Dig: A History Podcast: Recent Episodes
Recorded History Podcast Network
5 Cs of History: Change Over Time, Episode #4 of 4. Written and spoken language are separate things. Languages that are connected to a written script change more slowly and last longer than those that don’t. Writing acts as an anchor to humans’ ever-changing speech sounds. But these two aspects of language (speech and writing) did not always go hand in hand. Today we dive into the history of the written word. Bibliography Fischer, Steven R. A History of Writing New ed. London: Reaktion Books. 2021. Gabrial, Brian. “History of Writing Technologies,” in Bazerman Charles. 2008. Handbook of Research on Writing : History Society School Individual Text. New York: L. Erlbaum Associates. Powell Barry B. Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 2012. Stanlaw, James. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Hoboken NJ: Wiley Blackwell. 2021. Stroud, Kevin. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ “The Evolution of Writing.” Published in James Wright, ed., INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Elsevier, 2014 https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Change over Time Series. The Five Cs of History. Episode #3 of 4. The Rights Revolution movements of the twentieth century were deeply connected to one another, with activists known for their work in one movement having cut their teeth in the others. These movements were also profoundly influenced and connected to struggles of the past, with older movements having either been where activists began their activism or were mentored by senior members in the struggle. Additionally, many historians and sociologists are tweaking the narrative of “feminisms” by displaying how the feminist movement has been a continual movement and how many different feminisms have co-existed throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Feminism did not “go silent” at times but has always been present in different ways.
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5 Cs of History. Change over Time. Episode #2 of 4. In recent years, America’s two party system has seemed more intractable than ever: Democrats vs. Republicans. Now, we have a clear idea of each party’s location on the political map: Democrats are liberal, Republicans conservative; Democrats are left-leaning, Republicans right-leaning. Right now, those truths seems so deeply entrenched that they seem almost natural - it’s always been this way and always will be. But if historians know anything it’s this: things change. In this episode, we’re thinking about change over time by looking at the long history of America’s political parties. Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Five Cs of History. Change Over Time #1 of 4. Roger Casement has been a subject of fascination - and controversy - for over a century. During his lifetime, he was an internationally-recognized champion for human rights, and was instrumental in exposing the horrors surrounding the rubber industry in the Belgian Congo and Peruvian Putumayo. Significantly, he spent his life striving to do more than just expose the injustices of the Congo and Putumayo - he built a network of activists and leaders willing to intercede, push for reform, and demand change for the indigenous peoples who suffered under European occupation. After years working within the British Empire, he was radicalized in his Irish nationalist beliefs, and spent the last two years of his life working to fight for Ireland’s independence from Britain. After his execution, some held on to the memory of him as a humanitarian hero, others claimed he was another martyr of the Irish nationalist cause, and still others distanced themselves from his evident homosexuality. The question of his sexuality determined whether or not he could be counted among the ‘real’ Irish heroes. Find the transcript and show notes at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Surprise Series! #3 of 4. Spanish American Nina Otero-Warren (1881-1965) was a suffragist, Progressive educator, woman's club member, public health and social welfare board member, and writer. She worked for formal and informal mediation between Hispanos, Anglo Americans, and Indians. She was instrumental in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, was the first Hispanic woman to run for United States Congress, and she was the superintendent of the Santa Fe school system for many years. Get the transcript and full bibliography at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Surprise Series. Episode #2 of 4. There was once a young, deaf Black man, and I’m not going to tell you his real name because those records are private, so we’ll just call him Levi. Levi lived on a farm in the Hudson Valley region of New York State. According to his patient case file, he was incarcerated at the Matteawan State Hospital because he murdered his white “master” in 1870. A quick google search - let’s face it, that’s often our first research step! - on Levi brought me to an index on Deaf Americans maintained by Gallaudet University that claimed that he was an enslaved farm worker who killed his white master, David Hasbrouck. On this episode, we won’t be talking about Levi’s murder case and all the issues it raised - you’ll have to read my future article for more on that. But instead, we’ll learn more about one of the things that made his murderous act possible. Today, we’re talking about the history of poor relief and child welfare in the United States.
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Guess the Theme Series, #1 of 4. Tea, it turns out, is a bottomless commodity history. As historian Erika Rappaport notes, at various times over the last two thousands years, “In Asia, the Near East, Europe, and North America, tea was a powerful medicine, a dangerous drug, a religious and artistic practice, a status symbol, an aspect of urban leisure, and a sign of respectability and virtue.” As a product of empire, cultural exchange, medicinal application, immense profitability, social imagination, and agricultural innovation, the history of tea is also the history of millions of intersecting individual lives. Some, like Catherine of Braganza, were elite women who made tea-drinking fashionable in 17th century Britain. Some, like Mary Tuke of England, were entrepreneurs who built a business and reputation on the products of the 18th century imperial markets. And yet others, like Anandaram Dhekial Phukan of Assam, were hopeful subjects of British imperialism who believed the 19th century empire could improve the lives of his people. The British thirst for tea altered economies and ecologies, started wars, underwrote individual fortunes and spectacular falls from grace. The simplicity and ubiquitousness of tea in British culture today belies its deep history. Today we’re going to spill a little tea, and see what we find out. Select Bibliography Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, Matthew Mauger, Empire of Tea : The Asian Leaf That Conquered the World (London : Reaktion Books, 2015) Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press; 2017) Jayeeta Sharma, Empire's Garden: Assam and the Making of India (Duke University press, 2011) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Spiritualism Series. Episode #4 of 4. You might think that the story of Pharaoh Sety I of Egypt's 19th Dynasty ends with his death. But you’d be wrong, at least according to one 20th-century British woman, Dorothy Eady. Dorothy, who believed herself to be the reincarnation of Sety's lover Bentreshyt, is the only reason we know about this story at all. Dorothy Eady’s past life, which she discovered piecemeal over time, became her obsession. It shaped everything about her. She spent the first half of her life searching for her spiritual home, Abydos, and the second half making amends for Bentrshyt’s sin. Perhaps most shockingly, Dorothy, now called Omm Sety, would resume Bentreshyt’s sexual love affair with King Sety 3200 years after their deaths! More on that in a bit. Today we’re using the story of Omm Sety as a gateway into the history of past lives in Britain and America.
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Spiritualism Series. Episode #2 of 4. The years 1896-1910 of the American woman’s suffrage movement are sometimes referred to as the doldrums because of an apparent lack of progress during the years. However, revised scholarship has shown that these were in fact the years where a lot of uncelebrated work was done for the cause. Today we will focus on the life of Anna Howard Shaw, who was the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) from 1904-1915. Shaw oversaw the transition of NAWSA from a volunteer-based organization to a professional entity with headquarters in New York City and a paid staff. You'll find show notes and a transcript at digpodcast.org Bibliography Trisha Franzen, Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage (Uni. of Illinois Press, 2014). Ellen Carol DuBois, Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote (Simon & Schuster, 2021). Wendy L. Rouse, Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement (NYU Press, 2022). Anna Howard Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer (New York: Kraus Reprint Co, 1970). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Spiritualism Series. Episode #2 of 4. Elijah Pierson was the embodiment of early 19th century Christian masculinity. So how did he end up, just a few years later, shambling along the streets of New York City with a scruffy beard, long hair, and dirty fingernails, following a wild eyed prophet? And - perhaps more disturbing - how did he end up at the center of a sensational murder trial? (And we mean literally at the center: he was the dead guy.) If you’re a historian of the United States, you’ve probably already guessed what we’re talking about. And chances are, if you ever had to take an American religious history class, or even an early America or Jacksonian America class, you may have read it. Those of you who haven’t, gee whiz, you’re in for a wild ride. Today, we’re talking about a book that is a true classic in the field of American religious history: Sean Wilentz and Paul Johnson’s 1994 book, The Kingdom of Matthias.
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Spiritualism Series, #1 of 4. The Fox sister’s story has been told hundreds of times, in autobiography, newspaper stories, biographies, histories of Spiritualism, Victorian entertainment, women’s rights movements, and many other contexts. Today we’re going to share some insights into Maggie and Kate Fox’s life, how their stories have been told, and why the way we tell these kinds of histories matter. For a complete bibliography and a transcript, visit digpodcast.org Select Bibliography Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America (1989) Simone Natalie, Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture (Penn State University, 2016) Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Spiritualism Series, Episode # 4 of 4. When Ann Braude published her groundbreaking book Radical Spirits in 1989, critics did not like that Braude prominently linked the women’s rights movement, particularly during the antebellum period, with Spiritualism. And even now, thirty years on, many histories still gloss over these important connections. So today we are exploring the close association of Spiritualism and the women’s rights movement of the nineteenth century.
Bibliography Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Second Edition. Indiana University Press, 2001. Cox, Robert S. Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. University of Virginia Press, Reprint 2017. Franzen, Trisha. Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage. University of Illinois Press, 2014. Hewitt, Nancy A. Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. McGarry, Molly. Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America. University of California Press, 2008. Seeman, Erik R. Speaking with the Dead in Early America. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Spiritualism, Episode #3 of 4. In the late 20th century, white Americans flocked to New Age spirituality, collecting crystals, hugging trees, and finding their places in the great Medicine Wheel. Many didn’t realize - or didn’t care - that much of this spirituality was based on the spiritual faiths and practices of Native American tribes. Frustrated with what they called “spiritual hucksterism,” members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) began protesting - and have never stopped. Who were these ‘plastic shamans,’ and how did the spiritual services they sold become so popular? Listen to find out! Get the transcript and other resources at digpodcast.org Bibliography Irwin, Lee. “Freedom Law, and Prophecy: A Brief History of Native American Religious Resistance,” American Indian Quarterly 21 (Winter 1997): 35-55. McNally, Michael D. Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Owen, Suzanne. The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. Urban, Hugh. New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements: Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America. Berkley: University of California Press, 2015. Bowman, Marion. “Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem, Heart Chakra of Planet Earth: The Local and the Global in Glastonbury,” Numen 52 (2005): 157-190. Amy Wallace, Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda. Berkley: North Atlantic Books, 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Spiritualism Series. Episode #2 of 4. For three years before his untimely death on the Titanic, British newspaper man W. T. Stead gathered the bereaved and curious in a room in Cambridge House so they could communicate with the dead. Several psychics, including the blind medium Cecil Husk and materialization medium J. B. Jonson, worked these sessions which had become known as Julia’s Bureau. After Stead’s death, Detroit medium Mrs. Etta Wriedt sought to channel the dead newspaper man. Wriedt was also known to channel a Glasgow-born, eighteenth-century apothecary farmer named Dr. John Sharp. Other frequent visitors include an American Indian medicine chief named Grayfeather, the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan, and a female Seminole Indian named Blossom who died in the Florida everglades as a young child. But the bureau’s most important spirit visitor can also be said to have been the founder of the bureau, Julia herself. Who was Julia? And how do these seances fit into the long history of Spiritualism? Find out today!
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Spiritualism Series, #1 of 4. Helen Duncan was charged under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, but her case was no eighteenth-century sensation: she was arrested, charged, and ultimately imprisoned in 1944. Of course, in 1944, Britain was at war, fighting fascism by day on the continent and hiding in air raid shelters by night at home. The spectacle of a Spiritualist medium on trial for witchcraft seemed out of place. What possessed the Home Secretary to allow this trial to make headlines all across the UK in 1944? That’s what we’re here to find out. Get the full transcript, bibliography, and resources for educators at digpodcast.org Select Bibliograph Lisa Morton, Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Nina Shandler, The Strange Case of Hellish Nell, (Da Capo Press, 2006) Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, (Oxford University Press, 1997) Malcolm Gaskill, Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches, (HarperCollins Publishers, 2002) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This is a special episode researched and written by one of our interns, Olivia Langa. Intern Episode! #2 of .... To find out more about the everyday lives of women in coal mining families we must look at the songs of less popular female Appalachian singers from the 1930s. One such place to look is in Depression-era Harlan County, located in the southeast corner of Kentucky, situated within a valley between the Pine and Black Mountains on the Kentucky/Virginia border. Most of the folklore that came out of Harlan County tell stories of the horror faced by the miners under the foot of the elite. However, three women, Aunt Molly Jackson, Florence Reece, and Sarah Ogan Gunning, wrote songs in response to the Harlan County upheaval and about the lives of coal mining families. Their work differs from that of the coal mining men because they were not directly involved in coal mining as their occupation. Instead, they occupied spaces within the home and family unit, bearing the responsibility of domesticity. However, with no money, no food, and the constant threat from outside forces, they carried a tremendous burden. Looking at their songs provides a look into their lives as coal miners’ wives and daughters and gives us a look into the devastation they witnessed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Animals Series. Episode #4 of 4. The interplay between human and veterinary medicine was incredibly common by the second half of the 19th century. While human medicine and veterinary medicine were distinct professions, they were inextricably linked in the latest experimental turn. Not only were animals involved in the experiments that led to medical breakthroughs, they were crucial to the ethical, and public health policies that shape modern medicine. Today we’re exploring the history of animals and medical science but we'll start at the beginning.
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Animals Series. Episode #3 of 4. The term “canary in a coal mine” is ubiquitous for any early warning signal. Like our fictional vignette of a miner carrying a canary into the coal mine, canaries were often taken into mines during the first part of the 20th century to test the air for poisonous gasses. The practice was so commonplace that it's become a cliché. Metaphors aside, canaries are a sentinel species, used by humans to detect environmental risks by providing advance warning of a danger. Often animals are used as sentinels because they are more susceptible to environmental hazards that humans may be in the same environment. In the case of coal mining, canaries -- or really any small bird -- are very susceptible to changes in air quality because of their rate of respiration, anatomy, and small size. Contrary to popular belief, canaries in coal mines do not have a very long history. They were only used as sentinel animals in British and American coal mines for roughly 100 years. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a long time at all. Yet, canaries have become ubiquitous with mining in general and as a figure of speech. Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Animals, Episode #2 of 4. Toads, dogs, cats, ferrets, rats, and occasionally even butterflies were depicted in the 16th and 17th centuries as “witch’s familiars” throughout Europe. A servant of the witches, whose purpose was to help them stir up trouble and cause harm in their enemies, familiars were particularly important in English witch lore. Some were conjured by witches, some sent by the Devil to tempt a woman into maleficence, some were supposed to be the Devil himself in the form of a common black dog. Whatever their origin and intent, familiars were not just background characters in English witch trials. They were presented as evidence and used to sentence hundreds, probably thousands, of people to death for witchcraft - in England. Not so in France or Denmark or Italy. It was only in England that the familiar’s significance was codified in law. Why, you ask? Great question. Let’s find out. For a complete transcript and bibliography, visit digpodcast.org Bibliography Maeve Brigid Callan, The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish (Cornell University Press, 2017) Alan Dures and Francis Young, English Catholicism, 1558-1642 (Taylor and Francis, 2021) Elizabeth Ezra, “Becoming Familiar: Witches and Companion Animals in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials,” Children’s Literature, 47 (2019) 175-196 Erica Fudge, Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and Their Animals in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 2018). Charlotte Rose Millar, “The Witch’s Familiar in Sixteenth-Century England,” Melbourne Historical Journal 38 (2010) 113-130. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Animals Series, #1 of 4. In mid-March of 2022, a video spread virally across social media platforms: an elephant with its trunk wrapped around the top bar of its enclosure, its eye casting an anxious look out. A keeper pats his cheek and holds an apple, trying to comfort the distressed animal. The elephant was trapped in his enclosure in a zoo during the Russian bombardment of Kyiv. Animals are victims, transportation, weapons, mascots, heroes, and soldiers in human conflicts – and have been for as long as humans have made war. But perhaps the most dramatic has been the elephant, the massive, intimidating, trumpeting beast of ancient warfare. Elephants are the largest land animals on earth, but not only are they huge and powerful, they have experience human-like emotions, are extremely intelligent, and have long memories. The combination of their extreme power and deep intelligence have long made them valuable to humans, especially as military machines. Today, we’re talking about the history of war elephants in ancient and modern warfare. For the complete transcript and bibliography, visit digpodcast.org Select Bibliography Thomas Trautmann, Elephants & Kings: An Environmental History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) Konstantin Nossov, War Elephants (Bloomsbury, 2012) Vicki Constantine Croke, Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of An Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II (New York: Random House, 2014) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Race Series. Episode #4 of 4. In today’s episode we’re going to explore race in the 1920s and dig into a few key moments and movements to see how race and ethnicity played a key role in shaping the American interwar years.
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Race Series. Episode #3 of 4. During WWII, South Africa's United Party failed to enforce segregation laws with the vigor that most Afrikaners thought was necessary. As a result, war time was accompanied by growing fears of racial mixing and prophecies of racial doom for white South Africans. Afrikaners placed much of the blame for the problems on non-white South Africans. The racial and ethnic discontent was complicated by Afrikaners' Christian convictions, fears of communism, and, strangely, a desire for modernization. These four principles resulted in their Apartheid project and South Africa's devolution into a racist pariah state For this month’s series on race, we are tackling one of history’s most notorious systems of racial segregation, South Africa’s Apartheid. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Race #2 of 4. We’ve discussed the end of American slavery many, many times here on DIG. We’ve talked about abolition in the context of Reconstruction, in the context of refugees sometimes called “contraband,” in the context of Black military service, in the context of the Black Codes and Jim Crow – just to name a few. You might notice something in that list: each of those things centers specifically on the end of slavery, but not on the long and arduous effort to end slavery. In the many times we’ve talked about abolition and emancipation (at least in the US) we’ve talked almost exclusively about the final days of America’s peculiar institution. Today, let’s shift our focus and look instead at the big picture, the long and shifting effort to end slavery in the United States. Get the transcript and further reading at digpodcast.org Bibliography Rael, Patrick. Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1865. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Race #1 of 4. Over the last five years the British government has been reckoning with more recent expressions of the anti-immigration and anti-Black sentiments among its elected officials. The “Windrush scandal” broke in 2017, revealing that the British Home Office systematically and intentionally denied citizenship privileges (like access to the National Health Service, passports, visas for visiting family members, and more) to those of the “Windrush generation.” The Windrush scandal highlights the disconnect between Britain’s self image as an antiracism world leader and the reality of racist policies and practices in modern Britain, but as this episode explores, the current scandal is just one of a long list of injustices imposed on citizens from the West Indies and other former British colonies. Get the transcript and complete bibliography at digpodcast.org Select Bibliography Kenetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2016). Kieran Connell, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain (University of California Press, 2019) Guardian staff, 'It's inhumane': the Windrush victims who have lost jobs, homes and loved ones | Commonwealth immigration,” The Guardian (April 2018) Amelia Gentlemen, “Lambs to the slaughter': 50 lives ruined by the Windrush scandal,” The Guardian Olivia Peter, “Windrush scandal: Everything you need to know about the major political crisis,” The Independent Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bad Women Series, #4 of 4. The popular image of Parks is one of quiet, and demure respectability. When we were in elementary school, we were taught that Parks was a tired old woman, whose feet hurt after a long day on the job. Because she was a Black woman living in the south, she was relegated to the “back of the bus” on Montgomery, Alabama’s public transportation. Yet, that day Parks did not move to the back of the bus. It was understood that her personal feelings and fatigue were the reason she did not give up her seat for a white passenger on that fateful day in December 1955, not her “lifetime of being rebellious,” as Parks herself said about her activism. Today we’ll discuss Rosa Parks, the mid twentieth century civil rights movement in the United States, and the formation of memory. Get the transcript and full bibliography for this episode at digpodcast.org Select Bibliography Carl Wendell Hines, reprinted in Vincent Gordon Harding, “Beyond Amnesia: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Future of America,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Sep., 1987): 468-476. Jeanne Theoharis, “’A Life History of Being Rebellious’: The Radicalism of Rosa Parks,” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed. Jeanne Theoharis (New York University Press, 2009), 115. Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2011). Rosa Parks, My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bad Women Series. Episode #3 of 4. Anyone who's read or seen Arthur Miller's play The Crucible likely remembers Tituba, the enslaved woman who sets off the 1692 witch panic in Salem, Massachusetts. In literature and history, she's been depicted as both a menacing Barbadian voodoo queen and a Black feminist touchstone. Who was the real Tituba? The answer is … well, not clear. But, today we’ll explore the history of how she has been used, interpreted, and sought out by scholars, poets, and playwrights since the early 18th century. Today, for this installment of our Bad Women series, we’re talking about Tituba, the “Black Witch” of Salem. We're producing this series as a collaboration with historian Hallie Rubenhold's new podcast Bad Women: The Ripper Retold. Rubenhold's book The Five has earned critical acclaim: this social history about the victims of Jack the Ripper is the 2019 winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction and was shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize. Find show notes and transcripts at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bad Women Series #2 of 4. Malintzin is by far the most controversial figure of the 1519 Mexican invasion. Was she a traitor, or a feminist national hero? Was she the mother of Mexico, or the Eve-like bringer of Mexico’s original sin? Was she a collaborator, bystander, or victim of the Spanish? In terms of her legacy, it’s a mixed bag. In terms of her lived experience, it is, as we often say, complicated. And today, we’re digging into the controversial history and legacy of Malintzin. Find the transcript, bibliography, and lesson plans to use with this episode at digpodcast.org Select Bibliography Rebecca Jager, Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea: Indian Women As Cultural Intermediaries and National Symbols (2015) Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Unframing the “Bad Woman”: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui and Other Rebels with a Cause (University of Texas Press, 2014) Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices, An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2006) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bad Women Series in collaboration with Hallie Rubenhold's new podcast Bad Women: The Ripper Retold . Episode #1 of 4. The life story of Shih Yang, known to history by her married name Cheng I Sao (the wife of Cheng I) would inspire countless novels and semi-fictionalized accounts of a Chinese pirate queen or “Dragon Lady” of the South China Sea. Indeed, her life was so sensational, and pirates so marginalized, that authors, even historians, have found it difficult to parse fact from fiction. But have no fear, we’re not in the business of peddling fiction and we’re not starting now. We’ve done the work. So, sit back, relax, and hear about the life of Cheng I Sao, the woman commander of the Pirate Confederacy in the South China Sea.
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BONUS EPISODE! Tuck into this episode by our badass intern Carly Bagley, a student at St. Mary's University in Texas. She wrote, recorded and produced this episode as a companion episode to Sarah's Slavery and Soul Food and Elizabeth's Birth of a Nation. Teaser: Last summer on June 17, 2020, the Quaker Oats Company announced its decision to rename its Aunt Jemima pancake brand after 131 years. Public opinion since the announcement has been mixed. One camp believes that the change is long overdue. While another group believes there’s nothing wrong with the brand’s namesake. For this special mini episode, we’re going to DIG in deeper and look at the history of Aunt Jemima. This case study will examine how something as innocuous as a box of pancake mix, represents America’s problematic history of racism. Find transcripts and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Occult Series. Episode #4 of 4. If you visit the city of New Orleans, Louisiana you will be regaled by stories of the magnanimous Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Join any of the hundreds of walking tours of the city and tour guides will weave tales of fact and fiction as you travel down the narrow streets of the French Quarter, and meander through the uneven grounds of NOLA’s famous cemeteries. Unable to visit New Orleans? No worries, just turn on the TV and watch a highly fictionalized account of Marie Laveau in American Horror Story “Coven” and “Apocalypse,” played by Angela Bassett. Or do a simple Google search and find pages and pages of blog posts and articles mixing snippets of fact with a heavy dose of legend for some interesting and entertaining reading. Since her death in 1881 Marie Laveau has morphed from a respected and charitable neighbor, or a “she-devil” and mysterious Voodoo Queen (depending on whose talking), and into a saint of strong, Black, feminist womanhood. How do we separate popular history from fact? Today we are digging into the real life of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, and navigating the buried line between fact and fiction. Find transcript and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Occult Series #3 of 4. Whether we’ve ever really given it any study, we’re all at least a little familiar with the link between the Nazi party and the occult. Movies like Captain America and Hellboy have plot lines that center on supernatural obsessions of Nazi leadership, desperately trying to find magical or supernatural ways of winning the war and establishing the Nazi worldview. Indiana Jones famously fought the Nazis - more than once! - to secure the Holy Grail and Ark of the Covenant, which the Nazis hoped would bring them cosmic power. But this is just pop culture, embellishing what we already know was a fanatical movement to create compelling movie plots, right? Right? Well, as we always say, it’s complicated - but in short, while those movie plotlines might be exaggerated for dramatic effect, they weren’t made up out of wholecloth. The NSDAP, or the National Socialist Worker’s Party, which rose to power in the interwar period led by Adolf Hitler, was a party ideologically enabled by occultist theories about the Aryan race and vampiric Jews, on old folk talks about secret vigilante courts and protective werewolves, and on pseudoscience ideas about ice moons. In this episode, we’re going to explore the occult ideas, racial mythology, and ‘supernatural imaginary’ that helped to create the Nazi Party. Bibliography Kurlander, Eric. Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Paradiz, Valerie. Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales. New York: Basic Books, 2008. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Occult Series. Episode #2 of 4. In 1980s Japan, mizuko spirit attacks, or hauntings by the spirits of aborted fetuses, were on the rise among middle school and high school girls. Listen to one Japanese teen's testimonial: “You probably won’t believe it, but mizuko spirit attacks are really frightful. Last summer, I got knocked up. I went to the hospital for an abortion, but about a week later, I started hearing the crying voice of a baby in the middle of the night, coming from inside me. Soon after that, a red blob came out of me, and when I looked at it closely, it looked like a baby. I was so scared! So last Sunday I went to a temple in Kamakura and offered incense before a statue of Mizuko Jizō. That’s what happened to me. Be careful, everybody!” This exact scenario DID happen to many young women in Japan in the 1980s. There was a sudden uptick in mizuko spirit attacks among young women and a media blitz about this phenomenon. But what are mizuko attacks exactly? And which came first? The media blitz or the hauntings? How were young women supposed to get rid of them? And what did this all mean? Find out in today’s episode about the history of mizuko spirit attacks.
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Occult #1 of 4. In the 1970s, Lorraine and Ed Warren had a spotlight of paranormal obsession shining on them. In the last decade, their work as paranormal investigators--ghost hunters--has been the premise for a blockbuster horror franchise totaling at least seven films so far, and more planned in the near future. So… what the heck? Is this for real? Yes, friends, today we’re talking about demonology, psychic connections to the dead, and the patriarchy. Just a typical day with your historians at Dig. Get the full transcript, bibliography, and more at digpodcast.org Select Bibliography Sarah Bartels, The Devil and the Victorians : Supernatural Evil in Nineteenth-Century English Culture, (Taylor & Francis Group, 2021,) Dyan Elliot, Fallen Bodies : Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) David Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History, (Princeton University, 2006) Ed. Joseph Laycock , Spirit Possession Around the World : Possession, Communion, and Demon Expulsion Across Cultures, (ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2015). Catherine Rider, Magic and Religion in Medieval England, (Reaktion Books, Limited, 2012). Cheryl Wicks, with Lorraine and Ed Warren, Ghost Tracks: What History, Science, and 50 Years of Field Research Have Revealed about Ghosts, Evil, and Life After Death (Graymalkin Media, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Birth Series. Episode #4 of 4. In his occupation as a swineherd, Jacob Nufer had performed countless genital surgeries on his pigs. He was an expert gelder. He was convinced he could deliver his child abdominally so that both his wife and child would survive. For this, there was no precedence. Most observers must have believed that Jacob was about to murder his wife and that his child might already be dead. Few people would have had confidence in his success. But Jacob was desperate. Using his gelding tools, Jacob made an incision in his wife’s abdomen, with no anesthesia and rudimentary sanitation, to deliver his infant daughter. Shockingly, the historical record asserts that both mother and child survived the operation. Even more shocking, Elizabeth is recorded as having five more children, all delivered vaginally. Their baby born by cesarean also thrived. She lived to the ripe old age of 77. This is the first recorded incidence of a cesarean section performed where both the mother and child survived the procedure. Or is it? You’ll have to keep listening to find out. Today we’re discussing the surprisingly long history of cesarean birth in western medicine.
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Birth Series #3 of 4. Childbirth is such a routine part of life that in some ways it can become invisible, especially historically. History, people often assume, is made up of major events, political elections, wars, etc. – not routine biological processes. But for something so invisible, it has made up a significant portion of the lives of women across time. Through American history, birthing women have advocated for the right to shape their own birth experiences, whether through home births surrounded by female kin or hospital births under twilight sleep. And the choices our foremothers made aren’t always the ones we might guess. Today, we present a history of childbirth in America. Bibliography Leavitt, Judith Walzer. *Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
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Birth Series. Episode #2 of 4. The 1915 silent-film The Birth of a Nation is one of the most popular and controversial films ever made. It’s success catapulted director D.W. Griffith into stardom while cementing the film, a piece of racist propaganda, into the annals of film history. It’s an amazing film with a horrifying message, which claimed that America’s rebirth after the Civil War was possible only through the power of white supremacy. The Birth of a Nation is still studied in film schools because of Griffith’s early use of dramatic camera and editing techniques. In 1992 the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Archives because it was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” But why was such a blatantly racist film so popular and why is it still relevant today? That’s what we hope to shed light on in this episode. Let’s dive in….
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Birth Series, Episode #1 of 4. Symphysiotomy. Probably not a word you’ve heard before - and if you have, I’m sorry? Symphysiotomy is an obstetric procedure in which a person’s pubic symphysis cartilage is cut to widen the pelvis for childbirth. Yes. Gross. I know. For most of the 19th century, symphysiotomy was a new solution to difficult births, and, to some doctors, preferable to Caesarean section, and certainly to the gruesome craniotomy. By the 1930s, though, in countries where childbirth had been medicalized, the symphysiotomy was phased out in favor of the safer C section - except Ireland. While surgical solutions to difficult childbirths increased in American and European obstetrics throughout the twentieth-century generally, it was only in Ireland that the use of symphysiotomy increased. Why, for the love of God, WHY, you ask? Let’s dig in. For a complete transcript and bibliography, visit digpodcast.org Select Bibliography Cara Delay, “The Torture Began”: Symphysiotomy and Obstetric Violence in Modern Ireland, Nursing Clio, May 31, 2016 Cara Delay and Beth Sundstrom, “The Legacy Of Symphysiotomy In Ireland: A Reproductive Justice Approach To Obstetric Violence,” Reproduction, Health, and Medicine: Advances in Medical Sociology, Volume 20, 197-218 (2020). Marie O’Connor, Bodily Harm Report: Symphysiotomy and Pubiotomy in Ireland, 1944-1992, (2011) Adrian Wilson, Ritual and Conflict: the Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England, (Taylor & Francis Group, 2013). Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660-1770 (Harvard University Press, 1995). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Border Series. Episode #4 of 4. In 1919, the idealistic American President Woodrow Wilson brought with him to the Paris Peace Conference his 14 Points. Among these points were the doctrine of self-determination (the idea that all peoples have the right to determine the nature of their own governance) and an idea for a coalition that enhanced international security (the League of Nations). While progressives lauded Wilson’s ideas in principle, the European powers who had won The Great War were skeptical and bitter. Unlike the United States, Britain and France had suffered immensely during the war and they wanted reparations for their losses. Moreover, most of the officials who made up the French and British states were not ready to surrender their empires. Even though anti-colonial movements had gained strength during the war, they were still the minority, and very few activists were in positions of power. To limit colonial power in a world that was apprehensive about it, a liberalized colonial schematic was created and called a mandate. The mandate would be granted by an international coalition that would be known as the League of Nations. These events transformed the peace-making process into something that was quite different from those of the past… or WAS it? We’ll soon find out! This week, as part of our border series, we’re telling the story of France’s League of Nations mandates in Syria and Lebanon.
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Borders #3 of 4. If we look for women of color in national women’s rights organizations before the 1970s, we don’t see very many. Once it was assumed that women of color did not participate in twentieth century feminism. Of course that wasn’t the case at all and the historical record is righting itself, as historians and other social scientists complicate the narrative of twentieth century feminism, arguing that feminisms were at play. Sociologist Benita Roth even titles her book Separate Roads to Feminism, showing that women of color acted in feminist ways but were not largely involved with national and white feminist organizations. Historian Cynthia Orozco has a new book out titled Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican-American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist, which excavates the importance of a feminist figure of the Mexican American Civil Rights movement, adding to the scholarship that unearths the “forgotten” history of women’s importance in major American social movements. In today’s episode we’ll be exploring the Mexican-American Civil Rights movement of the early to mid-twentieth century and two women important to that movement, Adela Sloss-Vento and Alicia Dickerson Montemayor, whose work to establish women as authoritative figures in the Mexican American Civil Rights movement paved the way for the Chicana Movement of the 1960s and 70s. Find a transcript, complete bibliography, and teaching resources at digpodcast.org
Select Bibliography Hernandez, Kelly Lytle. Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. University of California Press. 2010. Kaplowitz, Craig A. LULAC, Mexican Americans, and National Policy. Texas A&M University. 2005. Márquez, Benjamín. LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization. University of Texas.1993. Ngai, Mai. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press. 2004. Orozco, Cynthia E. No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. University of Texas Press. 2009. Orozco, Cynthia E. Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist. University of Texas Press. 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Borders Series. Episode #2 of 4. In popular media, borderline personality disorder has become linked in particular to beautiful, unstable, and ultimately dangerous white women, most famously Glenn Close’s character in the 1987 movie Fatal Attraction. As a diagnosis, borderline personality disorder went through various iterations before being declared a personality disorder enshrined in the DSM-III in 1980. Psychiatrists described borderline personality disorder, or BPD, in broad terms, with symptoms including intense emotions, fear of abandonment, instability in relationships, impulsivity, distorted self-image, uncontrolled anger, and dissociation. The diagnosis is very commonly used – more than half of those hospitalized with mental illness have been diagnosed with BPD. But another statistic about BPD is more revealing: between 70 and 77 percent of all people diagnosed with BPD are women. BPD is a troubled and troubling diagnosis, one that’s been criticized and theorized and analyzed by feminists, disability scholars, and so-called “borderlines” themselves. In this episode of our ‘borders’ series, we explore the complicated history of a different kind of border: borderline personality disorder.
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Borders #1 of 4. Like many of the Spanish conquistadors who made their way to the Americas, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca joined an expedition to explore “Florida” in search of glory and, ideally, an encomienda of his own. (“Florida” is what the Spanish called all of the land around the Gulf of Mexico, including the actual Floridian peninsula.) Unlike most Spanish conquistadors, Cabeza de Vaca ended up lost in the area we now call Texas for the better part of a decade, naked, barefoot, unarmed, horseless, and at the mercy of the natives he encountered--most of whom he couldn’t communicate with beyond gesturing and hoping to be understood. Cabeza de Vaca’s experience of the Americas was brutal at times, as he teetered on starvation, was beaten by his enslavers, and suffered indignities for much of his eight+ years lost in Texas and northern Mexico. Still, his recollection of his “journeys” are nuanced, if inevitably colored by his background and biases. And by the end of his life, he became a champion of indigenous rights, demanding reform so loudly that the other Spaniards of South America had him arrested and sent back to Spain on trumped up charges. Though the writing and travels of Cabeza de Vaca are very much a part of the history of conquistadores, they also stand out.
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Select Bibliography There are several English translations of Cabeza de Vaca’s text available. Fanny Bandelier’s is usable, but Adorno and Pautz’s is excellent, with thorough annotation and cross referenced footnotes utilizing Oviedo and other sources. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (transl. Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz), The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca (University of Nebraska, 2003). Rafael Varón Gabai, Francisco Pizarro and His Brothers: The Illusion of Power in Sixteenth-century Peru, (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997). Alex D. Krieger and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, We Came Naked and Barefoot : The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca Across North America, edited by Margery H. Krieger (University of Texas Press, 2002). Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford University Press, 1964). Dennis F. Herrick, Esteban: The African Slave Who Explored America. (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Baker H. Morrow and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, South American Expeditions, 1540-1545, (University of New Mexico Press, 2011). Kathleen Ann Myers, Nina M. Scott, and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, Fernandez de Oviedo's Chronicle of America : A New History for a New World (University of Texas Press, 2017) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bodies Series. Episode #4 of 4. Birth control and abortion are constant flash points in contemporary politics, and they’re often described as signs of a rapidly changing society. But women have always had ways (though not always quite as effective) to control family size through contraception, and early American women were no exception. Understanding the role that reproductive rights has played in American history provides critical context to today’s debates. Have we always had these kinds of debates? How did Americans think about abortion in the late 18th century, or the 19th century? We’re here to shed light on some of these questions.
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Bodies Series, Episode #3 of 4. While police investigations have adapted to new technologies, the basic premises of investigative police work have been pretty consistent since the 1880s in the UK, Ireland, and the US. But that does not mean that the philosophical and procedural organization of modern policing have not or cannot undergo revision or reform. For example, the ways that these national policing organizations dealt with same-sex sex when homosexuality was illegal shifted significantly over time . The Irish police -- or Garda -- had a multitude of tactics for catching men having sex with men. One of the most controversial was when they used agents provocateur, men who used their own bodies as bait for same-sex desiring men. This was a tactic employed first in 1927, and then dropped completely by 1936. Why? Today we’ll contemplate that question while thinking about authorized deception, authorized crime, and incitement to crime in the modern policing of sex. For the complete transcript, bibliography, and information about ways to support this show, visit digpodcast.org Bibliography Paul Bleakley, “Fish in a Barrel: Police Targeting of Brisbane’s Ephemeral Gay Spaces in the Pre- Decriminalization Era,” Journal of Homosexuality, 68:6, (2021) 1037-1058. Vicky Bungaya, Michael Halpina, Chris Atchisonb and Caitlin Johnston, “Structure and agency: reflections from an exploratory study of Vancouver indoor sex workers,” Culture, Health & Sexuality, Vol. 13, No. 1, (January 2011) 15–29 Vicky Conway, Policing Twentieth Century Ireland (Routledge Press, 2013). Derek Dalton, “Policing Outlawed Desire: ‘homocriminality’ In Beat Spaces In Australia,” Law Critique (2007) 18:375–405. Morgan Denton, “Open Secrets: Prostitution and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Irish Society,” (State University of New York at Buffalo Dissertations, 2012). Lyle Dick, “The Queer Frontier: Male Same-sex Experience in Western Canada’s Settlement Era,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes, 48:1 (Winter 2014) 15-52 Gregory Feldman, ““With my head on the pillow”: Sovereignty, Ethics, and Evil among Undercover Police Investigators,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58(2) (2016) 491–518. Angela Fritz, “‘I was a Sociological Stranger’: Ethnographic Fieldwork and Undercover Performance in the Publication of The Taxi-Dance Hall, 1925–1932,” Gender & History, Vol.30 No.1 (March 2018) 131–152. LaShawn Denise Harris, ““Women and Girls in Jeopardy by His False Testimony”: Charles Dancy, Urban Policing, and Black Women in New York City during the 1920s,” Journal of Urban History, Vol. 44(3) (2018) 457-475 Louise A. Jackson, Women police: Gender, welfare and surveillance in the twentieth century. (Manchester University Press, 2006). Gary Potter, “The History of Policing in the United States, Part 1,” Eastern Kentucky University Police Studies Online Gary Marx, Police Surveillance in America, (University of California Press, 1988) Brendon Murphy, “Deceptive apparatus: Foucauldian perspectives on law, authorised crime and the rationalities of undercover investigation,” Griffith Law Review, 25:2 (2016), 223-244. William Peniston, Pederasts and others: urban culture and sexual identity in nineteenth century Paris, (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004) 25-26 Michel Rey, “Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700-1750: The Police Archives," in Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, ed. Robbert Purks MacCubbin (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 179-91. Stephen Robertson, “Harlem Undercover: Vice Investigators, Race, and Prostitution, 1910-1930,” Journal of Urban History, 35: 4 (May 2009) 486-504. Philip Matthew Stinson, Sr., John Liederbach, Steven P. Lab, and Steven L. Brewer, Jr., “Police Integrity Lost: A Study of Law Enforcement Officers Arrested,” Final technical report, April 2016 https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249850.pdf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bodies Series. Episode #2 of 4. At the tail end of a pandemic (we hope!) vaccines are in the news. There are huge disparities in COVID-19 vaccination rates marked by class, race, and geography. Critics question the system of tiered eligibility as many essential workers like those in the food industry are not yet eligible for the vaccine. Others don’t trust pharmaceutical companies to tell the truth about the side effects or efficacy of their immunizations. Still more believe that compulsory vaccination violates their personal liberties and that vaccine mandates are a slippery slope into a fascist state. But we’re here to tell you that vaccination has always been controversial. Many of the concerns people have now about the COVID-19 vaccine were voiced in the past about the original smallpox vaccine. A few years ago, when we were the History Buffs Podcast, we released an episode about the history of immunization and anti-vax movements. In light of a renewed interest in vaccination, we’re revamping that tired old episode. This week, we attempt to add some historical context to our current vaccine debates by telling you the story of the invention of vaccination, its impact, it’s opponents, and the issues surrounding them.
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Bodies Series, Episode #1 of 4. Late in 2020, a number of white academics were revealed to be passing as people of color, making the concept of racial passing a matter of national conversation. For these white folks, the benefits of being considered a person of color were based on a perception that minorities somehow have special access, abilities, or freedoms unavailable to white people – which is, of course, both untrue and oversimplified. In reality, whites passing as people of color is a manifestation of their inability to believed, or inability to accept, that there might be spaces and roles that might exclude white people. However, historically, it has been Black Americans who have passed as white. Throughout American history, Black Americans have chosen to pass as white for a number of reasons - to escape from bondage, to avoid the oppression of Jim Crow, to succeed in a career otherwise closed to a person of color. Some passed only from 9 to 5, others, for their entire lives. But when Blacks passed as white, it wasn’t quite the same, nor was it just a way to land a job or garner some social cache. They did so to try to slip free of structural racism – and the results weren’t all positive. In this episode, Averill and Sarah discuss the history of African Americans passing as white in the United States. For a complete transcript of this episode, educator resources, and ways to support this show, visit digpodcast,org Bibliography Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave. New York: McDonald & Lee Printers, 1849 Craft, William and Ellen. Running a Thousand Miles For Freedom: or the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. London: William Tweedie, 1860. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Written By Himself. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845. Gatewood, Willard B. Aristocrats of Color, The Black Elite, 1880-1920. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000. Hobbs, Allyson. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Hughes, Langston. The Ways of White Folks. New York: Vintage Classics ebooks, 1990. McCaskill, Barbara. “Ellen Craft: The Fugitive Who Fled as a Planter,” in Ann Short Chirart and Betty Wood, eds., Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume I. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Sarah leads Elizabeth, Marissa, and Averill through a discussion and examination of the 1776 Report. Spoiler alert: it's complete garbage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Elections Series #4 of 4. On May 24, 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to codify marriage equality through a popular vote. Significantly, the popular vote enacted a constitutional amendment, adding protection for two adult’s right to marry regardless of sex or gender. In a country that only just decriminalized same-sex sex in 1993, this turn of events might be surprising. 61% of eligible Irish voters voted. 62% of those voters said Yes, to approve the referendum amending the constitution. Members of the main mobilizing campaign--the “Yes Equality” campaign that advocated for the amendment--credit their success to a strong social media movement, the mobilization of real people’s stories, and a non-confrontational high-road approach in comparison with the No campaigners. The leaders of Yes Equality, Grainne Healy, Brian Sheehan, and Noel Whelan, also insist that Ireland was just ready to accept gay and lesbian Irish people as equals, evidenced by the smashing success of a 62% victory. The 2015 referendum was absolutely a major milestone in Irish gay and lesbian history. Whether or not it signaled Ireland’s definitive acceptance of queer Irish people as “equal” is less clear. Bibliography Ed. Charlie Bird and Colm Toibin, A Day in May : Real Lives, True Stories, (Dublin: Merrion Press, 2016). Averill Earls, “Solicitor Brown and His Boy: Love, Sex, and Scandal in Twentieth-Century Ireland,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, vol. 46, no. 1, (March 2020). [[Yes, that’s me!]] Averill Earls, “Unnatural Offences of English Import: The Political Association of Englishness and Homosexuality in Nineteenth-Century Irish Nationalist Media,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 28, no. 3, (September 2019), 396-424. Diarmaid Ferriter, Occasions of Sin Brenda Gray, “Mobility, Connectivity and Non-Resident Citizenship: Migrant Social Media Campaigns in the Irish Marriage Equality Referendum,” Sociology, Vol. 53(4) (2019) 634–651. Grainne Healy, Brian Sheehan, and Noel Whelan, Ireland Says Yes : The Inside Story of How the Vote for Marriage Equality Was Won (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2015). Brian Lacey, Terrible Queer Creatures Eithne Luibhéid, “Same-sex marriage and the pinkwashing of state migration controls,” International Feminist Journal Of Politics, Vol. 20, No. 3, (2018) 405–424 Patrick McDonagh, “‘Homosexuals Are Revolting’: Gay & Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland 1970s-1990s,” Studi irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies, n. 7 (2017), pp. 65-91. Una Mullally, In the Name of Love (2014) Elizabeth O’Connor, “Discourse, performativity and the Irish marriage equality referendum debate,” Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, vol. 8 no. 1, 81-93. Sonja Tiernan, The History of Marriage Equality in Ireland: A Social Revolution Begins. (Manchester University Press, 2020) Brian Tobin, “Marriage Equality in Ireland: The Politico-Legal Context,” 30 Int'l J.L. Pol. & Fam. 115 (2016), 115-130. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Elections Series. Episode #3 of 4. 1968 was an extremely turbulent and painful year in the United States of America. The Vietnam War was in full swing, as well as the protest movement against it. Gallup Poll results in February of 1968 showed that fully half of the American populace disapproved of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s (LBJ) handling of the war in Vietnam. By March of 1968, LBJ notified his party and the nation that he would not run for a second full term in office. In April of 1968, beloved civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In June of the same year, popular NY Senator and former Attorney General Robert Kennedy (RFK) was assassinated. Then, the August Democratic National Convention in Chicago erupted in protests and police violence, the likes of which many in the U.S. had never seen. Needless to say, 1968 was a traumatizing year for the U.S and I’ve just mentioned the high points! Today as an addition to our series about important elections, we’ll be discussing the American presidential election of 1968 within the context of the larger political and social upheaval happening in the U.S. during that time.
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Election Series, Episode #2 of 4. The consequences of 1876 were enormous. To end the the election limbo, Democratic and Republican politicians worked out a shadowy deal in which Rutherford Hayes was declared the president (by one electoral vote!) and the Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction in the former Confederacy. The results of the “Compromise of 1877” were a total abandonment of the process of reforming the South from a land ruled by white supremacy and defined by slavery to one of freedom and equal rights. The federal government effectively washed its hands of Reconstruction and left the South to its own devices. The result was … not good. As one freedman, Henry Adams, described it: “The whole South – every state in the South – had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves.” Today, as part of our series on elections, we’re talking about 1876, the election that ended Reconstruction, upended the accomplishments of the Civil War era, derailed civil rights, and allowed for the reign of Jim Crow. Bibliography DuBois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: The Free Press, 1998. Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction. New York: Harper Collins, 1990. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1865-1877. New York: Harper Collins, 1988. Holt, Michael F. By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876. Lawrence: Kansas State University Press, 2008. Rehnquist, William H. Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876. New York: Knopf, 2004. Woodward, C. Vann. Reunion & Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1951. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Elections Series. Episode #1 of 4. On the morning of August 11, 1492, Rodrigo Borgia was elected Pope, taking the name Alexander VI and yelling “I am Pope! I am Pope!” The throngs of Romans in the Piazza di San Pietro shared in his excitement. But for some, the Papal Election of 1492 seemed to indicate the downfall of the papacy, if not the end of days. Giovanni de Medici is recorded as saying, “Now we are in the power of a wolf, the most rapacious, perhaps that this world has ever seen; and if we do not flee, he will infallibly devour us.” Gian Andrea Boccaccio wrote in a letter to the Duke of Ferrara, “ten Papacies would not suffice to satisfy the greed of all his kindred.” Ferrante, King of Naples, purportedly told his wife, “This election will not only undermine the peace of Italy, but that of the whole of Christendom.” The priest and prognosticator Girolamo Savonarola would spend the last year of his life trying to render the 1492 Papal election void due to simony, a campaign that resulted in his excommunication, torture, and execution. What was it about the Papal Election of 1492 and its resultant Pontiff, Alexander VI, that elicited such a dramatic range of reactions? As it turns out, this question is difficult to answer but it involves assassination, simony, nepotism, accusations of poison, coercion, abuse, incest, wildly debauched orgies, and political corruption.
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Drugs Episode #4 of 4. For centuries, psychiatrists searched for the cure to mental illness, frustrated that medical doctors seemed to be able to find the “magic bullet” medications to fight disease and infection. In the mid 20th century, though, a series of new major and minor tranquilizers revolutionized the world of psychiatry. Doctors doled out Miltown, Librium, and Valium to stressed businessmen and frazzled housewives, using ad men to market these psychiatric wonder drugs to just about every ailment imaginable. In the process, psychopharmaceuticals became intertwined with the women’s rights movement, enflamed mid-century gender politics, and changed the way Americans thought about mental illness. Get the transcript at digpodcast.org Bibliography & Further ReadingDavid Herzberg, Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and teh Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. New York: Crown Publishers, 2010. David Healy, The Creation of Psychopharmacology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Jonathan Metzl, Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Drugs Series. Episode #3 of 4. Tobacco smoking is definitely the default way to consume tobacco. But in certain times and places, smokeless tobacco- such as snuff, chew, or tobacco tea- have found niches. Yes, snuff was practical for some, a pop phenomenon to others, but many of these historical niches for smokeless tobacco were medicinal. It’s difficult to imagine now, in a society raised on the message of “smoking kills” but tobacco’s introduction onto the world stage in the 1500s can be traced primarily to its supposed medicinal properties. This is especially true of smokeless tobacco. But smokeless tobacco’s story doesn't end there. Get ready for a wild ride, this is the global history of smokeless tobacco. Find transcript and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Drugs Series. Episode #2 of 4. Today we’re going to discuss alcohol consumption in early America. Alcohol was very important to early Americans and it flowed freely through the colonies. Adults and children alike drank alcoholic beverages for a variety of reasons. One being that it was one of the few things that were safe to drink at the time. However, by the time of the Early Republic period, roughly 1790 to 1830, Americans were consuming more hard liquor per capita than any other country in the world. So today we’ll explore drinking in early America, ask why Americans drank so much, and how such drinking affected the new republic.
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Drugs, Episode 1 of 4. Quinine, the alkaline derived from the bark of the quina-quina tree, would prove the most effective treatment for malarial fever and infection in human history. In the decades after the bark of the tree was exported to Europe, every state with imperialist aspirations wanted access to quinine. The Spanish Crown, recognizing quina bark for its power and lucrativeness, monopolized the harvest and export of the medicament. By the beginning of the 19th century, the imperialist aspirations of Europeans required an effective malaria treatment. The quest for quinine led to a robust smuggling ring empowered by the Age of Revolutions, Italian social welfare, and the invention of the British Empire’s cocktail of choice. Quinine’s role in reshaping the world is immeasurable… but we’re going to give it the old college try! For the complete transcript and full bibliography, visit digpodcast.org
Select Bibliography Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (Yale University Press, 2002) Matthew Crawford, The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) Stefanie Gänger, A Singular Remedy: Cinchona Across the Atlantic World, 1751–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, (Oxford University Press, 1981). Andreas-Holger Maehle, Drugs on Trial: Experimental Pharmacology and Therapeutic Innovation in the Eighteenth Century (Rodopi, 1999) Clements Markham,Travels in Peru and India, (London: John Murray, 1862). Digitized by Project Gutenberg. Frank M. Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962, (Yale University Press, 2006). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Witches Series. Episode #4 of 4. On a brisk autumn day in New York City, 1968, roughly 13 women spent the morning of October 31st dressing in black cloaks and dresses. They stuck feathers, leaves, and furs in their long hair. One woman grabbed her enormous hat, roughly in the shape of a costume witch hat, but instead of a pointy top, it sported a paper mache pig’s head on a plate surrounded by dollar bills. These women were members of W.I.T.C.H., the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell and they were about to jump on their broomsticks and fly into the history books.
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Witches Series, #3 of 4. In 1618, the Earl of Rutland and his wife accused three women of bewitching their family. They believed that bewitchment was the cause of death of their first son, and the long-term illness of their second. The women in question were former servants of their household at Belvoir (or Beaver) Castle near Bottesford, England: Joan Flower, a Bottesford cunning woman, and her two daughters, Margaret and Phillipa. Joan Flower died while being transported to the prison at Lincoln; her two daughters were interrogated mercilessly by the Earl and several other noblemen who also served as magistrates in Lincoln County until they confessed. The jury found both guilty, and the judge sentenced them to death. Less than a year later, the Earl’s second son succumbed to his long-term illness. The Earl had his family tomb inscribed with these words: “In 1608 he married ye lady Cecila Hungerford, daughter to ye Honorable Knight Sir John Tufton, by whom he had two sons, both of which died in their infancy by wicked practises and sorcerye.”[1] Francis Manners and his wife, Cecily, were convinced that their family had been cursed by a witch. Historian Tracy Borman suspects foul play of a non-magical sort. Ultimately, the motive mattered little to the Flower women. Their accusers were too powerful to be denied a conviction, and they were too inconsequential, with too few friends in Bottesford or Lincoln, to survive a witch hunt. Full transcript and bibliography at digpodcast.org
Select Bibliography Bibliography Michael D. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006). Tracy Borman, Witches: James I and the English Witch-Hunts,(London: Vintage, 2014). Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Witches Series. Episode #2 of 4. Since at least the 1970s, academic histories of witches and witchcraft have enjoyed a rare level of visibility in popular culture. Feminist, literary, and historical scholarship about witches has shaped popular culture to such a degree that the discipline has become more about unlearning everything we thought we knew about witches. Though historians have continued to investigate and re-interpret witch history, the general public remains fixated on the compelling, feminist narrative of the vulnerable women hanged and burned at the stake for upsetting the patriarchy. While this part of the story can be true, especially in certain contexts, it’s only part of the story, and frankly, not even the most interesting part. Today we tackle male witches in early modern Eurasia and North America!
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Witches, Episode #1 of 4. In 1973, two professors active in the women’s health movement wrote a pamphlet for women to read in the consciousness-raising reading groups. The pamphlet, inspired by Our Bodies, Ourselves, looked to history to explain how women had been marginalized in their own healthcare. Women used to be an important part of the medical profession as midwives, they argued -- but the midwives were forced out of practice because they were so often considered witches and persecuted by the patriarchy in the form of the Catholic Church. The idea that midwives were regularly accused of witchcraft seemed so obvious that it quickly became taken as fact. There was only one problem: it wasn’t true. In this episode, we follow the convoluted origin story of the myth of the midwife-witch. Get the full transcript at digpodcast.org Bibliography & Further Reading Samuel S. Thomas, “Early Modern Midwifery: Splitting the Profession, Connecting the History,” The Journal of Social History 43 (2009), 115-138. Thomas Forbes, “Midwifery and Witchcraft,” The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 17 (1962), 1966. David Harley, “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch,” in Brian P. Levack, Witchcraft, Healing, and Popular Diseases: New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology (Florence: Taylor and Francis Group, 2001) Leigh Whaley, Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 Ritta Jo Horsley and Richard Horsley, “Who Were the Witches? Wise Women, Midwives, and the European Witch Hunts,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture 3 (1986), Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1970), Monica Green, “Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe,” Signs 14 (1989), 434-473. Margaret Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe (London: Oxford University Press, 1921) Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches (London: Oxford University Press, 1931) Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Mental Illness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1970) Jacqueline Simpson, “Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?” Folklore 105 (1994) Jennifer Nelson, More than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2015). Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth Century Representations (London: Taylor and Francis Group, 1996). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Food Series. Episode #4 of 4. In June 2020, Quaker Oats announced they were revamping their famous (infamous?) brand of breakfast products, Aunt Jemima. From the late 19th century to the late 1980s, Aunt Jemima products prominently featured the image of the Black mammy trope to sell the idea that all white families could have the comforting presence of a Southern Black cook in their homes. As always, there was immediately a backlash from Americans who appealed to the place Aunt Jemima holds in American nostalgia – but what many don’t realize is the way that the figure of Aunt Jemima was specifically created to provide that sense of nostalgia drawn from the long, racist history of Black women who were bound to serve white families. In this episode, we explore that history, and go back further to consider how even the staple foods of Southern cuisine originated in the horrors of slavery.
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Food Series #3 of 4. The Black Panthers are often misrepresented or their significance is minimized in popular thought and opinion. The everyday organizing is often lost and an overemphasis on the Panther’s clashes with law enforcement overshadow the substantial community programs, the Service to the People Programs, offered by the Black Panther Party on the local level. Additionally, the dominant narrative highlights the men of the Panther party, yet women made up 2/3 of the membership and set a community-focused revolutionary agenda. Instead of viewing Black power movements like the Panthers as the antithesis of the non-violent civil rights movement, it is important to recognize that civil rights and Black power movements such as the Black Panthers, both emanate from a centuries-long Black freedom struggle. As former Panther Ericka Huggins states, “We were making history. It wasn’t nice and clean. It was complex.” Get the transcript and complete bibliography at digpodcast.org Select Bibliography Austin, Curtis. Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party. University of Arkansas Press. 2008. Bloom, Joshua, Waldo E. Martin, Jr. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. University of California Press, 2016. Foner, Philip S. ed. The Black Panthers Speak. Lippincott. 1970. Harrington, Michael. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Jones, Charles E. , ed. The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered). Black Classic Press. 1998. Katz, Michael B. The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Levine, Susan. School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Newton, Huey P. Revolutionary Suicide. Penguin Classics. 2009. Orleck, Annelise. Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Orleck, Annelise, and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, eds. The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Peniel, E.Joseph, ed. The Black Power Movement: Rethinking The Civil Rights-Black Power Era. Routledge. 2006. The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. Black Panther Party : Service to the People Programs. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009. Arinna Hermida. “Mapping the Black Panther Party in Key Cities.” An Oral History with Ericka Huggins, Interviews conducted by Fiona Thompson in 2007, Oral History Center University of California, The Bancroft Library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Food Series. Episode #2 of 4. Cannibalism gave imperial powers compelling justifications for their colonial endeavors; indigenous Americans and Australasians were backward, uncivilized, savage, and ritual cannibalism served as proof of their need for a guiding hand. But it’s not that easy. Why? Because right at the moment when Europeans were using cannibalism to demean indigenous cultures and justify their civilizing missions, they too were engaging in cannibalism. So were most of the ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Asia, but under the guise of therapeutics. This week’s episode will focus on cannibalism’s most “civilized” iteration, but also its most widespread, medicinal cannibalism. It’s true. For thousands of years, all over the world, the human body has been both the object of medical treatment AND an ingredient in its therapies. ** Thanks to my student Dan Hacker for piquing my interest about this topic! ~ Marissa Rhodes For transcripts and show notes see: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Food Series, Episode #1 of 4. When the Spanish conquered Mesoamerica, they conquered cacao. Mixing the bitter cacao seeds with sugar and other spices - spices that were often also obtained through European conquest - the Spanish created a commodity that stimulated the European comestible market. Its luxuriousness grew first out of its expensiveness and rarity in early modern Europe. The inaccessibility of chocolate to most early modern Europeans meant it has not featured strongly in the longer history of European “aphrodisiacs” specifically, but the story of the ways that Europeans adopted the bittersweet central American drink as a sex remedy says a great deal about the history of sexuality, medicine, gender, economics, race, and imperialism. For the full bibliography and a transcript of this episode, visit digpodcast.org Select Bibliography Jennifer Evans, Aphrodisiacs, Fertility, and Medicine in Early Modern England, (Boydell & Brewer, 2014). Kate Loveman, “The Introduction of Chocolate into England: Retailers, Researchers, and Consumers, 1640-1730,” Journal of Social History v. 47 n. 1 (2013) 27-46. Ed. Cameron McNeil, Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao (University of Florida Press, 2009). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Commemorative Sex Series. Episode 4 of 4. Wherever you have a military, you will have sex. Whether it’s an occupied city, an encampment in a theater of war, or a military base here in the United States, anywhere you have a large population of young men, stationed away from their girlfriends and wives, you will soon have a booming sex trade – and the requisite STI outbreak. So how has the United States military dealt with this particular problem facing soldier health? For this episode in our anniversary series on sex, we’re talking about sex, sexually transmitted infections, and the US military. Find transcripts and show notes at: https://digpodcast.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Commemorative Sex Series: Episode 3 of 4. When and where public baths have been popular, they’ve meant different things to different cultures. They might be sites for socializing, religious purification, spiritual/bodily cleanliness, relaxation/pampering, public health/hygiene, homosocialiality, and, of course, sex, or some combination of those things. At the start of the twentieth century, single-gender communal bathhouses were central to emerging gay communities all over North America and Europe. At the end of the century, those sites of community formation were associated with the rapid and devastating spread of HIV/AIDS. In 1984, the city of San Francisco ordered the closure of bathhouses, insisting that often anonymous and unsafe sex was at the heart of the bathhouse. But the closure of the gay bathhouses in AIDS-era America echoes the closure and backlash against queer bathhouse spaces in places like early twentieth-century Russia and Mexico. The bathhouse was a contested space because of its same-sex sexual activity, with or without the threat of the looming pandemic. For a complete transcript and bibliography, visit digpodcast.org
Selected Bibliography
Allab Berube, My Desire for History ,(University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Ed. by Chris Bull, While the World Sleeps: Writing from the First Twenty Years of the Global AIDS Plague (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003). Dan Healy, Russian Homophobia: From Stalin to Sochi, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Victor M. Macias-Gonzalez, Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico, (University of New Mexicao, 2012). Ethan Pollock, Without the Banya we Would Perish, (Oxford University Press, 2019). Philip Tiemeyer, Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants (University of California Press, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Commemorative Sex Series: Episode 2 of 4. Today’s show is focused on the Hispanic concept of recogida and the accompanying system called recogimiento. Roughly translated into English, recogida means “pick up,” or “capture” while the word recogimiento means “recollection,” “seclusion” or “withdrawal” but, as many scholars before us have noted, these Spanish words resist translation. To early modern Spanish-speakers, they evoked a division in the worlds of the sacred and the worldly. To modern Spanish-speakers, they evoke social concepts related to honor and shame. We do know that recogimiento first came into use on the Iberian peninsula by Franciscans and Catholic mystics. Though this usage continued, the term also came to represent a system of virtue for women, one that revolved around sexual purity, honor, and physical enclosure. Eventually, this tradition-turned-social norm evolved into an institution for women with many purposes. Join us as we uncover the long and winding history of recogimiento in colonial Latin America.
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Commemorative Sex Series: Episode 1 of 4. It's our 100th EPISODE!!! Welcome to the start of another glorious SEX series. This episode on the Honeymoon in Niagara Falls is our 100th episode, and to commemorate the occasion, we're returning to one of our favorite Series themes: Sex. Thank you for supporting us, for joining us on this journey, and for listening! Niagara Falls was once known as the Honeymoon Capital of the World. Join us as we explore this unique phenomenon. Everything has a history, even honeymoons. Bibliography Cott, Nancy. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Breines, Wini. “The ‘Other’ Fifties: Beats and Bad Girls,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960. Ed. Joann Meyerowitz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Dubinsky, Karen. The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Howells, William Dean. Their Wedding Journey. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1883. Johnson, Miriam M. Strong Mothers, Weak Wives: The Search for Gender Equality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Johnson, Paul. Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. Katz, Jonathan. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York: Dutton Publishing, 1995. McKinsey, Elizabeth. Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This is a special episode, a recording of a live Anniversary episode in which we answer questions from listeners. We hope you enjoy! Thank you for listening to and supporting our show, and to those who submitted questions and joined us for the live episode, a special thanks to you all! <3
Next week (May 10) we will be releasing our 100th episode as Dig, kicking off a Sex series like no other. Cheers! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Violence Series #4 of 4. Though they’re rarely at the fore of the story, the women of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising were essential to the rebellion. They carried messages and supplies, provided cover fire in battles, and served on the front lines. In this episode Averill and Sarah dive into the historical treatment of the women of the Easter Rising, and the failure of the Free State after Ireland gained its independence to adequately honor the sacrifice of those women. Get the transcript and Further Reading recommendations at digpodcast.org Bibliography Mary McAuliffe and Liz Gillis, Richmond Barracks 1916: we were there: 77 women of the Easter Rising, (Dublin City Council, 2016). Edited by Ruán O'Donnell, Mícheál Ó hAodha, Voices from the Easter Rising, (Merrion Press, 2016) Richard Grayson, Dublin's Great Wars : The First World War, the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution, (Cambridge University Press; 2018) Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, “Schooling the National Orphans: The Education of the Children of the Easter Rising Leaders,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2016, Vol.9(2), pp.261-276 Marian Eide, “Maeve’s Legacy: Constance Markievicz, Eva Gore-Booth, and the Easter Rising,” Éire-Ireland, 2016, Vol.51(3), pp.80-103 Fearghal McGarry, The rising : Ireland--Easter 1916, (Oxford University Press, 2010). Constance Gore Booth Markievicz, Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz (Constance Gore-Booth), Also Poems and Articles Relating to Easter Week by Eva Gore Booth and a Biographical Sketch by Esther Roper, with a Preface by President de Valera, (Longmanns, Green, 1934) Margaret Skinnider, Doing my Bit for Ireland: A first-hand account of the Easter Rising, (Luath Press Ltd, 2017) Margaret Ward, Unmanageable revolutionaries: women and Irish Nationalism, (Pluto Press, 1995) Helen McBride, “Eirebrushed: Erasing Women from Irish History,” Nursing Clio Maria Luddy, “Women and the COntagious Diseases Acts, 1864-1886,” History Ireland (Spring 1993) Brittany Columbus, “Bean na h-Éireann: Feminism and Nationalism in an Irish Journal, 1908-1911,” Voces Novae, vol. 1, iss. 2, (2018) Cal McCarthy, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Revolution, (Cork, Ireland: Collins Press, 2007) Cumann na mBan Archives Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Violence Series. Episode #3 of 4. This week we're delving into penal violence in early modern Europe. For most people, we suspect, their familiarity with torture, corporal punishment, and execution for capital crime is confined to some gnarly anecdotes, perhaps a few graphic movie scenes, a little Monty Python, and, if you’re cool like us, your high school history project about medieval torture devices. But everything has a history and those things barely scratch the surface. Legal historians have been uncovering, measuring, and analyzing capital punishment for decades and today we want to share some of what they’ve found. Find show notes and transcripts at www.digpodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Violence Series, #2 of 4. Dueling seems crazy to us today. Two men take ten paces, turn to face each other, and stand still while they shoot to kill, all the while following strict rules. But while it’s easy to think of duels as simply evidence of a more violent age, dueling and other similar forms of violence offer an important window into the political, racial, and cultural history of the late 18th and early 19th century. Duels weren’t just about shooting at a guy you disliked – they were about masculinity, slavery, race, politics, honor, class status, and the sectional crisis. We're talking about all this in this episode about dueling and political violence in America in the first half of the nineteenth century. Get the full transcript at digpodcast.org Bibliography Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Earle, Jonathan. John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2008. Ellis, Joseph. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. Freeman, Joanne B. The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. Freeman, Joanne B. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Greenberg, Kenneth S. Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, The Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Hoffer, Williamjames Hull. The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2010. Letters from Alexander Hamilton to Aaron Burr, Founders Online, National Archives Online. Charles Sumner, “The Crime Against Kansas” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Violence Series. Episode # 1 of 4. Today we are examining violence and lynching towards ethnic Mexican people along the Texas Mexico border during the early twentieth century. Particularly we are discussing the mob violence, or lynching, against Antionio Rodriguez in Rocksprings Texas in November of 1910. Typically when lynching in America is discussed it is in reference to the obscene amount of lynchings against Black people in the United States between Reconstruction and the mid-twentieth century. However, anti-Mexican violence was also a harsh reality of racial violence throughout the American Southwest. Find show notes and transcripts at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
2020 Series #4 of 4. Just over one month after the first shots of the Civil War were fired, three enslaved black men got into a row boat and paddled across the James River from mainland Virginia to the Union-occupied Fortress Monroe. Whether they knew it or not, the three young men – named Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend – sparked the unraveling of the institution of slavery in the United States. In today’s installment of our ‘do-over’ series, we’re revisiting the complicated legal category of contraband, the term applied to enslaved people who fled to Union lines during the American Civil War.
Find transcripts and show notes at: https://digpodcast.org/2020/01/26/slave-contraband-refugee-the-end-of-slavery-in-the-united-states Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
2020 Series #3 of 4. What happens when you build an empire on sugar? Since the 18th century, sugar has been one of the most demanded commodities in the West. By the 1700s, technological advancements and production made sugar accessible to even some of the poorest Americans and Europeans, and imperial governments poured millions of dollars into the shaping of sugar colonies around the world. From the Caribbean to southeastern Africa to the Indian Ocean, sugar was king. But just as few today think on where their granulated white sugar comes from, those who consumed the White Gold between the 17th and 20th centuries knew little of the back-breaking, harsh, and unfree labor that went into producing that glorious sweetness, or the lengths to which their own governments went to float those potentially profitable sugar colonies. Empires built on sugar rotted away like teeth too long exposed to that sweetness. Find the complete transcript at digpodcast.org Bibliography James Patterson Smith, “Empire and Social Reform: British Liberals and the ‘Civilizing Mission in the Sugar Colonies,’ 1868-1874,” Albion 27.2 (1995) 253-77 Philip D. Rotz, “Sweetness and Fever? Sugar Production, Aeses aegypti, and Dengue Fever in Natal, South Africa, 1926-27,” PSAE Research Series 12 (2014) “Bussa’s Rebellion,” UK National Archives Carol MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar : Industry and Environment in Hawaiʻi (University of Hawaii, 2014) Alice G. Walton, “How Much Sugar Are Americans Eating?” Forbes (Aug 2012) “Britain is built on sugar: our national sweet tooth defines us,” The Guardian (Oct 2007) Karl Watson, “Slavery and Economy in Barbados,” BBC (2/2011) Barrie Cook, “Pieces of Eight,” History of the World in 100 Objects (BBC & British Museum) Emma George Ross, “The Portuguese in Africa, 1415-1600” Met Museum Matthew Edel, “The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the Seventeenth Century and the Rise of the West Indian Competition,” Caribbean Studies 9.1 (1969) 24-43. Mark Johnson, “The Sugar Trade in the West Indies and Brazil between 1492 and 1700,” University of Minnesota Expansion of Empire Seminar Sidney W. Mintz, “The Culture History of a Puerto Rican Sugar Cane Plantation: 1876-1949,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 33.2 (1953) 224-251. Heather Pringle, “Sugar Masters in a New World,” Smithsonian.com (January 2010) Pictures & Graphs from C.J. Robertson, “Cane-Sugar Production in the British Empire,” Economic Geography 6.2 (1930) 131-151
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2020 Series. Episode #2 of 4. To escape what came to be known as The Year Without a Summer, a small group holed up in a Swiss villa and challenged each other to pass the time by telling the best ghost stories. Several notable literary works emerged from this friendly storytelling competition. Lord Byron’s poem Darkness, and the seeds of a novel about a blood-sucking man, which was used later by John William Polidori to write The Vampyre. By far the most important work conceived during this blustery retreat was written by the teen-aged Mary Godwin Shelley. That’s right folks, today we’re talking about the world’s first sci-fi thriller, the gothic horror novel, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. What exactly was it about this work that captured the imagination of Shelley’s contemporaries? We have some ideas. The Scientific Revolution, gender crisis, literary Romanticism, and bodysnatching panics among them.
Find transcripts and show notes at https://digpodcast.org/2020/01/12/frankenstein-enlightenment Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
2020 Series. Episode #1 of 4. The 19th Amendment, however, was the first federal piece of legislation that guaranteed women the right to vote everywhere in the US. At the time, it’s passage was not guaranteed - as we will discuss in this episode - and was the result of tireless, radical, and controversial work of suffragists. The women who led these movements had to mobilize a nation of other women to support an initiative that was quite radical in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - and after 1875, they had to convince women and men that women's suffrage was in everyone's best interest. Their tactics were sometimes militant, sometimes conservative, and often national in scale, and it's thanks to them that the women of the United States can walk into their polling places this November and cast their votes for our next President. Bibliography: Adams, Katherine H. and Michael L. Keene (2008). Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Zahniser, J. D. and Amelia R. Fry (2014). Alice Paul: Claiming Power. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Get the transcript and more at digpodcast.org
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Death Series, Episode #4 of 4. If you were fluent in French and mingling at a French dinner party and your snooty acquaintance Genevieve likened the champagne she was sipping to la petite mort, you would know that she meant that the champagne, with it’s bubbly joy filling your nose and head, was orgasmic. But… why would you know that? “La petite mort” translates to something approximating “the little death.” That isn’t the most obvious of analogies for the glorious eruption that is an orgasm. We wanted to know more about la petite mort, so this episode is an investigation of the history of language, sexology, and indeed, orgasming, from the ancient world to the modern. Let’s plunge...erhm, dig, in. For the complete transcript and more episodes like this one, visit digpodcast.org. Bibliography: Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (Yale University Press, 2005). Lizzie Crocker, “Virginia Johnson, The Woman Who Discovered The Elusive Multiple Orgasm,” The Daily Beast (1 Sep 2017) Peter L Hays, “Sex, Death, and Pine Needles in ForWhom the Bells Tolls,” The Explicator, 69:1, 16-19 Max Kenneth, “The Philology of the Orgasm,” Nassau Weekly, February 9, 2005 (This is not actually very good, because it’s based on an assumption that the French word for orgasm is petite mort, but that’s not the common phrase in French) Dara Lind, “9 Shakespeare innuendoes you should have been embarrassed to read in English class,” Vox, Apr 22, 2016 William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1966). Robert Muchembled, Orgasm and the West: a history of pleasure from the sixteenth century to the present (Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2008). Jean-Luc Nancy, Adèle Van Reeth, and Charlotte Mandell, Coming, (Fordham University Press, 2016) Christopher Prendergast, Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama, (London: Edward Arnold Ltd, 1978). Graham Robb, Balzac: A Biography, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company). James Steintrager, The Autonomy of Pleasure : Libertines, License, and Sexual Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). “Benefits of love and sex,” National Health Service Victor Hugo’s eulogy for Honoré de Balzac
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Death Series. Episode #3 of 4. Today, as a part of our Death series, we are digging into a particular death, one that scandalized the Elizabethan court, provided fodder for decades of court intrigue and propaganda by Catholic exiles, and launched a literary genre of embellished folklore embraced by many, Jacobean players, and novelist Walter Scott among them. That’s right, Tudorphiles rejoice because 15 luckless men had been summoned by the Berkshire coroner to investigate the suspicious death of Lady Amy Dudley, née Robsart, the wife of Robert Dudley, the childhood friend, purported soulmate, and undisputed favorite of Queen Elizabeth I.
Find transcripts and show notes here: https://digpodcast.org/2019/12/01/amy-robsart-lady-dudley/
Up Next in our Death Series: La Petite Mort Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Death Series. Episode #2 of 4. The Black Death raged across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia in the mid 14th century. Families were thrown into chaos, the Catholic church faced dissension in its ranks, and townships struggled to provide services and control infection. The sheer ubiquity of death even fostered an artistic genre: the danse macabre, which reminded young and old, rich and poor, healthy and sick alike that all would be made equal in death. For this episode in our Death series, what better topic than the Black Death itself? Coming up in our Death series: The Death of Amy Robsart, Lady Dudley "La Petite Mort"
Select Bibliography: Ole Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2004) Joseph P. Byrne, The Black Death (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004)
For the complete Bibliography and a transcript, visit digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Death Series. Episode #1 of 4. Today we delve into the new book, Speaking with the Dead in Early America, by historian and friend-of-the-pod Erik Seeman, where he explores the history of Protestant communication with the dead in the three centuries before the advent of Spiritualism.
Coming up in our Death series: The Black Death The Death of Amy Robsart, Lady Dudley La Petite Mort
For show notes and transcripts, visit https://digpodcast.org/
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Radical Religions Series #4 of 4. Join us as we highlight the religious underpinnings of the women’s reform movement of the late nineteenth century in America, with particular emphasis on the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the quite radical Protestant Christianity that many white and Black women in the nineteenth century utilized to push for women's rights. Find a bibliography and transcript for this episode at digpodcast.org. Select Bibliography: Frances Willard: Radical Woman in a Classic Town Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920, (Urbana: University of Illinoi Press, 1981). Nicole Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009). Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Radical Religions Series. Episode #3 of 4. In the 1880s, when the buffalo were all but extinct, droughts and over-grazing meant famines, and the promised rations from the government shrank, a new religion spread rapidly through the tribes of the Great Basin and Plains west. It was called the Ghost Dance religion, preached by the Paiute prophet Wovoka, who spread a message that peace and hard work would bring a better future. But the hope-filled religious revival was perceived as a threat by Indian agents and the US Army, and Wovoka’s message of peace led to slaughter at Wounded Knee Creek. The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee have been considered inextricably linked ever since, but in this episode, we explore the complex and moving history of the religion and question whether we really should end this story with the massacre at Wounded Knee. For show notes and transcripts, visit www.digpodcast.org.
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Radical Religions #2 of 4. Duggie Mack was one of three young Jamaicans who traveled with a delegation to Ethiopia in 1961 searching for a way to move all of his people “back to the Promised Land.” The Rastafari, like many Pan-African movements before them, preached a ‘repatriation’ dream, and Mack hoped to make that dream come true. Would he succeed? Listen in to find out. Select Bibliography
Peter Clarke, Black Paradise: The Rastafarian Movement (San Bernadino, CA: Tte Borgo Press, 1994) Douglas Mack, From Babylon to Rastafari: Origin and History of the Rastafarian Movement (Chicago: Frontline Distribution International Inc, 1999). Velma Pollard, Dread Talk: The Language of the Rastafari, (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014). Michael A. Gomez, Diasporic Africa: A Reader (New York: NYU Press, 2006). Get the transcript and full bibliography at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Radical Religions Series. Episode #1 of 4. They stoked rebellion in enslaved Africans in Suriname, they possessed an unhealthy obsession with blood, gore, and the genitals of Jesus Christ, they allowed their women to preach (against the Pauline prescriptions) and they indulged in all kinds of wicked behavior. Worst of all, to their many enemies, people liked them. They demanded no pay. They worked hard. They built schools and churches with their own hands. They improved literacy among the colonists (they achieved full literacy themselves) and preached in dozens of languages. Their profuse, emotive style was engaging and attractive to most of the ordinary people who encountered them. Who were these religious radicals? They were the Moravians. For show notes and transcripts, visit digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bodies in Blue Series #4 of 4. Imagine a piece of furniture, part cupboard, part chest of drawers -- decorated with patterns of hearts, pinwheels, and intricate floral imagery -- emblazoned on the front in large, bold letters the name H-A-N-N-A-H B-A-R-N-A-R-D. This chest belonged to somebody, it’s ownership screaming out from the colorful images around it, assuring a sort of immortality of the person who once owned it and whose name is ever visible on its front. This boldly constructed, colorfully decorated cupboard with the name Hannah Barnard emblazoned across the front was made in 1715 in Hadley, Massachusetts. The cupboard, and other pieces of furniture like it, were familiar to early American furniture aficionados and experts but in 1992 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote “Hannah Barnard’s Cupboard: Female Property and Identity in Eighteenth Century New England” and brought the chest to a wider audience. Find Sarah Handley-Cousins's new book, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War Northon Amazon, or at a library near you. Get the transcript and complete bibliography for this episode at digpodcast.org Select Bibliography: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of the American Myth, (New York: Vintage Books), 2002. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bodies in Blue. #3 of 4. Sexual impotence has been a problem since at least the beginnings of recorded history and, since then, people have been striving to cure it. However, the cultural meanings of impotence, (why it matters) and even its definitions, vary wildly over time and space. In Sarah Handley-Cousins’s new book Bodies in Blue, she recounts the stories of Civil War veterans with uro-genital injuries. She describes the non-visible disabilities they experienced, the sexual dysfunction they suffered, and how these realities shaped their performance of masculinity in postbellum American society. In honor of her book’s release, this week’s episode will, with vast chronological and geographical boundaries, explore the cultural history of impotence. NOTE: This episode is NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Find Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North by Sarah Handley-Cousins here. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bodies in Blue, Episode #2 of 4. Like all things, “fatherhood” has a history. From the enslaved men of the Anglo-American Atlantic to the middling sort to working class daddies and "their chairs," ideas about fatherhood across socio-economic status in the nineteenth century shared one common trope: fathers were supposed to be providers. This wasn't always the case in the US or Britain. 18th-century ideal fatherhood looked quite different from the 19th century, and of course in the late 20th century feminists and gender equality activists began criticizing this narrow view of fatherhood. So this episode takes a look at the particularly industrialized, urbanized, "Victorian" kind of daddying. Find Sarah Handley-Cousins's new book, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North on Amazon, or at a library near you. Select Bibliography For the full bibliography and transcript of this episode, visit digpodcast.org
Stephen M. Frank, Life with Father : Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White : Family and Community in the Slave South, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Julie-Marie Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914, (University of Manchester. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2015). John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bodies in Blue Series. #1 of 4. In 1864, young Daniel Folsom was institutionalized for something that we might consider PTSD. In a letter home to his sister, he promised her, “I shall try and be a man.” Why was Daniel so concerned with his manhood? What did it mean to be a man during the Civil War era? In this episode, we talk about masculinity during the Civil War era. Find Sarah Handley-Cousins's new book Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North on Amazon, or at a library near you. Find Show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Secret Societies & Clubs #4 of 4. London was a colorful place in the 1790s, full of vices that the Victorians took great pains to either criticize or euphemize in their histories of England: alcoholism, casual sex, venereal disease, child abandonment, vagrancy, unwed motherhood, and the list continues. To contemporaries, these were all areas of concern but one vice in particular took priority: gambling. Victorian historian John Ashton wrote that “the canker of gambling was surely eating into the very heart of the nation.” Why was gambling suddenly such a concern? Surely Britons had been gambling for centuries, playing cards, rolling dice, and placing wagers on aspects of every-day life since at least the times of the Picts (Iron Age). Your answer?... women were doing it. This week’s episode is about the exclusive Faro Ladies and a rival society that appeared, to all, to be their exact opposites, the Bluestockings. We, however, are not so sure… Read the transcript at digpodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Secret Societies and Clubs. 3 of 4. The Odd Fellows, the Masons, the Knights of Pythias: all ancient, secret, solemn orders full of the pillars of the community, right? Then what do we make of some of the super weird stuff they did, like pushing each other around on mechanical goats or pretending to be Iroquois sachems? In this episode, we explore the deeper, gendered meanings behind the rituals and rites of American fraternal orders in the 19th century. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Clubs #2 of 4. If the internet is to be believed, the Illuminati are everywhere, controlling everything. They killed JFK and Tupac, they made Lindsay Lohan famous, they stole antimatter and blew up the Vatican, they run McDonalds, and of course, they started the French Revolution. Well, the internet is not to be believed, and here to the rescue are your historian heroes - Robert Langdon, Alex Yarbrough, Averill Earls, and Sarah Handley-Cousins, on conspiracy theories, the Illuminati, and the French Revolution. A transcript and complete bibliography can be found at digpodcast.org. Key texts for this episode include: Augustin Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, 1797 John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, 1797 Una Birch, Secret Societies and the French Revolution, (1911) Vernon Stauffer, “The European Illuminati” (1918) J.M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (Secker & Warburg, London: 1972). Alan Forrest, “The French and European Revolutions,” A companion to eighteenth-century Europe (Blackwell, 2008) 495-511. Michael Taylor, “British Conservatism, the Illuminati, and the Conspiracy Theory of the French Revolution, 1797-1802,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 47, no 3 (Spring 2014) 293-312. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Secret Clubs and Societies. 1 of 4. Deadpool, Boba Fet, James Bond, Jason Bourne, Winter Soldier and Kill Bill... from the Assassin's Creed video game to the John Wick series, professional assassins are vilified and valorized in equal measure. Why do some assassins earn our admiration, even affection, while others remain defamed and deviant in the popular imagination? This episode tells the story of the Hashshashin, as one Ismaili Shia sect became known when word of their purported use of hashish and opium circulated around the Mediterranean. Etymologists tell us that the work "assassin" is derived from "Hashshashin" because the group became so universally defamed for their targeted killings that their name became synonymous with political murder. This episode will sort through the most enduring legends of the Hashshashin, establish their accuracy, and demonstrate how the sensationalized stories of one medieval Ismaili sect shaped the "Western" consciousness forever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Eugenics, Episode #4 of 4. At the beginning of the 20th century, eugenics - the belief that the human population could be manipulated through selective breeding - was on the cutting-edge of modern science. Following the example set by American eugenic sterilization and anti-miscegenation laws, and empowered by the rise of the ultra ethno-nationalist Nazi party, German scientists helped Third Reich officials to implement a series of eugenic laws designed to craft the ideal German 'Volk.' But within a few years, these eugenic programs became far more radical, intent on the liquidation of the disabled population of Germany. Transcript of the episode is available at digpodcast.org Sources for this episode include: Henry Friedlander, The Origins of the Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) Patricia Heberer, "The Nazi Euthanasia Program," in The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. Jonathan Friedman (London" Routledge, 2011) Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors (New York: Basic Books, 1988) Sheila Faith-Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) Edith Sheffer, Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi, Vienna (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2018) Susan Bachrach and Dieter Kunz, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race (Charlottesville: University at Virginia, 2008) Special thanks to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Hess Seminar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Eugenics 3 of 4. In 1968, researchers found that one-third of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were surgically sterilized. This ignited the U.S. reproductive rights movement and the political demand to end forced sterilization in Puerto Rico. However, Puerto Rican women's reproduction has been tied to identity and nationalism since the United States assumed governance of Puerto Rico in 1898. Latin-x have a long and complex history with birth control and surgical sterilization. Chicanas and puertorriquenas have been subjected episodically to unwanted sterilizations in state institutions and public clinics while also struggling to access safe and affordable birth control, including surgical sterilization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Eugenics #2 of 4. If you are stumbling on this episode because you are someone obsessed with Japanese culture, then you probably already know about the blood-type fad that leaves poor Type-Bs at the bottom of the dating pool. What you may not already know, however, is how Japan developed that particular discrimination premise -- after all, knowledge about "blood types" is not ancient. It's not even particularly old! Indeed, the "science" and superstition that shapes the blood-type fad today is rooted in the crossroads of Japanese "modernity": Western science, Japanese nationalism, and a heaving effort to get people to stop marrying their damn cousins. Get the transcript and full bibliography at digpodcast.org. Key texts for this episode include: Rachel Nuwer, "You are what you Bleed: In Japan and other east Asian countries some believe blood type dictates personality," Scientific American (11 Feb 2011) Sumiko Otsubo, “Eugenics in Imperial Japan: Some Ironies of Modernity, 1883-1945,” Dissertation School of the Ohio State University (1998) Jennifer Robertson, “Blood Talks: Eugenic Modernity and the Creation of New Japanese,” History and Anthropology 13:3 (2002) 191-216 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
By the 19th Century, the European public had been engaging in scientific debate for decades, gathering exotic curiosities, and energetically pursuing the secrets of life. At the same time, they enslaved millions of Africans, profited from the exploitation of their labor, along with that of American Indians and Chinese coolies, and built a hierarchy of human biology, putting themselves at the top. This episode demonstrates how fuzzy the line was, and still is, between science and sexuality, classification and domination, investigation and exploitation, public health policy and genocidal violence. This week, in episode one of our Eugenics series, we will identify 18c antecedents to eugenics such as public sanitation, population hygiene, hereditary science, and human typologies in order to understand the powerful impulses under-girding modern eugenics. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Georgian London was the epicenter of urban pleasure culture. Harlots leveraged their assets, rakes indulged in licentious sex, and brothels, molly-houses, taverns and bawdy houses were scattered all over the city. Behind all this reckless abandon lay a milieu of misery. Between 1756 and 1760, the Foundling Hospital of London admitted 15,000 infants. This amounts to 10% of all the births in London for those years. This week’s episode addresses the trope of seduction, the realities of prostitution, and the ways that rapidly rising illegitimacy ratios stimulated child abandonment in eighteenth-century London. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Sex 2.0: Episode #3 of 4. Today’s episode is part of our sex series 2.0 and a continuation of one of our earliest episodes, Selling Sex: 19th Century New York City Prostitution and Brothels. In that episode, Sarah and Elizabeth discussed the vibrant sexual culture in New York City during the Gilded Age, roughly 1870 to 1890. Today Elizabeth and Ave are going to do a deep dive on the most famous antagonists of that sexual culture: anti-vice crusader, Anthony Comstock. A complete bibliography and transcript can be found at digpodcast.org. Some of they key texts for this episode include: Amy Werbel, Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (Columbia University Press, 2018). David Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868-1900 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In the age of #MeToo, rape and sexual assault have been consistently in the news. Debates abound about what counts as rape, whose testimony we should believe, and too often, men with power and privilege get away with it. But though it feels pressing right now, none of those debates are new. Join Sarah and Marissa as they look for context for today’s debates in Sharon Block’s important book, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Sex Series #1 of 4. Have you been tested? Averill and Elizabeth take a look at the long history of Europeans blaming women for sexual transmitted diseases, and the gendered and racially charged British imperial policies for locking up women to protect the penises of imperial men. A complete transcript and the full list of sources and further reading are available at digpodcast.org. Some of the key sources for this episode include: ed. Kevin Siena, Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe; Philippa Levine,Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire; Alain Corbin, Women for hire: Prostitution and sexuality in France after 1850 ; Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris; and LOTS of articles - check out the Bibliography for all of them! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bodies Episode #4 of 4. Shannon Withycombe's Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America puts miscarriage at the center of the study of nineteenth-century science, medicine, and women’s experience with their reproductive bodies. You may be surprised by the range of responses to pregnancy loss, motherhood, and reproduction in the 19th century. Get the transcript and complete bibliography at digpodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bodies #3 of 4. In 1996, two college students stumbled upon some skeletal remains in the Columbia River in Washington. The body, it turns out, was the oldest ever found in North America. In order to understand the story and controversy of the Kennewick Man, also known as The Ancient One, we need to go way back to the ethnographers, anthropologists, and archaeologists of the 19th century. These men sought to unlock the mysteries of race by collecting skulls and bones they could measure and examine, and ultimately, they constructed a theory of race that confirmed their own racist world views, one which we still use today. Find show notes and episode transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bodies Episode #2 of 4. From whence came the poxiest of poxes? Averill and Marissa dive into the debates surrounding the origin of syphilis, with historians, paleobiologists, forensic anthropologists, and Shakespeare all weighing in. Further Reading: Kevin Siena, Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2005); Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French, The great pox : the French disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1997); and Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy(The University of North Carolina Press, 2013). A complete bibliography and transcript can be found at digpodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bodies #1 of 4. In this week's episode, we are going medieval. Conventional narratives tell us that medieval lepers were pariahs who lived out their days as rejected invalids, rotting away in decrepit asylums, quarantined from society. Some of this is true. The disease became so common in Europe, however, that medieval society was compelled to adapt to the presence of the chronically ill. Listen as we explore the lived experiences of medieval lepers on the Eurasian continent using documentary evidence combined with the latest paleopathological and anthropological findings. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Frontiers, Episodes #4 of 4. Find the transcript and complete show notes at digpodcast.org. Victorian-era European imperialism was facilitated by the thousands of missionaries, businessmen, soldiers, and private police forces employed by the religious, economic, and military institutions of “civilized” Europe, but there were also individuals that facilitated this process, such as Henry Morton Stanley, Joseph Conrad, and Roger Casement. These individuals were essential to the larger effort to normalize imperialism. They were seen as national heroes, adventurers, larger-than-life pinnacles of Europe’s “civilizing” mission in sub-Saharan Africa. All of these men treated sub-Saharan Africa as if it were theirs for the taking, where they could play and profit as they saw fit. All of these men were essential to European imperialism in sub-Saharan Africa: its rise, its fall, and its impact on the people it crushed along the way. So today we’re going to take a look at where Conrad, Casement, and Stanley’s stories intersect: in the Congo, or as Joseph Conrad called it, in the “Heart of Darkness.” Brief Bibliography (get the full bibliography at digpodcast.org): Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Houghton Miffling, 1999). Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press, 2007). Agata Szczeszak-Brewer, Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad (University of South Carolina Press, 2015) Dean Pavlakis, British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896-1913(Routledge, 2015) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Frontiers #3 of 4. Black cowboys made up at least one third of the cowhands that drove cattle along the long trails from Texas to mid-western and northern points in the middle of the 19th century. But you’d never know that from the images of the “cowboy” in popular culture. Contrary to popular media depictions, black cowboys were integral to the transformation of the West. They joined the round-ups, cattle drives, and served on the ranch crews that define the era of the great trail drives in the American West. Some were lured by the open range, the chance for regular, albeit low, wages, and the opportunity to start new lives. Others worked cattle and horses because those were the skills they honed while they were enslaved, and after emancipation they continued to work on the ranches and farms they and their parents had served on before the Civil War. Today we’re talking about cowboys, and cowgirls, of color in the American west. For transcripts and show notes click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Frontiers Series, Episode #2 of 4. Is space the new frontier? What are the links between the so-called “age of exploration,” the conquering of the American West, and the United States space program? We will be covering those questions and others in today's podcast, The Final Frontier: History, Science, and Space Exploration. Bibliography and transcript at digpodcast.org. Show Notes Howard McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Frontiers #1 of 4. Fur trading and frontier life in French Canada. As frontiers typically are, the story of the French Canadian wilderness has been a gendered one since its earliest iterations. If it ever existed in reality, this straightforward, masculine escape was complicated by complex alliances with matrilineal aboriginals and state-sponsored waves of immigration that brought radical women, authoritarian clergy, cloistered nuns, swashbuckling soldiers, skilled artisans, and eventually French nobility into the fold of frontier life. This week, we will attempt to uncover the lived experiences of men and women on the French Canadian frontier and think about how the trade in furs shaped their lives in interesting and very gendered ways. Find transcripts and show notes here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Creepy, Occult, and Otherworldly Episode #4 of 4. Get a complete transcript of this episode at digpodcast.org. Today we are discussing the bone-chilling fear that comes from knowing that all hope is gone, and your death – from the cold, or from a slow moving disease, or from starvation – is only a matter of time. We’re talking about the quest to explore the Arctic. Sources: George Lippard. The Greely Arctic Expedition as Fully Narrated by Lieut. Greely, U.S.A., and Other Survivors: Full Account of the Terrible Sufferings on the Ice, and Awful Experience of Cannibalism. Barclay & Company, 1887. Todd, Alden. Abandoned: The Story of the Greely Expedition, 1881-1884. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1961. Williams, Glyn. Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage. Berkley: University of California Press, 2009. The American Experience, The Greely Expedition, 2011. "The Doomed Franklin Expedition," Live Science "Franklin's Doomed Expedition Ended in Gruesome Cannibalism," Smithsonian Magazine Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Creepy, Occult, and Otherworldly Episode #3 of 4. Get a complete transcript of this episode at digpodcast.org. The Lalaurie Mansion in New Orleans, Louisiana, is said to be one of the most haunted houses in the French Quarter. The extreme and shocking stories that are told about the Lalaurie house are egregiously exaggerated and overwhelmingly gloss over the real issues of race, gender, and violence prevalent with the institution of slavery. Yet, we still voyeuristically consume these types of ghost stories. In this episode, part of our “Spooky” series, we’re exploring the story of 1140 Rue Royal - it’s haunted history so to say - and delving into the events, the media coverage, and the urban legend that grew from the events that took place in the early morning hours of April 10, 1834. Sources: Carolyn Morrow Long, Madame Lalaurie: Mistress of the Haunted House, University Press of Florida, 2012. Karen Halttunen, “‘Domestic Differences’: Competing Narratives of Womanhood in the Murder Trial of Lucretia Chapman,” in The Culture of Sentiment : Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, Oxford University Press, 1992. Kristin Nicole Huston, “‘Something at least human’: Transatlantic (re)presentations of Creole women in nineteenth-century literature and culture,” PhD dissertation, University of Missouri – Kansas City, 2015. Sarah Handley-Cousins, “Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not: The Troubling Rise of the Haunted Asylum,” Nursing Clio, 2015. Thevolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Slaveholding Household, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Tiya Miles, Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, The University of North Carolina Press, 2015. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “The Long Shadow of Torture in the American South,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South, eds. Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd, 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Creepy, Occult, and Otherworldly Episode #2 of 4. Get a complete transcript and the show notes for this episode at digpodcast.org. An old woman with a pointy hat, cauldron, broom, cat, and smelly brew? Why, she must be a witch! This tableau has titillated and thrilled and terrified Europeans and Americans for centuries. But this woman is not communing with the devil or cursing her neighbors. She’s not even making herbal remedies to heal the ailments of her village, as did so many women accused of witchcraft from the 14th to the 17th centuries. She’s just one of thousands of medieval/early modern brewsters -- women who brewed ale to sell -- trying to cobble together a living. Select Sources
Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Annie Bender, “Halloween witches resemble medieval beermakers, says Waterloo historian,” CBC Kitchener-Waterloo (27 Oct 2015) Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England : Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600(Oxford University Press, 1996). John Crabb, “Woodcuts and Witches,” Public Domain Review (4 May 2017) Elaine Crane, Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores : Common Law and Common Folk in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). Kat Eschner, “How New Printing Technology Gave Witches Their Familiar Silhouette,” Smithsonian Magazine (30 Oct 2017) Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1996). Gary F. Jensen, The Path of the Devil: Early Modern Witch Hunts (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Brian P. Levack, The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe(Routledge, 2006). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Creepy, Occult, and Otherworldly Episode #1 of 4. Get a complete transcript and sources for this episode at digpodcast.org. Instagram accounts like @Mrs_Angemi and @CrimeSceneCleanersInc boast hundreds of thousands of followers, all hoping to catch a glimpse of morbid pathology and the biohazardous remnants of foul play. This is obviously not a niche thing. We are just as much fascinated by violent death as we are scared by it. There is something about violence and death that is captivating to us. When violent death is combined with high-tech gadgets, police procedures, and super cool forensic testing, you get true crime, one of the most popular genres worldwide. Marissa is a true crime junkie. But she's also a social historian of medicine and the body, so today’s episode is a combination of her most favorite things. This episode weaves together three largely unrelated narratives: medical pathology has its own history; death investigation does too; and to make things more complicated, there’s a whole medico-legal infrastructure whose history we have to tell. Select Sources: Jentzen, Jeffrey M. Death Investigation in America Coroners, Medical Examiners, and the Pursuit of Medical Certainty. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009. Hanzlick, Randy, and Debra Combs. 1998. “Medical Examiner and Coroner Systems: History and Trends”. JAMA. 279, no. 11: 870-874. Simmons, John G. Doctors and Discoveries: Lives That Created Today’s Medicine. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Kevin Siena, "Searchers of the Dead"in Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 123. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Slavery #4 of 4. complicated story. Enslaved people in the Caribbean resorted to active resistance much more often than their North American and South American counterparts. Haiti (known then as St. Domingue), Jamaica, Barbados, and the Dutch Guianas were particularly prone to slave revolts, averaging one major revolt every two years between 1731 and 1832. No other slave societies have quite so complex a history of resistance as those in the Caribbean. Historian Sir Hilary Beckles has said, “the many slave revolts and plots... between 1638 and 1838 could be conceived of as the '200 Years' War'-- one protracted struggle launched by Africans and their Afro-West Indian progeny against slave owners.” In this week’s episode, we’ll cover the middle half of this 200-year long struggle. We’ll talk about enslaved Caribbeans’ suffering, their achievements, and their alliances with free people of color. But we will also discuss the realities of their violence, and their complicated legacies in revolutionary politics, race relations, and international diplomacy. Find transcripts and show notes here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Slavery #3 of 4. Show Notes and a complete transcript available at digpodcast.org. Today, we’re really excited to have an extra special episode for you. We’re honored to present this episode in conjunction with the PBS series, Secrets of the Dead. Coming up this October, Secrets of the Dead will be airing the story of the Woman in the Iron Coffin, in which a team of death detectives will reconstruct the Woman’s life. We’ve been lucky enough to see a preview, and let us assure you – you need to see this! But in the meantime, we’re here to offer a little extra context to everything you’ll learn from the experts on the show. "The Woman in the Iron Coffin" is a great opportunity to talk about so many things, but because the Woman was a free black woman living in New York City in the 1850s, we’re going to spend this installment of our slavery series talking about slavery in the Northern United States, how it came to an end, and the lives of free black folks in the North. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Slavery #2 of 4. In today’s episode we are discussing some laws in the United States that governed the bodies and lives of enslaved people and follow how those laws changed, or didn’t change, through emancipation and into the late twentieth century. So buckle up for a long look at Slave Codes, Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws in America. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Slavery #1 of 4. Get the Show Notes or read the full transcript at digpodcast.org. Between 1522 and 1536, the second most powerful man in the Ottoman empire was Ibrahim Pasha.The most surprising thing about Ibrahim Pasha is not his diplomatic successes or his untimely demise. What is most surprising about Ibrahim Pasha, the second most powerful man in the Ottoman Empire between 1522-36, is that he was a devsirme slave. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Original Research #4 of 4. Get a complete transcript and see the show notes at digpodcast.org The nation first had to truly grapple with the extraordinary expenses of war was after the American Civil War. As part of our series highlighting our own research fields, today we’re talking about Civil War veterans and disability, trauma, gore, crime, and extraordinary federal expenditures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The death of a young child was a very real and emotional experience for many families during the American Progressive Era. However, at the dawn of the twentieth century many Americans came to expect a better outcome in the life expectancy of their children. In the new age of industrial capitalism with rapidly changing technology, medical professionalization, and increasing wealth, America could have had the lowest percentages of child and infant deaths out of all industrializing nations. This was not the case, however. In 1900 America ranked 10th among principle nations in infant mortality. The estimated national infant mortality rate was 100 per 1,000 live births resulting in over 230,000 infant deaths per year. The maternal mortality rate was 15,000 per year. The actual numbers were probably much higher as official data was never exact. The United States did not have a uniform system in place to register births. And just to put this in perspective, in 1900 there were 76 million people in the United States, now we have 323 million people living in the U.S. So these infant mortality numbers were significant in 1900. Subsequently, the pain of the loss of a child was an element that touched almost every American living in the early 20th century. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Original Research #2 of 4. Get Show Notes and Transcripts at digpodcast.org. The case of the Dublin Castle Scandal was no ordinary trial, because this one included sex between men. Like most crimes, sodomy was usually a case of men caught in the act by patrolling policemen, or was otherwise uncovered by normal police work. The discovery of this particular government sex scandal, however, was the work not of the police, but of journalists. An examination of the Dublin Castle Scandal of 1884 sheds light on the Home Rule movement and queer history in 19th century Ireland. Listen as Averill Earls shares her original research on queer history and politics in 19th century Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Original Work #1 of 4. Employment agencies and classified job ads have a much longer history than you might think. Join us for a brief history of early modern employment agencies. Stick around for a preview of how Marissa is using this fascinating history in her dissertation about wet nursing in London and Philadelphia in the eighteenth century. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Fashion #4 of 4. Underwear, the unseen garments which sit in close proximity to genitals, skin, and all sorts of unmentionable orifices, are the most poorly-documented garments in history yet they shaped bodies, minds, and societies in complex and interesting ways. Sometimes we do really tight, analytical episodes. This is not one of those episodes. The history of underwear does not lend itself to that kind of treatment. It’s long, uneven, and extremely hard to get at because of poor documentation. So get ready for a wild and rambling adventure. Today we take on the global history of underwear from 3,000 BCE to the 20th century. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Fashion #3 of 4. Get Show Notes & a complete transcript at digpodcast.org. Who wears the pants in this relationship? If someone asks you this question, you probably understand what they mean. Who is the dominant one in the relationship? Who holds the power, the influence, the final say? From its earliest utterances, it was intended to challenge women who dared to seize too much autonomy in social relationships, and to shame men who failed to exert their dominance over women per the expectations of ‘manliness.’ Is that what people today are implying when they jokingly ask about pants in a relationship? Probably not. It is certainly possible. This is still a patriarchal world, after all. But seriously… why pants? Why do pants carry such weight? Why not a pocket watch? Or a bowler cap? Why not “who has the penis in this relationship” if that’s what you really mean? Why pants? The answer is a lot of things. Penises and pocket watches might be symbols of manliness as well, but few articles of clothing have so fraught a history as pants, particularly for defining gender, displaying manliness, and indicating dominance. Today we’re talking about pants; we’re barely going to scratch the surface, but in the end, you’ll at least know why pants are such a big deal when discussing relations between men and women. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Fashion #2 of 4. The suit has been the standard of Western men’s fashion, with some slight alterations, since at least the late 1600s. Not only that, but since the 1970s, even women, when they need to signal their professionalism, are expected to wear a feminized version of the suit. Why has the suit become the standard for professional wear? How have suits changed over the centuries? And what do suits represent in our society – and what have they represented historically? Ready? Suit up! Find show notes and episode transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Fashion #1 of 4. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire is one of the most horrendous industrial catastrophes in American history. In all, 146 people, mostly women and children, died in the fire. It shocked New York City and the nation and led to some of the most sweeping labor and safety reforms in history. In this episode we explore the labor conditions that led to the Triangle Fire as well as the fashion that spurned such an industry - the shirtwaist. A garment that took the Gilded Age and Progressive Era by storm. Get Show Notes and a complete transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Fashion Re-Release. Marissa and Sarah discuss Georgians’ and Victorians’ love affair with Tuberculosis and the tuberculean aesthetic in fashion and art. In Georgian London, some diseases started to seem fashionable, desirable even. Gambling was popular, elites were using snuff and drinking spirits, powdering their hair, whitening their faces with toxic creams, damaging their bodies with restrictive clothes and hairstyles. Ladies of fashion were perceived to be particularly vulnerable to disease and this made them even more attractive. This is the context where tuberculosis first began shaping beauty standards. The Victorians took this even further. Pre-Raphaelite painters, their models, and the discovery of the tubercle bacillus germ brought new classed and gendered meanings to the tuberculean chic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Environmentalism #4 of 4. Shinto - In Japan, recognizing the spirit of all things - from trees to mountains to interestingly shaped rocks - is part of Shinto. Older than writing in Japan, Shinto is the root of Japanese values and ways of thinking. Shinto is why the concepts of purity and impurity govern daily life, in the simple acts of gargling, hand washing, and removing shoes upon entry to a home. Shinto grounds the rites of passage in an individual’s life, like blessing children at ages 3, 5, and 7, and all birthday milestones - 14 or 15; 20; 60, 70, and 88 - thereafter. Many of the major festivals still celebrated in Japan are Shinto, and the practice of opening ceremonies - annually opening hiking trails, annually opening the sea, or the purification of new buildings - are also Shinto. And, of course, the centrality of nature in art and literature are Shinto. The pervasiveness of Shinto is fascinating - and that’s what today’s story is about. Find the Show Notes and a complete transcript on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Environmental history #3 of 4. The 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora changed history. The year following the eruption, 1816 was known in England as the “Year without a Summer,” in New England as 18-hundred-and-froze-to-death, and “L’annee de la misere” or “Das Hungerhjar” in Switzerland. Germans dubbed 1817 as “the year of the beggar.” The Chinese and Indians had no name for it but the years following the massive eruption were remembered as ones of intense and widespread suffering. Scientists are, only today, uncovering the historical impacts of this ecological disaster. Suddenly we have climatic data which have reshaped our understanding of the events of 1815 and the years that followed. Now it is historians’ job to explore the social, political, and cultural influence of this catastrophic event. All this and more today as we explore the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Environmental History, #2 of 4. Sarah and Elizabeth discuss the conservation movement and the creation of Americas National Parks in the late 19th and early 20th century. Find the Show Notes and a complete transcript at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Environment #1 of 4. Many natural history museums, in America and in the western world, were developed during the nineteenth century. These museums are both places to view and understand nature, they are also places that have a history in themselves. Museum goers look at dioramas of rare or extinct taxidermied animals, perhaps realizing that some of those animals behind glass were among the last of their kind, solemnly gunned down so that they might not be totally lost to us here in the 21st century and beyond. Today we will be discussing the history of natural history museums in America and the Western World. Find show notes and transcripts here.
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Womyn #4 of 4. Sex striking is a method of passive resistance, a form of peaceful protest, and something attempted by American Indians in the early modern era, First Wave feminists in Europe and America, Bolshevik women in the 1920s, Chinese women in the 1940s, and perhaps most famously, by the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace in the early 2000s. Sex strikes are an effective way for disenfranchised women to make their voices heard but they are a relatively recent phenomenon despite several click-baity articles which argue the contrary. So why are sex strikes portrayed as having a long history? Why don’t they? And why did they burst on the global scene in the 20th century? Is this a form of sisterhood that spans time and space? Or is it an instance of women buying into the patriarchal system? All this and more as we discuss history’s most famous sex strikes. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Womyn, #3 of 4. Victoria Woodhull was an advocate of free love, an outspoken advocate for women’s rights and suffrage, a Spiritualist medium, a stockbroker, maybe a sex worker, an all-around force of nature. She might be one of the most controversial women in American history, which means she is one of our favorites. For this episode of our series on Womyn, we’re talking about the life of the groundbreaking, rule breaking Victoria Woodhull. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Womyn, #2 of 4. Marriage - the word alone is loaded. Marriage is the butt of jokes, the “old ball and chain,” the end of fun. Marriage can also bring up images of fear, of abuse, of control. And marriage can invoke images of happy couples, of new beginnings, and of really really expensive parties and mediocre buffet lines. Today we’re going to do a quick exploration into the history of marriage in America. From the founding of our nation until the present day. Find transcripts and show notes at https://digpodcast.org/2018/04/01/marriage-america Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Womyn, #1 of 4. King Ahebi Ugbabe was unique among the men of Igboland in colonial Nigeria. There weren’t many kings in Igboland at all. But the infrequency of kingship is not what set Ugbabe apart: more importantly, in a world dominated by councils of old men, where political, social, economic, and spiritual roles were meted out in a complimentary but rigid dual-sex system, King Ahebi Ugbabe was a female who “became a man.” Find Show Notes and a complete transcript of this episode at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Law Series #4 of 4. Ever wonder how the modern prison system came to be? Join us for a discussion of 19th century prisons, their history, evolution and the intended reforms they were intended to produce. We take a deep dive into exploring the Auburn Prison and how the "Auburn System" came to dominate the penal system throughout America. Find show notes, further reading and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Law Series #3 of 4. In Germany in the 1930s, the state passed law after law to isolate, disenfranchise, and break down Jewish Germans. It is shocking how easily the German parliamentary government chipped away at Jewish citizenship, attacking the livelihoods and cultural contributions of small groups of Jews, before finally passing the series of laws known as the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their citizenship, rights, and, in the end, their freedom. You'll find the bibliography and a complete transcript of this episode at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Law Series #2 of 4. The doctrine of coverture deprived married women of legal status, merging her legal personhood with her husband’s. Today we’ll get into the complex ways that the doctrine of coverture shaped the lives of married women in the British Isles from the 11th to the 19th centuries. You'll find the bibliography and transcript for this episode at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Law Series #1 of 4. Studying the Fourteenth Amendment is like taking one thread of American history since the mid nineteenth century and following it through all of the major events of the period since then. It’s a great way to study history. So today we are going to discuss the Fourteenth Amendment. Explore what it is, why it became a Constitutional Amendment, and what legal decisions have shaped how the amendment is used today. Get the bibliography and complete transcript for this episode at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bonus Episode #6 of 20. In the third episode in our series on women's reproductive rights in America, Jane Roe & the Pill, we finally get to two of the most important turning points in our story: the invention of the hormonal birth control pill, and the Roe v. Wade case in 1973. The mid 20th century saw some critical turning points for women's reproductive rights, but also created lasting political divides and moral dilemmas. Join Elizabeth and Sarah as they continue the conversation. Read the complete transcript and find Show Notes for this episode at: https://digpodcast.org/2018/02/11/jane-roe-the-pill/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
True Crime Series #4 of 4. On September 21, 1905, a suitcase floated to the water’s surface in Winthrop Harbor, a shallow six-foot deep man-made channel, about three miles north of Boston Harbor. Stuffed inside the seemingly innocuous case was the torso of a “young and beautifully formed woman” whose intestines and stomach had been removed, along with her extremities... and her head. The Boston Globe splashed the headline across its front page the next day, “Dismembered Body of Girl Found in Suitcase Floating on the Tide at Winthrop.” Below the larger than life letters, the true nature of the crime was printed, “Death Probably Due to Peritonitis after Unsuccessful Operation of a Criminal Nature.” There it was, a dismembered body was found floating in the harbor in an unassuming olive-green suitcase, but the real scandal was that the body had recently undergone an illegal operation - an abortion. An operation so common that everyone reading the paper that day knew exactly what the headline referred to, but a crime so sensationalized, no one could utter its name. Find the bibliography and a complete transcript of this episode at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
True Crime Series #3 of 4. Today, we’re talking about a very real murder that was committed by a very real woman who lived in Missouri in the 1850s. But while this murder had all the elements that make for a flashy and exciting true crime story – sex, rape, murder, dramatic court room scenes – it is a very different kind of true crime tale and must be understood within its historical context. This is the case of Celia, an enslaved woman in 1850s America, and based on the work of historian Melton McLaurin in Celia, A Slave. Find the bibliography and a complete transcript for this episode at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
True Crime Series #2 of 4. Most societies are fascinated by women murderers. On September 14, 1767, a massive crowd gathered round the road to Tyburn, thronging around the hangman’s cart, throwing vegetable peels and other refuse. They shouted profanity at the occupants of the cart, one of whom was Elizabeth Brownrigg, the most controversial criminal to grace the pages of the London papers. The jeering crowd followed the cart 3 miles to the public gallows where they continued to hurl abuse at the condemned. They watched, ghoulishly pleased, as she ascended the steps up the scaffold to be unceremoniously hanged. Her remains were then publicly dissected and exhibited for all to see. This humiliation was the final phase of her punishment. This trope of the murderous wife and mother can be found throughout most of recorded history but in 1767 London, it blew up in a big way. A community midwife and mother of SIXTEEN was charged with the torture and murder of the young apprentice girls she had been fostering for her local parish. Stories… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
True Crime Series #1 of 4. After Michael Cleary murdered his wife Bridget Cleary, he wandered the Tipperary countryside in his best suit, telling everyone he met that he was going to reclaim her from the fairies. Three nights he waited for her to come out of the local fairy fort - the ring of stones that were settlements in Neolithic Ireland and have since fallen into ruin and legend. Of course she didn’t. She was buried in a shallow grave not far from their home in Ballyvadlea, Ireland. Michael Cleary’s murder of his wife, Bridget Cleary, is a bizarre and horrifying crime. But it’s also a case study of domestic violence, the urban-rural divide, and a simultaneously modern and superstitious Ireland, rife - according to the contemporary British presses, at least - with barbarians unfit for self-governance. For the bibliography and a complete transcript of this episode visit digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bonus Episode #5 of 20. At the Women’s Marches across the U.S. on January 21st, 2017, there were hundreds—maybe thousands—of women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who held up signs that conveyed their frustration with still needing to fight for rights like birth control and abortion. This is a battle that has waged for so, so long. On this episode, Sarah and Elizabeth look back at the late 19th and early 20th century struggle for women’s rights. After our country finally granted women the right to vote in 1920, the emphasis of the women’s rights movement shifted to focus on another issue: access to methods of family limitation. Show Notes and a transcript are available at: https://digpodcast.org/2017/02/19/before-roe-v-wade/save in overcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bonus Episode #4 of 20. Birth control and abortion are constant flash points in contemporary politics, and they're often described as signs of a rapidly changing society. But women have always had ways (though not always quite as effective ones) to control family size, and early American women were no exception. Understanding the role that reproductive rights has played in American history provides critical context to today's debates. Have we always had these kinds of debates? How did Americans think about abortion in the late 18th century, or the 19th century? In this episode, Elizabeth and Sarah start a three part conversation about women's reproductive rights in United States history by talking about birth control methods and abortion in the 18th and 19th century. For Show Notes & Further Reading, visit https://digpodcast.org/2017/02/05/early-american-family-limitation/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Winter Series #4 of 4. Charles Dickens may have capitalized on telling ghost stories at Christmas with A Christmas Carol, but this practice stretches well beyond the famous Victorian novelist. Join us as we explore the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmastime. Show Notes, Further Reading, and a full transcript available at https://digpodcast.org/2017/12/17/ghost-christmas-charles-dickens/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Winter Series #3 of 4. During the hey-day of Great Lakes shipping, when ships crossed these huge lakes loaded down with cargo, a fall storm could be – and often was - deadly. You might be familiar with one particular fall shipwreck, the 1977 sinking of the freighter, The Edmund Fitzgerald, or Big Fitz during a brutal November gale on Lake Superior. But today, we’re talking about another November storm, one that took place sixty-four years earlier. That storm became known as the Great White Hurricane of 1913. This storm was so severe that it killed 250 people and caused millions of dollars in lost ships, cargo, and property damage. This was a winter storm that exemplifies the storms of the Great Lakes region: hurricane force winds, coupled with blinding blizzard conditions, heavy snowfalls and bitter cold. Find show notes, further reading and episode transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Winter Series #2 of 4. The warmth - and light - of the houses of 19th century Britain were a characteristic of Victorian life. While open coal hearths continued to dominate home heating, the Victorian era was also the first to use radiant boiler-powered heat, whole-house gas lighting, and even - infrequently, but innovatively nonetheless - electricity. It was a brave, sometimes dangerous, often times poisonous, new world, but at least it was warm? Show Notes, Further Reading, and a complete transcript: https://digpodcast.org/2017/11/21/heating-homes-victorian-britain/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Winter Series #1 of 4. Today we are discussing the ways the theoretical Little Ice Age impacted the people who lived through it. The study of past climates is highly politicized. Historical climatologists argue bitterly, writing scathing critiques of each other’s data and interpretations. Climate change deniers use historical climatology to argue that what the science community refers to as global warming is merely a natural climatic variation. While believers in global warming use stories of climatic disaster uncovered by climatologists as warnings of our impending doom. By far the most hotly debated period in historical climatology is the Little Ice Age. It’s not only the underlying cause of some of history’s most critical moments: the Black Death, the Thirty Years War, the French Fronde, the English Civil War, and the French Revolution… just to name a handful… The Little Ice Age is also and an example of how CURRENT history can be. Find our show notes and full transcripts of this episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Creepy, Occult & Spooky Series #4 of 4. People are often surprised to learn that yes, even death has a history. In fact, death can be a powerful tool for unlocking the ways that people thought about themselves, their world, and one another – both for historians, and for people of different cultures trying to relate to one another. Today, we’re talking about death and how two vastly different cultures used it to try to relate to one another in early modern Canada. Find Show Notes, Further Reading, and a complete transcript at: https://digpodcast.org/2017/11/11/death-huron-wendat-feast-dead/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Creepy, Occult & Spooky Series #3 of 4. There wasn’t a soul in London, much less the neighborhood of Smithfield market, who hadn’t heard of the Cock Lane ghost. In 1762, the narrow London street was crowded with throngs of onlookers and busy-bodies who wanted to know if the rumors were true. A young girl at 20 Cock Lane , Elizabeth Parsons, was said to be possessed by a restless spirit. The Cock Lane ghost’s biggest claim to fame was its alleged knocking and scratching at all hours of the night and day. Witnesses devised a code to communicate with the ghost who claimed to have been murdered by her lover two years earlier. This had Londoners up in arms. Everyone took a side. Methodists and Anglicans viciously argued over the possibility of contact with the dead. London newspapers wrote daily updates about the séances, investigations and hearings that sought to uncover the truth behind Scratching Fanny, as the ghost was named, and her suspicious death. Londoners used the mysterious happenings at Cock Lane as a vehicle to debate religious difference, pre-marital sex, fraud, murder, and the vulnerability of some of London’s greatest minds in the face of superstition. Find Show Notes, Affiliate Links and a Transcript here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Creepy, Occult & Spooky Series #2 of 4. In 1978, John Carpenter created a horror film that would arguably change the genre, certainly led the way in slasher films, and all on a $325,000 budget, with a 21 day shoot and no big star names to speak of. The second film was released in 1981; the third in 1982; four and five were ‘88 and ‘89, respectively. The 1980s were particularly ripe for a horror storyline centered around Halloween - celebrated by a community of neo-pagans, and demonized by the New Christian Right for its pagan roots. In the US, this was a period of anxiety about Satanic cults, nerds playing Dungeons and Dragons in dank basements, and the dark stranger handing out razor-bladed candy to naive and unsuspecting trick or treaters. These anxieties were capitalized on by clever filmmakers, and the tone of the Halloween franchise shifted from the horror of the ordinary to the supernatural, the pagan, and even the importers of Halloween--the Irish! Show Notes, Further Reading, and a full transcript are available at https://digpodcast.org/2017/10/29/halloween-ii-vi-samhain/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Creepy, Occult & Spooky Series #1 of 4. We commemorate and document life through photographs, and have been doing so since the 19th century. But photography has also been used to document death. In this episode we are discussing Victorian postmortem photography. This has received a lot of interest on the internet lately as Victorian memento mori photographs have become rather popular on certain internet sites. And although many of the pictures on those sites are in fact postmortem photographs, many are not. They are either completely fake, or they are pictures of living people being passed off as postmortem photos. Find show notes, affiliate links and the transcript at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
War, Conflict and Violence Series #4 of 4. Today’s discussion is about the creation of historical memory and how one war in particular, The Texas War of Independence, is remembered. But also how historical memory of that war is profoundly colored by the memory of the Civil War through what is known as the Lost Cause. Find Show Notes, Further Reading, and a complete transcript of this episode at https://digpodcast.org/2017/10/08/lost-cause-texas-slavery/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
War, Conflict and Violence Series #3 of 4. Dealing with the history behind why we have Confederate memorials and what they mean, but also talk about something fun: guerrilla warfare – the irregular forms of war that took place largely in the Western reaches of the Civil War's borders. For Show Notes, Further Reading, and a complete transcript of this episode, visit https://digpodcast.org/2017/10/01/guerrilla-warfare-civil-war/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
War, Conflict and Violence Series #2.5 of 4. The military revolution changed every detail of military service, provided a profession for sons who were not their fathers’ heirs, sparked concerns over hygiene, fashion, taxation, necessitated the development of the modern nation-state as we know it and made Europe, a small insignificant region of the world, a hegemonic force for centuries to come. All this and more on today’s episode. Find Show Notes, Further Reading, and a complete transcript at: https://digpodcast.org/2017/09/24/military-revolution/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
War, Conflict and Violence Series #2 of 4. In early modern Europe—that’s about 1500 to 1800—warfare changed dramatically, mostly due to the rise of gunpowder weapons. The introduction of artillery and shoulder arms to early modern European warfare had immediate consequences such as changing fortress design, necessitating the switch from cavalry to infantry, and the building of large standing armies. Find Show Notes, Further Reading, and a complete transcript for this episode at: https://digpodcast.org/2017/09/24/military-revolution/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
War, Conflict and Violence Series #1 of 4. While today, press coverage treats Christianity’s alignment with political conservatism as a foregone conclusion, there is a larger milieu of liberal and progressive activism with Christian social justice. Join Averill and special guest Mark Lempke, PhD, for this special episode exploring George McGovern and the elusive Christian Left. Get the transcript and bibliography, and info about our guest host Mark Lempke, at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Sex Series, Episode #4 of 4. Get a complete transcript and bibliography at digpodcast.org. We have an image of puritans as cold, severe, hyper-strict and religious people, and while that’s not entirely false, it’s also not entirely true. From the very beginning, Early Americans were thinking about sex. The courts were burdened with hundreds of cases in which people broke the laws regarding sexual morality, such as premarital or extramarital sex or pregnancy out of wedlock. There was also a panic around a rise in bestiality! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In 19th century New York City, sex was for sale and it wasn’t hard to find it. Commodified sex was everywhere and available for any price. The years between roughly 1850 to about 1910 were the years that commercialized sex and vice in New York City were the most visible, the most prolific, and the most wild. Show Notes, Further Reading, and a full transcript at: https://wp.me/p8Ra4D-Wm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Sex Series, Episode #2 of 4. Marie Stopes was one of the most significant figures in the modern birth control movement. She founded 37 international family planning clinics and brought sexual knowledge and fulfillment to countless women around the world. Get a complete transcript and bibliography for this episode at digpodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Sex Series #1 of 4. The Marquis de Sade is a notorious figure in the history of the French Revolution. Some see him as a twisted, debauched lunatic who preyed on the bodies of women and children. Others see him as a literary genius who was a revolutionary spirit ahead of his time. Get a complete transcript and bibliography for this episode at digpodcast.org
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Buffalo NY Series, Episode #2 of 2. The late 1960s were a tumultuous time in United States history - major political assassinations, riots, protests, and a deeply controversial war all added up to a fractured and bruised society. Much of the action during the time period took place on college campuses - including the University at Buffalo, where Averill and Sarah got their PhDs, and Marissa and Elizabeth are currently pursuing their doctorates. Today, Sarah and Averill are talking about the court case at the heart of some of the most intense protests the University has ever seen: The Buffalo Nine. For a complete transcript and bibliography for this episode, visit digpodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bonus Episode #3 of 20. There is something fascinating about the history of reproductive rights, contraception, and abortion in every country and ideology that we've looked at in our women's reproductive rights series. This week we're turning to the impact of Communism on these issues, particularly in China and the Soviet Union. Here we have the complete range of reproductive control extremes - from hyper pro-natalist policies and criminalization of birth control and abortion in both China and the USSR; to the Soviet Union's provision and regulation of abortion while simultaneously paying for extensive maternal support programming; to China's one child policy, which included forced abortion and sterilization in an attempt to get control over an overpopulation problem. Averill and Marissa discuss all of these nuances and more in this episode on the impact of Communism on uteruses. For the full transcript and bibliography for this episode, visit digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bonus Episode #1 of 20. Averill and Sarah deliver a much-needed update and revision to an early episode about the founding of AIDS Project of the Ozarks (APO), an AIDS service organization that operates out of Springfield, MO and was incorporated in 1985.
For a complete transcript and bibliography for this episode, visit digpodcast.org.
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Buffalo NY Series, Episode #1 of 2. Most American history books devote a page at most to the War of 1812. It is often referred to as the forgotten war. However, scholarship on the war has exploded in recent years due to the 200th Anniversary of the beginning of the war in 2012. The War of 1812 may be a lesser known episode within the larger narrative of American history, but for inhabitants of Buffalo, NY and the surrounding region- the War of 1812 still holds a place of fascination and remembrance. Join Elizabeth Garner Masarik and Marissa Rhodes as they revisit one of our older History Buffs podcast and discuss the War of 1812 and how the Burning of Buffalo transformed this once frontier town overnight. For a complete transcript and a bibliography for this episode, visit digpodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bonus Episode #2 of 20. In 1987, a historian of modern China wrote a book that was way outside of his field - a historiographical work about the classical world, which argued that argued a racist and imperialist Europe had written Egyptian and Phoenician origins out of Greek history -- essentially whitewashing the African roots of Western civilization. The book caused a firestorm within the field of Classics, launching a series of rebuttals and re-rebuttals. Today’s episode is about the thesis that Bernal posed in his Black Athena, but it is also a peek behind the curtain of the academic world. It might get a little weird - because our discussion will be about the evidence Bernal used to support his assertion that Egyptian and Levantine civilizations significantly shaped ancient Greek civilization, but we will also dive into the backlash against Bernal’s work, and what that says about our profession, and how even historians are human and thus susceptible to the world in which we live. Join Averill and Sarah to learn more about Black Athena - and how the historical sausage gets made.
For a complete transcript and bibliography for this episode visit digpodcastorg.
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