Dig: A History Podcast

Animals Series. Episode #3 of 4. The term “canary in a coal mine” is ubiquitous for any early warning signal. Like our fictional vignette of a miner carrying a canary into the coal mine, canaries were often taken into mines during the first part of the 20th century to test the air for poisonous gasses. The practice was so commonplace that it's become a cliché. Metaphors aside, canaries are a sentinel species, used by humans to detect environmental risks by providing advance warning of a danger. Often animals are used as sentinels because they are more susceptible to environmental hazards that humans may be in the same environment. In the case of coal mining, canaries -- or really any small bird -- are very susceptible to changes in air quality because of their rate of respiration, anatomy, and small size. Contrary to popular belief, canaries in coal mines do not have a very long history. They were only used as sentinel animals in British and American coal mines for roughly 100 years. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a long time at all. Yet, canaries have become ubiquitous with mining in general and as a figure of speech.Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Animals, Episode #2 of 4. Toads, dogs, cats, ferrets, rats, and occasionally even butterflies were depicted in the 16th and 17th centuries as “witch’s familiars” throughout Europe. A servant of the witches, whose purpose was to help them stir up trouble and cause harm in their enemies, familiars were particularly important in English witch lore. Some were conjured by witches, some sent by the Devil to tempt a woman into maleficence, some were supposed to be the Devil himself in the form of a common black dog. Whatever their origin and intent, familiars were not just background characters in English witch trials. They were presented as evidence and used to sentence hundreds, probably thousands, of people to death for witchcraft - in England. Not so in France or Denmark or Italy. It was only in England that the familiar’s significance was codified in law. Why, you ask? Great question. Let’s find out.For a complete transcript and bibliography, visit digpodcast.orgBibliographyMaeve Brigid Callan, The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish (Cornell University Press, 2017)Alan Dures and Francis Young, English Catholicism, 1558-1642 (Taylor and Francis, 2021)Elizabeth Ezra, “Becoming Familiar: Witches and Companion Animals in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials,” Children’s Literature, 47 (2019) 175-196Erica Fudge, Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and Their Animals in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 2018).Charlotte Rose Millar, “The Witch’s Familiar in Sixteenth-Century England,” Melbourne Historical Journal 38 (2010) 113-130. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Animals Series, #1 of 4. In mid-March of 2022, a video spread virally across social media platforms: an elephant with its trunk wrapped around the top bar of its enclosure, its eye casting an anxious look out. A keeper pats his cheek and holds an apple, trying to comfort the distressed animal. The elephant was trapped in his enclosure in a zoo during the Russian bombardment of Kyiv. Animals are victims, transportation, weapons, mascots, heroes, and soldiers in human conflicts – and have been for as long as humans have made war. But perhaps the most dramatic has been the elephant, the massive, intimidating, trumpeting beast of ancient warfare. Elephants are the largest land animals on earth, but not only are they huge and powerful, they have experience human-like emotions, are extremely intelligent, and have long memories. The combination of their extreme power and deep intelligence have long made them valuable to humans, especially as military machines. Today, we’re talking about the history of war elephants in ancient and modern warfare. For the complete transcript and bibliography, visit digpodcast.orgSelect BibliographyThomas Trautmann, Elephants & Kings: An Environmental History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)Konstantin Nossov, War Elephants (Bloomsbury, 2012)Vicki Constantine Croke, Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of An Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II (New York: Random House, 2014) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Race Series. Episode #4 of 4. In today’s episode we’re going to explore race in the 1920s and dig into a few key moments and movements to see how race and ethnicity played a key role in shaping the American interwar years.Find transcripts and shownotes at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Race Series. Episode #3 of 4. During WWII, South Africa's United Party failed to enforce segregation laws with the vigor that most Afrikaners thought was necessary. As a result, war time was accompanied by growing fears of racial mixing and prophecies of racial doom for white South Africans. Afrikaners placed much of the blame for the problems on non-white South Africans. The racial and ethnic discontent was complicated by Afrikaners' Christian convictions, fears of communism, and, strangely, a desire for modernization. These four principles resulted in their Apartheid project and South Africa's devolution into a racist pariah state For this month’s series on race, we are tackling one of history’s most notorious systems of racial segregation, South Africa’s Apartheid. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Race #2 of 4. We’ve discussed the end of American slavery many, many times here on DIG. We’ve talked about abolition in the context of Reconstruction, in the context of refugees sometimes called “contraband,” in the context of Black military service, in the context of the Black Codes and Jim Crow – just to name a few. You might notice something in that list: each of those things centers specifically on the end of slavery, but not on the long and arduous effort to end slavery. In the many times we’ve talked about abolition and emancipation (at least in the US) we’ve talked almost exclusively about the final days of America’s peculiar institution. Today, let’s shift our focus and look instead at the big picture, the long and shifting effort to end slavery in the United States.Get the transcript and further reading at digpodcast.orgBibliographyRael, Patrick. Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1865. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Race #1 of 4. Over the last five years the British government has been reckoning with more recent expressions of the anti-immigration and anti-Black sentiments among its elected officials. The “Windrush scandal” broke in 2017, revealing that the British Home Office systematically and intentionally denied citizenship privileges (like access to the National Health Service, passports, visas for visiting family members, and more) to those of the “Windrush generation.” The Windrush scandal highlights the disconnect between Britain’s self image as an antiracism world leader and the reality of racist policies and practices in modern Britain, but as this episode explores, the current scandal is just one of a long list of injustices imposed on citizens from the West Indies and other former British colonies.Get the transcript and complete bibliography at digpodcast.orgSelect BibliographyKenetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2016).Kieran Connell, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain (University of California Press, 2019)Guardian staff, 'It's inhumane': the Windrush victims who have lost jobs, homes and loved ones | Commonwealth immigration,” The Guardian (April 2018)Amelia Gentlemen, “Lambs to the slaughter': 50 lives ruined by the Windrush scandal,” The GuardianOlivia Peter, “Windrush scandal: Everything you need to know about the major political crisis,” The Independent Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bad Women Series, #4 of 4. The popular image of Parks is one of quiet, and demure respectability. When we were in elementary school, we were taught that Parks was a tired old woman, whose feet hurt after a long day on the job. Because she was a Black woman living in the south, she was relegated to the “back of the bus” on Montgomery, Alabama’s public transportation. Yet, that day Parks did not move to the back of the bus. It was understood that her personal feelings and fatigue were the reason she did not give up her seat for a white passenger on that fateful day in December 1955, not her “lifetime of being rebellious,” as Parks herself said about her activism. Today we’ll discuss Rosa Parks, the mid twentieth century civil rights movement in the United States, and the formation of memory. Get the transcript and full bibliography for this episode at digpodcast.orgSelect BibliographyCarl Wendell Hines, reprinted in Vincent Gordon Harding, “Beyond Amnesia: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Future of America,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Sep., 1987): 468-476.Jeanne Theoharis, “’A Life History of Being Rebellious’: The Radicalism of Rosa Parks,” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed. Jeanne Theoharis (New York University Press, 2009), 115.Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).Rosa Parks, My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bad Women Series. Episode #3 of 4. Anyone who's read or seen Arthur Miller's play The Crucible likely remembers Tituba, the enslaved woman who sets off the 1692 witch panic in Salem, Massachusetts. In literature and history, she's been depicted as both a menacing Barbadian voodoo queen and a Black feminist touchstone. Who was the real Tituba? The answer is … well, not clear. But, today we’ll explore the history of how she has been used, interpreted, and sought out by scholars, poets, and playwrights since the early 18th century. Today, for this installment of our Bad Women series, we’re talking about Tituba, the “Black Witch” of Salem. We're producing this series as a collaboration with historian Hallie Rubenhold's new podcast Bad Women: The Ripper Retold. Rubenhold's book The Five has earned critical acclaim: this social history about the victims of Jack the Ripper is the 2019 winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction and was shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize.Find show notes and transcripts at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bad Women Series #2 of 4. Malintzin is by far the most controversial figure of the 1519 Mexican invasion. Was she a traitor, or a feminist national hero? Was she the mother of Mexico, or the Eve-like bringer of Mexico’s original sin? Was she a collaborator, bystander, or victim of the Spanish? In terms of her legacy, it’s a mixed bag. In terms of her lived experience, it is, as we often say, complicated. And today, we’re digging into the controversial history and legacy of Malintzin. Find the transcript, bibliography, and lesson plans to use with this episode at digpodcast.orgSelect BibliographyRebecca Jager, Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea: Indian Women As Cultural Intermediaries and National Symbols (2015)Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Unframing the “Bad Woman”: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui and Other Rebels with a Cause (University of Texas Press, 2014)Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices, An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2006) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices