US history

Tenth Street Baths

Steaming the “Nefarious Sin”: Bathhouses and Homosexuality from the Victorian Era to the AIDS Epidemic

When and where public baths have been popular, they’ve meant different things to different cultures. They might be sites for socializing, religious purification, spiritual/bodily cleanliness, relaxation/pampering, public health/hygiene, homosocialiality, and, of course, sex, or some combination of those things. At the start of the twentieth century, single-gender communal bathhouses were Read more…

By Averill Earls, ago
Women's Rights storm the capitol building. Black and white image

For Heart and Hearth… and the Rights of Women: Radical Christianity in Pursuit of Conservative Ends in the Nineteenth Century

Join us as we highlight the religious underpinnings of the women’s reform movement of the late nineteenth century in America, with particular emphasis on the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the quite radical Protestant Christianity that many white and Black women in the nineteenth century utilized to push for women’s Read more…

By Elizabeth Garner Masarik, ago