Natural Causes is a podcast about the politics and practicalities of going outside in a world on fire, hosted by Dr. James Stout. It approaches the outdoors, conservation, agriculture, food sovereignty, and Indigenous land rights as interconnected issues. We want to combine unflinching journalism with unabashed advocacy for the land we all share, and welcome everyone into the outdoors and the fight for our public lands. Our shared wild spaces are under threat like never before, from climate change, the Trump administration, and extractive capitalism. Now, more than ever, we need serious journalism and serious solidarity that engages people with the struggle to protect these spaces for generations to come. New episodes weekly.

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In 1904, men who believed in 'race science' put hundreds of people in a human zoo at the St. Louis world's fair. Today, those same racist, pseudoscientific views persist, and the men who hold them demand to be taken seriously in the name of academic freedom.

Sources & Further Reading:

Newkirk, Pamela (2015). Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga. Amistad.

Saini, Angela (2019). Superior: The Return of Race Science. Beacon Press.

McCray, Carrie Allen (2012). Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof. University of South Carolina Press.

Gould, Stephen Jay (1996). The Mismeasure of a Man. Penguin Books.

Nathan Cofnas’ Doctoral Thesis: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bd78170f-1131-47ef-af8d-7a3bb2ef41d0

https://jannalangholz.wordpress.com/2022/12/26/17-worlds-fair-deaths/

https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/specimen-days-human-zoos-at-the-1904-worlds-fair/

https://web.archive.org/web/20070610034510/http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/Bontoc.html

https://ashp.cuny.edu/documentaries-list/savage-acts-wars-fairs-and-empire-1898-1904/#

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/free-expression/how-i-became-the-scapegoat-in-the-jason-arday-affair-dc134088

https://investigations.hopenothate.org.uk/race-science-inc/

https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/2007046/ghent-university-under-fire-for-appointing-us-philosopher-with-ties-to-scientific-racism

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial-science/article/abs/reptiles-with-a-conscience-the-coevolution-of-religious-and-moral-doctrine-by-nathan-cofnas-pp-523-ulster-institute-for-social-research-press-london-2012-3000-isbn-9780956881151-paperback/4005A8AD3C5B21AC0A82A38D5D97BBF8

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/03/the-man-who-was-caged-in-a-zoo

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/nyregion/thecity/the-scandal-at-the-zoo.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevmrjd9lj1o

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/jan/06/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/largest-human-zoo-world-history

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James talks with Molly Conger about the javelina and their installable appetite for golf courses.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65x0RvhJNa8

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/nov/05/conservation.sciencenews

https://zoologicalbulletin.de/BzB_Volumes/Volume_56_1_2/049_054_BzB56_1_2_Moraves_Jiri_and_B%C3%B6hme_Wolfgang.pdf

https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife-conservation/living-with-wildlife/living-with-javelina/

https://content.civicplus.com/api/assets/8e8abbf4-6775-4575-9a10-fedacb7cb2c1

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In 1964, crosses burned all over Mississippi, signaling a return of the Ku Klux Klan. Their big debut was perfectly timed as a show of support for Byron de la Beckwith.


Sources & Further Reading:

Massengill, Reed (2024). Portrait of a racist: Byron De La Beckwith and the Assassination of Medgar Evers. Univ. of Tennessee Press.

DeLaughter, Bobby (2001). Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case. Scribner.

Mitchell, Jerry (2020). Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era. Simon & Schuster.

Vollers, Maryanne (1995). Ghosts of Mississippi. Little Brown & Company.

Sims, Patsy (1978). Stein & Day.

Nelson, Stanley (2016). Devils Walking: Klan Murders Along the Mississippi in the 1960s. Louisiana State University Press.

Dirks, Annelieke. “Between Threat and Reality: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Emergence of Armed Self-Defense in Clarksdale and Natchez, Mississippi, 1960-1965.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 71–98.

Ball, Howard (2004). Murder in Mississippi. University Press of Kansas.

Hamm, Mark (2017). The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism. Columbia University Press

Biondi, K., and J. Curtis. 2018. “From Structural to Stochastic Violence.” Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.

Newton, Michael (2010). The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. McFarland & Company, Inc.

Dittmer, John (1994). Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. University of Illinois Press.

Payne, Charles (1995). I’ve Got The Light of Freedom. University of California Press.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/accused-in-1964-mississippi-race-slayings-wrote-hate-letter-1.668898

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Byron de la Beckwith was tried for the same murder three times. In 1964, it just wasn't generally considered illegal for a white man to kill a black man in Mississippi.

Sources & Further Reading:

Massengill, Reed (2024). Portrait of a racist: Byron De La Beckwith and the Assassination of Medgar Evers. Univ. of Tennessee Press.

DeLaughter, Bobby (2001). Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case. Scribner.

Mitchell, Jerry (2020). Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era. Simon & Schuster.

Evers, Myrlie (1967). For Us, The Living. Doubleday & Company.

Tyson, Timothy (2017). The Blood of Emmett Till. Simon & Schuster

Vollers, Maryanne (1995). Ghosts of Mississippi. Little Brown & Company.

Martin, Ralph (1983). A Hero For Our Time. Bandwagon, Inc.

Baden, Michael (2006). Exhumation. in Spitz & Fisher's Medicolegal Investigation of Death.

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In the months leading up to the murder of Medgar Evers, the man who killed him was watching his world crumble. Byron de la Beckwith had dedicated his life to the cause of segregation, but it was a losing battle. The governor of Mississippi had backed down, allowing a second black student to enter Ole Miss. Governor George Wallace in Alabama backed down, too. Integration was creeping in all over. That, and his wife left him.

Sources & Further Reading:

Doyle, William (2001). An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi 1962. Doubleday.

Lambert, Frank (2010). The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights vs States’ Rights. Oxford University Press.

Massengill, Reed (2024). Portrait of a racist: Byron De La Beckwith and the Assassination of Medgar Evers. Univ. of Tennessee Press.

Metzl, Jonathan (2009). The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became A Black Disease. Beacon Press.

Rolph, Stephanie (2018). Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954-1989. Louisiana State University Press

Smith, Frank (1964). Congressman From Mississippi. Capricorn Books.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/race/100262race-ra.html

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/citizens_news/index.3.html

https://www.southernfoodways.org/the-greenwood-food-blockade/

https://snccdigital.org/events/leflore-county-cuts-off-surplus-commodities/

https://snccdigital.org/people/dick-gregory/

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/22/us/samuel-block-60-civil-rights-battler-dies.html

https://www.crmvet.org/docs/src/6210_src_ns.pdf

https://themilitant.com/1962/2633/MIL2633.pdf

https://snccdigital.org/people/lawrence-guyot/

https://snccdigital.org/events/jimmy-travis-shot-greenwood/

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/multimedia/medgar-evers-and-jackson-movement.html

https://www.wlbt.com/video/2026/07/15/medgar-evers-historic-1963-wlbt-speech-missing-over-six-decades/

https://da.mdah.ms.gov/vault/projects/OHtranscripts/AU_MP198001_119_098611.pdf

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In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Segregated schools didn't react right away, but segregationists did. Within months, the Citizens' Councils began to form in counties across Mississippi. And Byron de la Beckwith was one of the group's earliest and most enthusiastic members.

Sources & Further Reading:

Massengill, Reed (2024). Portrait of a racist: Byron De La Beckwith and the Assassination of Medgar Evers. Univ. of Tennessee Press.

Rolph, Stephanie (2018). Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954-1989. Louisiana State University Press

Silver, James W (1963). Mississippi: The Closed Society. Harcourt Brace & World Inc.

Vollers, Maryanne (1995). Ghosts of Mississippi. Little Brown & Company.

Williams, Michael Vinson (2011). Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr. The University of Arkansas Press

Cook, James Graham (1962). The Segregationists. Appleton Century Crofts

McMillen, Neil (1971). The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964. University of Illinois Press

Mendelsohn, Jack (1966). The Martyrs. Harper & Row

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/buried-truth-unresolved-disregarded-lamar-smith-murder-haunts-lincoln-county/

Cashion, S. A. (2013). "And So We Moved Quietly": Southern Methodist University and Desegregation, 1950-1970. Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Delao, Frank Delao, "Containing Communism in Texas: How the Right Interpreted the Cold War, 1945-1965" (2016).Open Access
Theses & Dissertations. 633

Rich, Evelyn (1988). "Ku Klux Klan Ideology, 1954-1988" Graduate Theses and Dissertations

https://supremecourthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Volume-37-Number-3-2012.pdf

https://usm.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/SO_eea548ac-a609-4b6f-be15-7ae300c2206b

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/7/27/al-aqsa-one-encroachment-too-many

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