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 retirement” so admired and extolled by eighteenth century philosophers, poets, and artists; and presented their domestic arrangement as the rare but mostly acceptable “romantic friendship” written about in novels and poems. The inscription on Sarah Ponsonby’s tomb is no accident. The Ladies of Llangollen were a queer couple who dedicated their lives to one another, and to the home they built and shared in North Wales - and this month we’re lifting up stories of queer and trans folks in history, beginning with these two reclusive (but bizarrely public) Irish women who eloped to Wales together.

Bibliography

Averill Earls, Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-72, Temple University Press, 2025. 

Fiona Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism (Bucknell University Press, 2017)

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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 untreated syphilis in approximately 399 African American men without their

Select Bibliography

Jones, James H. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. (Simon and Schuster, 1993). 

Lederer, Susan. “Experimentation on Human Beings.” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 19, No. 5, Medicine and History (Sep., 2005), pp. 20-22.

Reverby,  Susan Mokotoff. Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy. (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 

Sharma, Alankaar. “Diseased Race, Racialized Disease: The

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Disability Series. Episode #3 of 4. Since the advent of epidemiology (the study of infectious disease, its spread and prevention), humanists and scientists have been able to study mass-disabling events related to epidemic disease, especially prior to widespread vaccination. For example, the WHO has estimated that more than 20 million people who would otherwise be disabled are typically-abled today because of the poliomyelitis vaccine. The data from the pre-vaccine era is poor so it’s difficult to make such a precise claim but it’s still possible to look at historical “mass-disabling events” and to explore the ways that such events impacted society as a whole and disabled people specifically. That’s what we’re doing today.

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Disability Series. Episode #2 of 4. In 1973, Richard Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act, a bill intended to increasing hiring, extend rehabilitation services and increase assistance programs for Americans with disabilities. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, politicians and activists discussed the bill in explicitly civil rights terms, arguing that as the federal government had protected the civil rights of Black Americans and women, it must also protect the rights of disabled people. While there had been other bills focused on rehabilitation and services before, the Rehabilitation Act stood out to disabled Americans for one reason: one sentence in Section 504 of the bill. While other bills had appropriated money for services or called for programs, they didn’t include a provision for enforcement – but Section 504 did exactly that. Disabled people saw an opportunity: Section 504 could radically change life for disabled people in the United States. And when the federal government failed to fully enforce Section 504 in the years after its passage, disabled people took matters into their own hands.

Find show notes and transcripts at: www.digpodcast.org

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Disability Series, Episode #1 of 4. How and when scientists, doctors, and society started conceiving of the physical and emotional components of same-sex desire as a psychiatric condition of the mind? This was neither an ancient belief nor a postmodern (aka, post-1950) one, and it wasn’t an exclusively American phenomenon either. Rather, the classification of same-sex desire as a “disorder” had its roots in the foundations of psychiatry as a profession in the 19th century. Over the last 100+ years, that classification impacted individuals all across the world. You’ve heard of Sigmund Freud, whose work in the 1920s standardized a form of talk therapy that sought to interpret actions, thoughts, and desires through a particular lens of analysis. “Psychoanalysis,” though short-lived as a psychiatric practice, was certainly part of the longer-term framing of queerness and transness as “mental illness.” But Freud is just the tip of the iceberg. Today we’re digging into the history and relationship between psychiatry and sexuality; the scientific theories of sexuality that helped shape modern ideas about the relations between gender, genitals, desire, and identity; and the consequences of the medicalization of sexuality.

Bibliography

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Crime & Punishment Episode #4 of 4.  In the late 1940s and 1950s, alongside the better known “Red Scare” that targeted alleged internal political enemies - American Communists - the US government led a crusade against gay men and women in the military and civil service. During the “Lavender Scare,” thousands of people were fired or forced from their jobs, dishonorably discharged from the military, and denied positions in the US government because of their sexuality. And those policies were enforced for decades - through “liberal” administrations, and the federal decriminalization of same-sex sex in 2003 - with life-ruining, and life-ending consequences for tens of thousands of Americans. And since we’re basically reliving this awful period in history because Republicans believe that a time of queer persecution, women as second class citizens, and segregation and racism is America’s “great” era, we better know the history so we can know how to fight. 

Bibliography

Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 

Julian Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (Duke University Press, 2007). 

Josh Howard, The Lavender Scare, (Alexander Street Films).

John Howard, Men Like That: Southern Queer History, (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

David K. Johnson, “The Lavender Scare: Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Civil Service,” PhD Diss, (Northwestern University, 2000).

E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2008)

Elizabeth L. Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (Routledge, 1993).

Anna Lvovsky, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

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Crime and Punishment Series. Episode #3 of 4. In the summer of 1943 the city of Los Angeles erupted into what has become known as the Zoot Suit Riots, where roving bands of white servicemen beat and stripped Mexican American youth of their distinctive zoot suits. The riots took place amidst the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial- a case characterized by the press as a crackdown on Mexican American juvenile “delinquency.” In today’s episode, part of our Crime and Punishment series, we’re exploring the tender box that was Los Angeles during World War II. 

Find transcripts and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org

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Crime & Punishment, Episode #2 of 4. In 1862, as the Civil War raged across the fields of the south, another American war was coming to an end: the Dakota War, a conflict between the Dakota people and American settlers in Minnesota. Though the United States military won a decisive and punishing victory over the Dakota, they weren’t satisfied: Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley wanted the Dakota warriors left alive at the end of the war put on trial in a military tribunal. The trials were a farce of justice, with sometimes over 40 Dakota men convicted every day between September and November, 1862. At the conclusion of the trials, 392 Dakota men were found guilty and sentenced to death. President Abraham Lincoln reviewed each of the convictions and ultimately commuted the sentences of 264 of the men - and upheld the death sentences of 38. This is the history of the largest mass hanging in United States history, the execution of the Dakota warriors in Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862. For transcript, bibliography, and show notes, visit digpodcast.org

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FIXED! Crime and Punishment Series. Episode #1 of 4. In 1850, a bright-eyed eight-year-old girl walked across London Bridge in her carefully maintained school uniform. Her teachers called her promising; her siblings found her delightful. No one could have predicted that decades later, she would die violently in Mitre Square, known to history only as one of Jack the Ripper's victims. But this isn't another story about Victorian London's most notorious killer. Instead, we're exploring the lives of five women – Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane – before they became infamous crime statistics. Their stories reveal a London where respectability and ruin balanced on a knife's edge, where one misfortune could send a family spiraling into poverty. Join us as we peel back the sensational headlines to discover the real women of Victorian London's East End, their dreams, their struggles, and the system that failed them. This isn't a story about how these women died – it's a story about how they lived. This episode is based on Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five which you can buy at your local bookstore today!

Find transcripts and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org

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Spiritualism's Place. Episode #4 of 4. In honor of our new book, Spiritualism's Place, we're re-releasing one of our favorite episodes about Lily Dale. Today we're revisiting our exploration of the close association of Spiritualism and the women’s rights movement of the nineteenth century.

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