In Fair Atlanta, Where We Lay Our Scene: A Thanksgiving Love Story

By Sean Cosgrove

In recognition of this as my favourite American holiday, I couldn’t resist the urge to share with you a happy and historical Thanksgiving story I came across just the other day. It’s frothy and not particularly political, but I don’t think that makes it irrelevant or unnecessary. In fact, I sometimes think these simple stories have powerful messages of hope or love, or kindness or cheer, that transcend the historical and connect us to the past in a very real, and often emotional, way. A message not too far off what I took Thanksgiving to be about.

Feeling Lonesome This Halloween?: Nineteenth-Century Love Charms and Halloween Party Games

By Sean Cosgrove

Are you a single woman or man staring down the barrel of another Halloween spent curled up in bed with too much cheap candy corn you’ve bought in bulk from Walgreen’s under the auspices of being prepared for the hordes of trick-or-treaters that were never going to descend on your home?

Or, are you perhaps happily single or happily partnered and looking for the perfect Halloween party game? One you’ve probably never heard of before with a nice historical bent?

Even if the answer is no to both of those questions (and I would be very surprised), I still want you to grab a piece of paper and a pen, and get ready to embrace the Halloween spirit. Today, NursingClio is taking you back to the 1890s, my favourite historical decade, and bringing to you some of the ‘charms and spells’ guaranteed (if certain conditions are met) to be ‘cast with infallible certainty of result,’ bringing true love into your life.

Two open textbooks, one blank with a pen on it, another with capitalized "BLAME"

The Blame Game: Searching for Historical Complexity

By Carrie Adkins

I am almost finished with my Ph.D. This fall I’ll defend my dissertation on the history of gynecology and obstetrics in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States, and then – barring some unforeseen disaster – I’ll finally be able to make everybody I know call me “doctor.” At this point, I should be a genuine expert on my topic, and in some ways, I guess I am. Want to hear about the dangers of childbirth in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era? Curious about the history of surgeries like clitoridectomy and hysterectomy? Want to talk about racism and eugenics as applied to female bodies? I’m your girl. Let’s have coffee. Just don’t blame me when you start having horrific nightmares about vesicovaginal fistula and pubic symphysiotomy.

A Historian’s Guide to Summer: Back-to-School Mixtape

By Adam Turner

Here in the Pacific Northwest the days are long and hot and the raspberries are ripening, which means that a new school year is upon us. For teachers, it’s time to set aside the summer projects, chapters, and books, make a late-summer beverage, and think about teaching. In the interest of celebrating the end of summer, here are some songs that work well in the classroom.

Man Up: Give Blood Like a Victorian

By Sean Cosgrove

How do we convince people of the need to donate blood? It can be scary and uncomfortable, and I’ll be the first to admit, as someone who does not regularly donate, that it all seems like a lot of work. The answer, according to one comedian writing in a Sydney commuter magazine recently (which has unfortunately been lost to me and, to the best of my knowledge, is not reproduced online), at least in part, was to provoke people (especially men) into volunteering to roll up their sleeves. Rather than the softly-softly approach, the tugging on heart strings or outright begging, it suggested that we should try a more competitive approach: tell these people to drink their cup of concrete.

A Historian’s Guide to Summer: Independence Day Reading Edition

By Heather Munro Prescott

Via Book Riot, where Derek Attig reminds us that “In a very real way, the Fourth of July is a huge, national holiday celebrating a piece of paper and a scribble of ink. Yes, the celebration is for what that paper and that ink did—ideologically and politically, if not practically or militarily, separate the colonies from Britain—but it’s still, at heart, a celebration of paper and ink.”

A Historian’s Guide to Summer – The Ice Cream Edition

Adventures in the Archives: These Losses Which Are Not My Own

By Carolyn Herbst Lewis

Lately I find that my mind is muddled. I have accepted a position at a new institution, so both professionally and personally there are big changes ahead. In the meantime, I am caught in that strange space in-between. I am finishing up projects and responsibilities here, even as I am already making plans and thinking about my courses there. I look around my home and my campus office and all I see are things that need to be put into boxes. It is a strange time in which beginnings and endings are all tangled into one busy mess. No wonder it’s hard to get anything “done”.

Gallery of national women's history month pictures

31 Reasons to “Like” Nursing Clio on Facebook

Did you know that Nursing Clio has an awesome Facebook page? Well we do! Even more exciting (and we know you are excited), in honor of Women’s History Month, Nursing Clio will be honoring a different woman everyday during the month of March on our Facebook page. These women, both sung and unsung, have all made significant impacts, not only in the field of medicine, but in the times and places in which they lived, loved, and worked. Here is what you may have missed so far:

A sexy blonde woman standing by a silver car, smiling, with several tropical plants at the background

Bodies on Display, Then and Now

By Rachel Epp Buller

I witnessed a breakthrough this week, one of those “a-ha” moments that, as a teacher, is so terribly exciting. I’m teaching an undergraduate seminar this spring on Women and Gender in Art History. Since we’re a small school, though, we don’t have an art history major and many of my students come from non-art backgrounds. This means that most of the ideas and artists we’re talking about are brand-new for most of the students.
What was this “a-ha” moment? It was the realization, voiced by one of my students, that the display of women’s bodies that we see happening throughout the history of art is not really so different from the display of women’s bodies in contemporary popular culture. This may seem apparent to many of you readers, and the student in question was surprised herself that she had never made this connection. She is well-read in ideas of the male gaze, and considers herself savvy when it comes to critiquing mass media representations of women.