Jack Sheppard, Prison-Breaker

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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 Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. While I was working on that six Impossible Episodes about prison breaks that we had recently, I of course found a few topics that seemed like they could stand on their own as full episodes. One of them was John Shepherd, more commonly known as Jack Shepherd, who became kind of a serial breakout artist in eighteenth century England, and I have a caveat with this episode. There are a bunch of books about Shepherd's life. A lot of them were published right around the time that he died. One of the most well known of those is The History of the Remarkable Life of John Shepherd, and it's often credited to Daniel Dafoe. Another one is a narrative of All the Robbery Escapes, et cetera of John Shepherd, giving an exact description of the manner of his wonderful escape from the castle in Newgate and of the methods he took afterward for his security, written by himself. As that written by himself suggests, it is purportedly Shepherd's own autobiography, written from prison just days before his execution, and also responding to some of the details that were in that first book that I mentioned. The thing is this book is also often credited to Daniel Dafoe. Another of the books is Authentic Memoirs of the Life and Surprising Adventures of John Shepherd, who was executed at Tyburn November the sixteenth, seventeen twenty four, by way of familiar letters from a gentleman in town to his friend and correspondent in the country. This is published just under the initials G. E. G. E is the gentleman in town writing these letters, and some of the ors are purportedly also by Shepherd. If it's not clear, there's question marks around all of this about like who really wrote these and other works, and how accurate they are, how much of those sources agree with each other because they're correct, or whether it's more just because their various authors were all lifting information from one another. Some of Daniel Dafoe's purportedly historical work has come up on the show before. We've talked about how some of it's definitely exaggerated at best. What we do know, though, is Jack Shephard was for sure a real person, and he had two rounds of fame, the second one happening more than a century after his death. Also heads up. Although Jack Shepherd was mostly a thief and kind of a folk hero or maybe an anti hero, there's also a lot of execution and some murder in this episode. Jack Shepherd was born March four, sevent you know too, in White Rose spit of Fields, London. His father, Thomas, was a carpenter. Thomas apparently came from a long line of carpenters, and he had a reputation as a hard worker and being good at his trade. But he died at a young age, leaving his wife Mary to raise their three surviving children. That was Jack, his brother Thomas, and their sister Mary. For a time, Jack and Thomas went to Mr Garrett's school, which in some accounts was really a workhouse. Jack started working as a servant when he was twelve years old or so. He worked for a woolen draper named William knee Bone, which is a great name. Knee Bone was reportedly a kind man and helped Jack improve his reading, writing, and arithmetic. On April twelfth, seventeen seventeen, when he was fifteen, Jack started an apprenticeship with a carpenter named Owen Wood. Of course he was a carpenter, his name was Owen Wood, and he seems to have taken after his father. There. For the first few years at least, Jack was described as a very good apprentice. It's also possible that his brother, Thomas, was one of Wood's apprentices, although some accounts described Thomas as a fellow apprentice, but not as Jack's actual brother. That's a little vague. And then about five years into Jack's apprenticeship, things changed. Wood had a next door neighbor named Joseph Hind or possibly Hayne, who had been a button mulled maker, and Hind decided to give up his trade and instead take over the running of the Black Lion Ale House, which was not far away, and he started encouraging all the local apprentices to come spend their free time and days off there. This Ale house was where twenty year old Jack was introduced to quote a train of vices, as before I was altogether a stranger to He was also introduced to a woman named Elizabeth Lyon, also known as Edgeworth Best because she'd been born in Edgeworth. Elizabeth was a sex worker, and in seventy one she had been convicted of stealing a piece of silk and five yards of cambrick, and her hand had been branded as a punishment. Numerous accounts describe Elizabeth as seducing Jack into a life of crime. Although lots of accounts try to make Elizabeth responsible for Jack's decisions in works purportedly by him, he also places the blame on various other people in his life, yet none of them really suggests very strongly that he was a grown man and should be responsible for his own actions. There's also a little bit of contradiction and how different Jack's behavior really was after he started frequenting the Black Line alehouse. He either had been a totally upstanding apprentice, skilled in his work, and well on his way to becoming a carpenter with his own shop, at least before he fell into ruin, or he had always had quote evil inclinations and when the Wood family was at church on Sundays, he stayed behind and just got up to whatever he felt like doing. It seems like his actual crimes started in seventeen twenty three, when he was twenty one, Elizabeth stole someone's ring, and Jack broke her out of the local roundhouse. This was basically a small single room jail off and round as the name suggests, sometimes freestanding and sometimes built into a wall. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, smaller communities often used roundhouses as an overnight holding cell for people who were caught doing some kind of mischief or crimes, so they could be taken to town in the morning. Shepherd also started stealing from the jobs that Owen Wood had sent him on, starting with stealing two silver spoons from the Rummer tavern. For a while, he was keeping up his apprenticeship while also pilfering money or small items from his job sites, and he justified it by saying that Would wasn't paying him enough money to survive, and generally he seems to have been pretty critical of how Wood was running his business. Would was mostly doing lots of small repairs and projects at people's existing homes and businesses, and Shepherd thought he would be making a lot more money if he moved into doing new construction. Then, with less than a year ago on his apprenticeship, Shepherd left, turning his attention to thieving full time. By February of seventeen twenty four, he had established a small criminal operation involving himself, his brother, Thomas, and Elizabeth Lyon, with Jack and Elizabeth living together as husband and wife, even though she was reportedly already married to someone else. Jack also got into a little bit of fraud by claiming that he had already finished that apprenticeship to owen Wood, and he did that so he could get a job as a journeyman to a master carpenter. He used that job as a way to case houses so that he could rob the homes where he worked. According to Shepherd's purported autobiograph, fee he spent the night in every round house in the city and Liberty of Westminster, and Elizabeth Lyons spent a night, and most of them too. He had mostly managed to escape or to talk them both out of trouble, but eventually Thomas got caught, and when questioned, Thomas implicated Jack in a string of thefts. After this, Shepherd was captured and held in St Giles's Roundhouse in central London. This led to the first escape that most accounts describe in detail. Shepherd hadn't been searched very well before being locked in, and he had an old razor. He used the razor to cut one of the supports from a chair and then used that support to work a hole through the roof. He put the roundhouse's feather bed under the spot where he was working to muffle the sound of debris as it fell. That worked until he started to break through to the outside and a roof tile slid down the outside of the building and hit a passer by. Shepherd forced his way through the hole and ran. Yeah. He was like enough of this, trying to be somewhat discreet and I'm just going to force my way out through the rest of this. Not long after that, Jack and Elizabeth were both arrested, and this time they were taken to new prison in Clerkenwell, also in central London, and they were placed in what was supposed to be the strongest ward in the prison. They were in a cell together because they were believed to be husband and wife. But Shepherd had suggested to authorities that he was going to implicate some of his various accomplices, so he was being treated fairly leniently in this supposedly secure ward, and he was allowed to have visitors. One of these visitors smuggled in a saw, and Shepherd used it to saw through his restraints and to dismantle a barred window. He and Elizabeth then escaped by climbing down a rope they had made from bedsheets and Elizabeth's dress. We're going to talk some more about Jack and elizabe after we paused for a sponsor break. After Jack Shepherd and Elizabeth Lyon escaped from new prison, they went back to thieving. They broke into houses, they held up coaches on the highway. Shepherd also found another accomplice, a man named Joseph Blake, also known as Blueskin, and in mid June of seventy four, Shepherd and Blake robbed the home of Shepherd's former employer, William nee Bone. They stole a hundred and eight yards of woolen cloth and some other items. By this point, Shepherd had caught the attention of a man named Jonathan Wild. Wild maintained a whole network of thieves, burglars, and others who made their living through crime, and he also worked as a thief taker, apprehending suspects and handing them over to authorities. He used this thief taking to keep his criminal network in line. For example, he would demand that he get a cut of someone's hall and if they refused, Wild would just turn them in. Yeah, working for a crime boss who's threatening to hand you over to the police is the whole thing. Wild apparently wanted Shepherd to become part of this network, or possibly Shepherd had been part of it and had decided to strike out on his own. Whatever the background on that, Shepherd refused to cooperate with Wild, and Wild had him arrested, and some accounts Lion betrayed Shepherd to Wild in the lead up to this arrest, which was on July. This time, Shepherd was jailed in Newgate Prison in London and he stood trial at the Central Criminal Court also called the Old Bailey, on August twelfth, seventeen twenty four. Shepherd was tried for three crimes. Two of them involved stealing diverse goods from the homes of William Phillips and Mary Cook in two separate incidents from there vias February. There wasn't enough evidence against him for either of those two crimes and he was acquitted, but the third was for breaking into the home of William Nebone and stealing that hundred and eight yards of woolen cloth. This time, Shepherd was convicted and he was sentenced to death. As a note, the old Bailey records of this list Shepherd's first name as Joseph, but later on, when Joseph Blake stood trial for his participation in that same crime, the records list Shepherd's first name as John. Shepherd was returned to Newgate Prison and placed in the hold for condemned prisoners, and on August thirty one, four days before his execution was supposed to take place, he sawed through one of the iron spikes in the space above a door, squeezing between the remaining spikes to make his way out. That saw apparently came from someone named Mr Davis. Shepherd sneaked to the prison's reception area where he was meant by Elizabeth Lyon and another woman and they disguised him in a nightgown and they led him out of the prison and what was really not the smartest move, Shepherd then spent a stretch of time in London's Clare Market, less than a mile away from the prison, disguised as a butcher. As Shepherd was hiding out in the market, Jonathan Wild arrested Elizabeth Lyon. Eventually, with lions still in custody, Shepherd left London, but then he came back. He was captured again on September tenth as he was getting out of the coach that had brought him back to the city. By this point, news of Shepherd's crimes and arrests and escapes had spread, and he had become kind of a folk hero. In the words of the history of the Remarkable Life of John Shepherd, attributed to Daniel Dafoe quote, his escape and his being so suddenly retaken, made such a noise in the town that it was thought all the common people would have gone mad about him, there being not a porter to be had for love, nor money, nor getting into an ale house for Butcher's. Shoemakers and barbers all engaged in controversies and wagers about Shepherd. Newgate night and day, surrounded with the curious from St. Giles's, and Ragfair and Tyburn Road daily lined with women and children, and the gallows is carefully watched by night lest he should be hanged in cog Shepherd made another appearance at the Old Bailey, this time to prove that the man who had been captured was indeed the same Jack Shepherd who had previously escaped. Once that was taken care of, he was returned to the Condemned Hold in Newgate Prison. Unsurprisingly, he started planning to escape again. On September six, guards found a tool set hidden in a chair in the condemned Hold and a watchmaker's file concealed in a bible. Shepherd was moved from the Condemned Hold to a more secure apartment known as the Castle that was on the prison's fourth floor. He was kept underguard with his legs and shackles that were attached to a staple in the floor with an enormous padlock. I mean, there's illustrations of this, and of course they are for books that people were supposed to buy, so there's an element of them that is meant to be entertaining. But this padlock is illustrated as like as big as his head. It's huge. And then one day Shepherd found a nail on the floor. He used it to pick the padlock, and this left him free to move around the room. He tried to escape by going up the chimney, but he found that there was an iron bar across the opening there to prevent somebody from doing that exact thing. A guard surprised him before he had a chance to get back to where he was and put the padlock back the way it had been, and boy, that guard was chagrined when Shepherd showed him how easy it was for him to pick that lock. The guards then added handcuffs to Shepherd's restraints, and they took the nail away. As all of that was going on, Joseph Blake, a k A. Blueskin was captured and tried, and he also attempted to murder Jonathan Wild by slitting his throat after he had asked Wild to put in a good word for him, and Wild refused. Wild survived this assault thanks to having some muslin braided around his neck and the prompt attention of nearby surgeons. Blake was sentenced to death for the crime. Back in the castle on the prison's fourth floor, Shepherd escaped again on October fift The guards brought his evening meal. Everything seemed normal to them, but then in the morning they found the door blocked from the inside by a pile of random bricks, and once they shoved past them, they found that Shepherd was gone again. In the words of the history of the remarkable life of John Shepherd quote. The whole posse of the prison ran up and stood like men deprived of their senses. Their surprise being over, they were in hopes that he might not have yet entirely made his escape, and got their keys to open all the strong rooms adjacent to the castle in order to trace him. When, to their further amazement, they found the door ready open to their hands, and the strong locks, screws and bolts broken in pieces and scattered about the jail. Six great doors, one whereof having not been opened for several years past, were forced, and it appeared that he had descended from the leads of Newgate by a blanket which he had fastened to the wall by an iron spike he had taken from the hatch of the chapel on the house of Mr Bird, and the door on the leads having been left open, it is very reasonable to conclude he passed directly to the street door down the stairs. Mr Bird and his wife hearing an odd sort of a noise on the stairs as they lay in their bed a short time before the watchman alarmed the family. So apparently Shepherd had managed to twist apart the chain connecting his handcuffs, and then somehow he had gotten his hands on another nail and picked the lock holding his leg shackles to the floor, pulled out that iron bar that had previously kept him from climbing up the chimney, and took it with him so that he could force open all the locks between him and the outside. He came out through the Red Room, which was a cell where aristocrats were held, and that was empty at the time. Quote, he undoubtedly performed most of these wonders and the darkest part of the night, and without the least glimpse of a candle a word. He has actually done with his own hands in a few hours what several of the most skillful artists allow could not have been acted by a number of persons furnished with proper implements and all other advantages in a full day. So once Shephard got to the prison roof, he realized he didn't have a way to get down, so he went back to the castle to get a blanket, and once he'd made his way through the home of Mr Bird, he went to the home of Catherine Cook, which is where he managed to get himself the rest of the way out of his restraints. It's like that scene in The Highest movie where you go find your friend that owns boltcutter person to knock your shackles off. Sometime after that, Shepherd robbed a pawn shop of some very fine clothes, and once he was dressed in them, he went out drinking again, not the smartest move. He was arrested at a Jury Lane brandy shop, very inebriated. On October one, Shepherd was once again returned to the prison, and at this point he was really famous. People lined up at the prison to try to get a glimpse of him, and the guards actually charged fees for visitors, reportedly earning two hundred pounds by doing so. Some of his reported visitors were also famous, like past podcast subject William Hogarth, whose idol Prentice from his series Industry and Idleness is supposedly inspired by Shepherd. Shepherd's fame continued all the way up and then after his execution, which was on November sixteen, seventeen twenty four, at the age of twenty two, but execution took place before an enormous crowd. Estimates range all the way from thirty thousand to two hundred thousand people. There are some really sensational accounts of his hanging. Shepherd is pretty consistently described as being a very small man, and that was something that helped him squeeze his way out during various escape attempts. In one account of the execution, people were hoping that his small frame would help him survive the hanging, and once he had been cut down after hanging for the required fifteen minutes, maybe he could be resuscitated. But the crowd, unaware of this plan, to try to get his body and resuscitate him, rushed the gallows and pulled at his feet to try to make sure he died quickly and didn't suffer. His body was buried at the churchyard at St. Martin in the Fields. Elizabeth Lyon was kept in custody until after the execution. Once she was freed, she had a series of relationships with other young men that echoed her relationship with Shepherd. They were part romantic, part criminal. Accounts again describe her as quotes seducing the men into stealing and hurrying them to their own destruction. Again, she was not responsible for these men's decisions. No, it's the whole kind of trope of her being the evil seductress who lured innocent young men to their mortal doom. Lyon was eventually sentenced to seven years transportation to Maryland in seventeen. We don't really know what happened to her after that. Jack's brother Thomas was transported to Maryland as well, although there are some contradictions about exactly when, and some accounts it was in seventeen twenty five, so after his brother's death, and in others that was before Jack's execution, and he begged for a chance to tell his brother goodbye, in the end being allowed to see him only from a distance so that there was not any chance he would smuggle his brother or something he might use to escape, like the saws that people bringing to him. Circling back to Jonathan Wilde, he was executed on seventy five, his work bringing in thieves not really canceling out all the crimes that he was committing himself. People started writing plays and stories about Jack Shepard even before his execution. As we noted at the top of the show, there were a bunch of books about him that were published in seventeen twenty four and seventeen. Some of them purportedly factual, some of them definitely fictional. In seventeen twenty eight, the Beggar's Opera opened at Lincoln inn Fields Theater in London, with characters that had been inspired by people like Jack Shepherd and Jonathan Wild. Another play was called The Prison Breaker, and there were a lot of other stories and plays and songs and works of art, poems, anything you can think of to depict this famous thief and shailbreaker. There was one. But then Shepherd had a whole second wave of fame that came more than one d years later, and we're going to talk about that after we first paused for a sponsor break. When Jack Shepherd was alive in the seventeen twenties, crime and the fear of crime were widespread in England. Some of our recent podcast subjects were connected to all of this. The South Sea Bubble collapsed just a couple of years before Shepherd committed his first theft, The Gin craze and the moral panic surrounding alcohol in its connection to crime that was starting to grow. Increasing urbanization and overcrowding were exacerbating existing social and economic issues, and as is obvious based on how many people were hanged for theft or transported to the colonies. Earlier in this episode, the government was using really stream public punishments to try to deter petty crimes. This is a system that later became known as the Bloody Code. At the same time, though, a lot of people were really fascinated with things like robberies and jail breaks and highwaymen and gangs of thieves, and the news reporting of the actual crimes and fiction about all of this, like, all of that was incredibly popular. A hundred years later, some of this was starting to shift. In seven the death penalty was abolished for all but the most serious crimes, so nobody was going to get hanged over stealing bolts of cloth anymore. But two years after that, the criminal code started to expand in a way that increasingly criminalized poor people's lives. Things like selling animals on the streets, selling goods door to door, just being noisy, being drunk in public, announcing entertainments on the street, and playing games on public roads. We're all outlawed. These kinds of laws disproportionately affected poor people, whose homes tended to be too small and cramped to really do any socializing indoors. Poor people were doing most of their socializing outside, and increasingly the things that they did outside were also outlawed. To add to all of that, the Metropolitan Police was established in eighteen thirty nine and absorbed all the other organizations and jobs that had previously handled things like apprehending people accused of crime. The shifts in the legal code also really empowered the Metropolitan Police to carry out surveillance. There was a lot of language about their proactively noticing and taking action to prevent crimes. So understandably, poor people, especially poor people living in cities, thought they were being unfairly harassed and targeted by police for just living their lives. Many of the social and political issues that had been at work in the seventeen dirties were still ongoing a hundred years later, and that fed into the Chartist movement Beginning in eighteen thirty six. The Chartists were trying to secure more political power and better conditions for people in the working class. Authorities mostly ignored or suppressed the Chartist activity, which led to unrest, which was also quickly and sometimes violently suppressed. So then, with all of that going on in eighteen thirty nine, William Harrison Ainsworth started serially publishing a romance called Jack Shepherd. This is in a publication called Bentley's Miscellany that had woodcut illustrations by George Crookshank, and it quickly became a bestseller, even out selling Charles Dickinson's Oliver Twist. Jack Shephard and Oliver Twist were both part of a newly flourishing genre that came to be known as Newgate novels. These were books that were seen as glorifying criminals and a criminal underworld world. At first, this wasn't really seen as a huge problem. Bentley's miscellani had a middle class readership, and it was too expensive for poorer people to afford. Even when Jack Shephard was printed as a book in three volumes, it was still priced for the middle class. Each volume cost a pound five shillings. That was just too much for poorer readers. Within the middle class, this whole story was seen as mostly harmless, although possibly a little bit trashy, as a pleasure read. But then there were the plagiarized versions and the alternate versions, and the plays, many of which were much cheaper and some of which were specifically aimed at poor and working class people. At one point there were at least seven different versions of Jack Shepherd's story running at London's playhouses and penny gaffs, which were basically small theaters specifically for poor people. Suddenly, poor people could afford to buy and read an knockoff version of the Jack Shepherd story when poor people who couldn't read could just take it in at a penny gaff, particularly in London, the more affluent class started completely freaking out, thinking that the popularity of Jack Shepherd was going to spark an enormous crime wave. There is a bit of irony here, right that this happened as various reformers were championing this idea of literacy for the poor, so it quickly became like poor people should be reading to expand their knowledge. No, don't read that for having sakes. There were a lot of newspaper articles about the supposed threat of Jack Shepherd. Chambers Edinburgh Journal wrote quote, it is scarcely possible for the Life of Jack Shepherd to be read all at once by thousands, and acted night after night at once in five London theaters without causing the idea of burglary to be dwelt upon for the time with degree of fervor. At one point, somebody stole a snuffbox from actor Paul Bedford, who had been playing Shepherd's sidekick Blueskin in a play at the Adelphi Theater. An article in the Morning Chronicle about this did some victim blaming, saying that the actor quote might to some extent thank himself for what had happened. The very able manner in which he personated a thief on the stage had induced many a poor wretch who witnessed his performance from the gallery to try his hand at something of the kind. In real life, papers reported on petty crimes with headlines like another Jack Shepherd and another Young Jack Shepherd. There were books with these names too. Sometimes when people were arrested for various crimes, they gave their name as Jack Shepherd or so many Jack Shepherds and h have we mentioned. One of my favorite things there was merch. Oh I want to make some of this merch. People could buy Shepherd bags which contained lock picks and files and perhaps even a crowbar, basically your starter kit for becoming a Jack Shepherd. This moral panic about Jack Shepherd was already under way when a Swiss valet named Francois Corvassier slit the throat of his employer, Lord William Russell, on May five, eighteen forty. At the time, Russell was seventy one and asleep in his bed, so obviously this was a horrifying crime on its own. And then he was also from a really prominent family. He was a politician and had been a member of Parliament, and his nephew, Lord John Russell, would later become Prime Minister. Courvoisier's behavior seemed erratic, and he made a series of sometimes contradictory confessions to this crime. At one point he said that quote the idea was first suggested to him by reading and seeing the performance of Jack Shepherd. Sub quotes him by saying, I admired his cunning instead of being horrified at it, and now I reaped, but too well, the fruit of those papers and books. After he made this confession, newspapers that had previously predicted that all this Shepherd hype was going to cause problems printed articles that basically said I told you so. Answorth faced a huge backlash. His publisher dropped him, his club kicked him out, the press excoriated him, and random people accosted him about having written this Jack Shepherd book on the street. After Courvoisier was executed for the murder of Lord William Russell, the Lord Chamberlain Band all performances of all plays called Jack Shepherd, a band that was in place for forty years. It was most strictly observed in London, but it was also observed to at least some extent elsewhere in Britain as well. Some companies tried to get around this man by telling the story but naming their shows things like the Idol a Prentice. In eighteen eighty six, after the band had been lifted, Nellie Farren started as Jack in a burlesque called Little Jack Shepherd. Farren wasn't the only woman to play Jack. Because he was described as such a physically slight man, he was often played by women, and an era when child labor laws kept children from working as actors, it was pretty common for women to hold the role of principal boy. A lot of times, the principal boy would then be the person who played Jack Shepherd, even though that was an adult role. Another woman to play Jack Shepherd was Marianne Keeley, who learned some escape artistry for the role method acting. Jack Shepherd's popularity started to wane at the very end of the nineteenth century, but he still shows up from time to time. Bear told Bret Threepenny Opera was adapted from The Beggar's Opera, which, as we noted, was inspired by Shepherd and his circle, and there are more recent works as well. In the novel Confessions of the Fox by Jordie Rosenberg, Jack is reimagined as a transgender man. This is told within a frame story of a professor discovering a previously unknown manuscript that contains Jack's memoirs, and the professor's own story is told through the footnotes. Yeah, I have not read this whole book, but I checked it out from the library and I have read just the beginning few chapters of it. And I will say, if you want to check this out, it is a very sexual book. Beyond having like sex scenes that are confined as scenes, there's just a sexuality that is infused with the whole thing. It reminds me everything. It reminds me of, uh, like Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters in terms of like the level of um, just I'm not saying that to discourage people, but I like for me personally that there's a mindset I need to be in if that's what I'm going to be reading, I love a heads up that that's what. Yeah. Yeah, um. It's just just so folks know. And I've it's gotten like. It was really well reviewed and award winning when it came out, So at some point I'm sure I will finish reading it. I have some listener mails take us out, And this is from listener Matt, who wrote a note that said, good afternoon. I've recently started a history podcast. I just released my second episode. However, I'm not exactly happy with the end product thus far. Do you have any tips or tricks for someone new to podcasting, Matt. Back when we used to have our own, like standalone website that we had stuff on besides like a way to play episodes, we had a cool like tips for new podcasters thing, And since we don't have that website anymore, I thought I would say what the tips were, uh, which, these are the things that I usually tell folks when they ask for some kind of advice. Number One, NPR has a whole training section in it is that training dot NPR dot org. Some of it is focused on specifically radio, but a lot of that is clearly applicable to podcasts. Also, Transom is that Transom dot org and they have a ton of information about storytelling for audio and audio production, all kinds of stuff like that. They produced the House Sound podcast, which is a podcast about audio storytelling, and they have a tools section if people have questions about like what kind of equipment should I have for doing a podcast. Pr X also has training dot pr x dot org that more has classes and things that a person could sign up for more than like things that you could read online and and self educate yourself. As for the audio editing of the podcast, boy, I do not know, because that's not something that I personally handle. Our producer or Casey Pegram, does the audio edit on the show. This particular episode was edited by our colleague producer Max Williams. So that is what I would suggest for folks who are interested in learning about audio storytelling more generally and and podcasts and radio production more specifically. If you would like to get in touch with us, we're history podcasts that I heart radio dot com. We're all over social media Missed in History That's Real. Find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeart Radio app or wherever else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.