Episode 224 - History

It’s episode 224 and time for us to talk about History books! We discuss queer history, local history, spies, roads, colonialism, and more! 

You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast delivery system.

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray 🦇 | Jam Edwards

Things We Read (or tried to…)

• Lapêche : A history of the townships of Wakefield and Masham in the province of Québec 1792 to 1925 by Norma Greggie and Stuart Greggie (1974)
• Reconciling History: A Story of Canada by Jody Wilson-Raybould and Roshan Danesh (2024)
• The Drive Across Canada: The Remarkable Story of the Trans-Canada Highway by Mark Richardson (2025)
• Trans History: From Ancient Times to the Present Day by Alex L. Combs and Andrew Eakett (2025)
• The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America by Eric Cervini (2020)
• Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler by Lynne Olson (2019)
• How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr (2019)
• Fool Time part 1: The birth of the internet, according to Jon Bois (2025)
• Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History by Donna Seto (2025)
• Black History is For Everyone by Brian Jones (2025)
• When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day by Garrett M. Graff (2024)

Other Media We Mentioned

• Video Game History Foundation
  • Video Game History Hour (podcast)
• If Books Could Kill - The End of History
• Playing at the World, Vol. 1: The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson
• Dig (history podcast)
  • The Labor of Fashion: Shirtwaists and the Labor Movement in the Early 20th Century
• Side Quest: A Visual History of Roleplaying Games by Steenz and Samuel Sattin

Links, Articles, and Things

• Advanced Placement
• Golden Age of Comic Books
• Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs
• Harry Benjamin
• Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria
• Guano Islands Act
• Attempted assassination of Harry S. Truman
  

28 History Books by BIPOC Authors:

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcast chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

• The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop by Jonathan Abrams
• Remembering Our Relations : Dënesųłıné Oral Histories of Wood Buffalo National Park by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation
• The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk
• Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power by Leah Redmond Chang
• Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
• Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, translated by Janet Hong
• India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
• Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition by Nisid Hajari
• 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones
• Bad Mexicans : Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández
• The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book: Revised and Expanded by Gord Hill
• Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
• The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf, translated by Jon Rothschild
• Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation by Tiya Miles
• This Place: 150 Years Retold by multiple authors
• The Fire and the Word: A History of the Zapatista Movement by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez 
• Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera
• Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval
• Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History by Donna Seto
• Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly
• Korean History in Maps: From Prehistory to the Twenty-First Century edited by Michael D. Shin 
• Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton
• The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty
• Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History by Jaipreet Virdi
• Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Issues in Canada by Chelsea Vowel
• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
• The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Yang Jisheng, translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian
• Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution by Helen Zia
  

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Join us again on Tuesday, February 3rd we’ll be talking about Queer Romance!

Then on Tuesday, February 17th we’ll be discussing our 2026 Reading Resolutions (or non resolutions).