Dig: A History Podcast

5 Cs of History: Complexity, #2 of 4. Josephine Baker’s life story - both what we know and what we don’t/can’t know - is fascinating. For our purposes today, her life story is a perfect case study for complexity in historical thinking. Not only was she an icon of contradictions, but the way she lived and interacted with the world has allowed historians and feminist scholars to really tease out the complexity of her lifetime. Josephine Baker lived from 1906 until 1975. She was both a Civil Rights activist and a performer who used blackface and racialized tropes to entertain. She was both a woman who had intimate (probably sexual) relationships with other women, and exiled an adopted son when he came out to her as gay. She was both a deeply private woman and opened her home to the public like an amusement park. And for most of her life she lived in France, which was both deeply enamored with Black American culture and music and deeply racist. As Josephine Baker shows us, historical moments, like life stories, are rarely simple.

Bibliography

Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart, (Random House New York, 1993). 

Peggy Caravantes, The Many Faces of Josephine Baker: Dancer, Singer, Activist, Spy (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015) 151.

Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny, and Franz Kerschbaumer, Eurojazzland (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 2012)

Ed. Mae G. Henderson and Charlene B. Register, The Josephine Baker Critical Reader

FBI Records: The Vault — Josephine Baker

Patrick O’Connor. “Josephine Baker.” American National Biography Online

Mary McAuliffe, When Paris Sizzled: The 1920s paris of hemingway, chanel, cocteau, cole porter, josephine baker, and their friends (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 2016)

Alan Schroeder and Heather Lehr Wagner, Josephine Baker: Entertainer (New York: Chelsea House, 2006)

Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time, (DoubleDay, 1989). 

Jennifer Sweeney-Risko, “Fashionable ‘Formation’: Reclaiming the Sartorial Politics of Josephine Baker,” Australian Feminist Studies 2018, VOL. 33, NO. 98, 498–514

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Complexity Series. Five Cs of History. Episode #1 of 4. The dominant narrative- and the story that many of you expect to hear today- is that fatness used to be less stigmatized; that plump women were beautiful and plump men regarded as wealthy and important but that somewhere along the way, thinness became associated with beauty and fatness became medicalized as obesity and stigmatized as disgusting, leading to today’s skinny-loving, fat-phobic culture. There are, of course, elements of truth to this story but… it’s also way more COMPLEX than this. This week for our Complexity series, we’re covering the complex history of fatness in the premodern West.

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

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5 Cs of History: Change Over Time, Episode #4 of 4. Written and spoken language are separate things. Languages that are connected to a written script change more slowly and last longer than those that don’t. Writing acts as an anchor to humans’ ever-changing speech sounds. But these two aspects of language (speech and writing) did not always go hand in hand. Today we dive into the history of the written word.

Bibliography

Fischer, Steven R. A History of Writing New ed. London: Reaktion Books. 2021.

Gabrial, Brian. “History of Writing Technologies,” in Bazerman Charles. 2008. Handbook of Research on Writing : History Society School Individual Text. New York: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Powell Barry B. Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 2012.

Stanlaw, James. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Hoboken NJ: Wiley Blackwell. 2021.

Stroud, Kevin. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

“The Evolution of Writing.” Published in James Wright, ed., INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Elsevier, 2014 https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing/

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Change over Time Series. The Five Cs of History. Episode #3 of 4. The Rights Revolution movements of the twentieth century were deeply connected to one another, with activists known for their work in one movement having cut their teeth in the others. These movements were also profoundly influenced and connected to struggles of the past, with older movements having either been where activists began their activism or were mentored by senior members in the struggle. Additionally, many historians and sociologists are tweaking the narrative of “feminisms” by displaying how the feminist movement has been a continual movement and how many different feminisms have co-existed throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Feminism did not “go silent” at times but has always been present in different ways.

Find show notes and transcripts at www.digpodcast.org

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5 Cs of History. Change over Time. Episode #2 of 4. In recent years, America’s two party system has seemed more intractable than ever: Democrats vs. Republicans. Now, we have a clear idea of each party’s location on the political map: Democrats are liberal, Republicans conservative; Democrats are left-leaning, Republicans right-leaning. Right now, those truths seems so deeply entrenched that they seem almost natural - it’s always been this way and always will be. But if historians know anything it’s this: things change. In this episode, we’re thinking about change over time by looking at the long history of America’s political parties.

Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org

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Five Cs of History. Change Over Time #1 of 4. Roger Casement has been a subject of fascination - and controversy - for over a century. During his lifetime, he was an internationally-recognized champion for human rights, and was instrumental in exposing the horrors surrounding the rubber industry in the Belgian Congo and Peruvian Putumayo. Significantly, he spent his life striving to do more than just expose the injustices of the Congo and Putumayo - he built a network of activists and leaders willing to intercede, push for reform, and demand change for the indigenous peoples who suffered under European occupation. After years working within the British Empire, he was radicalized in his Irish nationalist beliefs, and spent the last two years of his life working to fight for Ireland’s independence from Britain. After his execution, some held on to the memory of him as a humanitarian hero, others claimed he was another martyr of the Irish nationalist cause, and still others distanced themselves from his evident homosexuality. The question of his sexuality determined whether or not he could be counted among the ‘real’ Irish heroes.

Find the transcript and show notes at www.digpodcast.org

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5 Cs of History. Causality Series #4 of 4. Despite the fact that eighty percent of Americans believe the U.S. Constitution prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, it does not. That is because the Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified. Despite being introduced in 1923, the ERA was not passed by Congress until 1972. However, the amendment failed to be ratified by the required number of states before the deadline set by Congress, and therefore did not become part of the Constitution. Since then, efforts to pass the ERA have continued but legal and political obstacles remain, and the ERA has yet to be officially added to the U.S. Constitution. We are in the process of exploring the 5 C’s of history on the podcast this year and in this series we are exploring causality, meaning how historians evaluate multiple factors that shape past events. Today we will look at the Equal Rights Amendment and the reasons that --so far-- it has not become law.

Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org

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5 C's of History: Causality, #3 of 4. In 2017, White House chief of staff John Kelly, then serving Donald Trump, was interviewed by Fox New’s Laura Ingraham, who asked about Kelly’s thoughts on a church in Virginia that had recently taken down a statue to Robert E. Lee. Kelly responded that Robert E. Lee had been a “honorable man” who “gave up his country to fight for his state,” and claimed that the war had been caused by a “lack of ability to compromise.” Today, when asked the reason for the Civil War, most of us would immediately- and correctly -  say slavery. And nearly all historians would support that. But still, the question nags. What about slavery caused a violent, protracted civil war? What event or issue or Supreme Court case or compromise was the straw that broke the camel’s back? Or was it the competing cultures of North and South that did it, both created and exacerbated by the existence of Black chattel slavery? Today, as we continue to explore the concept of causality as a historical thinking skill, we’re talking about the causes of the American Civil War.

Select Bibliography

Astor, Aaron, Judith Giesberg, Kellie Carter Jackson, Martha S. Jones, Brian Matthew Jordan, James Oakes, Jason Phillips, Angela M. Riotto, Anne Sarah Rubin, Manisha Sinha. “Forum on Eric Foner’s “The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions.” Civil War History 69 (2023): 60-86. 

Blight, David. Was the Civil War Inevitable? The New York Times Magazine. December 21, 2022. 

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5 Cs of History: Causality Series. Episode #2 of 4. There was a sense, among very learned folks, that Rome had been something great that had been lost. In their grief, Renaissance scholars pored over classical manuscripts, attempting to build a picture of Rome’s greatness and, perhaps, find a reason for its disintegration. Rome’s fall was bemoaned, even resented by some but the mechanics of its demise were still a bit of a mystery. Fifth century Roman manuscripts were few and far between. Renaissance scholars were forced to piece together scraps of information and tie them together with incredible amounts of conjecture. That is, until 1665 when a French legal scholar named Jacques Godefroy used a very old document in very new ways and revolutionized what we knew about the Roman Empire’s fifth-century demise. Godefroy’s work launched what is perhaps the most contentious academic debate in the Western Hemisphere. Yes, listeners, for this week’s episode on causation, we are tackling the Fall of Rome.

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

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The 5 C's of History: Causality Series, #1 of 4. According to the website of Britain’s National Army Museum, the first Opium War started when, “In May 1839, Chinese officials demanded that Charles Elliot, the British Chief Superintendent of Trade in China, hand over their stocks of opium at Canton for destruction. This outraged the British, and was the incident that sparked conflict.” In popular culture, and especially among European and American historians, the “Opium Wars” have long been framed as a conflict between the powerful/domineering British and the weak/insular Chinese, in which the British exploited China by getting the Chinese people addicted to opium and then went to war when the Chinese government finally tried to stop them, and the British used their military might to then extract punishing and unequal trade relationships with the Chinese for the next 100 years. Certainly elements of this framework, of this cause and effect, are true. There was a confrontation in May of 1839, and the Nanking Treaty absolutely created an exploitative and unequal trade relationship between the British and Chinese. And yet, unsurprisingly, this is far from the whole story - and far from the only way historians have interpreted the “Opium Wars”. Today we’re going to discuss the causes of the first Opium War, and the different - sometimes problematic - ways historians have framed the 1839-42 Anglo-Sino conflict. 

Select Bibliography

Transcribed Qianlong emperor’s letter to King George III - in Chinese, and in English

Song-Chuan Chen, Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Paul French, Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao (Hong Kong University Press, 2009). 

Henrietta Harrison, “The Qianlong Emperor’s Letter to George III and the Early-Twentieth-Century Origins of IDeas about Traditional China’s Foreign Relations,” American Historical Association (2017). 

Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War And The End Of China's Last Golden Age (Penguin, 2019)

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