Harriet Williams Russel Strong

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: Wilson.

00:00:16
Speaker 1: I don't know how Harriet Russell william Strong got on my list. She's on there twice, so I've thought of her a couple times. I love it. But she was quite a powerhouse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only did she manage to dig herself out of a pretty unfortunate situation when her fortunes changed rather abruptly at the age of thirty nine, she was also an inventor and an early proponent of water conservation. She had a lot of big ideas. Some of those ideas certainly had repercussions that, once they came to fruition in ways not directed by her, became other problems in other ways. But she's a very interesting story. I do have to do a heads up here because this episode does include a death by suicide. We're not mentioning any specifics, but if you just want to skip that entirely, you can. There will be a point when we say Harriet found herself Challe in a very challenging position. We get there, you can jump ahead thirty seconds or a minute and you'll be past it. But that's a pretty pivotal moment, and the repercussions of the event that we mentioned are throughout the episode, again not in detail, but just so you know as a heads up.

00:01:30
Speaker 2: Harriet Russell was born in Buffalo, New York, on July twenty third, eighteen forty four, to Henry Pierpont Russell and Marry Guest Russell. In eighteen fifty two, her family made a cross country moved to northern California, near the town of Quincy in Plumous County. When she was very young, Harriet had some kind of a spinal condition and had to spend almost all of her time in bed, but the specifics of that are a little bit hazy. She read, though, learned a lot about history and art and literature. Starting at the age of fourteen, Harriet attended the Young Ladies Seminary in Benicia, California, run by Mary Atkins. That school would later become Mills College. She attended until eighteen sixty. In eighteen sixty one, the family moved once again, this time to Carson City, Nevada, hoping to cash in on the silver rush, and in Nevada, Harriet met a man named Charles Lyman Strong. Charles was the superintendent of the Gould and Curry Mining Company, which was experiencing great success mining the comstock load, and Harriet and Charles married on February twenty sixth, eighteen sixty three. She was just nineteen, he was thirty seven at the time, and the following year they had their first daughter, also named Harriet Russell Strong after her mother. That year was a difficult one. Charles had a breakdown brought on by the stress of his job. He left the mining company and went to a hot spring to try to wrapt and recuperate. Harriet was also ill a lot. She was often described through a lot of her life as being fragile or delicate. Right, we're going to get to a point where that seems very much at odds with other things, and we'll talk about why a little bit. In eighteen sixty five, Charles went back to work once again in the mining business, this time assessing mines along the Pacific coast for investors from the east, primarily from New York. But that was ultimately unsuccessful, and he really wanted out of mining altogether. He and Harriet also had another daughter, Mary Lyman Strong. In eighteen sixty six, the year after Mary was born, Charles and Harriet became ranchers. They purchased a three hundred and twenty five acre property with Harriet's brother, William Henry Russell. This was in an area which was part of modern day Whittier, California, in Los Angeles County. Today it's roughly twenty miles east of downtown LA. The property had belonged to the last governor of Alta, California under Mexican rule, Popico, before the Strongs purchased it and built a homestead there. They named it Rancho del Forerte or Ranch of the Strong. At that time, there wasn't really much of anything on this ranch. The only crop that had been started there was oranges, and those orange trees were still very young when Harriet and her family acquired the property, and soon they realized why nothing had been grown there. It was that it was just about impossible to irrigate the land. After struggling with the ranch for several years, Charles once again went back to mining, even though he had been completely burned out on it when he left in eighteen sixty seven. Different accounts kind of just described this differently. One is that he was not doing well with the ranch and he wanted to leave, but others are more like he kind of just got bored.

00:04:58
Speaker 1: With it, and so I don't. In the time that he and Harriet had been at Rancho del Ferte, both of the Strongs had continued to deal with health problems. They both had complaints of back issues and headaches and nervous weakness, and they both tried a number of treatments, everything from iron supplements to water cures, but these just seemed to be for both of them chronic and lingering problems, and they never really got better. They would get somewhat better, but neither of them ever really seemed to feel one hundred percent or really good. But Charles did need to bring in some money, and he started chasing mining opportunities kind of around the western part of the country. He was in California, Nevada, and Arizona, and this constant hustle to try to find a promising vain meant that he was away from home a lot of the time, and as they were dealing with financial stress and him being gone. They did also welcome their third daughter, Georgina Pierpont Strong in eighteen sixty eight, and then their fourth daughter, Nell de Luce, who was born in eighteen seventy three.

00:06:02
Speaker 2: Living apart so much really strained Harriet and Charles's marriage a lot. They were also having serious financial issues and that added another layer of strain. Their letters are sort of fraught. They clearly love one another, but also seem to feel emotionally disconnected without having regular contact. In one letter to Charles that Harriet never mailed, she expresses some sadness and dissatisfaction that she doesn't get to experience love in her daily life. This was in eighteen seventy six, and she wrote, quote, it was mine for a few months only. You have told me too many times you have no love to give me to think that I, who have been loved always, should live an unloved wife. Yeah, It's kind of one of those things where, if I can read between the lines, it seems like he didn't not love her, but he was just too depleted to be as available to her as she needed. And she was wrestling with this dichotomy of being like, I know you love me, but I don't feel.

00:07:05
Speaker 1: Loved at all, and problems continued for the couple. The trick here is that we only have Charles's side of most of this correspondence. We'll talk about why in a minute. But he seems to waver on how they should live and figure this out. He sometimes wrote that Harriet and their children should move to be with him, and that at other times he would write, no, no, no, that was wrong. You should just stay put. We should continue as we are. In eighteen eighty two, Charles bought into a mine in California that was believed to be an excellent prospect for gold mining. It was not. The person who had sold it to Charles and other investors had salted it, meaning that traces of gold had been added to the most accessible areas so that when prospective buyers took samples, it made it look like a much more promising mind than it actually was. And then, to deal with his debt and these bad business decisions, Charles had taken out loans against the ranch, something that Harriet did not know about.

00:08:05
Speaker 2: Then, at the age of thirty nine, Harriet found herself in a very challenging position. Her husband, Charles burned all of their letters. That's why we don't have her side of a lot of correspondents. And then he killed himself. She had four daughters, and Charles's constant business struggles had left behind a load of debt to make matters worse. This all happened and was relayed to her while she was undergoing medical treatment for her ongoing spinal issues. She was in Philadelphia at the time, in a clinic run by Silas Weir Mitchell. Her first instinct was, of course, to go back home, but her daughters, who ranged in age from nineteen to ten at the time, insisted that she stay there and finish her six month treatment. Her treatment regimen does not sound enjoyable, and included things like alternating exposure to boiling and then freezing water on her back, and then only being allowed to sit up for a few minutes at a time twice a day.

00:09:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, that sounds tortuous to me.

00:09:11
Speaker 2: Well, and boiling, I'm like, was boiling an exaggeration because that sounds like third degree burns and death? She wrote in her account boiling okay, But she also wrote that only the freezing water really hurt her, okay, So I don't know if boiling was actual boiling point or just very very hot, and if it was very very localized, who knows. But when she returned home to California, she assumed the position of manager at the Rancho del Ferte, even though she had no idea how to do that job at the time. Harriet also had to deal with a lawsuit in the wake of her husband's death. One of Charles's business associates had tried to seize the property to make up for his loss in the salted mind deal that he had entered.

00:09:55
Speaker 1: Was strong. There was a lot of legal stuff going on, and it took a years for all of the issues with Charles's property to be settled, and in eighteen ninety one, the legal battle over her husband's business blenders was finally concluded.

00:10:10
Speaker 2: In eighteen eighty three, Harriet wrote that marriage was fundamentally limiting for women. Quote not because women of America have no ambition or mental capacity for progress, but because they do not have the sympathy and cooperation of their husbands and efforts to improve their minds. No doubt, she was grappling with her new reality and the fact that she had simply not been prepared in any way to handle the entirety of the family's finances. But there she was in that position. Interestingly, maybe unsurprisingly given the quote that we just read, she did not choose to remarry Harriet. In the meantime, while the legal stuff was all still getting figured out, started researching agriculture. She made friends with other ranchers in the area and asked them for their advice, and she also started reading just about any books she could get her hands on that offered information about successful ranching and farming. Rancho Delflerte had attempted to expand its crops in the time that Harriet had lived there, when Charles was still alive. In addition to the orange groves, they had tried various grain crops like rye and wheat, but those had failed, so she started considering what crops would work, using the knowledge she had gained from her self directed studies and her neighbors. We'll talk about how Harriet strong applied the things that she learned about ranching and farming and the outcome of what she tried after we pause for a sponsor break. One of the biggest problems for any rancher in the arid climate where Harriet was living, though was water. The topography of Los Angeles County plays a big part in this story because it sits in a rainage basin with mountains around it, so when there's no precipitation, it gets very, very dry, but when there is a storm, it floods. This is still a problem today. You hear all the time that when La has an actual big thunderstorm, the streets get flooded and everything's a mess. In Harriet's time, which she was considering crops, any crop needed water, and most options required more than could be counted on from natural rainfall, which when it did happen, was often more destructive than life giving. So Strong started brainstorming how she could get water to her crops consistently. This actually led her to file a patent, which she was granted on December sixth, eighteen eighty seven. It was a dam and water distribution system. She described her invention as quote, a series of reverse arch dams built one above the other in an inclined channel, watercourse, or valley, so that the water in each lower dam acts as a brace and support for the dam above, the whole being connected by gates. We're going to backtrack just a couple of years because that was not Harriet Strong's first patent, it was her fourth. Her first invention was a quote device for raising and lowering hard to reach windows. This is something she came up with while she was having to stay in bed because of spinal issues. That patent was granted in October of eighteen eighty four. The following month, she was granted another patent for an improved hook and eye closure. Then her third, a window sash holder, which used a small knob protruding from the window frame that would catch on a block instead of allowing the frame to slide all the way closed. She was granted that patent on November sixteenth, eighteen eighty six. It seems like she was trying to set up any possible revenue stream she could as she faced this uncertain future with Charles. Even before her damning an irrigation patent was granted, and knowing that she had figured out out how to control water, Strong decided to plant a crop that needed a whole lot of water, and that was walnuts. The reason she went with such a thirsty crop was because her research had revealed that it was also one of the most profitable if you could get it up and running. She planted a reported fifty rows of walnut trees in a half mile wide layout, totaling one hundred and fifty acres. Had she not had her irrigation system planned, this almost certainly would have been a spectacular failure. But it worked, and it worked really well, and by the mid eighteen nineties people had started calling her the walnut Queen.

00:14:36
Speaker 1: The Rancho del Ferte. Walnut crop was bringing in and reported two hundred and ninety five dollars an acre, so forty four two hundred and fifty dollars annually, which was a whole lot of money. In the eighteen nineties, she had turned the mess left behind after Charles died into a success story, and in the course of just a few years she had paid off the debts left behind by her husband, paid off the substantial legal fees related to settling his chaotic estate, and started to turn a profit.

00:15:04
Speaker 2: Harriet also used the income from the walnuts to expand and diversify the ranch's crops. Soon there were pecans and chestnuts, and also a lot of fruit orchards with lemons, figs, pomegranates, apples, pears, dates, and even pineapples. She also planted pampas grass instead of corn as a support crop for the walnuts, and then she sold the fronds as a decorative item. These are really popular as an alternative for ostrich plumes to put on people's hats. She had managed to develop an impressive infrastructure for the ranch's water systems, with artesian wells that were linked to a pumping plant that could carry water to all of these wading crops. If you're hearing all of this and thinking, wait, I thought this one was fragile, that's pretty common. It is really fascinating how much her well being seemed to suddenly shift once she was left to figure things out on her own. Us An Albertine, writing for Biography magazine in nineteen ninety four, noted quote, once free of marriage, Harriet ceased to be ill. In the second half of her life, she emerged as a modern public woman, a nationally known entrepreneur, inventor, agriculturists, civic leader, and suffragist. And most biographies that you look at note the death of Charles as a delineator in Harriet's life, separating the before and the after almost as two different people, and Harriet herself kind of seemed to want to eradicate evidence of her earlier life and the physical issues associated with it, as at one point she asked her oldest daughter to burn any letters in which she had talked about her health. She seemed to want to truly reinvent herself and to create a public persona that supported her ambitions. She would later say, for example of her success in her widow years quote, I had the courage of ignorance and plenty of determination to back it up. She didn't tend to mention any ailment ever, at least not on the record once she was the public figure. I just want to note that there is a widespread, pervasive, and totally false idea that disabled people can stop being disabled if they just try harder. Yeah, and so this part of her story irritates me so much.

00:17:19
Speaker 1: Well, it brings up a lot of questions, some of which we'll talk about it behind us.

00:17:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Like, I'm glad she worked her life the way she could work it. I do not want this story to reinforce such a false and damaging idea. In eighteen ninety three, Strong attended the World's Columbian Exposition as an exhibitor. She designed and oversaw construction of an exhibit called the Pampa's Plume Palace. In addition to being hawked as hat accoutrement, these grass plumes were sold to department stores as decor. They also became popular at political conventions because they could be dyed any color to match the decor or the part affiliation. The Pampas Plume Palace, which was part of the larger California Exhibition, won an award, and it is no wonder there are photos of the palace and it is quite a thing to look at. It shows a pavilion with a hexagonal footprint. The exterior walls of the structure, which have intricate designs woven into them, are a little bit fluffy because almost the whole thing was made of pampas grass, and it used the plumes as a design feature. The door opening sort of mimics what you've maybe seen in Moroccan design, and the windows, which are also shaped in the curved arches, have a crisscross lattice design within them, all of which is made of woven together pampas grass. Harriet also showed off her irrigation system at the expo, which was simply called dam and reservoir construction, and that one awards. She showed that alongside another invention that would make use of waste water and reclaim it for agricultural use, called Method and Means for Impounding Debris and Storing Water. She was granted a patent for her wastewater system in November of eighteen ninety four. Harriet's appearance at the expo was wildly successful, but it was not limited to inventions and marketing for the ranch's various crops. She also gave a lecture to the World's Fair Auxiliary Congress on suffrage. She believed in voting rights for women strongly, but her talk largely focused on her own story as a sort of cautionary tale for other women. She was very frank about how utterly lost she had been when she found herself facing a life without her husband and with no training in business or agriculture. She was adamant that women needed to be educated in the ways of business. She told the assembled audience that it had taken her, for example, a long time six years to learn not to sign contracts without a lawyer's input first. So it sounds a little bit negative and scary, but her overall message was very, very poss She was adamant that women could absolutely learn to run businesses, and moreover, that they should. She framed this as something that every woman should do quote to prepare herself for any and all emergencies. Several years down the line, she was still advocating for women to have the self assurance to take on entrepreneurial in business roles, stating in nineteen ten, for example, quote as for the business of running a farm, any woman who can think out and plan the affairs of a large household in all departments can manage a business as principal. Harriet continued to be an outspoken advocate for greater agency and independence for women, not just in terms of bolstering women's confidence, but with ideas about how municipalities should work to foster more women run businesses. She was adamant that every city should have a bank owned by a woman, as well as a drag good store, and that the proprietors of each should train other women by employing them there. She put forth the very bold idea that the board of directors for banks should retire one man every year and replace him.

00:21:06
Speaker 1: With a woman.

00:21:07
Speaker 2: She also walked the walk in terms of adding to her own workload by taking on civic issues. So she became a member of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in eighteen ninety three held that position for nineteen years. She used the platform that it gave her to campaign for suffrage in California. Yeah, she's often cited as the first woman to be on the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. One source I looked at said that there was actually another woman that was appointed to it at the same time, but that she had moved and had to step away from it. I didn't follow that one down a rabbit hole to find out if there really were too, but she's the only one that stayed there for a long time. Strong was also a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and she rubbed elbows with a lot of the most well known names from the suffrage movement, including people like Susan B. Anthony and Alva Belmont. But when she first traveled the East Coast as one of these suffrage events was happening, she was a little bit surprised at the level of resistance that many people, including women, had to the idea of political equality for women. She wrote this off as a problem of the upper class, where she felt like the women were so accustomed to having plenty of men in their lives to take care of them that they also let them quote do everything for them, even to the expression of opinions in great and grave matters. She remained adamant on this issue, saying that a lot of women, most women did not have the luxury of taking a stance like that. Harriet Strong continued to innovate in the world of agricultural irrigation. In nineteen hundred, she bought another property, Rancho San Antonio. Half of the acreage of this was worked by her own farm hands and staff, and the other half leased out to other farmers. To support the whole effort, Harriet founded her own water company, Paso del Bortolo Water Company. She dropped wells between the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel rivers instead of a pumping station that ran on steam to get that water out to the ranch. She was able to flip the Rancho san Antonio a few years later and made a lot of money on the sale. Strong had figured out ways to manage her own property's water needs, but she was thinking much much bigger, and we will get into her efforts to get politicians on board with her ideas and her frustrations in that effort. After we hear from stuff you missed in history classes sponsors. In nineteen oh five, Strong penda paper in which she made the case for establishing flood management systems both to control floodwaters and to make use of them, and her plan required storage reservoirs, which would have been huge and would have needed to be constructed. She had an entire plan for water conservation in a way that would actively benefit a lot of people, but she had a hard time getting others bought in, and this was in part because it was such a massive idea. It was just hard for a lot of people to see how this concept could possibly be funded for construction. Perpetually advocating and getting little support was undoubtedly irritating for Strong. She was recognized for her innovation and her success all over the country, but she shocked some of the difficulties she had up to being a woman. In nineteen thirteen, she gave a quote to Little Farm's magazine and a story about her that stated quote, a woman needs to have five times as much ability as a man in order to do the same thing. She may be permitted to conduct her own ranch and be a success and a small business enterprise. Yes, but let her go into the business of incorporating a large enterprise and bonding it as a man would bond a land and water project, and then see if the word does not go forth from mankind. Hold, this woman is going too far. She must be put down. She also, we should point out, was not really aware of or thinking about as many people who were innovating in various industries throughout human history. What are the repercussions of all?

00:25:16
Speaker 1: Sure, but eventually nature gave her a chance to start really making moves with her reservoir ideas. On February eighteenth, nineteen fourteen, a huge, four day long series of thunderstorms hit southern California. The storms caused ten million dollars in property damage. Trains were shut down, telegraph lines stopped working, and the entire area was in a panic. On February twenty first, the Los Angeles Express reported quote at eleven o'clock today in a final desperate attempt to stop the great storm damage being done to land and buildings at the Aliso Street bridge over the Los Angeles River, The Santa Fe officials shunted six heavily aiden box cars at a speed of forty miles an hour down the tracks and hurled them into the river at the foot of the bridge. This carried away fifty additional feet of land and a telephone pole, which fell within a few feet of an immense crowd of bystanders. So they were trying to use these box cars to slow the progression of the water because it was carrying away chunks of land, and in fact they made the situation worse.

00:26:25
Speaker 2: In the wake of this disaster, the Los Angeles Flood Control Association was formed and Harriet Strong was sent by Whittier as a delegate. She helped develop the legislation that would establish a flood control authority, and she worked to get it done with funding from a district wide tax. She continued to advocate for measures to manage and use the flood water, and she expanded beyond the idea of reusing water to plan out hydroelectric plants that made use not just of the water as a resource on its own, but that made use of its canet energy to harness electricity. One of the interesting aspects of her plan is that she felt strongly that speculators should not be allowed to profit from hydroelectricity. She thought any money that such a system made could be used by the government to benefit its people through things like tax reduction and veteran services.

00:27:21
Speaker 1: Once the Southern Flood Control Association was established in Los Angeles County, which is something that came out of that legislation she worked on, it would seem completely natural that Harriet would be invited as a delegate to their meetings or even to be on it. She had made studies of the workings of water and harnessing floods way more than just about anybody else. But she was not invited because no women's groups had been consulted or invited to send delegates. Harriet went anyway, and as the only woman at the meeting, she spoke out about it. She stated that she protested the lack of women delegates and pointed out that women were citizens, noting things were not quote as they were or twenty years ago. Women's clubs were invited to send delegates to future gatherings. I haven't looked.

00:28:06
Speaker 2: Into this at all, but I would bet money that indigenous people were also not included in these no way. Harriet also tried to leverage World War One as an incentive to get government officials to listen to her idea, and she took every opportunity to make her case for water management on a much larger scale. She pitched the idea of damming the Colorado River at the Grand Canyon. Strong's concept was that a series of dams could create storage reservoirs in the Grand Canyon's side canyons, and that these would fill during floods, preventing the water from reaking havoc below the Grand Canyon, and also offering an opportunity to generate electricity through controlled waterfalls.

00:28:53
Speaker 1: But her concept went far beyond this. She truly believed that if the Grand Canyon were properly damned in managed enough, nearby land could be converted to farmland through irrigation, that it could be farmed year round and would insure that no one was ever without food. She saw all of this as a way to ensure that the US came out of World War One victorious, and then that they would be able to feed the world. She later said of her ambitious idea quote, the only objection to the plan is said to be it was thought of by a woman.

00:29:27
Speaker 2: This idea became something of a crusade for Strong, and in nineteen eighteen she appeared before the House Committee on Water Power to share her expertise. Congressman Frederick C. Hicks of New York was one of her strongest supporters and was also her son in law. He and Georgina Strong were married. Before Congress, Harriet laid out her three part strategy of floodwater control, use of the captured water for agriculture, and generating electricity with the water. She continued to advocate that this should be a government run enterprise and not open it up to private business. In addition to all that she had outlined, she also made the case that building a dam of this nature would enable the US to stop using a canal that was in Mexico. She also made a statement during her testimony in support of women's suffrage. Yeah, there's some additional nuance to that canal in Mexico that was supplying water to some of the southwest US because it was owned by businessmen from New York and the US and they didn't want this to get cut off. But she was very like trying to make the patriotic play here in her rhetoric. But this also opens up a part of Harriet's story that is less delighting if you've been very charmed by this go getter spirit that we've been talking about up to this point. She was overall a very progressive woman, but she was also very much caught up in the politics of the day, and probably in the fact that she believed just about all of her ideas were correct. She advocated, for example, to President Harding himself as he was about to enter office, that he should be working on agreements with other countries to ensure prosperity and peace. That was right in line with so much of what she talked about. But but yeah, there were other statements too. In nineteen twenty four, when addressing the Hamilton Club, which was a Republican organization she founded for women, she stated, quote, we have learned that the Constitution was suited to the ideals of the people who settled the Western continent, and also we are learning that races not kindred to our own threatened to engraft different ideas, which, if not combated and checked, may engulf us destroy our government by causing first loss of respect for the government and then movement toward its overthrow.

00:31:51
Speaker 1: So that is awful rhetoric. Aside from the fact that its xenophobic, it also suggests that there weren't any people in the West before white people got there, which is all awful, but for context on it. This was the same year that President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of nineteen twenty four that was an openly racist piece of legislation that had written this tide of fear that if US truly became the melting pot it was allegedly supposed to be, that it would become wild and lawless because foreigners weren't going to fall in line. So this is all awful, no sugarcoating that, but it's worth noting she was not an outlier in that sentiment at the time.

00:32:35
Speaker 2: There are so many achievements in Harriet Russell Strong's life that we haven't touched on, and many of them relate to her civic work. She loved music and composed it. She was a board member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a founder of the Business League of America. She sat on the board of trustees for the University of Southern California Law School and was the first woman to do so. She carefully managed her public inmas but she also used that image to help other women and her community.

00:33:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it becomes a bit of a mixed bag. On September seventeenth, nineteen twenty six, Harriet was in a car headed home to Rancho Delferte when another vehicle hit the one she was riding in, and Strong was thrown from the vehicle. When she impacted her head hit the curb. She was killed almost instantly.

00:33:24
Speaker 2: A piece of legislation called the Boulder Canyon Project Act was passed by Congress at the end of nineteen twenty eight. This was the start of the Hoover dam Project. Harriet didn't live to see this idea realized, but it did happen, and it incorporated a lot of the things that she had been describing when she talks about these damn systems.

00:33:46
Speaker 1: This, of course, is.

00:33:47
Speaker 2: Its own, complicated, many downstream effects. Not to use a pun on purpose story.

00:33:55
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, it's interesting because a lot of her by biographies they kind of end there. But then with the coda of She'd be so happy, isn't this all great? And I'm like, whoa, whoa. I like Harriet in many ways, but I also feel like she merits a lot of discussion.

00:34:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, I of the many people we've talked about, this is somebody that I just have so many mixed feelings about and a lot of layers of frustrature.

00:34:28
Speaker 1: Yes, I can talk more about it on Oh and We're gonna sou. But I have a listener mail that is about our MRI episodes of good which delighted me utterly. This is from Dominique, who writes, Haya, I just wanted to write that I really enjoyed the MRI episode. I am a chemist and NMR was foundational learning during my undergraduate degree. In fact, I totally understand how chemists and physicists would rebuke the question of medical scans back in the day. We really only focus on identifying patterns of small chemical bonds, and expanded theories about organic tissues aren't in our general purview. In fact, even after a few years of studying and using NMRS, I still didn't make the jump in knowing how this applied to the body's tissues. I just wanted to say that all the jargon about unpaired spin and time of relaxation was thoroughly enjoyable to me. Slightly reassuring for me, Holly Fry, because I was very worried that anyone in the science community would be like, girl, you don't know what you're doing. It's very hard to learn things and parse them in a hopefully digestible way and be confident about it for me anyway. Dominique includes some pet tacks. I have two cats, Humphrey, a tuxedo cat, and Edward, an old tabby who is nineteen now. I caught humph sitting like this during the lockdown. Enjoy the pof loof love your show, Dominique. Humphrey's super cute. He's kind of doing one of those things where he's sitting halfway up with his feet in front of him, looking like he's just chilling. It's adorable. He is a fluffy baby. I love a fluffy kitty and I love tuxedos, and then her beautiful tabby Edward. I also have a nineteen year old cat listen, I Love I Love old kitties. Is very cute and has one of those tabby faces that looks like it might perpetually confer the idea that it is worried. I need to have a cat that always similarly looked worried. She was a cute little tabby que Dominique. Thank you so much both for beautiful kitty pictures and for reassuring me a little bit about science. I love it, I love all of it, and I love hearing from scientists always. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

00:36:57
Speaker 2: 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.