Dig: A History Podcast

Violence Series #4 of 4. Though they’re rarely at the fore of the story, the women of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising were essential to the rebellion. They carried messages and supplies, provided cover fire in battles, and served on the front lines. In this episode Averill and Sarah dive into the historical treatment of the women of the Easter Rising, and the failure of the Free State after Ireland gained its independence to adequately honor the sacrifice of those women. Get the transcript and Further Reading recommendations at digpodcast.orgBibliographyMary McAuliffe and Liz Gillis, Richmond Barracks 1916: we were there: 77 women of the Easter Rising, (Dublin City Council, 2016).Edited by Ruán O'Donnell, Mícheál Ó hAodha, Voices from the Easter Rising, (Merrion Press, 2016)Richard Grayson, Dublin's Great Wars : The First World War, the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution, (Cambridge University Press; 2018)Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, “Schooling the National Orphans: The Education of the Children of the Easter Rising Leaders,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2016, Vol.9(2), pp.261-276Marian Eide, “Maeve’s Legacy: Constance Markievicz, Eva Gore-Booth, and the Easter Rising,” Éire-Ireland, 2016, Vol.51(3), pp.80-103Fearghal McGarry, The rising : Ireland--Easter 1916, (Oxford University Press, 2010).Constance Gore Booth Markievicz, Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz (Constance Gore-Booth), Also Poems and Articles Relating to Easter Week by Eva Gore Booth and a Biographical Sketch by Esther Roper, with a Preface by President de Valera, (Longmanns, Green, 1934)Margaret Skinnider, Doing my Bit for Ireland: A first-hand account of the Easter Rising, (Luath Press Ltd, 2017)Margaret Ward, Unmanageable revolutionaries: women and Irish Nationalism, (Pluto Press, 1995)Helen McBride, “Eirebrushed: Erasing Women from Irish History,” Nursing ClioMaria Luddy, “Women and the COntagious Diseases Acts, 1864-1886,” History Ireland (Spring 1993) Brittany Columbus, “Bean na h-Éireann: Feminism and Nationalism in an Irish Journal, 1908-1911,” Voces Novae, vol. 1, iss. 2, (2018)Cal McCarthy, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Revolution, (Cork, Ireland: Collins Press, 2007)Cumann na mBan Archives Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Violence Series. Episode #3 of 4. This week we're delving into penal violence in early modern Europe. For most people, we suspect, their familiarity with torture, corporal punishment, and execution for capital crime is confined to some gnarly anecdotes, perhaps a few graphic movie scenes, a little Monty Python, and, if you’re cool like us, your high school history project about medieval torture devices. But everything has a history and those things barely scratch the surface. Legal historians have been uncovering, measuring, and analyzing capital punishment for decades and today we want to share some of what they’ve found. Find show notes and transcripts at www.digpodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Violence Series, #2 of 4. Dueling seems crazy to us today. Two men take ten paces, turn to face each other, and stand still while they shoot to kill, all the while following strict rules. But while it’s easy to think of duels as simply evidence of a more violent age, dueling and other similar forms of violence offer an important window into the political, racial, and cultural history of the late 18th and early 19^th century. Duels weren’t just about shooting at a guy you disliked – they were about masculinity, slavery, race, politics, honor, class status, and the sectional crisis. We're talking about all this in this episode about dueling and political violence in America in the first half of the nineteenth century. Get the full transcript at digpodcast.orgBibliographyChernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.Earle, Jonathan. John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry: A Brief History with Documents.Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2008.Ellis, Joseph. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York: Vintage Books,2000.Freeman, Joanne B. The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.Freeman, Joanne B. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2001.Greenberg, Kenneth S. Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman,Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, The Proslavery Argument,Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.Hoffer, Williamjames Hull. The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins ofthe Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2010.Letters from Alexander Hamilton to Aaron Burr, Founders Online, National Archives Online.Charles Sumner, “The Crime Against Kansas” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Violence Series. Episode # 1 of 4. Today we are examining violence and lynching towards ethnic Mexican people along the Texas Mexico border during the early twentieth century. Particularly we are discussing the mob violence, or lynching, against Antionio Rodriguez in Rocksprings Texas in November of 1910. Typically when lynching in America is discussed it is in reference to the obscene amount of lynchings against Black people in the United States between Reconstruction and the mid-twentieth century. However, anti-Mexican violence was also a harsh reality of racial violence throughout the American Southwest. Find show notes and transcripts at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2020 Series #4 of 4. Just over one month after the first shots of the Civil War were fired, three enslaved black men got into a row boat and paddled across the James River from mainland Virginia to the Union-occupied Fortress Monroe. Whether they knew it or not, the three young men – named Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend – sparked the unraveling of the institution of slavery in the United States. In today’s installment of our ‘do-over’ series, we’re revisiting the complicated legal category of contraband, the term applied to enslaved people who fled to Union lines during the American Civil War. Find transcripts and show notes at: https://digpodcast.org/2020/01/26/slave-contraband-refugee-the-end-of-slavery-in-the-united-states Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2020 Series #3 of 4. What happens when you build an empire on sugar? Since the 18th century, sugar has been one of the most demanded commodities in the West. By the 1700s, technological advancements and production made sugar accessible to even some of the poorest Americans and Europeans, and imperial governments poured millions of dollars into the shaping of sugar colonies around the world. From the Caribbean to southeastern Africa to the Indian Ocean, sugar was king. But just as few today think on where their granulated white sugar comes from, those who consumed the White Gold between the 17th and 20th centuries knew little of the back-breaking, harsh, and unfree labor that went into producing that glorious sweetness, <em>or</em> the lengths to which their own governments went to float those potentially profitable sugar colonies. Empires built on sugar rotted away like teeth too long exposed to that sweetness. Find the complete transcript at digpodcast.orgBibliographyJames Patterson Smith, “Empire and Social Reform: British Liberals and the ‘Civilizing Mission in the Sugar Colonies,’ 1868-1874,” Albion 27.2 (1995) 253-77Philip D. Rotz, “Sweetness and Fever? Sugar Production, Aeses aegypti, and Dengue Fever in Natal, South Africa, 1926-27,” PSAE Research Series 12 (2014)“Bussa’s Rebellion,” UK National Archives Carol MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar : Industry and Environment in Hawaiʻi (University of Hawaii, 2014) Alice G. Walton, “How Much Sugar Are Americans Eating?” Forbes (Aug 2012) “Britain is built on sugar: our national sweet tooth defines us,” The Guardian (Oct 2007) Karl Watson, “Slavery and Economy in Barbados,” BBC (2/2011) Barrie Cook, “Pieces of Eight,” History of the World in 100 Objects (BBC & British Museum) Emma George Ross, “The Portuguese in Africa, 1415-1600” Met Museum Matthew Edel, “The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the Seventeenth Century and the Rise of the West Indian Competition,” Caribbean Studies 9.1 (1969) 24-43.Mark Johnson, “The Sugar Trade in the West Indies and Brazil between 1492 and 1700,” University of Minnesota Expansion of Empire Seminar Sidney W. Mintz, “The Culture History of a Puerto Rican Sugar Cane Plantation: 1876-1949,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 33.2 (1953) 224-251.Heather Pringle, “Sugar Masters in a New World,” Smithsonian.com (January 2010)  Pictures & Graphs from C.J. Robertson, “Cane-Sugar Production in the British Empire,” Economic Geography 6.2 (1930) 131-151 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2020 Series. Episode #2 of 4. To escape what came to be known as The Year Without a Summer, a small group holed up in a Swiss villa and challenged each other to pass the time by telling the best ghost stories. Several notable literary works emerged from this friendly storytelling competition. Lord Byron’s poem Darkness, and the seeds of a novel about a blood-sucking man, which was used later by John William Polidori to write The Vampyre. By far the most important work conceived during this blustery retreat was written by the teen-aged Mary Godwin Shelley. That’s right folks, today we’re talking about the world’s first sci-fi thriller, the gothic horror novel, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. What exactly was it about this work that captured the imagination of Shelley’s contemporaries? We have some ideas. The Scientific Revolution, gender crisis, literary Romanticism, and bodysnatching panics among them.Find transcripts and show notes at https://digpodcast.org/2020/01/12/frankenstein-enlightenment Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2020 Series. Episode #1 of 4. The 19th Amendment, however, was the first federal piece of legislation that guaranteed women the right to vote everywhere in the US. At the time, it’s passage was not guaranteed - as we will discuss in this episode - and was the result of tireless, radical, and controversial work of suffragists. The women who led these movements had to mobilize a nation of other women to support an initiative that was quite radical in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - and after 1875, they had to convince women and men that women's suffrage was in everyone's best interest. Their tactics were sometimes militant, sometimes conservative, and often national in scale, and it's thanks to them that the women of the United States can walk into their polling places this November and cast their votes for our next President. Bibliography:Adams, Katherine H. and Michael L. Keene (2008). Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Zahniser, J. D. and Amelia R. Fry (2014). Alice Paul: Claiming Power. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Get the transcript and more at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Death Series, Episode #4 of 4. If you were fluent in French and mingling at a French dinner party and your snooty acquaintance Genevieve likened the champagne she was sipping to la petite mort, you would know that she meant that the champagne, with it’s bubbly joy filling your nose and head, was orgasmic. But… why would you know that? “La petite mort” translates to something approximating “the little death.” That isn’t the most obvious of analogies for the glorious eruption that is an orgasm. We wanted to know more about la petite mort, so this episode is an investigation of the history of language, sexology, and indeed, orgasming, from the ancient world to the modern. Let’s plunge...erhm, dig, in.For the complete transcript and more episodes like this one, visit digpodcast.org. Bibliography: Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (Yale University Press, 2005).Lizzie Crocker, “Virginia Johnson, The Woman Who Discovered The Elusive Multiple Orgasm,” The Daily Beast (1 Sep 2017)Peter L Hays, “Sex, Death, and Pine Needles in ForWhom the Bells Tolls,” The Explicator, 69:1, 16-19Max Kenneth, “The Philology of the Orgasm,” Nassau Weekly, February 9, 2005 (This is not actually very good, because it’s based on an assumption that the French word for orgasm is petite mort, but that’s not the common phrase in French) Dara Lind, “9 Shakespeare innuendoes you should have been embarrassed to read in English class,” Vox, Apr 22, 2016 William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1966).Robert Muchembled, Orgasm and the West: a history of pleasure from the sixteenth century to the present (Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2008).Jean-Luc Nancy, Adèle Van Reeth, and Charlotte Mandell, Coming, (Fordham University Press, 2016)Christopher Prendergast, Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama, (London: Edward Arnold Ltd, 1978).Graham Robb, Balzac: A Biography, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company).James Steintrager, The Autonomy of Pleasure : Libertines, License, and Sexual Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).“Benefits of love and sex,” National Health ServiceVictor Hugo’s eulogy for Honoré de Balzac Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Death Series. Episode #3 of 4. Today, as a part of our Death series, we are digging into a particular death, one that scandalized the Elizabethan court, provided fodder for decades of court intrigue and propaganda by Catholic exiles, and launched a literary genre of embellished folklore embraced by many, Jacobean players, and novelist Walter Scott among them. That’s right, Tudorphiles rejoice because 15 luckless men had been summoned by the Berkshire coroner to investigate the suspicious death of Lady Amy Dudley, née Robsart, the wife of Robert Dudley, the childhood friend, purported soulmate, and undisputed favorite of Queen Elizabeth I.Find transcripts and show notes here: https://digpodcast.org/2019/12/01/amy-robsart-lady-dudley/Up Next in our Death Series: La Petite Mort Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices