Dig: A History Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

Slavery #3 of 4. Show Notes and a complete transcript available at digpodcast.org. Today, we’re really excited to have an extra special episode for you. We’re honored to present this episode in conjunction with the PBS series, Secrets of the Dead. Coming up this October, Secrets of the Dead will be airing the story of the Woman in the Iron Coffin, in which a team of death detectives will reconstruct the Woman’s life. We’ve been lucky enough to see a preview, and let us assure you – you need to see this! But in the meantime, we’re here to offer a little extra context to everything you’ll learn from the experts on the show. "The Woman in the Iron Coffin" is a great opportunity to talk about so many things, but because the Woman was a free black woman living in New York City in the 1850s, we’re going to spend this installment of our slavery series talking about slavery in the Northern United States, how it came to an end, and the lives of free black folks in the North. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Slavery #2 of 4. In today’s episode we are discussing some laws in the United States that governed the bodies and lives of enslaved people and follow how those laws changed, or didn’t change, through emancipation and into the late twentieth century. So buckle up for a long look at Slave Codes, Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws in America. Find show notes and transcripts here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Slavery #1 of 4. Get the Show Notes or read the full transcript at digpodcast.org. Between 1522 and 1536, the second most powerful man in the Ottoman empire was Ibrahim Pasha.The most surprising thing about Ibrahim Pasha is not his diplomatic successes or his untimely demise. What is most surprising about Ibrahim Pasha, the second most powerful man in the Ottoman Empire between 1522-36, is that he was a devsirme slave. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Original Research #4 of 4. Get a complete transcript and see the show notes at digpodcast.org The nation first had to truly grapple with the extraordinary expenses of war was after the American Civil War. As part of our series highlighting our own research fields, today we’re talking about Civil War veterans and disability, trauma, gore, crime, and extraordinary federal expenditures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

 The death of a young child was a very real and emotional experience for many families during the American Progressive Era. However, at the dawn of the twentieth century many Americans came to expect a better outcome in the life expectancy of their children. In the new age of industrial capitalism with rapidly changing technology, medical professionalization, and increasing wealth, America could have had the lowest percentages of child and infant deaths out of all industrializing nations. This was not the case, however. In 1900 America ranked 10th among principle nations in infant mortality. The estimated national infant mortality rate was 100 per 1,000 live births resulting in over 230,000 infant deaths per year. The maternal mortality rate was 15,000 per year. The actual numbers were probably much higher as official data was never exact. The United States did not have a uniform system in place to register births. And just to put this in perspective, in 1900 there were 76 million people in the United States, now we have 323 million people living in the U.S. So these infant mortality numbers were significant in 1900. Subsequently, the pain of the loss of a child was an element that touched almost every American living in the early 20th century. Find show notes and transcripts here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices