Dig: A History Podcast

Spiritualism's Place. Episode #3 of 4. In honor of our new book, Spiritualism's Place, we're re-releasing one of our favorite episodes about Lily Dale. In the late 20th century, white Americans flocked to New Age spirituality, collecting crystals, hugging trees, and finding their places in the great Medicine Wheel. Many didn’t realize - or didn’t care - that much of this spirituality was based on the spiritual faiths and practices of Native American tribes. Frustrated with what they called “spiritual hucksterism,” members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) began protesting - and have never stopped. Who were these ‘plastic shamans,’ and how did the spiritual services they sold become so popular? Listen to find out!  Find transcripts and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spiritualism's Place. Episode #2 of 4. Enjoy this re-release of one of our favorite episodes in celebration of our newly released book: Spiritualism's Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale. For three years before his untimely death on the Titanic, British newspaper man W. T. Stead gathered the bereaved and curious in a room in Cambridge House so they could communicate with the dead. Several psychics, including the blind medium Cecil Husk and materialization medium J. B. Jonson, worked these sessions which had become known as Julia’s Bureau. After Stead’s death, Detroit medium Mrs. Etta Wriedt sought to channel the dead newspaper man. Wriedt was also known to channel a Glasgow-born, eighteenth-century apothecary farmer named Dr. John Sharp. Other frequent visitors include an American Indian medicine chief named Grayfeather, the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan, and a female Seminole Indian named Blossom who died in the Florida everglades as a young child. But the bureau’s most important spirit visitor can also be said to have been the founder of the bureau, Julia herself. Who was Julia? And how do these seances fit into the long history of Spiritualism? Find out today! Find transcripts and show notes here: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spiritualism's Place, Episode #1 of 4: Enjoy this re-release of our episode on Kate and Maggie Fox, the "founders" of Spiritualism. Averill wrote this episode in preparation for writing about the Fox sisters in Chapters 2 & 3 of Spiritualism's Place. This time around, you can listen for the context and history that didn't make it into the book! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Witches Series. Episode #4 of 4. This episode tells te story of one of Japanese folklore’s most infamous yokai (supernatural beings). The kitsune, “fox-spirit” or “fox-witch” has deep roots, millennias-old, in central Japan. The use of the word spirit conjures ghosts to western minds but the Japanese are using it to mean “supernatural or enlightened being”. This is why kitsune is also translated to fox-witch and, in many ways, this is a more accurate name within the western context. This shapeshifting spirit was believed to be the most cunning of yokais, its abilities only increasing with age. For centuries, kitsune have been suspected of performing kitsune-tsuki or “fox possession,” which were made easier by its ability to shapeshift into the form of a human woman. For this last episode on our 2024 Witches series, we’re tracing the history of Japanese fox-witches and the phenomenon of fox possession. Find show notes and transcripts at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Witches, Episode #3 of 4. The Salem witch trials lasted from late February 1692 to May 1693 in eastern Massachusetts Bay Province. This event resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of at least 155 individuals. Of these people, thirty were found guilty, with nineteen meeting their end by hanging. One man suffered a gruesome death by crushing under stones, while five others perished in jail due to harsh conditions. Although modest in scale compared to the extensive witch-hunts in 17th-century Europe, the Salem episode stands as the most severe witch-hunt in American history. It surpassed all previous New England witchcraft trials in terms of accusations and executions. The aftermath of the Salem trials marked a turning point. No further witchcraft convictions occurred in New England after this event. Moreover, the Salem crisis ultimately contributed to the downfall of the Puritan government in Massachusetts, signaling a significant shift in the region's political and social landscape. Bibliography Kamensky, Jane. Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England. Oxford University Press. 1997. Moyer, Paul. Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Cornell University Press. 2020. Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Vintage Books. 2003. Ray, Benjamin C. Satan and Salem : The Witch-Hunt Crisis Of 1692. University of Virginia Press, 2015. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750. Oxford University Press. 1980. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Celebrating Elizabeth's Book: Episode #1 of 4. Dear listener, we’ve got a special episode for you today. Our producer, Elizabeth Garner Masarik, just published her first book, The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State. You can buy it on any major booksellers website as a paperback or ebook. So we are starting a series of women’s history episodes to celebrate the publication of her book. Today we’ll begin with an in-depth discussion of her book and its dominant themes. So sit back and enjoy our deep dive into Elizabeth’s book, The Sentimental State.  Bibliography Elizabeth Garner Masarik, The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State (University of Georgia Press, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

5 Cs, No 6 Cs of History Series. Continuity. Episode #4 of 4. Pretend it’s 500 BCE and you know nothing about modern, scientific medicine. You know nothing about anatomy or biochemistry or microbes. How would you approach the art of healing your loved ones when they became ill? How would you identify what’s wrong with them and offer them the supportive care they needed, their best chance of survival? You'd probably keep track of any events like vomiting, diarrhea, urination, wounds that are weeping or orifices that are secreting. Is pus or wax flowing out of their ear? Are they urinating way more or way less than normal? Is their urine super dark or smelly? Is that cut on their ankle looking crusty and gooey? Note your experience of trying to heal this loved one is shaped entirely by fluids. This is one of the reasons why, for millennia, the practice of healing followed a comprehensive, rational, and holistic explanation for disease based on vital fluids (or humors). This week, for the last episode in our Continuity series, we are discussing the millennias-long strangle-hold humoral medicine had on natural philosophy and medicinal healing. And… plot twist… we may be head back in this direction. Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The 6 Cs of History: Continuity, Episode #3 of 4. Starting in the late 1990s, historians like Deborah Simonton and Judith Bennett argued that if we take a step back a look at the longue duree of women’s history, the evidence suggests that even as Europe’s economies transformed from market places to market economies, women’s work--and the value placed on gendered labor--was and continues to be remarkably (and frustratingly) consistent. There was not, in fact, a transformative moment ushered in by capitalism, industrialization, or post-industrialization for women. Even when factoring in race, urban/rural divides, and class, European (and American) women’s labor was always valued less than men’s, whether in the “household economies” or guilds of the medieval period, on the factory floors of the industrial era, or in the office cubicles of our more recent history. Today we’re going to take a step back and look at the longer history of the gender wage gap, where we can see the continuity in women’s work from the 14th century to the present. For show notes and a transcript, visit digpodcast.org Select Bibliography Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Deborah Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work:1700 to the Present (London, Routledge, 1998).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The 6 Cs of History, Continuity: Episode #2 of 4. In this final series on the 5- nope, 6 - C’s of historical thinking, we’re considering the concept of continuity. We’re much more accustomed to thinking about history as the study of change over time, but we must also consider the ways in which things do not change, or maybe, how they shift and morph in their details while staying, largely, consistent. In the United States, police brutality is, unfortunately, a constant. The contours and context change, extralegal violence at the hands of law enforcement does not. Today, we’re talking about long and in many ways unchanging history of police brutality in the United States. Find transcripts and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The 6 C's of History, Continuity: Episode #1 of 4. Reproductive labor is the labor or work of creating and maintaining the next generation of workers. This is the work of birth, breastfeeding or bottle feeding, washing dirty butts and wiping runny noses, nursing those who unable to care for themselves, keeping living areas habitable by washing and getting rid of refuse- and figuring out how to get water or where to put trash if not living with modern conveniences, cooking- including the sourcing, storing, and knowledge of food production to not make people ill. All of the things that humans rely on but that either through biology or through gendered norms, are the domain of women. Today we’re discussing the history of how reproductive labor was gendered as women’s work, the continuity of the undervaluation of reproductive labor within capitalism, and how this undervaluing contributes to the implications of gendered labor. Put more bluntly, capitalism is dependent on undervalued reproductive and gendered labor, and we’re gonna explore that history a bit in this episode. Find the transcript, full bibliography, our swag store, and other resources at digpodcast.org Select Bibliography Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1884. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. Slavery's Capitalism : A New History of American Economic Development. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2016. Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Caitlin Rosenthal. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. (Harvard University Press, 2018). Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2012). Lauel thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

5 Cs of History. Contingency. Episode #4 of 4. It’s October 10, 732 and the Umayyad armies commanded by Abd al-Rahman are facing the Franks led by Charles Martel. The battle is bloody and chaotic. When the fog clears, the Umayyad Muslim invasion is halted, and the Frankish Kingdom under Charles Martel emerges as a powerful force in Christendom. Historian Edward Gibbon writes that Tours was one of “the events that rescued our ancestors of Britain, and our neighbors of Gaul, from the civil and religious yoke of the Koran.” He continues, saying that if it weren’t for the Battle of Tours, “Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomat.” This week we are finishing our series on the last of the five Cs, contingency, by exploring the Battle of Tours, also called the Battle of Poitiers, which has been remembered as the only event preventing the Islamization of Western civilization. But, as always, it’s so much more complicated than that. Find transcripts and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices