The Blood in Our Soil usually examines what America has buried. In this special episode, it asks what America can still recognize.

Americans argue over the flag, the Constitution, the Statue of Liberty, every holiday, and even the meaning of fundamental rights. But we agreed on Dolly Parton.

Her death leaves more than an absence. It leaves evidence that we can still recognize strength without cruelty, faith without exclusion, wealth without indifference, and generosity without self-promotion. Her voice, humor, music, and humanity crossed genre, politics, religion, class, and region in a way few American symbols ever have.

If we know what the best of America looked like in Dolly, why do we treat those values as admirable in an entertainer and optional in a nation?

For once, America agrees. And that is something.

The Everglades has been treated as a swamp to drain, a wilderness to conquer, and a convenient place to discard whatever Florida wanted out of sight. In this episode, I trace how politicians, developers, sugar corporations, and the state reshaped South Florida by controlling its water, extracting its value, and pushing the human and environmental costs into the sawgrass.

From Napoleon Bonaparte Broward’s campaign to drain the Everglades to agricultural pollution, invasive animals, and bodies hidden in its vast interior, this is a story about the violence embedded in attempts to dominate a landscape that has never fully surrendered.

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Old Town San Diego is often presented as the birthplace of California: a landscape of preserved adobes, mission bells, restaurants, souvenirs, and carefully curated nostalgia. But beneath its streets lies another history: Indigenous displacement, colonial violence, public execution, and human remains absorbed into the modern city. In Episode 2, anthropologist Tomi Castle-White explores the stories Old Town preserves, the histories it buries, and the unsettling ways the past remains present beneath our feet.

This episode contains discussions of violence, death, and human remains.