Hey folks, it's Jack. Do you ever find yourself wondering about the little mysteries in life?

Like how refrigeration happened? Or just how many times did the CIA try to assassinate

Fidel Castro anyway? If you find yourself going down rabbit holes like these, then I recommend

a trip to the podcast, History of Everything. Hosted by History lover Steven Bell and

scientist Gabby Bell, the show dives into all the cool but weird little details that make

our world what it is today. You can count on them to cover literally the history of everything,

from potatoes to the crusades. So don't miss out, listen to History of Everything wherever

you get your podcasts, and tell them I sent you. Hello, in 1868 a publisher asked one of his most

prolific authors to write a girl's story, a book four and about girls. The author refused,

telling a friend, quote, I could not write a girl's story knowing little about any but my own

sisters and always preferring boys. End quote. But when her father, a broken, at times broken down

philosopher and educator asked her to try, she finally agreed. I plod away, she wrote in her diary,

although I don't enjoy this sort of thing. Perhaps she didn't, but the world did. Her name was

Louisa May Alcott, and little women, the book she wrote in record time for money, became an immediate

hit. The four March sisters patterned after Louisa May and her siblings have been popular all over

the world ever since. In 2009 Alcott scholar Harriet Ryzen cited a Korean woman who had said,

you don't grow up to walk two steps behind your husband when you've met Joe March. End quote.

But who was this self-professed tomboy who adapted the lives of four girls into the literary world?

How did her parents, particularly her father, the utopian philosopher and educator,

Branson Alcott, influence her? What were the secret sensationalist novels she wrote under pseudonyms

and how did her milieu, the world of conquered Massachusetts before, during and after the civil war,

influence the world she saw and the world she chose to write about. Louisa May Alcott,

...