For centuries, psychiatrists searched for the cure to mental illness, frustrated that medical doctors seemed to be able to find the “magic bullet” medications to fight disease and infection. In the mid 20th century, though, a series of new major and minor tranquilizers revolutionized the world of psychiatry. Doctors doled Read more…
In 1973, two professors active in the women’s health movement wrote a pamphlet for women to read in the consciousness-raising reading groups. The pamphlet, inspired by Our Bodies, Ourselves, looked to history to explain how women had been marginalized in their own healthcare. Women used to be an important part Read more…
In June 2020, Quaker Oats announced they were revamping their famous (infamous?) brand of breakfast products, Aunt Jemima. From the late 19th century to the late 1980s, Aunt Jemima products prominently featured the image of the Black mammy trope to sell the idea that all white families could have the Read more…
Wherever you have a military, you will have sex. Whether it’s an occupied city, an encampment in a theater of war, or a military base here in the United States, anywhere you have a large population of young men, stationed away from their girlfriends and wives, you will soon have Read more…
Dueling seems crazy to us today. Two men take ten paces, turn to face each other, and stand still while they shoot to kill, all the while following strict rules. But while it’s easy to think of duels as simply evidence of a more violent age, dueling and other similar Read more…
Just over one month after the first shots of the Civil War were fired, three enslaved black men got into a row boat and paddled across the James River from mainland Virginia to the Union-occupied Fortress Monroe. Whether they knew it or not, the three young men – named Frank Read more…
The Black Death raged across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia in the mid 14th century. Families were thrown into chaos, the Catholic church faced dissension in its ranks, and townships struggled to provide services and control infection. The sheer ubiquity of death even fostered an artistic genre: the Read more…
In the 1880s, when the buffalo were all but extinct, droughts and over-grazing meant famines, and the promised rations from the government shrank, a new religion spread rapidly through the tribes of the Great Basin and Plains west. It was called the Ghost Dance religion, preached by the Paiute prophet Read more…
In 1864, young Daniel Folsom was institutionalized for something that we might consider PTSD. In a letter home to his sister, he promised her, “I shall try and be a man.” Why was Daniel so concerned with his manhood? What did it mean to be a man during the Civil Read more…
The Odd Fellows, the Masons, the Knights of Pythias: all ancient, secret, solemn orders full of the pillars of the community, right? Then what do we make of some of the super weird stuff they did, like pushing each other around on mechanical goats or pretending to be Iroquois sachems? Read more…