Dig: A History Podcast

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. Find transcripts and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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,orgBibliographyBibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave. New York: McDonald & Lee Printers, 1849Craft, 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. BibliographyEd. 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 SinBrenda 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) 405–424Patrick 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.Find show notes and transcript at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. BibliographyDuBois, 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.Find show notes and transcripts here: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.orgBibliography & 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.Find transcript and show notes at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices