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History (3,597 posts)

The End of Love in the Seventeenth Century: Certainty and Uncertainty in Courtship

This article examines the emotional landscape of courtship and engagements in seventeenth-century Sweden. By using a framework by Illouz, understanding courtship as a cultural technique aimed at creating certainty in socially risky situations, the courtship of two women by one student is examined. The analysis moves from the intimate interactions of the couple to the family, the community and lastly the ecclesiastical and university authorities.

A brief art history of adultery

Historically, artistic representations of adultery have been used to raise questions about the importance of love and sexual desire in marriage. Artists have also used their works to explore themes of culpability and punishment, and to explore the consequences of infidelity for the families of the adulterers. Above: The Stolen Kiss 1787 by JH Fragonard and/or M Gerard

Then Again: From his Vermont farmhouse, a novelist imagined a fascist takeover of America

Nobel Prize winning author Sinclair Lewis sequestered himself on his Vermont farm during the summer of 1935 and hammered away on his latest novel. He was in a hurry, fearing that real-world events might overtake his narrative. For his plot, Lewis drew from national and international headlines of the day, but he made the main character a Vermont newspaper editor and set most of the story among the green valleys of his adopted home.

The ‘silver thread’: Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan (1890–1982), the Six Point Group, and new understandings of intergenerational female activism in England, 1960s to 1980

Hazel devoted her adult life to ‘the cause’, the fight for women’s equality. Born in Aspen, Colorado, U.S.A. in 1890 Hazel studied chemistry at Vassar College, graduating in 1913. She went on to teach and study at the University of Missouri where in 1916 she completed a master’s degree in chemistry. However she soon experienced gender discrimination first hand when she failed to secure employment as a chemist. She recalled this rejection in an article published in The Washington Post in August 1977:

I had decided I wanted to be a chemist, not a teacher again. I applied from New York to California, answering every ad relating to chemists. I got stacks of letters back. A big stack. Every single one read, ‘You are qualified, but we do not employ women.’ I was indignant!…

This injustice propelled Hazel in 1916 to join the new National Women’s Party (NWP), set up by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, to demand the equal franchise for women in all U.S. states via an amendment to the American Constitution….

Hazel was soon working for Alice Paul, leader of the NWP, at the party’s headquarters in Washington DC. Here she engaged in militant activism and along with Paul was arrested and jailed in 1917 for chaining herself to the railings of the White House. She was sentenced to 30 days in Occoquan jail and went on hunger strike. Within a week President Wilson had pardoned the women.Footnote13 Reflecting on her experiences as a suffragette Hazel commented that the NWP never sanctioned violence:

Tom Wolfe’s Sociology of the Weird

The Nation | T Streshinsky/Corbis/Getty
The Nation | T Streshinsky/Corbis/Getty

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the journalist broke free of his contrarian clichés to illuminate the origins of 1960s counterculture. Above: Jerry Garcia and Rock Scully, of the Grateful Dead, speak to Tom Wolfe at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, 1966.

That men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains: Reconsidering the origins of model psychosis

The promises of the Prozac century have fallen short; the number of novel, therapeutically significant medications successfully completing development shrinks every year; and the demand for better treatments constantly grows. Answering these hardships is a renewed optimism concerning the efficacy of controlled psychedelic therapy, a renaissance that has seen the resurgence of a familiar concept: intoxication as model psychosis. And yet, little has been made of where this peculiar idea originates. Why did we come to liken psychosis to intoxication, and why is this an idea we find so hard to shake?

America’s brutal capitalist class tamed its labor movement

In what he termed a “labor aristocracy,” Eric Hobsbawm saw echoes of what Marx and Engels had described. Hobsbawm posited that the anti-socialist, “workerist” tradition of union politics in the United States and the UK may be reflective of a powerful, elite layer of workers in the two countries’ labor markets. These white, often Protestant, male workers were comparatively highly paid and benefited from their position in capitalist production. Their rather advantaged market position put them at odds with more precarious workers who were more likely to advance universalistic programs for political transformation. Above: Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, December 1920

Upton Sinclair and the fight against workplace death and injury

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, published in 1906, remains one of the most widely known pieces of realist literature from the early 20th century. An expose of the brutal exploitation of immigrant workers in Chicago’s meatpacking industry, told through the struggles of Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus and his family, The Jungle—both as a novel and as a work of investigative journalism—takes on renewed importance today with rising levels of workplace death and injury, and amidst workers’ fightback for independent control of workplace safety through the independent investigation into the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. initiated by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).