Author: Doug

Doug Sofer, Ph.D., is a Professor of History at Maryville College in Tennessee. He's the creator of You Are A Weirdo, a media project that reaches beyond academia to share how history helps everyone understand the strangeness of now. Sofer hosts a podcast, writes a blog, and has penned a book manuscript on this same theme.

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Podcast

Your Network Is Disconnected

A large grid-like structure with electrodes
A Component of Francis Ronalds’ Electric Telegraph Design from His 1823 Book

From Francis Ronalds, Descriptions of an Electrical Telegraph, and of Some Other Electrical Apparatus (London: R. Hunter, 1823). Google Books link at https://books.google.com/books?id=zos5AAAAcAAJ .

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Mesopotamian Beer

People of Corn

  • Charles Phillips with David M. Jones, Complete Illustrated History: Aztec & Maya (New York: Metro Books, 2013), 284–285.
  • See also Jeffrey M. Pilcher. Food in World History (Themes in World History). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

Andean Peoples

Inca Suspension Bridges

Pigeons

Roast Beef Drumming

  • Frederick von Steuben, Baron Von Steuben’s Revolutionary War Drill Manual: A Facsimile Reprint of the 1794 Edition (Mineola, NY: Dover Military History, 1985 reprint of 1794 edition).
  • Username “John C.,” “Revolutionary War Drum Beatings | Dinner Call, The Roast Beef,” YouTube video, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqL-bHMYsyQ, accessed 2 Feb., 2023.

Optical telegraphs

Electric Telegraph

Brazil and Cândido Rondon

  • Todd Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation: Cândido Mariano Da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

Talea’s Homespun Cellular Network

  • Roberto J. González, Connected: How A Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020).

Audio Resources

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  • Secret bottom-of-the-screen bonus file: My imaginary video game music here as an mp3. Download it now!
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