Dig: A History Podcast

By Recorded History Podcast NetworkSociety & Culture History

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Dig: A History Podcast episodes

June 15 Lesbian Volunteerism in the AIDS Epidemic: A Story We Almost Lost
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

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1 hr 8 min
June 01 The Rise of the American Right During the Cold War: Anti-Communism, Suburban Women, and a Grassroots Revolution
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.

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49 min
May 18 Project MK Ultra: The CIA's Harmful, Pointless Quest for Mind Control
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

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1 hr 21 min
May 04 The KGB’s Queer Honeypots and the Cold War
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.

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51 min
April 19 American Idealist in Stalin's City of Steel: A Pre-History of the Cold War
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.

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1 hr 2 min
April 17 Love Canal, or How Toxic Capitalism Poisoned a Neighborhood and How "Housewives" Fought Back
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.

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1 hr 34 min
April 06 Rachel Carson and a Spring Without Nature: Science, Love, and Politics
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.

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41 min
March 09 Gwich’in, Food Sovereignty, and Environmental Justice in the Arctic Coastal Plain
Environmental History, #2 of 4. Many of the conservationists who’ve defended the Arctic heralded it as the “last great wilderness,” an ecosystem and landscape unmarred by corporate greed and violence, a place that needs to be preserved because of its “pristine” and “untouched” beauty. While well-intentioned, this narrative is, of course, problematic, because the absence of white settler colonial development is not the same thing as “pristine” or “untouched.” Entire communities of people call the arctic home. The Gwich’in and Inuit nations live on and have stewarded the northernmost reaches of this continent for some 24,000 years. At every imperialist and capitalist effort to destroy those lands with their greed, the Gwich’in and (some) Inuit have shown up to protest, testify, and speak out against those violences.

Bibliography
“Legal Action Challenges Arctic Refuge Drilling Plan,” Center for Biological Diversity, (15 Jan 2026)
H.R.1 - An act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to titles II and V of the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2018. Congress.gov. (2017)
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Status of Oil and Gas Program. Congress.gov. (Updated 4 Feb 2026)
Lenny Kohm and the Last Great Wilderness Tour (1995) Part 4
The Wilderness Act (1964)
Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (1980)
“The Inuit and Northern Experience,” Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 2 (2015)
Thomas Berger, “Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland,” THE REPORT OF THE MACKENZIE VALLEY PIPELINE INQUIRY: VOLUME ONE
Finis Dunaway, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (UNC Press, 2021)
Donella Meadows, “National Energy Policy,” The Donella Meadows Project (Sep 1991)
Elizabeth Manning, “Trump Administration Opens the Entire Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Oil and Gas Leasing,” (23 Oct 2025)
Brian Palmer and Anna Greenfield, “The Long, Long Battle for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” Natural Resources Defense Council (Oct 24, 2025)
Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous Climate Change Studies : Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” English Language Notes, Volume 55, Number 1-2, Spring/Fall 2017, pp. 153-162

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58 min
February 25 Bonus: Conversation with Amplified Podcast
Bonus! Marissa and Averill chat with Stacey and Hannah of the Amplify Podcast Network about podcasting and teaching, the realities of funding and institutional recognition, and what it means to do feminist history that "matters" in a shifting political landscape.

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39 min
February 09 Save it for the Rag-and-Bone Man: The Premodern History of Recycling, Salvage, and Reuse
Environmental Series. Episode #1 of 4.
In 1851, a journalist named Henry Mayhew set out to document the lives of London's working poor. What he found was astonishing. In the richest city in the world, thousands of people made their living by picking through other people's trash. There were the bone-grubbers, who scavenged bones from gutters to sell to soap manufacturers. There were the mudlarks, mostly children, who waded through the filthy banks of the Thames searching for coal, rope, and bits of metal. And then there were the pure-finders. What’s “pure” you ask? Well, "pure" was a Victorian euphemism for dog excrement. Pure-finders, mostly elderly women, spent their days scouring the streets of London for dog droppings, which they then sold by the pailful to tanneries in Bermondsey. The tanners used it to purify leather. Hence the name. We tend to think of recycling as a modern invention, something that started with the environmental movement of the 1970s. Blue bins, sorting instructions, that kind of thing. But as brilliant historians have uncovered, the story of how humans have dealt with their discarded materials stretches back millennia. For most of human history, the concept of "throwing something away" barely existed. To begin our series on environmental history, we're tackling the premodern history of recycling. Or as pre-WWII people would have called it: reclamation, salvage, scrapping, repair, and reuse. We'll meet rag-and-bone men and dustmen, shoddy masters and mudlarks. We'll discover how rags became paper, how old wool became new cloth, and how virtually nothing in the premodern world was ever truly waste.
Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org

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50 min