Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

This is a remarkably sad thing to say, but it's true. We live in an age of school shootings.

But like a lot of things in life, both good and bad, this isn't really a new phenomenon.

More frequent, sure. But new? Not so much.

So how far back do campus shootings go?

Try 1840.

Martin Van Buren was president.

Antarctica had just been discovered.

And on the morning of November 15th, the Richmond Inquirer reported the nation's first campus shooting on the bottom corner of page two.

In a single paragraph labeled painful occurrence,

the paper said that John A.G. Davis,

a beloved University of Virginia law professor, was, quote, shot by an unknown hand with a pistol in front of his dwelling,

and that, quote, the ball was received just below the

naval. Davis died. A manhunt was on for his killer. Now almost totally forgotten, the episode

bears some resemblance to the modern scourge of school shootings, the senselessness of motive,

the randomness of victims, the gun culture, as American as apple pie, gone totally awry.

Matthew Pearl, a novelist who wrote a short story based on the shooting,

described what happened in an essay for the Huffington Post in 2011.

Back in the 1800s, students at the University of Virginia wanted the freedom to carry guns on campus.

To mark the date when gun restrictions had been put in place, they had an annual

tradition of blowing off steam by rioting on campus and shooting pistols in the air. On the evening

of November 12, 1840, the tradition made its way to the campus homes of the school's professors

...