History (4,685 posts)

During a time of significant demographic, geographic, and social transition, many women in early nineteenth-century Montreal turned to prostitution and brothel-keeping to feed, clothe, protect, and house themselves and their families. Beyond Brutal Passions is a close study of the women who were accused of marketing sex, their economic and social susceptibilities, and the strategies they employed to resist authority and assert their own agency.

truthout

Through a close study of representations of lobotomy in a wide variety of cultural texts, American Lobotomy offers a rhetorical history of the infamous procedure and illustrates its continued effect on American medicine. The development of lobotomy in 1935 was heralded as a “miracle cure” by newspapers and magazines, which hoped openly that the “soul surgery” would empty the nation’s perennially blighted asylums. However, the miracle cure soon began to fall from favor with the American public, as the operation became characterized as a barbaric practice with suspiciously authoritarian overtones. – See more at: https://press.umich.edu/Books/A/American-Lobotomy#sthash.EDrTdqxp.dpuf

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Original article – 

Dark chocolate: lessons from the 1937 Hershey sit-down strike

Socialist Review

On the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Tom Kay examines how anti-Semitism used by the German ruling class as a weapon against the workers’ movement escalated into genocide.

Tower Colliery SWC was formed in 1951, at that time 1200 men worked at Tower. A general meeting was held and the men agreed to have 5p (1 shilling old money) deducted from their wages. This would be used for parties for the children of employees at Christmas. £1.50 would be used for retired miners to have “a get together” at the St Johns Ambulance Hall.

Scientific American | The Yorck Project, via WikiPaintings

Scientific American | www.rijksmuseum.nl, via Wikimedia Commons