Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey E. V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It's time for six Impossible Episodes. This is when I round up six topics that, for one reason or another, they don't really work as a full episode. Sometimes it's just a lack of information. We will not know a ton about a particular person or thing. For two of today's topics, we do have quite a bit of information, but a lot of that is visual. This is an audio podcast, we would be describing visual things at length, and I don't think that would work out very well for what we do. This is actually our third installment of six Impossible Episodes that has been devoted entirely to listener requests, and I've been hanging on to a lot of these requests for months years. So first up, from listener Tina, we have Nellie Cashman. Nellie Cashman was born to a Catholic family in Ireland in eighteen forty four or eighteen forty five. Her parents were Patrick and Fanny o'cassane. Their family name was anglicized at some point later on and she was christened with the name Ellen. It might be possible to do a whole episode about her because there is a lot of information available about her life, but some of what's around is really contradictory or possibly apocryphal. Her life also followed a pattern as she moved from place to place, so parts of it would start to really feel a bit repetitive. Nellie was born right at the start of the Great Famine in Ireland. We have a two part episode on this that came out in twenty thirteen. But essentially a lot of people in Ireland were tenant farmers and they were subsisting mostly on potatoes, as in getting about eighty percent of their daily calories from their potato crops. Anything else they grew or raised was to sell, not to eat. Starting in eighteen forty five, a blight killed the potato crop and that went on multiple years in a row, leaving these farmers and their families without their biggest food source. The British government was also in control of Ireland and took a very lais a fair approach to the situation, and also continued to export those other foods which might have been used to help people make up for the loss of their potato crop. This was a catastrophe. More than a million people died of hunger or disease because of it. The famine also led to a huge wave of emigration out of Ireland, including Nelly's family. She, her mother, and her sister Fanny, were in Boston by about eighteen fifty. From there they went to San Francisco, where Fans and he later married another Irish immigrant named Tom Cunningham. After Fanny's death in eighteen eighty four, Nellie took over the care of Fanny's five children. As far as we know, Nellie herself never got married. Much later, on the Phoenix Daily, Harold carried a report that she was going to marry a man named Mike Sullivan, but there's no record anywhere else of this person or of a marriage between them. A couple of sources used in this episode quote her as saying that she did not have time for marriage, and that quote men are a nuisance anyhow, now, aren't they They're just little boys grown up as quotable a quote as that is. Neither of the sources that included it cited where this might have come from, and my attempts to find it in newspapers of the day were unsuccessful. By eighteen seventy two, Nellie was making her living by following discoveries of silver and gold, opening boarding houses and restaurants, and provisioning and providing loans to people who hoped to strike it rich. Also known as grubstaking. Nellie also staked mining claims of her own in some of the places where she lived, going out into remote areas in sturdy boots and trousers. It's much easier to find newspaper quotes of her describing the uselessness of skirts while doing this kind of work, but surviving portraits of her generally show her in the long skirts that were common for women of the day. Yeah, this is where she had the similar pattern as she moved from place to place, She'd follow the gold or silver strike, stay there until it started to be played out, and then move on to the next thing. Gold and silver Russias took her so many places. There was pH Nevada, Cassiir in Northern British Columbia, Canada, Tombstone, Arizona, Kingston, New Mexico, various parts of Alaska and Canada. During the Klondike gold Rush, he was a successful business woman and sometimes also a successful prospector and minor, and sometimes she was one of the only women in the area where she was living. Her business and mining successes funded an array of religious and charitable efforts in the various places where she lived. Nellie was a devout Catholic, and among other things, she raised funds for Tombstone's first Catholic church and a Catholic church and hospital in Alaska, and sometimes she went to extreme efforts to help other people, like over the winter of eighteen seventy four to eighteen seventy five, she heard that miners who had decided to stay in the Cassier Mountains rather than coming back to town were starving and that they had started to develop scurvy. She undertook a mission to take fresh vegetables and potatoes, which contained vitamin C, to those stranded miners. Some of the descriptions of this make it sound like she was the one making the financial and logistical arrangements, but others she undertook the mission herself when troops from the Canadian Army refused. In this version, when the snow was too deep to traverse with sled dogs, she and a group of men she'd recruited, put on snow shoes and pulled the sleds themselves. At one point during this journey, she was buried in an avalanche in the night. After weeks of travel, she successfully made it to the miners, who reportedly all survived thanks to her efforts, and then afterwards she was known as the Angel of the Kafar Mountains. Cashman's charitable efforts also took her to places that other people simply would not go. For example, in eighteen eighty three, six men carried out a robbery in Bisbee, Arizona, during which they killed five people. Afterward, one of the robbers was lynched and the others were scheduled for a mass hanging. Cashman seems to have been one of a very few people who thought they deserved to be treated humanly, even after having committed a heinous crime. She visited them in jail and acted as their confessor and their spiritual counselor. When she learned that local businessmen were building a grandstand for the public to watch the hanging, she was appalled. She hired some men to tear down the grandstand in the middle of the night before the hanging. Took place on August thirteenth, nineteen twelve. Cashman became the first woman known to vote in Alaska. That was a year before non indigenous women were legally given the right to do so there, and we don't really know whether she knew that her vote was actually illegal at the time. Nellie Cashman spent much of the last years of her life in the northern parts of Alaska and western Canada. In addition to mining, she had a team of sled dogs, and at one point she set a record as a mucher. She died in Victoria, British Columbia, on January fourth, nineteen twenty five, at the age of about eighty, at a hospital that she had helped to fund. In nineteen ninety four, she was featured on a US postage stamp in a series called Legends of the West. In twenty fourteen, a monument was erected in her honor in Middleton, Ireland. Moving on from Nellie Cashman, next we have Ella of Salisbury, requested by Josiah. The exact year of her birth is unclear, but her parents were William, second Earl of Salisbury and his wife Eleanor de Vitree. William died in eleven ninety six, and most sources say that Ella was around nine years old when this happened. Ella was her father's only heir, and after his death she was considered a ward of King Richard the First, but then she disappeared. Like a lot of things about Ella's life, the circumstances around this are vague, but it seems that she was taken to Normandy and hidden there, possibly with her mother and possibly sheltered by her mother's family. The two main possibilities for what was going on here or that someone was imprisoning her to try to get at her wealth, or that someone was hiding her to protect her from that same thing. A knight named William Talbot disguised himself as a pilgrim to go to Normandy and retrieve Ella. He spent about two years looking for her, finally found her and took her back to the king. After this, Talbot became one of the Salisbury family retainers. Eventually, Ella was married to William Longspy, illegitimate son of King Henry the Second and half brother to King's Richard and his successor, John Lackland. William became the third Earl of Salisbury through this marriage, which was probably arranged while Ella was still a child, but not performed until she had come of age. Ella and William had at least six children together. Some sources say four sons and two daughters, others say four and four. We know very little about her marriage or her family life, but we do know that she and her husband laid some of the foundation stones for the Salisbury Cathedral when construction began in twelve twenty. Her husband, William, was part of various military campaigns on behalf of the king, and at one point he was believed to have been lost at sea. Another man came and tried to marry Ella, but she refused him. William then did die at Salisbury Castle on March seventh, twelve twenty sixth, and he was buried in the cathedral. It is possible that he had been poisoned by one of his enemies. His tomb was reportedly opened in the late eighteenth century and the body of a rat was found inside his skull that showed evidence of arsenic poisoning. I love that imagery as much as I hate anybody to be poisoned with arsnik. After her husband's death, Ella was Countess of Salisbury in her own right. She never remarried, which some sources attribute to her devotion to her late husband. Others suggest that she wanted her oldest son to become the Earl of Salisbury and she knew that if she remarried that title would pass instead to her husband. After being widowed, she had to surrender Salisbury Castle, but otherwise she retained all of her wealth and served as Sheriff of Wiltshire. Yeah A lot of sources describe her as really like one of the most powerful women in England in the thirteenth century. In twelve thirty, she founded two monasteries in one day. One was for the Carthusian Order and was known as Hinton Charterhouse. Her husband had actually founded a charterhouse for this religious community in Gloucestershire, but the monks had come to Ella saying that this wasn't sufficient to their needs, and then she resettled them on land that she controlled. The other was a house of Augustinian Canonis's at Laycock, Wiltshire. Eventually, Ella decided to pursue a life of religious devotion and she gave up her her title enjoined this community herself. In twelve thirty seven, when this became Laycock Abbey, she became its first abbess, serving in that role for twenty years and continuing to live there after retiring. She died on August twenty fourth, twelve sixty one, and was buried at the abbey she helped to establish. After the dissolution of the monasteries, this church was demolished and her tomb was moved to the abbey's cloisters. As I said earlier, she was really an unusually powerful woman for the time when she lived, and I do wish we knew more about her, Like I want a fuller sense of who she was as a person than we have from these sketchy outlines. We're going to take us quick sponsor break and come back with two more. Now we will move on to two people who we have lots of information about, but so much of that information is mostly visual. The verst is Charles Harris, known as Teeny, which was requested by Virginia. Teeny Harris was a photographer whose work forms a tremendously important record of Pittsburgh's black community from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen seventies. I think we may have read a listener mail about him at some point, maybe even the male that came from Virginia, because I have a vague memory of really gushing over how beautiful his photographs were, because they are truly stunning. Charles Harris was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in nineteen oh eight. He went to school until about the eighth grade and eventually developed an interest in photography. He was mostly self taught, and he became really good at it. His first professional job as a photographer was at a black owned magazine called Flash. After that, he became a photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, which was one of the United States major black newspapers. He also had his own studio, Harris Studio in Pittsburgh's Hill District, where he did portraits and other photography. In spite of the fact that he had very little formal training in photography, he earned the nickname one Shot for how efficient he was at it. His enormous collection of negatives, prints and other material is now part of the collection at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. And when we say enormous, this is at least seventy thousand images and there's a whole additional story behind this collection. In nineteen eighty six, Harris signed an agreement with a photo dealer named Dennis Morgan, who paid him three thousand dollars and promised that he would also pay him royalties on his work, and then Morgan took almost all of Harris's archive. Shortly before his death, Harris filed suit to try to get this archive back. He kept saying he just wanted his negatives, but this case had not concluded by the time Harris died, which was on June twelfth, nineteen ninety eight, at the age of eighty nine. Eventually, a jury ruled that Morgan had breached his contract with Harris and ordered him to pay four point three million dollars in actual and punitive damages. The Harris family ultimately dropped their monetary claim so they could instead get Harris's archive, which is what he had always wanted. The Carnegie Museum purchased this collection in two thousand and one and started the decades long process of conserving and preserving it. A lot of this material had just been stored in a basement without any sleeves around the negatives, so those negatives had to be very carefully separated from one another before they could be digitized. The very thought of that just made my entire back like tents up. Today, those seventy thousand images are available for browsing at the Carnegie Museum of Art website. The Charles Teeny Harris Archive Gallery also opened at the museum on November two of this year. There are photos of life in predominantly black neighborhoods around Pittsburgh and famous people of the day, including Ray, Charles, Louis Armstrong, and Harry Belafonte. And there are self portraits of Harris showing him as a very dapper and stylish man today. One of teeny Harris's cameras is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. A historical marker was also placed outside of the home where he used to live. That was in September of this year, just a couple of months ago, and some of his descendants were there at the ceremony. Our other largely visual topic is Scottish knitter and writer Jane Gagain requested by Anne. She was born Jane Allison on March twenty sixth, eighteen oh four and was the fifth of twelve children born to James Allison and Elizabeth mc claren. James was a tailor and clothier and was a Burgess of Edinburgh and contractor in ordinary to King William the Fourth in Scotland. On November sixteenth, eighteen twenty three, Jane married a merchant named John James Gogain. They went on to have nine children together, although three of those died in infancy. They lived in Edinburgh and they eventually moved into lodgings that were above John James's warehouse. Jane helped expand her husband's business into a thriving haberdashery firm which brought in laces and other goods from France. They made a couple of moves over the years as they were able to afford bigger, better locations, and John James also became a braid manufacturer. Eventually they expanded into selling stationery and Jane started creating patterns. In the mid eighteen thirties. When this was happening, hand knitting and crocheng were becoming popular hobbies for middle and upper class women as well as for royalty. The Gogain's shop in Edinburgh became a really central location for this flourishing craft, Jane started making custom patterns to order, printing her first three patterns in eighteen thirty six. Soon she was expanding this into whole books, starting with The Lady's Assistant for Executing Useful and fancy Designs in Knitting, netting and crochet Work in eighteen forty. She was hugely influential with these patterns. Among other things, she devised a system of notations with abbreviations and figures that was one of the precursors to what's used in these kinds of patterns today. Jane Gogain's books were very successful. She had lots of advanced subscribers, including Dowager Queen Adelaide, wife of King William the Fourth. Her miniature Knitting, Netting and Crochet book, which came out in eighteen forty three, sold twenty three thousand copies in just three years. There were also additional volumes of The Ladies Assistant and other books included The Knitter's Friend, being a selection of receipts for the most useful and saleable articles, Missus Gogain's Crochet Doily Book, and Missus Gogain's Knit Polka Book. In her introduction to The Knitter's Friend, Gogain wrote about how gratified she was that her books had quote been the means of affording a genteel and easy source of livelihood to many industrious females, both in the humble and middle ranks of life. You can find scans of a lot of these books online today. Yeah, if we tried to read the huge amount of information she left behind, we would mostly be reading off knitting and crochet patterns. I also want to point out that she spelled the word Douley in her book titled d Apostrophe O y L E Y, which led me to go look up the etymology of Doiley because I was like, there has to be a story for why this says that was named after a person. So I'm not sure how she got to the d apostrophe O, but I do love it. Ultimately, Jane's work making these pattern books seems to have overshadowed her husband's businesses, and they started to struggle. He was listed as bankrupt at two different points in eighteen forty three and eighteen fifty two. They eventually separated, and in eighteen forty nine they signed an agreement specifying that she would keep all the proceeds from the books and their copyrights. Apparently he cut her out of his will. I have thoughts and feelings. Jane Gagain died on May twentieth, eighteen sixty, reportedly of tuberculosis. Her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes her as living in a tenement with her two daughters. Now the tenement doesn't have quite the same connotations of poverty in Scotland as it does in the US. That same entry lists her wealth at the time of her death as eight hundred and twenty two pounds thirteen shillings five and a half pence. The National Archives Historical Currency Converter puts that as being worth a little more than forty eight thousand pounds in twenty seventeen. That was the year that the converter listed twenty seventeen. Specifically, we'll have our last two stories after another quick sponsor break. Next up is Edward A. Carter Junior, requested by Lisa, who heard about him from her father. Edward Carter Junior was born on May twenty sixth, nineteen sixteen, in Los Angeles. His parents were missionaries, and when he was a child they moved to India to start a church, and then after that they went to China. From his early years he was fascinated with soldiers, and while they were living in China, he was sent to a military school, which seems to have really suited his temperament. Various descriptions of Carter's early life are sketchy and a little contradictory on the details, but it seems like he had a rocky relationship with his parents. When he was about fifteen, he ran away to join the Chinese National Revolutionary Army, which was fighting against Imperial Japan. His father eventually tracked him down and he was expelled from the army when his commanding officers realized how young he was. The descriptions of what was going on in his family life that I read among different sources were wildly different from one another, which is why I have not tried to get in the detail on that. Carter did not give up on military service, though he tried to join the US Army at the age of eighteen and was rejected. He briefly served in the Merchant Marine, and then he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was one of the American volunteer units that fought against Francisco Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War. As Franco's forces closed in on victory in that war, Carter had to escaped to France. Back in the United States, he met Mildred Hoover, and in nineteen forty they got married. In nineteen forty one, he successfully enlisted in the US Army to serve in World War II. After his service in China and Spain, he was already an experienced soldier, unlike virtually all of the other new recruits, and he was promoted several times. But as we've talked about on the show before, during World War II, the US Army was racially segregated, and overwhelmingly all black units were assigned to things like manual labor. Carter was sent to Europe in nineteen forty four with a unit that was going to be doing supply transport. He kept trying to get assigned to combat duty, though, and that became possible after the Allies faced enormous losses during the Battle of the Bulge. At that point, the Army could no longer afford to keep black soldiers out of combat roles. The Army got thousands of black volunteers to go into combat, but they were accepted only if they gave up whatever rank they had earned and went back to being privates. Carter did exactly that, but by this point he had proven himself to be immensely capable. Not long after joining the first Infantry Company, Provisional Seventh Army Negro Company, he was quickly promoted back to sergeant and made a squad leader. His unit became part of a big push into Germany. They needed to cross the Rhine River, but most of the bridges in the area had been destroyed. As they were approaching the one bridge they believed was still intact, they came under small arms and bazooka fire from a warehouse. Carter volunteered to take three men to try to get to the warehouse, which was in the middle of a large field. This involved their crossing about one hundred and fifty yards of open space that had almost nowhere to take cover. They came under fire right away. One of the other men was killed instantly. Carter sent the other two men back to the road embankment, where everyone else was sheltering. One of those two men was killed and the other badly injured. On the way back to that embankment, Carter himself was shot five times and took shrapnel wounds. As he tried to get to the warehouse, he stopped to take some wound tablets. These were antibiotic tablets that were distributed to soldiers to try to prevent infection, and as he took a drink from his canteen to wash them down, the Germans shot it out of his hand. Carter wound up lying in the field, playing dead for about two hours. When German soldiers came out of the warehouse to investigate, he killed six of them, captured two more, and used the two he had captured as a shield to get back to his unit. He spoke German and he interrogated them on the way back to the road embankment. When they got there, he refused any medical treatment until he had finished his interrogation and was able to pass on all of the information he had gathered, information that greatly assisted his unit in getting to the bridge they needed to cross. Eventually, he was sent to the hospital, and when he was recovered enough to leave, he returned to service and trained other soldiers until the end of the war. He was recommended for the Distinguished Service Cross, which was at the time the highest honor of the army was awarding to black soldiers. Back in the United States after the war, Carter initially got a hero's welcome, but unbeknownst to him, Army intelligence had started a file on him in nineteen forty two due to suspicions that he might be a Communist. Even though he was fighting against Japan while in China and was fighting against fascists in Spain, there were concerns that he might have been serving alongside communists. The fact that he could speak Hindi and Mandarin because of where he'd lived before that also raised eyebrows. His attendance at a star studded welcome home dinner for veterans was also held against him, since a lot of those same Hollywood stars were suspected of being Communists. All commanding officers had to file reports on him, and his family members and neighbors were also targeted with investigations. As all this was going on, Carter re enlisted in nineteen forty six, but when that enlistment was up, his next attempt to re enlist was denied with no explanation. He thought there might be racial discrimination at work, so he went to the NAACP and the ACLU. The ACLU said he might be suspected as a communist, and he started trying and failing to clear his name. Eventually, he asked the ACLU to return his Distinguished Service Cross to the Army. He died of lung cancer on January thirtieth, nineteen sixty three. In the nineteen nineties, the US Army started examining service records from World War II, including the records of black soldiers who had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and not the Medal of Honor, which is the United States Armed Forces highest military decoration. After this investigation, President Bill Clinton presented the Medal of Honor to Carter and to six other black men who had earned it during their service but had only been given a lesser award. All but one of those recognitions was posthumous. The next day, Carter's remains were moved to Arlington National Cemetery. It was clear that racial bias was involved in black men not being awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II, but that didn't explain Carter's other experiences with being kept out of the Army. Later on, his daughter in law, Aileen, wife of his son Edward Carter the Third, put in requests about his service under the Freedom of Information Act. That's when all that scrutiny came to light, and the fact that Carter had been kept out of the Army even though there was no evidence that he had any ties to communism. Allen Carter also wrote a book about Carter and his service. After the family's advocacy, in nineteen ninety nine, Edward Carter Junior was formally exonerated of all suspicion. President Clinton and the US Army Vice Chief of Staff John Keene issued a formal apology to the family and to the nation. Carter was also posthumously awarded other medals that he had been eligible for during his service but had not received, including the Army Good Conduct Medal, the Army of Occupation Medal, and the American Campaign Medal. Lastly, we have someone whose story is short, and that's because her life was tragically short. That's Alice Augusta Ball, requested by Angela and many other listeners. She was born in Seattle on July twenty fourth, eighteen ninety two, one of four children born to James Presley and Laura Louise Howard Ball. James and Laura listed their race as black on census and marriage records, but Alice's birth certificate listed her race as white. Most accounts today described her as a black woman. James was a newspaper editor and a lawyer, and Alice's mother and grandfather were both photographers. Alice got an early interest in chemistry through developing photographs. She graduated from Seattle High School in nineteen ten and then went on to turn a bachelor's degree in pharmaceutical chemistry in nineteen twelve and then in pharmacy in nineteen fourteen. Both of those were from the University of Washington. She was a very good student. She co wrote a paper called Ben's Relations and Ether Solution with her professor William Denn which was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in October of nineteen fourteen. They also co authored another paper called Colorometric Studies of Pickrate Solutions that would go on to be published in nineteen seventeen. Ball was offered various scholarships to pursue graduate study. She decided on the University of Hawaii, which at the time was known as the College of Hawaii. She and her family had briefly lived in Hawaii when she was younger, with the hope that the warm weather would help her grandfather's arthritis. In nineteen fifteen, Alice Ball became the first woman and the first black person to earn a master's degree in chemistry from the university. She also taught at the university, making her the first woman to be a chemistry instructor there. Her master's thesis was on the chemical constituents of Piper methysticum or cava. Not long after she graduated, doctor Harry T. Holman got a copy of that thesis. He was a doctor at the Leprosarium on the island of Molokai. We talked about this leprosarium and the history of leprosy also called Hanson's disease in Hawaii on a recent Saturday. Classic. Holman thought that this research might make Ball a good candidate to study the oil made from the seeds of the chalmugra tree, and he asked her for help. Chalmugra oil had been used as a treatment for Hanson's disease in China and India, but it was known for being incredibly unpleasant. It was extremely sticky when used topically and was so foul tasting that people involuntarily threw it up when trying to take it orally. It also could cause additional skin lesions when injected. It's an addition to the lesions that were caused by the disease. This oil did seem to have some efficacy, at least in some people, but all of these side effects were such an ordeal that a lot of patients just refused to do it. Ball discovered how to create an ester ethyl form of this oil, which made its active components water soluble and injectable. These injections were active against the bacteria that caused Hanson's disease, and this became the first effective treatment for it. Although patients work considered to be completely cured afterward, many had negative bacterial cultures and stopped developing the lesions that are typical of the disease. This became the preferred method of treatment until the development of sulfa drugs in the nineteen thirties and forties. Alice Ball was only twenty three years old when she did this work, but tragically, Alice Ball died on December thirty, first nineteen sixteen, at the age of only twenty four. Her death certificate listed her cause of death as tuberculosis. However, an article in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser said that she died of exposure to chlorine gas after some kind of workplace accident involving a gas masked demonstration. The college denied that anything like this accident happened regardless. After her death, Arthur L. Dean, who had been Ball's graduate advisor, continued her work that on its own would have been reasonable, but when he published his findings, he didn't credit her or even mention her work. People started calling this method the Dean method. In nineteen twenty two, Harry T. Holman published a paper of his own in the Archives of Dermatology and Siphilology, detailing how he had gone to Ball for help and naming the process the Ball method. He noted that using this method, seventy eight patients had recovered and were able to be sent home from the leprosarium on Molokai, but this journal wasn't as widely read as Dean's publications, and Dean also eventually became president of the university, so it wasn't until the nineteen seventies that people really started to become more aware of Ball's contributions. There's the chal Mugatry on the campus of the University Hawaii at Manila. In two thousand, a plaque was placed there in honor of Alice Ball, and in two thousand and seven, the University of Hawaii Board of Regents also awarded her with its Medal of Distinction. She is somebody that I have also had on my list for an episode for a really long time and just did not have enough information, And every year or so I would circle back to see if any more information had become available, and when it became clear that that was probably not going to happen, she became part of the Six Impossible episodes. Today, hooray, I have some listener mail that is from Jenna and this is a listener mail about a conversation that Holly and I had in our behind the Scenes episode about Horace Walpole, and Jenner wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly, I'm writing with a quick answer to the question you may not have seriously posed in the Horace Walpole Behind the Scenes episode about whether this was the first novel to be published without attribution, and with a framing device to make it seem like a true story. I'm slowly finishing up a master's degree in English literature, and the rise of the English novel is one of the areas that's really piqued my interest. I actually read The Castle of a Toronto in one class on the subject. While Walpole's version of this framing device is one of the more elaborate I've seen, that kind of framing device was actually fairly common in fiction at the time. Robinson Crusoe, for example, begins with an unnamed editor saying he's put together the book from Crusoe's writings and swearing to their truth. As I understand, this was done at least early on, to convince readers to pick up the book and offset the stigma associated with fiction at the time. This stigma existed for reasons ranging from viewing it as falsehood and therefore inherently sinful, to viewing it as cheap slash lowbrow entertainment for women and commoners. While I can't think of any novels off the top of my head that use this framing device while also leaving off the author, I'm sure there were some. I hope this doesn't come across as patronizing or lexury. I just get excited whenever I have an excuse to talk about literature, especially the rise of the novel in the English speaking world. There's so much stuff we take for granted about fiction, especially literary fiction, so it's interesting to think of a time when people thought they needed excuses to write it. Fun fact, while I don't have a PhD in missed in history, I consider myself to have a master's degree. Since I listened to all of the episodes you two have worked on. I gave up after that, but I think it's still a pretty cool achievement that others might want to join. In Attached as pet tax is my many round panther aria and in her aspect as a land seal, as well as a few more normal picks. We've just moved, so she's been rolling around on her new carpet like there's no tomorrow, as well as a bit more clingy than usual, which I find the opposite of a problem. Thanks, as ever for all the work you do and making stuff I missed in history class accessible and engaging, even if I forget most of it. The second the episode is over all the best. Jenna thank you so much, Jenna, Holly and I. I also forget most of it the second that the episode was over. Also, I did not find this email as lectury or patronizing at all. I know and informative. The frame stories I could think of from like literary fiction of that era, were mostly from things that were later than the Castle of Toronto. I did not immediately think of anything earlier when we were talking about that on the episode, so it is good to know. I also really like this interest in the rise of the novel in the English speaking world, in part because when I was in college, I was required to take either a class called the Art of the Novel or Masterpieces in Drama. I don't know why I remember this. I wanted to take the Art of the Novel, but they were offered in alternate semesters, and the one that was going to fit with my schedule was Masterpieces in Drama. So I might have known this already, but possibly not remembered it at all because college was more than twenty years ago at this point. Yeah. For whatever reason, though, I remember more about the class where we talked about Castle of a Toronto than anything else from the entire time. I love these kiddy cat pictures. Everybody who has a black cat, I love them. I love ours. We just got back from Iceland the day before yesterday, so mine also are being extra clingy. I love it. I love cleany cat time. Yeah, I've gotten my face licked off. It's all good. Thanks so much Jenna for this email. If you'd like to send us a note about this or any other podcast or history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed An History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey E. V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It's time for six Impossible Episodes. This is when I round up six topics that, for one reason or another, they don't really work as a full episode. Sometimes it's just a lack of information. We will not know a ton about a particular person or thing. For two of today's topics, we do have quite a bit of information, but a lot of that is visual. This is an audio podcast, we would be describing visual things at length, and I don't think that would work out very well for what we do. This is actually our third installment of six Impossible Episodes that has been devoted entirely to listener requests, and I've been hanging on to a lot of these requests for months years. So first up, from listener Tina, we have Nellie Cashman. Nellie Cashman was born to a Catholic family in Ireland in eighteen forty four or eighteen forty five. Her parents were Patrick and Fanny o'cassane. Their family name was anglicized at some point later on and she was christened with the name Ellen. It might be possible to do a whole episode about her because there is a lot of information available about her life, but some of what's around is really contradictory or possibly apocryphal. Her life also followed a pattern as she moved from place to place, so parts of it would start to really feel a bit repetitive. Nellie was born right at the start of the Great Famine in Ireland. We have a two part episode on this that came out in twenty thirteen. But essentially a lot of people in Ireland were tenant farmers and they were subsisting mostly on potatoes, as in getting about eighty percent of their daily calories from their potato crops. Anything else they grew or raised was to sell, not to eat. Starting in eighteen forty five, a blight killed the potato crop and that went on multiple years in a row, leaving these farmers and their families without their biggest food source. The British government was also in control of Ireland and took a very lais a fair approach to the situation, and also continued to export those other foods which might have been used to help people make up for the loss of their potato crop. This was a catastrophe. More than a million people died of hunger or disease because of it. The famine also led to a huge wave of emigration out of Ireland, including Nelly's family. She, her mother, and her sister Fanny, were in Boston by about eighteen fifty. From there they went to San Francisco, where Fans and he later married another Irish immigrant named Tom Cunningham. After Fanny's death in eighteen eighty four, Nellie took over the care of Fanny's five children. As far as we know, Nellie herself never got married. Much later, on the Phoenix Daily, Harold carried a report that she was going to marry a man named Mike Sullivan, but there's no record anywhere else of this person or of a marriage between them. A couple of sources used in this episode quote her as saying that she did not have time for marriage, and that quote men are a nuisance anyhow, now, aren't they They're just little boys grown up as quotable a quote as that is. Neither of the sources that included it cited where this might have come from, and my attempts to find it in newspapers of the day were unsuccessful. By eighteen seventy two, Nellie was making her living by following discoveries of silver and gold, opening boarding houses and restaurants, and provisioning and providing loans to people who hoped to strike it rich. Also known as grubstaking. Nellie also staked mining claims of her own in some of the places where she lived, going out into remote areas in sturdy boots and trousers. It's much easier to find newspaper quotes of her describing the uselessness of skirts while doing this kind of work, but surviving portraits of her generally show her in the long skirts that were common for women of the day. Yeah, this is where she had the similar pattern as she moved from place to place, She'd follow the gold or silver strike, stay there until it started to be played out, and then move on to the next thing. Gold and silver Russias took her so many places. There was pH Nevada, Cassiir in Northern British Columbia, Canada, Tombstone, Arizona, Kingston, New Mexico, various parts of Alaska and Canada. During the Klondike gold Rush, he was a successful business woman and sometimes also a successful prospector and minor, and sometimes she was one of the only women in the area where she was living. Her business and mining successes funded an array of religious and charitable efforts in the various places where she lived. Nellie was a devout Catholic, and among other things, she raised funds for Tombstone's first Catholic church and a Catholic church and hospital in Alaska, and sometimes she went to extreme efforts to help other people, like over the winter of eighteen seventy four to eighteen seventy five, she heard that miners who had decided to stay in the Cassier Mountains rather than coming back to town were starving and that they had started to develop scurvy. She undertook a mission to take fresh vegetables and potatoes, which contained vitamin C, to those stranded miners. Some of the descriptions of this make it sound like she was the one making the financial and logistical arrangements, but others she undertook the mission herself when troops from the Canadian Army refused. In this version, when the snow was too deep to traverse with sled dogs, she and a group of men she'd recruited, put on snow shoes and pulled the sleds themselves. At one point during this journey, she was buried in an avalanche in the night. After weeks of travel, she successfully made it to the miners, who reportedly all survived thanks to her efforts, and then afterwards she was known as the Angel of the Kafar Mountains. Cashman's charitable efforts also took her to places that other people simply would not go. For example, in eighteen eighty three, six men carried out a robbery in Bisbee, Arizona, during which they killed five people. Afterward, one of the robbers was lynched and the others were scheduled for a mass hanging. Cashman seems to have been one of a very few people who thought they deserved to be treated humanly, even after having committed a heinous crime. She visited them in jail and acted as their confessor and their spiritual counselor. When she learned that local businessmen were building a grandstand for the public to watch the hanging, she was appalled. She hired some men to tear down the grandstand in the middle of the night before the hanging. Took place on August thirteenth, nineteen twelve. Cashman became the first woman known to vote in Alaska. That was a year before non indigenous women were legally given the right to do so there, and we don't really know whether she knew that her vote was actually illegal at the time. Nellie Cashman spent much of the last years of her life in the northern parts of Alaska and western Canada. In addition to mining, she had a team of sled dogs, and at one point she set a record as a mucher. She died in Victoria, British Columbia, on January fourth, nineteen twenty five, at the age of about eighty, at a hospital that she had helped to fund. In nineteen ninety four, she was featured on a US postage stamp in a series called Legends of the West. In twenty fourteen, a monument was erected in her honor in Middleton, Ireland. Moving on from Nellie Cashman, next we have Ella of Salisbury, requested by Josiah. The exact year of her birth is unclear, but her parents were William, second Earl of Salisbury and his wife Eleanor de Vitree. William died in eleven ninety six, and most sources say that Ella was around nine years old when this happened. Ella was her father's only heir, and after his death she was considered a ward of King Richard the First, but then she disappeared. Like a lot of things about Ella's life, the circumstances around this are vague, but it seems that she was taken to Normandy and hidden there, possibly with her mother and possibly sheltered by her mother's family. The two main possibilities for what was going on here or that someone was imprisoning her to try to get at her wealth, or that someone was hiding her to protect her from that same thing. A knight named William Talbot disguised himself as a pilgrim to go to Normandy and retrieve Ella. He spent about two years looking for her, finally found her and took her back to the king. After this, Talbot became one of the Salisbury family retainers. Eventually, Ella was married to William Longspy, illegitimate son of King Henry the Second and half brother to King's Richard and his successor, John Lackland. William became the third Earl of Salisbury through this marriage, which was probably arranged while Ella was still a child, but not performed until she had come of age. Ella and William had at least six children together. Some sources say four sons and two daughters, others say four and four. We know very little about her marriage or her family life, but we do know that she and her husband laid some of the foundation stones for the Salisbury Cathedral when construction began in twelve twenty. Her husband, William, was part of various military campaigns on behalf of the king, and at one point he was believed to have been lost at sea. Another man came and tried to marry Ella, but she refused him. William then did die at Salisbury Castle on March seventh, twelve twenty sixth, and he was buried in the cathedral. It is possible that he had been poisoned by one of his enemies. His tomb was reportedly opened in the late eighteenth century and the body of a rat was found inside his skull that showed evidence of arsenic poisoning. I love that imagery as much as I hate anybody to be poisoned with arsnik. After her husband's death, Ella was Countess of Salisbury in her own right. She never remarried, which some sources attribute to her devotion to her late husband. Others suggest that she wanted her oldest son to become the Earl of Salisbury and she knew that if she remarried that title would pass instead to her husband. After being widowed, she had to surrender Salisbury Castle, but otherwise she retained all of her wealth and served as Sheriff of Wiltshire. Yeah A lot of sources describe her as really like one of the most powerful women in England in the thirteenth century. In twelve thirty, she founded two monasteries in one day. One was for the Carthusian Order and was known as Hinton Charterhouse. Her husband had actually founded a charterhouse for this religious community in Gloucestershire, but the monks had come to Ella saying that this wasn't sufficient to their needs, and then she resettled them on land that she controlled. The other was a house of Augustinian Canonis's at Laycock, Wiltshire. Eventually, Ella decided to pursue a life of religious devotion and she gave up her her title enjoined this community herself. In twelve thirty seven, when this became Laycock Abbey, she became its first abbess, serving in that role for twenty years and continuing to live there after retiring. She died on August twenty fourth, twelve sixty one, and was buried at the abbey she helped to establish. After the dissolution of the monasteries, this church was demolished and her tomb was moved to the abbey's cloisters. As I said earlier, she was really an unusually powerful woman for the time when she lived, and I do wish we knew more about her, Like I want a fuller sense of who she was as a person than we have from these sketchy outlines. We're going to take us quick sponsor break and come back with two more. Now we will move on to two people who we have lots of information about, but so much of that information is mostly visual. The verst is Charles Harris, known as Teeny, which was requested by Virginia. Teeny Harris was a photographer whose work forms a tremendously important record of Pittsburgh's black community from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen seventies. I think we may have read a listener mail about him at some point, maybe even the male that came from Virginia, because I have a vague memory of really gushing over how beautiful his photographs were, because they are truly stunning. Charles Harris was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in nineteen oh eight. He went to school until about the eighth grade and eventually developed an interest in photography. He was mostly self taught, and he became really good at it. His first professional job as a photographer was at a black owned magazine called Flash. After that, he became a photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, which was one of the United States major black newspapers. He also had his own studio, Harris Studio in Pittsburgh's Hill District, where he did portraits and other photography. In spite of the fact that he had very little formal training in photography, he earned the nickname one Shot for how efficient he was at it. His enormous collection of negatives, prints and other material is now part of the collection at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. And when we say enormous, this is at least seventy thousand images and there's a whole additional story behind this collection. In nineteen eighty six, Harris signed an agreement with a photo dealer named Dennis Morgan, who paid him three thousand dollars and promised that he would also pay him royalties on his work, and then Morgan took almost all of Harris's archive. Shortly before his death, Harris filed suit to try to get this archive back. He kept saying he just wanted his negatives, but this case had not concluded by the time Harris died, which was on June twelfth, nineteen ninety eight, at the age of eighty nine. Eventually, a jury ruled that Morgan had breached his contract with Harris and ordered him to pay four point three million dollars in actual and punitive damages. The Harris family ultimately dropped their monetary claim so they could instead get Harris's archive, which is what he had always wanted. The Carnegie Museum purchased this collection in two thousand and one and started the decades long process of conserving and preserving it. A lot of this material had just been stored in a basement without any sleeves around the negatives, so those negatives had to be very carefully separated from one another before they could be digitized. The very thought of that just made my entire back like tents up. Today, those seventy thousand images are available for browsing at the Carnegie Museum of Art website. The Charles Teeny Harris Archive Gallery also opened at the museum on November two of this year. There are photos of life in predominantly black neighborhoods around Pittsburgh and famous people of the day, including Ray, Charles, Louis Armstrong, and Harry Belafonte. And there are self portraits of Harris showing him as a very dapper and stylish man today. One of teeny Harris's cameras is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. A historical marker was also placed outside of the home where he used to live. That was in September of this year, just a couple of months ago, and some of his descendants were there at the ceremony. Our other largely visual topic is Scottish knitter and writer Jane Gagain requested by Anne. She was born Jane Allison on March twenty sixth, eighteen oh four and was the fifth of twelve children born to James Allison and Elizabeth mc claren. James was a tailor and clothier and was a Burgess of Edinburgh and contractor in ordinary to King William the Fourth in Scotland. On November sixteenth, eighteen twenty three, Jane married a merchant named John James Gogain. They went on to have nine children together, although three of those died in infancy. They lived in Edinburgh and they eventually moved into lodgings that were above John James's warehouse. Jane helped expand her husband's business into a thriving haberdashery firm which brought in laces and other goods from France. They made a couple of moves over the years as they were able to afford bigger, better locations, and John James also became a braid manufacturer. Eventually they expanded into selling stationery and Jane started creating patterns. In the mid eighteen thirties. When this was happening, hand knitting and crocheng were becoming popular hobbies for middle and upper class women as well as for royalty. The Gogain's shop in Edinburgh became a really central location for this flourishing craft, Jane started making custom patterns to order, printing her first three patterns in eighteen thirty six. Soon she was expanding this into whole books, starting with The Lady's Assistant for Executing Useful and fancy Designs in Knitting, netting and crochet Work in eighteen forty. She was hugely influential with these patterns. Among other things, she devised a system of notations with abbreviations and figures that was one of the precursors to what's used in these kinds of patterns today. Jane Gogain's books were very successful. She had lots of advanced subscribers, including Dowager Queen Adelaide, wife of King William the Fourth. Her miniature Knitting, Netting and Crochet book, which came out in eighteen forty three, sold twenty three thousand copies in just three years. There were also additional volumes of The Ladies Assistant and other books included The Knitter's Friend, being a selection of receipts for the most useful and saleable articles, Missus Gogain's Crochet Doily Book, and Missus Gogain's Knit Polka Book. In her introduction to The Knitter's Friend, Gogain wrote about how gratified she was that her books had quote been the means of affording a genteel and easy source of livelihood to many industrious females, both in the humble and middle ranks of life. You can find scans of a lot of these books online today. Yeah, if we tried to read the huge amount of information she left behind, we would mostly be reading off knitting and crochet patterns. I also want to point out that she spelled the word Douley in her book titled d Apostrophe O y L E Y, which led me to go look up the etymology of Doiley because I was like, there has to be a story for why this says that was named after a person. So I'm not sure how she got to the d apostrophe O, but I do love it. Ultimately, Jane's work making these pattern books seems to have overshadowed her husband's businesses, and they started to struggle. He was listed as bankrupt at two different points in eighteen forty three and eighteen fifty two. They eventually separated, and in eighteen forty nine they signed an agreement specifying that she would keep all the proceeds from the books and their copyrights. Apparently he cut her out of his will. I have thoughts and feelings. Jane Gagain died on May twentieth, eighteen sixty, reportedly of tuberculosis. Her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes her as living in a tenement with her two daughters. Now the tenement doesn't have quite the same connotations of poverty in Scotland as it does in the US. That same entry lists her wealth at the time of her death as eight hundred and twenty two pounds thirteen shillings five and a half pence. The National Archives Historical Currency Converter puts that as being worth a little more than forty eight thousand pounds in twenty seventeen. That was the year that the converter listed twenty seventeen. Specifically, we'll have our last two stories after another quick sponsor break. Next up is Edward A. Carter Junior, requested by Lisa, who heard about him from her father. Edward Carter Junior was born on May twenty sixth, nineteen sixteen, in Los Angeles. His parents were missionaries, and when he was a child they moved to India to start a church, and then after that they went to China. From his early years he was fascinated with soldiers, and while they were living in China, he was sent to a military school, which seems to have really suited his temperament. Various descriptions of Carter's early life are sketchy and a little contradictory on the details, but it seems like he had a rocky relationship with his parents. When he was about fifteen, he ran away to join the Chinese National Revolutionary Army, which was fighting against Imperial Japan. His father eventually tracked him down and he was expelled from the army when his commanding officers realized how young he was. The descriptions of what was going on in his family life that I read among different sources were wildly different from one another, which is why I have not tried to get in the detail on that. Carter did not give up on military service, though he tried to join the US Army at the age of eighteen and was rejected. He briefly served in the Merchant Marine, and then he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was one of the American volunteer units that fought against Francisco Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War. As Franco's forces closed in on victory in that war, Carter had to escaped to France. Back in the United States, he met Mildred Hoover, and in nineteen forty they got married. In nineteen forty one, he successfully enlisted in the US Army to serve in World War II. After his service in China and Spain, he was already an experienced soldier, unlike virtually all of the other new recruits, and he was promoted several times. But as we've talked about on the show before, during World War II, the US Army was racially segregated, and overwhelmingly all black units were assigned to things like manual labor. Carter was sent to Europe in nineteen forty four with a unit that was going to be doing supply transport. He kept trying to get assigned to combat duty, though, and that became possible after the Allies faced enormous losses during the Battle of the Bulge. At that point, the Army could no longer afford to keep black soldiers out of combat roles. The Army got thousands of black volunteers to go into combat, but they were accepted only if they gave up whatever rank they had earned and went back to being privates. Carter did exactly that, but by this point he had proven himself to be immensely capable. Not long after joining the first Infantry Company, Provisional Seventh Army Negro Company, he was quickly promoted back to sergeant and made a squad leader. His unit became part of a big push into Germany. They needed to cross the Rhine River, but most of the bridges in the area had been destroyed. As they were approaching the one bridge they believed was still intact, they came under small arms and bazooka fire from a warehouse. Carter volunteered to take three men to try to get to the warehouse, which was in the middle of a large field. This involved their crossing about one hundred and fifty yards of open space that had almost nowhere to take cover. They came under fire right away. One of the other men was killed instantly. Carter sent the other two men back to the road embankment, where everyone else was sheltering. One of those two men was killed and the other badly injured. On the way back to that embankment, Carter himself was shot five times and took shrapnel wounds. As he tried to get to the warehouse, he stopped to take some wound tablets. These were antibiotic tablets that were distributed to soldiers to try to prevent infection, and as he took a drink from his canteen to wash them down, the Germans shot it out of his hand. Carter wound up lying in the field, playing dead for about two hours. When German soldiers came out of the warehouse to investigate, he killed six of them, captured two more, and used the two he had captured as a shield to get back to his unit. He spoke German and he interrogated them on the way back to the road embankment. When they got there, he refused any medical treatment until he had finished his interrogation and was able to pass on all of the information he had gathered, information that greatly assisted his unit in getting to the bridge they needed to cross. Eventually, he was sent to the hospital, and when he was recovered enough to leave, he returned to service and trained other soldiers until the end of the war. He was recommended for the Distinguished Service Cross, which was at the time the highest honor of the army was awarding to black soldiers. Back in the United States after the war, Carter initially got a hero's welcome, but unbeknownst to him, Army intelligence had started a file on him in nineteen forty two due to suspicions that he might be a Communist. Even though he was fighting against Japan while in China and was fighting against fascists in Spain, there were concerns that he might have been serving alongside communists. The fact that he could speak Hindi and Mandarin because of where he'd lived before that also raised eyebrows. His attendance at a star studded welcome home dinner for veterans was also held against him, since a lot of those same Hollywood stars were suspected of being Communists. All commanding officers had to file reports on him, and his family members and neighbors were also targeted with investigations. As all this was going on, Carter re enlisted in nineteen forty six, but when that enlistment was up, his next attempt to re enlist was denied with no explanation. He thought there might be racial discrimination at work, so he went to the NAACP and the ACLU. The ACLU said he might be suspected as a communist, and he started trying and failing to clear his name. Eventually, he asked the ACLU to return his Distinguished Service Cross to the Army. He died of lung cancer on January thirtieth, nineteen sixty three. In the nineteen nineties, the US Army started examining service records from World War II, including the records of black soldiers who had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and not the Medal of Honor, which is the United States Armed Forces highest military decoration. After this investigation, President Bill Clinton presented the Medal of Honor to Carter and to six other black men who had earned it during their service but had only been given a lesser award. All but one of those recognitions was posthumous. The next day, Carter's remains were moved to Arlington National Cemetery. It was clear that racial bias was involved in black men not being awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II, but that didn't explain Carter's other experiences with being kept out of the Army. Later on, his daughter in law, Aileen, wife of his son Edward Carter the Third, put in requests about his service under the Freedom of Information Act. That's when all that scrutiny came to light, and the fact that Carter had been kept out of the Army even though there was no evidence that he had any ties to communism. Allen Carter also wrote a book about Carter and his service. After the family's advocacy, in nineteen ninety nine, Edward Carter Junior was formally exonerated of all suspicion. President Clinton and the US Army Vice Chief of Staff John Keene issued a formal apology to the family and to the nation. Carter was also posthumously awarded other medals that he had been eligible for during his service but had not received, including the Army Good Conduct Medal, the Army of Occupation Medal, and the American Campaign Medal. Lastly, we have someone whose story is short, and that's because her life was tragically short. That's Alice Augusta Ball, requested by Angela and many other listeners. She was born in Seattle on July twenty fourth, eighteen ninety two, one of four children born to James Presley and Laura Louise Howard Ball. James and Laura listed their race as black on census and marriage records, but Alice's birth certificate listed her race as white. Most accounts today described her as a black woman. James was a newspaper editor and a lawyer, and Alice's mother and grandfather were both photographers. Alice got an early interest in chemistry through developing photographs. She graduated from Seattle High School in nineteen ten and then went on to turn a bachelor's degree in pharmaceutical chemistry in nineteen twelve and then in pharmacy in nineteen fourteen. Both of those were from the University of Washington. She was a very good student. She co wrote a paper called Ben's Relations and Ether Solution with her professor William Denn which was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in October of nineteen fourteen. They also co authored another paper called Colorometric Studies of Pickrate Solutions that would go on to be published in nineteen seventeen. Ball was offered various scholarships to pursue graduate study. She decided on the University of Hawaii, which at the time was known as the College of Hawaii. She and her family had briefly lived in Hawaii when she was younger, with the hope that the warm weather would help her grandfather's arthritis. In nineteen fifteen, Alice Ball became the first woman and the first black person to earn a master's degree in chemistry from the university. She also taught at the university, making her the first woman to be a chemistry instructor there. Her master's thesis was on the chemical constituents of Piper methysticum or cava. Not long after she graduated, doctor Harry T. Holman got a copy of that thesis. He was a doctor at the Leprosarium on the island of Molokai. We talked about this leprosarium and the history of leprosy also called Hanson's disease in Hawaii on a recent Saturday. Classic. Holman thought that this research might make Ball a good candidate to study the oil made from the seeds of the chalmugra tree, and he asked her for help. Chalmugra oil had been used as a treatment for Hanson's disease in China and India, but it was known for being incredibly unpleasant. It was extremely sticky when used topically and was so foul tasting that people involuntarily threw it up when trying to take it orally. It also could cause additional skin lesions when injected. It's an addition to the lesions that were caused by the disease. This oil did seem to have some efficacy, at least in some people, but all of these side effects were such an ordeal that a lot of patients just refused to do it. Ball discovered how to create an ester ethyl form of this oil, which made its active components water soluble and injectable. These injections were active against the bacteria that caused Hanson's disease, and this became the first effective treatment for it. Although patients work considered to be completely cured afterward, many had negative bacterial cultures and stopped developing the lesions that are typical of the disease. This became the preferred method of treatment until the development of sulfa drugs in the nineteen thirties and forties. Alice Ball was only twenty three years old when she did this work, but tragically, Alice Ball died on December thirty, first nineteen sixteen, at the age of only twenty four. Her death certificate listed her cause of death as tuberculosis. However, an article in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser said that she died of exposure to chlorine gas after some kind of workplace accident involving a gas masked demonstration. The college denied that anything like this accident happened regardless. After her death, Arthur L. Dean, who had been Ball's graduate advisor, continued her work that on its own would have been reasonable, but when he published his findings, he didn't credit her or even mention her work. People started calling this method the Dean method. In nineteen twenty two, Harry T. Holman published a paper of his own in the Archives of Dermatology and Siphilology, detailing how he had gone to Ball for help and naming the process the Ball method. He noted that using this method, seventy eight patients had recovered and were able to be sent home from the leprosarium on Molokai, but this journal wasn't as widely read as Dean's publications, and Dean also eventually became president of the university, so it wasn't until the nineteen seventies that people really started to become more aware of Ball's contributions. There's the chal Mugatry on the campus of the University Hawaii at Manila. In two thousand, a plaque was placed there in honor of Alice Ball, and in two thousand and seven, the University of Hawaii Board of Regents also awarded her with its Medal of Distinction. She is somebody that I have also had on my list for an episode for a really long time and just did not have enough information, And every year or so I would circle back to see if any more information had become available, and when it became clear that that was probably not going to happen, she became part of the Six Impossible episodes. Today, hooray, I have some listener mail that is from Jenna and this is a listener mail about a conversation that Holly and I had in our behind the Scenes episode about Horace Walpole, and Jenner wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly, I'm writing with a quick answer to the question you may not have seriously posed in the Horace Walpole Behind the Scenes episode about whether this was the first novel to be published without attribution, and with a framing device to make it seem like a true story. I'm slowly finishing up a master's degree in English literature, and the rise of the English novel is one of the areas that's really piqued my interest. I actually read The Castle of a Toronto in one class on the subject. While Walpole's version of this framing device is one of the more elaborate I've seen, that kind of framing device was actually fairly common in fiction at the time. Robinson Crusoe, for example, begins with an unnamed editor saying he's put together the book from Crusoe's writings and swearing to their truth. As I understand, this was done at least early on, to convince readers to pick up the book and offset the stigma associated with fiction at the time. This stigma existed for reasons ranging from viewing it as falsehood and therefore inherently sinful, to viewing it as cheap slash lowbrow entertainment for women and commoners. While I can't think of any novels off the top of my head that use this framing device while also leaving off the author, I'm sure there were some. I hope this doesn't come across as patronizing or lexury. I just get excited whenever I have an excuse to talk about literature, especially the rise of the novel in the English speaking world. There's so much stuff we take for granted about fiction, especially literary fiction, so it's interesting to think of a time when people thought they needed excuses to write it. Fun fact, while I don't have a PhD in missed in history, I consider myself to have a master's degree. Since I listened to all of the episodes you two have worked on. I gave up after that, but I think it's still a pretty cool achievement that others might want to join. In Attached as pet tax is my many round panther aria and in her aspect as a land seal, as well as a few more normal picks. We've just moved, so she's been rolling around on her new carpet like there's no tomorrow, as well as a bit more clingy than usual, which I find the opposite of a problem. Thanks, as ever for all the work you do and making stuff I missed in history class accessible and engaging, even if I forget most of it. The second the episode is over all the best. Jenna thank you so much, Jenna, Holly and I. I also forget most of it the second that the episode was over. Also, I did not find this email as lectury or patronizing at all. I know and informative. The frame stories I could think of from like literary fiction of that era, were mostly from things that were later than the Castle of Toronto. I did not immediately think of anything earlier when we were talking about that on the episode, so it is good to know. I also really like this interest in the rise of the novel in the English speaking world, in part because when I was in college, I was required to take either a class called the Art of the Novel or Masterpieces in Drama. I don't know why I remember this. I wanted to take the Art of the Novel, but they were offered in alternate semesters, and the one that was going to fit with my schedule was Masterpieces in Drama. So I might have known this already, but possibly not remembered it at all because college was more than twenty years ago at this point. Yeah. For whatever reason, though, I remember more about the class where we talked about Castle of a Toronto than anything else from the entire time. I love these kiddy cat pictures. Everybody who has a black cat, I love them. I love ours. We just got back from Iceland the day before yesterday, so mine also are being extra clingy. I love it. I love cleany cat time. Yeah, I've gotten my face licked off. It's all good. Thanks so much Jenna for this email. If you'd like to send us a note about this or any other podcast or history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed An History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.