Dig: A History Podcast

Midterms Series. Episode #1 of 4. It’s the spring of 1436 in Sandwich, a little port town on the Kent coast. The town council orders every household to go down to the beach, collect rocks, and pile them up next to their chimneys, presumably to drop on the heads of any Frenchmen who come strolling down the high street. But there was no French army marching on Sandwich. The crown had been flooding t...

Supreme Court Decisions That SUCKED Episode #4 of 4. Plessy v. Ferguson, was decided in May of 1896, by a vote of seven to one. It held that the State of Louisiana could lawfully require railroads to provide what the statute called "equal but separate accommodations” for white and Black people, and that a passenger who refused to sit in the car assigned to their race could be prosecuted as a crimi...

Supreme Court Cases Series. Episode #3 of 4. In 1830, afraid that white missionaries were aiding the Cherokee in their effort to resist giving up their lands, the Georgia state government made it illegal for white people to live within Cherokee Nation  territory without a license from the government.  Samuel Austin Worcester - raised in Vermont and trained as a Congregationalist minister...

Supreme Court Decisions That Sucked Episode #2 of 4. In 1942, the U.S. government rounded up citizens and forced them into concentration camps. Between the two countries, over 140,000 people were removed from their home and interned without legal recourse. In many cases, their captors--the U.S. military--sold off their houses, businesses, and belongings for a fraction of their worth, or their form...

Part 2! SCOTUS Series. Episode #2 of 5. In August 1895, a ship docks in San Francisco carrying a cook named Wong Kim Ark — born in that very city, armed with an airtight certificate proving it. The customs collector refuses to let him off anyway. What follows is a four-month standoff in the harbor, a Supreme Court case that will define what "American" means, and a legal argument that never really...

Supreme Court Cases Series. Episode # 1 of 5. This is Part 1 of a 2-part episode! In August 1895, a ship docks in San Francisco carrying a cook named Wong Kim Ark — born in that very city, armed with an airtight certificate proving it. The customs collector refuses to let him off anyway. What follows is a four-month standoff in the harbor, a Supreme Court case that will define what "American" mean...

Women's History, Episode #4 of 4. In the spring of 1966, inside a rented office space in New York City that smelled like cigarette smoke and mimeograph ink, a cadre of people worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), pronounced “snick.” SNCC was one of many organizations, such as CORE, the SCLC, the NAACP, and others, working for the Civil Right Movement in the South. It had...

Women Series. Episode #3 of 4. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court released one of its most important and revolutionary rulings: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, usually better known as Brown v. Board. The ruling overturned the infamous ruling in Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that established the ‘separate but equal’ precedent that made Jim Crow discrimination legal. The Bro...

Women's History Series, #2 of 4. In 1590, the king of Scotland fomented a witch hunt in North Berwick, implicating as many as 200 people, convicting 70, and executing as many as 50. He participated in the “questioning” of the accused, tearing confessions of treason and weather magic from their trembling lips. He sent those whom he “believed” conspired against him to their deaths. Why? Reading his...

Women Series. Episode #1 of 4.  When we tell the story of AIDS— and we tell it more often now, in films and museums and classrooms— we tend to tell it as a story about gay men. And of course it was, overwhelmingly, a catastrophe that fell on gay men. But standing right beside those men, and very often holding them as they died, were lesbians. They organized. They protested. They gave blood. They e...

Cold War #4 of 4. Today, in our last episode of our Cold War series, we are exploring the Cold War roots of the modern conservative movement. We’ll trace the arc of the grassroots movement from the 1950s up to the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, getting a glimpse at how the conservative movement began to move away from moderate, mainstream Republicanism. And we will see how women wer...

Cold War Series. Episode #3 of 4. The Allied victory in World War II meant an end to war with the fascists in Germany, Japan, and Italy, but it did not mean an end to war. In fact, the war just shifted into something more shadowy and covert, where secret weapons, sleight of hand, and leveraging information could be more important than guns and bombs. Desperate to develop tactics and secret weapons...

Cold War Series, #2 of 4.  During the Lavender Scare, the US government fired hundreds (but possibly thousands) of civil servants for being gay or lesbian, ostensibly because of a Communist-panic in which Americans were convinced a homosexual could be blackmailed into giving up state secrets to those rascally Soviets. Turns out, though they weren’t particularly successful at it, the Soviets did tr...

Cold War Series. Episode #1 of 4. In this episode, we uncover the extraordinary story of John Scott, a twenty-year-old American idealist who abandoned the University of Wisconsin during the Great Depression, taught himself to weld, and boarded a train for the Soviet Union. He would spend nearly a decade in Magnitogorsk, Stalin's new “City of Steel” in the Urals, building blast furnaces, marrying a...

Environmental History #3 of 4. In the mid-1970s, parents in Niagara Falls, New York were struggling to figure out why their children were getting mysteriously ill. For two years, officials from the state had been investigating the environment in Niagara Falls For years, residents had been complaining about “the odors of chemicals and fumes.” By the mid-70s, officials had determined that the smells...

Environmentalism Series #4 of 4. Rachel Carson is often touted as inspiring the modern global environmental movement. In 1962, when Carson’s book Silent Spring was published, she was a fifty-five-year-old former government employee and an award-winning writer of oceanography books. She did not hold a university position, had no PhD, nor was she affiliated with any political organization. She did n...

Environmental History, #2 of 4. Many of the conservationists who’ve defended the Arctic heralded it as the “last great wilderness,” an ecosystem and landscape unmarred by corporate greed and violence, a place that needs to be preserved because of its “pristine” and “untouched” beauty. While well-intentioned, this narrative is, of course, problematic, because the absence of white settler colonial d...

Bonus! Marissa and Averill chat with Stacey and Hannah of the Amplify Podcast Network about podcasting and teaching, the realities of funding and institutional recognition, and what it means to do feminist history that "matters" in a shifting political landscape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Environmental Series. Episode #1 of 4. In 1851, a journalist named Henry Mayhew set out to document the lives of London's working poor. What he found was astonishing. In the richest city in the world, thousands of people made their living by picking through other people's trash. There were the bone-grubbers, who scavenged bones from gutters to sell to soap manufacturers. There were the mudlarks, m...

Bonus Episode: This year, 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the moment when American patriots pledged their lives and their sacred honor to declare the American colonies independent of the British crown. By the time the Continental Congress signed that document, American blood had already been shed and the colonies were already fighting the war that would ultima...

Trying something we've never done before - an end-of-year wrap up in which we discuss our favorite episodes to write and be co-hosts on from the 2025 season, and a little sneaky preview of what is coming in 2026! Happy New Year, all, and thank you for being supporters of this show! xoxox Ave, Marissa, Sarah and Elizabeth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A Bonus Episode! Yule logs, dried orange slices strung across your windows, decorated trees and simmer pots - all the marks of a neopagan holiday season! Wait, that's Christmas, you say? Well, can't it be both? A brief history of modern witchcraft, just in time for the winter solstice celebration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We're on a little break, getting our stocking stuffers and Yule logs together, so to tide you over until our next new release, here's an oldie but goodie (with a little remixing - though unfortunately there is no fixing our singing) about the history of ghost stories at Christmas time! Original transcript at: https://digpodcast.org/2017/12/22/christmas-ghost-dickens/ Learn more about your ad choic...

Spooky Series, Episode #4 of 4. Over an eight-month period in 1896-1897, thousands of people across North America reported seeing mysterious ships in the air or lights in the sky. There were over 12,000 newspaper accounts published about the phenomenon in 408 different newspapers in 41 American states and six Canadian provinces. The airships were usually described as oblong, cigar-shaped objects,...

Spooky Series. Episode #3 of 4. In 1220 CE, St. Francis of Assisi tamed a ferocious werewolf terrorizing Gubbio, Italy—transforming "Brother Wolf" from savage beast to peaceful townsperson. But why did Christianity need to conquer the wolf? For millennia, werewolves have stalked the boundaries between civilization and savagery, humanity and monstrosity. From ancient Mesopotamian curses to Greek my...