Dig: A History Podcast

Midterms Series. Episode #1 of 4. It’s the spring of 1436 in Sandwich, a little port town on the Kent coast. The town council orders every household to go down to the beach, collect rocks, and pile them up next to their chimneys, presumably to drop on the heads of any Frenchmen who come strolling down the high street. But there was no French army marching on Sandwich. The crown had been flooding the kingdom with writs warning of “perpetuelle reproche, vilonye and shame” if Calais were lost. That’s not intelligence. That’s hype. It’s propaganda! Or is it? Join us as we dig into six centuries of English propaganda.

Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org
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Supreme Court Decisions That SUCKED Episode #4 of 4. Plessy v. Ferguson, was decided in May of 1896, by a vote of seven to one. It held that the State of Louisiana could lawfully require railroads to provide what the statute called "equal but separate accommodations” for white and Black people, and that a passenger who refused to sit in the car assigned to their race could be prosecuted as a criminal. Plessy is the decision most Americans associate with the phrase "separate but equal," and it is the subject of this episode in our series on Supreme Court Cases that Sucked.
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Supreme Court Cases Series. Episode #3 of 4. In 1830, afraid that white missionaries were aiding the Cherokee in their effort to resist giving up their lands, the Georgia state government made it illegal for white people to live within Cherokee Nation territory without a license from the government. Samuel Austin Worcester - raised in Vermont and trained as a Congregationalist minister - had lived for years with the Cherokee and became close with the Cherokee leadership. In March 1831, the Georgia Guard arrested Worcester and fellow missionaries under the new residency law. Most of the arrested missionaries agreed to leave the state in exchange for having their charges dropped - but not Samuel Worcester. With the Cherokee leadership, Worcester instead decided to use the charges against him as an opportunity to appeal to the United States Supreme Court. The resulting case, Worcester v. Georgia, was a critical win for the Cherokee Nation, and to this day, remains one of the most important cases in establishing our modern understanding of tribal sovereignty. And yet, despite the legal win, the actual aftermath of the case was the theft of Cherokee land and the forcible removal of the Cherokee from Georgia, resulting in the death of thousands of people.

Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org
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Supreme Court Decisions That Sucked Episode #2 of 4. In 1942, the U.S. government rounded up citizens and forced them into concentration camps. Between the two countries, over 140,000 people were removed from their home and interned without legal recourse. In many cases, their captors--the U.S. military--sold off their houses, businesses, and belongings for a fraction of their worth, or their former neighbors simply took what they wanted. Many, many scholars have demonstrated that the forced internment of Japanese American internment camps was racially motivated. That wasn’t a secret. Lawyers and activists were writing about the injustices of Japanese internment at the time it was happening. And that racism was made precedent in 1944, when the US Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Fred Korematsu, a birthright American citizen, who tried to remain in his home in the months after General John L. De Witt declared that people of Japanese descent were to be shipped to a holding center. In today’s episode, the USSC decision that sucked is Korematsu vs. United States 323 U.S. 214.
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Part 2! SCOTUS Series. Episode #2 of 5. In August 1895, a ship docks in San Francisco carrying a cook named Wong Kim Ark — born in that very city, armed with an airtight certificate proving it. The customs collector refuses to let him off anyway. What follows is a four-month standoff in the harbor, a Supreme Court case that will define what "American" means, and a legal argument that never really died. This episode traces Wong Kim Ark's fight for the citizenship he was already owed — from Chinese Exclusion to Angel Island interrogations to the Supreme Court's 2026 ruling that cited his case by name. Some questions, it turns out, don't stay settled.

Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org
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