History Buffs

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Sarah and Averill deliver a much-needed update and revision to our early episode on the founding of the AIDS Project of the Ozarks. 

It is with great sadness and equally great excitement that we release this episode - our reflection on two years of History Buffing. In the fall, the show will be rebranded as Dig: A History Podcast, as a few of our founding members are putting podcasting into the backseat of their lives as they pursue careers and degrees, and Averill, Marissa, Elizabeth, and Sarah embark on a new iteration of what you’ve come to expect from the History Buffs.  Thank you, dear listeners, for journeying with us. Check back this summer for a few remastered episodes, and then tune in and subscribe to Dig in September! As always, you can keep up with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.  We apologize for the sound quality here - we aren’t used to recording with five people at once - and promise that the fall launch of Dig will be more like the superior quality we’ve achieved in recent months.

Join Averill and Katie as they discuss the trek of Central African refugees on a harrowing journey through the jungle. For the last installment of our immigration series we conquer a major 20th-century crisis that is often overlooked:  the flight of refugees from Rwanda and the Congo during the mid-1990s.  This crisis produced more refugees than any event since World War II, and they trekked through some of the thickest jungle on Earth to escape violence and advancing armies.

We are super excited - this is our first listener request! The late 1960s were a tumultuous time in the United States - major political assassinations, riots, protests, and a deeply controversial war all added up to a fractured and bruised society. Much of the action during the time period took place on college campuses - our own University at Buffalo included. Today, Sarah and Averill are talking about the court case at the heart of some of the most intense protests the University has ever seen: The Buffalo Nine.

Averill and Marissa grill Black X frontman Mark Miller from the HMNI Fanzine Podcast and historian of alcohol activism Colin Eager on straight edge, the hardcore music scene, and how they fit into the 1980s drug-panicked, “Just Say No” Reagan era. 

Sarah and Marissa team up with Shots of History to talk about the history of whiskey-making the United States, and the notorious Whiskey Rebellion of 1791.

In 1987, a historian of modern China wrote a book that was way outside of his field - a historiographical work about the classical world, which argued that argued a racist and imperialist Europe had written Egyptian and Phoenician origins out of Greek history — essentially whitewashing the African roots of Western civilization. The book caused a firestorm within the field of Classics, launching a series of rebuttals and re-rebuttals. Today’s episode is about the thesis that Bernal posed in his Black Athena, but it is also a peek behind the curtain of the academic world. It might get a little weird - because our discussion will be about the evidence Bernal used to support his assertion that Egyptian and Levantine civilizations significantly shaped ancient Greek civilization, but we will also dive into the backlash against Bernal’s work, and what that says about our profession, and how even historians are human and thus susceptible to the world in which we live. Join Averill and Sarah to learn more about Black Athena - and how the historical sausage gets made.

Sugar has become ubiquitous in modern-day cuisine: it’s pretty much everywhere and in everything we eat. But how did this White Gold earn its place in consumer culture? Join Averill, Marissa, and Katie as they discuss the history of sugar cultivation and its relationship to empire and consumerism.

Donald Trump, in a September 2016 presidential debate, said, “NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country.” But NAFTA was not addressed in any of his executive orders, and now President Trump’s intentions for NAFTA are unclear. Today Averill and Elizabeth continue our series on US immigration with this episode about the North American Foreign Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Maquiladoras and Mexican immigration in the 20th century. Trump has said little about what improvements he wants, apart from halting the migration of U.S. factories to Mexico. This this conversation is also closely tied to rising nativist sentiments in America about Mexico and Mexicans in general, and cannot be separated from the discussion of wall building, and actions our President has taken to place restrictions on immigration. In our current political climate, this rhetoric and vitriol has had a dramatic impact on the lives of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, which has everything and nothing to do with the actual role of the economy in all of this.  

Marissa and Sarah discuss Georgians’ and Victorians’ love affair with Tuberculosis and the tuberculean aesthetic in fashion and art. In Georgian London, some diseases started to seem fashionable, desirable even. Gambling was popular, elites were using snuff and drinking spirits, powdering their hair, whitening their faces with toxic creams, damaging their bodies with restrictive clothes and hairstyles. Ladies of fashion were perceived to be particularly vulnerable to disease and this made them even more attractive. This is the context where tuberculosis first began shaping beauty standards. The Victorians took this even further. Pre-Raphaelite painters, their models, and the discovery of the tubercle bacillus germ brought new classed and gendered meanings to the tuberculean chic.

There is something fascinating about the history of reproductive rights, contraception, and abortion in every country and ideology that we’ve looked at in our women’s reproductive rights series. This week we’re turning to the impact of Communism on these issues, particularly in China and the Soviet Union. Here we have the complete range of reproductive control extremes - from hyper pro-natalist policies and criminalization of birth control and abortion in both China and the USSR; to the Soviet Union’s provision and regulation of abortion while simultaneously paying for extensive maternal support programming; to China’s one child policy, which included forced abortion and sterilization in an attempt to get control over an overpopulation problem. Averill and Marissa discuss all of these nuances and more in this episode on the impact of Communism on uteruses.

In this continuation of our series on immigration, Dan and Elizabeth focus on the Mexican-American experience within the United States: instances of racism, the importation of Mexican workers, and how Mexican-Americans were intentionally excluded from the welfare state. The Bracero Program began in 1942, and was an agreement between the United States and Mexico, which started the legalization and control of Mexican migrant workers along America’s southern border area. The program lasted until 1964, and it is estimated that in this 22 year period, approximately 4.6 million Mexican nationals came to work in the U.S. as braceros.

Anti-Vivesection in the 19th Century

When we think of immigration we tend to think of people crossing over nation-state borders, from one country to another. These borders seem somehow solid in our collective mind, yet they normally only exist within treaties, maps, and in perceived ideas of community. But in many ways, borders are arbitrary distinctions, attempting to separate one from another but instead creating unique spaces, or borderlands that house a give and take, push and pull, amalgam of culture and people. In this episode, we are going to be talking about how the United States’ southern border formed and how ideas of race and manifest destiny came to define what it meant to be an American or an immigrant.

In the third episode in our series on women’s reproductive rights in America, we finally get to two of the most important turning points in our story: the invention of the hormonal birth control pill, and the Roe v. Wade case in 1973. The mid 20th century saw some critical turning points for women’s reproductive rights, but also created lasting political divides and moral dilemmas. Join Elizabeth and Sarah as they continue the conversation.

Immigration and migration have been pretty hot topics lately. This week a particularly interesting question has been bouncing around just about everywhere: were the people transported during the Atlantic Slave Trade immigrants? This got us thinking about forced migrations. In this episode, join Averill and Sarah as they talk about two particularly powerful examples of forced migration: the Atlantic Slave Trade, and Indian Removal. Also, a little chat at the end about the work we do, both as podcasters and as professional historians.

It should come as no surprise that the American military has bases all over the world in strategically important places. But how did we obtain them, especially those ones that exist in the middle of other sovereign nations? Join Averill, Katie, and Dan as they discuss American base acquisition in this week’s episode of the History Buffs Podcast.   Show Notes and Further Reading Diego Garcia: “Diego Garcia Islanders Displaced in U.K. Failure Hope to Return Home,” NPR, April 16, 2015 Scott Foster and Robert Windrem, “Tsunami Spares U.S. Base in Diego Garcia,” NBC News, January 4, 2005 Joshua L. Harris, “U.S. Military Presence in Diego Garcia: National Interests vs. Human Rights,” ICE Case Studies No. 120, December 2003 David Vine, “The Truth About Diego Garcia,“ The Huffington Post, June 15, 2015 David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, Princeton University Press, 2011 Guantanamo Bay: Copy of checks sent to Cuba “The United States, Cuba, and the Platt Amendment, 1901,” Office of the Historian “Agreement Between the United States and Cuba for the Lease of Lands for Coaling and Naval stations, February 23, 1903” Yale Law School Avalon Project  “The Case for CLosing - and Keeping Open - Guantanamo,” NPR (6 Mar 2016) Jess Bravin, The Terror Courts (Yale University Press, 2013)  Philip Ewing, “Fact Check: Is Obama Handing Guantanamo Bay Back to Cuba?” NPR (Feb 25, 2016)  Alyssa Fetini, “A Brief History of Gitmo,” Time (12 Nov 2008)  Jeannette L. Nolen, “Guantanamo Bay detention camp,” Encyclopedia Britannica (Updated 22 May 2013) Michael J. Strauss, The Leasing of Guantanamo Bay (ABC-CLIO, May 14, 2009)  

Show Notes & Further Reading Anita Grossman, Reforming Sex (Oxford University Press, 1995) Volker Roelcke, Sascha Topp, and Etienne Lepicard, eds., Silence, Scapegoats, Self-Reflection: The Shadow of Nazi Medical Crimes on Medicine and Bioethics (Göttingen: V&r Unipress, 2015). Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in 20th Century Germany (Princeton University Press: Princeton; 2007). Mark Roseman, Devin Pendas, and Richard F. Wetzell, Beyond the Racial State (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, IN; 2008). Christiana A. E. Norgren, Abortion Before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan (Newark: Princeton University Press, 2001). Samuel Coleman, Family Planning in Japanese Society: Traditional Birth Control in a Modern Urban Culture (Princeton University Press, 1992) Takeda Hiroko, The Political Economy of Reproduction in Japan (Routledge, Sep 23, 2004)