"The Trials of Madame Restell" is a compelling account of sex, gender relations, and abortion in pre-Civil War New York City. Syrett has a talent for bringing historical figures and the atmosphere of nineteenth-century New York City to vibrant life. You won't forget Madame Restell, Anthony Comstock, or any of the others who shaped the history of sexuality and gender in this era.
The biography of one of the most famous abortionists of the nineteenth century-and a story that has unmistakable parallels to the current war on reproductive rights
For forty years in the mid-nineteenth century, "Madame Restell," the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control medication, attended women during their pregnancies, delivered their children, and performed abortions in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. It was the abortions that made her famous. "Restellism" became the term her detractors used to indict her.
"Pure Adulteration" uses the lens of food production to investigate how the manipulation of food products shaped US Gilded Age and Progressive ideas about nature, health, and purity. If you are what you eat, we're all at least a little artificial, and Cohen shows how 150-year-old ideas shape what and how we eat in the present.
Benjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades at the turn of the twentieth century to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods in the United States.
In the latter nineteenth century, extraordinary changes in food and agriculture gave rise to new tensions in the ways people understood, obtained, trusted, and ate their food. This was the Era of Adulteration, and its concerns have carried forward to today: How could you tell the food you bought was the food you thought you bought? Could something manufactured still be pure? Is it okay to manipulate nature far enough…
Huebner uses previously un- and understudied correspondence in the University of Alabama, State Historical Society of Missouri, and other special collections and archives to illustrate romantic and familial bonds between World War I soldiers and their loved ones. Some soldiers made it back to the US alive, and some did not. Huebner's work is especially evocative of how families waited years after the war was over to receive soldier's remains after their hasty burials in France in 1917 or 1918, prolonging their sorrow and ability to give those soldiers a proper goodbye.
Americans today harbor no strong or consistent collective memory of the First World War. Ask why they fought or what they accomplished, and "democracy" is the most likely if vague response.
The circulation of confusing or lofty rationales for intervention started from the moment President Woodrow Wilson secured a war declaration in April 1917. Yet amid those shifting justifications, Love and Death in the Great War argues, was a more durable and resonant one: Americans would fight for home and family.
Intervention came at a moment when arbiters of tradition regarded those very institutions-the white family in particular-under pressure from…
A concise overview of fertility technology—its history, practical applications, and ethical and social implications around the world.
In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman’s uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology surveys this history in all its medical, practical, and ethical complexity, and offers a look at state-of-the-art fertility technology in various social and political contexts around the world.
Donna J. Drucker’s concise and eminently readable account introduces the five principal types of fertility technologies used in human reproduction—artificial insemination; ovulation timing; sperm, egg, and embryo freezing; in vitro fertilization; and IVF in uterine transplants—discussing the development, manufacture, dispersion, and use of each. Geographically, it focuses on countries where innovations have emerged and countries where these technologies most profoundly affect individuals and population policies. Drucker’s wide-ranging perspective reveals how these technologies, used for birth control as well as conception in many cases, have been critical in shaping the moral, practical, and political meaning of human life, kinship, and family in different nations and cultures since the mid-nineteenth century.
