Stuff You Missed in History Class

This 2011 episode from prior hosts Sarah and Deblina covers polio, a threat in the early 20th century that often left victims paralyzed or dead. Vaccines caused an immediate drop in polio cases and today have nearly eradicated the disease. 

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Tracy and Holly talk about school science fairs and their performance in them. They then discuss the interesting aspect of Field of Cloth of Gold preparations that put people from England and France side by side as they worked.

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The Field of Cloth of Gold was a summit and celebration that was held to start what was hoped to be a long-term alliance between France and England. And it required a lot of fancy footwork to keep two monarchs appeased.

The development of penicillin started – but definitely did not end – with the chance discovery of some mold in a petri dish. There is so much more to the story.

The subject of this 2018 episode is sometimes called a 19th-century Rosa Parks. When Elizabeth boarded a Manhattan streetcar in 1854, a chain of events began which became an important to the civil rights of New York's Black citizens.

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Holly speculates about how one article about Josephine Cochrane got so many details wrong. Tracy then talks about the details of Canada's currency featuring Viola Desmond. 

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Sisters of the Underground is an 8-episode scripted series by Executive Producers Eva Longoria and Dania Ramirez. It follows the true story of three courageous women, known as the Mirabal sisters, who changed the world. Their lifelong activism in the Dominican Republic and state-orchestrated assassination ignited outrage that led to the downfall of one of the most brutal and enduring dictators of the 20th Century, Rafael Trujillo (aka El Jefe)...

Desmond was convicted after refusing to leave her seat in a segregated movie theater in Nova Scotia in 1946. But she also established the first beauty salon for Black women her area, and founded a beauty school for Black women.

There is one woman in particular who normally gets the credit for inventing the dish washer. But there were other inventors trying to come up with ways to automatically take care of kitchen clean up both before and after Josephine Cochran.

This 2014 episode covers why when the Great London Smog descended in December of 1952, nobody initially realized anything unusual was going on. At its largest, it extended 30 kilometers around London, and it killed thousands of people. 

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