Hello and welcome to This Day, a history podcast from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day we are in peak Girl Scout cookie season, folks.

Girl Scout cookies are technically available for sale from January through April,

but I really do think most people associate

them with this time of year, early spring.

But what year do we associate it with?

Well, that's what a listener wanted to know.

Shout out to Nathan, who said that he's interested to learn about the history of Girl

Scout cookies, but also any political or social forces that kind of may tie in.

So let's hook this to April 1917, because that was

indeed the year that started at all. The mistletoe troop in Muscogee, Oklahoma, baked cookies

to raise funds to help with the World War I efforts. It took off pretty quickly from then,

and then in the 1930s, it really became standardized and normalized and nationalized

and it kind of turned into the cookie industrial complex that we know and love today. So here

to discuss as always Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.

Hello, Jody. Hey there. I am of course going to ask you to rank your cookies in one second.

Okay.

Okay.

But, you know, look, we're a U.S.-based podcast.

I think usually we just sort of take that as an assumption that most people have a basic

understanding of U.S. history.

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