Dig: A History Podcast

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

Death Series. Episode #2 of 4. The Black Death raged across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia in the mid 14th century. Families were thrown into chaos, the Catholic church faced dissension in its ranks, and townships struggled to provide services and control infection. The sheer ubiquity of death even fostered an artistic genre: the danse macabre, which reminded young and old, rich and poor, healthy and sick alike that all would be made equal in death. For this episode in our Death series, what better topic than the Black Death itself?Coming up in our Death series: The Death of Amy Robsart, Lady Dudley"La Petite Mort"Select Bibliography:Ole Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2004)Joseph P. Byrne, The Black Death (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004)For the complete Bibliography and a transcript, visit digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 DeathThe Death of Amy Robsart, Lady DudleyLa Petite MortFor show notes and transcripts, visit https://digpodcast.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 transcript for this episode at digpodcast.org.Select Bibliography:Frances Willard: Radical Woman in a Classic TownRuth Bordin, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920, (Urbana: University of Illinoi Press, 1981).Nicole Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009). Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 would bring a better future. But the hope-filled religious revival was perceived as a threat by Indian agents and the US Army, and Wovoka’s message of peace led to slaughter at Wounded Knee Creek. The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee have been considered inextricably linked ever since, but in this episode, we explore the complex and moving history of the religion and question whether we really should end this story with the massacre at Wounded Knee. For show notes and transcripts, visit www.digpodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 BibliographyPeter Clarke, Black Paradise: The Rastafarian Movement (San Bernadino, CA: Tte Borgo Press, 1994)Douglas Mack, From Babylon to Rastafari: Origin and History of the Rastafarian Movement (Chicago: Frontline Distribution International Inc, 1999). Velma Pollard, Dread Talk: The Language of the Rastafari, (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014).Michael A. Gomez, Diasporic Africa: A Reader (New York: NYU Press, 2006).Get the transcript and full bibliography at digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices