90 Second Narratives

“On February 1, 1956, the British Somaliland Protectorate’s Radio Somali carried the voice of nationalist Michael Mariano across the northern Somali territories…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Safia Aidid

For further reading:
Somalia: Nation in Search of a State by David D. Laitin and Said S. Samatar (Westview Press, 1987)
Africa’s First Democrats: Somalia’s Aden A. Osman and Abdirazak H. Hussein by Abdi Samatar (Indiana University Press, 2016)

“On January 10, 1928 Assistant City Solicitor William Laukaitis told a real estate salesman he wanted to buy an expensive lot in the suburban Baltimore neighborhood of Homeland…” 

So begins today’s story from Dr. Paige Glotzer.

For further reading:
How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890–1960 by Paige Glotzer (Columbia University Press, 2020)

This special episode combines all ten stories from Season 1…

“Schoolgirl Activism in French Mandate Lebanon” - Johanna Peterson, PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of California San Diego

“Two Doctors, Two Paths in Cold War Brazil” - Dr. Eyal Weinberg, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

“Lawmakers in the Spanish Empire” - Dr. Adrian Masters, Researcher at the University of Tübingen

“Race and Violence in Early Modern Spain” - Dr. Erin Kathleen Rowe, Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University

“A Catholic in Confucian Robes” - Dr. Sky Michael Johnston, Teach@Tübingen Fellow at the University of Tübingen

“The Answered Prayer of Wang Mingdao” - Dr. Amy O’Keefe, Assistant Professor of History at Meredith College

“Martin Luther Goes Undercover” - Dr. Sky Michael Johnston

“Making Cow Brains Your Oyster” - Dr. Claudia Kreklau, an Associate Lecturer in the School of History at the University of St. Andrews

“Missionaries Try to Convert a Desert” - Dr. Sky Michael Johnston

“A Puritan Tells Ghost Stories” - Ryan Hoselton, Instructor and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Heidelberg

For information about Season 2, follow the podcast on Twitter @90secNARRATIVES

“In the mid-eighteenth century, a group of German Jesuit missionaries tried to convert the desert landscape of Baja California.”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:

Sky Michael Johnston. “‘What is California? Nothing but Innumerable Stones’: German Jesuits, Salvation, and Landscape Building in the California Missions,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 2 no. 1 (2015) 36-55.

“If you have heard of the Chinese Christian preacher Wang Mingdao…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Amy O’Keefe.

For further reading:
Amy O’Keefe, “Walking the Enlightened Path: Wang Mingdao’s Road to Independent Christianity under Japanese Occupation,” in 1943: China at the Crossroads (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2015).

“On Holy Thursday in the year 1604 in the city of Seville, Spain, a bloody fight broke out between two confraternities on the Plaza of San Salvador…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Erin Kathleen Rowe.

For further reading:
Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism by Erin Kathleen Rowe (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

“How does a story about two doctors reveal the social, political, and ethical divisions that typified Brazil during the Cold War?”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Eyal Weinberg.

For further reading:
Eyal Weinberg, “‘With colleagues like that, who needs enemies?’: Doctors and Repression under Military and Post-Authoritarian Brazil,” The Americas 76 (2019): 467-505.

“What in the world was a Jesuit priest doing in Beijing’s Forbidden City dressed like a Confucian?”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Sky Michael Johnston.

For further reading:
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan D. Spence (Viking, 1984)
A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552-1610 by Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Oxford University Press 2010)

“Do you believe in the immortality of your soul? If not, the colonial New England Puritan minister Cotton Mather would like to tell you some ghost stories…”

So begins today’s story from Ryan Hoselton.

For further reading:
The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather: An Edition of “Triparadisus” edited by Reiner Smolinski (University of Georgia Press, 1995)
The Life and Times of Cotton Mather by Kenneth Silverman (Harper & Row, 1984)

“Pedro Rengifo was a part-Indian, part-Spanish man from the La Paz area of what is today Bolivia, who around 1583 sailed from Lima for Madrid. He had an important message for King Philip the Second…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Adrian Masters.

For further reading:
Adrian Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition -and-Response System,and the Creation of Spanish Imperial Caste Legislation,” Hispanic American Historical Review 98 (2018): 377-406
Felipe E. Ruan, “Andean Activism and the Reformulation of Mestizo Agency and Identity in Early Colonial Peru,” Colonial Latin American Review 21 (2012): 209-237