Dig: A History Podcast

The Rise of the American Right During the Cold War: Anti-Communism, Suburban Women, and a Grassroots Revolution 01.06.2026 48min

Cold War #4 of 4. Today, in our last episode of our Cold War series, we are exploring the Cold War roots of the modern conservative movement. We’ll trace the arc of the grassroots movement from the 1950s up to the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, getting a glimpse at how the conservative movement began to move away from moderate, mainstream Republicanism. And we will see how women were central to the movement's organizational and political success. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Project MK Ultra: The CIA's Harmful, Pointless Quest for Mind Control 18.05.2026 1h 20min

Cold War Series. Episode #3 of 4. The Allied victory in World War II meant an end to war with the fascists in Germany, Japan, and Italy, but it did not mean an end to war. In fact, the war just shifted into something more shadowy and covert, where secret weapons, sleight of hand, and leveraging information could be more important than guns and bombs. Desperate to develop tactics and secret weapons that might give them an upper hand over their new Soviet enemies, the United States began to experiment on drugs like LSD, hoping that they might give them the power to control minds, get fodder for blackmail, or extract information from captured spies. The project, run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from roughly 1953-1973, cost thousands of dollars, hundreds of deaths, and inflicted innumerable human rights violations and ended in complete and utter failure. It did not result in a single piece of useful information. Today, as part of our series on the Cold War, we’re talking about project MK Ultra. Find show notes and transcripts at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The KGB’s Queer Honeypots and the Cold War 04.05.2026 50min

Cold War Series, #2 of 4. During the Lavender Scare, the US government fired hundreds (but possibly thousands) of civil servants for being gay or lesbian, ostensibly because of a Communist-panic in which Americans were convinced a homosexual could be blackmailed into giving up state secrets to those rascally Soviets. Turns out, though they weren’t particularly successful at it, the Soviets did try to use sex scandals of all kinds to cultivate spies from the “West” -- including, but not limited to, queer Westerners traveling or working in the USSR. The “honeypot” entrapment was a coercive measure used on all sides of the Iron Curtain to try and get state secrets. And while there’s no morality in spy games, the true story of the men used by the KGB to try and tip the scales in the information race of the Cold War is pretty sad--but also a useful window onto the Soviet attitudes toward same-sex desire, the unique relationships of queer citizens to their respective countries, and the messed-up games that characterized the US-USSR struggle for world dominance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

American Idealist in Stalin's City of Steel: A Pre-History of the Cold War 19.04.2026 1h 1min

Cold War Series. Episode #1 of 4. In this episode, we uncover the extraordinary story of John Scott, a twenty-year-old American idealist who abandoned the University of Wisconsin during the Great Depression, taught himself to weld, and boarded a train for the Soviet Union. He would spend nearly a decade in Magnitogorsk, Stalin's new “City of Steel” in the Urals, building blast furnaces, marrying a Russian woman, and slowly, painfully watching his idealism curdle under the pressure of Stalinist terror. His memoir, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel, is one of the most remarkable eyewitness accounts of Soviet industrialization ever written— and it tells us as much about the seductive power of Cold War ideology as it does about steel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Love Canal, or How Toxic Capitalism Poisoned a Neighborhood and How "Housewives" Fought Back 17.04.2026 1h 33min

Environmental History #3 of 4. In the mid-1970s, parents in Niagara Falls, New York were struggling to figure out why their children were getting mysteriously ill. For two years, officials from the state had been investigating the environment in Niagara Falls For years, residents had been complaining about “the odors of chemicals and fumes.” By the mid-70s, officials had determined that the smells emanated from an old ditch-turned-toxic waste dump. But while everyone could agree the dump was stinky, no one really seemed to believe it was actually pressing public concern. But then children started to get sick. For this episode of our Environmental History series, we're telling the story of Love Canal — one of the most consequential environmental disasters in American history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rachel Carson and a Spring Without Nature: Science, Love, and Politics 06.04.2026 40min

Environmentalism Series #4 of 4. Rachel Carson is often touted as inspiring the modern global environmental movement. In 1962, when Carson’s book Silent Spring was published, she was a fifty-five-year-old former government employee and an award-winning writer of oceanography books. She did not hold a university position, had no PhD, nor was she affiliated with any political organization. She did not consider herself a feminist, and by most accounts she had little taste for public controversy. Unbeknownst to most people, she was also living with advancing breast cancer, a fact she kept largely hidden from the public while she faced down the combined fury of the American chemical industry, the Department of Agriculture, and a scientific establishment that was furious with her. Carson was, as historian Linda Lear puts it, "an improbable revolutionary," yet she changed the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gwich’in, Food Sovereignty, and Environmental Justice in the Arctic Coastal Plain 09.03.2026 57min

Environmental History, #2 of 4. Many of the conservationists who’ve defended the Arctic heralded it as the “last great wilderness,” an ecosystem and landscape unmarred by corporate greed and violence, a place that needs to be preserved because of its “pristine” and “untouched” beauty. While well-intentioned, this narrative is, of course, problematic, because the absence of white settler colonial development is not the same thing as “pristine” or “untouched.” Entire communities of people call the arctic home. The Gwich’in and Inuit nations live on and have stewarded the northernmost reaches of this continent for some 24,000 years. At every imperialist and capitalist effort to destroy those lands with their greed, the Gwich’in and (some) Inuit have shown up to protest, testify, and speak out against those violences. Bibliography “Legal Action Challenges Arctic Refuge Drilling Plan,” Center for Biological Diversity, (15 Jan 2026) H.R.1 - An act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to titles II and V of the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2018. Congress.gov. (2017) Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Status of Oil and Gas Program. Congress.gov. (Updated 4 Feb 2026) Lenny Kohm and the Last Great Wilderness Tour (1995) Part 4 The Wilderness Act (1964) Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (1980) “The Inuit and Northern Experience,” Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 2 (2015) Thomas Berger, “Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland,” THE REPORT OF THE MACKENZIE VALLEY PIPELINE INQUIRY: VOLUME ONE Finis Dunaway, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (UNC Press, 2021) Donella Meadows, “National Energy Policy,” The Donella Meadows Project (Sep 1991) Elizabeth Manning, “Trump Administration Opens the Entire Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Oil and Gas Leasing,” (23 Oct 2025) Brian Palmer and Anna Greenfield, “The Long, Long Battle for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” Natural Resources Defense Council (Oct 24, 2025) Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous Climate Change Studies : Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” English Language Notes, Volume 55, Number 1-2, Spring/Fall 2017, pp. 153-162 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bonus: Conversation with Amplified Podcast 25.02.2026 38min

Bonus! Marissa and Averill chat with Stacey and Hannah of the Amplify Podcast Network about podcasting and teaching, the realities of funding and institutional recognition, and what it means to do feminist history that "matters" in a shifting political landscape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Save it for the Rag-and-Bone Man: The Premodern History of Recycling, Salvage, and Reuse 09.02.2026 49min

Environmental Series. Episode #1 of 4. In 1851, a journalist named Henry Mayhew set out to document the lives of London's working poor. What he found was astonishing. In the richest city in the world, thousands of people made their living by picking through other people's trash. There were the bone-grubbers, who scavenged bones from gutters to sell to soap manufacturers. There were the mudlarks, mostly children, who waded through the filthy banks of the Thames searching for coal, rope, and bits of metal. And then there were the pure-finders. What’s “pure” you ask? Well, "pure" was a Victorian euphemism for dog excrement. Pure-finders, mostly elderly women, spent their days scouring the streets of London for dog droppings, which they then sold by the pailful to tanneries in Bermondsey. The tanners used it to purify leather. Hence the name. We tend to think of recycling as a modern invention, something that started with the environmental movement of the 1970s. Blue bins, sorting instructions, that kind of thing. But as brilliant historians have uncovered, the story of how humans have dealt with their discarded materials stretches back millennia. For most of human history, the concept of "throwing something away" barely existed. To begin our series on environmental history, we're tackling the premodern history of recycling. Or as pre-WWII people would have called it: reclamation, salvage, scrapping, repair, and reuse. We'll meet rag-and-bone men and dustmen, shoddy masters and mudlarks. We'll discover how rags became paper, how old wool became new cloth, and how virtually nothing in the premodern world was ever truly waste. Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 26.01.2026 1h 27min

Bonus Episode: This year, 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the moment when American patriots pledged their lives and their sacred honor to declare the American colonies independent of the British crown. By the time the Continental Congress signed that document, American blood had already been shed and the colonies were already fighting the war that would ultimately lead to the birth of the United States as an independent nation. As momentous as this revolution was, it wasn’t until over 10 years after the Declaration was signed that the revolutionary act that truly founded the nation took place: the Constitutional Convention of 1787. It’s one thing to declare your independence and earn that freedom with spilt blood and military victory; it’s quite another to make that independence meaningful and real in the form of a meaningful, functional and enduring government. And in a moment when the meaning of that government, and indeed the integrity of the the central document of the founding - the Constitution - itself, is as imperiled as it has ever been, it’s the Constitutional Convention, not the Declaration of Independence, that has real resonance for us in the ‘now.’ On this special bonus episode of Dig, join us in a little deep dive into the United States Constitutional Convention. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bonus Episode: Best of 2025, What's Coming in 2026! 05.01.2026 39min

Trying something we've never done before - an end-of-year wrap up in which we discuss our favorite episodes to write and be co-hosts on from the 2025 season, and a little sneaky preview of what is coming in 2026! Happy New Year, all, and thank you for being supporters of this show! xoxox Ave, Marissa, Sarah and Elizabeth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Orange Slices, Simmer Pots, and Naked Dancing: A Brief and Incomplete History of Modern Witchcraft 21.12.2025 27min

A Bonus Episode! Yule logs, dried orange slices strung across your windows, decorated trees and simmer pots - all the marks of a neopagan holiday season! Wait, that's Christmas, you say? Well, can't it be both? A brief history of modern witchcraft, just in time for the winter solstice celebration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Re-Release: A Ghost Story for Christmas! 07.12.2025 43min

We're on a little break, getting our stocking stuffers and Yule logs together, so to tide you over until our next new release, here's an oldie but goodie (with a little remixing - though unfortunately there is no fixing our singing) about the history of ghost stories at Christmas time! Original transcript at: https://digpodcast.org/2017/12/22/christmas-ghost-dickens/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Martian Visitors in the Gilded Age 10.11.2025 43min

Spooky Series, Episode #4 of 4. Over an eight-month period in 1896-1897, thousands of people across North America reported seeing mysterious ships in the air or lights in the sky. There were over 12,000 newspaper accounts published about the phenomenon in 408 different newspapers in 41 American states and six Canadian provinces. The airships were usually described as oblong, cigar-shaped objects, sometimes with wings that would flap up and down. What was going on that would have inspired so many unidentified flying object sightings? And why did they seem to cluster around an eight month period in 1896-1897? Today, in the last installment of our 2025 spooky series, we are going to dive into this late nineteenth century UFO-sighting phenomenon and perhaps figure out what was going on. For the complete bibliography, visit digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Beasts and Believers: A History of Werewolf Trials in Early Modern Europe 27.10.2025 58min

Spooky Series. Episode #3 of 4. In 1220 CE, St. Francis of Assisi tamed a ferocious werewolf terrorizing Gubbio, Italy—transforming "Brother Wolf" from savage beast to peaceful townsperson. But why did Christianity need to conquer the wolf? For millennia, werewolves have stalked the boundaries between civilization and savagery, humanity and monstrosity. From ancient Mesopotamian curses to Greek myths of divine punishment, from medieval theology to early modern courtrooms where hundreds died in werewolf trials, the shape-shifter has embodied our deepest anxieties about human nature itself. Join Marissa and Elizabeth as they uncover the forgotten history of werewolf prosecutions that claimed real lives, explore how economic crises and religious upheaval sparked lycanthropy panics, and trace the transformation of the werewolf from genuine judicial threat to Hollywood monster. This third episode in our Spooky series reveals how the figure of the werewolf has shaped—and been shaped by—Western culture's evolving understanding of violence, identity, and the wild within us all. NOTE: This episode contains references to sexual assault, violence against children, and descriptions of gruesome gore. Listen/read with extreme caution. Find show notes and transcripts at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're Bound to Die: The Long History of the American Murder Ballad 12.10.2025 1h 24min

Spooky Series. Episode # 2 of 4. If you look through recordings of country, western, and folk music ranging from the 1920s and 1930s through to present, you’ll notice a theme: songs about crime, murder, and executions are ever-present. From Grayson & Whittier’s recording of the centuries-old ballad “Rose Connelly” in 1927, to Lloyd Wilson’s “Stagger Lee”recorded in the 1950s, Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”in the 1960s, to Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone”in the 1990s, to Jason Isbell’s “Live Oak” or “Yvette”or Zach Bryan’s “Birmingham” in more recent years, songs about the murder are a staple of the American musical tradition. How did songs about violence and crime become so central? Today, we’ll take a closer look at the murder ballad tradition, tracing them back to the real crimes that inspired them but also considering what they might teach us about race, gender, and American culture. Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Suffer a Witch to Live? Religious Conflict and Witchcraft Persecutions; or, No One Expects the Inquisition 29.09.2025 54min

Spooky Szn Episode #1 of 4. How would you expect the Spanish Inquisition to treat a confessed witch? Does the suggestion conjure visions of fire, torture, and lots of murdered women? You aren’t alone - but this is a history we definitely need to unpack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yellow Rose of Texas: Myth-making and Race in the 19th Century 15.09.2025 49min

Women's History, Episode #4 of 4. Today we're exploring one of Texas's most enduring legends - the story of the "Yellow Rose of Texas" and her supposed role in the Battle of San Jacinto. We are going to unravel the myth of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” We will explore the woman at the heart of the tale, Emily D. West, who was a free woman of color working in Texas, and untangle her real life from the Texan myth. We will also unravel how Emily’s tale was erroneously tied to the song, “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Select Bibliography Jeffrey D. Dunn, “‘To the Devil with your Glorious History!’: Women and the Battle of San Jacinto” in Women and the Texas Revolution, edited by Mary L. Scheer. (UNT Press, 2012). Obiagele Lake, Blue Veins and Kinky Hair: Naming and Color Consciousness in African America (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003) Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821—1865. (LSU Press, 1991). Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850. (UNC Press, 2018). Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World, (UNC Press, 2013). Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (UNC Press, 2018). Frances Edward Abernethy, 2001: A Texas Odyssey (UNT Press, 2001). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Whispers and Wives' Tales: A History of Women & Gossip in Premodern Society 01.09.2025 58min

Women Series. Episode #3 of 4. Dale Spender, a feminist literary scholar, wrote in 1980: “It is not surprising to find that there are no terms for man talk that are equivalent to chatter, natter, prattle, nag, bitch, whine, and of course, gossip, and I am not so naive as to assume that this is because men do not engage in these activities. It is because when they do, it is called something different, something more flattering and more appropriate to their place in the world. This double standard is of great value in the maintenance of patriarchal order.” From the feminist perspective, dismissing women’s talk as “gossip” was a useful tool to reinforce the patriarchy. Punishing women who were known “gossips” was a strategy devised by men to neutralize the threat of gossip to their authority whether that be in the home or in the community. This is an important thread in the history but, as always, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Join us as we explore the history of gossip in the Western (primarily English-speaking) world. Find show notes and transcripts at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Women and Slavery: How Harriet Jacobs Revealed Women's Experience of American Enslavement 18.08.2025 1h 19min

Women Series. Episode #2 of 4. In 1861, one of the most powerful slave narratives in American history was published under the title, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Harriet Jacobs and edited by the famous abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child. The memoir unflinchingly recounts the unique experience that enslaved women faced in the American system of Black chattel slavery - to put it bluntly, Jacobs describes the years of grooming, manipulation, sexual harassment, and threats of rape that she faced at the hands of her master, Dr. Flint, and the abuse she took from her mistress, Mrs. Flint. Jacobs’ memoir painted a picture of slavery that had all the brutality that we’re familiar with learning about - backbreaking work, horrific physical punishments, tearing families apart, inhuman treatment. But it also added a new layer - that enslavement was a different experience for women, for whom sexual terror was a constant, pregnancy was profitable, rape was often unavoidable, and childbirth and wet nursing were part of their labor. For this episode in our latest series on women’s history, we’re talking about women and American slavery. Find transcripts and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices