Josephine Baker took Europe by storm, reaching dizzying heights in her fame. Yet when she returned to the US, she was rejected by her fellow countrymen. Join the History Buffs as they discuss Baker, bananas, and racism in Europe and the Americas.
Fur trading and frontier life in French Canada. As frontiers typically are, the story of the French Canadian wilderness has been a gendered one since its earliest iterations. If it ever existed in reality, this straightforward, masculine escape was complicated by complex alliances with matrilineal aboriginals and state-sponsored waves of immigration Read more…
Employment agencies and classified job ads have a much longer history than you might think. Join us for a brief history of early modern employment agencies. Stick around for a preview of how Marissa is using this fascinating history in her dissertation about wet nursing in London and Philadelphia in Read more…
Underwear, the unseen garments which sit in close proximity to genitals, skin, and all sorts of unmentionable orifices, are the most poorly-documented garments in history yet they shaped bodies, minds, and societies in complex and interesting ways. Sometimes we do really tight, analytical episodes. This is not one of those Read more…
Sex striking is a method of passive resistance, a form of peaceful protest, and something attempted by American Indians in the early modern era, First Wave feminists in Europe and America, Bolshevik women in the 1920s, Chinese women in the 1940s, and perhaps most famously, by the Women of Liberia Read more…
We have an image of puritans as cold, severe, hyper-strict and religious people, and while that’s not entirely false, it’s also not entirely true. From the very beginning, early Americans were thinking about sex. The courts were burdened with hundreds of cases in which people broke the laws regarding sexual morality, Read more…
Marie Stopes was one of the most significant figures in the modern birth control movement. She founded 37 international family planning clinics and brought sexual knowledge and fulfillment to countless women around the world. She was also a complex and complicated figure in the women’s rights and eugenics movement. We Read more…
The Marquis de Sade is a notorious figure in the history of the French Revolution. Some see him as a twisted, debauched lunatic who preyed on the bodies of women and children. Others see him as a literary genius who was a revolutionary spirit ahead of his time. We invite Read more…
For hundreds of years, governments have been drawing a line in the sand between the wanted citizenry and the unwanted potential citizenry.
A brief history of the struggle over the St. Patrick’s Day Parades in NYC & Boston. Can a person be both gay and Irish(-American)? Of course – but not everyone agreed when it came time to march.