Dig: A History Podcast

Radical Religions Series. Episode #1 of 4. They stoked rebellion in enslaved Africans in Suriname, they possessed an unhealthy obsession with blood, gore, and the genitals of Jesus Christ, they allowed their women to preach (against the Pauline prescriptions) and they indulged in all kinds of wicked behavior. Worst of all, to their many enemies, people liked them. They demanded no pay. They worked hard. They built schools and churches with their own hands. They improved literacy among the colonists (they achieved full literacy themselves) and preached in dozens of languages. Their profuse, emotive style was engaging and attractive to most of the ordinary people who encountered them. Who were these religious radicals? They were the Moravians.For show notes and transcripts, visit digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bodies in Blue Series #4 of 4. Imagine a piece of furniture, part cupboard, part chest of drawers -- decorated with patterns of hearts, pinwheels, and intricate floral imagery -- emblazoned on the front in large, bold letters the name H-A-N-N-A-H  B-A-R-N-A-R-D. This chest belonged to somebody, it’s ownership screaming out from the colorful images around it, assuring a sort of immortality of the person who once owned it and whose name is ever visible on its front. This boldly constructed, colorfully decorated cupboard with the name Hannah Barnard emblazoned across the front was made in 1715 in Hadley, Massachusetts. The cupboard, and other pieces of furniture like it, were familiar to early American furniture aficionados and experts but in 1992 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote “Hannah Barnard’s Cupboard: Female Property and Identity in Eighteenth Century New England” and brought the chest to a wider audience. Find Sarah Handley-Cousins's new book, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War Northon Amazon, or at a library near you.Get the transcript and complete bibliography for this episode at digpodcast.orgSelect Bibliography:Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of the American Myth, (New York: Vintage Books), 2002.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bodies in Blue. #3 of 4. Sexual impotence has been a problem since at least the beginnings of recorded history and, since then, people have been striving to cure it. However, the cultural meanings of impotence, (why it matters) and even its definitions, vary wildly over time and space. In Sarah Handley-Cousins’s new book Bodies in Blue, she recounts the stories of Civil War veterans with uro-genital injuries. She describes the non-visible disabilities they experienced, the sexual dysfunction they suffered, and how these realities shaped their performance of masculinity in postbellum American society. In honor of her book’s release, this week’s episode will, with vast chronological and geographical boundaries, explore the cultural history of impotence.NOTE: This episode is NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Find Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North by Sarah Handley-Cousins here. Find show notes and transcripts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bodies in Blue, Episode #2 of 4. Like all things, “fatherhood” has a history. From the enslaved men of the Anglo-American Atlantic to the middling sort to working class daddies and "their chairs," ideas about fatherhood across socio-economic status in the nineteenth century shared one common trope: fathers were supposed to be providers. This wasn't always the case in the US or Britain. 18th-century ideal fatherhood looked quite different from the 19th century, and of course in the late 20th century feminists and gender equality activists began criticizing this narrow view of fatherhood. So this episode takes a look at the particularly industrialized, urbanized, "Victorian" kind of daddying. Find Sarah Handley-Cousins's new book, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North on Amazon, or at a library near you. Select BibliographyFor the full bibliography and transcript of this episode, visit digpodcast.org Stephen M. Frank, Life with Father : Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White : Family and Community in the Slave South, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).Julie-Marie Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914, (University of Manchester. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2015).John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bodies in Blue Series. #1 of 4. In 1864, young Daniel Folsom was institutionalized for something that we might consider PTSD. In a letter home to his sister, he promised her, “I shall try and be a man.” Why was Daniel so concerned with his manhood? What did it mean to be a man during the Civil War era? In this episode, we talk about masculinity during the Civil War era. Find Sarah Handley-Cousins's new book Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North on Amazon, or at a library near you. Find Show notes and transcripts here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Secret Societies & Clubs #4 of 4. London was a colorful place in the 1790s, full of vices that the Victorians took great pains to either criticize or euphemize in their histories of England: alcoholism, casual sex, venereal disease, child abandonment, vagrancy, unwed motherhood, and the list continues. To contemporaries, these were all areas of concern but one vice in particular took priority: gambling. Victorian historian John Ashton wrote that “the canker of gambling was surely eating into the very heart of the nation.” Why was gambling suddenly such a concern? Surely Britons had been gambling for centuries, playing cards, rolling dice, and placing wagers on aspects of every-day life since at least the times of the Picts (Iron Age). Your answer?... women were doing it. This week’s episode is about the exclusive Faro Ladies and a rival society that appeared, to all, to be their exact opposites, the Bluestockings. We, however, are not so sure… Read the transcript at digpodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Secret Societies and Clubs. 3 of 4. The Odd Fellows, the Masons, the Knights of Pythias: all  ancient, secret, solemn orders full of the pillars of the community, right?  Then what do we make of some of the super weird stuff they did, like pushing  each other around on mechanical goats or pretending to be Iroquois sachems? In  this episode, we explore the deeper, gendered meanings behind the rituals and  rites of American fraternal orders in the 19th century. Find show notes and transcripts here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Clubs #2 of 4. If the internet is to be believed, the Illuminati are everywhere, controlling everything. They killed JFK and Tupac, they made Lindsay Lohan famous, they stole antimatter and blew up the Vatican, they run McDonalds, and of course, they started the French Revolution. Well, the internet is not to be believed, and here to the rescue are your historian heroes - Robert Langdon, Alex Yarbrough, Averill Earls, and Sarah Handley-Cousins, on conspiracy theories, the Illuminati, and the French Revolution. A transcript and complete bibliography can be found at digpodcast.org. Key texts for this episode include: Augustin Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, 1797 John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, 1797  Una Birch, Secret Societies and the French Revolution, (1911) Vernon Stauffer, “The European Illuminati” (1918)J.M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (Secker & Warburg, London: 1972).Alan Forrest, “The French and European Revolutions,” A companion to eighteenth-century Europe (Blackwell, 2008) 495-511.Michael Taylor, “British Conservatism, the Illuminati, and the Conspiracy Theory of the French Revolution, 1797-1802,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 47, no 3 (Spring 2014) 293-312. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Secret Clubs and Societies. 1 of 4. Deadpool, Boba Fet, James Bond, Jason Bourne, Winter Soldier and Kill Bill... from the Assassin's Creed video game to the John Wick series, professional assassins are vilified and valorized in equal measure. Why do some assassins earn our admiration, even affection, while others remain defamed and deviant in the popular imagination? This episode tells the story of the Hashshashin, as one Ismaili Shia sect became known when word of their purported use of hashish and opium circulated around the Mediterranean. Etymologists tell us that the work "assassin" is derived from "Hashshashin" because the group became so universally defamed for their targeted killings that their name became synonymous with political murder. This episode will sort through the most enduring legends of the Hashshashin, establish their accuracy, and demonstrate how the sensationalized stories of one medieval Ismaili sect shaped the "Western" consciousness forever.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Eugenics, Episode #4 of 4. At the beginning of the 20th century, eugenics - the belief that the human population could be manipulated through selective breeding - was on the cutting-edge of modern science. Following the example set by American eugenic sterilization and anti-miscegenation laws, and empowered by the rise of the ultra ethno-nationalist Nazi party, German scientists helped Third Reich officials to implement a series of eugenic laws designed to craft the ideal German 'Volk.' But within a few years, these eugenic programs became far more radical, intent on the liquidation of the disabled population of Germany. Transcript of the episode is available at digpodcast.orgSources for this episode include: Henry Friedlander, The Origins of the Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) Patricia Heberer, "The Nazi Euthanasia Program," in The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. Jonathan Friedman (London" Routledge, 2011)Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors (New York: Basic Books, 1988)Sheila Faith-Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)Edith Sheffer, Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi, Vienna (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2018) Susan Bachrach and Dieter Kunz, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race (Charlottesville: University at Virginia, 2008) Special thanks to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Hess Seminar.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices