Matty
Botanical illustrator and recovering project manager, based in Denver. Handles the recording, the research rabbit holes, and the plant drawings scattered through this site. Wrote and played the theme.
About the show
Why plants
Because the thing being fought over is almost always growing in a field somewhere, and almost nobody tells the story from the field.
Seeds of Discontent is a history podcast about how plants have been used as instruments of both oppression and resistance — the crops empires were built on, and the same crops people used to fight back.
Most political history gets told through documents and decisions. We tell it through the organism the argument was actually about. A tax on tea is a story about a shrub. A famine is a story about a tuber and a monoculture. A war is, occasionally and quite literally, a story about a flower. Follow the plant and you get a version of the history that's harder to sanitize, because plants keep receipts — in soil, in trade ledgers, in what a place is still growing two centuries later.
Each episode takes one plant, works out who profited from it and who was forced to grow it, and then looks for the moment somebody refused. Sometimes the refusal is a revolt. Sometimes it's a pattern on a piece of cloth. We cite our sources on the episode page, and we correct ourselves on air when we get something wrong.
The hosts
Sunshine
[Two or three sentences about Sunshine — what she brings to the show, what she's obsessed with, where she's from.]
How it's made
- Recorded in Denver, Colorado.
- Researched from primary sources and academic histories wherever we can get them; everything we leaned on is listed on the episode page.
- Theme music written and performed in-house — shaker, two banjos, guiro, upright bass.
- Illustrations drawn by hand.
Corrections
We will get things wrong. When we do, tell us — corrections get read at the top of the next episode and the show notes get updated with a dated note. Send a correction.