In 1930, nineteen-year-old black (preta) Jovelina Pereira dos Santos, a live-in domestic servant in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, hid her […]
Microwave Cookbooks: Technology, Convenience & Dining Alone
The microwave is celebrating its 50th birthday this year, but even that can’t redeem the innumerable copies of microwave cookbooks […]
Pornography on the Playground
When I was 19, I had a summer job supervising a playground. It was a pretty lame job. It paid […]
Our Favorite Podcasts
This week, we brought you interviews with the historians behind two new history podcasts, Dig and Sexing History. Today we polled our […]
Iron Man and the Science Fiction of Disability
In March 2015, a YouTube video sponsored by Microsoft’s #CollectiveProject made the social media rounds. In this video a well-known […]
No Excuses: The 21st-Century Supercrip in Three Snapshots
In the past decade, the landscape of commercial fitness has changed drastically. It has become less dependent on stationary exercise […]
“Witness the ‘Wall of Genitals’”: Anatomical Display at Brooklyn’s House of Wax
Located in the lobby of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Brooklyn, the House of Wax is a dimly lit bar […]
Safe Spaces: Not Just for College Campuses
While teaching the US history survey in 2013, I planned a lecture based on Danielle McGuire’s fantastic book on how […]
Mary, Did You Know?: An Essay on Christmas Carols, Medical History, and Reproductive Politics
The Christmas season is a curious time for a historian of women’s health, abortion, and maternal politics: at its historical […]
White Woman in Blackface as a Black Man in a White Coat? Scary.
Here’s a frank, perhaps surprising, and definitely disheartening admission: nothing you read here should be new to you. It’s been […]
