Category: Podcast

These posts complement the You Are A Weirdo podcast

Categories
Podcast

Your Tea Comes with Baggage

Golden statue of Lu Yu standing in a garden with tea bushes nearby
Statue of Lu Yu, at the Dragon Well Tea Plantation, Meijiawu, Hangzhou (China)

Image Source: Peter K Burian, Wikimedia Commons, shared using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

What  beverage pops into your mind when you think of England? It’s almost certainly tea. But how did this leafy drink become British?  After all, tea plants usually grow in far-away places like India or China. The answers have something to do with empire-building, and with sugar. Join your intrepid host for a caffeine- and sucrose-powered journey through thousands of miles of space, over thousands of years of time. You’ll wrestle with the harsh realities of the Atlantic slave trade, and face the legacies of multiple globe-spanning empires. Along the way, you’ll also learn about the origins of Southern sweet tea. At the end, you’ll discover why your seemingly innocent cup of hot leaf water may have come with strings attached.

Select historical sources

General Histories of Tea

  • Erling Hoh and Victor H. Mair, The True History of Tea (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009).
  • Sarah Rose, For All The Tea in China: How England Stole The World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History (New York: Penguin, 2010).

Tea Grown in England

  • Tregothnan https://tregothnan.co.uk/

Maps of the Indian Ocean Trade Region

  • University of Texas at Austin, Map Collection https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/indian_ocean.html

Lu Yu: Celebrity Popularizer of Tea

  • James A. Benn, “The Patron Saint of Tea: Religious Aspects of the Life and Work of Lu Yu.” In Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History (Honalulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2015), 96–116. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x1kn2.9.

Portuguese Armed Trading

  • Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 65–67.

Chinese-Portuguese War

  • Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeteon, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 124–137.

Gaspar Da Cruz

Catherine of Braganza

Pre-European African Forms of Servitude & Slavery

  • Akosua Adoma Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Century (Legon-Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004), esp. Ch. 5.
  • Kevin Shillington, History of Africa [4th Kindle Edition] (London: McMillan International, 2019), Section 5 introduction & Ch. 11.

Iced Tea

Britain’s Russia Company 

  • Michael Wagner, “Misunderstood and Unappreciated: The Russia Company in the Eighteenth Century,” Russian History 41, no. 3 (2014): 393–422. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24667162.

The Russian Sugar Cube – Tea Trick

  • E.g., Adrian Wanner, “The Russian Immigrant Narrative as Metafiction,” The Slavic and East European Journal 55, no. 1 (2011): 58–74. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23347693 .

1879 “Iced Tea” recipe in Housekeeping in Old Virginia

Japanese Green Tea in the USA

  • Robert Hellyer, Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

1875 “Cold Tea” recipe by Mary Virginia Terhune as “Marion Harland”

  • Mary Virginia Terhune, Breakfast Luncheon & Tea: A Recipe Book (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1875), 225. https://books.google.com/books?id=tUACAAAAQAAJ
  • “Marion Harland, Author, Dies at 91 [Obituary]” in New York Times, 4 June, 1922, 28.

Audio resources

Categories
Podcast

You Hear Dead People

A man speaking into a tube connected to a late 19th century phonograph
From The Phonograph and Phonograph-Graphophone (New York: Russel Bros. Printers, 1888), 9. The Graphophone was an attempt by Alexander Graham Bell’s company to improve on Thomas Edison’s original 1877 phonograph design.

Shuffle enough random songs and you’re certain to hear many singers who are no longer among the living. Before 1877, hearing voices of the dead would have been a supremely blood curdling experience. Yet we weirdos of today routinely listen to the sounds of the departed; we usually don’t even think about it. The invention of the phonograph fundamentally changed that aspect of the human condition, and altered how human-made sounds could travel through both space and time. Understanding how people reacted to this technology when it first arrived can reveal something important about who we’ve become.

Sources for Episode 3: You Hear Dead People

Select audio & written sources:

  • Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan’s audio clip was part of his toast to Thomas Edison and to the phonograph itself.1I admit that my goofy introduction to this episode felt just slightly like propping up a corpse and connecting servo motors to its arms and having it wave to passersby. From what little I know of Sir Arthur Sullivan–including his quip about how much bad music the new phonograph was likely to proliferate–it does seem like he too had a quirky sense of humor and might appreciate the effort here. That said, I’ll let you know if I’m suddenly haunted by apparitions singing about modern major-generals….
  • Edison on the many potential uses of the phonograph
  • Thomas Lambert’s talking clock
  • “Bottled speeches”
    • Robert G. Ingersoll, “On Liberty,” spoken by the author, 31 Dec., 1897 at the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, https://yalemusiclib.aviaryplatform.com/collections/213/collection_resources/13433 . For a nearly identical version of this poem entitled, “Apostrophe To Liberty,” see, e.g., Robert G. Ingersoll, Prose Poems and Selections from the Writings of Robert G. Ingersoll, Fourth Edition (New York: C.P. Farrell, 1890), 57–58.
  • Science of the ear at the Kansas Academy of Science
    • J.T. Lovewell, “On Sound Transmission by Electricity.” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (1872-1880), 6 (1877): 25–29. https://doi.org/10.2307/3623543.
  • Technological advances in the 1890s and “the perfected phonograph”
  • Bird song from 1913
  • Charles Kellogg, professional bird imitator
  • Garrett Hobart, Vice President of the United States
  • Recording the Qur’an
  • Béla Bartók & music of the Hungarian peasantry
    • See, e.g., Judit Frigyesi, “Béla Bartók and the Concept of Nation and ‘Volk’ in Modern Hungary.” The Musical Quarterly 78, no. 2 (1994): 255–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/742543.
  • Siti binti Saad: East African pop star
    • Laura Fair, “Siti binti Saad (c. 1885–1950): ‘Giving Voice to the Voiceless,’ Swahili Music, and the Global Recording Industry in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Dennis Cordell, editor The Human Tradition in Modern Africa (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2012), 175–190.
  • You can interact with OpenAI’s Chat GPT conversational chat bot at https://chat.openai.com .
  • 1
    I admit that my goofy introduction to this episode felt just slightly like propping up a corpse and connecting servo motors to its arms and having it wave to passersby. From what little I know of Sir Arthur Sullivan–including his quip about how much bad music the new phonograph was likely to proliferate–it does seem like he too had a quirky sense of humor and might appreciate the effort here. That said, I’ll let you know if I’m suddenly haunted by apparitions singing about modern major-generals….