How would you expect the Spanish Inquisition to treat a confessed witch? Does the suggestion conjure visions of fire, torture, and lots of murdered women? You aren’t alone – but this is a history we definitely need to unpack. Transcript for: Suffer a Witch to Live? Religious Conflict and Witchcraft Read more
Whispers and Wives’ Tales: A History of Women & Gossip in Premodern Society Written by Marissa Rhodes, PhD Recorded by Marissa Rhodes, PhD and Averill Earls, PhD Marissa: On September 9, 1838, a humble woman named Mary Grout descended the stairs outside of her cramped apartment on Rich-street in the Read more
The Salem witch trials lasted from late February 1692 to May 1693 in eastern Massachusetts Bay Province. This event resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of at least 155 individuals. Of these people, thirty were found guilty, with nineteen meeting their end by hanging. One man suffered a gruesome death Read more
Swear words shock and offend. They also have a physiological impact on us: we blush, our heart races, and our brain is stimulated. The words that have this power vary over time and space. The history of swear words really drives home the idea that the past is a foreign Read more
Anyone who’s read or seen Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible likely remembers Tituba, the enslaved woman who sets off the 1692 witch panic in Salem, Massachusetts. In literature and history, she’s been depicted as both a menacing Barbadian voodoo queen and a Black feminist touchstone. Who was the real Tituba? Read more
They stoked rebellion in enslaved Africans in Suriname, they possessed an unhealthy obsession with blood, gore, and the genitals of Jesus Christ, they allowed their women to preach (against the Pauline prescriptions) and they indulged in all kinds of wicked behavior. Worst of all, to their many enemies, people liked Read more
By the 19th Century, the European public had been engaging in scientific debate for decades, gathering exotic curiosities, and energetically pursuing the secrets of life. At the same time, they enslaved millions of Africans, profited from the exploitation of their labor, along with that of American Indians and Chinese coolies, Read more
This Halloween, take a minute to notice amputated limbs littering haunted houses, scary stories about reanimated corpses that you tell by the fire while you’re camping, all that rubbernecking on the thruway when there’s a horrific accident, the endless tv shows, podcasts, and books dedicated to grisly murders… or even Read more
Underwear, the unseen garments which sit in close proximity to genitals, skin, and all sorts of unmentionable orifices, are the most poorly-documented garments in history yet they shaped bodies, minds, and societies in complex and interesting ways. Sometimes we do really tight, analytical episodes. This is not one of those Read more
The doctrine of coverture deprived married women of legal status, merging her legal personhood with her husband’s. Today we’ll get into the complex ways that the doctrine of coverture shaped the lives of married women in the British Isles from the 11th to the 19th centuries. Listen, download, watch on Read more