Hello and welcome to the show! Here for the last of our 2019 reruns. As we are on vacation,

we thought that since the Greta Gerwig Little Women is coming out on Christmas Day,

that we would send you slightly back in the time machine of the history chicks to an episode

from 2018 to our coverage of Louise May Elcott, the author of the original story of Little Women.

We hope you enjoy and now on with the show! Welcome to the history chicks where any resemblance to

a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental. And here's your 30-second summary!

4 Sisters Adventure Through Life in Civil War era New England. They make the best of poverty and

the absence of their father as they come of age and become the best little women that they can be.

And then one of them writes a novel about it that sells millions.

The End. Let's talk about Louise and May Elcott. But first let's drop her into history.

In 1868, the first US parade with floats took place during Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama.

The refrigerator car and the stapler were both patented and helium was first discovered.

The military Shogunate government ended in Japan and the governing power was returned to the Emperor.

Cornell University opened in New York and the first traffic lights were installed outside

Westminster Palace in London. And WACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois, future and last Zarr Nicholas

II of Russia and composer Scott Joplin were all born. And in 1868, a coming-of-age novel about

four sisters in Civil War era New England called Little Women was first published.

Louise and May Elcott was born on November 29, 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, the second

of the four surviving children of Amos, Bronson, Elcott and Abigail May Elcot.

Honor father's 33rd birthday, you think that would have created sort of a bond?

You would. It did one day year.

Papa was from rural Connecticut and was a member of a mostly illiterate farming family who was

...