Jessica Brabble

Jessica Brabble

Contributor

Jessica Brabble is a graduate student in the Department of History at Virginia Tech. Her research interests are in disability studies, eugenics, popular culture, and race. Her current work focuses on the use of bodies as spectacle at the North Carolina State fair at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

History

“All the World’s a Harem”: Perceptions of Masked Women during the 1918–1919 Flu Pandemic

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During the influenza epidemic that ravaged the United States in the fall and winter of 1918 and 1919, cities across the country advised or required masks. Soon, discussions of masks took center stage across American media. Newspapers were filled with articles explaining how to make, wear, and purchase masks. From their inception, these discussions were… Read more →

Health and Wellness

Farmers’ Almanacs and Folk Remedies: The Role of Almanacs in Nineteenth-Century Popular Medicine

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The Farmer’s Almanac has always been a staple book in my grandmother’s rural North Carolina household. Before deciding when she should plant her garden or what seeds she should put in the ground, she consults the almanac. She and her friends plan the community hog-killing by the moon phases in the almanac, believing that the… Read more →