Episodes

  • Kitsune and Kitsunetsuki: A History of Japanese Fox-Witches and Fox Possession

    Kitsune and Kitsunetsuki: A History of Japanese Fox-Witches and Fox Possession
    Sep 30 2024
    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
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    59 mins
  • The Salem Witch Trials of 1692

    The Salem Witch Trials of 1692
    Sep 23 2024
    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
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    55 mins
  • Spectral Evidence, Floating Witches, and Angry Neighbors: The Other Witch Panic of 1692

    Spectral Evidence, Floating Witches, and Angry Neighbors: The Other Witch Panic of 1692
    Sep 16 2024
    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
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Love and Magic: A History of Violence

    Love and Magic: A History of Violence
    Sep 9 2024
    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
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    45 mins
  • History of Thin: The Changing Meaning of Thinness in the Modern World

    History of Thin: The Changing Meaning of Thinness in the Modern World
    Jul 29 2024
    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
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • The Battle for Deaf Education: Clashing Methods, Minds, and Cultures in the Nineteenth Century United States

    The Battle for Deaf Education: Clashing Methods, Minds, and Cultures in the Nineteenth Century United States
    Jul 22 2024
    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
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • One-Sex, Two-Sex, or …?: Thinking About the Sexed Body in History

    One-Sex, Two-Sex, or …?: Thinking About the Sexed Body in History
    Jul 15 2024
    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
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    49 mins
  • Bonus Episode: The Nineteenth-Century Feminist and Writer that You’ve Probably Never Heard Of: Elizabeth Oakes Smith

    Bonus Episode: The Nineteenth-Century Feminist and Writer that You’ve Probably Never Heard Of: Elizabeth Oakes Smith
    Jul 8 2024
    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
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    1 hr