A Confederate Civil War Submarine Was Lost 150 Years Ago. Its Reappearance Was An Unsolved Mystery…Until Now

One of the most mysterious submarine disasters in history was the sinking of the HL Hunley, a Confederate Civil War submarine. This 40-foot-long tin can was the first to successfully attack another ship—but the results were as disastrous as they were historic. Shortly after its torpedo exploded, the Hunley disappeared off the coast of Charleston. The mystery of what happened to the Hunley and its crewmembers persisted for over a century until the sub was finally recovered in 2000. But the discovery of the sub only led to a more puzzling mystery—the skeletons of all eight crew members were found in the cramped interior, each seated at their stations with no indication they ever tried to escape.

Those mysterious deaths piqued the interest of today’s guest Rachel Lance, the leading underwater blast trauma specialist in North America, who found the case so fascinating that she banked her Ph.D. career on solving it. Lance, the author of the new book In the Waves, provides a definitive answer to what happened to the submarine and its crew on that fateful night. During three years of investigation, she went through archives, delved into previously unknown aspects of the blast and shock science, and built her own mini-submarine and explosives.

Machine-Generated Transcript

Below is an AI-generated transcript complete with timecodes. This transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the podcast episode.

Scott Rank 0:12
History isn’t just a bunch of names and dates and facts. It’s the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why we got here. Welcome to the history unplugged Podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange, and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is. I’m your host, Scott rank.

One of the most interesting stories of the Civil War is the CSS Hunley. This was the first combat submarine to sink a warship that USS use atonic. And this thing was basically a tin can. The Humvee was only 40 feet long. There were eight crewmen crammed into it was made out of solid iron and there was a tiny little Little snorkel inside with bellows he’s oxygenated the submarine. five members of the crew were killed in 1863 on the Hunley during the test run, and then it sank again in 1863 are all eight members of the second crew were killed. But in 1864, the Hunley sunk the 1200 and 40 displacement ton USS use atomic, however, right after that the Hunley itself disappeared when it was finally recovered in 2000. Here’s what was strange. The skeletons of all eight crew members were found in a cramped interior each receive that their station with no indication they ever tried to escape. And if a submarine were filling with water, then your brain is overloaded with co2 and you panic so what on earth is going on? to figure this out? In this episode, I am speaking with North America’s only underwater blast trauma specialist Rachel Lance Rachel’s a biomedical engineer who specializes in patterns of injury and trauma. She spent several years as an engineer for the US Navy, and She’s the author of the new book in the waves my quest to solve the mystery of civil submarine. So when Rachel tried to figure out the fate of the Hunley should archival research doing normal historical research, but then she also did scientifically and ballistics testing, she built a mini-submarine made of material sort of similar to the original Hunley to use for blast research, sending off explosions and lakes around North Carolina to test a variety of gauges and many bombs. She also had the help of an ATF agent to secure amounts of black powder for lab explosions to test the effects of blast waves and pressure on the Humphrey crew. So with all this, she was able to argue what was the fate of the Hunley and why the members of the crew died in the way they did. A really interesting look into a branch of naval history that most people don’t know much about. I certainly didn’t when we started, and there’s a lot to learn here. So hope you enjoyed this discussion with Rachel Lance. Rachel, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thank you for having me. Well, I am very interested in talking with you about a civil war era submarine, but something I’m curious about and it caught my eye when I saw the press materials for your book is That you are described as the only underwater blast specialist in North America. So please tell me what does an underwater blast specialist

Rachel Lance 3:08
Oh, you have to be even a little bit more specific than that. I’m the only underwater blast trauma specialists. Oh, very specific to human injuries. There are other people who study ships and what happens to inanimate structures. But what I do is I look at the patterns of injury and trauma that occurred to human beings during various scenarios. My personal favorite areas of research are underwater because I think it’s really just somewhere we’re not supposed to be in the first place, at least not biologically. And that makes for some really interesting physiology. One of the many ways that we can get hurt or killed underwater is from underwater explosions. And that seems a little bit obvious, right? You can blow someone up pretty much anywhere including underwater, but one of the reasons that it’s interesting is that you no longer see as the effects of shrapnel you’ll no longer see these projectiles, you only see injuries from the pressure waveform itself. And so that’s a lot of what I research is looking at the various ways that were killed from these underwater blasts, and especially how to prevent it, how to stay safer and farther away, or how to come up with preventative measures that reduce the impact.

Scott Rank 4:24
Well, when I’ve seen war movies, where I’ve seen descriptions of naval battles where a ship is sunk, or a submarine are torpedoed and I imagine being on that vessel and seeing the water rush in or instantaneously explode, there’s something about it that makes my toes curl in a way that other types of death that would be just as terrible don’t have simply been bombed, I don’t think of but drowning or being in a contained vessel and seeing the water rise. I don’t know what it is about that. Have you observed that with people as you’ve talked about your research, so you could just kind of see the dread in their eyes as he talked about these things. You’re looking

Rachel Lance 4:58
Oh yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a very human response, especially once you start describing the submarine, this thing was only 40 feet long, and it was only four feet in diameter. So once you start putting dimensions on that, and people imagine that they’re gonna have to be hunched over inside this tiny metal tube the whole time, they start to have a very realistic picture of what it would have been like to be trapped in something that’s small and then to be underwater, and also attached to a Giant Bomb at the same time. So it was one of those things where you have flooding of a vessel or things like that. I think part of it is mentally hard to deal with because you know that you have that warning time of seeing it coming.

Scott Rank 5:40
Well, let’s look at the Hunley I did a very long series with a guest on military battles in the Civil War. And we mentioned this briefly, but all we really did was mentioned that a submarine existed in the Civil War, and we were baffled by this and it had some strategic value. But could you describe what this actually was because I think when people hear this, they’re in imagining some type of retro steampunk technology like out of wild west or Leonardo da Vinci flying machines, this type of an acoustic technology? So what is a submarine in the 1860s?

Rachel Lance 6:11
Well, in the 1860s, it was a little bit like the Wild West, but only in that, there were no safety regulations. So you have a submarine that’s a homemade model. And this thing is hammered out of the recycled iron from the boiler of an old steamship, one of the three men, who are credited with its invention and creation was an engineer on steamships. And so you would have had access to all of these old parts. So together they hammered this 40 foot two together out of these recycled iron plates, and they added some bins and they added a propeller. It carried eight men total One of them was in the front and he had access to about two-inch diameter little window portholes. Now is how he steered and navigated. The other seven were inside and the third job was actually as the engine So this is a human-powered submarine. Each of those seven people was at one handle along with a long crank that ran through the belly of this thing. And together, they just cranked it continuously. And it was connected to a series of gears that eventually went outside to the propeller. And that was how the hudley moves through the water. Hmm.

Scott Rank 7:20
And other things to my ignorance will come out here because I don’t really know how a submarine works when it comes to oxygen, and I’m assuming there are methods to keep it going. So no one suffocates but what do you do about oxygen supply in a vessel like the humbly

Rachel Lance 7:34
Oh, well, they kind of just

toughed it out. To be perfectly honest. It had a little snorkel system. So if you look at pictures, right after the forward conning tower, which is kind of like this kettle shaped thing, you see this box with an antenna and those antennae are the snorkel system and inside the Hunley, there was basically a large fireplace bellow and in theory, they pump that bellows to circulate the air now in practice, and I’ve done a lot of math to support this. It didn’t seem to work that well. But yeah, the historical testimony and then the actual theoretical math lineup together, that the snorkel system didn’t really push enough air to give them a fresh supply. So what they really would have done is they just would have breathed it down until it became uncomfortable, or they had like a little warning candle in there. If their warning candle, extinguish, then they would surface and just open up the hatches.

Scott Rank 8:32
Okay, well, that is a very blunt fourth force method to do it because there’s not any other way at the time. So looking at the Henley’s operational legacy, what did the Confederate States of America hope that it would accomplish and what did it actually accomplish when it went on its mission,

Rachel Lance 8:48
their big goal was to break the blockade. What was happening by 1864 was the Charleston South Carolina was the last major city in the south. That was still in Confederate control. So at this point, the union military has really closed in, they’ve been very successful in taking over all the various ports and harbors, and Charleston is kind of the last big one standing. What they were doing was focusing all of their firepowers on it, and trust and also is where the Civil War started. So that’s really decided to secede. All of these union men and union officers are therefore determined to kind of just buckle this city. And so they set up shop surrounding the entire harbor and they’re gonna starve them out is their goal. They’re not gonna let in any supply ships, they’re not gonna let in anyone bringing food, and they are shelling the city every night. The goal of the huddling and the reason these guys call inside is that they were on the receiving end of all of this. So we have letters home from at least the pilot towards Dixon who’s talking about the lack of food, he’s talking about how much weight he’s lost and how he has nothing to eat, and he’s constantly in the range of gunfire and that kind of led To me helps give a logical motivation of why they would do something so risky. But what they wanted to do is use their little submarine to sink one of those union ships, since submarines were so incredibly new. And they were very stealthy and both sides were developing them. So they both kind of knew what was going on a little bit. But the actual men on the decks didn’t know what was happening. The Confederate thought that this would strike enough terror into the fear into the Confederate thought that this would strike enough terror into the men of the black hate that they would all just take their ships and go home and open it up and they would be able to get fresh supplies in. It didn’t end up actually working out that way. They ended up standing their ground. They continued the blockade Charleston fell exactly one year to the day after the Henley’s attack, but what it did was it completely changed the face of warfare. So now obviously submarines are everywhere. About a quarter of the countries in the world have them and they’re in Major facet of naval warfare today,

Scott Rank 11:02
the Humvee launcher torpedo. What does a torpedo look like in the 1860s? Again, this speaks to my ignorance, but in my mind, I imagine a toy that you would get from the dollar store a wind-up rubber band, a propeller that would then go out to the ship. Am I completely off base here? Is there something to it?

Rachel Lance 11:19
You’re gonna laugh because you’re not completely off base, but also You’re thinking too advanced.

Unknown Speaker 11:25
Okay.

Rachel Lance 11:26
Yeah. So the word has actually changed in meaning. And that was one of the things that the Hunley did was at that time. You have the word torpedo. And what that means is actually what we would call now either just a bomb or a mind, so it’s stationary. So when you hear like the famous phrase from Admiral Farragut, he’s like, Damn the torpedoes Full speed ahead. He’s actually talking about stationary minds that they’re sealing your ship through a minefield at that point. And the same is true of the Henleys. So it had a spar on the back. And it was attached just like at the front end on the very bottom

and on the end of it was their torpedo, which was literally just a stationary bomb with no propulsive mechanism of its own. And it had a pressure trigger. So they had to get that close to the enemy ship. They had to crank this thing close enough to the whole of the USS Housatonic to just stab it in the side

with this bomb, and set it off.

And that’s exactly what happened. So we know that they were at most 16 feet away from the blast when it occurred.

Scott Rank 12:32
Wow, we’ll get into what happens to the Hunley but what’s the immediate result of this is the Union Army shocked at what happened to they know what happened is the Confederacy somehow believe they have supremacy in the arms race,

Rachel Lance 12:46
they immediately know what happens.

So both sides are working on submarines, even though they’re mutually pretending they’re not both sides have spies even though they’re mutually

Unknown Speaker 12:55
presenting NATO.

Rachel Lance 12:56
So they both kind of know that these technologies are a thing that Both picking away at and they immediately knew that it was a submarine attack, especially because of a lot of the crew that whose atonic survived. From their perspective, this bomb goes off underneath the starboard hall or boat. Immediately the ship starts to sink like right away, and it is on the ocean floor in less than five minutes.

Thankfully for them, it was only in 30 feet of water. So that becomes really key because this is

the middle of February. And even though it’s the south, this is still the Atlantic Ocean. So the water temperatures in February of Charleston are still pretty cold. The modern averages are about 50 degrees where if you’re in that water for two hours, you’re dead from hypothermia. So this crew managed to scramble up the rigging and the mass so they’re clinging to the mass and the sales and the various pieces of rigging as their ship sinks to the bottom of the ocean. And that’s where they stay for about another hour until one of the other union vessels in the blockade was able to come and rescue them and pick them out of there.

Scott Rank 14:06
All right, as far as sinkings go, that’s much more manageable than if they were in deep water.

Rachel Lance 14:11
Right? It could have been a lot worse for them. There are about 200 people on that ship and only five died. So obviously, you never want to make light of the loss of life. But in terms of a combat situation, that’s not the most fatal scenario that could have occurred. And then the Confederacy knew of the victory because they knew that the union was talking about it. And they immediately actually thought that the Hunley was back. The first rumor that spread around Charleston was that they’d all made it back home alive. It was only a few days later that they realized the truth of the submarine was never going to come back.

Scott Rank 14:47
Right. And before we get up to its discovery, the Hunley disappears, what do people think to happen there?

Rachel Lance 14:54
Well, one thing you have to understand about this submarine is that it’s already got a reputation either before it goes out, this thing is called more dangerous to those who use it than the enemy, I believe is the quote, I have to look up the exact wording, but it’s already sunk twice. And that’s not including their original designs. They had made two other previous entire submarines, both of which think multiple times, and the Hunley herself sink twice in practice. The first time she didn’t kill her whole crew. But the second time she did and that was actually the one where Horace Hundley was driving. And they renamed it in his honor after he died in the boat. So this submarine is already known to be extremely dangerous, it’s extremely prone to sinking. The people inside don’t have a lot of time to react. They’ve died these horrifying ways the descriptions of their bodies and how they’re trying to claw their way out the exits have made their way through the rumor mill in Charleston. So when it doesn’t come back on February 17, nobody is extremely surprised by that. They all just kind of think the same thing happened yet again.

Scott Rank 16:05
If you were trying to escape, I’m assuming the outside pressure would be so great. It would be difficult to open attach, is there any means of escaping it if it’s sinking or in operational?

Rachel Lance 16:15
Yes, there’s actually really one of my favorites submarine facts of all time. There is a German submarine called the brand talker. And it was about 10 years before the Civil War, but they sink during a trial run as they were practicing. And their captain had the savvy. They also had the benefit of a slightly larger hatch, which I think is helpful. The Henley’s hatches were very small, but their captain had the wisdom and the quick thinking to flood the submarine. And when you do that, you bring up that pressure inside the vessels so that you can actually open the hatch. So he did that and him the three of the men inside that one escaped successfully. So that’s the first successful submarine escape in history.

Scott Rank 16:58
Well, not so much with the humbly so Yeah, let’s look at the discovery. And this is also a ghost story. So when they find out how it is, so what is the condition when its remains are discovered?

Rachel Lance 17:10
Well, that’s where it got interesting to me. They brought this thing up in 2000. And the first thing that everyone notice is, is there a couple of little pieces where it looks like it’s been subject to the ravages of 150 years underwater. That makes sense. But otherwise, it looks pretty intact. There’s no damage from the bomb. And then the more they asked me about it, the more that mystery deepens. The key piece of information that really hooked me and I think has hooked a lot of other people on this is when they opened it up, and they started pulling out the dirt in the soil and they accumulated crud from the inside, and they found the bones of the crew were still in there. But not only that, they were all seated through paddle stations. It’s human nature if you’re trapped in a submarine to try and get out and there is a degree to which you do don’t even have a choice because as carbon dioxide builds up, it causes a biological panic response. So no matter how cool and level headed a person is, under normal circumstances, they’re being subjected to a chemical signal to cause them to panic. And for all eight people to have just sat there quietly, is a pretty strong indicator that whatever happened to them, they didn’t see it coming, it had to have been very quick. So from there, you need to look at that puzzle piece, and then figure out what the other options are for what might have sunken.

Scott Rank 18:31
Well, this is where you come into the story and decide to do some research and CSI. So when you hear about the story, what makes you think, Okay, I’m going to try to find out what really happened here. A lot of

Rachel Lance 18:41
it, honestly, I think just came down to stubbornness. There was this puzzle and it just bugged me and I just wanted to figure it out. And that’s kind of I think the personality of a scientist is you have to be irked by a lack of answer to the point that you’re willing to spend your whole day. So over it.

And that’s kind of what happened with me with this one is it looked at

it and I thought, Okay, well, I actually do have the tools to at least contribute something to this. If nothing else, I knew that I could calculate the amount of gas that would have been inside the submarine and look at the values for that. And then, of course, I was kind of an addict. After that, I wanted to keep going. I wanted to keep investigating other theories and I ended up doing that.

Scott Rank 19:26
Yeah, what were some of your professional experiences that helped you to get some insight into what could have caused me to sink a

Rachel Lance 19:33
bit. One was knowing how to do gas calculations. Before I came back to grad school, I was working as a mechanical engineer for the US Navy, and my main job there was to build underwater breathing systems. So that has a pretty obvious tie in already I have this background in how to calculate how much gas supply you have. And what happens is you lose oxygen and what happens is you build up carbon dioxide and I think that was really important to at least looking at the initial problem of did this fixie inside the submarine? Because that was the leading theory at the time. So once I was able to use professional expertise and my kind of scientific background to piece together that no they would have been feeling carbon dioxide, they would have been in pain, they would have been extremely uncomfortable from carbon dioxide long before they had any chance of losing consciousness from oxygen loss. Then, from there, I felt like I had kind of knocked the mean theory out of the running and I really needed to be able to provide an alternative.

Scott Rank 20:40
Well, I’m very curious about your research methods here and my audience, too. They like historiography and the process of putting together historical stories. And I have many guests who have gone into the archives and looked at old manuscripts and original sources, but I think you might be the first to has done ballistics testing. Yeah, science, stuff like that. So what were the different things you do to research different theories?

Rachel Lance 21:05
It all depends. I mean, science tells you what it needs. So anytime you have a problem or a question, it’s gonna tell you the circumstances in the environment and you don’t get to dictate what the problem looks at, you just have to adapt to it. That was very true with this one. Like, for example, you mentioned the archival research. So I was looking at the theory that the crew of the whose atonic shot at the Henley as it was approaching, we do know that the crew saw the Humvee approaching, she was not fully submerged at the time, and that one of their firearms manage to the sinker, but that did that require both archival research and ballistic testing because I wanted to shoot at modern cast iron, make sure that I had a controlled experiment with a firearm where I knew exactly what the variables were. But I also wanted to make sure that my cast iron was accurately representing what was historically true, and so on. I had a combination of things for that, just like you said, where there was a civil war re-enactor. Ken was just super generous and he was willing to come and bring his firearm and shoot a bunch of cast iron for me, which is really helpful. And then also going to the National Archives in DC and spending just weeks looking through old documents, which they have in spades, thankfully. So,

Scott Rank 22:25
yeah, tell me more about the work with the mini-submarine and explosive. So if I understand correctly, you designed a miniature of the Hunley.

Rachel Lance 22:35
Yes, you can scale a lot of glass problems. It’s not perfect. There are limits to how small you can go. Obviously, once you get really tiny, there are some other physics coming into play. But for the most part, you can create a scale model. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do. So the original Hudley was 40 feet long, and my scale was dictated by the size of my car. did not want to have to rent a truck for every experimental day. So I built it to one six scales, which gave me a six and a half foot submarine roughly. And that was the largest size I could fit in my sedan. But yeah, so from there, I also built little scale spars and I worked with an ATF agent who is nice enough to volunteer his time to build scale black powder charges as well. And we took them out to a pond. And we set them off and I was able to measure what was occurring both in the water and then inside the submarine as well.

Scott Rank 23:35
I’m sure you had no problem finding volunteers to shoot guns at a replica Civil War submarine. I think that would give people volunteer for that.

Rachel Lance 23:44
It’s funny because I think people are willing to volunteer because they really misunderstand, like how tedious and precise science can be. So I always had a vote. I had a ton of volunteers for day one. After that, people start laughing Kind of avoiding you.

Scott Rank 24:02
Yeah, lab research a little I understand not nearly as sexy as just putting in a magazine and opening fire on it as much as you want.

Rachel Lance 24:10
Yeah, they’re good day.

Scott Rank 24:12
Yeah, it’s their mess with the submarine itself. Okay, so to be able to design one that would give accurate data for what would have happened to the original Hunley? How close did you have to be? I mean, I’m guessing it doesn’t have to be a situation of finding a civil war reenactor who also does period-accurate welding and using the exact type of iron that would have existed at that time and all those different methods? So that sounds like one extreme or the other extreme. You couldn’t just use any material. So how close did you have to approximate it and how did you design it in order to get what you needed?

Rachel Lance 24:47
Absolutely. Okay, so Well, thankfully, I’m not the first one to study this field. If I had been the first one that sort of flunking a project, but luckily there’s a lot of information already out there. They’re about how blast affects structures. And like any scientist, I was able to kind of build on the things that were done by people before me. One of the things you mentioned that was really important as a material because this thing in the 1860s was built out of wrought iron. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to find wrought iron. But there are like a few people who make fancy fences for an extreme amount of money. And that’s pretty much it. You’re not gonna find anyone to make you a wrought iron submarine in the 21st century, do what I had to do was find the next closest material. And what I ended up doing was looking at this physics looking at the decades of work done by blast physicists before me of what parameters were important. So I picked out my parameters that were going to be key to this problem. And then I found the material that most closely replicated them. For me, that was mild steel. Which is a kind of soft steel, it’s not stainless so it will rust really easily. But it’s accurate to wrought iron within like two or 3%. Which given the number of variables that you see day to day in a blast experiment anyway, then that was pretty good for me. And it’s also really easy to machine. So that was also a bonus.

Scott Rank 26:23
So when you came to the experiment to fire at it, what did you discover? Or what were the results that started to clue you on to the fate of the Hunley?

Rachel Lance 26:32
Okay, just to clarify, we fired at casting samples with the guns. Okay. When we were doing the blast experiments, we were using small explosive charges. Yeah, we weren’t shooting at the summary. And although some days I did feel like I wanted to.

It could be frustrating. But

yeah, so we were using these small explosive charges. And what we were looking at was, first of all, The last waveform in the water, because you can tell a lot about that. Just in terms of are you setting this up correctly. So based on your strength and what you’re expecting what it looks like compared to other data that was really important. And that was really key for me in troubleshooting. And then the other thing we’re looking at is how that last waveform was affecting the submarine. So I had multiple gauges like inside the bow, as well as gauges measuring how that hole moved and responded. And that’s, I think we’ll, we’ll leave, we’ll leave a little mystery for the book there. But yeah, those are some of the things that I was measuring in response.

Scott Rank 27:38
All right, well, as much as you care to share, what do you think was the end result? Based on what you could tell? How did the crew of the Hunley meet their fate and not appear to be trying to escape what their lives in their final moments?

Rachel Lance 27:54
I mean, they had a bomb the size of a beer keg and they were less than 16 feet away. So to me as a boss trauma researcher, when you see someone that close to a bomb that big, you think, did they die from the bomb? And that was my theory from the outset. But the real key is proving it in science. You can’t the real eureka moment is not when you develop your theory, the real eureka moment is when you get your experimental setup to work. And so that’s a lot of what the book is about. It’s about trying to get this data to evaluate whether or not they could have potentially been killed by their own bomb.

Scott Rank 28:29
How long did it take from when you were first able to set up experiments till you believe that you had conclusive proof if you want to call it that? Your theory?

Rachel Lance 28:39
Yeah, with the submarine, it was about six or seven months. I had already been working on it for quite some time before that as well just looking at gauges and looking at different aspects of the setup. But yeah, once I got the submarine in half in hand, and I at that point, that was the last piece I needed to really head out to the pond and start blasting.

Scott Rank 28:58
So what do you think? I mean, with being able to understand what has happened with the Hunley Do you think it’s helped other people with a why that now that we know it’s fake? This helps us better understand the period or when it comes to submarine warfare, this illuminates something and what do you think? I guess the contribution is now with this discovery.

Rachel Lance 29:20
I think the contribution, my favorite response, this book has just been the number of people who didn’t understand blast. And one of the things that I thought was possible, but I didn’t fully anticipate To what degree it would happen was the number of veterans who have reached out to me so that’s been really heartwarming for me as a former naval employee, like obviously, our active duty men and women are really important to me. And the number of veteran veterans who have reached out and said, this is the first real understandable explanation of blast trauma, or now I understand what was going on a lot better. That’s what I personally have taken away from It, I don’t know that this problem will necessarily provide any massive or magical insight in terms of the blast in the future, just because it’s such a weird and rare occurrence to have happened. But yeah, I’m hopeful that if I can just educate people a little bit more about what’s going on and what’s going on with current blast problems and traumatic brain injuries, and that’ll be a contribution.

Scott Rank 30:26
That’s something I’m curious about and maybe a way to wrap this up and tie these in together is when you’re talking about blast trauma in general. This isn’t obviously just a civil war thing but goes along with naval warfare itself. So what is something that you think is important if they understand blast trauma better that you wish people would understand about it better?

Rachel Lance 30:49
I think I would just like people to understand that a lot of injuries are invisible. And that’s very true with blast trauma. And it’s especially true with traumatic brain injury is everyone kind of thinks like, Oh, well, you know, the brains inside the crew skull of the Hunley were intact, so, therefore, it couldn’t have been boss trauma. And I don’t want active duty people having this horrifying image in their heads of their brains just becoming scrambled eggs. Because they don’t their brains are intact years after the fact you can often do an MRI and see no difference. But that doesn’t mean that the trauma isn’t real. These injuries are real and they affect real people and an understanding of what they actually look like and how they can be subtle, I think is really important to interacting properly with their survivors.

Scott Rank 31:44
Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is really interesting and hats off to you for creatively looking at this problem and finding a lot of different ways to attack it both with firearms explosives archival research a lot together, but Very interesting. So, people. Yeah, absolutely. So people want to check out the book. The name is in the waves my quest to solve the mystery of a civil war summary. Rachel, thank you for joining us.

Rachel Lance 32:10
Yeah, thank you again for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Scott Rank 32:13
There you have it. That is all for today’s episode. Once again, I want to start things off by thinking about the spymasters of history unplugged. Oh, explain what that is in a second. Responding masters include bill IV moon doggie from Ohio, Tom from Ohio, Ryan Gillan, Rob from Chicago, Nick Brooks, Michael from New York, Carl from Norway. Josh Reddick, Jennifer French Lee J. Carrington, McRae’s, David Santee, Chris See, and Baron Fraser. If you’d like to support the show, there are some very easy ways to do so. First, go to the site half price history calm. I’ve worked out an arrangement with a lot of the authors who’ve appeared on this show, and you can go there and get their books for 50% off. All you have to do is go to half price history.com enter the promo code unplugged at checkout. Second, please leave a review and Subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player of choice whether Apple podcasts or Spotify or whatever. Third, join our Facebook group you can go to Facebook and search for history unplugged there you can talk with other fans of the show about recent episodes what you liked what you didn’t like. Also, I have exclusive content there such as live streams where I do live versions of podcast episodes where you can leave feedback as I’m talking and I will address it on air. Last and I think this is the best is to join our membership program the Bolton’s Rangers. Nelson’s Rangers were George Washington spies during the Revolutionary War, but it’s also the name of the membership program for history unplugged. If you go to patreon.com slash unplugged, you can join the membership program at three levels. If you join at the scout level, you’ll get all 400 episodes of history unplugged, absolutely ad-free, and early access to new episodes. If you join the second level, the intelligence officer level gets all the stuff that scouts get along with bonus episodes. There’s currently about 40 of them. including series on Audie Murphy and operation long jump about the Nazi attempt to assassinate FDR Churchill install it in 1943. Finally, if you join the spymaster level, you’ll get a shout out to you and or your business. At the end of each episode, you get a three-pack of hardcover history books, and you can find out what those are if you go to patreon.com slash unplugged. Finally, you can ask me a question about history on absolutely any topic on earth, and I will research it and devote an entire episode to your question. Probably about 30% of the questions in the archive for the show have been based on these sorts of questions. So there you go. Go to patreon.com slash unplugged to learn more. All right, well, that is all for today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai