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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class from house

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Speaker 1: works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm

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Speaker 1: trazy and I'm holly trying. And we have gotten so many,

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Speaker 1: so so many listener requests to talk about the history

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Speaker 1: of a specific color. Um. Most recently it was Nicole

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Speaker 1: who asked us to talk about the creation of the

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Speaker 1: color move And before that we had Dora who asked

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Speaker 1: us to talk about pillet, which is a blue dye

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Speaker 1: that's really important in the Jewish tradition. He wrote an

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Speaker 1: entire book on that one, and he sent us a

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Speaker 1: review copy of it about a year ago. I'm absolutely

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Speaker 1: certain we've gotten requests to talk about cockeneal red and

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Speaker 1: a general history of the color blue. And I think

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Speaker 1: those must have been on Facebook or Twitter, because I

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Speaker 1: can't find them in our inbox, um in either of

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Speaker 1: their inboxes. Actually, if you've been checking out of our

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Speaker 1: episodes before, were the very end. Our email address now

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Speaker 1: is History Podcast at how stuff works dot com, So

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Speaker 1: if you send it to Discovery, we will not get it.

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Speaker 1: We won't get it. So we also very recently had

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Speaker 1: a listener named have Lah asked if we might talk

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Speaker 1: about a general history of color or of dies, and

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Speaker 1: so that's where we are today. A lot of these

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Speaker 1: other specific requests that people have made of us are

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Speaker 1: going to come up today. Um, but this is sort

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Speaker 1: of an overview of dies and pigments and how we've

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Speaker 1: been using them during or throughout history, which I love

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Speaker 1: because I love color and you know, style and art

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Speaker 1: and all the other people. The nice, nice follow up

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Speaker 1: to our recent makeup episode which featured lots of color talk.

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Speaker 1: So it all makes sense. So, uh, animal, vegetable or

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Speaker 1: mineral could almost be a guessing game about pigments and dies.

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Speaker 1: People have been using all of these to try to

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Speaker 1: make things prettier all the way back into prehistory. Are

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Speaker 1: they most of the world people have had a lot

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Speaker 1: of them to choose from. If there wasn't a plant

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Speaker 1: source of red, there could be an animal. And if

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Speaker 1: there were neither of those, perhaps they had a mineral

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Speaker 1: that they could source for red color. So to start, ochre,

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Speaker 1: which is made of iron oxide, is found abundantly all

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Speaker 1: over the planet. Iron oxide itself is one of their

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Speaker 1: most common minerals, and ochre is probably the thing that

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Speaker 1: people used to make their clothing and surroundings more colorful

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Speaker 1: before they used anything else. That was probably the first pigment,

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Speaker 1: and ochre produces a range of earthy kind of yellow

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Speaker 1: brown to red brown colors. It was used in some

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Speaker 1: of the world's oldest cave paintings, so when you imagine those,

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Speaker 1: you can pretty quickly conjure what ochre looks like and

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Speaker 1: what the various levels of saturation of it looked like.

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Speaker 1: And it was also used in textiles. We have evidence

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Speaker 1: that prehistoric people's also used it to dye animal skins.

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Speaker 1: And while it's been used all over the world throughout history,

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Speaker 1: in particular the Maori of New Zealand have traditionally used

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Speaker 1: ochre extensively. They've used it on their faces and hair,

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Speaker 1: on their canoes and homes, and on the bones of

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Speaker 1: the dead. There's also in the yellow family saffron, which

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Speaker 1: comes from the dried stigmas of crocuses um. This makes

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Speaker 1: really rich yellows and oranges, and one of its most

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Speaker 1: recognizable uses as a die is in the garments of

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Speaker 1: Buddhist monks. Saffron has a really long history of its own.

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Speaker 1: It could almost go in the later part of this

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Speaker 1: episode when we're gonna be talking about a few colors

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Speaker 1: that have a longer history, but just as much of

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Speaker 1: its history is about being a spice and a medicine

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Speaker 1: as it is about being a die. I'm just having

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Speaker 1: a moment where I'm remembering my mom's awesome saffron bread.

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Speaker 1: As we talked about the saffron. Saffron rice is also diligous,

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Speaker 1: so good uh Mata root can make all kinds of

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Speaker 1: shades of reds and yellows. Cinnabar, which is a sulfide mineral,

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Speaker 1: has been used to make red as well, although it

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Speaker 1: is unfortunately toxic. So is lead, which we also talked

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Speaker 1: about in our cosmetics episode, which has also sometimes been

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Speaker 1: used to make red paints. In Europe, people used woade

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Speaker 1: to make blue and purple dyes for centuries. This is

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Speaker 1: a plant that changed in the seventeenth century and people

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Speaker 1: started importing indigo, which was a superior source of dye

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Speaker 1: from India. India is not the only place where indigo grows,

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Speaker 1: but once it started to catch on in in Europe,

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Speaker 1: the British started up a number of indigo plantations in India.

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Speaker 1: This made India the main source of indigo for much

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Speaker 1: of Europe, and this sort of led to a cycle

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Speaker 1: of demand and more demand, um they would plant plantations

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Speaker 1: and demand would increase and they would be more plantations,

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Speaker 1: and people were really working themselves to the bone on

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Speaker 1: these indigo plantations. This eventually led to India's Indigo Revolt,

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Speaker 1: which was an uprising by the farmer against the plantations

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Speaker 1: and the European owners of the plantations in eighteen fifty

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Speaker 1: six and eighteen fifty seven. And theingo is still used

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Speaker 1: extensively today, though especially for dyeing denim for your blue jeans.

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Speaker 1: So green tones have come from lichen, fungi and especially minerals.

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Speaker 1: Copper has been a big one here, but cobalt has

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Speaker 1: also been used to make some shades of green. When

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Speaker 1: it comes to shades of black, there are all kinds

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Speaker 1: of very common things that you can use to make

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Speaker 1: paints and inks out of, including soot, ivory and bones,

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Speaker 1: but you can't really die things with most of these

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Speaker 1: because they don't stick to the fabric. For a long time,

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Speaker 1: there was no true black dye. People in Europe would

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Speaker 1: mostly make black fabric by dyeing at a series of

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Speaker 1: other colors, which unless it was sort of a byproduct

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Speaker 1: of re dyeing the same gown over and over as

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Speaker 1: it got older. This was just time consuming and expensive. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: that's even an issue that can tenues today when people

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Speaker 1: purchase an article of clothing or a piece of fabric

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Speaker 1: and they want to diet black. Even the commercially available dies,

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Speaker 1: what you usually get is a very dark purple. It's

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Speaker 1: very ticky to get a nice saturated black. And that

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Speaker 1: actually changed this sort of time consuming, really costly approach

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Speaker 1: to multiple dye layers that they were doing after Europeans

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Speaker 1: started making their way to the America's and they actually

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Speaker 1: found a tree that became known as logwood, and the

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Speaker 1: heartwood of logwood is very very dark, and a true

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Speaker 1: black dye could be extracted from it. Because the primary

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Speaker 1: source of logwood was traders from Spain, this guy was

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Speaker 1: actually banned in England from its introduction there around fifteen

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Speaker 1: seventy five all the way to sixteen seventy three. Parliament

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Speaker 1: claimed that logwood produced colors quote of a fugacious character.

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Speaker 1: The Anglo Spanish War and other tensions between England and

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Speaker 1: Spain probably had a lot more to do with it

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Speaker 1: than whether the dye faded quickly. There are also lots

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Speaker 1: and lots of ways to make white pigments including chalk,

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Speaker 1: rice and limestone, and as we also talked about in

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Speaker 1: our makeup episode, lead lead as kind of a multi

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Speaker 1: purpose component, depending on exactly what it's made with and

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Speaker 1: how it's prepared. That's really why there's so much lead

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Speaker 1: based paint around for so many years, so in most

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Speaker 1: of the world, people have had quite a number of

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Speaker 1: options for making a vast array of colors, but a

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Speaker 1: couple of specific guys have turned out to have really,

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Speaker 1: really rich stories of their own, and we will talk

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Speaker 1: about those more in just a moment. If Tracy would

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Speaker 1: like to take a brief pause for a word from

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Speaker 1: our sponsor, and now we will hop back to the

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Speaker 1: wonderful world of color. One source of red around the

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Speaker 1: world has been insects. The cockoneal is a scale insect

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Speaker 1: that's native to Central and South America. Some people also

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Speaker 1: pronounce that coconeal, and Europeans got their first glimpse of

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Speaker 1: it thanks to the conquistor Hernan Cortes in the fifteen hundreds.

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Speaker 1: The various species of insect used for this dye are

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Speaker 1: all in the genus Dactylopius, although Cortes as soldiers called

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Speaker 1: them Cocanelia cultivada. The females live on prickly pear cactuses.

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Speaker 1: The wind blows them from cactus to cactus when they're

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Speaker 1: still nymphs, and then as they mature, they attached themselves

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Speaker 1: to the cacti. The females are harvested from the cacti

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Speaker 1: and then dried, and then they are crushed and bathed

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Speaker 1: in acid. And a pound of dye contains about seventy

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Speaker 1: thousand of these little insects. Some people, in addition to

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Speaker 1: pronouncing cockneal two different ways, also use coconeal and carmine interchangeably.

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Speaker 1: Other people sort of differentiate between coconeal and carmine as

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Speaker 1: two shades of red. Either way, Carmine is also made

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Speaker 1: from these same bugs. Soon after Europeans were introduced to

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Speaker 1: these insects, the Habsburgs decided to start up a cocaneal

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Speaker 1: business and started exporting cockneal back to Spain, and the

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Speaker 1: cockneal trade then spread all over the world. In the

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Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds, dyers started figuring out how to modify cockneal

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Speaker 1: to make all kinds of other shades of red, so

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Speaker 1: the demand for its skyrocketed. Although occasionally it would dip

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Speaker 1: a little bit thanks to various economic conditions or perhaps wars.

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Speaker 1: Entrepreneurs in Europe kept trying to figure out how to

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Speaker 1: move cockneal production out of the Americas because, in addition

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Speaker 1: to it being pretty expensive to ship these massive loads

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Speaker 1: of of insects across the ocean, this was the height

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Speaker 1: of piracy's golden age, which meant that ships that were

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Speaker 1: carrying this red dye were always at risk in the

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Speaker 1: part of the ocean that they needed to cross to

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Speaker 1: get back to Spain. And although the insects themselves live

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Speaker 1: in many parts of the world today thanks to very

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Speaker 1: deliberate efforts to transplant them, actually getting a usable number

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Speaker 1: of them to grow somewhere else turned out to be

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Speaker 1: really quite a task. Ship after ship left the America

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Speaker 1: has loaded down with plants and insects, only for something

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Speaker 1: you know, unfortunate to befall them along the way. Either

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Speaker 1: the insects would die or their life cycle would be

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Speaker 1: interrupted by the travel or a well meaning crew member

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Speaker 1: would destroy those pesky bugs with salt water. Once the

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Speaker 1: insects finally did make it to India, which was really

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Speaker 1: one of one of the places people were hoping they

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Speaker 1: could take off, it was without a crop of cacti

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Speaker 1: for them to live on. They wound up surviving on

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Speaker 1: a similar species that already lived in India. But even so,

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Speaker 1: the Indian cockneal industry really never managed to supplant the

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Speaker 1: American one. India was producing four thousand pounds of the

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Speaker 1: die a year by seventy seven, but pretty much everyone

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Speaker 1: in Europe thought it was vastly inferior to the die

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Speaker 1: that was coming from Central and South America. Coconeal is

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Speaker 1: still used today, and one of those uses is actually food,

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Speaker 1: which is a little bit chagrinning and disturbing to people

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Speaker 1: who don't like the idea of eating bugs. Unless you

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Speaker 1: are allergic to them, there is no health risk in

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Speaker 1: having them in your food. Yeah. I kind of look

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Speaker 1: at that as one of those whenever I have a

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Speaker 1: food revelation about oh, this is actually a gross thing

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Speaker 1: you've been consuming, I'm like, well, I've consumed it for years, right,

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Speaker 1: And cocknell is one of the many things that goes

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Speaker 1: in that category. We also have a few fancy blues

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Speaker 1: to talk about, and I think blue is your favorite color,

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Speaker 1: isn't it It is? That's not why we're talking about

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Speaker 1: more than one fancy blue die. A gyp shap blue

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Speaker 1: is the oldest man made blue die and the oldest

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Speaker 1: man made die in general that we know of, As

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Speaker 1: its name suggests, that got to start in Egypt about

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Speaker 1: three thousand years ago with the combination of a lime, copper, oxide,

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Speaker 1: and quartz. And once these were put into a kiln

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Speaker 1: in the right proportions, they were fired down to a

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Speaker 1: fine powder that could be made into paint and dies.

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Speaker 1: And if you are confused, because earlier we said that

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Speaker 1: ochre was the oldest thing, you can pretty much make

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Speaker 1: an ochre paint out of straight up ochre and something

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Speaker 1: to moisten it with. And this was a much more

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Speaker 1: deliberate combining of multiple ingredients to make a die. Ultramarine

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Speaker 1: has also been around for a really long time. It

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Speaker 1: is made from lapis lazuli, which was primarily mined in Afghanistan.

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Speaker 1: Making ultramarine from lapis lazuli was an intensely manual processed

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Speaker 1: powdered mineral would have to be repeatedly needed with lie

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Speaker 1: to ultimately make this die. There's some evidence that the

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Speaker 1: Chinese had access to ultramarine as early as the eighth century.

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Speaker 1: B c. There are some very ancient glazed beads that

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Speaker 1: modern analysis has shown to have been made with ultramarine.

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Speaker 1: There are also other blue pigments used in the glaze, though,

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Speaker 1: so it is possible that the ultramarine was accidentally synthesized

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Speaker 1: thanks to impurities in the kiln. We do know for

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Speaker 1: sure that by the century CE, deliberately made ultramarine inks

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Speaker 1: appear in Byzantine manuscripts. It's popularity really took off during

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Speaker 1: the Middle Ages in Europe, and because so much time, labor,

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Speaker 1: and travel was involved in its production and distribution, it

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Speaker 1: was exorbitantly expensive. This is one of the reasons it

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Speaker 1: was used with very particular significance and religious artwork. The

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Speaker 1: Virgin Mary often wears ultramarine blue clothing in medieval art,

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Speaker 1: and the cost and expense is also why the French

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Speaker 1: Society for the Encouragement of National Industry announced a prize

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Speaker 1: for whoever could make a cost effective synthetic ultramarine in

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Speaker 1: eighteen twenty four. And cost effective here meant less than

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Speaker 1: three hundred francs per kilogram. I got into some drama

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Speaker 1: about who eventually claimed that prize because there were too

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Speaker 1: two people who independently of one another, came up with

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Speaker 1: the same basic process for synthetic ultramarine, and then is

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Speaker 1: often the case, artists didn't want to use the synthetic

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Speaker 1: synthetic one because they thought it wasn't as good as

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Speaker 1: the real one. Hellett is a blue dye that's very

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Speaker 1: important in the Jewish tradition. It was traditionally used to

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Speaker 1: tie blue threads used in the tassels that are in

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Speaker 1: the corners of prayer shawls. This color comes from the

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Speaker 1: glands of a snail, most likely Helplex trunkulus, and at

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Speaker 1: first the color that the snails secretions produces kind of

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Speaker 1: a brownish yellow. But if you soak cotton in a

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Speaker 1: vat of it see sort of that dye this cotton,

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Speaker 1: and then let it air dry in the sun, it

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Speaker 1: turns blue. Talent is mentioned repeatedly in the Torah, and

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Speaker 1: often in the same context as precious materials like gold

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Speaker 1: and silk. The dye was so religiously important that the

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Speaker 1: methods for making it were a very closely guarded secret.

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Speaker 1: This unfortunately meant that the knowledge of how to produce

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Speaker 1: it was lost around the seventh century, as Islamic people's

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Speaker 1: moved into the Eastern Mediterranean. Modern scholars have managed to

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Speaker 1: recreate how to produce this color, but there's still some

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Speaker 1: debate about whether it's exactly the same as the ancient

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Speaker 1: hue described in these texts. And before we talk about

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Speaker 1: another dye that was definitely made from snails, where will

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Speaker 1: take a brief break to talk about a word from sponsor,

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Speaker 1: And now we will get back to some of those

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Speaker 1: colors that have particularly interesting and longer stories. So we've

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Speaker 1: already talked about some totally cost effective, widely available ways

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Speaker 1: to make purple. But in the Roman Empire, people got

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Speaker 1: a little weird about purple, and one color purple in particular,

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Speaker 1: as with tell it Tyrene, purple came from sea snails,

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Speaker 1: specifically balinist brand Daris, previously known as Murix Brandaris, and

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Speaker 1: this dye was primarily made in the city of Tire

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Speaker 1: in what is now Lebanon. Its height of popularity was

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Speaker 1: during the time of the Roman Empire, and it's mentioned

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Speaker 1: at least fifty times in the Christian Bible. When it's living,

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Speaker 1: this snail secretes a slightly toxic mucus that's part of

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Speaker 1: how it kills its prey, and if you crack open

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Speaker 1: its shell. You can puncture the mucus gland and get

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Speaker 1: out a drop of that mucus. When this drop of

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Speaker 1: mucus is exposed to light, it progresses through several colors

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Speaker 1: on the blue green end of the spectrum before winding

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Speaker 1: up purple. It took twelve thousand snails to make enough

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Speaker 1: die to die one Roman Toga. Consequently, an enormous hill

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Speaker 1: of discarded shells formed outside the city of Tire and

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Speaker 1: today this hill has actually become usable land. It's home

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Speaker 1: to houses, businesses, there's a cemetery there and it's actually

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Speaker 1: known as Murex Hill. There are still broken snail shells

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Speaker 1: all around its base. That astounding twelve thousand snails number

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Speaker 1: is why purple dye, especially Tyreheanne purple die, was so

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Speaker 1: expensive and associated only with the very rich. But by

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Speaker 1: the year four hundred, it's popularity had also made these

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Speaker 1: snails pretty hard to find, so it became illegal for

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Speaker 1: anyone who wasn't actually part of the royal family to

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Speaker 1: wear tyree and purple because it was just too scarce.

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Speaker 1: And you know, the royal royalty didn't want to lose

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Speaker 1: their purple that they were so fond of. Both both

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Speaker 1: emperors Nero and Theo ds Is. The second considered the

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Speaker 1: wearing of tyree and purple by Nod royalty to be

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Speaker 1: punishable by death. Following the end of the Roman Empire,

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Speaker 1: the color fell out of favor and people went back

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Speaker 1: to the old standbys of indigo. And like him, this

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Speaker 1: is one of those situations where you kind of look

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Speaker 1: at what it took to make this purple, and the

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Speaker 1: fact that you could make purple other waves. It was

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Speaker 1: really it's not like that was the only purple that existed.

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Speaker 1: It was just the only one that was so rare

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Speaker 1: that people got a little strange about how they they

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Speaker 1: were emotionally invested in it. Yeah, color status becomes a

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Speaker 1: whole sociological studiable thing at that point. So eventually people

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Speaker 1: figured out how to make synthetic dies. William Henry Perkin

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Speaker 1: was an English chemist. He was actually trying to synthesize quinine,

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Speaker 1: which we've talked about before. It's used to treat malaria

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Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty six, and he stumbled across something else entirely,

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Speaker 1: which was mauve die, and he was making the substance

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Speaker 1: and it was kind of black and gross looking, and

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Speaker 1: then he realized as he looked at it that it

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Speaker 1: was actually kind of a pretty color in spaces in

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Speaker 1: different spaces. Um this came to be known as analygine

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Speaker 1: purple and as mauvine, and it was the first truly

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Speaker 1: synthetic die. Perkin then used his newly discovered chemical process

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Speaker 1: to set up his own die factory, and once Queen

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Speaker 1: Victoria wore a move dressed to her daughter's wedding, which

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Speaker 1: was in eighteen fifty eight, Europe was almost instantly caught

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Speaker 1: up in mauve madness. Perkin then turned his eye to

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Speaker 1: all kinds of other colors, and he ended up becoming very,

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Speaker 1: very rich, but he gave most of his profits away

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Speaker 1: to charity. This didn't instantly put an end to natural dies.

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Speaker 1: There are still plenty of natural dies being used even today.

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Speaker 1: Many artists and artisans really resisted the idea of using

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Speaker 1: synthetic colors, and at first aniline was also very expensive.

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Speaker 1: But the availability of synthetic dies did really change the

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Speaker 1: playing field significantly when it came to color. You know

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Speaker 1: why I spend so much time and effort farming cockneal

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Speaker 1: If you can just make it pretty synthetic red, that's

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Speaker 1: basically the same shade, and today colors have lost some

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Speaker 1: of the connotations that they carried in earlier parts of history,

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Speaker 1: especially in the industrialized world. It's pretty common knowledge that

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Speaker 1: in many parts of the world, blue and purple were

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Speaker 1: the colors of royalty. But today you can get a

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Speaker 1: blue sweater for the same price as a brown sweater.

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Speaker 1: You don't have to pay extra for a royal purple crayon.

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Speaker 1: And today people might use the colors she wear to

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Speaker 1: judge your personality or your sense of taste, but in

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Speaker 1: places where synthetic dies are readily available, that doesn't actually

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Speaker 1: extend to your actual social class or net worth. Colors

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Speaker 1: are democratized. Anybody can have them. Yeah, and I read

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Speaker 1: a really interesting paper that was about Yeah, people pretty

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Speaker 1: much now will judge your color literacy, like whether they

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Speaker 1: think the combination of colors you're wearing our tacky or

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Speaker 1: too showy or something like that. Um, but that doesn't

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Speaker 1: actually translate to how much those colors cost or what

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Speaker 1: your actual social status is. Yes, it'll be uh, you know,

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Speaker 1: to borrow from Project Runway. Your taste level that's discussed,

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Speaker 1: not so much your social standing. Right. I also have

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Speaker 1: an interesting piece of listener mail. This is This is

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Speaker 1: from David, and it's one of those messages where someone

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Speaker 1: asks the question that I actually found the answer to

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Speaker 1: while I was researching the podcast, but it didn't make

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Speaker 1: it into the episode because I didn't want to derail

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Speaker 1: USTs down a rabbit hole of sidetrack. So this is

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Speaker 1: from David, who says, dear Tracy and Holly, and your

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Speaker 1: podcast about the Battle of Moments, you discuss the vision

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Speaker 1: of angels coming to the rescue of the British troops

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Speaker 1: led by a saint. I'm not well versed in mythology

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Speaker 1: or history, so I wonder if it's actually the first

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Speaker 1: instance of this type of story. In Robert Jordan's fantasy epic,

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Speaker 1: The Horn of Valier is used to call upon the

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Speaker 1: Heroes of the Horn, a group of deceased legendary warriors

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Speaker 1: led by a great general arter Hawkwing, to assist the

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Speaker 1: protagonists of the story to prevail in the final battle.

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Speaker 1: It was always my assumption that Robert Jordan, trained in

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Speaker 1: military history at the Citadel, was borrowing from mythology for

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Speaker 1: this and other elements of his story, But now I

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Speaker 1: wonder if it was borrowed from the story of Battle

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Speaker 1: of Mons. Is it possible that General John char terrorists

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Speaker 1: who you characterized as a propagandist and who would also

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Speaker 1: be trained in military history, may have borrowed this either

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Speaker 1: from earlier military legend or from mythology. Mythology can be

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Speaker 1: a powerful tool for rallying troops, something that even corporations

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Speaker 1: are well aware of and used to motivate workers without

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Speaker 1: landish or heroic stories of their founders e g. Steve Jobs.

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Speaker 1: Are you aware of any mythological basis for this supposed event,

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Speaker 1: cheers David. So. First, Uh, what this actually reminded me

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Speaker 1: of when I was working on it was the oath

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Speaker 1: Breakers um, also known as the dead Men of dun

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Speaker 1: Harrow in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Uh. Similarly,

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Speaker 1: some deceased troops who are going to come back and

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Speaker 1: fight and save the day, uh for the protagonists. And

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Speaker 1: there is definitely a folkloric precedent for stories of some

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Speaker 1: kind of supernatural or divine intervention coming to help people

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Speaker 1: in the battlefield. It's pretty clear in this particular story, UM,

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Speaker 1: that the that the story the Bowman was the ultimate

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Speaker 1: source for something and that UM that John shar Terras's

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Speaker 1: propaganda work was kind of building up that story that

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Speaker 1: people were already passing around. But I read a really

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Speaker 1: interesting article in the journal Folklore from two thousand and

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Speaker 1: two by a man named David Clark which went into

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Speaker 1: the whole history of wartime stories about supernatural interventions that

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Speaker 1: changed the course of a battle. Uh, And so I'm

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Speaker 1: just gonna read a little bit of it. Similar stories

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Speaker 1: can be found in the folklore and the mythology of

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Speaker 1: many nations. These include the vision of the Holy Cross

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Speaker 1: to the Emperor Constantine before the Battle of Millivan Bridge,

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Speaker 1: and the legends of King Arthur and Frederick Barbarossa, who

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Speaker 1: were said to lie sleeping in caves waiting for the

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Speaker 1: call to defend their country in a future conflict. In

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Speaker 1: the case of the visions of Moms, an interesting avenue

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Speaker 1: of investigation relates to the substitution within popular belief of

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Speaker 1: King Arthur with St. George as identity of the figure

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Speaker 1: on horseback who scatters the German cavalry. The source of

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Speaker 1: this motif can be found in match of the story

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Speaker 1: where the soldier recalls the invocation to St. George printed

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Speaker 1: upon plates in a vegetarian restaurant. Furthermore, Arthur Matchin's writings

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Speaker 1: were directly influenced by the patriotic and martial traditions drawn

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Speaker 1: from the mythology of Britain. UM. He then goes goes

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Speaker 1: on to talk about some other uh folkloric stories about St.

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Speaker 1: George appearing to troops at different battles UM, starting as

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Speaker 1: far back as the fourth century. So yes, while there's

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Speaker 1: definitely historical precedent of uh, you know, folk tales and

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Speaker 1: legends of supernatural troops coming to help in a battle, UM,

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Speaker 1: in this particular case, it's pretty clear that it was

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Speaker 1: a short work of fiction that inspired the whole thing.

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Speaker 1: So thank you very much David for writing to us.

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Speaker 1: If you would like to write to us, we were

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Speaker 1: at History Podcast at how stuffworks dot com. We're also

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Speaker 1: on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history

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Speaker 1: and on Twitter at mist in History. Our tumbler is

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Speaker 1: missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're on

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00:25:08,440 --> 00:25:11,920
Speaker 1: Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash miss in history. If

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Speaker 1: you would like to learn a little more about what

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Speaker 1: we have talked about today, you can come to our

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00:25:16,040 --> 00:25:18,399
Speaker 1: parent website, which is how stuff Works dot com, and

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Speaker 1: you can put colors into the search bar you will

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Speaker 1: find an article that is called why do you boys

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Speaker 1: wear blue and girls wear paint? I think it's actually

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00:25:26,800 --> 00:25:29,080
Speaker 1: girls wear pink and boys wear blue, but it gets

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00:25:29,080 --> 00:25:31,320
Speaker 1: into the story of how we got into this gendered

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00:25:31,359 --> 00:25:34,400
Speaker 1: situation of what colors are okay for boys and girls

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Speaker 1: in American culture. You can also come to our website

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Speaker 1: which is missed in History dot com, and you can

436
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Speaker 1: You need