Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy D. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Over the
Speaker 1: last couple of years the Holly and I have been
Speaker 1: on this show, we have gotten literally hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 1: of requests from listeners, and maybe five percent of them
Speaker 1: are requests that we get over and over and over
Speaker 1: and over again, And unfortunately a handful of those most
Speaker 1: requested episodes are also ones that we can't really do
Speaker 1: a whole show on. Sometimes there's just not enough information
Speaker 1: available about the thing. Sometimes the information exists somewhere, but
Speaker 1: there's not a way that we can really get to it.
Speaker 1: It's either uh, not in a language that we speak,
Speaker 1: or it's so spread out among so many different things
Speaker 1: that it would take way more time than we can
Speaker 1: really put into a show that puts out two new
Speaker 1: episodes in a week. Or sometimes they're just there's information,
Speaker 1: but it's so far removed from primary sources that it
Speaker 1: just doesn't feel that reliable. Occasionally we actually get emails
Speaker 1: from people who kind of go, I want you to
Speaker 1: do an episode on this. I know the information is
Speaker 1: out there, because my friend is doing his master's thesis
Speaker 1: on it, and I'm just gonna go ahead and put
Speaker 1: it out there. We cannot do a master's thesis level
Speaker 1: of work for a podcast that comes out twice a week.
Speaker 1: We would be on like a Dan Carlin hardcore history
Speaker 1: kind of schedule if if that were the time that
Speaker 1: we could put into every episode. So what we're gonna
Speaker 1: do today is to take six of these things that
Speaker 1: are impossible to do an episode on their own, and
Speaker 1: we're gonna just run through them in one show. So
Speaker 1: that is our six impossible episodes for today. So first up,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about Mary Fields, who is also known
Speaker 1: as Stagecoach Mary. And this is a person who a
Speaker 1: lot of people here about for the first time through
Speaker 1: a post on Badass of the Week, which, if you're
Speaker 1: not familiar with that site, the language is a bit blue,
Speaker 1: so maybe do not google it after this episode and
Speaker 1: read it allowed to an elementary school class or other
Speaker 1: small children, etcetera. Here's what we do know about Stagecoach Mary.
Speaker 1: She was born a slave in Tennessee in eighteen thirty
Speaker 1: two and was owned by a family called the Dunns.
Speaker 1: She had one of the Dunn's daughters Dolly basically grew
Speaker 1: up together, and Mary learned to read and write while
Speaker 1: she was still a slave. After slavery was abolished, she
Speaker 1: moved to Toledo, Ohio with Dolly Dunn, who was going
Speaker 1: there to become a nun. Dolly Dunn became known as
Speaker 1: Mother Amadeus, and she eventually moved to Cascade, Montana to
Speaker 1: teach at a school for Native American children. For a while,
Speaker 1: Mary stayed behind in Ohio, but when Mother Amadeus became
Speaker 1: extremely ill, they sent for her. Mother Amadeus eventually got better,
Speaker 1: and Mary stayed in Cascade. Did odd jobs around St.
Speaker 1: Peter's Mission, and she basically acted as a protector for
Speaker 1: the nuns. She also got a job delivering the mail
Speaker 1: by stagecoach, which made her the first African American woman
Speaker 1: to work delivering US mail. And we talk in our
Speaker 1: Charlie Parkhurst episode about what a demanding and dangerous job
Speaker 1: stagecoach driving was, and Mary apparently took to it tremendously.
Speaker 1: She was extremely reliable as a driver, and she developed
Speaker 1: a reputation for fighting, brawling, and taking guph from absolutely
Speaker 1: no one. Uh There are a number of stories of
Speaker 1: her knocking men out with one blow under a variety
Speaker 1: of circumstances, and this is also why she wound up
Speaker 1: not working for the convent anymore. Uh. It was the
Speaker 1: combination of her personality and her work that earned her
Speaker 1: that nickname Stagecoach Mary. Eventually she retired from stagecoach driving
Speaker 1: and opened a laundry and she became a really beloved
Speaker 1: figure in Cascade, which actually made her birthday a holiday.
Speaker 1: And stage Coach Mary died in nineteen fourteen. She was
Speaker 1: eighty two at the time, and she is buried just
Speaker 1: outside Cascade, Montana. In terms of information about her, there's
Speaker 1: a children's book about her, as well as a documentary
Speaker 1: called Discovering Mary, and that's by a woman named Joyce Fitzpatrick.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen the film itself, but she talks about
Speaker 1: picking up tidbits of information for years before making the film,
Speaker 1: and the film itself actually started out more as a
Speaker 1: documentary of her recording her own process of looking for
Speaker 1: more information about Mary Fields. So when for People first
Speaker 1: started asking us to do an episode about stage Coach Mary,
Speaker 1: there was actually a crowdfunding project in the works somewhere
Speaker 1: about a documentary. I'm not sure if it was this
Speaker 1: documentary or a different one. But now almost two years
Speaker 1: later when I went looking for it again, all traces
Speaker 1: of that have vanished into the ether. So at the
Speaker 1: time I was like, hey, when this documentary comes out,
Speaker 1: maybe we will be able to get enough to do
Speaker 1: a whole episode on this person. And it's it evaporated.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know what happens to it. So
Speaker 1: if it does come out, there's alway still with possibility.
Speaker 1: We'll see. But next step in our impossible episodes is
Speaker 1: the London beer flood. And you may remember the episode
Speaker 1: in our archive about the Boston molasses flood, which was
Speaker 1: back in the era of Katie and Sarah in nif
Speaker 1: of that in Boston's North End ber sending a fifteen
Speaker 1: foot wave of molasses that ripped buildings off their foundations
Speaker 1: and killed more than twenty people and also injured another
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty. So the London beer flood was
Speaker 1: a lot like that, except that it was beer, and
Speaker 1: it was about a hundred years earlier, and it's also
Speaker 1: we have a similar amount of information about it as
Speaker 1: about the Boston molasses flood, except that episode on the
Speaker 1: Boston Molasses flood is from back when the podcast was
Speaker 1: only fifteen minutes long. Yeah, there was a lot us
Speaker 1: flushing out of all of the details at that point.
Speaker 1: And so for the London beer flood. On October seventeenth,
Speaker 1: eighteen fourteen, a three story tall beer vat of fermenting
Speaker 1: beer broke at a brewery and unleashed a fifteen foot
Speaker 1: high wave of porter and as the wave roared through
Speaker 1: the brewery, it broke taps off other vats, which caused
Speaker 1: a chain reaction that then flooded the surrounding area with beer.
Speaker 1: Some sources report this having happened at the Horseshew Brewery
Speaker 1: on Tottenham Court Road, and other sources say it was
Speaker 1: the Mrs Henry mu and Company on Bainbridge Street. So
Speaker 1: to kind of solve that mystery, those two streets intersect
Speaker 1: with each other, uh And the second the Mew Brothers
Speaker 1: bought the brewery in eighteen forty one, so this is
Speaker 1: sort of two different ways of describing the same brewery.
Speaker 1: And eight people were killed in the beer flood and
Speaker 1: many buildings were destroyed. There was no drainage in the streets,
Speaker 1: so the beer basically had nowhere to go except through
Speaker 1: people's homes, so it just went right into them and
Speaker 1: right through them. And two of those people that were
Speaker 1: killed for a mother and daughter who were having tea
Speaker 1: in their home and then were swept away. Five more
Speaker 1: were a family who had been killed in their basement
Speaker 1: while they were in the process of mourning their two
Speaker 1: year old child who had just died. A brick wall
Speaker 1: collapsed and killed another woman named Eleanor Cooper. There was
Speaker 1: an inquest after has happened. One of the hoops holding
Speaker 1: the vat together had actually broken and slipped off earlier
Speaker 1: in the day, but apparently this wasn't a really unusual occurrence.
Speaker 1: It happened sometimes and they would go and fix it.
Speaker 1: When George Crick, who was a seventeen year employee of
Speaker 1: the brewery, reported the incident to his boss, he was
Speaker 1: told that it would not be a problem and he
Speaker 1: was instructed to delegate replacing the hoop to a different employee.
Speaker 1: The inquest determined that this was an act of God
Speaker 1: and the brewery was cleared of all around doing. There
Speaker 1: were no restitutions paid, and actually the taxes is that
Speaker 1: the brewery had previously paid on the beer that it
Speaker 1: was brewing were waived. One of the longstanding rumors about
Speaker 1: this flood is that people rushed to the streets with
Speaker 1: pots and pans to try to get free beer. This
Speaker 1: is almost certainly false and probably stems from an effort
Speaker 1: to sort of insult the people living there, because many
Speaker 1: of them were Irish. The brewery did eventually resume operations,
Speaker 1: but then it closed in n one, the two hundredth
Speaker 1: anniversary of the London Beer Flood was in and at
Speaker 1: that point there was this just huge number of articles
Speaker 1: that came out about it, and I was really hopeful
Speaker 1: at that point that hey, we'll have enough information to
Speaker 1: do a whole episode now, But all the articles basically
Speaker 1: said the facts that we just told you. There wasn't
Speaker 1: a lot of additional information that came out around the
Speaker 1: two hundredth anniversary. So the middle part of this episode
Speaker 1: is going to cover two subjects that have brought on
Speaker 1: a load of request, but they are really really difficult
Speaker 1: to substantially. So before we dive into those, Tracy, do
Speaker 1: you want to pause for a word from a sponsor, Well,
Speaker 1: let's do that, alrighty. We've gotten several requests to talk
Speaker 1: about Edward more Drake, and we got a lot more
Speaker 1: after he was a character in the most recent season
Speaker 1: of American Horror Story. But if you take all the
Speaker 1: supposedly out of Edward Mordraake story, there's not a lot
Speaker 1: of words left in it. So what we do know
Speaker 1: supposedly is that Edward Murderke was the son of an
Speaker 1: upper class or noble family in England, and he's said
Speaker 1: to have been rather a good looking man, except for
Speaker 1: the fact that he had a second face on the
Speaker 1: back of his head. The most lengthy documentation we have
Speaker 1: of this is from Curiosities of Medicine, being an encyclopedic
Speaker 1: collection of rare and extraordinary cases and the most striking
Speaker 1: instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery,
Speaker 1: derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its
Speaker 1: origin to the present day, abstracted, classified, annotated, and indexed,
Speaker 1: and that is by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle,
Speaker 1: and that came out at about eighteen nineties six. So
Speaker 1: that entry goes. The following well known story of Edward Mordrake,
Speaker 1: though taken from lay sources, is of sufficient notoriety and
Speaker 1: interest to be mentioned here. Quote one of the weirdest
Speaker 1: as well as most melancholy stories of human deformity, is
Speaker 1: that of Edward mor Drake, said to have been heir
Speaker 1: to one of the noblest peerages in England. He never
Speaker 1: claimed the title, however, and committed suicide in his twenty
Speaker 1: third year. He lived in complete seclusion, refusing the visits
Speaker 1: even of the members of his own family. He was
Speaker 1: a young man of fine attainments, a profound scholar, and
Speaker 1: a musician of rare ability. His figure was remarkable for
Speaker 1: its grace and his face. That is to say, his
Speaker 1: natural faith was that of an antinous But upon the
Speaker 1: back of his head was another faith, that of a
Speaker 1: beautiful girl, lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil.
Speaker 1: The female face was a mere mask, occupying only a
Speaker 1: small portion of the posterior part of the skull, yet
Speaker 1: exhibiting every sign of intelligence of a malignant sort. However,
Speaker 1: it would be seen to smile and sneer while more
Speaker 1: Drake was weeping. The eyes would follow the movements of
Speaker 1: the spectator, and the lips would jibber without ceasing. No
Speaker 1: voice was audible, but more Drake aversed that he was
Speaker 1: kept from his rest at night by the hateful whispers
Speaker 1: of his devil twin, as he called it, which never sleeps,
Speaker 1: but talks to me forever of such things as they
Speaker 1: only speak of in hell. No imagination can conceive the
Speaker 1: dreadful temptations it sets before me, for some unforgiven wickedness
Speaker 1: of my forefathers. I am knit to this fiend. For
Speaker 1: a fiend it surely is. I beg and beseech you
Speaker 1: to crush it out of human semblance, even if I
Speaker 1: die for it. Such were the words of the hapless
Speaker 1: more Drake to man version treadwill has physicians. In spite
Speaker 1: of careful watching, he managed to procure poison whereof he died,
Speaker 1: leaving a letter requesting that the demon face might be
Speaker 1: destroyed before his burial quote lest it continues, it's dreadful
Speaker 1: whisperings in my grave. At his own request, he was
Speaker 1: interred in a waste place, without stone or legend to
Speaker 1: mark his grave. And we wanted to point out that
Speaker 1: there are variations on spelling. So if you go look
Speaker 1: at this, this is a transcription uh in. In this
Speaker 1: particular one that we read, they leave the R out
Speaker 1: of more drake, so it's more dick. So you may
Speaker 1: see it either way. If you go looking like it
Speaker 1: show notes or whatnot. So, Uh, there are a number
Speaker 1: of conditions that can cause someone's who appear to have
Speaker 1: a second face or like remnants of facial structures. Um,
Speaker 1: but what these two doctors, they were really doctors, the
Speaker 1: guys he writes this book. Uh, what they are reporting
Speaker 1: is something that this guy supposedly said to two different physicians,
Speaker 1: and it all sounds the tone is more like rumor
Speaker 1: than actual medical evidence. The whole thing goes into like
Speaker 1: the probably apocryphal category. There's just not there's no real documentation.
Speaker 1: And it's very convenient that he says he was buried
Speaker 1: with no stone or no marker, Like we have no
Speaker 1: way to prove that this person ever actually existed because
Speaker 1: all we have to go on is this third party account. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's such a compelling story and I know people
Speaker 1: love it, but it also when you kind of break
Speaker 1: it down, it reads like a checklist of all of
Speaker 1: the the vital elements of any sort of juicy, Like
Speaker 1: it's you can't substantiate it, and the details are baked
Speaker 1: into the story that you can't substantiate it, Like no,
Speaker 1: and he will never be found because he didn't want
Speaker 1: to be found. It was grave is unmarked, and no,
Speaker 1: his doctors told us, but we don't really know those doctors,
Speaker 1: and so it's all, yeah, it's not going to happen.
Speaker 1: Our next story is similarly a story that people really
Speaker 1: really love a whole lot. But we've gotten a lot
Speaker 1: of requests for a lot of them come in around Halloween,
Speaker 1: but they come in through the rest of the year also,
Speaker 1: And these are for Robert the Haunted Doll, who is
Speaker 1: sometimes also called Robert the Enchanted Doll, and in the
Speaker 1: words of the Key West Art and Historical Society quote,
Speaker 1: Robert is a one of a kind, handmade doll created
Speaker 1: around the turn of the twentieth century, standing forty inches
Speaker 1: tall and stuffed with woodwool known as Excelsior. He is
Speaker 1: dressed in a sailor suit at once for painted features
Speaker 1: not unlike those of a jester. So, just to be
Speaker 1: pretty upfront, this thing looks creepy. Um. The paint is
Speaker 1: worn off of its face, so it has creepy flat
Speaker 1: black eyes, and the nose and mouth are sort of
Speaker 1: hard to define from the rest of the face. It's
Speaker 1: got this wooden head that's also got some pitting in it,
Speaker 1: so the whole thing is a little bit unsettling and
Speaker 1: unnerving to behold. Yeah, I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: find old dolls creepy. This is a very old doll,
Speaker 1: and then it has this creepy story to go along
Speaker 1: with it. Robert was a gift given to a little
Speaker 1: boy named Robert Eugene Otto, who later became known as
Speaker 1: Gene rather than Robert, and it was given to him
Speaker 1: when he was four years old. This was in nineteen
Speaker 1: o four, and it's a little There are different accounts
Speaker 1: of exactly who gave it to him. The original origin
Speaker 1: and all the stories as the Bahamas, but it's not
Speaker 1: quite clear whether it was the maid who was from
Speaker 1: the Bahamas or if it was the maid's daughter, because
Speaker 1: some people report that it was a little girl. Either way,
Speaker 1: the doll is about the same size as Jean himself
Speaker 1: was at the time, and Jeane named the doll Robert
Speaker 1: after himself. Jean also gave Robert his own room in
Speaker 1: the attic with his own toys, and he eventually started
Speaker 1: blaming this doll for his own misbehavior. Eventually, Robert took
Speaker 1: the blame for anything unwelcome that happened to Jeane, and
Speaker 1: along the way. Other people who were not Jeane started
Speaker 1: reporting weird things about the doll. People looking through the
Speaker 1: window from the street said that they would see it
Speaker 1: move from one side of the attic turret to another.
Speaker 1: People inside the house said that they could hear it
Speaker 1: walking around and giggling above them while they were downstairs,
Speaker 1: and some people even said that they saw the doll
Speaker 1: the dolls expression change as though it was listening to
Speaker 1: their conversations. Jean eventually became an artist, you know. He
Speaker 1: grew up, and he married, and his wife is reported
Speaker 1: to have hated the doll and demanded that it be
Speaker 1: locked in a chest. Eventually, after both Jean and his
Speaker 1: wife died, their home was made into the Artist House Hotel.
Speaker 1: Myrtle Reuter, who bought the home in nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: donated the doll to the East Martello Museum twenty years later,
Speaker 1: and the doll was on display at the museum, which
Speaker 1: is an old fort, and the doll also has its
Speaker 1: bear with him. Museum staff reported that dirty cameras and
Speaker 1: other electronics often failed around the doll. Museum patrons have
Speaker 1: written him letters of apology after taking his photograph without
Speaker 1: having permission, and then they would experience bad luck later.
Speaker 1: All of this sounds pretty underwhelming, considering that a lot
Speaker 1: of the blog posts that you find about Robert uh
Speaker 1: describe the doll as evil or possessed or the most
Speaker 1: haunted doll in history. Those kinds of posts aren't generally
Speaker 1: those sorts of things we can use as sources for
Speaker 1: the podcast. And what we do know about the doll
Speaker 1: for sure is that it's a doll, and it creeps
Speaker 1: people out. And I will admit that, I though I'm
Speaker 1: still a little nervous talking about Robert without his permission,
Speaker 1: Really I hope nothing bad befalls us. That sort of
Speaker 1: makes me chuckle, because usually I'm the more superstitious of
Speaker 1: the two of us, and I don't have it for
Speaker 1: this one. Well, ghost stories scare me, even though I
Speaker 1: would follow myself generally skeptical about such things. Interesting, we've
Speaker 1: all learned a little about Tracy today before we get
Speaker 1: to the next two stories that are particularly wacky. Do
Speaker 1: you want to take another word from a sponsor to
Speaker 1: get back to our last two impossible episodes? These are
Speaker 1: also hard to substantiate, but they're not nearly as paranormal
Speaker 1: in their origin as the two that we had before
Speaker 1: the break. We're going to start first with the lost
Speaker 1: Army of camp by Ses. And this actually was a
Speaker 1: really welcome suggestion the first time that we got it,
Speaker 1: because I had been looking for some interesting ancient history
Speaker 1: to talk about. Uh, and so I got this, and
Speaker 1: I was very excited. And then as soon as I
Speaker 1: looked into it, I went, that's not going to work.
Speaker 1: Greek historian Herodotus wrote about camp by Ses to sending
Speaker 1: an army of fifty thousand soldiers on a mission to
Speaker 1: destroy the Oracle of Ammon. And this is the same
Speaker 1: oracle that Alexander the Great later visited. He did that
Speaker 1: in the year three thirty two BC. After this visit,
Speaker 1: Alexander the Great reportedly started to think of himself as
Speaker 1: the Sun of Ammon. And this particular event purportedly happened
Speaker 1: almost two hundred years prior to Alexander's visit. The oracle
Speaker 1: had refused to recognize Cambyses as sovereign over Egypt, so
Speaker 1: Cambyses sent an army out from Thieves to the oasis
Speaker 1: of Siwah, where the Temple of Ammon was located, to
Speaker 1: destroy the oracle. But the army never arrived. So here's
Speaker 1: what Herodotus had to say about that. As for those
Speaker 1: who were sent to march against the Ammonians, as they
Speaker 1: set out and journeyed from thieves with guides, and it
Speaker 1: is known that they came to the city of Oasis,
Speaker 1: inhabited by the Samians, said to be of the Ascreonian tribe,
Speaker 1: seven days march from Thebes across sandy desert. This place
Speaker 1: is called in the Greek language Islands of the Blessed.
Speaker 1: Thus far it is said the army came after that.
Speaker 1: Except for the Ammonians themselves and those who heard from them,
Speaker 1: no man can say anything of them, for they neither
Speaker 1: reached the Ammonians nor were turned back. But this is
Speaker 1: what the Ammonians themselves say that when Persians were crossing
Speaker 1: the sand from Oasis, probably the oasis of Carga, to
Speaker 1: attack them, and we're about midway between their country and oasis.
Speaker 1: While they were breakfasting, a great and violent south wind arose,
Speaker 1: which buried them in the masses of sand which it bore,
Speaker 1: and so they disappeared from sight. Such is the Ammonian
Speaker 1: tail of this army. And that's most of all we
Speaker 1: know about it a sandstorm buried in army, maybe, but
Speaker 1: a lot of historians think the whole thing is completely apocryphal.
Speaker 1: Every once in a while, researchers will find in scare
Speaker 1: quotes the army. Usually what they have found is some
Speaker 1: shards of pottery and some bones. Some of these finds
Speaker 1: are outright hoaxes, and others have been a little more substantive,
Speaker 1: like there really is pottery and there really are bones,
Speaker 1: but often they're The research itself is still questionable in
Speaker 1: some way, like people have gone and done they're searching
Speaker 1: without actually getting permission to be in Egypt in the
Speaker 1: first place, and then they've presented findings as a documentary
Speaker 1: film rather than through the typical channels that you announce
Speaker 1: academic findings, like through a journal that is subject to
Speaker 1: peer review. Lastly on our list of six impossible episodes
Speaker 1: is Julie Darbignen. We get a lot of request for her.
Speaker 1: She's portrayed as a swashbuckling, cross dressing bisexual opera singer
Speaker 1: with romantic adventures to rival Casanova's, which is pretty exciting.
Speaker 1: Lots of the most lots of the more recent requests
Speaker 1: are also accompanied with a link to the post that
Speaker 1: was written about her at the Rejected Princess's blog. Here's
Speaker 1: a snippet of her entry in Curiosities of Biography or
Speaker 1: Memoirs of Wonderful and Extraordinary Characters, which came out in
Speaker 1: eighteen forty five. This female, who acquired extraordinary celebrity as
Speaker 1: a singer in France in the seventeenth century, was one
Speaker 1: of the numerous instances in which a stage heroin, fortified
Speaker 1: by public favor and presuming on the magic of a
Speaker 1: melodious voice, defied the laws and institutions of a country
Speaker 1: by which she was supported, and committed with impunity, crimes
Speaker 1: which would have doomed a common unaccomplished desperado an ignominious death.
Speaker 1: This romantic and indecorous adventurer, who dressed, fought and made love,
Speaker 1: and conquered like a man, having been married at an
Speaker 1: early age. Fortunately for her husband, Monsieur Manpaq, quitted him
Speaker 1: a few months after their nuptials for the superior attractions
Speaker 1: of a fencing master, a weapon which she afterwards handled
Speaker 1: with destructive dexterity against many antagonists. While today's accounts of
Speaker 1: her tend to talk about her escapades pretty gleefully. Earlier
Speaker 1: retellings are unsurprisingly a bit less glowing. In this particular,
Speaker 1: her account goes on to describe her wooing a young
Speaker 1: lady and then when that young lady had second thoughts,
Speaker 1: burning down her house which is where Lampin was staying,
Speaker 1: abducting her, and then holding her captive until they were discovered.
Speaker 1: The trouble with an episode on Lama Pan is that
Speaker 1: even the accounts of her from that time that she lived,
Speaker 1: which was roughly sixteen seventy to seventeen o seven, really
Speaker 1: read a lot more like rumor than a factual account.
Speaker 1: And while there are a couple of thorough looking blog
Speaker 1: posts about her, some of them are quite lengthy. Mostly
Speaker 1: they are sourced in kind of bits and pieces from introductions,
Speaker 1: footnotes and asides and other works. There's at least one
Speaker 1: novel about her. But we can't use fiction as a
Speaker 1: source for our history podcast because history and fiction are
Speaker 1: two different things sort of. I mean, you could make
Speaker 1: an argument that all history is in some way fictitious,
Speaker 1: but a novel is not a source that we could
Speaker 1: use about someone's life. Yeah, since novels really generally make
Speaker 1: no assertion of historical accuracy, like they're not held to
Speaker 1: that same standard. It's just not a viable source to use.
Speaker 1: You can mention it. We've mentioned it in other episodes
Speaker 1: where we go there's just novel about it, and there's
Speaker 1: just interesting info that may or may not be true,
Speaker 1: But we can't really use it as a primary source. No,
Speaker 1: unless we're unless our episode is about the person who
Speaker 1: wrote the novel, then it's totally is relevant and absolutely
Speaker 1: no shade to rejected Princesses in that assessment, Like rejected
Speaker 1: Princesses is awesome. I love that blog, but for our purposes,
Speaker 1: we need a little bit you were layers of according
Speaker 1: to so and so between us and the subject before
Speaker 1: we can really talk about it really well. Um, we
Speaker 1: get so many episodes, are so many requests about her.
Speaker 1: They're just like, I love her, she sounds awesome, doesn't
Speaker 1: sound awesome? You should do an episode on her. Sounds awesome?
Speaker 1: And I'm like, she does sound awesome, sounds super awesome.
Speaker 1: She sounds super awesome. Uh, but I I you know,
Speaker 1: I can't really build a podcast episode on a blog
Speaker 1: post that is sourcing footnotes of other books that I
Speaker 1: can't go and read for myself. For various reasons. So
Speaker 1: those are six things that we get requests for all
Speaker 1: the time but are impossible to do. Hold up the
Speaker 1: whole episodes on at least at this point. Yes, So
Speaker 1: hopefully this gave you a little bit of satisfaction those
Speaker 1: of you that are yearning for those episodes, I hope.
Speaker 1: So I also have some listener mails to send. This
Speaker 1: message is from Ethan. Ethan says, I thought you might
Speaker 1: be interested in the following bit of info about the
Speaker 1: Iroquois Theater fire. Architect Louis Gonzil investigated the Iroquois Theater
Speaker 1: fire and was granted full access to the site beginning
Speaker 1: the morning after the tragedy. Since he found it quote
Speaker 1: impossible to obtain plans or specifications of the structure, he
Speaker 1: measured the building, reconstructed the plans, and photographed various sections
Speaker 1: of the theater. This took weeks and his inspection was exhaustive.
Speaker 1: His findings were dated January twentieth, nineteen o four. Mr
Speaker 1: Gonzelle attended the court proceedings following the disaster and quote
Speaker 1: was greatly surprised to see that, notwithstanding the many faults
Speaker 1: and defects in the planning of the theater and the
Speaker 1: unparalleled negligence displayed in its supervision and operation. All of
Speaker 1: the suits ended in verdicts not guilty. His paper was
Speaker 1: never meant for publication, but after years of discussions with
Speaker 1: eyewitnesses and conversations at memorial meetings, he concluded that quote
Speaker 1: actual conditions prevalent in the theater at the time of
Speaker 1: the fire have been maliciously withheld from the public by
Speaker 1: clever and successful manipulation. He published his paper in ninety five,
Speaker 1: and the Theater Historical Society of America republished it in
Speaker 1: booklet form. In Anyone looking for details about how the
Speaker 1: tragedy reached the proportions it did should look for this
Speaker 1: booklet or contact the Theater Historical Society. I think some
Speaker 1: of my sources quoted from the booklet, but I did
Speaker 1: not personally read the booklet myself, So I'm glad to
Speaker 1: know that that's a thing you can still get your
Speaker 1: hands on looking for more information about that. So thank you, Ethan.
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