Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

And here's your 30-second summary.

9 score and 18 years ago. The tallage brought forth on this continent a young woman, conceived in Kentucky and dedicated to the proposition that not all potential husbands are created equal.

Now she is engaged in the Great Public War. Testing whether her reputation or any reputation so contorted in damage can overcome.

The history chicks are met on a battlefield of that Great War. It is all together proper and fitting that we should do this.

The End

Let's talk about Mary Todd Lincoln. But first let's drop her into history. In 1818 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus is first published in London.

Congress decided that the US flag will have 13 red and white stripes and 20 stars. Felix Mendelssohn, age 9, performs his first public concert in Berlin.

The Christmas Carol silent night is written and performed the very next day in Austria to English boxers are the first to use padded gloves. Illinois becomes the 21st state in the US making that flag obsolete.

Paul Revere, Abigail Adams, Queen Charlotte of Great Britain died. 1818 was a good year for several important births.

Women's right activists Lucy Stone and Amelia Blumer were born civil rights activists Frederick Douglass was born writer Emily Bronte was born and on December 13 18 18 the future Mary Todd Lincoln was born.

Mary and Todd was born like I said on December 13 18 18 in Lexington, Kentucky. She was the fourth of six living children to Robert and Eliza Parker Todd.

Now both mom and dad were Lexington, Kentucky aristocracy. The Todd and Parker families were kind of twisted together into this really cool dynasty tree.

Both of Mary's grandfathers who were cousins helped to settle Lexington. They followed Daniel Boone's recently marked road that he had done in 1775.

But as beginnings the town was kind of a misnomer. It was a few cabins behind a fort behind us, the arcade fans. But they really helped to build the town. They were firmly entrenched in it.

So yes, Papa was the son of a rich man, one of the founders of Lexington and had been well educated at Transylvania University.

A place admittedly that I take a picture of every summer on my way through like it cannot be real. It cannot be real. Yes, it's real.

It's all established and it's named after this very foresty part of Virginia called the Transylvania colony. But it throws me a new every year. You'd think I'd remember.

I had to look it up. So I can imagine seeing it would be kind of cool. I was like seriously, really am I reading that right? Yeah.

So anyway, Papa qualified as a lawyer at the tender age of only 20, but alas, there was quite a glut in the lawyery market around town and the war of 1812 intervened and he and three of his five brothers went off to fight.

Mamas family, though not quite as rich was probably at least in the 10% if not the 1%. She was the oldest daughter in a large family whose father died when she was only six, leaving her mother known to everyone in Lexington as simply widow Parker to live as a rich widow and like a city fixture for 50 more years.

Mamas brothers of course got an advanced education, but Mama and her sister Mary Ann just went to the Lexington female academy where they focused on penmanship, grammar, reading, writing, embroidery and painting until the age of 12 when it was considered silly to educate a woman any further.

...