Tag: Colonial America

Fleas, Fleas, Fleas

In September, I turned on Democracy Now! and came into a story about the mass extinction of a third of the world’s parasites. Although I made sure that my response to the story included the morally and ethically correct alarm and horror, I must admit my initial response was relief. After all, parasites are, um,… Read more →

“We lost our appetite for food”: Why Eighteenth-Century Hangriness Might Not Be a Thing

In August 2015, Oxford Dictionaries declared that the word “hangry” had entered our common vocabulary. Surely most people living in the twenty-first century have experienced the sense of being simultaneously hungry and angry. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hunger was also everywhere. A recent NPR essay examines how slaveholders withheld food from enslaved people,… Read more →

Pub Quiz #1: Ye Olde America

By Adam Turner

Welcome to the inaugural Nursing Clio Pub Quiz, the “Ye Olde America” edition. I just finished teaching a four-week summer course on US women’s history to 1870, which left my head buzzing with little facts and historical anecdotes about women in colonial America and the early republic. Being a fan of trivia (and a bit of a nerd) I decided the perfect outlet for these snippets of the past would be a blog version of the venerable pub quiz. Let’s see how you do! (No Wikipedia peeking, folks.) Good luck!