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Dig: A History Podcast

Latest episodes

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Jan 20, 2019 • 58min

“Walking Corpses”: Life as a Leper in Medieval Eurasia

Bodies #1 of 4. In this week's episode, we are going medieval. Conventional narratives tell us that medieval lepers were pariahs who lived out their days as rejected invalids, rotting away in decrepit asylums, quarantined from society. Some of this is true. The disease became so common in Europe, however, that medieval society was compelled to adapt to the presence of the chronically ill. Listen as we explore the lived experiences of medieval lepers on the Eurasian continent using documentary evidence combined with the latest paleopathological and anthropological findings. Find show notes and transcripts here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Dec 30, 2018 • 1h 10min

Hearts of Darkness: Victorian Imperialism and Travel of the African Continent

Frontiers, Episodes #4 of 4. Find the transcript and complete show notes at digpodcast.org. Victorian-era European imperialism was facilitated by the thousands of missionaries, businessmen, soldiers, and private police forces employed by the religious, economic, and military institutions of “civilized” Europe, but there were also individuals that facilitated this process, such as Henry Morton Stanley, Joseph Conrad, and Roger Casement. These individuals were essential to the larger effort to normalize imperialism. They were seen as national heroes, adventurers, larger-than-life pinnacles of Europe’s “civilizing” mission in sub-Saharan Africa. All of these men treated sub-Saharan Africa as if it were theirs for the taking, where they could play and profit as they saw fit. All of these men were essential to European imperialism in sub-Saharan Africa: its rise, its fall, and its impact on the people it crushed along the way. So today we’re going to take a look at where Conrad, Casement, and Stanley’s stories intersect: in the Congo, or as Joseph Conrad called it, in the “Heart of Darkness.” Brief Bibliography (get the full bibliography at digpodcast.org): Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Houghton Miffling, 1999).Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press, 2007).Agata Szczeszak-Brewer, Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad (University of South Carolina Press, 2015)Dean Pavlakis, British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896-1913(Routledge, 2015) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Dec 17, 2018 • 41min

Black Cowboys: People of Color in the American West

Frontiers #3 of 4. Black cowboys made up at least one third of the cowhands that drove cattle along the long trails from Texas to mid-western and northern points in the middle of the 19th century. But you’d never know that from the images of the “cowboy” in popular culture. Contrary to popular media depictions, black cowboys were integral to the transformation of the West. They joined the round-ups, cattle drives, and served on the ranch crews that define the era of the great trail drives in the American West. Some were lured by the open range, the chance for regular, albeit low, wages, and the opportunity to start new lives. Others worked cattle and horses because those were the skills they honed while they were enslaved, and after emancipation they continued to work on the ranches and farms they and their parents had served on before the Civil War. Today we’re talking about cowboys, and cowgirls, of color in the American west. For transcripts and show notes click here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Dec 10, 2018 • 1h 13min

The Final Frontier: History, Science, and Space Exploration

Frontiers Series, Episode #2 of 4. Is space the new frontier? What are the links between the so-called “age of exploration,” the conquering of the American West, and the United States space program? We will be covering those questions and others in today's podcast, The Final Frontier: History, Science, and Space Exploration. Bibliography and transcript at digpodcast.org.Show NotesHoward McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Dec 2, 2018 • 57min

Fur Trading and Frontier Life in French Canada

Frontiers #1 of 4. Fur trading and frontier life in French Canada. As frontiers typically are, the story of the French Canadian wilderness has been a gendered one since its earliest iterations. If it ever existed in reality, this straightforward, masculine escape was complicated by complex alliances with matrilineal aboriginals and state-sponsored waves of immigration that brought radical women, authoritarian clergy, cloistered nuns, swashbuckling soldiers, skilled artisans, and eventually French nobility into the fold of frontier life. This week, we will attempt to uncover the lived experiences of men and women on the French Canadian frontier and think about how the trade in furs shaped their lives in interesting and very gendered ways. Find transcripts and show notes here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Nov 5, 2018 • 1h 16min

Cannibalism, Frostbite, and The Quest for the Northwest Passage

Creepy, Occult, and Otherworldly Episode #4 of 4. Get a complete transcript of this episode at digpodcast.org. Today we are discussing the bone-chilling fear that comes from knowing that all hope is gone, and your death – from the cold, or from a slow moving disease, or from starvation – is only a matter of time. We’re talking about the quest to explore the Arctic.Sources:George Lippard. The Greely Arctic Expedition as Fully Narrated by Lieut. Greely, U.S.A., and Other Survivors: Full Account of the Terrible Sufferings on the Ice, and Awful Experience of Cannibalism. Barclay & Company, 1887.Todd, Alden. Abandoned: The Story of the Greely Expedition, 1881-1884. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1961.Williams, Glyn. Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage. Berkley: University of California Press, 2009.The American Experience, The Greely Expedition, 2011."The Doomed Franklin Expedition," Live Science"Franklin's Doomed Expedition Ended in Gruesome Cannibalism," Smithsonian Magazine Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Oct 29, 2018 • 1h 1min

Haunted Slavery: The Lalaurie Mansion

Creepy, Occult, and Otherworldly Episode #3 of 4. Get a complete transcript of this episode at digpodcast.org. The Lalaurie Mansion in New Orleans, Louisiana, is said to be one of the most haunted houses in the French Quarter. The extreme and shocking stories that are told about the Lalaurie house are egregiously exaggerated and overwhelmingly gloss over the real issues of race, gender, and violence prevalent with the institution of slavery. Yet, we still voyeuristically consume these types of ghost stories. In this episode, part of our “Spooky” series, we’re exploring the story of 1140 Rue Royal - it’s haunted history so to say - and delving into the events, the media coverage, and the urban legend that grew from the events that took place in the early morning hours of April 10, 1834. Sources:Carolyn Morrow Long, Madame Lalaurie: Mistress of the Haunted House,  University Press of Florida, 2012.Karen Halttunen, “‘Domestic Differences’: Competing Narratives of Womanhood in the Murder Trial of Lucretia Chapman,” in The Culture of Sentiment : Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, Oxford University Press, 1992.Kristin Nicole Huston, “‘Something at least human’: Transatlantic (re)presentations of Creole women in nineteenth-century literature and culture,” PhD dissertation, University of Missouri – Kansas City, 2015.Sarah Handley-Cousins, “Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not: The Troubling Rise of the Haunted Asylum,” Nursing Clio, 2015.Thevolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Slaveholding Household, Cambridge University Press, 2008.Tiya Miles, Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “The Long Shadow of Torture in the American South,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South, eds. Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd, 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Oct 21, 2018 • 51min

Witches Brew: How the Patriarchy Ruins Everything for Women, Even Beer

Creepy, Occult, and Otherworldly Episode #2 of 4. Get a complete transcript and the show notes for this episode at digpodcast.org. An old woman with a pointy hat, cauldron, broom, cat, and smelly brew? Why, she must be a witch! This tableau has titillated and thrilled and terrified Europeans and Americans for centuries. But this woman is not communing with the devil or cursing her neighbors. She’s not even making herbal remedies to heal the ailments of her village, as did so many women accused of witchcraft from the 14th to the 17th centuries. She’s just one of thousands of medieval/early modern brewsters -- women who brewed ale to sell -- trying to cobble together a living. Select SourcesJonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge University Press, 1998).Annie Bender, “Halloween witches resemble medieval beermakers, says Waterloo historian,” CBC Kitchener-Waterloo (27 Oct 2015)Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England : Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600(Oxford University Press, 1996).John Crabb, “Woodcuts and Witches,” Public Domain Review (4 May 2017)Elaine Crane, Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores : Common Law and Common Folk in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).Kat Eschner, “How New Printing Technology Gave Witches Their Familiar Silhouette,” Smithsonian Magazine (30 Oct 2017)Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1996).Gary F. Jensen, The Path of the Devil: Early Modern Witch Hunts (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).Brian P. Levack, The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe(Routledge, 2006). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Oct 14, 2018 • 1h 4min

Forensic Pathology and the History of Death Investigation

Creepy, Occult, and Otherworldly Episode #1 of 4. Get a complete transcript and sources for this episode at digpodcast.org. Instagram accounts like @Mrs_Angemi and @CrimeSceneCleanersInc boast hundreds of thousands of followers, all hoping to catch a glimpse of morbid pathology and the biohazardous remnants of foul play. This is obviously not a niche thing. We are just as much fascinated by violent death as we are scared by it. There is something about violence and death that is captivating to us. When violent death is combined with high-tech gadgets, police procedures, and super cool forensic testing, you get true crime, one of the most popular genres worldwide. Marissa is a true crime junkie. But she's also a social historian of medicine and the body, so today’s episode is a combination of her most favorite things. This episode weaves together three largely unrelated narratives: medical pathology has its own history; death investigation does too; and to make things more complicated, there’s a whole medico-legal infrastructure whose history we have to tell. Select Sources:Jentzen, Jeffrey M. Death Investigation in America Coroners, Medical Examiners, and the Pursuit of Medical Certainty. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009.Hanzlick, Randy, and Debra Combs. 1998. “Medical Examiner and Coroner Systems: History and Trends”. JAMA. 279, no. 11: 870-874.Simmons, John G. Doctors and Discoveries: Lives That Created Today’s Medicine. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.Kevin Siena, "Searchers of the Dead"in Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 123. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Sep 17, 2018 • 1h 24min

Rebel Slaves and Resistance in the Revolutionary Caribbean

Slavery #4 of 4. complicated story. Enslaved people in the Caribbean resorted to active resistance much more often than their North American and South American counterparts. Haiti (known then as St. Domingue), Jamaica, Barbados, and the Dutch Guianas were particularly prone to slave revolts, averaging one major revolt every two years between 1731 and 1832. No other slave societies have quite so complex a history of resistance as those in the Caribbean. Historian Sir Hilary Beckles has said, “the many slave revolts and plots... between 1638 and 1838 could be conceived of as the '200 Years' War'-- one protracted struggle launched by Africans and their Afro-West Indian progeny against slave owners.” In this week’s episode, we’ll cover the middle half of this 200-year long struggle. We’ll talk about enslaved Caribbeans’ suffering, their achievements, and their alliances with free people of color. But we will also discuss the realities of their violence, and their complicated legacies in revolutionary politics, race relations, and international diplomacy.Find transcripts and show notes here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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