Dig: A History Podcast

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.orgBibliography & Further ReadingSamuel 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, 2011Ritta 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. Find transcripts and show notes here: www.digpodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.orgSelect BibliographyAustin, 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 RhodesFor 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.orgSelect BibliographyJennifer 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.orgSelected BibliographyAllab 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. Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.BibliographyCott, 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! <3Next 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