Dig: A History Podcast Recorded History Podcast Network

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
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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)

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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.
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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
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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.
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Elizabeth's Book, The Sentimental State #2 of 4. We’re talking about abortion and Ireland today. It’s hard for a lot of reasons. People shouldn’t have to fight so hard to make decisions for their own bodies. An unborn fetus should not have the same legal status as an adult woman. But we’re honoring Elizabeth’s book, The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State, with this series about women, activism, and reform. Elizabeth tells the history of American women, Black and white, who took the anxieties and ideals of the Progressive era and mobilized them to exact political change. Reading Elizabeth’s book reveals a lot about the welfare state today, but also, I think, is a kind of roadmap for collective action. For Irish women, and all people with uteruses, unwanted pregnancies left one with few choices until it was finally decriminalized in 2018. Two-thousand-and-eighteen. Barely six years ago. Today we’re looking at 100 years of Irish history, inclusive of both the north and south. And most of that history, and most of this episode, is painful. But from that pain came people, mostly women, taking care of each other and fighting for change. And from that collective action came reform. Today, women in both Northern Ireland and the Republic can legally obtain an abortion up to twelve weeks in their own country. Is it perfect? No, of course not. As Elizabeth’s book reminds us, reform never is. But it’s leaps and bounds better than it was. For our listeners in Texas, South Dakota, Oklahoma, and 18 other US states, this episode will hit too close to home. But I hope it’s also a reminder that collective action works. We can have something, and lose it, and then get it back. We just need to fight for each other. So chin up. We can do this together.
Select Bibliography
Fran Amery, Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: The Changing Politics of Abortion in Britain (Bristol University Press, 2020).
Lindsay Earner-Byrne and Diane Urquhart, The Irish Abortion Journey, 1920-2018, (Palgrave Macmillian, 2019).
Jennifer Thompson, Abortion Law and Political Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Fiona Bloomer and Emma Campbell, Decriminalizing Abortion in Northern Ireland (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Begoña Aretxaga, Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland (Princeton University Press, 1997)

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