Six Impossible Episodes: Mother Goose 3

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frey. This is a return of six Impossible Episodes. If you're new to the show Six Impossible Episodes, it's kind of a series. We'll tackle six different topics that, for whatever reason, usually can't fill out an episode on their own. The first time that we did one on Mother Goose Rhymes, it was because of a listener request for an episode about the Muffin Man. This was a listener request from a child that had been passed on via an adult. That one was a lot of fun, and so the next six Impossible Episodes we did was another one. Some time has passed now since those two, and I thought maybe we would go for a third. We have to start, though, with a caveat that Folks who have heard the other earlier Mother Goose episodes will probably find familiar. A lot of these poems and songs were first published hundreds of years ago, and some of them might have existed for quite some time before appearing in a book or some kind of other print material. But most of the explanations for their purported origins are much much newer, like in a lot of cases, hundreds of years newer, and usually these wind up seeming more like somebody sort of trying to come up with an explanation that matches up with what's written in a poem, rather than someone actually finding evidence that a poem referenced a specific person or historical event. They're fun anyway, though, so we're doing it. And first up, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again. The first known publication of this rhyme was by Samuel Arnold in seventeen ninety seven in a book called Juvenile Amusements. Arnold was a composer and an organist who lived and worked in London. His version was a little different, though it started out the same, but then ended four score men and four score more could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before. Some people interpret this as a riddle with the answer being an egg. According to folkloris Iona and Peter Opie, who specialized in the study of childhood culture and published so much research on it in the last half of the twentieth century. There are multiple different versions of the same poem slash riddle in other European countries, like Trilla Trola in parts of Germany or Bullabula in France. All of these similar poems seem like they are connected, but it's really not clear which of them might have been the first one ever to be composed. Also, Humpty Dumpty is often depicted is sort of an anthropomorphized egg, including in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which came out in eighteen sixty five, but the term humpty dumpty predate Samuel Arnold's publication of this nursery rhyme by roughly one hundred years. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, It's been used since at least sixteen ninety eight to mean a drink quote made with ale boiled with brandy, and in seventeen eighty five the word humpty dumpty was used in writing with a different meaning, that being a person who was short and squat and maybe kind of frumpy, especially if they keep their shoulders hunched.

00:03:43
Speaker 2: I feel attacked.

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Speaker 1: A character named Humpty Dumpty who had these physical traits also appeared in print before the Humpty Dumpty poem in the Lilliputian Writing School that came out sometime between seventeen fifty four and seventeen sixty four. So some people speculate that this poem is a reference to King Richard third of England, that the humpty is referencing the way his body looked because he had scoliosis, and the wall that he was on was a horse named Wall, and the falling down part is referencing his death at the Battle of bosworth Field.

00:04:20
Speaker 2: However, the only.

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Speaker 1: References to Richard the third having a horse named Wall that I could find, they all seem to be explanations of what Humpty Dumpty is about. I don't know if anybody else said at any point anywhere that he had a horse named Wall. The other thing that people point to with this a lot is that this could be Richard third, is that all the King's horses and all the King's men is maybe a reference to the my Kingdom for a horse line from Shakespeare's Richard the Third. There is also a completely different explanation that Humpty Dumpty was a large cannon that was used during the English Civil Wars. In this explanation, the Royalist town of Colchester was under siege by the Parliamentarians and they had this big cannon that they had nicknamed Humpty.

00:05:12
Speaker 2: Dumpty up on a wall.

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Speaker 1: Either the cannon recoiled when it was fired and fell off the wall, or the Parliamentarians shattered the wall and caused the cannon to fall down, but either way the Royalist forces could not repair it. But according to the opies, the source for this story is a series of fictitious nursery rhyme interpretations that were printed in Oxford Magazine in nineteen fifty six, which people misinterpreted as being real. Yeah, I've heard this cannon explanation a lot too, and I did try to go and track down this original article to see exactly what it said, and I could not find a way to get at it. So I wish I could did not sussess but do that. So next we go on to our next poem, which is sing a song a sixpence a pocket full of rye four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing. Wasn't that a dainty dish? To set before the king. There's also a second verse that I think people don't maybe say as much, which is the King was in the counting house counting out his money. The queen was in the parlor eating bread and honey. The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes. There came a little blackbird and snapped off her nose. So we're gonna look at this one in pieces first. There are multiple references combining sixpence with singing going back to the seventeenth century, including a line from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which was first performed in sixteen oh two. That's Sir Toby Belch saying, come on, there is sixpence for you. Let's have a song. In the sixteen fourteen play Bonduka by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, a character calls out, whoa, here's a stir Now sing a song of sixpence. So that bit's been around for a while next. Allegedly at least part of this was written by English literary critic and Shakespeare commentator George Stevens, who supposedly wrote it to make fun of Henry James Pie. Pie was named British poet Laureate in seventeen ninety, and unlike most people who are named a country's poet laureate, Pie was not well regarded for his verse. He was probably named poet laureate as a reward for supporting or doing some kind of favors for somebody in Parliament. Some sources point to William Pitt the Younger, who eventually became Prime Minister. A lot of Pie's contemporaries made fun of him and made fun of his poetry, especially his poems commemorating the King's birthday, which apparently were particularly horrible, at least based on what I read second hand, having also not found the exact poems they're talking about again. Allegedly, one of these birthday poems was so bad that Stevens responded with and when the pie was opened, the birds began to sing? Was not that a dainty dish to set before the King? Pie in this instance was spelled Pye, like Pie's name, and Stevens was supposedly inspired by a line Pie had written that referenced a feathered choir. This story shows up in a lot of sources, especially in works that were printed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it's not clear where it came from, also drawing some questions around this. The first written appearance of sing a song a sixpence is in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Songbook, published in seventeen forty four, forty six years before Pie was named Poet laureate. In that version, it is a bag of rye rather than a pocket.

00:08:59
Speaker 2: Naughty boys are who.

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Speaker 1: Was baked into the pie rather than blackbirds. It is definitely possible that Stevens kind of recited a bit of a nursery rhyme that he already knew to make fun of Henry James Pie. Though there are several other proposed explanations for this rhyme, but none of them really seem to have any backup, Like maybe this is a reference to King Henry the Eighth and the dissolution of the monasteries and those four and twenty blackbirds are really choirs of monks singing and baking pies to try to earn the king's favor. Or maybe in those later lines of the second verse, the queen is supposed to be Henry's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who he divorced, and the maid is his second wife and Boleyn who was beheaded, and that the beheading is what's being referenced when the blackbird snaps off the maid's nose. Or maybe the blackbirds are a reference to twenty four hours in a day, and the King and Queen are the sun and the moon. Honestly, it all seems kind of random. I feel like this is a literature class where people are like any interpretation is valid as.

00:10:02
Speaker 2: Long as you can back it up with the text.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety nine, the website snopes dot com published an explanation involving the pirate Blackbeard using this song to recruit new pirates for his crew. The sixpence and the rye were the money and whiskey that these pirates would be paid. The blackbirds in the pie alluded to how pirates would lure the crews of other ships into a false sense of security by pretending to be in distress. This explanation went on from there, explaining each line in the poem as part of a code for recruiting pirates. But this was from a section of the website called the Repository of Lost Legends or troll. They were supposed to be so obviously made up that no one would mistake them for real urban legends. In other words, snopes dot Com was trolling people, But really some of the articles in this section of the website are more obviously made up than others. Like an article about how mister Ed was really a zebra not a horse, accompanied by pictures of mister Ed, who was clearly a horse, is a lot easier to spot as fake than a made up interpretation of a nursery rhyme that seems pretty similar to the many, many other widely repeated nursery rhyme interpretations floating around in the world that are at best barely connected to reality. Some people did wind up falling for this Blackbeard fantasy, including the TLCTV show Mostly True Stories Urban Legends Revealed, which aired in two thousand and three. Yeah, apparently later on they didn't exactly error retraction, but they in a different episode they said the opposite. One possible inspiration for this poem is something we have talked about on the show before. Last year, we did an episode on the history of pie, and in it we talked about a fifteen ninety eight Italian cookbook titled Eppelario, which included a recipe for making a pie and then filling it with live birds, which would then fly out when the pie was cut open. The Opies actually referenced this recipe, as well as later cookbooks that referred back to it. They reference that in their Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. We are going to have more mother Goose fun, but first we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. Our next rhyme is newer than some of the others that we have been talking about over this kind of mini series. Here we go around the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Here we go around the mulberry bush on a cold and frosty morning. This is a song. I won't sing it because I'm bad at that. There are lots of additional verses, including this is the way we wash our face, this is the way we colmb our hair, this is the way we brush our teeth, and this is the way we put on clothes. This nineteenth century rhyme is usually sung to an older tune, one that was first documented in the middle of the eighteenth century as Nancy Dawson. This melody is also used for another song with some similarities to here we Go round the mulberry Bush, which is called nuts in May. That one goes here we come gathering nuts in May, Nuts in May, nuts in May. Here we come gathering nuts in May on a cold and frosty morning. The Opie speculated that the popularity of here we Go round the Mulberry Bush is at least partially due to nuts in May already being a well known song when Mulberry Bush was written. In their book The Singing Game, Peter and Aana Opie mention the use of this song in Glasgow infant schools in eighteen thirty four as a way to teach pupils about hygiene and but with the verses ending to come to school in the morning rather than on a cold and frosty morning. And aside from the first verse about the mulberry bush, this really does seem like the kind of didactic song that somebody might make up to teach young children about things like cleanliness. It really has some parallels to the kinds of songs that we talked about in our episode on the history of Happy Birthday to You, which we ran as a Saturday classic not long ago. Many nineteenth century versions of this song start with a verse about going around some kind of plants, but they aren't consistent about what kind of plant they reference. The opies point out that Thomas Hardy, born in Dorset, England, knew this song as being around a gooseberry bush, while T. S. Eliot, who grew up in Saint Louis, Missouri, knew it as a prickly pair. In James Orchard Halliwell Phillips's popular Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Tales, a sequel to the Nursery Rhymes of England, which was published in eighteen forty.

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Speaker 2: Nine, it is bramble bush.

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Speaker 1: It's not clear exactly where the mulberry bush came from or how that one seems to have become the most common, almost standard verse. Mulberries grow on trees and not on bushes, And of course trees and bushes these are both constructed categories that we have made up to understand the world. But in general trees have a central trunk, while shrubs tend to be smaller and have multiple woody stems. In nineteen ninety four, Robert Stephen Duncan, who had been governor of hm Wakefield Prison, self published a book called Here we Go Round the Mulberry Bush, House of Correction, fifteen ninety five HMP Wakefield, nineteen ninety five. And in this book he claimed that this nursery rhyme was a reference to women prisoners and their children walking around a mulberry tree in the prison's exercise yard in the nineteenth century, and there was a mulberry tree there. It was removed in twenty nineteen after dying due to a beatle infestation and other issues two years before. A replacement has since been propagated from cuttings from the original tree. It's not clear, though, what evidence there is to connect this mulberry tree to the children's song, other than that both the tree and.

00:16:22
Speaker 2: The song exist.

00:16:24
Speaker 1: Since this is a self published book that came out in nineteen ninety four in the UK, we were not able to get a copy of it to see what specifically Duncan said about it, or what kind of documentation there might be to support this idea. But sometimes people point out the incongruity of a children's song possibly being connected not only to a prison, but to one that has now more recently become a high security prison in more recent years than this song was originally written Wakefield Prison has been nicknamed the Monster Mansion because of the notoriety of some of the people incarcerated there and the sometimes gruesome and horrifying crimes that some of them have been convicted of committing. But there are still other proposed explanations. One is that it's a veiled reference to early efforts to start a silk industry in Britain, because silkworms eat mulberry leaves, and those first efforts didn't go so well, which is why the morning was cold and frosty. There's also a bit about going around the mulberry bush in some versions of Pop Goes the Weasel, but that seems to be a very recent addition to a song that goes all the way back to the sixteen hundreds. Moving on to our next rhyme, Hickory dickory dock The mouse ran up the clock, the clock struck one, the mouse ran down Hickory dickery doc. This is yet another rhyme that appears in the seventeen forty four Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, but with slightly different spellings. Hickory is hick e r e and Dickery is d ic k e er. Some versions of this rhyme say down he run instead of the mouse ran down, so that run rhymes with one. Others say down he ran, which feels more grammatically correct, but doesn't rhyme as well. Grammar another thing we made up to make sense of the world.

00:18:15
Speaker 2: Sure.

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Speaker 1: The opies described this as a counting song with hickory dickory doc possibly referencing the counting systems used by shepherds in parts of northern England. These systems grew out of Celtic languages like Kumbrick and were widely used in some areas up through the nineteenth century in parts of Derbyshire, Cumberland and Westmoreland. Eight nine and ten were Hovra, Doverra and dick. Some of the purported explanations for this one seem like just another instance of two things existing without necessarily being connected to one another, beyond the similarities that people spotted between them later on. One is the idea that this poem is a reference to Richard Cromwell, who was Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland for less than a year after the death of his father Oliver Cromwell in sixteen fifty eight. Richard Cromwell wasn't effective in this role at all. People described him as mousey and timid, and he was given nicknames like tumble Down Dick. Another thing that definitely exists is the astronomical clock at Exeter Cathedral in Devon, and this clock is fascinating. It probably dates back to the fifteenth century, but its inner workings are a replacement installed at the end of the nineteenth century. This clock shows the hour of the day, the day of the lunar month, and the phase of the moon, and the door that allows access to the interior workings of the clock has a little hole for a cat cut through the bottom. This was allegedly made specifically because mice we're running up and down the clock's mechanism and affecting its accuracy, so that door is so cats could get in there and stop that problem.

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Speaker 2: This has led to.

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Speaker 1: Some people suggesting that this specific clock is the inspiration for Hickory Dickory doc As a cat person, I know Tracy has some questions like, couldn't a cat do even more damage to the mechanisms if they pounce on a mouse that's running around in there? Or perhaps just batting machinery. I mean, yeah, I mean, I can see what people are saying, but it also seems like a cat could cause definite problems. Yeah, I mean, you have to have a lot of trust that your cat is a pretty focused mouser with strategy that does not involve destroying other things.

00:20:42
Speaker 2: Which seems like a big ask.

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Speaker 1: Yes. So Catherine Els Thomas takes a totally different approach to this in her book The Real Personages of Mother Goose. Thomas's work has been a major source in a lot of the interpretations that we have talked about in earlier installments of this series. She refers back to an essay on the archaeology of Popular English phrases and nursery rhymes by botanist John Bellenden Kerr, which came out in eighteen thirty four. He argued that a lot of English language rhymes that seemed nonsensical were really written in Anglo Saxon, which probably is what we would call Old English, and that Anglo Saxon was, according to him, the same as Low Saxon. So Kerr claimed that in this Low Saxon Dowkin meant to give it once, to give without delay. Maw spelled maegh meant stomach, clock spelled klocke meant cloak or gown, Ran meant lank or wanting food, and strak meant immediately. So this was about someone in a cloak or a gown demanding to be given food immediately. In other words, this was a criticism of Catholic clergy demanding provisions from peasants, while also lampooning the peasants who did as the clergy asked. A lot of Kurz explanations of the purported Low Saxon origins of idioms and nursery rhymes kind of boiled down to anti Catholicism in some way. This seems like the longest walk interpretation to me. Yeah, I tried to figure out there are languages and dialects today that are sometimes called Lo Saxon, and I was like trying to figure out is this the same as what or is this something different? Like I really was not able to confirm whether any of these words he was talking about aligned with reality at all, right, and just the whole idea that these seemingly nonsensical English language nursery rhymes are really totally different words in a different language I'd found that both fascinating and baffling. So we're just going to take a quick sponsor break and ruminate on that for a little bit and then get to our last two rhymes. Okay, Georgie Porgie putting him pie kiss the girls and made them cry when the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgy ran away. This rhyme was first written down in the eighteen forties, although initially it was not that the boys came out to play and Georgie Porgie ran away. Georgie Porgie ran away when the girls came out to play. In the eighteen fifties, James Orchard Halliwell Phillips, who we referenced earlier, published a variant on this, which was roly Poly Pumpkin Pie kissed the girls and made them cry. When the girls began to cry, roly Poly runs away. The Georgie in this poem is often interpreted as George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham, favorite of King James the First, and as referencing his affairs with the King and also with women at the court. So after breaking some lady's hert, George would run back to the King for his protection. Another interpretation is that Georgie is King George the Fourth before his ascension to the throne while he was serving as Prince Regent. In this interpretation, the poem is making fun of him for his weight and is also referencing his relationships with two different women. One is Maria Ann fitz Herbert, who he wanted to marry so badly even though she was Catholic, but under the Active Settlement of seventeen oh one, only Protestants could take the throne and anyone who married a Catholic was barred from taking the throne as well. That did not stop George, though he married Maria Ann fitz Herbert in secret in seventeen eighty five. That marriage was not a legal one, though, and George got married again in seventeen ninety five as part of an agreement with Parliament to pay off his debts. This wife was Catherine of Brunswick, who he absolutely hated, to the point that he did not allow her to attend his coronation in eighteen twenty one.

00:25:14
Speaker 2: What a gem Yeah.

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Speaker 1: In the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, the opies say of all this quote, as with other of the better known rhymes. Numerous guesses have been hazarded that n historical character is portrayed as usual, no evidence is vouchsafed. And lastly, little miss Muffett sat on a toughet eating her curds, and whey, there came a big spider who sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffett.

00:25:45
Speaker 2: Away.

00:25:46
Speaker 1: Tracy learned this as along came a spider, so did I. This first appeared in print in eighteen oh five in Songs for the Nursery, as with Mary Mary. Quite contrary which we talked about on a previous installment. Some people interpret this as being about Mary, Queen of Scott's and in this case the spider is Protestant reformer John Knox. John Knox was the author of a tract titled the First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, which attacked three Catholic queens, Mary the First of England, Mary of Geese, Queen Dowager and Regent of Scotland, and Mary Queen of Scotts. Knox was also a major figure in the Protestant Reformation in Scotland. Catherine L. Was Thomas describes it this way, quote denouncing the frivolous little miss Muffett from the pulpit of Saint Giles, until the ecclesiastical atmosphere was blue and sulfurous. The Big Spider, with angry brow and darkling means, strode down the canongate, turning sharply to the right. He quickened his pace to enter Holyrood, and, sitting beside her, demanded her recantation, all in vain. Although he could frighten little Miss Muffett away from her toughet, as he did eventually, never by expostulation, threat or entreaty could the Big Spider induce the French bread Scotch beauty to recant. Mary was ultimately forced to abdicate and spent the last nineteen years of her life as a prisoner before being executed in fifteen eighty seven. Is there conclusive evidence that this poem is about that now and others offer a totally different interpretation that this is about English naturalist and physician doctor Thomas Muffett, who wrote a lot about insects and arachnids, including making an illustrated manual called Theater of Insects. Supposedly, this poem is a reference to one of his stepchildren, or children, possibly a daughter or stepdaughter named patients specifically. Some accounts go for so far as to say that Muffett was tormenting his children or stepchildren by frightening them with spiders, or even doing experiments on them with spider venom.

00:27:58
Speaker 2: Those poor spiders.

00:28:00
Speaker 1: Although Muffett was a real person, he died in sixteen oh four, two hundred years before this poem first appeared in print. Of course, Mary Queen of Scott's lived even longer ago than that, but she was also a much better known figure than doctor Thomas Muffett.

00:28:16
Speaker 2: There's also some back.

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Speaker 1: And forth about what is meant by a toughet in this poem. Tough It can mean a hillock or a mound, but it can also mean a footstool. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary cites little Miss Muffett as the first written use of tofit meaning in to quote from there perhaps hasseock or footstool, But then the OED has this additional note quote doubtful, perhaps due to misunderstanding of the nursery rhyme. The opies note how similar little Miss Muffett is to a lot of other rhymes, including Little Jack Horner, which we discussed in our first Mother Goose episode. The poems all involve someone little Miss Muffy, Jack Horner, Miss Mopsey, pull Parrot, Tommy Tackett. The subjects of all these poems are all sitting and waiting for something when something else happens. Some of these go back to the early eighteenth century, so it's possible that there are variations on a little poetic formula. So that's our six impossible Mother Goose episodes for this time around. I hope folks have enjoyed them. I have a little listener mail that is also about the meanings of things. Liz sent this, and I love the subject of the subject line of the email, which is Scott Joplin and the Cakewalk unlocking a core memory. So Liz wrote, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I love the show and I've been listening for the past few years. You're always on my way to Slash from work and when doing stuff around the house. I was just listening to the Scott Joplin episode on my way to the store and it unlocked a core memory that was apparently deeply and unknowingly problematic. I'm originally from Texas, no where near Texarcana, but If you know anything about Texas, you know that Texans are just ridiculously proud of being Texans. This episode unlocked a series of core memories from elementary school in Austin. I remember learning about Scott Joplin and music class. As soon as I saw the title of the episode, I remembered hearing the maple leaf rag and also having to learn a weird dance number. For some reason, I assumed the teacher focused on him because he was the father of ragtime and also likely a native Texan and an educational two for if you Will. Then Holly mentioned a cakewalk, and I had yet another memory unlocked. While at this school, the library hosted a yearly cakewalk. It was organized like musical chairs. Moms donated a cake, we all walked in a circle around some chairs to music, and then stopped. When the music stopped, the winner got to take home a cake of their choice. So there I was in my car driving to the store and heard Holly mention the cakewalk and that, uh, it needed its own explanation, And I laughed and thought, what explanation? I did one every year in elementary school. But then you explained its origins and let me tell you, I screamed. So yes, cakewalks did continue for some time after Scott Joplin's time, well into the nineteen nineties. I don't think I thought about the yearly cakewalk in decades, But oh my, what a wild flashback this episode brought on. It made me wonder what other seemingly benign activities I did as a child that have deep roots in racist practices. It's wild to think about it, and I think it highlights why pods like yours are so important. And then there are some pet pictures. There is a cat, a cat named Etta. I accidentally printed the pictures, except I printed them so big. I'm gonna I'm gonna make sure that Holli can see the glory of what I printed by it. I think you should frame each of these pages and make a giant art installation of a cat that is six feet tall. Yeah, it's this would be really really an armis if I had printed the whole cat. But I just have the left eye and ear in what I accidentally printed because I'm just perpetually forgetting to turn off the printing of attachments when I print episodes. Then that makes me feel like an old person who doesn't know how to do email.

00:32:19
Speaker 2: Edna is very cute.

00:32:21
Speaker 1: By the way, Yes, the other two pictures that I actually printed out have no visible animal because of my printer settings. But anyway, there's a final note about being scared to look up the dance that they learned along with maple leaf frag to find out if it also has some connotations. Liz, first, thank you for sending this note. I am sorry I printed it in such a way that I cannot just tell everybody what your pets look like. You are not the only person now who has had this experience. I grew up in North Carolina and went to a public school in a somewhat rural to suburban kind of area, and our annual I think it was the Halloween carnival. It was the same one that we talked about in our Crash at Crush episode where they would buy like a beat up used car and you could pay a dollar to take a swing at it with a baseball bat. There was also a cake walk every year, and it was very like musical chairs, except if I'm remembering it correctly, it was laid out with like tape on the floor so that you were walking and then something like that. That is my memory of cakewalks as well. Yeah, so I don't think it was like musical chairs where they take a chair away. I think everybody came to a stop and then a number was the winning number, and that was who got to go get a cake. We didn't participate in this in my family, not because we had any aware of the history of the cakewalk.

00:34:02
Speaker 2: We did not.

00:34:04
Speaker 1: It was just because it was not what my mom wanted to spend money on. She was like, we can make a cake at home. I was super ready for your mom's issue to be that she did not know the nutritional contents of the cake.

00:34:17
Speaker 2: That might have been that.

00:34:20
Speaker 1: She might have assumed that none of the other moms, because it would have been mostly other moms doing the baking, maybe not everybody, but might have assumed they were not good bakers.

00:34:30
Speaker 2: Might have there might have.

00:34:32
Speaker 1: Been like a random element to which cake you got. She didn't want to wind up with a cake that we would not like. I don't remember the exact tales I was five, but yes, yes, lots of places still as of them, which that would have been more like nineteen eighty eighty one doing the cakewalk. So yeah, other seemingly innocuous things that people may have done in elementary school that I have had on my list to do an episode about for a long time. May I get to you at some point. It maybe not square dancing. Apparently there is a whole history of square dancing where people were encouraged to do it at school for racist reasons. So, anyway, if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcasts for a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. We're all over social media. Missed in History? That's why I'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, on Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.