In January 2020, I showed students a clip of historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in the documentary A Midwife’s Tale. Ulrich […]
Such a Pretty Tsaritsa
In her 2018 memoir Such A Pretty Girl, Nadina LaSpina describes her childhood in mid-twentieth century Sicily, and the pitying […]
Talking Back to the NIH
In January 2018, Serena Williams went public about how she almost died after giving birth to her daughter. Williams has […]
Clara Immerwahr: Science’s Tragic and Surprisingly Modern Heroine
A woman is in an unhappy marriage. After much stress and hard work, and a healthy dose of sexism in […]
Asymptomatic Lethality: Cooper, COVID-19, and the Potential for Black Death
Black people in the United States have long known that all white people, at any time, have the potential to […]
Absolutely Disgusting: Wet Markets, Stigma Theory, and Xenophobia
Since the initial descriptions of cases of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, there has been a persistent focus on “wet […]
COVID-19 Didn’t Break the Food System. Hunger Was Already Here.
Like everything else in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, American food has become almost unrecognizable overnight. Grocery stores picked […]
Understanding Her Position and Place: An African American Nurse at the Stewart Indian School, 1908-1917
In September 1908, Allie Helena Barnett left her family in Atchison, Kansas, and traveled to Carson City, Nevada, where she […]
A Complete Halt to the Liquor Traffic: Drink and Disease in the 1918 Epidemic
When the annual Pennsylvania convention of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) began on October 4, 1918, delegates “rejoiced” that […]
Living in Isolation and Connecting through Reading, 1930–1946
Amid all the dramatic headlines about COVID-19, news stories describe how people now share anniversaries, birthdays, and other occasions with […]
