History (4,531 posts)

Bernard Simon Talmey, Love: A Treatise on the Science of Sex-Attraction, for the Use of Physicians and Students of Medical Jurisprudence (New York: Practitioners’ Publishing Company, 1919)

How Better Homes in America — a collaboration between Herbert Hoover and the editor of a conservative women’s magazine—promoted idealized whiteness.

Starting in 1865, regulations pursuant to public hygiene issued by the Unitary Government provided for administrative and political control of the funerary practice. Specifically, they regulated the management of cemeteries and the burials, increasingly drawing the funeral rituals from the control of the Church and of Catholicism, therefore secularising death for the construction of a new political religion. Hygiene became fundamental in order to promulgate cremation as a system of preserving the integrity of the bodies, preserving the ashes as a tangible and indestructible product of body matter and as a measure to protect public health by eliminating the risk of miasmatic pollution of the air caused by the cadaveric fumes. In the early 1870s, the practice of cremation began to spread, especially in the territories of Lombardy-Veneto and Savoy, as an expression of the progressive policies of the new Italian state, antagonistic to the old Catholic religious traditions. This paper intends to highlight the key aspects of the political significance that the cremation took on during the Risorgimento period, while also illustrating the methods adopted by important authors from that time period regarding incineration techniques and cremation methods.

Read the full article ›

Heart Mountain sentinel (Cody, Wyoming), July 28, 1945

‘A reputation for cheeriness’. Robert Burton (1635) by Gilbert Jackson.

Warders at Winson Green Mental Hospital used this alarm whistle. It is representative of the level of institutional security within psychiatric hospitals around the early 20th century. Whistles such as this were part of control measures to curb patients’ disruptive or aggressive behaviour.

Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, has been called “the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.” For almost fifty years, through her tireless service of the poor and her courageous witness for peace, she offered an extraordinary example of the gospel in action.

James Jessen Badal’s extensive research reveals how the citizens of Collinwood were desperate to find someone to blame. Rumor and suspicion splintered the grieving community. And yet they also rose to the challenge of healing: officials reached out to immigrant families unsure of their rights; city charities, churches, and relief agencies responded with medical help, comfort for the bereaved, and financial support; and fundraising efforts to assist families totaled over $50,000—more than $1 million today.

The demolition by implosion of Lafayette Courts in 1996 marked the end of the high-rise era in Baltimore public housing.

In Colonizing Madness Jacqueline Leckie tells a forgotten story of silence, suffering, and transgressions in the colonial Pacific. It offers new insights into a history of Fiji by entering the Pacific Islands’ most enduring psychiatric institution—St Giles Psychiatric Hospital—established as Fiji’s Public Lunatic Asylum in 1884.

Kew Asylum around the time Catherine Hay Thomson went undercover there.

The history of unemployment and concepts surrounding it remain a mystery to many Americans. Frank Stricker believes we need to understand this essential thread in our shared past. American Unemployment is an introduction for everyone that takes aim at misinformation, willful deceptions, and popular myths to set the record straight.

Ex-Celtic Chuck Cooper (above), equipped with a master’s degree in social work, broke further color barriers in his hometown of Pittsburgh: becoming the first African American director in the City of Pittsburgh government’s history as the Director of Parks and Recreation and pushing affirmative action at the Pittsburgh National Bank as an urban affairs officer.

Grace Abbott and her sister Edith fought for social welfare reform on behalf of the urban lower classes, working with Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago from 1908 to 1920.

A day to honor Alice Paul would be a good choice. Born in 1885, Paul earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Swarthmore College, got a master’s degree in sociology from what is now Columbia University, and studied social work in England before getting her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Reasoning against Madness: Psychiatry and the State in Rio de Janeiro, 1830-1944 examines the emergence of Brazilian psychiatry, looking at how its practitioners fashioned themselves as the key architects in the project of national regeneration. The book’s narrative involves a cast of varied characters in an unstable context: psychiatrists, Catholic representatives, spiritist leaders, state officials, and the mentally ill, all caught in the shifting landscape of modern state formation.