Dig: A History Podcast

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

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