History Talk, the history podcast from Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective

On 20 November 1975, Spanish General Francisco Franco died in bed, signaling the unceremonious end of one of Europe’s longest dictatorships (1939-1975). Written by Andrea Davis. Narrated by Nicholas Breyfogle. A textual version of this podcast is available at https://origins.osu.edu/milestones/death-franco-spanish-civil-war

The issues of race and racism remain as urgent as ever to our national conversation. Four scholars discuss such questions as: Since Race does not exist as a biological reality, what then is race and where did the idea develop from? What is racism? How have race and racism been used by societies to justify discrimination, oppression, and social exclusion? How did racism manifest in different nation...

HIV and COVID-19 have both laid bare that stark racial disparities exist in population health and in access to quality medical care in the United States. Written by Erin V. Moore. Narration by Dr. Nicholas B. Breyfogle. A textual version of this video is available at https://origins.osu.edu/connecting-history/hiv-covid-affordable-health-care-lessons. This is a production of Origins: Current Events...

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In this talk about her new book, Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to tran...

The story of Israel's foundation has often been told from the perspective of Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel. In this presentation, Ori Yehudai turns this historical narrative on its head, focusing on Jewish out-migration from Palestine and Israel between 1945 and the late 1950s. Based on previously unexamined primary sources collected from twenty-two archives in six countries, he will ta...

In July 1995, in the final days of the Bosnian War, over 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were killed in the Srebrenica massacre. As the largest case of mass violence in Europe since World War II, Srebrenica serves as a poignant reminder of the dynamics and consequences of extreme nationalism, the long legacies that acts of violence leave on individuals and communities, and the importan...

We are facing a world food crisis of unparalleled proportions. Our reliance on unsustainable dietary choices and agricultural systems is causing problems both for human health and the health of our planet. Solutions from lab-grown food to vegan diets to strictly local food consumption are often discussed, but a central question remains: how did we get to this point? Join Ohio State History Profess...

Faculty experts from the Ohio State University Department of History hold a conversation about the first one hundred days of the Biden administration. An in-text version of this episode can be found at: https://origins.osu.edu/index.php/historytalk/first-100-days-biden-administration-insights-history Panelists: -Maysan Haydar, Lecturer and Graduate Student, Department of History -Treva Lindsey, As...

Eminent environmental historians from the Ohio State University Department of History share how environmental history informs our shared future in a world confronted by pandemics, climate change, droughts and floods, unstable food supplies, changing energy needs, and the threats of pollutants and toxins. An in-text version of this episode can be found at:https://origins.osu.edu/index.php/historyta...

The real origins of the iPhone’s power stems from the pioneering efforts of communication innovators that preceded the AT&T engineers of the 1920s. The story of wired long-distance communication really begins with the Western Union post-diggers who laid the first American transcontinental telegraph in 1861 and the Atlantic Telegraph Company that dropped the first transatlantic telegraph cable into...

Shannon Gonzales-Miller, PhD, shares her dissertation research project that sought to examine the experiences of identity erasure, invisibility and hyper visibility for Urban Indian, graduate students who attended an historically and predominately white public university. She considers how prevailing, monolithic descriptions of Native students influences the classroom experiences of non-Reservatio...

This presentation is an Indigenous autoethnographic study of a family’s story of survival through the Native American boarding school system. Although this project was in a part an academic exercise, it was also an effort to reclaim pieces of a family’s experience that was purposefully silenced and erased from mainstream hegemonic nationalist narratives. Speaker: Melissa Beard Jacob, PhD | Intercu...

The medieval church gave birth to the misogynistic rhetoric that continues to hinder women’s progress in the West today, but it also witnessed the first real “feminist” rumblings of discontent. Medieval women were not content to be victims of oppression: they challenged the rhetoric, and when that didn’t work, they found ways to work around it. Listen to historian Sara Butler, Professor and King G...

With more than 80 million forcibly displaced people in the world and another 260-plus million international migrants, humans today seem to be on the move. Debates over immigration and refugee policy in the U.S., Europe, and across the world have become fierce and deeply divisive, to say the least, and will surely continue to dominate politics in the coming years. All the while, lives are in the ba...

On World AIDS Day 2020, in the midst of another pandemic, Ohio State University History Professor Thomas McDow presented a close look at the historical factors that shaped the global spread of HIV, from equatorial Africa to the world. Thomas F. McDow is a specialist in African History at Ohio State University. He co-teaches a course with a microbiologist on the global history and science of HIV an...

In August 1942, the most famous battle of the Second World War began. More than four million combatants fought in the gargantuan struggle at Stalingrad between the Nazi and Soviet armies. Over 1.8 million became casualties. More Soviet soldiers died in the five-month battle than Americans in the entire war. But by February 2, 1943, when the Germans trapped in the city surrendered, it was clear tha...

On the Season 1 Finale of Prologued, we look back and what we have learned over the last seven weeks and forward to what this means for the future of women in American politics. Season 1 Host: Sarah Paxton Today's esteemed guests: Dr. Lilia Fernandez, Rutgers University Dr. Joan Flores-Villalobos, the University of Southern California Dr. Kimberly Hamlin, Miami University Dr. Susan Hartmann, The O...

After 6 weeks of analyzing women's voting and activism, we finally turn to the final frontier: Public Office. From School Boards to the Presidential ticket, join us as we trace the bumpy road of women running for elected office. Today's esteemed guests: Dr. Susan Hartmann, The Ohio State University Dr. Michele Swers, Georgetown University Mayor Nan Whaley, Dayton, Ohio Background Reading & Digging...

During the 1970s, a counter-movement arose that challenged the feminists push for the Equal Rights Amendment. Today, we turn to Phyllis Schlafly and her fellow conservative women who saw what feminists' considered sexist discrimination as privileges that they had earned and refused to relinquish. Today's esteemed guests: Dr. Susan Hartmann, The Ohio State University Dr. Michele Swers, Georgetown U...

The fading of former suffragist activism during the interwar period did not spell the end of the fight for women's rights, especially as so many women remained unable to exercise their citizenship. In this episode, we turn to the next era of women's activism, the Women's Movement of the 1960s and 70s. In the wake of World War II, the revived women's rights movement followed a similar path to their...

With the August 18, 1920 ratification, women's suffrage was now the law of the land. Theoretically all women should have been able to vote and that massive organizing power that brought the 19th Amendment to fruition to further "women's issues." Today, we talk about the post 19th Amendment reality that many women in the US were still barred from voting and that what is, and is not, a "women's issu...

As the suffrage movement entered he 20th century, it gained momentum as a flood of states passed their own suffrage amendments and World War I loomed. However, not all women were supportive of the pending 19th Amendment. Today, we discuss the heyday of the suffrage movement and the women who opposed their own enfranchisement. Today's esteemed guests: Dr. Kimberly Hamlin, Miami University, Oxford D...

At the heart of the suffrage movement was a shared belief that women deserved to be full owners of their own citizenship and have the right to exercise that citizenship at the ballot box. But the suffragists agreed on little else. From the beginning, the suffrage movement was splintered into different organizations that advocated different courses of action and often these organizations were in di...

On the season premiere of Prologued, we confront the myth of the women's voting bloc in the aftermath of the 2016 election and during the 2020 election cycle. Then, to truly understand the truth of the women's bloc, we take you back--all the way back to the American Revolution--and learn that women in America have never been completely united. Today's esteemed guests: Dr. Joan Flores-Villalobos, t...

Welcome to Prologued! Prologued is a publication of Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. Origins, a joint venture between the Ohio State University and Miami University History Departments, and hosted by Origins historian, Sarah Paxton. Prologued is a serial podcast from Origins that performs in depth discussions of historical roots that have been lost, ignored, or misconstrued, resu...