Stuff You Missed in History Class

While serving as a surgeon with Napoleon’s army in the 1790s, Larrey developed a system for getting wounded soldiers off the battlefield and into treatment. His dedication to providing care to anyone who needed it earned him the respect and admiration of France and its enemies.

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Charlotte and her husband Maximillian became the rulers of Mexico through a plan concocted by France's Napoleon III. But the strain of conflict there, and French finances being withdrawn, caused the empress' mental health to decline.

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This 2016 episode delves into how industries and governments had a really weird preoccupation with protecting people from margarine way before it was made with the hydrogenated oils that led to its unhealthy reputation in more recent years. There's even bootlegging involved.

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Holly and Tracy talk about Annie Londonderry's cavalier relationship with the truth and the challenges of travel with the wrong clothes and bike. Then talk turns to a strange paper that Tracy read while researching rinderpest.

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The declaration that rinderpest had been eradicated was less than 10 years, but rinderpest’s history goes back much farther than that. And the process of eradicating the disease really illustrates how it took a coordinated, international effort to do it.

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Annie Londonderry gained fame for being the first woman cyclist to circumnavigate the globe. Sort of. In the 1890s, she DID circle the globe, but there are a LOT of inconsistencies in the details of her story, including why she did it in the first place. 

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We're jumping back just a couple of years to an episode on Ignaz Semmelweis made a connection between hand hygiene and the prevention of childbed fever in the 19th century.

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Holly and Tracy talk about selecting subjects for the show while living in strange times, and venture into talk about Emily Dickinson.

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Ida Lewis lived most of her life fairly isolated on a tiny island off the coast Rhode Island. But it was a life she deeply loved. In her words, “I could not be contented elsewhere.”

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Tracy and Holly discuss what it feels like, as people who study history, to live through an event that you know will be historically significant. To all of our listeners: Please stay safe, and thank you for being part of the SYMHC family.

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