Stuff You Missed in History Class

Holly and Tracy talk about the apples from the childhoods, fruit-based desserts, and a cocktail that Holly stumbled across while researching nachos. Grace Humiston's tricky name is mentioned, as well as the more frustrating aspects of her story.

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Grace was an attorney and an investigator who did a lot of work to exonerate people who were wrongly convicted, expose corruption, and, in one particularly dramatic case, solve a murder that police had written off as the victim having run away.

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Lots of foods are named after people, but sometimes the stories of those names are hard to pin down. This episode looks at where Granny Smith apples, nachos, and the Cobb salads get their names.

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This 2018 episode covers one of the United States' first successful Jewish American writers, moving in the New York literary scene of the late 1800s. She also wrote one of the most famous poems of all time, and even if you don't know her name, odds are you know at least some of that work.

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Holly and Tracy talk about the aspects of the stethoscope story that didn't make it into the episode, including the classism related to cleanliness standards that often comes up in writeups about it. Tracy discusses the difficulty in getting a sense of Eunice Newton Foote's personality based on the available documentation of her life.

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In 1856, Foote became the first person to make a connection between the Earth’s temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere, though she’s rarely credited for it. 

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One of the most basic tools of the medical profession is the stethoscope, but it’s a more recent invention than you might suspect. Its invention is credited to French doctor René Laënnec.

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This 2017 episode covers Tudor's clever plan: In cold weather, he would harvest ice for cheap, and then sell it all around the world when it was hot.

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Holly and Tracy talk about the kitties in their lives and Mike's good fortune to have had his meals cooked for him. When they turn to smallpox, discussion covers the inevitable ways in which it informs thinking about the current pandemic.

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Smallpox is a viral disease that has existed for millennia. But it’s now one of only two diseases that’s been eradicated through human activity, and a global plan was enacted to do it.

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