Episode 4.8. Warm Bodies. The Life and Times of a Renaissance Anatomist
Gabrielle Falloppia is credited with inventing the condom. He didn’t, but he did discover the fallopian tubes, all while battling academic r...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & Podcasts
Society & Culture
Dirty Sexy History
Going beyond the sanitized and idealized to the dirty reality of human history with Jessica Cale. There's more to history than what you learned in high school, and we're going to skip to the...
Episodes
20 of 83 episodes
Episode 4.7. Love and War: The Secret Lives of Ancient Women
Ancient history has traditionally been dominated by the lives of great men, while ancient women are confined to the margins or omitted altog...
Episode 4.6. Tea in Colonial America
Burned, hanged, and symbolically “executed,” tea was a controversial commodity in 1770s America. This week we talk to Dr James Fichter about...
Episode 4.5. The Undesirables: How Britain Locked Away a Generation
Under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, Britain imprisoned 50,000 people as “moral imbeciles.” Many of them were young women—working class, po...
Episode 4.4. Abortion in Early Modern Italy
Just this week, all but two Senate Republicans voted against the Right to Contraception Act. At the same time, the GOP is calling for a nati...
Episode 4.3. The History of Nostalgia
Nostalgia can be both good and bad—at its best, it manifests in historical reenactment, vintage fashion, and mid-century modern furniture. A...
Episode 4.2. Josephine McCarty: Abortionist, Spy, Mother of the Year?
During Josephine McCarty’s trial for murder, she was portrayed as an ordinary woman—a mother of six, she was only looking out for her childr...
Episode 4.1. High Priestess and Empress: Florence Farr and Ellen Terry
This week we welcome back to the show Susan Wands, author of the Arcana Oracle Series. We’re looking at the extraordinary lives of Florence...
Episode 3.21. Dancing With Myself: The History and Science of Masturbation
Following on from Episode 3.19 on sex toys with Hallie Lieberman, this week we talk to clinical psychologist Dr Eric Sprankle about the hist...
Episode 3.20. “Fallen Women” in Victorian Poetry
Literary nerds rejoice! This week, we have another history/literature episode, looking at sex work in Victorian poetry with Emily Calleja. W...
Episode 3.19. Adult Toys
Sex toys have existed for 28,000 years, so why is there still such a stigma around them? This week we’re talking about the history of sex to...
Episode 3.18. Mythbusting Corsets
You’ve heard it all before—corsets are dangerous, uncomfortable, a tool of the patriarchy meant to oppress women! But are they? Were they ev...
Episode 3.17. Men’s Sexual Health in Early Modern England
In seventeenth-century England, seeing a doctor was a big deal. Before the NHS, people paid doctors, quacks, and even astrological medical p...
Episode 3.16. Renaissance Beauty: Cosmetics, Poison, and Plastic Surgery
For women in Renaissance Italy, beauty was everything: it could be a vocation, a way to get ahead, entertainment, or even a weapon. Women of...
Episode 3.15. The Oneida Community: Progressive Utopia or Polyamorous Cult?
Between 1848 and 1879, the Oneida Community tried to build heaven in Upstate New York through the principles of communism, free love, and co...
Episode 3.14. Fairies, Entities, Ghosts, and Gods: Rebel Folklore with Icy Sedgwick
What can folklore teach us about history? More than you’d think! This week, Jess talks to Icy Sedgwick about fairies, ghosts, gods, psychopo...
Episode 3.13. Black Sam Bellamy and the Golden Age of Piracy
He might not be the most famous pirate, but Black Sam Bellamy may have been the most successful: when his ship wrecked in 1717, it took Sam...
Episode 3.12. Big Cult-Leader Energy. The Legacy of Madame Blavatsky
Madame Blavatsky is no longer a household name, but her ideas changed the course of history. A central figure in Victorian Spiritualism, she...
Episode 3.11. Fight Like Hell: Women and the American Labor Movement
Strikes have been in the news more and more lately, but what is a Labor Union and why should we care? Unions have gotten us many of the righ...
Episode 3.10. Snuff, Smelling Salts, and Sulfur: Scent in 18th Century Fiction
What did the 18th Century smell like? You probably think of horses and chamber pots, but do you think of tobacco? How about sulfur? This wee...