Six Impossible Episodes: Back-to-Court

0:01Speaker 1:Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. Today's episode was inspired by a few things. One, it is back-to-school time in a lot of the U.S. I think by the time this episode comes out, probably... Most school systems that have a summer break will be back in class. Yeah. Most of them probably. But as I was working on it, the returning to school was in the process of happening. My friend's child specifically is starting kindergarten, so I have been thinking a lot about school. Two, I had a random memory about my own school days. It just, in the moment, I went, was that real? It was real. but thinking about it sent me down a big legal rabbit hole. And three, we have not had an installment of six Impossible episodes in a while, so why not? Today, we are going to take a quick look at six U.S. Supreme Court cases that all have to do with the rights of children in primary and secondary schools in the U.S. This is about, to be clear, public school. Private schools are not run by the government in the same way that

1:24Speaker 1:public schools are. So a lot of these constitutional questions don't apply to private school. And we're also not talking about colleges and universities because to the court, they are different. They're not the same environment as a K-12 school at all. And colleges also, most college students are legally considered adults. So court cases about college are a little different from the court cases about K-12. These decisions that we're talking about today involve topics like free speech, school prayer, corporal punishment, and search and seizure. And the last case we'll be talking about discusses drugs. So if any of those issues are issues for you or the people that you listen with, heads up. And also, none of this should be taken as legal advice. I would not want anyone to be called into the principal's office and say, But stuff you missed in history class told me to. That's not what we're trying to do here. That would be terrible. First up, we're going to talk about West Virginia State Board of Education versus Barnett, which was decided in 1943 and had to do with whether children can be required to say

2:39Speaker 1:the Pledge of Allegiance in school. The Pledge of Allegiance was first drafted in the late 19th century, and it's gone through various revisions. It wasn't officially recognized by Congress until June 22, 1942, as part of the flag code. West Virginia v. Barnett needs some setup involving an earlier case. In 1935, children attending public school in Minersville, Pennsylvania, were required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. They had to put their right hand to their chest and then salute the flag with their arm extended, and they had to say, quote, I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. The Gobitis family were Jehovah's Witnesses, and they considered this to be against their religion, in part because it broke the biblical commandment against making and worshiping graven images, as well as the commandment of, thou shalt have no other gods before me. Lillian and William Gobitis were expelled from school after refusing to do it, and their parents filed suit. This case made its way to the Supreme Court, and on June 3rd, 1940, the

3:53Speaker 1:court decided against the family, essentially saying that a person's religious belief did not relieve them from having to obey an otherwise valid law. Also, in the eyes of the court, school systems and school authorities were allowed to take measures to foster national unity, and it was not the court's role to censor state legislatures that tried to do that. The number of school systems requiring daily pledges of allegiance increased after the Supreme Court's decision. in Minersville v. Gobitis because of the decision and because of an increased focus on encouraging patriotism and national unity in the wake of World War II. This included schools in West Virginia, where the State Board of Education adopted the same pledge that had been cited in Gobitis, with students performing a straight-armed salute while reciting it. This salute was criticized for looking too much like a Nazi salute, although the palm was meant to face upward rather than downward. Students who refused to say the pledge could be expelled, at which point they would be considered delinquents, and their parents at that

5:01Speaker 1:point could be fined or even jailed. Like the Gobitis family, the Barnetts were Jehovah's Witnesses, and Walter Barnett told his daughters not to salute the flag or to say the pledge. After they refused to recite the pledge, they were expelled from school, and Barnett filed suit. This case also went to the Supreme Court, which found in Barnett's favor overturning Minersville v. Gabitis. This 6-3 decision was announced on June 14, 1943, which was Flag Day. The majority opinion was authored by Justice Robert H. Jackson, and it's considered to be one of Jackson's most important opinions. Jackson wrote, the freedom asserted by these appellees does not bring them into collision with the rights asserted by any other individual. It is such conflicts which most frequently require the intervention of the state to determine where the rights of one end and those of another begin. But the refusal of these persons to participate in the ceremony does not interfere with or deny the rights of others to do so. The majority opinion later said, quote, It is not clear whether the regulation contemplates that pupils forego any contrary convictions of their own

6:38Speaker 1:and become unwilling converts to the prescribed ceremony, or whether it will be acceptable if they simulate assent by words without belief and by a gesture barren of meaning. The opinion concluded, quote, if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, It is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein, We think the action of the local authorities in compelling the flag salute and pledge transcends constitutional limits on their power and invades the sphere of intellect and spirit, which is the purpose of the First Amendment to our Constitution to reserve from all official control. This was the first U.S. Supreme Court case to establish that students do have some First Amendment rights while in school. As it is interpreted today, public schools can have some kind of in-school observance that incorporates the Pledge of Allegiance, but it's unconstitutional to force students to do it or to punish them if they don't.

7:51Speaker 1:Our next decision came from the Warren Court when Earl Warren was Chief Justice. Other Warren Court decisions we've covered on the show include Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board of Education, Hernandez v. Texas, and Griswold v. Connecticut. The post-World War II years marked the start of the Cold War and the Second Red Scare. The United States started framing itself as a God-fearing, moral nation in contrast to the supposedly godless USSR. This was obviously reductive, but it was also an influential line of thought in the U.S., with religion increasingly described as an element of American patriotism and part of public life. The U.S. added Under God to the Pledge of Allegiance during these years in 1954, and an increasing number of public school systems started adding prayer or Bible reading to the school day. In 1951, the New York State Board of Regents proposed a prayer for use in public schools. It was written by Christian and Jewish religious leaders, and it was meant to be non-denominational.

9:00Speaker 1:It read, quote, Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon thee, and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country. the New York Board of Regents is responsible for supervising education within the state, and this prayer was part of a policy statement that said in part, quote, we believe that at the commencement of each school day, the act of allegiance to the flag might well be joined with this act of reverence to God. How or whether to implement this was up to each school board.

9:34Speaker 1:The Board of Education in New Hyde Park on Long Island directed teachers to lead the class in the prayer at the start of each school day. Students were allowed to opt out and leave the room, and some did. But the parents of 10 students argued that the use of this prayer in school violated their children's rights, even though their participation wasn't mandatory. They filed suit against school board president William Vitale Jr., One of the parents, Stephen Engle, became the lead plaintiff because his last name was first in an alphabetical list. The Engles were Jewish, and some of the other plaintiffs included Jewish, Unitarian, and Atheist families.

10:15Speaker 1:No one denied that reciting the regent's prayer was a religious activity. The basic question was whether state officials writing a prayer for use in schools was in violation of the Establishment Clause. That's the part of the First Amendment to the Constitution that prohibits the government from establishing a religion. This language was originally written to apply only to the federal government, But after the Civil War, it was also applied to the states under the 14th Amendment. Two justices did not participate in this case. One was ill, and the other had not taken his seat on the court yet when the case was argued. The court issued a 6-1 decision in Engel v. Vitale on June 25, 1962, finding that government-written prayers did violate the Establishment Clause. The court's opinion was written by Justice Hugo Black, which concluded, quote, it is true that New York's establishment of its regent's prayer as an officially approved religious doctrine of that state does not amount to a total establishment of one particular religious sect to the exclusion of all others. That indeed the governmental endorsement of that prayer seems relatively insignificant when

11:34Speaker 1:compared to the governmental encroachments upon religion which were commonplace 200 years ago. To those who may subscribe to the view that because the regent's official prayer is so brief and general, there can be no danger to religious freedom and its governmental establishment, however, it may be appropriate to say, in the words of James Madison, the author of the First Amendment, it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity in exclusion of all other religions may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians in exclusion of all other sects?

12:16Speaker 1:That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever. This was the first Supreme Court decision to find school prayers to be unconstitutional, and it was incredibly controversial. The families involved faced ridicule and harassment, and people were furious at the court, framing its decision as kicking God out of schools. But the controversy went all the way back to the regent's prayer itself, which had been criticized for excluding people of non-Christian faiths.

12:56Speaker 1:and for not directly referencing Jesus Christ, something that of course had been done to make the prayer more inclusive to people of other religions. Yeah, there were people who really wanted there to be prayer in school who were actually very happy about this court decision because this prayer specifically they did not feel was the good one. Not Christian enough. Right. They generally speaking were not happy about a similar case that was decided the following year, and that was School District of Abingdon Township, Pennsylvania versus Shemp.

13:30Speaker 1:That was focused on laws in both Pennsylvania and Maryland. It was two cases that were heard together. Those laws required the school day to start with the reading of Bible verses and the Lord's Prayer, and the court struck those laws down as unconstitutional as well. Other cases related to prayers and the Bible in school have gone before the court since then. And they all have their own nuances. Most recently, in 2022, the court issued a 6-3 decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District ruling that a high school coach's prayers on the field after football games were protected under the free exercise and free speech clauses of the First Amendment. Today, broadly speaking, nothing prevents an individual person from praying or reading the Bible in school not really doing so with their friends or family members either.

14:25Speaker 1:These cases are about whether the schools or the school systems can organize, require, or sponsor those prayers and Bible reading. We will have more cases after we pause for a sponsor break. Our next couple of cases are also about First Amendment rights in schools. The first is Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which was also decided by the Warren Court. In December of 1965, students in Des Moines, Iowa, planned to wear black armbands to school in protest of the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War.

15:11Speaker 1:Principals heard about this and said that students who came to school with black armbands on would be asked to remove them. If the students refused to do that, they would be suspended until they could return to school with no armband. A small number of students, including four siblings, came to school wearing armbands, refused to take those armbands off and were suspended. They returned to school after the winter holiday break, at which point the planned armband protest would have been over, but they wore black for the rest of the school year in protest. Petitioners in this case included some of the suspended students, John Tinker and Christopher Eckhart, who were in high school, and Mary Beth Tinker, who was in junior high. Their fathers filed the complaint against the school district on their behalf. Their case made its way through the courts, and the Supreme Court issued its 7-2 decision on February 24, 1969. Although subsequent cases have narrowed its scope somewhat, Tinker v. Des Moines is seen as a landmark decision outlining students' constitutional right to free speech in school. The court's decision, authored by Justice

16:26Speaker 1:Abe Fortas, says explicitly, quote, first amendment rights applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. This has been the unmistakable holding of this court for almost 50 years. The decision went on to note that there was a difference between these armbands and things like dress codes. Quote, the problem posed by the present case does not relate to regulation of the length of skirts or the type of clothing to hairstyle or deportment. It does not concern aggressive, disruptive action or even group demonstrations. Our problem involves direct, primary First Amendment rights akin to pure speech. The school officials banned and sought to punish petitioners for a silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on the part of the petitioners. There is here no evidence whatever of petitioners' interference, actual or nascent, with the school's work or of collision with the rights of other

17:39Speaker 1:students to be secure and to be let alone. Accordingly, this case does not concern speech or action that intrudes upon the work of the schools or the rights of other students. Possibly my favorite passage of this decision, and maybe even my favorite passage of all the decisions we're talking about today, quote, in our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are persons under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the state must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the state.

18:23Speaker 1:In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the state chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved. In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views. As Judge Guinn, speaking for the Fifth Circuit, said, school officials cannot suppress expressions of feelings with which they do not wish to contend. Long story short, under this opinion, schools can only discipline students for their speech because if that speech causes substantial disruption at the school or if there is actual evidence that it will cause disruption. Undifferentiated fear or apprehension of a disturbance or a desire to avoid the unpleasantness or discomfort of difficult subject matter is not enough to restrict student speech. This standard is known as the Tinker Standard or the Substantial Disruption Test. Tinker v.

19:27Speaker 1:Des Moines has also been used as a precedent in a lot of other Supreme Court cases relating to student speech. Two justices dissented, Hugo Black and John M. Harlan II. Black had authored the court's opinion in Engel v. Vitale, but in this case, Black concluded that the schools had acted reasonably. He also made a slippery slope argument that I personally found kind of ridiculous. Quote, school discipline, like parental discipline, is an integral and important part of training our children to be good citizens, to be better citizens. Here, a very small number of students have crisply and summarily refused to obey a school order designed to give pupils who want to learn the opportunity to do so. One does not need to be a prophet or the son of a prophet to know that after the court's holding today, some students in Iowa schools and indeed in all schools will be ready, able, and willing to defy their teachers on practically all orders. Dude, they were talking about armbands.

20:30Speaker 1:Those armbands were not preventing anybody from learning. What I think is some of the stuff I got away with in school. One of the cases that cites Tinker more than 40 times is Hazelwood v. Kohlmeier, which was decided on January 13, 1988. And it's one of the cases that inscribed some limits on students' rights to free speech. The Journalism II class at Hazelwood East High School in St. Louis, Missouri, produced a newspaper called The Spectrum. several times a year.

21:02Speaker 1:It was school policy for the principal to review the newspaper before it was published. Principal Robert Reynolds had some concerns about two of the articles from the May 13, 1983 issue, which was the last issue of the school year. One on teen pregnancy used pseudonyms for its interview subjects, but Reynolds thought those subjects might still be identifiable. It also discussed sex and contraception, which Reynolds thought was inappropriate for the school's younger students. And an article about divorce named and criticized a student's parent. The journalism advisor had removed that name from the version that was supposed to go to the printer, but Reynolds also thought that the student's parents should have the opportunity to respond to what was being printed about them in the paper, which is something...

21:54Speaker 1:that is supposed to be, at least, a standard part of the practice of journalism. Reynolds thought that there was not enough time to make changes to these articles and still have the newspaper out before the end of the school year. So he withheld the two pages that contained these articles, even though he didn't object to the other articles on those pages. And then the rest of the paper went to print. Three students, Kathy Kohlmeier, Leslie Smart, and Leanne Tippett, went to the American Civil Liberties Union about this. The ACLU had also been part of West Virginia v. Barnett, and the New York Civil Liberties Union was part of Engel v. Vitale. This time, ACLU lawyers filed suit against the school system, and the case made its way to the Supreme Court. The court issued a 5-3 ruling against the students, finding that their First Amendment rights had not been violated in this censorship of the paper.

22:53Speaker 1:That only adds up to eight because Justice Anthony Kennedy had been appointed to the court but was not yet confirmed. The court's opinion was written by Justice Byron R. White. As we already said, it repeatedly cited Tinker, including stating that public school students do not, quote, shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. But the court had also established that the free speech rights of public school students at school are not identical to those of adults in other settings. This decision explored several distinctions, including whether a school newspaper could be considered a public forum. In this case, it was not. It was a limited forum intended mostly for the school. Another distinction was between tolerating the speech of students, which was the focus of the decision in Tinker, and promoting student speech.

23:49Speaker 1:This newspaper was funded and published by the school, so the school could be interpreted as endorsing or promoting the views that were printed in it. This decision concluded, quote, We cannot reject as unreasonable Principal Reynolds' conclusion that neither the pregnancy article nor the divorce article was suitable for publication in Spectrum. Reynolds could reasonably have concluded that the students who had written and edited these articles had not sufficiently mastered those portions of the Journalism II curriculum. that pertained to the treatment of controversial issues and personal attacks, the need to protect the privacy of individuals whose most intimate concerns are to be revealed in the newspaper, and the legal, moral, and ethical restrictions imposed upon journalists within a school community that includes adolescent subjects and readers. Finally, we conclude that the principal's decision to delete two pages of Spectrum rather than to delete only the offending articles or to require that they be modified was reasonable under the circumstances as he understood them. Accordingly, no violation of

24:56Speaker 1:First Amendment rights occurred. There are other cases that have established additional limits on the student free speech rights first outlined in Tinker. One of the more recent is Morse v. Frederick, a 5-4 decision from 2007, which found that public schools can prohibit students from displaying messages that promote illegal drug use at school-sponsored events. We will have two more cases after one more sponsor break. Our next case that we're going to discuss was part of the inspiration for this episode.

25:38Speaker 1:I don't remember what brought this to my mind, but I randomly remembered that when I was a kid, there were a whole lot of teachers who had wooden paddles on their desks or displayed somewhere in their classroom. That seemed so wildly contradictory to the attitudes of my parent friends and my teacher friends today that I had a brief moment of, wait, was that real? Yes, it absolutely was, although sitting here in my adulthood, I find it to be extremely messed up. Looking into whether corporal punishment is still legal in schools in the United States led me to the 1977 Supreme Court decision in Ingram v. Wright. Yes, corporal punishment is still legal in some places. We will get to that. This case involved James Ingram and Roosevelt Andrews, who were students at Charles R. Drew Junior High School in Dade County, Florida. Corporal punishment is still allowed under Florida law, although as of July 1st, 2025, it requires parental consent. Under the law that was in place in Florida in 1970, parental consent was not required, but corporal punishment could not be, quote, degrading or unduly severe. The

26:53Speaker 1:court summarized the law this way, quote, The authorized punishment consisted of paddling the recalcitrant student on the buttocks with a flat wooden paddle measuring less than two feet long, three to four inches wide, and about one half inch thick. The normal punishment was limited to one to five licks or blows with the paddle and resulted in no apparent physical injury to the student. school authorities viewed corporal punishment as a less drastic means of discipline than suspension or expulsion.

27:27Speaker 1:In spite of that policy, Ingram was struck more than 20 times in one incident and required medical attention, and Andrews was struck in the arms on two occasions— The court acknowledged that discipline at the school seemed to be particularly harsh and that these punishments did not align with the policy. But it was looking at the constitutionality of the law, not whether the school officials had followed the law correctly. One constitutional question was whether this law violated the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads, quote, Another question was whether it violated the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause.

28:20Speaker 1:In a decision authored by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., neither of those was violated. The Eighth Amendment was not relevant because it was intended to protect people who were convicted of a crime and, quote, the prisoner and the schoolchild stand in wholly different circumstances, separated by the harsh facts of criminal conviction and incarceration. The decision went on to say, quote, the school child has little need for the protection of the Eighth Amendment. Though attendance may not always be voluntary, the public school remains an open institution.

28:55Speaker 1:Except perhaps when very young, the child is not physically restrained from leaving school during school hours. And at the end of the school day, the child is invariably free to return home. Even while at school, the child brings with him the support of family and friends, and is rarely apart from teachers and other pupils who may witness and protest any instances of mistreatment. The court also found that under the law, the process for deciding to administer corporal punishment was sufficient in the context of a school.

29:31Speaker 1:There were requirements and safeguards to protect students from being paddled excessively or without cause. Even though the records showed some excesses in the case of these two students and other students, whose stories were part of the evidence in this. To sum it up, quote, the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment is inapplicable to school paddlings. And the 14th Amendment's requirement of procedural due process is satisfied by Florida's preservation of common law constraints and remedies. Today, in most states, corporal punishment is legal in private schools. Again, those are not run by the government. According to the National Education Association, which is a labor union representing educators, corporal punishment is legal in public schools in 17 states and practiced in 14. There are substantial gender and racial disparities in who is paddled, with boys and Black children being paddled far more often. Also, disabled students are paddled more often, although some states have specifically outlawed corporal punishment for disabled children. Yeah, the states where it's legal but

30:45Speaker 1:not practiced are, for the most part, states where there's a law still on the books, but all of the state school boards have banned it. Our last case involved a 14-year-old student in New Jersey known as TLO in court records and was about whether searching a student's property violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. In March of 1980, a teacher caught TLO and another student smoking cigarettes in the bathroom. The other student admitted to smoking, while TLO denied it and said that she did not smoke. The school's assistant principal, Theodore Czaplik, searched TLO's purse and found cigarettes and rolling papers. Czaplik thought the rolling papers might be used with marijuana and did a more thorough search of the purse, finding a bag of what's described as grass-like substance, as well as other items that seemed to implicate TLO in selling cannabis drugs.

31:45Speaker 1:Choplik contacted police, the police contacted TLO's mother, and at the police station, TLO confessed to selling marijuana. TLO was charged with delinquency in juvenile court. Her defense argued that the search of the bag at school had been illegal under the Fourth Amendment, which reads, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue... but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

32:25Speaker 1:If the search was illegal, the evidence it unearthed would be inadmissible. This strategy, though, was unsuccessful, and TLO was convicted and sentenced to a year of probation. The 6-3 decision in New Jersey v. TLO was announced on January 15, 1985, and the court's opinion was authored by Justice Byron R. White. The court found that the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures does apply to school officials, not just to law enforcement officers. The court stated that students also have legitimate expectations of privacy at school, but those expectations have to be balanced against the school's need to maintain an environment that is conducive to learning. So this idea of balance exists for adults outside of school as well.

33:17Speaker 1:With a person's expectation of privacy and security balanced against the government's need for, in the court's words, effective methods to deal with breaches of public order. This is also connected to two different legal standards, reasonable suspicion and the probable cause referenced in the Fourth Amendment. Reasonable suspicion is a lower standard, requiring less evidence, and according to this decision, it's enough for a school official to search a student's property.

33:48Speaker 1:Probable cause is a higher standard with more evidence involved, and it's required for things like arrests and searches that are carried out by police. So the court found against TLO, and it summed up its thought process this way. Quote, a teacher had reported that TLO was smoking in the lavatory. Certainly, this report gave Mr. Choplik reason to suspect that TLO was carrying cigarettes with her. And if she did have cigarettes, her purse was the obvious place in which to find them.

34:18Speaker 1:After the court elaborated on that point for a little bit, it continued, quote, Our conclusion that Mr. Choplick's decision to open TLO's purse was reasonable brings us to the question of the further search for marijuana once the pack of cigarettes was located. The suspicion upon which the search for marijuana was founded was provided when Mr. Choplick observed a package of rolling papers in the purse as he removed the pack of cigarettes. Although TLO does not dispute the reasonableness of Mr. Choplik's belief that the rolling papers indicated the presence of marijuana, she does contend that the scope of the search Mr. Choplik conducted exceeded permissible bounds when he seized and read certain letters that implicated TLO in drug dealing. This argument, too, is unpersuasive. The discovery of the rolling papers conceitedly gave rise to a reasonable suspicion that TLO was carrying marijuana as well as cigarettes in her purse. This suspicion justified further exploration of TLO's purse. So, school officials can search students' properties, but they do have to have reasonable suspicion in order to do so. Yeah,

35:31Speaker 1:I feel like this one also has the, like, stepped angle of it where it's like and i found a thing that made me need to search more right which is part of what gets into like the legal trickiness of how her defense was trying to argue um which is fascinating yeah there's also a whole like i put it into the outline and then took it out because i felt like it was getting longish uh and it was not actually relevant to the final But during the proceedings of working its way through the courts, this raised another argument about whether she had incriminated herself, which is another, you have the constitutional right not to incriminate yourself. And it was unclear whether she had intentionally or unintentionally waived the right not to incriminate herself at the police station itself.

36:20Speaker 1:But this was like a whole other question. And this is a Supreme Court case. Yeah. Did not even get into. So of all of the cases, I feel like this one was one of the more complicated of these six that we've talked about. Yeah, for sure. Do you have complicated or uncomplicated listener mail? I have some really interesting listener mail. And I am not sure if this person goes by just the first name or the first and their middle name. So I'm just going to say Mary.

36:47Speaker 1:This is from Mary. And Mary wrote after our heat waves episode and said, Howdy, y'all. Just listen to the three heat waves episode. I'm a U.S. life actuary, and I've been keeping track of all sorts of mortality trends as part of my professional life. But I write about it on my sub stack with some posts on weather slash climate related deaths. One U.S. historical heat wave you may want to look into was in 1980. And then there's links and sources. In the 1980 heat wave, about 1,300 Americans died as a result from that specific heat wave.

37:24Speaker 1:A few hundred more died from extreme heat elsewhere. In the last decade, an increasing number of people have been dying from extreme temperatures, not only extreme heat, but also extreme cold. I just realized today I needed to update for 2025 data, which are now available. If you want happier weather-related death stories, deaths from lightning have dropped precipitously over the decades, partly due to improved weather forecasting. And then there is some information about the source of that in a chart, which does indeed show the number of annual lightning strike deaths just dropping from a high of almost 450 a year until almost none. Wonderful. Between zero and 50, more than almost none. There are some historically interesting lightning strike deaths. I came across a grave in the old burying ground in Hartford, Connecticut, where the person had died due to a lightning strike. And then there's information about this person, Captain Seymour, who was 49 and standing inside his house when the lightning struck it. Another lightning death I recall is that of a priest and perhaps altar servers at a church where Verdi, the opera composer,

38:43Speaker 1:used to be an altar server slash choir boy. There had been an anecdote that he had cursed that specific priest as a boy because he had gotten distracted during the mass and the priest smacked him in the head or something. or that one of the altar servers had bullied him, but it's apocryphal. The lightning strike itself, 1828, is not apocryphal, Mary. Thank you for this email, Mary. Yeah, that's cool. I did not know this about the heat deaths rising, and this chart makes it look like that there are actually more deaths from cold than heat. But all of the sources that I looked at from researching that episode said that on average, heat is the worst.

39:30Speaker 1:greatest cause of weather-related death in North America. And it makes total sense that there would be way fewer lightning strikes with the combination of better weather forecasting and also public education and about how to not get struck by lightning. Yes. Although I have in my lifetime seen some people flagrantly not doing that. Yeah. I'm remembering the time I was in Washington, D.C., and I was on the National Mall when a sudden, you know, summertime thunderstorm blew in, and I was... running at top speed to take shelter in a museum, and I ran past a scout leader who was sheltering under a tree with his troop. And I yelled at them about how bad that idea was and that they needed to get indoors. And then I told my dad about it, who was a scoutmaster for many years, and dad was irate about this man he had no contact with. So thank you again for this email. If you would like to send us a note, we're at historypodcasts at iheartradio.com. If you would like to see the show notes for these episodes where you can read just a whole lot of Supreme Court opinions, if you really want to, that is at our website, which is missedinhistory.com.

40:51Speaker 1:And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.