Unearthed Year-end 2025, Part 1

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It is time for our most recent installment of Unearthed, which is when we talk about things that were literally and figuratively unearthed over in this case the last quarter of twenty twenty five. So this is once again a two part episode, as is pretty much always the case anymore. We've got a ton of updates, some things about books and letters and animals and an exhumation, and then we'll have other stuff that was on Unearthed on Wednesday. So starting off with the updates. In last falls installment of Unearthed, we spent quite a bit of time talking about the Executive Branch's focus on the Smithsonian Museums, including a request for the Smithsonian to send a wealth of information about the museum's and their exhibits to a committee at the Executive Branch for review. The Smithsonian submitted materials on September eighteenth, and three months later, on December eighteenth, a letter that had been sent to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch the Third was posted on the White House website. The letter characterized the museum's submission as a partial production of materials that was woefully incomplete, and suggested that the Smithsonian's federal funding could be withheld if it does not comply. This letter also reiterated that federal funding is available to the Smithsonian only for use quote in a manner consistent with Executive Order one four two five three Restoring Truth Insanity to American History, which is an executive order we have also discussed on the show before. I really don't have much to add to this. We have already talked about this executive order. We've already talked about how the Smithsonian is not an executive branch agency. So this is like just more of what we talked about repeatedly over the course of twenty twenty five. Also, uh, we've talked previously about just how important and valuable the work of public media has been to our show, And just yesterday, as of when we are recording this, the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted to dissolve itself. That is, the corporation that has sent the money to public Broadcasting for almost sixty years. President and CEO Patricia Harrison said of this quote. For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans, regardless of geography, income, or background, had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling. When the administration and Congress rescinded federal funding, our board faced a profound responsibility. CPB's final act would be too pet the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attack. I don't have a lot to add to this again either. Again, this just happened yesterday as of when we are recording. I found out about it after the end of business hours, which is why I did not even send Holly a brand new third update to this episode before we recorded it. I'm glad you said that, because I was like, I know, you should say. You were looking at me like and this one is Scy's. Well, I was more worried that I had. I was like, I know, I went to the right email, but yeah, it would have been three changes to the outline sent in the span of about two hours. Fine by me. Uh. Moving on. In April of twenty twenty two, we did a two part episode on Ernest Shackleton, who led an expedition to Antarctica that went very wrong after his ship, the Endurance, got trapped in the ice. The Endurance was supposedly one of the strongest ships of its time, and this disaster has been blamed on an apparently weak rudder, which the ice was able to tear away. With no rudder, of course, the ship could not steer, so it couldn't get out of the ice, and it was ultimately crushed. But a paper published in Polar Record, a journal of Arctic and Antarctic research, which came out in October, has come to a different conclusion that the ship wasn't really all that strong to begin with. According to this paper, the Endurance was really designed to go at most to the edges of the Antarctic, not deep into the pack ice farther south. That pack ice can put huge amounts of pressure on a ship as it moves. The weakest part of the Endurance's hull was around the engine room area, and the engine room also was large and not reinforced by beams, so all of that would have made it a lot easier for the ice to crush the sho and on top of that, Shackleton may have known this before setting out on the expedition. His nineteen twenty book South, which chronicled the expedition, said that the shipwrights who had built the Endurance quote had never done sounder and better work, and he framed its destruction as the inevitable outcome for any ship that was trapped in pack ice. But in a letter to his wife Emily, he framed the Endurance as not as strong as the Nimrod, which he had taken on an earlier expedition in nineteen oh seven. Part of the research that went into this paper came from underwater imaging that was conducted after the wreck of the Endurance was found. Back in twenty twenty two, we talked about that finding on previous installments of on Earthed, and the research also examined a lot of diaries and correspondence for coming to this conclusion. In our Spring twenty twenty three on Earth, we talked about a gold pendant that had been discovered by a metal detectorist in twenty nineteen, which had just been unveiled at the British Museum. That pendant was decorated with the letters h and k, a tudor rose and a pomegranate bush, which was a symbol of Catherine of Aragon. It was made of high quality materials, but without the same level of craftsmanship, so there was speculation that this had been made in a hurry, perhaps as a tournament prize or as something someone was going to wear at a tournament. Now this pendant is believed to have been a commission for a tournament that was held in October of fifteen eighteen to celebrate the betrothal of Mary, daughter of Henry the eighth than Catherine of Aragon, to Francis Dauphin of France. At this time, Mary was a toddler and the Dauphin was a baby. It is possible that Henry the eighth was the person who commissioned this piece. He was known to have jewelry like this made for members of his court to wear at similar events. Because of its age and condition and its connection to the twenty four year marriage of Henry and Catherine, this pendant is being described as one of the most important sixteenth century pieces ever discovered in Britain. It is currently on display at the British Museum and the museum is raising funds to try to permanently acquire it. They've set a goal of three point five million pounds or about four point six million dollars, with a deadline of April of twenty twenty six. Next prior hosts of the show did an episode on Rapanui or Easter Island, and they also did an update to that episode, which came out in twenty twelve, And of course Rapanui has made a ton of appearances on Unearthed. Several articles and papers about Rapanui and the Maai statues there came out toward the end of last year, and one of those papers was about how large statues were moved from where they were made to the roads where they are today, and the conclusion in this paper was that they were walked there. And when I saw all the headlines about this, my first thought was did we not know that already? The idea that moi walked to their destinations goes back to the eighteenth century, when the island's inhabitants told Dutch explorer yakab Ragavin that was how they moved back In twenty twelve, a team of US anthropologists and archaeologists used a replica to demonstrate that three teams of people could use ropes tied to the moi to rock it back and forth so that it would move. They moved that replica more than three hundred feet in under an hour. Yeah, and in a way that you could describe as walking. But while a YouTube video of this experiment got millions of views, the academic paper that the team published the following year got a lot of skepticism. Among other things, when it was published, the prevailing narrative about the island was that its residents had committed eco side by cutting down the trees to make the rollers to move the statues. We have talked about a lot of research that contradicts and undermines this whole eco side theory on past installments of an Earth that as well. But the idea that they walked the statues just went against the idea that they cut down big rollers and deforested the whole island to do it. The new paper that yielded this latest round of headlines was written to address that skepticism. It was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, entitled The Walking Moi Hypothesis Archaeological Evidence, Experimental Validation and response to critics. According to the authors, walking the statues to their destinations is the explanation that best fits the available evidence. The paper systematically addresses the various critiques of the one that was published in twenty thirteen. The paper's acknowledgments credit several Rapanui people for their involvement, insight, and commitment to community based archaeology on the island. This still is not completely settled, though archaeologists and Professor Sue Hamilton, who was not involved in this research, was quoted in Live Science as saying, quote the current work by the author's further demonstrates the technical possibility of upright movement of the statues moa I, but does not prove that it happened. Hamilton also noted that there are other possible explanations for what went on. This paper was written by Carlippo and Terry L. Hunt, and they published another paper on Rapanui in December. This one was also in the Journal of Archaeological Science, and it examined the role of rats in the deforestation of Rapanui using final evidence and ecological modeling. Polynesian rats arrived on the island with people in the twelfth century either as stowaways on their canoes or as an intentionally introduced food source. At that point, the island was covered with slow growing palm trees, and while people did cut some of them down for various reasons, it's likely that the bigger factor was the rats eating the palm nuts that the trees used to reproduce, and since the rats had no other predators on the island other than people, they proliferated. So while Rapanui was largely deforested by the time Europeans first arrived on the island, according to this paper, it wasn't a case of humans just cutting down all the trees. And there was also yet another paper. LiPo Hunt and other co authors also published an article in Plus one about Rapanuis society. At the time that the moai were created. Prior to contact with Europeans, Rapanui society was made up of small groups of independent families rather than having one centralized leadership or government. So this research looked at whether the quarry where most of the moi were created, was similarly decentralized. They created a comprehensive three D model of the quarry and found that there were thirty distinct centers of quarrying and carving activity. They also found evidence suggesting that once they were made, the moai were transported out of the quarry in all different directions. So their conclusion based on this is that moai creation was decentralized, similarly to how Rapanui society was decentralized overall, and the three D model that they made for this is viewable online. Our episode on the Jacobite Rising of seventeen forty five ran as a Saturday Classic in May of twenty twenty one, and archaeological finds related to it have come upon on Earth since then. In October, archaeologists from the University of Glasgow and the National Trust for Scotland announced the discovery of more than one hundred projectiles at Culaden Battlefield, site of the last major battle of the rising. These projectiles were found in an area that had been investigated previously without producing any archaeological material, possibly because the area was forested during that earlier investigation. These projectiles included lead, musket balls and cannon shot. This includes a three pound cannon ball believed to have been fired by Jacobite artillery, and it's believed that some of these are from the very last actions in the battle, as the Jacobites were being defeated by government troops. The musket balls may have been fired by Irish troops who were in French service, known as the Irish Biquet, who were fighting alongside the Jacobites and continued to fight against British government troops while many of the Jacobites retreated. I don't actually know if at the time if they said that piquet as a French term, or if it was said more like pickets, which is where that word comes from. This likely saved the lives of the Jacobites who escaped. The Jacobites were trying to restore the House of Stuart to the British throne, so from the Hanoverian perspective, they were rebels who would have been executed if they were captured, but since they were serving in the regular French army, captured Irish paquets would have been treated as prisoners of war. We're going to take a quick break and then talk about some more updates. It has been a while since we have talked about the Maya Train on Unearthed. That is the train that was built to carry tourists from the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula to less visited sites farther inland, including Mayan historic sites. This train was controversial since its construction had the potential to unearth and possibly damage other archaeological sites along the way, and there were concerns that there might not be just enough time or money to study and protect all of these sites in advance of the construction, so simultaneously making historical and archaeological sites far their inland more accessible, also potentially causing damage on the way to get there. Last November, Creuz, working on the Maya train, accidentally discovered an inscribed stone slab in the ruins of the city of Kabbah, dated back to the seventh century. It has been dubbed the Foundation Stone. Conservators have restored the stone's hieroglyphs and a translation is in the works. One of the things translators have substantiated is the name of a female ruler, ex chak Chian, who came to power in the year five sixty nine. These hieroglyphs connect x chuk Chian to various deities and suggest that she was involved in the construction of some nearby sporting facilities. A lot of the work with this is still very preliminary, but it suggests that she helped guide the city of Koba into becoming an important regional power. Next, work is still ongoing to find and identify victims of the nineteen twenty one Tulsa Race massacre, which we originally covered on the show in twenty fourteen and then ran as a Saturday Classic in twenty nineteen. In November, officials working at Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa announced that they had documented the remains of eighty more people who had been buried in unmarked graves, with nine of them meeting the criteria to be exhumed and studied further. Those criteria are based on historical records and eyewitness accounts describing where and how victims were buried. Yet not every unmarked grave is believed to have been connected to this massacre. This most recent season of field work in Tulsa has concluded now, but the lab work from that field work is ongoing. The hope with this continues to be that they will be able to identify the victims and connect them to surviving family members wherever possible. On November sixteenth, twenty twenty two, we did an episode on Boston's Coconut Grove Fire, which took place in nineteen forty two and continues to be the deadliest nightclub fire in history. On June twenty fifth, Bob Schumway, last known survivor of the fire, died in a senior living community in Naples, Florida, at the age of one hundred and one. His death was covered in The Boston Globe in November, and the Coconut Grove Memorial Committee paid tribute to him during its annual anniversary vigil on November twenty ninth. Humbwey was eighteen the night of the fire, and had gone to Coconut Grove with a friend after Boston College lost to Holy Cross in that night's football game. Both of them were uninjured and stayed at the club to help with the rescue and recovery. Our next update is that on January nineteenth of twenty twenty two, we did an episode on Britain's eighteen ninety seven putative expedition into the Kingdom of Benin and the removal of artworks and artifacts from that kingdom that are known today as the Benin Bronzes. Much of Benin City was destroyed by fire during this raid, and it is not fully clear whether that fire was unintentional or if the British forces set it on purpose, but then it spread a lot farther and faster than they had expected it really. I mean, the raid itself horrifying and bad, obviously, but it does not seem like the intent was to burn the whole city down right. Archaeological work has been undertaken in Benin City ahead of the construction of the Museum of West African Art, and some of it has been focused on the site of the Obo's Palace, which was one of the buildings that was destroyed. Archaeologists have found parts of the palace that predate the colonial era and archaeological layers that predate the establishment of the Kingdom of Beni. In addition to evidence of the palace and the post colonial structures that were built there afterward, researchers found evidence of metalworking workshops, more than one hundred thousand pieces of ceramics, glass bottles, smoking pipes, and other objects. Analysis of all of this material is ongoing and should lead to a better understanding of the pre colonial Kingdom of Benin and the site's postcolonial development. Next there's always work going on at Pompeii, and Pompeii has made an appearance in multiple episodes of the show and as a frequent flyer on Unearthed. Some of the most recently published research about Pompeii is what some of the victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year seventy nine were wearing. In particular, researchers have raised questions about why some of the victims were wearing wool. Today, a lot of people probably associate wool with war garments and cold weather, but it really is a versatile material that can also help keep people cool when it is hot out. Wool is breathable and it's moisture wicking, and as sweat evaporates out of it, it helps cool the person wearing it. Wool was also a widely used and affordable fabric in the area two thousand years ago, so by itself, evidence of wool clothing on some of the victims of the eruption doesn't mean anything unusual. But for a long time, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius was believed to have happened in the month of August. Based on the writing of Pliny, the younger. Some of these people weren't wearing summer weight garments, but instead multiple heavy layers of wool, so these garments could back up the competing hypothesis that this eruption really took place later in the year, more like October, in the autumn, when temperatures would have been cooler. That's sort of one possibility. Another is that people might have put on multiple layers of heavy clothes while trying to escape Pompeii because they thought that those layers would help protect them from volcanic debris. Either way, some questions suggested by the fact that people had heavy wool on and for our last update, prior hosts of the show did an episode on the Bio Tapestry in twenty eleven, and it has been featured on several installments of Unearth since then. There are a number of questions about the tapestry, one of them being where it was hung before it wound up at Biocathedral in France, where it was listed on an inventory from fourteen seventy six. One of the proposed locations has been the dining hall of the Dover Priory, but a paper published in the journal Historical Research suggests a different location, the refectory at Saint Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, and this paper also suggests a purpose for what we commonly call a tapestry, but it's really an embroidery. The Benedictine monks who lived at this abbey were required to eat in silence while listening to a reader. If the bay a tapestry were hanging from the walls of their refectory, it could have served as kind of a visual accompaniment to the religious or moral or historical texts that were being read from during meals. Refectories of this era typically had very long, uninterrupted walls, which would have provided enough space for the embroidery to hang as one piece. That's actually one of the arguments against the idea that it was designed to be hung in by a cathedral which did not have that kind of continuous uninterrupted wall space. This is of course all speculative, and the paper does not try to present it as a final answer. This paper also has origins in a class at the University of Bristol in which students study the tapestry in the current research around it and were as to come up with possible alternative explanations for the Bayou Tapestry. The Bayou Tapestry Museum in France is being renovated right now, which is part of why this embroidery is being loaned to the UK for the first time. It will be on exhibit in the British Museum from September of twenty twenty six until June of twenty twenty seven. This loan has involved the British government ensuring the embroidery for about eight hundred million pounds or roughly a billion dollars. Yeah. Some of the headlines that I saw regarding this is like, at last the Bayou Tapestry returns to Britain where it belongs. There's a whole I mean that there's a lot of stuff, right, It's discussed in that episode. Also, I mean a billion dollars is a lot of money, but the tapestry is irreplaceable, so yeah, yeah uh. Anyway, moving on to books and letters. According to rec search published in Current Anthropology, signs used in murals and undecorated pottery in the ancient city of Teote Juacan in Central Mexico may constitute a written language. It's possible that they're a very early form of udo as Tecn, which later developed into multiple other languages, including cora Quito and Noir. If this is true, it could also shed some light on who lived in Teotihuacan and when the Nadel speaking Aztecs arrived in the area. Researchers involved with this work have described it as difficult because the logograms that are used sometimes seem to have a clear representative meaning, like pictures of birds and animals, but together they can seem almost like they're meant to be read as a rebus puzzle with different elements meant to be sounded out to form a word. Yeah, a lot of this sounds very preliminary to me, but also really interesting of like how it might be interpreted and what those interpretations might mean. Next, a small book containing religious songs that was passed down through a family before being given to the National Library of Norway may actually be Norway's oldest book. This book currently has eight remaining pages. Those pages are written in Latin and it is bound in sealskin. According to this family, it came from a monastery in western Norway. It is believed to date back to the thirteenth century or older, and this sealskin binding is being described as unique. There are only two other known books of a somewhat comparable age in Norway, and one of those is missing its binding. Next, a family picking up trash on Wharton Beach in Western Australia found a schweps bottle containing messages from two World War One soldiers, Malcolm Alexander Neville and William Kirk Harley, who were traveling on the same troop transport wrote a letter to his mother, while Harley's letter said that his mother had died, so anyone who found the letter should keep it. They corked this bottle and threw it overboard. Once it washed up on shore, it got covered in sand, which helped protect the contents until it was uncovered by storms earlier last year. Deborah Brown, who found this bottle, went on a quest to try to find the families of these soldiers and return their letters to them. Neville was killed in action in April of nineteen seventeen, and she was able to track down his great nephew. Harley did return home from the war, and Brown was able to reach his granddaughter. There's been a lot of very heartwarming coverage of this in the Australian Press. If you want to just go read some feel good stories about family members being reconnected to this message from an ancestor, go google that. And lastly, linguists are trying to compile the first ever complete dictionary of ancient Celtic, scouring all kinds of surviving sources to bring together a collection of what will probably be about one thousand words. Ancient Celtic contained many more words than that, but there is very little written documentation of it remaining today. Sources include everything from accounts of Julius Caesar's conquest of northern Europe two memorial stones that date back roughly two thousand years. This is a work in progress, but the plan is for it to be publicly available when it is complete. We're going to take another quick sponsor break and then talk about some animals. Now we will talk about some research involving animals, starting with domestic dogs. Research published in the journal Science in November has looked at the physical characteristics domesticated dogs and how those characteristics have changed over time. So this research analyzed six hundred and forty three modern and archaeological skulls, including ones from recognized dog breeds and street dogs and wolves. The oldest skulls that they analyzed were from about fifty thousand years ago, which is before dogs are known to have been domesticated. The team created three D models of each skull and used a method called geometric morphometrics to compare them, and they found that during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods there was already a lot of diversity in dogs. The oldest skull that could really be distinguished as a domestic dog rather than a wolf was from about eleven thousand years ago, which wasn't that long after dogs were first domesticated relatively speaking. The team found a lot of variety in the shapes of dog skulls by about eight thousand years years ago. To this variety was probably connected to how dogs and people were living and working together, and how quickly different groups of people started using dogs for specific roles, as well as what kinds of tasks those dogs were doing, like if the dogs were helping humans to hunt, or if they were hurting livestock or controlling pests. Basically, breeds were developing really early on in the development of dogs as a domesticated animal. At the same time, though, the researchers noted that while these domestic dogs skull shapes really quickly started showing a lot of variation, this variation was not nearly as extreme as you can see in some of today's dog breeds. They did not have the equivalent of like a pug. There were no sharpays. No, there was variety, but the spectrum was smaller. Right Moving on to cat domestication, research from a team at Peking University, published in December has looked at the timeline of when domesticated cats were introduced to China. We have talked about a couple of other studies looking at this same question on Unearthed before, and this research involved twenty two small bones from fourteen archaeological sites around China, the oldest dating back about five thousand years. According to this research, leopard cats were living around human settlements more than five thousand years ago, and they continued to do so until about the year one hundred and fifty CE. Then there was a gap in felines around settlements, with the first definitive example of a domestic cat in China dating back to about the year seven point thirty. While leopard cats still live in much of Asia today, they never became domesticated in the way that cats did. They are very cute. Researchers also looked at the DNA of modern and ancient cats in China to try to pinpoint the geographic origins of domesticated cats when they were introduced to China, and their research suggests that domesticated cats were introduced along the Silk Road. Not very surprising as a way for that to happen. This research puts the introduction of domesticated cats into China even later than research we have talked about on the show before. Researchers have found the oldest mule in Western Europe. This animal's remains were found during an archaeological dig in Catalonia back in nineteen eighty six and they date back to some time between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE, three to four centuries before it was believed that mules were present in Western Europe. Yes, is one of those re explorations of an older find with new technology and techniques that are available today. Mules are, of course a hybrid of a donkey and a mare, so this suggests that people in this part of Europe learned about hybridizing equine species a lot earlier than was previously thought. It is possible that this mule was bred on the Iberian Peninsula after the Phoenicians introduced to donkeys into the area, but future research using genetic and isotopic analysis will be needed to actually confirm that. They'll use those isotopes to figure out things like what the mule ate when it was alive. Speaking of donkeys, there are written records of colonists bringing horses to what is now Virginia in the early seventeenth century, and no written records of donkeys on things like ship manifests. But archaeological research at the site of the Jamestown settlement has revealed that colonists brought donkeys with them as well. This isn't really surprising, since donkeys were already known for being working animals on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. These were likely brought from the Iberian Peninsula or from western Africa. These donkeys and the horses that had been brought with them became food sources for the colonists during the winter of sixteen oh nine to sixteen ten, which is known as the Starving Time. Researchers have found the remains of two wolves on the Swedish island of Stora Carlzo, which is a small island that does not have any native land mammals. This suggests that seal hunters and fishers who used this island between three thousand and five thousand years ago brought wolves there for some reason. The wolves also have some traits that suggest that they may have been living alongside humans, including some isotope analysis that suggests they were eating a lot of seal meat and fish, which would not be the typical diet for a wolf unless someone were feeding it to them. One of these wolves had some kind of a leg condition that probably would have affected its mobility, meaning that it might have only been able to survive with the help of people. These remains are somewhere between three thousand and five thousand years old, and according to DNA research, they are definitely wolves and not domesticated dogs. They are also somewhat smaller than a typical wolf of the time, and one of the two seems to have a reduced amount of genetic diversity. So it seems like these wolves were living alongside people for some reason, but there's a lot that is unclear about that, like had people managed to tame some wolves. Were the wolves being kept caged or were they otherwise restrained? Was there some other method of managing the wolve's behavior and keeping them around the settlement with people. We don't really know the answers to any of that. Researchers in Sweden have found the burial site of a dog dating back about five thousand years. The area where it was found is now a bog but at the time it was a lake. This dog was clearly buried in tensionally, it was likely placed in a bag or a container made of skins, along with stones to weigh it down. The dog also had a polished bone dagger between its paws. Research into this burial is ongoing, including some isotopein DNA analysis that might reveal more about the dog and where it came from. But it is possible that this burial was part of a ritual rather than the simple burial of a pet or a working dog that had died and our last animal find. According to research published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, Roman officers stationed in the Egyptian port of Baronyke may have kept Indian macaques as a mark of status. This comes from the analysis of thirty five monkey burials at an ancient animal cemetery in Baronyke. In addition to providing a glimpse of what wealthy officers might have spent their money on, this also provides some of the earliest evidence of an animal trade between India and Roman Egypt. Almost eight hundred burials have been examined at this animal cemetery, and the monkeys have some notable differences from the other burials. About forty percent of the monkey burials included grave goods, so objects buried along with the monkeys, and that was true of only about three percent of the cat and dog burials. The grave goods that were buried with the monkeys included things like food shells and collars that were made of luxury materials. Some of these monkeys also seem to have been buried with other small animals that seem like they were meant to be the monkey's own pets. We are going to finish off today's episode with one historically relevant exhumation. Eliza Monroe Hay, oldest daughter of US President James Monroe, was exhumed from her burial site in Paris and returned to the United States, where she was reburied with others in the Monroe family at Hollywood sen Matery in Richmond, Virginia in October. So Eliza and Roe hay had died in Paris in eighteen forty, and the burial plot where she had been laid to rest had been paid for by an American diplomat named Daniel Brent. After hearing that this plot was going to be cleared and resold, Barbara Varndick, who is the author of Eliza's True Story, the first biography of President Monroe's eldest daughter, started a two year process to have Hayes body return to the US. That obviously was successful. I just said she was returned to the US and laid to rest here, and that biography came out just last year. We're going to have more unearthed on Wednesday. But in the meantime, do you have listener mail, Tracy? I do. I have listener mail that is from Mary. It's from October, and I don't think i've read it before. Mary wrote, Hello, Tracy and Holly. I've been listening to the podcast for several years. I've gone pretty deep into the archives, though I have not completed my symhcphd. In parentheses yet I love history and learning and appreciate the variety of topics you cover. I also appreciate your willingness to stand for justice, ethics, and all the good things decent humans should be doing during challenging times. Standing firm and what'strit and has never been more important. I was really excited to see the history of soap episode recently. A few years ago, I had some allergy testing and learned I am allergic to coconut Coconut oil is in very nearly all soaps, including Syndet cleaners, which use coconut derived ingredients. I decided to learn how to make my own soap and other skincare products out of necessity apart from learning in my fifties that showers and baths are in fact not supposed to be an inherently itchy experience. I discovered that I love making soap. I get to tap into my creativity by using different colorants, fragrances, and butters and oils to make each batch unique and end up with a useful product. So making has become my happy place and a great source of stress relief. Since January alone, I have made so much soap. If you still had a physical address, I would share the wealth. If you wanted to give me an address I could use to ship soap too, I would love to share it as a thank you for all of the enjoyment and learning I've had from your podcast over the years. For picture tax, I have attached a picture of a small sample of the soap I've been making recently. I also added pictures of both my daughter's cats. The two black cats will be moving in with us in a few weeks while my daughter and her wife return to the nest in order to work toward grad school. Orange Kitty, it's very sweet and sociable and very chatty. And then there's like a ps that says part two. I wrote this message and forgot to hit send. And that's not all bad. I just finished the eponymous diseases episode, and there's another topic that's right up my alley. I work as a public health professional. Years ago I used to do communicable disease investigation, including vector borne diseases. This brought back memories. Your listener mail response at the end about researching and verifying sources can't be understated, especially with the degradation of public health systems and available resources. Thank you for being a source of education and support. Mary. Thank you Mary so much for this email. These are some incredibly cute cat pictures. We have an orange tabby kitty cat wearing what looks like a little shirt, standing with two front paws on an open book, and the biggest of big eyes with huge pupils. A black kitty cat curled up on a chair who does not look happy to be having a picture taken. And then a black kitty cat on top of a dresser cabinet kind of thing looking into the middle distance I feel, which is a thing that cats do. And then, oh man, these soaps are beautiful. These it's a picture of a lot of different soaps. They have kind of a marbled appearance of different swirls of color. Really lovely. Those are very beautiful soaps. Thank you so much for the offer of sending us things. I am touched. Anytime anyone wants to send us things, I will say when we did have a physical address, the amount of things received became overwhelming, and again deeply appreciated and am grateful for anyone's attention in that way. That it was more stuff than we could deal with. Some of it from listeners, A lot of it from book publicists who sent us unsolicited re few copies of things, and it was just more than we could really handle. And then now we have a dispersed working environment and we don't have a centralized place for things. But again, thank you were even the suggestion and for these beautiful, amazing pictures. I love this whole email, except for the part that you had to spend many years being itchy anytime you bathed or showered. That's not good at all. When I was little, I had a lot of trouble with itching, and it took getting rid of anything that involved fragrance in our household. But anyway, thank you again. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we are at History podcast atiheartradio dot com and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, but anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah,