's the
sort of thing that would be really fun to research
by going through old newspaper archives to figure out exactly
what people were saying about it at the time. And
the thing is, a writer named Matt Soniac has already
done that in the pages of Mental floss, so trying
(17:01):
to get a whole article together based on that exact
same process, which just feel a little bit too much
like we were cribbing off of his work. There is
a preserved piece of this meat at the Monroe loos
Nick Medical and Science Museum at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.
If you are yearning to see what the vomity meat
(17:21):
looks like, I'm not look on your face pretty much
says it. Also, I won't say the V word anymore. Uh.
And and we have two more impossible episodes, one of
which makes us really sad that it's impossible, and we're
going to talk about them after another brief word from
a sponsor. Uh. That particular sponsor at this moment is
scare space the best way to create a beautiful website
(17:44):
or online store for you and your ideas. I have
been working online for my selling blog. I'm not gonna lie.
I'm a little bit of a foot dragger, but it's
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make sure when you go and start your new trial
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that you enter the offer code history to get teen
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Build it beautiful. Okay, as we said before the break,
(19:10):
our penultimate impossible episode makes us so sad that it's
been possible. One of our most frequently requested episodes, at
least after we did one on the night, which is
so people stopped requesting that one is infamous serial killer Elizabeth,
or more accurately, Elizabeth Bathory. And Elizabeth Bathory was actually
(19:31):
the second subject ever covered on our show, so when
people ask for an episode on her, we point them
back to that one, which being the second episode ever
on our show. It is only three minutes long, and
we don't normally put out duovers of previous hosts episodes.
History is basically infinite, and even if we would have
approached the subject in a different way from a previous
(19:53):
host take on it, there's just so much to cover
that we haven't already done. Uh. There is an exception.
I did a review of m um one of them, Zenobia,
just because that was like a personal zone of super
interest for me. But normally we don't usually backtrack on
those um But when it comes to Elizabeth Bathory, we
(20:13):
get so many requests and so many disappointed follow ups
when people realize that the old episode is quite brief,
that it made sense to at least talk about it. So.
Elizabeth Bathory was born in fifteen sixty into Transylvaane, his
ruling family. She was very wealthy, very beautiful, and very
well educated, and when she was eleven or twelve, she
was betrothed to a member of another prominent family, but
(20:36):
a couple of years later she actually had a child
by a different man, who her fiance purportedly killed by
having him castrated and then ravaged by dogs. Bathori's illegitimate
child was kept secret from the rest of the world,
and her marriage went ahead is planned when she was fourteen.
Her husband died when she was forty three. In between
their marriage and his death, she had four children. By
(21:00):
the time of her husband's death in sixteen o four,
there were rumors spreading that she was sadistic and cruel,
and these rumors really escalated after his passing. There were
stories that she tortured her servants and the daughters of
peasants who were living in the area. She was rumored
to drink their blood and bathe in it in order
(21:20):
to preserve her beauty and her youth authorities actually investigated her.
In sixteen ten, Count Georgie Thursoh, who was Bathori's cousin,
was sent by King Mattias to find out what was
going on, and he reportedly walked in on Bath three
conducting a torture session. He took depositions from people both
within and outside of the estate, and he concluded that
(21:41):
Elizabeth had killed six hundred girls with the help of
her servants. She was placed under arrest that December. Four
people who were reported to be her accomplices were tried,
and three of them were executed. One was sentenced to
life in prison. She herself was never tried, but she
was confined to a window room in the castle for
the rest of her life, which ended in sixteen fourteen.
(22:04):
She was found dead on August twenty one of that year.
There's some evidence to suggest that the claims against Bath
three were deeply embellished, or were in fact slander. King
Matthias owed Bath three a great deal of money, and
her family apparently waived that debt in exchange for getting
control of her captivity. Those same family members also got
(22:24):
control over all of her land, so unfortunately it became
clear almost immediately when trying to research a full length
episode on Elizabeth Bathory that it just was not going
to happen. There are several brief articles about her from
reputable sources, but the couple of books that have been
written about her in English were both self published. Now,
(22:47):
we're not knocking the idea of publishing your own work
or of reading self published work. Of course, you may
do what you want, but since we are not experts
in a lot of the things we talked about, we
take a number of steps to try to ensure that
the work we do you has been approached with a
high degree of ecademic rigor. We did, actually, very late
in the game find out about one non self published
(23:08):
book in English. But then, uh, neither of us is
really comfortable sourcing an entire podcast from one book whose
facts we can't verify through other independent sources. So that's that, uh,
and that brings us to impossible Episode six. Yeah, a
(23:29):
lot of people ask us to do an episode that's
about research tips or ideas on where they can find
information on particular subjects, and we talked about this a
little bit in our Listener Male f a Q episode
a couple of years ago. But that one was more
devoted to our process of making podcasts, and having a
whole episode on research tips seemed like stretch. But since
(23:51):
we're having to round out our six and to tie
onto the one we just talked about, uh some tips
for research. So when it comes to two books, for me,
the books that I read for episodes are usually person's
memoirs that they wrote themselves about their own lives. And
often if there is some contention about whether the person's
(24:11):
memoirs are embellished, we will say that yes, um and
otherwise most of the books, there are some exceptions, but
most of the books that I used for the podcast
have been published by academic presses, and so you have
some confidence that there has been like an editor involved
in fact checking and helping to make sure that the
(24:31):
whole thing is is as accurate and uh correct as possible.
That's like one of the steps of making sure that
the information that we're getting is right, which is why
for our podcast specifically, I wouldn't normally use the self
a self published book unless it was somebody's own self
published memoir. Yeah, and one of the things that I
(24:53):
do usually it's unusual that I think either of us
would just use one in book for an episode. Uh So,
one of the things that I do, even when they
are meeting all of the criteria Tracy just talked about,
is I kind of do a little pattern recognition, like
where are there some things that come up slightly different,
(25:16):
because I try to trace those back to the root
and find out what is consistent across all of them
and where they may have diverged and what may have
caused that. Um. Because there are cases where things get
a little wiggly, uh in part just in the writing process,
as as one person tries to tell the story of
someone and another person does that, they may use language
(25:36):
that kind of maybe not always even on purpose, conveys
a different meaning in the historical record. So we try
to really root those out across multiple sources. And this
is where I am going to advocate for your local library. UM.
Which may sound ridiculous that a lot of people think
about going to the library and checking out books, but
(25:56):
most public public library systems at this point have databases
that anyone with a library card can access where you
can get a lot more academic information on subjects, things
that have been through peer review, things that have been
through some kind of like more stringent editorial process to
make sure that what is on the page is as
(26:18):
accurate as it can be. So usually my uh, my
research process involves books when they are available, and then
from databases any number of uh like academic papers on stuff,
and then um, when there are not those sorts of
things available, things that are from people who, in one
(26:39):
way or another are the experts in that particular field. Right, So,
local library, that's my big research tip. Anytime anybody emails
us and says, can you give me research tips, local library,
It's gonna help you out a lot. That's usually a
reference librarian who can help you with lots of tips
about like what your specific library system offers. UM being
(27:01):
now in a totally different public library system than I
was when I was actually living here locally to our
office where I'm recording this episode from today. Actually, uh,
different libraries can have vastly different offerings in terms of
exactly which databases they offer and what other services they have.
So each library system's reference librarian will help you out.
(27:24):
And I will say this having um worked in a
library for more than a decade and having still a
lot of friends who are librarians and specifically reference librarians.
They often love it if you go to them with
a juicy research topic. They get so excited because a
lot of times it's just people wanting to like put
together something simple for like I have to do a
research paper, or I have a reference librarian friend who
(27:47):
finally had to put the kaibosh on the person who
kept coming in to do her son's homework. But but
she gets really excited when someone comes to her with
a really interesting research topic. And I think a lot
of times if you develop a relationship with your local
reas librarian, don't drive them crazy. But certainly those are
people you want to make friends with because they can
help you find stuff you never would have even known existed. Yes, yes,
(28:09):
my fiance is a librarian and most of his library
work involves more the curation of data than book stuff
at this point, So whenever we are talking about podcast
things and I bring up some weird subject, he gets
super excited and it's like I'm gonna go into the
stacks and see if i have anything on that. I'm like,
(28:32):
I didn't ask you to do that. Just remember that's
the person that is drawn to the library sciences. My
other big one is I love to find if it's
all possible, uh, contemporary newspaper. Yeah, yeah, that that, and
there are a number of services that will help you
with those, like subscription services. I don't want to name
them my name, just because I don't endorse any particular one.
(28:52):
The different ones off for different benefits. So but if
you find one you like, like, that's a gold mine. Yeah.
And a lot of times your local library will have
an archive of the newspaper, like your local newspaper, and
then often some other big name ones like the New
York Times in the Boston Globe. Uh, some of like
the biggest, most long standing newspapers for US people. So
(29:18):
those are some research tips. I hope they're helpful. Yeah.
I think the other thing to always be careful about
is not looking for research that backs up what you
already think, but actually reading the research. It's easy to do,
so easy to do, but yeah, you have to kind
of keep your mind as objective as possible. That's how
we keep winding up with episodes that we thought were
going to be a ralicky good time and they were
(29:40):
not and turned dark and stormy. Yes, so I have
a couple of emails that are actually kind of related
to this last piece of Impossible episode, and they are
both pretty short, so I'm just gonna read them both.
The first one is from Catherine, and Katherine says, Hi,
Holly and Tracy, a kind of the only made on
your recent USS Cyclops episode about a book she had
(30:03):
consulted for source material reminded me of a question I've
been wanting to ask you all for a while, and
looking through the blog entries and sources for program content.
As an aside, coming from a research profession, I cannot
tell you how much I appreciate that you publicly document
all of your source material on the blog. I noticed
that in your research you often make an effort to
read inside at least one book on the subject in question.
(30:24):
Given all the books you've consulted during your time working
on the podcast, I was wondering if you had any
favorites that you can suggest to some of your BiblioFile
listeners such as myself. Thanks again for all you do
to make the podcast of Delight, Sincerely, Catherine Um And
then she mentions having read one of the books that
we read for one of the episodes, which was pretty cool,
(30:44):
And then the other one is for Monica, and Monica says, hello, ladies.
I recently discovered your podcast about two weeks ago, and
I am obsessed. I am probably about halfway through the
archived episodes, and I'm already dreading the day when I
can no longer binge listen to new episodes. I was
a classic studies minor in college, but have a great
passion for history, especially European. I'm also absolutely obsessed with
(31:07):
British history. I was curious to know if anyone in
your office has a book recommendation or authors that refer
to the Dark Ages in Europe anywhere in Europe, maybe
Holy Roman Empire, or perhaps a book of maps that
shows Europe from eleventh centuries to twenty one century. I'm
always losing myself in the geography of the time, so
(31:27):
to Monica, I'm opening that question up to listeners. If
listeners have recommendation for this books and nothing immediately came
to my mind, um so if you have book suggestions
for Monica sent us a note history podcast at how
stuffworks dot com and for Catherine's note. We did write
Catherine back with some things that immediately came to mind,
(31:47):
but I wanted to read her note for two reasons.
One thank you Katherine and to um. A lot of
folks don't realize that we have show notes for every
episode that we do in our blog, and the show
list out all of the sources, and those sources include
basically everything that we read. So going all the way
back through the Tracy and Holly era, if there are
(32:09):
episodes of the podcast that you listen to and are
interested in and you want to know more, you can
find out where you can read more by looking in
all of those uh and the show notes post for
that particular episode. Um. The the thing that gets tricky
is at this point you and I have each researched
an episode every week for many months, and so it
(32:35):
takes like I am sure that I forgot many many
great great books when I emailed Catherine back, I just
like the two that sparked into my brain immediately were
the ones that I said, but me too, Yeah, my
brain just at this point when we get to the
end of recording, sometimes I have forgotten literally the subject
that we talked about by the time we're in uh
(32:56):
the studio next well, and I think to um, part
of it for me is like, UM, very topic specific.
You know, like I can tell you what some of
my favorite Disney history books are, or my favorite Queen
Victoria history books are, right, but those might not be
the kind of history books that you want to read.
(33:18):
So if we just pick a few off the top
of our heads, like I would probably never pick one
that's just a vast general history book, which isn't to
say that those aren't great, but those wouldn't probably be
the ones that nestle in my heart as favorites. Yeah,
And the books that I recommended to Catherine, we're both
ones where they were memoirs where the person speaking had
(33:39):
such a lovely candor, yeah, that it sounded like I
was like sitting down with that person and hearing him
tell me a story. They were Frankie Manning and Luis Alvarez.
There was those two memoirs that I recommended just because
those both had just a casual, lovely conversational tone which
(34:00):
may float your boat and may not anyway. Yeah, that's
that's one of those ones. It's a little bit tricky,
I know, for me, because everybody's taste is different, particularly
on the um when you're reading on the page. The
things that resonate with one person or not, I'm gonna
be the same things that resonate with someone else. Yes.
So if you know of great, awesome resources for the
(34:21):
things that Monica asked about regarding the Dark Ages in Europe,
please write to us. Or if you want to recommend
other books, please write to us. If you UH have
awesome questions that you want to ask, you can please
write to us. We're History podcast at how stupwork dot com.
We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss
in history and on Twitter at miss in history. Are
tumbler is miss in history dot tomber dot com, and
(34:43):
we're also on Pinterest at pentriest dot com slash missed
in History. We have a spreadshirt store at miss in
history dot spreadshirt dot com. You might be tired of
me saying miss in history, but I'm gonna say it
one more time, which is that our new instagram is
at missed in history. If you would like to learn
a little bit, we'll were about what we talked about today,
just it's tiny bit more. You can come to our website,
(35:03):
but the words Elizabeth Bathory in the UH the search bar,
and you will find the article that actually sparked for
the original very shorts A minute was at the Bathory episode.
You can also come to miss the Mystery dot com
and you will find show notes that list all of
our sources, including lots and lots and lots of books
that you might love, uh, an archive of every single episode,
(35:24):
lots of other cool stuff we do. All that, and
a whole lot more. How stuff works dot com or
missed in hisstory dot com for more on this thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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