Stuff You Missed in History Class

In 1818, something about the rings of Saturn – we don’t know what, exactly – led John Cleves Symmes to conclude that the Earth was [Read more]

This 2013 episode covers Johann Beringer, the University of Wurzburg’s chair of natural history and chief physician to the prince bishop in 1725. He was [Read more]

Tracy and Holly talk about the use and misuse of tear gas, and then a theory that links L. Frank Baum’s work “The Wonderful Wizard [Read more]

Jacob Sechler Coxey led the first protest march on Washington, D.C. in the 1890s, with a plan to create jobs for the nation’s unemployed population with [Read more]

Tear gasses, or lachrymator agents, are named for the lachrymal glands, which secrete tears. But tears are just one part of it. It was developed for [Read more]

This 2011 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina examines Fritz Haber’s mixed legacy. The Nobel-Prize-winning Father of Chemical Warfare was responsible for fertilizers that fed [Read more]

Holly and Tracy discuss the complexities of Isabella Bird’s story, as well as the similarities between the pneumonic plague in Wu Lien-Teh’s story and what [Read more]

Wu Lien-Teh was a doctor who’s most well known for his public health work and the pneumonic plague epidemic in the early 20th century. Learn [Read more]

Bird is celebrated as a world traveler, though she didn’t really come into her own as a traveler until she was in her 40s. Her [Read more]

The second episode in our revisit of the Irish Famine covers the mid-1800s, when the poorest people in Ireland ate almost nothing but potatoes, saving [Read more]