The Defenestrations of Prague

“Defenestrate” just means “to throw out of a window.” And apart from sounding like the punch line to a joke about Daleks … there has been a surprising amount of defenestration in Czech history. And almost all of it has been connected religious wars.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Tracy here with news about some live appearances
we have coming up. Saturday, July seven, I will be
at History Camp Boston where I will be part of
the History Podcaster panel. And then the next day, Sunday,
July eight, at two pm, Holly and I both will
be doing a live podcast at Adams National Historical Park

(00:20):
in Quincy, Massachusetts, where our show will be John Quincy
and Luisa Catherine Adams abroad. This is an outdoor show
and it will happen rain or shine, and we're coming
back to Convention Days in Seneca Falls, New York. Our
show is at four pm on Saturday, July twenty one
in the historic Wesleyan Chapel. You can get more information

(00:41):
about all of these shows with links to buy tickets
where applicable at Missed in History dot Com. Click on
live shows in the menu. Welcome to steph you missed
in History class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,

(01:06):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. Today we have a podcast that I
have started on and then stopped maybe five times in
the last five years. But we're coming up on the
four hundredth anniversary, so it kind of feels like I
need to do it now or never. We have to

(01:27):
could do this in another hundred years, Yeah, we would
be so old, Holly, we would be robots. We would
be able to really tell history from a live perspective
of the Yeah. So this is the much requested defenestrations
of Prague. And just to set a little expectation, the

(01:50):
the actual defenstrating does not take that much time. It's
a pretty simple story. Defenistrate just means to throw out
of a win. Oh and it's from the Latin word
finestra for window. Apart from sounding like it's the punch
line to a joke about daleks, there's been a surprising
amount of throwing people out of windows in Czech history,

(02:13):
and almost all of it has been connected to religious wars.
So we're going to talk through all that today. Hooray.
The first defenistration of Prague took place almost one years
before the start of the Protestant Reformation, but it stemmed
from the same kinds of reforms and conflicts that were
part of the Reformation. Jan Who's was a Bohemian religious

(02:37):
reformer who was born around thirteen seventy and his religious
work overlapped the Western Schism, which was a huge dispute
within the Roman Catholic Church. Here's how this dispute started.
Bartolomeo Pregnano was elected pope in thirteen seventy eight. He
became Pope Urban the sixth, and he had been elected

(02:57):
in part because for about seventy year all of the
popes had been French and the papacy had been headquartered
in Avignon. Romans started calling for a Roman pope, or
at least an Italian one. They were tired of all
these French popes, and before his election, Pregnano had been
serving as the archbishop of the Italian city of Bari.

(03:19):
So he satisfied the Romans demands for at least an
Italian pope. But Urban the sixth was hard to get
along with. He constantly butted heads with the cardinals, who
had become very powerful during all those decades of French popes.
So the cardinals elected one of their own as Pope,
Robert of Geneva, who became Clement the seventh. While Urban

(03:41):
the sixth was Pope from Rome, Clement the seventh was
Pope from Avignon, and Clement the seventh is regarded as
an antipope, which is the term for someone who makes
a competing claim to the legitimately elected pope. The election
of Clement the seventh spawned a long series of popes
and anti popes, and various kingdoms and communities sided with

(04:03):
one or the other of them. This wasn't at all
the first time in history that there had been an antipope,
but this whole competing string of them, and the disputes
among the various states about which one was legitimate, stretched
on for the better part of sixty years. The Western
Schism really damaged the Catholic Church's reputation. It also undermined

(04:25):
the idea of the pope as the supreme authority. So
as the church's power and authority were weakening, movements for reform,
which had existed for almost as long as the church,
had started to become a lot more vocal. One of
these reformers was Yan Militch, who established Bethlehem Chapel in Prague.
Bethleham Chapel became Prague's most popular church, and it conducted

(04:49):
services in Check instead of in Latin, starting in fourteen
o two. Jan Who's was in charge of the chapel,
both as the preacher and as an administrator, and the
chap well also became home to a national reform movement,
and Who's became a leader in that movement as well.
In fourteen o nine, Petro's Filargos was elected pope, becoming

(05:11):
Alexander the Fifth. He was intended to replace two competing popes,
that was Gregory the twelve and Benedict thet but neither
Gregory nor Benedict stepped down when Alexander was elected, so
instead of one pope there were three. Those made things
a lot more complicated for jan Who's and his followers,

(05:31):
who supported Alexander, but higher church officials in Bohemia still
recognized the authority of Gregory, and at this point things
had already been difficult for the reform movements that Who's
was part of. English theologian John Wycliffe and his followers,
who were known as the Lollards, had been influential in
the Bohemian movement, but a lot of Whitecliffe's teachings had

(05:52):
been condemned as heretical. Some of the movements members had
also been accused of heresy, and then some of them
were can to their views this left Who's without anybody
to back him up. He was accused of heresy as well,
although at first he wasn't prosecuted for it. Eventually, Pope
Alexander was bribed to ban preaching in private chapels, including

(06:17):
Bethlehem Chapel. But Who's refused to stop his work, he
was excommunicated and once again charged with heresy. I was
talking to a friend of mine who was a history
teacher about this whole thing, and she was like, I
wish jan Who's had been good at giving compliments sandwiches
like some of the other people who didn't wind up
accused of heresy because he was just like a dent

(06:41):
on fire all the time. So then when he refused
to stop preaching, the entire city of Prague was punished.
As long as he kept doing his work, none of
its citizens would be allowed to receive communion or to
be buried on Catholic church grounds. Finally, the Council of
Constance was assembled to resolve the issue of the three

(07:01):
competing popes and end the Western Schism and to deal
with jon huss. The Council began in November of fourteen fourteen,
and Hosts was summoned to appear under a letter of
safe conduct. But even though the safe conduct promise was
supposed to keep him from harm, Who's was tried for
heresy and convicted. He was burned at the stake on

(07:22):
July sixth, fifteen. After Who's's martyrdom, nobles in both Bohemia
and Moravia protested what had happened. They wrote letters to
the council, and they offered their protection to people who
are being persecuted for their religious beliefs. Who's his followers
and other like minded reformers became known as the Hussites.

(07:44):
These events sparked a massive movement in Bohemia, a century
before the start of the Protestant Reformation. The Hussites were
using a Check language liturgy instead of a Latin one.
They were also administering communion to lay people using both
bread and wine, when Catholic services reserved wine only for
the clergy. One branch of the Hussites were the Utraquists,

(08:07):
whose name means both kinds. I had no idea this
dispute about receiving communion in one kind or both kinds
was even a thing my entire upbringing as a Methodist.
The dispute was there wasn't even a dispute. There was
a discussion that was more about whether to use bread

(08:29):
that had been made or communion wafers, and whether it
was okay to have grape juice or wine like one
kind or both kinds did not even factor into it. This, finally, though,
brings us to throwing people out of windows. In Prague
in fourteen nineteen, the city's magistrates were holding several Utraquists prisoner,
and in retaliation, a group of Hussites broke into the

(08:50):
new town hall on July and they threw several city
council members and other officials out of the windows. Some
of these people were killed and the ing once it's lost.
The fourth died not long after this. Now this might
be apocryphal, but a number of sources say that he
died of outrage because of this definistration, or maybe of

(09:11):
a heart attack or a stroke that was brought on
by his anger over it. I feel like the word
defenistration is like such a nice, convoluted way to say
we did something really barbaric. It's a complicated word that
sounds like an important and uh, you don't not violent thing,

(09:32):
but in fact it's tossing people out of windows anyway.
This first definistration of Prague is usually marked as the
first violent incident in the Hussite Wars, which spanned from
fourteen nineteen to fourteen thirty six. Once lous A successor
as King of Bohemia was his half brother, Holy Roman
Emperor Sigismund, who was vehemently anti Hussite. There's actually some

(09:56):
debate about what his role was, but he was the
person who had promised Young Wo safe conduct to the
Council of Constance, and he was suspiciously absent during the
trial and execution. Even though the Hussites had huge support
all over Bohemia, Sitismens took a violent stand against them,
going so far as to seek a papal bull from

(10:17):
Pope Martin the Fifth proclaiming an anti Hussite crusade. The
Hussites fought back against that only this crusade, but also
against another one that followed it. Peace talks began in
fourteen thirty one at the Council of Basle. In fourteen
thirty three, a delegation of Hussites spent three months there
talking about the four core freedoms they wanted known as

(10:39):
the four Articles of Prague. These were the freedom to
preach and worship as they wished, communion in both kinds,
punishment of mortal sinners, and that the clergy should observe
a vow of poverty and the church should not hold property.
This was actually the more moderate set of demands. The
Hussites had split into two main factions, the Utraquists and

(11:02):
the table Rights. The table Rights were a lot more radical,
and they had gone so far as to establish their
own city with the hope of putting all of their
beliefs into practice there. So, when the Council of Basil
granted the Hussites communion in both kinds, the Utoists were satisfied,
but the tab Rists were not so. Then the Utraquists
joined forces with the Catholics to defeat the Taborists in

(11:25):
fourteen thirty four. It was still about two more years
before the Catholics and the Utraquists finally finished their negotiations
for peace, and while there were still schisms and incidents
of persecution, they stayed mostly peaceful between the Catholics and
the Hussites for almost two hundred years, and Jon huss
and his work went on to inspire other Reformers, including

(11:48):
Martin Luther. There was another window throwing incident in fourteen
eighty three, when a Catholic mayor was thrown out of
a window of the old town Hall. But that's not
what people are usually talking about when they say the
second Definistration of Prague. We will get to that one
after a quick sponsor break. As we said earlier in

(12:12):
the show, the first Definistration of Prague took place about
a hundred years before the start of the Protestant Reformation.
The second one took place about a hundred years after,
on May sixteen eighteen. But we have to back up
a little bit to make sense of it. The Protestant
Reformation caused huge social and political upheaval in Bohemia, just
like it did elsewhere in Europe. At the time, Bohemia

(12:36):
was ruled by a collection of estates that formed the
Bohemian Diet. The three estates were the Lords, the Knights,
and the Burgers, and in fifteen seventy five, the King
and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian the second of the House
of Habsburg had promised the estates that he would tolerate
at least some religious diversity Maximilian's promise didn't really account

(12:59):
for all of the religio just diversity in Bohemia, though
he had promised to tolerate denominations that accepted the Bohemian
Confession of fifteen seventy five. This was more formally the
Confession of Holy Christian Faith of All Three Estates, and
it was an attempt to create a confession of faith
that most people in Bohemia could agree to. The Bohemian

(13:20):
Confession was patterned after the fifteen thirty Confession of Augsburg,
which is the primary confession of faith in the Lutheran Church,
and its goal was to try to satisfy everyone, or
at least as many people as possible, with one document
that Bohemia could then formally recognize as the official, acceptable
statement of faith. It was intended to create a framework

(13:43):
for a peaceful coexistence among the religions. The three major
churches in Bohemia at the time were the Roman Catholic Church,
the Utraquists, and the Unitis Fratrum or Unity of Brethren.
Both the Utraquists and the Unitist Fratrum had Hussite roots,
and today the Unitis Fratrum is the Moravian church. There

(14:04):
were also Lutherans and other Protestants in Bohemia, but they
existed in much smaller numbers. The Bohemian Confession included things
that each of these religions wanted, also avoided material that
would be considered unacceptable for one or more of them. So,
for example, it mentioned all of the observances that the
various churches found to be sacraments, but because the Lutherans

(14:28):
considered baptism and communion to be the only sacraments, those
were the only two that were specifically mentioned as sacraments.
While Maximilian the Second expressed his support for the Bohemian Confession,
he didn't formally implement it before dying in fifteen seventy five.
It was his son and successor, Ridolf the Second who

(14:49):
finally made it official. Ridolf signed a document known as
the Letter of Majesty on July nine nine. The Letter
of Majesty granted all religions that accepted the Bohemian Confession
freedom to worship. The Letter of Majesty didn't come from
a benevolent desire for religious freedom, though, and Rudolf wasn't

(15:09):
even consistent about upholding it after he signed it. In
sixteen o eight, his brother, Archduke Matthias, had invaded part
of Bohemia after trying to force Rudolf to abdicate. The
so called feud between the Habsburg brothers gave the Protestant
Estates some leverage over Rudolph. They agreed to be loyal
to him in exchanged for their religious freedom. So once

(15:33):
this letter was signed, Bohemia was still officially Roman Catholic,
but other religions, as long as they followed that confession,
had the right to worship freely. On the same day
that Rudolph signed the Letter of Majesty, Catholics and the
Protestants in Bohemia also signed an agreement that laid out
the details of this freedom and how they would interact

(15:54):
with each other. For example, if a member of one
of the higher Estates wanted to install an Utraquist priest
on his land, he could, and if an Utraquist lived
in a Catholic parish and was attending church and tithing,
he could be buried in the parish cemetery without having
to seek any kind of special permission. But otherwise Catholics

(16:15):
and Utraquists would not be buried in one another's graveyards.
So after this Catholics and most of the Protestants coexisted
mostly peacefully in Bohemia for the next few years, although
the Utraquist church gradually faded away as more people became Lutheran.
But this didn't really help Rudolph stay on the throne.

(16:35):
He wound up seeding Bohemia to his brother Matthias in
sixteen eleven, and then Matthias became the Holy Roman Emperor
in sixteen twelve. Rudolph had been less tolerant of religious
descent than their father Maximilian had, and Matthias was less
tolerant than his brother Rudolph had been. In sixteen seventeen,

(16:56):
the Archbishop of Prague ordered Protestant chapels that were being
built in the towns of Brumov and Probe to be closed.
This went directly against the freedoms that were guaranteed in
the Letter of Majesty, but even so Matthias upheld the
decision to close the chapels. Not long after that, Matthias
was succeeded by his cousin Ferdinand a Second, and Ferdinand

(17:19):
was devoutly Catholic. He was a major figure in the
Catholic counter Reformation, and Ferdinand wanted to make Bohemia a
strictly Catholic country. He started appointing a lot of staunch
Catholics to his counsel. In response to all of this,
Protestants in Prague called an assembly. There they put to

(17:40):
Catholic regents William Slovada and Yaroslav Martinik on trial. This
assembly found the men guilty of violating the Letter of Majesty,
and then on May both of them, along with their
secretary Fabricius, were thrown out the window of the Prague
Council assembly room about fifty feet that's roughly fifteen off

(18:01):
the ground. Fortunately, they landed in a giant pile of
horse manure, so none of the three men were seriously harmed,
and Catholic supporters saw this as miraculous evidence of divine intervention.
I will keep my giggling to myself on that one.
I mean, it is funnier, funnier than the other defenestration

(18:24):
where people died. These guys just landed in horsepoop, which
would be gross, but they weren't seriously hurt. Right, it's
the miracle of of horse manure that makes it funny.
But this window throwing incident is marked as the start
of a Bohemian revolt against Ferdinand the Second, which then
grew into the Thirty Years War, and we're going to

(18:45):
talk more about that after we have another quick sponsor break.
The Thirty Years were was so long, complicated and convoluted
that it's not really possible to do a play by
play of it, and just the last third of our
show today. It would not be possible to do it
in a full episode or even a two part or

(19:05):
it would take an entire podcast, a new podcast that
would be only about the Thirty Years War, and it
would take thirty years to do it, because, uh, a
lot of when you watch lectures and read books about this,
a word that comes up over and over to describe
it is exhausting. All of the parties involved had their

(19:25):
own motivations and their own objectives in going to war.
In some places it was a civil war, and in
other places it wasn't. Some of the states that were
involved entered the Fray after they had already been at
war with each other for years before that bled over
into the greater conflict. All of these various actors had
their own things going on. The whole thing was so

(19:48):
far reaching and convoluted that a lot of historians describe
it as multiple different wars rather than one thirty years war.
It has so many branches it's it really is hard.
It's kind of like an amiba, like you can't contain
it in one thing. It just keeps expanding in different directions.
It's a lot, and it did start out mostly about religion.

(20:11):
The Holy Roman Empire was Roman Catholic and had been
ruled by members of the Catholic House of Habsburg since
fourteen forty. Whether the Empire tolerated religious diversity depended on
who was emperor, but the Empire itself wasn't one monolithic entity.
It was a huge hodgepodge of overlapping semi autonomous states,

(20:32):
and whether those states tolerated religious diversity also depended on
who was ruling them, regardless of how tolerant the individual
rulers were, for the most part, they had the right
to decree which religion the people should follow, and this
idea had been set down in the Peace of Augsburg
on September fifty five. The Piece of Augsburg was an

(20:55):
agreement between the Holy Roman Empire and the German states,
some of which were Catho like in some of which
were Lutheran. It put an end to violent conflict between
all of these different entities. The Piece of Augsburg included
the idea of kujus reggio ejus religio, or whose rule
his religion. In other words, whoever ruled could choose the

(21:17):
religion of the state. Lutheran or Catholic. Those are really
the only two options in this particular agreement. This basic
idea was still in play in Germany by the time
the Catholic regents were thrown out the window in Bohemia,
and even though the Peace of Augsburg was between the
Empire and the German states, the same basic idea was

(21:37):
followed in other parts of the Holy Roman Empire as well,
and that was one of the things that led to
this war. Under the Peace of Augsburg, the ruler was
supposed to decide the religion, but people didn't necessarily want
to follow the religion that their ruler did. Religion also
played a huge part in the relationships among the various

(21:57):
rulers and the kingdoms and the states that they controlled,
both within and outside of the Holy Roman Empire. In Germany,
the Catholic and Protestant states each formed their own military alliances.
The Protestant Union was first formed in sixteen o eight,
and eventually it had England, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden
as allies. The Catholic League was formed in sixteen o

(22:21):
nine in response, and the Catholic League was allied with
the Habsburgs. So all these alliances were already in place
by the Defenestration of Prague in sixteen eighteen, and for
the next two years the mostly Protestant Bohemian estates fought
against the Catholic Holy Roman Empire. In sixteen twenty, Holy
Roman Emperor Ferdinand the Second and the Catholic League defeated

(22:45):
Frederick the Fifth, King of Bohemia at the Battle of
White Mountain, and as numerous historians have noted, the war
could have ended there. Ferdinand was not satisfied with having
only crushed the Bohemian revolt, though in sixteen twenty one
he started rounding up and executing rebel leaders in Prague.
He ordered the remaining Protestants to either be exiled or

(23:08):
to convert, and soon Britain, Denmark, and the Dutch Republic
had all entered the war. For about ten years, the
Catholics still had the upper hand, but then Sweden joined
on the Protestant side in sixteen thirty and the Protestants
rallied for about four years. Then in sixteen thirty four,
a Spanish army defeated the main force from Sweden, once

(23:30):
again giving the Catholic side the advantage. That's when France,
a Catholic country, joined the Fray on the Protestant side.
From France's point of view, it was more important to
resist the Habsburgs and the Empire in Spain than to
stay on the same side as all the other Catholic states.
And then from here on out, the Thirty Years War

(23:51):
became more and more about territory and politics, while becoming
less and less directly about religion. Over time, the may
Your powers began hiring mercenaries to supplement their armies, and
there were atrocities on all sides. One of the war's
most infamous incidents was the Massacre of Magdeburg, when the

(24:11):
Empire and the Catholic League sacked the Protestant city of
Magdeburg and killed about twenty thousand civilians. Fighting on the
Catholic side were a mercenary light infantry known as the Croats,
who became the fighting force most often associated with the war.
Although some of the Croats were Croatian at the time,
this was more of a generic word for the type

(24:33):
of light cavalry that they were in. Its actual members
were from other ethnic groups as well, and it's also
where the word cravat comes from, after a French word
for the scarves that they wore as part of their uniforms.
All of the major powers in Western Europe were ultimately
involved in the Thirty Years War, and there was fighting

(24:54):
in their American colonies as well, but a disproportionate amount
of the fighting took place in Germany, and this led
to colossal losses for Germany. As much as of the
German population was killed, and this was not just losses
from battle. As troops moved from one place to another,
they commandeered food and other resources, and a lot of

(25:15):
the time they just left people to starve. Disease also
spread rapidly along with the armies. There was never really
a concrete winner of this drawn out, complicated conflict. Peace
talks went on at the Congregation of Westphalia for more
than five years from sixteen forty three to sixteen forty eight,

(25:36):
negotiations took place in the Westphalian towns of Moonster and
on the Brook, and they involved two hundred different rulers
and thousands of other officials. The only European powers not
involved where the Ottoman Empire, England, Poland and Russia. First,
they spent six months just on matters of procedure, like

(25:59):
who was going to sit where and who had precedents
when entering the room. From their negotiations started by addressing
issues that were specific to Germany. More international peace negotiations
took place from October sixteen forty five to April of
sixteen forty six, and for most of the rest of
it the negotiations were about religion. The war didn't stop

(26:23):
during the peace talks, though, uh they kept going on
with all the fighting, and during the later years France
was actually actively trying to undermine the peace talks because
some of the terms that had been agreed to we're
going to leave it vulnerable to attack from Spain. The
war finally ended with the Peace of Westphalia, which redistributed

(26:43):
a lot of territory in Europe, basically redrawing the map.
It also recognized the United Provinces of the Netherlands and
the Swiss Confederation as independent republics, and it confirmed and
expanded on the Piece of Augsburg, adding Calvinism to the
list of lerated religions. So, at least in theory, Lutherans, Calvinists,

(27:04):
and Catholics could all worship freely, and those were the
three primary religions in Europe at the time. But Austrian
territory wasn't included in this religious freedom, and the Peace
of Westphalia also didn't recognize the Hussite religions that we
talked about in earlier parts of the show. They weren't Lutheran, Calvinist,

(27:25):
or Catholic, so they continued to not be recognized as
allowable religions and their members continued to face religious persecution.
Throughout this war, military forces in Europe got much bigger,
even before the widespread use of mercenaries. All of the
major European powers also got a lot of administrative experience

(27:47):
managing these ever increasing militaries. They applied that newfound knowledge
to governance. These loosely connected groups of semi autonomous political
units that had been part of the Holy Roman Empire
started to coalesce into the nations as we think of
them today. This is connected to another element of the

(28:07):
Peace of Westphalia. The agreements recognized the sovereignty of all
the member states of the Holy Roman Empire. The Peace
of Westphalia gave each one the right to negotiate with
the others on their own behalf, as long as that
wouldn't somehow damage the Holy Roman Empire. And this was
a massive change. It's set the stage for today's international

(28:27):
model of independent nations that are all, at least on paper,
equal on the world stage. I mean, different nations obviously
have different amounts of power and wealth. But the bigger
countries aren't getting multiple votes in the u n just
because they're bigger. It's not how it works. The idea
that nation states have exclusive sovereignty over their own territory

(28:50):
and have equal rights to that sovereignty is even called
Westphalian sovereignty. The power structure within these nations also changed.
Although nations continued to have official religions, those religions had
less political power. A monarchy might still be rooted in
the idea that the monarch had a divine right to rule,

(29:11):
and the law might still have a heavy religious influence.
Religious persecution still existed, but it was far less common
for the church and the state to be essentially the same,
almost inseparable thing, And of course there was still plenty
of war to go around. After the Peace of Westphalia,
France and Spain continued to be actively at war with
each other from the time the treaty was signed until

(29:32):
sixteen fifty nine. They hadn't been able to actually negotiate
with each other much during the peace talks and Westphalia
because they couldn't agree on the protocol to do it.
In all those six months of negotiations about who's that
where and who got to come into the room first,
France and Spain could not get it together. Multiple other
wars also started in the years after this treaty, but

(29:54):
they tended to be more about territory, trade, resources, and
colonialism than specifically and directly about religion. And all of
that started with three people being thrown out a window,
along with the hundreds of years of religious warfare that
happened before that. So other people have also been thrown

(30:14):
out of windows in Prague since the Second Defenistration, but
none of them is really considered to be an official.
Third one, the most widely known as the death of
Jan Masariic on March tenth. He was the son of T. G. Massarik,
the first president of the Czechoslovak Republic, and he was
the only non Communist member of that government. He was

(30:37):
found beneath the window at the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
and it's not clear whether he fell, jumped, or was
thrown out of that window. And on that upbeat note,
you know what you got cooking and listener mail. I
have some mail that goes back to our episode about
the Bisbee deportations, and this is from Francesca, who says,

(30:59):
Dear Holly and Tracy, my name is Francesca, and I
just started listening to the podcast not too long ago,
but I've been really enjoying it. I had to write
in after listening to the podcast on the Bisbee deportations.
I lived in Arizona for a little while as a
child and had visited Bisbee several times, but I never
knew the deportations had even happened, so it was interesting
to learn something about an area I've actually been to.

(31:22):
My main reason for writing is to comment on something
you mentioned briefly. You mentioned that the mining industry was
starting to shift over to more open pit mining at
that point. My father is a geologist. She goes on
to talk about her father working for a company that
was actually owned by Phelps Dodge. She goes on to say,
even in the nineties when they were when we were

(31:43):
living there, the company owned the houses much like they
did at Bisbee, and there was a company store. There
wasn't a hospital there, but there was a clinic for anything,
and for anything more severe you had to go to Stafford,
which was about an hour away if I'm remembering right.
I don't remember a lot of it since we lived
there when I was six to eight years old, but

(32:03):
I did have the chance to go on a mine
tour when my grandparents visited, which my father arranged. You
have no idea of the scale of the operation there,
and it was neat to be able to see a
part of what my father did for his job. It
was cool to hear Felts Dodge mentioned in this podcast,
since that's a company I haven't heard of since my
father left them to work for a different company. So

(32:24):
thank you for the fascinating history lesson and a blast
from the past. Sincerely, Francesco, thank you, Francesco for writing
this email to us. I also wanted to mention on
a number of occasions that are a mystery to me.
Instead of calling the i w W the Industrial Workers
of the World, which as its is its name, I

(32:45):
typed into the outline the completely incorrect word international. It
is not called the International Workers of the World. It
is the Industrial Workers of the World. And a couple
of people who have pointed that out mentioned that it's
a I'm a mistake, which I don't quite understand how
it's a common mistake because it makes the name sort

(33:07):
of redundant to say the International Workers of the World.
So anyway, I apologize for making that error that either
I read somewhere and just absorbed incorrectly or just typed
the completely wrong word in the outline. Either way, if
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast where History podcasts at how Stuffworks dot com.

(33:28):
We're also on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest.
All of those that missed in History. You can come
to our website, which is missed in History dot com
and you'll find the show notes for all the episodes
that Holly and I have worked on together. You will
find a searchable archive every episode we have ever done,
and you can find and subscribe to our podcasts on

(33:50):
Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and wherever else you get podcasts.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how staff works dot com m m HM