Born in the USA: A History of Birth [rebroadcast]
It’s BackStory’s birthday! To celebrate our first year as a weekly show, the American History Guys are going back to where it all begins: birth. From midwives to maternity wards, ideas of sin, and of citizenship, this episode explores what it means to be “Born in the USA.”
Rinse and Repeat: Cleanliness in America
Cleanliness is next to godliness, we say, and Americans have long associated good hygiene with moral and spiritual purity. But what does it mean to be “clean” in America?
Civil War 150: Empty Sleeves and Broken Hearts
In this interview Ed interviews Megan Kate Nelson about the proliferation of so-called “empty sleeve narratives” in poems, stories, songs, and artworks that glorified amputee veterans returning home after the Civil War.
Contagion: Responding to Infectious Disease
In this hour of BackStory we trace the trajectory of that change and examine the shifting role of the state when it comes to coping with epidemics. Where do we draw the line between promoting the public good and protecting individual rights? How did people understand the causes and experience of disease in their own time?
Born in the USA
To mark the rebirth of BackStory as a weekly program, the History Guys set out to explore the earliest stages of life in America. They begin with a few of the basic assumptions we have about birth in America today, and spend the hour exploring how those assumptions came into being.
The Health of the Nation
The following audio clip is excerpted from the BackStory episode “Body Politics: A History of Health Care.” You can listen to the entire episode here. Political scientist Jacob Hacker, author of the “public plan,” uses history to explain how we wound up with a system so different from the European model, and why lobbyists hold [...]
Health Care in the New World
The following audio clip is excerpted from the BackStory episode “Body Politics: A History of Health Care.” You can listen to the entire episode here. Reporter Catherine Moore visits Virginia’s Mt. Malado, the first hospital in the New World, and finds out why the “public plan” in the Virginia colony may have had its drawbacks. [...]
Heathen Health
The following audio clip is excerpted from the BackStory episode “Body Politics: A History of Health Care.” You can listen to the entire episode here. The Memory Palace‘s Nate DiMeo tells the story of how inoculation first came to the New World. Excerpted from: Body Politics: A History of Health Care
Mother Knows Best
The following audio clip is excerpted from the BackStory episode “The Good Mother: A History of American Motherhood.” You can listen to the entire episode here. Ann Hulbert, an expert on parenting experts, explains why mothers in the 1920s were instructed not to smother their children with love. Excerpted from: The Good Mother: A History [...]
"Body Politics" Transcript
This is the transcript of “Body Politics: A History of Health Care,” first broadcast in October of 2009.
