French Republican Calendar

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we're kind of into holiday time, we are, and as we approached the end of the year, some people may already be making their plans for the new year. Yeah, you know, you know what I did. I didn't make plans for the new year, but I did go through my work calendar for the new year and I marked all the company holidays. Nice. Um, yeah, I mean, I listen, we'll talk about this one behind the scenes, but we all know I have a little problem with planners and addiction. Um. So, if you're like me, you might be filling out your calendar or checking to see what day of the week, your birthday or a favorite holiday is going to be on next year. But here's the thing. What if the coming year was going to be completely different than any year you had ever known in terms of how you marked the days of the year in the passage of time. Like, what if someone decided that we were going to change at all and you had to learn a completely new calendar. That sounds like an our deal sounds awful. We mentioned the Revolutionary calendar, which is also known as the French Republican calendar in our recent episode on the famous magician Robert Rudin and his date of birth we mentioned in that episode is reported as both December six and December seven, depending on the source you look at, for the simple reason that he was born during this relatively brief period where France abandoned the Gregorian calendar for an entirely different one, and by the time the country reverted back to the Gregorian calendar, the Robert family and probably a lot of others realized that they had some dates in their family celebrations that did not quite line up the way that they thought, and that is very understandable what you see just how different the French Republican calendar had been. So today we're going to talk about what catalyzed that shift in timekeeping and the issues that came with it. But to get to the point where we can talk about France's bold experiment, we have to talk a little bit about how calendars developed. It kind of a high level review and got to the point where we're all using pretty much the same one today. Yeah, there have been various calendars created by humans throughout history as efforts were made to track time. Some of them are still in use in some context today. The two primary components that have driven almost all of them since the beginning have been the observable movements of the Sun and the moon, So the days that follow the rising and the setting of the Sun and the moon, and the months that follow changes in the moon as it goes through its lunar cycle, passing from the new Moon through its various waxing and waning phases, full moon back to new moon, whole regular cycle of observable things in the world right, and there have been a lot of different ways of arranging those two things into calendars. For many cultures, including Egyptian and Hindu tabulations, the day started not at midnight but at dawn, and others like the Greeks and Babylonians, counted their days starting at sunset. Some calendars have focused primarily on the lunar year, prioritizing the lunar cycle as the main way of determining a year over the solar cycle. The problem is that those two cycles, the lunar cycle and solar cycle, don't quite line up. The Hebrew and Chinese calendars have had a combined solar lunar year, though the number of days in a year is less typically than the calendar most of us are familiar with, and then on leap years they get not an extra day, but a leap month, so that then you have thirteen months. If you only use a lunar cycle to determine the year, you end up about eleven days short of a solar year. And there have been lots of different solutions to this problem, and those solutions have had varying degrees of success. Some calendars, like the Chinese and Hebrew ones we just mentioned, add an extra month for basically leap years. Others add extra days. There have always been problems with making those exactly line up. Those problems only get more complicated the longer any given calendar is used, because what starts out as just a tiny incremental difference causes things to really slide around over time. Yeah. For example, the Egyptians identified the three hundred and sixty five days solar year and divided it into twelve lunar cycles, with five extra days landing at the end of the year. Not perfect, but pretty good, but a solar year isn't really three hundred sixty five days. We know now that it's three hundred sixty five days, five hours, forty eight minutes, forty six seconds. You can even get more incremental beyond that, and over the course of say a ten year period, that difference may not be especially problematic, but it's the year stretch on. More and more dates related to things like harvest could get really really wonky. And absolutely no calendar is perfect, but we have gotten more and more precise beyond just counting the days and the months. Every day has to be subdivided as well. In addition to starting a day at different points in the sunrise and sunset cycle, variations and how the day has been subdivided over the centuries have been numerous as well. Some of these have shifted with the seasons the same way a calendar might, so that during the summer the day was measured slightly differently than during the winter when the days were shorter. We talked about that in an episode where we talked about Japanese timekeeping in clocks that had different faces that accounted for all of these. These were called temporal hours, and the day always had the same number to mark the time the sun went above the horizon. All the way back to ancient Egypt, there had been twenty four hour systems, but that number was separated into twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night. So in the summer, when the sun was above the horizon for longer periods of time, the length of an hour at night would be shorter, the length of an hour during the day would be longer. And we should note, of course, that this was also a pretty localized way to think about time. There was really no accounting for the fact that people who lived closer to the Earth's poles would have different amounts of daylight and night. So places Lakes Falbird, Norway, which is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean that experiences the phenomenon known as midnight sun with constant daylight during parts of the summer, just could not function on the same twelve hours of daylight system, for example, that Egypt could, and it actually wasn't until the thirteen hundreds that hours became standardized to twenty four equal increments in a day. Building on the Greek lunar calendar, the Romans developed the Roman Republican calendar, which was adopted around seven thirty eight b c. E. This was a ten month calendar that was really short, just three d four days, with another sixty one point five days that were just kind of left hanging to cover the coldest months. So these ten months have pretty familiar names Martius, Apulius, Maius, Junius Quintilius, sextialists September, October, November, and December. January and February got added later, and February was originally at the end of the calendar before it was moved to go between January and March. That happened in the fifth century BC. Uh all sounds confusing, and it probably was. Yeah, the concept of like true standardization just was not really in play. In the first century b C. Under Julius Caesar, there was a fairly massive overhaul of this confusing calendar. This combined the Egyptian Solar calendar with the existing system to clean up some of those issues with lagging accuracy and the need to insert so many different stop gaps year to year to account for the days that the initial setup just couldn't handle. The Julian calendar, which is credited in large part to an astronomer named the signs looks pretty familiar. There were three d sixty five days, twelve months of thirty or thirty one days, except for February, which had twenty eight. The leap year existed, but they didn't add the day of February twenty nine. Instead, it was February twenty three for two days. I didn't see why that was the case, but it's pretty interesting. It's just so weird and random to at the Julian calendar in place. Julius Caesar had declared that the year forty six BC was just going to have to be extra long. It had four hundred forty five days in it. The Julian calendar was a big step forward in terms of accuracy, but it also had problems. Specifically, the length of the year had been miscalculated, not by that much, just by eleven minutes and fourteen seconds, so again, not something that would be hugely problematic for a while, but the Julian calendar stayed in effect for more than fifteen hundred years without any major changes, and those eleven minutes added up. If you do the math over the course of fifteen hundred years, that turns into more than eleven days of discrepancy. There are still people who use the Julian calendar, particularly the Eastern Orthodox churches. We've had various episodes of the show that have like had different dates depending on like whether the particular place was still on this calendar. But today it's more than thirteen days off. Even so that's pretty good considering how long it had been used. The next significant revision of the calendar came from Pope Gregory the thirteenth, who I kind of want to do an episode on. At some point after having lost a day per century, the Julian calendar was, you know, in this thirteen to fourteen days off issue by the time of Gregory the thirteenth papacy. And while we call this a significant revision, it was really more of a correction because the structure of the calendar remained the same twelve months, three hundred sixty five days a year with leap years. But to make this correction in the year fifteen eighty two, the day after October four was October fifteenth. Of course, they just jumped ahead a little bit. After that, the new rule was instituted that no century year could be a leap year unless it was evenly divisible by four hundred so while the year two thousand, for example, was a ep yer, the year will not be. This may sound perhaps like a kookie rule, but it actually is something that was developed to help keep the calendar pretty accurate, meaning that we will have a discrepancy of less than a day for several thousand years. It is still not perfect. The calculations used for this actually differ from the solar year by twenty six seconds, so it's pretty good, but it was intended to keep us less than a day off for an estimated twenty thousand years, and in reality we're going to be about a day off by the year nine. I feel like I've heard about we're doing a leap second try to account for that, yes, exactly. So. The Gregorian calendar was adopted in pretty much any place that the Catholic Church was in power in fifty two, and it took a while for it to become standard throughout most of the world, and for a lot of purposes that pretty much is. It wasn't adopted in Great Britain and its colonies until seventeen fifty two. Sweden instituted it the year after that. Japan switched to the Gregorian calendar in eighteen seventy three. China started officially using it in nineteen twelve. Greece adopted it in nineteen twenty three. There's a duality of calendar used for Islamic countries, so the Gregorian calendar is used for day to day life. The Islamic calendar continues to be used for religious holidays. UM. I think the Hebrew calendar is official state calendar in Israel, Like, there are still multiple calendars being used. Um. An interesting point to note here is that even countries and cultures that are not Christian now or in maybe have never been predominantly Christians still used the Gregorian calendar, which is deeply associated with the Catholic Church, as a secular calendar. It has become an international standard in a lot of contexts. Yeah, it's fascinating to me that countries that never had Christianity are like, yeah, we'll adopt that calendar. That that's the secular calendar. Um. Coming up, we're going to dig into just how radical the French Republican calendar was. Get ready, but before we get to that, we will pause for a sponsor break. Okay, we're not going to rehash the French Revolution here. We have talked about it a lot over the years. That's because it's a really important event in world history. But it's also really complex. It happened over a number of phases, it has a great deal of complexity within those phases. All of that is outside the scope of today's calendar talk. So here's the very broad stroke version of what happened to get to the point where there was an idea to completely throughout the Gregorian calendar. By the end of the seventeen eighties, France was near bankruptcy due to the spending of the monarchy on extravagances and also giving money to support the American Revolution. There had been a lot of agricultural problems, including bad harvests and animal diseases that had left a lot of France's population destitute, and on top of that, the crown was imposing heavy taxes to try to make up their financial deficits. The middle class, which had become the largest component of the population. I read one statistic that it was like, suddenly the middle class was percent of the population, but it had less power than the nobility or the clergy. And all of this kind of made up the ingredients that led to the start of the revolution. Even before the revolution, going back to the mid seventeen eighties, there had been calls for a new calendar to more closely reflect the ideals of France's people. There had even been some efforts in that regard, but each of them had proved to cause problems, and it became apparent that a complete system had to be devised. The Gregorian calendar, which featured Saints Days and was highly oriented to meet the needs and ideals of the church, felt outdated at a time when rash realism was becoming more and more popular and the ideals of the Enlightenment were supplanting the so called ancient regime in which the church and the monarchy was were just so so closely bound together. In the months following the founding of the First Republic of France, talk of a new calendar turned to action when Jebel Rome was chosen to head up this project. Rum was president of the Committee on Public Instruction in the First Republic and he did a lot of other jobs as well, but he was also pretty well suited to this job of calendar revision because he had also studied to be a mathematician, and he got two other mathematicians to assist gas Barmane and Joseph Louis Lagrange, and they all worked out the details of balancing a new system to combine the lunar and solar cycles, and to decimalize the system. Later, a poet was also brought onto the project, Fabre de Glantine to name everything. This calendar was intended to be disruptive, and that cracks me up. We're gonna make a mess on purpose. It was meant to completely upend the social order, to represent secularism, naturalism, and rationalism. There would be no religious holidays, no royalist mentions, nothing to follow the old ways of the ancient regime. Additionally, the metrics system, which had been developed in the late seventeenth century and had been going through a series of refinements ever since then, would be at the heart of this, with as many aspects as possible of the calendar built on a base ten system. This use of a decimal system was in part to bolster the calendar's identity being rational and scientific system, not one that was built based on religious beliefs. I'll note that like generally based ten numbers are I think older than that, but we're talking about a decimal system where every thing is is divided into uh decrements of ten so that they're easy to calculate and remember. But then they made it really hard. This new calendar still did have twelve months, although they did not correlate to the existing Gregorian months at all. It was not as though they renamed December, for example, to something else. There was really no possible way to make a one to one comparison or translation directly from one to the other so that you could quickly do it in your head and remember, oh, now December is called this. The twelve months in the Revolutionary calendar had names that referred to nature and natural happenings in the world at times that the months fell. So vonn Damier was the month of vintage, a new year and a time to look back on the old, and it also referred to the grape harvest. Bremier was the month of fog, which fell in late autumn. Fremier referenced dropping temperatures in the start of wintry weather. Neveaus, which followed was the month of snow. Pluvio's, the month of rain, came after that, followed by vant Do's, the month of wind. Geminal in the springtime has of course the same route as the word German. Eight flo Real, which followed references flowers prairieal was the month of meadows. Messidor took its name from the Latin messy for harvest to be cleared. This was an early summer harvest, not I think when we say harvest we tend to always think of autumn. That was not the case. Dermador that followed was the month of warmth, referencing the warm temperatures of summer, and fruc diador referenced the fruits which were ripened in the late summer sun. New Year's Day was moved away from the Gregorian January one. The Revolutionary calendar started on what correlated to the start of Vandomier, on September no coincidence, The first Republic of France was established on September two, so the calendar tied its start to a rebirth for the country, a sort of an anchoring principle. These months were only three weeks long, because weeks we're ten days long. Each day was ten hours, each hour was one hundred minutes, and each minute was one hundred seconds. That meant that while the hours and minutes were considerably longer than they had previously been. The second was suddenly about fo shorter. You can imagine the panic that this cost himong clockmakers who had been working with an established set of gear proportions for as long as they could remember, and suddenly none of that was gonna work anymore. I think I would just quit and wander into the countryside, leaving my tools behind me. I think I would do there's a fire in the distance as you walk away, like that's the end of that. The ten days of the week were named simply for their numerical order. No more would the days we named for gods or have any sort of religious condination. So became primedy, the first day duoti or second day treaty, third day cartdy, keen, tody, sextity, septidy, octod e, nonity, and decady if you're wondering. This was in part, very specifically to make it confusing to people who attended church, so that they couldn't really remember what day they were supposed to be going, because this would not be the same week to week, since the church still retained the old calendar and observed Sunday as the main day for church services. You have a whole bit of your belief built around the idea of on the seventh day he rested, and now the week has ten days. You're you're you're doomed. Yes, so Fabrideglantine, a poet who headed up naming for all of the new aspects of the calendar, wrote of this whole effort quote, the priests assigned the commemoration of a so called saint to each day of the year. This catalog exhibited neither utility nor method. It was a collection of lies of a seat or of Charlotte Nisum. We thought that the nation, after having kicked out this canonized mob from its calendar, must replace it with the objects that made up the true riches of the nation. Were the objects not from a cult, but from agriculture. So every single day on the calendar had its own name. So while there were days of the week that Tracy had just read out, if you knew the whole system, you could just say selex, the French word for flint, and you would know that that was the sixteenth day of the month. Nivos. This episode is scheduled to come out on December nine two. In the Revolutionary Calendar, December nineteenth would be olive or if you wanted to include the month, olive rime or o leave de frimo. Each day name was a reference to nature. The day names were themed to their month, the months were themed to their season, and all of the months in each season were designed to rhyme with one another, so like the sort of springtime e season was germana florial preial. Once the system was designed, it was officially adopted in the autumn of seventeen nine three as the Decree of the National Convention of October five, sevent This decree laid out the rules of adoption and function of the new calendar and read quote. The beginning of each year is set at midnight, beginning on the day when the true autumnal equinox falls. For the Paris Observatory, the first year of the French Republic began at midnight September seventeen nine two and ended at midnight separating September twenty one from September seventeen nine three. The year is divided into twelve equal months of thirty days each, after which followed five days to complete the ordinary year, and which do not belong to any months they are called complementary day. Each month is divided into three equal parts of ten days each, which are called decades in memory of the revolution, which after four years led France to the republican government. The leap period of four years is called la franciad. The inter calorie day, which must end this period is called the day of the Revolution. This day is placed after the five complementary days. Incidentally, in case the word decade jumped out at you, it literally means the ten day week, not ten years, as we refer to a decade. Uh that last bit though, mentioning the inter calorie day, that's normally what you would call a day or a month, inserted into a calendar to make the solar year work and correct those discrepancies that pop up. That's an error or miraccurlately, that cannot exist in function at the same time as their leap rule of la franciade that comes right before it. This us to do with those holidays that made up that gap created by only having thirty day months. There were five such holidays that fell at the end of the year. Instead of being religious in nature, they were all based on the ideals and the virtues of the New Republic, La Fete de la Virtue, which was the celebration of Virtue, La Fete de geni, the celebration of talent, la Fete trav this celebration of labor, La Fete de la Celebration of convictions. I hate that day, uh I just I feel like that is when everybody is going to come tell me what they think of something, and I'm like, stop, stop doing it. And La Fete de recompose, or the celebration of Honors. In leap years, there would be a sixth holiday Lael Revolution, the celebration of the Revolution. But there wasn't a leap year every four years, as the provision had made it sound. The leap years were to be calculated by astronomers on an as needed basis to insert the year started on the autumnal equinox. So messed up, you guys. Stop, that's that's my friend. Laignon Um the French Republican calendar. Incidentally, that problem didn't ever come up because the calendar was abolished before the problem really made itself happen. Um the French Republican calendar was put into practice on what would have been Nove The Gregorian calendar, and it was kind of backdated to have recognized September twenty two as its official start, so like that was point zero and then the years were counted up from there. While the ideals that led to adoption of the French Republican calendar were shared by a lot of the people of France, actually living with this new system was problematic and just about every way you can imagine. So we already mentioned the clockmaker having to overhaul their work, but that was really just the beginning. Of course. Since this system was only employed by France at a time when there was an established global trade, there was a constant stream of problems for anybody trying to do business outside of France, and I just there's similar challenges today for places that like in some way have another calendar going on. So not only was there no direct correlation between months and weeks, but even leap years were handled differently in the Revolutionary calendar, so the conversion of dates uh that anybody using the Gregorian calendar had. This was just a constant dance of shifting and reconciling the days. Official documents were marked with the French Republican date, but if you had to do business elsewhere those dates really just meant nothing, so business people found themselves just duplicating their work to try to stay and stuff with their colleagues from other nations. This also meant that things like money cycles, so when people got paid and when their payments were expected to others shifted around. So if you have ever been in a situation where you go, for example, from being paid every other week to one where you get paid twice a month or even monthly, you know that can be a difficult adjustment, and it was for the French as well. Pay days aside, those ten day weeks meant that there were only three rest days a month and a much longer work week that was obviously not popular. Although the fifth day was declared a half day, the schedule is still really grueling, and for laborers who, as we mentioned earlier, wanted to continue to attend church, even if they could figure out what day they were supposed to go, they probably would not have that day off as they would have in a seven day week. Because of that particular problem, a lot of people switched back to the seven day week unofficially a few years into the new calendar's use. To top off follow these logistical issues. It was just a lot of new stuff to learn, and a lot of people found it kind of absurd and ludicrous. All of the days being named for plants and animals and herbs and things like that might have seemed poetic, but it made for some problems with associations. While the day of Citria meaning pumpkin was a rather charming day of the year that fell in the month of vandomier, imagine if your birthday or some other important personal event fell on a day that was more like fumier nevos or manure day. Uh US politician John Quincy Adams called the Revolutionary calendar coarsely vulgar and superficially frivolous. Once it was put into practice, a lot of French citizens kind of started to feel the same way. Right, can you imagine what day was your baby born? Manure day? I would stick literally think you're to um As power shifted in France after the Revolution or there was still more revolution to come, so too did appreciation for this rather behemoth project. After Maximilian Robespierre was overthrown on the date of ninth Thermidor that was July, the reactionaries who had unseated him began a pretty vocal campaign against the French Republican calendar for all of the reasons that we have mentioned here. Also, having made such huge, sweeping changes to the basic structure of people's lives was characterized as having been a tyrannical move on the part of the Jacobin government. But there was also concern among new government officials that changing all of this again was just going to cause more disruption just as people were getting the hang of it, and that it would set the precedent that they would roll back some of their other truly beneficial changes that had come from the revolution and the founding of the New Republic. So this cal under stayed in place for more than a decade. Sort of. No one really liked the new calendar all that much. In practice, adopting new festivals and holidays and giving up the ones that had been in place for centuries was something that just never really caught on. People may have wanted new leadership for France, but they also wanted their traditional holidays and feast days. By the time the year eight of the new calendar rolled around, the years were always written in Roman numerals, which I did not read. As v I I I, but I could have uh. The new festivals were no longer being held, but the calendar itself was holding on. It was finally when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power that as first Consul before he became emperor, he and the Catholic Church reached the agreement known as the Concordat of eighteen o one. This re established the status of the Catholic Church in France, although not as the country's official religion as it had been in years before. The Concordat of eighteen o one also did away with the ten day week and let people go back to officially using the old days of the week names, so welcome back Lunday through Demone. But the months in the years of the French Republican calendar remained for almost five more years. Finally, on January one, eighteen o six, Napoleon, who had in the interim declared himself emperor, reinstated the Gregorian calendar in its entirety, and France was back to the same time keeping in calendar as most of its neighbors. Professor Howard C. Warren of Princeton University wrote a paper called Psychological Aspects of calendar reform, which appeared in the Scientific Monthly in n He wrote about the real issue of adoption of new modes of marking, the passage of time quote, and the efforts made to reform our lopsided calendar. Too little consideration has been given to the principles of psychology. The popular mind clings to tradition and the fundamentals of life, as shown in our persistent cleaving to our bewildering system of weights and measures, and the British adherence to their inconvenient monetary system. It often requires a social cataclysm like the French Revolution to uproot these traditions. Clearly that these traditions did not stay uprooted in France, and this effort to sort of fell into history as an interesting and weird experiment. The Revolutionary calendar was also dubbed quote the most radical attempt in modern history to challenge the Western standard temporal reference framework. It was called that by sociologist Viatar Zarubavel in nineteen seventy two. Zarubavel went on to write quote, one of the most remarkable accomplishments of the calendar reformers was exposing people to the naked truth that their traditional calendar, whose absolute validity they had probably taken for granted, was a mere so show artifact and by no means unalterable. However, the reformers must have realized the possible boomerang effects of that, since it was impossible to expose the conventionality and artificiality of the traditional calendar without exposing those of any other calendar, including the new one. At the same time, one could not help realizing, for example, that if the seven day week did not derive from the heavens and was merely an arbitrarily imposed convention, so was the ten Da de cod The new calendar could not be viewed as absolutely valid since its users witnessed its birth and knew that things used to be different in the past. One last thing to note, e O one was not the very last of the French Republican calendar. During the Paris Commune, the revolutionary government that sees power in France from March eighteenth to May eighteen seventy one, Commune reinstated this controversial calendar, and that government only lasted for two months one you can three days. It was not recognized by everyone by any stretch, so at that point the calendar did not cause the kind of disruption that it had caused almost a century earlier. There was plenty of other disruption happening during the calendar of the problems, right the calendars. Kind of a side note, Um yeah, I legitimately loved this story. It's so um kukie. It's the kindest way I um. I think we may have said that's in the last episode where this came up briefly in the Robertan episode, but like I didn't, I didn't realize the extent to which this was a different calendar, completely different. And I know there are a lot of people in a lot of places around the world who historically or even more recently have like had to move to a different calendar, and how chaotic that must have been. But this was very extra chaotic and on purpose. Yes, yeah, I mean, I um. There's part of me that admires the effort right of going Like, as I've often say, I love change. I find it very exhilarating. So like the idea of going, we're wiping the slate clean, We're going to start with this totally new system. There's part of my brain that lights up at that. But then when I think about the logistics of like how do I know when to board my flight? Okay, I would I would be terrified. Then, so we'll talk more about all of this terrifying madness on Friday. You have some listener mail for us before then. I do. I have a few pieces because two of them are very short and uh so there are three altogether, but they're mostly very funny um verses from our listener Emily, who writes Hello, I'm a longtime listener and fan of the podcast, and I'm getting caught up after a few weeks of being beyond busy with a new job. Congratulations Emily. I just listened to the wig Aboard episodes and Holly's comment about a Weegi board for cats in the behind the scenes episode reminded me of one of my favorite silly Internet things I have come across. It is the post board. This is a Wigia board for possums. The options are hilarious. All of the letters of the letter A, so it's just lots of screaming. Of the words on it are faint or scream and the little plan chet has tiny little possum handprints on it. It's very very cute. Thank you. That was a delight and made me giggle. Um. The more meaty email comes from our listener, Aaron, who writes Hi, Ladies. Longtime listener, but this was the first time I heard something worth writing to you about. I love listening to the podcast on my commute to and from my job as an occupational therapist in a rehab hospital. Thank you for doing that work. It's important. I am also playing catch up on some recent episodes and had to do a double take when I heard you mentioned Russell Sage in the recent two parter on Charles Chapin. I am an alumna of Russell Sage College in Troy, New York. Yes, named after the man himself, and loved hearing a little bit more about our namesake. The folklore on campus was always that Mr. Sage was not fond of the idea of women's education, and so when he died, his wife, Margaret Olivia Slocum Stage, supposedly used the money he left her to found a woman's college out of spite in nineteen sixteen. I'm not sure if that was truly the case, but it's always been a fun story to tell prospective students and their families while giving tours around campus. While there is no statue of Russell on campus, his wife does have a statue on the campus green, and the bookstore is named Moss after her. Despite her stipulation that nothing be named in her honor, It's been a tradition to sit in her lap after important campus events. And I've included a picture my friends took of Margaret and I hanging out after our five year class reunion in I've also included the requisite pet tax picture of my terrier Dalmatian mixed Deed, who may be small in size, but his very large opinions keep up their great work. Um, this is hilarious and I love it. I love that we have this picture of UM sitting in the lap of a statue. I know some people would probably find sitting on statues to be inappropriate. I love it, Um, and Deed is so stink and cute. I have a little dog crush. Here's the other thing. Our listener, Heather wrote us with just a couple of suggestions, but Heather also included pets in costumes because her puppies, Cooper Bailey and Theo dress this characters from the Wizard of Oz and it's amazing, so good they are so so cute. So they are the Lion, the Tinman, and the Scarecrow. We have gotten some other good pet costume pictures and I hope I will be able to give them all shout outs. If I don't, please know they made me delighted just the same. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and you can subscribe in the I heart Radio app or wherever it is you listen to your favorite podcast guests. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H