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Dig: A History Podcast

Dig: A History Podcast

By: Recorded History Podcast Network
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Summary

 Four women historians, a world of history to unearth. Can you dig it?Averill, Marissa, Sarah, & Elizabeth Copyright 2017 All rights reserved. Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • The KGB’s Queer Honeypots and the Cold War

    The KGB’s Queer Honeypots and the Cold War
    May 4 2026
    Cold War Series, #2 of 4. During the Lavender Scare, the US government fired hundreds (but possibly thousands) of civil servants for being gay or lesbian, ostensibly because of a Communist-panic in which Americans were convinced a homosexual could be blackmailed into giving up state secrets to those rascally Soviets. Turns out, though they weren’t particularly successful at it, the Soviets did try to use sex scandals of all kinds to cultivate spies from the “West” -- including, but not limited to, queer Westerners traveling or working in the USSR. The “honeypot” entrapment was a coercive measure used on all sides of the Iron Curtain to try and get state secrets. And while there’s no morality in spy games, the true story of the men used by the KGB to try and tip the scales in the information race of the Cold War is pretty sad--but also a useful window onto the Soviet attitudes toward same-sex desire, the unique relationships of queer citizens to their respective countries, and the messed-up games that characterized the US-USSR struggle for world dominance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    50 mins
  • American Idealist in Stalin's City of Steel: A Pre-History of the Cold War

    American Idealist in Stalin's City of Steel: A Pre-History of the Cold War
    Apr 19 2026
    Cold War Series. Episode #1 of 4. In this episode, we uncover the extraordinary story of John Scott, a twenty-year-old American idealist who abandoned the University of Wisconsin during the Great Depression, taught himself to weld, and boarded a train for the Soviet Union. He would spend nearly a decade in Magnitogorsk, Stalin's new “City of Steel” in the Urals, building blast furnaces, marrying a Russian woman, and slowly, painfully watching his idealism curdle under the pressure of Stalinist terror. His memoir, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel, is one of the most remarkable eyewitness accounts of Soviet industrialization ever written— and it tells us as much about the seductive power of Cold War ideology as it does about steel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Love Canal, or How Toxic Capitalism Poisoned a Neighborhood and How "Housewives" Fought Back

    Love Canal, or How Toxic Capitalism Poisoned a Neighborhood and How "Housewives" Fought Back
    Apr 17 2026
    Environmental History #3 of 4. In the mid-1970s, parents in Niagara Falls, New York were struggling to figure out why their children were getting mysteriously ill. For two years, officials from the state had been investigating the environment in Niagara Falls For years, residents had been complaining about “the odors of chemicals and fumes.” By the mid-70s, officials had determined that the smells emanated from an old ditch-turned-toxic waste dump. But while everyone could agree the dump was stinky, no one really seemed to believe it was actually pressing public concern. But then children started to get sick. For this episode of our Environmental History series, we're telling the story of Love Canal — one of the most consequential environmental disasters in American history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    1 hr and 33 mins
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