Imagine a piece of furniture, part cupboard, part chest of drawers — decorated with patterns of hearts, pinwheels, and intricate floral imagery — emblazoned on the front in large, bold letters the name H-A-N-N-A-H B-A-R-N-A-R-D. This chest belonged to somebody, it’s ownership screaming out from the colorful images around it, Read more…
Sexual impotence has been a problem since at least the beginnings of recorded history and, since then, people have been striving to cure it. However, the cultural meanings of impotence, (why it matters) and even its definitions, vary wildly over time and space. In Sarah Handley-Cousins’s new book Bodies in Read more…
Like all things, “fatherhood” has a history. From the enslaved men of the Anglo-American Atlantic to the middling sort to working class daddies and “their chairs,” ideas about fatherhood across socio-economic status in the nineteenth century shared one common trope: fathers were supposed to be providers. This wasn’t always the 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…