Broomology (BROOMS) with Cate O’Connell-Richards

Whisks and witches. Bristles and Shakers. Potions and prisons. From making brooms to jumping them, teacher, author, broomsquire, and Broomologist Cate O'Connell Richards gives us the overlooked history of how that broom got in your garage. So light a candle and tuck in for fibers, harvests, how-tos, angel wings, hawktails, besoms, labor laws, Broomcorn Johnnies, utopic communes, wedding traditions, oral histories, care tips and how everything is more interesting with context. Even brooms. Content warning as requested by the guest: when we talk about history, especially witches, there may be mentions of violence, death or sexuality.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey, it's the last guy at the campfire pouring Pepsi on the embers. Ally Ward, did you ever think you'd have a whole episode on brooms? Me neither. Here we are. It continues to be spooktober. You've got cinnamon brooms on the brain, witches in your windows. Let's get into it with an artist, educator, historical researcher, and yes, a broom squire. Speaking of broom, the word comes from the plants, brooms, which have these stiff, kind of bristly twigs that work well to sweep stuff away. And scopa means broom in Greek and in Latin. And listen, I wanted this to be titled scopology.

• 0:42Alie Ward?

  But alas, our guest and the historical record and various craft references and books informed me that yes, broomology is the official study. Do not tell me I'm making it up. That's real. But first, thank you so much to patrons of the show who support Ologies for one hot dollar a month and submit questions before we record. Thank you to everyone out there wearing Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. If you need kid-friendly, swear-free Ologies episodes, you can find them in their own feed. Wherever you get podcasts are called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. They're also linked in the show notes. Thank you also to sponsors of Ologies who make it possible for us to donate to a cause of each ologist choosing every week.

• 1:19Speaker 01

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• 2:20Alie Ward?

  And thank you to everyone who has supported us just by leaving a review, which helps so much that I make sure to read them all, such as this still green one from Robin Elaine, who wrote, "Thanks for always showing us how lucky we are to live somewhere with eclipses and insects and oceans and bodies and really nerdy humans who love to talk about what they love." Thanks for listening to it, of course, Robin. Now, right now, that thing they love is brooms? It's exciting. The brooms, they're overlooked. They're taken for granted. Silent, no voice, but they make your life better every day. Where did they come from? What are they made of? Who makes them? There's a story in everything, so let's hear about that. And quick content warning, as requested by the guest. When we talk about history, especially witches, there may be mentions of violence,

• 3:04Alie Ward?

  death, or sexuality. Otherwise, we're talking mostly about objects today. And we also may get swept away with corny jokes that you may bristle at, but I think you can handle it. So light a candle and tuck in for fibers, harvests, how-tos, angel wings, cocktails, besoms, labor laws, broomcorn johnnies, utopic communes, wedding traditions, oral histories, care tips, and how everything is more interesting with context with teacher, author, and broom squire, and broomologist Kate O'Connell Richards.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  All right. So my name is Kate O'Connell Richards. I use gender-neutral pronouns. I am an artist, educator, writer, and broom maker.

• 4:15Alie Ward?

  Hell, yeah. When I found out there were broom historians out there, I lost my mind. But just, one of the first things I saw of yours was this flowchart of the history of brooms. I, like, my keyboard ignited. I was emailing you so fast. I was like, Kate, we're on the show. And you know, when it comes to the history and the culture of brooms, how, is this a field of study that there are historians in the past that have written books and papers on this? Or how do you gather information on something that is so oral tradition and passed-down knowledge, you know?

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Man, you just hit the nail on the head. You are absolutely correct in the way that this is mostly, it's a folkloric or a folk practice. There's a lot of oral tradition, not formal or academic. The broom is everywhere. It is global, all over, all cultures. And each one of those specific cultures, regions, peoples have their own broom history. So I read a lot of agricultural journals, Union periodicals, sometimes looking at broom equipment manuals. There is no, like, complete source on this, at least not that I've found.

• 5:34Alie Ward?

  Is that part of what you like about it? Do you feel a little bit like a detective trying to track down, like, really hard-to-find facts?

• 5:42Speaker 04

  Very much so. I have a very short attention span.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  I am an artist, a jeweler. I'm used to, like, a very kind of frenetic, hands-on environment. I've started studying brooms for my work, for my sculptural pieces. And then I started writing, and writing is very different. The wide variation of sources and stories that brooms bring to me just keep me so engaged because of my darting around brain. We're talking farming and agriculture. We're talking about material and making. I've gotten so deep into the broom, my most recent pieces were about labor and prison labor specifically. It is an object that can take you anywhere. You can ride on it anywhere, I guess.

• 6:28Alie Ward?

  You know, when you say that you are a maker of brooms as well as someone who studies them and you're a materials artist, could you take me back a little bit to when you started crafting them? Or how did you end up with fibers in your hand that became a broom?

• 6:45Speaker 04

  That's a great question. I was getting my master's in fine art, and so I was doing a lot of research. And my interest kind of always laid in a lot of fantasy. I was a very imaginative child. I come from a family of historians, librarians. I'm a metalsmith because I actually started off casting lead figurines with my father, who would do tabletop wargaming.

• 7:12Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I knew we were going there.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  So that's why I'm a metalsmith. I grew up all over. But my most formative years were in Kansas, kind of in, like, a pretty rural area. Lots of abandoned things, a lot of light trespassing and rusted tools, and nobody around. You're in the middle of the field. And so I was very interested in the objects and shapes of kind of pre-industrial agricultural tools. We look at them now as these sort of magic objects because not many Americans come into contact with that kind of equipment anymore. So in the end, my work became about where objects of labor and objects of sort of magic practice or spirituality intersect. Now, can you think of a better object?

• 7:58Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  That combines those two things, and brooms?

• 8:02Alie Ward?

  Honestly, no, I cannot, which is why I'm freaking out to have them on. And at one point, they were able to secure a grant and travel to Mountain City, Georgia, and work with the Foxfire Appalachian Heritage Center, which has a museum.

• 8:14Speaker 04

  They teach classes on traditional Appalachian broom making. So I went there and I took a class with a woman named Carol Morse, who's been making brooms for probably longer than I've been alive. And it was pretty transformative, not just as a maker, but my curiosity was wedded. That's how I got started with making brooms.

• 8:34Alie Ward?

  Well, was there also something about Appalachia and the folklore of brooms? So it was like, kind of a little bit, like, a little dark and spooky? Like, did that appeal at all?

• 8:47Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I have always, you know, liked the macabre, the spooky, the magical. Former Goth kid here.

• 8:55Alie Ward?

  Me too.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 8:56Alie Ward?

  You know what prompted this whole episode, actually, is my friend Catherine went to Paris and was like, you know, what's crazy is, like, everything's very clean. All the people who are sweeping the streets have these old-looking brooms, kind of like a witch's broom, but they're green. And I was like, were they the fan kind? Because I went to Thailand and they have a lot of fan-shaped brooms. And she's like, no, they were like the round kind. And I was like, why are there different types of brooms in different parts of the world? Why is the American version of the broom that we think of kind of a flattened one, but not a fan-shaped? And I know that you deal mostly with American broom folklore, but just in general, like, shapes of brooms, are those totally functional?

• 9:41Alie Ward?

  Or are those just cultural, what's been handed down?

• 9:46Speaker 04

  That's a great question. I think I'm going to say that to all your questions.

• 9:49Alie Ward?

  Thank you.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  I'll talk about the flattening of the broom in a moment in the US, the great flattening.

• 9:55Alie Ward?

  Ooh, the great flattening. We'll talk about who is responsible for that.

• 9:59Speaker 04

  But when it comes to global brooms and all the different shapes and colors, you see factors include the need and the available plants. The plant material that we talk about when we talk about American broom making is sorghum. Specifically, there are two variants, sorghum vulgare and sorghum bicolor. But in Southeast Asia, many brooms are made out of a plant called tiger grass. There's African broom grass. There's all these different grasses that can be used to make a broom. So that's one factor to why brooms look different. When it comes to the shape, the shapes are kind of fit for purpose. Like, when you think about a home or a space that needs to be swept out, you want to make sure that the ends of those bristles, that's the head of the broom, make tight contact with things like floors and ceilings and corners. And so that's why you see like a 90-degree angle

• 10:44Speaker 04

  at the base of a broom, so it can fit up against the baseboard. But one thing that you see, a common shape we do see all over the world is what we would call a fan tail, which is made by adding bundles of fiber on one side of the broom head instead of symmetrically.

• 10:58Alie Ward?

  So fan tail brooms are kind of woven up the side like an asymmetrical feather, rather than all gathered in one place. It's a bunch at the top, like a stiff tassel.

• 11:11Speaker 04

  But folk traditions, so what may be called one name in one region can totally be called something else in another. You're going to hear things like angel wing versus turkey wing, you know, hawk tail.

• 11:24Alie Ward?

  What's the difference there?

• 11:26Speaker 04

  There's not.

• 11:27Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  You know what? Then you may have one broom maker that starts making one slightly different and calls it that, and it sticks around long enough that we now know that as that style. It's continually growing and changing all the time, even today.

• 11:42Alie Ward?

  And yes, those angel wing, hawk tail, and turkey wing brooms have a splayed out fan shape. And as you go up the handle, more stalks or grass is woven together. I imagine it's really difficult to find historical examples of this because they're made out of sticks and grass, right? So they don't preserve super great?

• 12:03Speaker 04

  No, not too great. Plus, people can unwind them, cannibalize them to make new things, wear them down to nubbins. That's why you don't store your broom on its head because it warps the bristles. And so you always want to hang your broom.

• 12:17Speaker 05

  News to me.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  Like, if you buy a nice artisan broom, you want it for looking, maybe, maybe not cleaning. It's good to hang it up. Don't balance it on the bristles. But it does lead to this lovely thing where if you walk through a neighborhood, every front porch has a broom, and those brooms are usually jacked up. They've been out on the porch for a long time. But take a look at the bristles next time. You'll see the curvature from continual use or just storing on the corner like that.

• 12:46Alie Ward?

  So the bristles end of a broom is called the head. That's the business end. But who among us remembers the blissful pre-quarantine, early 2020 trend called the broom stick challenge? Does this ring a bell? As someone who's a best mologist, have you known that you can make a broom stand upright and make it look like magic? You know that that trend was going around a few years ago? Yeah.

• 13:11Speaker 06

  We got the NASA broom challenge here at the fire station. We love science.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, you know, the bristles of broom corn is kind of like the, you know, laying on a bed of nails. If you cut them straight enough, yeah, you can totally do that. But hey, I know, magic, magic.

• 13:28Alie Ward?

  When I first did that, I was blown away. I was like, well, of course, it's just a ton of tripods, right? You're just making a tripod out of the bristles, right? So yeah, this started in February 2020 with a post explaining that because of the Earth's gravitational pull, NASA said it was the only day of the year to achieve that perfect broom balance. Everyone was trying it. For weeks later, and NASA confirmed, yeah, no, we did not ever say that, you sweet clowns. It's just the physics of a bunch of corn broom tripods. Speaking of which, let's talk materials.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. You ready?

• 14:05Alie Ward?

  Yes.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Let's talk about sorghums.

• 14:07Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 14:08Speaker 04

  So sorghums are a genus of plants in the grass family. So there are two species in particular of sorghum, sorghum vulgare and sorghum bicolor, that are popular cereal grains. Those are plants that provide food.

• 14:21Alie Ward?

  They're also called great millet or broom corn, although it's not really corn or millet. The stalks are tall and they look a lot like corn, but instead of that silky corn hair at the top, there are these stiff twigs with these tiny seeds and a lot of split ends. And those stiff twigs are probably, right now, there's some hiding in a corner of your kitchen pantry. They know you're talking about them.

• 14:48Speaker 04

  When you look at broom corn, it can be very tall, but it looks like what we know as corn without the ears. But it has a very long tassel and these kind of large flat leaves. The usefulness of sorghums goes well beyond food, but you can make brooms with them. But of course. And we call them broom corn, which it can get a little in the weeds, if you'll forgive me. You'll hear words like millet, broom, straw, grass, given to a lot of different plants. And there are a lot of different plants that can be used to make brooms. So I want people to be able to look at a broom and be like that, you know, right now, go like, oh, that's sorghum. But most people don't have broom corn brooms anymore. But yeah, most people do have plastic brooms.

• 15:29Alie Ward?

  I feel like broom corn does a better job, though. I feel like it scrapes stuff a little better than a plastic broom. But I also just, the idea of a plastic broom kind of aches me out because I just think of microplastics all over the house. I am full of microplastics, like top to bottom. So whatever. We'll find out how they killed us long after we're dead. But I do personally, I really love the sound of little swishy whiskers on wood.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, the bottoms of broom corn, the wispy ends actually have a natural Velcro effect. And so they can totally pick up dust a lot easier than the sort of slick, oily surface of plastic.

• 16:15Alie Ward?

  Why do we see in folklore, why do we see witches' brooms being the round kind and our modern brooms being fanned out? Was that like some sort of evolution of function? Or was that totally just materials based?

• 16:35Speaker 04

  Oh, man, there's a story about it. I mentioned like the sort of the great flattening. And so when we see a round broom, that is a tradition from Europe. We call those besums today, from the Old English. The style traveled with the colonists to what we now know as the United States. You know, the first kind of moments in American broom making that I found are not just studying, you know, indigenous cultures of New England. They had a very particular kind of shaved splint broom where you would have a piece of wood, usually birch, I believe, and you would kind of peel down a thin strip of material off the outside of the sort of cylinder of wood, but leave it attached at the bottom.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  And then you would just shave so many of these down, then you would bind it and you'd have this kind of, it looks somewhere between a mop and a broom, as we would know today.

• 17:28Alie Ward?

  Okay, so these are so-called splinter brooms, and the peeled pieces are so delicate and they're wispy, almost as thin as like a pine needle, but just whittled down wood into really fine bristles.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  But the early colonists brought the round broom, the besum, with them. Which could be made, again, out of birch or just like any kind of twiggy, sticky material. Those are the real witchy brooms. Those are the ones that look very kind of, I don't ever want to call a broom evil because the associations of evilness and brooms and the people who carry them is something that it gets very dark. There's a famous photo by William Henry Fox Talbot, and he was a photographer. We have very early photographs. We're talking, I think, 1840s. I think it's just called The Doorway. And in this photo,

• 18:21Speaker 04

  this extraordinary photo, you see a besum. And so everyone can Google that photo and look at that.

• 18:28Alie Ward?

  I'm on it. It's so beautiful. There are these golden tones of black and white kind of sepia. And this is a photo of the threshold of a stone house. It's got a beat up wooden door that's halfway open, and the room beyond it is just plunged into darkness. But diagonally in the frame is the stiff, craggy, bristled besum broom with a knobby stick, exactly what you would picture in Halloween rom-com about a witch tooling around a New England town, maybe falling in love with a local melon farmer. And again, William Fox Talbot, The Open Door. Casey, you want to see it?

• 19:07Speaker 04

  Oh, The Open Door. Again, spooky, spooky. And it's done in that old kind of silvery photo style. But we see a broom leaning across the door, a besum broom. And that's the kind of image I want you to, you know, kind of keep in your mind when it comes to these European brooms. The besum traveled over to New England, and so we were making round brooms. And the first early centers of what would become the broom making industry were a place in Massachusetts called Hadley and then Shaker Communities. Now, the Shakers, that's not their official name. Their official name is the United Society of Believers in Christ's second appearing.

• 19:48Alie Ward?

  That's a mouthful.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  They were a religious group that were ostracized from England and came on over very, very early in the process. They're not to be confused with Quakers, but they were initially known as Shaken Quakers, hence their more colloquial title, the Shakers.

• 20:07Alie Ward?

  Oh, got it.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  Their kind of leader, it's a little bit more than that, but Mother Anne Lee, it was a woman and actually accused of being a witch in England.

• 20:15Alie Ward?

  A shocker.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  Nice little tidbit there, but

• 20:18Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  They lived in very particular communities, types of communities. They were celibate, which doesn't make for a very long lasting community. And they lived in these gatherings of buildings. And you can still visit these buildings today. And a lot of those spaces have been turned into kind of museums today. And you can go visit them and take broom classes. But they supported their communities through craft and the creation of objects, very well made objects, furniture, clothing, and brooms. Brooms was a, was a Shaker industry. So we see a lot of early strides being made in American broom making at these Shaker

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Communities. And then we also have the farming communities of, of New England.

• 21:04Alie Ward?

  And yeah, the Quaking Shakers, they let loose during worship service. They danced ecstatically, like ravers wearing bonnets. And they believed in equality of the sexes, huh? A god that was both genders, communal living, and pacifism. What? Author June Sprig wrote a book called By Shaker Hands and noted that, quote, "The Shakers felt that work and worship were inseparable." So their household tools and objects were used with reverence, like a ritual. They had a real pride in their workmanship, work people ship. But yeah, no boning, no boning. And there were up to 4,000 Shakers at one time in the mid 1800s

• 21:49Alie Ward?

  across like a dozen or so New England hotspots. And they did welcome unhoused people and orphans with open arms. There's now only one Shaker community, the Sabbath Day Lake Shaker Village in Maine, and it has three members. But they are accepting new ones. In case you're like, whoa, crafts, peace, non-binary vibes. And hey, if you're ace or aromantic and you like to groove, maybe they'll have you as a fourth. But the Shakers were being established in like the mid 1700s. 75 years before that, William Fox Talbot photo was snapped. And there also emerged in that time, mid 1700s, a major player

• 22:32Alie Ward?

  on the North American broom scene. He was.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  Levi Dickinson was a farmer in or around Hadley, Massachusetts. And we're talking at the very end of the 18th century here, the 1790s.

• 22:45Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  But when it comes to like the winners of history, like Levi Dickinson is the name that in this very specific world, people point to. And so Dickinson grew a couple acres of broom corn and started making brooms, really, you know, were very popular brooms.

• 23:05Alie Ward?

  These are the brooms that are standard now in a lot of countries. But back then, it was a new thing to buy a broom.

• 23:11Speaker 04

  So broom making for a lot of history was a thing that was done in the home by the family. A household might have a small patch of broom corn growing in their garden specifically for this. And it was cyclical. You would harvest it at a certain time, or in this case, just chop it down, dry it out. And you might make a couple extra for peddling to members in the community, but it wasn't necessarily a business. We have evidence of this. Thomas Jefferson, you know, one of the, the most recorded figures in American history, mentions broom corn being grown in his own private farms in Virginia in 1781. It was just part of colonial farm life, like textiles and food preparation. And so Dickinson

• 23:52Speaker 04

  was part of, you know, this practice. And he started by growing a couple acres, I think, nearby in an alley somewhere. And he would make brooms with these. And they were said to be the best, the best brooms.

• 24:08Alie Ward?

  Other people were doing this, but old man Levi is the legend.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  You go to Hadley, Massachusetts, you're going to find like, this is where Levi Dickinson started it.

• 24:16Alie Ward?

  So Levi is in Massachusetts. He's scrappy. He grows a couple acres and he just makes really good brooms. And people were like, damn, this broom that Levi made, way better than the one I've been threading together. Do people start asking him like, hey, Levi, let's get more of these brooms together?

• 24:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, it was said that like the women, the women of the community loved his brooms so much that they asked for more and that it was women that were kind of propping up this, this new economy, or that it was his wife that really adored the broom.

• 24:49Alie Ward?

  And according to a 2015 article written by the American Broom Shop titled Corn Broom, Still the Boss, in the year 1797, farmer Levi Dickinson grabbed some tassels of dried sorghum, as people did then, and made such a good broom for his wife, it changed history. Damn, that is a good broom. The Shakers were like, damn, that is a good broom. And they gave us some tweaks. They had a few notes, like flattening it for greater directional surface area. And this broom boom was born. By the 1920s, broom corn crops totaled over 80,000 tons in the US. In 1965, America manufactured 35 million

• 25:34Alie Ward?

  corn broom brooms.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  And Levi Dickinson made some strides in the kind of equipment. We make brooms on these broom benches or broom winders.

• 25:43Alie Ward?

  So that's when brooms went from the besum, round bundle of bristles, to the flat wedge of the Shakers. Can you imagine Levi sitting on the porch, probably blasting a hand rolled cig, sun fading over the horizon, maybe there's some onions simmering on the wood stove for like a salt pork and turnip stew. He's vibing, he's making a broom. And as soon as we can jump timelines, I'm going to go there to that moment. I want to hide behind a stump with a hard cider. I just want to take it all in.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  At the turn of the 18th century, the 1790s into the 1800s, that's, and think about that in terms of American history too. You always have to, to keep in mind what is going on in this country that is changing very rapidly.

• 26:29Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Speaker 04

  Indigenous peoples are being displaced. The lands are being stolen. We have this continual spread from east to west. Then they go more west until things change in the 20th century. Because where broom corn went, you made brooms. It's not too good for anything else. You can make a whiskey with it. If you've ever had sorghum whiskey.

• 26:50Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  There is a, from China, a cao liang liquor that is also made with sorghum. Yeah, I can make porages, flowers, sweet syrups and alcohol. But I always got the vibe that there's just other plants that were better at it.

• 27:03Alie Ward?

  Is that where the word whiskey comes from? Because when you said whiskey, I was thinking you meant a little baby whisk. But I wonder if whiskey comes from whisk at all. I'm gonna have to look that up.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  I have no idea. I have no idea. That would be fascinating, wouldn't it?

• 27:18Alie Ward?

  Right? Okay, I'm, I'll do an aside on that. I'm doing an aside on it. So whiskey, hard alcohol, comes from the Gaelic word meaning water of life. If it's Scottish whiskey, there's no E in it. If it's American whiskey, you got an EY at the end. Whisk, though? Hmm. That comes from Old Norse for a wisp of hay. So this is where we would put a game show, losing horn. Also, if you're Scottish and you are cackling at the word besum or bism, yes, it is a very coarse slang term for a woman. Or, or from what I understand, someone who's like kind of a cheeky nuisance. I've heard both. So it's best that you ask a Scottish person.

• 28:01Alie Ward?

  Or you fly me out to Scotland, so I can fact check this. Thank you. However, whiskified does mean shit hammered. At least it did in 1802. But if you're into sorghum, less for the spirits and more for the bod, you can belly up to the 2024 Journal of Food Science article, Sorghum and Health: An Overview of Potential Protective Health Effects, which dishes out the research that sorghum grain is a great source of fiber and low glycemic starches, and it kept study participants and trials full for longer than wheat forage, perhaps because it promotes an increase in the appetite relating hormones GLP-1, potentially tasty, but a North America invasive.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  So, you know, here's the thing. Broomcorn is not an indigenous species to the Americas. It is from Eastern Africa originally. And we do know it was in Europe by the 17th century, if not sooner, from early botanical journals that mention it. There is a great suspicion that the plant, at least in part, came over to the United States with enslaved Africans during the time of the transatlantic slave trade. And now it would be an incredibly difficult thing to trace.

• 29:11Alie Ward?

  Of course, yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this leads us to the person who's most often accredited as the father of American brewmaking, and that's Ben Franklin. We have letters from him. He wrote a couple folks in his life, but he writes to his sister Jane in 1757, "I enclose you some whisk seed. It is a kind of corn, good for creatures. It must be planted on hills like," and this is quote, "Indian corn," which is what we know as corn today. There's stories kind of filling the gaps on how Franklin came into the possession of this broomcorn seed. Some say he was sent a brush broom made from broomcorn, which he cleaned his travel hat with, and it dislodged his seed. Another is that he was examining this, this broom that belonged to a lady friend.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  He had many lady friends.

• 30:00Alie Ward?

  Apparently, that guy was a horny one.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  I know.

• 30:03Alie Ward?

  Horny toad, from what I understand. Was Ben Franklin horny, you ask me? Of course he was. Let's take a dip into his 1745 letter to a friend, chock full of romantic advice. This letter is now titled in the archives, Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress. So his thesis reads, quote, "You should prefer old women to young ones. You call this a paradox and demand my reasons." Ben then offers eight different reasons, among which are, "Because older women have more knowledge of the world and their minds are better stored with observation, their conversation is more improving and more lastingly agreeable."

• 30:43Alie Ward?

  Also, "Because when women cease to be handsome, they study to be good by an augmentation of utility." He continues, "There is hardly such a thing to be found as an old woman who is not a good woman." So you lose your beauty, so then you just have to be real nice. Also, he says, "Taking an old lady as a mistress means that you can't knock her up as easy, and it's less suspicious if she visits your house, because maybe you're just keeping the elderly company." But then Mr. Franklin gives us a lesson in, I guess, lymph integrity, and he offers that, "In every animal that walks upright, the deficiency of the fluids appears first in the highest part.

• 31:27Alie Ward?

  The face first grows lank and wrinkled, then the neck, then the breast and arms. But," I imagine that he wrote this next part while arching an eyebrow, just like a, like a little, like a little devil. He says, "The lower parts continue to be as plump as ever, so that covering all above with a basket," excuse me, "and regarding only what is below the girdle, it's impossible to know an old from a young one." He explains that, "As in the dark, all cats are gray. The pleasure of corporal enjoyment with an old woman is at least equal and frequently superior because they're more practiced." His final reason was, "They're so grateful."

• 32:14Alie Ward?

  I, I got mixed feelings here, but as a palate cleanser, I can offer you a tidbit from Ben Franklin's pamphlet, A Letter to a Royal Academy, which is also known to scholars as A Letter to a Royal Academy About Farting, or Fart Proudly, in which Mr. Franklin describes the challenge of retaining, quote, "A great quantity of wind from digesting common food." And he implores scientists to study farting and develop a pill or an additive that renders the wind inoffensive, or, he offers, perhaps as pleasing as perfume. If you've ever held a crisp 100 in your hand, next time you see one, you need only glance at the strained, pursed lip countenance

• 32:59Alie Ward?

  to know that this was a man fed on pastries and ale, a blustery gut under his vests. Now, I hope, I hope that parts of New England are haunted by Ben Franklin's ghost. I want him to float through a CVS and discover the Holy Trinity of beano and lactaid and gasax, all that noodling with keys and kites, child's play in comparison. Anyway, Ben Franklin.

• 33:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, he stole a seed, I guess, from his lady friend's broom. Another say that he traveled to Egypt and brought the seed from there. And then there, like, color is added to the story, like, he smuggled the precious cargo in a snuffbox. But it's true, he did travel between Europe and the US several times. And also, there's a statue of him in Arcola, Illinois, which is one of the, if not the most known, broomcorn capital of the United States.

• 33:54Alie Ward?

  I didn't know that.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:56Alie Ward?

  Now, have you been there? Did you go?

• 33:58Speaker 04

  I did, I did go. They have a broomcorn festival. It, it reminds me very much of the kind of festival that I had growing up in Kansas. You know, you eat a funnel cake, and there's craft booths, and it's kind of hot. But, like, you see all this local history, and boy, oh, boy, do I love local history.

• 34:15Alie Ward?

  I love sweating and walking near booths and smelling vegetable oil frying. I, literally, I love that. Okay, so I'm sorry to report that you just missed the broomcorn festival of Arcola, Illinois, which occurred in September. But on a plus note, that means that you have 10 and a half months to prepare for the 2027 Arcola National Broom Sweeping Contest, which pits you against five pounds of broomcorn seed, tiny little beads, essentially, that need to be swept through a maze and into a bucket, and the highest weight wins, of course. Not competitive? Maybe you have carpal tunnel? That's fine. Just sit back, enjoy a parade featuring Arcola's world famous lawn rangers,

• 35:01Alie Ward?

  which are a precision yard work drill team, and they march in step with brooms, or they just roll by, they're perched on the thrones of their lawn mowers. I watched video of this year's festival to get hyped up for next September, and one guy, literally cleaning up in the sweeping competition, was this elderly man. And then I realized, when he turned around, no, it was just a younger guy in a bald cap and a waistcoat, dressed in homage to our nation's founding farting horn dog. And I hope that this young man's cosplay netted him some interest from older women, because all cats are gray in the dark. Speaking of going back in time.

• 35:40Speaker 04

  The 1800s is where we see the growth of the broom industry as, you know, colonists spread west, and that allowed, you know, larger swaths of land where we had just evicted people that had been here, made for, you know, large spaces to, to grow a lot of broomcorn. Given that it was, you know, deeply tied to agriculture, seasons were very important. And so there were itinerant workers called broomcorn johnnies. I have heard that there were broomcorn janes as well, but again, that, I'm trying to find more about that. But of course, as you can imagine, being an itinerant worker in the 19th century was, it was mostly men.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  And there's a lot of very Steinbeckian stories about these roving broomcorn johnnies that would go into town and get really drunk after a long day's work, cause a lot of mayhem, and then leave until next year.

• 36:34Alie Ward?

  Holy smokes. Do you know, I wonder how many people in the US don't realize that their great, great, great granddaddy was a broomcorn johnny, you know? Like, I can imagine, broomcorn johnny comes into town.

• 36:46Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm sure.

• 36:48Alie Ward?

  Some people were creeped out by broomcorn johnnies because they were itinerant farmworkers, but others waited around just to harvest the side of them.

• 36:55Speaker 04

  Some of the sources I have are just, you know, people from very particular parts of the United States, rural areas, who are writing just their own personal autobiography, and they talk about their mother seeing the broomcorn johnnies return and things like that. Yeah.

• 37:12Alie Ward?

  I bet.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:14Alie Ward?

  I bet they had games.

• 37:17Alie Ward?

  My daddy was a broomcorn johnny.

• 37:19Speaker 04

  I imagine them breaking a beer bottle on the countertop, like, back off.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  Their sarsaparilla or whatever they're drinking.

• 37:30Alie Ward?

  I can imagine just irresistible broomcorn johnnies. So they were itinerant, and so we didn't see a lot of women who, at that time, were, felt safe, perhaps enough to just be roving about, working in this field, right? Like, literal field.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  I, I imagine, I imagine not, you know, as an artist and a crafts person, I was pretty taken aback at the practice of brewmaking. You know, it's this object I really love to make. It carries such a fascinating history, and we cannot deny the romance of the old, with an E on the end of it, handmade. But it was also a vehicle for prison labor.

• 38:07Alie Ward?

  Which not much has changed there. I mean,

• 38:09Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 38:10Alie Ward?

  And anyone who thinks that prison labor is a thing of the past is unfortunately unaware of how prevalent it still is in this country.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  Oh, it's incredible. It's incredible. So if you go outside of Laramie, there's a place called the Wyoming Territorial Prison, which is now a museum.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  If this building could talk, if it could tell you all of the stories of the 1,063 convicts that were incarcerated here, what a great moment that would be to be able to.

• 38:43Speaker 04

  This is the early 1900s, so the very beginning of the 20th century. It operated for only a handful of years. It's notable for, I think it was Butch Cassidy or some outlaw had been imprisoned there. And so that's like kind of a selling point for the tourist side of it. But they made brooms there and they have a very large broom studio.

• 39:06Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  And there's signage all over it. You can see the broom equipment. And these prisoners were shackled if they refused to work. It was pretty dangerous conditions if we think about the quality of machinery at that point in time. Like if you got your hand in there, you'd buy hand. And the profit being made from these prison-made brooms, you know, of course, went to the folks running this prison. This is the broom shop where the prisoners made brooms. You can actually buy one today in the gift store. But, I mean, you know, many objects that Americans still use today are made in prisons, mattresses, clothing, metal goods, and prisoners are making often less than $1 an hour.

• 39:51Alie Ward?

  This warrants its entire own episode, but the long and short of it, as we mentioned in our Indigenous Fire Ecology and Fire Ecology episodes, is that prison labor is alive and well in the United States despite the 13th Amendment, which declared that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction, except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. So if you want to hear the whole U.S. Constitution read to you with the sides, have a gander at our two-part nomology episode. We're going to link in the show notes. But yes, that might be news to some people. And Made in

• 40:32Alie Ward?

  America, The Products of U.S. Prison Labor Are All Around Us is an excellent essay and a photo gallery by Tulane University Professor Daniella Zalkman for the nonprofit news outlet, The Marshall Project. And this piece explained that incarcerated workers are responsible for producing over $2 billion in goods annually and $9 billion in services, from eyeglasses to barbecues to mattresses to the Arkansas governor's mansion to labor. And a lot of the objects are sold via federal and state prison industries to public institutions like libraries and schools and courthouses and agencies. Now incarcerated workers, according

• 41:14Alie Ward?

  to this piece, make between 33 cents and $1.41 per hour working for state-owned businesses. In six states, though, the hourly rates are $0, absolutely nothing. Now, being on the front lines of wildfire duty for prison laborers, that's between $2.90 and $5.12 per day, according to some 2023 reports. And the ACLU published a 2022 report titled Captive Labor Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers. And this was in collaboration with the University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic. And that establishes

• 41:56Alie Ward?

  in this report that the U.S. incarcerates over 1.2 million people, and two out of three of those incarcerated people are also workers. And from the moment that they enter the prison gates, they lose the right to refuse work. More than 76% of incarcerated workers report that they're required to work or face additional punishment, such as solitary confinement, loss of family visitation, or it strips them of the ability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap. So if this is something that is new news to you, yeah, it's an interesting fact about our for-profit prison system in the U.S. Brooms. Who knew?

• 42:39Speaker 04

  So this is this sort of connection that I found between the sort of old world kind of craft, the kind of making that I'm doing as an artist, and then contemporary issues today, which again, all from the broom, all from the broom.

• 42:52Alie Ward?

  This is why I love this. We actually had a ton of questions from listeners. Can I lob some at you?

• 43:00Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 43:01Alie Ward?

  And before we lob those, let's toss some money at a more than worthy cause. And this week, Kate shows the Prison Arts Collective, which is dedicated to expanding access to the transformative power of art to people experiencing incarceration via arts programming in California prisons. So to learn more, visit prisonartscollective.com. Now, thank you, Kate, for their suggestion, and thank you, sponsors of the show, who make these donations possible every week.

• 43:29Speaker 02

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• 45:03Alie Ward?

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• 46:20Alie Ward?

  Okay, so patrons via Patreon.com slash Ologies can submit questions before we record simply by joining at the $1 level. And of course, you always send in great ones. Let's just start with the nitty and the gritty. Diana Staresnick, Dean, Alice Rubin, Holden a Goose, Grace Conroy, Anne McHenry, Sarah, and Alina Devogt wants to know, in Diana's words, why, why, why, why can I never get that last bit of swept grit into the dustpan? Holden a Goose says, it's so annoying. Why is it so hard to get the dust into the dustpan? Is there, do we need finer and finer brooms or smaller and smaller dust pans? What do we do?

• 47:03Speaker 04

  Do you know of one? Because I don't. I've had the pleasure of using some very fine handmade dust pans, I will say, but I have, I've never seen anything get it all. You know, and I feel bad because it's like you're using this beautiful handmade broom and then you're like, well, I guess I'll get my dust buster. That was actually a big, a big, a big hit to the broom industry in the mid 20th century, of course, was carpets and vacuums.

• 47:27Alie Ward?

  Dang, I hadn't even thought about that. If you live somewhere more humid, I can't imagine you're going to want a wall-to-wall carpet, like in the tropics or in parts of rainforests, things like that. But so it's just something that is going to suck, and that's okay.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  It's okay.

• 47:43Alie Ward?

  Perhaps a wet cloth. It's okay.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  Yes, I think that's a great idea.

• 47:46Alie Ward?

  Even the world's broom experts agree that that is.

• 47:53Alie Ward?

  That sucks. And that, it just is.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  I feel bad because I feel like I'm playing right into the hands of Big Vacuum.

• 48:00Alie Ward?

  No, no. But that's the thing, is with Big Vacuum, you don't get to see what is going into the dustpan. Do you know how many people probably have vacuumed up gemstones that they later were like, a ruby fell out of my wedding ring and I vacuumed it. They're in the garbage.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  Oh, I know.

• 48:18Alie Ward?

  This actually did happen to my mom. It was actually a 25th anniversary gift my dad had given her decades before. A ring with a row of five diamonds to represent each member of our immediate family. And she'd had it for decades. Shortly before your grandpa had passed, one diamond went missing. And we vacuumed their whole place, carefully sifted through silt and lint to no avail. It had probably been sucked up the week prior. And after my dad made his journey to the grandol, everything, we replaced that diamond with a ruby in remembrance. But I'm still mad at the vacuum.

• 49:00Alie Ward?

  But I'm not alone. Our own Mercedes Maitland recalled that when I was a little kid, she told me, my friend and her little brother were over and I was showing them these three little meteorite samples we got as souvenirs on a recent trip. And my friend's little brother dropped one of the little meteorites into the carpet. We looked so long and hard, she says, none more than him, and never found it. So that baby 1,000% got vacuumed up. And her friend's little brother still brings it up and feels super guilty about it two decades later. A broom would never do that to you. Like, how many times have you found something because you swept it up and you're like, oh, my God,

• 49:37Alie Ward?

  this tiny screw from my glasses that fell out, here it is. Big Vacuum doesn't help you out in that capacity.

• 49:46Speaker 04

  Not at all.

• 49:47Alie Ward?

  So I'm Big Broom.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Big Broom.

• 49:49Alie Ward?

  I'm Tiny Broom. Oh, we have so many good questions. Let me see. Gabby, Ara Victor, Ranger France, Diana Bauer, Medium Farmer, Caitlin Whitman, Pooja, Maz Naturewalks, and first time question asker, Tabba Catastrophe, wants to know. Tabba Catastrophe says, I heard once that you're supposed to trim your broom once the ends start getting all fucky. And my raggedy broom sweeps fine enough that I've never tried. Also, I'm lazy, they say. Was that legit advice or just an old person trolling me? Maz Naturewalks wants to know, when is it time to retire your broom and replace it with a younger, hotter model?

• 50:28Alie Ward?

  When do you give your broom a makeover or bid it adieu?

• 50:34Speaker 04

  Good questions. I say, well, function, obviously, these, I assume, are all brooms that are being used. When it comes to trimming, you know, when we make a broom, we do trim the ends. So we have that nice, those nice planner kind of faces, again, to fit into baseboards and things like that. But if the broom corn gets so warped that it's going all out in different directions, like an octopus, that may make the use of it a little difficult. So yeah, you can totally trim a broom. You can use a pair of scissors. It might wear it down a little bit, but you can do that.

• 51:04Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 51:04Speaker 04

  Or find a broom maker who has a corn chopper.

• 51:08Alie Ward?

  Corn chopper.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  Corn chopper. Also, you can really keep the life of your broom going by, again, hanging it and never storing it on its head. I have used brooms well beyond the point that they should be used. I understand having a connection to an old, an old friend, in a way. I cannot tell you when to trade out your old broom for a newer, hotter model. That is something that only you can decide. Again, I'm going to go back to function. Is it working?

• 51:37Alie Ward?

  I think it's really good to know, though, that you shouldn't be storing them bristles down. I never would have known that. And if you and your broom are besties, and maybe she just needs a little judge, she needs a little glow up.

• 51:48Speaker 04

  You can spritz it with some water and vinegar and it kind of brings it back to life.

• 51:52Alie Ward?

  Is that a good way to clean your broom? Because you do figure, like, your broom touches a lot of gross stuff, but like,

• 51:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:58Alie Ward?

  do you clean it? I guess you vinegar, vinegar and water is a good thing to do.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. And always keep it dry. Again, like, mold is always, always an issue.

• 52:07Alie Ward?

  Gabby, Jack Snacks, Magda Kossowska, and Brain Shenanigans wanted to know, Jack's snacks asked, what's the weirdest material a broom has been made out of that you've seen? Magda also asked that. What's the wildest broom material? Do you ever see crafters make them out of, like, repurposed garbage or tampons or anything that you're like, whoa, that's wild?

• 52:32Speaker 04

  Oh, my goodness. Yeah. My friend Sister Wolf, aka Cassandra, has a background as a, someone who cuts and dyes hair. And you can imagine that history of being a stylist, working for, making brooms as well. And she's done some really wonderful artistic pieces, kind of linking those two together.

• 52:52Alie Ward?

  And if your feed needs more spooky handmade witchy objects, I know it does. Highly recommend Cassandra's Instagram. It's underscore Sister Wolf underscore. For upcoming classes, there are events, there are commissions for altar brooms. Also, she has a Victorian morning collection, which is going to release online on October 30. So thank you, Cassandra, for pointing me and Kate's direction. You can go to SisterWolfCraft.com or underscore SisterWolf underscore on Instagram.

• 53:21Speaker 04

  People are doing all sorts of different things when it comes to art brooms. And, you know, incorporating metals and leathers, dyeing broom corn has been big for a very long time. Creating images in that, in that broom corn. People are combining with broom making for some really interesting things.

• 53:39Alie Ward?

  Gabby wanted to know, how long does it take to make a broom? And I'm sure that depends on the broom. But Lacey said, is there a broom that's considered the hardest to make? What separates the average broom squire from an expert broom squire? And Cam Bam said, do you call your craft besom making? And is this different from broom making? And also, how, how long does a broom tend to take if you're making something that's artisanal in a craft broom?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  You ask a lot of questions.

• 54:07Speaker 04

  So when it comes to the term broom squire, first of all, I refer to myself as a broom maker. Sometimes if I'm feeling a little cheeky, I'll call myself a broom squire, because how could you not?

• 54:16Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Oh, completely.

• 54:17Speaker 04

  That is left over from the sort of guild system that, again, came with the colonists over from Europe to the United States. When you're learning a particular skill, things like woodworking, printmaking, in European art education, like being a sculptor, you would start off as an apprentice. You would study under someone. And then eventually, after a certain amount of time, you would make your way to being a journeyman. And that means you would literally journey around and see other art and look at other masters' pieces. And then you would eventually become a master by doing a master work, you know, after so many years of being in this field, as it were. Now, again, gross generalizations here.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  And broom squire was someone, I believe it's five years, making brooms for five years.

• 55:05Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 55:06Speaker 04

  I teach at a trade school. And you'll hear it in trade school parlance, like, especially with, like, electricians, HVAC, I think, things like that. You'll hear journeyman or apprentice on occasion.

• 55:17Alie Ward?

  What about traditions? Eliza Hammer Gage, RJ Deutsch, Gillian Seattle, wanted to know about, Eliza asked about history on jumping the broom. Momo said, I'm looking to make my own broom to jump for my wedding in the relatively-ish near future. And Momo said, to my knowledge, this started out as an African American tradition. And as a Black woman, I'd love to find a Black broom maker to learn from, but I haven't had much luck. Are there any out there? Do we source from Etsy? But jumping the broom as an African tradition, could you tell me anything about that?

• 55:49Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. So when it comes to a lot of folklore surrounding brooms, a lot of it has to do with, like, doorways, boundaries, leaving one reality and going into another. There's a lot of lore about leaning brooms against doorways. So when it comes to jumping the broom, you're, you know, jumping some kind of perceived boundary from one reality to another. And so this makes sense for weddings. It's also an object, the celebration of a home, this new home together. I'm going to point to, right now, a really great book called Jumping the Broom by Tyler DiPari, who is Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In this book, it's fantastic.

• 56:32Speaker 04

  There's actually a lot of cultures that jumping the broom came from. Romani peoples, different African traditions, and the British Isles, specifically Celts and Welsh peoples. And again, you're seeing a theme throughout this, you know, this entire episode. It was brought to the United States through colonization and the enslavement of Africans through the transatlantic slave trade. And today, we still see it practiced, of course, in a lot of contemporary Black American households, Cajun communities, but also in neo-pagan and modern pagan practitioner weddings as well. It was popularized in the 1970s. It's my hope you and my boy gonna jump the broom someday. Good wife like you, just what he need to steady him down.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  It kind of entered the cultural consciousness, again, through The Roots TV mini-series based on the book by Alex Haley.

• 57:22Alie Ward?

  And this book, Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual, traces the rise in popularity in the 1980s, in the 1990s, when wedding ceremonies and receptions got more personalized and more involved. And then also through the 2016 Roots series remake, which includes a discussion about whether the tradition was actually practiced in Africa. It's a great book. We'll link it on our website. So where can you get one if you're looking for something artisanal and meaningful?

• 57:55Speaker 04

  I do know a couple of Black broom makers. So three broom makers that you can look into are, we have Jasmine Best, very cool artist and broom maker. There's also Nam Joty in Texas and Prairie Breeze Folk Arts out of Canada.

• 58:11Alie Ward?

  We'll link these broom handles on our website, but the folks are Amina Haswell of Canadian-based Prairie Breeze Folk Arts, at Prairie Breeze Folk Arts, Nam Joty, Corcalsa, or the handle Blue Cypress Botanicals. Also, that website is Brooms and Baskets. Jasmine Best is at JasmineBestArt. And yeah, we're going to put a bunch of links on our website because I know that was a lot of people. I love that you know so many broom makers. This is why you're perfect for this episode. I was like, Kate, get on here. We've got to talk brooms. Thank you. I wanted to go back to a quick definition, too. Mouse Pakistan, Alice Rubin, Julia in Seattle and Sydney S. Have a banger of a question. Alice wants to know, is a toothbrush a broom?

• 58:54Speaker 04

  Oh my God.

• 58:58Alie Ward?

  Does it count? If it's a side bristle, does it count? Does it have to be a down bristle? What is it?

• 59:04Speaker 04

  I think it's an honorary broom. I really think it is when I think about what it's doing. And you know, wet brooming is definitely a thing, wet sweeping. I think it may be a broom.

• 59:16Alie Ward?

  And from what I understand, early toothbrushes were a stick that you chewed until you bristled the end. And then you use those bristles to clean your teeth. So I feel like in terms of evolution, toothbrushes evolved from a mini mouth broom. But what about sport brooms? We had a few listeners, Lacey and Nicole Kleiman, wanted to know about sport brooms, like curling brooms. Are those actually brooms?

• 59:46Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to, this field isn't big enough to have specialists yet.

• 59:55Speaker 04

  Sports brushes, I think, are usually the bunch of plastic bristles. And I'm sure things like the stiffness of the bristle, which gets into plastic sciences, is, is important.

• 1:00:04Alie Ward?

  Y'all, you either love curling and you know all about it and you're thrilled I'm doing it aside on it. Or you're me and you see like six minutes of curling every four years when the Olympics are on. And you always Google, what is curling? And you stop reading the Wikipedia page like four sentences in. But we're looking at a big polished granite stone. It looks like a Mentos, but it's the size of like a pizza and it's got a handle on it. And it's on the ice. And then there are some brooms to make the ice smoother and clear the stone's path. The brooms or brushes used to be made of corn, but now they have fabric, hog hair or horse hair heads.

• 1:00:48Alie Ward?

  And if you hear the word broom gate, that refers to a scandal a decade ago, when a new type of brush material was used that scored the ice in like microscopic little troughs instead of smoothed it. And people, don't tell me that broom heads don't matter because a lot of sports lawyers would argue that they do. But most of us are not going to worry about this too much until the 2030 Winter Olympics in the Alps, which are not now. I mean, we are putting this out in October, and so I have to get to a question that so many people asked. Erin Everton, Katie Lou Who, Jennifer Rieger, Matt and Leslie, Andrea Legaki,

• 1:01:30Alie Ward?

  Max G, Quill Sloan, Greg Wallach, Nathan, Gardener Gabby's mom, Allison, Hallie Ragusa, want to know witches, witches. Anthony Richards wants to know, why did witches use a certain kind of broom? Would any old broom work? Do they have any other modes of transportation? Sarah asks, why are brooms associated with witches? What is going on?

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  I am, are you ready?

• 1:02:01Alie Ward?

  I'm so ready.

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  So for this, we have to head to the 15th century in Europe, at the very least.

• 1:02:08Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:02:09Speaker 04

  And it's in the 1400s that we see the first depictions of specifically women on broomsticks in manuscripts, as well as in the 1480s, the publication of two important works. One is the Papal Bowl of Pope Innocent the Eighth. And the other is called the Malais Malaphicarum, AKA The Hammer of Witches. And these two works from the church would change European history and our concepts of witchery forever. I'll start with the, the Papal Bowl. A bowl, it's spelled like the animal, is just the communication between the Pope and the people.

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  And this Papal Bowl was called, and please forgive me, Latin's a little rusty, but the sumis desiderantis effectibus, which means desiring with supreme ardor, which would be a really metal title, were it not that this is a really horrible thing. And a lot of horrible things came from this. And what this Papal Bowl, it declared the, and I'm going to put quotations here, reality of witches and witchcraft and how they're dangerous. And essentially giving state sanctioned authority for people to witch hunt in what we now know as Germany. So that happens. And then we get the Malais Malaphicarum, which is written by a German clergyman, Kramer.

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  This is where we get a lot of our imagery, our, again, quotes, knowledge of witch practices. There's talks of witches traveling, flying, they're working in service to the devil and really kind of fomenting a paranoia overall about the sneaky nature of witches and how they use the most unassuming objects for, for evil purposes. Wood and bone and, and root. And, you know, it's not very long before these very specific tools of the home are prescribed malevolent powers. You know, and again, kind of playing into the, it's where you least expect it. Kind of a paranoid attitude about witchcraft.

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  Kramer was, again, a German clergyman and you read this, this work and you're like, man, this guy was not fun at parties.

• 1:04:26Alie Ward?

  Absolute wet blanket, this guy. But the notion spread and then it takes off through the 1500s.

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  So apart from the broom, like flight and travel was also part of this paranoia of witchery, that they go on these flights together and cause mayhem and mischief. But it wasn't just brooms. It was also cooking forks, which we don't use these anymore. It's kind of a large wooden fork that would hold a pot over a fire. Now, what unifies all these things is that they're all long and phallic.

• 1:05:02Speaker 04

  The idea of the evil woman was any kind of, anything that would hint at like perversion or sexual liberation of any kind. And so you can imagine why a phallic tool would be seen in the hands. And you can see it in artwork, you know, these so-called witches are holding it in a way that appears that they have a penis. And that, again, added to, you know, the imagination and the fear of, of these women. And you can see women holding these tools and enchanting people or just, again, like cackling in the air and looking very maniacal. Adding to the, the scary quality, the fact that witches can fly, you know, that they were making these ointments, which caused hallucinogenic effects

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  and therefore felt, you felt like you were flying. And this is where it's important to note that the things that became popular fears for people about women, where these were all, you know, very closely connected to things like pagan fertility rights, again, phallic objects and knowledge of the natural world, being able to make medicines and ointments and whatnot.

• 1:06:11Alie Ward?

  And we have a wonderful episode on Indigenous ethnobotany featuring Dr. Lee Joseph. But we also covered this in more depth in our 2023 Witchology episode with teacher and author Theo Parma. And I'm going to play that clip for you because it's just chock full of fun facts relating to brooms and witchery. Broomsticks. Everyone wants to know what's the deal with magic broomsticks.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're a thing. So broomsticks have, they're a domestic tool, right? Those domestic tools, if you look again at the old images of witches, you'll see pitchforks and like things that you'd use in agriculture. You see ladles and pots. So again, these are women's things, right? But magic can be done with everything. There is another story, and it may be true, like broomsticks have long been used in different forms of magic. There's another story of witches jumping around on broomsticks in a field to show the crops how high to grow.

• 1:07:00Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  You know, this is a common witch kind of legend. And so potentially someone came across this and were like, oh my God, witches are flying on brooms. Because if you, if you start to really go for it and someone's like looking at a hill across a bunch of crops. They're like, what are those people doing hovering on brooms over there? So there is that idea. I don't know how much veracity that has, but it is a common witch legend that we tell each other. And then there is the idea that, this is more interesting. Then there's the idea that witches slather poles and staffs and pitchforks and broomsticks with the flying ointment, which there are various.

• 1:07:36Alie Ward?

  Of ingredients for the flying ointment is like an age old kind of idea that witches would cover themselves with while naked or cover something else with. And then they would press it against a mucus membrane and enter a trance state to fly. Oh, okay. Wait. So when you're seeing these naked witches in these images, straddling poles. Like, go have a look at that. You can find many woodcuts of this, many interesting images. Basically, the idea is that there are these witches fucking broomsticks and poles that are covered in ointment that send them into an ecstatic trance. And witches fly, like witches are witches form of flight. Wow, I never knew that. This makes sense because Scott Sheldon asked, I heard the reasons why witches are associated

• 1:08:21Alie Ward?

  with flying on brooms is that they would put on a psychedelic salve on a broomstick that got them high. That's correct. And then use the broomstick as a way to get said salve up to their nether regions. There you go. Boom. Yes. Scott Sheldon, why even ask the question when you know the answer? You know, way to go. You know, Scott. Let's loop back to ergot, the fungal infection of rye and other grains. Okay, so ergot poisoning can cause all kinds of bummer, such as muscle spasms, convulsions, states of mania, hallucinations similar to LSD dosings, bleeding, miscarriage, and a feeling that the limbs are engulfed in flames. So the witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, happened in the 1690s, and 200 people were accused of using the devil's magic. 20 were executed.

• 1:09:06Alie Ward?

  And then nearly 300 years later, a theory arose that those suffering the effects of these suspected witches were actually possessed by this grain fungus. Witchcraft or really bad food poisoning? Anyone who's ever doordashed Imodium and Pedialyte would have trouble figuring it out, too. So then this holy shit, it was grain rot, y'all, spread as the golden explanation. But then other scholars, years later, say, hey, hold those horsies. And in an article published in the Journal of Clinical Toxicology in 2000, titled Witchcraft or Mycotoxin: The Salem Witch Trials, academics pored over a bunch of research and using tree ring data, brought into doubt the weather conditions that would have supported a rye outbreak of ergot.

• 1:09:49Alie Ward?

  And the age of the girls afflicted were older than typical ergot victims. And their symptoms changed depending on their audience. They also had no lingering symptoms. I enjoyed that this paper also included a delightfully casual bullet point. A few cows died, so what? Then concluded that when the evidence is weighed carefully, both pro and con, it seems unlikely that ergotism explains much of what went on in colonial Salem. So it's been chalked up to impressionable teens following trends, which is its own danger. Now, with the shroomy brooms, an Atlantic article titled Why Do Witches Ride Brooms? NSFW explains that these tinctures may have included deadly nightshade,

• 1:10:33Alie Ward?

  Jimson weed, and two plants I could have sworn were birds, henbane and mandrake. And yes, taking these by mouth might cause barfing. So other orifices, it is. And also, the witchcraft hysteria really picked up in the 1400s, and the Black Plague was in the 1300s. And of course, that episode was witchology with Phioparma. Now, on those aesthetics, Kate tells me.

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  And still to this day, how we get a lot of these ideas of how a witch is. You know, if you see a classic symbol of a witch, you've got an older woman with a broomstick, you know?

• 1:11:07Alie Ward?

  Uh huh.

• 1:11:08Speaker 04

  I do want to point out the work of Sylvia Federicii. And she wrote about these phenomena are deeply tied to the beginnings of capitalism, for which the breakup of communities, common spaces, was necessary. Think about all the folk knowledge that was lost and social cohesion. If you know anything about Salem in the United States, you know, it rips a community apart.

• 1:11:29Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  And in Germany, where Malais Malafacharum was published, thousands were executed, mostly from burning. A lot of women, but not exclusively. And Salem happened in 1692. So we're talking a span of, what is it, about 200 years? And a lot of people died. And the kinds of women that were usually targeted were older. They were sometimes deeply mentally ill or socially ostracized, poor, maybe widows, you know, just kind of shortchanged in their communities. These were the kind of women that were looked at as witches and suspected.

• 1:12:07Alie Ward?

  And already marginalized typically. I think witches just get kind of a lot of misogynist and gender anger directed their way, which, as we've learned, is nothing new. One of the last listener question here that is very of the moment. Ara Victor, Abigail, Kiki's Delivery Service, Jenny Lowroads, Sunflower Star, Joshua Mador, wanted to know, this is very polarizing. Ara Victor asked, what are cinnamon brooms? Why am I seeing them everywhere? Abigail wanted to know, how to prolong your cinnamon broom's life? Why can't they smell so good forever? And Jenny asked, why do they make the awful cinnamon ones? And I'm like, excuse me. Kiki's Delivery Service wanted to know if cinnamon-scented brooms are anything

• 1:12:50Alie Ward?

  other than a seasonal capitalist grab. So very polarized thoughts on a cinnamon broom. Trader Joe's tends to have them this time of year. They get snapped up fast. I tried to buy one for my local sprouts, and they were like, girl, you needed to come like weeks ago. So cinnamon brooms, are they traditional? Do they just smell good?

• 1:13:10Speaker 04

  I don't know about their tradition, but they are, you know, a fibrous plant material that's been soaked in cinnamon oil for a period of time. And I've never purchased one. I actually do get, what a phenomenon. I get asked about them a lot. I have to say, I am not much of a Trader Joe's shopper.

• 1:13:27Alie Ward?

  Oh, fuck, what did they do?

• 1:13:29Speaker 04

  It's in protest since they got rid of their coconut-encrusted cashews. I do think that the cinnamon brooms smell good. I think olfactory experience is important in broommaking. You know, broomcorn, linen, wood, all these traditional broommaking materials have a distinct and pretty pleasant smell, adding to the experience of use, particularly in our smell-free world of plastic. I can't be seen as an authority on this. I feel a little indifferent about them.

• 1:13:57Speaker 04

  You know?

• 1:13:58Alie Ward?

  I think that it's up to everyone else to form their own opinions on them. Just a side note, the history of cinnamon brooms, it's not like the deepest rabbit hole I fell down. It was at best really more of a raccoon nook. And essentially, cinnamon and brooms, they're good luck. They protect the home, they smell good. My friend Catherine, again, who prompted the broom episode, loves a cinnamon broom. She waits all season for it. She was having a really bad day, and I went to go drop one off on her doorstep to make her feel better. Couldn't find one, and I had to just drop off some cinnamon oil. And I was like, put this on something and pretend it's a cinnamon broom. So you got to get them early, is the point. That's both. Brooms make the best gifts.

• 1:14:43Alie Ward?

  I'm just saying, talk to a broommaker. Oh, I am. And on behalf of patrons, Gaby, Lacey, Katie Hammond, Tori Van Kara-Broke, Cambam, Jordan Smith, Sarah Allen, and Ben Pollack. Ben wanted to know, as younger people have taken an interest in learning historic skills, has there been any uptick in broommaking in recent years? Do you have tips on starting to create one? Can you make them out of anything? If someone's like, I'm getting hype for brooms right now, I love them now. What is a good place to learn how to make them? Or can you grab some stuff from the yard?

• 1:15:19Speaker 04

  So essentially, it is a bunch of fibers being bound together with some tension, and that's important. You know, to make a broom, you need your fiber, broomcorn. It's usually the toughest thing to procure, but you just need a good twine. And you could just do it with a two by four. We do, we use these things called footsticks if we don't have a formal winding machine. And footsticks are just, you wrap your winding material around them, and you keep your foot on them so you can pull up.

• 1:15:47Alie Ward?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:15:48Speaker 04

  And create that sense of tension.

• 1:15:50Alie Ward?

  So this is like a spool that's in a square frame, about the size and shape of a loaf of Wonder Bread, but made of wood. You can also call this a broommaking foot treadle, or a foot bobbin, or a broom winder. And by the looks of it, you can easily screw a few sticks of wood together, or you can pay $75 for one on Etsy. After all, I mean, you're just going to put your feet on it. So it depends on how you feel about feet. Speaking of, a lot of barefoot pics in the demos online. It's just out there.

• 1:16:20Speaker 04

  And so the broom stays in tension as you're winding it, which is very important, because if you don't wind that material tight enough, the broom will just fall apart. And that's essentially it. If you just want to make a whisk, which a whisk, by the way, again, there might be some differences in region, but whisks are brooms without like a wooden handle. It's like a little hand broom. Now, here's where I say that you can find a local art center, which may have broommaking classes. They're very popular, particularly in the South. Appalachia has a strong broommaking culture, and it's a region of the United States that's very craft supportive. You can find books on how to make a broom at such places. But I will point to two more contemporary books. One is Swept Away by Karen Hobbs.

• 1:17:04Speaker 04

  This is how a lot of people got started making brooms. Karen Hobbs sadly passed. I mentioned Nam Joty earlier in the episode. I learned from a woman named Carol Morse at Foxfire. Nam studied a little bit with Karen Hobbs. And so we have this lineage happening of broommaking. The other is by a woman who runs Sunhouse Craft, and her name is Cynthia. This is a very, very new book, Cynthia Mayne, very recent. It's called The Handmade Broom. And she runs Sunhouse Craft also in Berea, Kentucky. Again, we're talking the South. There's a lot of support for handcrafts there. All you need is a few things, and you can make a broom. And if you mess up, you can unwind and try again.

• 1:17:47Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Alie Ward?

  And no, no one's the wiser, and you've had a good time.

• 1:17:52Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:17:54Alie Ward?

  I think if you need a cinnamon broom and they're sold out, then. You know, just make one, put some cinnamon oil on it.

• 1:18:01Speaker 04

  It's an opportunity to learn how to make cinnamon brooms. That's what I'm saying.

• 1:18:04Alie Ward?

  It is.

• 1:18:05Speaker 05

  I can try.

• 1:18:06Alie Ward?

  What is something that about broom making or being a historian of this is really challenging?

• 1:18:14Speaker 04

  Challenging. Well, it's, it's challenging to, to make art and write about craft history just in general right now. I work a day job. I am an educator and I kind of have to balance my time working with this, this independent research, which, you know, I've gotten a couple grants for, which I'm very fortunate for, but it's just tough.

• 1:18:37Alie Ward?

  But enthralling. Brooms, such a little thing, is such a big thing, actually.

• 1:18:44Speaker 04

  It really is a collection of people's work, a collection of people's cultures, a collection of needs in order to get something to clean our home. Again, all just coming from this one thing that most people don't think about on a daily basis.

• 1:19:01Alie Ward?

  What about one of your favorite things about like, what just gives you butterflies? Is it when you start going down a research rabbit hole? Is it when you're just like kind of in flow making? Like, is it teaching? Like, what do you love the most?

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, when I find those connections between things. I like to read and write and research the history of American labor. And I also love to make brooms and research broom history. And then I found out that there were broom unions at one point. Those kind of moments where things, my favorite things come together. And that's what keeps me going is, is that kind of discovery.

• 1:19:37Alie Ward?

  Any idea when we might be able to expect a book?

• 1:19:40Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. I do plan in the next year to deliver to an editor that I'm working with and start formally shopping around.

• 1:19:47Alie Ward?

  I love it. And publishers hit you up.

• 1:19:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:52Alie Ward?

  Instagram is Kate O'Connell Richards or kate o'connell richards dot com. We're going to link that right in the show notes because brooms matter.

• 1:20:01Speaker 04

  I do think it's important to touch on the romance of the handmade. Living in this time of globalization, late stage capitalism, we've become alienated, not just from the products of our labor, but the origins of the very materials we use to make goods, even craft goods in our home.

• 1:20:18Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:19Speaker 04

  Very few things are, are produced completely in the US anymore. And even if they are, the components used to make them come from abroad. And most broom cord available to makers today is imported to the US from Mexico. So even if we wanted to make something that calls to mind like old world craft and total self sufficiency, we're still kind of beholden to the state of things. And that's something I try and keep in mind.

• 1:20:42Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:20:42Speaker 04

  And it's, it's no secret that during the pandemic, Amazon's revenue soared and as we all bought and had delivered everything, home essentials, workout gear, home office supplies. And during this time, many people turned towards crafting and objects, the people that could stay home that weren't, you know, had to work as an essential worker. You know, Oscar Wilde once said that like, I think it was in Soul of Man Under Socialism that, you know, if, if we were left to our own devices, we would truly probably stay home and make art.

• 1:21:12Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:21:14Speaker 04

  And with that romance, it's important to remember at one time, industry and production were seen as like the magical new thing. And now we see those systems as a sort of damaging status quo, some of us with the handmade becoming a little bit more magical.

• 1:21:30Alie Ward?

  So ask smart people not smart questions because for everything or thought, there's an expert for it. And honestly, they want to talk. And if you type in broom making class and look near you, I bet there's one within a couple hours drive. Have an outing, drink some cider. Brooklyn, you've got one at Tatter on November 14th. Just look around and then make a broom. Thank you so much to Kate for being on the show and do find them online as well as many of the other makers that we mentioned. Those are going to be on our website at alieward.com slash ologies slash broomology. We are at ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm at alieward with one L on both. Smallologies are shorter, kid friendly episodes in their own feed. Wherever you get podcasts, you can join our

• 1:22:13Alie Ward?

  Patreon for a dollar a month at patreon.com slash ologies. Ologies merch dot com has your shirts and totes and stickers. Erin Talbert admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardward is the website. Scheduling producer Noel Dilworth keeps things tidy but flexible. Managing director, who has a handle on everything is Susan Hale. And editor Jake Chaffey and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio tie all of our, our bristly pieces together and sweep out the chaff. Nick Thorburn tapped, tapped, tapped the theme music. And if you stick around to the very end, you know, I may tell you a secret. And this week, right now, I'm staying at, yes, a Verbo in upstate New York with some friends to celebrate some birthdays,

• 1:22:55Alie Ward?

  to eat some cider donuts, to wear a coat. And we had a layover en route here and I was in the terminal. I was sitting with our 14 year old daughter, Grammy, who's a dog waiting to board, but it wasn't our group yet. You know, they were just boarding like group one or whatever, families and military personnel stuff. And a guy walked toward the boarding lane and complimented Grammy on her sweater and her very chill demeanor. And I said, well, thank you. She's stoned. And he said, well, I can see that. I'm a veteran. And it was so sweet and vulnerable because the VA healthcare system is so fucked

• 1:23:34Alie Ward?

  and military personnel can sometimes suffer combat trauma. And our cannabinology episodes, we talk about medicinal marijuana and we went into some PTSD info. And, and he mentioned that he has a practice in Albany. And I realized that he had said vet and I just assumed veteran, but he meant veterinarian. But anyway, we have an excellent episode about post traumatic stress disorder in veterans. And that's called traumatology with Dr. Nick Barr. We can link that episode. And honestly, what these booktober episodes are teaching me the most is that sending people into wars to kill children. So some people can make money is really the

• 1:24:15Alie Ward?

  scariest thing that exists, isn't it? That's enough out of me. Tell your brooms I say hi.

• 1:24:21Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:24:22Alie Ward?

  Bye bye.

• 1:24:52Alie Ward?

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