Maine passed its first abortion statute in 1840, not long after the pardon of Dr. Call. Could there be a connection?

Centering material culture when researching those with scant documentary evidence of their lives can help fill in the gaps of their experience.

With Force and Freedom, Carter Jackson makes a stimulating and insightful debut which will have a major influence on abolition movement scholarship.

Women’s work is often hidden or marginal within historical records that were meant to show men’s economic and political lives.

Ultimately, books are static, material things. As historians and writers, we’re always changing, and so is the field of history.

Pet of the Petticoats extends the reach of Anglo-Atlantic anti-Catholicism to the stage, illustrating the ways its tropes and anxieties moved across genres and into sentimental stage comedy.

Cridge’s American utopia did not singularly hinge on technological innovation or economic equality. It was a comprehensive achievement that combined political and economic equality with women’s autonomy and health.

Cycling culture offered individual women, as well as couples, greater freedom in daily life.

Whitman creates a beautiful tension between the images of marauding lovers, armed and fearless, and two boys clutching each other’s fingers and clinging to each other.

Brothel guides tended to be small, making them easy to conceal. They also mimicked other types of publications to make it easier to hide the guides’ true purpose.

From 1863 onward, Beecher was obsessed with forgiveness. The most influential preacher in the country, he aggressively agitated for the Union to extend complete forgiveness to Confederates.

William Cronon presents in Nature’s Metropolis an assertion of the fundamental interconnectedness of the city and the countryside. This is figured in the history of Chicago, primarily in the nineteenth century, as the city grew from the commodification of the produce of its rural environs.

In the early republic, social media had its own crucial importance, although what the media employed was not the tweet, but little bits of pasteboard.

From Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.
Winner of the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award

The Stewart Children instances passionately held ideas about the common welfare structuring a painting that sought to have a moral and social impact on viewers.

Clothing studies are too often overlooked by historians and even material culture scholars. Kate Haulman makes an overdue and important […]

Searching for the prey of an effective censor makes the thrill of discovery especially tantalizing, since the “treasure” is not meant to be found.

The book is both an intersectional study of crime and an intersectional study of gender, poverty, and class.

Combining Revolutionary politics with the social and cultural valences of gender, race, class, nation, and power, this political cartoon serves as a multidimensional cipher which people at every knowledge level can participate in analyzing.

Historians have tended to assume that enslaved people inevitably, and eagerly, resisted slavery in a quest for liberty. Yet in fact, in the Berbice rebellion, many enslaved people were reluctant to join.

“While bringing an incident of rape to legal officials was undoubtedly challenging for all victims, ironically, the cases that might be most successfully prosecuted were often the most difficult for victims to bring to court.”

“Which babies born outside the U.S. count as Americans from birth? And which men and women can bestow U.S. citizenship, automatically, upon their children?”

Yet it’s not at all clear what Thomas Jefferson’s political legacy, his racist writings, his slaveholding, his proclamations against slavery, his fear of miscegenation, and his (apparently) active miscegenation mean to us when taken together.

The rise of the handkerchief was not simply a function of shifting social mores. It was also a part of the “civilizing process” through which the haves became readily distinguishable from the have-nots.

“Jefferson repeatedly relied on the common symbol of homespun, much as he wore the best clothes he could find while in France, but when he dressed even further down as president he knew that his slippers would be understood differently by different people.”

As much as Audubon drew attention to himself as an artist and man of science—and he did so ceaselessly and shamelessly—he also drew the attention of the American people to the richness and diversity of nature in America, helping them see it in national as well as environmental terms.

Embroidered orchards and peony hair ornaments testify that women were practitioners of floral display, but many women sought knowledge as well as style.

Harry Franco and Henry Ward Beecher in the antebellum market

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The anatomical museum was not just a transgressor of public morality, it was a notorious, flagrant transgressor, a public institution devoted to the display of things that should not be displayed.”

The English Puritans who founded Massachusetts in 1630 formed a society as committed to religion as any in history. But for them, marriage was a civil union, a contract, not a sacred rite.

It is exceedingly difficult to trace women, but particularly non-elite women of color, through the sources that are available.

This timely piece of work reminds us that the rights we sometimes take for granted have not always been available to all.

He was a man stretched between worlds: one of cautious belief, another of passion and sentiment; one of rational learning, another of devotion and deep emotion.

When it came to women being federal employees, Jefferson could not see the light for the lighthouse.

Growing increasingly three-dimensional and more ornate with every added layer of material, sentimental or “fancy” valentines, as they were called, were harbingers of hope, fondness, and desire.

Erotic standards are also historically contingent: what would have raised eyebrows in the eighteenth century often seems laughably tame, even quaint to the modern viewer.

Brothel guides’ positive descriptions of well-behaved, mannered, self-conscious brothelgoers suggested that if such genteel, respectable men allowed themselves to enjoy the sexual pleasures for sale in American cities, then why couldn’t the reader himself?

It is not hard to imagine the allure of such a work for readers—modest or otherwise—for it provided a rare detailed discussion of sex.

“[N]o matter how progressive, or how much it seemed to reflect a vibrant spirit of competition, of Darwinian triumph and bootstrap optimism, boxing still suffered from an image problem.”

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

There were far more Democrats in the 1850s who still supported the antiquated honor code that justified dueling than there were Whigs.

Across the pantheon of presidential elections in early America, few have stressed the themes of sex and gender so spicily as the heated contest of 1856. It was a year of many firsts.

There has never been a shortage of negative depictions of Burr, but it has become a nearly two-centuries-old cliché that he “has always been out of favor,” that he has only enjoyed the reputation of “outright villain” among the founders.

Each generation has contextualized the sexuality of the founders differently but ultimately came to value them as role models for their masculinity and sexuality.

Years before his immersion in the company of injured Union soldiers, Walt Whitman was surrounded by disabled men—or so he […]

A cane only appears once in Leaves of Grass, but it turns up in conjunction with another word that appears again and again in the poem: lean.

“Unlike West, Peale, and Trumbull, who gaze piercingly outward at viewers, Goodridge refuses a returning gaze, due not to modesty but to distraction.”

How, and why, did the language of love and romance become the language of war?

Impulsive and volatile, brave and rapacious, the pirates who came to life on the pages of Bucaniers of America served up an alternative model of manliness.

Anthony’s readings focus on texts where professional male figures seek some form of psychological compensation for the threats to their manhood posed by the potential for financial instability.

Nazera Sadiq Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century is an exemplar of well-researched and innovative scholarship, an exciting book for scholars of early African American literature and beyond.

This breakthrough addition to Whitman’s corpus refocuses his personal, poetic, and political vision while enriching current debates over masculinity, disability, affect, and the medical-industrial complex.

“Encouraged by ideological constructions of clerking as an apprenticeship leading to mercantile proprietorship, clerks often found their hopes frustrated by obstinate realities.”

A man’s choice of a particular friend was assumed to be based on admiration for that friend’s sensibility and character; men found in these friendships a context for being understood and encouraging their best selves.

Ammunition, Or Sarah Winchester, 23 Years Dead, and My Grandmother, Newly Widowed, Speak The men were paid extra: danger money. […]

Why did authorities feel the need to apply police powers to sex?

Statement of poetic research One day I decided to rewrite the complete works of Emily Dickinson in “plain speech.” She […]

Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet) I had been twice to Pondbefore I learned you hadnot only been there, but filmed it.Of course […]

Wandering too is a technique of not looking, a practice of studied indirection. In that way it’s like revising—whether a poem or an entire collection—which is also a way of denying one’s loss of a past through an attempt to re-experience the sensations that accompany originary composition.

The main tale is a cautionary one, although it turns not on the dire consequences of legislating morality but instead on the futility of such attempts.

As an undergraduate at Wake Forest University, I joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. While I appreciated little of the […]

I’ve always been a big proponent of historical fiction, for the life and imagination it brings to often dry historical […]

Women were not merely objects of male colonists’ desires; they also gloried in their reproductive abilities.

How could I tell that story for people who lived and died more than a century ago?

In a majority of these letters, we find Whitman integrating a reflection on his uncertain state of health with an expression of his desire to be with Peter again.

Edith Maude Eaton is more than a token representative of Asian North American literatures within the overarching fields of American and Canadian literatures.

Miller’s book centers on the queerness of suffering, theorizing modes of abjection that destabilize and shift sexual and racial identifications.

Winthrop’s 1861 novel is touted in 2016 as one of the queerest texts of the nineteenth century.

How did a nineteenth-century woman of means accomplish so much, unhampered and unassisted by a husband, and what sort of life did this strong-willed woman live?

While the Puritans feared the encroachment of the wilderness on their borders, the greater, paradoxical fear was of the perversion of the natural order lurking within human nature itself.

Lawmakers believed that men who fathered children had fulfilled a patriotic duty, which they continued to pursue by providing for their families.

Alcoholic beverages for most people were food, prepared in the same kitchens by the same people who cooked the spoon bread, stirred the porridge, and roasted the meat.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

The women of sensibility were expected to feel but not to feel too much.

In seeing identity construction as a negotiated performance, Alex Myers’s novel reflects the historical literature, as does his representation of eighteenth-century friendship, masculinity, soldiering, and material culture.

Harper’s early work adds a new genre–unabashedly romantic poetry– to her oeuvre.

As an abolitionist lecturer, Harper honed to perfection a polemical political style that appears to differ with the seemingly sentimental and religious form of Forest Leaves.

Sex and Family in Puritan Massachusetts Common-place asks Michelle Morris about her 2013 book, Under Household Government: Sex and Family […]

Tricks a Girl Can Do Hannah Maynard (1834-1918) was a Canadian photographer whocreated surreal images after the death of her […]

Kelly A. Ryan’s work, Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700-1830, explores the intersections of patriarchal power and […]

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s first book of poems had been considered lost to history for well over one hundred years. Johanna Ortner shares the tale of recovering this incredibly valuable text–and shares the text itself–with the readers of Common-place.

The neat separation of feminine and masculine spheres existed more as an ideal than as a fact.

Students can see how the virtue and nurturing nature of women is clearly reflected in the mother’s face and through the calm manner she exhibits as not one but two children demand her attention.

Age-phobic rhetoric is commonplace in American culture, especially as it relates to women, its history stretching back at least to the second half of the nineteenth century.

The secrecy of brotherhood made brothers; men achieved their highest emotional possibility in republican secrecy.

Sitting in a sunlit reading room at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I pored over letters I knew from genealogical records and internal evidence were the material remains of a stepfamily.

Freemasonry and these notions of public and private, legality and illegality, justice and injustice, have crossed paths more than a few times.

To Find You III         [O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu House, Abiquiu, NM; present day] Bushes of mulberry, rosemary, cherry;trees of filbert, plum, and […]

Participation in a privileged culture of masculinity was an important part of achieving and maintaining political power.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Both the supporters and detractors of the Vigilance Committee claimed to have not only God and the right, but also ‘the ladies’ on their side.”

In its intermingling of the national, the paternal, the feminine, and the global, this letter is perhaps not quite the warm epistle of friendship it purports to be.

History and the Found Poem Debt We may never know the mystery of sleep.We don’t want to become machines. But […]

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“In denouncing drunkenness, “white middle-class men were engaged in a battle over gender identity that was not exclusively an attempt at class domination against working-class men.”

Ephrata monks experienced an intentional and dramatic physical transformation.

Greenberg’s unique angle nicely complements the existing literature on working-class households and labor activism, yet it will simultaneously force scholars of the period to rethink their entire approach to investigating working men.

Kelley’s extensive research makes clear that the educated women of the early nineteenth century reveled in their learning…

During the Revolution, allegations of rape by British soldiers in newspapers and pamphlets were construed as attacks on American rights, rather than as the violation of an individual.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Unlike the starving seamstress or the prostitute, both represented as victims of male commercial culture, the women trained as designers, wood engravers, and illustrators represented a new, respectable, potentially comfortable form of female industry.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

The Russians soon recognized that they would gain greater profits if they could convince skilled native men to do the work for them.

Plantation doctors understood that they worked for the slaveholder, not the patient, and elevated their reputations over their patients’ desires.

Confounded physicians could but observe the often contradictory genitalia, and consequently their pronouncements depended as much on traditional stereotypical social indicators as on biological markers when they decreed a physically anomalous individual male or female.

What’s old is new again

Mary Clark Carr, it turns out, is even more interesting than Ann Carson. Anyone with a gun and a few friends can kidnap a governor, but how many women in the early republic had the talent, initiative, and opportunity to earn their living by writing?

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“By the late 1870s, guides mentioned a few pastimes as specifically well suited to women and children. Guides began to list carousels, circuses, pantomimes, and magic and marionette shows in conjunction with kids.”

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“How did this ultimate Tomistic curiosity evolve, and what does it mean?”

The obviousness of reproduction as a frame for hereditary racial slavery did not come quickly to me nor, I would argue, does it come so for most.

In place of powdered wigs and radical ideals, Berkin shows us bloody legs and dirty shirts.

The central theme in the study of Brook Farm, [Delano] emphasizes, should not be explanation for its collapse but appreciation of its achievements.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

The book’s a genre send-up: a mystery, with traces of the gothic; a love story, with an overwrought romantic sensibility; a picaresque, somewhat overblown.

A mere four hundred British families applied to live for three months in London’s retrofitted 1900 House, but nearly ten times as many Americans are seeking to live for twice as long in the far more physically grueling Frontier House.

“Godbeer challenges our early-twenty-first-century understanding that it is natural that each person have a distinct sexual orientation that comprises a major part of personal identity–a sexuality. Early European Americans had no such understanding.”

What better way to explore the bare essentials of the master-slave relationship than with the figure of the black slaveholder, who comes to slavery without the delusion of racial difference that divided white owners from their slaves?

The taste of independence Sampson experienced as a “masterless woman,” according to Young, may have contributed to her willingness to seek her fortunes as Robert Shurtliff in May 1782.

At its best, the book finds a kind of poetry in the act of diving into the wreck of the archive, the dark grottoes of history where competing narratives jostle, where myth and “truth” hopelessly blur.

Whereas during the Revolutionary era wearing American-made clothes signified frugality and private sacrifice for the public good, by the mid-nineteenth century wearing American-made clothes signified prosperity and the rapid growth of the nation’s internal commerce and industrial capacity.

Parent turns to Marxist theory to structure his answer to the question of the origins of the slave system with markedly mixed results.

“Young readers travel into the world of books with little or no luggage. They generally don’t have prior knowledge of the times.”

“Even though Crain invokes Tocqueville and presents Emerson as particularly attuned to larger currents, he is reluctant to draw connections between his subjects and American culture, or to look elsewhere for further support of his interpretation.”

Women like Pocahontas essentially became, like Pygmalion, characters eventually submissive to certain English manners and mores, made devoid of all cultural threat by their nearly complete assimilation into dominant, white society.

Massachusetts, after all, had not executed anyone for rape in twenty-seven years . . . Yet now . . . the community took a daughter’s accusation against her father so seriously that it sent a man to the gallows. What circumstances, we wondered, led to this extraordinary outcome?

Since the ability to impregnate a woman was a crucial component of manhood in seventeenth-century America, T could be at best only a partial man by colonial standards.

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