With topics ranging from the disappearance of Aaron Burr’s daughter to the last Carolina parakeet, UNC Asheville alum Tracy V. Wilson and co-host Holly Frey’s Stuff You Missed in History Class explores the untold stories of the past.
The podcast, produced by the educational website HowStuffWorks, debuted in 2008. Since Wilson joined the podcast team in 2013, Stuff You Missed in History Class has become one of the most popular history podcasts on iTunes. With more than 1,000 episodes to date, the show continues to grow in popularity.
Wilson said her time at UNC Asheville started her on her podcast journey.
“One of the things I loved about UNCA’s liberal arts core is that it’s writing-intensive and it teaches students how to ask good questions and how to find good answers to those questions,” Wilson said. “It was really that combination of research and writing skills that allowed me to be hired at HowStuffWorks.”
For Wilson, the required humanities courses proved to be the most helpful in terms of finding a job after graduation.
“I think a lot of people in my generation learned history in a very dry, not particularly relevant way,” Wilson said. “Once I was out of my early school grades, my history classes involved reading incredibly dull textbooks and taking mostly multiple-choice tests on what we’d read. I had always loved to read, but I remember my history books being so boring that I had to force myself just to slog through my homework.”
Wilson said she felt as if she was being made to memorize the facts of history for its own sake with no connection to the world she was living in, something she said is pivotal in truly understanding history.
Though Wilson said she knows teachers today try to contextualize history for students, seeing these patterns was never something she was able to do in grade school.
“UNCA’s humanities courses, on the other hand, have a lot in common with a more current way of developing historical thought in students,” Wilson said. “We used things like literature and art as primary sources to try to understand the world views of different places and times in history. This was the first time that I saw history as something other than a bunch of disconnected facts that I needed to remember for a test, instead seeing it as a way for better understanding where we are in the world and how we got there.’
Wilson’s humanities courses got her interested in history, but it took several years for her to figure out how to harness that interest into her job.
After graduating from UNC Asheville in 1997 with a degree in literature and language, Wilson started her career at HowStuffWorks in 2005 as a senior staff writer. From there she moved up to manager of editorial staff development and then to editorial director. As of last year, she stepped down from her role as editorial advisor to focus on the podcast, which became its own entity separate from the website.
Wilson said her experiences at UNC Asheville helped her not only in her current job, but also allowed her to first experience the joys of education and challenge herself. She described the yearning to expand her education as a hallmark of her time at UNC Asheville.
“I wound up thriving in college and enjoying school in a way I had never expected to,” Wilson said. “My K-12 grades had always been fine without my having to put forth a lot of effort, but at UNCA I found that I continually wanted to really push myself to excel and learn more.”
Graduating with both Distinction as a University Scholar and Distinction as an Undergraduate Research Scholar and completing both a creative writing and literature thesis, Wilson certainly rose to the challenges she said UNC Asheville afforded her.
As a staff writer, Wilson was tasked each week with figuring out how one specific thing worked and explaining it in an interesting way.
“In a way, it was like being back at school,” Wilson said. “Every week I had an assignment that involved in-depth research, often on something I didn’t already know about. In the decade-plus since then, my job has morphed into creating audio content rather than text, but the same set of skills is still at the heart of it.”
Wilson said she enjoys working on podcasts because the research and writing processes are suited to her temperament. Each week she and Frey put out two episodes with each host taking the research lead for one of the two. Though they each have their own methods, they both put in between 16 and 24 hours of research per episode. Wilson said she draws on her college experiences for research and often draws from articles from JSTOR and other digital archives.
Though she and Frey host only one of dozens of history podcasts, Wilson said they are different ways to tell similar stories and they can all be interesting.
“There are so many different ways to approach a podcast and people’s tastes are really all over the map,” Wilson said. “There’s no one right way to do it, although caring about what you’re doing and having a good microphone and a quiet place to record certainly helps.”
You can hear Wilson in Stuff You Missed in History Class on the podcast website.
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