Dig: A History Podcast

Recorded History Podcast Network
  • 4.8 (21)
  • SOCIETY & CULTURE
  • UPDATED MONTHLY
Dig: A History Podcast Podcast

Four women historians, a world of history to unearth. Can you dig it?

  1. 4 DAYS AGO

    Spectral Evidence, Floating Witches, and Angry Neighbors: The Other Witch Panic of 1692

    Witches Series. Episode # 2 of 4. In 1692, the unusual behavior of a young girl was explained as the result of the evil trickery of a witch. Soon, people were naming culprits, and those accused were on trial for their very lives. You’re all familiar with the story, right? But today we’re not talking about the famed witch panic that gripped Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 - no, we’re talking about the other witch panic that took place that very same year, 200 miles away in Stamford, Connecticut. What can this concurrent, but very different, witch panic teach us about ideas about witchcraft in colonial New England? Find transcripts and show notes at: www.dogpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1h 2m

  2. SEPT 9

    Love and Magic: A History of Violence

    Witches III, Episode #1 of 4. Magic practitioners - both real and fictional, historical and contemporary - wield many different kinds of magic. Blood and bone magic, necromancy, divination, cleansing magic, manifestation, earth and elemental magic; the list is extensive. But wherever there is magic use, you are likely to find love magic. Spells and incantations to entrap a lover, potions and drugs to enthrall or make one feel amorous - love magic is ubiquitous in our current cultural representations of magic, especially (but not exclusively) when there are women magic-users involved. Curiously, while love magic has been around for millenia, love magic was not always so firmly feminized. And that seems worth digging into. Bibliography Laine Doggett, Love Cures: Healing and Love Magic in Old French Romance. (Pennsylvania State UP, 2009). Christopher Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, (Harvard UP, 2009) Gyorgy Endre Szonyi, John Dee's occultism : magical exaltation through powerful signs Jeffrey Watt, “Love Magic and the Inquisition: A Case from Seventeenth-Century Italy,” The Sixteenth Century Journal , Fall 2010, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2010), 675-689. Benjamin R. Foster, From Distant Days: myths, tales and poetry of Ancient Mesopotamia, (CDL Press, Maryland, 1995) Corinne Wieben, “The Charms of Women and Priests: Sex, Magic, Gender and Public Order in Late Medieval Italy,” Gender and History Vol.29 No.1 April 2017, 141–157. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    45 min

  3. JUL 29

    History of Thin: The Changing Meaning of Thinness in the Modern World

    Bodies Series. Episode #3 of 3. The modern history of the body is marked by the coinciding pathologization of fatness AND the elevation of a new thin ideal. But one can make the argument that even after fatness was pathologized (deemed medically or psychologically abnormal), it was not necessarily stigmatized in any systematic way UNTIL its opposite quality- thinness-- took on new and important meanings of its own. In this sense, it’s not fatness whose meaning changes with time so much as that of THINNESS. As was made clear in this episode’s prequel, The History of Fat: The Complex Attitudes Toward Fatness in the Pre-Modern West, fatness has always been complicated- at some times accepted, even admired, and at other times criticized and a source of revulsion. In response to gender crises, technological advancement, and anxieties about modernity, twentieth-century beauty standards came to worship thinness in ways that were completely unheard of in premodern times. Today we tackle the History of Thin. Find transcripts and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1h 4m

  4. JUL 22

    The Battle for Deaf Education: Clashing Methods, Minds, and Cultures in the Nineteenth Century United States

    Body Series. Episode #2 of 3. In the mid-nineteenth century, a feud erupted between two camps of prominent public intellectuals and thought-leaders in the United States. The results of this feud affected the education, culture, and lives of generations of Americans. And yet, you have probably never heard of it. One the one side, the manualists, who believed that deaf people should be educated in manual methods in the form of sign language. On the other side, the oralists, who believed that deaf people should not use sign, but instead be educated in how to read lips and vocalize spoken English. It might be easy to see this as a just a schism between two pedagogical perspectives - is it better to teach using this method or that method? But this was about much more than educational approaches - instead, it became about the very place of deaf people in United States society. Thinkers and educators had spent decades of the nineteenth century debating the nature of deafness and the deaf mind: could deaf people think and reason without formalized language? Could they tell right from wrong, or were they animal-like? How might deaf people exist in a civil society if they did not share a common language? Were deaf people a distinct cultural group, or disabled individuals who could be assimilated? Today, we’re talking about the history of deaf people in the United States. Find transcripts and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1h 5m

  5. JUL 15

    One-Sex, Two-Sex, or …?: Thinking About the Sexed Body in History

    Bodies, Episode #1 of 3. Historian Thomas Lacquer’s 1992 Making Sex argues that the one sex model dominated ancient and medieval medicine and popular ideas of sex, until, approximately, the Enlightenment, which gradually dispelled the one sex model in favor of the two-sex model--the strict dimorphic binary of sex, male and female, that most people are probably familiar with today. While numerous historians, and particularly historians of the ancient and medieval periods, have challenged the scope and specifics of Lacquer’s thesis, the revolution in gender history that his work prompted is undeniable. To kick off this series on Bodies, we’re going to talk about the history of how sex - or the meaning and value ascribed to genitals - was socially and scientifically constructed and reconstructed in Europe over the last two thousand years. For a full transcript, bibliography, and more, visit digpodcast.org Select Bibliography Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990).  Joan Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1995) Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Routledge, 2013).  Thomas Lacquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1992) Elizabeth Reis, Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex (John Hopkins Press, 2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    49 min

  6. JUL 8

    Bonus Episode: The Nineteenth-Century Feminist and Writer that You’ve Probably Never Heard Of: Elizabeth Oakes Smith

    Bonus Episode: We're diving into the biography and the life and times of a woman named Elizabeth Oakes Smith. Elizabeth Oakes Smith was a household name in the mid- nineteenth century. She was a journalist, she was a women's rights activist, she traveled across the country speaking on the lyceum circuit, and she was also a well-known published author. Famous writers such as Edgar Allan Poe reviewed her written work and gave her raving reviews. But something happened. Elizabeth Oakes Smith was essentially erased from history. Bibliography Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870. University of Illinois Press, 1993. Patterson, Cynthia. "Illustration of a Picture": Nineteenth-Century Writers and the Philadelphia Pictorials, American Periodicals, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2009):136-164 Reed, Ashley. Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America. Cornell University Press, 2020.  Scherman, Timothy, ed.. Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings, Volume I: Emergence and Fame, 1831-1849. Mercer University Press, 2023. Scherman, Timothy, ed.. Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings, Volume II: Feminist Journalism and Public Activism, 1850-1854. Mercer University Press, 2024. Tuchinsky, Adam. “‘Woman and Her Needs’: Elizabeth Oakes Smith and the Divorce Question.” Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 1 (2016): 38–59. Woidot, Caroline M., ed. The Western Captive and Other Indian Stories by Elizabeth Oakes Smith. Broadview Editions, 2015. Wyman, Mary Alice. Two American Pioneers: Seba Smith and Elizabeth Oakes Smith. Columbia University Press, 1927. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1h 0m

  7. MAY 27

    La Mutine: Gender and France's Forced Migration Schemes

    EMG's Book Sentimental State. Episode #4 of 4. In this episode, Marissa and Averill uncover the harrowing real story behind a wave of forced migration from early 18th century Paris to the struggling French territories along the Gulf Coast. Driven by underpopulation woes and a charlatan's get-rich-quick scheme, over 100 women were quite literally rounded up from prisons and poorhouses under dubious accusations of "debauchery" and "prostitution." Their journey into this cruel human trafficking operation is laid bare through the meticulous research of historian Joan DeJean. You'll hear how an ambitious and ruthless warden conspired with corrupt officials to clear Paris' streets by falsifying charges against poor servant girls, foreigners, and even women simply deemed "inconvenient" by their own families. Branded as criminals but guilty of little more than poverty, these so-called "corrections girls" were then abandoned in hellish conditions at the Crown's fledgling outposts with no provisions. Yet many survived through grit and resilience, going on to become founders of New Orleans' aristocracy. Find transcripts and show notes at: digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    55 min

  8. MAY 20

    Red Power Progressivism: A Biography of American Indian Rights Activist Zitkala Ša

    EGM's Book The Sentimental State. Episode #3 of 4. In 1923, Zitkala-Ša, a Dakota woman, wrote an unpublished essay titled "Our Sioux People," tracing the U.S. government's relationship with the tribe. She described a scene where delegates from the Pine Ridge reservation met with Mr. E. B. Merritt of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC. Zitkala-Ša quoted: "through all the pathos of their sad story, the sight of thier gaunt faces, their cheap and shabby civilian clothes which bespoke their poverty more than words, Mr. E. B. Merritt, Assistant Commissioner sat unmoved in his luxurious office, where walls were hung with bright colored paintings of primitive Indian folk and their teepees." Zitkala-Ša's complex political writing and activism added American Indian perspectives to women's political activism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We do this episode in honor of Elizabeth's new book, The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State. Find transcripts here show notes: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1h 24m
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4.8
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About

Four women historians, a world of history to unearth. Can you dig it?

Information

  • Creator
    Recorded History Podcast Network
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2024
  • Episodes
    196
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Averill, Marissa, Sarah, & Elizabeth Copyright 2017 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Dig: A History Podcast

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