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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh, Tracy, we're at a time of year.

We are. When a lot of folks are kind of looking to the future and thinking about the coming

year and setting goals to themselves, we've talked about it many times on the show, I love doing

that. I love the year turnover and I love a good resolution and a new planner. But this also

leads to a lot of people purchasing self-help books of one kind or another

as they work on those goals.

And I am very fascinated by the self-help genre.

So I thought it might be interesting to talk about the ways self-help books have evolved over time,

even before they were called self-help books.

But here's the real, real.

I almost produced a very different episode.

I started out actually working on an episode about positive psychology and the ways

...