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In Spiritualism's Place, four friends and scholars who produce the acclaimed Dig: A History Podcast, share their curiosity and enthusiasm for uncovering stories from the past as they explore the history of Lily Dale. Located in western New York State, the world's largest center for Spiritualism was founded in 1879. Lily Dale has been a home for Spiritualists attempting to make contact with the dead, as well as a gathering place for reformers, a refuge for seekers looking for alternatives to established paths of knowledge, and a target for skeptics. This intimate history of Lily Dale reveals the role that this fascinating place has played within the history of Spiritualism, as well as within ...
In Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution, Sarah L. Swedberg examines how conceptions of mental illness intersected with American society, law, and politics during the early American Republic. Swedberg illustrates how concerns about insanity raised difficult questions about the nature of governance. Revolutionaries built the American government based on rational principles, but could not protect it from irrational actors that they feared could cause the body politic to grow mentally or physically ill. This book is recommended for students and scholars of history, political science, legal studies, sociology, literature, psychology, and public health.
With The Sentimental State, Elizabeth Garner Masarik shows how middle-class women, both white and Black, harnessed the nineteenth-century “culture of sentiment” to generate political action in the Progressive Era. While eighteenth-century rationalism had relied upon the development of the analytic mind as the basis for acquiring truth, nineteenth-century sentimentalism hinged upon human emotional responses and the public’s capacity to feel sympathy to establish morally based truth and build support for improving the welfare of women and children. Sentimentalism marched right alongside women’s steps into the public sphere of political action. The concerns over infant mortality and the...
In the popular imagination, Civil War disability is virtually synonymous with amputation. But war affects the body in countless ways, many of them understudied by historians. In Bodies in Blue, Sarah Handley-Cousins expands and complicates our understanding of wartime disability by examining a variety of bodies and ailments, ranging from the temporary to the chronic, from disease to injury, and encompassing both physical and mental conditions. She studies the cases of well-known individuals, such as Union general Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, alongside many cases drawn from the ranks to provide a more comprehensive view of how soldiers, civilians, and institutions grappled with war-related di...
Setting the Stage: The Foundations of Modern Male Beauty -- Physiognomists and Photographers -- Beauty Experts and Hairdressing Entrepreneurs -- Artists, Athletes, and Celebrities -- Poets, Soldiers, and Monuments -- Men on Display in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries -- Brylcreem Men, Cinema Idols, and Uniforms -- Teenagers, Bodybuilders, and Models -- Youthful Rebels, Gender-Benders, and Gay Men -- Insecure Men, Metrosexuals, and Spornosexuals.
A lively, subversive history of the new UK jazz wave, encapsulating its revolutionary spirit and tracing its foundations to birth of the genre itself. By the end of the last century, jazz music was considered by many to be obsolete and uncool, a genre appreciated only by out of touch white men with deeply questionable taste. And yet, by 2019, a new generation of UK jazz musicians was selling out major venues and appearing on festival line-ups around the world. How has UK jazz rehabilitated its image so totally in twenty-five years? And how did it ever become uncool in the first place? Reaching back to the roots of jazz as the 'unapologetic expression' of oppressed peoples, shaped by the forc...
This book provides an overview of Irish gender history from the end of the Great Famine in 1852 until the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922. It builds on the work that scholars of women’s history pioneered and brings together internationally regarded experts to offer a synthesis of the current historiography and existing debates within the field. The authors place emphasis on highlighting new and exciting sources, methodologies, and suggested areas for future research. They address a variety of critical themes such as the family, reproduction and sexuality, the medical and prison systems, masculinities and femininities, institutions, charity, the missions, migration, ‘elite wome...
The fascinating story of a British army chaplain's buggery trial in 1774 reveals surprising truths about early America. On the eve of the American Revolution, the British army considered the case of a chaplain, Robert Newburgh, who had been accused of having sex with a man. Newburgh's enemies cited his flamboyant appearance, defiance of military authority, and seduction of soldiers as proof of his low character. Consumed by fears that the British Empire would soon be torn asunder, his opponents claimed that these supposed crimes against nature translated to crimes against the king. In Vicious and Immoral, historian John McCurdy tells this compelling story of male intimacy and provides an unp...
As Americans--both civilians and veterans--worked to determine the meanings of identity for blind veterans of World War I, they bound cultural constructs of blindness to all the emotions and contingencies of mobilizing and fighting the war, and healing from its traumas. Sighted Americans’ wartime rehabilitation culture centered blind soldiers and veterans in a mix of inspirational stories. Veterans worked to become productive members of society even as ableism confined their unique life experiences to a collection of cultural tropes that suggested they were either downcast wrecks of their former selves or were morally superior and relatively flawless as they overcame their disabilities and triumphantly journeyed toward successful citizenship. Sullivan investigates the rich lives of blind soldiers and veterans and their families to reveal how they confronted barriers, gained an education, earned a living, and managed their self-image while continually exposed to the public’s scrutiny of their success and failures.
Originally inspired by the digitisation of the autobiographical writings of Constance Maynard, this volume considers women’s historical experience of sexuality through the frame of the history of emotions. Constance Maynard (1849-1935) rose to prominence as the first Mistress and Principal of Westfield College, holding that position from 1882 to 1913. However, her writings offer more than an insight into the movement for women’s higher education. As pioneering feminist scholars such as Martha Vicinus have discovered, Maynard’s life writings are a valuable source for scholars of gender and sexuality. Writing about her relationships with other women teachers and students, Maynard attempted to understand her emotions and desires within the frame of her evangelical religious culture. The contributions to this volume draw out the significance of Maynard’s writings for the histories of gender, sexuality, religion, and the emotions. Interdisciplinary in nature, they use the approaches of literary studies, architecture studies, and life writing to understand Maynard and her historical significance. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s History Review.