Peter Roget and His Thesaurus

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So I think it's a safe bet that if you've done any amount of writing, you have probably stumbled across Roger's bizaris. Yeah. That's I think one of my earliest experiences of like, here are resources in the library. Yes. Uh, And Roger was a person, Peter Mark Roget. He was a doctor and a scientist who really liked putting things into classification systems. But his life was quite dramatic well before he put together the book that is his legacy, and today we're going to talk all about that. We want to give you a heads up that this episode contains discussion of suicide and some detailed discussion because of an event that shaped Roget's life. So if you would like to skip that, jump ahead about two to three minutes to the first ad break, starting when we mentioned the year eighteen eighteen. Peter Mark Roget was born on January eighteenth, seventeen seventy nine, in London. His father, Jean Roget, was a Genevese pastor who had moved to England as an adult. He died when Peter was just four years old. His mother was Catherine Romilly, and her brother, the abolitionist, legal reformer and politician, Sir Samuel Romilly, became a significant figure in Peter's life. After his father died, Peter referred to his uncle as his surrogate father. Peter's mother, Catherine, has been characterized by biographers as domineering. She was very involved in her son's life. She likely had depression, and sometimes she exhibited paranoia, and she really really pushed her son to be an achiever. When Peter was just fourteen, his mother moved the entire family, including his sister Annette, who likely also had depression, to Edinburgh, Scotland, so that Peter could study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He did not only take classes intended to prepare him for a career as a doctor, though he also loved and studied literature and philosophy in se At the age of nineteen, Roget graduated for medical school. Even in this early stage of his life, he had this proclivity to study the classification and organization of things that was really apparent. His medical school thesis, which was about chemical affinities, invoked the work of Carl Annaeus and his classification system, as well as others who had used it in their work. One of Rogget's first projects out of school was, unsurprisingly a system of classification. This was very very broad in scope. He wanted to sort all knowledge into three categories. The first was the material world, which focused on natural history, the second was the intellectual world, which included all manner of philosophies, theories and belief systems, and the third was the world of signs, which was really about words and communication. And he collaborated on this work with a philosopher, Dougald Stewart, but it was never published. In sevente Roger was published for the first time in the journal of Thomas Bettos. This is a series of notes regarding consumption as it related to various professions. Roger also joined Betters Research Facility, the pneumatic medical institution that was in Bristol, England. In Bettos group, Roger worked alongside Humphrey Davy experimenting with gases and their possible medical uses. One of the things that they worked on were possible pain management or sedative uses for gases like nitrous oxide. They actually published a paper about it in eighteen hundred. That was more than forty years before such things were ever used in dental work or surgery, and in some cases the researchers were also experiment subjects. Roger wrote about his own experience with nitrous oxide, which for him was quite disorienting. Quote. I seemed to lose the sense of my own weight and imagined I was sinking into the ground. I then felt a drowsiness gradually steal over me, and a disinclination to motion. I was gradually roused from this torpor by a kind of delirium. I felt myself totally incapable of speaking, and for some time lost all consciousness of where I was or who was near me. Roger did not stay with the Bedos Institute for very long. He left Bristol in eighteen hundred and moved east to London. There he continued his medical studies by working with a number of prominent physicians of the day. One if those was Edward Jenner. Yeah, his connections throughout his life kind of read like the checklist of important scientists and doctors of the period. Peter Roget also made money during this time as a private tutor, he was hired to educate two boys, Burton and Nathaniel Phillips, and also to travel with them on a year long trip around Europe. Roggie was twenty three when they started their trip, heading first to Paris, where things started out quite well. They visited museums, they walked the city, and they took in the culture. And although Roger was not exactly in love with French life he wrote some very disparaging things about the French people. Uh he was happy to be making money and traveling, and when they moved on to Geneva, he found that to be quite enjoyable. But then they got trapped there. On eighteen o three, Britain declared war on France, and Napoleon Bonaparte declared that all adult British citizens and French territories were prisoners of war. That means Roger was part of that group. Much to his shock and surprise, His charges though were not affected. They were under eighteen, and he didn't just want to send them off on their own, hoping they would make it home safely. They tried to petition the French government for an exemption because of their situation but when that failed, he started reaching out to their father's business contacts in Switzerland try to find these boys a safe haven. He moved the boys first to Lausanne and then to Nuctel. Then he did something rather ingenious. So if you'll remember we mentioned at the top of this episode that his father, Gean Roget, was from Geneva, Peter did an impressive bit of bureaucratic dancing, and in less than twenty four hours he managed to track down his deceased father's birth certificate and the government official to provide certification that Peter was Jean's son and thus eligible for Genevieve citizenship. This whole business had, according to Roget, required a bribe. This let him get a limited passport to rejoin the Phillips brothers, but then to get home they had to sneak through small towns, never speaking English in front of anybody, making some more bribes along the way. Eventually they got to unoccupied Germany and from there they were able to get passage home. Roger later wrote of this ordeal, quote, it is impossible to describe the rapture we felt in treading on friendly ground. It was like awaking from a horrid dream or recovering from a nightmare. Back in England. In eighteen o four, Roger moved to Manchester and took a job at the public Infirmary. In addition to his work as a public health physician, he also put together a lecture series there, several in fact, the first was eighteen lectures grouped together as an offering of the College of Arts and Sciences, and in these classes he returned, as ever to his love of classification to form the curriculum. Physiology was broken down into four units of classification covering the human respiratory, nervous, mechanical and reproductive functions. He also taught animal physiology, although that was separated out into a different course of fifteen lectures. Because of his efforts and assembling those educational course is, he's credited with starting Manchester's first medical school. But Manchester didn't keep Roge for long either. In eighteen o eight he moved once again to London. He set up a private practice but also continued teaching. This time it was at the Russell Institution, and he built on the lecture plans he had worked on in Manchester. In eighteen o nine, he finally gained his Royal College of Physicians license, and at that point he joined the Medical and tru Urgical Society. In eighteen eleven he became the Society's secretary, and in that role he headed up to society's periodical transactions. In eighteen twelve, he published his own paper in IT which was about the detection of arsenic in poisoning cases. That same year he also became the professor of Comparative anatomy at the Royal Institution. Throughout his time as a lecturer there, establishing a framework of classification for any subject was always imparted in his lectures. One of the major concepts he was working on through all of his practice and teaching was the idea that the brain itself was subconsciously classifying things just as part of a person's perception of the world, and he referred to the brain as quote an organ of association. He innovated outside of physiology inventing a device in eighteen fourteen that he called a log log scale. This was a spiral slide rule that could add the logarithms of logarithms. The paper on this was published in eighteen fifteen and it contributed to Roger becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Eighteen fifteen also marked the beginning of a new job that was decidedly in Peter Roger's lane. He started working with Encyclopedia Britannica, and his writing there included biographies of various scientists and thinkers of the day, as well as articles about medical science itself. And this writing, truthfully is a little bit of a mixed bag if you look at it now. It was all pretty advanced for the early nineteenth century, but today obviously a lot of it is outdated or just flat out wrong. He wrote a significant article on the kaleidoscope, which expanded available knowledge of optics and the workings of the human eye, and he produced a lengthy article on physiology, and in that physiology writing he continued to espouse his approach to categorizing the workings of the human body. This was where an area that Roger had been interested in really came to the forefront. That was the nervous system. At this time, knowledge of the nervous system and exactly how it functioned were still pretty primitive. That was something Roger acknowledged in his writing, but he did note, as others before him had that the nervous system quote bears a greater resemblance to the transmission of the electric agency along conducting wires than to any other fact we are acquainted with in nature. In eighteen eighteen, Roger's family went through a horrible series of tragedies. It began with his aunt, and that was the wife of Sir Samuel Romilly, die of cancer on October twenty nine that year. Peter had been her doctor. Samuel had been at her bedside for weeks in the end for going sleep and food, and once she died, his own physical and mental health quickly declined from the neglect and the stress of the situation. On November two, Sir Romilly asked his daughter Sophia to go get Peter Roge. Peter was also his doctor, so this wasn't a surprising request for somebody who was obviously ill, But when Roger arrived, it became apparent immediately that this errand had been a ruse. Romilly had wanted privacy because he intended to end his life. Once Sophia had left, he had cut his own throat, and Peter arrived just afterward. Rose tried to treat his uncle, but after scribbling down the cryptic words quote my dear I wish on a piece of paper. Remily died in his arms. After that, Peter's mother, Catherine, also fell into her own deep depression. She became very, very paranoid. She was certain that the house staff was working toward her demise, and she progressively became kind of closed off from everyone. She alternated between paranoid episodes and near catatonia for the remainder of her life. Coming up, we'll talk about how Peter Roget's work at the lectern was what helped get him through all of this. First, though, we'll take a quick sponsor break. Unsurprisingly, given what he had just been through, Peter took several months off of work after his uncle's death, and he also wrote to a friend that his confidence was deeply shaken. He wasn't even sure he should be a doctor anymore. But he also knew that he couldn't easily switch professions at that point in his life, and so he restarted his career sort of by going back to lecturing at the Royal inst Atitution. He described it as like starting at the bottom of the ladder and just rebuilding. But his lectures there were very well received and very well reviewed, and this reinvigorated his passion for his profession. He realized that he really was better at educating and research than he wasn't working with patients, so he slowly cut back on his time in practice until he was working entirely in writing and lecturing. It also took him several years to complete an entry for Encyclopedia Britannica under the heading of physiology, but when it was completed, this was a significant addition to the compendium. One of the interesting things here is his assertion that mental functions like remembering and thinking are not for physiologists but for psychologists to contemplate. Of course, we know there interlinked in their physiological processes involved, but at the time he was like, no, no, we're just going to talk about the mechanics. Uh. Peter Roget's Encyclopedia entry that exam and deafness and muteness was quite insightful actually for its time. Again still pretty outdated looking at it now, but he was one of the first to really make the case that hearing and speech issues were not indicators of any kind of lack of intelligence, which was a commonly held and of course deeply incorrect belief of the time, and he suggested that treatments with things like speech therapy, sign language learning, and education in written forms of communication could help bridge that gap. A lot of what he wrote for the Encyclopedia was crossover material that he was also working on in his own research. The two branches of his work really fed into one another. One particular area in which this happened was his writing regarding the structure of the human brain. When Rog's editor tasked him with writing an entry on cranioscopy, there were a number of new ideas in the field. This entry was needed to help people sort out all the different ideas that people were espousing. Roger's writing in this effort was flinching in his criticism of some of his contemporaries. Johann Caspar Lavataire was a theologian who had advanced his theories that a person's appearance could offer clues to their intellect and behavioral development. And he did that in the late eighteenth century. That was not really a new idea. Throughout the eighteenth century, that was a growing theory, and his work was followed by the work of Franz Joseph Gaul who developed a system called craniology. This would eventually become known more as phrenology. For example, Gall believed that he could palpate a person's head and correctly determine that person's natural talents and skills, as well as their deficiencies. When Roggie took a close look at all of Gaul's writings on craniology, he just found it fundamentally flawed, and he wrote exactly that in his Britannica article on the subject, writing quote, nothing like direct proof has been given that the presence of any particular part of the brain is essentially necessary to the carrying on of the operations of the mind. Of Gaul's methodology, Roger wrote, quote, with such convenient logic and accommodating principles of philosophizing, it would be easy to prove anything. We suspect, however, that on that very account they will be rejected as having proved nothing. Although Roger had been thorough in his examination of craniology, and he had explained his logic and the ways in which he had shown Gall's method to be faulty, there was a significant backlash to the Encyclopedia entry. That backlash was even among other physicians, people who were starting to make their living as for noologists, of course, were incensed. They said that Roger simply could not comprehend the science involved in their work. A team of brothers, Andrew Combe, who was a doctor and George Combe, who was a lawyer, wrote that quote, the publishers of the Encyclopedia may yet find cause to regret having ever had the disadvantage of your pen about rose A. The two of them had, of course started a phrenology business, and in response to their critique, when the next edition of Encyclopedia Britannica was released, Peter Roche had updated the article. He changed the entry title from craniology to phrenology. He made clear that the validity of phrenology was on phrenologists to prove, and he included a twenty one page addendum to the article in which he refuted all of the Komb brothers points. He had consulted numerous scientists and doctors on the matter to assure readers that he was not writing strictly from his own experience, and none of them quote afforded any evidence favorable to the doctrine. After two years of back and forth with the Coombs Brothers in print, rog just stopped participating in any argument about phrenology because at that point he felt that the field was recognized as inherently flawed. Groger wrote for other publications in addition to Encyclopedia Britannica, including the Cyclopedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, and later the Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine. He wrote entries on a range of medical subjects, including tetanus, asphyxia, and aging. Outside of requested or assigned topics from his editors, he continued to do his own research. Somewhere in the late eighteen teens or early eighteen twenty, Roget met Michael Faraday and Joseph Plateau, and that led him to start his own experiments in optics. He had, as we just mentioned, already written about kaleidoscopes and their possible improvements, but at this point he really started working with them to see how they could be used to elicit various responses from the human eye as a research and diagnostic tool, and he published his findings in his paper on the Voluntary Actions of the Iris in eighteen twenty. He suspected that his claim to be able to manipulate the iris might be met with questions, and he was clear that he could prove his work if challenged, writing quote, when I have stated that I possessed the power of dilating and contracting at pleasure the iris, the fibers of which are usually considered as no more under the dominion of the will than the heart or blood vessels, my assertion has in general excited much astonishment. Such, however, is strictly the fact I can easily satisfy any person who witnesses the movements. As he was becoming really well known for his science, writing, Roget married Mary Taylor Hobson. That was on November eighteenth, eighteen twenty four, in St Philip's Church in Liverpool. This was truly a love match. The couple eventually had two children. A daughter named Katherine Mary, who went by Kate, was born in eight They also had a son, John Lewis, born in eighteen twenty eight. Not long after he got married, Peter wrote about the optical illusion that became his most well known work in that area. It was something that he described as quote the illusion that occurs when a bright object is wheeled rapidly round in a circle, giving rise to the appearance of a line of light through the whole circumference. This became more commonly known as the spoke illusion, and it started when Roger simply noticed the wheel of a cart on the street turning through his window. He and Mary had only been married a few days at that point, they had skipped a honeymoon, and when he saw it, he apparently said, Mary, I have just noticed something truly remarkable about human vision. He saw how the spokes of the wheel looked like they were curved, even though he knew they were not, and he was instantly curious about what was happening with his vision and perception to create this illusion. The story goes that he went out to the street and flagged down a vendor with a cart and offered to pay him if he would just roll his cart back and forth for him for a while so he could study the wheels. As the cart wheels turned at his direction, Roger took detailed notes. He came to the conclusion that what was happening was that his eye was taking in the movement as frames, and what looked like the spokes of the wheel bending was really retinal after images. In seven Roger became Secretary of the Royal Society. In eighteen twenty nine, Francis Henry Edgerton, eighth Earl of Bridgewater, died. Francis was an eccentric fellow and will almost certainly be a show topic in the future. But he's important to the life of Peter Roge because when he died he left eight thousand pounds to the Royal Society. With the use of the money clearly spelled out. He wanted the greatest minds of the day to write essays on the theme quote the Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation, and then that would be collected into book form so that a thousand copies of it could be printed. This project became known as the Bridgewater Treatises and it went to press with eight parts, and of course Peter Roget was a contributor. Oh, Bridgewater, I can't wait to do that episode. For a variety of reasons, um Roger wrote a two volume title for the Treatises, which was Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to natural theology. He took this project extremely seriously and he ended up writing more than six hundred pages for it, more than two hundred and fifty thousand words, and it was all meticulously organized and accompanied by illustrations. Roget believed at the time that this was the most important project of his life. In these pages, while explaining the most up to date information on scientific concepts, he also made the case that the order of nature and what appeared to him and many others to be something that was carefully designed, was proof that there was a god. Roget's treatise was published in eighteen thirty four. He had written through yet another devastating loss. In the summer of eighteen thirty two, Mary was diagnosed with cancer. As her illness progressed in the winter, Roger hired Agnes Catlow to take care of the children and their education. Agnes was also one of the illustrators for Roger's Bridgewater Treatise. Mary died on April twelfth of eighteen thirty three, and she was buried in St. George's Church in Bloomsbury. Peter's grief was really intense. He talked about not wanting to be alive anymore, and through the loss and the grief, Agnes Catlow remained she really held the household together. Yes, she and Kate were very very close for years and years and years, and as he had come through this darkest period of his morning, it had been returning to writing his treatise that had really kept Roget going. The same year that it was published, he moved into a new position at the Royal Institution. He became the first to hold the role of Fullerian Professor of Physiology. Just as some of Roger's prior writing had garnered criticism, so did this treatise, though this time the roles were somewhat reversed. In seven Charles Babbage wrote an unauthorized Bridgewater Treatise of his own, titled Quote ninth Bridgewater Treatise a Fragment. In this he made sharp criticism of Roget's work. While Babbage didn't discount the existence of God, he strongly objected to the idea of using science to explain the divine. Babbage's position was much more along the lines of thinking that God had created the universe, but a deity was not intervening in the ongoing development of natural law and our understanding of it in the long run. While Roger may have thought he was working on his most important writing yet his participation in the Bridgewater treatises didn't really get all that much attention outside of criticism. Like Babbage is, a new person was about to enter Roget's life at this point, and we're going to get into that right after we hear from the sponsors. They keep stuff you missed in history class going. In eighty seven, the family governess Agnes Catlow left her job with the Roger's to set up a school. Peter hired a woman named Margaret Spowers to replace her, and while Roget and Spowers never married, they soon began a romantic relationship and they lived as a couple, although secretly they did not publicly behave as though they were a couple. Spowers lived with Roger for the rest of her life. In the eighteen forties, Peter Roger's career took a number of hits. Marine biologists Robert Grant accused him of taking many of his ideas and claiming them as his own and the Bridgewater Treatise. In response, Roger had the Lancet print all of his correspondence with Grant from the eighteen thirties when he was working on the project that included him telling Grant that he was using the information in the treatise and that Grant would be acknowledged in it, which he was. Well, this may look like Grant had overblown things that still hurt Roget's reputation. Next, Roger was criticized by the Lancet for what they felt was him slighting another scientist by keeping his writing from being published by the Royal Society, and for this the Lancet and many other scientists at the time called for his dismissal. Then Roger was part of a bigger scandal for the Royal Society in which the Society's Royal Medal for Research had been given to Thomas Snowbeck erroneously, the paper that had won had not in fact been read to the Society. That was something that was part of the rules of that that metal being issued. This once again slighted another scientist, Robert Lee, who had read a paper in Midwiffery that was lauded as exceptional but had not received any recognition. On November seven, Peter Roger, who was exhausted by one handle after another, resigned as Secretary of the Royal Society. He would stay on for one more year to wrap things up, although he definitely had done some questionable things. He never acknowledged any wrongdoing and called all of the accusations against him malignant attacks. He had been the Royal Society's secretary for twenty one years. Peter roget with seventy when his retirement began, but he was still eager to share his knowledge, and if you read any accounts of him, everyone who knows him comments on how he is an extraordinary good health um And so he was ready to just keep going and doing things. His entire life, from the time he was a boy, he had made lists. This had started as simply cataloging the things around him, but that habit evolved as he matured into listing things related to his studies and then his work, and all of this list making with something that had helped him make order of things in the world, and many modern historians theorized that he was the way he dealt with anxiety and depression, particularly during the many very stressful periods of his life. He had found a very practical use for one of his collections of lists. Over the years as he was writing, he had kept running lists of words, grouping like words together so that he could use them for his own reference. So he decided to revisit that list and prepare it for publication. He had assembled a preliminary version when he was in his mid twenties, but he hadn't gotten it to the point that it was suitable for printing even in his later life. This whole process took more than a decade. He had started it in his early sixties, but it wasn't until his retirement that it was ready. In the early summer of eighteen fifty two, the first version of Roger's the Saurus of English Words and Phrases, classified and arranged so as to facilitate the expression of ideas and assist in literary composition, was published. And while he was preparing that first edition, Peter's daughter Kate had been spiraling with some sort of mental illness. She bounced back for a little while, but she soon had another's described as a depressive episode, and for a while Roger had sent her around to visit friends and family, hoping travel would help her. And then there was this idea that she should be a governess because that might help her focus on other things, but she could not get a placement anywhere. Finally, Roger set her up in her own place with a small staff, essentially kind of banishing the problem from his household. His son and the rest of the family were pretty mortified that he had done this. Kate did get better, though, and after Margaret Spowers died of breast cancer in Et two, she moved back home with her father for good. The word the sais means treasure in Latin, and that was exactly what the author hoped it would be. Roger stated his intent quite clearly in the the SIUs is introduction quote. The present work intended to supply, with respect to the English language, a desidera autumn hitherto unsupplied in any language, namely, a collection of the words it contains, and of the idiomatic combinations peculiar to it, arranged not in alphabetical order, as they are at a dictionary, but according to the ideas which they express. For this purpose, the words and phrases of the language are here classed not according to their sound or their orthography, but strictly according to their signification. Is her both gent that bet? Yeah, Peter Roget. The introduction to that thesaurus is so long, like the preface is very long. Um. Now, often if you were to purchase that thesaurus today even if it is a Roget's thesaurus, it will be in what's called dictionary form, meaning that it is alphabetical. But the initial additions were and some still are. As Roget's introduction indicated organized by ideas. He broke them down into classes. Class one was words expressing abstract relations. The subheaders here were existence, relation, quantity, order, number, time, change, and causation. Class two was words relating to space, with the subheaders space in general, dimensions, form, and motion. Class three was words related to matter, including matter in general, inorganic matter, and organic matter. Class four is where things really get intense. This is the words relating to the intellectual faculties, and this is broken down into two sections of its own. First is formation of ideas, which covers everything from operations for intellect in general all the way to creative thought, and second is communication of ideas, which includes nature of ideas, communicated, modes of communication, and means of communication. Class five is words relating to the voluntary powers, and it's broken down into you sections like Class four was this time individual volition and intersocial volition, and class six as words relating to these sentient and moral powers. That's broken down by types of affections. If all this sounds kind of confusing, once you start exploring it, it starts to feel pretty intuitive. It has a certain flow to it, but for folks who never quite got that vibe. There was also an alphabetical index in the back. In total there were a thousand headings. I definitely remember like having the Rojs the Saris in this form in the public library and like thumbing through it. Yeah, and Roger had intended for it to be easy and intuitive. Writing later in that rather long introduction, I mentioned quote, it is to those who are thus painfully groping their way and struggling with the difficulties of composition, that this work professes to hold out a helping hand. The inquiry can readily select out of the ample collection spread out before his eyes and the following pages, those expressions which are best suited to his purpose, and which might not have occurred to him without such assistance. In order to make this selection, he scarcely even need engage in any critical or elaborate study of the subtle distinctions existing between synonymous terms. For if the materials set before him be sufficiently abundant and instinctive, tact will rarely fail to lead him to the proper choice, and people really liked it. One reviewer noted that you could read through the entire book because Roger had arranged things in such a way that they had a very pleasing flow. It was enjoyable to move through it. The concept was embraced really quickly, and soon there were more printings needed. Roget continued to add to his entries and to refine them, something that all of his years of writing for encyclopedias had no doubt prepared him for. In September eighteen sixty nine, Roget visited the village of West Alvern on vacation, and he died there on September twelve, at the age of ninety. He had continued to revise his bizarre is right up to the end of his life, and when he died, his son John took over as editor. More than forty million copies of Roget's bars have been sold over the years. Peter Roger was deemed the Saint of cross Wordia by New York Times magazine. There are also many other things He's been called. One thing that we will talk about inner behind the scenes, um okay. His life was a wild ride so much more than I had anticipated. Yes, I was trying to go for a no bummers episode, and then I got to all of the sad parts and I said, yeah, too late, hot late. YEP. I understand this for sure. Um, But I have a fun listener mail which actually mentions an episode that Tracy did the research for, but oh it tickled my fancy. This is from our listener Kristen, who writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed your episode on the Nutcracker. I have seen many versions of this ballet over the years and always enjoyed the vivacious nature of the ballet. However, the strangest Nutcracker I've ever seen had to be the production I saw at Las Scala in Italy nearly twenty years ago when we were living in Milan. I took my daughter with the expectation that she would love the beautiful costumes and lively dances. This was a major mistake on my part. The production, from sets to dances was very dark and baroque. Think Haunted Mansion Ride without the skeletons. One scene even featured dancing bats. It was very eerie, so I was quite relieved to find my daughter actually slept through most of it. I have been a great fan of your show since when I listened to your podcast. I feel like I'm sitting with two friends over a cup of coffee, hearing about your latest discoveries. Even with an m A in history, I learned something new every episode, so clearly there's a lot of stuff I missed in history class. And now for the cat tax. Attached are two pictures of our family cat, Gemma jinks. She has a very large, fluffy cat with long whiskers, strange meal which makes us think she's at least part main cone. She also has an affinity for lying on whatever fabric I'm working on, in this case a bustle petticoat, because that is what cats do. Thank you for all you do to make my days more interesting. Um. Yes, cats love to sit on fabric, That's their job. I want time travel and see this version of the Nutcracker where it is apparently the spooky Halloween version. Sounds good. It sounds like, um, someone crawled in my brain and said, what can we combine to make you happy? I love it When that happens, there will be bats. There will be black everything. I mean, can you imagine like the snowflakes, but it's all black and it's like ash or something. I'm just talking on the top of my head. I don't know that's what happened. I'm already I'm down a rabbit hole of my own design. I want I want the all gothic, very spooky Yogi Halloween Nutcracker, and I hope somebody makes it now. Um Kristen, thank you for that and for your absolutely beautiful kitty, Cashy is so cute. I love a fluffy kitty. If you would like to write to us, you could do so at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on all of the social media's at mt in History, and if you would like to subscribe, you can do that on the iHeart Radio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.