Our Most-requested Episodes (We Already Have)

Published Dec 14, 2015, 6:45 PM

We often get episode requests, but because there are so many episodes in the back catalog, some of the most common requests have already been covered. So in today's podcast we're going to hit the highlights on the episodes people ask for again and again.

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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy be Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We're doing something just a little bit different today, entirely new territory for us in terms of the different thing that we're doing. So we know we have really amazing listeners who have been with us basically since day one, and they were listening to the show when it was Candice and Josh and it was called Factory Factor Fiction and the episodes were five minutes long, and like those folks have stayed with us this entire time. And then we know we also have other amazing people who came in later and then went back to the beginning and listened to every single episode, which I applaud you. I've only ever managed to do that with Welcome to night Vale, and that is way fewer episodes than ours. Right, this is gonna be our seven hundred and eighty second episode, although the math is a little fuzzy because some of them are two parts and a few of them in the archive our reruns. So anybody who has listened to seven hundred and eighty two episodes of our show Uh, shout out to you. That's incredible. But we also have so many new people who are a lot newer to the podcast and haven't been listening for nearly as long. And we know this because number one, a lot more people are listening to the show now than we're in two thousand and eight, and number two, a lot of the requests that we get for episodes for us to talk about are actually things that past hosts have already done. So in today's podcast, what we're gonna do is give the highlights on some of these episodes that people really ask for again and again and again. We will give a brief hint of what each of them is about, and then we are going to put links to all of them on our blog. We're also planning to work up a playlist from them that will be sharable. So it's sort of like one of our Unearthed episodes that we do every year, except instead of things that were unearthed in other people's addicts there, things were unearthing out of our own archive. Um, so all of these are from previous hosts of the show. None of them are things that Holly and I have worked on together. So you'll get to hear some new voices if you go listen to these from the archive. But we've also curated the list so that it includes the episodes that are most like what the show has involved evolved into in terms of the length and the way it approaches subjects, so probably will not seem completely jarring to hear a similarly structured podcast, just with different hosts. Uh. A few of them are a little shorter than our episodes are today, but for the most part it's because they don't have a listener mail at the end. So the first time we're going to talk about is the Edmund Fitzgerald and the episode that we're referencing is from April eleven, and it was hosted by Sarah and Dablina. And that podcast on the Edmund Fitzgerald is admittedly a little bit tricky to find if you do not already know where it is, because it is in a bigger episode called five Shipwreck Stories. So if you just search by Edmund Fitzgerald, you may have some trouble. Although I think Tracy may have retagged it's it's easier to find that way. I tried to. Uh, yeah, we're we've been going back and retagging Tracy has really been a champion on that. But you know, seven eight two episodes, there's a lot to go back and retag. So this is the only roundup episode that we're also including in this round up, so we don't wind up in some sort of recursive podcast loop. It's some sort of Edmund Fitzgerald inception. But but so many people have asked about the Edmund Fitzgerald that we did not want to leave this one out. So the many, many requests for the Edmund Fitzgerald are actually not new at all. When Sarah and Bblina asked for some shipwreck episode suggestions at that time, the thinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald was like far in a way the most requested one that they got. It's because of that song. Yeah. They theorized that maybe that's one of the reasons, and that so in brief, the s S Edmund Fitzgerald, captained by Ernest M. Mcsorrel sank Lake Superior on November tenth of nine with the loss of all twenty nine on board. It was accompanied on its journey across the lake by Arthur m Anderson, captain by Bernie Cooper, and one of the eerious things about this story was that the two captains were in radio contact with each other for much of the voyage before the Edmund Fitzgerald fell silent. And the exact cause of that shipwreck is still a mystery, and that is something that Sarah and Bablina discussed, so when you go back to that episode, you will get more info on that mysterious vanishing. Next up in our frequent Request is Mary Secol which is from February, and that is when Katie and Sarah are hosting the show together, and Katie had a particular fondness for Mary Seacole because she was a nurse and Katie's mother also is a nurse. Mary Secal was born in Jamaica and developed nursing skills there during a cholera epidemic. She then put those skills to youth and other epidemics in Jamaica, California, and Panama before going to put them into practice on the front lines during the Crimean War, and Katie and Sarah talk about the context for the Crimean War before getting into Mary Secoel's time as a nurse there. She worked at a hospital where she earned the nickname the Black Nightingale, and she worked on the battlefields themselves. Mary Secul's work was really really important and she was way ahead of her time in terms of nursing and medicine. She also chronicled her story and the delightfully titled autobiography The Wonderful Adventure Adventures of Mrs Sea Cool in many Lands. UH. The next one that's often requested is the Halifax explosion, and this was covered on December nineteenth, even again by Sarah and Dablina. And the short version is that on December six of nineteen, two ships, the Imo and the mont Blanc collided in Halifax Harbor, and the mont Blanc was packed with truly staggering amounts of a explosives. When people on shore and in the neighboring piers saw the mont Block on fire and they did not realize how dangerous its cargo was, this big crowd of spectators started to gather and there were definitely also people who were helping. There was also a lot of people who were just looking, and that meant that when the mont Block exploded, more than eighteen hundred people were killed and thousands more were injured, many of them with eye injuries that resulted in blindness. Sarah and Deblina talk in a lot more detail about exactly what happened and the investigations into who was at fault, as well as the aftermath of this whole massive incident. We actually get two distinct categories of emails about the Halifax explosion, and one of them is the request that we do an episode on it. The other is a note from people who have heard that episode and they've written in to tell us that every year, Halifax sends a Christmas tree to Boston as thanks for the city's help after the disaster. We actually got one of these literally last night. I wrote this episode outline yesterday. A few hours later, we got another email asking us to talk about the Christmas tree. And also, by total coincidence, we're recording this on December the first, and this year, the Christmas Tree is being lit on December three. Uh. I don't know if I'll get over there to see it in person, because I would need to leave work early to do that, and I already left work early once this week to go to a lecture about Harvard's collection of medicine documents. UM, So I'll definitely try to get over and see it on Boston common and take some pictures to share with everybody, h regardless of where, whether I make it over there for the tree lighting. Before anybody writes to say a medicine podcast would be cool, we have like seven of them. There are a whole lot. There's like a series. It's awesome. Uh So the next one that's off requested is uh chungy Sow And this was recorded on March nine, also by Sarah Deblina. And this podcast on Chungy Sow can be tricky to find because before you even get into the multiple spellings that are sometimes used for her name, she's referred to by two different names. Yet depending on where you're reading this, she is either referred to as Chung i Saw, which means wife of Chung E, or Chung Shi, which means Chung's widow. So she's a wife or a widow, depending Most of the requests that we get to talk about her asked us to discuss Chung Shi, perhaps because that's the name that the Rejected Princesses used when they did a post about her, But in the podcast, Sarah and Deblina used the name Chungy Sao. They also actually titled the podcast Don't Cross the Dragon Lady because that was her nickname. Yeah, But so that's one where I went in on our website and put her actual name in the title so that people can find on our website more easily. So Chineseau was a pirate, and contrary to the stereotypes that most of us think about when it comes to pirates, she was a woman, She was from China, and she was not remotely a loner. She commanded what was basically a pirate empire. She did become a pirate by marrying into a pirate family, so that was the chungy that people name her in reference to, but she used some real business savvy to take it to a whole other level and her pirate confederation, Like when we say a whole other level, it is no joke. She had six fleets of ships fleets, not a fleet of ships, six ships, but six full fleets, four hundred junks, and a staff of seventy pirates. So she was really rather amazing. Also a very complex character in history. Yeah, And also in the pretty amazing and kind of a complex story is Pope Joan, which is under the title, was there a female pope and that came along on September six and was hosted by Katie and Sarah. So Katie and Sarah talk about whether Pope Joan was a real person or not. The story was that Joan was in love with a scholar and followed him to Athens, and since a woman couldn't join the Benedictine monastery where he was studying, she disguised herself as a man and joined the monastery anyway. She purportedly rose up through the ranks and then served as pope for two years before her gender came to light after she gave birth while riding a horse in a procession. I hate when that happens. It's just such an absurd assortment of details, all kind of clambered into one that. Ah, that sounds just crazy. Uh. There is a lot about this story that's possibly apocryphal, and Katie and Sarah get into whether it was real or not, and they also get into the history of when people have believed it and when they haven't and why that has been the case at various points in history. So again, it's another one that's quite complex. There are a lot of layers and still some question marks around the whole thing. Uh. So they covered that Whole Banana's episode. We're going to talk about another chunk of episodes after we have a brief word from one of our sponsors to get back to our most frequently requested archival episodes. Uh. Next up, we have Emperor Norton and that is from May one from Katie and Sarah. So I reread the entirety of Neil Game and Sandman over the holiday as a couple of years ago, and as I did that, I jotted down some of the weird and interesting historical characters that make kind of cameos in that comics series. One of the ones I got really excited about was Emperor Norton. And then I got back to the office after the holiday was over and actually started putting together a list of episodes that I had thought of. Uh, and I learned there was a podcast on him already. Joshua Norton had in fact been a pretty successful merchant in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. He made quite the fortune for himself, but he saw most of it vanish in one bad business decision. He disappeared from the scene for a couple of years, and then when he came back to San Francisco on September seven, teeth of eighteen fifty nine. He did so dressed as Napoleon, and he claimed that he was the Emperor of the United States and the protector of Mexico. He held this self proclaimed emperor post for twenty years. I'm imagining no one was paying him for this ship, I mean, not officially, but he did get a lot of his living expenses came from sort of fans of his he developed. He became a very locally known character and people people gave him money and helped him out. And he was not actually homeless. He was living in a boarding house and it became clear after his death that that was where he had been living and UH and overseeing his empire. It was full of all sorts of documents related to the running of his empire of the United States. UH. The next one that gets requested frequently is Cynthia Anne and Quana Parker. In that episode, there are two episodes. One is novembery and one is December five. Those are both of two thousand and twelve UH, and those are Sarah and Debilina episodes of some of their later episodes. A lot of folks right in and asked us to do a podcast on the two of them, but Sarah and Deblina actually did too, or two podcasts, one on each. We actually had our biggest spike in requests for this one after our episode on Olive Oatman, because, like Olive, Cynthia Anne was captured in her case by members of the Commanche tribe and wound up living among the tribe. Cynthia Anne was kidnapped when the four where her family had been living was rated. Some of her family was killed and Cynthia Anne was taken captive. She was only nine at this time, and Cynthia Anne was the only one of her family who survived and was not ransomed back. Her story, not Olives, is actually more likely to have been the basis for the movie The Searchers. We had a few questions about that once we did the Olive Oatmen episode. Yeah, Cynthia. Cynthia Anne actually eventually married her abductor. She had three children with him, and the eldest, Quanta, wound up being the Comanches last war chief. It's a long and often a very sad story, and this two part series is also a way of looking at the war that grew out of the United States Western expansion into the Great Plains. Next on our list is another thing about war, and that is the New York Draft Riots that came out on April eleventh of eleven. It was another Sarah and Deblina venture, and most of our requests for it mentioned the two thousand to Martin Scorsese movie Gangs of New York. So whenever we get a pile of them in a row, I wonder if that was just replayed on TV, or maybe it's on Netflix right now or something. Because they tend to come in and chunks. They did a clump together. So during the Civil War, the Federal Congress passed the Union Conscription Act of eighteen sixty three, which set up a draft. Basically, able bodied men between the ages of twenty and forty five were required to register unless they could pay a fee or have a substitute take their place, and lottery would determine who would actually serve. An attempts to enforce this draft on July thirteenth of eighteen sixty three led to a riot, and that riot included rating and torching government building. About three people were killed, and a huge portion of those killed where police officers and soldiers. One of the many things that Sarah and Dublina talked about in this podcast is all of the social factors that led to this riot, including the influx of both Irish immigrants following the Great Famine in the late eighteen forties and the influx of recently freed slaves, many of them competing for the same low wage jobs. It's a podcast that ties a lot of the themes that we've talked about in more recent podcasts as well altogether, including the Harlem hell Fighters and the two parter on the Irish Potato famine itself. UH, coming interestingly from from this particular episode when they When they began that episode, they talked about how they were looking for creative way to talk about the Civil War because they didn't just want to do a multipart podcast on the Civil War itself. UH. Their next the next topic on our list actually came from listeners responses to that request. It is on Alan Pinkerton from June twenty seven eleven and also obviously by Sarah and Bablina. So they had asked for some Civil War topics and wound up putting together a series on Civil War spycraft, and one of them is the very frequently requested by Alan Pinkerton, whose name is so ubiquitous that he almost needs no introduction. He and the Pinkerton's, which were his detective agency, became both famous and notorious in various parts of American history during and after the Civil War, and while the episode mostly sticks to his Civil War work, it also talks about his founding of the first national detective agency, this group called the Pinkerton's, and his basically creating the job of private investigator, which had not existed before that time. We have a kind of fun one the next on the list, and that is the Bone Wars, which is another one that Sarah and Bablina covered in two parts that came on on Decever thirty first and January nine, and our biggest spike in requests for an episode about this one definitely came in April of this year when Emmanuel Shop who was a vertebrate paleontologist at the New University of Lisbon and Portugal, suggested reversing the previous reversal and paleontological thought about whether the Brontosaurus and the Apatosaurus are two different dinosaurs. That question was one of the many oddities of the scientific feud that has come to be known as the Bone Wars. This was an intense rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Offnel Charles Marsh, and the two men had been friends, but their competition with one another eventually caused a bitter divide between them. Their race to be the best paleontologist did in fact advance the field dramatically by finding in catach rizing many many fossil specimens, but unfortunately their feud was so bitter and underhanded that it also actually stood in the way of progress. The whole Brontosaurus and a Patosaurus question came into the picture because Marsh found an incomplete, possible fossil skeleton that he named a Patosaurus, and then two years later he found a different, more complete skeleton that he named the Brontosaurus, and they were actually Obviously, the decision goes back and forth about whether they were the same species or different species, but most people credit the fact that he named it something else with the fact that he was trying to discover more dinosaurs than cop did. And another great thing about this particular two parter or is that it it makes callouts to the other scientific rivalries that Sarah and Deblina covered, including the gas Wars and Tesla versus Edison. Up next, we have the Boston molasses flood that is from October fifth, two thousand and nine, which is a Katie and Sarah episode, and we actually don't get quite as many requests for as we used to, in part because we mentioned it in our first Six Impossible Episodes podcasts that came out in February of this year, and in that particular episode we talked about the London beer flood and why there's not quite enough information on it to flesh out a full episode, especially since the moston molasses flood is already in the archive and they're extremely similar stories. In the nineteen teens, molasses was in fact big business in Boston thanks to its use in distilling and making munitions, and on January fifteenth of nineteen nineteen, a tank that was holding two point three million gallons of it burst. Twenty one people died, one and fifty more were injured, and property damage from this huge wave of molasses, which crested at twenty five ft tall, was enormous. One of the things that really cracks me up about this episode is that they're talking about what the weather was like in Boston at this point, and they referenced superstorms that dropped twenty inches of snow on Boston. I hate it when you mentioned bad weather and then somebody comes along and tells you that the weather is a lot worse where they live. But having been in Boston during last year's record breaking uh snow season that had a hundred and ten inches of snow or something, um, the idea that twenty was a superstorm made me giggle a little when I heard it on this show. It might have been if those twenty inches fell in like an hour, that would be a superstorm, But twenty inches by themselves is not necessarily super in New England. And with that, we are going to pause for just one more moments so we can have a word from one of the great sponsors that keeps his show going. So another podcast topic that is often requested is Oak Island, and this one was recorded in April of it's April to be exact that it was published h and it is a Katie and Sarah episode. So their story about whether there is an Oak Island money pit isn't just about that question that the name of the episode is actually is there a money pit on Oak Island? And it's so it's not just about yes or no there is or is not a money pit on Oak Island. It looks at the whole story of where this idea that maybe there's a pit full of money out there, where that idea came from, and the series of attempts that people have made to try to get to what may or may not be buried treasure. And at times they tell the story with a lot of chagrin because it seems like people were about to answer that question and then they went home for the night and everything was ruined when they got back in the morning. That is a it's a it's a thing that happens in this search for money pit. Yeah, and uh, in case you want even more on it, Stuff you Should Know also covered this one as well, and although there's as much more recent from February. And it's kind of funny how that goes. Sometimes like a podcast episode that one podcast does will inspire a house Stuff Works article, which in turn inspires the Stuff you Should Know episode, or sometimes that chain goes in a different order. But it's a funny interconnected thing, it is. And sometimes we've accidentally done episodes on similar topics very close together without any of us actually knowing it, because we don't usually consult with other podcasts on what they're doing. We sometimes do, but not as a matter of course, And so it is funny how sometimes something will happen. And yeah, there's definitely there's definitely some overlap in the in the listeners of all the various podcasts How Stuff Works has, but uh, folks that listen to the stuff you should Know don't necessarily listen to ours on a regular basis or vice versa. Um. It's also kind of funny to me how at this point in the whole Oak Island money Pit story, if there is actually a pit full of money, there has probably been more money spent trying to get to it than the pit would actually contain at this point. Yeah, I feel like the Oak Island story is the money pit at this point. I think they make that joke in the episode, like it's just it's its own whole money pits yep yep. On a similarly wet but much sadder track is the Johnstown Flood. We've gotten lots and lots of requests for this one, and it came out on a December time another Katie and Sarah. Uh, or no, it's another Sarah and Deblina. I'm getting the past hosts confused. Uh, it's another Sarah and Deblina podcast. And the South Fork damn burst on eighty nine and it sent twenty million tons of water through Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing two thousand two nine people, which I think makes it makes sense why so many people ask us for it, because we get a lot of requests for really sad stuff we do, and it's one of those things where the numbers are so staggering and it's such an extreme and dramatic event that I think that's part of the appeal of people wanting to hear more about it. And one of the more surprising parts of this episode, if you're not already be familiar with the story, comes right at the beginning, and that's that Johnstown was so prone to flooding that people basically had a routine to deal with it, like they would do things like move their belongings upstairs when a flood was coming to try to protect those possessions. But this particular incident was far, far too big to be managed that way. It's like an hour for the water to get to the town when a dam burst, but by the time it got there it was said to be moving with the force of Niagara Falls, and so in addition to the thousands of people who were killed, the property damage was just enormous. And next up is Nellie Bligh and she is often requested, but there is an episode about her and it first aired on March was an episode done by Katie and Sarah and their episode on Nellie Bligh walks through her career as a journalist from the early days when she was only making five dollars a week to the pinnacle when she was earning twenty five thousand dollars a year, and that is in late nineteenth century dollars a year, so that was a pretty significant income. One of the reasons why her story is so fascinating and so often requested is that the steps she took as a journalist were often extremely dramatic. She did things like feigning a mental illness to get access to a mental institution and then do an expose on it. She made a record breaking trip around the world um so and apart from the innate uh excitement and a lot of these assignments that she had, she was also these were also definitely not the sorts of writing tasks that were assigned to women at this time. And it's really clear if you listen to Katie and Sarah's episode that they absolutely love her and we do too. It's a really good episode, So I highly encourage you to go give that one a listen. Of all the ones that I listened to in in preparing this episode, like that is the one that has the most sheer delight in the voices of the hosts and what they're talking about, So I I love her. Also, Um, Sarah and Doublina have done three different podcasts that are in some way related to Ned Kelly, and usually Ned Kelly is the person who people specifically ask us to talk about. They did a podcast on Ned Kelly and then two podcasts on other bush Rangers in Australia, and so the one that was just on Ned Kelly came out on June, and then on September and September twenty one of that year, the two parter came out on other bush Rangers who were basically outlaws on the Australian Outback. So these episodes together wind up looking at about a hundred years of Australian outlaw history, and they take a look at the realities and the myths of ned Kelly and the other bush Rangers, since, as these stories often go, there are some elements that are real and others that have fallen into more romanticized mythology, so the facts may not always be accurate. And they also talk about how Australia became a haven or outlaw activity and it was not just because a lot of Bushrangers started as escaped convicts. Yeah. They spent a lot of time talking about the social factors that led to people turning to crime as basically a way of life. Uh. Nick Kelly and the Bushrangers are actually so far off of my base of knowledge that the one time we have mentioned Bushrangers in a past episode, I said it wrong. I said it in a different way than how it is pronounced. I'm not going to say it again because that was embarrassing. If that is your worst crime, my dear. Uh. The next one is that are our last one? It is the most exciting, I think. Yeah. This one is the whale ship Essex, and this was covered by Katie and Sarah back in September. First aired on September, and the whaleship Essex, in case you did not know, is the inspiration for the novel Moby Dick. But it was a real whaling ship that was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in eight and the story of that happened is really pretty harrowing. So we're gonna leave that to Katie and Sarah because they did a lot of really good work on that. We don't want to steal their thunder Well, and I'm actually really shocked we're not getting more requests for the whale ship Essex right now because as we are recording this, marketing for the movie In the Heart of the Sea, which is based on a book about the whaleship x Essex, is like it's at a fever pitch right now. I feel like every time I opened up a new web page or turn onto television, there is a commercial for In the Heart of the Seat with the giant giant whale tail destroying things. Well, I have a theory completely based in nothing, just I feel like the way that they're advertising it doesn't make it clear that it is based on anything grounded in reality. Um it seems it seems so big and over the top the way they're pitching it that it seems more like Michael Bay's history than like a Yeah, I watched I rewatched one of the trail for it yesterday as I was working on this podcast, and I had two immediate thoughts, and one was there's a shot of some ships in a harbor, and I was like, I am pretty sure that is the Boston Tea Party museum and ships shot from the air, Like I don't, I'm I think that might be what that is. And I thought about like going to research that and seeing if it really was a shot of the Boston Tea Party ships and museum, because it really did look like that to me. And the other was that whale is just so big and the whales are large, but I have also been on a whale watch and the whales we saw were not nearly as like Leviathan as the one in the movie is, so uh yeah, I'm wondering how the scale of the whale actually measures up to the reality of sperm whales. This is also what I'm really jealous of past hosts for covering like really early, really really early in the in the life of us being on the show. I was putting the little list of things that I really really wanted to talk about, and I was like, I want to talk about this we ship they got sunk by a whale, but I can't because we have that already, which is fine. I love our past host. Basically all the folks that have worked on the show are friends and colleagues, so I'm happy they got to do it, but sad I did not. And that is it for our most Requested episode round up. Uh, those are the things. I put together this list through a couple of methods. One was just memory of the things people ask us for over and over, and one was looking in my Scent items folder and outlook. Uh, and I've emailed I think it was like two thirty six emails that were links to episodes that we have already in my items folder. And then I was really embarrassed because I realized I had sent the same person multiple links on multiple days and I never realized it was the same person because there's so much so we guess there's so much email. I was sending so much email, so uh, yeah, embarrassing. Well, I mean I know for me, like there's there's a point where we get so much email where uh, eventually I will sometimes like, oh I remember this person. But it's hard to establish pattern recognition when you're getting so much. And we've talked about before how like the podcast is not the only thing that Tracy and I do, So it's kind of like, oh, I'm in the middle of editing this article. Oh there's another history email. I'll kind of shunt it off and read it later. And so it's like, with the constant juggle of all the stuff, I have a really hard time developing pattern recognition and see recognizing people's names over and over. We do. We do read all of your emails. We read them all. We answer a bitifully small proportion of them because there are so many, but we do. We do read them all. So thank you so much everyone who sends us these wonderful emails that come into our inbox all time. We love them. Uh. And so, as we said at the clap of the show, we're basically going to put links to all of these inner show notes that are blog at Miston history dot com. So people who are interested uh and hearing these for the first time or in re listening to an old favorite whichever floats your boat. You can find all these in one place are awesome. Producer Noll is going to try to put together a share able playlist of them also to make them easier to find. Um and we will post links to all of that as many places as we can think of. Uh. And if you want to see whether we've got something you're interested in in our archive. We also have a blog post that Tracy put together which is how to find old episodes of stuff you missed in history class, and it basically has lots of tips on how to search and how to hunt for things that might help you. If you are wishing we would do something, it might already exist, either by us or previous hosts, and your wish could be instantly granted. I love it when the wish is instantly granted. I always feel kind of guilty when somebody has clearly put so much time and thought into convincing us that we should do an episode on something and it's something that we already have. Uh. It could be me overthinking things, but I always feel like if that were me getting the email back saying hey, we we love that person. Also, here's a link to the episode that we have on them, Like that would kind of take the wind out of my sales. I don't know if it would or not for me, but I do feel bad that they spent time they didn't have to making their case. Yeah. So anyway, Yeah, yeah, we have so many episodes in our archive and uh, I would say, um, just because in our archive on our website and missing history dot com, I have gone in and tried to put the person's name in the title for things that uh that did not have their name, like don't Cross the Dragon Lady did not have the in there. So I've like gone and I've put the names in as many of the titles as I can find to make them easier to find them before and so it may be a little easier on our website than in like it teams. Um. So yeah, that is our most requested episodes that we already have. Do you have some fresh listener mail that does not in fact requestion episodes that already exists? Uh, it is so fresh that it came in this morning. It is from Gabrielle and it is from our very very recent episode from yesterday. In terms of when we were recording this podcast on the Gallipoli campaign, and Gabrielle says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I have just finished listening to your episode on the Gallipoli Campaign and it was very good. Despite as a new Zealander, I couldn't miss it in history class. One small point that has recently been made more widely known about the Anzac biscuits is that although it is possible sweet biscuits were sent over in care packages and ANZACs are good keepers and travel well, they became iconic because of the massive fundraising efforts for soldiers aid societies such as the Red Cross in the early aftermath of the landing. Hundreds of bake sales and tables of works were set up, and most of them had a version of this oatmeal and coconut biscuit that is made without eggs and by melting together the butter and golden syrup. This recipe was popular during rationing as it uses minimal amounts of scarce ingredients. At least one hospital ship was funded in this way. They also are the only exception to an Act of Parliament that forbids naming any commercial product after Anzas and must be one made to the original recipe and two only called biscuits, never called cookies, and their title. A well known sandwich chain could not do the first when attempting to add it to their menu. Half chocolate dipped Anzac biscuits are becoming more popular uh and during April, commemorative tins are for sale and the supermarkets all over the country and in Australia love the show. Gabrielle, thank you so much for this awesome information about Anzac biscuits. Um, Gabrielle. My my information that they were uh, that they became famous for being sent to soldiers actually came I'm a prior listener mail from several years ago, uh from somebody who actually sent us a recipe for how to make them, um, which is delightful. And I have that recipe still and maybe over the holidays when I have some extra baking time, I will make them and see what they are like. So thank you again, Gabrielle sent for sending that. That is great information. If you would like to write to us, we're a history podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash miss in History, and our Twitter is miss in History. Our tumbler is miss in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're on Pinterest at pinterest dot com. Slash missed in history. If you would like to learn more about something that we have talked about today, you can go and put the words oak Island into the search bar at how stuff works dot com and you will find the article on the Oak Island money pit uh that was inspired by our podcast and then inspired a podcast from stuff You should do if you can also come to our website where we will have the list of all of these episodes, links to all of them, where we have our tips on how to search our archive in different formats. You can do all that and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or missing history dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com. M

Stuff You Missed in History Class

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