Dig: A History Podcast

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 a...

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 transcri...

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...

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 Pet...

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...

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 p...

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-genit...

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-centur...

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'...

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: gam...

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 ritua...

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 Yarb...

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...

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...

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 1...

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 eve...

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....

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...

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 a...

 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...

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...

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 dig...

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...

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 He...

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 a...