Blackwater, Wetlands & Cypress

Flotemersch, Joseph E., and Karen A. Blocksom. “Blackwater Rivers: An Introduction and Overview of Ongoing Research.” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2025.
A concise scientific introduction to blackwater systems, including the tea-colored appearance produced by tannins released from decaying plant matter.
Read through the EPA

USDA Climate Hubs. “Carbon in Non-Forested Wetlands of the Midwest and Eastern United States.”
Useful for the relationship between wetland hydrology, low-oxygen conditions, slower decomposition, carbon accumulation, and anaerobic decomposition products including methane.
Read through USDA Climate Hubs

U.S. Forest Service. “Baldcypress (Taxodium distichum).” Silvics of North America.
The source for much of the bald cypress material, including regeneration under flooded conditions and the wonderfully unsatisfying scientific answer regarding the precise function of cypress knees.
Read the Forest Service account

Dahl, Thomas E., and Gregory J. Allord. “History of Wetlands in the Conterminous United States.” U.S. Geological Survey, Water-Supply Paper 2425.
An important source for the history of American wetland drainage, development and “reclamation,” including the Swamp Land Acts and the longstanding treatment of wetlands as obstacles to settlement and agriculture.
Read through the USGS

The Great Dismal Swamp & Marronage

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. “Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge: About Us.”
Includes the refuge’s Indigenous history, the use of the swamp by freedom seekers and maroons from the late seventeenth century through the Civil War, and the Dismal Swamp Company’s attempts to drain and profit from the landscape.
Great Dismal Swamp history

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. “Water: The Lifeblood of a Swamp.” 2024.
Especially useful for George Washington and the Dismal Swamp Company’s 1763 mission of “draining Improving and Saving the Land,” carried out using enslaved labor.
Read the Fish & Wildlife Service feature

Sayers, Daniel O. A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp. University Press of Florida, 2014.
A major archaeological study of the communities that lived within and around the Great Dismal Swamp.
University Press of Florida

Haints, Gullah Geechee History & Haint Blue

Merriam-Webster. “Haint.”
Used primarily for the linguistic point that haint is a regional variant of haunt in the supernatural sense, rather than evidence that the word itself originated in Gullah Geechee language.
Merriam-Webster: Haint

Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. “The Gullah Geechee People.”
A community-centered introduction to the history, language, arts, foodways and spiritual expressions of Gullah Geechee people of the lower Atlantic coast.
Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor

Arkansas Heritage. “‘Haint Blue’ Leaves Mark on Arkansas History.” 2020.
Used in the episode particularly as an example of remembered family folklore surrounding haints, water and blue-painted architecture rather than as proof of one universal origin story.
Read the Arkansas Heritage article

Hass, Sophie. “The Color of Spirits: Investigating Haint Blue in the American Lowcountry.” M.S. thesis, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, 2025.
Hass’s work traces the sparse documentary history of the term, its broader recognition in the twentieth century, and scientific analysis identifying synthetic ultramarine and Prussian blue rather than indigo in the historic samples studied.
Columbia GSAPP thesis summary

Credle, Jamie. “Our Haint Blue…Ain’t.” Historic Savannah Foundation, 2020.
The Davenport House case study discussed in the episode, including the later dating of the blue attic paint and Louise Miller Cohen’s important reminder that haint-blue practice was not universal among Gullah Geechee families.
Historic Savannah Foundation

Conjure, Curse Work & Power

Illes, Judika. Encyclopedia of 5,000 Spells: The Ultimate Reference Book for the Magical Arts. HarperOne.
Referenced for Illes’s argument about domination and coercive magic in relation to material conditions, constrained agency and unequal power. The episode uses that argument as a starting point rather than treating every historical claim in the encyclopedia as settled scholarship.
Book information

Brown, William Wells. My Southern Home; or, The South and Its People. Boston: A. G. Brown & Co., 1880.
A primary historical text used for Brown’s account of Dinkie and conjure under slavery. The text contains nineteenth-century terminology and should be read as a historical source rather than a modern scholarly account.
Read the public-domain text through Project Gutenberg

National Park Service. “Rehabilitation of Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial: Discovery of a Subfloor Storage Pit/Shrine.” 2021.
Archaeological discussion of bottles and associated material discovered beneath quarters occupied by enslaved people at Arlington House. The report itself remains appropriately cautious about assigning a single definitive ritual meaning to the assemblage.
Read the National Park Service report

Lerner, Jennifer S., Ye Li, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Karim S. Kassam. “Emotion and Decision Making.” Annual Review of Psychology 66 (2015): 799–823.
A broad review of research showing that emotions systematically influence judgment and decision-making, sometimes helpfully and sometimes harmfully, rather than simply functioning as irrational interference.
Read the review

Lerner, Jennifer S., and Larissa Z. Tiedens. “Portrait of the Angry Decision Maker: How Appraisal Tendencies Shape Anger’s Influence on Cognition.” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 19, no. 2 (2006): 115–137.
Especially relevant to the episode’s discussion of anger and certainty. This review examines how anger can influence perceptions of control, responsibility, risk, and certainty, and how anger triggered in one situation can carry over into judgments made somewhere else.
Read through Wiley

Lerner, Jennifer S., Julie H. Goldberg, and Philip E. Tetlock. “Sober Second Thought: The Effects of Accountability, Anger, and Authoritarianism on Attributions of Responsibility.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 24, no. 6 (1998): 563–574.
This study is particularly relevant to the Weight of Judgment. Anger was associated with more punitive attributions and simpler processing, while accountability encouraged more complex consideration of responsibility and reduced some of anger’s carryover effects.
Read through SAGE

Carlsmith, Kevin M., John M. Darley, and Paul H. Robinson. “Why Do We Punish? Deterrence and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, no. 2 (2002): 284–299.
A useful companion to the episode’s distinction between protection, cessation, restitution, punishment, and revenge. The research examines the difference between the reasons people say punishment is necessary and the factors that actually influence how much punishment they believe someone deserves.
Read via DOI

Brown, Brené. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. Random House, 2021.
Brown’s work is an accessible companion to this section, particularly her discussion of accurately naming emotion, looking beneath anger for the experiences that may be traveling with it, and treating anger as something that can catalyze courage, change, compassion, or justice without assuming that anger itself provides the final answer.

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4. Further Reading

Want to follow one of the rabbit holes deeper? These are excellent places to start.

Carver, Charles S., and Eddie Harmon-Jones. “Anger Is an Approach-Related Affect: Evidence and Implications.” Psychological Bulletin 135, no. 2 (2009): 183–204.
A deeper dive into anger as an emotion associated with approach motivation, useful for understanding why anger so often arrives with the urge to act, confront, correct, or move toward a problem rather than away from it.
Read the abstract through PubMed

Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart.
If the academic papers above make your eyes glaze over, start here. Brown’s larger project of developing more precise language for emotion fits beautifully with one of the central ideas of this episode: anger is information, but information still requires interpretation. Her official Atlas of the Heart resources also include an index of the research behind the book.

J. Brent Morris, Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp.
For the much longer Great Dismal Swamp episode I exercised tremendous restraint and did not accidentally make. Morris draws on documentary and archaeological evidence to examine maroon life and freedom-making in the swamp.
Dismal Freedom

Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons.
A wider history of marronage in the United States, useful for understanding the Great Dismal within a much larger geography of escape and autonomous life.
Slavery’s Exiles, NYU Press

Andrea Feeser, Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life.
Excellent for anyone who wants to understand how important indigo really was to colonial South Carolina while keeping that history separate from unsupported assumptions about the material composition of every historic blue-painted surface.
Red, White, and Black Make Blue

Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition.
A scholarly history of African American conjure and its relationship with religion, healing, harming, protection and community life.
Black Magic, University of California Press

Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System.
A deeper examination of African American Hoodoo history and practice, particularly useful as a counterweight to modern commercial flattening of culturally specific traditions.

Daniel O. Sayers, A Desolate Place for a Defiant People.
For the archaeology underneath the Great Dismal section and the complicated relationship among landscape, autonomy, maroon communities, enslaved labor and the swamp economy.