Dig: A History Podcast

Midterms #2 of 4. Whether it’s based on a kernel of truth or pure fiction, moral panics are incredibly powerful. They strengthen calls for increased policing and harsher sentences, fuel political campaigns that harness baseless fears to motivate voters; they result in increased prejudice and stigmatization. And just like clockwork, we get one every couple of years - often, right around the time of the midterm elections. Take, for example, “migrant caravans,” or large groups of migrants traveling together across Central America in hopes of making it to the United States. While groups of migrants often band together for safety, they only seem to become the object of media hysteria in election years - such as in the fall of 2018 and 2020, the summer of 2022, and (wouldn’t you know it??) the fall of 2026, just weeks before the midterm elections. Today, we’re going to explore the concept of the moral panic and consider just why they are so powerful in shaping public behavior.

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Midterms Series. Episode #1 of 4. It’s the spring of 1436 in Sandwich, a little port town on the Kent coast. The town council orders every household to go down to the beach, collect rocks, and pile them up next to their chimneys, presumably to drop on the heads of any Frenchmen who come strolling down the high street. But there was no French army marching on Sandwich. The crown had been flooding the kingdom with writs warning of “perpetuelle reproche, vilonye and shame” if Calais were lost. That’s not intelligence. That’s hype. It’s propaganda! Or is it? Join us as we dig into six centuries of English propaganda.

Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org

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Supreme Court Decisions That SUCKED Episode #4 of 4. Plessy v. Ferguson, was decided in May of 1896, by a vote of seven to one. It held that the State of Louisiana could lawfully require railroads to provide what the statute called "equal but separate accommodations” for white and Black people, and that a passenger who refused to sit in the car assigned to their race could be prosecuted as a criminal. Plessy is the decision most Americans associate with the phrase "separate but equal," and it is the subject of this episode in our series on Supreme Court Cases that Sucked.

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Supreme Court Cases Series. Episode #3 of 4. In 1830, afraid that white missionaries were aiding the Cherokee in their effort to resist giving up their lands, the Georgia state government made it illegal for white people to live within Cherokee Nation  territory without a license from the government.  Samuel Austin Worcester - raised in Vermont and trained as a Congregationalist minister - had lived for years with the Cherokee and became close with the Cherokee leadership. In March 1831, the Georgia Guard arrested Worcester and fellow missionaries under the new residency law. Most of the arrested missionaries agreed to leave the state in exchange for having their charges dropped - but not Samuel Worcester. With the Cherokee leadership, Worcester instead decided to use the charges against him as an opportunity to appeal to the United States Supreme Court. The resulting case, Worcester v. Georgia, was a critical win for the Cherokee Nation, and to this day, remains one of the most important cases in establishing our modern understanding of tribal sovereignty. And yet, despite the legal win, the actual aftermath of the case was the theft of Cherokee land and the forcible removal of the Cherokee from Georgia, resulting in the death of thousands of people.

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Supreme Court Decisions That Sucked Episode #2 of 4. In 1942, the U.S. government rounded up citizens and forced them into concentration camps. Between the two countries, over 140,000 people were removed from their home and interned without legal recourse. In many cases, their captors--the U.S. military--sold off their houses, businesses, and belongings for a fraction of their worth, or their former neighbors simply took what they wanted. Many, many scholars have demonstrated that the forced internment of Japanese American internment camps was racially motivated. That wasn’t a secret. Lawyers and activists were writing about the injustices of Japanese internment at the time it was happening. And that racism was made precedent in 1944, when the US Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Fred Korematsu, a birthright American citizen, who tried to remain in his home in the months after General John L. De Witt declared that people of Japanese descent were to be shipped to a holding center. In today’s episode, the USSC decision that sucked is Korematsu vs. United States 323 U.S. 214.

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Part 2! SCOTUS Series. Episode #2 of 5. In August 1895, a ship docks in San Francisco carrying a cook named Wong Kim Ark — born in that very city, armed with an airtight certificate proving it. The customs collector refuses to let him off anyway. What follows is a four-month standoff in the harbor, a Supreme Court case that will define what "American" means, and a legal argument that never really died. This episode traces Wong Kim Ark's fight for the citizenship he was already owed — from Chinese Exclusion to Angel Island interrogations to the Supreme Court's 2026 ruling that cited his case by name. Some questions, it turns out, don't stay settled.

Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org

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Supreme Court Cases Series. Episode # 1 of 5. This is Part 1 of a 2-part episode! In August 1895, a ship docks in San Francisco carrying a cook named Wong Kim Ark — born in that very city, armed with an airtight certificate proving it. The customs collector refuses to let him off anyway. What follows is a four-month standoff in the harbor, a Supreme Court case that will define what "American" means, and a legal argument that never really died. This episode traces Wong Kim Ark's fight for the citizenship he was already owed — from Chinese Exclusion to Angel Island interrogations to the Supreme Court's 2026 ruling that cited his case by name. Some questions, it turns out, don't stay settled.

Find show notes and transcripts at www.digpodcast.org

Note: The version of this episode originally released contains an error. Marissa erroneously stated that Charles Sumner eventually became a Supreme Court Justice. The error has been edited out.

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Women's History, Episode #4 of 4. In the spring of 1966, inside a rented office space in New York City that smelled like cigarette smoke and mimeograph ink, a cadre of people worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), pronounced “snick.” SNCC was one of many organizations, such as CORE, the SCLC, the NAACP, and others, working for the Civil Right Movement in the South. It had been a harrowing few years. 1964’s Freedom Summer had been successful in rallying more Americans to support Civil Rights but also sparked extreme backlash that resulted in volunteers being beaten, harassed, and even killed.

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Women Series. Episode #3 of 4. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court released one of its most important and revolutionary rulings: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, usually better known as Brown v. Board. The ruling overturned the infamous ruling in Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that established the ‘separate but equal’ precedent that made Jim Crow discrimination legal. The Brown ruling required that the federal government integrate public schools, bringing white and Black children together to receive equal education. While this story is often told as one part of a progressive and inspiring story about the Civil Rights Movement, a movement for rights that we now sort of all agree was good. But in reality, Brown v Board and the wider movement were met with extreme resistance from white supremacists. While white male politicians like George Wallace got the most attention, they were riding a wave of racism and resistance created and kept alive by white women. Today, for this episode of our latest women’s history series, we’re talking about the white women who fought back against the Civil Rights Movement.

Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org

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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)

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