Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor is a historian whose new book Under the Hammer is the first to document how auctions in early America, for everything from sacks of sugar to enslaved people and Indigenous land, shaped the way we buy and sell everything today.

On this week's episode of Minds Over Matters, Hartigan-O’Connor talks about how auctions came to define how we buy and sell goods. She explains how auctions were as much a social as an economic activity, where people could buy and be seen buying goods. The echoes of this American adoption of auctions continue to resonate today.

Read more about her work:

• UC Davis: How Auctions Shaped Buying, Value and What Can Be Owned in Early America

Giovanni Peri is an award-winning global economist and one of the world’s leading experts on migration. He is the Founding Director of the Global Migration Center, an interdisciplinary research center focusing on migrations and migration policies, and has shared his findings on such notable outlets as CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and the Economist Magazine.  

On this week's Minds over Matters episode, Peri talks about the impacts aggressive deportations have historically had on the U.S. economy as well as the impact of immigrant workers on jobs and wages.

Read more about his work:

• New York Times: Why Trump Allies Say Immigration Hurts American Workers
• Time Magazine: How Trump’s H-1B Reform Could Harm American Tech Innovation
• UC Davis: Deportations Meet the Demographic Cliff
  

In the debut episode of Minds Over Matters, evolutionary anthropologist Dr. Manvir Singh joins host Ed Kiggins for a wide-ranging conversation about a phenomenon that continuously pops up across human cultures: shamanism. Why is this the case? Why does shamanism repeatedly develop across societies? Singh views shamanism as a potent mind technology, one that helps us deal with the uncertainty of everyday life and, more deeply, the uncertainty of existence. In this conversation, Singh guides Ed through the history of shamanism, its current iterations in modern-day foraging societies, and its echoes and analogs in modern Western society. Is shamanism a force for good? And just how relevant is it in your life today? The answers may surprise you.

Bio: Dr. Manvir Singh is an evolutionary anthropologist and writer studying the origins of human behavior and societies. Seeking to make the “strange familiar and the familiar strange,” his research focuses on the cognitive foundations and cross-cultural patterns of music, storytelling, justice, and religion. A contributing writer to The New Yorker, Singh recently published his first book Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, which explores the origin and persistence of shamanism through human time and cultures, from Ice Age hunters to modern-day foraging societies and the offices of CEOs and hedge fund managers.

Publications:

• Shamanism: The Timeless Religion (new book)
• Manvir Singh’s archive with The New Yorker
• Full list of academic publications available at Google Scholar