Reverb Effect

Alexander McConnell talks with Olga Medvedkova, a Soviet antiwar activist whose arrest garnered worldwide attention in 1983. In light of the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, what can we learn from Medvedkova and the Soviet peace movement?

Join Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1777 as he waits, in an aristocrat’s antechamber in Munich, for a conversation that could change his life. What did it mean to wait in the past? Who waited? How did it shape society and culture, and how did it define social interactions?

In this episode, Paige Newhouse interviews Jason Young, co-curator of Hear Me Now: the Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, a traveling exhibit housed at the University of Michigan Museum of Art centering enslaved artisans and the stoneware they produced.

The funerary inscription of Clesippus tells an impressive story of illustrious honors and administrative achievements in Ancient Rome. But there is another story, one of a man who navigated slavery, disability, and the sexual advances of the woman who owned him.

In 1911, a contested horse race sparked one of the largest movements by Black South Africans to reclaim colonized land. How does the history of the Native Farmers Association offer a glimpse into alternate futures of property ownership in South Africa?

What happens when ten Puerto Rican men try to register to vote in 1950s Connecticut? Their eligibility is contested, and Democrats and Republicans become embroiled in a heated debate that ends at the Connecticut Superior Court. The ten Puerto Rican men, however, get lost at the wayside … we don’t even know all ten of their names. How much of their story can we uncover?

In this episode, public historian Elena Marie Rosario sifts through archival records to recreate the story of these ten men, while also paying attention to how underlying themes of colonialism, ethnicity, and politics direct their story. 

In 1836, two tailors transformed the fashion industry forever when they opened the first chemiserie, a shirt store, in Paris. Their radical feat? They tailored a shirt.

In this episode, John Finkelberg tells the story of how Monsieurs Pierret and Lami-Housset essentially invented the precursor to the modern button-down shirt. Within a few years, these garments were one of the most sought-after luxury goods. Created by expert men, these revolutionary new products embodied new notions of masculinity developing in nineteenth century Paris.

Except one of the tailors, Monsieur Pierret, was actually a woman.

How both the care of household goods, and indeed, the goods themselves, came to be gendered was neither natural nor inevitable—it was a historical process. While demography and economics shaped London’s changing labor force, religious and moral literature guided the path of change and then justified the outcome. Taken together, these changes appear as backlash against the new opportunities and choices available to women in the first century after the Plague.

Why do we have the prenatal visit schedule that we have today? Where did it come from? What was the evidence for the recommended schedule of prenatal visits, and why hasn’t the schedule changed in nearly 100 years, despite medical advances? How can doctors amend that schedule to both increase equitable access to healthcare and keep parents and babies safe? 

During the Progressive Era, high infant mortality rates captured public attention. Reformers concluded that medicalized prenatal care could positively impact infant and maternal outcomes: it could save lives. In 1930, the Children’s Bureau detailed a new schedule of prenatal visits—12-14 visits during pregnancy. The Children’s Bureau provided neither evidence for the schedule nor alternative plans for parents with social, environmental, or medical risk factors, but hoped a uniform schedule could prevent harm to parents and babies. And there the schedule sat while the world changed for nearly 100 years. Despite medical advances and attempts to alter the schedule to take risk factors—or a lack of risk factors— into account, nothing changed. Until everything did.

The adventure began in 1961, when Leo Sarkisian and his wife Mary were living in West Africa. They traveled across the region documenting traditional and pop music for Tempo Records. But one day, Edward Murrow came to Guinea and asked if Leo would be willing to join the Voice of America. 

Leo Sarkisian signed up and in 1965 created Music Time in Africa, which has continued for more than 50 years. Christopher DeCou follows Leo’s story to examine how entertainment can be caught up in political conflicts and asks the question, what makes propaganda?

Beatrice was fifteen years old when her mother died. By day, she assumed her mother’s role as the caregiver and housekeeper for her family in Chicago. By night, her father used her as a sexual substitute for his deceased wife. The rape and incest continued in secret for two years, until Beatrice appealed to the Chicago Municipal Court for protection in 1915.

The court convicted Beatrice’s father of incest and sent him to prison. But what would they do with Beatrice? Grace Argo follows Beatrice’s story to show how incest victims’ trauma, survival strategies, and the ways they sought power or pleasure in the aftermath of abuse conflicted with reformers’ ideals and spelled their fate.

Content warning: This episode discusses child sexual abuse, rape, and incest.

Michael sat in the intake room, waiting for his friend to arrive. He didn’t expect family to visit. By then, his mother had passed and he was estranged from his father. Without other visitors, he was eager to help his new friend, sociologist and criminologist Clifford Shaw. Shaw had taken an interest in the boys at the St. Charles School for Boys, and asked Michael to write down his life history sometime around 1930. 

Testimonials like Michael’s illuminate a complicated dynamic between children and authority figures, which plays out literally throughout the life history and in more subtle ways in the actual construction of the text. Allie Goodman follows Michael’s story to explore these dynamics. What were these children trying to say? How can we best listen?

When disappearances along the migrant routes through Mexico skyrocketed in the 1990s and early 2000s, largely due to the domino effect set off after changes in regional border policy, mothers of the disappeared came together once again. What began as an expedition to locate their children, marching from embassies to migrant shelters to public markets with photographs of the missing, has now become a worldwide call to action, demanding that governments put an end to the international border regimes that disappear migrants and erase the evidence.

Arielle Gordon explores a mass movement of mothers who—even in the face of police intimidation, faked corpses, corrupt authorities, and government lies—thrust the unseeable into sight.

In the seventeenth century, Spaniards understood Purgatory to be as much of a place—indeed one capable of being seen and even visited—as its newly established colonies in the New World. Otherworldly spaces like hell, purgatory, and limbo became part of a “colonizing imaginary,” a worldview that included the cartographic project of mapping and claiming places and peoples far beyond Iberian shores. 

Yet such projects have traditionally and historically been interpreted as the purview of men—missionaries, colonizers, and conquistadors who traveled across the Atlantic to participate in the entangled projects of conversion, colonization, and conquest. Hayley Bowman explores the ways in which women, too, contributed to this system of knowledge production. Female mystics envisioned and visited such places by spiritual means, wielding their own authority and contributing to how early modern Spaniards understood not just the afterlife, but their own position in the wider world and cosmos.

On August 2, 1589, the King Henri III of France was assassinated. In a series of accusations that pointed to his policies, his pastimes, and his desires, they called Henri a sodomite.

Sodomy accusations gesture towards the unchristian and unmanly comportment of the accused. And yet the content of sodomy accusations has changed much over the past millennium. By attending to the moments of congruence and divergence in these accusations, Aidyn Osgood explores how sexuality helps forge conceptions of masculinity. He also investigates how masculinity is a contingent cultural product created by people with political goals rather than a simple, natural outgrowth of human bodies. These ideas resonate powerfully today, when we find ourselves again considering the meanings of masculinity in popular culture.

This year marks the opening of Il Museo Italo Africano, “Ilaria Alpi” or the Iliaria Alpi Italo-African Museum in Rome, Italy. A revival of the former Italian Colonial museum (1923-1971), it has been renamed for its present-day reinstallation. Colonial museums and their collections are tangible representations of the historic and unequal relationships between people, communities, and nations. What does this particular museum and its collection tell us about Italy and its former African colonies? 

Timnet Gedar traces the history of this museum’s collection, including “human zoos,” in Italy and the looting of north and east African nations. This context demonstrates the role of museums in the colonial project and the power of knowledge production, raising questions about the implications of this history for the contemporary reopening of the museum. She asks us to consider the current Mediterranean migration crisis as a reflection of the ongoing, uneven power relations between Italy and its former African colonies and how past and present are linked, even in (or especially in) museums and their collections

Since Donald Trump stepped into the political spotlight, many have likened him to Archie Bunker, star character of the 1970s sitcom All in the Family. The comparisons were based on the crude demeanor, the vulgarity, and the racist and misogynistic views. The comparison seems apt. While the two men certainly shared some unfavorable characteristics, many of those who made the comparison focused on the apparent source for those characteristics—their shared hometown—Queens, New York.

Daniela Sheinin hadn’t given much thought to the comparison, but when she found a kitschy drinking glass at an antique mall displaying an Archie For President graphic, she thought maybe this was something to contemplate. Instead of the president as Archie, we have Archie as the president.

As she began to investigate the Bunker/Trump trope, one thing became clear. They may share a hometown, but they differ in their responses to the rapidly changing Queens neighborhoods that have come to define the borough. In this episode, we consider the many phases of Queens neighborhoods. They are marked by precisely that—fluidity and impermanence. In their transience, as the world moves onward, and the nation evolves, does progress leave something important behind? And to whom is this idea appealing? Where do Trump and Bunker fit now, in what is the most diverse region in the United States?

These questions were some of the many topics covered when Daniela conducted oral history interviews during her dissertation research. Some are featured in this episode.

Los Angeles’s international reputation was on the line. As they prepared to host millions of visitors to the city for the 1984 Olympic Games, planners expressed their anxieties about one issue in particular—crime. To ensure a successful, safe event, planners opted for a massive display of police power. As athletes, spectators, and press from around the world arrived in the city, they would be watched. Federal, state, and local forces would collaborate to control the steady stream of people and to justify the added costs of anti-crime and anti-terrorism technologies.

In hindsight, this was only a blip in the long history of law enforcement expansion in Los Angeles, and in the United States. Police using anxieties about terrorism goes back much farther than the successful Olympics bid. This had long been an effective strategy to obstruct political activism through the twentieth century.

David Helps takes us from his discovery of confidential police records to audio footage of key actors in LA’s history of intrusive law enforcement, to on-the-ground policing, to the assault on US American civil liberties and the response from various activist groups. He illuminates the ongoing possible tensions between police departments, the technologies of surveillance they employ, and civilians. What are the police allowed to know about civilians, and what are their justifications for acquiring that information?

Migrant detention at the US border is not new. While it’s become common in 2020 to hear of the incarceration of men, women, and children at the border attached to the current administration, these policies have been in development for the past 40 years. Over time we’ve seen the shifting legal, political and cultural definitions for people who arrive from Central America and Cuba. We’ve seen the transformation of the asylum seeker to criminal, begging the question: is “prison” a more suitable term?

Alexander Stephens and Gerson Rosales didn’t expect for their research to align quite so closely. One works on the arrival of Cubans on the Mariel boatlift, the other on Salvadoran migration. But when they both stumbled across the same detention center in a surprising place, they sat down together to talk about these intertwined histories, from one small-town detention center to the largest system of immigrant prisons in the world.

Matt Villeneuve details the simultaneous intrigue and frustration that comes from discovering an interesting source with minimal detail. He explains the winding path of constructing a story—from the mysterious nature of a single clue to the sometimes serendipitous breakthroughs of the archive.

The clue was a note, tucked away in a digitized letter, referencing a 1969 illustration of an indigenous woman in protest. Equipped with questions about the US indigenous past, Villeneuve goes on the hunt for this illustration. From digital collections to libraries to social media, he makes connections over time to build a story. From an ambiguous note, the story transforms into one that considers the nature of art and protest in the history of schools as sites for the erasure of indigenous culture.