Wrong Side Of History

Jay Singleton
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Philosophy
  • Semiweekly

What history's 'Bad Guys' believed and why

  1. 1d ago

    Black Nationalism: Part 3

    Become a member of Wrong Side of History Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. ⁠Join here⁠ If integration meant depending on white institutions, what would it take for Black Americans to build something of their own? For Black nationalists, self-determination meant more than political independence. Marcus Garvey’s UNIA tried to build a Black economy of businesses, newspapers and even a shipping line connecting Black producers and consumers around the world. Decades later, the Nation of Islam built farms, restaurants, property, businesses and supply chains of its own. But independence required something from the people inside these movements too. Black nationalists argued that self-determination required discipline, thrift, education, strength and a willingness to stop measuring Black advancement by acceptance into white society. And that raises a more difficult question about integration itself. W.E.B. Du Bois wondered whether a good Black school might sometimes serve Black children better than a hostile integrated one. Malcolm X and James Baldwin disagreed over whether the goal should ultimately be a world beyond race at all. Because integration doesn’t only combine things. It can also require something to disappear. So how much of your history, institutions and identity should you be willing to give up to become part of something larger? ON THIS EPISODEJay Singleton: Writer and host⁠⁠El Train⁠⁠: Music JUMP TO:(00:00) — Introduction(00:39) — Why Black Nationalists Distrusted Direct Action(02:15) — Stokely Carmichael and the Limits of Nonviolence(04:31) — Independence, Patience and Political Leverage(06:39) — What Does Self-Determination Look Like?(07:39) — Marcus Garvey and the UNIA Economy(10:37) — The Nation of Islam Builds a Parallel Economy(13:15) — Discipline, Strength and the Culture of Independence(17:17) — The Nation of Islam’s Transformation of Black Life(20:37) — Brown v. Board and the Question of Inferiority(22:02) — W.E.B. Du Bois on Separate Black Schools(26:00) — Does Integration Require Disintegration?(29:26) — Malcolm X, James Baldwin and a World Beyond Race(30:30) — Post-Racial America or Black Nationalism?(31:53) — Conclusion and Outro

  2. Oct 27

    Black Nationalism: Part 2

    Become a member of Wrong Side of History Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. ⁠Join here⁠ Could Black Americans use the American system to dismantle segregation — or was the system itself the problem? In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education declared segregated schools unconstitutional. A year later, the murder of Emmett Till showed just how far America still had to go. For integrationists like Martin Luther King Jr., the answer was to make America live up to its own promises. Use the courts to remove legal barriers, education and religion to change hearts, and integration to free both Black and white Americans from the psychology of segregation. Black nationalists saw something different. They feared that the same institutions that had tolerated segregation for generations could delay change, absorb Black Americans without giving them real power, and turn them into a constituency to be courted rather than a people capable of determining their own future. So the disagreement was no longer simply over whether segregation should end. It was over a slightly harder question: Can the tools of the American system change America? ON THIS EPISODEJay Singleton: Writer and host⁠⁠El Train⁠⁠: Music JUMP TO:(00:00) — Introduction(00:56) — Brown v. Board and the Promise of Integration(05:31) — The Murder of Emmett Till(08:14) — The NAACP and the Integrationist Strategy(10:19) — Martin Luther King’s Case Against Segregation(14:18) — Can Law Actually Create Integration?(15:13) — Can the System Change the System?(16:13) — Why Black Nationalists Were Skeptical(17:02) — Delay, Incorporation and Political Power(18:16) — The Black Nationalist Alternative(18:40) — Next Episode and Outro

  3. Oct 20

    Black Nationalism: Part 1

    Become a member of Wrong Side of HistoryGet the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show.Join here Why would Black Americans fight segregation and reject integration? For some Black nationalists, integration meant asking people who despised them for permission to belong. They wanted something else: institutions they controlled, a history they could claim, and a future they could build for themselves. But did overcoming racism require abandoning race or organising around it? In Part One, we talk about why people doubted that integration was possible, desirable, or enough. Martin Luther King Jr. believed America could be redeemed. Malcolm X questioned the dignity of seeking acceptance from people who kept refusing it. And Martin Delany changed his answer as America gave him reasons to hope, leave, and hope again. And beneath all of this was the question: Can you be Black and American ? ON THIS EPISODEJay Singleton: Writer and host ⁠El Train⁠: Music JUMP TO:(00:00) — Introduction and Membership(00:24) — The Civil Rights Revolution(03:32) — What Is Black Nationalism?(09:16) — Can You Be Black and American?(12:52) — Rootlessness and the Search for Identity(14:26) — Is Harmonious Integration Possible?(15:23) — Martin Delany’s Changing Convictions(19:18) — The Nation of Islam on Integration(21:42) — The Story of Yakub(23:25) — The Sparks of The Modern Civil Rights Movement(23:40) — Next Episode and Outro

  4. Sep 29

    Preview: Eugenics Endnotes

    .⁠⁠Join here⁠ to become a member of Wrong Side of History Get the full End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show ______________________________________________________________ In this members only episode we’ll  talk about: How Eugenics was practiced differently in different placesThe central anxiety that helped justify the most radical policies More about the religious aspect of the whole movement And wrestle with this moral challenges that surrounded this movement READ THE BOOKS Caleb Williams Saleeby, Parenthood and Race Culture (1909) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42913/42913-h/42913-h.htm The Eugenics Review, volume 1 (1909–10): https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000529261  Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: ⁠https://www.routledge.com/Eugenics-Human-Genetics-and-Human-Failings-The-Eugenics-Society-its-sources-and-its-critics-in-Britain/Mazumdar/p/book/9780415514811  Music: ⁠El Train⁠

  5. Sep 15

    Eugenics: Part 2

    Become a member of Wrong Side of History Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. Join here What kind of future did the eugenicists believe they were building? Eugenics did not only promise to prevent human decline. Its supporters imagined a world without hereditary disease, a more intelligent and cooperative humanity, and eventually even world peace. In Part Two, I follow that promise from one of the movement’s clearest early targets, haemophilia, into its increasingly ambitious visions of human betterment. Francis Galton tried to measure inherited genius. Caleb Saleeby imagined raising the average person. William Inge proposed an ideal hierarchy of human excellence. And at the movement’s fringe, Nietzsche’s Superman became a prophecy that eugenics might fulfil. To understand why eugenics became mainstream, we have to understand the future its supporters believed they were creating: not one of death and destruction, but health, abundance, purpose and peace. Follow Wrong Side of History for the End Notes on September 22. The opening section will be public; members receive the complete episode. READ THE SOURCES Parenthood and Race Culture by Caleb Williams Saleeby: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42913/42913-h/42913-h.htm Hereditary Genius by Francis Galton: https://galton.org/books/hereditary-genius/ “Probability, the Foundation of Eugenics” by Francis Galton: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_71/August_1907/Probability%2C_The_Foundation_of_Eugenics Aratra Pentelici by John Ruskin: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25897/25897-h/25897-h.htm The Eugenics Review, Volume 1: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000529261 SOURCE NOTES The John Ruskin passage comes from Aratra Pentelici, a series of Oxford lectures delivered in 1870. William Inge was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and later Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. ON THIS EPISODE Jay Singleton: Writer and host El Train: Music JUMP TO: (00:00) — Introduction and Membership (00:42) — What Victorians Owed Future Generations (03:50) — Haemophilia and Preventable Hereditary Suffering (08:31) — Eugenics and the Birth of Modern Statistics (10:19) — How Eugenicists Judged a Condition (12:03) — From Colour Blindness to “Feeble-Mindedness” (15:14) — The Genie Out of the Bottle (17:01) — From Preventing Suffering to Improving Humanity (18:06) — Galton and Hereditary Genius (19:12) — Saleeby’s “Elevated Humanity” (24:00) — William Inge’s “Ideal Humanity” (27:00) — Nietzsche and the Superman (29:44) — Eugenics as a Religion of Peace (32:02) — The Organising Principle of Civilisation (33:05) — Outro

  6. Sep 1

    Eugenics: Part 1

    Become a member of Wrong Side of History Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. Join here Why did eugenics become mainstream among some of the most educated, scientifically minded and socially conscious people of the early twentieth century? Before eugenics became inseparable in public memory from Nazi Germany, forced sterilisation and racial supremacy, British eugenicists believed modern civilisation had created a serious problem: medicine, sanitation, welfare and charity were saving lives while interrupting the natural selection that had shaped humanity. In Part One, we try to understand the fear of human decline that gave the movement its urgency, from evolution and heredity to Victorian workhouses, “care and quarantine,” positive and negative eugenics, and the belief that humanity could consciously direct its own future. This is the story of how a movement remembered for cruelty understood itself as compassionate, enlightened and even religious. Follow Wrong Side of History so you don’t miss Part Two: The Promise of Human Betterment. September 15. READ THE SOURCES Parenthood and Race Culture by Caleb Williams Saleeby: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42913/42913-h/42913-h.htm The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin: https://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/published/1874_Descent_F944/1874_Descent_F944.html Essays in Eugenics by Francis Galton: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/73802 The Eugenics Review, Volume 1: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000529261 ON THIS EPISODE Jay Singleton: Writer and host El Train: Music JUMP TO: (00:00) — What Were They Thinking? (00:55) — Why Eugenics Became Mainstream (02:25) — Two Observations That Changed Everything (04:17) — Could Humanity Direct Its Own Evolution? (05:21) — The Three Questions of Eugenics (06:38) — Eugenics as a New Religion (10:34) — The Victorian Problem: Charity and Natural Selection (14:05) — Care, Quarantine and Human Decline (18:00) — If Natural Selection Was Broken, What Next? (18:52) — Positive and Negative Eugenics (20:05) — Why Persuasion Came Before Force (24:29) — Preventing Predictable Hereditary Harm (25:31) — Next: The Promise of Human Betterment

  7. Aug 18 ·  Bonus

    Premium Preview: Dead Dogma

    Get End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. Join here __________________________________ What does it mean to believe something without really understanding why? John Stuart Mill called this dead dogma: a belief that may be true, but has become little more than a script. I look at why Mill thought even correct ideas become weaker when they’re never challenged and what happens when certainty replaces understanding. This is an essay about testing what we think we know, understanding the strongest arguments against us, and keeping truth alive rather than merely repeating it.

  8. Aug 11

    Anti-suffrage: Endnotes

    Become a member of Wrong Side of History Get End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. Join here _____________________ Queen Victoria called women’s rights a “mad, wicked folly.” But unlike their American counterparts, some British anti-suffragists proposed women’s councils, a ministry for women and even a separate women’s chamber of parliament organised around the belief that the sexes had different duties. To understand how that vision made sense, I compare British and American anti-suffragism, from Queen Victoria and imperial motherhood to suffragette militancy. READ THE BOOKS Women Against the Vote by Julia Bush: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/women-against-the-vote-9780199248773 The Freedom of Women by Ethel B. Harrison: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL32871291W/The_freedom_of_women The Status Game by Will Storr: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-status-game-on-social-position-and-how-we-use-it-will-storr ON THIS EPISODE Jay Singleton: Writer and host El Train: Music JUMP TO: (00:00) — Introduction and housekeeping (02:47) — British vs. American anti-suffragism (03:32) — How large were the two movements? (05:00) — Suffragette militancy (07:05) — What British and American antis shared (08:06) — Queen Victoria: an anti-suffragist icon (10:22) — Imperial motherhood (12:18) — Did political authority depend on force? (14:37) — The anti-suffragist “forward policy” (15:23) — A separate political sphere for women (17:51) — End Notes (18:48) — The danger of defining human differences (24:09) — Humiliation and political change (27:41) — Outro

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What history's 'Bad Guys' believed and why

Information

  • Creator
    Jay Singleton
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    13
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Jay Singleton
  • Show Website
    Wrong Side Of History

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