Stuff You Missed in History ClassHolly and Tracy talk about the new year and the ways they use calendars. Tracy mentions the birds that often receive ire from humans.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V.
Wilson.
Oh, and it's a new Year, so I wanted to talk about day planners and all. Yeah, when you sent me this out, Wine, I was like, what a great New Year's Day episode topic. It was just fortuitous really because as you know, I've talked about it so many times. I love this. I love a fresh year. I love starting out my planner. I love the idea of just like starting fresh and going forth with new hope for the year ahead. And it may or may not pay off, but that's how we do it. But also, this is like a moment. I tend to be really like a messy, you know, I have hands and so many pies that it's like I can have a moment to freshly reorganize my life, which I appreciate you had mentioned during the show and before we started recording. The Farmer's Almanac, yeah, which I didn't talk about in the episode almost because it's so kind of prominent and still goes on. That started in eighteen eighteen in Lewiston, Maine, and it still is put out every year. Obviously it's changed as all of the others have to become an all encompassing reference and delight kind of project. Yeah, I just felt I was like, I think that's probably the one people in the US at least probably have seen around on bookstore shelves, and I feel like maybe an elementary school, it was one of the things that we would use to look up very very basic facts in the library. Oh, I don't recall doing the same, but that doesn't mean anything. Yeah, and then you know discussions of weather, the weather predictions for the year right where it turned out to be a yeah, I really really We talked a little bit about the book The Accidental Diarist by Molly McCarthy, and I I there were some interesting facts in it that I really loved. One was just a way that she described that book that Aitkins put out, which was the first Planner in the US that people were like, no, thank you. And she had this great turn of phrase where she said it quote ask users to account for themselves as they accounted for their money. And I'm like, oh, that's why nobody wanted to use it. But also that whole thing to me is very interesting because the one thing we didn't get into in the episode that I wonder about is like, if that was brought over as something that was very popular in Britain already, if that was part of why it was rejected, It's like, we don't need their ways, thank you. We're in the middle of trying to get away from those guys, yeah, which is interesting. We also talked about Doddsley's book in the UK. He was actually printing that because it got around some of the publishing rules for almanacs, because not everyone was allowed to print almanacs, and Doddsley was like, well, I'm going to make it blank pages and there's just some of that almanac stuff in here, but it's not an almanac. And that's kind of how he got around it, and a lot of people did that for a long time. But it's really really interesting. The other thing that happened that got mentioned in her book, and I read about it in some other places, but I didn't put it in the episode because it gets more into an interesting sociological discussion. But it's not really like something you can find historical fact on is that people or you can't find historical fact but it's hard to like parse them into a reasonable statement about reality is that people don't use these things always the way they're intended. Like some people will buy a calendar and then they just use it like it's a blank sheet of paper. Or they will use a calendar for multiple years because they're using it in a different way than how the prompts of it are laid out, and at that point, right it just becomes its own thing. There's the variability that's possible when you offer someone a largely blank book and say use it how you need it is like it can be anything. It's which I find kind of interesting. I mentioned in the episode that we were gonna talk about the fact that I had found mentions of other planners that came up in other languages, but I couldn't track them down, and I found I really really tried. I found a mention on a site that admittedly is like a company's website that makes short day planners. Yeah, that was saying that it actually was an Italian invention in the sixteen fifties, which would have been after we see some of these ones popping up. But I couldn't. There was nothing attached to that claim in terms of like who or where. I think they mentioned that it was in Bergamo, but it's not more specific than that, so it was a little bit tricky to pin down. I mean, I think that as global society became more complex, as various you know, industries started to form, and things got less agrarian and more metropolitan in some places, it's only natural that something to like organize things was going to come up. So I think it's entirely possible that things were concurrently developing around the world. Are you a planner person? No. I There are a number of things in my life that I have established as a habit and then maintained that habit for years.
Uh.
And I've never successfully done that with planners or diaries. Uh. And I have just come to accept this about myself, Like even I'm not in a write everyday habit right now, but like even when I have been in a write everyday habit, like for some reason writing it in a diary, I've been something I could stick with. Uh. And there have been a couple of times when I've like had really good intentions with a planner and it has never worked out. There was also one time before my husband and I were married, but while we were living together and I was traveling a lot for work, and he had various like weekends type commitments that he had, and I was like, we should make we should have like a physical shared calendar that we can keep up with all of this stuff on And that lasted maybe a couple of months, and then we just had this calendar that was turned to the wrong month and never updated with our stuff on it. It just I don't know, no, I know this exact dance because I'm not always. Sometimes that thing gets me through the whole year, and other times it's like I get so busy that I almost can't take the time to write stuff down. And then I'm like, oh, I abandoned that for the entire month of June or whatever. And then I'm like, well, yeah, and so I'll restart throughout the year. But then there are other years where I'm like, on it like a bonnet. I'm like, I got it. It's organizing my life, et cetera. We also had the shared couple's calendar that went astray, and even now we have a shared online calendar that's supposed to note travel specifically just traveled nothing else. But I am awful at updating it, so like poor Brian will occasionally be like, what do you mean You're going to New York next week? I just it's like it's not in the calendar, and I'm like, I didn't put it in the cat I thought I told you. I told you in my heart, but not with my mouth. Yeah, but I figure, you know again, a new start always makes me happy, So I'm always ready to start a new calendar. And it's also partially because, like I mean, I'm definitely a stationary dork, right, Like, oh, when you can design a calendar, when you can and do the their companies that let you select your cover and your style of layout and your what kind of grid you have, and it's I love it. So it's like eating cupcakes. It's the best. Yeah, I love it so much that I also buy all of the accessories, and those are what really fall to the wayside, where it's like you're not you're not really going to use this right habit tracker, but you have it in case you get a wild hair again down the road. Yeah, I'm a sucker. I'm a sucka. You put an astromech droid on it, and I will buy it so I can tell you. Yeah, my current one has a scene from Return of the Jedi on it, done in watercolor. I'm very excited. Twenty twenty four. Please be good to me. I'm gonna do my best to make this planner a successful and functional item in my life, ever present, ever present. Yeah. I think you know everybody struggles with how they work. I think there's an all or nothing that becomes part of the problem, right sure, where it's like, oh, I screwed up for two months, so I guess I'm not using this, and it's like, you can go back if you want. There's there's no planner jail. You're fine. Do whatever. Whatever helps you is the right way to use it. HM is always my thing. Anyway. I could go on about calendars and planners for a long time, but I won't. I've done it enough.
So we talked about the Great English Sparrow War.
This week. I hope I have not made like ornithologists and bird watchers and et cetera annoyed by using the words English sparrow in the episode title. I did that because the sparrow war means multiple different things, right, and I did not want people to think they were going to be clicking into something that was going to be about like Chairman Mouths for Pests campaign or something like that. At the time, people were referring to it as the Great English Sparrow War or the English sparrow War. They called them English sparrows a lot. So that is why I titled it that way, both for clarity and to reflect how people were talking about it at the time, while also giving the birds you know, current right, current scientific and common name. A thing that is interesting to me about this is that here in the United States, I think people a lot of people have a visceral hatred for three kinds of birds.
Okay, one or more of them, Okay.
Sparrows specifically, how sparrows, starlings, and pigeons, all three of those birds are here in the numbers. They are because of like intentional decisions made by human beings. Right, I will confess I didn't know people felt this way about sparrows or starlings. I have heard more starling hatred than sparrow hatred.
I think I must be in.
My like weird bird lady hippie bubble where nobody's bothering me with this. Yeah. So, while I was working on this. I had this Zoom call with Rosemary Moscow. We sort of had dinner over Zoom, and one of the things that we were talking about is that today there are people who really hate sparrows. They hate them so much, and one of the big reasons is because of their taking over the bluebird nests and sometimes killing the bluebirds and especially killing baby bluebirds, and especially if somebody put up a bluebird house in their yard and they see this happen a lot of times, they will be outraged and like want to get rid of the sparrows or get some kind of sparrow control going on. But again, there are other birds, including native birds, that do the same thing, and also speakes and raccoons and bats, and like all of these other animals also prey on birds and they're young. It is not something that is unique to sparrows at all. Another part of that Zoom conversation was about how Cows and Brewer neither of them was right really because they were just mad. Yeah. The Cows was like, these birds are the worst and and we should kill them all, and Brewer was like, no, they're not. And even if it does turn out they're bad. Uh, there won't be that many of them, so it'll it'll be fine. Like neither of those was correct. And when there has been researched more recently into like, okay, what is the actual impact of how Sparrow's eating grain, it's been kind of like not clear that there is an obvious, like clear correlation. Right, So, yes, Sparrow's starling and starlings and pigeons all like introduced intentionally for reasons, and now we have a lot of them, and people get really angry. And I think pigeons in part because they're all over cities and they poop on statues and whatnot. Yes, I love pigeons though they're so pretty. Yeah, there was a plaza right by our hotel in Barcelona that was so full of pigeons, and I would take pigeon pictures and send them to what was Mary and be like, look at all these pigeons. Yeah, they seem okay with those pigeons. I mean they have people out there selling little bags of seeds so you can hold your arm out and the pigeons will come and land on you. So yeah, I don't know if you witnessed any of those. I saw somebody try to feed or I guess really Patrick saw this.
I did not see what was happening.
I just saw the birds suddenly get very excited, and I guess somebody had fed a bird something, and of course then the rest of the pigeons were like, oh, me too, and the person was not expecting this to happen. It seemed like that was Patrick's read on what was going on. We also didn't really get into it, but like there were ongoing efforts to eradicate or at least control the sparrows, and in nineteen ten, the USDA published a pamphlet that was titled How to Destroy English Sparrows, which described them as cunning, destructive, and filthy and had all kinds of tips to like discourage him from nesting for long enough that they would finally abandon the nest site, and then also like to kill them, which is I don't know. It did not really work. There have been some introduced animal eradication efforts we have talked about on the show before, which I think have been successful, like eradicating goats from some of the Galapagus islands, but that's a little like a bird can just fly to another island, Goats not so much going to this whole episode the bird and science issues aside, I'm like, this is it really a fewed about birds? This is two guys who want to be the most one in ornithology having ego battles with each yah, and I don't. Here's the thing. I have certainly had those things in my life about which I am almost irrationally angry and will dig in on. But it is simultaneously hard for me to understand. Like arguing with somebody who's already dead, right, like wanting to just carry that anger in your heart to your grave that seems exhausting well over a decade later, yeah wooh, Like I feel like that was seventeen years later. Oh, you gotta get past that. You need you need to talk this through with a professional. The other thing that made me go uh oh was when we were talking about cows still trash talking Brewer in his personal correspond and I was like, dear Lord and butter, do not let people in one hundred years pull out my texts and start revealing the things I have said about people in moments of anger or venting, because that's not cool's yeah, yeah, that ain't gonna be good for anybody.
Yeah, when.
Uh, when that article, I can't if there's the actual title of it, but people were describing as it is, like who's the bad art friend?
And it was about.
A dispute within a writing group where like one person had donated an organ and then there was a lot of judginess. And one of the conversations I had in like my group chat was I hope no one ever subpoenas my group chat, Like I'm not in there being awful to people, but they're for sure been times when I've just been like so and so has been such a jerk blah blah blah. Yeah, yeah, I've been fully insulting to people when it's just like me and a friend. And you understand that, like part of the function of your close, trusting friendship is that sometimes you're going to vent ugly things about people that you don't necessarily feel when you are in a more pleasand reasonable place, But in that moment, you've got to get the anger out and you're gonna say yucky things.
Yeah.
Yeah, happens for real, Yeah all the time about all kinds of things, people on the street, people on that that's how you stay nice in real life, is it right? You deal with those emotions in a private, trusting circle. There are just a lot of things that happen in life where I'm like, what you really should be doing here is like writing this in your journal, or talking to a friend about it, or maybe talking to your therapist or some other you know person. Uh not not picking a fight with a stranger on the internet right about birds? But it's so easy. Yeah, yeah, I will say this. I have perpetual fear because, as we have discussed, I feed all of the animals of my neighborhood on my deck, and I'm always like, uh oh, am I messing with some stuff. Like I remember when we started to get corvids. I was like, uh oh, like because I love them, but I was also very conscious of the fact that they will sometimes go after other birds. But I think I feed them all enough that everybody seems cool. I will look out there sometimes and like a crow and two doves and a cardinal and a squirrel are all eating at the same time in pretty close proximity, and nobody seems to care. And I'm like, I think everybody has enough food that we don't have to We're okay, which I'm probably giving them all like heart disease from overfeeding or something, and you know, that's another way in which I am ruining nature, but it's never my goal. I just want everybody to be cool. Yeah, So I'm glad I finally got this onto the list because all the ridiculousness.
Was fun to read.
I did kind of struggle with how to end the episode because it mostly just stops because they died, right, there's not really a greater resolution. They died, the sparrows are still here, there are still people who hate them. There's no d new moone. Neither of them were ever satisfied. There's no like key learning from it, because other introductions were still happening after that, both intentional and accidental.
And then yeah, there's a.
Whole, uh, that whole thread about like there's still a lot of discussion of invading of invasive animal or plant species that mirrors the way that some people talk about immigration to United States of human beings, and there's like all this you know, continuing interconnection overlap, and we didn't get it into the episode, but like almost a counterpoint. Sometimes people will talk about immigration using the terminology of natural disasters. Yeah, that's all connected. Uh so yeah, that was like the less the less fun side to read about was reading the eugenicists talking about the sparros. Yeah, so, Happy Friday. So we're gonna leave off with eugenics. Whatever's happening on your weekend. I hope it is going to be great. We will have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We will have something brand new on Monday. You know, if you've seen some great birds out in the world and you take pictures of them, send us bird pictures too, or you know, if you have pet birds in your house, birds lovely? Yes, please Yeah, if you have animal animal tax you want to pay us.
It does not have to be a dog or a cat, or a horse or a lizard.
I'll take snakes, i will take bugs, I will take I just like animals and I like when people have great relationships with them. Yeah.
So again, Happy Friday, See you soon. Stuff you missed in History.
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