Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more, is that Shakespeare? No, it's Geico. Oh yeah. Yeah, that's Shakespeare from one of his unpublished works.

Oh it to be not for awakening and honey, give it to the berries for 15 minutes.

Could save you fifteen percent or more.

No, it's from Geico because they help save people money.

Well I hate to break it to you but Geico got it from Shakespeare.

Geico fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more. So we're starting, we're rolling. Are we already recording, looking at your notes? This is so official. Hey, guys, it's Brian Baumgartner. Maybe you've heard my podcast, an oral history of the Office, where we go deep into the making of the show now. Well, you can go even deeper. That's what she said, because I am sharing my full length conversations with the cast and crew of the office.

Listen to the office deep dive on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson. And I'm Holly Fry. Over the last few months, the state of Georgia made a lot of headlines when its voters elected Joe Biden for president and then in a runoff, elected John Asaph and Rafael were not as senators. This broke a decades long pattern of Georgians electing Republicans rather than Democrats into these roles. These elections followed just years of organizing and advocacy and legal work and voter registration efforts in the state.

And the person who's become most widely known for all this work is Stacey Abrams. Really, though it involved multiple civil rights and voting rights and labor organizations along with individual people. And Abrams has made it entirely clear that it was not work that she did by herself. So I just wanted to call that part out to you. As I was watching all of this unfold, though, my mind kept returning to other earlier voter registration efforts in the United States and one of those is the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, which is now better known as Freedom Summer.

This project was met with an extremely violent and deadly backlash. And in some ways, that backlash has overshadowed the work that the project set out to do. And that work actually involved a lot more than registering people to vote. So that is today's topic for the show. And before we start, I just wanted to shout out the podcast seen on radio, especially its fourth season, which is called The Land that has never been yet. That is a 12 part series exploring the history of democracy in the United States and the many, many ways that it has not actually been all that Democratic.

Episode seven is on Freedom Summer. And it's what inspired me to put it on the topic list when that episode first came out in April of twenty twenty, because it kind of contextualized Freedom Summer a little differently than I had learned it before. So for some context about what led up to Freedom Summer in the early 1960s, Mississippi existed in a state of deeply oppressive, violent racism. Most of its black residents were still working in the same jobs that their ancestors had done while enslaved things like tending and picking cotton, doing manual labor or doing domestic work.

And these were overwhelmingly the only kind of jobs available for them. Most of Mississippi's black population lived in poverty.

The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that public school segregation was unconstitutional and Brown versus Board in 1954. But in the early 60s, Mississippi was one of the places where schools were still segregated. In spite of that ruling, some of the school buildings for black students were actually relatively new. But the schools themselves were deeply, deliberately underfunded. Fewer than one percent of Mississippi's black students graduated from high school at the time, and many black people in Mississippi could not read or write.

This wasn't a case of pettiness or the Mississippi government just not caring about the quality of education for black students. It was an intentional effort to keep Mississippi's black population in a state of ignorance. It was the same logic that had led to laws making it illegal to teach enslaved people to read a century before. In many parts of Mississippi, white people were in the minority. And like enslavers of the past, they knew it would be harder for black people to organize if they lacked literacy and a basic education.

Throughout the South, White Citizens Councils had formed in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Board.

These organizations were made up of powerful, high profile white citizens, and they were dedicated to maintaining a state of segregation and white supremacy in the places where they operated. Although white citizens, councils and their members could be violent, these organizations tended to be more focused on things like legal and economic oppression than there were on physical violence. In Mississippi, the white citizens councils were so effective at maintaining the racial status quo that the Ku Klux Klan, which tended to be more overtly violent, didn't have much of a presence there until 1963.

And on top of all this, as we said at the beginning, Mississippi was a place of violent, racist hostility. Black people were expected to maintain a demeanor of total deference and subservience to white people. Any perceived lapse was punishable by violence or even death. More people were lynched in Mississippi than anywhere else in the South, including the notorious lynching, a 14 year old Emmett Till, which took place in Money, Mississippi, in 1955.

The NAACP started establishing field offices in Mississippi in the early 1950s. In late 1954, Medgar Evers was appointed NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, and by 1955, the NAACP was the most powerful civil rights organization in the state, along with the Mississippi Progressive Voters League and the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, the NAACP worked primarily on issues related to voting in Mississippi, including offering voter education and support and registering to vote. NAACP Youth Councils also offered civics education for young people to prepare them to register to vote once they were old enough to do that.

Most of this work was done discreetly because the level of racist violence in Mississippi was so extreme. But just the act of registering to vote was incredibly risky under the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution, quote, The right of citizens in the United States to vote shall not be denied. Or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude, but in Mississippi, anyone who wanted to register to vote had to face a white registrar, and those registrars routinely denied voter registration to black people.

This was not just a matter of the registrar saying no, though a two dollar poll tax was financially out of reach for Mississippi's poorest people who were disproportionately black. There was also an extremely unnecessarily complicated application form. There was a test as well. And once again, this test was unnecessarily complicated, even to the point of being unpassable. It involved interpreting a section of the state constitution. It was up to the registrar what passage you were given, and it was also up to the registrar whether your interpretation passed the test.

Black people also faced intimidation and threats during the entire process, things like the sheriff standing in the room with one hand on his gun and the other on his baton while people tried to take those impossible tests, especially in small towns in rural parts of the state where everyone knew each other, the sheriff or the registrar might pointedly mention that they knew your employer or your landlord who would not be happy if they found out that you were trying to register to vote.

Beyond the convoluted process and the threats and intimidation, black people who tried to register to vote in Mississippi often faced actual retribution afterward, whether they were successful at registering to vote or not. If you were black and you tried to register to vote, you might be fired from your job or evicted from your home or run out of town entirely. Somebody might burn a cross in your yard or firebomb your house, or you might be arrested, beaten or even killed.

As a consequence of all of this, by 1962, less than seven percent of eligible black voters in Mississippi were actually registered. This was the lowest percentage in any state, and that was after years of work on the part of the NAACP, the Mississippi Progressive Voters League, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership and other organizations. One of those other organizations was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNEEK. SNEEK had been formed during the lunch counter. Sit ins that we talked about on the show in January of twenty twenty was formed after Ella Baker convened a meeting of youth activists at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Members of SNEEK started arriving in Mississippi in 1961. Snick activists quickly realized that the kind of direct action they'd been doing during the lunch counter, sit ins and other demonstrations was not what the people of Mississippi were really looking for. The threat of violence in response to such an outward protest was just too great. But on top of that, many of the direct action campaigns that had taken place earlier in the civil rights movement just weren't relevant to a large portion of Mississippi's black population.

If you were a sharecropper living in a rural part of the state, there probably was no lunch counter for you to patronize at all. Nor were there services like municipal buses to integrate, as had been done through the Montgomery bus boycott.

So as snick activists established themselves in the state, they started looking for a way to turn their attention to what was relevant to the people of Mississippi. And what Mississippi's black residents wanted was to be able to vote so that they could vote racist officials out of office.

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A series of events in Mississippi in the early 1960s led to the creation of the Mississippi Summer Project in 1961, the Freedom Rides, which were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, or core, tested whether bus lines had integrated following the Supreme Court's decision that interstate bus segregation was unconstitutional. And this included integrated groups of Freedom Riders making their way into Mississippi, many of whom were arrested and abused while in prison once they got there. There is, of course, a whole lot more to this.

This is one of the many things that has come up in the episode so far that we have previous episodes on. We actually replayed previous hosts episodes on the Freedom Rides as a Saturday classic back in twenty twenty. Also in 1961, James Meredith applied for admission to the University of Mississippi, which was still not admitting black students, and that launched a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

In 1962, the Kennedy administration announced its voter education project, which would provide funding and tax exempt status for organizations that were working to register black voters. Part of the project's goal was to encourage the civil rights movement to shift away from direct action demonstrations and to focus instead on voting, which the administration saw as less confrontational and divisive. Civil rights organizations knew that this was a strategic move on the government's part to try to influence what they were doing. But they also saw it as an opportunity.

And as a result, in 1962, the Council of Federated Organizations was formed to act as an umbrella organization. It brought together Snick Corps and the NAACP to focus all of their efforts on voting rights and registration in Mississippi. In the fall of 1962, the Board of Supervisors of LeFlore County, Mississippi, voted to end its participation in the federal surplus food commodity program that was a critical food source for thousands of the county's black residents. Sneek field organizers concluded that this decision was in retaliation for their voter registration work in the county, although the Board of Supervisors denied this allegation.

Comedian and activist Dick Gregory brought about 14000 pounds of basic staples, including baby food, to the area in a chartered plane.

Dick Gregory donation got a lot of media attention, and activists in Mississippi started trying to figure out a way to keep that focus going to make the rest of the country more aware of what conditions were like in Mississippi. And an idea on how to do this was proposed by sneek field secretary Robert Moses, known as Bob and Allard Lowenstein, who had been a Freedom Rider and had worked with SNEEK to coordinate a mock gubernatorial election in Mississippi in November of 1963.

That mock election had brought in about 100 volunteers, most of them white, to try to demonstrate how black voters could shift elections if they could freely vote. Freedom Summer was more ambitious than the 1963 mock election. They would bring as many as 1000 volunteers, most of them white, to Mississippi. The involvement of white students would mean that the white media and the general population of the rest of the country might actually pay attention to what was happening there.

And organizers also knew that white parents were likely to start contacting their representatives in the federal government and otherwise demanding action if they thought that their children were at risk. This idea was deeply controversial, though. The groups that made up the Council of Federated Organizations were integrated and they had worked with groups of white activists before. The civil rights movement as a whole had also involved the ongoing work of Jewish and Christian activists and clergy, and plenty of black activists who were already in Mississippi had come there from somewhere else.

As one example, Bob Moses himself had been born in Harlem. But this idea of just so many young white students, all coming from other states into Mississippi was really troubling to a lot of people. There were also concerns that these students, who would mainly be recruited from prestigious universities in the north would be too idealistic or unwilling to work under the direction of black people. This was compounded by the fact that many of the most experienced activists in Mississippi were, by this point, exhausted and burned out.

Plus, this was inherently dangerous work and anyone who participated was putting their own lives at risk. This idea had its supporters as well, though. One of them was Fannie Lou Hamer, who is definitely on the list for her own episode in the future. At some point, Hamer was a sharecropper and a timekeeper on the plantation where she worked. She had become an organizer for SNEEK and had been forced to leave that plantation in August of 1962 after she led a group of black people to register to vote.

In an interview with Terry Gross, sneek activist Charlie Cobb, who had been born in Washington, D.C., described Hamer as backing him against a wall and saying, Charlie, I'm glad you came down here. What's the problem with other people coming down here? The controversy went on until the summer of 1963. On June 12th of that year, 37 year old NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was murdered in his own driveway. Evers had been born in Mississippi and he had been involved in boycotts of service stations that refused restroom access to black people, along with other boycotts and protest active.

And he had also helped investigate the murder of Emmett Till, he had faced a series of death threats before being murdered after two different juries failed to reach a verdict. His murderer, a white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan member, Byron De La Beckwith, was finally convicted in 1994. Evers murder was what led many of the people who had opposed the project to put those reservations aside.

The Mississippi summer project, as this idea came to be known, was announced in February of 1964 by James Farmer of Core, James Forman of SNEEK and Bob Moses of both Snick and the Council of Federated Organizations. They would train young white volunteers and activism and nonviolence. Then these volunteers would come to Mississippi, where they would live in the homes of black Mississippi residents and work on three interconnecting projects. One was talking to black residents about registering to vote. Another was to recruit these same people into a new political party.

That was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And the third was to teach at Freedom Schools, which were independent schools that were meant to fill the gaps that had been left by Mississippi's intentionally bad public education system. For black students, the voter registration effort was an uphill battle. Volunteers went door to door in pairs, one black and one white to encourage people to register to vote and to offer support with the registration process. But most people they talked to were understandably afraid to register.

Although about 17000 people tried to register to vote during Freedom Summer, only about sixteen hundred were successful. But many more people were willing to join the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party by late summer of 1964. That group had 80000 members.

The Freedom Schools were also a success, and they grew in number over the course of this project. In the end, there were more than 40 schools that served more than 2000 students. They met in church basements, homes and parks, and in places where children were working as farm labor. They held their classes at night. Some of the schools had night classes for adults as well. The day often began with freedom songs like Ain't Going To Let Nobody Turn Me Round, and from their volunteers taught reading and math, black history, black literature and art, civics, dance, drama, music, storytelling and other subjects.

Some schools had their own newspapers or they staged their own plays. Although the volunteers teaching in these schools were nearly all white, the curriculum was developed by black people from Mississippi according to their own needs.

As we noted up at the top of the show, the white response to the Mississippi summer project in Mississippi was incredibly violent. And we will talk about that after a sponsor break. This episode is brought to you by Monday, Dotcom. Listen, we've talked about a lot of great themes on our show before. You know, I love to talk about the Lumiere brothers, but understanding how to work in a team can be challenging. And Monday Dotcom Work OS is a platform that's going to let you plan and track and manage work.

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Organizers of the Mississippi Summer Project were selective about which volunteers they accepted for this, they needed people who were responsible and level headed and who would carry out the instructions of their black hosts and organizers without hesitation. They had to be willing and able to follow the project's principles of nonviolence. And that meant not resisting or fighting back, even if they were physically attacked. And they had to understand the risks involved, including the risk of being seriously hurt or killed because of this work.

Many of the volunteers went through a two week training and orientation at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, which included everything from how to behave to how to nonviolently protect themselves while being beaten.

Volunteers were also trained on how to keep themselves and others as safe as possible. They would be staying with black families and working with black organizers, and they needed to know how not to put those people at risk through their actions. And this training really highlighted the fact that a lot of the volunteers had good intentions, but they didn't really comprehend what they were about to face. And one session, a group watched a video of the registrar from Forrest County, Mississippi, whose appearance and demeanor and speech seemed almost like an exaggerated caricature.

It was not an exaggeration at all. He was a real person. When volunteers started laughing, Sneek field staff who were conducting this training were understandably outraged. This level of caution and effort to train and prepare the white volunteers was absolutely justified. During the Mississippi Summers project, the homes of at least 30 black families and more than 30 black churches were firebombed or otherwise destroyed. In just one night, the Ku Klux Klan conducted a coordinated cross burning simultaneously burning crosses in almost 80 percent of the counties.

In Mississippi, there were 35 documented shootings in at least 80 volunteers were beaten, with four of them being critically wounded. There were also six known murders.

Volunteers for this project started arriving in Mississippi on June 21st of 1964 and the very next day, while others were still training in Ohio, three civil rights workers disappeared. They were James Chaney of Mississippi, as well as Michael Schwerner, who was known as Mickey and Andrew Goodman. Schwerner and Goodman were both from New York. Schwerner and Chaney were both field workers from the Congress of Racial Equality, and Goodman was there for Freedom Summer and had just finished his training at Miami University.

It was Goodman's first day in Mississippi.

The three men had volunteered to investigate the bombing of a church where Schwerner had been working for Core. Chaney was driving them back to Meridian, Mississippi, when Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price pulled him over for allegedly speeding and arrested all three men after Chaney was allowed to pay a fine at about 10 p.m. that night. The three men were allowed to leave the jail and told to get out of the county, but they never reported back in with their friends or other activists.

At the time, the FBI did not have a field office in Mississippi. So FBI agents from New Orleans started a kidnapping investigation on June. Twenty third, authorities found the station wagon that the men had been traveling in that had been set on fire and was still smoldering when they found it. This led the FBI to call this the Mississippi Burning case. Most of the activists from Mississippi had concluded that the men were dead as soon as they did not check in as scheduled.

But for the white volunteers, this really brought home how much danger they were really in. Worried white parents started calling the Capitol to try to ensure that their kids would be safe, and Shauna's wife, Rita, made a series of media appearances in which she consistently put the focus back on the project and on conditions in Mississippi. She was one of the people that made a lot of demands for increased like federal attention on what was happening in Mississippi. And on this investigation, J.

Edgar Hoover called her and her husband communists. And there's a like a phone recording between Hoover and President Lyndon Johnson where Lyndon Johnson says that she was worse than a communist, that she was ugly and mean to him like that's their treatment of her was not good at all. The FBI established a Mississippi field office during all of this. And although they didn't really investigate the other crimes that were going on, they did search for Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman.

They found the bodies of eight other people during this search. After receiving a tip, law enforcement finally found the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman buried in an earthen dam on August 5th, 1964. All three had been shot and Chaney had also been severely beaten.

Although more than 20 men, most of whom were members of the Ku Klux Klan, were arrested in connection with this crime. A Mississippi judge dismissed the charges against them. The only way for the federal government to have jurisdiction was to file civil rights charges rather than murder charges. In 1967, 18 men were tried for having violated federal civil rights law. In relation to these murders, an all white jury found seven of the men guilty, including Deputy Sheriff Price.

The jury deadlocked in their verdicts for three of the accused, and they acquitted the rest. None of the convicted men served more than six years in prison. And the only person to actually be tried for murder in connection of all of this was Edgar Ray Killen, who had orchestrated the attack. He was convicted of manslaughter in 2005 and ultimately died in prison. President Barack Obama awarded Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman the Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2014, and their bodies were discovered just a day before the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party held its state convention in Jackson, Mississippi, to elect a delegation that would travel to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, later that month threw out the national convention.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party also maintained a 24 hour vigil for the three men and a protest which included signs bearing slogans like one man, one vote, as we noted earlier.

By this point, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had about eighty thousand members, and the party's goal was to represent Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention rather than the Democratic Party's all white delegation. And their case for this was really clear cut. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had followed all of the Democratic Party's rules and procedures about its own convention and its own delegate selection. Meanwhile, Mississippi's Democratic Party had systematically excluded black participants, and many of its members had orchestrated a campaign of racist terror against the state's black population.

Multiple people testified on behalf of the MDP before the Democratic National Convention Credentials Committee, including Rita Schwerner, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer. Hammer's testimony was particularly damning and compelling. She talked about her own experience trying to register to vote, after which the owner of the plantation where she worked and lived had told her to withdraw her registration or leave.

She also talked about being in a house that someone fired 16 bullets into, and she talked about her arrest while returning from a voter registration workshop on June 19th, 1963, while in jail. After that arrest, she could hear officers beating and shouting racist slurs at other people who had been arrested with her. Then officers forced two black prisoners to come into her cell and to beat her so badly that she had permanent kidney damage. Hamer ended by saying, quote, All of this is on account of we want to register to become first class citizens.

And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America. During all of this, President Lyndon Johnson was worried that he was going to lose the support of white Southern Democrats if he showed too much sympathy toward Mississippi's black pop.

He was also generally fearful that something was going to go wrong at the convention and he'd wind up losing the nomination, so he held an impromptu press conference while Haymer was speaking, one that people thought was going to include the announcement of his running mate, but which instead announced that it had been nine months to the day since his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated. This strategy on Johnson's part did not work out, though the fact that he had preempted Hammer's testimony became its own story, and many news programs played it in its entirety during their next evening broadcasts.

So Johnson instructed Hubert Humphrey to negotiate with the MDP, suggesting that he would be selected as his running mates if Humphrey was successful. Humphrey tasked Walter Mondale with working out a plan, and that plan, which Mondale was the one to announce, was for two members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, one black and one white to be seated as delegates at large, while the all white Democratic delegation would be seated as normal if they would support Johnson for president.

The national Democratic leadership also promised not to seat any segregated delegations in the future. Although this was framed like it was a compromise, the MDP did not see it that way at all and refused to accept it, a decision that divided the movement as a whole. Many of the all white Democratic delegation from Mississippi also withdrew from the convention rather than promising to support the Democratic candidates afterward, many of the DFPS delegates were able to get badges from delegates from other states who were sympathetic to what they were doing so they could enter the convention hall.

But the chairs for the Mississippi delegation were removed.

There were people, mostly people from outside Mississippi who were involved in the civil rights movement who were like, you got something, you you should take it. But the delegation from Mississippi was like, it is not enough and it is unacceptable. So this attempt to appease racist white people did not really work out for Johnson, although he did win the presidential election, most of the southern states he was trying to hang on to, including Mississippi, went for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater.

And after another tumultuous Democratic National Convention in 1968, which came up in our two parter on COINTELPRO in twenty twenty, the Democratic National Committee established the McGovern Fraser Commission to try to reform their entire nomination process.

So as we said earlier, although 17000 black people tried to register to vote during Freedom Summer, only about sixteen hundred were approved by county registrars in the Mississippi. Freedom Democratic Party was not seated at the Democratic National Convention as they had hoped and overall had thought that they would be.

So in terms of the three initial projects of Freedom Summer, the Freedom Schools were the most outwardly successful.

However, for a bigger picture, look at things. Aaron Henry, who was president of the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP during the 1960s, described one of the biggest positive outcomes of Freedom Summer as, quote, the human relations aspect or in the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, quote, Before the 1964 summer project, there were people that wanted change, but they hadn't dared to come out. After 1964, people began moving to me. It's one of the greatest things that ever happened in Mississippi.

In addition, the Freedom School served as a model for the federal Head Start program, which provides early childhood education and health and nutrition support for low income families, as well as various programs that were part of the war on poverty and on a national level.

Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On July 2nd of that year, during Freedom Summer and on August 6th of 1965, he signed the Voting Rights Act, which outlawed things like poll taxes and literacy tests, as well as harassment and intimidation when people tried to register to vote. It also specified that jurisdictions that had a history of this kind of discrimination had to have preclearance from the District Court for the District of Columbia or from the U.S. Attorney General any time they tried to change their voting laws and policies.

Freedom Summer's work raising awareness about conditions in Mississippi contributed to the passage of both of these laws, particularly the Voting Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, in turn, dramatically affected voting access in Mississippi. By 1969, more than 66 percent of eligible black voters in Mississippi were registered, which was more than five percent above the national average. However, in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Shelby County vs. Holder, which invalidated that preclearance requirement and the Voting Rights Act.

And this has led to an increase in voter suppression efforts. There are often not as obvious as they were in Mississippi in the 1960s. So today they are things like disproportionately purging black indigenous than people of color from the voting rolls or shutting down the polling places in those communities while keeping them open in predominantly white communities or passing voter I.D. laws that disproportionately target people of color, cutting polling hours to make it harder for people who don't have flexible work schedules to vote, and then signature matching requirements, which are often really subjective.

And they disproportionately affect older voters and voters of color whose signatures and thus votes are thrown out if they don't exactly match.

Yeah, that signature match thing, who among us can replicate their signature, particularly if one of them is on like a digital screen versus Yevhen paper? It's so hard.

And then also, like my mother physically cannot find anything. My my father's signature has looked like an indistinguishable scrawl. The first letter of his first and last name is like a discrete thing, but the rest of it is just kind of a wavy line. Somebody is comparing those two things by subjective criteria, and, you know, they are both 75 years old, they're in the categories of people who are likely to be thrown out under those kinds of requirements.

Once again, before we wrap up this episode, the whole the land that has never been yet series from seen on radio is highly recommended. The Freedom Summer episode includes interviews that host John Buin conducted with people who were part of Freedom Summer. So that is another great way to get additional context on this whole topic.

Yeah, part of me doesn't want to describe it because I like having the experience of listening to it myself. So marvelous. But a lot of the people that he is interviewed are people who I love to hear speaking.

Many of them are no longer with us. And there they are from a documentary he had done some years before. So more of the people that he was interviewing were still alive then than are now. But that whole series I listened to as it came out, and it is, is extremely worth listening to you, as are there other. They've done other. They did seeing white, which is about the history of the idea of race and racism. And there's one called men.

That's the history of patriarchy. They're all very, very good. Do you have very, very good listener e-mail ideas from April and April and says good evening, Tracy and Holly, before I begin, I just wanted to say thank you for continuing your work throughout the current madness that we have found ourselves in. Your podcast is a much welcomed and informative distraction. I recently listened to your Unearthed here in twenty twenty episode released on, I think January 13th.

Twenty one. I can't remember if it was part one or two, but you both mentioned the recent discovery of a thermo poem in Pompeii. You describe the beautiful imagery on it, some that possibly describe the menu items like the rooster and fish and others that were more decorative, like the water nymph. You also described the somewhat odd inclusion of a dog. Holly, I believe you said your husband was particularly concerned about the fate of the dog. Well, he might not need to fear.

I'm not sure if the two of you are aware, but there is a precedent of canine imagery in Pompeii and artwork. Balou, you should find the link to a BBC article which shows a picture of a mosaic depiction of a guard dog. It's literally a centuries old version of a beware of the dog sign based upon the fresco. It may have served the same purpose as the mosaic, although I'm not quite sure why a guard dog would need to be at a food cart.

But hey, ancient Rome was a lively place. Obviously, this is merely a conjecture. Although I have studied art history, I do not claim to be an art historian nor an archaeologist. Thanks again for your work. I really love your podcast. It is a nice balance of instruction and laughter, which as a teacher I can appreciate. Sincerely, Apelin. Thank you Apelin for this email about the dogs and both because of the like, providing possible context for why the picture of the dog is there.

But also it just made me imagine a food stall whose clientele are so unruly that they just got to have a dog on hand.

I presume it's so people don't thieve directly from the things.

The good news is my husband, because he was very worried about this ancient dog, found that a BBC article. So, yeah, but I super appreciate it.

And it's it is one of those funny things.

You know, you get fixated on something and you are looking up ancient dog imagery in Pompeii.

So thank you again for emailing us.

Apelin, if you would like to email us about this or any other podcast history podcast at I heart radio dot com. And we are also all over social media at missed in history. So you'll find our Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. You can also subscribe to our show on the I Heart radio app and Apple podcast than anywhere else.

You get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in history class is the production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts from My Heart radio visit by her radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On March 5th, Disney invites you to travel to the fantasy world of Cassandre and Rhia and the last dragon. When an evil force threatens the land dividing its people, it's up to Lone Warrior Rya to track down the last dragon and restore peace. From the studio that brought you Molana and Frozen comes the next epic adventure featuring the voices of Kelly Marie Tran and Aquafina, directed by Don Hall and Carlos Lopez.

Estrada, Syria and The Last Dragon the way you want in theaters or order it on Disney plus with Premiere Access March 5th, this episode is brought to you by Clorox. So one of the things that I've been doing in Pandemic is one of my best friends and I. We've occasionally needed to borrow things back and forth or loan things. And so one of us will occasionally go stand outside the other one's house while the other stands inside and we drop the thing in the driveway and sometimes we have a little chat.

But going out into the world means that I know that I'm tracking germs into the house when I come home. And I don't want to worry about what's on the bottom of my shoes. I just want to enjoy my time in the house. So I disinfect with Clorox disinfecting mopping floors, they kill ninety nine point nine percent of germs, including covid-19 virus. That's when used as directed on hard non-porous surfaces, kills sars-cov-2 covid-19 virus.