Welcome to the BabaYaga Project! The Baba Yaga Project is a podcast and blog that focuses on community rituals, folklore, and historical identity. The mission of the project is to explore the way that people have used rituals throughout history to create individual and community identities. We hope to create a space for the public to explore the history of these practices and better understand themselves and the identities they claim by building historical context. We want to use history and collective identities as a way to look toward a more inclusive and equitable future.
We are two historians, Margot and Sonya, on a mission to study the ritualized year and life. Throughout our first year, we will be tackling topics and cultural practices from private property to white wedding dresses, midsommar celebrations to Christmas trees. We want to take some time to explore ideas we take for granted in modern western culture. Have we always done something this way? As so much of the world changes around us, we want to pause and place our rituals and practices in a historical context and adapt historic practices into a more accessible and sustainable contemporary life. From large systemic change to personal choices, we want to use the past and its context to examine the present and the possibilities for the future. In our second year, we aim to focus on the ritualized life and individual identity before exploring collective and national identities in our third season.
We have now added the American Girlies Podcast, where we read, review, and rate the American Girl Doll book series! In this new project, we focus on historical pedagogy, and dive into the historical accuracy of these nostalgic books. We hope you will join us for it all!