Wangui Muigai is the winner of the inaugural Nursing Clio Prize for Best Journal Article for “‘Something Wasn’t Clean’: Black Midwifery, Birth, and Postwar Medical Education in All My Babies,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 93, no. 1 (2019), 82–113. An assistant professor of history and African and African American studies at Brandeis… Read more →
Tag: film
Just Being There: The AIDS Crisis and the Shanti Project’s Hospital Counselor Program
When Ward 5B premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the nurses of the first AIDS inpatient unit in the United States walked down the red carpet with movie stars Julianne Moore and Halle Berry. Garnering critical and popular praise as well as Oscar buzz, Ward 5B explores the famed AIDS unit from the time it… Read more →
Sex Trafficking in Twentieth-Century Europe
Thanks to Liam Neeson and edgy action-thrillers like Taken, Americans have a pretty specific idea of what the sex-trafficking industry looks like: naïve young American girls, traveling on their own for the first time, who trust the wrong guy and get kidnapped. In Taken, the girl’s father happens to be ex-CIA with a “very particular… Read more →
“Charlie Says” and the Santa Cruz Prison Project
Joan Didion, Again “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969.” This ubiquitous Joan Didion quotation, from her essay “The White Album” (1979), appears in approximately one gazillion accounts of the Manson Family murders, and now it serves as the opening title card to the 2019… Read more →
The Opioid Epidemic as Metaphor
I watched a lot of drug movies in high school. Maybe it was the clothes, the pulsing soundtracks, or how much I loved a voiceover. It also could have been the incredibly pretty people in these movies. Maybe it was because the Drug Movie as a format involves a type of fantastical world-building absent from… Read more →
Colorizing and Fictionalizing the Past: A Review of Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old
Five years ago, the Imperial War Museum in London contacted Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) and tasked him with presenting some 100+ hours of archival footage from the First World War in a “fresh and original” way, without any new or modern footage. For over half a decade, Jackson and his team… Read more →
Bohemian Rhapsody
In July 1985, at 6:20pm local time, Queen (comprised of bassist John Deacon, guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor, and lead singer Freddie Mercury) took the stage at Wembley Stadium for their performance as part of Live Aid, a star-studded concert broadcast worldwide to raise money for famine victims in Ethiopia. Critics have consistently ranked… Read more →