90 Second Narratives: Recent Episodes

Sky Michael Johnston

90 Second Narratives is a podcast featuring engaging true stories told by trained historians. Each episode includes a short story interwoven with expert analysis of the story’s historical significance. The concise length and storytelling format of the episodes make history accessible, dynamic, and entertaining. The subjects of the stories are diverse—spanning the globe and ranging from the pre-historic to the modern age. While individual stories stand alone, the episodes in each season are linked thematically and combine to offer comparative perspectives that illuminate connections from across the human experience. Every episode also includes recommendations for further reading. 90 Second Narratives provides a novel way to hear historians share the wonders of the past in their own voices.

This special episode combines all the stories from Season 10…

“The Cepalinos’ Global Fight against Inequality” – Dr. Margarita Fajardo, Alice Stone Ilchman Chair in Comparative and International Studies, Sarah Lawrence College

“Addressing Slavery in the Museum” – Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor of History, Howard University

“The Perseverance of Menominee Women” – Dr. Jillian Marie Jacklin, Lecturer in Democracy and Justice Studies, History, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Harlem” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston

“Creative Community Responses to Climate Change in New England” – Emma C. Moesswilde, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of History, Georgetown University

“In the spring of 1816, the weather in New England turned suddenly chilly. A distant volcanic eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 had expelled sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere in such quantity that they reduced the amount of solar energy that could reach Earth’s surface…”

So begins today’s story from Emma C. Moesswilde.

For further listening:

Climate History

For further reading:

J. Luterbacher and C. Pfister, “The Year Without a Summer,” Nature Geoscience 8 (2015): 246–48.

“In mid-twentieth-century Latin America, an intellectual movement that changed the region, the world, and the global economy emerged. The members of the movement were called cepalinos…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Margarita Fajardo.

For further reading:

The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Eraby Margarita Fajardo (Harvard University Press, 2022)

“On November 20, 1955, David Ames, an anthropologist and research associate with the Wisconsin Legislative Council’s Menominee Indian Study Committee spoke with Phebe Nichols Jewell the wife of Angus Lookaround at their home on the Menominee reservation in Northeast Wisconsin…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Jillian Marie Jacklin.

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the most significant theologians of the twentieth century. To this day, large audiences are still drawn to his important writings including The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together, and Ethics. But Bonhoeffer is even more widely-known for his remarkable and tragic biography…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further viewing:
Dr. Victoria Barnett, “From Harlem to Berlin: Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Experience of American Racism” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_iAL8GvSqk]

“In the past three decades black social actors, committed curators, public historians, and academics have pushed western museums to examine slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in their exhibition spaces. But the introduction of slavery in the museum has been very problematic…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo.

For further reading:
Museums and Atlantic Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (Routledge, 2021)

This special episode combines all the stories from Season 9…

“Becoming a Friend of God in Eighteenth-Century North Africa” – Dr. Zachary Wright, Associate Professor of History and Religious Studies at Northwestern University in Qatar

“Posthumous Friendships between Jesuit Brothers” – Dr. Ulrike Strasser, Professor of History at the University of California San Diego

“Life’s Seasons and the Friendships of Frederick the Great” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston, Associated Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) Mainz

“Otto von Bismarck’s Four-Legged Friends” – Dr. Claudia Kreklau, Associate Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews

“Narragansett Friendship, Roger Williams, and Religious Freedom in America” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston

“The Friendship that Introduced a Heroine of Mexican Independence to the World” – Dr. Silvia Marina Arrom, Jane’s Professor of Latin American Studies Emerita in the History Department at Brandeis University

“On the Doors of the U.S. Supreme Court” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston

“Today a flight from Prague to Guam covers an aerial distance of over 7,100 miles and takes about 15 hours. The journey may seem far, long, and cumbersome to many travelers. Yet today’s challenges pale when compared to those faced in 1678 by Augustinus Strobach…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Ulrike Strasser.

For further reading:

Missionary Men in the Early Modern World: German Jesuits and Pacific Journeys by Ulrike Strasser (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Read it now for free via Open Access here.

“As enshrined on the door of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in bronze, John Marshall and Joseph Story were friends. But what was it that earned this pair of friends the most prominent place on these monumental seventeen-foot doors? It was this: their association with the 1803 Supreme Court case Marbury v. Madison. That was the case that established the principle of judicial review, giving the federal courts power to declare legislative and executive acts unconstitutional…”

So continues today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:

Joseph Story, “Memoir of the Hon. John Marshall.”

“During a recent visit to Washington D.C. with my family, we visited the United States’ Supreme Court Building. It was a quiet Monday afternoon without a cloud in the sky…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:
“The Bronze Doors” Information Sheet

“Many long-term friendships change over time with the seasons of life. This was certainly true in the case of Frederick II, King of Prussia, known as Frederick the Great…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:
Frederick the Great: King of Prussia by Tim Blanning (Random House, 2016)

“I want to tell you about the friendship between two women, nearly two centuries ago, that’s had a very long tail in Mexican history. On February first, 1840, shortly after arriving in Mexico City, Fanny Calderón de la Barca – the Scottish wife of the new Spanish ambassador – met doña María Ignacia Rodríguez de Velasco…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Silvia Marina Arrom.

For further reading:
La Guera Rodriguez: The Life and Legends of a Mexican Independence Heroine by Silvia Marina Arrom (University of California Press, 2021)

“‘The true scholar,’ the 18th-century North African Sufi master Shaykh Ahmad al-Tijani told his disciples, ‘is the one who gives form to what is clear, and clarifies what is ambiguous, and this from the strength of his knowledge, the breadth of his understanding, the soundness of his spiritual vision (naẓr)and his verification (taḥqīq)’…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Zachary Wright.

For further reading:
Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World by Zachary Valentine Wright (University of North Carolina Press, 2020)

“Historians point to the year 1648 as a watershed moment in the development of religious tolerance in Europe. In that year, the Peace of Westphalia brought an end to the Thirty Year’s War—one of Europe’s grimmest chapters of religiously-inflected violence…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:
Michael Warren Murphy, “‘No Beggars amongst Them’: Primitive Accumulation, Settler Colonialism, and the Dispossession of Narragansett Indian Land,” Humanity & Society 42 (2018).

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, New York: Penguin Books, 2012.

“Historians like to say, everything has a history. Recently, the history of animals, has seen some development. The history of dogs, living closely beside humans for millennia as guards, workers, hunting aids and companions, illustrates a relationship with nature over time and sheds light on how our species has understood our role on our planet as owners, custodians, or exploiters of the natural world, and it includes ambiguous friendships…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Claudia Kreklau.

For further reading:
Parry, Tyler D., and Charlton W. Yingling. “Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas.” Past & Present 246 (2020): 69–108.

A.W.H. Bates, (ed.), Anti-Vivisection and the Profession of Medicine in Britain: A Social History, The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017.

This special episode combines all the stories from Season 8…

“A Black Woman’s Spiritual Journey to the City” – Dr. J. T. Roane, Assistant Professor of African & African American Studies at Arizona State University

“Cotton: Connecting the Atlantic World” – Dr. Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University

“Soju: A Liquor’s Global Journey” – Dr. Hyunhee Park, Associate Professor of History at the City University of New York, John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center

“The Columbian Exchange” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston, Associated Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) Mainz

“Hotel Owners and the Shape of Japanese Transpacific Migration” – Dr. Yukari Takai, Research Associate at the York Centre for Asian Research at York University and Visiting Research Scholar at the International Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan

“Chinese Migration and the Shaping of Costa Rica” – Dr. Benjamín Narváez, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota Morris

“A US Consul on the Road to a Coup” – Dr. Abby Mullen, Term Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and Host/Executive Producer of the Consolation Prize podcast

“Using Astrology to Plan Journeys” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston

“The ‘Conflict Thesis’: A Resilient Idea’s Journey” – Dr. James C. Ungureanu, Humanities Teacher at Trinity Classical Academy in Santa Clarita, California

"What factors do you take into consideration before going on a journey? Do you have any sense of when is a good time for a journey? Or, a good time for a specific type of journey? In sixteenth-century Germany, people had a way of systematizing the good and bad times for many of life’s activities, including travel…"

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:
Der Bawren Practica oder Wetterbüchlein

“When historians of science and religion write about the ‘conflict thesis,’ what are they talking about?”

So begins today’s story from Dr. James C. Ungureanu.

For further reading:
Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict by James C. Ungureanu (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)

“At the turn of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Japanese migrants left their island nation, landed in Hawai’i, only to depart for Seattle, San Francisco, Vancouver, or Victoria…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Yukari Takai.

For further reading:
Yukari Takai, “Recrafting Marriage in Meiji Hawai’i, 1885-1913,” Gender & History, 31, 3 (2019), 646-664.

“One of the most famous, and consequential, journeys in the history of humanity was Christopher Columbus’ fateful journey across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:
The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 by Alfred W. Crosby (1972)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“When American soldier William Eaton started his search for Hamet Karamanli in late 1804, he had an audacious plan…

So begins today’s story from Dr. Abby Mullen.

For more, listen to the Consolation Prize podcast.

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“I am looking at a square cotton canvas about 10 cm by 10 cm. A grid of black and white tiles – they look like domino counters - have been painted on it in alternating patterns. This canvas was given to me by the wonderful artist and Turner Prize winner, Lubaina Himid CBE…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Anna Arabindan-Kesson.

For further reading:
Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World by Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Duke University Press, 2021)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Crossing the thresholds between worlds…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. J. T. Roane.

For further reading:

“A Totally Different Form of Living: On the Legacies of Displacement and Marronage as Black Ecologies” Southern Cultures 27 (2021) by Justin Hosbey and J. T. Roane

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“On November 20, 1930 the Ulúa arrived in Limón, Costa Rica with four Chinese passengers carrying Costa Rican passports…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Benjamín Narváez.

For further reading:
“The Power and Pitfalls of Patronage: Chinese Immigrants in Costa Rica during the Era of Exclusion, 1897–1943” Journal of Migration History 6 (2020)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“For those who have not yet tasted soju, or heard about it, soju is the distinctive national spirit of Korea, a clear and colorless distilled liquor similar to vodka. It was only available inside Korea in the twentieth century, but soju is now one of the world’s most popular drinks…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Hyunhee Park.

For further reading:
Soju: A Global History by Hyunhee Park (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

This special episode combines all the stories from Season 7…

“Togolese Women in the Struggle for Independence” – Marius Kothor, PhD candidate in the Department of History at Yale University

“Taungurung Community in Australia” – Dr. Jennifer Jones, Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, Archaeology and History at La Trobe University’s Albury-Wodonga Campus

“Native Americans in Anti-Colonial Networks” – Dr. Justin Gage, Visiting Researcher at the University of Helsinki and Instructor at the University of Arkansas

“An Islamic Community in Nineteenth-Century West Africa” – Dr. Mauro Nobili, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“The Church Order in the Protestant Reformation” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston, Associated Fellow, Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) Mainz

“Underdogs in the American Imagination” – Dr. Bruce Berglund, Historian

“Community in Loneliness” – Dr. Fay Bound Alberti, Reader in History at the University of York

“Healers in Seventeenth-Century Angola” – Dr. Kalle Kananoja, Senior Researcher in the Department of History at University of Oulu

“Intellectuals in Hindustan” – Dr. Manan Ahmed Asif, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University

“The story that I want to tell you is about loneliness…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Fay Bound Alberti.

For further reading:
A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion by Fay Bound Alberti (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Even someone who is well-versed in the history and theology of the Protestant Reformation might not know much about the subject of this story: the church order…

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:
James M. Estes, “Johannes Brenz and the Institutionalization of the Reformation in Württemberg,” Central European History 6 (1973)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“In 1698, a batch of denunciations was collected in the Jesuit college of Luanda, Angola…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Kalle Kananoja.

For further reading:
Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500–1850 by Kalle Kananoja (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“The Black Spur Drive in Australia’s scenic Yarra Ranges wends through ‘majestic Mountain Ash forests’ and past gurgling brooks, taking tourists to lush beauty spots…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Jennifer Jones.

For further reading:
On Taungurung Land: Sharing History and Culture by Jennifer Jones (Australian National University Press, 2020)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“In Togo, people often tell a popular story about the country’s independence. The story goes something like this…”

So begins today’s story from Marius Kothor.

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“By the late 1870s, after years of resistance, most western Native Americans had been forced onto reservations, those ever-shrinking pieces of land created by the United States government to contain and separate Natives…”

So begins today’s story by Dr. Justin Gage.

For further reading:
We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance by Justin Gage (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020)

American Native Networks

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith explores the intertwined histories of a West African Arabic chronicle, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and its role in advancing a political project, the legitimation of the nineteenth-century Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi, located in what is now the Republic of Mali…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Mauro Nobili.

For further reading:
Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāshand the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa by Mauro Nobili (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Sports are an important ingredient in building community. Whether you’re a participant or a spectator, sports allow you to take part in a visible, public activity, fostering social connection and a sense of shared identity…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Bruce Berglund.

For further reading:
The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey and the Globalization of Sports by Bruce Berglund (University of California Press, 2020).

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Muhammad Qasim Firishta was a physician, a diplomat and an intellectual. Born around 1570 CE and died sometimes after 1620 CE in the Deccan, contemporary India, he was known for his way around libraries and around circles of power…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Manan Ahmed Asif.

For further reading:
The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India by Manan Ahmed Asif (Harvard University Press, 2020)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

This special episode combines all of the stories from Season 6…

“African American Periodicals and Print History” – Dr. Brenna Wynn Greer, Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College

“Marketing Books with Peasant Models” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz

“A Late Medieval ‘How To’ Book” – Dr. Melissa Reynolds, Perkins-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University

“Paper and Books in Early Modern Europe” – Dr. Daniel Bellingradt, Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Book at Erlangen-Nuremberg University

“Creating the Images in Early Modern Printed Books” – Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, PhD candidate in the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University

“Books, Translations, and Audiences” – Dr. Samuel B. Keeley, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz

“Religion and the Business of Books” – Dr. Scott McLaren, Faculty Member in the Graduate Programs in Humanities and History and Associate Librarian in the Scott Library at York University

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“If a sixteenth-century European author, printer, or publisher wanted to include pictures in a book, they had several options…”

So begins today’s story from Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen.

For further reading and viewing:
Chen, Jessie Wei-Hsuan. “A Woodblock’s Career: Transferring Visual Botanical Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries.” Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science 35 (2020): 20–63.

The Plantin-Moretus Museum collection of woodcuts

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“In 1942, John H. Johnson launched Negro Digest, which quickly became a bestselling periodical among African Americans and building off its success, Johnson launched the black photo-magazine EBONY in 1945…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Brenna Wynn Greer.

For further reading:
Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship by Brenna Wynn Greer (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“When is a book not just a book? Well, as almost any cultural historian can tell you, a book is almost never just a book…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Scott McLaren.

For further reading:
Pulpit, Press, and Politics: Methodists and the Market for Books in Upper Canada by Scott McLaren (University of Toronto Press, 2019)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“In the nineteenth century, an ever-increasing volume of political and religious debates played out in the public sphere of printed books and journals. At the same time, more and more books were being translated and adapted for ever-expanding audiences in other countries…

So begins today’s story from Dr. Samuel B. Keeley.

For further reading:
Behind Inverted Commas: Translation and Anglo-German Cultural Relations in the Nineteenth Century by Susanne Stark (Multilingual Matters, 1999)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“This story is about one of the earliest models to appear on the printed page: the sixteenth-century German peasant…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:
Sky Michael Johnston. “Printing the Weather: Knowledge, Nature, and Popular Culture in Two Sixteenth-Century German Weather Books.” Renaissance Quarterly 73 no. 2 (2020): 391-440

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Nicholas Neesbett was an experienced healer in fifteenth-century England…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Melissa Reynolds.

For further reading:
Melissa Reynolds. “The Sururgia of Nicholas Neesbett: Writing Medical Authority in Later Medieval England.” Social History of Medicine 34 (2021)

How To: Reading Medicine and Science in England, 1400–1600 by Melissa Reynolds (forthcoming)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Almost every book from the fourteenth century onwards was made of paper, and every letter sent was a paper sheet folded. Early modern Europe was a paper age…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Daniel Bellingradt.

For further reading:
The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Materials, Networks edited by Daniel Bellingradt and Anna Reynolds (Brill, 2021)

Vernetzte Papiermärkte: Einblicke in den Amsterdamer Handel mit Papier im 18. Jahrhundert by Daniel Bellingradt (Herbert von Halem Verlag, 2020)

Vervlechting van de papiermarkt: De Amsterdamse papierhandel in de achttiende eeuw by Daniel Bellingradt (Uitgeverij Verloren, 2021)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

This special episode combines all the stories from Season 5…

“Billy Graham: Emblem of American Evangelicalism” – Dr. Aaron Griffith, Assistant Professor of History at Sattler College

“Katharina von Bora: Paragon of the Protestant Household” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz

“Francis of Assisi: Model of Medieval Sainthood” – Dr. Donna Trembinski, Associate Professor of History at St. Francis Xavier University

“Adolphe Crémieux: Pioneering Justice Minister of France” – Dr. Noëmie Duhaut, Wiss. Mitarbeiterin, Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz

“Dadabhai Naoroji: Leader of Indian Nationalism” – Dr. Dinyar Patel, Assistant Professor of History at the S P Jain Institute of Management and Research

“Bob Marley: Icon of Dissent and Love” – Dr. Jeremy Prestholdt, Professor, Department of History at the University of California San Diego

“Ida Pfeiffer: Pioneer of Leisure Travel” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston

“Audre Lorde: Embodiment of Black Internationalism” – Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil, Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico.

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“In 1984, Audre Lorde travelled to Berlin…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil.

An extended version of this story is available on the podcast website.

For further reading:
Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement by Tiffany N. Florvil (University of Illinois Press, 2020)

“Adolphe Crémieux was the first Jewish minister in France and, in fact, in Europe…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Noëmie Duhaut.

For further reading:

Noëmie Duhaut, “L’Alliance israélite universelle, les Juifs roumains et l’idée d’Europe,” Archives Juives 53 (2020): 72-89

Adolphe Crémieux: A Biography by S. Posener (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1940)

“Katharina von Bora was an iconic representative of the new household piety championed by her husband, Martin Luther…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:
Martin Treu, "Katharina von Bora, the Woman at Luther's Side," Lutheran Quarterly 13 (1999): 156–178.

Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germanyby Amy Leonard (University of Chicago Press, 2005)

The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg by Lyndal Roper (Oxford University Press, 1991)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“In 1999, the BBC designated Bob Marley’s anthem, ‘One Love,’ the song of millennium…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Jeremy Prestholdt.

For further reading:
Icons of Dissent: The Global Resonance of Che, Marley, Tupac and Bin Laden by Jeremy Prestholdt (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Ida Pfeiffer was an icon of leisure travel, before leisure travel was even a thing…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:

A Visit to Iceland and the Scandinavian North by Ida Pfeiffer.

Wanderlust: The Amazing Ida Pfeiffer, the First Female Tourist by John van Wyhe (NUS Press, 2019).

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Francis of Assisi is one of the most famous medieval saints. An icon, in his own time and today…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Donna Trembinski.

For further reading:
Illness and Authority: Disability in the Life and Lives of Francis of Assisi by Donna Trembinski (University of Toronto Press, 2020)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“In 1972 the evangelical celebrity preacher Billy Graham filmed a television interview with talk show host Phil Donahue in a unique location: a women’s prison in Marysville, Ohio…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Aaron Griffith.

For further reading:
God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America by Aaron Griffith (Harvard University Press, 2020)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“At the heart of my book are two questions. How was an Indian elected to the British Parliament in 1892? Why would an Indian—a colonial subject from a land five thousand miles away—want to stand for election to Parliament in the first place?”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Dinyar Patel.

For further reading:
Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism by Dinyar Patel (Harvard University Press, 2020)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

This special episode combines all the stories from Season 4...

“'Do you Bant?' Diet and Deafness in Victorian England" - Dr. Jaipreet Virdi, Assistant Professor, Department of History at the University of Delaware

"Black Women’s Exercise at Greater Bethel Gymnasium" - Dr. Ava Purkiss, Assistant Professor of American Culture and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Michigan

"Menopause and the Mongols" - Dr. Susan P. Mattern, Distinguished Research Professor, Department of History at the University of Georgia

"Stephen Ricks and Childhood in the Antebellum North" - Dr. Crystal Lynn Webster, Assistant Professor, History Department at the University of Texas at San Antonio

"Diabetes, Science, and Race in the Early Twentieth Century" - Dr. Arleen Marcia Tuchman, Nelson O. Tyrone Jr. Chair and Professor of History, Vanderbilt University

"Finding Lu Gwei-djen in the Archive of Chinese Medical Science" - Dr. Lan A. Li, Assistant Professor, Department of History at Rice University

"Renaissance Women as Frontline Healers" - Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History, Emory University

"Intimate Exchanges and Public Health in Colonial Mexico" - Dr. Paul Ramírez, Associate Professor, Department of History at Northwestern University

"The History of Nursing in the Context of COVID-19" - Dr. Barbra Mann Wall, Thomas A. Saunders III Professor and Director of the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry, University of Virginia School of Nursing

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“As the novel coronavirus began to spread in the United States, people across the country turned to historians for crucial insights regarding the history of disease and nursing…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Barbra Mann Wall.

For further reading:
Nurses and Disasters: Global, Historical Case Studies edited by Barbra Mann Wall and Arlene W. Keeling (Springer, 2015)

The Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“In 1916, Elliott P. Joslin, the foremost diabetes specialist in the United States, insisted that…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Arleen Marcia Tuchman.

For further reading:
Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease by Arleen Marcia Tuchman (Yale University Press, 2020)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“This is a little story about a little child. In 1822 the Philadelphia Shelter for Colored Children opened as the first formalized, private orphanage to admit African American children…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Crystal Lynn Webster.

For further reading:
Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North by Crystal Lynn Webster (University of North Carolina Press, 2021)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“In 1923, a group of black women from the South Side of Chicago did what many women do when they want to lose weight—they joined a gym…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Ava Purkiss.

For further reading:
Ava Purkiss, “‘Beauty Secrets: Fight Fat’: Black Women’s Aesthetics, Exercise, and Fat Stigma, 1900-1930s,” Journal of Women’s History, 29 (2), 2017: 14-37.

From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture by Koritha Mitchell (University of Illinois Press, 2020)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Genghis Khan’s mother was abandoned by her clan with seven small children in 1170. Her husband was dead. Her oldest son, who would go on to conquer much of Asia, was nine…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Susan P. Mattern.

For further reading:
The Slow Moon Climbs: The Science, History, and Meaning of Menopause by Susan P. Mattern (Princeton University Press, 2019)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“William Banting was a British funeral director who, at age 66, was obese, weighing 202 pounds at 5'5", and needed a truss to hold an umbilical rupture in place. His weight was so troublesome that he could not tie his shoes and had to walk down the stairs backwards to limit the pain of weight on his knees and ankles. He tried losing the weight but his efforts were in vain…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Jaipreet Virdi.

For further reading:
Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History by Jaipreet Virdi (University of Chicago Press, 2020)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the Spanish Crown developed a policy of strict quarantine whenever an epidemic broke out in its American colonies…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Paul Ramírez.

For further reading:
Enlightened Immunity: Mexico's Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason by Paul Ramírez (Stanford University Press, 2018)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Malta was warm. The afternoon sun stretched across the island as Lu Gwei-djen walked ahead…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Lan A. Li.

For further reading:
“Escaping Immortality: Science, Civilization, and Lu Gwei-djen (1904-1991)” by Lan A. Li (forthcoming)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

“Bubonic plague ravaged Italy in the summer of 1630. Household healers scurried to make preventive remedies that would ward off this dread disease…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia.

For further reading:
Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy by Sharon T. Strocchia (Harvard University Press, 2019)

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

This special episode combines all the stories from Season 3…

“Motherhood and Adoption in Precolonial Uganda” - Dr. Rhiannon Stephens, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University

“Challenging the ‘Family Values Economy’” - Dr. Ryan Patrick Murphy, Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies at Earlham College

“Paternity, Immigration, and Legal Definitions of Family” - Dr. Nara Milanich, Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University

“A Marriage at the Nexus of Religious Communities” - Dr. Christine B. Lindner, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Murray State University

“Family, Mission, and Early Civil Rights Activism” - Dr. Kimberly Hill, Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas

“A Mother Shapes the Mongol Empire” - Dr. Anne F. Broadbridge, Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

“Frigid Mothers in Late Chosŏn Korea” - Dr. Ksenia Chizhova, Assistant Professor of Korean Literature and Cultural Studies at Princeton University

“A Father Fights for His Boy, a Soldier” - Dr. Rebecca Jo Plant, Associate Professor of History at the University of California San Diego

“Father and Son Pastors Interpret an Earthquake” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz

Follow 90 Second Narratives on Twitter @90secNARRATIVES.

“Starting in the late seventeenth century, Korean women’s identities became defined through the familial and domestic roles they performed in their husbands’ households…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Ksenia Chizhova.

For further reading:
Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday by Ksenia Chizhova (Columbia University Press, 2021)

“In 1843, the Protestant community in Ottoman Syria faced a challenge…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Christine B. Lindner.

For further reading:

Christine B. Lindner. “Syrian Protestant Marriages in Early to mid-Nineteenth Century Bilād al-Shām: 'Aliens at Home' or rooted in Syrian Tradition,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 27 (2018), 133-148.

“In August 1861, a fourteen-year old Pennsylvania boy named Oram Gregg joined a Union cavalry regiment…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Rebecca Jo Plant.

For further reading:
Of Age: Boy Soldiers, Parental Rights, and Military Power in Civil War America by Rebecca Jo Plant and Frances Clarke

“Motherhood took different forms in the communities that lived on the north-west shores of Lake Victoria and in its littoral from around the eighth century…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Rhiannon Stephens.

For further reading:
A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 by Rhiannon Stephens (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

“This is a story about how people reacted to an earthquake that occurred in 1601 in the German region of Württemberg. Our guides for the story are two Lutheran pastors who were also father and son, Lucas and Andreas Osiander...”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:
Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes, by Craig Martin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)

“This is a story about three young siblings, the Lees. In June 1952, the Lees, ages 11, 13, and 21, left China and arrived in the United States…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Nara Milanich.

For further reading:
Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father, by Nara B. Milanich (Harvard University Press, 2019)

“In 1204 on the East Asian steppe, Genghis Khan’s Mongol soldiers defeated enemies known as the Merkits, killed the Merkit princes, and took their wives and families as spoils. One of these wives was named Töregene…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Anne F. Broadbridge.

For further reading:
Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire, by Anne F. Broadbridge (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

“In July of 1999, a coalition of activists from LGBT groups and from Local 11 of the Association of Flight Attendants, AFL-CIO, dressed up as the Teletubbies character Tinky Winky and stormed the United Airlines ticket office in downtown San Francisco…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Ryan Patrick Murphy.

For further reading:
Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice by Ryan Patrick Murphy (Temple University Press, 2016)

“Many graduates of historically black colleges and universities committed their lives to helping their communities thrive in the midst of daunting circumstances…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Kimberly Hill.

For further reading:
A Higher Mission: The Careers of Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston in Central Africa by Kimberly D. Hill (The University Press of Kentucky, 2020)

This special episode combines all the stories from Season 2…

“Baltimore: Housing Exclusion in Action” - Dr. Paige Glotzer, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Berlin: Little Neighborhood, Big Politics” - Dr. Teresa Walch, Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

“Kirkuk: A Highway to Expulsion” - Dr. Arbella Bet-Shlimon, Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington

“Port-au-Prince: Occupation and Solidarity” - Dr. Brandon R. Byrd, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University

“Hargeisa: Anticolonialism from the Countryside to the City” - Dr. Safia Aidid, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Toronto

“Ulm/Jakarta: Bringing Civic Identity Abroad” - Dr. Philip Hahn, Assistant Professor at the University of Tübingen

“Detroit: Urban Gardening for Sustainability” - Dr. Joseph S. Cialdella, Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan

“Atlantis: Plato, Myth, and History” - Dr. Benjamin B. Olshin, Associate Professor in the School of Critical Studies at the University of the Arts

“Connecting Distant Cities: Camels as Transportation” - Dr. Matthew Herbst, Professor at the University of California San Diego

Follow 90 Second Narratives on Twitter @90secNARRATIVES.

“Of the world’s camels, 90% are dromedaries…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Matthew Herbst.

For further reading:

The Camel and the Wheel by Richard W. Bulliet (Columbia University Press, 1990)

“Jakarta in late July, 1681…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Philip Hahn.

For further reading:

Philip Hahn, “‘Rather Back to Ceylon than to Swabia’: Global Sensory Experiences of Swabian Artisans in the Service of the Dutch East India Company (VOC),” in Embodiment, Expertise and Ethics in Early Modern Europe: Entangling the Senses (Routledge, 2020)

“In the 1970s, Iraq’s Ba‘th government escalated a campaign to ethnically cleanse the northern provincial city of Kirkuk, a multilingual town that had long been the hub of Iraq’s oil industry…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Arbella Bet-Shlimon.

For further reading:

City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkukby Arbella Bet-Shlimon (Stanford University Press, 2019)

“On July 28, 1915, under the authority of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, USS Washington entered the harbor at Port-au-Prince…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Brandon R. Byrd.

For further reading:

The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haitiby Brandon R. Byrd (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

“If you imagine residents of American cities at the turn of the twentieth century, you probably picture them working in factories, not vegetable gardens…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Joseph S. Cialdella

For further reading:
Motor City Green: A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit by Joseph Stanhope Cialdella (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

“Tucked away in northwest Berlin, the quiet residential streets of Moabit’s Beusselkiez belie the drama they witnessed in the early twentieth century…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Teresa Walch.

For further reading:
Stormtroopers: A History of Hitler’s Brownshirts by Daniel Siemens (Yale University Press, 2017)
The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin: Politics, Consumption, and Urban Space, 1914 -1945 by (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

“I’d like to talk about the lost city of Atlantis. Well, it is not lost. It is simply missing…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Benjamin B. Olshin.

For further reading:
Lost Knowledge: The Concept of Vanished Technologies and Other Human Histories by Benjamin B. Olshin (Brill, 2019)

“On February 1, 1956, the British Somaliland Protectorate’s Radio Somalicarried the voice of nationalist Michael Mariano across the northern Somali territories…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Safia Aidid

For further reading:
Somalia: Nation in Search of a State by David D. Laitin and Said S. Samatar (Westview Press, 1987)
Africa’s First Democrats: Somalia’s Aden A. Osman and Abdirazak H. Hussein by Abdi Samatar (Indiana University Press, 2016)

“On January 10, 1928 Assistant City Solicitor William Laukaitis told a real estate salesman he wanted to buy an expensive lot in the suburban Baltimore neighborhood of Homeland…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Paige Glotzer.

For further reading:
How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890–1960 by Paige Glotzer (Columbia University Press, 2020)

This special episode combines all ten stories from Season 1…

“Schoolgirl Activism in French Mandate Lebanon” - Johanna Peterson, PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of California San Diego

“Two Doctors, Two Paths in Cold War Brazil” - Dr. Eyal Weinberg, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

“Lawmakers in the Spanish Empire” - Dr. Adrian Masters, Researcher at the University of Tübingen

“Race and Violence in Early Modern Spain” - Dr. Erin Kathleen Rowe, Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University

“A Catholic in Confucian Robes” - Dr. Sky Michael Johnston, Teach@Tübingen Fellow at the University of Tübingen

“The Answered Prayer of Wang Mingdao” - Dr. Amy O’Keefe, Assistant Professor of History at Meredith College

“Martin Luther Goes Undercover” - Dr. Sky Michael Johnston

“Making Cow Brains Your Oyster” - Dr. Claudia Kreklau, an Associate Lecturer in the School of History at the University of St. Andrews

“Missionaries Try to Convert a Desert” - Dr. Sky Michael Johnston

“A Puritan Tells Ghost Stories” - Ryan Hoselton, Instructor and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Heidelberg

For information about Season 2, follow the podcast on Twitter @90secNARRATIVES

“In the mid-eighteenth century, a group of German Jesuit missionaries tried to convert the desert landscape of Baja California.”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:

Sky Michael Johnston. “‘What is California? Nothing but Innumerable Stones’: German Jesuits, Salvation, and Landscape Building in the California Missions,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 2 no. 1 (2015) 36-55.

“If you have heard of the Chinese Christian preacher Wang Mingdao…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Amy O’Keefe.

For further reading:
Amy O’Keefe, “Walking the Enlightened Path: Wang Mingdao’s Road to Independent Christianity under Japanese Occupation,” in 1943: China at the Crossroads (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2015).

“On Holy Thursday in the year 1604 in the city of Seville, Spain, a bloody fight broke out between two confraternities on the Plaza of San Salvador…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Erin Kathleen Rowe.

For further reading:
Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism by Erin Kathleen Rowe (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

“How does a story about two doctors reveal the social, political, and ethical divisions that typified Brazil during the Cold War?”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Eyal Weinberg.

For further reading:
Eyal Weinberg, “‘With colleagues like that, who needs enemies?’: Doctors and Repression under Military and Post-Authoritarian Brazil,” The Americas 76 (2019): 467-505.

“What in the world was a Jesuit priest doing in Beijing’s Forbidden City dressed like a Confucian?”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan D. Spence (Viking, 1984)
A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552-1610 by Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Oxford University Press 2010)

“Do you believe in the immortality of your soul? If not, the colonial New England Puritan minister Cotton Mather would like to tell you some ghost stories…”

So begins today’s story from Ryan Hoselton.

For further reading:
The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather: An Edition of “Triparadisus” edited by Reiner Smolinski (University of Georgia Press, 1995)
The Life and Times of Cotton Mather by Kenneth Silverman (Harper & Row, 1984)

“Pedro Rengifo was a part-Indian, part-Spanish man from the La Paz area of what is today Bolivia, who around 1583 sailed from Lima for Madrid. He had an important message for King Philip the Second…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Adrian Masters.

For further reading:
Adrian Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition -and-Response System,and the Creation of Spanish Imperial Caste Legislation,” Hispanic American Historical Review 98 (2018): 377-406
Felipe E. Ruan, “Andean Activism and the Reformulation of Mestizo Agency and Identity in Early Colonial Peru,” Colonial Latin American Review 21 (2012): 209-237

“You know Martin Luther, as the German monk who challenged the teaching of the Roman Church and sparked the Protestant Reformation. In late 1521, however, Luther was hiding for his life…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:
Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer by Scott H. Hendrix (Yale University Press, 2015)
Reformation Europe, 2nd ed. by Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

“On December 1, 1924, French High Commissioner Maxime Weygand closed Ahliah Girls’ School…”

So begins today’s story from Johanna Peterson.

For further reading:
A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman by Wadad Makdisi Cortas (Nation Books, 2009)
Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon by Elizabeth Thompson (Columbia University Press, 2000)

“About one hundred and fifty years ago, ‘looking the part’ of being middle class in German lands, involved eating organs…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Claudia Kreklau.

For further reading:
Beyond Bratwurst: A History of Food in Germany by Ursula Heinzelmann (Reaktion Books, 2014)

“‘‘Organic’ Tools for Social Standing: Oehm’s and Allestein’s Recipes for Brain, Lung, and Udders, 1850-60s” by Claudia Kreklau (H-Net.org)

Hello and welcome to 90 Second Narratives, a new weekly podcast featuring "little stories with BIG historical significance." In each episode, a trained historian shares an engaging true story that includes a brief explanation of the story’s historical importance. New stories are released every Monday.