Étienne Cabet and the Utopia of Icaria

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

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Speaker 2: I dropped everything to learn more about Ettien Cabe after he and his utopian experiments came up in the Narcisse Montreal episode, which was the last thing I worked on before this one. I'm not exaggerating. I had a whole different plan for what I was going to work on next, which I threw out the window and said, Ettien Cabe and so here we are. That's today's episode.

00:00:42
Speaker 1: Dun Dun Dun. Ettienkaba was born on January first, seventeen eighty eight, in Dijon, France. His father, Claude, was a cooper and his mother's name was Francoise. Various sources described Claude as a radical, including being a member of the Jacobin Club and the follower of Maximilian Robespierre during the French Revolution. These sources are not entirely clear on whether Claude's support of Robespierre continued throughout the Reign of Terror, but Etienne was definitely raised in a household that was passionately anti monarchy and unafraid to take a stand against real or perceived injustice.

00:01:22
Speaker 2: Etienne got an education as a boy, and he spent some time studying medicine before eventually earning a law degree in eighteen twelve. Unlike Narcis Montsorial, he definitely became a lawyer, and he practiced law. A lot of his work focused on defending or advocating for people who were socially or politically oppressed, or making things harder for the people or the entities that were doing that oppressing. He developed a reputation for being both eloquent and skilled, but his ongoing activism and political views led to him being banned from practicing in Dijon, so he moved to Paris.

00:02:01
Speaker 1: By this point, the French Revolution was well in the past. Napoleon Bonaparte had come and gone, and the Bourbon monarchy had been restored in France. For about five years after Napoleon's final downfall, the French government had been fairly moderate. That changed in February of eighteen twenty with the assassination of Charles Ferdinand de Bourbon, Duc de Berrie, nephew of King Louis the eighteenth The Assassin had been one of Napoleon's supporters and had explicitly stated that his purpose was to end the Bourbon line of succession. This led to a backlash that brought a more right wing ultra royalist government into power, which led to another backlash by Republicans and others on the left, including the establishment of a secret revolutionary society called the Charbonarie patterned after the similar Carbonari in Italy.

00:02:54
Speaker 2: Came became director of the Charbonarie as it planned for an armed uprising against the king. This plot was discovered and four French soldiers who were connected to it were tried, arrested, and guillotined. This fate did not befall Cabe. He continued his anti monarchy pro republic work through things like politics, journalism, and pamphleteering, and then he took an active part in the July Revolution of eighteen thirty. During this revolution, Charles the Tenth, who had become king after Louis the eighteenth's death in eighteen twenty four, abdicated and was replaced by Louis Philippe, who had been a member of the Jackoman Club and for the most part pretty supportive of the liberal opposition.

00:03:41
Speaker 1: Louis Philippe was styled as King of the French, not King of France. A revised constitution established France as a constitutional monarchy and preserved various rites that had been achieved during the French Revolution. There were also efforts to establish a government and administration that would satisfy people on both the left and the right, including appointing people from both sides to various positions. Ettienn Kabe, at this point, well known for his radical and revolutionary activities, was named Attorney General of Corsica. This appointment did not last very long, though. Trying to satisfy to diametrically opposed factions was an impossible task, and the king faced continual challenges from both ends of the political spectrum, including from Cabe. Kabe wrote a book about what he saw as the failure of the revolution and established a radical newspaper called Le Populaire. Ultimately, Kabe either left his position as Attorney General or was removed from it. I'm not totally clear on the details, but he still had enough support from like minded people to be elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the French parliament. The government suppressed Kabe's newspaper in eight thirty four, and he was charged with les majeste, or crime against the sovereign. After being convicted, he was given a choice of going to prison or going into exile, and he chose exile. He went to London, where he stayed for almost five years. One of the sources that Tracy used in this episode says that he took his common law wife, Delphi Lossage with him along with their daughter Celine, but another says that he met and married Delphine while he was in London.

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Speaker 2: In London, Kabe taught French. While working on his English, he wrote a history of the French Revolution, which came out in eighteen thirty nine, as well as the six hundred page History of Christianity, which focused on Jesus Christ as an advocate of economic equality and described the Kingdom of Heaven as communist in nature. And he started reading works like Thomas Moore's Utopia and writings by Robert Owen, who we talked about in our most recent Saturday Classic. Cabe and Owen also met to talk about these ideas. At this point, Owen had ended his efforts with communal living in New Harmony, Indiana, and he had returned to Britain.

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Speaker 1: Here's how Kabay saw the state of things, as described by journalist Albert Shaw in a book about him in eighteen eighty four. Quote. What had been at first a movement of the middle class against an absolute monarch and an intolerable aristocracy had almost imperceptibly come to be a movement of the lowest class against the middle class. The first and second estates were no longer formidable. Louis Philippe was the king of the bourgeoisie. Money was the new tyrant. Capital controlled the electorate. The government was in league with bankers, manufacturers, and the mercantile classes. Democracy now meant the movement of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Society was breaking into two more and more clearly defined classes, the rich and pro prosperous, the capitalized class numbered by thousands, and the laboring class, numbered by millions. Oppression was no longer conceived of as political, but as industrial.

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Speaker 2: Kabey also saw all of this not as a new phenomenon, but as something that had been playing out over and over again throughout history. He saw humanity as continually divided into a quote, crude, idle arrogant minority that hoarded all the wealth and imposed poverty on everybody else. He thought the only way forward was to find some way to prevent this one small portion of humanity from continually praying on everyone.

00:07:41
Speaker 1: So he wrote a book about a place that was free of all this. Voyage on Icari or Voyage to Acaria, also known as Voyage and Adventures of Lord William Caresdale in Acaria. It's presented as the journal of a young English nobleman detailing his experiences in a nation ruled by a benevolent dictator known as a car. Akaria is presented as an ideal society, completely egalitarian and almost like an enormous family. Each province is divided into self governing communes, which make decisions by consensus. Representatives from each commune do the same at the provincial and national level, with a car guiding the nation through a transition into this perfect system. Everyone in Akaria worked, but thanks to all that collective labor and access to various technologies, the work was easy and the days were short. Everyone had what they needed, and there was no money or need to buy or sell anything, no private property and no crime kebe returned. To Paris in eighteen thirty nine after the end of his period of exile, and Voyage to Ikaria was published. The following year, he also relaunched Le Populaire, and his ideas and write became really popular, especially among skilled crafts people whose work was being affected by mechanization and industrialization. One example was tailors who were seeing a shift from making bespoke garments to mass production. Kabay's ideas were also appealing to a lot of women. He talked and wrote a lot about how women were oppressed by the same systems as men were, but then were further oppressed by being stripped of their rights and relegated to domestic roles in servitude. This included both paid and unpaid labor in their own families and for others.

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Speaker 2: Soon people were having discussion groups in places like coffee shops and other gathering places to talk about Kabay's work and the idea of a truly egalitarian society. For the next few years, Kabay continued his writing and his printing work. He published the book on Christianity that he had written back in London as well. Eventually, he started making plans to establish a real life Akaria. In the words of journalist Charles Nordoff, who visited an Akarian community much later, quote Ettien Cabe had a pretty dream. This dream took hold of his mind, and he spent sixteen years of his life in trying to turn it into real life. He advocated for this plan in Le Populaire, announcing it in May of eighteen forty seven with a proclamation that began Alonsonicerie. Updates on arrangements and fundraising and proposals for where to go played out in the paper, and the following year Le Populaire included an announcement that the settlement would be established in Texas. We'll have more on that after a sponsor break. Eten CABE's idea to establish an Acarian society in Texas was influenced by Robert Owen. Shortly after the end of Owen's efforts in New Harmony, he had looked at the possibility of establishing another community in northern Mexico. This never came to fruition, in part because of an immigration law passed by Mexico in eighteen thirty. This was when huge numbers of US citizens were immigrating to Mexico and Mexico was afraid that the United States would try to annex this part of its territory. This law limited immigration into Mexico from the United States and also banned enslaved people being brought into Mexico. That was an issue because a lot of the Americans who were wanting to go to Mexico also wanted to bring an enslaved workforce with them. Of course, this law did not have the intended effect of keeping Mexico from losing this territory. Americans moved there illegally anyway, and Texas declared itself independent in eighteen thirty six. It became a US state in eighteen forty five, so by the time Kabe started looking for a place to establish Acaria, the region Owen had been considering was part of the United States. Owen connected Kaba to a land agent named William Smalling Peters, who worked out a deal for one thousand acres of land along the Trinity River, along with another ten thousand, two hundred forty acres of land farther away from the river. But this land would only be theirs if the Acarians established homesteads on each of the parcels by July first, eighteen forty eight. Meanwhile, the front page announcement in the Populaire announcing a plan to go to Texas came out on November fourteenth, eighteen forty seven, just a little more than six months before that deadline. The first group of sixty nine Akarians didn't set sail from the hav France until February third, eighteen forty eight. When this group got to the United States, things went very badly. They arrived in New Orleans, Louisiana, and then they went on to Shreveport by steamboat. Once they got to Shreveport, they had to go west about three hundred miles or four hundred and eighty two kilometers over roads that barely existed. Once they got to their allotted land, they discovered that this was not thousands of contiguous acres. Plots of about six hundred and forty acres each were scattered in almost a checkerboard pattern, with the state of Texas still controlling the rest of the board. The whole point was to establish a community where people would live and work and eat collectively. So this arrangement of separated plots of land that were not connected to each other, that was just not suited to what they were trying to do. It's a little unclear whether Kabay or these first arrivals were aware of this setup beforehand, or whether a language barrier might have affected what the Akarians understood about exactly what the land that they were getting. Also, since that first group of Acarians did not even get to Texas until June second, they had less than a month to try to build a house on each of these parcels. This was not the end of it, though a lot of the land was swampy and there were lots of mosquitoes. We mentioned earlier that Kabe's ideas were really appealing to skilled crafts people whose trades were being affected by industrialization. So these are the kind of people who might be able to make things to use or sell to keep a colony going once it was established. But they were not farmers, and they were not accustomed to the kind of labor required to farm completely unbroken ground. They seemed to have escaped a yellow fever outbreak that struck New Orleans that year, but many of them contracted malaria. At least four people died of it or other illnesses. One person was struck by lightning and their doctor got sick and then had some kind of serious mental health crisis. Although the Akarians did manage to get some shacks built on these parcels of land, trying to do that by their deadline meant that they had almost no crops planted by the start of August. Then the late summer heat made that health situation even worse. It became clear that there was just no way that they would be able to plant enough food to live off over the winter. They finally decided to go back to Shreveport, where they handed over all the materials and tools and oxen that they had bought from the Peters Company. A second group of twenty one men had arrived in Texas just days before this decision was made, and one of them wrote to Kaba with just a really discouraging report of what was going on.

00:15:58
Speaker 1: To add to all of this, events back in France had called this whole project into question. Kabey had an estimated four hundred thousand followers, and fewer than one hundred had actually left to go to the United States. Many more had put their money toward this cause, though, and Kabey started to face a lot of suspicion about exactly what he was doing with that money. As the first group had been preparing to leave, Kabey had been charged with fraud. He was cleared, but this was a huge disruption.

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Speaker 2: And on February twenty second, just about three weeks after that first group had departed for the United States, a revolution began in France. It was one of a series of revolutions that started across parts of Europe in eighteen forty eight. By February twenty fourth, King Louis Philippe had been deposed and France had once again become a republic. Acarians in France were split over what they should do. Should they continue on with their plan of establishing a colony in the United States, or should they try to make this new French republic more like what they envisioned for Akaria. Some went so far as to argue for that advance group to be recalled, and after hearing the news, some of the ones who had gone to the United States wanted to return to France.

00:17:20
Speaker 1: Kabey thought there was no possible way to turn France into the communist utopia he envisioned. While he had a lot of followers, there was just too much antipathy for his ideas and for the entire concept of communism, so he continued making preparations to go to the US. Kabe arrived in New Orleans with more followers in December of eighteen forty eight. Everybody found temporary places to stay while they and those earlier arrivals all decided what to do. Although some did go back to France and some filed suit against Kabe for fraud. Once they got there, the majority decided they should find another more suitable place to build their utopia. A small group set out to look for a new location along the Mississippi River. What they found was Navu, Illinois. Navu was built on land purchased by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints in eighteen thirty nine, after the church had been expelled from the state of Missouri the year before. The church's headquarters were located in Navu from eighteen thirty nine to eighteen forty six, and during that time the city's population was predominantly made up of church members. Navu had grown into one of the largest cities in Illinois, but the Latter day Saints had started leaving in eighteen forty four. After founder Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram were shot and killed while in jail facing charges of treason in nearby Carthage. This is, of course a whole long story, but the treason charge stemmed from Smith calling out the militia to enforce martial law during a dispute involving a newspaper that had been highly critical of him. Harassment and persecution of church members had escalated after the Smiths were killed, including the burning down of more than two hundred homes and farms in September of eighteen forty five, so by eighteen forty six, much of Navu was abandoned.

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Speaker 2: When Kabe's Location Scouts arrived there in early eighteen forty nine, Navu really seemed ready made for their purposes. There were already homes, farms, stores, and other buildings. The land had been prepared and tended. It was not an undrained swamp or an uncultivated prairie. Since it was on the Mississippi River, it would be pretty easy for new arrivals to get there. The remaining Ofkareans in the United States voted to move to Navu at the end of February, and once they were there they bought and leased various buildings and parcels of land from the church trustees. One of these buying decisions was controversial. Kabai wanted to buy the ten which had been badly damaged in a fire. Most of what was left was the stone work. Kabe hoped to turn this into the community's school, dining hall, and gathering space. People who objected to this plan thought it was too expensive, it needed a lot of work to make it usable, and buying it meant they couldn't afford to buy more practical buildings. Akaria was at least theoretically supposed to make decisions based on consensus, although only men had voting rights, but they had also elected Kabe to essentially act as a dictator for a ten year period while the colony was getting started. He went ahead with that purchase, but the temple was struck by a tornado in eighteen fifty when the work on it had barely begun. From that point, its stones were repurposed into other buildings. Yeah in addition to the tornado, they had possibly been ripped off by somebody they bought large timbers from for the work that needed to be done on the interior. At this community's peak, there were about five hundred Akarians living in Navu, although people were continually deciding to return to Europe and being replaced by new arrivals, mostly from France, but from other parts of Europe as well. Emil Valet, whose family joined the Navu community in eighteen forty nine, described it this way, to the exception of the family, everything was in common among them. No private property, no monies, no poor, no rich, no competition, no antagonism, complete solidarity, the strong working for the feeble, the sick, the one working for all, and all working for one, everyone producing according to his strength, his talent, his skill, and consuming according to his wants. No lawyers but arbitrators. The schools open to all children, equally universal suffrage for men above twenty years of age. Women having the deliberative right, and as soon as an enlightened, the consultative right. The people having its full and complete sovereignty, making its own laws and willing to submit to the dictation of the majority. Women rehabilitated, cherished and respected, love, confidence, security, happiness. Just to be clear that passage was part of an essay in which Valet hoped to show quote the demoralizing influence of communism on men and its inadaptability to human nature. Yeah, that this paragraph sounded so idealistic to me that it seemed weird to just not make it clear he was not saying that this turned out great. It's funny because he does make it sound fantastic. He makes it sound pretty awesome. To join this community, people had to pay an entry fee. The amounts changed at various points, but generally it was around six hundred francs. If somebody left the community, this money was returned to them. They also had to be prepared with enough clothing to survive for about five years, so that money plus clothing meant that people had to have some income some amount of wealth. To join up, parents had to agree for their children to be educated in what was basically a boarding school with pretty limited contact with the rest of the family. Divorce was allowed, but marriage was also expected, so if somebody got divorced, they were supposed to find a new spouse quickly.

00:23:25
Speaker 1: The community was also non theistic, and many members were atheist or agnostic, but people could also continue to uphold their own religious beliefs if they had them, and much of Kabe's writing was underpinned with what he saw as Christian morality. Kabai also wanted Akaria to function within the scope of local and federal laws, like getting their community formally chartered by the Illinois legislature and Akarian's becoming US citizens. Kabey himself became a citizen in eighteen fifty four, and there was at least one mass naturalization ceremony held in Navu.

00:24:02
Speaker 2: At least twenty people died in a cholera outbreak aboard the steamboats on their way to Navu from New Orleans, but apart from that, this effort went far more smoothly than what had happened in Texas. Soon the Akarians purchased a distillery and a flour mill to be used as sources of income for the community. They also acquired a printing press and established a library. But things took a turn after Kabe had to return to France in eighteen fifty one to face charges of fraud. Although he was cleared of these charges, he was appalled by how he found things when he returned to Navu. Although some Akarians had occasionally consumed alcohol, now people were drinking to excess, and some of them had taken up smoking, which he also despised.

00:24:52
Speaker 1: Some of the women had started wearing perfume and having individual personal items that they considered their own. Kabe wrote up a new, much stricter code of conduct called the forty eight Articles that a lot of people found really tyrannical, in which the majority voted against implementing. Although Navu had a lot of advantages for the Akarians, Kabey had intended it to be a temporary home and had planned for the community to eventually move farther west. To that end, in eighteen fifty two, a group of Akarians traveled to Adams County, Iowa, and they acquired land there near Courning. This community became known as a welcoming stop on the thirteen hundred mile trek from Navu, Illinois that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints followed to Salt Lake City. This trek was known as the Mormon Trail. Much of this migration took place in eighteen forty six in eighteen forty seven, but it continued until the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in eighteen sixty nine, at which point most people just went by train, so this community in Iowa was a plan for a future move, not schism, but there were schisms to come, and we're going to get into those after we paused for a sponsor break.

00:26:16
Speaker 2: As an Akarian community was being established in Adams County, Iowa, the community at Navu, Illinois was becoming increasingly contentious. Kabe's approach to being sort of a limited time benevolent dictator was falling apart. The community had held annual elections at which he had been unanimously voted president every time, but when he wanted to change the community's charter so that the president would be elected every four years instead of annually, people objected. There were also growing divisions over the role of women. Although Kabe had talked a lot about the ways that women were at a disadvantage in society, Akarian women still did not have the right to vote, and a lot of the times they were the ones doing most of the domestic work.

00:27:06
Speaker 1: In eighteen fifty six, as Kabai's decisions became increasingly unpopular, the Akarians elected JB. Girard to be their president, but Kabai refused to allow him and the newly elected governing board to be installed. There had also been some back and forth leading up to this election, in which Kabey agreed to withdraw his proposals for changing their charter in exchange for being elected for another term, but then didn't actually withdraw them. Kabay started undermining the community, doing things like raising questions about their financial position with their creditors and keeping the account books secret from the people who were supposed to be taking responsibility for them. Some of his critics petitioned the Illinois legislature asking them to repeal the community's active incorporation, but that effort failed. This eventually led to an extremely acrimonious schism, with the majority of the community voting to expel Kabey. Afterward, kab took about one hundred and eighty people who still supported him to Saint Louis. Here's how Albert Shaw described the aftermath of this quote. It need scarcely be said that the community at Navu had been greatly weakened by the split. Much of the movable property, all of the account books, a large portion of the library had been carried off by the cecidars. The titles to the real estate, both in Navu and in Iowa, were in Kabay's name, and long tedious suits were required in order to give the community perfect legal title to its own premises. The whole system of industry had been deranged, crops had failed, debts had greatly increased. The Saint Louis party, claiming as we have already shown to be the real Akarians and maintaining the old bureau in Paris, had so industriously circulated their version of the story in France that the Navu majority were there regarded by their still numerous Akarian fellow disciples as base ingrates who had overturned the society for selfish ends, driven away their noble benefactor, Cabe broken his heart and caused his death by their brutal treatment. Letters of explanation sent from Navu to France were returned unanswered. No more funds or recruits came to Navu. If that phrase caused his death by their brutal mistreatment, caught your attention. On November eighth, eighteen fifty six, about a week after arriving in Saint Louis, Ettienkabe had a stroke and he died at the age of sixty eight. The people who had followed him to Saint Louis were truly devastated. One of them took their own life, but the rest decided to try to carry on. They remained in Saint Louis while they tried to work out a plan, and then in May of the following year they bought an estate called Cheltenham, west of the city. It only came with twenty eight acres of land, but it already had a large house and some cabins, and was close enough to Saint Louis that people who had gotten jobs there could go back and forth to work to help keep the community afloat. About one hundred and fifty Acarians moved to Cheltenham, but they soon faced similar divisions to what had happened back in Navu, with some people wanting the community to be united under one powerful leader and others wanting a system that was more egalitarian. People continually left and were continually replenished with new arrivals from France, who again thought this one was the real Akaria, but eventually there were more people leaving than arriving. After the start of the Civil War, a lot of young men left to join the US army. By eighteen sixty four, there there were only about twenty Akarians left at Cheltenham, which was not enough to keep the community going, and it was disbanded that March.

00:31:08
Speaker 2: The community at Navu was also following through on the plan to move to Iowa, although there were some people who decided to return to France instead. The Akarians had established a new charter with the state of Iowa in eighteen sixty, and that charter did allow for some individual property ownership. Unlike the group at Cheltenham, which had lost so many members that it could not survive a further reduction during the Civil War, the Aekarians in Iowa found that their crops and their wool were in very high demand, so they weathered the war and they were even able to acquire some more land for the community. We read from the writing of journalist Charles Nordhoff earlier in the show. He visited the Akarians in Iowa in eighteen seventy four. At that point, their community had sixty three members described their life as hard, a huge contrast to what Kabe had envisioned in recruitment pamphlets that the Akarians produced earlier on For example, back in eighteen fifty four, the Akarians in Navou published a German language pamphlet that had described what Kabe thought he could do if he was able to secure half a million dollars, an amount that would give him access to a lot more credit, which he could then use to secure all kinds of necessities and even some luxuries. Nordhoff also pointed out the contradiction in the idea of starting a commune based on the idea of total economic equality by taking on an enormous amount of debt. In this pamphlet, Kabe had described quote dwellings supplied with gas and hot and cold water, of factories fitted up on the largest scale, of fertile farms, under the best culture of schools, high and elementary, of theaters and other places of amusement, of elegantly kept pleasure grounds, and so on. But the Acarians in Iowa had started out twenty thousand dollars in debt, and at first they were able to build only mud huts to live in. They eventually upgraded to log cabins and then two frame houses, plus a dining hall, a wash house, a dairy, a schoolhouse, and various workshops for things like carpentry, blacksmithing, and shoemaking. A two story building served as their common dining room and their kitchen, and it also did have a library and living space on the upper floor. They'd built a sawmill and a gristmill that they could use to bring in more income, and they had paid off all of their debt.

00:33:45
Speaker 1: In other words, for more than twenty years, they had worked really, really hard, often living in a way that was barely above subsistence, to get out of debt and keep their community going. In Nordhoff's words, quote a moderate degree of prosperity is possible to them now, but they have waited long for it. I judged that they had but poor skill in management and no business talent, but certainly they had abundant courage and determination.

00:34:14
Speaker 2: However, they were still facing similar ideological divisions to what had played out in the other Akarian communities. One of the big issues was still women's suffrage, but there were also disagreements over how strict the community should be and how open to newcomers, as well as whether they should be focused on their own community or on trying to spread communist ideals to the wider public. They gradually coalesced into two groups known as Young Ikaria and New Ikaria. Although some of these divisions felt very broadly along age lines. There were some older people in the young group and some younger people in the new group. One of the difficulties in all of this was that the more progressive people had an overall majority, but they did not have a majority among the people who were both male and old enough to vote. These two groups wound up in court, and in August of eighteen seventy eight, the Akarians charter was declared to be forfeit. The circuit court designated trustees from outside the community to divide its property, resulting in the Iowa settlement being divided into east and west portions. The young Akarians went to one side and the new Akarians to the other, with new charters being established in eighteen seventy nine. I don't know if in practice it felt like they just put a big tape line down down the middle of town. That is what it sounds like. That's how it comes across from me. Eventually, seventeen of the young Kharians left and they joined a small group that had previously gone to California. They called themselves the Acaria Speranza community, with Sporanza coming from Lesperance. That name was taken from other utopian writing. This group disbanded in eighteen eighty six. The Akarian community in Iowa carried on until eighteen ninety eight, and it was the last Akarian community to disband. It had existed for forty six years, making it the longest known non religious communal living experiment in the US. Some of the Akarian communities buildings in Navu, Illinois and in Corning, Iowa, are still standing and at least at some points they've been operated as living history museums. I had trouble tracking down whether any of these are still operating currently. It seemed like in one case maybe by appointment, but like no longer functioning websites, phone numbers hard to track down.

00:36:53
Speaker 1: That kind of a thing. Oh, do you also have some listener mail? I have so many thoughts about this. I can't wait for behind this.

00:37:00
Speaker 2: This email is from Mary and it is titled Revolutionary Cookies, Sweet History, And it's like, we have the email and we also have a story about the email. The email starts Hello, Holly and Tracy, and then that's followed by a series of photographs and the photographs are on a cookie package for a Jovita edar Concha cookie. Yeah, and so scrolling pastologies as well as a very cute picture of a very cute dog can return to the email, which says, recently, I took a motorcycle ride to the Claremont packing House In Claremont, California. There are restaurants and stores, but there was also a kiosk called Revolutionary Bites Bakery, and since I love cookies and revolutionaries, I stopped to buy all of their cookies pay tribute to various historical revolutionaries, many of whom I've never heard of. The strawberry concha cookie clebrating Hovey to Dar caught my eye. I'm attaching pictures of the cookie and the history behind Miss Dar possible future episode. I actually got to see you live in Los Angeles a few years ago for a spooky Halloween show. The picture I took with you is one of my treasured memories for my pet tax I'm attaching a picture of my granddog Cooper and his silhouette I had done of him at Disneyland. Thank you Mary, So First, thank you Mary for this email. Second, when I read it, I felt like I had fallen into some kind of wormhole because this email arrived after we had recorded our episode on Hovey to Edar, but before the episode had come out, So.

00:38:44
Speaker 1: In my head I was like.

00:38:46
Speaker 2: Oh, wow, we already have email about the Hovi' to Edar episode that just came out.

00:38:53
Speaker 1: No, it was not out yet.

00:38:55
Speaker 2: It was just a serendipitous discovery of this cookie. I looked at the website and the Instagram page of Revolutionary Bites Bakery. I found that whole thing very charming. If I were closer to there, I would definitely go check out and try some of these cookies. There's the packaging for the Hovi toa Edark cookie on the back has like a very brief biography of her and again just incredibly incredibly cute puppy dog.

00:39:28
Speaker 1: It's also interesting because contra cookies are like have a long pre colonial history. Oh yeah, yeah, like they're an interesting historical thing in and of themselves. That's great.

00:39:39
Speaker 2: I did not know this, so thank you so much for this email and these pictures, even though it caused me to kind of go, what day am I? Where am I living? Did I fall through time by accident? If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, including episodes that we have recorded, but not really at least yet. You can We're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and you can find us on various social media ad Missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd 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.