Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

Now let me read you an email right off the bat that we got from a listener named Jonathan,

who writes us with a very fun fact about the Billy Joel song, We Didn't Start the Fire.

I had the catcher in the ride Eisenhower vaccine. England's got a new queen. fact about the Billy Joel song, We Didn't Start the Fire.

Jonathan writes us pointing out that there are 59 people name-checked in that song,

which is basically a list of a bunch of notable events and people that happened between the 50s and the 80s. And Jonathan points out that there was a brief period

in which all 59 of those people were alive at the same time. So listeners, I will give you

like 10 seconds to try and guess when that might have been. This is a very hard trivia question.

If someone asked this at a trivia night, I would just be like, screw you, dude.

But it is in May of 1951 to September of 52.

All of the people in Billy Joel's Weed and Start the Fire, which was written many years later.

In the 80s were

alive. Sally Ride was born in May of 1951 and George Santayana died in September of 1952.

So Jonathan wrote us to suggest that this could be a good hook to revisit that song and

its many historical name checks. And Jonathan, you are right. That is a great idea.

And here we are doing it with, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. So I don't think we can take as a given that

everyone knows all the names we're going to discuss all the names in this song. But I don't think we can

take as a given that everyone knows this song. So, uh yeah we've all had it we've all had it stuck in our head for the last couple days of we've been prepping for this but um and we want to take a crack at just laying out what is this thing we're talking about billy joles we didn't start the fire The song is amazing. And I feel like it was on air all the time in the 1980s and 1990s when I was a kid.

And it was one of those things.

Okay, so imagine a world where the bare naked ladies don't exist yet. And that idea of the very fast talking song is still kind of a novelty. And that's what this song is in a way. Like it's sung. It's not talked, but it is basically just like every verse is just

a cramming in of all of these different references to people and things and events. And then

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