Episodes

  • The Women and the King: Scottish Witch Hunts Under James VI

    The Women and the King: Scottish Witch Hunts Under James VI
    Jun 28 2026
    Women's History Series, #2 of 4. In 1590, the king of Scotland fomented a witch hunt in North Berwick, implicating as many as 200 people, convicting 70, and executing as many as 50. He participated in the “questioning” of the accused, tearing confessions of treason and weather magic from their trembling lips. He sent those whom he “believed” conspired against him to their deaths. Why? Reading his witch-hunting treatise, Demonologie, one might assume it was because he feared the threat that magic-users posed to his country. But perhaps the shrewd and savvy king had other, more earthly reasons to stir up a panic that destroyed those who moved against him. Bibliography Katherine Brice, The Early Stuarts 1603–1640 (1994) Ed. Julian Goodare, The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context (Manchester University Press, 2002). Julian Goodare, “Frameworks for Scottish Witch Hunting in the 1590s,” The Scottish Historical Review Oct 2002) Julian Goodare, “Witchcraft in Scotland,” The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian Levack, 300-317 Christina Larner, Enemies of God (1981) Brian Levack, “State Building and Witch Hunting in Early Modern England,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (2010) 213-226 Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, Tamara Wallace, “The Witch-Finder King: A Study of James I of England and his Relationship to Witchcraft,” Undergraduate Thesis, University of Victoria (2023) Liv Helene Willumsen, “WITCHCRAFT AGAINST ROYAL DANISH SHIPS IN 1589 AND THE TRANSNATIONAL TRANSFER OF IDEAS,” IRSS 45 (2020) Jenny Wormald, “The Witches, the Devil, and the King,” in Freedom and Authority: Scotland c. 1050-1650 (2000) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    43 mins
  • Lesbian Volunteerism in the AIDS Epidemic: A Story We Almost Lost

    Lesbian Volunteerism in the AIDS Epidemic: A Story We Almost Lost
    Jun 15 2026
    Women Series. Episode #1 of 4. When we tell the story of AIDS— and we tell it more often now, in films and museums and classrooms— we tend to tell it as a story about gay men. And of course it was, overwhelmingly, a catastrophe that fell on gay men. But standing right beside those men, and very often holding them as they died, were lesbians. They organized. They protested. They gave blood. They emptied bedpans and changed sheets and sat through long nights in hospital rooms that nurses were afraid to enter. To some people listening it may seem only natural that lesbians stood in solidarity with gay men but to historians of queer history, this turn of events is surprising; these were, in many cases, women who had spent the entire previous decade in open political conflict with gay men. The 1970s gay and lesbian movement was not one big happy family. It was torn by a deep and sometimes bitter rift between gay men and lesbian feminists. And yet, when the crisis came, the women showed up. As part of our 2026 Women series, and in honor of Pride month, we’re going to tell their stories. Find show notes and transcripts at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • The Rise of the American Right During the Cold War: Anti-Communism, Suburban Women, and a Grassroots Revolution

    The Rise of the American Right During the Cold War: Anti-Communism, Suburban Women, and a Grassroots Revolution
    Jun 1 2026
    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
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    49 mins
  • Project MK Ultra: The CIA's Harmful, Pointless Quest for Mind Control

    Project MK Ultra: The CIA's Harmful, Pointless Quest for Mind Control
    May 18 2026
    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
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    1 hr and 21 mins
  • The KGB’s Queer Honeypots and the Cold War

    The KGB’s Queer Honeypots and the Cold War
    May 4 2026
    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
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    50 mins
  • American Idealist in Stalin's City of Steel: A Pre-History of the Cold War

    American Idealist in Stalin's City of Steel: A Pre-History of the Cold War
    Apr 19 2026
    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
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Love Canal, or How Toxic Capitalism Poisoned a Neighborhood and How "Housewives" Fought Back

    Love Canal, or How Toxic Capitalism Poisoned a Neighborhood and How "Housewives" Fought Back
    Apr 17 2026
    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
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    1 hr and 33 mins
  • Rachel Carson and a Spring Without Nature: Science, Love, and Politics

    Rachel Carson and a Spring Without Nature: Science, Love, and Politics
    Apr 6 2026
    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
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    40 mins