Life at Attica, 1971 (Part 1)

Attica Correctional Facility originally opened in rural, upstate New York in 1931. In 1971, conditions at the prison were at a point where they were humiliating, dehumanizing and counterproductive to rehabilitation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Google and Squarespace Make it Professional, Make It Beautiful. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm

(00:45):
Tracey V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. On September people
incarcerated in prisons all around the United States went on
strike to protest, among other things, forced and virtually unpaid labor.
And a lot of the parts about this strike in
the news, I mean, they've varied very widely widely in
terms of the scope and the size of the strike,

(01:07):
but one thing they have in common is that, seemingly unanimously,
they mentioned that September nine was the anniversary of the
start of the Attica prison uprising, and then that's basically
all they say about that Attica is a well known
enough name that a lot of people do know that
there was some kind of massive and violent incident there
and that it ended really horribly. But unless you've done

(01:28):
a deeper study of the justice system or civil rights history,
that or maybe pop culture references to the Attica chant
from Dog Day Afternoon, which even that I had to
look up which movie that was from, Like I've heard
people chant Attica and not even I had to go
figure out, like, yeah, well, I'm thinking there's also a

(01:48):
cartoon that used to run on up N and then
cartoon Network called Home Movies, and they did an Attica
chant in it, But it probably is referencing that day
after that and that, so that pop culture reference might
be where that knowledge ends for folks too. I mean,
my informal poll found a lot of people who had
the basic sense something bad happened, but not at any

(02:09):
of the details. So we're gonna fill in some gaps
today and next time. Even at two parts, I want
to stress this is really an overview. Whenever we do
something that by nature has to be an overview, like
we have, we'll get lots of letters that sailed something
along the lines of you missed this and this, and
I'm just The official report of the New York State

(02:30):
Special Commission on Attica is five hundred and seventy four
pages long, and heather An Thompson's Blood in the Water,
which is an incredibly thorough history of the uprising that
just came out in August seven and fifty two pages long.
My original outline for this it was like ten thousand
words long, which is way less than any of that,
and like I even had to shorten that way down

(02:52):
to get it into a two part podcast. So this
is a basic overview, and we're going to look today
at the condition that made Attica Correctional Facilities so right
for an uprising, and then in our next episode we
will talk about what actually happened over those four days
that started over September nine nine. This is an event
that really started out confusingly before it became really complicated

(03:15):
and chaotic, and by the end, I mean, I would
it's horrific and unconscionable. So be prepared. Attica Correctional Facility
originally opened in rural upstate New York in nineteen thirty one.
It was at the time the most expensive prison ever
built in the United States, with a price tag of
about nine million dollars. Built in part by labor from

(03:37):
Auburn Prison about one miles away, Attica was specifically designed
to mitigate the threat of prison uprisings. There had been
several high profile incidents across the US in the decade
before Attica was built, and in addition to its contained
cell blocks, each isolated within its own yard, it was
surrounded by a wall that was thirty feet high and

(03:57):
two ft thick, which extended twelve ft underground and was
topped by fourteen gun towers. In terms of its overall design,
Attica followed the same basic model as the first large
large scale prisons in New York. These were founded in
the nineteenth century around the idea of rehabilitation through work
and silent reflection, and the original nineteenth century model, small

(04:20):
single occupancy cells were primarily used for sleeping from sun
up to sundown. The incarcerated population worked in silent labor.
The only day they were mostly confined to their cells
was really Sunday, which also included an addressed by the
prison chaplain about the redemptive value of hard work and
the idea that you can rehabilitate someone by sentencing them

(04:42):
two years of dawn to dusk. Silent labor had some
problems of its own, but besides that, in the century
and a half between those first prisons being built and
Attica opening its doors, life behind bars in New York
changed dramatically, but the design and the structure of the
prisons really didn't. The six by nine foot cells originally

(05:02):
designed simply to be slept in, were instead used to
confine people for up to sixteen hours a day. For
new arrivals at the prison, it was up to twenty
hours a day for four to eight weeks until their
processing was complete. Each cell contained a bed, a toilet,
a sink with cold water, a stool, a small table,

(05:23):
and a two door cabinet. The only source of warm
water was a bucket delivered each evening to be used
for washing up, shaving, cleaning the cell, rensing, clothing, and
washing any personal items that weren't issued by the prison
and three of the cell blocks. Each cell had three
solid windowless walls and one wall that was made of
iron bars, and the fourth cell block there was one

(05:45):
small window in the back and the door was solid
metal metal with a small grilled opening. As a side note,
there was a fifth cell block by the time that
this uprising. We're going to talk about happened E Block,
which was built in nineteen sixty six. How's the Division
of Vocational Rehabilitation or DVR, which was initially intended to

(06:05):
provide rehabilitation services for people with physical disabilities during their incarceration.
Conditions at the DVR were quite different from the rest
of the prison, and it's really the rest of the
prison that will be focusing on. Although Attica is a
maximum security prison and it is actually still in use today,
that does not mean everyone incarcerated there in nine seventy

(06:27):
one was a dangerous person who actually needed extra security.
New York had way more maximum security beds than it
did medium or or minimum security, and that was especially
when you compared the amount of space and the prisons
to the actual rate of convictions for crimes. Also, a
lot of the lesser security facilities were only open some

(06:47):
men under the age of thirty, so frequently men incarcerated
in New York State prisons wound up in maximum security
no matter what they had done, or how old they were,
or whether it was their first offense. Attica and other
maximum security prisons housed men serving short sentences as well
as ones who were in prison for life for crimes

(07:09):
that really ranged all over the spectrum. More than half
of the people in Attica in nineteen seventy one, we're
serving a maximum sentence of seven years or less, and
only sixty two had been convicted of violent crimes. Compounding
this basic issue of math was the way the criminal
justice system was operating in New York in the seventies.

(07:30):
Crime had been increasing dramatically in the United States. Between
nineteen sixty and nineteen seventy, the violent crime rate increased
a hundred and twenty six percent, and it kept climbing,
although somewhat more slowly, all the way until the early
nineteen nineties, before falling pretty consistently. Since nine, people have
a perception that crime is rampant, but it is actually

(07:52):
quite lower than it was during the period we're talking about.
Even though a lot of crime in the sixties and
seventies went un reported or never led to an arrest,
the court system in many states was still incredibly overtext,
and in New York, for example, there were about thirty
two thousand felony indictments a year, but the courts could

(08:12):
actually only handle four to five thousand of those. To
keep this incredibly overloaded system moving, courts relied on plea bargains,
which is when a person who's charged with a crime
enters a guilty plea, usually in exchange for a lesser
charge or more lenient sentencing. If you watch a lot
of today's crime dramas on TV, which I mean to
be honest, those are my guilty pleasure. When I'm traveling,

(08:36):
I'm often even maybe most of the time. Plea bargains
are presented as the defendant's best option and a good
way to get a shorter sentence guaranteed instead of running
the risk of a longer sentence at trial. That was
not at all the sentiment among people facing criminal charges
or prison time in New York in the seventies, the

(08:58):
state's reliance on plea bargaining was viewed as hypocritical and dishonest,
as though the state was not actually interested in justice
but was just trying to clear its plate. Plea bargains
also led to people getting wildly different punishments for the
same exact behavior, and to people who really had committed
more serious crimes pleading to a much lesser offense and

(09:20):
then being incarcerated with people whose crimes were relatively minor.
These disparities, and many others related to race, culture, and
economic class, made people moving through the criminal justice system
incredibly cynical long before being sentenced to prison. In nineteen
seventy one, about two thousand, two hundred men were incarcerated

(09:42):
at Attica. Percent were black, thirty seven percent were white,
and eight point seven percent spoke only Spanish, with the
Spanish speaking population being predominantly Puerto Rican. Eighty percent of
the people incarcerated had not finished high school, and most
of them were from impoverished areas in New York's major cities.

(10:02):
And we're gonna talk about what life was like at Attica,
but first we're gonna pause and have a word from
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To get back to Attica. In New York, as in

(11:52):
many states, the prison system is part of the Department
of Corrections, and in the years just before the uprising
New York and this depart men had actually changed the
language that used to talk about the prison system. Prison
became correctional facility. Guard became correctional officer, warden became superintendent,
and so on. But these changes were really in name only.

(12:14):
The department was not really focused on correction or rehabilitation,
especially in maximum security. What the primary purpose was was
keeping people securely confined to prison. Conditions at Attica and
New York's other maximum security prisons were degrading and they
were dehumanizing. Some of the prisons practices were humiliating on

(12:36):
their own, and others were smaller day to day and
dignities that eventually added up. It can be easy to
think along the lines of well, prison is not supposed
to be fun, but this didn't make prisons safer or
more efficient or more effective. These conditions did nothing to
lower the rate of crime or reduce the rate of
recidivism after people were released, and some even encouraged ongoing

(12:58):
criminal behavior while in incarcerated. If you if you feel
like prisons point is to make people miserable for a
period of years and then put them back into society
with less than they had before, they were doing a
great job. But if you feel like prison should help
overall lower the incidents of crime, it was not helpful.

(13:20):
For the most part. What the conditions that the prisons
did guarantee was that people re entered society after their
release with fewer resources and fewer job skills than they
had before they were incarcerated. And it also came along
with an even greater degree of cynicism and bitterness towards
the justice system based on the experiences of being imprisoned,

(13:40):
and a lot of these humiliating into humanizing and really
counterproductive conditions were the ones that specifically became a part
of the negotiations during the Attica uprising in ninety were
coin of kind of walk through what some of these were.
So if you were incarcerated at Attica, your life was
governed by a set of rule that seemed arbitrary and petty.

(14:02):
Although there was a rule book, it was not consistently
distributed to new arrivals, and it didn't actually list all
the rules, and it wasn't available in Spanish. The most
common punishment for breaking rules was being quote keep locked
or completely confined to your cell. As long as you
weren't keep locked. On a typical weekday, you spent roughly
eight to ten hours out of your cell. About five

(14:25):
hours of that time was devoted to work or school.
School was required for anyone who tested below a fifth
grade education when they were incarcerated at the prison. The
rest of the time outside of a cell was devoted
mainly to meals and an hour or two in the
exercise yard weather permitting time, and the yard was a
little longer on weekends because work assignments weren't happening. Many

(14:47):
of the work assignments were tasks that basically kept the
prison running, such as janitorial work, or making and serving food,
or making uniforms, keeping the grounds, unloading deliveries, in the like.
Pay for most positions was about thirty cents a day.
There were also a few jobs that were created in
part with the idea of providing workplace skills for a

(15:09):
productive return to society. One of these was in the
metal shop, which made shelves and other furniture for sale
to other state agencies. Regardless of where in the prison
you worked, there were probably way more incarcerated men assigned
to the job than were actually needed to do it.
This is a practice that was commonly described at the

(15:29):
time as feather betting, which is not a word I
had heard before researching this. Feather Betting meant that a
lot of the work was actually pointless, busy work, or
redoing something that had already been done, like remopping the
same stretch of floor you had literally just mopped. You
would have no privacy, not even for using the bathroom,

(15:50):
even though you had to conduct visits with your family
through a mesh screen. You would be strip searched before
and after, and that search included an examination of your
genitals and body cavities. So if you wanted to talk
to your mom through a screen, you have to have
a body cavity search before and after. With only a

(16:10):
few exceptions, you only got to shower about once a week,
and you were allotted one roll of toilet paper and
one bar of soap per month. You could buy more
at the commissary, along with other basic necessities, but the
commissaries prices did not reflect the fact that you probably
only made thirty cents a day. The commissary was also
prone to running out of stock, and since your commissary

(16:32):
day cycled through the whole prison before starting back at
the beginning of the list, if they were out when
you needed something, it could be quite a while before
you even got another chance. Unless you could afford to
buy lots of food from the commissary, and the commissary
had what you needed when it was your turn to
make a purchase, you didn't get enough to eat. The
food at Attica was not sufficient to meet federal dietary standards. Also,

(16:56):
the commissaries sold lots of food that was meant to
be heated, like can soup and instant coffee, but methods
to heat that food were not allowed. Because of the
big disparity between the prices at the commissary and the
rates of pay, unless your family could afford to send
you money, you were probably going to make ends meet
through hustling that might involve, among other things, trading cigarettes

(17:19):
for services that were part of your prison work, smuggling contraband,
making moonshine, drawing and selling explicit artwork, and sex work.
If you got sick or hurt, your treatment was likely
to be delivered in a callous and even insulting way.
For example, if you said you had a headache, the
doctor might ask you how you knew you had one.

(17:40):
Because there definitely were people who faked illness to try
to get out of work, the medical staff generally treated
everyone as though that's what they were doing. Care was
mostly limited to treating excruciating pain and preventing the spread
of contagious disease through the prison. Preventative care was non existent,
and care for chronic conditions was extremely limited. Vacancies among

(18:01):
critical medical staff were also extremely slow to be filled,
and in the meantime, the prison just did without them
when there was no one there. If you needed psychological
care or treatment for a substance addiction, there was virtually
none available, with the psychiatric staff mostly being devoted to
parole hearings and appointments for other purposes, filling up months

(18:21):
in advance dentil care was also minimal, with many people
eventually losing teeth due to a lack of adequate care. Recreation,
of course, was limited by the weather. Winters in this
part of New York are harsh, and the only recreational
facility was the exercise yard, where you could spend between
an hour to an hour and a half on weekdays

(18:42):
and up to six hours or so on the weekend.
Each yard also had one television, though the yard's capacity
was about five hundred people. At night, you were locked
in your cell at five fifty pm and you were
allowed to talk and sail eight pm. UH. This was
generally quite loud because your method of talking to your
neighbors was basically by shouting. After eight p m, silence

(19:05):
was mandatory, and lights out was at eleven. The prison radio,
which you listened to through headphones that plugged into your cell,
ran until midnight. If your behavior was good enough, you
could get a hobby permit and order craft supplies, which
you could work with in your cell during those hours.
You can also work on your own legal defense using
information from the prisons small law library that you had

(19:28):
to copy by hand, since the law books could not
leave the library. If you had the money, you can
enroll in a correspondence school and study in your cell.
So apart from this physical confinement and all these other
things that came along with it, there was also a
lot of restriction on information entering and leaving the prison,
both personal letters and media. Sensors went through all incoming

(19:51):
and outgoing mail except for legally protected legal correspondence and
that had been implemented by court order. The sensors could
reject out going mail for a variety of reasons, and
including talking about prison news, quote, begging for packages or money,
talking to the press, and not quote sticking to your subject.

(20:12):
So you can imagine that last point was incredibly subjective. Also,
you were only allowed to correspond with your immediate family,
and the definition of immediate family did not include common
law spouses, which meant that more than twenty of the
prisons Black and Puerto Rican populations could not write to
their spouse. Up until November twenty five, nine seventy, English

(20:35):
was the only language allowed for mail entering or leaving
the prison. Mail in Spanish was often simply discarded. After
this nineteen seventy change in the rules, there was still
no Spanish speaking censor, though, so translating incoming mail became
a prison work assignment, with the mail being held for
up to two weeks before being handed off for translation.

(20:57):
Outgoing mail still had to be in English, so if
only spoke Spanish, you had to find someone from your
part of the cell block to translate for you. All
radio programs and reading material were also screened and censored,
and what was available didn't really align with the prisons demographics.
The rules them seems to be a lot more strict

(21:17):
uh for material aimed at a black demographic and material
in Spanish. Radio programs and literature targeted toward a black
audience was generally prohibited, and Spanish language materials and programming,
both on the radio and in print. We're in really
short supply. While the prison had started to loosen up
some of the censorship policy for media in the months

(21:38):
before the uprising, the review committee was still rejecting a
lot of material. All of these rules and procedures were
overseen by Attica's civilian and law enforcement staff. By far,
the largest job category at Attica correctional facility was its
custodial staff. The correctional officers and their supervisors, oh Only

(22:00):
eight percent of the staff had jobs you might describe
as intending to help or rehabilitate. That includes teachers, chaplains,
medical personnel, counselors, and parole officers. The chaplains did not
conduct Muslim religious services, even though there were hundreds of
Muslims in Attica. Unlike Attica's incarcerated population, which as we said,

(22:21):
was fifty black, Aside from one Puerto Rican officer, the
entire custodial staff was white. Except for those who had
served in the military. Many of the officers had never
actually met or closely interacted with many black or Puerto
Rican people before coming to work in the prison. They
mainly lived in very overwhelmingly white rural areas in the

(22:43):
prison's vicinity. If you are a correctional officer at Attica,
your job was mainly dedicated to maintaining order and security.
You were not a social worker or a counselor. In
spite of the name change, you were basically still a guard.
Your role wasn't really to protect anyone other than your self,
other employees and visitors from violence or unwanted sexual advances

(23:04):
or other harm. Because of the total lack of privacy,
the real possibility of unchecked physical or sexual assault. Attica's
incarcerated population generally felt completely unsafe, with many arming themselves
with makeshift weapons. Many of Attica's officers in nineteen seventy
one also had very little formal training. About a third

(23:25):
of the officers working there that year had been hired
between the end of World War Two in the nineteen fifties,
when the only training was a two week program described
as useless. A new contract implemented in April nineteen seventy
also meant that job duties for correctional staff were assigned
on the basis of seniority. As a result, the officers
with the most experience started selecting themselves for the task

(23:49):
that had the least actual contact with incarcerated men. That
left the least experienced staff overwhelmingly being the people who
were spending the most time with the prison population. If
you worked as an officer, it's also likely that you
thought of your job as something of a dead end.
Although correctional officers had a defined process for promotions and advancement,

(24:12):
being promoted typically involved being transferred to another prison elsewhere
in the state. Moving stipends were generally not enough to
cover relocating a whole family, so transferred officers usually tried
to wait it out until a position opened up at
a prison near their home. There was a trend of
only applying for promotion if you were willing to be
separated from your family, possibly for years. Running through this

(24:36):
whole interlocking system of incarcerated men and the custodial staff
responsible for them was a heavy thread of racism. There
was a clear breakdown and who had the good jobs
and who had the bad ones. For example, only thirty
seven percent of the prisons population was white, but the
most prestigious jobs, with the most side benefits and the

(24:57):
most privileges were over a whelmingly staffed with white men.
By comparison, more than two thirds of the men on
the grading crew and in the metal shop, two of
the least desirable jobs in the prison, were black or
Spanish speaking, even though they made up fifty and nine
percent of the population respectively. There were only a couple

(25:18):
of desirable jobs, like the laundry, that had a predominantly
black workforce. Rules were also selectively enforced in a way
that seemed racially prejudiced. For example, officers frequently confiscated submersible
heaters known as droppers, which were used to illicitly heat
up food butt from the commissary from black people while

(25:38):
looking the other way when white men had the same devices.
The same trend generally held true for things like whose
cells got searched for contraband and other rule enforcement officers
also actively discouraged friendships between Attica's black and white populations, implying,
for example, that a white person could expect to have

(25:59):
his privileges revoked if he kept socializing with quote colors,
and referring to white people who had black friends with
a racial slur that we are not going to repeat here.
There was, of course, racial prejudice among the incarcerated population
as well, which went beyond things that were very obvious
like slurs or fighting, or just general attitudes. Although there

(26:21):
was no formal segregation in place in Attica in nineteen
seventy one, the population tended to segregate itself at meals
and in the exercise yard, with the custodial staff either
tacitly or explicitly encouraging the segregation. So that was the
general atmosphere at Attica in ninety one. The prison was

(26:42):
infused with racism at essentially every level. Incarcerated men were
cynical about the justice system and distrustful of the custodial staff,
who in turn feared, looked down on, and actively despised them.
And it all played out in a setting full of
relentlessly to humanizing policies and practices. In addition to all

(27:03):
these dynamics and the years just before the uprising, a
couple of specific events led to even more tensions. And
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(28:29):
years just before the uprising at Attica to competing factors
caused tensions and frustrations to escalate their even further. The
first was a shift in its incarcerated population. More than
eight percent of the people incarcerated in Attica in V
one had arrived in nineteen sixty five or later. These

(28:49):
new arrivals tended to be younger and more politically aware
and active, and as a general rule, a lot more
resistant to authority than their predecessors, something that to show
deal staff was not really used to or prepared for.
Many had been born in the years immediately after Brown
versus Board, and had lived through violent backlash against integration

(29:11):
and the civil rights movement, as well as the activism
and social unrest of the sixties. Some were active participants
in nationalist organizations like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords.
Many of these newer arrivals, especially newer Black arrivals, took
on the role of educating other incarcerated man about civil rights,
political activism, and sociology, even organizing an unofficial sociology class

(29:35):
in nineteen seventy one. They also advocated for improvements to
the prison. For example, on July two of nineteen seventy one,
a group calling itself the Attica Liberation Faction sent the
Commissioner of the Department of Correctional Services, Russell g Odwa Oswald,
a letter and manifesto that spelled that started with just
a scathing and pretty radical description of the prison system,

(29:58):
including phrase is like the fascist concentration camps of modern America.
The actual demands that this outline, though, were incredibly reasonable overall.
They were things like legal representation when when appearing before
the parole board consistency and rule enforcement, adequate food, clothing
and hiding facilities, and adequate medical care. And somewhat ironically,

(30:23):
the other increasing source of tensions was a series of
somewhat relaxed rules and minor improvements, in part as a
result of these newcomers advocacy. Commissioner Oswald was new to
the job starting on January one of nineteen one. In
addition to his experience in the Department of Corrections, he
also had experience in social work, and he wanted to

(30:45):
reform the prison system to focus on successful rehabilitation instead
of just confinement. A lot of the reforms that the
Attica Liberation faction demanded were ones that he had already
hoped to do. But as is off the case, people
became really frustrated when the promised reforms were very slow
to materialize, and the prison's population, especially the younger men,

(31:08):
increasingly doubted that these promises were actually going to be kept,
and a lot of the custodial staff, who I want
to stress a lot of the custodial staff had pointed
out that a lot of things happening in the prison
were were unfair and we're to humanizing like that is
not something that was just universally adhered to without question.
But a lot of the custodial staff also thought that

(31:30):
Oswald's ideas and his policies and the reforms that he
wanted to make, along with other court rulings and policy
changes that had been taking place at about the same time.
They thought all these things were coddling and pandering and
we're denying them. That the the authority that they needed
to do their jobs. And then one event set the
stage for the actual uprising. On August twenty one, officers

(31:56):
at San Quentin Prison in California killed activist and author
George Jackson during an alleged escape attempt. There continue to
be unanswered questions and controversies surrounding Jackson's death, and that
could really be a whole other podcast episode on its own,
but the conclusion among Attica's incarcerated population was that he
had been framed and murdered. A protest followed at Attica,

(32:19):
which included a silent fast and a sit in. This
protest was nonviolent, but even so it was terrifying to
the inexperienced custodial staff on duty. The uprising that began
on September nine, n started a little less than three
weeks after George Jackson's death when incarcerated men and officers alike.

(32:40):
We're still really on edge in that aftermath at Attica,
and that is what we're going to talk about next time. Hey, Tracy, Yeah,
is your listener mail a little lighter in tone? It
has been a very heavy episode. We talked about a lot.
We're gonna talk about something not nearly so heavy for
a second. It's from Amber. Amber says, Hello, ladies. Not

(33:02):
only did I love hearing about the creepy ghost ships,
but this episode was a little shout out to both
places I have claimed as hometowns in my life. I
grew up in Marion, Massachusetts, which is the town the
captain of the Mary Celeste, Benjamin Briggs, was also from
the Historical Society Museum, and marian is basically seventy Mary
Celeste information. My other hometown is now Newport, Rhode Island,

(33:24):
and have lived here for eight years, living about a
mile from Easton's Beach. The locals call it first Beach
since there is a line of beaches around the bend
uh at Aquedec Island. I did not look up how
to say that, so I hope I didn't right. The
story of the seabird kind of makes me laugh since
the the area around the other stretch from First Beach

(33:45):
is very cliffy and rocky, so it just makes me
think the ship came to shore in a slow motion way,
like the scene from Sideways where Paul Giamadi and Thomas
Hayden Church managed to slowly crash their car into a
tree that's basically in the middle of a field. Must
have been destiny. You should look into the other historical
happenings in New ports Is. There is so much pirates
like Thomas, to colonists like Ann Hutchinson, the first synagogue

(34:07):
in America, Gilded Age mansions, among many others. I love
all of your work. Your topics are so interesting. Thanks
for keeping me so entertained, Amber. I wanted to read
this for two reasons. One was to have a little
lighter breather for a second at the end of this
really heavy episode, and the other is because I left
an entire s out of Easton's Beach every time I

(34:29):
put it in that episode, so it is Easton's and
not Eaton's topology for that Uh, if you would like
to write to us about this or any other podcast
where at history podcast at how stuffworks dot com. We're
also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in
history and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler

(34:50):
is missing history dot tumbler dot com. We're also on
Pinterest at pinchest dot com slash missed in History, and
our instagram is missed in History. You can come to
our parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot
com to find out about all kinds of fascinating information.
You can come to our website, which is missing history
dot com to find show notes about this and every
other episode Holly and I have worked on, as well

(35:12):
as an archive of every single episode we have ever
done lots of cool stuff, So you can do all
that and a whole lot more at how stuff works
dot com or miss in history dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, is it how
stuff works dot com