Dig: A History Podcast

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

Episodes

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

March 8, 2026 • 57 mins

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...

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Bonus: Conversation with Amplified Podcast

February 25, 2026 • 38 mins

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

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

February 8, 2026 • 49 mins

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 ...

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The Constitutional Convention of 1787

January 25, 2026 • 87 mins

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 Unite...

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

January 4, 2026 • 39 mins

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

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

December 21, 2025 • 27 mins

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

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Re-Release: A Ghost Story for Christmas!

December 7, 2025 • 43 mins

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/ad...

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Martian Visitors in the Gilded Age

November 9, 2025 • 43 mins

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 fla...

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

October 26, 2025 • 58 mins

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 medi...

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You're Bound to Die: The Long History of the American Murder Ballad

October 12, 2025 • 84 mins

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...

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

September 28, 2025 • 54 mins

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

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

September 14, 2025 • 49 mins

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 ...

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

August 31, 2025 • 58 mins

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 ...

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Women and Slavery: How Harriet Jacobs Revealed Women's Experience of American Enslavement

August 17, 2025 • 79 mins

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...

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Sati: The Virtuous Woman, the Chaste Wife, and the Immolated Widow in Colonial and Postcolonial India

August 3, 2025 • 55 mins

Women's History, Episode #1 of 4. In 1987, the last reported instance of sati threw India into a maelstrom of furious debate and conflict following the ritual suicide of Roop Kanwar after her young husband’s death. Nearly 150 years earlier, British colonial officer Lord William Bentinck passed a prohibition on sati in British India. As Roop Kanwar’s death suggests, British colonial rule did not end the practice of sati in India - n...

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The Pansy Craze

July 20, 2025 • 40 mins

Love in the Lav series. Episode #4 of 4. The late 1920s birthed what would become a defining cultural phenomenon—the "pansy craze"—when LGBTQ+ culture burst into mainstream American entertainment from the late 1920s through the early 1930s. The smoky haze of Prohibition-era speakeasies provided the perfect backdrop for drag queens, called "pansy performers,” to be catapulted into underground stardom, with major cities like New York...

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Anne Lister's Search for a "Great Love": Reading the Diaries of the First Modern Lesbian

July 6, 2025 • 72 mins

Love in the Lav Series. Episode #4 of 4. Today, we’re telling the story of Anne Lister’s life in her own words with a special emphasis on her search for a “great love.” But along the way, we’ll also try to give you some examples of why her diaries have been deemed the most important documents in LGBTQ+ history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Female Husbands, or People Have Always Transed Gender

June 22, 2025 • 61 mins

Averill's Book, Love in the Lav Series, Episode #2 of 4. In 1746, Charles Hamilton, a doctor, married Mary Price in Wells, England. Hamilton was a traveling doctor, selling patent medicines and dubious medical advice, and had met Mary when staying in a rented room. After the wedding, Mary joined Charles in traveling and selling cures for a couple of months until suddenly, she decided she no longer wanted to be married – and to get...

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Just Friends: The Ladies of Llangollen

June 8, 2025 • 51 mins

Love in the Lav Series, Episode # 1 of 4. Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, colloquially known as the Ladies of Llangollen, lived together in North Wales for 51 years in a cottage that they renovated and designed to suit their tastes, on an estate where they built gravel footpaths wending through perfectly lush gardens planted with all manner of shrubs, flowers, fruit trees and bushes, and vegetables. They embraced the “rural reti...

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The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Medical Ethics & Race

May 4, 2025 • 49 mins

Disability Series, #4 of 4. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was an ethically problematic, to say the least, medical research project conducted in Alabama. Officially titled “The Effects of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” this government-sponsored research project was conducted by the United States Public Health Service in Macon County, Alabama, between 1932 and 1972. For four decades, researchers observed the progression of unt...

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Dig: A History Podcast

Episodes

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.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Bonus: Conversation with Amplified Podcast

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

The Constitutional Convention of 1787

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

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

Re-Release: A Ghost Story for Christmas!

Martian Visitors in the Gilded Age

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

You're Bound to Die: The Long History of the American Murder Ballad

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

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

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

Women and Slavery: How Harriet Jacobs Revealed Women's Experience of American Enslavement

Sati: The Virtuous Woman, the Chaste Wife, and the Immolated Widow in Colonial and Postcolonial India

The Pansy Craze

Anne Lister's Search for a "Great Love": Reading the Diaries of the First Modern Lesbian

Female Husbands, or People Have Always Transed Gender

Just Friends: The Ladies of Llangollen

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Medical Ethics & Race

Popular Podcasts

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

Bonus: Conversation with Amplified Podcast