Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, Fun Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and Tracy Wilson. About six months ago, we put out an episode that was called Six Impossible Episodes, and it was six subjects that are really frequent listener requests, but for some reason or another they could not really stand on their own as individual episodes. And people seem to enjoy that one. And since then we've collected another heaping handful of topics that people are asking for a lot, but which we can't quite be a whole show on. So today six more Impossible Episodes. All right, These are fun because it's a you know, a little less intensive than digging super deep in like a long, full length episode, and it's like a nice little shworket sport. Yes, and I am writing on an airplane four times in six days, so that's why we're doing this today. Yeah, there, it's going to be super fun. I love it. So. First one, anytime we say anything about Paul Revere on our Facebook posts or anywhere else on the internet, really at least one person, but far more often it is more than one asks the same question, which is, how come nobody ever talks about Sybil Luddington, and so in case you maybe aren't from the United States, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Paul Revere was part of a now famous ride to spread the word of an impending attack, and later on in the war, Sybil Luddington also made a different but far less famous ride. So anytime we say Paul Revere, it's like a call in response somebody else says Sybil Lendington. You could use that as the alternate to Marco Polo is a pool game, I'm pretty sure. So. Sybil was born in Connecticut on April fifth, seventeen sixty one, and when she was still a abe, her family moved to Duchess County, New York, which lies along the New York Connecticut border. Her father, Henry Luttington, had decades of military experience, so as war loomed between Britain and its colonies in North America, he quickly became a colonel and was put in command of a regiment that was responsible for guarding territory along the New York Connecticut border. This is a pretty critical piece of land because it was one of the primary ways that the Loyalists could reach Long Island Sound from elsewhere farther inland. That's why when Governor William Tryon and his men rated Danbury, Connecticut in seventeen seventy seven, a rider was sent from Danbury to the Luddington home in Duchess County to ask Sybel's father to send help. Danbury was also strategically important, and it was home to several Continental Army storehouses that were full of food, munitions, and other supplies. So this rider that had been dispatched was too exhausted to continue by the time he got to the letting and home, and Colonel Luddington needed to prepare for battle, so he sent his oldest child, Sibyl, to muster his forces so they could go to Danbury's aid. It's not totally clear whether she volunteered for this task or whether she was sent, and at this point, Sybil had just turned sixteen, and her ride wound through forty miles of mostly wooded territory at night. So Sybil's age and the length of her ride, which was longer than Paul Revere's, are often held up as reasons why she is really more deserving of a claim than Paul Revere was. And then there's often this undertone of well, she should have had that acclaim, and she would have if she were a man. But as most of these things go, there's more to it than that. Paul Revere's ride is famous largely because of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, first published in eighteen sixty one, and that is the one that starts with listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. It's not a very historically accurate poem, which is why a lot of people remember wrong things about Paul Revere's ride, including that he was not the only one that was on it. Right, the poem is only about him. But this poem was written more than eighty years after the ride in question took place, and it was written after Longfellow visited the Old North Church in Boston, which is more more formally known as Christ Church. And the Old North Church is the one where the one if by Land too if by Sea signal lanterns were hung. And there are several likely reasons why Paul Revere is the star of this poem and not someone else. Apart from his ride to warn of the attack, he was a prominent Boston citizen and an active participant in other parts of the Revolutionary War. For example, he made an engraving of the Boston massacre that we talked about in our episode on that event. Paul Revere also served with Longfellow's grandfather in the service, And just to be really basic about it, I think we should add that Revere is easy to rhyme things with. It is much easier to rhyme things with than Luddington. So when Longfellow was writing his poem about someone he had a family connection to, whose ride connected to a place he had just visited, Luddington's story hadn't even been written down yet. It survived as family lore for roughly one hundred years before it was actually published anywhere, and Sybil's great nephew, historian Lewis S. Patrick, wrote about it in nineteen o seven, at which point school children were already memorizing the Longfellow poem. So you could totally make the argument that Civil Lettington's gender meant she could not make a name for herself the way Paul Revere did and later become famous thanks to a historically inaccurate poem. We just don't really know anything about her beyond the fact that when the war was over, she got married to a Revolutionary word veteran named Edward Ogden. They had a son, and they later opened a tavern, and she died on February eighteen thirty nine. Just was not the sort of prominent, publicly facing citizen that Paul Revere had been, and we don't have any primary source documentation about her ride at all, and even tiny details like how she spelled her name are different based on the things like her tombstone, her signature, and census records literally spelled differently in all of those places. So in terms of no one talking about her, there are many many children's books about Sibyl Lannington, and she was commemorate commemorated on a bicentennial postage stamp in even when she lived, George Washington himself came to her home to thank her personally for having written to muster all the men after the Battle of Danbury. There is a particularly fierce looking statue of her in Carmel, New York, along with a number of historical markers along her ride route. So her story just was not well known at all outside of her family and maybe local neighbor from the area when the poem that made Paul Revere famous was written. Like, that poem was solidly in the collective memory of America before Sibyl Luddington's story was even written down at all. Yeah, that poem has great scansion, and so it's really easy to remember and it's really kind of engaging. But as the sort of sad coda as well, Colonel Luddington's efforts were also too late to save Danbury. The British burned thousands of barrels of food along with tents, shoes, and other supplies before Luddington and other reinforcements were able to arrive. So that is the story of Sybil Lettington and also why people talk about Paul Revere more. Uh. Next up, we have one that was requested first by Diane long enough ago that it is number fifty six on our listeners submitted Ideas list, which is now hundreds and hundreds of ideas long. It is the Capuchin Catacomb in Palermo, Sicily, which are home to about eight thousand mummies. The Capucin community in Palermo was established in fifteen thirty four at the Church of Santa Maria de la Pacha. At first, the Friars who lived there were buried in what was essentially a mass grave, but about sixty years later the monastery outgrew. That's that mass burial site, so the Friars decided to dig a larger set of catacombs using natural caves that already existed in the area. Doing this required them to exhume the bodies that had already been buried, and when they did, they found that forty five of them had been naturally preserved and we're just in a really pristine condition. Their bodies had dehydrated rather than rotting. They interpreted this as a sign from God, and then, rather than proceeding with what had essentially been planned as a bigger mass grave, they decided instead to keep the exhumed bodies intact and displayed them as religious relics, and the new burial site that they created was built with that end goal in mind. They also gradually refined the caves natural preservation process into an intentional mummification, which included removing the organs and stuffing the cavity of the bodies with straw and placing the bodies on terra cotta tubes to help them dry faster. The Friars used a number of other preservation methods as well. Sylvestro of Gubio was a sixteenth century Capuchin monk, and he was the first to be buried in these new catacombs. Originally, the only bodies that were placed in the catacombs were those of Friars who were part of the Order after they died. But eventually, as words spread about the catacombs, being mummified and placed there after death became a mark of high status, so the bodies of nobility and famous local citizens joined that those of the Friars, and eventually the Order began allowing the burial of anyone who requested it in seventy three. One of the things that makes this place so compelling is that the bodies, which are very well preserved, are out in view you. They're dressed. Family members would even come to change the body's clothes. And some are on shelves, some hang from hooks, and some are in open coffin like containers. Some are posed almost as though their taxidermy displays. And there's one hall that's entirely the bodies of infants, some of them in cradles, and although they're arranged into approximate categories like professionals, priests, monks, virgins. Relatively few of these bodies are actually identifying. The Friars stopped burying new bodies there in eighteen eighty, and they made only two exceptions afterward. One was Giovanni Patterniti, who was buried in nineteen eleven, and the other was Rosalia Lombardo, who was two years old and placed there in nineteen twenty. The monks teamed up with the European Union to start a conservation project on the site in two thousand eight, because it has become a major tourist destination, but very little had been done up to that point in the centuries since it was first built to preserve it. We're going to put an image gallery of some pictures of this place on our website because it is incredible to look at. But most of the information that's available about it in English as of right now is sort of like travel god type of stuff. It's it's a tourist attraction at this point, and most of the things that are written about it are written in that vein, so I could not find enough richer information to make a whole episode out of it, but so many people have asked, we want to spend a whole time today. Cool, So before we go to our next impossible episode, you want to pause from a brief word from a sponsor sounds good. Our most recent requests for our next subject, who is jean Ditisson, came from Laramie and Mary and two different emails very recently, and she, unfortunately, is yet another person who falls into the not enough reliable information available in English category. We've had some folks right in to tell us that we just need to hire some people who speak other languages, y'all. It's just the two of us and NOL. Like, we don't have like a staff budget. No, we we don't have a translation staff. We literally look so many things up and we still get them wrong because we are not fluent speakers of every language, because it is just the two of us and NOL. Yeah, and we do try to outsource whilm we can, but sometimes it's just not feasible right when you're working, uh so. Jeanne de Clisson was a noblewoman and a pirate. In THTT three, her second husband, Olivier, the third Lord of Clisson, was executed for treason upon the orders of King Philip the sixth of France, so n pulled her money. She bought a fleet of ships, She rallied the support of other discontented nobles who were unhappy with Philip the six for some reason, and then she went on a rampage of terror and piracy. She purportedly painted her ships black and died their sales red to make her fleet extremely impressive, and she was nicknamed the Lioness of Brittany. I can see why lots of people want to hear about her. She's fabulous, though a little cutthroat and blood thirsty. M She was so successful in her revenge campaign that she won the support of King Edward the third of England, who loaned her more ships and weapons so she could more effectively fight against France. When she was done with seeking revenge, she sought and gained sanctuary in the English Court. And people like to send us Wikipedia articles at starting points, which thank you, but we actually do not use Wikipedia for our research, and we're going to talk about our research a little bit more later. Uh. And the Wikipedia entry for Jenne Dilisson does have more details about her life, but they are basically sort of scattered sentences, and it's not really documented in terms of sourcing. Yeah, so that's not really a valid source for us, and it's it's not even the thing the thing that you can do we can see what the sources were and start from there because it doesn't say where these random sentences of facts came from. Who knows. So moving on. Uh, that I think is the briefest of our six impossible episodes today. Moving on, So we're not sure when the first request came in to talk about the Kentucky meat Shower, but there were a whole lot that came in after X K c D put out comic number fifteen O one, which is called Mysteries, and that charts a bunch of historical mysteries based on how weird they are and whether they can be explained or not. So the Kentucky Meat Shower is in the quadrant for stuff that's both really weird and also explained. And we have episodes about several of the other mysteries that are in that comic, including the Mary Celeste D. D. Cooper, the Oak Island money Pit, I think, the delf Pass incidents, a bunch of them, a lot of them, really, So yeah, I thought about doing a whole episode that was just on the mysteries from the comic that we haven't covered, And I think some people actually did ask for that specifically. But some of them are extremely recent and others are basically summarized in a sentence. So on March three, eighty six, the Crouches, who lived in Bath County, Kentucky, witnessed what appeared to be meat falling from a clear sky. And these pieces of meat were in various shapes and sizes, some of them just little meaty whisps, and some chunks as big as a person's hand. The New York Times later wrote about this event under the headline flesh descending in a shower and all capital letters. So it also sounds like a weird um, like the kind of play that you would see in an experimental college theater. Oh yeah, So afterwards, Alan Crouch and his wife found that a strip of their land about a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide was just covered in chunks of this meaty substance. Neighbors came by to look at it. Their cat ain't some of it? Yeah, some people tasted it also. Uh. They came up with various theories for what they thought it tasted and smelled like, including mutton, venison, and bear, and eventually people gathered up pieces of it and sent it to various labs for testing, and the various labs came back with various results, including that it was dried frog spawn, that it was nostock, which is a cyanobacteria that forms this gelatinous protective coding, or that it was some actual type of animal flesh, And eventually the prevailing theory became that it was actually brace vomit, my least favorite thing in the world, vulture vomits, which would explain why the cat was so drawn to it from from vultures that had overindulged on something they had scavenged. That makes it super gross. As we said that the cat and a number of people ate some of it. So there are not really a ton of books or historical papers or peer reviewed whatever on this event. It's the sort of thing that would be really fun to research by going through old newspaper archives to figure out exactly what people were saying about it at the time. And the thing is, a writer named Matt Soniac has already done that in the pages of Mental floss, so trying to get a whole article together based on that exact same process, which just feel a little bit too much like we were cribbing off of his work. There is a preserved piece of this meat at the Monroe loos Nick Medical and Science Museum at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. If you are yearning to see what the vomity meat looks like, I'm not look on your face pretty much says it. Also, I won't say the V word anymore. Uh. And and we have two more impossible episodes, one of which makes us really sad that it's impossible, and we're going to talk about them after another brief word from a sponsor. Uh. That particular sponsor at this moment is scare space the best way to create a beautiful website or online store for you and your ideas. I have been working online for my selling blog. I'm not gonna lie. I'm a little bit of a foot dragger, but it's coming along and soon we'll actually officially launch. I'm pretty excited because while I had some troubles starting out, all on my end going what the heck do I do next, they totally walked me through it, and I love the process now and I feel like I have a really good understanding of the product. So they basically are going to give you the opportunity through a really simple interface to build a powerful and beautiful website. It's a robust and reliable platform. Squarespace has state of the art technology powering your site. It's gonna be the maximum security and stability you could ask for. And what I really like is that your website will scale to any device, so people that are looking on mobile devices get the same great experience as people that are looking on the laptop or desktop. It's fabulous. And if you want to monetize your website, there's a commerce option. Every website comes with powerful e commerce capabilities. So start your trial with no credit card required and start building your website today. Uh make sure when you go and start your new trial that you enter the offer code history to get teen percent off your Squarespace account and show your support for the show. So go build your free trial and then if you just had you want to hang onto it, then you can pay for it and keep going forever. With all that stability, they're at your fingertips. Just go to squarespace dot com. Enter your offer code history squares base, Build it beautiful. Okay, as we said before the break, our penultimate impossible episode makes us so sad that it's been possible. One of our most frequently requested episodes, at least after we did one on the night, which is so people stopped requesting that one is infamous serial killer Elizabeth, or more accurately, Elizabeth Bathory. And Elizabeth Bathory was actually the second subject ever covered on our show, so when people ask for an episode on her, we point them back to that one, which being the second episode ever on our show. It is only three minutes long, and we don't normally put out duovers of previous hosts episodes. History is basically infinite, and even if we would have approached the subject in a different way from a previous host take on it, there's just so much to cover that we haven't already done. Uh. There is an exception. I did a review of m um one of them, Zenobia, just because that was like a personal zone of super interest for me. But normally we don't usually backtrack on those um But when it comes to Elizabeth Bathory, we get so many requests and so many disappointed follow ups when people realize that the old episode is quite brief, that it made sense to at least talk about it. So. Elizabeth Bathory was born in fifteen sixty into Transylvaane, his ruling family. She was very wealthy, very beautiful, and very well educated, and when she was eleven or twelve, she was betrothed to a member of another prominent family, but a couple of years later she actually had a child by a different man, who her fiance purportedly killed by having him castrated and then ravaged by dogs. Bathori's illegitimate child was kept secret from the rest of the world, and her marriage went ahead is planned when she was fourteen. Her husband died when she was forty three. In between their marriage and his death, she had four children. By the time of her husband's death in sixteen o four, there were rumors spreading that she was sadistic and cruel, and these rumors really escalated after his passing. There were stories that she tortured her servants and the daughters of peasants who were living in the area. She was rumored to drink their blood and bathe in it in order to preserve her beauty and her youth authorities actually investigated her. In sixteen ten, Count Georgie Thursoh, who was Bathori's cousin, was sent by King Mattias to find out what was going on, and he reportedly walked in on Bath three conducting a torture session. He took depositions from people both within and outside of the estate, and he concluded that Elizabeth had killed six hundred girls with the help of her servants. She was placed under arrest that December. Four people who were reported to be her accomplices were tried, and three of them were executed. One was sentenced to life in prison. She herself was never tried, but she was confined to a window room in the castle for the rest of her life, which ended in sixteen fourteen. She was found dead on August twenty one of that year. There's some evidence to suggest that the claims against Bath three were deeply embellished, or were in fact slander. King Matthias owed Bath three a great deal of money, and her family apparently waived that debt in exchange for getting control of her captivity. Those same family members also got control over all of her land, so unfortunately it became clear almost immediately when trying to research a full length episode on Elizabeth Bathory that it just was not going to happen. There are several brief articles about her from reputable sources, but the couple of books that have been written about her in English were both self published. Now, we're not knocking the idea of publishing your own work or of reading self published work. Of course, you may do what you want, but since we are not experts in a lot of the things we talked about, we take a number of steps to try to ensure that the work we do you has been approached with a high degree of ecademic rigor. We did, actually, very late in the game find out about one non self published book in English. But then, uh, neither of us is really comfortable sourcing an entire podcast from one book whose facts we can't verify through other independent sources. So that's that, uh, and that brings us to impossible Episode six. Yeah, a lot of people ask us to do an episode that's about research tips or ideas on where they can find information on particular subjects, and we talked about this a little bit in our Listener Male f a Q episode a couple of years ago. But that one was more devoted to our process of making podcasts, and having a whole episode on research tips seemed like stretch. But since we're having to round out our six and to tie onto the one we just talked about, uh some tips for research. So when it comes to two books, for me, the books that I read for episodes are usually person's memoirs that they wrote themselves about their own lives. And often if there is some contention about whether the person's memoirs are embellished, we will say that yes, um and otherwise most of the books, there are some exceptions, but most of the books that I used for the podcast have been published by academic presses, and so you have some confidence that there has been like an editor involved in fact checking and helping to make sure that the whole thing is is as accurate and uh correct as possible. That's like one of the steps of making sure that the information that we're getting is right, which is why for our podcast specifically, I wouldn't normally use the self a self published book unless it was somebody's own self published memoir. Yeah, and one of the things that I do usually it's unusual that I think either of us would just use one in book for an episode. Uh So, one of the things that I do, even when they are meeting all of the criteria Tracy just talked about, is I kind of do a little pattern recognition, like where are there some things that come up slightly different, because I try to trace those back to the root and find out what is consistent across all of them and where they may have diverged and what may have caused that. Um. Because there are cases where things get a little wiggly, uh in part just in the writing process, as as one person tries to tell the story of someone and another person does that, they may use language that kind of maybe not always even on purpose, conveys a different meaning in the historical record. So we try to really root those out across multiple sources. And this is where I am going to advocate for your local library. UM. Which may sound ridiculous that a lot of people think about going to the library and checking out books, but most public public library systems at this point have databases that anyone with a library card can access where you can get a lot more academic information on subjects, things that have been through peer review, things that have been through some kind of like more stringent editorial process to make sure that what is on the page is as accurate as it can be. So usually my uh, my research process involves books when they are available, and then from databases any number of uh like academic papers on stuff, and then um, when there are not those sorts of things available, things that are from people who, in one way or another are the experts in that particular field. Right, So, local library, that's my big research tip. Anytime anybody emails us and says, can you give me research tips, local library, It's gonna help you out a lot. That's usually a reference librarian who can help you with lots of tips about like what your specific library system offers. UM being now in a totally different public library system than I was when I was actually living here locally to our office where I'm recording this episode from today. Actually, uh, different libraries can have vastly different offerings in terms of exactly which databases they offer and what other services they have. So each library system's reference librarian will help you out. And I will say this having um worked in a library for more than a decade and having still a lot of friends who are librarians and specifically reference librarians. They often love it if you go to them with a juicy research topic. They get so excited because a lot of times it's just people wanting to like put together something simple for like I have to do a research paper, or I have a reference librarian friend who finally had to put the kaibosh on the person who kept coming in to do her son's homework. But but she gets really excited when someone comes to her with a really interesting research topic. And I think a lot of times if you develop a relationship with your local reas librarian, don't drive them crazy. But certainly those are people you want to make friends with because they can help you find stuff you never would have even known existed. Yes, yes, my fiance is a librarian and most of his library work involves more the curation of data than book stuff at this point, So whenever we are talking about podcast things and I bring up some weird subject, he gets super excited and it's like I'm gonna go into the stacks and see if i have anything on that. I'm like, I didn't ask you to do that. Just remember that's the person that is drawn to the library sciences. My other big one is I love to find if it's all possible, uh, contemporary newspaper. Yeah, yeah, that that, and there are a number of services that will help you with those, like subscription services. I don't want to name them my name, just because I don't endorse any particular one. The different ones off for different benefits. So but if you find one you like, like, that's a gold mine. Yeah. And a lot of times your local library will have an archive of the newspaper, like your local newspaper, and then often some other big name ones like the New York Times in the Boston Globe. Uh, some of like the biggest, most long standing newspapers for US people. So those are some research tips. I hope they're helpful. Yeah. I think the other thing to always be careful about is not looking for research that backs up what you already think, but actually reading the research. It's easy to do, so easy to do, but yeah, you have to kind of keep your mind as objective as possible. That's how we keep winding up with episodes that we thought were going to be a ralicky good time and they were not and turned dark and stormy. Yes, so I have a couple of emails that are actually kind of related to this last piece of Impossible episode, and they are both pretty short, so I'm just gonna read them both. The first one is from Catherine, and Katherine says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, a kind of the only made on your recent USS Cyclops episode about a book she had consulted for source material reminded me of a question I've been wanting to ask you all for a while, and looking through the blog entries and sources for program content. As an aside, coming from a research profession, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that you publicly document all of your source material on the blog. I noticed that in your research you often make an effort to read inside at least one book on the subject in question. Given all the books you've consulted during your time working on the podcast, I was wondering if you had any favorites that you can suggest to some of your BiblioFile listeners such as myself. Thanks again for all you do to make the podcast of Delight, Sincerely, Catherine Um And then she mentions having read one of the books that we read for one of the episodes, which was pretty cool, And then the other one is for Monica, and Monica says, hello, ladies. I recently discovered your podcast about two weeks ago, and I am obsessed. I am probably about halfway through the archived episodes, and I'm already dreading the day when I can no longer binge listen to new episodes. I was a classic studies minor in college, but have a great passion for history, especially European. I'm also absolutely obsessed with British history. I was curious to know if anyone in your office has a book recommendation or authors that refer to the Dark Ages in Europe anywhere in Europe, maybe Holy Roman Empire, or perhaps a book of maps that shows Europe from eleventh centuries to twenty one century. I'm always losing myself in the geography of the time, so to Monica, I'm opening that question up to listeners. If listeners have recommendation for this books and nothing immediately came to my mind, um so if you have book suggestions for Monica sent us a note history podcast at how stuffworks dot com and for Catherine's note. We did write Catherine back with some things that immediately came to mind, but I wanted to read her note for two reasons. One thank you Katherine and to um. A lot of folks don't realize that we have show notes for every episode that we do in our blog, and the show list out all of the sources, and those sources include basically everything that we read. So going all the way back through the Tracy and Holly era, if there are episodes of the podcast that you listen to and are interested in and you want to know more, you can find out where you can read more by looking in all of those uh and the show notes post for that particular episode. Um. The the thing that gets tricky is at this point you and I have each researched an episode every week for many months, and so it takes like I am sure that I forgot many many great great books when I emailed Catherine back, I just like the two that sparked into my brain immediately were the ones that I said, but me too, Yeah, my brain just at this point when we get to the end of recording, sometimes I have forgotten literally the subject that we talked about by the time we're in uh the studio next well, and I think to um, part of it for me is like, UM, very topic specific. You know, like I can tell you what some of my favorite Disney history books are, or my favorite Queen Victoria history books are, right, but those might not be the kind of history books that you want to read. So if we just pick a few off the top of our heads, like I would probably never pick one that's just a vast general history book, which isn't to say that those aren't great, but those wouldn't probably be the ones that nestle in my heart as favorites. Yeah, And the books that I recommended to Catherine, we're both ones where they were memoirs where the person speaking had such a lovely candor, yeah, that it sounded like I was like sitting down with that person and hearing him tell me a story. They were Frankie Manning and Luis Alvarez. There was those two memoirs that I recommended just because those both had just a casual, lovely conversational tone which may float your boat and may not anyway. Yeah, that's that's one of those ones. It's a little bit tricky, I know, for me, because everybody's taste is different, particularly on the um when you're reading on the page. The things that resonate with one person or not, I'm gonna be the same things that resonate with someone else. Yes. So if you know of great, awesome resources for the things that Monica asked about regarding the Dark Ages in Europe, please write to us. Or if you want to recommend other books, please write to us. If you UH have awesome questions that you want to ask, you can please write to us. We're History podcast at how stupwork dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in history. Are tumbler is miss in history dot tomber dot com, and we're also on Pinterest at pentriest dot com slash missed in History. We have a spreadshirt store at miss in history dot spreadshirt dot com. You might be tired of me saying miss in history, but I'm gonna say it one more time, which is that our new instagram is at missed in history. If you would like to learn a little bit, we'll were about what we talked about today, just it's tiny bit more. You can come to our website, but the words Elizabeth Bathory in the UH the search bar, and you will find the article that actually sparked for the original very shorts A minute was at the Bathory episode. You can also come to miss the Mystery dot com and you will find show notes that list all of our sources, including lots and lots and lots of books that you might love, uh, an archive of every single episode, lots of other cool stuff we do. All that, and a whole lot more. How stuff works dot com or missed in hisstory dot com for more on this thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, Fun Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and Tracy Wilson. About six months ago, we put out an episode that was called Six Impossible Episodes, and it was six subjects that are really frequent listener requests, but for some reason or another they could not really stand on their own as individual episodes. And people seem to enjoy that one. And since then we've collected another heaping handful of topics that people are asking for a lot, but which we can't quite be a whole show on. So today six more Impossible Episodes. All right, These are fun because it's a you know, a little less intensive than digging super deep in like a long, full length episode, and it's like a nice little shworket sport. Yes, and I am writing on an airplane four times in six days, so that's why we're doing this today. Yeah, there, it's going to be super fun. I love it. So. First one, anytime we say anything about Paul Revere on our Facebook posts or anywhere else on the internet, really at least one person, but far more often it is more than one asks the same question, which is, how come nobody ever talks about Sybil Luddington, and so in case you maybe aren't from the United States, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Paul Revere was part of a now famous ride to spread the word of an impending attack, and later on in the war, Sybil Luddington also made a different but far less famous ride. So anytime we say Paul Revere, it's like a call in response somebody else says Sybil Lendington. You could use that as the alternate to Marco Polo is a pool game, I'm pretty sure. So. Sybil was born in Connecticut on April fifth, seventeen sixty one, and when she was still a abe, her family moved to Duchess County, New York, which lies along the New York Connecticut border. Her father, Henry Luttington, had decades of military experience, so as war loomed between Britain and its colonies in North America, he quickly became a colonel and was put in command of a regiment that was responsible for guarding territory along the New York Connecticut border. This is a pretty critical piece of land because it was one of the primary ways that the Loyalists could reach Long Island Sound from elsewhere farther inland. That's why when Governor William Tryon and his men rated Danbury, Connecticut in seventeen seventy seven, a rider was sent from Danbury to the Luddington home in Duchess County to ask Sybel's father to send help. Danbury was also strategically important, and it was home to several Continental Army storehouses that were full of food, munitions, and other supplies. So this rider that had been dispatched was too exhausted to continue by the time he got to the letting and home, and Colonel Luddington needed to prepare for battle, so he sent his oldest child, Sibyl, to muster his forces so they could go to Danbury's aid. It's not totally clear whether she volunteered for this task or whether she was sent, and at this point, Sybil had just turned sixteen, and her ride wound through forty miles of mostly wooded territory at night. So Sybil's age and the length of her ride, which was longer than Paul Revere's, are often held up as reasons why she is really more deserving of a claim than Paul Revere was. And then there's often this undertone of well, she should have had that acclaim, and she would have if she were a man. But as most of these things go, there's more to it than that. Paul Revere's ride is famous largely because of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, first published in eighteen sixty one, and that is the one that starts with listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. It's not a very historically accurate poem, which is why a lot of people remember wrong things about Paul Revere's ride, including that he was not the only one that was on it. Right, the poem is only about him. But this poem was written more than eighty years after the ride in question took place, and it was written after Longfellow visited the Old North Church in Boston, which is more more formally known as Christ Church. And the Old North Church is the one where the one if by Land too if by Sea signal lanterns were hung. And there are several likely reasons why Paul Revere is the star of this poem and not someone else. Apart from his ride to warn of the attack, he was a prominent Boston citizen and an active participant in other parts of the Revolutionary War. For example, he made an engraving of the Boston massacre that we talked about in our episode on that event. Paul Revere also served with Longfellow's grandfather in the service, And just to be really basic about it, I think we should add that Revere is easy to rhyme things with. It is much easier to rhyme things with than Luddington. So when Longfellow was writing his poem about someone he had a family connection to, whose ride connected to a place he had just visited, Luddington's story hadn't even been written down yet. It survived as family lore for roughly one hundred years before it was actually published anywhere, and Sybil's great nephew, historian Lewis S. Patrick, wrote about it in nineteen o seven, at which point school children were already memorizing the Longfellow poem. So you could totally make the argument that Civil Lettington's gender meant she could not make a name for herself the way Paul Revere did and later become famous thanks to a historically inaccurate poem. We just don't really know anything about her beyond the fact that when the war was over, she got married to a Revolutionary word veteran named Edward Ogden. They had a son, and they later opened a tavern, and she died on February eighteen thirty nine. Just was not the sort of prominent, publicly facing citizen that Paul Revere had been, and we don't have any primary source documentation about her ride at all, and even tiny details like how she spelled her name are different based on the things like her tombstone, her signature, and census records literally spelled differently in all of those places. So in terms of no one talking about her, there are many many children's books about Sibyl Lannington, and she was commemorate commemorated on a bicentennial postage stamp in even when she lived, George Washington himself came to her home to thank her personally for having written to muster all the men after the Battle of Danbury. There is a particularly fierce looking statue of her in Carmel, New York, along with a number of historical markers along her ride route. So her story just was not well known at all outside of her family and maybe local neighbor from the area when the poem that made Paul Revere famous was written. Like, that poem was solidly in the collective memory of America before Sibyl Luddington's story was even written down at all. Yeah, that poem has great scansion, and so it's really easy to remember and it's really kind of engaging. But as the sort of sad coda as well, Colonel Luddington's efforts were also too late to save Danbury. The British burned thousands of barrels of food along with tents, shoes, and other supplies before Luddington and other reinforcements were able to arrive. So that is the story of Sybil Lettington and also why people talk about Paul Revere more. Uh. Next up, we have one that was requested first by Diane long enough ago that it is number fifty six on our listeners submitted Ideas list, which is now hundreds and hundreds of ideas long. It is the Capuchin Catacomb in Palermo, Sicily, which are home to about eight thousand mummies. The Capucin community in Palermo was established in fifteen thirty four at the Church of Santa Maria de la Pacha. At first, the Friars who lived there were buried in what was essentially a mass grave, but about sixty years later the monastery outgrew. That's that mass burial site, so the Friars decided to dig a larger set of catacombs using natural caves that already existed in the area. Doing this required them to exhume the bodies that had already been buried, and when they did, they found that forty five of them had been naturally preserved and we're just in a really pristine condition. Their bodies had dehydrated rather than rotting. They interpreted this as a sign from God, and then, rather than proceeding with what had essentially been planned as a bigger mass grave, they decided instead to keep the exhumed bodies intact and displayed them as religious relics, and the new burial site that they created was built with that end goal in mind. They also gradually refined the caves natural preservation process into an intentional mummification, which included removing the organs and stuffing the cavity of the bodies with straw and placing the bodies on terra cotta tubes to help them dry faster. The Friars used a number of other preservation methods as well. Sylvestro of Gubio was a sixteenth century Capuchin monk, and he was the first to be buried in these new catacombs. Originally, the only bodies that were placed in the catacombs were those of Friars who were part of the Order after they died. But eventually, as words spread about the catacombs, being mummified and placed there after death became a mark of high status, so the bodies of nobility and famous local citizens joined that those of the Friars, and eventually the Order began allowing the burial of anyone who requested it in seventy three. One of the things that makes this place so compelling is that the bodies, which are very well preserved, are out in view you. They're dressed. Family members would even come to change the body's clothes. And some are on shelves, some hang from hooks, and some are in open coffin like containers. Some are posed almost as though their taxidermy displays. And there's one hall that's entirely the bodies of infants, some of them in cradles, and although they're arranged into approximate categories like professionals, priests, monks, virgins. Relatively few of these bodies are actually identifying. The Friars stopped burying new bodies there in eighteen eighty, and they made only two exceptions afterward. One was Giovanni Patterniti, who was buried in nineteen eleven, and the other was Rosalia Lombardo, who was two years old and placed there in nineteen twenty. The monks teamed up with the European Union to start a conservation project on the site in two thousand eight, because it has become a major tourist destination, but very little had been done up to that point in the centuries since it was first built to preserve it. We're going to put an image gallery of some pictures of this place on our website because it is incredible to look at. But most of the information that's available about it in English as of right now is sort of like travel god type of stuff. It's it's a tourist attraction at this point, and most of the things that are written about it are written in that vein, so I could not find enough richer information to make a whole episode out of it, but so many people have asked, we want to spend a whole time today. Cool, So before we go to our next impossible episode, you want to pause from a brief word from a sponsor sounds good. Our most recent requests for our next subject, who is jean Ditisson, came from Laramie and Mary and two different emails very recently, and she, unfortunately, is yet another person who falls into the not enough reliable information available in English category. We've had some folks right in to tell us that we just need to hire some people who speak other languages, y'all. It's just the two of us and NOL. Like, we don't have like a staff budget. No, we we don't have a translation staff. We literally look so many things up and we still get them wrong because we are not fluent speakers of every language, because it is just the two of us and NOL. Yeah, and we do try to outsource whilm we can, but sometimes it's just not feasible right when you're working, uh so. Jeanne de Clisson was a noblewoman and a pirate. In THTT three, her second husband, Olivier, the third Lord of Clisson, was executed for treason upon the orders of King Philip the sixth of France, so n pulled her money. She bought a fleet of ships, She rallied the support of other discontented nobles who were unhappy with Philip the six for some reason, and then she went on a rampage of terror and piracy. She purportedly painted her ships black and died their sales red to make her fleet extremely impressive, and she was nicknamed the Lioness of Brittany. I can see why lots of people want to hear about her. She's fabulous, though a little cutthroat and blood thirsty. M She was so successful in her revenge campaign that she won the support of King Edward the third of England, who loaned her more ships and weapons so she could more effectively fight against France. When she was done with seeking revenge, she sought and gained sanctuary in the English Court. And people like to send us Wikipedia articles at starting points, which thank you, but we actually do not use Wikipedia for our research, and we're going to talk about our research a little bit more later. Uh. And the Wikipedia entry for Jenne Dilisson does have more details about her life, but they are basically sort of scattered sentences, and it's not really documented in terms of sourcing. Yeah, so that's not really a valid source for us, and it's it's not even the thing the thing that you can do we can see what the sources were and start from there because it doesn't say where these random sentences of facts came from. Who knows. So moving on. Uh, that I think is the briefest of our six impossible episodes today. Moving on, So we're not sure when the first request came in to talk about the Kentucky meat Shower, but there were a whole lot that came in after X K c D put out comic number fifteen O one, which is called Mysteries, and that charts a bunch of historical mysteries based on how weird they are and whether they can be explained or not. So the Kentucky Meat Shower is in the quadrant for stuff that's both really weird and also explained. And we have episodes about several of the other mysteries that are in that comic, including the Mary Celeste D. D. Cooper, the Oak Island money Pit, I think, the delf Pass incidents, a bunch of them, a lot of them, really, So yeah, I thought about doing a whole episode that was just on the mysteries from the comic that we haven't covered, And I think some people actually did ask for that specifically. But some of them are extremely recent and others are basically summarized in a sentence. So on March three, eighty six, the Crouches, who lived in Bath County, Kentucky, witnessed what appeared to be meat falling from a clear sky. And these pieces of meat were in various shapes and sizes, some of them just little meaty whisps, and some chunks as big as a person's hand. The New York Times later wrote about this event under the headline flesh descending in a shower and all capital letters. So it also sounds like a weird um, like the kind of play that you would see in an experimental college theater. Oh yeah, So afterwards, Alan Crouch and his wife found that a strip of their land about a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide was just covered in chunks of this meaty substance. Neighbors came by to look at it. Their cat ain't some of it? Yeah, some people tasted it also. Uh. They came up with various theories for what they thought it tasted and smelled like, including mutton, venison, and bear, and eventually people gathered up pieces of it and sent it to various labs for testing, and the various labs came back with various results, including that it was dried frog spawn, that it was nostock, which is a cyanobacteria that forms this gelatinous protective coding, or that it was some actual type of animal flesh, And eventually the prevailing theory became that it was actually brace vomit, my least favorite thing in the world, vulture vomits, which would explain why the cat was so drawn to it from from vultures that had overindulged on something they had scavenged. That makes it super gross. As we said that the cat and a number of people ate some of it. So there are not really a ton of books or historical papers or peer reviewed whatever on this event. It's the sort of thing that would be really fun to research by going through old newspaper archives to figure out exactly what people were saying about it at the time. And the thing is, a writer named Matt Soniac has already done that in the pages of Mental floss, so trying to get a whole article together based on that exact same process, which just feel a little bit too much like we were cribbing off of his work. There is a preserved piece of this meat at the Monroe loos Nick Medical and Science Museum at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. If you are yearning to see what the vomity meat looks like, I'm not look on your face pretty much says it. Also, I won't say the V word anymore. Uh. And and we have two more impossible episodes, one of which makes us really sad that it's impossible, and we're going to talk about them after another brief word from a sponsor. Uh. That particular sponsor at this moment is scare space the best way to create a beautiful website or online store for you and your ideas. I have been working online for my selling blog. I'm not gonna lie. I'm a little bit of a foot dragger, but it's coming along and soon we'll actually officially launch. I'm pretty excited because while I had some troubles starting out, all on my end going what the heck do I do next, they totally walked me through it, and I love the process now and I feel like I have a really good understanding of the product. So they basically are going to give you the opportunity through a really simple interface to build a powerful and beautiful website. It's a robust and reliable platform. Squarespace has state of the art technology powering your site. It's gonna be the maximum security and stability you could ask for. And what I really like is that your website will scale to any device, so people that are looking on mobile devices get the same great experience as people that are looking on the laptop or desktop. It's fabulous. And if you want to monetize your website, there's a commerce option. Every website comes with powerful e commerce capabilities. So start your trial with no credit card required and start building your website today. Uh make sure when you go and start your new trial that you enter the offer code history to get teen percent off your Squarespace account and show your support for the show. So go build your free trial and then if you just had you want to hang onto it, then you can pay for it and keep going forever. With all that stability, they're at your fingertips. Just go to squarespace dot com. Enter your offer code history squares base, Build it beautiful. Okay, as we said before the break, our penultimate impossible episode makes us so sad that it's been possible. One of our most frequently requested episodes, at least after we did one on the night, which is so people stopped requesting that one is infamous serial killer Elizabeth, or more accurately, Elizabeth Bathory. And Elizabeth Bathory was actually the second subject ever covered on our show, so when people ask for an episode on her, we point them back to that one, which being the second episode ever on our show. It is only three minutes long, and we don't normally put out duovers of previous hosts episodes. History is basically infinite, and even if we would have approached the subject in a different way from a previous host take on it, there's just so much to cover that we haven't already done. Uh. There is an exception. I did a review of m um one of them, Zenobia, just because that was like a personal zone of super interest for me. But normally we don't usually backtrack on those um But when it comes to Elizabeth Bathory, we get so many requests and so many disappointed follow ups when people realize that the old episode is quite brief, that it made sense to at least talk about it. So. Elizabeth Bathory was born in fifteen sixty into Transylvaane, his ruling family. She was very wealthy, very beautiful, and very well educated, and when she was eleven or twelve, she was betrothed to a member of another prominent family, but a couple of years later she actually had a child by a different man, who her fiance purportedly killed by having him castrated and then ravaged by dogs. Bathori's illegitimate child was kept secret from the rest of the world, and her marriage went ahead is planned when she was fourteen. Her husband died when she was forty three. In between their marriage and his death, she had four children. By the time of her husband's death in sixteen o four, there were rumors spreading that she was sadistic and cruel, and these rumors really escalated after his passing. There were stories that she tortured her servants and the daughters of peasants who were living in the area. She was rumored to drink their blood and bathe in it in order to preserve her beauty and her youth authorities actually investigated her. In sixteen ten, Count Georgie Thursoh, who was Bathori's cousin, was sent by King Mattias to find out what was going on, and he reportedly walked in on Bath three conducting a torture session. He took depositions from people both within and outside of the estate, and he concluded that Elizabeth had killed six hundred girls with the help of her servants. She was placed under arrest that December. Four people who were reported to be her accomplices were tried, and three of them were executed. One was sentenced to life in prison. She herself was never tried, but she was confined to a window room in the castle for the rest of her life, which ended in sixteen fourteen. She was found dead on August twenty one of that year. There's some evidence to suggest that the claims against Bath three were deeply embellished, or were in fact slander. King Matthias owed Bath three a great deal of money, and her family apparently waived that debt in exchange for getting control of her captivity. Those same family members also got control over all of her land, so unfortunately it became clear almost immediately when trying to research a full length episode on Elizabeth Bathory that it just was not going to happen. There are several brief articles about her from reputable sources, but the couple of books that have been written about her in English were both self published. Now, we're not knocking the idea of publishing your own work or of reading self published work. Of course, you may do what you want, but since we are not experts in a lot of the things we talked about, we take a number of steps to try to ensure that the work we do you has been approached with a high degree of ecademic rigor. We did, actually, very late in the game find out about one non self published book in English. But then, uh, neither of us is really comfortable sourcing an entire podcast from one book whose facts we can't verify through other independent sources. So that's that, uh, and that brings us to impossible Episode six. Yeah, a lot of people ask us to do an episode that's about research tips or ideas on where they can find information on particular subjects, and we talked about this a little bit in our Listener Male f a Q episode a couple of years ago. But that one was more devoted to our process of making podcasts, and having a whole episode on research tips seemed like stretch. But since we're having to round out our six and to tie onto the one we just talked about, uh some tips for research. So when it comes to two books, for me, the books that I read for episodes are usually person's memoirs that they wrote themselves about their own lives. And often if there is some contention about whether the person's memoirs are embellished, we will say that yes, um and otherwise most of the books, there are some exceptions, but most of the books that I used for the podcast have been published by academic presses, and so you have some confidence that there has been like an editor involved in fact checking and helping to make sure that the whole thing is is as accurate and uh correct as possible. That's like one of the steps of making sure that the information that we're getting is right, which is why for our podcast specifically, I wouldn't normally use the self a self published book unless it was somebody's own self published memoir. Yeah, and one of the things that I do usually it's unusual that I think either of us would just use one in book for an episode. Uh So, one of the things that I do, even when they are meeting all of the criteria Tracy just talked about, is I kind of do a little pattern recognition, like where are there some things that come up slightly different, because I try to trace those back to the root and find out what is consistent across all of them and where they may have diverged and what may have caused that. Um. Because there are cases where things get a little wiggly, uh in part just in the writing process, as as one person tries to tell the story of someone and another person does that, they may use language that kind of maybe not always even on purpose, conveys a different meaning in the historical record. So we try to really root those out across multiple sources. And this is where I am going to advocate for your local library. UM. Which may sound ridiculous that a lot of people think about going to the library and checking out books, but most public public library systems at this point have databases that anyone with a library card can access where you can get a lot more academic information on subjects, things that have been through peer review, things that have been through some kind of like more stringent editorial process to make sure that what is on the page is as accurate as it can be. So usually my uh, my research process involves books when they are available, and then from databases any number of uh like academic papers on stuff, and then um, when there are not those sorts of things available, things that are from people who, in one way or another are the experts in that particular field. Right, So, local library, that's my big research tip. Anytime anybody emails us and says, can you give me research tips, local library, It's gonna help you out a lot. That's usually a reference librarian who can help you with lots of tips about like what your specific library system offers. UM being now in a totally different public library system than I was when I was actually living here locally to our office where I'm recording this episode from today. Actually, uh, different libraries can have vastly different offerings in terms of exactly which databases they offer and what other services they have. So each library system's reference librarian will help you out. And I will say this having um worked in a library for more than a decade and having still a lot of friends who are librarians and specifically reference librarians. They often love it if you go to them with a juicy research topic. They get so excited because a lot of times it's just people wanting to like put together something simple for like I have to do a research paper, or I have a reference librarian friend who finally had to put the kaibosh on the person who kept coming in to do her son's homework. But but she gets really excited when someone comes to her with a really interesting research topic. And I think a lot of times if you develop a relationship with your local reas librarian, don't drive them crazy. But certainly those are people you want to make friends with because they can help you find stuff you never would have even known existed. Yes, yes, my fiance is a librarian and most of his library work involves more the curation of data than book stuff at this point, So whenever we are talking about podcast things and I bring up some weird subject, he gets super excited and it's like I'm gonna go into the stacks and see if i have anything on that. I'm like, I didn't ask you to do that. Just remember that's the person that is drawn to the library sciences. My other big one is I love to find if it's all possible, uh, contemporary newspaper. Yeah, yeah, that that, and there are a number of services that will help you with those, like subscription services. I don't want to name them my name, just because I don't endorse any particular one. The different ones off for different benefits. So but if you find one you like, like, that's a gold mine. Yeah. And a lot of times your local library will have an archive of the newspaper, like your local newspaper, and then often some other big name ones like the New York Times in the Boston Globe. Uh, some of like the biggest, most long standing newspapers for US people. So those are some research tips. I hope they're helpful. Yeah. I think the other thing to always be careful about is not looking for research that backs up what you already think, but actually reading the research. It's easy to do, so easy to do, but yeah, you have to kind of keep your mind as objective as possible. That's how we keep winding up with episodes that we thought were going to be a ralicky good time and they were not and turned dark and stormy. Yes, so I have a couple of emails that are actually kind of related to this last piece of Impossible episode, and they are both pretty short, so I'm just gonna read them both. The first one is from Catherine, and Katherine says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, a kind of the only made on your recent USS Cyclops episode about a book she had consulted for source material reminded me of a question I've been wanting to ask you all for a while, and looking through the blog entries and sources for program content. As an aside, coming from a research profession, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that you publicly document all of your source material on the blog. I noticed that in your research you often make an effort to read inside at least one book on the subject in question. Given all the books you've consulted during your time working on the podcast, I was wondering if you had any favorites that you can suggest to some of your BiblioFile listeners such as myself. Thanks again for all you do to make the podcast of Delight, Sincerely, Catherine Um And then she mentions having read one of the books that we read for one of the episodes, which was pretty cool, And then the other one is for Monica, and Monica says, hello, ladies. I recently discovered your podcast about two weeks ago, and I am obsessed. I am probably about halfway through the archived episodes, and I'm already dreading the day when I can no longer binge listen to new episodes. I was a classic studies minor in college, but have a great passion for history, especially European. I'm also absolutely obsessed with British history. I was curious to know if anyone in your office has a book recommendation or authors that refer to the Dark Ages in Europe anywhere in Europe, maybe Holy Roman Empire, or perhaps a book of maps that shows Europe from eleventh centuries to twenty one century. I'm always losing myself in the geography of the time, so to Monica, I'm opening that question up to listeners. If listeners have recommendation for this books and nothing immediately came to my mind, um so if you have book suggestions for Monica sent us a note history podcast at how stuffworks dot com and for Catherine's note. We did write Catherine back with some things that immediately came to mind, but I wanted to read her note for two reasons. One thank you Katherine and to um. A lot of folks don't realize that we have show notes for every episode that we do in our blog, and the show list out all of the sources, and those sources include basically everything that we read. So going all the way back through the Tracy and Holly era, if there are episodes of the podcast that you listen to and are interested in and you want to know more, you can find out where you can read more by looking in all of those uh and the show notes post for that particular episode. Um. The the thing that gets tricky is at this point you and I have each researched an episode every week for many months, and so it takes like I am sure that I forgot many many great great books when I emailed Catherine back, I just like the two that sparked into my brain immediately were the ones that I said, but me too, Yeah, my brain just at this point when we get to the end of recording, sometimes I have forgotten literally the subject that we talked about by the time we're in uh the studio next well, and I think to um, part of it for me is like, UM, very topic specific. You know, like I can tell you what some of my favorite Disney history books are, or my favorite Queen Victoria history books are, right, but those might not be the kind of history books that you want to read. So if we just pick a few off the top of our heads, like I would probably never pick one that's just a vast general history book, which isn't to say that those aren't great, but those wouldn't probably be the ones that nestle in my heart as favorites. Yeah, And the books that I recommended to Catherine, we're both ones where they were memoirs where the person speaking had such a lovely candor, yeah, that it sounded like I was like sitting down with that person and hearing him tell me a story. They were Frankie Manning and Luis Alvarez. There was those two memoirs that I recommended just because those both had just a casual, lovely conversational tone which may float your boat and may not anyway. Yeah, that's that's one of those ones. It's a little bit tricky, I know, for me, because everybody's taste is different, particularly on the um when you're reading on the page. The things that resonate with one person or not, I'm gonna be the same things that resonate with someone else. Yes. So if you know of great, awesome resources for the things that Monica asked about regarding the Dark Ages in Europe, please write to us. Or if you want to recommend other books, please write to us. If you UH have awesome questions that you want to ask, you can please write to us. We're History podcast at how stupwork dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in history. Are tumbler is miss in history dot tomber dot com, and we're also on Pinterest at pentriest dot com slash missed in History. We have a spreadshirt store at miss in history dot spreadshirt dot com. You might be tired of me saying miss in history, but I'm gonna say it one more time, which is that our new instagram is at missed in history. If you would like to learn a little bit, we'll were about what we talked about today, just it's tiny bit more. You can come to our website, but the words Elizabeth Bathory in the UH the search bar, and you will find the article that actually sparked for the original very shorts A minute was at the Bathory episode. You can also come to miss the Mystery dot com and you will find show notes that list all of our sources, including lots and lots and lots of books that you might love, uh, an archive of every single episode, lots of other cool stuff we do. All that, and a whole lot more. How stuff works dot com or missed in hisstory dot com for more on this thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com