Behind the Scenes Minis: Murder and War

Holly discusses the inscription on the Beachamps' headstone and the court of public opinion. Tracy shares information about Wilfred Owen's brother Harold. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argonix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:35Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 1:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Workplace chaos. We've all been there. Deadlines are slipping, projects are piling up, and suddenly you realize the missing piece is the right person. That's when you say, this is a job for sponsored jobs. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, your job post gets a boost so you can connect with quality candidates faster. In fact, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. Spend less time searching and more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Get

• 2:04Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 2:14Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:24Holly Frey?

  Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:29Holly Frey?

  So there was a thing this week. We talked about the Beecham Sharp tragedy, sometimes also called the Kentucky tragedy. And there was a thing I thought about including in it, but I did not.

• 2:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay.

• 2:44Holly Frey?

  And the reason why is that it's long.

• 2:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay.

• 2:47Holly Frey?

  Um, hold on, I'm counting. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I don't even know. It's, uh, they're at the end of their lives.

• 2:58Holly Frey?

  Anne wrote a poem about their whole experience with the intent that it would be engraved on their tombstone.

• 3:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay.

• 3:09Holly Frey?

  Which sounds lovely, at least, you know, in terms of like, from a sentimental point of view. But this poem is long. It's not, it's not like a short little thing. It's like 30 or 40 lines long. It's really, really long. And I just, and it did end up on their tombstone. And I just think of the poor person that had to engrave all of that because it is not a brief piece of writing by any means. It would be like going, you know, I would like two of Shakespeare's sonnets engraved on my tombstone. Like today, that would probably be quicker work. We have machines to do it. Not in 1826. And it basically is a very romanticized version, of course, of their story.

• 3:51Holly Frey?

  Yeah. I also didn't know that a lot of people, I mean, I think it's, it's pretty commonly believed that Anne really co-authored that final document with her husband. That she had a lot of say in it. It was not written in his handwriting.

• 4:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay.

• 4:09Holly Frey?

  Though that initially, when I read that, I was like, are they suggesting that this was a fake document? No, most people are actually indicating that Anne probably wrote it all down and was a collaborator on it. Whether that's just because he had poor penmanship or she was kind of driving the bus in terms of like, how that document was written and what it contained is a matter of some speculation. But the two of them really wrote it together.

• 4:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 4:37Holly Frey?

  This is such a mess of people. Lately, we've had a lot of discussions of people accusing each other of things that cannot be verified.

• 4:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 4:49Holly Frey?

  The whole thing about her child is so messy, so messy. And the only person who we could say knows for sure, or knew for sure who the father was, was her.

• 5:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mm hmm.

• 5:05Holly Frey?

  And she never, she never stated it was anyone other than Sharp, but there are even some questions about whether she ever actually stated it was Sharp.

• 5:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mm hmm.

• 5:18Holly Frey?

  So it all stays a mystery.

• 5:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hmm.

• 5:21Holly Frey?

  It's a little unsatisfying.

• 5:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Holly Frey?

  It's also an interesting thing in that obviously this was written, or this whole thing took place in the 1820s, so some decades before the Civil War.

• 5:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mm hmm.

• 5:38Holly Frey?

  And reading some of the accounts, even though I know this was the case, it's still a little startling how casually people will just talk about the enslaved people that they own and how that makes them important.

• 5:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 5:53Holly Frey?

  It's like, we know that that was going on.

• 5:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 5:56Holly Frey?

  Then when I read contemporary accounts, it always feels like a punch in the gut, like, oh, nobody was like, I mean, people were, but nobody in, in this, you know, who was writing this down and being like, yes, he was very wealthy. He had X number of enslaved people, although they of course don't, don't word it quite that way. There, those people never go own, owning people, hmm, that seems, that seems weird and wrong. Like, I just, I don't know. I know that's my hippie dippy talking.

• 6:29Holly Frey?

  I just want everybody to have a moral compass.

• 6:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Holly Frey?

  I don't know why that's so hard. It's also a, an interesting thing in terms of how completely gripped an entire community can be by.

• 6:44Holly Frey?

  The events and behaviors in the lives of a very few people.

• 6:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 6:51Holly Frey?

  Right, because there was all of this infighting among legislators. While farmers were seriously like, are we going to survive?

• 7:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Holly Frey?

  And some of those legislators really did seem more interested in just winning over one another than the actual constituents that they represented. We've never seen that before, but when you think about, there are a bunch of people literally sitting there going, is my farm going to be foreclosed? Am I going to lose everything?

• 7:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 7:21Holly Frey?

  While all of these men bicker. It's very frustrating. And then it becomes really, really easy to see how there could have been political machinations involved in the murder that played out.

• 7:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 7:36Holly Frey?

  Beecham, obviously, you know, towards the end was like, yes, I did it, but and I wanted to do it, but also I don't know if I would have done it. I waited four years, but then this guy kept telling me I should do it.

• 7:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 7:50Holly Frey?

  Kept pointing out that my wife's reputation had been ruined.

• 7:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 7:55Holly Frey?

  He was right. I did want to kill him after that. Like I, it's a very interesting example of how levers can be pulled by people with intents that are dishonorable to manipulate the passions of other people to do things that are not necessarily on their behalf, but that will benefit them directly.

• 8:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. Yeah. And like, one of the things that really struck me was how much, leading up to him, like, authoring or co-authoring a confession. How much of it was based on absolutely circumstantial? The closest thing to, like, actual evidence being.

• 8:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  His wife saying like, I recognize that voice.

• 8:41Holly Frey?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Which, I don't know, maybe. But everything else, absolutely circumstantial.

• 8:47Holly Frey?

  Yeah. Everybody that gave testimony just about someone else came along and said, that's not true. He never had that conversation. I don't know what they're talking about. That didn't happen. That's not what really took place. It's such a mess. I don't know. It also is a good, not a good example, but a clear example of the way that public opinion gets put in place. Because again, right up until the sentencing, Beecham was very adamant that he didn't do it.

• 9:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 9:19Holly Frey?

  And with no evidence, it took that jury less than an hour to go, yep, guilty. It's like, did you just go off vibes? Like, that's not how that's supposed to work.

• 9:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:30Holly Frey?

  It's just a fascinator, in a sad way. I don't have a funny story to add to this one this week. Usually if it's really heavy, I try to make sure there's some ding dong story I could tell about my own ridiculousness.

• 9:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 9:44Holly Frey?

  At least take the edge off. And there, I've certainly, I'm sure, done plenty of ding dong things in the last several days even, but.

• 9:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 9:52Holly Frey?

  I don't have one ready to roll.

• 9:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  I don't think I'd ever heard of this before.

• 9:57Holly Frey?

  Yeah, I mean, I, it's one that I stumbled across. It's another one of those great. I was looking at a paper and I saw a headline on another part of the paper and I was like, what's that about? And it was like, oh, this was one of the great things. This kind of makes it lighter. You surely saw The Corpse Bride, right?

• 10:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Holly Frey?

  You know where there's that moment? It's in a song where one of the characters is talking about all of the things that have been playing out, again, revealing some, some things that the characters in the movie have done. And they go, and a murder most foul. I found that exact line as a headline talking about this case. Murder exclamation point most foul. And I always thought that was very fun and cute and probably based on some, you know, that is, I think, right.

• 10:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  I think it's one of the Shakespeare tragedies, I'm pretty sure.

• 10:54Holly Frey?

  Yes, but I was surprised to find it as a headline in a Kentucky newspaper.

• 10:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Holly Frey?

  Murder most foul. And it at least gave me a moment of corpse bride fun. In the midst of a lot of yucky. He said, he said, she may be said, but we don't know. Stuff.

• 11:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Holly Frey?

  I feel like the fact that Ann Cook moved out to the country to be alone with her mother out of society was probably a good indicator that she didn't want to talk about any of that.

• 11:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 11:29Holly Frey?

  Now, whether or not that was an issue of feeling ashamed or, I don't know, maybe she just didn't want to get in the mess.

• 11:40Holly Frey?

  Anyway, it's a lot of sad and so much hangs on the testimony of the neighbor, some of which seems to be almost contradictory of itself. It's a little unclear. Anyway, a murder most foul.

• 11:58Holly Frey?

  Let's go watch stop motion animation for fun after such sad stories.

• 12:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 12:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hey, everybody, it's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  It was could rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 12:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it. All came together and held up on game day.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.

• 12:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 13:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.

• 13:04Speaker 05

  Connecting changes everything. AT&T.

• 13:07Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 13:50Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:14Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to Dr. Doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

• 14:56Holly Frey?

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• 15:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jessa have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 16:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 16:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  We talked about Wilfred Owen this week.

• 16:25Holly Frey?

  We sure did.

• 16:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  I have kept circling back to Wilfred Owen repeatedly. Dulcie at the Corumest is a poem that we've read, I think in high school, maybe also in college in like a different context, in a more humanities context in college and in literature class in high school. And I did not know anything about his life or biography when reading the poem. The poem was really about like World War I and the horrors of trench warfare.

• 17:00Holly Frey?

  Right.

• 17:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  And the use of gas and things like that. It was not about Wilfred Owen as a person. And so I did not realize that he had been a soldier and that he had been killed at the age of only 25, so close to the end of the war. And when I learned that.

• 17:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  I kept just circling back to him and kind of wanting to do an episode about it. And as I said in the episode, I just kept kind of wanting to hug him. I am sad that he had such a short life because of war. I got the impression that you had some, some similar responses as we were wrapping up the episode.

• 17:41Holly Frey?

  I did, and his work, I never really studied him. So looking at this, after you had sent it over the, I, to me, there's such a very obvious through line from his work to another recent topic who is near to my heart, Kurt Vonnegut and the way he talks about war.

• 18:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Holly Frey?

  I'm like, I guarantee he read his work. I guarantee it.

• 18:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  I had not thought about that, but that makes absolute sense.

• 18:08Holly Frey?

  Yeah, it's very, um, not romanticized when he talks about it in any kind of way, even in his offhand decides, it's usually all about how stupid the whole thing is and pointless.

• 18:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, and that is the, the undertone of a, a number of Wilfred Owen's poems as well. Regarding the height requirement to join the British Army.

• 18:33Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  So as we said, he was a little more than five, five, just like a smidge over five, five. And the height requirement at the very beginning of the war had been less than that. And then they had such a surge of people trying to enlist that they raised it to just have a way to quickly weed people out.

• 18:54Holly Frey?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  But then kept having to progressively lower it. Simultaneously, there were people underneath what had been the original, the original limit, which I think was five foot three. And there were men under five foot three who wanted to enlist and a lot of them actually who wanted to enlist. And so special battalions were formed called bantam battalions.

• 19:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  Named for the, I think Rooster, right? Bantam Roosters.

• 19:24Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  And a lot of the people who joined these bantam battalions were like dockworkers, mine workers, people who were shorter than average, but also like really stocky and really strong. And I kind of went on a slight detour, learning about bantam battalions. And then was like, Tracy, you gotta get your mind back on your work. So I don't know if, if that might be a, a topic for some kind of future episode, or it might be incorporated in a future episode in some way.

• 20:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  I got the impression that like, these were generally men who were very used to doing very hard work and simultaneously, the other battalions of men who were taller than that could be kind of patronizing toward them.

• 20:24Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 20:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  And so it seems like there was a lot of, a lot of social expectation and ideas about masculinity kind of interwoven with all of this.

• 20:34Holly Frey?

  Well, this also makes sense because you know, bantams are a smaller fowl.

• 20:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Holly Frey?

  And they're not just roosters, like there are many fowl that could be categorized as bantam. Like there are ducks that would be called bantam as well as chickens.

• 20:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  I think I've most often heard it with Rooster.

• 20:50Holly Frey?

  Yeah, but they are little and sturdy.

• 20:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 20:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  I also have some thoughts about Harold Owen.

• 21:03Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  Who I have not researched at all. I know zero about his life, but he went to such lengths to, to just black out parts of his brother's letters and in some cases, cut out parts of them with scissors. Without knowing that a person who is reading the collections of his letters that his brother had edited and published, uh, might think that, you know, these were letters sent from the front, maybe they just got damaged in transit. Like that might be what illegible meant. No, illegible meant that Harold went through them and expurgated them.

• 21:40Holly Frey?

  He made them illegible.

• 21:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. And logically, with it being, you know, the early 20th century.

• 21:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  If what was being cut out was in some way related to Wilfred Owen having feelings or relationships with other men, that likely would not have been something he would have been writing openly about. So it seems like this could have been things that his brother would have been like able to see that people could like read into, or like his brother not being particularly guarded with how he was, how he was writing about things.

• 22:26Holly Frey?

  Right.

• 22:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  But near that passage where Owen, where Harold Owen in his biography of his brother described him as having no relationship with anybody because he thought it might interfere with his intellectual ability, Harold Owen said this about himself, quote, "I deliberately chose the Roman Catholic religion because of its insistence on celibacy. In Wilfred's thinking, poetry supplanted religion." And I was just like, I have thoughts and questions.

• 22:56Holly Frey?

  Me too.

• 22:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  If we had a time machine, I would just kind of want to go meet both of these brothers and talk to them more. This whole thing also illustrates why I can find the meme about historians describing lovers as friends to be frustrating, because this is the kind of things that historians are dealing with when writing about queer history a lot of the time. Friends and family members who are very protective of somebody's legacy, who in some cases have gone through and cut parts of their letters out with scissors,

• 23:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  and will not allow historians access to the actual primary, original documents to review them.

• 23:44Holly Frey?

  Right.

• 23:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  Only selectively give some stuff or some expurgated, expurgated stuff or whatever. And it's only later.

• 23:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  Often after either those family members have died, or those family members have become more open about, you know, their, their past family member, or in some cases, you know, something's been passed down through a family, and they come into the hands of somebody who has different, you know, social and political ideals and beliefs than the person who was originally cutting stuff out of letters with scissors. That is when historians are actually able to get more into the real depth of a person's whole life. So, sure, there are, you know, previous histories of, or previous biographies of Wilfred Owen,

• 24:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  including ones read by his brother, that don't touch on that at all. And one element of that is like just not having access to the original documents in their entirety to go through.

• 24:53Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Holly Frey?

  We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, not to hype them more,

• 25:42Holly Frey?

  but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 26:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:59Speaker 06

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• 27:55Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 28:39Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 29:11Holly Frey?

  I always try to think about like what that moment is where someone decides essentially to rewrite history. And I, I honestly am a little conflicted about it for a couple of reasons. Obviously, like it sucks to not have original documents available to tell it an accurate story. I also do understand, as frustrating it is, as it has been for me, not just in cases like this where it's queerness being erased, but you know, with anyone where there's something about them that someone in their family thought it was best people not know.

• 29:51Holly Frey?

  But I can also see as incorrect as this, this move was, you know, someone like his brother who clearly had his own stuff going on, worrying that his brother's legacy would be forgotten or tainted in some way.

• 30:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Holly Frey?

  If, and wanting to position it in a way that he would be recognized for his writing and not the other things about him.

• 30:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 30:21Holly Frey?

  I mean, it's, and it's hard because it's easy for us to go, that's short sighted. But like, at the time, it probably seemed like, well, his work can be buried forever, or I can do this.

• 30:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 30:31Holly Frey?

  And he can be seen in this other way. Not the same thing at all, but right, like Queen Victoria's daughter trashed a bunch of her writing.

• 30:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 30:41Holly Frey?

  When she died, rather than let people see it. And so I do understand that there's also a tertiary part of it for me, where I also wonder how much grief is informing it. Because if you've, I mean, every one of us will experience a grief if you have not already, and I'm sorry, and it sucks. But there is a thing that happens, I have seen it happen to people, where when someone has passed, without even being cognizant that you are editing the story.

• 31:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:16Holly Frey?

  People start telling their version of that person's story, focusing on things that are different than other things, and wanting to almost create this, not always idealized, but a version that is what they remember and what they were part of.

• 31:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 31:34Holly Frey?

  And, and wanting to like pare down anything that doesn't fit that.

• 31:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 31:40Holly Frey?

  Again, don't love it, but I do understand the motivation of it.

• 31:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, well, and socially, the culture that you and I have grown up in and lived in in our whole lives, we eulogize people after they die. When like, That's just sort of a baseline of what's expected is like,

• 32:03Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 32:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  You don't go to somebody's funeral and say a bunch of things about them that could be taken as really negative in a typical.

• 32:11Holly Frey?

  Unless you're a rabble rouser.

• 32:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Unless you're a rabble rouser. Like, the word eulogy literally has the idea that it's affirming they're in the word.

• 32:21Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 32:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  So, yeah, the, the story of, of Wilfred Owen and all of his personal papers reminds me a little bit of Ann Lister, who we covered on the show before.

• 32:30Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 32:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Who wrote, if you haven't heard that episode, Ann Lister basically wanted to marry a woman and figured out a way to make that work for herself and wrote many, many, many diaries extensively chronicling her life and also in, in chronicling all of her relationships. And when a family member later on, you know, this was all in the 19th century when all of this would have been stigmatized and in some ways illegal, a family member cracked the code that she had written and realized what they were about and kind of went, yikes, and put them back in the vault. And I feel like we're so fortunate that those things, they went back in the vault instead of being burned because that is something that could

• 33:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  have happened and has happened with other figures from history and honestly, people now, I'm sure. So, yeah. I still just want to hug Wilfred Owen.

• 33:29Holly Frey?

  I love so desperately that he and his mother worked out a code together.

• 33:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, and a couple of different codes, a couple of different ways to stay in touch. I didn't know anything about these postcards until learning about the code that they had worked out together. And the postcards were just basically a fast way to let your loved ones know that you were alive.

• 33:51Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 33:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  It took, you know, two seconds to fill the thing out and then it would just be mailed. And it had instructions printed on it very clearly that if you wrote anything on it. Other than your name, the date and the date of the last letter you received from that person, it would just be discarded. And also, you know, the things in and of themselves, a form of propaganda, because all of the, all of the statements you could communicate with somebody were, none of them were like, yeah, none of them were like, I am in the hospital and will never recover. Like, that was not an option.

• 34:27Holly Frey?

  I wonder too, since these were postcards, if part of this wasn't an effort at concealment from like, enemies reading.

• 34:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, yeah, maybe.

• 34:40Holly Frey?

  And trying to triangulate where people were, what kind of actions were happening, et cetera. I mean, it, yes, it is propaganda still. I'm not trying to claim it's not. But like, if there is a secondary, like, intelligence and concealment aspect to it.

• 34:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Maybe so. Maybe so.

• 34:58Holly Frey?

  I wanna, I can so easily picture a film about the leadership, sitting around in a room going, well, we have to make it easy for them to communicate with their people back home. Okay, but then that's gonna make it easy for our enemies to read them and them figuring out this complex flowchart of what they could and could not include.

• 35:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  Having had a job before where I had to write things that went through multiple levels of approval and revision, I am imagining the approval process of exactly what went on this postcard.

• 35:35Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  I'm imagining that we can just write a whole musical about the whole writing and editing.

• 35:40Holly Frey?

  Oh, you write the musical. I don't, I don't want the singing, but.

• 35:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  I would be really bad at that. I was just thinking about, about Operation Mincemeat is just what that made me think of. A show that I've only heard parts of. Anyway, anyway, whatever's happening on your weekend, I hope it is good as possible. If there's somebody in your life that you want to go hug, I hope they're cool with that and that you're able to go give them a hug. We'll be back tomorrow with a Saturday classic and something brand new on Monday.

• 36:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 36:30Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 37:01Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 37:38Speaker 07

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• 38:06Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 38:36Speaker 00

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